After Her (7 page)

My father never liked to hear about my visions. In some ways this was out of character, because my father was, himself, a man who operated a lot on instinct—someone who followed leads that came from no discernible place but a gut sense he was onto something, which very often he was. Maybe part of his attitude concerning what I experienced came from not wanting to saddle me with the weight of some kind of otherworldly abilities that might in the end create sorrow or trouble for me, as perhaps they had for him. (He never said this, but I felt my father saw things too, though he just chalked it up to a detective's instincts.) Suppose I saw into the future, and what I saw was frightening? Better to believe it wasn't real.

So he offered alternative explanations. There had been minor tremors for days leading up to that quake, he said. Pete the shoemaker had been so old he was bound to die before too long. If a person predicts the phone's about to ring often enough, she's bound to get it right now and then.

“What you observe in Rachel,” he said to our mother, back when they were still together, “is how perceptive she is. She's tuned in to her gut, and she's a great observer. These are traits of a good detective, incidentally. She's watched my comings and goings so well she's gotten a feel for when I'm likely to come home. Even if it's not the same time every day.”

I had not mentioned, then, the other time I saw an event happening before it did. The night our mother found the key in our father's pocket and knew who it belonged to. The crying I heard through the thin walls of our house, and our father's low voice, saying little, denying nothing. Then gone, that same night. My vision had not revealed the woman's face, but I knew she'd have black hair.

Of all the people acquainted with my abilities to tune in to some other place besides the one we inhabited, Patty was the most fervent and steadfast in her conviction that they were real. In the past, my sister and I had considered the possibility that my gifts might be put to use in the purchase of winning lottery tickets or (if we could only get someone to take us there) at the racetrack. But I'd explained to her that this was not a gift I could call on at will. I wasn't a fortune-teller. I was more like some CB operator, tuning the dial of his radio, picking up random frequencies. The moments when my powers presented themselves occurred spontaneously and seemed up to this point beyond my control. They could show up at any moment. They could also fail to do so.

Now, though, I sought to call on this gift of mine for the purpose of locating the killer of Charlene Gray and seeing to it that he was put behind bars—though more so, probably, out of a desire to demonstrate to our father what wonderful and helpful daughters he had, what great members of his team we were. I knew he'd love me—love us both—whether or not we helped him solve his case. But we wanted to be more than his precious little girls. We wanted to be his helpers and sidekicks, his secret weapon. We might not get to live with him anymore. But we'd be irreplaceable.

 

Chapter Eight

W
here we lived, the only crimes you generally heard about—the kind they had laws against anyway—were things like driving under the influence or shoplifting. In his career in the city, my father had handled many murders—and once, back in his days as a beat cop, he had taken a bullet in a domestic dispute in which a husband had put a gun to his wife's head while she held their screaming baby.

But mostly—as with that one—these crimes occurred among people who knew each other already, where things got out of hand. Because murder interested me—and someday in the future, as a writer, I felt it would be important to understand the workings of the criminal mind—I'd followed the story, the summer before, of a series of killings of women in New York City by a man who called himself “Son of Sam.” For a period of many weeks, it seemed as if people all over that city had been so terrified they hardly left their apartments at night.

“If you were on that homicide squad, you would have gotten him,” I'd told our father. Patty and I believed he must be the smartest detective in America. The world probably.

“It's not always about the detective,” he told us. “Sometimes you've got a killer on your hands who just doesn't give you much to work with. David Berkowitz was like that. You know how they got him in the end? A parking ticket.”

“You would have figured something out,” I said. “You always do.”

“I'll tell you one thing,” he said, lighting up a cigarette. “It must have been driving those New York homicide guys crazy, having that animal at large. Women showing up dead, and them not finding anything to go on. For a copper, there's nothing worse.”

Once when we were little, our father took us to the neighborhood where he grew up, in North Beach. He showed us the corner where his father's barbershop used to be, and his family's apartment, the place where his mother used to hang the laundry out. That was in the early years, before she ran away. After that it was just him and his pop.

He seemed different in his old neighborhood. Walking down Columbus Street, he had a kind of nervous energy to his step. People knew him in this neighborhood, and not just the women. A couple of old-timers greeted him in Italian.

“God, I love this place,” he said. “People that knew me when I was young would never believe it, that I'd end up living in a town where you can't buy a decent cannoli.”

We didn't know what that was, so we kept quiet.

