Simple (7 page)

*   *   *

IRIS HAD FORGOTTEN
to eat, what with all the excitement and her being on the news. She'd taken three phone calls from people who went to her church and two from her daughters saying they saw her on TV. One of the stations had apparently had her at six o'clock, but the two others played her little bit at eleven.

“Did I sound crazy?” she asked Corrine Corrigan, who played bingo beside her most Tuesdays.

“No, you sounded smart. I liked that line about the girl being dignified.”

“Well, she was. She wasn't trashy at all.”

Iris made herself two pieces of toast and began to scramble an egg. She had her appetite back these days so it was wild that she'd forgotten about food until now, except for snatching pieces of candy from the box on the end table. Give her chocolate, she wasn't going to complain.

During the fuss in the afternoon she was asleep in her bed. She was recovering from bypass surgery, and her whole system was a
mess
. It was surely the anesthetic—given a choice she would have refused it, not that that was possible—because after the surgery something went wrong with her melatonin, from what she could tell, turning her schedule upside down as if she lived in Egypt or Russia or somewhere. She was on a six- or ten-hour delay. Instead of getting sleepy at midnight, she got sleepy anytime between six and ten in the morning, depending on what she found on TV to entertain her throughout the night. A thriller at four in the morning could juice her up quite a bit. And for a while, she'd even lost her taste buds.

Her daughters worried about her because she sat on the glider on her porch so much of the time. She'd been amused that they thought some drug-addicted college student was going to bang her on the head, go in, find her wallet, and leave her for dead after she'd been through all the trouble of surgery. It wasn't funny anymore. This very thing—the break-in, the theft, the violence her daughters had feared—had happened to Cassie Price. Tomorrow her daughters would be here again trying to persuade her to move to the suburbs. But she had her friends, her church, her house, her porch, and the funny thing is, she wasn't frightened. She knew the students who went up and down the street—to see them anyway. They drank, she knew that. They lived in student messes, most of them. That didn't bother her. That was what young people did.

She made it to the news, and so did Cal Hathaway, the guy who worked on houses, and one student, an Indian guy, and one black man who owned his house, didn't rent. The media had wanted to show a variety of types, she supposed. She felt she'd won an audition, being the only white woman they chose.

She carried her scrambled eggs and toast to the front porch and sat on her glider.

The news guys were nice. The cops thought she was a ditz. She said, “I can tell you two things. Cassie was driving down the street yesterday and some guy in a gray car was following her. He wasn't right behind her, but I could tell.”

“How could you tell?'

“Because of how the car moved.”

“How was that?”

“Kind of—I can't explain it. If a person was walking and another person followed. The pace or something.”

“The rhythm?”

“Yes! The rhythm.”

“What kind of gray car?'

“I don't know the makes. Foreign, I think, not American.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The shape.”

“Okay. And what's the second thing?”

Then she'd hesitated. All she said was, “In the middle of the night, somebody was in the back alley getting into a black car.”

“So a different person?”

“I guess.”

“Make of the car?”

“Small. American. That's all I know.”

She didn't say the part about how the person getting into the car looked like an astronaut. Because her kids were worried about her visions, her mind. They said she had a thing called “surgery brain.” Like the time she fell asleep in the living room chair and woke up and saw the dog she used to have that died seven years ago, just standing there looking at her. “He was coming to get me,” she said, “but I told him I didn't want to go yet.”

The daughters looked at each other, those sideways glances, and even though she was miffed, it made her laugh to think how everyone got old (if they were lucky) and how you couldn't understand old when you weren't there. When you
were
there you knew the world was mystical and strange. Maybe the astronaut wanted Cassie Price. One way or another, he got her.

FOUR

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15

RICHARD CHRISTIE
sat on the side of the bed to answer the phone. “Christie here.”

“Commander?”

He saw it was midnight, no, 2:00
A.M.
“What is it?”

“You said to call,” McGranahan reminded him. “So. We questioned our man. It went fast. It went easy. Cal Hathaway. He confessed.”

“McGranahan,” Christie began carefully, “are you saying all the rest of it stacks up?”

“It does. You want to review?”

He saw Marina had opened her eyes. “Sure. Yes, I do. Thank you for letting me know,” Christie said. “I'll read the files in the morning.” There was a pause. Christie stepped in to fulfill the expectation he heard in the silence. “Good work.”

He hung up.

Marina asked him something from her half-sleep. He interpreted it to mean, from the upward lilt, “You okay? Everything okay?” In spite of the fact that she was probably still down under, he answered her. “Sometimes I get it wrong. The guy is—”

A delicate snore. No. She was asleep.

Last night, the kids yammering in the backseat, they made it to the parkway just before ten. Christie had done all the driving; his legs were all wonky the last time he got out of the car to take a bathroom break, and he had to hold on to solid things because of a land-sickness, which was not unlike seasickness—the body fighting to right its balance system.

Now, 2:00
A.M.
on Saturday morning, he still felt a slight vertigo. It forced him to want to lie down and let others do what they did.

*   *   *

HE SAW THE ADMITTING
officer write down Caucasian on the form, but he didn't say anything. He was too upset to get into it. The right term for him, he'd learned, was quadroon, one black grandparent. He'd gotten beat up because of it when he was seven years old. Those boys at school wanted him to
look
black, they said. They said he was trying to pull something off. They asked if he bleached his hair and skin. At first he thought they were joking and he laughed, but he learned later the laughter had infuriated them. They said alternately that he must have white parents who didn't want him because they obviously dumped him off on an old black woman. They meant his grandmother who walked him to school. She'd stopped working for the Connollys because she was sick with something that had turned out to be cancer. Some of the boys taunted him that he had an old black mother. He didn't try to correct them. It took him a long time to realize that everything about him, his pacifist personality, his mild answers, the color of his skin, made them crazy.

