I glanced over at Hudson. He hadn’t moved. My fingers stumbled over the keyboard while I forwarded the slide show to Lyle so his practiced, less emotional eye could run over this carnage.
It was still too early to get up, but I couldn’t imagine closing my eyes, knowing my brain would play the images endlessly. Better to focus on another task. Lyle had provided me with the password and access code for an extensive open-records site that the newspaper paid dearly for every year. Birth and death certificates, phone numbers, addresses, court documents—all only seconds away.
It didn’t take long to find Barbara Thurman. She was now Barbara Monroe, in her fifties and no longer a reporter covering kidnappings for a Chicago tabloid. I wrote down her phone number and address on the hotel notepad and shut down my computer.
Adriana Marchetti’s kidnapping, the murders of Fred Bennett’s family, the newspaper clippings from my mother’s safe deposit box. How were they connected?
An hour later, when Hudson’s watch alarm beeped, I was showered, dressed, and ready for a little more business in Chicago before my flight out tonight.
Madddog12296 had done his job. He’d dragged me to a hellish, fertile playground in my head that I hadn’t known existed.
Barbara Monroe lived in one of the renovated stone cottages in a gentrified neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. A chaotic herb and flower garden meandered up the stone walkway, fighting off weeds, giving me a good vibe about her. In my occasional vegetable gardens, weeds rarely got the death penalty.
“Hi, guys, I’m Barbara,” she greeted Hudson and me, opening the door for us while holding the collar of a tall, lunging black animal that was hands-down the ugliest dog I’d ever seen. Black hair stuck out of bald patches. There were dime-sized red sores on his back that appeared to be healing. “Cricket, get back. Sorry, my teenage daughter has a thing for strays, and this one isn’t trained yet. Also, he’s not contagious, just ugly for life, according to the vet.”
I tried patting his bony, scaly head, bare of hair except for a tuft behind his ear, and he licked me appreciatively. Whatever happened to him, Cricket appeared to have sustained little psychological damage.
I’d called and introduced myself to Barbara only two hours ago, and she sounded busy but cheerful enough on the phone about helping. “I gave all that up a long time ago for a more lucrative PR career,” she informed me. “I’d met my first husband, and he didn’t like the idea of taking death threats in the middle of the night.”
Still playing tug-of-war with Cricket, she gestured to a cozy room on our right, bulging with books, antiques, and stacks of The Atlantic, the Utne Reader, and Scientific American. Again, a good sign. Someone who reads about intelligent life.
“Have a seat. Let me crate Cricket.” She and Cricket disappeared into the back of the house, and I zeroed in on the cardboard box open in the middle of the floor. How could I not? It called out to me in large black Sharpie letters: CHICAGO INQUIRER.
“Don’t even think about it,” Hudson said, pulling me with him onto a leather love seat. “Just wait for her.”
The box spilled over onto the floor with what I presumed were the oddball accessories of a newspaper reporter’s desktop—a dusty, tarnished trophy, a windup toy of a human peanut with Jimmy Carter’s face on it, a stained coffee cup that advertised the paper, miscellaneous clippings, a bulging Rolodex, and—most fascinating to me—stacks of old notebooks.
“Hard to believe I didn’t dump this stuff,” Barbara said. Unhindered by the dog, she stood an elegant five feet, eight inches in Manolo Blahnik heels and a well-cut black suit, vibrating with the kind of energy I’d seen in her reporting. I suspected that Barbara was a fierce competitor in the land of public relations.
She ran a hand through artfully chopped hair, too inky black to be anything but dyed, and picked up a lint roller from a library table, removing Cricket’s hairs from her jacket.
“I suppose I kept it all because I never got closure.”
“When did you quit?” I asked.
“A lifetime ago. Right after the Marchetti girl’s kidnapping. It was my last, and biggest, story. A career-maker, my editor told me. I didn’t have the stomach for it or I wouldn’t have let my husband talk me into quitting. Then, again, I was only twenty-five. What do you know at twenty-five?”
I nodded encouragingly. “I read the column you wrote telling everybody off.”
