The Whole Truth (13 page)

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It's here," she said, patting a transcript of his interview with the detectives. "I read it."

"That's not how it was."

"No? How was it, Ray?"

"Sharecroppers. My folks were sharecroppers in Alabama. Near Mobile? We raised cotton." He lifted his hands to show her his palms. "Still calloused, from pickin', all the years I was little. We'd be out in the fields from sunup to night. That's why I never went to school. My parents always made me work beside them in the fields. We needed the money, otherwise they'd never have done that to me. You might think that they were terrible parents for working me like that, but they were great and we had a real good time together. My mom was a great cook and my dad was the strongest man in the county, maybe in the whole state. He made a lot of money, but we never got rich, because he always gave it away to other sharecroppers for their families, so they wouldn't go hungry and their kids'd have shoes to wear in the wintertime.

"My mom always complained when he gave everything we made away, but she didn't mean it, and I could tell, because she was always cooking for other people, taking them sweet potato pies and ham steaks and biscuits, like that.

"They're dead now, my mom and dad, but they were wonderful people."

His public defender sat staring at him.

"Were there any barbers in your family?"

"Nah, I just told them that because I don't like them. My folks were sharecroppers, like I'm telling you."

The lawyer took it hook, line, and sinker until she reported it back to her boss, who looked at her incredulously, and said, "Philanthropic sharecroppers?"

When a young assistant state's attorney came to the jail to interview Ray in the watchful presence of his public defender, the young prosecutor started it all out by saying, "So which is it, Ray? Son of a barber? Son of a sharecropper? Son of Sam?"

"Hey!" objected the public defender.

"All right," the suspect said, as if capitulating to the inevitable. He cast a sly smile toward his own lawyer, whom he had fooled so easily. "Okay, I'm just screwing with you guys. I'm tired of this. I'll tell you how it really was, but then you got to leave me alone about my life. I mean, all that's over, and I don't want to have to talk about it all the time. What I told the detectives and what I told you"—he shot another sly look toward his lawyer, who stared impassively back at him—"was kind of both true. My dad was a doctor."

Ray laughed, so that his teeth showed. They looked more like baby teeth than adult ones, his public defender thought. If he had ever used the toothpaste the cops found among his belongings, she didn't see any evidence of it.

"He was a surgeon, like what barbers used to be. So that wasn't so far-fetched, was it? And he was like a gentleman farmer, too." His sly grin appeared again. "That's where I got the sharecropper. But the truth is, we raised horses, mostly, but there was a few pastures of hay to feed them. You could say that's related to sharecropping, right? And my dad really was a great man, like I said. He saved all kinds of kids' lives. He was a bone doctor, what do you call it?"

"Orthopedic surgeon, Ray," said the assistant prosecutor, with heavy sarcasm.

'Yeah, that. He fixed their bones and birth defects, and stuff."

"And your mother," said the prosecutor, in the same sarcastic tone, "she was a great cook, no doubt. A Pillsbury Bake-Off winner, maybe?"

"Well, if you're not going to believe me," Ray said, looking offended, "I'm not going to tell you anything else."

"Come on, Ray," said the prosecutor. "Tell me another story."

"Where'd you come from, Ray?" they all asked him.

He had other stories, too, to "explain" himself. He spun them out one by one, as each previous one got shot down or the detectives' patience wore thin. As each story grew more elaborate than the one before, they also seemed to move further away from anything resembling the truth.

4

Raymond

I feel my own patience wearing thin, so I put down the manuscript, and look at my watch: almost midnight, and I still don't know anything new, except that I've done a fair job on those four chapters, and I feel okay about them. Unfortunately, a good literary effort doesn't help the search effort. I get up and stretch, and go to my kitchen for a snack to see me through the next batch of pages. With a pot of smoked fish dip, a box of rice crackers, a knife, and a napkin, I return to my office to go through my notes.

Here's a sarcastic quote from Paul Flanck about Ray: "There was the My Father Was a Fireman story. Dad Was a Doctor Who Saved My Life One Time. That was a good one. Then we had, My Mother Was a Doctor and My Father Was a World-Famous History Professor. I kind of liked that one."