Now he didn't correct the police. All his life people had written down Caucasian. Hospitals, schools, jobs, insurance, driver's license. There were years when he was relieved by it—it helped him get by. But something had happened lately; the drift of the country, politically, got into his heart. He wanted to be fully what he was.

He had dirty blond hair. It was uneven in color with natural blond streaks from working outdoors so much. His skin was still white. He'd burned from working outdoors, then tanned. Even so, he looked white. He had green eyes, a sort of green/hazel that occurred fairly often in mixed-race people. His eyes were wide spaced, not large.

They kept ordering him around. They made him sit in a big chair that was like an electric chair. It did something to him—like an X-ray, they said when he tried to protest. “It won't hurt you. Sit still.” He had to stand for a long time in a line, and then he had to sit for a long time in a room with a lot of other people, most of whom seemed to be drunk and unwashed. He tried to sleep, sitting, standing.

He'd had that thing they call arraignment. It was in a funny dark room with a video camera and a person asking him questions on the screen. That person, a tired old man, asked him if he had any money, to which he replied, “Not much.” The man said he would get him a public defender.

Then they took him to another line where they even made him strip and examined him every which way. Somehow it reminded him of being born—scrubbed and slapped and pushed to breathe on his own.

They were folding up his clothes, everything he owned. “I want to keep my watch with me.”

“Can't,” they said. “We're supposed to take it.”

“Take it? It's mine.”

He gave up his clothes when they pulled the basket away from him, but he wouldn't give up his watch. He accepted the limp bedroll with its toothbrush, paste, tiny towel, red uniform, blanket, and that was about it. He was made to shower and use a special shampoo. They made him put on the red prison suit with white lettering.

When the officer walked him down the corridor of the jail, he heard murmurs of “Who came in?” “White guy. Must be drunk.” “Guy can hardly walk.”

He didn't think fatigue could be this bad. He couldn't care about anything.

The cell smelled of urine. The bed was a metal bunk bed with a thin mattress. He got one knee down on the lower level, crouching, and then let himself fall the rest of the way. He still wore the wristwatch he had fought hard to keep. “Be my guest,” the man with the uniforms had said finally. “It's only going to cause you trouble.”

Before his head dropped on his wrist, he noticed it was five thirty in the morning. After I sleep, he told himself, I'll tell them, everybody, the public defender and everybody, why I said it, how I just wanted to sleep. I'll tell them the truth about my mother making me angry because she thought I did the thing. And then about how I couldn't stand those guys coming at me and at me with their questions.

He knew there would be a large mark on his face from the watch, but he couldn't move to adjust his body. Everything went black.

*   *   *

FOUR HOURS AFTER
the phone call from McGranahan, Christie sat at his kitchen table studying the newspaper while Marina poured him a cup of coffee.

The reporter had written it with only the early details of the story, not the confession, which had happened late at night. The article, which had made it to the front page, carried the expected shock value. A pretty young woman was dead. Her name was Cassandra Price. She'd come to the city from a town so small it had only eighty inhabitants. She was twenty-two, finishing up a summer job as a paralegal at a prestigious law firm and getting ready to attend Pitt law school. Friends and colleagues reported she was extremely serious about her studies and worked all the time, reading law and about law even in her time off. The murder had happened at her house, a property in Oakland, a fixer-upper that had once been rented to students. She had wanted to own something herself instead of renting a place, as most students do. Neighbors said she was happy to spend her evenings working on the house. People from the Connolly law office reported that she was thrilled to have a little backyard, a chance to garden. The reporter managed to convey an image of a promising young person just coming up in the world, just blossoming. The final paragraph of the article stated that a man doing repair work for Ms. Price had sensed something wrong at the house and had found her body. The placement of the paragraph managed to imply the handyman was the answer to the reader's questions.

Christie couldn't wait to go into the office.

“You're beating yourself up,” Marina said. “We deserved to go on vacation. You deserved it.”

“I know that.”

He was dressed and driving to Headquarters only minutes later. Once he got there, he felt like himself again. He popped on his computer and started to read the newest accounts of the investigation. He read through the interview notes for the law firm and the neighbors. His five men, headed by Dolan, had done interviews averaging ten minutes each at the firm. You could get a lot in ten minutes, but they'd come away with little more than what was in the paper.

He read Coleson's and McGranahan's notes again and thought over the facts. Cassie had been strangled. She had been wearing her nightgown. Her wallet and cell phone were missing. In her house the detectives found the morning coffee prepped and ready to go. They found the bleeping alarm clock set. Her clothes were set out for the next workday.

Someone had entered through the back door. The lock looked a little rough, but it wasn't absolutely clear it had been tampered with. The photos of it were vague and didn't make particular sense. The crime scene was strangely devoid of evidence. The Forensics staff looked for hairs, footprints, all the usual, and it would be a while before they analyzed most of it. But, good, they took samples of what they could get.

The pathologist had reported early on that the marks on Cassie's throat were consistent with manual strangulation. Coleson and McGranahan had surmised as much from their first visual inspection.

Christie read on. While Coleson and McGranahan talked to the boy, the young man they eventually arrested here at Headquarters, other detectives helped Forensics to comb the crime scene. One of the young detectives was the one who picked up a pair of work gloves from Cassie's porch, just outside her door. The gloves had hair in them.

Christie next went down the hall to watch the video of the interrogation.

“Did you want her wallet for her photograph, perhaps?” Coleson was asking.

“No.”

“You didn't want to look at her? Did you like looking at her?”