by C. L. Gaber
“There’s no more electric chair—and it’s Old Sparky … not Old Sparkly,” Nat interjects, as I just keep my trap shut and watch the exchange.
“What do you mean no electric chair?” Deva shoots back, clearly disappointed. “I thought there has always been an electric chair.”
“They thought that was a little too cruel and unusual in terms of punishment,” Nat lectures. “They don’t even use it in Florida anymore, and they have very high standards for what they consider cruel or unusual down there.”
“Well, don’t tell me we’re going through all this trouble just so he can spend the rest of his life playing tennis and bocce ball at some country-club prison,” Deva almost shouts, causing the rest of us to shush her instantly.
“I want a dramatic ending to this!” Deva insists.
“Okay, drama mama, because this hasn’t been enough excitement already,” I finally speak up.
Inside the suburban mall, I follow the others past the overpriced jewelry stores and the sunglass stores where shades cost more than diamonds. We move past the vitamin store that smells like the iron and blue-green algae tablets my mom makes me take in the morning.
There’s a big looming bargain department sign ahead, and Deva straightens her shoulders and marches past the clothing section with her eyes trained on the automotive department. For the briefest moment, Cissy lingers to glance at a dress on one of those racks, and without moving her gaze, Deva barks, “Cissy!” at her.
Cissy immediately picks up the pace.
“That dress was pretty cute,” I whisper into her ear while hoping that Deva can’t hear me.
“Really, Jex,” Deva says, still looking straight ahead. “I thought I made it clear that dusky pink is not in your color palette.”
“And I feel that eye roll,” she adds, still full steam ahead.
Two old men are watching cable news in the automotive store waiting area, which stinks of rubber tires and motor oil. Nat does a “be cool” gesture with her hands—palms down, hands spreading apart—and we push the door open to a car service area that is so loud with air compressors and hydraulic lifts that no one would even hear Godzilla stomping in.
Nat surveys the mechanics in the garage and then points to a pair of legs sticking out from under a red Mustang and whispers to us, “That’s him.”
“You’re identifying him based on his knees?” I whisper.
“It’s him,” Nat mouths. “Those are some very big knees.”
Staring down at his grease-stained blue mechanic’s pants, I approach him gingerly and then start to talk to those rather large knees in a firm voice that I heard my father use on the phone the other night while talking to a beat cop.
“Billy Guffman!” I say in a harsh, clipped tone.
No answer.
I try again. “Billy Guffman, come out from under that car. Immediately!”
The knees stay put.
“We need to talk to you for a minute and it’s important,” I state in the best Malone no-nonsense guttural bark.
“What the … ” Billy says from under the car, his words hard and clipped. Confusion registers on his meaty face when he slides out.
“We need to talk,” I bark at him without hesitation.
“Hey, you kids need to get out of here,” Billy shouts back, and gestures with his hand, pointing back toward the waiting room. “You will get in huge trouble being out here.”
“No, we need to talk,” I insist, and Billy gives me a very puzzled look before getting to his feet. He towers above us and puts his hands on his hips as if he’s the commanding officer of the auto repair bay. I take a step back, but don’t back down.
“Where are your parents?” he says, looking at me—and me alone—in the most quizzical manner. “Do they know you’re out here?”
“Trust me, Billy, you don’t want my parent around,” I shoot back. Where did that come from? Who knows—but it works, because a wave of realization washes across Billy’s face. He knows I mean business. About something.
“I can’t imagine what we need to talk about considering I’ve never seen you in my life,” he shoots back. “Did I work on your car? Do I know your older sister or something? Wait, you’re not that girl Debbie’s sister, because I swear we never had anything going on.”
“Uh, nice Billy,” Deva interjects, clearly bored at the pace of our attempt at an interrogation. “Here’s the deal: We’ve come into some new information about another old girlfriend of yours. And while we’re standing here wasting your time and our time—and frankly God knows what these motor oil fumes are doing to my pores—our dear Patty Matthews is lying out there somewhere alone and dead.”
