Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  Shaw shakes his head. “No two-way mirrors in here, just the glass in the door. And they wouldn’t tape our conversation because it’s protected by attorney-client privilege and they know I’d sue them six ways to Sunday.” He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, and lowers his voice. “Your uncle says you didn’t kill the girl. That true?”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I say, my voice somewhere between detached and disturbed.

  Shaw nods, once. “They show you a warrant?”

  “No.”

  “Good. They didn’t arrest you, so they don’t have anything on you. They may think they have motive, but that just makes you interesting.” He scratches his nose. “Where were you the past two nights?”

  “At home.”

  “Got a witness for either time?”

  “No.”

  Shaw quirks his mouth. “So you tell them the truth. Answer every question unless I tell you not do, and do not give them any more information than they ask for. Understand?” I nod, and Shaw stands and opens the door, leaning out into the hall and calling out that we are ready.

  Detectives Panko and Klingman conduct the interview, recording it on an iPhone that sits on a tripod in the corner. As they question me, I’m both hyperalert and a step removed from the entire proceedings because of how surreal this is, as if I’ve walked into an episode of Law and Order. Johnny Shaw sits quietly, eyes closed as if he’s taking a nap.

  Klingman starts by asking where I was the past two evenings, and I tell them I was at home, alone. Then I remember that last night around eight o’clock I took Wilson on a walk and saw my landlord, Tony, out power-walking. We waved at each other. Klingman writes this down, while Johnny Shaw cracks an eye open and glares at me, then goes back to being a statue. Then Panko picks up the questioning and asks me how I met Marisa. I tell them about meeting Marisa at the conference, then spending the night with her at the hotel.

  “And then you hired her to teach with you?” Panko asks.

  “I didn’t hire her,” I say. “The school hired her as a sub for my coteacher.”

  “But you weren’t against hiring her.”

  Shaw’s eyelids flutter, but he says nothing. “No,” I say. “She mentioned our night together, said it had been fun, but we were both adults and this was about her doing a job.”

  “Did you tell anyone at work about your prior relationship?”

  “It wasn’t a relationship,” I say. “We had a one-night stand before she was hired. But no, I didn’t. Marisa was right—we were both consenting adults, it was our business, and as I wasn’t going to be her supervisor, I didn’t think I needed to share that with anyone else.”

  Klingman sits forward. I make an effort not to stare at his stained tie, but it keeps catching my eye, like a comma splice in a student’s essay. “When did your relationship at work change?” he asks.

  “When did we start dating? Maybe three weeks after she started at Archer.”

  “Who instigated it?” Panko asks.

  “She did,” I say. “I didn’t really resist.”

  Klingman nods. “I saw a picture. She was real attractive.”

  There’s a pause like an unspoken sigh at Klingman’s observation. I’m aggravated by the bluntness of his words. It’s the was that really bothers me, the past tense a crude reminder that she is dead. “Yeah,” I say, my voice tight. “She was.”

  Panko frowns slightly at his partner, then shifts forward in his seat. “Mr. Faulkner, we understand that you broke up with Ms. Devereaux recently.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Panko smiles slightly. “Can you elaborate a little for us?”

  I let out a long breath and tell them how Marisa Googled me and found out about my parents, how she tried to get me to talk about them, and how she manipulated the Faculty Award vote. Klingman takes notes on a pad while Panko just listens. When I get to the part about confronting her in my classroom, Panko and Klingman both lean forward in their chairs.

  “How did she react?” Panko asks.

  “She asked if I thought she was only good enough to be my whore,” I say. “Then she took off her shirt and her skirt and told me to fuck her right there, on my desk in my classroom.”

  Klingman is on the verge of gaping at me again. Panko raises his eyebrows. Even Johnny Shaw peeks at me. “Then what?” Panko asks.

  “I turned my back on her,” I say. “And then she left.”

  Klingman sits back and clears his throat. “So that was it?”

  I shake my head. “She started impersonating me on Twitter.”

  “Yes, your head of school told us about your allegations,” Panko says, looking at his own open notebook. “Including stealing your grade book and putting a picture of a naked woman in it for a custodian to find in the hallway.” He looks up at me. “And saying some pretty nasty things on Twitter, pretending to be you. Caused one of your students to attempt suicide.”

