Burning Blue

by Paul Griffin

  I was still suspended, but as part of my bail agreement I was required to honor my obligation to meet with her once a week.

  “You mean she, don’t you, Doctor?”

  “I was referring to her disfigurement.”

  “I don’t care about it, okay? It’s so not important. What, you’re afraid that once I see it, I won’t want to hang out with her anymore, right? That once the mystery of what’s underneath those bandages is over, the fascination will have worn off for me. Or that maybe it’ll disgust me? The lack of symmetry? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “No, Jay, I wasn’t thinking any of those things at all. I wasn’t even aware you hadn’t seen the burn yet. I was merely suggesting the act fascinates you. That it may well be impossible for a person like you to understand how someone could willfully do such a thing to another human being.”

  “A person like me?”

  “Yes.” She leaned forward, tapped a note into her computer. “I’ll have to write a letter to the DA about you, of course.”

  “Going to tell him I’m a nut job, right? Thanks a bunch, Doctor.”

  “I’m going to tell him you’re a great kid.”

  I was actually touched, but not so much that I was above setting my magic phone onto her desk and ripping off her BlackBerry’s new password.

  Later that Friday afternoon and into the night, I raided Schmidt’s patient files for Angela Sammick’s case folder. Angela had made no mention of Dave Bendix, but she had body image issues that Schmidt rated severe. She noted that Angela had a plastic surgery wish list on perfectbeauty.com. I torched through the firewall, maybe five seconds. Angela had uploaded pictures of herself. Using the site’s graphics tools, she reconstructed her body, but most of her wish list focused on her face, new nose, chin, cheekbones.

  I went out onto the fire escape with a cup of what I thought was instant cocoa until I sipped it. It was one of those no-frills brands, and the label had said chocolate mint, but it tasted more like boiled Scope. The fresh air felt great for all of ten seconds before it became too cold for somebody wearing a tee and boxers. The stars didn’t so much twinkle through the pines as sever them.

  I sat on the living room floor, pressing my back against the radiator grate. Across the room, the wall looked weird. Until two days ago, my father’s paintings had covered it entirely, gifts from friends and artists. But now there was a box of blank wall where the painting hocked for my bail money had been, I couldn’t remember which. The art had become ordinary, the way you rarely look out a window to take in the view after a month or so of living in a place.

  Nicole called. “My dad just left,” she said. She sounded really groggy. “I can’t drive. Come over. Please?”

  The security company SUV was back out in front of the Castro house. The door opened. Sylvia was teary. She led me to the kitchen, where Mrs. Castro was crying. “A hit job,” she said. “The detective thinks it’s possible the Sammick girl was paid to do it.”

  I’d been contemplating the same idea on the ride over. That new Angela on perfectbeauty.com didn’t come cheap, $135,000. Now I understood why Detective Barrone hadn’t seemed too happy when Angela was caught. She was holding back on the arrest in the hope Angela would make contact with the person who hired her to do the hit on Nicole. Could Dave Bendix have promised to pay for all that plastic surgery in exchange for Angela’s burning Nicole? Why, though? How could burning Nicole help Dave? It couldn’t. Being connected in any way to the attack almost guaranteed he wouldn’t get into Harvard.

  “Your father’s book,” Mrs. Castro said. “Did you remember to bring it?”

  I hadn’t. “How’s Nicole about all this?”

  “Actually, she seems to be hanging pretty tough about the Sammick situation. We just got the call. Emma died this morning.”

  Her bedroom was cold and dark, but sweat glistened on her forehead. The only light came from a miserable crescent moon being dunked into brown clouds. She was lying on top of the covers. Her pajama bottoms stuck to her legs. She wore a thick hoodie. The front was rolled up to cool her sweaty stomach. The window was open. I went to close it. “Leave it,” she said. “Please.” Her hair was messy, straggly over the bandage on her cheek. She put out her hand for me to hold it. “Prozac,” she said.

  I looked to her night table for a prescription bottle and found none. “Where is it?”

  She shook her head. “The shrink made me take it. Or made Mom make me.”

