A Simple Act of Violence (16 page)

Read A Simple Act of Violence Online

Authors: R.J. Ellory

Stood on the landing for quite some time, my hands sweating. And then I approached her door and stood silently for just a moment - a moment to steel myself, to gather my nerves. I felt the handle slip between my fingers and I had to wipe my palm on my tee-shirt to gain purchase.
Pushed the door open gently. Couldn’t see through the curtain my dad had rigged above the bed. Could hear her breathing, raspy and deep. She was sleeping, and for this I was grateful.
Her skin was pale and transparent. Skin like tissue, like mother-of-pearl - and like the skin of a drum, taut across her face, the tension was visible as she murmured and sighed. Fingers thin, incapable of grasping anything with more than a featherweight touch, her body beneath the covers like a scarecrow. Nothing to her. Eaten away from inside, that’s how she looked, and she’d been this way for as long as I could recall. This was not who I wished my mother to be. This was someone - or something - else, and I watched her silently, not daring to breathe, not to make a sound, for if she woke she would start screaming or crying or talking crazy, and I’d heard that too many times to deal with it any more . . .
I didn’t know what my father was going to do, but Big Joe always had an answer, always had a solution to the problem.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘your mom has an illness. She has an illness that
doesn’t really have a cure.’
I felt breathless and dizzy, tears welling against my lower lids. I didn’t want to cry. I never wanted to cry again.
‘There’s nothing wrong with crying,’ Big Joe said, and he reached out his hand and held it against my cheek. ‘Cry if you
want to.’
‘Is it going to help?’ I asked.
He smiled, shook his head. ‘Some people think it does.’
‘And you? What do you think?’
‘Don’t see how it can.’
‘Then I ain’t gonna do it.’
There was silence for a little while longer, and then I closed my
eyes and asked, ‘How long?’
‘Before she goes? I don’t know son, I just don’t know.’
‘Does anyone?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘So what do we do then?’
‘Do? I don’t know that there’s anything we can do except wait.’
‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ I said. ’We’ll wait.’
Such memories from an age ago, and now it is Monday evening, the 13th of November, and Catherine is gone. Just like my mother. That, more than anything else, turned out to be the greatest irony of all.
Classes are done. I am packing books into my bag and brushing chalk from the cuffs of my jacket.
I turn and look at the board, and there - right across it - I have written a very famous quote.
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’
I think we killed the man who said that.
What was I telling them today? What was I feeding hand-over-fist into their impressionable minds? The ethics of literature. The responsibility of the author to maintain honesty, integrity, to present the reader with as accurate a representation of the issues as can be managed.
‘But according to whose perspective?’ one student asked. ’Surely
truth is relative. Surely truth is perceived very differently from one person to the next.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Truth is relative. Truth is personal, it is in
dividual
. ’
‘So where do we draw the line?’ the student asked. ‘Where does
one individual’s perception of what he considers to be the truth become a lie?’
I laugh. I do my very best Jack Nicholson and say, ‘Truth? You
want the truth? You can’t handle the truth . . .’
The bell goes. Class dismissed. The student looks at me as he leaves and I see suspicion and accusation in his eyes. The question was never answered.
And I think: I was like you. A long time ago I was like you.
And then we found the line that divided the truth and the lies. We crossed it so many times it became obscured and faded and eventually disappeared altogether.
Perhaps the worst lies were those we told for the best.
Perhaps the worst lies were those we told ourselves.
ELEVEN
Tuesday morning, sky the color of a dirty bandage, struggling with the idea of rain. Natasha Joyce was home after the school run, seated on the lowest step of the stairwell. Phone receiver pressed against her ear, expression absent-minded, a little vacant. She’d been on hold for minutes, had maintained her patience while the mayor’s office treated her to elevator music. White folks’ elevator music. Chloe would be away for several hours. The house was clean and she was alone. Kept thinking about the older of the two detectives, that he’d seemed so similar to the man that had come with the Sheridan woman. The woman who had not been named Sheridan. They had not looked physically similar, but there was something about them. Maybe the first one had been a cop too . . .
‘Ma’am?’
‘Yes, I’m here,’ Natasha said.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, we seem to be having some sort of difficulty with our computer system. You said King, right? Darryl Eric King?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Registered date of death was October 7th, 2001.’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
A moment’s hesitation. ‘It should be here, ma’am, there’s no question about it.’
‘Maybe the delay in sending the records over . . . I spoke to someone before and they told me that after five years the records all go into archives, and maybe there’s a delay or something?’
‘It’s done electronically, ma’am,’ the woman at the other end of the line said. She was black, no doubt about it. Seemed like she wanted to help Natasha Joyce get her question answered. ‘They just shoot that stuff right over here and it uploads onto our system directly. If the record exists it should be here.’
‘So what does that mean?’ Natasha asked. She felt nervous, agitated. Something else now didn’t make sense.
‘What does it mean?’ the woman asked. ‘It means that someone somewhere has f-u-c-k-e-d up, that’s what it means.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘You give me your number, Miss Joyce, and when I get a chance I’ll e-mail the IT people and see what they have to say about this, okay?’
‘And you’ll call me back?’
‘You have internet?’
Natasha smiled. As if. ‘No, I don’t have internet.’
‘Then I’ll call you back, yes. Bear with me though. It may take a little while to get an answer from these fellas.’
‘Okay, thank you,’ Natasha said, and then she gave the woman her number.
‘I’ll do what I can, alright?’
‘Thank you.’
‘No problem . . . you have a nice day now.’
‘Yes, thank you . . . you have a nice day too.’ Started to put the phone down, and then suddenly, an afterthought. ‘Miss?’ she said. ‘Miss?’
Meant to ask the woman’s name, but the line was dead.
Natasha Joyce hesitated for a moment, and then she lowered the receiver into the cradle and got up from the stair.
For some unknown reason she thought she might not hear back from the Police Department Administration Unit.
For some other reason she felt afraid.
 
