Delusion

by Peter Abrahams

  “Cool car,” Pirate said. He’d owned a convertible himself once, till it got repossessed. “Any chance of like putting the top down, Miss, ah?”

  “Call me Lee Ann,” the reporter said. “Sure it won’t be too hot?”

  “Nah.”

  She put the top down, letting out a blast of cold air. Pirate got in.

  “Seat belt, please,” she said.

  He fastened his seat belt.

  “How does Mexican sound?” she said, zooming off fast enough to sink him back in his seat.

  “Mexican?

  “For lunch. There’s a real nice place, Café Feliz, just opened up.”

  “Well…”

  “Don’t like Mexican? How about Italian?”

  “Yeah. Italian.”

  “There’s Vito’s on the west side.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “But on the way, we’re going to play a little game.”

  “What kind of game?” Pirate didn’t like car games—license plates from different states, spotting the most cows, all that shit. Did he look like a kid?

  The reporter dug around in the compartment between the seats, handed him a strip of cloth.

  “What’s this?”

  “A blindfold,” she said. “Put it on.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just trust me.”

  “Trust you?”

  She touched his knee. “Come on, Alvin, you’re free now. Relax.”

  A little touch on the knee, but it had a double effect on him: first, he missed what she said after that; second, he put on the blindfold.

  “It’s just for a minute or two,” she said. “How about some music in the meantime?”

  “Okay.”

  “I hear you like country.” Then came George Jones: “Things Have Gone to Pieces.” Pirate felt the wind on his face. This was freedom, America, being young on the road. Only he wasn’t young anymore. Pirate tried to figure out the chord progression, could not. He stopped listening, stopped feeling the wind, waited for whatever was coming next.

  The car stopped.

  “You can take off the blindfold.”

  Pirate took off the blindfold.

  “Notice the changes?” the reporter said.

  Pirate looked around. They were parked at the end of a street, facing a path, and maybe a canal or something beyond it. “Changes?” He didn’t get it.

  “You don’t notice something missing?”

  Pirate thought for a moment. “No people around, you mean?”

  “The pier’s gone,” the reporter said.

  “What pier?” said Pirate, starting to get annoyed. What the hell was she talking about? They climbed out of the car.

  “Sure you don’t recognize the place?” the reporter said.

  “Is this part of the game?” he said. “I don’t think we’re in Belle Ville anymore. Besides that, I couldn’t tell you.”

  The reporter laughed. “You win,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “Because this is where the old Parish Street Pier stood, where Johnny Blanton got killed. Now I know for absolute one hundred percent sure you didn’t do it.”

  “This was a test?”

  “Which you passed with flying colors. Let’s go eat.”

  For a moment, Pirate felt even more annoyed, close to anger. He took a deep breath. A test, only a test. “Okeydoke.”

  They got back in the car. The reporter turned the key. “Any idea who did kill him?” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “Because unless he’s dead, the real killer’s still out there.”

  Pirate shrugged.

  “Wouldn’t it be something to find out who?”

  He started thinking about that.

  They sat in a booth at Vito’s, the fanciest restaurant Pirate had ever been in. He ordered what she ordered, the menu turning out to have so many Italian words, but not any he knew, like pizza and spaghetti.

  “Feel like talking some business?” the reporter said while they waited for the food.

  “What kind of business?”

  She leaned forward. Not as good-looking as Susannah, none of that glowingness to her skin, maybe not good-looking at all, but there was something about her, like…hey! He got it: maybe she was available. Uh-oh. Her lips were moving, but he’d missed whatever she’d said.

  “Uh, Lee Ann, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Can you say that again?”

  Behind those weird glasses, her eyes were looking at him a little funny; just a little, not enough to mean she wasn’t available.

  “I’m thinking of writing a book,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “About you.”

  “Me?”

  “You, your case, what you’ve been through, your whole story.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “What’s your reaction?”

  “How long?”

  “How long a book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Two or three hundred pages.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.”

  “What’s the title?”

  “Haven’t got one yet. Any ideas?”

  He said nothing. She was watching him closely.

  “I do believe you have a title,” she said. “Spit it out.”

  “This Is a Test, Only a Test.”

  Lee Ann sat back. “Wow.” She opened her mouth to say something more, but at that moment the headwaiter went by, followed by three or four customers. The last one, a big, blond guy in a dark suit, saw Lee Ann.

  “Well, well,” he said. “The voice of the Guardian.”

  Lee Ann smiled up at the blond man. “The Guardian has many voices, Mayor,” she said. Her eyes shifted to Pirate, back to the man, her smile spreading. Mayor? Was that his name, or was he maybe—

  “Mayor?” she said. “Have you met Mr. DuPree? Alvin DuPree, meet Mr. Kirk Bastien, mayor of Belle Ville.”

  The mayor stuck out his hand. “Hi, there, Mr.—” His gaze went to the patch. Words stopped coming but the mayor’s mouth stayed open and his color went bad, like he was turning into black-and-white. By that time Pirate was shaking his hand, not too hard, not too soft, just right. Pirate’s hand was probably bigger, but hard to tell, the way the mayor’s hand withdrew so fast.

