Blame: A Novel (3 page)

Waiting for Brice to come out, Joey was suddenly, acutely thirsty. She’d get out and go look for a spigot, but if he caught her, Brice might get angry again. So she stretched out on the seat and when she woke up next, the truck was moving, with Brice at the wheel.

Where are we? she asked.

Well, look who’s awake.

She saw then that they were driving down Lake Avenue, the city lights shimmering below.

What pills was she on? said Brice. Do you have any idea?

No, Joey said.

You doing okay?

Yes.

You know what? Brice looked down at her. You’re a real good girl.

She assumed that he’d cut west soon to take her home, but he drove through downtown Pasadena to the Bellwood instead. I have to talk to Cal Sharp. Then I’ll call someone, he said, and find out what in the hell I’m supposed to do with you.

•

The Bellwood lobby was deserted except for the new night concierge with the snotty English accent. While Brice went to look for Cal, Joey drank out of the drinking fountain by the ladies’ room until her temples throbbed. Using the repeating pinecone pattern on the carpet, she played listless, makeshift hopscotch down a side hall until she came to an unattended housekeeping cart by the service elevators. She helped herself to a foil-wrapped chocolate and one small shampoo. A key sat in the service elevator controls, and just to see what would happen, Joey turned it. The doors opened, so she got in and rode all the way up to the roof. The elevator let her off behind the wet bar by the pool house.

On the other side of the roof, the penthouse was dark. In between, the large rectangular pool glowed, lit by one lamp in the deep end as by a single suffusing intelligence. Chaise lounges, in neat double rows, were covered with sheeting. Joey walked over to the edge of the roof, a tar-papered hump planted with a wrought iron fence. The three-quarter moon looked like a partially dissolved butter mint. The mountains were black. Directly below was the Bellwood’s parking lot, where Brice’s pickup and the hotel’s airport van were parked side by side. As Joey watched, another van, white with a dark orange stripe, turned into the lot and stopped with no regard for the parking lines. Two men hopped out and threw open the back doors. An ambulance.

The attendants pulled out a gurney and raised it up like an ironing board to full height. Strapped on the gurney was Joey’s mother, her face alone visible. How could Joey be so sure? The chestnut hair. The pale, broad forehead. The familiar quickening of fear.

A man—unmistakably Cal Sharp—walked out from the shadow of the hotel and stood by the gurney as the attendants unloaded tall chrome stands the height of saplings, and squat green tanks of oxygen.

As Joey watched, Cal Sharp touched her mother’s face. He leaned down and kissed her on the lips, and put his cheek beside hers, and cupped her face with his hand. He kissed her again and stroked her brow, and kissed her again and again, all over her face. He stopped, turned his head as if to hear a whispered secret. Then he stepped back, the attendants moved in, and—Joey really couldn’t see this because of the foyer roof—everyone must have gone into the hotel.

The service elevator’s door had closed, so she ran across the roof, past the pool and the draped chaises, to the customer elevator by the penthouse. She pressed the button. Waiting, she half expected the doors to open and her mother to appear with full entourage. But wouldn’t lights be on in the penthouse suite, the door unlocked, the rooms aired and air-conditioned, with fresh flowers and the usual cellophane-wrapped fresh fruit basket awaiting her mother’s arrival?

The elevator took a long time to come, and was empty. On its descent, it stopped at four of the six floors, although nobody waited at any of them. In the lobby Joey ran to the desk. The British concierge was writing something in a ledger. Hey, she said. What room is my mom in?

The man looked up slowly. I’m sorry? he said.

My mother’s here! I saw her with Mr. Sharp.

He began writing again. Mr. Sharp has gone home for the night. Your
uncle
is in the Mojave bar.

But, she said.

The man would not look up.

Brice was at the end of the bar. Mother’s here, she said. I saw her come.

Brice raised his dull, bloodshot eyes to hers. Your mother’s not here, honey, he said. She’s in the hospital. She’s very sick, you know. Very sick. This time, sweetheart, she’s not going to make it. Tears spilled down his cheeks.

No, Brice. Joey tugged his arm. Really, I saw her arrive.

He pulled her to him. His body felt taut and hard and made her think of the canvas cots at summer camp. His chest shook against her. Embarrassed, she waited for him to stop.

Uncle Brice, she said. Mom arrived in an ambulance, and Mr. Sharp met her at the back door. They came into the hotel. I saw.

