Rhona just nodded. She looked at Riel as she said, “He was seen fighting with Robbie.” I bristled at that. I hadn’t been fighting with Robbie. I had shoved him. Once. That was all. “He was seen near the park the night it happened. He has an alibi that doesn’t seem to be holding water at the moment. They may try to get a search warrant—they may want to see if they can find the clothes he was wearing that night, check for blood. You know the drill, John.”
I couldn’t begin to remember what I had been wearing two whole weeks ago. Anyway, whatever it was, it had probably been through the laundry by now.
“I’m going to contact the girl,” Rhona said. She consulted a file. “Jennifer Hayes. See if I can talk to her. Also Ashley Tierney and her mother.”
Riel nodded. Meeting adjourned.
We got to school in time for second period. I got to my English class just as the bell rang. I tried to catch Sal’s eye as I made my way to my seat, but he was staring down at his desk and didn’t look up. When class finished he bolted from the room. I tried to follow him, but Ms. Stephenson called my name and crooked a finger to get me to go to her desk.
“Your essay on Hamlet,” she said.
“What essay on Hamlet?”
“Exactly,” Ms. Stephenson said. “It was due on Friday, Mike.”
I had completely forgotten.
“Get it in tomorrow and I’ll only take ten points off. Any later than that, and you start losing five points a day. Got it, Mike?”
If things are going to go bad, why not go all the way? I sighed and nodded.
By the time I got out of Ms. Stephenson’s classroom, Sal had been swallowed up among the thirteen hundred kids who were on lunch—assuming he was still on school property and hadn’t taken off to one of the zillion restaurants along Gerrard Street or hadn’t gone over to Gerrard Square. It was obvious he was trying to avoid me. Maybe he felt bad about talking to the police. For sure I would have felt bad if I’d been in the same situation—especially if I had told the police something that would make Sal look bad, which I was pretty sure I would never do. But how was Sal supposed to have known? I had never told him that I’d lied to Riel about how I got my hands all banged up. And who knows how the cops asked him the question? The poor guy probably didn’t have a clue what they were after. And that’s what I wanted to tell him—it’s not your fault.
Cat, though, Cat was something else. Cat knew exactly what she was doing when she talked to the cops. They didn’t even have to ask her. She had volunteered the information. Wrong information. If I ran into Cat … Jeez, I had no idea what I’d do if I ran into Cat.
“Hey, Mike.” Vin caught me by the arm.
I shook free, mad at him too. Vin, who adored Cat. Sweet little Cat. Yeah, right. I turned, headed for the nearest exit and pushed my way out into the schoolyard.
“Hey, Mikey, wait up!” Vin burst out the door behind me. “Hey!” He caught me by the arm again and this time when I tried to shake him off, he held tight. “What’s the matter with you?”
My hands clenched into fists as I faced my old friend. Old as in used-to-be.
“What?” I said. “She didn’t tell you?”
“Who?”
“Who?” Like there were so many shes in Vin’s life.
“You mean Cat?”
I just stared at him.
“Tell me what?” Vin said. He looked genuinely baffled.
I studied his face. We had been friends since we were five years old. We’d both been in and out of a lot of trouble since then. We’d had our differences too. And over that time I had learned a few things about Vin. One, Vin could sling the bull with the best of them. He’d got me going more than once about things that turned out to be his idea of a joke. Two, when he was slinging away, and when it was a good story he was slinging, he eventually gave himself away. Usually it was his eyes that did it. They just couldn’t stay focused on his victim the whole time. They always shifted away. Most people didn’t realize that, but I had caught onto it and, after that, Vin had never been able to put one over on me.
So I peered at him now to see whether his eyes would shift.
They didn’t.
He stared right back at me, two little lines between his eyes, shaking his head slightly.
“Come on, Mike,” he said. “What’s going on?” He really seemed to have no idea.
