Here She Lies (6 page)

Once Julie and I had lugged in all my stuff, we stood together in the silvery darkness of my quiet room and watched Lexy sleep.

“She’s beautiful,” Julie whispered.

And I reminded her: “She’s
ours
, Jules.” I one-arm-hugged her against me as we stood there staring at my beloved daughter.

After a while she went upstairs and I went to bed, sure I wouldn’t sleep—but within minutes, I did. I slept a solid six hours, until the ringing phone interrupted a dream I lost as soon as I opened my eyes.

Through the diaphanous yellow curtains I saw the gentle hues of early dawn. The phone rang again and, afraid it would wake Lexy, I picked up my extension. I heard Julie’s scratchy morning voice talking to a woman; we must have answered the phone simultaneously.

“Slow down, Carla. What van?” Carla, I remembered from last night, was one of Julie’s nearest neighbors.

She was at least in her seventies and obviously a very early riser.

“A white van, parked down the street from your house. I saw it twice yesterday, oh, about two hours apart.”

“I didn’t notice it. I was in my house all day, in my office, working.”

“It was a white van, just sitting there, with a man inside. It gave me the willies—when I got home I wrote down what I recalled of the license plate. It’s crazy, I know, but I didn’t think of it until just now. I was making my tea and, well, that’s how it goes at my age sometimes. I remembered.”

“Did you call the detective?”

“Yes, I did. He thanked me. I just can’t believe it, Julie. Right here, on this street, a
murder
.”

Seated in our circle of canvas folding chairs in Julie’s backyard, beneath a bruised morning sky that promised rain, Detective Gabe Lazare put down his tall blue glass of iced tea so it sat lopsided on an uneven piece of slate. I’d noticed he didn’t skip pleasantries before getting down to business and I was grateful for the gentle transition from a harsh awakening. Julie and I had been up for hours, battening down the hatches, after Carla’s call about the mysterious lurking van. I’d learned how the windows locked (we agreed to keep ourselves sealed up tight every night), where flashlights and candles were stowed in case of a power out-age (deliberate or otherwise), and Julie was just explaining how the alarm system worked when Detective Lazare called and asked to come over.
Asking
was his polite method of telling us he was on his way.

“Delicious iced tea.” Lazare nodded in Julie’s direction.

“You can thank my sister. She’s the chef, not me.” “Tea isn’t cooking,” I said, “but I’m glad you like it.”

The baby monitor was in my lap and I jumped at every fizz of sound. I kept expecting Lexy to wake up; her morning nap had gone nearly two hours now. Instead what I heard was sounds of Bobby, finally awake, his footsteps echoing down the hall, presumably to the bathroom. He had been released sometime in the night and was deeply asleep in the Pinecone Room when
we
woke up at dawn to the ringing phone.

“Your neighbor’s partial license plate turned out to be pretty useful.” Lazare leaned over to reach into his leather briefcase for a piece of paper, which he handed to Julie first. When she in turn gave it to me, I saw that it was a grainy fax of a photograph—a mug shot—of a fiftyish man with a buzz cut and skin weathered beyond his years. He was squinting as if he normally wore glasses. “His name’s Thomas Soiffer. Owner of a white van, Massachusetts plates, resides outside Springfield. E-Z Pass had him driving west on I-90

across Massachusetts yesterday morning.”

“And?” Julie.

“Why was he here?” Me.

“What we know about Mr. Soiffer is mostly on paper. He’s a plumber by trade, but he has a criminal record. Not what you’d call the finest of citizens. Did some time for assaulting his girlfriend—nearly killed her.”

“And he used his E-Z Pass to drive here and sit outside my house before killing someone?” Julie said.

“Not the brightest bulb.”

Lazare’s eyes paused a moment on Julie and I could just see his detective mind calculating a diplomatic bridge between our layman’s comfort zone, where the most obvious assumptions ruled the borders like trigger-happy armed guards, and his professional instincts to carefully navigate the unknown.

“Well, Forensics found some other blood along with Zara’s, but we don’t know if it belonged to Soiffer or someone else,” he said. “If we had a murder weapon or a DNA sample on file for him, it would make this a lot simpler. But we don’t. So now it’s all about legwork.

