Seeing and Believing

by Norah McClintock

  “We were coming home,” I said to Riel. “Vin was going to talk to the cops. It’s all a big mistake. He was scared, so we were coming home and we were going to get you to call the cops for him.”

  Riel told the two cops that I was fifteen. He asked them if they suspected me of any wrongdoing. I held my breath as I waited for the answer. They said no, but they wanted to know why I was with Vin, who was wanted because of a murder-robbery at a convenience store. Riel told me I should answer all their questions. They had about a million of them. Finally they said they wanted me to go down to the police station the next day to make a formal statement.

  “But I don’t know anything,” I said.

  “They just want you to say again what you’ve said, and it’ll be written down,” Riel said. He promised them that I’d be there.

  “You want to tell me how you managed to find Vin when the police couldn’t?” Riel said after the cops had left.

  “It’s like I already told the cops.” He gave me a sharp look now that we were alone. “Police,” I said, correcting myself. Riel is one of those people who doesn’t like the word cop. He says it’s disrespectful and insists that I say police or police officer instead. I don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve met a couple of his cop friends, and they don’t make a big deal about it. One of them, a homicide detective named Jones, always refers to himself as a cop. “I didn’t find Vin. He found me. He was waiting outside the community center when I got off work.”

  Riel stared at me for so long it scared me. Finally he said, “I thought you said you haven’t seen him since last fall.”

  “I haven’t.” Jeez, what was his problem?

  “So how did he know where to find you?” Riel said. “How did he even know you were working at the community center?”

  “I don’t know.” Riel looked hard at me. “Maybe he asked someone,” I said. “A lot of people know I work there.”

  “So when the police were here this morning and asked you if you’d seen Vin or knew where he might be and you said no, you were telling them the truth, right, Mike?”

  “Yeah.” Did he think I’d be stupid enough to lie to him after everything I’d been through last year? “Tonight was the first time I’ve seen Vin since last fall. He was waiting for me in the park when I got off work. He told me what happened. He says he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wasn’t with the guys who robbed the store. But he was in the store when they came in. He says that they shot the woman, and then the old man came in and they shot him. Vin says he was scared. If it was me, I’d have been scared, too. So he ran. He says he knows it was stupid, but he wasn’t thinking. He says there was a girl in the store that the two guys didn’t see. He says she can back him up. He’s pretty sure she saw everything and that she can tell the police that he had nothing to do with it.”

  Riel looked at me for a few moments before he said, “If Vin sticks with that story, he’s going to be in for a rough ride.”

  “What do you mean, if he sticks with that story? He swears that’s what happened.”

  Riel shook his head. “Think about it, Mike. The two guys shoot the woman. Then, according to Vin, the old man shows up and they shoot him. But they don’t do anything to Vin, who’s a witness to the robbery and shooting? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Maybe they figured someone must have heard the shots and had already called the cops. Maybe they panicked. Vin said they got out of there pretty fast after they shot the old man.”

  Riel didn’t look even remotely convinced. He said, “But instead of going to the police and telling them what he saw, like a good citizen”—like Sal, I thought—“Vin hides out for nearly twenty-four hours. Then, when the police finally find him, he’s got some money in his pocket that probably came from the store. And when the police ask him about it, first he says he doesn’t know where he got the money. Then he changes his story and says the robbers dropped it in an alley and he picked it up. Does that make any sense? He’s so scared that he runs away from the scene instead of staying and calling for help, but when he sees money lying in the alley, he stops to pick it up?”

  “When you say it like that—”

  “I’m not the one who said it, Mike. That’s what Vin said. And then he tells you there was a girl in the store, someone who saw the whole thing.” His tone of voice—a real teacher tone—told me he didn’t believe it. “What did Sal say? What did he see?” He surprised me when he said that. The cops who had come to the house that morning had mentioned Sal, but they hadn’t said he was a witness.

  “You know about Sal?” I said.

  “His mother called me. She’s worried something could happen to Sal because he spoke to the police. Where she comes from, the authorities weren’t always the good guys.”

  I knew that. Sal had told me all about life in Guatemala.

  “Did Sal say anything to you about seeing a girl, Mike?”

  I shook my head. “He said he didn’t see anyone except the woman and the old man. Maybe the girl ran, too.”

  “Right,” Riel said. “Just like Vin. Everybody runs. Nobody calls the police. Nobody comes forward to say what happened. If I were on this case, Mike, I wouldn’t buy it. Not any of it. Not for one minute.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “That’s going to depend on Vin.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was in the paper that I found on the kitchen table the next morning: “Police make arrest in convenience store shooting.” It was one of those small stories, the kind that runs in a column down one side of the page, each story only a paragraph, some of the stories hardly any longer than the headline. It didn’t mention Vin by name. It called him “a youth, age sixteen, who cannot be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.” It said the police had evidence. It didn’t say what it was, but I already knew.

  I heard a rustling sound behind me and caught a whiff of perfume. Susan.

  “Hey, Mike,” she said, her voice bright like she had a smile in it. She was wearing a robe over a sleeveless T-shirt and pajama bottoms. She didn’t have any makeup on yet, but she looked terrific. She always did. “You working today?” she said.

