The Prison Inside Me

by Gilbert Brown

  “Heather,” Szysmanski said very kindly, “you have a nice day. See you in jail.”

  Heather turned to her computer, called up the city telephone directory, found George Nichols on 2456 Andrews, hit the “call” icon, and picked up her desk phone as the ring began.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Mrs. George Nichols?”

  “This is Mrs. Nichols.”

  “Thank you. My name is Heather Thompson. I am a reporter for the Herald. Please accept the Herald’s deepest condolences on the death of your husband. Mrs. Nichols, I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “What kind of questions?” Susan answered in a tone so hostile that its coldness took Heather aback. Heather wondered what she was afraid of.

  “Nothing very complicated,” she answered rather softly, “just some details of his age, how long you’ve lived in Trout Lake, anything else you think you’d like to see in the short item for tomorrow’s edition.”

  “OK, go ahead.”

  “How old was Mr. Nichols?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “He ran the summer camp up at the lake, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long had he had that camp?”

  “Almost thirty years.”

  “How long have you lived in Trout Lake?”

  “Almost thirty-five years.”

  “Is there anything else you’d like to see in the article to inform your friends, neighbors, and professional acquaintances?”

  “No, that would be more than enough.”

  “Mrs. Nichols,” continued Heather, “we publish very wonderful and consoling obituaries in almost every edition. The Herald has highly skilled, special writers who can help you compose a fitting obituary for your husband. May I have that department give you a call to assist you with this?”

  A long pause followed. Finally, Susan answered, “No, thank you, that won’t be necessary. If we decide to publish an obituary for George, I’ll call the paper. Thank you. Good morning.” She hung up.

  Heather looked at the now-silent phone in her hand. Strange, she thought, one day away from her husband killing himself, and she is as cold as ice. What kind of questions? What was she thinking? Did she think I was about to start an investigation of why he killed himself? What did he do?

  Heather reached for her cell phone again and called Szysmanski.

  “What now, Heather?” he answered. “Haven’t you anything better to do than tie up my phone?”

  “Siz,” Heather said in a puzzled voice, “I just spoke to Mrs. Nichols. Is she all right? She first sounded afraid that I would ask questions she didn’t want to answer. Then she answered some simple things about his age and how long they’ve lived in Trout Lake with a tone that was cold as ice. Does she know that her husband is dead? I don’t think so. There’s something wrong here, and it’s not just my reporter’s limited intuition after only a couple of years on the job. What is it, or is it me?”

  Szysmanski hesitated a moment. He liked this young girl trying to get started in the newspaper business. He, too, thought the whole deal was strange, but was he about to exchange trade secrets with this novice?

  “Look, Heather,” he said, “death brings out all kinds of strange emotions from people. When you’ve been around for a while and dealt with more of these situations, you’ll see the full gamut of human response. Each one may be different, each one like ‘I wouldn’t do it that way.’ This is just another one, a suicide, sudden, quick, no lingering illness to wind down. Take it for what it is, forget it, write your story, and go on. It’s the way things are.”

  “Siz, it still stinks. She sounded like she lost a pet dog—in fact, like someone else’s pet dog. Or maybe like she was the one who killed the dog!”

  A smile crossed Szysmanski’s face. Is this kid reading my mind? “OK, Heather, thanks for calling and sharing ideas. Now be a good girl and get your story written. See you soon.”

  Heather turned to her keyboard and began, “Mr. George Nichols, age sixty-four, former owner of The Recovery Camp on Trout Lake, committed suicide late Tuesday night with a gunshot wound to his head at his home at 2456 Andrews. Nichols had lived in Trout Lake for thirty-five years…” When she finished, she transmitted it to the city desk, where her e-mail address was added to the bottom. The city editor made no changes and forwarded the article to layout, indicating “Page 2 or nearby in editions of Thursday.”

  When Heather arrived at work Thursday, she picked up a copy of the edition to see if any of her other submissions had been approved and found their way into print. Without being asked by the city editor, she had taken some time to write about a thousand words on the Jay Street random shooting, hoping that this two-week-old story still had “legs” that would interest the Herald readership. She found nothing but the one hundred words on the Nichols suicide.

  She booted up her computer. It began to flash with notices of arriving e-mail messages. She saw that the first one was from an unrecognized sender, gsscott@lasso.com. She opened it and read:

  My name is Glenn Scott. I live nearby and subscribe to the Herald. I read your article about Mr. Nichols’s suicide. I cannot tell you how happy I am to read your article. I was a camper at Recovery when I was nine. I had a lot of learning problems. My parents sent me to the camp to get the skills I needed to do well in school. Mr. Nichols touched me all over and took pictures of me in the nude. I was invited to take late-night tutoring lessons with him in his office. He gave me lots of good things to eat and then would touch me all over. I am so ashamed at what I did. Now that he is dead, I want to tell the whole world what a bastard he was and how he ruined my life. I hope he burns in hell!

  Heather stared at her screen. She looked at the time display at the bottom. It was 8:38 a.m. She looked up at the time of the Scott e-mail: 6:47 a.m. The delivery person could only have delivered this edition at about 6:30 a.m. Distribution tried to get it to the delivery points by 6:00 a.m. She scanned the other e-mails in her inbox but was able to recognize all the other senders as reporters, friends, and the usual advertisements.

