LITTLE FAITH
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(Continued)
3.
I
lay on my back on heavy, dark cotton sheets, under a spongy
blue blanket of unnatural origin. Everything in the room
had come from a superstore. None of it looked like the
home of a hooker.
She
lay on her side, her head on my chest. My arm curled around
her neck and I stroked her hair.
“Is
this what you wanted?” she asked.
“It’s
better,” I said. “Do you mind?”
“It’s
okay.” Some time passed. “I can’t ask
you to spend the night.”
“I
understand,” I said, and threw off the blanket.
“You
don’t have to go now.”
“I
should.”
“I
just . . . I don’t want any trouble with the neighbors.
I saved for this place for a long time.”
“That’s
cool,” I said, pulling my pants on.
“I’m
retired now.” She eyed the ceiling. “Semi.”
“What
do you do with your time?”
She
took a moment. “What does that mean?”
“I’m
serious.”
“I
have friends!”
I
nodded. “I don’t.”
She’d
sat up. Light rolled in from the living room. She noticed
the path of my eyes and pulled the blanket up over her
breasts.
“I’m
saving to have them hoisted,” she said.
“They’re
fine.” I put my jacket on, left money on the dresser,
what I knew from Vice was a typical call-girl rate plus
tip. And not so much that I couldn’t afford to come
back.
As
I headed out of the bedroom, she said, “Good night,
Tonto.” Tonto was a nickname she knew from way back,
when I was a young detective under an older detective’s
wing. Once, I interrogated her. Once, she sold me out.
And still I didn’t have a place I could go where
I could count on a warmer reception. Not even home.
I
said, “Good night, Vita.”
I
drove down Airport Boulevard, past the monolithic cement
columns that the Koenig overpass would use to tread through
Hyde Park, following the interstate frontage road to Thirty-eighth
Street to my house.
I
first came to Austin when I was fifteen, leaving my home
in Elmira, New York, in the middle of the night when my
father woke me with the information that he had fallen
out of favor with the Big Boys and that we were leaving
the state, now. My mother had walked out years earlier,
with the promise that she was leaving my father, not me,
though I never heard from her again. Her family had disowned
her for marrying a Jew—they didn’t care that
he was a mobster. His family, including an ex-wife and
two kids, were having nothing to do with either of us.
So Pop and I arrived in Texas as a duo. I had a few laughs
as a high school hoodlum, then joined the army, saw the
world, came back to Austin for college, married my college
sweetheart. I got turned down by the FBI, nixing my ambition
to get revenge on the Mafia for destroying my family.
Joined the police. My wife left. I fell in love with my
best friend’s wife, Rachel. He died, we shacked
up. She split. Four years later I still rented a house—the
house Rachel had lived in with me—catercorner from
the one where she’d lived with my best friend. I
only thought of her when I saw their house, when I saw
our house, when I saw our bed and when I breathed. Like
an idiot I’d passed up the chance to marry her.
If I’d played my cards right, I could have had a
long and happy life with the woman of my dreams. Instead
all I had was my job.
It
was 1:30 A.M. when I got home, and Jessica greeted me
at the door in her flannel jammies, with no acknowledgment
that she’d broken up with me barely two hours before.
I was too tired to bring it up. She handed me a chalk
drawing on a rectangle of construction paper, torn at
the edges. The gray chalk smeared my fingers. Jessica
bounced on the balls of her feet, saying, “Look
what I drew you!”
Jessica
had her moments. I tried to put aside that they were always
moments of acting like a sweet kid. She didn’t have
too many moments as an adult.
“What
is it?” I asked. What I saw was an oval in seven
shades of gray, on a nearly black background. An egg floating
in space.
“It’s the cosmic egg.”
