False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  “Stick your hand down there if you want.”

  Phil squinted as smoke curled into her eye. “I don’t want none of your lesbian shit while you’re staying here.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Tuesday

  6

  To her great disappointment, Callie was not afforded a moment of disorientation when she woke up in her old bedroom inside of her mother’s house. Everything was instantly familiar: the caustic bite of salt in the air, the gurgle of aquarium filters, the chirping of many birds, a dog snuffling outside her locked bedroom door. She knew exactly where she was and why she was there.

  The question was, how long would it take Andrew’s detective to figure out the same?

  From Leigh’s description of Reggie Paltz, the guy would stick out in the ’hood as bad as an undercover cop. If Reggie was stupid enough to knock on her mother’s front door, Phil could be relied upon to show him the thick end of her baseball bat. But Callie was fairly certain it would not go down that way. Reggie would be under strict orders to stay in the shadows. Andrew Tenant had come at Leigh straight on, but Leigh wasn’t his main target. Buddy’s son was not paying homage to his father’s murder by wrapping cling film around his victim’s heads. He was using a cheap kitchen knife, the same type of knife Callie had used to mortally wound his father.

  Which meant that whatever game Andrew was playing, Callie was more than likely the prize.

  She blinked up at the ceiling. Her old poster of the Spice Girls stared back, the ceiling fan protruding from between Geri Halliwell’s legs. Callie let a few lines of “Wannabe” run through her head. The great thing about being an addict was that it taught you how to compartmentalize. There was heroin, and then there was everything else in the world that didn’t matter because it was not heroin.

  Callie clicked her tongue in case Binx was awaiting an invitation on the other side of the cat door. When the animal did not appear, she levered herself up in the bed, feet going down to the floor as her shoulders went upright. The sudden change in orientation dropped her blood pressure. She felt dizzy and nauseous and, suddenly, her bones were itching to the marrow. She sat there, investigating the early symptoms of withdrawal. Cold sweat. Aching bowels. Pounding head. Untamed thoughts nagging her skull like a beaver gnawing on a tree.

  The backpack was leaning against the wall. Callie was on her knees, on the floor, without a second thought. She made quick work of finding the syringe in her dope kit, locating the nearly full vial of methadone. The entire time she set up the shot, her heart begged with every beat needle-needle-needle.

  Callie didn’t bother to search for a vein in her arms. There was nothing left to use. She slid across the floor, sitting in front of the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. She used her reflection to locate her femoral vein. Everything was backward, but Callie easily adapted. She watched her reflection as the needle slipped into her leg. The plunger pressed down.

  The world got softer—the air, the gurgling sounds, the hard edges of the boxes scattered around the room. Callie let out a long breath as she closed her eyes. The darkness inside her eyelids turned into a plush landscape. Banana trees and dense forest peppering a mountain range. On the horizon, she saw the gorilla waiting for the methadone wave to break.

  That was the problem with a maintenance dose. Callie could still feel everything, see everything, remember everything. She shook her head, and like a View-Master, she clicked to another memory.

  The anatomy drawing in Linda Waleski’s textbook. The common femoral vein was a blue line running alongside the red femoral artery. Veins took blood to the heart. Arteries took it away. That was why Buddy hadn’t died immediately. The knife had nicked the vein. If she’d opened the artery, Buddy would’ve been dead long before Leigh killed him.

  Callie shook a fresh image into her head.

  Meowma Cass, the bottle-fed kitten Dr. Jerry was taking home with him at night. Callie had named her after Cass Elliot, who had died of a heart attack in her sleep. The opposite of a Cobain, who’d put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger. His suicide note had ended with a beautiful tribute to his daughter—

  For her life which will be so much happier without me. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU!

  Callie heard a scraping noise.

  Her eyelids slowly peeled open. Binx was outside the window, clearly indignant to find it closed. Callie pushed herself up from the floor. Her body ached with every step. She scratched at the glass, letting Binx know she was going as fast as she could. He gamboled about the metal security bars like a dressage horse, if dressage horses were not homicidal adrenaline junkies. There was a pin lock on the window, a long bolt that kept the sash from opening. Callie had to edge it out with her fingernails while Binx stared at her like she was a moron.

