The Courage to Kill

Chapter 1

The man made his move. You with this guy? Shouting, pressing her, his voice a bullet in her ear.

She stood at the bend in the bar of some crowded club, no stool to sit or lean on. Electronic jazz seriously cranked.

Again his hot breath buffeted her ear, Let me get you an Irish coffee?

She knew the spawning gaze, letting her know she could be the one, if only. She could have been any man’s type—dirty blond, mid-twenties, legs, good muscle tone, hard body. The Athletic Woman with a cherubic face, that aura about her. And loose, unkempt, sexy.

But her good looks falsely announced an easy target.

She applied the athletic elbow to force him back. Then, with sudden astonishment, she found herself answering his first question, I-I don’t know, even when it was none of his fucking business if she was with the guy or not. It occurred to her she’d said the wrong thing. Should’ve said, Yeah, now beat it asshole.

Then something more nerving dropped her, a faux slap to her face: neither did she know who she was. Or where she was. Or how she had gotten here.

The man said something but it did not register. She pressed the damp cool napkin from under her drink against her forehead. Long Island Iced Tea. Her drink of choice. A sudden vision came of another woman, a friend, comforting her. A place like this, frosty rum sweetness flowing over her lips.

Then pain. She flinched, hand going to the visceral, touching low. The pain was familiar and that made it welcome, a buoy to keep her from sinking further into some place darker. She squeezed the bar’s leather edge to brace against the sharpening throb. Sweat broke on her brow. Nausea swept her.

The spasm reached its peak, then immediately start to ease. As if normal. But colon spasms aren’t normal.

Who was she? Panicking now, hyperventilating, needing to calm, to grasp something else familiar, anything. Don’t spin out of control. But nothing came to her. She felt wobbly, as though drunk. Helpless.

You’re bleeding, the intruder said.

What?

She dabbed her chin with the napkin, then her cheek, glaring at it.

No, your arm … What happened? Did somebody hurt you?

Dried blood on her right forearm, thin lines around two small crescent-shaped indentations, like the gouge of fingernails. Not like, they were fingernail marks. And bruises. She hadn’t felt them, still didn’t.

First thought: assaulted. Like the man said. Then confusion because she remembered she’d had colitis attacks before—when things went wrong, when she was bad. She felt her face go ashen as she pressed her legs together, feeling for signs. Bile worked up to her throat. But she detected no foreign fluids. Be rational, she told herself. There’s no way she could’ve been molested, with only a puny scratch and bruise; she would have been beat to hell resisting. She’d been trained to defend against the attacker, become the attacker, go for the soft places, the groin, neck, shit as a final dissuasion if he got that close to penetration. She had not been violated, at least not tonight.

Just like that the colic spasm faded. She almost wished it hadn’t. Now, spiraling anxiety. Who in hell was she? Her eyeballs jumped with fear; she couldn’t see clearly, people surrounding her, faceless strangers. Her eyes shut as she again held onto the bar rail, desperate for control. Desperate to step on rampant emotions before they leveled her. Just concentrate on breathing, think of the sound of waterfalls, Bones purring, concrete objects. Bones. Yes, her cat, something familiar.

Her eyes opened. She waved at the bartender. Please call me a taxi. Right now, please.

Hey, I’d be glad to give you a lift, said the man, still there.

She looked at him now as though he was the one who’d dug the nails into her arm. Fury rising. Her hand, clawed, lifted to rake his face, but an inner discipline screamed ... Stop!

Get away from me! she said in a voice that carried over the now idled quartet.

She fled past a gauntlet of blurred faces, critical orbs glued on her. On the sidewalk, now, feeling winded. Good feeling, like a run. She steadied herself against the brick siding, her weight melting into its solidness.

Her breathing slowed. Her eyes seemed to focus now—street signs, Market Street and Fifth Ave, under the six-frond gaslamp casting dull yellow through the fog, cars moving noisily in both directions, their headlights softened in the marine layer fog. The panic draining into a pool of the familiar.

