A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  She turned to look over her shoulder at him. Did he really mean it?

  He smiled. “You driving?”

  “Of course I’m driving. You’re just the water boy.”

  “And sex toy.”

  “One of many. You have a plan B in case there’s nobody home at the apartment?”

  “Always.”

  “Care to share?”

  “We do something else.”

  “Brilliant,” she said. She loved when he was like this, upbeat, ready for action. The problem was, how long would it last?

  Sixty-Two

  Victoria McBride was at home, but she looked none too happy to be awakened at such a god-awful early hour by the heel of DeMarco’s jackhammer fist. After a rap of four thumps, followed by one of seven thumps, followed by one of nine thumps, she yanked open the door.

  “For fuck’s sake,” she said, squinting, her pupils black microdots. “What do you want?”

  She was a woman of average height, thin but busty, dressed in black thong panties and a T-shirt that failed to cover her navel or the purple crystal ornament dangling from it. Her only other accoutrements were short, spiky black hair, smeared mascara, and screaming red finger- and toenails so bright that DeMarco felt his pupils shrinking. The edges of her nostrils were inflamed, and she sniffed every ten seconds. Every now and then she used her long fingernails to scratch at her arms or belly.

  “Are you Victoria McBride?” he asked.

  “How should I know? You couldn’t wait for a decent hour to pound a hole in my door?”

  Both he and Jayme took out their IDs. DeMarco said, “Would you mind putting on some clothes, please, so we could talk?”

  “I’m wearing clothes,” she said. “What do you want?”

  The building smelled of fried meat and burnt onions. Babies were crying, radios and televisions blaring. Somebody one floor above was either using a pogo stick or stomping out a fire, all while singing in off-key Spanish.

  She gave the IDs a quick glance. Then shook her head, sniffed, and slapped herself on the cheek, hard enough to make Jayme wince.

  “We’re looking for your son, Connor,” DeMarco said. “Is he home?”

  “I just got out of bed, remember? I’m still trying to wake up. What time is it?”

  “A few minutes after ten.”

  “In the fucking morning?”

  “Correct,” DeMarco told her. “Is your son at home?”

  “What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “As far as we know, nothing. We’d just like to talk to him for a minute.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that with you.”

  “Well, you’d better get at liberty. Or else you can forget about talking to my boy.”

  “He’s over eighteen, Ms. McBride. We don’t need your permission.”

  She squinted at him for half a minute, then at Jayme for another fifteen seconds. Jayme smiled and said, “I love your belly button jewelry.”

  Victoria looked down. Gave the dangling crystal a flip. “It’s a piece of crap,” she said. “I paid twenty dollars for this thing. Supposed to be real quartz and silver, but I think it’s turning my skin green.” She used the middle finger of each hand to stretch her naval open. “Does that look green to you?”

  Jayme squatted down and leaned close. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe a little blue. More like bruising, I think.” She stood. “Can you remember how it might have gotten bruised?”

  The woman thought for a moment, then her eyes widened in a silent Aha! “That asshole Daryl,” she said. “He likes to suck it into his mouth. Not just the crystal but the whole thing! Don’t ask me why.”

  Jayme shook her head and tsked in commiseration.

  “Ms. McBride,” DeMarco said. “If we could speak to Connor, please?”

  She turned slightly and screamed over her shoulder. “Connor!” She listened for a moment, heard no reply, and screamed louder. “Connor!” Still no reply. She sniffed, pinched her nostrils, and looked to Jayme again. “What day is this?”

  “This is Monday,” Jayme said.

  “You should’ve told me that in the first place. He’s down at Hot Head’s.”

  “The burrito place?” DeMarco asked.

  “Well, what else is called Hot Head’s?”

  “He works there?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Are you done with me here? People have to sleep, you know.”

  “Have a lovely day,” he told her.

  She took a step back and flung the door shut. The dead bolt clicked.

  DeMarco turned to Jayme. “Well?” he said. “Was her belly button green or not?”

  She said, “Now that I know about Daryl and his spit, I guess it could have been mold.”

  He chuckled, but he was already thinking about Connor. About having to grow up with a mother like that. In an atmosphere like that. But the kid had a job, he was enrolled in college. DeMarco hoped for the best.

  Sixty-Three

  They sat at a table in the front corner, as far away as possible from the serving counter and the other employee. DeMarco sat with his back to the door, facing Connor, with Jayme between them. The room smelled of onions and garlic, fried meat and boiled rice. Connor said, “If we get a rush in here, I need to get back behind the counter.”

  “You sell a lot of burritos this early?” DeMarco asked.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “We’ll be quick,” Jayme told him. “I saw that you were at the memorial for Samantha Lewis.”

  “Yeah?” he said. He glanced out the window. Then met her gaze again. “Me and a hundred or so other people. So what?”

  DeMarco asked, “You were one of her friends?”

  The young man was silent for a moment, then answered. “Hardly even knew her.”

  “How did you know her?” Jayme asked.

  He shrugged. “We went to the same school. I just figured, you know, it was the thing to do.”

