Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Her last scripted line.

  The afternoon light had faded, and she sat in the shadow of a tree, Rose Red exposed. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her Italian accent. She sounded like what she once was, a Mexican-American girl from the South Side, a scrapper who bent her morals until they strangled her. Despair leaked out of every pore. I could now make out the edges of her blue contacts. They couldn’t hide the misery that lurked behind them. I’d seen those eyes before—on my mother’s face, at Tuck’s funeral.

  I willed myself to pick up the box. I could do this. Perhaps I had lived every moment of my life to get here, to this spot inside Rosalina’s vine- and pain-infested jungle. Maybe every research paper I’d ever written, every case I’d studied about childhood trauma, was preparation for this moment. Perhaps I was meant to find Adriana. Maybe she was still alive and held the answers.

  I thought these things even while recognizing Rosalina Marchetti for what she was: a brilliant manipulator, a pathological liar.

  I asked one more question, to test her.

  “When you hugged me up on the terrace, you were looking for a wire, right?”

  “Of course,” Rosalina said. “You can’t be too careful.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I let the water from the hotel’s luxury shower massager run like hot spikes down my spine. Rosalina and I parted on pretty good terms, considering—not enemies, not friends.

  She seemed satisfied that I would at least make an attempt with Anthony Marchetti. I made no promises about the finger but placed it carefully in my purse, unable to bear the thought of opening the box, not yet, and certainly not in front of her.

  Rosalina allowed me to walk out of the mansion grounds on the winding driveway much less dramatically than I arrived. I was two minutes late, but my cabbie had waited.

  Even with all the lies, details in Jack’s and Rosalina’s stories matched so closely they were impossible to ignore. I turned and stuck my face in a blast of hot water, my mind drifting to Sadie and our conversation yesterday at the hospital.

  I’d gone to check on Mama, but the truth is, I needed a Sadie fix more, my little sister’s assurance that it was all going to be OK before I took off for Chicago. We sat in a booth in the hospital cafeteria drinking cups of black coffee from the bottom of the pot and sharing a piece of dry lemon pound cake whose only saving grace was a drizzle of white glaze.

  I had laid it all out: my jail visit with Anthony Marchetti; the details of Jennifer Coogan’s unsolved murder; the little girl with my Social Security number buried in a Chicago cemetery; the emailed photo of Alyssa Bennett, slaughtered with her family in a Mafia frenzy more than thirty years ago; the almost comical warnings from a rodent-voiced husband killer on death row. My concerns that Jack Smith wasn’t really who he pretended to be.

  “Three little girls,” Sadie mused, smashing the last crumbs into her fork. “If you include Rosalina’s missing daughter.” I hadn’t thought of parsing it that way. Sadie always had a way of tilting the world a little to change my view.

  Her long legs were stretched out across her side of the booth. She wore a fitted white T-shirt, low-slung jeans held up by a tooled leather western belt, brown Reef flip-flops, and pink toenails with daisy decals, courtesy of Maddie. Silver hoops in her ears, not a whisper of makeup except a little black eyeliner, short wild hair she kept pulling her fingers through, big blue weary eyes, and still, the kid sweeping the floor two tables away couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

  She cast a spell. Maybe this was a curse for the McCloud women or at least for whoever ran into them.

  Later, Mama lay motionless between us, heavily medicated, her hospital bed at a forty-degree angle, the IV pumping in nutrients, the lines of the heart monitor spiking in a choreographed pattern. She was too young for this kind of ending. Some people were destined to live the most significant part of their lives all at once, in a brief, intense span of time. Maybe Mama was one of them. Maybe, I thought, she’d lived that part of her life before she ever saw my face.

  “I can’t believe she told us all those lies,” I said to Sadie, finally, to break the depressing silence. “And maybe Daddy, too.”

  I expected sympathy. I didn’t get it.

  “Why not?” my sister shot back. “You always thought Mama was perfect. That our childhood was perfect. You just wouldn’t look at the signs. Mama put on a good show, but she never, ever got over Tucker.”

