The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  “Do you think they’re ever having sex again?”

  “My mother and my dead father? No.”

  Catherine sat up and turned to face me, her feet on the armrest between us. “Tom and Pam.”

  I sighed. “If we’re ever that much not on the same page, please just end it. Right in the middle of dinner, I don’t even care.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “Okay, it probably isn’t. But I’m just saying, don’t let your manners and good breeding convince you it’s better to sit through an experience like that.”

  She laughed a little on good breeding. “I wouldn’t have guessed that Tom was a commitment-phobe.”

  “He’s not. But you can’t just randomly suggest dropping by a jewelry store to look at rings. Or can you? Is that what straight people are doing now?”

  “When Wystan proposed,” Catherine said, “he asked my father for permission.”

  “Ew.”

  “I didn’t know about it until after I’d already said yes. So it’s no wonder that the marriage didn’t last.”

  “And you didn’t call it off right then and there?”

  “Things had already been set in motion. I thought that if I just tried hard enough, I could be the girl he thought I was. But it didn’t work.”

  “Spoiler alert.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me.

  I slowed to a stop at Long Street, my brakes grabbing at the road a little. To our right, the inky black of the river was partly illuminated on its far side, a pulse of blue and red and white. I squinted, trying to bring the scene into focus. At least a dozen squad cars, maybe more; the reflection of the swirling lights bounced off the half-solid river.

  I tore myself away from the spectacle across the frozen water and turned left onto Long. Catherine rearranged herself so that her arm was linked through mine on the armrest. “I’m going to miss you too, you know,” she said.

  I felt myself smile in the dark.

  “This has been nice, hasn’t it? Behaving like an old married couple, going on double dates where our relationship is definitely the more solid of the two?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now we just need matching silk menswear pajamas and the transformation will be complete.”

  “Why does your version of old married coupledom sound like something from It Happened One Night?”

  “There’s nothing I like better than to meet a high-class mama that can snap ’em back at ya,” she drawled, her head on my shoulder as I drove. “You’ll pick me up from the airport when I get home?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe we can get dinner somewhere nice on the way. The Pearl.”

  “You won’t have gotten your fill of oysters in Rhode Island?”

  I felt her look up at me. “They have oysters there?” she said, her tone one of mock surprise. “Shit, I might not come back.”

  “You better.”

  Catherine tucked her head back at my shoulder. “They might have oysters, but they don’t have you.”

  ELEVEN

  I slept a little, possibly a self-defense mechanism after such a tense evening—a tense day, really. But I woke around one, startled and slightly overheated. Beside me, Catherine was at the bottom of the ocean, untouchable. Finally I gave up and went downstairs to charge my phone. While I waited for it to power up, I poured a glass of water and looked out at the snowy backyard, just as I had last night. When the phone finally buzzed back to life, I went to the Dispatch website to see if there were any more details about what had happened to Mickey Dillman.

  Police: off-duty officer found dead near Scioto River.

  I leaned against the granite countertop on my elbows and read the rest of the article.

  The body of 43-year old Michael “Mickey” Dillman was found near the Olentangy River below the Long Street Bridge on Saturday evening, police said. He was a veteran officer of the department, serving a decade in the detective bureau before taking on a supervisor position in the Administrative bureau in 2014. He was currently on leave following surgery and expected to return to active duty in two weeks …

  Even though Dillman was no longer in the detective bureau, the people who’d worked with him probably felt this acutely. Not that there was ever such a thing as good timing for someone to die, but this wasn’t it: almost two years to the day that my father was killed.

  I thought of Tom’s face in the streetlights outside the restaurant.

  I started to send a text to him but wasn’t sure what to say. Anyway, it was the middle of the night. Middle-of-the-night text messages were fraught with meaning, though maybe that wasn’t the case if they were in reference to a dead body.

  I thought about getting in the car and driving over to Nightshade, but I already knew that this case wasn’t going to be as simple as finding the missing—or at least misplaced—employee back at work like nothing had happened. Instead, I pulled up the club’s Facebook page and saw half a dozen new posts of varying degrees of politeness, asking why they weren’t open, and what was going on.

  That was an excellent question.

  * * *

  Catherine was mostly silent on the drive across 670. Her flight was early, six-fifteen, the type that always seems like a good idea until you remember how shitty early flights are. Maybe that was why she was quiet, why her posture was rigid, uneasy. When I pulled up to the United doors at the passenger drop-off area, she turned to me, her eyes impossible, and said, “Do you want to come with me?”

  We looked at each other for a long time. The flight left in less than an hour. It wasn’t a real invitation, and we both knew it.

  “I mean,” she went on, “I’ll be busy the whole time, but since you’re going to miss me so much, why don’t you just come?”

  I didn’t want to argue right before she left. I said, “Catherine.”

  “So I guess you aren’t going to miss me then?”

  Something had changed overnight, and I didn’t know what. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I have work.”

  “Work from the hotel.”

  “How?”