  I draw in a shuddering breath and let it out. Suddenly I’m exhausted. “Yes,” I say.

  Panko nods slowly. “If that had been me, I don’t know,” he says. He glances at Klingman. “I’d be upset.”

  Klingman snorts. “I’d be pissed,” he says. “My girlfriend turns into a psycho bitch and gets me suspended from my job? I would not be happy.”

  Johnny Shaw opens both eyes, his glance sharp and keen, but he says nothing, just watches.

  “I wasn’t,” I say. “I wasn’t happy. She called to gloat, and I hung up and blocked her number.”

  Klingman nods, commiserating. “This was after you got suspended?”

  “Yeah, I—” I stop, thinking. “No, sorry, that was earlier. It was last Saturday.” I have to keep my timeline correct. The last time she called me was the last time I heard from her. That is the story. I resist the urge to wipe my palms on my pants.

  Panko regards me from under half-lowered lids. “She contact you again after that?”

  I think about the litany of texts Marisa sent to me on her own phone. I’m going to eat your heart. “No,” I say.

  “You sure about that?” Klingman says.

  Could they know something? I hesitate but look steadily at Klingman, trying to turn my hesitation into a deliberate pause for emphasis. “Yes,” I say. “I’m sure.”

  Klingman’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t believe me.

  Johnny Shaw brings his hands together in a soft clap, startling all of us. “Asked and answered,” he says. “What other questions do you have, gentlemen, because it’s getting late in the day.”

  Klingman is annoyed and tries to land a jab. “Why’d you need a lawyer anyway, Ethan?” he asks.

  Shaw stands abruptly, his chair legs squealing on the tile floor. “Because we are in America, Detective Klingman.”

  “Okay, counselor,” Panko says, palms up and facing Shaw. “No need to get riled up. Mr. Faulkner, if you have anything else to share with us, please—” He makes an open gesture with his hands, welcoming anything else I have to say.

  “I hope you find who did it,” I say, surprising everyone in the room, including myself, with how forcefully I say it.

  “Ethan,” Johnny Shaw says, one hand on my shoulder, and I nod, throttling back my emotions. Shaw makes a show of looking at his watch. “If you don’t have any more questions …”

  “Actually,” Panko says, standing up and wincing slightly as if his back hurts. “We wanted to ask if you would be willing to give us a DNA sample, just a cheek swab, help us rule you out as a suspect—”

  “Absolutely not,” Shaw says, his hand still on my shoulder and now gripping it as if my shoulder has somehow insulted him. “Not without a warrant.”

  Klingman makes one last attempt. “If it helps exonerate your client—”

  “Do you know,” Shaw says, voice rising to thunder pitch, “how many false positives there are on cheek swab tests? And if word got out to the press that the police were conducting a DNA test, forget the fact that you have no evidence whatsoever that my client had any
thing to do with Ms. Devereaux’s tragic death? His career would be finished. You want a DNA test, you get a warrant and we pick the test and an independent lab.”

  There’s a knock on the door, and it opens to reveal an older cop with a lot of brass on his uniform. He looks at me blankly, then waves Panko over to him. Klingman sits sullenly across from me as Panko and the cop talk, the cop doing most of the talking while Panko listens, but I don’t really hear what the cop is saying to Panko. Instead I sit in that interrogation room, imagining the walls are made of metal bars and I can’t leave. I’m having a hard time keeping my breathing steady, and I can feel my face flush. Acid is slowly burning a hole in my stomach. I need to go outside. I need air. And then I’m standing, Shaw’s hand on my arm guiding me, and the cop with the brass on his uniform is gone and Panko puts a card in my hand and says to call him if I think of anything, that they’ll be in touch, and then Shaw is leading me out of the room and down the hall past more cops and through three different doors until we exit the building into the warm, humid night that tastes of hot asphalt and exhaust, and I want to put my hands on my knees and bend over to catch my breath for just a minute.

