The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Skirting it,’ Angela agreed, ‘according to tax returns. But not bankrupt yet.’

  ‘Smarter to quit while you’re ahead.’ Frank steered past the sagging roofs and cars parked on lawns of East Eightieth. Accumulating seniority in the detective unit had its privileges; the Crown Vic had rolled off the assembly line a month before and still had that pristine smell. Angela had made Frank promise not to smoke in it if she would refrain from leaving empty coffee cups under the seat. So far, they’d stuck to the deal.

  In any case, he had not been freaked out by the explosion, or taken it personally. The cop killing, however, was a different story. The powers that be and a particularly vindictive Fate had decided to drop the investigation for the killing upon the shoulders of Frank and his partner. He needed to be freaked, he needed to be obsessed, and most of all he needed to come up with a viable suspect. Do it fast and make it stick. Failure would be felt in his record, in the squad room, in the locker room, in the eyes on him everywhere he went. Failure, to put it mildly, was not an option.

  They’d probably even take the car back. He and Angela would be driving a rusted Pinto from now until retirement.

  ‘Did you know him?’ his partner asked.

  ‘Marty Davis? No.’

  ‘I talked to the guys on his shift,’ she said. ‘I even looked up a few from shifts past, but they all sounded pretty consistent. A stand-up guy, not on the take, not the most powerful round in the ammo belt but reliable. He lived to write tickets.’

  ‘So who did he tick off badly enough to come gunning for him?’

  ‘They all had a list of suspects. A few came up more than once, a crazy ex-girlfriend—’

  ‘Doesn’t every cop have a crazy ex-girlfriend?’ He braked, enjoying the quiet rotors.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Crazy boyfriend, then.’

  ‘Nope. Annoying, certainly. But the girlfriend has since moved to LA to pursue her dream of working at Disneyland, so she’s out. Then there’s an alderman named Bevilaqua with fifteen outstanding parking tickets. He and Davis had been having a pissing contest going back two years over the man’s habit of parking in the fire lane when late for a meeting. Apparently he doesn’t handle his temper any more efficiently than his schedule and threatened to, quote, string Marty up by his thumbs, unquote.’

  ‘If he wants to intimidate a cop he needs to use a threat coined in the last century. I mean the last last century.’

  ‘True, but he repeated this one on a number of occasions. The third choice is the most likely. Marty arrested him three times for domestic violence. The last time he served four years and has a permanent restraining order to keep him away from both his wife and children.’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘Lots of them, but only to other inmates, who relayed the info to the correctional officers, who passed it on to Marty when the guy, Terry Beltran, got out early for good behavior last month.’

  ‘Has he approached Davis?’

  ‘Marty didn’t say anything to his friends, and they say he wouldn’t have been shy about something like that. The guy’s probation officer said he’s been making his meetings, not with good grace, but showing up, and has neither mentioned Marty nor asked about him.’

  ‘And that’s it? The guy’s a cop for twenty years and only has three enemies?’

  Angela shrugged. ‘You know what patrol’s like. The scumbags talk big when you’re putting the cuffs on, but once they’re in the system you get crowded to the bottom of their payback list.’

  ‘Problem is you never know which scumbag is going to be particularly good at holding a grudge.’

  ‘And smart enough to keep it to himself,’ Angela added. ‘One of our instructors in the academy said we were signing up to walk around with a bull’s-eye painted on our backs for the rest of our lives. I never forgot it. You ever had someone come back on you?’

  ‘Not yet. But tomorrow is another day.’ Frank pulled over to the curb, stopping in front of a tiny house near Superior. He heaved a sigh and unfolded his aching body from the car, hoping to find it – the car – in the same condition when they returned. The two-story home appeared ready to fall down, or at least think about it. An apple tree, the only concession to landscaping on the entire street, looked as old as the house. Apples littered the ground; frozen all winter, they had waited for these spring months to resume decomposition. Angela preceded him up two sagging wood steps to a screen door with no screening left in it. She reached through and knocked on the inner door.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘Just leave it.’

