Authors: ADAM L PENENBERG
They passed a sign for a lakefront resort.
“Enough about Jimi Cruz,” Marsalis said. “Let’s talk about Sonia.”
Summer fidgeted with her seat belt. “Sure.”
Marsalis parked near the lake, the town’s tourist magnet. A short distance away, there was a resort, restaurants, cafés, a bookstore, and shops bursting with kitsch. The lake shimmered emerald. Tourists meandered along the water’s edge.
“Right off there”—Marsalis pointed out a spot on the path running along the lake—“is where the doll and the child’s corpse were found.” Marsalis reached across Summer’s body and opened her door. “Sonia’s
wait
ing,” he crooned.
Summer continued to sit in shocked stillness, but Marsalis insisted, flicking her shoulder with his fingers. She got out of the car, her knees crackling. She looked around, wary of her new freedom. But Marsalis took care of that when he slammed the door shut and, kicking up gravel, peeled out.
After she watched Marsalis shrink to a crumb on the horizon, Summer took the path to the water and skirted the edge. She surveyed the terrain. The banks were slippery, few vines to hang onto. A snake sunned itself on a log. Cattails grew in the muck. The scent of skunk cabbage. Summer tried to visualize what must have happened. The girl must have slid through those cattails.
With mincing steps, she approached the water. Below the surface was a doll, tethered off shore. Another Marsalis prop, she thought. She leaned over for a better look when her footing gave way. She slipped, flailing in the mud, and pitched headfirst into glacier-fed water. After adjusting to the icy shock, she treaded over to the doll. She untethered it and tossed it up on the bank. Relying on vines jutting out of the mud, she pulled herself up to land. Sopping wet, she stood on the shore—stared at the doll, studied the water.
The doll was filthy and waterlogged, one of its eyes popped out. Summer remembered when and where she had last seen it: As a teenager she had rifled through one of her mother’s closets, looking for a special pair of shoes, when she came across a box holding an old doll wrapped in tissue paper. When Sonia found out, she panicked. She told Summer to never go through her belongings ever again. No other explanation. Just a somber retreat, then guilt: Sonia’s
modus operandi
.
No, this doll wasn’t a Marsalis prop.
Heart fluttering, Summer rode the vines into the water and located the string that had anchored the doll. Seaweed and vines grabbing at her legs and ankles, she played an imaginary game of tug of war, using the string to propel herself forward through the underwater thicket searching for its origin. When she got to the end she clawed through the mass of vines just under the surface, unraveling one ropey strand at a time, wishing she had a knife. Unable to see what her hands were doing, she picked and pulled vines until her fingers dug into something hard. Breathing hard and flushed with fear, she worked faster now, until she viewed a partially decomposed head.
Oh my God
.
Panicking, Summer retreated, climbing up the bank and collapsing on a carpet of leaves, alternating between guttural sobs and dry heaves. It took her a while to regain enough composure to sit up. She looked around, listened to the birds whistling, the crickets chirping, the rustling sound made when a slight breeze tickled the trees. The way sunlight caught the lake was beautiful, she thought. Then she felt like something wasn’t quite right, an object out of place; her intuition playing tricks? No. There, propped between two partially secreted tree branches, an unnatural object. Summer peered into the lens and realized Marsalis had watched the whole thing. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d ripped Marsalis’s surveillance gear down and onto the ground, trampling it with her shoes. Then she flung it into the woods. Immediately after she was sorry; she had just giving Marsalis even more of a thrill.
A few minutes later, while Summer wound down the hiking trail, watching the sun shimmer on the lake, she tried to piece together what had happened. Sonia, her body and mind ravaged by melanoma, must have decided to return to the scene of her crime of abandonment. Summer always wondered why Sonia had accepted so much responsibility for Wib’s lonely death. She believed she had killed them both with her inattentiveness, which would partially explain why she had doted so much on Summer, suffocating her for the better part of her childhood.
