How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

  Mirabelle made a Hmm noise looking over at the Solarium entrance, and following her eyes, Susanne saw Jason wheeling in the medication cart. “What the hell,” Susanne exclaimed, rising, and Emilia barked at her to sit back down.

  Jason had seen them and tried to escape the room, but Gil caught up and cornered him in the hall, Susanne close behind. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Gil said. “You get arrested for selling drugs in a nursing home—stealing them, then selling them—and you end up back in the same job? How did you manage that?” Susanne marveled at the fact that though she knew her husband must feel enraged, he sounded merely curious.

  Jason mumbled that they’d have to talk to his supervisor, and slipped back through the locked door of the nurses’ station. Without returning to check on his mother, Gil stomped up the stairs to the first floor, and again Susanne followed. The supervisor, a heavy-breasted woman named Celeste Knox who always carried a clipboard in front of her chest, met them in the doorway of her office; Susanne realized that someone must have alerted her from the Solarium downstairs. Ushering them in, she offered them seats, but Gil said it wouldn’t take that long. “What is Jason Lee still doing here? Or doing here again?” He took a step closer to Celeste, who clutched the clipboard tighter and told them she was not at liberty to discuss matters pertaining to human resources.

  “How about matters pertaining to crimes committed in your facility?” Gil kept the same even, unflustered voice, which seemed to throw Celeste off all the more. “How do you expect me to keep my mother in a place where drug deals are going down?”

  Susanne winced without showing it. Surely nobody actually referred to drug deals “going down” anymore.

  But of course it was Gil’s implied threat to pull his mother out of Belle Meadow that Celeste paid more attention to. Under her breath she said, “The charges against him didn’t stick. The police could prove the narcotics log was falsified, but not who did it. We felt it was only fair to bring him back. He was going to sue for wrongful termination, otherwise.”

  “‘Didn’t stick’?” Susanne had vowed to let Gil handle it because he obviously felt he needed to, but she couldn’t help reacting. The charges against Joy hadn’t stuck, either, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t done what she was accused of. “But he’s the one who got our daughter involved in this whole thing. She ends up dead, and he ends up back in his job scot-free?”

  Celeste Knox lowered the clipboard between them, as if she understood that a gesture of sympathy—woman to woman, and perhaps mother to mother—was in order. But her expression was one of puzzlement. “They have someone in jail for that. Who has nothing to do with this facility or, if I understand it correctly”—now did she narrow her eyes at Susanne; was she thinking there might be more to see than she’d at first discerned?—“with the sale of illegal drugs.” Then she excused herself, getting almost all the way through Have a great day before catching herself and finishing with I’m sorry.

  On their way back down to the Solarium, Gil asked, “You know Joy didn’t die because of drugs, right?” She could tell what he wanted to add: She died because of your friend there. The one in jail. The one they arrested.

  Why didn’t he say it? Not because he was willing to entertain an alternative, Susanne knew. It was because they had the funeral to get through. After that, what would happen to their marriage was anyone’s guess, and at the moment she couldn’t have cared less. Or at least that’s what she told herself as they returned to her mother-in-law, who flashed ten fingers of different colors before asking them why her sister never came to see her anymore.

  Viable

  Alison’s next checkup was scheduled for the day before the funeral. She told Tom she wanted to put it off to the following week—too much sadness, too much stress—but he persuaded her to keep the original time. “We need something good right now,” he told her. She’d made it beyond four months, the longest she’d ever lasted, though because she’d taken to wearing baggy dresses and sweaters (afraid to jinx things if anyone guessed too soon), you couldn’t tell by looking.

  The night before the appointment, they went over to Doug and Helen’s for dinner. The news was on the TV in a corner of the kitchen, and Tom saw the crawl POLICE SEEK LEADS IN LATEST ATM GRAB. A still photograph from the surveillance video showed a figure in a bulky jacket, probably a man, holding up a flip-flop-wearing woman in a bank kiosk at night. Images from the robberies had been too indistinct for police to make out anything useful except what looked like a Rochester Red Wings cap, which had led to newscasters dubbing him the Triple A Bandit. “You’ll get him,” Tom said to Doug, though the Chilton cops had failed to get anywhere in identifying the thief. “That hat should help, right?”

