Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) (10 page)

In the ensconced session a floor above they’d reviewed her
earlier statements and descriptions, emphasizing the specific points in her
descriptions of the men from the first statement she’d given to Sherry the
night of the murder. This assistance was balanced by repeated cautions that it
was common for suspects to try to change aspects of their appearance in “major
drug and homicide cases.” As one of the suited men explained to her like a
patient teacher, she should be careful not to tie herself to any particular
characteristic in “verifying the identity of the two men we have in custody who
murdered Luis Edmond Rodriguez at your home in New Orleans.”

Then they’d let her look through photographs of the dozen
men about to be paraded downstairs. They thoughtfully placed the pictures on
the table in two stacks: ten in one, two in the other. The
other
drew
her eyes, the
other
constricted her throat, the
other
made her
heart pound so hard she thought it might crack her ribs.
These
two
!
She stared at the expressionless faces of the men who had stepped onto the
middle landing after shooting Luis to death in his room. Touching only their
edges with her nails and the dry tips of her fingers, she set the two pictures
side by side. She peeked at Walker who frowned slightly, shaking his head in a
tiny movement telling her to keep her recognition to herself. His confirming
nod was just as small.
These two.
The digital date stamped at the bottom
of the pictures was yesterday.

They left her alone at the table to study the two, shoving
the rest aside like yesterday’s newspapers.

The younger man’s hair came to a black point aimed between
bushy brows arched in a look of invaded innocence over eyes she hadn’t seen
until today. In the other picture the balding man’s eyes were flat too, but
there was a sinister glint behind them, like a flash of black ice on a night
highway; even in the mug-shot photo his eyes seemed alive and able to follow her.
She leaned closer and was able to make out the jagged white scar dropping from
his right eye socket through a layer of some kind of makeup. The little bulge
under the t-shirt must have been a cross hanging from the chain she could see
around his neck.

These two.

She gulped and ground her teeth, set aside her horror and
studied the faces. She studied the two pictures and memorized. And she
remembered.

She was still standing by herself in the corner of the big
room when a new group of men came in and sat in the chairs at one end of the
row now set out. The strangers did not exchange greetings with the cops. One
was white with a shock of snowy hair that cascaded back over the collar of his
expensive-looking suit; another was a black man with gold-crusted eyeglasses
and a matching wrist-chain, a diamond earring in his left ear. The last was a
striking Hispanic man with jet-black hair and teeth gleaming like white
tombstones rowed under a trimmed mustache. He was dressed impeccably in a
charcoal suit with an orchid pinned to its lapel like they were celebrating a
wedding or prom instead of a murder case lineup.

She stared at the three new players until the frame of
Walker’s body interfered, walking toward her like he was shielding her from
something that could harm her.

“Who’re they?” She whispered as he led her to the other end
of the row of chairs.

“Lawyers . . . uh, lawyers . . . for those men, the
d..defendants.” His jaw was clenched and he was talking through lips pressed
almost closed. “Somebody OK’d it. I, uh, I didn’t know.”

As soon as they sat, the seats filled between them and the
three lawyers. Over the room’s subdued murmurs she heard the hum of
high-powered lights being started, white pin-pricks shined through flaws in the
curtains, fold-edged bands of milky-white appeared on the floor and ceiling.
From the edge of her eyes she saw the Hispanic lawyer watching
her
instead of whatever was going to be divulged by the parting drapes; the tallest
person in the room, he was examining her over a superior confident smile.

As the curtains opened, the fronts of the audience were
bleached in the reflected light, in their expectant rigidity they took on the
look of a row of mannequins. A raised stage appeared from behind the curtains,
a spotless glass partition across its front. Black horizontal lines were
painted at each end of the otherwise blank backdrop, the longer ones marked 5’,
6’, and 7’.

After the curtain-parting screeching stopped the remaining
sounds were self-conscious throat-clearings, church whispers, and an occasional
muted burst of nervous laughter. Another set of lights from a track on the
ceiling clanked to life; aimed at the back wall of the platform, the new lights
added another notch added to the bizarre white radiance.

