Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  He saw her pause, unsure whether to admit she had no idea what was going on.

  “Yes,” she said carefully.

  “This is your judicial interrogation. You understand that you don’t have to talk to me?”

  “Yes,” she said, more confidently. Eduardo flashed to an image of the unthinkable cartwheel this girl had done during her initial questioning; he saw her starfishing her way across the interrogation room under the cold light of the camera. “Why can’t my dad bail me out?” she said.

  “Bail has to do with the seriousness of the crime, not the evidence against the accused. Do you have any other questions for me?”

  She did not, but Eduardo had a few for her. He spent the first twenty minutes asking for factual information he already knew—Lily Hayes’s full name, her date of birth, her reason for being in Buenos Aires. (“I thought it would be an interesting place to study abroad,” she’d said. “And has it been?” She’d laughed a harsh, unbecoming laugh.) These were the equivalent of lie tests on a psych battery or polygraph. He asked her to go through the day of the murder minute by minute, in order to catch deviations from the account she gave to police; he then asked her to repeat it four more times, in order to catch variations between accounts. Certain variations were suspicious, of course, but then so was no variation at all. Lily Hayes was chewing a strand of hair, he noted, which was intriguing. It was a strange, careless thing to do—it was vulgar, really, and he wasn’t sure he could remember seeing anybody over the age of about seven do it—and it was interesting to him that she felt comfortable engaging in such an activity in this, one of the most important formal conversations of her life. At the forty-five-minute mark, Eduardo began asking the real questions.

  “So,” he said. “I understand you felt that Katy was insipid.”

  At this, Lily looked green and appalled. “Where did you hear that?”

  Some prosecutors wouldn’t tell her, in order to make her wonder who among her friends might not be on her side. They’d want to make her understand that the days when she could expect answers were over; that avenues to comprehension were charities now, to be dispensed or withheld at their whim. These kinds of prosecutors would want to build up the breathy edginess of paranoia, that bewildered lost-in-the-woods-at-night disorientation that makes someone look for any sort of beacon or semaphore. Paranoia in a defendant was a great asset for a prosecutor, it was generally thought. But Eduardo did not like to withhold answers. Partly, it offended his sense of fair play. And partly, he disagreed with the strategy. He felt that giving defendants a false sense of marginal competence—a slight idea of where they stood in relation to the world—made them relax just enough to make a mistake, if there were any mistakes to be made (which, of course, he never assumed that there were).

  “An email you wrote,” he said.

  “I see.”

  “Do you remember who you wrote that email to?”

  “No.”

  “So it could have been any number of people, then?”

  Lily said nothing. Eduardo pretended to look at his notes. “When you said she was insipid,” said Eduardo, “did you mean she was ‘lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate, or challenge’?”

  “I mean—yes, I suppose so. Yeah.”

  “Was there anything in particular you found especially insipid about the victim?”

  There was really no need to refer to Katy as the “victim” just now—though it was how Eduardo would refer to her in court, of course, to remind the three judges (over and over and over) that the dead girl, in stark contrast to the living girl in front of them, was dead. But it was best to get in the habit early.

  “I don’t know,” said Lily.

  “Her reading tastes, perhaps? Her vocabulary?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you consider yourself a smart woman?” said Eduardo. This language, too, was intentional. In public, in the courts, Eduardo would refer to Katy as a “girl” and Lily as a “woman,” whenever he wasn’t referring to them as “victim” and “defendant,” even though Lily was, in fact, three and a half months younger than Katy had been when she died. This was, again, just good sense. You could subtly direct the judges toward the truth through small adornments and pressures and omissions; Eduardo would never deviate from the facts, of course, but there was nothing wrong with using words with slightly different connotations in order to illuminate the reality of a situation. Who could deny that the differing designations reflected an emotional veracity, if not a biological one? You looked at Lily—leaving aside questions of guilt or innocence—and you saw her callousness, and her emotional remoteness, and her sexual experience, and you knew you were dealing with an adult. And then there was the small matter that Lily would grow up, in prison or out, and Katy would always be a girl and would always be dead.

  “What?”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “Is it fair to say you thought were you smarter than the victim?”

  “Is it fair to say you think you’re smarter than me?”

  Eduardo put down his notepad and raised his eyebrows. Lily’s face was flushed; he could tell that she was slightly surprised, but also slightly pleased, at what she had said.

  “I would not presume that,” he said firmly, and lifted his notepad again. “Insipidness aside, there were a lot of other things you didn’t like about Katy Kellers.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Let me remind you of some of the things you didn’t like about her, according to emails you sent during the month of January alone: her hair, her name, her teeth—”

  “I loved her teeth!”

  “ ‘They were not the teeth of a serious person,’ according to a Facebook message you wrote to your friend Callie Meyers on January seventeenth, 2011.”

  “I liked her teeth. I wanted teeth like that.”

  “Do you think Katy ever had to have braces?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She never had braces. They were just naturally straight.”

  Lily stared at him.

