Blue Avenue

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Yeah,’ I said to Daniel Turner. ‘It’s Belinda Mabry.’

  ‘No doubt?’

  I wretched but held my stomach down. ‘No doubt.’ I turned and rushed out of the tent into the open air.

  Behind me the technician spoke calmly to Daniel, as if he saw this kind of thing every day. ‘First glance, it looks like she suffocated. No trauma. Shortly before death, she had rough sex, probably rape. I’ll tell you more after we cut her out of the bag.’

  I breathed deep but the hot morning air stirred my stomach and bile rose into my throat. I swallowed it and looked up at the sun and the sky around it and wished the blue enormity could lift me out of myself. When I lowered my gaze, Daniel’s partner was eying me. She nodded toward the tent. ‘Makes me want to puke and I’ve been doing this for eight years.’

  ‘How do you know me?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone knows you, BB. You don’t wash off so easy.’

  ‘I never tried to.’

  ‘Then why are you surprised I know you?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know,’ I said and wandered toward the yellow tape. A wasp darted toward me as though the sweat on my skin were an irresistible sweetness.

  The detective fell in beside me. ‘Daniel says you told him you haven’t seen Belinda Mabry in twenty-five years. You sure about that?’

  I kept my eyes in front of me. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘No reason. But you look distressed, more than someone might expect after all this time.’ She shook her head doubtfully. ‘I mean, twenty-five years is a long while. You were just kids.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her in twenty-five years,’ I said.

  ‘I guess we never get over some people. First love?’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  She peered into my eyes. ‘None, apparently.’

  I stepped toward her. ‘You think I killed her?’

  She stepped back calmly and offered a false smile. ‘No, sir. Not unless you’ve also killed two prostitutes.’

  ‘Huh?’

  The smile stayed. ‘The sheriff’s holding a press conference in an hour. Your friend’s the third victim, same M.O. The other two worked the streets. I don’t know about your friend. The others weren’t bagged but the killer raped and suffocated them and tied them up the same. Naked and trussed. Each time, the woman’s clothes have been folded and stacked next to the body. Super neat, like the killer launders and irons them after the killing. Maybe he does.’

  She watched me to see how I took the news. I took it like a man. Bile rose in my throat and I vomited at her feet.

  TWO

  I drove east into the sun on Blue Avenue. The air quivered over the hot asphalt. A heavy woman in a faded housedress and slippers pushed an empty shopping cart on the shoulder of the road. She was no older than thirty but she limped and used the cart like a walker. She stopped in the shade of a palm tree and stared at me as I passed like I didn’t belong.

  I kept the windows up and the air conditioner on full until I shivered in the breeze. My dream from the previous night flooded my mind. Not what I saw in the dream, not Belinda lying between the tracks with her legs wide open as the freight train rolled over her, not my hand reaching for her from too far away. The dread. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do to save her or, if there was, I wasn’t going to do it.

  Traffic on the return trip over the bridge was thick and I fell into a line of cars and waited my turn. What choice did I have?

  Susan’s Acura was gone from the driveway. She would be doing errands, none of which she would mention to me later, none of which I would ask about. Eight years ago she’d had a lover or I was pretty certain she’d had. He’d sold real estate in the neighborhood, and while it lasted Susan had shown a renewed interest in life that spilled over into the rest of our household. She’d started taking classes to get a real-estate license and I was happy for her and happy for myself too because I felt less guilty about my own habits. But I’d had a talk with the real-estate agent and the affair had ended the way these things will.

  Fela, our nine-year-old tabby, sat on the front porch. Thomas had brought her home as a kitten and Susan had insisted we keep her though cats make my eyes water. As if she could sense my hatred of her and decided that she’d fool with me, Fela took to me immediately. Now she stood and stretched as I came up the steps and rubbed against my leg as I unlocked the door. I’d long ago stopped kicking her away. I picked her up against my chest and carried her inside.

  Thomas was eating a bowl of Cheerios at the kitchen counter. ‘Morning, Champ,’ I said. I dropped Fela to the floor and put my hand on his shoulder.

  His back stiffened. ‘Champ’s a dog’s name.’

  I tried a smile and squeezed his shoulder.

  He swung as if I’d jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Don’t do that.’

  I sat on a stool next to him. ‘Why are you so angry?’

  He spooned Cheerios into his mouth.

  I picked up a piece of cereal that had fallen on the counter and put it in my mouth, let it melt into my tongue. ‘I was done being angry by the time I was your age,’ I said. ‘Maybe I developed early. Even when I was thirteen or fourteen, I didn’t stay angry long. A burst maybe and then I would be done. I’ve always been a happy person, always tried to be.’

  He didn’t bother rolling his eyes. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Anger’s a waste of energy. Gets you nowhere.’ I looked at the same spot in the air that seemed to interest him. ‘If you don’t like the way things are, take a breath, think about how you want them to be and then change them. Right?’

  He dipped his spoon into the bowl, filled it with Cheerios and milk and lifted it in the air. With his other fingers, he bent the spoon-end down and released it. The spoon catapulted wet cereal on to my chest.

