Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  “Don’t let him fool you with that hard-nut routine. If you do put him in the backseat of your car he’ll roll over for you faster than a golden retriever puppy.”

  “Well, if you ever see us together again, don’t go thinking it’s love. I’ll just be cracking his nuts. You know what I mean, buddy? I’m not getting any closer to his stinger than that lousy breath of his.”

  While Shannon was snorting one of her laughs I decided to keep my own counsel regarding my latest theories. Apparently no one except me suspected a connection between the Sherman “drug thing” and the murders. It’s been my experience in life that when bad things start to happen in clusters, it’s no coincidence; the bad things are connected. But I needed more than a gut feeling to go on or my case wouldn’t get any closer to a courtroom than an honest criminal defense lawyer.

  “Okay, Shannon, I have another one. Did you tell McCoy about us and the Hastings night?”

  “It’s Jeff. He’s all over the place. Even Vince warned him to shut his trap from now on, or he’d fire him too. They were talking about Carlyle and how he came up with the idea to hire you. I’m betting Jeff and Carlyle were in cahoots. But I can’t get a word out of Vince.”

  Shannon and I agreed to keep our party lines open and then signed off as Rita walked into my doorway. “Must I stay later or may I go shopping now?”

  I knew what she had said, but wasn’t processing it. Too many things on my mind made it difficult for me to focus on technicalities and social niceties. I expected Rita to merely deliver her message and then be gone, but she remained in my doorway expecting conversation and an early dismissal to get to her sex shop before closing time. I looked at her blankly.

  “Did you forget to eat today?” she asked. “You are pale.” I got up and walked to my mirror. Rita stood behind me a few inches shorter. We studied my face, waiting for fangs to emerge or horns to sprout from my head.

  “You are—how they say—gaunt, a bit withered. I think I must start feeding you.”

  Mike was back in my doorway. He walked in and put his arm around Rita’s shoulder, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Go wait in your office, huh, sweetie?”

  Finally beaten, Rita huffed, and trotted dejectedly back to her office. Miko would have to wait another day.

  “We need to talk.” He stood with both hands on the door jambs, his arms spanning the entrance as if he were blocking my exit. But I had no intention of leaving. It was him I intended to throw out.

  “Mike, I don’t care who you’re screwing. I just hope you’re not screwing around with me. And I can’t do this with you right now. I’m busy.”

  “Yeah?” He pushed himself through the doorway and into my office, where he pulled out a chair and flopped himself in it. “I’ll just sit here until you’re done. It’s getting near closing time anyway.”

  “The fuck you will! I told you I’m busy right now.”

  His head snapped back in mock fear. “Whoa! And I’m afraid to swear around you?” He got up and bashed my door shut like it could have been the side of my head.

  I glared back at him. When my adrenaline was pumping at peak anger levels (or after two shots of Patrón Silver), I had no fear. I could rant with a loaded gun in my face if I had the right energy flowing through me. Blame it on my Italian genes, but once I got emotional about something, the safest thing to do was to get behind a steel barrier and hope my gun wasn’t loaded.

  “Mike,” I said in a low fervid growl like I was revving up a meat grinder for the gristly parts. “You’re not afraid of me. You simply gauge your behavior based on what you think will be the most impressive for your immediate audience. You assume I want to be treated like a little princess because I made the mistake of being a little too starry-eyed with you. You think I merely tolerate words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shithead’ but that I don’t use them myself because they make me shiver and quake. Well, I don’t care whom you’re fucking because I think you’re a shithead. And no, you cannot sit in my office and wait for me to finish my work, because even if I were twiddling my thumbs in here, I don’t want to talk to you right now unless it’s related to drug stings and the occasional murder.”

  When I finished he nodded slowly, looking surprisingly sullen after my tirade. With his arrogant, devil-may-care attitude, I thought he might even laugh at me.

  But he didn’t.

