A Good Killing

by Allison Leotta

  So Mom told my story, piece by piece, occasionally turning to me to confirm that she was getting a detail right. Sergeant Gargaron did not move his hands from their folded position on his desk. I hadn’t told Mom the part about Rob, and so she did not tell his father. After she finished, he opened a notebook.

  “So let me get this right,” he said. “Your daughter is the one who called Coach Fowler, correct?”

  “Yes,” Mom said.

  He took the cap off a ballpoint pen, touched the tip to his meaty tongue, and finally jotted something in his notebook.

  “Your daughter didn’t call you?”

  “I was at work.”

  “You do have a cell phone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mm hm. Coach Fowler allegedly went to this party at your daughter’s request.”

  “Yes.”

  “He drove her home at her request too.”

  “I . . . suppose you could say that.”

  “Although no one saw her leave with him.”

  “I’m not sure.” She looked at me. I shrugged and shook my head. Another jot in the notebook.

  “When she came home, she didn’t tell anyone what allegedly happened?”

  “No one was home. I told you, I was working.”

  “Mm hm.” Another mark in the notebook. “In fact, she showered and went to bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then had breakfast in the morning? Without telling you anything?”

  “Yes, and then we went to church.” Mom started to sound annoyed.

  “Where she didn’t mention the alleged incident to anyone. Not even to your minister? Or her Sunday school teacher?”

  “She doesn’t go to Sunday school anymore. She’s fifteen.”

  “Just the facts, ma’am.”

  “That is a fact.”

  He frowned and wrote the longest entry yet in his notebook, as if my waning religious education or Mom’s snark were the most important pieces of information in the case.

  “And you say she was a virgin.”

  I wanted the chair to swallow me up.

  “Yes. But I don’t see how that matters.”

  He turned and picked up a faxed sheaf of papers. “This is the report from the sexual-assault nurse.” He handed it over to Mom. I glanced over her shoulder and saw from the time stamp that he had received it more than two hours earlier. I wondered if he’d deliberately made us wait those last two hours. He said, “Page five.” Mom flipped to page five. I gaped at the picture. It was a huge diagram of a vagina.

  “You’ll see that the nurse noted there was no vaginal tearing, no intact hymen, and no indication that Jody’s hymen was recently punctured.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “There’s no evidence that Jody was a virgin who was deflowered last night.”

  Deflowered? What was I, a daisy? If so, I was the most mortified daisy in this garden. My petals would have all fallen off the moment I had to start discussing my vagina with Herb Gargaron.

  Mom cleared her throat. “It’s my understanding that a girl can lose her hymen before having sex.”

  “Maybe so. It can also indicate that your daughter was not being entirely truthful. You know, she might not want to tell you if she’d had sex before.”

  I sunk in my chair. This was a nightmare.

  “Now you listen here, sir,” Mom’s hands were clenched so tight, the papers crumpled. “This is not about my daughter’s chastity or choices she might have made with boys her own age. This is about what Coach Fowler did to her last night.”

  “No offense intended, ma’am,” Sergeant Gargaron said, with condescending calm. “I’m just pointing out the evidence in the case. In a he-said-she-said like this, the victim’s credibility becomes very important. Any evidence that she lied about, well, anything, could be very damaging. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. But you should know: questions will be asked. You might not like the answers. You should consider how your daughter’s name will be tarnished if she decides to pursue this claim.”

  He sucked on the straw in the Arby’s cup, pulling up the last inch of pop with a long, strangled slurp. He gestured for her to give him back the papers. She obeyed. Her hands were shaking; her voice, too. “I assume she’ll get a victim’s advocate? Someone who can counsel her besides you?”

  “Ah, a victim’s advocate.” Sergeant Gargaron smiled. His eyes were as small and mean as Rob’s. “I almost forgot. You know the system quite well, don’t you, Mrs. Curtis? As I recall, you were a frequent flier in our domestic violence program for a while.”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but Mom probably came to this very station a few years before, after Dad was arrested for the Big One. Plus, there were all the times she’d called 911 on Dad for hitting her before that. She probably knew many of the officers in the station, but not in the way she knew people in the hospital. There, she was a respected colleague, the med tech who could draw blood from patients with even the tiniest veins. Here, she was just a “victim.”

  We tend to rise or sink toward others’ expectations of us. It takes a lot of conscious will not to. Although she’d gotten stronger since Dad left, Mom seemed to grow smaller in her chair.

  “It’s one thing to go making accusations about your husband,” Sergeant Gargaron said. “But it’s another thing to accuse a respected man. A pillar of this town. You might find there are more drawbacks than benefits to yourself this time.”

  “I am not making this up,” I said. “And neither is my mom.”

  His eyes slid toward me. “I would never say you made it up. I’m just telling you: other people might.”

  “What he did was wrong.” Mom’s voice was quiet. “We want to press charges.”

  “I’ll note that in the file.” He sighed loudly. “But I just take the reports. The DA makes the final decision on cases like this. We’ll let you know.”

