“We contacted a few people at your mother’s place of business,” said Detective Margate, “and we talked with a couple of former secretaries. Your mother is a woman with a temper.”
Detective Ronert’s eyes were on me, a track star waiting for the starting pistol.
“Never,” I said.
“Explain these pictures to us,” said Detective Margate.
A throaty catch in her voice told me how badly she wanted to believe me.
A knock on the door, and someone opened it, a uniformed officer. Detective Margate speared him with a glance, and he backed away, shutting the door carefully.
I felt sick.
“The bruises are from my sister’s hand,” I said.
“Your sister?” The detective puckered her lips doubtfully. “You let your sister claw you like this?”
“Cass and I have arguments.”
“This looks like more than an argument,” said Detective Margate, trying to sound matter-of-fact, unable to keep the hope from her voice.
“I said I would do anything to get out of being maid of honor.”
The two detectives waited.
“It was in the hall, on the way to my room. She wouldn’t let me walk away. She got a hold of me—” Digging her fingers into me, through the cotton of my blouse. Hissing into my ear. Telling me she’d tell Mother that Dad was having an affair with his producer.
I kept my voice steady. “She has a strong grip. I tend to bruise.”
“Does your sister get violent with you often?” asked the detective. A new note had entered her voice.
I continued, “The attacker had me for only a second, and I was running hard. I was wearing a sweatshirt with thick cloth, and he didn’t have half of Cass’s intensity.”
I was looking at the floor, but I could sense the two detectives locking glances.
“Has your sister ever sought help?” asked the detective.
“Cass is studying psychology,” I said. Cass had never had a moment of doubt, never an instant of stage fright.
“Your family doesn’t intervene?”
“Intervene in what?” I said.
“My brothers and I were always horsing around,” said Detective Ronert after a silence. “Maybe it’s not a big deal. Kids get hurt.”
Detective Margate fumbled through her folder and found what she wanted.
I had thought this would be over now, the bruises explained, everybody happy.
As she extended her hand I caught a glimpse of her wedding band, rose-gold, and an engagement ring, a small diamond. I wondered what she told her husband about her work, and what it would be like if she had children, how she would explain her job to them.
“This won’t be a surprise. You’ve had a look at this already,” she said. “On the news.”
I did not want to see, but it was too late.
Chapter 29
A man’s face gazed out of a mug shot, full color, a weary, harried expression, before an ascending line of ruled marks along the margin, indicating his height. He was five feet nine inches tall. It was a stare that almost appeared wise, a runner after a losing marathon. He had lost, but he had finished. He looked like the composite drawings in the news, but more gaunt, as though he strained to keep in shape. His features were powder-puffed with rose and blue markings.
“The officers involved used excessive zeal,” said Detective Margate.
“Why did they arrest him?”
“He has a good alibi for the night he attacked you,” said Detective Margate. “He can name witnesses, friends he was with in a Chinese restaurant in San Lorenzo.”
His left cheek was bruised, right where my fist would have struck it.
“Why is he in jail?” I asked.
“All the other attacks were in a distinct geographical area. Look here.” She shook out a map of the East Bay, and a blue X marked locations in East Oakland, near the zoo, in San Leandro near the hills.
“The attack on you was several miles north of his territory.”
“He was wearing a ski mask.”
“Recognizing his face doesn’t matter,” said Detective Margate.
“You can look at him all you want,” Detective Ronert chimed in, relaxed, now, hands in his pockets. “His facial features are public knowledge.”
“Why did they arrest him?” I insisted.
“We can’t discuss the case in detail,” said Detective Margate. “We can’t tell you why he is a suspect. But without your help, this man will be out of jail this time tomorrow.”
I held the mug shot out to her, and when she didn’t take it immediately it fell, spinning to the floor.
“I can’t do it,” I said.
“Oakland Police are making a tape of his voice according to the script we’ve created. You won’t have to see him, or be in his presence. You’ll sit in a room like this—” She gestured, a realtor showing off a room with a stunning decor.