  “I thought Schmidt was a psychologist.” You needed to be a psychiatrist to prescribe Prozac. My father was on it after my mother was killed.

  “The other shrink,” Nicole said. “I can’t get out of bed now, but I don’t want to be asleep. I took her with me to the national Girl Scouts conference speech last spring. The pageant directors, you know? They set up these events. This was one of my first speeches after the coronation. All those mothers looking up at me, their daughters looking up to me. I was trembling. Emma calmed me down. She introduced me, not a twitch of nervousness I could see. She spoke so well, a little adult. She was amazing. ‘You are so going to rock this,’ she whispered into my ear as I took the podium. ‘No way you can’t. I’m your good luck charm.’ She was, too. She was my good luck angel. People say it all the time: The world was a better place with her in it. You dismiss it as a cliche, but the problem is it’s true. It also means that the world is a worse place without her in it.” She put her hand to my cheek. She pulled me to her so that I was spooning her. She smelled of strawberry shampoo and antiseptic. We watched the moonlight go weak on the walls with the thickening clouds. After a few minutes she started to breathe more slowly and then snore, very lightly. Then she sneezed and fell into a sneezing fit. She went to the bathroom.

  The neighbor’s cat was at the window, staring in. When I went to close the window, the cat jumped away. Nicole watched from the bathroom, blowing her nose.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The next day, Saturday, I called Nicole’s cell, and she didn’t pick up. I tried the house phone and got the machine. When I got home from work Saturday night, I hadn’t heard back from her. Sunday afternoon, I got her mom on the house phone. “She’s sick with a terrible flu, Jay. She’s been sleeping all weekend.”

  I hadn’t slept all weekend. I had been trying to figure out what my father was doing in Marathon. I couldn’t get it out of my head, what he told me that night when I asked him what he’d done with all his attempts at painting. “I burned them,” he’d said.

  I met Cherry at Sbarro for a slice. “Here’s the thing about boys,” she said. “You’re all idiots. This isn’t PMS bitchy she’s going through, okay? She lost a sister.”

  “Technically, they weren’t sisters.”

  “Technically, you’re brainless. This is exactly what I’m talking about. You need to give her space, Jay. Tell me you didn’t text her.”

  “A couple of times. Okay, four.”

  “You’re worse than a girl. Give her a few days. How are you doing, though? About Emma, I mean. Are you okay?”

  “Me? Fine. I mean, yes it sucks, but you know. It’s not like I knew her. Collectively I spent maybe a couple of hours with her. Seriously, I’m cool.”

  “You’re so not cool, you poor boy.” She pulled me into a hug. I was exhausted, and I sort of cried into her hair. “Crying can be sexy when it’s done in a rugged albeit sensitive dude way,” she said. “Can I bite your earlobe? Just a nibble? No?”

  My suspension ended the next morning, Monday. I was eating by myself, under the B-wing stairs. A bunch of dudes from wrestling rolled up on me. Rick Kerns was suspended for another week, but this other heavyweight was happy to fill in for him as pack leader. He nodded. “Spaceman. Heard you and Dave are cool about Nicole.”

  “Nothing’s going on,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Hey, that was ballsy. What you did for her, I mean. Jay, seriously, man, come to practice sometime. We need dudes like you on the team.” He nodded again as he headed off.
<
br />   “Later, Jay,” somebody else said as they left.

  After school I headed down to the Hoboken waterfront to meet my father and his friend from the old days. She was a lawyer. She couldn’t take the case because she wasn’t licensed to practice in New Jersey, but she knew we were broke and was happy to give us free advice. Her name was Camilla, and she chain-smoked. “I think your best bet is to try to get the Lyles woman to drop the burglary charge,” she said. “That might get the judge in the mind-set to reduce the obstruction charge or maybe even throw it out.”

  “How do we get her to drop the charge?” my father said.

  “Steve, not to tell stories in front of Jay, but do you remember that time you had a couple too many from the frat house keg and ditched me to hang with that pretty little blond thing? What did you do the next day?”

