Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  On Saturday, Crissy Varner had a noon to midnight shift at the bar where she worked. She de-Varnered herself with a tartan skirt and surprisingly good makeup. “There’s a sitter usually,” she said, “but I figure since you have a kid anyway, you know how this all goes.” We, all three of us, knew that Crissy was lying: no one ever sat for Stella. Small, internal, so quiet she seemed either developmentally delayed or rich with ancient wisdom, she took care of herself on Saturday and for most of the rest of the week.

  “Of course, Crissy. That would be a waste. I’d love to stay in with her, I could get some notes typed up.”

  I took Stella to the Harlow Mall, the sign a vivid teal swoop visible from the highway. When we drove closer, I could see the garlands around the base of it, both fresh and rotted. There’d been a minor scandal in the news when Harlow had their security guards clear away the memorial blooms six weeks after the shootings. They were replaced, and since then, they’d just had to stay there, without any signage. We went in, and I reached for Stella’s hand simply because she was there and the same height as my son. She took it.

  Stella knows what her father did, Crissy has told me. Sometimes I wondered how much Stella knew: more than her mother had revealed to me, I was sure of that. I’d been consumed by a wish to see her moving in the space of Harlow Mall, alive with commerce—DVD players, sneakers, swimsuits—and the ghost of Chuck Varner’s closing act. The management had replaced all the tiling in the atrium after the massacre, when every media outlet in the country outside of prime-time network television ran aftermath shots of the blood, pooled and sprayed over the green floor, the mingled liquid of victims that had to be pressure-washed off after staining the public consciousness. The new tiles were pale yellow. Scuff magnets, but far from the crimson and mint of our collective slaughter recall.

  Stella was carrying a small clutch purse, a thrift-store find that would have netted fifty dollars in a vintage store in New York. She let go of my hand and walked a few paces ahead of me, and I was ready to catch her if she ran. She stooped to pick up a dime I hadn’t seen, feeding it into the little mouth of her purse. I let her keep walking: I was only obliged to watch her, and I could see her. She cleared a small crowd of shoppers, young Asian girls, entering a small oasis clear of people but rich in sun from a skylight. She stopped, and I could sense that she was waiting for me, in the way that I used to wait to be approached at parties, at bars, when there was a particular man nearby that I wanted to meet. Looking slightly upward, absent, not really in the room, floating just out of reach. I went to her.

  “Daddy was smarter than you,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “And smarter than all the people in here. He called it the collection house, this place. He would get me a cinnamon bun and talk to me for a long time, away from Mom. She didn’t know anything. She still doesn’t know anything.”

  “What would he talk about?” I asked. Stella was looking into the dark of her purse, poking at the dime there, and the hair clip with frogs on it that I’d watched her put in before we left the trailer. There was no dirt or lint in the lining, just perfect black.

  “He’d talk about these people. How they might think they wanted to be here, but they didn’t really. They didn’t want to be anywhere. He said he was going to help them.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  I SAID WE DON’T know where the decedent is right now, Ms. Potter. That likely means the remains are in transit, and not even between facilities, just midtransfer in the morgue and as-yet-not refiled. The info’ll pop up on my screen the minute you leave, probably.”

  Officer Dan Maitland leaned back in a chair that clearly wasn’t his, pulling his shirt down and taut, with a conclusive nod. We were far from concluded. I put both my hands on the desk, near a framed photo of a family that I could tell wasn’t Maitland’s, and stood up. My phone was recording all the audio in case I wanted to use this conversation later as a reference, for when I dumped all the parts of this that I was ready to tell on Jaya and we decided what to do.

  “Finding the body is important, and yes it is ridiculous to say that out loud. But it’s also beside the point of what I asked you, Officer. Was the autopsy perfunctory, or did you actually look for a cause of death that wasn’t necessarily in line with what you arrested that kid for?”

