Life Sentences (7 page)

Detective Makowski touched his
brakes at the bottom of
Kester
Street, then took
a right onto
Godschalk
, where the brown lawns were
dappled with sunlight. The Sea Breeze was flat-roofed and peach-colored
with mostly pre-owned cars parked out front. Dead weeds hugged the building
in those hard-to-reach places, and a dozen bouncy, smooth-skinned Hispanic
kids shot hoops in the vacant lot next door. When their basketball rolled
across the dead grass toward the walkway, Detective Makowski punted
it back to them.
This is Anna's place
,
Daisy thought numbly.
Anna spent the
last ten months of her life on this street, living in this building.
Her apprehension grew incrementally as they climbed the cement steps
and rang the superintendent's doorbell. After a moment, the whine of
the buzzer broke the lock's hold, and Detective Makowski held the door
open for her. "After you," he said, as if they were on a date.

The blunt-faced superintendent
greeted them in the lobby. He had patent-leather hair and spoke in loud
letters, and Daisy hated him almost instantly for having failed to protect
her sister. "She was a very nice person," he said. "Always
polite and considerate. We had a tenant OD on drugs last year, but murder?
Sheesh
. That's never happened before."

"This isn't a homicide investigation."
Detective Makowski snatched the keys away. "Thanks. I'll take it
from here."

She followed him up a flight of
stairs, then down a fake-plush hallway, where they stopped in front of a
recessed door with yellow crime tape stretched across it. "The
tech team's been through the place already," he said, ripping off
the tape and fumbling for the keys. "So it's kind of a mess." He
pushed the door open, then stepped aside.

Daisy paused on the threshold of a
sunny one-bedroom and thought she could detect traces of Anna in the
swirl of strange smells. The white walls were coated with blue fingerprint
powder, and dozens of trash bags lined the front hallway, waiting to be taken
out.

Detective Makowski located the
thermostat and turned the air-conditioning on high. The blinds were rolled
up, letting in broad patches of sunlight that heated the living room like
a pizza oven. She couldn't bear the sight of the blue sky through the wide
windows. Anna's blue sky. The popcorn ceiling was cracked and watermarked
in places, chips of plaster dotting the slate-colored carpeting. It made
her sad to think that her sister had been living under the illusion that
she was creating a whole new life for herself.

"The contents of her mailbox
were four and a half weeks old," Detective Makowski said.
"The earliest postmark was February 21."

"So you think that's when she
disappeared?"

"Could be. Was it her habit to
check the mail every day?"

"Back home she'd practically
ambush the mailman." Daisy drew numbly into herself. "Where
are the bloodstains?"

"Right over here."

She followed him into the kitchen,
where she bumped her head on a wrought-iron chandelier. It swung back
and forth on its creaking chain until she steadied it with her hand. The
detective switched on the light, and cockroaches scattered every
which way. Blue fingerprint powder covered the backsplash, the windowsills
and stove. In the aluminum sink was a pile of dirty dishes, all the water
bled out.

"The place didn't look ransacked
when I initially entered it," he said. "Just messy. No signs of
disarray. No attempted staging of the area." He pointed at the floor.
"We found the bloodstains on an area rug right here. It's down at
the lab, being processed."

She felt an icy finger trailing up
and down her spine. "Maybe she cut herself. It's so near the sink. Maybe
she cut her finger while she was cooking."

"Could be," he said.
"Does she have any boyfriends or lovers that you know of?"

"She's had plenty of short-term
relationships. She was engaged for about ten seconds. Her problem is
that she hooks up with all the wrong people. All these borderline
sleazeballs
."

"Could you make a list for
me?"

"If I can remember them
all." She followed him into the bedroom, where a double bed dominated
the floor space. She looked around at the four walls and noticed a lot
of small gray patches where many pieces of tape had once been, the white
paint peeling in places. "Where's all the Virgin Mary stuff?"
she asked.

He seemed surprised. "You
know about that?"

"Anna has her obsessions.
The Virgin Mary, angels, exorcism, spirit guides, documented 'miracles.'"

"Are you Catholic?"

She shook her head. "Protestant.
We're not exceptionally religious, but Anna became obsessed with
the Virgin Mary after one of her friends took her to Mass."

"When was this?"

"Years ago." She glanced
at the ceiling and noticed the spray-painted message. "End 70? What
does that mean?"

"I was hoping you could tell
me."

She frowned. "A biblical reference?"

He shook his head. "I checked.
There is no 'End 70' in the Bible. See over there?" He pointed at the
back of the bedroom door where her sister had written End 70 over and
over again in pencil on the varnished wood. "Doesn't ring any
bells?"

Daisy shook her head. "Her illness
has a tendency to manifest itself in mysterious ways, Detective."

"Call me Jack."

She smiled, then stood moodily.

