Three years later, I was working Juvenile, and got a call out on a 65 that involved two juveniles. A young teenage mother, stoned, fell asleep on the couch with her six-week-old son. She rolled over in her sleep and smothered the baby.
When I walked into the tiny, generic apartment on Flannery, I stopped, my usual professional words of introduction caught in my throat. The young mother’s face was blotched, startling shades of red and white; she veered between wild hysterics and glum defensiveness. She wasn’t the surprise. It was the uniformed officer. I barely recognized the man I’d last seen at Marjorie LaSalle’s house. Ray Robileaux, now working uniform patrol out of Broadmoor Precinct, paced slowly in front of her, his face shuffling among dismay, tense concern, and what fleetingly looked like panic. Every line in his body was unassuming. He was much thinner than I remembered, but still handsome in that uncommon way.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, words finally uncorked, rising up out of my mouth drenched in sarcasm before I could stop them. “Ray Robileaux.”
He paused in midstep as though he’d been slapped before his shoulders slumped, his fingers relaxed, and he faced me full on. He looked oddly embarrassed.
“Detective Stevens.” His voice was melodious and polite. He gave me the facts of the case, one finger tapping softly against the small green notepad he held in his hand. When he’d finished, I didn’t even give him the courtesy of a nod.
“I believe you’re done here now, Officer Robileaux,” I said, a half-second after he’d finished speaking.
Two weeks later he came into the Juvenile office and sat down in the chair beside my desk, took a pear out of his pocket, and put it gently on the blotter in front of me. “This is for you,” he said.
I stared at the pear and then at him. His uniform was too big, and his shoes needed polishing. His eyes were the color of tin. Finally, he rubbed the edge of his index finger along his nose and said, “I must have done something to piss you off.”
I nodded warily.
“I’m here to offer my apology, for whatever it was.”
I folded my hands in my lap, leaned back in my chair. “Okay.”
He nodded slowly, got to his feet, and quietly walked out of the office. I sat there for a long time, looking at a poster of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list on the wall beside the door, until the phone rang, jerking me back to work.
Over the next several months, Ray continued to drop by the Juvenile office, sometimes putting a cup of coffee, or a beignet, or a piece of fruit on my desk and chatting briefly for a few minutes before he left.
When he asked me out six months later, his request so tortured and awkward that he blushed, I said yes.
I waited until Thursday evening to tell Ray that I was investigating his old case.
I’d asked Josh Hebert about the case once, soon after Ray and I started dating. Josh was still working Homicide and sat on the edge of my desk contemplating his hands when I asked him if he thought Marjorie LaSalle had stabbed herself.
“It was Ray’s case,” he said.
“C’mon, Josh, you worked it with him.”
“We differed on some things.”
“And?”
“And it was an odd case. No fingerprints, no blood transfer. A hard one to call, I’ll give you that. But things aren’t always as they appear.” He looked at me without expression. “Aren’t you learning that with Ray?”
“He was a different man then,” I said.
Josh shrugged. “There you have it.”
“But do you think she did it?”
“What I thought then is pretty irrelevant now, isn’t it?”
I’d shaken my head, frustrated with his ambiguous answers. “At least Ray takes a stance,” I’d said, and Josh nodded slowly, looked as if he was going to say something else, then shrugged again and left.
Now, watching Ray clear away our plates scattered with shrimp shells and corn cobs as I started on my second Abita beer, I wished my husband was more open to doubt, allowed more room for the gray areas where most of life, I was learning, played out. I thought about the videotape I’d watched earlier that day, the 911 recordings, the crime scene photos, the police psychologist’s report, the witness statements. Ray’s report was clear-cut: Marjorie LaSalle had stabbed herself, and he’d carefully laid out every piece of incriminating evidence he had. Which was a lot.
I took a swig of beer and watched Ray rinse off some strawberries, put them on a plate. He came back to the table with his own beer, a nonalcoholic one he’d been nursing all evening, took off his glasses, kissed me, and popped a strawberry into my mouth.
“Ugh. Strawberries and beer don’t mix.” I wrinkled up my face.
“You’d rather champagne?”
“I’d rather wait on the strawberries.”
He lifted my feet up into his lap and began to massage my right foot, his thumb digging hard between my toes. “Tough day?”
“You remember when we met?” I said.
He smiled. I loved his smile; it had such depth to it. “When we worked that juvenile homicide off Flannery and you gave me hell.”
“You deserved it.”
He worked his hand down around the ball of my foot. “Probably.”
“I mean the very first time.”
“Ah.” The lines around his mouth tightened slightly.
“Remember?”
His hands stopped moving, and he peered at my foot as though the answer—or escape—was buried between my toes. “Why are you bringing this up again?”
“She’s coming in tomorrow afternoon. She wants the case reopened.”
All warmth evaporated from his body. “After six goddamn years?”
“What options did she have before now?”
“That woman stabbed herself, Cathy, and you’re never going to convince me otherwise.”
I picked at the beer label with a fingernail. “Think of all the weird cases you’ve worked, Ray. Isn’t it just possible, on this one, that you’re wrong? Women don’t stab themselves like that. Look at any of the statistics.”