  “There was a bullet in her head, Ms. Potter. I’m sorry to put so fine a point on it, but that’s what we saw at the scene, and that’s what the autopsy extracted. And the suspect isn’t a kid. He’s a seasoned small-time criminal who escalated petty theft into a spate of bolder break-ins, and then graduated to home invasions. We have a lot of that around here these days, I’m afraid. Most of the time it doesn’t go fatal, thankfully. Not thankfully in your mother’s case, I mean—”

  “I got it. Am I going to get to speak to him? Or is he going to be misfiled, too, maybe via getting nightsticked to death in his cell?” I said, seeing in Maitland’s eyes that I’d pushed it too far with that last comment. Worse, it made me feel bad, because he seemed hurt, not angry, which in turn made me angry again for caring about the idiot feelings of the man who was standing in the way of me confirming, with my eyes, that Crissy Varner was dead. Maitland looked like he still had a bit of innocence in him, though he must have been working through the rising flames of opioid hell and cutting his teeth on the kind of thorny Stilford domestics that happened every weekend, in which the caliber of firepower under the mattress was sometimes the only limit on how bad things could get within the four walls of a rotted-out relationship. Maitland was small, about my height, lean, maybe half-Hispanic. His eyes were a light enough brown that they could almost pass for yellow under the hostile and artificial office fluorescents, which were better suited to illuminating oral surgery than a conversation.

  “It’s far from typical for our department, or any other, to let family members speak to those suspected of murdering their relatives. So, no, you won’t be speaking to him, except via some pretty remarkable circumstances.”

  “Is it typical that I also don’t get to speak to the detective in charge of the case? That I’ve been handed off to a, no offense, lower-ranked stand-in?” I did mean offense. I wanted to see Crissy dead, badly. I needed to know the exact reality I was contending with, and this little functionary was standing in the way. This was another trick I had for controlling myself, one that Chuck hadn’t taught me, but that I’d taught myself after escaping him and Crissy: as long as I was focused on the one problem in front of me, the rest of the horror around me couldn’t collapse in. It had been surprisingly useful in getting my movies made. And right now my one problem was finding Crissy.

  “This—the department isn’t asking for indulgence, but some level of understanding is required for us to communicate effectively here. There is a detective on this case, Ron Pargiter, and he’s excellent. I assure you that he’s overseeing every detail of your mother’s case, and that I’m checking in with him frequently, but the volume of homicides this year is such that our detectives have been using qualified officers for detail work, while overseeing the investigations as a whole.” Maitland emphasized the last few words, pulling his lips into a flat, serious frown that looked completely ridiculous.

  “So any open-and-shut killing that seems vaguely drug-related and doesn’t involve anyone making over $50K a year gets offloaded to the nearest uniform cop,” I said. Maitland’s lips opened and I had a vivid sense of how many times he would call me a cunt when talking about this encounter after I left. When it was clear he wasn’t going to answer, because it was equally clear that I’d gotten it exactly right, I went back to the suspect.

  “I’m not speaking to this suspect—what’s his name, anyway?”

  “Vernon Eagle Reilly.”

  “God. He never had a chance at not being permanent trash with that name,” I said, still standing but trying to lessen the tension by a few percentage points so Maitland wouldn’t go into full informational lockdown.


  “Maybe he should have changed it,” Maitland said. The wall behind him was papered with Missing posters, a fairly even blend of young women and young men. Some had small blue ballpoint checkmarks in the upper right corner.

  “I have no intention of speaking to Reilly as a bereaved daughter. I’m going to speak to him as a journalist and documentarian, for the purposes of a film that I’m making on the death of my mother.” I took over stare-down duties from Maitland.

  Maitland sighed. A long one, an older man’s sigh.

  “If you’re recording me, Ms. Potter, you are doing so without my permission. And I don’t want to have any legal dealings with you, because frankly, as I’ve said, we’re stretched thin as it is.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I lived here for eighteen years, Officer.”

