Part of me wanted to hug him. Can you believe that? After what he’d done to me, I wanted to hug him. I wanted us to be buddies again. I thought about how great it would be if I could undo what had happened, if I could fly backward around the world like Superman and cancel the past six months. Instead, I stood up.
“I gotta go, Vin,” I said. “Riel’s waiting.”
“But you’ll find her, right, Mike?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“You promise, right?” His voice was higher than usual. Maybe he was telling the truth, and maybe he wasn’t. But he wasn’t faking it about being scared.
“I promise,” I said. But as the guard showed me out, I couldn’t help wondering: if there had been a girl in the store, and if she had seen and heard everything that had happened, why hadn’t she gone to the cops? Why hadn’t she told them exactly what had happened?
Riel wasn’t pacing. In fact, he didn’t even notice when I came back into the reception area. He was standing as far away from the security desk as he could get, and he was talking on his cell phone. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to, but I heard him say that name again. Kate. Why was he talking on the phone all the time to someone named Kate? Finally he flipped his phone shut and dropped it into his jacket pocket. When he saw me standing there, he said, “How’s Vin?”
“He’s locked up, and the cops don’t believe him,” I said. “How do you think he is?”
Riel have me a sharp look. I knew he didn’t like Vin. He couldn’t get over what had happened last fall. He handed me an envelope.
“What’s this?” I said.
“It’s an envelope.” No kidding. “Vin left it for you at the desk.”
“What’s in it?”
“It’s addressed to you, Mike, not me.” He signed us out on the visitor log. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I opened the envelope on the way back out to the car. There was a single sheet of paper inside. On it was a drawing of a spider. Underneath, Vin had printed, The tattoo looked like this. I looked at it and shoved it back into the envelope. Riel glanced at me, but he didn’t ask.
CHAPTER FIVE
We made a few stops on the way home. Riel had to pick up some shirts at the dry cleaner and some groceries. His cell phone rang when we were about three blocks from the house. He pulled over and answered it.
“We’re just around the corner from the house,” he said.
The way he said it made me think it was Susan this time, not the mysterious Kate.
“When?” Riel said. “What did they want?” He listened for longer than it would have taken to drive home. “Did they leave their names?” he said. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll let you know.” His voice softened a little. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I thought he’d start the car again as soon as he finished the call, but he didn’t. Instead he dug something out of his pocket—the card that Detective Canton had given me and that Riel had said he would hang onto, “just in case”—and punched in a phone number. He identified himself to whoever answered and asked, “What do you want to see him about?” I froze when he said that. Detective Canton wanted to see me?
“Is he a suspect?” Riel said.
All of a sudden I was frozen and sweating both at the same time.
“I’m reminding you that he’s a juvenile,” Riel said. He listened some more. Then he said, “Okay.” He glanced at his watch. “Okay, he’ll be there.” He closed his phone, dropped it into his pocket, and looked at me. “They want to talk to you again.”
My mouth was so dry I could hardly ask my question. “Do they think I was involved?”
“They say you’re not a suspect. They consider you a person of interest.” He said the words like he was spitting out a bad taste in his mouth.
“Person of interest? What does that mean?”
“It means nothing,” Riel said. “It’s a weasel word. It doesn’t have a legal definition. If someone is a suspect, you have to tell him so. Suspects have rights. If you call someone a person of interest, you’re not calling him a suspect. You can always say that you just think the person might have information about a police matter. Mostly it intimidates people. But you’re just a kid. They have to be careful how they treat you.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I got it. “So they don’t think I’m a suspect?”
“We’re going to straighten that out before we agree to answer any questions,” Riel said.
“We?”
He looked at me, his hands on the steering wheel.
“I want to be clear on this, Mike,” he said. “I don’t for one minute think you had anything to do with that convenience store robbery. Vin, that’s another matter. I think you have a pretty good idea what I think about him. But the fact that he was with you when he was arrested and the fact that you went to see him—”
“What does that have to do with the police wanting to see me?”
“Canton knows you were with Vin when he was arrested. He knows you’ve been to see him.”
“He does?” But we’d only just come back from there. “How did he find out so fast?”
“The pressure’s on, Mike. A pregnant woman was shot.”
“She was pregnant?” I didn’t remember seeing that in the newspaper.
Riel nodded. “Now she’s dead and her husband is in critical condition. Canton and Mancini want to get whoever did it. They’ve got Vin in custody. They’re not buying his story. They’re keeping an eye on him. It sounds like they think he knows the other two guys who were involved.” His face was grim. “If it was me,” he said, “if it was my case, I’d be asking myself if there was a reason other than friendship why you went to see him.”
I stared at him.
“I’d wonder if Vin’s best friend, who says he was home alone when it happened, might have gone to see Vin to check out what he told the cops.”
Jeez.
