When the Day of Evil Comes

by Melanie Wells

  “Will do.”

  He reached for his belt and pulled out what looked like a walkie-talkie. The kind my brother and I played with when we were kids. Only this one was big and black and official-looking. He asked dispatch for a female officer, specifying the hotel name, address, and room number, adding that, “the suspect is cooperative but is unclothed.”

  Great. Let’s advertise and see if we can draw a crowd.

  He disconnected the call and stared at me. Officer Pruitt clearly had no intention of letting me out of his sight.

  “What happened to Mariann Zocci?”

  “You have the right to remain silent.”

  “Was she badly injured?”

  “If you choose to forego that right, anything you say can and will be used against you.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “You have the right to an attorney.”

  “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

  “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

  “Is she in the hospital?”

  He stared at me.

  I tightened my towel and stared back.

  We stood like that, staring at each other until the female officer arrived.

  She had a peppermint-red hairdo, pink shimmery lipstick (certainly non-regulation), and a big black handgun strapped to her belt. I was afraid of her.

  “Officer,” she said to Officer Pruitt.

  “Officer,” he said back. “Mrs. Foster would like a female officer to chaperone her preparation for departure.”

  “Mrs. Foster,” she said to me.

  “Ms.,” I said.

  “Ms.,” she said. “Please unlatch the door so I can step inside.”

  She followed me inside and shut the door behind us.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked. It seemed a fair request for such an intimate experience.

  “Officer Simon,” she said. “I know this is awkward.”

  No kidding.

  “But if you’ll just dress quickly, we can get you down to the station and get this over with.”

  I turned my back to her and reached for my suitcase, fishing around for some clean clothes.

  She turned aside discreetly as I dressed.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s going to happen? Where are you taking me?”

  “County lockup,” she said. “You’ll be processed there, arraigned in the morning, and then assigned to a cell.”

  “I’m going to jail?” I shoved my legs into a pair of jeans. How did one dress for jail? Comfort seemed a priority, so I reached for a sweatshirt. “But I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent.”

  “Everyone’s innocent, honey.”

  “Can you tell me what happened to Mariann Zocci?”

  “Who is Mariann Zocci?”

  “The woman I didn’t assault and batter.”

  “I have no information, Ms. Foster. I’m just here to assist in your arrest.”

  Assist in my arrest. Like she was doing me a favor.

  “What should I do with my stuff? I’m supposed to check out in the morning.”

  “I suggest you leave it and have someone pick it up.”

  “I don’t know anyone in Chicago,” I said.

  “I’m very sorry, ma’am.”

  The Chicago Police Department wasn’t interested in my problems, apparently. And I was going to jail. Alone. For something I didn’t do. In a city where I knew no one.

  And Mariann Zocci had been assaulted and battered.

  “Can I make a phone call?” I asked.

  “Not until you’re processed.”

  “Look. You seem like a nice enough person. I’m asking for a break here. I’m not a criminal. I’ve never done anything wrong in my entire life. Can I just please make a call? One?”

  She looked at me, considering my plight. Surely she’d heard this a thousand times. For some reason, still unknown to me, she relented.

  “Hurry it up,” she said.

  I raced for my phone and dialed Liz Zocci. It was after midnight. She answered on the second ring. Maybe it was true that mothers never sleep.

  “Hello?”

  “Liz. Dylan Foster.”

  She didn’t seem at all fazed. As though we were old friends and I always called her at 12:15 in the morning.

  “Dylan. How are you?”

  “Have you heard from Mariann?”

  “No. How did it go?”

  “Fine. But I think she’s been beaten. I’m being arrested for assault.”

  “You assaulted her?”

  “Of course not. I’m just being arrested for it.”

  “Did Joe come home while you were there?”

  “I think so. As I was leaving,” I said. “Can you find out what happened to her? Someone needs to check on her.”

  “Where are they taking you?”

  I covered the phone and spoke to Officer Simon. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Cook County lockup. Downtown.” She recited the address, which I repeated to Liz.

  “Is this your one phone call?” Liz asked me.

  “I don’t think so. I think I get an official one later.”

  “Don’t make your phone call until morning. You may need to save it for an attorney. I’ll try to find out what happened and let you know. Maybe they’ll put me through to you.”

  “Thanks, Liz.”

  “And Dylan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Christine woke me up to pray for you tonight.”

  “Good. I need it.”

  “Obviously.”

  We hung up. I was ready As ready as I was going to get, anyway. I hoped silently that no press had gotten wind that Mariann Zocci, the matriarch of a prominent Chicago family, had been beaten. I didn’t need any pictures of myself splashed on the front page of the Tribune. Not without mascara or a lawyer.

  Officer Simon escorted me to the police cruiser. Officer Pruitt cuffed me, which ranked right up there as one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. As I was loaded into the backseat, he put his hand on the top of my head, helping me duck into the car. Just like on TV.

  The ride to county lockup was depressingly short, my sense of dread accelerating the entire process to warp speed.

