by Sacchi Green
“Officer Phillips, with all due respect, have you ever held a child in your life?”
Nechama braced herself for trouble, but Tom surprised her. “Seven years as a camp counselor, certifications in CPR and first aid, and I was most of the way to a degree in social work specializing in dealing with young children before I changed direction and became a cop.”
Nechama barely held back an exclamation of surprise. The witness was just as taken aback. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then stepped out of the doorway and gestured Tom inside. She watched him walk down the hall, and Nechama felt an irrational flicker of jealousy. Then the woman squared her shoulders and turned her attention fully to Nechama for the first time.
“You can come inside, too, Officer Zayden.”
“Thank you.” Nechama hesitated, feeling for a moment as if she were on a first date. She held out her hand. “I apologize, but I never caught your name.”
“Marleen Williams. Come inside.”
Nechama couldn’t resist staring at Marleen’s ass as she led the way into the kitchen and poured coffee for both of them. Marleen didn’t so much walk as stalk. Her every gesture suggested a simmering, sensual anger that made Nechama want to unwrap her and unwind her secrets.
“Ms. Williams,” Nechama said after a moment. She forced her eyes higher as Marleen turned around, just managing to meet her gaze despite a distracted moment staring at her full lips. “I’m sure this is a difficult situation for you, but I’d like to make a recording of you talking about what you’ve seen today. I’m walking into this cold, so I’ll ask you to keep that in mind as you describe what’s happened.”
Marleen nodded, but her eyes stayed wary. Nechama got out her digital recorder and placed it on the table between them. Marleen set down coffee cups for both of them, the liquid almost as black as her skin. Nechama usually took cream and sugar, but she didn’t feel she could ask.
Marleen sat at the table, and her face got even harder. “The upstairs neighbor’s name is Chantel. We watch—watched—each other’s kids sometimes. I try not to leave mine with her—too many different men up in there, and too much liquor. But sometimes. Anyway, last night, I was sitting up late after I put my two to bed. I heard a thud.” The woman paused, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand.
“Can you describe the thud?” Nechama prodded.
“Heavy. Loud. Horrible. It was like I already knew what it was. I didn’t really know. But I walked to the spot under where it happened and waited there. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. I thought about opening the door.” Marleen stopped and shook her head. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t go to sleep after that for a long time.”
“About what time was this?”
“Maybe around midnight? Then in the morning, little Sean comes knocking on my door. He says his mommy’s sleeping on the kitchen floor, and he can’t get her up.”
“What did you do?” Nechama said.
Marleen took a long drink of her coffee. Nechama tried hers. It was so hot that she thought Marleen must have burned her mouth and throat, though she showed no sign of pain.
“I told him to go away,” Marleen said finally. “Told him we were all tired with damn kids driving us crazy, and it was a Sunday morning, and the good Lord made a day of rest for a reason. He came back three more times, and I kept sending him away. But the last time, I was lying there thinking about that thud again, and the next time he came, I let him in. I made him eat a bowl of cereal with me before I would go upstairs to help him.”
“And what did you see when you went upstairs?”
Marleen slammed her coffee cup down on the table, causing some of the burning liquid to splash out and onto her hand. She didn’t react. “What do you think I fucking saw? I saw Chantel’s dead body on the kitchen floor.”
Nechama blinked and cleared her throat. “I’m very sorry for what you had to see, Ms. Williams,” she began.
“Are you?” Marleen challenged. “I’m not like you. I don’t get excited dealing with these situations.”
“Ms. Williams, I do this because I want to help people, not because I get excited.”
“Really?” Marleen’s hand darted out and pinched Nechama’s left nipple. Nechama had to bite back a yelp that would have been equal parts surprise and arousal. She jumped up from her chair, one hand on her gun.
“You’re going to shoot me now?” Marleen said. “I saw your little nipples getting hard when I was talking to you.”
