“When I got home yesterday,” I say, afraid of the new look in Howard’s eyes, “my mother handed me a package. It was the video. There was no return address. I didn’t know who had sent it to me.”
“So you didn’t know about this seedyvideo until you received it?” asks Lord.
“No! I
didn’t
know!” I yell angrily. I know what they’re insinuating now! “I’m not a pedophile!”
“But you watched it?”
As calmly as I can, I tell them what I told Jamie…that I kept forgetting it was an image, that Jamie was no longer there in that prison, being sodomized and tormented.
Amazingly, they seem to comprehend what I’m saying. “Please, go on,” Lord requests.
“I didn’t call Jamie all day because I was so…ill…so traumatized…that video was horrible…it made me so
sick
…I couldn’t talk to him…couldn’t call him…I was just so…”
“Were you angryat him?” Howard guesses.
“I was hurt…traumatized…seeing him…doing those things… I know he didn’t want to, but…It’s so hard to talk…”
“Mr. Mattheis,” Lord says gently, “did you punish Mr. Pearce because of that video?”
“No!” I scream. “Listen to me, goddamnit! I did
not
do this to Jamie! Someone else did it…I’m beginning to think I know who!”
“Alright, then, who?” asks Howard.
“Yvette Feldman…she’s the one who sent the video. She told me last night at The End. She came up to me and said, ‘Did you get your package?’ She said a friend of hers, here, at
this
police station, gave her the video. She told me she sent it to me because ‘Jamie is a pervert and he’s corrupting me!’”
Lord and Howard stare aghast at me. “Mrs. Feldman sent it to you? You’re sure about this?”
“She
bragged
about it!” I snap. “And she said, ‘Tam do you reallywant that faggot to drag you to hell with him?’”
“But she didn’t write her name or address on the package?”
“No.”
“Hmmm…” Lord ponders for a moment. “If she did this, we can pick her up for distribution of child pornography…but we don’t know she did it…it’s just your word. In fact,
you
could be charged with possession of child pornography.”
“She sent it to me…I didn’t know what it was!” Then I sob, “Please, I want to see Jamie.”
“He’s in surgery, I said. Can you think of anyone we should be talking to about Mrs. Feldman’s involvement in this? Anyone at the bar aside from Miss Pendleton?”
“Talk to Stacy again! Maybe she remembers how Yvette talked about it, bragged about it.”
So they go out into the hallway and interview Stacy again. “She didn’t hear what you and Mrs. Feldman talked about. All she says is that Mrs. Feldman sat at a table with you for a few minutes. She says Jamie was very upset about that, that you didn’t even invite him to sit with you, that he was wondering what was such a big secret that you couldn’t include him, and that he suspected you wanted to end your relationship with him.”
I shake my head violently. “No…Yvette said, ‘I’d like a word with you.’ I told her to fuck off…we’ve hated each other for years… but she said it was veryimportant that she speak to me. She took me over to the table and told me she was the one who sent the video. When she did, I grabbed Jamie and took him out of there. I didn’t
drag
him away. I was sickened…I wanted him
away
from that bitch!
“When we got home, I told him what Yvette had done, and we…we got into it…I said things…he said things…we were hurting, do you understand?...and he slapped me. I apologized about watching the video, and he told me everything. He told me his parents abused him, made videos of it, and sold them to their friends. He was crying, he tore the towel bar off the wall, and…he was going to slit his wrists with it…”
The two policemen both sit back suddenly. “He was suicidal?”
“Yeah,” I replysoftly.
Jamie, forgive me...
Howard leans forward again, “And did you help him accomplish…?”
“No!” I spit at him. “I did not!”
“It is a bit brutal for an assisted suicide,” Lord observes wryly.
“I did not tryto kill him, and I did not assist him to kill himself,” I sputter. “We apologized to each other, for everything we said, for mystupidity. I never should have watched that video. I felt like I was no better than one of the freaks his parents sold to! But we made up…everything was okay…he promised…”
“He has a funny bite mark on the back of his neck,” Howard says, his usuallysquintyeyes widening curiously. “Like a hickie or something…what’s that from?”
“I reallydon’t think it’s anyof your business!”
“Maybe
you
raped him…”
“I’d like to put your lights out right now!” I snarl.
“But you won’t,” Howard says lightly. “You know better. Cowards like you never take on someone their own size.”
“I wrote in those diaries a verylong time ago,” I say, wearyto the bone. “I would never harm another living being. I write articles against animal cruelty. I volunteer at an animal shelter in L.A. I’m ashamed of what I wrote. I’d like to sayI didn’t write it, but I did. Or at least someone I used to be. I’ve changed.”
“People don’t change,” grunts Officer Howard.
“Yes, they
do
…people
do
change. I know…I’m one of them.”
“That’s what theyall say.”
“You’re testing me,” I mutter.
