“No.”
I jump back in. “So you didn’t visit the Skyview last night?”
“Nope.”
“Then tell me where you were.”
“At what time?”
“Say from eight o’clock.”
“I was at the Underground at eight o’clock. I stayed for another hour, then went home.”
“And you were home all night?”
“Yup.”
“Alone? Or did you have company?”
“Just me.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DELIA
An hour later, his statement on the record, Connor’s out the door and I’m finally home with Danny, who’s somehow stayed awake. I feel pretty good about my day, especially Connor’s interview. I got him on tape lying about his relationship with Bradley and about never visiting the Skyview. And his alibi is no alibi at all. Not that I’ve convinced myself that he’s involved. Or that the woman on the tape is somehow innocent. At this point I’m willing to entertain other possibilities. Including the possibility that Connor and the woman are somehow connected.
Danny’s sitting next to me on the couch, waiting for me to make good on my promise to discuss the case. We’ve grown incredibly close, me and Danny, closer than we’ve ever been. Courtesy of the virus, Covid-19.
Dodging the virus was never on the table. As a first responder, I walked into homes where every member of the family was sick, half of them coughing their lungs out, and not a mask to be found. So I’d get sick for sure, and my son, in all probability, as well. But I didn’t worry about Danny all that much. I just assumed that his illness would be short-lived.
Viruses don’t read probability charts. That’s what it boiled down to. I was only sick for three days and my symptoms were mild. Not my son. At one point Danny ran a fever of 103.2 that persisted through the longest night of my life. He complained of headaches, broke into sweats that soaked the bedclothes, had chills that all the blankets in the house couldn’t warm. His harsh, dry cough quickly became constant, and he cried out for me at times, even as I sat on the edge of the bed holding his hand.
“Mom, Mom, Mom.”
The theory shared by most cops is that human beings have only three responses to a threat: fight, flight, or fright. Me, I was a fighter, always ready to throw that first punch, especially as a child, when boys and girls are close to the same size. Not this time. This time an uncontrollable fear seized me and held on day after day. I could barely force myself to leave Danny’s side to use the bathroom or to gather the boxes of food left at my door by Vern and Lillian. And I finally understood the power of love, a truth I’d resisted throughout my life. The thought of losing Danny was simply unbearable, yet I felt utterly helpless. Yes, I tried cold compresses and Tylenol to bring his fever down, and I practically force-fed him liquids to keep him hydrated. But his fever returned night after night after night until time lost all meaning, until there was only the present and my son lying in pain on the bed.
Danny recovered, obviously, with no sign of any permanent change except with our relationship. Our ties go unspoken now. There’s no need to speak them aloud, because there isn’t any room for doubt. There’s no distance between us, no considerations to be considered.
Danny eagerly scrutinizes a series of photos I took at the crime scene with my cell phone. Including a few of the body. And, yeah, I’m guilty enough to swear him to secrecy. On the other hand, he loves to watch high-body-count movies with his friends. Movies where human beings are torn apart by everything from knives to death rays to flesh-eating zombies. A little reality won’t hurt.
“Was he a bad guy?” Danny wants to know.
“Very.”
“Then he got what he deserved?”
Danny’s not being flip. He really wants to understand why I’m making such a fuss when the world’s better off without Bradley Grieg.
“In a way, he did,” I admit. “It’s like justice, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But in this country, regular people aren’t allowed to get justice for themselves. Not unless they’re defending themselves against an immediate threat. If people want justice, they have to call the police and let the government find justice for them.”
“That’s not fair.”
I know better than to continue discussions when Danny retreats into fair mode. In his mind, he’s the chief justice of what’s fair and what’s not. Like this morning, when Barry called me a dyke. Punching Barry in the face was fair, even necessary.
“Fair or not, this particular killing wasn’t about justice. We’re pretty sure the motive was robbery.”
Danny mulls it over for a minute, then surprises me by asking a truly important question as he points to a photograph. “Was he dead?”
“Before he was shot?”
“Yeah.”
