So, if I wanted to, I could take the same positive view of things. I could tell myself that the reason I was still at liberty was that they hadn’t been able to find anything against me. The reason I wasn’t locked up somewhere was that I was in the clear. I could tell myself, never mind David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, and Rubin Carter, the cops never got it wrong. Or, at least, they wouldn’t get it wrong in my case. In fact, that is what I told myself. I even tried to believe it.
Riel was standing in the hall near my locker after school on Monday. His expression was grim.
“Get your stuff,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“Is something wrong?” I said. Yeah, give me a gold shield and call me detective. Like it took more than three brain cells in total to figure out the answer to that question. If Riel was waiting for me at my locker—something he had never, ever done before—then something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Just get your stuff, Mike.”
I was sure Riel being here and being in such a sour mood had something to do with the cops. But I didn’t ask because there were a lot of kids in the hall, stashing books in their lockers and stuffing notebooks and binders into their backpacks. So I did the same thing. I shoved the books I didn’t need up onto the top shelf of my locker and crammed the books I did need into my backpack. When I turned around, shouldering my load—Don’t make a paperback textbook when you can add a few pounds to the daily load by slapping hard covers on them, right?—I saw Cat a couple of lockers down, watching me. Riel didn’t seem to notice. He nudged me to get me moving.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Later,” Riel said. It was all he said. He walked to the stairs and went down them quickly, checking every few steps to make sure that I was with him. If I was a pace or two behind, he looked impatient. Well, tough. If he wanted me to power on the speed, then the least he could do was tell me what the problem was.
We went through the front door of the school and out onto Gerrard Street. A streetcar stood at the corner, in the westbound track. Both the front and rear doors were open, which meant that it was illegal for cars to pass it. A double line of cars stretched back more than a block behind it. Ahead of it, the traffic light was green. Another streetcar jam-up, I figured. Another normal day in Toronto. It was no big deal. Nothing I would have paid attention to at all if it weren’t for the fact that I saw Sal standing on the back steps of the streetcar, holding the door open.
A car behind the streetcar honked its horn. Then, like little children catching onto a fun idea, the drivers of other cars started to lean on their horns. Sal didn’t move from the steps.
“What’s Sal up to?” Riel said.
I shook my head and started to walk toward the streetcar. When I got closer, I heard Sal speaking to someone in Spanish. His hand was stretched out, reaching for his father, who was standing at the top of the streetcar steps. Inside, the streetcar driver was saying, “Get on or get off, it’s all the same to me. But do something so that I can get this vehicle moving.”
Sal spoke again, quietly but urgently. I saw him try to grab his father’s hand. His father ducked back out of his way but didn’t get off the streetcar steps.
“Look, mister, if you don’t move, I’m going to have to call the cops,” the driver said.
“No,” Sal said. “No, it’s okay. Don’t call them. He’s fine. He just can’t breathe, that’s all.”
“There’s plenty of air outside,” the driver said.
“Maybe a window seat,” Sal said. “With the windows open.”
I glanced along the length of the streetcar. All of the window seats were taken and all of the windows were closed against the chilly air. Nobody looked like they wanted to move to make room for a man who was delaying their trip. Then someone shouted. It took a moment for me to understand that it was Sal’s dad. He yelled something, and I saw him run up the aisle toward the driver. Sal jumped up into the streetcar and ran after him. I could hear him talking fast, but softly, to his dad. He caught his father by the hand and led him to the back door of the streetcar again. But once they got to the door, Sal’s dad stood his ground. He jerked his hand away from Sal.
“That’s it,” the driver said. He appeared at the door right behind Sal’s dad. “That’s it, I’m calling the cops.”
I looked back up at Sal and saw the panic in his face. After everything that had been happening, he didn’t want the police anywhere near his dad.
“Just a minute, sir, if you don’t mind,” said a voice behind me. Riel’s voice. He was talking to the driver. “I know this man. Just give me a minute.” Then he turned to Sal and said, “Ask your father if he’d like a ride home. Tell him he can ride up front and we’ll keep all the windows open.”