I turn to glare at Deva for speaking out of turn, but quickly notice that Billy has turned white as a sheet.
“Patty? What do you know about Patty? You look too young to have known her … what in the hell is going on here?” he stammers.
“We know all we need to know about Patty,” I jump back in, feeling the need to take control of this back from Deva before she blabs too much in her impatience. “What we need to know from you is … ”
Oh darn. My mind goes blank. What is it we need to know from him? I’m totally flubbing this. Olivia on Law & Order never flubs her line when she’s at that moment of confronting the suspect. I totally suck at Interrogation 101.
I must have a pleading look of desperation on my face because the next thing I know, Billy is grabbing an oily rag and wiping his hands on it, turning to shout at another mechanic that he’s taking a fifteen-minute break. He points to the exit door and we obligingly head that way with him trailing behind. The door shuts behind us with a thud and the noise of the garage is muffled.
“Food court—now!” he commands us and points toward the open mall. We walk silently to the nearest table at the food court and take our seats without uttering a word.
“Look, I am not the smartest person on the planet,” he announces.
Deva stifles a laugh and I kick her under the table.
“But when people who I don’t know show up at my work talking about Patty, I know something is up. So spill it, what do you know?” Billy demands.
“We’re going to make this fast, so just listen and don’t talk, Billy,” I say, removing any nervous tension from my voice by speaking extra slowly and clearly and pronouncing every syllable. A quick glance at Nat bolsters me because she nods assuredly.
“We know what happened to your girlfriend Patricia Matthews. I can’t tell you how we know, I can only tell you that we know,” I add. “I’ll give you this much information so that you know we’re not kidding around. You gave her scrunchies for her birthday present.”
Billy looks at me wide-eyed in amazement.
“Ick—scrunchies!” Deva adds disdain for emphasis, as if next to being responsible for Patty’s disappearance, his greatest shame is giving scrunchies as a gift.
For some reason, Billy doesn’t look mean or scared for a minute. He looks a little bit sad, which shocks me. Then Billy folds his arms across his wide chest, but not in defiance. Even more startling is when he drops his head like it’s just too heavy and is about to roll off his stump of a neck.
“This makes no sense,” he mumbles, his plastic athletic pants rustling on the seat and his plain black T-shirt molding to him.
“Listen up,” Nat says, leaning in and talking low. “We found Patty’s diary. We aren’t lying about it. You remember? The notebook. I’m guessing she talked about it because the girl poured her heart out in it. You must have known she kept a diary.”
Billy sits stone-faced. He’s not about to give it up.
Nat persists, “The notebook where she wrote all about you and your big love affair and how her dad knocked her around a little bit because he hated your guts.”
No response from Billy.
“Okay, you want to play this out?” Nat tests Billy. In one swift move, she reaches into her backpack, and for a minute I hope that she just plans to pepper spray hi
m so we can race out of here. Instead, she grabs her cell phone. For a quick second, I wonder if Nat is going to call the real cops, which could mean big trouble for me.
“Does this look familiar?” Nat says, slow and low.
Even I stifle a gasp when the cover of Patty’s notebook comes up. Nat has obviously logged the evidence. For safe keeping. She swipes her finger across the screen and the first pages of the notebook, each neatly represented in a photo, fly past Billy’s increasingly bugged-out eyes.
When he makes a quick grab for the phone, Nat jets her hand just out of his reach.
“Does this prove you’re a killer? Maybe yes. Maybe no. One thing is for sure: Your dead little girlfriend Patty wrote it … she wrote about all of it,” Nat says. “And most interesting of all is what she wrote about you, Billy.”
What happens next surprises all of us. Billy allows his giant head to fall into his big saucer-like hands.
“I don’t want to get into all this again. Why doesn’t this ever go away? Why?” he says to no one in particular.
