The Price of Innocence (19 page)

‘And give up this glamour? What could be better than the smell of decades-old bloody clothing in the morning?’

‘I mean it, Tess. No more caffeine. I have to take a leak, so I am leaving you to guard our fortress against any marauders, with your life if necessary.’

Theresa collected her tote bag and her water bottle and her box from the passenger seat floor and dropped them on the truck’s bumper. ‘Fear not. I am armed with the Urn of Eternal Life and the Last Season’s Fashion Tote Bag of Death. The lost treasure of the Bingham is safe with me.’

He turned to go into the building.

‘Unless any orcs show up,’ she called after him. ‘Then all bets are off!’

She saw his head shake, and then she was left in the parking lot with a crammed garage space and a crammed moving truck, wondering how to fit one into the other. Might as well get started. She picked up the box from Payne Avenue to scoot it to the end of the bumper, out of her way.

The sun now peeked through the gathering storm clouds to warm her. Her clothes were caked with dirt and dust. She had sweated and chilled and sweated again until she couldn’t stand the smell of herself, or at least what she could smell over the iodine odors clinging to the inside of her nose. Her mouth tasted like the concentrated ashes at the bottom of a coffee pot that’s been on the burner for five or six hours. Her make-up had long since sunk into and clogged up her pores, revealing the latest shade of her bruises. Her skin had the shininess of an oil slick and she didn’t want to think about what her hair looked like.

‘Good morning.’

Of course she turned to see David Madison.

He wore work clothes, pleated trousers of a weighty material and a white shirt with a tie, underneath a lightweight trench coat. It made him look even taller. He carried a briefcase, and seemed to study her as unobtrusively as he could manage. ‘Sorry if I startled you. I had a meeting at the hospital next door and I knew the M.E.’s was here and I thought I’d go to the front desk and ask the receptionist if you were in, but then I saw you here … are you all right?’

‘Um – yeah.’

He watched her face, picking his words. ‘You look …’

‘Like death warmed over? I know. We were at the explosion site all night. What are you doing here?’

‘Meeting. Butterfly Babies and Children’s –’ he gestured at the sweeping hospital system situated one door over from the M.E.’s office – ‘had a few problems in their account, numbers not quite adding up. Sometimes a quick meeting unties the knots a lot faster than phone calls. Otherwise it just snowballs – you must be really tired.’

‘No, actually. Around three or four in the morning a second wind kicks in and you start running on adrenalin.’ She wished he would turn his back for one second so she could at least blot her face. Maybe she could point out the clock tower on the medical school—

‘Can I get you anything? Coffee?’

She laughed, the sound too long and too tinged with hysteria, and his face shaded from sympathy to worry. He set the briefcase down and used both hands on her elbows to guide her to the moving truck’s wide bumper. ‘Maybe you should sit down. I hope you’re going to go home now, get some rest. Do you want me to take that for you?’ And he took the box holding all the evidence that remained of the Payne Avenue explosion, twenty-five years previously. It reminded her of her unanswered questions.

David Madison barely gave it a glance as he set it on the truck’s bumper, next to her left hip.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘No, I’m not going home.’ She explained how overtime used in the same week it accrued would not be counted at time and a half, so that she’d lose the extra half per hour, and that with another coffee and maybe a Diet Coke she’d make it through the day just fine. Her body coped better if she stayed on the daytime/night-time schedule and somehow fooled it into forgetting that it had lost an entire night.

‘Does that work?’

‘Not really. Did you get the hospital’s accounts all straightened out?’

‘Yes. Our account, anyway, Gardner’s.’

‘And what does Gardner’s supply?’

‘Chemicals.’

She felt her face freeze before the word even registered and, even then, didn’t know why. ‘What kind of chemicals?’

‘All kinds. Mostly stuff for factories and other manufacturing processes, solvents and caustics, but some diagnostic reagents for hospitals and other labs. Places like yours, I guess.’

‘Oh. That’s kind of strange, that we’re in similar lines of work.’

He crouched on the asphalt, so that he could look up into her face rather than vice versa. ‘No, I crunch numbers. It doesn’t matter if Gardner sells chemicals or bowling balls or clothes. They’re only numbers to me. What you do sounds a lot more interesting.’

