I gulped the soda through the straw, wishing there was something stronger than aspartame in it to briefly drown the images on those Polaroids I’d wrested from Kindt. Next to me, Maitland was still rehearsing. I decided to run in on him before he could start the conversation the way he wanted to.
“You spent a lot of time with my mother,” I said. His eyes snapped up. This was a tough interview gambit, a play on the cold-reading techniques that sham psychics use, and that Chuck Varner had originally taught me on a teaching-mission day when he’d gotten no less than four teen boys at the Stilford Polytechnic smoke pit to agree to an afternoon meet-up: a probing guess that you’re ready to follow up with a half-dozen other probes if you miss on the first, fast enough that it’ll seem that you have impossible knowledge once the subject replies with a dazed “Yes” when you score a hit. I didn’t have to guess beyond one, though.
“Yes,” Maitland said. “I knew her very well.” He was looking straight ahead, tracking a duo of teen boys, one in an unzipped red hoodie and the other wearing a Danzig T-shirt and studded punk bracelets, as they walked toward two slightly younger girls. When the girls turned to see them, they hugged and headed for the escalator.
“You were a Chuck Varner hobbyist,” I said. Now, Maitland was looking at me. “Came as close as you could to the source to find out more.”
“You’re wrong there. I didn’t have any interest in that aspect of things, and Crissy respected that. I came to your mother for counsel, for advice. There were many different sides to that woman, Blanche. I think that if you’d ever come to know her as a grown woman, your opinion—”
“This is the second conversation I’ve had this week with a man trying to explain my mother to me. I lived with that bitch for sixteen years and underwent a wash of mental abuse that only a professional asshole like a cop or social worker or nurse or any of the other people who should have gotten me away from that woman could be blind to.” Crissy had made me an expert in dealing with the police and family services in the couple of years after Chuck’s spree: say as little as possible to the cops, and say exactly these things to the social workers, with as little improv as possible. The reactions had been trained into me by Chuck, then Crissy. There’d been a thorny time in the weeks after Crissy was banned from Harlow Mall for handing out Varner Six cards, but she’d agreed to a few rounds of therapy and had pled residual abuse trauma. I was trained to cry at the right times and in front of the right people when the prospect of leaving the trailer and Crissy behind came up, and a cycle of case workers who didn’t seem to share files or opinions with each other eventually just let it all go. So Crissy had me for another eight years.
“That’s the deal with you people,” I went on. “You don’t see what’s going on when it is going on, but then you talk about understanding it deeply the moment it’s done.”
“I knew Crissy. Well enough that I understand why it was smart to be scared of her,” Maitland said.
“Why would you be scared of a trailer-living waitress with no family and no friends, Officer?”
“She didn’t need friends, Blanche. You know that. She told me as much. She probably told you.”
“So you’d talked to her, you’d spent time with her, and you end up single-handedly investigating what happened to her?” I realized I could speak as loudly as I wanted to in here, and the only effect would be to make Maitland uncomfortable. The ambient screaming of advertisements and video games raised the volume on every conversation on the floor, making everyone around us oblivious to what I was saying.
“Your mom had people who listened to her and I was one of them, Blanche. Don’t you remember me even a little bit? We were neighbors for a few months. Kindt remembered me right away, but he did always have an eye for kids.”
It was when Maitland smiled, a twitch on the right side of his mouth that slowly extended, that I remembered. Remembered specifically holding that face in the dirt with the back of my sneaker while Boyd Sharpton pulled his pants down and sprayed him with a Super Soaker when we were all about ten years old and he was smaller, maybe seven.
“Goddamn,” I said. “Dan. Danny.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Maitland said. Danny.
“You changed your name.”
