The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Oh yeah,” Novotny said. “Lots of times. Nice kid, he had these long eyelashes, like, shit, no wonder the Cook girl was crazy for him. He was polite, too, real soft-spoken. But I think he must have been stupid, because he didn’t understand what he was facing. How often do you see a black kid thinking he could beat the system? He was shocked when the sentence came down, I remember. Tried to hang himself. But he was too tall.”

  I thought about that. When everything went wrong, that had to be an incredible disappointment: not even being able to pull off giving up. “So you believed him,” I said.

  Novotny polished off his drink. “I don’t know. I’m just saying what I’ve noticed. A guilty kid, he can tell you the hair color of the cashier who sold him the cigarettes he bought while he was busy not committing the murder, right? An innocent kid, one who actually was buying the cigarettes instead of committing the murder—he barely even remembers he bought any until you ask him about the receipt in his pocket. The Stockton kid could hardly say anything to help himself. No alibi, no idea who’d put a bloody knife in his car, no help at all.” He paused and looked at me. “I was him, I would have started making stuff up to fill the story in. But he didn’t. Like I said, stupid. All he wanted to know was if we found Sarah yet, like she was going to make sense of it for him.”

  Novotny didn’t seem like the type to suggest someone’s innocence lightly. Cops never were. “What do you think happened to her?”

  “I haven’t the faintest,” Novotny said. “None of her stuff was gone. No secret rendezvous in her e-mail. This was before all the kids had cell phones, so nothing there. No activity on her savings account. She’s probably dead, that’s all I can think. Otherwise how else did she vanish like this?”

  “The million-dollar question,” I said.

  He shook his head, his expression going serious. “This is one of those cases. The ones that stick with you. Nothing makes any sense. There must have been a hell of a secret, that’s all I can think. The Cooks were nice people, boring corporate jobs, no known enemies. And we got Brad saying he and Sarah were the love story of the century, but then we got Elaine’s family saying she was terrified of Brad. Sarah’s not here to settle it for us, so you look at her, maybe she did it. But she’d have to hate both her parents and Brad a whole helluva lot in that case, and there’s no evidence of that at all.”

  “So she’s gone, and they’re dead, the end?” I said.

  “Bah,” Novotny said. “I don’t know what to tell you, kid, if you were hoping for insight. That’s all I got. I don’t think the case was open-and-shut, not by a long shot. But Danielle Stockton would tell you she saw Jesus Christ himself if she thought it would help her brother out,” he added, shaking his head. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “The execution is in two months,” I said. “I think it’s important to her to know she tried everything. There’s something to that, you know? So listen. What if I wanted to visit Brad Stockton in prison?”

  “Then you’d fill out a form and wait to get put on the approved-visitor list like everybody else. Believe it’s form DRC twenty-ninety-six.”

  “Are you saying I’m like everybody else?” I said.

  He chuckled. “Okay, no. As a licensed private investigator, you—wait, you do have a license, right?”

  “Petey, what do you take me for? Of course I do.”

  “Okay, so you’d be entitled to visit in an official capacity if you have a written statement from the attorney of record.”

  “Is that something you think you could help me with?” I said. “I’m impatient.”

  Novotny grinned. “Yeah, okay. I can call the law firm.” He looked at me for a long time. “What did your daddy think, you being a detective?”

  “He thought I was wasting my time too,” I said. “He thought I should have been a dental hygienist.”

  Novotny laughed. “Good as they come, Frank was,” he said, although the anecdote I had just shared was not one of my father’s finer moments. Most of my anecdotes weren’t. “They got the guy, right? The guy who shot him?”

  “Dead at the scene,” I said.

  Novotny nodded. “Good, good. That has to be a relief.”

  I nodded, though it wasn’t, not really. I didn’t like to think about it: the twenty-year-old kid my father had pursued across a housing-project playground, the kid who turned and fired three times before Frank could even unholster his gun. My father’s partner shot back, taking the kid down with a bullet to the chest. But it was too late. That bullet wasn’t a time machine. Nothing about any of it was a relief. “Thanks for the drink,” I said, giving him one of my cards. “Drinks.”

