Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  Although she had bought Teena’s compliance, Cassandra did not feel she had permission to plunge right in, ask the questions she wanted to ask. The whole setup felt vaguely unethical. Was this checkbook journalism? Was she obligated to write about how she procured the interview? She had learned, in her second memoir, to keep her relatively cushioned lifestyle off the page, not to invite the reader’s envy. Would the context make Teena look shrewd or greedy? And would it be unfair to describe the preoccupation with the wineglass and all that suggested?

  “I don’t usually drink at lunch,” Teena said out of the blue, as if reading her thoughts, but perhaps she was merely following Cassandra’s eyes as they tracked hers.

  “Hey, I’m having sake, which is more potent than wine. I often have a drink with lunch. Americans can be too abstemious.”

  “I don’t know that word,” Teena said, the kind of frank admission that was rare in Cassandra’s circles. No one among her New York friends ever admitted ignorance. Most of her New York friends were men, however. Challenged on the word, she wasn’t sure she could define it.

  “Overly concerned with being good, virtuous,” she said, knowing she was probably wrong.

  “That’s one thing I’ve never been accused of. I do like to drink. But I’m not an alcoholic. There’s a test you can take. I found it online. I drink alone, but then, I live alone. And I can’t remember the last time I had a drink at lunch, and I wouldn’t have risked this one if it weren’t the end of my shift. As it is, I’ll make sure I don’t drive until at least an hour after I’ve finished that. At my size, I could blow the legal limit without being close to drunk. I never get drunk, but the blood doesn’t always agree with the brain.”

  Poor thing. All those rules—didn’t she know the score-keeping marked her more completely than her habits, whatever they might be? Had she struggled with alcohol before she left police work? Cassandra decided it was time to prod Teena toward the topic they had agreed to discuss.

  “I thought ex-detectives ended up doing consulting, security and the like. Or private investigation. It never occurred to me that I would find you in Nordstrom’s designer collections.”

  “How long have you been looking for me?” There was a flattered wistfulness to her voice, as if she couldn’t help teasing out the story of Cassandra’s pursuit.

  “A week or so? I found your name in the newspaper stories, the ones from back around the time…it happened. The archive on the local database only goes to 1991, but when I dropped your name into it, I found a small item. Something about an accident, a settlement.”

  “I was injured on the job, but it wasn’t exactly officer-of-the-year stuff. I was lucky to get anything. There are a lot of legal limits in those situations, according to the FOP counsel. In fact, it’s kind of like Let’s Make a Deal. They offered me the box—coverage of all related health issues for life, full pension although I was way short of my twenty—but I went for the curtain. And it looked like I was going to get the goat until the car manufacturer kicked in. I got luckier than I had a right to be. My colleagues thought I was greedy, trying to get money for an accident that everyone believes was my fault.”

  “Was it?”

  “No. I dropped my weapon while trying to subdue a suspect, she kicked it under the car, I reached in to get it, the parking brake popped. I’m lucky I even have the use of the hand, but those surgeons at Union Memorial are good. That’s where you want to go for hands in Baltimore.”

  Hard not to look at the hand under discussion, but it appeared normal enough, although Cassandra remembered the moment back in the store, how difficult it had been for Teena to pluck Cassandra’s business card from the carpet.

  “It was curious to me—the article about your settlement didn’t reference Calliope Jenkins.”

  “Why is that curious?” Bristling, on alert.

  “Well, it was a big deal, right? Like with me, no matter what I do—if I, say, saved a child from drowning—the writer will feel obligated to mention that I wrote My Father’s Daughter.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yes, I’ve written two more books since then and—”

  “No, I mean it’s interesting, the example you used, saving a child from drowning. I guess you think I failed to save a child.”

  “No, no, no—”

  “Because I didn’t. What I failed to do is to get a sociopath to admit she killed her child. There’s a difference. Calliope Jenkins’s son is dead, was dead, long before my department got involved. That falls on others—Department of Social Services, the hospital personnel who sent a baby home with a crack-addicted mother who had already had one child taken away from her. Did you find their names?”

  “Well, the one who died in the car accident. And there was a social worker who had to testify before a state legislative committee about why Calliope didn’t get the mandated follow-up visits—”

  “A supervisor, a boss, covering her ass and her employees’ asses. They were almost as bad as Calliope, sitting there and invoking her constitutional rights, like she was Gandhi or Martin fucking Luther King.”

  “Not to play devil’s advocate, but Calliope didn’t receive that much attention, didn’t become the symbol of anything. One thing that interests me is that her story played out about the same time as Elizabeth Morgan’s. Remember her?”

  Teena shook her head. She was emotional, angry, but trying to calm down.

  “Anyway, Morgan was white, educated, and accused her ex of abusing their daughter. She remained in jail rather than reveal her whereabouts. I knew all about Elizabeth Morgan but never heard about Calliope Jenkins until last month. I think that’s part of what I’m writing here.”

  “What are you writing, exactly?” Said with a squint, and Cassandra thought she might be catching a glimpse of the detective that Teena had once been.

