The Price of Innocence (13 page)

‘Yeah. So how does she go from bouncing off the walls with excitement over her new TV set to slitting her wrists? That –’ he faced Theresa with eyes full of anger – ‘is what’s bothering me.’

She could see that. ‘Show me the body.’

Frank turned without speaking. She followed him through a kitchen cluttered with dirty dishes, unopened mail and loose food. Boxes of cereal stood open; one had fallen over and trailed Fruit Loops across the cracked laminate counter. Three cockroaches feasted there, too gorged to move as she walked by. A single navel orange, the only apparent concession to good health in the room, sat forlorn and forgotten behind the empty dish drainer. Theresa felt immense gratitude for her more hygienic upbringing.

Mail had been stacked on the table until the weight of it had pulled the top envelopes over. A number of them had warnings in red, dire predictions about the consequences of late payments, and seemed to have been soaked with water at some point. The cardboard box with the dead cop’s belongings sat as Angela had described. Next to it sat a small, empty box with bright red designs which had once held a cell phone.

The dog had been no neater with his food dish, or perhaps someone had accidentally kicked the bowl as they went by, because kibbles crunched under her feet. Not a single drawer or cabinet door was completely closed, but one stuck at least halfway out. This seemed to be the standard kitchen ‘junk drawer’, full of twist ties, assorted tools, take-out menus and a can opener.

She snapped a few pictures as they walked. A filthy home didn’t just represent a not terribly attractive lifestyle. It caused a serious problem in the investigation of the crime. At any scene investigators searched for items that didn’t belong, that stood out, that seemed to have been recently deposited. How could she find a stranger’s hairs or fibers on carpeting that hadn’t been swept in a decade, or determine if an intruder had knocked over a pile of items when everything in the house normally lived on the floor? Did the ex-boyfriend rip all the clothing out of the woman’s closet or did she simply find hangers too much trouble? There was a reason why investigators on TV always went to wealthy homes. How hard could it be to find a wayward casing in the rug when the maid had just vacuumed that morning?

The steps to the second floor creaked and Theresa stepped carefully to avoid tripping on the many loose strings – the floral tapestry runner reminded her of her grandmother’s house, as did the dark wood of the steps. Generations of footsteps had worn a groove into each one.

The upstairs held three tiny bedrooms and one bath, the conditions of all four on a par with the kitchen. The bathroom came first, at the top of the stairs. From the landing Theresa could see the too-white hand extend out over the edge of the porcelain tub and the puddle of blood on the floor. But she did a quick walk-through in the bedrooms first; once in the bathroom she would remain there for quite some time, so she might as well get a rounder picture of the victim before that. One bedroom must belong to the kid Frank had mentioned. It contained the electronic accouterments of a teenage boy’s life and smelled like team spirit.

‘What’s his name?’ she asked Frank, who leaned in the doorway. Over his shoulder, Angela watched Theresa.

‘Brandon.’ Some memory made him chuckle, a dry, mirthless rattle. This case bothered him, but she didn’t want to ask him about it with his partner standing there. No matter how close he and Angela might be, Theresa doubted they were to the point where Frank would be comfortable discussing a weakness. And letting your cases get to you was, in his view, a definite weakness.

A mattress on the floor and a stained comforter, shoved to one side, made up the bedding. A battered dresser with clothes overflowing from its drawers would have looked ransacked, but a healthy coating of dust on the edges made it clear that the compartments had been in that position for some time. Two notebooks sat neatly aligned at the foot of the mattress. Had young Brandon walked past the bathroom with his mother’s body to come into his room and drop off his school work?

‘Was the bathroom door closed when he came home?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Frank said.

Angela said, ‘From the way he described it, the door was not completely closed, but he said something about knocking on it before going in.’

Partially closed, so he probably had gone to his bedroom first. A boy would hardly want to walk in on his mother in the bathroom. But if he found the house unlocked he would assume she was home and eventually get curious about her location. Or simply need to use the toilet. ‘What about the house? Locked?’

‘Open.’

The next bedroom belonged to a female, one who wore tiny, shimmery tops and thong underwear. She also hadn’t been there in a long time; every item and surface had a half inch of dust on it. Frank explained about the daughter in jail.

