Boy Still Missing (31 page)

With the police held back for the time being, I shut the window and slid the dresser in front of the door in this room, too. I turned off the TV and went into 5B, where Jeanny was crouched on the floor, crying. She had managed to put her clothes back on, and her hair was still tucked inside her sweater. In her hand she squeezed her father’s silver cigarette case. Sophie was wailing away next to her in the makeshift bed. I set the gun down on the dresser and threw on some clothes as fast as I could. Sat next to Jeanny, put my arms around her. “It’s going to be okay,” I told her. “Trust me.”

“No it’s not!” she screamed, pushing me away. “You’ve gone crazy! You’ve got to stop all this! You’re going to hurt someone.”

“I won’t hurt anyone,” I said. “I would never hurt anyone.”

Jeanny just put her head in her hands and cried. “I was wrong about you,” she croaked into her palms. “So wrong about you.”

I tried to hold her again, but she shrugged me off, kept crying.

“You weren’t wrong,” I told her.

“Oh, yes I was!” she shouted, thrashing her head up to face me. “I thought you were good. I thought you made some bad decisions because of what happened to you. I thought I could help you put things right again. But you are fucked, Dominick Pindle! Look what you’re doing! You are sealing your fate!”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I know you think I’m crazy. But I need to do this for my mother. For her sake, I want Roget to be held accountable for leaving her here to die.”

“How is any of this going to help you prove his guilt?”

The path to answering that question came not from me but from a police officer whose voice crackled through a speaker atop one of those cars in the parking lot. “What do you want?” his amplified, electric voice asked.

I didn’t walk to the window right away, because I needed Jeanny to understand what I was doing. “Look. I’m going to jail anyway. If I surrender now, then I’ll never have any power to get Roget or to do anything for my mother again. Think of this as a protest. I’m protesting Roget’s claim of innocence. I’m protesting my mother’s death. I’m protesting for all the women who’ve died the way she did.”

I thought that last part would make Jeanny truly understand, but she just sat there crying. Out in the parking lot that speaker crackled again. The officer’s voice repeated, this time stopping between words so the question sounded mixed up and broken: “What? Do you? Want?”

“If you want to leave, then go now,” I told Jeanny. “I’ll move the dresser, and you can walk right out the door. I understand.”

Still she sat there. “What about Sophie?” she said after a while.

“The baby stays with me. But if you want to go, go. It’s your choice.”

Jeanny didn’t move. She looked down at Sophie, then around at the room where my mother had died, where we had fallen in love. Two things so opposite, oddly connected. I put my hand out to her then, and she let me touch her, stroke her arm. I reached over and pulled her hair out from her sweater so that it spilled down her back like something set free. We sat there awhile as Jeanny looked from Sophie to the door, then back to Sophie again. And that policeman’s voice kept prodding, repeating his question. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I gave up on her and went to the window. I knew that asking for money or freedom would do me no good. Once they got the baby, they’d throw me in jail, and that would be that. It was clear I needed to ask for something they couldn’t take away. And I knew exactly what that something was.

“Officer Roget left my mother here to die, and I want him investigated for his connection to her death!” I called through the window. No sooner were those words out when I thought of one last wish for my mother. A fairy-tale ending that she never got when she was alive. “And I want you to contact my uncle in New York City. Donald Biadogiano. Tell him to find a way to bring me Randolph Burdan. I will give the baby to him and only him.”

Once again the air was silent outside.

I knew that meeting my brother shouldn’t have mattered anymore. It wasn’t going to change anything after all. But if my life was speeding toward the hard, gray nothingness of a concrete-wall dead end, I might as well take this last chance to get whatever I could for my mother.

When I turned away from the window, Jeanny was talking on the telephone. I listened to her tell whoever was on the other end of the line that she was at the Holedo Motel with me and the baby. That the state and local police were outside. I kept my eyes on her as she repeated the details of our situation. Jeanny spelled my name, emphasizing each letter so there could be no misunderstanding. “
D
as in dog.
O
as in octopus.
M
as in man…” She did the same with my mother’s name. Roget’s, Edie’s, and her own, too.

“Who was that?” I asked when she finally hung up.

“Channel Six. Eyewitness News out of Boston.”

“How did you get their number?”

“In the phone book,” Jeanny told me, pointing to the Yellow Pages on the nightstand. “If we’re going to have a protest, we need to get people’s attention. We do it all the time in New York.”

She was going to stay. I pulled her to me and kissed her. I thought it seemed strange that anyone from a TV station would care about what was happening to us in the Holedo Motel. Then I remembered Joshua Fuller’s voice saying,
You’re news, kid.
I saw that swirl of headlines about my mother in all those newspaper clippings. Maybe they
would
be interested. When we broke apart, I asked, “Now what do we do?”

“I guess we wait,” Jeanny said.

