Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  She was starting to see what he wanted. He liked the moment when she gave in, especially if there was a buildup.

  “That’s better.” He breathed in, as if submission had a good aroma. “What I’m talking about is getting to a level of trust.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s what I want in my life, at this point. A mate. Someone I can come home to. Can you understand that?”

  She nodded, as if this made perfect sense. Like this was the most logical thing she’d ever heard and she wasn’t scared out of her freaking mind every single second she was in his presence.

  “But you know there’s a little bit of fear in every relationship,” he said. “I mean, let’s be honest about it. It might be fear that the other person is going to abandon you. Or that they’re going to cheat on you with someone else. Or, I’m just saying, as a for instance, go nuts and cut your throat for no reason.”

  “Sure.” She nodded more rapidly, like a dashboard bobblehead going over an unpaved stretch of road.

  Who knew where this was really going?

  “My folks were kind of like that.” His thumbs went inside the gun belt. “Always were on edge with each other. Sometimes one was up. Sometimes it was the other.”

  “Yeah, my grandparents were like that too,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “When they were trying to raise me.”

  Maybe this was a new route. Just going with it. Acting like you could accept and relate to whatever he said.

  “Did I ask about your fucking grandparents?” he said, his voice suddenly turning cold. “I was talking about me. Okay?”

  “Okay. Right. My mistake.”

  “My mother was a beautiful woman, like you are…” His eyes drifted up toward the window and then stopped. “Actually, she was kind of a whore. Like you.”

  “I’m sorry. That must have been really hard for you.”

  It was like she hadn’t spoken. “Maybe she cheated because my father cheated first.” His tone turned more ruminative. “Or maybe she did it because she thought he was going to abandon her with a kid she couldn’t control anyway. And she thought she could hook up with someone strong who could knock me into line.”

  She tried to tell herself that it was good he was opening up to her this way. Like for some reason he could be at ease around her. Being himself. And perhaps she could get him to the point where he’d be relaxed enough to change their arrangement. Letting her go on the condition that she never told anyone about this place and what he’d done to her. It wasn’t impossible. If she could make him feel like he still had the power to come here and do what he wanted and let his hair down, then he might let her live.

  “But she didn’t have to do what she did,” he said abruptly. “I mean, Jesus Christ. My father’s a cop investigating drug dealers and my mother starts banging drug dealers? Because she’s doing drugs? I mean, what is that?”

  “I don’t know.” She blinked, starting to feel nauseous again, following the twists and turns he was taking her through.

  “It’s sick. That’s what it is. She was a sick, sick woman. And I was her only child. And she took everything my father was, everything he worked for, and she destroyed it. Totally. She humiliated him in front of his friends and his colleagues because everyone on the job knew what she was doing. Okay? So what choice did he have except to beat her to within an inch of her life and mess her up so that no one would ever want to fuck her again? Right?”

  “Uh-huh.” She hugged her knees tighter, afraid to look at him at all now. “I guess.”

  “It is right. Because someone had to show her that a man should be strong. And never allow himself to be humiliated like that.”

  “Definitely.” She nodded. “None of that should have happened.” She felt like the girl in a monster movie, looking away from the gargoyle gnashing its teeth and dripping venom. “Your parents should have taken better care of you.”

  “Who the fuck asked you?” He crouched down and slapped her. “You’re talking bad about my parents? Who the hell are you to judge?”

  The sting made everything go white behind her eyes. “But you just said…”

  “Maybe you misunderstood.” He smiled, showing lots of teeth. “Maybe you got it all wrong. Maybe I was feeding you false information to see how you’d react. Maybe I was the one who beat my mother. Because my father was too broken to do it and I knew I wouldn’t get in trouble because I was twelve and a mother wouldn’t send her only son to get locked up.”

  “I don’t know what to say now.” She was starting to shake. “Just tell me what you want me to say.”

  “Who said you needed to say anything?” He suddenly screamed, turning bright red. “Maybe I just wanted to hear myself talk. Maybe it gets me hard to make you listen. Or maybe you’re just a thing to me and I won’t even remember you in a couple of months.”

  She began to sob, face against her knees. No one would remember her, she realized. No one was even looking for her now.

  “You’re not going to let me live.” She forced herself to look back at him. “Are you?”

  * * *

  He still hadn’t quite figured out why he hadn’t gotten rid of her the way he’d gotten rid of the others.

  He hadn’t targeted her or stalked her. He’d just found her one night, six weeks ago, shaking her good thing and offering it for sale in Wyandanch. It had been a while since he’d done this, but he expected to go through the business of scaring her, tying her up, getting off, and then dispatching her and dumping the body. But instead something weird had happened. Maybe it was because both his parents had died and he was free now. Maybe it was just getting older and having some of the natural rage burned out of him. Or maybe it was the fact that he’d tapered off the drugs and finally gone cold turkey a few months before. But for the first time that he could remember, he’d been able to have sex with a woman in a somewhat normal way, no trouble getting it up for once, and now he wanted to keep her around, at least temporarily. If only as a trophy to remind him of his success.

  “Anyway, I brought you Chinese food.” He held up a takeout bag he’d brought down. “Moo shu pork and egg rolls.”