  She called up the city telephone directory. No Glenn Scott appeared. He must live in some suburb—no, not across the state, since the edition is only distributed locally after six thirty. Oh, my God, she remembered, we have an electronic edition that has been out since two in the morning. This Scott could be anywhere. She picked up her phone, looked at the internal telephone sheet attached to it, and dialed the four digits of the circulation department. I’ll find him either through local circulation or subscription to the e-edition. The phone rang twice, and the recorded voice answered. “If you failed to receive your paper, or if you received a wet paper, please press one. For all other matters, the circulation department opens at nine in the morning. Please call then.” She looked at her screen again. It was 8:42 p.m.

  She called across the room to the city editor. “Fred, I think you want to see this.”

  At police headquarters, at about 8:45 a.m., the desk sergeant rang Szysmanski’s line. “Siz, I think this call is for you, if you are handling the Nichols suicide.”

  A voice came on. “Who is this, please?”

  “I am Detective Robert Szysmanski of the Trout Lake Police Department. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Never mind,” the somewhat elderly voice answered, “who I am is not important, and I don’t want any police people coming around my house.”

  Szysmanski smiled, knowing that the caller’s telephone number and location were already in the police computer. “No problem, sir. What can I do for you?”

  “I just read in the Herald that this guy, George Nichols, killed himself. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir, just as you read it; it is a suicide. Is there something you want to tell me about that?”

  “Yeah, I’m an old man with cancer, not too much time left, but this has bee
n burning inside me for thirty years. My kid, never mind his name, was having trouble at school, gettin’ bad grades, makin’ trouble. I saw a social worker lady, and she told me to send him for special tutoring on the weekends to this camp up on the lake, and then I put him there when I couldn’t afford it for the summer, too. Yeah, he did better, but he came home with stories about this Nichols guy touchin’ him you-know-where, givin’ him lots of candy and cookies, even takin’ pictures of him in the nothin’-at-all. I told my boy that he was lyin’ just to get out of the work; no grown man who’s a good teacher does a thing like that to a nine-year-old. When my boy saw how angry I was, he started to cry. I thought he was ashamed that he lied to me, but now he’s a grown man, and I’m dyin’, and he asks me why I didn’t believe him. He ruined my kid, and he ruined me, too. I hope someone killed the son of a bitch ’cause I sure would have liked to do it.”

  “Sir,” Szysmanski interrupted, “why don’t you give me your name, and let me come out and talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “You keep away from here, y’hear? I don’t want nothin’ to do with cops. The bastard is dead. I don’t need no more than that!”

  “Sir, maybe I can talk to your son. That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

  “No way. You leave my kid alone. He’s had enough trouble in his life without you addin’ to it. Leave him alone, y’hear?”

  “Sir, the Trout Lake Police Department is here to help you and everyone else. I am sure that others need our help, too. We need more information. Just a telephone call without knowing who is calling is not enough for us to do anything. Please give me your name and your son’s. Together we can make sure that whatever is coming to Mr. Nichols, and to you, will be done. Please let me help you.”

  “I’ll talk to my boy and call you back.” The line went dead.

  Szysmanski looked at the dead phone for an instant. He pressed the disconnect key and punched in four numbers. The voice answered, “Donna Baker, records department, how may I help you?”

  “Donna, Siz here. I need a hand on this Nichols suicide that you may just be entering in records. Do me a favor and see if we have a prior sheet on him. If we don’t, can you get some recent bio and find out where he lived before he moved here thirty-five years ago? Maybe there’s a prior item on him somewhere else. No, I don’t know where he lived, but if you do a search, I’m sure you’ll find a bio. He was a successful camp operator on the lake and helped lots of kids with academic problems. Thanks, and if you get something, you can call me or send me an internal e-mail.”

  The detective listened for a moment. “Yeah, this is a rush job. If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have called you tomorrow. Yeah, I love you too, even when you don’t bring me coffee.”

  The city editor looked over Heather’s shoulder at the screen. He picked up the phone on Heather’s desk and punched in four digits. Heather heard him say, “Ben, I’m here in the city room with one of our new, bright stars, Heather Thompson. (Heather knew he was talking to Ben Trout, the owner and publisher of the Herald.) Maybe you saw the blurb on page two of this morning’s edition about the suicide of a guy named George Nichols that happened Tuesday night after we went to press. Anyway, Heather has an e-mail from a Glenn Scott, some kind of subscriber we can’t identify until circulation opens at nine, accusing Nichols of molesting him when he was a kid. Yes, of course, we will run this down. But in the meantime, how do want us to proceed?”

  Heather stared at Fred as he listened intently, making notes on a pad on her desk that she couldn’t read because his hand was in the way and interrupting every few minutes to say, “Yes, sir, I got that.” He finally terminated with, “We’ll get that done right away.”