“Oh, yes. The naïve rantings of a young reporter. It was like spitting into the ocean. By that time, my boxes were packed. The publisher was ticked that my editor even let that column see the light of day.”
“You got actual death threats?” Hudson asked.
“Just two. The same guy. It was long before caller ID. He called to tell me to drop the story or he’d kill me in an unpleasant way. Real scary, because he called my apartment after midnight when I was alone in bed. Liked to wake me up.”
She kneeled and pulled out four more notebooks I hadn’t noticed, hidden out of sight on the floor behind the box.
“For you. I thumbed through these. There isn’t much I didn’t print.”
“It’s OK for me to take them?” Even years later, I was surprised Barbara could hand her notes off so easily. Lyle would rather cut off an ear.
“I never really believed Rosalina’s whole story. She was a drugged-out mess at the time, although she knew how to use her looks to pull the sympathy chain. I always doubted her, but the police thought she was telling the truth because of the witness to the kidnapping.”
I abruptly stopped flipping through the scratchings in her notebooks. “I didn’t know there were any witnesses.”
Barbara glanced at her watch. Platinum, I noticed. Not a reporter’s accessory. It made me rethink her a little. Her earrings were expensive hammered silver squares that matched a cuff on her wrist.
“It was a detail kept out of the press,” she told us. “I didn’t find out until several days after the kidnapping, when a cop slipped up talking to me. The witness was a stripper friend of Rosalina’s who claimed her pimp would kill her if he knew she spent an afternoon off-duty to be with Rosalina and her kid. She had one of those indulgent Italian princess names. Gabriella, maybe? I’m sure I wrote it in there. Her story matched Rosalina’s word for word, maybe a little too closely. The police cut her a break and left her out of it, and so did I.”
Barbara started stuffing everything back in the box, including the cheap trophy engraved with the inscription “Chicago’s Rookie Reporter of the Year,” which she angled so I would be sure to see it.
“Sorry to rush you, but I’ve got to go sell a campaign for an erectile dysfunction drug.” She winked. “That changes lives, too.”
This sophisticated, toned woman wasn’t at all the slightly plump, gray-haired Barbara with a vague memory of distant events that I’d imagined on the way over here. Apparently, I wasn’t what she imagined, either.
“I like you, Tommie,” she said. “You’re not what I expected. I’ve spent plenty of time on the couch. You’re not the usual brand of psychologist. You get what you need by really listening. Not casting silent judgment. It’s a better approach. Believe me, I know.”
She was gooping it on pretty thick. Maybe I hadn’t pressured her enough. And she seemed oddly relieved. How far to go was always the psychologist’s dilemma. It occurred to me that she hadn’t asked any questions at all.
Barbara opened up a black patent-leather shoulder bag that cost more than most people’s monthly mortgage and reached into a back pocket of a wallet, behind a lineup of shiny credit cards. She pulled out a tattered 3 × 5 photograph with a white creased line down the middle from being folded in half for a very long time, and handed it over.
It was a picture of a sweet-faced little girl perched behind a cupcake with a single lit candle. On the back, in faded blue ink, I could make out the name “Adriana Marchetti.” I’m pretty sure my face remained blank, something I’d become better at in the last week.
Barbara Monr
oe continued to contradict herself. A powerhouse PR woman and a matter-of-fact caregiver to down-and-out strays. A $1,600 purse, and a photograph memento of someone else’s probably dead little girl.
Barbara hesitated for a second and then reached inside her purse again, this time for a large manila envelope.
“I’ve decided to give you this, too. My husband—my third husband,” she corrected with a wry smile, “thinks I’m a little nuts to do this. But about two years ago, I did a press packet for a start-up company that specializes in age progression. You know, for missing kids and stuff. I asked him to age Adriana forward as one of the press kit samples. She was so young when this picture was taken that it’s a bit of a crapshoot. But if she’s alive today, she might look something like this.”
Before I could lift the flap on the envelope, Cricket howled from his gut—the slow, pitiful howl of a dog that knows he’ll soon be without human company—and Barbara hustled us out the front door. “Every time we leave, he’s still sure we’re never coming back. My daughter will be home from school to walk him in a minute. Or rather, Cricket will walk her.”
