J Bertrand - Back on Murder

“Someone Robb mentioned. Evey something, short for Evangeline, like in the poem.” She looks at me blankly, but I decide now’s not the time to astonish her with my knowledge of Longfellow. “We’ll need to follow that up.”

She hands me some printouts on the vandalism. Sure enough, the incident was reported. Fontaine’s father, a Hewlett-Packard employee, even retained a lawyer and managed to get a restraining order against Hannah Mayhew, preventing her from approaching either the family home or James personally.

“So not only have we failed to recover our victim,” Cavallo says, “or seize her kidnapper for that matter, but we’ve turned up a little dirt to tarnish her name.”

“You think this might be why Donna’s reluctant to go on television? The drug suspension, the restraining order, that’s a lot of dirty laundry to put out there.”

Wanda interrupts with a long sigh. “Mama’s tired, boys and girls. And if that kid walks out of here without giving us our missing girl, that means our only real lead isn’t a lead anymore. Then I’ll be real tired, and when I’m tired I get irritable.”

“Should we beat him with a hose until he talks?”

“Don’t put ideas in my head, March. Just go in there and ride him until he either coughs something up or has a nervous breakdown.”

“He’s just a kid,” I say.

“A kid who slings dope. I couldn’t care less about his feelings.”

“It’s not his feelings I’m worried about. It’s his rights.”

“Look, he’s not going to jail for dealing, so he’s in no position to complain. If he knew he was walking on that one, I’m sure he’d thank us. I just want to find this girl and get the chief off my back, okay?”

“Where is Hannah Mayhew?”

“You gonna keep asking, and I’m gonna keep telling you I don’t know where she is. How many times I gotta say it? I. Don’t. Know.”

“James,” Cavallo says. “Where is she?”

His eyes roll for the hundredth time. I feel like rolling mine, too.

“Did you kill her?”

“No.” All trace of shock or indignation long since gone.

“Did you have someone kill her?”

He smiles wearily. “One of my posse?” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “No.”

“Is she still alive, James?”

“How. Should. I. Know?”

The door opens and Wanda signals for us to come outside. As soon as it shuts, she starts shaking her head.

“What?” Cavallo asks.

“It’s on the news.”

“What is?”

“That we have him,” Wanda says. “They’re reporting right now that we have a juvenile suspect in custody.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“No,” she says. “I just got off the phone with Villanueva, who’s been trying to get them to stall the story. Too late. They’re talking about it right now on TruTV.”

I shake my head. “Beautiful. So we haven’t fixed our leak.”

“What’s the plan?” Cavallo asks.

“The plan?” Wanda presses her fingertips to her temples. “I’m gonna start by shooting myself, and if that doesn’t work, I’m gonna shoot myself again.”

The two women head down the hallway, conferring on strategy, leaving me to wander back into the monitoring room. On the screen, Fontaine wipes his palms on his jeans, then scrutinizes his fingers, peeling at some loose skin around the nails.

I need to talk to Carter Robb again so I can track down this girl Evey and see what she has to say. And it’s time to call Bridger, too. I’ve waited long enough for my dna results.

Fontaine looks up at the camera. He shakes his head, then rests it on the table again, settling in for another long wait.

As the elder sister, Charlotte grew up with competing and possibly counterbalancing senses of both entitlement and obligation, feeling she had a place in the world but also a set of duties, often unpleasant, to go along with it. Her younger sister, Ann, inherited a finely tuned sense of proportional justice, probably stemming from a childhood concern that everyone, herself in particular, receive a fair share. It’s probably too simplistic to trace their many differences in temperament and politics back to birth order, but I find myself doing it anyway.

Both sisters went into law, but Charlotte gravitated toward high-paying corporate work, scratching her civic itch with occasional involvement in the Harris County Republican Party. Ann, on the other hand, works mainly on death-row appeals, believing that while there might be guilty people behind bars, it’s a safe bet none of them received fair trials.

Even over dinner, the types persist. Charlotte, the gracious hostess, reigns over a plentiful table, while Ann subtly annoys her, double-checking that each of us gets the same amount of food and drink. Afterward, when Charlotte takes charge of clearing the dishes, Ann tries to press all of us into duty. Failing that, she insists on helping her sister in the kitchen, leaving Bridger with me.

“So I hear you got pulled into that task force,” he says. “How’s that going?”

“It would be better if you expedited those test results I’ve been waiting on.”

His eyebrows rise. “What results?”

“You said I’d need a sample to compare, so I found one – Hannah Mayhew’s mother. I think she’s the girl missing from the Morales scene. Now we’re waiting on you guys to say whether I’m right. Sheryl Green has the samples in her lab apparently.”

“Really,” he says. “That’s news to me.”

“If you could light a fire under her, I’d appreciate it.”

He gives a noncommittal nod. “I’ll look into it.”

I’d like to get more out of him, but Ann saunters into the dining room with coffee, followed by Charlotte, who looks lovely in a white linen blouse and mustard tan trousers, her lipstick freshly reapplied. I pause to admire her.

To say the years have been kind to my wife, at least physically, is an understatement. As time passes and her contemporaries either go to seed or under the knife, she only improves, still as thin and leggy as the day we married, the patina of fine lines on her face never detracting from its essentially placid symmetry. Looking at her now, the thought that my eyes could stray even for a moment seems ridiculous. A show of ingratitude toward God or the cosmos, whoever arranges such things.

In contrast, Ann sips her coffee with a harried, squinched look, like she’s worried or anticipating a blow. I wonder if this is general agitation, or the result of words that passed between the sisters while they were busy in the kitchen.

“So,” Ann says, adding more cream to her cup. “Alan says you’re assigned to the Hannah Mayhew task force. Is that right, Roland?”

I nod.

To my left, I see Charlotte tense up. Her unspoken rule about no work at the dinner table is being violated by a longtime offender.

“How are you dealing with it?” Ann asks.

“I’ve been trying to get a little help from the ME’s office.”

Alan smiles distantly. “I told you I’d check into it.”

“That’s not what I mean, though,” Ann says. “How are you dealing? I mean, a case like that, and you of all people…”

Charlotte’s spoon hits her saucer. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know -”

“No, I don’t know. Why should Roland have to deal with anything? He’s a professional, Ann. This is what he does. You don’t ask Alan how he deals with having to cut people up.”

“That’s not what I’m saying – ” Ann begins.

“It’s all right,” I say, holding up my hands. “I’m doing fine. I’d rather be back in Homicide, and if some tests come through, I should be back there soon. In the meantime, I’m just keeping my nose clean and trying to avoid the cameras.”