  Sergeant Gargaron stood up. The meeting was over. As we showed ourselves out, he sat down with a grunt and started unwrapping the remains of his Arby’s sandwich.

  The police didn’t come to our apartment to collect my clothes that night.

  28

  Windows Media Player showed four different tracks, which meant that there were four different 911 recordings from the coach’s house. Anna clicked on the first one. An audio recording began.

  “911 Emergency,” said a male operator. “Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”

  “Police,” a woman sobbed. A baby cried near the phone, too. “Maybe an ambulance.”

  The operator got her address. Several words had to be repeated because of all the crying. Then he asked her name.

  “This is Wendy Fowler.”

  “What’s going on, ma’am?”

  Her words were obscured by the sound of banging and a male voice yelling. Wendy screamed louder. “He hit me. My husband punched me in the face, and he pushed me down, and I’m scared that he’s going to hurt me more. He’s very, very drunk.”

  “Where is he, ma’am?”

  “He’s outside the door!” More banging. “I’m locked in the bathroom with my baby daughter!”

  “Does your husband have any weapons, ma’am?”

  “No. I mean, yes, he owns a couple guns, but I don’t think he’s got them now.”

  The banging continued and the yelling got louder. The baby squealed again.

  “Please hurry,” Wendy cried.

  “Yes, ma’am, stay calm, a unit has been dispatched and should be there any minute.”

  He stayed on the line with her for another three minutes, during which Coach Fowler yelled and Wendy sobbed. His slurred words were mostly indecipherable, with the occasional “bitch,” “whore,’ and “fuck you up” loud enough to be heard. Then there were two more male voices.

  “Sir, sir, cal
m down. We’re here to help you and your wife.”

  “Back away from the door, sir.”

  The recording ended. Anna felt a sick sense of familiarity. In her job, she had heard countless phone calls like this one. Growing up she had, too.

  She clicked on the next recording, then the next. They were all similar, Wendy calling the police because her husband was beating her and she was afraid he’d get more violent. As the dates of the recordings progressed, the baby changed into a little girl, who expressed her fear in words instead of baby cries. Anna stopped at one part and played it again. “Please come before Daddy kills Mommy!”

  Anna shuddered. She looked at the attached paperwork, which listed the dates and times of the calls. Wendy had dialed 911 from her house four times over the course of her ten-year marriage.

  Anna looked up and saw Jody standing in the doorway. Anna had been so engrossed in the tapes she hadn’t heard her sister returning home from work.

  “Is that Wendy and the coach?” Jody asked.

  “Yeah,” Anna said.

  “God, that’s horrible.”

  “Did you know he abused her?”

  “No one knew.”

  “Did he ever do this to you?”

  “No.” Jody shook her head. “He was a perfect gentleman.”

  Anna suspected there were even more violent incidents, but Wendy only called when she needed someone to physically restrain her husband from continuing an assault. If he just hit her and walked away, she didn’t call the police. This was someone who wanted to keep things private.

  Most likely, Wendy forgave him afterward. That’s how it worked in most cases. In 80 percent of domestic assaults, the victim didn’t want to press charges. It wasn’t like a mugging: the victim often was in love with her assailant. She might blame herself for “causing” the assault. And in Wendy’s situation, where all the money and power in the relationship was held by the coach, she would have even more incentive not to take him to court.

  But in the end, Wendy had consulted a divorce lawyer. Anna took the CD out of the computer and held it up. “We just found your defense.”

  “Ugh. I don’t want that, Annie.”

  “Why not? Let the blame go where the blame goes.”

  “I want you to defend me. But I don’t want to drag someone else into this. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

  “She is your worst enemy.”

  “She’s more similar to us than different. She’s just a woman trying to live her life.” Jody pointed to the CD. “How can you want to hurt her after hearing that? Don’t you feel sorry for her? And her daughter?”

  “I do. But I also think Wendy might have killed him. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t want to put Wendy or her kid through any more than I already have.”

  “We’re not putting her through anything. We’re not charging her with a crime. We’re just saying someone else had a motive to kill the man.”

  “We don’t need to destroy her to win. I didn’t kill the coach. They won’t be able to prove I killed him. There won’t be any evidence, because I didn’t do it.”

  “The system doesn’t always reach the right result,” Anna said softly. And, she thought, I’m not even sure what the right result is.

  “But I’ve got you on my side,” Jody said. “So this time it will.”

  29

  On a warm Tuesday afternoon a few days after Jody’s arrest, Anna got a call from Rob.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “You’re asking for my disciplinary record?”

  “And anything else I can cross-examine you on.”

  “Anna, you have to realize, this is not about me. This is about Jody.”

  “Sure. She’s the one facing life in prison—because of you.”

  “No, because she killed Coach Fowler. You act like she’s some innocent little dove.”

  “She’s not a dove. She is innocent.”

  “Meet me today,” Rob said. “I’ll show you something. Then tell me if you still think she’s innocent.”

