A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

  After an absent nod, her face twisted into a snarl, and she pounded the wall with a small fist. “What does this mean, Joe?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything yet. Don’t jump to conclusions. Listen, though—I took Brett into custody today.”

  “What?”

  He told her what he had found on David’s phone, and she sank onto the bed, her fist clamped over her mouth. “My God,” she whispered.

  He sat beside her. “It sounds suspicious, I’ll admit,” he said. “But maybe there’s an explanation.”

  Her eyes flashed. “And maybe there’s not.”

  As he looked away, tacitly conceding the point, she moaned and collapsed into him, burying her head in his chest. He started to pull away and then held her tightly, choking back his own emotions.

  He didn’t know how long they sat on the bed, but some time after the flow of tears had stopped, she pushed away and reached for a tissue on the nightstand. The chime of another text came in. He braced himself as he looked down.

  It was Ari, letting him know she was working late and staying the night in Durham. As he slowly returned the phone to his pocket, Claire composed herself and said, “Are you hungry?”

  “You know, I’m starving. But you don’t have to—”

  “It’s okay. It will give me something to do. Grilled cheese and tomato soup?”

  He spread his hands. “I won’t say no to that.”

  “Good,” she said, with a faint smile. “Because it’s all I have.”

  The grilled cheese was just the way he liked it, white toast smothered in Velveeta with a touch of mayonnaise. She made him two. The soup was out of a box but had chunks of real tomato. After finishing it off with a few shakes of pepper, her chin trembled as she scooped it into a bowl and brought it to the table. “David loved this meal. I made it all the time.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  Her smile, soft and faraway, broke his heart.

  She joined him in silence as he ate. When he finished, she poured herself a glass of red wine and offered him a beer.

  “Sure” he said, after a moment.

  After pouring him a Stella, she wandered over to the couch. He sat next to her, and Claire downed half her glass in one swallow. They drank in silence for a while, until she fixed him with a steady gaze. “What happens next ?”

  They were sitting a foot apart on the couch. He hadn’t wanted to leave her in a distraught state, but he suddenly felt uncomfortable, as if he had crossed some unspoken line. “What do you mean?”

  “With Brett.”

  “Oh.” He felt foolish. Claire was hardly in a state of mind to think about anything other than finding her son’s killer. “He’ll have some explaining to do, if he doesn’t want to stay in jail. And his explanation had better be good.”

  “You’ll follow up on it ?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  They drifted into silence again, until she crossed her legs underneath her, exposing a narrow sweep of thigh. “I don’t love Brett. But you probably know that already.”

  He rolled the glass between his palms. “Why stay with him?”

  “You probably know that too.”

  “The money?”

  “I guess that’s the crude answer, yes. To me, it’s deeper than that. Security. Providing the right environment for my son. Brett paid the down payment on this house, enough that I could afford the note. I’m paying it back to him as a loan. With no interest.”

  “That was good of him.”

  “Was it?” she said. “He wanted something, just like I did. I just—” she put a hand to her forehead—”why is life so hard, Joe ? Even without . . .” she buried her face in her glass and took a long swallow. “Not all of us got out, like you did.”

  “I didn’t get out. I ran away.”

  She blinked at him.

  “After my cousin Joey died, I just needed to . . . be somewhere else. Did you know I was a preacher for a while ?”

  She smiled. “I heard.”

  “That didn’t last long. I tried being a prison chaplain after that, but that didn’t last either. Being a cop felt right. I think most people who serve others, myself included, are really just trying to plug the hole inside ourselves. I don’t even think it’s selfless.”

  “The good ones usually don’t,” she murmured. “I’ve never tried helping anyone, except my son. I’ve never been in a position to.”

  “Being a parent is the most important job of all,” he said, and then regretted it when her face crumpled. “Sorry,” he mumbled, reaching out to touch her forearm. She leaned over and grasped his hand, clutching it tight, and the movement further loosened the belt of her kimono. He tried to ignore the crease of creamy skin revealed between her breasts but found it impossible.