  “Forgive me, sir.” Callie gave his silky back some long pets. He pressed his head up under her chin because cats were social groomers. “Did the wicked witch let you outside?”

  Binx told no tales, but Callie knew that Phil had probably fed, watered, and brushed him before offering him the choice of either the couch, a fluffy chair, or the door. The scrawny old bitch would throw her body in front of a bus to save a chipmunk, but her children were on their own.

  Not that Phil was that ancient. She’d been fifteen years old when Leigh was born, then nineteen when Callie came along. There had been a constant rotation of boyfriends and husbands, but Phil had told the girls that their father had died during a military training exercise.

  Nick Bradshaw had been a radio intercept officer who’d flown with his best friend, a Navy fighter pilot named Pete Mitchell. One day, they had gotten on the wrong side of a Russian MiG during a training exercise. Bradshaw was killed after a flame-out sent their jet into a flat spin. Which was horrifying to think about, but also hilarious if you knew that Pete Mitchell was called Maverick and Bradshaw was Goose and that was basically the first half of Top Gun.

  Still, Callie found it preferable to the truth, which probably involved Phil passing out after drinking too much. Both Callie and Leigh took it on faith that they would never learn the true story. Their mother was a master of subterfuge. Phil wasn’t even her real name. Her birth certificate and her criminal record officially listed her as Sandra Jean Santiago, a convicted felon who collected rent for slumlords around Lake Point. The felony meant Phil wasn’t legally allowed to carry a gun, so she carried a baseball bat—she said for protection, but it was clearly for enforcement. The Louisville Slugger was signed by Phil Rizzuto. That’s where her nickname had come from. Nobody wanted to get on the bad side of Phil.

  Binx shook off Callie’s hand as he jumped down. She started to close the window, but a flash of light caught her eye. She felt a flicker of panic burn at the methadone. She looked across the street. The pile of shit was still festering on the sidewalk, but the light had flashed from the direction of the boarded-up house.

  Or had it?

  Callie rubbed her eyes as if she could manually adjust the focus. There were cars lining the road, trucks and old sedans with the mufflers attached by clothes hangers alongside the BMWs and Mercedes favored by the drug dealers. Maybe the sunlight had hit a mirror or a piece of metal. There could be broken crack pipes or pieces of foil in the yard. Callie squinted at the tall grass, trying to figure out what she’d seen. Probably an animal. Maybe a camera lens.

  White dude. Nice car.

  Binx arched against her leg. Callie put her hand to her chest. Her heart was beating hard enough to feel the thump. She studied each boarded-up window and door to the house until her eyes watered. Was the methadone fucking her up more than usual? Was she being paranoid?

  Did it matter?

  Callie closed the window. The pin went back into the sash. She found her jeans, slid on her sneakers. She shoved her ill-gotten gains into her backpack. Her dope kit and the methadone went under the mattress. She would have to hit Stewart Avenue before lunchtime. She needed to sell the rest of this shit so she wasn’t carryi
ng if the police stopped her. She turned to leave, but couldn’t stop herself from looking out the window again.

  Her eyes squinted. She tried to recreate the memory of the flash of light. Her imagination filled in the details. A private eye with a long, telescoping lens on his professional-looking camera. The click of the shutter as he captured Callie in her private moments. Reggie Paltz would develop the photos, take them back to Andrew. Would they both look at her images the way Buddy had? Would the two men use them somehow, some way, that Callie didn’t want to know about?

  A loud bang sent her heart into her throat. Binx had knocked over one of the boxes that Phil had stacked around the room. Newspapers spilled out, magazine articles, crazy shit that Phil had printed from the internet. Her mother was a rabid conspiracy theorist. And Callie said that as someone who understood that rabies was a virtually fatal virus that caused anxiety, confusion, hyperactivity, hallucinations, insomnia, paranoia, and a fear of drinking fluids.

  With the exception of alcohol.