  “Um, your crusty MacBook? Can’t you Google people from anywhere?”

  “Well, there’s more to what I do than that.”

  Catherine unbuckled her seat belt and pulled her handbag up from the floor. “Right, you have to run around talking about crimes to what’s-his-face, Tom, who’s clearly in love with you, by the way—”

  “That’s not—”

  “Just kiss me good-bye, okay?”

  “But—”

  “Roxane.”

  I didn’t know how to talk to her when she got like this, so I leaned over and kissed her, my eyes squeezed shut. “Can I call you tonight?”

  “I’ll call you, okay? I’ll be in and out of things but I’ll call when I can.” She got out of the car without saying anything else and went around to the trunk and rapped her knuckles on the back window.

  I pulled the release and got out too. “Come on, what kind of a good-bye is this?”

  She heaved her rolling suitcase out of the trunk and shoved it toward the curb with one heeled boot. “You’re asking me?”

  “Catherine, if you really wanted me to come with you, why didn’t you ask me last week? Or last night, when we were talking about it?”

  Yanking up the handle on the suitcase, she said, “I don’t know why I asked at all. I have to go.”

  “Please don’t do this. You always do this.”

  “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  She dragged the suitcase up over the curb and disappeared through the sliding glass doors that led into the airport.

  I stared after her, my heart pounding. The thing of it was, I wasn’t even surprised. Catherine had always been this way, picking fights out of nowhere, acting like I was the one being unreasonable. Especially when she was about to leave. She’d done a lot of leaving, both physically and emotionally.
I thought something was different this time—we were different, older, more self-aware—but something always seems different this time, right up to the moment that it doesn’t.

  I knew she wouldn’t turn around and she didn’t.

  * * *

  The officer behind the desk at the police headquarters knew me and clipped a visitor’s badge to my collar because my hands were full—coffee for Tom, tea for me. I went up to the third floor, which housed the detective unit. I squeezed in through the door on the heels of someone I didn’t recognize and wound my way through the maze of cubicles until I found Tom’s. His chair was empty, but his coat was still there. I set the tray of beverages down on the desk and stood around awkwardly for a while, thinking about what Catherine had said. Clearly in love with you, by the way. What would she have said if I hadn’t interrupted her?

  I looked at my phone, pretending to myself that she actually might have called already.

  She hadn’t.

  There wasn’t much in the way of personal items in Tom’s workspace, but I did notice a photo of him with my father—an actual photograph on glossy paper—tacked to the burlap wall behind his computer monitor. I pulled out the pushpin and squinted at the picture. It was one I’d never seen before, probably from five or more years before Frank died. They were both in jeans, both holding beer bottles, Tom caught in mid-laugh while my father looked right into the camera, his piercing blue eyes crinkling up. They were outside, in front of a picnic shelter or something. I flipped it over; the back bore a few lines of neat cursive handwriting in black ink.

  Tom Heitker and Frank Weary, July 4

  I sat on the edge of Tom’s desk and studied the photo again, wondering who had taken it.

  When I heard footsteps on the carpeted hallway outside Tom’s cube, I stuck my head out.

  “What the hell are you doing in there?” Ed Sanko asked. Then he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. I guessed he had decided after the Arthur Ungless case last summer that I wasn’t just a brunette Veronica Mars, but a detective with some smarts. He added, “He’s around here somewhere. You hear what happened last night?”

  I nodded. Sanko gestured at the photo I was holding.

  “I found that in a box of old pictures this morning. I was looking for ones of Mickey.”

  “You know what this is from?”

  “Some cookout Mickey and Sunny had, years ago.”

  I wondered if this was when my father had bonded with Sunny over the halo-halo. “Did you know him well?”

  Sanko held up a hand and tipped it back and forth. “He left not too long after I moved to homicide, and he was over the later shift anyway. But we all work so close. You know how it is.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear about him.”

  “Yeah.” He stepped farther into Tom’s cube and rested an arm on top of the burlap divider. “Kinda glad to run into you,” he said, his voice lower. “You think he’s okay?”

  “Tom?”

  Sanko nodded.

  I thought about the conversation I’d had with Tom last night. Do you ever feel like … It was possible to be okay and not okay at the same time. But I told Sanko what he wanted to hear: “I think so. Why?”

  “I just … I know you two are close, so he probably confides in you. But it seems like something is going on. Even before we heard about Dillman, it seemed that way.”

  Before I could respond, Tom rounded the corner, saying to someone over his shoulder, “I’ll definitely let you know as soon as you can get it back, okay?” He stopped, looked at me and Sanko and added, “Oh. Hi.”

  “I was just telling Weary here about this picture,” Sanko said, nodding a good-bye to me before disappearing into his own cube.

  Tom sat down heavily in his chair. “Please say this is coffee and that it’s for me.”

  I pulled the cup with my tea out of the paper beverage tray. “With real cream and everything.”

  “Bless you.” He peeled back the plastic tab on the lid. “So you’re snooping around my desk now.”

