Quicksand

by Carolyn Baugh

  “With your permission?”

  “She didn’t ask me! She worries about you—”

  Nora put her head on the tiled surface of the bar. “Ya Hammudi, please tell Baba something…”

  “Ya Baba … Nora has a gun,” Ahmad offered.

  “Your gun doesn’t scare me, girl. Not having grandchildren scares me.”

  Nora rose, kissed her brother’s cheek and then her father’s. “I’m going upstairs,” she said. “Neither one of you is allowed to follow.”

  Both were too busy chewing to respond.

  * * *

  Google Maps was one of the most convenient and dastardly programs ever invented, as far as she could tell. Nora stayed up most of that night, printing up detailed close-ups of the alley, and she began charting the row houses and twins that clustered around it. She hated the feeling that they could be way off, that the body left on the weedy bricks was only thrown there randomly. But trying to determine who lived there was the only good direction they could go in at this point.

  A total of ten homes were in eyeshot of the corpse that had been left there. Mrs. Chambers’s house was one of four single-family homes, and three twins rounded out the number. Nora drew in the body’s location and figured the angles relative to each home. She got current names for the owners of each place, and made a chart with whatever demographics she could locate in the municipal databases to which she had access.

  The next morning she struck out early, before Baba and Ahmad had arisen.

  Nora showed her badge to three separate sets of security guards, and then sat waiting for more than thirty minutes. Finally, “Jane Doe”—Nora forced herself to stop mentally referring to her as “the not-dead hooker”—was brought into the interview room of the Alternative Detention Center.

  Nora regarded her curiously. In her orange jumpsuit, and with an elastic tying back her hair, she looked very different from the hysterical, mostly naked girl Nora had first seen next to a pile of meth.

  The girl did not look at Nora.

  Nora intercepted the guard, asking if the cuffs could be removed, but the guard shook her head. “We’re used to the drugs here, but this one has an extra measure of instability somewhere in the mix. Lot of hair-pulling, self-abuse. The cuffs are as much for her own safety as for yours.”

  Left on her own with Jane Doe, Nora found herself unsure of how to begin. “I’m Officer Nora Khalil,” she said. “We’ve been trying to find out your name, but it seems you aren’t talking.”

  The girl shrunk in on herself, not looking up.

  Nora studied her. She realized Jane Doe was much younger than they had thought. Perhaps she was no more than sixteen, and Nora’s stomach immediately began to twist anxiously. “I know we found you in a difficult situation.” Nora paused, carefully watching the girl’s expression. “But I’m going to recommend you be transferred out of here, to a hospital. We can help you, if you’ll let us. Get you medical help. Rehab. Help you get back on your feet…”

  Nora started doubting if the girl even understood what she was saying. “You do speak English, right?” She squatted, looking up at the girl where she sat. “Right?”

  Jane Doe glanced at Nora, then looked away. It seemed to Nora that the girl’s whole body was trembling.

  “Yes? Is that a yes?”

  Silence.

  Nora sighed. “We are trying to find out information about Dewayne Fulton. Can you tell me how you ended up in that loft with him and Lisa Halston?”

  Silence.

  Nora rose to standing again. “How about if you just tell me your name? How old you are? We can try to find your family.”

  Silence.

  “How about…” she backed away from Jane Doe and went to sit on the bench across from her. “How about if I just sit here with you for a little bit then. And maybe … maybe you’ll talk if you feel like it?”

  The girl flicked a glance at Nora again, in what she was starting to accept as acknowledgment. And so they sat.

  It was very, very still; almost immediately, Nora became hyper-aware of her own breathing. Only seven minutes passed before she choked on her own silence and started chattering. “I bet the food is pretty nasty here. My dad has a restaurant, you know.”

  The girl was unmoved. She would not surrender over food.

  “Really good stuff,” Nora continued, undaunted. “Chicken kabob and lamb curry and these giant Greek salads with his own secret dressing. And then there’s the baklava. He has an awesome baklava. Kill you straight up if you have a nut allergy.”

