by Jason Dias
I said, “Is it still rough? With you and… and your ex?”
“Yeah. He’s having real trouble accepting that I’m gay. It’s real personal with him, like it’s an affront. A betrayal. I don’t know, maybe he’s right. But he thinks I must never have loved him, or that I must hate him now, and none of that’s true. It’s just… We married really young, you know? And I didn’t know. I had feelings, but I thought everyone had those. Like it was a phase or something. I didn’t know about lesbians, not really. I didn’t know any. I thought they were characters in books or like radical feminists or something, not real people. I’m sorry. I’m dumping on you.”
“I asked. So it’s rough. He thinks you’re gay to spite him.”
“Or something. Or like it’s a comment on his masculinity. He’s doing everything to make this harder. He won’t give an inch. All my stuff is held hostage. I don’t need alimony and I don’t want it. But the dog. Pony, her name is. He doesn’t want her, but he’s keeping her to upset me. Says he’s going to take her to the shelter. I have to call them every day to see if he followed through on the threat. God, what a mess.”
“Mine wasn’t that bad. He was angry but I didn’t really want anything from him. Didn’t feel anything. Still don’t. Not even afraid to talk to him. Just don’t want to hurt him any more. He didn’t deserve what happened.”
“What did happen? Do you mind me asking?” Ay sat a little forward in her seat.
“You can ask, but I don’t even know. Can’t say. Even now. But it did. Hey. Check on that second autopsy for me and then head out of here for a while. Squeeze your girl. Be a person. OK?”
Ay wiped away tears I hadn’t seen her cry. “OK.”
I made one more call: the last one I wanted to make.
“Catholic Diocese, Rebecca speaking.”
“Enrique, please.”
“Please hold.”
Silence on the line. I flipped through papers while I waited. Then:
“Sanchez.”
“Hello, Enrique.”
More silence. “Who is this, please?”
“Sorry to trouble you, Ricky. I need your help. Child predator, deceased, church affiliations. Department doesn’t want to pursue any further but I have to get ahead of our murderer. Need to know who moved the victim here. Everyone involved. They’re all in danger.”
“Dom?”
“Yeah, Ricky. It’s me.”
“Wow. And all business. I’d managed to forget about you for two straight days. Uh…”
“I’m sorry. Enrique, I’m sorry. Take a deep breath. Imagine you don’t know me. Lives are on the line right now. I’m just a cop who needs information to save lives. OK?”
“Tell me.”
“Sidney Carrington. He did something bad in New York City. The Church seems to have retired him and moved him here to avoid scandal. He’s been murdered, and a secretary connected to him. I need to know who else knew and who else helped.”
“I know. We all know about them. We’re in shock over here. Marie’s loss is heartbreaking. Such a sweet person. No malice in her. Whoever hurt her is really sick.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Ricky. And they aren’t done. Maybe a parent or a little boy all grown up. Someone with insider knowledge to track Carrington all the way here. Can you help? We need to know what the killer knows, and now.”
“Shit.” I could almost hear him massaging his temples. I’d picked up the habit in our years of marriage. “Ah, on the record, I couldn’t say anything. I’m not a lawyer.”
“I know what you aren’t. And I’m not looking to beef with Mother Church. What about off the record?”
“I don’t know.”
“People are going to die, Enrique. We can stop that from happening. You can.”
“Dinner. Meet me for dinner. That restaurant shaped like an airplane. What’s it called?”
“The Airplane Restaurant.” I scribbled it on a sticky note. “Time?”
“Seven.”
“It will be dark at seven. Sunset is at…” I checked on my tablet. “Never mind. Four-fifty. Dark it is.”
“What’s the problem? Something going to happen after dark?”
“I said never mind. It’s crazy. Ricky… Thanks. See you at seven.”
He clicked off the line. I leaned back and sighed. Probably, six or eight miles away in his generic Diocese office, he did the same.
A rapping sound at my door. I turned. “Jo. Good timing.”
