Now or Never (30 page)

“You think so?”

Harry could tell he wanted to believe it, and he wanted him to as well. “Sure I do. That’s usually the way it happens. A victim walks into an unknown situation. It’s sad but true.”

“But she was a good nurse, a nice girl. Christ, she was hardly old enough to be called a woman—she was too young, too … aw, she didn’t deserve this.”

“No one does,” Harry said. He took a statement, then grabbed a cup of coffee and made his way to the morgue.

The air conditioning was blasting noisily as he stepped through the steel doors into the cold, white-tiled autopsy room. Over the din he could hear Dr. Blake humming as he analyzed Suzie Walker’s body.

She was lying on a steel autopsy table beneath a strong overhead light. Blake had already cleaned the body and completed his preliminary examination, dictating his notes into a microphone suspended over the table as he went along. Each fingernail had been scraped for particles of skin or fiber that might have been caught in the struggle, and hair samples has been combed and clipped from her pubic hair as well as her head and eyebrows. The body bag, along with her underwear, had been preserved for trace evidence and would be sent to the crime lab.

A photographer was taking still shots and videotaping
the proceedings. Blake was proceeding with his examination.

“No hypostasis, indicating that she was not killed when lying on her back and then moved. She probably died in the kneeling position in which she was found,” he said briskly into the microphone. Then he hummed some more, as he indicated on a chart the exact locations of the stab wounds and their depth. He took swabs to establish whether there had been a sexual assault and stated that evidence already indicated that there had not.

He glanced up at Harry, still standing by the door. “Come on in, detective,” he said mildly. “Might as well make a night of it, now we’re all up anyway.”

Harry stayed where he was; what had happened to Suzie was obscene enough, and he didn’t want to see her defiled by Dr. Blake, even if it was his job.

“You’ll know by now who this is,” Blake said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t really know Nurse Walker myself—not in my department, y’know. But she worked alongside me the other week, when the tropical storm caused all that mayhem on the roads. She was a good nurse, quick-thinking, clever. It’s a great pity. Yes, a great pity.”

Blake was humming tonelessly again as he picked up the dissecting knife. Harry wished impatiently that he would at least find an identifiable tune. He sounded like a percolator on the bubble.

Blake held the knife over Suzie’s body, then made a deep incision from the neck to the pubis, detouring the navel, where the tissue was tougher.

“Hmm,” he said, inspecting his handiwork. “Hmm, I see.” He removed the organs, slid the stomach away, opened it up with scissors, and proceeded to empty the brownish contents into a large container.

“Not much here,” he said to Harry. “She didn’t eat much on her last night apparently. Nor did she drink.”

Harry had been present at many autopsies, but this was
like watching Suzie being killed all over again. Sickened, he turned away. “Let me have the results as soon as you can, doctor,” he called, pushing back through the heavy doors. He told himself it was the icy room, but he felt chilled to his bones.

Driving slowly back to the precinct, his mind was still filled with the sights and sounds of the terrible night.

Rossetti was at the computer, he was busy putting the evidence on file.

“What d’you think, Harry?” he asked somberly.

Harry flung himself into an office chair. He swung it from side to side, staring upward into space.

“I think life’s a bitch, Rossetti,” he said. And he meant it.

M
AL COULDN’T SLEEP
that night. She shuffled her pillows around, seeking a comfortable spot, threw off the blanket, and tossed and turned until she was wrapped like a mummy in the wrinkled sheets. Sighing, she unraveled herself and got up.

Folding her arms over her chest, she went to the window. The night was clear and starry, filled with the pinkish glow from the lights of Manhattan. She thought about Detective Harry working at the precinct, drinking too much coffee, the way he’d told her he always did on the graveyard shift.

The graveyard shift
. The words repeated themselves in her head, and she shivered, thinking again about her mother.

She remembered how she felt the day the letter arrived from the college admissions office: dizzy with excitement and sick with fear. The white envelope with Washington State University printed on it lay on the gray plastic kitchen table with the angled metal legs that somehow always smacked you right in the shin when you sat down. She couldn’t bear to open it. Her mother was smoking, staring blankly into space. There was a furrow between her brows as though she was suffering, but Mallory knew her pain came from the dark thoughts in her mind.

