Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  He hadn’t. I watched as we passed some of the bars I remembered down here, places that tried on the outside to look like friendly little crab shacks but there were more Rolexes inside than in all of Geneva.

  I was nervous, and I could tell Darren was too. I hadn’t seen Fred or my nephews in close to three years, and who knew what state they were going to be in. Matthew and Luke were eleven now, twins like Ginger and me. And like us, not identical – Luke was blonder and had Ginger’s glow about him, where Matthew was a bit darker and more pale. More like me, as I recalled, but I hadn’t seen them in a long time.

  And look at the state I was in. I debated getting the driver to pull over so I could pull a clean t-shirt from my suitcase in the trunk, but even the little bit of vodka I was drinking had put lead into my thighs. I didn’t want to move.

  The driver took a hard left and we wound our way through streets with houses you couldn’t see from the road, with huge private gates and lush bougainvillea along the side of the road. Eventually, we pulled into a driveway with a huge gate in front and with a click on something on his visor, the gates smoothly pulled open.

  Darren and I looked at each other. The driver hadn’t buzzed the security panel outside the gate, he had his own clicker.

  “This is Fred’s car,” I whispered. “This isn’t a limo service.”

  “He can’t hear you,” Darren said, indicating the privacy glass separating us from the driver.

  “How do you know,” I said, as the car swung around a circular driveway, paved with what looked like Italian marble, to a mansion. There was no other word for it. It looked like a small hotel, all pale yellow stone and actual turrets, with a gigantic fountain out front and a fit-looking man in a black polo shirt and black cargo pants hurrying down the steps toward us.

  Darren and I looked at each other. “We’re on,” he said. He looked closer at me. “You have a cranberry moustache.” With that, he climbed out of the car. I swiped frantically at my lips with the back of my hand.

  “Ms. Cleary,” the butler, or bodyguard, whoever he was, said to me, reaching his hand in to help me out. He looked kindly into my eyes, ignoring the vomit-splashed clothes and the juice stain above my lips. He was so good, it was as though he hadn’t seen them. “I’m so sorry for your loss. We’re all devastated at Mrs. Lindquist’s passing. Just devastated.”

  Mrs. Lindquist? My sister had servants now, and they called her Mrs. Lindquist?

  “Thank you,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “James Rosen,” the man said. He had a slight accent I couldn’t quite place. Israeli maybe? “You can call me Rosen. Or James. Whichever you prefer.”

  “Just don’t call you late for dinner?” I blurted and caught Darren rolling his eyes off to my side.

  Rosen smiled kindly and nodded, obviously not knowing what the fuck I was talking about. Good thing – neither did I. I have been known to babble a bit when nervous.

  Darren and I stood by, watching the driver and Rosen unload our luggage from the trunk of the limo. Neither of us was used to being waited on like this, and all I could think of was, where is Fred? Where are the boys? Why haven’t they come outside? Did they see the vomit on my shirt and are hiding behind the curtains? I wondered frantically if Rosen wanted to share a pipe with me. Then the thought made me laugh out loud.

  Rosen and the driver – whose name, Darren seemed to know, was Derek – glanced up as I started giggling frantically and uncontrollably. I couldn’t breathe. I started hiccupping in a very ladylike fashion, and before I knew it I was bent over at the waist. Then there was a sound coming from somewhere, a horrible keening sound, and when Darren put his hand on my back, I realized it was coming from me.

  Ginger was dead. My twin was dead. It couldn’t be right. It was as if every sadness I had ever experienced – losing my parents, leaving Jack – was trying to make itself heard.

  I am not one to cause scenes, but I sat right down on the ground. I didn’t feel like my legs could bear my weight any longer. I was rocking back and forth and I couldn’t seem to catch any air.

  I didn’t look up, but I could see that everyone was standing stock-still around me. Then I could feel Darren’s hand on my back and under my arm, pulling me up.

  “They were twins, she and Mrs. Lindquist,” he said to the two men. “Think one of you could show us to a bathroom?”

