Cartwheel (4 page)

On the taxi ride back to the hotel, Andrew and Anna gazed out separate windows and did not speak. Every few blocks, they passed graffiti in support of Cristina Fernández—newly beloved in the wake of her husband’s death, newly forgiven for raising the taxes on soybeans—and Andrew experienced a minor stab of satisfaction. Encountering something in the world that confirmed what he’d learned of it always gave him a nice solid sense of existing in an actual universe—a reassuring feeling, and one that had been slipping away from him, faster and faster, in recent years. Even before Lily’s arrest, Andrew had felt untethered—like his life had come undone in big sloppy pieces, and nothing had held together long enough to really count. Sometimes it seemed to Andrew that the meaning of his existence had been like a rare gas in a bottle he’d mistakenly uncorked—it was still out there somewhere, presumably, but was now so diffuse as to be undetectable.

Andrew had not slept with anyone since Maureen. He rarely put it in a sentence like that, but there it was. Of course, there had been chances—graduate students: ambitious and/or working out father issues and/or bored and drunk—but he had never taken any of them. The closest call had been an ABD named Karen, who had sleek hair and a creamy avian face and glasses that offset her unruffled beauty in a way that made her look like a porn star playing a librarian—there was no way, there was just
no way
, that those things actually had corrective lenses in them. Her area was Central Asian republics, and she’d spent an entire summer in Almaty trying to quiz Kazakhs on their feelings, their actual feelings, about Nursultan Nazarbayev. And there’d
been one night when she and Andrew had had too much wine and too much high-spirited talk about whether the revolution in Egypt was best compared to the Eastern bloc countries in 1989 or to Iran in 1979 or to Iran in 2009, which had gotten them onto the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, and this had led them into dark cynical snorting about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the ’80s, and then the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before September 11th, and then they’d gotten onto rogue intelligence services generally, and conspiracy theories they’d never articulate in the classroom—he spoke of the ISI and Benazir Bhutto, she spoke of the FSB and Lech Kaczyński’s death in that weird plane crash, which, Andrew had to admit, was admirably, almost sexily, audacious. And maybe there was a moment when he’d looked at her mouth—not something you usually do, he realized, unless you’ve got some ideas—but then he’d backed away, and scratched his neck, and went off to get some cheese cut into cubes which, as Karen pointed out, was not really the best way to maximize the surface area of cheese.

Andrew did not know what Karen had wanted from him. There was nothing he could really do for her, he didn’t think, besides write her the glowing recommendation she was already going to get. But there must be something—some power he had that he hadn’t yet unpacked—because there was no way she’d be talking to him if it weren’t strategic. She was a student of Kissinger, after all, a believer in realpolitik. And though there might be permanent interests, there were no permanent allies.

In the taxi, Anna was still staring out the window. “Hey,” said Andrew. He pulled on her ponytail and she shook it away from him. “What do you think of the city?”

“I don’t like it,” said Anna, still looking out the window. Outside, the midafternoon light was coming down in great golden bars, like some kind of ancient currency.

“Do you think you’d like it here if this weren’t happening?” said Andrew.

“I don’t know,” said Anna. There was a long pause, and then she said, “No.”

On Tuesday, Andrew left Anna at the hotel and went to Tribunales to meet with the lawyers. There were only two of them—Franco Ojeda and Leo Velazquez—but Andrew couldn’t help but think of them as a phalanx; they were mercenaries, it seemed to him, come to fight for pay. The conference room where Andrew met them was wood paneled and high ceilinged; it reminded Andrew of 1987, a terrible year. Ojeda was very fat and Velazquez was very bald; the overhead light caught his pate in a complicated, adamantine shine. Ojeda offered water, which Andrew declined, and Velazquez pulled down the blinds, which Andrew did not understand. And then, with the help of audiovisual supplements, the lawyers laid out the criminal case against Andrew’s oldest living daughter.

“First,” said Ojeda. His English was only very lightly accented; Andrew cringed at how much this surprised him. “The emails.”

The emails—which the lawyers had helpfully printed out, color coded by date and arranged in a binder—had emerged almost immediately after Lily’s arrest; Andrew could only assume Lily had accidentally left herself logged in on one of the school computers, which was the kind of thing she would do. Andrew had read them over and over already, and they never sounded any less damning; this time, he closed one eye and half-skimmed, not wanting to look at them straight. Lily really could sound awful if you didn’t know her.