A small black-leather purse hung from a strap that crossed her chest. She wore her purses that way. She had on loose clothes, cotton slacks, neck-high blouse, conservative wear. She’d been somewhere she didn’t want or have to make an impression. She unsnapped the purse. Keys, a pack of Parliament Lights, wadded tissues, loose change, a cigarette lighter. She tried the cigarette lighter. Four clicks and it worked. There was a palsy-like jitter in her fingers trying to pull out the cigarette. The purse was light, nearly empty, no compact, no lipstick, no feminine gear. She found fifty-seven dollars in the billfold, three credit cards, two of them platinum. But no snapshots in it, no boasting of a man or child, no pictures at all except on the California driver’s license. She didn’t at first recognize the woman in it, with the short ash-blond hair and shiny tanned complexion. But she knew the priggish grin. It was the contempt-of-authority pose that came to her by nature. The 27-year-old was her, Janice Leigh Parrish.

Chapter 2

She stamped out her cigarette under a heel-less loafer and stepped into the taxi. She repeated out loud the address on the license, 2304 Albatross, please. It sounded right. She felt comfortable.

That in Mission Hills? he asked, flat eyes reading her in the rearview.

I don’t know. Yes—don’t you have a map?

The driver made a hard left on Fifth and drove north. He was dark, Arab. Settling into the deep seat, she repeated the name on the license, Janice Leigh Parrish. Something wrong with that, but what?

The cab sped along an uphill grade, losing the patch of skyscrapers to the fog, turning west toward the bay, then north again onto Albatross, a straight wide street running through groves of junipers, sycamores and old live oak. Good neighborhood, well appointed, and most importantly, good location. The lots here were wide, most with open yards, a few behind iron and shrub walls. The cabby stopped at the number painted on the curb and turned to look at her straight on. His passenger was asleep in the corner; her head slumped against the window. He checked the meter and spoke in a voice louder than necessary, Wake up, lady. You’re home.

Startled, she jerked upright clutching her throat as if trying to strangle herself. She stepped out and paid the sixteen-dollar fair with a twenty.

Alone on the sidewalk, her legs and arms weak as though she had the flu, or finished a long run. She tried to connect herself with the street, the house before her, any memory.

She stepped onto the dark property through a picket-fence gate into a yard of multiple flowerbeds, walked up a sidewalk with a melaleuca here, sculpted manzanita on the other side. Finches, she remembered, flocked in the low tangled branches of the native manzanita, chirping through the day. Painted cedar shingles skirted the bungalow’s plank siding. It had wide windows and a large porch under a slanted roof.

The place was not alien to her and she stepped up to the porch. Spider plants on hangers; she felt the strain of lifting the full water bucket feeding them. She’d dug the ground by the porch planting Veronica to add blue to a garden of concha, sage and redbud.

She recalled standing on a footstool by the front door to change the incandescent porch light to a yellow CFL, but couldn’t remember when that was.

At five-eight she needed to bend slightly to look through the tiny hinged window set into the door. Dark inside; not like her to turn out all the lights. Neither the cat nor her liked the dark.

She rang the bell. Deep inside she heard a nursery rhyme put to music and began humming its tune. The pungent fragrance of a summer gardenia suddenly enveloped her, that too familiar, and enchanting. She’d planted the gardenia from a quart container. It grew into the lush, prodigious bush on the left side of the steps looking out from the porch. The one planted on the other side failed to survive; she had pulled it out and put it in the compost bin in the backyard.

On a key chain heavy with keys, she somehow found and inserted the correct key on the first try, slipping it easily into a tarnished brass door lock. She recognized other keys—two for the office, the backdoor key, file cabinet keys, spare of a client’s lock box, car key … Her car. Where was it?

She entered the house and gasped catching the shadowy image of herself in the mirror. The mirror stood in a vintage hat rack opposite the door. Its rosy age and gold leaf casing wouldn’t soften the visage. No priggish grin, just a drawn face with the sunken eyes of someone needing sleep or someone coming off a binge. In her experience, it could have been either. Was she drunk? The shoulder hair would have been parted left with a wave on the right side of her head had it not been matted to her forehead. But of course looking into the mirror, she saw backwards. But had she been running? Why so disheveled?

