by JoAnn Chaney
Round and round. Life was a circle; they were all drawn in. It had the force of a hurricane, pulling things toward the eye. He was being flung around, caught in a never-ending loop. But that’s how life was. History repeats itself. Everything that’s happened will happen again. It was cliché but it was also true, Loren had experienced it himself. Most people had. That was déjà vu. Evans was feeling it now; Loren had seen the look on his face. He’d been through it before with his first wife, although that’d been different, hadn’t it?
Was that how Evans remembered both his wives, together like a chorus, the lines between them blurred until they became one? Like the guy Loren had once known who’d married three different women named Pam. He’d divorce one and marry the next. Easier that way, he’d said. One Pam gets old, I trade her in for a younger Pam. He’d been elbowing Loren in the side as he said it, like it was a joke. It took everything Loren had to keep from twisting that stupid fuck’s arm up behind his back until he squealed.
All together now, with feeling.
Loren’s chest was tight, and he was having trouble breathing. Maybe it was the steam building up in the bathroom; a stupid old man like him should know better than to stay so long under hot water. Or maybe it wasn’t the heat at all, maybe it was the fact that he was riding that carousel back around again, that Ortiz was still in town asking questions, that he was back to what happened almost thirty years ago. Had he loved Connie? Yes. Hell, yes. He loved her still, even after all these years. She was the only woman he’d ever really loved.
Did you love her, and killed her anyway?
He’d been in love with her from nearly the moment they’d met. But he was just a stupid kid back then—young and dumb and full of come—and not used to being around women, and she was so friendly and kind to him, and beautiful. He’d spent a lot of time with her that first six months after he’d been partnered with Gallo, ate dinner at their house and sometimes crashed on their sofa, and he’d spent a lot of time alone with Connie, because Gallo had a tendency to get so drunk he’d break things, he’d scream and get violent and angry, he’d threaten to kill his wife, to gut their dog, to rip the baby right out of Connie’s belly and throw it into the street. It was a good night when Gallo blacked out from the booze, when he’d fall where he stood and sleep it off and wake up better in the morning, grinning sheepishly and asking for a glass of water and two aspirin. Loren stuck around as much as he could, to protect Connie from her husband, because he loved her, and she must’ve known. She must’ve known how he felt, although she never mentioned it. And Loren had never said anything to Connie for two reasons—it would’ve been a real pansy thing to do, to declare his love for this woman like he was Romeo swooning around beneath a balcony in the middle of the night; and the second reason, maybe the most important one: she was married to his partner.
And then they’d gotten into an argument one day at work, because Gallo stuck it to hookers during his lunch hour and Loren didn’t like it, he’d kept his mouth shut long enough but then piped up one day. But that wasn’t the only thing he was pissed about, was it? No, Loren had a laundry list of complaints against Gallo. He’d respected the guy at first, even admired him, but that’d soured over their time as partners. When a man comes home he takes off the mask he’s worn all day for the outside world, and if he’s a monster underneath—well, it’s his family who suffers. And boy, did Connie suffer at the hands of her husband.
Have some respect for your wife, Loren had said, and Gallo swung. That punch was the beginning of the end for a lot of things: their partnership, their friendship, and ultimately, Gallo’s life. The two men ended up rolling on the ground, throwing punches and knocking over desks and chairs in the bullpen, and Loren had come out on top without any big problems—he was young and quick and strong back then, and he was angry. He’d jammed his knee right up between Gallo’s shoulder blades, pinning him to the ground, and he’d had his gun out, had the cold metal barrel pushed up against the soft spot of flesh where the stalk of the neck meets the skull. There was snot running out of Gallo’s nose and a gash above his brow was dripping blood down into his eye, he’d lost the fight but not the war, and they both knew it. Their fight had been over Connie, and she was at home, waiting for Gallo, making his dinner and scrubbing the trail marks out of his underwear, and that was always where she’d be. Gallo had been pressed against the filthy linoleum, laughing as the other guys circled them, trying to talk Loren out of pulling that trigger, and Gallo had laughed, his mouth was full of blood, his teeth were swimming in pools of red, but he’d still laughed.
