Beyond Recognition

42

Ben missed Emily. Daphne wouldn’t answer any of his questions about her, pretending she didn’t exist. He was shuttled back and forth, between talks with Susan, school classes with juveniles in detention, and evenings with Daphne. He used to think he had it bad living with Jack Santori, putting up with the parade of drunken women and the awful groaning downstairs late at night. But isolation was worse. The only thing keeping him from running away was Daphne’s threat to put Emily out of business. Ben wouldn’t do that for anything, not even his own happiness.

When Daphne showed up in the middle of classes, Ben knew it meant trouble. Anything out of the ordinary routine meant trouble. She briefly consulted with the teacher and Ben was excused, to the heckling of others. He met up with Daphne in the hallway, his heart beating fast with concern.

She was wearing black jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket. She carried a large purse by a thick strap over her shoulder.

“We need to ask a favor of you, Ben.”

“Who, you and Susan?”

“Boldt and I. The sergeant.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You should,” she said, a little stunned by his remark. “It’s good to have him on your side.”

He was loath to admit it, but he liked Daphne. He even felt sorry for her in a way, because all she seemed to do was work and talk on the phone. She said she liked to go on a run in the evenings, but she’d only managed one run since he’d been staying with her. “What kind of favor?”

“Sergeant Boldt wants to ask you some questions. Show you some pictures. You know what a lineup is?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe do a lineup.”

He didn’t want to show her how he felt about any of this. “What if I don’t want to?” he asked sarcastically.

“Then I talk you into it,” she answered honestly.

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Bribery, probably.”

“Like what?”

She answered with a question. “How about seeing Emily?”

He felt like shouting a resounding “Yes!” but tried instead to hide his feelings, not give her too much leverage.

“It can’t be at her place,” Daphne said. “Maybe at the library, somewhere like that. I can work on it.”

“Work on it,” Ben said, but she glared at him and he added quickly, “please.”

On their way to her car, Ben asked her, “Are you divorced?”

“No,” she answered, clearly surprised.

“My mom was divorced before she met him.” He had not told her much about himself, though she seemed to know a lot. Initially, he had feared the police were after him for the five hundred dollars, that they would arrest him and lock him up. But that was no longer the case; he knew it had to do with Nick. Putting Nick in jail would be a real pleasure.

“A lot of people get divorced these days,” she explained. “It doesn’t make your mother any less a person.”

“I thought she went away,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. Daphne started the car but glanced over at him before shifting gears. “She did, sort of. Go away. You know?” He felt tears coming and turned to look back at the building from which they had come. “He told me she left me. That she left us both. And I believed him.” He felt a tear run down his cheek then, and he kept his face toward the glass of the window so she couldn’t see. The car backed up.

“Ben, you’re old enough to understand that people like Jack Santori do bad things. They hurt other people. Those of us who end up victims face some tough choices.” She had started to drive, but she pulled the car over and put it in park and turned to face him. Her eyes moved as if she was thinking hard or remembering something. “If we dwell on being victims, we often never escape. The better choice is to move on. Talking about things can help.” Too many memories for her. She felt herself break.

She had tears running down her cheeks; so did he. For an instant she reminded him of his mom, because his mom seemed always to be crying, especially in the months before she left. He thought of the lie-she had never left-and cried all the harder. She had been lying down there in the cold and the damp, down there with mice and spiders and ants and God knows what else. Nothing left but some bones and that gold ring.

He relived the experience of finding that ring for the first time since promising himself not to think about it. As Daphne reached over and hugged him he felt her warmth, and he smelled her sweetness, and he buried his face in her chest and fell apart, images surfacing, feelings surfacing that he had no idea were buried inside him. He saw himself as a child. He saw his mother naked in the bathtub, running her toes under the hot water and laughing. He saw her bruised face, her swollen eye, and her fat lip, and he remembered her warning in a frightened voice, “Don’t you say a thing about this in front of him. When you look at me, you don’t see it. When he looks at you, you act no different, Benjamin. You’re my best boy, right? You gotta do this for me.” She’d been protecting him; he realized that, though too late.

