The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘From college, right?’ Theresa asked.

  He gave her a surprised, direct look. ‘Yeah. How’d you know that?’

  ‘I saw your picture in the yearbook.’ It was him in the Rathskeller photo. She tried, physically tried, to keep from asking the next question. ‘Do you know David Madison?’

  He could not have been capable of faking such a blank look. ‘Huh?’

  Angela looked fairly confused herself. Only Frank narrowed his eyes at Theresa until she felt herself blush. But he turned back to the man and continued with this line of thought. ‘You were friends with Marty too, right?’

  Bilecki’s eyes welled up with water and his lips trembled, and Theresa felt so bad she continued to hold out the box of tissues. ‘Yeah, Marty. Lily and Marty both dead now? Tell me that’s just a coincidence.’

  Theresa stopped blushing. She and Frank exchanged a look.

  ‘Why would you think someone killed Lily?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘You immediately assumed someone killed her. You must have a particular person in mind.’

  ‘No. It’s just something I said. It don’t mean anything.’

  Drugs lowered one’s inhibitions, but also one’s defenses. A five-year-old could have lied better than this man. He stared at the others as they spoke, until a question came along that he didn’t want to answer. Then not just his gaze but his entire head turned to the floor.

  Problem was, the drugs also made him a bit paranoid while giving him a quite rational reason to avoid any entanglement with the police. All this added up to an unproductive interview.

  ‘Did you sell Lily the meth she took this morning?’

  ‘She scored some? Today?’

  ‘Yes. Did you sell it to her?’

  ‘I didn’t know she wanted any. She swore she had finished with it for good after the last time.’

  ‘What happened the last time?’

  ‘She went to jail. No, that was the second-last time. The last time she went to pick up Brandon at school and those bitches called Children’s Services on her.’

  ‘They noticed she was high?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he told them, indignant. ‘And she was only a little bit. But she still swore off it after that.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘If you and Lily didn’t have a drug habit in common any more, why are you hanging around?’

  ‘I told you. We’re friends.’

  ‘Just friends.’

  ‘I got friends,’ he insisted, as if Frank had implied he didn’t.

  ‘Since college. You and Lily and Marty.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The tears threatened again but he pulled them back, apparently determined to present his memories with a touch of dignity. ‘We went to Cleveland State and flopped in this pit on Payne. It was all we could afford.’

  ‘Did you graduate?’

  ‘Hah! No, I flunked out the third quarter. Lily and Marty made it a little longer. I quit after—’

  ‘After what?’

  ‘After I flunked.’

  ‘And you stayed in touch all these years.’

  ‘Yeah. I got friends,’ he repeated, defensive again, and then abruptly chuckled with a low, rattling laugh. ‘Not that Marty wouldn’t arrest me if he found stuff on me. Marty took that cop shit seriously. But he would loan me a few bucks, too, if I was clean.’

  ‘And Lily?’

  ‘She didn’t have a lot of bucks, but she’d make me something to eat once in a while.’

  ‘Where do you live, Mr Bilecki?’

  ‘Um. Around.’

  Homeless, and mooching off the same friends for twenty-five years. Not much of a life. Theresa wondered what he had studied in college. Frank asked when Bilecki had last seen Lily – two weeks prior – and Marty – two months prior – and if he knew who might have a grudge against Marty or any other reason to kill him. Bilecki said no, and that he figured it had to be some scumbag that Marty had put away, while obviously not including himself near that category. Then Frank came full circle back to the beginning. ‘Why did you think someone had murdered Lily?’

  ‘Nothing. I wasn’t thinking. I can’t think like this, in times like this.’ He repeated this theme for a few more sentences before running down into silence, wrapping both arms around himself and rocking slightly, his gaze darting to every item in the room except the faces of the other three people present.

  The other three people waited. Obviously Mr Bilecki had something he wanted to say, and simply had to make up his mind whether to say it.