You’re not gonna shoot your partner, Ralphie. You don’t have big enough balls.
Loren didn’t shoot him, just stood up and walked away, disgusted with the whole thing, and they’d both ended up suspended, sent home for a week without pay. And Connie must’ve found out what went down somehow, and that was why she’d shown up at his home one evening, when he’d still been nursing a bruised rib cage and had decided to stay in, he’d answered the knock without a second thought, never thinking it might be her. He’d been in the middle of eating dinner, a ham sandwich he’d slapped together and brought to the door with him, although he dropped it when he saw Connie. He ended up scraping the American cheese and mayonnaise out of the carpet, but that was much later, when he had time to consider such things.
“Oh my fucking Christ,” he said, his voice rising in pitch, until it was more like the warbling tone of a frightened old man. He never heard that particular sound come from his own throat again. “What happened?”
Connie was in a bad way. He’d see worse in the coming years—women with teeth knocked right from their mouths and cigarettes put out on their breasts and on one memorable occasion a woman who had been hit so hard her eyeball had come free of the socket and was dangling from the stalk of veins and stringy muscle in a meaty red bag—but he’d only been with the force two years by then, and he hadn’t seen much yet. But it was bad enough, maybe worse for him because he was in love with her. Connie had been beat to shit, and that was putting it lightly. Gallo had used her face as a punching bag, and the skin around one of her eyes had already begun to swell and pinch shut, the way black eyes tend to do. There was a wide gash across the bridge of her nose, and by its mushy, smashed shape, Loren knew it was broken, and by the way she was swaying in the doorway he was shocked she’d been able to keep a grip on the baby wrapped in a blanket and tucked under her arm.
If Loren had been around it wouldn’t have happened, but it wasn’t like he could be around all the time, especially not after the knockdown he’d had with Gallo.
“Ralph,” Connie said, her puffy, bloody lips barely able to form the words. The one eye she could still see from was unfocused and dull; it reminded him of a blind woman’s, not really seeing anything at all. She reached out, groping for him, until he took her hand. “Hel’ me.”
Her one staring eye, hopeless and vague, it’d filled him with a rage he’d never known before, and he knew then that he was capable of murder. A man in love will do just about anything, after all. He will kill if he has to.
The memory of that moment, of Connie standing in the doorway of his home with her one blank eye and the way his palm itched for his gun so he could point it right at Gallo’s smarmy face, made the gooseflesh rise all up and down his arms, despite the fact that the water pouring from the shower was scalding hot. Aftershocks, even after so many years. Like the aftereffects of a huge earthquake, moving him to the very core. It’d been a long time, but he still felt them, and there are some things that never leave you, no matter how much you wish they would.
You might as well just admit to Ortiz you did it, his father whispered. You plugged Gallo full of lead and then planted him like a goddamn sunflower out by the Mad River.
“But I didn’t kill him,” Loren said. He stuck his head under the showerhead and came back out sputtering.
There’re pills for people who hear voices, you know, ol’ Marv rasped in his ear. H
appy little pills that’ll make everything A-OK. Make me go away.
“But then I wouldn’t have the pleasure of hearing your voice every five goddamn minutes,” Loren said. “And then what would I do? Probably die of loneliness.”
Oh, he’d given plenty of things a try to make the voices go away, to make the anger go, the anxiety, but none of it had worked. Pills and therapy and even those stupid-ass coloring books they marketed to adults. Nothing had worked.
Or just keep pretending like everything’s fine, Marv said. You’re gravy, right? Good on everything. How’s that working out for you so far?
“Shut up.”
You’re one fucked up hominid, you know? his father said, laughed. It was wild, rollicking laughter that bordered on hysterical. Loren had never heard his old man sound like that when he was alive, not once. He put his hands over his ears, but it was only a reflex and it didn’t help. Not when his father was camping out in his brain.
