Dead Ball

by Judith Arnold

  “Mom?” Karen’s voice emerged as a feeble thread of sound. It was the same voice she used to have during thunderstorms when she was three years old and petrified that the house would be struck by lightning.

  “I didn’t do anything, Karen,” Lainie said quickly. “The police are mistaken. I’ll straighten this whole thing out.”

  “But they’re arresting you.”

  Lainie turned to find the two officers close behind her. Knapp was holding handcuffs. “That won’t be necessary, Detective Knapp,” she said. “I’ll come with you as soon as I change my clothes.”

  “You’ll come with us now,” Knapp said firmly, planting a bruising hand on her shoulder.

  “I can’t change?” She motioned toward her legs. “I just got home from soccer practice. I’ve got mud on my sweatpants.”

  “Sorry,” he said, sounding not the least bit sorry.

  “Can I call my lawyer?”

  “From the station house. You’re entitled to a phone call. I won’t use the handcuffs, Ms. Lovett, but you’ll have to come with us now.”

  Lainie exchanged a look with Karen. Her daughter appeared as frightened as Lainie had felt yesterday. Why she couldn’t muster any fear now, when worse had come to worst, was a mystery. She handed Karen her bag—the police weren’t going to get their hands on it, even though it contained nothing more incriminating than a dirty sports bottle and her mud-caked cleats. At least she wasn’t wearing the cleats. She’d changed into sneakers at the field because driving was easier in them.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” she promised Karen. “Call Peter Cataldo. He used to work with Dad. If he’s not at the office, phone him at his house. His home number is in the phone book in my night table drawer.”

  “Is he a lawyer?”

  Lainie nodded. “Tell him what happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened!”

  “I got arrested. Tell him that. I love you, honey,” she added as Knapp gave her a tug. If she didn’t leave with him now, he might manacle her wrists with his clanking handcuffs.

  He opened the back door of the cruiser for her and she got in. The seat was vinyl, with a mysterious stain on one side. Lainie cautiously slid toward the other side and fastened her seatbelt. She wondered how she would have accomplished that feat if she’d been handcuffed. Would she have had to ask Knapp to strap her in? She’d rather die in a collision than allow him to stretch the seatbelt across her chest.

  A wire mesh barrier separated her from the front seat. She felt like a dog in a travel crate. The stain on the seat nibbled at her consciousness. Who had left it? Some drunk oozing bodily fluids? Driving under the influence was probably the worst crime the Rockford Police dealt with—except for one murder.

  Recalling Peter’s instructions to her yesterday, she kept her mouth shut. A tingling sensation in her fingertips alerted her to how tightly she was clenching her hands, and she willed herself to relax them. This was all a huge mistake, and it would get straightened out soon enough. And just in case her arrest was some divine punishment for her having enjoyed herself on Saturday night, she silently vowed never to have sex again.

  The uniformed cop drove around to the rear of the police station building, and Knapp led Lainie inside through a back door. She stood mutely in her dirty sweats while the charge against her was read again, front and profile photos were snapped, and her fingers were pressed into an ink pad and then onto squares marked on a sheet of paper. Hadn’t Knapp said her prints were already in the system? She’d been fingerprinted when the Rockford School District had hired her.

  So now they had two sets of fingerprints. The smell of solvent from the moistened towel they gave her to clean off the ink lingered on her hands. A clerk took her keys and wristwatch and sealed them in a yellow envelope. “Why are you taking those?” Lainie asked.

  “So you don’t hurt yourself,” the clerk explained.

  As if Lainie could hang herself using the wristband of her watch, or slice open a vein with her house key. “I’d like to make my phone call,” she said.

  “Fine.” Knapp brought her to a desk, handed the receiver to her and pressed a button to connect her to an outside line.

  She desperately needed to talk to Peter, but what if he’d left his office for the day? She hadn’t memorized his home phone number.

  The person she really wanted to talk to was Roger, but he wasn’t available.

