Nasty Cutter

by Tim O'Mara

  Allison reached into her bag and pulled out her mini-tape recorder. She showed it to Billy. ‘Do you mind if I tape the interview?’ she asked. ‘I want to make sure I get everything right.’

  Billy shook his head. ‘I don’t mind. I just don’t know what you want me to say.’

  ‘You can start,’ Ally said, ‘with what you did today. What’s a normal day like for you now that you’re …’ She seemed to be at a loss for how to put that.

  Billy helped her out. ‘Out of prison? Working for my brother?’

  ‘I wanted to say “a productive member of society,” but I didn’t want to sound like a cliché. But what’s a normal day like for you? What did you do today, for example?’

  He gave that some thought. ‘I went into my office at the Great Neck dealership,’ he said. ‘That’s where the office manager is, the one I work with for maintenance and repairs. I’m not too good with the paperwork end of things, so I – we – count on her a lot. Her name’s Angela. Technically, she works for me, but I couldn’t do half the job without her. Angela and me make sure the work we said was going to be done was really done. We make sure our billings and invoices are in order and stuff like that. That usually takes us right up to lunch. We got six dealerships you know.’

  ‘I read that,’ Ally said. ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Bobby doesn’t do things halfway, Ms Rogers. In fact, he’s thinking of buying two more dealerships out in Suffolk. Right now we got two in Nassau, two in Queens, and two right here on the West Side. These are my favorites, because they’re by the river. Bobby’s always thinking ahead. That’s what made him such a good pitcher.’

  ‘I thought it was his cut fastball,’ I said, breaking the no-talking rule.

  ‘Lotta guys had a cut fastball, Ray,’ Billy said. ‘It’s knowing when to throw it that made him so good.’

  ‘Weren’t you his catcher when he pitched?’ I asked. Allison gave me a look that said I’d forgotten the game rules here. I ignored it.

  ‘Every game in high school. I also played second when he played short.’

  I remembered that. The papers called them the ‘Taylor Made Boys.’

  ‘So, you had to know when to throw it, too, right? You called the pitches.’

  He paused at that. ‘We kinda called them together. Me, Bobby, and Coach. He shook me off a lot of times. But when he had that pitch working, sometimes that was all I called for. The cutter.’

  I turned to Allison, who, I could tell, still wanted me to shut up. ‘A cut fastball,’ I said, ‘breaks hard right before it crosses the plate. Bobby made a lot of good hitters look stupid, and that was his ticket to college.’

  As soon as those words came out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back. I shouldn’t have said anything that reminded Billy who went to college and who didn’t.

  ‘So it was a pretty good pitch, huh?’ Allison asked Billy.

  ‘Nasty,’ he said, his voice clearly registering admiration. ‘When it was breaking, it was nasty.’

  ‘So what do you do after lunch?’ Allison said, taking the conversation back to the present. ‘Do you come into Manhattan a lot?’

  Billy had a tough time transitioning from the past to the present, so it took him a while to answer.

  ‘At least once a week,’ he finally said. ‘I try to split my time evenly between the dealerships. And Bobby likes me around the office most of the time.’

  ‘Do you still get to work on the cars yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘It’s one of the perks of being the boss, I guess.’ He paused again. ‘That sounds weird when I say it out loud, but I am kinda a boss. If I wanna work on a car, I can do it. Just today over here, someone brought in a Maserati. There was nothing wrong with it, just a scheduled maintenance. The thing was a piece of art. And I got to touch it and help make it better. That’s a pretty sweet thing to be able to do.’

  Allison nodded at that. I watched her trying to phrase her next question.

  ‘So,’ she started. ‘You’ve always been good with cars?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Even back in high school. I took auto shop instead of art. Coach was also the shop teacher. I learned a lot from him.’

