In Plain View

by J. Wachowski

  “Give me the camera,” he said to Ainsley, ignoring me in the extreme.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I pressed. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Sheriff Curzon.”

  Boy, I hadn’t cheesed-off a local public servant this fast in years. Good to know I hadn’t lost my touch.

  Ainsley appeared mesmerized. He lowered the camera off his shoulder and shot me a quick, panicked look.

  “It’s all right,” I soothed with a snicker. “You don’t have to give him anything.”

  While I was busy being amused at the sheriff’s bravado, Curzon reached over and grabbed the television camera, scanned the side quickly and pressed eject. He plucked the card right out of its slot. Ainsley stood there, face frozen.

  “I am the man in charge here,” Curzon announced. “And I said, no cameras.” He looked at me and the 35mm hanging from my neck.

  I wrapped a hand around my Nikon lens and dared him to try.

  He jabbed the little black rectangle of digital recording at me like a pointed finger. “Give me that card or I will arrest you. You can tell your story to the judge-tomorrow morning.”

  It felt like being clocked upside the head. Six months ago, I’d have gone to jail for my card with no hesitation.

  My fingers opened the camera and handed him the memory card.

  Of course, the fact that I had a roll of exposed 35mm tucked in my pocket made it a little easier. “We heard there might be a story worth covering here, Sheriff.”

  “I don’t think so, Ms. O’Hara. A man’s dead. Sad, but nothing important enough to rate the television news.”

  I couldn’t help it. This time, I did laugh.

  “Something funny about that?”

  I was thinking, then why bother? But I said, “Just between you and me, Sheriff, around here, it’s news when somebody’s dog dies.”

  “Not from around here, are you?” he deadpanned. Was that a sense of humor? It didn’t last. “There’s nothing to see here, Ms. O’Hara. My office will provide a written statement to the press as soon as possible.”

  “Ah.” I nodded, all understanding. “And when do you think that might be?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Look, I’m just trying to do my job, Sheriff. Performing a public service, you know?”

  His gaze dropped abruptly, taking in my leather pants. He hesitated for half a second before he added, “Funny. That’s what they used to say about prostitution.”

  I flashed the man a smile and winked. “And I’ll bet people like you still do, Sheriff.”

  Ainsley’s eyes popped and he did a panic check-look left, look right, look down.

  Now I’ll admit, I was overdressed for fieldwork. Compared to the girl in the bushes in the long dress and hat, I was looking more Saturday night on Rush Street than Monday morning on Michigan Avenue. But no way did Sheriff Curzon, in his fine suit, hold to an Amish dress code standard. He was trying to annoy me.

  Oh, there was definitely something going on around here.

  “What’s in the bushes?” Curzon asked, stone-faced and heavy on the green-eyed death glare.

  “What?” I asked him back.

  “You had your head in the bushes. You drop something?”

  “No.” I felt the silent shadow-presence of the girl behind me. A little louder I answered, “No. Thought I heard a rabbit or something.” I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged. “You know us city girls, we’ll do anything for a glimpse of wildlife.”

  He wasn’t wholly convinced, but one of the other men down near the tree called out. “Time to go,” Curzon announced.

  “See you.” I waved.

  I caught the flavor of a grin quickly suppressed, before he grabbed Ainsley’s silver camera case with one hand and the boy’s elbow with the other.

  “Walk,” Curzon ordered Ainsley.

  It irritated me he never bothered to look back and see if I followed.

  Curzon did not lead us into the area near the action; he edged the crowd and handed us off to a couple of junior dogs whose job was to shoo us back to our truck. As we crossed the road, I noticed a skinny guy in worn corduroy pants ahead of us. He stumbled toward an old Civic, head bent over a spiral notepad, pen flashing. A comrade in arms.

  “Hey!” I jogged after him.

  Ainsley followed slightly behind, camera case clunking with his long-legged strides.

  “Excuse me?” I called. “You with the Trib?”

