by Leah Stewart
He says, sharply, “You’ll just put it in the paper.”
“That would depend.”
“I’m not stupid,” he says.
“Why did you call me, Peter?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I shouldn’t have.” I hear him inhale deeply, probably lighting a cigarette, and a picture comes to me, of him looking up at the second story of his house, hiding the pack in the waistband of his shorts.
“Isn’t your mother going to catch you smoking?” I ask.
He laughs bitterly. “She’s got other things on her mind.” He falls silent for a moment. Then he says, “Gotta go,” and abruptly hangs up the phone.
I sit for a moment, looking at the receiver in my hand. “What the hell,” I say.
“What?” Evan asks, looking up from his computer.
“I just had the strangest conversation.” I hang up the phone. “Brother of the dead girl. Called me, asked if I had a sister, hung up.”
Evan shrugs. “Crazy with grief, maybe.”
“I guess,” I say. “Or just crazy.”
“Who’s crazy?” Bishops asks, appearing at my desk.
“Nobody,” I say. “What did you get?”
He drops a notebook in front of me. CAR, it says, in big block letters. SKULL.
“What’s this mean?” I ask. He has written “jack-o’-lantern” in the middle of the page.
“He said the car crushed her skull like a jack-o’-lantern,” Bishop says. “He asked me if I ever smashed them on Halloween.”
“Did you?”
“Of course,” he says. “All the boys did.” I don’t tell him how I cried the year the neighborhood boys smashed our jack-o’-lanterns to pieces on the front steps. Every year after that they stayed in the window. My mother never put them outside again.
I page through the rest of his notes while he narrates. They found signs of rape, semen, a few fibers. Under her fingernails they found skin. The physical evidence points to one man, though he may have had accomplices. He or they probably bound her wrists after they took her out of the trunk, after she scratched at least one of them. I read Bishop’s notes on the condition of the body. Scrape marks and road burns. Bruises on the lungs and liver. Rupture of the bladder and stomach. Blood in the chest and abdomen. Rib fractures, dozens of them. Pelvic fractures. Tire tracks on the clothes and the skin.
“Looks like a stranger attack to me,” Bishop says.
I say, “So they think she was alive when the car came at her.”
“They know it,” Bishop says. “She was badly beaten. But she was alive.”
“I hope she was unconscious.” I see it again, her body in fetal position, her hands to her face. I’m certain she was conscious. She heard the sound of the engine approaching, she felt the tires touch her skin, the crushing weight.
“That’s the best you can hope for,” Bishop says. “What an awful way to go.”
I slide the photocopy of her face out from under today’s newspaper on my desk. She’s laughing. The boy is kissing her cheek. “Why her?” I say, tapping my pen on her face. “Why this girl?”
“She was there.” Bishop shrugs. “Sometimes there is no reason. Just the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Even that’s a reason,” I say. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “That’s the kind of thinking that can make you crazy.”
“Not having a reason makes me crazy,” I say. “Fate, and all that. That makes me crazy. There is no fate. One action leads to another. There’s always some reason, no matter how small. There’s some reason this girl died. There has to be.”
“Jesus,” Bishop says. “Don’t think about it, okay? You can’t think about stuff like that. Some people are bad, and one of them saw this girl and took her and killed her. It’s a terrible, random thing. The important thing for you now is to keep it in the paper so the police feel pressure to catch the guy who did it.” He leans in and looks at the picture. “Look at her,” he says. “She looks so normal.”
The phone rings. I reach for it, and Bishop touches me on the shoulder and goes back to his desk. I watch him walk away, his lips moving like he’s singing. “Olivia Dale,” I say into the phone.
“Hey, it’s Hannah.” She sounds friendly, as though she’s forgotten or forgiven our earlier exchange.
“Hey you,” I say. I push the picture of the dead girl away. “What’s up?”
“You know that guy Carl? With the weird goatee?”
“I don’t.”
