Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (21 page)

Babe was relieved—she didn’t take kindly to too many disappointments in one day. “Has it occurred to you that O’Malley may have appointed himself your guardian angel?” Babe said.

It hadn’t. Over the last few years the snappy dialogue between O’Malley and me—even when it bordered on the frisky—had built up
a kind of scar tissue. We couldn’t touch nerve endings if we tried. And I think we did try every once in a while, but never, it seemed, at the same time, so we never made that complete circuit required to turn on the lightbulb.

“Speaking of the angel…” Babe jerked her chin in the direction of the police station across the road, where a now ubiquitous patrol car sat idling and O’Malley stood leaning against it, on the phone. “The angel’s lookin’ good. I think he’s dropped a few pounds,” she said, sizing him up. “You take him out of that blue polyester uniform, put him in a pair of black jeans, black T-shirt, leather blazer. I bet he’d look mighty fine, with that salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes.” Clearly she’d given this some thought. I hadn’t and I had a hard time resisting the urge to raise myself up off the counter stool, peer out the window, and visualize Mike O’Malley’s proposed makeover.

Babe left to seat a couple of women with two toddlers and I peeked at O’Malley while pretending to be reaching for napkins. Not bad, but was he really date material? What was it Lucy and Babe were seeing that I wasn’t? Maybe all these near misses meant we were just supposed to be friends.

“You’re busted,” Babe said over her shoulder.

“I just wanted to see if he was coming this way.”

“You are such a bad liar. If you’re going to survive in a small town, you’re going to need to hone those skills.”

O’Malley headed toward the diner. He sprinted across the street easily, and moments later the screen door opened, then jingled shut with a smack. Babe was still with the newcomers, helping one of the women strap an obstreperous kid into a wooden seat that had all the appeal of a vintage electric chair. No wonder the kid was screaming.

“Hello, ladies. Okay if I serve myself?” O’Malley needn’t have asked for permission. Babe adored him and he knew the diner’s setup better
than some of her employees. He poured himself a coffee and slid onto the counter stool beside me, a smug look on his face.

“Okay. What?”

“State police didn’t need to chase your friend too far—he drove straight into an overpass on the Merritt. Sheared off the top of his rig.

“Oh, and there’s something else. Caroline Sturgis is coming home.”

Home. Was it here in Michigan where this cell was; Oregon where my fictional grandmother lived and died; or Springfield, where everyone knew me as Caroline Sturgis? Bland, boring, stay-at-home, faintly amusing and to-be-pitied Caroline Sturgis, who drank a little too often and rarely finished her crafts projects but was otherwise just like any of the other suburban moms who spent their days chauffeuring kids from one structured activity to the next with only the occasional break for spa treatments or Wednesday matinees in New York City.

The last weeks had been a far cry from soccer matches and afternoon theater dates. I no longer knew or remembered how I’d managed to keep track of all the lies for so many years. It was as if I’d kept an internal bulletin board just like the slick white one in my kitchen that told me where everyone was. Some days the schedules were as complicated as the landing at Normandy, but the bulletin board gave me the illusion of order—Molly at soccer, Jason at hockey practice, Grant gallivanting all over the world, Caroline in Connecticut, not to be confused with Monica in Michigan. Never to be confused with that girl I used to be.

They put me in solitary confinement for my own safety. No one seriously thought that I’d hang myself with an Hermès scarf, but they’d never had a resident like me before and frankly didn’t know what to do with me. Oddly enough, I might have welcomed the company of the other women. As it was, I heard them only once a day when I was let out for my forty-five-minute exercise break. Some jeered and some cheered as I was led past their cells. I heard everything from “skinny bitch” to “hockey mom, can you hook me up with some blow?”

I tried to focus on Grant and the kids. Was Molly keeping up with her piano lessons in Tucson? Was Jason wearing his helmet for the pickup hockey games he’d be playing in? I didn’t imagine anyone else in the building was thinking about hockey pucks, and it was difficult for me to do it. I kept drifting back to the path that had led me here.

