Life Sentences Page 14

  Then she had joined their ranks.

  The woman was looking at a dress, a Tory Burch shift in pale green and pink. Teena had been selling the hell out of it—those two shades never went out of fashion in preppy Baltimore—but it wasn’t right for this customer.

  “It’s pretty,” she ventured. “And incredibly popular.” The woman winced. Good sign. “I have a sense it’s not to your taste.”

  “I tend to be pretty somber,” the woman admitted with a laugh. “Maybe I should change, though. It’s such a spring look and I’d like to believe that spring might finally make it here, although I know from experience that Baltimore won’t get down to the business of spring until late April.”

  “You’re from here, then?”

  “Originally.” She passed the Tory Burch by but picked the next dress on the rack, a fluffy Alice + Olivia. She was clearly in a romantic mood, drawn to pretty-pretty things quite different from the severe clothes she was wearing today. A woman in the mood for a change. Recent weight loss? But this woman did not move as if her body were new or surprising to her; quite the opposite. This was a woman who was used to being attractive, perhaps even overrated her looks a bit, lost track of how age chipped away at a woman. She had the languid aspect of someone who was dreaming, modeling these clothes for someone’s appreciative gaze. Teena saw this quite a bit, across all age ranges. She wondered at it, the human capacity for silliness and love as the decades mounted up. That part of her was as dead as the nerves in her right hand.

  “What about this? I think it suits your coloring.” She pulled out a jersey dress that was more rose than pink, and hue made all the difference. A Dolce & Gabbana, it also cost twice as much as anything else the woman had picked but was far more appropriate than the bubble dresses draped over her arm. Her figure was good enough, but someone who had made the decision to let her hair go silver—in contrast to Teena, who had just let her hair color go, period—couldn’t carry those younger silhouettes. The shopper inspected the price tag, unfazed.

  “Would you like a pair of pumps?” Teena asked, shooting a look at the suede boots. Gorgeous, with a high, stacked heel, but ill-suited to these clothes. It would be a shame to lose the sale simply because a pair of winter boots defeated the buyer’s imagination. “Size seven?”

  “Eight,” the woman said with a knowing smile. She understood that Teena had been careful to underestimate her shoe size. Good for her. Teena had never understood this peculiar vanity. Granted, Teena wore a size six, but still. Your feet were your feet; no diet or exercise on the planet could change them. It was the one size that women should own with pride. Girly girl that she had always been with her love of clothes and makeup, Teena remained baffled by some other aspects of femininity. There had been moments, in the box with Calliope Jenkins, that she believed this was the root of her problem: She didn’t understand women, much less mothers. Teena couldn’t break Calliope because she wasn’t female enough. Ironic, given that she had lobbied for the assignment—and been granted it—on the basis of gender. Calliope Jenkins looked up at men with those sleepy, clouded eyes, and they had trouble seeing a killer. A crazy woman, yes. The men in the squad all agreed they could smell the crazy on Calliope. A troubled woman and a woman who caused trouble—yes. A killer? Logically, she must be, but logic withered in the face of Calliope’s calm recitations, the call-and-answer of “I take the Fifth,” “I have nothing to say.”

  “I’ll make sure you have a pair of light-colored pumps,” Teena promised. And, while she was at it, she would take the liberty of bringing a few other items. There was a Roberto Cavalli that no one had been able to carry, much less afford.

  CASSANDRA SAT ON THE PADDED stool in the dressing room, wearing nothing but her bra and underwear. The lighting was stupidly harsh. She reminded herself of Tisha’s drawings, only aged thirty years. This had gone too far. She had come here to introduce herself, ask for a meeting, but her nerve had failed and now she felt deceitful. For her earlier books, she had relied on her memory and her journals, maybe a few telephone calls to friends and family. How did someone talk to someone new, especially this sad woman whose thin frame couldn’t quite fill her clothes, pretty and well chosen as they were. Where did one begin? “At the beginning,” her father always said when she was in a panic over a paper for school.

