27 Blood in the Water (11 page)

“At seven o’clock in the morning?” Arthur asked.

“Your lawyer’s here,” the little Hispanic woman said.

Arthur got off the bed and turned his back to the door. He put his wrists together behind his back and pushed them through the slot. He felt the cuffs snap over his wrists.

He stepped away from the door and turned to look at it. The little Hispanic woman unlocked it and stepped back. He stepped out into the corridor and let her take his arm.

“You don’t think it’s a little odd for my lawyer to be here at seven o’clock in the morning?”

“Your lawyer’s here,” she said again.

“He’s a public definder,” Arthur said. “He doesn’t go anywhere at seven o’clock in the morning.”

The little Hispanic woman didn’t say anything, and Arthur let it go. It was a break in the routine. He thought he should be grateful for it. He looked behind him at the cart bringing the breakfast trays. He had no idea what happened if he missed the breakfast tray. He probably just missed breakfast. He didn’t like the idea. He never ate much of anything at home, but he was hungry all the time in here.

They went to the end of the corridor and around a corner. The little Hispanic woman opened another set of doors. They were in yet another corridor with doors, but these doors didn’t seem to lead to cells. She stopped and unlocked one of them and then opened it wide.

“Go ahead,” she said. “You’ve got to get dressed for court.”

Arthur looked into the room and saw his clothes there, his jacket, his tie, his shirt, his trousers, the entire suit he was wearing when he’d been brought to this place. The suit was folded instead of hung up. It looked a little tired. He’d already worn it four or five times. They kept making him change into it when he had a court hearing.

“Am I supposed to go to court, really?” he said. “Now? At this hour of the morning? I didn’t even think courts were open at this hour of the morning. What’s going on here?”

“Get dressed,” the little Hispanic woman said as she removed Arthur’s handcuffs.

Then she locked the door behind him.

Arthur went over to the shelf where the suit was and looked at it. He remembered putting it on the morning he was arrested. He’d been very careful about picking it out. They were already looking at him oddly in the office. They were already talking about him behind his back. Then there were the secretaries, who hadn’t liked coming anywhere near his desk. He kept expecting to be fired, or, if not fired—that might look bad, firing somebody who hadn’t been convicted of anything, or even arrested—then put on some kind of leave of absence “until all this was over.” People were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but it didn’t work that way in everyday life. It was especially not the case once you’d been arrested.

He shucked off his orange jumpsuit and started putting on the parts of the suit, putting them on one after the other. His belt was not here, probably as a precaution against suicide, but that was par for the course with the way things were done around here. If he’d wanted to commit suicide, he could have used the tie, and they had given him that. Besides, why would anyone want to commit suicide in just these circumstances? He hadn’t been convicted of anything. He wasn’t on his way to the death house. The only thing that made him feel like he wanted to die was the endless boredom, and now the boredom had been relieved by all this.

He went to the door, knocked so that she’d know he was done, and turned his back so that she could put the handcuffs on. Instead, she swung the door open all the way and stepped back.

“He’s in the conference room,” she said.

Then she turned her back to him and started walking. Arthur was nonplussed. If this had been one of those movies he liked so much, this would have been a setup. She would have tricked him into following her down a corridor unbound, and then somebody would have raised the alarm that he was about to escape. Then there would have been a hail of bullets. Then he would have been dead.

She got to the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened immediately. It had been waiting on this floor. She stepped back and waited until Arthur got inside. Then she pressed the button for the first floor and stared at the ceiling.

Arthur looked down at the thick curve of her neck. He thought again that he could take her any time he wanted to. He could leave her disabled and bloody on the floor. He could walk right over her and out and never be heard from again, except that there were all those other people around, and some of them had guns.

The elevator door bounced open. She stepped out into yet another corridor. Arthur stepped out after her. This corridor was full of desks and people, not prisoners but officers. They looked at him with interest as he came walking out, and as soon as he passed Arthur could hear the low murmuring of whispered conversations.

