Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (15 page)

She'd been precise and emphatic during her point-by-point recitation, but now she teared up, and I reached over, handed her a tissue.

She wiped each eye slowly several times. “It's just hard, you know. Every time I go back there, my terror returns, and then the unbelievable accusations of Robileaux, and I'm just—”

“Let's take a moment,” I said gently. “Can I get you coffee, water?”

“I'm just frustrated. And traumatized. Still, six years later. That's why the polygraph wasn't accurate. Every time I think about that
night my heart starts thudding, and I'm back there, terrified. None of this is right. I didn't stab myself. I wouldn't do that to myself; I wouldn't do that to my children. I have letters here from people attesting to that.” She pulled out several sheets of paper and slid them over to me. “There's one from a doctor here that says based on my injury it was
extremely
unlikely I stabbed myself. Extremely unlikely. I don't know where Robileaux got that the angle of the knife indicated I might have. And the fact that I have no history of self-destructive behavior was irrelevant to him. Statistics concerning self-destructive behavior clearly indicate that self-stabbing in the chest is not a female form of self-destruction and in fact requires substantial physical strength to perform. Given that it took such force to remove the knife that I was lifted off the surgical table, well, how could I have done that?”

I nodded. Exactly, I thought.

“And then,” she flipped through pages and pointed to the penultimate paragraph in Ray's report. “He keeps saying my kinesics, my body language, clearly indicated guilt, even in that final interview, that interview that, I must add, was taped without my knowledge and done clearly to sabotage me.”

“That was—”

“But the only kinesics my body displayed was that of a woman with two fresh scars on my chest and back, still burning from thoracic surgery four weeks earlier.” She sat back, took a deep breath, and traced a finger along the scars on her upper chest.

I watched the movement, gestured slightly toward it after a moment. “I was surprised, the scars,” I said quietly.

She looked down, and her face softened. “I covered them up for a long time. I hated them, thought they were ugly. Then a friend said they were like a necklace. My scar necklace. I haven't tried to hide them since.”

“Your strength has always amazed me, Marjorie.”

She leaned forward, put her hand on my knee. “I did not do this to myself, Cathy. I need you to believe that.”

I nodded slowly.

“Do you believe me?”

“You've got a number of good points here.”

“But do you believe me?”

“There are troubling inconsistencies.”

She sat back, her face tight and shut off. “You aren't going to answer that, are you.” It was not a question.

I recrossed my legs, spoke carefully. “It's not my place to determine whether you're telling the truth, only whether the case should be reexamined.”

“And what have you decided, can you at least tell me that?” A tinge of sarcasm colored her voice.

I gestured toward her file. “I need to look at that again, and my partner, George Donovan, will study it as well. If we decide to reopen it, investigate it as attempted murder, there is very little physical evidence for us to work with. But I need to check all the details, talk to the investigating officers, the witnesses. Our goal is to be fair and thorough.”

“If you talk to Robileaux, he'll just say what he's always said.”

“I know,” I said, and then cursed myself silently.

She leaned forward, her voice both eager and angry. “You've talked to him?”

I pushed my chair back slightly from the table, put my hands in my lap. “Marjorie, I simply can't say anything more at this point. I'll call you next week, the following at the latest, and let you know the disposition. I'm just very, very sorry for all you've gone through.”

“Well.” The word came out flat and quick and hung in the air between us for several seconds. “I suppose I'm grateful that at least you listened and seem to care. It's more than I ever got from Robileaux or anyone else in this department. I suppose you can't take sides, can you? You cops protect your own, and you're not about to say Robileaux was wrong.”

“I'm not protecting—”

“
No.”
She held her hand out, palm facing me. “Don't try to explain. It wouldn't change anything.” She stood up, gathered the files in her arms. “Funny how inadequate words can be, isn't it, given that all I have now is words?”

“Marjorie.”

She tilted her head and almost smiled. “You're just doing your job. And I'm doing what I need to do. I'm thankful there could be
some movement on this. It's more than I ever expected from the police.” And then she did smile, a big crooked smile that suddenly showed her age. “I'm a brokenhearted woman with nothing to lose. And I won't stop.”

