Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  The dynamic had been different, of course, when Ellen was courting Cassandra. Seducing her, to be blunt. She had started by whispering in Cassandra’s agent’s ear: Cassandra’s publishing company had never really understood her. My Father’s Daughter was a word-of-mouth fluke, a child that had thrived despite almost criminal neglect. True, they had published The Eternal Wife very well, but a publisher would have to be stunningly incompetent to undermine Cassandra Fallows’s second memoir. They didn’t love her, they didn’t appreciate her. Ellen did, Ellen would.

  Her next move was to take Cassandra to lunch, eschewing the obvious places in favor of a low-key restaurant in Cassandra’s neighborhood. Yes, back then, Ellen had come to her. “Why start gossip if we don’t need to?” Ellen had said of that first meeting in Brooklyn. They had a lovely three-hour lunch, complete with a bottle of wine, although Cassandra later reflected that she drank most of it; Ellen’s glass never seemed to need refilling, although she consumed gallons of water. Ellen’s praise for Cassandra’s work was headier than the wine, however. She spoke about discovering Cassandra’s first book when she was a senior in college, how much it had meant to her. She was bowled over—her exact turn of phrase—by the raw honesty about sex in the second memoir. She would be happy to publish anything that Cassandra wrote, anything. “I would publish your grocery lists,” she said. “I bet they’re poetry. I don’t believe you can write a bad sentence.”

  As it happened, it was only a week later that Cassandra’s editor, Belle, sent a sorrowful e-mail about Cassandra’s proposed novel, then a scant thirty pages and a semicompleted outline. It gives me no pleasure to say this, Belle wrote, but the writing lacks something. I wish I could tell you exactly what it was. The best I can do is say that your fiction seems tentative, as if you do not believe in the power of your own imagination, the authority of your voice. In these pages, you haven’t committed to the story and you seem to be papering over that fact by trying to divert us with these tangential bits of research—the history of the hospital, for example, the “open my records” movement among adoptees and their biological parents. Those digressions worked in your nonfiction, but here it feels like padding. We probably should talk.

  She should have taken Belle up on that invitation. But the e-mail stung—not because it was unfair, but because it hit, with uncanny precision, the nexus of Cassandra’s own fears and insecurities about the work. Meanwhile there was Ellen, willing to pay more money than Cassandra had ever dreamed, for anything that she wrote. Anything. And Ellen cooed over the proposal, pronounced it brilliant, said it seemed to her a remarkable idea, a vehicle for true fusion. And when the early reviews, in essence, echoed all of Belle’s fears, Ellen stood by Cassandra. “They aren’t reviewing the book,” she said. “They’re reviewing your contract. It’s not unlike what happened when Martin Amis published The Information, and all the press was about his agent and his teeth and his marriage.”

  Cassandra did the math: Ellen would have been in high school at the time Amis published that book. How could she know such ancient publishing history? But Ellen was a freak, the type of young girl who set her sights on being an editor when she was eleven or so, who liked to tell people that she used her bat mitzvah money to subscribe to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. Before she was twenty-seven, she made a name for herself with her uncanny knack for picking up debut novels for bargain prices and building them up beyond anyone’s expectations. Perhaps that was the problem. Both she and Cassandra had strayed from their usual paths when they joined forces. Ellen had paid a lot of money; Cassandra had tried to write fiction. Ellen couldn’t take the money back, but she could nudge Cassandra to return to her more lucrative niche.

  “I do think you have to answer the question,” Ellen said now, frowning at her bread and breaking it into pieces. “Did she or didn’t she?”

  “Only her hairdresser knows for sure,” Cassandra said. Ellen’s blank expression reminded her of their age difference; she clearly didn’t have any memory of that old Clairol ad. Okay, no more jokes. “It’s tricky—after all, her lawyer can’t comment publicly—but I think she must have. In fact, I’m beginning to think that’s why the first lawyer left the case so abruptly. She learned something—or Callie told her something—that compromised the defense, ethically. Which must be why she won’t talk to me.”

