Dark Places (20 page)

The figure was all shadow: I could make out a halo of ruined hair, the jutting edges of short shorts, an oversized purse, and thick,
muscular legs. She came out of the dark to reveal a tanned face with eyes that were set slightly close together. Cute but canine. Lyle nudged me, gave me a searching look to see if I recognized her. I didn’t but I gave a quick wave just in case and she stopped jerkily. I asked if she was Krissi Cates.

“I am,” she said, her vulpine face surprisingly eager, helpful, like she thought something good might be about to happen. It was a strange expression to see, considering the direction she’d come from.

“I was hoping to talk to you.”

“OK.” She shrugged. “About what?” She couldn’t figure me out: not a cop, not a social worker, not a stripper, not her kid’s teacher, assuming she had a kid. Lyle she only glanced at, since he was taking turns gaping at her or turning almost entirely away from us. “About working here? You a reporter?”

“Well, to be frank, it’s about Ben Day.”

“Oh. OK. We can go inside Mike’s, you can buy me a drink?”

“Are you married? Is your name still Cates?” Lyle blurted.

Krissi frowned at him, then looked at me for explanation. I widened my eyes, grimaced: the look women give each other when they’re embarrassed of the men they’re with. “I got married, once,” she said. “Last name’s Quanto now. Only because I been too lazy to change it back. You know what a pain in the ass that is?”

I smiled as if I did, and then suddenly I was following her across the parking lot, trying to keep out of the way of the giant leather purse that bounced against her hip, giving Lyle a look to pull it together. Just before we got to the door, she ducked against the side of the club, murmuring,
you mind?
and snuffed something from a packet of foil she pulled from her rear pocket. Then she turned her back entirely to me and made a gargling sound that must have hurt.

Krissi turned back, a broad smile on. “Whatever gets you through the night …” she sang, waggling the foil packet, but partway through the verse she seemed to forget the tune. She snuffed her nose, which was so compact it reminded me of an outie belly button, the kind pregnant women get. “Mike’s a Nazi about this stuff,” she said, and flung the door open.

I’d been to strip clubs before—back in the ’90s when it was considered brazen, back when women were dumb enough to think it was
sexy, standing around pretending to be hot for women because men thought it was hot if you were hot for women. I guess I hadn’t been to one this low-rent though. It was small and filmy, the walls and floors seemed to have an extra wax coating. A young girl was dancing gracelessly on a low stage. She marched in place, actually, her waist rolling over a thong two sizes too small, pasties waffling over nipples that pointed outward, walleyed. Every few beats she would turn her back to the men, then bend over and peer at them through her spread legs, her face going quickly red from the flood of blood to her head. In response, the men—there were only three of them, all in flannel, hunched over beers at separate tables—would grunt or nod. A massive bouncer studied himself in the wall mirror, bored. We sat down, three in a row at the bar, me in the middle. Lyle had his arms folded, his hands in his armpits, trying not to touch anything, trying to look like he was looking at the dancer without really looking at her. I turned away from the stage, wrinkled my nose.

“I know, right?” Krissi said. “Goddam armpit of a place. This is on you, right? Because I have no cash.” Before I even nodded she was ordering herself a vodka and cranberry, and I just asked for the same. Lyle got carded, and as he was showing the bartender his ID, he started doing some uncomfortable impersonation, his voice going even more ducklike, a weird smile pasted to his face. He made no eye contact, and gave no real signal that he was doing an impersonation. The bartender stared at him, and Lyle said,
The Graduate. You seen it?
And the guy just turned away.

So did I.

“So, what do you want to know?” Krissi smiled, leaned toward me. I debated whether to tell her who I was, but she seemed so disinterested I decided to save myself the trouble. Here was a woman who just wanted company. I kept glancing at her breasts, which were even bigger than mine, tightly packed and well trussed so they poked straight out. I pictured them under there, shiny and globular like cellophaned chicken.

“You like ’em?” Krissi chirped, giving them a bounce. “They’re semi-new. Well, I guess they’re almost a year now. I should have a birthday party for them. Not that they’ve helped me here. Fuckin’ Mike keeps screwing me on shifts. It’s OK though, I always wanted
bigger boobs. And now I have them. If I could only get rid of this, is what I need to get rid of.” She grabbed at a minimal fat roll, pretending it was much worse than it was. Just beneath it, the white glint of a caesarian scar snaked out.