  “And then you left,” Maitland said, a little edge to it. “Things aren’t the way they used to be when you were—”

  “Fine. So the city went bankrupt a few years ago, so as a direct result you can’t find my mother’s body, and you’re an underqualified officer working this case, and you’re pretty sure that you’re going to hang up any investigating from here on out because problem solved, there’s someone in jail and that’s that.”

  “We strongly believe that the suspect in custody is the person who killed your mother, Ms. Potter,” Maitland said. “Is there any particular reason you’re reluctant to accept the man who was seen with a gun outside and inside the residence where your mother was found dead as her killer?”

  “Because it’s not simple with her,” I said, speaking before I had a chance to think. “It was never simple with her, just like it wasn’t with my dad. Did you do that much research, at least? You know who you’re looking at? Whose body you lost?”

  “I’m aware of your family history.”

  I’ve noticed something with people when they talk about mass killings—not just Chuck’s, but any of the ones in schools, Manson, Jonestown. There’s disgust, there’s shock—but there’s also a note, a tiny note, of reverence. Not for the killer, but for the event. Maitland hit that note of reverence, more than I thought a cop familiar with the banality of murder would, casting his eyes down for a moment and touching his eyebrow in what looked more like a miniature salute than a scratch as he went on speaking.

  “There’s no chance that I, or anyone else in the department, would hold what your father did against you, or use it as a reason to treat the investigation of your mother’s homicide with anything less than our maximum—”

  This had me halfway to the door before I knew it was happening. I turned, grabbed my purse strap, and starting pulling down on it, hard, keeping my hand there so I wouldn’t stick my finger into Maitland’s face.

  “I’m not begging you to do your job even though my dad was a piece of shit. I’m telling you you’re not looking deeply enough into this. Did you check, thoroughly check, to see if this Vernon Reilly had a preexisting relationship with my mother? Did he know her?”

  “They may have crossed paths, but there was nothing significant. Nothing he’s told us, nothing we can verify,” Maitland said. He was starting to get the look, not in the eyes, but in the hands and brow, the skin just above his cheekbones and below his eyes, that you get used to chasing in interviews when people are deliberately holding back from you. Chuck Varner had taught me to look for it when I was in the first grade, made me sit in the passenger seat of the Chevy and study him talking to teenagers outside the 7-Eleven, the way he would lean into them when they started to scratch their faces or pretend to squint up at the sun or down at the pavement. Chuck would shoot me a quick smile when his subject first started to cave, when the opening was made. When people are pursued, they start to fuck up. Then they start to apologize. Then you can ask something of them.

  But being a cop, Maitland probably knew all of this, too. Soon his eyebrows and forehead were smooth, and his hands were invisible below the desk.

  “Crissy wasn’t stupid, Officer Maitland. She wasn’t altogether sane, and she was a bad mother, but if she wanted to hide her ties to someone that she had planned something criminal with, she would do a very careful job of concealment. And I’m telling you that the person who killed her is someone she would have known in advance. If Reilly isn’t that person, then you have the wrong guy.”

  “Ms. Potter, do you have a specific reason to believe that your mother was murdered by someone in particular? Have you had recent contact with her?” Maitland, trying to wrangle back control of the interview, had altered the tone of his voice, coming across with a reasonable impression of a smooth, conversational interrogator.

  I shook my head, sure now that they hadn’t made even the slightest effort at an investigation away from the crime scene: Maitland hadn’t checked Crissy’s credit cards, seen her flight to New Orleans.

  “So there’s absolutely no chance that your mother was a victim of a random break-in, of which we had about twelve thousand last year? There’s no chance that she was in her home at the wrong time, that she said the wrong thing, that some skeeve with a burnt-out brain killed her because it seemed like the simplest solution to his problem? No chance of that?”

  I was quiet, and eventually, I sat down again and let Maitland finish his small lecture, while I evaluated whether there was any sense to what he said. If he wasn’t going to listen to me, I could at least listen to him to find out exactly how stupid or how smart he was.

