Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  “For what?”

  “I wanted to cop some T’s and B’s. It was my birthday, and I wanted to get real high. So I said, ‘Gimme your bread.’ But all he had on him was a twenty-dollar bill. I said, ‘Shit, you can do better than that.’ And he says, ‘I can give you a check.’” Carnova hooted with laughter. “I can’t take no checks. So I drove down to the bank, there on Fifth, and I says, ‘Gimme your damn bank card and I’ll get some money.’ And he says he don’t have no bank card, when I know damn well he does. So I smack him with the back of my hand.” He slashed the air with his hand. “I said, ‘Gimme that bank card.’ But he won’t. So I pull over and hit him again. He starts crying and says now he don’t use no bank card. And I start waling on him . . . ”

  Carnova’s voice died off.

  “Why didn’t he try to get away?” Lennart said.

  “He was strapped in with the seat belt.” He started to say something else, then swallowed it.

  Finch stared at him for a long moment. “You’re lying about this, aren’t you, Terry? About Lessing being queer.”

  “No, I ain’t lying,” the kid said defiantly. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  Art slapped the kid—hard enough to knock him off his chair. The other cops didn’t move a muscle. Carnova sat on the floor for a second, looking stunned.

  “What’d you hit me for, man?” the kid said with the true innocence of stupidity.

  “I felt like it,” Finch said between his teeth. “I may feel like it again.”

  Carnova began to smile. “Sure. You wale on me as much as you want. My old man used to wale on me. See what it gets you.”

  He got to his feet, brushed off the seat of his pants, and sat down again at the table. “See what it gets you,” he said, giving Finch a fierce look.

  Finch leaned back in his chair. “So you beat him up because he wouldn’t give you money.”

  “That’s what I told you,” Carnova said sullenly.

  “According to the coroner, his skull was fractured twenty-eight times, Terry. Six of his ribs were broken. Both collarbones. The hyoid bone in his neck. His right arm.” Finch stared at the kid coldly. “Why’d you do that, Terry?”

  The kid ducked his head. “I don’t know why,” he whispered.

  Finch reached out and grabbed Carnova by his hair, jerking his head up violently. “You don’t know why!” he shouted, looking directly into the kid’s eyes.

  The boy tried to pull away, but Finch had a good grip. After a time the kid stopped struggling and sat there, staring at Finch. A blush filled both of Carnova’s cheeks, and his eyes teared up with pain and indignation.

  Finch gave the kid’s head a good yank, then let go, flinging his hand away as if it was contaminated. The kid kept staring at him, tears running down both cheeks, almost as if he was sorry for what he had done.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said angrily. “He was good to me, most of the time. He gave me things.”

  For a second I thought Finch was going to hit him again. But Art held back.

  “So you killed him for being good to you?” he said dully.

  “No, man!” Carnova said in an anguished voice. He wiped the tears from his cheeks with both hands. “I didn’t mean to kill him. He just . . . he kept provoking me. He wouldn’t give me the money.”

  Carnova sobbed suddenly. It was startling, coming from a kid like him—like hearing an animal make a human sound.

  “I drove from one bank to another, all over the fucking town,” he said, beginning to cry in earnest. “I kept giving him chances, man. But he wouldn’t come across. It was my birthday, man, and he wouldn’t come across!”

  Carnova sobbed again. “I was real high, from celebrating. High on T’s and B’s. All I wanted was a few more dollars so’s I could score again. I didn’t want to come down, you know . . . I just wanted to stay up there for the whole day. But Lessing, man, he wouldn’t give me the number.”

  “What number?”

  “For the bank card, man. The password number. He just . . . wouldn’t. So I got mad. I says to him, ‘I’m going to show you, man. I ain’t some little prick you can jerk around. I’m a man.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was kinda messed up. His face, I mean. He just kinda grinned at me like he was daring me on, you know. Like he didn’t have no respect for me at all. Like he didn’t care.”

  Carnova took a deep breath and wiped his face again. His nose was dripping snot and he wiped it, too, with the back of his hand. He sat there for a moment, breathing hard.

