He’d interviewed me just before my third book, Dust to Dust, came out. The house was being built then; and that’s where they took my picture—in faded jeans and a thermal undershirt, hair flying—standing under the newly framed entranceway as belligerent waves flapped over the seawall in the distance.
“Why build a house,” he’d asked, “with the ocean beating down your door on one side, and the river on the other?”
“I like to live dangerously,” I’d told him, hoping he knew good copy when he heard it.
He had. The article began, “True-crime writer Garner Quinn has built her home, and her career, on dangerous ground.” I still remembered those words, but his name was mostly a blank.
He turned back to me, satisfied that I was his best bet for the moment. “All over but the shouting, eh, Quinn?”
“We’ll see.” Something about him reminded me of a sardine. Long and sallow. Tapering at the head and feet. Oily.
“Of course, it probably doesn’t matter much to you which way it goes now.” He flashed a sardinish smile, teeth narrow and pointy. “Royalties being royalties.” This was my punishment, I decided, for dawdling in the hotel suite, for wandering away from the pack.
“How’s the Nickster bettin’?” asked the B Man.
“He thinks Pacino’ll play him in the movie.” I stepped back to let a young woman pass.
“Mmm-mmm, can’t get enough of that South’n fried chicken.” The reporter licked his lips in the direction of the girl. It pissed me off that he considered me one of the guys, someone he could cuss with, and leer at other women around.
“See you in court,” I said.
He grabbed my sleeve. “Be a pal, Quinn. Come on, between us.” I kept my face impassive, committing nothing. “No matter what she says, you don’t really think he’s innocent, do you?”
A loud commotion saved me from having to answer. Microphones waving, cameras jockeying for position, the press ebbed and flowed down the hall like a giant amoeba. At its nucleus, looking serene and untouched, was Susan Trevett Cox.
“Mrs. Cox! Susan—!” a jumble of voices yelled at once. The B Man from People moved toward the Susan Cox Story reflexively, like a weed toward the light.
Susan’s face, stripped of all makeup, was spit-polished and shiny under the fluorescents. Her hair had been tied back so severely that the broken ends around the crown and neck frizzed out like a halo, framing a small upturned nose, immense lashless eyes, the pouty upper lip. It looked a lot different than it had that first time, almost a year before.
THREE
She was surrounded by reporters that day, too; blond hair tumbling in feathery wisps, eyes fringed with dimestore mascara.
I watched the wheelchair brigade as it passed out of Richland Memorial. Sitting within the confines of the big metal contraption, flanked by two bulky detectives and a gaggle of geeks from the prosecutor’s office, Susan looked as small and defenseless as a child. It wasn’t until one of the men took her elbow, assisting her toward a waiting car, that the illusion of fragility snapped against that taut reality of spandexed hips and high, firm breasts—the kind women go to surgeons for—bobbing like buoys on the filmy polyester sea of her aqua-blue blouse. Susan didn’t walk, she rippled.
Her glorious body strained against the garlands of gauze wrapping it as if to say, Let me out. In one slow, liquid movement, she poured herself into the car’s upholstered darkness, the bandages playing peekaboo with the outer skin of her clothing.
There would be more linen dressing, I knew, winding its way around her shoulders, under the up-tipped breasts, across her belly, and down her buttocks. All in all, the knife had pocketed forty-seven crosses into the girl’s flesh.
I stood apart as the reporters swarmed toward the departing automobile. There would be time later. I would have plenty of opportunity to talk, to listen, to become whatever and whomever Susan needed me to be—a sister, a mother, a friend, a confessor. It didn’t matter.
I played them all very well.
All Through the Night, the Jeff Turner book, started out as so many of my books did, with a tip. Someone was murdering girls down in Columbia, South Carolina. The press dubbed the killer the Holy Ghost because he’d staged a funeral Mass for each of the women he attacked before raping and killing them. A friend of a friend knew one of the detectives.
I was lousy with those kinds of friends.
The call came one hot summer morning. “Thought you might be interested.” The detective’s voice was a whisper. “We got a live one.”
