The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (14 page)

I first met Marlene Dixon approximately one month after the Bar Dive incident. She called my cell just as I was walking across the Market Street Bridge on my way home from an eighth-grade science fair.

“Is this Noa Singleton?” she asked.

Instantly I could tell she was a lawyer. That confident tone bordered on aggression, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the tone veered closer to the arrogant slant of the scale than mere confidence.

I cleared my throat.

“This is she.”

“I think you and I have something in common that I’d like to discuss with you.”

I bit the nail of my index finger and tore it from its bed.

“Who is this really? Did Bobby put you up to this?”

“This is not a joke,” she insisted. “Do you have a father who owns a bar called Dive Bar off of Girard Avenue?”

I cleared my throat again.

“Bar Dive?”

“Dive Bar,” she corrected without pause. “It is called Dive Bar according to city records.”

I walked to the edge of the bridge and looked down over the filthy
water of the Schuylkill. Wind crescents carved themselves into the flow. I spit out the papery nail and watched as it floated downward like a feather.

“Ms. Singleton?”

“Who is this really?” I asked.

Nobody knew about my relationship with my father, save for Bobby, and only he knew about it loosely as far as the fact that he was an anonymous telephone caller. I never told anyone, including Bobby, that I actually met him. But Marlene didn’t answer me. Instead, she began to do what she did best. Delegate. Order. Manipulate.

“Meet me at the diner on Fitzwater and Seventh tomorrow at noon. Can you do that?”

I cleared my throat again.

“I … uh …”

“Is that a yes or a no?” she demanded. “I don’t have all day.”

“No ma’am.” I stumbled, looking around the bridge. There were only teenagers walking by in flip-flops and sunglasses. “I mean yes ma’am. That’s a yes. I’ll meet you.”

M
ARLENE WAS SITTING AT THE RESTAURANT ALONE AT A CORNER
table by a tall bay window, dressed in a black pantsuit with a colorful French scarf tied around her neck three times. She was flipping through the pages of a yellow legal pad when I walked in. She didn’t even bother to look up. Instead, she placed a fancy black ink pen carefully at the edge of the legal pad, pushed it away, and only then looked up to me.

“Marlene Dixon?” I asked, shoving my hand out to greet her. “Hi, I’m Noa P. Singleton.”

“Noa,” she said, after an uncomfortable two or three seconds in which she examined every crease in my clothing, every hair out of place in my ponytail, every blemish on my cheeks. She placed an elegant hand on the table as if to push herself up to greet me, but decided against it. Now I understand why, but at the time, her utter disregard for my name and presence felt like acute disapproval.

“Good. Please sit, Noa.”

My name almost popped out of every sentence the way an English word splices the fluid Spanish of a Telemundo newscaster.

“Weren’t we meeting at noon?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, it’s twelve twenty now. I have a meeting at one. That doesn’t give us much time, does it?”

She pulled up her sleeve to reveal a platinum watch framed with
hundreds of miniature diamonds. It was the type of watch that a powerful woman wears only after purchasing it herself—not a token of courtship.

“I have to admit, I’m a bit nervous right now,” I said, sitting down.

She didn’t respond. A woman like that didn’t need to. Instead, she leaned over to her briefcase and pulled out a yellow folder that contained several photographs.

“Take a look at these.”

“No drink first?”

Again, she didn’t reply. Almost as if I had no choice over my actions even then, reluctantly, I took the folder and opened it. Inside, a colorful photograph, documentary-style, peered out at me from the table. At first, it was a bit hard to tell who he was, but upon closer glance, the pixilated image settled in my line of vision and its clustered dots of oranges and blacks, reds, blues, and browns formed an image I’d been trying to forget for weeks.

“What is this?”

“I believe you know exactly what this is,” she said, glancing over to her legal pad. “And whom?” A list of names were scribbled on it, but I couldn’t quite read them. “Do I need to review the events with you?”

My eyes squinted, and I pulled the photograph closer to my face so that I could be sure it was his. In the photo, he was resting in a hospital bed, gaunt and metallic. A collection of wires bridged his cheek to the mouth. One eye was swollen shut with shades of indigo. Yellow clumps of hardened pus collected at the tear duct, and broken capillaries completed the shattered facial bouquet.

