Last Call

by Baxter Clare

  “I hope so. He was a good husband.”

  They are quiet, fiddling with the cherries.

  At length Tracey says, “Did I ever tell you I can tie a cherry stem with my tongue?”

  “Couple times. I ever show you a lesbian with a hard-on?”

  Tracey bulges her cheek out with her tongue and Frank grins.

  “I was so jealous of you when we were first married. He had such a crush on you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Noah had always been respectful with his ardor and Frank had gracefully ignored it. His passion eventually died for lack of fuel and what took its place was their friendship. Sitting here next to his wife, it occurs to Frank that Noah did have an affair. With her. Not a conventional one, surely, but an affair that endured all these years nonetheless. Tracey is watching her, and Frank knows she’s seen the naked thought when she asks, “Is there something I should know about that?”

  “No. Never anything like that. You know that.”

  Frank envies Tracey and Leslie their tears. She feels them churning inside her and wants to blurt how much Noah loved her and how much she loved him. How she took for granted that he’d always be there. Always interfering, always telling Frank what to do. Saying what she couldn’t. And still can’t.

  Frank clamps her teeth together, but a quaver still escapes when she reminds Tracey, “It’s late. We’ve gotta work tomorrow.” She drains her glass and stands.

  Tracey stands with her, taking Frank into a hug. “You love him as much as I do.”

  The tears make a final stand against their stony prison walls, but Frank is prepared, quelling the surge before it can rally. “Maybe.” She shrugs. “Different, but maybe.”

  She kisses Tracey good-bye. It will be a long time before she comes back.

  Chapter 15

  The dumpsite hasn’t changed. A useless, handwritten sign warns, NO GARBAGE. Crude paths transect the lot. Frank looks at a crime scene photo from the same angle it was taken. There’s no path in the picture.

  Frank steps into the cored ruin, checking it against a couple of pictures. It’s gone now, but there was a mattress about ten feet from where the bodies were found. Frank thinks the perp dumped the kids on the ground, but that the woman took the time to arrange them properly. She’d have felt remorse, but he would have been trying to hustle her out. She wasn’t familiar enough with the site to have him at least put the kids on the mattress. A guy like that wouldn’t be secure enough to leave his wife alone for very long. They probably did everything together, so Frank assumes he’s equally unfamiliar with what’s behind the improvised walls. They probably know the dumpsite in passing but never stepped foot in it until they left the kids there. This reinforces Frank’s suspicion that her perps live in the neighborhood and lead relatively respectable lives. They aren’t junkies or loonies crawling around in abandoned buildings.

  Frank wanders the lot in a grid. She picks her way around broken bottles and chunks of concrete. Dried weeds brush against her legs. Their seeds hitchhike on her socks and trousers. She wonders if there are ticks. Gail would know. She’d probably laugh at Frank’s squeamishness, and for an instant Frank regrets the distance she’s put between them.

  Having walked the entire lot, she surveys it from different angles. The perp would have been vulnerable from the north where the lot faces the street, and from the house on the west overlooking the site. High fences on the east and south block the view. Frank knows that the house directly across the street was vacant when the Pryce kids were dumped. Not a bad gamble to dump two bodies here. Especially in a part of the city where no one minds anyone else’s business, and if they do, they don’t tell.

  But why not farther away? Frank wonders. The perps were obviously mobile enough to get the kids here, so why not keep going and hide them really well? Organized offenders usually make some attempt to hide the bodies. The Pryce attempt was half-assed, leading again to the idea of two perps. Frank thinks the woman might have pleaded to leave the children close to home, in a place where they’d be found quickly. The thought of the children rotting and being eaten by animals might have been so disturbing that for once she argued with her man. He might have been distracted enough to cave. He would have been anxious to get rid of the bodies. If the abduction was as spontaneous as it seemed, he wouldn’t have planned out a disposal site. The lot probably put a comfortable enough distance from where they lived, or from wherever they abducted the kids, while concealing the bodies in the rubble bought them time to clean up.