A picture of the
Enterprise
transporter room floated
through her mind, then a hazy scene of her, Brian and Luis in their weekly
ritual of fixing popcorn together and watching reruns of
The Next Generation
.
She blinked and shook her head in a tiny jerk to try to change the picture as
Agent Walker’s elbow pressed against hers in a reassuring nudge.

A barrel-chested man stepped onto the stage and moved from
position to position as the spots were adjusted to eradicate shadows. He rolled
his head around and mugged a bit, a khaki-uniformed flat-topped Hannibal Lector
in the unforgiving light. No one spoke now, suppressed coughs and chair legs
scraping the tile floor were the only sounds added to the hum of the lamps
behind the glass.

Responding to a signal from somewhere, the test cop nodded
one final time, pivoted, then marched out of the light to stage right. As soon
as he disappeared, from out of the dark at stage left a slump-shouldered man
emerged; trailed by others, she could see the orange front of each man as he
stepped into the light, then shuffle toward her in the defeated posture of
chained men. Several looked familiar to the point of boredom with the routine,
others looked dazed as new zoo animals. The line first stood in ragged order
with their right shoulders toward the audience, then it sullenly squared around
in obedience to a direction only it heard. His body opened right in front of
her.

The second one.

She exhaled through her nostrils, sat back heavily and
nudged Walker’s arm, nodding so slightly it wouldn’t have been detected by
anyone other than him even in a well-lighted room. Somehow she knew he
got
it.

“
Number five step forward!”
Suddenly blasted from a
ceiling speaker. A portly black man of about forty hesitantly stepped out from
the others. He looked around numbly, like an actor who’d forgotten his lines.

“
Left Side! Right Side! Around! Step back now!”

The disembodied voice governed the incarcerates, ordering
each to model in a similar routine. She found no logic in the order they were
summoned. The members of the dispirited troupe projected individual personas
ranging from indifference to hostility, a couple of them defeated their chosen
posture by implausibly trying to switch back and forth.

The voice called Number Two next to last. He was the tallest
in the line; they all wore shapeless jail issue jump-suits, but he wore his
with a cocky ‘in your face’ style, as if his outfit was tailored.

She examined Luis’s younger killer through the Plexiglas: A
successful-looking punk slouching a pace ahead of the other unfortunates
marshaled up there with him. He exhibited no shame or concern; rather than
worry or guilt, his long-bowed face displayed only an insouciant contempt from
a pair of curled Elvis lips, oily dark ringlets splashed over the back of his
shirt. There he stood in front of her—the first man who stepped from Luis’s
room and peered into the abyss at the top of the stairs. She studied him,
vaguely aware of Walker’s eyes and some others in the room studying
her
.

This kid looked like an older, richer version of the doomed
high school greasers she knew from not that long ago in Kansas City. Luis had
been a little like that too, she remembered, and she remembered thinking how
shocked her parents would have been had they ever met him. But Luis was missing
the stupid meanness so common to the breed; he wasn’t afraid to be gentle, he
was open to learning.

She was surprised at her calmness as she examined the
killer, realizing that her anger at what he had done outweighed her fear of
this brutal man sequestered behind a wall of glass, viewing him not as a threat
but
as
a
specimen
.

But she wanted separation from him, wanted space and time
between them, wanted the space of the world and all history gulfed between
them.

In the dark room unsummoned memories flashed through her mind:
Brian sleeping on his back in blue pajamas with airplanes on them, his blanket
collapsed to his knees. Stick figures glaring up at her from jerking pastel
light. An electric image ranting about eternity, a preacher made up of all
mouth and no ears. Luis’s back at the sink, his narrow shoulders jiggling as he
danced in place, singing American pop songs only half in English; Brian with a
towel next to him, giggling and mimicking the Spanish words, the boy on the
chair as tall as the man.

But the space was only fifteen feet. And the time was
now
.

