Life Sentences (21 page)

TEENA'S RIGHT HAND WAS THROBBING
when she woke up, a sign that the weather was changing. It had been a warmer-than-usual March, but the winter months could never be mild enough for Teena. Worse, she had rolled on her right hand in her sleep, possibly to keep it warm beneath her body, but that had only helped to freeze it into a semi-claw position. She had to get ready for work virtually one handed, which made blow-drying her hair a bitch. Still, she managed, and her right hand was more or less back in service by the time she got in the car.

The mall was dead. Teena didn't need to read the newspaper to know what was going on with the economy. She saw it every day at work. The managers had kept repeating, like a hopeful mantra, that
business would pick up before Easter. Old-fashioned Baltimore clung to the tradition of new outfits and hats on Easter, even its own version of a promenade, although that had the bad habit of turning into a near riot. Easter had come and gone, and things were about as dead as Teena had ever seen. Forget the housing market, the stock market—if you wanted to know how nervous consumers were, drop by Nordstrom's high-end departments.

Bored, she fed Fatima's name into the computer system again. She had taken it almost personally when Cassandra had reported back to her that the interview was a bust, that Fatima not only wouldn't help her find Callie Jenkins but had dropped all these hints about how dangerous it was for Cassandra to look, how she would regret it. Teena didn't buy that for a second. She could recognize a head game, someone trying to dress up ignorance as purpose and intent. She wasn't sure how the computer, having given her Fatima's address already, could do anything new for her, but she didn't have anything else to do and—

Fatima Hollins's Nordstrom card had been paid off, in full. In arrears a week ago, it would have been at a zero balance now, except that someone had come in and charged six hundred dollars' worth of clothes two days after the account was paid off, which happened to be two days before Cassandra visited the woman's house. Fatima had been on this floor, too, not down in the Rack, although over in the plus-size department.

Teena's first impulse was to call Cassandra. But what did she really know?
Slow down,
she told herself. It was an interesting juxtaposition of facts, nothing more at this point. Cassandra goes to visit Fatima and she suddenly has the scratch to pay off her bill, and then some. But her credit showed an ongoing history of boom and bust. Like a lot of people, she got in a little over her head, then she caught up. Nordstrom, almost all department stores, would go bankrupt if people didn't over-spend here and there.

No, it wasn't
Cassandra
whom Teena needed to call. She fed another name into the system, one she hadn't really thought about for years. Yes,
there was the account, although it was all but dormant, last used for a few purchases around Christmas. This one probably shopped at more exclusive stores now. But Teena remembered Gloria Bustamante when she was wearing the Montgomery Ward version of dress-for-success suits, with lumpy shoulder pads that looked like little hens hiding in the folds of her jacket. Gloria was older than Teena, but she had been a late starter, green as they come when they first faced off. Teena remembered feeling sorry for her at the time, regarding her as a glorified paperweight, an object placed on Callie to hold her down, keep her still. When Gloria had quit Howard & Howard, Teena had assumed it was because she was opting for a less combative form of law. Yet she had built up quite a good criminal defense practice, which suggested she had more on the ball than Teena had suspected. What might Gloria Bustamante know?

 

“WHAT IF THIS WERE REAL?”
Reg asked Cassandra.

Perhaps because they spoke so little—a consequence of spending almost all their time in bed, not wanting to waste the hours they had—the words seemed overly portentous. Cassandra assessed them, considered all the possible meanings, then decided to keep things lighthearted.

“I thought I was real,” she said, taking Reg's hand and smacking it on her hip. “Doesn't this feel pretty solid?”

He kept his hand there. “This is different for me. And not just because you're older than the other women I've been with.”

“Thanks,” Cassandra said dryly. “Good to know.”

“I mean—look, I've always had…diversions in my life. I assumed you understood that when we started.”

“I understood. Does Donna?” Not quite so lighthearted now.

“I don't think Donna cares,” he said. She turned her face to him, amazed, and he backtracked. “I'm not saying she knows, on a conscious level, but she suspects. Yet I've been considerate. I haven't shamed her. She can live with that.”

Cassandra didn't want to argue with him, not about this topic. But—those words again—she was her father's daughter, and she couldn't let a piece of illogic go by, even if it was in her best interest. “I was in Baltimore all of a month when I heard you described as a pussy hound. Could Donna really be that sheltered?”

“I don't know. How much did you know about your father?”

“Not much. But I was a child. I'm not asking about your daughter but your wife.”

“I read your book—”

“You did?” She couldn't help it; this was almost as thrilling as the words she believed she had heard, was still trying to decipher.
What if this were real?
Of course the very use of the subjunctive indicated it
wasn't
real; still—

“Well, I listened to it on audio. They should have had you read it. You have a much nicer voice than the woman they used. Anyway, I don't think your mother knew, not really, and your father was all but rubbing her face in what he did.”

“Not at first. But did you get to the section where he starts using her nickname, the one he always despised? It's clear there that she was beginning to suspect his infidelities.”

“Clear to you, writing after the fact. Did you ever ask your mother what she knew, when?”

She was irritated now, much as she didn't want to be. Who was Reg to question the authority with which she had written about her life, her family?

“We never spoke…on point about these things. It would have been too painful for her. But I showed my mother what I wrote, and she never contradicted it. Nor did my father.”

“Maybe she just preferred your version. Most people would, don't you think? Would prefer not looking like a fool. Maybe you gave your mother a dignity she didn't feel she had in real life.”

Cassandra struggled to a sitting position. “Are we having a fight?”

“What?”

“I feel as if we're quarreling, and I don't know why.”

“Sorry.” He put an arm around her, kissed her forehead. She felt like she was seventeen, but the kind of seventeen no one ever gets to be. Comfortable in her skin, flush with knowledge. Leda again, in Zeus's beak, but holding on, his equal. “I should know better than to challenge a Baltimore girl on her own mother. My fault.”

