“So you don’t have a thing going with her?” Vin said.
“You kidding?”
“What was that look all about then?” Vin said. “A girl doesn’t give that look to a guy unless she has some kind of feelings for him, right?”
“A girl doesn’t give that look to a guy she has good feelings for,” I said. “She’s never even spoken to me, but she’s already decided that I’m scum just because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And I had managed that little trick twice—once in the alley and once again in the school auditorium.
“Wrong place?” Vin said.
“I overheard her talking to Riel about what she saw,” I said.
“What she saw? What do you mean?”
I knew that I probably shouldn’t say anything more. After all, she had been talking to Riel in confidence. Riel had made that clear enough. But she hadn’t actually seen anything that could help the cops, so what did it matter? And besides, this was Vin, my best friend—well, okay, so I wasn’t 100 percent sure of that right now, not with Cat in the picture. But one thing I did know: if I held out on Vin, refused to answer his question, it wouldn’t help the situation. Besides, all Rebecca had seen were just kids. In the distance. Coming out of the park. Kids who maybe didn’t even have anything to do with Robbie Ducharme.
There was the other thing too—the thing with the man who had identified me. A month or so ago I would have called Vin first thing to tell him all about it—because Vin was my best friend. Always had been. Probably would be again once he got over Cat.
“Mikey?”
“If I tell you,” I said, “you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone else.”
“Hey, Mike … ” Vin gave me a wounded look, like I should know better. Best friends never ratted. Best friends never said things they shouldn’t outside of the circle.
I told him about Rebecca first. “Maybe you saw it in the paper. There was a girl who said she saw kids in the park.”
“Rebecca with the red hair?” Vin said.
“Yeah. But she was too far away. She couldn’t ID anyone. Just knows they were kids, that’s all. But that’s not the best part.” Best part? Make that weird part. “There was a guy too. A man. He called Crime Stoppers and said he saw a kid near the park that night. The cops showed him yearbooks from St. James, from Hillside and from our school. Guess who he ID’d?”
Vin peered intently at me and waited.
“Me,” I said. I even laughed. And I guess it was kind of funny, if you looked at it the right way. “You believe that? The guy picked out my picture and told the cops I was the kid he saw near the park that night.”
Vin blinked. “You, Mikey? You were there?”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t there. That’s the thing. I just happened to walk by the park that night and this guy saw me and contacted the cops. They sent a homicide detective to the house to question me and everything.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t tell him anything.” Jeez, didn’t Vin get it? “I wasn’t there, not in the park, I mean. I just went by there.”
“So you didn’t see anything either,” Vin said. He shook his head. “A guy gets stomped and no one sees anything. Guess the cops pretty much hit a dead end, huh?” He glanced at his watch. “If I don’t get moving, Cat’s gonna give me a hard time all day,” he said. “That is, if she even speaks to me. She hates it when I’m late.”
“I thought she hated it when you pretend-smoked.”
“That too,” Vin said. “But she’s cool, Mike. If you ever got to know her, you’d like her.”
I watched him go. Then I turned back to Sal’s house. I had to go up there. Sal probably needed someone to talk to. And it was the right thing to do. But, man, how come the right thing always turned out to be the hard thing?
As soon as I had pressed the doorbell, I started to worry that Sal’s mother would answer the door. Talking to Sal would be hard enough, but I had no idea what I would say—what I should say—to Mrs. San Miguel. So I was relieved when Sal’s face appeared in the little diamond-shaped window cut into the inner door.
Sal peered out at me for a second, then his face disappeared. I waited. Nothing happened. Should I ring the bell again? Or should I assume that Sal didn’t want to talk to me, that he probably didn’t want to talk to anyone? I hesitated, trying to put myself in Sal’s shoes, trying to decide what I’d want my friends to do if my dad had just been taken away in handcuffs. I decided to ring again.
The inner door opened before my finger reached the doorbell. Sal pushed open the outer aluminum door and stepped out onto the porch. He closed both doors behind himself before he said anything. When he turned around again, I saw that his eyes were watery and red around the edges. I wondered how much sleep anyone ever got at Sal’s house.
“You heard about my dad, right?” Sal said.
I nodded. “Vin told me what happened.”
Sal snorted. “Right. Vin. I saw him standing down there on the sidewalk. I kept waiting for him to come up to the house, but he never did.”
“He probably didn’t know what to say.” I didn’t tell Sal what I really thought, which was that if you’d known Vin for a lifetime, he could be okay, like he was when my mother died. But Sal hadn’t known Vin for a lifetime. They had never been as close as Vin and I were … used to be … maybe still were. “You know Vin. You need someone to jazz you, he’s the guy. You need someone to think up the right thing to say when, well, you know—Vin’s not so good at that.”
“Yeah,” Sal said. He sounded angry. He was probably thinking the same thing I was—that if it had been important enough, Vin would have at least tried. And since he hadn’t tried …
“You okay?” I said.
Sal nodded. His head moved up and down slowly, like it weighed as much as a boulder.
“How about your mom? How’s she doing?”
“See?” Sal said. “It’s not rocket science.”
