Mislaid (20 page)

As the day went on, the prosecutor began to feel a creeping sense of nascent professional embarrassment. He was staging
a high-profile drug bust with no drugs. Thinking of the spotless room, he began working up a catchphrase for the press, something about “arrogant shit’s ass on a stick.”

He felt certain the dramaturgy of going to trial against Byrdie would benefit his career and justify his expensive sting operation. There was similar excitement among the rank and file. They might be looking at undreamed-of success: Not penny-ante possession cases, but heavy-duty hard drug dealing. Not just any white kid, but the crème de la crème. Not just drugs, but statutory sexual assault on a minor on drugs! But they needed corroborative evidence. For his own peace of mind, the prosecutor felt he should not lay himself open to charges of failing to question statements by loosely wound kids who may or may not have been tripping when they witnessed various events and/or confessed and/or retracted their confessions. With some it was hard to tell. Mike in particular was such a sweaty-palmed, incoherent little guy anyway. The hard evidence adequate to indict Byrdie was in the pockets and/or bodily cavities of a petite junior female named Shadow, whom it was incumbent on the police to find before she had a chance to excrete certain metabolites or douche her organs. It was still less than forty-eight hours since the party.

To find her, all they had to do was find Temple. Luckily he was one of the more conspicuous people in Charlottesville.

A number of officers were assigned to track him down. It took them a while. He was still too headachy to endure his roommate or go to class. He slept for a good long while with his head down on a study carrel in the library and then moved to a sofa. Instead of his tennis sweater he was wearing an elegant blazer that had once belonged to the poet Mark Strand. A couple of times a security guard approached to rouse him, noticed the clothes, and let him lie.

“Run this by me again, Bird Dog,” Lee said to his son. “Why does it make any difference what underage slut gets gang-raped in your frat house? Where’s the novelty?”

“I’m saying, she was not a slut. She was a good kid. And Mike says I carried her home with an amount of drugs in her pocket that could get us all sent to prison.”

“So?”

“What if the police had stopped me? I don’t even know if it’s legal to carry girls around.”

“They didn’t stop you. They didn’t catch you. What are you so worried about?”

“You’re the one who checked me into a motel! What are you so worried about?”

Lee said, “I’m not worried. But we don’t talk to cops in our family. You’re too young to know that. We have a different level of access to the law.”

“What about the girl?”

“What about her?”

Byrdie remembered the note. “When I dropped her off, I left her a note.”

“You didn’t sign it, I assume.”

“I signed it as ‘Thetan Hegemon.’ ‘Byrd Fleming’ looks, I don’t know, kind of freighted. She was black. But so, so cute.”

Lee went to the refrigerator and got them each a beer. “Go on,” he said.

“I wanted her to be able to find me if she wanted. I thanked her for an interesting evening,” he said.

“Jesus, Byrd,” Lee said. He pulled out his address book and added, “I’m going to put you on the phone with your uncle Trip, because this is way over my head.”

BTF III, Esq., had been in politics only very briefly when a scandal in the 1970s earned him an unelected appointment, but he still had some pull, and Byrdie told him the story: Mike, his housemate and brother, had returned from a police interrogation telling all and sundry that he had nobly covered up Byrdie’s crimes. Those crimes were possession of an amount of acid large enough to suggest dealing and a black woman small enough to suggest an age of around fifteen. Both were Mike’s crimes, but that didn’t seem to penetrate Mike’s awareness. In his own mind, he had handed off his crimes in a lateral pass when Byrdie relieved him of the victim and—unwittingly—the drugs. Byrdie feared that transporting a drugged girl laden with drugs might be construed as smuggling. In related news, he had assaulted his accusers with a long, heavy sword.

Trip said, “You’re fucked. Bend over like you mean it.”

“How do I do that?”

“Go down to the station and say hello. Then don’t say another word. That’s the hard part. You’re going to think you can manipulate them, because they’re going to be such obligate jackasses, but pride goeth before a fall. Never, ever give in to the temptation to tell them what really happened. If it conflicts with their theories, they’ll take it out on you. Make them think, and they’ll want revenge. Your job is to sit tight while I play my hand. It’ll be interesting, making a neat tidy felony case out of this, fit for circuit court.”

