“Lost causes. Terrible for the memory.”
“Apparently,” I said, out of snappy responses.
“Gotta go,” she said. “Now don’t forget.”
“Of course not,” I said.
I put the phone away, walked to my van, and got in. I stared out the windshield for a long minute, then started the engine. As I headed for German Village I tried to concentrate on Aaron Custer. But the whole way home, all I could think of was what if Anne hadn’t had an in-service thing? What if she’d shown up on the running path the next day to wait, and wait in vain?
Lunkhead run, indeed.
16
Mansfield Correctional Institution sits on a hill off a country road on the outskirts of the small city it’s named for, more or less halfway between Columbus and Cleveland. People sometimes confuse it with the old prison in Mansfield, where the movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed: a long-shuttered Victorian-era building whose gloomy, castle-like appearance makes you think a closer look might reveal Miss Havisham peering out an upstairs window. Just before 11:00 Wednesday morning I turned off the road and drove up toward the new prison, whose alternating brick colors gave it the appearance, appropriately enough, of stripes. I parked, went inside, surrendered my driver’s license, and signed in.
Fifteen minutes later I was led through a barred door that rolled open at the command of an officer in a glassed-in booth, then rolled back shut behind me with a menacing finality. I tamped down memories of my own time behind bars and focused on the job I had to do. Two minutes after that I was sitting in a room on one side of a bare wooden table, the only window a small square in the door. After another minute I heard footsteps and the door opened and then Aaron Custer was sitting across from me in dark pants and a beige shirt. He was shackled at the ankles and the wrists, with his wrists linked to a chain around his waist.
“Are those necessary?” I said to the guard who escorted him in and was now standing at attention by the door.
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve got thirty minutes. Any profanity or raised voices and the interview’s over. Any questions about prison security or discipline, interview’s over. Anything else I don’t like—”
“I got it,” I said.
Aaron was smaller than I’d expected, thin, with a shaved head, brown eyes, and a smooth face that made me wonder if, at age twenty-two, he’d started shaving yet. His shirt, with INMATE stenciled across the front, seemed big on him. He sat with his hands together, fingers intertwined, as though he were in church. Or pretending to be a judge. As I studied him I realized he looked familiar, as if I’d seen him before. Seen him in some other context than the mug shot run over and over again after his arrest. Tried to pinpoint what I was thinking. Realized after a moment I had to be imagining things. The Sandy Hook killer looked familiar too, after the two hundredth viewing of his picture.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said.
“Sure.”
“I’ve been talking to your grandmother.”
“I know.”
I decided to jump right in. “Eddie Miller. You believe him?”
“I guess.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I guess.”
“You think he was telling the truth?”
He blinked a couple times. Looked around the room as if he couldn’t recall why he was there.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t remember that night.”
“Do you remember setting the fire?”
He shook his head.
“Do you remember being at a party at the house? Earlier that night.”
“No.”
“Do you remember talking to anyone at the party?”
“No.”
“Tina Montgomery?”
He shook his head.
“But you know Tina, right?”
“Yeah. Went to school with her.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Just a friend.”
“People said you were arguing with her. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“Do you remember getting thrown out of the house?”
He shook his head again.
“Do you remember threatening to kill everyone?”
“I know they said I did.”
“But you don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Do you remember getting beat up, afterward?”
“No.”
I said nothing.
“I was drunk,” Aaron said, picking up on my frustration. “I don’t remember stuff when I drink.”
“Did you get drunk at the party?”
“No.”
“You didn’t drink at the party?”
“I didn’t get drunk there,” he said. “I got drunker. I guess. I don’t remember.”
“You came to the party drunk.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you come to the party drunk?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Because that’s what I did, before,” he said. “I drank.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the fact you can’t remember anything might mean you didn’t do it?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Why would it? Everything points to me. I’d set fires before, when I was drunk.”
“I talked to a girl named Chelsea Fowler. Do you know her?”
“No.”
“She said she heard you talking to Tina.”
“I said, I don’t know her.”
“She said that you said, ‘The boss is gonna take him out.’ Several times.”
For the first time, his eyes seemed to focus.
“She said that?”
“That’s right. Boss. That’s your nickname, right?”
“Was.”
“Was?”
“I’m like the opposite of a boss in here. Sounds stupid.”
“OK,” I said. “It used to be. You got it from your grandfather.”
“Yeah.”
“Take him out. That was Jacob?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you know Jacob.”
“I’d seen him around.”
“You know he sold pot?”
“I guess. Lots of people sell pot. Even here.”
The guard cleared his throat.
