“Badminton,” his three companions corrected.
“It’ll be time to go home before we know it,” Gillian said, almost to herself. “I’ve got to get back to my desk by Tuesday morning.”
“Now I hope this won’t be your only trip up here this summer,” Frances told her. “You’re welcome anytime, you know. Dan and I can never get enough of you two. Isn’t that right, honey?”
“Oh, and us too,” Henry said drowsily from the couch. Gillian nodded her agreement.
Fall Girl
When I was twelve, my mother shot a soda-pop salesman she’d known less than eight hours. Daddy had purchased the gun a few weeks before, telling her it was to keep us safe now that they were divorced. He taught Mother how to load, fire, and clean the gun. He also installed locks on our new apartment door and windows. Afterwards, he slipped three keys off the ring and pocketed them, flipping the remaining ones on the table. Mother eyeballed this maneuver, but let it pass.
“Now where’s my jacket?” he said, beginning to roll his shirtsleeves down.
Mother grabbed his blazer from the back of a chair and handed it to him. Slipping it on, he smoothed the lapels, tugging his shirtsleeves down from the wrist. Despite his labors, he looked crisp and elegant, and I longed to throw myself at him and beg him to stay.
“Do you really think we’re unsafe in a neighborhood bookended by a John Wanamaker’s store and a Bonwit Teller?” Mother asked as he headed for the door. He didn’t answer. Didn’t even give her a glance.
And perhaps Daddy was right—maybe there was a dangerous, if undetectable, current coursing down the street, because it was only a few weeks later that Jerry Santini, a man Mother met earlier that day, walked out of our bathroom, saw my mother removing bills from his wallet, and headed for the phone, mumbling something about “thieving bitch” and “not getting away with it.”
Mother, adept at both identifying potential danger and acting quickly on it, moved toward the drawer where the gun was kept, planning only—or so she insisted later—to scare Jerry Santini.
“I figured he’d take off when he saw it,” she told me.
But stymied by our Ericafone, a Swedish import with the dial on the bottom popular at the time, Jerry was too sluggish for her swift actions. She caught him in the chest, the ribs, the thigh, emptying the entire chamber, in fact. He’d been shooting his mouth off about what he was going to do to her when she started pulling the trigger.
My mother almost always acted on instinct, especially in tight spots. So however it happened, whatever state she was in, and whatever Jerry Santini said or did or didn’t do, Mother killed him, emptying the gun of bullets, letting it clatter on the hardwood floor.
There wasn’t much Jerry did know after only an hour or two’s acquaintance. Mother met Jerry Santini at a shoe repair shop. She was always a sucker for a man who took care of his shoes, and Jerry wore an expensive pair of well-polished, buttery-black wingtips. There were no holes in his black socks, an item she examined carefully over the top of the wooden stall. She was disproportionately impressed by such touches, often judging people solely on their appearance. So she invited him to come up to her apartment where she served him stuffed figs, cocktail nuts, dates, and several dry martinis before taking him to bed.
My mother’s apartment gave the impression of belonging to a wealthy woman who wouldn’t need to rob a soda salesman. Having her child sleeping in the next room would also seem to preclude her undertaking a robbery, much less a shooting.
After shooting her date with a degree of marksmanship no one would’ve predicted, Mother rushed into my room and shook me.
“Look at the marks, Christine,” she hissed.
Only half awake, I badly wanted to see at least a blossoming of bruises. But her neck was white and blemishless.
Seeing my disbelief, she dropped onto my bed and began to sob, claiming through her tears that no one ever took her side. It was then that she confessed she might just have peeked inside his wallet, an action she’d been forced to take given our current position.
“Your father’s stingy. How can we be expected to live on…”
I did feel responsible once I understood. If it weren’t for me—for her reluctance to leave me alone even at twelve—Mother and her date might’ve gone out to a nightclub or theater, where she wouldn’t have been tempted to rifle his wallet. Or she might have been able to steal the odd twenty dollars less conspicuously—blaming its loss on a waitress or busboy should it be discovered. Or maybe they would’ve gone to his apartment, where no gun conveniently waited in a drawer. My role in this debacle was growing large.
I hadn’t heard the ruckus in the living room because my mother had turned on Saturday Night Live before Jerry and she made love, and it was still playing. I’d slept right through the skits about bumblebees and cheeseburgers, the lovemaking taking place in the next room, and, even more blessedly, the gunfire. Only Mother, screaming in my ear as ABBA sang SOS during the musical interlude, was loud enough to wake me.
I was still clinging to the hope her imagination had gotten the best of her—or, at the very least, that the wound was not the fatal one she reported when we finally walked into the living room. She continued to jabber away, pretending we were looking at some ordinary thing—like a broken vase or a ruined piece of furniture—so the oddness and horror of finding a dead body in my living room didn’t immediately sink in.
