Blank Confession (16 page)

The funny thing was that I didn't feel
bad
about what I had done. That one or two seconds when I could have let go of the stun-gun trigger and pulled Jon back onto the roof …those seconds were gone forever. And if I had pulled him back, something even worse might have happened.

I have no regrets,
I told myself as I walked home. I was so far inside myself that I hardly noticed the unfamiliar car parked in front of our house.

An unfamiliar voice called my name. “Mike Martin?”

I turned to look at the man in the car. I'd seen him someplace before.

“Are you Mikey?” he said.

“Maybe.”

He crooked a finger. I took a few steps closer to the car and suddenly remembered where I knew him from. He was the cop who had busted me for Advil.

I was pretty sure this time it would be something worse than Advil possession.

“Can we talk for a minute?” he said.

“About what?”

“You know a boy named Shayne Blank?”

“I go to school with him.”

“Seen him lately?”

“Not today,” I said.

“How about yesterday afternoon?”

“I saw him at school.”

He smiled, letting me know I was getting the answers right—so far. But it wouldn't be long before I had to start lying.

“Why don't you hop in?” he said.

“Do I have to?”

“Either that, or we could go inside and talk about it with your parents.”

I walked up to the car and got in.

He said, “My name is George Rawls. You remember me, don't you?”

“Yeah. You're the Advil cop.”

“Actually, I'm more of an everything cop, but I do a lot of work with young people.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know where he lives? Shayne Blank?”

I shook my head.

“But he's a friend of yours, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It's important that I talk to him.”

“About what?”

George Rawls took a few seconds before answering, then shrugged and said, “There was an incident yesterday afternoon. A boy fell off a building and was badly injured. I think maybe you know him. Jon Brande?”

“I know him.”

“Your friend Shayne stopped by the station yesterday and told me he'd thrown Jon off the building.”

I'm not sure what happened with my face then, but Rawls found it fascinating.

“You didn't know?”

I shook my head.

“Apparently, your sister was involved as well. I talked to her on the phone a couple of hours ago. She claims she doesn't remember much.”

“What did she say?”

“That she and Jon and some other kids were partying, and she and Jon got in a fight, and he hit her. Then she took some sort of painkiller and fell asleep. The next thing she knew, Shayne Blank was taking her to the hospital. But here's what puzzles me. Shayne gave me his home address, but the address turned out to be a vacant lot. And when I checked with the school, they had the same address for him. Supposedly, he was living with his aunt, but as near as I can tell, there is no such person. Do you know anything about that?”

I had no problem looking utterly bewildered.

“I see,” said Rawls. He reached into his pocket, came out with a cheap-looking cell phone, and turned it on. “Prepaid cell,” he said. “Your friend left it with me. A parting gift.” He worked the buttons for a few seconds,
then held it up so I could see the image on the phone display. “There are several photos here. Do you know what this is?”

The photo showed a long bench covered with beakers and assorted other chemistry stuff.

“It looks like a chem lab,” I said.

He showed me the next photo, the same bench from another angle, and then a shot of some shelves filled with assorted packages of cold medicines.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“What you're looking at is a meth lab. Is your friend Shayne involved with drugs?”

“No!”

“Take a look at the rest of these photos.” He cycled through about ten more shots. More of the meth lab, then a shot showing the door, then a hallway, then several more shots of the interior of an apartment, including a picture of the Harley parked in Wart's living room.

“That's Jon's brother's apartment,” I said.

“Wart Hale? How do you know? Were you there?”

“The motorcycle in the living room,” I said, thinking quickly. “Marie told me about it.”

He nodded, accepting my lie, then folded the cell phone and put it into his pocket. “So Wart is cooking meth at home. Now
that
is interesting.”

Wart Hale returned from the Hogfest motorcycle rally the next day and walked into his apartment to find it full of police in biohazard suits dismantling his meth lab. His arrest was the lead story on the evening news, along with a piece on Jon Brande, who the newscaster characterized as “another young victim of the crystal meth epidemic.”

Both Marie and I had to talk to the police several more times. Marie stuck to her claim that she didn't know what had happened on the roof, and I stayed with my story, that I had never been there. I could tell that Detective Rawls didn't believe me, but after repeating the lie again and again, it got easier, almost as if I believed it myself.

Marie never asked me what had really happened that day, but every now and then I caught her looking at me with this odd expression on her face, as if she wasn't quite sure who I was. I'll always wonder if she had seen me send Jon off that roof.

Eventually, things settled down to a new normal. Marie started seeing Trey Worthington. Marie helped him with his homework, so he was around a lot. Our parents didn't care for him much at first, but Trey turned out to be a pretty nice guy with Jon out of the picture. Also, he was
good to have around when something needed to be lifted, pounded, or dragged. He and Dad bonded one day while digging out the elm stump in the backyard. Trey with an ax was a fearsome sight to behold.

Kyle Ness tried to take over Jon's drug business, got busted a month later, and was sent to Saint Patrick's Reformatory for Youthful Offenders. Tracy, Maura, Carlos, and the other stoners found a new supplier; I was happy not to know who it was.

Shayne Blank disappeared, no one knew where.

I went over to Pépé and Mémé's one afternoon in May and, over a game of checkers, told Pépé everything that had happened. Except for the part where I sent Jon off the roof. I told Pépé that Jon had fallen. It felt bad, lying to Pépé, but I was pretty sure he would prefer it to the truth.

