All of Us (ARC) Page 14
“And you are?”
“Martha.”
“Okay, so tell me, Martha, where were you on the night
your father was killed? Did you exist?”
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I laugh again. I’ve been led to water and now I’ll drink.
Good move, one that puts Halberstam to shame.
“I did exist and I was home all night. You want it step
by step? After dinner, I set up the ironing board in front of the TV and went to work. That was around seven. Then
I watched Modern Family and American Housewife while I ironed blouses, skirts, and pants. Sitcoms fascinate me, by
the way. They’re so far removed from the lives we’ve lived,
they seem like science fiction.”
I pause for a moment while he guides the car into a park-
ing space reserved for cops on official business. His eyes
are dark and hard to read inside the car, but I don’t sense
hostility.
“At ten,” I tell him, “I switched to the local news. You
know, a police shooting in the Bronx, video of a robbery in
Brooklyn, weather, weather, weather. I wasn’t watching the
clock, but I’d say I was in bed by ten thirty.” I shake my head, still trying to read Ortega. “For certain, I never opened the front door.”
“Well, if you did, we’ll definitely know. The security cam-
eras in this building don’t work, but there’s a camera across the street that covers the entrance to your building. We
won’t get our hands on it until this evening, maybe tomor-
row morning.” He smiles. “No offense, by the way. Like me
visiting your therapist, it’s just another base to cover. Plus, you knew where your father would be that night. You had
the address of the Golden Inn Hotel lying on your little table.
In plain view.”
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Despite the last part, I brighten at the thought.
Redemption, or at least the possibility. If we’re eliminated as suspects, there’s no new reason to commit us. “So, if you watch the tape and don’t find Carolyn Grand, that’s it. We’re clear?”
He shakes his head as he pops the locks and opens his
door. “The fire escape in your kitchen leads to an alley separating your building from the one to the north. The alley
runs all the way between your street, South Portland Ave-
nue, and South Oxford Street to the east. There’s no secu-
rity camera back there, just low gates at either end. They
wouldn’t present much of a challenge to someone really
determined.”
He doesn’t add “really motivated” because he doesn’t
have to.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TINA
Daddy’s skin is gray. His lips are the color of gristle
and his eyes have shrunk down into his head like
something was pulling at them. I know what that something
is. It’s death.
If death goes on long enough, death claims everything
in the body, even the bones, the fingernails, the hair. That’s what they taught me in school.
Daddy made me go to school. He told me I had to because
if I didn’t go to school the city would come around asking
why. Then they would take me away and sell me and I’d be
a slave forever, even when I grew up.
So, I decided to go to school and Daddy got me all dressed
on my first day. He took my hand, but he didn’t open the
door. He knelt down and said, “Listen close, Carolyn. You’re gonna go to school, but you can’t tell nobody about the special things we do together. Nobody.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
He shook his head and grabbed my chin and forced me to
look into his eyes. I was afraid of his eyes, but I had to look anyway.
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He said, “Do you remember Pancho?”
Pancho was the name of the dog we had once. He was
always nice to me, but one day he tried to bite Daddy. So,
Daddy tied him to a pipe in the basement and killed him.
Daddy made me watch. He said, “This is what happens
when you’re bad. This is what you get.”
He hit Pancho with a golf club. Hit him again and again
and again. Pancho screamed for a long time. Then he whim-
pered for a long time. Then he died. I remember watching
his chest rise and fall, faster and faster. I remember that his tongue was hanging all the way out and it was covered with
blood. I remember that when he died, his eyes looked like
Daddy’s do now.
“What happened to Pancho could happen to you, little
girl. Yes, it could. Anything can happen to bad little girls and there’s nothing they can do about it.”
I didn’t tell anyone. My first year and my second year in
school. I didn’t talk to anyone except teachers when they
asked a question and I always sat by myself and I never
looked at anyone. I wanted to be the invisible girl, but they found me anyway. First a few. Freak, freak, freak. Then
everyone. Freak, freak, freak. Pinches, shoves, yanks came
next, but they weren’t anything at all compared to Daddy.
Alone, though, always alone. At home, at school. Always.
They could smell it on me.
I told in third grade. I told Mrs. Vallardi. She was my
counselor and she said it would be all better if I talked about my problems at home. She knew something was wrong she
said. I couldn’t fool her. So, I told.
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I told and I told and they took Daddy away and they gave
me to the Acevedas in the Bronx. The Acevedas were nicer
than Daddy. If I did my work, if I was a good, good girl, they never punished me.
