“You did just fine,” Infante said, seizing the opportunity to pat her forearm. The moment stretched out, not at all awkward.
“Can I get you something? Food, a drink?” Her voice was a little lower, almost husky.
“I probably shouldn’t. I have to drive back to the airport in an hour or so, catch a flight home to Baltimore.”
He caught her stealing a glance at his left hand. “There are lots of flights out of Jacksonville. You could probably go first thing in the morning, and it wouldn’t make much difference. Home at nine, either way, just A.M. or P.M. What’s the diff?”
“I already checked out of my motel.”
“Oh, well, accommodations could be made, most likely. People are real friendly here. And it’s fun, St. Simons. You’ve hardly seen any of it, I bet.”
He considered it. Of course he did. Here was a beautiful young woman, all but promising she would fuck him when her shift ended. He could sit at the bar, drink beer, let the anticipation build as he watched her twitch back and forth in those khaki shorts. She’d probably comp his bar bill, or at least sneak him a few under the table. And what was the difference—the diff—Saturday night versus Sunday morning? Nancy was doing the interview today, starting just about now, by his calculations. He had been cut out, through no fault of his own. Okay, through nobody’s fault, but definitely through no fault of his own. Under the circumstances—and the circumstances were beginning to form in his mind, an accident on the causeway, nothing big, nothing that would make the news, but enough of a hassle to trap him on the island until after the last Baltimore-bound plane left Jacksonville, and who could prove it didn’t happen?—no one would care if Infante came home tomorrow. It wasn’t like you needed to be an exceptional detective to do an airport pickup. Let someone else baby-sit the mom when she arrived, shuttle her to the Sheraton and keep her company. Heck, Lenhardt would probably enjoy hearing about his southern-belle adventure. Did you get a good meal on the department? No, but I got good pussy!
He brushed her wrist with his fingertips, feeling all that warmth, the vitality of her youth, the strength that came from never having had anything really bad happen to you. Kevin had no use for actual virgins, but he liked this particular kind of innocence, born of the belief that some guarantee had been made, that life would always be a smooth, creamy ride. Maybe it would be for this Heather. Maybe everyone she loved would die in his or her sleep, at appropriate ages. Maybe she would never sit at a kitchen table with her husband, weeping over the bills they couldn’t quite cover or arguing about the various disappointments he had banked. Maybe she would have children who brought her nothing but pride and joy. Maybe. Someone had to have a life like that, right? His line of work didn’t specialize in them, but they had to exist.
He slid his hand from her wrist, shook her soft little paw, and said good-bye, taking care to let her know, through his voice and expression, how much he regretted not staying.
“Oh,” she said, surprised, clearly a girl who was used to getting her way.
“Maybe another time,” he said, meaning, Tomorrow, next week, I’ll probably go home with another young woman I meet in a bar. But tonight I’m going to return my rental car and be a team player.
On the way out of town, he stopped at a barbecue joint in Brunswick and bought Lenhardt a T-shirt, a muscle-bound pig modeling his biceps: NO ONE CAN BEAT OUR MEAT. Even with that pit stop for a pulled-pork sandwich, he got to the Jacksonville airport so early that he managed to get standby on a flight that would get him into BWI almost an hour earlier than his original flight, a nonstop that would take almost half the time of his original one.
CHAPTER 32
“You want a better chair?”
“No, no.” Willoughby was embarrassed by the offer, by the sergeant’s very solicitousness. He was neither old enough nor distinguished enough to warrant so much attention.
“Because I can get you something better than that.”
“I’m okay.”
“I mean, over a few hours you’re going to feel that one.”
“Sergeant,” he said, intending to sound dignified and stoic, but achieving only cranky. “Sergeant, I’m fine.”
The building was a different one from the one where he had worked the bulk of his career, and he found himself grateful for that. He had not come here to stroll down memory lane. He was the ref, the linesman, here to rule what was fair or foul. A manila envelope, slightly dusty, sat at his feet, waiting for its moment. It was going on 4:30 P.M., an interesting time to begin a long interview. It was a drowsy time of day, when blood sugar dipped and people began thinking about dinner, maybe cocktails if they went that way. Earlier, Willoughby had watched the pretty detective eat an apple and several slices of cheese, washed down with a bottle of water.
“Protein,” she explained when she realized he was observing her. “It doesn’t give you a burst of energy, but it sustains you over the long haul.”
He wished he had a daughter. A son would have been nice, too, but a daughter cares for her parents in old age, while sons tend to get sucked into their wives’ families, or so he’d always heard. If he had a daughter, he would still have a daughter. And grandchildren. It wasn’t that he was lonely. Until a few days ago, he’d been pretty happy with his life. He had his health, golf, his golf buddies, and if he wanted to keep company with a woman, there were several at Edenwald who’d be thrilled to volunteer. Twice a month he met some old friends, Gilman boys, at the Starbucks on York Road, the one where the old Citgo station had been, and they talked about politics and old times. They called themselves “ROMEO”—retired old men eating out—and the conversation was damn lively. The sad truth was, Evelyn had been so sick and so frail for so long that he couldn’t really miss her. Or, more correctly, he’d been missing her for years, through the last decade of her life, and it was easier to miss her now that she was truly gone.