A deskman came out for a smoke. He watched them with undisguised curiosity, a hallmark of the Medical Examiner’s Office, where nosiness was considered an occupational qualification. She smiled at him – to do anything else meant rumors of clandestine parking-lot meetings would make the rounds by lunchtime.

‘So what was the problem at Rainbow?’

‘Alcohol.’

‘I’d love some.’

‘I don’t blame you. They had an extremely high amount of reagent alcohol on their bills and protested. It turned out to be a typo on the purchasing secretary’s form. That will prove to be my excitement for the day.’

‘This is mine.’ She stood up. ‘Just a lot of heavy lifting.’

‘Can I help you?’

She eyed the boxes in the truck. ‘We need to get it stored before the rain, but they’re dirty. They were covered with dust before the building collapsed. Now they’re covered with regular dust and concrete dust and plaster dust and nitrogen triiodide, and in some cases water from the fire hoses hit it and turned it all into a coating of dust mud.’

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold them away from my good tie, then.’

He pulled the smaller boxes off the truck, one by one, and walked them the ten feet to the garage, where Theresa scaled the mountain face to stack them as close to the ceiling as possible. No space could go unused.

‘Heaven help us if we need something for court before they find us a new storage area, or a miracle occurs and we move to our new building. And we will – need them, that is. Nothing in a county bureaucracy moves at a breakneck pace. Six months from now these boxes will still be here.’

‘I can’t criticize,’ Madison said, gingerly plucking a particularly grimy box of index cards from the moving truck. ‘I still have unpacked boxes in my garage from after – after my wife went to jail and we moved to another house. Only a few streets away from our old one, but I thought a new place would help the boys start over.’

She hefted the box up, leaving a fresh streak of dirt on her sleeve. ‘Did it?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If you ask me, nothing helped. They’ve stopped talking to me about it, of course, because I’m from the Stone Age and there’s no point in communicating with a fossil. But I see it. Every time there’s a love scene on TV or a sexy ad in a magazine or their friends are whispering the kinds of things that teenage boys talk about. I see the wheels turning. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.’

He leaned on the stack, two hands on the dusty boxes, while she searched about for a gap in the monolith for her latest brick and listened mightily. The words poured out as if he couldn’t stop them. Perhaps he had not had anyone he could talk to about it for a long time, if ever. Perhaps he wanted advice from another parent and figured, given her line of work, not much would shock.

‘It’s the older one, especially. Jake. He was the same age as this kid, they were in the same grade. That’s how Deirdre justified having this kid around all the time, she told me Jake liked having someone to play video games with instead of his little brother. But Jake never liked him. I –’ his expression showed just how much disgust he felt for his own naivety – ‘didn’t think a thing of it. She was always taking some misfit under her wing, the kids who struggled, the ones who didn’t speak English well. I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t question.’

‘Who would?’ Theresa said.

Madison retrieved another box. ‘So first Jake has to face the fact that his mother had sex with a child the same age as him. That has to raise all sorts of questions in his mind – if one boy, why not another? If she looked at one thirteen-year-old boy that way, then—’ He paused, obviously forcing himself to put these unthinkable thoughts into words. Theresa’s skin crawled. She didn’t want to hear any more, but this man needed to talk. So she waited, quietly sliding another box into place. ‘Then had she ever looked at him like that? Her own son? I don’t believe that for an instant,’ he added hastily, ‘but even if I tried to convince him, would he believe it? Can I even know that for sure? On top of that, he’s beginning to realize how young thirteen really is. With every day that passes, it becomes more unbelievable.

‘Second, it will occur to him, if it hasn’t already, that his mother used him as an excuse to have this affair right under our roof. Third, she’s been in jail for three years and she’s up for parole. She’s going to want to see the boys. She might even want
custody
.’

‘Have the boys ever visited—’

He passed her a milk crate of old weapons, wrapped in brown paper. ‘I took them there a few times, at the beginning, because they just missed her so much. But it would throw the boys into a tailspin for days. They began to resent her, resent all that pain, and she finally told me not to bring them any more. She sends cards on holidays, is all.’