  I grabbed his wrist. I’m a tall man, almost six foot four, not especially wide at the shoulders but big enough. Thomas also was tall and in a couple of years he’d be bigger than I was. But not yet.

  He attempted to shake free but I held him. ‘I thought you never got angry,’ he said.

  I let go of him. ‘I try to be a happy man.’

  ‘Right,’ he said and slipped off the stool and out of the room.

  I called after him, ‘You want to go for a drive this morning?’ It was a pathetic question, I knew, but he’d gotten his driver’s permit and we’d found occasional peace when he was in the driver’s seat and I was quiet beside him.

  ‘Yeah, right!’ he yelled again and slammed his bedroom door.

  Right. I felt my anger building. So I dialed Daniel Turner’s number. His partner had grilled me and I wanted to know why. If you don’t like the way things are, take a breath, think about how you want them to be and then change them. The department receptionist said Daniel wasn’t available, so I left a message asking him to call me.

  At 10:00 a.m. I turned on the kitchen television and the sheriff announced the presence of a repeat killer. He stood at a podium in front of the county courthouse. No reason to stand there instead of police headquarters except the courthouse had pillars that gave him dignity and, like pin stripes on a fat man’s suit, took a few pounds off him. He said that at 5:38 a.m. the police had received a call about a body on a Northside lot adjacent to Blue Avenue. Homicide detectives responded and found a woman, African-American, estimated to be between thirty-five and forty-five, deceased. The woman remained unidentified, he said.

  He waited a beat and said that unusual circumstances surrounding her death resembled those surrounding the deaths of two other women, a thirty-one-year-old African-American named Tonya Richmond and a twenty-nine-year-old Caucasian named Ashley Littleton. He said that the first two victims had been sexually assaulted but warned reporters that he wouldn’t tell them what was unusual about the circumstances so they need not ask for details. He continued talking as three boxes appeared on the screen, the first two showing the faces of the earlier victims with their names, the last a brown blank where, I
knew, they would place Belinda’s picture and name in the coming hours or days.

  Ashley Littleton’s face looked street-hardened, her eyes sunken, her brown hair stringy. It was the face of a long-time addict. Tonya Richmond’s picture was ten years old at least and showed a smiling young woman with eyes set a little too far apart. She was wearing a blue gown that revealed breast as if she were getting ready for the prom. The sheriff noted that both had been arrested repeatedly on prostitution charges and Ashley Littleton for passing bad checks. The arrest records were supposed to reassure the public, I supposed. If you avoided walking down Highway 1 in a miniskirt at 2:00 a.m. you should be safe. Still he warned women to be vigilant and report suspicious activity to the police. So as to protect the integrity of the investigation he would take no questions from the reporters, he said, but he promised regular progress reports.

  As I flipped off the TV, water splashed in the backyard pool. Thomas was taking a swim. I looked through the back window and saw him cut lazily across the water, and a longing swelled over me for a simplicity that I knew and maybe always had known didn’t truly exist and I didn’t trust even if it did exist. But the false memory of it did – from when I was Thomas’s age and was about to meet Belinda, later when the time I spent with her would shut down the roar of others’ voices, afterward with Susan for a short while, and still later when Thomas was young and wouldn’t stiffen when I put my hand on his shoulder, but rather relaxed into my touch and everything seemed right in the world.

  But Belinda had been gone for twenty-five years and now was dead. Ever since Thomas was born, Susan had slept in the sunroom. And, except during our occasional excursions when he practiced driving, Thomas spent most of his time alone in his bedroom writing and illustrating obscene comic books which he scanned and put online for his friends and hid from Susan and me.

  I got my cell phone, checked the memory and dialed Daniel Turner’s cell number. He answered on the third ring. ‘Hey, BB.’

  I kept my voice even. ‘Did you ask me to identify Belinda because you thought I might’ve killed her?’

  ‘No,’ he said, though he didn’t sound surprised by the question. ‘You knew her. We wanted a quick ID and we didn’t want to pull a relative into the circus if we could avoid it.’

  ‘Your partner seemed more interested in me than that.’

  ‘That’s because you’re an interesting man, BB.’

  ‘I try not to be.’

  ‘You can’t undo history,’ he said.

  ‘But you don’t think I’m involved in this.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Jesus, Daniel.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you’re involved.’

  ‘Your partner said the killer leaves the women’s clothes in a neat pile by the bodies.’

  ‘She shouldn’t’ve told you that.’

  ‘Does he leave their wallets too?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Don’t treat me like an idiot,’ I said. ‘You knew Belinda’s name and you said there was an ID on her body.’

  He paused for a moment. ‘Yeah, he leaves the wallets on top of the clothes. Cash is still there, credit cards too. And IDs – driver’s licenses, a community college ID on the second victim.’

  ‘What was the address on Belinda’s driver’s license?’

  ‘No way, BB.’

  ‘I want to pay respects to her family,’ I said.

  ‘Uh uh. You stay away from this now.’

  I’d been in the middle of it since I was seventeen years old. ‘You involved me when you called me this morning.’

  ‘Now I’m uninvolving you.’

  ‘Uninvolving isn’t a word,’ I said.

