The Pocket Wife (20 page)

J
ack arrives late to the station the next morning. He's nearly always prompt, no matter how late he's out working on a case, but the night before has really thrown him off his game.

Even when he got back from Bellevue—and by then it was well after two—he couldn't sleep. He couldn't get it out of his head, Dana in the ER, reaching out her hands the way she did, the fear in her eyes blurring with that other time all those years ago, in the same hospital, the girl who couldn't have been more than nineteen. And then there was Margie's phone call on his answering machine—the likelihood that by now he has a grandchild. He's already left five messages for her, but so far she hasn't answered any of them, which doesn't really surprise him. On the way home from Bellevue, he made a few calls, threw his weight around and found out Maryanne was in St. Joseph's. He leans back in his chair and sticks his feet up on the desk. He's the only one there. Everyone's either out on the streets or not in yet. He closes his eyes, and he's almost asleep when his cell phone rings, jarring him awake.

“Moss?” a shaky male voice says. “Jack? It's Ronald. Steinhauser. It's Celia's husband. Widower.”

“Ronald.” Jack glances at his watch. “You on your way in?”

“No,” Ronald says. “I'm . . . I'm late. I was up all night. It's terrible. If it hadn't been for her car, I'd never have known.”

“Known?”

“The Toyota. Hard to miss with all those . . . with her political bumper stickers. Could be a problem, I always thought, in traffic. Dangerous, even. You never know what kind of idiot might be behind you and suddenly go into road rage. Anyway, I knew it was Dana.”

“Knew
what
was Dana?”

“On the news. On last night's news. ‘Oh, my God!' I thought. ‘This is all my fault.' Unintentional, of course, but I should have been more thorough. I should have looked harder. All that doesn't matter in the end, though, does it? I'm as bad as a thug with an Uzi or a drunk driver mowing down a crowd inside a crosswalk.” Ronald belches, and Jack suspects he's still a little drunk from the night before. “She and Celia . . . the way they trudged together in search of chairs and other pieces of interest if not actual . . . um, usefulness . . .”

“You've got fifteen minutes, Ronald. I'll be waiting for you in my office.”

When, sixteen minutes later, Ronald Steinhauser puffs and pants up the hall and throws himself, red-faced, into a chair, Jack is toying with things on top of the table in the interrogation room. He stacks a little bunch of pencils in a pile against his steno pad. “Tell me about the photo in Celia's phone, Ronald.”

“I was coming down here last night to show you,” Ronald says, surprising him, “but then there was that shot of Dana's car on the news, and I . . . God, I was so . . . I closed my eyes for just a second, and the next thing I knew, it was morning.”

Jack fiddles with the pencils, knocking the pile over.

“So I got up and grabbed the phone and headed for the train. I
was on my way down here—at the entrance to the subway, and I took out my wallet to find your card . . . to verify your . . . with Celia dead and then with Dana— I felt like a piece of gum on a cosmic sneaker, invisible with all the hordes, all the crowds. When there are so many people, there is no one person, I was thinking, and just then someone bumped into me, and the next thing I knew, it was gone. ‘Help!' I yelled. ‘Somebody help!' and a jogger took off, came back with a traffic cop, but it was too late. He was gone.
It
was gone.”

“Your wallet?”

“No. The cell phone.”

“He took your cell phone and left your wallet?”

“Celia's cell phone, actually. The one with the picture.”

“Of Peter Catrell and his . . . work wife or whatever? Thought you said it wasn't in the phone. You looked, remember?
I
even looked.”

“Right. This was another phone. One I didn't know about. But then I didn't know about the bank account either. Anyway, the picture was in it. It was . . . at least it looked like the one Dana was so anxious to find.”

“Could you describe the photo, Ronald?” Jack weighs his words carefully.

“Yeah. Sure. It was a picture of a man leaning over, talking to a woman with blond hair down to her shoulders. A very busty woman, not that it matters. They were sitting at a table in a restaurant. It was difficult to tell much—the photo wasn't very good.”