“A little bigger,” offered Detective Ronert.
“The suspect’s attorney will be there,” she continued. “And one of your parents or their representative, an attorney or a counselor, should be there with you. We’ll be there, too, Dave and I. We’re on your side, Jennifer. And we’ll have Duncan Pierce along, too, the forensic psychologist. We’re your friends.”
Detective Ronert blinked, acknowledging all this.
“It won’t be difficult, Jennifer,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“You’ll listen to a tape of various voices. You will say which voice sounds most like him. You’ll be able to take as long as you need.”
“No.”
She didn’t move or make a sound right away.
“That’s fine,” she said finally, putting a pencil back in the holder on her desk, a Berkeley Police coffee mug stuffed with writing implements. “You’ve convinced us. The strain will be too great. We’ll drive you home. You’ve been very cooperative. Dave, go on down and see if the car’s ready.”
When he had gone, she told me, confidingly, “The red oil alarm keeps blinking.” She made that gesture with her fingers again, a motion like a bird’s beak opening, shutting, showing how the light flashed. “We keep topping it off with multigrade. I think it must be an electrical short. A burned out fuse under the dash. What do you think?”
I almost told her that I didn’t know that much about cars, but I recognized the tactic, Get her talking about anything and she’s hooked.
“I was sure you were protecting your mother,” she said. “And now I see that you’re protecting yourself.”
I already missed Detective Ronert.
“You’re going to cooperate with us, Jennifer. I’ll show you why.”
She didn’t have to tell me that these women were dead. Photo after photo, in lurid color, the faces of women looking sodden, people plunging out of depths for a gasp of air, unable to open their mouths.
I stayed in my fake leather chair, files open in my lap, spilling onto the floor. I tried not to focus too hard on the images, protecting myself. The pictures trembled in my hands.
“Our suspect didn’t do these women,” she said. She used do in a flat, vile way. “These are other cases, rape and murder, open files, technically. But we’ll never find who committed these crimes, Jennifer. These voices cannot speak.”
I stopped looking, closing a folder. The thought swept through me: I could tell Detective Margate everything, now. I wrestled to convince myself that the truth would be easier than this.
“Here in this cardboard box I have old files, more open cases, rape victims, no arrest ever made. We have a fallout shelter here at the police station, left over from the Cold War. We use it as storage for old, unsolved crimes, and the place is packed. This is why I’m a detective, Jennifer. I could make better money selling insurance, like my sister Julie. I could teach school, like my mother.”
I tried to imagine Detective Margate in a wedding dress, in white satin Kenneth Cole footwear.
“I wouldn’t talk like
this in front of Dave. Men don’t like it when you get emotional. It makes them nervous. Dave’s a good detective, though, so I thought I’d spare him the pain of watching you aiding and abetting a criminal. Hindering an investigation.”
I tried to imagine her with friends, deciding she’d have a piece of the whiskey chocolate cake.
“You can walk out of here and let us give you a ride home, but I’ll never forget you, Jennifer. I’m coming after you, week after week. I’ll send you clippings of the rapes and brutal attacks this criminal makes on other women, Jennifer. That’s why you’ll be a witness against this felon. I’m not giving you any choice.”
Chapter 30
After the fluorescent light of the police department, the late afternoon sun was heirloom gold, and our shadows fell ahead of us over the parking spaces carefully designated with yellow stripes.
The unmarked car had been washed, filmy towel swipes drying on the windshield. Detective Ronert drove, and I sat in the front seat, my knee against the empty shotgun bracket on the dash.
“It’s still broken,” said Detective Ronert.
Detective Margate, leaning over from the back seat, didn’t say anything. I couldn’t keep myself from looking.
Oil kept flashing red.
“Jennifer, tomorrow we’ll pick you up in one of our new Chevies,” said Detective Ronert. “Tinted glass in the back. Our prime-witness car. We’ll impress the hell out of the Oakland police.”
