The Killing Song, page 6
I stared at my father, stunned at his tone. But just as I opened my mouth to argue, I realized that his wanting to keep Mom here wasn’t about her faint condition. He didn’t trust me not to lose her, too, in what he once called “this hellhole of a place” I’d chosen as my home.
We were on 836, a few miles from the airport, and stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler. I couldn’t fit everyone in my Corvette, so Nora had lent me her RAV.
“How bad is this hurricane going to get?” Dad asked.
“It’s turning northeast,” I said. “This should be the worst of it.”
Dad watched the road for a minute, then cleared his throat. “So, tell me again what happened last night,” he said.
I gathered patience. I had already spent hours at the Miami Beach PD retelling the story to the Latina detective whose name I couldn’t remember at the moment. Nothing I had given Nora was worth anything to the new detective, it seemed. She needed her own version. Now my father did, too.
“We were at a club. She was on the dance floor for one more dance before we left. When the song ended, I couldn’t find her.”
“And this was what time?”
I tried not to hesitate. “Almost two A.M.”
“Were you drinking?”
I glanced at my mother in the rearview mirror. She was watching me, also wanting an answer. Suddenly I was in my crashed Opel again, blood trickling into my eyes, Mandy’s whimpering in my ears.
“Yes,” I said. “We both had a few. It was a nightclub. People drink in nightclubs. But Mandy wasn’t drunk.”
Dad ignored my edgy tone. “Have the police questioned the boy she was dancing with?”
“He was the first person I went looking for,” I said, “but he disappeared, too. The cops have a description of him and a partial name. They’ll find him.”
“What did he look like?”
I knew my father was not a bigot, but I wasn’t sure at this moment how he would react to the idea that Mandy’s last dance partner had been a black man in a sports jersey. My father had many black colleagues, but he was still a descendent of a Confederate general and lived in an all-white gated community.
He’d hear it from the police later, but for now, I gave him only a general description and reminded him that there was a widespread search for the man even as we drove.
“I want to see her,” Dad said.
I was so stunned I nearly lost control of the wheel. “What?”
“I want to see my daughter,” Dad said again. “Take me to the morgue.”
“I already officially identified her, Dad,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to go down there.”
“I need to see my daughter.”
“Why? Don’t you believe me that she’s dead?”
In the sudden quiet that followed, everything seemed to close in on me—the moist, warm air of the car, the steady thud of the wipers, the pummeling of the rain. I kept my eyes straight ahead, staring at the watery glow of red taillights.
The image of Mandy lying on that dirty ballroom floor came back to me. I had no idea how she looked now, if they had cleaned her up, wiped away the blood, combed her hair. But I had this sickening vision of her on a steel table, covered with a paper sheet, her skin pasty, her lips blue.
“I want to see my daughter,” Dad said again. “I’m asking you to make that happen, son.”
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed Nora.
It wasn’t called the morgue anymore. In fact, it didn’t even look like one. The Joseph H. Davis Center for Forensic Pathology was a huge modern building, set at 1 Bob Hope Road and guarded by a bronze cannon salvaged from a Spanish galleon that sank off Miami four hundred years ago. Inside, there was nothing to hint at the grisly work that took place all day and often into the night. With its air-freshener smell, Florida landscapes, mauve sofas and plush palms, it looked like a four-star hotel.
“Are we meeting the medical examiner?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said. “We’ll be seeing one of the assistants.”
I sat my mother down on a sofa and went to the desk. When I told the receptionist that Detective Brinkley had called on behalf of the Owens family, her face softened with sympathy.
She made a phone call and we waited in the deserted lobby. Dad stood near the door, reading the morgue’s mission statement. Mom’s eyes were vacant and dull, her hands gripping her purse.
“Mr. Owens?”
I turned to greet the man coming through the double doors but my father had already stepped forward to extend a hand. The ME’s assistant was a small black man with a cap of gray hair.
“You don’t have a police officer with you?” he asked.
“No,” Dad said.
“Then I must advise you, sir, that a person’s visit to a deceased loved one can—”
“I’m a surgeon, sir,” Dad said. “I assure you, I don’t need anyone to hold my hand. Please take me to Amanda Owens.”
The assistant looked at me, and I gave him a small nod. If I couldn’t talk Dad out of this, this man wasn’t going to be able to.
“I’ll stay here with Mom,” I said.
I watched them until the doors closed behind them, then went and sat down next to my mother on the sofa. She had her wallet open to a picture. It was of Mandy in front of our home, wearing a hot-pink shirt and white shorts. Her smile projected the sheer joy of being sixteen and beautiful. It reminded me how she had looked those last moments on the dance floor. One more dance, Bear.
“I can’t take my eyes off her,” Mom whispered.
I wrapped my arm around my mother’s shoulders. She felt small and fragile and I pulled her closer, finally finding the courage to say the words that had been on my lips for hours.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Mom touched my cheek. “Oh, no, Matty,” she whispered. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“But if only—”
“Hush, Matty,” Mom said. “Amanda wouldn’t want you to do this. She loved you so much.”
