Life Sentences (5 page)

A previous child had been taken.
That detail had been missing from the television report, and it was given only scant attention here. Calliope's parental rights had been terminated seven years earlier. That child would have to be—quick calculation—twenty-seven. How tantalizing. What had become of that child? Was that part of Callie's story? Should it be? Cassandra had researched 1980s adoption as part of
The Painted Garden
and knew that various groups began pushing for greater openness in adoption in the nineties. But that wouldn't affect Callie's first son. He would be able to find his mother only if they signed up for a mutual registry.

Images on microfiche tend to be grainy, especially when printed
out, but Cassandra pressed the button anyway, capturing the 1988 photo of Callie when she was first jailed for contempt. Calliope's face was hard, her eyes hollow, and the cords in her neck looked almost painful. Yet, even in a shapeless winter coat, there was the suggestion of a striking figure, a model's figure. Drugs? Cassandra had heard somewhere that heroin users have killer bodies, that drug abuse gives them raging metabolisms that never stop, even if they clean up. Callie's eyes were downcast in the photo, but her lawyer, holding her by the arm, looked straight into the camera. That was the woman who had yet to return Cassandra's calls, an unanticipated development. These days,
everyone
returned Cassandra's calls. True, she hadn't been able to find anyone who would help her contact the retired police detective who had worked the case, but those people had at least had the courtesy and professionalism to pick up the phone.

Studying the younger version of the lawyer, she found herself projecting all sorts of qualities on her. Bulldoggish.
Homely.
Cruel, but accurate. What was it like to be an ugly woman? Cassandra, like every woman she knew, was full of self-doubt about her own appearance, had several moments every day when she was disappointed by the face she saw in the mirror. The older she got, the more she felt that way. Yet she also knew, on some level, that she would never be described as
ugly.
What would that be like? Obviously, she wouldn't enjoy it, although—this just occurred to her—physical attractiveness didn't seem to have much to do with whether women were paired or single. The plain women she knew seemed to do better relationship-wise. There had been some faux-economic explanation of this recently, an appalling bit of pop journalism that had boiled down to the usual advice:
You're not getting any younger, so you better take what you can get.

Cassandra, a two-time loser at matrimony, had no interest in getting back into the pool, especially after her second husband's attempt to break their prenup. That was pure blackmail, and it had worked: She had given him more than he deserved in the hope that he wouldn't gos
sip about her. She still liked men—she had a married lover, in fact, someone ideal, who required almost no attention—but she had no use for marriage. Her father was right: Marriage had nothing to do with romance. The end of her first marriage had been truly tragic—her college sweetheart, undone by demons he had hid all those years, destroying them both financially. The second one had been a mistake, plain and simple, and her account of it had been a cautionary tale that boiled down to this:
If, on the eve of your wedding, you wonder if you are making a terrible mistake—you are.

She inserted the 1995 reel, the one that held the story of Callie's release, interested to see if the photo could reveal anything about the experience of seven years in jail. Funny, Callie was coming out of jail about the same time Cassandra started writing. In the second photograph, Callie actually looked better physically, but her expression was incredibly sad. To Cassandra's eyes, this was not a woman who felt vindicated. But then—why would she? Callie, upon her release, was still a woman believed to have killed her child and to have evaded justice on what many would call a technicality, a trick.

The homely lawyer was gone, replaced by a man. A strikingly handsome man. He seemed happy, at least—not out-and-out grinning, but allowing a tight smile that showed the hint of a dimple. Reginald Barr—the name was dimly familiar. Tisha had been Tisha Barr and she had a little brother, but he was known as Candy, in part because he was sweet, just a total charmer. But there was another, more peculiar reason for the name. The Reggie bar? No, that came much later. Candy's nickname was from his signature dance, the way he imitated an obscure singing group.

Cassandra's mind, when it raced toward a stray memory, was like a horse heading for a fence. She either slammed into the limits of her own mind or sailed over, finding what she needed. But she knew
this;
it had come up in her first book. The Astors, another quartet of Temptations wannabes. She had watched them on some dance show—
American
Bandstand
or Baltimore's own Kirby Scott?—and her father couldn't shut up about the name. “The Astors! The
Astors
! I wonder how much of the family fortune
they
inherited.”