  ‘Can’t. We’re the police. We need to talk to Lily Simpson.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We need to do a notification. She isn’t in any trouble. Are you her?’

  The voice continued from inside the house, to the left, and didn’t seem to be moving. ‘Yeah, but I’m really busy right now.’

  ‘Sorry, but we have to interrupt.’

  ‘Oh, for the love—’ the woman shouted. ‘Just come in, OK?’

  ‘You want us to come in?’ Frank asked. The department lawyers had said to clarify these matters.

  ‘As in open the door your damn self! My hands are full.’

  Frank shrugged, pulled open the empty screen door and turned the knob of the inner door. Then they entered and saw what Lily Simpson had her hands full with.

  Through a cluttered front room with an antique fireplace, the lady of the house stood at her kitchen table, bathing a small dog in a large plastic tub. The dog, a brown thing with long hair and perky ears, stared with pleading eyes from a coating of soapsuds.

  Lily Simpson had hair the color and consistency of straw and not nearly enough pounds on her slight frame. Her driver’s license reported her age as forty-five, but as Frank came closer he saw how the lines on her face belonged to someone twenty years older. Her eyes were bloodshot, with jumpy pupils, but no alcohol bottles in sight. Crack, he figured, or something similar. Her clothes, a T-shirt with rust stains and a pair of sweatpants held in place by a drawstring, had large wet spots.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’re Lily Simpson?’

  ‘Yes. What do you want? They didn’t do anything.’

  Her hands must have relaxed ever so slightly, and the dog took full advantage, putting two paws on the edge of the tub and pushing. This accomplished nothing save for adding another layer of water to the already soaked tabletop. Lily got a firmer grip and continued sudsing.

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘The kids. Or me. None of us did anything.’

  Frank decided to bypass the getting-to-know-you stage. ‘Are you acquainted with a Martin Davis?’

  ‘Marty?’ This got her full and un-irritated attention. She stared at them until the dog made a leap for it, leaving itself stranded over the edge of the tub, half out, half in. Lily dragged it back into the water without moving her gaze from Frank’s face. ‘What about him?’

  ‘We’re sorry to tell you that Martin Davis was killed in the line of duty on Monday.’

  She froze, but briefly, then went back to the task at hand. ‘I’m not surprised. I always said that job would kill him. Why he wanted to be a cop – no offense.’

  ‘None taken.’ Frank waited for her to ask another question, but she kept her head down, concentrating on the dog, until he realized she was crying. ‘What was your relationship with Officer Davis?’

  With a twitch of her neck she dried one cheek on her shoulder before answering. ‘We were friends.’

  ‘Just friends?’

  Now she looked up with freshly red eyes, before hauling the dripping dog over to the kitchen sink and dropping him on top of two spoons, a plate and a cereal bowl with corn flakes adhering to the rim. A cockroach scattered, but didn’t make it up the side of the basin before Lily turned on the tap. She adjusted the water to a comfortable temperature, and began the rinse cycle. Only then did she answer: ‘Off and on. I mean we were always friends, and off an
d on we were more. I’ve known Marty, Geez, seems like all my life. Since high school, but we got together in college.’

  ‘You went to the same college?’ Frank tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible. Neither the victim nor this woman struck him as brainy.

  He didn’t keep neutral enough and a defensive tone crept into her voice. ‘Yeah, we went to Cleveland State. I was going to major in elementary education, believe it or not. That was before I knew what kids were like.’ She turned off the water and Frank noted the relief in the dog’s eyes. Its tail even gave a half-hearted wag as Lily pulled a frayed terry-cloth towel from the edge of the table. Half if it had already been soaked from the washtub overflow.

  ‘What did Marty study?’ Angela asked. She had a habit of that, popping up with these off the wall questions. Frank would have preferred to do the notification and get out before one of the cockroaches decided to hitch a ride on his shoe.