  Mr. Skinny Guy looked back our way, his shoulders hunched. Beat reporters were kind of like B-movie undead; they always looked uncomfortable in the bright light of day.

  “What?”

  I jerked my thumb toward the truck and held out a hand. “I’m Maddy O’Hara, special assignment to WWST. We heard there was something going on here, but the cops won’t let us near the place. Did you get anything?”

  “Melton Shotter. I’m with the local daily-the Clarion.” He seemed a little disconcerted by my directness. “Did you say Maddy O’Hara?”

  “In the flesh.”

  “I’ve heard of you.” He shook his head in a wonders-never-cease kind of way.

  Although Average Joes wouldn’t know me from Adam, there were plenty of papers that ran my photos on occasion. Ainsley seemed to get a little thrill off my sort-of celebrity status.

  “There wasn’t much to get.” Melton shrugged. “Suicide. What kind of story would WWST be doing?”

  “Local human interest.” I glanced across the road at the broken stalks of a stripped corn field. “But you probably get a lot of suicides out here.”

  “There’s definitely more to it-” He sounded like a kid with a secret. All I had to do was be patient. Reporters live to tell secrets. “But I couldn’t get any kind of ID on the guy. They’ll never let me run the story without more detail.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The body was covered by the time I got close. Everybody had gathered round in a huddle.” He leaned toward me and his voice dropped. “I did see porno mags on the ground. Spread out all over the place, like the guy’d been reading them before he jumped.”

  “No way.”

  “I kid you not.”

  “What?” Ainsley ambled into the conversation in confusion.

  “Maybe it wasn’t suicide.” I felt that prickly tingle of discovery, the journalist’s drug. “Ever heard of autoerotic asphyxiation?”

  The reporter snapped his fingers and flapped his notebook open. “That’s what I missed! I heard the sheriff mumble something before they chased me off.”

  “Really?” I grinned back at the scene of the action. “Now why would Sheriff Curzon tell us there was no story here? I may be from out of town, but I’d say when an Amish-”

  “I don’t think he could be Amish,” Ainsley corrected me. “Maybe Mennonite-”

  “Whatever. When a man of serious religious conviction offs himself publicly, in more ways than one, that’s news.”

  Ainsley’s face scrunched again-grossed out, sure, but also trying not to laugh.

  Of course, when a sheriff steals your pictures, that’s a pretty good indicator as well.

  “Why do you think he was Amish?” Melton asked.

  “The clothes.” I pictured the girl in the bush wearing that dark bonnet, even before I thought of the man from the tree.

  “She got some pictures with a long lens before we got out of the van,” Ainsley clarified. “But that guy couldn’t have been Amish. He looked too old to shave, and I heard one of the cops say the Honda over there must be his. Amish don’t own cars.”

  “No cars at all?” I asked.

  “Too old to shave?” Melton said, at the same time.

  “Grown men wear beards,” Ainsley told him. “It’s a sign of maturity.”

  We experienced one of those awkward pauses in which I got caught staring at Ainsley’s baby-smooth cheek.

  “About those pictures?” Melton jumped in. “Could I get a look at those? The paper’d pay, of course. Th
ey’d run the story if I had a picture. Nothing too gruesome, though.”

  I thought about it for a minute, glancing back toward Sheriff Curzon. I didn’t have a lot of time here. Autoerotic asphyxiation was the kind of pseudo-serious sex topic they would love at network, a definite ratings grabber. The sleaze factor was high, but if I scored on ratings I’d definitely stay employed. Compromises like that guaranteed I’d be dining on antacids and acetaminophen for the foreseeable future. Yum, yum.

  There was certainly more to this than a simple suicide. I could feel it, the way I’d felt the girl behind me in the bushes.

  What was she doing there?

  I needed to flush this story out into the open where it was fair game. It’s not like my story would be competing with nightly news for a scoop. By releasing one of my photos to Melton, I could make the story public and re-direct Curzon’s fire toward the print media. Without heating up attention for the story, the sheriff would continue to stonewall me and chances were good, I’d end up stuck doing something on the network’s latest local promotional tie-in.

