by Robert White
“Good enough at first. You know, like most relationships. Then it got crazy with his drugs.”
“Marcus, is he a dealer?”
“Why? You think because he’s black he’s all about the drugs?”
“No, I didn’t know he was black till now, I just asked a simple question.”
She frowned, remembering. “That whole damned summer before she disappeared was getting crazier by the minute. At first it was just G-Money, I mean Marcus. She brought him home one night from the Down Under. Then it was drugs. Using, I mean. Him and her—well, me too, sometimes, but not like those two. He really had her hooked.
They were doing speedballs, ya know?”
A dangerous roller coaster, that. “What else?”
“He was really possessive. She had to do everything he said. He took her on buys. He used to run with a gang somewhere in LA. He was always talking about the Rolling 20’s. He said he quit gangbanging, but who knows? Marcus liked to talk big. Annaliese told me he was just a wannabee.”
Just to be sure, I interrupted. “You said he quit the Crips?”
“That’s what he said. The drug deals were all his.”
Gangs, the modern plague. I had shoveled enough bodies from both sides off the west side of Cleveland streets, but gangbangers rarely quit. We don’t die, we multiply was familiar graffiti spray-painted on home turf after a gang killing.
“So what happened?”
“Well, she got scared. I mean, we both did. They—”
“Who?”
“Friends of Marcus. They used to come around and take over the apartment. Some of them must have spent all their time in prison if you ever saw them eat, all hunched over their food like snarling dogs. Every time I got up to leave they’d ask me ‘where was I going?’ ‘Why was I dissing them like that?’ I mean, it was like I had no right to be there, like they were paying the rent. I said to Tyshawn, that’s one of Marcus’ homies, ‘Man, I ain’t seen the color of your money for rent.’”
“What are their names—Marcus’ friends?” I brought out my notepad and hoped she wouldn’t spook.
She looked blank.
“Brenda, what did Annaliese say about all this? These friends moving in, taking over the place?”
“Oh, at first she was on my side and then—well, it was just Marcus dropping by. Then it was like his friends just followed, took over and we couldn’t do nothing about it, ya know.”
“Did she have sex with just Marcus or the others too?”
“I don’t know for sure, but before she split, I asked her once. She just looked at me funny and, like, sad. There was one called Butt because his ass used to stick out behind him like a shelf. He once made a move on me but I told him I’d rather screw a dog. He had these really cold eyes, and he said that could be arranged.”
She shivered. “He was a really, really creepy.”
“Why did Annaliese run off?”
“Oh God damn, I don’t know. Things were just getting out of hand—the drugs, the whole mess.” She smothered her face in her hands for a long moment. “She used to make me so mad for letting people use her all the time. She had no backbone.”
“Did Marcus say anything that might lead you to guess where she might have gone?”
“He was furious. Tore the apartment up and called her a no-good bitch.”
“How long before Marcus took off?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long after Annaliese disappeared? When did Marcus and his friends stop coming and going—”
“That’s the point. I told him the cops were gonna come hammering down the door any day. Marcus was constantly at me to get in on his little drug business, always trying to set me up in something he had going on.”
“Making buys for him?”
“No, not that. He didn’t trust anyone for that. He used to take Annaliese along for—uh, what he used to call ‘protective coloring,’ she being white and all. I guess he wanted me to try to score illegal drugs over the counter, phony prescriptions or something. He was always talking about big scores. Funny thing is, we never saw any of his money either when it came time to buy food or pay bills. One time he smacked Annaliese across the face when she suggested he spend some of his cash on the food he and his friends used to gobble down—”
“Did he beat her?”
“No, not, like, every day or anything. Except when he was really stoned on something. The pipe would make him crazy, paranoid. Mostly he did it to impress the others. Once he dragged her around the kitchen by her hair. She hadn’t said nothing that deserved it either. That bastard Demetrius just about split a gut laughing. Sometimes I actually hated her for letting him beat on her like that.”
“Did Marcus do a lot of crack?”
“He used to peddle crack on the Strip. Some bartenders at the Lake used to buy from him.”
Heroin and crack were easy to get on the Strip, and any teen could score weed, but last summer meth started to make headway in the shitkicker bars. I knew some of the narco squad, Millimaki’s handpicked men, and they were a close-knit group, kept to themselves, drank together. A desk sergeant told me that Millimaki kept them on a leash for selective hits. I had heard the payoff rumors. The drug busts in recent years were all cosmetic raids, something for the paper accompanied by two or three columns of “war against drugs” yak by the publicity team from the station house. Not a serious takedown in years, as far as I could recall.
“Was Annaliese using?”
She hesitated and shivered but whether from the cold wind crossing the lake or the recollection I could not tell.
“I think so. I never saw her shoot heroin, but Marcus turned her on to all kinds of crazy shit. I came home one time and the turpentine fumes were enough to gag a maggot. I even accused her of huffing, but she denied it. God, did I swear at her.”
She looked at me then, her eyes assessing me or something deeper.
“Maybe she sent me that photo—”
“What?”
