Life Sentences (22 page)

“I've told you what I can. Check that—I haven't told you anything. Remember that. I haven't told you anything.”

“Got it,” Teena said, and Gloria had a flash of the brash, cocky young woman she had met twenty years ago. Teena had thought Gloria beneath her, barely worth bothering with. She might have been right.

“And, Teena?” Her voice caught her as she was leaving, the files
tucked under her left arm, the damaged right one hanging by her side. Not quite dead, but clearly affected.

“Yes?”

“If you do find Callie Jenkins, make sure she knows I didn't tell you where she was. The fact is, I don't know, don't want to know. I would have left her alone, but others won't. Tell her it's not my fault and tell her…”

She paused so long that Teena finally had to prompt her. “Yeah?”

“Tell her that Gloria Bustamante hopes she's doing well. And that Reg Barr has a daughter. Make sure you tell her that. Reg and Donna have a daughter.”

IT WAS ALMOST 1 A.M
.
and Cassandra's head was throbbing. As a college student, she had been the queen of the all-nighter, stoking herself on strong coffee and NoDoz, writing twenty-page papers in under four hours, cramming an entire semester's worth of work into the dark hours. But that kind of stamina can't be maintained. Her almost fifty-year-old body was, in some ways, more fit than her twenty-year-old one, loaded down as it was with those extra college pounds, exercise not yet a part of her routine. But her mind was flabbier, no doubt about it. It didn't help that the papers strewn around her held no narrative, no organizing principle, no story to follow. They were nothing more than endless lists of payees and amounts, all of which appeared mundanely legitimate.

Teena, who was using Cassandra's laptop more or less one-handed, wasn't faring much better. She had fed Callie Jenkins's name into the online records in every possible variation and come up empty. Cassandra poured herself another glass of wine and Teena actually frowned. She had been drinking Diet Coke since she had arrived here a few hours ago, toting these papers.

“To think I once thought about being a forensic accountant,” she muttered now, glaring at the computer.

“When was that?” Cassandra said, glad for the distraction, although she knew it meant she would end up rereading these pages again.

“After I—
after.
I wanted to find a way to do something like police work. But accounting's hard. I dropped my first class after three sessions.”

“Did you have to leave the force?”

“The department,” Teena said. “Not the force.” She smiled at her own semantic pettiness. “It depends on how you define ‘have to,' I guess. Maybe I could have stayed. But it was a relief for things to be over, in a way.”

“That sounds like a psychologist's point of view. You wanted to leave so you put yourself in jeopardy, suffered an injury from which you couldn't recover.”

“I could have learned to shoot with my left hand,” Teena said. “Damn, I knew a guy who was blinded when he was shot on the job, and he managed to continue working as an instructor at the academy. Fact is, with therapy, I might have been able to qualify with my right hand again.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I don't know. I felt like such a failure. Time after time, going down to talk to Calliope Jenkins. No confession. No body. No leads. You know in the movies how you see the detective up against some mastermind and there's all this
talk
? I would have killed to have someone who actually spoke to me. With her, it was this endless silence. She was like someone…waiting for a bus. She made me feel like a gnat, buzzing in her ear, and she wouldn't even bother to wave me away.”

“Like freeze tag or statues.”

“You played those, too?”

“I guess most Baltimore girls did. And television tag—I can't remember quite how that went, just that we shouted out the names of television shows.”

“And Mother, may I? Baby steps, giant steps—what else?”

“Banana steps?” Cassandra, living on a dead-end street with older children, had seldom played those games. She had watched, when she was younger, on summer evenings, but she was never deemed old enough to play. By the time she was, they had moved on. It had been lonely on Hillhouse Road. That was all she had been trying to convey in her novel. How had such a simple idea gone so wrong? Perhaps because she hadn't been willing to state it directly. Or maybe it was too ordinary an epiphany. Weren't all children lonely in some way?

Her bleary eyes rested on a new page. Payee, amount. Payee, amount. God, political campaigns were boring. Catering bills, janitorial services, office supplies. Her eyes backtracked. Janitorial services, paid out to Myra Tippet.
Myra Tippet.
She had been so focused on finding variations on
Callie, Calliope,
and
Jenkins
that she had skipped past this on the first reading. Cassandra wouldn't even have known the name if Fatima hadn't mentioned it yesterday.
She took to calling herself by her own name, back when almost no one did that…. Only she put a
Mrs.
in front of it, even though there was no Mr.