Sherry, the girl I’d met at the soup kitchen, had been around the block at least a couple of times. She was a user, and I knew it, but I learned a lot from her—good and bad. We spent two weeks together, my total-immersion apprenticeship into a life of petty crime. She and I took full advantage of all the social services agencies in the city, offering different names and different sad stories to each and moving on before too many questions were asked. We stayed away from personal details, even with each other.

On her own, Sherry inspired others, inside the shelter system and out, to grip their handbags and backpacks as if she was about to snatch them and make a run for it. It was an understandable reflex. She had the look of a female Artful Dodger, eager to give them the pitch, slick and practiced and knowledgeable of which buttons to push for maximum, sympathetic effect.

With my cherubic face, we made a good team. I gave her credibility. People were more trusting of us. As a duo, we got the benefit of the doubt, until one day she did snatch someone’s bag while waiting for her turn at a communal shower. She ran off and left me, her presumed accomplice, to face the music alone. It took
all the vestiges of my Midwest charm to convince the others at the shelter I’d had nothing to do with the robbery.

But it was a sign I should move on before I slipped up and gave something away. I’d lost my cicerone, my guide to the strange city, where every ten-block neighborhood was larger than my entire hometown.

I was sitting on a bench in Central Park, eating a bologna sandwich on squishy white bread for breakfast, when Sherry reappeared, jumping out from behind the statue of Balto, a hero dog who’d saved a bunch of people during a diphtheria outbreak.

“Ta-da!”

She laughed and boogied around the statue as if we were two friends who’d planned to meet for a movie or an afternoon in the city and she’d been a few minutes late. I tightened my hold on my bag and kept eating, eyes down. The sandwich was rubbery and tasteless, but I’d been happy to score four of them last night when the do-gooder truck made its rounds circling the park. I made them last for two meals.

“C’mon,” she said. “You’re not really sore, are you? I knew they wouldn’t call the cops on you. Look at you. You’re clean as a bar of soap.”

That’s what she thought. Where was she when my crap attorney was looking for jurors? I almost blurted that out but bit my lips. If Sherry knew I was wanted and there was any kind of reward for my capture, I’d be in custody before I finished my bologna sandwich.

“What do you want?” I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt.

Sherry reached into her stash and pulled out something that looked frighteningly familiar to me. My passport. I dropped the sandwich and fumbled around in my bag to see what else she’d stolen. Squirrels miraculously appeared to make off with the few scraps of bread and bologna at my feet. I kicked them away as if they were rats.

She held her hands up. “Nothing else, I swear. Take it,” she said, flapping the passport up and down, “before I change my mind. I could have gotten a nice chunk of change for it. It’s a testament to your good influence on me that I
brought it back.” She gently placed the passport on the wax paper my breakfast had been wrapped in, trying to avoid the mustard.

I was in shock. After my experience with Kate and Eddie, I knew enough not to trust anyone completely, but apparently I was still a stupid kid from Michigan who could be suckered into any setup and left holding the bag.

A discarded newspaper fluttered underneath the park bench. Sherry pulled it out and tore off a corner of the masthead. She scribbled a name and a number on it with a pencil stub she fished out of her pocket.

“Max will offer you a thousand dollars for it, but tell him I sent you.” She handed me the scrap of paper. “Hold out for two; he’s going to sell it for four anyway. And make him give you a fake driver’s license for free. He’s got tons of them. Pick a name you like. Pick a state.”

She walked away swishing the bag she’d ripped off from the other girl. “I’d love to stay and chat,” she yelled, “but if I spend any longer with you, you’ll have me going straight. And that would be a terrible waste of talent. One last piece of advice. Wise up, trust no one.”

That was the last time I saw her.

Max did offer me $1,000, but, as instructed, I negotiated and got him up to $2,500. He fanned out driver’s licenses like a deck of cards. When I saw Oregon, I knew I had the beginnings of my new life story. It was perfect—I’d lied about it so many times I already felt as if I was from Oregon. I tapped it with one finger and Max plucked it from the stack as if he were doing a card trick.

“You have to come back tomorrow with a passport-size picture, chica. Then I give you the money.”

