False Allegations (20 page)

“Oh, that was
retail
, honey. I got it for only six. Some bargain, huh?”

“Six hundred dollars?”

“Yes, six hundred dollars,” she said, in the tone you’d use on a moron. A stubborn moron. “I do not buy at Bloomingdale’s, baby. And you’ll need this belt too— it’ll go perfectly with the boots. Now give me some money, honey.”

I couldn’t wait for the clash of wills when it came time for her and The Mole to outfit Terry for college.

Pansy insisted on rubbing against my leg and being petted goodbye. So instead of cologne, I hit the subway wearing Eau de Neapolitan mastiff. And carrying the black aluminum briefcase, empty.

H
eather was on her side of the grille when the elevator arrived. This time she was wearing a modest plum–colored silk blouse over a black pleated skirt. But her dark stockings were seamed up the back and the skirt was six inches too short. I could see the faint outline of an ankle chain surrounding the bandage on her left foot. Her spike heels were the same color as her blouse.

“Hi!” she said brightly.

“How you doing?” I responded.

“I’m
great
…now that it’s finally happening. Come on, they’re waiting for you.”

I followed her down the hall, listening to the rasp of nylon as her thick thighs brushed together under the short skirt. She turned the corner, ushering me in ahead of her.

“Mr. Burke,” Kite said, getting to his feet. “Thank you for coming.”

“Like we agreed,” I replied, shaking the bony, blue–veined hand he offered me, going along with the show.

“This is Jennifer,” he said, nodding toward a young woman seated in a straight–backed teakwood chair. “Jennifer Dalton.”

I walked over to her, held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Me too,” she answered, not getting up. Her eyes were too big for her thin, pinched face. Her hair was mouse brown, thin at the temples. She was dressed in a slate–gray business suit over a fussy white blouse with a small embroidered collar, modest black pumps on her feet, sitting with her knees pressed together.

“Would you prefer I…leave you alone?” Kite asked.

“Up to you,” I said to the woman.

“I’d rather you stayed,” she said to Kite. Her voice was low and reedy, but very clear, every syllable articulated.

“As you wish,” Kite said, taking a seat in his fan–shaped chair.

I took the leather armchair. Heard the tap of Heather’s heels but this time, she was wasn’t going to stand behind me— she took a position between the woman’s back and the hologram, standing with her hands behind her, chest outthrust, orange eyes steady on me.

I settled in, investing thirty seconds in observing the woman’s composed face. “How old are you?” I asked.

Her face twitched. It wasn’t the question she expected. “I’m, uh, twenty–seven. Twenty–eight in November.”

“Were you born here? In New York?”

“In Queens. In Flushing. But we moved around when I was little.”

“Where?”

“New Jersey. Teaneck, then Englewood Cliffs. Then to upstate New York. But I really grew up in Manhattan. On the Upper West Side.”

“You went to private school?” I asked her.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Just a guess. You have any brothers and sisters?”

“I have a brother. Robert. He’s two years older.”

“What does he do?”

“Do?”

“For a living.”

“Oh. He…doesn’t do anything, I guess. He’s in rehab.”

“For…?”

“Drugs.”

“He ever do time?”

“Time?” she asked, her face confused.

“In jail.”

“Oh. No, he was never in jail. I mean, just once. A couple of weeks, that’s all.”

“Did you go and visit him?”

She shifted slightly in her chair. “Why are you asking all this?”

I looked over her shoulder. Heather was in the same spot, standing stony. “Just background,” I said.

She looked over at Kite. He didn’t respond, watching her as though she was a chemical experiment, waiting for the result.

It was quiet for a long minute. “No, I didn’t visit him,” she said quietly. “We’re not close.”

“Are your parents still together?” I asked.

“No. No they’re not. Is that ‘background’ too?”

“Yes, it is, Miss Dalton,” I said smoothly. “These are…delicate matters. I want to establish a foundation before we explore the central issues.”

She took a breath through her mouth, her shallow chest not involved in the process. “Go ahead,” she said finally.

“Your turn now,” I said, switching gears. “Just tell me about it.”

“He— “

“From the beginning,” I said softly. “From
before
it started, okay?”

She gulped another breath. “Okay. When I was twelve…I know that’s when it was because it was just after my birthday, that’s just before Thanksgiving…School was already started. I was doing all right there. Not great or anything, mostly B’s and C’s on my report card. And I was never any trouble. My teachers liked me. I had friends and everything. But my parents thought I should be doing better.”

“Your grades?”

“Not just my grades. I was a puller.”

“Trichotillomania?”

“Yes!” her eyes rolled up, settled back down, focusing on my face. “How did you know about that?”

“I had a friend who had it,” I lied. “Did they send you to a doctor?”

“No. They didn’t know it was a…disease, then. They just thought I was strange, I think.”

“So what did they do?”

“My parents were very religious. Psalmists— do you know it?”

“No. It sounds fundamentalist.”

“Well it’s not,” she said primly. “The official name of the church is the Gospel of Job’s Song. And its prophet is Job, not Jesus. It was founded in the sixteenth century by John Michael, a man who suffered terrible misfortunes— he had epilepsy, and he underwent a crisis in faith. When the revelations came to him, he started the church. Eventually, the Psalmists had to emigrate to America to escape persecution. They settled in upstate New York. Some say their teachings were an influence on Joseph Smith.”

“The Mormon prophet?”

“Do you know his work?” she asked, a faint look of surprise playing across her face.