  She kept squeezing his hand, though her expression had an absent glaze to it, as if she were dreaming while awake. After a time she set her wine down, shifted again, and brought her knees tighter to her body, exposing more of her thighs as she tucked herself against him, resting her head on his shoulder. She slipped an arm through his, and the warmth of her hand and the curve of her breast beneath the kimono made him start to harden.

  It felt like pushing through tar as he eased away and rose to his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s just late. I should get going.”

  In response, she took her lip between her teeth and gave a small, disappointed nod. As he slipped on his coat and backed out the door, her eyes, a study in grief and silence, never left his own.

  When Preach returned home, he started a fire in the potbelly stove on the screened porch, poured himself a bourbon, and shuddered as he eased into his hammock. He thought of Claire and wondered if the attraction was a new thing after all these years, or if those long-ago feelings had stayed buried within him like a virus, dormant until sparked to life.

  He pushed those thoughts away and reflected on Ari and how much he wanted their relationship to continue. He debated quitting David’s case, and then berated himself, because that wasn’t fair to David or Claire. They deserved the best help they could get, and in Creekville, in maybe the entire Piedmont region, that was Preach. He needed to put his impulses in the rearview mirror where they belonged. With a deep sigh at the base nature of man, wondering at the purpose of it all, he finished his bourbon, poured himself another, and carried it to bed. He decided to take Ari out to dinner, and someplace special after that. A piece of his childhood that might lead him to Nate Wilkinson.

  The day after tomorrow was Friday, and in every town from Maine to California, but especially in the South, that meant bright lights and football. Not only should most of the Creekville High students be there, but the games were a draw for drug activity in the shadows. Preach was betting he would find someone who knew where Nate was. That or Nate himself would make an appearance, even if suspended, lurking around the edges.

  The next few days, he hoped, would yield some answers. Maybe Brett would talk, maybe Lisa Waverly would tell him why David had been at her house, maybe Nate Wilkinson would drift within the detective’s orbit.

  As he turned the light off, he felt relieved beyond measure that suspicion had shifted away from Claire. No one wanted a mother to be guilty of murdering her son, especially a mother he knew personally. Yet his last conscious thought left him with a feeling of unease: If Claire was guilty, then she was doing a very good job, from trying to seduce him in such an unassuming manner to her quiet displays of guilt to producing one of Brett’s receipts from the night of David’s disappearance, at deflecting suspicion.

  16

  The visit from the police reinforced the decision Blue had made to leave Creekville.

  Things were too hot around the trailer park. Cobra was closing in, old Billy Flynn was about to make good on his promise, and the law was snooping around.

  And what about the comment that blond detective with
the shoulders like grapefruits had made, asking about her Chinatown shirt? Did he know something about the camera?

  At this point, she no longer cared about the answers to the mounting questions. She just needed to get the hell out of Dodge, as her daddy used to say.

  For a moment, just a moment, she considered turning herself in, either to the gang or the police. The gang idea she discarded as the height of stupidity. Going to the police wasn’t much better. They wouldn’t protect her, and if Los Viburos ever figured out she had narced, she was deader than Myspace.

  What if the murderer was never caught, she wondered? What if the gang never stopped believing she was a witness ?

  She didn’t have an answer.

  For now, she had to run.

  She started to hide her camera but realized there was no safe place to put it. Once she disappeared, her mom would turn her room upside down, and there was no basement or attic to stash it in. Blue lived in a trailer. A shoe box with a microwave.

  Just thinking of leaving the camera caused her stomach to clench and her palms to sweat. She realized she couldn’t do it. It was part of her now, a vital organ.

  With Night Lives on hold, she decided to chronicle her sojourn into the underground instead. Maybe she could call it Carolina Blue: A Forgotten Journey. Yeah, she liked that. An artsy vignette of shorts documenting the underbelly of the Piedmont, from the trailer park to Southern urban decay. She could submit it around the circuit, Austin to Sundance, gathering acclaim while she worked on Night Lives.

