Dark Rooms (18 page)

I glance into the rearview mirror. I look more than upset. I look crazed—eyes bulging, mouth twitching, skin splotched with pink and red. Taking a second to smooth out my expression, breathe, I say in an even voice, “I just want to understand why you think what you think. You're telling me you're positive Nica wanted to be spied on by my mom, took some kind of sick pleasure in it or whatever—why? Because she looked out the window a couple times? That seems like pretty thin evidence to me.”

He sighs. “I have other reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the wildness that was nonstop, never-ending, twenty-four seven. It's like she was always trying to show off for somebody, some invisible person she was terrified of boring. Who if not your mom?”

“How do you know it wasn't you she was showing off for?”

He makes a dismissive snorting noise. “I just know, okay?”

His tone annoys me—so sure of itself. I make a dismissive snorting noise of my own. The look he gives me is a hot one. I give it right back.

And then, spreading his hands, the knuckles already swollen to the size of gumballs, he says, “I know because I didn't like all the wildness. I was always trying to get her to calm down, not act up. And, besides, I wasn't someone she cared about impressing. I don't think she even knew who I was. Not really. She just had some idea about me in her head.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your mom thought Jamie was perfect, the perfect guy, the perfect boyfriend. And then I come along, his exact opposite. If Jamie was everything your mom loved, then I must be everything your mom hated, so Nica made up her mind then and there that she was going to love me. I think that's why she started calling me Demon. You know about the nickname, right? It's not news to you?”

I nod without meeting his eye.

“You know how I got it?”

“For punching some guy's lights out during a baseball game, right?”

His mouth twitches in irritation. “There was a little more to it than that. I didn't punch him for fun. I punched him because he kept calling me wetback, the other guys on the team wetbacks. Finally I lost it. The dumb asshole didn't even know that a wetback's a Mexican.”

“I never heard that part of the story.”

“Yeah, well, Chandler wanted it hushed up. Thought it was embarrassing—racism in the supposedly ultraliberal Independent School Conference. That's why I only got suspended from the team for two weeks. My point is, Nica liked the nickname because she liked to think of me as violent and thuggish. It's how she saw me. Really”—his voice turning bitter—“it's the reason she was with me.”

I start to protest, and then I flash back to the Chandler tennis courts, Damon walking by, Nica giving him that assessing look, then pronouncing him
rough trade
. The words die in my throat.

Damon resumes after a pause, still bitter-sounding: “Sometimes I think she was just one of those spoiled little girls with a nice, safe life that she tangles up with craziness because she's bored. That would be fine except she tangles up your life, too, and you're fighting for safe and boring. Safe and boring sounds great to you. But she doesn't give a shit. Climb up the side of a water tower in the middle of the night? Sure. Why not? Jump on the tiger's back. Throw your body on the grenade. Anything for a kick, right? Well, I was the kick of the moment. But my moment was passing. I didn't want to go to the edge with her. Worse, I wanted to pull her back. So I was really no fun and—”

That teakettle wailing sound is back in my ears. The way he's talking about Nica—I can't listen to it. I won't listen to it. I fumble for the door handle, get out of the car, start walking.

A few seconds later, the passenger-side door opens, and Damon calls my name. But I keep going, my eyes on my feet moving along the cracked, uneven sidewalk. Soon I hear his step behind me, right on my heels. And then his breath is on my neck, and one of his hands is closing roughly around my wrist. He jerks me back.

Eyes dark, blazing queerly, he says, “You're the one who wanted to talk about this. Not me.
You
.”

I wrench free of his grasp, tears burning my eyes. The house we're standing in front of has one of those inflatable kids' swimming pools on its patchy front lawn, the inevitable Our Lady statue. I can see a television light glowing bluely in a downstairs window.

When Damon speaks again, his tone is softer, gentler. “Grace, it's not like I thought the wildness was all there was to your sister. I knew it was just what she was choosing to show me. And, you have to remember, I was in love, so not exactly levelheaded and reasonable.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. None of that mattered, though. I loved her so
much I felt like I was out of my mind. Why do you think I let her talk me into those stupid his and her tattoos? I was a basket case when she broke up with me. Fucking beside myself.”

