Stacking in Rivertown (31 page)

“And she had no time to call the police in order to protect you from him. On top of that, she’s a well-respected figure without the history you have that makes you easier to convict.”

“I don’t want her dragged into my muck.”

“And if it came down to life in prison, you’d accept that?”

That’s a kicker. “I want to say yes, but I might get cowardly as this goes on.”

“What would she do if it looked that bad for you?”

I stare at her, blank, because I remember Miriam’s eyes when she drove off in the Rav. How they were dead, empty. I realize that I’m not sure what Miriam would do.

“Okay,” Cynthia says, checking her list. “I want you to give me a good description of this Kat person that got you into the car near the museum. I need any information as to where you think we might find her. And I’ll get in touch with Detective Bates in New York, or the men on his team, to get his notes on the murder investigation.”

Now she writes something on her pad. “All right. Is there anything personal you want me to check on?”

“Jeremy,” I say. “We are still married, after all.” I look away. I don’t want to start crying in front of Cynthia.

Her voice is softer now. “I’ll take care of it,” she says, gathering her things together as she stands to leave.

“Thanks for helping me,” I say.

“My pleasure,” she says, smiling. “And don’t talk about any of this to anyone.”

I salute her with my good arm and out she goes, leaving me deflated and sinking into darkness.

The next few days are hazy, interrupted now and then by interrogations with Beauty and the Beast, as I’ve begun to think of my two detectives. Cynthia tells me she’s gotten in touch with Johnson, who is refusing to give out information about Miriam’s whereabouts. He even threatened her with a lawsuit.

“What a great guy,” I say, lumping Johnson, the looker, and Ben all together in my mind.

They move me at the end of the week. It’s a new facility for prisoners who pose a high-security risk. When I get to my new home away from home, I’m put in a cell with a large black woman whose shape is reminiscent of Mama (which endears her to me), and who apparently has a fondness for stealing credit cards and amassing lots of stuff. She doesn’t like messing with the cash that she gets out of women’s purses.

“Small potatoes,” she says.

I find that, for the most part, my fellow women prisoners think rather highly of me because the word is out that while a prostitute in New York, I screwed some pretty important men. Even the president, the rumor goes.

Not this president.

As the days go by, I let my hair grow again, looking more like the old Clarisse. I even begin to feel like the old Clarisse, seeing how the dangers are everywhere. I dream of the days when gun stores were a dime a dozen, when all I had to do was turn the key in that Porsche and put my foot on the accelerator.

I nag my roommate, whose talents with acquiring stuff have landed her in a position of supply inside the prison. I want her to get me a weapon.

“You don’t want to mess with no tools now, Becca-Clarry.” That’s what she’s gotten to calling me. “You just get yourself in a pot of trouble.”

Eventually she comes up with a piece of a knife, the tip chipped and most of the handle busted off. I get that special feeling again.

Finally, I’m cleared to have visitors.

The first time they tell me someone’s waiting to see me, I’m on cloud nine. My depression has been dropping me off tall cliffs faster than I can count.

I walk in the room and sit down in my booth.

It’s Jeremy.

He looks like he’s aged ten years since I saw him last, and maybe has taken a hit in the cheerful department. I think he’s run a little short on bright sunny days.

“Clarisse?” he says like he’s not sure it’s me.

“Jeremy?” I say. My humor is always lost on him.

“I didn’t believe it was you at all for awhile,” he says. “I’d gotten used to the idea that you were dead.”

“You can hold on to that if you need,” I say.

“So when are you coming home?” he asks, looking gray.

“Well, I’m not going anywhere until the trial.”

“Oh yeah.”

Had he forgotten about that? “I don’t think I’m coming home, Jeremy. I think it’s over between us.”

The lines beneath his eyes ease.

“Who’ve you been seeing?” I ask.

His cheeks go red. “Just somebody I met at the hospital. You know, from the night you left. The night Ben came over?”

The night Ben came over? He says it like Ben was his guest.

“I felt bad about that, Jeremy. About him beating you up.”

Then Jeremy looks around as though to make sure no one is listening. “Was it really you that weekend? You know. At Ben’s.”

“‘I don’t like a hood,’” I say, repeating his remarks. “‘I like to admire their markings.’”

He swallows and his face goes the color of a fine variety of beet.

“I could have saved you a lot of money, Jeremy.”

He leans forward. “Maybe after you get out, we could visit every now and then?”

Oh God. Why me? “I don’t think that’s best.”

He sits back. “Oh.”

“I want a divorce, Jeremy. We can split everything down the middle, even my book earnings. I’m assuming it’s been a fairly big lump.”

“Oh yeah.” Then he races into a long spiel about how he’s invested in this market, that set of stocks, foreign currencies, futures (my personal favorite), etc., etc. He’s made a killing (killing might be the only thing he and I have in common at the present moment) and is looking for an even bigger house. Not only that but he’s had an incredible offer from some magazine to tell the true story about Clarisse Broder.

“Leave out the part about our afternoon date at Ben’s,” I suggest.

After he’s gone, my longing for Miriam surges up inside of me. She hasn’t written or sent a message through Tom or Josh. No one has seen or heard from her.

The news of her tour is all good. Miriam is selling CDs like hotcakes, and the rumors are that she’s in line for a Grammy. I’ve gotten to the point where thinking about her hurts so much that I try to pretend she was a dream I made up in my head.

Beauty and the Beast heard about her through Cinda, I gather. They forced a short interview, but it must not have come to much. Cynthia got a brief report about their conversation. The police tried to get a set of fingerprints, but Miriam’s lawyers went ballistic. The police would have to come up with a subpoena. In which case, they threatened to sue the state for loss of revenues.

