by Tanen Jones
“Oh, right.” Mary braced one palm against her thigh and flapped the other at me. “Sorry about that. Can I get my purse back?”
“I thought you wanted to be in this together,” I said, still clutching my phone. It was colder outside in the evening. My jaw clenched.
Mary straightened. “I do. What are you even talking about?”
“You almost got arrested,” I whispered. “What if you’d gotten arrested?”
She frowned. “They wouldn’t have arrested me,” she said. “Just for doing palm readings? Come on. They only kicked me out. Now I’m banned from the”—she tipped her head as far back as it would go and read the sign upside down—“Sunset Grille and Bar in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Probably for good. Whatever will I do?”
“You were sharking,” I snapped. “And you’re not taking things seriously.”
Her face dropped. “I’m taking things very seriously, Leslie,” she said, overenunciating to make up for the soft slur that had entered her voice somewhere around the third G&T. “You don’t even know how seriously I am taking it. Now give me my fucking purse.”
I let her take it from my shoulder. “But you—”
“But it’s just a little stressful,” she continued, hoisting the purse onto her own shoulder and feeling around for the money inside, “that my partner doesn’t trust me at all. So why don’t you go home to your giant house, and your nice husband, and your baby, and I’ll find somebody else to have fun with.”
I turned away from her on the pretense of digging for my keys. “Just get in the car,” I said, when I found them. I unlocked it and had my hand on the driver’s-side door when I realized she wasn’t beside me anymore.
“See you tomorrow, Leslie,” Mary called from the far end of the parking lot. I watched as she disappeared around the side of the building.
Maybe she can use all that money for a cab, I thought. I got in my car and pulled out of the lot. As soon as I made it to the light I thought better of it and turned around, but she was already gone.
42
Mary
I walked in circles until I felt sober enough that I probably wouldn’t die in the car and then I drove home mostly fine, except I had an awful time trying to remember which back street I was using to park the rental. I found the spot again after having to do a three-point turn and almost knocking somebody’s garbage cans over, and trudged around the corner down the sidewalk feeling pretty low.
When I saw him outside I thought he was a bobcat, maybe; the blanket he wore over his shoulders had distorted his shape so that he resembled only a black mass with flat, reflective eyes.
“You’re home late.”
“Sh— You scared me.” I laughed, but it was more like a series of exhalations. Dave shifted under the blanket. “What are you doing on the porch?”
He shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. What are you doing in the street? Did you walk here?”
“Took the bus,” I said, because I didn’t want him to get mad at me. I sat down next to him, and he let the blanket slip down his shoulders, so he wore it as a kind of fuzzy evening wrap.
“Leslie’s worried about you,” he told me. “She went out looking for you for hours. She only got back like forty minutes ago.”
I cocked my head. “I didn’t tell her I needed a ride. She decided to go look for me. I didn’t ask.”
“You’re not telling her where you’re going, sneaking out…” He let his head fall forward and rolled it gently from shoulder to shoulder, stretching the muscles in his neck. “You couldn’t call her from time to time?”
I shrugged. “Does she call me?”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a second, then grinned, looking over at me. “That’s immature.”
There was something infectious about his smile. I meant to give him an insincere one back, but a tiny bit of real amusement crept in. “Sisters,” I said.
“Yeah, sure. Sisters.” He stuck his thumbnail in his mouth and worked at it with his teeth. “Is something wrong with Leslie?”
A muscle in my thigh twitched, as if something had bitten me. “What?”
“You know…” He sighed. “Did you say anything to her, did you…”
“Did I tell her about your disgusting habit?” I asked. I thought about rocking my knee sideways to touch his, to show I was joking, and then I remembered what Nancy had said at the Frontier, about men who wanted to be in control.
He shook his head. “I don’t mean that. Just if you guys fought, or you told her—I don’t know.” He shifted his weight onto the edge of the step, jostling the blanket, which slipped off his back onto the porch steps.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” I said. “If there’s something wrong with Leslie, it was wrong before I got here.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he said, putting his hands on his knees like he was about to stand.
“Dave?” I said. “Are you ever scared?”
He cocked his head. “Of what?”
“Of her?” I said, unable to stop my voice from ticking up at the end.
Dave laughed, and just like before it warmed me against my will. I found myself unable to really believe it could be like Nancy had said. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who could hurt anybody. But neither did Sam, with his round belly and pink ears. “Sure,” he said. “She’s, you know, five foot ten, wicked serve. Play volleyball against Leslie, fear for your testicles.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” He stood up, and I reached for him. My fingers brushed against one of his knees, where the bone protruded knobbily; it made me feel sort of tender toward him, as if I knew him, maybe because I could imagine him as a teenager, all that stark bony flesh. “Hey, do you have another joint?” I asked, wanting to keep him with me a second or two longer.
He stared at me. I thought about Leslie finding his messages with Elaine, all that money gone to some other woman. I thought about Paul and the girl at his house, that girl who’d looked like me, my replacement. For a second they almost looked the same to me, Dave and Paul; I could have wanted to kill him too, if I’d loved him more. If I’d loved him as much as Leslie did. “I don’t do it that often,” he said finally, moving toward the door.