  “I’m not asking for a true-crime book,” Ellen said. “That’s too down-market, not at all your audience. But there has to be a journey. Even if you can’t say explicitly what you think, the reader has to know. You have to somehow persuade readers to feel empathy for someone generally regarded as a monster. And it’s got to go beyond the ‘Oh my, she was crazy!’ vibe of that Texas case, the woman who drowned her kids. There’s nowhere to go with plain crazy.”

  Cassandra spread taramasalata on a breadstick. Ellen’s advice, crass as it might sound, wasn’t off base. She still wasn’t sure what she would end up doing about the inconvenient fact that she had slept with one of the principals. If she was lucky—and, in fact, she usually was—she and Reg would sate themselves quickly, no one would ever know about the affair, and they could both go on with clear consciences. But wouldn’t it be fun if she could surprise Reg with her enterprise and ingenuity as an investigator? What if she ended up telling Reg things about this case that he never knew, never suspected. He didn’t even know where Callie was. Teena, too, had failed to find her. What if Cassandra could succeed? Only where to start? She thought of Fatima outside the church, anxious, even fearful. “That thing that happened to her?” What had happened to Callie? What did Fatima know?

  “Do you want dessert?” Ellen asked in a bright, cheerful way that somehow managed to indicate that she hoped the answer was no.

  “I wouldn’t mind coffee,” Cassandra said, feeling a little contrary. “And I always like to peruse the dessert list, dangerous as it is to women of a certain age.”

  “You look phenomenal,” Ellen said. “You’ve always been fit, with that nice skin, but there’s something…extra. Kind of glowy.”

  “Microdermabrasion,” Cassandra said, blushing.

  CHAPTER

  24

  TEENA WISHED THAT CASSANDRA HAD asked her to do something more difficult, although she wasn’t sure what that might be. Still, it was too easy, pulling up the home address of this woman, Fatima, from the billing department. Teena even had the perfect cover story: She wanted to write her a note to thank her for a recent purchase, a tack that Teena did use, as did several Nordstrom sales associates. Cassandra most certainly would have gotten a note if Teena hadn’t essentially extorted her.

  Once she pulled the account, she couldn’t help noticing that Fatima, who had a store card, sometimes paid only the minimum balance and every now and then missed a payment. Never more than one, and never more than once or twice a year. Her buying seemed to follow a bingelike cycle; the account would lie fallow for months, then she would come in and drop a thousand, give or take. She also spent a lot of her money at the basement level, the Rack. Quantity over quality, then.

  Teena mentioned that observation to Cassandra, keen to offer something extra. A mere address itself was a puny gift, even if that was all Cassandra had requested.

  “Hmmm,” Cassandra said. “That would fit with the girl I knew. And the woman I saw. When you buy clothes that memorable, you need more of them.”

  Her voice was muffled and a little subdued, but Teena chalked that up to the cell line, buzzy and unsteady from the train. Most people didn’t think twice about cell phones these days, but the thought of speaking on one from a train, a train returning from New York, was glamorous to Teena. She wondered what Cassandra’s apartment looked like, what filled her days back in New York. It was hard to hold on to the idea that Cassandra was only another Baltimore girl, not that different from her. More educated, sure, but Cassandra’s professor father had probably earned less money than Teena’s dad, who had his own heating and cooling business.

  Teena didn’t remember the ol
d neighborhood over by the racetrack; they had moved the year she was born. But they had gone back, from time to time, so her parents could impress upon their children how far they had come. They would drive around Park Heights on a Sunday afternoon, then head up to the Suburban House for what her father called, with no malice, good old-fashioned Jew food. Teena, a picky eater, made do with a bunless hot dog, shocked at the things her father ate with such obvious enjoyment. Gravlax. Kreplach. Borscht. Even the names sounded threatening, like creatures in a science fiction film. But she liked the drive, the tour of what they had left behind. Her brothers remembered where the bike shop was and—this shared in hushed voices—the pet shop, where a neighborhood girl had been murdered. The crime had taken years to solve and turned on the kind of obscure detail now omnipresent in television shows: Sand found on the girl’s body was determined to be from some exotic, faraway locale, not indigenous to the United States. That sand had led detectives to the pet store and a clerk who had snapped one day merely from encountering a privileged, pampered girl.