He touched her cheek. Come on, kitten, he said. I’m taking you to Mother’s.

•

Grandmother Court was out on the porch when they arrived, her hair as white as the roses flanking the door. She grasped Joey’s shoulders and searched her face. Go on in, dear, she said kindly. There’s a cookie for you in the kitchen.

Joey walked into the quiet carpeted hall, then through the dining room to the kitchen, where the light was bright and two store-bought oatmeal cookies sat on a plate on the table. The clock said eleven-forty. Joey could hear the adults talking in muffled tones. The white cat with black spots arched her back against the sliding glass door. Joey opened the door, and the cat swept past her knees. Joey stepped out onto the back deck, where the voices were fainter. The lawn rolled down the slope into a dark ring of trees. She pulled on the necklace around her neck. She pulled until the fine chain cut into the skin, and kept pulling until it broke free. She hurled it out into the yard. Lit by the yellow bug light, it flew through the air, a kinked golden arabesque.

•

Joey did not attend the last seven days of typing class. She never did learn to type her numbers. She stayed at her grandmother’s house through the weekend. Her mother died early Monday morning. The funeral would be Friday, at 2:00 p.m. at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. Her aunt from New York flew in, followed by her aunt from San Francisco. Her brothers were called home from camp, and the whole family was in constant movement between the Hawthornes’ glass house in the hills and the Bellwood Hotel.

Thursday night, Joey went up to the Bellwood pool with March Sharp. With their bare feet in the water, she told March that she had seen her mother come to the Bellwood in an ambulance. Your dad was there, and he kissed her all over her face, Joey said.

March kicked her legs slowly; her shins rose to the surface of the water, then submerged. My father is buying me a new horse, she said. An Arabian.

At the memorial service, Joey sat with her brothers and father in the front row. She stood when the minister said please stand and sat when he said please be seated. She read aloud the unison readings and the necessary responses. She rode to the gravesite and stood by as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Her grandmother had given her a linen handkerchief edged in delphinium blue tatting, but Joey did not use it. She did not cry at the funeral or at any time afterward, as she knew for a fact that Millicent Hawthorne was not really dead, but alive and free from them all in some as-yet-undisclosed suite in the Bellwood Hotel.

May 1981

Patsy MacLemoore came to on a concrete shelf in a cell in the basement of the Altadena sheriff’s department. Her hair had woken her up. It stank. She sat up, pushed it over her shoulder, and closed her eyes until the nausea subsided.

She had said she would rather die than come back here. She’d said that both times she’d been here before.

The little jail had no windows. Fluorescent tubes quivered night and day. A fan clattered, off-kilter. The cinder-block walls were a high-gloss beige, the enamel so thick prisoners wrote in it with their finger-nails, the obscenities inked in by grime. Each of the three connected cells contained a seatless stainless-steel toilet and a tiny, one-faucet sink.

Her head seemed to be in a clamp, and she was desperately thirsty. Lurching to the undersized sink, she drank from it sideways, cheek anchored against the greasy spout. The dribble was tepid and tasted of mold. In the next cell over, June’s haughty face loomed. Did she fuckin’
live
here? Every time Patsy’d been in, she was too. June’s top lip was like two paisleys touching—pandering lips, if ever there were any. What’d you do this time, Professor? said the lips.

Patsy let her mouth fill, the in-head sound a metallic gargle. Swallowing, she pulled back. Don’t know, she said. D’n’D. De-dicking some cretin. No idea.

Not what I heard, June said. And lookit your face.

Patsy resumed drinking, but her fingers went right to a ridge of scab crystallizing along her cheekbone, down to her jaw. No wonder her head hurt.

Returning to the shelf, she noted the itchy rasp of the prison gown. Lead blue, unrippable, it was made of 45 percent stainless steel, according to the label. She was naked beneath, not even panties.

I hear you’re in deep shit, Professor. Impossibly, June’s bangs were set in a pink foam curler. How do you get curlers in jail? June had a real mirror too, not the stainless-steel square provided before you face the judge, but a small, plastic-framed mirror propped up on her sink. And a hair dryer. A zippered sack of makeup spilled open on her sleeping shelf. Like she lived here.