The little Hispanic woman went to the third door on the left and said, “He’s in there.”

Then she waited until he opened the door and went inside.

The room he walked into was largish. There was a big conference table in the middle of it, with chairs all around. His legal aid attorney was sitting in one of them, holding tightly to a stack of folders he had pulled out of a briefcase. Arthur tried to remember the kid’s name, but he couldn’t. He looked like he might be twenty-two.

“Well,” he said, when Arthur walked in. “Sit down. Sit down. This is a development.”

Arthur sat down and folded his hands in front of him “What’s a development?”

“This is,” the lawyer said. “Didn’t they tell you? They’re dropping the charges against you for killing your wife.”

“What?”

“They’re dropping the charges against you for killing your wife,” the lawyer repeated. “And that changes everything, of course. It even changes the bail situation. They’ll never be able to hold you on remand now. They might have, of course, if they weren’t dropping one set of charges, but now with this—”

“Why?” Arthur asked carefully. “Why are they dropping the charges against me for killing my wife?”

The lawyer laid his hands flat on the conference table and sighed. “I don’t actually know,” he said, “but I’ve heard rumors. I’ve heard lots of them. We’ll know for sure when we go into court, and that’s in less than half an hour, so I want you to be ready. But the rumors are that the DNA evidence came back and the other body they found wasn’t your wife’s at all.”

Arthur considered this. “They had DNA from my wife?”

“I don’t know,” the lawyer said. “I suppose they must have. Mr. Heydreich, really, it doesn’t matter right now. We can get to all that later when we’ve got a little time. What matters now is that we go into that hearing and if they insist on charging you for the murder of Michael Platte, then we get bail for you on that. I’m pretty sure that’s more than perfectly doable. The judge is old Nancy Kildare, and she’s got no patience with prosecutors as it is. So just get yourself into some kind of a good mental zone and let’s go in there and get you out of here for good. Then you can get home and get back to some kind of real life.”

Arthur thought of saying that he would not be able to get back to any kind of real life until somebody else was caught and charged and convicted of the murder of Michael Platte, at least, but he did not say that. He only wondered where the police thought his wife was now.

2

LizaAnne Marsh had gone into a state of nearly apoplectic mourning on the day she’d heard that Michael Platte had died, but it had been a month now, and it was getting harder to keep her focus. She was still really angry about what had happened to Michael, of course, and beyond furious at all those ridiculous stories about how he was having an affair with Martha Heydreich. It was ludicrous to think that somebody like Michael would have had an affair with somebody as old and ugly and extreme as that woman, when he could have had any girl he wanted in Waldorf Pines. He could have had LizaAnne herself. She knew he was interested. If he’d lived, it would have been just a matter of time before they had something going, and it would have been something a lot more attractive than anything he could have had with that stupid shrieking cunt. People just said things like that because they liked to sound as if they knew things.

LizaAnne was in her bedroom. Stretched out across her bedspread she had two hundred and twenty little thumbnail photographs, one for each of the members of the senior class of Pineville Station Senior High School. She loved having these pictures, because they made everything so much easier. Before this year, she’d had to get along with nothing but pens and pencils and notebooks. Even the computer hadn’t been much help. Now she could actually see what she was looking at. That made all the difference.

Heather was in the bathroom, running the water in the sink far too long. Heather always ran the water in the sink far too long, and she took too long looking at herself in the vanity mirror, too. Heather didn’t have a bathroom for her own bedroom at home. Heather’s parents thought that would be “spoiling” her. As far as LizaAnne was concerned, Heather’s parents were too retarded for words.

The water turned off in the sink. The swoosh of the air dryer went on. LizaAnne actually hated the air dryer, but so many of the people who came over were impressed with it, she didn’t want to ask her father to take it out.

Heather came out into the room and brushed her hair off her face. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” she said. “My mother says it’s all around the club today. It’s everywhere. They’re going to let Mr. Heydreich out of jail because they don’t think he killed his wife.”

