The Aquittal

by Anne Laughlin

  Josie sat back down and took a breath. “Lucky me.”

  “Don’t be that way, Josie. Tell me how you are.”

  “Do you mean how am I in the general sense, like ‘what’s new?’ or ‘how was your day?’”

  “Josie.” Her mother’s voice had a warning tone to it.

  “Or do you mean ‘did you take your medication today?’” Josie didn’t hide her impatience. She was staring at her left biceps where a colorful tattoo said “Wish I Were Me,” surrounded by roses. She had no memory whatsoever of getting the tattoo.

  “Can’t it be both?” her mother went on. “I’m a worrier, you know that. It’s only natural I want you to take care of yourself.”

  Josie held her tongue. It was more likely the case that Elaine wanted to avoid another embarrassing episode of crazy from Josie. She was sick of being asked about her medication. It made her not want to take it.

  “Yes, I took my medication. I haven’t missed once, Mom.”

  “I know, sweetheart. It’s just that all the literature says bipolar people resist taking their medication. That scares me.”

  “Bipolar people?” Josie said. “That sounds like some indigenous group. ‘The bipolar people of the Amazon rainforest’…’”

  She heard her mother laugh, followed, as night follows day, by the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a rocks glass. It was remarkable, really, that Elaine sounded as sober as she did. She would have had her first drink no later than four fifty-nine that afternoon and been steadily drinking since. Yet she sounded like she could preach a sermon without a single eyebrow lifting in the congregation.

  “I’m glad you haven’t lost your sense of humor after all this,” her mother said.

  “I think it’s the only thing that keeps me relatively sane, at least according to Greta.”

  “Did she actually say that?” Elaine didn’t particularly like Greta.

  “She didn’t use the word ‘sane.’ She said a sense of humor helps keep me moving forward, whatever that means.”

  “Because you were never insane, Josie. You were only ill for a little while,” Elaine said adamantly. “I think it’s a dangerous word to use.”

  Josie wasn’t going to argue semantics with her mother when she was three sheets to the wind. Elaine might not be slurring her words, but Josie knew the signs of her mother’s inebriation. The most obvious was how loudly she spoke. The difference between her morning voice and her evening voice was like a softly played etude and Metallica. Josie wondered what mechanism of the brain made drunks believe the whole world had become hard of hearing. Then there was the way she repeated things. She prefaced most sentences with “Did I tell you…?” Chances were good she had.

  “Did I tell you I’m having lunch with Aunt Mary tomorrow?” Elaine said. “I really wish you’d come.”

  “Yes, you did, and no, I can’t.” Josie was intent on escaping a meal with cranky Aunt Mary.

  “Well, I won’t press you,” Elaine said.

  “Thanks.” Josie needed to get off the phone. “I’m beat. I’m going to turn in now.”

  She could practically hear her mother scrambling to come up with something to prolong the conversation. “Josie, did you take your medication today?”

  It was impossible to not find this maddening. “I told you I did. Do you want me to sign an affidavit?”

  There was silence on the line. Josie heard the click of a Bic lighter and more clanking of ice cubes.

  “There’s no reason to get nasty, Josephine. I’m so afraid you’ll have another episode like last fall.”

  Josie sighed loud enough for her mother to hear. “I’ve got to go, Mom. I can’t have a conversation with you when you’ve been drinking. I’ll see you Sunday at brunch.”

  That earned Josie a slammed phone in her ear, which she was expecting. Anytime she poked through the veil of her mother’s denial about her drinking, she got the phone slammed in her ear. It was a sure fire way to cut a conversation short.

  Josie left the dining room. Her apartment was a vintage one-bedroom, large by most standards with its separate dining room and eat-in kitchen. She’d lived in it for over ten years and never given much thought to decorating. She kept it clean and in good repair, but it was furnished as if for a graduate student in off-campus housing. One girlfriend had actually moved in and put framed posters on the walls and colorful placemats on the dining room table. But the girlfriend and her accouterment were gone after the night Josie brought a woman home for a three-way. In her amped-up state, the idea seemed not only reasonable, but brilliant. The girlfriend could not have disagreed more.

