Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) (7 page)

Plans?
She looked at the agent then on past him,
snorting air from her nostrils.
Plans?
Wearing jeans and a damp white
sleeveless T-shirt, she cracked her knuckles as she frowned and shook her head.
“I guess I really haven’t decided what I . . . what
we’re
going to do
now.” She signed and glanced at her hatted new friend, then frowned back at the
agent. “Why does it matter to you?”

Sherry joined her inquiring look at the agent.

“Well,” Walker coughed, his neck knot bounced up and down.
“Well, the thing is, uh, . . .”

He shook his head sharply, looked at the floor and coughed
and started again. “We think we’re going to be able to find the men who k . . .
killed your . . . uh . . . killed your roommate. Arrest them. They’re drug
dealers . . . out of Miami. Or, to put it more uh . . .p . . . probably, more
accurately, these two men
work
for the real dealers. We think they’re
what we call enforcers for a Cuban operation. American Cubans. We think t . .
.they’re connected to a big t . . . time ring they’ve operated down there for a
long time. This k . . ., uh, this
mistake
has opened them up to us.” He
looked down at the screen and Mary realized he was reading from it.

“I want you to know your descriptions were critical in
providing us with the information we needed to positively ID those suspects.”

He sounded like he was making a public service announcement.

“You’ve performed a valuable public service to the bureau,
Ms. Wilson.”

For a time no one spoke. A car splashed past and more
thunder rolled, nearer now.

Then Sherry interjected like he was completing an unfinished
sentence. “N’ you letter boys down there need her . . .” he jerked his head at
Mary but his eyes stayed fixed on Walker. “You’all need ‘er to finger ‘em fer
ya.”

Sherry paused and examined Walker’s face. “That’s what
you’re here today s’posed to be tellin’ her. Ain’t that right?” Sherry’s voice
was on its high lilt and as he finished speaking the room was split by a flash
of white, followed closely by a crack of thunder that vibrated the thin glass
in the windows. For an unsettling moment the light and noise jerked Mary back
to her last time here.

Walker nodded vigorously and leaned further forward, his
words came a beat out of kilter. “Yes, ma’am. The d . . .detective’s correct.”
He glanced at Sherry, then back at Mary. “We’re going to do this one . . . b .
. .by the book.”

Sherry’s eyebrows arched in mock surprise. The agent ignored
him and kept his own eyes on Mary, their centers a clear china blue circled by
a distinct black ring.

“We’re going to p . . .prepare a lineup, Ms. Wilson. We’ll
need you to p . . .point b..both of them out to us.” He straightened and
continued less intensely. “We know who they are. The law requires t…they be
identified by a witness for us to obtain an indictment. T..this is an important
case. D...drug related murder. It’s getting t…top priority from the strike
force. These guys are pros. The law calls them career criminals. They’ll give
them t . . .top-drawer lawyers.” He stopped talking and took a breath, never
releasing his eyes from hers. “We know these men are not going t..to . . .”

He stopped, swallowed impatiently and started again.

“Not going to say a thing. We have to make the case on the
evidence we can d..develop aside from them. They could even try to give them
alibis. We’ll try to make the case on them for your, uh, for Mr. Rodriquez’s
murder, then try to go higher up in the ring. We need you to identify them for
us and start that p..process.”

He stood and straightened his shirt front, his face looked
painfully sincere.

“You don’t have to uh . . . w..worry, Ms. Wilson. They won’t
be able to see you. Or know who you are.”

“
Ever
?” Said distinctly and directed past him toward
the hallway, her question came out rhetorical.

She stared through the glass-paned door at the suitcases in
the front hall, and at the washed-out plant and cardboard box heaped with toys
next to them. Sherry’s arms rested lightly on the cushioned arms of the rocker
as he searched the younger man’s face with narrowed eyes.

Walker’s eyes lost contact with hers and dropped to the
laptop, his fingers primed like a pianist’s. “The bureau will keep you briefed
about t . . . that. Where will you be staying?”

Sherry answered. “Look Agent . . .” he paused and furrowed
his forehead. “Agent, uh . . . Walker. Y’all cain’t be spectin’ her and that
boy to stay
here
?”

Walker looked back blankly, then his brows knitted.

Sherry’s head was over his knees and his pale blue eyes were
both open, serious under sandy brows pushing toward each other. “They just
stayin’ over at a friend’s now.” He nodded in the direction of the Quarter. “No
room for ‘em . . . ain’t that good an area for a little boy.” He regarded Mary
like a grandfather. “It’s a

old friend a theirs. Wouldn’t be no real trouble findin’
‘em, Mr. Walker . . . somebody had a mind to.”