  She is mindful as she walks that one of Ladeenia’s shoes was found next to a sprung sofa. It appeared that the shoe had snagged off her foot in passing. Either the killer hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. Probably the latter as he was no doubt in a hurry and what evidence would there be in a shoe? But it tells Frank her perp is tall enough to carry Ladeenia so that her foot dangled at the height of the couch. It’s also in the back of her mind that Ladeenia’s panties were never found. Frank has thought about this.

  Power-assertive rapists, as she has tentatively classified her perp, don’t usually take trophies, but it’s possible this is one of the ways her perp doesn’t completely fit the profile. Frank’s hope is that whoever killed Ladeenia kept her underwear. It’s a long shot, she knows, and she mumbles, “If wishes were horses …”

  Frank is so deep in thought that she reminds herself to ask Noah if Mrs. Pryce might know what was in Trevor’s pockets. Then memory guts her like a switchblade. Her immediate reaction to the pain is fury. It mutates into helplessness. Frank swallows it down, all the hot little knives. She clenches her teeth and stares at a tag on the south fence. She will absolutely not lose it and certainly not here.

  Noah was rarely in the office after the case went down. When she’d catch up to him, he’d explain this was where he’d been, probing inch by inch through garbage, dog shit and weeds, climbing up on rooftops to survey the scene from that vantage, sitting for endless hours amid the cold debris. This is where he’d been. And for Frank, this is where he still is. She’s awed by how much she misses him.

  Frank blinks hard, forging her composure on the anvil of deliberation. The transformation is made manifest—her jaw unclenches, shoulders drop and fingers relax. The effort is exhausting, but Frank disregards this too. Stoic the Magnificent is back and at the top of her game. She continues through her grids as if nothing has happened.

  For the next few weeks Frank runs on alcohol, caffeine and a smoldering rage. Pacing the cage of her office, she is Blake’s “tiger, tiger burning bright.” Her detectives give her a wide berth. She can feel their edginess around her. Though they would never admit it, they are probably afraid of her, afraid of being in her line of fire if and when she should blow. And they’re likely even more nervous that whatever Frank has might be contagious, so they keep their distance.

  Frank helps. She does what she has to do in the office as quickly as possible then heads for Raymond Street. Unless she has a meeting or gets called to a homicide, she is gone all day. She has become a regular fixture in the neighborhood. The crazy-ass white bitch walking up and down the street late afternoons is such a familiar sight that the dopers smoking on stoops don’t even bother hiding their chronic. The really perking ones might call out to her, but an ugly void in Frank’s eye keeps them where they are.

  She mad-dogs each house. One of them must have borne witness to Ladeenia and Trevor’s abduction. She curses that she can’t get wood to speak. Prowling the sidewalk day after day, she waits for the houses to yield their secrets. She can’t envision what the sign, the clue, will look like, yet she walks and waits for the burning bush that will crack the case. When it doesn’t appear, she’s not disappointed. Burning bushes work on their own schedule.

  Frank has drawn multi-colored lines on a map. The festive lines connect the Pryces’ house to Cassie Bertram’s duplex in myriad configurations. The most direct route is marked with a fat red line. Frank believes this is the route Ladeenia would have chosen. H
er reasoning is simple; it was late in the day and Ladeenia would have wanted to spend her time with Cassie, not wandering along indirect routes. Plus, the cold weather and threatening rain would have added to Ladeenia’s haste. So Frank walks the red line. She checks alleys and yards. She knocks on every door, questioning the occupants along the route.

  Most of the people she talks to don’t want to talk to her. They have already talked to the police. To Noah, to the uniforms that canvassed with him, to Noah again. Frank reminds them that South Central residents accuse cops of not caring, not trying hard enough. Here it is six years later, she stresses, and we’re still looking for whoever did this to these kids. We haven’t forgotten. She flaps Ladeenia and Trevor’s smiling school photos. They talk. But it’s been a long time. They add nothing that’s not anecdotal from the media. Some don’t remember and others didn’t live here then. But Frank doesn’t get discouraged. She expects as much. The case is old. People forget. But she has to satisfy herself that she has talked to every possible witness, every potential suspect.

