Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  “I got the call the next morning,” Fred said, as though we’d been in the middle of a conversation about it already. “She’d been gone all night, but that had… that had happened before.”

  Ginger? Staying out all night at motels? This could not be right. I shook my head to clear it. I must have missed something.

  He cleared his throat. “It was in a shitty little motel. The Sunny Jim. Can you believe that?” He laughed, almost as though he found something funny. “The Sunny Jim, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Fred,” I said, but he kept talking.

  “We were about to head out for school,” he said. “Matt and Luke and me. I was driving them. You know they’re in sixth grade?”

  I shook my head. To my shame, I didn’t really know. If I had thought enough to do the math I could have figured it out, but I had travelled so far down the highway of bad living that I couldn’t remember such things anymore. School and grades and car pools were for real people. I was a shadow of one.

  Fred nodded. “They’re smart. And both pretty good athletes, too. Get that from the Clearys, you know, the athleticism. You remember – I always threw like a girl.”

  I smiled. I did remember. In high school, I’d pitched for the girls’ softball team, and Fred often came to my games with Ginger and joked that they should open up the pros to girls. My siblings and I had always been strong and physically coordinated, and we all tended to be attracted to people who could break their ankles falling off a sidewalk. Other than my Jack. But Jack had no place in my life anymore. He couldn’t help me now.

  I hoped Fred wouldn’t ask how the boys were. I didn’t know if he knew that the twins had been taken away last night. I hoped he didn’t know. We’d have them back tonight, I kept thinking. Tonight.

  Chandler York cleared his throat. “Fred,” he said, “we don’t have much time here.”

  Fred looked down at his hands, and I noticed he was going bald, his exposed skull freckled. “She knew about you, Danny. She knew all about what you were doing.”

  “I know,” I whispered. My heart hammered inside my chest. “I mean, I tried not to lie to her. Not to Ginger.”

  “You never picked up your phone. You never returned her calls.”

  “Oh, Fred,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry. I just… couldn’t. You know?”

  “She wanted to save you,” Fred continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “She said that you were the other half of her, that she had always had the sense that you were put on this earth to do something special. And she couldn’t stand what you were doing to yourself. She said she had to understand it. To help you.”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry, and not to speak.

  “It’s your fault,” he said. Matter-of-fact.

  My heart stopped. “What?” I asked.

  Fred looked square at me. “Ginger’s death, Danny. It’s your fault. It was because of you.” I stayed silent, scared that if I opened my mouth, Fred would clam up and I would never hear the rest of what he had to say.

  “She got involved with some bad people, Danny, all because of you. Because of trying to save you. And do you know what they did to her? Do you know yet?” He wasn’t whispering anymore. The guard took a step forward, and Fred lowered his voice again.

  “They gave her an overdose of something and then they hung her from the shower rod. They tried to make it look like she killed herself, hanged herself.” Fred looked down, and I could see that his face was wet. In slow motion, I looked at Chandler York.

  “It did look like suicide immediately, Miss Cleary,” the man said gently. “But the post-mortem showed that she was, uh, hanged, after she had already passed. It was an overdose,” he said. “It was some bad dose of heroin.”

  “Heroin?” I couldn’t believe it. If Ginger had somehow wanted to replicate my life, my experiences, heroin wouldn’t have been on the menu. Smoking crack was bad enough. Shooting heroin was in another league, and I had never injected myself with anything, ever.

  Chandler nodded. “But it was the opinion of the forensic pathologist that Mrs. Lindquist was not a habitual user. In fact this might have been the first time. There were no other needle marks on her body.”

  No, no, no, no. This didn’t make sense.

  “But why do they think you did it, Fred? You don’t do drugs. I don’t understand.” I was calm. I would stay calm. I would stay calm until I found who did this to my sister, and then I would be able to let my rage out.

  “Because I’m her husband. That’s what they always think.”

