Body Language

by James W. Hall

  “As you know, Alex, they keep the ballistics reports on open murder cases. It’s all still there in the records. I think your friends at Miami PD would be real interested to learn what their father-daughter team was up to back then. Get out their microscopes and look at the slug that killed Darnel Flint and match it to the pistol your old man used for thirty years on the force. Yes, sir, I think they’d be quite interested in that.”

  “I told him,” Lawton said. “I didn’t mean to. It just came out.”

  She draped her arm around her father’s shoulder, drew him to her.

  “So you go to prison, Alex, and the old man goes to the nuthouse, where he belongs. Maybe I can bargain my way down to a year or two. Worth a try, don’t you think?”

  “It’ll never work.”

  “Oh, it’ll work. Sure it will. A woman with the Miami PD accused as a child killer. Oh, that’ll be a pretty headline. That’ll knock the Bloody Rapist out of top billing. You bet your ass. No statute of limitations on murder, sweetheart. The papers will eat it up. State’s attorney gets the Brinks money back, and in the bargain he solves an eighteen-year-old homicide. Probably be able to run for governor.”

  “You fucking bastard.”

  He resettled himself against his pillow, smile widening, glancing around the room as if he were basking in the cheers of a dozen of his closest buddies.

  “You getting raped by this Flint kid, that explains a lot,” he said, eyes coming back to hers. “Your bedroom behavior, for one thing. Right from the first, me doing all the work while you lay there like you were suffering through it, eyes closed. Like you were afraid of sex or hated it.

  “I think you had maybe two orgasms in all the years we’ve been together, Alex. And you were probably faking those. Two. That’s supposed to keep your man interested? But now I see what made you such a cold fish. This Darnel Flint thing. Christ, you should’ve told me up front what happened to you, that you were damaged goods. Full disclosure and all that, you know.”

  He looked at Lawton and snorted in disgust.

  “Only reason I did this Brinks thing at all was because of you, what a cold, dead fucking fish you are. It never would’ve happened if we’d had a halfway decent sex life, Alex. And then, like things weren’t bad enough already, you gotta bring that old bastard home. He’s babbling at the door while I’m lying there trying to get my dick hard. Christ, that’s all we needed, him in the next room, pawing on the wall, whimpering. It’s your fucking fault, Alex, the shit we’re in here. All of it. Every little bit.”

  Standing near the doorway, she felt the air move in and out of her. She looked at the gray light pouring in the window, heard the bells and voices of the hospital as another shift of healthy folks stepped forward to take charge of the endless onslaught of injured and diseased.

  “It’s simple, Alex. You do what I tell you, or you go to jail. They slam the old man away with the criminally insane. You want that, then go ahead, pick up the phone, turn me in.”

  Alexandra glanced at her father, then shifted her eyes back to Stan. He was lying back easily against his pillows, like a gambler relishing a well-played hand.

  She stepped forward and ran her fingers along the cold white foot-rail of his bed. Lawton hummed and shuffled on the linoleum beside her, doing the box-step, a tight square without his partner.

  “I’m already in jail,” she said. “I’ve been in jail as long as I can remember. You can’t do anything to me, Stan, that I haven’t already done to myself.”

  He sat forward an inch or two. His smile lost half of its glow, forehead tensing.

  “So go on, do it, make the call, Alex. Watch them cart that old man’s withered ass off where you’ll never see him again.”

  She felt the heat gather in her face, bands of steel tightening around her chest. She kept her eyes on his, drew a breath.

  “You’re good, Stan. You’ve found a very cute way to turn this all around, make yourself the victim. You rob your employer and kill your partner and this is all my fault and Dad’s. You’re simply doing what we made you do. That’s great. Real slick. It must be wonderful to have such a handy scapegoat for anything you want to do.

  “Well, let me tell you something, Stan. When the state’s attorney finds out what you’ve done, they’re not going to plea-bargain. You can forget that. I’m no lawyer, but I watch those people work every day. If you’re determined to take me down with you, then fine, go for it. I’m sure they’ll be happy to oblige. But don’t kid yourself. You’re going to spend the rest of your goddamn life on the other side. Get used to the idea.”