  No reaction. Nora went on, trying to make her voice sound chatty and friendly instead of pestering. “He came from Egypt before I was born. He didn’t know a thing about cooking before he came. Used to call his mother from the kitchen, asking her how to do things. When my mom moved over from Egypt to marry him, he’d call her at work.” Nora stopped and tried hard to get the girl to meet her eyes.

  But Jane Doe closed her eyes as if to shut Nora out. She leaned her head against the wall. Nora sank into a sitting position in front of the girl, and remained there in silence another few minutes.

  Finally she stood and fished a card out of her Windbreaker’s breast pocket. She left it on the bench next to the girl. “You can ask them to call me when you change your mind. We can help you.”

  Nora walked to the door and rapped on the glass, angry at herself for having come all this way without a solid idea of what to say or how to say it. The guard appeared and escorted her through the maze of hallways and back down to the lobby.

  The air on 7th Street was biting. She quickly walked the single block over to the field office, determined to match Jane Doe’s face to a missing persons report.

  * * *

  It was midafternoon when she made her way back to the apartment over the Cairo Café. Ahmad was seriously angry with her.

  “You have studied with me, like, not at all. Not even a little. What the heck, Nora? How many times did I help you train for a race? You made me ride my bike all over this city with you. Made me hurl insults at you so you’d run faster. You warped my entire childhood. And now you can’t even ask me a few terms from some flash cards?”

  Nora kissed his head, then sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. Hand over the flash cards.”

  “What was so important?” he demanded.

  “Nothing is more important. I’m sorry, habibi. Dissimulation.”

  He put his head down on the kitchen table. “I have no idea.”

  “False appearances. Pretense.”

  He jerked his head up, still irritated with her. “Yeah, you know the worst part, is that I totally couldn’t concentrate because Baba was on the phone with Aunt Madiha for like an hour this morning talking about this doctor from Dallas. Like, talking all loud the way he does.”

  Nora felt queasy. “What about the doctor from Dallas?”

  Ahmad shrugged, “I don’t know, Nora. What his father does in Egypt, and where they live in Cairo and all that stuff. How many bedrooms his apartment has and what part of town that’s in. How he feels about his wife working. If he could come here for a weekend, and where he would stay.…”

  Nora shot back in her chair and took the stairs down to the restaurant by twos. As the door closed behind her, she heard Ahmad shouting, “I thought we were studying!”

  * * *

  Her father was standing over a huge pot that bubbled with rice pudding.

  “What is going on with this kid from Dallas?” she asked, working to keep her voice low. “I thought this was just some joke, that you were teasing me.”

  He looked up, startled, then he frowned and went back to stirring. “I’m pretty sure when someone enters a room he or she should say, As-salaam alaykum. That’s what I know about that.”

  Nora said, “Are you really thinking I’m going to marry some man I don’t know from Dallas?”

  “He’s from Cairo,” her father corrected calmly.

  Fifteen different faces flashed be
fore her, girlfriends saying the same sentence, voices swimming in and out of unison: “A suitor came last night for dinner…”

  She searched for words she could not even formulate. She’d known this conversation was coming, known it to be inevitable, but had somehow been sure it was far off in some murky future, not now, today, here, in front of a pot of rice pudding. Her brain flailed about for words that refused to emerge in either language.

  Her father spoke gently. “Nora, this is the way we marry. This is how I met your mother, God rest her beautiful soul,” he took a moment to mop at his brow, in what seemed to Nora like a purely dramatic pause. “This is what works. You know it works better than the system here—look at the divorce rate in America.” He gestured to the kitchen, as though it encompassed the entire country.

  Javier the dishwasher walked by, carrying a still-steaming plastic tray full of dishes out to the server’s station. He nodded to Nora, and she nodded back before whispering, “I don’t want to marry that way, Baba.”

