Mosaic Truth

The air of the bar trembled with loud, electronic music and shrill laughter. The green, burgundy, and gold of the wall paint flashed in the motion of flirtatious gestures around the room. Surrounding the middle of the barroom, the gold high-tops stood kilter over scratched, glossy floorboards and hosted pairs, groups, and gatherings of women, and each woman added to the din that warbled in the air above their heads. The only pacific space was the narrow pathway that led to the burgundy bar counter at the back of the dimly lit room.
Just inside the door, Sandra pulled her light-brown suede jacket across her chest by the edges of the zipper. The uneven black floorboards gave way under her flats. As she cruised toward the bar, Sandra’s eyes scanned the shuffling room. Women coquettishly met her gaze but faded in and out of her concentration as she trod between the crowded gold circles. The room seemed to swell and warp like the landscape painting did two weeks ago at the Impressionist exhibit when Sandra stared at it for too long.
Sandra was looking at the far corner of the room full of women when she stubbed her toe on the leg of one of the darkly upholstered high top chairs at the bar. The empty seat had a conspicuous collision with the bottom of the blood-colored bar counter as Sandra sucked in a breath to suppress the pain. Sandra smiled at the women in tank tops and loose blouses sitting nearby as she gently pulled the chair back and hopped sideways onto the fake leather.
No sooner did Sandra sit down than she saw Grace in the other back corner of the room leaning against a high-top chair and smiling sourly to a red-headed young woman. Grace tucked a wavy strand of light brown hair behind her ear, revealing her angular profile.
Sandra ordered a Bud Light before stiffly rising and jamming her hands into the pockets of her suede jacket on her way over to Grace. When Grace noticed Sandra, she squealed and waved to her gingered friend as she strolled away. Metal bracelets tinkled a metallic melody in Sandra’s ears as Grace slung her arms up and around Sandra’s shoulders, who stood baffled. When they parted, Grace’s bright tone couldn’t disguise her flat voice. “Look how much you’ve grown and come into yourself. You even relaxed your hair; something you said you’d never do.”
“I wanted to look a little more professional. My braids didn’t really get me any respect when I started as a detective. Let’s go sit at the bar.”
“Oh sure, let me just grab my purse. I think I left it on the table back there. I’ll meet you over there.”
Sandra smiled and walked back to the bar. When she looked over again, Grace had one hand on her small purse but her other hand on that of the heavily freckled red-head. Sandra rolled her eyes, harboring intently her exhaustion with Grace’s brimming self-confidence: The confidence that trailed back to her high school declarations of self-segregation and the superior beauty of straight, blonde hair. The confidence that allowed Grace to believe anything she could imagine was real. Sandra took a deep breath to suppress the urge to drag Grace over to the bar.
Sandra turned to the group of women next to her at the bar, and asked them if they saw Grace here often, gesturing to her with a thumb. Jumbled affirmations came from all of them. Sandra laughed with them, and then Grace appeared between her and the women.
“Making friends?” Grace used the bar counter to lift herself into the high top chair separating Sandra from the other ladies. Even so, Grace had to spring into the tall chair.
“This place is always crowded, but I just didn’t know where else we could have met when you asked. Wait, what was it you wanted to talk about? You’re a detective, you said. I don’t remember seeing anything illegal going on.”
Sandra bit down on the immediate response that came to her. “Thanks for talking to me. I just have a few questions because what I’ve been investigating isn’t making sense.”
“Oh sure, whatever I can do to advise an officer of the law.”
Sandra smiled tightly. “I went back and read through Victor and Jane’s case files, and you were as close to Jane as I was to Victor. You might be able to help me make sense of it.”
Sandra held Grace’s gaze and watched as a fortress rose out of the insuppressible surprise behind her eyes, but Sandra had snuck past all her turrets and parapets before they were even erected. Sandra scoped out the defenses that Grace had built about the subject and retreated quickly to begin the siege. Grace’s eyes and hand flew to the flaring martini glass that had just appeared before her and took a slow sip.
“Oh, Sandra, I don’t want to revisit those horrible days. It’s too sad, really it is. I don’t know how you even made yourself read all the way through those files.”
“Why do you think I became a detective?” Sandra slid her bottle on the counter between her hands.
