by Tyler Dilts
Jen took a step past the colonel into the room, but I stayed between him and the door. He turned his shoulders indecisively, not sure whether to look at Jen or at me, and said, “Have you found out something?”
“Yes, we have,” Jen said.
As he turned to face her, she curled her right hand into a fist, shifted her stance to the balls of her feet, and centered her weight over her hips. She was going to hit him. On more than one occasion, I’d seen her break bones with her fists. I wanted to see her do it now. I wanted to hear the liquid crack and see the blood pour down the colonel’s face—but her fist relaxed, and she let her breath out slowly.
“What is it?” he asked.
Earlier, after we’d left Kirby’s office, on the way to see Ruiz, we made a stop on Broadway, a block east of Pine Avenue. As we walked past the Blue Cafe, a recording of a song that sounded like Muddy Waters’s “Who Do You Trust” reverberated above the empty patios and across the promenade. The song faded when we turned the corner into the alley and buzzed Rachel Williams’s apartment.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded far away. I wasn’t sure whether it was her or the tinny speaker or a combination of the two that gave the sound its airy, distant quality. But it didn’t matter. By that point, nothing would have eased the leaden feeling deep in my gut caused by anticipation of the conversation that Jen and I were about to have with Beth’s little sister. At that moment, I was able to understand, if not forgive, their mother.
“Hi, Rachel,” Jen said into the intercom. “It’s Detective Tanaka. I’m sorry, but we need to speak with you again.”
“Oh, okay.”
The buzzer worked this time. We went in and walked up. The door was open when we reached the upper landing. “Hi,” she said to us. I knew then that the speaker had nothing to do with the remoteness in her voice. It was almost as if she were somewhere else. She may very well have been. “Come in,” she said, opening the door wide. “Susan’s not here.” That particular piece of news would have been welcome in any of our previous meetings with her, but now it was something of a disappointment. “You can sit down if you want.” We walked across the loft and sat on the same couch we’d sat on during our last visit. Rachel curled up across from us, her feet tucked beneath her.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk about something very unpleasant,” I said.
Her face wilted, and I thought she might begin to cry.
Jen took over. “Rachel,” she said, her voice warm and tender, “we need you to tell us about your father.”
She did cry then. Two tears rolled down her left cheek, but her expression took on a solidity we’d not seen there before.
“What about him?” she asked.
“I think you know,” Jen said, her voice a whisper.
“Where should I start?”
For what I assume are much the same reasons why convicts brutalize child molesters in hideous ways behind prison walls, cops, no matter what their experience, never seem to develop defense mechanisms and coping strategies when it comes to crimes against children. I’ve never heard a homicide detective make a joke over the body of a dead child, although I once watched as Marty and another detective, the thirty-year vet whose slot I filled in for the detail, did a five-minute comedy routine crouched beside the corpse of a priest. (“Did you hear the one about the altar boy who ran away from home? He didn’t like the way he was being reared!”) I couldn’t sleep that night, but now when I remember the scene, I smile. Sacredness, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. What intrigues me, though, is that it has always seemed to me that the less we hold sacred, the more fiercely we protect it.
It had started so unexpectedly and built so gradually that neither Elizabeth nor Rachel, four years later, could pinpoint the origin. “We’d been at Vandenberg for years,” Rachel said. “It was the longest I’d ever been in one place. Four years at the same school. That was something for us then.” She was quiet, lost in the memory. “Beth and me, I mean. We were always moving. A new school every year. So we really liked Vandenberg, you know? It felt like home.”
We waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, Jen said, “What was it that happened?”
“We didn’t realize it then, but Beth figured it out later. She was always the smart one.” Rachel’s forehead crinkled, and she pulled her knee into her chest. “And the pretty one, too. I used to be so jealous of her.” She was beginning to drift, but we let her go. We both wanted to ask just what Beth had figured out, but we didn’t. She needed to find her own way.
