When the Day of Evil Comes

by Melanie Wells

  “I know, sweetie. I could tell.”

  “Did my angel come?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her face fell. “He said he would.”

  “I’m sure he meant to,” I said. “Maybe you’re my angel.”

  “No, silly-bean! He looks like Mr. Martin.”

  I knew better than to argue that point.

  Liz grabbed her hand and looked at me. “You ready to go?”

  “You have no idea,” I answered. “Thank you so much for coming for me I’m so grateful. I feel like I should mow your lawn for the rest of my life or something.”

  We made our way out of the courthouse and began the walk to the car, the late afternoon sun slanting warm against my face.

  “Did you have to post bail?” I asked, guilt already sinking in on me.

  “It was kind of an adventure,” Liz said, her eyes wide. “Practice for my boys some day, I’m sure, the little hoodlums. This one,” she looked down at Christine, “I’m not too worried about.”

  If my sketchy knowledge of legal procedures was accurate, I now owed Liz Zocci twenty thousand dollars. Ten percent of my bail money, which had been posted as a bond. And about a million percent of my meager self-worth.

  I couldn’t even let myself think about that.

  “How’s Mariann?” I asked.

  “She’s out. They released her this morning.”

  “Did she go home?”

  “She checked into the Four Seasons.”

  “Not the Vendome.”

  “I don’t think she’ll ever go back to the Vendome,” she said.

  “Does Joe know where she is?”

  “I don’t think she told him. I drove her there myself.”

  We loaded into her Suburban, Liz buckling Christine into her car seat while I flicked Cheerios off the passenger seat and settled myself in. I had never been so happy in my life. A jailbird. Out on bail. Intoxicated by the luxury of riding in a car without handcuffs on.

  “Where to?” Liz asked.

  “My hotel.” I gave her the cross streets. I had no idea where we were. “If I don’t take a shower and brush my teeth, I’m going to come out of my skin.”

  “You didn’t take a toothbrush with you?” She was incredulous.

  “I lost my ability to plan ahead when the cops showed up at my door. I panicked.”

  She nodded. “I could see that. Still … no toothbrush.”

  “No kidding.” I waited a minute. “Do you think Mariann would talk to me again?”

  “She’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “I know.”

  I waited. We both knew I was desperate.

  “I’ll call her while you’re in the shower,” she said.

  We finished the drive in silence, Christine singing gaily to herself in the backseat.

  At the Best Mid-Western, while Liz and Christine waited next door at Denny’s, I took a hot shower behind a newly installed plastic shower curtain, putting myself back together slowly, luxuriating in every detail of the experience. Clean towels. A mirror. A blow dryer. Mascara/Astonishing wealth to me now.

  Once I was showered and dressed, I flew around the room, shoving my things into a suitcase. Whatever the rest of this day brought, there was no way I was spending another night at the Downtown Chicago Best Mid-Western. Not only did the place have bad mojo for me, but Joseph Zocci, the Chicago Police Department, and Peter Terry had all managed to find me. It was time to move.

  I locked my stuff in the Neon, checked out of my room, walked next door, and slid into the booth with Liz and Christine. They were sharing French fries and a chocolate shake. Christine was dipping the fries in the shake and drinking her ketchup with a straw.

  I ordered a club sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, both of which I inhaled. Christine chattered to herself and colored on the back of a place mat while Liz and I talked.

  “I talked to Mariann,” Liz said. “She said she’ll see you. She didn’t sound too good. She’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Thank you for asking her,” I said.

  I waited a minute and then asked the question that was tugging at me. “Why are you helping me?”

  Liz jerked her head over to her daughter. “My kid has good instincts. It was her idea.”

  “Thank you for posting bail. I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “They return the bond money if you come back for trial. So I’m in good shape. Unless you move to Mexico or something.”

  Little did she know. Mexico was sounding pretty good to me right about now.

  “What’s Mexico?” Christine asked.

  “It’s a place with blue sky and a beach,” Liz said. “Like Lake Michigan but warmer.”

  Christine started drawing yellow sand and a blue sky.

  “Did Mariann tell you anything?” I asked.

  “She told me everything.”

  “Was it who we thought?” I didn’t want to be too specific in front of Christine.

  “Of course.”

  “Will she leave?”

  “I doubt it.”

  We sat silently for a minute, listening to Christine hum. She ran out of paper, so her mother handed her another kids’ menu.

  “Has he done this before?” I asked Liz.

  “Many times. But I’ve never seen it this bad.”

  “Grandpa’s mean,” Christine said, without looking up.

  So much for shielding her from the brutal truth.

  Liz smiled at me. “I told you. Good instincts.”

  I watched Christine choose a brown crayon. She drew an awkward, thin stick figure, festooning it with golden wings and a silver halo.

  “Mommy, how do you spell my angel’s name? I can’t remember.”

  Liz said the letters slowly as Christine drew them.

  I watched her scrawl the name awkwardly in purple:

  E-A-R-L

  27

  LIZ GAVE ME MARIANN’S room number and hugged me good-bye, Christine reminding me once again that her angel looked like Mr. Martin and would I come see her tomorrow. I promised her I’d try.

