The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  “That might not be something to be proud of.”

  “But maybe it is,” Brad said.

  “Maybe it is,” I said. “And you’re not protecting her.”

  His eyes crinkled up. “I wish that’s what this was.”

  “Even after all this time.”

  “Protecting her would mean she was okay. But I don’t know what happened. I don’t.” He rubbed his hand over his face.

  I wanted to think I could help him, but it wasn’t easy. Not when he didn’t think I could. He didn’t think he could help himself either, and he’d had nothing but time to come up with a way to do it. I didn’t know what to make of Brad Stockton yet. But I also didn’t think that was the end.

  FIVE

  I went to Dirty Frank’s on Fourth downtown and placed a carryout order for dinner—a hot dog topped with sriracha cream cheese and Fritos and a side of Tater Tots. While I was waiting, I sat at the bar and ordered a Crown Royal on the rocks. The restaurant was small and pleasantly warm, and the chill from the prison started to fade away. I was staring into my drink and thinking hard about whether I bought Brad Stockton’s I’d rather die than sell out my beloved routine when I felt a hand between my shoulder blades. I jumped, spinning around on my barstool to see my father’s former partner right behind me.

  “Hi, sorry,” Tom Heitker said quickly. “Was that creepy?”

  “Extremely creepy,” I said, letting myself smile. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He grinned at me, stepping in closer to let a waiter squeeze past with an armful of the red baskets that served as plates.

  “And what are you doing way down here, dressed in jeans?” I said.

  “There was a community policing meeting in Twelve Precinct. I wanted to go incognito so I could eavesdrop.”

  Even in jeans and a fleece half-zip, he’d get pegged as a cop anywhere. It was his posture, or maybe something about the eyes, a guarded squint. He was in his late thirties, and he’d worked with Frank for his entire career as a detective, till now. He had lost weight since my father died, twenty pounds from a frame carrying an extra forty, and he looked good. But then, he had looked good before.

  “And?” I said.

  “Pointless,” Tom said. “Nobody saw nothing, ad infinitum. Can I sit?”

  I gestured at the empty barstool beside me. “I’m not staying though. I ordered food to go. I spent the afternoon at the prison in Chillicothe and all I want to do is get home.”

  Tom held up his own carryout bag. “Great minds,” he said. “What are you working on?”

  “Tracking down a witness in an old case. Maybe a witness, maybe not. Double murder in Belmont a while back.”

  “When?”

  “Fifteen years ago,” I said. “Ish.”

  “Married couple, right? Stabbed to death? Daughter went missing?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised. “How do you know that?”

  “Cops remember everything. I was working a drug task force on the southeast side back then. I was always down there. Belmont and Columbus have weird borders. That case was closed in record time, I recall. What’s going on now?”

  “The kid who was convicted is going to be executed in two months,” I said. “His sister hired me. She claims she saw the daughter in Belmont a couple weeks ago.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Yeah,” I said, letting out a sigh without meaning to. “Have you ever worked a case where someone was framed?”

  “Nope. That’s television stuff. Ditto for faked suicides.”

  “That’s what I thought.” I finished my whiskey. “I can’t figure this guy out though. The missing daughter—a logical alternate theory of the crime. But he wouldn’t let his lawyer talk about it at the trial and even today, fifteen years later, he still won’t entertain the thought. I don’t know if that’s idealistic or delusional.”

  “Fifteen years is a long time to put up a front,” Tom said. “Then again, didn’t they have him dead to rights with the murder weapon?”

  “Correct.”

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law and all that. Goes both ways.”

  “Sure does.”

  “So it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  The bartender brought over my carryout bag, and I slid off the barstool. “Well,” I said.

  Tom and I watched each other for a few beats. He was always a little shy around me, and I found it slightly endearing. “So do you want to come over, or what?”