  A second, longer line on Frank’s map stretches from the red line to the dumpsite. She will start questioning people along the most direct route, working backward from the site to the home where the Pryces lived at the time of the abduction. Then she will canvass secondary routes, and tertiary. More if necessary. She is determined to cover a wide radius between the two lines.

  She studies the dozens of photos Noah took of the crime scene and neighborhood. She carries pictures of onlookers from the crowd with her. Noah’s already identified most of them. Frank makes everyone she questions study the faces in the photos. One man identifies his brother. He’s moved to Las Vegas. The man Frank talks to can’t remember what he was doing the night the Pryces were murdered, let alone his brother.

  Frank tracks the brother down. Jorge Medina. He buses tables at the Riviera Casino. He has a history of misdemeanors and fails to return Frank’s phone calls. On a starry Saturday morning she drives to Las Vegas to catch Medina during his noon shift. Medina’s an unimpressive character who remembers nothing. He racks his brain but can’t tell Frank what he was doing that night six years ago. He doesn’t even remember why he was visiting his brother. When he lived in Orange County it wasn’t unusual for their families to get together and have dinner, play cards. Frank watches his apprehension grow in proportion to the failure of his memory.

  Finally she flips him her business card, tells him to call if he thinks of anything. She leaves with the conviction he’s clueless. Civilians are naturally nervous around cops, but only guilty people try to hide their worry. In addition, barring a traumatic event in their lives, the only people who can tell you what they were doing on a given night six years past are people who have created an alibi and memorized it. Innocent people don’t need alibis.

  Frank leaves Las Vegas no closer to a suspect than when she arrived. Still she’s pleased with the miles of desert highway between her and L.A. Plenty of hours to think about the Pryce kids. Hot air blows through the car and she cools off with a six-pack of Coronas triple-bagged around a bag of ice. Frank slaps her hand against the door, keeping time with ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Well insulated, she cruises into the burning sunset.

  Chapter 16

  Despite a traffic jam in Barstow, Gail is still awake when Frank gets in from Vegas. She puts down the book she is reading and smiles.

  “Any luck?”

  “Nope. Guy didn’t know a thing.”

  “Sorry.”

  Heading for the bathroom, Frank shrugs. “No big. I’m gonna get the dust off of me.”

  She spends as much time as she can in the shower, hoping Gail will be asleep by the time she’s done. But she isn’t and Frank gets into bed beside her. Gail closes her book and turns the light off. She snuggles into Frank, and Frank accommodates the doc’s head on her shoulder. Gail caresses Frank in a way that used to drive her nutty. Now Gail’s touch is almost repulsive. She’s relieved when Gail quits.

  “Talk to me,” Gail whispers to Frank.

  Except for a mad desire to be back on the highway, Frank feels nothing.

  “I can’t,” she confesses.

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t. There aren’t any words inside me.”

  “Just empty?” Gail sympathizes.

  Frank thinks again about the frozen quarry. “Yeah. All empty.”

  This seems to satisfy Gail but then she asks, “Is it Noah? Is it still missing him so much?”

  The answer that leaps to mind is worse, and Frank is furious. Furious at Gail for bringing up what she’s worked so hard to ignore, furious at this invasion of privacy, furious that Gail cares, furious that she can’t go to sleep, furious that she has to constantly defend herself. Inside, she is a raging ball of self-contained fiery hell. Outside she is a sheet of glass—cold, rigid and just as fragile.

  “I can’t talk about this,” she manages.

  “Why? What would happen if you did?”

  “You’re asking the impossible, Gail. Do you want to see me crack into a million pieces? Is that what you want? To see me all busted up like Humpty Dumpty? You’d be stuck with a thousand broken pieces and you’d have to sweep me up with a broom and put all my pieces into a paper bag where they’d scream for all eternity, and you’d have to hear that and I’d have to hear that and we’d go crazy with all the endless screaming. Is that what you want?”