She glanced at the top of the page: This was 1990, three years after Callie's arrest. She tracked back to 1988—there it was again. Not every month, but at least once a quarter, and the amounts were odd: $3,017, $2,139, $4,045. They were credible numbers. But, really, how much did a campaign office need in the way of cleaning?

“Was Callie's mother a cleaning woman?” she asked Teena.

“Maybe. I remember she worked at Parks Sausages, I think, but it wouldn't be unheard of if she did some part-time maiding off the books.”

“Drop the name Myra Tippet into the online files, see what comes up.”

Even as a one-handed, one-fingered typist, Teena was swift. “Nothing,” she said.

Cassandra tried to think this through. “In 1988, Julius Howard's campaign starts making payments to Callie's mother on a regular-irregular basis. But her name disappears once it's online and easier to search.”

“Interesting, I'll grant you. I'm not even sure if she's still alive.” Another round of lightning, staccato typing. “Nothing comes up in the Social Security database—when people die, you can find their names there—so I have to think she's alive. No idea where she is, though. I think we should go back to the Paul Simon album. Gloria was trying to tell me something.”

“‘The Obvious Child,'” Cassandra said. “Well, it is pretty obvious, right? She's talking about Callie's missing son.”

“Or Reg's daughter. She was awfully particular on that point, that we should tell Callie about Reg's kid.”

“Why would Callie care if Reg has a daughter? He wasn't even her lawyer until five years in. Maybe Gloria Bustamante is trying to divert us from something
she
did.”

The bit about Reg's daughter had rankled in other ways, too, but Cassandra couldn't tell Teena that. Just the reminder that Reg had a daughter bothered her, because it was that fact that doomed their relationship. Cassandra could love a man who left his wife, but she could never love a man who left his daughter. She had set herself up rather neatly, she saw now. But she hadn't known about Reg's daughter, not at first. Not like Annie, who had met Cassandra in the hospital. She hated to be reminded of that one detail, the only blemish she knew on her stepmother's character.
You saw me, saw
us.
Even if you fell in love with him the day he rescued you, couldn't you have pulled back from your emotions, walked away? Yes, I know he pursued you after leaving the hospital, and I know how persuasive he can be. But couldn't you have resisted, Annie, for my sake? Was it really that big a love?

“Myra Tippet isn't enough,” Teena said. “Unless we can find her, but she's not coming up on any search engine I try.”

“Tippet of the iceberg,” Cassandra said, laughing at her own joke in the slightly hysterical fashion of the sleep deprived. “But there are still janitorial services on the payee lists, right?”

“You would think,” Teena said, returning to the screen. “Catering company, banquet hall, office supplies, individuals, catering company, office supplies, limo company, banquet hall—”

“Stop.”

“Sorry,” Teena said. “It's just easier sometimes if I say things out loud.”

“No, I mean, go back. Limo company. What was the name?”

“High Styles Transportation Service.”

But Fatima hadn't told her the name of the company, only that it was struggling.

“Address?”

“Rosewood Path in Owings Mills. Hey—”

“That belongs to Fatima's husband, that's the address you found for me. Can you search just for the limo company?”

“Think so.” The quick clatter of keys. Normally, Cassandra would wince at hearing her laptop hit so hard, but she didn't mind in this situation. “It only appears three times, going back two years.”

“Fatima told me the company's only been around two years. What do you want to bet, though, that the next report shows the company again and the amount is high enough to cover the Nordstrom bill that Fatima just paid, along with the new things she bought herself?”

“Again, political campaigns do use town cars and limos and the like. It would be hard to prove this wasn't a legitimate use.”

“We're not trying a case in court. We're looking for information that we can use to get people to talk to us. Fatima kept warning me about some shadowy ‘they.' Perhaps she meant Julius Howard. Perhaps the reason that Howard & Howard represented Callie in the first place is connected to Julius. What did the old news stories say? Donna's father agreed to take the case as a favor to the ACLU. But maybe he took it on as a favor to Julius, his brother.”

“And why would he do that?”

“The child. The obvious child.”

