In the Night of the Heat (11 page)

Judge Jackson toured me through his display case with more vigor than I could have mustered in his place, but his sigh deflated him. His shoulders shrank before my eyes.

“All this…” His breath clouded the glass until he dutifully wiped it clean. “A statue, paper, and memories…” He didn't finish, but he didn't have to. Death takes everything that counts, that's all.

Judge Jackson closed the study's doors so we would have privacy. I doubted that Evangeline Jackson could hear much of anything, but he took the precaution.

“This might seem strange to you, son, but I need to search you,” the judge said.

I spread my legs and raised my arms. “I have a permit, but I don't carry a gun,” I said.

“That's your own business, although you may want to start. I'm not worried about a gun.” He patted me down as methodically as my father might have, with a special emphasis on pockets and creases.
He was looking for a tape recorder, I realized. Fireworks whistled in my head.

Judge Jackson gestured toward a leather recliner, and I sat. He sat across from me, atop his desk, facing me from several inches higher. Elevated, just like in court.

“You know I'm a sitting federal judge.”

“Yessir.”

“Mr. Hardwick, my son's killer is out there, and I want him found. Because the police don't give a damn, in the words of Malcolm, I'm left to do it by any means necessary. That's why this job calls for discretion. Delicacy. My niece believes we can trust you, but I want to hear it from your mouth.”

“Trust me to…what, sir?”

“To keep what's my business
my
business.”

Sounded safe enough. “I'm not the chatty type.”

Judge Jackson studied me for a beat. Then he found a fat envelope on his desk and tossed it to me. It was heavy. “Ten thousand,” Judge Jackson said. “Twenty percent up front. A solid lead gets you another ten. You provide me reasonable evidence that you've found the killer, the name makes fifty. Cash.”

Impolite or not, I had to peek into the envelope just to see the neat stack of new bills, in hundreds and fifties. The scent from the envelope was strong and cloying. I liked that smell.

Reasonable evidence.
That was a much looser standard than one he'd need in court, which, as he knew better than any of us, was
Beyond a reasonable doubt.

“What's your definition of a ‘solid lead'?” I said.

“I'll know it when I hear it.”

“Does full payment hinge on a successful prosecution?”

“All I want is a name and evidence.”

It almost sounded too good to be true. Granted, I didn't have a badge or a PI license, but that meant I had less to lose for trespassing or illegally taping a conversation. “I appreciate your faith, Judge Hardwick, but I'm way out in the cold. Do you have a lead?”

He picked up a sheaf of papers, dangling it like bait. “This is probably mostly a load of crap, but it's a start. It's a copy of the Robbery-Homicide murder book. You'd know what LAPD knows, as of 3:00
A.M.
this morning. If this exchanges hands today and you get caught with it, you're on your own. And son, mention my name, and I'll bury you. You do not want to make an enemy of me.”

My heart thudded. When Serena died, I would have sacrificed a digit to get my hands on the official LAPD murder book. Even with Dad's connections, the only way I'd gotten a simple incident report was through April.
She would be salivating if she saw this
…

But discretion was discretion. Even if she'd been here, I couldn't have told April. I couldn't tell Dad. I couldn't tell anyone.

“If I may be blunt…” I said. “You're taking a lot of risks, sir.”

“Risk is a part of life,” he said, looking annoyed. “Do you know how many of my fellow federal judges have been indicted in a decade? Accused of failing the bench? Four. Why do they do it? For money, usually. For power. For a blow job. For the risk itself. A friend of mine once told me, ‘All you need is a reason.' Well, I have mine. And I'll sleep at night just fine.”

“I hope you trust your LAPD connection.”

“With my life,” he said. “My source came to
me
and said LAPD was throwing the case. Sometimes, justice and the law are two separate and distinct entities, Mr. Hardwick.”

We both knew the truth of that. When I nodded, he went on: “Internally, they call it murder—but to the outside world, it's a suicide. Without any pressure to find a killer, there's no incentive to clear up
the confusion. That's where you come in.” Judge Hardwick took a deep breath. “Do you think, Mr. Hardwick, that my son killed himself?” His eyes shimmered.

“Bullshit. Sir.”

Judge Hardwick loosed a sour smile. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Surprise me.”