  Time to take a gamble.

  “I might be able to help you out with a photo, Melton. Let me take a look at what I’ve got. What’s your deadline?”

  “Eight o’clock.” Melton passed me a card.

  All of a sudden, I thought to look at my watch. It was past two already. “Damn. How long will it take to get back to the station?” I asked Ainsley.

  “As long as it took us to get here, I guess.”

  Double that damn. I’d never get back to the station for my bike and home again by three o’clock. “We need to go.”

  “Back to the station?”

  “No. I need you to take me straight…to my appointment.”

  3:11:17 p.m.

  Maddy O’Hara was going to be a problem.

  “This is township ambulance number five, currently en-route with a twenty-eight-year-old male, apparent suicide.”

  “This is County ER. Can you repeat?”

  He twisted the cell phone away from his mouth and shouted to the man driving the ambulance. “Siren? Can’t hear a fucking thing back here.”

  The sheriff had sent a car to escort them to the hospital. With both vehicles blaring full lights and sirens, even the dead couldn’t hear himself think.

  What was she doing there?

  He flipped the blanket back and tugged the zipper down. Some genius had decided to start making body bags white instead of black lately, because everybody knew what a black bag meant. Like it made a difference-black or white. What nobody could change was the sound of that big, thick zipper sealing everything up inside. Forever.

  He peeled open the sides of the bag and forced himself to think in the impersonal terms of work. “Male patient…mottled skin…obvious lividity.” Painting the picture for the dispatcher in the ER gave him time to reach down inside, open the rough, buttonless shirt and attach the cardiac monitor electrodes.

  “Lead one-flat line.”

  Had she gotten a call too?

  “Lead two-flat line.”

  “Roger. Stand by,” the dispatcher said.

  The only personal effects the sheriff’s team had located on the scene were those fucking magazines. It was hard not to hit something just thinking about it.

  There had to be a cell phone. He held his phone cocked against his shoulder, pulled off the electrodes with one hand and snaked the other hand down into the bag, along the body. It was cold already. There were damp patches where fluids had started to settle. He felt the change of texture and temperature through the thin casing of latex over his hands.

  Nothing.

  The phone wasn’t the only thing missing that could get him into trouble.

  “Everything all right back there?” his driver called out.

  “Fine.”

  He had to find the sample bag. Everyone was watching him now. Thinking the worst. No matter how hard he tried to explain, to fix things, it never seemed to be enough. Nothing else could go wrong now or more people would get hurt.

  She didn’t know what she was getting into. He was not going to let her fuck everything up now.

  The face lying before him wore a contorted grimace of pain and bruising.

  He wasn’t supposed to touch the body but he couldn’t stop himself. He pounded down with both fists, hard, center of the chest, right over that guilty heart.

  What did you do? What did you do, you dumbass farmboy?

  “Hey! Whoa, what’s going on back there? We’re one minute away, man. Captain’s going to be at the other end. Don’t freak on me now.”

  “Okay. I’m okay.”

  There was no peace in death on that face. Only pain. And hatred.

  Gently, he laid his hands on the face. He massaged the mouth, the jaw, the brow. He tipped the head and smoothed the expression.

  At last, the face appeared peaceful.

  He would do whatever he had to do to fix it, to smooth it over.

  Everything was going to be fine. Just fine.

  He zipped the bag shut slowly, so there was almost no sound at all.

  3:52:34 p.m.

  It took forty-two minutes for Ainsley to drive me to the house that once belonged to my sister, Angelina O’Hara.

  Jenny was waiting, sitting on the doorstep hunched by the bulk of her backpack, fiddling intently with her shoe. She’s the kind of kid who looks like she’s made of hollow straws and toothpicks, all held together by wire bread ties. Everything about her was either stiff or sharp.

  I swear, we couldn’t have been more than twelve, thirteen minutes late, at most.

  “This is where you live?” Ainsley asked.

  “Yeah.” A squat, yellow-brick ranch house was not my idea of heaven either.