After what seemed an eternity, she saw Walker make an
instant of eye contact with his Hispanic friend standing behind the row of
chairs and soon the melancholy line turned right and trudged back to its own
shadowy abyss. Walker led her out a door at the back of the room, they stood
alone in a hall lined with rows of square metal lockers painted gray. He laid
his hand on her shoulder and drew her a step closer with his face lowered. “Any
doubt?”

“No,” she sighed deeply, rubbing her face and looking down
the corridor.

The lockers reminded her of Luis’s funeral and she was
washed with grief, bathed with exhaustion. “I saw him at the house,” she
continued tonelessly, still staring tiredly down the hall. “He was the first
one. He looks the same.”

She frowned wearily into Walker’s face. “So . . . who is
he?”

“Later.” He pulled the door open and they went back to the
show.

A round-shouldered man in his mid-fifties wearing shabbier
clothes now stands with the lawyer trio, the quartet off to themselves. The new
one’s bored-looking and pops mints into his mouth one after the other. As she
walks toward her chair he joins the others in inspecting her, none of them make
any effort to conceal their stares.

With the audience reseated, another file of shackled men
starts toward them from the left.

The first man.

She leans her shoulders and sees a tiny nod from Walker’s
chalk-mimed chin. The line stops and Number One rotates toward the audience
before the others without being told to, as if he knows who’s the star of this
performance. With breath bated, she lowers her gaze, half expecting to see a
barrel sticking out of left fist.

Then she looks back up at his face, death still except for
his eyes. The gun bore eyes in this man’s face return nothing, staring
impassively through the glass as if they can see her, as if he knows exactly
where she’s sitting with only a gossamer barrier between them—the same look he
had when he stared into the elusive dark at the top of the stairs before nodding
up at her, before escaping the relentless siren, before running down the steps
of her violated home.

Like he knows.

The skin over his lips is lighter, shielded from tan by a
now-absent mustache. The white zag hanging from his eye is brought to vivid life
by the blaze, there’s nothing around his neck.
Lilac
generates in her
nose, behind it a sharp burning smell. She leans toward Walker as the man
completes his routine. Even though she knows he cannot see her, he seems to
reestablish eye contact on each sure pivot. His obsedian eyes bid her like an
uncovered well summoning a toddler.

She shrinks away further, finds comfort in the solid press
of Walker’s arm, feels him lean toward her. Lighted by the glare, and by the
killer’s malevolent cool gaze, she sees the granite set of Walker’s jaw,
through the hard contact of his arm she senses his determination to punish the
murderers, to do
justice
. His outlaw Adam’s apple is pronounced but
still. His face is as grim—as
stone
— as the killers’ faces were on the
landing after finishing with Luis. Walker seems to have forgotten her, the blue
centers of his eyes rimmed with hard black circles that drill the man on the
stage.

She wonders if there’s room behind the rigid face for any
other kind of justice beyond retribution, wonders if he can find the zeal
necessary to protect her—to protect
hers?

The men on the stage turn away, their rounded shoulders and
short steps give them a strangely military sameness. On the civilized side the
viewers take their feet, stretching and talking quietly as if the credits are
still running. A uniformed cop directs the lawyers to an exit by pointing a
rolled-up paper, offering only a stone face as he positions his burley body
between theirs and hers like a blocking lineman.

As they walk out with their briefcases and talking on their
cell phones, each gives her a final appraisal like coaches scouting the other
team. The Hispanic man leaves last and holds his gaze on Mary until the
cop-lineman pulls the door closed behind him.

*** *** *** ***

“They’re not in the room.” Mary spoke as the maitre d’
pulled out her chair. Walker stood at attention until the tuxedoed man snapped
open her napkin and delicately dropped it across her lap. “Bet they’re over at
McDonald’s.”

She looked around the sumptuous room and sighed. “All this
makes me feel a little guilty, you know? I’ve never
really
been away
from him in his whole life.” She glanced around again and shrugged
philosophically. “Maybe it’s good for him . . . who knows? But I do feel sorry
for poor Mrs. Cloutier. She’s always indulged him . . . and now . . .”