He got out and grabbed the towel off the rack, dried himself. He’d go to sleep, but the thought of sleep made him think of Gallo, too. That’s how Gallo had looked after that bullet went through his skull—like he was sleeping. If you could ignore the shards of bone and the blood and the grayish-yellow brain matter that had gone everywhere, exploding like a fucking grenade, you might’ve thought Gallo was conked out for the night, counting sheep and floating on a cloud. That’s how Gallo had looked in the grave, like he was snoozing, as if the man had decided to crawl into a hole beside the Mad River and doze. The only thing that had broken the illusion was when Loren had started dropping shovelfuls of the moist, nearly black soil over Gallo, when it rolled into the dead man’s open mouth and got caught in his hair. The shovel’s wood handle cut into his hands, made them slick with blood from his own palms, but he kept at it, dumping more dirt into the hole until it was full. But not too full. A mound of dirt heaped over the grave might attract attention, so he scattered some of the extra soil around, tried to make it all seem natural. And then it was done. Loren had sat down for some time beside the loose dirt where he’d buried his partner, exhausted, thinking about what had to be done next. He hadn’t wanted to get up. The Mad River had been beautiful back in those days, clean and free of trash and overgrown, wild, and he’d enjoyed sitting there, the shovel propped up across his thighs, but he’d still been aware of Gallo under him, the process of decomposition already started. It wouldn’t be long before his old partner was a meal for the worms. A bird started to sing, deep and throaty, and then stopped abruptly, and Loren knew it was time to go; this area didn’t see many people, but sometimes there were kids out this way, throwing rocks in the rushing water and sailing wax-lined paper boats, and he didn’t want anyone to spot him. Especially carrying a shovel and filthy with dirt, that would’ve been bad news.
Besides, he’d had more work to do. There was still Connie and the baby. He had to get rid of them.
* * *
He’d missed a phone call while he was in the shower. It was Spengler.
“Shouldn’t you be getting your beauty rest?” he asked when he called her back.
“You’re the one who needs it, not me,” she snapped. She was getting quick. “The station’s been trying to reach one of us, but I was putting my kid to bed.”
“You have a kid?”
“And you call yourself a detective? Jesus.”
“What’s going on?”
“We have a visitor waiting to see us,” Spengler said. “It’s Detective Abe Reid. Retired from the Madison PD. He was in charge of the investigation on Janice Evans’s murder. Drove all the way out from Phoenix to talk to us.”
“Tell him to check in at a hotel, we’ll see him tomorrow.”
“Oh, I think you’ll change out of your Underoos and drive back to work for this,” Spengler said. “Reid is saying Janice Evans isn’t dead.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Detective Abraham Reid, now retired, stood up in the interview room to greet them, but it was slow. He rested his weight on his hands, palms flat on papers on the table in front of him, his knuckles red and swollen. Those hands might’ve been quick with a gun at one time, but those days were long past. If he held anything these days, it was a golf club on a course in Phoenix, or a glass of iced tea. And this old man, Spengler thought in wonder, his face deeply lined and what was left of his hair nothing but delicate baby wisps clinging to his spotted scalp, had driven the twelve hours from Arizona alone.
“I’m eighty-nine years old,” he said, recognizing the look on Spengler’s face. “But I’ve still got a few brain cells rattling around in my upstairs. Enough to steer a car, anyway.”
“I hope the drive up wasn’t too bad,” she said, sitting. Loren stayed by the door, his arms folded across his chest.
“Nah. Nothing but interstate, and the Caddy just about drives itself.”
“If it’s okay, I’d like to skip the small talk and get straight to the point,” Spengler said. “I’d like to get back home to my son.”
“Of course,” Reid said. “And I’d like to head back myself. I love Colorado, but I can feel the humidity in the air right now and it’s not agreeing much with my joints.”
He held up a hand to show her. He had a candy pinched between his fingers and he fumbled it, sent it tumbling to the floor. Spengler leaned over and picked it up. It wasn’t a candy at all, she saw, but a cough drop. She handed it back to Reid and he held it in both hands, bent fingers worrying the wrapper until it came loose. The process took long enough that she considered asking if he needed help, but kept her mouth shut in the end. No need to offend the old man.
