False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  Buddy’s briefcase was on the table.

  Locked.

  Harleigh looked for a knife in the drawer. She jammed it under the clasp, ordering Callie, “Tell me what happened. Exactly. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Callie shook her head again. “I don’t—I don’t remember.”

  The lock popped open. Harleigh was only momentarily frozen by the sight of so much cash. The spell broke quickly. She unpacked the money, checked the liner, the inside pockets, the folders, asking Callie, “Where did the fight start? Where were you in the house?”

  Callie’s lips moved without sound.

  “Calliope.” Harleigh cringed at her mother’s tone coming out of her own mouth. “Tell me now, God dammit. Where did it start?”

  “We …” Callie turned back toward the living room. “Behind the bar.”

  “What happened?” Harleigh kept her voice hard. “Be exact. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Callie’s voice was so weak that Harleigh had to strain to hear the details. She looked over her sister’s shoulder, playing out the movements as if the fight were unfolding in real time. Callie’s nose taking the pointy end of Buddy’s elbow behind the bar. The box of wine corks tumbling. The camera falling off the shelf. Callie being disoriented, lying flat on her back. Walking into the kitchen. Head under the faucet. Threatening Buddy that she was going to tell Linda. The attack. The phone cord being ripped from the wall. The strangling, the kicking and punching and then—the knife.

  Harleigh looked up. She saw that Callie had put the receiver back on the hook. The list of emergency numbers was still taped to the wall beside the phone. The only clue that something bad had happened here was the broken cord. “Trevor ripped the cord.”

  “What?” Callie said.

  “Tell them Trevor ripped the phone cord. When he says he didn’t, everyone will think he’s lying so he doesn’t get into trouble.”

  Harleigh didn’t wait for Callie to agree. She repacked Buddy’s briefcase and slammed the lid shut. She gave the kitchen another once-over, looking for somewhere Buddy could stash the cassette. Her eyes finally settled on his hulking body. He was still slouched to the side. The cut in his leg continued to sputter.

  She felt her own blood stop cold.

  You didn’t bleed unless your heart was still pumping.

  “Calliope.” Harleigh swallowed so hard that her throat clicked. “Go check on Trevor. Now.”

  Callie didn’t argue. She disappeared down the hallway.

  Harleigh knelt down in front of Buddy. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and lifted up his giant head. His eyelids slitted open. She saw the whites of his eyes as they rolled back.

  “Wake up.” She slapped his face. “Wake up, you stupid cocksucker.”

  The whites flashed again.

  She pressed open his eyelids. “Look at me, asshole.”

  Buddy’s lips parted. She could smell his cheap whiskey and cigars. The stench was so familiar that Harleigh was instantly back in his Corvette.

  Terrified. Helpless. Longing for escape.

  Harleigh slapped him so hard that saliva flew from his mouth. “Look at me.”

  Buddy’s eyes rolled up but, slowly, they came around to center.

  She saw the glimmer of recognition, the stupid belief that he was looking at someone who was on his side.

  Buddy stared at what was left of the phone, then looked back at Harleigh. He was asking her to call for help. He knew he didn’t have long.

  She said, “Where’s the cassette from the camera?”

  He looked at the phone again, then back at her.

  She got in his face. “I’ll kill you right now if you don’t tell me.”

  Buddy Waleski was not afraid. He viewed Harleigh as a prude, a rule-follower, the girl who knew the difference between right and wrong. The twitch that pulled up the left side of his lips told her he was happy to bring down Miss Goody Two Shoes and her baby sister right alongside him.

  “You fucking asshole.” Harleigh slapped him harder than the first time. Then she punched him. His head banged into the cabinet. She grabbed his shirt, reared back to punch him again.

  Buddy heard the sound before she did. A distinctive click coming from his shirt. She watched his confident expression slip into uncertainty. His eyes moved back and forth, trying to get a read on whether or not she understood.

  Harleigh was frozen, right fist still raised, left fist still gripping the front of his shirt. She rolled through her senses, trying to force herself back into that exact moment—the copper-penny smell of blood, the rasp of Buddy’s faint breathing, the bitter taste of lost freedom souring her mouth, the feel of his dirty work shirt wadded into her tight fist.