My agent makes an appearance, overjoyed with my celebrity, as though I’d planned it all along, and she talks about the book I’ll write about my jump from the bridge and my time on the lam. Huge publishing houses are vying for the rights to it, offering her “large six-figure advances,” as she’s fond of saying.

It takes me awhile to figure out what that means, and when I do, it disgusts me. It gets me to longing for those days by the river with Mama and her groceries.

Things go along for awhile, and as the weeks pass, Tom, Josh, Greg, and Burt take turns visiting, trying to keep me cheerful, my most ingrained failing.

I keep harping on Cynthia about copping a plea, but she wants more leverage.

“Why are the prosecutors hanging on to this?” I say.

“It’s an election year,” Cynthia says. But then she starts in on that thing I won’t talk about. “You don’t have to shoulder this, Becca. Where’s Miriam?”

I shrug and leave the room.

But at night, I wake up reaching for Miriam, searching for her body and its warmth. Sometimes I wake myself up talking to her, telling her the things she always wanted to know, the things I kept from her.

I lie in my cot empty and filled with guilt. No wonder I haven’t heard from her. I almost got her killed. And I led her to believe I was someone that I wasn’t. I was a fake, a lie.

There’s an especially bad day at the beginning of February when I’m lying in my cell. I think I hear her voice. I sit up, following the sound into the lounge, and there on MTV is Miriam being interviewed about the CD and another new video just released.

She looks so good. So beautiful. Tears start in my eyes. I sit mesmerized, hurting like I don’t think any beating or whipping from Ben could have ever done. I search her arms for the bracelet I gave to her. She’s not wearing it. I look for anything at all that connected the two of us. There’s nothing. Even her clothes are new. She’s let her hair grow too, but it’s been lightened and cut to make her look younger.

I watch her new video all the way through and go back to my cell, lying still, too terrified to move.

A few weeks later, they come to get me. I have a visitor. When I sit in my booth, I don’t recognize her at first. She’s wearing a wig and a sun hat.

It’s Kat.

“Beth,” she says. “It’s Katherine. You remember me.”

“Yeah, Kathy. How’s the kids?”

“Gone to the four winds.”

I search her face and stare into her eyes. I follow the shape of her lips. Her voice fills me like the first time I heard it. I want to wrap her in my arms, desperate for touch. But she’s so thin. So drawn.

Her clothing is something Kat would have never worn before. Two red scratches run the length of her neck, and inside one arm I see tracks, some fresh, some purple.

“I was the first he ever took to the basement,” Kat says. “He had a small place in Brooklyn then. I met him at Columbia my second year at school. I didn’t have much of a family, just like you. He was always looking for that. But he got me to come to his place one night. I didn’t see the light of day for six months.

“By that time, I was his. I’ve seen it work so many times. To survive, I learned to help him. And now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I never imagined that Ben would be gone.”

And looking at Kat, to remember her skin, her arms, I ache so sudden. And in my head it’s as if I see Miriam disappearing, turning her back to me as she walks away. I know I never deserved Miriam’s love. Yet before me sits Kat, my first love, anyone’s heart’s desire.

But her eyes. God, her eyes are like Violet’s in Bates’ photos, having been drained of life, having siphoned down into the Dumpster. I notice for the first time how the human face is not a whole thing but an assembly of parts, easy to unmake.

“I came because I wanted to see you so badly,” she says. “And to tell you I’m sorry for everything I did to you.”

“No,” I say, interrupting.

“Shh, Beth. Let me finish.” Now her head falls to the side. “I’m most sorry about that last day in the car. I just wanted you back safe. I didn’t want Ben to hurt you.”

I think of her naked then, and how her skin was like milk, creamy and cool.

“I’m going to talk to your lawyer. But I had to see you first.” Her eyes intensify. “I love you so, Beth.”

I’m trying hard not to cry. “Don’t, Kat. I don’t care if I’m in prison. Wait for me. I want you to be free.”

She smiles, but it’s a terrible thing, a face behind a face, having been kept secret within.

“I want to make things right, Beth. From that first night I drugged you, I regretted everything. But then having you with me in our prison brought me such happiness. So I want to help you now.”

My tears are running down my face. And the scent of her comes over me.

“It wasn’t all bad, Kat. You taught me how to be a person. You taught me about the best things in life. I would have never written that book if it hadn’t been for you.”

For one moment, I see that I’ve gotten through, that I’ve touched something inside of her. “I’m rich now, Kat. When I get out, I’ll take care of you.”

She looks at me with the eyes that spent six months in Ben’s basement, those eyes that brought powerful men near to tears. She doesn’t say anything.

A guard tells me time is up. Kat stands. I keep looking back.

I remember her hands, how she pressed them together in front of her chest.

Kat is arrested on her way out of the prison. There are also outstanding warrants for her arrest from New York in connection with Ben’s murders. Kat is sucked into the California system of so-called justice, disappearing from my view.

“I’ve got to see her,” I keep harping at Cynthia. “She’s sick. I know how to help her.”

She stares at me. “Becca, have you talked to the psychiatrist yet? I told you to do that weeks ago.”

“She needs me,” I say again.

Kat, arrested and indicted under her birth name, Alissa Moulin, gives evidence that verifies my story about the threats made against me.

Cynthia is on cloud nine.

Then Bates is taken off the critical list. He learns about Ben’s shooting, and how I’m being charged with murder. From what I hear, he blows a tube, of which he still has a few poking out.

Now Cynthia’s ready to negotiate.

They offer me second-degree murder and the baseline sentence of fifteen to twenty.

Cynthia laughs.