Left for Garbage

little plane until it landed on the floor amongst the other scattered papers. Salvatore faced her. “I could go into a lot of bullshit on this, Denise, but the bottom line is that we don’t have anything and …” Denise leaned forward angrily but Salvatore raised his hand to silence her. “And it doesn’t matter how badly you want to blame me for it, or your parents, or the world in general, because what it all comes down to now is this: What the police said to you way back when at Universal, when you led them on your first wild goose chase, is true. Everything you say is a lie. The defense has filed a motion to include dozens of your partying shots in the days after Deeley disappeared. The cadaver dogs hit your trunk, the media is against you, the public is against you, and the only person left on planet earth who believes in Manny the nanny is your mother, and most people think she’s delusional.”
    Salvatore leaned forward toward Denise and held out his hands to her. Protectively, she drew hers back and wrapped her arms around herself.
    Salvatore nodded and pulled his hands back. “Okay, I didn’t come here to frighten you. I came here because you and I have reached the end of Liars’ Lane, Denise. I have urged you to accept the plea bargains as they came in, but I’ll admit I didn’t do so very strongly, and I’ll go first here. I lied to you when I said we could get an acquittal. The State has a strong case, and barring a miracle, I think at this point the best we can hope for is Murder Two, and you’ll probably draw down forty-to-life. I don’t have a single idea what happened to Deeley. You’ve let me chase a ghost for years and I let you run me because of the attention. Well, I’ve fucked up, Denise, and there will be plenty of people out there …” Salvatore made a gesture to indicate the world beyond the increasingly small room they sat in, “… to call me a clown, and incompetent, and to say I never should have gotten into this in the first place. But I’ll live it down in time. A person can live down anything, Denise. But you’ll be in prison and you’ll be old before you ever see the light of day outside of bars again. So if you’ve got anything to tell me, now’s a good time for it.”
    Denise didn’t answer him. She stood up and called for the guard.
    Salvatore said her name and then fell silent and watched as she was led out of the room.
    Back in her cell, Denise curled up on her bunk and moaned in fear.
    She told … she told on me … I always knew she wanted to but she couldn’t talk yet. Now she’s dead and it looks like she has told, after all .
    The child who had stolen her girlhood was now trying to take her life; it wasn’t fair, not fair , not fair.
    Denise’s terror began to ebb and was replaced by anger. This wasn’t going to happen . She was going to have more than thirty lousy days of freedom.
    I’m only twenty-five , she thought resentfully. Deeley has taken six years of my life, and that is enough, and this is not going to happen. Think, think , she berated herself, think of a story, a good story, one Salvatore can tell, and then the trial would be like before, something hard to get through on my way to her real life .
    Denise sat up, leaned back against the cold wall of her cell, and concentrated.
    Within a few minutes she began to smile. Alice, good old go-ask-Alice, as she and the other girls had called the junkie short-time loser who had been on her cell block at the Orange jail. Alice had been one of those women who Denise could tell was going to be in and out of lockup for one thing or another for the rest of her life. Well, there were no winners in jail, she thought, present company excepted. Back when Alice had been on the block, Denise hadn’t been bored and miserable, like she was now.
    She’d had her friend Ruby, TV, computer access and a couple of guards who were wrapped around her finger. So, she hadn’t listened to Alice’s stupid stories on purpose, but there had been no way to avoid overhearing them.
    Alice was obviously jonesing for whatever her drug of choice had been, and at night, since she couldn’t sleep, she’d engage in conversation with the other short-timers on the block.
    Denise had been forced to listen to Alice’s sob-story about how her little boy had drowned in her parents’ pool a couple Christmas’s earlier and been found by Alice’s angry father. The kid’s grandfather had called Alice every name in the book