  She dialed home. “Hello?” Karen’s voice trembled.

  “Karen, it’s Mom. I’m fine, honey,” she said, assuring herself it wasn’t a lie. She was fine. This was all a stupid error. Once Knapp realized that, he would drop to his knees and beg for her forgiveness, and then she’d have to help him back to his feet because he was too out of shape to stand by himself. “Did you reach Peter Cataldo?” she asked Karen.

  “Yes. He said he’d see you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Lainie had assumed he would drive straight to the police station—he could get here to Rockford in little time, what with his flair for exceeding the speed limit without getting caught.

  “He said he’ll find out everything he needs to know tonight and meet you at the courthouse tomorrow.”

  “Courthouse?”

  “I wrote some things down,” Karen told her. “He said it’s too late for them to arraign you today, so you’ll be arraigned tomorrow. He’ll meet you there. He said . . .” A pause; Karen was probably struggling to read her notes. “He said don’t say anything. If they ask you stuff, just say you aren’t going to talk to them without your lawyer present, and then don’t say anything else. Mom . . .” Again that watery, little-girl voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I really can’t talk, Karen.”

  “Can I come there and see you?”

  The thought of her daughter seeing her here, under arrest, made her nauseous. “It would be better if you didn’t,” she said.

  “Should I call Grandma? Either one?”

  “No.” The last thing she needed was her meddlesome mother or her imperious mother-in-law crashing this party. “The whole thing is a mistake. I didn’t do anything wrong. Peter will resolve everything. Please try not to worry.” She closed her eyes and ordered herself not to worry, too.

  What else could she tell her daughter? What else needed to be said before she lost phone contact with the real world? “I need you to do something for me, Karen. Call the Hopwell School and tell them they’ll have to hire a substitute teacher for my class tomorrow. The extension you need to dial is on the fridge, on a piece of paper held by my Sierra Club refrigerator magnet.”

  She glimpsed Knapp staring at her. Wonderful. Now he knew she had a Sierra Club refrigerator magnet. Surely that proved she had conspired with the People for the Preservation of the Planet to snuff out Arthur Cavanagh.

  “Okay,” Karen said.

  “I love you so much,” Lainie said, feeling a sob lodge in her throat. She swallowed it down. “The police are going to feel like idiots when they realize what a mistake they made.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I hope, Lainie thought.

  “Okay.” Karen didn’t sound okay at all.

  “Goodbye, sweetie. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom,” Karen said, then started to cry.

  Lainie hung up the phone. She was so close to crying herself, she couldn’t bear to listen to her daughter’s plaintive sobs.

  The clerk who’d taken her keys and watch led her down a back hall to a cell and locked her inside. Lainie stared at the bars, which were the color of cheese mold, at the light green cinderblock wall, at the shelf-like bench protruding from one wall, and at the stainless steel toilet and sink protruding from another wall. The entire cell was maybe four feet by eight feet, and the door was locked.

  H
er tears erupted, and she did nothing to stop them.

  She sat on the bench and wept with more fervor than she’d wept after Roger had died. By the time he’d died, she’d been prepared for it. She’d mentally rehearsed his death so many times in his final few weeks that when he actually died, she’d been ready. Of course she’d cried, but not like this.

  She wasn’t ready for this.

  Why couldn’t Peter come tonight? Why couldn’t he make this all go away? All she’d done was have sex with Stavik, damn it. Patty was her friend. Why would anyone think she’d kill Patty’s husband? Had the world gone mad?

  It had. And in another few minutes, she’d be joining it in madness.

  She was still crying when the clerk brought her a turkey sandwich and a cup of microwave chicken noodle soup. Between her sniffles and hiccups, she ate it, knowing she’d need her strength for the morning. Everything tasted salty from the tears dripping into her mouth. Even if she hadn’t been crying, the soup would have been much too salty. She’d swallowed ocean water at Cape Cod that had less salt in it.

