Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  She put her hands to her face. “I must look—”

  “No, no.” He sat beside her. “Don’t say that.”

  She leaned into him, pressed her face against his shirt. “Are you all right? Oh God, you’re all right, you’re all right, you’re all right.” She clung to him, gripping his jacket as though hoping to crawl inside.

  He wrapped his arms around her, swaying gently. “Shush, shush, hey, I’m okay, I’m fine. What about you?”

  What about me? she thought. My mind’s a danse macabre. I’m sick with fear and I want to die from guilt and I missed you and thought I might never see you again, or if I did you’d hate me, like I thought you did when I first saw you in the doorway, that look in your eye.

  “I was so scared.” She jerked her head back. “You smell like you were scared, too. Oh God, what happened?” She reached up, grazed his cheek with her fingertips. “Where were you the last few hours?”

  He took her hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to shower.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant. My God, it smells wonderful. You’re here. You’re here.”

  13

  Murchison took what solace he could from the fact he’d had the good sense to extend the crime scene to the two Victorians on either side of the Carlisle property. He sat in a patrol unit, waiting for a callback from the watch commander, while officers manned the front and rear of each house, making sure no one made it in or out.

  The watch commander was himself waiting—expecting word from down the chain of command, men who were tracking down the owners of record for both premises, so Murchison and his officers could gain permission to enter. They’d knocked, hoping someone was inside and would have the good sense to open up, but no such luck. Lacking anything concrete to claim exigent circumstances, they couldn’t just plow on in with neither a warrant nor permission. And they lacked anything solid enough yet for a warrant.

  What they had was dribs and drabs—scraps of information collected bit by bit from members of Long Walk Mooney’s crew, their friends, hangers-on. They’d been brought in one by one by patrol units or questioned in the field. The bad news—every single one denied any involvement by Arlie Thigpen or Long Walk Mooney in the Carlisle killing. Alibis, such as they were, abounded, contradictory and otherwise. But what they did hand up got confirmed by Holmes’s nameless source, who checked in when word of the mutt hunt made the rounds.

  He’d told Holmes it was true, there was a mixed-race male—skittle, Holmes said, was the word used—heavyset, six feet tall, went by the name Manny. He’d hung around the fringes of the Mooney crew the past few weeks, then got tipped he could crash at one of the houses next to the Carlisle home. No one as yet knew which one, which was why Murchison had men stationed both places.

  Tight as a nun’s butt, Murchison thought. In Stluka’s defense, not to mention Truax and Hennessey, who’d done the first check, both Victorians were indeed secure. The search would probably reveal how the kid had gotten in and out, but still, it felt embarrassing, to be so close and at the same time so clueless. Good thing Jerry went home for a few hours’ sleep, he thought. Otherwise he’d be sitting here howling.

  The radio call came through. Murchison picked up. “What’ve we got?”

  “We tracked down your owners.” The watch commander this shift was an old-timer named Durbin. “Gotta tell you, Murch. I mean, it was like pulling teeth, getting them to cop to the fact they were listed on title.”

  “They’re straw men.” Murchison had to hand one to Toby Marchand’s lawyer. The Queen of Naps. “What about consent to enter?”

  “You’re good, go on in. But get this—neither one of these owners had keys.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Who does? Have keys, I mean.”

  “Woman named Veronique Edwards.”

  Murchison laughed. Victim’s sister. “That’s too perfect.”

  “Both owners said she handled the sales, these are investment properties, blah blah, she’s in charge of the renovations.”

  That made Murchison look, just to be sure. “What renovations?”

  “Guys I had making the calls, they said these people couldn’t even tell for sure if the Edwards woman had keys, you want the truth.”

  Didn’t want to tell you, Murchison thought.

  “My guys told them we needed access, keys or no keys, now, not next week, what’s it gonna be? After some real sandbagging they finally said yeah, sure, okay. My guess is they’re calling this Edwards woman right now. Her or their lawyers.”