We’re trying to find him.”

Just then Lexy issued a fairly dramatic sigh and I sat forward, ready to get up and go to her. But the sigh melted back into the monitor’s static silence; she had gone back to sleep.

“Does that name—Thomas Soiffer—ring any bells with either of you?” Detective Lazare asked.

Julie and I agreed that neither of us had ever seen the man in the picture nor had we heard his name. It was a stranger’s name, though one we would now never forget. A stranger with a criminal record, a
dangerous
man, hanging around outside Julie’s house yesterday morning, only hours before a murder.

“So far none of the local plumbers and electricians and so forth recognize the name either,” Lazare said.

“We’ve put the word out and we’ll see if we hear anything in the next few days.”

“Detective,” I said, deciding to risk a theoretical leap, “do you think someone might have thought Zara was one of
us
? Since she resembled us, I mean.”

“Anything’s possible.” Lazare sort of smiled.

“Why? You wouldn’t know that name from the prison back in Kentucky, would you? He didn’t do time there, but sometimes these guys know each other. They talk.”

“I’ve never heard the name,” I said. “Not that I can remember. But I saw a lot of the prisoners. I saw
hundreds
of people. And Bobby’s been working in that one prison for over ten years—he’s seen
thousands
.” It was a medical prison. Some of the prisoners had a real need for physical therapy, but some used it as a way to break their routines. You could tell, mostly, who was in pain and who was just bored. It was the restless ones I most hated working on, pressing my hands into their muscled flesh, the intimacy of that, while their eyes darted around the office, looking for something—what? A way out? A weapon? All the prisoners there were white-collar criminals, but incar-ceration had a way of transforming some people, creating a taste for violence. And the detective was right:
talk
they did, sometimes endlessly and often with an absurd amount of self-righteous indignation.

“We’ll check it out with the prison,” Lazare said.

“We’ll also find out if any prisoners released recently had anything against you.” He pulled a notepad from his pocket and jotted a reminder. “Julie, you renovated this house last year. Am I right?”

“Yes, I did.” She had gutted the barn and rebuilt the interior from scratch. “My contractor’s name was Hal Cox. He brought in a lot of people. I didn’t know their names—I was still living in Connecticut.”

“Could you e-mail me the particulars of your contractor? And anyone else involved in the project.”

“Sure,” Julie said. “The contractor handled every-thing with the architect. I can put you in touch with her, too.”

“Much obliged.”

Julie nodded. “So, Bobby’s not a suspect anymore?” That was a sticky word,
suspect
, and it caught in my mind.

“Bobby and I had a good, long talk,” Lazare said,

“but at this point, no one is officially a suspect.”

“Not even Thomas Soiffer?” I asked.

“Yes and no. We’d like to speak with him.” He pulled his mouth into a thin, evasive smile.

“What about Zara’s brother?” Julie asked. “I heard he works in construction. I heard he’s a not-so-nice guy.”

“I heard that, too,” Lazare said. “And I checked it out. All her relatives are in Hungary—the bad brother’s just a rumor. Not unusual in these cases.

Violent death kind of uncaps people’s imaginations.

Makes our job a little harder, but it’s human nature, can’t be helped.”

“What now?” Julie asked.

“Sit tight. There’s no real reason for the two of you to worry. Chances are this was a random incident. But just to reassure you, I’m putting a security detail on your house. Unmarked car, maroon sedan. He’ll be parked outside. Best thing is to leave him alone—don’t visit him, no coffee and such. It’ll just draw attention.” I was a little surprised to be offered the extra support from what I assumed was a small local police force. But he himself had said that they rarely saw this kind of crime and I guessed they felt more comfortable erring on the side of caution. So did I.

Julie and I simultaneously thanked him and this time he smiled in full. The
matched set
effect; we were used to it.

“How long?” Julie asked.

“As long as you need him. We’ll see how this thing plays out.” Lazare bent down to pick up his empty glass. And then he hesitated, sat back and looked at me.

“Annie, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but why did you leave home yesterday?”

That phrase,
leave home
, threw me off. It sounded so final.

“I guess you already know, since you’ve been talking to Bobby,” I said.

