Martin Misunderstood Page 5

  Really, it was luck that he'd slipped in the bathtub and hit his head. When An had found him there, the only question in her mind was whether to leave the water running or not while he slowly bled to death. She was the child of Dutch parents, and knew better than to waste water. She had turned off the shower, then gone in to watch Wheel of Fortune.

  This was back when you had to buy merchandise with your winnings. An could still remember the woman who had won that night. The camera panned over all the exotic, expensive items while a second camera showed the winner's excited face as she called out her purchases. 'I'll take the dinette set for fiveninety- nine, and the matching sideboard for three-fifty.' There was always a couple of hundred dollars left over, and invariably the winner would have to choose the white, ceramic greyhounds. An had always wanted one of those greyhounds. She'd yet to find one at a store. It was the kind of thoughtful gift Jill would've found for her if she'd had the strength to get out of bed (not that they had a lot of money; Jill's disability pay from the hospital barely helped with her part of the mortgage).

  Bruce knocked on the door as he entered the interrogation room. He held a folder in his hand; the crime-scene photos. He put the folder on the table and slid it toward An as a twelve-year-old boy in a suit walked in behind him.

  Well, the public defender couldn't have actually been twelve, but he looked it. When he walked across the room, his shoes squeaked. She noticed that his hair was wet at the crown where he'd combed down a cowlick. The sleeve of his suit still had the manufacturer's label sewn on to the cuff.

  'I'm Max Jergens,' he said, and An nearly laughed, thinking the name would be more fitting for a well-endowed porn star. She couldn't help it, her eyes went directly to his crotch. Jergens noticed, of course. His lip curled up in a smile.

  An tried to sound professional, and to not look at his crotch, when she told him, 'I'm Detective An Albada. We have some questions for your client in connection with the death of one of his co-workers, Sandra Burke.'

  He put his briefcase on the table, opened the locks, took out a legal pad, closed the briefcase, put it on the floor, sat down at the table, took a pen out of his breast pocket, took the cap off the pen and put it on the opposite end, then wrote down the word, 'Anabada.'

  Martin said helpfully, 'I made the same mistake myself,' as he took the pen from his lawyer, crossed through the word and wrote in a flourishing script much like a teenage girl's, 'Detective Anther Albada.' He even put a circle instead of a dot over the 'i'.

  Bruce chuckled behind An. She didn't have to turn around to know that he had his arms crossed over his chest and was staring down his nose at Martin.

  Jergens asked, 'What evidence do you have against my client?'

  Martin began, 'It's silly, really—' but An cut him off with a 'Was he talking to you?' look.

  She said, 'We found blood on Mr Reed's car, his own mixed with that of the victim. We have conclusive evidence that it was Mr Reed's car that ran over Ms. Burke.'

  Martin's face turned a whiter shade of pale. 'I cut my hands,' he explained. 'The bumper was hanging off the front of my car. My hands got cut.' He held up his palms and she saw the criss-cross of razor-thin lines. They had taken photographs of the wounds when they were booking him, and An had thought then as she thought now that had Sandra Burke been felled by a mortal paper cut, this would have been an open and shut case.

  Jergens asked, 'Where was her body found?'

  'Less than half a mile from Mr Reed's place of employment – the same route he takes home every day.'

  Jergens seemed surprised. 'Is that so?'

  'We believe he took his mother home, then went in search of the woman who had humiliated him two days before.' An watched Martin as she laid out the scenario. He didn't look like someone who would fester with hatred, but then again, she was a grown woman who had carried on an eight-year relationship with an imaginary friend, so who could tell?

  Jergens asked, 'Does he have an alibi?'

  'No.'

  'Ouch!' Jergens chortled. He looked down at his legal pad where he was tracing An's name with his pen. When he saw her watching, he gave her a wink and turned one of the circles into a heart.

  'Are you narcoleptic?' Martin asked his lawyer.

  Jergens shook his head sadly. 'Don't I wish.'

