Laura Lippman - Life Sentences

The clerk loaded her box back into the shopping cart. Beltway Fine Wines had a distinctive smell that Teena could never quite pin down, a combination of wood, damp cardboard, and something spicy. She wondered if the various spirits under its roof slipped into the air. She always felt a little… altered when she was here, but then, she came here after work, when she was in the middle of the transition from work Teena to home Teena. No one called her Teenie anymore, but she still couldn’t carry her full name, Sistina.

‘Someone called you, looking for me?’

‘She was shut down by the public information officer in Baltimore City, I think, so she dug around, found some of your old compadres, those of us who jumped ship back in the early nineties. I guess she assumed we were disgruntled types, more likely to break rank. She was half-right.’

Lenhardt had left when a new chief tried to force a rotation system on the homicide squad. Teena might have joined the exodus, but she had her accident a few months later.

‘She?’

‘Some writer. Kinda famous, I think—I remember my wife reading one of her books for book club. She’s working on a new book.’ He swiped his credit card, took his bagged purchases from the clerk. Teena realized she was blocking other shoppers trying to make their way to the exit. She began rolling slowly forward, but Lenhardt caught up easily and fell into step beside her.

‘Why does she want to talk to me?’

He gave her a look. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’

‘No.’

‘That’s what I thought. I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t have anything to tell, but if I had—I wouldn’t have, Teena. You know that.’

‘But—why? Why now?’

‘She just realized she knows—what was her name, the one who never talked?’

‘Calliope Jenkins.’ She felt like a child risking the candy man. Say the name three times and she’ll appear. Not that Teena was scared of Callie Jenkins. Not exactly.

‘Right. They went to school together.’

‘And that’s a book?’ Her voice screeched a little on the last word, but the whoosh of the automatic doors provided cover. They were outside now, and the wind was cutting, carrying little pinpricks of rain that stabbed exposed skin. She had forgotten to put her gloves on and her hands ached. The medical experts hired by the other side during the arbitration said Teena’s Raynaud’s was coincidental, that she couldn’t prove it was a direct result of the accident. Small-framed women were prone to it, they said. Still, Teena never minded the cold before the accident.

‘Her name is Cassandra Fallows,’ Lenhardt said. ‘This writer, I mean.’ He had followed her to her car and she had a pang of embarrassment at its plainness. An out-and-out hooptie would have been less humiliating than this green, well-kept Mazda, which seemed to announce to the world how small and dull her life was. ‘On caller ID, she comes up as a New York area code. Begins with a nine at any rate. In case she does find you. Although I admit I tried, out of curiosity, and your number is unlisted, although your address comes up readily enough through the Motor Vehicle Administration. Not that she can get that without driving down to headquarters in Glen Burnie. Still, you know, if she’s even a half-assed researcher, she’ll be able to find your address. Unless—you own or rent?’

‘Own.’

He grimaced. ‘Well, that’s good—I mean, rent is just throwing money away—but that makes it easier to find a person. Sorry, now I sound like your father. I am a father now. A boy and a girl, Jason and Jessica.’

‘Congratulations.’ She meant it. Being a father, a parent, seemed miraculous to her. Anything normal did. But her mind wasn’t really on Lenhardt’s kids. A writer, doing a book. Every couple of years or so, back when the case was fresher, she would get a letter from a reporter, usually someone new at the Beacon-Light , an eager kid who had just stumbled over the story. She should have expected this, with the New Orleans case kicking up Calliope’s name, however briefly. She herself had started when she heard the news. But it had been so long since anyone had spoken of Callie to her. That was another reason not to attend cop parties. No back-in-the-day, no war stories.

‘Bye, Lenhardt. It was nice seeing you.’

‘Maybe our paths will cross again,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. Especially if you shop here regularly .

She drove home and, as it often happened, was shocked to find herself there fifteen minutes later, panicky to realize that she had driven so mindlessly. She had always been prone to zone out that way. It was part of the reason she almost never drank outside the house—at her size and weight, a generous glass of wine could edge her over the legal limit. Oh, it couldn’t make her drunk—based on her consumption of box wine, it took quite a lot to make her drunk—but who would believe that, should Teena Murphy be pulled over in her fancy clothes and plain car? They would expect her to be drunk. It would explain how she survived being her.

Pulling into her parking pad, she heard something—a branch cracking perhaps—and almost jumped out of her skin. The sound was the only memory she had, and she wasn’t even sure if that was true or something her brain had manufactured after the fact. But any kind of snapping, cracking noise threw her into a panic. She couldn’t be sure, but she believed that she hadn’t screamed until she heard the sound, all those breaking, snapping bones, like twigs under a giant’s foot. In her ears, it sounded like scoffing laughter, someone taunting her. Not that Calliope Jenkins had even smiled, much less laughed, in all the time she had tried to talk to her over the years. Still, Teena always believed she was laughing on the inside, delighted by her ability to play them all.

The accident happened a couple of months after they announced Callie Jenkins’s release. Now that was sheer coincidence. Teena had gone to pick up a woman, the mother of a kid who had just been charged in a homicide, and the woman freaked out. Teena had always prided herself on not making the mistake of going for her gun too early, something women police were faulted for. Small as she was, she could and would take a beat-down. But she was tired that morning— not drunk—and she had gone for her gun, and the woman had knocked it out of her hand, sent it skittering under the car. Teena had been groping, grasping for it when the car started to roll backward.

She let herself into the small, neat rowhouse she had purchased with her settlement from the car manufacturer, the deep pocket that had finally swallowed responsibility for her accident. Oh, they didn’t admit the parking brake was faulty, and they had done enough research, her FOP lawyer said, to know they could pretty much destroy her credibility in court. They just decided it was cheaper to settle and what was nothing to a big car company was more than enough to buy this house, in cash, on Chumleigh Road. Chumley! Now she remembered. She had watched that cartoon. She just forgot. She forgot a lot. She was forty-six years old and she could barely believe that she was once a little girl who had watched cartoons, who had decided she wanted to apply to the police academy because of Angie Dickinson in Police Woman .

‘She’s part of the gimp lineup, you know,’ her father would say, referring to the other popular television shows of the day. ‘There’s a guy in a wheelchair, a blind guy, and a fat guy. She’s a woman, and that’s handicap enough.’ He wasn’t being mean, and he certainly didn’t know he was being prophetic, that his daughter would one day join the gimp lineup twice over. Her father simply never understood why a pretty girl—and, although he never said it, a straight girl—would choose a career in the Baltimore City police department. Teena didn’t dare to say it out loud, but she believed she could be the first female chief in the department’s history, the first woman in the nation to lead a big-city police department. In the seventies, it wasn’t weird to believe that kind of shit. Strange, now that there really were women heading departments—in Des Moines; in Jackson, Mississippi—it seemed less probable to her. When she had joined homicide in 1986, she was the third female detective. Now, twenty-two years later, there were…two female detectives.