“You’ve always had a soft spot for that woman. You’ve never been able to look at it objectively.” He studied the table with great interest.
“Did you?”
He put my foot down and swept both hands across his face and through his hair, a gesture I knew well. “Are we going to fight about this?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Me either.” He drained his beer and stood up, headed toward the back door.
“I just wanted you to know,” I said softly.
“Now I know,” he said, the door closing behind him with a gentle click.
I stared blankly at the door for a minute, then downed the rest of my Abita and went to the kitchen sink and started washing the dishes. Ray stood on our patio, smoking a cigarette, my dog crouched down at his feet, tail wagging, begging for a ball toss. Ray ignored him, but the dog didn’t give up. Smoke curled up into the darkening sky, and I felt a momentary longing to join them. We’d both quit a year ago, but Ray still slipped, and more often than he wanted me to know.
I leaned on the counter, chin in my hands, and looked at his back, his hair just lapping the collar of his shirt, his cop stance of barely locked knees and feet at shoulder’s width. I thought of his quiet tenderness, the way he treated our relationship like one of those sand dollars he loved to collect on our trips to Perdido Key, his lack of selfishness as we negotiated our way through the dailiness of living with each other. Love is a mystery, I thought, not for the first time. A giddy, difficult mystery. My husband was human—he could still be arrogant and short-tempered at times, he had a hard time admitting when he was wrong, and his sense of humor was decidedly off kilter—but I loved him. Sometimes that was as much a surprise to me as it was to him.
But even during the height of his drinking, the worst of his marital troubles, I knew Ray had been a good detective, prejudiced sometimes and bullheaded often, but he was usually thorough and preci
se.
Which brought me right back where I’d started: thinking about Marjorie LaSalle’s stabbing.
Friday was rushed with appointments, hearings, and interviews, but I found it hard to concentrate, thinking about Marjorie’s file sitting on my desk like the gecko lizards my dog loved to bark at—defiantly immobile, definitely there despite the camouflage techniques, and quite capable of biting when provoked. And I felt like a metronome: back and forth. She couldn’t have done it; maybe she could. What was I missing? No, she couldn’t have done it, but then…
I found myself mentally rehashing a case I’d handled out of Broadmoor, about a year after I’d graduated from the academy. My partner, Charlie, and I went out on a shots-fired, man-down call about 6:00 in the morning, just before end of shift, at an apartment off Sharp Lane. A hysterical woman in her forties greeted us at the door dressed in a plaid bathrobe that gave us glimpses of her ample nakedness underneath, her hair so overbleached it looked like a horse’s mane. Her boyfriend was in the bedroom, lying on the right side of the bed wearing a mud brown T-shirt and white boxer shorts. His right hand flopped over the edge of the bed, a gun on the floor below it. The back of his head was blown off. Blood and brain matter covered the headboard and fanned out across two of the walls and down onto the carpeting.
He’d been despondent for days, she told us, talked about suicide. But she hadn’t thought he was serious until the shot woke her.
“I was right there, on the bed beside him, sleeping, when he did it,” she wailed. She alternated among fury that he’d done this to her, hysterics over reliving the moment, and heart-stopping grief that he was dead.
By the time Barker and Cowan with Homicide arrived, we’d gotten her calmed down somewhat, found his prescriptions for antidepressants, had the name of the counselor he was seeing at the V.A. Hospital in New Orleans. Straightforward suicide, we told the detectives. Bizarre, but straightforward. The detectives agreed.
While we waited on the coroner and crime scene guys, the victim’s girlfriend decided she’d get dressed. But she didn’t want to go into the bedroom, so I retrieved some clothes I found tossed on a chair and handed them to her through the bathroom door. A second later we heard a shriek so abrupt and piercing that we all jumped. Charlie put his hand on his gun.
“Ma’am,” I said, knocking on the bathroom door. “Ma’am? Are you all right; what’s going on in there?”
She opened the door, mascara running down her cheeks, and handed me her bra. “It’s got him on it,” she screeched.
I looked down at the bra. Bits of brain clung to one of the cups.
“Jesus. Sorry.” I hurried into the bedroom to get her a clean one from the dresser, horrified at my mistake.
When Charlie and I left an hour later, she was still crying, despite my best attempts to console her, and Barker and Cowan were getting ready to transport her downtown for a statement. Charlie and I drove to the Mister Donut a block away so he could pick up a dozen for his kids, and we sat there waiting for a fresh hot batch, drinking a cup of coffee, saying very little.
“Never fucking seen anything like that.” Charlie sat hunched over the counter, one foot tapping against the foot stop. He’d been in the department for over ten years and was about to make corporal. “Shooting himself in the bed while she lay sleeping beside him.”
But both of us went slack-jawed two weeks later when Barker and Cowan arrested the woman for murder. They’d followed routine procedure on a shooting: the Atomic Absorption Test, a fancy name for a simple test that checks for gunpowder residue on anyone who was at the scene. She’d tested positive; her boyfriend’s hands had been clean.
