Maggie Terry

by Sarah Schulman

  Apartment 5F was not hard to find. Old chipped red paint, three locks, and a warped tilt indicated the cave of Jamie Wagner’s father. It was also the one blasting classical music, the kind she grew up on. The only thing Maggie and Wolf could do in the same room. Of course, lots of different kinds of people listened to classical music, but they would be more likely to have a better sound system than the tenant in 5F. It was so staticky it seemed to be coming from . . . a radio, not even a computer. She knew she had her man. Maggie knocked.

  No answer.

  “Mister Wagner?” she called out. “Mister Wagner?”

  The scratchy notes continued.

  “Mister Wagner, it’s Maggie Terry, the investigator. We have an appointment to talk about your child.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  2:30 PM

  Slowly, very slowly, the door crept open at the hands of a defeated, exhausted old fellow. He was sad. His apartment was sad; his life was sad and things had been that way for a very, very long time. They would never be fixed. And that had apparently been true even before his fetishized daughter’s promising, wounded life had come to a terrible, sudden, and violent close.

  Stefan Wagner smelled. He was rotting, and he didn’t care. He was the kind of man tired people would stand on the subway to avoid sitting beside. He was angry and scared and entirely unreliable. His suit was lived in; his shirt was yellowed. His life was one of misery, with a single, sterling exception . . . his beautiful and successful daughter, Jamie. No wonder he had wanted so badly to be near her.

  “I don’t like bureaucrats, doctors, government officials,” he said.

  “Good, because I am none of the above. Is that Mendelssohn?”

  “Yes.”

  Was there ever a day that Maggie’s class and education did not come in handy? What did people do who had not grown up going to the symphony? She’d escaped marrying a boy like her father, or even a boy the opposite of her father, rejected being a lady who lunched, refused the garden club, and said NO to taking the commuter train into the city from some suburban hell to see a matinee as a way of life. She had become a professional in a man’s field, and she had learned a lot about how people really lived. Sometimes she learned the hard way, but Maggie had accrued a lot of information. A lot. Not enough, but a lot. She wasn’t afraid of lost, confused souls like Stefan Wagner; she was used to them. She was at home with people who no one else could handle. The shitty apartments, the crazed manias.

  It was all coming back to her. This was the world she had lived in every day. This was the world she and Julio had shared. The topsy-turvyness of the whole thing, the otherworldliness. That lack of rules was really what let her and Julio agree that they needed to make that godforsaken plan. To meet in the Bronx and talk to Martin Scott Bond. Both she and Julio knew that was a euphemism, they didn’t say it to each other, but at that point, with Maggie high all the time and Julio crazed with worry about his son’s life, they both knew that what they really were going to do was . . . well, to put it honestly, they were going to break the law they had both promised to uphold. They were intending to show up at Martin Scott Bond’s crappy apartment and . . . intimidate him . . . into . . . withholding evidence . . . because . . . because, well, as Julio said, “The department is not protecting Eddie, and that is what they are supposed to be doing. And you know, Maggie, it’s because he’s Latino and they need to find a cop to make an example of, and that’s not gonna be no white cop. And I can’t let them destroy my son’s life for doing what any of them and their fathers and sons would do—shoot to kill if you don’t know what’s what—but we have to protect our own.”

  “Yeah, Julio, yeah.” Maggie was at triple speed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And who knows how far they would have gone, what they ultimately would have done to poor Martin Scott Bond, who was presenting himself as an innocent bystander.

  “How come he was there?” Julio was sweating, shaking. “He was implicated, and he’s blaming it on my son, with that motherfucking footage!”

  Maggie was just supposed to “eat dinner,” which meant do some coke, and change her clothes and meet Julio at Bond’s apartment at nine, but how was she supposed to know that that was the night, that very night that Frances—goddamn her—Frances had arranged for an intervention.

  Julio was sitting in his car, fuming and out of his mind, waiting for his partner of eleven years to come be by his side as they both broke the selectively applied modern law of regulations, and instead carried out the ancient law of tribe, where a man defended his son no matter what. As he was waiting for her, and as she, having done two lines at Georgie’s, intended to get back up there, Frances was also waiting, but she was prepared.

  “If you fight this, Maggie, you will NEVER see Alina again. I promise you. I will get you a narcotics arrest and that will be the end of your life. You will never be a cop again, you will never see me again, and you will never ever see your daughter again, as long as I live, unless you go to detox right now!”

  What could she do?

  The joke was—and Maggie was laughing even today, eighteen months and three days later, standing in a firetrap with a sick old man, listening to Mendelssohn—the joke was that Frances was lying. Frances was already involved with Maritza and she wanted Maggie out of the picture. Frances had no intention of ever sharing custody, and Frances didn’t give a fuck about Maggie’s career. But Maggie was too stoned to notice what a liar Frances had become. How cold. Foolishly believing that there was actually a choice being offered between Alina, on one hand, and Julio’s love for Eddie, on the other, Maggie chose Alina without hesitation. And she felt good about that choice. In fact, she felt relieved. This would be it. Her moment of goodness had finally dawned.