When she heard that, Robyn retorted, "No, the best one was, I Come from a Long Line of Attorneys. His great-grandfather was Clarence Darrow in that one, I believe, and the way he told it, you would have thought it was the god's honest truth."

But the truth is apparently what Ray is incapable of telling.

Each story sounds convincing for about the first five minutes of the telling, until it unravels over some obvious boner—like the number of Raymonds in his family. Then the detectives would say again, "Okay, one more time, Ray, whose little boy were you?" And their suspect would shrug and frown and appear to be trying really hard to remember something.

Robyn told me they thought they had a break when she telephoned Paul at home one night, woke him up, and asked him, "Paul? What kind of kid makes up stories about hero dads?"

"What?" And then the sleepy detective got it. "Adopted kids?"

"Yeah. Or kids whose dads have died."

"And kids who hate their dads—"

"I think so. They fantasize about how they're really adopted and their real dad is, like, an astronaut."

"A rich astronaut."

"A rich, handsome, football hero astronaut."

"A rich, handsome, football hero astronaut who is desperately searching for the son who got away by mistake."

"So, Robyn, are we looking for a Raymond Raintree who was adopted about twenty-eight years ago?"

Maybe they were, they agreed, but it was damn little to go on. For one thing, they didn't even know if that was his real name. Or exactly how old he was. And they sure didn't have a clue as to where he'd been born. By the time they hung up their telephones, they were both feeling as discouraged and frustrated as they were before Robyn got her bright idea to begin with.

According to my notes, it was about that time when Ray stopped spinning his tall tales. They kept asking him the same questions, but now he shrugged his skinny shoulders and said with a martyred air, "Nobody believes anything I say, so I'm not even going to try to tell you anything anymore." This was before he stopped talking entirely; at this juncture the only thing he refused to utter was any more stories.

"I think somebody insulted him," Robyn surmised at the time.

Paul disagreed. "Nah, I think he got bored."

"Maybe." For once, Robyn had conceded a point to her partner. "If we aren't going to believe him, maybe it's not fun anymore."

I was there, to see Paul roll his eyes. "And don't we just live to entertain Ray Raintree?"

"One of the problems with the situation involving Raymond," Robyn Anschutz admitted, and I wrote down, "was that sometimes it seemed so absurd that we had a hard time remembering how serious it was, too."

My own eyes are gritty with fatigue, but I think of the searchers who are a lot more weary than I am, and then I think of children all over Florida who will not be safe until Ray is captured.

I pick up my notes again, and read:

What they couldn't get out of their suspect, they attempted to dig out of his meager belongings.

"The contents of those backpacks were intriguing," Robyn said, "but they didn't tell us a thing about who he really was, or where he came from."

The detective wasn't particularly surprised to find the comic books.

"Superheroes," she scoffed. "Typical. These guys, these killers, they have this inflated idea about themselves. I've talked to psychiatrists about it. They call it 'inflation,' it's like blowing a limp balloon full of hot air. These guys—their egos—are limp balloons. Sometimes their peckers are, too, and they can get it up by acting out against weaker people. Low self-esteem doesn't even begin to describe it." She warmed to her theme. "And the way they see other people, that fits a comic book, too. We're not real or three-dimensional to them, we're just these pictures they think they can move around, stomp on, do anything they please."

You're so right, Robyn, I thought. I wouldn't be able to use that ¦wonderful pecker quote for my book, but I could use the rest of it. From Robyn's own reading on the subject, she knew it was unfortunately true that psychopaths—if that's what their suspect was—didn't model themselves on the sterling virtues of comic book superheroes. It was only the power they craved. Psychologists might say it was a power over other people, because sociopaths/psychopaths lack any real power over their own wills, having wholly surrendered to sick compulsions.

I set those notes aside and pick up another pile.

The medicine the detectives found in one backpack had troubled them.

If Ray had been stealing other people's medicine and swallowing it indiscriminately, his lawyers might have a stab at some kind of effective defense, if they could demonstrate diminished capacity.

"He was a regular little pharmacist," Paul Flanck had told me. "There were a lot of over-the-counter pills, like cold medicine, the sort of stuff everybody has in their medicine cabinets, even on a boat. He had NyQuil, Sudafed, Robitussin, zinc lozenges, ibupro-fen, you name it. But he also had prescription medicine for high blood pressure and asthma. We found antibiotics and vitamins, there were suppositories and inhalants. Stem to stern. We figured the guy ¦was a galloping hypochondriac. If he wasn't sick before he took all that stuff, he would be if he mixed them up."