“You look like crap, Dom.” She didn’t look much better than crap. She had on jeans that were a little too big and a rumpled sweater. Her greasy hair was pulled back in a ponytail but a bunch of frizz had escaped containment and gave her a fuzzy halo.
“Thanks.” I saw the file in one hand. “That the secretary?”
“Marie. Same as Sidney. Head twisted around, everything wrecked in there. Complete exsanguination, no cause. This one is creeping me out. They all are troubling, but these two especially.” She came and sat across from me. “How many murders in this town since I moved into the coroner’s seat?”
“Fifteen years? Sixteen murders, more or less?”
“How many times have I said, ‘I don’t know’?”
“Can’t say. None?”
“None. Everything leaves a trace. Everything. If you know what to look for. It’s not just the blood, Dom. Contact points.”
She wanted me to ask, so I asked. “Go on.”
“The force needed to wrench someone’s head around the way these two were mutilated, well, think about it. How would you do it?”
“I’d throw him to the ground. On his front. I’d kneel on his back. One arm under his chin. I’d pull up and wrench around at the same time. Probably fall over to the right, keep my weight on him as I did.”
“Good enough.” She tapped her teeth with one finger. “Larynx wasn’t damaged. Not crushed, anyway, just stretched too far. No bruising on the throat. No bruising on the back. Whoever did this to two human bodies did it without touching them.”
“Postmortem?”
“No. That would account for some lack of bruising, but the throat would still be injured. That amount of force should have damaged the trachea. Maybe you grab the head with both hands and turn it. To deliver the amount of internal damage, that’s a lot of pressure on the skull. Ought to have left marks. Dents in the bone, even. But there’s nothing. Not a sign. We haven’t even started on the blood.”
“Creepy.”
“Right.”
“Makes you think about vampires.”
She sat back, a sardonic smile making her face lopsided. “That’s the spirit. I haven’t heard a joke out of you since... well, since I can’t remember when. No, there’s an explanation. Haven’t found it yet but I will. Count on it.”
“I will.”
We chatted some more. Outside, the sun went down. I knew the moment the horizon drank it. At four forty-nine I felt normal, healthy, safe. Sane. At four-fifty, anxiety entered my bloodstream. The universe took one step to the left. Everything was the same. Jo still sat, rambling on about what her dogs did last night when she put bacon on to fry and forgot about it. Cops came and went. Messages waited on my tablet. And everything was different.
“Honey, you do not look good. Are you sick?”
She’d noticed me staring into space, no longer listening. “Maybe. Listen. Something happened last night. I think I know who the doer is. It’s all really improbable, though. And I’m scared. Right now. She, uh, she gave me nightmares.”
“Improbable is right. Beatrice is the biggest girl I know, and she couldn’t twist the head off a person. I’m surprised you don’t have more nightmares.”
She was right. “Moment of weakness. You know what I did today? Called my ex.”
“Ricky? That would make me edgy, too. I never understood-”
“Me neither. We’re having dinner. And he’ll give us some leads. If I find who, maybe that will help you find how.”
War
>
A fifties-vintage cargo plane provided the impetus for the restaurant. The right wing of the plane extended into the building. From the outside, it looked like only the left wing was intact. The aircraft, bare aluminum, glowed a menacing silver-gray under the sun but became just another shadow in the dark.
Inside, past a lobby meant to seem like an airport check-in desk, past an ejection seat from an old fighter plane, there he was. You could go upstairs and sit inside the plane itself at cramped little tables with aviation training maps under glass. He had elected to sit downstairs, under the wing of the aircraft. If there was symbolism in the VW Bus-sized engine above and behind him, I missed it. The flight crew had tacked up gold and silver garlands everywhere and liberally applied mistletoe to the ceiling.
“You look well,” I said. He had grown his hair out a little. Slicked back over his scalp, it curled around his neck, untamable. He had a high forehead, dark eyes set wide in a square face, soft skin showing crows’ feet. The seams in his face were evidence of habitual smiling.
