No One Tells Everything (4 page)

A sweatshirt covers the boy’s face as police lead him from the apartment, only jeans and Nikes visible. And large handcuffed hands. He is big, almost lumbering, and he stumbles before reaching the car.

The vinegared wine comes up in Grace’s throat. She lunges for the bathroom in time to throw up pure liquid, blackberry-dark against the white porcelain of the toilet. It drips from her lip as she falls back against the tub; she spits acidic juice into a wad of toilet paper.

She wonders if Sarah Shafer thought she might die when she first felt the knife. She wonders when she knew.

T
he next day at work, Grace avoids Brian as much as possible, slinking off to the bathroom whenever she senses his approach. She can’t face the inevitable “that was fun last night” or “we should do that again sometime,” the strained friendliness and sincerity. She spends most of the day hunched down in her cube trying to find out anything more about Charles Raggatt.

He lived at the complex where the body was found, a spoiled rich kid who was allowed to move off campus to the beach during his first year because money made the school bend the rules. He was the social chair of his fraternity. He drove a new red Land Rover.

“I didn’t know him,” a kid interviewed on campus said, “but I knew Sarah and she was awesome. I heard he crashed his BMW when he was drunk and his parents bought him an SUV as a replacement. She would never have been friends with that guy.”

He supposedly had a $3000-a-month allowance, a 60-inch television, disco lights and a smoke machine for parties, and a penchant for boasting about high school antics. He was a finance major who was barely passing. There is no real variance in the tone of what is reported: he was an asshole who got whatever he wanted.

No one has spoken up in Charles Raggatt’s defense, or expressed disbelief that he was capable of such a thing. In fact, no one admits to knowing him at all.

Grace wonders who would speak up for her.

###

Grace goes to Chances straight after work, telling herself she needs to go to clear her mind of the murder.

Jimmy bows a little when she arrives and pours her a glass.

“Have the job offers started streaming in?” he asks.

“Everyone passed on me,” she says, waving it off.

“Oh no, really? I’m sorry, Gracie. I’d never pass on you.”

He smiles but quickly looks away, corking the bottle and setting it behind him, even now, not wanting to imply a possibility of more than this. Years ago, before the parts they played for each other became intractable, in the middle of their banter he had asked, stuttering on the first word, “Would you like to go out sometime?” She had thought he was kidding so she laughed and then he blushed and then so did she and she said, “Oh, Jimmy” and panicked and said, “Sure!” too loudly, too late, too full of wine. He nodded his head but they both knew that the moment had passed, that the space of intimacy had closed over, filled in.

“Thanks, Jimmy,” she says.

“Maybe you need a hobby,” he says. “I hear knitting is making a comeback.”

“As long as I can do it here.”

Jimmy is pulled away by orders down the bar.

Grace lifts her glass with ceremonial seriousness, trying to forestall the pleasure of the first taste. She doesn’t last long. She sips, and then she drinks it down.

Another of her father’s old rules was that when he arrived home from work, there was no talking to him before his first cocktail. As a young girl Grace had such a crush on her dad. Tall and lean, his golden hair a little floppy, so handsome in his dark gray suit. His hands strong but refined; his nails, short and buffed. His monogrammed pigskin briefcase had been a gift from her mother, and its contents were an adult mystery. Indecipherable papers. A few pens in their designated loops. Grace and Callie used to watch him when he came in the door, whispering between themselves as he set down his briefcase, got a glass from his carved mahogany bar, filled it with ice, pulled out one of the bottles from down below, opened it—Grace likes to believe she can recognize the thwunk sound of the cork stopper of a Maker’s Mark bottle—and poured the smoky amber liquid into his glass. He would sip it down a little and then top it off again.

“Where are my favorite girls?” he would say then, before even turning around, and they would come running.

“Let your father relax for a minute,” their mother would call from the kitchen. But Callie would already be squealing as he tickled her. Grace would hang back a bit, smiling, waiting for him to pull her in for a hug.

The older man next to her at the bar orders a Jim Beam, neat, and she almost wants him to talk to her. It wouldn’t matter what he said.