“She broke up with you?” I say the words slowly, wanting to make sure I'm hearing them right.

“Yeah.”

“When?”

The note of excitement in my voice must catch his attention because he gives me a funny look. “The night she died.”

“Damon, why?”

“Can we sit? My leg's killing me.”

We move to the edge of the lawn, drop down on the grass. He stretches his leg out in front of him, massaging his knee through the hole in the brace. I try to curb my impatience, wait until he's ready to start talking. I'm about to burst when, at last, he says, “The answer to your question is, I don't know. I picked her up at school that night. We drove to Talcott Park, like we'd done a dozen times before. It was warm out. I brought a blanket. And we were, you know, together. Everything was good, I thought. Then she got a call.”

A call. Yes, yes, I'd known there'd been a call only I'd forgotten I'd known. The police had learned about it from Nica's phone records—learned, at least, that it was made if not who made it. They'd told my mom and dad and me a Chandler pay phone was the source, which didn't narrow things down a whole lot since Chandler was basically Nica's entire world. A nonclue. Though maybe not.

“From who?” I ask, trying to downplay my eagerness.

Damon lifts his hands, turns them over, the palms empty, no answers in them.

Disappointed, I say, “Well, what did they talk about?”

“There was no talk. Not on her end, anyway. She said, ‘Hello,' then listened, then said, ‘Okay,' once, maybe twice, then hung up.”

“And then?”

“And then she dumped me, told me to take her back to school, which I did.”

“I wonder who called her.”

“What does it matter who called her? The important question is, who killed her? And we know the answer to that one.”

“Not,” I say, “exactly.”

He stares at me, totally lost. Finally he says, “What?”

I lay it out for him. Except for me being pregnant, which isn't relevant to Nica's murder, I tell him everything: about Manny Flores and the poem in
The Rag;
about the tattoo I spotted in Nica's armpit, the answering one I spotted in his; about using my staff password to log onto Chandler's online directory and seeing Max's name in his emergency contact information, Googling “Fargas Bonds” and finding the ad on Craig's List.

When I'm finished, Damon's silent for a long time. Then he says, “So that's why you took the job? To learn about me? Because I might have been the one who”—pausing, then skipping the verb altogether—“Nica?”

“I needed the money too, but pretty much. I knew you were heading off to college. Still, I figured I could learn about you from your uncle, get close to you through him. I had no idea you were actually working at Fargas Bonds. God”—I start to laugh—“it must have been so weird for you, Nica's sister showing up at the office out of the blue. I can't imagine what was running through your mind when you saw me.”

“No, you can't,” he says, and laughs back, a sharp staccato sound that ends almost as quickly as it begins.

“That you'd taken deferred admission was just a lucky break for me. I mean, there's only so much I could've found out from Max.”

“What would you have done if I hadn't?”

“Spent a lot of time staking out your dorm at UConn, I guess.”

Again we lapse into silence, and again he's the one who breaks it. “If you're telling me all this, it means you don't believe I did it.”

It's not until he says it that I realize it's true. “No, I don't.”

“But I just gave you motive and opportunity. And you saw I had means earlier.”

I brush a blade of grass off my knee. “I know.”

“So why?”

“Because I think you're delicate.” And when he laughs, shakes his head, I say, “Not delicate as in effeminate. Delicate as in, like, sensitive.”

We're looking at each other, and then we're not looking at each other, as if we're suddenly shy of what we might see in the other's face. A minute or so later, he says, “So, who else is on the suspect list?”

“Nobody.”

“Short list.”

“Yeah, well, the police were pretty convinced it was someone she knew. And I know everyone she knew, except for you.”

“Why were they so convinced it was someone she knew?”

“There was something about the entrance wound, the shape of it or something. There was other stuff, too. I just don't remember any of it.”

Damon chews on his lip, thinks. “And maybe because she wasn't shot in the back, so she wasn't running away.”

“Maybe,” I say. “I mean, probably, yeah. Makes sense.”

