by David Liss
I cranked my legs into the darkness, spinning them wildly until I felt like a cartoon character whose lower half was just a blurry wheel beneath the torso. Sometimes at the end of long runs I liked to push it, and I marveled that my legs could do such things, that I could move so fast and with such force without paying attention to how my feet hit the ground.
I’d never punched it like this in near total darkness with a cop on my trail. It didn’t matter. I ran, and I kept running until I was sure I’d gone two miles, maybe more. I was used to pacing myself, attuning my speed to my natural rhythms, but not now. Now there was only speed. Fast as I could go, and nothing else mattered.
I was now out of the trailer park and into an area of small, older homes. It was the sort of place where half-rebuilt, half-rusting cars sat in backyards, where lawns were crisscrossed with missing grass, where broken swing sets creaked in the wind.
And it was familiar. I was sure I’d been here before. I walked for a moment to catch my breath. Two miles wasn’t much, but I’d gone about as fast as I ever had. Then, while walking bent over, panting, I realized I had indeed been there before, I had sold books there.
I was just down the street from Galen Edwine, at whose barbecue I’d sold four sets of books- the fabled grand slam that had never paid off.
But Galen Edwine had taken a shine to me, the way customers sometimes did with bookmen. He’d told me to come back anytime. He’d said, Let me know if you ever need anything. I needed something now. I needed shelter and a place to rest where Jim Doe would never look for me.
It took about five minutes to find the house. I was sure it was the right place because of the garden gnomes that had so encouraged me that day. It was well after two in the morning now, and the house was entirely quiet and dark.
I rang the doorbell.
I rang it a couple of times to suggest urgency and to make certain that the unexpected chime didn’t simply fade into a dream. I saw a light go on in the bedroom, and I heard a scrape just outside the door.
“Who is that?” asked a panicked voice.
“Galen, it’s Lem Altick. Do you remember I tried to sell you some encyclopedias a couple of months ago? You told me if I ever needed anything…” I let it hang.
The door opened slowly, and Galen, wearing boxers and a T-shirt, stared at me with sleepy eyes that hung beneath a glossy slope of balding scalp. “I didn’t expect you to take me up on it,” he said, but there was nothing harsh in his voice. If anything, he seemed amused.
“I have kind of an emergency,” I told him. “I need a place to stay. Just for a few hours.”
Galen scratched his head with one hand and opened the door the rest of the way with the other. “Come on in, then.”
***
Lisa, Galen’s wife, came out in her robe, yawned a hello, and went back to sleep. If she found something unusual in a door-to-door salesman returning to their home in the middle of the night, she didn’t say anything about it. Galen and I went to the kitchen, where he put on some coffee and took out a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts. I looked at the ingredients, which included butter and milk and eggs. I passed.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
I told him. Not all of it. Not even most of it. Just enough. I told him that I’d run afoul of Jim Doe from Meadowbrook Grove and that Doe wanted to frame me for a murder that he had likely committed himself.
Galen shook his head. “Yeah, I know that guy. We all do around here. He’s bad news, Lem. But I’ll tell you, I know the sheriff’s people have their eye on him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did, too. He won’t get away with it. Go to the county and tell them everything. Believe me, they’ll treat you like a hero.”
I nodded and tried to look relieved, but his suggestion didn’t help me. I didn’t want to have to survive some long-term investigation that would eventually shift the blame from me to Doe. I just wanted to get out of there alive.
“Well,” Galen said after a few minutes, “maybe you can look up something useful in those encyclopedias I bought from you.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?”
“I mean,” I said, “you never got those encyclopedias.”
“Sure I did.”
“But the credit application never went through.”
“Sure it did. There’s nothing wrong with my credit.” Galen took me to the living room, where the entire set rested in the place of honor, on the bookshelves next to the television. The rest of the shelves were filled with knickknacks and photographs of his son and older people I assumed were his parents and in-laws. Not another book in sight.
“But they told me the credit app didn’t go through. I don’t get it.” But I did. I got it just fine. “What about your friends? Did they get theirs?”
“Of course.”
It was Bobby. Good-guy Bobby was skimming from his own sales force. Telling us sales didn’t go through when they did, so he could take the commission for himself.
“They stole from you, didn’t they,” Galen said with unexpected gravity.
“Yeah,” I told him. “They did.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. Those operations aren’t always as honest as you want, and maybe yours is less honest than most. You know, the same weekend you were in town, a couple of boys came by my younger brother’s house, twelve miles or so from here, and they were selling books, using a lot of the same language that you used. My brother isn’t married, doesn’t have kids, so when he told them he didn’t want anything, they tried to sell him speed. One of them seemed kind of pissed off that the other one had brought it up, but my brother looks the part. He’s real skinny, long hair, tats. They must have thought he was a kindred spirit and decided to take a chance. You believe that?”
I nodded. I could believe it. Because that’s what all of this had been about. This whole thing was an excuse to distribute speed. That’s why Ronny Neil had said that Bobby didn’t know what was going on, why it was better to be with the Gambler than with Bobby.