  She twisted the material tighter, bunching up the thick cotton.

  The click drew her eyes to his chest.

  Harleigh had only checked his pants pockets. Buddy was wearing a Dickies short-sleeved work shirt. The seams were reinforced. Two flapped breast pockets were on either side. The flap of the left pocket was up, worn with two fang-like impressions from the ever-present box of Black & Milds.

  Except this time, he’d put the box in backward. The cellophane window on the front faced his heaving chest.

  Harleigh slid out the long, skinny box. She stuck her fingers inside.

  The mini-cassette.

  She held it to his face so that he could see that she had won. Buddy wheezed out a long sigh. He only looked faintly disappointed. His life had been filled with violence and chaos, mostly brought about by his own hand. Compared to that, his death would be easy.

  Harleigh looked down at the small, black plastic cassette with its faded white label.

  A piece of electrical tape covered the protection tab so that the tape could be recorded over again and again.

  Harleigh had watched her sister change over the last three years, but she’d chalked it up to hormones or brattiness or just growing into another person. Callie’s heavy make-up, the arrests for shoplifting, the suspensions from school, the late-night whispered calls that went on for hours. Harleigh had ignored them because she’d been too focused on her own life. Pushing herself to work more, to save more money, to do well in school so she could get the hell out of Lake Point.

  Now, she was literally holding Callie’s life in her hands. Her youth. Her innocence. Her trust that no matter how high she flew into the air, the world would catch her.

  It was all Harleigh’s fault.

  Her hand squeezed into a fist. The sharp edges of the plastic mini-cassette dug into her palm. The world went red again, blood soaking everything she saw. Buddy’s fat face. His meaty hands. His balding head. She wanted to punch him again, to beat him into oblivion, to plunge the steak knife into his chest over and over until the bones cracked and the life spewed from his disgusting body.

  Instead, she opened the drawer by the stove. She pulled out the roll of cling film.

  Buddy’s eyes went wide. His mouth finally opened, but he had lost his chance to speak.

  Harleigh wrapped the cling film around his head six times before it tore off from the roll.

  The plastic sucked into his open mouth. Buddy’s hands reached up to his face, trying to claw open a hole to breathe. Harleigh grabbed onto his wrists. The big strong man, the giant, was too weak to stop her. She looked into his eyes, relishing the fear and helplessness, the panic as Buddy Waleski realized that Harleigh was stealing his easy death.

  He started to shake. His chest thrust into the air. His legs kicked out. A high whine came from his throat. Harleigh held on to his wrists, pressing them back against the cabinet. She was straddling him the way he had straddled Callie when he’d choked her. She was pressing her weight into him the same way he had pressed Harleigh back into the seat of his Corvette. She was watching him the same way Dr. Patterson, Coach Holt, Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Ganza, Mr. Emmett had all watched her sister. She was finally doing to a man the same fucking thing that men had been doing to Harleigh and Callie for their entire
fucking lives.

  It was over too soon.

  All at once, Buddy’s muscles released. The fight had left him. His hands flopped down to the floor. Urine seeped into his pants. If he had a soul, she imagined the Devil grabbing onto it by his filthy shirt collar, jerking him down, down, down into hell.

  Harleigh wiped sweat from her forehead. Blood was on her hands, her arms, arced into the crotch of her jeans where she had sat on top of him.

  “If you’d like to make a call …”

  She turned around. Callie was sitting on the floor. She’d pulled her knees to her chest. She was rocking, her body slowly moving back and forth like a wrecking ball.

  “Please hang up and dial again.”

  SPRING 2021

  4

  “Let’s see what’s going on with Mr. Pete.” Dr. Jerry started examining the cat, tenderly palpating a swollen joint. At fifteen years old, Mr. Pete was roughly the same age in human years as Dr. Jerry. “Maybe some underlying arthritis? Poor fella.”

  Callie looked down at the chart in her hands. “He was taking a supplement, but developed constipation.”

