Robards, Karen (7 page)

Pig’s the word for you, all right, she thought, taking another sip of her cotTee. Of the male chauvinist variety.

The coffee was faintly bitter on her tongue, but welcome nonetheless.

“Mind if I shut the door?” he asked, gesturing toward it.

“Not at all.”

He closed the door, then turned back to face her. His army jacket was open. Beneath it he wore another plaid flannel shirt, this one in shades of brown and blue. Five o’clock shadow darkened the lines of a lean jaw and shaded the sides of his cheeks. His black hair was longish on top, short at the sides, and untidy. All in all, she decided, he was goodlooking enough to merit Nancy’s come-hither sway-if one liked blue-collar types. Personally, she had never been too partial to big,

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cute, and macho. In her experience, those elements usually added up to stupid. And arrogant. And anti successful, competent women.

“Have a seat.” Her tone was not exactly that of someone making an invitation. It was too abrupt for that, and the nod with which she accompanied it was abrupt, too, but he sat in one of the straight-back chairs in front of her desk, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his thighs. Without Nancy to prompt it, he had lost his smi’le. His gaze met hers, and suddenly he didn’t look any more friendly than she felt.

“You wanted to talk about my daughter,” Grace prompted.

He nodded. “For starters, she goes to Hebron, right?”

“Yes.” Hebron was the big public high school that was the bright and shining star of the city’s educational system. Grace would have preferred a smaller, private school, butJessica had begged to go there. And Grace, as she usually did where Jess was concerned, had given in.

“You know anything about her friends?” he asked. The question was almost accusing. His tone was the final straw.

“Wait a minute.” Grace held up a hand to stop the conversation right there. She fixed him with her judge’s stare, perfected over three eventful years on the bench and guaranteed to pin miscreants to the spot like bugs in a collection until she saw fit to release them. “Stop right there. Your attitude ticks me off, Detective. I don’t know you from Adam, and you don’t know

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me. Who are you to sit in judgment of how I raise my daughter?”

For a moment he returned her stare without speaking or ‘altering his elbows-on-knees posture by so much as an inch.

. “I’m the narc who didn’t bust your daughter last night, Your Honor,” he said at last in a measured way. Straightening, he reached down into his jacket pocket. “Even though she had just paid twenty bucks for this when we came across her.”

He pulled a Baggie from his jacket pocket and held it up so that Grace could see it. The clear plastic bag held a small amount of what appeared to be dried, ground-up grass.

Harmless looking, unless you knew what it was. Grace knew what it was. She audibly caught her breath. All the vinegar went out of her, just drained right away along with her spine, so that she was left sitting there like a jellyfish, gazing speechlessly at him and the hideous, horrible, terrifying thing that dangled from his hand. -

“I see you recognize it.” His voice was dry as he restored the Baggle to his pocket. “Top grade Colomblan by way of Mexico, by the way.”

11 Oh, my God,” Grace said. She felt as if she’d been socked in the gut by a huge, invisible fist. She could hardly draw breath.

He nodded. “Hebron was more or less clean up until about five years ago. Then somebody figured out that these kids have the resources to buy drugs and started a campaign to penetrate the high school. Bingo!

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Now Hebron’s got a real drug problem, and Dom and I got the job of catching the creeps responsible. I’m hoping your daughter can help us.”

“Oh, my God.” Grace felt as if she were suffocating. Jessica had bought pot. She was smoking pot. The night before, she’d been drunk. Grace saw all her bright dreams for her daughter wavering like a mirage in her mind’s eye. One wrong move and they w ould vanish. “My God.”

His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed as he registered her distress.

“If it’ll keep you from hyperventilating, I’ll start out by telling you I don’t think your daughter’s in very deep.” His voice was not unsympathetic. “At least, not yet. I’ve never run across her before the last couple of weeks, and I would have if she was out there regularly. “

“How Grace swallowed, then tried again. “Where did you find her?”

