Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) (6 page)

Mary tuned out the radios and stared through the drizzle that
had begun on the drive over. The house’s exterior was gloomier than she
remembered, even allowing for the bank of clouds rolling up from the Gulf, and
for the sunglasses she’d absentmindedly put on to start the day—but things
still
looked
the same.

The afternoon’s iron-gray light threw weak, misshapen
shadows across its front in a way she’d never noticed before; but she knew,
really
,
nothing about the building’s appearance was changed at all. Beaming over a
tailored white suit, Magic Johnson’s mahogany face thrust itself irrationally
into her mind’s eye. She blinked and shook her head as they pulled to a stop
with her eyes glued to Luis’s window, her heart swelling like a wound under her
ribs. The window began to pulse as she stared; threatening to swallow the
house, it seemed to be breathing and growing in a malevolent, knowing sync with
the rising pounding in her chest and ears.

She sucked air through her nostrils and tightened her jaw,
forced her mind to regain control and reduce the window to its normal innocuous
dimensions.
Normal
. She sucked bitterly again and squinted behind the
dark lenses, twisting her knuckles in her lap.
Normal!
After what
happened behind
there
, she asked herself silently, her eyes locked on
the window to keep it the same, could anything ever be
normal
again? The
invisible difference changed it all, she considered ruefully, changed it all
forever.

The identical-appearing frame structure she was looking at
that had so recently provided warmth and shelter—a
place
in this world
for her and for Brian—now, like the death looming behind Magic’s healthy face
on Leno last night, forecast only a future as forbidding as the low-slung sky.

Now it was only a place she wanted to be away from.

As she sat trying to gather her courage, she remembered a
line from her father: One of the most remarkable things about being human, he’d
postulated in one of his rambling discourses, was the undeniable capacity for
feelings
,
for intuition and imagination to plumb deeper depths and reach greater heights
of understanding than mere logic, science or observance could achieve. It was
something
like that
, her lips curled into a tight smile under her sunglasses. And
here, looking up at the unaltered façade, the
normal
façade of what had
so recently been her home, she was overwhelmed with the oppressive truth that
while nothing was different in a logical, scientific or observant sense,
everything
was changed
.

The comfort of the simple building she was looking at was
reduced to a warm memory, and even that meager consolation was fading like a
photograph left out in the sun as she gazed through the rain.

On the porch a uniformed cop was talking on a cell phone
while pulling a slicker over his head, bouncing from one foot to the other, bold
yellow letters spelled out
NOPD
against the wrinkled blue plastic. He
was tall and black with a bored posture, but he smiled broadly and flicked the
hat in his hand toward them when his head popped through the poncho’s hole and
he recognized the car.

The brass bulbs that topped the iron posts of the fence
seemed to glow in the grudging light, the wet curly leafs of the hedge a richer
shade of green than she remembered. The last words she had heard from Luis came
to her, a promise that he and Brian would trim the bushes on his next day off.
She looked at the ragged hedge, trying to imagine it was the same thing Luis
had talked about—
How could it continue to sprout, how could it not know?

Sherry parked the unmarked Dodge in front of the house,
right next to a sign forbidding it.
He turned the key, halting the
country-western music and police-band static, the wipers died in mid-cycle. The
drops clicking on the roof soothed her in the sudden quiet; Sherry strummed
square pink fingers on the steering wheel, but the action was gentle and seemed
more patient than insistent. The gold band on one of the tapping fingers
glinted through a stream of detached impressions.

“Hon, this is prob’ly gonna be a little hard on you.” His
voice’s bayou lilt danced on the rhythm of the fingers and the rain. “Let’s
just get on in there . . . pick up the things ya’ll need, then we’ll get right
back on out.” He patted his door with the knuckles of the ring hand and looked
at her with an understanding single eye. “‘Spect it’ll be easier next time.”

She stared at the house for another moment, then nodded
resolutely, tossed the glasses on the dash and opened the curbside door and
skipped over the sidewalk, ducking under the vinyl barriers stretched across
the bottom of the steps:
Crime Scene! Do Not Cross!