  She wondered how long it would take her mother to notice she was gone. She would probably appreciate the extra food stamps, especially after Blue made off with all her spare cash.

  After packing her canvas satchel with clothes and toiletries, Blue dipped into her own secret stash. Every now and then, she stole a few dollars from an easy mark at school or one of her mom’s boyfriends. Blue had over five hundred dollars hidden in her mattress, which she was saving for a trip to LA when the time came to promote the film. It pained her to disturb the fund, but staying alive took precedence.

  Terrified someone from Los Viburos would catch her leaving, she crept out of the trailer at 4 a.m. and scanned the deserted grounds. Armies of cockroaches scuttled underfoot. Inspired by her new idea, she kept to the shadows and filmed her exit on the sly, capturing the litter and the silent trailers strewn like junked cars in the darkness.

  The slam of a screen door in the distance caused her to flatten against the side of a van. When no one came her way, she shuddered out a breath. Enough. She had captured the essence. After hurrying to the tree line, she stuffed her camera in her bag and hurried through the woods, forcing away her fears of the unknown. Waiting in town for the bus was too risky, so her plan was to hitchhike to Greensboro and arrive around dawn. Hitchhiking posed its own risks, but she would take her chances over running into Cobra.

  Leaving town would cement her guilt in the eyes of the gang, however. She knew there was no turning back. Not unless the police caught the murderer.

  The woods closed in around her, deep and dark and chittering. To distract her mind from her surroundings, she pondered her decision to go to Greensboro. Charlotte and DC, the closest large cities, were too big and dangerous. Most of the others were too small to disappear. Richmond or Asheville might work, but she had been to Greensboro once before, on one of her few trips outside Creekville, when her father had taken her to see the circus. It might have been the best day of her life.

  Once she arrived, she planned to find the cheapest motel possible, one with a weekly rate and a cash discount. After that, surely she could find work somewhere. Everyone needed a dishwasher, didn’t they?

  Relieved to leave the creeping darkness behind, she emerged from the woods and walked half a mile across town to the state highway. The lack of cars surprised her. After no one responded to her thumb, she ended up walking all the way to Highway 54, a busy road that led to Burlington, halfway to Greensboro. She could have walked the same distance in the other direction and tried the interstate, but that unnerved her. Visions of traveling serial killers and seedy truck drivers danced in her head.

  Starving and exhausted, wondering if she would end up walking the entire fifty miles to Greensboro, someone finally pulled over as the pink light of dawn snuck through the pines. It was a red and white Ford Ranger, a low-slung relic with square headlights.

  She eyed the driver as the vehicle came to rest: camo hat pulled low, gray sweatshirt with the logo torn off, worn jeans, grizzled beard covering a lined face and an unsmiling mouth.

  That was okay. She trusted frowns more than smiles.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Greensboro.”

  “I’m only going to Burlington.”

  “I can take the bus from there.” She shrugged off her canvas bag and opened the passenger door before he could change his mind.

  After she buckled in, he pulled onto the road and said, “Little young to be hitching, aren’t you? Don’t you have school today?”

  “I graduated in May,” she said, with a rueful smile. “I came to Chapel Hill to party and ran out of money.”

  “Huh,” he said, eying her clothes and the stuffed canvas bag. “Are you homeless, kid?”

  “Um, no. You’re not a creep, are you?” she said. “Because my daddy’s a cop.”

  The driver flinched. “What? No. Hey, if your dad’s a cop, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “It’s okay,” she said quickly, as the truck slowed. “I won’t say anything, promise. He’d be super happy if he knew you were giving me a ride. I just don’t want him to know I left. He’s on a fishing trip and my mom’s at her sister’s. I don’t do this a lot, you know. I was supposed to ride home with a friend but she left with some guy and, like I said, I ran out of money.”

  As he sped up again, Blue breathed a sigh of relief, amazed at how quickly the lies had flowed.