“As you pointed out
before
you saw it.”

Ronald clears his throat. “Did I? I don't really remem—”

“Did you recognize them?”

“It looked like Dana's husband,” Ronald says, “but to be honest, it was hard to tell.”

“Well, listen, Ronald. Thanks. Too bad you can't bring in the phone.”

“I know. I was devastated. ‘Take my wallet!' I wanted to yell after the guy—in fact, I think I did. ‘Take my wallet!' I yelled at him. ‘But bring me back the phone! Bring me back this picture, whose disappearance has caused a friend to go over the edge. Literally.'”

“Well, that's a shame, Ronald. Where'd you find it anyhow?”

“In my car. Under the . . . you know, mat in the backseat. I stopped at a light yesterday, jammed my foot down on the brake, and the thing flew out. It must've gotten mixed up with my stuff when I moved into the hotel.”

“Yeah? Flew under the front seat, you mean?”

“No. Well, sort of. I heard it bounce out back there, so I fished around when I stopped, and there it was. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Weird.” He tries not to smile. This guy is such a liar. And he's so
bad
at it. Jack was a little surprised that his alibi for the night of Celia's death checked out. The bartender remembered him vividly, though, so it was definitely Dana who went back to their house.

“Heart-wrenching about Dana. Will there be a memorial service? I know a funeral isn't possible at this point.”

“Not until she dies, probably.”

“Wait. I thought— Last night, on the news, they showed her—”

“She didn't jump,” Jack says. “Somebody stopped her.”

“Oh, my God! That's wonderful! That is so totally wonder—”

“I agree. Thanks for coming down, Ronald. Glad you found the photo.”

“Can she . . . can Dana have visitors?”

“I don't know,” he says. “Probably not yet.”

“Well, could you see that she gets the message?”

“About the picture?”

“Yes,” Ronald says. “It might help her.”

“I'll see she gets it,” Jack says. He knows that Ronald's story doesn't hold water, but the important thing is that he did at some
point see the photo and obviously deleted it to cover his own ass. And in light of all the lies he's handed over, Ronald's making himself a prime suspect—jealous husband, first one on the scene, wife threatening to take off with another man. He doesn't seem the type, but people like Ronald have been known to go off the deep end, do a one-eighty on a lifetime of placid with one crazy, violent act. Peter's still in the running, too, with his prints all over the bedroom and his obvious lack of regard for women, including his own wife. And although Dana will be relieved to hear what Ronald's got to say about the photo, this minor revelation does nothing for her case. Too late now for it to make her feel she hasn't lost her mind. That ship has clearly sailed.

Meanwhile there are still Kyle's prints in Celia's car, the missing five grand, the glass elephant he found in the Steinhausers' overgrown yard—still the knowledge that his son knows more than he's saying about the murder on Ashby Lane. Jack stretches, locking his fingers over his head. He's listened to everyone who's streamed through the office since Celia's death. He's noted the shifting eyes, the skirted questions, the suave and not-so-suave responses, the dilated pupils, the tapping feet and babbled, rambling answers. Now it's time to figure out what matters and what doesn't. It's time to sort the truth from the lies and see what kind of picture comes to light.

D
ana opens her eyes and closes them again. She doesn't move. She doesn't want to be here. She doesn't want to be anywhere. She wants to be gone, and she would be if they had left her alone, if they had let her fly. “Do you remember?” the doctors asked her when she first arrived here, in this new place outside the city, the move from Bellevue orchestrated by Peter. “Do you remember what happened to you on the bridge?” As if her interrupted flight were someone else's doing, as if it were a perpetration and not her own idea, her own last-minute plan, her own longing to escape the loose and flapping sashes of her life.

It's the colors she remembers most—the blue-black of the sky, the gray of the bridge, the spots of silver where the light hit, the white tips of the waves beneath her, the pink umbrella someone held above her head, the dark blue print of a skirt, a brown arm forcing her away from the bridge's edge, holding her firmly while the ambulance bulldozed its way through traffic. She remembers a collage of light and dark, of color and white, unlike this world of gray, where everything is muted. Her mind is a muddle, a puddle, a murk. The chaos and confusion are still there, but the bright,
sharp sparks are gone, the volume turned down on her madness.