“We were following a car full of kids from Hebron last night. They drove to Brandeis Park, where they met up with a group of kids in another car. We had surveillance set up. Your daughter got out of the first car, walked over to the second. She handed a twenty through the window, got this in return, started to walk back to her group, and passed out cold on the ground midway there. A patrol car cruised by about then, and turned on its lights to go after a speeder. It must have scared the daylights out of everybody because both cars hightailed it out of there, leaving your daughter lying where she fell. One of our cars tailed them. Dom and I

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checked on your daughter. About the time we put her in our car, her description came over the radio, so we took her home.”

“You’re sure she was the one who bought-that.” Her gaze touched on his pocket. Her lawyer’s instincts were to search for the loophole, to find a way out for her daughter at all costs. Her mother’s instincts were muddier. More on the lines of Jessica needing to take responsibility for what she had done.

“I’m sure.”

“Why didn’t you arrest her?” Grace was still having trouble talking.

He glanced away from her then, very briefly. Then he looked at her once more. “Like I said, I’ve never seen her around before. She’s new to this group, and they’re using her to score. Dom and I aren’t out there to bust a bunch of kids, anyway. We want the big guy, the guy who’s selling it to the little dealer who’s selling it to them. I’m hoping your daughter might be persuaded to help us.”

“How could she help you?”

“For starters, she could give us the names of the kids in the cars. A couple we know, the rest we don’t. She could tell us who set up the deal. Who she gave the twenty to. Who that person gives the money to, if she knows.”

“In other words, you want her to act as an informant. “

“We’re asking for her help.”

“She helps you or you charge her, is that the deal you’re trying to make?” Grace remembered the coffee

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then. Her hand moved to the cup, curled around it. But she couldn’t summon up the will to lift the brew to her mouth. She felt numb, as if her body had been shot full of Novocain.

“Nope. Consider last night a freebie. We’re not going to charge her. She can help us, or not. But if I were you, I’d think about that ‘not.’ She doesn’t help us, that drug ring’s going to stay right where it is, where she is exposed to it constantly. This time, when we caught her, she’s not a stoner, not a cokehead or a crackhead, doesn’t score smack, is not heavily involved in the drug scene. Next time, whether it’s us or someone else, who knows? She could face big-time jail time-or worse.”

“I’ll take her out of Hebron … … Grace was talking more to herself than him. Her right hand was clenched tight around the cooling coffee cup. Her left hand was clenched into a fist in her lap.

He shrugged. “If you think that’ll help.”

“I’ll put her in private school, and ground her for the rest of her life, and hire someone to be at home when she gets home, and …”

“Watch her every minute of every day?” he finished for her. “Not possible. According to what I read in the police report, she managed to sneak out on you just last night. For the third time in … what was it, three months? That you know about.”

Silenced, Grace could do no more than look at him. The sheer impossibility of watchingJessica twenty-four hours a day until she was an adult overwhelmed her. It could not be done, not without locking her daughter

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up in some kind of prison. Anyway, given Jessica’s nature, the more restricted she was, the more she could be counted on to rebel the moment she got the chance.

“So just how would helping you help her?” Grace asked finally.

“We’d be able to break up the drug ring that’s targeting her school, for one thing. It would help us get rid of the bad guys. And it would put her on notice that she has already come to the attention of the authorities and had better watch her step in future.”

Grace stared at him fixedly while she turned the problem over in her mind. In law school, her keen analytic ability had always been touted as one of her

3trengths, but for a moment, swamped as it was by terror and pamic, it threatened to fail her. When it did begin to function, however, one thing became perFectly clear almost at once.

“My daughter would be in danger. If anyone found Dut that she was helping you, she would be in danger.” His eyes narrowed. “We would protect her. Guaran,eed.”

Grace laughed. The sound was short, staccato, inamused. “You can’t guarantee that she would be ?rotected. You can’t watch her twenty-four hours a day .or the rest of her life any more than I can. You think I ion’t know what happens to kids who rat on dealers? Set real. I’m a judge, for God’s sake. I’ve seen it, and t’s ugly.” She took a deep breath. “No. I thank you .or your forbearance in not arresting her last night, but lo. She cannot help you. I’m sorry.”