A tape played inside his head and he heard them arguing and he heard her being hit, and he heard her say, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything. Just not my boy.” After that the bed had pounded against the downstairs wall for a long time, and later he’d smelled smoke and, worried the guy had passed out while smoking, he went to look and found his mother sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. He went down the stairs quietly and walked right up to her-she didn’t smoke cigarettes, not as far as he knew, and it upset him to see her smoking and he told her so. She was staring at the drawn curtain; she didn’t seem to hear him. The room was dark, and as his eyes adjusted, each time she drew on the cigarette a red light spilled over her body, and he realized she was sitting stark naked in that chair. Then, as the cigarette drew down, he saw that her body was covered in red, angry scratches, some of them deep enough to still be bleeding, black ugly bruises as big as potatoes. She exhaled and, without looking at him, said, “Go to bed.” Tears ran down her cheeks. He hurried up the stairs, but he didn’t go to bed; he sat in the shadows and watched her instead. She smoked four cigarettes in a row, found a coat in the coat closet, and put it on. She sat on the couch for a while, and when Ben awakened from an unplanned nap, she was in a different chair, looking out the window again, as if she wanted to be out there. She smoked two more cigarettes. Ben caught himself hugging his knees, crying into his pajamas. Jack called from the bedroom, “Get in here. We’re gonna play a little more.” Ben’s mom glanced up toward where Ben was hiding, as if contemplating something. She snubbed out the cigarette-he would never forget that because she used her bare foot to grind it into the rug; he had looked at the burned spot often and thought of her. She unzipped the coat, shedding it and leaving it on the couch, and walked slowly toward the bedroom, almost like a zombie. He heard the guy say something, heard his mother’s voice though not her words, and then caught the distinctive sounds of a hard slap and his mother’s groan, and he had covered his ears with his palms and run to his room and buried his head under his pillow, as he had so many nights before.

“He killed her,” Ben said to Daphne, between his sobs. She squeezed him all the tighter. “He killed my mom and put her down there.” Daphne didn’t tell him to be quiet; she didn’t tell him everything would be all right. That had been what he had feared the most, being told to shut up or that things would work out. Because they weren’t going to work out, and Ben knew it.

Daphne said, “You can tell me anything that comes to mind. It doesn’t have to make sense. I want to hear it, if you want to share it.” These words seemed to come from the voice of an angel to him. He cried all the harder. She said, “You’re safe here, Ben. Emily, me, Susan-we’re not going anywhere. We’re here for you. We’re your friends. You can talk to us. You can share with us. It’s safe.” She squeezed him again.

“I’m afraid,” he said, admitting aloud for the first time something he had lived with for what felt like forever.

“Me too,” said Daphne. “And you know what? It’s okay to be afraid.”

He looked up at her then, and for a moment he forgot everything. There was only this woman and the feeling that whatever was wrong was suddenly okay. That he was safe.

He shut his eyes and tried to hold it there forever.

The big man was Boldt, he knew that much. He wasn’t so much tall as big, and yet his hands belonged to a different person, with their long fingers. They looked like he kept them in his pockets all day or something. Hiding them. Protecting them. Ben had never seen hands quite like that.

The other guy to visit the houseboat was some sort of artist. He had a gentle face and kinky hair and went by the name of Andrew or Andrews; Ben couldn’t tell if it was a last name or a first name. He set up his pad of white drawing paper under a lamp on the small countertop bar that separated Daphne’s galley from the tiny sitting room that housed Ben’s fold-out couch. There were three tall stools at the counter where Ben usually sat while Daphne cooked.

The one called Boldt brought a videocassette with him that Daphne put into the machine and set up for Ben to view. Boldt explained, “You’ll see five men, all standing alongside one another-”

“I know what a lineup is,” Ben interrupted. He wanted these guys gone. He wanted Daphne to himself. He wanted that meeting with Emily she had promised. For the first time in a very long time he felt as if things weren’t as bad, as scary, as they had seemed, and he didn’t want to lose that feeling.

Boldt glanced over at Daphne, who asked Ben politely not to interrupt, saying that Boldt and this other guy had a job to do and it had to be done in a certain way, and even if all of them knew exactly what was supposed to happen, the sergeant still had to explain everything to Ben-which he then did, without interruption. Boldt thanked him at the end of the explanation, and it made Ben feel better about the whole thing. He wasn’t used to a guy thanking him for anything, only ordering him around.