The phone rang, faint but nonetheless startling her. Her watch read close to eleven o’clock, not too late. She stepped through two rooms with confidence even in the dark. She went for the dining room light switch but missed, instead knocking askew the EC Bell print and thought suddenly of Robin, Robin who had opined that the rust colors in the giclée clashed with the pale blue tone of the room. She doesn’t belong in the dining room anyway, Robin had said of the innocent-faced nude in the print. Jay thought the naked model resembled Robin and had bought it for that reason. Move her to the living room, Robin had said. Candid that one, but maybe she was right.

She flipped on the kitchen light, picked up the receiver and waited, hoping it was Robin. Desperately hoping.

But it wasn’t Robin. Janice? Are you there? … Hello?

As the female voice spoke a cat meowed at her feet. She reached down and lifted it under the belly. The orange-and-blue four-pound creature grunted giving over to the lift and hung limply, purring. At least she wasn’t completely alone. She had Bones.

She recognized the voice, the impatience in it, but could not connect a face.

I know your rules, Janice, but I had to call, the woman said, decidedly. I won’t be made to feel guilty for infringing on your space. I wanted you to know that Raoul and I are leaving tomorrow for San Miguel. I’m letting you know in case you might feel the need to reach me. Despite being ill I am going down with him. He needs me there. Don’t worry about me, Jan.

The face came to her, angular, nearly cardboard sharp, crow paths around the mouth, eyes, ash-blond hair like her own but streaked white. She had set restrictions on her mother’s calls, true. But why?

You—?

Please, Janice, don’t start. You just don’t know how it’s tearing me up inside, honey, the way you’re throwing blame around. I know it’s a crucial time in your life. But it’s killing me.

And then something else came to her, the thing with her license—her name. Her name wasn’t Janice, not now, not ever again. She could not just then account for the vehemence over her name. But it was Jay. Maybe the woman didn’t know. No, of course she knew, listen to her begging. It occurred to her, to Jay, that no one from the old family knew. She had discarded that other name and she had discarded them. With fucking extreme prejudice.

I … Wait.

She tried to remember what terrible thing had happened. why was she suddenly so mad? Why would she disown her own mother?

She said, I understand your concern. She didn’t, though, and she hated herself for not saying so. It was how she had always responded, agreeing so the woman would not attack.

She turned on the dining room light and sat down heavily in a table chair, phone held just off her ear so it wouldn’t burn her so much. Do I have your number? she asked. The question felt odd.

Of course you do. People never change their number in Mexico, her mother said. Honey, what is it, are you all right? Does that therapist have you on another drug?

I can’t talk right now.

Oh, Janice. I just wished you’d let me take care of you.

Like you always did? Jay thought, the anger now burning her ears. Still the overbearing mother.

Well, goodbye now, Jay said and cradled the phone, wanting to say something else to the woman, but afraid. She felt guilty; the woman always made her feel guilty. Pitying this person who so easily could provoke her. Nobody can make you do anything, make you feel any way. The book says so. Her therapist says so.

In the kitchen again, she set a kettle on the stove, stroked a match on the side of the old O’Keefe & Merritt stove as she always did and bumped her head on the overhead copper vent. She found tea bags in a porcelain container labeled Sugar, blue flowers painted on it and the three matching containers beside it. Cozy kitchen items acquired with her beloved paternal grandmother in mind.

The cat followed her steps, coming close to her ankle then flopping full weight a cat-step short of her foot. She surrendered a small sigh for the cat’s enduring flaw. Bones had damaged her brain in a fall from the pepper tree as a kitten and she could not walk the backyard fence without losing balance and taking a tumble. Jay would marvel watching Bone try to walk a straight line on the kitchen counter, inevitably having to finally jump to the floor. She imagined sobriety testing, Bones taking the trip to jail every time. But it wasn’t humorous.

She sat at the dining room table with her lemon-spiced tea and opened the phone book to the name Janice Parrish. It listed the number she remembered. Just under it was the name Joseph Parrish.

