Triptych

by Karin Slaughter

She pushed him away more firmly this time. “Will.”

  He rolled off her and fell against the back of the couch with another groan, but this one was far from an expression of pleasure.

  She pulled her underwear back on as she stood. Her shirt was still crooked and she leaned over as she adjusted it.

  He wrapped his hand around her leg. “Why do you do this?”

  She stepped out of his reach, finding her purse on the table by the front door. “Why do you let me?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  FEBRUARY 9, 2006

  9:58 AM

  Martha Lam had apparently made not one but several phone calls. John had gotten a full refund on the rent he had paid at the flophouse and the room at Mr. Applebaum’s was almost thirty dollars cheaper a month. Combined with the fifty bucks John had gotten for crawling through the vacuum tank, he might actually be able to eat this month.

  “Damn,” Ray-Ray said. He was looking at a woman who had just pulled up with a Toyota Camry full of screaming kids. “She cain’t help that she ugly, but the least she could do is stay at home.”

  John gave him a sideways glance. “When’d you learn to speak in complete sentences?”

  “They’s a lot more to a brother than what you see,” Ray-Ray told him.

  He left John at the dryer and went to help wipe down one of the cars. John’s uneasy peace with Ray-Ray had settled into some kind of friendliness on the other man’s part since he’d taken him to the hospital. John wasn’t sure what had brought about this transformation, but he wasn’t about to complain. He had enough people after him right now. Anything that got Ray-Ray off his back was all right with him.

  The hospital visit had been a good thing for John, too. He still felt his heart skip in his chest when he thought about seeing Robin in the waiting room. She’d been wearing her work attire, but he couldn’t help seeing past that to her soft skin, her full lips. The way she stood with her weight shifted to one leg, her hip jutting out. What would it be like to run his hand along that hip, pull her close to him? These were the kinds of thoughts that kept a man awake at night.

  Robin wasn’t the reason John had gotten in to work early this morning, showing up even before Art. Moving from one place to the other wasn’t a big deal. John had tossed his clothes into the cooler and used it as a suitcase as he walked the six blocks over to Mr. Applebaum’s house. Once John was settled in, he went back to Ashby Street one more time and dug up the knife where he had buried it under a tree for safekeeping. He’d sweated all the way on the bus, scared he’d be caught with a weapon. At the car wash, John had dropped it in the vacuum canister and sat on the retaining wall under the magnolia tree until Art had driven up in his Cadillac, asking, “What’s with you, Shelley? You bucking for a promotion?” as he locked his car door.

  John was trying to think logically, figure out what to do next, but as much as he tried to concentrate, all he could feel was a burning anger. Michael had put that knife under his mattress in the flophouse just like he’d stashed the kitchen knife, the so-called murder weapon, in John’s closet all those years ago. What the hell did the guy have against him? What did John ever do to Michael to bring this down on his head? Not just John’s head, but on his entire family.

  It was one thing to set up John all those years ago, but to keep it up, to use his identity while he was locked away in prison…that was some kind of sick obsession. Michael hated him. You didn’t hold on to another man’s name for all these years unless you really fucking hated the guy. And the prick had obviously used his position on the police force to reach out to Ms. Lam, trying to get her to throw John back into Coastal with the pedophiles and rapists. It wasn’t enough to frame him. He wanted John to suffer.

  John had adjusted to his loss of freedom over the years, letting himself believe on some level that he belonged with men like Ben Carver. He had been a bad kid, a bad son. Richard Shelley could have testified to that. Even without his father’s damning testimony, in John’s own court of opinion, he did not come out completely blameless in Mary Alice’s murder. He had invited her to the party. He had been stoned. He had given her the alcoholic drink. He had gone back to her house, sneaked into her bedroom. He had snorted the speedball that knocked him on his ass. He had let it all happen.

  But knowing it was Michael, his own cousin Woody, who had butchered Mary Alice made John sick with rage. He couldn’t be angry for his own sake, but he could be angry for Mary Alice, livid as hell that Michael had not just raped the girl, not just killed her, but ravaged her like a rabid animal.