I blinked. “I don’t get it.”
“Saying the right thing. You don’t have to be a genius.”
Oh.
“My mom freaked out,” Sal said. “At one point they all had their guns drawn. You have any idea what that’s like, Mike, seeing a bunch of cops with their guns pointed at your dad? They called for a translator, but heck, it seemed to take forever. So they were telling me what to say to him and I was saying it. Then when they finally got him to drop the hedge clippers, they were all over him, pushing him down to the ground, putting handcuffs on him. You should have seen the way he looked at me. Like I was on their side or something.” His voice broke and trembled. I thought maybe he was going to start to cry, but he didn’t. “They took my dad away in handcuffs,” he said. “And my mom started to cry and cry. It reminded her of what happened back home.” Back home in Guatemala, he meant. “I called my aunt, and she called a lawyer. My mom’s going down to the police station. I have to go with her. Her English isn’t so good when she’s upset.”
“Vin said nobody got hurt,” I said. “They’ll probably let him come home, no problem.”
Sal didn’t look convinced. “There were TV cameras here,” he said. “And reporters. It’s going to be all over the news, I know it. So that gives my mom something else to worry about. She thinks Dad’s going to lose his job.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I should say something.
“He can’t get fired for something that has nothing to do with work.” That was the best I could come up with. And it was the way I thought things should work. But you never knew. I had lost the first job I ever had after I got into trouble with the police.
“It’s not just that,” Sal said. “When my dad gets like this, when he gets all worked up, he can’t stand to be closed in, you know?”
I didn’t know. Not exactly.
“He cleans those big office buildings,” Sal said. “All night he’s in those big high-rises. He has to ride in an elevator. Then when he gets
to the offices, the windows don’t open. He can’t stand that. When he gets upset, he has to be outside. And if he can’t get outside, then he has to have the windows open.”
We stood there for a moment, not saying anything. I couldn’t think of anything that would make Sal feel better. Sal just plain didn’t speak.
“I’ll come by after school,” I said at last. “If there’s any homework you need to know about, I’ll let you know.”
“Yeah,” Sal said. His tone said it all: Who cares about homework? What’s homework going to accomplish? “Thanks.”
I dropped by Sal’s after school, like I had promised, but no one answered the door. So I took out the list of homework assignments that I had collected, scribbled a note on the top of it, and shoved it through the mail slot. On the way home from Sal’s place, I stopped by Blockbuster to return a video that was already a couple of days overdue. When I came out again, a car horn tooted. Riel was sitting in his car at the curb. He waved me over.
“How did you know I was here?” I said.
“I didn’t,” Riel said. “Get in.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“Get in, Mike.”
Yes, sir. Jeez. “Seriously,” I said after I buckled up, “how did you know where I was?”
Riel put the car into gear and flipped on his turn signal before pulling out into traffic. “I was looking for you.”
Looking for me? That didn’t sound good.
“We have to go downtown,” Riel said.
“What for?”
“Detective Jones called. He wants to talk to you again.”
A lump of ice formed in my stomach, its chill spreading through my whole body.
“Why?” I tried to make the word sound casual, tried to give the impression that I couldn’t imagine why Detective Jones would want to talk to me again. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he just wanted to go over my story again, maybe try to trip me up. Cop games. After all, as far as I knew, I was the only lead they had, the only kid who had been identified around the park that night. But that didn’t mean anything, not if someone had only seen me walk by the park.
“He said he needed to clarify a few things,” Riel said. He sounded casual enough himself, but there was a tightness around his eyes that told me that he had probably asked the same question. Any guy who used to be a detective must know what it meant when the cops wanted to talk to a person a second time.
We drove the short distance without talking. Riel parked as close as he could to police headquarters, and we went inside. He told the police officer at the front desk why we were there, then we waited for Detective Jones to come down and meet us and show us to an interview room.
“We’re going to videotape this, okay, Mike?” he said.
I glanced at Riel, who nodded. I was in for it now. I wished a bunch of things all at the same time. I wished I had never left the house that night. I wished I had never lied to Riel. The thing with lying: once you start, things can get complicated. And, boy, did I ever wish that man hadn’t turned on his TV when he got back to town.
Detective Jones cautioned me again, just like he had the other day at Riel’s house. And he asked me again if I understood what he had just said to me.
I nodded. I felt like an insect caught in a whirlpool. The whole room seemed to be spinning around me. Any minute now I was going to get sucked down the drain.
“Can you tell me what it means?” Detective Jones said.
My mouth was so dry that I almost choked on my answer. “It means that anything I say can be used against me,” I said.
“Do you want a lawyer?” Detective Jones said. He looked at Riel.
“Let’s see where you’re going first,” Riel said.
Detective Jones looked at me.
“Okay, Mike?”
“Okay,” I said. But, boy, it was so not okay.
“Mike, can you tell me again where you were on the night that Robbie Ducharme was killed?”
“I already told you that.” I’d told him twice. And anyway, it wasn’t such a big deal.