Him, she thought, feeling suddenly nauseous. She spilt tea onto the page, bleeding through both names.

She realized, too, that she was overwhelmed and very tired.

In the bathroom she searched the medicine cabinet for a Darvocet, digging through two rows of old and current prescription canisters. Finding the bottle she broke one of the tables in half, then tapped a Restoril capsule out of another bottle, getting them down with faucet water.

She studied her face in the mirror. Something wrong, but what? Someone once had said childlike describing her face. Her skin was still rich-colored, her eyes still clear and bright, her best asset. Where was the pain behind this false face coming from?

She heard a noise like the pinch of a door opening and wondered vaguely if she’d locked the front door behind her. She must have, she always locked her doors. No, not true, not when she stumbled in drunk and barely functional. Sometimes not even that.

She stepped into the hall, looked both ways, then into the dining room and peeked through the living room to the foyer. No sounds, no wind from an open door.

In the bathroom again, she shut the cabinet door and again stared at that face, its seriousness. Behind her the shower curtain quivered. She gasped and turned. Bones. The cat had slipped off the rim of the tub onto the Talavera floor, landing with a thud.

Poor baby. Jay laughed. It sounded awkward, forced.

Bones, I swear to God, you are one daffy cat.

She made the mistake of again looking into the mirror where, in a flash, the lighter face, the one laughing, had died.

Something else was there, a show from another time, something that drugs could not mask. The flash of his quivering hand, held ready to strike but grabbing her arm instead, welding itself there. Knotty, strong fingers. Then a splash of blood. Then someone’s contorted, painful-looking face. Hers. Back in the mirror.

Oh, God! she yelled. She tried to hold down the drugs she’d just swallowed, but failed.

Chapter 3

She didn’t heard the chimes or the rapping at the door; two Desyrel caps had left her essentially, blissfully comatose.

But the cat heard both sounds and panicked, bolting in and out of doorways and off furniture. In the bedroom the afflicted feline leaped toward the bed but missed and knocked the lamp off the nightstand. The light bulb, which had been left on, exploded. That explosion was the thing that finally roused her.

Hearing what sounded like a construction hammer in the other room, Jay stumbled out of bed. Someone then hollered, angry-sounding voice, saying, If you’re in there, open the door. This is the police. Police, Miss Parrish. Are you there?

She could tell it was morning, maybe as late as eight because of the brightness of the light filtering through the cracked blinds. Sunny out, no marine clouding. She did not see the cat, though she heard its hollow wailing from somewhere in another room. Bones! Hush, easy. The cat’s bellow instantly dwindled to a mew and it slinked in shame through the door.

Jay’s head pounded at the temples, full of wet sand. She labored in her nightclothes, her movements heavy. Struggling to the front door, she tried bringing her eyes into full focus. A vague gold shield flashed in the door’s inner window. She opened and let two six-foot men pass into her house. Only half dressed, she was too foggy to have any fear.

The two men wore dull-colored clothes and their faces were serious. The clock on the upright read 8:38.

What’s this about? Jay asked, as if fully awake.

The bulkier man spoke. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Millard and the other man, younger, as Detective Pedroza.

I’m sorry if we woke you, but we have a few questions concerning your activities last night. I’m afraid it won’t wait. The detective’s grave look betrayed his calm tone. Calm now that they were inside and had her attention.

Jay collapsed onto the couch. Both men moved to catch her but both were slow. Miss Parrish, can you hear me? the older one, Millard, asked.

Light entered behind her fluttering eyelids. She exhaled slowly, feeling light-headed, dizzy, sweaty, nauseous. Huh? What?

Millard knelt next to her, both knees popping with the effort. You must have fainted. You want some water?

Jay managed opening her eyes to a squint. No, I just need sleep … I’m—I’m just very tired.

Are you taking medications?

His face was near hers, him kneeling.

For my nerves, mostly. She studied him, curiously, as she would a prospective homebuyer, trying to identify him. Her eyes clearing some.

