Rundown (10 page)

Mom folded her arms and said, “Detective Margate called.”

“What about?” I asked, my legs a little stiff from the saddle. I wanted a shower, my Quinn-glow fading.

“We aren't supposed to tell anyone: Oakland Police are about to make an arrest.”

My throat closes when I feel too much all at once. Dad has the same problem. I gave the little cough I copied from him, half nervous habit, half necessity. “They're about to catch someone?”

“According to Margate.”

“Who is he?”

She shook her head: I don't know. “People have been calling,” she said. “Friends crawling out of the woodwork. They know what happened. People talk.”

I found it a little troublesome to breathe but kept at it, the way you do twenty meters down, trusting your equipment.

She shifted a finger, got a better grip on her elbow. “I called Dr. Yellin.”

Dr. Yellin, my mom's psychiatric hero. She had taken a course from him, and he had written on her paper a giant pink “Brava!” She thought he was the wisest man on the planet.

“I want to help the police, if I can,” I said, not putting enough power into the words.

“I think you've been through enough,” she said. “I have my doubts about you going down to the police department for the lineup, all those detectives getting their hooks into you.”

My voice said, “I only heard a few words.”

Wait a minute
.

“It wouldn't be a visual lineup, in your case. They might even have the spoken words on tape, Margate tells me. But she pleads for our cooperation.”

“Tonight?”

“She wants to see you now. She wants to review the case. We have to be reasonable.” Mom was doing her usual form of pacing, standing in one corner, delivering a few words, appearing in another part of the room, uttering a few more. It must be some old opera training, keeping the audience entranced while she tried to hit those high Cs.

Mom was trying to convince herself, so I kept my mouth shut.

“We want to help,” she was saying. “Up to a point. The TV and newspapers don't know the case is going to break. Margate says Berkeley PD can sit on the news a day or less, but then the Oakland police blotter and the DA's office will leak once they grab the guy, no matter what. She wants to review your options.”

“What does that mean?”

Mom acts in control but puts too much effort into it, arranging magazines on the coffee table, straightening pillows on the sofa. I knew that if Cass told my mother about Dad it would hurt.

“There must be something distinctive about the suspect's voice,” Mom went on. “Something only you would know. An accent, a lisp, some special quality. You can help the cops nail this guy, the way no one else can.” She hesitated, waiting for me to chime in with a description of the voice.

Wait a minute
. I imagined the words spoken in different voices: a rasp, a musical tenor, a Daffy-Duck sputter.

“She says then it will be hard to keep your identity a secret. No one will print your name, but everyone will know without saying. If they can keep the man in custody without your testimony, they'll do it.”

“So I won't have to testify,” I said.

“You probably will, at the preliminary hearing, but they can do it through deposition. They'll seek to protect your identity because you're a minor.”

“I'll be one of those talking silhouettes. Like those ex-CIA agents who tell all to the news.”

“I called Marcell Springer. He said freeze-dry you, talk to a head doctor, and keep you out of the picture.”

I recognized the name of Mom's old lawyer friend, the one who helped her beat the speeding ticket. I also recognized his choice of words. But I would do anything before I spoke with Dr. Yellin, Mom's own personal psychological Buddha. “So—what's the difference, if everybody knows,” I said.

“Jennifer,” she said: Don't be an idiot.

“I'll be respected,” I said, finally getting some electricity into my voice. “I'll be an example to women, not to be afraid.”

“That's not the way to handle this,” she said.

“What if the suspect won't cooperate?” I said.

“I told her no way would I subject you to an ordeal,” said my mother. “I said we would seek our own medical counsel before we made a move.”

“This guy they are about to arrest is going to say ‘Wait a minute'? Like he's auditioning for a play. Step forward and sound like a rapist, Mr. Doe. That doesn't make any sense. Why would a criminal say something in a lineup, like he's happy to be able to help. What kind of lawyers does this poor guy have?”

“He might be innocent,” said my mother.