“I know.” Detective Jones’s voice was calm, almost soothing. He sounded sorry to be asking the question again. But he didn’t fool me. He wasn’t sorry at all. He was doing his job, and his job was to find out what had happened to Robbie Ducharme. “I know we went over this already,” he said, “but I need to make sure I have everything straight. Can you tell me again, Mike? Just run through it the way you remember it.”
I fought down the panic that was churning up my belly the way a gale-force wind churns up lake water. Okay. No problem. I could do this. I drew in a deep breath and began. I had left the house. I had walked over to my old house. I had stood out on the street for a while, looking at the old place, thinking about Billy. Then I had taken a long walk. What had I told Detective Jones before? Oh yeah, over to Greenwood, down to Queen, east to Coxwell.
“And what time did you leave John’s house?” He indicated Riel with a nod of his head.
“Around eleven,” I said.
“Any idea what time you were at your old house?”
I shrugged. So far so good. I started to relax as I tried to make the calculation. It wouldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes to walk there. “Maybe quarter after,” I said.
“And you stayed there how long?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe longer.”
“Did you see anyone?”
I shook my head. It had always been a boring street. A street where you could count on people being safely inside at that time of night. A street where nothing much happened.
“So it was pretty quiet out there, I guess,” Detective Jones said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Detective Jones sat back in his chair. If I’d had to name the expression on his face as he looked over at Riel, I would have said it was regret.
“What’s your old address, Mike?”
I told him. Thirty-eight.
“Do you know what happened at thirty-four that night, Mike?”
Thirty-four? That was two houses down from where Billy and I had lived. An older couple lived there. Portuguese, I think. I didn’t know their names, but the woman always used to smile at me when I went by their house and on Sundays their kids used to show up with their grandchildren, a whole pile of them.
“Mr. Cardoso,” Detective Jones said. “He and his wife live at thirty-four. You know him?”
I’d seen him around. Mr. Cardoso didn’t smile like his wife did. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing the old man smile.
“He has Alzheimer’s,” Detective Jones said. “You know what that is?”
Sure, I knew. “It’s a disease. When you get it, you can’t remember stuff.”
Detective Jones nodded. “It’s a degenerative brain disease. You forget all kinds of things—your past, the names of your loved ones, the streets in your own neighborhood. People who have Alzheimer’s tend to wander. They have to be watched because they can hurt themselves. They might run a bath that’s all hot water, no cold, and then burn themselves badly when they get into the tub. Or they might turn on a burner on the stove and then forget all about it and burn whatever’s on the stove. It can be a real fire hazard.”
I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Something had happened at the Cardosos’ house that night. I knew it without Detective Jones saying it. I felt like I was fighting for my life now—me against my nerves. I was fighting to stay calm, to keep my face from showing the sick feeling that was washing over me.
“Just after eleven p.m. on the night that Robbie Ducharme died, Mrs. Cardoso made a 911 call,” Detective Jones said. “It seems Mr. Cardoso got out of bed sometime before that and turned on one of the gas burners on the stove. Mrs. Cardoso had made fried chicken for supper that night and she left a pan of cooking oil on the stove. You know what happens to cooking oil when it gets really hot, Mike?”
I had a pretty good idea.
“It bursts into flame,” Detective Jones said. “It’s a good thin
g Mrs. Cardoso is a light sleeper. She said she got into the habit after her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Because, let me tell you, if she hadn’t woken up when she did … ” He shrugged.
I didn’t dare look at Riel, but I felt him right there at my elbow.
“What I don’t understand,” Detective Jones said, “is how you could have been on your street, in front of your house, at the time you said you were, and how you didn’t see the fire truck that was there. You want to tell me how that can be, Mike?”
Riel stood up abruptly. “I think I need some time with Mike,” he said.
Detective Jones held his eyes on me for a moment longer. I looked at the floor. I swallowed hard and kept swallowing hard. I knew if I stopped, I’d throw up. Then Detective Jones got up and left the room.
“You let me know when you’re ready,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to me or Riel.
Nothing happened in the seconds after the door closed behind him. Riel was standing a little behind me and I couldn’t make myself turn around to face him. I kept staring at the floor and swallowing hard. After a little while, I saw Riel’s feet circle around in front of me. He pulled out a chair, positioned it directly opposite me and sat down in it.
“What’s going on, Mike?” he said.
He didn’t accuse me of anything. He hadn’t accused me of anything the first time Detective Jones had questioned me either. What did that mean? What was Riel thinking? Jeez, what was Detective Jones thinking?
“I asked you a question, Mike,” Riel said.
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Robbie Ducharme,” I said.
“If I had to put money on it, I’d have to bet that Detective Jones thinks you did,” Riel said. “He’s catching you in an awful lot of lies, Mike. You lied to me about where you were that night. And then you lied to him. Lying to me, well, that’s only going to make it hard for you and me to get along. But lying to the police when they’re conducting a homicide investigation? That’s pretty serious.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even make myself look at Riel. I was too embarrassed, because not only had I been caught again, but now I was crying. I couldn’t believe it. I was acting like a girl and I couldn’t stop. I wiped angrily at the tears that were leaking out of my eyes.
Truth and Lies Page 8