“I’m trying to find the truth.”
“The truth?” Alright, fuck it! “Jamie asked me to bite his neck the night before last.”
“Was it a sexual thing?”
“It was,” I reply, sitting straight and defiant, waiting for them to smirk and grin. “We had rough sex. He asked me to spank him and to bite him, and I did.”
They say nothing. I think about Jamie, alone in a frozen orange grove, left for dead. I think about whoever did this to him. I think about his parents, how theyleft him alone to die.
And I say, “If Jamie dies, I’ll never forgive myself…I begged him to let me go to work with him…I had a bad feeling…I didn’t want him by himself…” The tears roll down my face. “I shouldn’t have listened to him. I shouldn’t have let him be alone. If he dies, I don’t think I can live…I’ve loved him all my life…I’ll never love anyone else…”
It begins to dawn on them.
“Mr. Mattheis,” Howard asks, his voice shockinglygentle. “Do you still have the video that was sent to you?”
“It was horrible…it was evil…it was so evil…what they did…” Mystomach cramps again.
“Mr. Mattheis…”
“Yeah?” I replyweakly.
“You still have that video at your house?”
“Yeah…It’s at my house…in my VCR…I wanted to throw it away…break it…”
“You didn’t, did you?” asks Lord.
“No.”
“What about the package it came in?” “It’s there somewhere…I didn’t toss it.” “Good.”
It’s been three or four hours since Jamie was found, and the cops cannot find anything solid against me. The diaries are not even close to pertinent, nor are the statements given by Mom, Stace and the Asshole. The D.A. refuses to press anycharges. For a while, I’m terrified she’s going to charge me with possession, but once I tell her how I received the tape, and how shocked and horror-struck I was, and how Yvette behaved that night about it, I am released.
I’m not going home. I can’t possibly sleep until I see Jamie for myself, see if he’s alive…breathing…and I’m sure once I’ve seen him, once I see what they’ve done to him…I won’t be able to close myeyes anyway.
Officer Pete Bloom, Lloyd Tafford’s old partner, comes to them, having just heard about Jamie’s attack. He’s retired from the police, but he still likes to drive around in his civilian car at odd hours, looking for suspicious activities or characters. “I saw three people, walking down Solano right about where Jamie’s car was found. I recognized them, so I didn’t think anything of it, except…it was strange…how they were walking around at two in the morning.”
Theyask Yvette to come in and talk to them. She admits she sent the video, and that she got it from one Officer Steven Cantrell. She bribed him with sex, she says, and he gave it to her. “You have a bunch of them here at the station, Steve told me. Ever since theyfound the kid’s parents dead and all that.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” Lord bemoans. “Why would you deliberately send Mr. Mattheis a videotape of his boyfriend being raped and abused?”
Yvette shrugs nonchalantly. “I thought he should see what his boyfriend is…”
“And what is that?”
“Acocksucking little fag!”
Everycop within earshot is taken aback. “He was a little boy!”
It doesn’t phase her a bit.
“Are you involved in this beating, Mrs. Feldman?”
“No,” she responds flatly. “I’d like to throw ‘em a parade though.”
“So you know who theyare?”
“Maybe…”
“Whydon’t you tell us?”
“So you can punish
them
?” she jeers. “They did the world a favor! They exterminated a disgusting little insect! I’m only sorry theydidn’t kill Tam too, that overgrown, bleeding heart faggot!”
“Theydidn’t
kill
Mr. Pearce, Mrs. Feldman.”
“Too bad,” she shrugs arrogantly.
“But he may die…It sounds to us like you knew about this attack before it happened,” Howard snarls at her. “That makes you an accessory. We can charge you with conspiracy and depraved indifference. You could go awayfor quite some time.”
Yvette gasps and says, “Steve…he was going with them to do it.”
“With whom?” Lord asks.
She won’t saya word more, until she sees an attorney. They arrest her, for distribution of child porn.
They know something’s off. The station doesn’t keep items from cases on the property longer than five years or so. The child porn videos found in Jamie’s childhood home were either erased, destroyed, or warehoused somewhere off site.
“Tryagain, Steve,” snaps Officer Lord. “Where did you get the video?”
Veryclumsily, Cantrell states that he got it from his cousin in Davis. “He bought it off the guy’s parents back in ’87 or ’88. I found it and recognized him. Then I told Yvette about it. She wanted a copyso she could see for herself. I told her I got it from the station and that I couldn’t share it, but…I went ahead and gave it to her.”
“Did you participate in this beating?” theyask him.
“No…I was just out with them for drinks last night,” stammers Cantrell. “Then theystarted talking…”
“Who started talking?”
“Yvette…and her brother Ray…and her husband Benny…and some other people…theystarted talking reallyloudly…we were all wasted…they asked me to come along…they were going to find James and Tam…and just…razzthem a little…just for fun…I didn’t want to get involved…I’m an officer, after all.”