  “I drove down to the Ferry, down there on River Road. And I pulled Ira out, and I says to him, I’m gonna give you one more chance.’ But I can see he’s pissed off now. I says, ‘Give me the money.’ That’s when he hit me.”

  “Lessing hit you?”

  “Yeah,” Carnova said, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “Ira shouldn’t have done that, man. Not to me. Not that night. I picked up this rock and I hit him back with it. Right in the face.” Carnova shuddered. “Man, it made a weird sound. Ira just kind of wobbled around and then he fell. I says, ‘Get up!’ But he ain’t moving at all. That’s when I start to get scared. I stoop down there and listen to his heart, and it’s like . . . I couldn’t believe it happened, man. He was dead. I started shouting at him, like, ‘How can you be dead, man!’ And then, I don’t know . . . I just lost it. I started pounding on his face and his chest. Screaming at him, ‘How come you’re dead? You can’t be dead!’ Shit like that, you know. I mean I’m so pissed off that he’s dead, I just can’t think straight. I take this rock from the ground and start pounding his head with it, cursing him and crying and shit. I must’ve hit him a hunnert times. There’s blood all over me.”

  Carnova’s eyes lit up weirdly. “I tasted his blood, man. It was all over my face and my mouth, and I tasted his blood.” The light in his eyes went out, and he slumped forward in his chair. “I drug his body over to this old shack. Put some siding over it. Drove around in his car for a few hours, then ditched it.” Carnova looked up, exhaustedly. “That’s about it.” All four of us stared at the kid for a moment. Then Art stood up. “Did you get that?” he said to the stenographer.

  The stenographer nodded.

  “Good.” Finch stretched his arms over his head, then slammed one hand down on the table in front of Terry Carnova, making the kid jump in his chair. “We’re going to do this again, Terry. And again. Until we’re satisfied with what we got. That okay with you?”

  Carnova nodded stupidly, slumping back again in the chair. The defiant look he’d had on his face—that brazen, self-congratulatory look of celebrity—had vanished. He was just an ordinary kid now, who knew that his moment of glory had come and gone unapplauded.

  Staring at him bent over in the chair, his dirty blond hair falling across his face like a veil, I tried my best to think of him as human. To think again of the ugly, predictable history that had made him what he was—the poverty, the ignorance, the abuse, whatever. I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t make myself feel a thing for Terry Carnova.

  When Finch started asking the same questions again, I got up and went out into the hall.

  12

  TERRY’S TEENAGE girlfriend, Kitty Guinn, was sitting on a bench outside the interrogation room smoking a cigarette. She stared at me pointedly as I walked by, holding up her right hand, like a kid in high school trying to get the teacher’s attention. Greasy red hair braided in pigtails and fastened with bobby pins. A pale, freckled, red-eyed face, already aging, already old. No shape to speak of beneath a striped cotton shirt and jeans. I gave her a hard look, and she jerked her hand back quickly, ducking her head to her breast.

  “Please, mister,” she said in a nervous, down-home voice. “Are you a policeman?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “You ain’t a policeman?” she said with surprise.

  “My name is Stoner. I work for the Lessing family.”

  The girl dr
opped her eyes, as if the name Lessing meant something to her. “Maybe you help me anyways, Mr. Stoner? I just gotta talk to Terry.”

  “You’re going to have to wait until they’re done.”

  “When will that be, you think?” She looked up at a clock on the wall in front of her. “It’s already ‘bout four. And I got a bus to catch.”

  “It could take all night.”

  She thought about that for a second and made her face look grimly determined. “Then I just gotta wait. ‘Cause I can’t have him thinking what he thinks about me. And somebody ‘round here’s gotta hear me out.” The girl gave me another pointed look.

  It was obvious that she wanted to talk about Carnova. But I’d had my fill of her boyfriend, and the last thing I felt like doing was sitting there and listening to her apologize. On the other hand, I didn’t want to blow the chance to learn more about Lessing. And judging by her reaction when I’d mentioned Ira’s name, there was a possibility that the girl knew something worth listening to—something that Carnova hadn’t admitted to or had distorted in his confession. Maybe it was a measure of how little I was looking forward to confronting the Lessing family with Carnova’s story, but I decided to give the girl a chance to talk.

