Again Izzy clicked off the recorder and handed it to Forbes, who gave him an encouraging nod.
“You are sure about the self-harm?” she asked him, off the record.
“Yes,” he said. “Long time issue for her. Those are mostly new, or new-ish. I commented on them when I saw her last.”
“Next of kin?”
“A mother, maybe in the area still. I’m not sure. Only child, father’s deceased.”
“You want to follow up on that, or…?”
“I can,” he said. “I will.”
“What about the drug use?”
“Some, I think. On and off. Never knew or suspected heroin, though. It’s possible. She was squatting recently, last few weeks or so. Maybe she got into it there.”
“Real Mother Theresa we got here,” the cop chimed in.
“Would you please just shut the hell up?” Izzy shouted.
The officer looked stunned. Forbes smacked her mouth and moved between the two men.
“Can you both attempt a little professionalism here?” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the cop said, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender. “Ya’ll act like she was a personal friend or something.”
“She was,” Izzy said.
The cop said nothing to that. He only blinked.
“Get the tape,” Forbes said. “I want to check that defense wound for trace.”
“Goddamn Cherry Ames here,” the officer piped up.
Forbes stamped her foot on the floor.
“Okay, Bishop was right. Would you please shut the fuck up, officer?”
The officer shut up.
In the nurse’s lounge, Izzy slumped on the sofa and cried into his hands. The same phrase kept rolling through his mind, a broken record, the soundtrack to his guilt and sorrow.
I would feel safer with you.
Cynthia had not been his best friend, or even a particularly close one. Neither of them were people wont to get close. Both of them liked to maintain certain degrees of aloofness, though hers were longer and farther than his. Only two people in his entire life had ever consistently called him by his full name: his great-grandmother, and Cynthia. He quit telling her to call him Izzy after a few weeks of failure, and even learned to enjoy that private thing between the two of them. He’d tried calling her Cyn two or three times, which was met with hostility. Formality was a wall, a shield. Self-preservation was paramount. Safety was key.
Safer with you.
“Goddamnit, Cynthia,” he said. “Goddamnit.”
Five
Isaiah.
He snapped awake with a start, glancing half-panicked around the room until his eyes landed on Trish.
“What did you say?”
“I just asked if you were asleep,” she said.
The TV was still on, the movie they’d started still playing. He’d dozed off, and somewhere along the line dreamed he heard her voice. Cynthia’s.
“I guess I was,” he said.
“This thing is really messing with your head,” she said.
“That asshole cop,” Izzy snarled. “He was so nasty, so—dismissive. Like her life didn’t matter. Or her death.”
“Give it another five years and you’ll be more like that,” Trish said. “It’s a defense mechanism for those guys. My dad was a combat vet. He was like that.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t quite like that. I see what you’re saying, but it was all about who she was to him. She was beneath him. Just some junkie whore.”
“Who was she to you, Iz?”
Frowning, Izzy reached for his water glass only to find it empty. He set it back down and said, “She’s dead, Trish. Surely your jealousy doesn’t extend to the afterlife.”
“You don’t have to snap at me. It was a legitimate question. You said she just some junkie to the cop, so I wondered what she was to you. That’s all.”
A responsibility? he thought. If so, he’d failed spectacularly.
At some length, he said, “Let’s just finish this movie.”
He’d missed enough of it to be bewildered as to the plot, but it didn’t matter. He was content to not talk about it just now.
“Toxicology report is pretty ugly,” Forbes said, tapping the paperwork with a ball point pen. She sat behind her cluttered desk in her private office in the Travis County Medical Examiner building, right on the periphery of the hospital complex. Framed photos of nephews and nieces faced outward, pictures of her two golden retrievers faced her. Priorities.
“Positive for marijuana, alcohol, and opiates. I might think something like Vicodin if it wasn’t for the tracks. Cynthia was using, and plenty.”
She slid the report closer to Izzy, who didn’t move to pick it up or look at it.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Abuse and assault survivors are addicts at an alarmingly high rate.”
“What do you use?”
“We’re not talking about me. But nothing, really. Lots of caffeine.”
She leaned back a bit, causing her brown leather chair to squeal.
“Point is, I’m sorry to say Officer No-Nuts was more or less right, however horribly he went about expressing the opinion. Ramos overdosed.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” Izzy said.
“Because you were fond of her.”
“Because she invited me to a party the night she died, and she said she’d feel safer if I went.”
“That’s not much, if anything. Could mean she’d feel less likely to shoot up with you watching over her.”
“Or that somebody was making her feel unsafe.”
“Did she have PTSD?”
“I—what does that have to do with anything?”
“Don’t dissemble, Bishop. PTSD patients don’t often feel safe, whatever their circumstances. Seems to me she formed a bond with you in particular that she didn’t have with anyone else. If she was going somewhere with a lot of people she didn’t know well and probably didn’t trust, it’s no wonder she’d feel safer with you.”
“I didn’t go,” Izzy said.
“You didn’t kill her. She did that all on her own.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You said it yourself,” Forbes reminded him. “The evidence doesn’t lie.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “What about the defense wound?”