“In your own words.” He clicked his pen twice, drawing the ballpoint in and out, and waited for an answer.

“Bobby’s been unfaithful.”

“And you can substantiate that,” he said, not phras-ing it as a question, but I answered anyway.

“Yes.” One clear word, no ambivalence, so he wouldn’t ask again.

“That’s good,” he said, “because someday you may need to fall back on that to comfort yourself.”

“What exactly did Bobby tell you?” My tone had sharpened. I didn’t care.

Detective Lazare slipped his pen into his shirt pocket and closed his notebook. The gestures seemed contrived to reassure me that he was
just curious
or this was
off the record
or some other ineffectual apology meant to gloss over the intrusive line of question-ing. “Annie, I’m not taking sides in this. I’m just a detective doing his job, wondering why so much happened in one family in one day. Wouldn’t you?” Of course I would. I
did
wonder that. But we had started this meeting in the spirit of shared information and now I felt, well,
guilty.
I didn’t understand why. Or why he would want me to. I didn’t answer his part-rhetorical, part-combative question and after an awkward moment he offered an olive branch of sorts.

“Well, anytime you feel like talking,” he said, “my door is open.”

Julie glanced at me and I
knew
she was thinking the same thing I was: that if I needed a therapist, I’d find one. She stood and reached for his glass, which he handed her without a word. He used the armrests to push himself up from the canvas chair.

By way of good-bye, he said, “Cases like this, they’re tough. Woman like that. Comes from a nice family over in Hungary. Her people were poor; she was helping support them, sending money home. From what I hear she was a political activist in her town until things got a little too hot and she lost her job. Came here on a short visa and stayed. Immigrants like her, well, they’ve all got their story, don’t they?” It came at us like her eulogy—brief, helpless—and we listened. Softened. He was a master at saying two things at once:
remember, Zara is the victim here
and
I’m just a guy doing my job.

Julie walked him through the house to the kitchen door.

Sitting alone in the yard, I realized the detective had left behind the fax of Thomas Soiffer. I suspected he had left it on purpose; he wanted us emotionally in-volved in this, to open us, in case our proximity to the murder held some special secret. Had he rattled me on purpose, just to test my reaction? I studied Soiffer’s photo and the longer I looked at it, the more that griz-zly face seemed to gain dimensions of cynicism and rage. I could
see
him with a knife in his hand, slipping through the twilight, behind Zara, one sinewy hand grabbing her hair to yank back her head, the other drawing the blade across her neck like a violin bow.

Had anyone heard her scream? Or was her death silent, her final sound muted by the violent severance of her vocal cords?

I was startled by a shuffle emanating from the monitor, which soon began to issue the cranky sobs of Lexy waking. Creak of a hallway door opening, thud of footsteps, clank of the crib’s side lowering.

“Shh, honey.” Bobby’s disembodied voice floated from the monitor. “Daddy’s here.”

I folded the fax into eighths, slipped it into my pants pocket and went through glass-paned French doors that led directly into the big living room, which I had come to think of as Sundance East. Through a front window I saw Detective Lazare drive away in a silver car. The maroon car sat parked to the left of the house under a leafy tree with an enormous bark-striated trunk that seemed to twist out of the earth. There was a man in the driver’s seat, but I couldn’t see his face or any detail. He was very still.

Halfway up the living room staircase on my way to find Bobby, I met him on his way down, holding Lexy.

He was wearing jeans and a burnt-orange T-shirt; he must have packed himself a bag before leaving home yesterday. His hair was wet—he had showered—but he was unshaven. When Lexy saw me she dove in my direction and I had to reposition myself on the stairs to simultaneously catch her and keep my balance. She immediately rooted for my chest. Bobby followed us down the stairs and stood in front of the couch while I settled in to nurse our baby.

“Detective Lazare’s a real piece of work,” I said, once Lexy was latched on. I was still smarting from our conversation, the therapist bit.
If I ever wanted to
talk.
I
always
wanted to talk—but to him?

“Yup.” Bobby nodded. “That he is.”

“But I don’t think he really suspects you of anything, Bobby. I think he’s maybe, well, a little mis-guided.”