“What?” That wasn’t possible. “I didn’t threaten Robbie. Why would I do that?”
“Because you were still mad at him,” Detective London said, like I was some kind of idiot, like he had to spell it out for me in a loud voice. “You’re the kind of guy who loses his temper, right, Mike? The kind of guy who uses his fists when he’s angry.”
“Okay,” Rhona Katz said. This time she stood up and didn’t sit down again. “That’s it. Unless you have something definite that ties my client to the incident in the park, we’re out of here.”
“Come on, Mike,” Detective Jones said. He peered into my eyes and wouldn’t stop. He looked like he felt sorry for me. “Why don’t you just tell us what happened? Get it over with. You’ll feel better. Everybody feels better when they’ve made a clean breast of it. What happened? Did you just happen to run into Robbie in the park? Did he say something about your Uncle Billy again? Is that what happened?”
“Come on, Mike,” Rhona Katz said. She touched my arm.
I was amazed that my legs were strong enough to hold me. I pushed back my chair with trembling hands and followed her to the door. Riel was right behind me.
I don’t remember how I got from the interview room to the sidewalk next to Riel’s car. But there I was, standing on the sidewalk while Rhona Katz said, “We need to talk.” There I was, watching Riel make an appointment with her for the next morning and then watching Rhona Katz step out into the street to flag a cab while Riel circled to the driver’s side of his car and unlocked the door.
I got in and buckled my seatbelt.
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “I never threatened Robbie Ducharme outside the music room. And I didn’t see him in the park. Except for that time I shoved him, I never touched him.”
Riel sat still, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his eyes focused forward. He sat like that for a while before slipping a key into the car’s ignition. Before he started the car, he looked hard at me and said, “Somebody sure isn’t telling the truth.”
I didn’t have the courage to ask Riel who he thought that somebody was.
For the first time that I could remember, Riel didn’t cook supper. Instead he ordered in pizza. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t organic.
We sat at the table in the kitchen, Riel opposite me, the open pizza box between us. Riel worked his way through a piece, chewing on it as enthusiastically as if it were a piece of cardboard. He washed down each mouthful with a gulp of beer straight from the bottle. I was usually good for half a large pizza, but not tonight. I nibbled at the one slice on my plate.
Riel drained the last of the beer from the bottle in front of him. “Remember I told you I knew the Ducharme family?” he said. They were the first words he had spoken since we’d sat down.
I nodded. He’d mentioned it right after Robbie was killed.
“We all did,” he said.
We? All?
“Mr. Ducharme used to have a restaurant,” he said. “Downtown, near police headquarters.”
Cops, he meant. All the downtown cops knew the Ducharme family. All the homicide cops.
“They ran it together, Mr. and Mrs. Ducharme. Robbie used to hang around after school. This was when he was little. Mr. Ducharme closed the restaurant after his wife died. He owns a sandwich place now, near his house. The idea was, he could be right there for Robbie all the time.”
I felt like telling him, no offense, but the last thing I’m interested in right now is Robbie and his family. If things had been different, maybe I would have come right out and said so.
“You know what happened to her?” Riel said. It was what Ms. Stephenson would call a rhetorical question, one where an answer isn’t expected. How could I possibly know, except that Riel had just said she died?
“March break,” Riel said. “When Robbie was ten. His mother took him to Disney World down in Florida. His father couldn’t get away from work, so it was just the two of them.” He reached for his beer and raised it to his lips before realizing that the bottle was empty.
“You want me to get you another one?” I said.
Riel shook his head. “So Robbie and his mother are down in Florida,” he said. “And one night, instead of staying at Disney World, they decided to go exploring. Mr. Ducharme said his wife used to love to do that—get off the beaten path, you know.”
I wondered why he was telling me about Robbie Ducharme’s mother.
“While they were out exploring in Florida, Robbie’s mother was mugged. It started out as a mugging, anyway. She’d sent Robbie into a store to get ice cream. She was waiting outside. And a guy with a gun comes up to her, tells her, give me your money. At least, that’s what the police down there figure he must have said, because someone across the street saw her open her purse and take something out and hand it to the guy. The person across the street, he didn’t see Mrs. Ducharme struggle or say anything to provoke the guy. But the guy shoots her anyway.”
Jeez.
“That’s when Robbie comes out of the store,” Riel said. “So now the guy points his gun at Robbie.” He looked down at the empty beer bottle again. “I bet Mr. Ducharme told the story a dozen times, like he just had to keep saying it, like he couldn’t believe it.” He looked back up at me. “Someone must have called the cops because all of a sudden they’re there and they’re yelling at the guy to drop his gun. But the guy doesn’t. The cops have to shoot him. They find out later that he was seriously high. Too much stuff in his system, he’s not thinking straight. And Robbie, he was just standing there. A little kid—ten years old. Up until then he hasn’t said anything, hasn’t cried. Nothing. Until the cops shoot the guy. Then he starts to cry.” He got up, put his empty beer bottle back in the case, and poured himself a glass of water. He drank half of it before sitting down again. “The cop down there told me at first he thought maybe Robbie must have been hurt. Then he figured Robbie was in shock, like maybe he couldn’t take in what had happened to his mother.”