  “Any time, doll. I hope you have more luck with Brad than I ever did.”

  “Ten bucks I do,” I said.

  We shook on it.

  * * *

  My father always had a drink in his hand. It was part of him, like his broad shoulders or his temper or his antifreeze-blue eyes. It was the catalyst to every good time and every bad time he ever had. It was a magnifying glass he put himself under, revealing the truth of him. It was the only thing we had in common, the only thing we ever agreed on.

  The last time I saw him was three weeks before he died. We had dinner once a month, my brothers, my parents, and me. I don’t remember what we ate or what we talked about. Probably nothing of consequence, because despite the monthly get-togethers, we weren’t really close. I only remember the last thing my father said to me, grabbing my arm as I walked past his chair on my way out.

  “You turned out okay,” he said as he gripped my arm. It didn’t sound affectionate. It sounded like an accusation. Frank had been a cop for thirty-eight years. Everything he said sounded like an accusation. “More like me. I was afraid you were going to turn out like your mother.”

  Andrew and Matt, wisely, had already left. My mother was sitting on the couch. She didn’t look up from her magazine. “Let go,” I said.

  “She’s nice, that’s what people would say about her, she’s nice. But you,” he said. He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot and whiskey-wild. He was still touching my arm. His other hand held a cut-crystal tumbler, empty except for an ice cube that barely had a chance to start melting. “You know, maybe you could stand to be a little nicer, actually. You’re a girl. You have to be nice. But not too fucking nice. That’s what you have to do. Be nice but not too fucking nice.”

  I jerked my arm away from him. “Good night, Mom,” I said.

  “Drive careful,” my mother said, ignoring the tension as usual.

  I left without saying anything else and drove home too fast and called Andrew to tell him about it.

  “You’re always so surprised, when he does something shitty,” he said. “But, Roxane, he’s Dad. He’s always going to do something shitty. That’s all.”

  “Yeah,” I said. But I’d had a weird feeling that there was more to it somehow.

  THREE

  Be nice but not too fucking nice. I replayed that final conversation as I drove to see Kenny Brayfield. This was as close to fatherly wisdom as I was ever going to get. There were too many bad feelings between us, about my work, about his affairs, about the types of men and women I brought home. There wasn’t any peace. Neither of us ever apologized, and we wouldn’t have been interested in forgiving each other anyhow, not all the way, not then. But I thought that I didn’t have to decide about my father yet, that given enough time, the past would start to drop off the permanent record like a bad debt or a speeding ticket. I just wanted to wait. I thought there was time. But there wasn’t, and the part that bothered me most was how my father said I was like him, and how he was right.

  I mentally tabled the matter as I parked my car. Next Level Promotions was in a square brick office building in the Brewery District on the south end of downtown. It was one of those cheaply modern spaces with glass walls, exposed ductwork, and fake Herman Miller furniture. Five young, beautiful employees were sprawled on a
plush white area rug, folding T-shirts that bore the logo of a new vodka brand. A Radiohead song was blaring from a pair of iPhone speakers. I approved of the music choice, at least. One of the women looked up at me, twisting her red-lipsticked mouth. I guessed I didn’t resemble a potential client enough to merit a warm reception. “Can I … help you?” she said.

  “Here to see Kenny Brayfield,” I told her, raising my voice over the bass line. I pulled out a card from the pocket of my leather jacket and handed it to her. “He knows I’m coming.”

  “Let me see about that.” She took my card and stood up, stepping back into her patent-leather heels. I noticed then that the other four employees on the white rug had taken off their shoes as well.

  “Am I allowed to walk on this or should I go around?” I said to the others as she clacked down the polished concrete hallway.

  No one said anything. A beat later, the one-person welcome committee returned and pointed in the direction she had come from. “You can go back.” She sounded disappointed that she didn’t get to throw me out.

