EQMM, March-April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "You met her once,” Cheryl said. “She came here to pick me up, and you loaned her fifty cents for the jukebox."

  I didn't remember that, didn't even remember Cheryl's daughter's name. I recalled a few stories that Cheryl had told about her over the years: her daughter making the honor roll in high school; her daughter winning an academic scholarship to the University of Memphis; her daughter intending to study political science and pre-law. Cheryl was proud of her kid, and she had a right to be. A single mother who struggled to pay the rent and keep food in the fridge on minimum wage plus tips, Cheryl raised a kid who not only survived high school without getting hooked, arrested, or pregnant, but actually achieved something.

  "None of it makes sense, Charlie.” She peeled open a pack of Doral 100s, her hands shaking like those of a very old man with a bad case of palsy. “Lea had her head on straight. She knew what she wanted, knew she had to work to get it. Then this happens.” She tilted her head and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. “It's just not fair."

  Cheryl sat silent for a moment, smoking and staring at the tip of her cigarette as if she might find the answers she needed in the fire. I glanced around the Refugee. A few regulars were watching us, their heads properly lowered with a mixture of embarrassment and respect. For the first time all day, the jukebox had fallen silent, and no one seemed willing or capable of dropping a couple of quarters to start it up again. Outside of the clinking of glasses and a stray cough or two, the bar was as silent as a Baptist church on a Monday morning.

  I knew what I was going to say before I said it and was already cursing myself for my foolishness. “Look, if there's anything I can do, anything you need, just let me know."

  She snubbed her cigarette, sat a little straighter on her stool. “I'll pay you."

  "That isn't necessary ... I mean, there's probably nothing...” I stopped myself before I said “I can do.” “I don't mind doing a favor for a friend."

  "I was saving to buy Lea a car. She needed one real bad, and I meant to have one by her birthday.” She shrugged and her words trailed off. “I'll pay you."

  "What do the police say?"

  "She left a note."

  "You think that something happened, that someone else was involved,” I said, certain that she did or that she was trying desperately to believe it. “That's what you want me to find out?"

  Cheryl surprised me. “I don't know, but if Lea killed herself, it means that my daughter was a stranger to me, that I didn't know her at all.” She leaned her elbows on the bar and stared into the mirror at her haggard reflection. “I guess I want you to introduce me to my daughter."

  * * * *

  The next afternoon I dragged myself and a world-class hangover up three flights of stairs to Lea's apartment while the building manager, a spry eighty-year-old woman with copper-colored hair, ice-blue eyes, and a Mississippi accent as thick as river sludge followed behind me and explained that nothing like this had ever happened here. Her building wasn't the most exclusive in town, but it was safe and clean and until Lea Washburn went headfirst off her balcony, the police hadn't had to step foot on the property in the better part of ten years.

  "I met her mother a couple of times, you know? You could just tell she thought Lea hung the stars and the moon. Then something like this happens so close to Christmas.” At the top of the landing, she brushed past me with a contemptuous glance at my wheezing and went to unlock Lea's door. “If you weren't a family friend, I wouldn't even consider letting you in the apartment.” She jammed the key into the lock as if she were angry with it. “Normally, I guard my renters’ privacy like it was my own. The first thing I told Mr. Tandan when he hired me was that I was a building manager, not a snoop or spy."

  She shoved open the door, let me enter, and then stepped in after me. There was nothing special about the apartment—living room, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a single bedroom that opened to a wrought-iron balcony where one piece of the railing leaned as if it too had considered jumping.

  "Just to think,” she said.

  She shook her head sadly and made the sign of the cross. Then she said she was going to wait outside because she just didn't feel right being here where poor little Lea had died.

  There really wasn't anything to see. The bed had been stripped and sprayed with disinfectant; the living room was empty except for a single end table with a broken leg that made it list like a drunk trying to hold on to his dignity. I pilfered through the kitchen. There was nothing there either except for a few dried-up roaches, a broken plate, and a couple of batteries that might or might not have been dead.

