Authors: Alafair Burke
Never Tell (4 page)
A
s Casey Heinz jogged up from the 6 train at Bleecker, he was thinking that, all in all, it had been a good day.
Ramona’s school had some kind of teacher in-service Monday, so she’d been able to spend the day with him, starting with a snack at AJ’s. On a day without Ramona, he might have had only a chocolate-chip muffin, forcing himself to chew slowly, careful not to show his hunger. The fact that he was getting sick of that particular food option would have helped to slow the pace of his eating. He was tiring of nearly all the choices at AJ’s, one of the only places left on the Lower East Side that allowed them to hang out without buying too much. A cup of coffee first. A couple hours later, a muffin. Sometimes Brandon or Vonda would drop in with enough collected change for another cup of java.
AJ’s was starting to feel like home.
But, today, time wasn’t a problem, because Ramona was there. Girls who carried themselves like Ramona were never asked to leave, no matter who they consorted with.
Cost wasn’t an issue, either, when Ramona was around. He appreciated how Ramona paid. Not just the fact
that
she paid. Of course she would, given their different circumstances. But it was cool
how
she did it. Always ordering something for herself, too, even when Casey knew she wasn’t hungry enough to finish it. And she always seemed to order the things that Casey liked. Today it was chicken breast, mozzarella, and basil on a baguette. She’d picked off a bite or two, then, when Casey had finished his muffin, she’d pushed the sandwich toward him, insisting, “I’m so full. Here, can you finish this?”
As they had walked through SoHo after lunch, he had studied her profile. He’d never known a girl as pretty as Ramona. She wasn’t classic pretty. Or even cute pretty, the way most straitlaced high school girls were, with their misplaced confidence and upturned noses. Ramona was actually sort of funny-looking. Her nose was a little too long and flat, and he knew from memory that one of those big eyes of hers fell a little lower than the other. And her lips were on the thinnish side, her smile a bit crooked. But all of those features together? Ramona was, by any definition of the word, a stunner.
Even cooler was the fact that she didn’t try to be pretty. No highlights in that short jet-black hair of hers, the ends chunky as if cut with a razor. Plus, she wore way more vintage clothing and black eyeliner than acceptable among Upper East Siders. Plus, she hung with the likes of Casey.
Usually, they goofed around the neighborhood, making fun of the pretentious, surreal art galleries and the wannabe punk kids. And usually one of them had someone in tow—he with Brandon, or her with Julia. But today it had been just the two of them.
And they hadn’t just goofed around. Today, Ramona had really
talked
to him.
“I’m worried about my mom. I think she’s depressed or something.”
Casey couldn’t imagine what Ramona’s mother could possibly be depressed about. From what he could gather, her full-time job was to shop and work out, but he held his tongue.
“I called Julia last night. She thinks I should talk to my dad. Tell him that she’s spending so much time holed away in her room all day.”
“See this?” Casey had pointed to his own face. “This is a look of pain and humiliation that you talked to Julia about this before me.”
“Sorry.” She had leaned over and grabbed his shoulders from behind in a quick half-hug. “She’s just constantly in contact, you know, with text and IM and everything.”
Texting and instant-messaging. Two other conveniences of a normal life that Casey did not enjoy. At Promises, there was a fifteen-minute limit on computer use unless it was related to a job search, and residents didn’t have their own phones. Anyone who wanted to contact him had to leave a message at the front desk. Or with Joy, who worked the register at AJ’s from noon to five on weekdays. She was a sweetheart that way.
The pain and humiliation were feigned, in any event. Ramona and Julia Whitmire had known each other since the single-digit years. Casey’d met Ramona only last December, when they were both hanging out in Washington Square Park. Casey would probably never be Ramona’s best friend, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t his.
Julia was supposed to meet them today at AJ’s but had once again been a no-show. In her absence, he made a few comments at her expense.
“Julia thinks you should tell your dad because as much as she bitches about those parents of hers, she’s a daddy’s girl. She’d love nothing more than a chance to tattle on her own mommy to get a few brownie points from her dear, distant dad.”
“Harsh.”