“Could you repeat all that to Dad?” He handed the receiver to Lee.

“I wish you could see what Byrdie has on,” Lee told Trip. “A rainbow shirt and a black girdle. He looks ready to sell his tail end on Ninth Avenue.”

Byrdie looked down and said, “These are bike shorts!”

“I can see his fundament,” Lee continued.

“This shirt is Deadhead, not gay pride,” Byrdie said pointedly. “It’s batik!”

“Go out now and buy him some trousers,” Trip advised, cackling.

“But why? They might not even take him into custody.”

Byrdie had already peeled off the shorts. He handed them to Lee and requested his pants and shirt.

Lee drove him to the police station in town and announced his presence. Byrdie stood contritely, looking at the floor, a guilty schoolboy. A routine book-and-release on his own recognizance, with an appointment to come back the next week to be arraigned on felony hard-drug-dealing charges to be determined in circuit court by a grand jury. They guessed bail wouldn’t be set too high, and that his lawyer should bring his checkbook.

“See?” Lee said, cradling his genitals for safety as he sat down in the car. “That wasn’t so bad. Trip will pull some strings and get the charges expunged. No need to fuss and fret. I really do love these pants. Comfiest I ever had on.”

“Keep them, Dad. My gift to you.”

“And if you can’t move out of that house full of pizza-face losers, at least exclude me from your future shenanigans. Let Trip handle this shit from now on. It depresses me no end.”

Byrdie settled in at the motel for a few days. Criminality was the kind of novel experience he felt he would be best able to handle with salty snacks and daytime television.

He was glad to be away from the house. He imagined an obsequious uproar. All the brothers excited by official attention, flattered by interrogations, reenacting hard-boiled noir movies. Jabbering hoarsely about the need to protect themselves, about what should be done with stool pigeons, about who had known
what when. Presenting a united front, looking to their fugitive hegemon for leadership. He realized how wrong he might be. Suddenly he found them all immensely irritating.

He would have liked to send for his girlfriend, but his stress levels made him hesitate. Her presence would have necessitated talking to her. So much for burritos and
Night Court
. She was such a good girlfriend. But he felt no longing. He wondered instead how he could warn Shadow.

He wrote her a postcard from the lobby, in care of her dorm room. “The police were there. Be careful!” he wrote. He couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t be incriminating to one or the other or both of them. He didn’t sign it at all. He assumed she would remember his handwriting from the earlier note and draw her own conclusions.

It was too succinct. Karen had been nursing a crush on him, but that two-sentence letter killed it. She didn’t think she had been warned by a friend. She thought, This is a threat from an asshole drug dealer in trouble who thinks I might fink!

So far the prosecutor knew one thing for certain about Shadow: she had twelve hits of acid. She might have been a sexual assault victim, too, in theory, but time to prove that was running out. So she was trading sex for drugs. Not in reality—reality wasn’t directly relevant—but in the case he might make against Byrdie. Shadow could be Byrdie’s acid whore. Like a crack whore, only with acid.

He turned the thought over in his mind and realized his equation didn’t quite hold, because acid isn’t addictive. Her motive would have to be money. Money is as addictive as air. “Shadow” could be a prostitute’s nom de guerre . . .

The prosecutor wasn’t asking for much—just guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt and a courtroom free of conflicting information. He wasn’t anybody’s nemesis! He had nothing against Byrdie or Shadow, either one! He just needed to put away some criminals for his résumé.

“Acid whore,” he said aloud, rehearsing for the newspapers. “A so-called fraternity house where a drug lord lured a penniless local girl . . .” Decency forbids further reproduction of his shameful imaginings.

“Karen Brown,” Temple said, readily. “We grew up together.”

The cops traded looks. “Can you give us a description of Miss Brown?”

“Black, short, built, long blond hair, light blue eyes, ivory skin.”

The cop was confused. “Did you say black? What’s black?”

“Karen.”

“She’s a black girl.”

“Yes. She’s my girlfriend.”

“And she’s light-skinned.”

“Yes.”

“But black.”

“She’s on a minority scholarship.”

