11. If a Cop Asks How Fast You Were Going You’re Not Legally Obligated to Reply
IF A COP ASKS HOW FAST YOU WERE GOING YOU’RE NOT LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO REPLY
I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning in my own bed, inexplicably, still wearing the jeans that had been plastered to my legs.
I changed out of them quickly, hoping my mother wouldn’t barge in and ask me to explain the smell of booze and decomposition.
I’d forgotten to buy more coffee, to my own detriment.
My head was pounding; despite Emmanuelle’s life-affirming smoothies, the hangover was severe and my skin looked like shit.
I peered groggily out the window of my bedroom—my car was in the carport, so apparently I’d driven home, which I never would have done, or didn’t think I would have.
Was it possible to be so drunk you could forget a basic tenet of your own survival?
Obviously I was alive, though, so there was that.
I also had a thousand texts from Teddy, or so it seemed when I picked up my phone.
anya, where are you? thought you’d be done by now
everything ok?
i don’t get it, i was doing you a favor
take it you’re not coming. a text would have been nice.
i’m really disappointed in you anya. thought we had something here.
My eyes blurred as I read, or rather, skimmed listlessly.
These were the exact emotions I didn’t want to have to babysit.
I understood the impulse to complain—it had certainly not been my finest hour—but things occasionally came up, as per the nature of human existence.
We were barely even dating. What was he going to be like when I was on set, or if I ever had to leave and film on location?
If my life choices bothered him, he and my mother could start a club.
teddy im sl slrry I didn’t have my phoen its a long st;lry
Why was autocorrect always off duty when my affliction was most severe? I shut my eyes through a riotous wave of nausea and paused, catching the sound of voices from the living room.
Odd. They were men’s voices. Not a common register in my mother’s and my domain, unless you counted my mother’s favorite network procedurals (anything involving a detective still tormented by The War was usually her entertainment of choice).
It wasn’t Tito Joss or any of the older tenants, either—obviously, since they weren’t speaking Tagalog.
I fixed my errors and sent another, hopefully final text to Teddy. i’ll make it up to you xx
I typed the kisses only after much wrestling with myself, determining eventually that it was what someone might do if they were genuinely sorry—or, falling short of that, what someone who was invested in a relationship to any degree of sincerity might do, which I might very well be if any of this came to involve his mother.
I cycled through the characters I’d been lately and settled on something from the Christian Girl Autumn collection, which didn’t sit well with my stomach.
I was swallowing another violent rush of bile just as I heard a knock on my bedroom door.
I jumped, checking for pants as if I hadn’t just stumbled my way into a pair of track shorts five minutes earlier. My head throbbed again—vindictive, cruel, redundant.
“Yes?”
“Hija. The police are here.”
“Okay.” No, not okay. I should have been more surprised, but my brain was running a loop of self-sabotaging conspiracy, too Catholic to really expect to get away with sin. I gave up on what an innocent person would do and simply chose hospitable politeness. “I’m coming.”
I took a deep breath and yanked open my door. There they were, as advertised. Two LAPD uniformed officers in my abruptly overcrowded living room.
I glanced between the two officers, both ambiguously middle-aged, one taller and white, the other sturdier and Asian. My brain felt like it was being pelted with hammers.
“Hello,” I managed, profoundly lacking a sense of knowing my lines.
I became aware of how ungodly hot it was in our apartment, even with all the windows open and the geriatric fan blaring at its top speed, like a drone of angry wasps.
Despite this, my nipples were showing through my tank top.
I wished I’d brushed my teeth. They felt like they were covered in a thin gauze, with that weird, mummified aftertaste.
“Do you know this woman?” The nearest cop, the Asian one, held out a picture of someone. A woman, that much was true.
“Um.” I frowned blearily at the image, feeling like this was part of a test I was failing. “I don’t think so. Maybe?”
The white cop arched a brow. “You think so, maybe?”
Oh, how I longed for strange men to mock me in my own home. My head pounded again, a wave of nausea coursing through me. I tried again to think of an appropriate role but could only see myself as an underpaid extra, insignificant to the narrative, probably left on the cutting room floor.
“I don’t think I know her,” I qualified through the obstruction of cotton-mouthed thick-brain, “but I don’t know, she looks like a lot of people.
