“Unless I see you before that. At work.”
“Right.” Boyd smiled. Harry squatted in front of the little girl. “You sure are pretty,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The girl pressed herself farther into her father’s legs. “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“Honey, that’s not nice,” Boyd said.
“It’s okay,” Harry stood up. “Kids and dogs never like me.”
Boyd started to say forensic psychologists believed those were the classic signs of a sociopath, but then thought better of it.
11
sophia was cleaning out the refrigerator when the doorbell rang. What a silly tradition, she thought, opening yet another Tupperware container of lasagna brought by friends in the days following the accident. As if eating were on the mind of people grieving a death. Near death, she corrected herself. She had dutifully shoved each container into the refrigerator. Now, three weeks later, the food had turned green and black with mold.
Again, it rang. Darius and Miranda had gone to the organic farmers’ market. If she ignored it, who would know? The third ring, a short burst, followed by a longer, more insistent lean, told her the intruder knew she was home and wasn’t going away. Reluctantly, she peeled off her plastic gloves, went to the front hallway, and looked crossly through the windows that flanked the door.
“Mrs. McMartin?” a man asked, holding up a badge. “Louis Carone. LAPD.”
She could see right away that he wasn’t an ordinary policeman. Not that she knew anything about police beyond the detectives in the movies. In real life, the cops who had stopped her over the years for speeding had always seemed like surprisingly nice men willing to let you off, provided your excuse included a child. The man at the door was more like one of Darius’s colleagues. Scholarly, gentlemanly, with murky gray eyes, sandy hair, a bit of a belly, a shirt with a collar, and a jacket with leather patches on the elbow. If she saw him on the street she might guess doctor. A pediatrician.
“Yes?” She opened the door, reluctant to let him in the house. Nothing in his eyes indicated good news.
“Could we speak?” He tilted his head as if he were looking for someone behind her.
“Um.” Sophia tried to think of a good reason to say no.
Carone followed her into the kitchen, where she leaned against a counter, crossed her arms over her chest, and watched as he took in the stack of Tupperware on the counter, the sour smell of food gone off, the chaotic bulletin board three deep with coupons, xeroxed poems, pictures of the girls, unpaid bills, grocery lists, expired tickets to the philharmonic, a computer printout of important phone numbers, handwritten cell-phone numbers added to the bottom, a recipe for veal piccata she had wanted to try until Helen told her she was going to hell for even considering cooking with veal. Watching his unreadable face, she suddenly felt uncomfortably exposed, as if she’d forgotten her pants and only now realized it.
“Something to drink?” she asked.
“Water. Thanks.”
Sophia turned to get a glass. She noticed a tiny piece of dried food stuck to the inside of the glass. For any other guest, she would have used a fingernail to scrape it off. For him, she left it on. As she filled the glass with tap water, she felt his eyes clinically appraising her. What was that thing doctors used to look in your ear? An otoscope. That was it. Louis Carone was otoscopic. He drank the water without noticing the fleck of food. Or he didn’t care. Either way.
“I’m trying to guess why you’re here,” she said. “But nothing is coming to me.”
He leaned down, opened a briefcase, and took out a sealed plastic bag. Sophia recognized Helen’s wallet and keys.
“Ah,” she said, sitting down. If God existed, which He so clearly did not—Helen’s accident was proof of that—the pressure on her shoulders was like His hand guiding her into a seat. A cosmic maître d’ concerned for her comfort.
Sophia touched the rippled green leather of the wallet through the plastic bag. She remembered the day Helen bought it at the mall. It was on sale, but even so, Sophia had hesitated. Wallets that belonged to her daughters had a way of getting lost. Now the leather seemed to be radiating some powerful grief-inducing force field. Sophia forced herself to look away from it, into the policeman’s unblinking eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say something?”
“I was going to tell you about your daughter’s friend. He had a complicated life.”
“The boy?”
“Not exactly. He was thirty-seven years old.”