Miller logged onto
imdb.com
, looked up It’s A Wonderful Life. Two hours ten for the feature. Called Tom Alexander at the coroner’s office and got a breakdown of the timeframe within which they had to work. Looked at the notes he’d made in the car. Already he’d been up for the better part of three hours, in the office for most of two. What he’d found unsettled him greatly. If what it implied was true . . .
Alexander was saying that Catherine Sheridan had been murdered between four forty-five and six, afternoon of Saturday, November 11th. The old guy next door had seen her coming into the house around four-thirty. Pizza had been ordered at five-forty, this confirmed by the telephone records from the Sheridan number. Delivery guy had arrived around five after six. Had taken maybe two or three minutes to find the body. Miller took the call from the Second just after six-thirty, had arrived at six fifty-four. Roth had appeared in the yard about ten minutes later. The two of them went upstairs, and by the time they entered her room it must have been seven-fifteen. Spent no more than a few minutes up there, came down again, and by this time the credits were playing on the TV. Say it had been seven-thirty, then the movie must have been started at about five-twenty. Maybe the guy killed her and then put the movie on. Miller scratched his head, rose from his seat and walked to the window. Something about the movie. Something about this stupid goddamned movie.
Door opened behind him and Roth appeared. Face red like it was cold outside. Miller hadn’t noticed. Had barely noticed anything on the drive over. Attention focused, channelled right into Catherine Sheridan’s universe, the world she’d occupied during that last handful of hours. The world that Miller seemed unable to enter.
‘So where we at?’ Roth asked. ‘You had coffee?’
Miller nodded toward a Starbucks cup on on his desk. It was just after nine; he’d been awake since six or thereabouts.
‘You didn’t sleep so good,’ Roth said, rhetorical.
Miller shrugged.
‘Amanda says hi . . . asked what you were doing for Thanksgiving.’
‘Invitation or being polite?’
‘Being polite I figure,’ Roth said.
‘Be a pain in the ass if I showed up, right? You got family over?’
‘Isn’t a family. Jews don’t do families. We do dynasties.’
‘Tell her I’m fixed. Tell her my girlfriend’s folks invited me.’
‘You don’t have a fucking girlfriend.’
‘It’ll stop your wife worrying about me.’
‘I’m not telling her that, for God’s sake. I’ll get the third fucking degree until I finally confess you’re bullshitting.’
‘Tell her whatever’s gonna work, Al. I’m not gonna come over there and be a fifth wheel at your fucking Thanksgiving Dinner.’
Roth waved his hand nonchalantly. ‘I’ll tell her something. ’
‘So, we gotta find out who this Sheridan woman is.’
‘What we got?’
‘Nada, don’t even know what she did for a living. You know what she did for a living?’
Roth shook his head.
‘What is it we do for a living?’ Miller asked sarcastically. He reached for the Sheridan file, pushed aside the stack of files relating to Mosley, Rayner and Lee. ‘Went through this earlier . . . there’s nothing about her job. Checked the social security number on our system and it comes up with a Puerto Rican woman named Isabella Cordillera like Marilyn said. You put Isabella Cordillera through the system and learn that she died in a car accident in June 2003. You try and access the details of the car accident and it comes up blank.’
Roth reached for the file, leafed through it as if there might have been something overlooked by Miller.
‘That’s not the only surprise waiting for us in this lot,’ Miller said. ‘There are social security numbers for the other three, and they look fine on the surface. They check out alright until you start to go back a little further.’
Roth frowned, tossed the Sheridan file onto the desk and leaned forward. ‘Those files were made up before,’ he said. ‘Those files carry the better part of eight months of investigation reports.’
‘The investigation reports are fine. I don’t have a problem with the reports, Al, I have a problem with the women themselves.’
‘Sorry, I’m missing something on this.’
‘They were looking for common denominators amongst these women, right? The previous detectives . . . that’s what they were doing.’
‘Yes, of course. Sure. That’s what I would have done.’
‘Same here,’ Miller said. ‘But I started to look at it from a different angle. We’re looking for common denominators between them as murder victims, when we should be looking for common denominators between them as people.’
‘Like what?’
‘First of all they’re all single. Secondly, they had few friends . . . I mean, really no close friends at all that we’ve found. All the statements come from neighbors, work colleagues, but there’s nothing in there from the boyfriend, the best girlfriend, the one they went shopping with, went to the gym with, that kind of stuff. Like Amanda, right? She has girlfriends, doesn’t she? The ones she spends God knows how long on the phone to every other day.’
‘Sure she does.’
‘But not this lot,’ Miller said. ‘None of them have a single report from someone who claimed to be a close friend.’
‘That can’t be right. Everyone has—’
‘Apparently not,’ Miller interjected. ‘Apparently not everyone does.’
‘So where from here?’ asked Roth.
‘So they’re all single. They have few friends. I’ve got Metz and Oliver chasing up everything they can find out about their homes . . . lease and mortgage details, where their personal effects went, that kind of thing.’

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