Libby Day
NOW
The stretch of I-70 between Kansas City and St. Louis was hours and hours of pure ugly driving. Flat, dead-yellow, and littered with billboards: a fetus curled up like a kitten (Abortion Stops a Beating Heart); a living room turned red from the glare of ambulance lights (Take Care Crime-Scene Cleanup Specialists); a remarkably plain woman giving fuck-me eyes to passing motorists (Hot Jimmy’s Gentlemen’s Club). The billboards ominously advising love of Jesus were in direct proportion to those advertising porn liquidators, and the signs for local restaurants consistently misused quotation marks: Herb’s Highway Diner—The “Best” Meal in Town; Jolene’s Rib House—Come in for Our “Delicious” Baby Back Ribs.
Lyle was in the passenger seat. He’d debated the pros and cons of joining me (maybe I would have more rapport with Krissi alone, us both being women; on the other hand, he did know this part of the case better; but then again, he may get too excited, ask her too many questions, and then blow it, he sometimes got ahead of himself, if he had one flaw it was that he sometimes got ahead of himself; then again, $500 was a lot of money and he felt somewhat entitled, no offense, to come along). Finally I’d snapped into the phone that I’d swing by Sarah’s Pub in thirty minutes, and if he was out front, he could come. Click. Now he was fussing next to me, flicking the door lock up and down, fiddling with the radio, reading each sign out loud, like he was trying to reassure himself of something. We drove past a fireworks warehouse the size of a cathedral, and at least three bundles of fatality markers: small white crosses and plastic flowers gathering dust on the side of the road. Gas stations made themselves known with signs skinnier and taller than the wilting weather vanes of nearby farms.
On one ridge was a billboard with a familiar face: Lisette Stephens, with that joyful grin, a phone number below for information on her disappearance. I wondered how long til they took it down, drained of hope or money.
“Oh God, her,” Lyle said, as we passed Lisette. I bristled, but my feelings were similar. After a while it was almost rude to ask you to worry about someone who was clearly dead. Unless it was my family.
“So Lyle, can I ask you, what is it that makes you so obsessed with the … this case?” As I said it, the sky got just dark enough to switch the highway lights on, and all in a row, into the horizon, they blinked white, like my question had intrigued them.
Lyle was staring at his leg, listening sideways like he usually did. He had a habit of pushing one ear toward whoever was speaking, and then he’d wait a few seconds, like he was translating whatever was said into another language.
“It’s just a classic whodunit. There are a lot of viable theories, so it’s interesting to talk about,” he said, still not looking at me. “And there’s you. And Krissi. Children who … caused something. I’m interested in that.”
“Children who caused something?”
“Something to happen, something that got bigger than they were, something that had unintentionally major consequences. Ripples. That interests me.”
“Why?”
He paused. “Just does.”
We were the two unlikeliest people to charm information out of someone. Stunted human beings who got awkward every time we tried to express ourselves. I didn’t really care if we got much from Krissi, though, as the more I thought about Lyle’s theory, the more it seemed like bunk.
After another forty minutes of driving, the strip clubs started showing up: dismal, crouched blocks of cement, most without any real name, just neon signs shouting Live Girls! Live Girls! Which I guess is a better selling point than Dead Girls. I imagined Krissi Cates pulling into the gravel parking lot, getting ready to take off her clothes at a strip club that was so entirely generic. There’s something disturbing about not even bothering with a name. Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment—at least one moment—when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?
“This will be my first strip bar,” Lyle said, and gave his pert-lipped smile.
I pulled off the highway, to the left, as Krissi’s mother had advised—when I’d phoned the only club listed, a greasy man told me he thought Krissi was “around”—and rattled into a pasture-sized parking lot for three strip bars, all in a row. A gas station and trucker park sat at the far, far end: in the bright white glow, I saw the silhouettes of women scuttling like cats between the cabs, doors opening and shutting, bare legs kicking out as they leaned in to line up the next trick. I assumed most of the strippers ended up working the trucker park once the clubs were done with them.
