One on one, p.36
ONE ON ONE, page 36
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
Sergeant Woods clears his throat. “Our likely perp’s hospitalized in worse condition than the victim and the victim’s already told two conflicting stories.”
“I hate these frigging domestic cases,” Poloniak grouses.
“We want a confession from this bozo or the truth from Deanie,” Woods continues.
Poloniak snorts. “Jesus. If she knows what the hell happened. She was probably as loaded as he was.”
Noting Sam’s fists clenching, Sergeant Woods drops a hand on his right forearm.
“If the mother was there, maybe she’ll talk.”
“If shuh-she knows what the hell happened,” Sam mocks the Chief. “She was probably as luh-loaded as he was.”
Poloniak’s face reddens.
“Look here, bub—” he growls.
Woods intervenes.
“We’ll be talking to her. He got himself to the hospital and never said word one about the girl being injured, let alone missing, so she went without care overnight in an abandoned building. If that’s not negligence and endangerment of a minor, I don’t know what is.”
Poloniak agrees. “Time to have a look at that place.”
“You come with us, Sam,” Woods suggests, “tell us if it’s the way you left it.”
Sam has no desire to go back there and less to see Judy Gauthier but it’s something to do while he is waiting for Deanie.
Being in the backseat of a police cruiser evokes a strong sense of guilt about every bad thing he has ever done. He hopes no one sees him as they drive through town.
“Sam.” Sergeant Woods breaks in on his thoughts. “Have you ever seen any signs of prior abuse?”
The silence from the backseat draws the cop’s eyes to the rearview mirror.
“Somebody put a cigarette out on the back of her hand a few weeks ago. She said it was her mother. She was stealing Judy’s butts.”
“Did you believe her?” Poloniak asks.
Sam hesitates. “I wasn’t sure anyone else would.”
With his arm over the seatback, Poloniak cranes around to pursue it. “Do you know of anything else? She tell you anything else?”
“No. She’s always bruised up. I thought it was from hoops. She’s such a physical player.”
Woods clears his throat. “You think there might have been sexual abuse as well?”
Sam meets Rick’s father’s glance in the rearview mirror. “All I know was she was scared of him and he didn’t like her getting calls from boys. I always had to pick her up and let her off out of sight of the house.”
Poloniak drums the back of the seat with his fingers. “This girl, she gets around, Sam. She parties a lot. You don’t think maybe a guy who’s practically her stepfather might be sort of frustrated with his girlfriend’s daughter running around? He might try to exert some discipline?”
Sam’s laugh is rusty. “Discipline? You should see her face. What’s left of it.”
“All right, Sam,” Woods says soothingly, “nobody’s excusing the son of a bitch. We’re just investigating. Trying to get a picture of what’s been going on.”
The house at the end of Depot Street is still empty, the door slightly ajar as Sam left it. While the cops pick their way around the debris inside, they make him stay in the backseat of the cruiser. The neighbors peek out of their houses and then they put their winter gear on and come out and stand around, staring at the cop car and at Sam, who sinks lower in the seat. Woods comes back to make the radio calls that put a serious investigation into motion. As Sergeant Woods takes him up the walk into the house, Sam hopes the neighbors are noticing he is not in cuffs.
Everything is just as he left it.
It hits him she’ll need some clothes and her books and uniform, her high-tops and Walkman, from this house she should never have to go into again.
“She’s going home with me. Be all right if I get clothes and things for her?”
“Better not disturb anything yet,” Poloniak advises.
Woods peers into Deanie’s bedroom. “Sam’s already walked through the broken glass. We’ve taken the Polaroids of the bedroom, Chief. I think Sam can take her books and some clothes. I’ll keep an eye on him while he does it.”
Crunching glass with every step, Sam collects her backpack and duffel onto the cot with her high-tops. Rick’s father stands in the door, tracking his every move. The drawers of the dumppicked dresser in the corner yield up the meager assortment of her ragbag wardrobe—so little of it. He recognizes all the pieces. It hits him how little she has. When he’s stuffed it all into the duffel with her high-tops and her uniform and books and swept in a handful of tape cassettes and another handful of makeup, there’s nothing much left besides some rolling papers and matches and candle stubs—her coat on a nail driven into the wall, her bathrobe on the back of the door. He takes them both.