  ‘How did you keep up with the changes in technology?’ Ally asked. This was the tough part. ‘I mean, when you were in high school it was mostly hands-on stuff. And now it’s mostly computerized. With you … being away for ten years …’

  ‘You can say it, Ms Rogers,’ he said. ‘When I was in prison for ten years, I took some computer classes. That was another thing I was good at in school. They weren’t like the computers we have now, but I kinda understood them. When I was in prison and Bobby got to The Show, he donated some money to the prison library for up-to-date computers.’

  ‘The Show’ is baseball lingo for the major leagues.

  ‘So when you got out, you were prepared for the changes?’

  ‘I had to take some more courses, but, yeah, I wasn’t starting from zero.’

  Allison spent the next five minutes or so asking more questions about his job, his social life, his relationships after getting out of prison. Billy seemed eager to answer all of them. Things were good for him now. Having had most of his twenties taken away from him, life pushing forty was remarkably normal. Then she shifted the conversation.

  ‘I’d like to go back to the night of the assault,’ she said.

  Billy’s face lost most of its emotion. It wasn’t completely blank, but it was close. He looked like he knew the topic might come up but was hoping it would not.

  ‘OK,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened that night?’

  ‘You mean everything?’

  ‘Whatever you remember. I know it was twenty years ago, but whatever you can remember would be helpful.’

  He thought about that for half a minute and then let out a deep breath I didn’t know he was holding in.

  ‘It was a party,’ he began. ‘We were a few weeks away from graduation, the baseball season was over, and we were all going to college in a few months, so we decided to start the parties early. Bobby and me had scholarships, so we were really in the mood to party and hang out until September.’

  ‘Do you remember who was at the party?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not everybody. A whole lot of us went to the beach. After that about ten or twelve of us went to the house. We probably shouldn’t have drove, but we did.’ He mentioned a bunch of names of the kids he remembered who were at the house that ended with, ‘Me, Bobby, and Melissa Miller.’

  ‘Was Melissa Miller part of your regular group of friends?’

  ‘Not really. She was good friends with some of the cheerleaders we hung out with, so I guess she came along with them for the night.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  He gave that some thought. ‘She was cute,’ he said with a shrug. ‘She kept hanging on Bobby, and that pissed off Bobby’s girlfriend, Maura. Maura O’Neal.’

  ‘What did Maura do?’ Allison asked.

  ‘She told Melissa to find her own guy.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Find her own guy? I don’t know. I was pretty drunk, and we were smoking pot, too. I’m not sure of too much after we started smoking.’

  Allison gave that comment a few seconds, and then said, ‘But you told the police – and your lawyer – that you remembered Bobby and his girlfriend leaving the party before everyone else.’

  He shrugged again. ‘I guess I did.’

  ‘You remembered that but not too much else?’

  I could tell by the way his face changed he didn’t like that question. Whatever his intellectual limitations, he seemed to understand the purpose of that question.

  ‘I think I remember that so good because Maura made a big deal of Melissa paying all that attention to Bobby and wanted to leave. Bobby told me they left ’cause when Maura got pissed, she wasn’t in the mood anymore. If you know what I mean.’

  Allis
on nodded. ‘That makes sense,’ she said. ‘How long did Maura and Bobby go out with each other?’

  ‘I don’t think it was that long. I think they broke up before July Fourth. She and Bobby were going to different colleges anyway.’ He took a quick pause. ‘I didn’t like her. I always had the feeling she was hanging with Bobby ’cause of who he was.’

  ‘Knew he was going to be a star?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But she did remind me that they left the party early.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yeah. She said they tried to get me to come with them, but I was really drunk and stoned, and I used to get angry when I drank and smoked at the same time. Nobody could tell me what to do when I got that way.’

  ‘Is that what happened that night?’ Allison asked. ‘You got wasted and angry and assaulted Melissa Miller?’

  ‘It musta been. Bobby was gone and Melissa said it was one of us, so it had to be me, right?’ He closed his eyes and licked his lips. ‘It took me a while for the memory to come back, and, when it did, it was fuzzy and scared the heck out of me. I mean, that I could do something like that. I liked Melissa. I’m not that kinda guy.’