  The crime scene photographs in the courtroom had been shocking, but John had been there, had seen her body with his own two eyes. The bite marks on her small breasts. The dark bruises and deep lacerations on her inner thighs. The way her eyes were still open, staring at the door like she thought her mother would walk through at any minute and wake her for church. Her mouth had been brimming with her own blood, her hair stuck to the pillow with it.

  That fucking bastard. That God damn sick bastard.

  It didn’t stop with Mary Alice, though. Michael was still out there, still doing whatever the hell he wanted to do in John’s name. And he was a cop. A cop! He could jam up John anytime, was probably sitting on his ass right now thinking of yet another way to put John in the frame for his own sick crimes. The thought of last night, the tips of John’s fingers touching the folding knife, almost getting caught with a weapon in his hands, made him break out into a cold sweat. Michael could do anything. He could arrest John right now and there was nothing John could do about it.

  And maybe John deserved it. Maybe after what he had done to Michael’s neighbor, he deserved to be tossed back in jail with all the other sick bastards. He had mutilated a child. He had used his own hands to defile that girl. It didn’t seem right that he should get away with such a thing.

  The way things were looking, he probably wouldn’t.

  The dryer stopped and John started folding the towels, piling them up in a rolling sixty-drum trashcan so they could move them around the cars as they worked. He needed to talk to Ben again. John had grown up in prison, but he thought like a prisoner, not a criminal. He needed someone to tell him what to do.

  “Are you John?”

  The woman in front of him was slim, about five-eight or -nine. Her black hair was in a pixie cut and she wore a close-fit cropped jacket over her tight blue jeans.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, looking for the telltale bulge under her jacket. She didn’t look like a cop to him, her jacket was too nice, but John had never been good at spotting the bad guys.

  “You’re John Shelley?” she asked.

  He glanced over her shoulder. Ray-Ray was sucking on a lollipop, but John could see his eyes were taking in the scene.

  John asked, “Do I know you?”

  “You moved,” she said. “I thought you lived on Ashby Street.”

  He tried to smile when what he really wanted to do was drop the towels and run. “What’s going on?”

  She had her hands on her hips, and he thought about Ms. Lam. He couldn’t help himself. He looked right at the metal cap screwed onto the vacuum tank.

  “I’m Kathy Keenan,” she said. “A friend of your sister’s.”

  He dropped the towels. “Is Joyce—”

  “She’s fine,” the woman assured him. “You just need to talk to her.”

  “I…” He looked down at the pile of towels, then back up at the woman. He didn’t know who she was or why she was here, but she was crazy if she thought she could make Joyce do anything she didn’t want to do.

  John knelt down to scoop up the towels. “She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “I know she doesn’t,” Kathy said. “But she needs to.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I’m a friend of hers.”

  “You can’t know her very well if you think this will work.”

  “I’ve shared her bed for the last twelve years, John. I think I pretty much
know her better than anyone on earth.”

  So, Joyce was gay. John wondered what Richard thought about that. One child a convicted rapist and murderer, the other queer as a three-dollar bill. John couldn’t help but smile at the probable magnitude of Richard’s disappointment.

  Kathy had asked, “Does it bother you that your sister’s a lesbian?”

  “I really don’t think I have room to talk,” John had admitted, all the while thinking, God, Richard must have been livid when he found out. His perfect Joyce was batting for the other team.

  Kathy drove a black Porsche, the kind of car John could only see from his hands and knees as he cleaned the trash out of it. She had driven him straight up Piedmont Road, taking a right on Sidney Marcus and ending up parked in front of a small building on Lenox Road right up from the interstate. The sign outside read Keener, Rose and Shelley in fancy gold script. The car beside them, a graphite gray BMW, was parked in the space reserved for Joyce Shelley.

  Joyce worked less than two miles from the Gorilla. She might have even passed him every day on her drive in.

