Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  “Shut the fuck up,” Kent said through clenched teeth. He wasted no time pulling me out of the car and parading me handcuffed in front of the cameras for optimum wide-angled lens exposure.

  Through the police station they escorted me. Some of the cops looked on wide-eyed. Others smiled coyly in an abbreviated show of thumbs-up approval. Almost worse than being arrested for murder was the shock of feeling an outcast among the very people I thought were my friends.

  They pushed me into an empty cell and within minutes I was retrieved by O'Rourke, who freed my cuffed hands and wordlessly walked me to an interrogation room, where a hot cup of coffee sat on the table in front of me.

  “You're shaking,” he said. “Coffee's hot.”

  I didn't know what to say. How do you thank someone you've been mistreating for years? Who'd have thought a hot coffee would humble me to my knees? I was afraid to say anything that would sound disingenuous, something even simple O'Rourke would interpret as too little too late, so I opted for straightforward honesty. Always the best course when you're given only a few minutes to unload a shitload of apologies.

  “Hey, O'Rourke, thanks for the coffee. You're a good man…. The chief's not around, is he?”

  I already knew the answer, but it was nice to see O'Rourke scrunch up his face in pain and shake his head. “Yeah… well… sorry. He left the building when they said they were bringing you in.”

  I nodded, my position in the chief's life brought abruptly home to me: I was a weak link in his chain of command. In the real world—outside the bedroom—I could do nothing but bring him down with me—down to where I'd brought myself via that ladder that everyone comes back down sooner or later.

  “But Mr. Piganno is sending someone over to see you,” O'Rourke said by way of comfort. “Shouldn't be too long. Get you anything else while you're waiting?”

  I shook my head and O'Rourke walked out, leaving the door open behind him. I sat alone, wondering why the girls hadn't come to meet me. My answer came in the form of an ex-AAG who stood in the doorway scowling at me like I was a flea-infested dog.

  “Didn't figure it'd be you, Lynch,” he said. “Melone would've been my guess. Marianna could get herself arrested by a meter maid.”

  “What are you doing here, Kendall?”

  “Vince sent me here to have a little defense chat with you. Apparently you need a good criminal lawyer.”

  “Okay then, let me ask you again. Why are you here?”

  He ran his fingers through his sandy blond locks as he plopped his briefcase on the table in front of me and pulled out a chair. “As much as I'd like to sink you, Lynch,” he said, “this just isn't your MO. If you wanted to kill someone, you'd tear him limb from limb, none of this shoot-'em-in-the-back-of-the-head shit. So save me some time and aggravation and give me something to make this all go away.” When he finished talking, he tilted his head at me.

  Then I tilted my head back at him. “Get real, Kendall. Whoever shot Safer and Boardman walked off the boat at the dock. There's not enough evidence to even hold me here.”

  He nodded his head. “But I should let them hold you overnight just to bust your agates.”

  “Probably not in my best interests to be honest with you right now, but go fuck yourself.”

  He opened his mouth full of pretty white teeth and laughed heartily. “I probably deserve that, but what people deserve is never the question. The question is, who has the balls to give it to them? And that's what ultimately surprised me about Marianna. That she actually dumped me.”

  Yeah, I thought. She did have balls. And I'd always prided myself on being the strong one, the unemotional one, but maybe I'd been giving myself too much credit. Could it be that angst-ridden Marianna was actually stronger than me? And Laurie and Beth too? Did they derive some inner fortitude from having had a real family life? If I had been conceived in a petri dish and grown in a lab, I might have been nurtured by concerned white-smocked technicians instead of ignored and swept aside by everyone except the paperboy.

  “Get me out of here, Jeff.”

  “Yeah, yeah…okay. Initial forensics and simple-ass common sense says there's no way you shot Safer in the back of his head and then hit your head and had him land on top of you. Plus your gun wasn't shot. The bullets they found in Safer and Boardman weren't shot from it. And no one bothered checking Boardman for gun residue because the dumb cops assumed you were the shooter and he was a victim. So timeline looks like you hit your head first, then Safer comes below, gets shot, and lands on top of you. You didn't shoot Boardman, did you? Lovers' quarrel or something?”

