She cocked her head and I heard the Life Saver rattle against a back tooth. “Couldn’t come by the station, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I thought I’d speed things up.”
She placed her hands in the pockets of her suit jacket, leaned back on her heels. “Don’t like being in a police station since you brought down a cop, that it, Mr. Kenzie?”
“The cells do seem that much closer.”
“Uh-huh.” She stepped back as Larry and two other forensics cops walked between us.
“Detective,” I said, “I’m real sorry an investigation of mine led to the arrest of a fellow-”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Joella Thomas waved a long hand in front of my face. “Don’t care about him, Mr. Kenzie. He was old school, old boy network.” She turned toward the curb. “I look old school to you?”
“Anything but.”
Joella Thomas was a slim six feet tall. She wore an olive double-breasted suit over a black T-shirt. Her gold shield hung from black nylon cord around her neck and matched the gold of the three hoop earrings in her left earlobe. The right lobe was as bare and smooth as her shaven head.
As we stood on the sidewalk, the deepening heat and morning dew rose off the pavement in a fine mist. It was early Sunday morning and the yuppies’ Krups coffeemakers were probably just beginning to percolate, the dog walkers just arriving at the doors.
Joella stripped off a twist of foil on her roll of Life Savers and removed one. “Mint?”
She extended the roll and I took one.
“Thanks.”
She placed the roll back in the pocket of her suit jacket. She looked back in the alley, then up at the roof.
I followed her gaze. “Jumper?”
She shook her head. “Faller. Went on the roof to shoot up during a party. Sat on the edge, spiked, and looked up at the stars.” She pantomimed someone leaning too far back. “Must have seen a comet.”
“Ouch,” I said.
Joella Thomas tore off a piece of her scone and dipped it in her oversize mug of tea before sliding it onto her tongue. “So you want to know about Karen Nichols.”
“Yup.”
She chewed, then swallowed a sip of tea. “You worried she was pushed?”
“Was she?”
“Nope.” She sat back in her chair, watched an old man toss small pieces of bread to some pigeons outside. The old man’s face was pinched and small and his nose was hooked so that he looked a lot like the birds he fed. We were in Jorge’s Cafe de Jose, a block from the crime scene. Jorge’s served nine different types of scones, a variety of fifteen muffins, squares of tofu, and seemed to have cornered the market on bran.
Joella Thomas said, “It was suicide.” She shrugged. “It was clean-death by gravity. No signs of struggle, no scuff marks from other shoes anywhere near the place she jumped from. Hell, it doesn’t get any cleaner.”
“And her suicide made sense?”
“In what way?”
“She’d been melancholy over the boyfriend’s accident, et cetera?”
“One assumes.”
“And that would be enough?”
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at.” She nodded, then shook her head. “Look, suicides? They rarely make sense. Tell you something else, most people who do it don’t leave a note. Maybe ten percent. The rest, they just off themselves, leave everyone wondering.”
“There must be a common thread or two.”
“Between victims?” Another sip of tea, another shake of the head. “All of them, obviously, are depressed. But who isn’t? Do you wake up every day thinking, Wow, it certainly is just super to be alive?”
I chuckled and shook my head.
“Didn’t think so. Neither do I. How about your past?”
“Huh?”
“Your past.” She waved a spoon in my direction, then stirred her tea. “You completely settled with everything that’s ever happened to you in your past, or are there some things-things you don’t talk about-that bug you, make you wince when you think about them twenty years later?”
I considered the question. Once, when I was very young-six or seven-and I’d just taken several swats of my father’s belt, I walked into the bedroom I shared with my sister, saw her kneeling by her dolls, and punched her in the back of the head as hard as I could. The look on her face-shock, fear, but also a sudden weary resignation-was a look that drove itself into my brain like a nail. Even now, more than twenty-five years later, her nine-year-old face jumped out at me in a Back Bay coffee shop and I felt a wave of shame so total it threatened to crumple me in its clenched fist.
And that was just one memory. The list was long, accrued over a lifetime of mistakes and bad judgment and impulse.
“I can see it in your face,” Joella Thomas said. “You got pieces of your past you’ll never be reconciled with.”
“You?”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling fan above us, exhaled loudly. “Oh, yeah,” she said again. “The thing is, we all do. We all carry our past and we all mess up our present and we all have days we don’t see much point struggling on toward our future. Suicides are just people who commit. They say, ‘More of this? The hell with that. Time to get off the bus.’ And most times you never even know what straw it was that broke their back. I’ve seen some that, I mean, seemed to make no sense. A young mother in Brighton last year? All accounts, loved her husband, her kids, her dog. Had a great job. Great relationship with her parents. No money worries. So, all right, she’s the bridesmaid in her best friend’s wedding. After the wedding, she goes home, hangs herself in the bathroom, still wearing that ugly chiffon dress. Now, was it something about the wedding that got to her? Was she secretly in love with the groom? Or maybe the bride? Or did she remember her own wedding and all the hopes she’d had, and while watching her friends exchange vows, she was forced to face how cold and unlike her fantasy her own marriage was? Or did she suddenly just get tired of living this long-ass life?” Joella gave me a slow roll of her shoulders. “I don’t know. No one does. I can tell you that not one person who knew her-not one-saw it coming.”
My coffee had cooled, but I took a sip anyway.
“Mr. Kenzie,” Joella Thomas said, “Karen Nichols killed herself. That’s not debatable. You waste your time looking for why-what good’s that going to do?”