Sal’s face flooded with gratitude when he turned to look at Riel. His expression changed, though, when he saw me.
“Ask him,” Riel said, his voice gentle and encouraging.
Sal spoke in Spanish to his father and held out his hand again. Riel stepped closer to Sal and said something I didn’t understand, because it was in Spanish. I stared at him. But Sal’s father came down out of the streetcar.
“Thank you,” Riel said to the streetcar driver. Then he said something else in Spanish. Sal gave me a look that said, How come you never told me? All I could do was shrug.
Riel’s car was parked just down the street from the school, which surprised me. Most of the time he walked to school. “It’s good for you,” he always said. If he drove—which he did when he had a lot of stuff to carry or when he knew he was going to have to run errands at the end of the day—he parked in the staff parking lot. I wondered why he hadn’t done that today.
The first thing Riel did after he unlocked the car was roll down all the windows. Then he came around to the passenger side and opened the door for Sal’s dad, who was standing on the sidewalk. Riel looked at me like, what was I waiting for? I climbed into the backseat with Sal.
Sal told Riel his address. Riel drove to Sal’s house, talking to Sal’s dad in Spanish all the way. Riel did most of the talking. Except for a word here and there, the most Sal’s dad did was nod. Mostly he looked straight ahead. His head was leaning toward the open window. I was worried that he was going to stick his head right out, but he didn’t.
When Riel pulled up in front of Sal’s house, Sal got out and opened the door for his father. Mr. San Miguel got out. If he thanked Riel for the ride, I didn’t hear him. He just walked up the little path to the porch and disappeared inside. As I was getting out of the back seat to go and sit up front with Riel, Sal leaned down through the open passenger door and said, “Thanks, Mr. Riel. I was afraid the driver was going to call the cops.”
“I’m glad I could help,” Riel said. Then he said, “Is your mother holding up okay?”
Sal shrugged. “My aunt comes over a lot.”
“How about you?”
Sal looked down, away from Riel. He did the same thing whenever a girl he liked looked at him. It meant he was embarrassed.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sal glanced at me as he straightened up and turned toward his house. His eyes were all watery again. He sucked in a deep breath, slung one strap of his backpack over his shoulder, and marched up the front path like a guy marching into battle. I guess, in a way, that that was exactly what he was doing.
I slid into the front seat and fastened the seatbelt.
“I didn’t know you could speak Spanish,” I said.
“I spent some time traveling in Latin America,” Riel said, “while I was trying to decide what to do with my life. I wanted to meet girls. And after I met a few—” He shrugged. “If anyone ever tells you that the best way to learn a language is to go out with a girl who speaks it, they’re not lying to you, Mike. Trust me.”
The thought of Riel being tutored by a pretty Spanish-speaking girl made me smile. It also made me think about what I would do when I finished high school.
Instead of heading home,
Riel drove down to Queen Street. He parked the car and led me into his favorite restaurant, which from the outside looks like a hole in the wall. Inside, though, the place is clean and cheerful. Better than that, it serves the best burgers and the best ribs I’ve ever tasted. Maybe that’s why Riel liked it so much. Or maybe he liked it because all the waitresses knew him and seemed to enjoy flirting with him, even the married ones.
Riel led the way to a booth in the back. He ordered coffee, then looked over at me. I ordered a Coke. Riel didn’t say anything while Annette, the waitress, went to get our drinks. That made me nervous all over again. Whatever Riel wanted to talk to me about, it was serious.
Annette set a mug of coffee and a small bowl of plastic creamers in front of Riel and a large Coke in front of me. Riel pulled the foil lid off one of the creamers and dumped the contents into his mug. He stared down at his coffee while he stirred it. When he put down his spoon, he looked directly at me.
“Jonesy wants to see you again,” he said. “You have any idea why?”
I shook my head. But I guessed that if Detective Jones wanted to see me again, it had to be something about Robbie Ducharme.