I sat there a long time after she left, staring at her file, thinking about scars. About how some are so visible and some are hidden, even to ourselves, buried deep beneath tissue and muscle and bone in that ethereal place that makes us who we are. How both kinds mark us forever—knotty and twisted and painful to the touch even years later. But there's something about a scar that is so boldly, even proudly, displayed that makes it beautiful, luminous—a testament, and an honorable one at that, no matter the cause. And I wondered about my own scars, what new white snake was twisting into being deep inside from my inability to say, “Yes, Marjorie, I believe you; I have always believed you. Ray was wrong,” as I scrawled
Reopen
across her file, tossed it on George's desk, gathered up my badge and gun, and headed home to my husband.

She had been a woman who looked good in hiking boots. In the picture on the scuffed pine dresser, she wore khaki shorts, a Guatemalan shirt, and boots laced tightly above the ankle, the edge of teal green socks just visible. Her calves were muscular and brown.
Lithe
, I think, is the word some might use to describe her. Hazel-gray eyes curved up slightly, thin lips rested on a wide mouth, nose sloped into a gentle bump with a spatter of freckles and faint sunburn. A mole lingered between her brows. Deep auburn hair fell well below her shoulders, thick and frizzy with curl, the kind of hair that probably distressed her in humidity, made her dream of straight and simple, something that whispered just above her collarbone. She would have wanted my hair in the same way I envied hers. She had a sharp jawline and prominent cheekbones—both long enough to work in her favor. She was smiling, an impish grin, head tilted left to avoid the sun's glare.

From the picture I wouldn't have guessed she was so short, but the body lying between the bed and the wall was 5'2" at the most.
She lay on her back, naked. I was working on the assumption that this was the same woman as in the picture, although the only feature I could match for sure was the hair, and even that wasn't a safe bet. This woman's hair was clumpy with dried blood and matted across her face—if you could call the black, swollen flesh barely visible under the hair a face. Both arms were up in the defensive position, resting on her brow, as though her last moments were weary ones, not icy white terror, as though her hands and mouth had never been bound with duct tape.

Perhaps, I thought—a weak hope—perhaps she passed out early on before these last tortures. I couldn't tell. I knew she'd been alive for most of it; there was too much blood. Blood everywhere on and around her swollen corpse, already coagulated into thick, leathery pools and blackened at the edges. Dead bodies don't bleed.

She'd been alive. Shake that one out of your mind, go home and try to pay the bills, cook dinner, wash the laundry. She'd been alive when he took the pliers and tore off one of her nipples and yanked out two of her teeth. She'd been alive when he cut off her middle finger. She'd been alive for each of the five cigarette burns on her stomach and thighs. She'd been alive when he took the tennis racquet and jammed it up her vagina with such force that the handle was a purplish-blue hump just below her sternum.

 

In police work, just like life, “what-ifs” don't really pertain. It's already happened. That's the beauty of a crime scene, of any crime. It's pure fact. It's done. Inarguable. You play what-ifs to find the angle that will take you down the right path to solve the crime, what-ifs to ferret out the motive; but a crime, in this case a dead body, is exquisitely simple: there are no what-ifs. All the nuances of other possibilities—a right turn instead of a left, coming home ten minutes later instead of five minutes earlier—are obsolete. The robbery has occurred, the blow has landed, the person is dead.

It's one of the aspects I like best about my job. Wash away all the noise of motivations, clues that do or don't add up, guilt or innocence, and what you still have is fact: a crime.

Yet life is full of other possibilities, slight dimples in the texture of our days that change the course, sometimes forever invisible even to ourselves, of what might have been. And when an event becomes visible, something to take note of for whatever reason, being human we rewind the tape—hoping to put some logic to chaos, hoping to find the cause in order to make better sense of the effect. We look for meaning in coincidences. We try to connect the dots and discover some larger pattern at work. This practice has no great benefit except to soothe our pain or curiosity. It makes what is essentially nonlinear, linear for a moment. And then we can play what-ifs if only to understand our own control—or lack thereof—over our lives.

 

In the long, fevered weeks that followed, despite my best intentions and deep belief that addressing the facts, and facts alone, was the best approach to living one's life, I seemed incapable of stopping the what-ifs. And the place I came back to again and again was that morning, the start of day shift, a Monday, just before I found her body.

