Guns and Roses

by Brennan, Allison; Armstrong, Lori G. ; Tabke, Karin; Causey, Toni McGee; St. Claire, Roxanne; Brown, Josie; Littlefield, Sophie; Griffin, Laura; James, Lorelei; Day, Sylvia

  “On a Sunday morning?” Joe said with surprise.

  “Yeah, I guess she does this just about every week. Army’s gone to pick her up.”

  “That’s some kind of dedication.”

  “Hey.” Odell glared a little balefully. “You want to talk dedication—I’m here, ain’t I?”

  The girls had the television on the news, though no one was watching. Most sipped from paper coffee cups and sat in clusters of three and four. A few slept, their fuzzy printed throws making the room seem like one of Madiha’s sleepovers.

  “Do we all have to talk to you guys?” one of the girls demanded. “Even if we were, like asleep the whole time?”

  “An officer will need to speak with each of you,” Joe said firmly.

  “Can we at least go see the guy?” another girl asked. “You know, like to identify him?”

  “It’s Tank Nestor, isn’t it?” another said, prompting all the girls to talk at once.

  But Joe’s attention was diverted. On the television they were showing footage of Shi’a Muslims in Islamabad observing the Day of Ashura by beating themselves with chains, some attached to razors and knives. It was the stock footage they ran every year during the Muslim month of Muharram, along with a few interviews with the faithful in the San Francisco bay area, sort of the Shi’a equivalent of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

  The casual way the media lumped it all together irked Joe. Only ten percent of Pakistani Muslims were Shi’a; most were Sunni, like his family. Matham, the ritual chest beating, was frowned upon. None of his parents’ friends in Fremont had flogged themselves with anything stronger than a Swedish massage yesterday; he was willing to bet. Ah, well, the blending of cultures took time, even here in the shadow of one of the most progressive cities in the country.

  He forced his attention back to the girls.

  “One at a time,” he said loudly, holding up a palm for emphasis. “Who is Tank Nestor?”

  At this, the girls fell silent, eyeing each other with what might have been complicity or merely a sudden shyness.

  “Kaylanna dated him,” a voice finally said uncertainly. Joe found the speaker, a plain-faced girl near the back who was marking her place in a textbook with a finger.

  The girl who was wearing the “Boys Suck” T-shirt turned and glared at her accuser. “I wouldn’t call it dating.”

  The girl who had spoken up shrugged and looked at the floor. “I just thought…”

  Before she could finish her sentence, Army Fiske came through the door trailing a thin, shivering, wet-haired girl in oversized shorts. Gia Hanover, no doubt.

  ~*~

  Joe asked Kaylanna Pace to speak with him and Trina privately, while Odell organized the girls to be interviewed and Fiske escorted Gia to her room to towel off her hair and put on a sweatshirt. Kaylanna sprawled in the same seat where Robby Singh had evaded Trina’s questions. Somewhere between Joe’s first encounter with her and now, she had managed to apply even more makeup, and her lips shone as though they were molded from wet vinyl.

  “You dated the victim.”

  “I didn’t date him. No one ‘dated’ Tank.” Kaylanna made air quotes using lacquered nails painted a shade of red so dark it was almost black.

  “Okay.” Trina gave the girl a fraction of a smile, and not a warm one, at that. “How would you describe it?”

  “We hung out. Look, Tank? He’s a junior. He’s a starter on the football team. He doesn’t really spend a lot of time with freshmen, get it?”

  “What about Gia Hanover?” Trina said. So far, no one had been able to recall seeing Gia since the night before, and her roommate had gone home for the weekend.

  The face Kaylanna made indicated that she didn’t think much of the girl either. “Look, Gia tried to be a Little Sister at Sigma Mu. But she wasn’t picked.”

  “What’s a Little Sister?”

  Kaylanna looked at Trina like she was stupid. “You know, like, the girls who get invited to all their parties. It’s only freshmen girls, before they join sororities. Anyway, if I was her…” Kaylanna paused and grimaced, as though the notion was too distasteful to contemplate. “If I was her I wouldn’t ever go back. But Gia just didn’t get it. She went to that party with some of the other…” Kaylanna let her voice trail away and then sighed.

