Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  He was nodding, getting the picture. “No security cameras,” he said.

  “They were pretty scarce as recently as twenty years ago. Liquor stores and other retailers in high-crime areas had them, but they didn’t work all that well, and people would forget to maintain them. Porter Dawes had one, just a single camera aimed at the checkout counter, and one of my duties was rewinding the tape at closing time and setting it up for the next day. Now we’ve got four cameras inside the store and one outside, and they’re digital and they pretty much maintain themselves. And that’s in a store that’s never been held up even once.”

  We talked about the cameras, and what deterrent value they might have for potential shoplifters. As far as robbery went, we were an unlikely target in the first place, and became less of one each year, as our proportion of credit card sales increased.

  We’d wandered off the subject, but that was all right. A father and son, enjoying the back-and-forth of a conversation. When it had run its course, or at least as much of its course as it needed to run, I said, “You didn’t expect all this when you started to tell me about my brother Hank.”

  “I don’t know what I expected, Dad.”

  “But not this conversation.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Neither did I. I wanted that whole part of my life to stay in Bakersfield.”

  “That’s where it happened?”

  “And that’s where I’d come to believe I’d left it. Like that cowboy, riding into town and starting over. I’ve been living that new life for all these years, to the point where I barely remember the old life, and the man I used to be.”

  “Buddy,” he said.

  “Buddy’s gone,” I said, “and it’s not hard to let myself believe he never really existed in the first place. I didn’t think anyone would find a way to follow his trail all the way east to Ohio. And I didn’t think anyone here would ever have to know anything about what happened back there.”

  He thought about that, took it in, nodded.

  “When forensic analysis improved, when the whole business of cold case investigation started making headlines and showing up on TV, what bothered me most wasn’t the prospect of a trial and a prison sentence. It was that you and your mother would know who I was and what I’d done.”

  “Mom doesn’t know any of this.”

  “No. But you’d both find out in a hurry if they came knocking on the door. And your sister, too, and I can’t even wrap my mind around that.”

  “No.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, picked my words carefully. I said, “It was hard to have this conversation. But it kept getting harder not to have it.”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “One thing that bothered me, and I don’t even know how conscious I was of it, but in order to keep this particular secret, I had to consign all of my past life to the shadows. There were all these things about me that I couldn’t let you know. For God’s sake, I have nine brothers and sisters! That’s nine aunts and uncles that you were never going to know about. I won’t pretend we were close, but they existed, and you had a right to know about them, and I couldn’t tell you. Of course they’re not blood kin of yours, but—”

  “They might as well be,” he said. “You’re my dad, they’re your brothers and sisters, so that makes them my uncles and aunts. And I don’t even know how much blood matters, but it’s a fact that they’re blood kin to Kristy.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “DNA and all,” he said.

  DNA and all.

  I felt better for our conversation, I told him. It had relieved me of some inner tension. We talked a little more, and then he went off to do homework and I sat down and recorded our conversation.

  YOU’RE MY DAD. Three words, uttered with no particular inflection, yet they’d put a lump in my throat and kept coming back to me.

  And indeed I am. And Kristin’s dad as well, and Louella’s husband. I’m J. J. Thompson, long-established local retailer, member of various civic-minded fraternal organizations. Infrequent churchgoer, once-a-week bowler. A family man. A man, as I believe I’ve already called myself, of settled habits.

  I’m all those things. I’m also Buddy, and Roger before that.

  “You’re my dad.”

  I type the words and I can hear him saying them, and they continue to move me. And they bring to mind another three-word statement which they seem to echo:

  “I forgive you.”

  And I find myself at the brink of tears. But I don’t have to hold them back. They hold themselves back.

  I WROTE THE previous entry four days ago. Shut down the computer, went downstairs, and went on with my life. The following day I never even walked into my office, and the day after that I found myself thinking that this journal (if I want to call it that, and I suppose it’s as good a word as any)—that this journal had served a purpose and been a valuable outlet, but that its time had come and gone and now I was done with it.

  Perhaps I ought to delete the file. Or, because deletion is such an uncertain and inconclusive process, perhaps what I really ought to do is junk the computer after having destroyed its hard drive.

  It’s probably due for a replacement, anyway. I don’t know how many years I’ve owned it, but certainly two or three years longer than I’ve owned my car. Every two or three years a man will spend money on a car that’s not substantially different from the one he’s trading in; computers, meanwhile, evolve far more rapidly, yet we keep them as long as we can.

  And I’ve had this thought, and will doubtless have it again, and I’ll keep this laptop (which wouldn’t dream of complaining even as I peck away at its keys) until it breaks down and makes the decision for me.

  As I said, it’s been four days. And it might have been several more, there’s no way of guessing how long it might have been, but for the show that aired tonight on Dateline.

  A cold case solved. A woman in eastern Tennessee, not far from Knoxville, who’d laced up her Nikes and gone for a run eighteen years ago.

  And never came home.