I lowered my head against my mother’s shoulder, but I didn’t cry. My mom was gripping my hand like I was the only thing standing between her and the abyss of loss. And I realized that I was now her only child.
“Mr. Owens.”
The assistant was waving me back into the hallway. I excused myself from my mother and followed the man down the long hallway.
The man stopped at an open doorway. “There,” he said softly. “I thought you might want to comfort your father.”
When I looked inside the room, I felt a small tearing in my chest. Mandy was lying on a table, her body draped with a white sheet. Her head was propped on a metal brace, creating a sharp, perfect profile and a cascade of damp blond hair. Her skin wasn’t pasty white but a soft pink, her lips an odd shade of raspberry.
I didn’t see my father right away, then his head came into view just over Mandy’s shoulder. I realized he was sitting on a stool on the other side of the table. His cheeks were streaked with tears, his lips moving in what I assumed was prayer. And although his eyes were open, I sensed he hadn’t seen me come in.
I walked around the table to him and waited for him to acknowledge me, but he didn’t. He was intent on Mandy, smoothing her hair from her forehead, his whisperings now audible.
It wasn’t a prayer. He was talking to her about the day she was born. I knew because I had heard the same story many times from my mother. How her arrival had interrupted the Tar Heels–Blue Devils game. The frantic drive to University Hospital in a rare southern snowstorm. The short labor of thirty minutes, because, as my mother had always said, her “little girl was anxious to get living.”
His story finished, Dad lowered his head to the table and started to cry.
“Bunny,” he whispered. “My little Bunny.”
I bent down, wrapped my arms around my father’s broad shoulders and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I found myself staring at Mandy’s face and, for the first time, felt no need to turn away. I wanted to burn every detail of her into my memory.
8
The office was almost deserted when I got there. I had been working from home most of the last two years, so I had forgotten how quiet things could be at eight in the morning.
After the scene in the morgue yesterday, after depositing my parents in their hotel, I had gone home and gotten as close to drunk as I could on the half bottle of scotch I had stashed at my place. When the scotch didn’t work, I added a Vicodin left over from an old touch football injury, and I finally drifted off listening to Elvis Costello’s Goodbye Cruel World.
When I woke up sometime after five, I was curled in the oversize La-Z-Boy, the Bose earphones still on my head and dark shapeless dreams in my brain.
Now I was at the office. Because there was nowhere else to go.
There were a couple guys tucked in their cubicles but they were working Starbucks lattes instead of the phones. It occurred to me, around the edges of my consciousness, that it wasn’t just the early hour that accounted for the emptiness of the newsroom.
The paper had been going through spasms of downsizing for the last five years as circulation and ad revenue shrank. Even though I seldom came into the office these days, I knew how bad it was. I got the emails inviting me to the pink-slip parties. The lucky ones got buyouts, but the latest had just been axed. In the ten years I had been here, the editorial staff had gone from three hundred to one fifty. Bureaus had been closed, editions abandoned, deadlines compromised.
I had survived, so far. I was one of three reporters left on the I-team, but investigative journalism cost time, money and patience. I knew that when the next round of cuts came down from the twelfth floor, my name might be on the list.
I think that was part of the reason I didn’t come into the office anymore. It was hard to watch something you love die the death of a million little cuts.
The receptionist looked up as I flashed my ID badge.
“You want a paper?”
Through the fuzz of my brain, I realized she was holding a copy of that morning’s Times. I went back to get it, thanking her. The paper was warm, with that mossy melted-plastic smell I loved.
I made my way past the business department and through what used to be the arts and entertainment sections. My cubicle was its usual messy nest. Towers of yellowed newspapers. A dead plant with a deflated balloon that someone had sent me for my birthday six months ago. A calendar still stuck on February. A crusted Dunkin’ Donuts travel mug that I had given up for lost.
I threw the mug and plant in the trash and sat down. The computer monitor was coated with dust. I used a sleeve to wipe it clean and powered it up.
After logging in, I just sat there, staring at the computer. I had no idea what I was doing there, but it was better than staring at the walls of my cottage or going to the hotel to watch my mother turn into a ghost.
As I swiveled slowly away from the screen, my eyes fell on the copy of the Times. The story was there at the bottom of the front page, along with a small color photograph of Mandy. She was smiling. It took me a moment to realize it was the photo I had given to the cop back on the beach.
At least they had cropped me out.
The story was written by Jeannie Laughlin, a young woman who had been brought in from the community news office to take over my old cop beat. Jeannie had called me last night.
I’m sorry, Matt, but I have to ask you—
You need a quote, right, Jeannie?
What I really need is to talk to your parents. I called their home in Raleigh but—
Leave them alone, Jeannie.
Matt, come on, you know that Darcy wants—
Don’t go near my parents. I’ll give you a fucking quote, but you don’t go anywhere near my mom and dad, you understand?
The call had made me remember something I had wanted to forget. It was my first week on the cop beat. I had to call the parents of a fifteen-year-old girl who had fallen off a horse at camp and broken her neck. My job was to get a quote. But no one had told them yet that their kid had died. I had gotten there first.
