Lippman, Laura (5 page)

“Sure,” he said, as if he’d never heard that before, as if two ex-wives hadn’t thrown that back at him time and again.

Her eyes opened then. They were a particularly vivid blue, kind of wasted on a blonde. A blue-eyed brunette, that was his ideal, the light and the dark, an Irish girl with eyes put in with a dirty finger.

“You don’t look like a baby,” she said. Her voice, unlike Gloria’s, carried no whiff of flirtation. She wasn’t playing it that way. “It’s funny, for a moment I had this vision of the cartoon character, the giant one who wore the diaper and the little cap.”

“Baby Huey,” he said.

“Yes. Was he a duck? Or a chicken? Or was he a
baby
-baby?”

“A chicken, I think.” Maybe they should get the neurosurgeon in to see her. “You told someone you knew about an old murder here in Baltimore County. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“It began in Baltimore County. It ended—actually, I’m not sure where it ended. I’m not sure it ever ended.”

“You’re saying someone started killing somebody in Baltimore County and finished it elsewhere?”

“I’m not sure—in the end…well, not the end but the part where bad things happened. By then I didn’t know where we were.”

“Why don’t you just tell me your story and let me figure it out?”

She turned to Gloria. “Do people—I mean, are we known? Still?”

“If they were here, they remember,” the old lizard said in a much-gentler-than-usual voice. Was she hot for her? Was that why she was willing to risk taking a case that might not pay? It was hard enough to figure out other men’s taste in women sometimes, much less a woman’s, and Gloria wasn’t sentimental that way in Infante’s experience with her. “Maybe not the name, but the moment they hear the circumstances. But Detective Infante’s not from here.”

“Then what’s the point of speaking to him?” She closed her eyes and settled back on the pillow. Gloria actually gave an embarrassed what-can-I-do shrug. Infante had never seen her so gentle with a client, so solicitous. Gloria took good care of the people she represented, but she insisted on being the boss. Now she was all deferential, motioning him to follow her out into the hall. He shook his head and stood his ground.

“
You
tell me,” he said to Gloria.

“In March 1975 two sisters left their family’s house to go to Security Square Mall. Sunny and Heather Bethany. They were never seen again. And they weren’t not seen again in the sense that police had a hunch what happened but couldn’t prove anything. Not like the Powers case.”

Powers was shorthand for a decade-old homicide, one in which a young woman had vanished, but no one doubted that her estranged husband was at the heart of that disappearance. They just couldn’t prove it. The conventional wisdom was that the guy had hired someone and lucked out, finding the tightest-lipped, most loyal hit man ever, a guy who never had a reason to trade the information. A guy who never got locked up or bragged drunkenly to a girlfriend,
Yeah, I did that
.

“So she knows what happened?”

“I can
hear
you,” the woman in the bed said. “I’m right here.”

“Look, you’re free to participate in the conversation if you like,” Infante said. Was it possible to roll one’s eyes when they were closed? Her expression shifted subtly, as if she were a peeved teenager who just wanted Mom and Dad to leave her alone, but she didn’t say anything else.

“There were some seeming leads in the early days. An attempt to collect ransom. Some, I think, what we would call persons-of-interest today. But nothing panned out. Virtually no evidence—”

“Sunny was short for Sunshine,” said the woman in the bed. “She hated it.” She started to cry but didn’t seem to notice she was crying, just lay in the bed letting the tears flow down her face. Infante was still trying to work out the math. Thirty years ago, two sisters. How young? Gloria hadn’t said. Young, obviously, young enough so that running away was ruled out and homicide assumed. Two. Who grabs two? That struck him as wildly ambitious and prone to failure. Wouldn’t taking two sisters suggest something personal, a grudge against the family?

“Arthur Goode kidnapped more than one boy,” Gloria said, as if reading his thoughts. “But that was before your time, too. He kidnapped a newspaper-delivery boy here in Baltimore and made him watch while…At any rate, he released the delivery boy unharmed. Goode was later executed in Florida, for similar crimes there.”

“I remember that,” said the woman in the bed. “Because it was like us, but not like us. Because we were sisters. And because—”

Here she broke down. She brought her knees to her chest, hugged them with her good arm, the one not bandaged and wrapped, and cried the way someone might heave after food poisoning. The tears and sobs kept coming, unstoppable. Infante began to worry that she might dehydrate herself.