  I nodded. “Noon to six.” I worked every Saturday, every other Sunday, and a couple of times a week, depending on when they had events they needed me to set up for and clean up after. “You?”

  “I’ve got the evening shift today and tomorrow,” she said. “Then I’m off for three days.” Susan was a doctor. She worked in the emergency room at the hospital that was just a couple of blocks from Riel’s house. “I’m going to be glad when school’s out for the summer. Then maybe when I have a day off, John will be around.”

  “You guys really should go somewhere,” I said. “After the wedding, I mean.” Riel and Susan were getting married at the end of June—six weeks from now—but had decided not to take a honeymoon right away.

  “We’ll get around to it,” Susan said, real casual about it, like it was no big deal. I didn’t believe it, though. The way I heard it, all brides were dying to go somewhere special after their wedding. “It’ll be nice to have John off all summer. We can really get organized.”

  Susan was going to move in with us. Into Riel’s house, I mean.

  “Yeah, but don’t you two want some time alone?” I said. Riel had never come out and said it, but I was pretty sure that I was the reason they weren’t going on a honeymoon, that Riel didn’t know what to do with me if he went away for a couple of weeks. “I can look after myself, you know.”

  Susan smiled and poured herself some coffee.

  “I know you can, Mike,” she said. “We’ll get away eventually. Just not this summer.” She glanced at the newspaper. “Are you finished with that?”

  I folded it and handed it to her. She tucked it under her arm and started out of the kitchen with it and her coffee.

  “Is he still here?” I said. Ever since Riel had proposed to Susan, she had started staying over. Not all of the t
ime, but more and more often. I still hadn’t got totally used to it. I didn’t mind that she was here so much. Susan was easy to be around and mostly—so far—she left it up to Riel to deal with me. He was my foster parent, not her. She never told me what to do and never yelled at me when I didn’t do something I was supposed to. It was like good cop (Susan, who was fun and liked to laugh) and bad cop (Riel, who was stern and strict). No, the thing about having Susan in the house, the thing that I couldn’t quite believe even when I saw it right there in front of me, was the way Riel acted. It wasn’t like he turned to mush with Susan or anything, but his face lit up when she walked into the room, and he smiled a whole lot more when she was around. He relaxed more, too.

  “He went out for a run,” Susan said. “He said he’d be back in time to go to the police station with you before you go to work.” She headed for the stairs.

  “Oh, hey, Susan?” I called to her. “Wait a minute.”

  She turned. I brushed past her—boy, she smelled great—into the living room, and grabbed a videocassette from the shelf under the TV.

  “This is for you,” I said, handing the cassette to her.

  She turned it over, looking for a label, but there wasn’t one.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  She examined it again.

  “Give me a hint,” she said.

  I shook my head. A surprise is a surprise.

  “You’re a real man of mystery, Mike.” She smiled at me, tucked the cassette under her arm with the newspaper, and went upstairs.

  Riel was back at ten thirty to drive me to the police station. He came in with me and sat there while I talked to one of the cops who had arrested Vin. The cop asked me over and over how I had found Vin, and I told him over and over that I hadn’t found Vin, he had found me. When he asked me what Vin had said, I told him what Vin had told me—that he hadn’t been involved in the robbery and the shooting. I told him what Vin had said about the girl, too. The cop didn’t say anything. He’d probably already heard it from Vin. He didn’t ask me again where I had been the night of the robbery, and I was relieved at that. He wrote down what I said, read it back to me, asked me if I wanted to add or change anything, and then made me sign it.

  After we finished at the police station, Riel drove me to work. Maybe ten or fifteen times that day, pretty much every time I passed one of the pay phones in the community center, I thought about calling Vin’s house to see how his mom and dad were doing. For a while, back when we were kids, I’d spent almost as much time at Vin’s house as I had at my own. His parents used to call me “the other son we never had.” But every time I looked at the phone, I imagined Vin’s mom or his dad picking up at the other end, and then I imagined myself fumbling for something to say, stammering and stuttering and in the end saying … what? I’m sorry to hear that Vin got arrested? I’m sorry Vin was in the wrong place at the wrong time (if you believe what he said) or I’m sorry he messed up even worse this time (if you believe what the cops were saying and what Sal and Riel thought)? Either way, it wouldn’t make them feel any better.

  And what about me? What did I think?

  I hated to admit it, but what Riel said made a lot of sense. Why would the guys who robbed the store shoot the woman and the man, but do nothing to Vin, an eyewitness to the whole thing? Maybe it was like Vin said, maybe they had panicked and run. Vin had said that he couldn’t identify the two guys. Maybe that explained why they hadn’t done anything to him. But how would they have known that? How could they have been sure that he hadn’t seen their faces or that there wasn’t something, even something small, that Vin could tell the police about them?

  And then there was the thing about the money. First he’d told the cops who arrested him that he didn’t know where he got the money, that it must have come from a bank machine. Then, as soon as one of the cops mentioned blood on the money, Vin said he’d picked it up in the alley when he was running away. He was scared, he was running, but he stopped to pick up money. I tried to decide if that was something I would have done.