  “I’m allergic to MSG.”

  “Oh well.” He put the bag down on the card table he’d set up in the corner opposite the toilet. “Guess you don’t eat then.”

  “You didn’t ask what I wanted.”

  “Excuuuse me.”

  “If you’re not going to kill me, how long are you going to keep me?”

  “Told you.” He pulled apart the stapled top of the bag. “Depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Depends on how much you don’t piss me off by asking a lot of stupid fucking questions.”

  She roused herself to stand up and pad over. Once she got within a foot of the table, she put a hand on her stomach, stuck her tongue out, and made a retching sound. “Ugh, that smell. Where did you order from? The town dump?”

  “No one’s forcing you.”

  “No one’s forcing me?”

  “No one is forcing you to eat,” he said pedantically. “Believe me, it doesn’t look like you’ve been missing too many meals.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “You don’t know what mean is.”

  “Why do you act this way?” she said. “Haven’t I given you everything you wanted?”

  She pulled the shirt tight from the bottom, so he could see the outline of her nipples against the material. Acting like a whore. This conversation was starting to remind him of the way his parents talked to each other.

  “Hey.” He grabbed her by the jaw and squeezed. “What did I tell you? I can get any woman I want, any time I want.”

  “Yeah?” She snorted defiantly, even as he smushed her features together. “Then what do you need me for?”

  “I’m starting to ask myself the same question.” He twisted her head sharply and then let her go. “You’re a fucking pain in the ass. That’s what you are. You’re not worth the trouble
.”

  She rubbed her jaw and looked up at the ceiling, ten feet overhead, just out of reach with her short stature, even if she could stand on a chair.

  “Go ahead, scream again.” He pointed at the egg cartons. “No one can hear you. Scream your fucking head off. See how much good that does you.”

  “You know, you should ask yourself some questions,” she said. “About why you keep doing this.”

  Somehow she had a way of pushing his buttons but stopping just short of insolence. Of being just provocative enough to get his attention without quite pushing him over the edge and making him blow up.

  “You want chopsticks?” he asked. “I’m not giving you a knife or a fork. I bet you can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “What’s the point?” He suddenly turned and raised his hand as if to slap her. “So you can fucking psychoanalyze me? You can’t. Don’t you get it? It’d be like a dog trying to understand its master.”

  Instead of flinching like the others did, she kept staring with those eerily unblinking eyes.

  “I’m not a dog,” she said. “I’m a person. My name is Renee Williams. I have grandparents who love me.” She spoke louder as he pretended to clap his hands over his ears. “I haven’t taken any drugs since I’ve been here. How could I? You made me go through withdrawal on my own. I was alone when I was sick with night sweats and throwing up and diarrhea. But now I’m clean…”

  “Oh, what do you want, a medal?” He waved his hand, not wanting to deal with what she was trying to conjure for him.

  “I want you to see me as a human being.”

  She was right about the drugs, of course. Her skin had cleared since she’d stopped using and she looked both younger and more intelligent than she had when he first brought her in here.

  “Save your precious breath, because you’re gonna need it,” he warned her. “I already told you. You cannot understand me. And you cannot put a label on me. I know all the mind games and reverse psychology. I’m not some little sociopath with no executive function. I could kill you right now and sit down to eat these egg rolls. Just means more food for me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He sat down on a folding chair, snapped the chopsticks apart, and began deftly handling pork and pancakes. “You can believe whatever you want. I’m just being honest, because I’m free. And you’re not. I own you. I feed you. I house you. But you’re nothing to me. You don’t matter. In fact, I don’t even think we’re the same species.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” she said evenly.

  “Yeah, why’s that?” He gave her a lopsided smile, a rolled-up pancake halfway to his mouth.

  “Because one species can’t usually make another species pregnant,” she said. “And I’m carrying your baby.”

  40

  OCTOBER

  2017

  Mitchell Vogliano came home feeling ragged from a long day at the Brooklyn DA’s office. His bureau chief had treated him like a chew toy in the morning and in the afternoon the judge in Supreme Court had spoken to him like a five-year-old when he asked for another week to prepare arguments in his latest health care fraud case.

  He let himself in the Bay Ridge apartment, wishing he had a full-fledged family to come home to. A wife and kids to greet him like a conquering hero at the door, dinner ready in the kitchen, news of neighbors and relatives to be shared over the meal, and maybe a loving shoulder rub before bed. But here he was, thirty-six years old, salad for dinner in the fridge, barely covering his bills on a civil service salary, and living with a woman who didn’t even want to get married at this point. On the subway coming home, the one thing he looked forward to was taking off his shoes, hanging up his coat, and doing a little yoga in the spare room before he settled down to work on his briefs after eating.

  But as soon as he walked in, he saw Lourdes had her coat already hung up and the light was on in the yoga room. He pushed the door open and found she’d turned the studio into her personal workspace. She was in a t-shirt and jeans and surrounded by pieces of paper and index cards taped up on the walls, all profusely illustrated with charts and dates in her near-perfect Catholic school penmanship. There were strings of red yarn to demonstrate connections between the items, and for some reason he wondered first where she’d gotten the yarn since he’d never even heard her mention knitting.