This room of hers is nearly as horrible as the cubby in the Mill—worse, with those frigging creepy mirrors. Her belongings are as pathetic as a refugee’s. It occurs to him now that she made a style of holes and rags because that was what she had—turned them in into a kind of sarcastic joke by flaunting them. That mirror mind of hers. Clothe herself in holes, scalp herself for a hairdo, ornament herself with tattoos, jewel herself with ugly slavechains.
As he withdraws from the room, he catches a glimpse of himself in a fragment of mirror still clinging to the wall. He feels a sudden jolting nausea.
“The cartoon,” he says.
Sergeant Woods looks at him quizzically.
“The one she did on the wall at the Mill.”
“I’ve seen it,” the cop says. “Checking the place out.”
Sam looks at him. Sergeant Woods returns a direct and candid gaze.
“Look again,” Sam says. “Look again.”
Depositing her things in the truck in the hospital parking lot, he glances toward the building. In the Emergency Room reception area, visible through plate glass, Poloniak is claiming a clear plastic bag with the clothes cut off Deanie in it. It hits Sam this really is a legal matter now. They’re all going to be up to their asses in cops, lawyers and Department of Human Services social workers. Courtrooms and judges. Evoking all the emotional baggage of his own childhood, it makes him want to puke.
He turns back to the truck and reaches for his duffel to find his Walkman. Something clanks underneath the gym bag. He fishes out her waist and crotch chain rig. He holds it a moment, thinking. She had it wrapped around her hand and wrist like a weapon. The doctor said Tony Lord lost an eyelid and maybe the use of the eye—from flying glass? Did Deanie hit the mirror with the chain? Or use the chain directly?
Slowly, he tucks it into a jacket pocket. His chest feels tight and his eyes are dry and hot. Right this minute, Tony Lord is comfortably stoned on legal narcotics. Clenching and unclenching his fists, Sam leans against the truck, fighting the urge to prescribe a full dose of the chain in his pocket to good ol’ Tony—feed the motherfucker the whole length of it, link by link, jam his throat full of it.
In the ER, he draws it out and hands it to Woods. “She had it wrapped around her fist.”
Woods dangles the chain in front of Poloniak. “What do you think, Art?”
Poloniak jerks back his head. “Better hold on to it.”
It goes into another plastic bag.
Assuming a gargoyle hunch in the plastic chair in the waiting room, Sam closes his eyes and seals out the world with the noise in his headphones. He feels his cells thickening, petrifying, on the ledge of waiting. Like a fallen archangel condemned to this plane of time, he curls his toes inside misshapen, threadbare high-tops, his oversized hands and fingers slack between the knobs of his knees protruding from the rips in his jeans. The Walkman ‘phones make a robotic halo on his head as he perches meditatively on the edge of the chair with his ponytail splaying over his broad back.
Dr. Spellman taps his shoulder. Blinking, he knocks the ‘phones from his ears and lurches to his feet.
“She’s going to recovery now.”
He reaches for the bindle of her shoes and clothing.
“What about her mother? Shown up yet?”
He shakes his head.
In the recovery room, Deanie is still unconscious, her face half-covered in surgical dressings, the other half still surprisingly dirty. But with the bandages on her face and around her head to hold the facial dressings in place, she is now recognizably a human being; she has become merely the victim of a nasty head injury. Hitting up a nurse for a face towel, Sam wets it down with cool water and gingerly does the best he can to clean the rest of her face.
Sergeant Woods closes his notebook as Dr. Spellman walks away.
Next to him, Poloniak scratches his head, which is broad and flat at the top, thatched in colorless hair worn a little long on top in inadequate compensation for its increasing thinness. He bears a resemblance to one of the amphibious short-snouted rodents—beaver, wolverine, water rat.
“You notice the kid’s nose was scratched, upper lip bruised? You don’t think he was in the middle of it? I’m not saying he busted the girl’s face but maybe he did Lord’s for him after Lord punched out the girl?”