  * * *

  The day of my father’s funeral was the longest of my life. There was a full agenda: private prayer service at the funeral home. Procession to Saint Joseph downtown for the Mass. Procession to Greenlawn for the burial. Light refreshments at my mother’s house to follow. It was after ten when I finally left, dry-eyed and bewildered. I was wearing a strange outfit that belonged to my mother’s neighbor—my own wardrobe selection of a new black pantsuit and flats having been declared unacceptable that morning—and the borrowed pumps rubbed against my heels as I walked down the sidewalk toward my car. As I got closer, I noticed that Tom was sitting on the retaining wall in front of a neighbor’s house, staring at his own shoes.

  I sat down beside him. “I thought you left like two hours ago.”

  “I did,” he said without looking up. Like the other cops who had attended the service, he was wearing his uniform but he was all unbuttoned, disheveled. His short, dark hair was sticking up like he’d been tearing at it. He had worked with my father for close to a decade and he had spent a fair amount of time around my family in all those years, but I barely knew him personally, wasn’t sure if we had ever had a one-on-one conversation longer than a few lines.

  I stood up again. “Sorry, you look like you want to be by yourself.”

  “No, no,” he said. He turned toward me, his warm brown eyes full of stunned pain. “I really, really don’t.”

  We went to the liquor store at the end of my mother’s street and bought the cheapest whiskey they sold. I had plenty of liquor at home but I didn’t want to go home and I didn’t want that liquor. We sat in Tom’s car and passed the bottle back and forth between us without talking for a long time. The night sky felt heavy, like an X-ray blanket.

  “Your mom,” he said eventually. “She has people in town, right?”

  I took a long pull from the bottle. The whiskey burned all the way down but not as much as I wanted it to. “Two sisters. They’re staying with her right now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She’s had to be strong, to stay married to him. She’s tough. And she has a lot of friends. And my brothers.”

  “And you.”

  I drew a squiggly line on the fogged-up window and then erased it with my palm. “That’ll do a lot of good,” I said, trying and failing to use a light tone.

  “You know you were his favorite,” Tom said.

  I stared at him. “He never said that. He didn’t even like me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I don’t even blame him for that,” I said. “How could I? I never listened to a goddamn thing he said.”

  “Sure you did,” Tom said. “Didn’t he get you your first job?”

  I looked down at my hands. It had never occurred to me that my father had talked about me to Tom. “Is that what he told you?”

  He nodded.

  “Old family friend used to have a private security company. I worked there through college part-time, in the office, and I kind of stayed after I graduated. I thought I was going to be a psychologist. Frank told me I would make a terrible psychologist. But then I started helping on cases when I was supposed to be studying for the GRE. Which is just as well, honestly, he was right.”

  “You would have made a terrible psychologist?”

  “I’m too nosy. Too impatient.” I shrugged. “You know he was always right. Somehow. Even for the wrong reasons, he was always right.”

  Tom gave me a sad smile. “He was,” he said. “
But nosy and impatient, those are good qualities for a detective. So I guess that worked out.”

  “I don’t think I really had a choice. It’s the only thing I can do.”

  Tom sighed heavily. “Frank was proud of you,” he said again. “For doing your own thing, being your own person.”

  “Stop it,” I said, serious now. I had promised myself I wasn’t going to cry and I wouldn’t. I pressed my hand against my mouth until the tightness in my jaw eased up. “Change the subject.”

  Tom was quiet for a bit, gazing over the steering wheel at High Street. Finally, he shook his head. “I got nothing,” he said. Then he turned to me. “It happened so fast.”

  “Don’t.” I couldn’t hear about how fast it had happened, the end of everything. I picked up his hand. “No crying. I can’t take it. I’ll go home.”

  “You can’t drive like this,” Tom said, blinking fast, nodding.

  “Then I’ll walk.”

  “In those shoes?”

  My face felt too weird to smile. But I would have. I brought Tom’s hand to my lips. “I need to feel something else,” I said. It was the only other coping method I could think of. The whiskey wasn’t coming close to touching the way I felt. “Do you want to come home with me?”