“I still call my squad out in Madison once in a while to catch up,” Reid said. “About once a week. The newbies like to pick my brain if they have a head-scratcher come through. Old-timer like me has plenty of advice to give, I guess. And when I called yesterday, they mentioned some detectives out in Denver had asked to take a peek at the Janice Evans case.”
“They sent it right over,” Spengler said. “It looked pretty clear-cut.”
“Did they send any photos?”
“No, just copied and pasted the text of it into an email.”
“Of course they did.”
Reid chuckled, which turned into a harsh, grating cough. Alarmed, Spengler stood to get water but Reid waved her down.
“I’m fine,” he gasped. “I’ll be better when I get home.”
“Okay.”
“You’re right,” Reid said once he could speak again. “It does seem pretty clear-cut. Husband and wife get attacked in the middle of the night. Wife is killed, husband escapes. The woman’s boss is arrested for the murder, case closed.” Reid grinned. His teeth were too big and perfect to be real. “Easy to follow, easy to swallow, am I right?”
Loren laughed and came to sit down at the table.
“I like that,” he said.
Reid winked.
“I thought you might. So it was case closed, my boss makes me move on. But there were things that didn’t quite add up. Evans’s story, and the bullet wounds. It was almost perfect, and I wanted to keep going, see what I could come up with, but the chief wanted to move on.”
“I’ve heard that plenty of times before,” Loren said.
“We all have. For the head honchos it’s less about justice and more about controlling costs. So we moved on. Jesse O’Neil couldn’t remember anything of that night on account of the bullet that plowed through his head, and it was easier to put the blame on him. Use him as a scapegoat. But it still bothered me. And then, about six months after Janice’s murder, when the case had been closed and Matt Evans had already moved out to Denver, I saw her.”
“What do you mean, saw her?” Spengler asked.
“I saw Janice Evans, in the flesh,” Reid said. “I’d stopped by the A&P on my way home to pick up a quart of ice cream for dessert—my wife had a weakness for mint chocolate chip, god bless her—and I saw Janice there. Standing in the frozen foods, right in front of me. I’d spent
the last half year staring at her photo and there she was, ten feet in front of me, belly all full of baby. It took me about ten seconds to get over my shock and then I marched right up to her, called her Janice.”
“And what did she say?”
“Oh, she just looked at me real innocent and said she didn’t know anyone named Janice. Her name was Marie, she said, and she had to get home because her ankles were so swollen.”
“Marie? Is that what you said?”
“That’s right,” Reid said. “She said it like it was the honest-to-god truth, but I got a good look in her eyes when I called her Janice. Fear is the most honest emotion there is, nothing else sticks to it, and that’s what I saw. That woman, that was Janice Evans. But if Janice was alive, whose bones had been pulled out of that house? We’d assumed it was Janice, because who else would it be? We had no reason not to think it was her.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” Reid said. “We might not ever know. No local girls were reported missing, but that doesn’t mean much. Girls disappear, and half the time no one gives a damn. And as soon as the remains were released they were cremated. So I went to see Janice’s mother. She was living west of Madison, out alone in the middle of nowhere, and I asked what’d really happened. If her daughter had actually been killed. And I asked why there was a cute little red sport coupe in the driveway parked next to her truck. Why, I asked, does a woman who lives alone need two cars? She asked me to leave, but I saw the fear in her eyes, too. She was nervous. Already had a cocktail in her hand even though it wasn’t even the lunch hour. And I heard someone moving around upstairs. A person trying to be quiet, but back then these satellites picked up everything. When I asked who was up there, her mother looked over my shoulder, wouldn’t even meet my eyes, and said it was my imagination. You must be hearing things. But these ears had never steered me wrong before.” Reid yanked on one of his lobes. “Janice was up there hiding out, waiting for me to leave. And you know what I think? As soon as I did leave, I think she got in that car and disappeared. Out to Denver, I presume.”