Thirty-five

I couldn’t remember ever being so exhausted. Merritt’s dark story was draining me of every bit of my vitality; I felt as though a catheter was open in my arm and I’d been donating blood the entire time she spoke.

She said, “There’s more.”

Oh God. “You sure you want to go on?” I don’t.

“Absolutely. Yes.”

Softly, I said, “I’m listening.”

“We watched the tape that night at Maddy’s apartment. It’s pretty good. I mean the quality. She caught his face in the mirror a couple of times and she got my face like she said she would. Most of the time you can only see my legs. The sounds are disgusting. Gross.” She shivered.

“The pictures, you know, the photographs, weren’t as good. She had them developed at one of those one-hour places and they’re too dark. But you can tell…you know, what’s going on.

“I went back and surprised him the next day during his walk. He was really uncomfortable. Me? I was like, totally cool, relaxed. It was my turn now, that’s the way I felt. He wouldn’t even look at me. He actually told me he was too busy to visit with me that day, he was sorry. Visit with me? Can you believe it?

“I started jogging backwards in front of him, like, facing him? I asked him how old he thought I was. He said nineteen or twenty. I said guess again. He ignored me. I said I was fifteen, I can’t even drive. He stopped and stared at me like I was this disgusting little thing. I stopped, too. ‘Fifteen,’ I said. ‘Fifteen.’ He said he didn’t believe me and he started walking again. He tried to speed up, walk past me. I wouldn’t let him. So he turned and headed the other way. I caught up with him.

“I said, ‘I have a videotape, too.’

“He looks at me real quick, then he says, ‘Of what?’ like he doesn’t really care.

“‘Our little encounter yesterday.’ That was Maddy’s word. ‘Encounter.’ I liked it.

“He didn’t look at me, he just said, ‘Bullshit.’

“‘And a witness. I have a videotape, and a witness, too,’ I tell him. ‘A friend of mine followed us up to your ranch and videotaped the whole thing. Took some pictures, too.’

“‘Bullshit,’ he says again.

“‘Dr. Robilio,’ I say, ‘I think you’re in a heck of a lot of trouble.’ That gets him. He asks me how I know his name. I tell him I know everything. I know about his company. I know what stuff he does. Who his friends are. I got all that from the research Trent did, it’s in the file at home. I’m ready, I’ve done my homework. It was sweet.

“He says I’m lying. I ask him if he wants to see the pictures.

“He does. I give him two. They’re not very good, not as good as the video. But they’re good enough. He knows it’s him. He won’t give them back to me. I say I don’t care, my friend has the negatives and the videotape.

“He wants to know who my friend is and I say no way. But I say, ‘You want to know who I am? I’m Chaney Trent’s sister. Remember her?’

“I thought he was about to croak. He gets bright red. Turns away from me, then looks back over his shoulder.

“It takes him one more second, and he asks me how much I want. I say I want a lot and not just money. I want my sister. But later, we’ll get to that later. I’d like to show him the tape first, so he can see what kind of a mess he’s in. How about five o’clock, his house?

“He turned on me then. I was afraid he was going to hit me. So I stepped back and he called me ‘a little flesh-peddling whore. How dare you do this to me?’ I couldn’t believe it.

“I said, ‘To you? You’re the one who lets babies die. You’re the one who has sex with kids.’ I almost hit him. Talk about money for flesh; he was the one who was killing my sister just to save money. I said, ‘I’ll be at your house at five o’clock, warm up your VCR,’ and I jogged away. I felt fine. My heart wasn’t even racing. His reaction told me that he knew we had him. We had him good.”

She stopped as though the story was over.

Puzzled, I said, “And you went back at five, with the tape?”

“Yeah, I did. But Trent was already there. I told you I saw his Jetta, remember?”

“Yes. But what you told me before is that you had gone to plead with Dr. Robilio for your sister’s life. But what you’re saying now is that you had actually gone back to blackmail him with the videotape?”

She seemed stunned by the bluntness of my summation. She said, “Yes, I guess that’s right.” With both hands she lifted her hair off her shoulders and twisted it into a knot above her head. “Before, when I, um-”

“Lied?”

“Okay. Lied. I guess…I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you about the videotape at all.”

“And the rest of the-”

“The rest is just the way I told you. The way I look at it now is that I feel I may have done what everybody says I’ve done. Killed him, you know. But I didn’t pull the trigger. That was…Trent.”

“You went home with Robilio’s gun? As you told me before?”

“Yeah, the same as I told you already. I really was going to shoot myself with it.”

“And the videotape, you took that with you?”

“That, too.”

“The police never found it in your room.”

She lowered her hands and her hair spilled back down past her shoulders. She swiped a few strands from her eyes. “I, um, left it outside…for Maddy. When I called her I told her where it was. I didn’t want anybody to know what I’d done. I figured she would get rid of it, the tape. I made her promise not to show it to anybody. Especially Brad.”

“You didn’t know about any scheme that they cooked up? Madison and Brad? To try to extort Robilio’s company for money?”

She shook her head. Her tone was incredulous as she asked, “You think I would do this for money?”

I dropped my chin to my chest to try to stretch the tendons in my neck. They felt like they had been surgically replaced by steel cables. When I raised my head again I focused on Merritt’s eyes and knew my heart was not in what I needed to do next. I didn’t want to confront this kid. I wanted to comfort her. But I did what my training, and not my instincts, told me to do. I said, “You’re not being totally honest with me, Merritt.”

She looked surprised, then offended. “What do you mean?”

“The fingernail? Remember? The red one? The police found it.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that.”

What she meant was that she forgot I knew about that. I said, “Do you know where they discovered it?” I wanted her to tell me.

She shook her head. Her ignorance seemed genuine. But then again, picking liars out of the soup of life wasn’t one of my more developed talents.

“They found it in the master bathroom. On the second floor. You were upstairs in the bedrooms?”

She looked at the door and played with her hair before she said, “Yeah.”

The police had found no blood on the stairs. “That same day? Before you found his body?”

She nodded. “When I first went inside, I went looking for him. I went upstairs, all over.”

“And the nail?”

“I broke it.”

“How?”

It was beginning to register that Merritt was much more adept at omissions than she was at lying. She said, “I, I don’t know. I guess I, um, I hit it on something.”

This was painful. “What? What did you hit it on?”

“I, I don’t know.”

“Come on, Merritt, tell me. Let’s finish this tonight.”

In all my years doing this work I’d come to recognize that many patients have a need to secrete something away, to protect it from the harsh light of examination and confrontation. Early in my career, I was puzzled to learn that the secret was often not necessarily of much consequence, but instead that the motive had to do with my patients’ need to retain one safe place, to underscore their independence, their separation from me.

I waited.

“Do I have to?”

I didn’t answer. My lips felt rusty, my tongue uncooperative.

“This is Maddy’s secret. Not mine. I don’t want to tell it.”