  “Roxane.” Tom shifted in his seat. “You’re upset.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So are you.” I placed his hand on my bare knee.

  “I know you’re feeling crazy but we can’t—”

  “Sure we can.”

  * * *

  Now, just inside my apartment, Tom pushed me into the wall and kissed me hard in the dark. His hands found my shoulders and peeled off my leather jacket and dropped it to the floor with a jangle of zippers and loose change, and I hooked my thumbs into his belt loops and pulled him close to me so there wasn’t even the suggestion of space between us. He smelled good, like fresh air and pine, and his mouth was soft and hungry. “I want you right here,” he whispered, his voice equal parts intensity and restraint. Our respective carryout dinners were forgotten.

  “I have a bed,” I whispered between kisses. Everything about the day was beginning to recede from my mind like a tide.

  “I want you there too,” he said.

  He pulled my hands away from his hips and pressed them against the wall at my sides, slowly sliding my arms up over my head so he could hold both of my wrists in one hand. My breath caught in my throat. This was what I liked most, the way he wasn’t careful with me. He could be rough and tender at all the right times and he was different in private—assured and almost playful, unlike the reserved way he carried himself the rest of the time. He slipped his other hand under the hem of my shirt, his fingers at once hot and cold on my bare skin as he undid the button on my jeans and slid the zipper down so slowly I couldn’t stand it. Then he parted my legs with his knee. I arched toward him, my whole body humming.

  Afterward we lay on my bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, left over from the previous tenant like the paint colors. Tom was gently brushing the inside of my wrist with his thumb. It was like we were camping, gazing at the real night sky. We hadn’t bothered with most of our clothes. “I needed you,” he said, “after the last few weeks I’ve had.”

  I wanted to be annoyed at him for saying that, but I wasn’t. “Do you want to tell me about it?” I said instead.

  He tipped his head toward me. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like he was about to launch into something. But then his features relaxed. “Nah,” he said. “Just the usual bureaucratic bullshit. A million miles away right now.”

  “Good.” I liked him like this, relaxed and open. The night of the funeral had been a protest fuck, an act of defiance. But we’d seen each other quite a few times in the nine months since. There was nothing to it, just stress relief, pain relief, all of the above. But I still needed those things. I turned toward him and put my head on his shoulder. He slid his arm underneath me and made a soft noise in his throat and I played with the buttons on his plaid shirt. “I like this. It’s nice and worn.”

  “It should be, it’s twenty years old,” he said. “I’m into dark territory in the closet. Alice in Chains T-shirts are next. Everything else fits like a windsail.”

  “And it just makes you furious,” I said.

  “Stark raving mad,” he said. “It just kills me, the things people say to me sometimes lately, like, I’m thrilled they want me to know I look better now that I’m depressed.”

  I rested my chin on my arm and looked him in the eye. He was doing better than he had been during the spring and summer, but I knew what he meant. “But just so you know, I always thought you were a stud,” I said.

  Tom laughed in a way that seemed to take him by surprise. Then he cupped his hand around the back of my head and pulled me in for a kiss, and it said everything.

  Maybe it said too much.

  SIX

  I walked to the patisserie on Oak Street for breakfast and drank a cup of tea and ordered the white African sweet potato tart, which was not a breakfast food, so I got it to go in a little paper box in order to pretend it was for later. The neighborhood was caught in midgentrification right now, and though I approved of the introduction of exotic pastries, I hoped Olde Towne wasn’t going to get much nicer. I walked back home in the bright, cold morning air and tried to imagine who I might be appear to be: a rich lady buying a dessert tart for a Tuesday-night dinner party and checking items off a to-do list, instead of a slightly hungover detective inordinately proud of herself for being out and about before eleven o’clock and planning to eat half—no, most—of the dessert tart while driving. But when I got back over to Bryden Road, I saw a slim figure in a vintage-looking green wool coat in the doorway of my building between the two brick-enclosed porches, writing something on a large manila envelope. It was Catherine. I was glad I hadn’t started eating the tart as I walked.

