“It’s been months. She called me and told me what happened right after the business partner called her this morning. Has anybody told the boy yet?”
Frank Rush studied me for a moment. All of his thirty years of instincts were focused on my eyes, the inflection in my voice, the movement of my hands in my lap, my breathing. What if I had another asthma attack? An involuntary shut-down of my lungs in the office of the homicide investigator?
“The boy’s in a safe place,” he said. “You mind if I tape-record our conversation? It just helps me later when I have to put all the information in a report.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
He pressed the button on a hand-held recorder, whispered the date and time and my name, and asked me, “Mr. Winwood, you know anybody who might want to kill Allen Kilborn?”
“Well,” I hesitated, “no.” I intentionally left a space between the words to invite the next question.
“You seemed to hesitate with your answer.”
“Well, I don’t know how much you know about Allen Kilborn, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he was the kind of man someone might want to kill.”
I could almost see his mind reeling inside. “How so?” he asked.
“He was…abrasive.”
“Abrasive?” he repeated.
“He was a bully. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”
Frank Rush sat perfectly still, arms crossed on the desk in front of him. “Did you ever want to kill Allen Kilborn?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I never wanted to kill him. I would have liked to kick his ass a few times, but I wouldn’t want to kill anybody.”
“Do you have a key to his house?” he asked.
“No. I don’t even think Samantha has a key.”
“Have you ever been inside Allen Kilborn’s house?”
I pretended to think. “As a matter of fact, yes. This past weekend. Saturday afternoon around three o’clock or three-thirty. I stopped by to see if they were back from deep-sea fishing. I knocked, nobody answered, the door was unlocked, so I went inside and called out for the boy. They weren’t back yet, so we left.”
“Who is ‘we’?” he asked.
“My friend, Eddie Miller, was driving. We were on the way to watch a football game at a sports bar.”
Frank Rush leaned back in his squeaky leather chair. “Is it just a coincidence, Mr. Winwood, that the first and only time you’ve been in Allen Kilborn’s house was the same day he was murdered?”
I paused. “I guess so, but he wasn’t home. They weren’t back from the fishing trip. I’m sure you can verify that with the charter boat.”
The man stared at me. I waited the required period of time. “You act like I had something to do with this,” I said.
“Did you?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Whoever it was who went to see Allen Kilborn this weekend went there to kill him. It wasn’t a robbery. It was an execution. Do you own a gun?”
“No, I don’t have a gun. I’ve never had a gun.” I showed a touch of anger at the implied accusation.
Frank Rush said, “You wouldn’t mind if we searched your house, or your car, would you? I mean, you have the right to say no, but if you don’t have anything to hide…”
He shrugged his shoulders. It was a test.
“I don’t have anything to hide. You can search all you want.”
My car was taken behind the police station to a garage. I rode with Investigator Rush to my house. Two other officers met us there. I sat down on the couch as they combed through my house. Shirt, pants, socks, and shoes, all touched and replaced in drawers and on hangers. One guy crawled around in my attic with a flashlight and another sifted through the garbage in my garage. There was nothing to find.
My car had an odd smell, a chemical smell, when I got it back. After I left the police station I drove to see Samantha. Allen Jr. was with his grandparents. They’d searched Samantha’s house, specifically asking about Allen Jr.’s key to his father’s door. They took the boy’s computer.
I tried to ease Samantha’s concerns.
“This is routine, Sam. When somebody gets killed, the first place they look is the ex-wife or ex-husband, and whoever they’re dating. Don’t worry, we didn’t do anything wrong. They’ve probably already figured out we’re not involved. You know as well as I do the son-of-a-bitch probably had a dozen enemies who’d blow his head off if they had a chance.”
She said, “They asked me if you spent the night Saturday night. I was embarrassed, but I told them the truth. They looked through my car. They took Little Allen’s key and his computer. The man with the mustache said he was killed around midnight Saturday night. He said the only thing stolen was the gun. They think he was shot with his own gun. And they said the door was unlocked.”