  Gail soothes, “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yeah. I do. Don’t ask me to go there.”

  Frank feels Gail nod. Still she asks, “Would the same thing happen if you talked to Clay?”

  “Don’t you remember? Once Humpty Dumpty breaks, it’s all over. No one could put him back together again. Not all the King’s horses, not all the King’s men. He shattered beyond all hope. If he’d just stayed on the wall, he’d have been all right. So I’m hanging on to the wall.”

  “What if the wall’s crumbling?”

  “The wall’s not crumbling,” Frank insists. “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. He jumped or slipped. Maybe he was pushed, but the wall didn’t break.”

  “Frank, Humpty Dumpty’s a fairy tale, and you’re not an egg. If you break, you’ll heal. If you don’t break, you won’t heal. Don’t you know that by now? Isn’t that what happened with Maggie. You didn’t break and look what happened. You ended up in Clay’s office. He broke you properly, like a bone that was badly set, and helped you mend. You’ve got to break in order to get everything out or you’ll explode trying to keep all it in. Do you want to go through all that again?”

  Frank argues, “Fairy tales are metaphors for real life. If Humpty had just minded his own business and paid attention to staying on that wall he’d have been okay. But he slipped. He started snooping around in places where he had no business. He was an egg trying to be something he wasn’t. I’m a cop, trying to pretend I’m not. I’m trying to pretend I can live like other people. That I can deal with life by talking and feeling, and I can’t. For me to do what I’ve got to do I can’t feel it and I can’t talk about it. I’ve got to bag up my shit and dump it like the trash it is. Then forget about it. I’m hanging on to the wall, Gail. I’m bagging up the trash. I’m not going to fall off into that touchy-feely never-never land. I tried that. It doesn’t work for me.”

  “Oh, I see. Alcoholism and workaholism are so much healthier. Is that it?”

  “How many times do we have to have this conversation?” Frank sighs into the dark.

  “You tell me.”

  “You’re the one that keeps bringing it up.”

  Gail separates her body from Frank’s. She lies motionless on her side of the bed. Frank silently begs Gail to fall asleep. She believes her wish has been granted until Gail demands, “Are you satisfied with our relationship?”

  Lacing her fingers under her head, Frank breathes, “Fuck.”

  She should have known better. Gail’s a pit bull in an argument.

  “Are you?”

&nbs
p; “Not right now, no.”

  “Generally?”

  “Generally it’s fine.”

  “Tell me what you like about it.”

  “Gail, why are you doing this?”

  “Because I need to know. What do you like about our relationship? From what I can see, it doesn’t look like much. Half the time you beg off seeing me, and when you do deign to grace me with your presence you’re remote, aloof and unapproachable.”

  Frank notes the triple redundancy of Gail’s description, thereby making her guilty of only one fault.

  “And in case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t made love since Noah died. I don’t think you even like breathing the same air as me! But you’re perfectly happy.”

  Guilty as charged, Frank thinks. Gail is absolutely right. Frank doesn’t want to be with her. It’s more effort than she can manage right now. It’s not fair to drag Gail down to her level, but neither is it sporting of Gail to demand Frank meet her bar. Searching the air above the bed, Frank knows she must choose. Gail or the wall. Falling or staying. She makes her decision, but her words are halting.

  “You deserve better, Gail. Someone who can go through things with you. I can’t. I just can’t. I’m not built that way. I’m sorry.” She rolls her back to Gail. “Good night.”

  To ensure she won’t fall, Frank has crucified herself to the wall.

  Chapter 17

  Frank’s commute always gives her time to reflect, and the next morning she will go so far as to say she’s a heavy drinker and sometimes she drinks too much. Who doesn’t? But there is drinking, and then there’s problem drinking. If drinking doesn’t interfere with her daily functions, then there’s no problem. If it does interfere, then it’s a problem. Frank can’t see how her drinking is a problem. She does the same things that teetotalers do—she gets to work on time, does a good job, pays her bills and keeps her house up. What more does Gail want?