” A terrible thing to say—if anyone said that about me I’d simply expire on the spot.
What was the point of anything if people could say things like that about you without consequences?
But I’d already spent too long trying to craft a decent response and come up empty-handed.
“Was she a tenant here or something?” I asked, handing the picture back to them.
“You’ve attended a few parties at the de Witt residence recently,” the other cop said without answering, or maybe that was the answer. “Is that correct?”
“Oh. Um, yes. I work there.” Across the room, I could feel my mother’s eyes boring into me. Oh, so you can’t spend five minutes with your mother because you’re at a party doing god knows what?
The cops were taking notes, which somehow made it worse. “You work there? In what capacity?”
“I, um.” Through a fog of hesitation I managed to recall that I’d signed an NDA. Was I allowed to mention Jude? “I’m Emmanuelle de Witt’s personal assistant.” She would be fine with that little smudge of the truth, I felt. It wasn’t untrue in any meaningful way. “William de Witt’s sister.”
“Ah.” The officers exchanged a glance. I worried briefly that they were telepathic, aware of the precise distance between the truth and what I’d said aloud.
Unsolicited, inexplicably, I heard Emmanuelle’s voice in my ear. I could kill a man in this room and get away with it—
“Sorry,” I said, ignoring my impulses for fantasy. “I don’t … are you saying this person was at the party last night?”
The officer pulled out a printed copy of the picture Teddy had taken of me two nights ago, the night I’d climbed onto the villa’s roof.
“Does she look familiar now?” he asked.
“Oh. Oh.” The cop’s thumb was placed pointedly beside the woman who stood in the background.
The one with the crescent moon tattoo. Briefly, the image of her stumbling at the party last night repopulated in my brain.
The picture they’d shown me made her look so much younger.
Without the shroud of nightlife glamour, I’d had no idea who she was.
My mother, observing all this, was positively smoldering with unspoken rage. The police in our building! You realize what the tenants will say! But of course that doesn’t concern you, you never think about anyone but yourse—
“You know her now?” The white cop arched a brow.
“No, not really. I mean, I don’t know her,” I corrected myself. “I saw her that night, yeah. But I wasn’t introduced to her and we didn’t interact. I was—”
The first time I was locked in a room by a monster. I spent the night talking him down from the roof. Then I was …
It seemed unwise to mention that I couldn’t recall all the events of the previous night.
“I really wasn’t there for the party,” I explained.
“I couldn’t have told you who she was there to see.
” Then I allowed, from a place I told myself wasn’t envy, “I only noticed her because she was talking to William de Witt. You know, the actor?” I added unnecessarily.
Something about cops being in my living room or my ungodly hangover had affected my usual cognitive processes. “Why, did something happen to her?”
The cops exchanged a glance.
“She was found dead this morning,” the first one said. “And her body was … arranged.”
Mom shifted abruptly then. “What do you mean arranged?”
When my mother was stressed, as she currently was, her accent was thicker. I’d never been taught Tagalog specifically so that particular weakness would never befall me, according to her. The white cop gave her a dispassionate glance as if to say, pipe down.
“It’s quite gruesome. I wouldn’t show you if not for—” The Asian cop hesitated, glancing at my mother and the white cop before continuing, “If not for the hopes that you might … recognize something. Some detail that might help us figure out where she went after the party.”
How could I know that answer when I barely knew where I’d gone after the party? Again, I felt an unsteadying surge of stomach acid.
“Sure.” Compliance, I thought. The only real guarantee of safety—if there could even be a guarantee of safety—was compliance. “I’ll take a look, if you think it’ll help.”
I was grateful it was the Asian cop, and that he took such care to ensure my mom didn’t see what he was showing me. “Does any of this feel meaningful to you?” he asked me.
He placed the picture in my hands, and then I recognized her by what was left of her outfit. By those brief recollections I had of her stumbling through the snowdrift of ash that blew in on the wind.
The taste of dirt on my tongue, the eyes that seemed to linger in my memory, the omnipresence of a monster in my midst. There’s a devil on your back.
Her arm was at such a strange, contorted angle that I could see the crescent moon tattoo. Everything else was hard to take in.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to the police officers, and ran for the bathroom.
Then I threw up so hard I saw stars.