  “Some other what?”

  “Some of the other losers. Okay? I didn’t want to say it but, you know, you asked. Can I go now?”

  “I’d still like to hear more about your own relationship with Tank,” Joe said. “Can you be more specific about what you mean by ‘hanging out’?”

  Kaylanna Pace stared at Joe through half-lowered lids that were heavy with mascara, assessing him.

  “Is this, like, off the record?” she finally asked.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Like if I say something, not about Tank but like, that could incriminate someone for something totally different —” Joe held up a hand. “We’re not interested in anything unrelated to Tank’s death.” He had a pretty clear idea where this was going.

  “He gave me some Ritalin, okay? But only for finals.”

  There was a knock at the door. Paulette Huang poked her head in, pushing her glossy hair behind her ears.

  “Hey, Joe, Ed wants you,” she said. “It’s kind of a, you probably want to come now.”

  “Go ahead,” Trina said. “I’ll finish here.”

  Joe followed Paulette down the hall, neither of them speaking as they passed the line of girls waiting for interviews. She led him into a room that initially looked much like the others—two beds, two desks, and clothes and books strewn everywhere.

  Ed knelt next to one of the narrow closets, shining a light into its corners.

  “Blood everywhere,” Paulette said, pointing out red streaks on the side of a canvas hamper. The strong beam of Ed’s light revealed smears dried on the floor.

  “Whose room is this?” Joe asked.

  “Gia Hanover’s.”

  ~*~

  Gia pinched the skin of the soft underside of her arm; a practice she’d recently discovered brought her some relief. The room they had brought her to, all the way downtown in a big brick and glass building, was nothing like the dim cinderblock rooms on cop shows; it was actually kind of nice, with a view of tree branches and a table with a smooth, cool synthetic surface. Someone had brought her a Sprite, but Gia intended to drink only water today.

  She knew she’d think more clearly if she ate something, but she wasn’t going to eat. Not today.

  She’d taken some extra time in the shower at the gym, the water turned up as high as she could stand, scrubbing herself hard with the scratchy industrial fabric of the washcloth. Afterwards she hadn’t bothered to dry her hair. She just wanted to get back to her room, but when she came out of the locker room, that police officer was waiting.

  For one crazy minute, she thought he was there to talk to her about Tank, about what he’d done to her. The problem was that—though she had a good idea of what had happened—she wasn’t entirely sure. It was possible she hadn’t protested enough.

  But no. The cop, Fiske, was nice enough, but it was clear that it was her they wanted to talk to. It had been hard enough to follow him meekly through the barely-stirring streets of campus; harder still to pass the open doors of the lounge. Everyone was in there, staring at her. And now this. How long had she been sitting here waiting — ten minutes, ten hours? It was hard to know, especially with her head pounding and the sick feeling in her stomach.

  “God damn it, you can’t keep her in there!” The sudden and unexpected sound of her father’s voice outside in the hall jerked Gia wide-awake. Frank was loud. He used that voice to get what he wanted, around the house and presumably, on the job too, though now that he had been promoted to CIO or whatever it was, maybe he automatically got his way.

  Gia got up and went to stand by the door, but she couldn’t hear anything more, so after a minute she sat down again.


  Frank was here. That had to be bad.

  ~*~

  Joe tried his mother again. The interview with the Hanover girl meant he’d be late to his parents’ place, but as usual, she wasn’t picking up her phone.

  At least Trina had stayed back with Fiske to finish talking to the girls on the dorm floor after the body was taken to the morgue. Tank’s R.A. was on his way to id the body; the wallet in the pocket of the blood-soaked jeans contained both Terrence Nestor’s driver’s license and a pretty good fake Nevada license with the same photo, supposedly belonging to a twenty-two-year-old named Jackson Abernathy.

  Once Joe finished with this interview, he’d be done until tomorrow, when the autopsy was scheduled. That would still give him time to get down to Fremont and back in time to watch the Raiders game that he’d recorded.

  Joe wasn’t looking forward to interrogating the girl, who looked miserable, frail and most definitely underweight. Odell was dealing with the father, at least.