  Or both, Murchison thought. He ran it over in his mind, tried to imagine what he’d do in their shoes.

  “Durbin, it’s time to bring this Edwards woman down for a sit. Might be past time. Send a car over to get her. Her and her husband, no excuses. Whoever you send, make it clear, don’t say anything about keys or anything else. Offer condolences, sweetie her up. If pushed, we want to hear anything and everything she has to say about her brother. Tell her it’s all routine, but it can’t wait. Homicide, first seventy-two hours, you hear where I’m going. Same with the other owners, they don’t get a choice. Put ’em in different rooms, if you can find that many. Or out in the squad room where they can be watched. Regardless, they sit tight.”

  He signed off, got out of the car, and signaled to both crews to grab their tools. They were free to go in.

  Toby and Nadya rode in the back of a Yellow Cab from the hospital, sitting close. Toby wrapped his arm around her as she nestled her head into his shoulder.

  The clothes she’d worn last night had been claimed by the police. Toby’d not thought to bring anything for her, so it had been up to Marjorie, the nurse, to loan from her locker a cable-stitch sweater and jeans four sizes too large. Nadya’d rolled up the cuffs, and they’d found twine to cinch the waistband tight, the denim billowing at her hips and thighs. For shoes she wore the same paper slippers. They were ridiculously thin in the cold air, and she shivered beside him in the backseat of the cab.

  As he held her, something his father once told him came to mind. It was one of the best lessons the old man had ever given him, actually, about something he called at one time or another The Deep Sweet. Music is a living thing, he’d said. Inside every piece you ever play there’s a pulse, a real one—not made up in your head, in the music itself. It’s your duty to find it, connect. Do that, commit yourself to it, you’ll discover the reason you play. Discover yourself, reflected back in song. You don’t, you’re just blowing notes.

  Toby had felt it maybe a half-dozen times, no more. But the point was to know you’d felt it. To know that was to understand that inside every true thing there’s a welcoming beauty, even as simple a thing as a song. That kept you hungry. And that was the point—to keep on the hunt, to crave that echo, to know it’s there, and to never stop wanting it.

  Toby’d come to think of love that way, too. There were technicians in that realm just like in music—men and women who thought what happened between them was a matter of skill, a craft you refined. He’d fallen hard for a woman like that, almost proposed—a woman, sad to say, whom his mother still considered perfection—fashion model elegant but educated, too, Stanford Law, a worldly future ahead of her. But inside?

  As Nadya curled up beside him, he felt a deepening suspicion that this sneaky, mercurial truth toward which his father had pointed the way resided closer than he’d guessed. No sooner did this feeling arise, though, than he shrank from it. Maybe, he thought, it’s just need. Or guilt, trying to twist itself into something good. You’re a walking wound, he thought. Be careful. Let all this sit till your father’s death and all it means isn’t so raw.

  A long lore accompanied the Black male, white woman fascination—hiding from the harder truths, needing someone who embraces your self-delusions, saving each other. Hiding behind each other. You can drive yourself crazy, he realized, undermining your affections like that. Then again, returning to the feel of her body b
urrowing into his own, his former feelings—his admiration for her talent and mind, his attraction to her beauty, his affection, his curiosity—they all seemed shallow, equivocal. Inadequate. There was more going on here. For the first time, he felt a hint of that ineffable pulse echoing between them. And yet he realized, too, how suddenly, like his father’s life, it could be destroyed. And that returned to him his guilt. She was the one who tried to save him, he thought, at the very same moment you were turning your back on the old man for good. It shamed him. He found himself despising her a little—what good did she accomplish really, what help did she deliver, what did she see, she’s weak—even as he tightened his hold around her, despising himself more.

  They took the last corner and, in an eerie replay of the night before, police cruisers sat waiting, lining the street. Like they’d never left, Toby thought. It caused an odd sort of vertigo—wanting to find out what was going on but wanting to flee. Feeling at the same time both lost and right back at the beginning.