Bastard had worked over at the hog lot. I got the impression he’d been in on the speed deal, but when he’d been shot, Jim Doe and the Gambler must have thought it was drug related. That’s why they got rid of the bodies. They didn’t want the county cops or the FBI getting involved, messing up the operation.
“Do you think I could trouble you for a ride in the morning?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I need to be at my motel before nine.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“I plan to get a friend of mine, get the hell out of here, and never come back.”
Galen nodded. “That’s a good plan,” he said.
***
Thanks to the magic of utter exhaustion, I actually managed to get a few hours of sleep on Galen’s couch before morning came. I ate a strangely cheerful breakfast- actually, I just ate some fruit- with Galen, Lisa, and their six-year-old son, Toby. Then Galen told me he’d drop me off on the way to work.
I asked him to let me out behind the motel, and I thanked him profusely. Then I knocked on Chitra’s door.
She didn’t look as though she’d slept much, if at all. Her eyes were sunken and red, and she might even have been crying.
“Lem,” she gasped. She pulled me into the room and then pressed her whole body against mine and squeezed hard. Under the circumstances, it was just what I needed.
The downside was that it seemed to me an inopportune time for an erection, and there was no way she didn’t notice, but if she found it distasteful, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. “Tell me what is going on.”
I told her as much as I could in a rambling fashion. I told her about Jim Doe and the drugs and the pigs and murders, though I left Melford out of it. It seemed to me too much to explain how it was that I knew Melford was a killer and hadn’t turned him in, how I’d become friends with him. It made no sense, so it was best not spoken of, pa
rticularly since she didn’t much trust Melford.
“We need to go,” I told her. “The Gambler’s not going to be happy to see me, and neither is this guy Doe. Let’s just call a cab and get out of here. It doesn’t matter where. They don’t want me around, will probably hurt me if they see me, but they won’t come after us. They just want me gone, and I mean to give them what they want.”
“Do you want to come with me? To my house for a few days, just to make sure they don’t come looking for you at yours?”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I want to go with you.”
We called the cab, and in ten minutes we went outside, determined to abandon whatever personal belongings- selling clothes and toiletries, mostly- were still in our rooms. Too bad for us. There was no way I was going back for that stuff.
Idling in front of the motel was a yellow Checker, but as we walked toward it, I caught the flashing lights out of the corner of my eye.
I saw in an instant, because I was getting good at that sort of thing, that it was a brown county car, not a blue Meadowbrook Grove car. And that was something. But it wasn’t much. I felt that jarring electric zap in my stomach. Not a loose wire zap, but a strapped to the electric chair with a black hood over your head sort of jolt. And for an instant I felt that I would start running, commanded by my feet and a base animal instinct; I would simply take off and be gone. But that never happened.
The woman from the day before, Aimee Toms, got out of the car. Her face was blank, impassive, strangely appealing in its authority. “I need to talk to you,” she said to me. “I want you to come with me.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I just want to ask you some questions.”
I turned to Chitra. “You go,” I said. “Go to the bus station and go home. I’ll call you. I’ll come see you.”
“I’m not going without you,” she said.
“You have to. Believe me, I’m in way over my head, but you’re not in any real danger if I’m not around, and I’ll be better off if I don’t have to worry about you.”
She nodded. Then she kissed me. I couldn’t say exactly what the meaning was, but I can tell you that I liked it a whole hell of a lot.
And then Officer Toms led me into the back of the police car and drove me away.
Chapter 35
AIMEE TOMS STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD- or I thought she did, but I couldn’t be sure with her eyes hidden behind her mirrored sunglasses. Even when she talked to me, she didn’t move her head. Sitting behind the passenger seat, I watched her firm lower jaw work its way over a piece of gum that I knew, without asking her or seeing it, would be sugarless.
“So, what’s your story, kid?” she asked after we’d pulled out of the motel.
I didn’t kill them. I was there, but I didn’t do it, and I couldn’t have stopped it. The words sat there, drew me in with their gravity well, tried to shape my answer the way tracks shape the path of a train. But I wasn’t going to give in. I was going to try to tough it out. And if things became too frightening, I could always break down later.
“I’m just trying to make some money to go to college,” I told her. “I got into Columbia, but I can’t afford it.”
“ South Carolina?”
“ New York.”
“Never heard of it. The school, not the city. You look kind of collegey,” she observed. “Which is why I don’t understand why you’re getting involved in all of this.”
“All of what?” My voice cracked like her gum.
“You tell me.”
“I’m really sorry I trespassed yesterday,” I said, “but you didn’t seem to think it was a big deal then. Why is it a big deal now?”
“Trespassing isn’t such a big deal,” Officer Toms agreed. “On the other hand, drugs and murder- now, that’s a big deal.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. It didn’t sound convincing because the fear wafted out of my mouth, the hot vapor of fear in the cold air-conditioning of the car.
