She Talks to Angels

by James D F Hannah

  “Is that why he’s saying he didn’t kill Meadow Charles five years after the fact?”

  She raised a thin, drawn-on eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

  “Because you didn’t call me here just because I’m good-looking.”

  She laughed and lit a new cigarette. Crusts of pink lipstick clotted around the filter. “It was this weekend. He was hunched over listening to me talk about Momma and work and the kids, when he leaned in and dropped his voice down and he said, ‘Sis, I didn’t do it.’ I didn’t know for sure what he was talking about at first, until I thought, what the hell else would he be talking about?”

  I shifted my weight off my right leg. Standing like that left my shitty knee aching. “In his confession, he said he thought with Meadow testifying, he’d end up in prison. Now he’s saying, five years after the fact, that he didn’t do it? I’ll tell you, Ms. Dolan, that sitting on a long prison sentence, guys tend to come to one of two resolutions: they accept that they’re not going anywhere, or they start thinking of ways to get out.”

  She furrowed her brow, dislodging small flakes of drugstore makeup when she did. She sucked hard on her cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke out from the corner of her mouth. “He’s saying he didn’t do it, and I believe him.”

  “Does he know about your mother, how sick she is?”

  “He does. I don’t hide shit from him.”

  “You thought maybe he doesn’t want your mother going to the grave thinking her son killed a girl?”

  She took one last pull on the cigarette and flicked it through the air. It smacked against a dumpster and dropped into a puddle and hissed itself away to nothing. “I guess I’m wasting your time and mine. Sorry I bothered you.”

  I watched her walk off with a defiant stride. She was at the entrance when I said, “Why me?”

  She froze and looked back at me hard. Katie Dolan was not a woman to be trifled with. She probably had a good right hook.

  “The day after I visited Eddie, I called the state police,” she said. “The trooper I talked to said there wasn’t anything he could do but that I should call you.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Lieutenant Jackson Hall.”

  Goddammit, Jackie. I was going to beat the hell out of his bloated ass if it was the last thing I did.

  I walked over to Katie Dolan. Hands in my pockets, probably looking contrite. Sometimes I have to remember to rein in my asshole nature.

  “Let’s try this,” I said. “I’ll talk to Lieutenant Hall. He and I, we go back. Let me see what I can find out, and if there’s anything there, I’ll go talk to your brother and we’ll move from there. Does that work for you?”

  “It does. I appreciate this, Henry. So you know, I can’t pay you anything right now. Give me a little time, and I can pull together something to give you.”

  “It’s fine. It doesn’t cost anything to be annoying.”

  Katie smiled. “Lieutenant Hall said you’re a good man.”

  “Well, he’s an asshole.”

  “He said you’d say that, too.”

  2

  The noon AA meeting at St. Anthony’s was full of familiar faces I’d have punched if given half a chance. Woody, my sponsor, told me once I haven’t hit that “moment of serenity” that AA offers. I said I already lived in Serenity, and that it sucked, so why would I need more of it?

  Once the meeting was done, we cleaned up, putting up chairs and folding and stacking tables. Afterward we stood in the church parking lot and the sunshine warmed me up, and I had that weird feeling you get from being inside and the air conditioning being on too high, and you didn’t realize you were cold until you’re warm again.

  I bummed a cigarette from Woody. As he handed it to me, he said, “You should find someone to sponsor.”

  I had a rule about sponsoring, which was that I didn’t sponsor. Outside of a bad attitude and foul disposition, I didn’t have much to share with another alcoholic they would want. I was forty-two, collecting disability and early retirement, and only had a handful of months of real sobriety after years of trying. In my head, I didn’t seem to be the best example of success for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  I took a drag on my cigarette. “What sort of sunshine do you think I could spread to another soul?”

  “There’s a kid who’s coming to the 7 a.m. meeting above the Riverside, and you and he could be a good fit. He’s got other stuff going on besides being a drunk, but you can focus in on the drinking part of things.”

  “What other kind of stuff are we talking about?”

