“I’ll live,” Dooley said.
“The cops sure seem to think you robbed that store. That’s why they came by my house. Because you said you’d been at my party. They wanted to know what time you left, what kind of shape you were in, who went with you, stuff like that.”
“And?” Dooley said. He’d been wondering about that himself. When had he left the party? He didn’t remember. Who had he left with, or had he left alone? He didn’t remember that, either.
Two kids came up to the cash with a couple of horror movies. Dooley used to watch stuff like that all the time, but he’d stopped since the last time he was in lockup. Now he wondered what people saw in movies where people got hacked up and ripped open and tortured. He scanned the DVD cases and took the kids’ cash.
“And what did I tell them, you mean?” Rhodes said after the kids left. “I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much. I don’t know exactly when you left. I didn’t see you go. One minute you were there, the next you were gone. I figured you slipped out, you know, on account of Beth and then because of Landers.”
“Landers?”
“You know, because he was ready to tear into you.”
Dooley had no memory of that.
“Because of Megan,” Rhodes said, looking at him closely now. “You know, because Megan was coming onto you and Landers didn’t appreciate it. What’s the matter, Dooley? You’re acting like you don’t remember.”
“What about Esperanza?” Dooley said.
Rhodes looked completely baffled. “Esperanza? What do you mean?”
It sounded like Esperanza hadn’t told Rhodes what Landers had done. Landers had tried to scare her, and it looked like he had succeeded. She’d kept her mouth shut because she didn’t want Landers talking to Rhodes’ father. Dooley wondered what that was all about. He wondered if he should say something to Rhodes but decided not to. Things were hard enough for her. She was a maid, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t want to mess her up if he didn’t have to. So he said, “The blonde girl. That’s her name, right?”
Rhodes laughed. “The blonde girl is Jen. Esperanza is our maid. Geeze, Dooley, you were really wasted, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Dooley said.
He wondered if he should ask Rhodes about the roofies, did he know if anyone there was doing them or did he notice if anyone had slipped him anything. Landers could have done it. He had sure been pissed off enough. Or it could have been Gillette.
“What about Gillette?” he said to Rhodes.
“Eddy? What about him?”
“When did he leave?”
Rhodes shook his head. “I’m not sure. Late. You two got into it, too. You really have a temper when you get going, don’t you, Dooley? But you calm down again, which is good.”
“So you don’t remember when he left?”
“I saw the two of you talking, then I kind of lost track.”
A middle-aged woman came up to the counter with a sullen-looking teenaged girl. As Dooley reached out to take the DVDs she had in her hand, Rhodes said, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Look, I gotta run. I got someone waiting for me out in the car.” He nodded over toward the store window. Dooley turned and saw Beth sitting in the passenger seat of a black Mustang. That figured.
Dooley made it through his shift. He also made it through cleanup and Kevin’s non-stop mouth-running about up-sell-ing—“ So they rent a DVD, maybe a couple of DVDs. It’s obvious they’re going to be planted in front of the tube all night. So you’re doing them a favor by asking, you want snacks with that? You’re doing them a favor by checking their record, looking up their rental pattern. You say, I notice you rent two movies a week every week, or whatever it says. You tell them, you know, you should be a gold-card member. Nine-ninety-nine and you’ll save a dollar off every new rental for the next year—you have two movies tonight, that’s like getting the gold card for seven-ninety-nine and you’ll end up saving a hundred dollars…” Blah blah blah. Dooley’s headache came back.
What Dooley wanted to do the next morning: find Gillette and Landers and ask them a few questions. The stuff in his drink—there were different ways that could have happened. Some kids who party want everyone else to party, too. Anyone who was there could have done it. Or he could have picked up the wrong glass. Or, true, someone could have slipped him something. Someone who thought it would be funny. Or someone who wanted to get back at him for something. But his wallet at the electronics store? If he was brutally honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it was possible he’d done what the cops suspected—if he’d been blasted enough and angry enough, and all the evidence suggested that he’d been both. But if he hadn’t done it—and, boy, did he ever want to believe that he hadn’t—then how had his wallet ended up in front of that store? The cops had someone who had seen two people near the store. Who were they? Say he was one of those two people—who was the other person? Had those people or that person taken Dooley’s wallet and planted it at the store? It was possible. The shape he’d been in, someone could have lifted him upside down and shaken everything out of his pockets and he wouldn’t remember. Why would someone do something like that? To make him look bad, maybe, or maybe to get even with him for something. Once upon a time, there would have been a long list of people out to get him, but given the life Dooley had been leading lately, he felt he could whittle it down to just a couple of names: Gillette or Landers. Or maybe both of them.
So what he wanted to do was find them and talk to them. See if one or other of them had fucked him up.
What he didn’t trust himself to do: stay calm if it turned out one of them had. It was a real Dr. Calvin moment.
Dr. Calvin: So you think someone maybe drugged you and then framed you for a smash-and-grab. What’s the smart thing to do about that, Dooley?