  So, she said yes to giving up everything and being dragged off to a hospitalization that only Frances could pull her out of. Finally, Maggie Terry would do something right. She would tell the truth. She would submit. She would be a team player, and then everyone could live together forever, happily ever after because Frances had finally shown, for real, that she cared. This was Frances’s way of making Maggie’s dream come true. Frances was saying, “I will work with you.” She was saying, “We will do this together.” She was saying, “I am here.”

  So, Maggie sat and waited for the EMT. Sitting very still, knowing that happiness was finally in front of her, all because someone else in her life finally came through—finally, did not disappear.

  Only, it didn’t work out that way.

  In reality, Maggie never saw Julio again. Maggie never worked as a police detective again, and she never got high again. And she never saw her child again. Never. And here she was. Frances had lied.

  Wasn’t it weird, how much Maggie had trusted her? She must have loved her.

  “Do you like Mendelssohn, Miss Terry?” Stefan Wagner slowly reached toward his wobbly cassette player and raised the volume. He could not hear the static. He could not hear the chaos of the lag in the tape’s loop. He smiled.

  “It’s gorgeous.” Maggie pulled a professional facade out of the grab bag of her past. “Mendelssohn used this sonata form for his Hebrides overture, I believe. Isn’t that right Mr. Wagner?”

  “Exactly.” He had an accent as thick as Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes.

  “But why?”

  He returned to his clearly habitual seat on his newspaper-covered bed, leaving her a book-filled chair to negotiate. “Because it has a fairly strict pattern to follow, in form, as well as key and temperament.”

  She could see now that it wasn’t a radio at all, but a decades-old rickety cassette player, in this shabby, grim life.

  “I see, can I move these?”

  “Let me.” He carefully lifted one of the piles and placed it on the floor, leaving her a side of the chair to share with the other two stacks.

  “Thank you.”

  He was reassured now. It was all going to be fine. “Most authorities don’t know anything about music.”

  �
��I am a private citizen,” Maggie said calmly. “I was once a government employee, but I had some emotional problems and now I am a private detective working for a law firm. No government.”

  He nodded. Stefan Wagner would love AA. He very much wanted to identify. “Yes, people are very cruel when you become upset. They don’t allow for it.” He crossed his legs, no socks on under a disastrous pair of shoes.

  “Do you think, Mr. Wagner, that Jamie also had some emotional problems?”

  “She was so beautiful.” And then he started to cry.

  As Maggie watched him weep she saw that he was a person who had never stopped crying. That when she knocked on his door he had been crying.

  “If she wasn’t my daughter I would have married her.”

  Check. Just as Steven had reported.

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t offer you a drink; I never have company.”

  Maggie was still taken aback by the casual confession of his previous comment. That was not the kind of thing one says to a private investigator unless it was thought perfectly normal to have wanted to marry one’s murdered daughter.

  With great effort, Stefan slowly got down on his knees and reached under the bed. He wanted to do this, so she didn’t stop him. Some groaning and mispositioning finally produced a dusty, clear bottle. He sat back down, dustballs on his pants legs, filthy bottle in his lap.

  “Kirschwasser.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Just a little. It is an old German liqueur.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  He poured a shot into an old coffee cup sitting by his bed and then left it untouched.

  “I am sadder than sad.” His shoulders were slumped, lost in that horrible suit, a wreck of a life without its last oar. “Jamie and I shared so much in common.”

  “Like what?”

  “Neither of us could sleep. We used to talk to each other on the phone at four in the morning. She would call me, or I would call her. We were free in that way, to be sure the other had company when it was necessary. Maybe now I will throw away my telephone.” He indicated a dust-covered dial phone with a cracked black plastic receiver.

  The rickety cassette tape kept turning in the player, a bit slack in parts. The music was an eerie ghost of greatness past, while the machine itself remained a stark document to decline and how it becomes inevitable. Most people in that building probably didn’t know what a cassette was.

  “Stefan, can you tell me about the last time you saw your daughter?”

  She was listening very closely. There were some children outside. They must be the kids of the final Dominicans on the block. White yuppie children don’t play on the streets. They are controlled. These kids spoke English with those disappearing New York accents, the friendly way of talking. It was so casual, it made friends just by hanging out in the air like a hand-shake. Never shy, it too was being replaced by Valley Girl uptones and Midwestern drones. She heard the pigeons cooing. This apartment, this moment, these sounds. They were all the past. It was floating so far away. People like Stefan couldn’t get a lease anymore. They ended up homeless.

  “I tried to call her many times. She is the only one I call.” He looked again, mournfully, at the useless phone, a coffin of itself. “I called and called but she wouldn’t speak to me. Then finally she answered and screamed in my ear.”

  “What did she say?”

  “You’re sick, she said.” He was so shaken. Her anger survived the grave. “I’m calling the police.” He looked down at his hands, a fresh wound on top of ancient fresh wounds, each infecting the one before so that nothing ever heals. “Maggie, you are the police . . .”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why does everyone threaten to call the police? It never helps anybody. Why punish all the time? Why not accept and let us live together?”