Her name was just plain Susan Trevett then, a cocktail waitress who modeled lingerie at ladies’ get-togethers and businessmen’s lunches. She particularly enjoyed the latter, she told me, because she was able to pick up a little cash on the side.
“But I ain’t nobody’s bimbo, unnerstand?” she emphasized, her slow, southern voice clinging to vowels, the way the capri pants clung to her tightly rounded buttocks.
“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to make it big, you know.” She stretched toward her toes in a gesture that was both catlike and contrived. “Wanted to have it all.” Then, with one of the swift changes of emotions that I would learn to expect, her immense eyes clouded with tears.
“I coulda been in Playboy,” she went on softly, “maybe even made centerfold.” Susan looked down at the angry pink crosshatched welts on her wrists. “Men used to tell me I had a perfect body.”
“It still looks pretty perfect,” I said, truthfully, “to me.”
“Well, you ain’t Mr. Hefner, now are you?” sighed Susan Trevett.
We were sitting in the bedroom of the apartment where Susan had been staying since leaving the hospital. In the middle of the room her open suitcase spilled its contents onto an old shag rug. She kneeled next to it, the way I’d seen Asian women kneel, not with a thud, but a gentle undulation of the body, like cake dough folding into a pan. From behind, she looked to be about eight years old.
“Here.” She handed me a manila folder. Inside were several 8x10 color shots showing Susan Trevett in a sheer teddy with the laces completely undone. I leafed through the photographs, wondering if I would be expected to say something about how taste fully they were done.
“Guy I know took ’em,” she explained. “But Playboy mailed ’em back.” She continued, her voice earnest and introspective. “I think it was ’cause I didn’t have an agent. That and the fact that Eddie wannit much of a photographer.
“Which is how I come to take the job over at Annalee’s in the first place. To save up for my portfolio.” She rose suddenly, landing in another part of the room like an agitated butterfly. Her fingers worked at lighting a cigarette. “How I ended up comin’ home late that night.”
“Can you tell me about it?” I wished she would face me again, but couldn’t chance moving in her direction. The name of the game was unobtrusiveness. No tape recorder. No notepad. Just ears, eyes, and memory.
Susan Trevett sighed, or let out a drag of smoke. From where I sat, I couldn’t be sure. “Yeah,” she said, finally. “Why not?”
It was the sixth straight day of the heat wave. She remembered because one more would have made an even week. It had been a relief to report to work, Susan said, where it was air-conditioned. On her first break she’d had a fight with T. J. Shiels, the bartender she was dating, after catching him groping another waitress. To spite him, she’d started flirting with a college student from USC who was sitting at the bar. When her shift was over she left with the boy.
“What was his name?”
She shrugged, offering helpfully, “Mark, I think. Mark, or maybe Bart.”
“So did he take you home,” I prodded gently, “or what?”
Again, Susan shrugged. “We fooled around in the parking lot for a while.”
“You had sex with him?”
“His car was too small,” she explained, “so I just gave him a blow job.”
I nodded, as though this were a perfectly natural thing to do under
the circumstances. “And then he took you home?”
Susan stubbed out her cigarette in the palm of a big clam shell. “Hey, I may be a little wild,” she said, “but I ain’t nuts.”
She’d had the boy drop her off a few blocks away from her apartment, she explained, so that he wouldn’t know exactly where she lived. She lowered herself down slowly on crossed legs. “I always do that when it’s a new guy, ’cause,” she said, “you never know.” Her voice shattered into a little laugh. The irony of this was not lost on Susan Trevett.
“You walked the rest of the way home?”
She began playing with the feathery ends of her hair. “Yeah. I walked.”
“Then what happened?”
Susan arched her back as though it were stiff. “Look,” she protested, “can’t you just listen to those tapes the police got? I mean, I been over this a hunnerd times already.”
“I can come back,” I said, careful to keep my voice free of impatience and expectation. “We don’t have to do it now.”
She muttered, “Now, later. I guess it don’t make a hell of a lot of difference.”