“It’s the letter from the university, Mom,” she said.

Her mother’s gaze shifted momentarily into focus. “Oh,” she said.

“I’m scared to open it, Mom,” she persisted. “Why don’t you do it for me?” She pushed the envelope across the table with the tips of her fingers. All her hopes were in there. It was life or death. If she got in, she lived—she would work hard, and she would have a future. If she failed, she would work at the Lido Café or the Golden Supermart until she died from monotony and loneliness. She held her breath as her mother reached out and slowly picked up the envelope.

She looked at it, read the name and address, turned it over and over in her thin nervous fingers. She sighed and pushed back her straggling gray-blond hair, took a sip of the cold coffee, and lit another cigarette from a burning stub.

Mary Mallory thought she would just die from the tension. “Open it, Mom,” she urged, hardly recognizing her own voice, it was so rough with anxiety.

Her mother stuck the cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Narrowing her faded blue eyes against the smoke, she ran a broken fingernail under the seal. Mary Mallory clasped her hands tightly together on top of the table. She hardly dared look as her mother slowly unfolded the letter.

Her mother ran her eyes over the few lines. Then she refolded the letter and put it back on the table. Her eyes became blank again.

“Mom?” Mary Mallory controlled herself and there was only a tiny wobble in her voice.

Her mother took another puff on the cigarette, waving away the smoke with a thin hand.

“Mom!”
she cried, agonized.
“What did it say?”

Her mother shook her head, startled out of her torpor. “Oh. Oh, it said they have given you a scholarship … I think.”

Mary Mallory took a great gulp of air and snatched up the letter, opened it, read it. And then she screamed. She leaped to her feet; she kissed the letter and screamed again, jumping up and down, wild with joy, until the flimsy trailer rattled on its cinderblock supports.

“I got in!” she yelled.
“Mom, I got in!”

Her mother was staring out of the window. “Look, Mary Mallory, it’s raining again,” she said matter-of-factly.

And then Mary Mallory did something unthinkable. She ran to her mother and she kissed her. On the cheek. Her mother flinched and put a hand to her face, shocked. “Put on your poncho when you go out in the rain,” she reminded her.

But Mary Mallory didn’t care. Nothing mattered except that she had been accepted. She wouldn’t have to die alone in Golden.

Graduation from high school passed in a quick blur. Her name was read out, and she walked, blushing, onto the platform to pick up her diploma, but her mother was not there to see her.

She did not attend the prom. For weeks all the other girls had talked about was their dresses and boys, whether they would receive a corsage, and who they would neck with afterward in lovers’ lane on the cliff road, hidden by towering sequoias and madronas and ponderosa pines.

Mary Mallory had kept out of their way. She wished she could plug up her ears so she would not have to listen to their endless chatter, but still it seeped through in the rest rooms where they endlessly fixed their hair, in the schoolyard at recess, in the cafeteria where she ate lunch, her nose in a book, alone as always.

Only one teacher bothered to congratulate her on getting a scholarship.

“You’re a hard worker, Mary Mallory,” she said approvingly. “With a college education, you’ll be able to get
a decent job and make something of yourself.” She didn’t say “instead of ending up like your no-good mother,” but Mary Mallory knew that was what she was thinking.

For a long time now, she had been working evenings and weekends at the Lido Café; chopping onions and clearing dishes and pouring cups of coffee to earn extra money. Now she began to save up for college.

She took an extra job through the summer at Bardett’s Drugstore, stocking shelves and unpacking; anything menial they needed, she did it. She was able to buy herself a couple of sweaters and T-shirts and a pair of jeans, as well as a cheap duffel bag to pack them in. She thought the long summer days would never end, she was so eager to leave and begin living. But she worried about leaving her mother alone.

Finally, her bag was packed, the bus ticket purchased, and the address and phone number of her dorm carefully printed out and stuck on the old refrigerator door. They couldn’t afford a telephone, and in case of emergency she told her mother to use a pay phone. She had washed and polished the Chevy—all she had to do now was convince her mother to drive it, so she could pick up the food stamps and buy her own groceries.