  “Yeah. Douchebag’s so stupid he not only uses the same disguise every time, he can’t even cheer for a major league team.” Doug pulled the tab on a Genny. “He’s either dumb as a stump or he wants to get caught. My vote is stump.”

  “What a douche.” Tom was relieved to realize that Doug was inviting him to join in his derision of someone else, for a change. Since Martin Willett’s arrest, he hadn’t detected any lingering hostility on Doug’s part about the information Tom had initially withheld from him. Doug appeared satisfied now that the case was going the way he wanted, and this seemed to be all that counted: he would get a conviction in the teenager’s murder, and Mark Feinbloom would have no choice but to cast his swing vote on the Town Board to appoint Doug permanent chief.

  The relief felt good. Later, Tom would wonder why he couldn’t have left it at that. But he knew the answer was a simple one: if Martin Willett hadn’t killed that girl, it wasn’t fair that he be punished for it. A further question: What reasonable person would think he should? Though of course no one had assigned Tom the job of serving as the agent of justice, he didn’t see anyone else stepping up to the role.

  At dinner, Helen did her best to direct the conversation to something other than the case, trying to engage them in a debate about baby names. But Doug wasn’t ready to give up fuming about the fact that Martin Willett had been released. “Do you believe they let that guy walk?”

  “They didn’t ‘let him walk,’” Tom said, when the women remained quiet because they knew Doug wasn’t asking the question to hear a response. “He made bail.”

  “And how the hell did he do that, anyway?” Doug waved his fork so forcefully that a strand of spaghetti fell off. “How did somebody like that raise that kind of cash?”

  Helen wanted to bend down to retrieve the piece of pasta, Tom saw, but instead she held herself rigid in her seat. Nobody asked Doug what he meant by somebody like that. Doug set the fork on his plate with a clatter and announced he was too pissed to eat. “We got one black judge up here, and that’s who this asshole pulls?”

  “Don’t be racist, Dad.” Alison spoke in the same tone she always used to tease her father, but of course Doug didn’t take it that way.

  “It’s not racist, it’s reality,” he said. “If he went in front of either of the other two, bang, he’d be locked up so fast he didn’t know what hit him. We’re talking a murder charge here, not shoplifting. Not goddam crossing against the light.” The veins in his neck throbbed as he listened to his own words. “When he did this thing. That’s what gets me—he killed that girl, and already the system is giving him a break.”

  Tom said carefully, “I thought it was all circumstantial.”

  Doug looked as if he couldn’t be more pleased that Tom had brought this up.

  “Let me tell you about circumstantial. People have this idea that circumstantial isn’t real evidence. But it is. You got the right circumstances, you got a guilty guy, you got a conviction. What do we know about this prick?” He held up his hand to tick the points off on his raised fingers. Alison and Helen had already put their utensils down and sat back to listen, so Tom did the same even though he wasn’t finished eating. “One, he stalked the mother. Two, he knew the girl. Three, he had a sketch of her, and f
our, not only did you see him at the shack”—he jabbed a finger in Tom’s direction—“there was a mask at his house identical to the one we got a witness saying she saw this guy wearing a few minutes before the girl disappeared.” He opened his hands then in a gesture that asked them, What more could you want?

  Tom imagined what Doug’s reaction would be if he told him what he had so far kept to himself: that Martin Willett had not only been in the shack, he’d been in there looking for a teenage girl.

  “I thought it was two witnesses who saw him with the mask,” Alison said.

  “Well, it was. Originally. But one of them disappeared—that Pothead Pete guy.” Doug stabbed at his meat, and Tom thought his father-in-law probably blamed him for the fact that Cliff Ott had just not shown up for his shift at the shack one day, quitting without notice. When Doug went to check out the address Cliff had put on the job application, he found it was a fake. “But we have this teenager who IDs Willett and puts him in the mask,” Doug added, rebounding as he chewed noisily, with satisfaction. “One hundred percent.”