  “At this point, it’s easier to say what it won’t be. It’s not true crime, not exactly. It’s not just about Calliope. Still, I think there’s a story there, about where we started out and ended up. Not just us, but the other girls in our group. One of them is married to the lawyer who defended Calliope—”

  “Reg Barr, that pussy hound. I feel sorry for whoever married him. He landed the boss’s daughter, right? I heard that was the only way he kept his job.”

  Cassandra flushed, hurried on. “Yes, Donna Howard, also in our class. And he was the younger brother of yet another girl in our group, Tisha. Then there was a fourth girl who’s apparently become a very proper church lady after a wild youth. I think our stories add up to something much larger than the parts.”

  “Did you know Calliope well? Because I’d love any insight you have into her. I sat in rooms with her for hours on end. I was young, pretty raw, but I was good at what I did, and I couldn’t break her. Was she that strong willed as a kid?”

  Cassandra didn’t know the answer, which was the stumbling block, the enormous hole at the heart of the project. She had written about her father, and however skewed her vision of him might have been, he was an open book to her. Ditto her two husbands, no matter how they might have chafed at her versions of them. But Calliope was an enigma, a quiet girl she had largely ignored. She had to report Calliope’s life not only after Dickey Hill Elementary but during Dickey Hill Elementary. And for that, she needed Calliope.

  “She was…kind of self-contained. Do you know where she is?”

  “Not in Maryland, I know that much. I—look, this is illegal, you can’t repeat this or write this—I used the credit department one time to try and track her down, using her old address. I think—I keep thinking that one day, I’ll get a phone call or open the paper, and she’ll be dead. And I’ll be happy. At least, I think I’ll be happy. But I might be angry, too, because she’s the only one who knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  Teena looked at Cassandra as if she were an idiot. “Where she hid her baby’s body, what she did to him. It’s not really that hard to hide a body. You’d be surprised at the dead p
eople who never get found. And regardless what people think, it’s not that hard to try someone for homicide without a body. Look, I don’t know how much you know about murder police, but the fact is, the obvious answer is the obvious answer. A kid disappears. His mother, a disturbed woman with a history of mistreating her children, won’t say anything. She killed him. I want her to say that out loud, just once. On her deathbed, in a letter. I want—” She gestured limply with her right hand, the damaged one.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, actually. That’s the problem. Calliope Jenkins isn’t a person. She’s a black hole, and I don’t mean that in the nasty way it sounds. She sucks people in, you get inside her, and there’s nothing there. She’s dead inside, and she manages to kill anyone who comes near her, one way or the other. One kid abandoned to the system. One kid dead. The social worker who screwed up. And, okay, me. For seven years, Calliope drank up the attention like it was water or air. She loved it, she fucking loved it. She thrived. The rest of us fell apart.”

  Teena had not eaten any of the teriyaki she had ordered. Now she pushed it around her plate while she slowly sipped her way to the bottom of her wineglass.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Shaken baby, something like that, when she was high.”

  “The record on whether she was an addict is in dispute. A user, yes, but not necessarily an addict.”

  “If she wasn’t an addict, she was insane.”

  “Drugs, insanity—either one would make a charge of first-degree homicide unlikely, right?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” Teena was shifting back and forth between her old cop persona and her present-day role as a proper Nordstrom sales associate.

  “And seven years—that’s probably as much time as she would have served for manslaughter, or whatever the lesser charge was? So she did the time, after all, perhaps more time than she might have.”

  Teena lifted her eyes to Cassandra’s, then lowered them, fixing her gaze once again on the sake, then reaching for the bottle, turning it around in her hand.

  “Hatsumago,” she said. “Is it wine?”

  “Actually, sake is a kind of beer.”

  “I don’t drink beer, never have. Now, see, that’s another reason I know I don’t have a drinking problem. There’s a six-pack of Sierra Nevada in my fridge, been there almost a year. I bought it for a cookout, then decided I didn’t want to go. But I would never drink it, even if there wasn’t any other alcohol in the house.” A wry smile. “But then—there always seems to be some kind of alcohol in my house.”

  Cassandra felt herself warming to Teena Murphy, something she hadn’t expected. Her father had schooled her to be open-minded in most things, but he also had instilled an undeniable class snobbery. And he had been particularly disdainful of police officers. She remembered him sneering at the television during the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, his rage almost out of proportion to the events, appalling as they were. He was not the kind of man who would settle for a word like pig, not when he could say cochon and then make a joke about Circe. Of course, it was around the end of his marriage; he had left Cassandra’s mother by then. Cassandra knew firsthand now that divorce made people almost crazy with rage. In fact, she believed that the person who left was often angrier than the person who stayed behind.

  “As I said, she did seven years. Isn’t that a kind of justice?”

  “Justice,” Teena repeated, musing over the word. “I confess, I was never much interested in justice. Maybe that shocks you, but that’s not really a police’s job. The state’s attorney’s office screwed up lots of solid cases we sent them; juries voted to acquit because they didn’t like cops. I couldn’t control justice. I lived for results. I was the third female homicide detective in that department. I told them if they put me on Calliope Jenkins, I would get her to crack. She cracked me. The day I got injured? The woman had eyes the same color as Jenkins’s. That’s the last thing I remember. I looked into those eyes and the next thing I knew, a car was rolling over my arm as I reached for my gun. You don’t know, you can’t know, how many times I sat there, staring at her. Calliope, I mean. We had staring contests. And every time, I was the one who broke. She could hold a person’s gaze forever, all the time, saying the same things. I take the Fifth. I have nothing to say. Even her own lawyers thought she was a freak, especially Barr. You ask me, he was scared of her.”

