Baggage

by S. G. Redling

  My floor isn’t a bastion of productivity either. Lyle and Desiree hold court at the little kitchenette and both greet us with a perky hello. I can’t tell if they’re speaking louder than usual or if it’s my hangover. I get my answer at the door to the office.

  Detective Hinton rises when I walk through the door. She’s been waiting for me. Judging by the worried smile on Meredith’s face, she’s been waiting a while. Nobody looks happy about it.

  “Mrs. Ray, good morning.”

  She pushes back her jacket as she stands. I don’t know if it’s intentional but the move shows me her handcuffs.

  “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Let’s go to my office.”

  I wave a hand toward my end of the room. Meredith looks pale; Jeannie holds her mouth in a tight, white line. Officer Neighborgall steps out from the corner he’s been standing in, looking even more bristly and red-faced than when we first met. Hinton gives me a cool nod and walks ahead of me toward my desk.

  Me? I’m relaxed. Weirdly so. Maybe it’s a hangover, maybe it’s a testimony to the power of a solid base of nutritious food, but I don’t feel any stab of anxiety. Today is February 20. I have three hundred and sixty-two days before I plan on being afraid again.

  Jeannie and I follow the detective until Neighborgall clears his throat behind us. Hinton looks back at us.

  “We should speak privately, Mrs. Ray.”

  “It’s Ms. Ray, Detective,” I remind her again. “Or you can just call me Anna. This is my cousin Jeannie. It’s okay with me if she sits in with us, if it’s all the same to you. Unless this is something official. Is this something official?”

  Hinton studies me for a moment, then her eyes flicker over Jeannie. “Not yet.”

  “Great, after you.”

  I can feel Jeannie tense beside me. I can almost hear her thinking that she wishes she’d worn heels and something more intimidating than the snow boots and leggings. Her instinct, as always, is to jump in front of me and handle any difficulty. Funny though, for all the problems she has handled for me, Jeannie has never been there when the police have shown up. Not last year, not eighteen years ago. This is one of the few areas in which I am the expert.

  I sit down at my desk. Jeannie moves a pile of books and papers off a low stool and sits beside me. Only Jeannie, I think, could make such a lowly perch look important. Detective Hinton takes her time settling in on the uncomfortable office chair. She doesn’t make many adjustments; she’s apparently not concerned with comfort right now. Her attention is on her notebook. And on me.

  She asks me again if I spoke with Ellis the night he was murdered. They must have checked his phone. I pull mine out and tell her about the message.

  “You didn’t mention it on Wednesday.”

  “I didn’t know about it. I didn’t check my messages until after we spoke.”

  “On Wednesday.”

  “On Wednesday.”

  She stares at me. “Today’s Friday.” I nod at that irrefutable fact, not volunteering anything. What am I going to say? That it’s not Friday? “Why didn’t you let us know?”

  I don’t bother answering. Instead I replay the message on speaker. Jeannie sighs at the sound of Ellis’s voice but Hinton shows no reaction. I end the call.

  “Do you have any idea what he wanted to give you, Ms. Ray? What he wanted to talk about?” I shake my head. “Was there any indication that he had come back to your office at any point after you spoke with him at lunchtime? Had he left you any note or messages on your desk? Anything you can recall?”

  I wave my hands over the chaos on my desk. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  Hinton pretends to glance at her notes. “You were late to work that morning. You didn’t go to your desk when you arrived. Instead you took some books back to the library and when you returned, the uniforms were on site taping off the crime scene.”

  She looks at me expectantly, as if this is something I might challenge her on. I hear Jeannie breathing sharply through her nose, instinctively reacting to her tone, sensing bait in a trap but I know better. There’s nothing there. I’m hiding nothing and she hasn’t asked me if I am. This is bush league questioning and frankly I expected better of Hinton.

  “Right.”

