Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  “The Tucson PD asked if you could drive down to talk to them. Help explain what you saw on the screen when the call came in…go over the recorded conversation with them.” Clickety-click.

  Did they know about my second—illegal—call to the car? How would they? I hadn’t recorded it. Nancy’s voice didn’t give anything away.

  “When?”

  “Today. I know it’s your day off…”

  I thought I’d put Tucson behind me.

  “You’re supposed to contact a Detective Deke Treadwell,” she continued.

  Shit. Just hearing the name pulled me closer to the past than I wanted to be. He was my father’s old partner and they’d spent more time together than any two heterosexual guys ought to. After five eight-hour shifts a week, they fished Peña Blanca Lake together for stripers, smallies, and wahoo, and practiced their fire-extinguishing skills every weekend barbecuing ribs and beer-soaked chicken in the backyard. Treadwell knew every detail about what had happened. And probably where to lay the blame.

  “I have a root canal scheduled.”

  “Take Monday as a comp day,” she said, clicking for punctuation. “There’s one other thing.”

  As if Treadwell wasn’t bad enough.

  “Mrs. Markson wants to meet with you, too. She wants to hear the recording.”

  Click click click.

  Chapter Three

  I called Mad Cow to cancel our matinee plans, then stripped down to my workout clothes. I needed to push some muscles around before heading south. It was upper body today—a push-pull split working first on the chest muscles and then on the back. Biceps then triceps and an extra set of close grip lat raises. Coming off my summer schedule, there was lots of room for improvement.

  No need to take much with me: just a change of clothes in case I wound up staying overnight.

  I didn’t want my bosses to know I’d already taken home a copy of the Markson conversation and map markings, so I stopped at the HandsOn office on my way out of town to burn another couple of DVDs. The version I made for Mrs. Markson included the conversation with him, but I deleted the other voices and the fight beside the car. If it wound up being her husband’s voice, there was no reason for her to hear the grunts of pain as he was beaten. I wondered why she hadn’t asked the cops to hear their copy of the call. Maybe she thought this was all part of the HandsOn service she was paying for.

  I spiked my hair and put on khakis and a long-sleeved shirt to cover the tattoos. That was another change from the old Jessica Dancing Gammage. She never would have kept a record of her pain in red and black skin art.

  Traffic was mind-numbingly slow leaving Phoenix, as heavy on a Saturday afternoon as any workday rush hour. The radio announcer entered himself in the Dumb Question contest with a brayed “Hot enough for you?” I finished one of the water bottles before I even passed Sun Devil Stadium.

  I’d last been in Tucson in January, almost three years ago, on the night of my thirtieth birthday. All of my family still lived there, although I hadn’t seen any of them since that night. Well, none of them except the youngest of us, Bonita, and even she skirted the main topic like it was a mile wide patch of jimsonweed.

  I called Treadwell when I got to the Speedway exit, and he was waiting at the front door when I pulled into the visitor lot for the Tucson Police Department headquarters on Stone.

  I hadn’t seen him for close to three years, but he seemed to have aged ten in that time. His hair was now more gray than brown, there were basset hound bags under his eyes, and he was toting a good thirty pounds more than I remembered. He mopped his forehead and the back of his neck with an already damp white hankie.

  “I wasn’t sure it was you when I heard the name. You haven’t changed much. Except the hair. You’re what—thirty-three now?” He wiped his hand dry before offering a shake.

  “Almost.” It’s harder to lie when someone knows your history. Especially when the last time you saw him was at your murder trial.

  “Looking pretty buff,” he added, tapping my bicep with his forefinger.

  “I’m working at it.” I didn’t mention that the bodybuilding routine had started as an imitation of the male prisoners during my eight months in jail awaiting trial.

  A horny toad scooted across the sidewalk, his scales and spines rayed like a noonday sun. If dinosaurs came in teacup sizes, he would have taken Best of Breed.

  “How long have you been working up in Phoenix?” Treadwell asked with a vagueness and delicacy of phrasing I wouldn’t have expected of him.

  “A couple of years now.”

  “Your father always believed you, you know.”

  “I know.” And he still did. “I’d rather the HandsOn people not know about my life here in Tucson.”

  “Okay. They won’t hear it from me.”

  Treadwell ushered me into a small interview room that held two chairs, a metal desk, a two-line phone, and an old big box computer.

  I took one of the chairs, put my shoulders back, and handed him the DVD. “Do you want to use the one we emailed you or this one?”

  “This is easier.” He took the disc and slid it into the tray. “Take me through it.”

  I opened the data with Markson’s information and the map showing where his car had been when the air bag had gone off.

  “When the air bag is triggered, the car itself phones me, and I determine whether the client needs either medical or mechanical help. Then I find either the nine-one-one operator closest to that spot or a tow truck service nearby—whatever he needs—and connect the client directly to that number.” I used language and syntax straight from the training manual. I couldn’t afford to be Your Ex-partner’s Eldest Daughter or even The Girl Who Got Away with Murder; I was a HandsOn advisor helping the police.

  Treadwell jotted down the details from the screen. When he got to the wife’s name, I asked, “What did Mrs. Markson say?”