  "You going to spend forever in there?” the landlady shouted from outside the door.

  I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. “I need to look around."

  She huffed and announced that she had an appointment. Then she warned me not to leave before she had a walk-through to make sure everything was all right.

  I went back to the bedroom, picked up a cheap cordless phone from beside the bed, hit the Talk button, and got a dial tone. That didn't tell me anything other than that the phone still worked so I hit Off and put the receiver back where I'd found it.

  I wasn't expecting much. Earlier, I'd stopped by the Union Avenue precinct, hoping that an old friend had snagged Lea's case. That hadn't happened. The case had been assigned to Reggie Morales, a newbie in Homicide who'd graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice from Ole Miss. Within five minutes I knew two things about Morales: He was a sharp dresser, and he was still fresh enough to be polite and answer my questions.

  Lea Washburn had committed suicide. She and her boyfriend were having problems. Her grades were tanking, and she was in jeopardy of losing her scholarship and being placed on academic probation. On the night of her death she'd been drinking heavily and eating downers like they were popcorn. Her next-to-last call, unanswered, had been to her boyfriend, her last to a suicide-prevention hotline. Evidently, she'd either gotten a busy signal, hung up, or whoever was working the line wasn't that damn good at the job.

  Now I walked around her empty apartment, opened dresser drawers that had already been searched, ran my fingers over the spines of books—psychology texts, grammar handbooks, a collection of John Grisham novels. I was still there, still trying to decide if I should waste another five or ten minutes pacing through the apartment to make myself feel as if I'd done a day's work or if I should cut to the chase and head for the nearest bar, when I turned and saw a woman standing at the threshold of Lea's door.

  "I thought you were Mrs. Reynolds,” she said.

  She was young, in her early twenties, dressed in jeans so expensive they looked cheap, her brown hair chopped just below her shoulders. She wore severe black-framed glasses that emphasized her green eyes, and she had a book in her hand. I tried for what I hoped was a charming or at least harmless smile.

  "Do you have a second? I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about Lea Washburn."

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You're another cop, I guess."

  "Something like that."

  "I've already told you guys everything I know. I wasn't even here when she jumped. I got home thirty minutes later and there were cops and paramedics all over the place."

  "I won't take much of your time."

  "I've got Linguistic Theory in half an hour, and I can't be late again. Whatever you want to ask, ask quick."

  "Five minutes,” I said. “I just want to know about Lea, what she was like."

  "If that's all you want, it won't take more than a minute."

  It took over half an hour. During the course of the conversation I found out that the girl's name was Ashley and that she'd moved in across the hall a couple of weeks before Lea rented this apartment. They weren't friends. Ashley was a graduate student in Literary Studies. Lea was pre-law and acted as if her biggest ambition was to be either Martha Stewart or the president of the campus Republicans.

  "It was sad,” Ashley said. “Not just because her head
was in the wrong place but how she tried to fit in with people who she thought were successes. You know?"

  "Not really."

  "She'd buy clothes that looked like the crap all the elitist preppie kids are wearing but she'd buy them at Target and everyone would know. The only thing that those jerks in the Young Republicans hate more than grunge kids and Goths are people who try to look like them and shop at Target. Lea was a sorority girl who couldn't find one that would have her."

  I asked about Lea's boyfriend. Ashley sighed, shrugged her narrow shoulders, and said that it was sad but even Lea's boyfriend had been grabbed off a discount rack. Ryan Beatty had been a third-string quarterback at the university until he'd tested positive for steroids. After he was suspended, he dropped out of school and took a job as a bouncer at a campus bar where he'd met Lea. They'd been dating for months, and they had a “dramatic relationship"—lots of arguments, threats, and tears. A couple of times the arguments had turned physical and Ashley had heard Lea begging him not to hit her.

  My cop radar went up. God help me, the truth was I felt better than I had all day. Here was a real possibility—a steroid-addicted, loser boyfriend, with a bad temper. All I had to do was find one mistake, confront him with it, extract a tearful confession, and then I could return to the Refugee, give Cheryl the bitter comfort of knowing that her daughter was a murder victim not a suicide, and then get on with the business of swelling my liver to the size of a beach ball.

