“What?” Jaya asked.
“Maitland let me know that if I kept my mouth shut until the right time came, I’d come out of jail free and richer. And it didn’t matter who I talked to about it after a couple days, or nothin’. Weirdest fuckin’ cop deal I’ve heard of, so I guessed that he was one of Crissy’s boys. How about it, am I right?” Reilly was asking me, but I was staring at him, through him, at the prospect that Maitland was even more of a psycho than I’d thought. That even when he was being honest with me, he’d been lying about almost everything.
Reilly laughed and leaned back in the booth, knocking his coffee over with his knee. He didn’t mind.
“I need someone to start making sense,” Jaya said, pulling napkins out of the dispenser and floating them toward Reilly’s lap. He did the patting and soaking up, then got up.
“Hold it,” I said. “Wait.”
“Wait for what? I’m free and you got absolutely no hold on me. Just a ride down from lockup, and now here we are. I could use a good walk.” He sat back down, though, as the waitress approached, staring at her body in the black-apron-on-black-slacks-and-shirt uniform as though it were a transparent vinyl dress. She was a small girl, maybe Filipino, and I tried to communicate an apology to her with my eyes. Reilly waited as Jaya paid our bill, and we all left together, Reilly walking faster than us. I tapped his shoulder and got him to stop when we were out the front door.
“I’ll give you $500 for a few more minutes and answers, Vernon,” I said, doing my best to smile at him even as I ignored his high-beam staring at my tits. Eye-drilling the waitress had broken some sort of creep-dam of lust in him. I didn’t even cross my arms while I waited for him to answer.
“Five hundred dollars gets you, say, two answers.”
“Did Maitland tell you there was something bad planned after you got out of jail?”
“Wait,” Jaya said. “We don’t pay for interviews, Blanche, come on.”
I turned on her and laughed, but she didn’t laugh back—she had her no-bullshit high-integrity face on, and not just the fake one she had in meetings where she was insisting on an edit that we both needed to get past a distributor.
“That’s a movie rule, Jaya. This is a murder.”
“Nope,” Reilly said. “Didn’t tell me shit but that I should wait and it would work out for me. It was easy time to do in there, knowing I’d be out soon. I had to wait much longer, I could have called an actual lawyer and I could have gotten alibied by a bar full of people in SF, where I actually was the night Crissy got it.” Reilly walked a few feet away from us and started to flick at the hood emblem of a silver BMW, which would have looked out of place in this Denny’s parking lot if you didn’t know Stilford. People didn’t lose their taste for the food they grew up with here, even if they had managed to cash in on the city going broke through smart legal dealing or opportunistic drug dealing. The lot was clear of people, but crammed tight with cars—the capacity of the restaurant reflected the capacity of the parking lot, so people jonesing for all-day breakfast could take a look from the road and move on to the next franchise.
“What were they waiting for?” I was nervous about the car’s alarm going off, but it hadn’t yet, so all we had to worry about was the owner coming outside to scream at us.
Reilly stopped poking at the emblem and turned around.
“You,” he said. “That’s all I can think of. Crissy wanted you back here so bad, and now you are here. Guess Maitland, if he was one of her boys—”
“He was,” I said.
“What the fuck?” said Jaya. “You know about this, Blanche? It’s true? The cop’s—”
“Maitland knew he could get you where Crissy wanted you,” Reilly said. “Could at least do that for her, if he couldn’t keep her alive. And the other kid, too.”
“Who? Who’s the other kid?” I wanted to shake Reilly, the fucking moron, for just tossing this in. I could tell he hadn’t even been withholding it: he just genuinely didn’t realize what was important and what wasn’t.
“I guess that’s question number three, gonna have to charge you extra. But you look trustworthy so I’ll give you this up front. I can tell you this much: he was ‘ally material,’ like your mom would say. Crissy told me I wasn’t good enough to do the most important work. The ‘gun work’ to come, she said.