  “If you had a gun right now, you’d shoot me between the legs. It’s something more than me keeping that drug sting info from you. So tell me what you’re thinking, Prosecutor Melone. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  He looked me in the eyes. And then I knew I would never forget at least his eyes. He had stared at me too many times now for me to ever forget how they glittered at the edge like stars in a blue-black night sky. While I floated through his molten navy eyes, his bloated chromed Mustang started to shrink back into a cute little Tonka Toy.

  But I resolved that he could stand there until he turned to stone. I would never tell him my real fear of him—the one I couldn’t admit, even to myself. My fear of unknowable things. Those fears I had in court when I was looking at a murderer face to face and wondering what he was thinking as he pulled the trigger, or slit the throat, or tightened his grip on a soft white neck. I couldn’t tell Mike that despite those fears, I still got jealous when I saw his arm on Shannon’s back or his fingers laced through the red tresses of a twenty-year-old. I would never admit that despite his secrets I was falling hard for him and that love always scared me and made me stupid.

  Rita’s rigid voice came over the intercom and announced that Emily’s mother had arrived by plane that morning and had been to the hospital to pick up her daughter but Emily was gone.

  Mike interrupted our conversation. “Docs released her last night. You know, babe, you have my head spinning.”

  “Last night?”

  “She trumped up some nonsense about pestering calls and got the hospital to discharge her early. They spirited her back to the dorm in an ambulance. She was good to go, so they said.”

  “ ‘Good to go’ because the hospital doesn’t want any liability if the Holton murderer performs his gruesome magic under their roof. And what makes you so sure the ‘pestering calls’ were ‘trumped up’?”

  Mike glared at me with stormy eyes while his words forced their way through gritted teeth: “I’m not a detective anymore. If the cops thought they should have done something about the calls, they would have.”

  With great deliberation I picked up the phone and buzzed Rita. I told her to go home. She could still make Miko if she hurried. I gently placed the receiver back into its cradle. I was taking my time so I could think first, before the real words on the tip of my tongue came tumbling out like rocks from a dump truck. The emotional part of me wanted to strangle Mike and kick his body out my door, but the prosecutor’s blood still flowing through my veins stopped me. Why shoot the messenger when he might still have information to impart? Learn as much as you can, and then shoot. Or better yet, hand him back to Shannon for the final kill. Let her screw him to a wall with the electric drill of her sharp tongue.

  “Okay, McCoy, what’s really going on here? I’m not a soldier like you, and Carlyle doesn’t seem to care about anything but bad press and the concomitant dwindling of annual donations. Emily was getting threatening calls in the hospital and now she’s missing. And every time I turn around, I find you standing right in the middle of the pooled blood. Are we going to find Emily’s body in the morning?”

  Mike clenched his jaw and then slammed the flat of his hand on the desk in front of me like some kind of warning that I was next. Suddenly those liquid azure eyes lit up like a flame at the end of a candle. “Are you out of your fucking mind! You’re accusing me of murder. Do you understand that? And do you also understand that you are making me very goddamn angry? Now, you tell me what you’re keeping from me.”

  I backed up a few emotional steps because Mike had tripped me up with an outburst that frankly I didn’t think h
e was capable of. At least not with me. In a normal relationship I would have been glad we were getting it over with early. I mean, how often do women marry sweet guys only to find out, only after they’re married, that these same “cuddlemuffins” consider breaking their wife’s nose appropriate foreplay?

  Had I just contemplated the “M” word in reference to Mike McCoy? I reminded myself that his actions in the past few days had elevated my suspicions to a capital “S.”

  “Okay, Mike, let’s stand down a few feet.”

  I took a nice deep breath and adjusted the bass on my voice equalizer to a calming smooth-jazz level, and while mentally humming the tune to “The Girl from Ipanema,” I said, “It seems that Emily is kind of missing and I’m starting to get a little bit concerned. Why aren’t you?”

  Mike breathed, then ran his fingers through his glossy hair. He flopped back in his chair. “We are getting so mucked up with all this shit, you and me. I wish we’d met at a different time—under different circumstances—before all this . . .”

