As Long as We Both Shall Live

by JoAnn Chaney

  “And she volunteered at the hospital and the library.”

  “Okay,” Spengler said, scribbling into her notepad. “Anything else you can think of?”

  “I don’t know,” Maddie said, shrugging and picking a dot of lint off her thigh. “Sometimes she tried new things to surprise Dad. She’s done stuff like that before. Like the time she took those cooking classes. Do you remember, Han?”

  Hannah smiled, tears standing in her eyes.

  “Yeah. She took those classes for three months, specialized in French cuisine. She wanted to surprise Dad on their twentieth anniversary with a big meal and then he got so sick, so she didn’t. He was in the hospital and kept joking that Mom had poisoned him. That she was trying to kill him.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  Both girls laughed half-heartedly. Hannah sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “After you’ve been married to someone for so long, I bet it’s hard to be alone,” Hannah said. “Maybe we should be with Dad.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Maddie said. She sounded unconvinced. Kids aren’t stupid, Spengler knew. They picked up on everything, and she thought the girls knew more about Matt and Marie than they were letting on. Parents kept secrets from their kids all the time, to protect them, or to save them from embarrassment, but it hardly ever worked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Loren didn’t go straight home after leaving the station, although he should have. It was going to be a long day tomorrow, it would be a good idea to go home and get some sleep. Spengler had agreed they should split up the work—she’d left an hour before to visit Hannah and Maddie Evans, and he’d spent time scouring the records on Matt Evans himself, seeing what he could dig up. Nothing had jumped out at him so far, but Loren hadn’t been at it long before calling it quits. The man might be telling the truth, but you could never be sure. It’s the reason Loren had arranged for a squad car to park outside Evans’s house and keep watch through the night. He didn’t want him up and disappearing. If Evans felt like he was getting the squeeze, he might try to do a quick fade. It was another feeling Loren could understand.

  Loren left the station but didn’t go straight home because there was always a possibility someone might be following him. It had happened before and it was the last thing he wanted, for some weirdo to know where he slept at night. So he left the station and drove in circles for a bit, up Federal Boulevard and back down Kipling, fast, until he was pretty sure no one was tailing him. There was a billboard he always slowed down to look at, an advertisement for a child abuse hotline. It was a blown-up photo of a little boy, his eyes full of wavering, tearful hope. It would’ve been a good ad except some asshole had taken a can of red spray paint and given the kid a set of devil’s horns and a forked tongue, then blotted out his face with four words written in straggling letters:

  GOD ISN’T HERE ANYMORE.

  Just words, but it still gave him bad vibes every time he saw it. God’s not here anymore, but the devil is. In all the details.

  His apartment was on the second floor, which also happened to be the top. He’d chosen it because he liked to sleep with the windows open at night, even in the winter, and he knew better than to do that on the ground floor. He’d seen too much bad shit go down over the years because some crazy saw an open window and took it as an invitation, and he didn’t want to wake up one night with a knife against his throat and something hard and throbbing against his bunghole.

  He lived on the second floor, always had, always would, and he’d stayed here so long because he was comfortable, he knew the girls working the front office and the guys who did the landscaping and cleaned the pool, he recognized the neighbors and the sounds of the traffic flying by on highway 285, he even knew the sounds of the squawking PA system and revving engines out at Bandimere Speedway on a race night. He stayed on living in this place because he was used to it—it was the little things, like having a designated parking spot and knowing exactly which way to face in the bathroom so the neighbors couldn’t see you beating your meat through the window above the toilet—but it was mostly that he liked coming home to the same place every night, maybe all cops need that sort of predictability, that routine, it’s the only way they can keep sane after a day of police work, where anything can happen and usually does.

  But the problem with wanting predictability is that you hardly ever get it. Like this: Loren wanted to go home, take a hot shower, microwave a cheap frozen burrito, and go to bed, but as soon as he parked he saw that wasn’t going to happen. You can spend your whole life driving in circles and trying to stay hidden, but the past has a way of finding you anyway. It’s only a matter of time before it happens. Life is one big circle jerk, you’ll end up at the beginning again sooner or later. It had taken some time to catch up with him, thirty years, but Loren’s past had finally come back for him. It was ugly and carrying a gun.

  “Peter Ortiz, you old sonavabitch,” Loren said, ignoring the nervous flutter in his sternum as he climbed out of his car. “What an unpleasant surprise, to see your fat ass waiting for me.”

  “I’d say this isn’t any fun for me, but that’d be a lie,” Ortiz said, grinning and coming forward to meet him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Loren had once arrested an old man who’d kept women chained up in his house, to use as his personal sex toys and punching bags. That was years before, out in Ohio, when he’d first become a detective and started working with Gallo. Springfield was a town that’d once been named one of the best places to live in America but had since gone to shit, and it was the place where he’d seen firsthand how desperately bad humanity could be. Oh, but it was bad everywhere, he came to understand that over time, and sometimes he’d run across a pocket of something really bad, something so putrid and terrible that it didn’t seem like it could possibly be real. Surreal, that was supposed to be the word for it, but it wasn’t enough to explain it, not by a long shot. Surreal wasn’t awful enough, but there wasn’t anything else, so it would have to do.