  It would be a stretch to say that this story made Teena decide to become a police, as she would learn to say. Certainly, such details figured hardly at all in her life as a cop. There hadn’t been much Caribbean sand or many criminal masterminds in her career. Perps were stupid. The job wasn’t about matching wits but matching wills, and the detective had the advantage of being able to shift tactics, tone, even facts. The detectives also had the privilege of movement—the freedom to stand, to pace, to leave the room. Yet Teena seldom availed herself of it. She sat. She sat until her ass, which lacked for padding, went numb, then continued to sit some more. It was in her stillness and her silences that she broke people down. Men, especially, treated her like a blind date they had to appease, make conversation with.

  Then she met Callie, who could challenge her on every front. Quieter, stiller. It was eerie how long that woman could go without speaking, how immobile she became. She made Teena think of some impossible plot, from Batman or maybe The Wild Wild West, where the hero slowed his pulse until it was almost nil and people took him for dead. Callie Jenkins’s eyes were dead, but her squared shoulders and straight spine indicated something was inside her, holding her together. God? But if God kept Callie strong, that suggested Callie felt righteous, which meant—what, exactly? Under what scenario did a woman kill her baby and come to believe she was justified? Insanity, of course. But Callie submitted to psych test after psych test and always came back sane. Or sane enough to hang, as Lenhardt liked to say.

  What new tools did cops have now, what could they do? Teena recognized that the television depictions were bullshit, but things must have come pretty far since her day, when she entered data on those green-gray monitors with the pulsing cursor. Now a home computer could do things undreamed of when she first started working homicide. But it couldn’t find Callie Jenkins. She had tried. Of course, with a call or two, someone downtown would help her. Maybe not in the city homicide squad, where McLarney was the only survivor from her time. But Lenhardt, out in the county, he could help and would, without a single question.

  But Teena never asked anyone for anything, ever. That was another thing that fascinated her about Cassandra, the ease with which she requested favors from people. Sure, she said “please” and “thank you,” she had manners. Still, she had a way of asking that indicated she expected people to do her bidding. Where does that kind of confidence come from? Money, fame? No, Teena had known plenty of losers who were the same way. Some people were comfortable with building up favors. Teena had kept her balance sheet clean, neither asking nor giving. And when she ran into trouble, there had been no one there for her.

  THE ACELA HOME WAS DELAYED, one of those mysterious malfunctions where the train slowed to what felt like five miles per hour for long stretches. They were inching through New Jersey south of Trenton, having just passed the put-upon slogan along the bridge: TRENTON MAKES/THE WORLD TAKES. Cassandra said good-bye to Teena and returned to the Quiet Car from the vestibule where she had made the call, happy to be alone with her thoughts. She was pleased, of course, and grateful to Teena for her assistance. But she had cottonmouth and a headache. Not exactly a hangover, although she had drunk quite a bit the night before. Too much.

  The breakup with Bernard had been far more troublesome than she had imagined. He had cried. In public. At her favorite restaurant, a place she went to at least twice a month when she was home.

  “Bernard, this isn’t love,” she had said as softly as possible. The tables were very close together here, a storefront that used to be a pharmacy and had kept some of the old-fashioned fittings.

  “It is for me,” he said. “I was ready to—”

  She wouldn’t even let him say what he had been prepared to do.

  “I’m wrapped up in my work. I don’t have time for a lover.” This did not seem to console him. “Besides, it’s wrong. You’re married. I can’t do this anymore.” Because I’ve moved on to sleeping with an old friend’s husband who’s integral to the book I’m trying to write. Nothing wrong there!

  Bernard had settled down and even ended up enjoying the meal. The restaurant was that good; its food transcended heartache. By dessert, he was in such good spirits that he began enumerating all the reasons that Cassandra was right about the breakup, which was really an excuse to list all the things he disliked about Cassandra. She was a little full of herself, did she know that? Not an out-and-out narcissist, but self-centered. She thought everything was about her. They had dated only six months and had few interactions with others, but on those rare occasions they did, she was already correcting his version of stories.