  “We want order, Ms. Potter. Humans, not just police departments. People like you and me want situations to make sense, we want life and death to come with reasons. Sometimes we lose a grip on what we know just at the moment when it’d be most useful. Like with your mother, here. These situations—these crimes that have no reason, nothing personal, just an alignment of economics, bad luck, and a bad person—they don’t have any order to them. You add grief to all of that, and well . . . all that’s what you’re having trouble with.”

  I had my answer. Maitland was at least as dumb and lazy as he was condescending, and he had no intention of putting in an extra second’s work on a homicide case that he’d borrowed as training-wheels practice from an equally uncaring detective. Especially if the cost was only the freedom of a repeat offender with a silly name.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  “As in, I’m going to process what you said and there’s no point in me answering you right now, Mr. Maitland. Officer. I’m going to get back to the more directly useful interview work I’ve been doing.”

  “What interviews would those be?” Maitland asked, looking at the ceiling. He’d missed a line of dark stubble to the left of his Adam’s apple, and another patch at the right angle of his jawline.

  “Chatting with your citizens about murder, police competence levels, that sort of thing. Local color.” I hadn’t done any such thing, but I wanted to leave Maitland with something unpleasant. He did look pained.

  “I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t found this conversation useful. And I know it’s frustrating that we can’t bring you to your mother’s body right now, but I promise that we’ll resolve that situation quickly. Is there anything further you’d like to know about the case at hand that I can answer for you, Ms. Potter?”

  “You say Reilly had an escalating break-in pattern. Are you sure this is his one and only murder?”

  “We have him on some assaults, no murders. Mostly scraps in public, the kind that would be barroom fights if the parties involved were drinkers instead of users.”

  “You don’t think it’s worth looking into whether this killing fits with any home-invasion-type shootings recently? Whether my mom’s one in a line?”

  “There’s no call to put any zoomed-out conspiracy theory on it. Your mother was an unfortunate victim of unfortunate circumstances and a desperate man who had already committed three smash-and-grabs at the same trailer park. He was witnessed entering the scene, he’s our perp, and there’s not much of a story there.”

  “
I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to listen to, Maitland. But I am going to say it out loud in this police station so we can both know that I did what I had to do and said what I had to say.”

  “Please, Ms. Potter. And I can tell you that I am 100 percent listening. I understand that you’re bereaved, that this added stress—”

  “I’m not bereaved. Think a hostage is bereaved when the person holding her gets shot in the head? I’m there right now, but before the relief part enters into it. Because I don’t know what happens next, I just know that this isn’t over. I don’t mean the grieving isn’t over, I mean the killing isn’t. Okay?”

  “I understand but do not exactly agree, Ms. Potter.”

  “If my mother was killed for a nonrandom reason—if she was killed by someone who had any interest in Chuck Varner, and in his cult bullshit, then there will be more killings. Probably all at once. Probably a spree.” I didn’t tag on that Crissy had visited exclusively to more or less warn me that there was going to be another shooting, because I didn’t want to give this fake-caring cop any reason at all to keep me under watch or to forge a reason to put me in jail. Not that it seemed like he’d be willing to make that effort.

  “I’m hearing you, Ms. Potter. I really am, and I care about what you’re saying.” Maitland ended with the universal cop slang for “fuck off”: “We’ll look into it, I promise.”

  “Give me a call when your computer error that misplaced my dead mother like she’s an order of highlighters is resolved, all right, Officer? I never wanted to come back to this place and I don’t want to stay for an hour longer than I have to.”

  “I don’t blame you for that. Obviously I wasn’t on the force when it—when your father—happened, but I was around. A kid. And for all this—I want to apologize. For not finding you, or following the paper trail on this. We knew your mother had a daughter, I just didn’t know it was you. I’ve seen your movies.”