The Little Black Dress

by Linda Palund

  “Are you up for the drive, Wendy?” my mom asked.

  “Oh, it’s not a problem, Mrs. Linsky. Anything I can do to help, believe me, I don’t mind. And I want to see how Seth is too.”

  It’s true. We had all gotten closer in these last few days before the arrest. We were all friends now, and it was nice to have Wendy’s support, and her company would be welcome on the long drive down to San Diego.

  “We’ll take my car, if it’s okay, Mom,” I said. “It gets better mileage.” My car also went a lot faster, and the sooner we got to Seth and I saw for myself that he was all right, the better, but I didn’t say that.

  “Of course, Lucy,” my mom said. “Just don’t drive too fast. Seth will still be there, whether you get there thirty minutes later by driving safely or not. Please, Wendy, make sure she obeys the speed limit, okay?”

  Wendy assured her we would be as good as gold, and then we ran across the street to my house to pick up our coats and whatever else we might need. It was a shock when we stepped outside into the glare of daylight. I couldn’t believe it. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon. How could all this have happened in only the few hours since breakfast?

  The early hour turned out to be a good thing now, because it meant we could make pretty good time on the San Diego Freeway—the 405—and there was an entrance and an exit close to my house. I’d been avoiding these ever since Carmen disappeared. I never took that exit anymore, the one next to Frank Sinatra Jr.’s telephone booth, the one closest to the last place Carmen still lived and breathed.

  I kept those memories on the back burner and tried to keep my speed under control as we headed down the freeway, but I was so anxious to get there, it was all a blur. I just turned up the stereo and listened to Ladytron’s gorgeous electronica harmonies, and then, before I knew it, we were at the outskirts of San Diego. I turned down the stereo while Wendy used her phone to google map the way to the hospital, but after only a few wrong turns, I managed to find it and drove right to the emergency entrance and parked in the short-stay parking lot there, not caring if I got a ticket or not, just wanting to get inside as quickly as possible and see Seth.

  The emergency staff informed us he had already been brought up to a room on the orthopedics floor, and I feared the worst for him, wondering how many broken bones he had suffered.

  We raced to the elevator, found the right floor, and made our way to his room. There was a cop stationed outside his door, and I worried for a moment whether they had really got the coach in custody, but when I told the officer who I was, he smiled at me in such a way I realized that he was only there as a favor to the captain. Then he opened the door and let us in.

  Seth was out cold when we entered, and gosh, he looked awful. His face was all bandaged up, almost like Jonny Freeman’s, and where there weren’t bandages I could see how black-and-blue he was. His eyes were so puffy they would have been swollen shut even if he hadn’t been asleep. He had one arm in a sling and a small wrist cast on it, and both arms below his hospital gown were swollen and as black-and-blue as his face. He was a heartbreaking sight.

  Mrs. Greenberg was sitting in one of the guest chairs and looked up from her magazine as soon as we entered. “Oh, Lucy! I’m so glad to meet you.” She got up and hugged me, and I introduced her to Wendy, who had actually started to cry, much to my surprise. She’d been so strong up until now, my rock during this morning’s ordeal.

  “Oh, poor Seth. How bad is it?” she asked for both of us.

  “Well, he’s got several broken ribs, but they’re all taped up now, a broken wrist, and a broken nose, which he’ll have to have set when the bruising on his face quiets down. He’s pretty much bruised all over, but the doctors say his internal organs are intact. He looks bad, but he feels worse. When he wakes up, he can tell you all about it. He didn’t want to tell me too much, because I’m only his mother. I know it must have been a terrifying experience.” Then she gritted her teeth and spat out the next sentence. “If I could get my hands on that monster, I’d kill him myself.”

  With these words, Seth opened up his swollen eyes as far as he could and tried to smile. “Lucy!” he called out. It was only a whisper, really, but I could hear the excitement in his voice.

  Wendy and I rushed over to his bedside, and Mrs. Greenberg stood back and simply observed our sorry little reunion. “What’s the idea, going for a ride in the coach’s Hummer without me?” I joked.

