Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  Now she wore dark, somber knits purchased at her employee discount. To sell other women expensive clothes, she had found it helped to have a neutral look, one that couldn’t be pinned down in terms of label or cost. Because, of course, that was the paradox of waiting on wealthy women, the unspoken accusation hurled out when someone discovered she couldn’t wear something new and trendy: What do you know? You can’t afford these things. But Teena knew the clothes better than anyone. She lived among them, day in and day out. She thought of her life at Nordstrom as akin to a position in some strange animal orphanage, full of exotic beasts that needed new homes. She was careful about matching her charges to their future owners, determined that the rarest specimens go to customers who were worthy of them.

  “It’s funny, running into you,” Lenhardt said. His cart was filled with what Teena thought of as reputable purchases—three bottles of wine, a bottle of Scotch, a case of Foster’s. She wondered how long those would last him, how often he shopped here, if he drank one beer with dinner, or two, or three. “It was only a day or so ago that I got a call from someone looking for you. But that’s how it goes. You go years without seeing an old friend, then, boom, the name’s suddenly in the air. Ever notice that?”

  The clerk loaded her box back into the shopping cart. Beltway Fine Wines had a distinctive smell that Teena could never quite pin down, a combination of wood, damp cardboard, and something spicy. She wondered if the various spirits under its roof slipped into the air. She always felt a little…altered when she was here, but then, she came here after work, when she was in the middle of the transition from work Teena to home Teena. No one called her Teenie anymore, but she still couldn’t carry her full name, Sistina.

  “Someone called you, looking for me?”

  “She was shut down by the public information officer in Baltimore City, I think, so she dug around, found some of your old compadres, those of us who jumped ship back in the early nineties. I guess she assumed we were disgruntled types, more likely to break rank. She was half-right.”

  Lenhardt had left when a new chief tried to force a rotation system on the homicide squad. Teena might have joined the exodus, but she had her accident a few months later.

  “She?”

  “Some writer. Kinda famous, I think—I remember my wife reading one of her books for book club. She’s working on a new book.” He swiped his credit card, took his bagged purchases from the clerk. Teena realized she was blocking other shoppers trying to make their way to the exit. She began rolling slowly forward, but Lenhardt caught up easily and fell into step beside her.

  “Why does she want to talk to me?”

  He gave her a look. “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t have anything to tell, but if I had—I wouldn’t have, Teena. You know that.”

  “But—why? Why now?”

  “She just realized she knows—what was her name, the one who never talked?”

  “Calliope Jenkins.” She felt like a child risking the candy man. Say the name three times and she’ll appear. Not that Teena was scared of Callie Jenkins. Not exactly.

  “Right. They went to school together.”

  “And that’s a book?” Her voice screeched a little on the last word, but the whoosh of the automatic doors provided cover. They were outside now, and the wind was cutting, carrying little pinpricks of rain that stabbed exposed skin. She had forgotten to put her gloves on and her hands ached. The medical experts hired by the other side during the arbitration said Teena’s Raynaud’s was coincidental, that she couldn’t prove it was a direct result of the accident. Small-framed women were prone to it, they said. Still, Teena never minded the cold before the accident.

  “Her name is Cassandra Fallows,” Lenhardt said. “This writer, I mean.” He had followed her to her car and she had a pang of embarrassment at its plainness. An out-and-out hooptie would have been less humiliating than this green, well-kept Mazda, which seemed to announce to the world how small and dull her life was. “On caller ID, she comes up as a New York area code. Begins with a nine at any rate. In case she does find you. Although I admit I tried, out of curiosity, and your number is unlisted, although your address comes up readily enough through the MVA. Not that she can get that without driving down to headquarters in Glen Burnie. Still, you know, if she’s even a half-assed researcher, she’ll be able to find your address. Unless—you own or rent?”

  “Own.”

  He grimaced. “Well, that’s good—I mean, rent is just throwing money away—but that makes it easier to find a person. Sorry, now I sound like your father. I am a father now. A boy and a girl, Jason and Jessica.”

