Life Sentences Page 28

  But for all her discipline in other aspects of her life, she had never been very good at denying herself the men she wanted.

  “Donna, I’m not sure you should be here,” she said.

  “Please,” Donna said, throwing up her hands as if Cassandra had told a mildly amusing joke. “Reg and I have no secrets.”

  Again, Cassandra wished she could see Reg’s face, but he seemed intent on avoiding eye contact. Had any fire ever required so much tending and poking?

  “I found Callie Jenkins this weekend.”

  “In Bridgeville, yes,” Donna said.

  “You know where she is? Reg told me he had no idea.”

  Donna nodded. “He did tell that one tiny lie. I’m sorry about that, but it’s not to anyone’s benefit, not even Callie’s—especially Callie’s—to dig this up. You’ve heard how no good deed goes unpunished? My father tried to help Callie and she spreads these ridiculous lies about him. It makes no sense, but people are used to the truth not making sense. That’s the key to your business, right?”

  “My business?”

  “The things you write. Truth is stranger than fiction. Which sets people up to believe a story like Callie’s, preposterous as it is. It was easier to give her free legal help and pay her rather than allow her to humiliate him with her outlandish lies.”

  Cassandra had learned something helpful from Callie; a person didn’t have to speak right away, rush into a silence. She sorted through Donna’s words and, eventually, put her finger on the flaw.

  “What about Fatima, Donna? What sort of outlandish stories does she tell, why does she get paid? Or is it simply that Fatima, who also was a volunteer for the campaign, might be able to corroborate the affair? And, I as understand it, detail her own sexual relationship with your father.”

  “Fatima’s husband runs a limousine service. Campaigns use transportation services all the time. I’m sure Fatima would be happy to explain that to you.”

  “But it’s not against the law to lie to me. Will she be willing to say the same things to a grand jury?”

  “Oh, I don’t see a grand jury caring about this,” Donna said. “Besides, as you just said—no one risks anything by lying to you, so why do you assume Callie was telling the truth?”

  Reg had finally turned away from the fireplace, but he seemed happy to let his wife run the conversation. His face was a study. Cassandra couldn’t tell if he was angry or upset. Or betrayed. You lied to me, Cassandra wanted to say. You told me you didn’t know where she was. Then again, they were both adulterers and lying is the cornerstone of adultery. Hard to be offended on that score. She had a sudden image of Reg, wrapped in a towel, sitting at her laptop. She remembered Fatima’s resigned greeting at her doorstep, the very lack of surprise. Reg could have used the spotlight function to scour her computer for certain names, check on her progress. Was that the only reason he had slept with her?

  “Perhaps,” she appealed to Reg, “this should be a private conversation?”

  “Agreed,” Donna said with a sympathetic nod.

  Yet it was Reg who left the room.

  “You’ll have to forgive him,” Donna said. Cassandra really understood, for the first time, the phrase about butter not melting in someone’s mouth, how cool a mouth had to be for this to be possible. “It’s been a lot to process. He knew my family was helping Callie. He didn’t know it was essentially blackmail, although he had his suspicions. Uncle Julius has always had his…proclivities.”

  “Uncle Julius’s proclivities, but not your father’s?”

  Donna looked a little lost. She was strong, but she wasn’t used to fighting her own battles, out in the open. Donna operated in a world where unpleasant things remained implicit. Where, for example, a husband learned not to ask too many questions about the client he represented at his boss’s request.

  “This is not about my father,” Donna said. “That’s all you need to know. And he should not be humiliated because some aging crack whore suddenly wants more money.”

  “Callie didn’t ask for money. She risked the money she has by talking to me.”

  “She’s playing you.”

  Teena had said the same thing. But Teena had been crushed, disappointed that Callie hadn’t made a true confession.

  “Let me tell you what I’ve figured out on my own. Callie had an affair with your father. She had a baby. He broke up with her about a month before the boy’s birth and she was angry, angry enough to put your father’s name on the birth certificate. Granted, birth certificates aren’t truly public, but it was a problematic document, something she could hold over his head forever. She could have demanded support, and a court would have ordered genetic testing.”

