Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  He got up to shower. Even nonadulterers showered after sex, but it still made Cassandra a little sad. She was sadder that she had distracted him from those provocative words: What if this were real? What if? But it couldn’t be. And if she weren’t careful, the memory of this affair was all she would have to take away from her time in Baltimore. She must focus on the book, on Callie. But so far everything had been as frustrating as her trip through Baltimore’s suburbs, nothing but cul-de-sacs that kept looping back. She wondered again at Fatima’s implicit threat. How could anyone hurt Cassandra? Unlike Fatima, she hadn’t buried her past. She had put it on the page for everyone to see. Friends and critics alike sometimes marveled at this, as if it were an act of daring. But Cassandra, who had grown up in a house where everything and nothing was said, felt it was the simplest way to live. Say the worst things about yourself first, and no one can ever hurt you.

  Except, perhaps, the man in her shower, a man she was trying desperately to pretend that she didn’t love.

  “THERE’S AN OLD WOMAN DOWN in the lobby, saying she has to see you,” the desk attendant had told Gloria, and that’s what Gloria saw when she came down. An old woman, well dressed but slightly stooped through the shoulders.

  Then she realized she knew this old woman and she was almost ten years younger than Gloria.

  “Detective Murphy.”

  “Not Detective Murphy anymore. Not Detective Murphy for a very long time, but you know that.”

  “I do know.” Gloria looked at Teena’s right hand but made no move to shake it, to greet her in any way.

  “I think you know a lot.”

  “Almost all of it covered by attorney-client privilege. My client was very adamant about that. The things I learned in the process of her defense—I am not allowed to discuss with anyone. And you know that.”

  “Almost. You said almost.”

  Gloria studied Teena’s face. Jesus, she had aged badly. It made Gloria almost grateful never to have been pretty, if this was what pretty could become, what age could take away from you. She had felt that way even when she was young, back when she was working with Callie. Thank God I’m not beautiful because look what this girl’s beauty has earned her. Teena’s well-made, tasteful clothes and careful hairstyle only emphasized how time had ravaged her face. Part of it was that she was simply too thin. But there were her hooded eyes, too, which looked as if she never got a good night’s sleep. Why? So you dropped your gun and your patrol car ran over your wrist? You could have found a way to stay on the force if you wanted to. Hell, Gloria remembered a detective who had lost his right hand and learned to shoot with his left.

  But Gloria understood. She had always understood. Teena had claimed permanent disability because she wanted the punishment of exile, yearned for it. Teena Murphy had always been known for her clothes, but the thing she really loved to wear was a hair shirt. How silly of her.

  “Are you a private investigator now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So why do you care?”

  “I’m working—” Teena switched course. “I just do.”

  “She got to you, didn’t she?”

  “Who?” The face might have changed, but the steely composure was the same and only slightly less remarkable than it had been when Teena was young. She had been so prepossessed, poised. Hard to remember, but Gloria had envied her.

  “That woman, the writer, the one who’s been trying to stir things up. Why would you help her? What’s in it for you?”

  The lobby of Gloria’s apartment building was the kind of large, empty space that one would expect in one of Mies van der Rohe’s glass palaces, and her words echoed, taking on a strange emphasis. Gloria may have made mistakes, but she had never lost sight of what was in her best interest. Maybe she had a couple of hair shirts in her own wardrobe, after all.

  “I don’t know,” Teena said at last. “Probably nothing. What was in it for you?” She took in her surroundings. “This, I guess. Your own law office. So that’s what you traded, for whatever you knew. I thought you were stupid, but you were a lot smarter than I was.”

  Everyone assumed I was stupid, Gloria thought. Book smart, but stupid in the ways of the world. I thought I was being rewarded, but they were counting on my stupidity, my passivity. Then, when I finally took some initiative, I almost derailed my life. Those were my choices, cataclysmic failure or success on my own terms. What would you have chosen? What did you choose?

  “Do you know how to read a campaign finance report?” she asked Teena.

  “What?”

