I thanked her for her time, offered her a twenty that I couldn’t afford to spend, and was relieved when she told me to keep my money. Then I stopped her before she walked out of the door.
“Do you think Lea would have killed herself?”
“Maybe. If she looked in the mirror and realized who she really was.”
She shut the door softly behind her. I went out on the balcony, lit a cigarette, and smoked while I looked out at gray sidewalks and gray skies that hinted at snow but would only deliver another cold, driving rain. For a couple of minutes, I concocted a convoluted story straight from a made-for-television movie. Ashley was the jealous neighbor, in love with Lea’s boyfriend, enraged by the way Lea treated him, certain that if Lea were out of the way, she and Ryan would live happily ever after. But the theory was silly, pure fantasy. I clung to the possibility of Ryan Beatty as the murderer. I glanced at the sagging railing. Maybe Ryan Beatty had had enough of her cheating, and things had gotten out of hand. That would be a hell of a lot easier to tell Cheryl than that her daughter had finally taken an honest look in the mirror and decided she wasn’t good enough to live.
I flicked my cigarette off the balcony, stepped forward, looked over the rail, and spotted my butt on the sidewalk. The only thing that told me was that it was a long way down.
Investigating anything is a lot like life itself. Three quarters of everything you do is a waste of time. After my visit to Lea’s apartment, thirty-six out of the next forty-eight hours were a complete wash. I tracked down Ryan Beatty’s address but Ryan’s roommate, a stocky black kid with a facial tic, told me that Ryan hadn’t been home since Lea’s funeral and swore he had no idea where Ryan was staying. I dropped by the Delta Bar and Grille, but the manager, a saggy-breasted middle-aged woman with a smoker’s cough, told me that Ryan had taken the week off. She thought he might be at his parents’ place over in Arkansas, but she couldn’t say for sure. I spent half an hour with the University of Memphis’s strength-and-conditioning coach, who told me that Ryan’s problem was that he had a head for the game but not the body for it. In an era of two-hundred-forty-pound quarterbacks, Ryan Beatty was tall and naturally scrawny. Desperate to play, he took steroids to bulk up, got caught, and then got bounced off the team. For Ryan, college had only been an excuse to play football so as soon as he left the team, he left the university. When I asked if he thought Ryan might have killed Lea Washburn, the coach looked genuinely surprised. Not Ryan, he said. No way. Even when Ryan was “riding the ‘roids,” he’d been emotional, prone to crying jags over an incomplete pass at practice or a bad call during a game, but never violent.
I interviewed a couple of Lea’s classmates who told me almost exactly what Ashley, her across-the-hall neighbor, had. Lea was a sad girl who didn’t fit in and slept around a lot. I spoke with Lea’s professors, two of whom admitted to having an affair with her. They were very nervous and very married. Both expressed their regret over Lea’s death and provided me with alibis before I asked. And both begged me to keep their affairs secret, not from their wives, but from their departmental chairs. Exhausted, disgusted, and running out of options, I stopped by the Refugee, avoided as many of Cheryl’s questions as I could, and answered the others with outright lies. In fact, the only reason the entire forty-eight hours weren’t a complete waste is that I managed to get a few hours of sleep and somehow found myself spending a couple of relatively pleasurable hours talking the saggy-breasted, gravel-throated manager of the Delta Bar and Grille out of her phone number.
The next day an old University of Memphis football brochure gave me Ryan Beatty’s hometown in Arkansas and a quick call to the Calico Rock sheriff’s department gave me Beatty’s parents’ phone number and address, but I put off making the drive to Arkansas.
Stopping by the Better Way Foundation, the nonprofit suicide-prevention hotline that Lea Washburn had called before she’d gone headfirst over the balcony, seemed like a good idea. It was the last of the loose ends, and I was up early and determined not to hit the nearest bar until the sun was dipping on the other side of the Mississippi.
There was a Happy Holidays sign on the office door and silver tinsel draped over the entrance, but other than that the place didn’t look any more festive than you’d expect a suicide-prevention hotline to be. The office was small and cramped, its semicircular space cut into pie wedges by Styrofoam partitions. Each cubicle was crammed with flat tables, rows of phones that looked as if they’d been scavenged from a 1970s Jerry Lewis telethon. I followed a narrow hall to a desk where a cabbage-faced woman leaned back in a vinyl chair and shouted curses into a phone. I squinted at the nametag on her denim shirt, Sandy McAllister, Director, but I didn’t need a nametag to tell me she was in charge. Her desk had more phones than anyone else’s, and a narrow door behind her desk had a sign that identified it as Sandy’s Powder Room, a perk of management, I guessed. I gave her an inquisitive smile. She held up a finger for me to wait, cursed a little more, and ended the conversation by dropping the F-bomb. I figured if this was the kind of reception Lea got, there was no wonder she’d gone off the balcony.
“To hell with Memphis Light, Gas, and Water,” the woman said.
“I’ll second that.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t work for them, do you?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be unless you really feel an urge to get a cussing or have a boot kicked up your ass.”
I held up my hands. “Sorry twice.”
“You’re not a volunteer.” It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t quite an accusation. “So why are you here?”
“Lea Washburn.”
“We lost her,” the woman said, her voice softening, her face sagging with exhaustion. “About a week ago, right?”
“You remember her?”
She picked up a pack of Virginia Slims from her desk and lit one despite the No Smoking sign behind her head. “I can’t forget the ones we lose,” she said, curling smoke from her lip. “I dream about them every night.” She shook her head with as much sadness as I could remember seeing. “It’s the ones we save, I forget. Those are the ones that never come back to me.”
She insisted on calling me Charlie. She apologized for it, explained that she’d talked to so many potential suicides on the phone and knew that the best way to connect with them was by using their first names that she couldn’t call anyone Mister This or That. She hoped it didn’t offend.
“Charlie’s fine,” I said. “I’ve been married twice. You call me Charlie, you’re a friend for life.”
She laughed because she was supposed to, not because I was funny. “You’re a relative or a friend of the girl?”
“Family friend,” I said.
She snubbed her cigarette, studied my face a second, and then ran her fingers through her hair. It was long and straight, the gray of fireplace ashes. There were deep furrows in her brow and the corners of her mouth. Only the liveliness of her eyes, wide and cornflower blue, kept her from looking old enough to draw Social Security.
“You’re more than a family friend.”
I showed her my ID. “I’m working for Lea’s mother.”
“Lea’s mother? Not an ambulance-chasing lawyer anxious to file a lawsuit?”
“Her mother just wants a few answers.”
She picked up a pencil, tucked it behind her ear, and sighed. “When it comes to suicide, everyone wants answers. The sad thing is, there usually aren’t any.”
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
She picked up her pack of cigarettes, changed her mind, and put them back down. “Ask what you want to.”