The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “This is a murder investigation. It’s critical we speak to Alice Corrigan about her knowledge of the deceased.” Wow, that sounds straight out of a cop textbook. I wonder if Malone drew dicks in hers.

  “I understand the seriousness of the crime. But without a subpoena or an arrest warrant, my client isn’t obliged to talk to you.”

  “Can you at least tell us if Alice Corrigan is at home?” Malone asks, clearly exasperated. She looks like Uncle Rod when a restaurant serves him halibut and he knows that it’s cod. Newfoundlanders are serious about their fish. And Malone is seriously looking like she wants to grab Lopez by the narrow lapels and shake him until his twenty-four-karat-gold tie clip falls off.

  “No, I cannot confirm or deny that anyone is at home,” says Lopez, adjusting his skinny, polka-dot tie. But I see the curtain moving behind the window and the quick retreat of a blond head.

  “Fine,” says Malone tightly. “We’ll be back with a subpoena.”

  Lopez watches us walk back toward the driveway. “And make sure you don’t get any fingerprints on my Mercedes. I just had it handwashed and detailed,” he says before he slams the double doors shut.

  “Where were your wisecracks this time, Candace?” Malone unlocks the car using the remote.

  “You told me to keep my mouth shut.”

  I climb in the back of the car. Malone opens the driver’s door as hard as she can into the dick-of-a-lawyer’s AMG. Not once but twice.

  “Didn’t think you had it in you, Malone,” I say, leaning toward the front seat. She knocks me back against the upholstery when she pulls out of the drive.

  “I have more in me than you’ll ever know, Candace,” she says, taking off down the street quite a few nickels over the speed limit.

  I’m starting to think I’d like to know more about what lives inside Malone. But that might involve getting closer to a cop. And experience has taught me that’s more dangerous than a speeding car.

  CHAPTER 9

  WE CALLED IT A DAY after the run-in with the Corrigans’ lawyer. Malone was exhausted. She dropped me off in front of the E-Zee Market and went home.

  I tried calling Rod’s mother again but got a busy signal. Who the hell doesn’t have call waiting these days? Those Canadians probably still use tin cans with a string between them to communicate over the Arctic tundra.

  After that I went upstairs and took a few Aspirin before climbing into bed with some sangria. I watched Fried Green Tomatoes on TV then fell asleep with my cheek on the bottle. I’m a sucker for chick flicks, the one thing I had to myself growing up surrounded by men. I was too embarrassed to ask my dad to rent them at the video store. This was back when you actually had to go out of the house to pick up a movie. Now you can just park your ass in an armchair and be infused with a steady IV drip of Netflix. I was afraid Uncle Rod and my dad would make fun of me for wanting to watch an airheaded bimbo go to law school or the diary of a woman with more hang-ups than decent underwear. So I fed my guilty pleasure, closeted in my room, with the old movies they showed on TV. Beaches. When Harry Met Sally. Pretty Woman. I learned about being female from these movies, and it somehow both comforted and confused the hell out of me. Female friendships were rooted in jealousy, orgasms were fake, and the hookers in Hollywood looked a whole lot better than the saggy-titted wrecks with the sores on their lips I saw outside my bedroom window. I lived vicariously through these celluloid women I didn’t understand. I would have told Richard Gere to get stuffed if he wanted to get his sex for free by making me his girl. Business is business, after all, no matter how much of a Cinderella complex you have.

  The next morning Malone knocks before she comes inside my apartment. I’m in the corner, lifting weights. I finish a final bench press and then hook the barbell back into its brace.

  Malone sits down next to the Formica table on the only chair in the room. It has ripped yellow vinyl that catches your butt cheeks if you sit on it naked, and it wobbles a bit. I stay on the weight bench and take a slug of green-tea Kombucha straight from the bottle.

  “I hadn’t pegged you as a fitness nut,” she says.

  “Picked up the habit in prison,” I tell her, downing the rest of the sweetened drink that’s supposed to help with the ulcer I think I may be developing.

