After Her: A Novel

by Joyce Maynard

  “Why would anybody admit they were guilty?” I asked him. “When they know they’ll be let off if they just keep their mouth shut?”

  “It’s human nature,” he told me. “Every sorry mope I ever had dealings with is proud of his crimes. He knows what he did was against the law, and that society wants to punish him for it. He probably knows it was wrong. But he’s kind of like one of those dogs that lays a turd on the rug that wants to go back and point it out to you. Like it’s his big accomplishment. He really showed them all, doing that. There’s a part of this guy that’s proud he got your attention. He likes it that you want to listen to him. He’s got a reason to keep talking.

  “You know those punks that write graffiti on buildings or bridges or whatever? And they sign their name? Same thing. They’re doing something people tell them not to. So what’s the deal with the signature? There it is again. Pride. Arrogance, more like it.”

  Not that conducting an interrogation of a suspect was a piece of cake, my father told me. Far from it. Most criminals he’d had the pleasure of interrogating were smart bastards, he said—excuse his French. A murderer didn’t want to spend the rest of his life behind bars just because he had to brag about some job he did, knocking off his bookie or shooting his mother when she told him one too many times to pick up his socks. That’s why a good homicide interrogation required a little psychology.

  “Okay,” he told me. “First thing. You get this loser in the room, and you sit him on a bench. There’s nothing comfortable about this place. Nothing inviting. Your job is to keep Short Eyes off balance. Never let him forget it’s you in charge.

  “It should be a hard bench. The lighting matters. Bright. Harsh. Acoustics in the interrogation room are nuts, and that’s just how you want it. Every click of the lighter, your guy hears it. Scrape of your chair on the floor to drive him crazy.”

  Something in my father changed then, as he talked about his work. He said words he normally would never have said in front of my sister and me. He was in another world. In the interrogation room probably.

  “Different detectives have different styles. But one thing we all know, you’ve got to get him off balance, tighten the screws. Maybe you cuff him to the chair. Maybe you light up a cigarette or two and leave him sitting there to watch, knowing he’s dying for a smoke. He wants to take a piss, he has to ask you. Maybe you let him, maybe you don’t.

  “Now, here’s something I’ve taken care of, before I even bring the shitheel into the room—”

  Shitheel. I didn’t put that part in my paper, but that was the word he used.

  “It’s a small room, probably, but I fill it, floor to ceiling, all four walls maybe, with file cabinets,” my father told me. “On every drawer of every one, I write in big letters the name of his victim. Or victims, if there’s more than one. Like we’ve got so much evidence accumulated against the guy, it took a wall of files to hold it. This scares the shit out of the guy.”

  I asked him then what was really in the file cabinets.

  “Not a goddamned thing. We might have nothing on the guy. We’re messing with his coconut. But he’s sweating now.”

  “Isn’t that against the law?” I asked my father. “Like lying? Isn’t this kind of mean?”

  “May I remind you what he did that got him here in the first place? We’re talking about a scumbag who raped some woman, or cut her throat. Shot some poor loser full of lead for a cash register full of fives and ones. If I hurt his feelings now and then, I’m okay with that.

  “I may decide to take his belt away. Or his shoelaces. Maybe after a few hours, if he’s not cooperating, I decide it’s time to get myself a nice steak dinner and I leave him there, just sitting on that hard bench in his cuffs. Have myself a nice piece of pie while I’m at it. I’m in no hurry to get back. This guy’s not going anywhere. If he wets his pants, or worse, that’s not my problem.”

  He was on a roll now. I didn’t even need to ask him questions anymore. He was just going.

  “When I come back, he’s like a cat scratching to get out, he’s so crazy. He doesn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch if he had one, which he doesn’t. He can smell it on your jacket that you’ve just had a good piece of meat. That and a smoke. He’s got to have a cigarette, and you’re not giving him one.