  I couldn’t decide where to go first, the Four Seasons to talk to Mariann Zocci or to the Vendome to hunt down Earl, the porter who might really be an angel, or perhaps a defense attorney. I eventually opted for the Four Seasons, reasoning that even though Earl had said he worked nights, angels surely followed no regular schedule. He, after all, needed no sleep, at least as far as I knew about angels.

  I kept a wary eye out as I drove to the hotel, half expecting Joseph Zocci’s black Mercedes to shadow me.

  In the lobby of the Four Seasons, I passed two members of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team drinking martinis in the hotel bar, a man wearing silk pajamas and slippers asking the concierge for pipe tobacco, and a woman carrying a terrier that was wearing a little red doggie sweater. But no Joseph Zocci. The coast seemed clear.

  Another brass elevator. Another silent ride to another tasteful hotel hallway. And then I was standing in front of Mariann Zocci’s door.

  I hesitated before I knocked, gathering my thoughts as well as my resolve. I wanted to make sure this time that I asked everything that needed asking.

  My knuckles barely made a sound as I rapped on the heavy door. I wasn’t sure if the knock would even be audible from inside the room. But the door swung open in a minute, and I was looking at a shattered version of the woman I’d met the day before.

  The entire right side of her face was the color of Christine’s favorite crayon, puffy and shiny as an eggplant. Her right eye was swollen shut. Her left hand was a matching aubergine, the arm splinted and supported in a black canvas sling. She wore another Chanel sweat suit. Black this time. As though she had finally gone into mourning.

  “Good evening, Dr. Foster,” she said, as though nothing at all were unusual about her appearance.

  “Hello, Mrs. Zocci,” I replied. “Thank you for seeing me again.”

  “Please c
ome in.”

  She moved slowly, painfully, as I followed her into her suite. I stifled the urge to help her. As she passed each piece of furniture, she steadied herself with her good hand, reacquiring a modicum of balance so she could move again.

  We arrived at last at a formal seating area. She eased herself into a wing chair, raised her chin, and met my eyes.

  “What did you want to speak to me about, Dr. Foster?”

  “I meant to ask you a few things. About Erik.” I hesitated, unable to speak past the obvious legacy of violence on her face. “Are you sure you’re up to this?” I asked awkwardly.

  She smiled weakly and nodded, a tear leaking out of the corner of her good eye.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Zocci. That he’s done this to you.”

  She shook her head and cried silently.

  I leapt out of my chair and brought tissues back from the bathroom. It’s a therapist reflex. Always hand your crying client a tissue. It conveys sympathy without being invasive.

  She accepted my offering silently, dabbing at her eye as I took my seat again.

  “I won’t press charges. Against you, I mean.” She blew her nose daintily. “Joe told them it was you.”

  “I figured.”

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “Liz tells me you spent the night in jail.”

  “It wasn’t so bad.” This broken woman wasn’t getting a finger wag out of me. Not tonight, anyway, sitting there looking like that.

  “I really am very sorry,” she said. “I’ll speak to the detective tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you going to tell them?” I asked gently “About Joe?”

  Her shoulders shook with noiseless sobs. “I don’t think I can.”

  I’d worked with enough battered women to know that trying to coerce her wouldn’t do a bit of good. After all, she’d been letting him beat her for almost forty years.

  “Do your children know about this?” I asked.

  “They know. They’ve always known.”

  I waited for her to continue.

  “He came back from Vietnam a very angry man. So angry.”

  “He wasn’t like that before he went?”

  “I don’t know, really,” she said. “The truth is, I didn’t know him very well when I married him. He was just so dynamic. So charming and handsome. And powerful. I was young. Naive. I let myself be swept away by him. I didn’t know.”

  “You got more than you bargained for, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Nineteen. And such a child. I had been very sheltered. My family—my father, especially—was very protective.”

  “When did he hit you the first time?” I asked. I knew I was pressing. I longed for a cup of tea and a spoon as my therapist posture took over.

  “The night Joey was conceived,” she said, staring at her hands, watching herself twist and untwist her tissue. “We’d had a fight. He was very angry, and I always felt so guilty when he got angry. He hit me on the back of the head. With his belt. I’ll never forget the sound the belt buckle made, like being inside a bell tower.” She reached for another tissue. “And then he—That was the night Joey was conceived.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him? That first night?”

  She looked up at me, surprise on her face. “We’re Catholic, Dr. Foster.”

  “What about grace, Mrs. Zocci? Don’t Catholics believe in grace? In forgiveness?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I forgive him. I always forgive him.”

  I decided not to fight that one.

  “How did Erik feel about his father?”

  “Conflicted. Like the rest of us.” She shrugged. “He’s a very hard man to …”

  “Love?”

  “I was going to say hate,” she said.

  Not for me. I was great at hating him. Getting better at it by the minute, in fact.

  “Did Erik mention his father in his suicide note?”