“Picked up trace with the tape. Some of it was clearly visible. Dirt and vegetable matter. I’ll see that it’s compared with the backyard where they found her, maybe get it to the botany lab down at Texas State. It’ll probably match. At worst I’d guess she caught her hand on an errant nail or some debris back there, though there wasn’t any rust or anything like that. She was likely too high to notice.”
“So No-Nuts was right about that, too.”
Forbes just tilted her head and frowned.
Reluctantly, Izzy reached for the report.
Six
The Westover Apartments on Rundberg Lane were comprised of a single L-shaped building with a tarpaper roof and a dozen efficiency residences. Though Austin didn’t have rough neighborhoods comparable to Baltimore or Chicago, or even San Antonio, this was a poorer section of town and the Westover looked it. The parking spaces were filled with rusted out derelicts and late model jalopies, some of them on cinder blocks. Thumping hip-hop and accordion-heavy Tejano music competed for dominance from the apartments, blasting the noise level well above tolerable, though no one seemed to mind. Izzy parked in front of a shuttered taco stand across the street and walked over, taking in the vacant restaurants and businesses, the large number of people footing it on the sidewalks or just sitting around on curbs and bus benches.
He was a long way from trendy SoCo.
The address listed on the original admission forms was here, apartment 107 in particular. Cynthia was living with her mother at the time of the assault, though she was thrown out not long after. She hadn’t painted a particularly rosy portrait of Emelda Ochoa to either Izzy or th
e advocate, Sandy Chen. Neither of them encouraged her to go back, and for a while she had a place with a couple of other girls way south on Stassney. That didn’t last, either.
The unit was on the second level, farthest from the street. From the parking area Izzy could see dead plants cluttering up the sole window, tangling up warped blinds. Paint peeled from the water-rotted siding everywhere he looked. The railing on the steps up were flecked with rust, and the concrete steps themselves were cracked and crumbling. He passed an open door and got a strong whiff of pot wafting from inside. Someone laughed hysterically. At the end of the unsound landing, he paused in front of 107 and braced himself.
He raised his fist to knock, and the door swung open. A short, heavy woman in a housedress stood in front of Izzy, her round face ruddy and her eyes heavy with purple bags. She looked about fifty. A lit cigarillo hung between her lips. She furrowed her drawn-on eyebrows at him and said, “¿Qué coño quieres? Yo no te conozco, maricón.”
“I don’t…,” he stammered, surprised to be addressed in Spanish. “¿Está señora Ochoa?”
“Jódete,” the woman spat, and slammed the door. Izzy didn’t know the word, but he had a good guess as to its meaning.
He knocked again. This time when the door opened, a younger man stood behind the woman. His head was shaved to stubble and he wore a scraggly goatee. The man grimaced at Izzy.
“Señora Ochoa,” he said, “Cynthia is dead. ¿Entiendes? Your daughter has died.”
The woman frowned, then looked up at the young man, who looked dubious. Keeping his gaze on Izzy, he said, “Dice Cynthia está muerto.”
“¿Muerto?” she said. “Su mierda. Jódete.”
That again, Izzy thought, and before the door slammed shut a second time, the young man laughed and said, “Fuck her, and fuck you too, maricón,”
This time the bolt banged home, and the laughter continued as Izzy went back to the steps in a daze.
Cynthia had been kind in her reminiscences about her mother. Izzy’s heart pounded and his eyes burned as he waited for cars to pass so he could cross Rundberg back to where he parked. He wanted to hit something and curled his hands into tight, white-knuckled fists. When he got to the other side of the street, he took a swing at the air and yelled. Several people stopped what they were doing, who they were talking to, and stared. He didn’t care.
He speed-dialed Forbes, and when she picked up Izzy said, “Mother couldn’t be fucked about it. Slammed the goddamn door in my face when I told her.”
Forbes breathed a sigh into the phone.
“It happens, Bishop,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She never had a chance,” Izzy said. “From day one she never had a chance.”
“Some don’t. It’s brutal, but it’s true.”
“It’s fucked, Forbes. This is all fucked.”
“Bishop…”
He hung up and climbed into his Mazda, shaking all over and wanting very much to explode.
Forbes arranged with Dr. Jarvis for Izzy to have a couple days off, to which she referred as “mental health days.” She recommended he spend them sleeping in, spending time with his girlfriend, and tuning out of any thoughts pertaining to Cynthia Ramos as much as possible. Izzy did not believe she thought that possible at all, and he knew it was not. But he accepted the temporary discharge and went home.
Trish had gone and hadn’t left a note. She left the coffee pot on, so Izzy poured himself a cup and sat down at the little bistro table in the kitchen, watching the steam curl off the top. One of Trish’s magazines was on the table, which featured a lead story on “Sabotaging Your Relationships.” He frowned at it, thinking that self-destructiveness was a hallmark of abuse survivors, particularly those who suffered from PTSD. He’d never been analyzed for the disorder himself, afraid of what he’d discover. He wondered if Cynthia had, if her advocate had determined as much after her attack the year before. If so, she never brought it up.