  “I thought the only thing you lifted was a bottle,” she says, looking at the empty bottle of pre-mixed sangria on the bed.

  “I’m not a total fucking cliché, you know.”

  “Adopt any other healthy habits in prison?” she asks, raising that eyebrow again. I really have to remember to ask her where she gets them done. But I know what she’s hinting at. Whether I dried out on the inside. Alcohol had been harder to get than drugs in lock-up, but I had friends. Moreover, I had people who owed me. Something I’ve found to be much more lucrative than friends.

  “I run,” she says. “Do you?” She probably can’t imagine me keeping my physique without any kind of cardio.

  “Some people like to run, Malone,” I say, standing up. I grab a towel to wipe off the sweat. “And some people like to run after things.”

  She stares at me, not getting it.

  “Like a ball, Malone.”

  “Really?” she says, tilting her head, her bob grazing one shoulder. “I didn’t see you as a team player.”

  “I actually used to play on the women’s floor-hockey team in the pen.”

  “I’m glad to see incarceration got you involved in such wholesome activities.”

  I pull off my tank top and wipe the beads of sweat clinging to the gold star on my stomach. “You kidding? We had more injuries in a season than they did during a two-day prison riot.” While I search for a clean T-shirt, I catch Malone eyeing my tat.

  “You’re a Sneetch,” she says.

  “I’m a what?” I say, thinking she just called me a squealer.

  “The star,” she says. “On your belly. It’s like the Dr. Seuss story with the Sneetches.”

  I narrow my eyes at her. I’m not getting it.

  “You know, some Sneetches had stars on their bellies and some didn’t.”

  Then I remember the animated special from when I was a kid. “Some had stars upon thars,” I say, remembering. That kind of repetitive schtick was the old doctor’s calling card in all his stories.

  “That’s right. The ones that didn’t have them had them put on, and when the original star-bellied Sneetches found out, they had theirs taken off. To differentiate themselves.”

  “This is not a status symbol, Malone.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “A statement,” I say, finally finding a clean white T-shirt. I pull it down over my star, thinking now that if everyone got one, I’d probably have mine taken off, too. I get my jacket and keys, and Malone joins me at the door.

  “Maybe you’d like to try out for my hockey team,” she says. “Since you have so much experience.”

  “Ha,” I laugh. “No fucking way.”

  “Not with a fox?” Malone quotes, as we walk out into the hallway. “Not in a box?”

  “Not with a Sneetch tied around my forehead and a Who crammed up my ass,” I tell her, locking the door.

  But the truth is, I can’t skate.

  We drive to Lachlan Reid’s house. It’s not nearly as posh as the Corrigans’ or the Winogrodzski-Brents’. Lachlan lives in a row of rundown townhouses in a small co-op complex. It must be at the very outer limits of the catchment area for Brassnose Academy, a tip of the hat to social equality by elitists in search of token poor people for display at school events. When we ring the doorbell, it makes a strangled sound. The father answers in a yellowed wife-beater paired with pilled soccer pants. He takes one look at Malone’s badge and motions us up to Lachlan’s bedroom.

  “Would you like to be present while we question your son?” Malone asks.

  “No need,” says Mr. Reid, returning to the couch and the beer he’s nursing while watching Jerry Springer. I’d like to join him, but I don’t think Malone
would approve.

  We knock on Lachlan’s door, but he doesn’t respond. Then Malone announces herself and what she’s come about, and we hear some scuffling and shuffling before a sheepish-looking boy with long, sandy-brown hair hanging down over his forehead opens the door. Even with the hair, I can see that one of his eyes is black and swollen shut.

  “This is about Tyler,” he says to Malone then looks up at me and does a double take. He steps away from the door and we go inside. There’s only one chair, in front of the kid’s computer. He sits down in it and Malone takes a seat on the bed. I remain standing, taking in the posters on the wall. Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden mostly. Jesus, can’t this generation develop some of their own rock heroes? I also take in the tat on the kid’s leg. He’s wearing red basketball shorts. Malone sees it, too.