  At some point—she didn’t have her watch, so she had no concept of time—the ceiling light in the holding cell shut off. The fluorescent hall light remained on, however, buzzing like a mosquito and spilling light through the bars. She had no toothbrush, no soap. She wanted a shower and clean clothes. She wanted her bed. She wanted to go back to the night soccer practice had been cancelled because of the sprinklers and not go to Olde Towne Olé for a drink.

  She wanted a new life.

  When a uniformed officer appeared at the holding cell the next morning with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a granola bar, Lainie was bleary and hungry, and the inside of her mouth tasted like a rotten grapefruit. The mud spatters on her sweatpants had hardened into brown scabs and she’d kill for a stick of deodorant.

  No, she wouldn’t kill. Never. So please, someone—God, the police, someone—acknowledge her non-violent nature and let her go.

  The uniformed officer walked her down the back hall and outside to a van. Like the cruiser she’d arrived in last night, the van had a metal barrier separating the driver’s seat from the bench seats in back. Three male passengers were already in the van, and none of them resembled elementary school teachers. Even without deodorant, she smelled better than they did.

  One slumped crookedly in his seat and his eyes weren’t quite focused. He stank the worst, reeking of old liquor and not-quite-so-old urine. Another had an Asian ideogram tattooed on his neck and a silver ring puncturing one nostril. The third looked a little like Stuart Flexner, a boy enrolled in her class about ten years ago. Stuart had been one of her more challenging students, aggressive and bullying. She didn’t dare ask the thug sharing her bench seat, with his buzz cut, goatee, and metallic stare, if he was the boy who’d spent so many hours in her time-out chair that she’d considered charging him rent for it. She didn’t want to know. More important, she didn’t want to have to explain to him, if he was in fact Stuart Flexner, how she’d wound up seated with him in the bad-people van traveling to Cambridge.

  She wondered what he and the other two men had been arrested for. Assault? Robbery? Drug dealing? Rape? Ha, she could top them. She was in for murder.

  No one spoke as they drove through the suburbs west of Boston, onto the Mass Pike, off the Pike, and over the bridge into Cambridge, where the Middlesex Superior Courthouse was located. It was a large, boxy building, architecturally adorned with vertical lines that reminded Lainie of the bars of the holding cell in which she’d spent the night. She’d served jury duty in this courthouse a few years ago, but the building had looked different to her then. Viewing a courthouse as a potential juror was nothing like viewing it as a potential convict.

  Accompanied by armed guards, she and her fellow arraignees were paraded through a maze of corridors. Eventually they were brought to a waiting room and told to sit.

  She would have liked another cup of coffee—one that tasted better than the acidic swill she’d forced down at the police station in Rockford—but she didn’t dare ask. She just sat in her vinyl chair at a table, separate from her brothers in the Tribe of the Accused, and awaited the next chapter in this appalling ordeal.

  And then, the most welcome, joyous sight she could have imagined: Peter Cataldo swept in, carrying two large cups marked with the Starbucks logo. At that moment she was in love. The hell with Wayne, the hell with Peter’s sexual orientation. She was completely, passionately, to-die-for in love with him.

  In addition to the coffee, Peter carried an impressive leather briefcase, no doubt Italian and very expensive. His grooming was a direct inverse to hers; as grungy as she felt, that was how impeccable he appeared. He even smelled minty.

  Her eyes welled up with a fresh batch of tears.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” he said, settling in a chair at her table and popping the lids off their coffee cups. “Your life is about to improve.”

  “It couldn’t get any worse.” She took a sip of coffee. It was strong and a bit too hot, but the aroma alone invigorated her. One more sip and she felt almost human.

  “Here’s what’s going on,” he said. “They’re going to arraign you as an accessory to second degree murder. I’ve persuaded them to keep your name out of the news for now, because in terms of their case against you, they don’t have squat. But I can’t get the charge tossed until after you’ve been arraigned.”

