The homicide cop stared at Dooley for a few moments before he asked if Dooley had seen anyone on the bridge with the kid before the kid had gone over.
Dooley said he hadn’t even noticed that the kid was on the bridge until he was already on his way down.
The homicide cop asked Dooley again if he had touched the kid, trying to trip Dooley up again.
“Like I said,” Dooley said, trying to sound helpful even though all he wanted was to get the hell out of there, “I felt for a pulse.”
The homicide cop asked Dooley if he would mind emptying his pockets.
“What for?” Dooley said.
The homicide cop didn’t answer that directly. Instead, he said what Dooley already knew—that he couldn’t force Dooley to empty his pockets and that Dooley didn’t have to cooperate if he didn’t want to. He said, “You’ve been in trouble before, is that right, Ryan?” as if there was some chance he might be wrong. When Dooley nodded—what was the point of denying it? The cop wouldn’t have asked it that way if he didn’t know the answer and exactly what kind of trouble Dooley had been in—the homicide cop asked if there was any particular reason Dooley didn’t want to empty his pockets.
Dooley wanted to say, “You bet there is. It’s called my Charter rights.” But he knew why the cop was asking. Dooley was (supposedly) the only person who had seen the kid—a kid who went to his school—go off the bridge. Dooley had (supposedly) been alone with the body for five or maybe ten minutes before the boy on the bike came along. He’d been alone again when the boy went to make the phone call. So, fine, Dooley pulled his wallet out of his pocket and handed it to the homicide cop. He pulled out some coins, his house keys on a ring that was attached to a brass capital D—his uncle had given it to him along with the keys. He also pulled out his name tag from work, which he had unpinned from his shirt as he went out the door, and a pack of gum with half the pieces already gone. He pulled out his pager. The homicide cop took a good long look at it. Dooley bet he wanted to check what numbers had paged him. He asked if the homicide cop wanted to pat him down and said that if he did, he could go ahead. So the homicide cop did, after a thorough examination of Dooley’s wallet, which didn’t contain anything except the four pieces of identification that Dooley had already showed the patrol officer and a five-dollar bill. The homicide cop should have been satisfied, but he still looked suspicious. He verified Dooley’s information—again—and let Dooley go.
Three
Dooley could have headed for the nearest phone—after all, he knew where it was—and called his uncle. But he had a pretty good idea how that phone call would go. His uncle would interrupt him every two seconds to ask if Dooley had forgotten how to tell time, could he even count to ten, maybe making him do it just to prove he could, his uncle could be that harsh when he was pissed off, and nothing pissed him off more than someone who should know better breaking the rules.
Dooley was confident he could make the case that he was on the right side for a change—he had done his civic duty. But if he tried to argue that over the phone, his uncle would probably think it was some bullshit excuse Dooley was trying on to justify why he hadn’t answered not just one but two of his uncle’s pages. No, they were at the point now where his uncle would need to look Dooley in the eye to decide if he was telling the truth. Dooley wouldn’t mind seeing his uncle’s face, either, especially when Dooley told him, “You don’t believe me, call the cops.” He wondered what the chances were that his uncle would apologize to him.
Dooley caught sight of his uncle when he was still nearly a block from the house. He was sitting on the porch almost directly under the porch light with the cordless phone in his hand, and he was scowling into the night. Dooley bet his uncle had spotted him the minute he’d turned the corner. He felt his uncle’s eyes lock onto him but he didn’t move, didn’t stand up, didn’t come down the porch steps. He just sat there and watched as Dooley came closer and closer. He didn’t say anything either. He just waited.
Dooley climbed all the way up onto the porch, leaned against the railing, looked into his uncle’s steel gray eyes, mostly because he believed that his uncle expected him to do the exact opposite, and said, “I got your pages. Both of them.”
His uncle stared at him, still waiting. Dooley’s uncle was good at waiting, good at making the other guy fill up the spaces and maybe even incriminate himself with the filler talk.
“I was going to call,” Dooley said. Dooley was as good at paying out his words slowly—boy, could he be slow—as his uncle was at stretching out the silences. “But something came up.” Actually, Dooley thought, it had come down.
