Cracked (6 page)

Oh God. I needed crack.

“But where are my nephews? Did you know that Social Services has taken them?”

He nodded. “It’s protocol,” he said. “Sadly. They should be released into your custody tonight, now that family is here. I argued a last-minute motion yesterday to have the household staff watch them for the night before you and your brother arrived today, but I wasn’t successful.” I felt an inch calmer. One night, that was all they had been away. Darren would be able to pick them up tonight. That, at least, we could do for Ginger.

The lawyer said a few words to Greg the Guard, and I was asked politely to remove everything from my pockets and to submit my purse at the front desk. We walked down a hallway, I went through a metal detector, and a female guard waved a security wand over me as though it was the four hundredth time she’d done it that day. Which it probably was.

Another hallway, then a guard led Chandler and me into a room and shut the door behind him. We sat in silence for a moment or two before Fred, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, was led in by a different guard, his hands in cuffs, his ankles manacled.

I stood up. “Fred,” I said. I started over to hug him, but the guard stopped me.

“No contact with the prisoner, ma’am.” I was ma’am all over the place tonight.

He looked like he’d aged twenty years since the last time I’d seen him. His formerly sandy-red hair was now mostly gray, and he looked like he’d dropped twenty pounds. It made his sticky-out ears seem even more pronounced. My heart turned over. What had he gone through? Could this all be from the last days of horror? Or had something been happening before? I sat back down in my chair.

“Hi, Danny,” Fred said quietly. He placed his handcuffed hands carefully on the table in front of him.

“Officer,” Chandler York said to the guard, “would it be possible to remove my client’s restraints for a few minutes?”

“No, sir,” the guard answered, eyes straight ahead. “Sorry.”

“How’ve you been, Danny?” Fred said quietly, looking into my eyes. “Keeping out of trouble?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” I answered lightly. I wondered quickly, wildly, if I could excuse myself to the ladies’ room to fish the balloon out of my vagina and manage a quick line of coke. “Fred. What’s going on?” I found myself fighting back slight hyperventilation. I couldn’t breathe in here. Why weren’t there any windows?

“I got the call the next morning,” Fred said, as though we’d been in the middle of a conversation about it already. “She’d been gone all night, but that had… that had happened before.”

Ginger? Staying out all night at motels? This could not be right. I shook my head to clear it. I must have missed something.

He cleared his throat. “It was in a shitty little motel. The Sunny Jim. Can you believe that?” He laughed, almost as though he found something funny. “The Sunny Jim, for fuck’s sake.”

“Fred,” I said, but he kept talking.

“We were about to head out for school,” he said. “Matt and Luke and me. I was driving them. You know they’re in sixth grade?”

I shook my head. To my shame, I didn’t really know. If I had thought enough to do the math I could have figured it out, but I had travelled so far down the highway of bad living that I couldn’t remember such things anymore. School and grades and car pools were for real people. I was a shadow of one.

Fred nodded. “They’re smart. And both pretty good athletes, too. Get that from the Clearys, you know, the athleticism. You remember – I always threw like a girl.”

I smiled. I did remember. In high school, I’d pitched for the girls’ softball team, and Fred often came to my games with Ginger and joked that they should open up the pros to girls. My siblings and I had always been strong and physically coordinated, and we all tended to be attracted to people who could break their ankles falling off a sidewalk. Other than my Jack. But Jack had no place in my life anymore. He couldn’t help me now.

I hoped Fred wouldn’t ask how the boys were. I didn’t know if he knew that the twins had been taken away last night. I hoped he didn’t know. We’d have them back tonight, I kept thinking. Tonight.

Chandler York cleared his throat. “Fred,” he said, “we don’t have much time here.”

Fred looked down at his hands, and I noticed he was going bald, his exposed skull freckled. “She knew about you, Danny. She knew all about what you were doing.”

“I know,” I whispered. My heart hammered inside my chest. “I mean, I tried not to lie to her. Not to Ginger.”

“You never picked up your phone. You never returned her calls.”

“Oh, Fred,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry. I just… couldn’t. You know?”

“She wanted to save you,” Fred continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “She said that you were the other half of her, that she had always had the sense that you were put on this earth to do something special. And she couldn’t stand what you were doing to yourself. She said she had to understand it. To help you.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, willing myself not to cry, and not to speak.