“She was so popular. Partly just because we’d been there so long, longer than almost everybody else, and we knew everything about the school. But really it was her, you know? Not just because she was pretty, but because of who she was. She was smart and funny. And kind. All the boys just loved her. Everybody did. Everybody. I guess that was kind of the problem.”
We let her sit a while. When it seemed as though she was ready to continue, I said, “A minute ago, you said Beth figured something out. What was it that she figured out?”
“It was about our father,” she said. The sad fondness that had been in her voice just a few seconds earlier slipped away, and she looked like she’d eaten something that was beginning to sour her stomach. “He was supposed to be a general, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Yeah, second in his class at the Air Force Academy, knew all the right people. All that.”
“But?” Jen asked.
“When he got to Vandenberg,” Rachel said, “he just kind of topped out. See, that’s what Beth realized later. He’d had a promotion every year or so and moved right up. When he made major and we moved to California, he just stopped moving up. And that’s like a bad thing in the military. You have to keep the momentum up or you stall. Kind of like a plane.” I saw a flash of something in her eyes, surprise, I thought, at her ability to make that connection. “So he had to think of something else to keep moving up the ladder. Major just wasn’t good enough. And he did, he figured out a way.” She let go of her leg and put both of her feet on the floor.
“How did he do it, Rachel?” Jen asked.
“I only found out about this later, when Beth told me the whole story. But you know how I said everybody loved her, right? Everybody did. Especially General McCabe. Our father used to bring him home a lot. He’d eat dinner with us, have barbecues, go to the beach. He’d bring us presents all the time. We had to call him Uncle Mac. He wore this cologne—I don’t know what it was, but he always wore too much of it. Beth and I used to make fun of him. Called him McWank.
“But then, one day, around the same time our father finally made colonel, Beth just stopped. She changed. She got quiet. She stopped talking to people at school. She just kind of turned herself off. It was kind of funny, see, because I’d always wanted to be just like her, and all of a sudden, she was just like me.” Rachel paused, and as she rubbed her fingers across her cheek, a realization swept over her. “No, that’s not right. It wasn’t funny. It was sad. And I never knew why she changed like that. Not until later. I asked her over and over again what had happened, because I knew something had. Something must have. But she wouldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t tell me. Not until later.”
“Later,” Jen said softly, nodding.
“After she left for college. She couldn’t wait to go. She even finished high school a semester early so she could go sooner. She was accepted all over, with scholarships and everything.”
“She escaped,” I said.
“Then, after she left, Uncle Mac started coming around again. And he got even weirder. He started hanging around me more and more. And my father started to leave us alone more and more. He’d make excuses, like going to the store for wine or something, and he’d take Mom with him. And then Uncle Mac started touching me. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. Somehow I knew not to tell my parents. I called Beth.”
“What happened then?” Jen asked.
“I remember it was a Wednesday morning. Beth was home that afternoon. She drove all the way up from school. Got there before Dad did. And before Mom, too—she had a job in the PX then. But Beth just came in the door and grabbed me and held me and said she should never have left me there. She just kept saying she was sorry. Over and over and over.
“When Dad came home, as soon as he came through the door, Beth just stood up and got right in his face. I’d never seen her like that. So strong. I couldn’t believe it. And she said to him, ‘It stops now.’ He pretended not to know what she was talking about. She slapped him. Hard. He was so shocked. I don’t think anybody had spoken up to him in years. We never had.”
Rachel’s eyes had dried, and her voice, in its growing strength, seemed to lead her deeper into the memory. “She said it again to him, ‘It stops now.’ ‘You don’t give me orders, young lady,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do.’ She stared into his face and said it just like that. I thought he was going to have a stroke or something, the way he just stood there and trembled. ‘Do you understand me?’ she asked him.