  I didn’t bother to thank her as I stepped over the edge of the rug. I went around the corner, passing three empty offices and a small kitchen with a table stacked high with cases of vodka. At the end of the hallway, I found Kenny in a large office behind a conspicuously clean desk. He was skinny, dressed in a hoodie and dirty Chuck Taylors. His medium-brown hair was buzzed on the sides and slightly longer on top, and a diamond stud glittered from one earlobe. He looked like the type to get pegged by mall security as a shoplifting risk. But he owned this whole enterprise, so who was I to judge? When he saw me, he stood up and gave me a big smile.

  “So you’re the detective.” He shook my hand with an overly firm grip. “Wow. I mean, wow. How crazy is that?”

  “It’s pretty crazy,” I said as I sat down. There was a big window behind his desk, through which I could see the brownish-green Scioto River and the skyline of downtown Columbus beyond.

  “Can I offer you a drink?” He sat and reached for a vodka bottle with the same label as the shirts. It was that kind with gold flakes floating in it like fish food. “They’re a client, in case you wondered.”

  I shook my head. “Ingesting precious metals isn’t really my thing,” I said, and he laughed. “So, Sarah Cook.”

  “Sarah Cook.” He leaned back in his chair and balanced there.

  “Did you get a good look?” I said.

  He took longer than he needed to answer. “Yeah, I got a good look.”

  “And?”

  “And.” He paused again. I had been about to take my notebook from my pocket, but I stopped to stare at him until he finally spoke. “I don’t want to mess with whatever Danielle’s up to here.”

  That struck me as a strange thing to say. “Was it Sarah or not?”

  “I told Danielle at the time, it just looked like some chick.”

  My client had not mentioned that part. “So you don’t think it was her.”

  Kenny bounced in his chair. “Look, Danielle’s really shaken up. About the date, the execution date. I mean, me too. That’s crazy. So I get it, she wants to do what she can do. And yeah, this woman we saw, she looked sort of familiar. But Belmont’s a pretty small world. Lots of people look sort of familiar. I would have recognized Sarah. But they’ve always said she’s dead. So how could it be her?”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Well enough. She was a real sweetheart, good influence on Brad.”

  I shifted in my chair. It was uncomfortable, clearly designed to discourage long conversations with the boss. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, we used to get into trouble together, me and Brad. Dumb stuff, kid stuff. You know how it is, bored in the suburbs. But when Brad started hanging out with her he mellowed some too. But that’s ancient history. Believe me, if I thought there was even a chance that woman was Sarah? I would have hired you myself. Brad doesn’t belong in jail.”

  I nodded. So far I had three votes for Brad Stockton’s probable innocence. “So if Brad didn’t do it,” I said, “who did? You knew Sarah—do you think she could have?”

  Kenny sat up and leaned on his elbows. “She volunteered at the food bank and shit. She was, you know, a good girl. And she actually liked her parents, unlike basically everybody else I knew back then.” He splashed some of the vodka into a tumbler and tossed it back quickly, wincing like he’d learned to drink from a movie. “So the answer is either no fucking way, or it’s no one knew her at all.”

  * * *

  I went home feeling a little frustrated. Danielle had conveniently avoided telling me that the other witness to her Sarah sighting disagreed with her, which gave it something of a different flavor. But it was her money, and I figured she could lie to me if she wanted to. I sat at my desk and ran a few database searches in case Sarah Cook’s fifteen-year absence had left an electronic trail, which, of course, it hadn’t. I did have a fax waiting for me though, a statement on letterhead from the law firm of Donovan & Calvert, authorizing me to act in an official capacity at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. Peter Novotny worked fast. I liked that.

  I closed the computer and stared at the wall of my office for a long time. The previous tenant had painted spirited colors in every room: a dark, shiny teal in the office, burnt orange in the living room, aubergine in the bedroom, bright yellow in the bathroom, chocolate-brown walls and red cabinets in the kitchen, cornflower blue in the long hallway that ran the length of the apartment. When I moved in, I asked the landlord to paint over the craziness, to make everything white. But he hadn’t, and then I grew to like it, and then eventually I didn’t see it anymore. Sometimes it still took me by surprise.