  “You’re always saying, ‘No, no, you’re telling it wrong.’ As if there’s one right way, and it’s your way.” He went on to say that she was passionate in bed but a little cold elsewhere, too good at taking care of herself. Self-contained in a way that wasn’t attractive, yet bossy and needy, too.

  The only part she had bothered to contradict was the bit about storytelling. “You’re an investment banker,” she had said. “If I attempted to do what you do—or even explain what you do—you’d almost certainly correct me. I’m a storyteller. It’s what I do. I can’t bear it when a story isn’t told right.”

  “Jesus, Cassandra, everyone tells stories.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I do it better than most.”

  “On the page,” he said. “Where you write and rewrite and rewrite. But that doesn’t mean you’re some great raconteur, you know. You’re not…Homer.”

  “Well, I’m not blind,” she said.

  They had both laughed at that, which had soothed his feelings, let him assume she agreed with his other points. She didn’t, but she had to let it go. She had to allow him to sit there, counting up all the ways in which he didn’t like her. It was the price of breaking up with a man. God, how many breakups had there been like this? When did it ever end? At thirty, she had assumed that was all over. By that she meant the ups, downs, stomach-twisting ways of infatuation and love. Then at forty, she thought she must be off the hook, that her second marriage, while a little passionless, was a mark of her newfound, hard-won maturity. Instead, it was only proof that she was still capable of marrying the wrong person. Then Bernard, in fact, had seemed evidence enough that she had finally entered the phase of cool, composed, not-losing-one’s-self love. But it hadn’t been love at all.

  Reg was that all over again. Candy. How she longed to call him that, to remind him how far back they went, but some instinct warned her that Reg would not welcome his nickname. Still, she loved that they were familiar with each other’s previous selves, even if they never alluded to that fact. She had known the silly, laughing, dancing pest. He remembered the frowsy-haired girl. They admired the new outer shells, so smooth and shiny, but recognized them as the façades they were.

  The train, designed to go one hundred miles per hour, chugged lazily toward Baltimore, stuck on a track that could never handle its full speed. Ca
ssandra didn’t mind. Nothing was waiting for her in Baltimore tonight. She and Reg had plans to meet tomorrow afternoon, in her apartment. Reg will be proud of me when I find Callie without his help. I’ll have to be careful of his feelings, not flaunt it in such a way that it makes him feel inadequate. But the more I leave him out of it—well, the more I can leave him out of everything.

  He had a child and a wife he adored, according to no less an authority than his own sister. His reputation was such that even Teena knew he ran around. This was the kind of affair immortalized in popular song. Too hot not to cool down, et cetera, et cetera. Epic poetry does it better, her father would contradict, displeased whenever anyone claimed pop culture could have a power that art did not. But this was one area where she had to disagree with her father. Poetry—hushed and proper—had nothing on music when it came to expressing these kinds of feelings. Stupid songs competed in her head, the songs of her early teenage years, gooey with feeling. If she had a blue denim notebook, she would have doodled his initials on it and entwined them with hers. It was going to end badly. It had to end badly. She told herself she didn’t care.

  CHAPTER

  25

  EVERYONE KNEW BALTIMORE WAS SMALL; it was almost banal to make the observation now. But it was a fitful, unpredictable smallness. Gloria could go years, literally, without seeing someone and then the person suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

  That was the case with Reg Barr, the whole Barr-Howard clan. Reg truly had receded from her thoughts over the years. Now he was practically omnipresent. There was the writer’s query, then Reg’s own call. A new billboard advertising his legal services had gone up on North Avenue, visible from Gloria’s daily drive into the city. Gloria chose a new route. She opened the newspaper, only to find herself staring at Reg’s wife—the boss’s daughter, as Gloria still thought of her—opposite the comics, cooperating with a particularly vapid feature, “Five Things I Have to Have Right Now.” Gloria would have assumed Donna Howard-Barr was above such things, but she was apparently willing to pimp herself out to draw attention to a fund-raising event for the Alpha Kappa Alpha scholarship fund.