  An opened the folder Bruce had given her, keeping it tilted so that Martin and his boy lawyer could not see the contents. The pictures were stark, violent. Sandy had not just been hit by a car. Her body showed extensive bruising where she had been beaten repeatedly with a blunt object. On the scene, the coroner had guessed maybe a piece of wood or something with a square end. When An had opened the trunk of Martin's Camry and seen the crushed corner of his briefcase, she had added the case to the list of possible murder weapons.

  The coroner easily read the scene: the car had been used to knock down the victim. The subsequent beating was what had killed the woman. Then, the killer had gotten back into his car and ran over her head. Then her torso. Then her head again.

  An had to admit, if only to herself, that she was having trouble feeling sympathy for the victim. Sandra Burke had two children who were being raised by the State. She had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. She had been arrested once for intimidating one of her elderly neighbors into giving her ten dollars for cigarettes.

  All of this together was nothing spectacularly bad in the scheme of things – this was certainly not the first case An had seen where an alcoholic, bad mother had been brutally murdered – but there was one particular thing about Sandra Burke that really grated An's nerves: she was a hideous housekeeper. She'd left plates in the sink so long that the food had started to growmold. How hard was it to put them in the dishwasher? And would it have killed the woman to occasionally vacuum the rug in the front hall? For the love of God, the vacuum was right there in the hall closet.

  'Excuse me?' Martin said.

  An realized she had gone silent too long. She cleared her throat, trying to block out the image of the dirty dishes, to think of Sandra Burke as a human being instead of a grossly untidy person. 'Mr Reed, have you ever hit a woman?'

  He bristled. 'Of course not. Men are stronger than women. It's an unfair advantage.'

  Bruce chuckled. 'Have to be alone with them before you can hit them, right, Marty? Was that what it was all about?' He slammed his hands on the table, raising his voice. 'Tell us what happened, Martin! Tell us the truth!' He leaned closer. 'You came on to Susan and she told you to go fuck yourself! Isn't that right?'

  Martin and An exchanged a look. His voice was mild when he corrected, 'It's Sandy, actually.'

  Jergens scratched through the word 'Susan' on his pad and wrote 'Sandee'.

  An felt a headache working its way up from the back of her neck and into the base of her brain. She asked, 'Mr Reed, where did you go last night after you dropped off your mother?'

  'I just drove around,' he mumbled.

  'Speak up,' Bruce chided.

  'I said I just drove around,' Martin insisted. 'This is really crazy. Honestly, why would I hurt Sandy?'

  An kicked Bruce's foot with her own, indicating that he should go back to glowering with his back against the wall. She told Martin, 'Your co-workers claim Sandy taunted you quite a bit.'

  'No, she didn't,' Martin countered. 'Well, I mean, not in a disrespectful way. Not to be cruel, I mean. Well, maybe it was a bit cruel, but she didn't mean to hurt—'

  'Two days ago, she went on the loudspeaker and called you "teeny weenie" then Super Glued a twelve-inch vibrating rubber dildo to your desk.'

  Martin cleared his throat. 'She liked her pranks.'

  'Apparently.'

  'And Sandy knows that Super Glue can be easily removed with GlooperGone. It's one of Southern's best-selling products.' He shook his head. 'She started out on the Glooper line, for goodness' sakes.'

  An tried not to imagine Martin gripping a twelve-inch vibrating dildo as he lubed it with solvent and scraped it from his desk. 'S
ome of the women we talked to said that you listen to them while they are urinating in the toilet.'

  Jergens' lip curled in disgust. 'Seriously, dude?'

  Martin explained, 'My office is right outside the toilets. I wasn't listening. I didn't have a choice.'

  'Yeah, right.' Jergens went back to his doodling. An could see he had drawn a hangman's gallows with a figure resembling Humpty Dumpty hanging from the noose.

  An suggested, 'Mr Reed, you can clear this up if you just tell us where you were last night.'

  'I told you I drove around. I was home by eight – there was a television program I wanted to watch.'

  Jergens perked up. 'What'd you watch?'