  “Who’s that?” Ainsley asked.

  I had a sudden flash of the Boy Wonder reporting back to Uncle Rich all the details of my life story. Definitely not. Not before I signed the paperwork anyway.

  I popped the van door open but didn’t get out. “You’re mighty curious, aren’t you? Let’s add research to your job description. Go back to the station and make some calls. See if you can find out why Sheriff Curzon hates us. I’d guess he’s worked with the press before. See what you can find out. Then call the police station just before five. If they still won’t ID the body, get a name on who owns the property where it was found. We ought to try to set up an interview first thing tomorrow. Early light would be nice. Call me at home later so we can set a schedule, but plan on picking me up around seven-A. You got my cell number?”

  “Yeah. I got it.” He sounded distracted. Or maybe it was pissed. Sensitive boy. Wasn’t like I ordered him to pick up my dry cleaning.

  “Oh, one more thing. Push my bike into the dock, would you? Night air isn’t good for Peg.” I slammed the door behind me. “See ya.” I followed the van as it backed down the driveway, walking all the way out to the road so I could empty the mailbox.

  Jenny never picked up the mail; Jenny never went near the road.

  Three months ago her single mother-my only sister-was the hit part of a hit-and-run. She died.

  Fucking boondocks.

  I got the call between flights on my way to a natural disaster in Mexico-earthquake? Killer bees? Hell, I don’t even remember. I got off one plane and onto another, and just that fast, the life I had was over. My new life consisted of a thirty-year-old ranch house, a ten-year-old Subaru station wagon and an eight-year-old niece. Jenny.

  The school counselor told me it’d be a big mistake to move her right now. Said Jenny needed stability. Same house, same school, same friends. So, here I am in the no-man’s land of the Chicago ’burbs. Harbor of White Flight. Republican stronghold. Protestant heaven. Journalist hell.

  News flash: Jenny wasn’t all that happy with me either.

  I crouched down next to her on the concrete step. “Been sitting here long?”

  She shrugged and continued staring at her shoes.

  “Sorry I kept you wait
ing.”

  No answer. She leaned over and poked the tip of her shoelace into one of the lace holes.

  “I got the job. That’s why I was late. We don’t have to move or anything. For now.”

  Thank goodness I had enough cash stashed away, I could afford to sit on my ass with her for the summer. Neither of us was in any shape to detail a life plan more complicated than dinner and the TV guide. But I’d told her from the beginning that couldn’t last. Besides the money, I needed to work. It kept me in circulation.

  It kept me from going insane.

  Jenny finally tossed her head at me, oh? and her purple plastic barrette unsnapped. A curtain of fine, brown hair, straight as her mother’s, drooped in front of her face.

  “Guess we should get you a key or something,” I offered. “So this doesn’t happen again.”

  “Kids aren’t supposed to have keys,” she mumbled to her shoe laces. “Kids are supposed to have somebody.”

  “Right.”

  Our after-school routine was loosely based on her mother’s plan of operation. We ate a snack, watched cartoons together, then she tackled homework while I ran through my weight program. Today, I scrapped routine. I threw the kid a bag of chips and went straight down to my darkroom to work, eager to see how my shots would develop.

  I had turned a portion of the basement into a work area as soon as I’d arrived. One small window had to be blocked off, but there was running water and plenty of space to hang prints to dry. I tied lines to plumbing pipes, bought myself some heavy-duty shelves and a shop table at the local hardware store. Boom, I was in business.

  Jenny hung around the first time I printed a roll. But she didn’t like the smell of the chemicals, which meant I usually had my privacy in the darkroom. Another bonus. Sometimes the hardest thing about coming to live with Jenny was simply having her around all the time.

  People are funny. If somebody said go into a damp, smelly basement and sit around for a couple of hours, it’d sound unpleasant to most, but I always felt refreshed after time in the darkroom. There’s a certain level of concentration that must be maintained, steps that happen in a certain order, and in the end if you do it right, you get something beautiful.