“You haven’t changed.”
I sat. Enrique had coffee in front of him. An attentive waiter dressed as flight crew came by and I pointed at the coffee. “I’m sorry to do this to you.”
“It’s OK, Dominique. Really. I… We don’t have to talk about my feelings. You were never comfortable with that level of intimacy. I think you’d be more in your element if we just stuck to business.”
“So why dinner?”
“Because humans have to eat. And for my level of comfort. What you want is complicated. OK? Here’s your coffee.”
The waiter set it in front of me, a square white saucer with an art-deco mug. A little dish full of one-shot coffee creamers, a tray of sugar. Take your pick: raw, sucralose, or saccharine. “Are you ready to order or do you need a minute?”
Enrique ordered for both of us. It wasn’t presumptuous; we used to come here once a month and I’d always order the same thing: burger, slightly pink, no condiments, and sweet-potato fries with honey mustard.
The waiter left us alone again.
Silence stretched on for a minute. Two minutes. He looked into my eyes. I looked at his chin.
We both spoke at once. “So,” and “Anyway” mixing up in a verbal collision. “Go ahead,” I said, jumping in before him.
“All right. It’s complicated because there’s liability. And orders. I’m not allowed to share any information we’d consider privileged. I know there’s no actual privilege so don’t argue with me on that one. I’m to refer all requests for information up to the company lawyers. But I see you’ve already tangled with them and that’s why we’re here.”
“What do you want?” That came out harder and colder than I meant it. He looked hurt. I wanted to soften the words but didn’t know how. I blundered on. “I just mean, how can I make this OK? Can I?”
He sighed. “Don’t apologize. I know who you are. Totally without guile. People think you’re rude, sometimes, but you’re really just straightforward. I never hated that about you.” He saw me growing impatient, waved me off with a hand while he sipped coffee. “You’re right. Just business. I need blanket immunity. For everyone, for everything. I’ll give you what you want, and you use that to figure out what to do next, but none of it shows up in court ever. No police files, no sticky notes on your desk, nothing. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
I steepled my fingers and leaned back in the chair. The thing didn’t give an inch. “I haven’t got much choice here.”
“Doesn’t sound that way.”
The waiter moved between us with plates and a little wire rack of ketchup and so on. He needed several reassurances that we didn’t need water or extra condiments or more coffee or maybe a margarita and the food looked good. Then he wandered away again.
I took a bite of the burger. Too big for my mouth even without the pile of salad restaurants liked to put on them. Enrique kept eye contact. “I promise,” I said around a mouthful of ground beef. “I promise I’ll do everything I can to restrict my interest to protecting people. Nothing I see will result in new criminal inquiries from me about covering up child abuse. But if there are active child abusers and you know about them, we need to know about them. I’m a mandatory reporter, you know that.”
“We’re not monsters,” he said. When I didn’t say anything back, he went on. “We take people out of circulation. Get them counseling and support and, when it’s warranted, even containment. When people are high risk, we turn them over.”
“Doesn’t always work. I don’t want to argue about this. I want to save lives. You’re a conscientious man. Always have been. I’ll leave all that stuff up to you. Whole thing is too big for either one of us.”
He rubbed his temples. His salmon cooled in the dim light of the restaurant. Around us, life went on: more people seated, some people leaving, a family with pre-teens running excitedly up into the plane section. “God damnit, Dom.”
“There you go with the cursing again. I never understood it.”
He smiled through his irritation, or whatever feeling troubled him. “I’m allowed to say God damn it, but I’m not allowed to say God damn you. The latter is a curse, the former just an excited utterance.”
I set down the remains of my burger. Not much left but bun. Dabbed the corner of my mouth with the linen napkin. Looked Enrique right in the eye. “Tell me how you feel.”