  Her father looked up sharply, then set down his spoon, extinguishing the flame beneath the rice pudding. “Listen to me, Nora Khalil. If you think I let you go off to be a big bad police officer in order to have you forget who you are, you are very wrong. You are still my daughter. And it is my job to see you happily married. That. Is. My. Job.”

  He watched her digest his words. “When Dr. Dallas comes, you will meet him. Because I wish it. And I’m your father. And I. Still. Matter.”

  * * *

  The November sun rose coolly over an already bustling Monday. The thirty-three bus ground to a screeching halt under her window, and car horns echoed irritably through the streets as Nora donned her running gear. She had been tossing and turning most of the night, partially because she was so angry with her father, partially because she was so angry with herself for being angry. Of course he wanted her to marry an Egyptian doctor. Every Egyptian father wanted his daughter to marry an Egyptian doctor. Didn’t every father on the planet want his daughter to marry a doctor?

  It was all completely normal.

  She stared at herself for a long time in the bathroom mirror, then began to laugh. You’re only upset because you’ve gone and fallen in love with Ben Calder.

  She laughed for a while, felt tears spring to her eyes, then determined that she would run it all off. She packed her drawstring backpack full of maps and print-ups of Kingsessing (all of Saturday night’s research), and every missing persons report that looked vaguely like Jane Doe (all of Sunday’s research), and she headed out into the Monday morning swirl. Her backpack flopping against her back, and Haifa Wehbe singing in her ears, she sprinted along 21st Street and over the train tracks to the river. She passed faces she recognized—serious runners could always pick each other out of the group on the Schuylkill Banks. She watched as a few Canada geese feinted at a swanky stroller. A demonic shout from the speed-walking mother scattered them.

  Nora emerged by the Spring Garden Bridge and crossed over the parkway to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She ran the steps to the top, pausing, not because she needed the air, but because she loved the way the city unfolded beneath her, perfectly aligned, the wide parkway rimmed with multicolored flags of every nation. The city from this angle was open, accepting, cultured, alive. She liked the way she felt from the top of those steps, and she wanted an extra dose today after all the time she’d spent in Kingsessing and in the Alternative Detention Center yesterday. Those places had nothing to do with the Philly she grew up in. This fact unsettled her more than she’d realized.

  She ran up and down four more times before taking off down the parkway. She connected with Arch Street by Love Park’s towering fountain, then headed past the Convention Center, through the electric bustle of Chinatown, past the detention center and finally in through the wide glass doors of the Federal Building. She chatted with the security guard, mourning the Eagles’ loss with him despite her complete indifference, and then headed down to take a quick shower in the basement locker room. She changed into the extra white blouse and navy trousers she kept hanging in her locker. She wound her hair into a knot, secured it with an elastic, and walked meditatively up the eight flights of stairs. Two overly hair-gelled junior attorneys from the AUSA’s office brushed past her, trying to find a secluded area to smoke. She knew that Saturday’s corpse would already have made its way to one of Monty Watt’s drawers and she cringed, remembering, and wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t have followed her teammate Michaela into a nice, safe career as a personal trainer.

  The din of ringing phones, both office lines and cellular, hit her like a wave as she pushed open the door to the eighth floor. Wansbrough was alone in their cubicle, and looked up as she walked in. “You look fresh from a run.”

  She looked him over. “And you look worried. Did something happen with Fulton?”

  “I heard from the AUSA he’s pleading not guilty to the rape and murder.”

  Nora sank into her chair, processing this. “How can that be?”

  John shook his head. “Stranger things have happened. But because we still can’t find the murder weapon, it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “But the DNA…”

  “I don’t know what he’s up to. But that’s not the worst part…” John continued.

  She raised her eyebrows, questioning him.

  “It’s my twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  She laughed, despite herself. “Is that all? Okay, how are you celebrating?” Nora asked.

  “By not putting a gun to my head.”

  “Did you get Olivia something?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “You’re still working on it?” Nora demanded.

  “I’m working on it,” he repeated tersely.