  I got up and cracked a window. Even though it was cold outside, the ancient, overactive radiators in the building hissed and gurgled all day and night unregulated, causing the temperature in my apartment to spike to tropical highs. Almost every room in the place had a window open an inch or two, even in the dead of winter. But the heat wasn’t why I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. It was getting to be the time of night when the apartment felt like a tomb. Through the screen I heard the rustling of someone in the alley, dragging a sack of aluminum cans. “They all had their blank faces on,” he was muttering, “like Jesus Christ foretold.”

  I put my coat back on and grabbed my keys.

  * * *

  The lobby of the downtown Westin was all marble floors and baroque-looking upholstery, and the doorman gave me a familiar nod as I passed him and cut to the right for the bar. It was medium-busy for a Monday after eight, a few clusters of businessmen with their ties loosened at the tables and an awkward couple that was either on a blind date or was about to break up, but there was only one party sitting at the bar itself and I sat down at the opposite end. Andrew caught my eye in the mirror behind the liquor bottles and broke into a grin.

  My brother had tended bar in just about every hotel in Columbus by now. It was a good regular gig when you dealt a little bit on the side, because the hotel bar was the first place out-of-towners would check when they were in the mood to party. In-towners too, sometimes. He finished the drinks he was mixing and passed them to a server, who then carried them to the couple on the verge of breaking up.

  “Have you seen our new fall seasonal cocktail menu?” Andrew said as he turned to me, heavy on the sarcasm. He was thirty-seven, three years older than me. We had the same blue-grey eyes, the same dark brown hair. Mine hit just below my shoulders and my brother’s shaggily grazed his collar. His tattoos were visible from under the cuffs of his shirt. He pushed a narrow sheet of ivory card stock in my direction. “If I have to make another mulled-apple-cider-tini I’m going to kill myself.”

  I squinted at the menu in the semidark. “I’ll have the Winter in Paris.”

  Andrew thunked two shot glasses down on the bar and filled them both with whiskey. “No,” he said.

  “It doesn’t sound that bad. St-Germain and champagne? Maybe I’m feeling
classy.”

  “You’re not.” He slid one of the shot glasses to me and held his up. “Friends don’t let friends order cocktails invented by social-media interns.”

  I clinked my glass against his and we drank. “Is Matt dating someone?” I said.

  Andrew shrugged. “Like he’d tell me. Why?”

  “He sent someone my way,” I said, “and I figured it was some girl he was trying to impress.”

  “And?”

  “And, I’m just not sure I’m up to the challenge of impressing anybody.”

  “You’re the smartest person I know.”

  “Christ, you need to meet more people, then.”

  “Is this how you get when you’re feeling classy? I think,” he continued more softly as he refilled our glasses, “that after losing Dad, you just don’t want to pick back up and keep going.”

  I didn’t respond right away. Then I said, “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re scared. That it would mean you’re as over it as you’re going to get.”

  I swallowed my second shot and thought about that. Neither of us had a good relationship with Frank, but that didn’t make it any easier. In fact, it might’ve made it worse. “Aren’t you?” I said.

  “Roxane, I’m fucking terrified.”

  FOUR

  At eleven the next morning I meant to be heading an hour south of Columbus to the prison in Chillicothe. I wanted to get Brad’s side of the story, hoping that fifteen years in prison made him reconsider his own unhelpfulness. But as I drove I saw the exit for Belmont, and I decided to take a brief detour. Belmont was one of the city’s farthest-flung suburbs, way out on the southeast side. According to the sign that greeted me as I veered off the highway, it was also the wildflower capital of Ohio. I’d lived in the state for my entire life and this was the first I had heard of such a claim. But it didn’t look like Belmont had much else to pride itself on. It was seventies suburban sprawl personified, the ranch architecture, the cul-de-sacs. The Outerbelt divided it in half; everything on the east side of the freeway was the good side of town and everything to the west was the bad part. The east side had the bigger houses and the high school, a few narrow blocks that passed for a downtown, a mall called the Shops at Wildflower Glade, and a string of medium-nice hotels and chain restaurants. The west side had a skate park and a railroad crossing and a UPS sorting facility. There weren’t any wildflowers to be seen, but then again, it was November.