Erica Orloff - Trace Of Innocence

I eased my car into a space on the street.

“You want to crash here tonight?” Lewis asked, looking at me.

“As long as Ripper is in his tank, yeah.”

We climbed out of the car and went into Lewis’s house. I was tired, but I was still thinking about the whole crazy night. Lewis gave me a drunken hug, which for him also usually means planting a very loud kiss on my cheek—an exaggerated form of affection.

“There’s pork rinds and Slim Jims if you’re hungry, and your usual in the fridge.”

“I’ll pass on the snacks, but I think I’ll have a Dr. Brown’s.”

I had long ago developed an addiction for Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda—not always easy to find. The addiction was nurtured by my father, who used to take me and my brother to every diner between Rahway Correctional, where we visited my uncles, and home in Montclair, New Jersey, as well as every town we ever visited that had a diner, for that matter. Lewis always kept a supply of black cherry soda on hand, along with his sickening snack choices.

I heard Lewis climb up his stairs, and then I heard first one boot, then the other hit the floor as he pulled them off. I wandered into the kitchen and pulled a Dr. Brown’s out of the refrigerator. I walked back into the living room. A soft chenille blanket was draped over the back of the very comfortable leather couch. I settled a pillow on the arm of the couch and took the remote and clicked on to Comedy Central. Part of me wanted to laugh. I popped the top on my soda and started drinking. It hit the spot, but then, like the soda often did, it made me start thinking about my father, my brother, my mother and me. It was entwined with my memories of childhood. And then, inevitably, I thought of the night she disappeared.

The lights of a cop cruiser reflected through the window and onto the walls of my bedroom. Red pulsated and filled my room. I rubbed my eyes and sat up as a police officer entered my room, the beam from his flashlight hitting my face. The cop lowered the flashlight immediately.

“Hey, sweetie,” he soothed. “You okay?”

I nodded sleepily.

“Okay, then. You go back to sleep, honey.”

“Is Mommy okay?”

“Why?”

“I heard them arguing.”

“Who?”

I shrugged.

The cop came closer to me. “Think, honey. Can you remember what they said?”

I shook my head. “Where’s Mikey?”

“Your brother?”

I nodded.

“He’s downstairs with Officer Martin. You want to come down there?”

I nodded, and my teeth started chattering. Something was wrong, and I had no idea what. The cop came to my bed, and I saw the shadow of pity cross his face, a shadow I have learned to recognize many times since then. He scooped me into his arms and carried me down in my nightgown to the kitchen where my brother, Mikey, sat eating cookies with Officer Martin. They were dunking Keebler chocolate chip cookies into milk, and Mikey was talking a mile a minute.

I looked around the kitchen, teeth still chattering, and was handed a glass of Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda in a highball glass with ice cubes. The officers asked me questions that I no longer remember. All I do remember is the look on my father’s face when he got home that night.

She would never have left them alone, he screamed. He shouted what I already knew. In the instant I saw the red lights reflecting on my bedroom walls, in the moments of sipping Dr. Brown’s, the bubbles tingling my nose, I knew. Whereas Mikey always had about him the belief that the world was a safe place, I knew differently.

Like Ripper on the prowl, even as a little kid I knew that sometimes bad things escaped from their hiding places.

I spent that Monday at work testing a shipment of heroin to determine its purity level. Lewis called me into his office at around four.

“Here’s the file on the suicide king case. We’re supposed to look for something, anything, missed, in terms of DNA evidence.”

“You looked at the file?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“And there was a tiny bit of what could be sperm on the panties. Too small to have been tested that many years ago.”

“Anything else?”

“Well,” he drawled. “I’m no lawyer.”

I howled with laughter. Lewis’s IQ hovered near 170, which I only found out one night over many shots of tequila and a poker game with my father, brother, uncle and Lewis. As I recall, I lost a bundle—and Lewis lost more. When Lewis lost even his watch that night, he bemoaned a man of his IQ being at the mercy of Lady Luck—and the Quinns. And he accidentally cited his IQ score. Like most geniuses, he could be prickly. And like most geniuses, he knew better than anyone else. And that included attorneys.

“And?”

“And the man had completely incompetent counsel, Billie. Guess who his court-appointed lawyer was?”

“Don’t tell me….”

Lewis nodded. “Cop-a-plea.”

Lewis and I may have been scientists residing in a world of DNA. However, we got to know the different cops and attorneys and prosecutors on the basis of their reputations. Cop-a-plea Fred? He had the worst rep of all. He had a serious comb-over, wore sweat-stained polyester suits, and bottles rattled around inside his briefcase.

“If Cop-a-plea was his court-appointed attorney, he didn’t stand a chance in hell. Fred doesn’t care about guilt or innocence, just avoiding actually showing up for a trial.”

Lewis nodded. “This case is a textbook example of how to send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life.”

“So now what?”

“Now we test the tiniest of specks, evidence that was unable to be tested before. With the newer tests, I’m pretty sure if it’s not too degraded, we can get results. Most of this guy’s chances are pinned on that…we have to hope it’s not so degraded as to be useless.”

“Lewis?”

“Hmm?”

“You read the file, do you think he’s innocent? Or are you still just doing this because you have a crush on the ultimate unattainable woman?”

Lewis didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he swept a hand at his “wall art.” His office also had crime-scene pictures, as well as some scientific prints of cells and blood under microscopes. “You know, it would be real easy, as a man of science, to remain forever detached from what it is we’re actually doing. Over here—” his hand gestured to a crime scene with a body lying under a sheet “—we have the worst of what man can do. And over here—” he swept his hand to a cell photo that had been taken with an infrared camera “—we have cells, DNA and what they tell us. And never the twain shall meet. I mean, that’s how it can be. We just remain in this world—the lab. We can be lab rats. But sometimes, maybe, we have to emerge and go into the other world…. Yes, it’s very possible he’s innocent, Billie. And maybe it bothers me. And if I can do something about that, then I suppose I should.”

“Dear God, does this mean you’re getting a conscience?”

“Don’t let it get out.”

I knew, of course, that when the bayous of Louisiana released a floater who was once his childhood love he had had a determination to do right, using science. But I also knew he and I were both guilty of keeping our universe microscopic and not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe life was easier that way.

“Billie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think, if we do this, we’ll be doing God’s work?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t, but I thought…I don’t know. Do you think we’d be doing God’s work?”

“God and I are distant friends, Lewis. But yeah, maybe.” I took the case file and turned to leave his office, and over my shoulder, I said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”