But there was a part where the singers simulated bees buzzing around the sweet girl's head, and Candy Barr had turned that into a comic bit, slapping at the horde in mock terror. He also had a funny, hop-hop pelvis move, extremely precocious, a little nasty. Whenever he started doing that, Tisha chased him from the room.
Gee-whiz
…something, something.

So Tisha's brother had worked on Callie's defense. It was the kind of small-world touch that Baltimore was known for, all the more likely in the tight-knit black community of the Northwest Side. Plus, that was pure Tisha, looking out for an old classmate, trying to save Callie once again. Cassandra knew exactly how to play it: She would let Reg lead her to Tisha, then allow Tisha to take her to—everyone. Because she was, after all, writing about them all, even if Callie was her focal point. She wouldn't be too up-front about her interest in Callie, not at first, although she would keep trying to find that police detective.
Gee-whiz,
as the Astors sang.
Have you seen our girl?

WHERE THE HELL IS BANROCK STATION?

Teena Murphy put the box of chardonnay on the conveyor belt at Beltway Fine Wines, something she did—
damn
—every six days, on average, and it might have been a little more frequently, but she allowed herself vodka on the weekends. Yet this icy February day was the first time she had been moved to consider the name of her weeknight wine of choice. Box wine had many advantages—the price, the relative lightness of the carton, a key consideration for her—but Teena preferred it because she didn't have to confront how quickly the level was dropping.

“You having a party?” a voice behind her asked, a playful tenor. “How come I wasn't invited?”

She turned, surprised that anyone at Beltway Fine Wines would
joke with her that way. Teena had been a knockout in her prime, but her prime was a long time ago. She had also let her hair go gray, which made her look older still, as did her small, fragile-seeming frame. People didn't joke with slightly hunched, gray-haired ladies in the after-work rush at Beltway Fine Wines.

Unless they knew you once upon a time.

“Lenhardt,” she said. “What are you doing in my home away from home?” If she made the joke, it couldn't be true. Right?

Her former colleague laughed. He had aged, too, but then—it had been fifteen years, easy, since they had seen each other last. Teena still got invited to the Christmas parties, the retirement parties, even the homicide squad reunions, but she never attended. Her invitations may have arrived on the same paper, in the same envelopes as everyone else's, but there was a whiff of pity about them. Pity and contempt.

“You look good, Teenie,” he lied. Even in his wilder days, between his two marriages, Lenhardt had been able to compliment a woman without making it sound like a pass.

“You, too,” she said, and it wasn't as much of a reach. He looked as good as he ever had. Lenhardt—now in his fifties—had always been a little stocky, and there was only a touch of gray in his sandy hair.

“Where you living these days?”

“On Chumleigh, off York Road.” Quickly, defensively, always aware of the gossip that she had cashed in on her misfortune. “
West
of York Road. And it wasn't so expensive when I bought in.”

“Chum
leigh
!” He laughed at her blank look. “You don't remember Tennessee Tuxedo? His walrus friend, Chumley? And Don Adams was the voice of the penguin? No? Ah well, as a Baltimore Countian, you're one of the citizens I'm charged with protecting and serving, not necessarily in that order. You working?”

“At Nordstrom.”

“Explains the fancy duds. But then—you always liked clothes, Teenie. I remember—”

“Yeah,” she said, not wanting him to finish the sentence:
How excited
you were when you got to join CID, wear your own clothes.
She had dressed beautifully once she got out of uniform. It had been the eighties, not fashion's finest hour in hindsight, and she had gone into credit-card debt for that outlandish wardrobe. It had been the age of fluffy excess—oversize shirts, big jewelry, riotous prints. She remembered one skirt with enormous cabbage roses. Oh, and those big Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, which someone of Teena's height could practically wear as dresses.

Her colleagues had teased her, saying she looked like a punk, not getting that the look was, in fact, a romantic take on the downtown look. She had even been called in, told to tone it down, but her union rep had stepped in and said her clothes were within the guidelines for dress. The department was used to fashion plates, but the male version, peacocks strutting in expensive suits and ties. The other women in homicide, all two of them, went for that boring dress-for-success thing, suits and little bows. Teena would have rather gone back to wearing a uniform.