  Within a span of a half hour, I’d been booked, photographed, fingerprinted, and escorted into a holding cell that housed twenty other women.

  Jail, it turns out, is an efficient leveler. The luxury of self-righteousness became immediately unavailable to me.

  Most of my cellmates were clothed, shall we say, less modestly than I. And were surely due some grace from the Almighty, experienced sinners that they were. For once in my life, any sense of safe superiority I’d cultivated with good behavior and higher education fled my heart entirely. I was one of them.

  We were all in the pokey. Together. Twenty pathetic examples of miserable, needy humanity.

  I found myself a spot on the floor—a space relatively clean of urine and sputum—and curled myself into a ball, hugging my shins, my chin on my knees.

  If I were even a moderately decent Christian, I would have sung praises to the Lord, like a real disciple. Or witnessed to my jailers like Paul. Or forgiven my accusers like Jesus Himself.

  What I did instead was cry. And wallow in fear and self-pity. I had never felt so alone in my entire life.

  I watched the clock on the hallway wall tick off a second at a time, until 2:16 a.m., when one of my jailers approached my communal cage.

  “Foster?” he said loudly.

  I looked up. “I’m Foster.”

  “Phone call.”

  The few women in the holding cell who were still awake taunted me, mainly out of jealousy, I guess. A 2:00 a.m. phone call could only be good news.

  I trotted down the hall after the female officer, who was businesslike and efficient. She never once looked at me, and I’m sure if asked to describe me, would not have been able to. I was a nonperson to her. One of the inmates. Some
one to be herded and kept under control.

  She stepped aside as a door opened electronically. A bank of black dial phones was attached to a wall in the otherwise empty room.

  “Five minutes,” she said.

  I picked up one of the phones. “Dylan Foster.”

  “It’s Liz.”

  “Thank God. I’m so glad to hear your voice. How’s Mariann?”

  “Not too good,” she said. “She’s at Chicago Memorial.”

  “She’s in the hospital?”

  “Broken arm, fractured eye socket. Multiple contusions.”

  The breath came out of me.

  “Dylan? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. I’m just … stunned.”

  “Don’t be. It’s not the first time.”

  “Did you talk to her?” I asked.

  “Joe did it.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “Was he standing right there?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I think so.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Can you make it through the night?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I can get you out in the morning.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” I said, though I desperately wanted to ask her to do that.

  “You didn’t ask. I offered.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

  I hung up the phone and knocked on the steel door. My jailer pressed a button, motioned for me to step into the hall, and escorted me back to the cell.

  26

  NO ANGEL FLUNG OPEN the doors of Cook County lockup that night. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t doing the singing and praising required to precipitate such a miracle. As it was, though, I spent the next miserable hours curled on the floor of that holding cell, wondering where God had run off to. Where had He been when Joe Zocci was knocking his wife around? And why was He letting them blame me for it? Just what was He thinking abandoning me like this?

  I must have dozed, because I spent the rest of the night in the company of Peter Terry. My first encounter with him since the library. He hunted me through a rapid, violent series of dreams.

  In one, Mariann Zocci stood beside me, tapping me awake, urgent with something to say. Peter Terry arrived and grabbed her by the ankles, swinging her around by her feet, smashing her head into a telephone pole.

  Then Gavin was standing in a creek, watching the sun rise. Peter Terry eviscerated him. Literally. Stem to stern. And hung his mangled body by the neck from a shower curtain rod.

  In another, Peter Terry sat beside my mother’s hospital bed, holding her hand and gradually squeezing the life out of her, her face purpling as she gasped for breath.

  And finally, Peter Terry his white skin glistening, whispered into a blindfolded Erik Zocci’s ear, leading him slowly, a step at a time, to the brink, shoving him over the edge of a cliff and laughing hysterically as the boy hurtled toward oblivion.

  I awoke with my hands clammy, my heart pounding. Wishing for the simple nuisance of flies instead of this new plague of bizarre, terrifying images.

  Weak morning light at last squeezed through the dirty wire mesh windows, rousing my cellmates one by one. As the cell slowly shook awake, communal toilets were utilized and sometimes flushed. Faucets were turned on at the trough along the wall. Women stood in front of the sinks and brushed their teeth with fingers. I stayed in my corner, huddling alone, shivering.

  Occasionally a guard would rattle the cell door and call out a name, and the corresponding inmate would shuffle out behind her. These inmates did not return. Maybe they’d been assigned to cells. Maybe they’d been released. I didn’t know.

  At five of nine, a burly wrestler of a guard shouted “Foster!” I jumped to my feet and hustled out of there, following her down a series of desolate hallways.

  My destination, it turned out, was the county courthouse. For my arraignment.

  I had no attorney. I’d never made my one phone call. Never been offered the opportunity, as a matter of fact. So I stood in front of the judge alone, the court room buzzing around me, a hive of disinterested parties, going about their business. Oblivious to my desperate plight.

  The judge looked at me over her glasses. “You have no representation?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Can you afford an attorney?”

  I didn’t quite know how to answer that. “It depends on what you mean by afford.”