The agent frowned and tapped the side of the computer with
both hands. His face twisted, his lips moved to one side. “Let me find out what
the burueau can d..do on that.” He looked gently toward Mary. “May I use your
phone, ma’am? I left my cell in the car so we would not, uh, be d…disturbed.”

“I checked the one up in my room. No dial tone. Must be shut
off. So’s my cell.”

They sat in the dim room watching Walker run through the
rain to his car, legally parked a block up Dauphine, his computer bag tucked
under his arm like football. As he loped past, the tops of the trees above him
faded into the gray layer as if someone was
erasing
things, or the scene
was part of a street artist’s unfinished urban tableau. The strangled light
pitched vague shadows into the room, giving it a moody
film noir
look;
time had slowed.

“Fulla shit Ruggle sent the kid over here to do his dirty
work,” Sherry muttered, breaking the stillness with the first angry words she’d
ever heard from him.

“Dirty work?”

He rubbed the back of his neck with both hands, sucked his
teeth and exhaled noisily. The hat tipped forward. “What they’re tryin’ to tell
ya in their roundabout official fed bullshit way, Mary . . . what they’re
sayin’ Mary is
you’re
the whole case.” He examined her face before
continuing. “Gov’ment’s gonna use you to get those bastards. Convict ‘em.” He
leaned toward her, his face sagged like the edge of a tired glacier. “They’re
tellin’ you you’re the one’s gonna hang them boys, Hon. Or . . . they gonna use
you to hang whoever them boys work for.”

The misery of Luis’s last cries surfaced somewhere in her
mind, the piercing siren, the pulsing lights. She squinted at him for a long
instant, then her voice finally came out, bitter and strong. “Well, sorry,
Sherry, but I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

He raised a palm quickly, then used it to scratch under his
saucer eye. “No, no, no. Nothin’ wrong with that. You right. Somethin’ you
gotta do . . . that’s for sure right. S’posen’ you really sure you can identify
them men.” He studied her and pursed his lips. “Want you to think real hard
‘bout that, Mary. It kin put you in kinda a bad position, you know?”

He wheezed again and rubbed the bone between his eyes,
watching her all the while. “Like I said before . . .” He groaned and raised
himself out of the chair with both hands and shuffled across the thin oriental
rug to stand at the window. Facing out with his back to her he hitched up his
pants with both hands in his common gesture, first one side, then the other
before they dropped right back to where they were before he bothered.

The street lamps had come on. Against their light the drops
slid down the glass like silver tears. He joined his hands behind his back and
groaned again as he stretched his back and shoulders.

“And the boy.”

Despite the silent room she could barely hear his murmer.

“Brian.” He stared out the black shining street. “People you
dealin’ with . . . could be puttin’ him in a bad position too.”

He seemed lost in thought for a time, but it was hard for
her to tell for how long since time had stopped. Finally, he shook his head
wearily and whispered with an exhale just louder than the rain hitting the
window. “Things ain’t simple here.”

The words still hung in the air when Agent Clay Mark Walker
strode into the room after hanging his trench coat on the edge of the hall
door. He sat down in the straight-backed chair, pulled his machine out of its
case and turned it on.

Mary regarded him discreetly. With the overcoat off he sat
erect as a cadet, trim and fit in a starched white button-down shirt, dark tie
and suit. He was a couple of inches over six feet and appeared to be in his
early thirties. Contrasting Sherry’s more eclectic choices, Walker’s pants and
jacket were matched in both color and material. His ears projected a little
from his military cut. The knot on the front of his neck seemed to wiggle up
and down even more when he was nervous and his face looked pained when he was
struggling to speak. But overall, Mary thought, trying to put Sherry’s comment
out of her mind, he looked like a decent man; what she would describe as
embarrassed but earnest.

“I have obtained the necessary authority to provide lodging
at government expense for you and your son for a reasonable period of time,”
Walker read from the screen. “The government maintains a contract with a motel
chain down here. They have four units in the New Orleans vicinity.
Knights
Inns
. I don’t know anything about t . . .them.” He raised his head toward
the detective’s back, his brows knit together. “I guess we should . . . check
them in under some . . . uh, under some other name?”

Sherry stood staring outside, rubbing the side of his face
like it was numb.
Did she hear a sigh?

