The Vinyl Princess (14 page)

“You think you’ll give him another chance?”

“I dunno. I really don’t.”

I love how Kit’s convinced that Joel belongs on death row, but Niles she’s considering pardoning. Is there any doubt that love is truly blind?

“What time tomorrow morning? Should I pick you up at your house?”

“Yeah, um, how about ten?”

“Okay.”

“Fighting crime on our day off, how fun. Whatever will we do afterward, buy a Batphone?”

I try to laugh but I can’t. “See you tomorrow,” I say.

I hang up the phone and flip through my vinyl till I find Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
. I put it on the turntable and sit on my bed with my eyes closed, listening. It would be nice if there were a sign that I’m doing the right thing. Kit’s giving Niles another chance. Should I be giving M a chance to turn himself in? Who am I kidding? That’s not happening. It’s time to let go of the fantasy M. I think about the dream again, how I’m letting go of his hand, letting go of him, letting him fall.

I suppose a dream is as good a sign as any.

I sit at my computer and type in my blog address. As I’m waiting for it to load it occurs to me that my blog has become my soft place to fall. I’ve succeeded, finally, in finding a group of friends (sure, they’re in cyberspace but they’re real people) who’ve also been looking for a place to connect. I’ve started noticing that the same people check in almost every day, plus a bunch of new ones. Forty-three people have responded to the
Last Waltz
blog and it’s only been posted for twenty-four hours. They’re waiting like eager children, waiting to see what I’ll talk about next. I’ve decided that I’m going to charge a fifteen-dollar subscription fee for a year’s worth of
Vinyl Princess
fanzines. The postage is killing me, especially to Europe. Anyway, vinyl collectors are used to getting money orders because they’re always buying records through the mail. I have to start thinking about next month’s issue. It’s going to be bigger and better in a whole bunch of ways. I’ve also decided that I’m going to produce six issues a year. I can’t knock one out a month. I’ll lose my mind.

My Berkeley Fan has posted a new comment. I’ve started going to his comments first (and yes, I sure hope it’s a guy).

The East Village? That means he’s from New York. I think about Zach and then quickly dismiss the thought. No way.

T
here are only a handful of scenarios where you might find yourself at the Berkeley police station on a Tuesday morning. The obvious one is that you’re escorted in wearing handcuffs because you’ve done something very bad. Another scenario is that you’re the victim of someone else’s very bad thing and you’re here to tell someone about it. Finally, there are the friends, relatives and loved ones of the person who’s done a very bad thing who’ve come to pick them up or bail them out. There’s a tragic element to every one of these scenarios.

Looking around, I see very few of our kind sitting in the waiting area: that is to say, two teenage girls holding decaf mochas, casually dropping by to offer evidence in an ongoing robbery investigation. Although the tragic element exists, it’s a little harder to spot in our case. It seems to me, though, that the longer you’re inside the station, the more tragic things become.

Immediately upon walking through the doors, I felt a sense of guilt wash over me. Maybe that’s why people confess to crimes they haven’t committed. It’s not them; it’s this place. Now, standing at the reception desk, I have half a mind to confess to the robberies myself. I’ve called ahead and Officer Davis assured me that we should “come on down to the station,” but no one seems to know where he is, so we’re forced to take a seat on a wooden bench and inhale disinfectant and desperation while they locate him. We try to avoid eye contact with our benchmates, who regard us suspiciously. Even a toddler sitting on his mother’s lap gives us the stink-eye. A man across the hall is hunched over a pay phone, having a protracted conversation with his wife or his girlfriend.

“Look, baby. . . . Okay . . . I know I said that but . . . No, this is it, I promise. . . . No, you can’t do that. . . . I own half of it. . . . How will I get to work? . . . C’mon, baby . . . if you could just come and get me. . . . No, I know . . . but I mean it this time. . . . I love you. . . . No . . . don’t hang up. . . . Baby . . . don’t hang up! . . . Hello? . . .” He bangs the receiver against the phone and walks away, leaving it dangling.

While we sit there waiting, I start thinking about
Reggatta de Blanc
, by the Police. Great record. I walk up to the front desk and write it across my palm with a pen attached to a chain. I
must
blog about that album; it’s
so
cool.

Finally, Officer Davis appears, wiping his hands on a paper towel. I imagine him scarfing down a submarine sandwich in the janitor’s closet, ignoring his pages.