  “Oh, the injustices of old age.” Dr. Jerry hooked his stethoscope into his ears, which were almost as hairy as Mr. Pete’s. “Could you—”

  Callie leaned down and blew air in Mr. Pete’s face, trying to stop his purring. The cat looked annoyed, and Callie could not blame him. He’d gotten his paw hooked in the frame of the bed when he was trying to jump down for breakfast. It could happen to anybody.

  “That’s a good boy.” Dr. Jerry stroked Mr. Pete’s scruff. He told Callie, “Maine Coons are magnificent animals, but they tend to be the linebackers of the feline world.”

  Callie flipped back through the chart to start taking notes.

  “Mr. Pete is a neutered male of portly stature who presented with right forelimb lameness, having fallen from the bed. Physical exam revealed mild swelling but no crepitus or joint instability. Bloodwork was normal. Radiographs showed no obvious fracture. Start on buprenorphine and gabapentin for pain management. Recheck in one week.”

  She asked, “Bupe is point-oh-two m-g/k-g q8h for how many days?”

  “Let’s start with six days. Give him one for the road. No one likes car trips.”

  Callie carefully wrote his instructions into the chart as Dr. Jerry placed Mr. Pete back into his carrier. They were still on Covid protocols. Mr. Pete’s mother was currently sitting in her car outside in the parking lot.

  Dr. Jerry asked, “Anything else from the medicine cabinet?”

  Callie went through the stack of charts on the counter. “Aroo Feldman’s parents report an increase in pain.”

  “Let’s send home some more Tramadol.” He signed off on a new script. “Bless their hearts. Corgis are such assholes.”

  “Agree to disagree.” She passed another chart. “Sploot McGhee, greyhound meets motor vehicle. Cracked ribs.”

  “I remember this lanky young man.” Dr. Jerry’s hands shook as he adjusted his glasses. She saw his eyes barely move as he pretended to read the chart. “Methadone if they bring him in. If he’s not up to the visit, send home a fentanyl patch.”

  They went through the rest of the big dogs—Deux Claude, a Great Pyrenees with patellar displacement. Scout, a German Shepherd who’d nearly impaled himself on a fence. O’Barky, an Irish wolfhound with hip dysplasia. Ronaldo, an arthritic Labrador who weighed as much as a twelve-year-old child.

  Dr. Jerry was yawning by the time Callie got to the cats. “Just do the usual, my friend. You know these animals as well as I do, though be careful with that last one. Never turn your back on a calico.”

  She smiled at his playful wink.

  “I’ll give Mr. Pete’s human a call, then take my executive time.” He winked again, because they both knew he was going to take a nap. “Thank you, angel.”

  Callie kept up her smile until he turned away. She looked down, pretending to read the charts. She didn’t want to watch him shuffle down the hallway like an old man.

  Dr. Jerry was a Lake Point institution, the only vet in the area who took EBT cards in exchange for services. Callie’s first real job had been at this clinic. She was seventeen. Dr. Jerry’s wife had just passed away. He had a son somewhere in Oregon who only called on Father’s Day and Christmas. Callie was all he had left. Or maybe Dr. Jerry was all that she had left. He was like a father figure, or at least like what she’d heard father figures were supposed to be. He knew Callie had her demons but he never punished her for them. It was only after her first felony drug conviction that he’d stopped pushing her to go to vet school. The Drug Enforcement Agency had a crazy rule against giving prescription pads to heroin addicts.

  She waited for his office door to close before starting down the hallway. Her knee made a loud pop as she extended her leg. At thirty-seven, Callie was not that much better off than Mr. Pete. She pressed her ear to the office door. She heard Dr. Jerry talking to Mr. Pete’s owner. Callie waited a few more minutes until she heard the creaks from the old leather couch as he laid down for his nap.

  She let out a breath that she’d been holding. She took out her phone and set the timer for one hour.

  Over the years, Callie had used the clinic as a junkie vacation, cleaning herself up just enough so that she could work. Dr. Jerry always took her back, never asked her where she’d been or why she’d left so abruptly the last time. Her longest stretch of sobriety had been too many years ago to count. She’d lasted eight full months before she’d fallen back into her addiction.

  This time wouldn’t be any different.