Lily Simpson’s bedroom appeared similar to her son’s but with a slightly more feminine aspect. She seemed to be the same clothing size as her daughter but not as interested in dressing to appeal, owning mostly T-shirts and thin sweatpants, jeans and athletic shoes (called, in Cleveland, ‘tennis shoes’, despite the fact that few of its citizens had played the game since the mid-1970s). She had three books in the room, a dictionary, a paperback romance and the Bible, and one magazine (
Cosmo
). Two scratched CDs, Milli Vanilli and Tom Petty. Lily at least had a bed, with a wooden frame of indeterminate age and a set of unmade, threadbare sheets under a velour blanket with an assortment of dried stains. Theresa took a picture, and then gingerly pulled the top sheet back. None of the stains there seemed fresh.

A lamp stood on the nightstand between the bed and a badly painted wall. Next to it sat a box of tissues, a wadded-up bundle of bills, and three quarters. Theresa counted the money by its edges, without substantially moving the stack. Twelve dollars.

Also on the nightstand sat a wooden tray with an assortment of drug paraphernalia. Two butts left from marijuana cigarettes, a roach clip to hold same, a crack pipe made of pretty blue glass with cooked-on black residue in its bowl, a few of the inch-square baggies used to hold cocaine or heroin. No syringes, though, so the baggies must have held crack, or at least some drug that did not need to be injected.

‘I guess she never really got away from it,’ Angela said.

‘Drugs?’ Theresa asked.

‘She made it sound like a thing of the past. Maybe that’s why she felt a need to smear Marty Davis’ name a little. He got off the stuff. She didn’t.’

Frank moved away from the door.

T
heresa found him in the bathroom, a space barely large enough to hold the tub, a toilet and a single sink. The cabinet beneath it had only one door but held a healthy supply of toilet paper. Old-fashioned, undersized squares of white tile covered the floor, making the pool of blood seem even brighter by contrast. Plasma had begun to separate from the red blood cells, creating an outer halo of clear yellow liquid. Her clothes sat in a pile on the floor next to the toilet.

Lily Simpson lay in the tub, naked and white. Her knees were bent, her feet flat against the outer wall with her shoulders wedged into the far corner on one side of the faucet. Her head rested against the tiled wall so that she could stare at the cracked plaster ceiling with open eyes. Her dirty blond hair was dry and she wore no make-up. Many suicides put water in the tub, thinking that will somehow help them to bleed faster or simply make them more comfortable, but Lily had not bothered with that.

The box cutter she had used on her wrists lay in the bottom of the tub under her right shin. Her left arm stretched over the floor to create that dramatic pool but Theresa suspected that most of the draining had been accomplished through her right wrist, which lay on the bottom of the tub with a direct line of red between it and the drain. Her life had escaped neatly and efficiently.

Theresa began to photograph. When done with that, she sketched. Occasionally she asked a question. The landlord said she left Marty’s place about four o’clock. No one yet knew how she had traveled from there to home.

Frank said, ‘Most of the neighbors didn’t pay any attention to her and didn’t know her friends. One woman across the street would hang out here occasionally; she knew some people who came by but only by their first names, of course. Never noticed their cars. Never knew Lily to mention suicide, either, but said she kept up with the drugs. Low-key, but constant.’

Theresa checked the medicine cabinet – aspirin, and a well-used safety razor. An empty pill bottle for a three-year-old oxycodone prescription. ‘She didn’t keep them in here where the kids could get them.’

Frank snorted. ‘Sure. She hid them in an open box next to her bed. That would really keep Junior from helping himself.’

Theresa checked the drawers. ‘No razors.’

‘That’s why she used the box cutter.’

‘Who has straight razors in the bathroom these days anyway? No one uses them to shave any more,’ she chatted, just to keep the conversation going, to stave off that awful silence emanating from the dead victim and maybe get her cousin to open up about why the suicide of a drug addict had rattled him, now that his partner had gone back downstairs. ‘Scraping wallpaper, that’s about the only time I’ve used a razor blade in the past twenty years. They’re more likely to be found in the garage or the tool box.’