  “They do have squat,” Lainie argued, imitating his hushed tone. “They have the BlackBerry.”

  “They want you to testify against Loverboy. That’s what this is about. They’re trying to scare the squat out of you.”

  “Please, Peter, don’t mince words. They’ve already scared the shit out of me.”

  He smiled. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re adorable when you use profanity? So. You’ll testify against Stavik, and this will all be nothing more than a bad dream.”

  “I didn’t see him put the BlackBerry in my purse. I can’t lie and say I did.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to lie. All you have to do today is enter a plea of not guilty. They’ll release you on your own recognizance.”

  “Peter.” She started to weep again. He plucked a handkerchief from a pocket of his trousers and handed it to her. She dabbed her eyes with it, mumbling her thanks. “What if they don’t release me? I spent last night in a holding cell. I thought I’d go insane after one night. I don’t know why this is happening to me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s what they all say.” He patted her shoulder. “It’s an ugly situation, but you’ll get through it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m the best criminal attorney in the Bay State, sweetheart. Yes, I’m sure.”

  A guard summoned Lainie and the best criminal attorney in the Bay State to join him at the door. The three of them walked down some more halls. In the glaring light, Lainie saw every smudge of mud on her clothes, every grass stain. She hadn’t combed her hair that morning. Her breath could slay a dragon. And she hated herself for crying. It made her feel weak and helpless.

  They entered a courtroom through a side door and were led to a table before the judge, whose elevation and black robe put Lainie in mind of the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, or perhaps an extremely important choir director. The judge was a prune-faced woman with hair like a cumulus cloud resting on her skull. A clerk read a docket number and then the charge against Lainie: “Accessory to murder in the second degree.”

  “How do you plead?” the judge asked Lainie.

  She glanced at Peter. He nodded, granting her permission to speak. “Not guilty,” she said.

  A young man with short red hair and a scabbed shaving knick on his chin stepped forward. “Your Honor, the people seek two hundred thousand dollars bond.”

  Lainie’s knees went rubbery. Peter discreetly cupped his hand aro
und her elbow; he must have sensed how close she was to collapsing. “Your Honor,” he said, “Ms. Lovett is a public school teacher, a mother, and a homeowner. She’s also innocent. She’s not going to flee the jurisdiction. She intends to clear her name.”

  “This was a heinous crime, Your Honor,” the redhead argued, although he mispronounced heinous so it came out sounding like “highness.” “A man was shot through the head with a nail gun.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” the judge barked, then banged her gavel and glowered.

  “Fifty thousand dollars?” Lainie echoed in a whisper.

  “A minor setback. We’ll take care of it,” Peter said, still clutching her elbow. The guard who’d escorted them into the court now led them away, although Lainie could barely walk. The bones in her legs had turned to macaroni, and with each step her body threatened to collapse.

  Fifty thousand dollars? Oh God. Oh shit.

  They wound up in yet another nondescript room. Had Lainie realized how much of her state taxes went to paying for nondescript rooms in the Middlesex Superior Courthouse, she might have launched a tax revolt.

  Peter led her to a chair and she slumped into it. Shudders ran the length of her spine, causing her to shiver even though the room was warm. “They’re trying to scare you,” he explained.

  “They’re succeeding.”

  “Can you raise fifty thousand dollars?”

  She struggled to think clearly. Her brain seemed to have turned into macaroni, too, overcooked and mushy. Fifty thousand dollars. “I could cash in shares from the mutual fund,” she said. “That’s Princeton money. I won’t be able to pay Randy’s tuition for next year.”

  “Sit tight,” Peter said, rising and giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’ve got an idea.”

  She watched him leave and shuddered again. If anything was worse than what she’d just lived through, it was the thought of enduring the next ten minutes without Peter by her side. Was she really going to have to sacrifice Randy’s tuition money over this ridiculousness? As best she knew, a person got her bail money back once her trial was over. But that could be years from now. In the meantime, would Randy have to transfer to UMass?