  Callie had given up on hope ages ago. She was a junkie, and she would always be a junkie. Not like people in AA who quit drinking but still said they were alcoholics. Like somebody who was always, always going to return to the needle. She wasn’t sure when she had come into this acceptance. Was it her third or fourth time in rehab? Was it the eight months of sobriety she’d broken because it was Tuesday? Was it because it was easier to have these maintenance spells when she knew they were only temporary?

  Currently, only a sense of usefulness was keeping her on the somewhat straight and narrow. Because of a series of mini-strokes in the past year, Dr. Jerry had shortened the clinic hours down to four days a week. Some days were better for him than others. His balance was off. His short-term memory was unreliable. He often told Callie that without her, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to work one day, let alone four.

  She should feel guilty for using him, but she was a junkie. She felt guilty about every second of her life.

  Callie pulled out the two keys to open the drug cabinet. Technically, Dr. Jerry was supposed to keep the second key, but he trusted her to accurately log in the controlled substances. If she didn’t, then the DEA could start snooping around, matching invoices to dosages to charts, and Dr. Jerry could lose his license and Callie could go to jail.

  Generally, addicts made the Drug Enforcement Agency’s job easier because they were desperately stupid for their next fix. They OD’d in the waiting room or had a heart attack on the toilet or snatched as many vials as they could shove into their pockets and started running for the door. Fortunately, Callie had figured out through big trials and little errors how to steal a steady supply of maintenance drugs that kept her from getting dope sick.

  Every day, she needed a total of either 60 milligrams of methadone or 16 milligrams of buprenorphine to ward off the vomiting, headaches, insomnia, explosive diarrhea, and crippling bone pain that came from heroin withdrawal. The only rule Callie had ever been able to stick to was that she never took anything an animal needed. If her cravings got bad, she dropped her keys back through the mail slot in the door and stopped showing up. Callie would rather die than see an animal suffer. Even a corgi, because Dr. Jerry was right. They could be real assholes.

  Callie let herself stare longingly at the stockpiles in the cabinet before she started taking down vials and pill bottles. She opened the drug logbook next to the stack of charts.
She clicked her pen.

  Dr. Jerry’s clinic was a small operation. Some vets had machines where you had to use your fingerprint to open the drug cabinet, and your fingerprint had to match the chart and the chart had to match the dosage and that was tricky, but Callie had been working for Dr. Jerry on and off for nearly two decades. She could beat any system in her sleep.

  This was how she did it: Aroo Feldman’s parents had not asked for more Tramadol, but she’d logged the request into the chart anyway. Sploot McGhee would get the fentanyl patch because cracked ribs were awful and even a haughty greyhound deserved peace. Likewise, Scout, the idiotic German Shepherd who’d chased a squirrel over a wrought iron fence, would get all the medication he needed.

  O’Barky, Ronaldo, and Deux Claude were imaginary animals whose owners had transient addresses and non-working phone numbers. Callie had spent hours giving them backstories: teeth cleanings, heartworm meds, swallowed squeaky toys, unexplained vomiting, general malaise. There were more fake patients—a bull mastiff, a Great Dane, an Alaskan Malamute, and a smattering of sheepdogs. Pain meds were dosed based on weight, and Callie made sure to pick breeds that could go north of one hundred pounds.

  Freakishly large Borzois weren’t the only way to game the system. Spoilage was a reliable fallback. The DEA understood that animals were wriggly and a lot of times half an injection could end up squirted into your face or onto the floor. You recorded that as spoiled in the book and you went about your day. In a pinch, Callie could drop a vial of sterile saline in front of Dr. Jerry and get him to cancel it out in the log as methadone or buprenorphine. Or sometimes, he would forget what he was doing and make the change himself.

  Then there were the easier options. When the visiting orthopedic surgeon came every other Tuesday, Callie prepared bags of fluids with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that was so strong it was generally only prescribed for advanced cancer pain, and ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic. The trick was to siphon off enough of each drug so that the patient was still comfortable for surgery. Then there was pentobarbital, or Euthasol, which was used to euthanize sickly animals. Most doctors pulled three to four times what was actually needed because no one wanted it to not work. The taste was bitter, but some recreational users liked to cut it with rum and zonk out for the night.