Murder Is Forever, Volume 1 Read online

  Aleah nods. Dee Dee, she notices, isn’t in much better shape than her home. Her hair looks slept on, there are bits of crusted food clinging to her gray shift, and her bare feet are marked with bony, reddish lumps.

  “Remind me what theater it is you’re going to?” Dee Dee asks.

  Somehow, Aleah is certain that Dee Dee doesn’t really need reminding.

  “The Canterbury,” Aleah says. “Over on Pearl.”

  This is the story she and Gypsy have rehearsed.

  “Right, the Canterbury. I’ve driven by it. Looks fancy as hell from the outside, what with all those columns and that ivy. Even if the ivy is fake.”

  “It’s just a normal theater on the inside,” Aleah says.

  “Well, maybe someday I’ll see for myself,” Dee Dee says.

  Is she asking to be invited? Aleah wonders.

  There’s a brief lull before Dee Dee asks her next question: “You’ve had your license for how long now?”

  “Going on six months,” Aleah says.

  “I told you, Mama, she’s a real good driver.”

  It’s Gypsy, wheeling herself into the living room, flashing Aleah a big, nervous smile.

  “My gosh, look at you,” Dee Dee says.

  Gypsy is decked out in a pale blue ruched dress with a cloud print—the one she wears to church on holidays and special occasions. She’s accessorized with an imitation pearl necklace, a black handbag, and gold-colored shoes. For a bit of flair, she’s put on two different shades of lipstick: dark violet on her upper lip, scarlet on the lower.

  “You know it’s gonna be dark in that theater, right?” Dee Dee says. “Ain’t no one gonna see you.”

  “Out of the house is out of the house, Mama,” Gypsy reasons.

  “Well, I wish you’d told me you were gonna doll yourself up. I could’ve helped some. You look like a French Quarter whore.”

  Aleah blushes. Gypsy pretends not to hear.

  “And what are you wearing them heels for?” Dee Dee continues. “You know you can’t walk as it is.”

  “We better be going,” Aleah says. “I hate missing the previews.”

  She wheels Gypsy out to the car, helps her into the passenger’s seat, and folds the wheelchair into the trunk. As they’re pulling away from the curb, Aleah says: “Your mother’s wrong. I think you look very pretty.”

  “I just hope he thinks so,” Gypsy says. “I never been so jittery in all my life.”

  “Aren’t you going to at least tell me his real name?” Aleah asks.

  “I promised I wouldn’t.”

  “So I’m just supposed to call him Secret Sam? Like Secret is his first name? Hey Secret, how’s it going? That’s a nice jacket you’re wearing, Secret.”

  Gypsy giggles.

  “If he wants to tell you, that’s different,” she says. “But a promise is a promise.”

  Aleah thinks:

  Dee Dee was right about one thing…I’m just the transportation.

  * * *

  They sit in a booth by the window, Gypsy facing the door. There’s an empty ice cream sundae bowl and two empty cups of hot chocolate on the table in front of them. Gypsy, unused to the sugar and syrup and cream, is feeling a little queasy. They’ve been here over an hour, but it feels like longer since either of them spoke. Gypsy breaks the silence.

  “He’ll be here,” she says. “I must’ve got the time wrong.”

  “You want to text him?” Aleah asks.

  “I told you, he ain’t got a phone.”

  Gypsy taps her fingers tunelessly on the table. Aleah wants to comfort her—or rather, she wants to want to comfort her. Really, Aleah is having doubts about the existence of this man with no phone and no name. The doubts are making her irritable, even angry. Her time has been wasted on a schoolgirl fantasy. Like there’s nothing else she could be doing. Like she doesn’t have her own problems. Not that Gypsy would ever think to ask. Aleah feels herself on the cusp of saying something she might regret. Time for a pause, she thinks.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” she tells Gypsy. “When I get back, we should probably go.”

  She hurries away before Gypsy can object. In the parlor’s private bathroom, she runs water over her wrists while she talks to herself in the mirror.