  “You had to have braces, didn’t you?” said Eduardo. “I understand you had them into college. I understand you had to visit home on weekends for orthodontic follow-up.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

  “We’ll move on. Tell me about your relationship with Sebastien LeCompte.”

  “We were friends.”

  “You had a sexual relationship?”

  Lily turned her face to the side. “Briefly.”

  “Were you aware that the victim was also having a sexual relationship with Sebastien LeCompte?” This query contained a bluff, as well as a fairly obvious supposition—but, being a question, it was not exactly a lie. And at any rate, the reality of Sebastien LeCompte’s involvement with Katy Kellers did not matter half as much as whatever Lily had believed that reality to be.

  “I wouldn’t necessarily have called it a relationship.”

  “You were aware of it, though?”

  “I mean, I certainly wondered.”

  “What made you wonder?”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Eduardo pretended to make a note of this, though he wasn’t really writing anything.

  Lily shifted in her seat. “I just mean, I could tell. They weren’t as careful as they thought they were.”

  “And how did you feel about it?”

  “Not much.”

  “Really? You weren’t angry?”

  “Not really. We weren’t in love or anything.”

  During his seventh week with Maria, Eduardo had whispered into her ear while she was sleeping: “Tell me who you are, because I love you already and I want to know who I love.”

  “I mean,” said Lily, uncertain about what to do with his silence. “Sebastien and I weren’t, like, a couple.”

  “But you were sleeping together.”

  Lily looked pensive;
the light through the bars made long tapering wicks on her face. “I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore today,” she said.

  Eduardo nodded. “That’s your right,” he said. He snapped his notebook shut in order to convey a sense of finality, of satisfaction. “This has been a good conversation. You can go have your medical exam now.”

  Though he would never let it matter, it was true that something about Lily Hayes reminded Eduardo of Maria. What was it, exactly? The breeziness of a person to whom nothing was ever denied? But in Maria this quality had been charming and elfin, and in Lily it was, assuredly, only obnoxious. And at any rate, Eduardo knew that there was something sinister about Lily that went well beyond impulsivity.

  Take, for example, the cartwheel. Eduardo had worked enough high-profile cases to know how the cartwheel would play, what binary of accusation and defense would grow in its wake. For the prosecution, by way of the media, an argument would be made that the cartwheel was callous, flippant, reflective of the same kind of bottomless disregard that could, given the right circumstances and drugs, disregard another human life. The counterargument, obviously, would assert that the cartwheel was whimsical and guileless; an exuberant outburst that was now being willfully misunderstood by the old and the humorless and the agenda having. Indeed, the defense might say, if the cartwheel was evidence of anything it was evidence of innocence: How could someone guilty, someone who wanted to look not guilty, do something like that? Only a person who knew that she was innocent and was too young to know that this might not matter would ever, ever do a cartwheel in an interrogation room.

  But Eduardo knew better, because he had spent years studying an impulsive woman. Maria sometimes did things that were crazy or ill-advised, Eduardo would be the first to admit—though more commonly she did things that were merely strange: He’d once found her in the living room at three a.m. staring at a red umbrella she’d lit up with a flashlight, and more than once he’d passed by the closed bathroom door and heard her murmuring to herself in the claw-footed tub. One time she’d hung up a paper moon in a tree, where it shone through the branches like an illuminated coin.

  “It’s beautiful,” he’d said, assuming Maria had wanted to do something beautiful.

  “Oh, is it?” she’d said distractedly, as he wrapped his arms around her.

  “I just wanted it to be interesting.”

  “It is,” said Eduardo. He could hear the sticky note of pleading in his own voice. He so wanted to see whatever it was she wanted him to see.

  “No,” said Maria, looking at him calmly. “Nothing beautiful is really interesting.” She’d torn it down then, though not angrily—just methodically, thoroughly, as though correcting a mistake she now saw that she’d made.

  There were difficulties, too, of course. Maria had a tendency to internalize free-floating stress from the universe, though her life was not, as far as Eduardo could discern, at all stressful. This knotty, inaccessible melancholy of hers was so different from his own; whatever went on with Maria was always some strange iteration away from sense. She’d fall into black spells, growing monosyllabic and morose, speaking in a kind of halting iambic pentameter. She’d disappear into the bathroom to sob (and how she sobbed—these choking, wretched sobs that somehow came at exactly even intervals, so that they seemed almost like some kind of biological or geologic process). One winter she even went a little bald; Eduardo came upon a collapsed black octopus of hair in the shower drain, looking like the remnant of a massacre.

  And there were times—rarely, but memorably—when she could be cruel. The first time he’d really seen it was the night he’d been appointed fiscal de cámara. Maria had organized a celebration for him at a restaurant, though he realized later that every night with Maria was a kind of complicated, triple-edged celebration—like the wedding of an old lover, or the birthday party of an old enemy. There was always a manic sheen of strenuously sought and hard-won fun and an underlying sense of deep and growing trouble. The night of the promotion, Eduardo had felt humble and serene and pleased with himself for the first time in he didn’t know how long. Their friends were laughing and drinking and having a great time until Maria clinked her glass for a toast. Everybody stopped speaking and stared at her happily, and Eduardo felt grateful and honored—because she was so beautiful, because he was so lucky—as he waited to hear what she would say about him.