  “Scared of her?”

  “He always seemed nervous when we went over to the jail to talk to her. But she didn’t mind talking. That is, not talking. She was in jail; she could have passed word back that she wasn’t going to talk, her lawyer could have blocked us. Don’t you see? She liked it. She liked being in that room with me, liked fucking with me. She loved it. She was—I don’t know, showing off.”

  “Showing off? For you? For her lawyer?” Cassandra could understand the temptation to show off for Reg.

  “I know, I know. I sound crazy. But you asked. I was pretty when this started.” Teena looked startled by the train of her own thoughts. “Yeah, I was. Cute as a button. Had a big career ahead of me, a one hundred percent clearance rate. Everybody talked to me in the box. I didn’t see why Calliope Jenkins would be any different. But she was.”

  Teena balled up her napkin and threw it on her untouched plate. “I don’t know that I have anything I can contribute to your book. But I sure look forward to reading it.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  NOTHING REALLY SURPRISED CALLIOPE ANYMORE. She wouldn’t claim to be psychic, someone who could see the future. Far from it. She simply had learned to expect the worst, all the time, and life seldom disappointed on this score. Every trip to the mailbox, every ring of the phone, made her uneasy. No news was good news. Right now, she was clutching a bag of groceries to her chest and staring at the caller ID screen on her phone, trying to decide which was worse, taking the call or listening to the message on the voice mail later. Suck it up, she told herself. Get it over with.

  “Callie!” Reg Barr, his baritone as warm and sweet and full of shit as ever. Thank God they hadn’t invented a phone that could transport smell. The man was a cologne addict. Callie had gotten to the point where she claimed she was allergic, and he still wouldn’t stop wearing that shit. Aramis, Paco Rabanne, whatever. He probably wore something grander now, something not only expensive but hard to find, picked out by his pretty little wife. He probably still stank to high heaven.

  “What’s up, Reggie?”

  “Just checking in. You know.”

  “Why, Reggie?” She loved using the nickname he had shortened, knowing he despised it. She would call him Candy if she dared, but it was tricky, knowing how far to push Reggie Barr.

  “C’mon, girl. You know I always want what’s best for you.”

  Man lied natural as breathing. Although—scary thought—he probably believed most of the crap he said. He thought he had done right by her, he really did. God, he was dumb. Not book dumb. He knew what he was doing in a courtroom, when it came down to it. Outside of a courtroom, he was what her mother would call pig-ignorant. Slick, with charm that ran a mile wide and an inch deep.

  “Everything’s good,” she offered, semisincere. Nothing was bad. That is, there was no new bad, just the old bad, which she had lived with for so long she barely noticed it. That was a kind of good, right?

  “Anything going on?”

  Shit, had someone seen her back in Baltimore? But, no, Reggie would have gone straight for that if he had the goods on her.

  “Not much. I did like you suggested, got a volunteer job so I wouldn’t just be sitting around. I work at the Nearly New shop over to my church.”

  “Get first crack at the good stuff, huh?”

  She wanted to correct him, tell him that she wouldn’t abuse her position that way and that the Nearly New in Bridgeville wasn’t exactly awash in Gucci, anyway. But he was making conversation, not thinking about what he said. He was probably doing three other things as
he spoke to her—checking e-mail, reading stuff on his desk, motioning to a secretary to bring him a cold drink. It had been a long time since Callie Jenkins had been deemed worthy of Reggie Barr’s undivided attention.

  “What do you want, Reggie?”

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Got some paperwork coming up. Same ol’ same ol’. Okay?”

  “I always do what I’m s’pose to do,” she reminded him.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said, and her heart broke a little because she remembered those words in a different context and knew she would never hear them again. Could never be that again. A good girl. Such a good girl. My good, beautiful girl.

  “If you’re ever in doubt, you call me.” A pause. “You will call me, won’t you, Calliope? Don’t let someone sweet-talk you into doing something that wouldn’t be in your best interest. Anyone else tries to talk to you, you just give it a pass, right?”

  She knew she should just reassure him, let him hear what he needed to hear. She wouldn’t make trouble for her mother. He had to know that. But it was hard not fucking with Reggie Barr just a little.

  “I don’t know, Reggie. I’m not sure I’ve ever done what was in my best interest.”

  But she had made this mistake before, treating him like a boy, someone even more on the outskirts of things than she was, yearning just as hard after things they weren’t supposed to have. Yet Candy—no, Reggie, no, Reg—he had ended up on the inside of things, whatever the opposite of outskirts were, so far in he could barely see out anymore, and he never missed a chance to assert himself on this score. He wasn’t like her, and he wouldn’t let her suggest that he was.

  “Look, Callie, I’m serious. If need be, I’ll drive over there and go through all of this with you. The statute of limitations—”