  On the other hand, according to Vin, the other two guys had their faces hidden by hoods. Vin didn’t. That’s why the storeowner was able to identify him, but not the other two. It was also why Sal had been able to identify him. What kind of person goes to rob a store with two other guys and doesn’t even bother to try to cover his face, especially when the other two guys who are involved cover their faces? I mean, you’d have to be pretty stupid, right?

  And then there was the girl. Vin had said there was a girl in the back of the store. He was pretty sure she had seen the whole thing and could tell the cops that he wasn’t involved. Well, the cops had arrested Vin, which meant they didn’t just think he was involved, they were pretty sure of it. So obviously that girl hadn’t come forward. Or if she had come forward, she hadn’t backed Vin up. Instead of saying something that could clear him, she must have incriminated him, which meant that he had been mistaken about what the girl would say. And that meant that either he really was involved, or the girl thought he was. So why would he make a big deal about her being able to clear him?

  Maybe it was like Riel thought—there was no girl. She didn’t exist. Vin was making her up. Sal hadn’t seen a girl. The cops hadn’t mentioned a girl (but then the cops didn’t talk about all the details of anything, ever). Still, why would Vin say there was a girl in the store who could tell the cops he wasn’t involved if there was no girl? How would that help him? It wouldn’t. It just plain wouldn’t. Even Vin would see that.

  It didn’t make sense. None of it did.

  Unless Vin was telling the truth.

  Maybe Vin’s face wasn’t hidden because he really wasn’t involved. Maybe he ran because he really was scared. Maybe he had really picked up the money without thinking, just because it was there. And maybe it was there because the guys who had robbed the store really had dropped it.

  And maybe the girl really existed.

  Maybe she had seen what had happened and could help Vin out. But for some reason she hadn’t come forward. But why hadn’t she? If I’d been in her position, I’d be talking to the police for sure. If she wasn’t talking, what did that mean? That didn’t make any sense either.

  It was giving me a headache just thinking about it …

  The likeliest thing was that Vin had flat-out lied to me. He’d done it before. Maybe it had turned into a habit.

  And, let’s face it, if I had been in that store to rob it, wouldn’t I say I didn’t do it? I mean, who’s stupid enough right away to say, Yeah, I was involved in a shooting where someone got killed and someone else ended up in the hospital? Especially if the other guys who did it got away? Nobody, that’s who. Not even Vin.

  Riel was in the living room, reading, when I got home. He reads a lot. Mostly history. Mostly, I think, so he’ll know what he’s talking about when he stands up in front of the class. He glanced up when I came in.

  “How was work?”

  “Okay.”

  “You hungry? I made some chili.”

  The one thing my uncle Billy used to know how to make was chili, but his was mostly meat, beans, and tomatoes. Riel makes vegetarian chili—beans and peppers, onions, mushrooms, corn, tomatoes, all very spicy. It’s okay. But would it kill him to stir in a little hamburger?

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll heat some up.”

  “How about your homework? Is that done?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He glanced at his watch. His point: it was getting late.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t have much to do.”

  “Exams are coming up soon.”

  “I know.” Jeez, I knew he meant well, but he could relax once in a while. I hesitated. “If I wanted to see Vin, how would I go about doing that?”

  Riel looked at me, surprised. “Do you want to see him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just wondering.” No, that wasn’t t
rue. The truth was, “Yeah, I do.”

  “Mind if I ask why?” He had that look on his face—it’s just a question, it’s no big deal. But I knew it was more than that.

  I shrugged. “I’ve known him forever.”

  Riel waited.

  “I know you think he’s pretty messed up. But—” But what? “But I have known him forever. And … I want to talk to him. I need to look at him and see if he’s lying to me. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but I need to know.”

  Riel looked at me for a few moments before he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Considering that Vin’s name hadn’t been in the paper, a whole lot of people at school seemed to know that he was the one who’d been arrested. There was only one person I could think of who could have spread the word. Sal.

  “I can’t believe he told everyone,” I said to Rebecca at lunchtime. Rebecca has thick coppery-red hair, dark brown eyes, a ton of freckles, and a beautiful smile. She makes me feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” she said. “I mean, someone you know gets arrested right in front of your house, and you didn’t even call me. How come?”

  I shrugged. The truth was, I had been so wrapped up in what had happened that it hadn’t occurred to me to call her. But I sure didn’t want to tell her that. She might take it the wrong way, like I thought she wasn’t important.

  “You were at that thing for your grandparents,” I said. Rebecca had been up at her grandparents’ place in Muskoka all weekend. They’d been celebrating some milestone anniversary.

  “Yeah, but I had my cell,” she said. “You could have called me.”

  “Sorry,” I said. But I was still thinking about Sal. “He should have kept his mouth shut,” I said. “I mean, the media isn’t allowed to report Vin’s name. So why is it okay for Sal to broadcast it?”

  “Well, he’s not the media,” Rebecca said. She studied me for a moment. “Why are you so mad at him anyway?”