  Josie flopped onto her old sofa and tried not to cringe at this or a thousand other fuzzy memories like it. That was then. Now she had a way to climb back into life. She knew the shortest route to finding the inside dope on the Lauren Wade case was to call her former partner, Beverly Morton. Bev had been transferred to Major Crimes shortly before Josie left the CPD. Her connection with Bev could be key in getting Sarah to hire her, and she wanted the job. Being able to pay her bills and work on an interesting case seemed like a dream come true. She fell asleep thinking about how to approach Bev after all she’d put her through.

  Chapter Four

  Saturday, September 7

  Bev and Josie sat in Bev’s unmarked sedan near Foster Beach, their eyes fixed on Lake Michigan in front of them. The wind whipped up a steady stream of whitecaps on the lake that broke apart as they hit the cement wall at the water’s edge. A long line of empty parking spots was on either side of the sedan, the gloomy weather leaving only a few cars parked within sight. They were all driven by men looking for other men, stubbornly using a long-standing system of signaling each other through headlights, a sort of urban sexual semaphoring. It was made completely outdated by the new phone apps designed for cruising. Who needs headlights?

  Bev and Josie had often eaten their lunch here. Bev bit into one of the sandwiches she’d picked up on her way over, but Josie could barely eat a bite. Being with Bev, being in a police car again, the sound of the staticky radio—all sharp reminders to Josie of what she’d lost. She kept her eyes firmly on the dark and turbulent lake, knowing she should break the silence and start talking, but she felt bound at the chest, breathless.

  When their partnership had been broken up by Bev’s promotion to homicide, Josie thought she’d simply break apart. One minute she’d felt like there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, and the next she felt the universe had ripped away the one person she couldn’t do anything without. Bev was closer to her than any one of the depressingly small number of people in her life. She understood her, had patience with her. She had Josie’s back. But truthfully, Bev didn’t seem as devastated as Josie when she learned they’d be parting. She could see the relief in Bev’s eyes as she hugged Josie and moved her gear three rooms over to the homicide division.

  “You know,” Josie said, breaking the silence in the car. “I may have gotten my first clue something wasn’t right when I saw you skedaddle away from property crimes.”

  “It was a promotion, Josie. You would have skedaddled too, especially from property crimes.”

  “Maybe,” Josie conceded. “Was I really that bad?”

  Bev turned to look as her. “You weren’t bad. But you were ill, which I didn’t know, and it was getting worse. I admit I’d taken about all I could.”

  Josie looked down at the food in her lap—a barely touched roast beef, with melted provolone and some peppers that about took the top of her head off.

  “I never knew I was ill. I felt invincible and then more invincible still. I was bored with tracking down missing property; I kept trying to make it more exciting.”

  “Well, you certainly did that,” Bev said, her mouth full of tuna salad.

  Josie took a deep breath. “It turns out I have something called bipolar I disorder, which makes me slightly crazier than bipolar II disorder. But on the overall scale of BPI craziness, I come in somewhere toward the lower end. I
wanted you to know that.”

  “I’m glad you’re better, Josie. I’m not here to rehash how annoying you were while you were sick.”

  “Why are you here, then?” Josie asked.

  “You tell me. You’re the one who called.”

  Bev was about the coolest person Josie’d ever met. She could tell her anything and she wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

  “I need your help in a case my new agency caught.”

  “New agency? What’s that mean?”

  “My PI agency. I just opened it, as in yesterday, and I already have a murder case.”

  Bev looked stunned. Maybe she could still be surprised.

  “Didn’t I tell you that?” Josie said. “It seems like I would have told you that. This medication makes me a little spacey.”

  “How’re you doing with that? I understand a lot of people go off their meds pretty regularly.”

  At least she didn’t say “bipolar people,” like her mother.