“Not harsh. Just true. You know I love that girl. Almost as much as you.” Then he’d felt awkward, but Ramona didn’t seem to mind the comment.
After the stroll through SoHo, they headed west and hung out on the High Line, then they walked store to store in the Village. Maybe if Julia had ever shown up, she would have forced them to buy something. Not Casey, of course, but Ramona.
When Ramona announced at two o’clock that she needed to go home, he wondered whether she would have stayed longer if Julia had been there. Then he wondered whether he’d ever stop having those kinds of thoughts. He hated realizing how insecure he was at heart.
But then he’d bumped into Brandon on Eighth Street, holding his latest cardboard sign. “Trying to get home to Louisiana. Need $55 for a bus ticket.” If Casey had a hundred dollars, he’d bet it all that Brandon had never been south of D.C. Brandon was cockier than Casey. Bolder. Undoubtedly a little shady. Casey had been careful to keep his distance those few times while Brandon did hand-to-hand sales in the park. Casey made a point never to challenge Brandon, though, or to show that he was worried. Brandon was the only guy Casey had met on the streets who was willing to accept him.
It had been a good day.
By the time Casey made it back to AJ’s, it was just shy of five o’clock, so Joy was still there. As usual, she snuck him some food with his coffee. Sometimes it was pumpkin or zucchini bread—whatever they had the most of and would likely have to throw out at closing—but today he scored with a piece of lemon cake.
“Got a message for you, too, hot stuff.” Joy was only twenty years old and had a bleached white pageboy haircut and a sleeve tattoo on her right arm, but she liked to talk like a 1960s waitress slinging hash in a Waco diner. “Your favorite little lady called.”
“Natalie Portman’s finally seen the light, huh?”
“You know which one I mean. Little Missy Ramona’s sweet self. She said to call her faster than green grass through a goose.”
Casey was pretty sure that was Joy’s choice of words, not Ramona’s. He made a show of taking his time leaving AJ’s, then hightailed it to one of the neighborhood’s last remaining pay phones, at the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker. After four rings, he heard Ramona’s familiar outgoing message: “Hey, there. It’s Ramo—” Typical. Ramona had a habit of leaving her cell phone silenced, in her purse, and otherwise ignored. Any other person his age could leave a message and expect a call back on his cell within an hour, but Casey didn’t have that luxury. He fished through his wallet for his list of contacts, dropped fifty more cents, and dialed another number.
Ramona’s father answered. Damn it. “Hello, Mr. Langston. This is Casey Heinz. May I please speak with Ramona?”
Casey had met Ramona’s parents only once, that night when they walked out during intermission—some play they called a “cheap Albee rip-off”—and came home early to find Casey and Ramona watching a marathon of
Arrested Development
. They didn’t know the details of Casey’s living situation, but it hadn’t taken them long to infer from his appearance and vague responses to their questions that he was not from Ramona’s usual social circle. He made a point of using his best manners on the rare occasions he called her house.
“Ramona is—well, she’s very upset right now. She’s in her room. I think her mother’s trying to talk to her.”
“Did something happen? I got a message from her and it sounded urgent.”
“She wanted to speak to you, huh? Well, I guess I should let her know you’re returning her call, then. Just a moment, Casey.”
He heard murmuring in the background, and then Ramona was on the line. “Casey, oh my God, Casey. Please come over. Please. I need you here.”
I need you.
How many times had he fantasized about Ramona saying those words? But in his imagination, her voice had been soft and vulnerable. Now she barely sounded human, the syllables coughed from her throat between rasped sobs.
“It’s Julia. It’s Julia. She’s gone, Casey. Julia’s dead. She killed herself.”
E
llie was sitting on the front steps of the Criminal Court Building when she spotted Rogan pulling a U-turn to meet her at the curb. He greeted her with a frustrated shake of his head before tearing up Centre Street.
“So where have we been summoned to now?” she asked as she snapped her seat belt in place.
He remained silent for another six blocks before he finally spoke.
“Don’t try to pretend that what we did today was good work, Ellie.” He rarely used her first name. “We were in and out of there faster than a straight-to-cable movie, and we spent the whole time looking to prove the conclusion we came to within a minute of entering that house. We’re no different than those lazy uniforms and smart-ass EMTs. We assumed the spoiled little rich girl slit her own wrists, and we made sure not to notice anything that might pull us in another direction.”
