Homicide Related (20 page)

“That's Tuesday, Ryan,” Randall said. “The day Jeffrey arranged to meet you to pay you back, correct?”

Dooley said nothing.

“Correct?” Randall said, an edge of irritation in his voice now.

“Yeah,” Dooley said. “I was waiting for him.”

“You called Jeffrey a total of ten times in the space of an hour, Ryan. You left three messages. You did not sound happy.”

“I was pissed off,” Dooley said. “I thought he was ducking me. He never showed up.”

“I see.” Randall looked at Dooley but didn't say anything, probably wanting Dooley to sweat over what the next question would be. Then: “So you're saying you didn't see him at all on Tuesday?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw Jeffrey Eccles?”

“Monday.”

“The day he made all those phone calls to you?”

“Yeah. He came to the store.”

“The video store where you work?”

“Yeah. He called my cell, but we're not allowed to take calls at work. So he came to the store. He told me that he needed an extra day. I told him okay.”

“You told him he could pay you back on Tuesday instead. But you say he didn't show up.”

Was he stupid? Hadn't he just said that—
twice
?

“Yes,” Dooley said.

“Where were you Tuesday night, Ryan?”

“You think I killed him? Is that it?”

“Where were you Tuesday from the time you left school until the morning?”

“I was at the restaurant waiting for Jeffie until four-thirty. Then I went home and I was there for a while.”

“Until when?”

“Until maybe eight.”

“Was anyone else home?”

“My uncle.”

“You spend time with him?”

“No. He went up to his room after supper.”

“What was he doing up there?”

“I don't know.”

“What happened at eight?”

There it was again—the subject Dooley hadn't wanted to get into before and didn't want to get into now. But it looked like he didn't have much choice.

“I called my girlfriend and then I went over to her place.”

“The girlfriend whose building you were at the night your mother died? Beth, right?”

Dooley didn't want them to drag Beth into this. What would she think, especially after everything that had already happened? What would her mother think?

“Look,” he said. “She's a nice girl. She's never been in any trouble. I'll answer your questions, but you don't need to hassle her. She's not involved.”

Randall's partner spoke for the first time. He said, “Not involved in what?”

“Not involved in anything,” Dooley said. “She's not like that.”

Randall surprised Dooley. He didn't ask anything more about Beth. Instead, he said, “Was anyone else at your girlfriend's place besides you and your girlfriend?”

“No,” Dooley said. He was annoyed at the heat he felt in his cheeks when Randall's partner smirked at him.

“What time did you leave her place, Ryan?” Randall said.

Too soon. Always too soon.

“Eleven-thirty.” Beth had been reluctant to let him go, even as she was pulling him by the hand to the door, worried about her mother showing up. She kept kissing him. By then she had pulled on a pair of drawstring pants and a flowery little tank top. Her hair hung down in waves over her shoulders and halfway down her back. He was fully dressed, with his jacket on, but he still felt the heat of her. She kissed him, then she told him he had to go, her mother could be home at any minute, then she kissed him again until he couldn't think straight, until he wouldn't have cared if her mother was standing right there in front of him. At least, that's what he thought at first. Then he imagined how it would play out if she actually did appear, and he kissed her one more time and let her go. It was the last time that things had been right between them. He hadn't thought about Nevin even once that night. He wished Beth hadn't come by the store the next day. He wished she hadn't talked to Linelle. He wished he'd been straight with her from the start.

“You don't have to talk to her about that, do you?” he said. “Her mother—” Shit. “She'd get into trouble, that's all,” Dooley said, feeling like a pussy, begging these two cops.

“What did you do after you left your girlfriend's place?” Randall said.

“I went home.”

“Straight home?”

“Yeah.”

“How long did it take you to get there?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“Was anyone home when you got there?”

“My uncle.”

“Can he verify what time you got home?”

“I don't think so. I think he was asleep.”

“You think? You don't know?”

“I didn't check on him or anything. I went right to my room.”

“So you didn't see your uncle after eight o'clock that night, is that what you're saying?”

“Yes, but—” He knew what they were thinking: If he hadn't seen his uncle, then his uncle hadn't seen him, which meant that there was no one who could say for sure when he got home. Which meant that no one could say for sure where he went after he left Beth's house. Which meant …

“You didn't talk to him?”

“No.”

“So how do you know he was home?”

What?

“If you didn't see your uncle and you didn't talk to him, Ryan, how do you know he was home?”

“Well—” Of course he was home, Dooley thought. Where else would he have been?

“When was the last time you saw your mother?” Randall said.

Dooley stared at him. Randall had started out on Jeffie, but now he was back on Lorraine. What was going on?

Randall seemed to enjoy Dooley's surprise. He repeated the question: “When was the last time you saw your mother?”

Dooley spotted the difference right away. Why was Randall asking it that way this time—not when was the last time you spoke to her, but when was the last time you saw her? Dooley thought about Beth and the newspaper clipping she had and the fact that she was mad at him.

“I may have forgotten something the last time you asked me about Lorraine,” he said slowly, trying to sound like this had been bothering him for some time, like he was happy to have the opportunity to clear it up now. “You remember you asked me when the last time was that I spoke to her.”

Randall waited. He didn't say a word.

“I think I may have told you that I hadn't spoken to her in years,” Dooley said.

“You
may
have told me that?” Randall said. “That's exactly what you told me.”