“Julius is the father of Callie Jenkins's dead child? But there was a birth father on record, another junkie.”

“I don't know. I do know the coincidences are piling up, that it's simply too much.” Cassandra was groping for another fact about Fatima but one not provided by Fatima. Something about Spelman, how she had gotten there, Fatima's offense at the idea that she was churchified, her angry need to know exactly who had suggested she had changed so radically.

“Teena, let me have the computer. I need to look up something in my notes.”

But in the split second it took for Teena to slide the laptop across the table to her, Cassandra remembered. Tisha was the one who said Fatima was churchified. But Donna was the one who complained that Fatima had cut herself off from the group. “My uncle Julius wrote her a recommendation. She volunteered in his office in the late seventies.”

The late seventies. That was when Julius Howard ran for city council president—and lost. He never again attempted to run for an office that might have given him greater acclaim but had stayed in his safe senate district. The late seventies—Fatima would have been twenty or twenty-one, a juicy girl. She had been juicy at twelve. Had Callie volunteered, too?
We worked together.
Where, Cassandra had asked, and Fatima had dodged the question.

Cassandra stared blindly at her computer screen, trying to organize her racing thoughts, which included one melancholy undertone:
This is going to cost me Reg.
So be it. She wasn't going to get to keep him, anyway. And then:
But what does this have to do with Reg's daughter; why would Callie care?
She still didn't want to think about that. Besides, what she had now was a conspiracy theory beyond conspiracy theories, all wild conjecture. If it weren't so late, she would call her father, ask his advice. He would help her sort it through. Ah well, they were having breakfast tomorrow. She rubbed her eyes, once, twice, three times. And, as if in a fairy tale, the
third time brought forth a genie from the bottle. Not a genie, per se, but a line of text on the computer in front of her, which was still showing the expenditures of Julius Howard's campaign in the last reporting period.

Amuse Catering, Bridgeville, Delaware.

She heard her own young voice in her head, cocksure and patronizing.
“Although you pronounce it wrong, you're named for one of the Muses. I was almost named for one of the Muses, but my father decided to call me Cassandra instead, for the woman who had the gift of prophecy.”
Saw Callie taking this in, smiling slightly, pleased to know her name, mispronounced though it might be, had such a highborn origin. “Does that mean I'm funny?” Callie had asked. “Not
amuse,
” Cassandra corrected. “A. Muse. The Muse of epic poetry.” And she had rattled off the other eight, because she was the kind of little girl who could. It was probably the longest conversation she and Callie ever had, and Cassandra had done almost all the talking.

“Why would a state senator, one from Baltimore, use a Delaware catering company?”

Teena shrugged even as Cassandra used the database's search function. It showed up every quarter. As with Myra Tippet's janitorial services, the amounts were odd enough to be credible, averaging out to $15,000, four times a year. Not a lot. Probably not enough to repay a woman for seven years of her life, but it might seem generous to Callie. And tantalizing to a reporter, if one ever checked these records. But who would research Julius Howard, dedicated backbencher that he had become? Who could find Callie Jenkins in Amuse Catering, an LLC registered in another state?

“This is her,” she told Teena.

“It's a PO box.”

“She'll have a driver's license, living where she does. I bet that's public information. We can get that. Not here, tonight, but we can get it.”

Teena held up her left hand and it took Cassandra a moment to recognize the invitation for a high-five. She slapped her lightly, feeling
triumphant. But she also felt sad, contemplating what all this intrepid enterprise was going to cost her. Not only Reg, but any chance of rapprochement with Tisha, much less Fatima or Donna. She realized, in that moment of seeing the possibility recede, how much she had hoped to reconnect with her old friends. She had always understood that Reg was merely hers to borrow, perhaps even a subtle get-even. But she would have liked to have Tisha as a friend again, to have someone in her life who knew the whole of her. Not just the parts she had written down and shaped, but every ragged detail, every playground moment, every tiny triumph, every enormous failure. Even the frowsy hair.

You don't want to mess with them,
Fatima had warned. She was genuinely fearful, but she owed and was owned by the Howards in a way that Cassandra never could be. If the friendships had lived—but they hadn't, and that had been
their
decision, the consequence of their inaction. She would find no joy in hurting Donna and her family. But she couldn't help but be exhilarated by the opportunity to find Callie and get her story.