Grace placed a jeweled hand on top of Sandra’s shoulder. “I can’t imagine. You went to the police academy just so you could find out more about how Victor killed Jane and then himself?”
“You could put it that way. Usually, I say that I joined the force to uncover whole, ugly truths.”
“I guess you’re here for me then. I only tell pretty ones, sometimes.” A bubbly giggle erupted from Grace.
“Is that a confession?”
Sandra smiled with a false levity, but she realized that she was fooling around and went back to the topic at hand before Grace could open her mouth again. “Anyway, I read through the files, and I had some questions. I had to call in a lot of favors to understand some things since I have no authority over Victor and Jane’s cases. The evidence I’ve found makes these files seem full of holes.”
“What do you mean?” Grace tilted her martini glass to one side, and in the corner of Grace’s eye, Sandra saw her defenses preparing: bowmen on the parapets, catapults loaded. Sandra smiled briefly. It’s time, she thought.
“When I first joined the force,” Sandra looked at the still full bottle dripping condensation onto the red-lacquered counter. “I attended a lecture on detective work as finding the complete truth. The speaker, an old, very successful detective said that our job was ‘all about finding the small pieces of the mosaic of truth’. The case files for Victor and Jane just don’t form a complete picture. There are holes in the story and assumptions that were made.”
“Okay, so why am I involved?” Grace slid her thin finger along the rim of her martini glass and then licked the salt off of it.
“Because you were Jane’s friend. I thought you might want to help me understand what really happened to them. I don’t know about how you felt about them, but I wouldn’t have gotten through high school without them. Victor especially helped me deal with a lot of the racism I experienced in high school,” Sandra watched as Grace’s mind processed the information, the machine within the fortress ticking. Grace’s face straightened and looked strained.
Grace stammered for a moment before laying her hand on Sandra’s arm. “Sandra, dear, I know that high school was hard for you, and maybe Victor helped you through it. But you have to know that the truth is he killed Jane because she told him she was leaving him. He was too possessive of Jane and couldn’t handle the fact that she was going to dump him. Sometimes, good people do terrible things.”
“That’s not what I said that day,” the two women locked eyes. Sandra’s eyes widened as she remembered the day in the cafeteria when she, Victor, Jane, and Grace had all been sitting together at a small round table, as usual. Grace and Jane had been talking about some romantic comedy that they had recently seen, one that Sandra would probably never watch. Grace had insisted that she should. “This movie will change the way you see life and love. Just because there are no black actors in it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it.”
Sandra had abruptly sprung upward, and, when she looked over, she saw that Victor had done the same. Their metal chairs smacked the grimy, gray linoleum so hard that Sandra thought the floor might have cracked. Victor stared lasers at Grace. “Why would you say that? Maybe Sandra’s just not into your rom-com crap, like me. Not everything is about race.”
“I just think it’s ridiculous that she won’t consider seeing it at all. Jane liked it, right?”
Jane sucked in a breath, her mouth limply open and her hands rubbing her bruised wrists, and Victor watched as she gathered her thoughts.
“Victor, let it go. Sometimes, good people say terrible things. It’s fine; I’m done eating anyway.” Sandra righted her chair and picked up her tray. She walked past all of the whispering people that had turned to look at the scene.
Two days later, Jane was murdered in the park while Sandra and Victor walked home together.
“You were so consumed with whatever movie you had seen that day. I said that sometimes good people can say terrible things. It takes a bad person to murder two people for love.” Sandra stared into Grace’s eyes and saw the first defensive volley nocked and drawn.
“Murder two people? Unrequited love? This sounds like daytime TV, is that where you got the idea?”
“No, I got it from my colleague, a forensic psychologist. She thinks, based on my explanation of Victor and Jane’s relationship, that Victor was about as normal as can be: not a psychotic killer. Someone framed him.”
Over the parapet in Grace’s mind came her defensive strike. “That’s an interesting idea. I want to know what concrete evidence you pull out from under twelve years. How much hurt and anguish you cause trying to find a truth that you don’t even know exists.”
“If you don’t believe my forensic psychologist, the county pathologist looked at the angles of the cuts on Victor’s wrists, and he thinks that they are too obtuse for Victor to have naturally done it to himself. Forensics don’t lie. Victor didn’t kill himself. And if he didn’t kill himself, should we believe that he really killed Jane?”
