Burning Blue

After school I headed down to the Hoboken waterfront to meet my father and his friend from the old days. She was a lawyer. She couldn’t take the case because she wasn’t licensed to practice in New Jersey, but she knew we were broke and was happy to give us free advice. Her name was Camilla, and she chain-smoked. “I think your best bet is to try to get the Lyles woman to drop the burglary charge,” she said. “That might get the judge in the mind-set to reduce the obstruction charge or maybe even throw it out.”

“How do we get her to drop the charge?” my father said.

“Steve, not to tell stories in front of Jay, but do you remember that time you had a couple too many from the frat house keg and ditched me to hang with that pretty little blond thing? What did you do the next day?”

“I apologized.”

“On bended knee you apologized. And you were sincere. We worked it out.” She nodded to me. “Offer her compassion, Jay. She just lost a daughter.” Her phone beeped. “Fellas, I have to get a man out of jail. See you around.”

The air was cold, but the sun was warm. “Steakhouse or salad bar?” my dad said.

He didn’t need to be gnawing on rib fat. “Afraid it’ll have to be rabbit food.”

He slapped my knee. “Maybe I ought to go with you to see the Lyles woman.”

“Thanks, but it’ll be better if I go solo. You know, so it doesn’t look like I’m going because my old man forced me to.”

“You ever gonna cut that hair?”

“When I start stepping on it.”

“That’ll be an interesting look.” He sighed as he pushed himself up from the bench. “Salad, huh? Bleh.”

“Dad, seriously, it’s cool if you have a girlfriend in Marathon.”

“Jay, seriously, back off. There’s nothing going on down there. Let’s go, we’re getting steaks.”

After school the next day, Tuesday afternoon, I headed for Mrs. Lyles’s house. I bought flowers but realized they would make me look like a kiss-ass, and I gave them away. I wasn’t into my second rap on the door when it opened. Her eyes were puffy slits rimmed with washed-out mascara. She smoked a cigarette. “I’m just on my way out,” she said.

“Ma’am, my name is Jay Nazzaro.”

“What do you want?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, wait, you’re him. You’re the. .” She slammed the door.

I nodded to nobody but myself. I was at the curb when I heard “Wait.”

I headed back up to the porch and waited at the threshold. “You see me holding the door for you, don’t you?” she said.

The house was more of a wreck than the last time I’d. . been there. We went to the kitchen. “Sit.” She laid out coffee mugs. “That night at the party a couple years ago. Angela told me you stood up for her.” She poured old coffee. “The detective told me your name, but I couldn’t place it until just now, when I saw your face.” She pulled a faux leather bound album from a stack on the table and flipped to a sketched portrait of me. Angela must have drawn it from memory, because I couldn’t remember posing for a picture like this. She nailed me, my eyes, my trying not to look scared. I hated her a little more for getting inside me like that.

“She told me the whole story,” Mrs. Lyles said. “Or at least the story that was told to her. She herself remembered just tatters of it. I told her she should go out with you, but she said she wasn’t good enough.” Her eyes went to her wristwatch. “I have to visit my daughter now. I’m afraid. I’d like to know if you would come with me.”

FORTY-NINE

The last place I should have been with a tracking bracelet on my ankle was a juvenile detention center, but I had to get Bobbie Lyles to drop the burglary charge. I was stunned when the guard let me in. “Perfectly legal and more common than you would think,” she said. “Parolees visiting prisoners, you know?”

Angela was considered too dangerous to others and herself for a non-secure, face-to-face meeting. A guard escorted her to the chair behind the Plexiglas partition. She was a mess with a black eye and a split lip. Her mother gagged and hurried out for the bathroom. Angela eyed me. “So sweet of you to visit, Jameson.” She was definitely medicated, spacey eyes. All the face jewelry was gone, of course. The pinhole by her lip was infected. She was pale. “The other girls aren’t really feeling me,” she said.

“Especially when you’re around anything liquid, right?” Her jumper was an oddly cheerful color, bright teal. “Why’d you follow us to my apartment house that day?” I said. “What, you just couldn’t resist?”

“I was bombed.”

“Driving drunk. Nice. Lucky you weren’t killed.”

She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Yeah, lucky me.”

The room was freezing, but Angela’s sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were a mess, lots of scars, cigarette burns. One of them was elaborate, a pentangle. She caught me looking at it. “Pretty, right?”

“The test run?” I said, referring to that very first email she sent Mrs. Marks.

She turned her forearm out so we both could see the burn better. “I think it looks righteous. Should have seen when I did it, the tiny little bubbles. I swear, I was salivating. Like it was juicy, you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t, Angela. So that thing about Nicole giving you her jeans. You made it up.”

“No, it was true.”

“Then how could you burn her after she was so nice to you?”

“Because she was so nice to me.” She picked at the pentangle scar. “You don’t think it looks cool?”

“Why are you protecting him?”

She rolled down her sleeves. “Have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Angela, did you ever ask yourself, Why me?”

“Are you kidding? Since I’m like three years old.”

“No, I mean why this nutcase picked you to do the job. He must have known you hated Nicole, right? The only dude that comes to mind there is Dave Bendix. I know about you two, okay? I have video.”

“No you don’t, Spaceman. You have Dave Bendix at a wrestling match I happened to be at. You have me cheering him on, like the three hundred other people in that gym. You have shit. Look, my lawyer tells me that in like a week the shrinks will have gotten together and deemed me nuts, and I’ll be whisked to a psych center for four years. I’ll be drawing pictures and watching movies all day and getting all these great meds. After that, three years probation, self check-in parole. I’m not saying anything about anybody else who may or may not have been involved.”

“But Dave can’t touch you now. It’s done. You’re not going to get any more time added to your sentence for turning him in.”

She smiled and shook her head. “You just don’t get it. You don’t get any of this. You’re perfectly incapable of understanding.”

“You don’t want to see the dude who put you up to this fry?”

“I would love to see him fry-are you kidding? But it wasn’t Dave. Trust me.”

“Trust you? Are you kidding? Then who did it? Who paid you to burn Nicole?”

“I. Don’t. Know. Like I told Barrone. I wish I knew. She offered to get the DA to halve my sentence if I could ID the contract issuer. Why are you winking at me?”

“I’m not. My eye twitches when I haven’t slept in three days. How could you not know who made you burn her?”

“I got a letter, maybe three months ago, no return address. Letter says, basically, ‘Nicole Castro needs to burn.’ Letter says how it might happen, maybe somebody should throw battery acid into her face. If I do the job, I get a hundred grand, enough to get the hell out of here, maybe go to France, where people are cool and leave you alone, start a new life, go to art school or some shit, you know? Of course I’m like, this is too good to be true.