  That particular killer had been a real piece of work, Loren remembered. Lazy eyed and gray haired, he told Loren he’d been keeping the women locked up to further the population. Breeders, that’s what he called them, because after the soon-to-come apocalypse went down there’d need to be people to rebuild. His children would do it, he said. A whole new world order would come about because of the splooge shooting from his balls.

  But the old man seemed to have forgotten he’d had a vasectomy a few years before and there was no way he was getting any woman in the family way. He just liked women and sex and hurting people, the sick look a person gets on their face when they’re in pain, and he couldn’t get it unless the women were always with him, unless he got to do whatever he wanted to them without any sort of consequence. He had two women when the police came knocking on his door—it’d been three, but one had managed to escape and had gone straight to the cops and brought them back—but by the time Loren busted his way into the place and found the women, they were dead. Well, one was dead, her head split in half like a melon with a tire iron, the skull peeling back from her brain, and the other was just about there. She’d started squirming when she saw Loren come into the room, trying to scoot away because she thought he was the old man, come back to hurt her some more, to finish the job he’d started when the cops had shown up on his doorstep, and Loren had screamed that he had a “breather,” not a “breeder” like the guy had been calling her, that he needed a paramedic right away.

  Please, she’d said, gurgling the words through the blood running down her throat. Please don’t.

  A young Ralph Loren, who had a normal childhood, who had parents who loved him and who ate a home-cooked dinner with his family every night as a kid, who’d graduated the police academy before he had hair on his chest, when his voice still sometimes cracked and turned high pitched—he’d never known how really fucked up the world could be until that moment. The past, it makes a person who they are, and i
f Loren was asked what the watershed moment in his life was, the experience that defined him, he would say there were a few of those moments in his life, and finding that woman on the floor of that attic room was the first of them. Of course, if anyone ever asked Ralph Loren a dumb-ass question like that, it was much more likely he’d tell them to go fuck themselves than answer.

  But if Loren decided to open his mouth and spill the beans, this is what he would say: Breaking the lock on the thick oak door to that attic room, kicking at the knob so hard he wouldn’t be able to put any weight on that foot the next day, barely able to hear the screams of the old man as he was arrested downstairs, and then walking into the room, into the smell of shit and blood and death and sex, and being hit by an overwhelming wave of dizziness, because this couldn’t be real, could it? This room was something you’d see in the movies, you’d see it on the big screen and then you’d go home to your nice, clean home, where there wasn’t a dead woman curled up in one corner like a shrimp, her arms thrown up over her face to protect herself. This couldn’t be real. Could it? Could it?

  But it was.

  It was an attic room the women had been kept in, the small windows boarded up with thick planks of wood, and big O-hooks had been screwed into the walls with the chains binding the women’s ankles threaded through them. In one corner was a plastic paint bucket with a lid, the kind anyone could get at the hardware store, and even though the lid had been snapped into place the thick smell of shit still hung around it in a cloud. It was their toilet, Loren realized sickly. And written on the wall above this makeshift toilet were five words, scrawled up there with a red marker, or maybe it was blood, he never knew. There were other things, too, little sketches and tick marks, maybe the women drew them to count the days or just pass the time, but none of it caught his eye, except those five words. And those words might as well have been burned into his brain because Loren carried them with him for the rest of his life, like a mean, grinning monkey on his back who’d decided to hitch a ride. Words can be the most powerful thing in the world, sometimes they were the best things but they could also be the worst, and he could never hear any of those words alone without it bringing the entire phrase to mind.

  ALL TOGETHER

  NOW

  WITH FEELING

  “It doesn’t matter what it means, Ralphie,” Gallo said when he mentioned it. “We caught the sonavabitch. He won’t spend another day out at King’s Island trolling for sluts to lock up in his attic.”

  “They weren’t sluts.”

  “All women are sluts, Ralphie,” Gallo said. “Even your mama was one once, I don’t care if you think otherwise. It’s true.”

  If anyone made a comment like that to Loren these days they’d most likely be swallowing their own teeth, but back then Loren ignored those sorts of things. Let them pass. Like water off a duck’s back, his mother had taught him. The days of turning his cheek were long behind him though, and a lot of that was because of Gallo. He learned a lot during their time as partners. Gallo showed him the ropes, taught him everything about working Homicide, about analyzing the scene and becoming the suspect, going on the hunt. Loren learned a metric shit-ton from Gallo, maybe too much. And then it soured. A partnership is like a marriage, like Hoskins always said; a good one is hard to find. And it was good with Gallo, until it wasn’t.

  All together now, with feeling.

  What did it mean? No one cared, but Loren couldn’t stop thinking about those words, about that phrase, and it was the girl who’d escaped who finally told him that one of the dead women had taught choir at some high school and she used to say it when the old man wasn’t home and they’d all scream in unison, in the hopes that a neighbor would hear and come help.