  ‘Beer. Women. Video games, anything to have an excuse to get away from his parents without having to get a job. One of his room-mates had a Nintendo, and that’s what Marty studied more than anything else.’ Lily wrapped the dog and transferred him back to the kitchen table, absently pushing aside two water glasses and a magazine to make room. ‘Isn’t that funny, I don’t remember what Marty was supposed to be majoring in. Chemistry, maybe? Or math? I guess it doesn’t matter, he never graduated. Neither did I. I got pregnant with my first, and that was that.’

  ‘Marty’s?’

  ‘What? Oh. No, Shawna wasn’t Marty’s, we were broken up by then, sort of. Her father joined the Army to get out of child support and died in the Gulf War, good riddance. I couldn’t even get any of the death benefit because I couldn’t prove she was his.’

  ‘Paternity test?’ Angela suggested.

  ‘Those cost money, don’t they?’ The dog’s mood seemed to improve under the vigorous toweling, though Lily didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her own actions. Her countenance appeared to be a million miles away, or perhaps twenty-odd years. ‘It don’t matter. I can’t see me as a teacher, anyway, wearing little sweaters and cutting things out of construction paper.’

  Something in her voice made Frank think she could see it, and sometimes did.

  Lily dried the inside of the dog’s ears with the towel, gently, then got out a brush. The dog never took its eyes off Frank, as if hoping he might have a treat with which to reward him for all this suffering. Frank decided to get the conversation back on track. ‘We’re here to tell you that Marty named you as beneficiary in his will.’

  A look of panic leapt to her face. ‘I can’t pay for a funeral.’

  ‘The police department has already taken care of the funeral. It was this morning.’

  ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even get to go to the funeral? Why didn’t you guys tell me sooner?’ She lowered the dog to the floor.

  ‘You didn’t see it in the papers? On TV?’

  A boy of twelve or thirteen threw open the back door, took one look at the two cops, and began to back out again.

  Frank said, ‘Come in. No one’s in any trouble.’

  The kid maintained his position by the door, just in case. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘They’re cops, Brandy. Nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It’s Brandon. Did Shawna get knifed in the shower room?’

  His mother shrugged without energy. ‘His sister’s doing two years for grand theft. No, Brandon, it isn’t about Shawna.’

  ‘Too bad.’ The boy appeared visibly disappointed. He also appeared to need a good deal of the care his mother had just lavished on the dog. Pasty skin carried a layer of grime and a cut festered on his left hand. He hadn’t been starving, though.

  ‘Go to your room.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Grown-ups are talking. Beat it, Brandy.’

  The kid shuffled off, with heavy steps and a few backward glares which tried for intimidating and came off as pouty. The dog, now the cleanest thing in the room, obviously lacked the intelligence to escape while it could and instead began to investigate Frank’s shoes. Meanwhile Frank explained that they hadn’t found the will until that morning, a preprinted form on which Marty Davis had filled out the blanks longhand. He had kept it stuffed into a pile on his dining room table, along with a collection of Playboys, a picture of his swearing-in, a tattered copy of the police union rules and notebooks going back to high school. ‘Actually you were the contingent beneficiary after his mother, but she died several years ago. He listed her as emergency contact and we couldn’t find an address book. He didn’t have a lot of close friends, and none of them mentioned you.’

  She sat in one of the mismatched chairs, heavily, leaning one arm on the still-sodden table. ‘Not surprised at that either. I’m from the first half of Marty’s life.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Da— Marty?’

  Lily pulled a half-empty bottle of beer from behind the washtub and took a mouthful to think with. Frank wondered how close it had been to the overflowing tub, and tried to catch the expression on his face before it puckered up at the thought of drinking dog bath water. Not that it mattered. Lily’s gaze focused only on the past.

  Finally she said, ‘A year ago, maybe more? After Christmas, but we still had snow on the ground. He dropped off a friend somewhere around here after a cop party – someone’s retirement, or bachelor party or something – and saw my house. He’d do that once in a while, come by for old times’ sake – well, more for a beer and a lay, I guess. But those were our old times, and I guess he’d get sentimental now and then. I do, too. Did.’