“I saw the back of him, once. Skinny fucker. He was in her trailer that time I went by. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and Crissy got between me and him as soon as I opened the door. She was fucking pissed, booted me out right away. He good enough for the ‘gun work’? I asked her. She didn’t even answer or ask why I swung by. Threw a fifty on the dirt and didn’t take my calls for a couple months.”
“Oh my god,” I said. Crissy had gotten me back to Stilford the only way she could be sure that I’d come. By getting herself dead. She knew I would need to see her body. That I’d need to know.
“Are you sure it was a man?” Jaya asked. “You just saw the back of a person.”
“Definitely a dude,” Reilly answered. “Your mom never would have let a girl in any of this shit. Only you, Blanche. She missed you so fuckin’ much.”
There was a faraway popping sound as Reilly grinned at us, scratching at one of the patches on his skin that wasn’t bearded or pimpled over. The pop repeated, and this time there was a closer and louder metallic spang just behind Reilly. He turned to look at the new hole of blackness in the hood of the BMW, just as one opened up in the right side of his head, and redness sprayed out of the left. For an insane moment, all I could think of was running past him to the car, to the Ruger tucked into that driver’s side compartment, the infinite security I could get from the bullets inside it.
Jaya started to scream and I grabbed her, leaning with my arms wrapped around her so I was half-carrying her tiny weight as we ran back into the restaurant.
When we were inside and she put her hands on my cheeks in a half-clutch, half-slap, I felt air push into my open mouth and understood that it hadn’t been her screaming, but me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
THERE WAS A plastic tarp over Vernon Reilly now, reducing his body to a shape and the red that had leaked from him into a black design that strobed under the patrol car lights. The Stilford cops, experienced as they were with homicides in this banner year, had gotten the parking lot taped off, the BMW into their temporary possession (to the despair of its owner, who turned out to be a Chinese-American bicycle shop owner), and the Denny’s emptied out in about eleven minutes. Jaya was sitting in the passenger seat of her car, wearing a metallic blanket over her clothes at the insistence of a paramedic who’d seen her shivering. She’d clamped down on her shock and fear before I had, though, doing what I couldn’t—getting it out in those physical shakes, crying on my shoulder.
We agreed that my screaming after the gunshot was a kind of progress. It was our first post-shooting laugh, coming just as the cops pulled up.
I finally met Maitland’s detective. Ron Pargiter was black and the kind of tall that partially ironed out the extra eighty pounds he was carrying, but was wearing pants that he should have moved on from. The zipper crept down every time he stooped and stood up again. He finally answered me on one of my many Maitland questions.
“Officer Maitland has been suspended. For reasons unrelated.” Pargiter was scanning windows in the office buildings around the Denny’s, looking for one both low enough and close enough to make the angle of the bullets that had ripped into the car and Vernon’s head make sense.
“Reasons unrelated to what?” I asked. Jaya had mostly stopped shivering, getting rid of the fear by focusing on work: a uniform was leaning down and speaking to her in the car, and she was doing one of her curious-dummy-to-seasoned-interrogator arcs. The cop would start gently explaining what crime and murder were to her and be defensively explaining his credentials and theories on this particular case within minutes.
“Reasons unrelated to this particular shooti
ng,” said Pargiter.
“There needs to be a fat ‘As far as we know’ in front of that, Detective. Where’s Maitland, like, right now? And where was he an hour ago?”
Pargiter stared at me for a long, silent moment. Maybe a full minute, which is longer than people think it is when two people are being quiet. He pulled me aside, but not with his hand, which I appreciated. Instead, he nodded to the far wall of the building, past the logo. I walked there first, with him behind me. Close enough that a bullet that was looking for me would have found him first.
“I’m going to be direct and as open as I can be with you, Ms. Varner, because I think you have more to tell me, and we might as well be direct with each other. And by direct I mean you don’t lie to me even once, and if you do find yourself lying, you correct yourself immediately and say ‘sorry, Detective Pargiter, for jeopardizing our trust.’ And lying includes concealing crucial information, is that clear?”