Nechama glanced helplessly at the voice recorder. There was no way she wanted audio from the last minute playing in court. “Ms. Williams, I’d appreciate it if we could focus on taking your statement. Your testimony could be very important to finding the person who did this to your neighbor. What you or I feel about it really doesn’t matter compared to that, does it?”
Marleen gave a sharp nod, leading with her chin, lowering her hands into her lap.
Nechama stopped her current recording and queued up a new one. It felt unethical to erase the embarrassing one, but she could try to set things up so it was easy not to play it in court. She kept her eyes off Marleen altogether, choosing a spot in the middle of the table. Her left breast felt like Marleen had burned it. She was so aroused, her nipple almost stung. She took a deep breath. “Now, I think we’re going to need to start over.”
“Officer Zayden, would you say that Marleen Williams cooperated with investigating personnel?”
Nechama didn’t like the way the defendant’s attorney was sneering at her. She shifted uncomfortably in the witness box. Thank god she was able to show up in uniform to testify—if she’d had to change into a dress, she wouldn’t have had a prayer of thinking straight.
“She did,” Nechama said.
“Did she say or do anything hostile toward you or any of the other officers?”
Nechama hesitated. “Not that I can recall.”
The attorney grinned. “Officer Zayden, I’m about to play back what I think is a puzzling interaction with a key witness. Would you like to explain anything about it before I do?”
The prosecutor finally stood up. “Objection, your honor.” About goddamn time, Nechama thought. Unfortunately, the objection didn’t do any good. The defense attorney was trying to discredit Marleen, and the judge deemed it relevant to point to the incident with Nechama as a possible sign of mental instability. Nechama wished her skin were as dark as Marleen’s—she’d never felt so on the spot while on the stand, and she was sure that even her relatively swarthy skin wasn’t enough to hide her blush.
By the time she got off the stand, she had no idea what had been done to the prosecution’s case and barely any memory of what she had actually said. One male juror was leering at her. As she stepped down and made her way out of the courtroom, he winked. Nechama felt her blush intensify, and she dropped her eyes.
Once in the hallway, she made her way straight to the bathroom. She stepped inside, closed and locked the door behind her. Only then did she realize she wasn’t alone.
Marleen Williams sat hunched in a corner under the sink, tears streaming down her face but no sound coming out of her mouth. Shoving aside her own feeling of humiliation, Nechama dropped to her knees beside the other woman. “Ms. Williams, are you all right?”
She returned a hostile stare. Nechama just waited a moment, until the other woman spoke grudgingly. “Does it fucking look like I’m all right?”
Memories of the defense attorney’s grin were all too recent for Nechama. “Fine,” she said. “Forget I asked.”
Marleen scrubbed angrily at her face. “Wait, Officer Zayden. I’m sorry. I know none of this is your fault.”
“You’re damn right it’s not,” Nechama said.
“I don’t want to be here. I didn’t want to testify. I don’t want to think about this. I never wanted to see it.” Tears began to flow again, but they didn’t affect Marleen’s low, unsettlingly calm voice. Her eyes seemed governed by an entirely different set of laws and emotions tha
n the rest of her body. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be psychologically evaluated. I’m not a criminal.”
The singsong litany showed no sign of abating. “Ms. Williams,” Nechama said. “Ms. Williams. Marleen.” The other woman finally looked up at her first name.
“What do you want from me?”
“I meant what I said. I want to help you.” Cautiously, Nechama moved a little closer. She didn’t think talking with Marleen Williams would compromise the trial. They’d both testified already. In any case, it was too late to stop now.
Nechama touched the back of the other woman’s hand, as lightly as she could. She was close enough to smell Marleen’s perfume, a spicy, food-based scent. It soured Nechama’s stomach a bit now, layered over the other smells in the bathroom.
Marleen flipped her hand over and grabbed Nechama’s, hard enough to hurt. Her fingernails dug into Nechama’s skin. “What do you want?”
“I told you.” Nechama tried to pull back, but the other woman’s grip was iron.
