Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Suicide Bonds by Tim L. Williams

By day an English professor at a western Kentucky college, Tim L. Williams still manages to find time to turn out a large number of topnotch stories in both the literary and mystery fields. His work has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin, and has appeared in many magazines besides EQMM. His most recent work in the crime genre appeared in Murdaland. He is currently at work on a new novel featuring the hero of this story, Charlie Raines.

Five days after her daughter jumped from a fourth-floor balcony, Cheryl Washburn was back behind the bar at the Refugee Lounge. We gave her sympathetic smiles and larger than average tips and whispered that she was holding up all right. Of course the cliché about regulars in low-rent, dimly lit bars like the Refugee is that they form a patch-quilt family, and, like most cliches, it’s a lie. We worried about Cheryl because she was one of us but were secretly thankful that this time misfortune had found someone else. Hardcore drinkers aren’t family. They’re more like army buddies tying to survive a protracted guerrilla war without even the hope of a ceasefire.

I caught her watching me a few times, brow furrowed, eyes searching for something she wasn’t going to find in my booze-bloated face. Cheryl was an attractive woman, not pretty exactly but attractive. At thirty-seven, with a body that looked twenty-five and a face that was pushing fifty, she was no one’s idea of a traffic stopper, but when you looked at her in the right light, you could still see the girl who had turned heads before life, hard work, and even harder drinking had gotten the best of her. A couple of years ago we’d shared a bed. It was okay. Neither of us fell in love, but neither of us ended the evening by weeping. When you’re forty-five, single, and without any illusions about your desirability as either a life partner or a one-night stand, “okay” is a successful evening.

“You got a minute, Charlie?” she asked just before her shift ended.

I drained the last of my beer, did my best to smile. “Just a couple and then I’ve got to catch a flight to the French Riviera.”

She forced herself to laugh as she climbed onto the empty stool next to me. I knew she didn’t want my time, my lame jokes, or my condolences. When your twenty-year-old daughter, an honor student at the University of Memphis, gets loaded on booze and downers and jumps from a fourth-floor balcony, you want answers more than you want comfort. Most days I like my job, or at least pretend I do so that I don’t have to face the fact that I’m middle-aged and don’t know any other way to make a living. Chasing bail skips, running background checks, working mall security, and repossessing cars are all fine with me. But I hate it when things get complicated — when people in pain or trouble hire me with the expectation that I can help.

“You met her once,” Cheryl said. “She came here to pick me up, and you loaned her fifty cents for the jukebox.”

I didn’t remember that, didn’t even remember Cheryl’s daughter’s name. I recalled a few stories that Cheryl had told about her over the years: her daughter making the honor roll in high school; her daughter winning an academic scholarship to the University of Memphis; her daughter intending to study political science and pre-law. Cheryl was proud of her kid, and she had a right to be. A single mother who struggled to pay the rent and keep food in the fridge on minimum wage plus tips, Cheryl raised a kid who not only survived high school without getting hooked, arrested, or pregnant, but actually achieved something.

“None of it makes sense, Charlie.” She peeled open a pack of Doral 100s, her hands shaking like those of a very old man with a bad case of palsy. “Lea had her head on straight. She knew what she wanted, knew she had to work to get it. Then this happens.” She tilted her head and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. “It’s just not fair.”

Cheryl sat silent for a moment, smoking and staring at the tip of her cigarette as if she might find the answers she needed in the fire. I glanced around the Refugee. A few regulars were watching us, their heads properly lowered with a mixture of embarrassment and respect. For the first time all day, the jukebox had fallen silent, and no one seemed willing or capable of dropping a couple of quarters to start it up again. Outside of the clinking of glasses and a stray cough or two, the bar was as silent as a Baptist church on a Monday morning.

I knew what I was going to say before I said it and was already cursing myself for my foolishness. “Look, if there’s anything I can do, anything you need, just let me know.”

She snubbed her cigarette, sat a little straighter on her stool. “I’ll pay you.”

“That isn’t necessary... I mean, there’s probably nothing...” I stopped myself before I said “I can do.” “I don’t mind doing a favor for a friend.”

“I was saving to buy Lea a car. She needed one real bad, and I meant to have one by her birthday.” She shrugged and her words trailed off. “I’ll pay you.”

“What do the police say?”

“She left a note.”

“You think that something happened, that someone else was involved,” I said, certain that she did or that she was trying desperately to believe it. “That’s what you want me to find out?”

Cheryl surprised me. “I don’t know, but if Lea killed herself, it means that my daughter was a stranger to me, that I didn’t know her at all.” She leaned her elbows on the bar and stared into the mirror at her haggard reflection. “I guess I want you to introduce me to my daughter.”

The next afternoon I dragged myself and a world-class hangover up three flights of stairs to Lea’s apartment while the building manager, a spry eighty-year-old woman with copper-colored hair, ice-blue eyes, and a Mississippi accent as thick as river sludge followed behind me and explained that nothing like this had ever happened here. Her building wasn’t the most exclusive in town, but it was safe and clean and until Lea Washburn went headfirst off her balcony, the police hadn’t had to step foot on the property in the better part of ten years.

“I met her mother a couple of times, you know? You could just tell she thought Lea hung the stars and the moon. Then something like this happens so close to Christmas.” At the top of the landing, she brushed past me with a contemptuous glance at my wheezing and went to unlock Lea’s door. “If you weren’t a family friend, I wouldn’t even consider letting you in the apartment.” She jammed the key into the lock as if she were angry with it. “Normally, I guard my renters’ privacy like it was my own. The first thing I told Mr. Tandan when he hired me was that I was a building manager, not a snoop or spy.”