When Summer got to the lodge, she phoned the medical examiner.
Chantelle bitched about the extra work. “Two bodies in one day? What the hell kind of investigation are you conducting?”
“A very stressful one,” Summer said.
“Do you at least have any idea who the victim is?”
Summer was shivering, her lips purple. Eventually she managed to say, “My mother.”
Chapter 17
Melba Ignacio sat behind
the smudged glass partition thumbing through a Bible. T
hey all find God in the slammer,
Summer thought,
like a jury would forgive them so long as they’ve let the Lord into their life
. Ignacio was on the road to 40, and a rough ride it had been. Acne scars ate at her cheeks. Gray roots poked through short black hair. A jaundiced dot marked her eye.
The phone pinned between her shoulder and ear, Summer held the note Rosie had passed her up to the glass. “This yours?”
Ignacio picked up the phone and said in a smoky voice, “You SK’s lawyer?”
“That’s right,” Summer said.
“I got information about Gundy,” Ignacio said. “You help me, I help you.”
“You already have an attorney.”
“Fuck, yeah, I know. Rosie and me, we go way the fuck back. Grew up together. Same shitty neighborhood. But she won’t help me out.”
“If you asked her to spring you, she can’t.”
“I’m innocent, all right? I may be a cocksucker, but I ain’t no dope shagger.”
Summer held up the police report and tapped it with her finger. “You ran away from a cop and dropped ten vials of crack at her feet.”
“Personal consumption, and I only had
two
vials,” Ignacio explained. “They trumped up them charges and shit. I was framed.”
“Why would the cops do that?”
“Look. Me and Gundy? We had this arrangement. He’d call, I’d come by. For two fucking years. I came by the night someone fucked him up good.”
“What time?”
“He told me be there by ten but I was late, like twenty minutes. Had to find a sitter for my kid, ’cause my man and me had a fight.”
“What does Gundy’s place look like?”
“It’s in the Prairie View district. Split-level action. Condo, sidewalk out front. The outside’s painted this ugly baby diarrhea color.”
Summer’s mouth went dry. “Could you describe the person you saw?”
“That’s why I got you here.”
“Well?”
Ignacio regarded her cuticles. “All I’m gonna say now is that it wasn’t no SK.”
“How do you know?”
“We’re in the same cellblock. See her every fucking day. She’s cool. Knows this kung fu shit, so the guards are afraid of her. Sometimes the motherfuckers beat the shit out of us for no reason. But they don’t wanna fuck with here. She’s chilled out the tensions between the
Cholos
and other Latinas, blacks, whites—like one happy fucking United Nations.”
“You’re telling me you saw someone leave Gundy’s around the time of the murder. You get a good look?”
“Pretty good.”
“What was she wearing?”
“I didn’t say ‘she’.”
“He?”
“Didn’t say ‘he’ neither.”
“What
are
you saying?” Summer asked impatiently.
Ignacio folded her arms. “That’ll cost you.”
“Money? What are you going to do with that?”
“I ain’t asking for money. I just want you to get me out of here.”
Summer ground her molars. “Tell me about your relationship to Gundy. Were you lovers?”
“No lovin’, just sex. He was into hardcore S&M, liked to hurt girls, drip candle wax, smack them around, tie them up. He ran a tab with Sexcorts, the place I worked. Most of the other girls wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. I mean cra-a-azy. But, I ain’t stupid. I don’t have the look men want to know better anymore. I took what I could get, and what I could get was Gundy.”
“There’s not much I can do for you. This is a felony. The best you could do is cop a plea, maybe get it reduced from intent to sell to misdemeanor possession, although the D.A’s reluctant to do that these days. With your record, no matter what, you’re still going to do time.”
“Bullshit. You know if you wanna get me out, you can. All you gotta do is talk to the
man
. Street-speak. Say for $1500, he’ll lose your file for you. Then they gotta let you go. But you got to hurry. The trial starts tomorrow.”