  “Yeah,” Seth sighed. “It was a real joyride.”

  “How bad was it?” Wendy again asked the question that was on my mind.

  “It was worse than anything you can imagine,” Seth answered, groaning as he tried to turn his face away. But that was obviously too painful a position, so he just groaned again and turned back so he could look up at us through his swollen eyelids. “Basically, I thought I was going to die. He just kept hitting me and hitting me, but the worst thing was knowing all the time that he was going to kill me anyway. I still don’t know why he didn’t.”

  “Your dad made a bargain with him,” I told Seth. “If he let you go, he’d let the coach escape to Mexico.”

  Seth made a painful grimace. “Does that mean he goes free?”

  “I don’t think so. Your dad has some kind of a plan. Now that you’re safe, he’s got something in the works down in Tijuana. He doesn’t seem worried about it. He’s pretty certain he’s got the coach. He’s going to call me when he has him in custody, but he sounded really sure about it.”

  “I hope so,” Seth moaned. “I hope so. That creep can’t be allowed out there. You should have seen him, Lucy. He was so ugly. So crazy and mean.” Seth groaned again from the effort it took to talk. “God, I hurt all over.”

  “Would you like some more pain medication?” his mother asked. She had crept up behind us while we talked.

  “Yes, actually, I would, Mom,” he answered. “You don’t mind, do you, Wendy? Lucy? I’m gonna take something, and it’s going to make me pass out, but just for a little while. I’ll feel better when I wake up.”

  “No, no,” Wendy answered, “we don’t mind.”

  “You won’t go away, will you? You’ll stay here, won’t you? I’ll just fall asleep for a few minutes, and then I’ll wake up again, and it would be nice if you were still here.”

  “Of course,” I assured him. “We’ll wait with your mom. Your dad will call soon, and we’ll all still be right here.” I moved out of the way for the nurse, who came in with Seth’s mom. She injected something into the IV tube running into Seth’s arm.

  Sure enough, in a few seconds, Seth’s eyes glazed over, and he nodded off. The nice officer from outside came in with some chairs for Wendy and me, and we sat down.

  “Would you girls like a coffee? I’m going down to the cafeteria, and I can bring you back something,” Mrs. Greenberg asked kindly.

  “Yes, that would be great,” I answered. “Black coffee would be wonderful for me.”

  “Milk and two sugars for me, please,” called Wendy as Mrs. Greenberg turned to go.

  For a while, Wendy and I joked about the possible new nose Seth was likely to get, and then Mrs. Greenberg returned with our coffee and some pastries, and we sat and made small talk about school while we ate.

  Later I heard that back at police headquarters, Captain Greenberg was sitting with a very morose and acquiescent former star quarterback. They were in the interrogation room in the felony wing of the county jail, and Captain Greenberg had been questioning the quarterback for over two hours. Luke held nothing back, and only his weeping interrupted his confession, and later, after Seth was released from the hospital and returned home, where he had access to his computer once more, he downloaded the transcript and brought it over to my house so that he, Wendy, and I could read the whole sorry thing.

  “I want to come clean,” Luke had said right away. “I’ve got nothing left to hide. I know my life is over. Everything I worked for since I was a kid. I know it’s all over now.

  “I
always knew I would be a great quarterback, ever since I was a kid, but the Uni High team was crap until Coach Billy came along. He built up the team and promised to make me a star. That’s exactly what he did too. Every major university scouted me last year. I could take my pick of any college in the USA. They all offered me a full scholarship. I knew it was only a matter of time before I made it into professional football.

  “But that’s all over now. Coach Billy was working too many angles. I knew something was wrong, but he kept telling me what a star I was going to be and how I just had to stick to the program, and the world would be mine.