  The cabbie turned around in his seat and queried them with his eyes, as though to ask if they really wanted out. Toby slid his arm out from around Nadya’s shoulder—she’d clutched that hand in her own so tightly he’d lost sensation in three fingers—took out the last of his cash, handed it across the seat, and motioned to Nadya.

  “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  An officer with a clipboard—not the same one as last night, Toby noticed, the one he’d wrestled with—stood guard at the gate, tipping one foot to the other in the wind. He was the youngest cop Toby’d seen so far, and he carried himself with an affected squaring of his shoulders, like a TV Texan. As the cab drove off, the baby-faced officer jotted down its license number on his clipboard.

  A small display of flower garlands and paper-wrapped bouquets cluttered the sidewalk. The flowers were joined by condolence cards, candy boxes, stuffed animals—even a balloon in the shape of a heart, made of Mylar and filled with helium, bobbing at the end of a string. Left by well-wishers, Toby guessed, neighbors. Same neighbors who told the police I wasn’t my father’s son.

  “My name is Toby Marchand,” he told the officer, walking up. “I live here.”

  The officer held up the clipboard, gesturing for them to wait, then turned his body away, leaning his head to one side to speak into the walkie-talkie attached by Velcro to his epaulet. With the sound of the wind, Toby couldn’t hear much of what the officer said, but he did catch his own name and that of Detective Murchison, plus the word girl. The officer ended his call and turned back. “Detective be out in about five, ten minutes. Wait here.”

  Toby led Nadya to the sidewalk, where she hunched down, her back against the trunk of the sycamore. With pained eyes she studied the mound of flowers and gifts, pulling the sweater hem down over her knees to the ground and tucking her feet inside, then stretching the neckline up above her nose. Once she stuffed each hand inside the opposite sleeve, only her eyes and the top of her head remained visible.

  Why were the police still here, Toby wondered, or here again? He felt like asking, but the young cop might as well be wearing a sandwich board reading: DON’T BOTHER ME.

  He returned his focus to Nadya, and she glanced up, meeting his gaze. I am the ruin of everyone I love, her eyes seemed to say. And everyone who loves me.

  “You know how much I care about you, right?”

  It didn’t come out quite the way he’d wanted. She seemed shocked at first, but the agony in her eyes dissolved a little. As she worked to free her face from the collar of the sweater, the slightest smile appeared.

  “Thank you.”

  He dropped next to her, wrapped his arm around her again, pulling up his jacket collar with the other hand. The wind seemed gentler near the ground. Nadya tensed up beneath his arm, her head swinging left, then right.

  “Can you smell that?”

  Toby sniffed the air. “What?”

  Her head stopped turning. She gazed at him with terror in her eyes. “Nothing.”

  He took her chin in his hand, wouldn’t let her look away. “Tell me.”

  She swallowed. “It’s nothing.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s in your head.”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  He stroked her cheek, the darker skin of his fingers accentuating her pallor. “Does it help, knowing it’s not real?”

  She looked away, trembling as she buried her fists deeper into the sleeves of the huge sweater. “Someday. I hope.”

  “When the flashbacks come, are they visual, too? Can you see him?”

  It seemed too personal, too needy a question. She took a long time to answer.

  “It’s like what you see when you switch the lights on, then off, real quick. It’s there, just an instant. Then it’s gone.” She shivered. “And it’s awful. But the fear, it’s there the whole time. I can’t make it stop. My heart’s going a mile a minute, I’m sick to my stomach. My whole insides just—”

  She closed her eyes and he held her again, tight, till Murchison appeared. He came wearing the same expression of buried rage smothered in despair that Toby had come to think of as the face of the law.

  “Why didn’t you tell me there was someone living in the house next door?”

  Toby glanced at Nadya, who stared back. They struggled to their feet.

  “I didn’t know,” Toby said.

  “There was?” Nadya asked.

  The young cop stepped forward, into Murchison’s orbit. The detective ignored him.