  With his eyes still closed, Allison and I looked at each other. Here we were with a guy who admitted to doing a horrible thing twenty years ago, and we both felt some sympathy for him. I had to admit it, Allison was right: this was a good story. How can you feel sorry for someone who sexually assaulted a girl about to graduate high school and start a new life for herself in college?

  ‘So Maura and Bobby tried to get you to go with them, but you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Wished I did,’ he said. ‘Then we wouldn’t be having this talk, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Allison said. ‘And it took you all that time to remember that?’

  ‘Yeah. Bobby reminded me, then Maura. Then Mr Stover said that if that’s what happened, then I must’ve been the one to hurt Melissa.’

  ‘Which you don’t remember doing?’

  ‘I remember some of it. I guess I was pretty out of it at that point, Ms Rogers. It’s not an excuse, I know, but I was as horny as the next teenager, and Melissa was coming on to me a bit after Bobby left.’ He drifted again; then he came back. ‘I guess maybe she figured if she couldn’t have the star, she’d settle for the star’s brother.’

  ‘Were you and Melissa getting physical?’

  He had mentioned that in his statement; she was ‘hugging all up on’ him and they kissed a little.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what I remember.’

  ‘But it took you a while to remember that?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yeah. My family and Mr Stover helped me some.’ He turned to me and said, ‘I remember your dad telling me only to say things I absolutely remembered. I thought that was nice of him, considering.’

  ‘Considering that everyone else was telling you what you remembered?’ I asked.

  He looked me in the eyes and nodded. ‘That’s a funny way of putting it, but, yeah. It was like I needed help, and I felt better when the memories came back.’ He looked at Allison and said, ‘You ever know you did something wrong, but you weren’t sure what it was and then you know?’

  Allison went along with it and said, ‘I guess.’

  ‘That’s what it was like,’ Billy said. ‘I had this feeling it was me who did … you know, that stuff to Melissa. And when I was able to remember it, I felt better. Even though I knew it was a bad thing and I was going to be in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Did Marty Stover tell you how much trouble you’d be in?’ Allison asked. We both knew the answer to that, because it was part of the interview Marty had conducted before Billy had given his official statement to the Nassau detective.

  ‘Yeah. He said I’d probably end up getting fifteen to twenty years. I got out in ten because of good behavior. And because I confessed. Marty made a big deal out of me saving both families and the county from going through a trial. That’s not why I confessed, though.’

  ‘Why did you confess?’

  ‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ he said.

  The right thing for whom?

  ‘And I don’t do any of that stuff anymore.’

  ‘What stuff?’ Allison asked.

  ‘Drinking and smoking. Maybe I have a glass of wine with dinner once in a while, but I don’t get drunk anymore. It was part of my parole when I got out – staying away from booze and drugs – and it just kinda stuck, y’know?’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t go to Marty’s benefit the other night?’ I asked. ‘Too much temptation?’

  ‘That was part of it. The other part was that I don’t think people like hanging around me too much. After what I did and all. I don’t blame them. It was a long time ago, but what I did was pretty bad.’

  ‘Don’t you feel you’ve paid your debt to society?’ Allison asked.

  Billy shrugged. ‘I did the time they gave me, Ms Rogers. I don’t know about paying any debts. I’m sure Melissa Miller wishes I never got out.’

  I could tell by the look on Allison’s face that she agreed with him, but she kept that opinion to herself.

  ‘Are you seeing anybody now?’ she asked. ‘Romantically?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I tried for a while, but as soon as someone realizes who I am and what I did, they lose interest. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He didn’t believe her. ‘So let’s say you and me were going out for a few weeks and then you find out that I’m a sex offender. You’d still keep seeing me?’

  Allison paused. ‘I’m not sure how to answer that, Billy.’

