Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Body of a Girl

  A Penguin Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Leah Stewart

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1011-9048-7

  A PENGUIN BOOK®

  Penguin Books first published by The Penguin Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  PENGUIN and the “Penguin” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: May, 2002

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Epilogue

  For Matt

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my agent, Gordon Kato, and my editor, Carolyn Carlson, for their good advice and faith in this book.

  For counsel on everything from police procedure to Memphis geography, thanks to Zack McMillin, Steve Hall, Cletus Oliver, and Dr. Wendy Gunther. I couldn’t have written this book without Angie Craig.

  Many thanks to my teachers, A. Manette Ansay, Charles Baxter, and Nicholas Delbanco. I am grateful for the support of Wyatt Prunty, Cheri Peters, and the staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and also to Norma Diala at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for giving me a job while I wrote this book.

  For love and encouragement, thanks go to my family, particularly Susan and Skip Francies, Cameron Stewart, Gordon Stewart, and Julie Finch. I am also grateful to my friends and readers Carolyn Ebbitt, Caroline Kim, Surrena Goldsmith, Leigh Anne Couch, Terry Joffe, Shivika Asthana, Nina Reid, and especially my coach, Elwood Reid.

  1

  This has been a summer of murders. Memphis is so hot people move like they’re wearing something heavier than their skin. I can’t help but feel that these things are connected. I can’t put this in the stories I write. It’s not fact. It’s not true, in the way we mean true at the newspaper, which is that we got someone else to say it.

  There are reporters at this newspaper whose whole job it is to interview zoo workers about new baby animals. One guy wrote a three-part series about how to avoid the lunch rush at the fast-food drive-thru. I’m the one the cops like to show photographs of raped and beaten women, looking at me out of the corner of their eyes to see if I can take it. “Okay,” I always say, when I think I’ve looked at them long enough. “I see.” I work the police beat. Murders are my responsibility.

  It’s cloudy this morning, and so humid I’m sweating just standing still. Here and there patches of light shine through the clouds, as though someone poked holes in my jar so I could breathe. On the ground not three feet from me is the body of a young woman, white, my age. Steam rises from the dirt all around her, and when I look down I can see it coming up between my feet. I’m trying to get it straight in my head, how I’ll describe this scene in the paper, how to make it simple, clinical, how to explain that what looked like smoke was only rainwater evaporating in the terrible heat. But all I can think is My God, my God.

  She is curled up. Her hands are bound in front of her, her wrists wrapped round and round with what looks like white string. Her white T-shirt is patched red with blood. From the waist down she is naked, tire marks slashed across her skin. On one foot she wears a sandal; the other is bare. She is lying among tire tracks in a patch of sandy ground, and around her tufts of wild grass and dandelions push up through the dirt. She knew that car was coming. I would ball myself up like that, trying to disappear.

  This is not where I’m supposed to be. Normally I’d arrive at the scene after the crowd had gathered, and I’d stand behind the yellow tape, with the rest of the press, the crying neighbors, the mamas with babies on their hips leaning in to get a look, lucky to catch a glimpse of the body bag when they brought it out. Today I was about to pull into the newspaper parking lot when I heard it over the police scanner—DOA, at the park, less than two miles away. I followed a police cruiser to the site and stopped my car next to it. When I got out, the uniformed cop sauntered over to me and asked me what I thought I was doing. I said I was press and he looked me up and down. “You want to look,” he said. “Go ahead and look.” He’s not supposed to do that, but maybe he thought I would faint and give him a story to tell his buddies. So I kept my face blank, and I walked right up to the dead girl and didn’t say a word. The cop watched me, and shrugged, disappointed. “Stay out of the way,” he said.

  I’ve learned to stomach the photographs they show me, but now I know it’s nothing like being so close you could lean down and touch that dead, dead skin.

  I flip open my notebook. This is the first time I haven’t had to wait for the cops and the medical examiner to give me a secondhand version of the crime scene. Faced with the real thing, I realize I don’t know where to look, what details I’ll even be allowed to print. The body lies near the river, not far from the park entrance, where the ticket booths were during the two festivals in May, one for barbecue, one for blues. Whoever dumped the body made no attempt to hide it, or to drag it to the water, only yards away.

  Around us, cars arrive, their tires kicking up dust. Doors shut, and the rumble of male voices grows louder. Somebody shouts. I don’t even turn my head to look, scrawling words in my notebook.

  The feet are small and narrow, with tiny pink toenails.

  The exposed legs are slender, with just the hint of muscle beneath the skin. There’s a little scab near one ankle, as though she nicked herself shaving.