  “To show your respect,” Jayme said.

  “Exactly.”

  DeMarco said, “You didn’t share any classes with her? Dr. Gillespie’s, for example?”

  “Who’s Gillespie?”

  Jayme said, “You were with Kaitlin and Becca and Griffin at the memorial. All of them took his class in comparative religion.”

  “Yippee for them.”

  The smart-ass attitude was a familiar one to DeMarco. He wondered if he had come off like that to people when he was Connor’s age. He said, “Yippee for you too.”

  “Says who?”

  DeMarco smiled. “The registrar. You received an A.”

  The boy looked out the window again. Watched the street traffic for ten seconds. “We had discussion groups sometimes. Informal. New students, old students, anybody could attend. I said hello to her once. We talked a little bit. That’s the extent of it.”

  DeMarco asked, “Where did these discussion groups meet?”

  The young man didn’t answer. He continued to watch out the window.

  Jayme asked, “Was Dr. Gillespie in attendance as well?”

  Finally Connor turned to look at her. “Why don’t you ask him that?”

  “Because,” she said with a smile, “at the moment we are talking to you.”

  Just then a tall, thin Black man stepped in through the door. He paused and looked toward the counter, but apparently didn’t see what he wanted to see there. Then he noticed Connor at the table, and raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

  Connor saw him too, but looked away. The customer went back out the door and made a left. Connor said, “I don’t remember ever seeing him at one.”

  Both Jayme and DeMarco had caught his reaction to the customer. She said, “You don’t recall ever seeing Dr. Gillespie at one
of the discussion groups?”

  “Yeah,” Connor said. “What difference does it make?”

  DeMarco said, “What kind of car do you drive?”

  It caught Connor by surprise. “What?” he said.

  “I’m just curious. What kind of car do you drive?”

  “Who says I even have a car?”

  Jayme said, “You drove one to the memorial, didn’t you?”

  “What does any of this have to do with anything?”

  She said, “We won’t know until we hear the answers.”

  “And I’m just supposed to sit here and waste my time feeding you trivial information?”

  DeMarco said, “Why is it a waste of your time to help us find a murderer?”

  McBride pushed back his chair. “If you want to place an order, come up to the counter. Otherwise I’ve got better things to do than sit and watch the cars go by.”

  He stood and walked briskly to the back of the store, then disappeared into the kitchen.

  Jayme said, “Kids don’t have much respect for authority these days, do they?”

  “Permissive parenting,” he said. And thought, Or negligent parenting. Drunken parenting. Hardly any parenting at all. “What’s this generation called, anyway?”

  “Generation Z.”

  “‘Z’ as in what? ‘Zombie’?”

  Jayme pushed back her chair. “Are we finished here?”

  He turned to look at the menu above the counter. “You hungry?”

  “Don’t tell me you are already?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, and stood. “Just thinking of you.”

  She stood, gave him a look, one eyebrow cocked, and headed for the door. A moment before she stepped outside, he leaned close and whispered, “Eyes left.”

  The thin Black man was leaning against the corner of the building, smoking. The moment he noticed Jayme, he slid behind the wall, out of sight.

  “Oh yeah,” she told DeMarco as they walked to the car.

  Sixty-Four

  “I remember it being orange,” Jayme told him. “And longer than most these days.” She collected their iced coffees from the fast-food take-out window and handed them to DeMarco. Then drove to the front of the restaurant’s lot and parked facing the street.

  “Like a Dodge Challenger maybe?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding as the image solidified in her memory. “I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.”

  DeMarco stripped the paper from the plastic straws, jammed a straw into a lid, and handed the cup to Jayme. Then denuded his straw as well. “So he earns minimum wage selling burritos,” he said, thinking out loud. “Lives in public housing with his mother. How does he pay for a $30K car? $35K with all the goodies.”

  “Generous mommy?”

  “Generous mommy with a heroin habit? Seems unlikely.”

  “So he has another source of revenue. Ergo the non-burrito customer who didn’t hang around long enough to be introduced.”

  “You know,” DeMarco said, “once you factor drugs into a situation, anything becomes possible.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t see any signs in those other kids.”

  “Smart dealers don’t use.”

  “And you think Gillespie is involved in this somehow? Got his own campus drug ring?”

  DeMarco sipped his coffee. Squinted at the sun glaring off the windshield. “What doesn’t jibe is the way all those kids look. Why go to the trouble of putting together a crew based on their physical similarities?”

  “They’re all dark-haired little beauties, that’s for sure. I don’t think any of them stands over five six. Connor maybe, but he was wearing those hiking shoes with the thick sole.”

  “Same thing I’m wearing,” DeMarco said, and waggled his feet. “They’re comfortable.”

  “But they do add an inch or so, right?”

  “What do you expect me to wear—flip-flops?”

  “Please, not with your feet.”

  “Hey. I wore army boots for four years.”

  She grinned and told him, “Thank you for your service.”

  “You mind if we get back to the subject at hand? Five kids who all share similar physical traits. All who took the same college course from the same professor.”

  “And probably all got As,” she said.