  “‘All together now, with feeling,’ that was kind of our mantra, know what I mean?” the girl had told Loren with a wry smile. That girl had been tough, but she’d spent months chained up in that attic, living through things no one could even imagine, things no one would want to imagine, and less than a year after she’d escaped she was dead. Her sister found her hanging in her own closet, the cords from the window blinds looped around her neck. “She’d yell that, and then we’d all start screaming. Harmonizing, she called it, and sometimes we’d laugh about it. But it never worked, no matter how loud we were. No one ever came to see what all the racket was about.”

  Many years later, many miles away from Springfield, a lifetime away, Loren would walk into another crime scene that looked like one of Jacky Seever’s but wasn’t, and there would be words written on a wall, a different phrase, but it wouldn’t matter because it would still bring him back to that attic room, to the woman on the floor, her eyes bright with terror as she tried to scoot away before making one final, choking gurgling noise on the blood in her throat and then dying. Two different crime scenes, with nothing in common except Ralph Loren, one man bridging the gap between them, because everything is connected, everything is a circle, it’s all the same even when it isn’t, and it’ll never be over.

  Second verse, same as the first.

  And right now the past was coming back with a roaring vengeance. There was Pete Ortiz, his hands folded across his chest, waiting for him to come home. Just like he’d done thirty years before, except now Ortiz wasn’t so skinny or zitty, and he was dressed nice, good shoes and a wool coat with his hair slicked back from his face, but the ghost of the kid he used to be was still there, lurking behind the mask of his adult face, peeking around the edges.

  “This has happened before, right?” Loren wanted to ask Ortiz once he’d thrown his car in park and climbed out. “We’ve done this before, this same exact thing? You waited for me outside my house after Gallo disappeared because you wanted answers. You were angry and I hit you, and here you are again. I’m not crazy, am I? That’s what happened? Am I remembering it right?”

  But Loren didn’t ask, mostly because he was afraid of the answer. He was sure it did happen, Ortiz had been waiting for him, angry and frightened, and then slunk away after Loren broke his nose, but he’d been sure about memories before and been wrong. And if he was wrong, if he asked the question and Ortiz looked at him like he was crazy, he wasn’t sure what he’d do.

  So instead, he asked Ortiz if he wanted to go out and grab some dinner, maybe try to make some peace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Loren didn’t sleep much these days. It might be because he was getting old—he could remember his old man getting around three hours of snooze a night and functioning just fine, although Marvin Loren always said that any damn fool could turn wrenches and unclog drains on no sleep, especially a fool who’d been working as a plumber for most of his life.

  “I don’t need eight hours to yank the nest of hairs out of the Sanborns’ bathtub drain once a month,” he’d said once over dinner, when he’d had one too many beers. “That whole family has black hair, but when I unclog that tub there are always blond ones mixed in there. White-blond long ones, and there’s only one person in town with hair like that, son, and she rings groceries down at the Big Bear Supermarket, and has lately been seen in the company of Gary Sanborn.” He snickered and kicked back another mouthful of beer, swished it around in his mouth before swallowing. “Sanborn, that sly ol’ dog. He thinks he’s fooling everyone, but let me tell you something, Ralphie. You might flush your shit down the toilet, you might think it’s gone for good, but your plumber could still find it. There’ll always be people like that, who can sniff out the bad shit everyone does, and they’ll ruin your entire life if they can. You’ve gotta be careful of those men. Remember that and it’ll save you a helluva mess of trouble in the long run.”

  Loren did try to remember those words, and all the things Marv Loren used to say, stupid or not, especially lately. The old man had been dead for a long time now, but Loren could still hear his voice clear as day and sometimes even smelled the cologne Marv always wore—English Leather, that’s what men wear, English Leather or nothing at all—and today was one of tho
se days when his father was muttering nonstop, the same way he would when he’d fall asleep in front of the ol’ boob tube, kicked back while The Dick Van Dyke Show was on. Those mutterings didn’t usually make sense, they weren’t much more than half conversations transmitted from dreamland, and little Ralphie Loren had learned to tune them out like background noise as he sat Indian style on the shag rug in the warm radioactive glow of the TV, but sometimes his father would say something that’d make the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up. You paid attention when a person said something in their sleep, you made note of it, especially when it was your father, and that rule still held true. He heard Marv Loren in his head pretty often these days, although Dr. Patel said it wasn’t actually his father but his own inner monologue or some baloney like that.

  “You’re not crazy, Ralph,” Patel had said. “It’s your own thoughts you hear, only your mind is telling you these things in your father’s voice. There’s nothing wrong with you. Believe me, it’s perfectly normal. I find this is typically brought on by stress or anxiety, but nothing to worry about.”

  Loren wasn’t so sure he bought into Patel’s explanation completely, but then he never did trust doctors. Of course, he never thought much about his father’s voice at all, although it was like radio static more often than not, nonsensical and irritating, but then there were the days when the station suddenly came in, usually only for a moment, like he’d been twisting the tuning dial and finally hit on a local channel, and Marv Loren’s voice was shouting in his skull, screaming to be heard.

  And today just so happened to be one of those days when his old man’s voice was coming in loud and clear. And when his father was talking Loren made sure to listen. The old man had helped him before, whispering advice only he could hear. Marv should’ve skipped the shitty plumbing career—har, har—and become a cop.