I got out of the car and fumbled with the notes Lyle had given me, a neat, numbered list of questions to ask Krissi, if we found her. (Number One: Do you still maintain that you were molested by Ben Day when you were a child? If so, please explain.) I started to review the rest of the questions when a movement to my right caught my attention. Far down in the trucker park, a small shadow dislodged itself from the side of a cab and started toward me in an intensely straight line, the kind of straight you walk when you’re wasted and trying not to look it. I could see the shoulders pushed forward, far out ahead of the body, as if the girl had no choice but to keep moving toward me once she started. And she was a girl, I saw when she reached the other side of my car. She had a wide, doll-like face that glowed in the streetlight, light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail from a domed forehead.
“Hey, you got a cigarette I could bum?” she said, her head jittering like a Parkinson’s patient.
“You OK?” I asked, trying to get a better look at her, guess her age. Fifteen, sixteen. She was shivering in a thin sweatshirt over a miniskirt and boots that were supposed to look sexy but on her looked childish, a kindergartner playing cowgirl.
“You got a cigarette?” she repeated, brightening, her eyes wet. She gave a quick bounce on her heels, looked from me to Lyle, who was watching the pavement.
I had a pack somewhere in the back of my car, so I leaned in and rummaged through old fast-food wrappers, an assortment of tea bags I’d swiped from a restaurant (another thing no one should ever buy: tea bags), and a pile of cheap metal spoons (ditto). The cigarette pack had three cigs left, one of them broken. I doled out the other two, flicked a lighter, the girl leaning in crookedly, then finally hitting the flame, Sorry I can’t see a thing without my glasses. I lit my cigarette, let my head do its heat-wave dance after that first rush of nicotine.
“I’m Colleen,” she said, sucking on the cigarette. The temperature had dropped quickly with the sun, we stood across from each other bouncing up and down to keep warm.
Colleen. It was too sweet a name for a hooker. Someone had once had different plans for this girl.
“How old are you, Colleen?”
She glanced back toward the truck park and smiled, hunched down in her shoulders. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not working there. I work over there.” She pointed to the middle strip club with her middle finger. “I’m legal. I don’t need to …” She nodded back toward the row of trucks, all of them immobile, despite what was happening inside. “We just try to keep an eye out for some of the girls that do work it. Sisterhood thing. You new?”
I’d worn a low-cut top, assuming it might make Krissi more comfortable when I found her, signal I wasn’t a prude. Colleen was looking at my cleavage now with the eyes of a jeweler, trying to match my tits to the correct club.
“Oh, no. We’re looking for a friend. Krissi Cates? You know her?”
“She may have a different last name now,” Lyle said, then looked away toward the highway.
“I know a Krissi. Older?”
“Mid-thirties or so.” Colleen’s whole body was humming. I assumed she was on uppers. Or maybe she was just cold.
“Right,” she said, finishing her cigarette in one aggressive pull. “She picks up some day shifts at Mike’s sometimes.” She pointed to the farthest club, where the neon said only G-R-S.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. But you gotta retire sometime, right? Still it sucks for her, because I guess she spent a lot of money on a boob job, but Mike still didn’t think she was primetime anymore. But at least the boob job was tax deductible.”
Colleen said all this with the perky ruthlessness of a teenager who knew she had decades before such humiliations touched her.
“So should we come back during the day shift?” Lyle asked.
“Mmm. You could wait here,” she said in a babyish voice. “She should be done soon.” She motioned back toward the line of trucks. “I need to get ready for work, thanks for the cigarette.”
She trotted, again with that push of the shoulders, toward the dark middle building, flung the door wide, and disappeared inside.
“I think we should go, this sounds like a dead end,” Lyle said. I was about to snap at him for going chickenshit on me, tell him to just wait in the car, when another shadow climbed out of a truck far back in the line, and began heading toward the parking lot. All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind. My stomach lurched at a lonely image of me trapped here or somewhere like it. It wasn’t so unlikely, for a woman with no family, no money and no skills. A woman with a certain unwholesome pragmatism. I’d spread my legs for nice men I knew would be good for a few months of free meals. I’d done it and never felt guilty, so how much would it take to find me here? I felt my throat tighten for a second, and then snapped to. I had money coming now.