  Strange though it seemed now, she had sometimes struggled with her English assignments, at least in the public school system; the Gordon School had been far more open to her nontraditional approaches. In ninth grade, still in public school, Cassandra had been given a failing mark on a paper on Faulkner because she had attempted to write it in the voice of Benjy. The teacher knocked off a point for every misspelled word and sentence fragment. “I have a hunch,” her father said, “that your teacher has not, in fact, read The Sound and the Fury.” No matter how harsh or kind her teachers’ assessments, her father had gone over her papers and evaluated them according to a different standard. He had critiqued her metaphors, drawn red lines through clichés, insisted that she could do better. “Too neat, too proper,” he said. “I didn’t raise you to be a mynah bird, mouthing teachers’ banalities back to them.”

  She made eye contact with her own image in the triple mirror and practiced her lines silently. Hi, I’m Cassandra Fallows and I’m researching a book about Calliope Jenkins. Not exactly correct. Hi, I’m Cassandra Fallows and I’m writing another memoir, but it’s also an investigation into the life of Calliope Jenkins. God, how did journalists do it? She knew how they approached her, via publicists and e-mail, sometimes at public events. She found the latter a little gauche. But if that tactic was gauche, then sandbagging someone at her job was lower still. Cassandra had felt flush with success, digging up Teena’s address and going to her home, but days had gone by without a reply. Luckily, a neighbor—not the suspicious old man, but a harried young mother unloading groceries—had let the location of Teena’s employment slip, along with the fact that no one ever called her Sistina. The nickname, Teena, had set Cassandra up to expect a tackier and younger person, which she realized now was silly. Twenty years had passed. Teena had to be in her forties at least and she looked to be well into her fifties.

  She pulled on the rose-colored dress that the unsuspecting Teena had chosen for her. The former detective knew her clothes: The dress, unprepossessing on the hanger, was remarkable on the body and the color made her skin glow. She had eschewed the high heels—she had a horror of putting her feet in shoes that other women had worn—so she raised up on tiptoe, hands on her hips, surveying herself. Where on earth would she wear it?

  AT THE CASH REGISTER, even as she paid for the dress and allowed Teena to hand-sell her a lightweight spring coat to complement it, more than doubling the bill, Cassandra still could not figure out how to say her piece. She clung to the fleeting hope that her credit card might prove to be an icebreaker—other clerks, in other stores, and not just bookstores, had made the connection on occasion. But while Teena’s glance seemed to snag on it, she didn’t say anything, only walked around the counter and handed her the hanging bag, a bit of Nordstrom protocol that had always amused Cassandra.

  “I wasn’t actually planning to shop today,” she said.

  “Sometimes, that’s when you find the best things.” Said with a smile, but also finality. The sale had been made; she was done with her. Although Teena was probably one of the ones who followed up with handwritten notes.

  “No, I mean—I came here to meet you.”

  Teena’s face froze. No, no, no—Cassandra heard her father’s voice, castigating. That’s weak, Cassandra, inaccurate. Teena’s face clouded over. But that wasn’t it, either. Her expression changed subtly—a new mask, which established that the previous face had been a mask as well. Teena Murphy probably had masks upon masks upon masks.

  “Why would anyone want to meet me?”

  “I’m writing about Calliope Jenkins—”

  Teena Murphy threw up her hands, almost as if warding off a blow. “I�
��m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Why don’t you take my business card?”

  Teena accepted the card, dropped it, then had trouble retrieving it from the carpet. Was something wrong with her hand?

  “It’s not a book about Calliope Jenkins. But I knew her, when we were children, and I think it’s interesting, the way our paths diverged—”

  “What was she like?”

  Asked in an anguished rush, the words seeming to escape Teena’s throat in spite of herself. The question caught Cassandra off guard. But then—shouldn’t that be the central question? What had Calliope Jenkins been like as a child, as an adult? Did the child predict the adult and her life in any way? Cassandra should be prepared to answer this question. It was nothing less than the spine of her book.