Sophia felt her stomach lurch. All this time, she’d been picturing a reckless man-child made stupid by beer and youth, one of those driver s who sends your heart racing when he passes you going ninety miles an hour on the freeway. Did Helen know how old he was? Siri said he was in his mid-twenties, so that meant Helen probably believed it. Shit. Not only did he kill her, he lied to her. Sophia would have known better. The skin hangs differently on a thirty-seven-year-old than it does on a twenty-five-year-old. But Helen was so young, so inexperienced.
“They barely knew each other,” she said, wanting to put as much distance as possible between her family and Bobby Goralnick. “Her friend told us she was breaking up with him the day of the accident.”
The policeman took a small reporter’s notebook out of his jacket pocket and made a note. She’d seen poet friends of Darius from the university do the same thing when a description or a phrase struck them in the middle of dinner or a party. She’d always thought the gesture excessively self-cherishing.
“Did the friend say anything else?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“About Bobby. His work, his past.”
“Maybe if you told me what you were looking for.”
Carone looked around the kitchen again, as if he were looking to change the subject to something more pleasant—the advantages of Corian over granite for countertops. “You have a nice house,” he said. “You can tell the people who live here are cultured, you know? You don’t see that a lot in my line of business.”
Sophia knew she was supposed to feel complimented but instead she felt offended on behalf of the people he had just maligned. “I’m sure the people you deal with have a culture,” she said primly.
“Oh,” he said, nodding, “they do. It’s just very loud. Everything here is so quiet. You can hear yourself think. You could probably hear the grass grow.”
Sophia looked down at the floor. The policeman, she noticed, was showing no signs of wanting to leave. Something in the tilt of her head must have communicated her impatience because, suddenly, he changed the course of conversation. “The man Helen was with that day, you called him Bobby Goralnick. That wasn’t his name. We think it was Virgil Tilden.”
Sophia winced. Ever since the accident, she had worked hard to keep from thinking about Bobby Goralnick. As far as she was concerned, he was nothing. A nobody. A piece of dirt under the fingernail. Not worthy of a moment’s consideration. Or so she told herself. Truthfully, if she thought of him at all, she feared her hatred would grow and grow like a toxic mold until it killed all the life around it. So she had worked to forget every thing about him. And now here was this man in her kitchen forcing her to consider the facts of his life. As she feared, her mind went to the darkest places she could imagine: crystal meth labs in abandoned Iowa farmhouses, racist skinhead plots to kill liberal senators, child prostitution rings exchanging boys and girls at Disneyland. The kinds of stories the nightly newsmagazines could tease out to fill an hour of prime-time television. How had this happened to her daughter? All she could think was, Bobby Goralnick must have been a great lay. Helen wasn’t dishonest by nature. Mostly, she was a good girl, eager to please, slow to anger, not terribly rebellious or, thank God, original. For her to have strayed so far, it had to have been the swamp pull of sex. Which meant her mother and all the disapproving priests; the old biddies she remembered from childhood; the spinster sex-ed teachers in high school
, with their sensible shoes and tight buns; the moralistic painters from the fifteenth century she studied in graduate school; the right-wing loonies in the White House; the Bible-thumping, toupee-wearing preachers on the upper reaches of cable channels—they had all been right. Sex could kill you. Sophia had tried to revolt against this idea. She herself had sought out experiences, allowed Yanni Twardokea to put his hands on her breasts right there, next to the industrial-size vats of olives and the putrid-smelling barrel of feta cheese at her parents’ restaurant. Left home as soon as she could. But when it came to defying her mother’s beliefs, she never really left anything. She married the first man who fucked her because—much as it appalled her to admit it—something of her mother’s fear of sex had seeped into the groundwater of her cerebral cortex. On the spectrum of rebellion, she’d scored a tepid 2 out of 10. Who knew how far she might have gone if she hadn’t been hobbled by that unwelcome legacy of fearfulness? She had tried to free her daughters from the strictures of her youth. She taught them to protect themselves from diseases, unwanted pregnancy, and even offered to loan them her updated copy of the Joy of Sex (Mom! Gross! ). But all along, it was her mother who was right. Sex kills.