The figure was all shadow: I could make out a halo of ruined hair, the jutting edges of short shorts, an oversized purse, and thick, muscular legs. She came out of the dark to reveal a tanned face with eyes that were set slightly close together. Cute but canine. Lyle nudged me, gave me a searching look to see if I recognized her. I didn’t but I gave a quick wave just in case and she stopped jerkily. I asked if she was Krissi Cates.
“I am,” she said, her vulpine face surprisingly eager, helpful, like she thought something good might be about to happen. It was a strange expression to see, considering the direction she’d come from.
“I was hoping to talk to you.”
“OK.” She shrugged. “About what?” She couldn’t figure me out: not a cop, not a social worker, not a stripper, not her kid’s teacher, assuming she had a kid. Lyle she only glanced at, since he was taking turns gaping at her or turning almost entirely away from us. “About working here? You a reporter?”
“Well, to be frank, it’s about Ben Day.”
“Oh. OK. We can go inside Mike’s, you can buy me a drink?”
“Are you married? Is your name still Cates?” Lyle blurted.
Krissi frowned at him, then looked at me for explanation. I widened my eyes, grimaced: the look women give each other when they’re embarrassed of the men they’re with. “I got married, once,” she said. “Last name’s Quanto now. Only because I been too lazy to change it back. You know what a pain in the ass that is?”
I smiled as if I did, and then suddenly I was following her across the parking lot, trying to keep out of the way of the giant leather purse that bounced against her hip, giving Lyle a look to pull it together. Just before we got to the door, she ducked against the side of the club, murmuring, you mind? and snuffed something from a packet of foil she pulled from her rear pocket. Then she turned her back entirely to me and made a gargling sound that must have hurt.
Krissi turned back, a broad smile on. “Whatever gets you through the night …” she sang, waggling the foil packet, but partway through the verse she seemed to forget the tune. She snuffed her nose, which was so compact it reminded me of an outie belly button, the kind pregnant women get. “Mike’s a Nazi about this stuff,” she said, and flung the door open.
I’d been to strip clubs before—back in the ’90s when it was considered brazen, back when women were dumb enough to think it was sexy, standing around pretending to be hot for women because men thought it was hot if you were hot for women. I guess I hadn’t been to one this low-rent though. It was small and filmy, the walls and floors seemed to have an extra wax coating. A young girl was dancing gracelessly on a low stage. She marched in place, actually, her waist rolling over a thong two sizes too small, pasties waffling over nipples that pointed outward, walleyed. Every few beats she would turn her back to the men, then bend over and peer at them through her spread legs, her face going quickly red from the flood of blood to her head. In response, the men—there were only three of them, all in flannel, hunched over beers at separate tables—would grunt or nod. A massive bouncer studied himself in the wall mirror, bored. We sat down, three in a row at the bar, me in the middle. Lyle had his arms folded, his hands in his armpits, trying not to touch anything, trying to look like he was looking at the dancer without really looking at her. I turned away from the stage, wrinkled my nose.
“I know, right?” Krissi said. “Goddam armpit of a place. This is on you, right? Because I have no cash.” Before I even nodded she was ordering herself a vodka and cranberry, and I just asked for the same. Lyle got carded, and as he was showing the bartender his ID, he started doing some uncomfortable impersonation, his voice going even more ducklike, a weird smile pasted to his face. He made no eye contact, and gave no real signal that he was doing an impersonation. The bartender stared at him, and Lyle said, The Graduate. You seen it? And the guy just turned away.
So did I.
“So, what do you want to know?” Krissi smiled, leaned toward me. I debated whether to tell her who I was, but she seemed so disinterested I decided to save myself the trouble. Here was a woman who just wanted company. I kept glancing at her breasts, which were even bigger than mine, tightly packed and well trussed so they poked straight out. I pictured them under there, shiny and globular like cellophaned chicken.
“You like ’em?” Krissi chirped, giving them a bounce. “They’re semi-new. Well, I guess they’re almost a year now. I should have a birthday party for them. Not that they’ve helped me here. Fuckin’ Mike keeps screwing me on shifts. It’s OK though, I always wanted bigger boobs. And now I have them. If I could only get rid of this, is what I need to get rid of.” She grabbed at a minimal fat roll, pretending it was much worse than it was. Just beneath it, the white glint of a caesarian scar snaked out.
“So, Ben Day,” she continued. “Red-headed bastard. He really fucked my life up.”
