Last Call (22 page)

Bailey pauses, checking Frank’s reaction.

There is none and he continues, “I ain’t no child molester, though. Nothing like that. It was just that one time. One time only. You know how it is, a man living all alone, he gets lonely. Men got needs. You know how it is. You been around, you seen plenty.”

“Got that right,” Frank echoes.

“Yeah, so see. It ain’t no big deal. Just had a little fun with her, that’s all, then I let her go.”

“What time was that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Afternoon sometime. You know, when all the kids is outta school. Wasn’t dark yet. She had plenty a time to get home. I don’t know what happened to her after that.”

“Tell me about doing her. Did you take her front or back first?”

Bailey looks sly. “Front, I guess.”

“Where?”

“Whatcha mean where?”

“Well, like standing up, lying down. How’d you do it? That first time.”

“Um, up against the table. Yeah. It was good.” He chuckles a little, clearly delighting in the memory.

“How ‘bout the second time.”

“Wasn’t much later,” he brags. “She a pretty little thang. Took her up against the stove that time. From behind. Um, yep, I liked that, too.”

“What was she doing all this time?”

“Not much. Just quiet like.”

“Did you tell her to be quiet?”

“Yeah, you know, a little place like I got. Gots to be quiet. Don’t want everyone hearin’ your bidness.”

“If she was so quiet why’d you tape her mouth?”

“Well.” It’s his first falter. “To be on the safe side. I didn’t want her screamin’ or nothin’ like that.”

“Did you tape her before the first time or after?”

Bailey recalls his timing. “Before, I think.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, it was before. She had it on at the table, so it musta been before.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. You know, I know what I done was wrong. I ain’t saying it was right. But I didn’t hurt her. I had to tape her ‘cause I known it was wrong and if somebody’d a heard us, and found me with her with my pants down … man, I’da been looking at statutory rape. I didn’t want to get caught. I know I done a wrong thing. It wasn’t right, but I just couldn’t help myself. Had a lot on my mind, you know. A man’s got needs.”

Frank leads him through the sequence again as he fills out his statement. He admits to duct-taping Ladeenia, but insists he never saw her brother. Frank doesn’t push the point. She doesn’t have to. Frank doesn’t have the physical evidence to back her, but she at least has SID’s lab reports and photographs of the evidence. The tear mark at the end of the strip around Trevor’s left ankle matched the tear marks at the beginning of the strip around Ladeenia’s mouth. Whoever taped Ladeenia used the same roll of tape on Trevor. And now Bailey’s sworn to taping Ladeenia.

They drink 7-Ups and she helps him finish the statement. When the deputy comes to take Bailey back to his cell, Frank stops him. She stands conspiratorially close to Bailey.

“One more thing.”

“What’s ‘at?”

“What’d you do with her panties?”

“Ha, ha, ha.” Bailey laughs. “Ain’t nobody
ever
gonna know that.”

He laughs again and Frank smiles. The guard moves Bailey out.

“Dumb fuck,” she whispers to his laughing back. She’s still amazed at what perps will tell a cop. With or without the panties, Bailey has nailed himself three ways to the cross.

In her car, in the free, hot, L.A. sunshine, Frank calls Queenie and tells her about the statement. That simply, after six years, the case is made.

Going through the motions of a celebration, Frank barbecues a porterhouse and opens an equally rich and bloody zinfandel. She celebrates alone, in front of the TV. The steak is excellent and the wine better, but Frank is relieved when the phone rings. She hopes it’s an ugly call-out.

“This is Franco,” she answers.

“Hi. It’s Gail.”

Completely broadsided, Frank’s breath gets stuck in her throat. “Gail.” Frank tastes the novelty of the word in her mouth. “What’s up?”

“I heard you cleared the Pryce case. I just wanted to say congratulations.”

“News travels fast. How’d you hear?”

“I ran into Jill. She was picking up some evidence.”

Frank is dumbfounded, and Gail fills the silence.

“It must feel pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Frank agrees, thinking it should feel better than it does. She’s noticing that the highs of homicide are lower, and so are the lows. The trip across the country that she’d promised herself flashes through her mind. And she knows she’ll never take it.

She hears Gail say, “I still have your key. I was wondering what you wanted me to do with it.”

