by Jodi Compton
When I was outside again, my eyes strayed involuntarily upward, at the north tower.
Oh, why not? You’re here already.
In the confines of the little elevator, the odor of the vomit I’d mostly scraped off my shoes was unmistakable. I couldn’t go visiting like this. On the 26th floor, I detoured back from the elevator to the stairs, and took my shoes off on the landing, behind the stairwell door. There was no worry that they would tempt thieves. I took off my socks as well. There’s a dignity to bare feet that stocking feet just don’t have.
When Cicero answered the door, I said, “I was just in the neighborhood. I’ll leave if I’m interrupting something.”
“Where are your shoes?”
“They’re in the stairwell,” I said.
“I see,” Cicero said, as though this were completely reasonable. “Every time I consider asking you more about your personal life, something like this happens, and I realize how much more fascinating it is not to know.” He rolled backward in the doorway, admitting me.
I declined anything to eat, but Cicero made us both tea, and we went into his bedroom.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“Who?” Cicero asked.
I was looking at the photos on the low bookcase in his bedroom. “Him,” I said, tapping what looked like the oldest of the photos, in weathered black-and-white.
It was a young man on a horse. The man, a teenage boy, really, wore a broad-brimmed hat and what might have been his nicest clothes, dark trousers and a cream-colored collarless shirt. The horse was beautiful: obviously nearly as young as the boy, with a dark-brown or black coat that gleamed even in an old photo, neck arched with impatience at being reined in long enough for the photo to be taken.
“That’s my grandfather,” Cicero said. “In Guatemala.”
“How old is he, in the photo?”
“Eighteen,” Cicero said. “I never knew him; he died not long after I was born. But I’m told that he loved that horse. Back then, a fast horse was your five-liter. I guess it wasn’t really his, it was the family’s. But he thought of the horse as his, until one day he came home to find his father had sold it to pay for his sister’s wedding dress.”
“No shit?” I said, amused.
“Oh, yes. He was just beside himself,” Cicero said. “At least, that’s how the story goes.”
“Were you born there?” I asked.
“In Guatemala? No,” Cicero said. “Here in America. My parents wouldn’t even let Ulises and me learn Spanish until we were well grounded in English.”
“You know,” I said, “we were going to get back to the story of your brother, and we never did.”
Cicero picked up an unrelated photo on his bookcase, one in which he seemed to be hiking with a female friend, and set it back down. “There’s not much to tell,” he said.
His pointless action with the photo told me differently, and I waited for the rest.
“Ulises moved here with a girlfriend,” Cicero went on. “She quit him eventually, but he liked it here, so he stayed. They sent me up here to live with him about four years ago, after rehab, and he died a year after that.”
It wasn’t the end; in fact, it was a prologue.
“Ulises was a baker,” Cicero said. “He had screwy hours, starting work at two in the morning, at a little bakery in St. Paul.”
Immediately I knew the story Cicero was going to tell.
“The neighborhood wasn’t the best. There was some drug activity there,” Cicero said. “One night, as Ulises was going to work, there was an APB in Ramsey County for a drug suspect who’d taken a shot at some cops. Ulises drove a car similar to the one they were looking for. A couple of plainclothes Narcotics officers saw him parking behind the bakery and they braced him as he got out of the car.”
“And they shot him,” I said. You didn’t have to be a cop to have heard about it.
Cicero nodded. “They said afterward that he ignored commands to raise his hands and reached for a weapon instead. Both of them opened fire. They hit him seven times and killed him.”
“I remember,” I said. “It was awful.”
“I believe them when they say he was reaching into his jacket. Ulises was probably reaching for his wallet. They were in street clothes, in a bad neighborhood, at two in the morning, pointing guns at him. Ulises probably thought he was being robbed. There was even a newspaper columnist who floated that theory, but the police never lent it any credence at all.”
Oh, yes they did, I thought, just never in public forums. I remembered the days of heated debate that had gone on in locker rooms and shooting ranges, anywhere cops talked among themselves.
“They also suggested, early on, that Ulises had ignored their commands because his English wasn’t good enough. They had to back down from that idea. English was his first language, just like it was mine, and everyone who knew him knew that.” He paused. “Naturally, the review board found no fault with the officers. They went back to work, and a week or so later, I had to move up here.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” Cicero said. “It’s not your fault.”
“ Cicero,” I said, “I probably should tell you something.”
My lie of omission- about being a cop- no longer rested lightly on my shoulders. I looked over at the photos, found the one of a younger Cicero and his brother. There was something lighter in Ulises’s expression. A physician’s seriousness informed Cicero ’s face, even at rest; Ulises looked more easygoing.
“I’m right here,” Cicero said patiently.
Come on, Sarah, it’s not that hard. Three little words: I’m a cop.
Then we both heard it, the muffled shrill sound that was my cell phone ringing in the depths of my shoulder bag. I turned from the photos on the table, shot Cicero an apologetic look, and dug the phone from the bag.
“Sarah?” It was Marlinchen. “I’m sorry to bother you, but-”
“What is it?” I asked, antenna up.