The room had the dreamlike atmosphere of a scene from a B movie, like the ones we watched on late-night TV. How could the dead body on the floor be genuine when the rest of the room was still the familiar place where I’d watched Mary Tyler Moore a few hours earlier?
“He seemed like such a nice guy.” Mother sounded surprised by this sudden change in personality—as if he’d pulled something over on her.
“How many times did you fire the gun?”
The blood was shockingly red. Our black and white TV had shielded me from the truth. The black blood on TV was somehow less startling—less of a life force, more like sludge.
“Six?” She paused for a second. “Look, I fired until the gun was empty—like I did at the shooting range, the one your father took me to.”
Mother didn’t know Jerry’s last name until we examined his wallet more thoroughly.
“Santini,” she said triumphantly, his license in her hand.
But Mother continued to forget Jerry Santini’s name every time she was asked in the weeks ahead—I never once heard her get it right. More often than not, she called him Joey Spatini, confusing his name with a packaged spaghetti sauce popular at the time.
Sprawled on the fluffy carpeting, an item Mother made my father buy as part of their divorce settlement, Jerry Santini was certainly dead, putting to rest any notion Mother had exaggerated or misunderstood the outcome of their tête-à-tête. It was almost impossible to stop her from immediately spraying the area with rug shampoo.
“Hey, you’re not supposed to touch anything,” I said, clapping my hand over the nozzle. “They can find things out from his blood.”
It was before the science of blood splatter or DNA, but there was still information to be gleaned from it. Blood type, at least.
She turned toward me, the can still poised. “Just what do we want them to find out, Christine? It was an accident. You upset me when you insist on seeing this…mishap as a crime. Make sure you use the word accident when they come—the police or whoever. First impressions last longest, you know.”
I was speechless.
“And look,” she continued, “we have to protect ourselves, not make the case for the cops. They’ll be trying to pin it on me—us.”
Us? Us?
Mother’s voice trailed off as she stepped back from the body. She’d already linked me with the events. Perhaps I saw us as linked too. It was our apartment, our life. I should have been more vigilant in protect
ing her—us.
“I’m gonna call Cy. He’ll know what to do.”
“Not Daddy?” I whispered.
If she’d kept the door locked as Daddy suggested, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Military training and running a business had prepared him for tight circumstances. His shirt would never wrinkle, his pants would retain their pleat. Surely this meant something.
“How could we possibly call your father, kiddo? Look what’s lying on our rug. Think Hank would be able to see past that?”
Her voice had regained its normal strength; the power in the room subtly shifting back to her. I nodded, still transfixed by the pooled blood and the man I’d never set eyes on before.
He was naked except for a pair of extremely tight briefs. The bottoms of his feet were pink and plump, like he’d never spent much time on them. Good attendance to his feet seemed essential to the story, and I couldn’t see his face at all—squashed into the rug as it was. I could see he boasted a nice head of steely black hair and wore it long in the back.
Cy Granholm, the man Mother went to call, had loomed large in our life lately. In the last three months, he’d handled Mother’s divorce, gone to court with her on a speeding ticket, and twice filed papers demanding an increase in child support. Mother had begun calling him at his home with domestic and household troubles: questions about financial matters, advice on how to fix the gurgling toilet.
“Cy!”
I heard Mother on the phone in her bedroom. There was gaiety in her tone—probably a quality she’d cultivated long ago and couldn’t discard now—even though it was unseemly.
The treacherous Ericafone still lay on the living room floor. If the incident had happened in the bedroom, the use of her baby blue princess phone might have saved Jerry’s life.
“If it’s not too late, I could use your help, Cy. No, no, you’ll have to come over here.” She laughed a little, pretending, if only to herself, that it wasn’t too awful, that nothing was greatly amiss. “I’d rather not explain it over the phone.”
So two hours after the soda salesman’s death, I told two police officers I’d found Jerry Santini strangling my mother in the living room and pulled the gun Daddy bought for us from the drawer.
“I held the gun in my hand,” I said, caught up in the excitement of the scene and more than half believing it. “Confusion ensued and the gun went off.”
Nobody flinched at my words. I was the sort of twelve-year-old who might say such a thing. “I was barely aware of doing it.” The idea of his murder being dreamlike seemed like a good way to go.
Cy nodded in the background as I said exactly what he’d instructed me to say an hour earlier, telling the police as little as possible. I was perhaps a bit shrill in my delivery, but shrillness established my immaturity. Reticence was Cy’s advice for any situation allowing it—and ladylike tears, if needed.
I didn’t mind lying for Mother, and it turned out I was pretty good at it, and would get even better in the years ahead. When Mother lied, she prattled on. I was the essence of brevity, my tears restrained. I looked to her for approval, but she kept her eyes pinned to the wall behind me where a chartreuse and aqua ceramic señorita and señor danced the tango. I was on my own.