  “Stuff. That part doesn’t matter. What matters is that he wants to be sober.”

  “Is he an asshole? I’m not dealing with him if he’s an asshole.”

  “He’s young. Everyone’s an asshole when they’re young.” He pointed at me, his cigarette clenched between his fingers. “You still haven’t grown out of it.”

  “It’s part of my charm.”

  “Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep at night,” he said. “Come by the meeting in the morning, and you can meet him.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m not doing anything else at that time. Oh, wait, yeah I am. I’m fucking sleeping.”

  Woody stomped his cigarette out underneath his Doc Martens. “Not tomorrow you’re not.”

  The trooper stationed at the front desk just inside the Parker County state police outpost entrance couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, maybe six weeks out of the academy, and his uniform still had the fresh-from-the-package creases. I resented him on sight for no good reason whatsoever.

  He told me Lieutenant Jackson Hall was at court, but he’d be back soon. Would I like to have a seat? Sure, why not? I had nothing else to do—a fact that depressed the ever-living fuck out of me.

  I flipped through out-of-date magazines until Jackie walked in. He wore a charcoal gray suit a size too small and a pale blue shirt with the tie knotted too short in front and the back dipping out from behind. His face was red and blotchy, and his blond hair was combed straight back from his forehead. He saw me and said, “Oh but what fresh hell is this that I deserve you showing up to darken my door?”

  I trailed him through into the back of the outpost and into his office. He hung his suit coat from a wall hook and lowered his bulk behind his desk. I dropped my comparatively svelte self into a visitor’s chair.

  “Tell me the truth here, Jackson,” I said. “When there’s shit you don’t want to deal with, is your first thought to give them my number and let them pester me for a while?”

  “I know you, Henry. You get twitchy with nothing to do. What with your tendency to cause mayhem, I figured this might interest you. Keep you out of trouble. Or get you into trouble. One or the other. Something so you’re not bored.”

  “I appreciate you thinking about me, but next time, just call. Or better yet, text, because I hate phone calls. Besides, sorting through Meadow Charles’s murder is the type of thing that’ll do nothing but escalate my blood pressure and insurance rates. Eddie Dolan confessed to the murder, combined with fingerprints on a murder weapon and a motive. I watched us help put away guys with a fuck-ton less than that.”

  “Between you, me, and the wall, I’ll tell you I never liked Eddie Dolan for this. It never rang right to me.” Jackie grabbed a Snickers bar from a desk drawer. He unwrapped it with a dexterity honed by decades of practice and wiped out half in a single bite. “People went ape-shit nuts over this case. Meadow Charles became this venerated saint who walked on water, healed the lame, and she’d taken pity on this poor retard, and what thanks did she get for her act of benevolence? Killed at the local dump and raped afterward.” He ate the rest of the Snickers and tossed the wrapper into a garbage can next to his desk. “No one paid attention to the fact she was a goddamn addict, just busted on possession charges again, staring at jail time and the ruination of her family’s good name. To hear everyone say she was nothing but heaven on earth, and Dolan, he was a rabid
dog we needed to put down. It was all too pat and simple.”

  “So riddle me this, Super Cop: If you had a murder weapon, fingerprints, a motive, and a confession, then what did you not like about this case?”

  Jackie leaned back in his chair and rested his feet on the desk. Blue socks stretched down from underneath his cuffs into scuffed brown loafers. The fashion police would not have approved.

  “Dolan’s simpler than first-grade math. He was legit heartbroken about Meadow. He cared for that girl, like they were friends and not just a pair of drug-addled disaster cases. We had him in the box for hours, pressing on him, but he wouldn’t break. Never budged from his story until it was all on the line and the attorney convinced him the only way he’d see sunlight outside of Mount Olive was to take the plea. But most of all, I never bought the motive. That task force had people lined up around the block, primed and ready to testify. Meadow wasn’t going to be the person who sent Dolan to Mount Olive. Hell, he was just another fucked-up druggie, and the task force wanted big fish. And regardless of how retarded he is, I couldn’t ever convince myself that lizard brain of his was capable of formulating a murder.” He brought his feet down and turned his face serious like they do on TV shows. “Plus, Dolan might be a lot of things, but I never believed him to be a rapist.”