He looked across the table at me, as if he were waiting for me to say something. But what could you say after a story like that? All I could think of was what Robbie had said to me about Billy: Who you cry over says everything.
“Robbie was in therapy after that,” Riel said. “I don’t know if it explains everything about him, but, if you ask me, it explains a lot.”
“I wish someone had told me,” I said.
“Told you all about Robbie’s life, you mean? Some kid you hardly knew, were never interested in?”
“Maybe I would have reacted differently.”
“Sure,” Riel said. “And maybe if somebody had told Robbie more about you, he wouldn’t have said what he said. Only it doesn’t work that way. Everybody has their own reasons for doing things—good or bad—and most of the time the rest of us don’t know what they are. That’s why it generally pays to give the other guy the benefit of the doubt.”
Which I hadn’t done in Robbie’s case. I stared down at the half-eaten piece of pizza on my plate. I was still staring at it when I said, “So, what am I supposed to do now?”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Riel said. “Jonesy’s a good cop. He knows how to keep an open mind until he has all the facts. He’ll keep dogging it.” He reached out, flipped the pizza box shut, then carried his plate to the sink and dropped what remained of his slice into the garbage.
“Am I grounded?” I said.
“Is that all you’re going to eat?” Riel said.
I nodded. Riel took my plate. “No, you’re not grounded,” he said. “But it might be a good idea for you to stay put for a while.”
I watched Riel clean up. It was hard to tell what he was really saying sometimes. I wasn’t officially grounded, but I should probably stay put. Did that mean I had to stay in?
“I need to take a walk or something,” I said. “You know, get some air.”
Riel was wiping down the table with a damp cloth. He stopped what he was doing and peered hard at me. “If you go, you�
�re going to come back, right?” he said.
The question threw me. “Yeah,” I said. “Where else—” I saw some of the tension go out of Riel’s body. He wasn’t worried about what I might do when I went out. He was worried about whether I would come back. It made me feel a little better. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to come back.”
“You know your curfew, Mike,” he said, more relaxed now, sounding more like his regular self.
“Yeah.”
I wondered if Riel would have let me leave the house if he’d known where I was planning to go. Probably not. So I was glad the subject hadn’t come up. The last thing I wanted to do was lie to him again. He deserved better than that.
It was quiet on Jen’s street. The sun had been down for at least half an hour. The streetlights had been on for longer than that. But it wasn’t so late that people had pulled their curtains and drawn their drapes. As I walked down the sidewalk, I had a good view into most of the houses that lined the street. You could always see into houses early in the evening when it was dark outside and people had all their lights on inside. When I got to Jen’s house I could see right into her living room and, beyond that, into the dining room. A man was standing between the two rooms—Jen’s dad. He seemed to be talking to someone. Then I saw a willowy figure glide across the room in a long fluid movement. Jen. Moving like a ballerina. She wrapped her arms around her father’s neck and went up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. Then Mr. Hayes disappeared from view. The porch light went on. I ducked behind the hedge that marked the front border of the property and peeked through it. Mr. Hayes came out of the house and walked to the car that was parked in the driveway. I retreated a little further and crouched between the side of the hedge and a tree on a neighboring property until Mr. Hayes’s BMW backed down the driveway and took off up the street.
After he had gone I crept back to the hedge and followed it, trying to keep myself out of the line of sight of the house. I tried to move as if I belonged in this neighborhood, so that the people who lived in the big houses wouldn’t notice me, wouldn’t peg me as an outsider, someone potentially up to no good. When I got to the edge of the driveway I slowed my pace. I looked down to where the garage was, behind the house but visible from the sidewalk, doing my best to make it seem that I just happened to be glancing in that direction. The Hayeses had his-and-hers Beemers. Both of the garage doors were open, so I could see that Mrs. Hayes’s Beemer wasn’t there, which meant that Mrs. Hayes wasn’t home either. It had been a lousy day in a lousy week in what I sometimes thought of as a lousy life, but, finally, something was going right.
I turned back and walked up the flagstone path to the front porch. I drew in a deep breath and pressed the doorbell.
When Jen appeared at the door, I couldn’t help it, my mouth dropped open. I hadn’t been up close to her in nearly two months. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was, how creamy her skin was, how green her eyes were, how golden her hair was, how soft and pink her lips were. When she pushed open the outer door, I inhaled the flowery scent of the perfume she always wore. I would have been in heaven, I might even have felt hope—if only she had been smiling.
Jen frowned at me. The hand holding open the outer door trembled. For a moment I was afraid she was going to step back into the house and shut me out. I wondered whether grabbing the door before she could close it would make things better or worse.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“I have to talk to you.”
“The police were here. They asked me about where I was a couple of weeks ago—the night that kid was killed in the park.”
When Jen was happy, when things were going her way, her green eyes were as cool and inviting as summer grass under a June sky. When she was mad, though, they were as hard and sharp and cold as emeralds. They were cold now.
“They came here and asked me all kinds of crazy questions,” she said. “My dad almost had a heart attack he was so mad. What are you trying to do to me, Mike?”