“Get out of here,” Charlie said when Cowan told us. I couldn’t say a word. I felt betrayed. I also felt stupid. I resolved then and there never to put myself in that position again. And for the next several months I played out my interactions with her over and over again, trying to figure out what clues I’d missed, what I hadn’t seen. I questioned Charlie and the detectives. They all shrugged, said you can’t always read the truth.
But, I thought, that was an easy call after the Atomic Absorption Test came back positive. The evidence was irrefutable. Marjorie’s case, on the other hand, was as murky as my husband’s gumbo.
“You’re looking at that file like it’s going to start talking to you,” George said, startling me out of my reverie.
I put my palm up to my forehead and pressed hard. “I wish it would.”
“I’m headed over to Armed Robbery, then I’m going home,” he said. “You about done?”
“Just this last interview.” I grimaced and pulled Marjorie’s file over in front of me.
“A hinky one, huh? Want to talk it through? I got a couple of minutes.”
I cupped my chin in my hand and looked at him. “Sometimes I hate this job.”
“That Ray’s case?”
I nodded.
“I looked over it earlier today, quick, but I got the jist of it.”
“And?”
“He’s not the man he used to be, Cathy.”
“Jesus, George, enough already. I know.”
He squatted down on his heels in front of me, concern deepening the lines in his face. “What I’m trying to say, but you keep taking my head off, is that Ray could have been wrong on this one. There’s some compelling evidence to indicate she might have done it—lack of blood transfer and fingerprints, the polygraph, the psychologist’s statement. On the other hand…” He shook his head slowly. “That’s a hell of a wound to self-inflict, and I’m not sure I buy what Ray pinpointed as her motive. I need to spend more time with it, but it’s okay to think that, you know? You aren’t betraying the man you’re married to now by saying he handled a case poorly six years ago. The worst that could happen is Cold Cases reopens the investigation, and he gets a letter in his file. It’s an odd case. But there’s no malfeasance, right?”
“Technically, no.”
“What does Ray say?”
“He won’t talk about it.”
George stood, stretched his arms back behind his back, and shrugged. “No problem, I’ll interview him.”
“It’s just…hard,” I said.
“Go with your gut. You’ve got good instincts.”
“What if you don’t trust your gut?”
He grinned and winked at me. “Then you punt it, girl. Let someone else decide.”
“That would be you,” I pointed out.
“Then it’s me.” He slipped his shoulder holster on, then his suit jacket, and patted me on the back as he headed out the door. “You think too much.”
Why, I thought, do men always tell women they think too much?
I glanced at my watch and gathered myself up to go out to meet Marjorie LaSalle.
My first thought was that her hair was prettier: softer and lighter and longer. She looked happy, and younger than when I saw her last, if that was possible, comfortable in her skin despite a fluttery nervous tension as I said her name. Three bulging brown folders rested in her lap.
When she stood to face me, I struggled not to stare at her chest. She wore an olive-colored blouse, the first three buttons undone, and her scars, one long vertical line and two short curved ones, were visible and distinct, snaking across her tanned skin and trailing down into the V of her breasts. They were hard to ignore, those scars.
“I’m Officer Stevens.” I extended my hand. “Why don’t you come on back to my office.”
“Don’t I know you?” she asked, when we were seated at the small, round table George and I used for interviews. “Did you work on my case?”
“Sort of,” I said, smiling. “Victim Services.”
“Oh my gosh. Cathy, isn’t it? Cathy Stevens.” She reached forward and gave me a hug. “Oh, I’m so glad it’s you. I feel so lucky. Look at you, you look great. And you’re married,” she said, picking up my hand, fingering the ring. “Who is he?”
“A cop.” I smiled slightly and hoped she wouldn’t press fo
r a name.
“I’m married, too. Just over a year.”
“Cesar?”
“Oh no. I met Eric a year after my stabbing.”
“Congratulations.”
“You too.” She ran her hands across the folders in front of her. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She grinned, and I found myself grinning back. The old admiration rose up, and I pushed it down. In another life, she and I might have been friends. And I guess we were once, in a way, briefly.
“So,” I said. “Your case.”
She nodded, and her face lost its softness. “I want it back in attempted homicide where it belongs.” She fingered a small necklace she wore around her neck, one with an intricate, delicate design that looked faintly religious and rested at the point where her three scars converged. “You’re the one who decides?”
“I’m the one who makes a recommendation; other people will review it as well.”
“Do they take your recommendation?”
I nodded. “Usually.”
“Ah.” She leaned back and put her hand on her chest, closed her eyes briefly before she looked at me again. “So. You’ll reopen it?”
“You’ve seen the police report?”
“I got copies of everything through my lawyer.”
“Then I’d like to hear your version, where you feel the police investigation was problematic.”
“Where it went wrong was Detective Ray Robileaux accusing me of doing this to myself,” she said firmly.
I nodded but kept my face impassive.
“You were there, after it happened. You know.”
I opened up the file and slid my notebook on top of it, picked up a pen. “Well, let’s go through it again. I understand you have a list of points you want to cover. Why don’t we start there.”
She looked at me intently, then shifted in her chair and sat straighter. She pulled out several typed pages and began reading off them, glancing at me now and again to speak extemporaneously or when she wanted to stress a point.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 13