“Nothing weird about that. And my hair just got darker on its own, with time. My mom was real disappointed. I just took my stepdad’s name after high school, when I was old enough to make the choice and sure enough that I’d never see my birth dad to have to explain it to him. But yeah. Danny Lear, back then. Crissy insisted that you wouldn’t remember me, you know. Once my stepdad finally was able to afford a two-bedroom for us downtown, we were out of the park for good. I used to have to bike back to see your mom. And I did, usually at least once a week.” Danny turned slightly toward me on the bench, as though he were presenting himself freshly, as though we could meet for the first time once he’d told part of the truth about himself.
“Crissy made sure that we barely crossed paths, once she started teaching me,” Danny said. “Plus, you were older than me and I was kinda scared of you. It was your mom who made me feel welcome. Let me come over when you had after-school stuff, when it could be just the two of us in the trailer. Eventually she didn’t let me play with you, or with any of the kids that you liked. Crissy used to let me play with your toys while she talked about Chuck Varner and the way forward. ‘The Way Forward’ is how Crissy said it, you know. You could hear the capitals.”
“Yes, I know. ‘The Way Forward.’ ‘Your Life Is Mine.’ I know all of it.”
Maitland laughed and crossed his legs, rolling up the right cuff of his pants and pulling down his sock. He had a small tattoo. Ylim, small but emphatic in Baskerville font. I got a chill that started in my cheekbones and flashed through the rest of my body.
Chuck Varner had given me the same tattoo, but a cheap stick-and-poke version, on top of my six-year-old foot one Sunday morning in the trailer, when Crissy was at work and he was in one of his directionless, black moods. The tattoo was a greenish smear now, but it itched under my sock. What he’d done that day with the needle was to etch the day and the lesson into my mind.
“The physical,” Chuck had said, his breath sweet and medicinal from the gin slush slop he and Mom drank on the days they allowed themselves to, “is the scaffolding that holds up the mental. You get me, Blanche?”
I’d nodded, memorizing “scaffolding” to look it up later, bracing for the pain that he warned me would come. He wasn’t ready yet, still heating up a needle from a motel sewing kit over one of the burners on the stove, holding it there with pliers. I was right next to him, helping the way he used to let me, by holding something nearby while he did the real work. A technique that Crissy tried to reverse when she took on my teaching, always having me make the speech or hold the gun.
Chuck had dipped the needle into the small pot of India ink we’d found in the crammed caddy of stationery that Crissy kept on one corner of the kitchen table. He started to roll down my right sock, then stopped.
“You choose which foot.”
I immediately pulled the right sock down the rest of the way, and Chuck smiled.
“It wasn’t a test, baby. But still, good. I think it’ll look best there.” When he started, the pain blazed up so intensely I didn’t have the screaming language for it, so I just stayed quiet. I thought I could feel the needle going right into the most prominent bone on the top of my foot, the part that rubbed against the inner tongue of my Keds when I put them on barefoot. Chuck stopped for a moment, holding my foot in both hands like a salesman, the butt of the tattooing needle between his teeth.
“That’s the ‘Y,’ Blanche. We can stop if you want.”
“No,” I said. It was in a controlled tone, one I managed by imitating the way Mindy Rawls, a cute black girl in my class who had a voice that I admired, talked. If I’d tried to answer in my own voice I would have at least remembered how to cry, even if I couldn’t scream. Chuck didn’t notice any dif
ference.
“Good. Because that one was a test.” He started poking and dipping again, mixing the ink with the blood in my foot, my blood with the ink in the bottle. “I’m keeping it to initials for when we’re famous, baby. When Your Life Is Mine isn’t just a slogan on a card. When it’s known as the name of the single most important political and social movement of our time. The words and message that brought truth to America.”
I guess that was the last lesson I learned that day: that pain could build to a point where you took in the reality of everything around you, without processing, without explanation. Because that was the first time I had an inkling that Chuck Varner was babbling, just saying words without any meaning behind them. I forgot my catechism, and for a second, I forgot that he was Dad: he was just a man who was hurting me and saying nonsense words with his cupcake-and-formaldehyde breath sharp in my nose while he stabbed my foot.