Her hand moved again. She was going to go back inside. She was going to slam the door.
“I’m in big trouble, Jen,” I said. “They think I was involved in what happened to Robbie.”
A puzzled look played across her face. I tried to remember if she had ever been in any of Robbie’s classes, but couldn’t.
“Robbie Ducharme,” I said. “The kid who was killed in the park.”
And there it was. That cold look, the one that always reminded me of Jen’s mother. And there was that tilt of her head as she crossed her arms over her chest and studied me again. Her expression, her whole body language, said, Yeah, that figures.
“You and your friends managed to get into big trouble this time, huh, Mike?”
I couldn’t have felt worse if she’d kneed me.
“Jeez, Jen…”
She just stood with her arms crossed, her expression like winter, like she was the exterminator and I was the bug.
“If they asked you all those questions,” I said, “then you’ve got to know where I told them I was.” I wasn’t sure how Detective Jones would have gone about it. Would he have said, Michael McGill told us … and then gone on to tell her the story I had told the cops? Or would he simply have asked her to account for her whereabouts that night and then maybe asked her questions about it? So you’re saying you weren’t down on Eastern Avenue at around midnight, you’re saying you didn’t meet someone down there, you’re saying you didn’t get into a car? Either way, Jen was smart. She had to have figured it out.
Maybe if I hadn’t been working so hard to convince her to help me, and maybe if BMWs weren’t so well made and didn’t run so quietly, I would have noticed that Mr. Hayes had returned. Maybe if Mr. Hayes had closed his car door when he got out or maybe if he’d turned off the engine, I would have noticed that he was coming up the flagstone path behind me. But Mr. Hayes didn’t do any of those things, so I didn’t notice, not until a hand grabbed me by the upper arm and spun me around, not until I was actually staring into Mr. Hayes’s furious face.
“Jennifer, go back inside,” he said. His hand was as tight and hard as a vise grip. There were going to be bruises, for sure. “And you—” If he’d yanked any harder on my arm, he would have dislocated it. “You get out of here before I call the police.”
“Daddy—” Jen said.
“I said, go inside,” he yelled at her. With each word his fingers bit a little deeper into my arm. Mr. Hayes had a grip like iron. I knew he belonged to a gym. He worked out four or five times a week. Played racquet-ball. Went mountain biking with a couple of lawyers the same age as him, looking for that forever-young experience. I used to think it was pretty funny, guys pushing fifty acting like they were closer to fifteen. I had never considered that all that working out could make Mr. Hayes a truly scary guy, a guy who, if he didn’t hang on to that temper of his, could do some serious damage. I thought about it now, though.
Jen retreated into the house and closed the outer door, but she left the heavy inside door open and stood her ground behind it, watching through the glass.
“You,” Mr. Hayes said, pressing his face in close to mine, “you stay off my property and away from my daughter. You got that?”
I nodded. No way was I going to argue with this guy.
Mr. Hayes released me with a shove that sent me careening backward down the porch steps. I had to grab the railing to keep from falling. Mr. Hayes started down the steps toward me, his eyes on fire. He couldn’t have been scarier if he’d been a hundred-pound Rottweiler with a law degree. I scrambled backward down the rest of the steps, then turned and retreated down the path to the sidewalk. Mr. Hayes came down a few steps. I drew back even farther and crossed the street. Only then did he turn. Only then did he guide Jen back into the house, away from the door. Then he came out again, down the path to his car. He pulled a jug of milk from the front seat before closing and locking the car. Well, that figured, The guy pays who-knew-how-much to belong to a gym, but wh
en he needs a jug of milk, what does he do? He jumps in his Beemer and drives all of three blocks to the closest 7–Eleven.
CHAPTER NINE
Whenever I had a bad day—when I got in trouble with a teacher or when Vin was acting like a jerk for some reason, or when I’d had my heart set on something that I ended up not getting, like being tagged to play forward in soccer when I was nine—my mom used to say, “Tomorrow is another day.” She said it as if it were a good thing, as if I should look forward to the next day because, as she said, “You never know what it’s going to bring.”
Except that sometimes you did know. And sometimes what it was bringing was something no one in his right mind would look forward to.
Like meeting with Rhona Katz. It wasn’t Rhona so much. She was okay. Pretty. And I bet she was a real tiger in court. But it was the fact of having to meet with her. Being in that much trouble that all of a sudden I was a guy who needed a lawyer.
Riel put on a jacket and tie to take me down to her office, which I couldn’t figure out. Rhona was supposed to be an old friend of his. Who was he trying to impress? Or maybe I had been wrong about him and Susan. Maybe they really were just good friends.
At the meeting, Rhona—Riel made me call her Ms. Katz—wanted the same thing as the cops. She wanted all the so-called facts of the case.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “And I do mean everything. Every detail you can remember. Anyone you noticed on the street. Anyone who might have noticed you, even if you don’t know their names.”
I told her the whole story—again—stopping whenever she raised her hand. She was writing everything down, and sometimes I talked too fast for her. I wanted never to have to tell it again. I wanted it to end. She wanted what she called “a complete record.”
After I told it again, I answered all of her questions. Then I said, “I didn’t do anything.”
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