And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “You’re desperate for a real case here, Detective. This one’s a sow’s ear.”

  “Sow’s ear? You turning into a farm boy, Banco?” Sarah waves at the waitress and aims her gun hand at Eddie’s martini glass. “One of those,” Sarah mouths so the server can read her lips over the backbeat of reggae. She gets a nod back.

  “Look,” Eddie says. “You have the girl’s phone. Send Flytiger another email as Leston. Ask him why he’s not here?”

  Sarah takes Zoe Leston’s phone out of her clutch and examines the dark screen. Then she shrugs at Eddie. “I sent the first email unauthorized. Another one will cinch a wiretap violation.”

  “Shit,” Banco says.

  “Yeah. I could end up like Rupert Murdoch.”

  “If you do, buy me a yacht.”

  “I’M FINISHED HERE,” Sarah says. Two pickle martinis have done their job. The world of this red-tinted bar is glowing with a pleasant, womblike crimson. “Where’s the crapper?” she asks Eddie.

  He points his chin. “That way, Detective.”

  The bathroom locks with a hook latch and Sarah hikes her skirt and balances over the splashed toilet, then she wipes the seat dry. After all, it is her job to clean up after the citizens. Or maybe she does it out of respect for immigrants like her grandmother, who spent her first years in America on Madison Avenue, mopping out women’s lavatories in a corporate tower. She washes her hands, wipes the lipstick from her teeth, and unlatches the door.

  “’Scuse,” she says shouldering into the man waiting outside. She’ll never get used to unisex bathrooms.

  “Sorry,” he says.

  Sarah recognizes him from earlier, the guy with the saggy shoulders and scuffed loafers. He looks miserable and as if he’s gone one drink over his limit, like her.

  Seen close up—with his make-do clothing, nostril hair, and faintly pocked complexion—he is in no sense a lady killer. He’s lost out completely on the trifecta of looks, attitude, and money, with his once nice shoes suggesting a former job that paid well. Sarah’s nonjudgmental term for such types is survivor, and she fully dismisses him as a person of interest. He can’t be Flytiger, her only suspect. For a second she considers bringing him in for questioning but then realizes Eddie is right: she is desperate. Desperate to make the Leston case a murder case.

  “Hey,” she says to the man as he steps around her. Half in the toilet, the man turns about and the closing door knocks into him. The man is drunker than Sarah thought—unstably drunk. This will make her work easier. “Looks like someone stood you up tonight. Maybe I know her. Maybe she sent me to tell you she couldn’t make it.”

  Sarah’s survivor looks down at her and his eyes almost focus. His face, soaked with little-lost-boy desperation, starts to brighten. “She sent you?” he asks. “Zoe?”

  Sarah deflates: Flytiger.

  “MR. WINTER. OVER here please,” Sarah says, directing him to the chair beside her desk in the bullpen—which is empty but for two other detectives distantly pecking out reports. “I’ll need your statement before I can answer your questions.” So far, Sarah has told him nothing about Zoe Leston.

  Back at the tavern, hoping the night air would clear her head, she had shown Winter her badge and asked him to take a walk. He’d agreed and all along the way, as if to bolster his alibi, drunkenly pestered her for information about the victim—“Where’s Zoe? She in the hospital? Was she assaulted?” And at the precinct house, Winter began to chew a cuticle. Now, seated in Sarah’s guest chair/witness chair/perp chair, Winter is as jumpy as a squirrel in an alley. He straightens his pants, crosses and uncrosses his legs, shifts onto one haunch and then the other as though the metal seat is a hot plate. In other words, he’s overplaying the upset friend role and acting more and more as though he’s guilty of something. Maybe Eddie is wrong, maybe the Leston case is a silk purse and she’s not been torturing a friend of the victim by keeping the truth from him. This guy’s the perp.

  “Please, can’t you just tell me if Zoe is all right?” Winter asks.

  Sarah’s conviction wavers.

  She ignores the question and brings up the standard witness form on her computer, filling in the name and address fields from Winter’s driver’s license. Then she proceeds with her interrogation.

  “The last time you saw Zoe Leston was six nights ago Thursday, correct?” she asks, going over what he’d told her back at the tavern.