  “Yet she didn’t. What does that tell you?”

  Cassandra had thought that part through. “That she was in love with him and believed he would leave your mother for her, eventually. That’s how he controlled her. But she was depressed, hysterical. Her behavior was increasingly erratic. It must have been worrisome for the upstanding Andre Howard—the good Howard brother—to have such a loose cannon. It was absolutely providential when the boy was taken and put up for adoption.”

  “A godsend for the boy. Otherwise, he might have ended up dead, like his brother.”

  “We’re talking about your brother, Donna. Think about this. Your half brother—Aubrey’s uncle—and he’s lost to you. Unless he signed up for one of those registries they started offering adopted children and their biological parents in the eighties. About the time that Donntay, the second son, died.”

  “Are you going back to writing fiction, Cassandra? Maybe it will work out better for you this time.”

  The insult carried some sting, but it was clumsy by Donna’s standards.

  “I think your father was the anonymous tipster who reported Callie for neglect. Even if he wasn’t, he seized that opportunity to convince Callie to put the boy up for adoption. Her parental rights were terminated less than six months after the initial report. That doesn’t happen unless a parent relinquishes custody. The most inept public defender on the planet wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. But Callie agreed to release her own son.”

  “Oh, this is new,” Donna said. “She’s adding to the story now.”

  “No, she didn’t volunteer this. She’s ashamed that she surrendered him so willingly. But when I called her last night, she admitted that your father persuaded her that she should let the boy be adopted.”

  “The story just gets more and more fantastic, doesn’t it?”

  “I think it gets more logical. It explains why your father would agree to help Callie when her second child died. Yes, their child had essentially been disappeared; the birth certificate was now a confidential document that no one would ever be allowed to see, not even their son. But Callie was still out there, and she was increasingly unpredictable. She was using drugs, and she was depressed again, just as she was after the birth of her first child. Which indicates that her mental state might have been postpartum, not that her defense attorneys seemed to care or notice. He needed something to hold over her, and a homicide charge worked nicely. Never mind that the circumstances, as Callie described them, would have allowed for a defense that her child died of sudden infant death syndrome, that an autopsy might have proved that her child wasn’t abused. If she’s telling the truth, an autopsy would have been in her best interest—but not in your father’s. He trained her in silence, in secrets, and she never questioned him. But Gloria did. Gloria started poking around. Is that why she left and was replaced by Reg?”

  “Did Gloria tell you that? Because she would be disbarred—”

  “Gloria Bustamante won’t even take my phone calls.” It was true, as far as it went. Gloria was probably on safe ground, giving them public records and the CD, but why make life complicated for her? Cassandra wasn’t even sure if Gloria knew why the fact of Aubrey would unlock Callie’s secrets.

  “Callie Jenkins was an unfit mother. Her first child was
taken from her—”

  “For neglect, not abuse. Callie says she never raised a hand to either child, and I believe her. Because she knew what it was to be hit, and she wouldn’t do that to her own children.”

  “Please. We all know that abused children are more likely to be violent. Besides, her second son was a crack baby, which is why she was assigned a social worker in the first place. She probably shook him to death when he wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “Crack babies were a media myth.”

  “All babies cry. We’ll never know what happened, will we?”

  “Because your father took that baby away, made sure that Donntay’s body wouldn’t be found. Who benefited from Callie sitting in jail seven years, saying nothing? Primarily your father.”

  Donna tapped her foot as if merely impatient with the conversation, the time she was wasting on a Sunday afternoon.

  “Look, what do you want from us?”

  “Nothing. I’m here as a courtesy. I am going to write about this, but given the nature of what’s happened, there will probably be legal consequences even before my book comes out.”

  Donna swatted at the air as if trying to catch a tiny bug in her palm. “There won’t be any legal consequences. Oh, sure, the state’s attorney may be pressured into looking into the case if you can persuade anyone to print this outlandish nonsense. But it’s going to come down to my father’s word against Callie’s. Who do you think will be believed?”