On our way home, we pulled into an observation area just south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Holding his hand—one of us on each side—we walked across it. “Who would ever think of painting a bridge red?” our father said. “That's the great thing about this city. That and a few million other things.

“I should bring you here more often,” he said. But except for the handful of nights we spent on the hideaway bed at his apartment after the divorce, he hardly ever did.

Back in his days as a San Francisco cop, our father had handled some scary situations, but after the divorce from our mother, he'd taken the Marin County job. Patty and I both knew he'd missed the excitement of the city.

So I knew it was good news for him, in an odd way, that he had a real murder to work on for a change. It made him angry, knowing someone got killed—especially a woman, most of all a young one. But I could also tell from his voice on the phone when he told us there'd been a killing that he was charged up. This was the kind of moment our father lived for—what he did best—and he'd waited a long time for a case that would call on his best abilities. If there was ever a moment for my father to be a hero, this was it.

Somewhere just beyond our house, no more than a mile away, a man had lurked in the brush, waiting for a girl not that much older than my sister and me—to have sex with her. He was willing to kill her to get that. Maybe he was out there still. Or safe at home someplace, believing he'd got away with what he'd done. Maybe he was even stretched out in some Barcalounger like Helen's, watching the latest news reports about the murder, thinking how smart he was.

Only now the killer had Detective Anthony Torricelli on his tail—olive skinned, smart as a fox, and lithe as a jaguar—in that black leather jacket that he always wore, even when the weather turned hot. I could see him now, cigarette in hand, poring over clues and possible leads, tracking license plates and makes of cars, interviewing the boyfriend probably, or the ex-boyfriends, interviewing gas station attendants and hitchhikers who might have been passing through the area at the time of the murder, studying plaster casts of shoe imprints found near the crime scene. But mostly, though he was never the hiking type, he'd be endlessly making his way along the trails himself, back and forth, back and forth, in search of anything—a broken twig, the fiber from a pants leg—that might lead him to the killer.

There was no doubt in my mind my father would find him.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
C
HARLENE
G
RAY'S
murder, Patty and I tromped up to a place we knew, a rock outcropping a little ways up the mountain, in the hopes of my communing with the dead girl's spirit, and thereby uncovering information concerning her murder. Patty carried a tin can from which we'd removed both the top and the bottom. Uneasy though my sister was around fire, but ready as always to follow my instructions, she stuck it in the ground and piled dry grass inside, while I struck the match. Not having many other options to choose from, she sang a verse of “Kumbaya.”

I folded myself into the lotus position and closed my eyes, with my fingers in a position I'd seen on a TV show Jennifer Pollack watched sometimes,
Lilias, Yoga and You.
I took a deep breath and held it. Slow exhale. Another breath.

I could smell the smoke of the burning grass and hear my sister's own more shallow breath beside me. Farther off, the sound of birds overhead, and the faint murmur of male voices higher up on the trail. (Police officers, probably. Not so far off, though beyond sight. In search of the same thing we were.)

I sat there for a long time, waiting. In times past, pictures had sometimes come to me with a stunning clarity—pictures of things that happened or were going to happen—but this time none did. I could almost feel my brain hurting, I was trying that hard to locate anything that might offer up some clue.

Girl ties shoelaces, fills water bottle, sets out on hike. Girl stops to apply insect repellent, adjusts strap on canteen. Man approaches. Asks the time maybe? Asks if she has bug spray he can borrow. She reaches in her pack.

Girl sits on rock. Takes out granola bar. Takes swig from canteen. Realizes need to pee. Heads to the ranger station. Sees man.

Maybe he was chewing gum that day. The whole time it was going on, his jaw kept working it. Maybe it took his mind off things, having that gum in his mouth.

“You want a stick of gum?” he says. “Cinnamon. My favorite.”

Once, long ago, in our parents' bedroom, I'd found a book called
The Joy of Sex,
with drawings in it of men and women naked together. After our father moved out, the book disappeared, but now, to get my vision started, I tried to conjure images. Without the joy part. Nothing.

That gum again. After, he'd want to get rid of it. A wad of gum always ended up tasting bad once you'd chewed it for a while. Once he was finished with the girl, he wouldn't need it anymore. He'd have that taste in his mouth you get when you've had a wad in there for too long. Never mind the particular associations on this occasion.

“We need to go to the ranger station,” I told Patty.