“No. Money today and picture this afternoon.”

“Okay, okay, I tried. How do you know Sherry?” Max asked, his nose running from who knew what substance he’d just inhaled. Sherry had said he was a dealer, but she didn’t say in what. Whatever it was, he managed to stay under the
radar of most law enforcement types. According to Max, they hassled him only when things were really slow.

“The cops don’t bother me. I don’t kill nobody. I don’t sell drugs near schools. I don’t pimp out no little girls.”

Yes, I bet they loved him. I bet even now some civic group was naming a park after him near the Port Authority.

I sat in the back of a coffee shop on West 54th Street as he cut and pasted my picture into the fake driver’s license and then sealed it with a portable laminating machine.

“This gizmo, best investment I ever made. You gotta think about a revenue stream, chica, an IRA. I can help you get work.” He looked at me and then shook his head.

“Nah, I don’t think so. You too sweet. You look so sweet you could be like that girl in the Neil Diamond song, ‘Sweet Caroline.’” He pumped his fist in the air in time to the music in his head.

So a grubby guy who dealt in black market IDs and fake food stamp book
lets gave me twenty-five hundred dollars, a new driver’s license, and a new
name. On the bus ride to Florida I fleshed out my new past and hurtled toward what I hoped was a new future.

Three years later when I met Grant Sturgis he gave me another new life. Over time, I allowed myself to think that I might really have buried that other person. The one from Michigan who did a stupid thing so long ago she really did seem like another person.

Babe’s Paradise Diner looked the same as it did most mornings, with one exception. In the past if there had been a cluster of people hunched around one other person, it would have been around Babe. That morning people were huddled around a ten-inch computer screen in the corner booth.

“I’m standing outside the Connecticut police station where just weeks ago the suburban woman known as the Fugitive Mom was held when it was discovered that she was escaped convict Monica Jane Weithorn. Weithorn escaped from a minimum security facility in Michigan more than twenty years ago and today she returns to sleepy Springfield, Connecticut, to the shocked neighbors and friends who for decades knew her as Caroline Sturgis.

“After surrendering her passport, the convicted drug dealer was released on one million dollars bail. What she does next and what she’ll call herself is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain. Authorities in two states will be keeping a watchful eye on her until December 6, when she returns to Michigan to hear
the judge’s decision on whether she’ll be forced to serve out her original sentence or be returned to the privileged upper-middle-class lifestyle she’s been enjoying for these last two decades. Back to you, Dave.”

“Stop screwing around on the Internet, Harry. Aren’t you supposed to be working on that thing?”

The man in the corner booth grumbled but complied. That news report was as much as most people had seen or heard that morning anyway. Caroline was coming home. The crowd dispersed as he turned off the sound on his netbook.

“Something in the tone of that reporter’s voice made me hate her,” Babe said.

I knew what she meant. As vague as it was, the report made it seem as if Caroline had been selling crack in school yards and buying bling and driving big cars over the backs of small children and hopeless drug addicts. The true story was more complicated. Of course she did have a pretty sizable bling collection and a couple of big cars. It was a confusing situation. Even Caroline’s friends didn’t know exactly where they stood.

I’d caught the early news at home, and it was a little more complete than the web video clip. According to the TV news, she and Grant would be landing at the Westchester Airport at 7
P.M.
Journalists and cameramen were already camped out, ready to pounce.

But I knew better. Caroline was already home, having arrived at Bradley Airport, outside Hartford late the previous evening. I knew because we’d talked this morning. I was on my way to see her.

I’d take a private unpaved road to the back of the Sturgis house. Caroline and Grant would leave the inside garage door open for me and I’d be able to enter that way.

They waited for me in the mud room, looking pasty and drained. I guess that was to be expected. He had cavernous circles under his eyes,
and she had dark roots, edgy if you lived in the East Village but a major no-no for suburban Connecticut. She tried unsuccessfully to cover them with a scarf folded over many times to serve as a wide headband. Her usually buffed and ovalled nails were rough, and she’d torn at her cuticles, bloodying a few of the fingers.