“Allie?” he asks, looking from me to Kit and back to me again. He has no recollection of who I am. You have to wonder if he’ll ever make detective with his unbelievably bad eye for details.

“That’s me.” I wave my hand.

“C’mon back.” He holds open the low wooden gate that separates us and we walk through it. We follow him up the stairs to a large room filled with desks that looks remarkably like the set of
NYPD Blue
. Officer Davis points to two chairs in front of a desk with his nameplate on it. We take our seats and he eases himself into a leather chair on wheels behind the desk and rifles through a stack of files in his inbox till he locates the right one. There’s a photo in a frame sitting on his desk: a woman with a fat kid on either side of her, one boy and one girl. They’re all wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Goofy is standing behind them with his arms around the group. I imagine Officer Davis was the photographer.

“So.” He looks at me. “You remembered something else about the robbery?”

“Yes, well, sort of. I actually know who did it.”

“You do?” He looks dubious, like maybe he thinks I’ve been watching too much
CSI
on television.

“Well, I have a first name for one of them—Joel, probably an alias,” I say, attempting cop talk, “but I have a good description of them. We both do.” I look at Kit, who nods vigorously.

“Really?” He crosses his arms and leans back in his leather chair. It complains loudly. He still looks doubtful. As an afterthought he leans forward and grabs a pencil. He writes
Joel
with a question mark after it on the file.

“So, what makes you suspect this Joel fella and his buddy?”

“Well, we both work on Telegraph, as you know, and a few weeks ago we started to notice these two guys hanging around the neighborhood.”

“And what made them stand out?”

What am I supposed to say here?
Oh, one of them was gorgeous and I fell madly in love with him and foolishly imagined a future where he and I were together all the time?
I clear my throat. “Well, they were new. We’d never seen them before, and one of them, the one who calls himself Joel, came into the record store while I was working and pretended to be looking for something, and I think he was scoping the place out.” Okay, now I really sound like a whacked-out
CSI
watcher.

“You do, do you?” He’s digging around in his ear with his pinkie now. He examines his finger and wipes it on his pants. “And you only recently made the connection?”

My heart starts to pound. Good question. Officer Davis is sharper than I thought. “Yeah, um, you know, I just sort of put it together all of a sudden.”

“So?”

“So, the night of the robbery, when he spoke, I recognized his voice.” I’m definitely not telling him about our coffee date. Kit and I discussed it on the way over. I don’t want to be
that
connected to the crime.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Have a nice evening.’” Now that I’m saying it out loud it really does sound absurd.

“That’s it? ‘Have a nice evening’? You recognized his voice in four words after only hearing it once?”

“He has a very distinctive voice. Oh, and I recognized his boots too.”

Officer Davis rubs his face with his thick hands. “Do you girls think you could recognize either of these two guys if you saw a photo of them?”

Kit looks at me. We both say yes.

Officer Davis presses a button on his phone and speaks into it. “Rebecca, I gotta couple of gals here who say they can identify the Telegraph robbers. Can we get the mug books out? Let’s give them California for now, okay?”

“You got it,” says the speaker.

He takes his finger off the button. “So, we’re going to get you to look at some photos. It’s probably best that you don’t discuss this with each other as you’re looking. It could push you in the wrong direction. Just let me know if you come across anything that looks familiar. We’ll start with California and go from there, okay? If you don’t find what you’re looking for today, we’ll set you up with a sketch artist so we have something to go on here at the station. Okay?”

“Um, this Joel guy, he had sort of an East Coast accent, maybe New Jersey.”

Officer Davis narrows his eyes. His hand goes for the button. “Rebecca, bring New Jersey too, okay?”

“Yep,” says the box.

The books are enormous. In each photo, the man wears the same expression. A few pages in, I figure out what it is: regret. I start to get depressed almost immediately. Kit sits on a rolling chair at one desk and I sit at another, flipping through photos earnestly at first, looking for our man, but soon we both become despondent. The room is completely airless. What were we expecting this to be like? Looking through a wedding album or an album of someone’s trip to Paris?

