Chapter 5 - The Glass Partition
The visitor room at the Dallas County Jail smelled of stale floor wax, industrial bleach, and cheap coffee.
I sat on a metal stool behind a thick pane of scratched plexiglass. Grandma Eleanor sat beside me, her arms crossed over her chest, her face set in stone.
On the other side of the partition, the heavy steel door buzzed open.
My mother stepped inside, wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit. Her hair, usually perfectly blown out, hung in greasy, tangled strands around her face. She looked twenty years older than she had three nights ago at the dinner table. Her hands were cuffed at the wrists, attached to a belly chain that clinked with every step she took.
When she saw me through the glass, her face twisted into a desperate, tragic mask. She picked up the plastic phone receiver with trembling hands.
I picked up my receiver.
“Andrea!” my mother sobbed through the crackling speaker. “Oh God, Andrea, thank God you came! You have to talk to the DA! You have to tell them I didn't want any of this! Mark forced me! He threatened to leave me penniless if I didn't sign those trust papers!”
“Shut up, Linda,” Grandma Eleanor said flatly, picking up her own extension.
My mother stopped mid-sob, blinking through her swollen eyes at her mother.
“You mentioned Alex,” I said, my voice dangerously steady, completely empty of warmth or pity. “Tell me what happened to my husband, Mom. And if you lie to me once—just once—I will walk out that door and let David Vance push for the maximum sentence on every single charge.”
My mother swallowed hard, her tongue darting out to wet her dry lips. She looked around the interrogation room nervously before leaning closer to the glass.
“Alex found the invoices,” my mother whispered, her voice cracking over the line. “Two weeks before the crash. He was auditing Caldwell Manufacturing’s quarterly logistics expenses for his firm. He noticed that Midwest Logistics was billing Caldwell for forty trucks a week, but the factory loading docks only logged fifteen.”
“Mark was overbilling the family business,” Grandma said, her voice dripping with ice.
“It wasn't just Mark!” my mother stammered, looking terrified. “It was Gregory Mendoza and Carl Vance! They were stealing three hundred thousand dollars a month from Caldwell Manufacturing and splitting it three ways! When Alex found the discrepancy, he didn't know Mark was involved. He thought he was helping the family! He brought the audit papers to Mark at his office!”
My stomach churned violently.
Alex had trusted Mark. Alex had thought he was protecting my family’s manufacturing business from an outside rogue vendor.
“What did Mark do?” I whispered, tears spilling down my face.
“Mark panicked,” my mother sobbed, covering her face with her cuffed hands. “He called Gregory. Gregory told him that if Alex took those papers to Eleanor or the board, all of them—Mark, Gregory, Carl—would go to federal prison for corporate fraud.”
“So they tampered with the truck,” Grandma Eleanor said, her voice so sharp it cut through the room like a razor.
My mother didn't answer right away. She wept hysterically into the plastic phone receiver.
“Linda!” Grandma barked into the phone. “Answer her!”
“I didn't know they were going to kill him!” my mother wailed through the glass. “I swear to God, Andrea, I didn't know! Mark told me Carl was just going to cause a minor fender-bender on the highway to steal Alex’s briefcase with the audit files! They were supposed to force his car off the road and take the laptop!”
“A minor fender-bender?” I screamed into the phone, slamming my hand against the glass partition so hard the guard in the corner shifted his stance. “He drove an eighty-thousand-pound semi-truck into Alex’s driver-side door at sixty miles an hour! He crushed his car! He left him dying in the rain!”
My mother shrank back from the glass, cowering beneath my rage.
“And you took their money after that?” I wept, my voice shaking with raw, agonizing grief. “You knew they caused the crash that killed my husband, and you let them transfer $180,000 of my inheritance to buy your diamond earrings? You watched me starve while holding the hand of the man who murdered my daughter’s father?”
“I was scared, Andrea!” my mother whimpered. “Mark told me that if I said anything to the police, he would tell them I was in on the billing fraud from the start! I had no choice!”
“You had a choice,” Grandma Eleanor said softly, her eyes filled with a terrifying, absolute disgust. “You had the choice to be a mother. You chose to be a parasite.”
Grandma hung up her phone receiver with a soft click.
She stood up, taking her cane.
“Grandma, please!” my mother begged through the glass, tapping her cuffed hands frantically against the partition. “Don't leave me here! They’re going to give me twenty years! Eleanor! Andrea! Please!”
I picked up my receiver one last time.
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“You are not my mother,” I said quietly into the microphone. “My mother died the night Alex did.”
I hung up the receiver and walked out of the room without looking back.