“We’ve got an appointment downtown,” Riel said. “I asked a friend of mine to meet us there. A lawyer.”
Part of me wanted to laugh—nice try, ha-ha, but you can’t scare me. Another part of me felt cold and numb. A lawyer. That must mean that Riel thought it was serious too.
“Why would he want to see me again?” I asked.
Riel wrapped his hands around his mug of coffee. So far he hadn’t taken even one sip. “Mike, if there’s anything I should know, anything you want to tell me, anything at all, now would be a good time to speak up.”
It felt like all of the air had been sucked out of the little restaurant. I had to breathe hard to fill my lungs. The bright sunny lighting faded to a dull gray. I saw Riel’s lips moving and knew that he was saying something else to me, but the words were drowned out by the hammering of my heart. Did Riel think I hadn’t told the truth about that night, about Jen? Did he still think I was lying? Is that why he’d said that?
“Mike?”
I looked up at him and swallowed hard. If the cops wanted to talk to me again, it couldn’t be good. If they’d just wanted to say that my story had checked out, no problem, they would have told Riel. And for sure Riel wouldn’t be sitting across from me with the same expression on his face that my mother used to have when she got another call from Billy’s school saying Billy had ditched classes again.
“I told you the truth,” I said. Please believe me. Please. “The whole truth.”
Riel peered at me. After a while he nodded. Maybe I would have felt better if he had nodded sooner or if he hadn’t looked like he’d just been fired, or like Susan had dumped him.
“Drink up,” Riel said.
But I didn’t touch my Coke. Riel threw a couple of dollars onto the table. He hadn’t touched his coffee either.
Riel’s lawyer friend was named Rhona Katz. She was tall and thin and pretty—Riel seemed to know a lot of pretty women. She had on a pale blue skirt with a matching jacket. The color reminded me of my mother’s eyes. She smelled nice too, the way my mother used to. She was standing outside police headquarters, holding an expensive-looking leather briefcase. She smiled when she saw Riel and shifted her briefcase from her right hand to her left so that she could shake my hand when she introduced herself. Her grip was firm. So was her voice as she told me that the best thing for me to do was answer all of the questions the police wanted to ask. But, she said, if anything came up that I wasn’t sure about or that I wanted to talk to her about first, I should just say so. Then she said, “Is there anything you want to tell me before we go up, Mike?” She looked and sounded casual as she said it, and at first I thought it was a routine lawyer question, something she always asked. Then I caught her exchanging glances with Riel.
“There’s nothing,” I said. “I already told John.” Meaning Riel. “I told the truth.”
She didn’t argue with me. She just nodded and said, “That’s fine.”
Detective Jones looked a lot more serious than the last time I had seen him, which was really saying something. His partner, Detective London, was with him. I’d met him before, when Billy had died. Detective London eyed me like I was a three-egg, five-slices-of-bacon breakfast and he hadn’t eaten in days.
“Sit down, Mike,” Detective Jones said.
I sat.
“Tell me again where you were the night Robbie Ducharme was killed,” he said.
“Suppose you tell me why you’re asking,” Rhona Katz said.
Detective Jones glanced at her for all of a nanosecond before turning back to me. “Mike?”
Rhona Katz laid a hand on my arm.
“It’s okay,” I said. I was going to convince him this time. I was going to convince them all. I told him again when I had left the house, why I’d left, exactly where I’d gone, what I’d done and when I had returned home.
“And you never spoke to Jen Hayes that night,” Detective Jones said. “And, as far as you know, she didn’t know you were there and she didn’t see you. Is that right?”
I nodded.
“Pretty convenient,” Detective London said. Something in his tone made me look at him. He stared right back at me like I was every bad kid he had ever come across—a liar, a cheat, a thief, and 100 percent not to be trusted.
“Detective,” Rhona Katz said, “unless you have something concrete—”
Detective Jones kept his eyes hard on me the whole time. He didn’t smile at me anymore, didn’t try to sound friendly, didn’t talk softly to encourage me. “We spoke to Jen,” he said. “She says she was with her best friend Ashley Tierney that night.”