  “Don’t be smart with me, Ms. Foster.” She scanned the courtroom and chose an attorney, pointing for the man to come to the bench. A skinny black man in a badly fitting suit trotted up to the defense table with his briefcase.

  “You’ll be representing Ms. Foster for the purposes of this arraignment,” the judge said to him. “How does your client plead?”

  I stood there mutely, convinced for once of the wisdom of keeping my mouth shut.

  “Absolutely not guilty, your honor,” the man said.

  “Calm down. Bail?” said the judge.

  “The state requests that bail be denied,” came a voice from the other side of the aisle. I peeked around my lawyer to see yet another badly suited man standing behind the prosecutor’s table.

  “On what grounds?” asked the judge.

  “The defendant brutally assaulted one of Chicago’s most prominent citizens, a frail, defenseless elderly woman. Ms. Foster is not from the area and has no family here. She’s clearly a flight risk. And an imminent danger to society.”

  “Counsel?” the judge said to my attorney, whose name I had never heard.

  “Uh,” he said, “we deny all that. Yes. We do.” He leaned over to me. “You going to show up for trial?”

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  He looked at the judge. “We request the defendant be released. Right away.”

  “You want O.R.?” said the judge.

  “Yes. O.R., that’s what we want,” he said.

  “You want the defendant released on her own recognizance?” she said.

  “Yes,” my attorney said confidently.

  I wasn’t feeling too confident about my attorney.

  “The people object to that,” the prosecutor said.

  “Bail is set at two hundred thousand dollars.” The judge rapped her gavel, dismissing us all without another glance. “Next case.”

  My attorney turned to me, his face seeming familiar suddenly, in some distant sort of way “I’ll come see you later today,” he said. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He picked up his briefcase and rushed off. And I was alone again. The entire procedure had taken less than five minutes.

  As the guard turned me toward the door to escort me back to jail, I caught a glimpse of Joseph Zocci sitting alone in the back of the courtroom. Just looking at me. No expression. No movement. Like a reptile. Waiting.

  The guard led me out of the courtroom and through another maze of hallways, doors slamming open and closed as we walked through them. Clanging in my ears. My head pounded. I felt weak. I was hungry and exhausted.

  A final door shoved itself open and I walked into a cell. Six feet by ten—I know because I paced that route back and forth like a cat—with two bunks, a sink, and a toilet The other bunk was empty which meant I had my own room. My first break in twelve hours.

  I alternated between pacing my cell and sitting on my cot trying to figure out what to do.

  Lunch arrived, a single slice of fatty ham on white bread, a smeared dot of yellow mustard staining the bread and reminding me of the smiley-face flag on my rental car. A plastic cup of mushy fruit cocktail sat next to the sandwich, along with a bite-size 3 Musketeers bar and a carton of skim milk. I picked at it and paced some more.

  Still I had made no phone call. I had not heard from Liz Zocci. Or my nameless attorney.

  With all that time on my hands, I contemplated my situation, trying t
o fit the pieces together. It was like a puzzle with no solution. As though someone had thrown together the oddly shaped pieces of a dozen different jigsawed images.

  If I’d had pen and paper, I would’ve tried to draw it all out, inking connections onto the page as well as into my thoughts. But since I had neither, I had to make do with my brain alone, which was filled with static and fogged by fatigue.

  The last two days had been packed with characters and events. As I catalogued it all—suicides and shower curtains, my adventures at the Vendome, the disparate members of the Zocci clan—it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet finished my conversation with Mariann Zocci. I hadn’t asked her about Erik’s suicide note. Also, she’d refused to talk to me about Joe Zocci’s cruelty, which seemed to me central to the entire mystery. And she’d refused to talk about her first son’s death. Little Joseph Jr. The lost boy.

  I must have fallen asleep with my head spinning like that, for I dreamed again. This time Peter Terry, instead of delighting in his cruel mischief, was wary. Restrained. In the shadows behind him, a sinewy dark figure watched him. Peter Terry seemed to fear this figure, darting away from it, looking over his shoulder as he ran away.

  The jangle of metal jolted me awake. I opened my eyes to see the guard who had escorted me to court.

  “You made bail,” she said without animation. “Congratulations.”

  I stood up and followed her. I was getting used to following people down hallways.

  She stayed with me as my captors processed my release. There were several pages of documents for my signature, verifying my address in Dallas, promising that I’d show up for trial. The last piece of paper said I’d been treated well and that my rights had been respected. I signed.

  The guard led me through a swinging door and then walked away wordlessly.

  A child’s voice shouted my name.

  “Miss Dylan!”

  I scanned the room. It was Punkin, standing there all dressed in pink, holding her mother’s hand.

  She ran over to me and hugged my legs. I thought my heart was going to explode. Nothing ever felt so good to me as that nutty little kid squeezing my knees.

  Liz walked over behind her.

  “Okay, Punkin,” she said. “You don’t need to tackle her.”

  “I prayed for you,”. Punkin said to me, releasing my legs and gazing up at me.