Judge Hardwick busied himself with decanters and cut-crystal glasses and frosted ice cubes from a hidden minibar. He handed me a glass filled with tea-colored liquid, and poured himself an identical libation. I sipped. Damn. Good bourbon. I wanted to take a doggie bag home to Dad.

We sipped, sizing each other up. “So,” he said. “Here's what you'll have: Certainty. A sense of purpose. The murder book. Access to the crime scene. And, if you want it, access to the body—but the funeral's on Sunday, so you need to make a decision fast.”

I had already made my decision, I realized. Maybe I'd decided as soon as I saw Evangeline Jackson in her crippled haze at the kitchen counter. Or while I'd stared at two generations of glory captured inside that display case. Or sooner than that, when I'd seen T.D.'s high school graduation photo.

No matter what T.D. Jackson had or hadn't done, his parents deserved an answer. Any parents of a slain child deserved that small comfort.

I didn't ask what would happen to the accused if I gave Judge Jackson a name.

I didn't want to know.

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO HER CAR,
Melanie paused before starting the engine. She settled back in her seat to say something important, her eyes unwavering. “I'm engaged.”

“Congratulations,” I said. It took me a second to remember why she'd even brought it up. The visit to Judge Jackson's house had erased my plans to see Melanie Wilde naked. As fine as she was, the fever had passed. Besides, we had just shared an experience much more intimate than sex. “Then I guess you'd better take me home.”

All I could think about was Chela.

It was five thirty when I walked through the front door, and Chela had already been home for two hours. I barely greeted Dad in the living room, and Marcela had left for the day.
Chela might be on the phone with him right now
, I thought as I bounded up the stairs.

I flung Chela's door open, forgetting to knock.

She wasn't on her phone, or sitting at her computer. She was sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, combing out her hair. Chela rarely wore her hair loose; I'd forgotten she had so much, with wiry spirals flowing toward her neck. She hid her hair most of the time, but
it had been loose in her photos to Internet Guy. The memory made me feel sick to my stomach.

“Where's the phone?” I said to her startled,
who-me?
eyes.

“Jesus! It's called
knock
-ing.” But my face told her to cease the shit flow, so she kept quiet. She knew what I wanted, but dug in her purse and handed me her iPhone.

“Not that one,” I said. “Where's the phone he gave you? Put it in my hand
right now.
”

A pathetic desperation played across Chela's face. She knew it was useless to lie, but she couldn't think of an alternative. “What phone? What are you
talking
about—”

I went for her desk drawers first—the desk we'd chosen at Staples and I'd put together myself, piece by piece—throwing their contents to the floor. I saw gum wrappers, loose change, and a pack of Marlboro Lights, another broken promise. No surprise there. I had noticed the stink of cigarettes despite her gum and mints more than once, but I chose my battles. A slender flash drive fell out of the second drawer, and I stuck that in my back pocket.

Chela shrieked as if I'd struck her.
“Stop it!”
But she was frozen where she sat.

I yanked out her computer's power cords, and the screensaver photo of the two of us at Santa Monica pier vanished into blackness. “Where's the
phone,
Chela?” I said, lifting the monitor high. When she didn't answer—staring at me as if she couldn't quite place who I was—I surprised us both by throwing the monitor to the floor.

Even with carpeting, the screen cracked in two.

Chela jumped to her feet, as if she was afraid I would take better aim next time. She did a spin toward the door, but I blocked her and slammed it shut.

“Stop it!”
she screamed. “I'm getting out of here—freak!”

“Oh,
I'm
a freak?” I said. The next words tumbled out of my mouth before I could think about what marks they might leave. “That's a joke, coming from a girl who sends dirty pictures to an old-ass man. Give me the fucking phone!”

I picked up the computer's brain next, the CPU, raising it above my head. Chela covered her head with her arms, hunching herself in a ball. I sure as hell would never throw any object at her, much less one that heavy—and I wasn't going to trash an eight-hundred-dollar computer—but maybe she didn't know that. Blood infused her face beneath her skin, splotchy and dark.

“M-my term paper's on there…” Chela whimpered.

I didn't know if she really gave a damn about her term paper or if she was only pretending to, but her sudden tears looked real enough. Chela's helplessness drained away my anger's volatility. Most of my rage wasn't for her. That realization flooded me with shame.