  “I apologized.”

  “On bended knee you apologized. And you were sincere. We worked it out.” She nodded to me. “Offer her compassion, Jay. She just lost a daughter.” Her phone beeped. “Fellas, I have to get a man out of jail. See you around.”

  The air was cold, but the sun was warm. “Steakhouse or salad bar?” my dad said.

  He didn’t need to be gnawing on rib fat. “Afraid it’ll have to be rabbit food.”

  He slapped my knee. “Maybe I ought to go with you to see the Lyles woman.”

  “Thanks, but it’ll be better if I go solo. You know, so it doesn’t look like I’m going because my old man forced me to.”

  “You ever gonna cut that hair?”

  “When I start stepping on it.”

  “That’ll be an interesting look.” He sighed as he pushed himself up from the bench. “Salad, huh? Bleh.”

  “Dad, seriously, it’s cool if you have a girlfriend in Marathon.”

  “Jay, seriously, back off. There’s nothing going on down there. Let’s go, we’re getting steaks.”

  After school the next day, Tuesday afternoon, I headed for Mrs. Lyles’s house. I bought flowers but realized they would make me look like a kiss-ass, and I gave them away. I wasn’t into my second rap on the door when it opened. Her eyes were puffy slits rimmed with washed-out mascara. She smoked a cigarette. “I’m just on my way out,” she said.

  “Ma’am, my name is Jay Nazzaro.”

  “What do you want?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, wait, you’re him. You’re the. .” She slammed the door.

  I nodded to nobody but myself. I was at the curb when I heard “Wait.”

  I headed back up to the porch and waited at the threshold. “You see me holding the door for you, don’t you?” she said.

  The house was more of a wreck than the last time I’d. . been there. We went to the kitchen. “Sit.” She laid out coffee mugs. “That night at the party a couple years ago. Angela told me you stood up for her.” She poured old coffee. “The detective told me your name, but I couldn’t place it until just now, when I saw your face.” She pulled a faux leather bound album from a stack on the table and flipped to a sketched portrait of me. Angela must have drawn it from memory, because I couldn’t remember posing for a picture like this. She nailed me, my eyes, my trying not to look scared. I hated her a little more for getting inside me like that.

  “She told me the whole story,” Mrs. Lyles said. “Or at least the story that was told to her. She herself remembered just tatters of it. I told her she should go out with you, but she said she wasn’t good enough.” Her eyes went to her wristwatch. “I have to visit my daughter now. I’m afraid. I’d like to know if you would come with me.”

  FORTY-NINE

  The last place I should have been with a tracking bracelet on my ankle was a juvenile detention center, but I had to get Bobbie Lyles to drop the burglary charge. I was stunned when the guard let me in. “Perfectly legal and more common than you would think,” she said. “Parolees visiting prisoners, you know?”

  Angela was considered too dangerous to others and herself for a non-secure, face-to-face meeting. A guard escorted her to the chair behind the Plexiglas partition. She was a mess with a black eye and a split lip. Her mother gagged and hurried out for the bathroom. Angela eyed me. “So sweet of you to visit, Jameson.” She was definitely medicated, spacey eyes. All the face jewelry was gone, of course. The pinhole by her lip was infected. She was pale. “The other girls aren’t really feeling me,” she said.

  “Especially when you’re around anything liquid, right?” Her jumper was an oddly cheerful color, bright teal. “Why’d you follow us to my apartment house that day?” I said. “What, you just couldn’t resist?”

  “I was bombed.”

  “Driving drunk. Nice. Lucky you weren’t killed.”

  She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Yeah, lucky me.”

  The room was freezing, but Angela’s sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were a mess, lots of scars, cigarette burns. One of them was elaborate, a pentangle. She caught me looking at it. “Pretty, right?”

  “The test run?” I said, referring to that very first email she sent Mrs. Marks.

  She turned her forearm out so we both could see the burn better. “I think it looks righteous. Should have seen when I did it, the tiny little bubbles. I swear, I was salivating. Like it was juicy, you know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t, Angela. So that thing about Nicole giving you her jeans. You made it up.”

