by Adam Mitzner
I had to fight a laugh, for this was certainly not the time. But I couldn’t understand how she could be so unaware about the way I felt about her.
“I’m still trying to get my arms around this a little bit,” I said. “I don’t mean that as an excuse, although it probably is one. But you’re the first person I’ve felt . . . this kind of closeness with since Sarah, and so there are a lot of conflicting feelings that come along with it. I guess I should have made it clearer to you that the strongest of those feelings is . . . what I can only assume is happiness, and I say that I can only assume it because it’s been so long since that particular emotion registered with me at all. So, thank you. Really, I’ve been very happy since we’ve been together, and given how my mental state has been over the last year or so, that’s really saying a lot. And I don’t just mean since New Year’s Eve. Since you hauled my ass out of bed after Rich and Deb’s party. You were right, this has been really good for me, and I truly believe that a big part of why it’s been so good is because of the time I’ve been able to spend with you.”
I kissed her, at first with a closed mouth, but it wasn’t long before our tongues were all over each other’s. I assumed that we had finished the talking part of the program, but after a few moments of necking, Nina pulled away.
“You need to know, Dan, that you’re not the only one who’s vulnerable here. I know that my story has none of the overt tragedy of yours, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not every bit as gun-shy. I promised myself that I was done falling in love with unavailable men. So I don’t think I’m asking too much of you to just be honest with me. If this is a . . . I guess rebound isn’t the right word, but you know, a getting-your-feet-wet kind of thing, but you’re not up for a full-fledged relationship, just tell me now.”
I had seen Nina in many different looks—confident and sexy were the main ones, but she could also be charming and inviting. This was the first time I saw insecure and uncertain.
“I’m sure that my James Bond approach to life has confused you,” I said with self-deprecation, “but I’m not a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. The truth of it is, Sarah was my first serious relationship, and even though it’s only been a few days, I already consider you my second. I can’t guarantee how it’s going to end, but I know that I don’t want it to end.”
I looked into Nina’s face, questioning if I should say more. She answered by kissing me again. Now the talking part of the evening was over.
27
We had rented the cheapest car they had at the first rental counter in the airport, a Nissan Sentra, two-door. The moment I turned it on the next morning, the “A-Rod” song came through the speakers. And it was right at the good part:
Gonna stop you when you sing,
gonna give it til you scream;
don’t like what you said,
gonna go A-Rod on your head.
“That’s an unfortunate coincidence,” Nina said.
“Not much of a coincidence. I bet they play that every ten minutes down here, and on virtually every station.”
We headed directly to Roxanne’s high school. The hope was that someone there might be able to tell us who Roxanne’s friends were from back then, and they might know something about her life now.
The school’s principal was, unfortunately for him, named George Clooney. Even more unfortunate, this Mr. Clooney looked much more like a high school principal than a former two-time People magazine Sexiest Man Alive, right down to the plaid shirt, cheesy mustache, and ten-years-out-of-style glasses.
He was kind enough to show us Roxanne’s senior yearbook, however. Pulling it off a top shelf, he immediately flipped to the pages covering the senior show, which had the banner headline “Beauty and the Beast.”
“This is Carolyn Anton,” he said, pointing down at one of the pictures. The girl he was indicating was wearing a beast costume from the ballroom scene. “I would have said she was Roxanne’s best friend. They were the two stars of the show. Roxanne played Beauty, and Carolyn was the Beast. They did three shows, and on the last night, they switched parts.”
“Any idea where Carolyn is now?” I asked.
“She still lives in town, so she probably isn’t that hard to find. I don’t know her address. Her mother died right after graduation, so she’s not at home anymore.”
“Do you know where she works?”
“No, sorry.”
George Clooney seemed much more interested in the yearbook photo than where Carolyn Anton was today. He chuckled, almost to himself, but loud enough that I felt obliged to ask him what he found amusing.
“I always thought that Carolyn was the more talented one. Guess I made the right call not becoming a talent scout.”
“What about Roxanne’s mother?” Nina asked. “We understand that she still lives in Stocks.”
“Yeah. New house, though. She moved to the nicer part of town right after Roxanne hit it big.”
“Do you have her new address?”
Nina followed this request by flashing him her gold-standard smile, and George Clooney smiled back. I’m sure if I had asked the question, I would have gotten a lecture about student confidentiality, but for Nina, he said, “Sure. We update student addresses, you know, for alumni purposes.”
George Clooney then put down the yearbook and walked out of his office until he was hovering over one of the secretaries. “Can you get me Andrea Wells’s new address?” Clooney asked her.
• • •
We decided to try Carolyn Anton first. As luck would have it, locating her address wasn’t very difficult at all. She was listed in the phone book, or in this case, on Google. Finding her house, however, was a bit more challenging. It required several turns down unpaved roads, and more than once the female computer voice on my phone GPS seemed to be leading us away from civilization altogether.
Although I didn’t recall actually passing over railroad tracks on the way to Carolyn Anton’s home, she definitely lived on the metaphoric wrong side of them. Most of the structures along the roadside were little more than wheel-less trailers, usually with some type of rusted car parked on the small patch of grass in front.