  “That’s an interesting tattoo you have,” Malone says, indicating the wolf face framed by white arms. “Same as Tyler Brent’s.”

  “Yeah, well, we were friends.” His phone buzzes with a notification from where it sits on the desk next to the computer. He ignores it. A considerable feat for a kid his age.

  “With friends like that, you should probably make sure your health insurance is paid up,” Malone says, indicating the well-purpled shiner.

  “That was nothing,” Lachlan says, shaking his head so the hair falls in front of his eyes again.

  “That nothing got you suspended.”

  “Got Tyler suspended, too,” the kid says, sniffing.

  Malone keeps the iPad in her purse, trying to put the boy at ease. This is a dialogue, not an interrogation and all that bullshit. “What was the fight about, Lachlan?” she asks him with her best ‘I’m only here to help’ face. Malone has a lot of faces.

  “Nothing.” Everything is nothing with this kid.

  “Listen, buddy, your friend’s tits-up in the morgue and you guys were whaling on each other the day before. You better answer the detective’s questions if you want this to go the right way.” I can do the bad cop thing. I’ve seen it in action enough times. Malone gives me a nasty look. Doesn’t she understand she’s supposed to be the good cop?

  “I don’t know what happened to Tyler,” he says, fingering a loose thread from the hem of his shorts.

  “Well, we’ve seen Tyler, Lachlan,” Malone says. That makes him pay attention. He looks up from the thread. “And while he didn’t look so good, he didn’t seem to have any marks on him from a fight.”

  “Did that make you angry? Getting a beating from your buddy? You decide you want to give him a scare. Then you snap and go a bit psycho and kill him?”

  “I’m not the fucking psycho!” Lachlan shouts at me. He doesn’t seem to know enough to be afraid of me, this kid. I’m just another ineffectual adult in his life hassling him.

  Malone tries to calm things down. “Now, now, let’s not get overheated here.”

  Lachlan still has his one good eye trained on me. He lifts up his white shirt, exposing his stomach. There’s an angry red T on it that’s just starting to scab over. “Tyler did this. He was the fucking psycho.” He pulls the shirt back down and crosses his arms on his chest, looking away again.

  “Tyler did that?” Malone says quietly.

  “Yeah,” the kid says. “He was going to carve his whole fucking name there if the fucking gym teacher didn’t come along.” Someone needs to tell this kid to get a new adjective.

  “What were you fighting about, Lachlan?” Malone asks again. “She’s right, you know,” nodding her head at me. “It doesn’t look good that you and Tyler had a fight the day before he got killed. A district attorney could make a lot out of that. Maybe even enough for a trial.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Tyler. I never saw him again after that.” His lip is beginning to tremble. I almost feel sorry for the kid.

  “Then tell us what the fight was about,” Malone says gently, all good cop to my bad. She’s finally getting into her role.

  Lachlan’s good eye is starting to tear up. The swollen-shut one only oozes. He wipes both of them, along with his nose, with the back of his arm. “It was about Alice,” he says.

  “What about Alice?”

  “He was two-timing her with Jessica Mendler.”

  “And she asked you to exact some justice for her?” I ask, trying to cast suspicion on the kid in front of me. It’s not inconceivable that Alice would attempt to get a boy like Lachlan to do some rough stuff for her, given the graphic content of her letter. Pretty young girls can convince boys to do some ridiculous shit for them. Young men aren’t just led around by their dicks at that age, they’re enslaved by them.

  “No, it was nothing like that,” Lachlan says, reaching for a bag of frozen peas off the bed and putting it on his eye. But it was something like that. Unbelievably, Malone catches on before I do.

  “Jessica was your girl,” Malone says. “That’s why you were angry at Tyler.”

  “We weren’t going out or anything,” he says, adjusting the peas. “But he knew I liked her.” The last sentence is said with a vengeance that almost makes me think he did kill Tyler.

  “Where were you on Saturday night, Lachlan? Between around ten and one the next morning.”

  “Why don’t you ask Alice’s mom where she was?” he says defiantly. “She had more fights with Tyler than I ever did. One day she went over to his house and threw his Xbox out the window.”