  “Have sketch, will travel?” I said as I approached her from behind.

  “Hi,” she said as she turned around. Her long blond hair was twisted away from her face in wavy sections. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of oversize sunglasses with white frames. She looked, as always, like she had stepped from the pages of an Anthropologie catalogue.

  “That was fast,” I said.

  “Well,” Catherine said. “Danielle called me not ten minutes after I talked to you, so I thought I should get it to you quickly.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  We looked at each other. Or, she looked at me while I looked at my reflection in the lenses of her sunglasses. “Let me see your eyes,” I said.

  She didn’t smile but she pushed the sunglasses into her hair. Her eyes were lovely, pale green and sparkling. “Hi,” she said again.

  “Hello.”

  I hoped she wouldn’t ask how I was holding up or if I was seeing anyone or say that I looked great or that I looked awful, and she didn’t. Instead she handed me the envelope and flipped her sunglasses back down, nodding at the grease-spotted box I was carrying. “What’ve you got in there?”

  “It’s not breakfast, I swear,” I said, and she finally smiled. “Come in so I can pay you, and we can share.”

  Catherine lifted the sunglasses again. “I really have to go,” she said. “And you don’t have to pay me, it only took an hour.”

  “I’ll get dinner then,” I said, “the next time we have dinner.”

  “We’re not going to have dinner, Roxane. You know I can’t see you right now.”

  I did know, though this knowledge was somewhat confounded by the fact that she was standing here. She could have sent the sketch with Danielle, but she hadn’t.

  I placed the tart on the brick ledge formed by the wall of my porch and pried up the edges of the metal brad that secured the envelope. Then I pulled a thick sheet of paper out of the envelope and took in Catherine’s work. As usual, it looked effortless and yet eerily realistic, a charcoal sketch depicting a w
oman with sad eyes and a spray of freckles across her nose. Her face was fuller than in the yearbook photo, her mouth more pulled in at the corners. But it resembled Sarah Cook, at least a little.

  “It’s very good,” I said. “Which I’m sure you know. Thanks.”

  “I hope it helps.”

  “Me too.”

  “Let me know,” she said. “What happens.”

  We looked at each other for another long moment. There was a lot I wanted to say to her, but I couldn’t make myself say any of it.

  Then she pulled out her keys and adjusted the strap of her handbag. “Okay. Well. Later.”

  “I hope,” I said.

  Catherine kissed her fingertips and reached out and pressed them against my sternum for the briefest instant. Then she turned and hurried down the sidewalk without another word. I listened to the sound of her heels clicking against the sidewalk and waited to see if she would stop and come back, but she didn’t. Then I grabbed the tart off the brick wall and got in the car.

  * * *

  Before I headed back to the gas station for another crack at the security tapes, I decided to check in with Sarah’s family in case one look at Catherine’s sketch could tell me if I was on the right track faster than days of canvassing could. Elizabeth Troyan lived on the east side of Belmont in a big colonial with white-painted bricks and black shutters and one of those little sculpted hedges surrounded by decorative pavers and a water feature. But the pond was full of dead leaves and mud and several pulpy community newspapers. I would have guessed that no one had lived here in weeks, but the curtain fluttered as I walked up the steps to the porch.

  The woman who opened the door was blond, late twenties, her thin frame dwarfed in an oversize cowl-neck sweater. Her eyes were ringed in heavy black liner, lashes spidery with mascara. She frowned thoroughly at me. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Elizabeth home?”

  “It’s not a good time,” she said.

  From somewhere in the house, a female voice slurred, “Cass, who the fuck is it now?”

  The young woman in front of me winced a little. “It’s no one, Mom, go back to sleep,” she called.