  “So you never really got a chance to look around your office to see if anything was different, if anything had been left for you. The police were moving through the building, people were upset. You could have missed something. The way you missed the voice mail message.”

  I hear the faintest click of Jeannie’s tongue letting me know her estimation of Detective Hinton’s standing is sinking as quickly as mine. I wouldn’t have taken the detective to be the kind of cop who makes icebergs out of ice cubes hoping to sink someone’s little ship. Or at least I thought she might be the kind of cop to be a little better at it. This is her angle?

  “Of course,” she says with gentleness, “you had a lot on your mind. February seventeenth. It’s a bad day for you, isn’t it?”

  My estimation of her skills elevates with unfortunate speed.

  I realize another reason I’m so relaxed. I’ve been expecting this. I’m always expecting the police. I’m always expecting to be questioned.

  She looks toward her notes. “February seventeenth is the day your husband died. Am I right? Suicide? That must have been hard.”

  I fall into a stillness I have spent a lifetime mastering. I wonder how much she knows about that date, how much she knows about hard deaths. She’ll get nothing from me.

  “Did Professor Trachtenberg know about your husband’s death?”

  “No.”

  “No? You didn’t talk about it with him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why would I?”

  She shifts in the chair and I’m having trouble reading her expression. She’s not like the cops in Nebraska, whose wide, pale faces broadcast their shifting opinions like billboards—pity, horror, suspicion, cynicism. She’s not like the cops in Missouri—fat and freckled, panicked and horrified and pretending that I couldn’t see or hear them. No, Detective Hinton isn’t looking at me like that. She looks thoughtful. She looks calm and patient and I have to remind myself that I’m not lying to her.

  “Ms. Ray, Professor Trachtenberg had a gift for you in his pocket when we found him. It had your name on it. Do you know what he was bringing you?” I shake my head. Hinton pulls a photograph out of her inside pocket and slides it across the desk. It’s a dark color photograph of a small potted plant wrapped in paper and tied with twine. I squint to make out the details.

  “It’s rosemary, Ms. Ray. Is there any significance to rosemary for you?”

  I shake my head again. There’s the obvious, of course, and it’s so obvious and so much what I would have expected of Ellis. A part of me I should be ashamed of feels grateful that I didn’t have to endure receiving this gift. I wonder if I would have been able to suppress my contempt at such a saccharine gesture from someone trying to get into my pants via my grief. I want to think better of him, to hope there is a more esoteric meaning to this, but Jeannie says it aloud.

  “Rosemary for remembrance.” She speaks to Hinton. “It’s from Shakespeare.”

  “I know,” Hinton says. “Hamlet. Ophelia talking with her brother, Laertes. I went to college, too.” She ignores Jeannie’s smirk and pulls the photo closer to her. “This suggests that Professor Trachtenberg did know about your husband’s death. It suggests that he was trying to comfort you, reach out to you. The message on your phone supports that idea. We know he was pursuing a relationship with you.”

  “I told you there was no relationship. We weren’t seeing each other.”

  “But he was pursuing it.” She lets that sit there for a moment. “We’ve spoken with several people who were aware of his interes
t in you. He discussed getting to know you, being interested in your opinion on a number of topics. He even asked certain staff members about possibly arranging events where you might be together.”

  I’m uncomfortable talking about this in front of Jeannie. I’m embarrassed and awkward, as if this information has morphed into some weird confession discovered in a teenage diary I never would have kept but that is written in my handwriting nonetheless. As if Trachtenberg’s misguided interest were somehow my fault.

  Jeannie’s shoulder brushes against mine. She’s leaned in close. “If Anna says there was no relationship, there was no relationship, regardless of what Ellis might have wanted.”

  “That might be true,” Hinton says, “but the fact is, people were aware of his feelings for you, Ms. Ray. And Professor Trachtenberg was a man who attracted a lot of attention. He had a great deal of influence on campus and a lot of people vied for his attention, personally and professionally. Someone might have been aware of his attention on you. They might have been jealous or resentful of it.”

