Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “C’mon now, Billy,” he said, patting his shoulder. Billy’s tears abruptly stopped, and he picked up the story as cleanly as if he had simply turned his head to cough.

  “Anyways, I call her back and she can’t even speak. She’s just like, noises, like, sobbing, strangling. I swear it was like listening to a broken heart direct. I mean, all I could make out was ‘Please, Billy, please, Billy’ I mean, you had to be some kind of statue not to…” Billy sighed, his breath fluttering as he fought down another panic attack.

  “So I went over. I went over, she wasn’t there, but the door’s wide open so I go in. The boy’s laying there under the table, like on his side, and he’s in his pajamas and his skin is, like, gray-blue and he’s got like, vomit on his front and I just—I don’t know—I just went robot on it. I got a garbage bag from under the sink? You know, one of those cinch sacks? And I got him out of there, like I was, it was a dream. I didn’t, I had never seen him before, her son, and as I’m picking him up? I get hit with this, like, weird realization. I started thinking that I just couldn’t ever remember picking up a child in my arms in my entire adult life. I mean, I must have, but—I mean, I don’t have kids, Felicia’s boy is mostly grown, I don’t have nephews or nieces, so it was like maybe the first time I ever—”

  “Then what.”

  Billy took a breath. “I’m like half out the door, and I stop myself. Where the fuck am I going? I mean, I don’t even have a car. Felicia’s… I didn’t want to take her car. And I see on the table, the dining table, she had left me car keys and this note that said, ‘Under his angel,’ and I knew what she meant because she had taken me there, you know, over in Freedomtown a few weeks before, ’cause she’s like the type of person, if she falls for you, you got taken on the tour of special places. You know—‘This is where I grew up. This is where I got—I don’t know—lost my virginity’ or, like, ‘This is the place I go to be with my thoughts.’ She was, like, a sentimental person, and she had taken me there, Freedomtown, because I’m not from around here, and it was, like, ‘This used to be my favorite place when I was a little kid, and that used to be the Chicago Fire, and Cody, my son, he calls that mannequin up there his angel, so I knew, but—” Billy suddenly reached out, touched Lorenzo’s chair. “Detective Council, look into me. Look into my heart…”

  “Just keep telling it, Billy,” Lorenzo said gently. “You’re doing good.” Billy dropped his head between his knees, then came up talking.

  “OK, so I go downstairs with the boy and at first I was gonna go straight to the police, tell them something like, I found him some-wheres, you know. Just take it away from under her roof—maybe it wouldn’t come back on her. But I got scared. I mean, how do I explain how I found this kid, and then it’s, like, ‘Oh, your girlfriend works with his mother? Huh, how ’bout dat.’ It was like, the minute I had walked into that apartment, man, it was like, I was fucked. I mean, you just can’t… So it was like, I had to do what she asked me. I had no choice. So I go to her car, I lay the boy down on the backseat. Now I’m thinking, I have to dig a grave, I have to… What am I gonna use, you know, and I straighten up from putting him in the backseat and I’m coming around to the front and I see her across the street in a doorway. She’s all scrunched up, looks like some kind of wild animal, and I got scared of her. I didn’t want her to come over, ’cause I didn’t want to look into her face, you know, ’cause I swear I didn’t think I could handle all that madness that came at me over the phone. So I’m desperate to get out of there before she can come across the street, and I’m so nervous I drop her keys, and I go bend down to pick them up and when I stand up? I look over to where she was? She was gone. And, like, I never saw her again. And, look.” He touched Lorenzo’s chair. “Alls I was doing was letting my heart go out. I never… And when you came over the last night? I was scared. It hit the news so big-time and here you come. I mean…” Billy shut his eyes, put a hand to his heart. “You be me last night, Detective. What would you do?”

  “You want me to understand you?” Lorenzo asked quietly.

  “Yes,” he said, bobbing his head.

  “You want me to, to sympathize?”

  “Yes.”

  “The more you tell me…” Lorenzo shrugged, leaning back.