  “Ethan,” Shaw says in a low voice, his hand like a vise closing around my upper arm. “Walk. Let’s go. Just a few more steps. Breathe. That’s it.”

  Dimly I register a black car and Shaw’s gorilla-sized assistant, Gus, in a too-tight jacket and tie standing by the open door. Shaw pushes me into the car and I scoot across the back seat and drop my head down to my knees. Shaw gets in next to me, the door whomping shut, and then Gus gets in the front seat behind the wheel, the entire car tilting slightly from his weight, and then we are pulling away from the police station as if on smooth rails.

  “You going to puke?” Shaw asks me, not unkindly.

  I shake my head and take a long, deep breath, then another, and then I sit up, the dizziness momentary and then gone. “Thanks,” I say. “Thank you. That was …”

  “That was bullshit,” Shaw says. “They’ve got nothing and so they try to pin it on someone. You’re the ex-boyfriend; it’s convenient. Once they find some physical evidence, they’ll look somewhere else. But they’ll probably get a warrant for your DNA—Shit,” he says, pounding his fist onto the seat between us, his expression laced with anger and worry. “You blew your nose. What did you do with the tissues?”

  I stare at him for a moment, then reach into my pocket and pull out the balled-up tissues. “Didn’t see a trash can in there.”

  Shaw lets out a sigh. “Good. You throw that away, it’s all the DNA they need. No expectation of privacy.”

  “But I didn’t do it. So why not—”

  He shakes his head. “I meant what I said back there. DNA evidence can be sloppy, and I don’t trust the police to do this right. Look at O. J. What you need to do is go home and lay low. Don’t make any out-of-state trips or anything. They know you’re suspended from work, it’s not a great look, but just sit tight. Don’t talk to your landlord about the cops, and do not talk to a reporter.”

  “A reporter?”

  “Pretty Buckhead girl gets killed and left in the trunk of her car? There’s going to be reporters. If you think talking to Panko was hard, try seeing yourself on the nightly news.” I must look horrified, because he smooths out his tone. “Look, if they get a court order for your DNA, I can raise a stink about the Atlanta PD’s crime lab; they botched a serial rape case last year. I know a good lab; the police would rather outsource to them than send a DNA test to GBI, because that would take weeks.”

  Johnny Shaw continues trying to mollify me as we drive on through rush hour traffic, and I tune out his voice and try to process all of this, but it’s like trying to process a storm when you are in the middle of it. Someone killed Marisa, and I’m a suspect. And I just lied to the police about when I last heard from Marisa. I realize I still have Panko’s card in my hand. How would he react if I called and told him the truth about Marisa’s phone and the texts? Then Susannah and Uncle Gavin, and Frankie and Caesar, would all get sucked into the same vortex of shit with me. I can’t let that happen.

  Before I know it, the car pulls up at the foot of my driveway, and I get out, then bend down to look at Johnny Shaw in the back seat. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” I say to Johnny Shaw, reaching out to shake his hand.

  He takes my hand in a strong grip. “Oh, I’m good, but maybe not that good,” he says. “You oughta thank your uncle.”

  I frown. “My uncle?”

  “You see the precinct captain come in at the end, talk to Panko? He told Panko to cut you loose.”

  “You’re saying Uncle Gavin got the cops to let me go?”

  Shaw drops my hand and shrugs. “They got to ask you their questions. It was enough.” He leans back in his seat, and I take the hint and close the car door and watch as they drive away.

  Wilson is overjoyed to see me and almost pees all over the doormat before I can get him out of the house and into the yard, where he starts sniffing the bushes for chipmunks. That night he sleeps curled up at the foot of my bed while I stare at the ceiling, everything about Marisa and my uncle and the police tumbling through my mind. I know that I need answers about what Marisa did, and I need to get them before the police decide to blow my life up even more. Tomorrow Frankie and I will drive to that monastery, Johnny Shaw’s warning be damned, and see what we can find out. With that thought, exhausted and more than a little sick at heart, I fall mercifully asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Frankie picks me up when the early-morning light is washing from blue to gray and the birds are not yet singing. I step out onto my porch when he arrives, the Frankenstein rumbling and shivering the air. Wilson lets out a single yip from inside and then falls quiet. I hate leaving him alone again, even though my neighbor Gene told me he would let Wilson out and take him for a walk.

