Rough Trade

he was out. He’d served something like eleven months and had been released for good behavior or whatever other administrative excuse they use to make room for the influx of fresh felons that keeps pumping through the criminal justice system. His release was a one-day story, covered by the networks and collectively forgotten. The cameras showed Fredericks emerging from the prison downstate, sporting a buff, prison-yard physique and announcing that he was readier than ever to go back and play in the NFL.
    Who knows, perhaps he would have. There were already coaches making noises that Fredericks had paid his debt to society. Besides, isn’t sports all about second chances? But no one counted on Amber’s mother.
    Enraged at the thought of her daughter’s assailant once again playing before a crowd of adoring fans, and committed to preventing what had been done to her daughter from happening to anyone else, Mrs. Cunningham began taking her daughter on the tabloid news shows. After Dateline ran the story contrasting Fredericks, fit and transparently unrepentant, to Amber, drooling and disfigured in her wheelchair, all talk of Fredericks returning to the NFL evaporated.
    I thought about the cascade of tragedy that had swept through the Rendells and threatened to destroy them. I also remembered the question I’d asked myself earlier in connection with Harald Feiss. What happens when you take away what matters most to a man? What happens is you make him dangerous.
     
    I went off in search of Chrissy and found her in the family lounge adjacent to the ICU. She was sitting in one of the institutional stacking chairs facing Detectives Eiben and Zellmer. Her posture could be best described as finishing-school upright—ankles crossed, hands folded demurely in her lap. On her face was the same ice-queen look that was so familiar from my mother. She was so still, she might have been sitting for a portrait, one titled I'm furious and I think you’re lower than dirt.
    “And when was the last time you saw your husband, Mrs. Rendell?” inquired Detective Eiben, loosening his tie and making himself comfortable, no stranger to this part of the hospital.
    “I was just with him when you arrived.”
    “No, I meant to speak to.”
    “Yesterday, we spoke briefly on the phone.”
    “Why only briefly?”
    “Because he was in Los Angeles on business and he was leaving for a meeting.”
    “And how did he sound to you?”
    “I’m sure he sounded like a man whose father had died recently,” I interjected. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the point of this line of questioning. What does Jeffrey Rendell’s state of mind have to do with anything? It certainly doesn’t sound as though he was attempting suicide.”
    “This is not an adversarial proceeding,” Detective Zell-mer assured me. “We just throw out questions and hope that some of the answers lead somewhere.”
    Personally I hoped that homicide investigations were a bit less random than that, but I didn’t say anything. I think under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have felt so snippy, but I was tired and feeling emotionally beaten up, and it wasn’t even my husband who was lying in the next room hooked to enough equipment to launch the space shuttle. I was desperate to protect Chrissy. I’d promised her that everything would be all right and look where we were sitting.
    “Did your husband mention anything about returning to Milwaukee today?”
    “No,” replied Chrissy. “When the officers came to the door this afternoon to tell us what had happened, I was so surprised. I had no idea.”
    “Any idea what he was doing at his father’s house?”
    “Absolutely none.”
    “Do you think it could have had anything to do with your decision to flee Milwaukee?”
    “Oh come on,” I countered, “she didn’t flee. She left. And her husband knew exactly where she was.”
    “And you planned to remain with Ms. Millholland in Lake Forest the rest of the day.”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t really have a plan; originally I hadn’t even planned to leave Milwaukee. I just... I mean... after what happened I couldn’t stay in my house anymore.”
    “I’m surprised you didn’t ask Jack McWhorter to come and stay with you. After all, the two of you are close. Wouldn’t it have made you feel more secure to have a man in the house?”
    “Jack is in L. A. with my husband.”
    “No he’s not. We just spoke with him at the stadium. He flew back to Milwaukee late