Dooley: Kick the guy’s teeth in?
Dr. Calvin: I believe I said smart thing.
Dooley: Let the police handle it?
Dr. Calvin: Very good.
People like Dr. Calvin always thought that you should leave things to the experts because people like Dr. Calvin were experts, and experts always thought they knew everything—it’s what made them experts.
Dooley wasn’t so sure. Not when it came to the cops and for sure not when someone had handed the cops a gimme. I mean, come on, there’s a smash-and-grab and what do you find at the scene? Something that screams the name of a person who is not only known to the police but who is known for crimes that are similar in nature. You gotta check it out, right? And what do you find? Said guy, passed out in his own backyard—where have we heard that one before, my fellow officers? And the guy claims that he doesn’t remember a damned thing. Right.
No, Dooley didn’t like the odds on that one.
But—and here, he believed, was where there was some wisdom in what Dr. Calvin always said—if he went and found Gillette and Landers, and if he came to believe that one (or both) of them had framed him, he wasn’t sure he would be able to hold it together. And that would jam him up even worse. So instead of doing what he wanted to do—find Gillette and Landers—he went down into the ravine. He spent the morning there, walking, looking, talking to anyone he could find. On the way home, he circled around and climbed up onto the old railway bridge, the one Everley had gone off, and got a big surprise. Beth was sitting there, her arms on her knees, her head on her hands. He hesitated—should he advance or retreat? Before he could decide, she raised her head, and he saw that she had been crying. She had a fierce expression on her face as she wiped the tears off her cheeks.
“What are you doing here?” she said, as if he were on private property instead of on a public walking path.
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure himself why he had come up here.
She stood up. “Get off this bridge,” she said.
“Look, I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “I really am.”
“Right.” Boy, was she bitter. Was she still mad about his reluctance—okay, his
refusal—to be hypnotized? “You expect me to believe that after what you did?”
“Look, about the hypnosis this—”
“The hypnosis thing?” She shook her head in disgust. “You’re going to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
He stared helplessly at her.
“Right,” she said again. He was getting the idea that she was one of those girls who always said the opposite of what she meant. “Mark came home a couple of months ago with one eye swollen shut and a big bruise on his face. Ring a bell, Dooley?”
Oh.
“He wouldn’t say what happened,” she said. “My mother wanted him to call the cops, but he wouldn’t do it. He said he was afraid what would happen if he got the cops involved. He said, you know how it is with bullies, you tell on them and all you get is bullied more.” Yeah, Dooley knew all about that. “He wouldn’t even say who did it. But now I know it was you, and you have the nerve to come up here and tell me you’re sorry about him?”
“Who told you?” he said. He didn’t even bother trying to sound indignant.
He read contempt in her eyes. “Now you’re playing dumb. Friday night you looked ready to rip his head off, and now you don’t remember?”
It must have been either Gillette or Landers.
“What else did they say about me?”
She held herself tall, reminding him of a little bird puffing out its feathers to make it look bigger than it really was. But he knew from the tremble in her lower lip and the way her eyes jumped from him to around him and behind him—probably hoping to see someone else, anyone else, nearby—that she was afraid to be up here alone with him.
“Everything,” she said.
If she knew everything, then it had to have been Gillette. To hell with Dr. Calvin. He wanted Gillette.
“Were you up on this bridge the night my brother died?”
“What?” Dooley said. “No!”
“You said you didn’t know my brother, but you did. You beat him up.”
“I didn’t beat him up. He was hassling a kid. I tried to get him to stop. He shoved me. I tried to get him to back off. That’s all.”
“Peter was there, too. He told me what happened.”
So it had been Gillette and Landers.
“Then he lied to you,” Dooley said. “So did your brother.”
“Mark would never lie to me.”
Oh boy.
“Maybe you didn’t know your brother as well as you thought you did.”
She didn’t like that.
“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry he died. But I didn’t have anything to do with it. I just saw him fall.”
She looked at him a moment like he was Satan, complete with horns and a tail. Then she turned and walked off the bridge.
Dooley went to every single place he could remember having been with Gillette. He ran into people he used to know, most of whom were surprised to see him out, some of whom probably wished he wasn’t, a couple of whom offered him some refreshment, all of whom were amused when he said, no, he didn’t do that anymore. None of them had seen Gillette. None of them knew where he was living now.
Seventeen
If Gillette was at school on Monday, he was keeping a low profile because Dooley didn’t see him. Same thing on Tuesday.
On Wednesday when Dooley was leaving school, he ran into Rhodes. Bracey was with him. So was Landers. Landers scowled at him. Dooley wished he could at least remember Megan coming onto him. It would make that scowl worthwhile. But he couldn’t.
“Have you seen Gillette?” Dooley said.
“No,” Rhodes said. He seemed surprised. “I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Me? Why?”
“He’s missing.”
“Missing? You mean, he’s skipping class?”
Rhodes shook his head. “His mother called me.”
“You know his mother?”