  ‘With all due respect, Ms Rogers. You just did.’

  After we said goodbye to Billy, Allison suggested we head over to the diner she knew on Eleventh. I had an even better idea: Alfie’s on Tenth. A friend had taken me there a few months before and I was impressed with their great selection of craft beers and good food. Feeling gracious, Allison acquiesced and I got my way.

  We settled into a table along the wall and ordered a couple of Kelso Pilsners. After the server left to get them, Allison said, ‘So what did you think of Billy Taylor?’

  ‘He was more with it than I thought he’d be,’ I said. ‘I mean, I only spoke to him for a little bit the other night, and you were doing most of the talking. He seems to have come a long way since the assault. At least from what little I can remember about what my dad told me. Honestly, I’m not sure what I expected today.’

  ‘Me, neither. He seemed to remember everything that was in the file, though. He may have forgotten a few facts, but that’s to be expected after twenty years.’

  ‘What did you think of his confession?’ I asked as the server came over with our drinks. We told her we’d be having dinner, but we’d be a while before ordering. I took a sip of the pilsner. Score another one for the borough of Brooklyn.

  ‘What do you mean, his confession?’

  ‘He seemed to get a lot of help “remembering” what happened that night.’

  ‘He was drunk, high, and intellectually challenged.’

  ‘And those are the ones who are most easily led down a certain path of thinking.’

  ‘You’re saying you think he was told what to remember?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s a possibility.’ We both took sips. ‘Between his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, and his own lawyer, who knows how much is his memory and how much is what he was told was his memory. I wish I had more notes to read than just what Marty wrote.’ Did I just say ‘I’?

  ‘And there’s no videotape of his statement, right?’

  ‘They weren’t doing them back then. All we have is Marty’s notes.’

  Allison considered that for a few seconds. ‘Do you remember your dad saying anything about Billy’s confession?’

  I shook my head. ‘He wasn’t Billy’s lawyer.’

  ‘But he was there. Billy said he was nice to him.’

  ‘That could mean he gave him a soda or a snack
or something. My father didn’t talk about his own cases very much. I barely remember him talking about the Taylors. Just that it was pretty obvious Billy was a bit on the slow side.’

  ‘You think your mom would remember anything?’

  ‘I doubt it. It was too many years ago.’

  She ran her fingers up and down her glass as she thought about that. I always found it sexy when she did that, but I took the time to steal a glance at the menu. The fried chicken sandwich sounded good.

  ‘Marty kept the files from the case on his computer for all these years, right?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I know it’s a long shot, but is there any chance your father kept records of his own? Maybe even duplicates of Marty’s?’

  ‘Of a case that wasn’t his? That is a long shot.’

  ‘But it’s a possibility.’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s also possible he kept his doodles from law school.’

  Allison put her hand on my leg. Here we go again, I thought. I took it off. Gently.

  ‘Just tell me what you want, Ally. Stop with the leg massages.’

  If she was offended, she didn’t show it. ‘I want you to ask your mother if she still has your dad’s old records and files around the house.’

  ‘I can answer that,’ I said. ‘Yes. She keeps them down in the basement. She had everything put into boxes, including his old computer. She says she feels a responsibility as a limited partner in the firm to hold on to them. I think it’s also a way of holding on to my father’s memory. Every year I ask her to get rid of them, and every year she tells me she will.’

  The server came back, and Allison and I ordered two more beers. I got the chicken sandwich and Ally went for the salad. She had a habit of ordering light food when drinking beer. Didn’t make much sense to me.

  ‘So call your mother for me,’ she said. ‘And ask if I can come over and go through your dad’s old records.’

  ‘What are you going to tell her you’re looking for?’

  ‘Your mom loves me.’ She gave me a big smile. ‘I’ll tell her I’m looking for more background on the story about Billy Taylor and Melissa Miller. You didn’t tell her that Edgar stole Marty’s files did you?’