The Maid(46)

The car ride is silent. This time, I’m seated in the back of the police cruiser instead of up front. I don’t like it back here. The vinyl upholstery squeaks under me every time I make the slightest move. A bullet-proof glass barrier separates Detective Stark from me. It is smeared with grubby fingerprints and dark-brown blood stains.

Imagine you’re in a limousine, sitting in the back seat, being driven to the opera.

Gran reminds me that entrapment is only a state of mind, that there’s always a way out. I join my hands in my lap and breathe deeply. I will admire the view out the window. Yes. I will concentrate on that.

We are at the station in what feels like seconds. Once inside, Detective Stark leads me to the same white room in which I was questioned before. On our way there, I feel more eyes upon me—uniformed officers who gawk as I pass, some of them offering a nod, not to me, but to Detective Stark. I hold my head high.

“Have a seat,” the detective says. I sit down in the same seat where I sat before, and Detective Stark sits across from me. She closes the door. She doesn’t offer me coffee or even water this time, which is a shame. I could use some water, though I know if I ask for some it will arrive in a dastardly Styrofoam cup.

Shoulders back, chin up, breathe.

Detective Stark has not said a word. She’s sitting there in front of me, watching me. The camera in the corner blinks its red eye at me.

I’m the first to break the silence. “How may I be of service to you, Detective Stark?” I ask.

“How can you be of service to me? Well, Molly the Maid. You can start by telling the truth.”

“My gran used to say that the truth is subjective. But I’ve never quite believed that. I believe the truth is absolute,” I say.

“Then there’s something we agree on,” Detective Stark replies. She leans forward and puts her elbows on the scuffed white table between us. I wish she wouldn’t. I disapprove of elbows on the table. But I don’t say anything.

She is close enough that I can see tiny gold flecks in the irises of her blue eyes. “Since we’re talking about truth,” she says, “I’d like to share with you the results of Mr. Black’s toxicology report. No autopsy report yet, but we’ll have that soon enough. Mr. Black had drugs in his system, the same drug that was on his bedside table and strewn on the floor of his bedroom.”

“Giselle’s medicine,” I say.

“Medicine? Benzodiazepine, laced with some other street drugs.”

It takes me a moment to change the picture in my head from Giselle at the drugstore counter to her acquiring something illicit in a sordid back alley. Something isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense.

“Anyhow,” Detective Stark says, “It wasn’t the pills that killed him. He had a lot in his system, but not enough to kill him.”

“What do you believe killed him then?” I ask.

“We don’t know yet. But I assure you, we’ll get to the bottom of it,” she says. “The full autopsy report will determine if the petechial hemorrhaging was due to a cardiac arrest or if something more sinister happened.”

It comes back to me in a flash. The room starts to spin. I see Mr. Black, his skin gray and taut, the little pinprick bruises around his eyes, his body stiff and lifeless. After I made the call to the front desk, I looked up. I caught my reflection in the mirror on the wall in front of the bed.

Suddenly, I feel clammy and cold, like I’m about to faint.

Detective Stark purses her lips, bides her time. Eventually, she says, “If you know something, now’s your chance to be on the side of good. You do understand that Mr. Black was a very important man? A VIP?”

“No,” I say.

“Excuse me?” Detective Stark replies.

“I don’t believe that some people are more important than other people. We’re all very important in our own way, Detective. For instance, I’m sitting here with you—a lowly hotel maid—and yet clearly there is something very important about me. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have brought me here today.”

Detective Stark is listening carefully. She zeroes in on my every word.

“Let me ask you something,” she says. “Does it ever make you angry? Being a maid, I mean? Cleaning up after rich people? Taking care of their messes?”

I’m impressed by this line of questioning. This is not what I was expecting at all when I was escorted here.

“Yes,” I answer truthfully. “I do sometimes feel angry. Especially when guests are careless. When they forget that their actions have an impact on others, when I’m treated like I don’t matter.”

Detective Stark says nothing. Her elbows remain on the table, which continues to grate on my nerves even though it’s only officially a breach of etiquette when there’s a meal being served.

“Now let me ask you a question,” I say. “Does it ever bother you?”

“Does what ever bother me?”

“Cleaning up after rich people. Taking care of their messes,” I say.

The detective pulls back as though I’ve sprouted the head of Hydra and one hundred serpents are hissing in her face. What pleases me, though, is that her elbows are no longer on the table.

“Is that how you see this? That my job as a detective is to clean up after a man has died?”