  “Isn’t that what I said?” Winter snaps.

  Sarah gives him a look and moves on. “Where did you last see Ms. Leston?”

  Winter can barely contain his impatience. “At a mutual friend’s opening. Medusa Gallery. Chelsea. Afterward we went to a diner. Moonstruck. Like I said, I paid with a credit card if you want to check. Then I walked Zoe to the Twenty-Third Street subway and went home. Except for her email this morning, I haven’t heard from her since. So what’s going on? Is she in trouble?”

  “You didn’t get on the subway with her that night?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Because you live downtown. In fact, you live almost exactly across town from where Ms. Leston was staying on Henry Street.”

  Winter appears bewildered. Then his eyes focus. “Oh, sorry. The license is wrong. I’m not on River Terrace anymore. I’m up at 75 Lexington now, across from the old armory.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sarah says and clicks her cursor back into the address box of the witness screen. “I know the neighborhood,” she adds to jab at his pride. When interrogating solo you’re forced to play both good cop and bad cop. “You must be in the Popeye’s building. I can smell the fried chicken on your clothes. You should file a complaint about their ventilator. Apartment number?” she asks.

  “3B,” Winter says, beaten down. And then his eyes narrow. “Wait a minute, you don’t think I had something to do with . . .” Winter’s question trails off.

  “To do with what?”

  “I don’t know,” he snaps. “You won’t tell me. All I know, and it’s all from you, is that Zoe is in some kind of trouble. She’s missing, isn’t she? I mean, how did you even know we were meeting tonight?”

  Not wishing to mention tapping into the victim’s email, Sarah refocuses her suspect. “Was Ms. Leston distraught when you left her at the subway?”

  “Distraught? No. She recently quit her job in DC. I think she broke up with someone there. But I don’t think she was unstable, if that’s what you mean. She wasn’t crying. She might have been upset, but she wasn’t distraught.”

  Winter’s fine distinctions bode badly for her theory that he might know more than he’s saying. He is trying too hard not to imagine the worst.

  “You say she broke up with someone?” Sarah asks. “Did you ever meet the person she was seeing?”

  “No. Did he do something to her?”

  Sarah is earning her Chen the Merciless nickname. But rule one: keep your witness in the dark for as long as possible. Memory is evidence best left uncontaminated.

  “Have you ever known Ms. Leston to do drugs?”

  “Drugs?” echoes Winter. “You mean medication?”

  “I mean, say, recreational.”

  “No. So she’s under arrest? Look, if it’s a matter of bail—”

  “And what about yourself? Are you on any medication?”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “If Ms. Leston was upset, you might have offered her some of your meds last Thursday. You know, to help her through.”

  Winter looks hard at her. “Jesus! What is this?” Coming to his feet he knocks over his chair and the crash echoes through the big room. This is no act.

  “Yo! Everything good down there?” calls Lieutenant Ellison, the larger of the two officers typing reports tonight.

  “We’re good,” Sarah tells him.

  She returns to her witness, her ex-suspect. He is an open wound. “Please sit down, Mr. Winter,” Sarah says gently. “May I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “DROWNED?” WINTER SAYS, absorb
ing the information.

  “The autopsy report isn’t finalized, but that is likely the primary cause. I’m sorry.” Sarah touches Winter’s arm though she resists any deep sympathy. In her job she can’t afford such emotions. The man is slouching now more than ever, crumpling over to stare between his shoes. “Let me refer you to a grief counselor.” Sarah digs through her desk for a business card and places it in front of Winter. “Goodnight, sir. Thank you for your time.”

  Over the past hour Sarah has extracted all she is going to get out of her witness—which was basically next to nothing—so she is done with him. What she knows about Zoe Leston she knows mostly from her cell phone and a manila folder of family documents and news clippings found near the body. She knows that Zoe was a graduate of NYU and that her family history is as tortured as the Kennedy’s. Zoe’s grandparents became her adopted parents, both are deceased in a murder/suicide/euthanasia event. Her mother killed in an auto wreck more than two decades ago. Sarah could find no living next of kin —except for a maternal aunt with dementia in an East Setauket nursing home—until she contacted one Detective Ray Murak, mentioned in a clipping. Retired and now a volunteer who answers phones for the Monroe Police, Murak gave her the name of the victim’s biological father, Donald Alan Aldridge, whom Sarah located in a South Florida prison. Three days ago, Sarah had arranged a phone interview with the inmate, who had not seen his daughter since she was an infant.

