Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  Marcie looked down. “Please. Whatever happens, just keep on being my friend.”

  Ernie felt defeated. Softly, he asked, “Can the father help you?”

  Her eyes misted again. “No. I don’t think so.”

  This, perhaps, was another opening. “Then, for his sake, it might be better if you considered all your choices.”

  She sat straighter. In a new voice, clear and determined, she said, “I’d never ask him to come forward. Unless he decides to, I’ll keep who he is a secret.”

  The thought seemed to burden Marcie; the spurt of life in her expired, and she looked wan and thin again. Helpless to do more, Ernie asked, “When was the last time you ate anything?”

  Marcie stared at the floor again. “Last night, I guess. In the morning, I’ve felt kind of sick.”

  “You should at least try to eat something,” Ernie told her. When Marcie did not argue, he went to the kitchen.

  He had left the breakfast dishes in the sink, he saw, a symbol of his own listlessness since his family had left him. When he looked in the refrigerator, all he had besides hot dogs, milk, and beer was the makings of a tuna sandwich. Suddenly it struck him that his life seemed empty as the refrigerator, and that he did not wish for Marcie’s life ever to be like this.

  Pensive and sad, he took her a tuna sandwich on a plate. “Here,” he said. “Why don’t you have some of this.”

  She tried to smile. “I guess I should. After all, I’m eating for two now, aren’t I.”

  The incongruous sound of this on the lips of a teenage girl he knew and cared for filled Ernie with sudden anger—at her fate, at her parents, at the baby’s father most of all. That Marcie should strive to be the adult she was not, about to live a life she could only dimly imagine, should never be: Ernie was failing his own children by his absence, and now could not stand that everyone else should fail this child.

  Silent, he watched her eat for a time. Then, tentatively, he said, “Maybe we can talk a little more.”

  It seemed to startle her. She put down the sandwich, looking at her watch. “God,” she said. “I have to meet him.…”

  Already she was somewhere else, plunging toward her unhappy new life. “You don’t have to meet him,” Ernie protested. “Not yet. Before you decide anything, let me take you to Planned Parenthood. You shouldn’t be talking to him before you figure out your options.”

  Marcie stood abruptly. “You’ve always listened to me—that’s why I wanted to tell you. But it’s our baby, and I have to talk to him.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I love him, Ernie, and I’ll love our baby too.”

  Ernie watched her, feeling his frustration swell and, he realized, a jealousy he did not care to think about. Marcie came to him, kissing him on the forehead. Gently, she said, “Thanks for being a friend.…”

  Thanks for being a friend, he thought. It was as meaningless as a yearbook inscription for someone you might never see again. As she went through the door, Ernie said, “I’m not just a friend, Marcie—”

  The door closed behind her.

  Crossing the room, Ernie opened it again, hurrying after her.

  He caught her on the front walk, grasping her arm. “I’m more than a friend,” he repeated. “I’m an adult, and I care for you.”

  She looked at his hand, then at Ernie. “I know,” she answered softly. “Because I care for you. But you’re not the father, Ernie. He is.”

  He dropped his hand. “I just don’t want you to throw your life away.”

  Gently, she touched his shoulder. “But I won’t,” she said. “I’m just starting someone else’s life.”

  The words were so simple, so touching in their naive faith, that they disarmed Ernie utterly. He stood there—hardly moving—and watched her drive away.

  Who was he? Ernie wondered.

  Something snapped inside him. Without thinking, he opened the garage and got in the car to follow her.

  Ahead, Marcie turned, perhaps headed for Taylor Park.

  He followed her, glancing in the rearview mirror, as though looking for police. But suddenly what he saw was a middle-aged black man following a teenage girl who was not his lover or his daughter, and who didn’t know she needed him.

  He pulled over to the curb, watching her taillights vanish in the dark.

  * * *

  “So I came home,” Ernie said, “and spent the night alone, as always.” He paused, adding with sardonic bitterness, “But I was wrong. Marcie Calder didn’t throw her life away. Your friend Sam threw it away for her.”