The door opens. “How are you today?” a voice says, and Dana's eyes fly open in spite of her resolve to keep them closed.

“Fine,” she says, but it is such a tiny sound. “I'm fine,” she says, and again it's like a scratch, a bird's wing on a window. She closes her eyes.

“Is there anything you need?” With her eyes shut, the voice could be anyone's. It could be the Poet's voice or God's. It could be St. Christopher.

She shakes her head.

“Rest. I'll check on you later,” the voice says, and this time the door stays open.

Dana rolls onto her side and stares at the shiny wall.
Ocher,
she thinks,
semigloss.
The whole room is shiny; the whole ward is shiny. It's been recently painted. If she concentrates, she can even smell the paint.

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whisper. No,
she thinks,
it wasn't whisper; it was something else.
She'll ask Jamie to Google Eliot when he comes back. “The Hollow Men.” She won't ask Peter, even though the poem fits him to a tee.

She misses the clamor of Bellevue. She misses the yellow walls, the temporary cubicle that told her she was only passing through. She misses the Poet. He was there. She remembers him there, but she knows he couldn't be. “Was he there?” she says, but her voice is a sliver, falling on the rough whiteness of the sheet.
Not with a bang . . .

W
hen the door opens this time, there is no attempt to drown sound. Sneakers squeak across the linoleum and stop at the bed where Dana lies, pretending to sleep. “Hello there,” a new voice says. Jamaican, Dana thinks. “Time to get up.”

“No,” she says.

“Can't hear you.”

“No,” she says again.

“Sorry. Still can't hear you.”

“NO!”

“That's right,” the voice says, a little pleasanter, a little softer. “That's right, honey. You have to speak up!”

“NO!” Dana yells again, “I'm not getting up!”

“It's good to be heard,” the voice says, and Dana opens her eyes to a large, dark-skinned woman appraising her from the side of the bed. “But you still have to get up out of that bed.”

“Why?”

“Time for group,” the woman says—a doctor, Dana sees from her name tag. Dr. Ghea.

“I'm not ready for a group discussion,” Dana says, but her
words are garbled and wrong, circling her head like mosquitoes that need swatting.

“I'm sorry?”

“What's wrong with my voice?” Dana feels as if she's somehow landed on another planet where her words are meaningless. Maybe she took off after all. Maybe she did fly away.

“It's the medication,” Dr. Ghea says. “It slurs your words. Jumbles things a bit. We'll fine-tune your prescription, and soon you won't even be taking it.”

“No?”

“No,” she says. “You'll be on Depakote only. It just takes a while for it to kick in.”

“Oh.” Dana closes her eyes again. “I thought . . .”

“I know what you thought.” Dr. Ghea slips a blood-pressure cup around Dana's arm, and it compresses like a boa constrictor. “But you need to stay on your meds, Dana. No more of this trying to fly off the George Washington Bridge. You've got too much going for you.”

Dana chokes out a bitter laugh.

“Which you'll see if you ever get out of that bed and down the hall where you belong.”

“Group?”

“Yep. I'll even bring you there myself.”

“Wow,” she says.

“But only this one time.”

She doesn't want to go to group. She barely understands the doctor's words with all the racket in her head. And then there's the murder. Celia. Now it's coalescing. Piece by piece, the thready, floating bits of things, of thoughts and faces, memories and words, are catching on one another's edges, coming back together, like the big bang working backward, her life an explosion in reverse. There's so much time to think, lying here on the starchy sheets, the TV in the dayroom a dull and constant droning in the background, like a fly caught in a screen.