She shoved open the door, let me enter, and then stepped in after me. There was nothing special about the apartment — living room, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier bathroom, a single bedroom that opened to a wrought-iron balcony where one piece of the railing leaned as if it too had considered jumping.

“Just to think,” she said.

She shook her head sadly and made the sign of the cross. Then she said she was going to wait outside because she just didn’t feel right being here where poor little Lea had died.

There really wasn’t anything to see. The bed had been stripped and sprayed with disinfectant; the living room was empty except for a single end table with a broken leg that made it list like a drunk trying to hold on to his dignity. I pilfered through the kitchen. There was nothing there either except for a few dried-up roaches, a broken plate, and a couple of batteries that might or might not have been dead.

“You going to spend forever in there?” the landlady shouted from outside the door.

I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. “I need to look around.”

She huffed and announced that she had an appointment. Then she warned me not to leave before she had a walk-through to make sure everything was all right.

I went back to the bedroom, picked up a cheap cordless phone from beside the bed, hit the Talk button, and got a dial tone. That didn’t tell me anything other than that the phone still worked so I hit Off and put the receiver back where I’d found it.

I wasn’t expecting much. Earlier, I’d stopped by the Union Avenue precinct, hoping that an old friend had snagged Lea’s case. That hadn’t happened. The case had been assigned to Reggie Morales, a newbie in Homicide who’d graduated with a degree in Criminal Justice from Ole Miss. Within five minutes I knew two things about Morales: He was a sharp dresser, and he was still fresh enough to be polite and answer my questions.

Lea Washburn had committed suicide. She and her boyfriend were having problems. Her grades were tanking, and she was in jeopardy of losing her scholarship and being placed on academic probation. On the night of her death she’d been drinking heavily and eating downers like they were popcorn. Her next-to-last call, unanswered, had been to her boyfriend, her last to a suicide-prevention hotline. Evidently, she’d either gotten a busy signal, hung up, or whoever was working the line wasn’t that damn good at the job.

Now I walked around her empty apartment, opened dresser drawers that had already been searched, ran my fingers over the spines of books — psychology texts, grammar handbooks, a collection of John Grisham novels. I was still there, still trying to decide if I should waste another five or ten minutes pacing through the apartment to make myself feel as if I’d done a day’s work or if I should cut to the chase and head for the nearest bar, when I turned and saw a woman standing at the threshold of Lea’s door.

“I thought you were Mrs. Reynolds,” she said.

She was young, in her early twenties, dressed in jeans so expensive they looked cheap, her brown hair chopped just below her shoulders. She wore severe black-framed glasses that emphasized her green eyes, and she had a book in her hand. I tried for what I hoped was a charming or at least harmless smile.

“Do you have a second? I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about Lea Washburn.”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “You’re another cop, I guess.”

“Something like that.”

“I’ve already told you guys everything I know. I wasn’t even here when she jumped. I got home thirty minutes later and there were cops and paramedics all over the place.”

“I won’t take much of your time.”

“I’ve got Linguistic Theory in half an hour, and I can’t be late again. Whatever you want to ask, ask quick.”

“Five minutes,” I said. “I just want to know about Lea, what she was like.”

“If that’s all you want, it won’t take more than a minute.”

It took over half an hour. During the course of the conversation I found out that the girl’s name was Ashley and that she’d moved in across the hall a couple of weeks before Lea rented this apartment. They weren’t friends. Ashley was a graduate student in Literary Studies. Lea was pre-law and acted as if her biggest ambition was to be either Martha Stewart or the president of the campus Republicans.

“It was sad,” Ashley said. “Not just because her head was in the wrong place but how she tried to fit in with people who she thought were successes. You know?”

“Not really.”

“She’d buy clothes that looked like the crap all the elitist preppie kids are wearing but she’d buy them at Target and everyone would know. The only thing that those jerks in the Young Republicans hate more than grunge kids and Goths are people who try to look like them and shop at Target. Lea was a sorority girl who couldn’t find one that would have her.”

I asked about Lea’s boyfriend. Ashley sighed, shrugged her narrow shoulders, and said that it was sad but even Lea’s boyfriend had been grabbed off a discount rack. Ryan Beatty had been a third-string quarterback at the university until he’d tested positive for steroids. After he was suspended, he dropped out of school and took a job as a bouncer at a campus bar where he’d met Lea. They’d been dating for months, and they had a “dramatic relationship”—lots of arguments, threats, and tears. A couple of times the arguments had turned physical and Ashley had heard Lea begging him not to hit her.

My cop radar went up. God help me, the truth was I felt better than I had all day. Here was a real possibility — a steroid-addicted, loser boyfriend, with a bad temper. All I had to do was find one mistake, confront him with it, extract a tearful confession, and then I could return to the Refugee, give Cheryl the bitter comfort of knowing that her daughter was a murder victim not a suicide, and then get on with the business of swelling my liver to the size of a beach ball.

“But the thing is,” Ashley said, her voice dropping as if she were afraid she would be overheard. “I’m a committed feminist. The linguistics of gender is my thesis topic, for God’s sake.” She bit her fingernail, looked as if she were about to commit a heresy. “I didn’t really blame him.”

