“So,” she said, smiling. “This is the part where I say call me and you promise you will.”
“Sure,” I said.
She winked, touched my cheek with her fingertip. “How about this? I’ll just say thank you for last night. It was nice not to be alone. Call if you want. If you don’t, that’s okay too.”
She kissed my cheek, opened the door, and stepped out into the cold. I watched until she walked through the door, thinking that she looked old and worn in the morning light. But that was okay. I didn’t have the illusion that I looked any better. When she closed the door behind her, I reached to put my car in gear and happened to glance out my window. A chubby, round-faced man wearing a blue parka and green boots stood beside a rusted-out Oldsmobile, his lips lipstick red from the cold, his blue eyes narrow and angry beneath horn-rimmed glasses. I shrugged off his glare, put the car in Reverse, then changed my mind and jammed it back into Park.
“What do you want?” he asked as I approached him.
I held up a hand to show my good intentions. “Nothing much. You were staring awfully hard at the lady.”
“She’s a friend of mine,” he said. “I... I work here.” He gave me a petulant glare that made things a little clearer. “I just didn’t know she had a new boyfriend.”
“Oh,” I said, smothering my smile. “I’m not a boyfriend.”
He shrugged as if it was none of his business but couldn’t help but look pleased. The idea of Sandy as heartbreaker or the object of an elderly man’s crush struck me as funny, but I didn’t laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just curious.”
“It’s good you look after your friends.” I offered him my hand; he seemed reluctant but he took it. “Charlie Raines.”
“Freddy McFarland.”
“You answered the call from Lea Washburn,” I said.
“Who?”
“Suicide victim. A week or so ago. A student at the University of Memphis. You took the call and then Sandy took over from you.”
He frowned again. “Who are you?”
“Sandy’s friend.” I pulled my ID from my pocket. “And a private investigator working for Lea Washburn’s mother.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets, his face suddenly pinched and wary. “You should speak with Sandy then.”
“I have,” I said. “But you answered the call. I was hoping you might remember what she said to you, maybe if you heard any other voices in her room?”
He puffed his cheeks, glanced at the building and then back at me. “Lea Washburn,” he said. “Yeah, I remember her on account of Sandy took the call from me. She’s done that a couple of times, like she doesn’t trust that I know what I’m doing.” He shrugged and gave me a nervous smile. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Sandy just does it because she cares so much, you know? She wants to save everybody.” He shook his head again and sighed. “Which means, of course, she loses more than the rest of us and it’s hard on her. I’ve seen how she suffers. Sometimes I’d like to...” He let his words trail off.
“You’d like to what, Freddy?”
“Knock some sense into people. Stop them from hurting her the way they do.”
His eyes watered, maybe from the cold, maybe from something else. He looked close to bolting so I decided not to push him. At least not yet.
“You didn’t hear anyone in the background when Lea called? A male voice maybe?” I asked.
“Just the girl. She said she was serious this time and I knew she was.”
“Okay,” I said and then his words registered. “This time?”
“She’d called a couple of times before, I think.”
“You took the calls?”
“Yeah, but this time she sounded serious.” He glanced at the building and then shook his head. “Look, I’ve probably said enough. Sandy did the best she could with that girl, worked her heart out. Christ, she must have been on the phone two or three hours before things went bad.” He leveled a stubby finger at me. “So if you’re sniffing around for a lawsuit, I can tell you right now you’re on the wrong trail.”
Then he huffed, grunted, and waddled towards the Better Way Foundation’s front door. I thought about following, but I wasn’t sure why. Something seemed wrong about him, but what? And what did it matter? I couldn’t quite imagine Freddy McFarland slipping away to murder Lea Washburn before she... did what? Killed herself and caused Sandy McAllister more pain? That made a lot of sense. Still, Sandy had said she’d spoken to Lea for an hour and Freddy said two or three. But so what? People lose track of time, and in their business it had to be hard to admit failure. When I fail, a bail skip runs loose a few days, maybe deals a few more ounces of weed. When these people failed, someone died. That couldn’t be easy to live with. God knew it was a job I couldn’t and wouldn’t do.
Two nights later I was still looking for answers and still certain that I wasn’t going to find them when I drove by Lea’s building and spotted the light in her apartment. I told myself the apartment might have been rented, and almost kept going but then I hit the brake, pulled into the parking lot, and dug through my glove compartment for a Memphis PD badge that I’d stolen from a civic fund-raiser nearly a decade before.
I made it upstairs without having to flash my badge or confront Mrs. Reynolds. The door to Lea’s apartment was unlocked so I stepped inside and prayed I didn’t blunder upon a frightened woman spending her first night in her new apartment. But the apartment was as barren as it had been on the day I visited. There was a light on in the bathroom so I headed that way and then stopped when I saw a broad-shouldered young man in sweatpants and a hoodie pull a plastic bag from the toilet tank.
“I need to ask you a couple of questions.”
He spun, stared at me with wide, deer-in-the-road eyes, and then reached behind him. I knew what was coming, imagined myself pulling my gun from my jacket and barking something calm and commanding. But I’d barely gotten my hands on the butt of my gun when he hit me with the tank lid. My hands went to my temple, and my knees buckled. I was on all fours, trying to pull myself up, defenseless as he lifted the lid again and pulled it back over his shoulders. I shut my eyes, waited for him to hit me. Then he dropped the lid, fell back onto the rim of the tub, and put his hands to his eyes. I realized I wasn’t dead when I heard him weeping.
“I killed her,” Ryan Beatty said. “God help me. I killed Lea.”
Two hours later we sat in an IHOP and shared a carafe of coffee. Ryan was down to the occasional snivel now. I had a headache. Even worse, I was more certain than ever that Ryan Beatty was only guilty of being a few watts short of bright and of loving Lea Washburn too much for his own good.
“You didn’t kill her,” I said, angrily.
“I broke up with her. Two days before... before she jumped, I told her we were through.”
I refilled my cup with coffee I didn’t need or want. “Why?”
“I caught her in bed with this guy who works at the health food store on campus.”
“So you shouldn’t have broken up with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You did what any guy would do.” I lit a cigarette despite the sign that said this was a Smoke Free Environment. “How many times had you broken up with her before? After catching her with another guy, I mean?”
“Four. No, five if you count that weirdo chick that lives across the hall.”
I swallowed hard, raised an eyebrow. “The graduate student?”
“She’s majoring in Lezzie if you ask me.”
“But you always came back to Lea.” I ignored an angry glare from an overweight woman at the next table. “Was she stupid?”