  Tony found that the story had shaken him too badly for a quick response. Quiet, he pondered the difference between the unworldly but self-absorbed girl Sam had described and the resolute and unselfish one Ernie asked him to imagine. If this story was not true, still Ernie told it well. And if it was …

  “I can see it in your eyes,” Ernie told him softly. “You’ve still got quarterback eyes, Tony, and you’re still wondering if you can pin this girl on me. But it won’t work. Because I’m not the father.” Ernie gave him a sudden, mirthless smile. “Just like I told the police and Stella Marz,” he finished softly, “the day after they found her body and it hit me who the father was.”

  * * *

  “Jesus,” Saul Ravin said, and took another swallow of whiskey.

  For a moment, Tony stared out Saul’s window, watching Steelton vanish in the fading light of dusk. “That’s what the Calders weren’t saying, what Stella Marz refused to tell me. She and I have been playing cat and mouse, and Stella’s been the cat.

  “She’s known from day two that Marcie Calder was pregnant—she had Ernie and the autopsy to tell her that much. But it takes a while for the lab to DNA fetal material and come up with a dad. That’s what she’s been waiting for.”

  Saul nodded. “She’s been waiting for motive, Tony. A dad who feared exposure, if dad turns out to be Sam.”

  Tony could not shake the confusion he felt, the clash between the lawyer’s judgment and his own pointless wish that Sam be innocent; today, he could not bring himself to confront Sam with Ernie’s story. “That’s if Ernie was telling the truth,” he finally answered. “If Sam is, maybe she didn’t tell Sam because the baby wasn’t his but Ernie’s. No way Ernie’s kid could be Sam’s, or vice versa.”

  “I expect Stella Marz will tell you, soon enough. At least if she decides to bring murder charges.” Saul pushed a packet of papers across his desk. “In the meanwhile, Sal Russo found Ernie’s wife’s divorce petition. Which, as you suspected, involves a little more than Ernie choosing to live in whitebread city.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Nothing elevating, unless you’re us. Although there’s nothing that points to Marcie as the problem.” Finishing his whiskey, Saul gave Tony a first, bleak smile. “According to Mrs. Nixon, Ernie whacked her.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “You’re Mr. Lord,” Dee Nixon said.

  Standing on the front porch, Tony tried to conceal his surprise, taking in the woman as he did. His first impression was of intellect and a certain haughty severity—close-cropped brown hair, a high forehead, unsmiling eyes behind wire-rim glasses, a thin, somewhat regal face, a defiant tilt to her lanky blue-jeaned frame. She struck him as a woman quick to reach a judgment and perhaps unwilling to change it once she had done so.

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve come a long way for not very much.”

  Tony glanced out at the street—a neighborhood of row houses that seemed barely middle class, with a seedy corner store and a few unkempt lawns that stood out like bad teeth. “So have you,” Tony answered.

  To his relief, this seemed to amuse her a little, as if she placed a value on candor for its own sake. “This is only for the rest of the school year,” she said, “until we get settled in our own place. But it’s not Lake City, Ohio, so that’s something.”

  She pronounced “Ohio” in three distinct and mocking syllables. She did not seem like someone who gave much quarter or was incli
ned to mercy in argument; for that matter, Tony realized, she had yet to ask him in. Silent, he raised his eyebrows, looking past her into the living room.

  “Oh,” she said dryly. “I almost forgot. Do come in.” She moved aside, just enough for Tony to enter, and closed the door behind him.

  The living room was small and dark, brightened only by school pictures of two girls and a boy, presumably belonging to the sister who had taken Dee Nixon in. Dee sat facing him, legs crossed and hands folded; her motions had a certain precision, almost an elegance, and Tony found it easy to imagine her as the algebra teacher she was.

