by Varian Wolf
“So, ‘Angry’ Annie Eastwood,” said the cop who was going to be my polite debriefer on this fine afternoon. He had brought a friend with him. It looked like it was going to be a whole party.
He plopped a file down on the table between us. I noted that it wasn’t as fat as the file they had on me in Detroit.
The cop leafed through the freshly printed stack of flattering reports.
“Twenty-three arrests in Michigan, one in Ohio, five misdemeanor convictions, three felony convictions, two years in federal prison, in current violation of parole by failing to appear for your parole officer, leaving the county, possessing and discharging a firearm –unregistered, I might add, and with three outstanding warrants…for breaking and entering, vandalism, and,” his voice crescendoed for the climax, “murder of one Mitchell Robinson, aka “Short John” in Detroit, Michigan. You’re a regular little Detroit terror. So tell me, Miss Eastwood, what are you doing so far from home?”
I looked at him squarely.
“Waiting for my lawyer.”
“Uh huh,” he looked over his shoulder at his partner, “I’m Detective Schmidt. This is Detective Lopez. You’re familiar with the system, Annie? Well, if you are, you know that helping us now will help you when it comes to a plea deal.”
I thought about asking them to take off my cuffs and let me pick the thorns out of my feet so they could feel like they were doing me a favor, but then they’d feel like they were doing me a favor.
“We don’t have to tell you how bad this is,” said the other man, “Breaking into an apartment, discharging a firearm on a college campus, kidnapping one of the students…”
I smiled. I didn’t even flinch. Kidnapping. I should have thought of it sooner. It was icing on the cake. If they’d talked to Yoki, they’d know it wasn’t true, but they still would have to try to use it against me as a tool of interrogation. It was too perfect.
“Don’t get cocky yet,” said Schmidt. “You have charges to face in Michigan if we don’t get you first, and I don’t have to tell you that murder one can get you life in a maximum security penitentiary up there. There were witnesses to that shooting. They say you pulled the trigger on an unarmed man who was begging you for help.”
Apparently they hadn’t noticed who pointed the gun at who first. People in Detroit never were very good witnesses.
“Annie,” said Schmidt, sitting down, folding his hands on the table, and getting all cozy. “This really isn’t going to go well for you. I’m sure you’ve heard of Virginia Tech. If the prosecutor pushes the idea that you had similar intentions, you’ll be doing more time than the two years you did for that armed robbery conviction. They’re looking for scapegoats on that kind of case. You need to convince them that that’s not what this was.”
Bored, I looked around the room.
“Tell us what really happened, Annie.”
“Who were the two men outside the building?” asked Lopez, “The ones who bolted. What did they have to do with this?”
“So you did talk to Yoki.”
Lopez stepped forward. He was supposed to be the menacing one. He slapped a picture on the table and slid it over to me. It was a girl a few years younger than myself, but with more sun damage. White girl. She had long brown hair and big white teeth. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen her.
“Tell us what you know about Trisha Danes.”
Oh. That’s who it was. Fried chicken girl. The one whose nose I’d broken.
I looked at Lopez.
“I knew blonde wasn’t her natural color.”
They’d talked to dozens of people who were at that party already. They knew what had happened. That was so minor. Why were they bringing it up now?
“She disappeared last night. She never made it home. Her roommate called us after she heard about your,” he pointed aggressively at me, “fight with her at the party at Bartholomew Rathstein’s house.”
Schmidt’s turn. “You were seen leaving the party right after she did.
Lopez again, meaner. “You followed her out, didn’t you. You followed her outside to retaliate for her making you look bad in front of all those college-educated kids, didn’t you? You were trying to fit in, and she saw you for what you really were, so you punched her in the nose, and you followed her outside to finish the job.”
Whoa. Now we were getting into definitely-need-a-lawyer territory. This is where the dumb people talk and the smart people get dumb real fast.
“It’s looking a lot like lawyer time to me,” I said.
“A lawyer isn’t going to help you when the prosecutor’s office gets a hold of all this evidence.”
“Did you use the .40 to kill Trisha Danes?”
“Did your friend Yoki help you hide the body?”
“Where did you hide it?”
“Did you follow her home or kidnap her there?”
“Where is the black SLR Coupe you were seen driving that night? The McLaren.”
“Did you use it to dispose of the body? Where is it?”
The pair looked at each other. They didn’t like that they were doing all the talking.
“You’d better talk to us, Annie.”
And they were using my first name regular-like.
“This is not going to be good for you. You are not just going to sit there all smug with your little smart-Alec smirk and your little convict swag and get away with any of this. This is all going to be bad for you. You’d better cooperate with us.”
Was I smiling? I made an effort to stop straight away.
“What happened to Trisha Danes?”
Lopez sighed and stood up. Then he spun and slammed his fist on the table.
“Answer the question. What happened to the little college girl you had a fight with in front of everyone at that party, whose nose you, a trained fighter, broke. Tell us where she is.”
“This is your last chance.”
I looked at them, trying very hard to make sure I wasn’t inadvertently smiling. I didn’t literally spell it out for them, but I said it as clearly and concisely as I could.