Barbara flicked her remote at the blue Audi sitting in the driveway, eyes now hidden behind dark, sexy sunglasses that gave her an instant pass into her forties.
She vanished behind the tinted glass, with words that I’d wonder about later.
“Don’t disappoint me,” she said.
CHAPTER 22
I kept the manila envelope sealed until Hudson and I were crammed onto the Chicago El in two plastic blue seats that were sticky with a substance I thought best not to identify. We sat directly across from a public service ad recommending the use of pink condoms for Breast Cancer Awareness. I guess that isn’t much odder than NFL players wearing fuchsia shoes on a field where they are trying to kill each other.
Hudson had chosen our mode of transportation for the morning. He’d been quiet, almost sullen, ever since I ran the slide show for him back at the hotel. He didn’t like being a sitting duck in a cab he wasn’t driving, but a crowded train that allowed us to dodge and duck and leap from car to car was apparently acceptable. Just one of his many control issues.
Then again, I felt lucky that he agreed to this side trip to see Barbara Monroe at all and that at this moment his thigh was pressed against mine like a hot waffle press. It was a bonus that either one of his fists could concuss someone with a glancing blow.
While Hudson casually scoped the occupants of our car, I did the same. In one corner, a man and woman in jeans and matching turquoise Cancer Fun Run T-shirts were quietly arguing. In the other, a businessman in an ugly tie read a weathered John Grisham paperback. Everybody else appeared equally harmless, but then, I’d lost my instinct for this sort of thing.
I turned my attention to the envelope.
Actually ripping it open turned out to be a letdown, not the dramatic eureka moment in the movies. I realized that a tiny part of me wondered whether the face inside would look like Sadie, a sure sign my senses had left me, since I held her the day she was born. Rosalina’s missing daughter would be older anyway. My age.
“Barbara Monroe was ripped off,” Hudson said, leaning over to look. “The nose is crooked. Sort of Michael Jackson-y.”
“She didn’t pay for this,” I said, but Hudson had already started a conversation with the middle-aged Hispanic man nursing a Starbucks next to him. They slipped into a highly animated stream of Spanish about last night’s Cubs game.
I stared at the computer-generated color composite in my hand. An unhappy woman in her late twenties with short black hair and funky red highlights stared back. She had Rosalina’s eyes and a small, pursed mouth that looked like it wanted to spit out, “Who the fuck are you?” The nose tilted up and left, as if the artist couldn’t quite decide what to do with it. There was no resemblance to the gleeful copper angel in Rosalina’s fountain.
The image radiated an unreal quality, like someone improperly embalmed.
Waxy, shiny skin. Parts that didn’t fit together. The hair, stiff, like it had been sprayed to death. How in the hell did the artist commit to red highlights?
I flipped over the picture and found a note that Barbara had scribbled to me, saying that she’d provided the artist with a picture of Rosalina and a blurry police mug shot of the guy she says raped her. What a crapshoot. She signed off with, “Hope this helps!” and a giant B scrawled underneath like two perky cartoon boobs.
Age progression had advanced significantly beyond the scope of the amateurish portrait in my hand. How did Barbara Monroe think this could possibly help me?
The sweaty, extra-large man on my other side stunk like a combination of Old Spice, onions, and garlic. His thigh crept onto my side of the blue plastic seat by about two inches. I smiled politely and pulled out the first of Barbara’s notebooks.
They were a newspaper lawyer’s worst nightmare. Barbara used a bastardized shorthand that was, at best, cryptic: sweeping, curlicued handwriting with bursts of short phrases or words and the occasional full quote, often marked with three or four exclamation points. Like her stories, the notebooks read a little fast and loose, mostly posing questions and notes to herself.
Lttle grl’s white shoe.
Rosalina drunk???
Blck sedan.