  Callie went to the door, which was padlocked from the inside. She dug the key out of her pocket. A handful of coins came with it. Leigh’s change from McDonald’s last night. Callie stared at the two dimes and three quarters, but her attention was elsewhere. She had to fight the urge to stand at the window again. Instead, she closed her eyes, pressed her head against the door, and tried to convince herself that she was on a bad trip.

  Reality edged its way back in.

  If Andrew’s private eye was watching her from the boarded-up house, wasn’t that exactly what Callie wanted? Reggie wouldn’t need to go to the motel and bribe Trap or interrogate Crackhead Sammy. He would not find out that she was working at Dr. Jerry’s. He would not talk to her customers on Stewart Avenue. He would not tap his friends in the police force to maybe look into her and maybe find out what she’d been up to. His investigation would stop right at Phil’s doorstep.

  Callie opened her eyes. The coins went back into her pocket. She jammed the key into the lock and twisted it open. Binx scooted up the hallway en route to a pressing appointment. Callie closed the door, put the padlock on the outside. She clicked it shut, then pulled on the hasp to double check that her mother couldn’t break into her room.

  It was like being a kid again.

  The gurgle of saltwater aquarium filters got louder as she made her way up the hall. Leigh’s bedroom had been turned into Sea World. Dark blue walls. Light blue ceiling. A beanbag chair with Phil’s stringy outline was in the center of the room, offering a panoramic view of tangs, clownfish, firefish, damselfish, coral beauties, swimming through hidden treasures and sunken pirate ships. The smell of pot draped down from the ceiling. Phil liked to get stoned in the dark, wet room, lolled across the beanbag chair like a tongue.

  Callie checked to make sure her mother wasn’t nearby before going into the room. She peeled back a corner of blue foil covering the window. She knelt down so she could peer out at the boarded-up house. The angle was better from Leigh’s room, less conspicuous. Callie could see a piece of plywood had been pulled away from one of the front windows, revealing an opening large enough for a man to crawl through.

  “Well,” Callie said to herself. She couldn’t recall if the plywood had been in that position the night before. Asking Phil would probably send her mother into a delusional rage.

  She slid her phone out of her back pocket and took a photo of the house. Callie used her fingers to zoom in on the front window. The plywood had splintered when it was pulled back. There was no way of telling when it had happened short of getting a degree in forensic wood splintering.

  Should she call Leigh?

  Callie played out the possible conversation, the might-have-seens and could’ve-beens and all the other half-baked theories that would wind up Leigh’s cymbal-clanging inner monkey. Her sister was meeting with Andrew this afternoon. Leigh’s boss would be there. She would have to walk a razor’s edge. Calling her now, passing on what could be a methadone delusion, seemed like a really bad idea.

  The phone returned to her pocket. She pressed the edge of the foil back down over the window. She walked into the living room, where the menagerie continued. Roger stuck his head up from the couch and barked. There was a new dog beside him, another terrier mix, who gave exactly zero fucks when Callie patted his scruffy head. She smelled bird shit, though Phil was religious about cleaning out the three large cages that gave a dozen budgies pride of place in the dining room. Callie gathered by the burn of cigarette smoke that Phil had taken up her position in the kitchen. No matter how well her mother tended to her beloved animals, every single creature living in this goddam house was going to die from secondhand smoke.

  “Tell your cat to leave my birds alone,” Phil hollered from the kitchen. “He’ll end up with his skinny ass sleeping outside if he even thinks about touching one.”

  “Stupid Cunt …” Callie let the words hang for a few seconds “… is afraid of birds. They’re more likely to hurt him than the other way around.”

  “Stupid Cunt sounds like a girl’s name.”

  “Well, you tell him that. I can’t get through to him.” Callie plastered on a smile as she walked into the kitchen. “Good morning, Mother.”

  Phil snorted. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her, a cigarette in her mouth, and her eyes glued to the giant iMac computer that took up half the table. Her mother looked the same as she always did in the morning hours. Last night’s make-up was sloppy on her face, mascara clumped, eyeliner smeared, blush and foundation scratched by her pillow. How this bitch wasn’t a walking case of pink eye was anyone’s guess.

  Phil said, “I guess you’re laying off the dope. You’re getting fat again.”

  Callie sat down. She wasn’t hungry, but she reached for the plate.

