Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “She’s made some pretty dumb decisions even for a kid. She’s done things we wouldn’t have done at her age. She’s done things Anna wouldn’t have done.”

  “I suppose.”

  Maureen sighed. “It’s just—you really do want them to turn out to be smarter than you.”

  “Of course,” said Andrew mournfully. “I mean, what’s the point otherwise? That’s the whole thing. Just saying, okay. We’ve tried, we’ve done our best with ourselves and our lives, we’ve done all right. But the best hope is that something else might do better.”

  “You cede your competence to its next incarnation,” said Maureen. “That’s why it’s so terrible and astonishing.”

  “And boring,” said Andrew. “With Lily, at least.”

  “It was boring! She was such a boring baby, wasn’t she?” Maureen laughed. “Why was that? Is that an awful thing to say?”

  “Babies are boring when you’re not terrified, I guess,” said Andrew. It was true. Janie had probably been boring, too, but they’d been too scared to notice. “Being mortally terrified will make anything interesting. Bet you’re not bored now, are you?”

  “Nope! Riveted!” Maureen laughed again. “Oh, we don’t have the best luck, do we?”

  “Not the absolute best.” Andrew was saying, “One could imagine better”—but then he stopped talking because he and Maureen were kissing. He had not noticed that they were going to kiss. Perhaps there had been a brief fillip of intention—perhaps his hand had been on her face momentarily—before it happened. But it would be impossible to say for sure whose fault it was; they both maintained plausible deniability, he felt, throughout. The rest was muscle memory; a routine so routine that it was elevated nearly to ritual. All the thousands of times they had done this. It was strange the things you still remembered, whether you wanted to or not. They were like aging dancers performing the first ballet of their youth, just to see if they still knew how.

  Afterward, they slept. For the first time since arriving in Buenos Aires, Andrew did not dream.

  On Thursday, Ignacio Toledo was apprehended in Ciudad Oculta.

  He was not the kind of person Eduardo had been expecting. It was difficult, in fact, to tell what kind of person he was at all. Toledo appeared in Eduardo’s office wearing a heavy brown coat that he declined to remove, even though the air was stifling. Unlike most paco fiends Eduardo had known, he was not jangling with the twitchiness of a nervous system with broken shocks, nor was he particularly derelict; it was hard to imagine him standing around a prison yard, cooking kerosene and sulfuric acid on a spoon. In one light, in fact, Ignacio Toledo actually seemed to possess an odd sort of charisma: He had lazy half-open eyes and the kind of carved, rugged features that seemed to speak of great masculine stoicism. When you first glanced at him, you saw a person who might have been a lover to Katy, or to Lily, or to both; a person who might even—maybe—have inspired lethal passions in one of them.

  But then you blinked, and when you looked at Ignacio Toledo again, you saw something else. You noticed that he had bags under his eyes the shape and color of fire bellows, that his teeth looked like they were older than he was; you noticed that his gaze was somehow jumpy and leering simultaneously. Or was it? Eduardo was not sure. Uncharacteristically, when it came to Ignacio Toledo, Eduardo was not quite sure about anything. Even Toledo’s appearance without a state-appointed lawyer was difficult to unpack. With Lily, that decision had been born of a naïveté that was arrogant to the point of suicide, and maybe something similar was at work here. Or maybe it was more calculated with Toledo—perhaps this decision arose from the idea that accepting a lawyer was a tacit admission of guilt. But this was only a different kind of naïveté, ultimately, and there were moments when Eduardo wondered if Ignacio Toledo was purposefully inviting Eduardo to believe in either kind. Eduardo did not know and was not moving toward knowing; every time he found himself approaching a sense of Ignacio Toledo, something about him shifted—so subtly, so apparently guilelessly, that Eduardo could never be totally sure that there’d been any change at all. It was like catching a fractional glimpse of a fish through the reeds, turning back only in time to be sure of the motion—which may have been, after all, only your own shadow on the water.

  “Look,” said Eduardo. He squinted, as if this could somehow correct for the strange psychic parallax that seemed to be at work here. Out the window behind Toledo, the sun was a garish pumpkiny orange. Eduardo was already frustrated and had had to pee for an hour. He should have seated Toledo facing the window, but now it was too late to change places.