Jimmy pours her a new glass. She drinks and watches the soundless television above the bar. Attractive doctors getting it on in a supply closet.

The bar is filling up. In the mirror are animated faces, laughing, talking, elasticized. Jimmy is pouring pitchers, shaking martinis. A woman with brassy hair and deep scowl lines has joined the Jim Beam drinker. She nods as he talks. There is a formality between them—perhaps a blind date. Her armpit sweat is showing through her silk blouse and she keeps her elbows locked to her sides to hide it.

Grace glances at the TV but the doctor show is over.

“Gracie, you want a refill while I’m here?” Jimmy asks.

“I’m okay for now,” she says.

She’s making a new effort to stop at two and she steels herself against her desire for another. Two is fine, she thinks. Two is acceptable.

When she looks back up at the TV, it’s him. Charles Raggatt. A photograph of the arrest, his head uncovered, exposed. His face is pink and puffy, babylike, and despite a beefy, six-foot body, his shoulders have a slender quality, hunched over as if for protection, his chin scrunched against his chest. Mouse-brown hair sticks up in random patches. Not at all the person she’d spent the day reading about. He glances up and out with eyes that are exhausted, confused, almost myopic, without a trace of defiance. He looks like a child who has been awakened from sleepwalking, frightened and lost.

###

At her desk, Grace swallows four Tylenols with her coffee before she takes off her coat.

“Grace, hey!”

The spicy smell of Brian’s deodorant hurts her head.

“Hey.”

“I left a ton of stuff for you. Beverly is out today.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to have lunch today? I mean with me?”

His face is mottled by the shivering light bulb above him.

“I don’t know. It looks like it’ll be pretty busy around here.”

“That’s cool,” he says. “Some other time.”

“Yeah,” she says. “That would be good.”

“Definitely,” he says, his confidence restored.

Brian taps his fists on the top of her cubicle wall and retreats.

She flips through the new stack of page layouts on her desk for the Charles Raggatt story. The article is now just half a page, accompanied by his mug shot. They have a suspect and an explanation: a cocky rich kid, a pretty girl, a sexual advance gone bad. The sides have been determined and no one wants to be aligned with the villain. It will probably be the last time the story is covered in the magazine. The mystery is over.

Grace searches the small grainy photograph for more, but finds only the confounded eyes of a boy with a lot of secrets.

The article talks about Charles Raggatt’s car, his failing grades, his notorious partying, and then something new: he is from Cleveland, one town over from where Grace grew up. His father is the CEO of a venture capital firm. His mother, a onetime Miss Ohio. His parents could not be reached for comment. Grace imagines them, prominent in the community, known for their annual holiday party. The mom is petite and tan, with expensive jewelry. She’s had her kitchen and her eyes done. The dad has salt-and-pepper hair, goes hunting once a year with his friends, and spends as little time as possible at home. They can’t bring themselves to speak in their son’s defense. Bad for business. Embarrassing. Uncouth. They stay quiet and hire expensive lawyers.

###

“Did you see they arrested someone for killing that girl?” Jimmy asks.

“Yeah,” she says.

“What a bastard,” he says.

Grace has an urge to defend Charles Raggatt. He may have murdered someone, but there is something about him that she recognizes.

“We don’t know everything yet, though,” she says.

“Oh no?” he asks.

She takes a long drink.

“He’s from Cleveland, like me. From another preppy, repressed suburb.”

“No shit,” he says. “I hope there wasn’t anything in the water.”

Grace gives him a small laugh.

“He doesn’t look like the same person they describe,” she says.

“Looks can be deceiving.” Jimmy pours her another.

She shifts position in her seat, unable to get comfortable.

“I don’t know. He seems totally alone,” she says.

“Who isn’t?”

Jimmy smiles a little and she smiles back. She drains her glass and counts out some bills, intent on making it home in time for the news.

The image of Charles Raggatt lingers inside her, feathery, shifting, like smoke from smoldering incense.