It was funny about Evelyn—she didn’t like him to talk about the Bethany girls. Other cases, even ones that were far more gruesome in the details, didn’t bother her so much. In fact, she liked how he played it both ways. His life as a cop had brought him real cachet in their social circles, even made him sexier, and Evelyn had reveled in the fact, all her friends jockeying around him, vying for his attention, plying him with questions about his work. But not the Bethany girls, never the Bethany girls. He’d assumed that the subject was too heartbreaking for her. Denied children, she could not bear to hear about another infertile couple who had gained them, almost magically, then saw them taken. Now, for the first time, he wondered if the real problem was that he never solved it. Had Evelyn been disappointed in him?
“YOU’RE LATE,” Gloria snapped at Kay, taking Heather by the elbow.
“Heather told you what happened,” Kay said, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t lying, simply declining to contradict Heather’s lie, another hair split in a growing series of split hairs, a whole headful of them. But when she tried to follow them into the elevator, Gloria stopped her.
“You can’t come up, Kay. Well, you could come up, but you’ll be left in some empty office or conference room.”
“Oh—I knew that,” she said, her second lie in less than a minute, but this one merely a cover for her embarrassment.
“It’s going to be a while, Kay. Hours. I assumed that I would drive Heather home.”
“But it’s so far out of your way. You live up here, and I’m over on the southwest side.”
“Kay…”
She should go home, Kay told herself. She was getting too close to Heather as it was, crossing all sorts of lines. The mere fact that Heather was in her home—well, technically not in her home, but on her property—could result in a reprimand, threats against her license. She was losing her way. But, having gone this far, she was not willing to go back.
“I have a book with me. Jane Eyre. I’ll be utterly content.”
“Jane Eyre, huh? I never could read her.”
Kay realized that Gloria h
ad confused Brontë’s novel with the other Jane of nineteenth-century letters, Jane Austen. There probably wasn’t room for much in Gloria’s brain besides her clients, her work. Should Kay take her aside, tell her that they had visited the old mall? Would Heather volunteer this? Did it matter? Left alone, her eyes scanned blindly across the pages, following but not really absorbing Jane’s flight from Thornfield, the stiff proposal from St. John, the adorable, adoring sisters who turned out to be Jane’s cousins.
SHE WASN’T HAPPY to see a female detective in the room, although she tried to conceal her irritation and surprise.
“Are we waiting for Kevin?” she asked.
“Kevin?” the plump detective echoed. “Oh, Detective Infante.” As if she didn’t have the right to call him by his first name. She doesn’t like me. She resents me for being so much thinner, even though she’s a lot younger. She’s protective of Kevin. “Detective Infante had to go out of town. To Georgia.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
Gloria shot her a look, but she was beyond caring what Gloria thought. She knew what she was doing and what she had to do.
“I don’t know. Does it mean something to you?”
“I’ve never lived there, if that’s where you’re going.”
“Where have you lived, over the last thirty years?”
“She’s going to take the Fifth on that,” Gloria said quickly.
“I’m not sure the Fifth is relevant, and we keep telling you that we can get your client before a grand jury, grant her immunity on anything she did as far as identity theft goes, but—okay.” Fake easygoing.
I know you, Detective. You’re one of the good girls, the kind who gets to be class secretary, or maybe vice president. The one who always has a big jock boyfriend and fusses with his collar at lunchtime, already a little wife at age sixteen. I know you. But I know what it’s like to be a real teenage bride, and you wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t like it at all.
“As we’ve said repeatedly, this isn’t about the legal side of things,” Gloria said. “It’s also the poking about, the prying. If Heather provides the details of her current identity, you’ll start talking to her coworkers and neighbors, right?”
“Possibly. We’ll definitely run it through all our databases.”
Who the fuck cares?
But Gloria said: “You think she’s a criminal?”
“No, no, not at all. We’re just having a hard time understanding why she never came forward until she was involved in a car accident and facing hit-and-run charges.”
She decided to challenge the detective head-on. “You don’t like me.”
“I just met you,” she said. “I don’t know you.”
“When is Kevin coming back? Shouldn’t he do the interview? Without him we’ll have to go over a bunch of stuff I’ve already covered.”
“You were the one who wanted to do this today. Well, here we are. Let’s do it.”
“Gary Gilmore’s final words—1977. Were you even born?”
“That very year,” Nancy Porter said. “And how old were you? Where were you that Gary Gilmore’s death made such an impact on you?”
“I was thirteen in Heather years. I was a different age on the outside.”
“‘Heather years’? You make it sound like dog years.”
“Trust me, Detective—I aspired to the life of a dog.”
CHAPTER 33
5:45 P.M.
“Sunny told me that I could go to the mall with her, but I couldn’t hang around her. And then, maybe just because she said that, I wouldn’t leave her alone. I followed her to the movie Escape to Witch Mountain. When the previews began, she got up and went out. I thought she might have gone to the bathroom, but when the movie started and she still wasn’t back, I went out to the lobby to check for her.”
“Were you worried about her? Did you think something had happened?”