Woods shakes his head. “Lord and the girl are all cut up. If Sam was in the middle of it, he should be too. I wouldn’t be surprised if that chain is what did Lord’s eye for him. Spellman did say she didn’t think that was caused by flying glass.”
Poloniak nods.
“Besides,” Woods adds, “I saw the both of them late yesterday afternoon, Sam and Deanie—couldn’t have been much before it happened—and he was headed for Greenspark and she didn’t have a mark on her.”
The Chief stares at him in surprise. “You did?”
“Logged it,” Woods says. “Not their names, though. Look, Art, you know the kids use the Mill to party. We got an understanding, right? Better to know where they’re partying than not? Well, the Gauthier girl uses the place as a flop too. That in itself suggests home sweet home isn’t. Anyway, a while before Christmas, I rousted the two of them making out in the Playground lot. I’ve noticed him in the neighborhood a couple of times since and yesterday when I saw him in the vicinity again, I went down there to check it out. The girl was just leaving the Mill. I went in after her and there’s no doubt about it, they’ve practically set up light housekeeping in there. I didn’t see much harm in it, Art. Couple horny kids finding themselves a place to get it on. I didn’t see any sign of dope or booze so I made the judgment call to look the other way.”
Poloniak grins. “Just what I would a done. We don’t want the kid benched on account of throwing his back out humping her in the cab of his truck, eh? I’m nervous about this. Aren’t you, Woodsie?”
“God yes. His name on the blotter and we’ll have a media circus.”
“It’s a DHS case. We can sit on it. I’ll call Bill Laliberte and fill him in so he can keep the lid on at the school. He’s got to know DHS’ll be around anyway. We can trust the kid not to talk. He didn’t even want to talk to us. The TV bozos get about three seconds of the kid stuttering and they’ll decide he makes a lousy sound bite. It’s a shame, you know?”
“Yeah. I feel bad for her.”
Poloniak grimaces. “Yeah, yeah,” he says impatiently. “She was tough enough to look at before. I guess he’s so big he don’t have to look at her face unless she sits on him. I mean the kid. Good-looking boy like that and talented, goddamn he’s good, and shit for brains otherwise.” He sticks out an obscene fat tongue and waggles it. “Tongue-tied and numb as a hockey puck. What’s he doing with this freakin’ little pumpette when he could be screwing some nice cheerleader, shaves her armpits instead of her head?”
“Softhearted,” Woods suggests. “Look, so far as we know now, he’s peripheral to the case. Just a good Samaritan who brought the girl to the hospital.”
Poloniak grunts. “Softheaded’s what he is. Softheaded, softhearted, but mostly hard-on. Way I remember it, Woodsie, the Good Samaritan wasn’t popping the victim.” He notices Woods isn’t laughing. “Lighten up,” he says, with a broad wink. “I got money riding on that kid.”
Hanging over his forearm, she gags into the shallow plastic dish. Sam wipes her mouth again.
“Hurts worse,” she whispers.
“That’s ‘cause they’re professionals,” he assures her. “They know what they’re doing. That’s why you have to pay them so much—get it done right.”
The nurse laughs.
Deanie tries to smile.
Dr. Spellman enters, with another of the little kidney-shaped dishes in one hand. Deanie’s facial chains and the rings from her nose and ears are puddled in it. Tinged with blood, they are at once as gruesome and banal as pulled teeth.
“I have to turn these over to the police. You’ll get them back eventually.”
There’s a typed sheet about cleaning the wound, dressings and bandages, and telephone numbers to call for questions and to make a follow-up appointment with Spellman. The doctor dispenses an assortment of medications: antibiotics and painkillers—enough samples to save the cost of prescriptions, Sam notes gratefully. She must have been listening when Deanie said she couldn’t pay.
“No smoking,” the doctor reiterates. “Wear a seatbelt.”
“When can I play again?”
Deanie’s muffled question startles Spellman.
“Basketball,” Sam prompts. “Season runs another month, six weeks if the girls go to the finals.”
“Oh.” Spellman shakes her head. “I don’t know. If there’s a possibility of another blow to the wound in the next six weeks—” She purses her lips. “You should be able to go back to school in a few days but I think your season’s over.”