  She was even less prepared when Teena said, “Buy another five thousand dollars’ worth of clothing, and I’ll talk to you on my break.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  GLORIA WAS ROLLING THE DICE on her Eagle Scout, going for the psych evaluation in advance of the petition to move the case to juvenile court. She had mapped out the strategy with her client and his guardian. It was a little awkward, the guardian being the dead father’s brother. He could barely stand to be in the same room as the boy. A well-to-do engineer, he had decided that standing by his nephew was the best way to maintain appearances. But he couldn’t conceal his anger toward the boy, much less his fear.

  He sat with Gloria now, waiting in the hallway of the county courthouse while the boy met with psychiatrists.

  “He has to be crazy, right?” the uncle asked Gloria.

  “I think it will be determined that he needs long-term psychiatric help,” Gloria said, knowing she wasn’t really answering the uncle’s question. “We don’t need that finding to have him tried as a juvenile, but it could help.”

  “What if he comes out with a clean bill of health?”

  He won’t, Gloria wanted to say. He killed his parents and his twin sisters, for no discernible reason, and he’s been lying about it ever since, although not particularly well. Instead, she said, “It won’t prevent me from petitioning the court to have him tried as a juvenile. But he’s sixteen, at the upper edge of the age limit, and if he’s considered sane, such as it were, that will be tougher.”

  “But if he’s tried as a juvenile, they have to let him out—”

  “At twenty-one,” Gloria said.

  “So he gets five years. That’s a little more than a year per homicide.”

  “Even in the adult system, a first-time offender might draw concurrent rather than subsequent sentences.”

  “But not five years.”

  “You’d be surprised. I mean, no, I can’t imagine a judge would sentence him to five years, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he served less than ten.”

  “He would be only twenty-six,” the uncle said. “Still a young man.”

  “A young man who had served ten years in the Maryland prison system. If you believe in fresh starts, that’s not the best way to get him one. Look, this isn’t a gimmick or the exploitation of a loophole. He’s entitled to be tried as a juvenile. He’s under eighteen. A decade or so ago, that would have been the assumption, the only option. Have you read the emerging science on the adolescent brain? They shouldn’t be driving cars, if you ask me. I know this is terrifying, but if your nephew did what he is accused of doing—and he has not confessed, please keep that in mind—it was not a decision born of sound reasoning, whatever they say in there.” She jerked her head toward the closed door.

  “But as a citizen,” the uncle pressed, “would you want him on the street at twenty-one?”

  “I’m his lawyer. I want the best outcome for him. The state takes care of the other citizens. It’s a pretty good system, if you ask me.”

  The uncle, looking vaguely nauseous, excused himself. Gloria was glad for the distraction of Harold Lenhardt, even if she knew he was on the other side, rooting for her to lose this round. She liked Lenhardt. Everybody did. Even some of the people he locked up ended up liking him.

  “Smart strategy,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Have you ever considered,” she said, “that it might be better for the family if this isn’t dragged out in court?”

  “Let me guess. He’s working on these tales of amazing abuse, Mommy and Daddy doing horrible things to their kiddies. He killed them to make it stop, then killed his sisters because they could never be made whole again. Meant to kill himself, but found that it’s actually hard to get a shotgun in your mouth. I say ‘working on’ because it’s all bullshit, but I’m betting that’s where he goes next, after he finally lets go of the intruder story.”

  Gloria had known that no decent murder police would be fooled by her client, and Lenhardt was considerably better than decent. She shrugged, giving nothing away. She hoped.

  “Hey, did some writer call you?” Lenhardt.

  “From the Beacon-Light? Of course.”

  “No, not about this. That old case, whatchamacallit. She tracked me down, trying to get a lead on Teena. I figured she must want to talk to you as well.”

  So Cassandra Fallows was trying to find Teena Murphy. Not that Teena would talk, but it was interesting. Teena, Reg, Gloria—could she find Calliope?

  “Oh, her. She’s been leaving messages. I’ve been ignoring them.”

  “Gloria Bustamante, avoiding publicity. I guess they’re ice-skating in hell right now.”