The subject—Willoughby was not ready to call her Heather yet, if only out of self-protection, wary of investing too much hope in this woman, this resolution—the subject thought carefully about the question. Willoughby could see that she was someone given to thinking before she spoke. Perhaps she was simply a cautious person, but his suspicion was that she liked the drama created by her pauses and hesitation. She knew she was playing for a larger audience than Nancy and Gloria.
“It’s interesting that you ask that. The thing is, I did worry about Sunny. I know that sounds backwards, me being the younger one. But she was—I don’t know what the right word is. Naïve? I wouldn’t have had any words for it at the time. I just know I felt protective of her, and it worried me when she didn’t come back. It was unthinkable that she would buy a movie ticket and abandon the show.”
“She could have gone outside and asked for a refund.”
She furrowed her brow, as if considering this. “Yes. Yes. That never occurred to me. I was eleven. And besides, I found out right away why she left. She had sneaked into Chinatown, which was an R-rated movie. The way the lobby was set up—there were only two theaters—it wasn’t so easy to do that, and they watched for it. But if you used the bathroom on the other side—if you said the other one was full, or dirty—you could distract an usher and sneak in. We had done that before, to get two movies for the price of one, but not to see an R movie. It never occurred to me to try to see an R movie. I was a bit of a goody-goody.”
Sneaking into R-rated movies—did kids even have to do that anymore? And a movie such as Chinatown, what a disappointment that must have been if you were hoping for salacious kicks. Willoughby wondered if an eleven-year-old, back in 1975, could even grasp the big twist, the incest theme, much less follow the intricate land deal at the heart of the film.
“So I found her in the back row, watching Chinatown, and she got furious with me, told me to go away. Which attracted the usher’s attention, and we both got thrown out. She was really angry. Angry enough to scare me. Then she said that she was done with me, that she wouldn’t even buy me Karmelkorn as promised, and she didn’t want to see me again until our father picked us up at five-thirty.”
“So what did you do?”
“Walked around. Looked at things.”
“Did you see anyone, speak to anyone?”
“I didn’t speak to anyone, no.”
Willoughby made a notation on the legal pad they had provided him. This was key. If Pincharelli remembered Heather, she should remember him. It was one of the few things the music teacher had been forthcoming about, eventually. He’d seen Heather in the audience, watching him play.
Nancy Porter, bless her, caught it, too.
“You didn’t speak to anyone, okay. But did you see someone, anyone, that you knew?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Didn’t see anyone familiar. A neighbor, a friend of your parents’?”
“No.”
“So you just wandered around the mall, by yourself for three hours….”
“That’s what little girls do at malls, from time immemorial. They go to malls and walk around. Didn’t you, Detective?”
This earned a baleful look from Gloria, who was not enjoying her client’s combative attitude. Detective Porter smiled—a sunny, sincere smile, the kind of smile her subject had probably never been able to deliver in her entire life—and said, “Yeah, but for me it would have been White Marsh, and I hung out in the food court, near Mamma Ilardo’s pizza.”
“Nice name.”
“They made a good pizza.”
Nancy bent over her legal pad, writing furiously. All for show, Willoughby knew. All for show.
6:20 P.M.
“Tell me again what happened at the end of the day, when it was time for you to meet.”
“I told you.”
“Tell me again.” Nancy took a swig from a bottle of water. She had offered the woman repeated chances to have a soda, take a bathroom break, but she always said no. Too bad, because if they could get her prints on a glass, they could
run it through the system in minutes, see if they got a hit. Did she know that?
“It was almost five, and I had wandered back to the center, beneath the big green skylight, where the food was. Karmelkorn, Baskin-Robbins. I was thinking that Sunny might change her mind and buy me a treat after all. I decided if she didn’t buy me Karmelkorn, I’d tell our parents about the R-rated movie. One way or another, I would get what I wanted. Back then…back then I was very good at getting my way.”
“Back then?”
“You’d be surprised how years of sexual servitude break your will.”
Willoughby liked the way that the detective nodded, as if sympathetic, but didn’t let this information throw her off her stride. Yeah, yeah, years of sexual servitude, that old thing.
“It’s—what time is it, when you go to the Karmelkorn?”
“Almost five. I told you.”
“How did you know the time?”
“I had a Snoopy watch.” Recited in an oh-so-bored voice. “A yellow-faced watch on a wide leather band. It had belonged to Sunny, in fact, and she no longer wore it. I thought it was funny. But the way his arms moved, it was hard to ever know the exact time. So all I can say is, it was going on five.”
“And where was the Karmelkorn?”
“I couldn’t tell you in terms of north or south, if that’s what you want. Security Square was shaped like a plus sign, only one end was much longer than the other. The Karmelkorn would have been on the short, stumpy end that faced where the J. C. Penney was going in, but hadn’t opened yet. It was a great place to sit. Even if you weren’t eating, the smell was so rich and buttery.”
“So you were sitting?”
“Yes, on the edge of a fountain. It wasn’t a wishing fountain, but people had thrown coins in. I remember wondering what would happen if I fished them out, if I would get in trouble.”
What the Dead Know Page 24