I unclenched my fists and let out a long sigh. I looked out across the schoolyard. There were kids everywhere, talking, laughing, smoking, flirting, shooting hoops. Probably some of them were complaining too. Some of them were thinking, Boy, this is not my day. Thinking, I have problems. Probably even thinking they had big problems. Did they ever have it wrong!
“The cops asked me more questions,” I said.
Vin shook his head again. “What about?” he said, like he couldn’t figure it out.
“About the Robbie Ducharme thing.”
“What? Are they crazy? They think you had something to do with that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They do.”
“I don’t get it. Why would they think that?”
I studied him again. And again Vin’s eyes held firm on my own.
“Because of Cat,” I said.
“Cat?” Vin reacted as if I had said Hamlet told them I’d been involved. Or better, The ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared to the cops and told them. “My Cat, you mean?”
I nodded. “She told the cops she saw me fighting with Robbie Ducharme.”
This seemed to be news to Vin. “You were in a fight with Robbie Ducharme?”
“He said something to me once. About Billy. I shoved him and he fell and whacked his head. Cat saw.”
Vin seemed to relax a little. “So the cops were probably asking around about you and Robbie and she just told them what she saw.” He seemed relieved, as if what she had done was okay with him.
“She also told them she saw me fighting with him the day before he died,” I said.
“Jeez, you really had it in for the guy,” Vin said. He looked at me with new interest. “What did he say to you anyway?”
“She lied,” I said.
“What?”
“Cat. She lied to the cops when she said she saw me fighting with Robbie before he died. I don’t even remember seeing him that day.”
Vin didn’t say anything. He stared down at the ground, shaking his head, like he was having a hard time digesting this last piece of information.
“Your girlfriend lied about me to the cops, Vin,” I said. “And because of that I’m in big trouble. Riel had to get me a lawyer. And the lawyer says the cops are probably going to get a search warrant to see if they can tie me to being in the park or to Robbie.” I shuddered when I remembered how Rhona had put it. Check for blood, she had said.
“Jeez,” Vin said. It came out like a long, sad breath. “I don’t get it. Why would Cat do something like that?” Then, before I could even ask—and I wasn’t sure that I had been going to ask—Vin said, “I’ll talk to her. If she lied—”
If?
“She lied, Vin.”
“I’ll talk to her, Mike. I promise.”
Oh boy, math. Just the thing to take a guy’s mind off the fact that the cops think he’s been involved in stomping someone to death. The perfect way to distract a guy from the fact that his used-to-be-best friend’s girlfriend lied about him to the cops. The cure-all that would let a guy forget for a little while that the cops believed her and didn’t believe him because he’s already been caught in half a dozen lies. Stupid lies. Things that, now that I thought about it, I shouldn’t have lied about. Note to self for the future: If you decide, for whatever dumb reason, that you’ve got to lie about something, make it something big, something important, something life-and-death. And, oh yeah, have a larger-than-life reason for it so that if you get caught—knowing my luck, when you get caught—at least you can console yourself with the fact that you lied for a very good reason.
Of course, math didn’t take my mind o
ff anything, didn’t distract me, wasn’t a cure-all. It just embarrassed me because Mr. Tran sent me up to the board to write out a problem that he had assigned for homework. A problem that I had attempted to solve. I really had, it’s the truth. But math and I weren’t exactly on the same wavelength. I got the problem hopelessly wrong, which exasperated Mr. Tran. Mr. Tran, unlike Riel, is the kind of teacher who thinks that lack of results is due to lack of effort. If you get it wrong, it’s because you didn’t try. So naturally he assigned me ten more problems for homework. To help me, you know? So that I’d have to try.
“Do all of them, Mike,” he said. “I expect to see them in my box first thing tomorrow morning.”
Yes, sir.
After math, I discovered that I had left my history assignment in my locker. At least, I hoped that was where I had left it, because if it wasn’t there, then it was at home. And if it was at home, I was going to get into trouble with yet another teacher. Could the day get any better?
I spun the combination on my lock and opened my locker. The top shelf was a clutter of textbooks, notebooks, old assignments and test papers, some of which had overflowed onto the floor of my locker. I began to root through the pile on top. Not there.