  “But then everything got weird. All last year, I felt like I was on a roller-coaster ride. Everything was out of control. I felt like I couldn’t control anything in my life except the football. When I was on the field, I felt good, sure of myself, sure of my team. But then I started having these nightmares. About that girl, Carmen. I knew that somehow I was involved in her death, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t remember. But I kept having these dreams, and they seemed so real.

  “Later, I began to remember things. I remembered being very, very drunk that Wednesday afternoon, the same day that girl was killed. Coach Billy had invited me over to his house that day after school. We didn’t have practice, so we sat around drinking all afternoon. I remembered that Jonny Freeman was there too. Jonny was a funny guy, nice to have around. Too bad what happened to him.

  “Anyway, we were all drunk, and then the coach said he had some MDMA, so Jonny and I had some of that too. Then he had some other pills. I thought he said it was speed, but he must have slipped us a Viagra tablet, because later on I got this god-awful erection that wouldn’t go away. But I was so drunk and woozy from the MDMA, I couldn’t feel a thing, and after that it was all a haze.

  “I remember driving around in the coach’s Hummer, high as a kite. Then something horrible was happening. I know I was part of it, but it was like a dream. It wasn’t really me doing it, because I couldn’t feel anything. It couldn’t have been me. But Jonny was there, and that girl, and we were all doing something really bad to her, because she was screaming. But the coach had the music turned up, and I thought it must be the stereo. I still couldn’t feel anything, and my vision was all blurry. It was like it was all happening to someone else. Like I was watching a bad movie or something.

  “I remember seeing Coach Billy doing something I knew was wrong, but I don’t remember exactly what it was. All I remember was that it made me feel sick watching him. But all the time I had this enormous erection that wouldn’t go away. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make it go away. Then the coach must have driven me back to the school locker room, because I remember him putting me in the shower, and somewhere along the line, I lost all my clothes. I only remember waking up in my bed the next morning, stark naked and with a terrible headache.

  “When I heard about the murder, I knew deep down that I was somehow involved. I went to the coach and asked him if he knew what was going on. The coach told me I had dreamed the whole thing, but that I’d better not say anything about it or it would ruin my football career forever.

  “I thought that was a weird thing to say. I knew something wasn’t right, but I pretended that it really was all a nightmare, a dream. It hadn’t really happened. But deep down, I knew, especially when it happened the second time, I knew. I just couldn’t let myself believe I was part of it. I couldn’t let myself believe the coach had anything to do with it. Coach Billy was my friend. He was training me to be a big star. I was going to earn loads of money and show my dad up. I convinced myself it hadn’t happened. How could it? I didn’t need to rape any girls. Girls loved me; they worshipped at my feet. Well, except for those two.

  “Those two girls were different. I remember asking each one of them out for a date. I liked to score the pretty new girls before anyone else got ahold of them, but neither of them was interested in me. That Carmen was so beautiful, and she smiled so sweetly. What a gorgeous mouth. But she still said no to me. And that blonde Viking girl, she was nearly as tall as I am, but she put me down with a nasty comment about my brains, like I was dirt under her feet. I told the coach about them. I just mentioned it. Just saying that some girls in the school thought a little too much of themselves. I hadn’t meant to start anything. You have to believe me, I would never hurt those girls.”

  CHAPTER 35

  RESOLUTION

  GRADUALLY, MORE and more details of Coach Billy’s hold on Luke Ritter came out in the press. After the horrific details of the high school girls’ murders, the football team’s steroid addiction became front-page news. The school was stripped of its trophies when it was uncovered that the coach had the whole team hooked on steroids and had been selling steroids to wannabe athletes in the regular student body. High on testosterone all of the time, the football players were always ready for a scrap, ready to beat the other teams into a pulp, and were completely beholden to the coach for their success on the field.

  “I know I shouldn’t be talking to you two about this,” Captain Greenwood told Seth and me one night, a few weeks after the arrests. We were sitting in their den, drinking herbal tea that Seth’s mom had made us before she tiptoed off to bed, leaving us alone to discuss the case. “But after the parts you both played in all this, I feel you have a right to know. But you mustn’t share this with anyone, got it?”