Sleeping around had been more than a hobby to Lea. She’d taken it nearly to the level of a professional. Lea’s bedroom door had always been open — for classmates, philandering professors, casual acquaintances, any willing, well-dressed guy she bumped into at one of the local bars.

“Maybe she needed guys to prove that she wasn’t just a silly wannabe or maybe she just liked sex. Who knows? But the weird thing, the thing I didn’t like, was that she’d always tell Ryan about it. In detail. And he’d cry. I mean I’ve heard him wailing but Lea would keep goading and goading him. Like she enjoyed it.”

“Maybe she pushed him too far and he helped her off the balcony?”

“It’s possible, I guess. I mean, you see things like that on the news all the time. But I never really got the impression that he’d go that far.”

I thanked her for her time, offered her a twenty that I couldn’t afford to spend, and was relieved when she told me to keep my money. Then I stopped her before she walked out of the door.

“Do you think Lea would have killed herself?”

“Maybe. If she looked in the mirror and realized who she really was.”

She shut the door softly behind her. I went out on the balcony, lit a cigarette, and smoked while I looked out at gray sidewalks and gray skies that hinted at snow but would only deliver another cold, driving rain. For a couple of minutes, I concocted a convoluted story straight from a made-for-television movie. Ashley was the jealous neighbor, in love with Lea’s boyfriend, enraged by the way Lea treated him, certain that if Lea were out of the way, she and Ryan would live happily ever after. But the theory was silly, pure fantasy. I clung to the possibility of Ryan Beatty as the murderer. I glanced at the sagging railing. Maybe Ryan Beatty had had enough of her cheating, and things had gotten out of hand. That would be a hell of a lot easier to tell Cheryl than that her daughter had finally taken an honest look in the mirror and decided she wasn’t good enough to live.

I flicked my cigarette off the balcony, stepped forward, looked over the rail, and spotted my butt on the sidewalk. The only thing that told me was that it was a long way down.

Investigating anything is a lot like life itself. Three quarters of everything you do is a waste of time. After my visit to Lea’s apartment, thirty-six out of the next forty-eight hours were a complete wash. I tracked down Ryan Beatty’s address but Ryan’s roommate, a stocky black kid with a facial tic, told me that Ryan hadn’t been home since Lea’s funeral and swore he had no idea where Ryan was staying. I dropped by the Delta Bar and Grille, but the manager, a saggy-breasted middle-aged woman with a smoker’s cough, told me that Ryan had taken the week off. She thought he might be at his parents’ place over in Arkansas, but she couldn’t say for sure. I spent half an hour with the University of Memphis’s strength-and-conditioning coach, who told me that Ryan’s problem was that he had a head for the game but not the body for it. In an era of two-hundred-forty-pound quarterbacks, Ryan Beatty was tall and naturally scrawny. Desperate to play, he took steroids to bulk up, got caught, and then got bounced off the team. For Ryan, college had only been an excuse to play football so as soon as he left the team, he left the university. When I asked if he thought Ryan might have killed Lea Washburn, the coach looked genuinely surprised. Not Ryan, he said. No way. Even when Ryan was “riding the ‘roids,” he’d been emotional, prone to crying jags over an incomplete pass at practice or a bad call during a game, but never violent.

I interviewed a couple of Lea’s classmates who told me almost exactly what Ashley, her across-the-hall neighbor, had. Lea was a sad girl who didn’t fit in and slept around a lot. I spoke with Lea’s professors, two of whom admitted to having an affair with her. They were very nervous and very married. Both expressed their regret over Lea’s death and provided me with alibis before I asked. And both begged me to keep their affairs secret, not from their wives, but from their departmental chairs. Exhausted, disgusted, and running out of options, I stopped by the Refugee, avoided as many of Cheryl’s questions as I could, and answered the others with outright lies. In fact, the only reason the entire forty-eight hours weren’t a complete waste is that I managed to get a few hours of sleep and somehow found myself spending a couple of relatively pleasurable hours talking the saggy-breasted, gravel-throated manager of the Delta Bar and Grille out of her phone number.

The next day an old University of Memphis football brochure gave me Ryan Beatty’s hometown in Arkansas and a quick call to the Calico Rock sheriff’s department gave me Beatty’s parents’ phone number and address, but I put off making the drive to Arkansas.

Stopping by the Better Way Foundation, the nonprofit suicide-prevention hotline that Lea Washburn had called before she’d gone headfirst over the balcony, seemed like a good idea. It was the last of the loose ends, and I was up early and determined not to hit the nearest bar until the sun was dipping on the other side of the Mississippi.

There was a Happy Holidays sign on the office door and silver tinsel draped over the entrance, but other than that the place didn’t look any more festive than you’d expect a suicide-prevention hotline to be. The office was small and cramped, its semicircular space cut into pie wedges by Styrofoam partitions. Each cubicle was crammed with flat tables, rows of phones that looked as if they’d been scavenged from a 1970s Jerry Lewis telethon. I followed a narrow hall to a desk where a cabbage-faced woman leaned back in a vinyl chair and shouted curses into a phone. I squinted at the nametag on her denim shirt, Sandy McAllister, Director, but I didn’t need a nametag to tell me she was in charge. Her desk had more phones than anyone else’s, and a narrow door behind her desk had a sign that identified it as Sandy’s Powder Room, a perk of management, I guessed. I gave her an inquisitive smile. She held up a finger for me to wait, cursed a little more, and ended the conversation by dropping the F-bomb. I figured if this was the kind of reception Lea got, there was no wonder she’d gone off the balcony.

