Never Tell

Chapter Fourteen

Even from the hallway outside her apartment, Ellie could hear the television blasting.

“Holy hell,” she said, pushing the door closed hard behind her with her hip, the extra effort needed due to the many layers of old paint around the frame. “Mrs. Hennessy always said that rock-and-roll music of yours would make you deaf. Do I need to schedule you an appointment for a hearing aid already?”

Jess was barely visible on the sofa, his face peering out from beneath the comforter that she’d last seen on her bed. She heard a moan of some kind, followed by the sight of the remote control at the blanket’s edge. The volume decreased.

“That crazy biddy also said my music would lead me to Satan’s altar.”

“And I’m sure if she were still alive, she’d say New York City was close enough. You’re still home?”

“I think I’m sick.”

“Great. Remind me to wipe down that remote with rubbing alcohol.”

“You’re back early.”

“Technically I get off work at four o’clock, remember?”

“Yeah, right. You mean the way technically this apartment is occupied by the granddaughter of Mrs. Delores Macintosh?”

Ellie’s rent-stabilized sublet wasn’t entirely aboveboard. The fact that Jess had been the one to hook her up with the deal probably explained his comfort with long-term tenancies on her sofa.

“Don’t knock my overtime. How do you think I can afford your IQ-destroying basic cable? I thought The Hills was your drug of choice,” she said, glancing at the television screen.

“You are so 2009. I had a brief addiction to Toddlers and Tiaras, but it was actually too depressing, even for me, the way they tart those girls up. No offense, sis.”

“Please don’t compare me to a five-year-old with waxed eyebrows.” Ellie had briefly made the rounds in Kansas beauty pageants—a phrase that Jess often called an oxymoron—but strictly for the scholarship money. Even with a couple of runner-up prizes, she could only swing part-time classes at Wichita State. She had less than three semesters of credit by the time she left.

“I’ve since moved on to those impeccable arbiters of domestic modesty and taste, the housewives. They’re real, you know. One hundred percent authentic, real housewives. Because fake housewives just won’t do. Any city will suffice, but I am currently imbibing those lovable divas of our very own two-one-two.”

“From college girls to New York City cougars. I’ll choose to take the development as a sign of maturity. No work tonight?”

“I called in sick.”

“I would think your germs would blend in just fine at the Booby Barn.” With his current job at a strip bar, her brother had beaten his longest record of employment four-fold. The so-called gentlemen’s club on the West Side Highway was named Vibrations, but she and Jess preferred to conjure up their own pseudonyms.

“You planning to see Captain America?” he asked. “I can scram if you need me out of here.”

Jess had been referring to ADA Max Donovan as Captain America since she and Max had first met. She was convinced that they could marry and celebrate their fiftieth anniversary and Jess would still be calling him Captain America.

“He got called out to Rikers.”

“Want something to eat?”

The invitation usually led to Jess choosing the take-out place, Ellie paying, and Jess eating most of what arrived.

“I’m not hungry yet. You want me to get you something? Chicken soup?”

“No, I’ll call the deli when I’m ready.”

“I had a callout today to Bill Whitmire’s house.”

“Are you kidding me? The Bill Whitmire?”

“His house has an elevator.”

“He’s Bill Whitmire. His house should have an elevator, a water slide, and strippers in every room. Please tell me you slipped him a demo of Dog Park.” No matter where—or whether—he earned a paycheck, Jess’s true calling was as lead singer and guitarist for his band, Dog Park. Ten years ago, Ellie had moved to the city when she sensed that Jess’s phone calls home to Wichita—filled with allusions to always-imminent but never-actual “big breaks”—were a cover for serious trouble. What she found instead was that Jess had managed to carve out something of a life for himself, albeit not the one he described to their mother. Since then, she’d done the same.

“Right. Because I carry your demos around with me. Not to mention that his daughter killed herself last night.” She gave him a brief run-down of her day. “The girl’s mother couldn’t handle it. Says the girl would never do something like that. She kept begging me to believe her.”

“You all right?”