  “Why doesn't someone ask him who shot him? Is he able to talk yet?”

  “Just a graze. But the man insists he doesn't know anything. Says he was reaching over to tie the boat up and he felt a sharp pain in his arm. Thought it was a heart attack until he saw the blood, and then he passed out without ever looking up. For a big guy he's a real wimp. Can I ask you what the hell you're doing with him?”

  I was beginning to wonder myself.

  “It's not because of the chief, is it?” Jeff asked.

  “In what way?”

  “Are you trying to get the chief jealous so he'll leave his wife—”

  “Hey! Would I do a girlie thing like that?”

  “You don't have to tell me what really happened on that boat. And if you want another lawyer, I'll stop—”

  “Oh, shut up, Jeff.”

  I stood and walked to a bulletin board at the rear of the room, pulling out pins and stabbing them back in. “Scott and I went out on the boat, the winds picked up, and I went below, hit my head, and my lights went out. I woke up with a corpse on top of me. That's it. I left out all the adjectives, modifiers, and fucking expletives.”

  “And you heard nothing? No shots?”

  “Scott screaming at someone on a phone. By the time the shooting started, I was out cold.”

  “Okey-dokey” He stood abruptly. “Does Piganno know you're diddling a murder suspect?”

  “Yeah, he barred me from the case.”

  “Well, the whole AG's office is compromised now. You fucked up royally this time, old girl. Must say, I didn't expect it of you. Thought you were above all that female stuff.”

  “It's not female stuff. It's having a soul, something you lack because in your genetic sequence a heart is considered junk DNA.”

  “Yup, I'm higher up on the evolutionary ladder, where hearts and souls are about as useful as an appendix and just as prone to inflammation. Want my advice? Don't cut off your balls to spite your face. Temper the estrogen and start thinking like a guy—the way you used to.”

  “Can I go home now?”

  He laughed. “If I don't keep these charges from sticking, you'll be fired. It's automatic termination if you're even charged with a crime. So you owe me, Lynch. Big.” He swiped his briefcase from the table. “I'll get you out in a jiffy. Sit tight.” Then he left me alone with my cold black coffee.

  Jeff was right. All my life I'd repressed that female side, the one that played with dolls and cooed at babies. Why was I getting soft now? Was it my body's way of waking me up to reality: Breed now or forever hold your peace? In the past I would have bedded both Boardman and Chucky and never mentioned a word to either of them about the other. Was Jeff Kendall right? Was I pitting Chuck against Boardman in some jealousy game to get Chuck to leave his wife and marry me? I couldn't even think such thoughts without getting physically sick. And could I chance facing the girls with this pink-hued dilemma without forever losing my position as their Darth Vadered fearless leader? Would I ever be able to berate Marianna again for being an emotional wreck, scream at Beth when she was crying, or call Laurie a bleeding-heart liberal—without having them raise their plucked eyebrows at me? For the first time in my life I realized it was hard being me. For the first time in my life I suspected that the “me” I thought I was might be a facade, a brick wall slanting ominously to one side.

  I would hold the wall up o
r knock it down. Whatever. But I would do it alone. I could still do it solo.

  That's when asshole cop Kent came back into my interrogation room and closed the door quietly behind him. He leaned over the table so close to my face that I could see the early evening stubble just above his lip. He smelled of leather.

  “You're going to spend the night with us. And I get to tuck you in.”

  Every muscle in my body tensed as, in my mind, I stood and kicked the table into his gut.

  In real life, I collapsed back into my chair, a prisoner.

  He stood and moved to the door, backing against it to block anyone else's entry. “Why aren't you asking for the chief? Don't you want Chief Sewell to save your skinny ass?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I'm trying to save your job for you. As soon as the chief finds out what you're doing here, you're not only unemployed, you're dead.”