“To hell with Memphis Light, Gas, and Water,” the woman said.

“I’ll second that.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t work for them, do you?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be unless you really feel an urge to get a cussing or have a boot kicked up your ass.”

I held up my hands. “Sorry twice.”

“You’re not a volunteer.” It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t quite an accusation. “So why are you here?”

“Lea Washburn.”

“We lost her,” the woman said, her voice softening, her face sagging with exhaustion. “About a week ago, right?”

“You remember her?”

She picked up a pack of Virginia Slims from her desk and lit one despite the No Smoking sign behind her head. “I can’t forget the ones we lose,” she said, curling smoke from her lip. “I dream about them every night.” She shook her head with as much sadness as I could remember seeing. “It’s the ones we save, I forget. Those are the ones that never come back to me.”

She insisted on calling me Charlie. She apologized for it, explained that she’d talked to so many potential suicides on the phone and knew that the best way to connect with them was by using their first names that she couldn’t call anyone Mister This or That. She hoped it didn’t offend.

“Charlie’s fine,” I said. “I’ve been married twice. You call me Charlie, you’re a friend for life.”

She laughed because she was supposed to, not because I was funny. “You’re a relative or a friend of the girl?”

“Family friend,” I said.

She snubbed her cigarette, studied my face a second, and then ran her fingers through her hair. It was long and straight, the gray of fireplace ashes. There were deep furrows in her brow and the corners of her mouth. Only the liveliness of her eyes, wide and cornflower blue, kept her from looking old enough to draw Social Security.

“You’re more than a family friend.”

I showed her my ID. “I’m working for Lea’s mother.”

“Lea’s mother? Not an ambulance-chasing lawyer anxious to file a lawsuit?”

“Her mother just wants a few answers.”

She picked up a pencil, tucked it behind her ear, and sighed. “When it comes to suicide, everyone wants answers. The sad thing is, there usually aren’t any.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

She picked up her pack of cigarettes, changed her mind, and put them back down. “Ask what you want to.”

“You log incoming calls, don’t you?”

“We jot down whatever name the callers choose to give us and a few notes about them in case they hang up and then call back later. As for 911, we can’t do that at all. If word got out that suicide-prevention hotlines were turning over information to the police, no one would ever call again.”

“Do you record the conversations?”

She gave me a wary smile. “Without the caller’s permission that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”

I smiled right back at her. “But you do it anyway.”

She picked up her cigarettes again. “Just to protect ourselves in case of a lawsuit, to prove that while maybe our volunteer didn’t do any good, at least he didn’t do any harm.”

“So if I wanted to listen to the tape?”

This time her smile was playful and flirtatious and made her seem at least ten years younger. “You’d have to ask nicely.”

I waited in a narrow, mildewed cubicle in the back of the building and flipped through a coffee-stained spiral notebook that served as the Better Way Foundation’s phone log while Sandy went to search for the tape. Lea had called at nine-thirty on the evening of her death and used her real name, maybe because she’d wanted to be stopped or maybe because she was past caring. Sandy shrugged apologetically when she set the kind of full-sized portable cassette recorder in front of me that I hadn’t seen since 1985 and then bent to plug in a clunky AC adapter.

“We survive on donations and since antidepressants hit the market, nobody donates money to a suicide hotline anymore. They just assume that everyone can pop a pill and be all right,” she said. “We buy most of our equipment from yard sales or scavenge it from garbage dumps.”

I tapped the log. “It says Freddy took the call, but then there’s a slash and an S.”

She nodded and lit a fresh Virginia Slim. “Most of the people who volunteer here aren’t professionals. They mean well and their hearts are in the right place but they’re a long way from being experts. Freddy’s a retired car salesman who started working here after his granddaughter overdosed. Sometimes when a caller seems serious, and the volunteer is inexperienced, I take over.”

“You talked to Lea?”

“For nearly an hour.”

“How did she sound?”

“Sad,” she said, gesturing towards the tape recorder. “But you can hear for yourself.”

Lea’s voice was a surprise. It was husky, whiskey-rough, sexy but with an undertone of defeat and exhaustion. She was tired, she said, tired of pretending to be something she wasn’t, tired of hurting people, tired of promising herself that she could change and then doing the same things she’d been doing since she was fourteen, tired of letting the world and herself down. Sandy tried to reassure her, listened patiently to Lea’s litany of complaints, and gently pointed out other options, steps Lea could take to make herself and her life better. Then, thirty or forty minutes into the tape, there was a pop and Lea’s voice was replaced by tape hiss.

“Oh hell,” Sandy said. “Let me see the log.” She rifled through the notebook and then squinted in the dim fluorescent light. “That was the night the power went out. MLGW claimed it was our problem not theirs, and refused to come out unless we paid a hundred-and-fifty-dollar service call.”

“You don’t have a backup generator?”

She pitched the notebook on the table. “Are you kidding? We can’t even afford batteries for the damn tape recorders. I’m sorry.”

“It probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”

“So what now?”

“Good question.”

She gave me a smile that was almost girlish. “I’ve got an idea. Let me buy you a drink.”