“This is Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “Or was, many years ago. Apparently it’s been a long time since she’s used her real name.”

“Where has she has been? What happened to her sister?”

“Killed,” moaned the keening woman. “Murdered. Her neck snapped right in front of me.”

“And who did this? Where did it happen?” Infante had been standing all this time, but now he pulled up a chair, realizing he would be there for hours, that he would need to set up the tape recorder, take an official statement. He wondered if the case was really the sensation that Gloria said it was. But even if she was exaggerating its fame, it was the kind of story that would mutate into a clusterfuck when the news got out. They would have to proceed slowly, be delicate in their handling of it. “Where have you been, and why has it taken so long for you to come forward?”

Bracing herself on her right arm, Heather returned herself to a sitting position, then wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, a child’s gesture.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. I just can’t. I wish I had never said anything in the first place.”

Infante shot Gloria a what-the-fuck look. Again she shrugged helplessly.

“She doesn’t want to be Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “She wants to go back to the life she’s made for herself and put this behind her. Her sister’s dead. She says her parents are dead, too, and that jibes with my memory. There is no Heather Bethany, for better or worse.”

“Whatever she calls herself, wherever she’s been, she is by her own account the witness to the murder of a—How old was your sister?”

“Fifteen. And I was just about to turn twelve.”

“The murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. She doesn’t get to drop a bomb like that and waltz out of here.”

“There’s no one to arrest,” the woman in the bed said. “He’s long gone. Everyone’s long gone. There’s no point to any of this. I hit my head, I said something that I never meant to say. Let’s just forget about it, okay?”

Infante motioned Gloria to follow him into the hall.

“Who is that?”

“Heather Bethany.”

“No, I mean, what name is she going by now? Where does she live? What has she been up to? The cop who brought her in said the car was registered to Penelope Jackson. Is that her?”

“Even if I
do
have that information—and I’m not saying I do—I’m not authorized to give it to you.”

“Fuck authorized. The law is really clear on this, Gloria, all the way up to the Supreme fucking Court. She was driving a car, she was in an accident. She has to provide ID. If she doesn’t want to do that, she can go straight from here to jail.”

For a moment Gloria dropped all her arch mannerisms—the cocked eyebrow, the half smirk. Strangely, it made her even less attractive. “I know, I know. But bear with me. This woman has been through hell, and she wants to hand you the clearance of a lifetime, if you can be a little patient. Why not indulge her for a day or two? The way I see it, she’s genuinely terrified of revealing her current identity. She needs to trust
you
before she can tell you everything.”

“Why? What’s the big deal? Unless she’s wanted for some other crime?”

“She swears up and down that she’s not, that her only concern—and this is a direct quote—is becoming ‘wacko of the week’ on cable news. Once she’s revealed as Heather Bethany, her life as she knows it is over. She wants to find a way to give you the case without giving up herself.”

“I don’t know, Gloria. This isn’t my call. Something like this has to go up the chain of command, and they still might send me back to lock her up.”

“Lock her up and she won’t give you the Bethany case. She’ll say it was a delusion born of the accident. Look, you should be delirious with her terms. She doesn’t want any publicity, and your department hates being in the media.
I’m
the loser here, the one who won’t get any bump, and may not even get paid.”

At this, she reverted to form, batting her eyelashes and puffing out her lips in a monstrous pout. Shit, if anyone resembled Baby Huey, it was Gloria, with that fish mouth and beak of a nose.
Beak
—that was it, he had the image in his mind now. Not a beak, but a bill. Baby Huey was definitely a duck, and lord fuck a duck, as the old saying went.