  ‘Now it is. It’s what I’m doing to you.’

  ‘I’ll find out her address if you don’t tell me.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said and hung up.

  I stared at the phone in my hand. Thomas came in through the back and disappeared into his bedroom, closing the door behind him. The sharp-sweet smell of chlorine lingered in the air.

  I stared at the phone some more.

  Then I dialed a number that I hadn’t dialed in eight years and in the meantime I’d tried to forget but never could and, depending on your perspective, that was a good or a bad thing.

  A man’s rough voice said hello after the first ring.

  ‘Charles,’ I said.

  ‘BB,’ he said warmly, as if we’d talked twice a day.

  ‘Can you meet?’

  ‘This about Belinda Mabry?’

  The police hadn’t announced her identity and I guessed only a handful of people knew it. Even if he did know that Belinda had died, he shouldn’t know that I knew. ‘How did you hear?’

  ‘Don’t ask dumb questions.’

  ‘Meet me at Best Gas?’ Best Gas was my independent gas station, named by the Lebanese man who’d once owned it before selling it to my dad. I owned three other stations too, a Shell and a couple of Exxons, but I treated Best Gas as my office.

  ‘Give me twenty minutes,’ Charles said and hung up.

  As I stepped out the front door Susan pulled into the driveway and got out of the car. Two grocery bags sat on the passenger seat. I went to her and kissed her. ‘I’m going to check the stations.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said and looked at me close. ‘Was the dead woman your friend?’

  Sweat beaded on my neck. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Me too.’ I kissed her again and she held me awkwardly, so I pulled away. ‘I’ll be back in a couple hours.’

  She watched me go as though she feared I was leaving forever. ‘We have dinner at seven with the Lindseys,’ she said.

  I had no idea who the Lindseys were. ‘I’ll be back early.’ I tried a smile and she tried one too.

  Best Gas and Food Mart was on the side of a marshy stretch of a disused Westside highway, a mile from a coal-burning power plant that produced electricity for Jacksonville and the five surrounding counties. Why anyone built a gas station there I never figured out. Maybe the builder had expected power plant workers to stop at shift changes. I guessed my dad had bought it for the same reason that I spent more time there than at any of my other stations. Solitude and silence. Few cars stopped for gas, which I kept priced well above the city average, and only a few more stopped to buy a drink or a six-pack from the refrigerated cases. I’d hired a quiet, slow-witted woman to run the cash register on dayshift. She would nod hello when I came in and never bothered me when I went into the office in the back.

  I pulled into the lot a few minutes after eleven and parked in the back. On my way to the office I grabbed a Pepsi from the refrigerator and a package of Doritos. Charles had already arrived and had his feet on my desk. He wore faded blue pants, black steel-toed work boots and a soft white cotton shirt with silver buttons. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him in anything else, whether he was sitting in church or grinding the tool end of a screwdriver through the back of a man’s hand. I also couldn’t remember ever seeing a spot of sweat or dirt on his shirt. His boots had the flat blackness of well-worn leather and were always clean.

  Twenty years back, when he’d approached me to offer his services shortly after my first troubles, he was already gray-haired and leather skinned. At that time I would have put him between seventy and eighty. I still would’ve put him between seventy and eighty when I’d last seen him eight years ago. I would put him between seventy and eighty now as he sat in my office. He was a medium-sized man, about five ten and no more than 175 pounds. He had soft blue eyes and a fat red scar that descended from the bottom of each eye, tracing the trail that tears would fall if he cried. He’d never explained the scars to me and I’d never seen him cry.

  Except for the clothes and scars, you could find men who looked like him helping themselves to extra servings of pudding in retirement home cafeteria lines. His age and size caused many men who were twice as big and a third as old to underestimate him. He was th
e strongest, meanest man I’d ever met. He took bigger, younger men apart with his bare hands or, if he was feeling lazy, a fishing knife – the same knife he used to fillet the mullets he caught illegally with a cast net from a riverside retaining wall.

  If you asked him a question he didn’t want to answer, which was most questions, he would talk in circles. He would say, ‘At my age I’ve got nothing to lose.’ So I would ask, ‘How old are you, Charles?’ He would answer, ‘Old enough I’ve got nothing to lose.’ Or I would ask, ‘Where’d you get so mean?’ He would say, ‘In the war.’ I would ask, ‘What war?’ He would say, ‘The war.’ ‘The war is World War Two,’ I would say, ‘and you may be old but you’re too young for that.’ He would shake his head and answer, ‘Every war is the war to those who were there.’ So I would ask again, ‘Which were you in?’ Without a smile, he would answer, ‘The war.’ Most of the time I remembered not to ask unnecessary questions.

  He winked at me as I stepped into the office, his way of saying I was late.

  ‘How you doing, Charles?’ I said.

  ‘How’m I ever doing?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So Belinda Mabry’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘She is,’ I said.

  ‘And Daniel Turner asked you to identify her. A hell of a thing to do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t kill her?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘I’ve got to ask, that’s all, so I know what this is.’

  ‘You already seem to have all the information,’ I said. ‘You should know I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because I suspect you would’ve called me to help if you had.’