“I think someone’s outside the house. Liam heard noises earlier, when he went out to take a break from studying, and I just heard something outside the bathroom window while I was brushing my teeth. They don’t sound like animal noises to me.”
I could easily have told her to call the police in her area, but noises outside a house weren’t likely to be a top priority, and ten at night wasn’t a peak time for staffing at most smaller departments. The Hennessys would likely get a ten-minute visit, sometime in the next two hours. I couldn’t leave it at that. The Hennessy kids were my responsibility.
“I’ll come over,” I said.
***
Despite her disclaimer-They don’t sound like animal noises to me- I thought that Marlinchen had probably heard whatever had killed Snowball. If it had hunted on their grounds before, there was no reason it wouldn’t come back. But it was quite dark as I got close to the Hennessy home, and I didn’t blame Marlinchen for being afraid.
She met me at the door, Colm and Liam not far behind her. “Thank you for coming out,” she said quickly.
“You’re welcome. I’m going to make a quick check of the house, then the grounds,” I told her.
“The house?” Marlinchen said, startled. “The noises were outside.”
“Are you sure all the doors have been locked all night long?”
“I think… I guess…,” Marlinchen tried to answer, but she wasn’t quite sure, and her two brothers remained silent.
“Better to check,” I said. “Where’s Donal, by the way?”
“Sleeping,” Marlinchen said. “I sent him to bed a half hour ago.”
I checked on him first, and his chest rose and fell evenly in the light that spilled across his bed when I opened the door. Moving inside, I checked the closets as quietly as possible, and under both the beds. Nothing.
I went through the darkened upstairs rooms, then the downstairs. A door in the kitchen led down to a basement, and I shone my flashlight into its shadowy corners. T
here was some old furniture stored down there, and two mattresses. A smell of dust and concrete hung in the air. It wasn’t orderly, but I found nothing that suggested a recent intruder.
When I’d finished with the house, I went out into the garage, where Hugh’s Suburban stood. There was no one hiding under it, and the closets held only canned food and camping equipment, and a few dusty old bottles of wine.
Outside, I went to the broad back porch and dropped to my hands and knees, looking between a wide gap in the boards through which a human might easily have squeezed. Underneath was nothing but an expanse of dust and small nondescript rocks. I walked out to the fence line on either side of the house, poked around the bushes at the property’s edge, looked under the small wooden dock at the lake’s edge. No broken branches, no footprints to be seen. The only thing that was out of place was the little rise of overturned-and-smoothed soil near the willow tree, the resting place of the late Snowball.
Last, I went to the detached garage. The door was unlocked. Stepping inside, I pointed the flashlight beam into the darkness, and jumped.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. At first glance, it had looked like a body hanging from the rafters: a heavy bag. To the right of it was a weight bench. Colm’s gym, as the other kids called it.
The rest of the building was taken up by a car, an early-eighties BMW. Underneath a layer of dust, the paint seemed to be a deep bottle green. Its windows were likewise filmed with dust, like a corpse’s eyes, and all four tires were flat. It wasn’t damaged in any other way, but it had clearly been years since it was driven. I pointed the flashlight at a window, and the beam pierced the light layer of dust to show nothing out of the ordinary: pale-brown leather seats, all empty. Spiders had gotten inside, their webs threaded across the bars of the headrests and dangled loosely from the ceiling handgrips.
“Everything looks fine,” I told Marlinchen when she answered my knock at the door. “I think you probably heard an animal of some kind.”
Marlinchen looked sheepish. “Maybe what happened to Snowball has me on edge,” she said.
“That’s understandable,” I told her. “In fact, I was thinking I might as well just stay out here with you guys tonight.”
“Really?” she said. “That’s not necessary, honest.”
I’d expected that this would startle her, and said, “Well, it is late, and it’s a long drive back…”
“Oh,” Marlinchen said, falling back immediately into her good manners. “I understand. I didn’t mean-”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Look, I need to ask you another favor, if I’m going to stay out here all night. Can I run my shoes through your washing machine?”
The washer and dryer were both in the garage where Hugh kept his Suburban. I threw in both my Nikes and my socks, poured in detergent, and set the temperature control to the hot-water setting. As the first cycle started with a muted sound of rushing water, I crossed to the cabinet I’d checked out before, the one where the old wine lived.
Back in the house, the family room was unlit, the TV off. The kids had gone upstairs, and the whole downstairs was dark, except for the kitchen. I walked over and set the wine bottle down.
Footsteps told me Marlinchen was coming down the stairs. “Sarah? I was just on my way to bed. One thing I need to tell you-”
“Come down a second,” I said, interrupting her. “I need to ask you something, too.”
Marlinchen leaned out a little, over the stairway railing. I tilted the wine for her to see. “I found this in your garage. Liam said your father doesn’t drink anymore; I think it must be left over.” In fact, the year on the bottle was about eight years past. “There’s no sense in letting it go to vinegar. Do you mind?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “Listen-”
“Good,” I said. “Come join me.” I fished a corkscrew from a drawer.
“You mean, drink some?” Marlinchen’s voice, from the stairs, sounded both scandalized and tantalized.