“So, you maintain you were molested by him?” Lyle said, leaning out from behind me like a squirrel.
I turned around to glare at him, but Krissi didn’t seem to care. She had the incuriosity of the drugged. She continued to speak only to me.
“Yeah. Yeah. It was all part of his satanic thing. I think he’d have sacrificed me, I think that was the plan. He’d have killed me if they hadn’t caught him for, you know, what he did to his family.”
People always wanted their piece of the murders. Just like everyone in Kinnakee knew someone who’d screwed my mom, everyone had suffered some close call with Ben. He’d threatened to kill them, he’d kicked their dog, he’d looked at them really scary-like one day. He’d bled when he heard a Christmas song. He’d shown them the mark of Satan, tucked behind one ear, and asked them to join his cult. Krissi had that eagerness, that intake of air before she started talking.
“So what happened exactly?” I asked.
“You want the PG or R version?” She ordered another round of vodka and cranberry and then called out for three Slippery Nipple shots. The bartender poured them, pre-made, from a plastic jug, raised an eyebrow at me, asked us if we wanted to start a tab.
“It’s fine, Kevin, my friend’s got it,” Krissi said, and then laughed. “What’s your name anyway?”
I avoided the question by asking the bartender how much I owed, paid it from a fan of twenties so Krissi knew I had more money. Takes a mooch to catch a mooch.
“You’ll love these, like drinking a cookie,” she said. “Cheers!” she raised the shot up with a screw-you gesture toward a dark window in the back of the club, where I guessed Mike was sitting. We drank, the shot sitting thick in my throat, Lyle making a whoo! noise like it had been whiskey.
After a few beats, Krissi readjusted a boob and then pulled in another big gulp of air. “So, yeah. I was eleven, Ben was fifteen. He started hanging around me after school, just always watching me. I mean, I got that a lot, I always got that. I was always a cute kid, I’m not bragging, I just was. And we had a lot of money. My dad—” here I caught a flicker of pain, a quick wrinkle of her lip that exposed a single tooth—“he was a self-made man. Got into the videotape industry right at the start, he was the biggest videotape wholesaler in the Midwest.”
“Like, movies?”
“No, like blank tapes, for people to record stuff on. Remember? Well, you probably were too young.”
I wasn’t.
“Anyway, so I was kind of an easy target maybe. Not like I was a latchkey kid or anything, but my mom didn’t keep the best eye out for me all the time, I guess.” This time a more obvious look of bitterness.
“Wait, why are you here again?” she asked.
“I’m researching the case.”
Her mouth drooped down at the corners. “Oh. For a second I thought my mom sent you. I know she knows I’m here.”
She clicked long, coral nails on the counter and I hid my left hand, with its stumped finger, under my shotglass. I knew I should care something about Krissi’s homelife but I didn’t. Well, I cared enough not to tell her that her mom was never going to check up on her.
One of the patrons at one of the plastic tables kept peeling off glances at us, looking over his shoulder with a drunk pissiness. I wanted to get out of there, leave Krissi and her issues behind.
“So,” Krissi began again. “Ben was really sneaky with me. He’d, like … you want some chips? The chips are really good here.”
The chips hung in cheap snack packs behind the bar. The chips are really good here. I had to like the woman for working me so hard. I nodded a yes and soon Krissi was tearing into a bag, the stench of sour-cream-and-onion making my mouth water in spite of its better judgment. Yellow flavoring stuck to Krissi’s bubblegum lipgloss.
“Anyway, so Ben earned my trust and then started molesting me.”
“How did he earn your trust?”
“You know, gum, candy, saying nice things to me.”
“And how did he molest you?”
“He’d take me into the closet where he kept his janitor stuff, he was a janitor at the school, I remember he always smelled horrible, like dirty bleach. He’d take me in there after school and make me perform oral sex on him and then he’d perform oral sex on me and he’d make me swear allegiance to Satan. I was so so scared. He’d tell me, you know, that he’d hurt my parents if I told.”
“How did he make you go into the closet?” Lyle asked. “If it was at school?”
Krissi turtled her neck at that, the same angry gesture I’ve always made when anyone questioned my testimony about Ben.