She was losing track of the number of people who’d asked her that today. “Yeah. Fine. You didn’t come home last night.” Yesterday seemed like such a long time ago. “You stayed over at that bartender’s place?”

“Rebecca. Bartender slash actress slash singer slash superfine hottie.”

Just like Jess was a titty-bar bouncer slash rock god, the people he knew usually had multiple professions. Most recently, he had been spending multiple overnights per week with a victim on one of Ellie’s cases from last fall. That particular woman was an artist slash prostitute, but she’d vowed to get out of the life after it almost got her killed. Ellie had only just gotten past her worries about the relationship when it finally ran its course, as relationships with Jess always seemed to do.

She tried joining him in front of the television, but watching the real housewives fight over who drank more pinot grigio made her want to arrest somebody.

“I love you, Jess, but I can’t do it. It’s like I feel brain cells seeping away with each passing minute. I’m heading to the gym.”

“Keep it gangster.”

Ellie remembered everything about the first time she got punched in the head. She screamed, not from the pain, but from the complete surprise of the impact itself. It was only as she screamed from the shock that the actual, physical pain registered. The piercing stab right behind her temple that seemed like it had to have cracked her open from ear to ear. The throbbing that radiated across her skull, down her jawbone into her neck. The blurring of her vision. The sincere belief that her brain was rattling behind her sockets like candy in a thumped piñata.

The punch had been delivered by a sixteen-year-old kid she caught tagging a phone booth in Hell’s Kitchen. Stuck on graveyard with ten minutes to go before shift change, she had planned on confiscating the spray can and letting him off with a warning. The skinny kid with long bangs and the moniker 2SHY didn’t know that, though, and caught her off guard with a right hook. What she remembered most about that first punch was her anger—not about the punch, but about the tears. She had blinked over and over again, trying to focus her vision, trying to stop the pain, but mostly trying to stop those stupid fucking tears from falling down her face in front of the shitty little kid who’d gotten a jump on her.

She was so humiliated about getting knocked by a hundred-pound teenager that she processed the criminal mischief charge but let him slide on the assault of a police officer. It was only her third month on the job. She was still getting past the beauty-queen jokes. She didn’t need the house to know she’d cried from a sucker punch.

It was the first time Ellie had been punched, but she’d known it wouldn’t be the last. She also knew she’d need to get better at it.

Now she was a kickboxer at the total-contact level, allowed to apply full power, force, and strength against an opponent in a ring. Instead of tears, she felt beads of sweat pour down her face as she threw jab after jab against the heavy black practice bag.

The intensity of her one-sided fight was telling her something about her own energy. She was grinding it out the way she could usually muster only inside the ring against a live opponent. Something was eating at her.

As she chopped her lower shin against the side of the bag, she found herself thinking about Julia. And not the appearance of her thin, naked body in the pink bathwater, but her words on the lined yellow pages. Every word. Every sentence. The hesitation marks and cross-outs. Without realizing she’d done so, Ellie had committed the entire note to memory.

She could picture the girl in life, sitting cross-legged on her low platform bed, staring at the legal pad, three-quarters of a page already filled with blotchy black ink, crossing out yet another word. Unsatisfied with that single deletion, she would have stabbed the pen across the last four lines of text, running the ballpoint tip across the page so many times she actually managed to poke a hole in the paper.

I know I should love my life, but sometimes I hate it. My parents tell me all the time how lucky I am. Lucky to have good schools, a nice house. Money. Them. Yes, they actually said that. I was lucky to have them.

Julia had crossed out everything after the word money. Maybe she didn’t feel like writing about her parents. Maybe she realized they were the kind of people who never should have had children, but that the observation was better kept to herself.

Ellie followed the jab series with alternating hooks and uppercuts, then started to throw in front and roundhouse kicks, the appearance of Julia’s words still fresh in her visual cortex.

I understand why other kids would assume my life is easy. No one wants to hear a spoiled rich girl complain. I know some kids who would kill (maybe in some cases literally)

She had scratched out the parenthetical. It had probably been an attempt at humor, but she’d concluded correctly that it just didn’t belong there. She had tried to block the words out completely, but Ellie had been able to piece them together beneath the scratches.