  Joe entered the room, moving slowly, as you might around a skittish cat. Getting the preliminaries out of the way, he watched Gia carefully, but she spoke in a monotone and stared at his neck, never meeting his eyes, and picked at her wrists.

  There was something Joe wanted to know before he started asking about the night before. “Where’s your mom?”

  The girl’s eyes flickered. “Rehab.” The ragged fingernails of one hand skittered along the skin of her arm.

  “Oh. You live with your dad, when you’re home?”

  Gia finally glanced at him. “I don’t know. I mean, I never have before. But now, maybe I’ll have to.”

  Despite the circumstances, Joe felt the beginnings of pity for the girl. Early stats were in—she was an only child, parents divorced three years, both parents’ addresses were in an expensive L.A. zip code.

  “You mean, because your mom’s not there?” he clarified.

  “Yeah.” Gia frowned. “Why else?”

  Joe placed his palms flat on the table in front of him and tried to decide how to proceed.

  “What happened with Terrence Nestor?” he asked gently.

  “That’s his name? Terrence?” Gia seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Tank, I understand he goes by.”

  “Yeah, I never heard anyone call him anything else.”

  Joe already knew that Terrence/Tank wasn’t exactly a gentleman around the girls that flocked to Sigma Mu parties. “He was hard to stop,” one of the girls had said when Trina grilled her. “You had to watch yourself around him. But everyone knew that.”

  It was something she said after that, which had Joe feeling uncertain about which direction to go, “Not that Gia ever watched herself.” The girl clammed up when he pressed the point, but it had been clear enough—Gia went with nearly anyone who asked and did whatever they asked. She’d already earned a reputation for being a slut, and it was only January of her freshman year.

  He watched Gia carefully; she practically vibrated with anxiety. “Did you know Tank well?” he finally asked.

  Gia shrugged and stared at her hand. The fingers trembled slightly. “He was in my Bio class.”

  “Was yesterday the first time you… went out?”

  She glanced at him briefly, then away. “We didn’t go out. Me and some friends went to his fraternity for the party.”

  “But you and he spent time alone.”

  “After a while, yeah, I mean, we all drank together. And we had pizza delivered. But later…” She shrugged.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” Joe said. And he didn’t, though this was a tricky juncture; depending on which way this went, it could shift the course of the questioning. “I was just wondering what went wrong.”

  For a long time Gia said nothing at all. Joe had to force himself not to glance at the wall of glass, where he knew Trina was watching.

  Then she looked up, and he was surprised to see fat tears brimming in her eyes.

  “I don’t remember.”

  ~*~

  By late afternoon, Joe was in the family room of his parents’ condo in Fremont, lifting a spoon to his father’s slack mouth. When Joe and Omar were kids, they’d spent most afternoons stretched out on the floor of this room in front of the television, Omar hogging the remote. Omar was firstborn, by seventeen months, and even as a child, he’d taken easily to privilege, never questioning his right to the top bunk, the second chicken leg, the front seat when Joe and Omar accompanied their father to the tobacco shop on Sundays.

  Joe had been the disappointing son, the one who frustrated his parents by not living up to his potential. But it was Joe who returned to Fremont every Sunday to visit with Haroon, to tackle the list of chores Shamim had been compiling all week. Omar, saddled with a wife and two young kids, visited his parents whenever he could, swinging by after work with takeout from Shalimar, which had been their father’s favorite.

  Joe and Omar had taken markedly different paths in life: Omar with his arranged marriage, his sprawling house in the Silver Creek Hills in San Jose, his high-tech industry job with people reporting to him in thirteen states—versus Joe, who’d spent years working private security before finally becoming a cop in the affluent community of Montair and surprising everyone by being promoted to detective in a record-setting four years on the job.

  The brothers maintained the same close bond that they’d always had. Omar and Yasmin constantly tried to set Joe up on blind dates; the entire family begged him to settle down. They’d even given up hope of him marrying a Pakistani girl. Any woman willing to give his parents grandchildren—that seemed to be the only requirement these days.

  “Come on, Abba,” Joe murmured. “A little more.”