My key,
Frank is thinking.
My key.
Her brain has suddenly gone concrete.

“Yeah. Uh, just keep it. Toss it if you want. I don’t need it back. You’re not gonna pull a
Play Misty
on me, are you?”

“Not unless you’ve got Donna Mills hiding in your closet.”

“No chance of that.”

The silence waits for words.

“So how have you been?”

“All right.” Frank’s tongue stumbles. “I guess. Considering.”

“Considering what?”

Frank wants to say considering she’s lost Gail. Noah. Nancy. Almost lost her job. Might still if she can’t get a grip on her drinking. Considering her life is careening around like a .22 on bone. Considering that she feels like the top of her head is about to fly off if she doesn’t hold it down tight enough.

What Frank does say is, “Just stuff. You know. Work. Board of Review. All that.”

“Have you heard back from them yet?”

“No,” she answers, deftly redirecting the questioning. “How about you? How are you doing?”

Gail takes her time with the answer and Frank dreads what’s coming because it will probably be the truth.

“I wish things were different.”

“Yeah. I wish a lot of things were different.”

“Like what?”

“All of it, Gail. All of it.” Frank is torn between confessing her anguish and steeling herself against it. Habit wins and she forces a bland question. “How’s your mom doing?”

“She’s fine.”

“And your sisters?”

“They’re all fine. Everybody’s fine.”

“Good.” Frank is nodding. “That’s good.” What else is there to say, except what she can’t say? “The cats?”

“They’re okay. They miss you.”

“How do you know?”

“They told me.”

“Ah.” Frank’s still nodding, the silence screaming between them. Even as she wants Gail to ask her back, she wonders if she could go. Nothing’s changed. Frank knows she’s digging her own grave and she just can’t put the shovel down. So she does the graceful thing. “So. Do what you want with the key. But thanks for asking.”

Gail doesn’t answer and Frank summons the picture of Gail biting her lip and throwing her bob back the way she does when she’s frustrated, snapping her neck and tossing the hair from her eyes. Those lovely emerald eyes.

When Gail says, “Okay. I figured I should check,” Frank hears the tears in her voice. She closes her eyes. Regret, sorrow, longing— all the feelings she has no words for—hunker in her chest like stones, stones that weight her breath and entomb her courage.

Gail,
she whispers in her head.
Gail, Gail, Gail.
Like a mantra. She wants to blurt how sorry she is. That she knows she’s fucked this up. That it’s all her fault. But then what? She’ll change? She’ll be better? Frank knows this isn’t true and she loves Gail too much to lie to her.

She clears her throat. “So, I guess I’ll see you at work.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” Gail’s voice is pinched against the tears. “Take care of yourself, Frank.”

“Yeah, Doc. You too.”

Frank clings to the irrational hope that as long as they’re both on the line maybe something will shift. Maybe a miracle will filter through the wire and they can work it out. But the phone dies in her hand. Frank finally hangs up when the busy signal turns to static.

Six weeks have passed since Bailey was bound over on a double count of first-degree murder. The Queen was thrilled with his signed admissions, but what really clinched the case were the fibers SID vacuumed out of Bailey’s camper. They were the same color and material as Ladeenia’s sweater, but of course there was no evidence to match them to. Frank had been keeping Mr. and Mrs. Pryce informed of the investigation’s progress, and when told about the fibers, Mrs. Pryce ecstatically produced the matching Pooh shirt that went with the sweater.

She still hadn’t had the heart to throw it away. She’d sealed Ladeenia and Trevor’s clothing in plastic tubs, opening them now and then to sniff the fading scent of her children. Frank gave the shirt over to SID and the fibers turned out to be a dead-bang match to Ladeenia’s shirt. Case closed. Now the outcome is up to McQueen and how well her prosecutors play the jury.

Frank is sprawled on the couch, an almost empty bottle of Black Label at her side. Since handing Pryce over to the DA’s office, Frank has given up trying to control her drinking. She can’t summon the monumental energy it takes to keep away from the bottle. Gone too is the will to even limit her drinking. She just doesn’t have the fight for it. Giving in is so much simpler than going rounds every night only to lose in the fifth. She rides the liquid line between sobriety and oblivion, despairing of falling to either side.