For a moment I thought, My mother doesn't believe me.

But then she continued, “All I want to do is protect you, Jennifer. I would love to go back in time and erase this, like it never happened.”

Maybe they won't catch the suspect, I thought. Maybe he's thrusting his dirty socks and K-mart denims into a bag, leaving for the other side of the world.

“Where's Dad?”

“He's on his way.”

The Southwest Air 11:05 from L.A. was one of my dad's favorite flights, always half empty, and he could pick whatever seat he wanted.

“I saw a robbery once,” Mom was saying, “on the sidewalk, when I was younger than you.” I knew the story well, but now this legend from my mother's past really mattered. “It was in downtown Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue, a big man with a sawed-off baseball bat knocking down a man carrying a briefcase.”

She could see it now, after all this time, and she wished she couldn't.

It was one of those stories people tell over and over. Sometimes you don't want to hear them, sometimes you do. “Police had me sitting in the police station looking at mug shots, and for years I'd dream about those black-and-white photos, those grim, tired, hard-looking men.”

It was like she was telling me this for the first time. “I'd dream I was looking at a row of faces,” she said, “and they came to life. They moved their lips. They frowned. One by one they moved their eyes. And looked right at me.”

When the doorbell made its ding-dong, a computer chip programmed to sound like iron bells, Mom gave me a reassuring smile.

I crept upstairs. I shut my bedroom door quietly but firmly and stood beside the jamb. The house was big, and the walls were thick. The faintest murmur seeped through to me, Detective Margate's consonants, her s's sharp, like a badly tuned radio.

I pressed my skull against the doorjamb, but the vague, simmering murmurs would not distill into words. Months from now people would pass me in corridors and whisper, She helped the police break the case. She fought off the attacker.

When people knew the truth about me, all this would vanish.

Chapter 18

My mother writes exams for software companies, tests designed to cull crooks and risk-lovers. To the statement “You like a lot of excitement in your life,” the correct answer is
No
. If you check
Yes
beside “You like to drive fast sometimes, just for fun,” you'll end up working somewhere else.

Some of these tests are administered face to face, job seeker and psychologist. I took some of these exams, trying them out, cueing Mom when a question was too obvious. No one wanting a job would answer
yes
to, “I have been in shouting matches with my boss.”

When you lie, sometimes your eyes look upward, at the questioner's eyebrows. Sometimes your foot gives a little kick, unconsciously booting the question away. Listen for the pauses in the examiner's voice, Mom always said.

The tests are so easy I'm surprised anyone ever fails.

The detective stayed a longer time than I expected, like someone returning a borrowed book, saying they loved the ending, no time for any decaf, but then lingering anyway, to talk about their favorite chapter, the one where the murderer blurts the truth.

Afterward, my mother tapped on my door with her fingernails and said, “She's overworked.” She wrinkled her nose as she said this, meaning, Just between you and me. “Her husband is a contractor—he remodels kitchens. They both want to have children.”

My mother asks, and people talk.

“She hates this attacker, whoever he is. Personally. She wants to see him rot on a meat hook. She says the Oakland police are staking out an apartment building on Fruitvale Avenue.”

“What did she say about him?”

“She said the suspect has been in and out of institutions for thirty years.”

“Institutions?” Not jails, not prisons. “A violent man,” I ventured.

“She says he's sugar to everyone, nice-nice, until he gets a woman alone.”

A sick feeling throbbed inside me.

“I said you weren't here,” Mom added.

“Did she believe you?”

Mom makes a quiet, pretty laugh through her nose, as though too courteous to laugh out loud.

“Are you sure she isn't watching the house?”

“You're as bad as Cass.” My sister had done a report on the CIA as a high school senior, and for months afterward was pointing out innocent-looking pedestrians who could be operatives.

“I'll have a talk with Dad,” she said. She usually referred to my father as Terry or Terrance.

I took a ten-second shower, toweled off, and skimmed into my nightie. I turned out my light. I was sure I could see the dim strobe of an emergency blinker, the cops sitting at the curb conferring. I stole across the floor and parted the drapes. The street was empty.

