My mother was an alcoholic. Did I tell you that?
The detective has on a disgusting suit that smells of mothballs. It hangs on him. He scratches his nose and says a couple of bullshitty words to Paul about how sorry he is that he had to intrude on us like this. Paul has on his best hound-dog face and says it’s okay. Now I understand what he meant by not overdoing it. Man, is he good. I almost believe him.
“Sure,” Paul says to the detective. “Take a look around the house.”
I think about saying we’ve got nothing to hide, but don t. The detective goes over some details with Paul. My mom had gone to a party by herself. Paul didn’t go ’cause he wasn’t feeling well. At around three in the morning he got up to make himself a cup of milk. I was asleep, of course. He went downstairs and found my mother dead.
“Where’d you find your wife?” the detective asks.
“On that chair right there.”
Paul points to the Chippendale.
The detective walks over to the chair but doesn’t touch it. He asks, “What’d you do when you found her?”
Paul is confused. He says, “What do you mean? I called the paramedics, of course.”
“Yeah,” the detective says. “I know that. Did you touch her at all?”
“Touch her?” Paul asks.
The detective says, “Yeah, feel if the skin was cold... see if she was breathing.”
Paul shakes his head. “I don’t know anything about CPR. I figured the smart thing to do was to leave her alone and wait for the paramedics.”
“How’d you know she was dead?” the detective asks.
“I didn’t know she was dead,” Paul says back. His voice is getting loud. “I just saw her slumped in the chair and knew something was wrong.”
“Maybe she was sleeping,” suggested the detective.
“Her face was white... gray.” Paul begins to pace. “I knew she wasn’t sleeping.”
“You didn’t check her pulse, check to see if she was breathing?”
“He said no,” I say, defending my dad. “Look...” I get tears in my eyes. “Why don’t you leave us alone? Haven’t we been through enough without you poking around?”
The detective nods solemnly. He says, “I’ll be brief.”
We don’t answer him. We stay in the living room while he searches. A half hour later the detective comes back carrying all of Mom’s pills in a plastic bag. He says, “Mind if I take these with me?”
Paul says go ahead. As soon as he leaves, I notice Paul is white. I take his hand and ask him what’s wrong. He whispers, “Your fingerprints were on the bottle.”
I smile and shake my head no. “I wiped everything clean.”
Paul smiles and calls me beautiful. God, no one has ever called me beautiful. Want to know something weird? Paul’s a much better lover than he is a father. We make it right there on the couch, knowing it’s a stupid and dangerous thing to do, but we don’t care. An hour later we go to bed.
The fucking asshole pig comes back a week later with all of his piglets. Paul is enraged, but the pig has all the papers in order — the search warrant, the this, the that.
Paul asks, “What is going on?”
“Complete investigation, Mr. James.”
“Of what!”
“I don’t believe your wife’s death is an accidental overdose.”
“Why not?” I ask.
Paul glares at me. The detective ignores me and I don’t repeat the question.
“What do you think it is?” Paul asks.
“Intentional overdose.”
“Suicide?” Paul says, “No note was found.”
“There isn’t always a note,” the detective responds. “Besides, I didn’t mean suicide, I meant homicide.”
My body goes cold when he says the word. The pig asks us if we mind being printed or giving them samples of our hair. Paul nudges me in the ribs and answers, “Of course not,” for the both of us.
Then he adds, “We have nothing to hide.”
Now I’m thinking that was a real dumb thing to say.
They start to dust the Chippendale, spreading black powder over the fabric. Paul goes loony and screams how expensive the chair is. No one pays attention to him.
He stalks off to his bedroom. I follow.
“What are we gonna do?” I whisper.
“You wiped away all the prints?” he whispers back.
I nod.
“They’ve got nothing on us, babe.” He inhales deeply. “We’ll just have to wait it out. Now, get out of here before someone suspects something.”
I obey.
All the pigs leave about four hours later. They’ve turned our home into a sty.
Paul is becoming a real problem. He’s losing it, and that’s bad news for me. When I confront him with what a shit he’s being, he starts acting like a parent. Can you believe that? He fucks me — his daughter — then when he’s losing it, he starts acting like a parent.
Yesterday he didn’t come home at night. That really pissed me off. I reminded him that we were in it together. That pissed him off, and he claimed the entire thing was my idea and that I was a witch and a whore. Man, what a battle we had. We’re all made up now, but let me tell you something, we watch each other carefully.
Real carefully.
They arrested me this morning for the murder of my mother. They leave Paul alone for now. Apparently whatever they have is just on me and not him.
To tell you the truth, I’m kind of relieved.
The same detective asks me if I want to have a lawyer present. I say yeah, I’d better, knowing that Paul will get me the best mouthpiece in town. He has to, ’cause he knows that it’s only a matter of time before his butt is on the line. I’m left waiting in this interview room for about an hour. Just me and the detective. Finally I say what I know I shouldn’t say.
I say, “How’d you find out?”
“Find out what?” the detective answers.
“About my mom being murdered and all.”
His eyebrows raise a tad.
“You mean, how’d I find out you murdered your mom?”
I know it’s a trick, but what the fuck. I don’t care anymore. I nod.
“Did you kill your mom, Kristine?”
He asks the question like real cool, but I can see the sweat under his arm pits.
“Yeah,” I admit. “I offed her.”
“How?” he asks.
“I laced her coffee with her own Seconal,” I say. “When that didn’t do the trick, I injected her with more. That finished her off.”
“Where’d you inject her?” he asks.
“Under her tongue.”
He nods. “Smart thinking,” he says. “No marks.” Then he pauses and adds, “So you’re a hype, huh?”
I shake my head. “Recreational,” I say.
“Ah.”
“So how’d you find out?” I ask again.
“Two other things set an alarm off in me,” the detective said. “The autopsy report showed bruises on the inside of your mom’s right wrist. Like someone squeezed her.”
“Maybe someone did,” I say.
The detective says, “Yeah, like someone was feeling for a pulse. Yet your dad denied touching her.”
I say, “Maybe she was playing a little game with one of her lovers.”
“I thought of that,” the detective says. “She went to a pretty wild party. But then the bruises would have been on both of her wrists.”
I don’t say anything right away. Then I say, “You said two things. What was the second?”
“Your mom had loads of Seconal in her body, along with booze and coke. She also had just a trace amount of heroin. Too little if she actually shot up a wad.”