I said, “Why would you say you were going to take him out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“People think he might have been flirting with Tina, and that made you mad.”
“I told you, she wasn’t my girlfriend.”
“Did you want her to be your girlfriend? Ever?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“OK, yeah, I did. But that was a long time ago. In high school.”
“You stayed in touch.”
“A little. She was a friend.”
“Enough to come by a party she was at.”
“Maybe.”
“Enough to be jealous of another guy she’d been with? You wouldn’t be the first jealous drunk, in case you were wondering.”
“I guess.”
I looked at my watch, decided to move on. “Back to Miller. He say anything more about this witness?”
“Not really.”
“Anything,” I said.
He shifted a little in his chair. I heard the ankle shackles clink. “He said somebody saw what happened.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“Week before he died.”
“Where?”
“Recreation,” he said. “We were outside, in the yard. He just came up to me.”
“Did you know him?”
He shook his head. “He’d just gotten here.”
“OK,” I said. “Tell me exactly what he said. What his exact words were.”
“I told you,” he said. “He said somebody s
aw something.”
“That’s what he said? Or are you just kind of, you know, summarizing?”
He looked puzzled at this and seemed to be thinking hard. I was starting to get the impression that Aaron wasn’t all there. And it was giving me an even worse feeling about this case, if that were possible at this point. Repeated blackout drinking at a young age left the brain permanently rewired, and not in a good way. Even worse when a night of drinking was followed with a chaser of head slamming.
“He said, ‘I know a guy who knows you didn’t do it.’”
“That’s what he said? Those were his exact words?”
“Pretty close,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said.
“Your grandmother said he mentioned something about a Columbus Red Birds cap.”
“He said I was wearing it that night. Or, at least, the other guy said I was.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Could you have been?”
“Maybe.”
“Your grandmother said it was special to you. It was your grandfather’s. He used to take you to Clippers games.”
“Yeah.”
“So you could have been wearing it.”
He nodded.
“Do you still have it?”
“No.”
“You lost it?”
“It was in my apartment. After I was arrested. I don’t know what happened to it.”
I sat back. He looked at me, waiting for me to speak. The feeling came again, that I’d seen him someplace before. Someplace other than the news.
The guard cleared his throat. “Two minutes,” he said.
I looked at my watch. By my count he was ripping me off by at least a minute. But I really couldn’t see that it mattered.
I thought about the ground I hadn’t covered with Aaron. His parents’ divorce. Grandfather’s accident. Father’s suicide. The juvenile delinquency conviction for the trash bin fire. I considered that if police or firefighters investigating an unsolved fatal arson hired a psychiatrist and tasked him or her with developing a profile of the suspect, they could do worse, a lot worse, than describing the person sitting across the table from me.
I said, “What do you want to come out of this?”
“Out of what?”
“This situation. What you told your grandmother.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
He shrugged. I tried a few more questions, with the responses always the same. He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. He wasn’t sure.
He didn’t care.
“Time,” the guard said.
I said, “How about getting out? Being proven innocent? Does that mean anything to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Yes, I guess.”
“That’s it,” the guard said. “Stand up, Custer.”
“Are you innocent?” I said to Aaron. “Did you set that fire? Kill those people?”
“I said, that’s it,” the guard said.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “I really don’t know.”
As instructed, I stayed in my seat while the guard escorted Aaron out of the room. He didn’t look back at me as he shuffle-clinked down the hall. A minute later the guard returned and led me back toward the main lobby, silently standing beside me as the gate opened again at the signal from his colleague in the booth. I traded my visitor’s badge for my driver’s license and signed out.
Back at my van I picked up my phone, which I’d left on the seat, checked my messages, and saw the usual mess of electronic alerts. A breaking news update from Channel 7, Suzanne’s station, about an overturned vehicle on Interstate 270. A Facebook comment from my sister. A text from Anne with a reminder about tomorrow’s run, complete with a smiley face and a little cartoon image of a woman jogging.
In the middle of this jumble, a text message from a number I didn’t recognize.
Eric Jenkins. Guy at the party. A phone number followed.
I tried to think who this was. Then a follow-up buzzed its arrival.
Chelsea’s ex-boyfriend. Don’t tell her i gave you his number. LOL.
Chad, Chelsea’s current beau. I thought back to Sloopy’s Diner. Him taking my card. The look she’d given him when he’d brought up Eric’s name. But why would Chad care?
The answer came with the third text. I’m a criminal justice major. Cool what you do. Like Breaking Bad.
Not exactly, I texted back. But thanks.