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CHAPTER THIRTY
MARTHA
I come awake slowly, aware of sounds, a mumbling and
the sobs of a woman. My first instinct is to move away, to
create distance. Yet I stay where I am, my body not yet under my control. Seconds pass, a minute, before I realize that the body wracked with sobs is my own and the mumbling is a
clumsy attempt by Ortega to offer comfort. His arms are
wrapped around my shoulders and my head is against his
chest and my tears have soaked his blue shirt.
Horrified, I push him away, hard enough so that he stum-
bles back. I’ve never felt a man’s arms around me, never
known comfort from a man or a woman. I’m not about to
start now. No fucking way.
“Martha?” Ortega’s mouth is set in a line, his eyes nar-
rowed. I don’t know what to make of his expression. Don’t
know what Tina—and it could only be Tina, crying on a
man’s shoulder—might have told him. But I do know that I
have to reply.
“Yes.”
“And before?”
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“Tina.” I turn away to straighten my clothes. “She
remembers.�
�� The truth is far more complicated, but I don’t
explain. “It’s not like she has a choice.”
I turn back toward Ortega, glimpsing as I turn a fixed
image on a monitor. The monitor’s positioned on a shelf
behind the cop and it’s displaying a single image: my
father’s head. He doesn’t seem to me very changed. His
skin is grayish and his eyes are somewhat shrunken and
his lips are colorless. But all in all, he seems oddly undamaged. Not that I expect him to get up. I know he’s dead, that death has claimed him. Removed from our future, he no
longer frightens me.
“I read the case file at lunch this morning,” Ortega says.
“Hank Grand’s file, from twenty-seven years ago.” He hesi-
tates for a moment, his eyes dropping then rising again, his tone gentle. “I know what he did to you.”
We’re on the road, crawling alongside rush-hour traffic on
the Manhattan Bridge. I’ve already suggested that Ortega
use his siren to speed up our journey, but he only chuckled.
“And where would the traffic go?” he told me. “Into the
river?”
So now I’m fidgeting in the back seat, wanting to be rid
of the cop, the day and our body. I need a vacation. I need
respite.
We’re halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge when my dis-
posable phone belts out a string of cheery little tones. I dutifully fish it out of my bag. Without phone mail, I don’t have a lot of choice.
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“Hi, Carolyn, it’s Malaya Castro.” The cheery tone again,
high-pitched, almost girlish. “How are you?”
“How am I?” I laugh and Ortega laughs with me. He hits
the siren twice, whoop, whoop. “Never better, Malaya. Never better.”
“Great.” She takes a breath. “I got a call from the review
board a few minutes ago. They’ve scheduled a hearing.”
When I don’t respond, she adds, “On your case.”
“When?”
“Friday, ten a.m. You’ll have to be there.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be there, too. You won’t be alone.”
I glance out the window, staring for a moment at the
Staten Island Ferry as it crosses the bay. The wind is up and the orange ferry appears small against the whitecaps. “Why
are they doing this? Why now?”
“Kings County is part of the New York City Health and
Hospital System. Anything that goes wrong, that catches the
attention of the media, reflects on the mayor. The admin-
istration’s only doing what all administrations do. They’re
circling the wagons.”
“And I’m what? A hostile Indian?”
“We’ll find the answer to that one on Friday. Just remem-
ber, you need to be there. You need to show them who you
are and that you’re fully functioning.” She hesitates briefly as a horn sounds, then says, “Are you in a car?”
“Yeah, I’m with Detective Ortega. He drove me to the
morgue, to identify my father’s body.”
“Seriously?”
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“Yeah, why?”
“Because these days identifications are made at home
through the ME’s website. There was no need to travel.
You’ve been played.”
Dinner isn’t much, a can of tuna fish, the last of the mayo, a little red onion, two slices of whole wheat bread. Courtesy of a food pantry run out of a Baptist Church on Bergen Street.
Meager or not, I’m sharing my dinner with Marshal, the
man-boy who makes no judgments, who takes us as we are.
Marshal came over because he found a new email, which is
still unread. He’s proud of this discovery but prouder still that a website specializing in electronic music has added one of his compositions to its playlist. He tells me the name of the site, which I forget before the words reach my ears. I’ve listened to Marshal’s compositions and I can’t make them
any more than noise. Irritating noise at that. But for Marshal, this is the first time he’s been recognized by any professional and he’s as happy as a five-year-old on his birthday.
Far be it from me to rain on Marshal’s dream. I even share
the last of a small pound cake, which I was hoping to finish myself. By that time, we’re in the living room and Marshal’s pulling a joint from his shirt pocket.