  “Nice meetin’ you,” Pirate said.

  “Beg pardon for my slowness on the uptake,” the mayor said, his color coming back. He shot Lee Ann a quick glance, not especially friendly. “Word is you’re on a bit of a roll, Mr. DuPree. Enjoy your stay in Belle Ville.”

  “I’m from Belle Ville,” Pirate said. “But, hey, thanks.” He started to get that strange squinting feeling in his non-eye, but before he got a look beneath the man’s skin, the mayor had moved away toward his table.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Guardian landed with a thump in the driveway. Nell, on the phone in her office with an insurance agent who refused to accept that the Cloud Nine sculpture was gone for good, heard the sound through the open window.

  “From what you’re telling me,” said the insurance agent, “the thing’s indestructible.”

  “I never said that. I only said it was made of bronze. Some parts, especially at the top, are actually quite delicate, and—”

  “We’re going to give it more time, ma’am. That’s straight from Houston.”

  Houston, as Nell well knew by now, was headquarters, obdurate and dictatorial. She hung up, went outside and picked up the Guardian. The lead story was about bad things in the Middle East. It gave her a weird feeling of relief, a dishonorable feeling that ended up lasting only a few seconds. Page two, below the fold:

  WHO KILLED JOHNNY BLANTON?

  BY LEE ANN BONNER, GUARDIAN REPORTER

  The recent exoneration of Alvin Mack DuPree, who spent twenty years in Central State Prison wrongly incarcerated for the murder of Johnny Blanton, leaves the identity of the you
ng scientist’s murderer still unknown. When asked if the case is still open, Belle Ville police chief Clay Jarreau replied, “There is no statute of limitations for murder.” To a reporter’s question regarding the difference between an open case and an active investigation, the chief responded, “The investigation is ongoing.” The chief added that there were no current suspects and no leads. Although no public tip-line has been set up, the chief didn’t rule it out. “Anyone with information is asked to come forward.” Chief Jarreau, while still a detective at the time, was responsible for the original arrest of Mr. DuPree, an arrest at least partially responsible for his promotion to chief of detectives the next year, according to contemporary news accounts.

  After dinner that night, Clay went into the family room. He liked watching sports on TV, just about his only indulgence. Clay had been a fine athlete all his life: there was a whole drawerful of photos going back to his early childhood, showing him on diamonds, courts, football fields. Duke Bastien was in many of them. At Belle Ville West High School—neither family had the money for Belle Ville Academy—state champions their senior year, they’d played together in the backfield, one of those Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside combinations, with Duke, bigger, not quite as fast, as Mr. Inside.

  Nell walked into the family room, found Clay feet up, a drink in his hand, basketball on the screen.

  “Good game?” she said.

  “Not if you like defense.”

  He patted the cushion beside him. She sat down.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  On the screen a player in red went end to end, dunked with two hands, hung on the rim. Clay made a face.

  “Clay?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got a question, maybe a bit strange.”

  “Oh?” His eyes were still on the screen.

  “What happens to old photo arrays?” Nell said.

  “Photo arrays?” His eyes shifted toward her, then back to the game. The ref blew his whistle, calling a foul.

  “Those photo spreads,” Nell said. “For identifying criminals.”

  “We make them up from our collection—suspects, cons, street people. When we’re done they go back in the file.”

  “Are they numbered?”

  “The photos?” He nodded.

  “So you could recompose the arrays for a specific case?” Nell said.

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “Suppose you had to go over an investigation, start fresh?”

  Clay switched off the TV, turned to her.

  “What are you saying?” he said.

  “I’d like to see the photo array from the DuPree case,” Nell said, “the same ones I looked at back then.”

  The prominent vein in the side of his neck throbbed. “Why?” he said.

  “Because something’s gone wrong, horribly wrong. Don’t we have to start facing that?”

  “Nothing went wrong back then,” Clay said. “He did it.”

  “No, Clay. I think I made a mistake. And the other day you admitted you weren’t sure anymore.”

  Liquid slopped over the side of his glass; he laid it on the table. “You didn’t make a mistake.”

  “But I must have.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Clay said. “He had a fair trial. The jury decided.”

  “Would they have made the same decision without me?” Her memories of the time after the murder were so blurry, but the long-ago courtroom moment was suddenly clear, how from the witness chair she’d pointed her finger at Alvin DuPree, wearing a shirt much too tight for him and a badly knotted tie, and said: “Him.”

  “You never know what’s in the mind of a jury,” Clay said. “Maybe you actually made a bad impression on them, almost tipped the scales the other way.”

  That answer surprised her. “You think?”

  “It’s possible—that’s all I’m saying. The system isn’t perfect, isn’t even designed to be. That’s the difference between guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

  That made sense, but didn’t help her at all. She gazed at him. Those eyes of his, so expressive, at least to her, were now somehow watchful and pained at the same time, a look she’d never seen in them.