  Billy exhaled, got into it again. “So…I drive out to Freedomtown. I carry the boy to the, the spot. I didn’t know what I’m gonna use, but I go there, and I could see where someone—Brenda, I guess—had tried to dig some kind of grave, but she must have used her bare hands to do it because it was real shallow—I’m talking maybe a few inches deep, and there were like, claw marks in the dirt, but she didn’t tell me it was gonna be there. She didn’t tell me about this already dug grave, and I almost had a heart attack that it was right there, like, waiting. And I knew it was for the boy because she had thrown in some, action figures, you know, dolls for boys? So I go look for something to dig with? And I find some broken plank laying there by the base of that fake building, and I kind of use it as a shovel, you know, make what she started deeper.

  “And so then I go lay him in, and I didn’t know whether to take him out of the garbage bag or not…I mean, you lay a child down like he’s garbage? But I did it. I laid him in like that, because, because I didn’t want to look at him.” Billy started crying again, although the tears hadn’t found their way into his voice yet.

  “It’s, like, if I just thought about it—like, all I’m doing here is burying a garbage bag—then I could do it, you know, then I could tell myself—” Billy stopped, looked away, his chin juddering against his hand. “Maybe I could do it, ’cause I got death all around me anyhow. My father’s dead, my mother’s in the hospital. I mean, it’s everywhere I look…”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said, nudging.

  “So.” Billy took a deep breath. “So I close it up, and I get out of there.”

  “Close it up how.”

  “I covered him.”

  “With…”

  “Earth.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Then I put some big rocks over him. I don’t know why. I just, I guess I was thinking about, like, keeping the animals out, or I don’t know… I don’t know why I did that.”

  “So…” Lorenzo kept pushing him.

  “So I drive back to her building. I was just going to leave the car and go, but when I got there, I started thinking about how she sounded over the phone and how she looked from across the street, and I just sat there in the car… Can I tell you the truth?”

  “What you been doing all along?”

  Billy ignored the question. “I kind of hoped she did, you know, kill herself, because nobody knew about me and her and, like, if she checked out? My ass was clear, right? And, I didn’t want to go up there, but I did because I was, half expecting to find her like I found the boy. I mean, she was most definitely attached to that kid. I mean, you could tell. Anytime she was, nervous or uncomfortable with me, she’d always start talking about her son—what he had said yesterday, what had happened to him the night before, what movie they watched. He was like her security blanket, you know, out in the world, so I knew… Well, anyways I just wanted to see if—you know—go up there, not touch nothing but just see if she had…” Billy looked away, then came back.

  “It wasn’t, there was nobody there. It was just like I left it, door open… I didn’t think she had ever come back, and I was there in that apartment thinking about I don’t know what, and I just got down on my knees and started cleaning up under the table. I don’t know why I did that either. Evidence? Getting rid of evidence? I don’t know, I just… She had some cleaning shit under the kitchen sink, you know, like Comet? I didn’t know where she was, or, even if she was, but I’m down there doing that, and then I go back downstairs, and I wasn’t thinking too clearly, I guess, because I just got back into her car and drove myself over to my mother’s house. It wasn’t like, until I got in the driveway that I realized that I had taken her car, but that was that. I just put it in
the garage, went in the house, started drinking, and fell out.”

  “Huh.” Lorenzo was writing, thinking, In a garage, everybody scouring the marshes and swamplands for it. He eyed the wall clock: four-forty-five.

  “And then, like, I woke up the next day—I guess I woke up the next day—just kept drinking, fell out again, woke up the second day, turned on the TV, and there she was. Opened up the paper, there she was. Every which way I looked, there she was, there she was talking about some black man did it, and at first I thought she meant me—like, set me up—but then I just figured she was trying to get away with it and stacking the deck in a way that everybody would buy in.”

  “Get away with what?”

  “Her son.”

  “She kill him?”

