Back on Murder rm-1

by J. Mark Bertrand

  “Right.”

  “But it wasn’t Tommy. It was this. . girl. This half-dressed, sobbing, heartbreaking girl. She was clutching her purse to her chest, and the rest of her clothes. .”

  “Did she look — had she been abused?”

  “I don’t know what she’d been. I asked, and she said she couldn’t remember. She just woke up on the couch, all alone. He left her.”

  “Is this his girlfriend, date at the party, something like that?”

  “She wasn’t in the mood for talking,” she says. “I called him, obviously, and according to him, she’s just some girl who came to the party and crashed afterwards. So I ask him what he’s gonna do about it, and he says why would he do a thing? She can call someone for a ride. He acted like it was no big deal.”

  If we were talking about a normal person, I’d have a hard time believing this. But Tommy isn’t normal by a long shot. During our early renovation work, we’d put in the garage apartment so we could redo the bathrooms without disrupting our lives. Then a couple of years ago, when Charlotte left her old firm, we decided to rent it out. Since Tommy was a grad student at Rice with his dad in the oil business, he seemed like a safe bet. That’s not how it turned out, though.

  “Tommy’s in a tough spot,” I say.

  “You’re defending him?”

  “Not at all. I just think. . Look, the boy’s trying to find himself. Maybe he isn’t doing a very good job, but deep down he’s a decent kid.”

  “You didn’t have to give that girl a ride back to her dorm, Roland. She didn’t have any friends to come get her. Or she was too ashamed. So it was me, I took her home. She wouldn’t even let me drop her at the building. I had to leave her in the parking lot outside.” She grows silent, remembering the scene. “Anyway, I won’t accept that kind of thing happening under our roof. I’m tired of it.”

  “I’ll have a talk with him,” I say. There’s not going to be a romantic evening ahead. I’ve resigned myself to that.

  “Talk? You’re gonna talk to him? I don’t want you to talk to him.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I want him out of here, that’s what I want. He packs his bags and goes. That’s final. Tell him that.”

  “I’m not gonna tell him that,” I say. “The boy pays his rent — ”

  “You mean his daddy does.”

  “Sure. Whoever. I’ll have a talk with him and tell him to tone it down. No parties, no loud music, nobody coming and going.”

  “Roland, that girl could have been raped. I mean, she was really disoriented, like she’d been drugged or something. We can’t do nothing.”

  The drug reference gets me thinking, but not about Rohypnol. I remember the sleeping pill prescription on Charlotte’s nightstand. I wish she’d get rid of them, but it’s a sensitive topic. Last night I was out past three trying to catch up with known associates of Octavio Morales. By the time I got home, the driveway was empty apart from Tommy’s Audi coupe, and Charlotte was fast asleep. Could he really have thrown a party in the backyard without her knowing until the next morning? Even a couple of friends swilling beer in the moonlight?

  “Those pills you’ve been taking — ”

  “I don’t want to talk about that again.” She jumps down from the counter, starts walking in her bouncy, equine way. Hair streaming in tendrils. Leaving me behind in disgust.

  “Maybe we need to,” I say, going after her. “Because if there really was a party” — she turns, shocked at my doubt — “and you slept through it, then I’m wondering if the pills are such a good idea.”

  “Why shouldn’t I sleep?” She jabs her finger at my chest. “What would I have to be awake for in the first place? You weren’t here. You never are. We’re barely even a part of each other’s lives anymore. And I ask you to do one little thing, just one thing, and you blow up on me like I’m some kind of drug addict.”

  “That’s not what I said, baby.”

  “You think there’s something wrong with me?” she says. “That I’m not right in the head?”

  I start to reply, but we can’t go there. We really can’t. Not with our history. Not in September.

  She’s breathing heavily, nostrils flared, waiting for me to punch back, but when I don’t she decides to keep going. “Don’t you think you’re missing the point? That girl this morning, she could have been a victim of sexual assault. Here. On our property. And all you care about is lecturing me about my pills? Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why I need pills to sleep at night? I bet you haven’t, Roland, because there are some places you just don’t want to go — you’d have to admit some things to yourself that wouldn’t be too flattering.”