  “She’s handling a closing right now,” Kathy said. “She won’t be long.”

  John’s knees popped as he rolled himself out of the low-lying car. Time and again, he had to remind himself that he was almost forty years old. For some reason, he still felt fifteen, like Coastal had happened to another John, his mind going there while his body stayed on the outside, not aging, waiting for him to come back and claim it.

  “We’ll wait in her office,” Kathy suggested, leading him through the building. The receptionist’s eyes followed John as he walked past her desk, and he imagined that but for the janitor, she wasn’t used to seeing his kind strolling through these pristine corridors.

  “Back here.” Kathy had grabbed some notes from a cubbyhole with her name on it, and she read through these as they walked down the hall.

  Joyce’s office was nice, exactly as John would have imagined if he let himself think about his sister and her life outside of him. The Persian carpet on the floor had deep blues and burgundies and the curtains were a thin linen that let in the sunlight. The paint on the wall was a kind of chocolate beige. The colors were masculine, but there was something really feminine to the way Joyce had used them. Or maybe a designer had done the office, some pricey chick from Buckhead who got paid to spend rich people’s money. There were a couple of Oriental-looking paintings that weren’t to John’s taste, but the pictures on the credenza under the windows made his heart hurt in his chest.

  A young Joyce and John on the log ride at Six Flags. Baby John in Richard’s lap as he gave him a bottle. Ten-year-old Joyce on the beach in her two-piece bathing suit, a Popsicle in each hand. There were more recent photographs, too. Kathy and Joyce at the zoo. Kathy on a horse with a mountain view behind her. Two Labrador retrievers rolling around on the grass.

  The photo that stopped him was of his mother. Emily with a scarf around her head, her eyes sunken, cheeks hollow. She was smiling, though. His mother had always had the most beautiful smile. John had gotten through so many nights thinking about that smile, the easy way she bestowed it, the genuine kindness behind it. Tears fell from his eyes at the sight of her, and he felt a physical ache knowing he would never see her again.

  Kathy said, “Emily was a wonderful person.”

  John made himself put the frame back where it belonged. He used the back of his hand to wipe his eyes. “You knew her?”

  “Yes,” Kathy said. “She was very close to Joyce. It was hard on all of us when she got sick.”

  “I don’t…” John didn’t know how to say this. “I don’t remember seeing you at the funeral.”

  “I was there,” she said, and he saw tension around her eyes. “Your father isn’t very accepting of Joyce’s relationship with me.”

  “No,” John said. “He wouldn’t be.” Richard had always been certain that he knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Whoever crossed that line was as easily cut out of his life as the cancerous tumors he removed in the operating room.

  John felt the need to say, “I’m sorry about that. He’s always loved Joyce.”

  Kathy gave him a careful look. “Are you trying to defend your father?”

  “I guess it helps me if I try to understand his side of things, why he thinks the way he does.”

  She walked across the room and opened a door. John assumed it led to the bathroom, but he could see now that it was a walk-in closet lined with three filing cabinets. Spiral notebooks, probably fifty in all, were stacked in neat piles on top of each one.

  “These are all your court transcripts from your preliminary hearing, to the change of venue denial, to the last appeal.” She had pointed to different drawers as she said this. “This is your medical stuff.” She rested her hand on the top drawer of the cabinet nearest John. “Your first overdose in the ER, your admit after they arrested you, and…” Her mouth opened, but she had stopped. She still looked him in the eye, though. “Information from the Coastal infirmary.”

  John swallowed. Zebra. They knew about Zebra.

  “This is mostly parole board reports,” Kathy said, opening a drawer that contained six or seven thick files. “Joyce got the copy of your last one about a month ago.”

  “Why?” John said, thinking about the volumes of files Joyce had kept for over twenty years. “Why would she have this?”

  “It was your mother’s,” Kathy told him. “These notebooks.” She took one off the pile. “These are all her notes. She knew your case backward and forward.”

