I hand her $400 in twenties.
“So you can eat. How’d you meet Lomax?” I ask.
“He came up to DC with those two.” She points at the paper again. “Brown and Dorsett. They were in town to meet some Texas congressmen. Frank Dorsett used to keep Katie in an apartment down in Dallas. He knew she was in DC, so he sent Lomax to find her. Lomax found her and me, and took us to the hotel where Shel and Frank were staying. It was three nights of drinking and coke and—what they paid for.”
She shakes her head as if trying to dismiss the memory. “But the drugs,” she says. “It was over the top, even for me. Even for Katie. The reason she left Dallas in the first place was because of Frank. He had a lot of money, and she had a drug problem, and that was his way of controlling her. He’d keep her supplied so she was docile. You ever see a junkie right after she shoots up? You can do whatever you want to her. She’s like a rag doll.”
She tells me she assumed Lomax was another rich guy who liked to have fun, like Brown and Dorsett. “He did as much blow as Shel, only he didn’t shoot it, and he…” She trails off and is quiet for a moment.
“He wanted me to go back to Dallas with them.” She shakes her head. “No way. There was no way. I knew what he was like the first time we were together. And, no.” She shakes her head again. “He was acting nice that first time. He was pretending. But I knew, and it scared me.”
Brown and Dorsett returned to Texas, while Lomax stayed in DC for ten days, trying to persuade Anna to go to Dallas with him. “He took the key I gave to Katie. He’d let himself into my apartment. He was relentless. He told me he worked for the FBI. When I didn’t believe him, he showed me his ID. He saw what state I was in. He knew I wanted out of that life. He said if I helped him he’d get me into the Witness Protection Program. I’d have a new name, a new life, and the past would be wiped away.”
She rubs her silver crucifix and says, “There’s really only one person who can do that for you. But I still wouldn’t go. Until he brought up Katie. He found my weak spot. He told me he’d get her into rehab. He promised me. He promised! So I said OK. He wanted Katie to come too. She could keep an eye on Frank Dorsett while I kept an eye on Shel.
“He said, ‘Shel likes you. Stick by his side. Tell me who he talks to. Tell me everything he says. We can break this case in two weeks with a good informant.’”
“What was the case?”
She unfolds the washcloth from her foot and looks at the blood. The cuts aren’t too bad.
“Drugs, I guess. If there even was a case. I don’t think Lomax ever told the FBI about me. I did my job, even after I knew it was pointless. Lomax didn’t need an informant. There was nothing I could tell him about Shel that he didn’t already know. He just wanted to be my handler. He liked to…” She pauses for a second, then says bitterly, “handle me.”
She dabs at her foot for a few seconds and her face gets that hard, stoic look again—the look of a strong-willed person who won’t be dominated by her feelings.
“Shel was careless,” she tells me. “He’d talk right in front of me, with a razor blade in his hand and flakes of coke falling out of his nose. That house was drowning in drugs. It was like quicksand and everyone was sinking. Two weeks went by, then four, and then six. We were all sinking. And poor Katie. She had fled that city for a reason, and I took her right back there. Right back to her death.”
This topic is getting her too emotional, so I change it.
“That guy you were with at the airport,” I say.
“Ramón?”
“Did you know him?”
“No,” she says. “Lomax sent him to get me onto the plane. He introduced us the night before.”
“Ramón was arrested today,” I say. “Running drugs.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“He wasn’t very bright.”
“If Lomax wanted you on the plane, why didn’t he accompany you himself?”
“He said the flight was sold out.”
I think back to the scene at gate seventy-six. There were a dozen people on standby. But that can happen even when a flight isn’t sold out. Twenty people show up at the last minute. Eight get seats and twelve don’t.
“Did you know the plane was going to crash?”
“No.”
“Then why’d you get off?”
“Lomax was waiting for me in Honolulu. I didn’t want to see him.”
I shake my head.
“What?” she asks.
“Lomax was in San Francisco. He was at the airport after the crash.”
She looks puzzled at that bit of news, and I can see as she thinks it through that she’s the kind who does a lot of thinking. I don’t tell her about her name being checked off with the wrong color ink on the seating chart. If Lomax did that and got the world to believe she had died in the crash, then he could hunt her down later, and when he killed her no one would miss her. But why would he want to do that?
“I did try to inform,” she says. “I did gather evidence. Do you have a pen? Will you take down some names?”
I get a pen and paper from my shoulder bag, and she says, “Midland-Odessa Custom Hauling.”
“What’s that?” I ask as I write it down.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But… Martínez Resort Services. And Ramírez Resort Services. One’s in Galveston, one’s in Corpus Christi.”
“What are they?”
“Things Shel talked about with Frank Dorsett, and on the phone… And there’s a place in Kerville that rents power equipment, and a place in Rock Springs. Taylor Automotive.”
“Was that one of Brown’s car dealerships?”