  “Jealous enough to kill him?” This seems impossible to me.

  She nods. “The nature of the scene suggests rage.”

  Jeannie is warm beside me. “How was he killed?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s part of the investigation.” She looks from Jeannie to me. “I can tell you that there were very distinctive details at the scene. Not accidental. Deliberate. Specific.”

  We stare at her. What are we supposed to say to that? Is she waiting for us to reveal our knowledge of these details? For us to suddenly slip up and say something like, “Oh, you mean the bloody clown nose and Murano glass letter opener?” She must decide that’s not coming, because she follows up with something much worse.

  “Your husband was an English professor, wasn’t he?”

  “He taught composition at a community college.” I begin to wish I had blurted out that clown nose remark.

  “His suicide was quite dramatic. I read the report from the Chattam Police Department.” Jeannie squeezes my arm. Hinton just keeps on talking with that soft, nice voice of hers. “According to the report, he hung himself in your home. He also took a large combination of medications which he washed down with alcohol and, according to the autopsy, managed to cut deeply into both wrists before kicking the chair away to hang himself.”

  “Boxes.” The word squeaks out of my closing throat. “He kicked away boxes to hang himself. In my closet. In our closet. Our hall closet.” My arm burns where Jeannie squeezes too hard and I’m glad for the point of pain. It helps me focus. It helps me kick out of that ugly eddy that wants to pull me down. I clear my throat, recovered. “He was serious about killing himself. It was no cry for help. Ronnie wanted to die.”

  Hinton tilts her head. “Is that a comfort?”

  “No. Maybe.” I’ve never asked myself that. It feels like something I will think about now that it’s out there. “I don’t know.”

  She doesn’t give me time to think about it. Instead she slides another piece of paper across the desk. “This is a consent form, granting us permission to examine your phone for evidence. We’ll record Professor Trachtenberg’s message as well as access your social media and e-mail accounts.”

  I don’t touch the paper. “Why?”

  “You were the last person Ellis Trachtenberg called before he died. You must have had several contacts in common. We’re searching for any sign of hostility, threat, anger from the people around him.”

  “You’re searching for it on my phone?”

  “Yes. We need the message. It’s evidence.”

  Jeannie continues to squeeze my arm. “Don’t you need a search warrant for that?”

  “Not if Ms. Ray gives us consent.” Hinton’s tone stays level and pleasant. “If you don’t consent to turn over the phone, we will get a search warrant. In the meantime, an officer will be assigned to stay with you at all times to be sure no evidence is destroyed until we return with the search warrant—which we will have no trouble getting. We will still take your phone. We will still download the contents. The difference is you may not get your phone back until tomorrow or Sunday or maybe even Monday.”

  I don’t care about my phone. The only person I would ever call is sitting beside me. Still, my hands don’t want to take that piece of paper. “I don’t really have any social media. I mean, I have Facebook and LinkedIn but I don’t even know if I’m logged in on my phone. I’m not even sure I know the passwords for them.”

  Hinton nods. “It’s okay. We can take care of that.”

  She pushes the paper closer to me and I pick up my pen. I wonder how many thousands of drops of ink have been spilled putting my name on police documents. I can feel Jeannie’s disapproval at my signing. She probably thinks I should make this harder, I should resist, I should examine my rights in this situation, but I know that’s futile. The police have a mission. A dead body gives them permission to do pretty much anything they want. Warrants and investigations and interrogations are all fingers that make up the fist that they can use with any level of strength justice deems fitting.

  Fuck them. Take my phone. Read my e-mails. Someone might as well.

  I sign the form, put my phone on top of it, and push them both back to Hinton. She puts the phone in an evidence bag and tucks it into one of her many pockets.

  “Is there anything else?” I ask with suicidal pluck.

  There is. Of course.

  “We found your fingerprints at the scene. Can you explain why?”

