Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

“Your gut-that’s what we need. In the room with me, making eye contact with her. The commissioner says he’ll talk to you further about this, if it will make a difference.”

Willoughby walked to the window. It was overcast and cool, even by March’s temperamental standards. Still, he could play golf if he wanted to. Golf, the game one never perfects, the game that reminds you every time how human you are, how flawed. He had always said he would never play, never be drawn into the country-club life that was practically his birthright, but in the empty days of retirement he had fallen into it, and now he was stuck. He’d been forty-five when he retired. Who retires at forty-five?

A failure.

He hadn’t meant to be a career police. The plan, long ago, had been to go into police work for a mere five years or so, then switch to the state’s attorney’s office, run for attorney general as the candidate who knew the law at every level, maybe even take a run at governor one day. As a young man, fresh out of UVA law school, he had plotted his future with that kind of confidence-five-year plans, ten-year plans, twenty-year plans. Then he became a murder police at age thirty and decided to stay a little longer, maybe work a famous case or two to boost his profile. Within that first year, he caught the Bethany case. He stayed another five years, then another ten.

It wasn’t only because of the Bethany case, not exactly. But justice seemed less and less important to him. The courtroom wasn’t a place for answers. It was the world of epilogues, a stage setting where the players assembled the exact same facts, fitting them together-how had this young woman put it? Yes, like Legos. Here’s my version, here’s his version. Which appeals to you the most ? Legos. There were an infinite number of ways to put them together. He thought of the downtown library at Christmastime, where the windows were filled with magnificent Lego constructions made by local architectural firms. He thought about how carelessly he had assumed he would walk his own children, then grandchildren, past those windows. But his wife couldn’t have children, as it turned out. “You can adopt,” Dave had told him, and Willoughby had said unthinkingly, “But you never know what you’re going to get.”

Dave, to his credit, had said only, “No one ever does, Chet.” The debt to Dave weighed on him still, and it was not paid, it would never be paid. His one effort to repay it had resulted in this debacle-Miriam on a plane, the detectives assuming that science was on their side, that when all else failed they would get a subpoena and prove she was a liar, via her blood or her teeth-or her mother’s DNA. Yes, it would be better for everyone if this woman’s story could be debunked before Miriam arrived tonight.

“I’ll accompany you,” he said at last. “I won’t go in, but I’ll watch and listen, and you can consult me as you need to. But I’ll need some lunch, and then you better get some caffeine into me. This is going to be a long afternoon, and I’m used to enjoying a nice postprandial nap.”

He knew he was giving her something to ridicule, with that postprandial bit. She would probably repeat that around the department later. “He couldn’t say ‘after lunch’ like a normal person-he had to say ‘postprandial.’” But that had always been part of his police persona. He had deliberately allowed other police to take the piss out of him every now and then, to give them reasons to mock his grandiosity, his manners.

Their hostility to him, their suspicion of his motives in being a police, had always puzzled him. The best detectives loved what they did and were proud of it. They, too, could make more money doing other things, but they had chosen police work. Chet was simply doing the same thing, and his love was purer still. Yet they never got that. In the end they just couldn’t trust the guy who didn’t need the paycheck. This red-cheeked girl was no different. Right now she required his help, or thought she did. But when it was all over, she’d mock him behind his back. So be it. He would do this for Dave-and Miriam.

He wondered how she had aged, how much gray was in her dark hair, if Mexico had weathered that lovely olive skin.

The blankness of her passport reminded Miriam how immobile she had been for the last sixteen years, barely moving out of San Miguel, much less traveling beyond Mexico ’s borders. She hadn’t, in fact, flown since long before 9/11, but she wasn’t sure she would have noted the changes if she had not been primed to look for them. Customs in Dallas-Fort Worth had probably never been a particularly pleasant experience in the most hopeful of times. She wasn’t surprised at how rudely she was treated, or how they peered at her, then the photo on the passport, which was due to expire in a year. She had become a U.S. citizen in 1963 because it simplified everything. Contrary to what people thought, citizenship wasn’t conferred automatically upon marriage. If it hadn’t been for the girls, she might never have changed her citizenship. Even in 1963 she had a sense that she wasn’t meant to be an “American,” as residents of the United States so blithely called themselves, as if no other country in the hemisphere existed. But she took on that identity for her family’s sake.

“What’s the nature of your visit in the United States?” the immigration agent asked in a rapid monotone. She was black, forty-something, and so bored by her job that it seemed an enormous effort for her to rest her considerable bulk on the high, padded stool afforded her in the little booth.

“Uh…” It was only a split second of hesitation, but it seemed to be the excitement the immigration official had been longing for, the off-kilter answer that her ears were trained to pick up. Suddenly the woman’s spine was straight, her eyes sharp.

“What’s the nature of your visit?” she repeated, her voice now inflected. Vi-sit .

“Why, I-” Miriam remembered just in time that she was not required to tell the story of her life, standing here in immigration. She did not have to tell this woman that her children had been missing and presumed murdered for thirty years, much less that now, against all hope, one of them might be alive. She did not have to tell her about the affair with Baumgarten, the divorce, the move to Texas, the move to Mexico, Dave’s death. She did not have to explain why she became a U.S. citizen, or why she had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, or even why she had chosen to settle in San Miguel de Allende. Her life belonged to her still, at least for now. That could change, in the next twenty-four hours, and she could become public property once again.

All she had to say was, “Personal. A family matter. A relative was in a car accident.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “That’s awful.”

“It’s not serious,” Miriam assured her, gathering her bags and moving on to the domestic terminal, where she had a numbing four hours to kill before the flight to Baltimore.

“IT’S NOT SERIOUS,” the sergeant had told her the evening before, when she had recovered from the shock. Like someone thrown into deep, cold water, Miriam had been disoriented and stunned, her instincts overwhelmed. It had taken several moments for her to center herself, to do the natural thing and head for the surface, to break through to the place where she could breathe again. “The car accident, I mean,” the man clarified. “Obviously, the claims she’s making are very serious.”

“I’ll have to fly all day, but I could be back there by tomorrow night if I leave first thing,” she said. She was weeping, but it was the kind of crying that didn’t impede her voice, her thoughts. Her mind was flipping through her contacts in San Miguel, people who could and would do her favors. There was one particularly good hotel where the management was used to catering to rich types, with their sudden whims. They could probably book her ticket. Money was no object.