I looked him straight in the eye. I thought about how his friend on the drug squad had looked him in the eye, too—had looked right at him and had lied to him and how Riel had believed him at first. How was he going to know for sure that I wasn’t like his friend?
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said.
“And I wouldn’t lie to you, Mike.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Let’s get this over with, okay?”
It was just like Riel had said. Canton and Mancini knew I’d been out to see Vin. They said they wanted to talk to me about that.
“Is he a suspect in this case?” Riel said.
“Not at this time,” Detective Canton said.
“Is he going to be a suspect in five minutes?” Riel said. He sounded mad.
“We just want to ask Mike a few questions about Vincent Taglia,” Detective Canton said.
“It’s up to you, Mike, whether or not you want to talk to these detectives,” Riel said. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
Detective Canton said, “A woman was killed. Her husband is in grave condition.”
Grave? I looked at Riel. As far as I knew, grave was worse than critical.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you want to ask me?”
Riel was looking at Detective Canton. He said, “Do it right.” So Detective Canton explained my rights. He told me that Riel could stay if I wanted him to. He said I didn’t have to answer any questions, but that it would help their investigation if I did. He warned me that anything I said could be used in their investigation. Then he glanced at Riel, who nodded.
“You went to see Vincent,” Detective Canton said, finally getting down to it. “Did he tell you anything about what happened that night?”
“He said he didn’t do it. He said there was a girl in the store who can prove it.”
Detective Mancini, who was standing somewhere behind me, made a noise. It sounded like a snort. Detective Canton kept looking at me.
“Did you even try to find the girl?” I said. “Maybe she works there.”
“No one worked there except the
man who owned the place and his wife,” Detective Canton said. He used the same kind of voice a parent would use on a stubborn kid. “Did Vincent tell you anything about the other two people who were in the store with him when it was robbed?”
“Just that he doesn’t know who they were.”
“He didn’t tell you their names or what they looked like?”
“Just that they were wearing sweatshirts with hoods. He said they were dark blue.”
“He didn’t tell you why he went into the store with those two guys? He didn’t say that maybe they were just fooling around and things got out of hand?”
“What?” He was trying to trip me up. “No! I already told you—he already told you. He didn’t go into the store with them. He went into the store for a Coke, and then these two guys came in and they’re the ones who robbed the store and shot those people. Vin was scared. That’s why he ran. He says he knows it was stupid, but that’s what he did.”
“You told us that you and Vincent hadn’t seen each other in months,” Detective Canton said.
“That’s right.”
“But the day after Vincent was seen running out of a store where two people were shot, you were found with him.”
Found with him? What did that mean?
“I wasn’t found with him. He came up to me in the park after work. He told me what happened. He said he was afraid you wouldn’t believe him. We were going to my place to talk to John. He used to be a cop—police officer. I figured he would know what to do.”
Detective Canton just sat there for a few moments, staring at me.
“This isn’t the first time Vincent has been in trouble, is it, Mike?” he said finally.
I just shrugged.
Detective Canton stared at me a little longer.
“What else did you and Vincent talk about, Mike?”
“Nothing.”
“What was in the envelope?”
“What?” They knew about that, too?
“That was personal correspondence,” Riel said.
“He wrote you a letter?” Detective Canton said.
“You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to, Mike,” Riel said.
“He drew me a picture,” I said.
“A picture?” Detective Canton said.
“Of a tattoo.” I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to him. “He said the girl had that tattoo.”
“The girl?” Detective Canton said. “Or maybe one of his buddies, one of the guys who was with him in the store? Does he want you to deliver a message, Mike? Is that why he drew you that picture?”
“What? No!”
Detective Canton did his cop stare again.
“Were you in that convenience store with Vincent Taglia two nights ago?” he said.
Riel stood up. “That’s it,” he said. “Come on, Mike. We’re going home.” When I didn’t move fast enough, he grabbed my arm. “Come on.”
Detective Canton kept staring at me as we left.
Riel didn’t say a word until we were in the car. He cranked the key in the ignition like he was trying to twist Canton’s arm off. Then he turned to me and said, “You didn’t phone anybody that night, nobody phoned you or even phoned to talk to me and ended up talking to you, nothing like that?”
“No,” I said. Was he starting to doubt me? “I watched TV. I taped a show for Susan.”
“You did?” Riel said. She must not have mentioned it to him. “Where’s the tape now?”
“Susan has it.” I’d been wondering about that tape, about whether I should say something about it. “Do you think it would help me, you know, if they really think I had something to do with that robbery?”
“Maybe,” Riel said. “Although they could always say that you programmed the VCR to tape it while you were out.”
“But I didn’t,” I said. “I watched the show while I was taping it.”
“We’ll get the tape from Susan,” Riel said. “Just in case. And Mike? If you want my advice, I think you should stay away from Vin. If you don’t, they’re going to make things hard for you.”