  “What can I say? Nosiness runs in the family.” I sat back down on the edge of his desk. He wasn’t acting like someone who was in love with me. He was much more interested in the coffee. “I just saw this and had to get a closer look.”

  Tom took the photo from me and studied it for a while. “It’s like a time capsule.”

  I glanced over his shoulder at the photo. My father looked about the same as he had up to the end, though maybe he eventually got a little greyer at the temples. Tom was thirty pounds heavier in the photo, almost baby-faced, and he looked happy in a way that I’d never seen in person. It wasn’t like a time capsule so much as it was an alternate reality.

  “Ah, Christ,” Tom said. He opened a desk drawer and swept the photo inside. “Thanks for coming in this morning. I’m sorry about ditching you last night like that.”

  “Well, you should probably be telling Pam that, not me,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. Something sank in his expression. “I just mean—oh, never mind. It was fine. You know she adores Catherine. It’s not lost on me that I keep introducing people in my life to other people in my life and they always wind up liking each other better than they like me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. My mother and Pam? Pam and Catherine?”

  He finally gave me a small smile. “Your mother and Rafael.”

  “See, you’re getting the gist.” I sipped my tea. “But anyway, I know you didn’t want me to come in so I could whine about how I’m the least likeable member of my family.”

  He grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen. “I could debate you on that point all day, but you’re right. Let’s go into a conference room.”

  * * *

  Conference room was better than interrogation room, though the two felt similar—too small, bad lighting. I told Tom and another detective, Evangeline Clark, about how my path crossed, so to speak, with Mickey Dillman. The story was short on real information: the previous week, Dillman, who wasn’t even on active duty, had showed up at Addison’s apartment, told her roommate to have Addison call him about an unknown matter, and left an old business card that identified him as holding a job he hadn’t actually had in years.

  “I suppose if I was out of cards,” Clark said, playing devil’s advocate, “for my current gig, but I had some old ones laying around—no, I still don’t see it.” She was new to the detective bureau, about thirty, an athletic black woman in a tailored blue suit. “Because why would he be identifying himself as a police officer at all? He hasn’t been working.”

  I said, “Would he have been required to hand in his badge before he went on medical leave?”

  Tom tapped his pen on the legal pad. “Depends. We’ll have to find out the exact nature of the leave. And you have no idea what he wanted with this woman you’re looking for?”

  “None. He didn’t say, and the roommate didn’t ask.”

  Tom gave a heavy sigh. “I can see it being nothing. Like he sideswiped her car and was trying to do the right thing, while also trying to get out of doing the right thing.”

  “Is that like him? I didn’t know him,” Clark added, the last part to me.

  “I don’t know. He was a decent guy, maybe a little bit inclined to cut corners sometimes. But who isn’t.”

  The younger detective elbowed him. “You, for example.”

  Tom gave a half-smile. “I knew you were going to say that. Anyway, I guess Addison’s the one who could probably tell us what was going on, if only we knew where she was. You said she took a suitcase?”

  I sipped my tea, which was cold and had been for a while. “I said I think she took a suitcase, based on the wheel marks in her carpet.”

  “Right, I forgot I was talking to the resident carpetologist here,” Tom said.

  I laughed around a mouthful of tea and almost gagged. Nothing was funny, but everything was. Tom laughed a little bit as well. Clark shook her head, saying, “You two.”

  After they
were done with me, Tom walked me down to the lobby. “Just keep me posted if you figure out where she is.”

  “So you aren’t going to tell me to stay away from it?”

  “Not that you’d do it anyway,” he said, holding the elevator door open for a pair of patrol cops in bulky uniform jackets and gloves, “but you’re trying to give this woman’s friends some piece of mind, while this—we—I have no idea what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Any idea what happened?”

  Tom lowered his voice a little. “He was pretty banged up from being in the river—from the rocks. It’s so cold out, and the water’s half-frozen, too, so it’s hard to say how long. Or where he went in. No sign of his car yet—he’s had the same car forever, this black Thunderbird, from the mid-nineties. His pride and joy. I’ve been in that car. It’s surreal, putting out an alert for a vehicle that I’ve personally been in.” He shook his head. “Not supposed to happen like that. But anyway, no, no idea what happened.”

  “Did he drown?”

  “Don’t know yet. There was a big gash, here,” he said, touching the back of his head. “But they won’t know until the autopsy is finished.”

  “Could it have been a suicide?”

  He winced a little. “I never thought he was depressed. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Right.”

  “From what Sunny said—his wife, from what she said, he wasn’t in a great place. Emotionally.”

  “Assaulting your spouse will do that.”

  Tom pressed his mouth into a thin line. “That,” he said, “and the back problems, not being able to work. It sounded like a lot. But if you’re asking technically, based on the state he was in, the answer is maybe. Please keep that to yourself.”

  “Of course.”

  “And will you let Andrew know that we might want to talk to him about Addison?”

  “He’ll be thrilled.”