She shakes her head. “He talked about it differently, when he was arguing with Frank Dorsett. And he talked about it on the phone.”
“OK,” I say. I don’t know what to make of this information. “You need to get out of here. You can’t hide here forever.”
“I know.”
“Is Lomax the only thing you’re scared of?”
“Isn’t that enough?” she asks, offended, and her hand goes right back to the crucifix on her necklace.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “I mean, would you come forward and talk to the cops—”
“No!”
“—if we could get Lomax out of the picture?”
“No! How? No!”
“You want to press charges against him?”
“How could I?” she asks. “What evidence do I have?”
I nod toward the bruises on her wrists, and she says angrily, “That’s not evidence. Anyone could have done that!”
“You have any witnesses?” I ask.
“No!” she says angrily. “No, I don’t have a single goddamn witness. Katie’s dead. Shel’s dead. Franklin Dorsett is dead. It’s my word against his. A prostitute against a federal agent. Who do you think is going to win that matchup?”
“Calm down,” I say.
“Don’t tell me to calm down. Put yourself in my shoes. You think I want to be here? You think I wanted to go through what I went through?”
“All right, I didn’t mean—”
“If you want to help me, go gather evidence. Lomax was doing drugs. The FBI might put him away for that. They won’t put him away because some prostitute says he raped her. When a woman accuses a man, her character goes on trial. It’s not about the facts. It’s about her. And I can’t win that one. I can’t.”
“Jesus, calm down, will you?”
“I will not calm down. I want him put away. I want you to put him away. You did your job well enough to find me. Can you do it well enough to convict him?” She glares at me angrily for a second. “Can you?” she demands.
“I will get you out of here. One way or another. I promise you that.”
She gives me a long, penetrating look, and I can tell she’s measuring me, trying to figure out how far she can tr
ust me. The truth is, she hasn’t given me much to go on, and I have no idea how I’m going to fulfill the promise I just made. She sees the doubt I’m trying to hide, and she’s going to call me out on it.
“OK, Freddy,” she says calmly. “Then I’m relying on you. Sometimes we have to put our faith in others, don’t we?” She gives me another measuring look that shows she still doesn’t fully trust me. “Sorry I yelled,” she says. “You know I have no one to talk to here. I’m alone all day, Travis is worthless, and I’m going crazy.” She looks at the gun in her lap, and I see the thought flash in her eyes.
“Anna,” I say.
“What?” Her tone is short, impatient, like she doesn’t want to hear any more from me.
“Look at me.”
“What?” She says again, with the same annoyed tone.
“Look me in the eye. Just for a second. Please?”
She evades me for a few seconds and then looks at me reluctantly.
“The woman I saw in the airport,” I say, “the one walking to the gate for that Chicago flight knew exactly what she was doing. She was getting out. She made a plan, and she stuck to it. That took a lot of courage, and a lot of faith, and a lot of strength. Don’t let her down.”
“I know,” she says softly. “Thank you for understanding that.”
20
When you grow up with a guy like Lomax in your house, doing those things to your mother, you develop an instinct, a gut feeling when you see them. And you don’t ignore that. Ever.
That’s what threw me about him. I’m never wrong about abusers. I can spot them as easily as they spot their victims. What disturbs me is the way he played it off in the men’s room at the funeral, so friendly and charming and reassuring. I looked and looked and couldn’t find what had set me off. To be able to hide that from a guy like me, you have to be able to hide it from yourself, to turn whole parts of yourself on and off at will. The only people I’ve met who can do that are psychopaths.
If the guy had me doubting myself in less than a minute, what kind of psych job could he do on a woman he rapes and beats? No wonder she thinks no one will believe her.
I try to get more information out of her, but she doesn’t have much to give. She talks a lot about Katie, and when I ask her about herself, all I get is a list of regrets. She’s like a woman in the confessional, pouring out her sins to a man who was never meant to play the role of priest. All the things she’s done—the selling of herself, the drugs, the lying to her friends and family—it’s like listening to the catalog of wrongs I used to bring to that priest every week back in Brooklyn. Only she’s not talking about things that happened to other people. She’s talking about things she did herself.
I had a premonition when I met her, a sense of dread. She was going to drag me down. I felt it in the whirlpool dream, and listening to her now, I feel it again.
“You wake up one day,” she says, “and you ask yourself how you can be doing the things you’re doing, how you can be living the way you’re living. When did this become normal? When did it even become acceptable?”
Funny she used those words. After my mother died, those were the questions I most wanted to ask her. When did it become normal? When did it become acceptable? Because you and Dad couldn’t have started out that way. This is where she takes me. Back to those feelings I never want to revisit.
“Is something wrong?” Anna asks.
“No,” I say.
“Something’s bothering you.”
“No. Go on.”
She doesn’t believe me, but she goes on.