“Only what I’ve read,” I told her. I didn’t know what Kite had told her about my background, so I didn’t tell her
where
I read about religion— prisons get more missionaries than tropical islands. “You were raised in the church?” I asked.

“We both were, me and my brother. But we didn’t shun others, Psalmists aren’t a cult or anything.”

“So they turned to the church for help with your…problems?”

“They said I needed lessons. Religious lessons. So they sent me to Brother Jacob. Psalmists believe you have to pay with your own labor for what you receive. So I had to clean Brother Jacob’s house in exchange for the lessons.”

“Tell me about the lessons,” I said, leaning forward. Heather was a rock in the middle distance, the hologram winking behind her, shape–shifting in the morning light.

“The lessons were all about loving myself. Brother Jacob said if I didn’t love myself, I would keep hurting myself. He said that’s what people did when they were drunks, or drug addicts. Or even murderers. They hurt themselves. That’s why I pulled my hair. And I had to stop or I would never be happy.”

“Lessons from the Bible?”

“From Psalms. The Psalms are the truth, the real truth in the Bible. Brother Jacob said the Bible was
written
. By people, not God. But the Psalms were songs that had stood the test of time way before anyone knew how to write.”

“So he taught you the Psalms?”

“The
meaning
of the Psalms.”

“And how did he teach you, Jennifer.”

“First with the ruler,” she said, face tightened as her skin bleached slightly. “He said the ruler was for learning rules.”

“A wooden ruler, like for measuring?”

“It was for correction, not measuring,” she said in a mechanical voice. “First I would get it on my palm. He would ask me, every time, if I was pulling my hair out. If I told him yes, I would get the ruler. It stung at first, but I got used to it. After a while, he’d have to hit me really hard to make me cry.”

“But he did that?”

“Yes. I always had to cry.”

“When did he switch?”

“Switch?”

“To someplace else. Besides your palm?”

“How did you
know
that?” she asked, dry–washing her hands, looking at her lap. “How could you— ?”

“Just a guess,” I said. “Maybe an educated guess.”

“One day, I didn’t want to get hit. So I lied. I told him I wasn’t pulling my hair out. I used to sleep with gloves on. Even with a ski mask on my head— so I couldn’t get to my hair. It didn’t work. But when he asked me, I lied.”

“And then…?”

“He used it on my thighs. He made me lift my dress and he hit me on the back of my thighs with the ruler.”

“And it hurt worse?”

“Yes! Not just my…legs. It made me feel all…crawly inside.”

“So you stopped lying?”

“Yes. I mean, no. It didn’t matter. He started asking me if I had learned to love myself. Every time I said I
couldn’t
, he would hit me. Sometimes with my pants down. After a while, he made me take all my clothes off to be hit.”

Heather had shifted her stance slightly, leaning forward with her back arched, like a ship’s figurehead cutting the wind, mouth set and hard. “Did you ever tell your parents, Jennifer?” I asked her. “About what Brother Jacob was doing?”

“I…tried. But when I started, my mother told me I had to trust him. He was from the church, so I had to trust him. Whatever he was doing,
whatever
it was, it was for my own good. I never told her any more after that.”

“What happened next?”

“How did you know there was a ‘next,’ Mr. Burke?” her voice hardening with suspicion.

“There’s always a ‘next,’” I told her. “The only question is what it was.”

“Don’t you know?” she leaned forward in her chair, a sly, challenging look on her face.

“You learned to love yourself.”

She put her face in her hands and started to cry. Heather stepped close behind her, putting her hands on the woman’s shoulders, unblinking orange eyes steady on mine.

Kite didn’t move.

If I was a therapist, I would have stopped it then. We’d been going a long time, it was a natural place for a break. But if anything was going to break, it was going to be Jennifer Dalton. “Tell me about it,” I said.

She looked up at me, her thin face framed by her hands, too–big eyes blurry from the tears. “It sounds like you could tell
me
,” she said. “How did you know? I need to know how you knew!”

“I didn’t really know anything,” I assured her. “But when you hear the same material over and over again from different people— “

“You think I’m lying? That I made this up?”

“No. I don’t think that.”

“Then you believe me?”

“Not that either. I’m just listening, okay?”

“When do you make up your mind?” she asked me, her hand twitching near her hair.

“When I’m done,” I said, going along patiently, letting her take me wherever she wanted me to go.

“Could I have— ?”

Heather was already in motion, her heels tapping a faster rhythm than usual. She was back in a few seconds with the heavy brass tray, this time loaded with two small bottles of Coke, a heavy–bottomed clear glass tumbler, and a chrome ice bucket. She used a pair of tongs to drop three precise ice cubes into the tumbler, screwed the top off one of the Coke bottles in one long twist, and poured carefully. She held the tumbler in her left hand, watching it closely, like measuring medicine. Satisfied, she handed it to Jennifer Dalton— a bartender serving a regular customer the usual.

Dalton took a long, deep drink, wrinkling her nose from the bubbles’ tickle. She smiled up at Heather. “Thank you.”

“Sure, baby,” Heather replied, holding the brass tray in one hand, patting Jennifer on the shoulder with the other.

Jennifer cleared her throat, facing a task. When she spoke, her voice was flat, just–the–facts uninflected. “He told me to…touch myself,” she said. “First my chest. I mean, I didn’t really
have
a chest then, but it was…enough. So you could see it, I mean, enough. I had to smile while I did it. A
real
smile— he would always know. Then I had to do it…other places.
Every
other place.”