  “You’ve got nothing to lose now,” said Eduardo. “We know you were there. Your DNA is absolutely everywhere.”

  When Eduardo had said this to Lily, it had been a bluff—but this time it was true, and it was maddening that Toledo was acting as though they were playing some game of strategy at which Eduardo might yet be outsmarted. What did he hope to gain from this? Could he be dumb enough to believe that Lily was the one they were completely sure of, and that admitting to having had any dealings with her would be a fatal mistake? Eduardo was not sure he believed in a stupidity so vast. After all, Ignacio Toledo must know that his DNA was everywhere; he must know that his own involvement was so well established that he should be willing to implicate absolutely anyone—including Lily Hayes—for exactly as long as Eduardo would let him try. But instead, Toledo had remained mostly silent, while Eduardo thought with increasing longing of the urinal.

  “I wasn’t,” said Toledo.

  Eduardo held up his hand. He was trying to stop Toledo whenever he began obviously to lie. “Absolutely everywhere,” said Eduardo severely. “We know you were there. This is not a question.”

  Now Toledo was wringing his hands in a way that seemed nearly animalistic one moment and just generically distressed the next. Perhaps he was thinking of faking an insanity defense; if so, it was a very, very subtle performance. Nevertheless, any such attempt would be problematic, since it would naturally cast suspicion on anything Ignacio Toledo might be persuaded to say about Lily Hayes, which Eduardo still hoped would be plenty.

  “What is a question,” said Eduardo, “is exactly what Lily Hayes’s involvement was. Her DNA was also at the scene of the crime, and we’re trying to figure out why. Do you understand?”

  Eduardo was beginning to consider the possibility that Ignacio Toledo did not really believe in DNA; it was, after all, very hard to imagine someone so divorced from the modern world that they’d literally leave their shit in a toilet at a crime scene. Eduardo felt slightly deflated at this prospect. It was so cheap to catch a man like this—like winning at a game of football because the other team suddenly picked up the ball and ran.

  “This is Lily Hayes,” said Eduardo, pushing her picture across the table. “I’m sure you recognize her.” Eduardo tapped on Lily’s face but did not look at it. He did not like looking at the photo; he did not want to see again the gestures of mortality underneath Lily’s relative youth and health—the gray below her eyes, like thumbprints of news script; the teeth already yellowing, like a sepia photo fading into age. The Lily in the picture thinks she’s escaped the confines of childhood and eluded the claims of adulthood, but she is wrong. Consequence, like mortality, is after her already; it is just over her left shoulder—even though she doesn’t know it, even though she doesn’t feel it, even though it doesn’t yet cast a shadow.

  Eduardo leaned forward. He thought he caught a whiff of something vaguely briny, subaquatic, on Toledo, but then it disappeared. “I understand you spent ninety-seven days in jail last year for vandalism.”

  Toledo shrugged. “You seem like you’d know better than I would.”

  “You must have enjoyed your time there,” said Eduardo. He leaned back and his chair skittered sideways on a broken caster. A faint look of disgust either did or did not flicker across Ignacio Toledo’s face. He yawned, revealing teeth that were strangely small and sharp, like little broken buttons.


  “Excuse me, hello?” said Eduardo, rapping on the table. He bit the inside of his lip, willing himself to attention. “Listen. The only thing you can do now is help us understand how Lily Hayes was involved. This isn’t only the best thing you can do for your case at this point. It’s also basically the only thing you can do for your case. This is it. Do you understand? This is the last choice you’ll get to make in all of this. This, really, is the only one.”

  At this, something decisive seemed to flash in Toledo’s face—the whites of his eyes grew momentarily larger, perhaps, or then again maybe they didn’t—and Eduardo felt a queasiness that he recognized as the onset of unwanted certainty.

  “Do you not believe me?” said Eduardo. “Go ahead and get yourself a lawyer. He’s going to tell you exactly the same thing. I assure you.”

  There was another freighted silence. Eduardo tried to breathe shallowly so as not to jostle the mounting pressure in his bladder. And then—finally—Ignacio Toledo began to speak.