“I thought when you asked me that it was because you wanted to know if she said anything to me, you know, about what she was up to or if she was still into drugs, things like that.” Like he would have cared one way or the other.

Randall was looking evenly at him.

“I told you the truth. I hadn't talked to her in years. But I saw her a few days before she died. She showed up at my school.”

He couldn't tell what either of the detectives was thinking, but he had a pretty good idea they weren't buying in one hundred percent.

“Your mother came to your school?” Randall said.

“Yeah. She surprised me. I came out of school and she was standing right there on the sidewalk.”

“And you're telling us you didn't talk to her?”

“Yes,” Dooley said. It was God's honest truth. “But
she
spoke to
me.
” Beth had seen that. Beth had seen her talking to him.

“What did she say?”

“She said she wanted to see me. She wanted to know how I was doing.”

“That's it?”

“Yeah.”

“You haven't seen her in nearly three years, and she suddenly shows up at your school—you weren't going to that school the last time you saw her, were you, Ryan?”

“No.”

“So how did she know where to find you?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't ask her?”

“No.” That was the truth, too. He hadn't. He hadn't even wanted to talk to her. He'd wanted her to go away. He'd wanted her out of his life, permanently. But, boy, he didn't tell the cops that.

“So, what, she just said something like, Hi, honey, good to see you. I'll check back with you in another couple of years? Is that it?” Randall said.

“She said I should come and see her sometime,” Dooley said. “She said things were different now.”

“Different? Different how?”

“She didn't say.”

“You didn't ask?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Randall said. “You hadn't seen your mother in a couple of years, she shows up at your school and says things are different, and you don't even ask what she means?” He sounded incredulous, like what kind of sorry excuse for a son wouldn't ask, like there was something wrong with him.
Him
, not her.

“No,” Dooley said. “I didn't.”

Randall shook his head:
What a lowlife.

“Did your mother say anything else to you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No!”

“Before she showed up at your school, when was the last time you saw her?”

“Over two years ago,” Dooley said. “I kind of moved out.”

“Kind of?”

“I stayed with friends. Then I got into some trouble.” He didn't elaborate. He was pretty sure he didn't have to. “She never visited, never called, never wrote. Not when I was inside. Not since I went to live with my uncle.” So what did he have to say to her?

“You didn't think too highly of your mother, did you, Ryan?” Randall said.

“I told you. We weren't close.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean, you didn't like her, did you?”

“Okay, no,” Dooley said. “I didn't like her. You want to know the truth? I was embarrassed by her. But I didn't kill her, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Randall said.

Uh-huh? What did
that
mean? Randall leaned back in his chair.

“You want to tell us about the Friday before she died?”

What?

“The manager at the video store where you work says you went home on your break that night. He says he sent you to pick up a DVD you were supposed to have returned a week before. He says you came back without it.”

Good old Kevin—always finding some way to mess him up.

Always.

Ten

D
ooley looked across the table at Detective Randall. He looked up at Randall's partner, who was standing a little behind Randall. He fought the urge to look at the lens of the video camera that was recording everything he said.

“Okay,” Dooley said. They had him fair and square. Denying it would only make things worse. “Okay, but it's true that I hadn't seen Lorraine for over two years until she showed up at my school that day. I didn't even know she lived in town. I thought she'd split or something.”

“Why would you think that?”

Because that was pretty much what his uncle had led him to believe.

“Because she never came around. Because she always said how much she hated it here. She was always talking about moving out west. Then she shows up at my school and says she wants to see how I'm doing. She said things had changed for her. She said she wanted me to come and see her; she wanted to talk to me about something. That's all true.”

Randall waited.

Dooley sucked in a deep breath. He said, “But the Friday before she died, she came to the house.”

“We know that, Ryan,” Randall said, sounding almost bored. “I asked you about that the first time we talked. You remember?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember what you said to me?”

Dooley remembered perfectly.

“You said you weren't home.”

“I wasn't.”

“You said your uncle didn't tell you she'd been there.”

“He didn't. He never said a word about it.”

Randall watched him.

“I went home to get the DVD, like Kevin said. I was about to go into the house to get it when I heard her voice.”

“Your mother's voice?”

Dooley nodded. It had hit him like a lightning bolt, which was pretty funny when you thought about it because right up until that exact moment, he'd figured that the odds of running into her were about the same as his odds of getting struck by lightning. Lorraine had done her level best to ignore him for most of his life. There were plenty of times when he believed she would have offloaded him years ago, if it weren't for the welfare checks and the extra money she got for being a single mother. Having a kid had also saved her from being evicted from the co-op they lived in when Dooley was little. A bunch of the other co-op members had complained about Lorraine; specifically, they had complained about the late-night and middle-of-the-night comings and goings at her apartment and about the chaos surrounding one of her boyfriends who tended to get rowdy when he was cranked. They wanted Lorraine gone. Lorraine had taken Dooley to the co-op board meeting where she had been summoned to answer the complaints against her. She had sat Dooley on her lap, right there in front of everyone. Afterward, she had told him, “No one wants to put a little kid out on the street.” No one except Lorraine. By the time he was eight, she was telling him all the time, make yourself scarce for a couple of hours, huh, Dooley? You got some friends you can stay with, right? Suck up to one of the moms; maybe they'll invite you for supper.