I know some kids who would kill to have the “privileges” I know I have. But sometimes I wonder if maybe their lives aren’t actually better. Or at least more free. No one expects anything from a kid who has nothing.

I’m constantly being told how lucky I am, but the truth is, my so-called privileged life

Ellie felt her heart pound in her chest.

She could almost hear Julia’s thoughts as the girl held the tip of the pen above the page, trying to choose the right words to complete the sentence. That this life is harder than it seems. That this life can be challenging. That this life sucks. That this life—hurts.

Yes, Julia had settled upon that word. Maybe she had even recognized it was a little melodramatic. She hadn’t suffered from actual, physical pain or paralyzing depression. But she would have felt injured from the pressures of her life that no one wanted to hear about. And so what if she was melodramatic? She was sixteen years old, after all. Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a drama queen? Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a lot of the things other teenagers were permitted to be? And wasn’t that the purpose of the letter?

She pictured Julia writing the word she finally selected on the page:

my so-called privileged life hurts.

It hurts to be told that I’m not allowed to waste my potential. It hurts to hear that more is expected of me because more has been given to me. It hurts to believe that I can never amount to the person I’m supposed to be. It hurts to feel so alone every second of every day, even when I’m surrounded by other people. And it hurts to know that I have all of these feelings but am not supposed to voice them.

Ellie could hear blood racing through her veins. Her damp hair was plastered against her scalp. Her arms and legs began to ache, but she kept working the leather of the bag.

Julia’s thoughts moved in errant directions a few more times as she wrote, requiring more scratch marks on the page, but the words were flowing more easily now. She would have felt her emotions pouring from her like the ink from the pen, like Ellie’s sweat from her pores.

And then the tear had fallen to the notepad, hitting the letter f in feelings, blurring the shape into an amorphous blob. And then words began to fail her. It was time to wrap things up.

And that is why I have decided to kill myself.

Ellie continued to kick the bag. No forced entry. No signs of a struggle. Cuts consistent with self-infliction—the bathwater and a 0.16 blood-alcohol content helping the blood flow. One bump on the back of her head, but Ginger at the medical examiner’s office thought it consistent with collapsing against the tub after Julia slit her wrists.

And then Ellie started hearing snippets of voices from throughout the day.

Katherine Whitmire pleading, “You have to do something. It’s my daughter.”

The EMT saying, “There’s nothing for us to do here.”

Max, wanting to say more, but leaving it at, “You’re okay with that?”

Rogan, saying they screwed up. “You really got to get yourself right on this one.” Even Jess, asking if she was all right.

And then she heard voices from her past. You just have to learn to let it go, Ellie. How many times had she heard that damn phrase over the years? As if she could just open her hands and release the fact that her father’s brains had been blasted out the back of his head by his own gun. As if she could simply set aside her own past like a discarded shopping bag.

Ellie threw a flying punch as she worked through her own thoughts.

When Ellie’s mother tried to explain that Jerry Hatcher would never kill himself, no one listened to her—not the Wichita Police Department, not the city attorney’s office that made the call on whether to release his pension, not the neighbors, no one—no one except Ellie. And look where that had gotten them.

So today, when Katherine Whitmire had implored her, “Please listen to me,” of course she hadn’t. Ellie had wanted to scream at her: “Take a lesson or two from the tale of Jerry Hatcher.”

But Ellie didn’t want to be that kind of cop. She didn’t want to be the person who joked around about the girl’s crappy mother, like those EMTs. She didn’t want to passively check off the boxes like the medical examiner she called Ginger. She didn’t want to be the cop who didn’t at least pause to ask why Julia Whitmire’s suicide note had been handwritten, not typed, and on a notepad that was nowhere to be found in her home.

Ellie didn’t want to be like everyone else.

Then, like she’d been sucker-punched in the head, Ellie realized what had really been nagging at her about that scene at the Whitmires’. She suddenly stopped pummeling the bag. She held her gloves to her chest and bent over while she caught her breath, favoring one side to forestall an oncoming cramp.

Rogan had a good point. She had to get herself right on this one.