Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (13 page)

“You can't be serious.” I looked at the stack of files already on my desk. “Give it to George.” I nodded toward my partner, who had his feet propped up on his desk, reading glasses perched low on his nose. Red reading glasses with yellow polka dots, my spare pair because he'd forgotten his somewhere earlier today. I was tempted to giggle every time I looked at him, and I looked at George a lot. He was one of the handsomest men I knew, like an older Denzel Washington but with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache.

“Don't shove that shit off on me.” George's lips barely moved.

“She wants a female officer, Stevens. You're our female officer. I think.” Lou looked over at George, who never stopped reading but slowly raised his hand and gave him the finger.

“Generally that would be me,” I agreed. “But two days to prepare?”

“It's just an interview,” Lou said. “Do the rest afterward.”

I rested my chin in my hand and looked at him. After seven months in the liaison office, I'd learned we did things on Lou's schedule. Depending on the case, that was usually yesterday. Still, I had other plans for tonight, tomorrow was packed with appointments and cases to follow up on, and tomorrow night I'd intended more of what I had planned for tonight. I hated when my husband and I were on opposing shifts, and I guarded my time with him ferociously.

“Ray was the lead investigator, but the complainant's emphatic about a female handling the case,” Lou said. “George'll have to review your findings.”

“Sure.” I stared warily at the file on my desk.

Lou thumped his hand against the door frame before he left. “Won't be a problem, right?”

“Hasn't been before,” I said to his back.

“Good ole Ray Robileaux,” George said softly.

I reached for the file and read the complaint date, said, “Wow, an old one,” scanned the heading,
Attempted Capital Murder/Reassigned: Attempted Suicide
, saw the complainant's name, and felt my body lock up.

“What's a matter, girl? You gone a bit white there,” George said.

“I am white.” It was an old joke between us.

“I didn't mean nothing by it.”

“What?” I was still staring at Marjorie LaSalle's name.

“About Ray,” George said. “I like him. He's changed.”

I looked at George. He'd taken off my reading glasses. “You say that a lot, George, that you like him.”

“Well, I do.”

“I know he was an asshole; I know he's changed.”

“Maybe you should give me that file.”

“You'll get it soon enough.” I pulled the file back in front of me, glanced at my watch, called Ray and told him I'd be running a little late, then settled down to read my husband's final nineteen-page report and accompanying notes on the stabbing of Marjorie LaSalle.

 

Ray Robileaux was legendary in the department for three things: his ability to read a crime scene, his high case clearance, and his drinking. Not that the drinking was that much of an anomaly. Back in the old days, when we had a police chief without much spine, cops, especially the detectives, often drank on duty. You could walk into the Pastime Lounge and find on-duty detectives eating a slice of pizza and throwing back a beer at lunch-or dinnertime. After 10:00
P.M
., it was the Shipwreck Lounge, tucked into the back of BonMarche Mall, a dark, dirty dive with a loud juke box full of country-and-western tunes and songs from the 1960s. The Shipwreck was mostly frequented by off-duty uniform cops, the whole crew from ARAB—
Armed Robbery and Burglary—and a scattering of detectives from Homicide, Sex Crimes, and Juvenile. There were lockers at the front entrance to secure your gun.

Ray Robileaux was a regular at both the Pastime and the Shipwreck. By the time I'd graduated from the academy, his marriage had ended in a ferocious divorce, he'd lost custody of both his kids, and he'd been busted down to Communications—just one step above the Governmental Building security detail or the Booking Desk, in terms of punishment. Ray's drinking days were over if he wanted to keep his job. He checked himself into a rehab program at the Tau Center, started attending AA meetings, and dipped below the radar of department gossip.

Three years later, I was working Juvenile, and got a call out on a 65 that involved two juveniles. A young teenage mother, stoned, fell asleep on the couch with her six-week-old son. She rolled over in her sleep and smothered the baby.