  “Congratulations.” She meant it. Being a father, a parent, seemed miraculous to her. Anything normal did. But her mind wasn’t really on Lenhardt’s kids. A writer, doing a book. Every couple of years or so, back when the case was fresher, she would get a letter from a reporter, usually someone new at the Beacon-Light, an eager kid who had just stumbled over the story. She should have expected this, with the New Orleans case kicking up Calliope’s name, however briefly. She herself had started when she heard the news. But it had been so long since anyone had spoken of Callie to her. That was another reason not to attend cop parties. No back-in-the-day, no war stories.

  “Bye, Lenhardt. It was nice seeing you.”

  “Maybe our paths will cross again,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. Especially if you shop here regularly.

  She drove home and, as it often happened, was shocked to find herself there fifteen minutes later, panicky to realize that she had driven so mindlessly. She had always been prone to zone out that way. It was part of the reason she almost never drank outside the house—at her size and weight, a generous glass of wine could edge her over the legal limit. Oh, it couldn’t make her drunk—based on her consumption of box wine, it took quite a lot to make her drunk—but who would believe that, should Teena Murphy be pulled over in her fancy clothes and plain car? They would expect her to be drunk. It would explain how she survived being her.

  Pulling into her parking pad, she heard something—a branch cracking perhaps—and almost jumped out of her skin. The sound was the only memory she had, and she wasn’t even sure if that was true or something her brain had manufactured after the fact. But any kind of snapping, cracking noise threw her into a panic. She couldn’t be sure, but she believed that she hadn’t screamed until she heard the sound, all those breaking, snapping bones, like twigs under a giant’s foot. In her ears, it sounded like scoffing laughter, someone taunting her. Not that Calliope Jenkins had even smiled, much less laughed, in all the time she had tried to talk to her over the years. Still, Teena always believed she was laughing on the inside, delighted by her ability to play them all.

  The accident happened a couple of months after they announced Callie Jenkins’s release. Now that was sheer coincidence. Teena had gone to pick up a woman, the mother of a kid who had just been charged in a homicide, and the woman freaked out. Teena had always prided herself on not making the mistake of going for her gun too early, something women police were faulted for. Small as she was, she could and would take a beat-down. But she was tired that morning—not drunk—and she had gone for her gun, and the woman had knocked it out of her hand, sent it skittering under the car. Teena had been groping, grasping for it when the car started to roll backward.

  She let herself into the small, neat rowhouse she had purchased with her settlement from the car manufacturer, the deep pocket that had finally swallowed responsibility for her accident. Oh, they didn’t admit the parking brake was faulty, and they had done enough research, her FOP lawyer said, to know they could pretty much destroy her credibility in court. They just decided it was cheaper to settle and what was nothing to a big car company was more than enough to buy this house, in cash, on Chumleigh Road. Chumley! Now she remembered. She had watched that cartoon. She just forgot. She forgo
t a lot. She was forty-six years old and she could barely believe that she was once a little girl who had watched cartoons, who had decided she wanted to apply to the police academy because of Angie Dickinson in Police Woman.

  “She’s part of the gimp lineup, you know,” her father would say, referring to the other popular television shows of the day. “There’s a guy in a wheelchair, a blind guy, and a fat guy. She’s a woman, and that’s handicap enough.” He wasn’t being mean, and he certainly didn’t know he was being prophetic, that his daughter would one day join the gimp lineup twice over. Her father simply never understood why a pretty girl—and, although he never said it, a straight girl—would choose a career in the Baltimore City police department. Teena didn’t dare to say it out loud, but she believed she could be the first female chief in the department’s history, the first woman in the nation to lead a big-city police department. In the seventies, it wasn’t weird to believe that kind of shit. Strange, now that there really were women heading departments—in Des Moines; in Jackson, Mississippi—it seemed less probable to her. When she had joined homicide in 1986, she was the third female detective. Now, twenty-two years later, there were…two female detectives.

  Teena lifted the box of wine from her trunk, favoring her right hand, and cradled it on the point of her hip, the way a woman might carry a baby. She would eat something—a frozen dinner from Trader Joe’s, soup and a sandwich—forestall the first glass of wine just long enough to prove that she could. She would wash her dishes, tidy up the kitchen. Then, and only then, she would board the train for Banrock Station, chugging past all the other little towns on the route, all the places she would never know or visit.