  Unfortunately, the small dog chose that moment to re-enter the kitchen, and Bilecki made the most of the distraction. He scooped the squirming animal into his lap, petting and cooing in a nauseating, baby-like patter.

  Frank gave up the waiting game. ‘Mr Bilecki. Why did you think Lily had been murdered?’

  ‘Isn’t this a great dog? Lily loved this dog.’

  ‘Mr Bilecki.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to him? Is he going to have to go to the pound? I’d take him, but obviously I can’t afford it. I can’t even afford myself. Poor puppy.’

  Theresa tossed the box of tissues on the counter. It apparently hadn’t occurred to him to save some of that sympathy for the woman’s son.

  Angela stepped in, gently removed the dog from the man’s lap, and took it into the living room.

  Left with Frank’s question, Bilecki dissembled further. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it, I mean … it’s a rough world, you know, and sometimes Lily met bad types …’ It took a few more minutes of this before he stopped trying to look innocent and said, ‘It just seems weird that Marty and Lily both died in the same week. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does. Maybe Lily killed Marty, and the remorse made her suicidal,’ Frank suggested, though Theresa could tell he didn’t mean it.

  ‘No way! She would never have killed Marty. Lily couldn’t kill anybody.’

  ‘Then who did? Let’s suppose, for a moment, that Lily didn’t kill herself and someone murdered her. Why? Who would hold a grudge against both Lily and Marty?’

  Bilecki looked at him then, with a sudden, keen concern, so that Theresa believed that not only did he think such a person existed, he knew exactly who it might be. Frank saw it too.

  ‘Mr Bilecki?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, exhaling breath so foul that Theresa could catch the scent from five feet away. ‘I don’t think that’s possible. They didn’t have much to do with each other any more, not for years and years. I don’t know why Lily would – do this. At least she had this place, somewhere to stay.’ He stood up as he spoke, and placed one foot behind the other, slowly, moving toward the back door. ‘Lily never did anything wrong. Neither did Marty. We were just kids.’

  ‘No one’s saying they did. But someone murdered Marty. They might not have had a very good reason, but there must have been something. So if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them.’

  ‘No. Nothing. I have to go now. Sorry about Lily – will there be a funeral?’

  ‘I don’t know. Can you tell us who were her closest friends, or relatives? Besides her children?’

  He paused to think about that, but shook his head. ‘I didn’t really hang with Lily that much. I didn’t meet friends, and I don’t think she ever had no family.’

  ‘What about Marty?’

  ‘I didn’t hang with Marty. His friends were all cops.’

  So he’d stop by for a handout, but stayed in the shadows, Theresa thought; again, a lousy way to live.

  ‘I’ve got to go now.’ He made a dash for the door, opened it, and then stopped. ‘I can go now, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Frank said.

  The door slammed. It had grown dark outside, and Kenneth Bilecki disappeared into the gloom.

  ‘I can’t hold him,’ Frank said as Theresa raised one eyebrow at him. ‘This isn’t a homicide, and I doubt—’

  ‘Hey.’ Bilecki
stuck his head into the kitchen again, hanging on the knob as if he might swing on the door. ‘Is there going to be a funeral?’

  ‘You asked that already, remember? I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Here – take my card. If you remember any details about Marty and Lily that you think we might need to know, you’ll call me, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, no, there aren’t any. Nothing.’ He backed into the night as if it had plucked him from behind and swallowed him whole, leaving the door to shift gently in the open space. Coldness pressed into the kitchen.

  ‘Junkie,’ Frank muttered.

  ‘He’s kind of – skitterish,’ Theresa said, in the understatement of the year.

  ‘They’re all like that, meth heads. Why did you ask him about David Madison?’

  She explained where she had been earlier in the evening, just before where she’d been had exploded.

  His eyes narrowed again. ‘Uh-huh. And why were you talking to David Madison?’

  She became suddenly interested in the lump of melted plastic from the Lambert place explosion, which she had just rediscovered in her pocket. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Tess.’