They dropped me off at Animal Heaven at my request. I wasn’t supposed to come in that afternoon, and neither was Marta. Mr. DaGama was glad to see me, telling me the African Gray had made a noise that morning that sounded just like me.
“What did he say?”
“The actual word was hard to understand,” said Mr. Da Gama, working a twenty-pound bag of wild bird seed into a paper sack. “But it was your voice.”
Byron was hanging by his beak from the side of his cage, eyeing me as I approached. Without disconnecting his beak, he made a chuckling, ripped-steel noise, loud enough to stop me in my tracks.
A happy parrot is generally noisy, cackling, yelling. I picked a peanut from an open bag of East Bay Pet Wholesale seed, selecting a fine, fat one, and all the birds began to sound off, each wanting food and attention.
Byron accepted the peanut and then had to negotiate his cage, all the way down to his perch, without dropping it from his hooked beak. He clambered, inch by inch, offering a muttering, pleased discourse with me and with the other birds. And maybe with the peanut, too, telling the goober how tasty it looked. At last he gripped the peanut in one foot and unhusked it with his beak, his pupils dilating wildly, vibrant with pleasure.
I fed them all, made sure dishes were overflowing with seed, cleaned out the cages.
I waved good-bye to Mr. Da Gama, who was on the phone and could only give me a military-style salute in farewell.
I went home.
I watched the Discovery Channel in my bedroom. The bones of a mammoth were discovered by dam builders. A jazz pianist looked back on his forty-year career. Hummingbirds migrated from Oregon to Mexico, using the same landmarks used by human pilots, Mt. Shasta, San Francisco Bay. I propped myself on pillows but made no attempt to sleep, riding out the night with the TV remote in my hand, until nearly three in the morning.
The street outside was still.
Sometimes the quietest sounds carry best. I could hear the subtle open-and-shut of cupboards, the faraway shuffling, all but inaudible.
He was in the kitchen, at the breakfast counter with a bowl in front of him and a large spoon.
He tucked his head when he saw me, with a hand-in-the-cookie jar grin, and said, “Bernice made her special ice cream. I’m sorry you weren’t feeling well.”
My reflection flowed across the chrome toaster, restaurant quality, enough slots for ten slices of toast at once.
“Your mom and I couldn’t put a dent in it,” Dad was saying. “I just couldn’t resist, lying there, knowing it was in the fridge.”
Mom had spend a half hour on the phone before supper with Detective Margate, Mom wandering from room to room with the portable telephone. She kept agreeing, saying, “Yes, I see,” sounding gradually more and more fatigued.
In the end all my mother had said to me was, “Jennifer, at least I’ll be there with you,” in one of those dramatically weary tones she uses to silence argument. Mother would have killed before she let Cass go through an ordeal with the police.
I helped myself to the big tub in the freezer, a cardboard container big enough to hold a human head, packed with ivory billows of vanilla ice cream. I topped it with chocolate syrup and sprinkled salted peanuts on it, as Dad looked on approvingly. The syrup was cold and poured out thick, oozing out of the Hershey’s can, slowly descending to the ice cream.
“That’s why a very wise scientist invented the microwave,” said Dad, hunched on his stool. “It wasn’t just so you could reheat a whole cup of coffee in ten seconds.”
I could hear Cass in my mind, telling me to go ahead and ask. She would know: I didn’t have the nerve.
Chapter 31
Pots hung from hooks, casting vague shadows over the sink, the yellow Dualit toaster, the jars of dried herbs. The oversize fridge fell silent—a sound I was aware of as soon as it stopped.
The opening question is very important. It sets the tone every other question builds on. “You’ve been busy in L.A.,” I said.