  CHAPTER

  7

  “THE ELIZABETH PERLSTEIN LIBRARY will go here, and the old library will be converted into more classroom space, which we can definitely use.”

  Cassandra studied the blueprints with pretend interest. She was not very good at conceptualization and could not envision the future building. But the headmaster—a new one, his name quite gone from her head—was clearly excited about the addition to what had always been, frankly, a grotty little campus, one of Baltimore’s second-tier private schools, for those keeping score. Many were, as it turned out. Old-line Baltimoreans were geniuses at working a mention of Gilman, Friends, Bryn Mawr, Roland Park Country, Park School, even Boys’ Latin into some not really relevant anecdote. Some expressed surprise that the Gordon School was still around, assuming it had collapsed into the ashes of its own hippy-dippy good intentions. The school, however, had never been the Harrad Experiment/free love fiasco that was enshrined in the public imagination. It had been intellectually rigorous, owing as much to English boarding schools and St. John’s College’s classics-based curriculum as it did to the open-space experiment. The famed liberality had been confined to its lack of a dress code and its no-grades policy, which had included creating essentially fake records for colleges. Gordon School had done extraordinarily well at placing its students before that latter practice was uncovered and outlawed. Luckily, Cassandra had already graduated from Princeton by then.

  Whatever its flaws, the Gordon School had employed her uncredentialed mother as a lower-school math teacher. More crucially, it had offered Cassandra a scholarship for her last three years of high school. The combination of touchy-feely culture and exacting intellectual standards, but with no competition, had been perfect for a student of her temperament. She was genuinely thrilled for the chance to help the school now.

  She was less happy about the ceaseless pressure to contribute more of her own money to the project. It was funny how wildly others misjudged her income. Most people thought she had much less than she did, because it was inconceivable to them that a writer could make money. But some, like the headmaster here at the Gordon School, had erred in the other direction, suggesting she might want to give at the “Diamond” level, which started—started—at $100,000. God knows what kind of money was required to put one’s name on a building; Elizabeth Perlstein, class of ’88, was either one of those tech billionaires or married to one. Luckily, Cassandra had mastered the art of the graceful demurral, the ability to avoid the definitive no while never saying yes. Instead, she had waived her speaking fee, which was considerable, and persuaded her father to join her on the stage here for a fund-raiser, in which she would lead him, for the first time ever, through a public discussion of what had happened to him in the ’68 riots. Tickets to the talk alone were $50 and there was a private dinner for those willing to pay $250. The school stood to raise almost $50,000 from the event. Not Diamond level, but Platinum, and more than good enough by Cassandra’s estimation.

  “We feel so lucky to have you,” the headmaster said. “We thought the University of Baltimore symposium would have snapped you up.”

  “Oh, this is so much more meaningful to me,” Cassandra said. The fact was, the University of Baltimore had not even contacted her, nor had they asked her father to contribute an oral history to its extensive Web-based archive. She had been hurt by this omission, but not surprised, for there had been a small backlash against My Father’s Daughter once it found commercial success. The critical talking point, first advanced by a so-so lesbian African-American novelist, was that Cassandra had usurped a major political event and turned it into—she knew the words by heart—a story about a white girl’s birthday party, ruined by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, wah-wah-wah. The words had rankled, but Cassandra hadn’t been foolish enough to respond. Still, in quiet moments, when that stinging criticism came back to her, she argued in her head with her nemesis, a one-book wonder rumored to owe at least three books to three different publishers. Don’t write me out of history. You, of all people, should know what it’s like to be silenced, to be told that you have no role—because of race, because of gender, because of sexuality. My story is my story. And my father—complicated, less than admirable man that he was—saved a woman’s life that day. Yes, her pillow had received those words many times over.

  But this was only the fortieth anniversary. Perhaps by the fiftieth, they would be included. Fifty, ten years from now. Caught off guard by the realization that she was now at an age where, actuarially, she could not presume her father would be with her ten years in the future, Cassandra missed some point the headmaster was making. She smiled and nodded. Smiles and nods covered a multitude of oversights.

  “PEDANT,” RIC FALLOWS SAID a few hours later, after listening to her account of the meeting.