Marlene didn’t feel the need to wait an obligatory five minutes to permit me comfort before reining me in without the courtesy of introductions. No doubt she had more important meetings to attend. In that, I respected her for her efficiency, her veracity.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad I’ve got your attention.”

Though it wasn’t exactly Marlene Dixon who occupied my attention, all I could do was connect the image in my hand with the memory still pulsing in my temple; that of the vein throbbing in the
forehead of my father just as his hand shifted into the shadowman’s face.

“There’s more,” she said to me. “Feel free to look at the next few. Some are profile views, others of the bruising on the chest from internal bleeding.”

I stood from the table and my hands trembled as they pushed against it.

“Sit, Noa,” she sighed, motioning to the chair. Her fingers were long and manicured. “Please sit.”

“You have exactly one minute to tell me what this is all about and why you have photos of the night—”

“—sit down,” she instructed. “You don’t want to make a scene. Just take a seat again, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

I looked to my right and there was a young couple on a first, maybe second date. Then I looked to my left and it appeared to be nothing more than a business meeting.

“Nobody is following you, if that’s what you’re concerned about.” She paused, sipped from her coffee, and then continued. “Please sit.”

On cue, I acquiesced, and she took back her photo.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“This man is my employee. I hired him to follow your father around, and unfortunately, you seem to have gotten in the middle of things outside of Dive Bar—”

“—Bar Dive—”

“—Dive Bar, and, for that, I’m terribly sorry—”

“—Is he okay?” I asked again.

“—you saw, probably, what you should have seen, but nevertheless—”

“—Is he okay?”

Sounds from the minions finally made their way to her, and she stopped for a moment, and listened.

“He was hurt. He’s fine now, but he was hurt, and this is where we are.”

“And where exactly is that?” I asked.

I looked around and could have sworn that someone else was listening to our conversation, possibly following me around the same way the shadowman was trailing me outside Bar Dive.

“You paid criminals to follow my father around,” I said, probably a bit louder than I should have. Marlene’s pupils shifted momentarily. “Why?”

She looked again at her legal pad.

“Listen, Noa, we have something in common, and that’s why I called you.”

“I don’t think we have anything in common, Mrs. Dixon.”

She smiled abruptly as if the movement were a facial tic, pedantic and virile. “We have absolutely nothing in common, Marlene Dixon, Esquire,” I recited. “Senior Partner at Adams, Steinberg, and Coleson, LLP. Phi Beta Kappa Princeton University. Summa cum laude Harvard Law School. Head of Trusts and Estates in the Philadelphia Branch. Travels frequently to Tokyo and Hong Kong. I’ve done my research, too. You think I’m going to show up at a diner for someone who I know nothing about?”

“All right then,” she said, continuing to smirk, almost as if patronizing me was too simple, too pedestrian for her style. Instead, she pulled out another photograph from her briefcase and dropped it on the table facing me. An inhibited-looking girl, no older than me, stared unhappily out from a portrait studio with a pointed jaw, pearls, and perfectly straight teeth.

“This is my daughter, Sarah,” she declared. “Sarah, her father, and I are coming to the end of what we like to call the da Gama period.”

“As in Vasco da Gama?”

She moved an errant lock of hair out of her face, and from what I could tell, it was the only aspect of this woman’s entire image that was even remotely out of place.

“I’m glad you can read an encyclopedia, Noa. I can see that at least that half a year at Penn didn’t slip through your fingers.” She wet the corners of her lips before continuing. “Now, I’m here because my
daughter is coming to the end of her own mini-exploratory period, her period of sailing the intellectual world, if you will. I had hoped she’d use this time to study and take the LSAT or the MCAT or at least by this point be in graduate school. But instead, she is floundering around, spending all of her time with your father and what is barely a job.”

I drank some water and started chewing on a crushed piece of ice.

“I’m not following.”