  Fred had started to cry, great gulping sobs. Snot bubbled out of his nose. Chandler took out a handkerchief and raised his eyebrows to the guard, who nodded, and Chandler cleaned up Fred’s face. Gently, like you would a five-year-old. It seemed an oddly incongruous gesture, but sweet. And Fred barely seemed to even notice, just let Chandler wipe his face as he would a child’s.

  I couldn’t figure it all out, how any of this could be true, even remotely. But I would find out.

  Calm, calm, I told myself. You can smoke crack later. In a few hours, maybe less, things will be easier to bear.

  “Fred,” I said. “Who did this to her? Who was it?”

  Fred shook his head. “I don’t know, Danny. You tell me.”

  I went cold. “What do you mean?”

  “The suicide note. The fake suicide note, that someone made her write. It was addressed to you.” Fred got up and walked toward the door, and the guard opened it. He turned back around and gazed at me. “Oh, and, Danny?”

  I couldn’t look at him.

  “Don’t come here again. I don’t want to see you again.” He stood up, and the guard led him out of the room.

  * * *

  Chandler York followed me back to Fred and Ginger’s house. His shiny black Porsche – a car I had always seen as a midlife crisis car, a penis on wheels – seemed incongruous for a man of his stature and gravitas. He should have had a stately sedan, a Mercedes 600-series, or a Jaguar. But then again, I was riding around in the back of a stretch limo, so image-appropriate automobiles were not the order of the day. I kept glancing behind me on the drive back to the house, and Chandler was right behind us. I could see that he spent most of the ride talking on a cell phone. Probably explaining to his wife why he wasn’t going to make the opera gala, or whatever other tony event would occupy a normal evening for a man like him.

  I looked out the window and tried to erase the image of my sister hanging from a shower rod from my mind.

  Darren was still gone when we got home. Rosen was there at the door when I got out of the car. I wondered if he ever rested. He didn’t look like he needed rest. He looked like a high-end hitman. But in a good way.

  “You saw Mr. Lindquist?” he asked. It had started to rain, a light mist, and Rosen held an umbrella over my head as I walked to the front door. So much for Darren’s Santa Anas.

  “I did,” I replied. “James. You don’t think that Fred could do this, do you? Do to my sister what…” I couldn’t finish.

  “Absolutely not,” he interrupted. “It is inconceivable.”

  I nodded and stood outside the front door as Chandler York unfolded himself from his Porsche. I had to hand it to him, he was pretty graceful. Martial arts? Maybe a former Eastern bloc gymnast who’d lost the accent? My mind was whirring away, doing its best not to think of Ginger.

  Inside, Marta, who looked like she’d been crying since I left the house, brought us green tea and little lemon cookies in a living room the size of a ballroom. I hadn’t seen this room yet. In fact, other than the grand front hallway and the staircase up to my room, I hadn’t seen much of anything.

  Chandler and I arranged ourselves on sleek Bauhaus-style furniture. He sipped his tea, and so did I.

  “Well,” he said, breaking what was turning into the awkward silence of awkward silences. “I’m sure that wasn’t pleasant for you.”

  I gave him a look.

  “I spoke to the polic
e on the drive over here. Detective Miller.”

  “Like Barney Miller,” I said. God, I had watched too much 70s TV.

  “Uh. Right. Except his given name is Harry.” He smiled at me. “I’ve crossed paths with Miller a few times over the years, seen him at court. Seems decent enough.” I nodded. What did that matter now, I thought. Fred was already in jail. Chandler cleared his throat. “Danny. When, after Ginger’s … passing… did you talk to Fred?”

  “I didn’t,” I replied. “He left me a message, and the rest I got from my brother.”

  “And the rest of your family, when do they arrive?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. I wasn’t sure. Darren had been the family conduit in this situation. I loved my brothers, Skipper and Laurence. I loved them, but I hadn’t returned an email or a phone call from either of them in many months. I assumed they knew I was still alive, because they never stopped trying. I shifted in my seat, about to excuse myself to go and finally remove the drugs. Having a latex balloon shoved up your lady parts isn’t the most comfortable way to spend a long day. Between an international flight and a visit to a jail, I was happy I hadn’t had to undergo a body cavity search today.