  “The medication sucks but yes, I take it every day. I’m ten pounds heavier than I was a year ago, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the spots on my face. Exactly what every thirty-five-year-old wants—weight gain and acne. Now we’re onto treating the side effects. It’s a lot of fun.”

  Bev laughed. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not funny. It’s that you’re funny. I miss that. This guy they have me teamed with is the least energetic person I know, and as much fun as a migraine.”

  Josie relaxed a little. She’d always been able to make Bev laugh, even when she couldn’t stop talking or stay remotely on topic. Thoughts used to blow through her mind like a high-speed chase on a crowded highway, weaving in and out, dangerously wild, dangerous to others and herself.

  “So, I caught this case and I think you might know something about it. Did you work on the Kelly Moore case? The murder Lauren Wade was acquitted for?”

  Bev stared at her for a moment. “Yeah, I worked on it. At least for a little bit. My partner, Bill Nicholson, was primary on the case when I joined up with him. Of course he thought I couldn’t do anything more than log files, so that’s mostly what I did. I put together all the reports and statements and that sort of thing.”

  “That guy’s a complete asshole. Even my father hates him.”

  “Well, you can see why you in a manic state is preferable,” Bev said.

  “He’s probably one of the buttheads at the station who talked about me,” Josie said.

  Bev looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, after I did all that stupid stuff at the FOP dance and ended up in the hospital.” Josie had a petulant look on her face, waiting to hear how people ridiculed her behind her back.

  “Josie, no one talked about you at all, except to say it sucked you were sick and had to resign.”

  It had never occurred to Josie that people weren’t talking about the embarrassing pass she’d made at a superior officer or any of the other brazenly insane things she’d done. Greta once mentioned part of her disease was being grandiose, thinking the world revolved around her, that everyone noticed and cared about everything she did.

  She kept forgetting that.

  “I wasn’t going to take a fucking desk job,” Josie said. “Apparently, there’s some nutty rule about not allowing crazy cops armed on the streets.”

  “Are you carrying a weapon?”

  “Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you be if you were working on a murder case? I mean, you are. But if you were me is what I meant.”

  Bev smiled. “Tell me what you want from me.”

  Josie leaned forward and with as much sincerity as she could muster said, “I want a copy of the official file on Kelly Moore’s death, along with the detective notes.”

  Bev stared at Josie as if she were, well, crazy. But then she shrugged. “I can get you the official file, but no way on the other. You know Nicholson’s not going to put his notes in the official file, and we’re nowhere near close enough for me to ask for them.”

  Josie sucked on her bottom lip for a moment. “How about this? Since no one is pursuing an alternative killer since Lauren Wade was acquitted, why don’t you say you want to look into it in your spare time and you’d like to see his notes.”

  “Spare time?”

  “That’s what you could tell him,” Josie said. “It might work.”

  Bev nodded. “Okay, I’ll try. But don’t count on it. He’s not going to want his investigation to look weak.”

  Bev looked disgusted, a good cop frustrated by a bad one. Josie felt an overwhelming sense of loss. She’d always counted on the two of them eventually being homicide partners, a contemporary Cagney & Lacy, where Josie was the butch, hard-drinking Cagney and Bev was Lacy, complete with husband and kids, as she had in real life. They would have kicked ass.

  “I’ll get you what I can,” Bev said. “I need to head back to work. Maybe I can send it over today.”

  “Whatever you can do, Bev. I’ll owe you.”

  Bev snorted as she pulled out of the parking space. “Yeah. I’ll put it on your tab.”

  Chapter Five

  Lauren Wade wondered how a day at liberty could feel as long as a day in Cook County Jail. She’d been home for a week, but the six months of unimaginable tedium, bad food, and occasional bouts of terror had thrown her into a deep depression. She’d thought anything in contrast to jail would make her happier. Instead, she found herself unable to feel anything at all.

