Lippman, Laura (4 page)

“There’s a woman who was brought in last night—” he began.

“The Jane Doe?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t surprised that Kay had heard about the woman, quite the opposite. He had probably sought Kay out because he knew there would be little explanation required and therefore less conversation involved. “She’s refusing the psych exam. I mean, she spoke briefly to the doctor, but once the conversation became specific, she said she wouldn’t talk to anyone without a lawyer present. Only she doesn’t want to work with a public defender, and she says she doesn’t know any attorneys.”

Kay sighed. “Does she have money?”

“She says she does, but it’s hard to know when she won’t even give her name. She said she wouldn’t do
anything
without a lawyer present.”

“And you want me to…?”

“Don’t you have an…um, friend? That woman attorney who’s in the newspapers all the time?”

“Gloria Bustamante? I know of her. We’re not really friends, but we’re both on the House of Ruth board.”
And I’m not a lesbian
, Kay wanted to add, sure that this was the way Schumeier’s mind worked. If Gloria Bustamante, sexually ambiguous attorney, was acquainted with Kay Sullivan, who had not dated anyone since her marriage ended, then it followed that Kay must be a lesbian, too. Kay sometimes thought she should get a little custom-made button: I’M NOT GAY, I JUST LIKE TO READ.

“Yes. That’s it. Perhaps you could call her?”

“Before I do, I think I should check with the Jane Doe first. I don’t want to summon Gloria out here unless she’s going to talk to her. At the rates Gloria charges, the trip alone would be almost six hundred dollars.”

Schumeier smiled. “You’re curious, aren’t you? You want to get a look at the hospital’s mystery woman.”

Kay ducked her head, searching her purse for one of the peppermints she’d grabbed the last time she splurged and took Grace and Seth to a restaurant. She had always disliked Schumeier’s emphatic pronouncements about what others were thinking or feeling. It was another reason she had transferred out of his department.
You’re a psychiatrist, not a psychic
, she wanted to say. Instead she muttered, “What room is she in?”

THE YOUNG POLICE officer posted outside room 3030 quizzed Kay endlessly, excited to have something to do at last, but finally let her go in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn against the winter-bright sky, and the woman appeared to have fallen asleep in an upright position, her head twisted awkwardly to the side, like a child in a car seat. Her hair was quite short, a dangerous style for anyone without exquisite bone structure. A fashion choice or the result of chemo?

“Hi,” the woman said, her eyes opening suddenly. And Kay, who had counseled burn victims and accident victims, women whose faces had been all but vandalized by men, was more unnerved by this woman’s relatively unmarred gaze than anything she had ever seen. There was an almost searing frailty to the woman in bed, and not just the usual shakiness of an accident victim. The woman
was
a bruise, her skin about as effective as an eggshell in keeping the pain of the world at bay. The fresh cut on her forehead was nothing compared to the wounded eyes.

“I’m Kay Sullivan, one of the social workers on staff here.”

“Why do I need a social worker?”

“You don’t, but Dr. Schumeier thought I might be able to help you get an attorney.”

“No public defenders. I need someone good, someone who can concentrate on
me
.”

“It’s true, they do carry heavy caseloads, but they’re still—”

“It’s not that I don’t admire them, their commitment. It’s just—I need someone independent. Someone not reliant on the government in any fashion. Public defenders get paid by the government in the end. In the end—my father always said—they never forget where their bread is buttered. Government workers. He was one. Once. And he disliked them intensely.”

Kay couldn’t be sure of the woman’s age. The young doctor had said forty, but she could have been five years younger or older. Too old to be speaking of her father in such reverent tones, at any rate, as if he were an oracle. Most people outgrew that by eighteen. “Yes…” Kay began, trying to find a footing in the conversation.

“It was an accident. I panicked. I mean, if you knew the things going through my head, how I hadn’t seen that stretch of highway for—How’s the little girl? I saw a little girl. I’ll kill myself if…Well, I don’t even want to say it out loud. I’m poison. Just by existing, I bring pain and death. It’s his curse. I can’t escape it, no matter what I do.”