I went home that night. The highly trained police officers had failed to find my hidden cigarettes. I could’ve had the gloves hidden there, or the spare key, or a snapshot of the dead man sprawled across the floor, and they’d have missed it. As I smoked my cigarette in the dark, I wondered if Frank Rush was sitting in the bushes in my backyard watching. Maybe sitting in the same place Allen Kilborn sat weeks earlier after scaring the holy shit out of me.
On Tuesday afternoon Investigator Rush stopped by my office unannounced. I didn’t act rattled, expecting to hear from him soon. This time, we sat across from each other at my desk instead of his.
“I just had a few more questions I wanted to ask you. You mind if I tape-record the conversation again, just to help my memory? I wouldn’t want to get anything wrong.”
“Okay,” I said, and looked him directly in the eye.
“Where were you Saturday and Saturday night?”
“Allen Jr. went fishing with his father. I went to Samantha’s in the morning and took her to breakfast. We went shopping at the mall. After that, Eddie picked me up around three. We stopped by Allen Kilborn’s house, like I said, looking for the boy. He wasn’t there. We went to the bar and watched the game. I drank maybe two beers. I got back to Samantha’s around six-thirty. Allen Jr. got dropped off by his father at seven.
“After that, Allen fell asleep somewhere around ten. Me and Samantha stayed up, watched a movie, went to sleep around eleven. I usually don’t stay overnight when the boy is there, but I fell asleep and woke up the next morning around eight. I fixed coffee. I saw Little Allen in the kitchen before I went home to get dressed for church. And we went to church later that morning.”
For the first time in my dealing with Frank Rush, I saw some doubt in his eyes. Doubt that I was involved in the death of Allen Kilborn. Doubt that solving this case would be so easy. Or maybe I imagined it.
“Did you notice anything odd, or out of place, at Kilborn’s house that afternoon?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, the streetlight outside the house was busted. There was glass by the driveway.” “Anything else?”
“Only that I thought it was strange for the door to be unlocked in the middle of the day with nobody home. But then again, he lived out in the country. Maybe he didn’t lock his doors. I don’t know.”
The investigator looked down at his notes. “There was a calendar on Samantha’s refrigerator. Had Saturday marked in red.”
“I think Little Allen did that. He was looking forward to the fishing trip.”
“How long you and Eddie Miller been friends?”
“All our lives. We grew up together.”
“When’s the last time you and Eddie went to watch a game together, or drink a beer?”
“Before Saturday?”
“Yeah, before Saturday.”
“Probably ten years ago. College.”
He watched me closely again. “Is it just a coincidence, again, that the first time, the only time in ten years, you go have a beer and watch a game with your lifelong friend, Eddie, happens to be the same day, and the only day, you ever go inside Allen Kilborn’s house, which happens to b
e the same day Allen Kilborn gets his head blown off in that same house?”
Conscious of the tape recorder spinning round and round on the desk between us, I said, “I guess so, Mr. Rush, but I’m not a killer, and neither is Samantha.”
Frank Rush leaned over and turned off the tape recorder. “Would you mind, Mr. Winwood, providing me a written statement of your whereabouts on Saturday and Sunday? Just for the file.”
“No, I wouldn’t mind,” I said.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “Eddie told us about your ex-wife. We pulled the divorce file, and called Kate to verify a few things. Did you ever get charged criminally with assaulting the man you assaulted in that house off-campus?”
For the first time in our conversations, I was caught off guard.
“No,” I said, “ and it didn’t happen the way she said it did. People will say anything in a custody battle. Did she mention she was strung out on crack?”
It was near the end of our conversation. He accomplished his goal of shaking me up, but it wouldn’t make any difference. He stood to walk out the door, and then stopped in the doorway. “Oh, one last question. How many times have you been to church with Samantha and her son?”
We looked at each other. “Once. Sunday was the first time.”