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There was a pause as he digested this. His gaze as it met hers had grown hard.

“Your call.” He stood up and turned to leave. Reaching the door, he glanced at her over his shoulder. “Remember, though, only one freebie per customer.-

Then he left. The door closed behind him with an audible click.

RACE FELT LIKE A PACKHORSE as she shoulR

dered through the back door into the soft C9d

creams and yeflows of her kitchen. In one hand she juggled three plastic bags filled with groceries and her purse. In the other was her briefcase and, gripped by two fingers, the hanger hooks of the dry cleaning that was sheathed in slippery plastic bags and draped over her shoulder. The clothes kept slipping down her arm, impeding her progress as she leaned more and more to the left to keep them from sliding to the ground.

“Hi, Aunt Grace!” A piping voice greeted her as she dropped grocery bags, purse, and briefcase on the white-painted oval table at which she and Jessica ate most of their meals. Straightening up with relief, she hung the cleaning on the antique iron coatrack that stood against the wall Just inside the door.

“Hi, Courtney.” Rofling her shoulders to ease the cramping caused by carrying all that weight in such an awkward position, Grace greeted her niece with a smile as she darted past, a ponytailed four-year-old in

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a pink sweat suit. Then she glanced the length of the long, narrow, charmingly oldfashioned kitchen to discover her sister perched on one of the center island bar stools talking to Pat Marcel, the woman who came in once a week to clean. “Hi, Jax. Hi, Pat.”

” ‘Bout time you got home,” Jackie said with a smile, breaking off her conversation with Pat, who usually left at four and was thus owed two extra hours’ pay. Today Grace had asked Pat to stay until she got home so that Jessica would not be alone in the house. By the time they’d left the hospital that morning, Jess had already been much better, revived by the correct dosage of insulin. But she had stayed home from school under strict orders to sleep.

“Hi, Aunt Grace!” Paul, her sixyear-old nephewtafl, thin, sandy-haired, and freckle-faced–skidded past, sliding like an ice skater in his stocking feet on the hardwood floor. He had a hole in the knee of his jeans and a big grin showing off a space where one of his front teeth had been just a few days before.

“Hi, Paul. He lost a tooth,” Grace said unnecessarily to her sister. Having retrieved the groceries and her purse, she heaved them onto the island counter, which like all the others in the kitchen was of white cerarnic tile. For a moment she abandoned the groceries to Pat’s capable hands while she extracted her checkbook and a pen from her purse.

“This morning. It fell out just as we were getting ready to leave the house. You’ve never heard such a commotion in your life. It bled,” Jackie said significantly, reaching into a sack for a white bakery box that revealed half a dozen blueberry muffins through a clear

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cellophane window. She put the box on the counter, opened it, and helped herself to a muffin. “He’s all excited now, though, because the tooth fairy’s coming tonight. I hear you had some excitement of your own last night, by the way. Jessica’s diabetes act up again?”

Busy writing out Pat’s check, Grace nodded. The full story of what had happened was not for Pat’s ears. Grace wasn’t even sure she would tell her sister. Her first impulse was to keep the embarrassing, terrifying truth strictly between herself and Jessica.

“How is Jess, by the way?” Grace asked Pat as she folded the check and handed it to her. Having just Put away the milk and butter, Pat stood in front of the built-in refrigerator, which had been fitted with wood panels to match the cherry cabinets that lined the walls. One of the kitchen’s four vintage brass-and-glass lanterns, fitted retroactively for electricity, hung over her head, bathing her in a pool of light.

“She’s been real quiet all day, but I think she’s doing okay. A friend’s upstairs with her now. She brought Jessica’s hornework over, so I thought it would be all right if she went up.” In her mid-fifties, with short dark hair gone to gray, Pat had deep wrinkles between her brows and around her mouth that made her look perpetually worried. When she had first come to work for them, Grace had braced herself every time she had talked to Pat, waiting for the bad news that seemed imminent. It had never come, and Grace had finally realized that the worried frown was the woman’s habitaal expression.