Maitland was still showing me his tattoo when I came back to the present, running the pad of his right thumb over it, fondly. A disciple.
“What do you tell people it stands for?” I asked.
“Yesenia Lisa Isabella Malvar,” Maitland rattled off, then laughed. “My first great love. Crissy and I came up with the name together after I got the tattoo, which was the day after I got into the academy. We had a whole backstory and bio, how I’d gotten the tattoo not because I still loved the girl, but to remind me—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Maitland,” I said. The laughter, which had already stopped coming out of his mouth, now departed his eyes. He blanked out, went to that dead zone that most people only got to in the second before they were about to vomit from booze or food poisoning. And then I actually was meeting him for the first time: Maitland’s blankness was his real face, the black in the middle of his pupil deepening and reflecting out the nothingness that my mother had used as a foundation for Chuck Varner’s filth. I should have been more afraid of him, but I wasn’t; I’d seen this before. I’d almost become this.
“Sorry,” he said, when he remembered to port his personality back into his body. “I thought that maybe Crissy had told you about me, even if she didn’t use my name, and you were just waiting for the right signal. We never got to talk after her last trip to see you out in New Orleans.”
“You knew about that.”
“I gave her the cash for the ticket. I thought about telling her it would be no use, but I didn’t want to be disrespectful. And I’d been wrong, and watched her be right, so many times over the years.”
“You’re sick.”
“I’m focused, Blanche. So focused you have no idea. I know you have no gratitude and no perception—your mom made that extremely clear to me, and anyone who meets you must realize it within seconds. Do you know how hard it is being a cop here? Unrewarding? I see the charge the others get from rolling up on a domestic, defusing it, or putting the pieces together on some stupid B&E turned murder, and I think, hey, that’s a goddamn cop. That’s how you do it. You feel rewarded by the work, gratified by the small, the tiny, the microscopic victories. And I didn’t get any of that reward crap. Because I wasn’t doing any of it for me. I was doing it for Crissy Varner. Everything I did in my career was leading up to a moment that’s not going to happen anymore, because she’s dead. At least, it’s not going to happen the way we planned. She planned.”
I moved along the bench about a foot, then stood up and made a stop gesture when Maitland was starting to rise. I watched Maitland’s jacket when he settled back down, looking for the shape of a holstered gun. He was close to tears and started smiling to counteract what his eyes were doing.
“You were so lucky, Blanche,” Maitland said. “All those years with her. I know it must have been as much of a challenge as a reward, and ultimately it was a test that may have been impossible for you to pass, but—”
“Did you kill her?” I asked. Maitland stopped smiling, and almost looked like he was going to cross the few feet between us and put his hands on me. To shake me, not to hit me.
“I would do anything in my power to have your mother here with us again. I wouldn’t ever, ever allow her to be harmed, or to harm her, if I had any power over it. I’m with you on this, Blanche. I didn’t want to accept that it was some burnout like Reilly who ended up putting out that light forever, but I just can’t see any other way. I’ve genuinely looked for another answer. No one who followed Crissy could ever do this to her. Never.”
“You’re a cop, Maitland,” I said, trying to pretend for both of our sakes that I meant that he was a good, effective cop. I started to pace, tightly, making his eyes follow me. “Someone put that scope up there in that tree, and knew how much it meant. Either it was Crissy or someone who knew the story of the scope. Had seen photos of it, had taken the time to modify one to look just like it. So you’re saying that, what, Crissy did that, just in time for the scope to get stolen? Any thief would have pawned it, not hung it like a Hallmark ornament then fired a gun to get my attention. There is someone else out there, Maitland. Another one like you, or someone else that my mother used like she used Emil Chadwick, to get more attention on Chuck Varner’s idiocy and whatever she had planned. And I think whoever it is might have another shooting planned. Not like he shot my mother. Like Chuck shot all those people at Harlow Mall. Do you get me, Maitland? My mother’s weird coded messages plus her dead body are pushing me into some pretty unavoidable suspicions.”
