Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

“Pretty much all we did. I shoulda thrown her out twenty different times, but she was my sister and no matter what she did, I couldn’t turn my back on her. ”

“Must have been hard on Charlotte.”

Bethany nodded and took a drag on her cigarette. “Hard on all of us.”

Whatever grief Bethany felt was too tied up in anger and resignation to find its way to the surface, but Alex could see hints of it in her unsteady hands and glistening eyes.

“How did Joanie end up on the street?”

“You want the whole father-raped-her-strung-out-junkie sob story or you want me to just cut to the chase and tell you that selling her pussy and trading blow jobs for crystal was the only thing she was ever halfway good at?”

“I get the picture. Did she ever try rehab?”

Bethany laughed. “Shit! Whenever it was too cold to be outside and she was too mad at me to come home.”

“How’d she pay for that?”

“Medicaid, except for when she did a stint at Fresh Start, that fancy place up north of the airport.”

Alex was familiar with it. Fresh Start was the closest thing to the Betty Ford Clinic in the Kansas City area, drawing an affluent clientele from around the region. Medicaid patients didn’t fit their preferred patient profile.

“How’d she pay for a place like that?”

Bethany took another drag on her cigarette, lifting her chin and blowing out the smoke. “I wouldn’t know.”

Alex didn’t believe her, not the way Bethany looked away and her voice took on a phony nonchalance. Rather than press the point, Alex filed it under leads to follow up on, knowing she could subpoena Fresh Start for the information.”

“When was the last time you talked to her before she died?”

“The day she was killed. She called me all excited that she had some big date that night.”

“Did she say with who?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. I figured it was more of her bullshit.”

“If she did have a date with someone special and she wanted to get all dressed up, would she come here to shower and change?”

“I don’t know where else she’d go.”

“Did the detective tell you that Joanie wasn’t wearing anything when her body was found?” Bethany nodded. “Do you have any idea what she might have worn if she was going out for a special evening?”

“Only thing she had was a satiny black dress she said always showed off her tits and ass real nice.”

“Do you know if that’s what she was wearing that night?”

“Must have been because when I came home from the morgue, I gathered all her things and took them to Goodwill and I didn’t see that dress.”

Rossi’s investigative report didn’t mention finding the dress or any other clothing belonging to Joanie.

“Did the detective ask you about what Joanie might have been wearing?”

“No. Only thing he asked me was if it was Joanie lying in the morgue. When I told him it was her, he said not to worry ’cause they got the guy that did it.”

Bethany took a final pull on her cigarette, the smoke curling around her until a wisp of air coming through the trees blew it away. She turned in her chair, facing Alex, her brow furrowed.

“You think maybe she really did have a date that night and was wearing that dress when she was killed?”

“Maybe.”

“That fella they arrested, what’d he do with the dress?”

“I don’t think he did anything with it. He was living in a tent down in Liberty Park. That’s where they had sex, but he says he didn’t rape her. She told him that she had to go home to get cleaned up for some big date. That was the last time he saw her.”

Bethany gave her a long look. “So you really think he’s not the one who killed her?”

“I haven’t seen all the evidence the police have against him, but at least that part of his story matches up to what Joanie told you.”

Bethany dropped the cigarette on the ground and clasped her hands in her lap.

“Joanie always did look good in that dress.”

She lowered her chin, quiet at first. Her chest began to swell, her shoulders heaving. She snaked her arms around her middle, trying to hold back her grief, then giving in and sobbing.

“I shoulda been there. I shoulda been there.”

Alex put her hand on Bethany’s shoulder. “Been where?”

Bethany lifted her head, tears streaming down her face. “In the garage the first time our daddy raped her. On the street the first time she traded her pussy for dope. I shoulda been there, but I wasn’t. She was my baby sister and I shoulda been there. I shoulda saved her.”

She began to cough, a convulsive smoker’s hacking that forced her to stop crying. When the cough subsided, she stood, red-eyed and out of breath, ashamed that she’d broken down in front of Alex. She lit another cigarette, putting her armor back on.

“You can go. We’re done here.”

“Almost. Who stays with Charlotte when you’re at work?”

Bethany folded her arms against her breasts. “That child is ten years old. She don’t need nobody to stay with her.”

“Of course not.”

Alex walked away, stopping and turning around when she reached the end of the concrete slab. Bethany was standing at the trailer door, one foot on the step, watching her.

“You’ve got five thousand dollars sitting on your kitchen counter. That would buy a lot of therapy for Charlotte.”

Bethany glared at her, drawing deeply on her cigarette and exhaling the smoke through her nose.

“You come snooping around here again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Is that money yours or Joanie’s?”

Bethany flicked the butt on the ground and opened the door to the trailer.

“Doesn’t matter anymore, now, does it?”

Pieces were lining up, even if they weren’t quite falling into place for Alex as she drove away. Joanie Sutherland had a benefactor concerned enough about her to pay for a rehab stint at an exclusive treatment center. She was excited enough about meeting someone special the night she was killed to put on her one good dress. And Bethany had five thousand dollars in crisp hundreds sitting on her kitchen counter. Chances were those dots connected in a straight line to Joanie’s killer.

Her benefactor may have started out smitten, pretending he was Richard Gere in Pretty Woman or, if he was old and proper enough, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady . Joanie latched onto him, street-smart enough to know a good thing when she saw one, leveraging sex for rehab, then tacking on a premium to keep their relationship a secret, adding blackmail to prostitution. Her benefactor ran a cost-benefit analysis and decided he could no longer afford her. End of a sad but familiar story. The good news was that, if Alex was right, Jared Bell was innocent.

Had Rossi not made up his mind that Jared was the killer, he might have actually done an investigation that would have painted the same picture. But he didn’t, which brought Alex back to the night in Judge West’s barn when he told her that Jared was her new client. She suspected then that the judge was fronting for someone who wanted this case closed in a hurry, and now she wondered whether Rossi’s decision not to look past Jared for a suspect was part of that effort. She couldn’t picture Rossi conniving with the judge, but a year ago she would have said the same thing about herself.

Proving all of that wouldn’t be easy. Judge West wasn’t going to find religion and confess his sins, and he wasn’t going to give up whomever he was protecting. The same was true for Rossi if his hands were dirty. Bethany knew more than she was willing to say, maybe even knowing who killed her sister. But five thousand dollars was a lot of money, and if there was more where that came from, it might be enough to soothe her grief and guilt over her sister’s death.