  “What’s your name ?” she said, moving the conversation away from

  her.

  “Greg Peters. I’m a contractor in Durham.”

  “You got work in Burlington today?”

  “That’s right. Say, where’s your cell phone? I haven’t seen a kid these days who wasn’t buried in their phone.”

  “Out of battery,” she said, with a sardonic grin.

  The truth was that Blue was one of a handful of kids in the entire high school, maybe the only one, who didn’t have a phone. Her mom couldn’t afford the payments. It was very embarrassing.

  She could tell he was growing increasingly suspicious, so she shut up and watched the road. Most of the scenery was woods or farmland, peppered by a few farmsteads and local businesses. Gas stations, a lumber yard, a garden shop or two.

  Fifteen minutes later, they pulled into Burlington, a small town situated halfway between Durham and Greensboro.

  “Where should I drop you?” he asked.

  “A bus stop is fine. I have enough change to get home.”

  “All right, then. Which stop ?”

  “Anywhere downtown. They all go to Greensboro.”

  He didn’t respond, and she could tell he was nervous and just wanted her gone.

  After the highway crossed under the interstate and spilled into a tiny brick downtown, Greg let her off at a random bus station. “Watch yourself, okay kid?”

  “Sure. Thanks for the lift.”

  She felt like also thanking him for not being a creep, but she let him pull away, unused to adults showing her kindness. The bus stop was deserted, the shops still shuttered. A grimy slick of oil mirrored the gray sky above.

  Blue had never taken a bus before. It took her a few minutes to figure out the schedule, and she was relieved to find that a bus did in fact go to Greensboro. It arrived in ninety minutes and would take an hour to get there. Inspired by the bucolic emptiness of downtown, she filmed her environs for a while, then lay on her back with her head resting on her canvas bag as she waited for the bus.

&nb
sp; 17

  As the moody, orchestral genius of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 poured through the speakers, the black Lincoln Navigator rolled through the security gate and into the two-car garage attached to Bentley Montgomery’s East Durham residence. A restored gem amid a sea of dilapidated properties, the house was a two-story American Craftsman with a broad front porch, three dormer windows, and a tall, spiked iron fence surrounding the property.

  The plush Lincoln disgorged three other people along with Bentley and his hulking bodyguard. One was Javier Ramirez, the leader of the Los Viburos gang. Another was a dreadlocked white man in his thirties. The third was Cobra.

  Instead of entering through the side door, the bodyguard unlocked a steel door that fed into a stairwell. Before they had entered the Lincoln, he had confiscated the visitors’ guns, patted them down, and checked their clothing with a metal detecting wand.

  The white man, a drug dealer from North Durham named Van Mulkey, looked jittery as he followed Bentley down a flight of stairs to a large basement with a finished concrete floor, black leather furniture, and glass cabinets stocked with wine and expensive cognac. Video cameras overlooked the room from the corners. A range of African American art provided the decor, everything from whimsical folk sculptures to colorful chalk drawings, to framed and signed photographs of leading civil rights figures.

  Van plucked at the sleeves of his Carolina Panthers windbreaker. “Nice digs, yo. I didn’t know you cared about all this stuff.”

  “What stuff would that be ?” Bentley asked.

  “You know, politics and shit. I thought you’s all about the money.” “Civil rights and the arts are vehicles of transformation. Politics is a social construct mankind has devised to impose order, since we cannot govern ourselves without descending into chaos.”

  “Whoa. That’s deep, man.” Van gave a wet hiccup of a laugh. “I guess that’s why you’re the boss.”

  Bentley opened one of the cabinets and poured himself a tumbler of Rémy Martin. “What do you think, Javi ?”

  Javier Ramirez, the thick-bodied leader of Los Viburos, shrugged out of his white anorak and flung it atop a sofa. “Politics depends on who’s in the room. Two parties, huh? Which one’s for me? The rich whites who want me back in Mexico, or the liberals who ain’t got a clue how the world works ? Shit, at least the right knows how to get paid.”