  She held his eyes for a moment more, then turned to Lawton and took him by the elbow.

  “Come on, Dad. Let’s get the hell out of here. We have things to do.”

  Lawton jerked free of her grasp.

  “MVP, my ass,” Lawton said, facing off with Stan. “I never bought that story for a second. We’re sending you right back to Raiford, young man, where you belong. And this time, there’s no returning to civilized society for you. No, sir.”

  FOURTEEN

  In the hospital lobby, Alex called Gabriella, got her new address, a neighborhood just west of the airport. She took the Dolphin Expressway, keeping to the far-right lane. Holding to the speed limit, she was at Gabriella’s new neighborhood in fifteen minutes. Once or twice, she thought she spotted the blue pool truck lurking several cars back in the traffic, but she decided it was only an attack of anxiety.

  “Where are we?” her father asked as she pulled into her friend’s narrow concrete driveway. “I don’t recognize this.”

  “We need to talk to Gabbie Hernandez. You remember her. We were cheerleaders together back in high school; she ran for mayor last month.”

  “The one they caught smooching with the dictator.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why you want to see her?”

  “She knows people, Dad, lawyers, politicians. She’s very well connected. I think she can help us pick the right attorney.”

  “We should make a run for it, Alex. Take the money and go.”

  “No, Dad. I’ve got to face it once and for all. We’re not going to let Stan hold us hostage. But first, we have to find someplace to put you out of harm’s way. Just until it’s over, till it’s settled between Stan and me. I’m not going to risk having them ship you off somewhere.”

  “Hell, a lunatic asylum? No problem. Play checkers all day with a bunch of droolers, how bad is that?”

  It was two in the afternoon; a stupefying blaze of sunlight filled the street. No cars in the driveways of that working-class neighborhood. Most of the tiny houses had barred windows and elaborate religious statuary planted safely behind high chain-link fences. Rottweilers, Dobies, and German shepherds patrolled the treeless front yards or lay in the shade of Mary, Joseph, or Christ himself.

  Gabriella met them at the door and ushered them quickly inside. She gave a glance up and down the street, then bolted the door, wedged a steel brace into a fitting in the floor, and locked it tight against the back of the door.

  Alexandra set Stan’s duffel on the dining room table, unzipped it, and drew it open for Gabriella to see.

  “Good God, Alex.”

  Gabriella wore baggy jeans and a man’s white dress shirt, the tails knotted at her waist. She was a fragile woman, flat-chested, with the narrow hips of a twelve-year-old. Without makeup, her face showed each dreary sleepless hour, every torment from the last month of her public humiliations. There were long-suffering pouches beneath her eyes, puffy and dark, and a tight puckering in the corners of her mouth, as if she were constantly on the verge of whistling for her attack dog. Her coarse black hair was pulled back severely into a bun. And when Gabbie held up two banded wedges of hundred-dollar bills, Alex could see she’d been gnawing her nails to the quick.

  Gabriella waited till a passing jet had rumbled away.

  “We have to call the police.”

  “No,” Alexandra said. “What I need is a
lawyer.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “That’s why I came over here, Gabbie. All I know is the courthouse crowd, public defenders, but I need somebody good.”

  “A defense attorney? What? For Stan?”

  “No, for me. And for Dad.”

  “Alex, what’re you saying?”

  “There’s more to it now. More than just the money. Let me catch my breath, and then I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  “This may call for a glass of wine.”

  “His name was Darnel Flint,” her father said. “That’s where this all began.”

  Gabbie looked across at Lawton, who had sunk into the flowered couch beside the front window. He was thumbing through a copy of an old National Geographic, a song burbling on his lips.

  The house vibrated as another jet lifted off above them, china rattling in the hutch, the overhead fan going temporarily out of balance.

  “The Realtor said I’d get used to it,” Gabriella shouted through the whistling scream. She looked up at the ceiling as if expecting the plaster to give way. “I guess I’m going to need more time.”