  A white T-shirt is pushed up above the curve of the hips to reveal a pale stomach, the edge of a belly button. On the shirt I can barely make out the letters “MUS.” Something about the lettering is familiar, and then I realize why. It’s the Beale Street Music Festival T-shirt from last year. I have the same one at home in my closet. I wonder if the shirt is what made her killer think of bringing her here.

  Her fingers are clenched, the nails painted the same delicate shade as her toes.

  Her head is curled in toward her chest. The hair draped across her ruined face is long and dark, clotted with blood, powdered with dust.

  Someone bumps me, passing by, and still I don’t look. I barely feel it. It’s like we are alone here, the dead girl and me, two sides of a coin.

  From the ground in front of her face, steam rises, almost like breath.

  I lift my hand to write and see that it’s shaking. I watch as though those trembling fingers aren’t even mine. The body beyond slips in and out of focus as I wait for my fingers to steady. When they do I grip my pen tightly and write in my notebook: T-shirt.

  This is just my job.

  The c
rime tape has gone up and detectives are arriving. I know they won’t want to see me here. I haven’t been on the beat long enough to have the contacts other reporters have, and I don’t want to antagonize any of the cops. I take another look at her before I turn away. A few steps from the body, I can’t help but look again. I turn around, walking backward. A cop stands over her, obscuring my view. I can still see her bare white legs, her tiny feet.

  “Hey,” someone calls out. “Get the hell back.” I turn and see a cop striding toward me. I think his name is Detective Buchanan. He’s young enough to still look a little sick at the sight of the corpse. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “The tape wasn’t up yet. I didn’t realize how close I was.”

  “The body should’ve given you a clue,” he says.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say again, flashing him a smile, wondering if he’s lead detective. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

  He stares at me a second. “Getting to you, isn’t it,” he says. “You look sick.”

  “So do you,” I say, and he snorts. “Do you have a positive ID?”

  “I can’t tell you anything,” he says. “You know the routine; when the lieutenant gets here, he’ll talk to the press.”

  “Come on,” I say. “Give me something. Off the record.”

  He just shakes his head, and waves me away.

  Behind the yellow tape I watch the rest of the press arrive. The TV stations park their vans so close the cops have to squeeze in and out of the scene. People shout. The satellite towers go up, and the reporters line up in front of the tape. The cops stare at us from the other side. It reminds me of the Civil War reenactments my father used to drag me to as a child, the two lines approaching each other, volleying fire. If this were a neighborhood, I’d be canvassing the crowd, looking for somebody who knew the victim, somebody to tell me she’d been fighting with her boyfriend, somebody to tell me she’d heard the boyfriend hit her, she’d heard the dead girl ran around on him. But here there’s nothing to do but wait for the lieutenant, watching the cops’ backs as they bend and stand, cluster and part. Detective Buchanan passes by again, frowning. I can’t remember where I saw him before, which crime it was.

  Off to the right I can make out the taller buildings of downtown, the red letters on the roof of the Peabody Hotel. Somewhere past that, the glass panes of the Pyramid are glinting in the sun. Nearby is Beale Street, its strip of garish bars and souvenir shops isolated among warehouses and parking lots, as if it had been constructed as a movie set and allowed to stand. A hill rises on one side of the fairgrounds, dotted with the houses of rich people and local celebrities. I squint at the houses, trying to judge the distance. They’re too far away for the residents to have seen anything.

  This is my job, to give you all the details right up front, what time it was, where and how it happened, so you can use them to determine whether it could have been you. I’d never go there alone at night, you think, putting the paper down beside your cup of coffee after you read the headline and maybe the lead. It’s my job to keep you reading past that first paragraph, to make you see it like I do, what it is possible for your body to look like, how easily you could be destroyed.

  A cop in uniform stands in front of me, turning his head from side to side. It’s his job to keep the media and the curious out of the way. His white hair is damp with sweat, and the skin of his neck droops over the too tight collar of his shirt. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and mops at his face and neck. Then he says something about a little white girl.

  “What?” I say.

  “Heard she’s a pretty little white girl,” he says, leaning toward me.

  “It’d be hard to say if she’s pretty,” I say.

  “D’you see her?” He’s surprised when I nod. “Are you the one that found her?”

  “No,” I say. “I just saw her. Do you know who found her?”

  My notebook is in my hand, but I keep it closed. If he’s going to tell me something, I don’t want to scare him off.

  He doesn’t answer the question. He says, “That’ll give you nightmares.”

  “I don’t have nightmares,” I say. He looks skeptical, but it’s the truth. Lately I dream in words. My dreams aren’t movies, with images and sound. Instead I watch them scroll past like a story typed out on a computer, like when you play a video game so long that you still see the figures moving even with your eyes closed.