  “Let me save you some trouble,” she said, “so you don’t sit there trying to figure me out. The first thing I did after you called me was to call Ernie. So you should know right away that I don’t hate him. And I already know what you’re up to—trying to see if my kids’ father is a murderer or maybe just can be made to look enough like one to keep Sam Robb from being indicted. In pursuit of which you’ve gone over my divorce petition and decided I just might be worth talking to.”

  Tony found himself smiling. “There goes my first half hour,” he said.

  “There goes your case,” she answered, unsmiling. “But go ahead, ask away. Ernie can tell you that I never lie.”

  The phrase carried a certain irony, though whether directed at Ernie or herself, Tony could not tell. “Then I assume your divorce petition doesn’t, either.”

  Her shoulders seemed to slump a little. “No,” she said. “But there are all sorts of truths, including a few I wish I’d never spoken. Some to Ernie, and that one too.”

  Tony watched her face, betraying sadness for the first time. “With domestic violence,” he said, “I’ve never seen that much use in pretending. In the last case I had, the husband beat the wife until the night she stopped pretending and killed him instead.”

  Dee Nixon was quiet for a moment. “Why don’t you just listen, Mr. Lord. Then you can judge for yourself.”

  * * *

  They had gone to dinner and a movie with Johnny and Lynn D’Abruzzi, shortly before Johnny’s last and fatal heart attack. Marcie Calder had watched the kids; when Ernie had volunteered to drive her home, as always, it gave Dee Nixon time to lie in bed and come to terms with how truly bored—no, just plain alienated—she was in Lake City, Ohio. By the time Ernie entered the bedroom, all that she could think to say was, “I can’t stand this anymore.”

  Ernie stood at the foot of the bed, well knowing what this was—their life in a town full of white folks Dee found to be largely polite, well-meaning, and wholly alien to her own experience. Softly, Ernie said, “I thought it was a nice night.”

  “It was what it was,” Dee said tiredly. “And they are who they are. Look, Johnny’s a nice man and all, and I know you’re old friends. But he’s got nothing much on his mind except for sports, and even your friendship is based on you not pretending to be African-American, or any different than he is. I’ll never be any good at that, and I don’t want our kids to be.” She felt her voice rise, her exasperation breaking through. “God, Ernie, did you hear Lynn D’Abruzzi saying Pat Buchanan had some ‘good ideas’? Which ones? I wanted to ask her.”

  “She means abortion, hon. They’re Catholic.”

  “They’re oblivious. Do you want our kids to be like this? Then I guess racism is a blessing in disguise, because they can’t be.” Dee Nixon softened her voice. “I don’t want Drew and Tonya growing up to be everybody’s one ‘black friend,’ like we are—so damn tolerated by people who, if they’re lucky, will see them as ‘exceptions’ to all those other black folks out there they don’t know and never think about, except as symbols of what they’ve gotten away from by living here.”

  Ernie sighed. “ ‘They’ want what we want, Dee. A safe place, good schools, somewhere kids can still be kids.” He paused, leaning on the bed. “I know what this town can be like, better than anyone. But there’s no paradise on earth for us, and there won’t be for Drew and Tonya. If we’ve got a right to be here, they’ll know that they do too.”

  She sat up in bed. “You know what this comes down to, don’t you? I grew up in a black neighborhood. You grew up in a white one. It’s like having a father that beats you—part of you may hate him, but he’s the only father you know, so the other part of you hates yourself and wants to be like him. Till your dying day, what you’ll always need most is his approval. And you’ll never, ever get it.”

  He sat down on the bed, angry now, yet trying so hard not to be that it was frustrating to watch him. Softly, he said, “There isn’t a white person in this town who condescends to me as much as you do. You’re so damn intent on showing what my childhood did to me that you can’t step outside your own. For you, everything—and I mean everything—is defined by being black. You take your own ghetto wherever you go, and now you want our kids to live in it.”

  It stung her. “How,” she said bitterly, “did we ever get married? How did I not see it long before I let you drag us here?”

  “See what?”