Kay suddenly recalled the state fair up at Timonium, the freak-show tent, how at age thirteen she had worked up the nerve to go in, only to find just slightly odd people—fat, tattooed, skinny, big—sitting placidly. Schumeier had her pegged, after all: There was a bit of voyeurism in her mission here, a desire to look, nothing more. But this woman was talking to her, drawing her in, babbling as if Kay knew, or should know, everything about her. Kay had worked with many clients like this, people who spoke as if they were celebrities, with their every moment of existence documented in tabloids and television shows.

But at least the woman in the bed seemed to
see
Kay, which was more than some self-involved clients managed. “Are you from here?”

“Yes, all my life. I grew up in Northwest Baltimore.”

“And you’re what? Forty-five?”

Ah, that hurt. Kay was used to, even liked, the version of herself she glimpsed in mirrors and windows, but now she was forced to consider what a stranger saw—the short, squat body, the shoulder-length gray hair that aged her more than anything else. She was in good shape by every internal measure, but it was hard to convey one’s blood-pressure, bone-density, and cholesterol numbers via wardrobe or casual conversation. “Thirty-nine, actually.”

“I’m going to say a name.”

“Your name?”

“Don’t think that way, not yet. I’m going to say a name—”

“Yes?”

“It’s a name you’ll know. Or maybe not. It depends on how I say it, how I tell it. There’s a girl, and she’s dead, and that won’t surprise anyone. They’ve believed she was dead, all these years. But there’s another girl, and she’s not dead, and that’s the harder part to explain.”

“Are you—”

“The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.”

“The Bethany…oh. Oh.” And just like that it came back to Kay. Two sisters, who went to…what, a movie? The mall? She saw their likenesses—the older one with smooth ponytails fastened behind the ears, the younger one in pigtails—remembered the panic that had gripped the city, with children herded into assemblies and shown cautionary yet elliptical films.
Girls Beware
and
Boys Beware
. It had been years before Kay had understood the euphemistic warnings therein:
After accompanying the strange boys to the beach party, Sally was found wandering down the highway, barefoot and confused…. Jimmy’s parents told him that it wasn’t his fault that Greg had befriended him and taken him fishing but made it clear to him that such friendships with older men were not natural…. She got in the stranger’s car—and was never seen again
.

There were rumors, too—sightings of the girls as far away as Georgia, bogus ransom demands, fears of cults and counterculturists. After all, Patty Hearst had been taken just a year before. Kidnapping was big in the seventies. There was a businessman’s wife redeemed for a hundred thousand dollars, which had seemed like a fortune, a rich girl buried in a box with a breathing tube, the Getty heir with the severed ear. But the Bethanys were not wealthy, not in Kay’s memory, and the longer the story went without an official ending, the less memorable it had become. The last time that Kay thought about the Bethany sisters had probably been the last time she went to the movies at Security Square, at least a decade ago. That was it—Security Square Mall, relatively new at the time, something of a ghost town now.

“Are you…?”

“Get me a lawyer, Kay. A good one.”

Infante took the as-the-crow-flies route to the hospital, traveling straight through the city instead of taking the Beltway around it. Damn, downtown Baltimore was getting shiny. Who’d have thought it? He almost regretted not buying a place in town ten years ago, not that he’d still have it anyway. Besides, he had been raised in the suburbs—Massapequa, out on Long Island—and he had a soft spot for the jumbled secondary highways and modest apartment complexes where he lived up in Parkville. IHOPs, Applebee’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, gas stations, craft stores—to him this was what home looked like. Not that he had any intention of going back there, where it was now almost impossible to live on a police officer’s salary. He kept his allegiance to the Yankees and played the part of the brash Noo Yawkah for his colleagues’ amusement. But in his head, he knew that this town, this job, was right for him. He was good at what he did, with one of the better clearance rates in the department. “Baltimore punk is my second language,” he liked to say. Lenhardt was on him to take the sergeant’s exam, but then—people always thought you should do what they did.
Be a firefighter
, his dad said,
on the island
. His first wife had cajoled,
C’mon, watch
Law & Order
with me
. She wanted her favorite show to be his favorite show, her favorite meal to be his. She even tried to convert him to Rolling Rock over Bud, to Bushmills over Jameson. It was as if she were working backward, trying to create a logical match from one that had been all heat and desire from the jump. In that way she reminded Infante of himself in high school. He decided where he wanted to go to college—Nassau Community College, no major brain bust, that, it was all they could afford—then gave the guidance counselor the info that would make her computer spit out that school. That way his only option became a choice, instead of something that was forced on him.