Mary sat with her arms wrapped around knees drawn up to her
chest. The drops shimmering on the glass reminded her she should pack the
umbrella hanging in the hall. Like recalling the moment of an unexpected breeze
in August, she remembered buying the brass-footed lamp it hung from on a $5
yard sale impulse one day while she was out jogging, remembered Luis’s boyish
pride at rewiring the antique with Brian’s eager help, remembered their three smiles
glowing in its first light after he turned it on.

Her gaze fell from the unlit lamp to the luggage and boxes,
and to the ficus next to them. But she didn’t
see
any of it: her eyes
had gone from focus.

Walker’s eyes were shining from the muted glow of his
computer screen, his pianist’s fingers skittering over the keys like spiders.

Sherry’s eyes were missing, he was only a tired oval outline
framed in the ice-gray glow of the window. Past him out on Dauphine,
slow-moving cars trailed horizontal cones of light.

Led by high-tech stocks continuing their six-month plunge
over continuing jitters over the progress of the war in Iraq, the Dow dipped
below ten thousand for the third consecutive . . .  
Her mind blotted out of
the rest of the
Headline News
as if she possessed a built-in metabolic
remote control. Without trying to, Mary found herself following world events
better than she ever had, but she mostly used the sound rattling out of the TV
for insentient company when Brian was away at school. A spoon handle stuck out
of the milk remains in his
Barney
-decorated cereal bowl on the night
stand bolted to the wall between the twin beds. Meant for highway transients,
one of the room’s many faults to Mary was a shifting, undefined odor; sometimes
damp and musty, sometimes dry and dusty. Sometimes it smelled like other
people; then there was the one that lingered like the memory of a hospital
visit for a time after the maid left, a chemical antiseptance that sometimes
gave her a headache. She had not, as Sherry had initially optimistically
predicted,
gotten usta it.
The room’s decorating scheme seemed to have
been dreamed up by a committee resistant to taking a firm position on the issue
of color, the fiddle-leafed ficus in its orange pot being the only source of it
apart from the cathode haze bluing out of the tube. Behind the TV, a long
mirror hung over the credenza in what appeared to be an attempt at making the
cramped room feel larger. Other than the credenza and beds, the pieces were a
small round table and two chairs that looked like refugees from an elementary
classroom. She used both chairs this morning, slouching in one, her legs
stretched to the other between the beds, sipping coffee and staring lazily at
the strands of a cobweb across one corner of the ceiling, the news loop
chanting like a 21
^st
century mantra in the gloomy background.

A pleasant pool of heat spread into her thighs from the
ceramic cup they cradled. Despite its bold grade-school cursive proclamation,
she didn’t feel like the
World’s Best Mom.
Her eyes fell to the other
bed. With his legs crossed at the knees in blue jeans and high-tops, Brian lay
on his back playing his
Play-Station
. The machine beeped erratically,
the modulated sound sometimes joined by his feral bark of triumph or
frustration. A milk-box size refrigerator and microwave just as small joined a
DVD blinking an unchanging
12:00
and Mary’s answering machine to
supplement the room’s standard inventory. Mary gazed at the dark message light
and thought of home.
Home.
Invisible from the busy suburban street that
ran in front, the steel door of her new
home
opened onto the rear
parking lot filled with a melange of vehicles that traded out nightly.
Home
,
she thought again, nestling the warmth between her legs, furrowing her brow—

“Mom!” His loud voice aimed at the ceiling startled her.
“Workin’ tonight?” Before answering, she took advantage of his fixation and
studied him for a moment without his noticing. His eyes were a sharper brown
locked on the screen of the electronic toy he held at arms’ length over his
head, the pink tip of his tongue pinioned between his teeth. In that moment she
found herself transported back to
home
: back to sacred quiet Sundays,
she puttering in the kitchen, Luis and Brian in separate headsets bantering
over the game, yelling and bragging, their laughter joined and roiling up the
hardwood hallway like whitewater. She sipped and her memory pictured his tongue
sticking out on another day, concentrating as he struggled to master his bike
with Luis’s’ steadying hand on the seat, Mary running as a barrier between him
and the dangers of Dauphine, all three thrilled and terrified. She sighed and
tightened her jaw to drag her thoughts back to the noxious room, a room
brightened only by the presence of her son.