One drink became two and two became four. I’d never been fond of chain restaurants or lounges, but I’d also never been one to argue with convenience or a free drink so I sat in a leather booth at an Applebee’s and drank oversized mugs of draft beer without complaining. Sandy ordered martinis and drank them like she knew what she was doing. After a little while I gave up on pumping her for information about Lea. She’d told me all she could and nothing she said contradicted the fact that Lea had been home alone, despondent, drunk, and had decided to jump.

“I lost her, Charlie,” Sandy said. “I tried, God knows I did, but I can’t hold on to them all.”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say about Lea Washburn’s suicide so we moved on to the typical chatter of almost-strangers sharing a drink. She asked about my work and whether I liked it. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. She asked about my marriages.

She picked up her martini, swirled the last of her drink around the glass. “Let me guess. Your ex-wives didn’t like being married to a cop.”

“They didn’t like being married to me,” I said. “The cop thing I’m not so sure about.”

When she ran out of questions, it was my turn. She’d been married once. Her husband had died in a car wreck. She’d had boyfriends since but didn’t believe she’d ever marry again. She lived in a small apartment in Midtown with a Siamese cat named King Edward. Her work took up most of her time even if it didn’t pay all of her bills.

“Doesn’t it get depressing?” I asked, my own tongue loosened a little from the beer. “Talking to all of those sad, hopeless people day after day, I mean.”

She drained her martini and motioned to a perky young waitress for another round. “Only when I lose them,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything, just hurried to finish my beer before a fresh one came, and waited for Sandy to go on. She didn’t, at least not until after the waitress had taken our empties and then brought back our drinks. Then Sandy swirled her martini, took a quick sip, picked up a toothpick loaded with olives, and dropped it back into her glass.

“You know how cancer runs in families? In mine, it’s suicide. My mother, my brother, my daughter. It’s a mental illness, you know? I’m not sure what the psychiatrists say these days, but it is.” She downed a hefty swallow of her martini and then licked the moisture from her lips. “Suicidal people are manipulative and controlling. They can’t help themselves, but that doesn’t change what they are. Maybe I’ve been doing this for too long. I mean, you’re not supposed to judge the people you’re trying to save.” She lifted her martini glass. “So there’s my half-drunk confession for the evening. I sometimes resent the people I’ve dedicated my life to helping.” She smiled around the rim of her glass. “What about you?”

“I resent a lot of people,” I said.

She laughed and shook her head. “No, no. Let’s hear a confession from you. Fair’s fair, after all.”

I looked around at the ferns, the Eating Good in the Neighborhood signs, the Happy Hour crowd of car salesmen and young lawyers. “I really, really hate this bar.”

She touched the back of my hand with her fingertips. “Well then, let’s get out of here.”

I drove her to work the next morning. We’d locked her car and left it in the Applebee’s parking lot when she’d stumbled on her way out of the bar. Then we’d stopped at a Discount Liquors for a bottle of gin and a six-pack of tonic. We made it halfway through the bottle before we made it to her bed. I’d awoken at four in the morning, naked, shivering, hung over, sneezing from the cat hair under my nose. I thought about slipping away, maybe leaving a note to say goodbye. I didn’t, not because I’m Prince Charming but because I figured the least I could do was stick around to give her a ride back to her car. But she’d wanted to go to work instead and assured me that she’d walk over at lunchtime to pick up her car and maybe drown her hangover with a Bloody Mary. I parked in front of the Better Way Foundation and wondered if I should offer to walk her in or kiss her goodbye or do something foolish like send her flowers when I got back to my office.

“So,” she said, smiling. “This is the part where I say call me and you promise you will.”

“Sure,” I said.

She winked, touched my cheek with her fingertip. “How about this? I’ll just say thank you for last night. It was nice not to be alone. Call if you want. If you don’t, that’s okay too.”

She kissed my cheek, opened the door, and stepped out into the cold. I watched until she walked through the door, thinking that she looked old and worn in the morning light. But that was okay. I didn’t have the illusion that I looked any better. When she closed the door behind her, I reached to put my car in gear and happened to glance out my window. A chubby, round-faced man wearing a blue parka and green boots stood beside a rusted-out Oldsmobile, his lips lipstick red from the cold, his blue eyes narrow and angry beneath horn-rimmed glasses. I shrugged off his glare, put the car in Reverse, then changed my mind and jammed it back into Park.

“What do you want?” he asked as I approached him.

I held up a hand to show my good intentions. “Nothing much. You were staring awfully hard at the lady.”

“She’s a friend of mine,” he said. “I... I work here.” He gave me a petulant glare that made things a little clearer. “I just didn’t know she had a new boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I said, smothering my smile. “I’m not a boyfriend.”

He shrugged as if it was none of his business but couldn’t help but look pleased. The idea of Sandy as heartbreaker or the object of an elderly man’s crush struck me as funny, but I didn’t laugh.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just curious.”

“It’s good you look after your friends.” I offered him my hand; he seemed reluctant but he took it. “Charlie Raines.”

“Freddy McFarland.”

“You answered the call from Lea Washburn,” I said.

“Who?”

“Suicide victim. A week or so ago. A student at the University of Memphis. You took the call and then Sandy took over from you.”

He frowned again. “Who are you?”

“Sandy’s friend.” I pulled my ID from my pocket. “And a private investigator working for Lea Washburn’s mother.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, his face suddenly pinched and wary. “You should speak with Sandy then.”

“I have,” I said. “But you answered the call. I was hoping you might remember what she said to you, maybe if you heard any other voices in her room?”