“You know, he came to that party we had in January. He’s a friend of Kathleen’s. Somebody dared him to eat a whole bag of potato chips in three minutes and he did it, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Are you going out with him or something?”
“God, no,” she says. “But he called me. He knew that Allison girl. I guess he went to my high school, too, though I’ve been racking my brain and I can’t remember him from there. He saw your story in the paper.”
“Did you say goatee?” I ask, paging through my notebook.
“What?” she says. “Yeah. He’s got a goatee.”
I’m looking at my notes from Joan Bracken. Guy kicking door. Goatee. “What’s his last name?” I say. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”
“I’ve got his number,” Hannah says. “That’s all I know.”
She gives me the number, and I thank her and tell her I’ll call her later. There’s a silence. I say, “Hannah? Are you there?”
After a moment she says, “It’s scary, isn’t it.”
“What?” I say, tapping my pen on the paper where I’ve written Carl’s number.
Hannah says, “How close she was to being one of us.”
• • •
Carl Fitzner lives in one of those monolithic apartment buildings that look like something out of a science fiction movie, floor upon floor of identical modern kitchenettes, thin gray wall-to-wall carpeting, and the musty scent of too many residents, not enough vacuuming. He lives on the lowest level. When he opens the door he smiles at me with tentative hope, as though I’m his blind date, and invites me in. His small, high windows look out at the ground and his neighbors’ feet.
Carl is tall and plump; his face has a soft roundedness that gives him an air of bashful naïveté, despite his trendy all-black outfit and goatee. He seems nervous, and we stand awkwardly in his living room for a moment before he asks me to sit. The couch is 1970s brown velour and when I sit on it a puff of dust rises around me. Carl blushes and excuses himself, returning a moment later with a towel, which he drapes over the cushion beside me like a man laying his cloak over a puddle. I thank him and slide over onto the towel. Carl shuffles his feet on the carpet and asks me if I’d like something to drink, then disappears into the kitchen. I hear him washing glasses in there. He must not get many guests.
He returns with two glasses of water and sits on the edge of the armchair next to the couch. I warm up by making small talk about his acting ambitions, his part-time job as stage manager at the Black Horse Theater Company, people we know in common, like Kathleen, whom he knows from acting class and Hannah knows from her gym. “When I saw your name in the paper, I remembered you from your party,” he says. He speaks slowly, as though everything he says has to pass through a layer of cotton in his brain, and I wonder if he’s still in shock. “I called Kathleen and she gave me Hannah’s number. Hannah’s a nice girl.” I nod, and he says, “Did you ever meet Allison?”
“Not that I remember, unless you brought her to that party,” I say. “Did you?”
He shakes his head. “I came with Kathleen.”
I’m relieved to hear it. I wouldn’t want to know I’d shaken the hand I saw clenched, bound tight with stained white string. “So,” I say. “How do you know Allison?”
“Our mothers were good friends,” he says.
“Were?”
“My mother died when I was in sixth grade.”
“I’m sorry,” I say gent
ly.
Carl shrugs and looks down into his water, swirling the ice cubes in the glass. He seems embarrassed to have revealed this information. He says, “Allison’s mother helped me through it.”
“So you and Allison grew up together?”
“We were close as kids. And then in high school we went out a couple of times, to a dance or two.”
“You must have been very fond of her,” I say.
He smiles wistfully. “For years I had this huge crush on her, you know? I mean, she was beautiful. You can’t even imagine how beautiful.”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“You would have had to see her in person. She practically glowed. It sounds silly, I know. But it’s true.”
“But you were never a couple?”
He shakes his head.
I touch him gently on the knee. “Did you want to be?”
He laughs and sighs at once. “Of course. She was always saying, ‘Too bad I can’t fall in love with a nice boy like you, Carl.’ ” He blinks, then tilts his head and drains his water glass.
I wait for him a moment, knowing that if I don’t fill the silence he will.
“I loved her,” he says finally, rolling his glass between his palms. “But I was only her friend.”