Outside the car the air hung over the city like a wet
hangover.

The tall cop pushed open the front door, then stepped back
and touched his plastic-covered bill with the tips of his fingers like an
admonishing hotel doorman. “Not wearin’ your jacket, nasty afternoon like
this?”

She smiled up at him and pointed into the house.

She waited on the porch for Sherry to catch up and greet the
other cop before entering the house. Sherry handed him a sack with a cup of
coffee in it and seemed genuinely friendly to the younger man. She watched
Sherry from the corner of her eye and wondered:
Did ‘nigger’ come from
racism, or just old cop or bayou bad habit like he said?
It crossed her
mind again:
What did she really know about him?

She stepped through the door of her erstwhile home and her
heart began to pound. The lights were on. It went through Mary’s mind to wonder
if she was still responsible for the utilities
.
Mail was heaped on the
dark square of hardwood at the foot of the steps; bills, she knew, and little
else lurked in that pile. Next to her in the entryway, her sword from the other
night was now just a closed umbrella hanging without malice from a floor lamp.
As she nervously walked around, the objects and rooms felt detached now, no
longer
theirs.

She leaned in the kitchen doorway and laconically observed
that her erstwhile roommate had mopped the floor and washed and stacked the
dishes before his out of town guests first beat him senseless while he begged,
then shot him to death. Brian’s
Harry Potter
lunch box and matching
purple book bag sat next to each other in their usual spot on the counter; the
coffee ready to be turned on. Beside the coffee-maker, like something out of a
dream or escaped from another dimension, a ceramic mug sat as innocently as a
child, dedicated in uneven script to the
World’s Best Mom.

Why Luis?

Her eyes were looking at an orderly, empty kitchen, but her
mind pictured all the strangers she’d seen that night tromping through the
rooms, through their home, and she imagined the many more since. It smelled
wrong, people had been smoking; things were moved.

The detective took the stairs first, wheezing and knees
creaking with the climbing, his square black shoes clumped a little faster
across the middle landing, crossing it without turning his head toward the door
sealing off the death room, more yellow strands stretched in an “X” across its
frame.

He stood aside at the top landing and she brushed past him
to step straight over to Brian’s room and pushed open the door. She leaned
against the frame with her arms bound up tightly and studied the room. His
things were spread around the floor as usual, pennants and sports posters he’d
picked out and they’d put up together hung unmolested where they belonged. She
stood reassured by the room’s
ordinariness
, savoring the view, inhaling
its Brian smell, seizing moments of
before.
Their pleasance lasted for
the seconds until her eyes fell on
Mutt
and
Jeff
, chalky and
belly-up in the bowl on his dresser.

With a silent groan she bent and picked up her robe from the
floor and stepped across to her own room, its door left standing open. She
pulled suitcases from the closet at the back, tossed them at the foot of the
unmade bed and began filling. She could tell that the closet had been searched,
could tell that they’d ransacked the drawers—could tell that strangers’ hands
had handled her
things
.

Her knees jellied and her hands quickened through waves of
shudders as she tried to keep a grip on her mind. Sherry flipped off the hall
light and sat down on the stop step where she had sat her last time there, an
elbow propped thoughtfully on one knee, chin in palm, hat pushed to the back of
his head.

“Wadn’t it kinda hard to make out their faces very clear
from up here at this angle?”

“I could see them pretty well,” she called out, lifting her
face from her work, calming to answer his question. “Not perfectly, but almost
. . . really pretty well.”

He stayed sitting with his fingers pianoing against his
cheek as she trudged between the rooms. “Good thing ‘em bastards didn’t look up—”

“They did, Sherry. I told you. Both of them I think, one for
sure.” She stopped behind him and looked over him down toward the landing
outside Luis’s sealed-off door, her arms piled with clothes. “They must not
have been able to see me up here . . . it was dark where I was sitting.”