  It was one of his favorite words, his all-purpose condemnation. Pedant, pedantic, pedantry, pederast, the last of which he seemed to use interchangeably with pedant, although he clearly knew better. The irony, of course, was that Cedric Fallows was far more pedantic, in the literal sense of the word, than those he labeled.

  The pedant of the day was a neighbor here at Broadmead who had the temerity to complain about Mr. Fallows sitting on his patio in his bathrobe. And nothing else. Given the retirement community’s village-like aspect, with garden apartments built around shared courtyards, he could be glimpsed by his neighbors in deshabille.

  “Only if they’re looking,” he pointed out when Cassandra raised the issue.

  “Well,” Cassandra said, “apparently they are. And they can live with the bathrobe. Just not the lack of anything beneath.”

  “That was last summer. Why bring it up now?”

  “Because spring is icumen in,” she trilled. “Lhude sang the cuccu in his bathrobe.”

  He smiled. “It’s summer that’s icumen in. And your Middle English is deplorable.”

  But she had played his game, used a learned reference to lighten a tense moment. She could let the subject drop, move on to a discussion of their upcoming appearance at the Gordon School.

  “I’m not sure I want to go,” he said, surprising her. She thought her father would be dying for this bit of recognition. He had never had the academic career he envisioned, never published the big book in his head, the one he thought would
change the way people read myths. “Fuck Joseph Campbell,” he blurted out from time to time. Cassandra still wasn’t sure if he saw Campbell as the usurper of his ideas or the antithesis of what he had hoped to say.

  “We’re committed,” she said nervously, thinking of those blueprints, the advance ticket sales. “They’ve advertised—”

  “Oh, I’ll be there, if I must. But why can’t you tell it, as you did in your book?”

  “Because it’s your story.”

  “It was. Somehow it became yours.”

  She weighed what he was saying. A complaint? An acknowledgment of a literal truth? Or something in between?

  Yet her father had always seemed proud of her book. She remembered the first local signing, the one where no one had come, in a struggling independent in downtown Baltimore. Cassandra didn’t have many friends left in the city. Her friends were from college, her years in New York. In New York, at her first-ever publication party, the bookstore had been full of friends and publishing types, and there had been a dinner afterward in a restaurant. In Baltimore, where the publicist had assumed she would be championed as a hometown girl made good, there were exactly five people: her father and Annie, her mother and her mother’s best friend, and a woman who had clearly misunderstood the thrust of the book, believing it a history of the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The evening was notable, however, for it marked the first time since Cassandra’s high school graduation that her parents and Annie had been in the same room. (A midyear graduate from college, she hadn’t bothered to walk, just packed up her things and gone straight to a sublet on the Lower East Side, back when the Lower East Side was still the Lower East Side.)

  She had been nervous that night, reading in front of her parents. And Annie. The section she had earmarked for bookstore appearances suddenly seemed inappropriate, centering as it did on her attempt to re-create the moment her father met Annie. Her parents had raised her to be direct and down-to-earth about sex, but did that apply to their own sex lives? Her mother had explained the biology of the matter to her when she was eight, while her father had spent his life instructing her in the more indefinable nature of desire. She had been six or seven when her father had pointed out a woman near the Konstant Kandy stand in Lexington Market. “That woman,” he said, gesturing with the spoon from his ice cream, “has a magnificent ass. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth compared such an ass to a peach, or maybe it was a nectarine, but that’s a little flat-footed for me. What do you think? A cello, perhaps, or an amaryllis bulb, with the backbone stretching up like the stem, the head the flower?” No, the timing was off, for Roth’s book certainly wasn’t around when she was six. In fact, she remembered seeing its yellow cover on her father’s nightstand, in the apartment he shared with Annie, and thinking, He says he’s too strapped to get me new shoes, yet he buys himself hardcover books. But her father considered books as essential as food. He would have been baffled if anyone suggested not buying the book he wanted the moment he wanted it. Besides, her father’s library was a gold mine for a dirty-minded girl. Cassandra had read Roth and Updike and Mailer. She read Candy, although she didn’t understand it until she read Voltaire in a college lit class. Her father’s contemporary books, much more than his library of classics, prepared her well for the world she entered. The books didn’t stop her from having a stupid affair with one of her college professors, but they armed her with the information that the professor didn’t have as much power as a young woman might assume.