  ‘Have you ever been to an alumni board meeting? They don’t exactly rival the latest James Bond movie for entertainment value.’

  ‘Tess.’

  ‘What? Geez, I’m not thirteen any more. You have no authority to comment on my choice in, um, whom I’m interested in.’

  He literally clapped one hand to his forehead, as if she had announced a decision to become a nun or get a nose ring. ‘Interested? Are you out of your mind? The man’s a walking disaster! He drove the last woman in his life into the arms of a thirteen-year-old! How’s that for a recommendation?’

  She would have gotten angry, but her cousin had judged every male she’d ever dated equally harshly so that now she couldn’t help but laugh. And at least it got his mind off Lily Simpson. ‘That’s just mean. You can’t blame her pathology on him. My ex-husband’s probably tucking a dollar bill into the G-string of some girl our daughter’s age as we speak. Is that my fault?’

  He hesitated so long that she punched his arm for the second time in as many days.

  ‘Ow! No, I’m still trying to word my objections to this Madison guy. You turn down dates from every single guy in my unit because you don’t want to deal with drama and baggage, and the next thing I know you’re cozying up to someone who’s nothing but drama and baggage. Why? Because he held an umbrella for you?’

  ‘It’s the quiet things that speak the loudest.’

  ‘You get that off a fortune cookie?’

  Angela re-entered the kitchen in time for the tail end of this conversation. ‘You shouldn’t torment him, you know,’ she told Theresa. ‘He’ll go back to the station, run his name for warrants and get his DL history.’

  Theresa dared her cousin: ‘Go ahead. I’ll bet he doesn’t even have a parking ticket.’

  Frank rubbed one eye. ‘Fine, just expect to see your picture on the screen behind the anchors on Channel 15, that’s all. And don’t come crying to me when you do. What d’ya got, Angela?’

  His partner grinned at Theresa before checking the small notepad in her hand. ‘Kenneth Bilecki, on a one-man quest to rid the world of methamphetamines, one pipeful at a time. Arrested fifteen times, ten for possession, two for sale of, two for passing false scrip and one for loitering. Convicted only on eight of the possession charges and one of the false scrip. Never married – big surprise there. He has parents but they no longer wish to be contacted by law enforcement in regard to their son.’

  Frank said, ‘Convictions on nine out of fifteen – I don’t know if that means he had a good lawyer or a lousy one. At any rate he’s spent his life staying under the radar, and hardly likely to have graduated from minor drug charges to cop killer.’

  They decided to wrap it up. Theresa replaced the lens cap on her camera and zipped the case, patted the dog on the head and collected the various items of evidence she’d bagged up, all the while wondering why Ken Bilecki had referred to himself and his two friends as ‘just kids’. Perhaps that was the last time they were all together. Perhaps their college days seemed like yesterday to the man. Perhaps they were the only ones in his life on which he cared to dwell.

  Looking around at Lily Simpson’s present, she could see why.

  Her phone rang, and showed Leo’s number.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a pair of waders,’ he said.

  ‘I hate it when you begin conversations that way. It’s never a good sign.’

  ‘Homeland Security has excavated down to the first lower level. They’ve given us the green light to go in.’

  ‘In?’

  ‘It’s time to bring our boxes and slides and bloody clothing and other little babies of evidentiary value home. Don will meet you there.’

  ‘It’s nine o’clock at night.’

  ‘And the county will pay you overtime, isn’t that exciting?’

  Not as exciting as a decent night’s sleep. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘At the office, setting up the inventory and storage. Did you think I’d be home in bed while my troops labor in misery?’

  Why not? That had always been his technique in the past. Theresa quite regretted having only carrot sticks for dinner.

  ‘And dress warm,’ he added. Leo tended to speak as if he held all the wisdom of the ages, despite having only four or five years on her. ‘You know, layers, and all that.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Layers.’