  You’re here for Gypsy, she tells herself. Gypsy believes this is real. She needs to believe this is real.

  But then, she thinks, so what? What has any of it got to do with me?

  For the first time, Aleah wonders if she might have mistaken pity for friendship.

  Stop it, she tells herself. You’re just tired and cranky. Tomorrow, you won’t think like this anymore.

  But for now, the best she can do is put on a brave face. She leaves the bathroom feeling no better or worse than before.

  On her way back to the booth, she sees someone sitting with Gypsy. She feels her mood change: the world is once again a kind place. She’s never been so happy to be wrong. Gypsy has someone. She actually has someone. But then Aleah sees who it is sitting there—not Gypsy’s Secret Sam, but her mother. Aleah considers running out the door but makes herself walk forward. Dee Dee looks up at her, smiles.

  “I’ll take Gypsy home,” she says.

  Aleah is flustered.

  “Are you sure?” she asks. “I mean, I was…”

  Dee Dee stands, looms over her. Aleah is keenly aware of heads turning across the parlor.

  “Listen to me, Aleah Martin,” Dee Dee says. “You stay the hell away from my daughter. That girl don’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s made up in her head. You think you’re helping, but you’re hurting. So you just find some other way to earn your Girl Scout badge. Gypsy’s off-limits. You hear what I’m saying?”

  Aleah nods. She catches a glimpse of Gypsy huddled behind her mother’s plus-size frame, her head hanging low. She doesn’t bother to say goodbye.

  Outside, her fists clenched and her face burning red, Aleah thinks, Good riddance. Almost instantly, she hates herself for having the thought.

  Chapter 19

  Gypsy feels a jolt in her spine as Dee Dee drives her wheelchair hard over a crack in the concrete.

  “I always knew you to be ungrateful, but this tops it all,” Dee Dee says. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t take the belt to your behind when we get home. If you’re healthy enough to go tramping around, then you’re healthy enough for the damn switch.”

  Dee Dee is shouting in plain view and earshot of pedestrians and passing cars. Gypsy keeps her head down, prays that her mother did not park too far away. Luckily, it is after nine p.m. on a weeknight in a sleepy town, with only a handful of restaurants and bars open. Her greatest fear is that Nicholas will choose this moment to appear—that he will witness her being rocketed down a public street by her out-of-control mother. She feels, more clearly than ever, ashamed of the picture she and her mother make. Ashamed of her mother’s obesity. Ashamed of her own ailments and handicaps, most of which—maybe all of which—she doesn’t understand. She wishes she could disappear—simply dissolve, like in Star Trek, and resurface somewhere entirely different. Someplace tropical, maybe. A jungle lined with beaches. Sun shining year round on exotic plants and animals. She would swim and hike and draw and paint, and she wouldn’t care if she never saw another human being in her life.

  Meanwhile, Dee Dee is beside herself with the kind of anger that won’t die down until she’s tired herself out.

  “I thought you cleared your system of this kind of stupidity down in Naples,” she says. “I just don’t know how to get through to you. I truly don’t. Tonight, I want you to park yourself in front of a mirror and take a good hard look. You ain’t like other people, Gypsy. Not even a little bit. You need looking after, and won’t no one but me do it.”

  They turn onto a side street, and Gypsy spots their car parked with one wheel on the curb at the end of the block.

  “There are times you’re too weak to lift a spoon,” Dee Dee goes on. “Times you can’t hard
ly wipe your own ass. I’ve scrubbed vomit from your clothes, washed your sheets in the dead of night when you pissed yourself like a small child. Now who the hell’s gonna sign up for that if they don’t have to?”

  She opens the passenger door and steps back while Gypsy, hands gripping the hood, lifts herself from the wheelchair into the car. A few minutes later they are jetting down residential streets, Dee Dee aggressively slamming on the brakes at every stop sign.

  “I bet you’re wondering how I tracked you down tonight,” she says. “Well, I went into your computer and took a long look around. Turns out you’ve gotten real sloppy about covering your tracks. Anyway, I set Mr. Godejohn good and straight. Let him know how many laws he’d be breaking if he showed up at that parlor. You won’t be hearing from him again.”

