Valley of Ashes (42 page)

Sometimes it’s good to have a police force that doesn’t really know how to deal with investigating a homicide.

“So,” I said to Mimi, “you’re going to make sure the cops don’t fuck up and pin this on
me
, right? I mean, I’m willing to admit I kicked Setsuko’s ass, but that was in self-defense and the skanky bitch deserved it.”

“I don’t know, Madeline,” she said. “What have you done for me lately?”

We were sitting on the tacky condo’s front steps while a young
firefighter/EMT guy Novocained my arm and then put a nice fat bandage on it to keep me from bleeding all over Mimi’s car on the way to the hospital.

“That should do you,” he said, running a final strip of tape gently around my wrist. “Just make sure you get someone good for the stitches. Hold out for a plastic surgeon.”

“I will, thank you.”

He looked up at Mimi. “Sure you don’t want me to run you both down there, Meems?”

“Thanks, Jerry,” she said, “but then I’d have to come back for my car. And Madeline’s tough.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking wide-eyed into the blood-spattered living room behind us. “I guess so.”

“Ready?” she asked, standing up.

I was still kind of shaky, so she pulled my good arm across her shoulders.

Jerry looked uncomfortable, like he was about to insist I make the trip lying down in the back of the paramedic rig, but in the end he didn’t say a word.

Smart man.

I made Mimi stop for a minute in the parking lot so I could throw the shamrock down a storm drain.

“Really?” she asked.

“It was hideous,” I said. “And
nobody
needs more luck like that. Not even Setsuko.”

I
t took almost two hours before we got my arm stitched up. Probably would’ve taken longer if I hadn’t been with Mimi, but she knew some people in the ER and made them deal with me.

I didn’t really care, since my arm didn’t hurt that much and it wasn’t bleeding so badly anymore. And she made sure I got to lie down in a little curtained cubicle while I waited.

“You’re going to be up a long time,” she said. “Might as well sleep while you can.”

“I really have to go down to the police station? Couldn’t they just send someone here?”

“You hit a woman in the face with a fire poker, Madeline. This is going to be formal.”

“Self-defense,” I said. “I mean, hello, she’d
already
murdered someone. And she was trying to stab me to death.”

“All of which you’re going to have to explain to the cops. They’re not going to take my word for it.”

Of course she was right. If we’d been in New York, I’d be handcuffed to the side of the bed I was lying on already, with a couple of uniforms glaring at me.

“Fine,” I said. “Know any good lawyers?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to go call one and let me sleep?”

“Sure,” she said.

I was out before she’d pulled the curtain back.

The lawyer was a young guy named Art Selby. He was waiting for us at the cop station in cargo pants and a Moe’s Bagels T-shirt with his curly black hair all rumpled, but he knew his shit.

They wouldn’t let Mimi be in the interview room with us, of course. Someone took her statement outside.

I was exhausted by this point, but grateful for two things: First, they had really good coffee. Second, I wasn’t being interviewed by either of the two idiots who’d showed up at my house the day after Cary died.

I got Wilson, a nice grizzled old guy who probably lived out in Longmont and actually knew what he was doing.

Why he was on duty at three in the morning was beyond me, but maybe they’d woken him up, too. Arson and love triangles and murder and that kind of stuff not being your run-of-the-mill crimes in Boulder.

It took a while to give my statement since Selby kept interrupting, which was fine with me. It was boring and the only part that mattered was a discussion of what I was going to be charged with.

“We’re looking at a charge of second-degree assault here,” said Wilson. “If not first-degree.”

Selby shook his head. “Give me a break.”

Wilson looked all serious. “Reckless cause of bodily injury with a deadly weapon. COV.”

“COV?” I asked.

“Crime of violence,” explained Selby. “Absolute
horse
manure. This is third-degree assault, if that. First offense, mitigating circumstances,
and
self-defense.”

“Your client hit the woman in the head with a fire poker and took half her teeth out. Broke her cheekbone. Lucky she didn’t lose an eye.”

Should’ve aimed higher.

“Are you going to put me in jail?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said Selby.

“Maybe,” said Wilson.

“Look, I just want to lie down.” I said. “I’m really starting not to care whether it’s at home or behind bars or whatever. I could go to sleep right on this table, with all the lights on. You want to put me in jail, go ahead. Just don’t make me sit here for the rest of the night.”

Selby got all incensed on my behalf. “Ms. Dare’s lost a
serious
amount of blood tonight.”

I held up my arm. “Seventeen stitches. Plus she stabbed me in the shoulder blade. I’d show you that bandage, too, but I’d have to take my shirt off.”