Jeez. That was the one thing I hadn’t counted on. I tried to keep my face neutral, but Detective Jones seemed to pick up on something.
“But you knew that already, didn’t you, Mike?” he said.
I stared down at the tabletop. I didn’t answer. I was thinking about Jen. Thinking about the cops going to her school or her house and asking to talk to her. Imagined them saying, “It’s about Mike McGill. He says he saw you on Tuesday night. He says …” I thought about the look on Jen’s face, and then immediately tried to shake the picture that formed in my mind.
“Ashley and Jen say they were together all night,” Detective Jones said. “They were at Ashley’s house from a little after six in the evening until the next morning. Jen slept over because they were doing an English presentation together the next morning.”
Jen, walking up the path to Ashley’s house with her backpack and the little suitcase she used when she was sleeping over at a friend’s house.
“You spoke with Ashley’s parents too?” Rhona Katz said.
“They’re divorced,” Detective Jones said. “Ashley lives with her mother—who was home all night.”
“And who can testify under oath that Jen Hayes never left her house that night?” Rhona Katz said.
“Mrs. Tierney never left the house,” Detective Jones said, not exactly answering the question.
“That’s a no,” Riel said to Rhona Katz. “Ten to one Mrs. Tierney will say the girls were in Ashley’s room all night. Or that she was in her room all night. Am I right, Jonesy?”
Detective Jones looked annoyed. “Ashley’s pretty firm—she insists that Jen was with her all night.”
“You did say best friends, didn’t you?” Rhona Katz said.
Detective Jones glanced at his partner. Detective London said, “You want to tell us about how you got those marks on your knuckles, Mike?”
I looked down at my hands. They were pretty well healed. You had to look close to notice that anything had been wrong with them.
“You told John that you got your hands banged up when you were horsing around with your friend Salvatore San Miguel, right?” Detective Jones said.
My cheeks felt like they were on fire. Riel had spoken to them about me.
He’d told them stuff about me and he hadn’t let me know.
“That came as a big surprise to Sal,” Detective Jones said.
They’d spoken to Sal too? Why hadn’t Sal said anything? If the cops had come around asking me questions about Sal, for sure I would have told him. Then I remembered the look on his face when Riel and I had appeared at the streetcar door. He had been relieved to see Riel, but he hadn’t looked quite so happy that I was there. At the time I thought he was embarrassed at me seeing his father acting so weird, but now I knew that wasn’t it at all. At least, it wasn’t the whole story.
“I was mad,” I said. I had been mad then and, boy, was I ever mad now. Mad at Sal. Mad at Jen. Mad at everyone who was making me look bad. “I went all the way down there so I could talk to Jen and then it just didn’t work out. I punched a wall.”
“Why did you lie to John about it, Mike?” Detective Jones asked.
“Or are you lying now?” Detective London said.
“Okay, that’s it,” Rhona Katz said. She started to stand up.
“One more question,” Detective London said.
Rhona Katz sat down again, but only on the edge of her seat this time, like she was ready to leave the room at any moment.
Detective London leaned in close to me. His eyes were hard. His breath hit my face like a warm breeze. It smelled of onions. “Did you and Robbie Ducharme ever go at it?” he said.
I glanced at Riel, who was frowning now. Riel, who had spent some time in homicide. Who knew how it worked. Who knew when they asked certain questions and how and why and what they knew or thought they knew before they asked.
“And Mike?” Detective Jones said. “The truth this time.” He emphasized the last two words, making it seem that I had been lying every other time.
“No,” I replied. “We never went at it.” I used the same words that Detective London had, spitting each one at him.
“You’re sure about that, Mike?” Detective Jones said. His tone went all soft now. He asked the question in a friendly tone, the way I might ask Vin, Did she let you kiss her? And I got it. He was supposed to be the good cop. His partner was the bad cop. “You told John you didn’t know Robbie, isn’t that right, Mike?”
Truth and Lies Page 10