"Why don't you take a good look
around and see if there's anything missing from the closet or the bureau
drawers. Any clothing or jewelry or personal items she might've brought
with her from Vermont."

The closet smelled remarkably like
Anna-her smoky sweat, her intensely sweet perfume, that inexpensive
fragrance that reminded Daisy of cotton candy. She found her sister's
skirts and blouses and designer jeans folded neatly over their hangers.
She touched Anna's motorcycle jacket, the soft black leather clinging
to the shape of her. Anna's fuzzy bedroom slippers were grouped together
at the bottom of the closet like the passenger list of Noah's ark-fuzzy
ducks and lions and bears and monkeys, some so ancient and decrepit
they had to be duct-taped together. Daisy slid the clothes from one side
of the closet to the other, their various textures making it seem suddenly
so real. People left their footprints behind them, their shadows, flakes
of dead skin, strands of hair, acts of kindness, acts of cruelty.
"What exactly am I looking for?" she asked him.

"The outfit she was wearing
on the day she disappeared. I know it's a long shot, but maybe you'll recall
some clothing that isn't here."

Daisy stood for an unsettled moment.
There was an eerie silence inside the apartment. A lack. She felt as if
she were floating between the real world and an imaginary one. With trembling
hands, she slid the metal hangers from one side of the closet to the other
and recognized Anna's silk tie-neck blouse, her gold cowl-neck sweater,
the kiwi pin-tuck blouse and flax-colored chinos and those Nordic-blue
corduroy jeans. She slid the hangers along the painted rail, back and
forth, then said, "Her sundress is missing."

"Could you describe it for
me?"

"It's yellow with a pattern
of fuchsia flowers. The fabric is cotton with an Empire waist. I don't
see it here."

"Okay." He jotted it down
in a dog-eared notebook. "Anything else?"

She studied the haphazard collection
of shoes-black leather pumps, baby-doll flats, banana-yellow flip-flops,
orange
Keds
. "She had a beat-up pair of black
Nikes she liked to kick around in. Five or six years old maybe. I don't
see them anywhere."

"Good," he said.
"What about jewelry?"

Daisy circled the room, her thoughts
spiraling inward. Anna was a lot like the New England weather-wait a
few minutes, and her current mood would change. She went through bouts
of depression and periods of elation, and sometimes you couldn't
tell the difference between her crying jags and the gales of inappropriate
laughter. Without warning, she might smash everything in her room,
but she never threw anything away, and consequently, almost everything
she owned was cracked or chipped. Daisy had spent countless hours helping
Anna glue together her ruined keepsakes.

Now she rummaged through her sister's
bureau drawers, feeling like an intruder. Anna's bras and underpants
came in all colors of the rainbow-mango, pale rose, salsa red, sunset
orange, olive green. She opened the Hello Kitty jewelry box on the
bureautop
and said, "She loves big earrings. The
bigger the better." She found the silver hourglass watch her mother
had given Anna for her high school graduation; she found their dead
father's insignia ring; she scooped up the cherry quartz bracelets Anna
wore on her slender arms, the white bronze "believe in yourself
ring, the St. Jude pendant on its long gold chain.

"Hm." She frowned.

"What is it?"

"I gave her a pair of earrings
for her Sweet Sixteen. They were these dangly silver feathers, inlaid
with turquoise." She looked up. "They aren't here."

"Good." He jotted it
down. "Anything else?"

A column of sunlight pushed in
through the window behind him, and she could see the rooftops of De Campo
Beach-a checkerboard of pastels shimmering in the sweltering heat.
She was alone in her misery. She acknowledged this. The view outside
the window was unearthly, a mirage of hot air rising in distant ripples.
She could see the ocean from here, just a pale haze along the horizon.

"Her pocketbook," she
suddenly said. "It's dark brown learner, a shoulder bag with a front
flap and a magnetic clasp."

He shook his head. "We didn't
find any wallets or pocketbooks inside the apartment."

"You didn't find a brown cowhide
wallet?"

"No ID on the premises."

This gave her hope. "She
must've run away, then. Right? She took her pocketbook and her wallet with
her ID and some money and ran away."

He answered her question with
a question. "Did she ever run away on foot before?"

Crestfallen, she shook her head.
"Is her car still here?"

"Parked in the underground
garage."

Back in Vermont, Anna's
shitbox
1979 Ford Ranchero used to pull to one side
whenever you hit the brakes. The engine's timings were off, but she loved
that car. She beat that thing to death. Last April, shortly before moving
to L.A., Anna had sold it for a thousand dollars. The ad said simply,
Ford Ranchero. Runs. Best offer.
According
to Lily, she'd purchased another rattrap in
Califomia
-a
1989 Chevy Nova that needed new brake calipers and a front-end alignment.
Different car, same problem.

"The vehicle's being processed
for evidence," he told her, and Daisy's heart sank.