He reached his hand up and scratched the back of his neck. Frank Rush said, “Another coincidence?”
But he didn’t want an answer, and didn’t wait for one.
The funeral was on Wednesday morning at the Episcopal church. Allen Jr. was the same age I had been when my father died. Watching him cry made me feel the way I’d felt twenty years earlier as I stood in front of my father’s casket and wanted to wake him. Just wanted to touch his arm and remind him it was time to go throw the ball in the front yard. Watching Allen’s body shake in front of his father’s closed casket made me doubt what I had done. Maybe it wasn’t for me to decide. Maybe the bad would outweigh the good, for all of us.
I looked up at the stained glass window above, Jesus on the cross, multi-colored and all-knowing, glowing in the sunlight of a Wednesday morning, and I began to wonder about who I was, and what I had done, and whether anything would ever make sense again.
seven
Two days after the funeral I had my first experience of leaving myself. It sounds crazy, I know, but the way it sounds is nothing compared to the way it felt.
I was driving down the four-lane interstate alone in the afternoon. Traffic was light, and up ahead in my lane, two or three hundred yards in front, I saw an old pickup truck. The bed of the truck was piled high with picked corn, still in the husk, and on top of the pile of corn sat a Mexican boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. I found myself, within the drone of the radio, fixated on the truck ahead, and the corn, and the boy with the faded red t-shirt and black hair. I got closer and drifted into the left-hand lane to pass the old blue truck. I couldn’t seem to remove my eyes from the face of the boy. It was like I was hypnotized or something. And he looked back at me, no expression, with dark eyes against smooth brown skin, the color of wood.
We were nearly side by side, my car and the truck, me and the Mexican boy, and then I saw myself. I saw me, driving my car, from the eyes of the Mexican boy sitting atop the pile of picked corn in the back of the pickup truck. I saw me staring, my hands on the wheel of the car. I looked down at the brown hand resting on the ear of corn next to blue jeans, and looked up again to see myself for just a split-second longer behind the wheel of the car. Just a split-second, and then I was back inside myself again, seeing the Mexican boy, and him seeing me, and passing the truck, trying to figure out what had happened. Looking in the rearview mirror to see if the boy would turn his head around to the front, recognition that something had happened to him also. It wasn’t just me. But he didn’t turn around, and I kept going, speeding up to get away from the blue pickup truck.
It happened maybe five more times after that through the years, after that day, but never so profoundly, never with such stark images and clarity of perspective. To see the world through someone else’s eyes, if only for a second, and then return to yourself, moving away, never to see that person again. I’ve often wondered what happened to the boy. Where his life took him.
The fallout from Allen Kilborn’s murder was immediate. There were possibilities I’d failed to consider. A week before Gretchen’s next scheduled visit, I bought tickets for a play and made dinner reservations. I fixed up her room, wondering if I’d picked the right colors. Knowing I was only guessing what girls her age liked, or didn’t like, or thought was stupid. I’d missed so much. I’d missed waking her up in the morning, holding her hand on the way to school, the bond that can only come from the repetition of one goodnight kiss after another.
She didn’t come. The day before she was supposed to arrive, a deputy from the Sheriff’s Department knocked on my door. I sat on Gretchen’s bed, on the new quilt and clean sheets, and opened the envelope. My visitation was suspended. Kate’s lawyer called me “the subject of a murder investigation,” and said I was “cohabitating with a member of the opposite sex not related by blood or marriage.” Overnight visitation with my child should be suspended temporarily, they said. There was an affidavit from Investigator Frank Rush cleverly worded to call me a suspect, and at the same time call everyone in the world a suspect.
I called Kate’s house. No answer. I hung up before the machine picked up. I called again, and again. I wondered if Gretchen knew it was me, and didn’t pick up because she didn’t want to talk to me. Because she thought I was a murderer, and a cohabitator, and some strange man she didn’t really know, or even want to know, who lived a million miles away and sat in a room that wasn’t really hers, on a bed she didn’t really want to sleep in.