  “I thought you turned Terry in,” I said, sitting down beside her on the bench.

  Kitty Guinn edged away from me self-consciously, just far enough to let me know that she wasn’t the kind of girl who sat close to strangers. Under the circumstances it was a silly bit of redneck etiquette. But the fact that she had values of any kind gave her a big leg up on her boyfriend.

  “I did turn him in,” she said with a guilty look. “But I didn’t expect it to happen like it done. It was Tommy T. that was behind it. Not Terry. I told the cops that when they come to get me. But they wouldn’t listen.”

  “Terry didn’t mention anybody else,” I said to her.

  The girl glanced disparagingly at the door of the interrogation room. “He’s trying to make himself look big is all. ‘Cause of what happened to that man.”

  “To Lessing?”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “He was a good man, that man. He give Terry everything he wanted. When we didn’t have no money, he give Terry money. He was good to Terry. And Terry . . . he liked him real good. Like he was his own dad that he never had.”

  “I thought Terry said he had a father.”

  “No, he don’t. He don’t have no one, save that old bitch aunt of his, over ta’ Newport, and that bastard cousin of hers, Kent. Terry’s own dad skipped out when Terry was a kid. And his mom . . . well, she married some guy up in Akron. Got her a brand-new family, and Terry ain’t welcome. Terry didn’t have nobody till he met me. Nobody but that man.”

  “Terry says that Lessing was a homosexual. That he paid him for his company.”

  The girl shifted her eyes away from me, as if she wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t know nothing about that. He was good to Terry is all I know. There was never no trouble between them. And Terry ain’t no fag, I can tell you that. He ain’t never been no faggot. Them that says he is, like Chester Johnson and Tommy T., is liars.” She looked at me again, proudly. “I know Terry ain’t no faggot.”

  I believed that she thought she was telling the truth about Carnova’s manhood. But then she didn’t look like she’d had much experience with men. And she wasn’t very bright.

  “So you don’t think Lessing was a homosexual?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said stoutly, as if I’d talked her into it. “He was like a father to Terry. That’s why he give him that money, ‘cause he didn’t have no kid of his own.”

  “Did you ever meet Lessing?”

  “Once’t, he come over to our apartment,” she said shyly, as if the honor of it still sat heavily on her, “It was back in March. He bought us some pizza and Terry played some music on his guitar. Terry’s real musical.” Her eyes shone with pride.

  In spite of myself I’d begun to wonder why the hell she’d betrayed Carnova to the cops. Her love for the kid seemed genuine enough.

  So I asked her, “Why’d you turn Terry in?”

  Her face went pale with fright. “It was ‘cause he got so crazy after it happened. He said he was going to hell. And it didn’t matter no more what he done, ‘cause he kilt the only person who ever did show him any kindness. He said he was gonna kill me too. Cut me up with his huntin’ knife. And then he was gonna cut himself up.” She put a hand to her mouth. “I got scared. That’s why I called the cops. Terry kept talking about that body out there in the sun. He and Tommy T., they’d go and look at it ‘bout every day. Like they was going to a ball game or something. Terry’d laugh about it with him. But when he’d come back, he’d act even crazier. The other night, he copped some T’s and B’s and got real high and took out that knife and held it to my throat, ‘bout half the night. I kept tellin’ him it weren’t really his fault. That it was Tommy T. But that just made him madder. It was like half of him wanted it to be him that done it. And the other half jus’ couldn’t stand what he’d done.”

  She stared at me confusedly, as if Carnova’s state of mind went way beyond her understanding. To be frank, it went beyond mine too. The tormented boy she was describing bore no resemblance to the vicious little bastard I’d seen in the interrogation room. It was a side of Carnova I didn’t want to know about.

  The girl must have read the revulsion in my face, because her own face grew hard-looking. “You believe what you want,” she said stiffly. “But I done it to save him from himself.”