  “I wasn’t there, but in my heart? No. I think she was telling me what happened up front. I do. But I was scared anyhow. Scared of this here,” he said, gesturing limply to the room, to Lorenzo. “And I just went back to Felicia’s house. I took my mother’s car because I didn’t want to get back in that, Brenda’s car, everybody looking for it. So I go back, I’m nonstop drinking. I’m a beer drinker mostly, but… So I see Felicia and, right from the jump I’m fighting with her because she starts in on me with, you know, ‘Who were you with last night? What’s that bitch’s name?’ And I just hit her. I’m no, I’m not… I just whack” He slapped the back of his hand against an open palm. “I’m, my mind frame is like, this whole thing is Felicia’s fault. If she had only given me respect—as a man, as a person—I would never have started in with Brenda to begin with. And I just lost it. I’m like a crazy man. I start building up that dugout for myself, you know.” He blushed. “You saw that. And Felicia, she’s, like—I hit her. She keeps coming over, knocking my shit down, we’re yellin’, screamin’, I most likely hit her again, although I think we got to check the videotape on that one. Finally she has to go off to work and I built up my fortress of solitude. I was scared. I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to stay in. I didn’t want… My mother’s dying in the hospital.” Billy turned away again, weepy.

  “I mean, c’mon, man, you be me. I’m all holed up, I can’t turn on the TV, I can’t—I don’t know if they’re coming for me or what. So Felicia comes back in, we go at it again, you come by, I almost shit myself. I was sure… But you started talking about something else, and like, now you’re saying to me, ‘How come you didn’t tell me what she did, what I did.’ But, it was like, if you didn’t bring it up, maybe it didn’t happen, you know? I mean, what you expect me to say. ‘Oh, by the way, that kid the whole world is looking for? That guy the whole world got their knives out for?’ I mean, when you started in with that ‘You cannot hit her’ stuff, it was like, I just blocked on the other. I mean, I heard myself saying shit to you about… I just got into what you wanted to deal with. Straight up. You cannot tell me that’s so hard to understand. But homicide. Jesus God, there’s no proportion in that. I just, I just, she needed me. See, you… Mister Role Model. Your phone’s most likely ringing off the hook nonstop, but look at me.” He punched his chest. “Do you know how long it’s been since anybody needed me? You look me in the eye and tell me you think I did a homicide.”

  Lorenzo had never thought that. He looked into Billy’s weighted face, the features dragged downward, melting. “Hey, Billy,” Lorenzo’s tone gentle but unyielding. “Alls I can say is you should of talked to me when you had the chance.”

  “That’s not answering my question.”

  “It’s what the law requires, Billy,” Lorenzo said, hunching forward, elbows on knees. “Do I believe what you just told me? Mostly I do. But you made me come get you, brother. You let this shit fester another twenty-four hours.”

  “Listen.” Billy hunched forward too. “Didn’t you think, don’t you think I wanted to tell somebody? Don’t you think I wanted to, to unload all this? How bad is what I did…?” As Lorenzo got up and left the room, he could feel Billy’s eyes tracking him with doglike alertness.

  Bobby McDonald stood in the doorway of his office, Billy’s now-solitary sighs and mutters emanating, crackling but audible, from the speaker on Bobby’s desk.

  Lorenzo grabbed a tape recorder from a secretary’s cubicle and a phone from his own. “You getting her car?” he asked his boss on the fly, heading back to Billy in the box.

  “On their way,” McDonald said, returning to his desk.

  Back in the interview room, Lorenzo plugged in the phone jack and, putting on a little performance for Billy, rang up the prosecutor’s office—his name, on this day, getting him directly to Capra himself.

  “Hey, what’s up?” The prosecutor sounded cheery. “I hear you got the boyfriend.”

  “Billy Williams.” Lorenzo, still standing, threw Billy what was supposed to be a reassuring nod, Billy’s face heavy with anticipation. “I got him sitting here with me right now, and I was just wondering—he kind of made a clean breast of it, so is there anything we can do for him?”

  “How bad do we want him?”

  “Not too.”

  “So she’s the one, still?”

  Lorenzo hesitated, then said, “Yeah, as far as it goes.”

  “How’s his story?”

  “It’s trackin’.”

  “No clinkers?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s giving it his all?”

  “And then some.”

  Billy closed his eyes, his lips moving in mute prayer.

  “You’re gonna be at the press conference, right?” Capra made it sound like it was something to look forward to—boys’ night out.