  “Upstairs, I have reports from the Friends of Julius Howard committee. Paper reports from the seventies and nineties. The more recent ones are online.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “I’m saying I have some reports. You may have them. Anyone can have them. They are public documents. I didn’t request them until a few days ago.”

  “Why? I mean, why did you request them?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” Because I ran into an old friend and he’s not my friend anymore and I can’t bear it. Because I have tried to figure out for fifteen years now what constitutes justice. Because I have won freedom for innocent people and not-so-innocent people to make up for the fact that I could not help the first client entrusted to me. True, she didn’t want to be helped, but it was my job to persuade her to help herself, and I couldn’t. So I abandoned her, used my knowledge to sweeten my own life.

  “The early ones, they’ll be easy. They were on paper,” she said. “It’s only now that things are online that they’ve gotten so cagey. You get what I’m saying? You’ll find things easily enough in the old files, if you look carefully. But it’s the new files you need to study. Stay here.”

  She did not want Teena to come up to the apartment. If the day came when she was accused of violating any of her promises, if they tried to disbar her, she wanted her doorman to be able to say she spoke to Teena in the open.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, SHE came back with the files. The files and an old CD, Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints.

  “Music to study by?” Teena asked.

  “I am particularly fond of track one,” Gloria said. She was. She had bought this album because she loved the previous one, Graceland, which reminded her of the evenings she spent with Reg and Colton, imitating their bosses, singing their parody of “You Can Call Me Al.” She had bought the next album thinking to re-create those evenings of camaraderie, only to be haunted by one song.

  “‘The Obvious Child,’” Teena read out loud. “You mean—”

  “I’ve told you what I can. Check that—I haven’t told you anything. Remember that. I haven’t told you anything.”

  “Got it,” Teena said, and Gloria had a flash of the brash, cocky young woman she had met twenty years ago. Teena had thought Gloria beneath her, barely worth bothering with. She might have been right.

  “And, Teena?” Her voice caught her as she was leaving, the files tucked under her left arm, the damaged right one hanging by her side. Not quite dead, but clearly affected.

  “Yes?”

  “If you do find Callie Jenkins, make sure she knows I didn’t tell you where she was. The fact is, I don’t know, don’t want to know. I would have left her alone, but others won’t. Tell her it’s not my fault and tell her…”

  She paused so long that Teena finally had to prompt her. “Yeah?”

  “Tell her that Gloria Bustamante hopes she’s doing well. And that Reg Barr has a daughter. Make sure you tell her that. Reg and Donna have a daughter.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  IT WAS ALMOST 1 A.M . and Cassandra’s head was throbbing. As a college student, she had been the queen of the all-nighter, stoking herself on strong coffee and NoDoz, writing twenty-page papers in under four hours, cramming an entire semester’s worth of work into the dark hours. But that kind of stamina can’t be maintained. Her almost fifty-year-old body was, in some ways, more fit than her twenty-year-old
one, loaded down as it was with those extra college pounds, exercise not yet a part of her routine. But her mind was flabbier, no doubt about it. It didn’t help that the papers strewn around her held no narrative, no organizing principle, no story to follow. They were nothing more than endless lists of payees and amounts, all of which appeared mundanely legitimate.

  Teena, who was using Cassandra’s laptop more or less one-handed, wasn’t faring much better. She had fed Callie Jenkins’s name into the online records in every possible variation and come up empty. Cassandra poured herself another glass of wine and Teena actually frowned. She had been drinking Diet Coke since she had arrived here a few hours ago, toting these papers.

  “To think I once thought about being a forensic accountant,” she muttered now, glaring at the computer.

  “When was that?” Cassandra said, glad for the distraction, although she knew it meant she would end up rereading these pages again.

  “After I—after. I wanted to find a way to do something like police work. But accounting’s hard. I dropped my first class after three sessions.”

  “Did you have to leave the force?”

  “The department,” Teena said. “Not the force.” She smiled at her own semantic pettiness. “It depends on how you define ‘have to,’ I guess. Maybe I could have stayed. But it was a relief for things to be over, in a way.”