  John opened the notebook, stared at his mother’s neat cursive without really seeing it. When Emily was growing up, penmanship had mattered. Her writing was beautiful, flowing across the page like perfect flowers.

  The words, however, weren’t so pretty.

  Speedball = heroin + cocaine + ??? Why the bradycardia? Why the apnea? John turned the page. Bite marks around breasts match dental impressions? And, No semen recovered. Where is condom???

  Kathy said, “She was trying to get the physical evidence from the county at the end.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted to do a DNA test on the knife to prove that it was her blood, but the sample was so small they could only do a mitochondrial panel.” When he shook his head, Kathy explained, “Mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother, so even if it was Emily’s blood, there’s no way to rule out that it couldn’t be yours, too. Or Joyce’s for that matter, but that still wouldn’t have helped the case.”

  “ ‘Bite marks’?” he read.

  “She thought they could show your teeth didn’t match the bite marks, but there was a case, a Supreme Court case, where bite-mark evidence was ruled inadmissible.” She added, “But she thought that might help with the…the severing.”

  “What?”

  “The state’s odontologist was never called to the stand. About three years before she died, Emily petitioned for all your evidence, all the files. She was determined to start over, see if she missed anything. She found a report where the state’s dental expert said that he thought the tongue was…that it was bitten off, not cut off.”

  “Bitten off?” John echoed. His mind flashed on Cynthia Barrett, the sickening slickness of her tongue when he’d gripped it between his thumb and forefinger. Cutting was hard enough, but biting? What kind of monster bit off a girl’s tongue?

  “John?”

  He cleared his throat, made himself speak. “The knife was their key piece of evidence. They had an expert who said it was used to cut out her tongue. It proved premeditation.”

  “Right. Emily was going for prosecutorial misconduct. They claim they handed over the doctor’s report about the bite to Lydia during pretrial discovery, but Emily couldn’t find any record of it. It could have been grounds for an appeal.”

  He fanned through the pages, looked at the dates. “Mom was working on this when she was sick.”

  “She couldn’t stop,” Kathy told him. “She want
ed to get you out.”

  He couldn’t get over the volume of notes she had taken. Pages and pages filled with all sorts of horrible details his mother should have never even heard about. For the second time that day, he was crying in front of his sister’s lover. “Why?” he asked. “Why did she do this? The appeals were over.”

  “There was still a slim chance,” Kathy answered. “She didn’t want to give that up.”

  “She was too sick,” he said, flipping to the back of the notebook, seeing that the last entry was a week before she went into the hospital for the last time. “She shouldn’t have been doing this. She should’ve been focusing on getting stronger, getting better.”

  “Emily knew she wasn’t going to get better,” Kathy told him. “She spent the last days of her life doing exactly what she wanted to do.”

  He was really crying now—big, fat tears as he thought about his mother poring over all this information every night, trying to find something, anything, that would get him out.

  “She never told me,” John said. “She never told me she was doing this.”

  “She didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Joyce said.

  He swung around, wondering how long his sister had been standing behind him.

  Joyce didn’t look angry when she said, “Kathy, what are you doing?”

  “Interfering,” the other woman answered, smiling the way someone smiles when they’ve done something wrong but they know you’ll forgive them.

  Kathy said, “I’ll leave you two alone.” She squeezed Joyce’s hand as she walked past her, then pulled the door closed.

  John was still holding the notebook, Emily’s life’s work. “Your office is nice,” he said. “And Kathy…”

  “How about that?” she said, wryly. “A bona fide homo in the Shelley clan.”

  “I bet Dad was proud.”

  She snorted a laugh. “Yeah. So happy that he changed his will.”

  John clenched his jaw. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say.

  “Mama made me promise not to throw those out,” Joyce told him, waving her hand toward the closet. “I wanted to. I wanted to dump them all out in the yard and have a big bonfire. I almost did.” She gave a humorless bark of a laugh, as if she was still surprised she hadn’t torched everything. “I should have. I should have at least put them in a storage place or buried them somewhere.” She let out a heavy sigh. “But I didn’t.”