My hand stayed in the air where his knee had been, hovering uncertainly, so that it looked like I was saying, over and over again, Hello, or maybe So-so. “Could you put me in touch, then?”
“With my dealer?” His hand closed over the doorknob. “I guess so.”
“What’s his number?”
“Hers,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for his phone. “Um…” He read me the number, then added, “Elaine. Tell her you’re my sister-in-law, it’ll be fine.”
“Elaine,” I repeated, my fingers pausing against my own phone screen, which lit me sickly from below.
“Don’t tell Leslie, okay?” he added, opening the door.
“Right,” I said, tapping Elaine Campbell’s name into my phone. “I won’t tell Leslie.”
He went inside, pressing his fingertips against the glass door to keep it from slamming. I stayed seated on the porch, staring at the way the streetlight picked out the small downy hairs on my thighs.
43
Mary
The inside of the Bernalillo County jail was so ordinary—a little tan lobby with linoleum floors and plastic plants. I don’t know what I expected. Bars over everything, maybe, or a big hefty guard at the door. The only guard was the clerk sitting at a desk protected by Plexiglas, chewing on the nubby end of a pen cap.
Nancy had walked in ahead of me and she went up to the clerk. “I’m here to see one of the prisoners, Francis Clery.” She slid her badge into the well beneath the glass.
The clerk studied it briefly, then glanced up at me. “Who’s that?”
“This is Robin Voigt. She’s going to sit in.”
I held my br
eath. He pursed his lips. “Okay,” he said at last. “ID.”
I fumbled in my purse.
After the clerk was done taking my information, Nancy and I went to sit in the plastic chairs lining the far wall. They were textured to feel like sand, and my hands started sweating as soon as I gripped the edges. I let go, trying to relax. My body drifted toward Nancy—close, too close—and I whispered, “How long until we can go in?”
Nancy was straight-backed. “Depends on whether he’s in the middle of a structured block of time. Could be five minutes, could be an hour. He can refuse to talk if he wants. Then they’ll come out and tell us to go.”
I didn’t know what I’d do if that happened. I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking.
There was no television in the lobby, no reading material—which was the only thing that distinguished it from a dentist’s office. I stared at the peach-colored metal door. It had a little window cut into the top, crisscrossed by thin metal bars. Almost the only thing.
It was nearly an hour before an officer came to the door and nodded at us. I had been watching Nancy play Words With Friends on her phone. She was a terrible speller, which she tried to hide from me by tilting the screen away, but I could tell. I watched her laboriously assemble D-A-C-K-E-R-Y and frown when the game kicked it back to her.
“Officer Courtenay,” the other officer said as we passed. She nodded and we went in.
Past the door lay a short industrial hallway lined with more peach-colored metal doors. At the end of the hallway was a plate-glass door left ajar. Nancy and I followed the officer into this new room. It was small and cramped, with walls made of cinder block and tables shoved cafeteria-style along the perimeter of the room. Someone had painted a decorative stripe on the walls in a dark, burnt orange, which gave me the feeling of passing through chambers in a conch shell, where the peachy accents of the outer rooms gave way to a deeper shade nearer to the heart.
The focus of the room was a long squat set of windows, each outfitted with telephones and bolted-down wooden stools. Sitting in the second window was Frank Clery.
He was white, blue-eyed, with a long face and weak chin that undercut the effect of his well-muscled torso. He wore glasses, plastic Buddy Holly frames that he’d propped up on his fleshy, lined forehead. His tongue crept out to wet his lips as he caught sight of us—he was one of those men who had permanently red, shiny lips.
“Here you are,” the officer who had led us in said. “You have until one-thirty.”
“Thank you,” Nancy said. She crossed the room quickly and cast herself down onto the wooden stool. The windows weren’t designed for two-on-one conversations; I sat awkwardly off to the side, leaning into her space in order to see.
Clery eyed Nancy, then me. I couldn’t read on his face what he thought of us.
Nancy picked up the phone and motioned for him to pick up his end. He lifted the receiver with two fingers.
“Mr. Clery,” Nancy said. “I’m Officer Courtenay. This is Robin. We’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your relationship with a woman named Leslie Flores. We’re investigating her possible criminal conduct.”
Clery looked from Nancy to me. His odd oblong face remained flat, although his watery eyes gave him a persecuted air, like a man caught in a permanent windstorm. “Not talking,” he said, after some time had passed.
“Do you remember anyone by that name?” Nancy pressed.
He set the telephone gingerly back in its cradle, then met Nancy’s eyes through the glass. Not talking.
“Did she ever try to pawn anything at your store?” Nancy continued, speaking loudly and enunciating. The glass was thick, but not soundproof. We both saw him take in her question. “Did she ever hire you to perform any services?”
Clery turned in his seat toward the officer lurking on his side of the glass. His mouth moved, but he was facing away and I only caught the timbre of his speech. A question—Can I go yet, probably.