“I can’t help you.” She finally forced herself to meet the policeman’s false friendly gaze.
“If she kept a diary or had an e-mail account, we might be able to get some more information about Virgil’s activities.” He was all business now.
“You think she was involved in something illegal?”
Louis Carone craned his neck to the side and vigorously scratched a patch of hair next to his ear. Sophia had seen dogs do the exact same thing. “We’re in fact-finding mode.”
An orange flame of fury danced inside her. “Even if she kept a diary, which she did not, I would never give it to you.”
“I could get a search warrant.”
The flame danced higher, singeing her cornea, licking the hairline. “May I remind you that I am the grieving parent?”
“Okay.” Carone fished around in the breast pocket of his jacket and brought out a business card. “If you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” she said.
He looked disappointed. “You know, Mrs. McMartin, we could get rid of all the crime in this country if people who knew things would just step forward and say what they knew.”
“Here’s what I know—my daughter was not, is not, and never has been a criminal.”
“For whatever reason, she may have been hanging out with one.”
“She thought he played in a band.”
“From what I understand, nobody who knew anything about music would have been fooled by that.”
“If you have come here to accuse her of having a tin ear, guilty as charged. It runs in the family.”
“Look, I really don’t think she was involved in anything illegal.” Carone suddenly seemed determined to make peace with Sophia. “We’re just covering our bases.” He stood and ran his hand over his stomach, as if checking to see whether the belly that spilled over the top of his belt had miraculously disappeared while he was sitting down. Sophia had seen Darius make the exact same gesture. “He definitely had his enemies. That’s for sure.”
Sophia wished for the discipline to resist the information he was dangling in front of her, but it was useless. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“We found sugar in Tilden’s gas tank. It’s a suburban myth, something teenagers do when they want to get back at somebody. Like setting a sack of dog excrement on fire, then ringing the doorbell. They think the sugar will get in the engine and ruin it, but it’s not true. The sugar dissolves or the fuel filter catches it. In Bobby’s case there was a substantial amount—so there’s a small chance it contributed to a malfunction in the engine, but in my opinion, it was probably the six-pack he drank before getting on the bike that killed him.”
“Do you know who put it there?”
“This type of crime, it’s usually a kid. Or a woman. I gather he was something of a ladies’ man.” Betrayed women and angry children, the dyad of the unstable. Sophia thought of Yanni’s wife and the heart-shaped misery of her once-beautiful face.
After Carone left, Sophia sat at the kitchen table, trying to make sense of what she had learned. It had been six months since her last secret, stolen cigarette behind the garage. Now the craving was back, stronger than ever. She squeezed her left hand with her right, willing it to pass. When it finally receded, she reached for the plastic bag that held Helen’s wallet and keys. The plastic reminded her of the bags she used to keep food in the freezer. Written across the top was “Property of the LAPD.” She unsnapped the wallet. On one side, the plastic cards lay neatly in their appointed slots. On the other was the billfold for money. She used her thumb to slide out the credit card they had given her for emergencies only. The first month she had it, there had been a big fight after she used it to buy three hundred dollars’ worth of clothes at the mall.
“Mom,” Helen had argued, “it was an emergency. Everything was so on sale.”
Sophia was glad now she’d given in and let her keep the clothes. She ran a finger over the raised letters of the credit card, then studied the picture of Helen on her driver ’s license. She had complained bitterly about her half-closed eyes in the picture but Sophia had refused to pay the additional thirty dollars for a new picture.
Even as a little girl, Helen had a tendency toward vanity. “Mommy,” she’d ask, “am I pretty?”
Sophia hadn’t known how to answer. “Truthfully, you are devastatingly beautiful, but looks,” she finally told her daughter one day, “are the least of it.”
“It?” Helen had asked.
“It. You know, life.”
