“Hey, can you wait a minute?”
I called after the young man, but he had maneuvered out of the building at a pace I was struggling to match in heels. Organ music drifted out from the building as I picked it up to a jog, reaching him after he’d turned onto the sidewalk “Wait. Please, can I speak to you for a minute?”
He stopped. Facing me, his cheeks were wet with tears and his eyes bloodshot. He looked at me blankly.
“I’m sorry about what happened in there,” I said. “Everyone is hurting. And I can see that you are as well.”
He nodded but stayed silent, his eyes on my face, tears still flowing uncontrolled.
“I’m the one who found her,” I said. “My name is Andrea.”
He stepped back, drawing in a breath, his jaw dropping. It was almost as if I’d slapped him in the face. “That must’ve been awful,” he mumbled, his lips trembling. He’d gotten so pale that I wondered if he was on the verge of collapse himself.
“It’s obvious, to me at least, that you loved Zoe a great deal. How long had you been dating?” I asked. He wore the pain of her death like a shroud. Regardless of what Janek and Theresa had said or thought about the young man, his grief could not have been more real. He had loved Zoe and loved her deeply. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Levi,” he said, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Levi Vinson. We were together about three years. We met in school.”
There was a fogginess about him even through the tears—a delayed, blunted movement of his body—which made me wonder about his current drug use. Although his eyes were certainly red, his pupils reacted normally.
“How long had it been since you’d last seen her?” I asked hesitantly.
A flurry of questions were running through my head, first on the list the veiled accusations he’d directed at Dr. Wykell, but pressing him on it when he was so fragile seemed to cross the line. Obviously, there had been some messy aspects to their relationship, and he may have been her dealer, but it was also possible that he had been the last one to see her alive.
“About nine months ago, maybe ten,” he said, pulling a wadded-up tissue out of the pocket of his jeans. He dabbed his nose and continued. “We both had some shit going on. We were trying to get clean. She was doing good. Me, I was having a hard time of it. And she couldn’t stay clean if I wasn’t.” He paused and tried to fight the tears welling again in his eyes. Looking at the ground, he said, “She told me we couldn’t be together anymore if I was still using.”
“And still dealing?” I added softly.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “It was just as hard to get out of selling the stuff, as it was to stop using it. Once people know you can help them score, they hound you until you hook them up. The suppliers, they aren’t any better. They’d just as soon take an organ as give you a break when money’s involved. And it’s not like there are a lot of other ways to make that kind of money after you’ve dropped out of college.”
His voice was still flat, filled with resignation. The reality of the choices he’d had to make loomed large, and I could sense his regret. I looked closely at his face, wondering how drugs fit into his life now, wondering if he held any feeling of guilt for Zoe’s outcome.
“So, as far as you knew, Zoe was clean? At least when you last saw her?” The image of her body was filling my head again. It wasn’t an image anyone would want burned into their memory.
“Yeah, as far as I know. We exchanged texts every now and then, but eventually that stopped too,” he said, looking forlorn and unfocused. “I tried to call a couple times after but got a message that the phone had been disconnected. I assumed her mom had gotten tired of paying the bills and cut it off.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of Levi. His anguish was raw and real. But then again, if he had been her dealer, I couldn’t exactly trust him not to be protecting his own interests. And Michael’s comments about a black eye he’d given Zoe didn’t help. We still didn’t know if he had supplied the product that killed her or if it had been tainted. Drug dealers weren’t known to be any more reliable sources of information than drug users. Yet, I didn’t question his love.
“Did you know where she had been living?” The time frame was still confusing, as was the venom Levi had directed at Dr. Wykell.
“After her mom kicked her out, we got a place together. Just a little shit hole in Logan Square, but it was ours. We both had bartending jobs then. Made enough money to manage a dumpy, roach-infested studio apartment. Then I went to rehab, and she couldn’t afford the rent on her own. She crashed with friends for a while. I did the same after I got out. We were saving up for a place of our own, but the rehab, well, it didn’t take.”
That phrase “it didn’t take” was something I’d heard for years as a prosecutor. It confused me as much now as it had then since it suggested that this process was completely outside of individual control, something done to them. Intellectually, I understood it was far more complex than simple free will, but the ravages of addiction were beyond my personal experience.
“Do you know who she was staying with? I mean, after you guys broke up.” I’d gotten the impression that Zoe had been alone at the house on Pierce, but I was looking for a connection to the stash of rehab center pamphlets in the basement.
“Not really. Like I said, she broke up with me, so it isn’t like I got the download. She just said she was back to hitting her friends up for favors, a few days here, a couch there, someone who had a cousin who was leaving town for two months. There are a lot of compromises you make when your head’s all fucked up.”
“So you don’t have any idea where she’d been staying when she died?”
A shadow crossed his face with the question. “No, I didn’t see her again after we broke up.”
The kid was lying to me. I didn’t know why or what about, but it was there in that moment of vulnerability. He had seen her and may have known exactly where she had been staying the last days of her life.
“Did the two of you ever crash in a house in Humboldt Park? A house on Pierce?” I kept my eyes trained on him as I asked the question, my prosecutor background instinctively watching for the tell.
“No, that doesn’t ring any bells. I was pretty fucked up sometimes, but not that I remember.”
There it was again, the lie—eyes that shifted away from mine, the withdrawal of his body. What was he hiding?
“Was Zoe spiritual? You know, into sage, amulets, crystals—any of that stuff?”
Voices to my left caught my attention. The doors of the funeral home had opened, and a handful of people were beginning to leave. And Levi would be gone the minute any of the immediate family stepped outside.
“Yeah, she was into that,” he said, nervously looking at the building. “Didn’t make any sense to me, but she was always lighting incense, chanting. Clearing the bad energy, she called it. She had these rocks, crystals, I think. I don’t remember their exact names, but she told me every stone meant something. She said they had powers and if you held them and kept them around you, they could protect you. I thought it was all a bunch of bullshit, but hell, if she wanted to believe in the tooth fairy, it was her business. Sure wasn’t my job to tell her any different.”
“And what was she protecting herself from?”
“She said they kept away the evil spirits. I always thought she meant the horse, you know. That they could protect her from the addiction. Doesn’t seem like it worked.”
Or perhaps she was using the phrase evil spirits as metaphor for something else dark in her life.
“How do you know Dr. Wykell?” I asked, my eyes still studying him like a prosecutor.
I threw it out there, assuming I only had moments before Levi would be scared off, or run off, by Janek. My inquiry seemed to startle him. He jolted as if he were stunned by the question or uncertain of how to answer. It only lasted a moment, but it was long enough to have registered with me before the fog was back.
“I don’t know who that is. I gotta go,” he said, looking over his shoulder and moving further away from the building as more of the attendees left.
What was that lie about? It seemed pointless. Which is exactly why it meant something.