“You worked until nine tonight,” his uncle said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Dooley for a second. He hadn’t even blinked. “Not eleven, like you told me.”
His uncle must have called the store. If Dooley was supposed to be at work and his uncle wanted to check on him—or if he wanted him to bring home a movie, which he did sometimes when Jeannie was coming over—he called. When Dooley told him they didn’t like employees taking personal calls, his uncle said, “Tell them I’m a customer.” Dooley guessed he’d called the store and then, exactly one second later, had paged Dooley to find out where the hell he was.
“It was a slow night,” Dooley said. “Kevin let me go early.”
“Go where?” his uncle said, because the deal was that if Dooley wanted to continue living with his uncle, he was supposed to do certain things unfailingly. One of those things was coming straight home after work. Dooley’s uncle was mad because Dooley hadn’t lived up to his end of the bargain.
“I went for a walk,” Dooley said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” The truth was, he didn’t think his uncle would ever find out. If that kid hadn’t gone off the bridge, Dooley would have found a phone and answered the first page.
His uncle waited.
So did Dooley.
Then his uncle’s impatience got the better of him and he said, “I paged you. Twice. Are you going to stand there and tell me you were—” he flicked out his wrist so that he could consult his watch—“an hour and fourteen minutes away from the nearest phone?”
“It was more like five minutes,” Dooley said and waited until his uncle looked ready to yell at him again. That’s when Dooley told his uncle exactly what he had been looking at when his pager had vibrated the first time.
A new look came onto his uncle’s face. A curious look. A cop look, even though his uncle had stopped being a cop before Dooley had got to know him. Now he owned a couple of dry-cleaning stores.
“The kid jumped?” Dooley’s uncle said.
“Or was pushed or just fell,” Dooley said. “I don’t know. I didn’t see that part.”
“You did the right thing,” Dooley’s uncle said after Dooley told him about waiting until the kid on the bike came along and then getting the kid to call the cops while Dooley stayed put. Unlike the cop who had responded to the call, Dooley’s uncle didn’t seem to doubt Dooley. Dooley wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Most of the time, his uncle kept him on a short leash and drove him crazy asking him where he’d been and what he’d been doing, checking mostly to make sure that he hadn’t been doing things, which led Dooley to believe that his uncle didn’t trust him. But every now and again—like now—he’d take what Dooley said at face value, and that made Dooley feel pretty good because it was as close to an apology as his uncle ever came. “But you should have called me before you left the store,” his uncle said. “So I’d know.” He meant, so he’d know where Dooley was. His uncle was religious about being on top of Dooley’s whereabouts.
Dooley said, yeah, he should have.
Then Dooley’s uncle said, “You finally took it in to get it sized, huh?”
Dooley looked at his uncle, wondering if maybe he was having an aneurysm or whatever it was that happened in older people’s brains that made them say things that sounded like they were coming out of left field.
“Your grandfather’s ring,” h
is uncle said, nodding at Dooley’s hand. “You finally took it in, like I said, to get it sized to fit properly.”
“Yeah,” Dooley said.
His uncle nodded his approval. He was never happier than when Dooley finally got around to doing something he’d told Dooley dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of times that he should do. Dooley nodded back, even though the only thought in his head was: what the hell had happened to his ring?
Dooley’s uncle was the kind of guy who leapt out of bed wide awake and raring to go the minute the sun crested the horizon, and who either took a good long run or did an hour of weights and cardio (mostly jumping rope) before settling in for a high-fiber, whole-grain breakfast. Dooley was the kind of guy who mostly dragged himself out of bed at the last possible minute, chugged down two or three cups of coffee (black with a couple of sugars), and was in and out of the house a couple of times before he finally had (almost) everything he needed for school. There were, however, exceptions.
The exception for Dooley’s uncle: when he had overnight company.