  ‘Did he ever mention a Terry Beltran?’ These were probably stupid questions, since she hadn’t even spoken to the victim in over a year. But they were standard questions and if he didn’t ask them then for sure at some point in the future he’d be asked why he didn’t ask them, and Frank despised being asked why he hadn’t done something because there was never any way to answer without looking either lazy or stupid. So he asked.

  She looked at him again, coming back to the present, and drank another swallow of Pabst. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Did he ever mention being afraid of someone, or perhaps worried about them? Maybe someone threatened to get back at him over something?’

  He must have imagined the faint, sharp, startled look that shocked her eyes into full attention, so quickly did it evanesce only to be replaced by a frown. ‘What do you mean? Wasn’t he shot in a hold-up or by an escaping prisoner or something? Car accident? You know – regular cop work?’

  ‘Had he ever been threatened?’

  ‘No. I mean, not that he ever mentioned to me. Marty wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. I always thought – no offense, I loved him – he just didn’t have the brains to be.’ She shrugged. ‘If he was, he probably wouldn’t admit it to me. I’m just the bimbo, remember. If a guy talked trash to him and he laughed it off, that he would tell me, but any real problem, no. Why? Who killed him?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet. That’s why we’re exploring all possible avenues of investigation. Are you sure you can’t think of any past incident that might help us?’

  He waited for that startled look, that flash in her eyes that meant a name had popped into her head, but she showed nothing but confusion which gathered and massed into agitation. Best to get out before she demanded every detail down to the bullet’s caliber. Frank held out a card. ‘This is the number of our legal department. They can advise you how to claim the estate. I have to warn you there isn’t much,’ he added as a wild hope came into her eyes. ‘He rented his apartment and cracked up his car last month. He had a small amount in the bank – about four thousand dollars – but we haven’t found any other assets.’

  She took the card. ‘Marty wasn’t much of a saver. I’m sure he signed his paycheck over to the bartender every week.’

  ‘Our condolences on your loss,’ Frank added. His condolences weren’t much, but then it didn’t look like her grief, other than
those first few tears, amounted to much either. At least she’d come out of it with a few extra bucks to keep her dog in shampoo, and maybe spare some for the kid.

  Angela, true to form, popped up with another question. ‘What do you do for a living, Lily?’

  ‘I work for Downtown Courier. I deliver stuff.’ She gave a smile, which seemed to be meant only for herself. ‘Been doing that most of my life. Why?’

  ‘That sounds like a good job.’

  Frank knew his partner’s habit of working up to her questions, and left her to it.

  ‘I don’t like to sit still,’ Lily said.

  ‘What did you mean when you said you were from the first half of Marty’s life?’

  Lily scooped the dog from Frank’s feet, regardless of its wet fur. ‘From the bad half. The young and crazy half. The half when crack and meth were part of our study habits, before he saw the light and decided to become a cop.’

  She didn’t exactly say ‘cop’ the way most people said ‘child molester’, but it came close.

  ‘What made him see this light?’ Angela asked.

  ‘At the end of sophomore year—’ the woman began, then stopped, reassessed, and clearly changed her course. ‘Sophomore year, Marty got tired of both drugs and studying. They didn’t work well together. When we were high we thought we were studying our brains out, expected to ace every test, you know how it is when you’re cranked up—’

  Frank, who didn’t, nodded.

  ‘—and we’d bomb. Then we’d get all concerned and stop the drugs and really try to learn the stuff, but it was so damn hard, and harder still without a pop here and there to cheer you up. It wore Marty down. It wore me down. Marty decided to trash it all, including me, to work on the side of the friggin’ angels. By the time summer came he had enrolled with you guys and I was pregnant.’

  ‘That was it?’ Angela pressed. ‘No one particular incident that made Marty turn to police work?’

  ‘He said he figured he could put other people in jail or go himself, and he preferred it to be them.’ His wording still made her laugh. ‘Preferred. He’d get flowery once in a while.’