Brian frowned at her impatiently, then jerked his head back
into the competition. His focused look when he competed, even just against
himself while idling the minutes before walking to meet the school bus,
conjured for Mary a far less welcome image—its feral intensity dredged up the
uncomfortable
fact
of his father. Since his birth some small mannerism,
a look or something as subtle as a shading of his skin in a certain light, even
the way he phrased a thought had sometimes slapped her out of nowhere—a flesh
message on the authority of genes, Mother Nature instructing a lesson in the
irresistible impulse of heredity. She was never permitted to wholly forget that
the prize—
the life
— playing on the bed next to hers was necessarily the
product of
two
human beings, stamped by each. Incredibly, this indelible
marking came despite the boy’s having never even laid eyes on one of them.

“Take off those things if you want to talk,” she yelled
back, nodding at his headphones, competing against the minor din of the TV and
the game. “Thanks,” she smiled, leaning to mute the remote. “Yes, honey. I have
to. We need the money . . . it’s only a few nights a week. They’re giving me
the best nights down there . . . remember? Remember, sweetie? We talked about
all that, Brian?”

He nodded vaguely. With the game turned off he was still
playing, imagining the hands shaping over his head were airplanes or birds,
flying soaring things real only to him. Mary was happy for the moment, just the
two of them talking like equals in the hush room, the only sound the muffled
closing of anonymous car doors and trunks from the lot.

“We need the money, honey. You understand that, don’t you?
We have to have money.” He shrugged and she continued, trying to get him to
participate.
“Would you rather go in to Miss C’s . . . or have her come out here?”

“Can we get a movie?” He pressed his advantage with his eyes
glued to silent footage of some football game that had started up on the
television.

There’s the father again
, she sighed to herself
before answering. “Yes, sweetie. We can get one . . . maybe we can find one
you’ll
both
like,” she continued, smiling into her cup at the likelihood
of
that.
“But you have to promise you’ll go
right to sleep
afterwards.” She raised her face and attempted a look of parental severity.
“Promise, Brian?” He looked at her and smiled a shy obedience as her own face
collapsed to its usual soft smile of love.

“Mom!” She was stepping to the bathroom in her robe when he
called out again with his headphones back on, his voice too loud again, his
brown eyes locked back into the screen. “How long we gonna be—”

She cut off the question as if she hadn’t heard it by
closing the door and turning on the water at the sink. She queried the tired
face in the mirror: How many ways were there to tell a child his mother
didn’t
know
. Looking into her own eyes summoned the memory of them popping open
last night from some unexplained stimulus, finding
his
peering at her
from his bed, shining in the dark from what seemed to be their own power
source—a
natural
energy stronger than the feeble glow from the
Nemo
night
light she’d carted from their former house to comfort them both. She wondered
at the demons he was struggling with alone in his infernal stoic silence, then
rubbed the little tic that was starting on the right side of her face as she
stood in the fragile cocoon the sound of running water offered her from life.
What was it that opened and lighted those eyes—
his father’s eyes
—was it
the natural energy of youth . . . or was it
fear
? She sighed deeply and
scooped water to her face with both hands, straightened with another sigh and
turned off the water staring into her own scared eyes again. The only sound
then were regular electronic beeps and sporadic yips and squeals leaking
through the walls thin as cardboard.

*** *** *** ***

She lay in a winter twilight between wake and sleep, and in
the daily lull between the commotions of faceless travelers leaving and coming,
she and Brian being—in the comically officious parlance of the day-manager
trainee in her brown-checked
Knight’s Inn
polyester—their only
permanent
parties
. She smiled wanly in the semi-dark, remembering Sherry’s
sympathetic smile when she told him she thought those might well be the ugliest
two words she’d ever heard. She slept poorly in the motel, caused
by
or
cause
of
her daily dreamless
almost
nap in the afternoon while
waiting for Brian to come home.
Home
, she gritted her teeth and rolled
to try to get comfortable on the bedspread, twisting in the sweatshirt that
reminded her of the commitment she’s made to herself to get out and run—a
promise broken again today. She took some small satisfaction in being able to
keep her figure despite not exercising—partially the result of lack of appetite
since Luis’s murder— but she knew that particular virtue also flowed from her
own Mendelian gift: her mother was the kind of person always bending over the
carpet to pick up a piece of lint no one else noticed; she took the same
fastidious care of her own body and was able to maintain a lifelong sensible if
bitter trimness. Mary laid her arm across her eyes and groaned to keep tears
from welling, and to rid herself of the thought of her mother. She tried to
summon the energy and interest to pick up the room, one way of keeping out the sense
of strangers and smell after the maid left—working to keep the sad little room
theirs
.
Luis had been the neat one, she considered silently, then groaned again, trying
to force
him
from her mind. She lay without moving in a half-slumber in
the borrowed room, pondering how her mother’s ordered mind would deal with the
problems she was facing when she was yanked into consciousness by the rapping
on the metal door.