This is a possibility Vern and I discussed. Given the drug paraphernalia in the bathroom and the frequency of fatal overdoses, you have to figure it’s a possibility. If Grieg was already dead when he was shot, the only crime was illegal discharge of a firearm. You can’t murder a dead man, try as you might.
I glance at the photo on the coffee table. Grieg’s lying on his belly, legs stretched out behind him. One arm’s extended alongside his head, the other’s curled along his side with the palm up. His face is concealed by the blackened pillow and the blood. Just as well, because there isn’t all that much of it left.
“Our coroner’s doing the autopsy tomorrow morning. We’ll know for sure afterward. But it’s an excellent question. Grieg was a junkie. He might have OD’d before he was shot.”
Danny beams. This is a kid who loves to be praised. And the truth—I admit that I’m prejudiced—is that he mostly deserves the praise he gets. I put my arm around his shoulders and pull him close. We’ve moved three times since Danny was born, forcing him to make new friends and forge new alliances. Having a dyke for a mother didn’t make the process any easier.
“I love you, kid,” I tell him.
Danny responds immediately. “I love you, too, Mom.”
I’m still at it an hour later when I receive a phone call from Vern. Vern’s still at it, too, but he’s actually working.
“Bingo, Delia. Bradley Grieg was in Randy’s last night.”
“How do ya know?”
“Well, it was Connor got me started. You remember, he said the last time he saw Bradley was at Randy’s . . . then he said that Bradley liked Randy’s because the kind of women he meets at Randy’s are uncomplicated.”
“C’mon, Vern, out with the story.”
“It ain’t that complicated, Delia. When I got outta my car at Randy’s, I smelled weed. Strong, right? So I followed my nose to the back of the club and found a busboy suckin’ on a joint. The kid hit me with ‘No habla Inglés,’ but I speak enough Spanish to get by, and I convinced him to cooperate. That or go to jail and most likely find his ass deported. It wasn’t much of a choice, truth be told, and he recognized Grieg’s photo right away. Told me Grieg comes in a couple of times a week and that he was in the bar last night.”
“Anything else? Did he leave with a woman?”
“The kid didn’t notice. He thinks Grieg left after ten, but he’s not even sure about that.”
“You think he was being honest? The kid, I mean.”
“A hundred percent. When I let him go, he was so grateful, I thought he was gonna kiss me.” Vern pauses a moment. “Should I go in? They’ve got a dozen security cameras inside. I could ask to see the data.”
The offer’s tempting. Get the case rolling, maybe identify the woman tonight. But I’m not big on gambling, not if I have an option. Suppose whoever’s in charge at Randy’s says no. Suppose the footage goes missing overnight or accidentally gets deleted. Better to take the sure thing.
“Get out of there, Vern, without being seen. Tomorrow morning we’ll find a prosecutor to sign off on a subpoena for the data. Then we’ll serve it before the club opens.”
&nbs
p; CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GIT
It’s eight o’clock, an hour after I leave Zack’s. I’m in the living room with Mom, eating a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. Charlie’s in her room, watching Charlotte’s Web on her tablet, both the 2006 version and the animated 1973 version. She’s already read more than half of the book.
Charlie’s skills can’t be allowed to erode over the summer. She’s only finished second grade, but she reads on a fifth-grade level. Better still, she’s willing to use an online dictionary to define words she doesn’t know. Just now she’s comparing the novel to the movie versions made from it. I didn’t ask her to make the comparison, didn’t even suggest it. Charlie’s curious in ways that never crossed my little mind when I was her age. Maybe I was too busy surviving.
On most nights, Zack sleeps peacefully and I get to catnap. But the arthritis in his knees kicked up last night and the old man had a tough time. I spent most of it next to his bed, listening to him talk about his first wife, the only woman (according to Zack) he ever really loved.
Sleep’s calling out to me, but I’m determined to pass some time with Charlie. I’ll join her in her room as soon as I finish breakfast. Meanwhile, I have to put up with Mom.
“Katie Lowe dropped by last night,” she tells me. “You remember Katie?”