I feel sorry for him, his lonely apartment, his motherless childhood, the way his voice cracked over the words “loved” and “only.” It’s hard to picture him screaming in a hallway, kicking the dead girl’s door.
I smile at him. “So you were still close friends in high school?”
“We hung out with different people, but I was over at her house a lot. We went out a couple times, like I said.”
“What was she like then? Was she a cheerleader?”
“No.” He looks at me oddly. I can’t help it. I picture her in a short skirt, with pompoms.
He says, “She ran more with the arty crowd. You know, theater and the school paper and such. She was in the choir. She never cared for sports.”
“I’m sorry to have to ask this, Carl,” I say. “Was she ever into any kind of risky behavior? Drugs? Anything like that?”
“She smoked marijuana sometimes.” Then he catches himself. “Please don’t put that in the paper.”
“Off the record,” I say. “This is all off the record. I’m just trying to get a feel for what she was like, who she might have known . . .”
“I don’t think anyone she knew could have done this to her.”
“You’d be surprised,” I say. “The killer is often a boyfriend. Or an ex-boyfriend.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe.”
“Do you know of anyone who could have been angry with her? Anyone she might have rejected?”
“She went out with a lot of guys. I don’t know of one in particular who . . .” His voice trails off. He becomes very still, watching me, as though it’s just occurred to him I might not be his friend.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I ask.
“A few days before it happened.”
“At her apartment?”
He nods.
“And you didn’t have a fight, then?”
He nods, shakes his head, then is still again, looking as if he doesn’t know what to do next. He asks me if I mind if he smokes and then he takes out rolling papers and a pouch of tobacco and starts trying to roll a cigarette. “We didn’t have a fight,” he says. “We never fought.” He licks his finger, gets bits of tobacco stuck to it, licks it again, and then sits there trying to pick tobacco off his tongue, grimacing. The rolling paper falls open and tobacco leaks out.
“Here,” I say, and I roll the cigarette smooth and hand it to him. “I ask because a neighbor saw a man with a goatee leaving Allison’s apartment.”
“Lots of people have goatees,” he says, fingering his chin.
On the coffee table is one of those fat silver Zippo lighters that people carry to draw attention to themselves. I pick it up and lean in to light the cigarette for him, putting us eye to eye over the unnecessarily large flame. “The neighbor says he seemed angry. That he kicked the door.” Carl looks away. “Thanks,” he says.
I watch him take a drag. He’s working very hard to appear relaxed. “Must have been somebody else,” he says. “Wasn’t me. Definitely wasn’t me.”
“Any idea who it could have been?” I try to say this without sarcasm.
“Well,” he says slowly. He studies the cigarette in his hand. “Allison knew a lot of people. And she did like to live dangerously.” He looks up and laughs nervously. “I don’t mean she had a secret life as a stripper or anything.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, picking up my pen.
“She drove a little too fast, drank too much, ran with a fast crowd.”
I write it down: drank too much.
“Some of the fellows she dated,” he says. “And that Angela.” He says her name like my mother says “pimple.”
“What about her?” I ask, trying to picture the smooth-cheeked girl in the doctor’s office. All I can see is her white coat, her ringed hand clutching at a tissue.
“She’s no angel,” he says. “Despite the name.”
I press my lips together against the urge to laugh. In my notebook I write: Angela no angel? “Do you know if either of them ever stole anything?” I’m thinking of Joan Bracken, her sweater and earrings.
Carl frowns. “I remember Angela stole from a teacher’s purse once. Allison probably did it too, when we were kids. The thing about Angela, she had a boyfriend in high school, liked to play with knives. I heard he was into some unsavory business.” He hesitates, then leans forward and whispers, “S and M.” He doesn’t need my questions anymore. He settles back in his chair and keeps talking. “He was in my gym class, and once I saw him with his shirt off. Long marks, all down his back, like whip scars.”
I’m beginning to notice a habit he has of smacking his lips, like he’s imagining something savory in his mouth. I sound interested, respectful, when I ask, “And Angela?”