  The cop leans in like he’s going to tell me something, then he sees the notebook in my hand and stops cold. “You a reporter?”

  I say yes, wishing I’d kept the notebook in my bag. You never know what casual comment you might be able to use.

  “Big story for you, ain’t it,” he says. “White girl killed, probably raped. Not the usual black-on-black killing we get here. This girl’s young. Innocent.”

  “Nobody’s innocent,” I say. “There’s always something.”

  He laughs. “That’s nice thinking for a little gal like you,” he says. “You sound like a cop.”

  Here we go again. I say, “We cover a lot of the same territory.” Detective Buchanan comes up behind the cop and says something I can’t hear. The cop nods, then moves a foot to the right and doesn’t speak to me anymore. Now it comes to me where I saw the detective before. He was the officer in charge three weeks ago, when four men carrying semiautomatic rifles kicked down a couple’s door in the middle of the night, mistaking it for a crack house. They raped the wife in front of her husband, then shot them both. Their toddler hid under the bed until the men left, and when the police arrived they found her sleeping, curled up against her dead father’s chest with her thumb in her mouth. My roommate, Hannah, says, how can you write about these things?

  Verb follows subject, I say. Object follows verb.

  Lieutenant Nash keeps taking his jacket off and putting it back on, torn between his need to look professional and his need for relief from the unbearable heat. He’s a large man, and his round dark face is shiny with sweat. When he takes off his jacket his white shirt clings wetly to his back, though I can see that he’s wearing an undershirt. I’m right behind him, close enough to touch that back, and around me is the rest of the press. We follow him as he makes his way around the perimeter of the crime scene, all of us looking around for someone who might tell us more, who might tell us something no other reporter knows.

  Nash, the official spokesman for this case, has told us nothing I didn’t already know. I wrote it down in my notebook anyway: dead girl, white, mid-20s, no ID yet, no cause of death yet, no suspects yet. So far I barely have who, what, when, where, and how, let alone why, which is what everybody wants to know anyway, like they want to know why that athlete got AIDS, why the neighbor’s husband left her, why that house burned down and all the children in it died. They want to know, what made them choose this girl over another, over me? I find the reasons for them.

  “Any idea when you might have an ID?” I ask Nash.

  He looks exasperated. “By the end of the day,” he says. “We’ll call you at the end of the day.”

  That does me no good. By the end of the day, I’ll have no time to track down anyone who might know her, my story will be nothing but her name and no one will read it because they’ll have gotten all their information from the evening news. “Thank you,” I say, and smile prettily at him. A reporter from Channel 7 jostles against me and I resist the urge to elbow her in her pink-suited side. Instead I drop out of the pack and drift back toward the tape to watch the activity around the body. I can’t see anything until they all part to let the body bag through.

  I swear I must be feeling faint from the heat. When they bring the body bag out, that plastic shimmers beautifully, like water under the sun.

  In the police station, it’s always cold, even now in the middle of June. The furniture looks as though it hasn’t been replaced since the ’70s. Twenty years ago, the chairs were bright orange, and maybe when they were new they m
ade the place look cheerful, but now they’re just tacky, part of the general drab-and-dirt atmosphere. The interview room in homicide is white, with files spilling everywhere on the rows of metal desks. I’m sitting on a file, because it was in the chair when I went to sit down, and I couldn’t see anywhere on Sergeant Morris’s desk to put it.

  Morris is saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you anything.” On Saturdays he brings in barbecue for everyone, even me, and tells me stories from his decades on the force. Right now he holds a photograph, up and away from me.

  “Just give me her name, please,” I say, looking at his name tag, which I can’t stop reading over and over. I don’t know if they call those things they wear name tags. It seems like they should have some more official term, like breastplate. “Please.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “The brass is cracking down.”

  I look at my watch. “Please, Sergeant. You know I never quote you,” I say. “I won’t print anything without confirmation. Please. I’m on deadline.”

  “I hate to think about you on a story like this,” he says. “A nice little girl like you.”

  On the streets all over Memphis, I see cops whose muscles are thick under tight uniforms. They stride in twos or threes down the street like a posse in a Western movie, eyes scanning back and forth, their whole bodies heavy with assurance. I never talk to these cops. My cops are always fat and old and grimly sad. They have thick southern accents and call me “little lady.” There are female cops, too. The female cops never talk to me.

  Morris fingers some papers on his desk. I lean in closer. He’s about to give up the name. I can feel it.

  “Had a little girl killed a couple days ago,” he says. “Guy shot a revolver in the air, bullet came down, hit her.”

  I nod. I already wrote that story.

  “You know what really bugs me?” he says. “On TV? When they take a revolver and put a silencer on it.” He shakes his head. “A silencer doesn’t work on a revolver.”