  “Yeah, I knew her.” Toledo sighed with unexpected theatricality. “We talked sometimes and I sold her some weed once. The night it happened she came by really upset just as my shift was ending. She’d been fired a few days before and I didn’t want Javier to see her and get even angrier, and she seemed to really need to talk to someone, so I offered to buy her a beer. So we went out and, well, it turned into a pretty crazy night.”

  “Okay,” said Eduardo. “That’s helpful. Thank you. Did anyone besides you see Lily come by Fuego that night?”

  “I don’t think so.” Now Toledo seemed to be working something around the corner of his mouth, though Eduardo couldn’t quite catch sight of it properly—every time he looked at Toledo straight on, he stopped. “I mean, I saw her in the back alley, and I tried to sort of hustle her away. Because like I said, I didn’t want Javier to find out she was there.”

  “I see. And then what happened?”

  “Well, we went out—”

  “Where?”

  Toledo looked down and squinted into his lap. When people were lying, they usually rolled their eyes upward—but then again this was widely known by anyone who had regular occasion to lie or be lied to. “I don’t remember,” he said. “A place on Juramento. I can check.”

  “That would certainly be helpful. Did anyone see you there?”

  Toledo shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, it was really crowded—like completely packed—so I’m sure people saw us, but I don’t know if anyone would really remember us.”

  “I see. And you didn’t happen to make any of your purchases with a credit card that night?”

  Toledo shook his head.

  “Of course not. Go on.”

  “Well, anyway, we got really drunk, and then. Well. I know this part isn’t going to make me look so good, but I guess I should probably tell you the whole story.”

  “That would indeed be wise.”

  “Well, then we smoked some weed and took some paco. And anyway, all this time, Lily was telling me all these crazy stories about Katy, about the kinds of insane sex stuff Katy was into. I mean, I’d seen the girl around a few times myself and that was definitely the vibe I got from her. And somehow we got it into our heads that we should go back to the house and try to get something going with her. The two of us. It was Lily’s idea, really, but I’d seen Katy around a few times and thought she was pretty hot, so I was game. We got there and she was up for it, and things got started. But at a certain point Katy just started freaking out—”

  “Slow down. Freaking out how?”

  “Threatening to call the people whose house it was, threatening to call the cops. Lily started screaming back at Katy, and then I slapped her, just sort of to calm her down, get her to snap out of it. Then Lily hit her and Katy sort of tried to hit her back, and I was thinking this was maybe still part of the sex stuff, like maybe they did this all the time. I mean, I guess they’d had a pretty crazy fight at Fuego just a couple of nights earlier. I didn’t see all of it, but that’s what I heard. So anyway then Katy came swinging at me and I got in there, too, and, anyway, it was really fast, and like I said—”

  “And when did the knife come in?” Eduardo said this dispassionately. One could not let emotion corrode these things. He had to think of what it would be like to lose Maria. He had to believe that somebody—somebody rational and humane—would go about the careful business of doing all of this when he was unable to; he had to believe that somebody would stand back from the mosaic and try to make sense of the whole.

  “I honestly don’t even know,” said Toledo. “I was really drunk and frankly pretty high. Maybe Lily grabbed it, or maybe I did. Or maybe even Katy did. I mean, I’m sure your tests will show what happened, but I honestly don’t know. It was a mess. And in what seemed like a minute Katy was on the ground, and it seemed like she was hurt pretty bad. I asked Lily if maybe we needed to take her to the hospital but Lily said no, it was her problem, she would take care of it and would keep an eye on her and would call for help if she needed it. So anyway, naturally I left then. I definitely didn’t think Katy was dead at the time. It never would have occurred to me that she could be. I thought she was like, passed out. Every night at Fuego some girl or five passes out. I didn’t know that Katy had died until I saw it on TV the next day. And I had no idea what the hell had happened, or what had happened after I left, so I figured it was best to just lie low and see what happened next.” He shook his head. “It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible. I really can’t believe it at all.”

  “Thank you,” said Eduardo. “I do appreciate your being so forthcoming.”