They played the video for him then, and it looked just as it did on TV, with a line of five guys shoulder to shoulder standing in front of a white board that had lines for different heights drawn onto it. They kept their arms and hands behind their backs. There was a short guy with a beard, and next to him a taller blond guy with a tattoo showing at his chest, and then Nick, and then another tall guy with a messed-up ear, withered and small, and then a guy who looked pretty much like Nick but not really. They all turned right, then left. They spoke the same line, one right after another, so Ben could hear their voices. But he didn’t need to hear the guy’s voice.

“The guy in the middle,” Ben said. “The duffel bag had drugs in it.”

“You’re absolutely sure?” Boldt asked. “If this is the man at the airport, the one in the truck, that’s important to us. We need to confirm that. We don’t want to mix things up. But if not-”

“His name is Nick. He was a customer of Emily’s. He has his name on the back of his belt. He drives a light blue pickup with a white camper shell. There’s a Good Sam’s Club sticker on the back bumper, and there was a gun inside the camper shell: a pistol like the cops use on TV.”

“You saw the gun in the camper?” Boldt asked.

“I was in there,” Ben said.

“Drugs?”

“Stuff to make them, I think. Milky stuff. I saw a TV show about a drug lab one time. Like that.”

Boldt said, “And the duffel bag had this stuff in it.”

“In plastic things. Like for leftovers. Must have been a dozen of them.”

“Tupperware.”

“Taped shut with silver tape. And they had chemistry stuff written on them. You know? Letters and numbers.”

“What else did you find in the camper?” Boldt asked. Eye to eye with Ben, who remained on the stool, Boldt told him, “You know what immunity is, Ben? You have immunity. Nothing you tell us can get you in trouble. We didn’t read you your rights, did we? Because you’re not a suspect, you’re a witness. Whatever you did is behind you. You can’t get in trouble for any of it. And Emily’s not going to get in trouble either. Okay? You don’t have to worry about it.”

“I didn’t take any money,” Ben stated.

Daphne said, “Ben, Sergeant Boldt didn’t mention money. If you lie to us, even once, then we can’t trust anything you tell us. Does that make sense to you? Do you see the importance of not lying?”

“Let’s forget about the money,” Boldt said, as much to Daphne as to Ben. “Let’s talk about who was there at the airport. When you called nine-one-one you said it was a drug deal, didn’t you, son?”

“I’m not your son.”

“How many people were there, Ben,” Daphne encouraged.

He didn’t think he should tell. Emily had warned him to never so much as touch one of the cars. It was illegal. But Daphne’s asking made it different.

“Two,” Ben answered. “Nick and this other guy.”

“The other guy,” Daphne said.

Ben felt himself nod. The thing about Daphne was that she could get him to do things he didn’t plan on doing. It was almost as if she played tricks on him. The guys scared him, but not Daphne. He wanted her to hold him again; he wanted the others to leave so he could be alone with her. “What?” he asked her, seeing a strange look on her face.

“Sergeant Boldt needs a description of the other guy.”

“I didn’t see his face. He was over by some cars. It was dark. I couldn’t see him so good.”

The artist, on a stool alongside Ben, started sketching. Ben watched in amazement as the inside of the parking garage came to life on the page. “You were looking toward the inside or the outside?” the man asked.

“Inside,” Ben answered.

Boldt considered his words. “What’s amazing about when you see something is that there is stuff you see that you don’t even know you saw. You say you didn’t see his face because it was dark. That’s okay. Was he standing between some of the cars?”

Ben could recall the image clearly in his mind’s eye: a dark shape looking toward the truck. He felt the fear he had experienced, not knowing what to do. He nodded at Boldt. “Yeah, between some cars.”

“And was he taller or shorter than the cars?”

“Taller.” Ben understood then. “Yeah, taller,” he said proudly.

“My size? Danny’s size?” Boldt asked, pointing to the artist, who was shading the cars and making the page look even more realistic.

“Not as tall as you,” he told the sergeant. “Skinnier.”

Daphne smiled, and Boldt looked at her disapprovingly.

Boldt said, “Smaller all around, then? Shoulders, waist-a smaller frame?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

The artist worked furiously. On the page the shape of a body formed between two of the cars. Ben instructed the man, “He was standing back farther … was a little taller than that.” He couldn’t believe how clear it was in his mind. Seeing the artist’s sketch made it all so real for him-he knew exactly what was wrong with the picture. “There was a column there, you know? Yeah … like that. He was kinda leaning against it…. Yeah! There! That’s cool. Real cool.” He waited for the artist to get more of the guy on the page, then said, “His head was … I don’t know … thinner, you know?”