“I don’t think you’re telling the truth.” Marleen pulled her closer in. With her free hand, she grabbed the back of Nechama’s head, winding her fingers through the coarse curls there and yanking her head back. She kissed Nechama with a hard mouth, teeth cutting lips, tongue prying Nechama’s jaw open, breath forcing into lungs. Nechama was too startled to close her eyes, and she saw Marleen’s cold triumph when she couldn’t help letting out a moan.
Still controlling Nechama’s head with a fistful of hair, Marleen pulled Nechama back. Nechama tried to stay calm, but her breath was coming in a mix of panicky gasps and aroused moans. Marleen flicked at each of Nechama’s nipples. “Think I just gave you a little of what you want.”
“Why are you doing this? Maybe I…maybe I did want you when I saw you. That didn’t mean I was going to make a move or do anything unfair to you.”
“That’s what they all say,” Marleen said, jerking Nechama’s head for emphasis. “Going all the way back to Daddy and Uncle Jefferson and all the way up through Mrs. Pontin senior year of high school and Jeff Wainwright, career counselor, and Miss Maura Pembroke, loan officer at the local bank.” Marleen’s fierce eyes were rimmed with red.
“Jesus,” Nechama said. The revelation killed her arousal for the moment. “You thought I was going to make you do something with me before I’d be willing to do my job?”
Marleen stared back. Nechama pulled herself free of the other woman’s grasp. She got up in a kneeling position. “Now, you listen to me,” she said, her voice low and strong. “I’m a damn good cop. I’m not about to take advantage of anybody. If you want help from me, all you have to do is let me know. You don’t have to put out for me, and you certainly don’t have to humiliate me. Are we clear?”
Slowly, Marleen nodded.
“Now, do you need something from me?” Nechama said. “Because otherwise, I’m going to walk out of this bathroom now.”
The moment stretched. Nechama sighed and turned away. Before she could get to her feet, Marleen grabbed her again, this time by the wrist. Her hand was like a claw as she pulled Nechama closer. Nechama’s pulse began to pound, the chemicals in her body flickering between repulsed adrenaline and mindbending awareness of the other woman’s shape, smell and skin.
Then Marleen fell against Nechama’s chest, tears flowing fast, snot running from her nose. She wrapped her arms around Nechama’s waist and clung. For a moment, everything fell into place and Nechama held her, feeling the noiseless sobs wrack the other woman’s body.
“I never wanted to see, I never wanted to see, I never wanted to see,” Marleen repeated.
“Of course you didn’t,” Nechama said. “No one does. It’s a terrible thing to see.” She hesitated, then began to stroke Marleen’s back.
“I haven’t slept a whole night through since I heard that thud coming from the ceiling,” Marleen continued. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can think is that I’m the one lying on the kitchen floor, with my kids around wanting to wake me up.” Marleen paused for a moment, looking up at Nechama. “How do you do it? How do you go to sleep at night? You must be seeing this all the time.”
Nechama sighed. “Every night before I go to bed, I light a candle and say a blessing for everyone who’s on my mind. Then I get in bed and pull the sheets up around me and say the Shema. It’s a Jewish prayer. My mother always told me that if I said it before bed, nothing could come and hurt me in the night. Then I close my eyes and do my best.”
“I try to say the Lord’s Prayer,” Marleen says, “but I don’t know if I believe God is protecting me.”
Her eyes were wide and, for the first time, innocent. Nechama thought for a moment of the children she’d never had, the people she’d never let herself love. She thought of the ways she’d lost faith, and the ways she kept trying.
“You know why I became a cop?” Nechama said. She never told this story to anyone, not the real story. There was no stopping the wild impulse that drove her forward now. “I found my mother dead when I was eleven. The cops who came weren’t very nice to me. I think they were too shocked to be nice. She looked terrible. You know why I say the Shema every night? It’s because I thought she must have died because she forgot to say it. Even after I stopped believing that, I couldn’t stop saying the prayer. I wanted to be a cop because I wanted to make sure there was someone nice around to talk to the kids, and to the other people who are affected by what’s happened.”