Grace’s fortress suddenly felt a tremor. It wasn’t as stable as expected. “That doesn’t mean anything without real proof that someone else actually killed him instead.”
“But don’t you get that all these little details show a different picture than the one that we have now? I won’t let Victor and Jane’s mosaic truth have pieces missing or pieces that don’t fit quite right.” Sandra leaned in toward Grace, her eyes glinting.
“Sandra,” Grace sat straight up in the chair. “Why are we here talking about this?”
Sandra allowed a genuine smile to break across her face. “I’m glad you asked. I wanted to ask you a few more questions.”
“What’s that?” Grace said, having regained her bright smile, unprepared for her mental fortress to be breached.
“How long have you been attracted to women?” Grace’s face broke and she looked out at the barroom packed with women dancing together. She was laughing when she turned back to Sandra.
“What’s this got to do-”
“I found myself wondering if you ever felt attracted to Jane.”
“Well, yes, but nothing ever happened between us. Attraction isn’t a crime.” Grace drained the last of her martini in a gulp.
“No, but the day Jane was killed, I was walking home with Victor. That day, he explained to me that Jane wouldn’t tell him where the bruises on her wrists had come from. He thought she was hiding it from him to protect someone in her family. But now I think that another scenario makes much more sense.”
“You were with him at the time that Jane was killed? Why didn’t you step forward? Some outstanding citizen you were then,” Grace smiled as the bartender poured her another martini.
“When the police were asking questions back then, you had already said you saw them walking home together that day. It would have been a white girl’s word against a black girl’s word, and so I didn’t bother saying anything. Your deposition is still in the files, and I wondered why you would have said that.”
The air around the bar stilled, because Grace couldn’t think of any sort of comeback. So the two just stared long and hard into each other’s eyes. Sandra saw the gates of Grace’s fortress ripped off of their hinges, and, inside the fortress, the final pieces of the mosaic truth gleamed in the light coming from the opened gates. Sandra wished she could take them, but she knew there would be more time to finally fill her forensic mosaic.
“I said that because it’s what I saw, I guess. It was so long ago I don’t even remember much of what happened anymore. You never answered why you asked about my sexual orientation, either, so I think you’re grasping at straws that have no correlation in what happened twelve years ago.”
“All these details are relevant to my investigation. You were in love with Jane. You fantasized a life with Jane and in your head, lived in that life, but when you told her about your feelings after that romantic comedy you two had seen together, Jane said she didn’t share them. She had Victor. That was the day you bruised her arms as you gripped her too tightly trying to convince her to accept the fantasy you had created.
“She destroyed your fantasies. You couldn’t live outside of the life you had constructed in your head, and so you strangled Jane in the park, framed Victor, and made it look like he committed suicide two weeks later. Their deaths were necessary for your fantasy to survive. You risked a lot to guard your delusions and covered your tracks well, but I’m onto you. You let this illusion slip for a second, and I’ll be there to expose the truth.”
Grace rested her hand on the bar counter, her bracelets jangled gently. “If you manage to find more evidence, how will you know what’s true, and what’s not? You don’t have police authority in this case, so you won’t be able to spend much more time on this than you have already. The more time slips by in these cases, the harder it gets to find the truth, or so they say on TV.”
Sandra smiled at Grace. She put her hand on the bar counter and a foot on the black floorboards. “Remember that lecture I told you about? I asked the successful detective a similar question to your own, and he told me to continue to try to find the pieces until I’m not asking any more questions. So, when my questions are answered, maybe then I’ll know what’s real and what’s not.”
“You’re obsessed with your own version of the truth.”
“Why do you think I became a detective?”
“You’re obviously suffering mentally. I can help you find therapy if you want, but you need help.” Grace shifted slightly away from Sandra, and Sandra stood up.
“Everyone believed your story for so long, but I’ll work ten times harder to say I know the real truth. It’s a white woman’s word against a black woman’s word, but I won’t be silent this time.”
Sandra walked through the barroom full of dancing women, leaving Grace seated at the bar to finish her martini in stunned silence. She pushed open the door to the cool, dark air. She pulled her light-brown suede jacket closer around her torso and marched into the night.