You can’t call yourself a jaded cop if you’re not cynical about the different treatment an attractive white suburban blonde gets when she runs into trouble. Her story makes the front page, beams out into millions of living rooms, and strangers everywhere look upon her as their own. They worry, they agonize – and above all they love, projecting all their frustrated hopes onto this inscrutably attractive teen.
By losing track of their daughter, her parents have donated her to the public at large, and now she’s everybody’s missing kid.
I shake my head at it all. In my house off West Bellfort, sharing her deathbed with Octavio Morales, there’d been another girl. No one’s interested in her. Not even the lab. When I called to request a rush on the blood work, hoping to get an id on my absent victim, I got the usual answer. We’ll get to it when we get to it. No cutting to the front of the line.
But Hannah Mayhew won’t have to wait. They’ll bump her right to the front. Because girls like her aren’t supposed to disappear.
I can’t watch anymore. I turn the television off and go upstairs to change, not even bothering to keep the noise down. By now, her pills downed with a glass of water, Charlotte’s long past hearing.
There are closer bars and probably cooler ones, but the place I end up is the Paragon, where the waitresses wear layered tanks with plaid miniskirts and the crowd would rather drink than dance. Even on a Saturday night, even as Labor Day weekend kicks off, I can find a table in the back corner, far enough away from the speakers that the ice doesn’t shake in my glass.
I cast a glance over the room, confirming Tommy’s absence. Pearl Bar is his haunt these days, but I’ve caught him at the Paragon once or twice and had to leave. Nobody knows me here and I’d like to keep it that way.
A waitress named Marta flounces up, showing an inconceivable amount of tanned thigh. Acts like she’s never seen me before, not realizing she actually has. She jots down my whiskey sour, which I have no intention of drinking, then shuffles bar-ward through the crowd, shaking schoolgirl pigtails that look anything but innocent. I watch her move even though I shouldn’t.
She’s a cute enough little thing, but she couldn’t get famous just by vanishing.
“Excuse me. Are you using these?”
I turn to the table next to me, where a couple of women in low-cut tops are busy arranging extra chairs. One of them looms over me, a pink-skinned blonde with glitter on her eyelids, of indeterminate age, motioning to the unused seats around my table.
“Take them.”
They all descend, dragging the chairs off just in time for another wave of girlfriends, who arrive with many air kisses and group hugs.
When Marta returns with my drink, she nods toward the packed table and asks if I want to move. I think about it, but decide to stay put. I don’t plan on being here all that long. She gives me a suit-yourself shrug, then takes a deep breath before retrieving orders from the newcomers. I’m thinking girls’ night doesn’t generate the kind of tips for the leggy Marta that a table of men would.
I stare into the whiskey sour like it’s a crystal ball, but it doesn’t reveal anything. The glass sweats and eventually the ice shifts. My finger traces patterns in the condensation.
I’ve been coming to this place for years, going through the same ritual. The first time was October 6, 2001, and that night I made a big enough scene I had to wait awhile before showing my face again. Now I keep it discreet. Nobody needs to know why I’m here.
People stream past the table, some heading to the restrooms, others hunting the shadows for likely targets. As the crowd expands and contracts, the bartenders move with practiced grace. There’s a guy at the bar I’ve seen before – not here, but out in the real world. He cranes his head subtly, taking in the room without seeming to. A white male, my age or a bit younger, with a hedge of black hair jutting forward like the figure on the prow of a ship. Probably someone I know from the job, another cop, judging from the never-off-duty vibe he’s giving off. I lean sideways for a better look, but the crowd closes in.
For the rest of the night, the party at the next table bleeds girls. They peel off in packs of two or three, heading home or to other locations. As they go, their places are filled by empty shot glasses and slumped-over bodies. The glitter-eyed blonde starts scooting her chair closer to my side of the gap, sending sideways looks in my direction, keeping me here longer than I’d planned.
“Are you gonna drink that?” Marta says, appearing suddenly between the tables.
She gives off a self-assured vibe, but it’s the kind of brittle hardness you always see in women who keep choosing the abusive boyfriends, or can’t keep off the bottle or the needle. Deceptive strength, more protective coloring than character.
I glance at the melting lowball at my elbow, but don’t answer. Reaching into my pocket, I peel off a twenty and toss it onto the table. It’s a stupid gesture, the sort of thing that gets remembered. But I’m sympathetic to her type.
“All righty then,” she says, swiping the twenty and running a towel over the place where it landed. She gives the girls next door a reproving glance. “Sorry, ladies, but I think I’m gonna have to cut you off.”
The trio who remain howl in mock protest, then start giggling, proud to have downed enough liquor to warrant intervention. I slip away to the men’s room, where I check the time and feel slightly appalled at the company I’ve kept.
In the mirror I find a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, wearing jeans too young for him and a T-shirt too tight, with a rumpled cotton blazer that might as well have been slept in. His nose is off-center, no upper lip to speak of, and his jaw is far from square. In fact, to my eyes, there’s almost a rodent aspect to the face. I’m not sure even a daddy complex and a quart of tequila can explain the drunk girl’s apparent interest.
As I’m drying my hands, the door swings open. Somebody stops on the threshold and does a one-eighty, disappearing from view. I only get a faint glimpse, but I think it’s the familiar-looking cop from the bar. When I emerge, he’s gone.
The table of party girls is empty, too, sparing me the indignity of having to slink past. At the bar, Marta tracks my departure. Leaving the twenty was a mistake.
Out in the parking lot, sweat rises on my forehead and in the small of my back. But I don’t sweat in the heat all that much. This perspiration is psychological. Time to get home to my dead-to-the-world wife.
The pink-skinned blonde leans against the side of a red Jeep, stabbing at the lock with her keys. While I pause to watch, she gets down on one knee, eyeball to eyeball with the lock, slotting the key in with the care of a surgeon.
Later tonight, sitting in my driveway with the ignition off, I’ll try to remember how I crossed the distance between us. Try to recreate the steps, and envision my hand seizing her bicep, jerking her up from the ground. I’ll try to recall the instant before I pushed her, wondering what I was thinking to put so much force behind it.
And I’ll try to forget, too. The sound of her body thumping against the Jeep, her choked-off yelping. The sight of the tears.
But now it all happens in a blur, and the next thing I know she’s screaming and flailing blindly with her bangled arms.
“Are you crazy?” my voice is shouting. “I’m doing you a favor!” My hands shake her silly, leaving marks on the skin. “What’s wrong with you, getting behind the wheel in your condition?”
She’s not listening. She can’t even hear me over her moaning. And then her face changes, her mouth forming an O, her veiny throat jutting like the neck of a teapot. I realize too late what’s coming, and step back just as the first ropey torrent pours out, splashing down my pants leg and all over my shoes. She twists free, staggering toward the bar’s door, her hand over her mouth. Another wave hits, bubbling through her clamped fingers. That image, caught in slow motion by the amber glare of a streetlight, sears me.