We'd already had roll call, a joke on any shift but especially the day shift. No one's totally awake at 6:00 in the morning; you wake up on your first call or on your fourth cup of coffee. Most of us that morning were somewhere between the second and third cup.

Despite how TV likes to portray roll calls with crisply dressed officers sitting or standing in tight rows listening to crucial information—or, even more amusingly, no roll call at all—roll call involves making sure you're there and some degree of finger shaking about whatever the Captain and Lieutenant have up their ass for that day. The real information exchange takes place out on the back lot, when one shift is packing up to go home and the other is loading shotguns, performing radio checks, making sure the tires are inflated and the siren and lights work.

Bobby had already told us about the latest rape on Tulip Street, the McCollough kids terrorizing their neighborhood, and the rumor that the Lieutenant was, once again, on the warpath about officers not wearing hats on calls.

It was a very regular morning.

Several of us lingered near our units, discussing the latest developments in Steve Darcy's case. Darcy had been fired recently for killing an unarmed burglary suspect. The department wasn't keen on our shooting unarmed people. Darcy was appealing the ruling. The general consensus was that it could have happened to any one of us, and Darcy was getting screwed.

I had my unit started, waiting for a break in the radio traffic to put myself 10-8, in service, when Gwen stopped and said the Sergeant wanted to see me.

“What for?”

“You think I asked?” she said, raising both eyebrows so high her hat rose with the movement. “Sarah.” The way Gwen said my name, it had more than two syllables.

I smiled and shrugged.

Gwendolyn Stewart was tall, big yet muscular, and always had flawlessly applied makeup from Merle Norman, where she often visited when a shift was slow, dragging me along occasionally to check out the latest lipstick that she swore would bring out my eye color or the perfect blush to highlight my cheeks. She usually bought the lipstick or blush. But Gwen was persistent.

She'd been on the department twelve years, just two more than me, and was close to making corporal. She tended to be aggressive on calls and with people in general, which landed her in more fights than anyone else on our shift, except perhaps Doug Ledoux. She loved jewelry—diamonds in particular—and wore the biggest-assed diamond studs I'd ever seen on anyone who wasn't a socialite. She was a lapsed Catholic, her favorite expression was some variation on the word
fuck
, and she'd been married three times, the last time to an insurance adjuster. I didn't have high hopes for the marriage, and neither did she.

“Shoney's or IHOP?” I asked.

She waggled a piece of paper at me. “HQ gave me a 52 already. On the fuckin' interstate.”

“Later then.”

She snorted, said “Sarah” again. I knew her snorts well; she had three of them. This one meant, roughly translated, “Everyone but us is a dickhead.” I have to admit, the sentiment frequently seemed apt.

We'd been night-shift partners over two years now, the first all-female uniform team working out of Highland Precinct, a sprawling area, bordered on one side by the Mississippi River, that incorporated the state university, estates that had been in the family for generations, rural homesteads, middle-class subdivisions, and the Bottoms—a high-crime, low-income neighborhood nestled right up against the precinct's back door. We shared a distaste for overblown authority, petty rules, panty hose, wool, and okra. She sometimes frustrated me beyond reason, but she was loyal and funny. And I trusted her without reservation.

Back in the precinct, Sergeant Mosher tapped his thick but well-manicured finger on a felony theft report I'd written the day before. “Forgot to sign it,” he said, pushing it toward me.

I handed it back signed and dated.

“Noticed your ticket count was down last month, Jeffries.”

I'd been working under Mosher for the last year, and I liked him as much as you can like a sergeant. He didn't crowd me often, so I nodded.

“I'll take care of it. Sir.” Don't ever let anyone hand you any crap about cops not having ticket quotas. They are the great invisible rule on any shift.

I was almost out the door when Davy, the day desk officer, called my name. I wasn't fond of Davy. He was terrified of the streets, so he claimed a bad back. This from a man who ran a bush-hogging business on the side.

“Check this out, will you?” He handed me a call slip with a name and address. “Lady says there's something funny going on at her neighbor's. Wants to talk to an officer.”

“You're an officer, Davy. You talk to her.”

“Jeffries, she wants to
see
an officer.” He grinned, and my stomach lurched at the sight of his broken-post teeth stained yellowish-brown deep at the gums. I resolved, once again, to stop smoking. Soon.