A part of me understood that this wasn’t Jeannie’s fault. She had fought hard to make it to the mainsheet. But I also knew exactly how this whole thing had gone down.
Sometime after Mandy’s body was found, a computer feed had come into the office from the Miami Beach police. By nine A.M. Jeannie had fed the first details onto the Miami Times web page. There hadn’t been much but it didn’t matter. The battle for readers was now on the Internet, not the streets. What mattered was who got it posted the fastest. The Times was competing against bloggers and titty galleries. It was all about clicks now, not journalism or taste or decency.
Mandy’s body probably hadn’t even made it to the medical examiner’s office before that smiling picture of her made it to the web. I hadn’t watched any TV, but I was pretty sure that by the noon news, they had jumped on board. A pretty young blond tourist murdered on South Beach was juicy stuff.
I picked up the paper and started to read.
An unnamed source in the Miami Beach PD had revealed that Mandy was stabbed with “an ice pick–like instrument” and that cops were searching for a “person of interest.”
There was a paragraph that identified me as the victim’s brother and as a Times employee, but Jeannie hadn’t used my quote. To be honest, I couldn’t remember what I had given her.
The more I read, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew. Jeannie had managed to contact a few of Mandy’s college friends. The quotes broke my heart. I tossed the paper aside.
I turned back to the computer. The cursor was blinking slowly, like a heartbeat on a medical screen. I watched it for a long time, then positioned my fingers on the keys. I started to type.
BY MATT OWENS
I didn’t understand her grief then, that mother whose toddler had disappeared from the playground and was found dead in a drainage ditch four days later. I covered the story but I never understood her pain when she told me, “I only looked away for a moment.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
I spun around. Darcy Tuchman was standing behind me. I hit SAVE and CLOSE and the screen went blank.
Darcy parked a big hip on the edge of my desk and stared down at me over her glasses.
“Too late. I saw it,” she said. “I’ll repeat the question. What the hell are you doing?”
“I have to write this, Darcy.”
“Well, you can write it but I’m not going to print it.”
I massaged my neck and closed my eyes. When I felt her hand on my shoulder, I looked up.
“My office,” she said.
It took every bit of my waning strength to lift myself out of the chair and follow her through the newsroom. Darcy’s office took up some prime east-side real estate, with big windows that offered a commanding view of Biscayne Bay. Hurricane Jackie was now a depression heading to the Carolinas and the sun had come out in full force, making my eyes hurt.
Darcy pointed to the sofa and I sank down into it. She headed toward her desk, and I watched her as she rifled through some papers. She was sixty-something, silver haired. She was the one who, ten years ago, had seen something in my sports writing and asked me to come work cops for the Times. She was the only person in the newsroom I trusted to edit my stuff.
She took off her glasses, letting them dangle by the purple beaded cord around her neck.
“I’m sorry about your sister, Matt.”
I slumped back against the cushions, nodding. “Thanks.”
“How are you holding up?”
I kept my eyes trained on the windows.
“Never mind,” Darcy said. “Stupid question.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
“Matt,” she said softly. “I don’t think you should be here right now.”
It took me a few moments to work up the guts to face her. “Where should I go, Darce?” I said.
“Home.”
I shook my head slowly.
“You can’t work this story, Matt,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Do I have to tell you this?”
When I didn’t reply, she came out from behind her desk and sat down next to me on the sofa.
“First, it isn’t your story, it’s Jeannie’s,” she said. “And second, you’re too close to it.”
“I can write a good first-person feature.”
“This isn’t therapy.” She must have felt me draw away because she let out a long sigh. “Sorry, that was low.”
Her phone rang but she ignored it.
“You’re forcing me to be a bitch here, Matt, but I don’t care,” she said. “I want you to take two weeks off.”
My eyes shot up to her. “You’re ordering me out of here?”
“If I have to suspend you, I will. For your own good.”
I leaned forward and put my head in my hands. I could smell ink on my hands, hear a phone ringing.
Darcy’s hand was on the back of my neck, cool and gentle. Finally, I felt her get up off the sofa but I didn’t move. A moment later, the lights in the office went out. When I looked up, Darcy was standing by the door.
“Stay here for a while. Get some rest,” she said. She left, closing the door behind her.
I sat there for a moment, then slowly unwound my body onto the sofa. I closed my eyes, and when sleep finally whispered in my ear, it came in the voice of Elvis Costello.
I was a fine idea at the time.
Now I’m a brilliant mistake.
9
Later that day, I finally worked up the courage to go to the hotel to see my parents. The first hour was spent sitting around their room, then another two hours at the hotel restaurant, where we picked at our salads and sipped water. My mother rambled on about the funeral arrangements back in Raleigh and my father complained about how the ME was dragging his feet on the autopsy.
But worse were the moments of silence, when the air grew thick with grief and blame, so palpable I felt like I was suffocating.
I finally extricated myself by feigning a migraine, something I’d had as a teenager but hadn’t experienced since arriving in Miami. I hit the liquor store on the way home for a fresh bottle of scotch.