Now she wore dark, somber knits purchased at her employee discount. To sell other women expensive clothes, she had found it helped to have a neutral look, one that couldn't be pinned down in terms of label or cost. Because, of course, that was the paradox of waiting on wealthy women, the unspoken accusation hurled out when someone discovered she couldn't wear something new and trendy:
What do you know? You can't afford these things.
But Teena knew the clothes better than anyone. She lived among them, day in and day out. She thought of her life at Nordstrom as akin to a position in some strange animal orphanage, full of exotic beasts that needed new homes. She was careful about matching her charges to their future owners, determined that the rarest specimens go to customers who were worthy of them.

“It's funny, running into you,” Lenhardt said. His cart was filled with what Teena thought of as
reputable
purchases—three bottles of wine, a bottle of Scotch, a case of Foster's. She wondered how long those would last him, how often he shopped here, if he drank one beer with dinner, or
two, or three. “It was only a day or so ago that I got a call from someone looking for you. But that's how it goes. You go years without seeing an old friend, then,
boom,
the name's suddenly in the air. Ever notice that?”

The clerk loaded her box back into the shopping cart. Beltway Fine Wines had a distinctive smell that Teena could never quite pin down, a combination of wood, damp cardboard, and something spicy. She wondered if the various spirits under its roof slipped into the air. She always felt a little…
altered
when she was here, but then, she came here after work, when she was in the middle of the transition from work Teena to home Teena. No one called her Teenie anymore, but she still couldn't carry her full name, Sistina.

“Someone called you, looking for me?”

“She was shut down by the public information officer in Baltimore City, I think, so she dug around, found some of your old compadres, those of us who jumped ship back in the early nineties. I guess she assumed we were disgruntled types, more likely to break rank. She was half-right.”

Lenhardt had left when a new chief tried to force a rotation system on the homicide squad. Teena might have joined the exodus, but she had her accident a few months later.

“She?”

“Some writer. Kinda famous, I think—I remember my wife reading one of her books for book club. She's working on a new book.” He swiped his credit card, took his bagged purchases from the clerk. Teena realized she was blocking other shoppers trying to make their way to the exit. She began rolling slowly forward, but Lenhardt caught up easily and fell into step beside her.

“Why does she want to talk to me?”

He gave her a look. “Do you want to talk to her?”

“No.”

“That's what I thought. I didn't tell her anything. I didn't have anything to tell, but if I had—I wouldn't have, Teena. You know that.”

“But—why? Why now?”

“She just realized she knows—what was her name, the one who never talked?”

“Calliope Jenkins.” She felt like a child risking the candy man. Say the name three times and she'll appear. Not that Teena was scared of Callie Jenkins. Not exactly.

“Right. They went to school together.”

“And that's a book?” Her voice screeched a little on the last word, but the whoosh of the automatic doors provided cover. They were outside now, and the wind was cutting, carrying little pinpricks of rain that stabbed exposed skin. She had forgotten to put her gloves on and her hands ached. The medical experts hired by the other side during the arbitration said Teena's Raynaud's was coincidental, that she couldn't prove it was a direct result of the accident. Small-framed women were prone to it, they said. Still, Teena never minded the cold before the accident.

“Her name is Cassandra Fallows,” Lenhardt said. “This writer, I mean.” He had followed her to her car and she had a pang of embarrassment at its plainness. An out-and-out hooptie would have been less humiliating than this green, well-kept Mazda, which seemed to announce to the world how small and dull her life was. “On caller ID, she comes up as a New York area code. Begins with a nine at any rate. In case she does find you. Although I admit I tried, out of curiosity, and your number is unlisted, although your address comes up readily enough through the MVA. Not that she can get that without driving down to headquarters in Glen Burnie. Still, you know, if she's even a half-assed researcher, she'll be able to find your address. Unless—you own or rent?”

“Own.”

He grimaced. “Well, that's good—I mean, rent is just throwing money away—but that makes it easier to find a person. Sorry, now I sound like your father. I am a father now. A boy and a girl, Jason and Jessica.”