He stared for a minute. Snapped his mouth shut. Then he took a deep breath. “Honestly? I don’t know. A lot of things, confusing things that don’t go together. I never stopped loving you, you know that? But you wanted to go and I felt like trying to keep you would be selfish, like keeping a cougar as a housecat. And now you’re here again, it brings up all the anger and the heartbreak. And on top of that… I never liked the Church’s approach to scandals, Dom. I think it ought to be up to law enforcement. We should be accountable. But I’m a heretic, a believer in an imperfect Jesus, just a man with some good lessons. Whatever. I do the work, and the work has never involved me in anything morally questionable. Until now, this was just a thing on the news sometimes, a thing liberals throw on Facebook to upset Christians.”
“Anything else?”
He smiled again, tears in his dark eyes. “Lots else. Right now I’m going to eat this salmon, and later on maybe I’ll drink a little.”
The silence piled up. I watched him eat for a while. Then: “I always cared.”
“What?”
“How you feel. I always cared. Listened. Maybe I’m not that skilled at seeming to listen, because I’m busy actually listening. Now I’m going to apologize again for hurting you. No, shut up for a second. I’m going to apologize again, and you’re not going to pretend I didn’t, OK? I did hurt you and acting otherwise won’t change it and won’t make me feel better and won’t make you a martyr for any causes. I still love you, too, even if I don’t want to be married to you, and I owe you this.
“Ricky, Enrique, I’m sorry. You deserve better than you got. You’re a good man.”
There were tears rolling freely down his cheeks now and his mouth hung half open, maybe in shock. A little dab of tartar sauce marred his chin, a little left of center. Great time for a dramatic exit, to run away from the door I’d opened. Except that he still hadn’t given me anything. I remained trapped until I had a file folder full of information.
He picked it up from the vacant chair between us, my left, his right. A brown file folder just like any other in my file cabinet. Slid it across the table, brows furrowing as he caught up to the deluge of emotional sharing I’d dumped on him.
I picked it up, peeked inside. Photocopies. Sixteen or eighteen pages. Some of the quality wasn’t great. I imagined Enrique standing by a photocopier, pretending some official business, using his authority to escape unquestioned.
“Thanks,” I said. I dropped a twenty on the table to cover my half of the tab. He had the good grace to not try to claim the check. Risking sticky hands, I took a handful of sw
eet-potato fries to go.
Outside, in my Caprice, I just sat for a while. Sundown surrendered. Dark owned the night. The temperature sank into the twenties. And I munched fries and thought about Enrique. Then, as more snow started to drift down, I started the engine and contemplated where to go.
Office. Stash the file. It was potentially a powder keg. I threw the car in reverse, craned my neck around to back out of my space. Goosed the gas a little.
The car moved a foot, two feet, and then I saw a shadow. Somebody stepped behind the moving car. I jammed my foot on the brake, surprised and irritated. The person just stood there. Maybe Ricky wanting to talk some more. What a nightmare. In fact, the figure came around the car – a long walk. I dropped the passenger window.
Not him. Her. Ysabeau reached through the window to open the door with the inside handle. Seated herself next to me while I wondered how to react. First I rolled the window back up with the switch on my console. Second, locked the doors – not that doing so would keep her from leaving if she wanted.
“We’re going downtown,” I said.
“As you like. Did you miss me?”
“Definitely. I dreamed about you.”
“Of course you did. You are too stubborn to listen to stories.”
I had the car out of the space and shifted into first. Out of the parking lot, right onto Aeroplaza. “Right now, I’m placing you under arrest. No more games. We’ll sit in an interview room and you’ll answer some questions.” I ought to have cuffed her. But it seemed to me that a person who could reach through wire mech could probably slip handcuffs.
“Will you not tell me about Miranda? This is important case law, yes?”
“Sounds like you know all about it. I’ll give you a card when we make it to the station. I don’t get the feeling you’d like to avail yourself of the right to remain silent?”
“I had a daughter.”
I took the next right, accelerated to the speed limit. 45mph. Gas stations and hotels drifted by. “How long ago?”
“You know how long. Do not be obtuse.”
“Impossible.” It struck me that she hadn’t put on her seatbelt.