He puffed his cheeks, glanced at the building and then back at me. “Lea Washburn,” he said. “Yeah, I remember her on account of Sandy took the call from me. She’s done that a couple of times, like she doesn’t trust that I know what I’m doing.” He shrugged and gave me a nervous smile. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. Sandy just does it because she cares so much, you know? She wants to save everybody.” He shook his head again and sighed. “Which means, of course, she loses more than the rest of us and it’s hard on her. I’ve seen how she suffers. Sometimes I’d like to...” He let his words trail off.

“You’d like to what, Freddy?”

“Knock some sense into people. Stop them from hurting her the way they do.”

His eyes watered, maybe from the cold, maybe from something else. He looked close to bolting so I decided not to push him. At least not yet.

“You didn’t hear anyone in the background when Lea called? A male voice maybe?” I asked.

“Just the girl. She said she was serious this time and I knew she was.”

“Okay,” I said and then his words registered. “This time?”

“She’d called a couple of times before, I think.”

“You took the calls?”

“Yeah, but this time she sounded serious.” He glanced at the building and then shook his head. “Look, I’ve probably said enough. Sandy did the best she could with that girl, worked her heart out. Christ, she must have been on the phone two or three hours before things went bad.” He leveled a stubby finger at me. “So if you’re sniffing around for a lawsuit, I can tell you right now you’re on the wrong trail.”

Then he huffed, grunted, and waddled towards the Better Way Foundation’s front door. I thought about following, but I wasn’t sure why. Something seemed wrong about him, but what? And what did it matter? I couldn’t quite imagine Freddy McFarland slipping away to murder Lea Washburn before she... did what? Killed herself and caused Sandy McAllister more pain? That made a lot of sense. Still, Sandy had said she’d spoken to Lea for an hour and Freddy said two or three. But so what? People lose track of time, and in their business it had to be hard to admit failure. When I fail, a bail skip runs loose a few days, maybe deals a few more ounces of weed. When these people failed, someone died. That couldn’t be easy to live with. God knew it was a job I couldn’t and wouldn’t do.

Two nights later I was still looking for answers and still certain that I wasn’t going to find them when I drove by Lea’s building and spotted the light in her apartment. I told myself the apartment might have been rented, and almost kept going but then I hit the brake, pulled into the parking lot, and dug through my glove compartment for a Memphis PD badge that I’d stolen from a civic fund-raiser nearly a decade before.

I made it upstairs without having to flash my badge or confront Mrs. Reynolds. The door to Lea’s apartment was unlocked so I stepped inside and prayed I didn’t blunder upon a frightened woman spending her first night in her new apartment. But the apartment was as barren as it had been on the day I visited. There was a light on in the bathroom so I headed that way and then stopped when I saw a broad-shouldered young man in sweatpants and a hoodie pull a plastic bag from the toilet tank.

“I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

He spun, stared at me with wide, deer-in-the-road eyes, and then reached behind him. I knew what was coming, imagined myself pulling my gun from my jacket and barking something calm and commanding. But I’d barely gotten my hands on the butt of my gun when he hit me with the tank lid. My hands went to my temple, and my knees buckled. I was on all fours, trying to pull myself up, defenseless as he lifted the lid again and pulled it back over his shoulders. I shut my eyes, waited for him to hit me. Then he dropped the lid, fell back onto the rim of the tub, and put his hands to his eyes. I realized I wasn’t dead when I heard him weeping.

“I killed her,” Ryan Beatty said. “God help me. I killed Lea.”

Two hours later we sat in an IHOP and shared a carafe of coffee. Ryan was down to the occasional snivel now. I had a headache. Even worse, I was more certain than ever that Ryan Beatty was only guilty of being a few watts short of bright and of loving Lea Washburn too much for his own good.

“You didn’t kill her,” I said, angrily.

“I broke up with her. Two days before... before she jumped, I told her we were through.”

I refilled my cup with coffee I didn’t need or want. “Why?”

“I caught her in bed with this guy who works at the health food store on campus.”

“So you shouldn’t have broken up with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You did what any guy would do.” I lit a cigarette despite the sign that said this was a Smoke Free Environment. “How many times had you broken up with her before? After catching her with another guy, I mean?”

“Four. No, five if you count that weirdo chick that lives across the hall.”

I swallowed hard, raised an eyebrow. “The graduate student?”

“She’s majoring in Lezzie if you ask me.”

“But you always came back to Lea.” I ignored an angry glare from an overweight woman at the next table. “Was she stupid?”

“Lea was the smartest person I ever knew.”

“Then she knew you’d take her back. You didn’t kill her.”

As much as I wanted to believe that he had murdered Lea, it wasn’t true. The kid could have killed me when I was on my knees, but he couldn’t do it and he seemed genuinely heartbroken over Lea.

“Why did you hit me?”

He reached in his pocket, pulled out a plastic baggie that held a half-dozen medicine vials. “I thought you were after these.”

“Drugs?”

“Growth hormones. Muscle builders like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You deal steroids.”

His face and ears reddened but he shrugged. “You know how much I get paid for bouncing? I got to eat.”

I paid for his coffee and sent him on his way. Then I emptied the carafe into my cup, waved away the waitress’s offer for a refill or a menu, and spent a minute spinning a fantasy about the English grad student next door. Maybe she’d killed Lea in a fit of jealousy? She was a spurned lover who’d taken her revenge. But it didn’t hold water. The girl said she hadn’t been home and since she was the nearest neighbor, the cops would have checked her story. I was out of suspects and options.