  FIFTEEN

  At night, the remains of the Bingham building resembled footage of London during the Blitz. Ringed by blinding halogen lights, the irregular piles of brick and debris seemed like an alien landscape of bright hills and deep shadows. The warmth of a spring day had disappeared with the sun and Theresa had, indeed, gone home, laid on another coat of antibiotic ointment, and changed into layers. After a lifetime spent in Cleveland she had accumulated enough cold weather wear to travel the Arctic in comfort.

  ‘Are you wearing long johns?’ Don asked, noting the cuff of the thermal pants peeking out from the bottom of her jeans.

  ‘You betcha. Aren’t you?’

  ‘There’s only one way for you to find out.’

  ‘I would never take such liberties. Your virtue is safe with me.’

  ‘That’s disappointing.’ He pulled on a pair of heavy leather gloves and asked, ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Good question.’

  Homeland Security staff – or FBI, or Army or whoever they were – had used yellow caution tape to rope off a series of walkways. Most of the rubble had been removed to what had been the parking lot and divided into two sections, one for simple debris and another, much smaller, for stuff they wanted to take a closer look at. She and Don had been told upon arrival that they would not be allowed in either area. Not that they cared much. They had more than enough to do.

  HS staff also informed them that Bruce Lambert had graciously opened the lobby of his adjacent factory for workers who needed a bathroom, a rest or some warm air. The lobby had also been stocked with coffee, sandwiches, water and donuts.

  ‘Dunkin’s or Krispy Kreme?’ Theresa queried the slender Homeland Security agent.

  ‘Presti’s.’

  ‘Bless the man.’

  Don snorted. ‘PR – the richest man in the country being nice to the little guy.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Theresa defended. ‘Us little guys need a lot of nice.’

  A temporary metal staircase led to the first sublevel and their huge storage room. Originally, a section of the room had been closed off by a chain-link fence and a padlock, to which only the trace evidence section had the key, and stored boxes of evidence and row after row of victims’ clothing. Now the fence had been mangled and most of the clothing racks flattened, though some of the cardboard boxes had survived – they’d been stacked against the wall, which remained in parts. The rest of the storage
unit had been filled with file cabinets of old case files, X-rays and histology slides (slides made from sections of tissue for the pathologists to use in making a diagnosis). Along with Theresa and Don, one histologist, one toxicologist, two off-duty deskmen and poor little Dr Banachek had been recruited to work at the site.

  All of them plucked their items from the collapsed stones and carted them to the road where the county had rented a U-Haul box truck for this express purpose. This work could not be outsourced. These items were not bricks or books or furniture. They were evidence, and had to remain in the custody of the M.E.’s office at all times. It was mindless manual labor instead of intelligent forensic work, the stuff that ‘other duties as assigned’ covered in the job description, the tasks that came along more often than TV would suggest, but Theresa had long since become accustomed to them. She only wished she’d thought to bring a radio. Every job went more smoothly with tunes.

  She and Don assembled the supply of new cardboard boxes to fill with the clothing from victims past. For approximately forty years the bloody shirts and pants and underwear had been stored on hangers, covered with thin dry-cleaner’s bags and hung on wheeled racks, like closeouts from the old May Company’s bargain basement. Nowadays all items were sealed in breathable paper bags after thorough drying, better for forensic testing though not necessarily easier to handle, and certainly no more impervious to tons of rubble suddenly falling through the roof. Theresa pulled a piece of crushed fence to the side to reach the first rack. They both wore heavy leather gloves to protect their hands from broken glass and stone.

  ‘Usually these smell kind of musty, with that dried-blood smell,’ she commented to Don. ‘But now I don’t even notice it over the iodine fumes.’

  He folded the clothing into a fresh box. ‘At least it helped the dogs sniff out any remaining unexploded crystals. Wouldn’t want you filling your pockets again.’

  She shuddered at the thought.

  Don changed the subject, sort of. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t iodine fumes carcinogenic?’