Maitland took the lid off his soda and drank what liquid was left, then took in an ice cube and started sucking it. He looked down for a few seconds, as though he were making a silent prayer, a request for guidance. I used all my discipline to keep quiet, and it worked.
“That’s not the sort of plan Crissy would have made, Blanche. We’re beyond shootings. There’s not going to be another Harlow Mall. And even if she did think that that sort of chaos had a role—she wouldn’t have told me. Specifically me. I would have been in the dark about those types of plans.”
“Why?”
“I became a cop because your mother told me to, Blanche. She said it would be useful to us someday, and that it was as good a way for me to make a life as any other. She said—I remember this part so well, and it came back to me today in a big way, because we were talking up on that hill where you showed us that scope—she said that it was important to have people like me in positions of respect and authority when the time came, because it would show how multifaceted we were, how much the group has changed since Chuck Varner. And she told me that part of my role was to be clean of knowledge that could hurt us. That’s why she was careful to never, ever let me meet any of the other allies she was making.”
“Allies? Fucking disciples. Slaves. That’s what Chuck wanted, what she wanted. And this Reilly is clearly one of them, don’t you get it?”
“No,” Maitland said. He drifted for a second, smiled at a patch of wall behind my head, took on an expression that was both beatific and condescending. “Reilly is not the correct material for our belief system as it is now. Not at all. Blanche, your father may have started this movement, but Crissy became its center in a way he never could. She made it possible for people like me, who were horrified by what Chuck did but ultimately understood it, to have roles, to be a part of what was coming.”
Then Maitland told me one more thing, and it was enough. The soothing, overwhelming noise of the multiplex had gone silent the second I looked at his tattoo. He was still speaking when I turned around and started walking through the thick, vulnerable crowd, running the second I hit the sidewalk.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
THE OBVIOUS THING is to call the police. The only thing. We all think that—that’s part of the logic gap that makes true crime frustrating, that I struggled with before I shot The Marigny Five doc.
You talk to these people, with their suspicions, with what they’d already noticed, the pieces of a full pattern they’ve already discerned. You want to shake them, to ask why, why don’t you talk to
the police, why don’t you get this taken care of, why don’t you get it out of your life?
And of course, there are a lot of reasons. Ask a black man in New Orleans why he didn’t call the police and you’ll hear a few of those reasons, after he gets through laughing. Ask a woman who’s been assaulted and you’ll hear more, after she looks into your dumb face and wonders if you’re worth talking to, if you’ll bother to listen or if you’ll repeat the question.
When I finished running from Maitland and was back in the Arcadian parking lot, I took out my phone and I did think about calling the cops. This Detective Pargiter. “Officer Dan Maitland is a member of an unknown death cult headed up by my dead father and dead mother,” I’d say. “He was investigating her murder when he told me.”
Maybe a simpler “Officer Dan Maitland has ties to the victim in an ongoing investigation, and he didn’t reveal them.” But how hard would that be to prove? What else would I have other than what Maitland had said to me, which I could have fabricated, something he’d tell everyone I’d invented as part of my mad fantasy that Crissy’s death was a conspiracy, not a simple smash-and-grab shooting?
There are always reasons not to go to the cops. Especially if you’re going to them with unpleasant news about one of their own. But in that moment, the reason was control. If I let go of this information Maitland had given me, it wasn’t going to be mine anymore. It would be theirs to do with what they wanted to. Which would probably be nothing.
But there was a much larger reason. The same one that drives a lot of people who could talk to the police to stay at home, to clam up. Guilt. If I told them what I knew, what I suspected, they’d look at me. And maybe, maybe, they’d find out what I’d kept secret for so long.
This was the reason Maitland was counting on. The last thing he’d said to me was, “I know what you and Crissy did, that night. Just before you left her for good. Crissy told me everything, Blanche. I know you can keep secrets when they’re important. I want you to know that I can, too.”
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