  Gee, you’d think she would have led with that. “I go through the basement.”

  “That door is for maintenance only.”

  “Walter Voss told me I could. I cut through as a shortcut. He told me it was okay as long as I didn’t tell anyone. That door isn’t locked during the day.”

  “You are the only non-maintenance worker whose fingerprints we found.”

  “Maybe Walter Voss has a crush on me, too.” It’s the wrong thing to say and I know it but I don’t care. Maybe I do care. Maybe I want to irritate the very calm Detective Hinton, who can’t seem to make up her mind if she’s going to treat me like a suspect or not.

  “How do you know those are Anna’s fingerprints?” Jeannie’s voice is sharp.

  “They’re on file with the school. Digital scans on the day Ms. Ray consented to a background check as terms of her employment as per policy implemented for new hires after 2012. Do you remember agreeing to the terms of your employment, Ms. Ray?”

  I do. Barely. I remember mountains of paperwork for employment coming in on the heels of mountains of paperwork for insurance and interment and indemnity. Who knows what I agreed to?

  “Can you tell me what you might have touched in the maintenance room?”

  “The door? The elevator button, maybe the door to the stairs.” I try to think. I come through the basement in the morning, half awake, sometimes half sober. Did I ever stop to scrape mud off my shoes? Get something from my purse? Blow my nose? Did I ever do any of those things while supporting myself against a shelf? Did my hands brush a wrench or a hammer or a Colt 45 or whatever the hell might have killed Ellis? Can anyone fully account for where their hands have been? “I don’t know. I don’t pay attention. I wipe my feet and head upstairs.”

  She nods and I wait for her to pull out a photo of a flamethrower or a bear trap or some other bizarre device that could have left “distinctive” wounds on Ellis and that had somehow passed through my hands. Instead, she flips a page in her notebook.

  “You said Professor Trachtenberg brought you a book on Tuesday. Herbert Mann, The Eyes of God Turn.” Her finger twitches against her notebook. I’ve seen that before. “Do you still have that book?”

  I fumble. “Yes? I think. Somewhere.” I work to trace my steps back in my mind.

  “That girl borrowed it,” Jeannie says. “Right? Tha
t’s the book about the art movement you said was so bad, isn’t it? That waitress asked you about it.”

  “Oh, yeah, Karmen. She was supposed to pick it up. Or send her boyfriend to get it.”

  Hinton is watching me look around for the book. “Did she? Or he? Get the book?”

  “I don’t know.” I can’t say why but the idea of the book missing bothers me. I didn’t care for the book or the gesture from Ellis but I appreciate the idea of it in an abstract way. I like that books are given to a person from a person. I like it with a distant formality that makes me worry more about the book than about the dead man who gave it to me. It’s easier for me to worry about a book. I stand up and start scanning surfaces around my desk.

  “I don’t see it.” I’m talking to myself. “Wait, Meredith would know. Meredith would have to have been here if he picked it up. I was gone by then.”

  “Where were you?” Hinton asks softly, as if she doesn’t want to distract me from my rambling but my focus has returned. I don’t see the book. Worry is now futile.

  “We were at Ollie’s. Jeannie and I. I left work early. That’s where I saw Karmen.”

  “Karmen?”

  “The girl who asked for the book.” I return to my seat. Whatever spell Hinton had cast over me is broken now and I have the strange feeling of having just woken up. “She’s a student who works at Ollie’s. And at the library.”

  “Karmen Bennett?” Hinton’s voice stays level but that finger twitches again.

  “Yes. She’s a third-year student. Talented.” A protective surge rises within me at Hinton’s interest in Karmen. “She wanted the book to write a paper.”

  Jeannie chimes in. “For extra credit. She said she wanted to curry favor with Ellis.” I shoot Jeannie a look that is just shy of a glare and she looks surprised. “That’s what she said. She said she was low on favor with Ellis and hoped the paper would help.”