You Can Go Home Now by Michael Elias

Author:Michael Elias [Elias, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062954169
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

In the basement room of the shelter, I imagine life upstairs resembling a college sorority: a comfortable house, a flag with Greek letters unfurled from its second-story balcony, home to women living together, dedicated to sisterhood, companionship, and study groups. Phyllis is the housemother with an apartment on the ground floor: a sitting room office and a small bedroom.

“My door is always open,” she tells me.

The women in this sorority don’t go to classes, football games, have sex, drink alcohol, and smoke weed at parties with boys becoming men. Here in the shelter are women who, in different ways, have experienced men as people who abuse, beat, and sometimes try to kill them. In this sorority, I sleep in the basement. I wake up, climb the stairs, and emerge into another life: I have coffee with the women who have just seen their children off to school, or are assembling the ones who are being homeschooled because their lives are at risk from homicidal fathers or vulnerable to kidnapping by less-than-homicidal fathers. I learn that daddy and husband are often not terms of endearment. In this ordered and tremulous environment, we go over kitchen and housekeeping duties. There are schedules and timetables posted for whose turn it is to buy food, cook, or clean.

On some mornings, I help Sofia teach. Frankie allows me to correct his math problems but refuses to engage in any conversation. Then I leave, having memorized the present code, making sure to go out the side door across the yard, into the adjacent house, into Myra’s house, and out her front door. I walk to my car, unfollowed and safe, drive to police headquarters, and resume my work as a homicide detective. Linda Fuentes and I maintain a correct professional relationship. The other detectives are indifferent to my fading bruises; a gym fight between cops is not a big deal. Fuentes and I are just two of the boys. And no one, so far, no one seems to care about my erratic coming and going. If anyone wants any further information, I’ll tell them to ask Lieutenant Hagen. No one does. I spend the morning dropping off hit-and-run victim Daniel Huang’s clothes to Libby Murphy at the NYPD Crime Lab in Jamaica. I ask her to search for paint fragments in the fibers. Libby promises me results, possibly that afternoon. She is outraged about the son of a bitch who not only hit Daniel, but robbed him, too. On my return to HQ, I find another three cases on my desk in which the victims obtained restraining orders from their abusers. Two were married, one had a boyfriend, and none of them were anywhere near a women’s shelter when they were killed. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons they were easy to kill. Lunch is a takeout pho bowl from Tuk Tuk, a Vietnamese cafe. At four o’clock, Libby Murphy calls.

“I found paint fragments on Daniel’s hoodie.”

“Make and model?”

“White Toyota—a delivery van, I’d say.

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