  “I wish he’d left one,” she said wistfully. “Some words for me. So I could have had some idea of what he was going through.”

  “He didn’t leave a note?” I asked. “I’d been told that he’d specifically implicated me. That his note was the basis for the lawsuit against me.”

  “If there was a note, Dr. Foster, I have no knowledge of it. I never saw it.”

  I felt my heart quicken. “Was there an autopsy?”

  “I believe there was. I never asked about it.” She shuddered, her eyes glazing, as though she’d suddenly gone somewhere else. Someplace terrible. “I can’t bear to think of it. To think of them cutting my boy like that.”

  “You said Erik didn’t know how his brother died. Joe Jr.”

  “No one knows,” she said. “No one has ever known.” She looked at me again, suddenly coming back into the room. “I’d like to know how you found out.”

  “I read it in the archives of the Tribune.”

  “It was so long ago.”

  “It was just a small article. Printed the day after he fell, I think.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Nothing, really. Just that he fell from the twelfth floor of the Vendome.”

  “Did the article mention Joe?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  Her manner was such a strange, almost mystical combination of forthrightness and mystery. I couldn’t quite seem to wend my way to the heart of the truth with her.

  “Why do you think Erik chose to kill himself that way? By jumping from the same floor of the same hotel? How could he not have known?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Dr. Foster.”

  “Was it the same room?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  I looked at her for a moment, neither of us saying anything.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” I asked at last.

  She squared her chin, a small gesture of defiance. “There’s much I’m not telling you, Dr. Foster.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  She considered my question. “More to myself, probably You have to lie to yourself a lot when you’re in a situation like mine.”

  I accepted her words, silently wondering which situation, exactly, she meant.

  “You said Erik mentioned the white man to you.”

  “He believed he was a demon,” she said.

  “Okay. Demon. Did you believe him?”

  “Of course.”

  “You believe in demons, then?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Don’t you, Dr. Foster? Aren’t you, as you said, a woman of faith?”

  “I am.” So far, anyway. “Have you ever seen him?”

  “Erik’s demon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Demons needn’t bother with me, Dr. Foster. I defeated myself long ago.”

  I could feel seeds of anger sprouting in me, like weeds among the compassion she clearly needed. Anger and pity. All at once. She had defeated herself. The mottled battle-plan was traced in bruises across her face. It was infuriating to watch. And yet I had no experience with the kind of brutal intimidation she faced every day. I couldn’t possibly understand the battles being waged in the deepest part of her soul.

  “Was there anything else you wanted to say to me, Dr. Foster?”

  “Probably. But nothing I can think of now.”

  “Then would you mind excusing me?” she said. “I’m very tired. I’d like to get some rest.”

  She pushed herself up out of her chair with her good hand, barely maintaining her balance.

  I stood and reached to help her, out of reflex, really. She submitted to the assistance wordlessly, a strange, newfound intimacy passing unspoken between us.

  “Can I do anything for you before I leave?” I asked.

  “If you could get my pain medication from the bathroom. And bring me a glass of water.”

  She made her way slowly to the bedroom while I fol
lowed behind her, watching her carefully to steady her if she fell. We parted at the door to the bedroom.

  I flipped on the light in the bathroom and spotted the pill bottle on the marble countertop. I checked the label. The prescription was a refill. For thirty forty-milligram tablets of OxyContin, one of the more potent narcotic pain relievers.

  I was surprised to see such a high dosage prescribed for such a tiny woman. And I was surprised to see it written as a refill. OxyContin was so addictive that prescribing physicians recommended patients flush the unused pills down the toilet when the medication was no longer needed. I knew, because we dealt with this addiction commonly at the clinic. It was the cachet drug of choice among prescription drug junkies.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, Mariann was perched on the edge of the bed, her feet suspended above the floor like a child’s. I took her the pills and fixed her a glass of ice water.

  “You should eat something with this medication,” I said. “Otherwise, you’re likely to get nauseous.”

  “I’ve taken it before. I’ll have room service send something up.”

  I went to the living room and retrieved my bag, pulling out Erik’s journal. I returned to the bedroom and handed the journal to her.

  “You said you wanted to know what he’d been going through,” I said. “I found this a few days ago. In his dorm room.”

  She reached for it with one of her tiny, spidery hands, tears pooling in her one open eye.

  “His last entry is from May of his freshman year,” I said. “He doesn’t mention hurting himself. It won’t answer that question for either of us.”

  She looked up at me, fear furrowing her brow. I knew she was afraid of what she would find between those pages. “You’ve read it?”

  I nodded. “I would have given it to you last night. I wasn’t sure whether you would want to see it. It’s a tough read.”

  “He mentions me?”

  “Mostly his father,” I said. “And his pain for you.”

  She gripped the book in both hands.

  “Thank you, Dr. Foster. I’m so grateful.”

  I didn’t, know how long that gratitude would hold. Erik’s journal clanged with reverberations from her choices.

  We said our good-byes. I thanked her again for talking to me and then let myself out, leaving her sitting alone on the edge of the bed.