J
ack sticks his phone in his pocket and sits on a bench outside the front doors of the hospital. He tried to question Dana after checking around and finding she was transferred out of Bellevue and back to Paterson, but he was told he'd have to wait. She's getting settled in, the psych nurse told him when he tried to see her—a tall redhead wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was only the ID hanging from a ribbon around her neck that separated her from the visitors, the mothers and sisters, the daughters and friends.
MARCY
, her nameplate said, which Jack thought was interestingly close to “mercy,” and he'd wondered, not for the first time, how people's names affect their lives—the judge named Truman, the carpenter named Buzz.

It feels like the ending of things. Even though the day is bright and the sun is blazing through the trees, it feels as if summer's edged away. The air is still. Ann, Kyle, Margie, Joey—he feels their absence like an ache in his chest.

“Jack?”

He turns around. Kyle looks different, but Jack's not sure how. He's even shabbier than the day they had lunch. His hair sticks up
in tufts, and his clothes look slept in. There's something else, though. He seems different.

“Jeez. I thought you were smiling there for a second.”

“Naw. Must be the sun.” Kyle sits down on the bench. He glances at his watch. “Listen,” he says, “my friend—my girlfriend. . .”

“Is she all right?” Jack searches his son's face. “I phoned the hospital early this morning. Did she—”

Kyle stops him. “Let's do this first,” he says. “I'd rather just get this interrogation thing over with.”

“Okay. Your call.” Jack folds his hands. He leans back on the bench, even though he's dying to know about the baby. He takes a deep breath, forces himself into detective mode. “How'd your lucky charm wind up under Celia Steinhauser's window?”

“I don't know,” Kyle says. “The dog?”

“What dog?”

“It was on the news. They showed it on the news. A mutt—small? Brown?”

“No,” Jack says. “They didn't. Actually, the dog was missing for a day or two after Celia's murder.”

“Oh. She must've told me, then.”

“Would she describe it? I mean, why would she describe it? And why would your charm be there in the first place?”

Kyle shrugs. “I guess I left it in her car.”

“Look.” Jack takes out his cell. “I'm trying to help you here. If you don't want my help, you can talk to someone at the station.” He thumbs through his phone.

“Okay.” Kyle sighs. “You gonna arrest me,
Dad
?”

“Haven't so far.”

Kyle looks back at the hospital. He glances straight up at the windows, at one of the windows, it looks like. Jack watches him from behind the black curtain of his glasses.

“Did you pay?” he says, and Jack nods.

“I did. Nice place,” he says, and he thinks again of Kyle and Joey when they were little, remembers them swinging on a homemade swing, bright red, their legs pumping them higher and higher, Margie in the doorway, her hands cupped around her mouth. Thinks of the baby. He hands Kyle the key. “I like the tree in front,” he says. “When you were a kid, there was this tree in our front yard. . . .”

“Yeah,” Kyle says. He smiles. “Yeah. I remember. Thanks,” he says, “for this.” He holds up the key, sticks it inside his wallet.

“So where'd you get it?”

“What?” Kyle says. He slips the wallet into the back pocket of his jeans.

“The wad of bills?”

Kyle shrugs. He stares at the parking lot, or possibly the street, Jack can't tell which.

“I liked Celia,” Kyle says. “I didn't kill her. She was nice. She was a good teacher.”

“Go on.”

“I needed to get out of where I was living. I needed to get Maryanne out of there. That crappy—”

“Rosie's Rooms.”

“Yeah.” Kyle looks at him. “How'd you know?”

“Your mom,” Jack says. “She mentioned it.”

“When? I didn't know you guys were even talking.”

“We keep in touch. More so lately.”

“She didn't tell me.”

“Well, that's . . .” He doesn't finish. There's no point, really. It's par for the course. That's Margie, hoarding information, meting it out when it suits her. She still hasn't called him back. “So you had to get Maryanne out of where you guys were living.”

“Yeah. I kept trying to find work. Every day I was out looking for something. Maryanne had a job, but she— I knew she wouldn't be there much longer. She was pregnant, so I knew we might not even
be able to afford Rosie's Rooms. We might be out on the street.”