  “This is where I’m nice to him maybe. I do a U-turn on the guy. I’m his brother now. His pal. Though make no mistake, it’s me in charge. If he can keep me happy, I might be nice to him. He wants my approval now. He might want to impress Susie Snowflake, but the one that really matters to him now is me. Plus, he can see the pack of Luckys in my pocket. Just calling out to him.

  “ ‘You play any sports back at school, buddy?’ I ask him. Though I can tell to look at the guy—his soft middle, sloping shoulders—the closest he ever got to a ball game is the refreshment stand. Me, I’m the varsity forward that never knew his name. He emulates me, understand? I’m the big guy with the letter jacket.

  “Could be now’s when I put a hand on his shoulder. I call him by his Christian name, not the shortened version. No nickname here. We’re man-to-man.”

  I asked my father if he ever yelled at these criminals. Did he get really mad? Call the person names?

  “Yelling won’t work,” he told me. “Want to know the truth about this character? His momma beat him more in first grade than you’re ever going to. You gotta break him down easy. Chip away at that armor. Maybe, after a long time, you offer him a cigarette. I got my special lighter just for this, my Zippo, and I light his for him, like we’re old pals now. He’s thinking ‘This detective’s not so mad at me after all.’

  “You tell him, ‘Look, bud, I hear you. One look at that girl and you could tell she was a tease. She probably had it coming.’ ”

  I remember the look on his face as he told me these things. He hadn’t noticed that the restaurant was mostly empty. Lunch crowd long gone, but too early for dinner. The waitress over by the cash register, reading her horoscope.

  “You woo him, no different from a girl you pick up in a bar,” he said. “It’s a seduction. Just a different type.”

  Young as I was, I knew I shouldn’t really be listening to my father telling me about seduction. But he didn’t know I was there anymore was how it seemed. I might not have known the word for it at the time, but it was as if my father was in a trance.

  “ ‘Tell me what happened,’ I say to my guy. I’m whispering in his ear maybe. Up close enough he can feel my breath on his face. Maybe he smells my drink. Wishes he had some of that whiskey too.

  “ ‘You’re going to feel a lot better when the truth comes out,’ I say. ‘A sweet ass like that, who could blame you for wanting a piece of it?’

  “This is when he tells you yeah, maybe he lit her cigarette. Maybe he bought her a drink, but that was it. So he touched her hair. No law against that. So what if he put his hand on her neck. People do that. Even the president. Not Jimmy Carter, but JFK anyway.”

  My father was not done talking. “Once you get him to the place where he’s admitting physical contact, you have him,” he said. “He’s crossed the line now. Even if he reverses direction, he can feel it’s too late.

  “All he can do now is blame the victim, and he will.

  “ ‘She gave me a hard time,’ he says. ‘She came on to me. She called me a name. You wouldn’t believe how loud she screamed. She was busting my eardrum, man.’

  “That’s why he got a little rough with her. Just to quiet her down. Who wouldn’t?”

  This was the place in my interview with my father where he came back to the world again—the part of the world with the half-eaten bowl of tiramisu in front of him, and the ashtray full of cigarette butts, and the waitress saying, “No charge for this one, Tony,” and me with my cassette recorder, taking it all down.

  “And that’s how you conduct an interrogation, Farrah,” he told me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was nighttime. Patty breathing softly overhead
, Cat Stevens singing “Oh, baby, baby, it’s a wild world” as I lay there in the dark. More and more now, this was the time when the pictures started coming to me.

  I was thinking about something the gym teacher had said that day, about girls getting excused from gym if they had cramps, and my having told her that I had them. Knowing I’d have to keep track, now, of the date I offered the cramp excuse, without the presence of a real period to make the keeping track unnecessary. I was wondering if I had some disease that made it so I didn’t menstruate. Leukemia, or a brain tumor.

  I was thinking about my father, and how thin he looked when I saw his picture in the paper that day. I was thinking about Teddy Bascom, and the murdered girls—the deer fetus, and the vultures, and the horses having sex.