Her house was just such a double-wide. In the front wasn’t a car, but a tricycle, the red paint peeling in most places.
A woman came to the door just after we’d gotten out of the car, likely because she heard us coming up the gravel driveway. On her hip she was holding a girl who looked to be about two. In her other hand was a cigarette.
If this was Carolyn Anton, the few years since she’d graduated from high school had not been kind to her. She was at least thirty pounds heavier than in the yearbook pictures, and the bags around her eyes made her look a decade older than the twenty-one or twenty-two years she’d actually lived.
“Hello,” I said as we approached the door. “Are you Carolyn Anton?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
She said this with hostility, even though she had no idea that we were there on behalf of the man accused of murdering her former best friend. To her, we were just two people wearing dark suits in a trailer park, and that was bad enough. I had little doubt that Carolyn Anton assumed we were there to take something from her.
“My name is Dan Sorensen and this is Nina Harrington. We’re lawyers from New York City, and we would like to ask you some questions about Roxanne Wells. We understand that you were her best friend in high school. In fact, we heard that a lot of people thought you were the one who was going to be the big star.”
Carolyn smiled at the compliment. I couldn’t help but think that compliments didn’t come her way too often anymore.
“Are you reporters?”
“No. Like I said, we’re lawyers. From New York City.”
“There were lots of reporters down here right after Roxanne got murdered. But most of them have left by now. I guess it’s not such big news anymore.”
“Would you mind if we asked you a few questions?” I asked.
“Sur
e,” she said, too eagerly, I thought.
She opened the door, and her daughter jumped out of her arms and scurried away. “Come on in,” Anton said.
From the looks of the inside of her double-wide, Carolyn Anton didn’t do much entertaining. Filthy was the word that first came to mind. Dishes in the sink from at least three meals ago, dog hairs on the furniture, and the smell of cat urine so strong that I assumed she must have become immune to the odor long ago.
Out of my peripheral vision I caught Nina grimace at the squalor around her. This was every woman’s worst nightmare. Every person’s, really. Alone, broke, with no real possibility of it being better tomorrow.
I decided we didn’t need to bother introducing ourselves again. I asked, “Do you know anything about Roxanne’s life in the weeks leading up to her death?”
“I saw her over Thanksgiving,” Carolyn said with obvious pride, as if it supported her status as Roxanne’s closest friend.
“Did you visit her at her mother’s house?” Nina asked.
“No,” Carolyn said, looking a bit sheepish. “But I saw her at the Old Westerbrook.”
“Was she staying there?” I asked.
“I guess so. They hire hourlies over the holidays, and so I was there doing some cleaning, and ended up seeing her. She was real nice and was happy to see me. I asked her if we could get a drink or something before she left, but she said she was real busy. I gave her my email and she said she’d friend me on Facebook, but then she died right when she got back.”
This didn’t make sense. Why would Roxanne stay in a hotel when she was coming to visit her mother? Then again, maybe that’s what celebrities did. What did I know?
“Did you talk to her at all about anything going on in her life? Specifically, about men?” Nina asked.
“No. Just what I already said. That’s all. She said she was late to something and had to go.”
“Do you remember which cottage?” I asked.
“It was number eighteen. That’s the nicest one, and so I thought, you know, only the best for Roxanne.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“No. I mean, who would she be with?”
A lover, her murderer, her mother . . . but I let the question drift away without answer.
“When was the last time you spoke to Roxanne before seeing her that time over Thanksgiving?” Nina asked.
“Oh, it’d been a really long time. Right after graduation, maybe. She went to New York that summer and . . . and I got pregnant. I invited her to my baby shower, but she didn’t come.”
That pretty much indicated we were wasting our time. Carolyn Anton didn’t know anything more about Roxanne’s life than we did.
“Kind of strange, isn’t it?” Nina remarked as we were driving away.
“How so?”
“If Roxanne hadn’t been able to sing, this probably would have been her life, right? She’d be a waitress or whatever the women who aren’t waitresses down here grow up to be. She would have married young and pushed out a baby or two by now. Who knows if the husband sticks around. And instead of that, she was royalty.”
“Makes you realize why our guy was willing to do all he did to become Legally Dead.”
“And why he’s willing to risk going to prison to keep it,” she added.
• • •
As Principal Clooney had told us, Roxanne’s mother lived in a much nicer part of town. Her home was at the end of a tree-lined street like the kind you imagine when you think of a Southern town, grand homes with well-manicured lawns. Her house fit right in, a yellow Victorian with a white, wraparound porch.
I knocked lightly on the screen door. Just getting Andrea Wells to open the door would be something of a victory. Luckily for us, she was the trusting sort who preferred to ask us face-to-face to identify ourselves, rather than calling out behind the door “Who is it?”
The moment she opened the door, the resemblance to her famous daughter was apparent. Roxanne had clearly inherited her large blue eyes and inviting smile from her mother’s side of the family. Andrea Wells was an attractive woman, but there was a strain in her face that made her look older than I had expected.
It was a look I knew all too well. She was in mourning.