He breezed through the city, making the hospital in less than forty minutes. But it wasn’t good enough. Gloria Bustamante—the biggest ballbuster of any defense attorney he knew, male or female, straight or gay—was in the hospital corridor.

Fuck me.

“You look absolutely crestfallen,” the alcoholic old lizard said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to use that word in a sentence before, but now I see it—crestfallen. Like a blue jay whose little tuft is drooping in the front.”

She pulled at her own forelock, a stray piece of red-brown hair that showed an inch of gray at the root. Bustamante was her usual wreck of a self—lipstick in and out of the natural line of mouth, suit missing a button. Her shoes, expensive ones once upon a time, were scuffed and banged up on the toes, as if she’d been kicking something very hard over and over again. Probably a detective’s shin.

“She hire you?”

“I think we have an arrangement, yes.”

“It’s yes or no, Gloria. Are you her lawyer?”

“For now. I’m taking her at her word that she can pay my fee.” Her eyes flicked over him. “You’re here for homicide, right? Not traffic investigation?”

“I could give a fuck what she did with her car.”

“If she talks to you about the murder, can we make the traffic thing go away? No one was really at fault, she panicked—”

“Shit, Gloria. Who do you think you are, Monty fuckin’ Hall, trading me the accident for what’s behind the curtain? Any deal requires a prosecutor’s approval. You know that.”

“Well, then maybe I won’t make her available to you this morning. She’s exhausted, she has a head injury. I’m not sure she should speak to anyone until a doctor can determine if the injury has affected her memory.”

“They checked her out last night.”

“She was treated for her injuries. And she’s just passed a psych exam. But I’d like to bring an expert in, someone from neurosurgery. She might not even remember the collision. She might not be aware that she left the scene of the accident.”

“Save the bullshit for a summation, Gloria, and put the goods on the table. I have to determine that this case is in our jurisdiction.”

“Oh, it’s very much in your jurisdiction, Detective.” Gloria made it sound kind of dirty, her style when talking to men. When Infante first got to know her, he thought the innuendos were a way of her fronting, trying to hide her sexual orientation. But Lenhardt insisted it was a highly developed sense of irony, the kind of mindfuck that a professional mindfucker like Gloria used just to stay in practice.

“So can I talk to her?”

“About the old case, not about the accident.”

“Shit, Gloria, I’m a murder police. I could give a crap about some fender bender on the Beltway. Unless—Wait, did she do it on purpose? Was she trying to kill the people in the other car? Man, maybe this is my lucky day and I can get two clearances, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Gloria flicked her eyes over him, bored. “Leave the humor to your sergeant, Kevin. He’s the funny one. You’re the pretty boy.”

THE WOMAN IN the hospital bed had her eyes closed tight, a kid playing possum. The light in the room showed up the fine hairs on her arm and the side of her face, blond peach fuzz, nothing intense. And there was a hollowed-out look beneath the eyes, a long-lived exhaustion. The eyes flickered open for only a moment, then closed again.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured. “Do we have to do this now, Gloria?”

“He won’t stay long, sweetie.”
Sweetie
? “He just needs the first part.”

The first part? Then what was the second?

“But that’s the hardest part to talk about. Can’t
you
just tell him and let me be?”

He needed to assert himself, stop waiting for the introduction that Gloria didn’t seem intent on making.

“I’m Kevin Infante, a detective with Baltimore County homicide.”

“Infante? As in Italian for baby?” Eyes still closed. He needed her to open them, he realized. Until this moment Infante had never considered how vital open eyes were to what he did. Sure, he had thought about eye contact, studied the way that various people used it, knew what it meant when someone couldn’t meet his gaze. But he’d never had a subject sit there—lie there in this case—with eyes closed tight.