Sullivan's Justice (32 page)

Jessica’s fear for the woman grew. She had to be crying because her face was contorted in agony. In order to get a better vantage point, Jessica moved to her left. When she realized the person who was hurting the woman was her father, her fingers involuntarily opened and the keys fell out of her hand. Her father tossed the woman off, causing her to tumble onto the floor. He retrieved his burgundy silk robe, then charged toward his daughter.

“What are you doing up here?” he said, yanking open the door and grabbing her arm.

“I-I was . . .”

“Shut up,” her father yelled, picking her up and pressing her against the wall. “If you ever say anything about this to Jeremy or your mother, I’ll send you away.” He shook her. “Do you understand? You’ll never see this house again.”

Tears ran down Jessica’s face. “Yes . . . Daddy . . . please, you’re hurting me.”

He set her down on the floor, then patted her on the top of her head as if nothing had happened. “Now give me those keys and get downstairs where you belong.”

She’d never seen her father that mad before. Why was he hurting that poor woman?

Jessica never went onto the third floor again. Even today, darkness left her with a feeling of helplessness.

 

 

Pushing the past aside, Melody turned all the lights on and went to eat her food. She took a few bites of the spicy sauce, then tilted the half-empty bottle of red wine to her mouth. She didn’t know why she’d ordered so much food. She didn’t have an appetite lately. Her thoughts moved to Neil and the night of Laurel’s death. As she walked up the stairs to her viewing room, she decided to watch the video again.

Dropping her clothes at the doorway, she slipped on her robe and burped. The Chinese food tasted different the second time. Opening the small refrigerator she kept upstairs, she took out a cold bottle of water and washed down the bitter taste. A few minutes later, she was positioned at one of her monitors, waiting until the video player loaded the file. She clicked through it to find where she wanted to start watching.

The night of the murder, Melody had stayed up until five o’clock watching the footage she had recorded that day, frame by frame.

The leather-clad figure with a motorcycle helmet stood at the side of the house. The figure moved to the backyard. That’s when she saw Laurel coming out of the French doors. She had a portable phone in her right hand, then placed it to her ear. She must have been trying to call the police.

Helpless bitch, Melody thought. She should have learned to protect herself. A struggle ensued, and Laurel and the assailant moved into the house. Pausing the video, Melody moved to another monitor, which showed a different feed, and clicked play. They were in the bedroom.

Laurel was so weak, she didn’t stand a chance. She was forced to strip down to her cheap cotton underwear. Melody was surprised the red circular Target logo wasn’t imprinted on her ass. She watched the helmeted figure inject Laurel; then they both disappeared into the bathroom.

Melody panned to the other monitor and clicked forward to the point where Laurel was being dragged facedown across the pavement. That couldn’t have felt very good, she said to herself, even with whatever the guy shot her up with.

Laurel was propped up at the side of the pool, her head bleeding. Then Melody’s eyes locked on the screen. She saw the splash. Bubbles rose from beneath the water as the last bit of oxygen left in Laurel Goodwin’s lungs floated to the surface, never to be recaptured again.

Melody was sad for Laurel, but it had been wrong of her to try to take Neil away. The woman had to know Neil was dating her. Everyone knew. The local paper had even run a picture of them together. Melody was the innocent party again. When would it end?

She had a philosophy. Each person was allowed a certain number of mistakes. It was similar to tokens. Whenever you did something bad, you’d lose a token. Once they were all used up, an agonizing death was imminent. She’d seen it happen to Rees.

At the end, Melody had discovered the truth. Her husband was a homosexual by choice and heterosexual whenever it benefited him. He’d risen to the top in the fashion world by sleeping with high-profile women, then married a seventeen-year-old girl to mask his sexual preference. Rees had never made love to Melody, which showed he possessed a modicum of decency. She had found out he had AIDS. Rees had used up his tokens. She had threatened to expose him. So what if he killed himself? Even though she didn’t need it, Melody took his money as payback for all the poor women he’d deceived. He might not have known he had AIDS at the time he slept with them, but his lifestyle made him a high risk. His current male lover received nothing in his will.