  She realigned the sheet over Mama for the third time since we’d been back in the room.

  “After you left for college, I’d find her alone, staring at his high school baseball picture. She kept it in a box under the bed. She and Daddy officially moved into separate bedrooms my senior year, although I think they’d been sleeping apart for years. He loved her, but he couldn’t get inside her head. None of us could.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, at a loss as to how I missed all the gouges in my family’s psyche, the ones I was trained to spot and buff out for everyone else.

  While Sadie plumped up the pillow, I saw Mama and me at the piano. A hot afternoon. My little fingers, sweaty on the keys. I kept playing B flat instead of B sharp. I was doing this on purpose, angry that Mama wouldn’t let me go riding with Tuck.

  I heard the normal tumbling sound of Tuck plowing down the stairs. He jumped over the last three stairs to the landing, sunglasses propped on his head, big grin, ready to fly. Reckless, Mama often said. I always thought he was just a boy.

  He yanked on my ponytail. “B sharp, not B flat, Tommie girl.”

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically.

  “Don’t be long,” Mama said to Tuck. “I’m having one of those days.”

  Something silent and unhappy passed between them.

  Words were Mama’s rope, always thrown with perfect aim, pulling you in, wrapping you a little too tightly. You never knew when she’d pick up her rope. She missed wide with Tuck that time. He and his horse didn’t come home until midnight. The tension in the house was so charged and heavy for the next three days that I didn’t speak, terrified that a single word in the air would blow all of us up.

  Was this normal? Kids don’t know what is normal.

  But I didn’t express that to Sadie as she refilled Mama’s water, opened a new box of Kleenex, and set it on the tray. Pulled the call button closer even though Mama was too out of it to know.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have been there for you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m not really angry with you, Tommie. I’m not even angry with her. I’m just confused. And scared. I’m worried about Maddie’s safety. I want this to be over.”

  Then I heard the tone, the pleading one she used all her life when she needed backup, when I was the big sister who secretly finished her report on the Roman Empire or helped her slip out our bedroom window on a school night for a quick make-out session in the dark.

  The McCloud sisters were tight.

  “You know you are my sister no matter what you find,” she had said. “Figure it out, Tommie. Make it go away.”

  I pictured it like a Frito. Or maybe more like a Bugle.

  But still I did not open the box.

  It was 7:22 a.m. and I’d been awake in the hotel room for two hours, mesmerized by the stripe of the lamp’s blue neon light, thinking nightmarish thoughts about a decomposing baby finger while Rosalina’s bitter voice swam around in my head. Odd that I’d never seen another person besides Rosalina at her mansion. Not a maid. Not a security guard. Just that disembodied male voice over the speaker.

  I didn’t wait on the hotel operator’s wake-up call for permission to get out of bed. I took a quick shower and threw on some jeans, another of Sadie’s slightly too tight T-shirts, this one etched with a cheerful blue Buddha, a little mascara, and clear lip gloss. I jabbed two yellow No. 2 pencils into a makeshift bun on my head, the hairstyle I wore for studying since high school. Because, today, I planned to study.

  I stepped out of the hotel into the pedest
rian traffic on Michigan Avenue, which was vibrating with aggression to a ranch girl like me. A bike messenger cursed and swerved when I stepped into his path; a grinning homeless person punched me, hard, on the arm; a swinging briefcase rapped one of my knuckles, all before I reached a café a couple of blocks from the hotel. The businessman with the briefcase kept on walking and barking into his headset. In Texas, I would have wound up with an apology and maybe even a date.

  I appreciated a city with a pulse, but I needed to live where I could see the sky. At home, sky loomed everywhere, a blue marble cereal bowl a benign giant child turned over to keep us safe from his dog. Here, it was an afterthought, little slivers between the walls of the skyscrapers if you happened to look up.

  On the plus side, safety in numbers.

  Once I retrieved my coffee, I walked as far to the right of the sidewalk as I could, balancing the paper cup in one hand while watching the traveling red dot on my phone’s GPS. I was the dot, of course, on a twenty-minute stroll to the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library, a granite and red-brick behemoth squatting on the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway. I stood still for a moment and endured the battering of passersby just to appreciate it.