  Gloria smiled. She loved being misunderstood. Let people think she was a publicity hound, let them think she was a not-so-closeted gay woman, let them think she was a drunk. She would rather have a million misimpressions stand than have anyone know who she really was.

  “I ran into Teena. She looked like shit.”

  Gloria barely remembered the detective’s face.

  “She didn’t seem interested. In this lady or her book. But you know, Teena would dearly love to be vindicated.”

  “Wouldn’t anyone?”

  “Ain’t it the truth. Like your little Eagle Scout who’s in there now, talking to the psychiatrists. He thinks he was right. His logic might not be our logic, but he has some sort of reason for what he did. The question is, does that make him crazy? Or just plain evil?”

  “Pretty big philosophical questions for a Tuesday, Lenhardt.”

  “Yeah. Is evil insanity? Or a really unpleasant version of sanity? Like, there’s a part of me that thinks, a kid who did what he did—and the fact that we couldn’t break him down into confessing only convinces me that he did do it—he has to be crazy. But maybe not according to the law, you know?”

  “You been paying attention to that case in New York?” Gloria kept her voice as bland as possible. “The one where they’re going to release the guy who didn’t kill his parents when he was a teenager but got worked over by some really zealous homicide detectives who wrung a half-assed confession out of him? He served twenty years.”

  Lenhardt waved his hand, refusing the change of subject. “At least when I sit in a room with a kid like that, I’ve got somebody nearby with a gun. I don’t know how you do it.”

  Gloria did, but it wasn’t any of Lenhardt’s business. It was easier, in some ways, to work with defendants like this, where she was sure of what had happened. Much easier than trafficking in the kind of ambiguity that Calliope Jenkins had presented. Everyone was so sure that she had killed her baby. Actually, Gloria was, too. But she had believed that telling the truth might be better for Callie, whereas everyone else was adamant that she stick with the constitutional strategy. For a long time, Gloria hadn’t understood why. When she did—when she did, she left the firm. Should Gloria break down, talk to this writer after all? But, no, she had nothing to say. She had suspicions, suppositions, but in the end, she had walked right up to the door and refused to open it, chosen another door, and walked out.

  “Do you think Teena still blames Calliope Jenkins for everything that went wrong with her life?”

/>   “She has to blame someone,” Lenhardt said. On this topic, his injured colleague, he dropped the glibness. “That case, it’s like a curse, isn’t it? Like something you’d see in an old movie or that episode where the Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii. First Teena, then the social worker—”

  “I’d have committed suicide, too, if that happened on my watch.”

  “Officially, an accident,” Lenhardt corrected. “Ran her car into a tree.”

  “Freud said there are no accidents.”

  “Bobby Freud? Good police, but he never worked traffic investigation that I know of.”

  Gloria had to laugh. She knew better than anyone that life was full of accidents.

  The doors to the hearing room opened and Gloria’s client walked out, all smiles until he saw her. He adjusted his face into a more serious, thoughtful grimace, probably on the assumption that was what she wanted. On the assumption that she cared how he presented himself, which was wrong. He might be evil, whatever evil was. She really wasn’t sure. She honestly didn’t care.

  CHAPTER

  17

  HER CLOTHING QUOTA MET, CASSANDRA ended up taking Teena to a nearby sushi place, a recommendation from another customer who overheard Cassandra say that she preferred protein at her midday meal. Teena, despite her long tenure at the mall and a residence a few miles south, didn’t seem to have any idea where someone might eat in the area. Now that they were at the restaurant—Sans Sushi/Thai One On; Cassandra couldn’t help thinking how her father would wince at that—it was apparent that Teena was one of those odd people who didn’t care about food. However, she seemed almost too interested in the glass of white wine that had been set before her. Not that she was drinking rapidly, quite the opposite. She conspicuously ignored it, taking tiny sips, then staring away. Yet she stole glances at the glass when she thought Cassandra wasn’t looking and also studied Cassandra’s little cup of chilled sake.