  “That sounds like a psychologist’s point of view. You wanted to leave so you put yourself in jeopardy, suffered an injury from which you couldn’t recover.”

  “I could have learned to shoot with my left hand,” Teena said. “Damn, I knew a guy who was blinded when he was shot on the job, and he managed to continue working as an instructor at the academy. Fact is, with therapy, I might have been able to qualify with my right hand again.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I felt like such a failure. Time after time, going down to talk to Calliope Jenkins. No confession. No body. No leads. You know in the movies how you see the detective up against some mastermind and there’s all this talk? I would have killed to have someone who actually spoke to me. With her, it was this endless silence. She was like someone…waiting for a bus. She made me feel like a gnat, buzzing in her ear, and she wouldn’t even bother to wave me away.”

  “Like freeze tag or statues.”

  “You played those, too?”

  “I guess most Baltimore girls did. And television tag—I can’t remember quite how that went, just that we shouted out the names of television shows.”

  “And Mother, may I? Baby steps, giant steps—what else?”

  “Banana steps?” Cassandra, living on a dead-end street with older children, had seldom played those games. She had watched, when she was younger, on summer evenings, but she was never deemed old enough to play. By the time she was, they had moved on. It had been lonely on Hillhouse Road. That was all she had been trying to convey in her novel. How had such a simple idea gone so wrong? Perhaps because she hadn’t been willing to state it directly. Or maybe it was too ordinary an epiphany. Weren’t all children lonely in some way?

  Her bleary eyes rested on a new page. Payee, amount. Payee, amount. God, political campaigns were boring. Catering bills, janitorial services, office supplies. Her eyes backtracked. Janitorial services, paid out to Myra Tippet. Myra Tippet. She had been so focused on finding variations on Callie, Calliope, and Jenkins that she had skipped past this on the first reading. Cassandra wouldn’t even have known the name if Fatima hadn’t mentioned it yesterday. She took to calling herself by her own name, back when almost no one did that…. Only she put a Mrs. in front of it, even though there was no Mr.

  She glanced at the top of the page: This was 1990, three years after Callie’s arrest. She tracked back to 1988—there it was again. Not every month, but at least once a quarter, and the amounts were odd: $3,017, $2,139, $4,045. They were credible numbers. But, really, how much did a campaign office need in the way of cleaning?

  “Was Callie’s mother a cleaning woman?” she asked Teena.

  “Maybe. I remember she worked at Parks Sausages, I think, but it wouldn’t be unheard of if she did some part-time maiding off the books.”

  “Drop the name Myra Tippet into the online files, see what comes up.”

  Even as a one-handed, one-fingered typist, Teena was swift. “Nothing,” she said.

  Cassandra tried to think this through. “In 1988, Julius Howard’s campaign starts making payments to Callie’s mother on a regular-irregular basis. But her name disappears once it’s online and easier to search.”

  “Interesting, I’ll grant you. I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.” Another round of lightning, staccato typing. “Nothing comes up in the Social Security database—when people die, you can find their names there—so I have to think she’s alive. No idea where she is, though. I think we should go back to the Paul Simon album. Gloria was trying to tell me something.”

  “‘The Obvious Child,’” Cassandra said. “Well, it is pretty obvious, right? She’s talking about Callie’s missing son.”

  “Or Reg’s daughter. She was awfully particular on that point, that we should tell Callie about Reg’s kid.”

  “Why would Callie care if Reg has a daughter? He wasn’t even her lawyer until five years in. Maybe Gloria Bustamante is trying to divert us from something she did.”

  The bit about Reg’s daughter had rankled in other ways, too, but Cassandra couldn’t tell Teena that. Just the reminder that Reg had a daughter bothered her, because it was that fact that doomed their relationship. Cassandra could love a man who left his wife, but she could never love a man who left his daughter. She had set herself up rather neatly, she saw now. But she hadn’t known about Reg’s daughter, not at first. Not like Annie, who had met Cassandra in the hospital. She hated to be reminded of that one detail, the only blemish she knew on her stepmother’s character. You saw me, saw us. Even if you fell in love with him the day he rescued you, couldn’t you have pulled back from your emotions, walked away? Yes, I know he pursued you after leaving the hospital, and I know how persuasive he can be. But couldn’t you have resisted, Annie, for my sake? Was it really that big a love?