“Mrs. Wells?” I said.
“Yes,” she answered cautiously.
“My name is Dan Sorensen. I’ve come all the way from New York City. I’m a lawyer representing Legally Dead, and I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Nina and I had actually scripted the introduction. We’d debated whether to reveal that we were representing L.D., and concluded we didn’t want to be accused of tricking a woman whose daughter had recently been murdered.
“Who are you again? The police?”
“No,” I said, following it with a smile. “We’re lawyers. We represent Legally Dead . . . L.D. Like you, we just want to make sure the police arrested the right man.”
It all clicked for her then. She knew we were the enemy.
“Please leave. Now,” she said sternly.
“We’re very sorry for bothering you,” Nina said, and turned and began to walk away.
I turned around, too, but only for a moment. I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I’d begun speaking, and by then my eyes were filled with tears.
“Mrs. Wells, I lost my daughter recently, too. I know what you’re going through and I am sincerely sorry for your loss. I wouldn’t be here to talk to you about a subject that is so painful unless it was very important. All we want is to be sure that another family doesn’t suffer the pain that you’re going through now.”
She took a deep breath. One that said she didn’t know quite what to do.
“People keep telling me it’s going to get better,” she finally said.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing that it wasn’t much of an answer.
“Can I ask how your daughter died?”
“It was a drunk-driving accident. My wife died with her.”
Andrea Wells started to tear up. I did, too.
“She was six years old,” I said.
Wells said, “Every day, when I wake up, it’s like Roxanne just died.”
It was a feeling I knew all too well. And while under normal circumstances I would have kept that fact to myself, I knew that approach wasn’t going to get Andrea Wells to open up to me.
“Sometimes I’ll see something in a store and think that Sarah, my wife, would like it, or I’ll hear some silly joke that I think Alexa, that was my daughter’s name, would find funny, and then there’s the awful feeling again when you realize that the first thought you had, that happy feeling about sharing something with someone you love, it just wasn’t real because they’re not there anymore.”
“How long has it been?” Wells asked.
“Eighteen months. And I suppose I can give you a little bit of good news. I can’t say it gets better, but it does get easier. For a long time after, I just couldn’t do anything, and then Nina approached me about this case, and I met with L.D., and I . . . I truly believed him when he said that he loved your daughter and did not hurt her. And I thought, wouldn’t Sarah and Alexa be proud of me if I was able to save an innocent man? I understand how you must feel. Believe me, I do. The man who killed my wife and daughter died at the scene of the accident, and to this day, I only wish he suffered more for what he did. So I understand completely that you want whoever did this to your daughter to pay for his crime. But the thing is, so does L.D. And it would be a tragedy if the person who actually murdered your daughter is not punished for what he did. All we’re asking, and I know it’s a lot, but still we need to ask, is for a few minutes of your time, so we can be sure that the right man is going to be punished. I promise, we won’t be long.”
She hesitated for a moment, clearly not sure what to do. But then she pushed open the screen door. After she stepped inside, she motioned for Nina and me to follow.
The inside of the home was as well maintained as the exteri
or. In fact, it looked a little like a page from a magazine, the way everything belonged with everything else, without matching too much. Like her famous daughter, Andrea Wells preferred light colors. The living room sofa, love seat, and easy chair, as well as the curtains, were all slightly different variations of a pale yellow.
I imagined the home was the result of the cliché you always hear about how the first thing a pop star does with the advance off her first contract is buy her parents a house. This was that house, and everything in it had likely been purchased with Roxanne’s advance. I suspected Roxanne’s childhood home, while perhaps not as grim, was still closer to Carolyn Anton’s trailer than this place.
“Mrs. Wells, like I said, we understand that you want your daughter’s killer to be punished. And the truth is, we want that, too. We’re just not sure that our client is the man who killed her. We know the police have told you that he’s guilty, but we want to make sure.”
Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I thought I saw a nod of support. As if Roxanne’s mother had her doubts, too.
“So, could you tell us whether Roxanne ever said anything about problems in her relationship with L.D.?”
“She actually didn’t talk about him much at all. You know, when Roxanne was in high school, she wasn’t allowed to go out with any boy until I’d met him. But after she moved to New York City . . .”
Mrs. Wells didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she broke off eye contact and was now staring at the floor. I got the sense that she was embarrassed to admit how little she knew about her daughter at the end, which was apparently another thing we shared.
“Were you expecting Roxanne to come for Thanksgiving with L.D.?” I asked.
“No,” Mrs. Wells said, still looking away. “It wasn’t until the last minute that Roxanne even decided to come. She first said that she had to work. I was so happy when she called and said she could get away.”
If Roxanne hadn’t planned to come to Stocks until the last minute, then she couldn’t have invited L.D. and then disinvited him. But that still didn’t address why L.D. hadn’t gone with her, especially since his own plans had fallen through at the last moment, and that meant there was still room for L.D. to feel, as Marcus Jackson had so eloquently put it, disrespected. Besides which, I suspected Roxanne’s mother would not end up being our star witness, and her story would undoubtedly change after Kaplan had some time with her.