  "But the thing is,” Ashley said, her voice dropping as if she were afraid she would be overheard. “I'm a committed feminist. The linguistics of gender is my thesis topic, for God's sake.” She bit her fingernail, looked as if she were about to commit a heresy. “I didn't really blame him."

  Sleeping around had been more than a hobby to Lea. She'd taken it nearly to the level of a professional. Lea's bedroom door had always been open—for classmates, philandering professors, casual acquaintances, any willing, well-dressed guy she bumped into at one of the local bars.

  "Maybe she needed guys to prove that she wasn't just a silly wannabe or maybe she just liked sex. Who knows? But the weird thing, the thing I didn't like, was that she'd always tell Ryan about it. In detail. And he'd cry. I mean I've heard him wailing but Lea would keep goading and goading him. Like she enjoyed it."

  "Maybe she pushed him too far and he helped her off the balcony?"

  "It's possible, I guess. I mean, you see things like that on the news all the time. But I never really got the impression that he'd go that far."

  I thanked her for her time, offered her a twenty that I couldn't afford to spend, and was relieved when she told me to keep my money. Then I stopped her before she walked out of the door.

  "Do you think Lea would have killed herself?"

  "Maybe. If she looked in the mirror and realized who she really was."

  She shut the door softly behind her. I went out on the balcony, lit a cigarette, and smoked while I looked out at gray sidewalks and gray skies that hinted at snow but would only deliver another cold, driving rain. For a couple of minutes, I concocted a convoluted story straight from a made-for-television movie. Ashley was the jealous neighbor, in love with Lea's boyfriend, enraged by the way Lea treated him, certain that if Lea were out of the way, she and Ryan would live happily ever after. But the theory was silly, pure fantasy. I clung to the possibility of Ryan Beatty as the murderer. I glanced at the sagging railing. Maybe Ryan Beatty had had enough of her cheating, and things had gotten out of hand. That would be a hell of a lot easier to tell Cheryl than that her daughter had finally taken an honest look in the mirror and decided she wasn't good enough to live.

  I flicked my cigarette off the balcony, stepped forward, looked over the rail, and spotted my butt on the sidewalk. The only thing that told me was that it was a long way down.

  * * * *

  Investigating anything is a lot like life itself. Three quarters of everything you do is a waste of time. After my visit to Lea's apartment, thirty-six out of the next forty-eight hours were a complete wash. I tracked down Ryan Beatty's address but Ryan's roommate, a stocky black kid with a facial tic, told me that Ryan hadn't been home since Lea's funeral and swore he had no idea where Ryan was staying. I dropped by the Delta Bar and Grille, but the manager, a saggy-breasted middle-aged woman with a smoker's cough, told me that Ryan had taken the week off. She thought he might be at his parents’ place over in Arkansas, but she couldn't say for sure. I spent half an hour with the University of Memphis's strength-and-conditioning coach, who told me that Ryan's problem was that he had a head for the game but not the body for it. In an era of two-hundred-forty-pound quarterbacks, Ryan Beatty was tall and naturally scrawny. Desperate to play, he took steroids to bulk up, got caught, and then got bounced off the team. For Ryan, college had only been an excuse to play football so as soon as he left the team, he left the university. When I asked if he thought Ryan might have killed Lea Washburn, the coach looked genuinely surprised. Not Ryan, he said. No way. Even when Ryan was “riding the ‘roids,” he'd been emotional, prone to crying jags over an incomplete pass at practice or a bad call during a game, but never violent.