Jack bites his tongue.

“I applied for every job I could find. I tried places that weren't even advertising, where they didn't even have signs in the windows, but there was nothing.”

“So you . . . ?”

“So nothing. I just kept trying. Maryanne was so sure. ‘You'll find something,' she was always telling me. ‘Just keep looking.' Like that would change anything. I did, though. I kept looking. I was desperate. I was grabbing at straws.”

Jack doesn't move. He looks out over the parking lot. He barely breathes. What Kyle says now could end him—both of them, really. How can he put his son away for murder if it comes to that? Then again, how can he not?

“So this one day,” Kyle says, “it changed everything. I was walking out with Celia. Mrs. S, we called her. It was late. The class was late getting out. ‘Want a ride?' she says, and I told her sure. She said she'd drop me off in town. She seemed really distracted. She kept looking in her phone. Even when we were in the car—all the time she was driving, she kept looking in her phone. I figured she was hoping to hear from the guy who used to wait for her after class sometimes—that guy you asked me about. He'd stopped coming a few weeks before. At least I hadn't seen him in the hall.”

“Did you see him anywhere else?” Jack says. “Ever?”

“No.” He scratches his head. “Never. Only there.”

“Anyone else ever out there waiting for her?”

“Nope. Only that guy, and only him a few times. Four or five times, maybe.”

“Okay,” Jack says. “So you were in her car.”

“She stopped at a liquor store. ‘I'll just be a second,' she said. ‘It's been a rough day.' And she disappeared inside. She was in there a long time. I figured she was checking her cell again before she got in line. Anyway, I was bored. I opened her glove compartment.
Not for any reason, really. I was just . . . curious, I guess, to see if she had anything interesting, weed or anything. Her registration was in there, and I glanced at it. And then, just as I was closing the glove compartment, I see this withdrawal slip for five thousand dollars. No money, just the slip, but it was dated that day. That morning. Nine fifty-six.” He stops. He looks up at the windows and then back at the door, at the parking lot, everywhere but at Jack.

“Go on.”

“I had to get Maryanne out of that dump. Out of Rosie's. It wasn't safe. It wasn't a safe place. I kept thinking about the car registration. I kept seeing Mrs. S's address in my head. The next time I closed my eyes, it was all there, like it was printed on my eyelids.”

Jack doesn't move.

“I decided to rip her off,” Kyle says. “I decided to break into her house and take her money if it was still there. Not all of it—just enough to get us out of Rosie's. I'd pay her back. I
would've
paid her back. It was all I could think to do. I was desperate.”

Then why the hell didn't you call me?
Jack wants to say.
Or move in with your mother?
He stares at his hands as Kyle lights a cigarette.

“I walked up there from the bus. When I got close to her house, I put on a pair of gloves I bought at the drugstore. I was sure Mrs. S would be in class, but her car was still in the driveway. I figured she was running late. I decided to wait and look around her house for the money when she left. I knew she wouldn't carry it with her. She'd hide it somewhere inside, in a book, under her mattress, somewhere simple.”

He stops. He doesn't look at Jack; he looks back toward the hospital. “I snuck up near the side of the house to see about the window. It was fairly low. It wasn't locked. I knew it would be easy to climb through. I didn't see Mrs. S, though. I thought it was
weird she was still there. She wasn't ever late for class. Not on the nights I went anyway. I just stood there for a couple minutes, trying to decide what to do.”

“What about the dog
?
” Jack says. He bites his lips.

“It was inside. In the house. It was barking like crazy, but not at me. There was something else going on that I couldn't see. I crouched down in the hedges between their yard and their next-door neighbors' to wait for her to leave. There was something wrong, though.

“I heard Mrs. S yell something from the back of the house—from the kitchen, I guess—and then a second later she screamed, ‘What are you—' And then there's this racket, a crash, and the dog's still barking like crazy, and I move backward into the yard next door and I hide. Fuck, I'm thinking. All I want to do at that point is get out of there, and I wait for two, three minutes, maybe.”

