Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

“Hey, you were supposed to-” The voice was angry, not loud, but sharp enough to be heard above the music, so those standing nearby turned and looked. The man dropped her arm quickly, mumbled, “Never mind,” and disappeared back into the throngs of shoppers. Heather watched him go. She was glad she wasn’t the girl that he was looking for. That girl was definitely in trouble.

“Easter Parade” gave way to “Superstar,” a Carpenters song, not the one about Jesus. Just last week Sunny had given Heather all her Carpenters albums, proclaiming them lame. Music was the one area where Sunny’s taste might be worth imitating, and if she thought the Carpenters lame, then Heather wasn’t sure she wanted any part of them either. Five dollars -that was enough to buy an album and still have some left over. Maybe she would go down to Harmony Hut after all, buy something by…Jethro Tull. He seemed pretty cool. And if Sunny happened to be at the record store, too-well, it was a free country.

“The thing is,” Infante said to Lenhardt, “she doesn’t look like a Penelope.”

The sergeant bit. “What does a Penelope look like?”

“I dunno. Blond hair. Pink helmet.”

“ What ?” Drawing it out to two syllables.

“That old cartoon? The one where there was a car race every Saturday and they sucked you into believing that the outcome was somehow unknown? Anyway, Penelope Pit Stop was the name of the pretty one. They hardly ever let her win.”

“It’s Greek, though, right? I mean, not to take anything away from Hanna-Barbera, but I think there’s some famous story about Penelope, something to do with knitting and a dog.”

“What, like Betsy fuckin’ Ross?”

“Slightly before that. Like a few thousand years, asshole.”

Just twenty-four hours ago, when Infante was on the shit list, this conversation would have been completely different-same words, perhaps, but a much less friendly tone. Yesterday Lenhardt would have been up for the same bullshit conversation, but the insults, the digs at Infante’s intelligence, would have been serious, barbed rebukes. Today, however, Infante was a good boy. Two hours of overtime last night, at his desk bright and early, despite having stopped at the impound lot on his way in, and now at his computer, where he had pulled up Penelope Jackson’s North Carolina driver’s-license info and quickly arranged to get a copy of her photo faxed by the state police there.

Lenhardt squinted at the likeness, fuzzy from being enlarged on a photocopier. “So is it her?”

“It could be. Theoretically. The age, thirty-eight, isn’t that far off the mark, although our girl’s claiming older, which you don’t get much. Hair and eye color are consistent. Hair’s long in the photograph, cropped short in real life. The one in the hospital is definitely thinner than this.”

“Women cut their hair all the time,” Lenhardt said, his voice a little wistful, as if this fact made him sad. “And some even manage to drop a few pounds around the time they turn forty, or so I’m told.” Mrs. Lenhardt was a knockout, but a bit on the plump side.

“Still, I don’t think it’s the same face. This one here’s got a look to it. Kind of surly and cunning. The Jane Doe at St. Agnes, she’s softer. I mean, I don’t doubt she’s lying to me-”

“Of course.” Lying was assumed in their line of work.

“But I’m not sure what she’s lying about , or to what purpose. If she isn’t Heather Bethany-if she’s Penelope Jackson or someone else still-then how does she know to bring up this thirty-year-old case when she’s arrested? And how does she have the good fortune to fit the description, more or less?”

Infante pulled up another file on the computer, this one from a national database on missing children. He hadn’t known how to do this, but a quick call to his old partner, Nancy Porter, had pointed the way. Here were the two girls, Heather and Sunny, as they had been at eleven and fourteen, their last school pictures. Below the actual photos were an artist’s interpretations of how those girls might look today.

“She look like that?” Lenhardt asked, tapping the photo of Heather with his index finger-and leaving a little smear on Infante’s screen, right in the middle of the girl’s nose.

“Kinda. Maybe. Yes and no.”

“You been to a reunion, college or high school?”

“Naw. That stuff doesn’t do anything for me. And it’s all the way back on Long Island, where I got no people now.”

“I went to my thirty-year high school reunion a few years back. People age all different ways. Some, yeah, they looked like themselves, just a little older. Some just go , male and female. Like, you know, they got tired of trying. There were cheerleaders who weighed three hundred pounds, former football stars who managed the trick of going bald and developing dandruff. I mean, they bear no resemblance to the people they used to be.”

“I bet you liked that-going into the reunion with a pretty wife fifteen years younger than you.”

Lenhardt raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, as if it had never occurred to him that his wife was hot, when Infante knew the guy lived for the covetous glances thrown his way.

“But there’s a third type, female division only,” he said. “New and improved, better than they ever were. Sometimes with plastic surgery, but not always. They work out. They dye their hair. They’ve totally reinvented themselves, and they know it. That’s why they show up, so you’ll know it, too. The only way you could tell their age at all was by looking at their elbows.”

“Who looks at a woman’s elbows, you sick fuck?”

“I’m just saying it’s the one place that a woman can’t hide her age. My wife told me. She lemons hers sometimes. Cuts a lemon in half, hollows it out, fills it with olive oil and kosher salt and sits at her vanity, arms up like a little bunny.” Lenhardt demonstrated the pose. “I tell you, Kevin, it’s like going to bed with a fucking tossed salad.”

Infante laughed. Yesterday he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting to himself how anxious it made him feel, being on the boss’s bad side. He had preferred to rage instead at the unfairness of it all. But today he was redeemed, a good detective with a damned interesting case, and he couldn’t deny the relief. If this woman was Heather Bethany, she was going to give them a sweet clearance. If she wasn’t-well, she almost certainly knew something about something.

“Here’s what struck me,” he said, flipping to the notes he had taken at the impound lot. “We have this car registered in North Carolina two years ago. Penelope Jackson is no longer at that address, and her landlord, when I tracked him down, said she wasn’t the kind of solid citizen who left a forwarding address. Said she followed whatever man she got her hooks into, picked up bartending and waitressing jobs. So she moved out almost ten months ago but didn’t update her registration or license.”

“Such wickedness ,” Lenhardt said with a whistle. “How long did you live in Maryland before you got around to registering your car?”

“You can’t believe how they screw out-of-state people on title transfers,” Infante said. “But then-you’re one of those Baltimorons who thinks you’ve seen the world because you moved twenty miles out of the city. Anyway, the car’s backseat is trashed-burger wrappers, some of ’em pretty fresh, cigarette butts, although the gal in the hospital isn’t a smoker. You’d smell it on her if she were, and she’d be jumpy from nicotine withdrawal. It’s a car that looks as if it’s traveled a ways. But no suitcase. A purse, but no wallet on her when she’s picked up and no cash. It’s just garbage and the registration. How do you travel more than three hundred, four hundred miles without a credit card or a wad of cash?”