Manhattan Mayhem (13 page)

“Doc? It’s that cop again. Are you near a computer? I want to send that surveillance video to you and have you see if it looks like any of these people on her list.”

“Detective, I haven’t met them all.”

“You’ve met more of them than I have.”

“Okay. Right now?”

“Yeah. Right now, if you don’t mind. Or even if you do.”

“Wait?” Sam asked his wife.

She nodded, continuing to jog in place.

By the time Sam reached his computer, the e-mail was already there in his inbox. He clicked the video into action and watched while his heart felt as if it was hammering within every cell of his body, as if it might hammer so hard that it could beat him to death.

The quality was poor, but one thing was clear.

The figure in the hoodie and jogging pants was slouching against the wall of a building, with his hands pressed between his body and the wall and his left foot propped against it.

Sam didn’t collapse with relief while the detective was still on the phone with him. But when they hung up, he sank down onto the carpet, crossed his arms over his knees, put his face on his arms, and sobbed into them.

His wife came in, saw him, and ran to him, putting her arms around him. “What? Oh, Sam, honey, what?”

“It was the boyfriend. Priss’s boyfriend killed her.”

His wife collapsed into him, weeping, too.

“Oh, thank God it wasn’t you, Sam.”

A week passed before he could tell her the whole truth that he learned from the detective: Priss broke up with her boyfriend when he became scarily possessive and jealous, her sister told the police, and then Sydney pushed him further and further down that path. To turn him against Priscilla and toward herself, she told him about Priss’s former
boyfriends, increasing the numbers to spice up the story, claiming that one or two were still in her sister’s life while Priss was seeing him. Then, to light the final fuse to his wounded ego and growing rage, she said: “And I’ll bet she never even told you she had a baby with another man.”

NANCY PICKARD
’
s short stories have won Anthony, Agatha, Barry, Macavity, and American Short Story awards and have been featured in many “year’s best” anthologies. She has been an Edgar Award finalist for her short fiction and for three of her eighteen novels. She has served on the national board of directors of MWA and is a founding member and former president of Sisters in Crime. She lives near Kansas City, where she is working on a novel and percolating future short stories. Her favorite short story is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway, because it says everything that needs to be said and evokes deep feeling and understanding, and it does all that (in her opinion) in clean, well-lighted sentences.

She’d been found in the dilapidated Bronx apartment where she’d lived for the past seventeen months. It was a basement apartment and had only a couple small windows, but she’d made it darker still by drawing the curtains. It was so dim inside that the first cop to arrive had stumbled about, looking for a light switch. He’d finally found one only to discover that she’d unscrewed all the light bulbs, even the ones in the ceiling and the fluorescent ones on either side of the bathroom mirror. Neighbors later told police that they hadn’t seen a single sliver of light coming from her apartment for well over a month. It was as if the terrible capacity for destruction that I’d glimpsed in her so many years before had at last grown strong enough to consume her entirely.

A Detective O’Brien had related the grim details over the phone, the deteriorated condition of her body being the most graphic, the fact that the smell had alerted the neighbors. Then he’d asked me to meet him at the police station nearest my home. “Just following standard procedure,” he’d assured me, “Nothing to worry about.”

We’d agreed on a time and date, and so now here I was, dealing with Maddox again, just as I’d done so often before.

“So, tell me, what was your relationship with this young woman?” Detective O’Brien asked immediately after we’d exchanged greetings and I’d taken a seat in the metal chair beside his desk. His tone was casual enough, but there was an implication of something illicit in the word
relationship.

“We took her in when she was a little girl,” I told him.

“How little?”

“She was ten when she came to live with us.”

That had been twenty-four years earlier. My family and I had lived in Hell’s Kitchen when there’d still been some hell left in it; sex shops and hot-sheet hotels, burnt-out prostitutes offering themselves on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Eighth. Now it was all theaters and restaurants, chartered buses unloading well-heeled senior citizens from Connecticut and New Jersey. Once it had been a neighborhood, bad though it was. Now it was an attraction.

“Us?” Detective O’Brien asked, still with a hint of probing for something unseemly. Had I abused this child? Is that why she’d embraced the darkness? Luckily, I knew that nothing could be further from the truth.

“With my wife and me, and our daughter Lana, who was just a year younger than Maddox,” I told him. “She stayed with us for almost a year. We’d planned for her to stay with us indefinitely. Lana had always wanted a sister. But as it turned out, we just weren’t prepared to keep a girl like that.”

“Like what?”

I avoided the word that occurred to me:
dangerous.

“Difficult,” I said. “Very difficult.”

And so I’d sent her back to her single mother and her riotous older brother, hardly giving her a thought since. But now this bad penny had returned, spectacularly.

“How did she come to live with you in the first place?” O’Brien asked.

“Her mother was an old friend of ours,” I answered. “So was her father, but he died when Maddox was two years old. Anyway, her mother had lost her job. We were doing well, my wife and I, so we offered to bring Maddox to New York, pay for the private school our daughter also attended. The hope was to give her a better life.”

O’Brien’s expression said everything:
But instead
 …

But instead, Maddox had ended up in the morgue.

“Did you know she was in New York?” the detective asked.

I shook my head. “Her mother remarried and moved to California. After that, we lost touch. The last I heard, Maddox was in the Midwest somewhere. After that, we had no idea where she was or what she was doing. What was she doing, by the way?”

“She’d been working as a cashier at a diner on Gun Hill Road,” O’Brien told me.

“Maddox was very smart,” I said. “She could have … done anything.”

The detective’s eyes told me that he’d heard a story like this one before; a smart kid who’d gotten a great chance but blown it.

I couldn’t keep from asking the question. “How did she die? On the phone, you just said her body had been found.”

“From the looks of it, malnutrition,” O’Brien answered. “No sign of drugs or any kind of violence.” He asked a few more questions, wanted to know if I’d heard from Maddox over the last few months, whether I knew the whereabouts of any family members, questions he called “routine.” I answered him truthfully, of course, and he appeared to accept my answers.

After a few minutes, he got to his feet. “Well, thanks for coming in, Mr. Gordon,” he said. “Like I said when I asked you to come down to the station, it’s just that your name came up during the course of the
investigation.”

“Yes, you said that. But you didn’t tell me how my name happened to come up.”

“She’d evidently mentioned you from time to time,” O’Brien explained with a polite smile. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he added as he offered his hand. “I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course,” I said, and then I rose and headed for the door, sorry that Maddox’s life had ended so early and so badly but also reminding myself that, in regard to my finally pulling the plug on the effort I’d made to help her, she’d truly given me no choice.

At that thought, her image appeared vividly in my mind: a little girl in the rain, waiting for the taxi that would take us to the airport, the way she’d glanced back at me an hour or so later as she headed toward the boarding ramp, her lips silently mouthing the last word she would say to me:
“Sorry.”

But sorry for what? I’d asked myself at that moment, for by then she’d had so much to confess.

“Did you see her body?”

I shook my head. “There was no need. The building super had already identified her.”

“Odd that your name came up at all,” Janice said. “That she’d … talked about you.”

My wife and I sat with our evening glasses of wine, peering down onto a Forty-Second Street that looked nothing at all as it had when Maddox lived with us. Night was falling, and below our twelfth-floor balcony, people were on their way to Broadway, among them a few families with small children, some no doubt headed for
The Lion King.

“So, she came back to New York,” Janice said in that meditative way of hers, like a philosopher working with an idea. After a moment, a dark notion seemed to strike her. “Jack?”