“Then she succeeded.”
“Because I helped her. Because I locked the door and held her hand until it was too late to get help.”
“And your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Your daughter too.”
Her eyes flashed. “Goddamn you, no. I didn’t even know that Sarah was thinking about... or depressed... I didn’t know.” She took another deep breath. “I help people. Don’t you understand that? They don’t want to live so I help them die in the only way I know how.”
“You help people? Do you have any idea how many families you’ve destroyed, how many people you’ve shattered?”
“I’m a surgeon, Charlie. Living with someone who’s suicidal is like having cancer. Sometimes malignant tumors have to be removed. Yes, it’s painful, traumatizing, and people grieve for what they’ve lost, but in the end it’s necessary to cut out the cancer so they can move on with their lives.”
I was as weary as I could ever remember being in my life. “I shouldn’t have called you evil, Sandy. You’re not a monster. You’re just a sick and sad woman.”
“Go away, Charlie. I’ve had a long day, and you’re wasting my time. You can’t prove anything, and we both know it.”
In an hour-long television drama, this would be the moment the police burst through the door or I pulled a mini tape recorder from my pocket to show her that her confession had been caught on tape. But the cops weren’t outside, and I didn’t have anything on tape. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She could have just claimed that she was playing along, telling the maniac who’d broken into her apartment what he wanted to hear because she was afraid. There wasn’t a judge in America foolish enough to admit a recording like that into evidence. But that didn’t matter either because no prosecutor would even attempt to take this case to trial. There was no physical evidence, no real motive that a jury could understand, and the “smoking gun” was an absence of rust on a fuse. Any cop who submitted the case to the D.A.’s office for prosecution would either be busted back to street patrol or sent for a psychiatric evaluation. Sandy McAllister was a serial killer who killed with words, a murderer whose victims wanted to die. A half-bright defense lawyer fresh out of a cow-college law school could get the case thrown out before a jury heard the first witness.
“You’re right,” I said.
She smiled more in certainty than triumph. “Then go home, Charlie, go to bed or go to hell or go to a bar.”
“You’re right about the cops, but it doesn’t matter. Your life is over, Sandy. I’m going to make sure of that.”
“You’re not a murderer, Charlie.”
I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to wake up every morning and look at my face in the mirror and know what I’d done. But I didn’t see any other choice. She was sick, and she’d hurt far too many people.
“I have a friend, a writer for the Commercial Appeal who specializes in exposes. He’ll love this story and he’ll run with it. Within two weeks everyone in Memphis will know what you are and what you’ve done. How many people do you think will donate money to you then? How many volunteers will stick around?”
She licked her lips. “They wouldn’t print it. I’ll sue for libel.”
“No, you won’t. You can’t afford the legal bills, and even if you could, you wouldn’t because everything you’ve done would be under a microscope, and you couldn’t hide what you are any longer.”
Her eyes flared with anger. “You’re a bastard.”
“It’s over, Sandy. Everything’s over.” I cleared my throat, took a deep breath, and forced myself to go on. “It’s all been about control, hasn’t it? Your mother took it away from you by threatening to kill herself, so you took it back by helping her. And you’ve been taking control back from other people, the ones you thought were serious and who you couldn’t save. You did it because you’ve been one step away from swallowing pills or pulling that trigger your whole life. And we both know it.”
Her jaw set, her teeth gritted. For a second, I thought that she was going to come at me and come at me hard, but then her shoulders sagged and the mask of her face crumbled. She held a hand up as if she were trying to ward off an apparition.
“You have to stop, Sandy. You can’t sacrifice any more people.”
She turned to face the window. “Leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.”
“Keep staring out there, Sandy. Keep looking hard because it’s a long, long way down.”
Then I left and closed the door behind me.
Three days later, her suicide made the paper. At one o’clock in the morning, Sandy McAllister had finished a bottle of wine, put on a designer dress that she’d purchased the day before, and leapt from her living room window. When I read the article, I didn’t cry but I didn’t celebrate either. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything but ashamed and numb. I told myself that I hadn’t pushed her. I gave myself long pep talks about justice and the greater good and how many other people like Lea she might have helped to kill. I swore that I’d had no other choice. Then I realized that trying to justify the past is as big a fool’s errand as trying to reclaim it, and I stopped telling myself anything at all.
In the end, I went back to the Refugee. It was the closest thing I had to a home and when you’re beat up and exhausted, you always go home.
I was three beers into my homecoming before Cheryl climbed onto the barstool beside me. She kissed my cheek and tipped her beer bottle in my direction.
“I’m getting better,” she said. “It isn’t easy, but I am.”
“Are you?”
“Not really,” she said. “But I figured that’s what you wanted to hear.”
I smiled and lifted my own beer. “That’s what I want to hear.”
“I’m getting better,” she said.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Then she slipped away and left me alone. But that was okay. That was where I wanted to be — the only place I’d felt comfortable in a long, long time.
Foxed
by Peter Turnbull
Just as this issue goes on sale a new Hennessey and Yellich novel by Peter Turnbull, Informed Consent (Severn House Publishers), will also be released. The series, says Booklist, “has a pair of protagonists who can play in the same league as any of Britain’s top cop duos... Recommend this... to fans of John Harvey and Ian Rankin.” EQMM will have more tales of Hennessey and Yellich later this year.
MONDAY
The man was about thirty years old; the woman, thought George Hennessey, was approximately the same age, perhaps a little younger. Both were slender, both athletic-looking, and they lay fully clothed side by side in the meadow, among the buttercups. Hennessey pondered their clothing. Both wore good-quality designer wear: She had a blouse and skirt and crocodile-skin shoes; he wore a safari jacket over a blue T-shirt and white trousers. Both had expensive wrist watches. She wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring, he wore a wedding ring only. And they looked like each other; in their feminine and masculine way, they looked similar, same balanced face. Hennessey could see the basis for mutual attraction: If they looked at each other they’d see the opposite-sex version of themselves. He took off his straw hat and brushed a troublesome fly from his face. He glanced around him: meadows, woods, and fields in every direction and above, a vast, near cloudless sky, scarred, it seemed to him, by the condensation trail of a high-flying airliner. KLM or Lufthansa, probably, flying westwards from continental Europe to North America. Then, nearer at hand, the blue-and-white police tape suspended from four metal posts which had been driven into the rock-hard soil, for this was mid June and the Vale of York baked under a relentless sun.