Like Rees, Laurel had not been a good person. She deceived people with her tacky clothes and schoolteacher image. Her uncle had also been a teacher, and Elton had forced Melody to have sex with him. She remembered the nights he thrashed on top of her small body in the damp, scary basement while his wife and sons slept only a floor above. Even when the nurse at school saw her bruises and reported them to the police, her uncle’s stupid wife, Sally, insisted Melody had lied, disturbed over the tragic deaths of her family. Sally was probably still cooking his meals and washing his clothes while he molested other children, giving them cuddly teddy bears and expensive toys, then telling them if they told, their parents would punish them for lying.

Pedophiles were similar to people suffering from a terminal illness, Melody had later learned. There was no such thing as a cure. Until they died, pedophiles would be attracted to children. Years ago, the state hospital for the criminally insane had attached electrodes to their penises and shocked them every time they got an erection while looking at pictures of underage children. Nevertheless, when they were released, they did it again.

Laurel must have given drugs to Neil, intending to trap him into marriage and destroy his relationship with her. Where else would Neil get the drugs? She’d filmed him snorting the damn stuff.

She didn’t let him know how much she admired his work, for fear he would become overly confident and leave her. It was a shame to destroy such talent. Neil thought his recent paintings weren’t selling because of the slump in the economy. They didn’t sell because they were shit. Dope made you think everything you did was wonderful. She would never pollute her body or mind the way Neil had.

Her dilemma was staring her in the face. She wanted to release the video of the murder to the police, but she couldn’t let people know about her hobby, fearing she would end up in prison. It was a crime to spy on people without their consent, and now she’d withheld vital information in a homicide. She could send the video anonymously, however, and they wouldn’t be able to trace it back to her. The police didn’t have any evidence linking her to Laurel’s murder, but she couldn’t take any unnecessary chances. She had to find a way to help Neil. The tape she’d made of them having sex the night of the murder and the tape she was looking at now would more than likely clear him.

Melody opened a drawer in her desk and removed a bottle of scotch. A little alcohol was okay as long as she didn’t abuse it. She only got drunk during the holidays, when the past became too difficult to suppress. How many tokens did she have left? Not many, she figured. She’d better use them wisely.

 

 

 

 

 

N
eil stood alone on a large sand dune in Oxnard Shores, a beach community fifteen minutes from Ventura. Farther inland, Oxnard was not a desirable place to live. When his mother had brought him and Carolyn here when they were children, the area was just starting to develop. Now houses were crammed together along the sand and cars backed up in the narrow streets. At night, though, it was peaceful, and Neil came here often. The salty ocean breeze swept over him. The temperature had dropped into the mid-fifties, but even without a jacket, his skin felt hot and clammy.

He remembered playing on these same dunes. Some were three feet high and others as big as five. Grassy plants grew on top of them. He and his friends liked war games. Diving into the sand, they’d fire their fake machine guns at each other, making staccato sounds with their mouths. Life was simple then.

Things had changed—the gun in his hands was real.

Staring at the sea, the moon reflecting on the water, he wondered if he would see Laurel on the other side. He took a long drink out of the wine bottle he was holding, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He didn’t believe in all that Catholic bullshit. If there was a God, how could He punish someone for taking his life when it became unbearable? His poor father didn’t deserve to go to hell.

Maybe Neil could have understood himself if his mother hadn’t kept the truth hidden. Some people were merely too fragile. He was sure he hadn’t killed Laurel, but he now remembered hitting her. The night she’d died, he had taken so much Depakote to come down off the amphetamines, he was surprised he remembered anything. He recalled stumbling into the bathroom in the dark, leaning down to get a drink from the tap, and almost cracking his head open. The police had found the syringe in the sink. He may have touched it without knowing. If they found his fingerprints on it, they would lock him up forever. He’d rather die than go to jail.