When I walked into the tiny, generic apartment on Flannery, I stopped, my usual professional words of introduction caught in my throat. The young mother's face was blotched, startling shades of red and white; she veered between wild hysterics and glum defensiveness. She wasn't the surprise. It was the uniformed officer. I barely recognized the man I'd last seen at Marjorie LaSalle's house. Ray Robileaux, now working uniform patrol out of Broadmoor Precinct, paced slowly in front of her, his face shuffling among dismay, tense concern, and what fleetingly looked like panic. Every line in his body was unassuming. He was much thinner than I remembered, but still handsome in that uncommon way.

“Well, I'll be damned,” I said, words finally uncorked, rising up out of my mouth drenched in sarcasm before I could stop them. “Ray Robileaux.”

He paused in midstep as though he'd been slapped before his shoulders slumped, his fingers relaxed, and he faced me full on. He looked oddly embarrassed.

“Detective Stevens.” His voice was melodious and polite. He gave me the facts of the case, one finger tapping softly against the small green notepad he held in his hand. When he'd finished, I didn't even give him the courtesy of a nod.

“I believe you're done here now, Officer Robileaux,” I said, a half-second after he'd finished speaking.

Two weeks later he came into the Juvenile office and sat down in the chair beside my desk, took a pear out of his pocket, and put it gently on the blotter in front of me. “This is for you,” he said.

I stared at the pear and then at him. His uniform was too big, and his shoes needed polishing. His eyes were the color of tin. Finally, he rubbed the edge of his index finger along his nose and said, “I must have done something to piss you off.”

I nodded warily.

“I'm here to offer my apology, for whatever it was.”

I folded my hands in my lap, leaned back in my chair. “Okay.”

He nodded slowly, got to his feet, and quietly walked out of the office. I sat there for a long time, looking at a poster of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list on the wall beside the door, until the phone rang, jerking me back to work.

Over the next several months, Ray continued to drop by the Juvenile office, sometimes putting a cup of coffee, or a beignet, or a piece of fruit on my desk and chatting briefly for a few minutes before he left.

When he asked me out six months later, his request so tortured and awkward that he blushed, I said yes.

 

I waited until Thursday evening to tell Ray that I was investigating his old case.

I'd asked Josh Hebert about the case once, soon after Ray and I started dating. Josh was still working Homicide and sat on the edge of my desk contemplating his hands when I asked him if he thought Marjorie LaSalle had stabbed herself.

“It was Ray's case,” he said.

“C'mon, Josh, you worked it with him.”

“We differed on some things.”

“And?”

“And it was an odd case. No fingerprints, no blood transfer. A hard one to call, I'll give you that. But things aren't always as they appear.” He looked at me without expression. “Aren't you learning that with Ray?”

“He was a different man then,” I said.

Josh shrugged. “There you have it.”

“But do you think she did it?”

“What I thought then is pretty irrelevant now, isn't it?”

I'd shaken my head, frustrated with his ambiguous answers. “At least Ray takes a stance,” I'd said, and Josh nodded slowly, looked as if he was going to say something else, then shrugged again and left.

Now, watching Ray clear away our plates scattered with shrimp shells and corn cobs as I started on my second Abita beer, I wished my husband was more open to doubt, allowed more room for the gray areas where most of life, I was learning, played out. I thought about the videotape I'd watched earlier that day, the 911 recordings, the crime scene photos, the police psychologist's report, the witness statements. Ray's report was clear-cut: Marjorie LaSalle had stabbed herself, and he'd carefully laid out every piece of incriminating evidence he had. Which was a lot.

I took a swig of beer and watched Ray rinse off some strawberries, put them on a plate. He came back to the table with his own beer, a nonalcoholic one he'd been nursing all evening, took off his glasses, kissed me, and popped a strawberry into my mouth.

“Ugh. Strawberries and beer don't mix.” I wrinkled up my face.

“You'd rather champagne?”

“I'd rather wait on the strawberries.”

He lifted my feet up into his lap and began to massage my right foot, his thumb digging hard between my toes. “Tough day?”

“You remember when we met?” I said.

He smiled. I loved his smile; it had such depth to it. “When we worked that juvenile homicide off Flannery and you gave me hell.”

“You deserved it.”

He worked his hand down around the ball of my foot. “Probably.”

“I mean the very first time.”