One of my ears heard Dad calling from downstairs, wondering what was going on.

I lowered the CPU to the floor and sighed. My voice grew whisper-soft: “The phone.”

This time, Chela reached under her mattress and pulled out a small black cell phone I didn't recognize. When she gave it to me, she didn't meet my eyes. For only the second time since I'd known her, Chela sobbed. She fled across the room, finding the bathroom. She slammed the door, and I heard it lock.

Standing outside of that closed bathroom door, I remembered how tired I was. The racket in my head made it hard to sleep at night. All of April's warnings blended with the clanging in my head:
You're in over your head, Ten.

I stood in front of the bathroom door, trying to think of magic words. None came.

“Did somebody used to hit you, Chela?”

“Until I learned how to change their mood.” Her voice was muffled. She blew her nose.

“Who was it?”

“News flash: Who didn't? What do you care? You don't know shit about me!”

“So tell me.”

After a while, Chela came out of the bathroom, and we both sat on the carpet, avoiding the bed. She'd come on to me once, at the very beginning, and I was always careful when I was in her room. Most of the time, I didn't enter her room at all.

Chela took a deep breath before she began, as if she were jumping into a pool:

“Nana was dead in her bed five days before anybody knew but me. She was the only one raising me, except she was dying, so she wasn't taking care of me—mostly, it was me taking care of her. She signed the checks, and I tried to make life less shitty for her at the end. Literally. Made sure she was clean and had enough to eat. We were a pretty damn good team. And she felt so bad, always talking about how she wished she could do more, telling me she couldn't believe how different my mom was after she started doing meth. She said it was like a demon came and took over my mom's body.

“So I try to remember my mom from Nana's stories about what she was like in school, and how she got accepted into college, but by then she was off track. After that. Mom was just the same fuckup I already knew, who hadn't come to visit us for two Christmases in a row. I try to feel sorry for her, but I spend most of my time hating her. It was bad enough to do that to your kid—but your dying mother? That's sick. My father might have died over some stupid gangsta drug shit, but at least he had an excuse for not being there to make sure Nana didn't die and leave me alone.

“But that's exactly what the fuck happened. I go to her room to
make sure she's breathing…and she's not. She finally died. Finally. What did I do? I went to school. I wasn't dealing with it. That night was a lot of crying and hating life—
It's not fair! It's not fair!
All that shit—but I went to school again the next day. I got one hundred percent on a vocab test in my English class. And you say I can't concentrate on anything? No focus? My ass.

“So there I am, ten years old, eating SpaghettiOs and stale bread. Living with a dead lady. And now I'm thinking I'll be in trouble with the police for not saying anything sooner—I can just see myself on
Cops,
or in one of those interrogation rooms like on TV, with these cops standing over me with their arms folded, all like ‘So, young lady, why didn't you report your grandmother's death sooner? Was there foul play?' This is what's going on in my head. I used to pick up the phone and consider leaving anonymous tips, but then I'd think how stupid that was. They would know it was from me! And I even turned the heat off because…you know…I'm only ten, but I understand you can't leave a dead body lying out when it's hot. And this is Minneapolis, so let me tell you, house without heat gets pretty damn cold.

“But I wasn't ready to say, ‘Hey, okay, I give up my whole world now.' Nana's house was always too cold, and smelled like piss and vomit, but it was the only home I had. I liked my room. My school. My friends. I had this crazy fantasy that Mom would show up out of the blue, and suddenly she'd be off the meth, just in time to solve all my problems. That is definitely the way it would happen in a movie, so I even wasted time going through Nana's pile of telephone numbers for Mom, Last Known Number kind of thing, trying to see if I could find her. I'm making all these calls, waking people up all times of day and night, but trying to act all casual, like, “Hey, is Sherry around?,” and some people were like “Sherry Who?” but most people said, “I didn't know Sherry had a kid.” I couldn't make myself say her mother was dead, or I was alone. I couldn't say it to strangers, and
they didn't know shit anyway. I thought I had a lead, but it only went to a pay phone. I cried over that shit for about six hours.

“To be honest, I would have held out much longer than five days—I was thinking of long-term plans, maybe burying her in the backyard. But then the gas man came. I saw the truck drive up, and I run outside to make sure he isn't from a SWAT team or something. And he's walking around the house over to Nana's window to read the meter. The meter's right below Nana's curtains. And I know I closed her curtain, but in my mind there's just enough gap for him to see something's not right: ‘Whoa—there's a dead body in there.'