I slammed my fist into the open locker door.
The thing was, I had done the stupid assignment. Unlike my English essay, which, I admit, I had forgotten, I had actually done my history homework. But if I couldn’t find it, if I showed up without it and said, “I lost it,” or “I must have left it at home,” there was no way Mr. Danos was going to believe me. I’d be in trouble again. And there would be one more example of Michael McGill not telling it like it is, spinning it out, trying to get by on yet another lie.
Terrific.
I looked down at the overflow on the floor of my locker. It was theoretically possible that my assignment had slipped down there. Why not? After all, it was also theoretically possible that I could travel back to the time of the dinosaurs. Still …
I crouched down to begin looking.
And then I found myself in one of those moments.
They happen sometimes, those moments that last about a split second, when three or four or five things—big things—happen all at once. Those moments that, when you look back at them later, you can see each thing separately, like a little movie. You can see each one unfold, and then you can see the exact moment where they all collide, changing your life forever.
I crouched down to look into the jumble of papers and spotted a bag that looked suspiciously like a lunch bag—a lunch bag that didn’t look empty, which meant there was a sandwich in there somewhere, one that I didn’t remember, which meant that it had been there for a while. Well, there was no way I was going to deal with that right now. I was down there on my haunches, thinking about my history assignment, thinking about how old the lunch in that bag might be, when I also started thinking about the time—specifically, how much of it I had left before I would be late for history class. I turned to look at the clock halfway down the hall. And time splintered.
As I turned my head, I glimpsed something gleaming in the bottom of my locker. My brain processed what I saw in that fraction of a second: a watch.
My head continued to turn and my eyes began to zero in on the clock on the wall. But they ended up focusing on something else instead—on Ms. Rather, the school principal, standing at the end of the hall, talking to two men. Two men in uniforms. Two cops.
My eyes continued their sweep upward until they saw the clock. Three minutes. I had three minutes until the bell rang and I’d be officially late for history.
My head started to turn back toward my locker so that I could continue to search for my history assignment. On the way, I looked at Ms. Rather again. Then I looked at my locker. But instead of continuing my search for my history assignment, I reached out for the thing that had glinted at me from the bottom of my locker. The watch. But it wasn’t my watch. My watch was, well, I wasn’t 100 percent sure where it was. At Riel’s somewhere. In my room somewhere. So whose watch was this?
I picked it up. I looked at it. Then I realized that picking it up had probably not been such a great idea.
It was a nice watch.
A good watch.
An expensive watch. Solid, not like the one I owned.
And this watch was engraved.
To Robert.
From Grandpa.
Robert.
Robbie.
I stole a glance down the hall.
Cops. Standing there with Ms. Rather.
They’ll probably try to get a search warrant …
Robbie Ducharme’s watch.
In my locker.
When I thought about it later, it seemed to me that my movements were slow and heavy, as if someone had hit the slo-mo button on my life.
I slipped the watch into my pocket. Then, without looking down the hall to where the cops were, I stood up, closed my locker, locked it and slipped into the closest stairwell. I went down the stairs two at a time. The bell rang when I was halfway down. It didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t care. Instead of reporting to Mr. Danos’s history class, I kept going down the stairs until I reached the main floor. From there I pushed out the exit, which opened onto the east side of the school. I saw a cop car parked in front of the school. Another car pulled up right behind it. It wasn’t splashed all over with Toronto Police Service decals and it didn’t have a cherry on top, but I knew it was a cop car all the same. Detectives Jones and London got out and headed for the main entrance to the school. I hung back until they had gone inside. Then I ran for the streetcar that was stopped at the red light on Gerrard.
The front door of the streetcar was open. I ducked in, fishing in my pocket for my student card and a couple of mangled transit tickets I was sure were somewhere at the bottom of one of my pockets.