“Narrower?” Boldt asked.

“Yeah. Narrow. He had glasses. Big glasses, I think.” The artist corrected the head to where it was just right. He added the glasses three times until Ben said he had it. “A hat. One of those stretchy ones.”

“A knit cap,” Boldt said.

“Yeah. And a turtleneck up over his chin, I think. Or maybe a scarf or like the guys in the Westerns.”

“A bandanna,” Daphne said.

It amazed Ben how quickly the artist adjusted to every comment, how quickly it went down on the page. His hands moved in a flurry of activity, and when he pulled them away, it seemed like a Polaroid developing, the image growing out of nothing.

“Jeans?” Boldt asked.

“I couldn’t see his legs much,” Ben answered, more interested in the artist than Boldt. “No, not like that. Not a turtleneck, I guess.” The man erased it and tried a bandanna. “No. I don’t think so.” A moment later the man’s head changed completely. “Oh, wow! That’s it. That’s him.” The artist had drawn a hooded sweatshirt onto the man, the strings pulled tightly under his chin so that, when combined with the glasses, almost nothing showed of his face. “That’s it!” Ben repeated.

“The hood up like that?” Boldt asked.

“Just like that,” Ben answered.

“Any markings on the clothes?” Boldt questioned. “A sports team? A company logo? The name of a city or town?”

“You can shut your eyes if it helps,” Daphne said.

Ben tried shutting his eyes, and the image that was frozen while on the artist’s page suddenly came to life. He could smell the car exhaust, hear the airplanes and car traffic; the guy moved his head back and forth, first looking toward the truck where Ben hid, then toward the elevator and Nick with that duffel bag. Light sparked off his mouth. Ben decided to mention this. “His teeth are shiny.”

“Braces?” Boldt asked.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, his eyes still squinted shut. “Can’t see. Not exactly.”

“A gold tooth? A silver tooth?” Daphne asked.

“I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Can’t see much.”

“What’s the man doing?” Boldt asked.

Ben described the scene for them, the guy in the shadows checking out Nick and the truck. “He’s careful, you know? He’s waiting for Nick to get on the elevator. And then he does-Nick does-and the guy is coming for me, right at me!” He talked them through his panic as the guy headed toward the truck, the sense of panic, of diving back under the seat, of the truck never moving under the weight of the man, and then hearing that lock click into place. His terror at being locked up for a second time.

“As he walked toward the truck,” Daphne said calmly, “he came closer to you, didn’t he, Ben?” She added, “Maybe he stepped out of the shadows a little. Into the light a little. Go ahead and shut your eyes and try to picture that for me, would you? Can you remember? Can you see it?” Her voice was soothing, the same voice that had comforted him in the car, and so he closed his eyes, just as she said to do, and sure enough, the dark sinister form stepped out of the shadows, and for an instant Ben thought he could see part of the man’s face. What made the experience especially strange for him was that he didn’t remember this at all. Instead, it felt as if Daphne had made him see something he had never seen.

“I don’t know….” he mumbled.

“Go ahead,” she encouraged.

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s all right, Ben. You’re safe here. It didn’t feel safe then, did it?”

“No way.”

“You were scared. He was coming toward you.”

“I can’t get out,” he told her. “The door is unlocked and I don’t dare go out there.”

“He’s coming toward you.”

“Yeah.”

“But there’s more light.”

“Headlights. A car’s headlights,” he said, for he could see the image inside his head: it was in black-and-white, not color, and it happened quickly, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t slow it down. “He’s wearing a mask, I think. Plastic. A white plastic mask. Shiny, you know? Like a hockey goalie, maybe.”

“He wore a disguise,” Boldt said in a voice of disappointment. “Damn.”

The artist said, “A mask inside the pulled-up hood. Glasses over the mask. Hell of a disguise.”

The artist held up the sketch for him. It was just the guy’s head and shoulders, the parking garage a blur behind him. He had the sweatshirt up over most of his face, wore big dark glasses and had plastic-looking skin. The hat topped off the image. It was creepy to Ben how close that drawing came to real life.

“That’s him,” Ben whispered. He didn’t want to talk too loudly. The picture seemed real enough that the guy might hear.