“Or maybe he just seemed like a nice guy, somebody's dad, and while he was standing next to that window, I thought about how sad he would feel for me if he knew. And, man, the floodgates just started. ‘My gramma's dead! My gramma's dead!' I almost gave the poor guy a heart attack. He probably still sees my face in bad dreams. It made the news and everything—
CHILD LEFT FOR DAYS WITH DEAD GRANDMOTHER
. I think it was even on national news, someone told me that, but I had other fish to fry.

“The child authorities, not knowing my mom like I did, were sure all the publicity would make her come flying in like Wonder Woman. So it wasn't awful in the beginning—I was at this low-stress group home, and I thought of it like this summer camp I went to once, except with nicer beds. I cried a lot, but nobody gave me shit about it, and the caseworkers were really on top of my situation because it was in the news.

“Six months go by. Nothing. Suddenly they're talking about a foster family, and this couple comes and takes me home with them. They already had six other foster kids there, so it's not like they were bad people, it was just an unhappy place to be. Not yelling, but too much noise. So I ran away—for the first time.

“The funny part is, that was the best place I would be for a long
time. I just didn't know it yet. I wish I'd known. I would have stuck around.

“But I was the Runaway Queen. Any shit I didn't like, I was gone. I don't like the way foster dad's looking at me, I'm gone. Somebody tries to pull the my-thing-or-the-highway routine on me too hard-core, I'm taking the highway every time. Whatever. That's me. I knew from jump that nobody could take care of me except M-E. A dead body under your roof will teach you that whole lesson about being alone in the world pretty damn quick. So one day I just said, “Fuck it!” and jumped in this guy's Ford pickup, and by some miracle he didn't murder me somewhere on the drive between Minneapolis and California. What he wanted in return for the ride didn't seem like that big a deal.”

I hated to even wonder.

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Old enough to eat corn bread without choking. Freak that he was, at least he was a freak who kept his word, and as soon as we crossed the California state line, I was like, “Okay, I gotta go.” And that was it, we parted ways. I figured that wasn't my shining moment in terms of decisions, but I'd figure it out later. I didn't know how far Los Angeles was from where I'd gotten out, so I was hungry that same day. Dumb luck, if you can call it that: I got caught stealing from a gas station right from the beginning. I think that guy was keeping his eye on me the whole time—I must have looked like I didn't have shit, which I didn't. He made me blow him, then called the cops anyway, and I got sent to juvie. I didn't tell them my real name. I never said I was from Minneapolis. Nobody could get my story.

“So they lost interest and flushed me into the system. First place they sent me, I said something smart to the guy's wife, and he smacked me across the head. And he was a prison guard for a living, for real. Six months was like six hundred years.

“Then my caseworker sent me to a group home, I got popped for trying to steal an iPod with this friend of mine—shit, everybody had iPods but us—and I spent six months in juvie. Let's just say that I now understand what people mean when they say they'd rather die than go to prison. You don't mean shit. You're a number. You have no rights. Somebody's telling you when to sleep, when to eat, when to turn the lights off. I lost fifteen pounds in six months, and I never weighed that much to begin with. I thought it was just the shitty food—Oh, I didn't even mention how shitty the food is—but really I think I was on a hunger strike and didn't know it. I threw up a lot.

“I told God if he ever got me out of there alive, I would never go to juvie again. And that is one promise I definitely intend to keep. I was in another group home for a while, and I really tried to make that work, but one day I met Mother, and that was that.”

Mother was Chela's madam.
Our
madam.

Mother had brought Chela into my life. Mother was worried about one of her prize breadwinners after Chela disappeared with a celebrity client—and I like to think Mother was genuinely worried about her, too, even if it's best not to ascribe normal human emotion to her. Mother had asked me to find Chela; I did, but just never brought Chela back. I couldn't.

I started working for Mother when I was twenty-five, back when I was even more hardheaded when it came to seeing a mistake in plain sight. But Chela had been only thirteen when Mother found her. I'd figured out that much. Mother always said she didn't send Chela out with clients until a year after taking her in, but you're a fool to believe Mother at her word.