I picked up my check and left a three-dollar tip. Then I headed for the Refugee Lounge.

I’d finished two beers and a shot of bourbon before Cheryl managed to get a break. When she did she headed my way.

“So?” she asked.

“Let me buy you a drink and I’ll tell you what I know.”

She climbed onto the stool and met my eyes. I tried not to wince but didn’t quite succeed. Her face was puffy, her eyes bloodshot. She looked as if she’d had her last good night’s sleep about the time they were counting hanging chads in south Florida.

When I finished lying, she snubbed her cigarette into a tin ashtray, took a deep breath, and let it out with a shudder. “That’s it.”

“That’s it.”

She blew her bangs from her eyes. “A frigging chemical imbalance?”

“That’s what the M.E. told me off the record. A biological problem. Maybe her period came early and made it worse or maybe it was related to her diet, but that’s what he thinks. A chemical imbalance led her to do what she did. Listen, he’s the best doctor I know of in the South, and he said she might have been feeling fine and then her chemicals bottomed out. She couldn’t control what she did. He said it was more common than you think.”

I held my breath, told myself I was an idiot and this was the silliest lie anyone had told since Bill Clinton claimed he hadn’t had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. But I had hope, hope that her desire to believe would stop her from asking questions and would blot out her judgment. Everyone says they want the truth, but no one does, not really, not when the truth is as ugly as it usually is.

“Like a disease,” she said. “Like Lea had been born with a weak blood vessel or a bad heart.”

“That’s right.”

She smiled but the smile turned into a grimace. Then the crying began. But that was okay. She needed to cry. She’d been so scared, confused, and guilty that she hadn’t taken the time to grieve for her daughter. I held her a moment. Then I kissed the top of her head and left her to her grieving.

Three days later, five one-hundred-dollar bills came in the mail. I threw away Cheryl’s note and stuffed the cash into my wallet. Money spends no matter where it comes from or how much grief is involved in its making.

But I couldn’t sleep. I spent my days chasing bail skips, working security at a couple of car shows, and following cheating spouses, wasted my nights drinking in places where I was a stranger or pacing my apartment while ESPN droned in the background. Then three weeks and two days after I’d paid my last visit to the Refugee, I woke early and skimmed the Commercial Appeal while I sipped my coffee. I snapped awake when I reached the Metro section. LaRae Rose, a twenty-year-old education major at the University of Memphis, had stuck a .22 automatic in her mouth and pulled the trigger. She hadn’t left a note, but police were certain it was a suicide because she’d been suffering from depression and had made a last, desperate call to a local suicide hotline. I made a phone call of my own and got a couple of answers. Then I left my apartment, telling myself that it had to be Freddy McFarland and that when I did more checking, the sick hunch I felt in my gut would be proved wrong.

I was waiting in her apartment when she got home. She closed the door behind her, spotted my form in her living room rocking chair, her Siamese cat in my lap, and squealed in surprise. Then her eyes adjusted to the shadows. She dropped her keys on a table by the door and gave me a shaky smile.

“I think I said call if you want, not break into my apartment.”

I shoved the cat from my lap, stood up, and crossed to the window. “You have a beautiful view,” I said. “That’s the Pyramid over there isn’t it?”

“Jesus, Charlie. You almost gave me a heart attack and you want to talk about my view?”

I turned to face her. “I want you to tell me.”

“Tell you?”

“What it was you said to Lea Washburn to make sure she committed suicide. Was it the same thing you said to the girl who shot herself last night?”

She wiped her lips on the back of her hand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I spent the day at the library. I tracked twenty-three suicides in the last two years. Twenty-one of them called your hotline.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I borrowed a Memphis Light, Gas, and Water uniform and ID from a friend and stopped by the Foundation while you were out. It took me awhile to find the fuse box. Then I looked in your private bathroom.”

“And?”

“Nearly all the fuses in the box are rusted except for one, the one that powers your interior lights and recorders. No rust. It looks as if it’s been taken out and put back in quite a lot over the years. The power goes off and it’s only natural that you’d be the one to check the fuse since the box is in the bathroom right behind your desk. I talked to a few of your volunteers and then checked with MLGW. The only time the power seems to go off in your building is when you’re on the phone with a caller who ends up committing suicide.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you’ve made this connection because of rust on fuses?”

“The thing is, when you take fuses in and out, they tend to blow. I’m sure if I checked around at the neighborhood hardware stores I’d find someone who remembered you buying quite a few of them. Not many places have fuse boxes anymore. Fire hazards. Someone will remember.”

“So what?”

“I did a little ransacking through your tapes. Out of the eighteen suicides that you personally talked with, fourteen have tapes that are interrupted halfway through the recording and the logs coincide with your calls to MLGW. You thought you were covering your tracks, but it’s too neat and far too convenient.”

“You’re crazy, Charlie. I’d appreciate it if you’d get out of my apartment now.”

“You catch people at their lowest moments and convince them to take their lives. I’m not sure I ever believed in evil. Not until now.”

Her face flushed and her lips tightened across her teeth in a slash. “You don’t know anything, Charlie. You’ve got no right...” Her voice broke and then she took a deep breath to regain her composure. “You just don’t know.”

“The night we met you said you sometimes resented the people you were trying to help. That made sense. But you don’t resent them. You hate them.”