  As Rosen led the way inside, all was quiet. No sign of Fred or the boys, and the only human I could see was a squat little woman in a maid’s uniform Windexing a mirror in the hall as though her life depended on it. I felt like I was watching a movie. This couldn’t be real, could it?

  “Uh, James?”

  “Miss?”

  “Where is our brother-in-law? And the boys? Where is everybody?”

  Rosen paused and turned around, looked at us. “I thought you knew,” he said.

  “Knew what,” Darren said. I could tell his throat was dry.

  “Mr. Lindquist is being held at the Orange County jail. He’s been arrested. The police think he killed Mrs. Lindquist.”

  “He said she… did it herself,” I said. Darren hadn’t moved.

  Rosen shook his head. “That was the initial…” he started, but didn’t seem to be able to finish.

  I sat down suddenly again on a conveniently placed velvet chair in the hallway and put my head between my legs. I thought maybe I was going to be sick again, I was so lightheaded. I didn’t want to puke on Ginger’s beautiful floors.

  “And the boys, where are the boys,” Darren continued, ignoring me.

  “Oh dear. No one has talked to you,” Rosen said. “It all happened so quickly.”

  “Where the fuck are my nephews?” Darren said, his fists clenched. His voice was quiet, but his knuckles were white.

  Rosen regarded him seriously. “I’m afraid to tell you, sir, that until this matter is sorted, in the absence of family to take them,” here, Rosen’s voice changed a bit, “last night the police removed the children from the home and have placed them in the care of Social Services.”

  I sat bolt upright, my vision clearing. No. No way. No fucking way.

  “I’m going to change my shirt, and then I’m going to get Fred out of jail,” I said to Darren. “You get those kids back home.”

  Darren nodded, and looked at Rosen like he wanted to hit him. “You take the limo,” he said to me, still looking at the poor valet. “And maybe Rosen here can give me a phone number of whoever came and took the kids. How long have they been gone?”

  “They were taken yesterday, sir,” Rosen replied. “We presumed that someone would have called the family.” He took a step forward, put a hand on Darren’s arm, which I thought at the time was a very brave act. “I’m so sorry. We would have been happy to keep the boys here. We all love them. They are like our own children. Marta hasn’t stopped cleaning since they left. She hasn’t slept a wink.” Behind him, the maid I had seen earlier peeked around the corner and started talking away in Spanish, tears flowing down her kind face.

  Darren went over to her and hugged her, like he had done to me at the airport. The two of them stayed together like that, both of them rocking back and forth and crying. Something hardened in my chest. I felt more sober than I had ever felt. Rosen and I looked at each other.

  “Where’s my room, James,” I said. “I need to change.”

  I hadn’t thought about crack in nearly ten minutes. A record.

  3

  I was glad it was finally dark as Derek the driver steered the big car skillfully along the much quieter streets. He kept glancing at me in his rear view. The partition was down because I had asked him to lower it – I had planned to ask him questions about Fred and Ginger and the boys. But I found I couldn’t yet. Not until I had talked to Fred. I planned to get in to see him, even if I had to blow a corrections officer to do it.

  Okay, not really. And despite the clean shirt and a freshly washed face, I doubt any of them would want me to. I wasn’t exactly looking like
a sex bomb. I had neglected to change my vomit-splattered jeans in my rush to get to the lockup. And as I ran my hands through my hair, I thought I felt something sticky in there too. Lovely. But I doubted Fred would notice, under the circumstances.

  Every time I thought about the twins in some kind of group home or in foster placement, or whatever they did with kids whose mothers had died violently and had their father sent to jail for it, I felt like somebody had punched me in the solar plexus. I had to keep taking deep breaths and had to concentrate. Crack had addled my brain, and coming off it made it worse. I just wanted to lie down on the backseat and sleep for ten hours. Maybe more. Maybe until I woke up in heaven with Ginger.

  Except I doubted that Ginger and I were going to wind up in the same place in the afterlife. She was perfect, and me? Not so much.

  We pulled in through some wire gates and talked to a security guard. I couldn’t hear what they said, but the guard motioned us through.