“Second,” said Velazquez, opening a new binder. “The love triangle.”

The lawyers had produced pictures of all three of them, somehow—Andrew recognized Lily’s picture from her Facebook page—and with their images all lined up like that, Andrew saw something important that the lawyers were not saying. Lily’s looks did not help. She was pretty, but it was a sloppy sort of prettiness, suggesting carelessness,
sensuality, unearned privilege. Her breasts were, to her eternal chagrin, her mother’s. “I have the breasts of a medieval peasant!” she’d shouted as a teenager once. Andrew had been waiting in the foyer to pick the girls up for the weekend; he’d gazed at the ceiling and pretended not to hear. “What the hell do I need them for?”

“You’ll like them one day,” he’d heard Maureen say.

“I won’t,” said Lily miserably. “I got a 2300 on the SAT. I am never going to like them.”

“You got a 2280,” said Maureen.

Lily dressed them with varying degrees of success; in the heat, she tended to dress them very inadequately indeed. In the Facebook picture, she was wearing something ridiculous—some spaghetti strap thing, Andrew didn’t know what to call it—and they (the breasts) were simply not battened down in any serious way at all. Andrew blamed Maureen for this, somehow; some important, delicate conversation had been missed, somewhere along the line, and now here they all were, staring at this photo, which contrasted so starkly with Katy’s neat hair and sparkling teeth and compact body—all of it somehow virginal, somehow the particular beauty of an innocent.

Between Lily and Katy was a picture of Sebastien LeCompte—that name! In the photo, he appeared young, foppish, with overlong hair that reminded Andrew of some kind of ornithological plumage. The idea of this boy inspiring murderous lust was absolutely comic. Andrew was going to actually laugh about it, in fact, just as soon as he got out of this office.

“I’m sorry, but this guy?” Andrew tapped the photo. “Really? You’re expecting me to believe those two girls were fighting over this guy?”

“We’re not expecting you to believe anything,” said Ojeda. “But it’s what the prosecution will assert, and we have to assume that the panel will believe it.”

“Why?”

“There is some evidence,” said Velazquez. “A few emails the deceased wrote, indicating a new romance that she needed to hide from your daughter. And Carlos Carrizo—that’s the host family father—”

“I know,” said Andrew.

“—Has grudgingly admitted to seeing the deceased return from LeCompte’s house late one evening. But in terms of the trial, what your daughter believed to be the case is more important than what was actually the case, as I’m sure you understand. And your daughter believed that the deceased and Sebastien LeCompte were romantically involved. She said as much in her initial interrogation.”

“Are these really the concerns of law enforcement, though?” Andrew sat back heavily in his chair. “I mean, it all seems a little—tawdry. And, frankly, trivial.”

Ojeda blinked, impassive. “Your daughter’s emails characterize her relationship with the deceased as fraught, at best,” he said. “The love triangle element establishes a motive. And then there’s the question of your daughter’s behavior on the day of the murder.”

“You mean, trying to administer CPR to a dead body and then calling the police?” said Andrew. “You mean, doing exactly what she was supposed to do?”

“We’re not as concerned about the blood the truck driver saw on Lily’s face,” said Ojeda. “Lily found the body of the deceased, as you say, and we have every confidence that the DNA report will support that story. What’s somewhat more worrying for our case, actually, are the reports from the initial interrogation of your daughter’s rather … subdued … reaction to Katy’s death. And in conjunction with the cartwheel, of course, that looks a little strange.”

Andrew felt his tongue freeze momentarily in his mouth. “What cartwheel?” he said.

The lawyers exchanged another glance. “You didn’t know about the cartwheel?” said Velazquez.

“She did a cartwheel?”

“During the interrogation.”

“
During
the interrogation?”

“Afterward. Right after the first interrogation, when they left her alone.”

“Okay,” said Andrew, his tongue unfreezing. “Well. That’s odd, I
suppose. But I don’t really know what it has to do with anything. I mean, maybe she just wanted to stretch? Maybe she hadn’t moved in a while? At any rate, I just don’t see how it matters at all.”

But he did, and the lawyers could see that he did, and that they did not need to explain.