“Congratulations.” She meant it. Being a father, a parent, seemed
miraculous to her. Anything normal did. But her mind wasn't really on Lenhardt's kids. A writer, doing a book. Every couple of years or so, back when the case was fresher, she would get a letter from a reporter, usually someone new at the
Beacon-Light,
an eager kid who had just stumbled over the story. She should have expected this, with the New Orleans case kicking up Calliope's name, however briefly. She herself had started when she heard the news. But it had been so long since anyone had spoken of Callie to her. That was another reason not to attend cop parties. No back-in-the-day, no war stories.

“Bye, Lenhardt. It was nice seeing you.”

“Maybe our paths will cross again,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said.
Especially if you shop here regularly.

She drove home and, as it often happened, was shocked to find herself there fifteen minutes later, panicky to realize that she had driven so mindlessly. She had always been prone to zone out that way. It was part of the reason she almost never drank outside the house—at her size and weight, a generous glass of wine could edge her over the legal limit. Oh, it couldn't make her drunk—based on her consumption of box wine, it took quite a lot to make her drunk—but who would believe that, should Teena Murphy be pulled over in her fancy clothes and plain car? They would expect her to be drunk. It would explain how she survived being her.

Pulling into her parking pad, she heard something—a branch cracking perhaps—and almost jumped out of her skin. The sound was the only memory she had, and she wasn't even sure if that was true or something her brain had manufactured after the fact. But any kind of snapping, cracking noise threw her into a panic. She couldn't be sure, but she believed that she hadn't screamed until she heard the sound, all those breaking, snapping bones, like twigs under a giant's foot. In her ears, it sounded like scoffing laughter, someone taunting her. Not that Calliope Jenkins had even smiled, much less laughed, in all the time she had tried to talk to her over the years. Still, Teena always believed she was laughing on the inside, delighted by her ability to play them all.

The accident happened a couple of months after they announced Callie Jenkins's release. Now
that
was sheer coincidence. Teena had gone to pick up a woman, the mother of a kid who had just been charged in a homicide, and the woman freaked out. Teena had always prided herself on not making the mistake of going for her gun too early, something women police were faulted for. Small as she was, she could and would take a beat-down. But she was tired that morning—
not
drunk—and she had gone for her gun, and the woman had knocked it out of her hand, sent it skittering under the car. Teena had been groping, grasping for it when the car started to roll backward.

She let herself into the small, neat rowhouse she had purchased with her settlement from the car manufacturer, the deep pocket that had finally swallowed responsibility for her accident. Oh, they didn't admit the parking brake was faulty, and they had done enough research, her FOP lawyer said, to know they could pretty much destroy her credibility in court. They just decided it was cheaper to settle and what was nothing to a big car company was more than enough to buy this house, in cash, on Chumleigh Road.
Chumley!
Now she remembered. She had watched that cartoon. She just forgot. She forgot a lot. She was forty-six years old and she could barely believe that she was once a little girl who had watched cartoons, who had decided she wanted to apply to the police academy because of Angie Dickinson in
Police Woman.

“She's part of the gimp lineup, you know,” her father would say, referring to the other popular television shows of the day. “There's a guy in a wheelchair, a blind guy, and a fat guy. She's a woman, and that's handicap enough.” He wasn't being mean, and he certainly didn't know he was being prophetic, that his daughter would one day join the gimp lineup twice over. Her father simply never understood why a pretty girl—and, although he never said it, a
straight
girl—would choose a career in the Baltimore City police department. Teena didn't dare to say it out loud, but she believed she could be the first female chief in the department's history, the first woman in the nation to lead a big-city
police department. In the seventies, it wasn't weird to believe that kind of shit. Strange, now that there really were women heading departments—in Des Moines; in Jackson, Mississippi—it seemed less probable to her. When she had joined homicide in 1986, she was the third female detective. Now, twenty-two years later, there were…two female detectives.

Teena lifted the box of wine from her trunk, favoring her right hand, and cradled it on the point of her hip, the way a woman might carry a baby. She would eat something—a frozen dinner from Trader Joe's, soup and a sandwich—forestall the first glass of wine just long enough to prove that she could. She would wash her dishes, tidy up the kitchen. Then, and only then, she would board the train for Banrock Station, chugging past all the other little towns on the route, all the places she would never know or visit.