  “She wasn’t worried at first because he was supposed to be on his way to New Mexico. Then, when the officer came by to tell her about the car, she freaked.”

  “Any more news on him since then?”

  “Nothing.”

  I turned back to the recording. “That part, that’s a second voice, right? With an Hispanic accent?”

  “Yeah, maybe. But if he just got rear-ended, I’d expect to hear a second voice.”

  “What about this guy?” I turned up the volume at the point where one guy said “you lying sack” and the panting and thumping began. “That’s a third voice, right?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  Should I tell him about listening in on Markson’s car a second time? About the dragging, sawing, moaning noises that sounded like they came from a horror movie? These recorded sounds already made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The ones I hadn’t recorded were the stuff of nightmares.

  “I thought it sounded like two guys ganging up on Markson.” I didn’t have much more than a gut reaction to back up my claim.

  He shrugged. “I’ll have Forensics listen to it.”

  We went through the recording three more times, and with each playing I became more inured to the sound of fists, the breaking glass, the panting, the pummeling. Maybe violence, like a chanted word, loses its meaning with repetition.

  But the more I listened, the more convinced I was that Markson was either dead or dying right now.

  The room felt too close, the air thick with unspoken questions. When we were done, I hotfooted it to the elevator and outdoors. Treadwell followed me out.

  “Have you been to see your folks yet?”

  I shook my head. “We made a deal that I wouldn’t.” My mother had made sure of that.

  He turned away, but called back over his shoulder, “You know, I always believed you, too.”

  I watched him plod back into the cop shop, his shoulders hunched against the heat or maybe feeling the weight that that belief had cost him. Deke Treadwell and my dad: the only two people who still thought I was innocent.<
br />
  I had an hour to get across town to Emily Markson’s house in the Catalina foothills. Not enough time to find the sandwich and cold beer I would have liked to have. And definitely too late to find a way back into the life and family I’d thrown away.

  Emily Markson was probably just a couple of years older than me, but she had an air of elegance and sophistication that I could never have pulled off. A black satin robe covered her shoulders but was left open at the front to reveal a two-piece swimsuit underneath. Her hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and her lips were carnelian.

  “I’m so sorry to have wasted your time,” she said at the door. “I assumed the police would have told you.”

  “Your husband’s okay?”

  She didn’t take off her sunglasses as she led me through the house to the backyard.

  “I was frantic when the police first told me about the accident last night—worried sick until Darren called just a little while ago.”

  “Where is he?”

  She opened a sliding glass door and ushered me out toward an acre of decking and pool. A gilded version of Tucson sat in the basin below us, as if the mythical golden city of Cibola had come to life with the setting sun. From here, you couldn’t see any “going out of business” signs.

  “He decided to fly to New Mexico after all. He said he left his car at the airport.”

  Her voice held magnolias, pulled pork, and humid nights. This was not a woman raised in the desert.

  I wanted to believe her but couldn’t be sure. The glasses kept me from seeing any telltale jitter of perjury in her eyes, but the nervous plucking at the robe belied her words.

  “Does Detective Treadwell know?”

  “I haven’t talked to him directly, but I left a message. Darren only called a little while ago. He said he was between meetings.” She found another piece of lint on the black satin.

  “Did he have any idea who was in his car?”

  She shook her head. “It must have been stolen from the airport parking lot.”

  Who’d want to beat up a guy in a stolen car? The car’s owner, that’s for sure. Or maybe the cops. I wasn’t looking forward to suggesting that one to Treadwell.

  “Let me get you some tea,” she offered, pouring from the icy pitcher beside her.

  “Thanks.” Emily Markson said her husband was fine, but her fidgeting suggested otherwise. Maybe she knew who was driving the car and that was the cause of her concern. There’s a fine line of distinction between anxious and nervous and both of them can make you look like a liar if you’re not careful.

  I leaned back and admired the view. “Have you lived here long?” The house was stuccoed to look like adobe, with sweeping vistas of the saguaro-littered hillside and the golden-bright city below.

  “Only a couple of years. Darren is in real estate, and these houses were his most recent project.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “But he has even bigger plans. That’s why he set up those meetings in New Mexico.”

  “He’s building something there?”

  “No…I think his partners are there. I’m not sure.” She paused. “We don’t talk much about business.” She repositioned her sunglasses a little higher on her nose.

  That had been true enough in my house, too. My dad’s life as a cop was full of adventures, but they were stories that gave my mother the willies, paint-by-number pictures of a night he might never come home at all. They rarely talked about his job.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Almost ten years. Darren was teaching a business class at Tulane and I was a student there.”

  “What’s his new project?”

  “He found—”

  “Emily?” A man’s voice interrupted her answer.

  “Out here! We’re by the pool.”

  A late-thirties Adonis pulled open the sliding glass door and joined us in the backyard. His hair was blond on top but, unlike mine, it looked natural. Was this Darren Markson?

  “Ms. Dancing? This is my—”

  “I’ll take care of this, Emily.”

  Morse-code gazes passed between them. He double-blinked a message and then turned to me.