  When it was quiet again, Gabriella asked her if she wanted red wine or white, and Lawton called out that he’d like both. Alex followed her into the kitchen and Gabbie turned, gave Alex a comforting smile, and opened her arms. Alex stepped forward into the embrace.

  “Tell me, Alex. What is it? What’s happened?”

  Alex drew out of the hug and they sat at the dinette table, Gabriella holding Alex’s hand in both of hers. Alex told her the story. Darnel Flint. The long-ago rape, the cover-up. Stan’s threat to expose it all. When she was finished, Gabbie sat back in her chair and patted her shirt pocket as if searching for the cigarettes she hadn’t smoked in years. She stared up at the ceiling, blew out a breath.

  “Wow.”

  “Pretty grim, hush?”

  “Grim, yeah. But at least I understand now.”

  “Understand what?”

  “How you could have made such a mistake marrying Stan. It’s because you were traumatized as a child. You were severely wounded and you never healed, and it distorted your judgment about men.”

  “I’ll say it did.”

  “All these years, I never said anything. Friends can’t come right out and say things like that. What good would it have done anyway? As much as we care about each other, I don’t think our friendship would have survived that. But it was clear from the beginning, Alex, that man was missing a crucial part. He’s got the emotional development of a fifteen-year-old.”

  “You’re being generous.”

  “Twelve, then.”

  They laughed. But it died out quickly.

  Gabriella rose from the table and went to the refrigerator.

  “You have to get your father somewhere safe.”

  “I know. That’s priority number one.”

  “I’d take him in, of course. But this would be the first place Stan would look. He’d find me. You know he would.”

  “I know, Gabbie. Not here. I’ve got to get Dad out of town, a long way off, make sure he’s safe; then I’m turning right around and coming back with both barrels blazing. I’m going to take care of this thing with Stan. And Darnel Flint and all of it. It’s time to face this whole damn mess. Long overdue.”

  “You have an idea where you’ll go?”

  “I think so.”

  “I suppose you shouldn’t tell me. If I’m questioned later, I don’t want to have to lie. You can call when you get there, let me know you’re safe.”

  “Is this ever going to end, Gabbie? It just keeps going on and on and on.”

  Gabriella swallowed and squeezed out a smile that she meant to be encouraging.

  “I ask the same question a lot.”

  “It doesn’t end, does it? Once something this bad happens, it never stops; it changes everything. You can’t go back, rewind the tape, start over, all innocent and fresh.”

  “No, but you can survive a lot more than you think, Alex. I’ve learned that much. You can find happiness, a few seconds here, a few seconds there. But it’s still happiness. It’s like when you’re grieving over someone’s death. You never think you’ll get over it, but you do. You still hurt, but you learn to breathe again, breath by breath. You have to.”

  “When Dad first got sick,” Alex said, “I read some of the same books he was reading. About memory and his illness, you know. There was one story about a man who’d had an operation to cure his epilepsy, a patient named Mr. M. It became a landmark medical case, because his doctor, some kind of hotshot who was experimenting with radical lobotomies on mental patients, tried a totally unheard-of procedure on this Mr. M. He wanted to see what happened when he removed a large portion of the brain. So he drilled a hole in Mr. M.’s skull, with a hardware store hand drill, then stuck a silver straw into Mr. M.’s brain and vacuumed out a fist-sized piece of it. His hippocampus.”

  “Jesus.”

  “When Mr. M. woke up, he had no memory. None at all. He knew how to speak, but that was all. He was wiped clean. From that moment on, he couldn’t remember anything. You could speak to him one minute and walk away, then turn right around and come back, and he wouldn’t know you’d ever been there before. He was blank. Totally, completely empty. He could hold nothing. Somehow, he still had a sense of humor, still enjoyed going places, seeing people. But he remembered nothing later. Absolutely nothing.”

  “And you wanted to be like him.”

  “That’s right. It sounded blissful. It sounded perfect.”

  “Well, I’ve got a drill around here somewhere.”

  Alex smiled.