  “I’ve seen that woman in the society pages,” Malone says. “She couldn’t snap a twig, let alone somebody’s neck.” I guess she’s not going to let Lachlan know about the hanging bit. That’s the kind of evidence a cop holds back to try to trip a perp up later.

  “She could have gotten someone else to do it,” he says, looking down as he speaks to Malone. I can’t tell if he’s got something to hide or he’s staring at her boobs. Like I said, that age group is totally driven by hormones.

  “Where were you, Lachlan?” Malone asks again.

  Whatever he was fixated on before, it loses his attention. He looks up at Malone’s face. “I was here.”

  “Anyone able to vouch for that?” asks Malone.

  “My dad,” he says. Although the guy probably never got up off the couch once, I’m thinking, to confirm his son was at home.

  “Anyone else?” I ask.

  He looks lost for a moment then thinks of something. He drops the bag of peas back on the bed and turns back to the computer. After a few keystrokes, a website comes up on the monitor. It features a hulk of a man standing over a reclining woman, her breasts so huge she’d fall over if she tried to get up. Lachlan pulls up an avatar on the screen of a horned Viking warrior. The name under it says “Thorald.”

  “Thorald? What kind of dumb screen name is that?” I say.

  “Thor was taken,” he says. “But that’s me. And I was questing with my legion.”

  “Your what?”

  “Online, playing the game,” he says, “with my team.” He indicates some of the other characters standing around his avatar, a slinky chick with elfin ears and a three-hundred-pound horned pig bull wearing a bra. “I was online from after school until three in the morning.” I’m glad to see the younger generation is getting so much exercise these days. He must have burned at least a hundred calories with all that mouse clicking. No wonder they’re all so goddamn fat.

  “Could have been anyone using your handle,” I say. And that makes the kid collapse a bit. “But my dad …” he says.

  “Listen, Lachlan, we’ll talk to your dad,” Malone says. “Anything else you want to tell me? Stuff you and Tyler got into? Maybe someone he pissed off enough who’d want to hurt him?” She’s looking at the tattoo on his leg, piecing something together. But the kid clams up.

  “I want a lawyer,” he says and turns back to the computer to start up the game.

  “The kid’s going to lose it when your techies take his computer,” I say from the back of the unmarked. “He won’t know what to do with himself. Might have to actually go outside or someth
ing.”

  Malone just says, “Hmmm.”

  “Hey, where are we going now?” I hope not back to see the Corrigans. I need to find a way to get out of that somehow.

  “We’re going to pick up Tyler’s dry cleaning,” she says, holding up the pink pick-up slip. “Then we’re going to the station. I want to look up that tattoo. See if it means anything.”

  We pull into a strip mall and walk into Langley’s Dry Clean and Laundromat. The broad behind the counter has a face so lined I’m thinking she could use a good steaming herself. Malone hands her the slip and the woman brings back a black leather jacket draped in plastic.

  “Nice jacket,” I say, as we walk out the door after paying. Malone didn’t even identify herself as the police. They don’t care whose stuff it is. If you got a little slip and fifty bucks , you can walk away with a five-hundred-dollar jacket, which is what I’m thinking this beauty must have set Tyler back when he got it. Except it looks like he cut the arms off, ruining the damn thing.

  Malone throws it in the trunk and we’re off again. I slip down as low as I can in the seat when we park at the cop shop. I even put on my shades. I keep them handy in my inner breast pocket, next to my mickey.

  “Oh, don’t be such a wuss,” Malone says, letting me out of the car.

  “Did you just call me a wuss?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Put the handcuffs on.”

  “C’mon, Candace.”

  “That’s Carrie Fisher to you, and I said put the handcuffs on.” I’m not letting anyone see me walk into a cop shop unless it looks like it’s against my will.

  Malone pulls the cuffs off her belt loop and snaps them on my wrists.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” she says, as we do the perp walk over to the front door of the station. Malone has the dry-cleaned jacket over one arm as she leads me with the other.