Susan began telling the story, her story, again.
She’d started walking the two and a half blocks to her place. It was still hot. Her feet were killing her. She didn’t remember hearing anything, except for the sound of the cicadas, like sand paper rubbing against the night. “That’s the way they do it, innit? They rub their legs against their wings?” she asked me softly. “Or am I thinking of some other kinda bugs?”
There was no one on the street, she said. She took off her shoes and stuck them in her bag, then peeled off her pantyhose and hung them around the back of her neck, like a towel. The pavement hurt, she recalled, so she walked on the grass, humming to herself, dancing a little in the dark. By the time she reached the duplex she rented for three and a quarter a month, she’d already had her key out.
“I remember everything suddenly being so clear,” Susan said, “like it didn’t matter no more about T.J., or any of ’em. I was gonna get in Playboy. Be a big name. It was gonna be all right. I remember feeling real happy.” She let out another bitter laugh. “Innit a bitch?
“Here’s the part that really takes the cake—the moon was out, and I closed my eyes and made a wish on it. Closed my eyes for just that little bitty second, but it sure was enough.” The man had jumped out from between two parked cars, grabbing her from behind. Within seconds he was using the pantyhose around her neck as a garrote. She tried to fight him. Her pocketbook came loose in the struggle. The key flew out of her hand. It was later found in the grass.
Susan spoke without emotion now, as though these things had happened to someone else. Every once in a while she paused, seeming to see something in a small, dark space behind her eyes. She let it register and then went on, surprised, perhaps, at her own disaffectedness. I’d seen this before, victims detaching from the fear, the anger, the sense of naked helplessness.
She lost track of what she was saying. I prompted her gently. “Did you scream?”
“He put something in my mouth. A handkerchief, I guess. And he pounded my head down on the hood of a parked car.” She was becoming fidgety again. “Slammed me real hard—hey, you got a match?” I reached in my bag, and tossed her a pack. Although I hadn’t smoked for years, I carried it all—matches, butts, a store of gum, lots of tissues.
Susan walked over to a deco vanity, beat up but still a marvel for its rosy inlay and bold curves. I could see her face in the mirror as she lit up, then reached for a tube of liquid eyeliner and began applying it with a steady hand. “Next thing I know”—she was barely breathing, Kewpie lips parted, as though that were part of drawing the neat little line—“I was in the back of the van.” Beige. North Carolina plates. Blacked-out windows in the back. Gutted. Moldy carpeting on the floor.
She blinked, her left lid rimmed smoky blue, startling the white of the eye, making the iris stand out like the target of a ball toss in a carnival game. She went to work on the right.
The man had thrown her down and pulled the door shut, Susan continued with her dull, loose-lipped delivery. He took a condom out of his pants pocket. When he tried to rape her, she fought back. Hard. That’s when he started with the knife.
“You could see it was what he liked using,” Susan told me, “more than his dick. And the whole time, he’s whispering this mumbo-jumbo stuff in my ear. Dominoes, Nabisco—that kind of crazy shit.”
“Latin?”
“I guess so, though I can’t say I ever heard it spoke before then. All I know is it was weird, even weirder than his face.”
“What did he look like?”
“White.” Susan studied her handiwork in the mirror. “And I don’t mean just that he wannit black. Like a Halloween face’us been painted on.”
“The tests run on your blouse and skirt showed traces of greasepaint.”
She shrugged. “A great big sweatin’ moonhead, s’what he was.”
“What were you thinking?” I asked.
“Thinkin’?” she snapped. “I wannit thinkin’ anything. I was just tryin’ to get the fuck away from the bastard—and I did, too, didn’t I?”
I stayed quiet, remembering Susan’s statement to the police. How they’d struggled with the knife, how she’d managed to elbow him and break free. “Lord knows how I got outta the van. I just remember the fresh air hittin’ me, and my bare feet on the blacktop. There was a lighted window down the street”—her voice had sounded heartbreakingly young—“and I made toward it like heaven.”
I made toward it like heaven. I’d filed that phrase away.