  “Lourdes,” he said, deciding to keep the question to himself. “What the hell?”

  “Mitchell, I think I almost got this.” She waved at the walls a little too excitedly. “I just needed to lay all the pieces out to start to see the bigger picture.”

  “This looks like an insane asylum. Or a scene from Homeland.”

  “Right.” She capped the red Magic Marker she’d been using and wiped her hands on her shirt front. “That’s where I got the idea.”

  “But the woman on that show has a mental illness.” He put a hand to the small of his back and arched it.

  “Okay, but crazy isn’t always wrong,” she said. “Look what I got here.”

  She stood next to the beginning of the timeline she’d laid out with the cards. “In 1977, Kim Bergdahl is found dead with twigs and branches down her throat. The ADA on the case is Kenneth Makris. And the main witness before the grand jury is Joseph Tolliver, age seventeen.”

  “Whoa.” Mitchell stopped her. “I thought that was just a rumor.”

  “I’m still checking it out, but here’s what I know for sure…” She pointed to the next card. “In 1981, Joseph Tolliver becomes a police officer with a letter of recommendation in his file from Kenneth Makris.”

  “Does it mention this girl with the twigs in her throat case?” Mitchell asked.

  “No, of course not.” Lourdes waved him off a little too manically. “That would be too easy. But check it.” She pointed to the next series of cards. “In 1981, Joseph Tolliver becomes a police officer. In 1982, Stephanie Lapidus is found dead near Sunrise Highway. In 1989, Angela Spinelli. Tolliver had highway duty or supervision for both cases.”

  “Circumstantial.” Mitchell pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Joyce Templeton, 2002. Allison Forster, 2005. Anne Higgins, 2006. Yelina Sanchez, 2007. Miriam Gonzales, 2011. All within his jurisdiction. And mostly when he was chief and could control the chain of evidence.”

  “Also circumstantial. Not nearly enough to sustain an indictment against the chief of a major department. How would he have gotten away with it for so long?”

  “He had help.” She began pointing to an alternative timeline she’d laid out beneath the Tolliver cards, like a parallel history. “In 1984, Kenneth Makris becomes DA, partly because of the Bird Dog case and increased arrests against black and Hispanic residents. Same year that Joseph Tolliver becomes a sergeant. By 1988, he’s a lieutenant and helping to turn out the vote not only for Makris but also for Steve Snyder, the county executive. Then in 2003, Snyder supports Tolliver becoming the chief of the department.”

  “Lourdes…”

  “I’m telling you, Mitchell. It’s all part of the same deal.”

  “They were all in on it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Is that what you really believe?”

  “I’m not saying they all hired prostitutes and strangled them,” she rattled off. “I’m not that paranoid. But did they all find a reason to look the other way, because Joey was making them look good? I’m thinking yes.”

  “Sorry.” Mitchell shook his head, feeling a soreness at the base of his spine. “I’m still not buying it. For one thing, you told me yourself that Tolliver has alibis for some of these murders.”

  “He’s chief. He can alter time sheets, get people to vouch for him. You don’t have to be so literal.”

  “And for another,” Mitchell rattled off, knowing he had to talk fast to get in everything he had to say before she butted back in. “Where’s the connection to your Rockaway case? Not only is it farther away from Sunrise Highway, the MO is different from al
l the others, except the Bergdahl case. None of the others had anything stuffed down their throats, except for Renee Williams and Kim Bergdahl. And none of the others were pregnant, except for Renee. I say you’re talking apples and oranges. Forgive me, Lourdes. I know that’s not what you want to hear from me, but I love you too much to lie to you.”

  “But you admit it’s still possible, don’t you?” she said, with some edge-of-the-fingertips desperation.

  “Sure it’s possible. But ‘possible’ isn’t proof that will stand up in a court of law.” He came over and put an arm around her. “Look, I know how much you put into this. But is it also possible that with all this thinking about your sister, your lines have gotten a little blurred?”

  “Later for you, Mitchell.” She pulled away gently. “My lines are still straight. You’re just mad I took over your little yoga room.”

  “Actually, I was hoping one day it might be a baby’s room.” He looked sadly at the rolled-up mat in the corner where he’d envisioned a crib standing.

  “Whatever.” She started writing on another card. “But don’t tell me that I’m the one getting ahead of myself.”

  41

  OCTOBER

  2012

  Everyone had gone way over the top worrying about Hurricane Irene last year and, aside from a few flooded streets and lost homes, it hadn’t been that big a deal. Joey, who as chief had pressured the local politicians to close the schools for safety reasons, wound up getting more of an earful from mothers bitching about having the kids home from school all day and husbands pissed about how much the police were getting for overtime.

  So when the hype started up again about this Hurricane Sandy being the storm of the century, he didn’t lose his mind right away. They lived in a place where natural disasters didn’t hit as often as man-made ones.

  Just the same, as head of a major department overseeing some three thousand officers and responsible for the safety of a million and a half people, he knew he’d have to be on duty or at the very least reachable for most of the day and night to coordinate emergency procedures, rescue efforts, and the prevention of looting.