  Phil slapped her hand away. “You paid for rent, not food.”

  Callie took the coins out of her pocket and slapped them onto the table.

  Phil eyed them suspiciously. She knew where Callie kept her money. “That come out of your pussy?”

  “Put it in your mouth and find out.”

  Callie didn’t see the punch coming until Phil’s fist was a few inches from her head.

  She pivoted too late, getting clipped above the ear as she toppled out of the chair at an almost comically slow pace. The comedy stopped when her head cracked against the floor. The pain was breathtaking. She was too winded to do anything but watch Phil stand over her.

  “What the hell, I barely tapped you.” Her mother shook her head. “Fucking junkie.”

  “Crazy drunk bitch.”

  “At least I can keep a roof over my head.”

  Callie relented. “Fair.”

  Phil stepped over her as she left the room.

  Callie stared up at the ceiling, her eyes fixed like an owl’s. Her ears became alert to the sounds of the house. Gurgling, tweeting, barking. The bathroom door slammed shut. Phil would be in there for at least half an hour. She would shower, slather on her make-up, dress herself up, then sit back down at the table and read her conspiracy bullshit until the Jewish cabal turned everyone infertile and the world ceased to exist.

  Pushing herself up from the floor took more strength than Callie had anticipated. Her arms were shaking. The shock was still working its way through her body. She coughed from the remnants of smoke curling around the room.

  Phil had stubbed out her cigarette in the eggs.

  Callie sat in her mother’s chair and started on the bacon. She clicked through the tabs on the computer. Deep state. Hugo Chavez. Child slavery. Child neglect. Rich people drinking the blood of infants. Infants being sold for food. For a woman whose own daughter was literally molested by a pedophile, Phil had come late to the anti-pedophile movement.

  Roger’s snout pushed at her bare ankle. Callie picked around Phil’s crushed cigarette, finding pieces of egg to drop on the floor. Roger hoovered them up. New Dog hot-stepped into the kitchen. He gave her the kin
d of persnickety look you would expect from a half terrier.

  She told him, “Our safe word is onomatopoeia.”

  New Dog was more interested in the eggs.

  Callie looked at the time. She couldn’t put this off any longer. She strained her ears, making sure Phil was still in the bathroom. When Callie was satisfied she wasn’t going to get caught, she turned to her mother’s computer, selected incognito on a new browser window, and typed in TENANT AUTOMOTIVE.

  The search returned 704,000 results, which only made sense when you scrolled down and saw that sites like Yelp, DealerRater, CarMax, Facebook, and the Better Business Bureau had all paid for placement.

  She selected the main site for Tenant Automotive Group. Thirty-eight locations. BMW, Mercedes, Range Rover, Honda, Mini. They did a little bit of everything, but mostly stuck to high-end vehicles. Callie read through the brief history of the dealership’s growth—From One Small Ford Dealership on Peachtree to Branches All Over the Southeast! There was a line drawing of a tree showing the short succession: Gregory Sr. to Greg Jr. to Linda Tenant.

  The mouse found its way to Linda’s name. Callie clicked. A slick-looking photo popped up. Linda’s hair was short and frosted, probably courtesy of dropping a godzillion bucks at a tony hair salon. She sat at a Darth Vader-looking desk with a shiny red Ferrari behind her. Papers were stacked neatly to her left and right to impart the message that she was a lady who did business. Her hands were clasped together in front of her. No wedding ring because she was married to the job. The collar of her white Izod polo was popped. A choker of pearls lay like gerbil orthodontia around her suntanned neck. Callie imagined Linda was wearing acid-washed jeans and white Reebok high-tops because who wouldn’t fully embrace their Brooke Shields with that kind of money?

  The best part was Linda’s Miss America Pageant bio. Nothing about living in the ’hood with her rapist pedophile husband. Callie smiled at the selective editing—

  Linda Tenant graduated from the Georgia Baptist College of Nursing with a Bachelor of Science in nursing. She worked for several years at Southern Regional Medical Center before joining the family business. She volunteers with the American Red Cross and continues to lend her medical/managerial expertise to the City of Atlanta’s Covid-19 advisory panel.