“I don’t care if he killed her,” LizaAnne said. “I don’t care who killed her. I’m only glad she’s gone. Of course, it would have been better if Michael had still been alive to enjoy being able to live a normal life without having her skulking around him all the time, but that’s the way things are. Do they still think he killed Michael?”

“I don’t know,” Heather said. “I was trying to overhear when my mother was on the phone, but you know what that’s like. She doesn’t like me listening.”

“I’ve been thinking about Kathi Colson,” LizaAnne said. “I mean, I know she was at my sweet sixteen party, but I don’t think that should be the standard. I mean, I wanted lots of people at the party, so I let in people who don’t really belong to the A group. I mean, I didn’t let in dweebs or anybody like that. I didn’t let in anybody retarded. But I think Kathi Colson belongs in the B group. Don’t you?”

Heather looked down at the tiny picture in LizaAnne’s hand, and LizaAnne found herself thinking that she had been right all along. These pictures were really wonderful. She could see the faces of everybody in the class, and once she’d seen the faces she would know who belonged where. She was so glad she’d made friends with that retarded dork on the yearbook committee. She’d never have gotten them otherwise. It didn’t matter that she’d have to invite him to a party this year. He’d figure out soon enough he wasn’t wanted, and her own popularity was unassailable. She could never be touched when it came to that.

She put the tiny picture of Kathi Colson in the pile with the B group and searched around until she found the one of Didi Webb. Didi Webb was a special case. Didi had belonged to the A group, but then things had started to happen. First Didi’s father had lost his job. Then the whole family had had to move out of Waldorf Pines, and there had even been rumors that the bank was about to foreclose on the house. Of course, nobody’s house was ever foreclosed on in Waldorf Pines. The club had some kind of fund that stopped that from happening, but it didn’t keep a family in the house they couldn’t pay for. It just bought the house from under them and sold it to somebody else. Didi’s family had actually packed up and moved in the middle of the night, so that nobody would see them.

At about that time, LizaAnne had moved Didi from the A group to the B group, which meant being very careful to make sure that there were no empty places at the lunch table when Didi wanted to sit down. There were musical chairs for a while, until Didi got the hint, and stopped trying. There were awkward moments in the girls’ room, too, but LizaAnne could always cover up for those by concentrating really hard on her makeup. If things had stopped there, of course, Didi would just have descended to the B group, and that would have been that.

LizaAnne put the little picture down in front of Heather and waited. Heather looked away.

“It’s not like it’s her fault,” Heather said finally. “She didn’t make her father lose his job. It was just bad luck.”

“I don’t believe in luck,” LizaAnne said. “And I don’t think anybody ever loses a job unless he’s done something wrong. I mean, think of all the things we don’t know about. Mr. Webb might be an alcoholic. Or he might gamble. And, you know, even if he did those things, not everybody who does them loses his job. And people who lose their jobs get new ones. He’s been out of a job for a year now. There has to be something wrong with him.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her,” Heather said.

LizaAnne brushed this away. “Of course there does,” she said. “Families count. It’s just like dogs, you know. There’s a breed, and which breed it is determines a lot of things. The Webbs are—well, there must be something wrong with them. My father says that you can fool people for a while, but in the long run it all comes out. That’s what must have happened here. Mr. Webb fooled people for a while, but now everybody knows what he is. He’s no better than a bum, really.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true.”

“Of course it’s true,” LizaAnne said. “And if he’s a bum, she’s a bum. But even if she wasn’t, we’d still be where we are, and that’s that she doesn’t have a car anymore. She comes to school on the bus. We’ve seen her.”

“Lots of people come to school on the bus,” Heather said.

“Of course they do,” LizaAnne said. “But they’re all in the C group or lower, and you know it. And I’m not the only one who feels that way about it, either. Didi’s been hanging around with Norma Antonelli for weeks now, and I heard Norma talking about it to Sally Carr in the girls’ room. I mean, I’m not asking for her to have some fancy car the way she used to, but practically everybody has something to drive. Even dweebs have something to drive. It’s impossible.”