“Just, you know, threaten me. He had an altar in there, he’d pull it out, it was an upside-down cross. I think some dead animals too that he’d killed were in there. A sacrifice thing. That’s why I think he was working up to killing me. But he got his family instead. The whole family was into it, that’s what I heard. That the whole family was worshiping the Devil and stuff.” She licked chip shards off her thick plastic fingernails.
“I doubt that,” I muttered.
“Well, how do you know?” Krissi snapped. “I lived through this, OK?”
I kept waiting for her to figure out who I was, to let my face— not so different from Ben’s face—float into her memory, to notice the wide hairline of red roots springing from my head.
“So how many times did Ben molest you?”
“Countless. Countless.” She nodded somberly.
“How did your dad react when you told him what Ben had done to you?” Lyle asked.
“Oh my god he was so protective of me, he freaked, went totally ballistic. He drove around town that day, the day of the murders, looking for Ben. I always think if he’d only found Ben, he’d have killed him, and then Ben’s family would still be alive. Isn’t that sad?”
My gut clenched at that and then my anger flared back.
“Ben’s family—the horrible Devil worshipers?”
“Well, maybe I was exaggerating on that.” Krissi cocked her head, the way grown-ups do when they’re trying to placate a child. “I’m sure they were nice Christian people. Just think, if my dad had found Ben though …”
Just think if your dad didn’t find Ben and instead found my family. Found a gun, found an axe, wiped us out. Almost wiped us out.
“Did your dad come back to your house that night?” Lyle asked. “Did you see him after midnight?”
Krissi lowered her chin again, raised her eyebrows at me, and I added a more reassuring, “I mean, how did you know he never made contact with any of the Days?”
“Because I’m serious, he would have done some serious damage. I was like, the apple of his eye. It killed him, what happened to me. Killed him.”
“He live around here?” Lyle was freaking her out, his intensity was laserlike.
“Uh, we’ve lost touch,” she said, already looking around the bar for the next score. “I think it was all too much for him.”
“Your family sued the school district, didn’t they?” Lyle said, leaning in, getting greedy. I moved my stool so I blocked him off a bit, hoping he’d get the idea.
“Hell yeah. They needed to be sued, letting someone like that work there, letting a little girl get molested right under their noses. I came from a really good family—”
Lyle cut her off. “Do you mind if I ask, with the settlement … how did you end up, uh, here?” The customer at the table was now turned around entirely in his chair, watching us, belligerent.
“My family had some business setbacks. The money’s been gone a long time. It’s not like it’s a bad thing, working here. People always think that. It’s not, it’s empowering, it’s fun, it makes people happy. How many people can say all that about their jobs? It’s not like I’m a whore.”
I frowned before I could help myself, looked in the direction of the truck park.
“That?” Krissi fake-whispered. “I was just getting a hold of a little something for tonight. I wasn’t … oh God. No. Some girls do, but I don’t. There’s some poor girl, sixteen years old, works it with her mom. I try to look out for her. Colleen. I keep thinking I should call child services on her or something? Who do you even call for something like that?”
Krissi asked it with all the concern of finding a new gynecologist.
“Can we get your dad’s address?” Lyle asked.
Krissi stood up, about twenty minutes after I would have. “I told you, we’re not in touch,” she said.
Lyle started to say something when I turned to him, poked a finger toward his chest and mouthed, Shut up. He opened his mouth, shut it, looked at the girl onstage, who was now pantomiming fucking the floor, and walked out the door.
It was too late, though, Krissi was already saying she had to go meet someone. As I was settling up with the bartender she asked me if she could borrow twenty dollars.
“I’ll buy Colleen some dinner with it,” she lied. Then she quickly changed it to fifty. “I just haven’t cashed my work check yet. I will totally pay you back.” She made an elaborate play out of getting a sheet of paper and a pen for me, told me to write down my address and she’d totally totally mail me the money.
I mentally put the cash on Lyle’s tab, forked it over to Krissi, her counting it in front of me like I might shortchange her. She opened the big maw of her purse and a child’s sippy cup rolled out onto the floor.
“Leave it,” she waved at me when I bent to pick it up, and so I left it.
Then I took the greasy scrap of paper and wrote down my address and my name. Libby Day. My name is Libby Day, you lying whore.