  He smiled as a light knock interrupted what I assumed was his comeback threat. His head jerked toward the whisper through the closed door. He opened it and admitted his partner, the other cop from the boat, who slid into the room and stood next to his friend. Waiting.

  I remained seated. The table between us my only protection.

  A nod from asshole cop, and his partner moved behind me to the barred and frosted window.

  “Went home for the night,” he said to Kent.

  “The chief?” I said. “But he'll be back in the morning.”

  “Not soon enough for you,” Kent said. “And he won't say anything about this because he's as guilty as you are. Adultery is illegal last time I checked.”

  Before I heard him, the partner came up behind me and slapped a cuff around my wrist, then jerked my other arm behind me and fastened them together. Kent came behind me as I struggled. He kicked the chair out from under me and I fell, my “skinny ass” bouncing on the floor.

  They laughed, but the look on their faces wasn't humor. It was a look of pleasure or relief—like something held too long in their bowels and then released.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I backed away on my ass, skittering across the floor like a trapped bug until I hit a wall I couldn't climb. “What do you want? What did I do to you?”

  “You're a big-mouth broad who thinks she runs this station because the chief lets you suck his dick. You're no better than the whores we pick up every night in Olneyville, but the chief's letting you—his private whore-have the run of the Providence police force and we're staging a coup.”

  “You've got to be nuts. I'm an AAG. The chief's going to—”

  He kicked my feet closer to the wall. “He's doing nothing, because like I said, he's guilty of adultery and so are you. See, I did my legal research. Just because you're not married doesn't mean it's not adultery for you too. What do you think the press will do with the information? Piganno will give you the needle faster than a rabid dog.”

  “What do you want from me? It can't be rape, because I have a skinny ass. And you're too afraid to let me suck your little lollipops, because you know I'll chew them off. So what do you want?”

  Kent looked at his partner and shrugged. “Nothing. I don't want shit from you, bitch. I just want you to know we're all sick of it. We want you to know that next time you walk in this station, you'd better say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ real nice to all my brethren. You think you can do that? Be nice?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” I said. “I can do that. And I'm real sorry if I ever offended you. Real sorry.”

  “That's real nice. Real nice.”

  They yanked me up by both arms and dragged me on the floor to the door, where the partner opened the door as lookout and Kent pulled me to my feet and escorted me back to the cell. It was now about eleven at night and the place was quiet. O'Rourke must have left for the night. Chucky had never returned to the station.

  Sometime after 3 a.m. I fell asleep on the cement floor next to the steel bench to which they'd handcuffed me.

  OUT, OUT, DAMNED SPOT

  “HOLY SHIT, SHE IS STILL HERE.”

  I awoke to the rancid smell of a dirty cement floor and opened my eyes to Laurie's voice. Before I could look up, Chucky was unlocking my cuffs and Laurie was lifting my head from the floor. It was just now pounding from the injury I'd received the day before on Boardman's boat.

  “Who did this to you, Shannon?” Laurie asked as she inspected the back of my head.

  Chucky removed the cuffs and helped me sit up. “O'Rourke said he left you in a room to wait for Kendall. Who put you in a cell?”

  “I don't know,” I lied. “I must have passed out. Am I free to go?”

  Laurie helped me to my unsteady feet and I saw O'Rourke standing outside the cell. He looked at us in terror, obviously fearing he would get the blame for losing me in the police station all night.

  “Not your fault, O'Rourke,” I said. “Mine. All mine.”

  Laurie and I hobbled slowly from the cell. Chucky stood off to the side with O'Rourke, grinding his jaw. “This wasn't Kent, was it? Or one of the guys who brought you in?”

  I shook my head and lied, “I didn't recognize him, Chief. I don't know who it was.”

  “Well, you're going through photos of every goddamn one of my men and you'll pick him out. You're gonna tell me who did this to you, Shannon. You hear me? No one on my watch is going to get away with this shit.”

  I nodded to him. “Not now. Neither one of us needs any more trouble right now.”

  “Do you need a hospital?” Laurie asked.

  I snickered. Marianna or Beth would have tried to presume control and order me to the nearest ER. Laurie was smart enough to ask first.