Her eyes welled and she stopped talking and pivoted away,
hoping to avoid the horror of reliving that night another time. But unsummoned
memories washed over her anyway, rising more from gut than mind; she felt again
the breathless agony of the top step where Sherry was now sitting so calmly,
poised alone between the evil below and her son; heard again the voracious,
growing siren screaming like something hurt and living and coming; saw again the
images of heartless strangers peering into the dark from vacant eye sockets,
the business end of a gun searching in the darkness for her.

She concentrated and tried to focus on Brian’s doorknob, but
a vision of Luis’s beaten body lumped in front of the yelling preacher exploded
in her head and set the cut-glass reality aside, this picture provided by her
terror in full deadly color.

She blinked back moisture from the noxious blend of electric
burning and fetid body fumes stinging her nostrils.

Memories . . . only memories,
she mouthed the words,
steadying her licorice legs and struggling not drop her load.
Logically
,
she knew the awful stream of images were products of her mind, her
imagination—only a
mental
thing, as they say—but the emotions they generated
were distressingly and presently real, her father’s bromide about the power of
the mind proven again. Was it Kant? She tried the calming question, but her
chest clutched with the chokehold of fear for her son and for herself.
Again.

She stepped away barely upright, leaned against the wall by
Brian’s door to stop her knees from trembling; it was as if some invisible
thing
was squeezing her, restricting how deeply she could breath. It had been
restricted that way since . . .

“Detective S . . . Sherry?”

She was jerked back to this dimension by a yell from below.

“Mark Walker d . . . down here.”

A pause.

“Uh . . . we met T . . .Thursday. At your building. D . .
.downtown. I . . . I’m working with Special Agent Ruggle.” He was calling as he
walked up from the first floor. “Detective, I need to t . . .talk with Ms.
Wilson for a few minutes. Would you be willing to sit in?”

Walker stopped on the steps to their level, stood erect,
nodded at Mary, shrugged and self-consciously cleared his throat. “Regulations.
The bureau requires that we have t..two officers sit in. The Special Agent
can’t be here to…today.”

Despite the climb, Walker’s breath came easily.

Mary used the fish bowl to water plants, flipping off lights
as they descended. Sherry shuffled behind her, a suitcase in either hand. The
agent came last, carrying a plant in a red clay pot, a finger-painted tree done
in yellow on its side. As he used both hands to set it next to the pile of mail
on the hardwood at the bottom of the steps, Mary smiled sadly at the
pallid-looking ficus, then nodded at the agent as he straightened. “Thank you.
That one’s kind of special. Brian . . .”

The agent flushed and returned a bashful smile.

Huffing, Sherry smiled approvingly at the plant, absently
thumbing the ring on his left hand. “Wife always said a body needed to keep a
few livin’ things ‘round . . . ‘mind ‘em of what they love, you know?”

They sat in the living room, Sherry in a worn flower brocade
rocker, a knitted doily guarded the fabric behind his still-hatted head. He
tapped the spiral in his lap with a Bic as he waited. Mary’s legs were drawn up
on a brown corduroy loveseat, running shoes kicked over on a wine-colored
oriental rug that covered the room’s middle.

The agent carried a ladder-backed cane chair in from the
dining room. He sat down and pulled a laptop from the briefcase between his
knees, opened it and clicked some keys. As it booted to life, his eyes
reflected the blue-green glow that grew on the screen, his eyebrows moved in
and out and wrinkled like a schoolboy working on a math problem.

“Ms. Wilson.” The agent spoke to her earnestly like a guest
at a crowded party trying to be heard. He leaned toward her though this room
was still— with only tires swishing from the street and an occasional distant
rumble to disturb its nap-afternoon quiescence. “We need t . . . to know . . .
uh,”

He swallowed hard and his eyes lost some light as he looked
down and started over, the tips of his ears brightened.

“Can you tell us if you have any intention of leaving the
New Orleans area in the next few months?” He looked up from the screen. “Do you
mind letting us know your, uh, your p . . . plans?”