  “Oh Christ, Mike, don’t play the star-crossed-lover routine now. We’re both too old for that. The truth of the matter is neither of us belongs here. I’m a prosecutor, and you’re a cop. You shouldn’t be able to stomach this place either. We both sold out. I’m just trying to figure out how far you’ve gone. How much of your humanity you’ve traded for whatever it is you’re getting in return.”

  He looked at me with a dark face, the light ebbing from his sparkling eyes. “There’s a lot of water under both our bridges, Marianna, and we’ve both crossed over. I’m not a soul-searching kind of guy anymore.”

  “Maybe you never had a soul.”

  “A soul?”

  “Yeah, you know, that impalpable thing that makes us human, separates us from the animals? A conscience, a second thought about anything other than the aggrandizement of your dick. A soul.”

  “If you’re looking for souls, go to a church. Other than that, go talk to Vince Piganno.”

  “Those are my choices? God or Vince Piganno?”

  “I saw him at the AG’s office the other day when I met your friend Shannon—”

  “Ah, Shannon again—”

  “I’d like to know why you’re not an AAG anymore. Something’s not right with this whole scenario. What are you doing here?”

  “You already know. Vince fired me because I was downtown when Melinda Hastings was murdered—saw her body flying across the street—and then I ran home and told no one. Vince fired me. Carlyle hired me. And here I am.”

  Mike guffawed like I’d just tripped over my own foot. “Either you think I’m stupid, or you definitely are.”

  I began my chronic teeth-clenching, because accepting IQ evaluations from someone like Mike McCoy was like swallowing a prickly pear whole.

  He leaned over my desk close enough that I could smell that sickly aftershave. “How do I know you’re not a plant here? An enticing but poisonous plant? From the little I know of Vince Piganno, he’d sooner put a hit on your tail than let you work here. So give me the truth. You and Piganno have your own little sting going on, don’t you? You’ve been playing my strings like a fine-tuned violin.” He plopped back into the chair and began shaking his head as if he’d just solved the black hole paradox. “Am I a fucking dope or what?”

  “You’re a dope and I’m not a plant.”

  “But you hate this job,” he said. “And you don’t even belong here. You’re a prosecutor through and through.”

  He spoke his last sentence with the disdain of an exconvict who’d been trammeled by the legal system once too often.

  “I agree with you, but apparently Vince doesn’t because he fired me right into his past. But let’s get back to the tense present.” I eased myself back in my chair and very calmly asked him, “Are the drugs connected to the murders?”

  Mike’s expression remained hard and sour. “Sherman, Lipton, and Mila Nazir have no interest in murder. And you’re going to fuck everything up if you do get involved.”

  “But—”

  He rose from his chair and glared down at me, threatening me with his height. “Unless someone invites you in, stay out of it!”

  But I rose too. On my four-inch heels, eye to eye, I said, “Staying out of it would be about as hard for me as you staying out of Shannon’s panties.”

  “Shannon doesn’t wear panties.”

  Mike tornadoed out my door as I was lifting my desk chair for a home-run pitch.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Last Call for the Carousel

  RITA WAITED FOR MIKE to disappear down the hall, then popped her head into my office. “Perhaps this is not a good time . . . but your mother has called. She would like you to call her at home.”

  “Why haven’t you left yet?” I asked her.

  “To hear you and Mike fighting is so much more fun than a silly sex store! But now I will go. Good night,” she sang as she floated down the hall after Mike.

  I dialed home. My mother was worried because the coach of the soccer program had called her and told her that Cassie hadn’t shown up for the six a.m. practice that morning, that she had gone off with a friend the night before and had not been back. Cassie hadn’t been answering her cell phone either. Now, added to my list of other problematic issues, I had to play nursemaid to my negligent sister and overprotective mother. I screamed my frustration at my mother.

  “Give me the number at the camp. And stay off the phone in case she calls you.”