“Maybe it was like her way of saying, see, ‘I’m no good. I’m just like you said.’”
Brenda finally took her hand from her purse. She wiped her eyes.
“If you do find her, tell her I’m sorry and I miss her like hell,” she said.
I turned the heater on. I could see from the windshield the spot I had walked down a path to the lake’s edge with Micah just before the divorce. The sun’s dying rays had lit splinters of reddish gold in her hair. I was talking about a dispatcher at the station house whose husband killed her. I had met the guy once in Tico’s Place. He seemed like an ordinary guy, and he liked to talk about cars. A candyapple-red Corvette. You musta seen it cruising the Strip? I built that car from nothing, man. Twenty-four coats of paint alternating with lacquer. You put it under black light, you can see a rose tattoo on the hood . . .
“I’m beginning to fuckin’ freeze here.”
“You’ve been a great help. One more question: Do you have any idea where Annaliese might have gone to from here—let’s say, she was desperate to get away from Marcus . . . ?”
“No, I don’t. She never spoke of any family except her father’s people in Boston. Just the one time.”
“You remember why she spoke of them?”
“Damn it, man, does one mean the same thing in your language?”
I tried on a pout.
“Jesus, stop making that ugly face. What’s—why does your eye look funny?”
“I had an accident a few years ago.”
“No wonder those drivers were honking at you back there.”
Her left hand suddenly reached out to touch the pale starburst of scar tissue on my cheek. I let her.
“You’ve been around the block, haven’t you?”
“Occupational hazards,” I said.
My memory is pathetic now, and so I have to write everything down. Years ago some Cleveland attorneys looked shocked when they asked me for my notes on the witness stand and I told them to go ahead and ask their questions becau
se I remembered it all. I have a cloudy recollection of a lot of booze and one particularly bad beating that left my head a damaged box of memories.
“Listen, Brenda, you said a moment ago that Annaliese spoke of her father’s family. What about it?”
She sighed. “One more last question? She was talking about her mom and said that her mother and father had lived in Boston when they came from Germany and she said her grandmother had a beautiful porcelain doll collection that her mother raved about for years. Annaliese was drying her hair. We were on our way out to a club and she was toweling her head.” She touched her own ginger hair with the spiky black tips.
“Let me buy you a drink and take you home.”
“Just home.” She looked at me in a hard stare. “When I start dating one-eyed weirdos, I’ll be sure to give you a buzz.”
I gave her my business card when I dropped her off. What had been a rosy spring mackerel sky a moment ago had changed to pewter masses of scud in shapes of torn, dirty rags. I whipped down Ninevah and turned right on Erieview and almost fishtailed an oncoming Tundra. The driver’s eyes were big as we passed. Why name a car for a fiercely cold and treeless biome, I wondered.
I glimpsed the lake between the trees just now filling out in frozen meringue light. An omen, I thought. What I couldn’t fathom was whether it was for good or ill. Sometimes I’ll even check out the loopy scrawl of gull shit on the side of my car for secret messages.
One thing was writ large on my future itinerary: Boston.
I called Phil at the station house and jerked his chain to see what the computer had on this Marcus (“G-Money”) Gordon and his friends. I read Phil the names and gave him two of the street aliases Brenda had mentioned in case the department cross-referenced. I told Phil to leave me a message with my answering service. I could use Phil to check out what NCIC had, if any of these characters had a rap sheet. Phil owed me for a big favor years back, and being the wily veteran of station house politics he was, I knew he could cover himself in case Millimaki got wind of anything. Cops are a fraternity like the priesthood, but once you leave it, you’re just a civilian. A private eye, ex-cop or no, is maybe higher than a civvie but not so high they’ll take a bullet for you.
I still had a lot of phone calls to make to people I didn’t know. I needed to see O’Reilly to get some things cleared up in Annaliese’s messy past. In homicide you have two methods of investigation, a I knew some good detectives who liked to run full steam down one trail and hope it brought them to the perp; the reasoning is a blitzkrieg can get you from A to Z very fast while the trail is hot. It’s like hollering at three suspects in three different interrogation rooms and hoping one cracks. You can always apologize to the other two. Without a detective’s caseload to pressure me, I can take my time and finesse things a little.
I had one more loose thread to tie off. I was casting as wide a net as possible using Annaliese’s social security number, and one more odd fact of her young life emerged: she had been a uniformly indifferent student all through elementary and high school—straight B’s and C’s. With one exception: she received two A’s from the same social sciences teacher in her senior year at the high school. What made the grades stand out even more was that she was completing her Vo-Ed training and was never destined for college. Her social science courses were strictly electives. I called the high school and spoke to the principal, an ex-jock who, like so many in the profession, found in education a warm wing to crawl under and the right social clubs to join. He told me what he knew and then he gave me the name of his predecessor, a man whose contract had not been renewed by the school board. He was reluctant to speak about Lawrence Gallatine, but he mentioned that the firing was over a “private confrontation” that wound up embarrassing the school when it became public.
Lawrence Gallatine lived two miles south of Andover on Route 7 in a two-story ranch house surrounded by what looked to be fruit orchards, maybe grapes and raspberries.