  “Did she call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you’re sick?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you made Jamie sick?”

  “No, it was that man. The boyfriend.”

  You’re sick. Maggie had said that herself. It must be something that sick people say.

  Frances said it too. That night. That night that it all came to an end.

  Maggie looked at Stefan Wagner. She waited. Tried again, “Did your daughter Jamie ever actually call the police on you?”

  “No, she never did.” Stefan threw his hands up in the air, an old European gesture. “Finally I waited for her by the stage door.”

  “And then what happened?”

  He described standing outside, on a cold windy spring evening filled with joy that he would soon see his beloved daughter.

  Maggie sat still as he told her his story. She didn’t want to remind him that she was there so he could feel alone, feel comfortable. She didn’t cough or cross her legs. She was like the breeze.

  It all unfolded clearly, carefully. Jamie’s play had ended and the fans were gathering around the stage door to get the stars to sign their programs. His daughter played the housemaid hired by wealthy aristocrats in their country estate. Jamie brought the coffee tray onstage and then, later in the play, she came back, picked it up, and took it offstage. She had two lines:

  “Coffee, mum?” She was directed to say it in a Cockney accent to vaguely indicate Britain’s class system, and to add a bit of the saucy.

  And the inevitable “Will that be all, then?” inserted by a playwright who clearly had no imagination.

  Jaime had done hours of research to create back-story for her character. She gave her a name, Nancy, even though the program just said Housemaid. She gave her sex with a chauffeur to get off of her father’s farm, then a love affair with the son of an archduke, and a stint as a prostitute in London’s underworld. She gave her an interest in tarot cards, theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, and the occult. And a habit of padding her worn serving shoes with a piece of ribbon to give her aching feet a rest.

  “How do you know all these details?” Maggie asked.

  “We told each other everything. Even our sexual fantasies.”

  “At four in the morning when she couldn’t sleep.”

  “That’s right. We gave each other comfort.”

  Which he clearly thought was a good thing. The “comfort” that caused pain in all of her relationships.

  “In her first scene . . .” Stefan was enjoying the telling now. “After saying her line ‘Coffee, mum?’ There was a twenty-eight-minute monologue about being a queen who was dethroned, while Jamie, as Nancy, listened.”

  “For twenty-eight minutes.”

  “Listening actively is a difficult skill onstage. Jamie trained for this by watching performances of O’Neill plays like The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten, where actors had to actively listen for very long periods of time. She also studied the play Balm in Gilead by Lanford Wilson, in which an actress named Glenne Headly had a monologue long enough for every person in the theater to work through a personal problem they had been putting off indefinitely. Every night, Lucy’s monologue ended in applause. And when the adulation finally died down, Jamie a.k.a. Nancy a.k.a. Housemaid would pick up the tray and say, ‘Will that be all, then?’”

  Maggie saw something she hadn’t expected to see. She saw that for all the dysfunction that really was abuse, and actually was criminal; that simultaneous to this terrible use of his child, he loved her. Who else was out there reveling in her performance of “Coffee, mum?” Not Steven Brinkley. He was waiting for bigger things. And this new understanding helped Maggie see Jamie Wagner in a more positive light. For despite the inescapable destruction of her boundaryless, dangerous father, Jamie wanted to make every second of her tiny life-in-progress count for something. For the first time, Maggie had a glimpse of what Steven Brinkley had seen and then committed to: Jamie was really an artist. She had drive and intelligence. When it came to acting, she made the best of it, despite all the obstacles within and
without her, and her terrible loyalty to a father who was her biggest problem, and the sad way she blamed Steven Brinkley for pain he had not caused.

  In other words, aside from being murdered, Jamie had everything that Maggie wanted. She was loved. She had a future. And she was forgiven.

  “So what happened when she stepped out of the theater that night and saw that you were waiting for her? Even after she had yelled at you on the phone?”

  Like he’d said, it was a cold, windy spring evening. Stefan had stayed back from the crowd of hungry fans and watched until his daughter emerged, unnoticed, slipping past the principle actors and down the stairs to unlock her bicycle, which was chained to a No Parking sign against the curb. He’d walked up to her, bereft.

  “I’d said, ‘Jamie,’ And then she started screaming. On the street. Like a mad person.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said . . .” He paused with the pain of it all, all the pain that had become his life now that he was here and his child was not. “She said, ‘Get away, I told you to leave me alone.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I said, ‘It’s that man. Your boyfriend. He’s ruined everything between us, can’t you see that?’”

  Stefan was crying again now. That was the second man Maggie had seen weep openly because of Jamie’s accusations, even more so than her death.

  “Then she said, ‘He’s sick, too. All my men are sick. I have to get away from all of you. I have to find someone who doesn’t want anything from me, who doesn’t need anything, who has no opinions. And I will find them, I will.’ And with that she jumped on her bike.”

  Maggie processed his story. Jamie had two loves in her life. One, her father, was destructive and distorting. She would have had to fully face his betrayal to allow the other, Steven, who really saw her, to help her heal. But she got confused. She could not tell them apart.