“What time was this?”

Kyle shrugs. “I don't know. I was so . . . It was way after seven, though. I know that. Her class starts—started—at seven, and I'd timed it so she'd . . . Anyway, the next thing I know, the front door opens, real slow, real quiet, and I see somebody come out of the house and take off. A second later I see the dog shoot out and run down the street.”

“Was it a man or a woman you saw leave?” Jack says.

Kyle shrugs. “It was really foggy, hazy, plus it was starting to get dark.
Plus,
whoever it was wore a hoodie.”

“Damn.” Jack sits back on the bench. “Height? Build?”

“Hard to say.” Kyle closes his eyes. “I'm not sure about either the height or the build. Medium, maybe. Whoever it was was bent over, huddled up, so I couldn't really tell. Dark gray hoodie, sneakers, I think.”

“Where'd he—she?—go?”

“There was another little street across from Mrs. S's—a side street or something. Whoever it was went down there.”

“They get in a car?”

“Yeah. I think I might've heard a car starting up. I can't remember. It was all so . . .” Kyle shakes his head. He looks away from the windows and stares at his sneakers, shabby and worn through at the toes. “I waited,” he says, and Jack moves closer to hear him. “I made sure they were gone, and I went in through the window. She was lying there.” Kyle stops, he chokes. “Mrs. S. She was just lying there near the door. There was blood underneath her, pooled up under her head.”

“So what'd you— Did you try to
save
her? Yell for help? Do anything at
all
?”

Kyle shakes his head. Tears trickle down his cheeks. “I got on my hands and knees, to help her—to check her pulse, shake her, to do
something
—and then this car pulled up in the driveway. Her husband, maybe. I saw this vase lying beside her head. She was just . . . God, she was . . .”

“Then what?”

“Her purse was there, opened up on the floor, like whoever bashed her head in was looking for something. The money, I was thinking—somebody robbed her. It was there, though. In a bank envelope. Right in plain sight. I grabbed it. I didn't even think. I stuck it in my pocket, and I got the hell out.”

“Out the window?”

“Yeah.”

“You still had on the gloves?”

Kyle nods.

“Anything else you remember?”

Kyle shakes his head. “No.”

They don't speak for a few minutes. They look off in different directions, avoid each other. Finally Jack clears his throat. “Look, Kyle.” He'd bought these super-dark glasses to block the sun, to block out the world sometimes, but right now he's doubly glad they're as dark as they are. It's all there, Jack has always thought—it's
all right there in the eyes, what you're thinking, and what he's thinking now is that even if his son is telling the truth, he'll have one hell of a time selling it.

“Wait!”

Jack looks up. “What?”

“Lavender,” Kyle says. “It smelled like lavender.”

“What did?”

“The living room. Around the body. It smelled like this lavender body oil that Maryanne wears. And alcohol. Rubbing alcohol.”

“That makes sense,” Jack says. “Alcohol erases fingerprints.” Dana mentioned an odor, too, during her first interview. He also remembers seeing a pack of antiseptic wipes on her coffee table when he returned the cat. Lavender fucking wipes.

“So am I under arrest?” Kyle fiddles with his ring, the high-school ring that Jack gave Margie the money to buy the boy when he was starting his senior year, before Joey died, before their lives were turned upside down and graduating from high school was no longer a priority.

“Where's the money?” Jack wants to believe him. Even more, he wants to think he'd believe him even if Kyle weren't his son. He wants to believe his story's almost plausible. “Was that what I just handed over to . . . ?”

Kyle hesitates, and then he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet. “Here's what's left,” he says. “But yeah. The rest of it went for the apartment.” He hands Jack a wad of bills. “I wonder what Mrs. S was gonna do with all this money.”

Jack shakes his head. “So how about your lucky charm?”

“I guess it fell out while I was climbing in the window. He reaches back inside his pocket. He pulls out the elephant and sets it on the bench between them. “Sorry,” he says, “but I needed it.”