They were already making things hard for me.
As soon as we got home, I looked for the videotape that I had made for Susan, but I couldn’t find it.
“She must have taken it home,” Riel said. “She’ll probably call me tonight if she gets a break. I’ll ask her then. If not, I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Don’t worry.”
But I did worry. I worried so much that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept thinking about Vin and about the cops trying to scare me. And about Vin again. He would never have told them that I was involved. But they didn’t believe him about anything—they didn’t believe he hadn’t been involved, they didn’t believe that he didn’t know the two guys who had come into the store after him, and they didn’t believe that there was a girl in the store. So why would they believe him if he said his (former) best friend hadn’t been there? Riel was on my side, though, I was sure of it. That made me feel safe. I knew (well, I was pretty sure) that he’d stick up for me.
Then I thought about Rebecca, who was mad at me and who I should have called when I got home to see exactly how mad—although the fact that she hadn’t phoned me told me something.
And I thought about Sal, who was also mad at me and who had things going on in his life that all of a sudden I knew nothing about. My head was crammed full of everyone I knew and what they thought of me. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t sleep, and the next thing I knew, Riel was pounding on my door, telling me that if I didn’t get out of bed right now, I was going to be late for school.
I wasn’t late—not even close—because, of course, there was no way Riel would let me be late. I got to school at pretty much the regular time, which was a full ten minutes before the bell rang. Rebecca was standing in front of the school. She zeroed in on me as I came down the sidewalk. Her face was so serious that I started to get a sick feeling. All I could think was, She’s still mad at me, she’s going to dump me.
She walked over to me, still with a serious face, which was so pale that every single freckle on her nose and cheeks stood right out. Rebecca told me one time that when she has to do something hard—like stand up in front of the class and make a speech, or like break up with someone—she can’t sleep the night before. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all last night.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” she said.
My stomach did a backflip. Jen had started her dump-Mike speech the same way: I’m sorry, Mike …
“I shouldn’t have walked out yesterday the way I did,” she said.
No, you should have dumped me right then and there, in the middle of the cafeteria, with practically the whole school watching. If you’re going to do something like that, you might as well go big. Make a statement: Hey, world, Mike and I are through.
Then she said, “Forgive me?”
What?
I stared at her.
“Forgive you for what?”
“For walking out on you,” she said, giving me a look, probably wondering if I had even noticed that she’d been mad at me in the first place. She’d told me a couple of times that guys were emotion-blind (and maybe five or six other kinds of blind). Like when guys can’t see that a woman is upset, or when they don’t read the vibes the way women do. She looked like she was thinking that now—I was acting like a guy; in other words, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. And me? I was running her words through my head before I said anything, because I was sure I must have heard wrong. She wanted me to forgive her?
“It’s okay,” I said finally. She relaxed a little, which is how I knew I had said the right thing. “You were mad at me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was. But that’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have lost my temper, and I shouldn’t have walked out on you. You can’t solve problems that way.” She caught my hand and squeezed it. “I tried to call you yesterday after school, but you weren’t around.”
“You should have left a message,
” I said, even though I knew why she hadn’t. Rebecca always got a little nervous when she phoned Riel’s house. She said it made her squirm when Riel answered instead of me. He was her history teacher, and for some reason that always made her freeze up around him. So when she called and no one answered, she almost never left a message. She said it made her feel funny to think that Mr. Riel (she always referred to him like that) might listen to something she said to me. A few times, but only if it was urgent, she’d say, “Could Mike please call Rebecca?” really fast into the phone and then hang up. After every time she called me, she said, “You have to get a cell phone, Mike.” I was saving up for one.
“I called a couple of times, then I had to go to band practice,” she said now, “so you wouldn’t have been able to call me back anyway.” Mr. Korchak, our music teacher at school, had a rule about cell phones during band practice: Turn them OFF, ladies and gentlemen. “Practice went late, so by the time I could call you again … ” She shrugged, but I knew what she meant. I didn’t have a phone in my room. Riel would have picked up. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you face-to-face. We’re okay, right? We’re not breaking up or anything?”
“Jeez, no.”
She smiled at me. I love it when Rebecca smiles. It makes me feel warm, like I’m standing in the sun.
“So, do you really think that Vin had nothing to do with that shooting?”
“I went to see him yesterday.” I said it slowly, afraid that she would have a problem with that. But she just nodded. “He says he wasn’t involved. He swears it.” She waited. Maybe she’s right about women picking up on vibes better than guys, because she seemed to know there was more. “I want to believe him, Rebecca. I can’t help it. I’ve known him since forever,” I said. “But do I believe him?” It was the question that just wouldn’t leave me alone. “I don’t know. That’s why I have to find the girl.”
“What girl?”
I told her what Vin had told me.
“And this girl hasn’t gone to the police?”
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