Life Sentences (25 page)

CASSANDRA WAS SO FULL
of tea by the time she left Bridgeville that she needed two bathroom breaks before crossing the bay. The second time, at a McDonald's on Highway 50, she realized that, other than a few bites of cookie, she had not eaten since that unsatisfying breakfast with her father. She ordered a Quarter Pounder with cheese, à la carte, which the counter girl found disturbing, trying to cajole her into a Value Meal. “There's no value,” said Cassandra, “in paying for things you don't want.” It was the kind of thing her father often said. The Quarter Pounder, however, was disturbingly good, Proustian good. She remembered being seventeen, walking that razor-thin line between slut and popular girl. The key had been confining sex to boyfriends, but a
relationship could last as little as a month and still be legitimate. But then Cassandra had fallen hard for one boy, Chris. He hadn't been particularly popular or outstanding, although such reputations meant much less in a place like the Gordon School. In a graduating class of sixty, there was room for more nuanced personalities, less of an emphasis on cliques. Chris had been allowed to be Chris—a Dungeons and Dragons freak, a pothead, a musician, a cross-country runner.

Brainy and sardonic, he was a good match for her. Then he broke things off, without explanation, without even an official good-bye. Without any words at all, in fact. Worse, he didn't start going with someone else. It was one thing to be dropped in favor of another girl, harsh as that was. For someone to dump you and choose solitude meant you must be really boring.

Cassandra had started eating to console herself, consuming Quarter Pounders in great quantities. Although boys usually brought her home from school by then, her father still drove her every morning. She had stopped confiding in him, however. The September of her senior year, after her summer of conciliatory eating, her father intoned one morning, “Quarter Pounders. Aka four ounces. You've added, what, the equivalent of forty, sixty of those to your frame?” She had gone on a diet and, in essence, been on one ever since. Dieting was a kind of martial law in her life—never suspended, sometimes relaxed, frequently tested. She wondered if Callie ever thought about what she ate. Over the course of their long, halting conversation, she hadn't managed to finish her tea and didn't even nibble at her exquisite cookies.

Cassandra pulled out her Moleskine notebook and began writing from memory. Callie's story was simple almost to the point of banality. She had an affair with Andre Howard, became pregnant. He broke up with her, she broke down. About six months after her child was born, she was reported for neglect and the baby was taken from her and put up for adoption. She had drifted through the next few years, self-destructive and aimless, incapable of holding a job, indifferent to return
ing to school, although that was the one thing that Andre Howard offered her. The state senate had a scholarship program with virtually no oversight, Callie had explained. That, along with Julius Howard's recommendation, had been Fatima's ticket to Spelman. Callie didn't want to admit that her relationship with Andre Howard was anything like Fatima's, and she refused his help, holding out for love. Other men liked her, she liked using them, and when she was with a man, she took up his habits, good or bad. She was smoking crack—on the pipe, as she put it—when she gave birth to Donntay, which put her back under the supervision of social services. She insisted she wasn't a fiend, as she called it, just a casual user. Once Donntay's father left, in the final month of her pregnancy, she barely smoked at all.

Then she woke up one morning and Donntay was dead. She hadn't done a thing, had never laid a finger on him, but who would believe her? A sometime crack smoker, a party girl, one baby already taken from her. Hysterical, she had called Andre Howard. She had called him off and on over the years, and he was invariably kind. He swore he loved her, wanted to be with her, but there was always a reason he couldn't be. His brother's political ambitions. His wife's sadness over Donna living far away. He even cited Donna's inability to have children. He couldn't abandon his wife and start a new life with Callie if his wife didn't have the consolation of grandbabies. That's what he told Callie when she sat in jail, and upon her release. He had to stay with his wife because she was never going to have grandchildren.

Yet he had concealed her second child's body, protected her from prosecution, at great risk to himself. This, to Callie, proved he loved her.

God, what a sad, deluded story. Who would believe it? Cassandra wasn't sure that
she
believed it. Oh, that wouldn't keep her from writing it. Let the competing versions of the truth fight it out on the page. Only—this story could not be confined to the page. Callie was alleging that Andre Howard, one of Baltimore's most venerated citizens, had conspired with her to hide her child's body, preventing a proper inquiry
into his death. That wasn't the sort of thing that would go unchallenged, starting with Cassandra's publisher's lawyers, then moving into the criminal courts, where a new inquiry would be inevitable. Andre Howard would probably deny everything and what would she have then? The word of an admitted crackhead versus that of a man famous for propriety and good deeds.

She had more than Callie's words, however, even if Fatima refused to corroborate the details. There were the campaign finance records, the obvious payoffs. Could those be explained away so easily?

Her sandwich demolished, Cassandra ate the pickle that had slipped from the burger and nibbled that, although she didn't really like pickles. She had called Teena within minutes of beginning the drive home, thinking she would be excited by the news. But Teena had been angry, dismissive.

“What, she's claiming sudden death syndrome? That's brilliant, especially with no body. Did she wait all these years to spring that shit because it's uncheckable now?”

“Why would she lie?”

“Sheesh, Cassandra, because that's what people do. They lie. Especially when they're still vulnerable to being charged with murder. She's had twenty years to come up with this story. Frankly, I think she could have done better.”

“What about Andre Howard? If he believed that her baby wasn't a homicide victim, couldn't he at least say that he didn't conceal a murder? I guess he would be guilty of obstruction of justice, but nothing more—”

“I don't believe her on that score, either. The guy had an affair with her, fathered her first child—okay, he's a sleaze and he wouldn't want that found out. But would he become a coconspirator in a murder on that basis? I don't think so.”