Deanie sucks in breath. “No!” she cries through the mask of bandage and swollen tissue.
Started by her vehemence, Spellman shakes her head. “Really, young lady, I advise against it. I just closed a seven-inch wound in your face. I don’t like the thought it was for nothing.”
“Fuck my face!” Deanie blurts. “ ‘s fucked anyway.”
Spellman pales.
Sam tightens his arms around Deanie. “All right,” he soothes, “all right.”
She thrashes in the enclosure of Sam’s arms, tearing the IV line from the back of her hand and sending the dish of vomitus spinning from the bed. Blood from the IV cut spatters on Sam’s already stained shirt. But she is quickly too exhausted to maintain her hysteria.
In the truck he has started ahead of time to get it warmed up, the heat and whatever’s left of the anesthetic in her system pull her rapidly down into semiconsciousness and she sleeps peacefully with her head on his thigh.
29
“Home,” he tells her in the driveway but Deanie is beyond response. Her head falls back against his shoulder and she is slack and boneless in his arms.
Glimpsing him through the window, Reuben opens the door. Sam carries her into the kitchen. From astride Reuben’s shoulders, Indy chortles her delight at seeing Sam. Pearl looks up from stirring what smells like chicken soup. Her welcoming smile fades to concern.
“This is Deanie,” Sam tells them, “she needs a place to stay.”
Reuben hands Indy off to Pearl and follows Sam as he takes Deanie through the kitchen to the couch in the living room. Squatting next to her, Sam arranges cushions under her head. Reuben fetches blankets and watches anxiously as Sam tucks Deanie up. With a nod of his head, Sam indicates the kitchen and they all withdraw, leaving Deanie unconscious on the couch.
“Her mother’s boyfriend busted her face,” Sam informs them tersely.
Pearl sits down abruptly and Reuben moves closer to her, groping for her free hand. Indy’s little face grows anxious at the tone of Sam’s voice.
“Tell us about it, Sam,” his father urges.
“The creep’s in the hospital—I guess she fought back in spades—and the cops are looking for her mother. The DHS’ll be involved. She needs a place to stay until she has a foster home.”
Pearl converts her distress into practicality. “We’ll make up the bed on the sunporch. Put a heater in there.”
“She can have my room,” Sam offers.
There is a pause for consideration.
“The baby crying might bother her,” Reuben points out.
Sam hadn’t thought of that. They’re all used to it but she won’t be. Everything’s going to be strange for her.
Before he sits down to supper, he makes the call to the principal. Laliberte’s had contact with the cops and in turn has informed both coaches of the situation with their two AWOL team members. The principal sighs heavily over the doctor’s advice against Deanie playing again this season. There’ll be a meeting in Laliberte’s office first thing in the morning.
While they eat, Sam gives them a condensed version of the story he has now repeated three times—once to Dr. Spellman, twice to the cops. He omits his sexual involvement with Deanie, and the Mill, except as a place where he knew she sometimes took refuge. It’s too complicated; he doesn’t know how to explain it, nor does he know what may happen between Deanie and himself. She’s been through so much shit, it might be months or years before she gets over it, if ever. He realizes abruptly she will have to stay in the house alone tomorrow and possibly another day or two while he is at school and his folks are working, and depending on how quickly she is able to return to school and the DHS moves to find her a foster home.
When he proposes staying home with her, his father points out gently that this is exam week. “With the physical shock she’s experienced and the painkillers, she’s liable to sleep all day anyway. Pearl and I can check on her every hour or so.”
Pearl nods. “We’re only a few minutes away, Sammy.”
He moves her to the sunporch daybed off the living room, where a space heater has warmed up the glassed-in, heavily curtained porch to a sickroom temperature. The sunporch is bigger than Deanie’s room in the house on Depot Street. Full of plants and wicker furniture and the mildewy smell of summer in storage, it offers privacy the living room couch does not. It has served as a guestroom on prior occasions when Pearl’s stepfather visited. Morris has left behind an old man’s ribbed cardigan, smelling faintly of cigars, draped on the back of a chair, and sentimentally, Pearl has not tidied it away.