“Yeah, sure.” Another lowlife.
“Well, she’s tellin’ me that the one who shot Bradley’s a woman.”
“How does she know?”
“Her cousin, Ellie Norton? She’s goin’ out with the dispatcher works out of the police station? That would be Austin Flint? Anyways, Austin told Ellie, and Ellie told Kate. The killer was definitely a woman.”
“Well, that proves it.” I add a little salt and pepper to my eggs. “Austin told Ellie and Ellie told Kate.”
Mom looks confused for a moment. She never reads newspapers and only watches the local news to catch the weather report. The grapevine provides all the information she needs to guide her life. Experts piss her off.
“Don’t come as no surprise,” she says, ignoring my sarcasm. “That Bradley Grieg was a son of a bitch from the get-go. Same for his daddy, Big Jim. The man’s wife spent more nights alone in her bed than with him for company. In fact, far as Big Jim was concerned—this goes for his son, too—the women in his life didn’t mean no more to him than one of them love dolls.”
Thankfully, Charlie’s door is closed. The girl has big ears, and I’m tired of apologizing for Mom’s foul mouth. The woman says whatever comes into her mind, then accuses me of putting on airs when I complain. But this time she’s right on the money. I was no more to Bradley Grieg than a love doll. Whenever I close my eyes, I see those twenties fluttering to the carpet. I hear his voice, too, hear the contempt thick as vomit: “Fuck off.”
“Hate to imagine,” Mom adds, repeating herself, “what ol’ Connor Schmidt’s gonna do when he catches up with the one killed his buddy. Though it likely ain’t but a slap on the ass compared to what his daddy’s got planned. I knowed Carl Schmidt growin’ up and the man wasn’t nothin’ but mean.”
Mom drones on, but I tune her out. I work at Resurrection tonight. That means I’ll have thirty patients instead of one, most in poor condition. But that’s nothing compared with what I dealt with only a year ago, when the virus finally invaded Baxter. I should have seen it coming. No, I did see it coming. I worked, after all, in a nursing home located in a city economically dependent on a meatpacking plant. At the same time, as the virus slowly closed in on the country’s heartland, the danger seemed unreal. The coasts went first, California and Washington on the west; New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia on the east; Florida, Louisiana, and Texas on the south. Nestled in the belly of this beast, we somehow believed that the infection would spare us. Then hundreds of workers at Baxter Packing tested positive. My patients began to die. Then my turn came.
Harold McCarthy got sick in late April. Harry was ninety-two, and his legs were gone, but he was a relatively cheerful man who’d retained his faculties. He used to read me letters from his grandson while I dressed a bedsore on his lower back that refused to heal. Harry woke up with a fever one morning, usually the first sign of infection, and died forty-eight hours later in the hospital. This was before the virus overwhelmed Baxter Medical Center.
We didn’t mourn Harold, neither the staff nor the residents at Resurrection. We didn’t have the chance. Within a few days, thirty of the home’s fifty-two patients sickened. Initially we turned to Baxter’s volunteer ambulance corps for help. Our patients were transported to the hospital, where they received treatment, including ventilators. Then there were no more ventilators; then so many paramedics sickened that ambulances couldn’t be had; then my patients began to die in their beds.
Two weeks after Harold’s passing, Charlie and I both came down with a fever and chills. Not Mom, though, despite all her risk factors. I don’t know whether she was one of the many who remained asymptomatic, despite being infected, or whether the virus never touched her. I do know that her continued good health was very fortunate for our little household.
Charlie’s slight fever lasted all of two days. She had no other symptoms, no cough, no body aches, no chills. Me, I was sick enough for both of us. For the next two weeks my temperature rose above 103 degrees in the evening and never fell below 101.5, even at daybreak. My whole body ached, nose to toes, and my blood oxygen saturation level dropped to ninety-three percent from its normal hundred. At times I sweated, at times I shivered; my cough overwhelmed me whenever I lowered my head, and my chest burned with every breath. I had trouble walking across the room.