“You’re asking a lot.”
Ignacio shrugged. “Fifteen hundred bucks and a phone call’s all I’m asking. But believe me, it’s worth it.”
Summer took a moment to think. It was risky. After Cruz, could she afford to bend the law again? Could this blow her case wide open? Or just blow it up? “I’m not promising anything,” she said, “but say there’s this miracle, and you get out. Will you testify under oath? Tell a jury you saw someone other than SK come out of his condo? Tell the court about Gundy’s sexual perversions?”
“I’ll do anything to get out of here. I want to see my baby. Can you understand that? I know I fucked up, but I gotta be there for him. I’m all he’s got.”
“Don’t talk to the press, no newspapers, TV, nothing.”
“I won’t. Here’s what you do. Talk to this lawyer, Eddie Brockton. He be the man that can make files disappear.”
Chapter 18
Her alarm went off
at 3:20, but Summer was already up, sipping peppermint tea to settle her jangly stomach.
She tuned into cable-access Channel 67, a local station with a hodgepodge of programs covered by the First Amendment. The original intention had been to foster community programs; instead, viewers were confronted with 24 hours of political diatribes, endless loops advertising escort services and phone sex, psychic babble, anarchist manifestos, and political extremism.
Summer endured the one-minute program break, and then the screen shifted into grainy video. She could see Jimi Cruz on the floor, his back propped against a dirty stone wall. He was tying his arm with a hose, one end stuck in his mouth. He was all attention as he held a lighter under a tablespoon. When powder bubbled into liquid, Cruz sucked it up with a syringe.
“It’s good stuff?” Cruz asked.
“The best.” Marsalis’s voice, off camera. “And more where that came from.”
Cruz smiled dreamily. He found a vein, and Summer watched the needle disappear into his arm, watched the plunger push the narc into him.
“Why did you come back to Haze County?” Marsalis asked. “Why didn’t you stay in Las Vegas?”
Cruz’s breathing was relaxed. He talked softly. “I didn’t know anybody in Vegas, didn’t know the scene there.”
“That is not the reason, is it?”
“C’mon, man.”
“You shouldn’t have come back.”
“I just met you. How do you know this?”
“Tell me the truth, Jimi, or I’m taking my heroin.”
“Wait!” Cruz’s eyes were sugar-glazed. “OK, OK. There was this lawyer, really cool. Beautiful girl. I was curious. I wondered, like, what’s her deal? How could someone so pretty, so together, be so sad, you know? I just want to take care of her. Like by helping her, I’d be turning my own life around. Kick this habit, get a life. Stupid, huh?”
“Pointless,” Marsalis said.
Cruz wretched, grasped his sternum with his hands. “That’s a weird kick.”
“It’s the poison,” Marsalis said. “You’ll feel differently in a moment.”
Cruz rolled onto his side. “Where’d you pick up that little bit of slang? I thought me and my friends were the only ones calling it that.”
The camera panned closer. Pebbles of sweat swept over Cruz’s face.
“By coming back, you have jeopardized the very person you wanted to save,” Marsalis said. “If the D.A. finds out, they will hold her responsible. This I cannot allow.”
Cruz was almost unconscious. “You’re not running me out of town, man.”
“What is the last thing you wish to say, Jimi?”
“Huh?” More a groan than a question.
“You’re going to die now,” Marsalis said. “Tell me the very last thought you’ll ever have.”
Cruz was able to whisper one last word before his head flopped against the floor and his eyes rolled heavenward: “
Summer
.”
Chapter 19
All Summer could think about,
while a maid led her along the outer edge of Brockton’s stucco house and to his swimming pool, was death: Sonia’s death, Wib’s death, Cruz’s death, Gundy’s death. She barely felt alive herself, as if each passing took a piece of her with it.
The maid left Summer with Brockton, who was nestled under an umbrella with a 6-foot redhead. Other B-girl clients sunbathed topless.