  On the spoon was aloo gobhi, once his father’s favorite. Shamim still made it for him on Sundays. Haroon had no trouble helping himself to seconds until a warm autumn night nearly a decade ago when he came out of the Rite Aid on Grimmer Boulevard, carrying his wife’s blood pressure prescription in a plastic sack, and was savagely beaten in the parking lot behind the store. The police quickly arrested his attackers, a pair of drunken electrical contractors who’d driven in from Castro Valley looking for trouble, but unfortunately couldn’t tell a Lahore-born accountant from a would-be jihadist.

  Since the attack, Shamim did an admirable job attending to her husband’s needs, according to the continuing care workers with whom she occasionally urged Joe to speak. Mostly, she needed Joe to come for a few hours on Sunday so that she could get her hair done and do her shopping for the week.

  Joe stole a glance at his watch, though his surreptitiousness was unnecessary — Haroon’s mental capacity was on par with a toddler’s—and saw that it had been only forty minutes since his arrival. Once he got his father fed, he would tack down the carpet that had begun to come loose from the edge strip in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom and take a look at the kitchen sink, which was, according to his mother, draining slowly. After that, there would be nothing to do but watch television until his mother returned, when he’d bring up all her purchases from the car and tell her that he and his father had had a great time together.

  Then he’d bolt, fueled by his own guilt.

  His phone rang.

  “Detective Bashir,” he said, turning away from his father, who had a wet rime of orange sauce around his lower lip and was staring out the window and pinching a fold of his trousers between his fingers, his crabbed hands working the fabric restlessly.

  “She took roofies,” Trina said. “They showed up on her tox.”

  “Who?”

  “Gia Hanover. And look, I went ahead and had Odell bring Robby Singh back. I thought we should talk to him some more. This frat shit’s messed up, half the girls we talked to are afraid to have a drink at those parties. How fast can you get back up here?”

  As Joe listened, his body cramped and uncomfortable in the dainty upholstered chair his mother used when she fed her husband, he tracked the details Trina relayed with only a fraction of his
brain. The rest he focused on pushing back against the complicated tide of guilt, resentment, anxiety that washed over him whenever his family obligations intruded on his job.

  He told Trina that he’d get there as quickly as possible and tried his mother again. She didn’t answer her phone, of course. She had promised to try harder, mostly at the urging of her two grandchildren, who at eight and ten were incredulous that anyone, especially their Daadi, would be unavailable to them at any hour of the day. Joe imagined the phone stuffed deep in his mother’s fake Coach handbag with the ringer turned off and muttered under his breath as he hung up and dialed Omar.

  “Hey, Jamshed.” Omar had never called Joe by the name he adopted in high school, even after his parents relented.

  “Omar, I need to you to come sit with Dad—Mom’s not picking up and I have to go back in.”

  “Oh, damn, love to but we’re up in Mendocino. There’s a goat farm at this creamery where the kids can—”

  “How fast can you get back?” Joe interrupted, a little more forcefully than he’d intended.

  There was a pause, and when Omar spoke again, his voice was concerned. “Yasmin’s taken Taj over to the gift shop. It’s crazy here, the crowds. It’ll take us at least an hour, hour and a half to get back to the city and that’s after we—”

  “Never mind.” Already, Joe was keeping Trina waiting. A longer delay was out of the question.

  “You know I would, if I could,” Omar said. “And listen, any time you need me to take a Sunday, you just need to give me a little notice and I can—”

  “That’s not how it works.” Joe regretting snapping as soon as he spoke. “I’m sorry. Look. I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe I can come see the kids one night this week, take ‘em for pizza or something.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Relieved now that the situation was resolved, Omar sounded affectionate, if distracted. “Give Dad my—”

  But Joe had hung up before Omar could say it—love. Give Dad my love, a word his brother had no trouble uttering as if it was nothing. Even when they were kids, Omar had been that way. The affectionate one, the one who cried at his wedding to a woman he barely knew. The one who worried that Joe was missing out—on marriage, kids, hell, a barbecue grill and a minivan. More than once Joe had used the excuse that someone had to take care of their parents, but at its core, he knew the excuse was a hollow one.