  “Do you have a big family?” I asked. “Kids and all that?” He had been so gentle, cleaning Fred’s face; it was the gesture of a father.

  Chandler laughed. “Oh, yes. A lot. They’re all grown now, though, spread out, living their lives.” I nodded. He was probably a good dad. People who had lots of kids tended to love kids.

  “Detective Miller asked if it would be all right for him to come over this evening,” he said. “With his partner, Detective French. She’s a woman,” he added, nodding at me.

  “Fancy that,” I said. “They actually allow women to be police down here?”

  Chandler nodded and smiled a bit. “You got me,” he said.

  I put my cup down. “I want to know what’s going on here. The police thought it was suicide. Even Fred told me it was suicide at first.”

  Chandler shrugged. “It seemed open-and-shut at first glance. Suicide note. Sloppy, um, job of…”

  “Hanging,” I finished. I sipped my tea. What a civilized visit. Tea and cookies and suicide. Or murder. But the police were coming over, so I opted to leave the coke balloon firmly where it was for the time being.

  “But of course within a few minutes the medical examiner knew…”

  “That she was murdered.”

  “Right.” He paused. “Fred called you right away, he told me, before they told him the truth, that she did not take her own life. And soon after he was arrested, so…”

  That explained his frantic message on my voicemail. I thought about Lisa, the ticket agent at the airport, telling me that my sister hadn’t committed suicide. I shivered.

  “Miss Cleary – may I call you Danny?”

  “Sure.”

  “Danny, do you think I could get a real drink?”

  I found myself actually smiling at him. He looked tired suddenly, and his suit almost looked rumpled. He and Fred were probably pretty good friends, or close to it. He said he had met him at a benefit, and he knew Ginger. And the way he had cleaned Fred’s face at the jail, it was the gesture of a kind and gentle man. “Let me see if I can scare something up.”

  Five minutes later, we were both drinking Grey Goose over ice.

  “And how exactly is it that my brother-in-law was charged so quickly?”

  Chandler cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should wait for the detectives…”

  “Chandler. May I call you Chandler?”

  “I’d prefer it.”

  “Chandler, why did they arrest Fred?”

  He looked down at his glass and drained it. He grabbed the bottle from the ice bucket to his left and topped up my glass, and then filled his nearly to the brim. “His DNA. His was the only DNA recovered from her, uh, the body.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “But how could they possibly have gotten DNA this early? Doesn’t it take weeks? Or months?”

  Chandler nodded and took a generous swig. “It used to, and in most jurisdictions still does. There’s a very new technology – it’s called RapidHit, or RapidDNA, I believe, something close to that. Some police forces around the country have bought it and are testing it. It can turn DNA around instantly, apparently. Ninety minutes or something like that. Palm Springs has one, and they aren’t very far away. And in a case like this, with Fred and Ginger being so…”

  “Rich,” I finished for him.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked like the word was distasteful to him. In my experience, rich people don’t like to use the word “rich.” Especially in front of the poors. “You’d have to talk to the District Attorney, or maybe the detectives can help you. But all I know is that DNA analysis was done only about forty-eight hours after the… event.”

  “The event,” I said. I got a flash of my sister hanging from a shower rod, and for a moment I thought I would scream and never stop.

  “As this is all just now happening, I am going to have my team study the legalities of using this technology in court, its accuracy, possibly a constitutional challenge. We do have our work cut out for us.” He took a long swallow of vodka. “But even if we get this technology excluded, they will still be doing old-school DNA testing. And let’s face it, it probably is Fred’s DNA. They were apparently… intimate before your sister left the house that evening.”

  Oh God. Oh my God. How do people get through things like this without drugs, I thought. Why don’t they all just go mad? I needed to smoke crack. I needed to get him out of here.