  “Got it, Dad,” Seth said right away.

  “Not even with Carmen’s brother?” I asked. “I know he can keep a secret, and he should know what’s going on too, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve met James,” Captain Greenberg said. “I agree he’s a solid young man. If you feel that he’ll be discreet….”

  “Definitely,” Seth agreed. I’d brought James to visit Seth in the hospital, and just as I had expected, James had made a great impression.

  The captain put down his tea and looked across the coffee table at both of us. “I’m pretty certain that the combination of steroids and alcohol, plus the MDMA and the Viagra the coach slipped Luke, put him into the state the coach wanted him to be in when they kidnapped each of the two girls. Somehow, it must have enhanced his own pleasure to have Luke there to be part of the crimes, but he didn’t want him to be too aware of what actually was going on. He probably counted on the drugs making Luke forget what actually happened. It worked, to a degree. Luke hasn’t been able to remember anything clearly, but he’s definitely come to believe that the coach raped and murdered both girls. He also believes that he took part in the girls’ rapes too, but he honestly can’t remember doing it.”

  “Do you believe him?” I asked.

  “I do,” Captain Greenberg answered, looking at me, his eyes gray in the den’s dim lighting. He looked overwhelmingly sad. “It’s the way he talks about it, Lucy. He keeps telling us how sorry he is about everything, and he cries all the time. He says he’s sorry for what happened to the girls and sorry that he couldn’t remember. Then he starts crying again.”

  “Is he going to get bail, then, at the next hearing?”

  “No, his mental state is too unstable. They’ve postponed the hearing. The psychiatrists have determined that he is a danger to himself, and they cannot assure the public that he is not a danger to others either.”

  “Coming off the amount of steroids he was on couldn’t have helped,” said Seth. “His depression must be monumental.”

  “Plus he knows his life is ruined,” I added.

  “That too,” Seth agreed. “And he’s still only eighteen.”

  “Right now, he’s refusing to eat. Even his parents can’t make him eat. We’ve had him transferred to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, to their Psychiatric Medical wing.”

  “Will he be able to stand trial?” I asked.

  “He’s not going to have to stand trial himself, Lucy,” Captain Greenberg said. “The district attorney is letting him plead out so he can be a prosecution witness against the coach as soon as the coach is ready to stand trial.”
/>   “But he was part of the murders!” I protested. “He raped those girls too!”

  “I know, Lucy,” said Captain Greenberg. “But sometimes we have to make compromises in order to get the worst offenders.”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” Seth said.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Seth’s dad said, “Luke is in a really bad way, psychologically. I have reports from the staff at Twin Towers that Luke is raving all the time. He says he can hear Carmen’s footsteps walking the corridors day and night. He wakes up screaming every night and told the staff that he can hear her weeping outside his room. They tell me that all they can hear is Luke crying in his sleep before he wakes up.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear he’s suffering, at least,” I said grudgingly. “But does this mean that Luke goes free after the coach’s trial?”

  “Oh no,” Captain Greenberg assured me. “That wasn’t the deal the DA made. Luke will have to serve more time in a psychiatric facility until he’s well enough to be transferred to state prison. Then he’ll have to serve up to fifteen years for second-degree murder.”

  “Thank God,” I said, but even after all the horror of Carmen’s murder, I had to admit to feeling sorry for Luke. I genuinely believed his story that he had been used by the coach in some sick way.

  “Remember, Lucy,” Seth added, “Luke is going to suffer even more punishment when he reaches prison, being such a beautiful specimen of young manhood.”

  “But what about the coach?”

  “Yeah,” said Seth. “When he gets to prison, he won’t be anyone’s bitch! I can envision him actually thriving in there, coaching the prison sports teams and raping the newest prisoners and probably dealing drugs!”

  “Don’t let your imaginations run away with you,” Captain Greenberg said. “The charges against the coach are going to be rape and murder with aggravated assault, which calls for the death penalty, and on death row, there will be no perks.”