  Martin looked down, his face reddening. He mumbled something unintelligible.

  An, Bruce and Jergens all asked, 'What?' at the same time.

  Martin held his head up high, squared his shoulders. 'Dancing With the Stars.'

  Jergens shot Bruce a look, and both men chuckled. 'Did you watch it with your mommy?'

  An stared at the lawyer, for some reason feeling protective of the suspect.

  Martin answered, 'Yes, I watched it with my mother.' An could tell that he was struggling to hold on to a sliver of his dignity.

  She asked, 'Did you watch it all the way through?'

  Martin nodded. 'Mother went to bed when Mr T was doing the rumba, and as I am a lifelong A-Team fan, I wanted to see what would happen.' He added, 'There's nothing feminine about wanting to watch people dance. Mr T is very light on his feet. He's an amazing athlete. Lots of athletes take dancing lessons. It makes them more nimble.'

  An sighed again, sitting back in the chair. Sandra Burke had been murdered around eightfifteen, which, if An was remembering correctly, was around the same time one of the Dancing With the Stars judges had commented that, in fact, many athletes were nimble dancers.

  Martin could not stop defending his masculinity. 'There is nothing wrong with having a wide variety of interests. I am interested in many things. Very many interesting things.'

  'Books?'

  Martin smiled – a genuine smile. 'I love to read.'

  'What subjects are you most interested in?'

  'Well, murder mysteries. Science fiction, but more about social issues than space ships.' He stared down as his hands, almost bashful. 'I'm particularly fond of Kathy Reichs. Her main character is very . . . alluring. She gets to the bottom of things, like, you know . . . you.'

  An felt her face flush. She never missed an episode of Bones. Was he comparing her to Tempe Brennan?

  Bruce wasn't buying it. 'Come on, Reed. Dr Brennan is a forensic anthropologist.'

  'He's right, man,' Jergens agreed, seeming to forget that Martin was his client. 'Andi is a detective.'

  'Anther,' Martin corrected. 'Detective Anther Albada.' He kept his eyes on An as he pressed a doughy finger to the legal pad where he had written her name. 'Anther.'

  An had started to chew her cuticle again. She made herself stop. Things had gotten off track, and she could not for the life of her figure out how. She asked Martin, 'Do you read true crime?'

  'Definitely. But only Ann Rule – not the trashy stuff. Oh, and I never look at the pictures.'

  An opened the folder so Martin could see the photos. 'Pictures like these?' she asked, flipping picture after picture around, showing him Sandra Burke splayed naked, her body creased where again and again the car had backed up and driven over her. 'We found parts of her teeth in your back right tire.'

  Martin opened his mouth and vomited all over the table.

  What Martin Really Did That Night, or

  All That Glitters is to Goad

  Martin often said that he did not have a racist bone in his body. He had supported Barack Obama, or at least he had told people that he did (Martin's life was run by strong women; he was not one to embrace change). His closest co-worker was black. He occasionally listened to rap music and enjoyed the comedy of Chris Rock. He was, in short, a man who did not normally see black and white. When he looked at a person, he saw a person, not a skin color.

  Even with these sterling credentials, Martin could not help but notice that he was the only white man in the holding tank at the Atlanta jail. Neither had the color discrepancy gone unnoticed by his fellow prisoners. When he had first entered the cell, someone had noticed Martin's short-sleeved dress shirt and his clip-on tie and said, 'Look, a Republican.'

  He could not believe that they were holding him on such flimsy evidence. Sure, his blood was mixed in with Sandy's . . . stuff . . . but that didn't mean anything. Or did it? One need only read a good Patricia Cornwell to know that blood did not come with a time-and-date stamp. Scientifically, there was no way to prove that Martin had touched the bumper the day after the incident. What a mess!