He got up to shower. Even nonadulterers showered after sex, but it still made Cassandra a little sad. She was sadder that she had distracted him from those provocative words:
What if this were real?
What if? But it couldn't be. And if she weren't careful, the memory of this affair was all she would have to take away from her time in Baltimore. She must focus on the book, on Callie. But so far everything had been as frustrating as her trip through Baltimore's suburbs, nothing but cul-de-sacs that kept looping back. She wondered again at Fatima's implicit threat. How could anyone hurt Cassandra? Unlike Fatima, she hadn't buried her past. She had put it on the page for everyone to see. Friends and critics alike sometimes marveled at this, as if it were an act of daring. But Cassandra, who had grown up in a house where everything and nothing was said, felt it was the simplest way to live. Say the worst things about yourself first, and no one can ever hurt you.

Except, perhaps, the man in her shower, a man she was trying desperately to pretend that she didn't love.

 

“THERE'S AN OLD WOMAN DOWN
in the lobby, saying she has to see you,” the desk attendant had told Gloria, and that's what Gloria saw when she came down. An old woman, well dressed but slightly stooped through the shoulders.

Then she realized she knew this old woman and she was almost ten years younger than Gloria.

“Detective Murphy.”

“Not Detective Murphy anymore. Not Detective Murphy for a very long time, but you know that.”

“I do know.” Gloria looked at Teena's right hand but made no move to shake it, to greet her in any way.

“I think you know a lot.”

“Almost all of it covered by attorney-client privilege. My client was very adamant about that. The things I learned in the process of her defense—I am not allowed to discuss with anyone. And you know that.”

“Almost. You said almost.”

Gloria studied Teena's face. Jesus, she had aged badly. It made Gloria almost grateful never to have been pretty, if this was what pretty could become, what age could take away from you. She had felt that way even when she was young, back when she was working with Callie.
Thank God I'm not beautiful because look what this girl's beauty has earned her.
Teena's well-made, tasteful clothes and careful hairstyle only emphasized how time had ravaged her face. Part of it was that she was simply too thin. But there were her hooded eyes, too, which looked as if she never got a good night's sleep.
Why? So you dropped your gun and your patrol car ran over your wrist? You could have found a way to stay on the force if you wanted to.
Hell, Gloria remembered a detective who had lost his right hand and learned to shoot with his left.

But Gloria understood. She had always understood. Teena had claimed permanent disability because she wanted the punishment of exile, yearned for it. Teena Murphy had always been known for her clothes, but the thing she really loved to wear was a hair shirt. How silly of her.

“Are you a private investigator now?”

“Not exactly.”

“So why do you care?”

“I'm working—” Teena switched course. “I just do.”

“She got to you, didn't she?”

“Who?” The face might have changed, but the steely composure
was the same and only slightly less remarkable than it had been when Teena was young. She had been so prepossessed, poised. Hard to remember, but Gloria had envied her.

“That woman, the writer, the one who's been trying to stir things up. Why would you help her? What's in it for you?”

The lobby of Gloria's apartment building was the kind of large, empty space that one would expect in one of Mies van der Rohe's glass palaces, and her words echoed, taking on a strange emphasis. Gloria may have made mistakes, but she had never lost sight of what was in her best interest. Maybe she had a couple of hair shirts in her own wardrobe, after all.

“I don't know,” Teena said at last. “Probably nothing. What was in it for you?” She took in her surroundings. “This, I guess. Your own law office. So that's what you traded, for whatever you knew. I thought you were stupid, but you were a lot smarter than I was.”

Everyone assumed I was stupid,
Gloria thought.
Book smart, but stupid in the ways of the world. I thought I was being rewarded, but they were counting on my stupidity, my passivity. Then, when I finally took some initiative, I almost derailed my life. Those were my choices, cataclysmic failure or success on my own terms. What would you have chosen? What did you choose?

“Do you know how to read a campaign finance report?” she asked Teena.

“What?”

“Upstairs, I have reports from the Friends of Julius Howard committee. Paper reports from the seventies and nineties. The more recent ones are online.”

“Are you saying—”

“I'm saying I have some reports. You may have them. Anyone can have them. They are public documents. I didn't request them until a few days ago.”

“Why? I mean, why did you request them?”

“I honestly don't know.”
Because I ran into an old friend and he's not my
friend anymore and I can't bear it. Because I have tried to figure out for fifteen years now what constitutes justice. Because I have won freedom for innocent people and not-so-innocent people to make up for the fact that I could not help the first client entrusted to me. True, she didn't want to be helped, but it was my job to persuade her to help herself, and I couldn't. So I abandoned her, used my knowledge to sweeten my own life.

“The early ones, they'll be easy. They were on paper,” she said. “It's only now that things are online that they've gotten so cagey. You get what I'm saying? You'll find things easily enough in the old files, if you look carefully. But it's the new files you need to study. Stay here.”

She did not want Teena to come up to the apartment. If the day came when she was accused of violating any of her promises, if they tried to disbar her, she wanted her doorman to be able to say she spoke to Teena in the open.

 

A FEW MINUTES LATER, SHE
came back with the files. The files and an old CD, Paul Simon's
The Rhythm of the Saints.

“Music to study by?” Teena asked.

“I am particularly fond of track one,” Gloria said. She was. She had bought this album because she loved the previous one,
Graceland,
which reminded her of the evenings she spent with Reg and Colton, imitating their bosses, singing their parody of “You Can Call Me Al.” She had bought the next album thinking to re-create those evenings of camaraderie, only to be haunted by one song.

“‘The Obvious Child,'” Teena read out loud. “You mean—”