Plumbing whispered quietly in a far corner of the house, my mother taking a bath or a shower, trying to quiet her mind so she would be able to sleep. The phone trilled beside me and I groped, knocked it off the bed, found it in the dark.

Cass gets affectionate and talky when she's sleepy. She asked how I was feeling, was I getting enough rest, and then, niceties observed, careened right into her usual topic A. She said Danny found everything too easy, he rarely even had to study.

I said that this was hard for people like Cass and me to understand, because our own parents had worked so hard. Cass had always complained about Danny, said he was too good looking and that he was always going off to embassy cocktail parties with his parents, meeting God knew what sort of French-speaking temptress. It was her way of bragging.

“Well, Dad didn't exactly suffer,” Cass began.

“Remember how he didn't want us to see how upset he was when the restaurant burned?”

Cass had picked up a knowledge of sleeping pills from one of her first boyfriends, a pre-med student with an MG. I wondered if she had been mixing a few sleepy-time tablets with a glass of wine. For an instant I worried, thinking: Barbiturates, alcohol, coma.

Cass was making her feline sound of a person mulling heavy ideas, not to be interrupted. A yawn, or half yawn, flared the silence. “It's true—there were tears in his eyes,” she said.

I found myself thinking how much easier it would be on Dad if the wedding was called off.

I looked dumpy in my maid-of-honor dress, a robin's-egg blue Dupioni silk V-neck with a sweeping, A-line skirt. I didn't look cavewoman, but I didn't look half as good as Cassandra did in her princess-line skirt, off-the-shoulder bodice, white all the way. The wedding consultant had told Dad this was the glamorous but understated look an afternoon wedding demanded.

I had expected the consultant to be a friendly Dracula, eager to watch the fittings, all of us in our undies. Instead he had the carelessly well-dressed manner of a basketball coach and talked about
flow:
traffic, caterers. “Attention wants to flow to the bride.”

“I'd have a heart attack,” she continued, “rather than call off the wedding. If we agreed to get divorced right after the ceremony, we're going through with it, no matter what.” A brace of her Stanford friends, willowy and talkative, were going to be stunning as bridesmaids, a court of powder-blue dresses.

“Dr. Theobald is going to recite a poem,” I said.

As she sometimes does when approached by news she dislikes, she checked her hearing, made sure her data was sound before she reacted. “Dr. Theobald is doing
what?”

I told her again, same words, same tone of voice.

“I didn't agree to that.”

“Dad left me a note, like it's especially wonderful news.”

She didn't sound sleepy now. “I told Dad that Dr. Theobald is unreliable.” She said his name with mockingly overcorrect pronunciation
Tib-buld
. “I don't even like the way his voice sounds when he reads.”

“It doesn't say what poem. But Dad used three exclamation points.”

“My God, what if Dr. Theobald
wrote
this poem and he's going to recite it out loud.” She was wide-awake—I could almost hear the sheets slithering off her.

It would be easy to think that Cass had picked Danny out of a catalog, a glossy sampler of handsome guys sure to make bucks. She met him at a Monday Night Football party in Palo Alto, the pony keg nearly empty. They had volunteered to go out for more Miller Lite, and they missed the second half, never came back with so much as a bag of pretzels. Danny believed in God, could read German, and had once owned a budgie named Fatty. He told me he'd teach me how to play five-card draw, and every time he saw me he asked how Marta was doing, was I still running.

I was imagining demanding sexual practices, urgent appetites. “Danny's used to having everything his way,” Cass said, not about to be bought off with a change of subjects.

I sensed that I was trespassing, but tiptoed ahead. “Danny's insistent,” I hazarded.

Thinking about Danny calmed her, like he was a familiar bedtime story. “If I say I don't want halibut, it has those bones that scratch your throat, he just laughs and has the fish man weigh out the biggest halibut on ice.”

“Danny cooks?”