  “Big guy, bearish, on the chubby side, mixed-race.”

  In the corner of his eye Toby caught Nadya staggering a little on her feet. Turning, he saw her eyes swell. “What?” he whispered.

  “Could you describe him again?” Nadya asked.

  Murchison did. Nadya went white.

  “There was someone like that. At the club. When Mr. Carlisle got into the fight.”

  “You didn’t mention that before,” Murchison said.

  “He wasn’t one of the four who caused the real trouble.” Her voice barely rose above a whisper, but even so the words came out shrill, defensive. “He was just somebody in the crowd. He came up, put his arms around Mr. Carlisle, like he wanted to help break up the fight. When he loosened his hold, Mr. Carlisle turned right around and hit him. Hard.” She winced at the memory. “And kicked him, after he fell.” She looked up at Toby as though wanting to be forgiven for having to admit that.

  Murchison asked, “He follow you out to the car?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

  “Okay.” Murchison toed a spot of grass cropping out of a crack in the sidewalk, then looked off at the Victorian from which he’d come. “From what we found inside, looks like he lived on cold canned soup, vanilla cake frosting, and peppermint schnapps. Cellar dweller. Except he liked to sit up at the window on the top floor, too.” He pointed up toward the widow’s walk. “Bit of a smoker. You never saw an ash glowing red up at that window? Or any other lights at night?”

  Both Toby and Nadya looked, following the direction of his finger with their eyes.

  “He also liked making little flamethrowers with hair spray. You never saw that?”

  “No,” in unison. Nadya shook her head for emphasis, her eyes brimming with self-reproach. Toby said, “That house, it’s been empty months, maybe a year. You stop paying attention.”

  “Too bad for your father.”

  Toby couldn’t believe he’d heard right. “Are you saying that just because—”

  “Your father, he mention seeing anybody in that house?”

  “If he had, I’d have told you.”

  Murchison, to Nadya: “You?”

  She shook her head. Toby said, “I want to get her out of the cold.”

  Murchison leaned away, murmured something to the young cop, who ducked his chin as he listened, then leaned back. “One, given what we know now, I’d have to say it’s unwise for you to stay her
e. Could be your father’s killer was holed up next door, and he may have an inkling you can identify him. Two, I haven’t released the scene yet. Given what we just found, I’m not going to, not anytime in the next few hours. Three, I’ve been thinking about what your lawyer told me. I want to look at your father’s financial records, his checkbook, tax work papers, anything he didn’t give his lawyer. Your lawyer. But I still want you here in town. You want, go down, stay with Ms. Navigato for now.”

  Nadya edged forward, her paper slippers chafing the sidewalk. “Why are you being so hostile? What have we done?”

  Murchison didn’t answer, just stared back at her with a kind of wounded bafflement.

  “You think we’re guilty.”

  Toby touched her shoulder, whispering, “Choose your battles.” He tried to turn her away. She refused to move.

  “If you feel so much hate for us, who are you doing this for?”

  “I don’t hate anybody.”

  “Oh my God, you don’t see it in yourself?”

  Nadya shook her head and broke out of Toby’s hold, spinning away. Toby clung to her hand, to keep her close. “We’ll need to get some things from inside the house, Detective. Clothes, my shaving kit, things like that. I assume you’ll want to come with us, or have one of your officers come along.”

  Murchison tore the edges of the crime scene tape away from the gate as the younger cop jotted down everyone’s name on his entry/exit log. Once the tape was clear, Murchison turned to Nadya.

  “You sure you’re up for this?”

  He seemed more cautious than concerned. She stood there, staring at the gate. Toby said, “I can bring your clothes out to you, if you want.”

  “No. I want to go in.”

  Murchison pushed open the gate, and she looked through the opening into the yard. Standing perfectly still, she swayed a little on her feet, her skin blanching a ghostly white.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Toby said, taking one arm.

  Murchison tried for the other, but she tore her hand away, clasping it across her mouth. Hissing through her fingers, “The bathroom.”