  “Hell yeah,” Lorenzo answered in the same upbeat spirit. “So, Billy—”

  “OK, well, I mean I can’t really do jack shit for him right now.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I mean, maybe we can do something down the road, but for now he’s got to take a bad fall.”

  “Can we do something on bail?”

  “He’s full-tilt cooperating?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Nothing out of whack with her story?”

  “Nope.”

  “Twenty-five thousand? How’s that sound.”

  “Hold on.” Lorenzo palmed the mouthpiece, turned to Billy. “Can you get ahold of twenty-five hundred dollars?”

  Billy looked off, as if trying to remember something, then said, “I think so.”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said into the phone.

  “You got it.”

  “And yeah”—Lorenzo seized the moment—“can you do something about George Howard now?”

  “Who?” Capra threw a squint into his voice.

  Lorenzo gave himself a few heartbeats to calm down. “Curious George Howard,” he said distinctly.

  “I’m jerking your chain, Council,” Capra said affably. “He’s already out.”

  “Billy.” Lorenzo inserted the blank tape from Brenda’s aborted confession into the new recorder. “You ever, you never been in jail before?”

  “No.” He stared at the tape, at Lorenzo, as if watching a doctor prepare an injection.

  “OK, here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get charged with homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide, OK?” Billy jerked back. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Lorenzo had a hand on his arm. “They’re gonna set bail at twenty-five thousand. After a day or two, they’ll give you the ten-percent option; alls you’ll need is twenty-five hundred cash. Maybe you could put up your mom’s house for the rest, get you out of the joint in two, three, maybe four days tops.”

  “My mother is dying.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Lorenzo answered politely, but he was starting to feel impatient—Billy was not a customer.

  “Now, my guess is, in due time? If the forensics and the, the autopsy bear out your story? I think—I’m pretty sure—the charges are gonna be downgraded to something like improper disposal of a corpse. And that doesn’t carry any jail time at all, but you’re gonna at least have to go in for the next few day
s. Can you handle that?”

  “How do I know.” Billy’s eyes vibrated with whatever images were scrolling through his mind right now. “Can I get protective custody?”

  “Oh yeah. They’ll do that as a matter of course, you know, because of all the publicity.”

  “My mother’s dying.” Lorenzo remained silent. “How’m I gonna get the mortgage for the house without her knowing all this?”

  “That’s not my department, Billy.” Lorenzo glanced anxiously at the clock, the time sliding past his eye. “That’s for you to figure out.” Billy gripped his knees, shoulders bunched up by his ears. “Now, we’re gonna go through all of this again, this time on tape.”

  “You know, Brenda, coming up with this, this black carjacker?” Billy said, his voice different now, reflective, as if he had, at least for the moment, accepted his short-term fate. “I got to say—above and beyond, I mean—that really threw me that she did that.”

  Although Lorenzo’s immediate need was to take command of the dialogue, the shift in Billy’s tone from desperate to oddly detached seemed worth a listen.

  “I mean, I liked her. I mean, I couldn’t deal with her, because she was, too all over me after a while, but she made me feel good about myself, she gave me respect. But this carjacker thing…

  “See, I was raised, I was brought up to take people as they present themselves to you, you know, not to, to prejudge the gift by the wrapping. But I got to say I don’t particularly like white people, and I’m not even talking about 1619, four hundred years and all that. I mean as company, as, as, like, to talk to. It’s, like, I consider myself an educated individual, and the more education you have the more you’re gonna interface with the, the world in its entirety out there, and, like, I don’t know too many bald-faced crackers, to be honest. I mean… But still, it’s, like, most white people—for me—I feel like they’re not so much talking to me as they’re watching themselves talking to me—like, admiring themselves talking to me—and I play this guessing game. How many minutes into this conversation, no matter what we’re talking about right now—could be sports, the market, could be the weather—but how many minutes is it gonna take for race to come up. How long is it gonna take for the fact that it’s a white person talking to a black person to take over and change the subject, turn the subject into something racial. It never fails. Never. And I don’t know how you deal with it, but for me it’s nerve-racking, and it’s boring.”