  “But Meadow was raped, right?”

  “Coroner found post-mortem signs of vaginal trauma but no semen.”

  “Which puts Dolan wearing a condom, meaning he came to the landfill with the plan to kill and rape her.”

  “That’s Special Victims Unit-style shit there. I don’t think Dolan would have been able to have pulled all those pieces together to make it work.” He shrugged. “The prosecutor would have charged Dolan regardless of what I said, and fuck, what could I say? ‘I know I’m handing you one of the easiest cases of your whole career, but I don’t get why the retard killed the one person in his little world who liked him.’”

  What Jackie said made sense. I hated having to acknowledge it, though, and I’d never say it aloud. I had my ego to protect, and I didn’t need anything on him inflating more than it had already.

  I said, “I chase after this, how much shit am I signing on to shovel?”

  “Like you’re following behind the elephants in a parade. It’ll be bad, do not kid yourself. The Charles family, they’ve never gotten over this. I see them at Walmart wearing T-shirts with her homecoming picture. They’ve got money and sway. You know they hired off-duty FBI agents as security for the funeral? There were guys standing outside the church with AR-15s.”

  He reached into a drawer and brought out a copy of Rolling Stone and slid it across the desktop. Lady Gaga was on the cover, dressed like a dominatrix and getting ready to whip a guy dressed like Fred Flintstone; I’m sure it made sense to someone. I hadn’t bought Rolling Stone since college. It had seemed bigger back in the day, and thicker. I suppose that’s what she said, too.

  I turned to the page marked with a sticky note. It was a full-page picture of Meadow Charles wearing a sash and a tiara. The headline was “Heroin, Murder, and the Homecoming Queen.”

  “Story’s long, but it’s good,” Jackie said. “Doesn’t make us look like total assholes. Take that one with you; I’ve got more back home.”

  I turned to the reason Jackie had extra copies: there was a photo of him sitting at this desk, leaning forward, a look of fierce determination across his face. He wore the same suit in the photo, but he was thinner and it fit him better. There was a giant quote by him underneath the photo: “This isn’t just anywhere in America. This is Parker County, West By God Virginia, and this shouldn’t be happening here.”

  “You were very photogenic,” I said.

  “Some of us just can’t help but to shine,” he said.

  3

  Old-timers in AA say you have to be willing to go to any length to stay sober. I wasn’t sure why that extended to getting up so goddamned early, though, or having to listen to a bunch of drunks when the sun could barely be bothered to rise.

  The Riverside was a mom-and-pop twenty-four-hour diner popular with shift workers. The decor was America-esque randomness, dominated by wall hangings and paintings of roosters, with a healthy amount of anthropomorphic pigs thrown in for variety. It dated back to the 1950s, and whenever a magazine needed an example of West Virginia down-hominess, they came to the Riverside. The resulting articles hung framed next to photos of politicians over the decades. State senators and delegates got the same attention that pictures of Kennedy and Reagan and Clinton got. It was all very equalizing.

  What I cared about, though, was that they provided the coffee for the meetings, which made it a marked improvement from the usual swill we had to drink.

  We gave our greetings and gathered around a long table festooned with porcelain roosters. Woody sat across from me. Next to him was a young-looking guy, dark hair uncombed, so thin I wanted to go downstairs and get him a sandwich. He wore a checked shirt buttoned to the collar and cuffed at the wrists. He had a patchy excuse for a beard and tapped on the table top, a rhythmless pattern that became annoying after about three seconds.

  Woody said, “How are you this morning?”

  “I hate you. I hope you can live with that on your conscience.”

  “I’ll survive. You will, too.”

  Leading the meeting was a guy I didn’t know named Phil, a youngish lump of doughy flesh in a Cleveland Indians jersey. He had way too much enthusiasm for my bitter and cynical self with so little caffeine in my system, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone else, and the meeting moved quickly.