  The city editor turned to Heather after he hung up the phone. “He wants us to relay this to the police immediately. We have an accusation of a felony, and we are required by law to inform the authorities. He says we can’t publish any of this for fear of legal action until we get some kind of statement from a third party to corroborate the accusation and to whom we can attribute the information. Remember, this Scott may not even exist or may have some other grudge against Nichols. The best ‘third party’ would be the police, although maybe his family would also be acceptable. Do two things: Call Mrs. Nichols again and say you wish to speak to her about anything that would get her to meet with you. Then, get circulation on the line at nine—no, in fact, go down there and get the information about Glenn Scott, if he exists at all. Send this e-mail to my machine and then forward it to the cops. On second thought, I can do that, but you have better contact with Szysmanski. You give him a call and lay the thing out for him, maybe after you have ID’d Scott with circulation. OK, let’s get to it. Oh, yes, I almost forgot, one more thing. Check our files to see if we have a prior on Nichols. And then find out where he was before he moved to Trout Lake, and check felony files in that state for some prior record. Didn’t he go to Demotte State College next door? Maybe he lived there.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Szysmanski said in a half whisper. He was looking at the coroner’s report of the Nichols suicide just given to him by Harry Dawes, the chief of the Detective Bureau. He read the short passage silently to himself several times before he looked up at Dawes.

  “…cause of death is a gunshot wound to the head entry about one and one half inches above right temple; location, size, and shape of the wound, stippling and smoke residue, and edges are all consistent with a gunshot from a distance of six to nine inches with no intervening structure. Internal extensive damage and the recovered bullet are consistent with the firing of a 9-mm handgun. Projectile recovered from left side of mandible.”

  “Harry,” Szysmanski began, “we better get that projectile from the med examiner and match it to the Glock that’s in our lab. He couldn’t have held that weapon six inches from his head above his temple and fired it downward at an angle, unless it was deflected by his head bones into a downward path—not much chance of that. That bullet was fired by someone else, standing over him. Boss, we don’t have a suicide; we have a homicide.”

  Just then, another detective burst into Dawes’s office, where Szysmanski and Dawes were conversing. “Chief, open your computer and see the e-mail that the Herald just sent us. It’s from some guy named Scott or something accusing Nichols of molesting him when he was a kid.”

  Dawes turned to Szysmanski and asked, “Another one? To go along with your phone call? What have we got here?”

  “I don’t know,” Szysmanski answered, “but I’ll bet this is just the tip of some iceberg. Harry, we got enough here to get into the Nicholses’ house and see what else turns up. We gotta get his computer, wherever that is. His wife was very vague about it when I asked her. I can’t believe she doesn’t know where he keeps his computer, tablet, and cell phone. I think we got enough here to ask the DA’s office to get us a search warrant. The sooner the better, too. What do you think?”

  Dawes stood up, indicating that the interview was over. “Get a crew of four together, maybe including Brighton since he’s been in the house, and get ready to go. I’ll push this with the DA to get to the judge before noon to get the warrant. You can be in the house by one. And, oh, yes, take someone from the lab to dust around the desk and the den to see if any strange prints turn up that don’t belong to the house. Siz, are you following up to see if we have a prior on him?”

  When Szysmanski rang the Nicholses’ doorbell at 1:15 p.m. that afternoon, Susan looked surprised to see him and the group of men, some in police uniforms and others in street clothes with their badges hanging from their jacket pockets. “Mrs. Nichols, may we come in? This document is a search warrant issued by Judge Halloran authorizing us to search these premises, inside and out, to locate materials that may be used in clarifying the cause of your husband’s death. It would be most helpful to us, facilitate our work, and make much less of a mess of your home, if you could indicate where we can find some of the material w
e are seeking.”

  Susan looked at the warrant, whose wording she couldn’t understand. “Please wait outside until I call my lawyer.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we can’t do that. We are authorized under law to enter these premises and begin our work as of twelve forty-five in the afternoon. If you do not let us enter your home, I will place you under arrest for obstruction and have one of my men take you downtown to book you. You’ll be able to call your lawyer from there.”

  Susan looked panicked. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

  “No, ma’am, other than let us in right now. There is no objection if you wish to call your lawyer while we do our jobs.”

  Susan stood aside as the men entered. She went into the kitchen, followed by Brighton, who was motioned to do so by Szysmanski. She picked up the phone there and punched in a few numbers. Brighton heard her say, “I have to speak to Mr. Hubert right away. He’s where? Isn’t there anyone else who I can talk to? Of course it’s important! A bunch of police are here with a warrant to search my house for no good reason. I need help, so get someone. What am I paying you for? Yes, yes, call me right back!” She hung up the phone.

  Szysmanski was now in the kitchen with Brighton and Susan. “Mrs. Nichols, I don’t think you want us to make a mess of your house. Please help us. Please tell me where I can find your husband’s computer, tablet, and cell phone.”

  “They’re in the garage, in the trunk of my car, in his briefcase. Help yourself. What else are you looking for?”

  “Do you have a safe somewhere in the house? Are there any other firearms somewhere? My men have started up in your attic and will work down through your bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, cabinets, drawers, and so forth. But if you could help us with the location of the safe, open it for us, and let us see other weapons, we could be neater in our search.”

  “How long are you going to be here?”