Our apartment had a hushed air over the next hour despite the host of men who were carrying Jerry Santini off, examining the carpet, looking for the bullet casings, powdering the place for fingerprints, talking to Mother and me, snapping their cameras. A child murderess merits solemnity. Nobody pushed me beyond my practiced confession on that day or on any other day over the following weeks. Ordinary men, even cops in 1975, didn’t anticipate a mother asking her child to lie—even after the Johnny Stompanato case.
To be honest, I can’t remember either Mother or Cy Granholm directly asking it of me—the lying or taking the rap. Cy’s attempts to cobble a convincing story from Mother’s words had gone awry every time.
“You seem amazingly cavalier about what’s taken place here tonight, Eve,” he said. “You did kill the guy. Right? Unloaded the entire gun into his gut?”
“Truthfully, Cy,” her eyes fluttered, “I don’t remember a damned thing. Not until Christine was standing here beside me.” She looked up then, her lashes damp, her lips slightly parted. “And what else could I do?” she added, forgetting herself for a second and changing her tone. “For a lousy twenty bucks, he was willing to see me hang.”
“You sound like a cheap prostitute, Eve,” Cy said, frowning.
“He didn’t even buy me dinner. I fed him, in fact.”
Cy and I sighed simultaneously, fearing she’d indeed hang if she made such comments. So after that display of ineptitude, I stepped in with my special skill set. Everyone believed me—seemed eager to, in fact. My statement was met with subtle sighs of relief, of feet shuffling noisily in tight shoes, the funny crinkling noise nylon stockings used to make, the slight inhale of breath when what I was saying became clear, of the squeak of chairs as people sat down and started to write, with relief the entire sordid episode could be wrapped up quickly.
No one would have to haul Mother off to jail. No one would have to press up against her body in that see-through negligee Cy had made her continue to wear. No one would place cuffs around those fragile wrists or push her head down as she entered the police vehicle.
No, nothing bad would ever happen to Mother. Not when I was pathetically willing to be a good daughter and serve up my story. Not when it was clear I’d misunderstood the adult events transpiring in the next room. Got it wrong when I’d come in on a scene and mistaken ardor for violence. Mistaken shrieks of passion for those of fear.
There was no trial since I’d pled guilty, just a cozy hearing in the judge’s chamber. The story never appeared in any newspaper—if it spread at all it was over the telephone, in whispers in grocery store checkout lines, behind closed doors. The judge gave me some stern admonitions and scolded my parents for keeping a loaded gun in the house. My father assured the elderly adjudicator the gun hadn’t been loaded when he put it in the drawer; the bullets were in a separate package, the safety on.
“I never once touched the dreadful thing,” my mother averred, unmindful of the distressed motions from Cy behind her.
But a forensics report, read aloud by the judge, contradicted what she’d just said, announcing a stray fingerprint had been found on the gun. Mother instantly recalled taking the weapon from my hands.
“Christine was nearly paralyzed with terror at what she’d done. I had to pry it loose from her frozen fingers, terrified it’d go off again.”
I nodded my agreement as Cy signaled her to stop speaking with a jabbing slash of his hand. I could see the indecision in Mother’s eyes because she thought her account of the events was going well, and she didn’t like ceding her minutes on the stage. A collective sigh drifted across the room, all of us enervated by what we’d just heard.
At that moment, I could almost remember pulling the gun from the drawer. I could feel Mother’s hands on mine, prying the gun loose. I watched, transfixed by my imagination, as the revolver fell to the floor emptied of bullets. I think we all saw it her way for a minute; the drama of her account was compelling, convincing.
I wondered if all the hearings taking place in the judge’s chambers were set pieces like ours was. Were there rehearsals to keep things from getting out of hand in some cases? Jerry Santini had turned out to be an exceptionally solitary man. No family members or friends came forward to ask questions, to demand justice, to weep for their loss. Whereas Daddy’s family rallied around us.
Mother and I shared moments of intense intimacy for years to come, but none would ever match the neon brilliance of the night she killed Jerry Santini. How could they?
I was eventually ordered to see a court-appointed shrink. I began my therapy the next week, the doctor’s eyes wide at the idea of treating a child murderess.
“Where shall we begin?” he asked me.
I could feel Mother in his outer office waiting. She’d curled up cozily on his salmon-colored sofa. A copy of Glamour rested in her hand, the scent of her Mitsouko perfume drifted through the door. She was everywhere—my mother. And I knew my lines well by then—she didn’t have to worry about that.
About the Author
Patricia Abbott is the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Award nominated author of the acclaimed novels Concrete Angel and Shot in Detroit. She has published more than 100 stories in print, online, and in various anthologies. In 2009, she won a Derringer Award for her story “My Hero”. She is the author of two prior collections of stories: Monkey Justice and Home Invasion. She is the co-editor of Discount Noir. She makes her home in Detroit.
Visit her online at pattinase.blogspot.com and follow her on Twitter at @Pattinaseabbott.
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