  Once we were all done patting ourselves on the back for being alive and sober, we headed downstairs for breakfast. Fried foods and gravy sounded like an excellent idea. The kid clung to Woody’s side like Velcro, never saying a word or acknowledging me much.

  Our waitress was a grandmotherly type named Violet who filled our coffee mugs and told us she’d come back for our orders.

  Whoever had been at the table before us had left that morning’s edition of the Parker County Herald-Tribune behind. Woody glanced at it, then at the kid. The kid stared at his menu as if he expected to find a form of wisdom in the specials.

  To Woody, I said, “Is he on the spectrum? Is a short bus going to come by and pick him up?”

  “He’s being quiet, which is unusual, so be grateful for the reprieve,” Woody said. “I’d planned to put the two of you in a room together and see how quick you both sucked all the oxygen out.” He rolled up the newspaper and swatted the kid on top of his head, and the kid jumped and peeked up over the menu and blushed as if he’d just been caught staring at dirty magazines.

  Woody pointed at me. “Introduce yourself.”

  The kid smiled. “Sorry. My name’s Deacon. Everyone calls me ‘Deke,’ though. You can, too.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not happening.”

  He puffed out his chest, tried to look tough. It wasn’t a good look for him. “You got a problem with my name?”

  “Not with your name. Just the nickname. ‘Deke’ makes you sound like a douchebag. I’ll bet your parents, when they were poring over baby books trying to decide what nomenclature to slap on you, never said to one another, ‘Hey, let’s give our newborn bundle of joy a name that, in its derivation, will turn him into a frat boy who roofies sorority girls.’”

  Woody unrolled the newspaper. “This is going as well as I could have hoped.”

  To Woody, Deacon said, “You said he was a nice guy.”

  “No, I said he was a good guy,” Woody said. He’d turned his attention to the newspaper now. “I said nothing about him being a nice guy. I’d never lie to someone about something like that.”

  “I’m putting you down for a reference on my resume,” I said.

  Woody’s eyes moved over to Deacon. “You and he are a better match, sponsor and sponsee, than you and I would be. He’ll help keep you sober.”

  Deacon gave me an up-and-down. “How long you b
een sober?”

  “This time around, eight months.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much.”

  “Being sober is about a day at a time. All that matters is ‘Did you drink that day?’ That’s what you ask yourself. None of the days before that matter, and neither do the days that follow; all you’ve got is that one day of being sober.”

  Deacon seemed to give that some thought. Or maybe he was thinking about health care reform, or Japanese cinema, or why people listen to Rush. I had no clue what was rattling around his head. Could have been marbles for all I knew. I wasn’t interested enough to ask.

  Violet snuck up on us and asked if we were ready. I had fried eggs, fried apples, and biscuits. Woody got a Denver omelet and buttered toast. Deacon ordered pancakes and sausage.

  Once Violet left, no one said anything for a while. Another waitress came by and refilled my and Woody’s coffee cups. Deacon’s sat untouched.

  “Not a coffee drinker?” I said.

  He made a face like he’d licked a battery. “Not my thing. I’m more about energy drinks,” he said. “When I drank, that was my jam. Vodka and Red Bull.”

  “Then I suggest you break that habit. If you associate that with your drinking life, then you’ll remember it and you’ll end up drinking again.” I handed him the creamer and the caddy of sweeteners. “Learn to love coffee. You go to enough meetings, you’ll find out the myriad ways people can fuck up something so beautifully simple.”

  He dumped four packets of sugar and enough creamer to raise the level of liquid in his cup to the rim. He took a tentative sip and shuddered. “Jesus.”

  “Mazel tov.” I set down my cup. “How old are you anyway?”

  Deacon took another sip. His expression read that this one went down somewhat smoother. “Thirty,” he said. “Turned it last week. Same time I came out of rehab.”

  “Rehab for drinking?”

  “No,” he said. “Heroin.”

  I shot Woody an angry glare. Woody was reading the front page of the newspaper and couldn’t have given fewer fucks about my glare if he had tried.