  She’s right.

  “What was her name, this girl?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember. . I don’t think she said.”

  “Did you take her to the hospital, Charlotte? Did you report the incident? Get a rape kit done? Anything?”

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “Why am I being like this? Baby, listen to yourself. You think there are things I don’t want to admit to myself? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

  We’re not yelling at each other. Not quite. But it’s a hissing little knife fight of a conversation, no dodging or parrying, just attack, attack, attack. The kind of fight that makes her sick of the sight of me. The kind that leaves me baffled, wondering how we ended up like this. She’s talking, saying something nasty, and I start watching the way her hands move, the way her eyes widen and narrow, the fine lines that bracket her mouth.

  In a movie, I would take her in my arms, press my lips to hers, and after struggling a second she’d give in, flinging her limbs around me, running her fingers through my hair. And maybe I’d carry her upstairs and throw her onto the bed, and she’d pull at my tie and my shirt buttons like the whole argument was nothing but foreplay.

  But that’s not how it happens in the March household. She goes upstairs all right, but nobody carries her. I want to hit rewind, do the evening over, say all the right things. I want things to be easy between us again, open and natural, the way I remember us being. But I don’t know how to get there, so I end up on the living room couch, basking in the light of the flat-screen television she’s tastefully concealed in an antiqued armoire. Flipping channels, defiant, settling on the station most likely to irritate if she hears the sound through the ceiling.

  Cable news. Charlotte watches Fox. I flip over to CNN.

  Tommy needs dealing with, I know that. This is just the latest in a string of stunts. He seems to gravitate toward offenses I’ll take lightly but Charlotte won’t, though I doubt there’s any calculation behind it. Just instinct.

  But this is September so it’s not about him anyway. It was that girl, whatever her name was. One of Charlotte’s triggers. About the right age, too. Her protective instincts must have kicked in, and without any outlet she’d just stewed all day in her rage.

  On the television screen, after a look at what the Gulf Coast is doing to gear up for hurricane season, there’s a piece about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. Already there’s an underlying anxiety, a need to play up the never forget angle, but unlike the Holocaust, which gets similar treatment even though its absurd to think the deniers will ever get the upper hand, here the shrill solemnity seems almost necessary. As if we just might forget, or at least might stop talking about the tragedy for fear of being accused of using or politicizing it. Still, I don’t want to watch. My finger trails to the channel selector.

  But then a new segment begins, and a familiar face looks back at me.

  She’s cut her white hair short, and the camera flashes accentuate the pruning around her lips, but otherwise Lieutenant Wanda Mosser is unchanged since the days I worked Missing Persons under her tutelage. It was a brief stint, not my kind of thing, but I always respected the lady. She was straight out of the Ann Richards school of toughness, rising through the ranks at a time when, to hold her own, a woman had to be able to co
nvince everyone she was the best man in the room.

  “We’re taking the case very seriously,” she’s saying to a press conference audience, obviously prerecorded. “We are following a number of leads at this time, and we encourage members of the public with any information that might help to please get in touch.”

  Boilerplate stuff, but Wanda delivers the lines with conviction. Curious, I watch a couple of former prosecutors-turned-commentators long enough to figure out why my old boss is on the tube. A teenage girl named Hannah Mayhew disappeared in northwest Houston. She left classes midday yesterday at Klein High and no one has seen her since. Early this morning her abandoned car was discovered in the Willow-brook Mall parking lot, and now a major search is under way.

  But why is this national news? The girl’s only been gone a day and a half. Last week’s big headline, the vanishing financial advisor Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who’d gone out on his own after the Enron debacle, had consumed the local outlets without getting even a hint of national traction. The man absconded to Cancun and points southward, supposedly with a suitcase full of his clients’ money. Macneil, one of those guys who sits on everybody’s board, has a finger in everybody’s pie, put a dent in some prominent bank accounts, but outside the Loop, nobody cared.