“Nancy, let me try,” I said, reaching for her hand under the stool, out of Clery’s sightline. “Please,” I said. “I have to. For Leslie. It’ll be different if he knows she’s my sister.”
Nancy’s face said that she didn’t believe it would be different at all, in fact, but she found it endearing that I did. She paused, then tapped the glass twice with her knuckles. Clery turned around. She pointed at me.
“Can you get me a coffee?” I said, glancing at the digital clock on the wall. “I saw a break room on the way here—I bet they would let you in.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone with this guy.” Nancy was at her most heroic. If the room had had windows, a beam of light would have hit her right on her square jawline.
“I think it’s the only way,” I said. “Besides, there’s not enough room for both of us to talk.” I adjusted my weight on the stool, crossing my legs.
She rubbed her neck. “I’ll come right back,” she said finally. “Call if he says anything to you that you don’t like.”
“I will.” I gave her a tremulous smile.
Nancy left and I spun to face Clery. The officer behind him was bored, face aimed away from us.
I was almost always smiling when I was around other people. Even when I was only walking down the street, I’d trained myself to keep the corners of my lips curved up. Now, in front of Clery, I let the smile drop. He eyed me, startled.
Clery picked up the phone—full-handed, not like a germaphobe this time, so I supposed I had already exceeded Nancy in his estimation—and I picked up my end.
“What’s up, sweetheart?” he said into the line. He had a strangely adolescent intonation combined with the gravel of a habitual smoker.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “I’m here to bargain with you.”
He laughed. “Bargain? Sure. Pack of cigarettes for a presidential pardon.”
“I want to know what Leslie Flores paid you to do. You want to avoid prison. Sound fair?”
His watery eyes fixed on me. “You a lawyer?”
“Nah,” I said. I let Robin fall off me, like a skin. Mary fell away just as quickly. Underneath I was nothing; teeth and holes. “I’m just like you.”
He looked me up and down, or as much of me as he could see. “Scrawny. Stupid. Not seeing any similarities.”
The teeth showed. “Jennifer’s your wife, right?”
He gripped the receiver. “Did she say something to you?”
“Nancy—Officer Courtenay—she told me the whole case rests on getting Jennifer to testify against you. If she swears it was an accident, you’ve got a much better shot, right?”
He swallowed. I watched him consciously stop himself from twisting to see what the officer behind him was doing. “What do you care?”
“I have my own reasons for wanting to know what Leslie Flores paid you to do. In exchange, I’ll go to your wife’s address—1515 Los Alamos, right?—and I’ll beat the shit out of her until she tells the police it was an accident.”
He laughed again, this one more like a burp. “That’s funny. You almost got me.”
I leaned closer. “When I said I was just like you, what I meant was I will beat the shit out of your wife, and I will do it like I was painting my nails. Do you understand me now?” For a second I imagined us as twins, mirrors facing each other, reflecting nothing. A long black socket where violence might go.
Then he believed me. I saw when it happened.
“Talk fast,” I said. “Nancy will be back any second.”
He licked his lips. “Why do you want to know about that chick? Leslie?”
“She’s my sister,” I said. “If she hired you for what I think she hired you for, I’m going to ruin her fucking life.”
He smiled, an involuntary twitch. “If you don’t do it,” he said, “you know I’ll track you down. Don’t you?” He tilted his h
ead. “Robin, sister of Leslie Flores.”
“I know.” I smiled back.
“No broken bones,” he said after a minute. “No scars. Nothing on her face.” His long cheeks sagged.
“I’m not an idiot,” I said. “She’ll be fine.”
He nodded, licked his lips again. Then he sucked in a breath and opened his mouth.
* * *
—
Nancy returned as I was still working through what Clery had told me. I looked up at her. “He wouldn’t tell me anything about Leslie,” I said clearly into the receiver, summoning tears.
Clery hung up the phone and mumbled something to the officer behind him, who finally nodded and began to unlock the door to the prisoners’ section of the jail. I kept my head down and pinched both cheeks hard. There. I was splotchy and weeping.
“Crap,” Nancy said, setting the coffee down too hard, so that it sloshed a little. “Clery! I have a few more questions.”
He didn’t turn around. The door shut behind him, a muffled thump.
“We can’t bring ’em back,” the officer who’d led us in said from the doorway. “Visiting hours are voluntary.”
Nancy clasped my shoulder. I took a fortifying sip of coffee. “Did he say anything to you? I saw he had the phone up.”
“He called me a bitch,” I said. “I tried really hard to make him—make him see…”
“It’s not your fault.” Nancy rubbed my shoulder. “Look, you saw him, you talked to him. Do you think your sister would have anything to do with him? She probably sold him your dad’s antiques and he screwed her. There’s nothing you can do but just ask her for the truth or decide to let it go.”
I trembled. “You’re right. Nancy—”
“Let’s go,” she said. “We can talk outside.”
The officer at the door led us back into the lobby. Nancy and I signed out with the clerk. She held the door for me, guiding me through with a hand on the small of my back.
It was hot outside, leaning into summer. Nancy shaded her eyes. “Are you sure you’re okay?”