  “Let's go to the office.” A second later, I remembered I was a prisoner. I looked back at Chucky. “I am free to go, right?”

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Shit,” Laurie said. “I've never seen your eyes this wide.” Walking me straight again, she said, “Kendall said he got you released last night. We didn't know you'd been here all night until nobody heard from you this morning.”

  Laurie drove us to the office, where, despite the fact that it was Saturday, Vince was waiting for us. Pacing his windows, biting his lip, and smoking his favorite bad habit. If I was expecting a fusillade of reprimand from him, he surprised me by being real succinct when Laurie and I entered his office.

  In a quick five-minute monologue that neither Laurie nor I dared to interrupt, he stated our new marching orders: Not one of us was considered unbiased enough to handle the case, so Vince was taking it over himself; I'd single-handedly soiled all the laundry at the AG's office in a high-profile murder case; and I'd just slimly missed automatic termination, which was only on hold pending further fuckups.

  “So,” Pig summated, “if I find out that you've seen Boardman once more during this investigation, you're fired. If you go near, speak to, or even wave to any of the witnesses in this case, you're fired. If a scintilla of evidence surfaces connecting you to the murder yesterday on his boat, you're fired. If you breathe a syllable of back talk to me over this, you're fired. Now you and your girlfriends may return quietly to your backlog of other cases and shut your mouths until this thing is over.”

  No sooner was I locked away in my office than Scott Boardman rang me up on my cell from his hospital room. We had entered a new stage in our ever-bonding relationship: We were now potential suspects in two different murder investigations. He was getting released from the hospital the next day and wanted to confer with me and—of all freaking people—Brooke Stanford.

  “Nope,” I said.

  Like Vince, I, too, could be succinct, leaving little room for argument.

  “Shannon, Leo Safer was a friend of mine. Someone shot him and tried to kill me and maybe even you. That same someone's threatening both our careers, not to mention our freedom, and our lives. We need to work together on this.”

  “Call your lawyer. I think you dragged me into your nightmare on purpose to screw up the investigation into your wife's mur
der. I'm out. I've got my own hide to save.”

  Indeed, in a matter of a week I was a murder suspect; a base contingent of Providence cops had communicated a resentment for me I never knew existed; I was on the verge of alienating my girlfriends—the only family I'd ever had—by threatening their jobs as well as my own; and I was still on the phone with the guy who'd caused it all. Why was I still holding the receiver against my ear? Why did I let him soothe me with his smooth voice and the velvet memory of his skin against my face?

  “Please don't leave me now, Shannon. I swear to you I'm innocent. I swear I would never do anything to hurt you. How can I convince you?

  “Stop lying.”

  “Okay. Okay. But I haven't been lying, just not telling the whole truth.”

  “Leading me down the wrong path is worse than giving me nothing. And since my gut instincts aren't strewn with rose petals, I'd rather go on my own with this.”

  “I promise on my poor wife's soul.”

  “If you killed her, what's it worth?”

  “She's the mother of my kids.”

  “That didn't stop O.J. from killing the mother of his kids and then leaving her body where they'd find her in the morning when they went looking for their Frosted Flakes.”

  “They're releasing me tomorrow. Come to the Biltmore at five. Please? One more chance.”

  “No sex and no Brooke Stanford.”

  “But you have to hear about her. She's part of this.”

  I clicked my cell phone closed and dialed up Mike McCoy. Mike and I would never be friends if it weren't for Marianna. He and I were like two bears always fighting for the same cave. But after some quick math I realized my choices were limited. The girls were so concerned with protecting me that they were denying the bigger picture of saving their own careers. So I left them out and called Mike, agreeing to meet him at the Providence Public Library because neither one of us read books and no one would recognize us. We walked in like concerned parents, smiling at the older woman behind the circulation desk, to whom I offered a quick salutation and comment about summer reading lists, and Mike and I proceeded to the far corner behind a tall book stack. I sank to the floor and sat cross-legged while he pulled a chair from a table.