"You think she's dead, don't
you?"

"Hey. I don't give up that
easy."

She waved her hands in front of her
face. "I can't breathe."

"What? Are you all right?"

She was staring at her feet, at
the way her long pale toes dug into the sweaty soles of her sandals. She
noticed the coffee stains on the dove-gray carpet. Suddenly, Jack was
right next to her, one arm draped around her waist, his shoulder holster
pressing into her side. The carpet looked as if it hadn't been cleaned
in years.

"Let's get you some air,"
he said, guiding her toward an exit.

Jack
and Daisy stood outside on the leaf-strewn balcony, inhaling the scorching
ninety-seven-degree heat. She could see down into the street, where the
detective's battered Ford Topaz was parked crookedly beneath a jacaranda
tree. Funny, when they'd first pulled up to the building, Daisy had expected
to see several police cars with their lights flashing, staccato dispatches
emitting from their radios. Something to indicate that this was a big event.
Her sister was missing. Anna Hubbard was missing! The world should stop
spinning. People should pay attention.

"What type of meds was she
on?" Jack asked as he leaned against the balcony railing and fingered
his cheap sunglasses.

"A combination of antidepressants
and antipsychotics."

"She was seeing a shrink, you
said?"

"Until about six months ago,
when she quit and didn't tell anyone. My mother was still sending her
checks to cover the cost."

"Is she in the habit of
lying?"

"All the time." Daisy's
knuckles grew white from gripping the rust-colored railing. "We haven't
spoken in months. I've been busy at work, and frankly, her collect calls were
beginning to hurt my budget. She always called in the middle of the
night, and I have to get up pretty early."

He gave a resigned nod. "So
you last spoke… how many months ago?"

Daisy shrugged. "Two or
three." She remembered the last time Anna had called her collect
from the West Coast to share the "important news."

"Can
you talk?"

"What
is it, Anna? What's wrong?"

"Nothing's
wrong."

"You
just told the operator it was urgent."

"I
wanted to hear your voice, stupid."

"Jesus,
Anna. It's two in the fucking morning," Daisy complained.

"So?
I've got important news."

"Like
what?"

"Like
I'm going to have a baby."

"You're
what?" She struggled to sit up. "You're pregnant?"

"Happy
for me?"

"Who's
the father?"

"You
haven't answered my question yet."

Daisy
didn't believe her crazy sister. As far as she knew, Anna had spent the
past seven months moping around her LA. apartment, eating ice cream and
getting stoned. There were no men in her life. She couldn't hold down a
job and had very few friends, and as far as Daisy could tell, she lived off
her disability checks, Lily's generosity and a handful of credit
cards.

"So
when is the blessed event?" Daisy asked with all the sarcasm she could
muster at two in the morning.

"Soon."

"Soon
when?" There was no response, and Daisy knew it was nonsense. Anna
was lonely, that was all. "I don't even know how to respond to
this," she said.

"You
don't have to, Daisy. It isn't up to you."

"Anna…
are you taking your meds?"

"
Pfft
. That is so like you not to trust me."

"Well,
what do you expect? You call at two in the morning to tell me you 're pregnant…"

"In
a dream, I said."

"What?"

"I
was having a baby in a dream."

"You
didn't say 'dream.' You said nothing about having a baby in a dream, Anna."

"What
a
grumpface
. Why are you such a grump-face?"

Daisy
rubbed the bridge of her nose with vigorous fingers. "So you
aren
't pregnant? "

Anna
laughed. "No."

"It's
not funny. I'll hang up."

"Go
ahead."

"Are
you taking your meds, Anna? Because if you aren't…"

"You
know what? This is pointless." She hung up.

That was the way it always was with
Anna-exhausting, confusing, pointless.

"I'll need a list of all the
medications she was on," Jack said. "And a list of doctors she
was seeing. Plus any other medical conditions or allergies she might've
had. Any scars or tattoos or distinguishing marks…"

"She had slash marks on her
wrists from when she tried to kill herself once."

"Both wrists?"

Daisy nodded. "She gave up after
a few cuts because it hurt so much."

He opened his notebook and jotted
it down.

Daisy recalled her sister's first
psychotic break. Anna was thirteen, Daisy was sixteen, and they'd gone
upstairs to the attic to fetch some old board games that their mother
had put away the previous spring. Boring games, Anna called them. It was
summer, a stifling-hot August afternoon, and the stand-alone fan kept blowing
the hot air from one corner of the attic to the other. They'd propped the
only window open with a stick in order to get some fresh air circulating,
when all of a sudden a bird flew inside-a sparrow or a starling, one of
those mousy-looking birds that was always everywhere, pecking at the
grass seeds, darting across the lawn. The girls screamed and chased it,
and after a while, the bird grew tired and clung to the dusty curtains.
"It's infected," Anna hissed. "It's infected with
bugs!" Before Daisy could stop her, Anna grabbed a tennis racket
and beat the bird senseless with it, then threw it into the fan, where it
exploded in a squib of blood and feathers.