  “You got reservations somewhere?”

  “I’m working on it!” he snapped.

  “Oh my God,” she said. She powered on her laptop. “You’re lucky it’s a Monday, you might still be able to get reservations somewhere.” She began browsing the Internet. “Modern Asian fusion? Spanish tapas? Old-world steak house?”

  “I could take her to your dad’s place…”

  “Cheapskate! Answer the original question.”

  “Steak?” he shrugged.

  She made her way through to Butcher & Singer’s reservations page. “What time do you want to go?”

  “Dinner time. Seven. Seven thirty,” he said, as though it was obvious.

  Nora gazed at the screen and then smiled at him. “They have openings at five thirty or nine forty-five.”

  “Jesus…”

  “… likely won’t be there. Now … which one?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t you see about some other place?” he asked plaintively.

  “How can you skimp on the twenty-fifth anniversary dinner? Nothing less than a Stephen Starr restaurant will do.”

  “I don’t even know who that is!” he protested.

  “Olivia does, trust me.” Nora entered the rest of his information after he reluctantly passed her his credit card to hold their place. “And she’ll be very grateful.”

  “You mean I might get lucky?”

  “Eww. I meant she might decide to stay married to you.”

  She could see, though, that he was contemplating the confluence of his twin ideals of steak and sex.

  “You’re alright, Nora Khalil,” he said finally.

  Nora shrugged, ignoring the fact that he was still mispronouncing her name after six months. “You’d better call her. She’ll need time to primp.”

  As Wansbrough carried his cell phone into the bustling hall, Nora looked at her own fingernails—which she’d trimmed the night before with a toenail clipper while taking a break from her computer screen. She indulged in a thirty-second fantasy about a dim, romantic restaurant, a clingy black dress, and Ben Calder pulling out her chair. A second later, she spied Calder and Burton as they stepped out of the elevator together and started walking toward their cubicle. Nora tugged her
brain into focus.

  Burton didn’t say good morning. “Did you hear about the plea?”

  Nora nodded. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said, pointedly.

  Ben Calder smiled at her. “Good morning, Officer Khalil.”

  “So. What’s next?”

  “Less sleep,” Ben said. “More investigatin’.”

  “You should have that on a throw pillow,” Nora observed.

  Wansbrough stepped back in, pocketing his cell phone. “Did you get in to see Jane Doe, Nora?”

  She nodded. “Jane Doe needs to be in a psych ward. Like, immediately. She’s completely traumatized. And guys, I think she’s really young. I spent a lot of time trying to link her with someone—anyone—in the missing persons databases. I found nothing.”

  John nodded, writing himself a note. “I’ll get her transferred today. What about you, Eric? I heard you were working up a report for us. You ready to go with that?”

  Eric said, “Actually, I believe the project is proving successful. The PPD is helping a lot, to be honest—Officer Cook aided in the arrest of two lower-level members of the Junior Black Mafia late last night, a boy and a girl, both minors. Both demanded lawyers, so we’re forced to wait to talk to them.”

  “Where did you find them, Eric?” Nora asked.

  “Basement of grandma’s house,” he answered smugly.

  “Bad Granny!” Ben exclaimed, shaking his head.

  “So, surnames are helping; we can thank Mrs. Baker for that one. In the meantime, I’ve made a layout of Junior Black Mafia territory.”

  Eric finished hooking up his laptop to the plasma screen on their wall, and a bright map of Southwest Philly popped up. “Okay, so as we know, the Junior Black Mafia and the A&As are both transitioning from territorial into corporate gangs. If we can chart the perimeter of JBM territory, we’re looking at basically this area of Kingsessing—from 54th down to 59th and from Springfield to Whitby. Dewayne Fulton’s house is here,” he paused to point at the bottom southwest corner of the screen, “and our newest crime scene is here.” He extended his finger to point nearer to the northwestern edge of the screen. “The most drug business is on this strip, as we know,” he said, pointing at the line representing 55th Street.