  “Maybe that’s true,” she said, “but I’d still like to go over the old photo spread.”

  He sat back, very quickly, almost as though he’d been slapped. “Impossible. Even if we kept track of the individual spreads, all those pictures are long gone by now.”

  “What about the original picture of DuPree?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The one from the array.” She remembered Clay’s hand, sliding it across a steel desk, even remembered the position of his fingers.

  He gave her a long look, another one of those looks with his professional side mixed in. “That might be in his file.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Clay rose, put on his jacket.

  “Not now,” she said, rising, too, putting her hand on his sleeve. “I didn’t mean now. Don’t go.”

  But he did, shrugging out of her grasp and leaving without another word, closing the front door hard enough to send a low-level tremor through the house. Nell went into the kitchen, found the paper, reread the last sentence of Lee Ann’s article: Chief Jarreau, while still a detective at the time, was responsible for the original arrest of Mr. DuPree, an arrest at least partially responsible for his promotion to chief of detectives the next year, according to contemporary news accounts. Now Nell saw that sentence for what it was, an attack on her husband. And if she had really blown the identification, really sent the wrong man to prison, then she’d given Lee Ann the ammunition. Nell tossed the paper into the trash.

  She heard the front door close, softly this time. Looking out the window, she saw Norah walking across the lawn and the big wrecker from Yeller’s Autobody idling on the street. Nell went outside, couldn’t stop herself.

  “Norah?”

  Norah was standing by the driver’s side door of the truck. She turned, too far away for Nell to read her face, but the way she turned had said enough. Nell took a step or two closer anyway. The truck’s engine cut off and the driver’s door opened. Joe Don got out, came toward the house, Norah trailing after him.

  “Hello, ma’am,” he said. He wore a cowboy hat, tight jeans, in no way resembled the kind of boys Nell had seen on parents’ weekend at Vanderbilt. “I was thinkin’ we’d maybe go on out for pizza,” he said.

  “I’ve eaten,” Nell said.

  Norah made a grim face, but Joe Don laughed, a delighted, unself-conscious laugh, easy to listen to. “You’d be real welcome to come along,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Nell said. “You two have fun.” She shot Norah a quick glance, meaning not too much fun, not too late, be careful and other motherly messages. But couldn’t this—going out for pizza, hanging out with someone her own age—be a good thing? Norah gazed back blankly and climbed in the wrecker.

  The phone rang as she went back in the house. Nell answered.

  “Is Norah there?” said a woman; she sounded young.

  “She just left.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Um. I was just calling to say hi.”

  “I’ll pass that along. Who should I…?”

  “Is this her mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “My name’s Ines. I live down the hall—at school. Vanderbilt? Down the hall from Norah.”

  “I’ll tell her you called, Ines.”

  “Thanks,” Ines said. Pause. “Mrs. Jarreau?”

  “Yes?”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “All right,” Nell said; she found herself squeezing the phone. “I think.”

  “Yeah?” said Ines. “I was a little…” Her voice trailed off.

  “A little what?”

  “Nothing.” Another pause, this one long
er. “Just glad to hear she’s doing bet—doing okay.”

  “Does she have your number?” Nell said.

  “Should,” said Ines. “But here it is, just in case.” Nell wrote it down.

  Nell was loading the dishwasher when Clay came home. He sat at a stool by the small butcher-block island in the center of the kitchen, laid down an envelope.

  “You wanted to see this?” he said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t mean for you to—”

  “Here it is.” Clay opened the envelope.

  Nell moved closer to the island, stood on the other side. All at once she realized they were replaying that scene from twenty years before, some things changed—a custom-made butcher block instead of a steel table—and some things not, such as Clay’s strong, fine hands and the fear and uncertainty in her mind.

  Clay slid the photo out of the envelope. It had a faded number on the back: D964. Clay turned it over. Alvin Mack DuPree, but the only reason Nell knew that was because of the resemblance to the face in the still from Nappy Ferris’s surveillance camera. She could see nothing of the present-day Alvin Mack DuPree in these features, unlined and unmarked. He gazed unsmiling at the camera, the light harsh, but the man himself not bad-looking, if not in Joe Don’s league. She realized he would have been about Joe Don’s age. The thought unsettled her some more, and so did the fact that she had no memory at all of this photograph.

  The tip of Clay’s index finger rose. Then he tapped the photo, a half inch or so above DuPree’s head, lightly and just once. “Well?” he said.

  She stared at the picture, tried to somehow Photoshop it in her mind, sliding it over her memory of the face of the killer on the pier, blending them together. They wouldn’t blend. “I don’t remember this picture at all,” Nell said.

  “Why would you?”

  His tone—so impatient, so unlike him—made her glance up. She caught the expression on his face, professional, even cold for a moment, almost like another person, a look-alike ignorant of the character he was supposed to play.

  “Because it’s so important,” Nell said. “I must have examined it carefully.”

  “You did.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Of course,” Clay said. His face softened. “I also remember telling you—this was at your parents’ place—that you couldn’t blame yourself for anything, then or ever.”