“Hey, Hon. Lookie who we got here.” She opened the door to
Brian smiling shyly in a splash of sunlight between Sherry and Mrs. Cloutier,
his school backpack slung from his shoulder. The woman held a
Redbox
bag
and his lunch pail in the arm not around Brian’s shoulder, a paisley scarf
knotted as usual above her
high forehead. A hoop hung from her sole
visible ear, almost the same burnished tone as her skin. The strange woman’s
exotic appearance worked fine in the Quarter, seemed to
fit
there; with
the strip mall plainness of the asphalt parking as a backdrop,
today she
looked like a fortune teller who had unaccountably lost her way.

“Hope ya don’t mind,” Sherry patted the back of Brian’s
head. “Dropped by the school . . . kinda checkin’ on things, ya know? Boy told
me ‘bout your plans for this evenin’. Thought maybe I could help out a little.”
He stepped in and touched her elbow. “I kin stay a bit . . . give ya ride in.”

The DVD was
Lord of the Rings.

The interior of Sherry’s Reliant K was becoming familiar.
She had even begun to follow the radio slang, a feat made more difficult by the
ever-present cloud-layer of angry static and the New Orleans mix of accents,
fouled further by the cops’ territorial imperative to use a language all their
own. It was a professional prerogative she understood; her art training and
even her restaurant work employed their own vernaculars, she considered,
half-listening to the cop talk as they drove toward the Quarter and the
Maison,
a specialized language foreign to the uninitiated.
Gouache. Eighty-six
that
!

Mary cracked her knuckles in the lap of her black skirt
under her pleated tuxedo shirt, gazed at the tip pocket of the apron folded in
the seat between them. “Look, I know you’re a little skeptical about me
working—”

He grunted but kept his eyes level and on the road.

“Well, anyway.” she sighed, looking away. “Walker said they
haven’t arrested anybody.” After looking away for a time she continued. “Have
you ever talked to him on the phone? Walker, I mean. It’s like he’s a different
person . . . on the phone I mean.”

She glanced over at him but he stayed hunched behind the
wheel, his eyes to the front. “We need the money, Sherry. I think Agent Walker
talked them into paying for everything he could. Even the extras,” she shook
her head and snorted
extras
cynically. “But we still have to live. I
don’t have anything . . . we don’t have any savings. I can usually walk out of
there with a hundred, hundred fifty a night, on decent nights, makes a big
difference to us . . .” She shrugged and her voice trailed off in the face of
his indifference. They drove a few blocks in silence before she spoke again.
“Worst thing about down there’s everybody wants to know . . . you know . . .
asking me for
the real story
.” She shook her head. “Everybody liked him,
liked Luis I mean.”

His red face turned to peer at her.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she added quickly. “I just keep
it on business down there . . . or on nothing’s more like it. Nobody knows
where we are. I miss the bus . . . I shell out for a cab.” She looked out the
window again and laughed bitterly. “Besides, I really don’t know any
real
story
now do I?”

The detective grunted, his eyes fixed on the road.

“Sherry, I’ve listened to you on almost everything.
Enrolling him under his own name was just something I had to do, you know?
There’s just so much I can ask out of him. Changing schools was hard enough.
He’s a pretty good student. But asking him to go by some other name, make him
tell a whole bunch of new kids some different name, some made up name? I just
couldn’t do that . . .” She let her voice fade and looked back out the window for
a long minute. “I’m going crazy,” she whispered in a tight monotone. “We’ve
been in that lousy place a month now. A
month
! Nobody can tell us how
long this is going to go on . . . can you understand how hard that is? I can’t
answer his questions like a parent ought to do. He’s a strong kid . . . real
trooper, as they say. Doesn’t say much but I think he’s going a little crazy
inside too. He’d have to be, wouldn’t he?” His eyes fell to her hands twisting
in her lap but he didn’t say anything. “I’ve got to get a handle on what’s
going on, what’s going to happen . . . happen to us.” She exhaled through her
nose and continued in a lower tone. “I just wish we’d moved back to the house.
That motel, that room . . . we’re
both
sick of it.” She stopped talking
and worked her hands for a few moments, then went on. “He’s all I’ve got,
Sherry. I’ve got to think of what’s best for him . . . you know? What would you
do?” She frowned at Sherry aggressively. “Look at the life I’m giving him! Have
you noticed how pale he’s getting? That damned little room!”