They were glad of one thing: The only steroids they found were cortisteroid pills used to treat asthma and allergies.

"At least," Robyn said before the trial, "his lawyers couldn't claim a defense of steroid rage."

They asked Ray, "Why all the pills?"

He had stories for that, too.

"I collect them and give them to poor people," was Robyn's favorite.

Her partner preferred: "People take too much medicine. I'm just helping them clean out their systems."

One day, Paul asked him, "All that medicine you like to take, Ray, which one is the bullshit pill?"

How could Paul have known that this one sarcastic statement—out of all the others uttered by the frustrated cops and lawyers—would so offend the suspect that he would stop talking altogether?

But that was the beginning of Ray's long silence, a campaign he waged for many weeks, against a system that had finally stopped believing his lies. The problem was that without his lies, they didn't have anything, except the bare fact of his part-time employment at a water taxi company and the meager contents of three backpacks.

Immediately after Ray's arrest, the detectives interviewed Donor Miller again, as well as other employees of Checker Crab. I turn next to those notes. Some of my "notes" are copies of the cop's actual interviews and their arrest records. Some are just their best memories of who said what to whom. It turned out that the other employees—mainly young men and women—stayed away from Ray, considering him to be a freak. So they had nothing to contribute to the investigation, except that they hated it when Ray took out a boat for any reason, or slept on one, because he left messes behind him: food wrappers, unflushed "heads," water left running from taps, grimy handprints on pristine fiberglass, and footprints on clean canvas, not to mention cigarette butts and ashes.

"He didn't actually grind out the cigarettes on the decks of the boats," one of the girls said, referring to those boats whose owners rented dock space there. "But he'd smoke on boats where the owners told us not to, and he was real careless about where he flicked his ashes. I heard Mr. Miller yell at him a lot of times about that."

"Why did you put up with him?" Paul and Robyn asked Miller before he disappeared.

"Hell, I got a soft heart."

"Yeah, and you never personally had to clean up after him, right?" retorted Paul Flanck. "Not with other employees to do it."

"Listen, he's a worm, but even a worm's gotta live, is how I look at it."

"You're all heart, Donor."

"Like I said."

They asked how long Ray Raintree had lived and worked in the boatyard.

"Year and a half, maybe two."

That's what the other employees confirmed, although none of them had actually been employed at Checker for as long as that themselves.

"Where'd he say he came from?" the cops asked. "What did he tell you about himself when he showed up here?"

"He said he needed work and a place to bed down," Miller answered. "I told him I couldn't pay him nothin', but he could work for a bunk."

"You're all heart, truly."

"Hey! I gave him money to eat, too. You don't see him starving to death, do you?"

Once they had interviewed everybody at Checker Crab, the detectives had no place else to go.

"Dead end," said Paul.

"I think he spontaneously generated out of thin air," said Robyn. "Like on X-Files. He looks like something from that show. Maybe he can turn his skin inside out, or set people on fire without touching then, or maybe he's actually some kind of alien insect, or a slug, or something."

"It's too bad aliens didn't abduct him," her partner joked.

On that, the partners were agreed: It appeared that the earth would be a better place without Raymond Raintree on it.

All of that is in my notes, ready to transform into a chapter.

On my desk, volume nine of the Encyclopedia Britannica still lies open to pages 452 and 453, where I have been researching the pineal gland. From the encyclopedia, I have learned what the Howard County chief medical examiner didn't bother to mention, which is that in lower vertebrates the pineal has a structure like an eye, and that it's a light receptor. Human eyes are thought to have evolved from it. Upon reading that, I wondered if it could possibly have anything to do with why Ray had amputated the child's pineal gland. It sounds to me as if the pineal gland—also known as the pineal body, or the epiphysis cerebri—might also be the source of the metaphysical concept of the so-called third eye, which in some spiritual traditions is believed to "open" upon the advent of enlightenment. A spiritual adept whose third eye has opened is said to be the recipient of a pouring in of phenomenal intuitive abilities, of ageless wisdom, and even supernatural powers.