“Ah.” The lines around his mouth tightened slightly.

“Remember?”

His hands stopped moving, and he peered at my foot as though the answer—or escape—was buried between my toes. “Why are you bringing this up again?”

“She's coming in tomorrow afternoon. She wants the case reopened.”

All warmth evaporated from his body. “After six goddamn years?”

“What options did she have before now?”

“That woman stabbed herself, Cathy, and you're never going to convince me otherwise.”

I picked at the beer label with a fingernail. “Think of all the weird cases you've worked, Ray. Isn't it just possible, on this one, that you're wrong? Women don't stab themselves like that. Look at any of the statistics.”

“You've always had a soft spot for that woman. You've never been able to look at it objectively.” He studied the table with great interest.

“Did you?”

He put my foot down and swept both hands across his face and through his hair, a gesture I knew well. “Are we going to fight about this?”

“I don't want to.”

“Me either.” He drained his beer and stood up, headed toward the back door.

“I just wanted you to know,” I said softly.

“Now I know,” he said, the door closing behind him with a gentle click.

I stared blankly at the door for a minute, then downed the rest of my Abita and went to the kitchen sink and started washing the dishes. Ray stood on our patio, smoking a cigarette, my dog crouched down at his feet, tail wagging, begging for a ball toss. Ray ignored him, but the dog didn't give up. Smoke curled up into the darkening sky, and I felt a momentary longing to join them. We'd both quit a year ago, but Ray still slipped, and more often than he wanted me to know.

I leaned on the counter, chin in my hands, and looked at his back, his hair just lapping the collar of his shirt, his cop stance of barely locked knees and feet at shoulder's width. I thought of his quiet tenderness, the way he treated our relationship like one of those sand dollars he loved to collect on our trips to Perdido Key, his lack of selfishness as we negotiated our way through the dailiness of living with each other. Love is a mystery, I thought, not for the first time. A giddy, difficult mystery. My husband was human—he could still be arrogant and short-tempered at times, he had a hard time
admitting when he was wrong, and his sense of humor was decidedly off kilter—but I loved him. Sometimes that was as much a surprise to me as it was to him.

But even during the height of his drinking, the worst of his marital troubles, I knew Ray had been a good detective, prejudiced sometimes and bullheaded often, but he was usually thorough and precise.

Which brought me right back where I'd started: thinking about Marjorie LaSalle's stabbing.

 

Friday was rushed with appointments, hearings, and interviews, but I found it hard to concentrate, thinking about Marjorie's file sitting on my desk like the gecko lizards my dog loved to bark at—defiantly immobile, definitely there despite the camouflage techniques, and quite capable of biting when provoked. And I felt like a metronome: back and forth. She couldn't have done it; maybe she could. What was I missing? No, she couldn't have done it, but then…

I found myself mentally rehashing a case I'd handled out of Broadmoor, about a year after I'd graduated from the academy. My partner, Charlie, and I went out on a shots-fired, man-down call about 6:00 in the morning, just before end of shift, at an apartment off Sharp Lane. A hysterical woman in her forties greeted us at the door dressed in a plaid bathrobe that gave us glimpses of her ample nakedness underneath, her hair so overbleached it looked like a horse's mane. Her boyfriend was in the bedroom, lying on the right side of the bed wearing a mud brown T-shirt and white boxer shorts. His right hand flopped over the edge of the bed, a gun on the floor below it. The back of his head was blown off. Blood and brain matter covered the headboard and fanned out across two of the walls and down onto the carpeting.

He'd been despondent for days, she told us, talked about suicide. But she hadn't thought he was serious until the shot woke her.

“I was
right
there, on the bed beside him, sleeping, when he did it,” she wailed. She alternated among fury that he'd done this to her, hysterics over reliving the moment, and heart-stopping grief that he was dead.

By the time Barker and Cowan with Homicide arrived, we'd got
ten her calmed down somewhat, found his prescriptions for antidepressants, had the name of the counselor he was seeing at the V.A. Hospital in New Orleans. Straightforward suicide, we told the detectives. Bizarre, but straightforward. The detectives agreed.