  “I’m Paul Willard. I live next door.” He gestured to the west. “It would be helpful to hear that voice from the car. You know, just to put her mind at ease.”

  They must be close, if he already knew that she’d talked to her husband. But Emily wouldn’t need to ease her mind at all if she knew Darren Markson was okay. Maybe the car hadn’t been stolen after all. Or maybe this guy with free rein of the house was the one who wanted to hear that voice.

  She halfway answered my unspoken question. “Paul’s our lawyer as well as our neighbor. I called him as soon as the police came by this morning and then again when I heard from Darren.”

  Nice to have a lawyer on call at two o’clock in the morning. “Do you want me to leave this with you?” I held out the DVD copy I’d made.

  She glanced at Willard. “Yes, but could you stay for a minute and go through it with us?” She took off her sunglasses, revealing eyes as cold as a winter night. Those eyes didn’t lie. She wasn’t worried; she was mad.

  “There’s not much more I can tell you than what you’ll hear for yourself anyway. It only lasted a few seconds, and I didn’t really hear anything…”

  She took the disc from me, holding it at arm’s length with just the tips of her fingers as if it had an offensive smell. I gave up and followed her into the house with the lawyer hot on my heels.

  “This is Darren’s office,” she said, wiping nonexistent dust from a hip-high cabinet.

  It was much too pristine to be the kind of office I could work in. Two light-colored couches sat at right angles to each other, and blond wood bookcases covered two walls. The books were arranged by color. There was a sliver-thin, built-in desk with a laptop computer on it, but no sign of a folder, a loose piece of paper, or a chewed-on pencil. House as stagecraft.

  “Is this your husband?” The picture had been taken in some tropical clime with palm trees, ebony-dark rocks, and a blazing blue sky. It showed Emily Markson wrapped in the arms of a man the physical opposite of the blond lawyer at her side now. He looked to be about fifty, with dark, pomaded hair and a pencil-thin mustache. His lips were barely separated, showing little corn kernels of teeth.

  “Yes, on our trip to Hawaii last year.”

  She waved me to the desk chair and I sat down. The computer already had several windows open on the screen.

  “Here, let me get rid of those.” She leaned past my shoulder to click the documents closed. I didn’t get much of a look at any of them, but one phrase in an e-mail caught my eye: “At the riverbed.” It was signed “A” with a little dash after the letter. Maybe she’d been emailing friends about her car being stolen and this was one of the replies.

  Once the screen was clear she handed me back the disc, returned to the couch, and hugged an olive green throw pillow to her chest.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  She nodded. I slipped in the disc and double-clicked on the DVD icon.

  “…is Jessie. Is there an emergency in the vehicle?” My recorded voice was as thin and scratchy as that of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  “…want me to call an ambulance?” I kept my eyes on the screen.

  “…okay. I’ll check with the other guy.”

  The recording ended just a few seconds later. I’d cut it off before the hammering of fists and the strangled breathing started. I waited a few beats, then turned to face her.

  “Would you like me to play it again?”

  “No. Thank you. I…I don’t know that voice.” She tilted her face up. “Do you, Paul?”

  He shook his head.

  I ejected the disc and placed it on the desk. “I’ll be on my way, then.”

  She nodded and ushered me to the front of the house. As she reached for the doorknob, the sleeve of her robe pulled back, baring her arm almost to the elbow.
That’s when I saw the bruises.

  There are supposed to be twenty-seven ways to tell if someone is lying. Whether the eyes go left or right, up or down. Body language. Speech patterns. A physical response. But a good liar knows a hundred different ways to convince you that he’s telling the truth.

  Emily Markson was not a good liar.

  Chapter Four

  I left word for Detective Treadwell, although he’d probably already picked up the phone message that Darren Markson had made it safely to New Mexico.

  If that wasn’t Markson’s voice I’d heard on the call, whose was it? Had the car been stolen or had Markson allowed someone to borrow it? If so, it was probably someone Emily Markson knew. She said she didn’t recognize the voice, but why the anger in her eyes?

  And what about those bruises? Some were new, but others were already magenta and green. They ringed her wrist and continued up the inside of her arm. If Treadwell didn’t already know about them, I was going to make sure he found out.

  The sun was setting amid a braggart’s display of orange and purple clouds over the Tucson Mountains, and the city seemed to take a breath as the air cooled to what passed for Arizona fall temperatures. I called my sister, Bonita, and explained that I was in town.

  “Hey, I just booted the rest of the family out so I could pack. We have the house to ourselves.”

  “You leave soon?”

  “Tomorrow. But no more questions till you get here.”

  Bonita had decided almost a year ago to join the Peace Corps, but I hadn’t realized her departure date had grown so near. I stopped to pick up a bottle of champagne on the way over.

  She had moved away from our parents’ house when she started college and now rented a tiny, one-bedroom house on a quiet side street in the Fort Lowell neighborhood, an area more likely to have dismantled cars in the front yard than landscaping.

  She met me on the front porch.

  “You can hear that truck a mile away.”

  She was right. The exhaust sounded like a drum solo. But I knew she’d been watching from the porch since I’d called.