“I am waiting for my lawyer.”
They looked at each other again. Neither one of them was going to enjoy this, and they knew it, but their job description said that they didn’t get to quit for a long time yet. Cops think themselves the unstoppable force. They had no idea just how stubborn, how intractable, how unmovable an object I could be. I would have felt sorry for them, if I hadn’t hated them so god damn much. It was going to be a very, very long afternoon for all three of us.
And the night? Who knew what the night would bring, but something told me it was going to be full of surprises.
The cops took a break from grilling me after a while. They let me sit cooling my sandspur-perforated heels, while they sat discussing me on the other side of the one-way mirror. I was beat –not by them, by action. I’d spent the morning with Mark and part of the afternoon running barefoot in a bathrobe all over the city. I lay down on the floor and took a nap.
Problem was, they realized I was taking a nap. They didn’t like that much.
“Get up, Annie,” came Lopez’s familiar voice overhead. “No sleeping in here.”
What? No rest for the completely innocent?
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Time to get up and face the music.”
“Is it nighttime yet? It feels so late.”
“Don’t play all tired with me. Get up.”
He reached down to take my arm and hoist me up, but I don’t much like being hoisted (manhandled) by cops, and I managed to jump to my feet on my own…and with apparently threatening quickness. The man almost drew his gun.
Schmidt wasn’t coming in this time. It was going to be just the mean one and me. Earlier in my life/criminal career, they had sent the nice one in by himself, but I had noticed in the last few years that shift that denotes the system has labeled you as something different than they thought you were before, some
thing harder.
But Lopez didn’t start grilling me on his own. He didn’t break it down for me in words I could, with my impaired criminal brain, understand. Instead, he introduced a friend of his who had just come through the door.
“Annie, this is Detective Psalter. He is going to have a talk with you now. I wouldn’t mess with him if I were you.”
Ooh, and coming from the tough guy that was supposed to really scare me.
Lopez left the room, leaving me and Mister Psalter. The man stepped forward. He took off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, slowly, deliberately. He was saying, “I am a professional. I am in control. I have all the time in the world.”
He ran his hand across the table’s surface, fingered the file with my name and all kinds of bad in it. He was looking in the direction of it, but didn’t really seem to be looking at it. Finally, after much slow procedure, he sat down. Slowly.
He eased himself into place, lifted his hands and folded them on the table –not cozily as Detective Schmidt had done, but gracefully, threateningly, as a praying mantis might. He steepled his fingers. His nails were long and perfect.
“Annie,” he said smoothly, “you’re quite the difficult girl to pin down, they tell me.”
I was still looking at his nails.
“But I know you’re going to talk to me, Annie. I know because I want what you want.”
“I doubt that. I want a lawyer, and I suspect, if you wanted me to have one, I’d have one by now. So, you don’t want me to have one, I deduce.”
“Smart girl,” he said, looking out at me from deep-set eyes, “Because you’re smart, I know we are going to understand each other very well.”
“Oh, good. Then understand this: I’ll take the court-appointed guy, if you can scrounge one up, and until you do, no talkie.”
“You should know we have a shortage of those right now, the way we have a shortage of all the professionals a city needs to function. The storm drove them out, but it wasn’t just the storm. The chaos was always here, beneath the surface. The storm merely uncovered it. This city is a mess, but there are some good people working hard to bring it back from the brink, to lead it from a dirty past into a glorious future.”
Why was he telling me this? To throw me off the scent? He moved slowly, he talked slowly, he even took his good old time getting around to the subject. It was so staged, like he was deliberately trying the opposite tact of the other guys to the nth degree.
“This city will not tolerate people like you anymore, and the kind you associate with, muddying the waters. We need order, control. You bring chaos.”
I just didn’t have anything to say to that.
“What about this girl, Yoki Hayashi. Nice girl. Good student. Lots of friends. Member of a political club, star ballet dancer. What is your connection with her?”
“Lawyer.”
He tapped a nail on the metal tabletop. Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Let me rephrase the question.”
He bared his teeth, ran his tongue across them, and regarded me with an intensity of the eyes that was intended to be both menacing and meaningful. The gesture was quick and would not have been visible to the people behind the mirror or the camera in the corner of the ceiling. His back was to them. They were all focused on me.
“What does she mean to you?”
Though I wouldn’t have answered his question anyway, I was stunned speechless. Was he a witch? Something else? He didn’t have any fangs, if that’s what he was getting at. I somehow doubted he was sexually harassing me. I scanned his person: nothing remarkable. Just some guy, albeit creepy. Did he work for someone with fangs or magic? But who among the superpeople would be in on the police force here and why? Why in hell did they want anything to do with any of this bullshit? Yoki, of all people. The guy that had followed us home? My crimes?
And then it struck me, like a ham hock, because it was so obvious. It had to be Miguel. It had to be. Whoever this guy was, whoever he represented, they must be trying to get to him through me, and to me through Yoki. This had to be about Miguel. Had to be.
But what about New Orleans being an “open city”? What the hell about that? I was so going to kick Miguel for that later.