  “No, it was true.”

  “Then how could you burn her after she was so nice to you?”

  “Because she was so nice to me.” She picked at the pentangle scar. “You don’t think it looks cool?”

  “Why are you protecting him?”

  She rolled down her sleeves. “Have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Angela, did you ever ask yourself, Why me?”

  “Are you kidding? Since I’m like three years old.”

  “No, I mean why this nutcase picked you to do the job. He must have known you hated Nicole, right? The only dude that comes to mind there is Dave Bendix. I know about you two, okay? I have video.”

  “No you don’t, Spaceman. You have Dave Bendix at a wrestling match I happened to be at. You have me cheering him on, like the three hundred other people in that gym. You have shit. Look, my lawyer tells me that in like a week the shrinks will have gotten together and deemed me nuts, and I’ll be whisked to a psych center for four years. I’ll be drawing pictures and watching movies all day and getting all these great meds. After that, three years probation, self check-in parole. I’m not saying anything about anybody else who may or may not have been involved.”

  “But Dave can’t touch you now. It’s done. You’re not going to get any more time added to your sentence for turning him in.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “You just don’t get it. You don’t get any of this. You’re perfectly incapable of understanding.”

  “You don’t want to see the dude who put you up to this fry?”

  “I would love to see him fry-are you kidding? But it wasn’t Dave. Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Are you kidding? Then who did it? Who paid you to burn Nicole?”

  “I. Don’t. Know. Like I told Barrone. I wish I knew. She offered to get the DA to halve my sentence if I could ID the contract issuer. Why are you winking at me?”

  “I’m not. My eye twitches when I haven’t slept in three days. How could you not know who made you burn her?”

  “I got a letter, maybe three months ago, no return address. Letter says, basically, ‘Nicole Castro needs to burn.’ Letter says how it might happen, maybe somebody should throw battery acid into her face. If I do the job, I get a hundred grand, enough to get the hell out of here, maybe go to France, where people are cool and leave you alone, start a new life, go to art school or some shit, you know? Of course I’m like, this is too good to be true. There was a combo code and an address to this storage place off I-95. I go there, small locker, only things in it are a pair of Priority Mail envelopes, again no return address of course, but lots of hundred dolla
r bills with a note that says half now, half after. And what do you know, all of a sudden I have fifty k in my backpack.”

  “Why two Priority envelopes? He couldn’t fit the money in one?”

  “You don’t have to go to the post office window if a package is under thirteen ounces, which both were. Fifty k weighs a little over a pound-I checked. Cut the stack in half, you have two roughly nine ounce packages, just drop them into any old mailbox.”

  “You believed him, that he would pay you the second half?”

  She leaned in. “Dude, are you serious? I would have done it for five thousand. And anyway, he paid me the balance.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Unbelievable, right? A psycho with morals. Barrone seized it all anyway, the bitch.” She leaned back. “Not doing the job wasn’t an option. He had my address. Anybody nuts enough to advance me fifty k to burn Nicole is nuts enough to drop a bullet into the back of my skull if I tried to beat him out of the money. I’m the victim here too, Jay. I had no choice.”

  “Except maybe to go to the police?”

  “You’re funny. I tried to get info on him, in case he tried to get away with not paying the second fifty k, but I couldn’t turn up anything. I hacked the storage place’s files. Dude ordered the locker rental by mail, like sent a hundred-dollar cash down payment with an actual paper form. Who does such things anymore, I ask you. Registered as Joe Smith of Hopper Lane someplace in Florida. That checked out to be an unoccupied HUD-owned foreclosure.”

  “You tapped HUD?”

  “Please, it was easier than planting Trojans in Canadian discount drug spam. You know, Spaceman, you just might have the chops to run this dude down.” She waved me closer to the glass and whispered. “The money? It was actually a hundred k for the down payment. I left fifty of it where Barrone could find it, but I have the rest tucked away. You track this nut down, get me his name, let me be the one to break the news to Barrone, and I’ll take care of you. I swear.”