Pépé listened to the whole story without interrupting me once. When I finished by telling him how Shayne had just disappeared without a trace, he leaned forward and said in a low voice, so that Mémé couldn't hear him from the kitchen, “That is how it is with
djabs.
” Then he winked.

The other thing that happened that spring was I got a growth spurt. Only about an inch—okay, three quarters of an inch—but enough so that I've grown out of all my bar mitzvah suits. I took them all back to Thriftway—all ten of them—and got forty-three dollars. Mrs. Jerdes said she was overstocked in munchkin sizes. She didn't say it that way, but that was what she meant.

It's just as well—being rid of the suits, I mean. Shayne was right. The suits were a way of distancing myself from
people, a way of masking myself the same way Marie uses her makeup or the way Jon used his smile. And I never said this to Shayne, but he was masking too: dressing all in black and never telling people who he really was or where he came from.

A lot of people don't want other people to know who they are. I think that, secretly, most of us would rather be somebody else. Me, maybe life would be easier if I was taller, lighter-skinned, smarter, and nicer. The first three I can't do much about, but being nice is something I might be able to pull off. It's hard, though, when you are as good at being a wise-ass as I am. But I'm working on it. Because being sarcastic is a mask too.

Speaking of masks, I got a visit from George Rawls a few weeks later, and he wasn't wearing his suit. He stopped by the house dressed in baggy green shorts, scuffed-up Nikes, and a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt printed with giant hibiscus blossoms. He must have dressed himself in the dark.

Being sarcastic again. At least I didn't say it out loud.

“I almost didn't recognize you,” I said. Nicely.

“Same goes for you,” he said. “No suit?”

“I outgrew them. Where's yours?”

“I quit the police.”

“Oh. So, this isn't another interrogation?”

“Not at all. I just thought you might like to know, I found out a few things about your friend Shayne.”

My heart started thumping so loud I could hear it.

“Turns out his real name is Herman LaRose.”

“Herman?
”

Rawls laughed. “I guess you can't blame him for changing it.”

I stood there on the front step trying to breathe, realizing that I had almost convinced myself that Shayne had never existed.

“I might never have found out who he was, except he mentioned once he'd been in Louisville, so I called some of the schools there. One of the assistant principals knew who I was talking about right away. Said Shayne was a good kid. Kind of quiet, though. Until one day he got in a fight and beat up a couple of his classmates, then disappeared. I've traced him to three other high schools since, always calling himself Shayne Blank, never staying more than a month or two. None of the addresses he gave to the schools panned out—I suspect he was living in vacant houses, homeless shelters, whatever he could find.

“He mentioned once that he had learned self-defense from his father, and that his folks were military, so I called a friend of mine in Army Intelligence and asked him to poke around, see if any of his hand-to-hand combat instructors was missing a teenage kid. He had an answer for me within a few days.

“Kind of a sad case, really. Herman's dad was Special Forces, spent time in Iraq, the first war. His wife—Herman's mother—died in childbirth. The dad returned to the states and became a hand-to-hand combat specialist teaching at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. That's mostly where Herman grew up. But the old man had a breakdown eighteen months ago. He's now in a military psychiatric institution. Paranoid schizophrenia brought
on by post-traumatic stress disorder. Herman went to stay with an aunt in Texas after his dad's breakdown. He stayed there about a year, then busted some kid's kneecap and ran away.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Apparently he thinks he's some sort of vigilante. Every school he's been at, he's had a run-in with somebody. Turns out that every kid he's had a problem with was always a problem himself. The one in Texas was a notorious bully. In Louisville the kids he beat up were implicated in setting fire to a synagogue. In Oklahoma City it was a guy who date-raped one of the girls in school—he hit that kid so hard he crushed his cheekbone and dislocated his jaw. And after each altercation, Shayne—I mean, Herman—disappeared the next day.” Rawls shrugged. “My guess is that he's just as crazy as his old man. But you have to give him credit for wanting to continue his education.”

“Are you going to have him arrested? For what happened with Jon?”

“I'm not a cop anymore. Even if I knew where he was—which I don't—it's none of my business. Fact is, I'm going back to teaching.”

“If you're not a cop, how come you went to all that trouble to find out about him?”

“I was curious.” Rawls stood there without speaking for what felt like a long time. He cleared his throat. “You know how sometimes you meet somebody, and afterward you just can't go back to being what you were?”

“Because it's like they're watching you,” I said.

“Exactly. Or because whatever you do, you're thinking,
If so-and-so could see me now, what would he think?
I still think about my old man that way, and he's been dead twenty years. Anyway, I got the feeling after talking to him, and to you, that he mattered to you. I thought you'd want to know about him.”

“That he was real,” I said. Rawls smiled.

“That too.”

I spent most of that night writing a letter to Shayne, telling him thanks, and that we were all okay. I told him that Jon was permanently in a wheelchair, that Trey was going out with Marie, that I had given up on the suits, and that even though I was still the smallest kid in school, I was bigger than I'd been when he knew me. I told him a few other things I thought he might find interesting, like that Dad and I had started shooting baskets every night after dinner. It turned out that he'd always wanted to, but he thought I wanted him to leave me alone. Also, I wrote how Trey and I were helping Dad build that backyard fountain where the stump used to be. Five copper goldfish shooting water from their mouths. It was going to be amazingly cool.

And I told him that even though we were all doing well, we missed him.

I signed the letter and put it in an envelope with some pictures I'd taken of me and Marie and Dad and of the fountain we were building. I wrote, “Shayne Blank, aka Herman LaRose” on the front, but I left the address blank.

If I ever found out where he had gone, I would fill it in and send it to him.