  I tried to think about something nice then. The picture came to me of my father, sitting on the couch while my sister and I snuggled up on either side of him, watching Rockford Files, and our mother standing in the doorway with a bowlful of popcorn, looking almost happy for once. Margaret Ann (a different day now), opening the glass doors of that cabinet of hers filled with the dolls and saying, “Pick any one you want.” I wanted to linger there, but the picture shifted to the bad part of that story. My mother finding the key to Margaret Ann’s apartment. My father walking out the door, with his one suitcase. The sound of his car starting up. His headlights disappearing down the street.

  Your girls will never get over it.

  Then all the pictures were gone, but that wasn’t good news either. Now came the Sunset Strangler.

  All these weeks I’d been trying to locate one of my visions. That night one came to me, and I wished it hadn’t.

  I was inside a car. Not our father’s car, or our mother’s, though like hers this one looked a little beat-up.

  There were fast-food wrappers on the floor, and a plastic key ring with a woman’s naked body on it—all but the head—with huge breasts and little red lights where the nipples would go, which lit up when you pushed a button on her back.

  From where I sat—a bucket seat facing the steering wheel—I could see his hands winding a shoelace around his wrist. Knotting and unknotting it. With the hard end of the lace, the part encased in plastic, he was picking his teeth.

  Even with the windshield all steamed up the way it was now, I could see out onto the sidewalk of the street. There was a young couple walking past the car, the boy’s hand on the girl’s breast, the way Teddy Bascom’s was always ending up on mine, though in the case of these two, there was more for him to find there.

  I knew what the killer was thinking then. That he never got to put his hands on a girl that way. Not a living one, anyway. Not without a length of piano wire around her neck.

  The couple stopped by a streetlight and started kissing—but not the way Teddy Bascom kissed me. This was real, passionate kissing. This was the kissing of two people who were crazy about each other and could hardly wait to get home and do something about it. This might even have been love.

  Here was the worst part for the man in the car: he was totally invisible to them. I don’t know how I understood this but I did.

  My lips felt dry and chapped now, and there was a sour taste in my mouth as if I might throw up, but didn’t. I told myself to think about some small, good thing: the pair of Chemin de Fer jeans I’d put on layaway, that I was one or two nights of babysitting away from bringing home. Soleil telling me she was going to invite me to come up to her family’s place in Sonoma and go horseback riding. Teddy Bascom (this part was fantasy) playing with my hair and whispering, “You’re so beautiful,” though what he really said was, “Let’s get this shirt off you.”

  Now there was a hand reaching inside a pair of pants. I saw the hand move up and down inside the pants—eyes locked on the man and the woman kissing. Now came the sound of breathing. Deeper and faster. Then a long, low sigh.

  His fingers were opening the glove compartment. Out came a roll of electrical tape. Key in the ignition, car backing out and heading onto the highway now, turning the radio on to a country station. A Kenny Rogers song. How was it that I knew the words?

  I could see the feet—one on the gas pedal—in their black loafers, recently polished. Not shoes for hiking, but I knew where this car was headed. Those red towers looming overhead in the moonlight. He was driving to the Golden Gate Bridge, headed north to the mountain.

  THE NEXT NIGHT WAS HALLOWEEN. My sister, in her clown costume, lay stretched on our bedroom floor, sorting her candy. I had come outside to sit on the front step to watch the last of the trick-or-treaters straggling home, sacks in hand. All up and down our street the candles inside the jack-o’-lanterns flickered, casting an orange glow over the yards and front steps of Morning Glory Court. Inside our house, I heard the ringing of the telephone and headed inside. Of the three people who lived at our house, I was the only one who ever got a call.

  “It’s Alison,” Patty said, making a face.

  There’d been another murder on the mountain that day, number seven. A woman named Kelly Cunningham, a twenty-three-year-old hairdresser from Cotati whose New Year’s resolution had been to lose forty pounds by hiking on the mountain five days a week, rain or shine, had been found raped and strangled in a grove of eucalyptus near the east peak of Mount Tamalpais, with tape over her eyes and a Snickers wrapper on the ground beside her. The report on television offered few particulars, Alison told me, but one thing I could guess: she would have been naked, except for her shoes. The shoelaces would be gone from them. And I wouldn’t be seeing my father anytime soon.