  I interviewed a couple of Lea's classmates who told me almost exactly what Ashley, her across-the-hall neighbor, had. Lea was a sad girl who didn't fit in and slept around a lot. I spoke with Lea's professors, two of whom admitted to having an affair with her. They were very nervous and very married. Both expressed their regret over Lea's death and provided me with alibis before I asked. And both begged me to keep their affairs secret, not from their wives, but from their departmental chairs. Exhausted, disgusted, and running out of options, I stopped by the Refugee, avoided as many of Cheryl's questions as I could, and answered the others with outright lies. In fact, the only reason the entire forty-eight hours weren't a complete waste is that I managed to get a few hours of sleep and somehow found myself spending a couple of relatively pleasurable hours talking the saggy-breasted, gravel-throated manager of the Delta Bar and Grille out of her phone number.

  The next day an old University of Memphis football brochure gave me Ryan Beatty's hometown in Arkansas and a quick call to the Calico Rock sheriff's department gave me Beatty's parents’ phone number and address, but I put off making the drive to Arkansas.

  Stopping by the Better Way Foundation, the nonprofit suicide-prevention hotline that Lea Washburn had called before she'd gone headfirst over the balcony, seemed like a good idea. It was the last of the loose ends, and I was up early and determined not to hit the nearest bar until the sun was dipping on the other side of the Mississippi.

  There was a Happy Holidays sign on the office door and silver tinsel draped over the entrance, but other than that the place didn't look any more festive than you'd expect a suicide-prevention hotline to be. The office was small and cramped, its semicircular space cut into pie wedges by Styrofoam partitions. Each cubicle was crammed with flat tables, rows of phones that looked as if they'd been scavenged from a 1970s Jerry Lewis telethon. I followed a narrow hall to a desk where a cabbage-faced woman leaned back in a vinyl chair and shouted curses into a phone. I squinted at the nametag on her denim shirt, Sandy McAllister, Director, but I didn't need a nametag to tell me she was in charge. Her desk had more phones than anyone else's, and a narrow door behind her desk had a sign that identified it as Sandy's Powder Room, a perk of management, I guessed. I gave her an inquisitive smile. She held up a finger for me to wait, cursed a little more, and ended the conversation by dropping the F-bomb. I figured if this was the kind of reception Lea got, there was no wonder she'd gone off the balcony.

  "To hell with Memphis Light, Gas, and Water,” the woman said.

  "I'll second that."

  She arched an eyebrow. “You don't work for them, do you?"

  "Sorry."

  "Don't be unless you really feel an urge to get a cussing or have a boot kicked up your ass."

  I held up my hands. “Sorry twice."

  "You're not a volunteer.” It was
n't a question and it wasn't quite an accusation. “So why are you here?"

  "Lea Washburn."

  "We lost her,” the woman said, her voice softening, her face sagging with exhaustion. “About a week ago, right?"

  "You remember her?"

  She picked up a pack of Virginia Slims from her desk and lit one despite the No Smoking sign behind her head. “I can't forget the ones we lose,” she said, curling smoke from her lip. “I dream about them every night.” She shook her head with as much sadness as I could remember seeing. “It's the ones we save, I forget. Those are the ones that never come back to me."

  * * * *

  She insisted on calling me Charlie. She apologized for it, explained that she'd talked to so many potential suicides on the phone and knew that the best way to connect with them was by using their first names that she couldn't call anyone Mister This or That. She hoped it didn't offend.

  "Charlie's fine,” I said. “I've been married twice. You call me Charlie, you're a friend for life."

  She laughed because she was supposed to, not because I was funny. “You're a relative or a friend of the girl?"

  "Family friend,” I said.

  She snubbed her cigarette, studied my face a second, and then ran her fingers through her hair. It was long and straight, the gray of fireplace ashes. There were deep furrows in her brow and the corners of her mouth. Only the liveliness of her eyes, wide and cornflower blue, kept her from looking old enough to draw Social Security.

  "You're more than a family friend."

  I showed her my ID. “I'm working for Lea's mother."

  "Lea's mother? Not an ambulance-chasing lawyer anxious to file a lawsuit?"

  "Her mother just wants a few answers."

  She picked up a pencil, tucked it behind her ear, and sighed. “When it comes to suicide, everyone wants answers. The sad thing is, there usually aren't any."