  Tall arched windows filtered in light from all sides, while creepy winged gargoyles leered from the top, waiting for someone with a wand to bring them to life. Inside, thousands of visitors a day chose from among six million books, further proof that books would survive catastrophic events alongside the roaches.

  I closed the door behind me, instantly insulated from the madness of people rushing, rushing, rushing. I drank in the silence like precious water.

  Here, the world slowed to school-zone speed, controlled by librarians intelligent and methodical enough to be either great presidents or serial killers.

  Visiting libraries in foreign cities was a hobby of mine. College libraries, city libraries, itty-bitty libraries. It didn’t matter. Today I had the bonus of a purpose, a suggestion from Lyle.

  “Turn Off Your Cell Phone and Pagers, Please,” a sign asked politely. No exclamation point needed. With the help of an ancient docent at the front desk, it didn’t take long to pinpoint my destination: up three flights of sweeping marble stairs.

  I moved past a reading area laid out with dozens of current newspapers from all over the world and entered a glass-fronted chamber crammed with rows and rows of scratched-up metal file cabinets.

  The room held only one other occupant. A tiny punked-out girl in head-to-toe black with a single skull earring, grad student written all over her, who looked up from her thick book on Sartre and asked in an unexpectedly sweet voice, “Can I help you?”

  She led me to the cabinet with the microfiche reels, helped me collect the right dates and publications, walked over to a nearby machine, and provided an efficient lesson in the ancient art of reading and copying microfilm. I wasn’t a novice, I assured her.

  I’d done a sweltering summer of research into old microfiche records at mental institutions as an intern for two cantankerous UT professors who squabbled constantly about whose name would go first on a joint journal article that is still unpublished ten years later.

  Punk Girl smiled, offering a glimpse of the innocent still in there, while the skull in her ear leered like the gargoyles. I wanted to ask whether she was buying Sartre’s take on existentialism, if she believed our lives were blank pieces of paper on which we wrote the story with no help at all from God. I wondered if she’d gotten to the concept of mauvaise foi, bad faith, the part where we deceive ourselves in order not to take blame.

  I figured she would think I was nosy and crazy, which I pretty much was at this point, so I kept my mouth shut. As she walked away I snapped the first roll in place, switched on the light, and whirred past ads and headlines until I found the date I wanted: January 3, 1980.

  I could have found this in the Chicago Tribune’s online archives, but Lyle said there was nothing like experiencing the stories in real time, as they appeared in print. I could appreciate this. Researching online was a sterile experience. I liked original packaging.

  The headline was direct and screaming, in 72-point type: FAMILY BUTCHERED.

  The accompanying photograph showed cops throwing up in snow-covered bushes in front of an unremarkable saltbox brick house marked off with crime scene tape, the best action shot a newspaper photographer could get on a late-night deadline.

  I pressed the button to copy the page, scanning the brief story:

  CHICAGO—A family of five and an unidentified female were found shot to death execution-style last night in a home in a quiet Polish neighborhood on the North Side.

  Police identified the victims as Frederick and Andrea Bennett. The names of the three children and the second woman were not released.

  Police broke into the house about 9:30 p.m. after neighbors complained of a barking dog.

  Stefan Pietruczyk, a next-door neighbor, said the family moved in only two weeks earlier and kept to themselves.

  “Me and the wife thought it was strange that the kids didn’t come out much,” said Pietruczyk, who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty-five years. “And the parents weren’t that chatty. But we were real happy someone had finally fixed up that house. Now we wish they’d taken their troubles somewhere else. Our property values are shot to hell.”

  FBI agents swarmed the house shortly after Chicago patrol cops called in the murders. An FBI spokeswoman on the scene said further details would be revealed at a press conference today.

  I scrolled ahead. The next day’s front page featured a slightly more sedate 60-point headline: FBI FAMILY SLAIN BY MOB. Below were the headshots of the victims, including school pictures of the children: Alyssa, six, and two brothers, Robert, ten, and Joe, four.