“Still—” It was a good point, but Cassandra knew there was a counterargument to be made. She was simply too overloaded to find it.

“The first baby is enough to explain the blackmail,” Teena insisted.

“But the payments don't start until after Donntay dies.”

“As far as we know. They might have funneled money to her directly, then started using the campaign after she became a murder suspect, which made her more problematic. Look, she got into trouble and she reached out to a powerful man she could force to help her, because she had something on him. He came up with a legal strategy that allowed her to avoid being charged. But the idea of Andre Howard arranging the disappearance of the baby's body? No one will ever believe that. I think she's claiming his involvement now because she's terrified of losing his financial support. He'll find a new way to get money to her, and then she'll deny everything she told you. Did you get this on tape?”

“No, she asked me not to record her.”

“Aw, Jesus, Cassandra. You've got
nothing.
”

“I'm not building a court case, Teena. I'm a writer. All I need is a story, and I have it.”

“Until she recants,” Teena said. “She's using you.”

Who was using whom was highly problematic in this situation. Cassandra had the answer she had been instructed to find. It was not, Cassandra admitted to herself in McDonald's, a particularly satisfying one, but then, most answers fail to satisfy. Presented with a mystery, the human mind snakes out in a thousand directions; it is the
possibility
of an answer that seems thrilling. But when the puzzle is solved, tension dissipates. That is the nature of questions. Even on a quiz show, the real excitement comes in the moment
before
the answer, the agony of waiting to discover if the contestant is right or wrong. Cassandra had her book, if she wanted it, an ending toward which to write. It was more of a straightforward true-crime story than she had anticipated, albeit one filled with contrasts and symmetries. Callie, the poor child of an abusive single mother, finding a father and a lover in Andre Howard. Donna, the prized princess of one of Baltimore's most prominent fami
lies. She considered for the first time how close the two names were, Donna and Donntay. It was almost as if Callie were trying to establish some sort of connection to the Howards. Cassandra would simply take herself out of it, write a straightforward narrative about the Howards and this quiet girl who had gone off like a bomb in their lives.

Except—Cassandra couldn't take herself out of the story because she had slept with Callie's lawyer, who happened to be the Howard son-in-law. What was she going to do about that?

She found herself fixating on an image of herself at the microfiche machines in the library, her first glimpse of Reg. She had a flash of Reg in bed, but she tried to put that out of her mind. “‘The Obvious Child,'” Gloria Bustamante had said. Well, hinted, suggested. She was as cagey as her client had been naïve. Cassandra had assumed the child was Donntay, then Aubrey, whose mere existence had unlocked Callie's long-held silence. But what if the obvious child was the first one? The child taken from Callie permanently based on an anonymous tip about her mental state. The child Cassandra said Andre had fathered. Cassandra saw herself at the microfiche, the days of 1988 literally flashing by her, the machine's movement and smell making her faintly queasy. A stray fact had boomeranged out, striking her as odd but not vital, then skipped away before she could grasp it.

Then she knew. She understood what Gloria had figured out, what Callie could not bear to admit to herself. Andre Howard had made a mistake, but it was not a unique one, far from it. He could have weathered the fact of an illegitimate child. It was Andre Howard's way of handling his mistake that would have earned him public contempt.

Cassandra ordered a diet soda for the road, prompting a lecture from the counter girl on how she should have gotten the Value Meal after all. Everyone loves to say
I told you so.
Back behind the wheel of her car, she dialed a number that she knew better than to call on a weekend. But it was business, of a sort, and undeniably urgent.

REG HAD ASKED ALMOST NO QUESTIONS
when he returned Cassandra's call about a possible meeting, saying only that he would see her at his home on Sunday afternoon. She had assumed that the choice of location was to underline the professional aspect of the encounter. He probably thought that an empty law office would be an invitation to trouble.

It had never occurred to Cassandra that Donna would be present.

“Reg wanted me here,” Donna said, composed and lovely, still in her churchgoing clothes. Even Donna, proper as she was, wouldn't sit around in a green knit suit on a Sunday afternoon. “Given that your book touches on my life, too.”

“Your life?” Cassandra echoed.

“As a child. Wasn't that part of the plan? To write about several of us as we were when we were young, and how we are now?”

“It was one idea,” Cassandra admitted. “It's taken a turn, though—”

“Of course, I guess you get to be the most successful one,” Donna said. She was good at managing the trick of talking over another person without appearing rude or impatient. “That's what makes it interesting to you, right? Tisha is a nice suburban mama, Fatima has had this amazing transformation from good-time girl to church lady, and I'm mainly known as someone's daughter and someone's wife. But you're our little star.”

Her voice was good-natured, her face smooth. Cassandra might well have been imagining the crackle to the tone, like the very thin crust of frost that snaps beneath one's feet after the first true cold night of the year. She glanced quickly at Reg, trying to read him, but he kept his back to her as he fed kindling into a fire, which seemed de trop on a March afternoon. In fact, Cassandra suddenly felt extremely warm and almost wished it was a hot flash. Perimenopause would be preferable to this creeping sense of shame and humiliation. Had Reg told Donna about their affair? She should have broken off things with him definitively before she visited Callie. She never should have started in the first place.

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 adul
tery. 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 vio
lent. 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.