Simple (18 page)

“Commander, do you suspect me?”

“We don't think like that. We just cross the t's and dot the i's. We simply gather all the pertinent information at this stage. We're almost done here. Just one more question. Did you know Cassie Price was missing from work on Friday?”

“I didn't. I didn't notice. A hundred employees may not be big, but it's not small either. There are plenty of people I don't see on any one day and several I hardly know.”

“I understand. I thank you for your time. I'm sorry I had to ask questions that upset you.”

Christie doesn't dislike Connolly. In fact he identifies with him in some way that he can't quite explain in spite of the differences in looks, wealth, and experience. And the fact that Connolly probably lied.

As he gets into his car, he feels sorry Connolly no doubt dislikes him. He could imagine being friends across the money divide. He pulls out of the driveway and in his mind he is already home, having the bourbon he's been craving for the last hour, saying, “Hot day. Blistering,” as Marina searches his face for answers.

*   *   *

HE FLICKS ON THE TV
looking for replays of the Thursday night game. He finds enough other games in other cities to keep him watching. The pace of this contemporary world suits him—how strange to think that not so long ago if a person was not
at
a football game, that person saw nothing of it. Even with early TV you had to live in the vicinity of a team to actually see the game. Now you can live anywhere, you can see anything anytime if you have the money to pay for it. You could follow a team from Burma if you wanted to.

Dish vs. FiOS vs. cable. He loves it all, comparing, arguing.

At first she laughed. She said, “Where … why are you wearing that—” She didn't have a name for it.

“I was working,” he said. “Pulling plaster. Ugly job.”

And for a moment she paused, wanting to believe.

He had a long story made up in case she seemed different, in case she looked like a calm and logical woman, in case he was going to give her another chance. He watched a thought—a glimmer of the truth—cross her face.

“You can't expect this to go on,” he said.

“What did you do?” she asked. But she was scared by then. “Who did you talk to?” Then she turned determined/flirty—that cute look she got. “You don't understand. I'm not afraid.”

They wanted it done. They wanted
her
done and over with.

Shake it off. Don't think. Learn a new scenario until it becomes real.

He feels his stomach turning upside down again and so concentrates on the game. Games. The 49ers and the Broncos. The Vikings and the Colts. Airs out his secret wish that the Bengals will climb up out of their hole. Focuses on the games. Listens to the announcers saying what he already knows: skill, coaching, yeah, yeah, all have to be there, but swagger, confidence, that's the magic ingredient. It comes down to a head game most of the time—who dominates. Preparation, blah, blah, blah, and then the exercise of will.

He carried a crowbar, hidden of course, stuffed in his belt. In case he needed it. The other guy they wanted … it came down to trust … he couldn't trust anybody with it.

His heart jumps in his chest and feels as if it wants to be freed from inside him. His stomach turns again. He leaves the TV for a ginger ale. In his kitchen drawer, under some sample vitamins and other shit, he finds a bottle of generic acid reducer, ranitidine, and pops two.

Justifiable homicide: You are in danger and so you act quickly to defend yourself. Or your child is in danger. Or your property, therefore your life as you know it; your state, your country. He
felt
the danger. He understood it. They all did. It was visceral. It was destruction tromping toward them.

Ah. Think of nothing. Watch the game. And eventually get something into the stomach.

SIX

MONDAY, AUGUST 17

THE NEXT MORNING,
the clank of metal again, and Cal is once more called to the interview room.

Someone whistles. “Mr. Popular.” Is it Levon's voice? And even though he can't hear very well, he's pretty sure somebody laughs, saying something like, “Ever notice how much nicer they are to the murderers?”

Cal shuffles into the interview room, hoping it's his mother or the two detectives from Saturday.

A woman stands. He does not know her.

She nods for him to sit down. “Cal? I'm Dr. Beni. I'm with the behavioral unit. I'm here to see how you are and to do some record keeping on you.”

He sits. What's the trick? What do they want him to say now?

“It's important to be relaxed and to simply answer my questions. The aim here is to be honest. Totally honest. I can help you best if you are.”

About maybe fifty or so, this woman has a lined worried face and a small square body. Dr. Beni. She wears a jacket and skirt, nylons and flat worn shoes.

“Is this about making me confess?”

“No. This is about assessing your mental readiness to stand trial. I need to ask you a few simple questions. Try to relax, take a breath.”

He tries.

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Monday.”

“The date?”

“Sixteenth.”

“Sure?”

“Seventeenth.”

“Of what month?”

“August.”

“Good. Did you have breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why you are in here?”

“They think I killed Cassie Price.”

She paused, then wrote something down. “Do you understand why they think so?”

He worked to formulate his answer, what he had thought about as he lay on his cot. “Because I've always been different, because I used to have blackouts.”

“I see. Could I back up for just a moment? When they took you in, did you understand why they were questioning you?”

“Because I found the body.”

“Did you understand why they took you into custody?”

“They didn't have anybody else. Somebody broke in. They thought it was me.”

“Was it?”

“No. Not unless I had a blackout and went nuts.”

“Do you think you did?”

He couldn't answer at first. He shook his head. Then he said no, but his voice came out breathy and ragged.

“Why don't you think you did?'

“Because I don't remember.”

“Could it have been a blackout?”

“No. Yes, I guess it could have been. But I had no … I always got along with her. I never got angry with her, so why would I … They told me it was my gloves that did it. I keep trying to imagine it and I can't.”

“I read something in your records about a confession.”

He has to nod yes. “I didn't know what else to say.” He notices his hands are shaking.