  Of course there was no way Tom could mention that he’d spoken to Harper Grove himself, only the day before, at the clandestine request of the dead girl’s mother. And that he came away distrusting what Harper had said. But although he could feel Alison’s gaze piercing him with a warning, he felt compelled (by what, though? Stubbornness? Belief in the black guy’s innocence? A desire to stick a pin in the balloon of his father-in-law’s pompous certainty?) to press the question. “That does sound tight. But still, none of that actually proves anything. The police have no actual proof.” At the last moment, he decided to say “the police” instead of “you,” hoping to take some of the sting out of his challenge.

  “What are you trying to say?” Barely perceptibly, Doug leaned an inch closer toward Tom’s face.

  Tom leaned an inch back and next to him Alison put a hand on her baby stomach, a reflexive gesture that had become familiar to him in the past couple of weeks. He welcomed it; it meant the baby was real enough to her that she felt it needed protection.

  “I’m not sure Willett did it,” he said, declining to look his father-in-law in the eye.

  “No?” The heat of Doug’s hatred rose and gathered like the stink over garbage; Tom could feel and smell it. “Then let me ask you something. If he didn’t do it, who did?”

  “I don’t know.” It took a moment for the absurdity of the question to sink in. “How would I know?”

  Doug gave an elaborate shrug. “It’s just that you seem to have such a handle on the whole thing. When nobody else does.” The sarcasm in his tone was obvious to them all. “Maybe we should bring you in as a special consultant, you think? Since the police can’t seem to make any headway.”

  Tom knew better than to respond. He kept his eyes down, knowing he would not want to see the looks exchanged among the other three at the table. He could only imagine what they’d think if they knew where he was headed in the morning—before Alison’s OB/GYN appointment—instead of covering Cliff Ott’s abandoned shift at the shack.

  Willett’s attorney set up the meeting. When Tom put the call in to Ramona Frye and told her he had information he was sure she’d want to hear, she sounded suspicious, but when he mentioned that he was the police chief’s son-in-law, she was intrigued enough by the fact that Tom had contacted her instead of Doug or the prosecutor that she told him to meet her and Martin first thing the next day.

  Willett remembered him right away, Tom could tell, from their brief exchange at the shack the day Joy disappeared. Ramona said she wanted to record the meeting, and asked if Tom minded. He was taken aback but realized he should have expected it. If his voice was on tape, that was it—there would be no chance of telling Doug, later, that there’d been some mistake or misunderstanding. He took a deep breath, hoping it would contain the courage he needed, then went ahead and said he thought there was something wrong with the police case.

  “You’re damn right there is,” Willett said, but his voice sounded more weary than rancorous. Ramona held her hand up to indicate that he should let her do the talking, at least at first.

  “Tell us why we should listen to you,” she said to Tom. “Tell us why you’re here.”

  He hesitated, not sure where to start. Then he remembered how sick he was of people not saying what the truth was, or hiding part of the truth. He began by describing Susanne Enright’s call asking for his help in locating Joy, and (he looked away from Willett) his discovery of the affair between Susanne and her teaching assistant. When Joy was found murdered, he’d given that information to his father-in-law, including the name of the man Susanne’s colleague said she was sleeping with. At the time, he’d thought it was the right thing to do, but seeing Doug’s eyes light up at the tip had put Tom on edge.

  “On edge? Why?” Ramona was taking notes as well as recording the conversation. Willett leaned forward in his seat.

  Tom could not go so far as to reveal how much Doug Armstrong wanted to be named permanent chief and how certain he was that Doug believed securing a conviction in this case would clinch it for him. Even more, he could not say that his father-in-law was a racist who barely hid the fact and at times even seemed proud of it.

  Instead he said, “Because having an affair doesn’t mean you’re a murderer. And I know he—you”—he nodded at Willett—“were there that day, I saw you, but the mask thing just doesn’t make sense.”