“You never stopped seeing her,” Marleen said. “You never learned how to go to sleep.”
Nechama swallowed. “Yeah. I guess that’s right.”
“Did you hear what happened with the Costas case?” Tom said. He was driving the car on patrol. His tone was casual, but Nechama saw how his jaw worked and his knuckles whitened as they gripped the steering wheel. “The guy got off.”
“Yeah?” Nechama said. Her tone was the same. It was funny how they needed to play this game with each other, she thought. As if they were actually going to fool someone. “I thought the evidence against the guy looked pretty good.”
“It looked good to us,” Tom said. “We know what evidence usually looks like. Damn juries these days have been spoiled by ‘CSI.’ They won’t find someone guilty unless forensics finds a fingerprint complete with DNA, name, and signed confession.”
Nechama snorted. Then she sobered. “Marleen must be taking this pretty hard.”
Tom leered. “First name basis now, is it? You’d know whether she’s been taking it hard. How hard have you been giving it to her?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Seriously, you should have cuffed her when she grabbed you. Assaulting a police officer. Would have made the whole thing look less suspicious. They still would have had to throw out her testimony, but the incident wouldn’t have added to the defense attorney’s argument that ‘the cops mishandled the situation.’”
Nechama looked out the window. It was a fierce summer day. Everyone walking by on the street looked like they were barely keeping themselves upright under the heat. “Tom, I tell you what. You advise me on how to do my job when you’ve got a couple more years in, okay?”
“Both you and Marleen are ‘children of trauma,’ huh?”
She snapped her head left to look at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“We studied it in the psych courses I took for my social work degree. Even as adults, children of trauma tend to form twisted alliances with each other. Misplaced loyalty, keeping secrets, it’s all part of the pathology.”
“Thanks, Tom,” Nechama said. The sight of his overearnest expression made her sick. “Send the bill to my home address, okay?”
Nechama resisted the urge to park her car around the corner and walk to Marleen’s front door. She didn’t have anything to hide, she told herself. She wasn’t doing anything wrong.
She hesitated outside. The peeling gray house paint seemed on the verge of revealing the building’s bloody insides.
<
br /> Nechama took a deep breath and went in the front, turning left to knock at Marleen’s door.
“What the hell do you want? Am I a suspect now?” Marleen said. She looked like she’d just come home from work. She wore a black pencil skirt, a rich brown silk blouse, an architectural pair of gold earrings and peep-toe ankle boots. But the hot day must have gotten to her, because Nechama could smell her body even from several feet away.
“Ms. Williams,” Nechama began, then stopped. They had to be way past last names after the nipple tweaks and kissing and crying. “Marleen. I just wanted to see how you’re doing. I know they didn’t treat you well on the stand, and I heard the defendant was acquitted.”
Marleen shrugged. “I never expected it to be fair.” She cocked her head to the side and her face softened slightly. “You on duty right now?”
Nechama looked down at herself. The ever-present uniform almost seemed part of her skin. “No. I probably should have taken this off before coming out here.”
“It’s all right. You want some coffee?”
“Yeah. I would.” Nechama couldn’t help flicking her eyes up and down Marleen’s body again. Everything about the other woman—her eyes, her nails, her words—seemed sharp and designed to get deep inside of Nechama.
“I can’t promise I’m going to behave like a sane and reasonable person,” Marleen said.
“Is that the line the defense attorney used on you? He’s a prick.”
Marleen smiled and led Nechama inside.
“Where are the kids?” Nechama said.
“Their grandma is watching them for a while. I’ll go over to see them in a bit. I didn’t want them staying in this building. The doctors said they didn’t understand what happened, but I think they did.”
Nechama nodded. She noticed details of the house more than she had last time. Marleen liked big, bold colors and wild pieces, but she had only one such thing in every room. Nechama couldn’t help looking up at the ceiling.
“You can still hear the thud, can’t you?” Marleen said.
