Life Sentence Read online

  Like so many women her age, Ceil hadn’t prepared herself for economic independence, and after her husband had died, she was shocked to discover how little he had left her. He had even neglected to pay life insurance premiums. She was a struggling widow for more than ten years. Twice she came close to remarrying and both times pulled out just in time when she discovered the first guy was a closet alcoholic and the second had a sex offender record.

  An unmarried woman in her mid to late thirties was at a terrible disadvantage these days, she thought, much less someone her age. The eligible bachelors were either rejects from a number of relationships, or in some way ill prepared for a long-term commitment. Once anyone passed the age of twenty in this country, he or she was so embedded in his or her own ways, it was nearly impossible to spell compromise, much less actually achieve it.

  To be honest, she, too, had settled into herself. She no longer envisioned sharing anything, even coffee, with a man. He’d want it weaker or he’d want decaf for sure. That’s the kind of bad luck she had all her life with men, every man, even her own son.

  The worse thing about all this was the fact that sexual pleasure was rapidly becoming a distant memory, and she wasn’t all that unattractive either. Her ailments had aged her over the past year or so, but she still held on to a decent figure and a clear complexion. Now that she had gone through the root canal, her teeth weren’t as bad as they were for so many women her age. Perhaps she could do more with her hair. She had let it gray. She didn’t like the inexpensive color rinses and getting periodic color treatments in a real salon was financially prohibitive. However, it was really the aches and pains that kept her from addressing her appearance. She felt like she was sinking in the muck of self-neglect.

  Maybe, this was the feeling we all get before we actually do sink into the ground, she thought. I shouldn’t be suffering like this. Damn it all, I shouldn’t be suffering at all. She paused to glance back at Starbucks. Something, some sixth sense had urged her to do so. An elderly man, and she meant really elderly, dressed in what looked like a custodian’s outfit, had paused when she paused. She blinked at the memory of seeing him outside the café. It appeared as if he were looking in at her, but at the time she imagined he was just looking through the window at the place, fantasizing a frozen mocha or something. What she didn’t want to start developing was that paranoia older people took on when they reached the point when they felt vulnerable to anything and everything. She hated the idea that she was one of the so-called older, a card carrying member of the American Association of Retired People, but it was logical to worry. Who made easier and better prey than the older folks, desperate for some hope?

  However, that’s not going to be me, she thought. I won’t fall into any of these traps of age. I refuse to be a day older than I am and, in fact, I want to be and look younger than I am. I’ll start working on it again. That’s what it was all about these days in America anyway, youth, youth, youth, she thought bitterly.

  She continued up the walk mumbling to herself, chanting her determined thoughts until she made the turn toward the entrance of her apartment building, a degenerating brownstone that had once been the proud home of persevering immigrants forging a successful life in this land of opportunity. Why had it never been so for her? She was certainly feeling like a foreigner these days.

  At the graffiti-marred entrance she paused and, despite her driving desire not to be paranoid, nervously looked back for the elderly man. She didn’t see him. Smiling to herself – and at herself – she shook her head, inserted the key and opened the front door. She paused in the small entryway and tried to remember if she had checked for her mail this morning on the way out. She couldn’t recall so she took out the mailbox key and went ahead. There was the usual pile of bills and there were some advertisements stuffed awkwardly by a postman probably annoyed at all the junk mail he had to deliver. At the bottom of the short stack, she saw she had received another letter from her older sister Edith, married and living in Duluth.

  The contrast between herself and her sister couldn’t have been more stark. Edith had three successful grown children, two boys and a girl, all married with families of their own. The boys were both attorneys and her daughter was a CFO at a major advertising company in Minnesota. Edith’s husband owned and still operated a half dozen automobile franchises. They had a real Thanksgiving, inundated with family. They swam warmly through kisses and hugs and felt complete. ‘Jingle Bells’ never made them feel sad or nostalgic.

  She stared at the letter, confident her sister again would be pleading for her to consider coming to live in Duluth where she promised to set her up in decent housing and where she would have family nearby. It wasn’t difficult to understand why she avoided doing this. It was a total admission of failure. Not only was her marriage nothing to speak about, but there was Bradley. Her only child hung out there in Halloween imagery. She could imagine his face turned into a mask to frighten people, especially children. To survive with this great disappointment and failure in her life, she convinced not only other people but herself that she was childless. She had borne no fruit in her marriage.

  She needed the front door key to get through the second door as well. It was all part of the extra security just recently established with the change of locks, installation of window bars and alarms. She couldn’t remember when homes had become more like fortresses, but she certainly felt shut away when she closed the door to her apartment behind her. She fished the key out of her purse again. As she inserted it, she couldn’t help voicing a moan because the pain in her hip raged across her lower back as she leaned over to insert the key. Just a small abrupt movement like that could get it to sing, or rather buzz, through her body like a shot of electricity.

  She opened the door just as she heard the outside door open. Because of the pain, it took her a moment to turn, but there he was, the elderly gentleman, standing in the doorway. Something about the look in his eyes, the shape of his face, the features, although wrinkled and aged, stopped her from feeling any panic. It was very, very odd.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked him.

