“You of age, son?” Vickery asked.
“He’s eighteen,” Richard said.
“Well fine then, you two have a real nice day,” Vickery said, hissed a laugh in Richard’s direction, and muttered “already had a nice night,” under his breath.
“I’ll phone you later, Richard,” I said.
He raised a hand, flicked it at me as he turned back to the car.
John and I were mostly silent on the ride to his parents’, where he was going to try to sleep in the basement rec room for a bit. He hummed a snatch of some old ’50s bebop and tapped his fingernails on the door handle.
“How bad do you think that was?” he finally asked.
“For you, maybe not bad. Shows you’re a good American boy with healthy interest in women and casual sex.”
“That wasn’t casual. I don’t feel casual about that at all. Do you?”
“No. That was the wrong word. That was just the opposite,” I said. “But I’m more than a decade older than you, and I’m covering the crime that…it’s a conflict of interest. Better reporters have been fired for such a thing.” I was aware of the morning sunlight on my face, the wrinkles at the edges of my eyes, the age that hung on me. John’s face, despite a night of drinking and very little sleep, was like a petal.
“Last night. You saved me. That saved me. If you hadn’t stayed with me, I would have done something bad. I know it, Camille.”
“You made me feel very safe, too,” I said, and meant it, but the words came out in the disingenuous singsong of my mother.
I dropped John off a block from his parents’ house, his kiss landing on my jaw as I jerked away at the last second. No one can prove anything happened, I thought at that moment.
Drove back to Main Street, parked in front of the police station. One streetlight still glowed. 5:47 a.m. No receptionist on call yet in the lobby, so I rang the nightbell. The room deodorizer near my head hissed a lemon scent right on my shoulder. I hit the bell again, and Richard appeared behind the slit of glass in the heavy door leading to the offices. He stood staring at me a second, and I was waiting for him to turn his back to me again, almost willing him to, but then he opened the door and entered the lobby.
“Where do you want to begin, Camille?” He sat on one of the overstuffed chairs and put his head in his hands, his tie drooping between his legs.
“It wasn’t like it looked, Richard,” I said. “I know it sounds cliché but it’s true.” Deny deny deny.
“Camille, just forty-eight hours after you and I had sex, I find you in a motel room with the chief subject in my child-murder investigation. Even if it’s not what it looks like, it’s bad.”
“He did not do it, Richard. I absolutely know he didn’t do it.”
“Really? Is that what ya’ll discussed when he had his dick in you?”
Good, anger, I thought. This I can handle. Better than head-in-the-hands despair.
“Nothing like that happened, Richard. I found him at Heelah’s drunk, dead drunk, and I really thought he might harm himself. I took him to the motel because I wanted to stay with him and hear him out. I need him for my story. And you know what I learned? Your investigation has ruined this boy, Richard. And what’s worse, I don’t even think you really believe he did it.”
Only the last sentence was entirely true, and I didn’t realize it until the words came out of me. Richard was a smart guy, a great cop, extremely ambitious, on his first major case with an entire outraged community bellowing for an arrest, and he didn’t have a break yet. If he had more on John than a wish, he’d have arrested him days ago.
“Camille, despite what you think, you don’t know everything about this investigation.”
“Richard, believe me, I’ve never thought that I did. I’ve never felt anything but the most useless outsider. You’ve managed to fuck me and still remain airtight. No leaks with you.”
“Ah, so you’re still pissed about that? I thought you were a big girl.”
Silence. A hiss of lemon. I could vaguely hear the big silver watch on Richard’s wrist ticking.
“Let me show you what a good sport I can be,” I said. I was back on autopilot, just like the old days: desperate to submit to him, make him feel better, make him like me again. For a few minutes last night, I’d felt so comforted, and Richard’s appearing outside that motel door had smashed what was left of the lingering calm. I wanted it back.
I lowered myself to my knees, and began unzipping his pants. For a second he put his hand on the back of my head. Then instead he grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.
“Camille, Christ, what are you doing?” He realized how hard his grip was and loosened it, pulled me to my feet.
“I just want to make things okay with us.” I played with a button on his shirt and refused to meet his eyes.
