“Legally, you couldn’t be in the apartment, Lucy.”
“You shouldn’t have been in there, either, Aunt Kay.”
“I already was, but you’re right. It poses problems. You don’t want your prints or DNA in there, anything that might cause the police to be interested in you,” I tell her what she already knows. “It was wrong of her to talk to you that way. It was dishonest of her to make you the problem instead of dealing with what was so intolerable to her about her own self. But I should have made sure she was all right before I left. I could have been more careful.”
“What you’re really saying is you could have been more caring.”
“I was very angry, and I didn’t care enough. I’m sorry….”
“Why should you have cared? Why was it up to you to give a shit?”
I search for the true answer, because the right one is false. I should have cared because one should always care about another human being. That’s the right thing to do. But I didn’t. I honestly didn’t give a damn about Jaime last night.
“The irony is, she was done anyway,” Lucy says.
“We don’t get to decide that about anyone. She might not have been done. I’d like to believe she might have had insight at some point along the way. People can change. It’s wrong that someone has robbed her of that chance.” I’m deliberate and careful, as if feeling my way along a stony path that might trip me up and break my bones. “I’m sorry that my last encounter with her had to be so unpleasant, because there were many others that weren’t like that at all. There was a time when she was …”
“I won’t forgive her.”
“It’s easier to be angry than sad,” I say.
“I won’t forgive or forget. She set me up, and she lied. She set you up, and she lied. She began lying so much there was no reference point of truth left, and so she believed her bullshit.”
Lucy moves the cursor to playand clicks the mouse pad, and the digital recording begins. Bricks and steps and iron railings in shades of gray, and the sound of cars driving along the street in front of Jaime’s building, their headlights flashing past. Lucy opens another window and clicks on another file as a figure appears in the distance on the dark street, someone slender and on foot, the same young woman, I assume, but there is no bicycle, and she isn’t dressed the way she was last night. She begins to cross the street, and then the shocking hot spot of white glare as if she is an alien or a deity. She walks up to the entrance of the building, comfortable and at ease, her head flaring like a nimbus.
“That’s not the way she was dressed,” I tell Lucy.
“Stalking,” she says. “Dry runs. So far I’ve found five of them for the last two weeks.”
“Last night she had on a light-colored shirt. So what I just saw on the recording was from when …?” I start to ask, but I’m stopped by the sound of Jaime Berger’s voice.
“… I realize that once again I’m breaking the no-contact rule that I myself made.” The familiar voice drifts out of a speaker, and Lucy clicks on the volume and turns it up as the figure in the video recording disappears down the dark street in front of Jaime’s building. “I guess you know by now Kay is here and will be helping with a case of mine. We just had dinner, and I’m afraid she got perturbed with me. Always the lioness when it comes to you, and that didn’t help. Jesus God, it never helped. An unfortunate triangulation is putting it kindly. Somehow I always felt she was in the room no matter what room. Lights out, hello, Auntie Kay, are you there? Oh, well. We’ve been through all this ad nauseam …”
“Stop,” I tell Lucy, and she pauses both files. “Did she call you on your new number? When did she do that?” But I have a feeling I know.
Jaime’s voice is halting, and she is slurring her words. She sounds very much like she did last night when I left her, but slightly more impaired and nastier. I look at the BlackBerry plugged into the charger on the desk.
“Your old phone,” I say to Lucy. “You didn’t change your number, you simply got a new one when you switched to an iPhone.”
“She didn’t have my new number. I never gave it to her, and she never asked,” Lucy says. “I don’t use it anymore.” She indicates the BlackBerry.
“You kept it because she’s continued to call it.”
“That’s not really the only reason. But she’s called it. Not often. Mostly late at night when she’s had too much to drink. I save all of the messages, download them into audio files.”
“And you listen to them on your computer.”
“I can listen to them anywhere. That’s not the point. The point is to save them, to make sure they’re never lost. They’re all pretty much the same. Like this one. She doesn’t ask me anything. Doesn’t say she wants me to call her back. She just talks for a couple of minutes and abruptly ends it without saying good-bye. Sort of the way she ended it with us. Pronouncements and her talking at me and not listening, and then disconnecting.”
“You save them because you miss her. Because you still love her.”
“I’ve saved them to remind myself why I shouldn’t miss her. Or love her.” Lucy’s voice quavers, and I hear her grief and frustration and rage. “What I’m trying to tell you is she didn’t sound sick or in physical distress.” She clears her throat. “She just sounds like she was drinking, and that was a half hour after you were gone. So she probably didn’t sound even as bad as that when you were still with her.”
“She didn’t mention she felt bad or strange. She didn’t mention anything.”
Lucy shakes her head. “I can play all of it if you want, but she doesn’t say anything like that.”
I imagine Jaime in her maroon bathrobe, walking from room to room in her apartment, sipping expensive Scotch and looking out the window at Marino’s van driving off. I don’t know the precise time we left, but it was no more than thirty minutes later that she called Lucy’s old phone number and left the message. Clearly, her symptoms didn’t become severe until later, and I envision the nightstand with its spilled drink and empty base unit, the phone under the bed, and also what I saw in the master bath, medications and toiletries scattered everywhere. I suspect Jaime might have drifted off to sleep and possibly around two or three a.m. woke up short of breath and barely able to swallow or speak. It was probably at his point she frantically searched for something to take that might relieve her terrifying symptoms.
Symptoms, it occurs to me, that were eerily similar to what Jaime described when we were talking about Barrie Lou Rivers and what may be in store for Lola Daggette if she is executed on Halloween. Cruel and unusual, an awful way to die, and, according to Jaime, deliberately cruel. I thought she was trumping up a dramatic story to make her case, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe there is more truth to what she was alleging than she knew. Not scared to death but scared of it.
“Your mind is awake, but you can’t talk. You can’t move or make the slightest gesture, and your eyes are shut. You look unconscious. But the muscles of your diaphragm are paralyzed, and you’re aware as you suffer the pain and panic of suffocation. You feel yourself die, and your system is in overdrive. Pain and panic. Not just about death but about sadistic punishment,” I describe what Jaime was saying about death by lethal injection and what happens if the anesthesia wears off.
I think about how a killer might expose someone to a poison that stops breathing and renders the person unable to talk or call for help. Especially if the intended victim is incarcerated.
“Why would anyone send an inmate twentysomething-year-old postage stamps?” I get out of my chair.
“Why not sell them?” I ask. “Wouldn’t they be worth something to a collector? Or maybe that’s where they came from. Maybe they were recently purchased from a collector, a stamp company. No lint, dust, dirt, nothing stuck on the back, not wrinkled or grungy like they might be if they’d been in a drawer for decades. And allegedly sent by me in a counterfeit CFC envelope that included a forged letter on my counterfeit letterhead? Possibly, maybe? She seemed to think I’d been generous with her when I hadn’t been. A big envelope allegedly from me, and extra postage. Something else in it. Maybe stamps.” Lucy finally gives me her eyes, and I can see what’s in them. A deeper green, and they are immeasurably sad and glinting with anger.