When
I first met Jessica a few months earlier, she had been
thrown out, she said, by her abusive boyfriend. She moved
in with me. We had incredible sex, for two weeks. Then
restrained sex occasionally, me trying to hit all the
right spots without hitting the thousand or so that would
set loose some old trauma. Then that fizzled, too. There
wasn’t much that occupied her life, though she was
often tired. She didn’t have a job or money, or
any desire to cook, clean or even be independent. Desolation
brought us together and kept us that way, a union built
on loneliness. I would have thought two lonely people
together would be less lonely, but the math didn’t
work that way. Iknew that she’d previously gone
by the names Lizzie, Snow, and Jocasta, after the mother
of Oedipus. (If I needed help deciding not have kids with
her, that would have clinched it.) I made it a point never
to ask or research her real name. I did that once to Rachel,
with unfortunate results. As it turns out, people take
it personally when you investigate them.
What
I’d learned about Rachel, years back, was
that she’d had trouble with the law in Houston,
that she’d killed a guy in selfdefense, that she
hadn’t been arrested for it. I learned also that
her Social Security number had a New York State prefix,
though she always said she was from Chicago. We never
discussed the discrepancy.
Jessica
took the drawing. “The cosmic egg rose from the
ashes of Eve. It drifted into the stratosphere and when
it was ready, hatched the first lesbian.”
“Something
you wanna tell me?” The phone rang. “It’s
beautiful, thank you.” She reached her arms around
my neck and liplocked me, an intimacy we hadn’t
shared in a while. I thought for sure she’d smell
Vita on me, but she didn’t. The machine picked up, “Please leave a message. . . .” and
beeped.
“Captain
Action, it’s Jake. Pick up.”
I
pulled gently from Jessica and reached for the phone.
“Yeah.”
“Got
a hot tip. You’re in line for lieutenant.”
I
asked, “Didn’t you get a hot tip before?”
It was Jake who’d told me I was in line for promotion.
A dedicated desk jockey, Jake had hid out in the squad
room for years until the brass discovered his talent for
computer and telephone research and moved him into administration
where he belonged.
“Girl,
eighteen, rents an apartment over a house. Landlord comes
home, smells something’s up, goes in. She’s
in the tub, drowned.”
“Accident?
Drugs?” Jessica was kissing my neck.
“That’s
what the patrols thought. Empty pill bottles. They called
Marks, and he wrote it off without coming to the scene.
He didn’t want to leave the banquet, and he didn’t
want his boys leaving either. But the patrol at the scene
found semen on her bedspread. He called us, and I’m
calling you.”
Jessica
was working on my fl y. She’d decided that I was
better than independence and that she had to do something
once in a while to keep me from tossing her. But her timing
was off. I took her hand.
“Why?”
I said to the phone. “I’m not Homicide.”
They’d transferred me to Family Violence a couple
of years earlier, which made as much sense as anything.
“I’ll
clear it. Ace this and you’ll show up Marks for
his fuckup. Put you in line for a promotion you richly
deserve.”
“Jake
. . . why are you doing this?”
“You
saw those promotions go to those dumb rednecks.”
“And
Torbett,” I said.
“And
Torbett. God knows what they want from him. The Family’s
got most of that locked up.”
I’d
practically never heard the Family mentioned by name before,
and I worried that someone might be listening in to Jake’s
phone.
“So?”
I asked.
He
said, “They have the Family. You have me.”
It was nearly 2:00 A.M., and the shift had changed by
the time I stepped into the formaldehyde chill of the
morgue, still in my banquet suit, fluorescents shining
down on a room of gurneys and file drawers. Three new
guests, one named Faith.
The
graveyard-shift attendant pulled the sheet away. Faith
Copeland, eighteen, white, female. They’d found
her in the tub. Thin body, but a face bloated with water,
giving her the round look of a girl with baby fat. She
read younger than eighteen. Pale blond hair combed back.
I ordered the body sent to the medical examiner and drove
to Faith’s home.
Drowning
is a bad way to go. You struggle to hold your breath,
and when the need for oxygen gets desperate enough, you
suck in desperately and your lungs fill with water. Homicidal
drownings are rare: People will struggle to stay alive.
Except in the presence of drugs.