“It’s your fault,” he said. Matter-of-fact.

My heart stopped. “What?” I asked.

Fred looked square at me. “Ginger’s death, Danny. It’s your fault. It was because of you.” I stayed silent, scared that if I opened my mouth, Fred would clam up and I would never hear the rest of what he had to say.

“She got involved with some bad people, Danny, all because of you. Because of trying to save you. And do you know what they did to her? Do you know yet?” He wasn’t whispering anymore. The guard took a step forward, and Fred lowered his voice again.

“They gave her an overdose of something and then they hung her from the shower rod. They tried to make it look like she killed herself, hanged herself.” Fred looked down, and I could see that his face was wet. In slow motion, I looked at Chandler York.

“It did look like suicide immediately, Miss Cleary,” the man said gently. “But the post-mortem showed that she was, uh, hanged, after she had already passed. It was an overdose,” he said. “It was some bad dose of heroin.”

“Heroin?” I couldn’t believe it. If Ginger had somehow wanted to replicate my life, my experiences, heroin wouldn’t have been on the menu. Smoking crack was bad enough. Shooting heroin was in another league, and I had never injected myself with anything, ever.

Chandler nodded. “But it was the opinion of the forensic pathologist that Mrs. Lindquist was not a habitual user. In fact this might have been the first time. There were no other needle marks on her body.”

No, no, no, no. This didn’t make sense.

“But why do they think you did it, Fred? You don’t do drugs. I don’t understand.” I was calm. I would stay calm. I would stay calm until I found who did this to my sister, and then I would be able to let my rage out.

“Because I’m her husband. That’s what they always think.”

Fred had started to cry, great gulping sobs. Snot bubbled out of his nose. Chandler took out a handkerchief and raised his eyebrows to the guard, who nodded, and Chandler cleaned up Fred’s face. Gently, like you would a five-year-old. It seemed an oddly incongruous gesture, but sweet. And Fred barely seemed to even notice, just let Chandler wipe his face as he would a child’s.

I couldn’t figure it all out, how any of this could be true, even remotely. But I would find out.

Calm, calm, I told myself. You can smoke crack later. In a few hours, maybe less, things will be easier to bear.

“Fred,” I said. “Who did this to her? Who was it?”

Fred shook his head. “I don’t know, Danny. You tell me.”

I went cold. “What do you mean?”

“The suicide note. The fake suicide note, that someone made her write. It was addressed to you.” Fred got up and walked toward the door, and the guard opened it. He turned back around and gazed at me. “Oh, and, Danny?”

I couldn’t look at him.

“Don’t come here again. I don’t want to see you again.” He stood up, and the guard led him out of the room.

* * *

Chandler York followed me back to Fred and Ginger’s house. His shiny black Porsche – a car I had always seen as a midlife crisis car, a penis on wheels – seemed incongruous for a man of his stature and gravitas. He should have had a stately sedan, a Mercedes 600-series, or a Jaguar. But then again, I was riding around in the back of a stretch limo, so image-appropriate automobiles were not the order of the day. I kept glancing behind me on the drive back to the house, and Chandler was right behind us. I could see that he spent most of the ride talking on a cell phone. Probably explaining to his wife why he wasn’t going to make the opera gala, or whatever other tony event would occupy a normal evening for a man like him.

I looked out the window and tried to erase the image of my sister hanging from a shower rod from my mind.

Darren was still gone when we got home. Rosen was there at the door when I got out of the car. I wondered if he ever rested. He didn’t look like he needed rest. He looked like a high-end hitman. But in a good way.

“You saw Mr. Lindquist?” he asked. It had started to rain, a light mist, and Rosen held an umbrella over my head as I walked to the front door. So much for Darren’s Santa Anas.

“I did,” I replied. “James. You don’t think that Fred could do this, do you? Do to my sister what…” I couldn’t finish.

“Absolutely not,” he interrupted. “It is inconceivable.”

I nodded and stood outside the front door as Chandler York unfolded himself from his Porsche. I had to hand it to him, he was pretty graceful. Martial arts? Maybe a former Eastern bloc gymnast who’d lost the accent? My mind was whirring away, doing its best not to think of Ginger.

