Steel blew air through his lips and they flapped like a motor boat, knew his thoughts were all over the place. It often took him hours to sort and weed out the junk ideas and piece together a compelling argument, but he always felt that the debate was where the answers were, in the tossing of words from different perspectives, was where he learned best. Sometimes he’d even play devil’s advocate so he’d learn an issue he was curious about from another perspective and then turn around and debate it with someone else from the opposite side, just to learn more.
Marisa slid a hand through the back of his hair and twirled a few strands between her fingers. “I think life’s all about experiencing love through family and faith.”
“I’m with you on love and family…but the faith thing is a different story. Wish I had more, but it’s hard to force yourself to.”
She kept her hand along the back of his head, gliding it up and down. “You having second thoughts about us?”
Her hand massaging his scalp sent chills throughout his body and froze his gut, gave him butterflies tickling his insides, even after months, her touch never got old. He twisted his head. “Of course I am. I can’t stand you.” He laughed. “You’re the meaning of my life…don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She smiled, playfully slapped him. “You just answered your own question then.”
He smirked and held a hand on the cold door handle. “But don’t flatter yourself, or I’ll leave you for Amy Adams or Jennifer Love Hewitt.”
She laughed. “Yeah right. Like you’d have a shot.”
He chuckled and it rang out in the confined space.
They got out, slammed their doors, and stepped up to a red brick row home, third house from the corner, right off Christian Street, not far north of Broad. The neighborhood was a mix of locals, mostly minorities, hipsters, who were young, artsy types, and yuppies who worked at the city’s hospitals and law firms and had a goal of gentrifying the neighborhood. They bought homes cheap with the hopes of flipping them for double the cost when they’d get transferred to a more prestigious hospital or firm in or outside Philly. Steel swirled his eyes and noticed the diversity firsthand. In a one-block radius, he spotted an Asian-American take-out corner store in a brick building that did business behind bullet proof glass, as two tall, lanky, strung-out guys with tattooed necks stood on the front steps, each of their sunken in cheeks and baggy clothes made it seem as though they hadn’t eaten in days; a group of young black teens strutting up the block who Steel wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley; a group of white twenty-something hipsters with long hair past their shoulders, tattoos over every inch of their skin, dangling earrings, each carrying guitars on their backs; two middle-aged women in blue nurse scrubs holding brown lunch bags; a lone doctor with a stethoscope around his neck sipping a Starbucks coffee; and a grocery store that only sold natural food, a single apple displayed in the glass window for two dollars. Haves and have-nots mixed into one urban block—two worlds colliding, Steel thought. Gentrification at its finest. That always works out well. The poor and rich co-existing. A fervent liberal’s dream—a staunch conservative’s nightmare—the nightly news’ main setting for top robbery stories. He’d hear stories of different races wary of one another in those areas. And he thought how he longed for a time when the lingering race issues in America and the world would subside. He thought all races of people were one, all souls with outer shells, each shell a different color, and each exposed to different experiences as human beings due to environment and culture. But if you cracked the shell and stripped it down to the bare soul, the yearnings of man were universal, regardless of skin color or culture, he figured. Whether a poor family in a Third World country or rich family in America, black or white, it was the same goal—feed and protect the family, search for or believe in a God and meaning to our existence, do something great and long to be remembered after we die. He’d tell people that when we listen to music we often connect soul to soul not skin color to skin color.
The wind picked up a bit and whistled by Steel and Marisa’s faces. Steel’s ears stung and burned. His nose was hard and red, freezing cold, and leaked clear salty moisture. Marisa shoved her hands in her peacoat, hunched over, and clapped her knees together for warmth, stood on her tippy-toes.
Steel climbed the stairs and tapped his knuckles on the door three times. After a minute or two, a woman appeared. By Steel’s estimation, she was in her sixties but had probably taken care of herself in her youth. Her body was fit and moved like a healthy forty-year-old. “Hi,” she said, followed by a wide smile.
“Hello. Is this the home of Jonathan Herns?” Steel said.
Her smile faded and she blinked several times. “Yeah, it is. And youuuu are?”
“I’m Detective Steel, and this is my partner, Detective Tulli. We just have some questions for him.”
“Um…” She looked around. “I’m his mother. May I ask what this is in reference to?”
“His attorney was murdered, and we’d like to ask him a few questions.”
Her jaw dropped, face turned cherry, and eyes grew to the size of small eggshells, mixed of freight and shock. “Ms. Jones?” she whispered.
“Yes, sadly.”
“Oh, my god,” she said. The woman waved her arms multiple times, quickly. “Come on in, come in. Please.” As she turned and led the way, Steel heard her say to herself, “What a shame. She was such a nice lady.”
They entered the home through a small box-shaped enclosed entryway with another door to enter, which was common in Philadelphia row homes.
“One minute, my son is in the basement with my husband watching television.”
Steel watched the woman walk to the stairs, dressed in light blue jeans and a long-sleeve hunter-green Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt, her short blonde hair streaked with hints of auburn.