“There are people who want to hurt her, are there not? We can’t hold her. There’s no evidence she committed a crime. When she is released, tomorrow maybe, she’ll be in as much danger as she was before. They’ll get to her, unless you tell us what we want to know.”
Another meaningful/menacing look. I didn’t appreciate it.
“You know what?” I said. “I don’t give a god damn what you or the bad people out there do. That’s not my problem. My problem is belligerent cops who do not produce lawyers when they’re required. Habeas the lawyer’s fucking corpus. I want a warm, breathing body in here with a law degree. And then maybe –MAYBE I’ll talk.”
I was trying to buy time –time for Yoki, time for Miguel to do something. Jesus, it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea at all what he would do. I didn’t know him that well. I didn’t even know how old he was or when his birthday was, or his deathday. Maybe he’d get me a lawyer.
“Your situation is very simple,” the man went on. “You are back in the judicial system, soon to be the penal system. You have a friend who is highly sought after by someone who intends her harm. But she doesn’t have to get hurt. She can walk away from all of this, if, and only if, you give us exactly –and I do mean exactly, the information we ask you for.”
With that, he reached into his pocket and brought out an evidence bag. Inside was an unassuming black cell phone. My cell phone.
“So,” he said, “Tell me about Richard Albertson.”
I blinked. I mean, I think I blinked. It was long enough after he’d said what he’d said and before anything even remotely useful came to my brain for me to have blinked. I had no idea who he was talking about –but I wasn’t going to tell him that, not without a lawyer.
“The man who gave you this phone. Richard Albertson. Is he the same man who owns the McLaren?”
Ohhhh. That Richard Albertson.
“I want you to tell me about your relationship with him. Do you live with him? Is he your boyfriend?”
So the ham hock had hit the right head. This guy did want to know about Miguel, and he honestly thought he could get me to tell him. Ha! If he knew anything about vampires, he’d know that you don’t just get their people to talk. I couldn’t see Mark talking, and from the little I knew of Max I didn’t figure him for the squawking kind. I doubted that any of the other Ms would nark on their boy either. Andy wasn’t stupid. He was a fifty-karat ass, but after seeing his place and meeting his people, I knew he wasn’t stupid, and Miguel wasn’t stupid either. And both of them were very, very dangerous.
I suddenly got the overwhelming feeling –it was weird, that despite this prick cop’s air of evil intrigue and power, he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was dealing with. I was handcuffed and in jail with all kinds of charges pending against me, a friend whose life was in danger, and the guy who represented the bad people –on the police force, no less, sitting right in front of me with who knew what kind of power, and I suddenly felt confident, almost cocky. Again, I say, it was weird.
But I felt it, deep down –not in my soul, because I’m not sure I had one, but deep, deep down somewhere that I hadn’t glimpsed the tip of the iceberg of what Miguel could do, and if he started doing any of it, this whole ship of theirs was going to go down like the freakin’ Titanic.
Now I smiled, and I let it be just as smug and defiant and damn proud as I wanted it to be.
“You should have gotten me that lawyer,” I said, by way of letting him and whoever the fuck his people were know that if they weren’t going to play this game the human way, they were stepping right into the web of someone who was going to play the nonhuman way like a master. It may sound convoluted, but, trust me, he got it.
The man who called himself Psalter fr
owned an ugly frown and leered at me.
“If you think that I don’t represent the meanest, most God-fearing, merciless organization in the South, you are going to suffer its full wrath, and anyone else involved with you is going to be prosecuted,” he enunciated the final words for effect, “to the fullest extent of our law.”
At that moment, the overhead light went out. The lights in the hall and the little red dot that should signal the camera was in operation had gone out too.
“What’s –?”
I heard Psalter stand up in the dark. He was as surprised as I was, which meant this wasn’t his trick, which meant it was…
There was some noise in the hall, a door opening, people talking to each other, asking questions. Calm voices, worried ones. I heard Lopez’s voice. The people from the adjacent room had emerged. I saw the flicker of a flashlight sweep under the crack in the door.
“What’s going on?”
“Power’s out all down the hall –all of the rooms.”
“Nothing’s worked right since that damn hurricane.”
“I’ll go check it out.”
Receding footsteps.
“Fred, you okay in there?”
“I’m fine,” Psalter answered. “Just find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll open the door and get you out of there.”
“No. I don’t want to risk her slipping out. Just figure this out.”
“Okay,” Lopez replied. The flashlight began to recede.
“I can see you,” Psalter said quietly. “Don’t try anything. I have you exactly where I want you.”
I’d been in a jail when the power went out once before. It was creepy then, knowing there might be someone out there in the dark who’d like to take this opportunity to stab you in the back, but it was creepier now, with a man whispering at you like that and not being so certain that he was just as blind as you were.
But the backup power had kicked in after a minute that other time. That didn’t happen now. There was something wrong. People were calling to each other out there, discussing the problem, spreading the word that the outage was widespread in the building. There apparently weren’t any lights anywhere. Someone else trotted down the hall with a flashlight, this one brighter than Lopez’s had been. It flashed under the door and was gone.