“Were there defensive wounds?”

“I don't think so.”

“She didn't fight her killer then.” Damon chews his lip some more. “So what's the plan here, Grace? You're going to keep trying to figure this out all on your own, something even the professionals couldn't do, nobody in your corner, not your parents, not your friends? If you actually find the guilty person, what then? Go to the cops?”

I shrug, too dispirited to reply. He's not saying anything to me that
I haven't said to myself, but hearing the words out loud for the first time makes me hear them differently. The whole thing—what I'm attempting to do—just sounds so implausible, so ridiculous, a joke, basically. Imagine going to Detective Ortiz with a page of unsigned homoerotic verse torn out of a student magazine, a bit of graffiti on a urinal wall, and demanding that he reopen the case. I'd get laughed out of the station. I realize suddenly what I'd been hoping for when I confessed the truth to Damon: that he'd offer to help. Now, though, I can't fathom him offering. Who'd voluntarily get mixed up in something as harebrained and half-assed as what I've got going on? Sitting there, I feel the way I did that day in the boys' bathroom in Burroughs, just as low, just as useless.

“Why isn't Jamie on the list?” Damon says.

I look up, surprised we're still having this conversation. “Jamie?”

“Nica definitely knew him, right?”

“Technically he is on the list,” I say, careful of my tone, not wanting to sound emotional or like I have my back up. “He has to be. He's the ex. But by the time Nica was killed they'd already been over for a while. Why would he go berserk two months after the breakup?”

“He could have found out about me. Knowing Nica was with another guy would've set him off, wouldn't it?”

Thinking about how upset Jamie was when he thought Nica was seeing Mr. Tierney, I nod. “Okay, but how would've he found out? Nobody knew about the relationship besides you and Nica.”

“I didn't tell anyone,” Damon says.

“Did she?”

“She said she didn't. But that's not the only way he could have found out. Someone might have seen us together, at Talcott Park maybe, and said something to him. I mean, right?”

“Right.”

“Well?”

A long beat. “Yes, it's possible he killed her,” I finally concede.
And it
is
possible. Of course it's possible. What it isn't, however, is imaginable. I just can't see Jamie ever intentionally hurting Nica.

A memory edges its way into my brain.

A year ago. Nica, Jamie, and I went to a party at Trinity thrown by Owen Fitz, a friend of Jamie's who'd graduated from Chandler the previous spring. Nica and Jamie had picked me up in the little alley behind Burroughs. As soon as I'd opened the car door, I could tell they'd been fighting by the stiff-jointed way they were sitting, their pointed-straight-ahead eyes. And the ride passed in tense silence. At last we arrived at the address in South Green, an off-campus town house. It seemed so quiet and still, almost asleep—windows shut, shades drawn, lights out—that I wondered if we'd gotten the night wrong, or if somehow the party had been canceled and no one'd told us.

Jamie parked at the end of the street. Nica was out of the car before it fully stopped. She started for the town house, walking fast, not waiting for me and Jamie to catch up. I watched her climb the steps to the door, throw it open. Smoke and stink and heat and noise all tangled together tumbled through. In front of her was a scene broken up hellishly into slices and flashes: a dim room, a band, guys and girls jumping up and down, mashing into each other, a giant strobe light illuminating their sweaty faces one moment, banishing them to darkness the next. Without hesitating or looking back, Nica crossed the threshold, disappeared into the lurching mob.

I glanced over at Jamie, expecting him to chase after her or maybe to turn around, walk back to his car, leave us stranded, too disgusted to stay another minute. But he just gave me a sleepy-eyed shrug, like, let her go.

He and I ended up sitting on the moldy couch someone had dragged out onto the back porch—the only semiquiet spot in the house—talking, mostly about him and Nica. It sounded like he'd had it with her. She was too selfish, he said, too moody, too this, too that.
As he continued to tick off the
too
s, I stopped paying attention to his words, started paying attention to the mouth the words were coming out of: the sensitive well-shaped lips, the even white teeth, and, behind them, the tongue, soft and supple and cotton-candy pink.