  They were babies. How could anyone look into those innocent faces and pull a trigger?

  I peered closely at the main photograph—shuttered windows, empty driveway, anonymous landscaping—the earmarks of a safe house. According to the FBI, the Bennett family had been moved there from their home in an upscale neighborhood in Naperville. The unidentified woman with them was an FBI agent assigned to their protection.

  The story unfolded on the front page for five weeks, eventually revealing that Fred Bennett was an undercover FBI agent investigating the mob. And, finally, swift justice: the plea deal of mob boss Anthony Marchetti, who told the judge in his allocution that he flew into “an uncontrollable rage that I deeply regret” when he discovered Bennett deep inside his organization.

  The prosecutor took the death penalty off the table since Marchetti spared the families and the state of Illinois the misery and cost of a trial. It left a horrific killer a shot at parole. There was no mention of evidence of any kind, of how the FBI fingered Marchetti almost instantly for the six deaths.

  So far, none of this contradicted Rosalina.

  I looked at my watch. Two hours gone. A middle-aged woman in a pink sweat suit and brighter pink Puma running shoes walked past, flashing a shy smile. I made the mistake of smiling back.

  “How are you?” she asked, with the emphasis on the “you.”

  “Fine, thanks.” I cast my eyes down and silently begged her not to start a conversation. A genealogy chart peeked out of the canvas library bag hanging over her shoulder. There’s no such thing as a short genealogy conversation. Existentialism takes less time to explain.

  She instantly picked up on my body cues, and I felt a little guilty. She wandered over to a reading chair in a far corner, where she found her place a third of the way into a weapon-sized paperback copy of Anna Karenina, which was farther than I’d ever gotten. She turned the page, the movement of her arm revealing a lump on the right side of her waist. Insulin pump? Heart monitor? Gun?

  Somewhere in the back of my mind lurked the fact that Illinois had the toughest restrictions on weapons in the nation. Carrying a concealed weapon was prohibited for civilians.

  Keeping a wary eye on the diabetic genealogist in the
pink tracksuit, I refocused on the microfiche and snapped in another reel, this one for July of 1981.

  WHO CHOPPED OFF LITTLE ADRIANA’S PINKIE?

  I swallowed a gasp, startled by the headline even though I’d purposely picked a reel from a Chicago tabloid that gorged itself to the popping point on kidnappings and murder. In the next hour and a half, I discovered at least thirty stories from a dogged reporter named Barbara Thurman who had no ethical problem flaunting unnamed sources and sticking in her own opinion.

  Thurman hinted that Rosalina was a drug addict and possibly involved in the disappearance of her daughter. Rosalina claimed that the girl had been torn from her arms in the front yard of her grandmother’s home on the South Side, where she was visiting for the day. But no one else heard Rosalina’s screams or saw two masked men tear off in a black Mercedes. Not the grandmother, not the gang members who skipped school to roam the block, not the old man across the street planting petunias in his postage-stamp yard.

  One story delved into gruesome detail about the finger: how it arrived (regular mail, in a plain brown padded envelope, with a small brown bloodstain smudged in the corner); what the ransom note inside said (Nine left. Chop, chop. You know what to do.); how Rosalina reacted (she swallowed a bottle of aspirin and tried to stab herself with a steak knife before being transported to the hospital).

  Thurman’s final piece, a startlingly blunt opinion column, ran inside on page 3 with a headshot of an adorable brown-eyed baby and the headline: WHAT ARE THE POLICE HIDING?

  On every front, the cops had shut down reporter Barbara Thurman. Only two short months of investigating and the case of the missing Adriana Marchetti was marked unsolved and stuck high on a shelf. For the next twenty minutes, I punched the appropriate buttons to copy each story about Adriana, racking up sixty bucks on my MasterCard and a frustrating headache.

  I rubbed my temples. The books crowding the shelves felt like cold strangers, pressing in on me. The library was no longer my refuge.

  Pink Lady had disappeared.