  “That’s not my concern. I’ll write what I know, and people can decide for themselves what the truth is.”

  Donna clearly found it odd that anyone—Cassandra, readers, strangers—would not understand immediately that a Howard was so much more valuable than other people.

  “Maybe I wasn’t clear,” she said. “What do you need to drop this?”

  “You can’t buy me out of my book contract, Donna. Even if I didn’t have a contract I would feel obligated to tell someone what I knew. If I don’t, I become an accessory. I’ll be talking to the state’s attorney this week.”

  “Do you want Reg?” She might have been offering tea or coffee.

  “What?”

  “For keeps? It could be arranged. You have to admit—you are going to have some problems with credibility if you insist on writing this. The scorned woman and all.”

  What if this were real? Cassandra had thought Reg was asking what would happen if their affair became something serious, long lasting. Now she had to wonder if he had inadvertently tipped her to the charade it was, a situation meant to distract and, yes, discredit her.

  “Did you tell your husband to sleep with me?”

  Donna sighed as if being tested by a slow salesclerk. “I told him to help you with your project, thinking that would help us keep tabs on you. I didn’t order him to fuck you and rather hoped he wouldn’t. But I know my husband. I know all about him, despite what people think. And you—well, you’ve related your promiscuous tendencies in great detail for millions of readers. You can’t keep your legs together on a bet, which is a bit unseemly at our age, Cassandra. Even Fatima grew out of that.”

  “Perhaps with your father’s help.”

  “Look, I don’t care what happened between you and Reg. My husband loves me.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Like a skilled politician, Donna didn’t bother with questions she didn’t want to answer. “You could have a nice life together. Not here in Baltimore—he’d be untouchable, professionally, after humiliating me in such a fashion, leaving me for this neurotic white woman who can’t shut up about herself. But someone would buy out his interest in the firm and he would be rich, even after giving me my share.”

  Cassandra felt almost as outraged on Reg’s behalf as she did for herself, reduced to this loathsome caricature in a few deft words. This neurotic white woman who can’t shut up about herself. But then Donna, Fatima, even Tisha would argue that she had done the same to them, nailed them to the page with a few lines of blithe description. Donna’s version of Reg as a man who would do anything she told him was even more unflattering.

  “Secrets are like floodwater, Donna,” Cassandra said. “They’re eventually going to find a place to breach. You can’t control Callie anymore. You can’t embarrass me. I’ve always told the truth about myself, unattractive as it may be.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” She couldn’t help flushing. She had several things she preferred to keep secret. Not so much the affair with Reg—she was resigned to that becoming public if she took on the Howards. But there was Bernard, and Bernard’s wife.

  Donna walked over to an antique secretary, a fussy overwrought piece, the kind of item that decorators called “important,” a euphemism for hideous. A truly confident woman, someone secure in matters of taste, would never have allowed it to be foisted on her. Donna removed a manila folder from one of the desk’s cubbyholes and brought it to Cassandra.

  “What—” It was a police report, no more than two pages. A police report dated April 6, 1968.

  “Read it out loud if you like.”

  Cassandra chose to read it to herself: Police received a call to the 1800 block of Druid Hill Avenue for a report of an assault. Patrols found a number one male beating a naked number two male while a number one female tried to intercede. The assailant, Manfred Watson, told police he had found the victim, Cedric Fallows, in bed with his girlfriend. The victim fled the couple’s apartment—“This is bullshit.”

  “Your book was bullshit. Check a timeline, Cassandra. Next month marks the fortieth anniversary; there’s no shortage of information available. There were a few incidents early in the weekend, but not in that neighborhood. The real violence started late that afternoon. Your father sneaked out to have sex with his girlfriend and got his ass kicked by her common-law husband. He used the riots as a cover.”