He glanced around the somewhat modern living room. The blue rugs still held a new carpet scent of fresh fabric. The flat-screen television on the wall was at least forty inches, and the sofas were beige with barely visible thin blue stripes running vertical about every two inches. Everything matched. The walls were white with blue baseboards. The blankets draped over the sofa were blue.
Footsteps pounded the stairs by the kitchen, and the old wood shook and creaked. Steel and Marisa leered in that direction. The woman whispered something to the man her age, her husband, Steel thought, and motioned with her hands for her son to go sit on the sofa, her eyes narrowed and concerned.
The sixty-something husband led the way. He stood about 5’8, wearing blue jeans, a tucked-in red polo shirt, and gray New Balance sneakers. His brow was permanently raised, wrinkling his pasty white forehead skin. A thin layer of gray hair was swept across his scalp. His skin was pale and dry and had tiny brown age spots in the places that his thin silver beard didn’t cover. His eyes were small but curious, hiding behind thin glasses with a silver frame. The veins popping from his hands were thick and blue and like thin wires. He was reserved like a man who had the same daily routine for thirty years, read philosophy books for fun, and fished alone on the weekends for the freedom of being in nature. And gave off a vibe of being a thinker, centered, like he belonged in a university teaching, like a wise older man you’d see giving advice to kids in a Christmas movie.
The man extended his shaky hand, apprehension absorbing his growing wide-eyed stare. “Please have a seat,” he said.
They lowered themselves in a loveseat, and Jonathan and his parents took the sofa next to them.
“Is that true, what my wife just told me?” he asked.
“Desiree Jones was murdered, yes, sir, it’s true,” Steel said.
“My God…good Lord.” The man performed the sign of the cross.
Steel angled his body, kneecaps facing the family, eyes frozen on them, no blinking, studying. “Your name, sir?”
“Sure, sure, I’m Jonathan Herns, Sr., my son, Junior, and my wife, Elizabeth.”
“When did this happen?” Sr.
said.
“When was the last time your son had contact with Ms. Jones?”
The man patted his boy on the shoulder. “Ask him.”
Steel stared at the son, studied him. He looked about forty, give or take a year or two—even though his file said he was forty-five. He wore black sweatpants and a gray T-shirt. Still had all his brownish-blonde hair intact, although it wasn’t well groomed, was messy like a ten-year-old, along with his bushy eyebrows, and stubble on his face from a few days unshaved. His eyes stared back, but life from them as though most had been sucked out with a vacuum. Probably heavily medicated, Steel guessed.
“Jonathan, I understand Ms. Jones was your attorney for your disability case at one time.”
The man nodded twice, each nod five seconds long. Definitely sedated, Steel thought.
“And I understand the case didn’t work out for you?”
“No, sir. I was denied disability.”
Marisa grabbed Steel’s wrist, butt in. “You weren’t too happy about the decision, and understandably so, were you, Mr. Herns?”
Senior and the wife leaned back behind their son and shot curious eyes at one another. The father said, “If you think my boy had something—”
Steel held up a hand to the man.
Marisa continued. “Were you, Jonathan? Were you upset?”
Jonathan touched the top of his head, spoke slowly, “I have mild schizophrenia, really schizo-affective disorder, not the worst case, hard to diagnose because it goes in and out. I’m good this week, but it mostly increases when I’m stressed. I can’t work because I can’t take any stress, but I’m not physically impaired. I take an antipsychotic and an antidepressant to help control my symptoms, and they help, but I can’t work, or I’ll spiral out of control. My case took two years to reach a decision, and I was denied because Desiree wasn’t able to reach two of my doctors for forms about my condition and questionnaires about my illness, which I’d developed a year before hiring Desiree, so I was denied—denied care for one of the most serious illnesses in the world. Had it for over three years now. They said I’m capable of securing employment because we couldn’t prove my schizophrenia, which is a condition that is usually an automatic approval through Social Security.”
“And you were angry, threatened Desiree?”
“My son’s harmless,” Sr. said, patting his chest just over his heart, his gray eyebrows arching for sympathy.
Jonathan waved a hand to his father, his words slow and monotone from the drugs, his eyes catatonic. “I wasn’t on the antipsychotic at the time. I was angry, we discussed my behavior with her, worked it out, and she was working on my appeal case, or whatever they call it. I was mad and not properly medicated. I waited two years for my disability case, without an income, living here with my parents, after being independent and a perfectly healthy human being for most of my life.”
“So you had no animosity toward her after you apologized?”
“No. She was handling my case again. We moved on. She was nice about it. I slip in and out, and she understood that this is hard for me, with just recently having my life ruined because of this illness.” He held out each hand at his parents on either side of him. “Their lives as well, are affected.”
“Desiree had filed a police report against you,” Marisa said.