  All this research was what Eddie likes to call her undue diligence. For example, the interview with Aldridge was an investigative dead end that turned out doubly useless since there was no legal or practical way for an imprisoned father to claim his daughter’s body.

  The best option remaining is that Zoe Leston’s ex-fiancé will bury her. Dr. Porter Coombs had sent Leston more than a few emails over the past weeks, but having been in Brussels on the night Leston died, he’s no suspect; Sarah had finally reached him at a conference in San Francisco. Coombs will be arriving on a morning red-eye to officially identify the body.

  Sarah Chen would ask Winter to do the ID if he weren’t so high maintenance. Right now, ignoring her unsubtle goodnight, Winter remains firmly seated before her.

  “But,” Winter says, letting the word hang. “How could she have drowned in a bathtub?”

  As Sarah knows from many years of this, Winter is attempting to refute the unlikely aspects of the death in order to deny the death. It would be more convincing if she just showed him the body. Yet even she is not that merciless.

  “The toxicology report isn’t in, but we found Ms. Leston’s fingerprints on several pill bottles—pain meds that belonged to someone else.”

  “Oh,” Winter says—with a bit of realization, Sarah notes, as if pill borrowing was in the victim’s character. “She went to sleep.”

  “And sank down.”

  “Who . . . Who found her?”

  “The next-door neighbor. Her tub overflowed.”

  “Don’t you mean the downstairs neighbor?” Winter says, trying to catch Sarah out on a detail that will bring his friend back to life.

  “The water leaked under the hallway door. This was an old railroad flat. It has a kitchen bathtub.”

  “Oh,” Winter says. “This was in Zoe’s new place?”

  “Not hers. She was apartment-sitting for a friend—the friend with the back pills. She’s out of the country. Had nothing to do with it.”

  Winter looks away from Sarah, though not at anything. If eyes were lasers, his stare would burn through the three city blocks of brick and concrete that separate them from where Leston died. “That tub shouldn’t have overflowed,” Winter says.

  This is an intelligent observation. Sarah senses that Winter must be thinking that she’s done a cursory investigation into the death. She represses her irritation and responds. “There was a rag stuffed in the overflow drain.”

  “Uh-huh. Is there anything else I should know?”

  Sarah maintains her patience, barely. “Incense sticks and candles.”

  “Incense and candles?” Winter’s eyes return to Sarah’s. “You mean she did a . . . ceremony?”

  “Or she just wanted to relax in a bath.”

  “Detective Chen, I’m asking you if Zoe committed suicide.”

  She was afraid Winter’s reasoning would end here. The survivors of an untimely death always agonize over what might have prevented it, over their last minutes with the deceased and what understanding phrase or kind gesture might have changed things. Their guilt becomes an apology for their failure to stop their friend from dying. As Chen knows well, all of this second guessing is inevitable. None of it does any good.

  And so it would behoove Winter not to torture himself with this possibility. In this the survivor’s and the detective’s interests are aligned; Sarah does not wish to consider Zoe Leston a suicide either. Frankly, if the death was not a murder, an accidental drowning makes for an easier report than an uncertain suicide. Either way the woman is deceased, and since she has no family there is less of a need to go after absolute answers. But Sarah has hesitated too long in answering Winter’s question.

  “So you can’t tell me if she took her own life,” Winters says, almost triumphant. “You don’t really know if she did it on purpose?”

  “She left no note,” Sarah tells him.

  Winter’s gaze scolds her for not increasing his survivor’s guilt. She knows what he wants—to feel not helpless, to feel as if, even though the situation is hopeless now, he might have been able to change his friend’s destiny.