17
Columbus has a thing for villages. More accurately, for neighborhoods called villages. German Village, where I live. Merion Village, around the corner from me. Hungarian Village, around the corner from Merion. Victorian Village, home to Pendergrass Research and the coroner’s office and majestic restored homes from an era you’ll just have to guess at. And Italian Village, northeast of downtown, with Fourth Street running right alongside it. Good luck trying to find a short line for meatballs in a cup at the annual Italian festival, though the wait is always worth it. Look on a map and you’ll see that the fastest way to drive to the Ohio State campus from my house is right up Fourth, one-way going north, cutting out all those stoplights and crosswalks on High Street. Almost a speedway if you catch it at the right time of day.
Look at the same map and you’ll see that working your way over from German Village to Front Street and driving up that side of downtown to campus makes no sense at all. Unless you’re out for a Sunday drive, and even then. But there I was, a few hours after finishing the lunkhead run with Anne and on my way to campus to meet with Eric Jenkins. And driving right past the Neil House Inn on Front, where I’d seen Glen Murphy and his girlfriend, his other girlfriend, on their way inside a couple of days earlier. It was irrational, I know. So was coming up to Broad Street, turning left and making an illegal left turn on Civic Center Drive. As I headed south to make another loop, I glanced across the Scioto River at COSI, the children’s science museum. For some people, the wings extending out from either side of the old, renovated Central High School conjured images of flight. A crown jewel of downtown development, a sign that Columbus hadn’t just grown, but grown up as well.
Maybe it was just my mood, but today the wings made me think of something else. Of the ridges of a zeppelin that had crash-landed smack on the school.
This mood was not improved when, after my fourth loop around, somewhat to my surprise, I spied Murphy and the woman repeating the previous scenario at the hotel’s drop-off. You’d think I’d be angry at this point. But now, as I slowly drove past, I felt shame at what I’d done to abet this. I had blindsided Suzanne at Lindey’s, launching a flood of digital scorn aimed at her and Murphy, a development I should have foreseen. Out of some misguided attempt to redress an old wrong, I’d made our situation even worse.
And she didn’t even know it.
Unlike Chelsea Fowler, Eric Jenkins was more than happy to meet me at Starbucks. He ordered a fruit drink, which he drained while we talked. He was a good-looking kid, handsomer, I’d have to say, than Chad. Angular face, wisp of a mustache and beard which hinted at a bohemian side, comfortable in a long-sleeve button-down blue shirt and jeans. No Abercrombie & Fitch.
“So you dated Chelsea,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“Were you dating the night of the party?”
“That was near the end.”
“Just didn’t work out?”
“She’s a great girl. I just wasn’t ready to commit.”
“And Chad is?”
“Chad’s a good guy. Different strokes, you know?”
“Sure. So you were at the party that night.”
“That’s right.”
“You know Matt?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“And you heard Aaron that night. Talking to Tina.”
“Lots of people did. Kinda hard to miss.”
“Wh
at’d you hear?”
“Same as everyone, I guess.”
“Go ahead and tell me.”
“They were arguing. It was hard to understand Aaron. He was really drunk. Almost couldn’t stand up. And he was angry.”
“Angry?”
“Yeah. Or no. Kind of pissed, upset. He was a mess, either way.”
“What was he angry about?”
“Don’t know.”
“Do you remember what he was saying to her?”
“Something about the boss. ‘Boss is gonna get him.’”
“‘The boss is gonna take him out.’ Could that have been it?”
“Something like that.”
“Him being Jacob?”
“I guess.”
“Did Aaron and Jacob talk?”
“Briefly.”
“Where?”
“Outside. On the porch. After he’d been arguing with Tina, but before Matt threw him out.”
“Did you hear what they said?”
“Same thing. Something about a boss and the street.”
“A boss and the street?”
“Something like that.”
“Any idea what it meant?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know either one. I mean, I’d seen Jacob around campus. But not Aaron. He wasn’t in school, was he?”
“No. Did you know Jacob sold pot?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Had you bought from him?”
“Maybe.”
“Had you bought from him that night?”
“He said he didn’t have any. Wasn’t there for that.”
“He said he wasn’t there to sell?”
“Something like that.”
“Why was he at the party? Matt invite him?”
“Doubtful.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think they got along.”
“I thought they were friends.”
“They were roommates. Freshman year. I think they hung out a little after that. I didn’t get the impression they were that friendly.”
“Why?”
“I heard Matt and Helen talking about it that night. In the kitchen.”
“Helen Chen?”
“Yeah. He asked her who invited Jacob.”
“What’d she say?”
“She didn’t know.”
“Jacob stayed the night. Matt couldn’t have been too happy about that.”
“Probably not.”
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