“Because they’re vicious,” she said quietly. “They’re selfish and controlling and don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. You don’t know, Charlie. You didn’t live with my mother. She used the threat of suicide like a whip against my father and brother and me. If we did something she didn’t like, she’d rage about how her life was hopeless and no one loved her. Then she’d take half a bottle of pills, wait ten minutes, and send me to get help. My whole life she did that to me. Christ, she must have ‘tried’ to kill herself a dozen times.”

“Then she succeeded.”

“Because I helped her. Because I locked the door and held her hand until it was too late to get help.”

“And your brother?”

“Yes.”

“Your daughter too.”

Her eyes flashed. “Goddamn you, no. I didn’t even know that Sarah was thinking about... or depressed... I didn’t know.” She took another deep breath. “I help people. Don’t you understand that? They don’t want to live so I help them die in the only way I know how.”

“You help people? Do you have any idea how many families you’ve destroyed, how many people you’ve shattered?”

“I’m a surgeon, Charlie. Living with someone who’s suicidal is like having cancer. Sometimes malignant tumors have to be removed. Yes, it’s painful, traumatizing, and people grieve for what they’ve lost, but in the end it’s necessary to cut out the cancer so they can move on with their lives.”

I was as weary as I could ever remember being in my life. “I shouldn’t have called you evil, Sandy. You’re not a monster. You’re just a sick and sad woman.”

“Go away, Charlie. I’ve had a long day, and you’re wasting my time. You can’t prove anything, and we both know it.”

In an hour-long television drama, this would be the moment the police burst through the door or I pulled a mini tape recorder from my pocket to show her that her confession had been caught on tape. But the cops weren’t outside, and I didn’t have anything on tape. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She could have just claimed that she was playing along, telling the maniac who’d broken into her apartment what he wanted to hear because she was afraid. There wasn’t a judge in America foolish enough to admit a recording like that into evidence. But that didn’t matter either because no prosecutor would even attempt to take this case to trial. There was no physical evidence, no real motive that a jury could understand, and the “smoking gun” was an absence of rust on a fuse. Any cop who submitted the case to the D.A.’s office for prosecution would either be busted back to street patrol or sent for a psychiatric evaluation. Sandy McAllister was a serial killer who killed with words, a murderer whose victims wanted to die. A half-bright defense lawyer fresh out of a cow-college law school could get the case thrown out before a jury heard the first witness.

“You’re right,” I said.

She smiled more in certainty than triumph. “Then go home, Charlie, go to bed or go to hell or go to a bar.”

“You’re right about the cops, but it doesn’t matter. Your life is over, Sandy. I’m going to make sure of that.”

“You’re not a murderer, Charlie.”

I knew what I was going to do. I didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to wake up every morning and look at my face in the mirror and know what I’d done. But I didn’t see any other choice. She was sick, and she’d hurt far too many people.

“I have a friend, a writer for the Commercial Appeal who specializes in exposes. He’ll love this story and he’ll run with it. Within two weeks everyone in Memphis will know what you are and what you’ve done. How many people do you think will donate money to you then? How many volunteers will stick around?”

She licked her lips. “They wouldn’t print it. I’ll sue for libel.”

“No, you won’t. You can’t afford the legal bills, and even if you could, you wouldn’t because everything you’ve done would be under a microscope, and you couldn’t hide what you are any longer.”

Her eyes flared with anger. “You’re a bastard.”

“It’s over, Sandy. Everything’s over.” I cleared my throat, took a deep breath, and forced myself to go on. “It’s all been about control, hasn’t it? Your mother took it away from you by threatening to kill herself, so you took it back by helping her. And you’ve been taking control back from other people, the ones you thought were serious and who you couldn’t save. You did it because you’ve been one step away from swallowing pills or pulling that trigger your whole life. And we both know it.”

Her jaw set, her teeth gritted. For a second, I thought that she was going to come at me and come at me hard, but then her shoulders sagged and the mask of her face crumbled. She held a hand up as if she were trying to ward off an apparition.

“You have to stop, Sandy. You can’t sacrifice any more people.”

She turned to face the window. “Leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.”

“Keep staring out there, Sandy. Keep looking hard because it’s a long, long way down.”

Then I left and closed the door behind me.

Three days later, her suicide made the paper. At one o’clock in the morning, Sandy McAllister had finished a bottle of wine, put on a designer dress that she’d purchased the day before, and leapt from her living room window. When I read the article, I didn’t cry but I didn’t celebrate either. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything but ashamed and numb. I told myself that I hadn’t pushed her. I gave myself long pep talks about justice and the greater good and how many other people like Lea she might have helped to kill. I swore that I’d had no other choice. Then I realized that trying to justify the past is as big a fool’s errand as trying to reclaim it, and I stopped telling myself anything at all.

In the end, I went back to the Refugee. It was the closest thing I had to a home and when you’re beat up and exhausted, you always go home.

I was three beers into my homecoming before Cheryl climbed onto the barstool beside me. She kissed my cheek and tipped her beer bottle in my direction.

“I’m getting better,” she said. “It isn’t easy, but I am.”

“Are you?”

“Not really,” she said. “But I figured that’s what you wanted to hear.”

I smiled and lifted my own beer. “That’s what I want to hear.”

“I’m getting better,” she said.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Then she slipped away and left me alone. But that was okay. That was where I wanted to be — the only place I’d felt comfortable in a long, long time.