Not for long. Having nothing to prove he’s directly involved, depraved or indifferent to a violent crime, they fire Cantrell, then charge him, too, with distribution. It’s a paltry victory, but it still gives me a lift.
At my suggestion, the police locate the three dudes who bashed Jamie twice in high school. Guy number one now lives in Davis, works just a few blocks from the UC Medical Center. But he’s got an alibi. When they reach him on his cell, he’s at Pismo with the wife and kids, and has been there for almost a week. Guy number two was killed in some accident in Sacramento in 2002. Guynumber three now lives in Utah.
In the presence of their lawyers, Yvette and Cantrell backstab each other. She names him as one of the three who abducted Jamie. He names Benny. When she calls Cantrell a liar, he too names her as one of the three kidnappers. She emphatically denies it.
Then, Mrs. Cooke, the ladywho runs the bakeryon our main drag in Sommerville, calls in with a tip: Her very first customers upon opening her door at sixthe morning of the beating were Ray Battle, Steven Cantrell, and Lydia Rocha, a friend of both Stacyand Jamie, who, like Ray and many other “friends” of ours, is now living away from Sommerville but back in town for the holidays. The three came in, ordered some maple bars with chocolate milk, and talked in hushed tones about “Jamie.” Mrs. Cooke says she heard Lydia speak threateningly to Cantrell, and the words, “the little queer won’t be found until it’s waytoo late.”
It doesn’t take much effort to get Cantrell to rat Lydia out, as long as it’s understood that he “really didn’t want any part of this thing. I onlydrove,” he whines.
“Lydia’s been mad at them for years…And she’s been hot for Tam since high school,” Cantrell reveals. “She once had a crush on James, but it was brief, and then she liked Tam…she couldn’t believe they were spooning. She thought it was disgusting. She was the mastermind…she’s the one who wanted them dead… both of them…but when we got to James’s house, Tam had left, and it was onlyJames.
In the ER at County Hospital in Woodland, the docs insert a pleura-vac tube to siphon the blood out of mychest where myribs have punctured my left lung and caused it to collapse. When they realize I have internal injuries and their CT scanner is on the fritz, theyput me in a chopper and flyme to Sacramento, to U.C. Davis.
In the OR, they lay me on my side and stitch up my ruptured left kidney, then theyflip me over and stitch up the laceration along the right side of myhead, Bythe grace of God, the MRIs reveal no brain injuries or other internal trauma. Miraculously, my spleen wasn’t touched. They put my right arm and right hand back together and encase them in plaster. They ease the arm into a sling because mycollarbone is broken in half.
I’ve lost so much blood that they have to give me four or five units of PRBCs. I observe the chaos from up above, once again pivoting between the doors of life and death.
Mylungs are horrible, torn up and tired, theysay, and need a good rest, so they entubate me and let a ventilator do the hard work of getting oxygen into mytraumatized tissues.
Everynow and then Lloyd shows up, but he says little. Mostly, he’s like me, quietlywitnessing.
Tammy arrives at last, and when he tells the hospital staff I have no remaining blood or legal family on this earth, that I only have my emotional family in himself, Stacy and Peggy, they hand him my angel, thickly coated in a tacky mixture of mud and blood. He sobs quietly, his shoulders shaking.
Poor Tammy…I wish I could talk to him, tell him that I’m alright, in some peculiar, quiet way. I look awful lying there, a snarled plethora of tubes running through every orifice, my right eye so black I look like a pirate, the slits in myhead and flank held together with ugly black nylon and silver stitches. He cries and cries. I want to go to him, but I can’t move. I can’t speak, can’t let him know I’m alright.
Stacy comes in, finds Tammy sitting there with me. “I’m so sorry, Tammy,” she weeps. “Please forgive me…”
“Why’d you change your mind?” he asks her coldly, not taking his eyes from me. “You saw me ‘drag’ him out of The End. I was the last one with him, so I
had
to have done this, right?
“The wayyou’ve been acting…you can’t fake that…I know you didn’t do this…”
“No…I didn’t,” he says, his voice splintered.
“How you holding up?”
“I’m not,” he sobs coarsely.
“I’m sorry…I’m sorryI accused you…”
“I wasn’t the last one with him,” Tammy sputters. “They were…whoever theyare…”
“It’s going to be alright, Tammy,” Stacysays.
“Not if he dies,” Tammyshakes his head. “I can’t…I won’t be able to live without him…I can’t…” Peggycomes in a few minutes later. Stacypulls a picture from her wallet.
It’s me, sitting in front of the Christmas tree at work. Stacy took it a day or so before Peggy came in with her fractured pelvis. “Isn’t he sweet,” Peg exclaims.
Tammytakes the photo and holds it for a long time.
“He looks lonely there, doesn’t he?” asks Stacy, watching