“You seemed fine when we left.”
“And that’s on me. I deferred to you, but I should have realized you’re the last person who should’ve made the call on this.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I made the same call as everyone else there—except that girl’s mother, who’s not exactly objective.”
“We both know it’s not our job to make calls that fast. You mean to tell me nothing else is going on here?”
Ellie looked out the window, as if that could buy her some space.
There were days when she was grateful that she and Rogan could navigate their way through an interrogation with only exchanged glances. She had even learned to accept the fact that Rogan could tell she was PMS-ing before she could. But if there was some way to lobotomize the part of his brain that knew about her father, she’d saw open his head personally.
Ellie had never talked about her father to anyone at the NYPD, not even Rogan. But she couldn’t help that other people knew her background. After police in Wichita had finally arrested William Summer and named him as the College Hill Strangler, she had decided to go public. She thought the pressure would convince the WPD to reverse its decision and finally award her father’s pension to her mother. Turned out to be a shit idea, but she had to try.
Now, because her face had been on
Dateline
and in
People
magazine, everyone knew that—despite what she appeared to be now—she had once been the little girl who could never accept the fact that her cop-daddy blew his brains out. She wondered if that was all people saw sometimes.
As Rogan pulled next to a fire hydrant in front of the Whitmire townhouse, she knew that even her partner suspected that, maybe—just maybe—a cold night at the side of a rural road in Wichita was the real reason why Ellie had been so quick to chalk up Julia Whitmire’s death to suicide.
But Ellie knew her true motivations. She was being rational. She was acting on evidence, not emotion; on reality, not old memories. Julia had killed herself, and her parents needed to come to terms with that fact.
She noticed the engine was still idling. “So are you going to tell me why we’re here? Who’d the Whitmires call?”
“Everyone, from what I can tell. I did, in fact, get an earful from the Lou. So I asked myself whether we might have missed something.”
“I know, you told me that on the phone. So what is it? What did we miss?”
He turned off the engine, only to turn it right back on. “You know what kills me? This is exactly the kind of thing that
you
would notice. Think, Hatcher. Think about what we saw today.”
“Are we playing twenty questions? Is it bigger than a bread box? Animal, mineral, vegetable? Oh, wait, I know: it’s a screwed-up kid in a bathtub. Will you hurry up and tell me before we knock on that door again? Because we better have a damn good reason if we’re going to disturb that woman just as she probably finished downing her third Valium to try to get some sleep after watching her daughter’s body hauled away.”
Rogan turned off the engine again, and this time took the keys out of the ignition. “You were the one who spent the most time in her room,” he said. “The girl was a junior in high school—a member of her generation in every way, with every gadget in the world at her fingertips.”
“Yep, every luxury money could buy, and what did it do for her?”
He shook his head once again. “You still don’t see it? Ellie, you really got to get yourself right on this one.” He didn’t wait for her to get out of the car before making his way to the front door.
K
atherine Whitmire started talking as soon as she opened the door. “It’s about time. The EMTs. The medical examiner. The two of you. Your lieutenant. I lost count of the number of times I heard the word
suicide
today and the number of people who used it. All of you were lining up to tell me and my husband that our daughter did this to herself. And every single time, I believed it even less. I tried. I
begged.
”
A man came up behind her and placed a protective arm around her shoulder. “I’m Julia’s father, Bill Whitmire. Please, come in.”
As she took the seat offered in the parlor room adjacent to the foyer, Ellie found herself distracted by the man’s appearance. He was more than twice her age, but still handsome with longish salt-and-pepper hair, a strong jaw, and the kind of wear and tear considered distinguished on a man.
But Ellie kept seeing the man he’d once been—the man photographed so many times with famous musicians from her childhood, at spots like Studio 54, with then-starlets like Ali MacGraw and Carrie Fisher. He still carried himself with a rock-and-roll edge that looked out of place in this sterile townhouse. Ellie suspected the man spent little time here and had nothing to do with a decorating plan whose only reflection of his personality was relegated to photographs in the elevator.