“I started asking myself those questions before Katie died,” she says. “And every time I dug deep, all I found was shame and despair. It was a whole lot easier to take another pill, do another line, or drink another shot than to face the fact that I did this to myself. That I let it all happen. I can’t say that of all the girls I know. Some of them maybe never had a chance. But me…”
She stops and stares blankly at the floor for a moment, then says, “You need something to shock you out of that life. You need to be shaken violently from your complacency before you realize how truly lost you are. For me it was Katie’s death and…”
Her eyes go to the crucifix on the table, and then to me, and she says, “It’s a shocking thing to be found. It’s the most shocking thing you could ever feel, especially after you’ve tried so hard to disappear.” She pauses for a second, then asks softly, “Do you believe?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“How could I believe in a god that would allow his son to be crucified?”
“The Almighty Father,” the priest used to say as I sat next to my mother in church. I’d picture a brute like my dad at the dinner table in heaven demanding his food. Only he was bigger and stronger and angrier. And his hands, the hands that made the world, were even more powerful than those giant hands that wrapped around my throat when he got angry and knocked the wind out of me when he was drunk.
I inherited those big thick hands that broke down so many guys in the ring.
“You miss the point,” she says. “I mean, that is the point. He said the only way to live in this world is to love each other. And He wouldn’t renounce His love for anything. Not even in the face of the most horrible death they could inflict on Him.”
In church, I used to look at the man on the cross and think, if that’s what God did to his own son, what wouldn’t my father do to me?
I can’t think about the man who married my mother without wanting to kill him. Even now it makes my blood boil. And that fucking priest telling me God is good and God is great, and the smoke from those candles on the card table, stinging my nose like the candles by the altar…
Anna watches me closely. “That makes you uncomfortable.”
I want to throw those fucking candles out the window.
“I don’t like the subject,” I say.
“But you know the story.”
“I know the story. It’s just compelling enough to keep God’s victims running back into his arms for comfort. If that isn’t the model of all abusive relationships…”
I can tell she’s offended, even though she tries to hide it.
“You’ve been to church?” she asks.
“A long time ago.”
“With your parents?” she asks.
“My mother.”
“What about your father?”
I shake my head.
“No? Well, I understand if you’re cynical. Maybe you expected something you didn’t get. But you know, I don’t really expect anything anymore. It’s just… knowing there was one person who cared that much. That makes all the difference.”
Here it comes. The story of her life-changing moment, whether I want it or not. These fucking born-agains with their one-track minds are as bad as drunks. I know enough about her type to keep my mouth shut. It’s just… she couldn’t have picked a worse topic. And the worst thing about born-agains is they really mean it.
God, what’s wrong with me?
“I had this revelation—” she says.
She’s sincere. She means this. And I’m so fucking full of hatred right now…
“—looking at Him on the cross and understanding that someone cared. I don’t know why the realization came when I hit rock bottom. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it until then, but that’s when it came, and it hit hard. When you understand that one person cares, it changes everything, because then you start to care. It’s like you needed permission, and along comes this person and gives you permission to care, and the moment you accept it, everything starts to hurt and everything starts to heal. Does that make sense?”
“It makes sense to you,” I say. Why did she have to choose this topic?
“Well you’re a cold kind of a man, aren’t you? You come in here asking me questions, and then you shut me down because you don’t like the answers. Well, fuck you.”
“Sorry, I don’t like sermons,” I say. “But you seem to be good at them.”
“What the hell are you so bitter about?”
“Excuse me? Have you opened your eyes lately?” She hit the wrong fucking button and I can’t stop myself. “Look at this world! Look at yourself! You think whoever created all this deserves your praise?”
I feel another Chuck DiLeo coming on, and it scares the hell out of me.
She eyes me coldly and says, “I know your type. You go around keeping score of everything that’s wrong with the world, don’t you? Do that and you’re guaranteed to be bitter, because, yeah, the world is full of horrors. But you asked me about me, and I’m telling you about me. I’m taking responsibility for my life, which is a hard thing to do, considering how shitty I’ve treated myself. Why are you so tense?”
“When you’re all done here,” I say, “you can start a church and collect ten percent of everyone’s income.”
Like that church in Philly. She used to dress up for that. My mother would put on her best dress, and she would get down on her knees, on her fucking knees, like a prostitute, and pray to that bastard like He was going to do something for her.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asks with a tone of disgust.
“What was she expecting when she knelt in prayer?” I ask angrily.
“Who?” Anna asks.
“That the all-powerful would help her? Well why didn’t He? Was it His will to kill her? Is that how He repays devotion?”
“What are you talking about?” She picks up the crucifix and says, “I don’t know what your problem is, but try putting yourself in my shoes for a minute. Imagine there’s someone out there who loves you so much, they’re willing to take all the punishment that was meant for you.”
“You leave her out of this, goddammit.”
It was on a Sunday. It was a Sunday when he gave me that beating…
“And why?” Anna muses. “For no other reason than that you were born. You were born worthy in their eyes, so they go through this agony for you.”
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