‘That’s so sad.’ The words were inadequate, but she didn’t have any others. Theresa deposited the crate atop the mountain and made her way back down, sat on the lowest level of the stack and, her legs dangling, gave him her full attention.

‘On top of that, this kid is still walking around the neighborhood. Nothing happened to him, of course. He’s a victim.’ A touch of bitterness leaked out into his words and he reeled it back in. ‘At least I got Jake into another school. It’s not as good academically but I had to do it – they would have been in the same
class
. Bad enough that all his friends know and boys never get tired of talking about sex. It finally began to taper off, but a parole hearing is sure to make the news and that will start it up all over again. If she actually gets out, cameras will follow her every move to see if she gets back together with – him.’

Never his name, only ‘that kid’. To depersonalize the situation? Or to remind himself that the boy was exactly that, a child, a victim of the situation.

Just not the only one.

The hell with showing some restraint around someone she barely knew. She reached out and grasped his hands with both of hers. The smile he flashed melted her with its gratitude.

Then he coughed and changed the subject, freeing his fingers to gesture at the garage. ‘So did you find out why all this is necessary, why the Bingham blew up?’

‘That’s not my job. My job was to tote that barge and lift that bale.’ The cardboard flaps beneath her sunk a millimeter. ‘And I’d better get off this particular bale.’

He helped her off her perch before it could collapse, lifting her by the waist without any apparent effort. Then he promptly backed off so she could return to the truck bumper and take a seat on something she couldn’t outweigh. Maybe he realized that she was a professional at work and needed to behave as such. Maybe she smelled worse than she thought.

‘And you were at it all night, no less, toting those bales. I hope they pay you enough.’

‘Ha. It is to laugh.’

‘I, um –’ he suddenly found a piece of lint on his knee that required attention, then traced the label on the box with the tip of his finger – ‘wanted to see if you wanted to get dinner, tonight … with me, I mean … but I’m sure you’re too tired to now. Maybe another time.’

She put her hand on the box to steady it on the bumper. ‘Tonight would be great.’

‘Really? But I’m sure you’re exhausted. Tomorrow night – well, tomorrow night Anthony has a basketball game, but the next evening—’

‘No, tonight would be terrific.’

His mouth turned up, either at her answer or her enthusiasm. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely. Another Diet Coke or two and I’ll be great. Maybe three.’

‘All right. I don’t live too far from you, I’m in Parma. How about seven? Is that too late?’

She said it would be fine and gave him her address, which he did not write down. She watched him walk toward the parking garage at Rainbow Hospital, and wondered if the rush of blood she felt came because of the proximity of an attractive man, thoughts of what the evening might be like, or relief that he had to have seen the Payne Avenue address on the box of evidence and had not reacted to it in any way.

‘Tessie’s got herself a man,’ the deskman said as she climbed the steps to poke her head in the rear door to see what had become of Don. ‘You never smile at me like that.’

‘You lie. I smile at you every day.’

‘
You
lie,’ he grinned. ‘Never like that.’

T
here are no secrets in a government bureaucracy and certainly not around doctors. ‘What are you smirking about?’ Christine demanded before Theresa even reached the elevator. ‘You look like a really tired cat who caught the canary. Or the cat who caught another cat. What’s up?’

‘I’m punchy. Pulling an all-nighter at my age produces a state of euphoria as my body, denied sleep and food, turns on itself to find a new source of energy.’

‘Smart aleck. I have something interesting on your cop.’

‘Marty Davis?’ Theresa started up the steps, and Christine followed. The elevator took too long.

‘We have another dead cop around here? Step into my office. Want some coffee?’

Theresa giggled like a hyena until Christine rescinded the offer. The young doctor’s office had once been a supply closet and still resembled one, except for the shelf of heavy books and the scattering of knives, disabled guns and less common fare like brass knuckles and a ninja throwing star.

‘Do you want my chair?’

Theresa knew she must look really bad. Usually she had to perch on a surplus ammo can. She leaned against the wall and insisted, ‘No, I’m fine.’