  She sat on the deep sectional sofa in the family room of the house she’d shared with Kelly. The room was part of a recent addition she’d put on, mainly to please Kelly. The huge family room and kitchen on the first floor and master suite on the second were appended to the old brick house Lauren had owned for ten years. Kelly picked out the furniture and finishes with obsessive attention to detail and total disregard to price. That Lauren would be paying for everything was never discussed, simply assumed. Kelly made a decent salary at her marketing job, but she deposited her paycheck in a private account, from which she paid for clothes and meals out with friends. Their joint account was funded by Lauren.

  She chastised herself for dwelling on the negative. Kelly was dead. The troublesome parts of their life together were now moot, but she couldn’t help wonder how she could have been so blind to Kelly’s true nature. The first years of their life together had been so happy. Sexy, fun, energizing. Realizing Kelly was essentially a gold digger was disappointing, but she’d adjusted to it. The harder discovery was Kelly’s affair with Ann-Marie, a member of Lauren’s own book club. Kelly had begun to sit in when the club met in their house, which was most of the time. Lauren guessed it was the month they discussed Tipping the Velvet when she’d begun her affair with Ann-Marie, if that’s what you’d call it. It seemed too casual to be classified as an affair. Kelly had given more thought to the selection of the sofa Lauren now sat on than she did to the consequences of cheating on her lover. When Lauren confronted her about Ann-Marie, Kelly admitted, with only the mildest apology in her tone, to sleeping with her, as if she were confessing to bringing a puppy home unannounced. Lauren retreated to her study and avoided Kelly. One week later, Kelly was shot dead in the kitchen she’d so carefully designed.

  Lauren hauled herself up from the sofa. Her body was soft from the months of inactivity, but she was loath to do a thing about it. The depression that had begun long before Kelly’s death was now cloaking her in lead. She felt underwater. She understood Virginia Woolf and the rocks in her pocket.

  She put a pot of coffee on and started to unpack the groceries she’d brought into the house an hour ago. Every small task felt monumental, another thing added to the list of reasons she’d grown to despise herself. Can’t complete simple tasks, can’t stand up for herself, can’t win this fight against her brother. She felt her whole personality had changed.

  Her thumb sank into the side of a pint of ice cream as she put it in the freezer. When the doorbell rang, she dropped a cantaloupe and watched it roll across the floor, not bother
ing to pick it up or to answer the door. She knew who it was. Her brother Tim strolled into the kitchen, pocketing the key he’d used to let himself in and swooping up the cantaloupe, bringing the end to his nose and giving it a sniff.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said. They both knew he didn’t care at all whether he interrupted her. He tossed the fruit onto the island. “That’s not ripe yet, by the way.”

  “What do you want?” Lauren said.

  “I want to see how you are, of course.” He dropped a small duffel bag on the counter and moved to the refrigerator. “Cook County Jail has broken stronger women than you. Did anyone make you her bitch? Is that how you survived?”

  Lauren didn’t respond.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Well, you’ve got to do the hard things to survive sometimes. Isn’t that right?” He pulled a beer out and took a long swallow. He was tall and rangy, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans and clunky hiking boots. Lauren knew this was one of the many looks he adopted. He had a multiple sartorial disorder. A Seattle grunge band musician one day, a Brooks Brothers executive the next, a J.Crew yacht club member the day after that. But his demeanor toward Lauren was consistent—a conversationalist who refused to listen, a cheery sadist who never seemed to tire of his elaborate games.

  “Tell me how Mom and Dad are. You better not have hurt them,” Lauren said.

  “Better not, or what? I don’t see you have much leverage here, little sis.” His eyes sparkled. Eyes that were so blue they almost didn’t look like eyes. They had mesmerized a lot of people.

  “Tell me how they are.” Lauren sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, staring at him with all the loathing she could muster, which was plenty. Tim leaned against the counter, the coffee brewing behind him.

  “I haven’t done a damn thing to them. Relax. They’re safe in their little hideaway, plenty relieved you were acquitted, I can tell you that. If you’d gone down for murder, they were going to go down too and they knew it. What’s the point in keeping them? They’re fucking expensive to maintain,” he said, as if they were stabled horses. “Without our arrangement in place, it’s bye-bye John and Helen.”