  He held his breath as the odor of fresh feces filled the air. There were two toilets, both of them out in the open for the world to see. A large, bald man was sitting reading a magazine, doing his business as if this was just another day in his life. Martin had dealt with being around toilets most of his adult life and had tucked himself into the far corner when he had first entered the cell, but the odor seemed to bounce off the walls and envelop him. Sitting on the floor with his knees to his chest, all Martin could think about was this was how the system turned you into an animal. How long would it take before Nature won out and he was forced to relieve himself in front of complete strangers? How long before his dignity was completely removed and he was spitting on the floor and scratching himself alongside the other screws? Or was it fishes? Martin had still not mastered the lingo.

  Oh, if only his one phone call had been made to his father instead of his useless mother. She hadn't answered the phone. The answering machine had whirred, Evie's blunt voice saying to leave a message. He knew she was home—Evie could not drive herself anywhere because of her cataracts – just as he knew that she was aware that Martin was sitting – no, rotting! – in jail.

  His father would not have left his only son among these monsters. His father would have . . . oh, who was he kidding? Marty Reed has been just as useless in life as he was in death. An accountant, like his son would grow up to be, Marty had worked in indexing and actuarials for a large law firm downtown. His mother had called it 'the accident' right up until the insurance company had asserted that no matter how many times she insisted, the cause of Martin Harrison Reed Senior's death had been officially ruled a suicide.

  This was how it had happened: Marty had enjoyed a nice lunch of ham salad with a devilled egg. He had written a note on the back of an index card and taken off his glasses. He left both of these on his desk. The sight of Marty fumbling blindly through the office, bumping into chairs and walls (he was legally blind without his glasses) as he made his way toward the hallway, did not strike anyone as unusual at the time. He had the remnants of his sack lunch in his hand as he felt his way toward the trash chute. Someone reported hearing a giggle as the door squeaked open, though that would have been the last noise he made. Marty didn't even scream as he careened down the chute, landing thirty-eight floors down beside his wadded up lunch sack.

  It wasn't until several hours later when the driver of the garbage truck found the body that someone actually read the note: 'Please give my glasses to the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.'

  'That's nice,' Martin's mother had said, though she had been furious to learn that the Shriners did not allow women to attend their meetings. Martin had always assumed that explained the giggle. His father had finally managed to get the last word.

  'Hooty-hoo!' someone heckled. There were whistles and a few catcalls. Martin craned to see around the legs of the men standing in front of the cell bars. He saw a tennis shoe . . . a calf . . .

  'Shut up, you cocksuckers,' An told the men who were reaching toward her. 'Back the fuck off before I Tase every one of you.'

  Martin scrambled to stand, his heart thumping at the sound of her voice. The crowd parted and he walked forward, feeli
ng the curious, if not outright envious, stares of his fellow cellies.

  An nodded to the policeman beside her and he opened the cell door.

  'This way,' she said, walking down the hallway.

  Martin stumbled over his own feet as he tried to keep up with her. 'It was awful in there,' he said. 'You don't know what it does to a man. They're animals. I feel so—'

  'You were in there for less than thirty minutes,' she told him, punching a code into the keypad by the door.

  'Really?' he asked, surprised that it hadn't been at least an hour. 'It felt like an eternity. Thank you so much for . . .' Martin's brain caught up with the moment. 'Hey, where are you taking me?'

  'I'm letting you out on your own recognizance.'

  'What about the blood? What about my fingerprints?'

  'Are you trying to talk me out of this?'

  'I just . . . I don't want you to get into trouble,' he said, the truth coming out. His mind flashed on the image of An in the interrogation room. Was that concern he had seen on her face as he threw up all over the table? It wasn't revulsion – Martin had seen revulsion in enough women by now to know what that looked like.

  She asked, 'Why would I get in trouble?'

  'For letting me out,' he said. 'I mean, this is a lot of circumstantial evidence we're talking about.'

  She stared at him. He saw that one of her eyelids drooped more than the other. The circles under her eyes were darker in the fluorescent light of the corridor. He wanted to hold her in his arms. He wanted to kiss the droopiness away. Or kiss the droopiness in, because it seemed like it would be easier to make an eyelid droop more by pressing into it than it would be to remove the droopiness; it was just simple physics.