  The girl stopped talking to me after that. She didn’t even want to look at me. She sat stock-still, concentrating on the door to the interrogation room as if her own fate were being decided inside.

  ******

  I got up and walked down the hall to the CPD mess. Bought myself a cup of weak coffee from a dispensing machine. Sat down at a battered Formica table and stared out the corner window at the gray, turbulent sky.

  I didn’t know what to make of what the girl had said. She was desperate, and I had the gut feeling she’d say anything to make up for betraying Carnova to the cops. Some of her story had had the ring of truth—her terror was certainly real enough. But most of it was confused and confusing. Carnova’s motivation for killing Lessing, the accomplice whom Kitty claimed had actually committed the murder, Carnova’s crazy behavior after the crime. It was jumbled, I thought, because it didn’t really make sense to her. Not any of it. Except for the fact that Lessing had been kind to Carnova. Like a father.

  She hadn’t actually accused Lessing of being a homosexual; but then she’d sensed that I didn’t want to hear that, and she was sensible enough to play to her strength. If she knew that the homosexual charge might help Terry, she’d probably change her story to corroborate his. And a jury might buy the accusation.

  I wondered if I did.

  In spite of the fact that I didn’t want to believe him, Terry Carnova made it damn easy to see Ira Lessing in terms of homosexual clichés. A harsh, puritanical father. An icy, obdurate mother. A fragile, childlike wife. A loyal, obsequious friend who did the real work of holding things together. And a generous, good-hearted, compulsively complicated man. A man whose strengths and weaknesses I didn’t pretend to understand.

  Of course no one in the family, no one I’d spoken to on the street, had given me the slightest reason to think that Ira Lessing was gay. Only Carnova had claimed that. A kid who made his living hustling queers. A kid who was facing a death sentence and looking for a way out, looking for a way to redeem his manhood in front of the cops and in front of a jury.

  As I sat there, mulling things over, Art Finch walked into the room. He bought a cup of coffee and brought it to the table.

  “I’m taking a break,” he said wearily.

  “Has he changed his story?”

  “He’ll change it.”

  “Then you don’t believe it? The homosexual crap?”

  Finch took a sip of coffee. When he spoke he didn’t ans
wer the question directly. “The fucking little queer isn’t going to squirm out of the chair on the basis of some bullshit. Not if I can help it.”

  “The girlfriend claims he didn’t do it. Or that he had help.”

  Finch threw his hand at me disgustedly. “She’d say anything now. You heard him in there. The kid admitted that he did it, and he didn’t say a word about anybody else.”

  “What are you going to tell the family?”

  Finch leaned back in his chair and sighed. “They’re downstairs right now. At least the mother and the guy Trumaine are. That’s why I’m taking a break. They’re here to claim the body.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Jesus is right. Coroner says Lessing didn’t have a face left.”

  I got up from the table: “I’d better go find them.”

  “Down in the morgue. Bottom floor.”

  “You coming?”

  He nodded. “Eventually. I’m not in any hurry to do this. And I’d appreciate it if you’d pave the way.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. “Are you going to tell them about Carnova’s confession?”

  “Don’t have a choice,” Finch said. “Carnova’ll have a PD by tomorrow. He’ll want one after he gets done talking to the cons in the holding tank tonight. And even if he’s too stubborn to listen to the jailhouse lawyers, the court’s going to appoint a defender when he’s arraigned. As soon as that happens some of this fag shit is going to make the papers. And it sure as hell’s going to come out in court.” He gave me a grimly determined look. “But there isn’t going to be a word of it in the confession he signs. Not if it takes all night to get the truth out of him. You tell the family that.”

  13

  I FOUND Len Trumaine and Meg Lessing in a tiny waiting room outside the morgue. A police matron was sitting with them, reading a magazine.

  Trumaine tried to smile as I entered the room. But Meg Lessing didn’t notice me. The woman was obviously in a bad way. Not just worn out, but worn away by the ordeal. Her handsome face looked seared by it, as if the flesh had boiled off, as if it were all hard white bone. It made her fierce eyes burn like candles in a skull. A coiled rosary sat on a table beside her, untouched.