  Terror muddles the brain. My mother had to repeat the camp number three times before she got it right. I dialed and waited an eternity of ten minutes for someone to locate the counselor, or coach, or whatever the hell the person allegedly in charge was called.

  “Mrs. Melone?” A young man’s voice came over the receiver.

  “Mari Melone. I’m Cassie’s sister.”

  “I’m so sorry over this confusion. We were thinking of calling her school but didn’t want to get her in trouble—”

  “Get her in trouble? She’s missing!”

  “Well, we assume it’s just a teenage prank and she’s arranged with her boyfriend to drive up here and spend the night off campus. Worrying everyone like this is not acceptable behav—”

  “You assume this is a prank, so you don’t alert her family? Are you out of your minds? For liability purposes alone you should have called her family as well as the local police. She’s a minor in your care. If anything happens to her—”

  “Well now, hold on a minute. She told her bunkmate that she was going for a ride with a friend from home. It isn’t as if she disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night. This is not exactly an abduction we’re dealing with here.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that some people go willingly with their kidnappers because there is a gun in their back, whether literally or figuratively? Have you called the police yet? Or are you going to wait a few more days?”

  “Well, I’m not sure we should wait days—”

  “Well, sir, my sarcasm is obviously too sophisticated for you. Maybe you’ve been hit by too many soccer balls. I am not suggesting we wait days. I am suggesting that you should have contacted the police yesterday. So I think, with all due respect to your authority in this matter, that you should call the police now!”

  I gave him every telephone number at which I could be reached, and then called my friends in the AG’s office. I struggled over telling Mike, and finally decided that in the interest of finding my sister at any cost, I should alert him; he was head of Holton security, after all. I found him by cell phone and the connection was bad, but he didn’t sound overly concerned. “It hasn’t been that long,” he said. “But I’ll spread the word anyway.”

  When I finally went home, I found my mother leaning over the sink, seeking therapeutic counseling from her parsley plant on the windowsill.

  “If I don’t cut it young, it becomes old and tasteless, even on the root,” she said as she snipped off the tops.

  S
he may have been talking to me, but the chances are good she was merely apologizing to the elderly parsley for mercy killing. She often discussed things with her plants.

  My eyes watered at the sharp vinegar and garlic aroma coming from the pickled vegetables she had laid on the table in a bowl. Shades of bright green broccoli, white cauliflower, and orange carrot sticks had been floating for weeks in a vacuum jar at the back of the refrigerator, preserved by cider vinegar and whole garlic cloves.

  My mother focused out the window toward the neighbors’ yard as she spoke. “She promised to call as soon as she got there. And, of course . . . nothing yet. I call her and get no answer from her cell phone and they tell me they are giving her messages, but . . . nothing back. And now this. She is gone overnight. She will kill me yet.”

  “Cassie’s a teenager. They torment you so you won’t miss them when they go off to college. Nature has it all planned.”

  “You weren’t like that.” She turned to face me and dried her hands on her apron. “You were always with a soft heart. Clearheaded. Never a worry. Not like Cassie.”

  “I was a nerd, Mom. What can I say?”

  “Nerd?”

  “A loner. I studied, got As, didn’t do what all the other kids were doing”—I thought of Elliot and how alike we probably were—“I only had one close girlfriend. Remember Annie? Our big night out was shopping at the mall.”

  “Yes, yes, Annabel.”

  I went to the sink and wet a paper towel, wiping cold clean water across my forehead. I had bumped into Annie in court during her last divorce. The life had drained out of her. She seemed dead to me, as if I’d somehow ascended into some higher life and she’d stayed behind in a domestic hell of her own making.

  “I’m sure Cassie’s fine, Mom. She’s a drama queen. Remember the time she ran away for twenty-four hours and we found her in the front bushes in a sleeping bag?”

  My father walked through the door and stopped for a minute to look at me. “Ooh! You visit with us again so soon? Something must be wrong.”