My room became a little prison, which I left only to use the bathroom, the trip an ordeal that exhausted me. Food was left outside my door, but I had to force myself to eat and couldn’t get beyond the first few mouthfuls. Charlie was seven at the time, and frightened, obviously. I tried to reassure her by sitting on one side of my bedroom door while she sat on the other, reading me a story as I sometimes read to her in bed. At times, even that was too much for me. At times I became delirious.
My delirium, at least the episodes I can remember, took on a dreamlike aspect. I was a nurse, and supposed to heal my patients, but I couldn’t get to them. I tried. I started over and over and over again, only to have some obstacle block me. A car that wouldn’t start, a closed street, a cop issuing me a ticket. Then I’d find myself in my room, back where I started.
At the end of the second week, I had an especially bad night. My patients were dying and it was my fault. They needed my care, but I couldn’t get out of this room. Of course, I might have opened the door and walked out. It wasn’t locked. But the thought never occurred to me. No. I wept, I moaned, I cried out against this injustice, but I never tried to leave.
Propped up on pillows so that I was sitting upright, sleep finally came to me. As always, my fever retreated toward daybreak, and I woke up at first light, so weak that it was some minutes before I realized that my daughter had crept into the room during the night. She was now lying in my bed, one arm thrown out, her head on my lap. I should have reacted, should have shaken her awake, should have given her a stern lecture as I led her from my room. I didn’t, not for many long minutes, my need to be close to her overwhelming. But then my door opened and Mom walked into the room. She didn’t berate me. In fact, the hard lines of her mouth softened and I found a measure of compassion in her eyes. Nevertheless, she picked Charlie up and carried her, still sleeping, out of the room, leaving me to my tears.
After eight long, hard weeks, I returned to Resurrection. To the living and the dead, to empty beds and patients who never became infected. The living welcomed me home with hugs and tears. I mourned those gone. I went to work.
My bed calls to me as I finish my eggs, drop my dishes in the sink, and walk into Charlie’s room. Charlie will pass most of the day outside with the local kids, but I always spend a few minutes with her in the morning. Then, in the evening, we’ll have
supper together before I head out to work.
This morning I stand in the doorway for a moment. Charlie’s sitting in her little blue chair, absorbed in her tablet. She seems especially small to me. Especially small and especially vulnerable. I’m all she has, all that keeps her on this side of the Yards—or, worse, from foster care. And I could be gone in a heartbeat, one minute safe, then the knock on the door. Police, open up.
Because the more I learn about Bradley Grieg, the more likely it seems that the cops will track him to Randy’s on the night he was killed. They’ll commandeer any footage from the security cameras, and there I’ll be, loaded with makeup, in my broad-brimmed hat. My one consolation? Nobody at Randy’s knows my name, and I didn’t use a credit card. I’m not a regular, either, and I didn’t recognize any customers in the club.
Enough, enough with useless speculation. Charlie’s right here, right now, and I can’t take my outing back. I glance around the room at the purple walls, the gold curtains and pink bedspread. As usual, I allowed Charlie to choose the decor, then saddled her with a lecture on compatible colors. But this time she was adamant, and I let her have her way, accepting even the metallic thread in the curtains.
Charlie finally looks up. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, honey. How’s the book going?”
“I think it’s too sad.”
Guilt washes through me, as it always does when I see my daughter unhappy. After all, I chose the book.
“Why?”
“I didn’t want Charlotte to die, Mommy. I don’t see why she had to. If I wrote the book, she would’ve lived.”
“But didn’t Wilbur save Charlotte’s babies?”
Charlie won’t be distracted. “But Charlotte’s my name, too, Mommy.”
I run my fingers along the side of my daughter’s face. Charlie’s asking me if she’s going to die. After my own battle with Covid-19, this is a subject I prefer to avoid, mainly because I have no good answers. The possibility that I might have died isn’t, I’m certain, lost on Charlie. I stifle my daughter’s fear by taking her in my arms and holding her tight.
The Yards Page 7