“Finally,” said Ojeda apologetically. “There’s this.” He clicked a remote at the TV, summoning a black-and-white image of Lily and Sebastien LeCompte, who appeared to be shopping at some kind of Walmart-type store.

“What is this?” said Andrew.

“Security footage. From the day of the murder.”

“Why are we watching this?”

“You’ll see.”

On the screen, Lily and Sebastien were grainy and grim, moving in that strange halting way—disappearing and suddenly rematerializing three feet away—that was particular to people on security tapes. Andrew leaned forward. They looked guilty, and why was that? He realized it was because you only ever saw people on security footage when they were suspected of a crime; the way they dropped out of sight and then popped back up began to seem intentional, furtive. On the screen, Lily and Sebastien looked ghostly and very young. They moved through the store picking out basic, sensible things—a toothbrush, some toothpaste, the necessities for a person locked out of a house. At the end of one aisle, Lily lingered and, incredibly, produced a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She put one in her mouth without lighting it. Andrew felt a muted, faraway surprise that he knew, under any other circumstances, would be much larger—he had never known his daughter to smoke. On the screen, Lily turned to look at Sebastien and nodded toward the shelf behind her—which, Andrew could see now, was lined entirely with condoms. She raised an eyebrow and Ojeda paused the tape, freezing Lily’s face into an expression of strange, nearly vulpine suggestiveness.

“That,” said Velazquez, pointing, “is what they’re going to play.”

“Who?”

“The television.”

“What?”

“That she gave him this provocative look with the condoms.”

“I wouldn’t really say it’s provocative,” said Andrew, even though he knew it didn’t matter. He was beginning to see how this was going to go. “I mean, it’s not like she bought them, right? It’s just kind of silly, I think.”

“You have to understand, this is five hours after she’s learned of Katy’s death,” said Velazquez.

“She’s just making a joke,” said Andrew.

And Velazquez looked at Andrew blankly and said that that’s exactly what he meant.

On Thursday, Andrew and Anna took a taxi to Lomas de Zamora police station.

“Aren’t you hot?” said Andrew. He had told Anna to wear something modest, and now she was wearing a high-necked sweater and he worried she was hot. He was hot.

“No,” said Anna. She was resting her head on the window. Andrew managed not to comment on this, though he flinched every time they hit a bump. He had to figure that she’d quit it if she wanted to quit it.

From the outside, the police station looked normal enough—like a place you might voluntarily go, certainly, if you were in some kind of trouble. Andrew reminded himself for the hundredth time that this wasn’t Russia: This was a country where you were encouraged, on balance, to find the police if you had a problem. Inside, Andrew and Anna were conducted through a multi-phased entrance; they relinquished their documents to a man in a lucent box and were ushered into a small waiting room. Andrew was again relieved: The walls were papered with flyers for social service programs, and there wasn’t a single festering wound or homicidal gang in sight. The huge light on the ceiling was spackled with the desiccated bodies of a few electrocuted flies, some of them still twitching; in the corner of the room lurked an enormous
spindly-legged bug, as grand and improbable looking as a lobster; the smell of cloying disinfectant half-obscured the smell of something heavily organic. But in general, the room looked okay—like a place where petty obligations were fulfilled. A DMV, perhaps. Though Andrew saw how this place’s innocuousness could be dangerous; maybe it was why Lily had not realized the threat she was under—letting things go on in Spanish, failing to ask for a lawyer. He could scarcely believe it about the lawyer. Hadn’t she watched enough TV growing up to know to reflexively demand one, no matter what? Perhaps she actually hadn’t—they’d been stingy with TV, allowing only the most tedious and high-minded of programming, protecting their daughters from exposure to the mind-coarsening and the lurid. How funny that the most important thing Lily would wind up needing to know would be, essentially, a cliché, a little beat of verisimilitude in the preordained rhythm of a crime drama. How darkly hilarious, that this would turn out to be what they’d most needed to teach her. But instead they had raised an unworldly daughter; a child so confident in her language skills (a 5 on the AP exam, after all!), and so proud of the sophistication of her reasoning abilities (those papers on Quine!), and so assured of the infallibility of her innocence (!) that she assumed, wrongly and bravely, that her rational goodness could prevent disaster—even though the thesis of all of their lives had been that this was not so. How strangely funny that was. Andrew was going to laugh about that. Andrew was going to laugh about all of it, just as soon as he got out of this jail.