Dooley’s uncle had been married once, way back before Dooley was born. He told Dooley it had lasted all of two minutes, his ex-wife bowled over by the uniform, the handcuffs, and the weapon but, it turned out, not too happy with the pay, the hours, and the work—and the fact that cops mostly talk to other cops and never tell their wives anything. Since then, his uncle had gone out with a lot of women—he was a good-looking guy, Dooley guessed, for his age. Most of them he just fooled around with, nothing serious. Once bitten, twice shy, was how his uncle put it. But lately he’d been seeing a woman named Jeannie who owned a chain of ladies’ fashion stores in a few of the malls around town and who liked to have a good time. He’d been seeing her since before Dooley had come to live with him. Dooley never knew when he would come home and find her there, not that that was a problem. Jeannie was okay. Dooley liked her. He liked the way she put his uncle in a good mood. She had come over right after Dooley had finished explaining to his uncle what he had seen in the ravine, and she was still there when Dooley got up the next morning. He could tell because her purse was on the kitchen table, his uncle’s bedroom door was closed (it was open when he was alone), and there was no smell of sweat and no sign of whole grain in the kitchen. All of this was good for Dooley because, although his uncle had retired, he was still one hundred percent cop, and if he were up when Dooley strolled through the kitchen fully dressed at seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, his eyes would narrow and he’d look at Dooley and want to know what in hell Dooley was doing up so early and where in hell he thought he was going.
Dooley had put on sweats and sneakers—not so much for going out as for coming back again, when he was sure to encounter his uncle. He even made a little show of it, jogging in place on the porch as if he were warming up, and tossing a jaunty wave to the old lady across the street who, if it came to it, could mention to Dooley’s uncle that she’d seen Dooley. He jogged down the street, rounded the corner, slowed to a brisk walk, and headed for the ravine. He started jogging again before he was in sight of it, which was easy because it was downhill all the way. He connected with the path he’d been on the night before and ran (not too fast) along it, trying to keep his head up so it wouldn’t look like he was scanning the path, even though he was. He had to force himself not to slow down when he got close to where it had happened and saw that the crime scene tape was still there and that a bunch of cops were there, too, combing through the surrounding grass and scrub. Boy, they were really working the kid’s death. Dooley wondered if they’d have so many guys down there if it was the old guy with all the overcoats and the shopping cart or the woman with the Groucho Marx eyebrows who had gone splat. Theoretically they would say, yeah, you bet we would. But there had been a couple of homeless guys killed last winter. Dooley had read about it in the paper—he’d had to read the paper in civics class while he was in detention. He read that they’d been killed, but he never read that the cops had caught whoever had done it. Dooley jogged by, casting a glance in the cops’ direction because who wouldn’t, but being careful not to look overly interested. He thought he had pulled it off, too.
Until he saw the homicide cop who had questioned him the night before—Detective Graff.
Geeze, where had he come from?
Dooley realized that Graff must have been standing there the whole time, but he’d had his back to the path so Dooley hadn’t noticed him. He turned as Dooley jogged past and looked right at Dooley, forcing Dooley to wonder what a normal person, an innocent person, would do in response. Look right back, Dooley decided. That would be a whole lot less suspicious than pretending he hadn’t seen Graff. So Dooley looked and gave Graff a half-nod as he jogged past. He wondered if Graff or any of the other cops had found his ring. Or if they would. Or if it was even there. If it was, he figured he’d find out soon enough. If it wasn’t…
Four
It turned out the dead kid’s name was Mark Everley. Dooley found this out Monday morning when he walked into the kitchen and his uncle looked up from his newspaper and said something about school that Dooley didn’t catch because he was worrying about the ring. His uncle had given it to him. He’d said, “Your grandfather always had the idea his grandson would wear it.” He’d looked Dooley over that time and had shaken his head like he believed that the old man would have changed his mind fast if he’d ever got a good look at Dooley. “You’re it,” his uncle had said, and he’d set the ring onto the table in front of Dooley.