  There’d been the usual reports, sightings from as far away as Denver, but they never panned out. She was presumed dead, and likely buried, tucked deep in some patch of earth where she wouldn’t be found.

  They were fairly sure it was the husband, and it didn’t help his cause when he flunked a polygraph test. But he’d stayed with his story—she went out, she didn’t come back, I got no idea where she went to—and polygraph results aren’t admissible evidence. The local DA decided they didn’t have enough of a case to take to court, and if they’d tried, a defense attorney could have pointed out that she had a sort-of boyfriend, her occasional running partner, and while both his alibi and his own polygraph results had cleared him as far as the police were concerned, his role in her life might be enough to a jury to constitute an alternate theory of the crime, leading to reasonable doubt.

  And there was no body. You always needed a much stronger case when you didn’t have a body to point to.

  So the husband was never charged, let alone convicted, but everybody thought he’d done it, his kids included, and within a year he’d sold up and relocated to Baton Rouge. He moved a few more times over the years, and by the time they found the body he was in a halfway house in Medford, Oregon, fresh out of his latest stint of rehab and working in a car wash.

  It was an old man with a metal detector who found her. After a lifetime of teaching history at the University of Tennessee, he’d settled on two hobbies to enliven his retirement. He foraged for edible wild plants, and while he gathered them he scanned the ground with a metal detector, turning up musket balls and stray coins and no end of rings from pop-top beer cans.

  The woman—I could let Google supply her name, but what difference does it make? Although she’d been buried with her wedding ring on her finger, it seems unlikely that would have been enough to set his device humming. But she’d broken a femur some years back, and the re
pair of the fracture had entailed implanting a metal rod, and, well, you get the picture.

  He started digging, and when he began finding bones he picked up his phone and called it in.

  They went to Oregon to pick up the husband, who’d needed a minute to figure out what wife they were talking about; he’d been married and divorced twice since then, and opioid use had left him a little vague. Yes, he confirmed, they’d inserted a metal rod when they fixed her leg, and if it was titanium it was probably worth a couple of dollars, and he supposed it was nice that they found her, but it still had nothing to do with him. Wasn’t him that killed her, or dug a hole and left her in it.

  And, remarkably, he was right about that. While they were checking DNA to make sure it was in fact the running lady they’d found, they came across some other DNA and figured it was the husband’s, which would wrap up the case against him and tie a bow on it.

  Nope. It was the boyfriend’s. His wife had divorced him early on, and he’d left her with the house and kids and moved to East Texas. He’d remarried and had two more children, he’d set himself up again as an optometrist, he mowed his lawn and kept up with his garden, he coached his younger daughter’s soccer team—and he hadn’t seemed at all surprised when they came knocking on his door. The case against him was way short of being a slam-dunk, but he invited the officers in and poured them glasses of iced tea and told them everything. Waived extradition, accompanied them voluntarily to Knox County to await trial, where on advice of counsel he repudiated his confession, withdrew his initial Guilty plea, and wound up backing his way into a life sentence.

  While the story was unfolding, I waited for some relative’s DNA from 23 and Me to kickstart the cold case, because nowadays that’s always what I’m waiting for. But that never had a chance to play a role; they’d had both men’s DNA on file all along, the innocent husband and the guilty boyfriend, and all they had to do was run the usual tests. They did, and that was that.

  But this case resonated in another way entirely. If there’s a God, it shows him to be the Supreme Ironist. Here you’ve got two men, the husband and the boyfriend, and both their lives take the path you’d pretty much expect them to take. The husband, clearly guilty despite the legal presumption of innocence, had gone downhill in a hurry, stumbling almost inevitably into alcoholism and opioid addiction, with a good chance of dying of an overdose when his latest stint in rehab proved no more enduring than the ones preceding it. Unpunished by the law, perhaps, but punished by life.

  Meanwhile the boyfriend, presumed innocent not only by the legal system but by all concerned, had shrugged off the breakup of his marriage and created an exemplary new life for himself. He’d been genuinely successful, not merely in his profession but as a husband and father. You can make of it what you will, but his daughter’s soccer team hadn’t lost a match all season.

  And he was the one who was guilty, and who’d be spending the rest of his life in prison—while his new wife and kids tried to come to terms with the turn their lives had taken.

  You might say it got my attention.

  I came up here to write about it, and didn’t stop to wonder why I felt the need to do so. Nothing Dateline had to report changes my situation in any way that I can see. But the story has had an impact, which probably shouldn’t be surprising, and sitting here and tapping keys and forming words and sentences on the screen seems to be the way I’ve found for processing the thoughts in my mind and the events in my life. I don’t know that it helps me to put things in perspective, whatever that means, but it’s what I’ve taught myself to do, and I suspect I do it for a reason.

  I wonder what Alden made of it.

  We’d all four sat down to watch the show, but fifteen minutes in Kristin yawned theatrically and went to her room to play a video game. Louella wandered into the kitchen from time to time, she had something in the oven that required her occasional attention, but Alden and I never stirred from our seats.