  “You’d do it, wouldn’t you? If I asked you, you’d suck my brain right out.”

  “I don’t much like blood, but if that’s what you wanted, Alex.”

  As the throb of another jet began to build, Lawton sang out from the living room, “You got a swimming pool at this house?”

  “No, Lawton,” Gabriella called back. “No pool. Sorry.”

  “Well, these guys must be confused, then.”

  Alex pushed away from the table and hustled into the living room. Lawton was sitting forward on the couch, peering out the picture window at something out of Alex’s line of sight.

  “It’s that big guy again and his weird little girlfriend. Looks like they mean business this time. Armed to the teeth. You gals better stay down. Flat on the floor.”

  “Dad!”

  Inches from Alexandra’s shoulder, the door molding exploded and a plug of wood thumped her in the neck. Lawton was still leaning forward on the couch, staring out through the bright maze of shattered glass.

  “Those are some heavy damn weapons they’re playing with,” he said as the jet’s thunder died. “Using the noise of the planes to cover their salvos.”

  “Dad, get down! Get away from the window.”

  Alex pressed her back to the wall and began to inch around the perimeter of the room.

  “Telephone’s not connected,” Gabriella screamed from the kitchen. “Cell phone’s on the coffee table. I’ll get it, Alex. You stay there.”

  “Forget the phone,” she said. “We need guns, Gabbie.”

  “There aren’t any guns. I hate guns.”

  As the next jet passed above them, more glass erupted from the window. On the dining room table, a blue vase shattered; the roses it had been holding sprayed across the room. Gabriella dropped to her hands and knees and wriggled ahead close to the floor.

  Lawton brushed chips of glass from his lap and leaned back against the couch with a leisurely sigh.

  “Some neighborhood you got here. Is it always this noisy?”

  Gabriella reached out for the cell phone. The jet’s clamor was rising.

  Lawton dug his fingers in his ears.

  A foot from the couch, Alexandra pressed her back hard to the wall. She saw nothing out the window except the silent houses across the street, no signs of the shooters. But as the jet’s racket reached its heigh
t, the last shards of glass blasted from the window frame, and bullets sprayed the far wall, tearing into the hutch, the china ballerinas Gabriella collected, ivory girls raised up on pointy toes, pirouettes of glass, gravity-defying leaps. The bullets continued to pump into the back wall several seconds after the jet’s noise ended, as if the shooters were becoming bolder. Figuring they had softened up their target, gotten no return fire, and now were about to make the final assault.

  Gabriella had the phone at her ear. She was hunched forward on the floor. Frozen there with three red ruptures in the back of her white shirt, bloody blossoms opening. Alex stared at the wounds, framing them, holding, snapping her pictures, the same practiced detachment she employed every night.

  Lawton stood up and turned his back to the window.

  “I thought I heard something about wine,” he said.

  Another plane rose above the roof and slugs peppered the far wall, dinged the aluminum window frame, blasted the white batting from an easy chair. With the crazy grace of an idiot child, her father stood unharmed through the first of the barrage. Alexandra leapt across the coffee table, shoved him backward until he was flat against the far wall, and held him there as more slugs chewed through the plaster and cheap drywall behind them.

  “Hey! Easy now! What the hell!”

  Through the next volley, she kept him jammed against the wall. Gabriella was slumped forward on the Oriental rug. The phone had spilled from her hand, and her head was twisted to the left, dark eyes sightless and remote.

  When the rumble of the jet passed, Alexandra seized her father’s hand and hauled him toward the kitchen. On their way, the old man snagged the duffel and lugged it along. At the back door, Alex came to a sudden halt and cursed. There were half a dozen locks and dead bolts up and down the door. She spun around, searched the room for another exit. But there was none. Out in the front yard, a man shouted and Alex heard the metallic ratchet of heavy weapons being loaded.

  In a fury, she fumbled with the locks, working her way from top to bottom. Someone began to batter the front door as she slid back the last of the bolts, kicked the steel brace aside, threw the door open, and blundered out into the narrow, shrubless back yard.