There were no waiters nearby. We had been seated for minutes, and absolutely nobody had ambled to our corner to offer me a drink, bread, olives, anything. All that was before me on the table was the glass that was sitting at the table when I arrived, sweating as nervously as I was in receipt of Marlene’s continued oration.

“Your father is seeing my daughter, and, quite frankly, it’s a relationship that neither one of us wants to exist.”

My fingers curled around the glass and slipped down its corrugated torso. He wasn’t dating anyone, as far as I was concerned.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

In hindsight, it might have been more of a declaration than a question. A skip on a compact disc, or an accidental splice in a film that replayed the same frame twice.

“I’m sorry?” I said again.

“It looks like dropping out of college was the worst thing you could have done. You seem to have lost all powers of deduction.”

“Exactly how much research have you done on me?”

“Listen clearly: my daughter is seeing your father,” she said. “That is a relationship that cannot be. Are we clear?”

“So what?”

“Noa,” she said, calmly, as if her voice were reaching out to mine.

“You want me to be offended that my father is dating someone half his age. My age, right?” I paused, still piecing together the narrative. “To be honest, I couldn’t care less about your daughter’s inability to find herself, despite having a moderately rich patron.”

“Don’t humor me with your denial,” she said, pulling the photo back.

“I don’t care if your daughter is seeing my father. He’s nothing to me. He really is nothing to me,” I continued. “I’ve known him for all of five minutes.”

“And yet here we are discussing him.”

She picked up her legal pad and turned to a new page. I felt a little embarrassed at my behavior. It wasn’t my place to be so obstinate to a woman I’d just met with a longer pedigree than my entire high school’s administration’s put together. Then again, it wasn’t her place to presume that any emotion I felt for my father was basking in the envy of her daughter.

“How do you know I dropped out of college?”

She didn’t respond. Instead, her eyes traveled to my exposed wrist. A flash of surprise and she quirked an eyebrow.

“That’s quite a nice bracelet, Ms. Singleton.”

I quickly pulled down my sleeves.

“Do you think if you sell it, you’ll have enough money to pay your rent? Or go back to school? That is what you want, isn’t it?”

My nose itched and the pressure behind my sinuses crept upon me. He told me he wasn’t seeing anyone. He told me he didn’t have time in his life for anyone. I blew my nose on a cloth napkin, placed it in my lap, and then looked back to her. I never told her I dropped out of college.

“Have you been having someone follow me, too?”

“Look, Noa, you’re not fooling anyone,” she said, locking my gaze for the first time.

“How long has it been going on?” I asked. I don’t know if I was asking about Sarah or the private investigator. Both, maybe. Neither.

She unraveled her scarf for air to prepare for negotiations.

“Too long.”

“How long, Marlene? A month? Two months?”

“At least eight months. Maybe nine, I can’t be sure.”

“Almost a year?” I asked, in shock. Half of Marlene’s mouth curled. No doubt, this was the reaction she’d been hoping for.

“This relationship cannot be comfortable for you,” she said, picking up momentum. She was too glib to humor me, no matter the message, when all that mattered was what wasn’t said. “I cannot imagine how you would feel.”

“First of all, it’s not at all uncomfortable as I didn’t know it existed before now, and second, I couldn’t care less who my father or nonfather, if you will, chooses to be with. He did it to my mother and probably about three hundred other women since then. Hasn’t impacted my life one bit.”

“Noa, you wanted to find your father. You found your father. And now you’ve lost your father. It’s a pretty simple story.”

“Not really.”

“Did you or did you not come to Philadelphia to find your father?”

“I did not,” I lobbied, taking a sip of my own water.

“Did you or did you not find your father here in Philadelphia?” she asked again.

“He found me, if you must know.”

“Right,” Marlene said. “And how did he explain his decades-long absence?”

“I didn’t care.”

“If you say so,” she said, looking back to her legal pad, before continuing her cross-examination. “Where did he tell you he was before Philadelphia? Did he explain his three-year stint in a correctional facility outside Louisville, Kentucky?”

I looked around for the waiter again, but none showed. My hand still gripped the water. Waves of perspiration dripped over my fingers.

“What about the time he served in Ohio? I presume you know about California twenty-three years ago, and what brought him back here.”