  “I was your consolation prize, Ernie. What you really wanted was to marry the Lake City prom queen and make it into the white boys’ fraternity. For you, life really is high school, isn’t it? That’s why you came back here—to make the fraternity at last.…”

  “Bullshit.” She could see the vein in his temple. “You’re talking bullshit.”

  “Bullshit?” In her own anger and frustration, Dee gave him the faint, superior smile she knew that he despised. “Isn’t little Marcie your prom queen, Ernie? Isn’t that why you spend all those hours talking to her? It sure can’t be her mind.…” She stood abruptly. “Oh, I know—you’re just concerned about her.”

  He stood with her. “You fucking bitch…”

  She stuck her face in his. “It’s all so pathetic, Ernie. She needs another daddy, so she plays into your white-girl fantasy. She gets an audience, and all she has to do is let you imagine fucking her—”

  She could see it in his eyes, the instant before his palm crashed into her face. The world went white; as she reeled back against the wall, blinking away the tears of shock, Dee Nixon was honest enough to admit to herself that she had wanted him to do this.

  Ernie collapsed back on the bed, stricken by his own shame. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry.…”

  * * *

  Dee Nixon shook her head. “I didn’t leave because I thought he’d hit me again. I left because part of me had wanted him to do it, like my father did my mother.” Her voice filled with regret and self-disgust. “It was my own ugliness that scared me half to death—drove me to counseling, in fact. When my lawyer put that in the petition, I fired him. And now there’s you.”

  Tony tilted his head. “Did you believe that about Marcie Calder?”

  Removing her glasses, Dee Nixon wiped their lenses, pensive now. “If Ernie felt that way, he didn’t know it. I can’t really see him sleeping with that girl, and I sure can’t see him hurting her. If for no other reason than that he’s so afraid of his own true feelings.”

  Tony was quiet for a while. “In high school,” he said finally, “Ernie did me a kindness once. I never thought it was because he wanted to be like me. He just felt sorry for me, that’s all.”

  She put on her glasses, composed again. “He said you were a friend. But I don’t think he had ‘friends,’ really—I guess what he meant by that is you’d actually been decent to him.” She paused, leaning forward. “And now you’re looking to make him out the worst kind of racist cliché—the violent black man, post-O.J. The thinking part of me doesn’t defend any man hitting a woman for any reason. But I was there, and I know my husband. What happened between us was a private quarrel, two people’s weaknesses flaring up until they exploded like they never had before. Race may have destroyed our marriage, but I don’t want it to destroy him any more than it has already. So don’t expect me to help you, Mr. Lord. Because whatever Ernie did that night, it’s not nearly enough for him to deserve you.”
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  * * *

  On the flight from Chicago to Steelton, Tony wrestled with his conscience.

  His own instincts suggested that Dee Nixon was right: that although capable of violence, Ernie Nixon was not, by nature, a violent man; that such a portrayal could, in the end, appeal to subliminal bigotry. But she had her own share of guilt and shame; her own reasons—two children—for keeping the peace with an estranged husband; her own issues, including race, which might make Marcie Calder or Sam Robb a little less important.

  “Sam Robb…” she’d said to Tony as he left. “I used to work with him. All charisma and a yard wide, that kind of careless cocky charm that seems to take itself for granted. Until I saw how needy he was. That way, he reminded me of Ernie—hard to see a man who craves approval like that as a murderer.” But it was clear to Tony that she didn’t care much.

  Caring for Sam was Tony’s job, unless he gave it up.

  EIGHTEEN

  “You probably wonder,” Stella Marz said without preface, “if I’ve been fucking around with you. But then I’ve been wondering what you did to Jennifer Travis.”

  “You have been fucking around with me.” Tony sat down. “About Travis, all I did was preview my cross-examination. Someone else should have been honest enough to tell her that coming forward might take her places she didn’t want to go. But not to the criminal courts, I’m pretty sure—whatever its truth, her story is not one bit probative of murder.”

  Stella considered him, her eyes brown-green ovals of thought. “You always manage to look so innocent. I can’t even tell if you’re embarrassed.”