Someone yelled something when I bounded up the steps to drop my ticket into the box. I didn’t catch the words. They were in Spanish. But I did catch the expression on the driver’s face. It was the same expression you’d expect to see on the face of a man who was being held up at gunpoint. He gestured at me with his head—nodding toward the door. Then someone yelled something in Spanish again. I turned and smiled when I recognized Sal’s dad.
“Hi,” I said. Or maybe I just started to say it. I’m not entirely sure. Because while I was saying hi—or while I was starting to say hi—I realized that something was wrong. At first I thought it was the fact that Sal’s dad was standing in the aisle instead of sitting down. There were plenty of empty seats. Then I thought, No, that isn’t it. It was the way the other passengers were looking at him. There were maybe ten or a dozen passengers in all, most of them women. Two men, both of them old. Retired people, I figured. People who could be on the streetcar at two in the afternoon because they didn’t have to be at a job or at school. All of the passengers were staring at Sal’s dad. Or, I realized slowly, not at Sal’s dad, but at his hand. Actually, at what he was holding in his hand—a hammer. What was Sal’s dad doing on the streetcar with a hammer?
Sal’s dad yelled something else in Spanish. He raised the hammer when he shouted and seemed to be shaking it at a woman who was sitting close by. The woman ducked down in her seat. I heard a sound like crying. Jeez, what was going on?
“Close it, close it, close it, close it, close it, close it, close it,” Sal’s dad shouted over and over again. He shook the hammer at another woman. She screamed and then started to cry.
“Close the door,” she yelled at the streetcar driver. “He wants you to close the door.”
The driver reached for the controls and shut the front door to the streetcar. Then he collapsed in his seat.
“Now what?” he said. He spoke softly. It took me a moment to realize that he was asking Sal’s dad.
“Mr. San Miguel, are you okay?” I said.
At the sound of his name, Sal’s dad zeroed in on me. He shook the hammer at me. I retreated a step—a reflex action. The woman who had
ducked down in her seat peeked up. Tears were streaming down her face.
“You know this guy?” the streetcar driver asked me in a voice that wasn’t much louder than a whisper.
I nodded.
“Is he on drugs or something?” the driver said in an even quieter voice, as if he were afraid of what might happen if Sal’s dad heard the question. “First he wants everything open. Now he wants everything closed.”
I took another look at Sal’s dad and shook my head. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught the flash of lights. From where I was standing I saw one, two, three, jeez, four cop cars pull up—one in front of the streetcar, blocking it from moving forward, another right behind it, and one on each side. Then another cop car pulled up, and another. No wonder Sal’s dad wanted the doors closed now. After what had happened at his house, he was probably afraid.
All the cops stood well away from the streetcar, behind their cars. A bunch of them huddled together. They were trying to figure out exactly what was going on, I guess, so that they could decide what to do about it. I looked back over my shoulder at the streetcar driver, who was smiling cautiously now. He must have called it in, and the transit authorities must have called the cops.
“Hello in the streetcar,” a voice boomed over a loudspeaker. I looked out of the window and saw a plain-clothes police officer standing behind one of the squad cars. I also saw that it was getting darker outside, even though it was early in the afternoon. Big black clouds had rolled in.
“Hello in the streetcar,” the voice boomed again. “This is Sergeant O’Connell. I’m going to ask the driver to open the doors to the car so that all the passengers can come out.”
The woman who had been crying started to wipe at her tears. Other passengers looked over to whichever door was closer to them, the front or the back. The streetcar driver started to reach for the controls, but Sal’s dad shook his head—and he kept shaking it, back and forth, back and forth, tick-tock, tick-tock—as he shouted, “Keep closed, keep closed, keep closed!”
The driver looked at Sal’s dad, who was halfway down the car. Then he looked out into the street where there were a half dozen police cars and twice as many cops, all with guns. He’s going to open the doors, I thought. Then, as if I’d been hit by a hurricane or a tidal wave, I was flung to one side and was toppling toward an empty seat. But instead of landing safely on the upholstery, I struck the metal bar that ran up alongside the seat. It caught me in the ribs, knocking the air out of me and sending pain searing up my left side.
Truth and Lies Page 13