Inside, Marta, who looked like she’d been crying since I left the house, brought us green tea and little lemon cookies in a living room the size of a ballroom. I hadn’t seen this room yet. In fact, other than the grand front hallway and the staircase up to my room, I hadn’t seen much of anything.

Chandler and I arranged ourselves on sleek Bauhaus-style furniture. He sipped his tea, and so did I.

“Well,” he said, breaking what was turning into the awkward silence of awkward silences. “I’m sure that wasn’t pleasant for you.”

I gave him a look.

“I spoke to the police on the drive over here. Detective Miller.”

“Like Barney Miller,” I said. God, I had watched too much 70s TV.

“Uh. Right. Except his given name is Harry.” He smiled at me. “I’ve crossed paths with Miller a few times over the years, seen him at court. Seems decent enough.” I nodded. What did that matter now, I thought. Fred was already in jail. Chandler cleared his throat. “Danny. When, after Ginger’s … passing… did you talk to Fred?”

“I didn’t,” I replied. “He left me a message, and the rest I got from my brother.”

“And the rest of your family, when do they arrive?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. I wasn’t sure. Darren had been the family conduit in this situation. I loved my brothers, Skipper and Laurence. I loved them, but I hadn’t returned an email or a phone call from either of them in many months. I assumed they knew I was still alive, because they never stopped trying. I shifted in my seat, about to excuse myself to go and finally remove the drugs. Having a latex balloon shoved up your lady parts isn’t the most comfortable way to spend a long day. Between an international flight and a visit to a jail, I was happy I hadn’t had to undergo a body cavity search today.

“Do you have a big family?” I asked. “Kids and all that?” He had been so gentle, cleaning Fred’s face; it was the gesture of a father.

Chandler laughed. “Oh, yes. A lot. They’re all grown now, though, spread out, living their lives.” I nodded. He was probably a good dad. People who had lots of kids tended to love kids.

“Detective Miller asked if it would be all right for him to come over this evening,” he said. “With his partner, Detective French. She’s a woman,” he added, nodding at me.

“Fancy that,” I said. “They actually allow women to be police down here?”

Chandler nodded and smiled a bit. “You got me,” he said.

I put my cup down. “I want to know what’s going on here. The police thought it was suicide. Even Fred told me it was suicide at first.”

Chandler shrugged. “It seemed open-and-shut at first glance. Suicide note. Sloppy, um, job of…”

“Hanging,” I finished. I sipped my tea. What a civilized visit. Tea and cookies and suicide. Or murder. But the police were coming over, so I opted to leave the coke balloon firmly where it was for the time being.

“But of course within a few minutes the medical examiner knew…”

“That she was murdered.”

“Right.” He paused. “Fred called you right away, he told me, before they told him the truth, that she did not take her own life. And soon after he was arrested, so…”

That explained his frantic message on my voicemail. I thought about Lisa, the ticket agent at the airport, telling me that my sister hadn’t committed suicide. I shivered.

“Miss Cleary – may I call you Danny?”

“Sure.”

“Danny, do you think I could get a real drink?”

I found myself actually smiling at him. He looked tired suddenly, and his suit almost looked rumpled. He and Fred were probably pretty good friends, or close to it. He said he had met him at a benefit, and he knew Ginger. And the way he had cleaned Fred’s face at the jail, it was the gesture of a kind and gentle man. “Let me see if I can scare something up.”

Five minutes later, we were both drinking Grey Goose over ice.

“And how exactly is it that my brother-in-law was charged so quickly?”

Chandler cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should wait for the detectives…”

“Chandler. May I call you Chandler?”

“I’d prefer it.”

“Chandler, why did they arrest Fred?”

He looked down at his glass and drained it. He grabbed the bottle from the ice bucket to his left and topped up my glass, and then filled his nearly to the brim. “His DNA. His was the only DNA recovered from her, uh, the body.”

“Oh God,” I said. “But how could they possibly have gotten DNA this early? Doesn’t it take weeks? Or months?”

Chandler nodded and took a generous swig. “It used to, and in most jurisdictions still does. There’s a very new technology – it’s called RapidHit, or RapidDNA, I believe, something close to that. Some police forces around the country have bought it and are testing it. It can turn DNA around instantly, apparently. Ninety minutes or something like that. Palm Springs has one, and they aren’t very far away. And in a case like this, with Fred and Ginger being so…”