One of the techs was handling plastic sheeting at the scene around the corner, and I thought of how far it would have to reach to cover all the scraps of Vernon’s low-functioning, but still large, pink-and-red brain. I’d seen one piece go at least eight feet.
“Item one, Officer Dan Maitland was taken into custody immediately after returning to the station from the morgue where I was informed he met you, Ms. Chauhan, and a New York journalist named Emil Chadwick.”
“That turd Chadwick was not with us. And he’s not a journalist.”
“He’s what? Just a turd?”
“Correct.”
“This is what I mean by directness, Ms. Varner. By concealment. If you tell me something about Mr. Chadwick and then immediately bury it under wordplay, all you’re actually communicating to me is that I’m not worthy of the information you’ve got. And that makes me reluctant to tell you anything that isn’t directly related to your safety.” Pargiter had a way of talking in a slow, teacherly manner that wasn’t exactly condescending, and that was patient while expressing extreme impatience with lesser moral samples of the human race, such as myself.
“Don’t—if you’re going to lecture me on proper conduct, how about you tell me why an untested and fucked-up officer was handling my mother’s homicide, and not an actual detective? Not you?”
“We’re extremely overtaxed as a department. We were using lower-ranked officers as a proxy on certain cases as supervised training, Ms. Potter. Maitland was making daily reports to me and had never, as far as his record reflects, demonstrated unreliability. In this case, he had been lying in each of those reports. And we are suspending this program immediately department-wide.” Pargiter was answering me as though he were on the stand, probably some free prep work to answer this very question from whichever lawyer asked it when the time came.
“Fine. And I am being direct with you. Emil Chadwick is obsessed with my father’s crimes, and whatever relation he thinks I have to them, and he is an absolute turd. He told me to contact Officer Maitland directly, and it was clear that they knew each other. That’s all I know about him, other than that he’s here to exploit this situation,” I said, flapping a hand toward the body in the parking lot.
“We brought Chadwick in at the same time as Maitland, but released him. In fact, the arrest was at Chadwick’s request: he didn’t want Maitland suspecting that it was his call that got us to pick him up.”
“Chadwick got Maitland arrested.” I didn’t think it was this bit of information that got me dizzy, just the accumulated stress of watching Vernon Reilly’s skull fly apart a few feet away from me and the only friend I loved. But I found myself leaning against the warm brick of the building, with a second of time blank behind me.
“Breathe,” said Ron Pargiter, and I listened. I looked to the side to see if any cops were looking at me—Pargiter noticed and circled me so he was standing between me and any onlookers. After a couple of minutes I was upright again.
“Yes, Emil Chadwick called us to report Maitland’s malfeasance. And Alfred Kindt’s false ID of Vernon Reilly. It was easy to verify: nothing about Maitland’s handling of your mother’s case was done according to department policy or properly reported. Floods of false paperwork. But he was sitting right in front of me at the precinct when those shots popped off.”
“Kindt.” Kindt had been a Varner believer, too. Of course. He’d felt too crass to have the kind of faith that even a religion of baseless hate like Chuck’s would require. But Crissy could work with any sort of material if she really wanted to. The thieving and the perving comments had thrown me off, made me suspicious of him in the wrong way. Kindt hadn’t been taking the blue box out of the trailer to steal Crissy’s money—it was for the Polaroids. He wanted an artifact of her, of me.
“Did you get Kindt, too?”
Pargiter grimaced. “He was our first homicide of the day. Dead on his boat. Maitland’s alibied for that, too. He’s not our shooter, whatever you and Mr. Chadwick may suspect—” Pargiter held up a hand, stopping the outburst I was about to make. “I realize you are not a duo, but whatever different or similar suspicions you may have arrived at about Officer Maitland, he wasn’t up there with a rifle today.”
“Reilly just told Jaya and me that Maitland told him to sit tight in jail until I was here. Me. They were waiting for me to get to town before the next step. Next step being—” I pointed again toward the tarped-over shell of Vernon Reilly.
“Jesus shit,” Pargiter said, absolutely to himself and not to me. “Sorry.”
“What did Maitland tell you?”