  Anna paused. Her gut clenched at the thought of meeting him. She was always telling women to trust their instincts. She thought of the many times she had said, Trust that feeling in the pit of your stomach. If your body is telling you not to meet with a guy, don’t do it. But she needed whatever information she could get.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He told her where and when. The pit in her stomach deepened. She called Jody but didn’t get through. Anna left a voice mail telling her sister where she was going.

  She followed Google Maps’ directions to the address Rob gave her: a building in downtown Detroit. There was no problem finding parking on Washington Street. Tall buildings rose up around her, most of them unoccupied. She pulled to the curb right in front of the address, turned off the car, and looked around in amazement. The Metropolitan Building was a fifteen-story neo-Gothic tower that had obviously been abandoned years ago. Its windows were either glassless and open to the air or boarded over in plywood. Multiple layers of graffiti covered the bottom. Anna got out of the car. Instead of city sounds, she heard only insects and a faraway siren.

  The glass doors to the lobby were all boarded up. She was only slightly surprised to find one of them propped open. She walked into an entrance hall that had been completely gutted. Shattered bits of plaster and glass covered the floor, and the wind whistled through holes that used to be windows. Wires hung from the ceiling. Rob stood in the middle of the lobby, looking at her quietly. She suppressed a shudder and walked up to him.

  “Hey, Rob. You always knew how to show a girl a good time,” she said. “This is . . . extraordinary.”

  “I can’t be seen talking to you like this. Here, there’s solitude.”

  She walked over to a glassless window and looked out. She could see the Detroit River flowing a few blocks away. On the other side of the river was Windsor, Canada. It was a pretty view, gray and green, surreal to see from an abandoned skyscraper.

  “You want to go up?” Rob said. “The view is worth the hike.”

  She looked at him. She saw no malice in his face. And she did want to see this.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Rob smiled. “There’s the Anna I knew.”

  She followed him up a stairwell. Anna had no problem going up fifteen stories—she ran miles every day at home—although Rob was winded by the end. But he must have done this before, because he knew exactly where to go. He led her through a grim, graffiti-covered hallway to another set of stairs, and up to a deck marked ROOFTOP.

  He pushed through the door, and Anna found herself on the top of the tall building. She could see a 360-degree view of Detroit from up here. It was incredible. The river shimmered to the east, with flat Windsor sprawling as far as the eye could see beyond it. The Renaissance Center was a few blocks away, tall, gleaming, only half occupied. And she could see the rest of the buildings of Detroit, dozens of which were abandoned. It was like looking at archaeological ruins, standing before Machu Picchu or the Roman Forum.

  “Wow,” Anna said. She walked to the edge and looked down. There was no one down there. Several blocks away, inland, she saw a rectangular patch of green, with trees planted in neat, symmetrical rows. She realized she was looking at Cooper’s farm. It was one of the small patches of life in an otherwise decimated landscape.

  She could feel Rob coming up behind her. His meaty hand was on her shoulder. She tensed, realizing how alone they were, how little effort it would take to push her over the ledge.

  “I’m sorry things ended badly, ten years ago,” he said. “I always felt bad about that.”

  She turned slowly and met his eyes. She couldn’t gauge his intentions. She stepped back, away from him and the ledge.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just one of th
ose things. Growing up.”

  He turned to face her and rested his rear on the ledge. “Yeah. But I didn’t behave very well as it was happening. I shouldn’t have called you those names. I’m sorry about that.”

  He wasn’t going to push her. She half thought he wanted to kiss her.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said.

  He ran his thumb over his mustache. “But I want you to know: this isn’t because of us. I hate to be in this position. But your sister is not the saint you think she is.”

  “You keep saying that. Do you have anything to back it up?”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to her. She was starting to dread every time Rob showed her a piece of paper. She looked at him as she unfolded it. Someone had put an evidence bag on a Xerox machine and made a color copy. The bag was clear and Anna could see that inside it was a single white athletic sock. On the sock were several rust-colored stains, ranging in size from pinprick to lima bean.

  Anna recognized bloodstains. Most of these were long and teardrop shaped. The pattern indicated that the blood had landed on the sock after the liquid flew through the air, launched at fairly high speed. It was the sort of pattern that happened during stabbings or beatings, where blood flew off the victim onto the assailant. The pit in Anna’s stomach became a sinkhole.

  “What’s this from?” she asked, although she could guess.

  “That was found in your sister’s home,” Rob said. “Behind the washing machine. No other clothes had blood on them. We think she washed everything else, but overlooked this one.”

  Anna started to make arguments about all the reasons there might be a few bloodstains on a sock in Jody’s house. But she wouldn’t be standing here if it were Jody’s blood.

  “You tested it?”

  “The blood is Coach Fowler’s. You’ll get the full DNA results from the prosecutor in a few weeks. But I wanted to tell you now. For old times’ sake. And because you deserve to know what you’re defending.”

  He was looking at Anna with pity, which was far worse than anger. She liked the world better when Rob was a bad guy from whom she had to defend her sister. If her sister was the bad guy, and Rob was just a beleaguered public servant trying to do his job . . . she didn’t know where she fit in that world. She stepped next to Rob, put her hands on the ledge, and threw up over the side.