A
patrol named Scotto waited for me in the back alley behind
Avenue B, at the wooden steps leading up to the apartment.
He looked tired.
“I
tried to punch out at one,” he said. “They
told me to come back here and wait for you.” He
led me upstairs and into the apartment, a humble one-room
operation with a bathroom. “No prints anywhere,
even hers. They wiped every smooth surface, which knocks
out the possibility of suicide.” I nodded. “Sorry.”
“Go
ahead,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Department
of Public Safety didn’t find anything on the rug
but gravel, and she could have tracked that up herself.
The landlord came home a little after nine, parked in
the garage, saw the ceiling wasdripping. Knock, no answer,
goes in, she’s dead in the tub, water splashed around
the bathroom. He calls, we show up around ninethirty.”
The bathroom had an old-fashioned tub against the wall.
The killer would have been standing right in front of
it, or kneeling, if he held her under. Scotto showed me
the empty Valium bottles, one dated last week. Another
from another doctor. “Before we checked for prints,
we figured she OD’d and slipped into the water.
But . . .”
“Yeah?”
“If
she’d meant to kill herself, wouldn’t she
have been wearing something? People don’t like to
get found naked. And if it was an accident, why was there
water all over? I called Homicide about this, and I got
transferred to Marks—”
“And
he didn’t want to leave the banquet, so he said
it was an OD.”
Scotto
nodded. “And then I saw the bedspread.”
A
male visitor, Scotto said, had left a sample in the middle
of the bed. We guessed Faith was on the bed at the time.
DPS had taken the bedspread with them.
I
scoped the room. No pocket calendar or personal phone
book, but the killer could have lifted those. Small refrigerator,
yogurt, granola, vegetables. Vegetarianism as an excuse
for anorexia. Crystals and trinkets read hippie chick,
close to the earth. Rolling closet. Inside: Office dress,
cocktail dress, evening gown. Like a set of costumes.
Drawers: makeup, lots of it. Pimple creams. Moisturizers.
Like any other young woman, only more so.
“I
feel bad,” Scotto said as I yanked open the warped
wooden drawers of her dresser, one by one.
“Why?”
Socks, stockings, panties.
“I
was a fan,” he said.
“Of
what?” That’s when I saw her photos.
As
it turned out, American popular culture went on long after
I stopped paying attention to it. Faith Copeland was once
the star of her own TV show, which ran briefl y in the
1987–88 season. Her star rose and fell in the span
of twenty-two episodes. A series of black-and-white glossy
eight-by-ten shots showed her face go from cute (age eight)
to less cute (eleven) to desperate. At eighteen she was
an old kid, way over the hill by Hollywood standards,
living in a Hyde Park garret and forgetting to lock the
door.
I
found a fat wallet, stuffed with cash-machine receipts,
pawn tickets, phone numbers and a credit-card bill. A
business card from a cabdriver. One phone number read
“Mom,” with no area code. I figured local.
I called information and got the address, then told Scotto
to request Faith’s phone records. His jaw dropped.
“Tomorrow,”
I said. “Go home.”
I
drove west on Forty-fifth Street, past the state school
and the national guard, to the area where the river curved
north and wound around to Tanglewood Trail where Faith’s
mother lived, wondering if I should give this poor woman
one last decent night’s sleep rather than waking
her to tell her that her daughter was dead, the tragedy
of what happens to your children when they’re out
of your care, when I pulled in front of the house and
saw the living room light on. I stood at the front window.
A flag waved on the TV screen, and Mrs. Lucille Copeland
lay sprawled on the sofa, a tumbler clutched in her hand.
She wore a fl oral kimono. Peroxide-yellow hair burst
from her head in curls. She was something once. I rang
the bell twice before she got up, staggered to the door
and opened it.
“Yes,”
she said, eyes half shut, absently puffing her curls out
with her splayed fingers.
“Mrs.
Copeland. I’m Dan Reles.”
“Yes?”
“This
is about your daughter, Faith.”
“Oh,”
she said. Then she smiled bright. “Are you an agent?”
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