  Gypsy suppresses a little whimper.

  “And by the way,” Dee Dee says, “don’t go thinking you got a computer no more. It’s boxed up already. This is a new day, little missy. The rules are the same, but the consequences just got real consequential.”

  Gypsy is too numb to cry. She feels humiliated not by her mother’s tirade, not by the scene her mother made in front of Aleah, but rather by her earlier misguided belief that she might just get away with it, that she might manage to behave in the world the way other people behaved. She understands now that her future will look no different than her present. This is her life, here in this car.

  “You listening to me?” Dee Dee says. “Speak when you’re spoken to.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Yes to all of it, Gypsy thinks. Yes to everything you say. This is me surrendering. Once and for all.

  * * *

  A half-hour later, Gypsy is lying in bed when Dee Dee, who has dropped her screaming in favor of the silent treatment, brings in a cup of water and the nightly cocktail of meds. She sets them on the side table, then turns and walks out, slamming the door behind her.

  This time, without her mother watching, Gypsy sits up straight and swallows every last pill.

  Chapter 20

  Slater sits across the table from Nicholas Godejohn in a bare and forbidding concrete-and-tile interrogation room. They’ve dressed Nicholas in an orange jumpsuit. His dark hair is matted and oily; his morning breath has only grown more rank over the past few hours. He is skinny, short, pale. Sickly, Slater thinks. He might even pass for Gypsy’s brother.

  “I confessed,” Godejohn says. “What more we got to talk about?”

  “Quite a bit,” Slater says. “The judge and the lawyers and the jury will want the full picture. They’ll want details. A timeline.”

  “What kind of details?”

  “Every kind. They’ll want your every thought and action from the moment you met Gypsy to the moment we slapped the cuffs on.”

  “First of all,” Nicholas says, “I never knew she was called Gypsy Rose till you all told me. She said her name was Penelope. People shouldn’t be allowed to make up fake names on a Christian dating site.”

  Slater sees already where this is going: Godejohn will make himself an accomplice—a victim of Gypsy’s siren spell.

  “You’ve been arrested before,” Slater pivots.

  “Now don’t go bringing that up,” Nicholas says. “That was a big mix-up and it ain’t got nothing to do with this.”

  Slater ignores him.

  “For public lewdness,” he continues. “Apparently, you were watching porn and giving yourself a yank in the middle of a fast food restaurant at three thirty in the afternoon. Around the time school kids would be showing up.”

  “You got it wrong. It wasn’t like they say. Not one bit.”

  “How was it, then?”

  “First off, I had a jacket over my lap, so no one saw nothing worth seeing. And I was sitting far off in a corner by myself. No way no one but me saw that screen.”

  “Someone must have seen it.”

  “Yeah, well…that someone must’ve tried real hard.”

  Slater decides to change tacks.

  “No need to be defensive, Nick,” he says. “If anything, I think your prior helps you.”

  “Yeah, right. How’s that gonna help me?”

  “It shows your emotional state. The jury will read it as a cry for help. You must have been very lonely. You belonged in therapy, not prison. In fact, if they’d got you the help you needed, Dee Dee Blancharde might still be alive.”

  “You mean then it ain’t my fault?”

  “It’s less your fault.”

  Nick looks disappointed.

  “Yeah, OK,” he says.

  “And I’m guessing that same loneliness led you to Christian Couples?”

  “Ain’t no other reason to go on there. I mean, a guy’s got to be pretty hard up to start shopping for strangers online.”

  “I know that’s true,” Slater says. “Hell, I’ve been there myself.”

  “Yeah, huh?”

  “I’d been divorced ten years and hadn’t so much as touched a woman in all that time. Unless you count prostitution busts.”

  Godejohn smiles.

  “It’d been a while for me, too. I ain’t even gonna say how long.”

  “What led you to Christian Couples?”

  “They got a billboard up on the highway. Says something about God being the first matchmaker on account of Adam and Eve.”