“And we discussed that…I apologized. Like I said, she was a nice woman, and I can’t believe she’s dead. Sorry if I look like I’m lacking emotion for her, but my medication levels me out, can’t feel too happy or too sad. Talk to me next week and I’m a different person, in my own world.”
Steel bit his lip, and Marisa glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, checked him, waiting for him to lead.
“I think we’re just about finished here,” Steel said.
Another reason Steel liked to cut interviews short was to make suspects feel as though they won. Better to catch them off guard later on. Some detectives liked to do it others ways, but this way worked for Steel.
He and Marisa stood, gave a group-wave, and headed for the door.
Senior said, “Good luck.” He shook his head and lowered it toward the blue carpet. “What a sin.”
“We’ll be in touch, Mr. Herns.”
Jonathan seemed honest, Steel thought, but he needed to know if the man was in his right mind around the time of Desiree’s murder.
16
T
he thick office-air carried a wave of burned toast and sharp Lysol chemicals. Steel’s skin flushed a light shade of pink from the room’s temperature. Someone had turned up the heat and it pumped in slow, heavy spurts. He smelled the warmth in the air, almost sniffed out the fire boiling the water before being pushed through the metal vents, as if someone had lit a match.
He stuck a finger in between his tie’s knot and white shirt collar and loosened its grip. He scratched his cheek with all five fingernails until the skin streaked with red lines like he had gotten into a sparring match with a rooster during a cock fight.
The scent in the room changed and the warm air mixed with garlic, oil and burned tomatoes. Marisa walked toward him, gripping a square white pizza box, heading over to his cubicle, steam-clouds seeping from all four corners. The ceiling light shined in her pupils and she smiled, and Steel saw nothing but innocence, love and tenderness in her squint. He knew behind the uniform and job title of detective she acquired in adulthood, that deep down behind the authority figure she played in life, she was kind, caring and optimistic. Marisa was the type of woman who’d talk to a homeless person for an hour just so they wouldn’t feel alone, just so they’d know that someone cared. But he knew she was also tough, wouldn’t hesitate to slap cuffs on a person or scold them for messing with that same homeless person. She had attitude, didn’t take shit from anyone. He liked the mix, a woman who stood up for herself, but was warm and welcoming as well. He was a lucky man, he reminded himself.
“All right, one pizza, half cheese, half just tomato sauce.”
“Better be, Tulli,” Steel said, grinning and swatting at paperwork on the desktop to make some room.
She pouted and shot him a yeah-right look. There wasn’t a question who had the final say in this relationship. No debate over who the boss was. Steel gave off the impression that he held the role of leader, and Marisa let it slide in public, but when it came down to it, Steel was a puppy on a leash for her, would do anything she asked, lived the lyrics to Michael Bolton’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” That’s how he knew she was the one. With his previous relationships he had still kept his independence, let his doubts sabotage his feelings for the women, noticed flaws in all of them, kept his distance from each for comfort, still held out for the right girl for him. But with Marisa, he wasn’t at ease with even the slightest distance from her, cherished her. And Marisa’s inevitable human flaws weren’t viewed as negative things, rather an extension of her, her unique self, an asset—the positive quirks that made her more attractive. His heart rested in her hands and she could break it or grow it with her actions and if she chose to love him back.
Steel flipped open the cardboard box and got smacked in the face by warm smoke that swarmed his nostrils. He took in the clouds of pizza sauce, oily mozzarella cheese and burned dough. Uneven circles of shiny grease stained the inside of the cardboard and left black spots and leaked to the edges next to the round pizza. The cheese had caved in somewhere between being pulled from the oven and delivered to the office and oily grease puddles pooled in the divots. He tore off two pieces and slimy white cheese stretched thin with each tug. He grabbed a paper plate just beside the box and laid each piece on carefully, squeezing a thumb and finger against the hard, crispy crust, and handed it to Marisa.
“My love,” he said.
“Why thank you, my dear.”
He smirked and pulled two slices from the other end, the half with just tomato sauce, and made himself a plate. The cheese on the other side looked good, though. The greasier the better, fuck blood pressure, he thou
ght, but it bothered his stomach. For this case, he needed his health and a strong gut, so he went with the pizza without cheese.
They ate for about ten minutes, and each knew it would be the longest lunch break either of them would be getting until this case was solved.
After they finished chewing their last bites, Marisa rubbed her stomach, reclined in the computer chair, and spun, her head dangling by her side, her lips curled to a half smile. “I’m full now…I need a nap.” She pouted, flipped her eyes toward the ceiling, and blew air up toward her forehead, her breath shaking and swaying her bangs.
Steel ran a crumpled grease-stained napkin over his lips and tossed it on the desktop. He slapped his stomach. “You? I ate five pieces.”
She smiled and stood in one swift motion, kept gliding her hand across her stomach. She tossed each of their plates into a tiny black trashcan under the desktop and flipped the cardboard box shut. “I’ll go put the extra few pieces in the kitchen, somebody’ll eat it.”
“Yeah, I’ll pull up Desiree’s file.”
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