“I didn’t do it, okay. I just didn’t do it. I swear, I don’t know what happened the night Patty died,” he says in a voice that’s ragged and hovering on pure torment.
“Died? How do you know she died?” I ask in a quieter voice.
Suddenly, I remember my dad lecturing some other cop on the phone about pushing a suspect over the edge until he tells you what you need to know.
“Because her father was a psycho,” Billy starts to explain. “Because she had the worst family in history. Because her father was a big violent drunk. Because he almost killed her about half a dozen times—and that’s what she told me. Imagine what she never told me.
“Isn’t that enough?” he asks.
When I shake my head to push, he goes on.
“Any idiot could figure out that her dad had way too much to drink that night and tossed her down the stairs again,” Billy rants. “You know, he’d pushed her into the door before, got a giant bruise on her leg. She said it was a bike accident. She told that gym teacher that she fell off her bike. Except Patty didn’t have a bike.”
We sit in a sort of stunned silence.
“I know better because she told me. She was my girl. I tried to protect her, but she wouldn’t let me,” Billy says. “I could have hurt him. Look at me. He had half my size. I could have killed the guy.
“I kept showing up at the house at weird times like at night. I’d stand on the lawn just so she would have to come out. To see if she was okay,” Billy says.
“If I was going to kill anyone, I should have killed her father,” he adds in an exhausted voice.
My heart feels as heavy as Billy’s head, but I can’t give in to my emotions at this point. We just need to keep him talking.
“Look, I’m not saying that everything was rosy with me and Pats all the time. We were kids. There were issues,” Billy says, now beginning to talk to us unprompted.
“What issues do you have at that age except where to go and make out?” Deva interrupts.
“There were things,” Billy stammers. “But like I told the cops, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I was busy the night of that block party. Real busy. I didn’t even see Patty except for a minute. I just saw her for a minute and then she was gone.”
“What time did you see her?” I demand.
“It was almost dark. And I only saw her for a second,” Billy says.
“And you want us to believe this because … well, we’re waiting,” Cissy demands in a voice she has never used this summer or at least around me. She actually sounds commanding.
Billy avoids her gaze. Wait, did Cissy just hit on something?
He starts to open his mouth as if he wants to get something off his chest and then closes it without uttering a word. A split second later, he starts to speak again. Hesitantly.
“Okay, let me tell you something that few people really know,” he says. He opens his mouth to start speaking again when he’s interrupted by a reed-thin voice shouting: “Billy!”
We all look up and he turns to see the blonde woman coming up behind him. She’s dressed in cutoff shorts and sandals that slap on the mall tile floor and a faded blue halter-shirt.
Draping herself over Billy for a quick hug, her face isn’t warm or glad to see him, and then she looks at us with a mixture of confusion and hostility.
“Baby,” she announces in a cold voice. “What exactly is going on? The guys at the shop told me I could find you here.”
“Oh, hi baby,” Billy says in a nervous voice. “I was just … ”
“You were just what?” the woman demands. “You were just pretending you were sixteen again and about to ask one of these cute girls to the prom?”
“Who,” Deva injects, “are you? And for your information, I would never go to the prom with someone like him.”
“Oh Deva,” Cissy whispers, elbowing her friend in the ribs. “This is no time to discuss who is an acceptable prom date.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, little girl?” the woman sneers at Deva.
“And as for who I am, I’m his wife. I’m Mel Guffman. What I need to know is why you’re not after someone your own age. Don’t play with the big boys. You’ll get hurt.”
Alarms suddenly go off in my head. Mel … ?
Not Mel … issa.
It’s worth a shot.
“Wow, Melissa,” I toss out. “How nice to meet the best friend of the poor sad girl—the one with the horrible family life who went missing. Or should I say the girl who turned up dead?
“Let’s see here,” I go on. “You ended up with her boyfriend—isn’t that convenient?”