  Now a missing Houston teen is big news? Kids run away all the time in this town. Finding the car might put a sinister spin on things, but as far as I can tell from the commentary, no one saw her being abducted or anything.

  Then they flash a headshot of Hannah Mayhew on the screen. Everything becomes clear.

  She’s a beauty, haloed in golden hair with a dimpled smile that’s gotten plenty of use. Her eyes are that crystalline ice-blue that catches light like a prism. The picture looks professional, the background tastefully blurred, like it came straight out of a modeling portfolio. Which is no surprise. She has the kind of face that gets photographed a lot.

  You can’t call yourself a jaded cop if you’re not cynical about the different treatment an attractive white suburban blonde gets when she runs into trouble. Her story makes the front page, beams out into millions of living rooms, and strangers everywhere look upon her as their own. They worry, they agonize — and above all they love, projecting all their frustrated hopes onto this inscrutably attractive teen.

  By losing track of their daughter, her parents have donated her to the public at large, and now she’s everybody’s missing kid.

  I shake my head at it all. In my house off West Bellfort, sharing her deathbed with Octavio Morales, there’d been another girl. No one’s interested in her. Not even the lab. When I called to request a rush on the blood work, hoping to get an id on my absent victim, I got the usual answer. We’ll get to it when we get to it. No cutting to the front of the line.

  But Hannah Mayhew won’t have to wait. They’ll bump her right to the front. Because girls like her aren’t supposed to disappear.

  I can’t watch anymore. I turn the television off and go upstairs to change, not even bothering to keep the noise down. By now, her pills downed with a glass of water, Charlotte’s long past hearing.

  There are closer bars and probably cooler ones, but the place I end up is the Paragon, where the waitresses wear layered tanks with plaid miniskirts and the crowd would rather drink than dance. Even on a Saturday night, even as Labor Day weekend kicks off, I can find a table in the back corner, far enough away from the speakers that the ice doesn’t shake in my glass.

  I cast a glance over the room, confirming Tommy’s absence. Pearl Bar is his haunt these days, but I’ve caught him at the Paragon once or twice and had to leave. Nobody knows me here and I’d like to keep it that way.

  A waitress named Marta flounces up, showing an inconceivable amount of tanned thigh. Acts like she’s never seen me before, not realizing she actually has. She jots down my whiskey sour, which I have no intention of drinking, then shuffles bar-ward through the crowd, shaking schoolgirl pigtails that look anything but innocent. I watch her move even though I shouldn’t.

  She’s a cute enough little thing, but she couldn’t get famous just by vanishing.

  “Excuse me. Are you using these?”

  I turn to the table next to me, where a couple of women in low-cut tops are busy arranging extra chairs. One of them looms over me, a pink-skinned blonde with glitter on her eyelids, of indeterminate age, motioning to the unused seats around my table.

  “Take them.”

  They all descend, dragging the chairs off just in time for another wave of girlfriends, who arrive with many air kisses and group hugs.

  When Marta returns with my drink, she nods toward the packed table and asks if I want to move. I think about it, but decide to stay put. I don’t plan on being here all that long. She gives me a suit-yourself shrug, then takes a deep breath before retrieving orders from the newcomers. I’m thinking girls’ night doesn’t generate the kind of tips for the leggy Marta that a table of men would.

  I stare into the whiskey sour like it’s a crystal ball, but it doesn’t reveal anything. The glass sweats and eventually the ice shifts. My finger traces patterns in the condensation.

  I’ve been coming to this place for years, going through the same ritual. The first time was October 6, 2001, and that night I made a big enough scene I had to wait awhile before showing my face again. Now I keep it discreet. Nobody needs to know why I’m here.

  People stream past the table, some heading to the restrooms, others hunting the shadows for likely targets. As the crowd expands and contracts, the bartenders move with practiced grace. There’s a guy at the bar I’ve seen before — not here, but out in the real world. He cranes his head subtly, taking in the room without seeming to. A white male, my age or a bit younger, with a hedge of black hair jutting forward like the figure on the prow of a ship. Probably someone I know from the job, another cop, judging from the never-off-duty vibe he’s giving off. I lean sideways for a better look, but the crowd closes in.