  BY NOW, EVERYONE KNEW ABOUT the Sunset Strangler. Now all they had to put in the San Francisco Chronicle that next morning were the initials: “S.S. Strikes Again.” No further explanation required.

  The Marin IJ ran a feature in which local residents were interviewed—parents, teachers, a city councilwoman and a variety of businesspeople, the owner of a restaurant—and asked how the murders had affected their lives; the gist of the story being that the entire population of Marin County now inhabited a state of high anxiety, if not terror. “What’s going on here, anyway?” one woman was quoted as saying. “I pay my taxes. Where are the police when we need them?”

  There was also an interview with a haircutting client of Kelly Cunningham, the most recent victim.

  “She was more than halfway to her goal weight,” the woman said. “She was wearing size twelves. I even asked her if it was a good idea to keep jogging on the mountain, but she just told me you can’t stop living your life.”

  Only she could.

  NOVEMBER. IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOW, police patrolled the streets—Daffodil, Honeysuckle, Morning Glory Court—that led most prominently to the mountain from where we lived, and they staked out the parking lot where hikers left their cars. Over at the Pollacks’ house, on one of my babysitting nights, a new item had shown up in the bedside table drawer where they always used to keep the K-Y jelly and the condom supply: a small pink .45-caliber revolver. Purchased, no doubt, by Karl for Jennifer, as protection against the serial killer at large.

  There were no more hippies on the mountain, with or without clothes, and no more hikers. Every one of the girls I ate lunch with had been given a beeper by her parents—this being before the days of cell phones—so their mothers could locate them and get them to call home if they went to the rec center or the mall.

  Patty and I had no beeper. As before, our mother was off at work most days, or at the library, and in her room a lot of the time when she got home. Like our father, she had told us to stay away from the mountain, and we assured her that we would.

  But the truth was we weren’t afraid of the Sunset Strangler. The only thing that kept us from spending our afternoons out on the mountain as we’d always done was the fact that for the first time in our lives as sisters, we were spending long hours apart, away from our old haunts. Thanks to my recently acquired popularity, I no longer came home right after school the way I used to. Even on weekends, I was apt to be ti
ed up with the girls, hanging out at the mall or sitting on the bench at the dojo, watching Teddy at karate practice.

  In many ways, though, it was not me so much as my sister who’d found other and more consuming things to do with her time than making up adventures on the mountain with me. Where, only recently, I’d felt as though I was abandoning my sister, now it seemed as though Patty was the one, more than I, who’d chosen other ways to occupy herself.

  Patty was working hard on her jump shots; she was always trying to improve. But more than anything, her days that fall revolved around her visits to the home of Mr. Armitage, who had entrusted her with a key to his house—kept hidden under a flowerpot—so Patty could let herself in on the afternoons he was at work, to play with Petra and take her for walks.

  Even when she was home, her talk was often of the dog. “You know something cute?” she told me one afternoon. “Petra never gets it that she’s little. When I’m walking her, and we pass another dog, even if it’s a really big one like a golden retriever or a malamute, she barks like she’s protecting me.

  “Mr. Armitage says that sometimes he used to take Petra along when he taught his ballroom dancing classes, because he didn’t like to leave her by herself. Only he had to quit doing that, because it made her mad to see him dancing with people. She got jealous.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if Mr. Armitage moved away,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand it if I didn’t get to see Petra anymore. And Mr. Armitage is nice too.”

  “But he’s a weirdo,” I told her. “First he had a wife, then he didn’t. Who ever heard of a man that teaches dancing for his job?”

  “You know what I think?” Patty said. “Everybody’s a weirdo. With some people you just don’t know what their weird part is, but everybody has one.”