“Sure,” Rhodes said, surprised again, as if he was wondering if there was some reason he shouldn’t know her. “She’s nice. She works hard, you know, with four kids and she’s all on her own. You don’t know her?”
Dooley shook his head.
“Well, she said she hasn’t seen Eddy since he left home to come to my party. She sounded really worried. You don’t know where he is?” Rhodes said.
“Why would I know that?”
Rhodes blinked behind the lenses of his glasses. “Eddy said you and he used to be tight,” he said. “He said you’d had some kind of falling out. You two really got into it at the party.” Rhodes had mentioned that once before. The first time he’d said it, Dooley couldn’t remember what had happened. He still couldn’t. “I saw you talking to him after that. I thought maybe you had buried your differences.”
“I haven’t seen him,” Dooley said.
Dooley stopped short at lunchtime on Thursday when he saw his uncle’s car was parked in front of the school. His uncle got out and waited for Dooley to approach.
“What’s wrong?” Dooley said. It had to be something. Why else would his uncle be there?
“The police want to see you.”
“What about? The smash-and-grab? Did they get any prints?”
“No,” his uncle said. “All they have is that your wallet was at the scene. It’s not enough to charge you. The shape you were in, you could easily have dropped it. But I don’t think that’s what they want to talk to you about. It was a different guy who called.” Dooley’s uncle was an in-charge, on-top-of-everything kind of guy, but he looked worried. That shook Dooley.
“Did you ask him what it was about?”
“I did.”
“And? What did he say?”
“He said it was about a police matter,” his uncle said. “Do you have any idea how many times I said that when I was a police officer?” He shook his head. “I gotta tell you, it has a whole different effect when someone says it to you instead of the other way around.”
The cop who wanted to see Dooley, a detective named Joyeaux, thanked Dooley for coming in. He said that he wanted to ask Dooley a few questions and that Dooley wasn’t a suspect, they were just contacting people they thought might be able to help them out.
“Help you out with what?” Dooley’s uncle said, clearly impatient that the detective wasn’t getting right to the point.
“When was the last time you saw Edward Gillette?” Joyeaux asked Dooley.
“Who the hell is Edward Gillette?” Dooley’s uncle said.
“A guy I know,” Dooley told his uncle. To the detective he said, “I saw him at a party on Friday night. I heard he was missing. Did something happen to him?”
“Is that what this is about?” Dooley’s uncle said. “Some kid who’s missing?”
“Edward Gillette hasn’t been seen since last Friday night,” Joyeaux said. “Did you talk to him at the party, Ryan?”
Dooley was willing to bet that the detective already knew the answer to that. Gillette’s mother must have reported him missing. She’d also called Rhodes’s house, so unless the cops were brain-dead, they had already talked to Rhodes and had got a rundown of who was at the party and who had talked to Gillette.
“I remember seeing him,” Dooley said. “But I don’t remember talking to him.” He glanced at his uncle. His uncle didn’t say anything. “I was high,” Dooley said, looking at Joyeaux, avoiding his uncle now. “I had a few drinks. Some other stuff too.”
“What other stuff?” Joyeaux said.
“Rohypnol,” his uncle said, his tone dry. “Ryan ingested some Rohypnol that night. He thinks someone slipped it into his drink.”
Joyeaux looked surprised and suspicious both at the same time. He hadn’t known about the roofies, which made sense to Dooley. Whoever had spiked his drink sure wasn’t going to tell the cops about it, assuming the cops had talked to that person. Dooley couldn’t tell if Joyeaux believed him or not.
“What if I told you there were people at the party who saw you talking to Edward Gillette?”
Joyeaux said.
There wasn’t much Dooley could say. “If that’s what people saw, then I guess that’s what must have happened.” He wished things had happened differently, but apparently they hadn’t.
“What if I said there were people who saw you and Edward Gillette in what appeared to be some kind of altercation?”
Dooley shrugged. He already knew what had happened; Rhodes had told him. He’d probably told the police, too. Probably so had anyone else who had been at the party, had seen Dooley and Gillette, and had been questioned by the police.
“Where are you going with this?” Dooley’s uncle said. “Are you trying to suggest that Ryan did something to this kid?” He sounded annoyed, but when he glanced at Dooley, Dooley saw that he looked worried.
“Edward Gillette left home late Friday afternoon. He was last seen at a party on Friday night. Ryan was at that party.”
“So were a lot of other kids,” Dooley’s uncle said.
Joyeaux nodded. His tone was conciliatory when he said, “We’re just trying to get a picture of who Edward talked to, what went on at the party, who he left with, and where he might have gone. His mother is worried about him. She says this isn’t normal behavior for Edward.”
Dooley had a hard time believing that. It was possible Gillette had changed. It was possible that he was trying, just like Dooley was. But Dooley had a hard time believing that, too. He glanced at his uncle. He bet his uncle was thinking what he would do if Dooley had left home on a Friday and still hadn’t showed up by the following Wednesday.
Dooley Takes the Fall Page 12