  “Let’s see if Olcott can confirm that. Any other similarities?”

  “They are all contrarians. The only one who’s been the least bit cooperative is Becca. Though we have no idea how Samantha might have been.”

  “Let’s not forget about Khatri,” DeMarco told her. “What is he—at least six years older than the rest?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “So he’s the exception to every similarity. Cooperative, tall, older, not especially pretty. And a dropout from Gillespie’s course.”

  “Dropped out or pushed out?”

  He shrugged. Shook his head. Said, “One rich kid, half-Asian, fraternal twin of the deceased. One farm-fresh country girl. One Black girl, gentle, shy…middle-class suburbanite?”

  Jayme sipped her coffee. Then said, “That would be my guess.”

  “And one welfare boy who is probably selling drugs and whose mother is almost certainly a junkie.”

  “And one big pompous ass with poor taste in clothing standing right at the center of them all.”

  DeMarco sipped. Thought. Squinted. Took another sip. “Okay,” he said. “Physical appearance? Check. Aced the same course? Check unless facts prove otherwise. Rebellious, at least when it comes to us. Check. And that’s it. That’s all we’ve got. We need more connective tissue.”

  “Becca,” Jayme said a few seconds later.

  He reached into the back seat for Jayme’s laptop, handed it to her. “You hit Facebook, I’ll call Olcott.”

  “Maybe we should try the registrar ourselves this time. We don’t want the good detective getting the idea we think he’s working for us.”

  “Smart lady,” he said.

  “It’s called empathy.”

  “I think I read about that somewhere.”

  Sixty-Five

  With a little pressure and DeMarco’s insistence that she call Sheriff Brinker for approval, the registrar pulled up Becca’s campus address, home address, and the grade transcripts for her and the other students. And now Jayme and DeMarco stood in the shade outside the administrative building, close to the cool stone wall.

  DeMarco gazed into the high leaves of a maple tree, watched the light appear to jump back and forth, playing hide-and-seek behind the leaves. And the word komorebi came to him then, a word he had read long ago, probably in a novel by Yukio Mishima, that fine Japanese writer who disemboweled himself. A single word to describe the way sunlight streamed through leaves on a tree. There should also be a word for the way light through trees makes us suddenly remember a word, DeMarco thought. Or the way memories pop up out of nowhere for no apparent reason.

  Jayme, who had been staring at the ground between her feet, said, “According to Kaitlin’s roommate, most everybody gets a C from Gillespie. If they’re lucky. But not the doll collection. All As for them. Even though both Connor and Kaitlin have a GPA well under 3.0. I would love to hear Gillespie’s explanation for that.”

  DeMarco had spotted movement between the leaves, and followed it to its resting place near the trunk. Gray squirrel, he thought. As he watched the squirrel, he said, “Here’s my read on Khatri. He’s not just angry at Gillespie for humiliating him. He’s hurt. What he really wanted to do at that presentation was to impress Gillespie. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that Daksh grew up under the thumb of a very critical father. Mother too maybe.”

  “You think he knows more about Gillespie than he told us?”

  “We have to find out. He and Becca are our best shots right now. I
f either of them gives us something…”

  “We can use it to apply a little pressure to Kaitlin and Griffin. Connor, I don’t know. I sense a lot of resistance in him.”

  “He sells drugs. He’ll be the last nut to crack, if he ever does.”

  She was silent for a few moments. Then said, “Does it ever get to you, Ryan? Manipulating people like this? Exploiting their need for approval, love, whatever?”

  “People manipulate people every day. And cause a lot more damage than we will. Our job is to catch the bad guys.”

  She flinched. “I don’t mind using bad guys to catch bad guys,” she told him. “But you don’t know how fragile people like Daksh and Becca might be.”

  “All right, doc. You tell me how to play it, and that’s how I’ll play it.”

  A door banged inside the building, startling her. “Can we go to the car now?” she said, and started walking.

  He hurried to catch up. “Hey. What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You’re ticked off at something. And I’m the only something in the vicinity.”

  She shook her head, handed him the car key, and kept walking fast. He noticed a glimmer of tear in the corner of her eye. What in the world had he done wrong this time?

  Sixty-Six

  They sat in the car with the air conditioner running. He fiddled with the radio for a minute, hoping to find a soothing song, something to accompany an apology, then decided to go it alone, and turned the volume off. “I don’t know what I said to upset you,” he told her, “but whatever it was, I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head no. “You’re a kind person, I know that. You can be very compassionate.”

  “What is it then?”

  She tried out a smile. “Just one of those days. Feeling a little emotional for some reason. I just don’t want people getting hurt.”

  “I don’t either,” he said. “Especially you.”

  She gave him a long look then, her brow wrinkled, mouth tight, and he thought she was about to tell him something. She looked at him a long time, her mouth slightly open. Then her features relaxed. She turned away from him, pulled out her notebook and flipped to the last page used. Reaching for her phone, she said, “As long as we’re in town, how about I give Becca a call? Just in case she’s staying on campus this summer. Before we make the drive north to Daksh.”