What judge would order a child to fly across the country to sleep in the home of a man suspected of blowing a man’s head off sitting at his computer, in his own home? Not me. What’s more, I did it. I wasn’t just a suspect. I was a murderer. A man capable of such a thing, even if I was the only one who knew.
I loved Gretchen. I wanted everything I’d missed. I would have been a good father. Better than good. If the judge had given her to me so many years ago, I would have fixed her breakfast every morning. Gotten her dressed. Taken her to daycare or pre-school and made sure no one was mean to her. We would have played in the backyard, and had things together. Like words we both laughed about, or stupid little songs only the two of us could sing, because we’d made up the songs. They were ours.
But she didn’t come home with me. She went to California with her mother and her rich stepfather and now they wanted to cut the string of what was left. Maybe it was all a part of the investigator’s strategy. Put pressure on me. Take away my little girl. Watch it eat me up inside until I told the truth, all of it, for a chance to see my girl again, or a pack of cigarettes, or a promise of redemption and everlasting forgiveness.
Eddie called and wanted to meet me for a beer at the same place we met before.
When I arrived, he was already perched at a stool, a cold frosty mug of draft beer in his hand. I sat down next to him. He didn’t waste time with small talk. “This guy Rush has come to see me three times, Early.”
He held up three fingers and repeated, “Three times.”
“I know,” I said. “He’s been to see me, too.”
Eddie took a sip of his beer. He said in a low voice, “He’s asking me about you, and shit from college, and Kate, and the day we stopped by the dead guy’s house.”
He looked straight ahead while he talked. It occurred to me he might be wearing a wire. Frank Rush might be sitting in the back room of the bar, listening. He sent Eddie to see me. He squeezed Eddie with threats of arrest, co-conspirator accusations, and now, here we sat, me and my childhood friend Eddie Miller, not so far removed from the drugstore.
“He’s asking me the same questions, Eddie. I guess they can’t figure out who killed the man, so they just keep asking us the same things over and ov
er. Since we didn’t do anything wrong, we don’t have anything to worry about. That’s the way I look at it.”
Eddie looked over at me and took a little sip of his beer. We were quiet for awhile. I glanced around the room looking for anything out of the ordinary. Maybe somebody watching me, a tiny camera lens. Maybe I was paranoid, I thought. Maybe I’d be glancing around rooms for the rest of my life wondering who was wearing a wire or why somebody was looking at me.
Eddie said, “When I was a little kid, why did you tell me there was no such thing as Santa Claus?”
I thought about it. “I don’t remember, Eddie.”
“That was a shitty thing to do, Early. Shitty. We only have so much time to believe in things like Santa Claus, and after that, it’s bullshit and bills to pay, sittin’ around knowin’ we’re gonna die at the end anyway. You shouldn’t have told me that.”
He was sincere. I began to doubt Frank Rush was hiding in the back room with earphones. The bartender walked over to us.
“I’ll have what he’s having,” I said. “And bring him another one, too.”
Eddie looked down at his glass.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Somebody slapped my shoulder from behind. It was Jake Crane, my other childhood friend, the polar opposite of Eddie Miller. The guy who laid on the roof next to me watching his cousins take showers. I hadn’t seen Jake Crane in at least ten years. He was bloated, puffy in the face. I imagined ten years of cigarettes and whiskey, pool halls and local jails.
“It’s like a reunion,” Jake yelled. “Bring me one of those beers,” he called out to the bartender.
In my paranoid state, I immediately wondered if it was a coincidence. Maybe Jake was in over his head with some drug charge. Maybe he was willing to wear a wire, accidentally run into his buddies, try to start a conversation about Allen Kilborn. Maybe Frank Rush had decided Eddie was involved in the murder, and me and Eddie did it together. My mind spun in circles and eventually came to rest on the puffy face of Jake Crane. He pulled up a stool between us.
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