“That won’t do it, Camille,” he said. He kissed me almost chastely on the lips. “You need to know that before we go any further. You just need to know that, period.”
Then he asked me to leave.
I chased sleep for a few darting hours in the back of my car. The equivalent of reading a sign between the cars of a passing train. Woke up sticky and peevish. Bought a toothbrush kit at the FaStop, along with the strongest-smelling lotion and hairspray I could find. I brushed my teeth in a gas-station sink, then rubbed the lotion into my armpits and between my legs, sprayed my hair stiff. The resulting smell was sweat and sex under a billowing cloud of strawberry and aloe.
I couldn’t face my mother at the house and crazily thought I’d do work instead. (As if I were still going to write that story. As if it weren’t all about to go to hell.) With Geri Shilt’s mention of Katie Lacey fresh in my mind, I decided to go back to her. She was a mother’s aide at the grade school, for both Natalie and Ann’s classes. My own mother had been a mother’s aide, a coveted, elite position in the school that only women who didn’t work could do: swoop into classrooms twice a week and help organize arts, crafts, music, and, for girls on Thursdays, sewing. At least in my day it’d been sewing. By now it was probably something more gender neutral and modern. Computer usage or beginners’ microwaving.
Katie, like my mother, lived at the top of a big hill. The house’s slender staircase cut into the grass and was bordered with sunflowers. A catalpa tree sat slim and elegant as a finger on the hilltop, the female match to the burly shade oak on its right. It was barely ten, but Katie, slim and brown, was already sunning herself on the widow’s walk, a box fan breezing her. Sun without the heat. Now if she could only figure out a tan without the cancer. Or at least the wrinkles. She saw me coming up the stairs, an irritating flicker against the deep green of her lawn, and shaded her eyes to make me out from forty feet above.
“Who is that?” she called out. Her hair, a natural wheaty blonde in high school, was now a brassy platinum that sprung out of a ponytail atop her head.
“Hi, Katie. It’s Camille.”
“Ca-meeel! Oh my God, I’m coming down.”
It was a more generous greeting than I’d expected from Katie, who I hadn’t heard from again after the night of Angie’s Pity Party. Her grudges always came and went like breezes.
She bounded to the door, those bright blue eyes glowing from her suntanned face. Her arms were brown and skinny as a child’s, reminding me of the French cigarillos Alan had taken to smoking one winter. My mother had blocked him off into the basement, grandly called it his smoking room. Alan soon dropped the cigarillos and took up port.
Over her bikini Katie had thrown a neon pink tank, the kind girls picked up in South Padre in the late ’80s, souvenirs from wet T-shirt contests over Spring Break. She wrapped her cocoa-buttered arms around me and led me inside. No A/C in this old house either, just like my momma’s, she explained. Although they did have one room unit in the master bedroom. The kids, I guessed, could sweat it out. Not that they weren’t catered to. The entire east wing seemed to be an indoor playground, complete with a yellow plastic house, a slide, a designer rocking
horse. None of it looked remotely played with. Big colored letters lined one wall: Mackenzie. Emma. Photos of smiling blonde girls, pug nosed and glassy eyed, pretty mouth breathers. Never a close-up of a face, but always framed in order to capture what they were wearing. Pink overalls with daisies, red dresses with polka-dot bloomers, Easter bonnets and Mary Janes. Cute kids, really cute clothes. I’d just created a tagline for Wind Gaps’ li’l shoppers.
Katie Lacey Brucker didn’t seem to care why I was in her home this Friday morning. There was talk of a celebrity tell-all she was reading, and whether childrens’ beauty pageants were forever stigmatized by JonBenet. Mackenzie is just dying to model. Well she’s as pretty as her mother, who can blame her? Why, Camille, that’s sweet of you to say—I never felt like you thought I was pretty. Oh of course, don’t be silly. Would you like a drink? Absolutely. We don’t keep liquor in the home. Of course, not what I meant at all. Sweet tea? Sweet tea is lovely, impossible to get in Chicago, you really miss the little regional goodies, you should see how they do their ham up there. So great to be home.