  For the rest of the night, the party at the next table bleeds girls. They peel off in packs of two or three, heading home or to other locations. As they go, their places are filled by empty shot glasses and slumped-over bodies. The glitter-eyed blonde starts scooting her chair closer to my side of the gap, sending sideways looks in my direction, keeping me here longer than I’d planned.

  “Are you gonna drink that?” Marta says, appearing suddenly between the tables.

  She gives off a self-assured vibe, but it’s the kind of brittle hardness you always see in women who keep choosing the abusive boyfriends, or can’t keep off the bottle or the needle. Deceptive strength, more protective coloring than character.

  I glance at the melting lowball at my elbow, but don’t answer. Reaching into my pocket, I peel off a twenty and toss it onto the table. It’s a stupid gesture, the sort of thing that gets remembered. But I’m sympathetic to her type.

  “All righty then,” she says, swiping the twenty and running a towel over the place where it landed. She gives the girls next door a reproving glance. “Sorry, ladies, but I think I’m gonna have to cut you off.”

  The trio who remain howl in mock protest, then start giggling, proud to have downed enough liquor to warrant intervention. I slip away to the men’s room, where I check the time and feel slightly appalled at the company I’ve kept.

  In the mirror I find a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, wearing jeans too young for him and a T-shirt too tight, with a rumpled cotton blazer that might as well have been slept in. His nose is off-center, no upper lip to speak of, and his jaw is far from square. In fact, to my eyes, there’s almost a rodent aspect to the face. I’m not sure even a daddy complex and a quart of tequila can explain the drunk girl’s apparent interest.

  As I’m drying my hands, the door swings open. Somebody stops on the threshold and does a one-eighty, disappearing from view. I only get a faint glimpse, but I think it’s the familiar-looking cop from the bar. When I emerge, he’s gone.

  The tabl
e of party girls is empty, too, sparing me the indignity of having to slink past. At the bar, Marta tracks my departure. Leaving the twenty was a mistake.

  Out in the parking lot, sweat rises on my forehead and in the small of my back. But I don’t sweat in the heat all that much. This perspiration is psychological. Time to get home to my dead-to-the-world wife.

  The pink-skinned blonde leans against the side of a red Jeep, stabbing at the lock with her keys. While I pause to watch, she gets down on one knee, eyeball to eyeball with the lock, slotting the key in with the care of a surgeon.

  Later tonight, sitting in my driveway with the ignition off, I’ll try to remember how I crossed the distance between us. Try to recreate the steps, and envision my hand seizing her bicep, jerking her up from the ground. I’ll try to recall the instant before I pushed her, wondering what I was thinking to put so much force behind it.

  And I’ll try to forget, too. The sound of her body thumping against the Jeep, her choked-off yelping. The sight of the tears.

  But now it all happens in a blur, and the next thing I know she’s screaming and flailing blindly with her bangled arms.

  “Are you crazy?” my voice is shouting. “I’m doing you a favor!” My hands shake her silly, leaving marks on the skin. “What’s wrong with you, getting behind the wheel in your condition?”

  She’s not listening. She can’t even hear me over her moaning. And then her face changes, her mouth forming an O, her veiny throat jutting like the neck of a teapot. I realize too late what’s coming, and step back just as the first ropey torrent pours out, splashing down my pants leg and all over my shoes. She twists free, staggering toward the bar’s door, her hand over her mouth. Another wave hits, bubbling through her clamped fingers. That image, caught in slow motion by the amber glare of a streetlight, sears me.

  What have I done?

  She disappears into the bar, and I head off shaking my damp leg. Disgusted with her and with myself. My car is parked on the other side of the lot. I get the door open just as the first patrons stream out of the Paragon, glancing left and right for the man who accosted the glitter-eyed girl.