Dad lifted his shoulder, let it fall, a gesture I use all the time. “I do the same thing over and over. Standing under these hot TV lights. I say, ‘Polenta is corn meal cooked on the stove, stirred lovingly with a wooden spoon.’ And then I do it again. I say, ‘with a wooden spoon’, and next time I say, ‘stirred lovingly.’ The same words, a different emphasis.”
The ice cream made my teeth ache. I usually love it. I sat at the kitchen table, looking over at my father. We were two diners in a spacious late-night coffee shop.
“And pretty soon the words are nonsense syllables,” he continued. “I’m getting my picture taken today,” he said. “I’m going to look awful. I should be upstairs asleep, or lying quiet with ice cubes on my eyes.”
“Why do you need another picture of your face?”
“For full-page ads, me holding the new Ultra-Lo Ranch Dressing.”
“Reschedule the photo session,” I suggested.
“Thanks, Jenny. A lot. You’re telling me I look like doggy-doo.”
He looked like a tired man eating ice cream in his bathrobe. Although he said he had leased a convertible in L.A., he didn’t have much of a tan.
“Cass told me something,” I said. I was wearing a bathrobe I rarely put on, a rose satin wraparound with Belgian lace frills, big pockets. It was the sort of thing you’d wear if you had a silver cigarette case and called your makeup space a boudoir.
I had begun, and I couldn’t unsay it.
But when I didn’t continue immediately, Dad said, dryly, “Well, that’s unusual—Cass having something to talk about.” Unlike Mom, Dad sometimes caught the expression in Cass’s eyes when she was charming someone on the phone, accepting yet another compliment.
“It was about how things were going for you down in L.A.”
He shoveled ice cream into his mouth.
“She mentioned you and Maggie,” I said.
Dad made a little, noncommittal “Mmm?”
“Cass said you and Maggie are having an affair.”
The spoon stopped midway to his mouth. His hand felt for a napkin, found it, and he wiped his lips.
“Cass said this?”
“Yes,” I said.
He said, “She was joking.”
“She threatened to tell Mom.”
He ran a thumb over his eyebrows. He was quiet for a long time.
“I keep hoping we’ll see improvement,” he said at last. “As Cass matures. But I’m still continually surprised.”
Ice cream is terrible for the human voice, cools the vocal cords and
coats them with milk phlegm. I cleared my throat, took my time, and asked, “Are you saying that it’s not true?”
Dad had been staring at his empty spoon, like someone trying to make out his reflection. He peered at me. “You don’t believe it!”
My voice was barely above a whisper, so I stopped trying to talk.
“This is very disturbing,” he said. “Very troubling.” He acted the way people do when they get bad news, expressing their surprise, not absorbing it.
I shifted my fingers slightly on the counter.
“Cass saying it is one thing,” he said. “But, Jennifer, the thought of you believing it—”
The corner of the kitchen embraced a large brick fireplace with pothooks and a stack of pristine firewood. The fireplace had been obsolete when the house was built, but it radiated imaginary warmth. Dad got off his stool and came around the counter toward me, like a compact bruin in his dark blue bathrobe. Something about me stopped him, and he turned toward the fireplace, moving at half speed, his new leather slippers sticking very slightly to the floor with each step.
He spoke as though to the uncharred oakwood. “Cassandra said—what were her words, exactly?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What, exactly?” he asked impatiently
I couldn’t bring myself to say it again.
“It’s a threat, isn’t it? She’s going to tell Elizabeth this story.”
I said, “Cass won’t tell her.”
“Why not?” He came back to the breakfast counter and put his hands flat on the surface. “What’s going to keep Cassandra from saying anything that crawls into her head?”
“I gave in.”
“You ‘gave in’—and agreed to what?”
“I agreed that I wouldn’t change my mind about being maid of honor.”
“This is how you and your sister talk? How you plan the wedding?” He picked up his bowl and padded across the kitchen to the stainless steel vault of the kitchen sink. He ran water into the bowl longer than he had to.
Mom says you don’t have to answer every question, pick and choose.
Rundown Page 11