“He didn’t say anything. I didn’t think he could, the way the veins in his neck were bulging out. I never saw him so angry. See, he never got mad because he never had to. But he was so…I don’t know, it almost seemed like he was on fire. She asked him again. ‘Do you understand me?’ He still didn’t move.
“‘Here’s how it’s going to be,’ she said, ‘McCabe never comes into this house again. He never sees her again. Anywhere. At the school, on the base, at the store, anywhere. Ever. If she ever has to look at his face again, ever, I talk. To everyone who’ll listen. Do you understand me?’ He still didn’t move. He looked like a statue. ‘And you,’ she said to him, ‘you piece of shit, you leave and you don’t come back until Rachel’s out of the house. I don’t care what you do, where you go, what you tell people, you just go.’ He moved then. Just a little. He tilted his head to the side, just a little bit, but it seemed like so much. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘but don’t think it. It doesn’t matter if I can prove anything. If I just make the charges, you’re finished. Think about it. You know it’s true. Look at me. Look in my eyes.’ He did. ‘You know I’ll do it,’ she said.
“That was the first time in my life I ever saw him look scared. But he did what she said. She sat with me on the couch while he went upstairs and packed his bags. She didn’t budge an inch. And he did exactly what she told him to. He didn’t say a word. While we sat there, I figured it out—what had happened to her. What he’d done. What he had let be done. He used her to make colonel, and he was going to use me to make general. But she turned it around on him. She wouldn’t let him. She took control. I wouldn’t have believed that could happen. That she could do that, be that strong.
“And now,” Rachel said, the sadness edging back into her voice, “she’s gone.”
The colonel’s eyes lost their focus and something let go in his posture as he read our faces. As his understanding of what we’d learned began to take root, he seemed to contract in upon himself like a dying star, collapsing into blackness. Part of me wanted him to keep going, to shrivel into nothing, to disappear completely—but only a small part of me. Mostly, I wanted to make him scream, to cry out in pain and anguish. I wanted to hurt him.
“Turn around,” I said. I gave him about a second to comply, and when he wasn’t quick enough, I shoved him into the wall so hard that bottles clinked in the minifridge. I spun him around and pressed his face into the ugly, oatmeal-colored wallpaper.
As I twisted his arms behind him and tightened the cuffs on his wrists, I let Jen speak. “Mr. Williams,” she said, “you’re wanted for questioning regarding the murder of Elizabeth Williams. You’ll need to come with us.”
I pulled him away from the wall and steered him out of the room. I imagined him falling down the stairs, his face scraping across the steel-edged treads, the weight and momentum of his body driving his head into the landing and snapping his neck with an audible crack—but he didn’t fall, and even though the thought occurred to me, I didn’t push him.
Forty-five minutes later, the colonel was handcuffed to a steel chair, which was itself chained to a D ring that was inset in the bare concrete floor of the interview room. Marty, Dave, Ruiz, Pat, Jen, and I were huddled behind the two-way mirror in the darkened observation room, staring at him.
“Well,” Marty said, “at least it looks like somebody yanked the stick out of his ass.”
The colonel slouched forward in the chair, which was not uncommon, as the two front legs were shorter than those on the back, causing anyone sitting in the chair to either slide forward or slouch in order to adjust for the slant. The colonel, though, was reacting to more than just the angle of the interrogation chair. He looked as though he’d been left in the sun too long, left to wither and rot.
We fidgeted in silence, crossing arms, rattling keys in pockets, tapping feet, scratching necks, all the while eyeballing the fresh specimen on the other side of the glass.
“What do we do with him?” Dave asked.
“Let him stew,” Jen said. “He’s not ready yet.”
We watched him. One by one, detectives trickled out of the room until only Jen and I were left.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Let’s keep him overnight.”
“Think Ruiz’ll go for that?”
“Probably not,” I said. “So let’s take him downstairs and process him into the holding tank before we ask.”
I expected her to at least acknowledge the end run around the lieutenant’s authority, even if she didn’t argue against it, but all she did was nod and say, “Okay.”