“And she has what you call a passing complexion.”

“Anybody can tell looking at her that she’s black. She has full lips and a little flat nose, kind of like Barbie.”

“Barbie is Swedish.”

Temple was silent, thinking maybe they weren’t believing him.

When Temple called home to say the police had questioned him in connection with drugs, Dee uttered a scream she was sure could be heard in Charlottesville. She sat down hard, pounding the table with her fists. Meg was far away, incommunicado, at a squirrel sanctuary without a phone, and for several minutes
Dee hoped somehow to conceal the revelation from Ike forever. She felt very alone.

“Take it easy, Mom,” Temple said. “It was a coincidence. We went to this party where there was a bust going on. How were we to know?” He described the conversation, adding that Barbie could be black and Swedish, the way Pushkin was black and Russian. Dee told him to keep his mouth shut and not to talk to anybody until she conferred with Ike. Understandably, she kept putting it off.

They didn’t ask him anything else, and they never questioned him again. There had been a request from the university administration to keep the scandal within limits. They were not about to sacrifice a black Jefferson scholar. And of course he was exempt from the prosecutor’s project of railroading white students. There was even a danger that if the public became aware of his presence at the party, all the white boys would be off the hook. Temple was not a welcome addition to the case.

The news that Karen was also black greatly disappointed the prosecutor. He wouldn’t be able to charge her with anything, or even throw around his new catchphrase “acid whore.” It would alienate the very constituency he was trying to reach. With a sigh of resignation, he set his sights on Byrdie alone.

The authorities didn’t catch up with Karen until the next day. She had been so busy with meals and classes and buying new sneakers. Most of her classes were well-attended lectures, and Temple’s description applied to half the women at UVA. You couldn’t tell by looking who was a natural blonde, and certainly not which blondes were black. Any short girl might wear heels. They were waiting outside her dorm room when she got back from breakfast.

They asked whether she had been given blotter acid at the party, and what she had done with it. She said she had thrown
the acid away, because drugs are bad. She gave them the first note from Byrdie, explaining that she had found it in her pocket with the unwanted blotter, and the unsigned postcard.

“Did he do anything to you? Any evidence of a sexual encounter?” She shook her head, looking offended. “Would you be willing to submit to examination by a physician?”

“There’s nothing to examine!” Karen said. “I’m not that kind of girl!”

She led them to where she and Temple had disposed of the acid. And there it was—in tatters, laden with sand, but extant. Two nights underground including an episode of light rain had boosted its weight to a respectable five grams. They put the acid and Byrdie’s correspondence in Baggies and thanked her for her cooperation.

Not twenty minutes later, the prosecutor finally had his case. The poor, innocent black coed, the substantial amount of acid miraculously saved from the college dump, the note in Byrdie’s hand written with Byrdie’s Cartier fountain pen (it had been in the prosecutor’s possession since the search of Byrdie’s room), the revelatory postcard from the safe house, a.k.a. Holiday Inn.

The prosecutor put it all together, imagining himself a newspaper reporter, and experienced a moment of unexpected heavenly bliss.

Karen ran to Temple’s room and threw herself in his arms, wide-eyed with fear. Drugs. Sex. The police. This was not how she had imagined college.

She was scared straight. Instead of sitting still on his lap as she was used to doing, she squirmed. Temple leaned down and kissed the top of her head. Then he kissed her mouth. But instead of enveloping her in a bear hug as usual, he put one hand
on the nape of her neck and the other on her breast. Then he got up and locked his roommate out. “Shit, why didn’t we think of this before?” he asked.

“Because we’re retarded,” Karen said.

Hours went by before a loud knock and a stern, stage-whispered “Temple!” alerted them that Dee had arrived. He let her in almost immediately, and her dismay over his metamorphosis reached a peak. The bedspread was smooth, their clothes were on, but their underwear was in a corner of the floor, and their hair . . . Dee trembled. The shape of Temple’s coiffure, which wanted cutting, was that of a topographic model of West Virginia, and Karen’s hair was ratted all up the back like dog hair in a brush. Her lips had that bitten red look, and she was reading
The Myth of Sisyphus
as if she didn’t have a care in the world.