“So, Ben Day,” she continued. “Red-headed bastard. He really fucked my life up.”

“So, you maintain you were molested by him?” Lyle said, leaning out from behind me like a squirrel.

I turned around to glare at him, but Krissi didn’t seem to care. She had the incuriosity of the drugged. She continued to speak only to me.

“Yeah. Yeah. It was all part of his satanic thing. I think he’d have sacrificed me, I think that was the plan. He’d have killed me if they hadn’t caught him for, you know, what he did to his family.”

People always wanted their piece of the murders. Just like everyone in Kinnakee knew someone who’d screwed my mom, everyone had suffered some close call with Ben. He’d threatened to kill them, he’d kicked their dog, he’d looked at them really scary-like one day. He’d bled when he heard a Christmas song. He’d shown them the mark of Satan, tucked behind one ear, and asked them to join his cult. Krissi had that eagerness, that intake of air before she started talking.

“So what happened exactly?” I asked.

“You want the PG or R version?” She ordered another round of vodka and cranberry and then called out for three Slippery Nipple shots. The bartender poured them, pre-made, from a plastic jug, raised an eyebrow at me, asked us if we wanted to start a tab.

“It’s fine, Kevin, my friend’s got it,” Krissi said, and then laughed. “What’s your name anyway?”

I avoided the question by asking the bartender how much I owed, paid it from a fan of twenties so Krissi knew I had more money. Takes a mooch to catch a mooch.

“You’ll love these, like drinking a cookie,” she said. “Cheers!” she raised the shot up with a screw-you gesture toward a dark window in the back of the club, where I guessed Mike was sitting. We drank, the shot sitting thick in my throat, Lyle making a
whoo!
noise like it had been whiskey.

After a few beats, Krissi readjusted a boob and then pulled in another big gulp of air. “So, yeah. I was eleven, Ben was fifteen. He started hanging around me after school, just always watching me. I mean, I got that a lot, I always got that. I was always a cute kid, I’m not bragging, I just was. And we had a lot of money. My dad—” here I caught a flicker of pain, a quick wrinkle of her lip that exposed a single tooth—“he was a self-made man. Got into the videotape industry right at the start, he was the biggest videotape wholesaler in the Midwest.”

“Like, movies?”

“No, like blank tapes, for people to record stuff on. Remember? Well, you probably were too young.”

I wasn’t.

“Anyway, so I was kind of an easy target maybe. Not like I was a latchkey kid or anything, but my mom didn’t keep the best eye out for me all the time, I guess.” This time a more obvious look of bitterness.

“Wait, why are you here again?” she asked.

“I’m researching the case.”

Her mouth drooped down at the corners. “Oh. For a second I thought my mom sent you. I know she knows I’m here.”

She clicked long, coral nails on the counter and I hid my left hand, with its stumped finger, under my shotglass. I knew I should care something about Krissi’s homelife but I didn’t. Well, I cared enough not to tell her that her mom was never going to check up on her.

One of the patrons at one of the plastic tables kept peeling off glances at us, looking over his shoulder with a drunk pissiness. I wanted to get out of there, leave Krissi and her issues behind.

“So,” Krissi began again. “Ben was really sneaky with me. He’d, like … you want some chips? The chips are really good here.”

The chips hung in cheap snack packs behind the bar.
The chips are really good here
. I had to like the woman for working me so hard. I nodded a yes and soon Krissi was tearing into a bag, the stench of sour-cream-and-onion making my mouth water in spite of its better judgment. Yellow flavoring stuck to Krissi’s bubblegum lipgloss.

“Anyway, so Ben earned my trust and then started molesting me.”

“How did he earn your trust?”

“You know, gum, candy, saying nice things to me.”

“And how did he molest you?”

“He’d take me into the closet where he kept his janitor stuff, he was a janitor at the school, I remember he always smelled horrible, like dirty bleach. He’d take me in there after school and make me perform oral sex on him and then he’d perform oral sex on me and he’d make me swear allegiance to Satan. I was so so scared. He’d tell me, you know, that he’d hurt my parents if I told.”