When Laurel told him she was still legally married to Jordan and might eventually reconcile with him, he’d gone crazy. After snorting several lines of meth in the garage, he returned to the house and they’d argued some more. He slapped her. Then everything had become murky.

For the past three days, he’d been holed up in a cheap motel, trying to kick his drug habit. He was certain the police were going to arrest him. Once they tested him, the truth would come out. His hip bones were protruding. He must have lost ten pounds. He felt as if he were being squeezed to death by a boa constrictor. He’d sweated buckets and experienced violent muscle spasms. After saturating himself with booze, he decided he was either going to start using drugs again or kill himself.

The wine bottle was almost empty. The effects of the alcohol were kicking in, intensified by the three vodka martinis he’d tossed down a few hours earlier.

Laurel’s image appeared inside the mist, hovering over the ocean in a ghostly form. The memory of her soft voice rang in his ears. He had been desperate to bring back the happy times they’d spent together in high school. Their love had been pure, untainted by sex, drugs, alcohol, the kind of things many of their friends had already dived into. After constant heckling, Neil and Laurel had shared a marijuana cigarette late one night in her backyard. Stretched out on a blanket, they were laughing and munching on M&M’s when Neil looked up and saw Laurel’s father standing over them. Her parents had come home early from a wedding. Furious, Stanley Caplin accused Neil of being a drug dealer and forbade Laurel to ever see him again outside of school. They could have resumed their relationship after graduation. Everything was ruined, though, so they went their separate ways. Laurel remained in California and obtained her teaching certificate, while Neil perfected his art skills in Europe. He cursed the day he’d run into her at Barnes & Noble. Maybe she would be alive today if they hadn’t started seeing each other again.

He knew he had to leave Carolyn’s house before she found out the truth—that her brother was a drug addict. Only when you stopped using did you realize that the drug you were so eager to consume was poison. If you continued to use, it would kill you. Because of his anxiety over his paintings not selling, he’d started using twice as much. He’d been flying so high, he lost track of what he was doing. People would come up to him in a restaurant or club, rambling on about things a stranger couldn’t possibly know. Neil would quickly excuse himself, unable to remember the person’s name or where he had met him.

Proposing to Laurel had been an impulsive act, clearly induced by narcotics. He’d been drifting untethered until he seduced himself into believing that Laurel would become his anchor.

When he shut his eyes, he hallucinated that he was struggling in the dark, cold water. Gasping for air, he hoisted Laurel onto the edge of the pool. After two compressions of her chest, her eyes opened and her beautiful mouth spread in a smile. “I love you, Neil.”

Why did everyone think she was dead? She’d just gone for a swim and slipped under for a few minutes. Not a problem. Her future husband was there to rescue her. Reality struck him in the face and he was staring into Laurel’s dead eyes, her body stiff and frigid.

“It’s you and me forever,” Neil said to Laurel’s fading image. He closed his eyes. He cried for the children they would never have, the anniversaries they would never celebrate, all that they could have been.

“I’m still right here, Laurel,” he yelled into the wind. “Why did you leave me?”

He reached to his side and picked up the loaded pistol. They would be together again as soon as he pulled the trigger. He wondered how much blood would gush out. Would the remains of his brain be found by children out for an afternoon at the beach? That would mess them up good. So what, he thought, he’d spent most of his life screwing things up. Why change things now?

He put the gun away, lured back into his thoughts. If he had a canvas, he would paint it cold and gray like his soul, waiting patiently for the cruel world to disappear. Before he used the gun, he would take out a knife and slash the canvas once, symbolizing his father, then add another for Laurel.

Neil had found the police report describing his father’s suicide when he’d spent Christmas Eve with his mother. Why hadn’t she told him the truth years ago? He’d tried to understand, but it smashed his sanity. He tried to forget the pain, but the pain was the only thing that seemed real. He was broken and nothing could repair him. The truth about his father and the white powder had left a gaping hole that was about to swallow him, scratching and skidding down to the core.