  “It wasn’t my mask!” Willett seemed surprised by the vehemence of his own words. “Somebody planted that in my kitchen. Those officers brought it in with them, the chief stuck it in the drawer when he went in there alone, and then he ‘discovered’ it.”

  It was hard to imagine Doug would have gone that far. But Tom would not have bet the house on it. “You can’t be sure of that though, right?” he asked. “I mean, you probably didn’t look in that drawer before the police came. Someone could have broken in at some other point and put it there. Including whoever killed Joy.”

  It appeared that Willett had not thought of this. “Possible, I suppose. But I doubt it.”

  “What about the witnesses? Who said they saw you putting the mask on in your car outside the shack?”

  Ramona answered him. “One, the guy who worked for you, wasn’t exactly what you’d call solid—he was basically homeless and, you must have known this, completely baked.” Despite the circumstances, Tom suppressed a smile at the prim-looking lawyer’s description of his former employee. “And now, of course, we can’t find him. But the teenager is standing her ground.”

  “You’ve talked to her?”

  Ramona shook her head. “I tried, but the DA must have gotten to her first.”

  “Well, she talked to me,” Tom said. Hearing this, Ramona peered at him more intently, and he detected a flash of excitement in her eyes. “There’s something wrong there, too. I don’t believe her.”

  Willett slapped the table lightly in front of him as if to say There you go! Ramona put up her hand again, a cautionary gesture. “Why not?”

  “She messed up her story. She didn’t look me in the eye. When you put that on top of the other witness pulling out . . .” He knew he didn’t have to complete the sentence for them.

  “But she didn’t admit she was lying, right?”

  “Of course not. And I didn’t accuse her of anything, either. I’m not sure she thinks I suspect.”

  Ramona squinted at the page in front of her, which was filled with scribbling. “Would you be willing to testify, if I could get the grand jury to request it?”

  Again Tom hesitated. “I wasn’t planning to go that far. I just wanted to give you the information.”

  “But there’s nothing I can do with it if she won’t talk to me. I don’t want to take that chance.”

  He could feel Willett’s plea across the table and realized he had no choice. “Promise me you’ll try everything else first,” he said. “But if that doesn’t work, then okay, you can put me on your list.”<
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  Willett let out a breath it seemed he’d been holding the whole time they’d been in the room, and Ramona clicked off the recorder. When they all stood up, Willett covered Tom’s hand in both of his own and thanked him, and through the trepidation Tom felt in recognizing that there was no turning back, he knew that if he had the decision to make again, he wouldn’t do anything else.

  After leaving them, he had half an hour to get to the doctor’s office. Though he arrived early, Alison was waiting for him. “I thought you might have gotten the new guy to open up for you,” she said. If he hadn’t felt guilty, he might have said There is no new guy anymore, remember? As it was, he mumbled an apology, but it turned out that there was no hurry, because the doctor was delayed.

  In the obstetrician’s waiting room, they watched the muted news on TV. Hardly anything was being reported aside from Joy Enright’s murder and the arrest of Martin Willett. “I think Dad’s right,” Alison said, nodding at the footage of Willett returning home after posting bail. “My money’s on him.”

  The facts reported by the media did seem to point to Willett’s guilt. And yet. The lack of a motive niggled at Tom; just because you were pissed at someone for breaking up with you, it didn’t mean you went out and strangled her kid. Then there was Harper Grove’s less-than-convincing ID. On top of everything else were the entries from the journal Tom had read in the evidence room after they arrested Willett. The guy was smart, and he had plans to go somewhere with his life. There was nothing in those pages (which Willett had every reason to believe would never be seen) to indicate rage or anything else that would make a reasonable person think he’d risk losing everything he possessed over a relationship that had lasted only a few months. In fact, he’d been friends with Joy Enright, if you could trust what he’d written in his fancy book. He just didn’t strike Tom as a killer, especially after meeting with Willett and his lawyer.