  He started to smile, his lips thinning and whitening to reveal his yellow teeth and dark cavernous mouth. She could easily imagine the halitosis and she actually stepped back, poised to close the second door quickly and lock him out.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mom,’ he said. ‘It’s too late.’

  Detective Palmer Dorian closed his eyes for a moment to savor the delicious memory of his week with Tracy Anderson in the Dominican Republic. His good friend and attorney Marty Loman was able to get one of his wealthier clients to offer, with a little gentle arm twisting, his villa which came with a maid, cook and swimming pool. Marty’s client was developing condos on the island and Marty had done a great deal of work for him, and would do more. It was good to have influential friends. As his mother was fond of saying, ‘It’s not what you know, but whom you know.’ She was a former English teacher so she always got her ‘who’ and ‘whom’ right, he thought smiling at the way she would clamp on his father for his incorrect use of ‘good’ and ‘well’.

  The contrast between the quiet warmth and tropical sunshine of the Dominican Republic with his claustrophobic life in his lower Westside apartment was truly a culture shock. The people in the Dominican Republic were dirt poor, but exceedingly friendly. They seemed oblivious to their poverty and difficult conditions, in fact. Three times he and Tracy had gotten lost looking for a restaurant and all three times, pedestrians, and one time another driver, literally took them to their destination and were embarrassed to accept money for doing it. Tracy teased him about getting lost.

  ‘Where’s that famous psychic intuition you supposedly have, Detective Dorian?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were the poor man’s Charlie Chan.’

  ‘I’m too relaxed here,’ he replied. ‘It doesn’t work without real tension, pressure, a sense of crisis. Whether we find a restaurant or not isn’t that critical. As it wouldn’t hav
e been to Charlie Chan,’ he explained, half-kidding. After all, it sounded logical to him.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ she said laughing. ‘I couldn’t imagine you too relaxed anywhere.’

  However, it was true. He was relaxed. For seven glorious days, the grime and blood-dried crust of his day-to-day homicide investigations was blown out of his memory. He didn’t feel harried; he had instead this loose, happy demeanor, this sense that every day was beautiful just for them and they could do whatever they wanted. He was sure a good part of his brain had gone into a well-earned rest, especially that part that was continually processing motives and clues. Suspicion, that touch of paranoia he believed all good law enforcement officers must have, was hibernating. All that mattered was his and Tracy’s laughter, their affection, their private ecstasy.

  It wasn’t a honeymoon, but it was as close to one as he thought he would ever get. Unlike most of the women he knew in their late twenties, Tracy Anderson was not at all nervous or concerned about her future. She reeked self-confidence with the redolent power of a ripe onion. Comfortable with her sexuality and her emotions, she never even hinted at the need for any more of a commitment from him. Indeed, he had begun to wonder if she would eventually dump him like a thoroughly squeezed orange and move on with the emotional indifference of changing a channel on a television set.

  Somehow, in fact, the three magic words, I love you, weren’t uttered by either of them. It was always ‘You’re great’ or ‘That was terrific’ or simply, ‘You make me happy’. It seemed they hadn’t even invested emotionally enough in each other to have a bad argument. Contradictions were destined to be shrugged off or even ignored. Nothing seemed that important. Was this the perfect relationship or what?

  Mr Big Shot, he told himself, pretending you don’t give a damn about settling down and having children, a mortgage and worrying about college tuition. Somewhere, just lying dormant, hibernating with that intuitive power of yours, if you will, is that desire to have something more to care about and work for and die for than yourself. Mr Big Shot. That was what his mother called him these days. That was the extent to how harshly she would ever dare criticize him. His father teased him and called him Our Own Dirty Harry.

  No matter how they joked about it, Palmer sensed that his parents were afraid he would end up alone, hardened and damaged by the daily dosage of ugly, vicious acts of the people he had to investigate and arrest. He had to think like a criminal to catch a criminal and the danger was he would become unattractive as a prospect for a long-term happy relationship, if not physically then emotionally and psychologically, It was truly as if no bath, no cologne, nothing would or could get the stench of the gruesome crimes off him. He seriously wondered if such a thing were true.

  His older brother Marcus was in the soda bottling business with his father, married with two children, both girls, ten and eight. Marcus and his wife Charlene were always trying to fix him up with a ‘marrying kind of girl’.

  ‘You’re like pot smokers,’ he told them. ‘You’re uncomfortable smoking if a non-smoker is in the room, too.’

  During a lull, he sat at his desk thinking about all this. Was he too into himself, too self-centered? Was that really what ultimately prevented him from becoming committed to someone else? He was certainly neurotic about his physique, never missing an opportunity to shape and strengthen his muscles and always conscious of his weight? At six feet one, one-hundred and eighty pounds, he was still built like a high-school athlete, rationalizing that his attention to physical stamina and strength was mandatory for anyone in law enforcement. Although the dramatic pursuits through the streets of the city depicted in movies and television were really very rare, as was hand-to-hand combat, he wanted to be ready, as primed for action as a fireman.