“How did he make you go into the closet?” Lyle asked. “If it was at school?”

Krissi turtled her neck at that, the same angry gesture I’ve always made when anyone questioned my testimony about Ben.

“Just, you know, threaten me. He had an altar in there, he’d pull it out, it was an upside-down cross. I think some dead animals too that he’d killed were in there. A sacrifice thing. That’s why I think he was working up to killing me. But he got his family instead. The whole family was into it, that’s what I heard. That the whole family was worshiping the Devil and stuff.” She licked chip shards off her thick plastic fingernails.

“I doubt that,” I muttered.

“Well, how do you know?” Krissi snapped. “I lived through this, OK?”

I kept waiting for her to figure out who I was, to let my face— not so different from Ben’s face—float into her memory, to notice the wide hairline of red roots springing from my head.

“So how many times did Ben molest you?”

“Countless. Countless.” She nodded somberly.

“How did your dad react when you told him what Ben had done to you?” Lyle asked.

“Oh my god he was so protective of me, he freaked, went totally ballistic. He drove around town that day, the day of the murders, looking for Ben. I always think if he’d only found Ben, he’d have killed him, and then Ben’s family would still be alive. Isn’t that sad?”

My gut clenched at that and then my anger flared back.

“Ben’s family—the horrible Devil worshipers?”

“Well, maybe I was exaggerating on that.” Krissi cocked her
head, the way grown-ups do when they’re trying to placate a child. “I’m sure they were nice Christian people. Just think, if my dad had found Ben though …”

Just think if your dad didn’t find Ben and instead found my family. Found a gun, found an axe, wiped us out. Almost wiped us out.

“Did your dad come back to your house that night?” Lyle asked. “Did you see him after midnight?”

Krissi lowered her chin again, raised her eyebrows at me, and I added a more reassuring, “I mean, how did you know he never made contact with any of the Days?”

“Because I’m serious, he would have done some serious damage. I was like, the apple of his eye. It killed him, what happened to me. Killed him.”

“He live around here?” Lyle was freaking her out, his intensity was laserlike.

“Uh, we’ve lost touch,” she said, already looking around the bar for the next score. “I think it was all too much for him.”

“Your family sued the school district, didn’t they?” Lyle said, leaning in, getting greedy. I moved my stool so I blocked him off a bit, hoping he’d get the idea.

“Hell yeah. They needed to be sued, letting someone like that work there, letting a little girl get molested right under their noses. I came from a really good family—”

Lyle cut her off. “Do you mind if I ask, with the settlement … how did you end up, uh, here?” The customer at the table was now turned around entirely in his chair, watching us, belligerent.

“My family had some business setbacks. The money’s been gone a long time. It’s not like it’s a bad thing, working here. People always think that. It’s not, it’s empowering, it’s fun, it makes people happy. How many people can say all that about their jobs? It’s not like I’m a whore.”

I frowned before I could help myself, looked in the direction of the truck park.

“That?” Krissi fake-whispered. “I was just getting a hold of a little something for tonight. I wasn’t … oh God. No. Some girls do, but I don’t. There’s some poor girl, sixteen years old, works it with her mom. I try to look out for her. Colleen. I keep thinking I should call
child services on her or something? Who do you even call for something like that?”

Krissi asked it with all the concern of finding a new gynecologist.

“Can we get your dad’s address?” Lyle asked.

Krissi stood up, about twenty minutes after I would have. “I told you, we’re not in touch,” she said.

Lyle started to say something when I turned to him, poked a finger toward his chest and mouthed, Shut up. He opened his mouth, shut it, looked at the girl onstage, who was now pantomiming fucking the floor, and walked out the door.

It was too late, though, Krissi was already saying she had to go meet someone. As I was settling up with the bartender she asked me if she could borrow twenty dollars.

“I’ll buy Colleen some dinner with it,” she lied. Then she quickly changed it to fifty. “I just haven’t cashed my work check yet. I will totally pay you back.” She made an elaborate play out of getting a sheet of paper and a pen for me, told me to write down my address and she’d totally totally mail me the money.

I mentally put the cash on Lyle’s tab, forked it over to Krissi, her counting it in front of me like I might shortchange her. She opened the big maw of her purse and a child’s sippy cup rolled out onto the floor.