When I left a message earlier about meeting him, he came on the line in the middle of it, and agreed with some reluctance to meet at his house that evening.
A tall man with sable chin whiskers in a charcoal suit greeted me at the door. He wore leather sandals and held a copy of the London Times in his hand. I was introduced to his wife and three of his children; two more were away at college and two more were at a Christian camp, he told me. The rooms had religious pictures and sacred statuary on every table and wall. I saw the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Jesus staring at me from the dining room. Another one of Jesus on his knees, praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Bullets of blood dotting his forehead as the hour draws nigh and the soldiers are about to come.
He was in his mid-forties. His hair had gone salt and pepper. He looked fit. He had a way of clipping off his words sharply that implied a businessman’s sense of time’s value. He had expressed a concern for assisting my investigation over the phone, but now I sensed my presence was an intrusion.
“Mister Gallatine, can you tell me why Annaliese received A’s from your classes?”
“She was an excellent student.”
“It’s a long time ago. Do you recall all your students’ grades that fast?”
“The good ones, yes.”
“Did you know that you are the only instructor she’s ever had that gave her a grade higher than a B?”
“She received A’s from me because she deserved them. Simply put, she was an excellent student. Wrote one of the finest amateur papers I’ve ever had from a student her age.”
“Do you remember what the subject was?”
“The psychology of incest, I believe.”
“Mister Gallatine, they told me at the high school that you filed a suit against them with the American Civil Liberties Union for—” (I had my thumb on the page in my notebook for reference) “—uh, yes, here it is. For discrimination against you and denial of due process. Why ‘discrimination?’”
“Someone attacked my ethnic background. I was born in Germany and came to the United States at the age of seven. My father was a distinguished professor at Goethe University.” His facial muscles moved with what I took to be repugnance or irritation. “I thought you were here to ask about Annaliese O’Reilly, Mister Haftmann? I see no reason why this matter has anything to do with your investigation.” His wife and children had discreetly disappeared. I heard a television going in the den.
“Humor me, Mister Gallatine. Old cop habit. Is there something about that lawsuit that you can tell me?”
“It’s public record. I can tell you that I won that lawsuit and there was an out-of-court settlement. The school failed to prove there was a single witness with first-hand knowledge of misconduct and that they had unfairly tried to dismiss me.”
If I’d had the advantage of an interrogation room and plenty of time, I could crack that smug demeanor, but not in his home.
“Wait,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”
He left and returned a minute later with an accordion file folder; he handed it to me; inside were documents—legal papers, mostly, and newspaper clippings.
I skimmed through the pile. At the end there was an agreement and release form containing itemized statements, the result of which was that both parties agreed to drop their suits. The clipping from the Plain Dealer quoted Gallatine as victor in the arbitration dispute: “‘No employee anywhere should ever be subjected to the gross violations of due process as I have been. They have an essentially bone-chilling effect at an educational institution.’”
I wanted to slap the sanctimonious look off his face; instead, I stuffed the papers back into the file and handed it to him with a smile.
“I hope that this modest victory will help protect area educators and other employees from abuse, intimidation and rumors designed to silence or destroy them,” Gallatine said. It was a line he must have repeated often since his case.
“What happened, Mister Gallatine? Were you threatened?”
“Yes. I had the eviden
ce and gave it to the police who turned over three notes—clearly actionable in their tone and language—that I had received from this disturbed individual but the city solicitor’s office refused to prosecute. Instead, they attempted to dismiss me from my job.”
“May I see the notes?”
“I don’t see what this has to do with Annaliese’s disappearance, but all right.”
He left once more. I looked around the room. It was as middle class and bourgeois as any other. I stared out the front picture window. A chickadee landed on the porch rail and cocked its head from side to side. The black-and-white swirl pattern of its head made me think of a story about a sailor on an expedition in the North Pole. He was out on the ice peering down between his legs at a black speck. The speck grew larger. Before anyone else got there, the ice exploded where he was standing. A killer whale had mistaken him for a seal.
Gallatine returned with his notes and handed them to me. They weren’t much. Handwritten penciled notes requested a private meeting with Gallatine at a time and specific place. Gallatine was saluted by various obscene names. In the third note, the writer had apparently lost control and demanded a private meeting where they wouldn’t be “disturbed.” I had to laugh: academics in fisticuffs—isn’t that an oxymoron, or whatever they call it? A puff of air would knock most of them down. It smelled like an academic teapot tempest to me, which is about as violent as a stoning by popcorn.
“Before you decided to make the notes public, did you go see this person?”
He looked at me as if I had just arrived from Mars with a balloon-blowing goat. “I faxed the police, the school board, the newspapers, and the state board of regents. I was given an unsatisfactory apology. I hired a bodyguard for the remainder of the semester.”
“So you sued. Did this individual threaten you?”
“He accosted me in the hallway after my class one afternoon and demanded a private meeting with me. I told him to get a grip on it.”
“He lost his job, didn’t he? So did the principal. They told me that you—”
“Who is this ‘they, you keep referring to?”