Somebody Else's Music(140)
“Kathy,” she said, when she’d been bid a good afternoon in Kathy’s best professional voice. “This is Liz. I need to talk to Debra for a second.”
“Oh, my God,” Kathy said. “Ms. Toliver. Are you all right? They said on the news that they’d arrested somebody we’d never heard of, so we thought—”
“I’m fine,” Liz said, ripping out another page and tearing it, too, into quarters. She was going faster than she’d realized. There was a whole pile of page quarters on the floor now. Some of them had scraps of pictures on them with people she remembered.
“I’ll get Debra on the phone right this minute,” Kathy said.
Liz said “thanks” and found herself staring down at a photograph of herself. She was standing next to Belinda Hart, who looked so relentlessly vapid she might as well have been a cartoon. The shock was the picture of herself, which was not a picture of how she remembered herself, or even as she remembered seeing herself in this same picture all the other times she looked at it. This Elizabeth Toliver was not a Betsy Wetsy. She had high cheekbones and enormous eyes, and even the incredibly awful way she dressed did not stop her from being beautiful. She started to tear it and then hesitated. She wondered if this was one she ought to keep. Then Debra came on the line and she looked away.
“Debra? This is Liz. Get ready. I’ve just fired Maris Coleman in the most offensive possible way and agreed to marry Jimmy in three weeks in the same afternoon. I need to order a dress at Carolina Herrera and get hold of those checks Maris forged. Do you think that’s too much for me to ask of you?”
“If you’ve really fired Maris Coleman,” Debra said, “I will make myself your slave for life and peel every grape that even comes into the same room with you until the end of time.”
Liz laughed, and as she did she looked down at her hands. She was still holding the same page with the same photograph on it. She still looked beautiful. Belinda still looked vapid. She tore it in quarters and then in eighths.
Sometimes you could keep a few things from the past and they wouldn’t hurt you. Sometimes you couldn’t. This was one of those times when you couldn’t. Besides, she thought, she didn’t care if she’d really been beautiful instead of ugly. She’d felt ugly. She’d lived in the conviction she was ugly. She’d been treated as if she were ugly, and stupid, and worthless besides.
She let the pieces of the page fall to the floor and then pulled out three pages at once, as much as she could get and still tear. She went on tearing all the while that she and Debra talked, until all the pages of the yearbook were nothing but scraps and confetti on the floor.
SEVEN
1
If he’d been somewhere else—back in Philadelphia, still with the FBI, on any case anywhere where the local law enforcement had experience in murder investigations that went beyond the religious viewing of NYPD Blue—Gregor could have gone back to Bennis until the police needed to take his statement, or written that statement up and gone straight back to Cavanaugh Street. He was tired and achy enough to do both. It had not been a good day. He’d never had time for a shower, and he felt it. Sweat was dripping off of him in odd places. His entire body felt sticky. He’d never really had a chance to take a breath and consider the situation they were all in in all its aspects. He really didn’t like working on cases in a haphazard way. That was the FBI experience coming back to haunt him. City cops worked haphazardly all the time. They had to. There was too much crime and too much confusion to give them much time to think things through. The whole point of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit—besides the practical one of providing a central database on serial killings that would make it possible for the police in one state to learn of a perpetrator’s possible actions in another—was to have agents who had the luxury of thinking through all the aspects of a case, and the ramifications, and the future problems. Right now he felt half-finished. He could lay out for Kyle Borden and the state police what Peggy Smith Kennedy had done and why. He could even rely on the fact that Emma Kenyon Bligh was an eyewitness to her own attack to get them out of the worst of the problems a case like this would cause. What he could not do was to make the whole story gel in his mind, psychologically. It seemed to him that there was something fundamental they needed to know about Peggy Smith Kennedy that they didn’t. Maybe it was just that he needed to know it. Cops and prosecutors were not famous for the deep way in which they understood the people they arrested and prosecuted. Cops were too busy making sure that they arrested the suspect without getting themselves or anybody else killed. District attorneys made their reputations on convictions. To get convictions, they needed only to be able to spin a coherent story for a jury and to keep that jury focused on the heinousness of a crime. The human aspects only got in the way. Gregor Demarkian was firmly convinced that the death penalty would cease to exist tomorrow if the majority of Americans were required to really know the men and women who were being put to death, instead of seeing them only when they were being painted as comic book monsters by the media. He was always profoundly shocked when an incident arose that seemed to indicate that he was wrong—like, for instance, the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Millions and millions of people had watched her interview on 60 Minutes. Millions and millions of people had heard her speak a dozen times in the days before her death. She was a quiet, ordinary, not very threatening woman. Her crime had been committed under the influence of drugs and—more telling to Gregor, although he’d never admit it to Bennis—of a man. She had even become religious in the way so many people said was so important to them. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care. They wanted her blood, anyway. It made Gregor wonder if there was any such thing as progress. We had trains and plains and automobiles. We had computers and microwaves and 1,500 television channels beamed in by satellite. We still reacted to our fellow human beings the way illiterate peasants had in the Middle Ages, when the old woman who had lived next door for forty years could suddenly grow horns and a tail and be in league with the devil. Any moment now, it would start here, the thing that happened in small towns in cases like this. This morning, Peggy Smith Kennedy was a woman they’d known forever, a local teacher in a bad marriage, someone most of them remembered as a popular girl in high school. Tomorrow morning, they would bring out every even slightly odd thing she had ever done. They would rewrite her life the way they rewrote their own, but in the opposite direction. They would find signs and portents in every word she ever spoke and every night she ever came in late from a date when she was a teenager, every drink she ever drank when she was underaged, every lie she ever told to get out of the fact that she’d forgotten to do her homework or had spent too long necking to make it in for her curfew. In the end, only one of the things about Peggy Smith Kennedy’s life would matter, and they’d get that wrong. Gregor could see it coming. He’d nearly gotten it wrong himself. He’d almost forgotten what it meant for someone to be an obsessive.