But the ring was too big. “Your grandfather was a hefty man,” Dooley’s uncle had said. “Take it to a jeweler. Get it sized.” Which, of course, Dooley hadn’t got around to doing. Every now and then he wrapped some tape around the back of the ring, where it wouldn’t show. Every now and then the tape got black with dirt and ragged edged from sweat and grime, or it just plain wore out, so the ring slipped. It could be that it had fallen right off his finger. Or it could be that he hadn’t even been wearing it. He didn’t wear it all the time. For example, he didn’t wear it in the shower—water made the tape soggy and the ring uncomfortable. He didn’t wear it to bed, either. So maybe he hadn’t worn it to work on Saturday night. He couldn’t remember. He’d tossed his room yesterday, looking for it. Now he was thinking: could it have fallen into the sink? It was possible. That would be too bad, of course—after all, it was his grandfather’s ring, never mind that he had never met his grandfather. But falling down the sink was better than ending up in a few other places he could think of—and one place in particular.
His uncle was frowning at him now, his eyes sharp.
“What?” Dooley said.
His uncle studied him for another couple of seconds, probably wondering what was eating Dooley, probably thinking it was something to do with school, maybe some homework assignment he’d forgotten to do.
“Mark Everley,” his uncle said at last. “The kid who went off the bridge.” He shoved the newspaper across the table to Dooley. “You didn’t tell me he went to your school.”
“I thought I recognized him,” Dooley said, which was true. “But his head was kind of smashed up, so I wasn’t sure” which wasn’t true, but it sounded a lot nicer than saying what he was actually thinking (It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person), which would only have annoyed his uncle. “Anyway, I didn’t know that was his name and the cops didn’t tell me,” which was also true. He glanced at the picture in the newspaper and this time recognized the face right away—Mark Everley, his longish hair combed back, posed in front of one of those gray-blue screens that school photographers use, smiling at the camera, looking like your average high school student, which was a whole lot different from looking like a broken doll. The newspaper picture of Everley triggered another one in Dooley’s mind, but this one wasn’t from school. Dooley’s dominant impression: Mark Everley was an asshole.
There were more than two thousand students at the school Dooley went to. Dooley hadn’t mixed much with any of them so far. He
didn’t know who was in, who was out, who was invisible, that kind of stuff. Didn’t know and didn’t care. His mission while he was there was tightly focused: get through this year and then get through next year, as promised, and get the hell out of there. But from the way girls were carrying on in the hall when he got to school on Monday morning—crying, mostly, and hugging each other—Dooley figured that Mark Everley must have been popular. His funeral, which was scheduled for the next day, was announced during homeroom. Anyone who wanted to attend had to get a special pass. At lunchtime, the office was jammed. Dooley thought about going to the funeral, decided not to—after all, he didn’t know Mark Everley well (didn’t know him at all, really) and, based on what little he did know (which wasn’t much, really), didn’t particularly like him—then decided, what the hell, he probably should go, seeing as he was the last person who had seen the guy alive (well, assuming he’d been alive when he went over the side of the bridge; the newspaper hadn’t said anything about that). He went to the office after school and asked one of the school’s administrative assistants for a pass.
Mr. Rektor, the A-to-L vice principal, looked over at him from the fax machine where he had been punching in a fax number.
“I didn’t know you knew Mark,” he said.
“I didn’t,” Dooley said.
Mr. Rektor came over to where Dooley was standing, folding his pass so he could put it in his pocket. Mr. Rektor snatched it out of his hand.
“Then you won’t be needing this,” he said. “And don’t even think about skipping school tomorrow.”
Mr. Rektor had been apprised, as he put it, of Dooley’s past. Before Dooley was even allowed to enrol in the school, Mr. Rektor had made it clear to Dooley and his uncle that if Dooley caused any trouble, broke any school rules, or, God forbid, was seen anywhere in the vicinity of a baseball bat, he would be immediately suspended. Infraction number two would earn him an expulsion. Dooley’s uncle said it was fine with him if that was how the school wanted to play it, but if Dooley messed up, Mr. Rektor was going to have to get in line because he, Dooley’s uncle, had first dibs in the teach-Dooley-a-lesson department. After Dooley and his uncle left Mr. Rektor’s office that time, Dooley’s uncle had muttered, “Officious little prick. They’re all the same. They must breed them that way.”
Dooley Takes the Fall Page 2