Patsy’s own home, 729 Pomelo Street, was just six blocks away. Walking distance. Hell: crawling distance, if only they’d let you—ten minutes of sidewalk, then left on Pomelo, with its shingled cabins, thick-armed oaks, mountain views. So close, if only she could get there.

Hey, Professor, wanna borrow my brush? A turquoise paddle with mashed black plastic bristles slid through the bars, but Patsy knew better than to reach for it, lest the brush be retracted again and again, as many times as she’d fall for the ruse, only to be offered at a price, as if she kept a twenty rolled up in her privates for such expenditures. Naw, Juney, thanks anyway. Patsy gathered her long, damp, sharply sour hair—the mats as large and thick as trout—and wound it into a loose knot. But this proved too much tug on her scalp, and she shook it free, three painful shocks, each a silvery flash behind her eyes.

She couldn’t be in too deep shit, she thought, if she was still in this small-town dump. When’d I come in, Juney?

You were here when I come. Snoring in your own mess. Stinking up the place. We made ’em spray you down. What’d you do to make ’em so mad?

Who knows? said Patsy. Maybe I used too many big words, or lectured ’em on the progressive era. Hell, Juney, I have no idea. Oh, but we’ll find out.

O’Mallon was at the cage door. Hiya, Bitsy, Patsy said, using the jailhouse joke about a supposedly small part of him.

He opened the door, beckoned with a curt tilt of his head.

Lemons for breakfast? Patsy asked, though she couldn’t say for sure what time of day it was down here where the sun never shone. Standing, she realized she was still quite drunk. Well, they needn’t know that. She straightened her spine, causing more quick bright flashes of pain, and set off at a stately pace. O’Mallon, blocking her, produced cuffs.

Uh-oh. Daddy’s mad.

He drew her hands behind her back, clasped them in chrome, shoved. God
damn
, Bitsy. See ya, Juney, over her shoulder.

O’Mallon steered her by the upper arm down the floor-waxed hall to what Patsy thought of as the conversation room, another drab and battered place with a stoic oak table, plastic schoolroom chairs, and street-level windows with chicken wire in the mottled glass. Benny, the lawyer who had represented her in other drunk-driving episodes, sat inside the door. Did I call you? Patsy asked, for she had summoned him on more than one previous occasion with no memory of doing so. She grazed his shoulder with her hip. We have to stop meeting like this, she said.

Benny ignored her—her own counsel!

Lieutenant Peterson sat across the table. Also, Ricky Barrett, who had just last year been a continuing education student in her twentieth-century cultural history course. Those continuing ed credits had paid off; he was Detective Barrett now, working out of Monterey Park, as she’d learned during her last incarceration.

Everyone’s mouth was a down-turned crescent. She was not invited to sit.

To what do I owe such a . . . summit? she said. Such a meeting of the minds? None but the county’s best and brightest?

Shut up, Patsy. That was the world-weary Peterson. White-haired and monotoned. Just shut the fuck up.

But then nobody else said anything.

Really, you guys. What’s up? Why the faces? I can’t remember a thing.

Try, suggested Peterson.

Patsy pulled out a chair, sat, and tried. Monday morning survey, America 1865 to the present. Office hours. Personnel committee dinner at Anne Davis’s house, blankness setting in around the soup course, not her fault, the wine so cheap and bad. What time is it, anyway?

Noon.

Day?

Wednesday.

Shit. When’d I come in?

Last night.

So she’d missed the 9:00 a.m. survey that morning. They’d finished Reconstruction on Monday and were to start the Gilded Age today. I lost Tuesday, she said.

Across from her, Ricky Barrett snapped the elastic band on an accordion
file, a battered and cloudy-brown thing, the corners worn to white. Patsy couldn’t help but read the word felt-tipped on its side.
HOMICIDE
.

The taste of wet metal filled her mouth, and fear hit. She thought perhaps she’d misread, and looked again.
HOMICIDE
. Yes, but it was an old file, probably used for something else now—used for whatever county sheriff detectives detect: stray dogs, rabid skunks, backyard keggers gone rowdy.

Something like this was bound to happen, Patsy. Now Benny was speaking, darling, patient Benny. We’ll-get-you-off-this-time Benny who, in fact, never had. She should probably fire him, should’ve done so two cases ago and saved herself some big fines. But he had the clumsy charm, if also the legal facility, of a Labrador retriever, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. The way you were going, he was saying now, you had plenty of warning. There’s what, three priors? A suspended license?