It’s a shot in the dark that hits the mark. Melissa actually sways backward, almost falling, and Billy reaches up a giant hand to steady her. She swears under her breath and then looks like she might pass out.
“Baby,” Billy reaches up to steady Melissa. “These girls have found something that belongs to Patty. Something that no one has seen in a very long time. They found her diary. You remember she kept a diary, right?”
Melissa looks like she wants to reach out and strangle us and alternately ask us a million questions. Unfortunately, I think she wants to do a little more strangling than asking.
Billy senses this situation is about to spin out of control if we start asking Melissa questions.
“Leave her alone!” he commands. “We didn’t mean to do it. We just fell in love. We were kids. We didn’t want to hurt Patty. That’s what almost no one knows. We started dating each other when Patty was still alive.”
Tears fill Melissa’s eyes. “Why are we even talking about this again?” she says, gazing at us in horror. Then she lets it rip. “Honestly, we just fell in love. We were so young. But Patty … she would have never forgiven us.
“It would have killed her,” Melissa stammers.
“Bad choice of words,” I tell her.
That was an awkward moment—the four of us and the two of them standing there in a mall food court staring each other down, not knowing what to say. Bottom line: Billy and Melissa, you’ve been found out.
So there was one teeny flaw in Nat’s plan. After we confronted Billy, we didn’t exactly know what to do with the information dumped in our laps even though, weirdly, I think we kind of got them to confess something.
“I feel like a much younger, more attractive Dr. Phil!” Deva whispered to me.
One humiliating bus ride back home and we decided to do a post-op session at Deva’s mansion, where we could spend the afternoon dissecting our findings and perhaps do a home beauty DIY recipe because when on Deva’s turf, expect to exfoliate.
“All this concentrating on crime causes us to scrunch our faces, which is not good for wrinkle prevention. And yes, we do need to worry about that now—not later,” Deva informs us as she ushers us into the gigantic foyer with miles of white marble and ceilings that seem to hit the sky.
Every piece of furniture in the house is
white, from the plush leather couches to the white rugs in the living room. A gigantic white sculpture of a naked woman is plopped in a hallway that leads us to a kitchen that seems like it belongs in a restaurant. Without knowing why, I begin to imagine myself spilling something or causing some sort of million-dollar breakage.
I also find out that the parental units known as “Mummy” and “Daddy” are (as usual) away on a business trip again where they are opening up a new chain of walk-in health clinics.
Living solo in luxury suits our friend, who ushers us outside to the “pool complex,” which is an Olympic-size pool, an ocean-size hot tub, and a widescreen TV hanging from invisible cables. The lawn furniture is softer to sit on than my bed at either of my parents’ houses. The cushions are spotless white. A friendly housekeeper brings us organic mango ice tea, some hummus chips, and a veggie crudités tray with yogurt dip.
I tried not to let my eyes bug out when we walked into this dream palace complete with a circular driveway and White House–type white pillars. My new pal is just one cabana boy short of having her own resort.
It’s oddly relaxing just eating veggies and sitting by the sparkling blue waters of the pool. Allowing my body to sink into these deep cushions seems natural. Cissy flicks on the flat-screen TV so the sound will drown out our conversations just in case the housekeeper thinks it might be part of her job description to eavesdrop.
Curling up on what’s obviously her personal chaise, Deva pulls out the latest issue of Elle just so we look normal. We’re just four normal girls living the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
“So let me get this straight,” she begins. “Patty not only had the suckiest home life in the world. She had this doormat of a mother and an abusive father. But she also had a boyfriend who looks like King Kong’s younger brother and who cheated on her with her best friend, the woman who needs a good bath and a stylist.”
“I’m never complaining about anything again. For the rest of my life,” Cissy blurts out.
Frowning, I mention that my brain is turning cartwheels, whatever that expression means. Gingerly, I place my tea glass on a coaster made from African grass reeds that Mummy brought back from a health clinic tour of Africa she took with Angelina Jolie.