“Wilson, let her go home,” said Selby. “We can come back in the morning. She’s not going anywhere. She’s got little ones at home. Twin girls.”

“Please,” I said, trying to look all sweet and nonthreateningly maternal for a change.

Wilson was weakening.

“Better yet,” I said, “come to my house. I’ll make my husband go out for bagels.”

Hey, I’d seen Wilson checking out Selby’s T-shirt from Moe’s. The man was as tired as I was, not to mention hungry. And this wasn’t a doughnut kind of town.

“Fine,” Wilson said. “Ten o’clock.”

Sometimes, you really gotta love small-town police forces.

Mimi drove me home. Selby had ridden his bike.

Four weeks later, Mimi and I were sitting in my living room.

The whole assault thing had been straightened out pretty quickly. No charges.

Setsuko hadn’t made bail so I didn’t have to worry about running into her shopping at King Soopers or Wild Oats.

I’d gotten the stitches out, and the scar probably wouldn’t be all that noticeable once the redness had faded.

Dean’s face still wrinkled up with concern whenever I pushed my sleeve back.

Or maybe guilt. Hard to say.

I promised I’d fly back out from Massachusetts if they needed me to testify, but nobody thought that would be necessary in any kind of a hurry.

Nice to have Mimi vouching for me, though. And McNally and I had done a hell of a job on that final article for the
New Times
, if I do say so myself.

They’d caught the first arsonist, in the meantime.

Turned out it was a homeless guy. History of fire-setting, pretty delusional.

He’d come in from Seattle. Wanted there for arson, too.

Bittler got fired, which was pretty great. He hadn’t exactly been embezzling, but he hadn’t been exactly on top of the financial stuff, either. And maybe the bosses had finally figured out what a little shit he was, generally.

Dean and I were working hard at patching things up.

At the very least, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be tempted to fuck around on me again. Not for a long, long time, anyway.

And as my mother always said, you have the best shot with your first husband. Especially if you have kids together.

“You always run the risk of marrying the same person again anyway,” she said. “I’ve certainly done that once or twice. Can’t say I recommend it.”

Dean was trying to be nicer to me. Not always succeeding, but the effort was commendable and it’s not like we were getting more sleep, what with having twins.

He still couldn’t get it up, either. But I really did believe at this point that it was because he was ashamed of himself, so it didn’t seem quite so insulting.

Also, I’d lost twenty pounds in the last month. Shockingly horrible life events aren’t conducive to having much of an appetite, as it turns out.

But I looked damn good.

And I had my mojo back in spades.

I had my driver’s license now. Dean still had about six weeks’ worth of work to finish at Ionix. And I told him he could clean the fucking house himself, considering—once the packers were through with everything.

I packed some clothes and some Cheese Nips, loaded the girls into the Galant, and started east without my husband.

Mom thought I was nuts, but I said we’d be staying in motels and eating at Denny’s or whatever turned up. That seemed like a perfectly fine vacation to me—no cooking, and somebody else doing the dishes the whole way.

As for Boulder, I sure as shit wasn’t going to miss it.

Fall 1995

Hamilton and Cambridge, Massachusetts

L
isten, Bunny?” Dean’s voice sounded wretched, on the phone. He was still in Boulder.

I’d found us a house, or most of one—the upper two floors of a staunch old Edwardian place out on leafy Huron Avenue, in the western part of Cambridge. We were waiting to close on the place, no more renting.

It was toast-colored clapboard surrounded by boxwood hedges and old roses, a jumble of beautiful little rooms painted dark green and pale coral and butter yellow and icy Gustavian blue. There were chair rails and linen closets and proper old wooden floors and banisters without a spot of orange Formica or carpeting anywhere.

There was an upper porch and a corner dining room that felt like a tree house for grown-ups—two sides of it tall casement windows and two covered in French wallpaper, set at the height of the lushest, greenest boughs on the block.

While we waited, the girls and I were staying with my aunt Julie and uncle Bill in verdant Hamilton, on the North Shore.

Aunt Julie had made me a vodka tonic and steered me out onto their screen porch with the telephone when Dean called that night, waving me toward a beautiful old chintz-covered chaise longue and closing the porch’s French doors discreetly behind her as she went back inside.

“Bunny?”

“I’m here,” I said, watching three fireflies glide and swoop above the tall grass at the lawn’s far edge.

“Ellis called tonight. From Cincinnati.”

Not more about Setsuko, then. I didn’t have to come back for the trial yet.

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.

I let it out all at once, soothed by the brassy purr of crickets, out in the woods. The night air was still and hot, heavy with the promise of an impending thunderstorm.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “You sound exhausted.”