Still, no matter how shocking her
behavior, Daisy felt immeasurable sorrow for her sister-Anna's illness
was punishment enough. It was her life sentence.

"Anything else you can tell
me?" Jack said.

"Just that I have her diary."

"Diary? What diary?"

"I found it in her room back
home. I was going to give it to you, but since it's in code, I thought
you'd want me to translate it first."

"What kind of code?"

"Anna's Language. She makes
up words."

"Like what?"

"Sizzle means 'sister,' see-
ya
-later means 'elevator.' Stuff like that. But it's
last year's diary, so it might not be helpful. I'm sure she started a new
one once she got to L.A."

"We didn't find any diaries
or journals inside the apartment."

"Really? Maybe she took it with
her."

"Okay. Let me know what it
says. I'm looking for a total view of the situation. What was going on
in her life before she disappeared. I'd like to have her dental
charts, too, just in case." He removed his sunglasses and squinted
at her. "When was your brother born?"

"Twenty-five years ago.
Why?"

"Last week's missing person,
Colby
Ostrow
, was forty-five. That means he would've
been nineteen or twenty when Louis was born. Old enough to father a
son."

"You can't be serious,"
she said. "My mother is sixty-three years old."

He shrugged. "Stranger things
have happened."

"You obviously don't know my
mother."

"All I know is, Anna was looking
for Louis's father when she disappeared. We found a copy of your brother's
birth certificate inside the apartment." He pulled something
out of his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to her.

Daisy gave an involuntary shudder.
The birth certificate said that Louis Hubbard was born on March 5, twenty-five
years ago, to Lily Hubbard and John Doe.

"I want you to do me a favor,
Daisy. I want you to find out who John Doe is."

"Oh really? How would I go
about doing mat?"

"Ask your mother."

She scowled and handed the birth
certificate back. "Fat chance."

"It would save us a lot of
legwork and pointless speculation."

She shook her head. "Look, I
can clear this up right away. What color are Colby
Ostrow's
eyes?"

"Blue. Why?"

"What color is his hair?"

"Blond. Before it turned
gray and fell out."

She crossed her arms. "All
right. I'm ninety percent certain he isn't Louis's father."

"And you know this how?"

"Let's start with the eyes. It
takes three pairs of genes to control eye color, a combination of dominant
and recessive genes. Basically, when the '
bey
2' gene on chromosome 15 has a brown allele and a blue allele, the
brown allele will be dominant over the blue allele. But there are two other
gene pairs that can influence the outcome. Simply put, you only need
one dominant allele to express a dominant trait, but you need two recessive
alleles to express a recessive trait. My mother's eyes are blue. But
Louis's eyes were brown. In rare instances, two blue-eyed parents can
produce a brown-eyed child, or vice versa, but it's safe to assume that
Louis's father had brown eyes. And Colby
Ostrow's
eyes are blue, you said?"

He nodded.

"Okay, hair color is determined
by the presence of melanin in the hair shaft. Melanin is produced by
pigment cells in the hair follicles. There are two types-
eumelanin
, which ranges from light brown to black, and
phomelanin
, which ranges from pale yellow to dark
red. There are four copies of the gene for
eumelanin
in human DNA, and each one is found on a different chromosome. Each gene
has two alleles-one producing melanin, the other producing no melanin.
The more functional copies of the melanin gene you have, the darker
your hair will be. The same is true for
phomelanin
.
So it's a good bet that Louis's father had dark hair, whereas Colby
Ostrow
has fair hair. Of course, you can always dye
your hair a different color, but that won't affect the outcome."

"Wow."

"More importantly, I can't
picture my mother with a man twenty years her junior. I just don't see it
happening."

His beeper went off. "Excuse
me," he said, frowning down at the number. "
Gotta
take this." He left her standing on the balcony and ducked inside.

Daisy could pick up fragments of
conversation: "… fucking asshole's circling the drain… I hope
they fry the bastard…" Tough talk. Daisy wondered what he said about
her sister when she wasn't there? Had he been reining in his dark sense of
humor for her sake? As soon as she was gone, would he loosen his belt and
become a tough-talking cynic again?

"Listen, I've kept you long enough,"
he said, coming back outside and glancing at his watch. "There's nothing
more you can do. Will you be staying in L.A. for a few days?"

She nodded. "Until I find Anna."

"Okay." He ran his hand
through his hair, and some of the greasy strands stood on end. "Call
me tomorrow, and I'll tell you what I've got."

"Thanks."

"I can't share everything,"
he said, putting his arm around her and escorting her to the door.
"But I'll do what I can."