By the time we’d finished checking the colonel in for the night and made our way back upstairs, Ruiz had gone home. “When he found out where you were,” Marty said, “he was pretty pissed. Slammed his door and everything.”
I said, “But he didn’t stop us, did he?”
He answered by tossing an empty Styrofoam coffee cup across the room into a wastebasket. “Two points,” he said.
Jen and I didn’t speak much on the drive back to my house. The revelations about Beth and her father were considerable in their implications. The trouble was that we had no idea just what those implications were. The question foremost on our minds, of course, was whether these events provided the colonel with a motive to murder his daughter. Maybe she’d threatened to go public. That might do it. After pimping one of your daughters and attempting the same with the second, was killing one of them so long a leap? But why would Beth speak out now after so many years of silence?
When Jen stopped her Explorer to drop me off in front of my apartment, she said, “I could use a drink.”
We sat in the living room and finished off two bottles of Sam Adams Winter Lager that had been on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator for the last few weeks. I turned on the TV, and we pretended to be interested in a show on the History Channel, something about WWII and the “greatest generation,” just brimming with the warm glow of nostalgia. Nothing like sepia-toned reminiscences to beef up the powers of denial. Apparently only foreigners did bad things in the 1940s. The program never got around to the racially segregated battalions, internment camps, or Fat Man and Little Boy.
Jen swallowed the last of her beer. “Got any more?”
“Nope,” I said. “Those were the last.”
“I’ll have a screwdriver, then.”
I was surprised that she knew I had all the ingredients. It had never occurred to me that someone else might be aware of my proclivity for Grey Goose and Minute Maid. I tossed the empty beer bottles in the trash in the kitchen and wondered how she knew. It wouldn’t take much. A glance in the freezer and fridge would have done it. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. Still. I filled two glasses and went back into the living room.
Jen had turned the volume down on the TV, but the same program was still airing. In newsreel footage and black-and-white stills, American bombers
flew silently over Eastern Europe, dropping their payloads. Jews were gassed. Dresden burned.
“You think he killed her?” Jen asked.
“Honestly? After the way he imploded today, I don’t see it. But he’s as good as anybody else we’ve got.”
“Could be the reason he’s been hanging around.” She sipped her drink. “See what we know, if we suspect him. Typical patterns of guilt.”
“Yeah, unless he’s just trying to figure out if we know about the alternate career trajectory that got him promoted. He had to figure it would come out, right? Maybe that’s the guilt he’s dragging around.” I noticed that my glass held about a third as much liquid as Jen’s. I reached forward and put the glass down on the coffee table.
“Maybe.” She let her head flop back and looked at the ceiling. “Shit. Three suspects and we can’t even make a decent circumstantial case against any one of them.”
“It could be it’s not any of them,” I said. “Actually, if I had to make a bet right now…” I didn’t finish the sentence.
“All I know,” Jen said, “is that we still don’t fucking know.” She drained her glass in a long pull and handed it to me. “Barkeep, another round.” I think she was shooting for whimsical, but she missed the mark by a wide margin.
“You sure?” I asked.
She nodded. We kept drinking.
Two hours and three glasses later, she fell asleep on the couch and started to snore. That was the first time I had seen her sleep. I wished I had a video camera—or at least a tape recorder to get the sounds. “Hey,” I said softly, patting her knee. I said it again a bit louder and patted a bit harder, and she still didn’t wake up. “Jen!” I said, with what I felt surely was enough volume and force to wake her. She stirred a bit, rubbed her nose, and made an odd grunting sound before settling down again. She wasn’t going to budge. I thought about leaving her on the couch to sleep it off, but the couch left quite a bit to be desired in the comfort department. I tried to rouse her one more time and still had no luck. Her breathing settled into a slow, deep rhythm. I slipped one hand between the back of the sofa and her shoulder blades and the other under her knees and lifted her.