“Send it to HQ.”

“You're here. I'll call and tell 'em you're taking it.” Davy grinned again. “Unless you got something better to do.”

I stared at a water stain on the wall above his head, thinking how tired I was of Davy, how he'd never pull this on a male cop, thinking
how much I'd like to slap him silly. I took a deep breath and let what I thought was my better sense prevail. Davy was such an easy target.

“Define funny,” I said.

“Huh?”

“‘Something funny' at the neighbors. Can you be slightly more specific?”

He sighed and tugged his shirt down at the waist. Working the desk, Davy had gotten a little chunky. “She's worried.”

“That's a start.” I nodded encouragingly.

“Something about not seeing her neighbor for several days. Something about the back door.”

“You're good on those details, Davy.” I smiled sweetly, a smile that anyone who knew me recognized as the opposite of sweet. “So funny really means suspicious?”

“Look, Jeffries, you gonna take this, or you want me to pass it on to Mosher?”

“I'll handle it, Davy. You sit tight.”

Which is where, many days later, my what-ifs took me back to: sloppy attention to paperwork, my own damned sense of superiority, and letting Davy needle me into taking a call that should have gone through HQ dispatch. It didn't make what came to happen any easier to understand, and I've never denied my own culpability. But it was a starting point.

 

The complainant, Doris Whitehead, lived in an older part of the city, near the Mississippi River levee and the railroad tracks. It was a run-down area with small houses on large lots crowded with pecan, oak, and cypress trees. Some of the houses had been slave quarters originally.

This time of morning a pinkish-gray fog hovered near the river. The sun was an eggshell orb already burning through the haze. There was a peaceful hesitancy to the morning, a rare and appreciated beauty. It was another plus to the job, seeing the city in all its various guises. Sometimes, I could love it.

As my tires loped over the railroad tracks, I thought of the skele
ton woman. A year ago we'd found the remains of Val, a young coed, in the high grass down the bank from the tracks, near the university golf course. She'd been missing over four months. Went out for her regular jog early one morning and never came back. That's one of the downsides to working the job for ten years: your landmarks are crime scenes, and everywhere you turn, memories shimmer to the surface momentarily whether you invite them or not.

There was just enough left of Val's remains to tell she'd been sexually assaulted. That the perp had smashed in her head with a large metal object. Probably she died instantaneously. Probably. But that didn't ease the thoughts of what came before. That's what always froze me, set icy hot caterpillar nerves restlessly stirring; it's what I tasted. The just before.

Death is disgusting no matter the context. It rips the fabric of what is. Whether it's an elderly woman dying peacefully in her sleep surrounded by those who love her, a young boy killed in a drive-by shooting, or a drug addict dead from an overdose, death is singularly ugly. And sooner or later, whatever your personality or disposition, the exposure to death wrings life—that stuff that makes us who we are—from those who deal with it regularly.

I'd tried various ways to tame death, to compartmentalize the sheer human misery I dealt with day in and day out. Alcohol helped. So did sex. But then Tracy Skinner told me about the group—an informal gathering, she said, nothing religious, just a moment of acknowledgment—and invited me to join. The skeleton woman was my first.

We gathered at the site the night after Val's body was found. One o'clock in the morning with a cloud-soaked moon and the deep smell of wet mud and rotting grass drifting off the Mississippi, nine off-duty female cops picked our way carefully through tall weeds, one flashlight leading us to the edge of the golf green where we stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and stood in a circle. Marge, the responding officer, spoke quietly about the scene, described it in detail. And then for five minutes no one spoke, as we each, in our own way, honored the dead girl.

What happened next startled me. I'd only intended to wish Val's
soul a safe journey, to swear we'd find the scum who did this. But standing there, shoulder to shoulder with those other women, the night air lapping against my skin, her terror inhabited me. I could have reached out a finger and traced her figure against the splotchy sky. I saw her hands raised, felt the raspy, acid gasps on my neck, heard the tumbled “nonononono”; his hands were on my breasts, the sexual stink of his body clung to my face. For five minutes, all my carefully constructed defenses collapsed, and I panicked silently, completely. Then I went home and threw up.