“He mostly talked about you, Ms. Potter.”
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. Maitland wouldn’t, not at this point, tell the real police what he had on me. He wouldn’t do that.
“Or Ms. Varner, as Maitland insists on calling you.” Pargiter said my father’s name apologetically.
“You called me that when we started talking,” I said. Pargiter closed his eyes and moved his tongue around his closed mouth, as though trying not to scream at himself.
“I am so sorry. It’s Maitland’s talk still running through my head. Says calling you ‘Potter’ is disrespectful, no matter what you may think.
“Maitland said, and this is as close to quoting as I can get—he wanted me to record him and play you the tape, but I don’t accede to requests from suspects, especially ones that were once supposed to be cops—‘That you have nothing to do with what’s happening now, but it is all your fault.’ And he admitted to having a deep connection to your mother, getting angry at me when I asked if that relationship ever crossed into the romantic, but insisting that the only people who had ever been closer to your mother were Chuck Varner, you, and ‘Him. The boy out there.’ ”
“ ‘The boy out there.’ Crissy at least taught him how to talk in those elliptical shithead empty slogans. The—”
“The shooter, I presume,” said Pargiter. A young uniform cop came around the corner with a notebook and a self-important look. Pargiter pointed and shook his head. The cop immediately turned heel.
“Then what?” I asked.
“Then what what?”
“What did Maitland say?”
“Nothing. Said he was through talking, and wouldn’t be volunteering any more information or answering more questions. Hasn’t said a single word since, to me or anyone else. He’s just staring at the goddamn wall in his cell.” Pargiter had the dignity to look embarrassed by the piece of shit that wore his department’s uniform, and I took that into account. I wasn’t about to clasp his hand and tell him everything was fine, but it took the gas out of my attack.
“God.”
“Officer Maitland was an efficient cop in many ways, and good at working the game. Not quite enough to get promoted, not enough to make many friends, but enough that we gave him a chance on this new program.”
I stared at Pargiter and he didn’t look down. But he did modify his answer.
“I gave him the chance. When the call on your mother’s homicide ca
me in, Maitland told me he’d lived in that trailer park. I did come down to the scene, talked to the witness, saw how open-and-shut everything was. I handed the case to him and told him to keep checking in. And I went home and ate a pork chop dinner with my son.”
He said this last while staring full force into my disapproval. I had to admit, somehow taking it made him a little more okay in my eyes.
Pargiter kept talking. “I fished today but I can’t get any personal data, any reflection on what he is or was like, from anyone from his academy year or beyond. Even his partners. So I’m at a bit of an informational impasse, and I would be happy to take any statement you have, Ms. Potter. If you’d like, you could start by telling me why you didn’t come to anyone else in the department when you had suspicions about Maitland.”
I felt the distant prickling of danger at the back of my scalp when Pargiter spoke, this time. He wasn’t just sharing what he knew with me; he was strategically drawing me in, opening me up. This was a man who didn’t see clear divisions of criminal and civilian, just gradations of guilt. Guilt like the kind that was coming off me. I decided to tell some of the truth now. I could lie later, if I had to.
“Maitland told me what he told you. Except the shit about all of this being ‘my fault.’ He suggested that he had a preexisting relationship of some sort with my mother.”
“I’m not interested in what he told you. I’m interested in what you know, Ms. Potter. I think you know much more than your mother ever allowed Maitland in on. Just the impression I’ve gotten.”
Before we’d started this conversation, Pargiter had been shifting his legs a bit as he stood in the lot, the way a tall heavy person does when their knees and hips are complaining about a day of carrying the upright weight. But now he was stock-still, except for his scribbling hand.
“All of this,” I said, pointing at the tarped-over body, “is happening not because of me, but because of my father. My mother’s obsession with his ugly, stupid cult, which was nothing more than a collection of stupid slogans that gave shape to his fucked-up violence. Whoever shot Reilly here is someone who, like Maitland, subscribed to whatever it was Crissy twisted this cult into after Chuck died, and after I left the house.”
Your Life Is Mine Page 17