A radio was playing somewhere. Or perhaps it was a television in a nearby room. Her room was dead silent, and the light was finally fading, which she found restful. She thought about work. Had she been missed yet? She had called in sick yesterday, but today she hadn’t known what to do. It was a long-distance call, but she didn’t have a calling card handy and she wasn’t sure what would happen if she went through the hospital switchboard and she couldn’t get to the pay phone in the hall without going past the patrolman outside her door. Did calling cards mask one’s movements anyway? She couldn’t take the chance. She had to protect the only thing she had, this sixteen-year existence built on someone’s death, just as everything in her life had been made possible by someone’s death. It was her
real
life, for better or worse, the longest life she had inhabited to date. For sixteen years she’d managed to have this thing that others would call a normal life, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

It wasn’t much of a life, to be sure. She had no real friends, only friendly colleagues and clerks who knew her well enough to smile. She didn’t even have a pet. But she had an apartment, small and spare and neat. She had a car, her precious Camry, a purchase she had rationalized because of the commute to work, an hour on a good day. Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy—not a woman, obviously, but the same kind of storyteller, unafraid of big emotions and big stories.
Shit
, she had three tapes due back at the library Saturday. For sixteen years she had never been late for anything—a payment, a library book, an appointment. She hadn’t dared to be. What happened if you turned in tapes late? Did the fines accrue? Did they report you somewhere?

It was ironic, given her work on Y2K compliance, but she had long lived in fear of centralization, a day when the machines would learn to speak to one another, compare notes. Even as she was paid to prevent it, she had been secretly rooting for a systemic breakdown that would wipe all the tapes clean, destroy every bit of institutional memory. The pieces were out there, somewhere, waiting for someone to put them together.
This woman—she has the name of a child who died in Florida in 1963. How odd—because this woman, who resembles her, had the name of a child who died in Nebraska in 1962. Yet this woman was a child who died in Kansas in 1964. And
this
one? She was from Ohio, born in 1962 as well
.

At least it would be easy to remember who she was now: Heather Bethany, born April 3, 1963. Resident of Algonquin Lane 1966–78. Ace student at Dickey Hill Elementary. Where had the family lived before? An apartment in Randallstown, but she wouldn’t be expected to remember anything about that time. That was the tricky part. Not knowing what she should know but remembering what she
wouldn’t
know.

What else? School #201. Dickey Hill. Predictable jokes about the name. A newer building at the time. Jungle gym, chin-up bars in three heights, a slide that became hot to the touch on June days, hopscotch and foursquare grids painted in bright yellow. There had been a merry-go-round, not the kind with horses but one of those rickety metal ones. No, wait, that hadn’t been at the school but somewhere nearby, some-place vaguely forbidden. In the Wakefield apartments that surrounded the school? In her mind she remembered the dirt track first, because she pushed more often than she rode. Head down, like a horse in harness, she had lined up behind the boys, linking her left arm into the metal bar and beginning to run, making the riders scream with delight. She saw the toe of her—she needed a second to remember the shoes. Not athletic shoes, which is why she got in trouble. She was wearing her school shoes, brown, always brown, because brown was practical. But even practical brown couldn’t stand up to the orange dust of that playground, especially after the April rains. She had come home with dirt caked onto the toes, much to her mother’s exasperation.

What else could she tell them? There were eight sixth-grade teachers that year. Heather had the nice one, Mrs. Koger. They took the Iowa Basic Skills Test, and she was in the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. They did science projects that fall. She had netted crawfish from Gwynns Falls and put together an elaborate aquarium, but all four had died. Her father theorized that clean water was a shock to their systems after the murky, polluted stream and her exploration of that thesis had earned her an A anyway. Thirty years later she was beginning to have a clue how the crawfish had felt. You knew what you knew, you wanted what you wanted, even if it was literally scum.

But, of course, this was not what they would demand of her. They didn’t want the story of Heather Bethany
before
1975. They wanted to know about the subsequent thirty years, and small details would not satisfy. She could not placate them with anecdotes about, say, her boxy little tape recorder. It was the first purchase she was allowed to make, a reward for six months of living by their rules, for proving her trustworthiness. They were okay with the tape recorder but appalled by the handful of tapes she bought as well. The Who, Jethro Tull, even some of the earlier punk bands. She would lie on the bumpy chenille bedspread, still in her school uniform, and listen to the New York Dolls and, later, the Clash. “Turn it down,” she was ordered. “Get your shoes off the bedspread.” She would obey, but everyone was still appalled. Perhaps they knew that she, like Holly in the Lou Reed song, was plotting to get on the bus and go take a walk on the wild side.