  Slater knows that billboard. It stands maybe fifty yards from an adult store for swingers.

  “How long ago did you join?” he asks.

  “Not long before I met Penelope…I mean Gypsy.”

  “Did you meet anyone besides Gypsy?”

  “Not to speak of. Just some chat room flirting that didn’t go nowhere.”

  Slater smiles. He has Godejohn a little more relaxed, a little more trusting. It’s time, he thinks, to dig in.

  “So why Gypsy? What made her different?”

  Godejohn shrugs. His eyes dart around the room.

  “She was the only one,” he says.

  “The only one?”

  “Who reached out to me. She clicked the Like button on my photo. Even sent me a little note ’bout how cute I was. I didn’t have to do no chasing at all.”

  Good, Slater thinks. We can check on that. This is the real purpose of the interview: solicit statements that might support or contradict Godejohn’s version of events.

  “And she kept on pursuing you?” he asks.

  “Oh yeah. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but that one’s pure vixen.”

  He tells Slater about the midnight cosplay, goes into great detail about the fantasies—all of them, he claims, Gypsy’s—that had them dressed as pirate and princess, shepherd and shepherdess, sorcerer and sorceress, alien and astronaut.

  “At first, I took it personal,” he says. “I thought she just didn’t wanna see my face unless there was some kind of mask on it. But it turns out that’s her thing. It’s cosplay or the highway with her. Hell, she might even like jail. She might never want to leave. It’s all costumes in there.”

  Salter takes a sip of coffee while he thinks through his next question: “Now, this is very important, Nicholas,” he begins. “Did Gypsy always know she could walk? Did she know from the start that she wasn’t sick?”

  Godejohn squirms a little in his seat.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say from the start.”

  “When did she know?”

  “I ain’t sure, exactly. You kinda gotta read between the lines with Gypsy.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Well, she kept going on about someone she called the Savior. Took me a while to figure out that the Savior was some kind a doctor. She’d write things like: The Savior says I’m fit to walk on water, and The Savior says my blood’s the same as everyone else’s. He says I can sleep just by closing my eyes. And then I had to figure out that her ma was the one she called the Lard Monster. The Lard Monster tied her to chairs and wouldn’t let her eat nothing. The Lard Monster shaved off all her hair before it had a chance to grow. The Lard Mo
nster did this and that and the other, all of them things the devil himself couldn’t make no worse.”

  Slater nods as though something has clicked into place.

  “So the Lard Monster had to die?” he says.

  “After a while, yeah. Maybe Gypsy had that in mind the whole time. You’d have to ask her.”

  “Here’s what I really want to know,” Slater says. “How is it that you wound up with the knife in your hand?”

  Nicholas thinks back to that night. He sees himself lingering at the curb, his heart beating so hard he can barely hear over it. He must have spent an hour just staring at the dark house. Then came the slow walk up the steps to the Blanchardes’ front door. He found it unlocked, just as Gypsy promised.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It was like we were playing one of our games, only in real life. Gypsy needed saving.”

  “And you’d never met her before? I mean in person.”

  “No sir.”

  “But she knew what you were going to do?”

  “I’m tellin’ you, it was her idea. From start to finish.”

  Slater rubs his thumbs hard against his temples.

  “You’re saying you went over there to kill the mother of a young woman you’d never so much as laid eyes on?”

  Nicholas grins, nods enthusiastically. As though he’s found his defense. As though the fact that he’d never seen Gypsy in the flesh makes his actions selfless. Chivalric. Knight Nicholas Godejohn riding to the damsel’s rescue.

  Chapter 21

  Slater and Dr. Ryan watch through a two-way mirror as Draper interrogates Gypsy. Dr. Ryan, for his part, marvels at how far Gypsy’s physical transformation has progressed in such a short period of time. Her hair is crew-cut length now. Her cheeks have some color, and there’s already a bit more meat on her bones. Despite her predicament, she looks healthy—probably for the first time in her life.

  There’s a laptop sitting open on the table between Gypsy and Draper.