“Looks are the least of life,” Helen repeated, justifiably confused. Who was Sophia kidding? Even seven-year-old Helen McMartin, the recipient of a thousand “Aren’t you cute?”s from hordes of well-meaning, temporarily insipid adults, had figured out that looks were not the least of it. Looks were every thing.
Sophia studied Helen’s picture more closely. Even with the eyes closed and the poor-quality reproduction, she was struck by how alive Helen looked. The eager smile, the way the skin hugged the bones of her face, the pinkish blue of her skin. Such a contrast to the empty expression of the girl lying a few miles away in the hospital. She turned the license over. On the organ donor box, Helen had ticked “I hereby make an anatomical gift to be effective upon my death, of any needed organ or part.” She’d even had two of her friends—Siri and Anya—sign as witnesses. The date was two months earlier.
Before Helen’s accident, Sophia had never experienced the kind of grief that suddenly rose up and engulfed, like a rogue wave in an otherwise calm ocean. She could feel the warning signs now—the way the walls of her throat thickened; the buzzing, nervous tickle in her stomach. She also knew she didn’t have to succumb, she could swim away if she wanted. She shoved the driver ’s license back into the wallet and turned her attention to the key ring. The fake “What’s lucky about losing your foot?” rabbit paw, a birthday gift from Siri, who was into the animal-rights movement, made Sophia smile. She slid the house and car keys off the ring. They could go in the communal kitchen key drawer for the inevitable moment when someone in the McMartin household would panic over a lost key. And when (if ) Helen recovered, Sophia would know where to find them. Only one key remained on the ring. Silver and cheap, as if the door it opened was flimsy hollow core. Across the top was written a brand name. SCHLAGE. She thought of the Bohemian family in Howards End, a favorite book of hers in college. The Schlegels. An allusion, a professor had claimed, to the objective idealism of Hegel. Sophia, so keen to improve her mind, had dutifully gone to the library and checked out a book by the philosopher. She’d spent ten minutes on one paragraph and still had no idea what he was talking about.
Darius and Miranda came through the door, carrying white plastic bags filled with vegetables. “Hi,” Darius said, smiling brightly, weirdly, as if trying to
hide something.
“What’s wrong?” Sophia asked.
Miranda busied herself unloading vegetables.
“We have a surprise for you,” Darius said, the smile fading incrementally.
Outside, Sophia heard the hysterical yelps of a dog.
“No,” she said.
“You haven’t even met her. Him.” Darius said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“This could be a good thing. It could be a distraction.”
“Could be?”
“Just meet him.”
Darius went outside.
“I told him,” Miranda shook her head. “He insisted.”
Darius returned, holding a leash. At the end of it, a greyhound pranced manically in place, whether from excitement or fear, Sophia couldn’t tell and did not care. She had never been a dog person. Whenever she saw the woman who brought those doomed greyhounds to the organic market, she always felt sorry for her—who would ever want to adopt a retired racetrack dog? Apparently, if you ever let one off the leash, it would run away at forty miles an hour and never come back.
“If we don’t take him, he’ll be killed tomorrow.” Darius leaned down to pet the dog, whose eyes rolled back in ecstasy. Sophia thought he looked like a mosquito on crack. His fur, a yellowish white with patches of gray, looked like rancid milk.
“Is it even house-trained?” she asked.
Darius hesitated.
“You didn’t ask?”
“How could he be house-trained? He’s never lived in a house.”
“What are we going to do? Throw some hay in the corner of the kitchen?”
“Greyhounds are extremely intelligent dogs.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Monty. Apparently, he was a real champion. In his day.”
Sophia knew she ought to fight harder. When the girls were little he used to periodically threaten her with a puppy, but she always managed to talk him out of it. The walks, the shit, the fleas, the kennel bills when they went on vacation, the trips to the vet. She could make dog owning sound like a nightmare when she put her mind to it. This time, however, she lacked the will. Anyway, maybe he was right. A dog would be a distraction. Already the despair caused by Louis Carone had loosened its grip on her intestines.
And Sometimes Why Page 11