She stared at the webbed scar under his left eye, maybe from a car crash or some terrible street fight. The milk-colored scar might have escaped her notice on a white man. Oddly, the jagged flaw seemed to add humility to his broad face, embodying the kind of ingenuousness that could easily win confidence. And probably confessions, she thought, coming around to her skepticism. Be careful. Whatever he was after couldn’t be good.

The other detective, Pedroza, stood by the fireplace, stone faced, one hand in front of his crotch like he wanted to scratch or to protect himself. He seemed to be regarding the room for insight into the person who lived here. Noticing, Jay looked around the room herself. It was a sparse, clean-smelling room with leather and wicker furniture and thick-slatted wooden blinds, at the moment sealing out the daylight. No carpet or drapes, no fabrics in the room other than couch pillows, a small rug at the entrance. A room that didn’t tolerate allergens. There were no people pictures on the walls or flat surfaces, only the dull-colored painting of a strange symmetrical landscape. The room felt impersonal.

Millard said, If you would like to change into some clothes, make some coffee or something, go ahead. We can wait.

I’ll change if you don’t mind.

She got into a pair of loose khaki slacks, put on a bra and an orange linen shirt and over that a dark gray San Diego Zoological Society sweater, pushing the sleeves above her elbows. She didn’t feel dizzy lacing her running shoes. Then she took to the bathroom and bound her hair tight. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking but she felt okay.

Millard sat on the arm of the couch, one leg crossing the other at the ankle. He rubbed his face with both hands as though trying to wipe away the dirtiness of his business. Then he started, first wanting to know where she was last night roughly between six and eleven o’clock. She told him what she remembered. She told the truth as she remembered it, omitting the veiled hour or so before the nightclub.

And what time was that, that you arrived at your father’s place? Pedroza said from the hearth, an elbow propped against the mantle inches from a Mexican plate with the bas-relief gecko poised to lunged. The handmade Dolores Hidalgo clay plate was a Christmas gift from Jay’s mother. Why it was special to her, she couldn’t explain.

About seven-thirty or maybe eight. We had planned to meet.

Why were you meeting?

Is it really necessary for you to know that?

Both detectives stiffened.

Alright, it was the second time I had been to see him, she said. The first visit didn’t work out. I—There were personal things we needed to talk about. I needed to talk about.

This seemed to interest both men. Millard leaned forward.

How long were you there? he said, surprising Jay by not asking the obvious.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, which only spread the pain behind her eyes. It wasn’t long. I don’t remember exactly.

She saw they weren’t satisfied. We got into an argument and I left, okay? I wasn’t thinking about the time … We weren’t getting along. Is that what you want to hear?

That’s the ‘personal’ stuff? You two not getting along? said Pedroza, his tone slipping into derision. He still had his arm on the mantel, the elbow inching closer to the plate.

It was very personal between us and I’d rather not talk about it, Jay said. Would you please take your arm off the mantle.

Pedroza jerked his elbow as if a wasp had stung him. He looked at the mantle.

Millard said, I’m sorry, but we have to ask you to talk about it. He sounded regretful. Tell us about the argument. Did it get physical?

What’s happened to him? Jay said, her voice now quivering. Is he...he’s dead, isn’t he? What kind of detectives are you?

Millard lowered his face as though to silently confirm it. Please, just try to answer our questions. Did your father get physical with you, a push, a slap?

Why would you say ‘weren’t’? Pedroza said. Why use the past tense?

Jay tried to grin and frown at the same time. He’d thrown her a double-binding question. How could she even begin to explain? She sighed, looked at the cold bare floor.

When...when I was a child, my father … She averted looking at him. Do you know what I’m saying? … I only started remembering what happened to me recently, after I went into therapy. I had gone to confront him. It was the second time and he did the same thing again—He refused to accept responsibility—

She stopped. She felt herself getting worked up. She knew they wouldn’t understand.

Millard stood. Miss Parrish, can anyone corroborate you being at your father’s house? Was anyone else there?

What? No. I was there to confront him. I wouldn’t take anyone along for that.

Suddenly her eyes welled. Her father’s fragile visage came