“Listen, Lemuel. Lem?”
“Lem,” I confirmed.
“Listen, Lem. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I look at you, I talk to you, I see you’re not a bad guy. Believe me, I’ve been doing this long enough- and it doesn’t take that long, I’m sorry to say- to know that good people get mixed up in bad things. Sometimes they don’t understand what they’re doing. Sometimes they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But instead of coming forward, they hide and lie and break more laws to cover things up.”
All of this came uncomfortably close to the truth, and I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t reveal that closeness. I looked out the window instead.
“All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that if you tell me everything that’s going on, I’ll do all I can to help you out, to see that you’re not punished for being a victim of circumstance. Even if you think it’s too late to talk, it isn’t.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “All I did was wander a little too close to a farm. I don’t see why it’s a big deal.”
“We can do it that way if you want,” she told me. She didn’t say anything else until we arrived at the station.
It looked like an old office building, and except for their uniforms, the cops inside might have been just generic weary civic employees. The air conditioner gurgled mightily but produced little cold air, and overhead electric fans turned slowly enough that documents would not dislodge from desks.
Toms had a hand on my upper arm and squeezed with a kind of firm sympathy. My arms were behind my back. She hadn’t cuffed me, but it seemed like a good idea to keep them back there out of respect or to acknowledge that I knew she could cuff me so there was no point in flaunting my freedom. As we walked down a pale green cinder-block-lined hallway, which looked like a forgotten annex of my high school, we passed a uniformed officer walking a handcuffed black guy in the opposite direction. He was just a teenager, really, tall and lanky with a shaved head and the ghost of a mustache. He might have been my age, but he had the hard look of a criminal in his eyes, violent and seething and apathetic. I cast him a glance as we passed, as though to say that we were both victims of an oppressive system, but the kid looked back with rage, as if he would kill me if he ever had the chance.
Toms shook her head. “George Kingsley. You get a good look at him?”
“Enough to tell he’d slit my throat just for the fun of it.”
“Yeah, he’s like that. The thing is, Lem, I knew him when he was this smart little twelve-year-old. His father had all kinds of problems with the law, which was why I knew him, but his mother’s a good lady who saw he got to school and stayed out of trouble. But this kid did more than just follow the rules. He was always reading and talking about stuff. The ideas, the political ideas, you’d hear from him, a kid of twelve or thirteen. He was going to fix all the problems in the world. He was going to be a politician and help the black people. And he knew which laws he would repeal, which he would pass. It was incredible.”
“I guess it didn’t do him much good.”
“As near as I can figure it, he was hanging with some of the wrong kids one day when one of them decided it was time to stick up a convenience store. Kingsley thought they were there for candy. This other kid, he pulled out a gun. Stupidest thing. I don’t think the others knew he was planning anything, but they wouldn’t lay it all on their friend. So Kingsley goes to juvie for deciding to buy a Snickers with the wrong people. He was only in for eighteen months, but when he came out he was different. It was like they’d beaten all the heart out of him. He went in this lively, engaged little spitfire, someone on track to maybe really change the world for the better, and he came out just another thug from the thug machine.”
“That’s a real tragedy,” I said, doing my best to sound as though I meant it. I was having a hard time focusing on George Kingsley’s problems when I had some doozies of my own.
“Yeah, it is a real tragedy. You want that to happen to you? You plan t
o head off to Columbus University, don’t you? How about the university of getting raped every night?”
She was trying to unnerve me, but what was the point? I was already plenty unnerved. I wasn’t some tough kid who needed to be scared straight. But I was a bit of a smart-ass. “If everyone knows that weaker prisoners are getting raped by more vicious prisoners,” I said, “how come no one does anything about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you can raise that with the warden once you’re inside.”
I didn’t want to think about Melford’s prison riddle, but that was all I could think about, because I now knew the answer. I understood what Melford had been getting at. I understood why we had prisons if they didn’t work. I understood why we put lawbreakers in criminal academies to turn them into more dangerous, more bloodthirsty, more alienated criminals. I knew why Kingsley had gone in a victim and come out a victimizer. Prisons were set up that way because they did work, they just worked at something more sinister than I’d ever realized.
***
We sat in a small interrogation room around a flimsy metal table that had been bolted to the floor. I guess the cops thought some thief might try to make off with it if they weren’t careful. The surrounding walls were all the same pale green cinder block as the hallways- except for the billowy mirror facing me. I had no doubt that someone could be watching from the other side, though I thought it unlikely that anyone would be bothered.
Toms sat across from me and leaned forward on her elbows. “Okay,” she said. “You know why you’re here.”
“No, I don’t,” I told her. “I have no idea why I’m here.” Only partially true. I had no idea what they knew and what they didn’t know. What struck me, however, was how calm I felt. Maybe it was because I believed Aimee Toms to be basically friendly and maybe because I’d faced scarier moments than this- a whole bunch of them- in the past couple of days. I felt okay. I felt like if I played it cool, the way Melford did, I’d be all right.