  Toledo shook his head. “I just wish I’d known what Lily was really like, you know?” he said. “Then maybe I could have stopped it.”

  That day, Eduardo left work early. Outside, the evening was balmy, the light still dripping off the buildings like icicles. He had decided he would walk home.

  Eduardo was, overall, very satisfied with Toledo’s confession. In a broad sense, of course, no murder confession could ever be truly satisfying, because you could not hope for a real answer to the fundamental question of why one person murdered another. That question was on the order of cosmic questions about meaning and love and mortality, and it was not the job of a newspaper or a court to unravel it. In most cases—and this case, it seemed, was no different—there was no answer that could ever make a normal person understand.

  Across the street from Eduardo, a small protest was beginning. The students were yelling Putos Peronistas! this year, but they were yelling something every year. Eduardo stopped for a moment and marveled. All that vanity and self-congratulation, and all for not being dead or old yet. As though this, in and of itself, was some kind of accomplishment. Eduardo kept walking.

  But even without a satisfying answer to that most elemental question—the question of why—Toledo’s story made sense. The story did not need to force a jurist or a prosecutor or an average person to empathize his way into comprehension, after all. It did not need to make them see how an event like this could happen; it needed only to convince them that it had. And on that score, the confession worked. Significantly, it drew a narrative line between the triplicate data points of Lily’s DNA: on the knife, on Katy’s mouth, and on the bra. The defense could tell a heroic story about CPR to explain the mouth, but that story would not explain the bra, and Ignacio Toledo’s story explained both. It further explained the hours between when Katy Kellers died, according to the pathologist, and when Lily Hayes was seen streaking across the yard with blood on her face: If she and Toledo had not realized that Katy was mortally wounded, then Lily probably was surprised to find her dead. And all of this fit with the fact that clearly neither Lily nor Ignacio Toledo had expected the night to turn out the way it had; even before it was tested, the visible presence of DNA at the crime scene had strongly suggested that Katy’s murder had not been premeditated—had perhaps not even been entirely intentional.

  Toledo’s story made sense of all of t
his, too. And more important still, from the panelists’ perspective, it was unlikely that Toledo could know that it did. Realizing that Toledo had an incentive to lie about Lily’s involvement was one thing, after all—believing that he’d had the foresight to craft such a comprehensive, multivariable lie was quite another. And most crucially, perhaps, Toledo’s story was really only a continuation of the stories the judge panelists would have already heard from Lily herself: her suspicions about Sebastien and Katy leading to the fight with Katy at Fuego leading to Lily’s firing leading, finally, to this. The alcohol, the proximity to drugs, made more explicable the gulf between Lily’s past behavior and her behavior on this night. And although it would have been better if Ignacio Toledo and Lily had been seen together, they had both independently supplied reasons why they might have tried hard not to be: Toledo wanted to keep Lily out of sight of Javier Aguirre; and Lily had, by her own belated admission, purchased illegal drugs from Toledo—which must have seemed like a pretty serious problem, before Lily learned just how serious problems could be.

  It was true, of course, that Eduardo did not need Lily any longer to successfully prosecute the case. He had Ignacio Toledo—both his story and his DNA—and there were prosecutors, Eduardo knew, who would now begin to see Lily Hayes as a murky distraction, a person whose guilt was quickly becoming inconvenient. There were prosecutors who would want to edit her out of the narrative in order to tell the jurist panelists a cleaner, less subtle story—a story in which all the victims and villains looked the way they usually did, and all the motives were fairy-tale clear—and, depending on how much they thought it would strengthen the state’s overall case, there were prosecutors who might even offer Ignacio Toledo a modest deal in exchange for excising Lily from his confession. A deal of that sort could be breathtakingly, vanishingly modest—since Ignacio Toledo had absolutely nothing to lose—and there were prosecutors who would see all of this as an overarching win: one small moral concession for a broader moral victory, an indisputably pragmatic trade-off. There were prosecutors who would shrug and send Lily off into her life, keeping her guilt a secret between them. They would console themselves with the thought that she was very unlikely to do anything violent ever again. And they would tell themselves that—either way—the prosecution of Lily Hayes, as that of all people everywhere, was ultimately in the hands of God.