We don’t find them in California or New Jersey, so we branch out to Texas, Florida and Nevada, all the bad-guy states, I guess. Two hours pass and we’re still suspectless. Our credibility seems to be slipping away. Officer Davis brings in a sketch artist (is there actually a guy with a sketch pad and charcoal just sitting in another room waiting for moments like this?). We start with the bulldog. Since we only caught a glimpse of him, it’s tough to describe him. Kit saw him twice so I let her do most of the talking. For some reason, both of us recall that he was wearing cowboy boots in some kind of exotic leather, like ostrich or crocodile, but the artist doesn’t draw the feet, just the head and shoulders. We end up with something that looks remarkably like the guy we saw. He looks very menacing. I wonder if he’d be flattered by this rendering. I tell the artist that he’s very good but he seems not to care. I want to ask him if he rents himself out to birthday parties and bar mitzvahs to draw those giant-head, tiny-body caricatures for party guests or if this is his full-time gig. I think better of it. We start on Joel. Kit rolls her eyes at me when I use words like
sea glass green
to describe his eyes, and then I go into minute detail to describe his dark, long eyelashes. I describe him so perfectly to the artist that the final result scares me. I ask for a copy and he looks at me a little strangely but he makes me a copy of it. When he hands it to me he says, “This is police property. Don’t tell anyone I did this.”

Kit and I are allowed to leave but we’re supposed to come back tomorrow and look at more photos. We both have to work tomorrow, but Officer Davis says we can come in after work. He points out with a chuckle that the station is open twenty-four hours for our convenience. I get the feeling that this is something he says a lot.

When I get home from my long day at the police station, my mom looks almost back to normal. Her eye is sagging only slightly now and it makes her look a bit sad. She’s showered, washed her hair and applied makeup. She’s wearing a fitted purple long-sleeved dress. She looks nice.

“Is that new?” I ask.

“Yeah, you like it? I just bought it today.” She smooths the fabric over her hips.

“Yes. You look great. Where are you going?”

“Out for dinner with Jack. I guess he’s over the camping fiasco.”

“Mom, camping is not a date; it’s an endurance test. If you can survive camping with someone, you should marry them on the way home.”

She digs around in her bag and comes up with a lipstick. I watch her apply it in the mirror by the front door. Her lips have grown thinner over the years and I think she looks better without lipstick, but I would never tell her that.

“There was no danger of that on this trip. In fact, if we had been married, we probably would have gotten divorced on the way home.”

When Jack arrives to pick my mom up, I already know by his face that the relationship is over. I can tell that my mom knows too but she still gets her shawl, waves good-bye to me and walks out to the car with him. I watch out the window as he holds the passenger door open for her and closes it carefully once she’s in. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to run outside and throw a rock at his head. I suppose he thinks he’s doing the right thing, the gentlemanly thing, taking my mom out to a restaurant so he can tell her it could never work between them, so that he can dump her over dessert, like maybe there’s some dignity in that. He has not a clue about what a great person she is. He has no idea how smart and funny and wonderful she can be when she has access to indoor plumbing and a concierge and a warm bed. Who the hell does he think he is in his khakis and his argyle socks, waltzing into our lives from some loser town in the middle of nowhere, expecting dinner, expecting her to put up a tent, expecting her to act normal, when really all my mom’s good at, all she’s ever been good at, is being brilliant?

I throw a frozen pizza into the oven and flop onto the sofa. I start watching a DVD of
Summer of ’42
, periodically checking for Jack’s car out the front window, bracing myself for my mom’s return. I know I should be working on my blog but tonight I just can’t. The car pulls up when I’m on the second-to-last scene of the movie, where Hermie goes to Dorothy’s house and finds it empty and he’s reading the note she left him, telling him why she had to leave and that she’ll never forget him. Two pieces of cold pizza sit congealing on the coffee table. Jack doesn’t walk my mom to the door and I know she told him not to. I hear her key in the lock. She walks in, still fresh in her new dress, and sits down next to me on the sofa. She kicks off her heels and pulls her feet up under her.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“Oh, you know.” She looks at the TV. “Is this
Summer of ’42
?”

“Yeah.”

Hermie is standing in front of Dorothy’s beach house as an adult.

She watches the TV for a moment. A tear rolls down her cheek.

“Mom,” I say, sitting up and touching her shoulder. “Forget it. He’s an asshole.”

“I know. Shit.”

I go into the kitchen and pour her a glass of white wine. I set it in front of her and she looks at me gratefully and takes a sip.

“Thanks, doll face, you’re the best.”

I push my bare feet against her thigh. “You are,” I tell her.