It was a half hour's hike up, and the sun was high by now, but my sister didn't complain, though she did ask once if I had M&M's or saltines in my pocket, which I had neglected to bring along.

Normally we would have passed at least a few hikers on the trail, but that day, none. When we reached the ranger station, we spotted one police officer talking on a radio, but no apparent investigative activity under way.

“When you're finished with your gum, and you're in a place like this where you don't want to be a litterbug, what do you do with it?” I asked Patty.

“Throw it down the toilet?”

“Possibly,” I told her. “Me, I might stick it under the water fountain.”

I bent over the spigot then, slid my fingers over the metal housing beneath. With the first one, nothing, but my sister pointed out a second fountain, next to the men's room. (The men's room. Of course. He would have stopped there too.)

I watched her reach her fingers underneath the stainless steel bowl of the fountain, feeling around. I could see from her face that she'd located something. Now she handed me a wad of gum, grayish in color, which made sense. Only girls chose strawberry, or grape.

I hadn't thought to bring a Baggie, but I had a gum wrapper of my own in my pocket to wrap it in.

“Good work,” I told her. Not that we knew what we'd do with our evidence. “Now wash your hands.”

After, we started back down the mountain. The sun was getting lower in the sky now, making a golden glow on the hillside, and the California poppies were out. Partway down the trail, my sister stopped still and got down to her knees, in a way I recognized from a hundred other times with her on the mountain. She was studying an owl pellet.

She cupped the small, dry brownish-gray lump in her palm, then held it out to me, breaking it apart to reveal the evidence of fur and tiny, twiglike fragments of bone. With two fingers, she picked out a single hair, smaller than an eyelash.

“Mouse,” she said, her face a combination of interest and regret.

“He waited till she was dead to have sex with her,” I told my sister.

“He's afraid of girls. That's why he had to kill her first.”

This time I hadn't tried; the picture just appeared, as clear as the bits of mouse skeleton in my sister's palm
. A man's hands—thick, chubby fingers—working her shirt over her floppy head, unzipping her pants. Burrowing in her pubic hair.
I didn't want to, but I saw the next part too.

I could hear him breathing, in that labored way some people have, if they're very old, or overweight, or they suffer from emphysema or asthma. Or maybe just from being out of breath.

His fingernails were well tended, almost as if he'd had a manicure. Smooth skin, like a person unaccustomed to manual labor or spending time outdoors. Though he'd ventured here, out on the mountain. He'd passed this very spot.

We walked home in silence—my hand in my pocket, around the wad of gum, my sister with her own treasure: those tiny precious fragments of mouse skeleton, encased in fur.

F
OR WEEKS WE'D BEEN PLANNING
to spend Fourth of July weekend with our father in the city: see
Alien
, go out to dinner. The Thursday before the long weekend he called to tell us that it wasn't going to work out for our visit. Some problems had come up at work, he said. He didn't talk about the murder, but we knew that was it.

We kept seeing him on television, and some statement by him appeared almost every day in the pages of the
Marin IJ
that Patty delivered on her paper route. Every day now, she'd bring home an extra copy of the paper, where we were likely to see his name, if not his photograph.

Our father had always been like a movie star to my sister and me, but now he was a celebrity in the whole county and the Bay Area beyond it. He always looked so brave and reassuring, standing at the podium at those press conferences, fielding questions. He and his team were doing everything they could, he said, to locate the killer. If anyone had any information that could help (maybe they'd been on the mountain that day and seen someone suspicious, remembered a make of vehicle parked alongside the road?), they should call the Homicide Division hotline. He would personally see to it that every single possible lead was investigated. No stone unturned.

Whenever he appeared in the paper, we cut out his picture and stuck it on the bulletin board in our room, alongside all the others of movie stars and rock musicians. On the transistor radio in our room—in between the endless replays of “My Sharona” and “Summer Love”—we could turn on the news and know the announcer would have some comment by Detective Torricelli concerning the murder on the mountain. Our father had become the hero of the county. Our name was famous.

T
HERE WAS AN OUTDOOR POOL
we sometimes went to at the rec center a couple of miles from our house. We didn't own passes like most kids in our neighborhood, but you could usually sneak in if you waited for a bunch of people to come in a clump. We didn't go often, knowing it was a hangout for the popular kids, and neither of us qualified. But the temperature had stayed in the nineties all that week, and they'd taped off access to the mountain behind our house, making it impossible to hang out there.