  Frankie sits behind the wheel, one arm slung out the open window. He is wearing a crisp blue-and-white pinstriped button-down, the sleeves rolled back to his elbows, and dark jeans. Briefly I consider my own outfit—shorts, a clean T-shirt, and a hoodie for the cool morning. I look ready for the beach. “You going on a date?” I ask.

  “We’re going to a monastery,” he says. “Wanted to show some respect.” He glances at the sandals on my feet. I haven’t seen Frankie’s footwear, but I’m guessing he’s wearing black loafers.

  “You’re dressed up enough for the both of us,” I say. “Look, before we go anywhere … the cops came by yesterday. Questioned me about Marisa.” Frankie just looks at me as I stand in the driveway, so I keep going. “They didn’t arrest me, but they’re clearly interested in me as a suspect. I’m still going to find out what Marisa did. But I don’t want to get you in any more trouble. If you don’t want to take me to the monastery, that’s cool.”

  Frankie looks at me, his expression unchanging. After a few moments he says, “You wait to tell me until I show up to drive you there? You could have called.”

  I stare at him. “I don’t have your phone number.”

  “Could have called the bar.”

  He has a point. “Shit, Frankie, I’m sorry; I didn’t want my uncle to ask—”

  A smile slowly unfurls on Frankie’s face.

  I stop. “You asshole,” I say.

  “Get in the car,” Frankie says. “I told you I’d take you.”

  I get in the car, and Frankie slowly backs down the driveway. “Nice neighborhood,” he says. “How long you lived here?”

  “Since college.”

  He says nothing after that, negotiating the driveway, but his smile is gone. I know what he’s thinking. I got to go to college and take classes and party, all while he was sitting in an eleven-by-seven cell. I want to tell him it wasn’t really like that for me, that college was more about working to build a new life and get away from my old one. But explaining that I had it tough too would sound like the height of arrogant white male privilege.

  “How long you been
working for my uncle?” I ask.

  Frankie finishes backing out of my driveway, checks the mirrors, and then puts the car in drive and pulls away from the curb. “Since I got out,” he says. He looks at me to see my reaction, and to be honest, given that I’ve worked hard to extricate myself from my uncle’s life, my reaction is complicated. Frankie’s situation as an ex-convict is complicated enough without adding my uncle to the mix. Ruben worked for my uncle for years, doing God knows what kind of shady shit for him, then died of a heart attack. And then Frankie stepped in to take his place. Was that hard for Frankie? Did he feel indebted to my uncle, who had paid for his defense lawyer? Or did he resent how his father had literally worked himself to death for the man Frankie now worked for?

  Frankie must see something in my face, because he shrugs and says, “Hard to get a job when you get out of prison. Your uncle offered, and I knew how to work at Ronan’s.” He comes to a stop sign at Roswell Road, and even though there isn’t any oncoming traffic, he doesn’t turn onto the road but looks back to me. “If I’ve gotten between you and your uncle, or made you feel like I’ve taken your spot or something, I’m sorry.”

  That leaves me speechless for a moment. “No,” I finally say. “You haven’t. I got away from him years ago. I left. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Frankie doesn’t respond at first, instead waiting for an early-morning bus to roll past before turning onto Roswell. “Okay,” he says.

  We drive up to the Perimeter, and even though it’s before rush hour, there’s plenty of traffic, although it’s moving swiftly for now. Frankie rolls up the driver’s window before turning onto 285. I ignore the King and Queen Buildings rising up on our left. Ahead of us, the sky is beginning to crack open, a fiery light spreading across the horizon, and Frankie aims the Frankenstein directly at the rising sun, the V-8 beginning to thrum under the hood, finally getting to show off its paces a little.

  * * *

  WE TAKE THE exit for GA-400. The southbound lanes are heavy with traffic, but because we are heading north, Frankie can open up his car a little, and we move along at a brisk clip. The sun is now over the horizon, a golden star banishing the gray predawn to usher in a clear blue sky.