But tonight Fubar is on call. She has taken the extra precaution of unplugging her phone. No midnight pleading for her to take over a scene will interfere with her drinking. She’s been at it steadily since end of watch. She started with a pint of Jack Daniel’s while driving home, then plowed through a six-pack of Coronas in the backyard while barbecuing hotdogs she ate straight off the grill.

Food doesn’t interest her and she forces herself to eat. Her life revolves around clawing through morning hangovers then working as long past end of watch as she can before bowing to the hunger for that first drink of the day. She’s quit going to the Alibi. There’s no one there she wants to drink with and Nancy is frosty.

She’s taken to stopping for a pint on the way home and by the time she hits her driveway she’s got a gentle buzz on. She spends the rest of the night tending it. Somewhere between eleven and twelve she’s had enough to help her sleep. She swallows Advil and vitamins, brushes her teeth and wakes up around 2:30. Sometimes she can go back to sleep. Usually she can’t, until she has a tumbler of Scotch. Then she dozes until 4:30, gets up woozy and starts the cycle all over again.

She is watching
Cops
with the mute on. Coltrane plays in the background, with Johnny Hartman on “Dedicated to You.” She loves that song, but it doesn’t touch her. None of her music sounds good tonight. Sinatra and Ella are too maudlin. The opera that can move her to tears leaves her cold. Miles, Mingus, Redman—they all make her nerves itch. Nothing can soothe her tonight. Not even the booze.

This is the terrifying thought she has been dancing around since that morning at Nancy’s. What happens when the alcohol doesn’t work anymore, when the tail is thrashing the dog?

Not much frightens Frank, but the thought of being unable to escape herself is more than she can handle. She swallows from her glass, as much as her mouth will hold, and repeats the motion. She watches a cop in Houston trying to reason with a drunken wife-beater. She should be smashed by now, but she hasn’t heard the click yet. That lovely, comely, magical click.

” ‘Did you say click?’” she whispers, quoting from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

“‘Yes, sir’,” she answers in Paul Newman’s drawl. “‘That click in my head that makes me feel peaceful. It’s like a switch clicking off in my head, turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and of a sudden there is peace.’”

Like Burl Ives, she growls, “‘Boy, you’re a real alcoholic.’”

“‘That is the truth. Yes, sir. I am an alcoholic.’”

Frank turns the glass in her hand.

“Yes, sir,” she repeats in her own clear voice. “That is the truth. I am an alcoholic.”

She sits with the statement, unashamed and unrepentant. Just tired. Very tired.

On the coffee table, next to her feet, rest her .38, .357 and Beretta. Each weapon is meticulously cleaned and oiled. They gleam in the TVs blue light. Each fully loaded.

Frank levels her glass between her eyes and the handguns.

“Cop on a hot tin roof,” she muses through the jeweled refraction.

Colors glitter and twinkle in the crystal. She squeezes her hand and the crystal shatters. She crushes the shards into her palm. Hanging her hand over the couch she lets it bleed onto the tile floor. She considers the fiery little stabs of pain. They feel good and she tightens her hand into a fist. The shards bite deeper.

Studying her macerated palm, she notes, “You are one sick puppy.”

She watches her hand until the bleeding slows, then assiduously removes the shards over the bathroom sink. She takes pleasure in the pain. When she is done she pours rubbing alcohol over her hand and wraps it in a towel. She returns to the couch with a fresh bottle of Scotch. She doesn’t bother with another glass.

Unbidden, like a butterfly in a garden, a sparkling long-ago afternoon flits across the landscape of Frank’s memory.

It was early in their partnership, at the start of their shift one day, when Frank and Noah got the crying-baby call. They’d pulled up at the address dispatch gave them, to a house overgrown with weeds. The neighbor who’d called in the complaint met them on the sidewalk. The man who lived in the house had only recently moved in after winning his son in a vicious custody case. The last time the neighbor had seen the man was yesterday afternoon. He was walking into his house with his son in one arm and groceries in the other. The baby had started crying around 8:00 pm. She’d thought maybe it was just fretting, but she’d heard it again in the middle of the night and it hadn’t stopped since she woke up this morning.

“He seems like a good father,” the woman said.

Noah thanked her and told her they’d take it from there.