  Of course, none of that explained his pretty-boy attention to his stylistic clothes and shoes and the attention he gave his light-brown hair. He smiled to himself thinking about Tracy’s comment that he spent more time on his appearance than she did.

  ‘It’s as though you think you’re going to be discovered and put on a magazine cover,’ she teased, but quickly admitted she thought he was damn sexy. ‘I’d put you on my cover any day.’

  Her just saying that made her hot. He closed his eyes and visualized her and when he did so, he released an audible sigh.

  ‘What, are you having a wet dream on the job?’ Tucker Browning asked him as he arrived with some forensic reports they were both supposed to review.

  ‘Not that I know of, but I’ll check,’ he said and spun around in his seat.

  Poof, there goes the Dominican Republic and the image of Tracy in that abbreviate bikini strutting to the side of the pool, the sunlight bouncing off her smile as if she were the one who provided daylight. Maybe for him, she was, he thought. Today was his thirty-first birthday and she had just called to tell him she had made a reservation for them at Rossini’s, one of the first places they had gone to together.

  ‘I thought you might have to go to Washington,’ he said when she had told him.

  ‘Slipped through it. It’s what they call finessing the boss,’ she said.

  Tracy worked for a Donald Trump clone as a personal assistant and was making triple Palmer’s detective’s salary. During the two years he had known her, she had even quadrupled his salary with some bonuses. Real estate, business acquisitions, shopping centers were her areas of expertise. She moved her palms over all of it as if the world were one checker board and with a move, a jump here or there, changed people’s jobs, homes and lives in general. However, she was about as nonchalant about that as she was about herself. He both admired and resented her for that self-confidence. He wished she needed him more or at least gave him the feeling she did.

  ‘This should lock it up,’ Tucker said handing him the DNA results after a quick perusal.

  He read the affirmation with glee. They had been investigating the rape and murder of a seventy-two-year-old woman who barely survived on social security living in a subsidized housing development. Clues quickly led them to a young janitor, who looked like he had been hatched from an egg Satan had fertilized on a boring day of sin. Palmer didn’t need psychic or even intuitive abilities to suspect him. Guilt lay in the man’s eyes like a blood spot in an egg yolk.

  ‘They should all be this easy,’ he said waving the paperwork at Tucker.

  Tucker Browning leaned back in his chair and pinched his temples with his long, thin spidery fingers. He was ten years older than Palmer and all of those ten additional years were spent in homicide. At six feet four, with dull brown, thin hair and a Lincolnesque sad face, cut with wrinkles so deep they looked like they had been there from birth, Tucker Browning always looked like he was five minutes from retirement or retreat. He was a plodder, a by-the-book soldier who trusted every code and rule he ever had confronted. He depended on them and believed in them the way a scientist might believe in Newton’s Law. He was always wary of any diversion which made for dramatic contrast between them because Palmer was always thinking out of the box and eager to forgo procedure. The truth was Palmer’s reliance on instinct and intuition was a continual irritation for Tucker, who needed tangible, concrete reasons for anything they did. However, they held on to their partnership and friendship, both recognizing value in the other.

  Somehow, however, even though he was in this for the long haul, Palmer didn’t see himself as much a career detective as did Tucker. It was as if someday something else would occur. Maybe Tracy wasn’t so off the mark imagining he dreamed of being on magazine covers. Perhaps some other more interesting opportunity would waltz into the office and choose him for a partner. Tucker had no such illusions. He accepted himself and his life so completely that he was almost part of the furniture.

  ‘I’ll get this over to the chief so he can get it over to the district attorney’s office,’ Tucker said rising slowly and taking back the paperwork. Lanky, but quick on his feet when he had to be, Tucker spent a smile. He was as thrifty with his happy mo
ments as Silas Marner with his pieces of gold. ‘Case closed,’ he added.

  ‘Another notch in the belt.’

  Tucker nodded and turned just as a uniformed officer was leading Ceil Morris through the office toward their desks. It was clear to both of them that they were the targeted destination.

  ‘Uh oh,’ Palmer said. ‘Hold your water. The day’s not over.’

  Tucker paused.

  ‘Excuse me, Detective Browning,’ the uniformed officer said to Tucker, ‘but Mrs Morris here requested to speak with a homicide detective specifically.’

  ‘Oh? You here to report a murder?’ Tucker asked her.

  ‘It’s not a murder yet, but it will be soon,’ Ceil said.

  Tucker’s bushy eyebrows lifted and fell. He turned to Palmer. ‘This is Detective Palmer Dorian. He’s in charge of soon-to-be capital crimes, ma’am. He has a way sometimes of anticipating them,’ Tucker added, grateful for the opportunity to kid Palmer about his so-called intuitive powers. He set up a chair for her to sit on and then smiled at Palmer rather impishly before he continued on to make his report.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Palmer told the uniformed policeman. He pulled himself closer to his desk and opened a pad. ‘OK, ma’am, why don’t you start at the beginning. Let’s begin with your full name and address.’

  Ceil moaned and sat slowly, her hand pressed to her hip. ‘Terrible arthritis,’ she explained and then gave him her full name and address.

  ‘Now then, Mrs Morris, what brings you here today?’ Palmer asked calmly.