For his own part, Izzy had avoided drugs and alcohol like the black plague since his college days. He was no prude, but he was sufficiently terrified of falling into all the traps his history laid for people like him. Cynthia, he thought woefully, seemed to have marched right for them.
The toxicology exam appeared to have given only one possibility or, at best, two. Either she overdosed on accident, or she did it on purpose. If Izzy was right that she had no prior experience with heroin, he allowed the possibility that she simply didn’t know what she was dealing with and injected enough to send her underweight system into rapid decline. Her heart would have stopped before her other organs had the chance to start failing on her. There was, however, still a third scenario hidden in the tox report and track marks on her frail arm—that somebody else injected her with intent to kill her.
The cutting, he thought, doesn’t speak well for her mental state. She was depressed. Wanted to hurt herself.
Maybe Forbes was right. Maybe he was still trying to save someone when it was too late and she never could have been, anyway. People fall through the cracks sometimes, even ones you care about. Life wasn’t fair, and no one had a reasonable right to expect it to be.
Maybe Cynthia’s fate had been written a long time ago, Izzy considered, before she ever set foot in his ER that night.
He brought the coffee to his mouth and sipped, burning his tongue. He sucked in a sharp breath, spilled a bit on his hand and on the table. The sudden pain jacked his alertness better than the caffeine, and he crooked his mouth to one side, pondering just that.
Pain.
“That’s what the cutting’s about,” he said aloud. “She wasn’t trying to destroy herself. She was trying to feel.”
Izzy wiped his hand on his scrub bottoms and unlocked his phone, tapping on the contacts icon and scrolling down until he found the one he wanted.
Sandy Chen. Cynthia’s survivor advocate.
The hell with mental health days, Izzy thought, and he pressed the button to dial.
Though he liked and respected all the advocates from the crisis center he worked with, Izzy was relieved when Sandra Chen arrived to take Cynthia’s case. She was, in his estimation, the best of the lot by a long mile, and while he was boxed in by the restraints of evidentiary findings Sandy was in Cynthia’s corner two hundred percent from the word go. She too testified at Luke Osborn’s trial, but she never told the story of a girl broken by a bad man. Rather, it was a woman who survived despite that man’s every effort. Izzy long suspected Sandy belonged to that same secret club he and Cynthia were in, but he never asked. Whatever her motivation to do what she did, she was damned good at it.
When he called her, she assumed he was at the hospital and in need of her. Izzy told her no, and instead broke the news of Cynthia’s death.
“Oh Christ,” Sandy said. “Oh, Cynthia. How did it happen?”
“That’s a matter of some debate if you ask me, but according to everyone else she OD’ed sometime early yesterday morning. Heroin.”
“Heroin!” she said. “God, I wish she’d have told me that. If I’d known—Izzy, I could have gotten her help. I’d have done anything to help her.”
“I know you would’ve. I would, too. I saw her the day before, Sandy. She wasn’t fine—I won’t tell you she was fine. But I never thought she was shooting up, anything like that.”
“Still cutting?”
Mind reader, Izzy thought.
He said, “Yes. Very recently. Her whole right arm was a tic-tac-toe board all the way down.”
“Hmm.”
“What is it?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not unheard of that cutters will use, self-medicate and that sort of thing. It’s just that I don’t see Cynthia in that way at all. You use an opoid like heroin to shut everything down, cocoon yourself in a way. It’s a numbing effect the user is after. That, to me, is antithetical to why she cut herself.”
“I just told myself the same damn thing.”
“C
ynthia didn’t want to be numb. That scared her just as badly as her thoughts and feelings did. She wanted very much to feel alive, Izzy—just in a different way than she usually did, if that makes sense. For her it was a grounding technique. Not a good one, not what anyone would recommend, but that’s what it was. She was refocusing, drowning out the bad shit but not to the point of drowning out everything. Unless her circumstances and well-being drastically changed in the last few weeks, I’d be very surprised to learn she was shooting that shit.”
“I was shocked,” Izzy said. “She drank some, like anybody. Smoked some weed now and then.”
“Even coke wouldn’t bowl me over,” Sandy said. “But it’s a stimulant. Opposite of heroin. I just don’t see it.”
“When did you see her last?”
“A little under a month ago. She’d been dropping by a lot less frequently, and she was impossible to get a hold of. No fixed address.”
“I think she’d been squatting somewhere.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. She had virtually no support network.”
“Tell me something,” Izzy said, drawing a circle in the coffee spill on the table with his finger, “do you often have squatters among your clients?”
“Not super often, but yeah, it happens. Sometimes they’ll form little enclaves, the younger ones. Pull together in some place if they can’t find space in a crisis center or safe place—or just don’t want to. I had a kid in a situation like that in November, but he moved away since then. Oregon, I think.”
“A squatting situation?”
“Yeah, sort of a punk house on the eastside.”
“You don’t happen to know where, exactly?”
“I might actually have it written down someplace—but why, Izzy? What are you up to?”
“I’m really not sure yet, to be honest.”
“Well, I like an honest man. Let me poke around, see if I can find it. I’ll text you if I do. Fair enough?”
“Amazing. You’re the best, Sandy.”
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 3