  “This looks very bad for him,” I said. Concentrate on Fred for a minute, the police are coming, then within maybe thirty minutes I’ll lock myself in a bathroom, one of the far upstairs ones, and smoke. Hopefully until my heart explodes.

  No, not that much. After I kill whoever killed Ginger. Then I would gladly let my heart explode. It was on its way already.

  Chandler York looked at me. “Danny. Don’t worry. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m the best at what I do. I have a team dedicated exclusively to proving that Fred Lindquist did not murder his wife.”

  “Then who did, Chandler? Who do you think did?”

  Chandler York put his glass down on the coffee table, a low, wide thing made of teak. What was this doing here, I found myself thinking. Ginger had always said she hated mid-century modern. He leaned his elbows on his knee and swivelled his head around to look at me. “Who do you think did it, Danny?”

  “I don’t have a fucking clue,” I said. “How the fuck should I know? Ginger was my twin, but I haven’t been here in three years. My life has been sort of, uh, chaotic since I saw her last. I hardly talk to her, really. How should I know?”

  “Danny,” Chandler said. “You haven’t seen the note yet.” He drained the rest of his glass of straight vodka in one swallow. “You haven’t seen the bloody note.”

  * * *

  The doorbell rang, and before I could move, I could hear Rosen talking to some people.

  “Detectives Miller and French, Danny,” he said. I brightened up a bit at the use of my name. Miss Cleary was getting old, but not as old as ma’am.

  I stood and held my hand out in my best lady-of-the-manor fashion. I was faking it of course, taking it all from movies and Dynasty. Pop culture to the rescue. Chandler didn’t get up from the couch, just leaned forward to grab the Grey Goose and refill his glass. I found it a vaguely endearing gesture, that he felt so at home here, and that he was obviously taking this situation hard. He and Fred could be best buddies, as far as I knew. And as far as I was concerned, that was a good quality in a defence lawyer.

  Note to self: become buddies with a good defence lawyer. One never knows when it’ll come in handy, apparently.

  For my part, the crack craving was beginning to ease a bit, giving way to a slight Grey Goose buzz and a profound desire for oblivion in the form of sleep, not drugs. It was a new feeling. Novel, one might say.

  D
etective Miller was such a cliché it was like I was shaking hands with Columbo crossed with the actor Gabriel Byrne. Nicotine stains on the index and middle fingers of his right hand, tousled black hair that could really do with a wash. I liked him immediately. Didn’t trust him – he was a cop – but I liked him. Detective Amelia French, on the other hand, seemed like a real hot shot. Expensive suit, expensive highlights, expensive rock on her ring finger. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty or so – maybe a dozen years younger than Miller – but she wanted to let me know who ran the show. I took an instant dislike to her, and from the slight look of distaste she gave me when I got the old cold fish handshake, the feeling was mutual.

  But to be fair to her, I probably wasn’t in my best making-friends kind of mood. And I was pretty sure I did still have vomit in my hair.

  “Can either of you tell me who the fuck really killed my sister? And why you’ve got an innocent man in jail? And why Social Services took my nephews, when there were people here to take care of them?”

  Miller looked at me and smiled. “Get to the point, why don’t you?” he said. He flipped his keys around his index finger. Nervous tic. Definitely a smoker.

  “Want an ashtray?” I said to him.

  “Do you mind?” he asked, sitting down and making himself comfortable. He looked like he was in for the long haul. I was glad I had taken off my vomit-stained t-shirt. But the jeans were still pretty messy. And why did I care? Jesus. I must really need a hit if I was looking for some kind of distraction in a quick flirt with the homicide detective assigned to my sister’s murder.

  “This is my brother-in-law’s lawyer,” I said, motioning to the couch. “Chandler York.” Chandler waved half-heartedly with his glass.

  “We know,” she said, looking around the room as though she was a Secret Service Agent and I was the President. She flipped the drapes to one side.

  I looked around and grabbed a green glass objet d’art which probably cost more than my rent, put it in front of Miller, sat down next to him and took a cigarette out of his pack. “Sorry,” I said. “I just ran out.”