“I’m sorry about that outburst at the door,” Katherine said, “but we’re just . . . we’re . . . our daughter—she’s gone. And I’ve had to spend the entire day on the phone arguing and fighting and twisting arms. But you’re back now, right? You’ll be listening to what I’ve been trying to say? You’ll be treating Julia’s death as a murder?”
This was exactly what Ellie had been afraid of. They were getting these people’s hopes up for no apparent reason. She was going to let Rogan handle this one on his own.
“We can’t imagine what you’ve been through today,” he offered. “We want to be absolutely sure that we didn’t miss anything before—”
“Before you shut the folder on my daughter and move on to your next statistic.” Bill Whitmire wiped away a drop of saliva that stuck to his lip as he’d hissed the words. “You write case names on a whiteboard, don’t you, Detective? Like on television? Have you crossed her name off the board yet?”
“Mr. Whitmire—”
“You say you want to be sure you didn’t miss anything, but we all know the first twenty-four hours of an investigation are absolutely critical.” Apparently the record producer spent a lot of time watching crime TV. “You should be talking to our neighbors and her friends, checking sexual offenders released nearby, doing whatever it is you people
do
to find whatever monster came into our home and did this.”
Uniformed officers had already knocked on the doors of the other townhouses on the street, but no one reported seeing anything out of the ordinary.
She wished Rogan would cut to the chase, but he was still trying to manage the parents’ expectations. “The initial evidence, as we explained earlier today, indicated that your daughter was alone in the bathroom and was the author of the note we found on her bed.”
“Well, at least this time you avoided the
S-
word, but I think my wife and I heard the same message enough times today.”
Katherine placed a hand on her husband’s knee. “Please, let the detectives
speak
. They’re here for a reason.”
Rogan paused before continuing. “When we were in your daughter’s room earlier, I noticed that her homework all seemed to be printed out. Did she usually do her schoolwork on a computer?”
Ellie noticed the blankness in Bill’s face as he looked to his wife for the answer. Katherine nodded. “That’s all kids do now. They take laptops to school for note taking. Seems recently she was even getting by just with her iPad. Kids can’t even spell or print correctly anymore without a computer there to help them.”
“So if she had to write a letter of some kind—”
“She doesn’t write letters. No one her age does.”
Ellie now saw what Rogan had been trying to get her to realize on her own in the car. Julia’s suicide note had been handwritten, on paper. And not just written on paper, but drafted on paper, with false starts and crossed-out words.
Julia’s mother saw the point as well. “Julia wouldn’t have written that ridiculous note on her bed. Even if you could convince me that my daughter authored that note, I simply can’t imagine her putting a pen to paper in order to do it. She would go to her computer. Even if she wanted us to have a handwritten version, she’d draft it first on the screen, then write it out afterward.”
“That’s why we’re here. The note had scratched-out words and other scribbles on it, like Julia had started fresh, with a blank page, when she sat down to write.”
“No, not Julia.”
“What about the paper? The letter was on yellow lined paper, with holes punched on the side. I don’t recall seeing a notebook like that when we went through her room. Do you keep yellow legal pads around the house?”
This time it was the wife who looked to her husband. “No, not to my knowledge,” he said.
“So that means she didn’t write the note.” Katherine sounded hopeful for the first time since they’d encountered her. “That proves she didn’t kill herself.”
Ellie finally had to cut in. “It’s always possible she got the paper somewhere else. We’re here because we didn’t want to jump to conclusions.”
But like his wife, Bill Whitmire had already reached his own verdict. “Based on your experience, Detective, do you really believe this scenario makes any sense?”
“We’d like to take another look around if you don’t mind.” Rogan was already on his feet, heading for the stairs.
T
hey searched through every drawer, cupboard, box, and bag of the four-story townhouse, but nowhere did they find a yellow legal pad matching Julia’s supposed suicide note.
“You mentioned your daughter’s friends, Mrs. Whitmire. Who knew Julia best?”
It was a simple question, but Ellie recognized the look of determination on Rogan’s face. They were going to rework this case from the beginning, whether she liked it or not, and he blamed her for the crucial hours they had already wasted.