“She dated him, didn’t she? You wouldn’t know it now, but she was a big-haired heavy metal chick in school, painted her fingernails black and hung out in the parking lot smoking cigarettes during lunch. When we were fourteen, Angela was at a party where this kid died from snorting butane.”
“What about Allison?”
“She seemed like a normal girl,” Carl says, putting the emphasis on “seemed.” “But she was Angela’s best friend, wasn’t she?”
He goes on to tell me his low opinion of the rest of the people Allison knew. He tells me Allison wore her necklines too low, her skirts too high, laughed too loud at the jokes that boys told, spent too much time in the backseats of cars. Insinuation settles on my skin like a layer of dust. Some of it could be true, so I just keep nodding and taking notes.
“You talk like you think Allison brought it on herself.”
He lets out a breath like I punched him in the stomach. “That’s not what I’m saying,” he splutters. He stabs out his cigarette and stares at the ashtray. Then he holds up his hands, palms facing me. “All I’m telling you,” he says, “she was no Goody Two-shoes. She ran with a wild crowd. If you ask for trouble, you get trouble, right? Right?”
I don’t say anything. For a moment I’m sorry to have turned him inside out, the lonely young man who laid a towel on the couch for me, and found this. This is what they all end up giving me, the bitterness, the hate, what lies underneath.
He stares at me, his defensive expression crumpling into sorrow. “You look a little like her,” he says, and his eyes fill up with tears.
Sitting in my car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked I watch the light dim around the crime scene. There’s no breeze and the yellow police tape is still. One end has already pulled loose from a tree, trailing on the ground. I’m smoking one of David’s cigarettes, and the smoke floats in the hot thick air inside the car.
Allison Avery and I were born in the same year. I grew up like her, in a w
hite middle-class neighborhood of two-car garages and driveway basketball hoops, with two parents and a brother, though mine is three years older and we are not close. It’s surprising that, like me, she was on the school paper and in theater, that our paths didn’t diverge as early as I would have thought. Before I talked to Carl, I thought Allison Avery was like the girls in my high school that you didn’t have to know well to know. These girls started bleaching their hair and wearing bikinis to the swimming pool at twelve. They joined the cheerleading squad and dated football players and were voted to the Homecoming Court. They called their fathers “Daddy” and were rumored to give blow jobs at parties and drove around in red cars with big cups of orange juice topped off with their fathers’ vodka. I still think Allison Avery had something in common with those girls. They looked at you and held your gaze and you knew they never thought about the consequences, even getting caught another kind of thrill. I wanted, briefly, to be like them.
I had a friend named Lydia who, despite her wealthy family, had a penchant for shoplifting. She taught me to boost makeup from the drugstore, and to jimmy her parents’ liquor cabinet open and replace the vodka we drank with water. When I was thirteen, we got silly drunk and painted our faces with our stolen makeup and fell giggling off the bed. We got caught. My mother cried. I never did it again. One day I noticed Lydia had become one of those girls, her hair as shiny as a model’s. After that we passed each other in the hall without saying hello, both of us embarrassed we had ever been friends. For me there have always been consequences.
If I had grown up with Allison, I think there would have been that same moment, when we averted our eyes from each other as we passed, less than a foot apart. I don’t know what would have caused it. There is something that she did that I didn’t, and because of that, she is dead. I am alive.
When I press the unlock button the click reverberates, and I step quickly out of the car, drop my cigarette on the ground and rub it out with the toe of my shoe. Even out here the air is so dense and wet it’s like breathing liquid.
Hands in my pockets, I take a slow walk around the perimeter of the yellow tape. The place has the postapocalyptic stillness that comes when something terrible has been and gone, as though even the air has slowed like a passing car to survey the damage. I’ve grown familiar with these places—the rubble of a burned house, the lonely stretches of highway littered with bent metal and broken glass—places most people go by as though in slow motion, craning their heads backward for another look at what, thank God, didn’t happen to them. Like tourists on a boat ride, they pass safely through the wreckage of someone else’s life.