  Derek pulled the car out in front of the building. “I have to stay with the car, Miss Cleary,” he said nervously. He sounded like this was the last place he wanted to be. I wondered if he had spent a night or two here himself.

  He didn’t open my door this time, and I realized that I had already come to expect such treatment. A person could get used to this kind of life. Is this what had happened to Ginger and Fred? Had all this wealth done something bad to them? I couldn’t imagine it. They were the nicest people in the world.

  I approached a guard who was sitting behind a glass booth.

  “I’m here to see Fred Lindquist,” I said to him. “He was brought in yesterday. He’s my brother-in-law. He was apparently charged with killing my sister.” Babble some more, idiot.

  The guard just stared at me, then started tapping away at a computer.

  “His arraignment is tomorrow morning. No visitors.”

  Jesus Christ. “Please,” I whispered.

  “No, ma’am,” the officer said. “Only his lawyer and detectives working the case are allowed to see prisoners unless there is a visitation order. Besides,” he added, looking down at the papers in front of him, effectively dismissing me, “there are no visitors after six.”

  The man didn’t look like he would respond to flirting, so I didn’t try. Instead, I tried tears. It wasn’t hard. I seemed to be getting good at this crying thing.

  “Please,” I said, letting the tears flow down my face unchecked. “I just flew in and found out that the police think she was murdered, and that Fred was charged for it, and I don’t know where their kids are, and I don’t know what to do.”

  The guard sighed. “I’m sorry for your troubles. I really am. But without a visitation order, I can’t let you in to see him. I can give you a request for visitation, though,” he added, pushing a form through the partition to me. I glanced at it.

  “Can you tell me the name of his lawyer, then?”

  “I’m not supposed to,” the guard said warily.

  “Please. I’m begging you. I need to talk to him.”

  The guard sighed again, looked over his shoulder, and tapped away at the computer a few times. He took a piece of scrap paper and wrote a name and phone number down on it. I looked at the guard’s bright red hair and acne scars, saw him as another vulnerable human suddenly, and thought that he was the nicest person I had ever met.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said. I had seen payphones by the front door, and I headed back to them. Then I paused and turned around and went back to the guard. “You wouldn’t have change for the payphone, would you? I’ll pay you back.”

  This time the guard actually smiled. “You’re pushing your luck, ma’am,” he said, fishing a few quarters from his pocket and pushing them across the counter to me.

  “What’s your name, officer?” I asked him, scooping up the coins.

  “Greg,” he answered. “Greg Tobolowski.”

  “I owe you one, Greg.”

  “All you owe me is seventy-five cents, ma’am.”

  I started to walk away. I turned back again. “Greg?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Don’t call me ma’am. Call me Danny.”

  Greg smiled and nodded at me, and I went to the payphones with a lighter heart. Over the last couple of years, I had strayed so far from straight society that I always assumed that there was an invisible barrier dividing me from people in positions of authority. Even bank tellers seemed to be the enemy. Once upon a time, though, I had been moneyed myself – not like Fred and Ginger, of course, but I wore a significant cluster of rings on my left hand and paid five hundred dollars a month on my haircuts and highlights. I was never much of a shopper, but I hadn’t looked at the price tags on clothes, and had eaten in nice restaurants three or four times a week. Bought nine-dollar bottled water in those restaurants too. On top of the wine, of course.

  But that was a lifetime ago, and in the here and now, I was a crack addict standing in a jailhouse in California, trying to get my brother-in-law’s lawyer on the phone to find out why they thought he murdered my sister.

  I couldn’t think about the twins. That was Darren’s job. If I thought about them right now, I wouldn’t be able to function.

  I looked at the scrap of paper in my hand. Chandler York, it read, with a phone number scrawled underneath. I dialed the number and slipped a couple of quarters in the phone, hoping against hope that the man would still be in his office at this time in the evening. With a name like Chandler York, he probably charged a thousand bucks an hour. If I could charge that for anything, I’d be putting in pretty long hours.