  “Eduardo,” said Maria. She was smiling. She was radiant. “I always knew you’d excel at this job. You were born for it, weren’t you? You were born to be a prosecutor. Or maybe a prison guard.”

  Eduardo could feel his smile freeze. “I don’t know what you mean,” he’d said, trying to keep the bleakness out of his voice. Truth be told, he rarely knew exactly what she meant.

  “Oh, Eduardo,” said Maria, and the strangest thing was how much genuine affection was still in her face, her voice. “The reason you’re a genius at your job is because you love to punish people. You love to make sure everyone’s having as little fun as you are.”

  People never actually put down their forks when these things get said in public. They gather themselves further into the small tasks of eating; they busy themselves with spoons. Eduardo tilted his head back and laughed. This was what he’d learned to do whenever Maria said something like this; everyone was long accustomed to understanding nothing of the romantic relationships of others, and so they could accept anything as a sort of baffling in-joke, if that’s how Eduardo treated it.

  “I’m having fun.” Eduardo laughed again. “I am having fun.”

  After Maria left, it had been occasionally suggested to Eduardo that she might have been a bit selfish. It had been once proposed that she might, in fact, have had a diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder. “Garden-variety crazy,” his friends had said, “just your typical crazy-woman crazy,” but Eduardo could never agree. Maria was crazy, perhaps, but she was not typical; her lunacy was the blue electricity running through a more finely wired system. And though it might be a kind of madness, it was also a kind of rare brilliance, a rare honesty.

  And so Eduardo could easily imagine Maria cartwheeling from joy in any number of odd places, and in any number of inappropriate situations, where others might prefer that she not. But it was the joy that was the key; nobody cartwheels when they’re paralyzed with grief. And so Lily’s cartwheel wasn’t damning because it was quirky, as a small but self-righteous vanguard of quirkiness defenders the world over seemed to believe. Lily’s cartwheel was damning because it was, like Lily herself, indifferent. Lily’s cartwheel could not tell you that she was guilty. It could only tell you that—during that interrogation, not twenty hours after her roommate’s death—she had not been sad.

  Nevertheless, of course, Eduardo was not sure.

  On Tuesday, Eduardo met with Beatriz Carrizo.

  “I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through,” he said, pouring her a glass of water.

  They were sitting in his office with the shades drawn. Beatriz Carrizo’s hair was heavy and shiny; she wore a stretchy shirt with a pattern of beige-and-red florets. A gold cross glittered between her breasts. “Why can’t my husband be here?” she said.

  “I need to interview you separately,” said Eduardo. Beatriz’s eyes widened. “I don’t mean to alarm you. You’re not suspects.” This was true. They’d been away that weekend, at a nephew’s baptism in the north. “But I am interested in hearing your independent impressions of Lily Hayes. Separately.”

  Beatriz nodded. “Now.” Eduardo shuffled his papers, to create an aura of shifting gears. “What can you tell me about her?”

  Beatriz Carrizo shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really didn’t know her very long.”

  “Just your overall impressions would be helpful.”

  Beatriz took a long gulp of water, then stared out the window with a queasy, unresolved expression. “Well,” she said finally. “She was an odd girl, I’ll say that.”

  “Odd, how?”

&n
bsp; “She was cold. A little deceptive, maybe. She hung around with that boy next door at all hours of the day and night.” Beatriz pursed her lips momentarily as if wanting to stop herself, then unpursed them and went on. “I know she stayed over there when we were out of the house. Also, she was arrogant. She was always telling us things she’d learned about the city, as if we didn’t already know them. It was nice she was interested, I suppose. But it was also so silly. She just didn’t think about other people, that’s all.”

  Eduardo nodded. This was his impression, too, though, of course, he would not say so. “And what was Katy like?” he said.

  “She was a sweet girl. Quiet. We didn’t know her that well, either. It’s absolutely horrific, what happened to her. Is that your wife?” Beatriz was looking at the picture of Maria on Eduardo’s desk—one of the two framed ones he’d allowed himself to keep. It was taken four years ago, at a beach, and she was doing a handstand. Her hair was whipping around her face and she was smiling, her mouth like a peony. She was the only adult Eduardo had ever known who could do a handstand.

  “Yes,” he said, because he always said yes.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  He looked up at Beatriz quickly. “Did you have any difficulties with Lily?”

  “Difficulties?”

  “She was obedient? She was respectful? She followed the rules?”

  “Difficulties. Well. I suppose there were a few.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I caught her going through our papers.”

  “When was this?”

  “Maybe two weeks,” said Beatriz. “I mean, maybe two weeks before.”

  Eduardo nodded. “And you confronted her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did she react?”

  “Well, she was not sorry, I’ll tell you that. She didn’t even pretend to be sorry.”

  Eduardo made a note on his pad. “And what else?”