  Then Winter’s face loses its tension. His pupils dilate. “Before we said goodnight . . . Zoe mentioned reincarnation. I’d told her she needed to start over.” Winter’s eyes refocus. “I may have—”

  “Mr. Winter,” Sarah interrupts, “we can only accurately speculate from the physical evidence. Ms. Leston left no note and she drowned after taking a cocktail of drugs that are abused recreationally. Often we imagine that we have more influence over others than we do, but you were simply old friends who discussed random topics. Do not read too much into them. A grief counselor can explain this better.” Sarah pushes the psychologist’s business card toward Winter. “But there is one more thing I can tell you. There was a clean, folded bath towel by the tub.”

  “A towel?” Winter does not comprehend Sarah’s point.

  “Well, if Ms. Leston had planned to stay in the tub, why the fresh towel?”

  For Sarah the towel was the most important detail. Her observation, however, leaves no impression on her witness. As he walks out, he leaves behind the psychologist’s card. Clearly, Winter wants his guilt.

  CHAPTER 34

  Texas

  Daugherty, behind mirrored lenses, brakes hard to follow the patrol car ahead to a stop on the shoulder.

  Pyle, in the passenger’s seat, perks up. “Sure been wondering where the ass end of nowhere began.”

  The agents step out of their rented Taurus and stand on a desert blacktop nine miles west of Cairo, Texas. The landscape is a scrubland rimmed by distant mountains, uninteresting except for a few pyramid-like hillocks in the middle distance. After a few seconds the hot breeze blasts the car’s air-conditioning out of their suits. The county deputy who led them here is sauntering toward the agents. He removes his Stetson and dries the sweat on his brow with a shirtsleeve before pointing the hat at a pickup tilting on a rocky berm well off the road shoulder.

  “There she is,” he drawls.

  Pyle grins nastily at the deputy. “Yep, thar she is, Sheriff,” he says. Pyle’s sunglasses reflect the deputy’s into mirrored infinity.

  “The FBI appreciates the assistance, Officer,” Daugherty says neutrally, breaking up the stare-down.

  “It’s deputy,” the deputy says to Pyle. Then he returns his hat to his head and looks at the desolate road, which travels to the horizon in both directions. “You all have fun out here,” he says and goes back to his vehicle, U-turns up a swirl of dust that overtakes Daugherty and Pyle as the
y walk toward the truck.

  “Maybe you should ease up on the caffeine?” Daugherty says. Pyle has been chugging Red Bulls since they got on a 6 a.m. at LAX.

  “Maybe you should have let me take her at the house. We wouldn’t be chasing her skanky ass across the country,” Pyle says. They’ve both been up half the night, ever since word reached them about the abandoned pickup on Texas Route 90.

  “We weren’t sure that was her,” Daugherty reminds him. “Besides, her dog would have chewed your ass.”

  “I would have handled the bitch,” Pyle says.

  “Not without stitches.” Daugherty’s seniority gives him the final word.

  The pickup is unlocked and inside the cab Daugherty smells something sweet—burnt antifreeze. “She must have blown a head gasket,” he says.

  “Yeah, well she can blow me,” Pyle says. He starts tweezing hair samples from the headrest. “It’s her,” he says holding a strand to the daylight, as if he’s able to sight-read DNA.

  “That could be dog hair,” Daugherty says, noticing the mats of blonde fur on the passenger’s-seat upholstery. “This is all we’re going to get here. You done?”

  “I am now,” Pyle says, slipping an old Rand McNally from the driver’s-door pocket. He shows Daugherty. The atlas is folded to page 121, Louisiana.

  IN THE DUSTY heart of Cairo, Pyle, as he always does at roadside cafes, orders a chicken sandwich on toast without the chicken.

  “Very funny, mister,” the waitress says not blinking. She’s about forty-five and with enough ultraviolet damage to make her face just this side of scary. “That would be toast in my universe.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Daugherty says. “My partner’s been out in the sun too long.” He shows her his federal ID and a photo of Technical Sergeant Jessica Aldridge. “Face ring a bell? She’s lost a little weight. Won’t be in uniform. Travels with a dog.”

  The waitress places her hands backward on her hips. “What kind a dog?” she asks.

  “The kind that huffs and puffs and will blow your fucking house down,” Pyle says.

  “Honey,” the waitress says while placing the knuckles of one hand on the table and leaning toward Pyle’s face, “that’s what’s known as a wolf.”