I took down two oversized goblets from a high shelf. “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t make a habit of it, but you’re running a whole household. I think a glass of wine isn’t out of order.”
Outside the kitchen window, all was inky black, except for the lights of a pleasure boat drifting on the lake. I killed the main kitchen light, so that two overhead recessed lamps isolated the counter in a long pool of illumination, and pulled the cork from the wine. I didn’t say anything more to Marlinchen. She was intrigued. She’d come.
I can’t say I felt totally comfortable with what I was doing. But I wanted to speak freely to Marlinchen, and for her to speak as freely to me, and from what I’d seen, her armature wasn’t going to come down unaided.
When I sat down at the counter, I heard her footsteps again, descending. She slipped onto the stool next to mine, and I poured until her glass was nearly full. Her eyes widened.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “That’s not so much, for wine.” I pushed the glass over to her. “If anyone ever tries to serve you that much vodka, question their motives.”
We drank. Marlinchen winced.
“I know,” I said, “but stick with it. Its charms will become more apparent as time goes by.” I held up my own glass, watching the way the light pierced the ruby liquid. “One of the Puritans, like Cotton or Increase Mather, said this great thing about wine. He called it ‘a good creature of God.’ ”
“That’s lovely,” said Marlinchen.
Shiloh had told me that, Shiloh with his love-hate relationship with the Christian faith and his eclectic but vast knowledge of its followers and teachings.
“The thing I was trying to say earlier,” Marlinchen said, “is that you can’t close the door in Dad’s bedroom. The knob is virtually useless. People have been known to get stuck in there.”
“That’s probably not hard to fix,” I said.
“I know, but Dad’s hopeless about things like that,” Marlinchen said. “Not only is he hopeless with tools, I mean, he’s fundamentally incapable of caring about stuff like that. He’d rather just keep the door cracked all the time.” She smiled, rueful.
“To each his own.” I poured myself a splash more wine. “If memory serves,” I said, “you should be studying for final exams right about now, right?”
Marlinchen nodded.
“You never mentioned,” I said, “where you’ve applied to college and if you’ve been accepted anywhere yet.”
“Actually,” she said, “I’m putting school off for a while. I mean, I’m not Liam. It’s not like my grades are that great.”
“They’d probably be a lot better if you hadn’t been running a household of five,” I pointed out.
Marlinchen paused with the wineglass close to her lips. “These are extenuating circumstances, with Dad in the hospital-”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re balancing a checkbook, keeping a house clean, planning meals, cooking them, doing the grocery shopping. These are not things you learn to do in a matter of weeks. I have a feeling you’ve been doing them a lot longer than your old man’s been in the hospital, and even if your father makes a full recovery, things aren’t going to change much.”
She hesitated before speaking. “Family is important to me,” she said.
“That’s fine,” I said, pouring her more wine, “but Donal is 11 years old. By the time he’s 18 and ready to move out, you’ll be 24. Are you going to put off college until then?”
“College isn’t for everyone,” she said. “I bet you didn’t go.”
“I went for a year,” I said.
“See?”
“But it was long enough for me to find out I didn’t want what it had to offer,” I said. “You should find out too, before you’re too old for the dorms and Jell-O shots and all the things that make college more than just school,” I said. “Even right now there are things you should be doing with your high school years that you’re not. Like dating, or just going to the movies with friends.”
Marlinchen drank, mostly to stall for time. She was thinking up verbal evasive maneuvers. “You’re a friend,” she said after a second, her voice sweet. “You want to go to the movies sometime?”
“I’m not the sort of friend you should have at your age,” I said.
Marlinchen looked pleased, and I realized I’d stepped into a trap. “That raises an interesting point,” she said. “You’re out here, late at night, with a bunch of kids you hardly know. Why aren’t you out dating, Detective Pribek?”
“Because I’m-” I broke off. I really didn’t want to explain Shiloh to her.
Marlinchen saw my discomfort, and her newfound audacity drained away. “I didn’t mean to pry,” she said gently. “If you’re gay, Sarah, I’m totally all right with that.”
She was so sincere that I felt absurdly touched, but now I had to correct her misperception. “Well, gay people date, too,” I pointed out. “But what I was going to say was ‘Because I’m married.’ ”
Marlinchen’s mouth fell open slightly, in shock. “But… where’s your husband?” she finished.
“ Wisconsin,” I said.
“You’re separated?”
“Sort of,” I said.
Marlinchen wasn’t dense; she heard that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She played with the stem of her wineglass instead. “That’s too bad,” she said, and then nearly let the glass slip from her fingers.
“Careful,” I said, steadying it. “Let me weigh that down for you.” I poured again.
“You’re right,” she said. “The charm does become appear… apparent.”
“Stick with me, kid,” I said. “I’ll take you places.” Like Hazelden.
But I noted the high color in Marlinchen’s cheeks, and judged that she was ready for the direction I wanted to take the conversation. With a hundred-pound nondrinker, it didn’t take long.
“Since I’ve been out here, visiting you kids,” I said, “you haven’t mentioned Aidan to me. Not once.”