‘Mmm.’

‘She probably pulled it – the box cutter – out of that open drawer downstairs, walked up here, took off her clothes and cut her wrists. Didn’t even take the time to write her kids a note.’

Frank leaned casually against the door jamb, with nothing casual in the way he stared at the frozen hand stretched out over the tile, the palm turned up in supplication or abandonment or in one last contented sigh. ‘But why? She’s bouncing around all morning, harassing everyone she can find to get what she wants, and then offs herself? Why? She thought Marty would have a million dollars stashed in his mattress? She found out what cable costs? Why?’

‘Suicide isn’t always logical.’

‘It’s never logical.’

‘Some people consider it a viable alternative.’ They had had this argument many times, so she skipped right to her concluding remarks: ‘If you don’t understand it, you won’t understand it, so don’t try. In this case, if she had taken a healthy amount of meth earlier today, she might have crashed. Methamphetamine dumps a ton of the body’s neurotransmitters into the nervous system at once. It’s like getting socked with a boatload of adrenalin.’

‘You don’t have to lecture me in basic drug chemistry. I did my stint in Vice.’

She persisted. ‘The person becomes nervous and hyperactive. The problem is, this depletes the body of its supply of neurotransmitters, so once the high starts to fade the person doesn’t go back to normal. They go way below normal, to a sluggish depression. The same chemistry that caused the surge of energy causes a surge of fatigue.’

‘But not that fast.’

‘No.’ Theresa frowned. ‘She should still have been in the high stage, at least until tonight, maybe for another two or three days. It all depends on how much she took and its purity.’

‘Plus she’s been taking meth all her life, and suddenly she gets suicidal? There’s no history of suicide attempts.’

‘That we know of,’ she clarified. ‘Maybe she never took that much before, so this crash was worse than anything in her experience.’

‘She wasn’t
that
high. Just enough to be noticeable. You think I would have let her keep walking around if she’d been completely insensible?’

‘Of course not. But meth – that’s why it’s so insidious. It’s different from other drugs. Like cocaine, it lurks between the brain’s neurons, blocking the re-uptake of dopamines. But only meth actually goes inside the cells to push the dopamines out. These neurotransmitters eventually wear out, making it impossible for a chronic user ever to feel truly good again. Nothing would stimulate Lily like it once did, not a good meal, the love of her family, sex, nothing gets the blood flowing except meth, and that only in larger and larger quantities. So maybe she didn’t take too much, she just didn’t take enough, and finally realized that even
with
meth life really didn’t hold anything worth struggling for.’

Frank stared at the floor.

‘Look – I don’t know if that’s why she did it. But I can tell you this: I don’t see any signs of foul play here. There’s no sign of a struggle, nothing knocked over. The clothes are in a single pile. There’s no bruises on her arms –’ here she reached one gloved hand to the back of the woman’s skull – ‘no signs of trauma, no one hit her over the head, no petechiae in the eyes or lips to indicate smothering. There’s no sign of forced entry downstairs, right?’

‘The kid said he found the back door unlocked. That’s why he assumed Lily was home. She could have let someone in.’

‘Unlikely, since amphetamines make the user paranoid as well as hyper.’

‘So if she let someone in, it would be someone she knew,’ Frank said, following the thought.

‘Or she simply forgot to lock it when she came home. There’s also no sign of overdose, no foaming in the mouth or nose.’

‘What if she started to OD, at least became unconscious? Then someone could have put her here and sliced her wrists without creating bruises or signs of a struggle.’

Theresa checked the dead, open eyes and then the pile of clothing. ‘Actually an overdose would explain taking off her clothing, since it raises the body temperature until the person sweats profusely. But there’s no dampness on her clothes to indicate it, and her pupils are not dilated. That implies that the stimulation had worn off, setting her up for the depression stage. Everything here, cuz, is consistent with this woman coming home, walking up those steps and killing herself.’

Frank said nothing, but he had that stubborn frown he’d employed since his grade school days.

‘What’s bothering you about this victim, in particular?’

‘I told you. She comes into a sudden windfall, excited as hell, and an hour or two later, she’s dead.’