I knew psychologists who worked like this—scribbled diligently, using their notebooks more as a prop than anything else. But they also backed themselves up with a tape recorder. Then again, maybe I was being too hard on her. I’d met and envied a few people with photographic memories, including an autistic nine-year-old able to describe the peacock tattoo of the man who mugged his grandmother in such exquisite detail that the jury returned a verdict in ten minutes.
A name stood out amid the rubble of words: Rosalina’s witness.
Not Gabriella, but Gisella. Gisella Russo, which looped at a slant across a whole page, along with the single descriptive phrase pretty fat for a stripper.
And the name of the first cop on the scene—Milt Dobrzeniecky with a large SP? Check it!!! by his name. At least she was careful about some things. I tried to make out the near-illegible phrase beside his name, holding the page up to the window as a row of track houses zipped by, playing havoc with the shadow and light in the train.
I nudged Hudson, now dozing with his head slumped as if he’d had sex all night with me instead of sleeping for nine straight hours.
“What do you think that says?” I demanded, pointing to the words. He picked up the pad and gave it a cursory glance before tossing it back in my lap, confirming what I thought.
“It says ‘nose hairs,’ ” he said. “What’s for lunch?”
I stepped inside my hotel room, suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that Mama was taking her last breath, right now, a thousand miles away from me. I tapped out the number to the hospital with shaking fingers.
The nurse on duty was calm.
No change. Wade was sitting with her.
No change, I thought bitterly.
I threw the phone with such force that it bounced off the bed and onto the floor. Childish, I knew, but I was consumed with anger. Hot, bitter anger, stoked a little more every day by the knowledge that the woman staring blankly at the cracks in a hospital ceiling had waited too long to ever tell me the truth.
Were there moments when the words hung on her lips? When we swung high in the hammocks staring at the stars or at spectacular cloud shapes? When she helped me with a genealogy tree in sixth grade? When I took off for college? I’d never know.
I heard the faint clicking sound of a keycard in the lock and the door burst open, slamming into the wall. It happened so fast, I only had time to slip halfway behind the heavy curtain at the window.
Hudson.
Back from his trip to the vending machine, Coke in hand. I didn’t remember giving him a key.
“Where the hell is the guard?” he asked angrily.
“Do you ever, ever make a quiet entrance?” I emerged from the curtain, my hear
t still knocking around. “I have no idea why there isn’t a guard anymore.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He went to work on his phone.
“Agent Waring? Hudson Byrd.”
Even four feet away, I could hear the high chatter of a female voice rolling in an uninterruptible stream.
“Right,” Hudson said finally. “Yes. I do want to be there. About twenty minutes. Where’s the detail on Tommie’s room? Sorry to hear that. Uh-huh. I agree. She can stay in the room while I’m gone.”
This lit a little fuse in me.
“Thanks. Be there soon.” He tucked the phone back in a case hanging off his belt. I caught the glimpse of a gun tucked into the band of his jeans underneath his loose-fitting fishing shirt. A Hawaiian shirt or a fishing shirt on a Texas man was a big clue that he was concealing a piece. Fashion be damned.
“Louie’s lawyer showed up. They’re inviting me to sit in on the second round of questioning. Your guard was called off to a school shooting.” He held up his hand when he saw my expression. “Nobody hurt bad. As for Louie, the safest place for you is right here. He was caught in the act. All they need for now is the statement you gave them. I’ve got the feeling they want to use your kidnapping to get Louie to roll on something bigger. Like his family’s drug op.”
He tugged open the nightstand drawer and pulled out a Gideon Bible, blue with gold lettering. In perfect shape, like it had never been touched. Placed in hotel rooms since 1908. Gideon, I remembered, did whatever God wanted him to do. No matter what.
“Swear you’ll stay in the room. That you’ll throw the deadbolt when I leave.”
The tough-guy soldier stood in front of me holding a Bible.
Pleading.
“Swear on this Bible and the soul of the Virgin Mary.”
I’d forgotten he was a devout Catholic. He’d forgotten I couldn’t always be trusted even when there was a Bible involved.
I nodded imperceptibly.
He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back at five. That will be enough time to navigate the security lines at the airport.”
Playing Dead Page 19