Susan resumed work on her eye makeup. “That’s when I started yellin’ to beat the band, but mustn’t abeen nobody heard me, ’cause they didn’t come.” We lapsed into a long silence, thinking of all those people on that block, not hearing, never coming. It had been almost morning before someone noticed her, collapsed in a row of hedges.
“Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?” I asked finally.
“With the gunk on his face, sure,” she sighed. “Without it? I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Under her eyes the liner began to run in inky wet blobs.
“Shit,” Susan Trevett said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Less than a week later I sat with Susan in a small viewing room at a police precinct in downtown Columbia. The humid air was laced with tension, making it almost hurt to breathe.
“That’s him,” she said, pointing at the third man from the left.
The detective moved closer, his face almost touching hers, but whether from concern or downright lust, I couldn’t tell. “Are you sure?” he asked her.
“Absolutely, positively.” The wispy blond head bobbed.
Maybe we should try this chorus line in clown white now, I thought. Mix ’em up, give her another go at it. But then again, perhaps Susan Trevett had underestimated her own powers of identification. Because the young man was Jefferson “Bird” Turner, and he owned a beige van with North Carolina plates, blacked-out windows in the back, and moldy carpeting on the floor.
FOUR
“Susan! Susan! Do you have anything to tell us?” the reporters called.
Susan’s attorney, Tucker Morton, said, “After the defense rests, Mrs. Cox will make a statement.”
Shelby Cox’s arm tightened around his young bride. He reminded me of a possum—pink face frozen into preternatural stillness, eyes mesmerized by the headlights of an oncoming car that was about to steamroll him.
Susan shook off his sheltering embrace. “I have jus’ one thing to say now”—her soft, childlike voice rose above the clamor—“an’ that is—no matter what I said before—Mr. Turner is an innocent man.” A few flashlights went off. Susan Trevett Cox put up her hand as though to shield her eyes. From where I stood I could see the rosy tracks of scars on her wrist and forearm. Then Tucker Morton ushered his client and her husband down the hall.
The People reporter edged back in my direction. “D
id I tell you I got an exclusive? Cover story next week, and get this”—he nudged my arm with his elbow—“Susie put on mascara and lipstick for the photo shoot. I guess she felt the Lord would’ve wanted her to look her best.”
You slime, I thought. Aloud I said, “I gotta get inside, Bryant,” my tongue rolling off the name before I knew I knew it. I would have gotten away from him, too, if an elderly woman carrying a prayer-book, its leather cover grizzled like the lips of an old dog, hadn’t been taking her sweet southern time passing through the courtroom doors.
“Hey, what about this Dane Blackmoor stuff?” Bryant dodged my heels. “Sex-y, huh? Very sexy.”
“I really haven’t paid much attention,” I said, elbowing my way through the crowd as politely as I could.
“Oh, come on,” he protested in a stage whisper, “Blackmoor’s perfect for you! A match made in bestseller heaven!” He stopped suddenly, gesturing toward the section reserved for the press. “Well, this is where I get off. The cheap seats. See you around, Quinn.”
I continued down the aisle, sliding into my usual chair just behind the defense table. Jeff Turner’s mother, Varlie, was sitting with her sister in the row behind me. I turned around and flashed them a supportive smile. They nodded with faces set in the same sad lines, stone tablets carved with identical commandments: Life shall be hard; the poor will be trod upon; nothing good can ever come of anything. I doubted they’d show a spark of emotion, even when Jeff was set free.
Don’t jump the gun, I reminded myself. We aren’t out of the woods yet. Still, it was difficult not to anticipate a happy ending. I’d all but written it.
A tide of whispers lapped over the courtroom as the guards ushered in the defendant. Jefferson Turner had quite a following. Nick Shawde called them the Turnerettes, and insisted that at least two women on the jury were charter members of the club.
“He’s got that little-boy-lost thing going for him,” the defense attorney told me exultantly. “When he laughs, the ladies laugh. That hangdog expression crosses his pretty face, it’s hankie time in the ole South.”
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