  Now and then I’d glance over at him, and a couple of times our eyes met. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I could probably guess.

  ALDEN WADE SHIPLEY Thompson.

  He was a young man, but he was also a boy, and what a load I’d given him to carry. Had I been right or wrong to share my secret with him?

  The answer would be easier to furnish if I knew for certain how much would ever be known about the death of Cindy Raschmann. Would a pair of cops from California come knocking on our door?

  It was one thing if they did, another if they didn’t.

  And they might not. Investigations stall out. A case that had been so cold for so many years might never warm up enough to lead anywhere. There was no telling how good their DNA sample had been, or how much it might have degraded over the years. Or if they’d misplaced the damned thing, and given up looking for it.

  And state and local governments were increasingly handicapped by budget cuts, and I would think they’d have to practice a sort of triage in cold case investigations, allocating resources to the ones they had the best chance of resolving—or with the higher profiles, or those in which the victim’s next of kin made the most insistent demands for closure.

  Closure. That’s right up there with perspective. I don’t know what the hell it means.

  And one hears it all the time. “I had to stay with the case,” a dogged lawman will tell the camera, “because I felt it was my job to bring those good people closure.”

  And, when they presumably have achieved it, when the guilty verdict comes down and the sentence is read and the killer led off to spend the rest of his life in prison, where’s the closure? Aside from a measure of mean-spirited satisfaction, what those friends and relatives give off most is a sense of disappointment.

  She’s still dead. Life goes on, and so does death, and now what? Is that all there is?

  IF THEY CAME for me, the conversation I’d had with Alden would take a little of the shock and horror out of what followed. He’d be able to comfort his mother, to reassure his sister.

  And if they never did show up?

  I STOPPED THERE, slept on the question, woke up with what feels like the answer. Perhaps a night’s sleep has given me a measure of perspective, if not closure.

  I’m closer to Alden for our having had that conversation, for his knowing the awful truth about the man who has become his father. If the case of Cindy Raschmann remains cold forever, if the most unsettling visitors ever to ring our doorbell are Jehovah’s Witnesses and cookie-peddling Girl Scouts, there’s still more good than bad in having revealed myself to my son.

  No closure here, I’m afraid. I’ve managed to answer one question only to raise another.

  THAT LAST ENTRY was made the day before yesterday, typed out quickly before I went down for breakfast.

  The forecast was for rain, so I drove to Thompson Dawes, and caught the news on the radio. An item drew my attention as I was pulling into my parking space, and I stayed put long enough to hear it through to the end.

  It concerned a man in Missouri who’d been doing twenty years to life in a state penitentiary for killing a woman. There was no new evidence, and couldn’t be; the crime had been witnessed, the physical evidence supported the conviction, and he’d confessed immediately and never tried to repudiate the confession.

  Six months ago a judge had ordered his release. The prisoner was 76 years old, and had spent almost half his life in a cell, and had reached an age where he was certainly no threat to society.

  So they let him go, and in less than six months the son of a bitch did it again. Got himself a hunting knife, the sort you’d use to skin out a deer, and killed a middle-aged woman with a single stab wound to the heart. She was, as far as anyone could determine, a stranger to him, and if he had a motive he’d thus far kept it to himself.

  All morning long I kept thinking of all concerned—the man himself, the two women he’d killed some forty years apart, and the judge whose re-election now seemed unlikely.

  What did it mea
n? And why did it seem to possess some significance, still annoyingly unclear, for me?

  It never did rain.

  THAT WAS YESTERDAY.

  Woke up this morning to a clear day, cool but not cold. I took the car because I’d need to drive to a lunchtime meeting, but I’d already pretty much decided to skip it, and at noon when I got behind the wheel I didn’t even think about heading downtown.

  I hadn’t been aware of making a decision, hadn’t gone to sleep with the conscious hope that I’d wake up with an answer. But evidently a decision had made itself, and an unasked question had been answered.

  I drove home. The garage was empty, so Louella had gone somewhere.

  A supermarket visit? Probably.

  I went to the living room, turned the TV on and off again, picked up a magazine. I paged through it, and it wasn’t long before I heard her car in the driveway. By the time I got outside she had the trunk open and was lifting a bag of groceries. I took it from her, and she drew a second bag out of the trunk, and I followed her inside.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said. “I thought you had Kiwanis today.”

  “They can get along without me.”

  “While I,” she said, “cannot.”

  We kissed, and she stepped back and looked at me. Her expression of mild puzzlement was understandable. I was very much a creature of habits, and coming home at noon, unannounced and for no particular reason, was not one of them.

  But she was not alarmed. Whatever had brought me home, she could wait for it to reveal itself.

  I said, “I was a little concerned about you.”

  “About me?”

  “This morning, before I left the house.”

  “At breakfast?”

  “Your energy level,” I said. “Have you been feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “At least I thought I was fine, until you raised the subject just now. What exactly—”