Night passage

“Sure,” Jesse said. “I’ll let you know if we need you.”

Chapter 71

Jesse sat with Cissy Hathaway in her kitchen, looking out at the backyard now flowerless, the grass yellow in the weak sunlight. He handed her the Polaroid.

“This came today in the mail addressed to Reverend Cotter,” Jesse said.

Cissy took the picture and stared at it. As she looked at the picture she began to blush. Jesse was still. Cissy kept her eyes fixed on the picture, her face expressionless except for the bright flush that made her look feverish. She didn’t say anything, and Jesse didn’t say anything, and the silence grew stifling the longer it went on.

Finally Jesse said, “As far as I can see, there’s no crime here. You can tell me to buzz off, if you want to. But I thought you should know.”

Cissy put the picture facedown on the kitchen table and stared at the blank back of it. Jesse waited. Cissy got up from the table suddenly and walked to the counter. She got a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and stood with her back to him looking out the window over the sink at her driveway and the neighbor’s yard beyond it. She took a deep inhale and let the smoke dribble out. Jesse was silent.

“Jo Jo,” she said with her back still to him. “Jo Jo Genest took that picture. He has others.”

“Did he coerce you?” Jesse said.

“No.”

“Do you know why he sent the picture to your minister?”

Cissy took another big inhale and let the smoke out, still with her back to Jesse. She seemed to be memorizing every detail of the neighbor’s lawn. Jesse was quiet. It was going to come, he knew that. All he needed to do was wait.

“Yes,” Cissy said. “I know.”

“Can you tell me?” Jesse said.

Cissy took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the sink, turned on the water, flicked the disposal switch, and watched the butt disappear. Then she shut off the disposal, turned off the water, and turned from the sink. The high color had left her face. Her eyes seemed larger than Jesse remembered.

“I am going to have to tell you things that mortify me,” she said. “I will. But you have to promise not to be judgmental.”

“I won’t be judgmental, Cissy.”

“No, I think you won’t. It’s why I think I can tell you.”

Jesse nodded gently and waited. Cissy stood at the sink and folded her arms.

“You have to help me, Jesse,” she said. “You have to help me say these things.”

Jesse stood and walked over to the sink and put one arm around Cissy’s shoulders. She stiffened but she didn’t move.

“I was a cop,” Jesse said, “in the second-largest city in the country. I have heard stuff you can’t even imagine. I have seen stuff you don’t even know exists.”

She nodded slowly, her arms still folded, his arm still around her shoulder.

“You’re human, Cissy. Humans do things that they’re ashamed of. They get in trouble. They need help. I don’t want to get too dramatic here, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to help you when you get in trouble.”

Cissy nodded again. Then they were both quiet, Cissy hugging herself, Jesse’s arm around her shoulder.

“I have been married to Hasty for twenty-seven years,” Cissy said softly. “I don’t know if I love him, sometimes I don’t even know if I like him, but we’ve been together so long.”

She fumbled another cigarette out of the package and lit it.

“I think Hasty likes sex. I know I do. But somehow we don’t seem to like it with each other. When we have sex it’s . . . technically correct, I guess. But it is not much else and we don’t have it very often. I feel very stiff and cold and awkward having sex with Hasty.”

She smoked for a time, watching the exhaled smoke drift toward the ceiling.

“The longer we have been together, the odder Hasty has become. He was an important young man from a good family when I first met him. All this business with Freedom’s Horsemen . . .”

She shook her head.

“It occupies him more and more every year. I needed sex. And, I guess there is something very wrong with me, some of the kind of sex I needed.”

“No reason, right now, to decide if there’s something wrong with what you needed,” Jesse said.

“I know. I tell myself that. I took a series of lovers. Some of them were nice normal men who were happy to do nice normal things with me.”

She took in some smoke and blew it out.

“I actually met Jo Jo through Hasty. He came to the house one day. He and Hasty talked business in the den and I brought them some beer. The way Jo Jo looked at me. It was like he knew. I could feel his look go right through my clothes. Right through everything I pretended to be. I knew he saw me. And I let him know I knew.”

She was still standing stiffly, but she had allowed her head to rest lightly against Jesse’s shoulder.

“He wasn’t the first man, but he was the worst one,” Cissy said. “And the worse he was, the worse I was.”

She stopped talking and seemed to be thinking about her badness.

“The pictures?” Jesse said.

“They were my idea. I . . . liked being that way and I liked to see myself that way.”

“There are more pictures?”

“Many.”

“And he has them?”

“Yes.”

“Probably been better,” Jesse said, “if you kept them.”

“Maybe I half wanted him to tell,” she said.

“Maybe.”

She half turned and dropped her cigarette in the sink and repeated the process of washing it down the disposal. Then she settled back against Jesse’s shoulder.

“So why did he go public now?” Jesse said.

“I think he’s mad at Hasty,” she said.

“About what?”

“They had some kind of a business deal that went badly. Hasty blamed Jo Jo.”

“What kind of business deal?”

“I don’t know.”

Cissy turned in against Jesse and put her face into his chest. It was hard to hear her voice, muffled as it was against him. He could feel her trembling and he patted her shoulder a little. Over her shoulder he looked at his watch. Whatever was coming was coming slow. Finally she spoke again, her voice muffled against his chest.

“Jo Jo killed Tammy Portugal.”

There, Jesse thought. Cissy kept her face buried in his jacket. She was hanging on to him as if she might blow away if she let go.

“He used to tell me how he did it.”

“How he killed Tammy?”

“Yes.”

She began to sob against him. Big paroxysmal sobs, her body heaving. She said something he couldn’t understand.

“What did you say?”

She shook her head.

“No, you’ve come this far,” Jesse said, “and we’re still okay. You can say it. I can hear it.”

“I liked hearing about it,” she said, gasping the words out between sobs. “And he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone because then I’d have to tell how I knew.”

Jesse was silent for a moment, patting her shoulder gently. He had hold, finally, of the grotesque animal he’d been hunting. And he would have to pull it, snarling and vicious, slowly out of its hole. He didn’t know yet how big an animal it was going to be.

“I’m going to have to ask you to testify,” Jesse said.

She nodded her head against him, her body shaking. He held her. The sobbing went on for a long time. He patted her gently. He could hear the occasional car go ordinarily by on Main Street. Somewhere he could hear a dog bark.

“You were brave to tell me,” Jesse said.

She nodded against him.

“I had to tell you,” she said. “I couldn’t have those pictures all over town.”

“The next brave thing you are going to have to do is get psychiatric help. Good help. An honest-to-God shrink.”

“I’m sick,” she said into his chest, “I know I am.”

“You can get well,” Jesse said. “You know a shrink?”

She shook her head.

“Your family doctor can refer you,” Jesse said. “This is too hard to do alone. You need to save yourself.”