  I was just about to leave a message on his voicemail when I heard Greg talking to someone. A lean, fifty-something man in a million-dollar suit, with salt-and-pepper hair and a tall, tightly coiled grace. Greg was pointing in my direction, and the man turned to face me. My heart started pounding harder and I broke out into a light sweat along my hairline. When you’re a drug addict, you don’t want men like that looking at you while you’re standing in a jailhouse. It’s just instinct. Older white men in authority positions don’t usually take a shine to crackheads. They tend to ask awkward questions. Unless, of course, they’re paying them for their time in a motel somewhere.

  I hoped he didn’t notice that I had started to sweat, because at that moment I realized I still had a balloon full of drugs shoved inside me.

  The man approached. “Miss Cleary,” he said, smiling at me. He wasn’t handsome, exactly. His teeth were slightly crooked as though he had grown up without great dental care, but the whole package was somehow elegant. He carried himself as though he had seriously studied martial arts. “I’m Chandler York. I understand you’re looking for me.”

  “Golly,” I said. It was probably the first time in my life that I’d said the word, and I hoped it would be the last.

  “Let me just say, I’m so sorry for your loss.” He grabbed one of my hands with both of his.

  “Fred didn’t kill her,” I blurted out. I extricated my hand from his. They were too cool, his hands, like he’d just come from the morgue. I shivered.

  “Of course he didn’t,” the lawyer said, as though the idea was ridiculous. “I’ve known Fred for a couple of years now. We met at a fundraiser,” he said. “Salt of the earth. Beautiful wife.” Then he looked mortified for a moment, realizing that he was talking about Ginger. He started to apologize, but I shook my head. I didn’t want to waste time on niceties.

  “So why is he here?”

  Chandler York sighed, as though the weight of the world rested on his wide shoulders. “Would you like to see him? I might be able to arrange it. But only for a few minutes. And I would have to be present, of course.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. I would be very grateful.” Maybe I wouldn’t have to blow someone tonight after all. The thought made me almost start to laugh hysterically again. I really needed sleep.

  Oh God. I needed crack.

  “But where are my nephews? Did you know that Social Services has taken
them?”

  He nodded. “It’s protocol,” he said. “Sadly. They should be released into your custody tonight, now that family is here. I argued a last-minute motion yesterday to have the household staff watch them for the night before you and your brother arrived today, but I wasn’t successful.” I felt an inch calmer. One night, that was all they had been away. Darren would be able to pick them up tonight. That, at least, we could do for Ginger.

  The lawyer said a few words to Greg the Guard, and I was asked politely to remove everything from my pockets and to submit my purse at the front desk. We walked down a hallway, I went through a metal detector, and a female guard waved a security wand over me as though it was the four hundredth time she’d done it that day. Which it probably was.

  Another hallway, then a guard led Chandler and me into a room and shut the door behind him. We sat in silence for a moment or two before Fred, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, was led in by a different guard, his hands in cuffs, his ankles manacled.

  I stood up. “Fred,” I said. I started over to hug him, but the guard stopped me.

  “No contact with the prisoner, ma’am.” I was ma’am all over the place tonight.

  He looked like he’d aged twenty years since the last time I’d seen him. His formerly sandy-red hair was now mostly gray, and he looked like he’d dropped twenty pounds. It made his sticky-out ears seem even more pronounced. My heart turned over. What had he gone through? Could this all be from the last days of horror? Or had something been happening before? I sat back down in my chair.

  “Hi, Danny,” Fred said quietly. He placed his handcuffed hands carefully on the table in front of him.

  “Officer,” Chandler York said to the guard, “would it be possible to remove my client’s restraints for a few minutes?”

  “No, sir,” the guard answered, eyes straight ahead. “Sorry.”

  “How’ve you been, Danny?” Fred said quietly, looking into my eyes. “Keeping out of trouble?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” I answered lightly. I wondered quickly, wildly, if I could excuse myself to the ladies’ room to fish the balloon out of my vagina and manage a quick line of coke. “Fred. What’s going on?” I found myself fighting back slight hyperventilation. I couldn’t breathe in here. Why weren’t there any windows?