“Can you explain?”

He tries to explain how tired he was, how the gloves being his and his own mother looking at him like he did it just all came at him and he allowed himself to think he must have done this awful thing in a blackout.

Under the worried lines of her face, Dr. Beni seems kind. Maybe it's a trick. Is he being dumb to trust her when they all just want him to say yes and to explain how he did it?

“Did they read you your rights?” she asks. “Mirandas go like this”—and she recites the whole thing, just the way they do it on TV.

“Yes.”

“Do you understand your rights?”

“I guess so.”

“So which part of it is why you're here?”

“Because of the glove.”

“No. Not exactly. From the Miranda rights…”

He thinks. “‘Anything you say may be used…' That part.”

“Yes.”

“I have a whole series of questions I have to ask. Just relax. They can be kind of interesting.”

Relax. It's not possible. His hands still shake. Now his knees, too.

“Here's an example. It's just a game of imagine. If you were trying to sleep and a dog was barking so long and so hard that it was driving you crazy, what would you do?”

“Put a pillow on my good ear.”

“Would you get up, say anything to the dog or its owner?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't like that kind of thing.”

“What kind?”

“People being angry.”

“If somebody shoved you a couple of times and slammed you into a wall, what would you do to defend yourself?”

“Is this because—um?”

“What?”

“Because of what happened to me?”

“I'm not sure I understand. Here? Are you saying something like that happened here?”

“No. Before.”

“Would you like to tell me about that? We can come back to the questions at any time.”

And so he tells once more about the three who were at him all the time in grade school, so bad he didn't want to go to school. He tells how he tried to make friends with them because his mother said kindness was better. The three boys didn't want kindness. They called his grandmother his nigger mother. Nothing he said got through to them. It didn't matter what he said to them, they kept making up his life. They kept wanting him to fight, but he knew he had no chance against three of them. They knew, too, there was nothing he could do. He can still see their faces, how excited they were, and scared. They tried to kill him. And came near to doing it. He went to the hospital for a year. They went back to school and nothing at all happened to them.

“Where was this?”

“East Liberty.”

“Did you see them again?”

“No. My mother changed my school.”

“Never?”

“Well, I saw two from a distance once, but they walked away.”

“The new school—it was better?”

“Better, but I had blackouts. And a seizure. And my one ear never healed. I'm deaf in one ear. So I wasn't Mr. Popular.”

Mr. Popular.
Another joke, another taunt.

“What was your life like lately, these last years—before coming here?”

“Good. Nice. I have my own house. I like working on houses. I'm getting good at it, too. I like it way better than working for someone else.”

“What is it you like about being on your own?”

“I don't get nervous. I tell the customers what I'm going to do, how much it will cost, and I do it. I keep my word and they like that.”

“I'll bet.”

He keeps thinking they're finished the way she caps her pen as if she's about to pack up. She uncaps it again.

“I see that your mother visited you. Are you close to her?”

“Yes.” He thinks. “Yes.”

“Where's your father?”

“Dead.”

“Tell me about him.”

“I never knew him. I saw pictures. That's all.”

“Did you ever try to find him?”

He laughs. “No.”

“Why do you laugh?”

“He died when I was like two or three.”

“Oh. How did he die?”

“He was an alcoholic.”

“Did he have an accident or … get a disease?”

“My mother said pretty much everything in his body stopped.” His mother had told him when he was old enough to understand that his father had been a quiet man, not violent or anything, but a man who was so full of sorrow he was killing himself every day. She said it was as bad as if he stabbed himself repeatedly. He took all her money for drink. She couldn't watch it, and she couldn't keep supporting it, so she made him leave.

Dr. Beni is watching him, so he adds, “They were separated at the time.”

“Do you remember him at all?”

“No. Sometimes I think I do, but I probably just remember things my mother said.”

“Angry things?”

“No. No, she didn't get angry. She said he was … lovely. She meant as a person. In other ways. She still loved him.”

“I see. Were there other adults in your life when you were growing up?”

He tells in stops and starts about his grandmother, who cared for him a lot of the time, and then he adds the thing about being a quadroon.

The lines of her face soften. “Me, too,” she says. “There are so many of us around and people don't know.”

Then something in her expression … she doesn't look like his grandmother or mother, but she reminds him of these women in his life all the same.

*   *   *

“SQUAD MEETING AT
one,” Coleson tells McGranahan.

“Why so late?”

“Waiting for the labs. We're supposed to review the tapes of the confession before we go in.”

“Commander is just exercising muscle. It'll go our way eventually. I think.”

“What do you mean, you
think
?”

“I woke up with doubts. Probably dreamt something.”

Coleson stares at him. “Shit. If you start getting wobbly on me—”

“Well, we did stop looking fairly early on.”

“We were logical.”

“I know. It'll be okay.”

What they have found and will have to report is that nine co-workers, all men, drive black cars to work. But Cal Hathaway has a dark blue Hyundai that could easily have been mistaken for black, though why he needed to drive a block to commit the crime is not totally clear. If he drove because he felt he could be more hidden, that makes it a very premeditated crime. They hadn't been thinking of him that way.

McGranahan paces. “What would energize Cal Hathaway to do the murder in the middle of the night? Hands around her neck?
Gloves on.
That's the part that bugs me. If he just went there, woke her up, tried to get it on with her, okay. She said no, he got angry. Or maybe he went there earlier, they had a kind of date. Hung out. Then they had an argument. But why would he put on his work gloves in the middle of the night?”

“Something needed fixing in the house?”

McGranahan looks skeptical.