  Stunned as she was, Cassandra couldn’t help realizing that these bare, utilitarian sentences threaded a tiny needle. Her father’s insistence on the errand, her mother’s thin-lipped tension. The cake—Annie worked at Silber’s bakery. She had probably made Cassandra’s mermaid cake. He might have met her two months before, buying that hideous Washington’s Birthday cake for her mother. Here was the reason her usually articulate father had never been able to convey the assault with any real sense of drama, why Annie had been awkward and diffident when Cassandra met her in the hospital. Only—it was not her father who had spread the story. Cassandra was the one who had carried it into the world. He was simply too proud to call it back.

  “My family’s privacy for your family’s privacy,” Donna said. “Not that your family really has any privacy left, but you know what I mean. Your version can stand, uncontested. But not if you start talking about Callie.”

  Cassandra’s mind raced, overwhelmed. She wanted to argue that there were significant differences between their fathers. Yes, Cedric Fallows had lied, but it was a lie meant only for his wife and daughter, not the world. Andre Howard had lived a much larger lie, indifferent to the people he hurt as long as he could maintain his reputation. Her father’s story was only part of her first book, which at least had the merit of being utterly sincere. Yet, wasn’t Cassandra, too, taking advantage of Callie in a sense?

  “It’s not always a shameful thing, keeping secrets,” Donna said. “And it’s not hurtful, not in this case. Callie Jenkins killed her son, and she spent seven years in jail. Your father told a lie. My father succumbed to blackmail.”

  Cassandra found her voice again. “People who allow themselves to be blackmailed usually have something to hide.”

  “Cassandra, everyone has something to hide.”

  She was not being facile or glib, Cassandra realized. Donna was on intimate terms with secrets, and not only her father’s. What happened in your first marriage? Cassandra wanted to ask. Why is it such an untouchable subject, even for Reg? Is it the reason you can’t have children? Can you really be that cavalier about Reg’s cheating? Doesn’t i
t get exhausting, being you, keeping track of all the things you’re not supposed to talk about, maintaining this perfect façade?

  She said, “I’ll get back to you, Donna. Obviously, this is not my decision alone. But this much I can tell you—I’m passing on the offer of your husband.”

  She left Bolton Hill and drove across town, seeing and not seeing the familiar streets, absently cataloguing the few landmarks that had survived her childhood. The zebra-striped house; the shady avenue through Leakin Park, where the trees were starting to bud; the long-vanquished Windsor Hills Pharmacy, overtaken by the adjacent gas station and a minimart. Gravel crunched beneath her tires, summoning her back to the world. Her mother, drawn by the sound of a car, came out of the garage, wiping her hands on a rag.

  “Cassandra,” she said. “I thought we had agreed to meet at the restaurant. Besides, you’re hours early.”

  “More like forty years late.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  LENORE WAS STRIPPING A SMALL end table in the unheated garage. “Excuse me if I keep working but it’s almost too cool to be doing this, and I don’t dare use a space heater, so I have to keep going.”

  “I don’t recognize that table,” Cassandra said, trying to find a dust-free spot on which to sit, or at least lean.

  “I trash-picked it,” her mother said with evident pride. “There’s still a lot of dumping in the park. Hard to tell if the wood on this piece is good enough to stand on its own, but I can always paint it.”

  The solvent smell was familiar, if not exactly soothing. As a child, Cassandra had been embarrassed by her mother’s thrift—trash-picking, shopping at the Purple Heart and garage sales. Once Cassandra began making good money, she had reveled in buying what she wanted when she wanted it, refusing to clip coupons or wait for sales. And she adamantly refused to learn how to repair anything. She recalled her mother’s first project, in which Lenore had decided to install a shower fixture in the old bathroom adjacent to Cassandra’s room. It had required three trips to the hardware store over the course of a rainy Saturday and the result had been a Rube Goldberg contraption, with multiple—well, Cassandra didn’t know to this day what those pieces of hardware were called. The new fixture had extended out almost six inches and she was forever bruising herself on it. But Lenore improved. Today, she could install a garbage disposal, put up molding, lay a new floor—using adhesive tiles, but still, she could do it. She could even handle projects requiring wiring. But she was in her seventies, her hands losing strength and dexterity. What would her mother do, who would she be, when she could no longer fix things?