“You think the cops are gonna do a search?” He doesn’t
wait for a reply before adding, “Those notes on the table? If the cops get a search warrant, they’re gonna take ’em. So,
how about I copy them and stash the copies at my place?”
I nod and smile. “I like it, Marshal. I like you, too.”
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He blushes, then offers me the joint. “You want some?”
he asks.
I don’t and I tell him so. Still, I don’t object when he lights up. I merely hold out my hand for the email. “Alright, I’m
ready now.”
Zenia, greetings.
I fear I’ve become obsessed. When I first learned of Hank Grand’s death, I discarded the possibility that my multi had anything to do with the matter. Bear in mind, Hank Grand produced child pornography, regularly dealt with mob figures who distributed his films and passed twenty-seven years in some of New York’s most violent prisons. Consider also that Hank Grand stood a bit over six feet tall and weighed nearly 250 pounds. His daughter, by contrast, is of average height and slim—she can’t weigh more than 120 pounds—and to my knowledge has never been violent.
Surely, under the circumstances, my dismissing the possibility that Carolyn Grand (or one of her many doppelgangers) murdered her father can be forgiven.
Forgiven or not, my opinion abruptly changed following an interview conducted in my office by a homicide detective named Ortega. He probed as best he could and I did the same. I wanted to learn something of the circumstances surrounding Grand’s death, but Ortega was no more forthcoming with me than I with him.
Nevertheless, I did come away convinced that my little multi is a legitimate suspect.
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her visit. As this was my first opportunity to examine Eleni, I paid close attention to her appearance and manner. First the obvious.
She threw her sexuality in my face, making clear her willingness to give me her body if I wanted it. (I didn’t and don’t.) Her behavior, when it wasn’t teasing, was challenging, and she didn’t let up.
Still, after I got past her charade, I found something else, something she would have preferred I not find, a hard and cold assessment devoid of empathy.
That got me going, Zenia, and I began to speculate, my thoughts running toward the obsessive. Suppose I reverse engineered my original judgment. Suppose I began by assuming that Carolyn Grand murdered her father. Well, then, instead of a single suspect, I’d have five to consider.
Selena was the first to be discarded. Too unfocused and utterly nonviolent. Victoria came next. Proper, even a bit conceited, she’s obsessed with her image. I cannot imagine her committing a murder. Tina presented something of a problem. I’ve seen her angry, as you know, but her anger, when I examined it, was the anger of a child, a nine-year-old throwing a tantrum.
; That left Kirk, Eleni, and Martha. I’ll take Martha first. A self-identified lesbian, Martha is relentlessly capable. Her mindset is masculine and she instinctively focuses on resolving problems, the sooner the better. Hank Grand was certainly a problem. Did she resolve it?
Kirk shares Martha’s sexual preferences, but considers himself to be a man trapped in a woman’s body. In session, he is fearless and makes no effort to placate me. Nevertheless, of all the identities, he seems the least concerned with their shared misfortunes.
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I’ve already described Eleni. I believe Eleni could have played the seductress long enough to put Hank Grand off his guard, to overcome the size disparity. Further, I can imagine her killing him for the pure pleasure of watching him die. She’s that cold.
Enough, dear Zenia, lest I become too excited for sleep. It’s getting late, and there’s nothing to be decided here, lacking as I do, all knowledge of how Grand was killed. Was he stabbed, bludgeoned, shot, poisoned? Are the ladies innocent? Guilty? Just now, that’s for them to know and me to find out. And if my expectations are not terribly high, I do believe I’ll be royally entertained along the way, which is all I ask. So, good night. Sleep well.
Laurence.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
KIRK
R ight away, as I come out of the building, I’m drawn to
a middle-aged man on the far side of the street. He’s
leaning against the streetlight and obviously watching our
front door. Now he’s watching me. I stare back at him for a
minute, but he doesn’t turn away. One side of his mouth is
curved upward, the insolent pose so artificial I want to laugh, even as his dark eyes dart across my body. His thinning hair is cut short and spikes up at odd angles, matching a scruffy beard that runs to his larynx. Pulled tight over a bulging
chest, his sweatshirt bears the likeness of a wolf.
I slide my hand into the pocket of my khakis, the feel of
the paring knife in its sheath comforting and familiar. If he means to do us harm, he’s chosen the wrong Carolyn Grand.
I’m not afraid of him, not even a little bit.
Out of nowhere, Martha’s voice thrusts itself into my
brain, followed by Victoria’s. They’re talking over each
other, but the gist of their demand is plain enough. We’ve
got a hearing tomorrow and our freedom is hanging by a
thread. Just go about your business. Better still, turn around, get your dumb ass home and lock the door.