“Come on, Mom,” she said, taking her arm and levering her from the chair where she was watching television. “We’re going out for a drive.”

“You go, Mary Mallory.” Her mother pushed her arm away, but Mary Mallory was determined. She threw her arm firmly around her shoulders and walked her from the trailer into the hazy late-afternoon sunshine.

“It’s a lovely day, Mom. I thought we’d go buy your cigarettes, then maybe pick up something nice for supper at the market. It’s a celebration, you know.”

Her mother allowed herself to be bundled into the driver’s seat, and Mary Mallory put the keys in the ignition. “Remember when you drove here, Mom? All the
way from Seattle? All you have to do now is drive to the market and the gas station.”

Her mother crouched over the wheel. She put her foot on the gas and they sped off down the hill. Heads turned as they walked together into the Supermart, and Mary Mallory blushed, feeling eyes on them. She knew they made an odd couple: she with her thick bottle-glasses, her thin sticklike limbs, and her old flowered cotton dress from the thrift shop; and her mother with her wild curling hair, her vacant eyes and emaciated face, in a once-white shirt and blue skirt that exposed too much of her skinny legs. They looked
poor
, she thought angrily. They were poor. In fact, people didn’t come much poorer than she and her mom. How much further down could you go when you had nothing?

Then she reminded herself that
now
she had something. She was going to have a college education. She felt that same surge of elation she had experienced the day her mother had told her they were going to live at the seaside. With a college education she would finally be someone.

They paced slowly up and down the aisles while she showed her mother what to buy and what to do with the food stamps at the checkout. Her mother walked through it like a woman in a dream. Mary Mallory only hoped she would remember what to do.

Back home, she barbecued the celebration steaks on the rusted little hibachi outside. She opened a can of baked beans to go with them, and they sat silently across the table from each other. Her mother toyed uninterestedly with the steak. As Mary Mallory looked at her, her heart filled with despair. She had needed to share her small triumph, her pleasure, her excitement with her mother, but it was no good. Even the celebration supper was a failure.

Her mother was sitting on the orange vinyl sofa the next morning, watching the
Today
show when Mary Mallory came to say good-bye.

“I’m going now, Mom,” she said wistfully to the thin, pathetic figure hunched in a corner of the sofa. Her mother glanced vaguely at her, then back at the program. She said again, “I’m leaving for college, Mom.”

“I know,” her mother answered in the same mild tone she used for any news, good or bad. “Have a good time, Mary Mallory.” And she lit a cigarette from a butt in the ashtray.

Mary Mallory let her hand rest for a moment on her mother’s hair. Tender feelings flowed from her—she wanted so badly to hug her, to kiss her, to know that her mother cared. “Bye, Mom,” she said.

Her mother got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “Good-bye,” she said distantly.

The campus was much bigger and more sprawling than Mary Mallory had expected. Nor had she realized she would have to share a room in the dorm with another girl. She knocked nervously on the door, waiting, until someone called, “Come in.”

Junie Bennett frowned when the door opened and Mary Mallory stepped inside. “Oh my lord, look what the cat dragged in,” she muttered under her breath. “Hi, I’m Junie Bennett,” she said out loud. “The bed nearest the window’s mine. Yours is over there.” She pointed to the one against the wall. “First come first served.” She inspected her roommate with critical green eyes.

“I’m Mary Mallory Malone.” She held out her hand, smiling hopefully.

“Mary Mallory.” Junie raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you have a nickname?”

“Oh … just Mary.” Surprised, she changed her name in an instant.

“I’m going out to meet some friends.” Junie snatched up her sweater and her bag. “Just keep your stuff to your own side of the room, please.”

Mary gazed wistfully after her. Junie Bennett was everything she would like to be—tall, blond and pretty, with a pert nose, red lipstick, loads of confidence, and a real gold bracelet on her summer-suntanned wrist. She even had a pet name—Junie. Mary bet she had been a cheerleader in high school. And she was so well-dressed—her smart red skirt and white shirt looked expensive and brand new.