  “Myra Tippet isn’t enough,” Teena said. “Unless we can find her, but she’s not coming up on any search engine I try.”

  “Tippet of the iceberg,” Cassandra said, laughing at her own joke in the slightly hysterical fashion of the sleep deprived. “But there are still janitorial services on the payee lists, right?”

  “You would think,” Teena said, returning to the screen. “Catering company, banquet hall, office supplies, individuals, catering company, office supplies, limo company, banquet hall—”

  “Stop.”

  “Sorry,” Teena said. “It’s just easier sometimes if I say things out loud.”

  “No, I mean, go back. Limo company. What was the name?”

  “High Styles Transportation Service.”

  But Fatima hadn’t told her the name of the company, only that it was struggling.

  “Address?”

  “Rosewood Path in Owings Mills. Hey—”

  “That belongs to Fatima’s husband, that’s the address you found for me. Can you search just for the limo company?”

  “Think so.” The quick clatter of keys. Normally, Cassandra would wince at hearing her laptop hit so hard, but she didn’t mind in this situation. “It only appears three times, going back two years.”

  “Fatima told me the company’s only been around two years. What do you want to bet, though, that the next report shows the company again and the amount is high enough to cover the Nordstrom bill that Fatima just paid, along with the new things she bought herself?”

  “Again, political campaigns do use town cars and limos and the like. It would be hard to prove this wasn’t a legitimate use.”

  “We’re not trying a case in court. We’re looking for information that we can use to get people to talk to us. Fatima kept warning me about some shadowy
‘they.’ Perhaps she meant Julius Howard. Perhaps the reason that Howard & Howard represented Callie in the first place is connected to Julius. What did the old news stories say? Donna’s father agreed to take the case as a favor to the ACLU. But maybe he took it on as a favor to Julius, his brother.”

  “And why would he do that?”

  “The child. The obvious child.”

  “Julius is the father of Callie Jenkins’s dead child? But there was a birth father on record, another junkie.”

  “I don’t know. I do know the coincidences are piling up, that it’s simply too much.” Cassandra was groping for another fact about Fatima but one not provided by Fatima. Something about Spelman, how she had gotten there, Fatima’s offense at the idea that she was churchified, her angry need to know exactly who had suggested she had changed so radically.

  “Teena, let me have the computer. I need to look up something in my notes.”

  But in the split second it took for Teena to slide the laptop across the table to her, Cassandra remembered. Tisha was the one who said Fatima was churchified. But Donna was the one who complained that Fatima had cut herself off from the group. “My uncle Julius wrote her a recommendation. She volunteered in his office in the late seventies.”

  The late seventies. That was when Julius Howard ran for city council president—and lost. He never again attempted to run for an office that might have given him greater acclaim but had stayed in his safe senate district. The late seventies—Fatima would have been twenty or twenty-one, a juicy girl. She had been juicy at twelve. Had Callie volunteered, too? We worked together. Where, Cassandra had asked, and Fatima had dodged the question.

  Cassandra stared blindly at her computer screen, trying to organize her racing thoughts, which included one melancholy undertone: This is going to cost me Reg. So be it. She wasn’t going to get to keep him, anyway. And then: But what does this have to do with Reg’s daughter; why would Callie care? She still didn’t want to think about that. Besides, what she had now was a conspiracy theory beyond conspiracy theories, all wild conjecture. If it weren’t so late, she would call her father, ask his advice. He would help her sort it through. Ah well, they were having breakfast tomorrow. She rubbed her eyes, once, twice, three times. And, as if in a fairy tale, the third time brought forth a genie from the bottle. Not a genie, per se, but a line of text on the computer in front of her, which was still showing the expenditures of Julius Howard’s campaign in the last reporting period.