###

One of the last times she saw the professor, they ate dinner at a dark, brick-walled Italian place on Tenth Avenue, far from anywhere his wife might see them. Grace had sensed him distancing himself from her so she made the extra effort. She wore a skirt with tall boots—his favorite on her—and spritzed her wrists with perfume.

He had taught a class that night, so he was riled up, still in pedantic mode. He told her about a student who had turned in one of the best papers he’d ever received—insightful, well written, succinct—when everything else she’d ever done for him was barely mediocre.

“She clearly plagiarized. Or got help,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure. But it makes the most sense.”

“So? It’s not necessarily right,” Grace said. “Maybe she was really inspired this time. Or maybe she got a babysitter and finally had enough time to work on it.”

“The simplest explanation is usually the best. Occam’s Razor.”

He jabbed the air with a marinara-covered fork. Two red droplets landed on the tablecloth in front of her.

“That’s reductive. It doesn’t hold true for everything,” she said.

“I’m just saying the odds are in my favor.”

She bit down on the inside of her cheek. Under the table she gouged her knuckles against her thigh.

“Simplistic is not the same as simple,” she muttered, stabbing her penne.

“Grace, it’s common sense. You know what they say in medical school? When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.”

He sucked up a tendril of spaghetti and smiled at her. She said nothing more about it.

But it makes her angry now to think about it and she wants to tell him. She dials, but his wife answers. Grace hangs up.

She drinks well past her two-drink moratorium. She phones her mom but hangs up when her dad answers. She is restless, wound up.

Out on the curb, bags of garbage and recycling are piled in perilous saggy stacks. She fills a grocery bag with the empty bottles from the top of her refrigerator and carries the clanking bundle outside on her hip. The cement is deadening cold on her bare feet. She wobbles and narrowly misses stepping on a patch of scattered glass.

A group of boys walks by, two by two, razzing each other. They are tall but still adolescents, baseball hats under sweatshirt hoods.

“What’s up, Mami?” one says, walking backward to face her. “Where you been all my life?”

He has a sweet face, with burnished skin and wide brown eyes that reflect the streetlight overhead. His friend punches him and they laugh, continuing on their way.

She envies their easygoing confidence, their comfort with each other. She balances the bottles gingerly on the top of the heap and skitters back inside.

In her bedroom, the light from the sidewalk shines through the blinds in stripes across the duvet. Grace lies awake and absently traces them with her finger. She wrestles with the things she knows about Charles Raggatt and the case, but they don’t cohere. The story is only becoming murkier.

He has signed a confession and he is being held without bail. She wonders what it feels like to confess, if he wishes now that he could suck the words back in. She pictures his fleshy hands holding a blue ball-point pen, his signature precise, almost delicate. What if he wanted to give up his life? Perhaps now he can curl up in his cell and sleep.

Grace wishes she could do the same, but her brain ricochets despite the hour and the alcohol and the Tylenol PMs. Charles Raggatt. The telling thing is the silence. No friends rallying to his defense, no family offering its support. No one to contradict a profile that’s easy to despise.

She gets up and pulls on her coat over her pajamas. It’s warmer outside than it was earlier, a descended fog visible in the streetlights’ yellow pools. She walks up toward the park, past storefronts armored with metal grates. A car service Lincoln slows next to her but she waves it on. A late-night subway train rattles underneath the sidewalk. On the corner, the all-night Greek diner glows safe and welcoming—there are other people awake—despite the dinginess of its greasy windows.

Inside there is only one customer, a jittery woman in sunglasses, emaciated in a cavernous UCLA sweatshirt. Crystal meth or mental illness or despair. Grace takes a seat in the booth furthest from her and waits for the old man behind the counter to stop reading his paper.

“Yes? You know what you want?” he calls out to her. His accent is Greek. His eyebrows are bushy tentacles reaching out in every direction.

Grace orders a vanilla milkshake. He doesn’t smile.

When he turns the shake mixer on, the skinny woman jerks her head up, angry at the noise’s intrusion. Grace smiles in appeasement and the woman looks back down into her coffee.

Grace wonders what threads they have decided don’t support the neat story of the murder, what errant strands they have snipped away. Maybe, she thinks, I’m the only one who’s curious.