And that’s exactly what we did. Jeanny carried Sophie in her case to the back corner of the room and got her settled in for sleep. I piled pillows on the floor by the window, fixed the curtains just enough for us to see. She sat next to me, and we watched the police out there for over an hour. All of them with their waists strapped with so much stuff—guns, walkie-talkies, handcuffs, clubs—that they looked like carpenters wearing tool belts. Different officers kept trying to talk me down—but never Roget. They took turns at the radio, telling me I should give this whole thing up and come outside. But I didn’t respond. They knew what I wanted, and until they started taking me seriously, I wasn’t leaving. The whole while the storm kept flip-flopping from snow to rain, rain to snow. The officers clustered around one another. Random squad cars came and went. A few of the men looked restless and bored, glancing at their watches as the minutes ticked by. A trooper in tall black boots and a cowboy-style hat kept trying to comfort Edie. Offering her coffee, urging her to take a seat in the back of his car.

But she wouldn’t budge.

She just kept staring up at the motel.

The bewildered expression on her face didn’t quite hold the fear I had heard in her voice during our phone conversation. I wondered—
hoped was more like it—if somehow she was beginning to understand what I was up to now that she had heard my demands.

At the other end of the lot Roget stood by his car with the door open. One arm resting on the roof, one hand fingering his mustache. He looked about ready to make a break for it, but something kept him anchored here. The scales in his mind must have weighed down on the side of confidence that he could pull out of this situation unscathed. He could still be the town hero with his shiny gold badge. After all, he was an officer with a clean record and an alibi for the night my mother died. I was a runaway. A juvenile delinquent holed up in a motel room with a gun and a baby.

Who would ever believe me over him?

That’s what I was asking myself the moment I saw a white van slow down in front of the motel and turn into the parking lot.

Channel 6 Eyewitness News.

Jeanny seemed brought to life by the sight of it. Even from the window, we could see Roget watching that big blue eye painted on the passenger door. It seemed to be staring at him, taking in the whole scene, actually witnessing everything that had happened here, everything that was about to happen, too. I wasn’t as confident as Jeanny that the TV news spelled victory, but something told me Roget realized he might lose control of this situation if he wasn’t careful. And when five minutes later a Channel 9 Action News van pulled up, followed by a station wagon from Channel 3, I actually started to believe he was scared.

“Did you call all of those stations?” I asked Jeanny.

“No,” she said, not turning her gaze from the window. “But word must be out about what’s happening here.”

I watched Roget rush to the back of his car and pop open the trunk. He pulled out a roll of
DO NOT CROSS
—
POLICE INVESTIGATION
yellow tape. Barked orders at his men to block off the area. But the three reporters and their cameramen were already dispersing. Two of them headed toward the state troopers. A silver-haired reporter scrutinized the lot before approaching anyone. He was a man I had seen my whole life
when I flicked channels on the tube or ate at the TV tables with my parents as they watched the local news. It felt weird to see him down there, looking too tall and artificial with his beige trench coat and square face. Like he belonged more in the box in my living room than in real life. He squinted his eyes toward Roget and seemed to size up his gold sheriff’s badge, different from the rest, then walked toward him. A cameraman followed, weighed down by a snaky tangle of wires and a bulging black knapsack. A white spotlight clicked on, casting a sharp glow on Roget’s saggy face. I couldn’t hear the reporter’s question, but whatever he said must have pissed Roget off. He shouted, “Step away, sir! We are in the middle of a police action, and your presence is a direct interference. Now, step away!”

The reporter didn’t move. He held a microphone extended in his outstretched arm, the light burning behind him, the square black eye of the camera watching Roget. He repeated his question, again not loud enough for us to hear. And Roget shouted one more time, “I am ordering you to step away!” His men rolled out more of that yellow tape, corralling the reporters as best they could.

But that didn’t stop them.

The man from Channel 9—who I had never seen on TV but who looked a bit like Joshua Fuller only without the birthmark—positioned himself and his cameraman so that the motel was directly behind him. The reporter from Channel 6 did the same. And in an instant two lights shone on them as they spoke into their microphones.

“This must be live,” Jeanny said, jumping up to turn on the TV.

I followed her, and she was right. On Channel 9 there was the Joshua Fuller look-alike. The words “Special Report” flashed beneath him at the bottom of the screen. His voice came out at a steady volume, because the TV in this room worked right. Still, it took me a few seconds to focus on what he was saying. My brain was busy adjusting to the idea that the man outside was the man I was watching from inside—that so many people were watching as he talked about me, my mother.

“…In a strange twist, this kidnapper is not asking for money. His
demands? He wants the town’s sheriff—Officer Russell Roget—investigated for an alleged connection to his mother’s death from a criminal abortion. The fifteen-year-old boy has accused Officer Roget of leaving Theresa Pindle to die in the motel you see behind me on January twenty-third of this year…”

He kept talking, but something made me reach up and switch the station. Sure enough, on Channel 6 another one of the reporters from outside stared back at us. Only this guy had already begun talking about my mother’s past. “…The late Theresa Pindle made headlines years ago, then under the name Theresa Tierney, when she sued a Manhattan doctor on the grounds that he coerced her into giving up her child in a private adoption for his financial gain…”

Again my hand seemed to reach up on its own and turn the dial. On Channel 3 Edie’s face filled the screen. “I want my baby,” she sobbed into the hard, black nub of a microphone. “I just want my baby. That’s all.”

As I watched her cry, I found myself imagining all the other people tuning in to this newscast. A man who had just returned home from his job. A woman who had cooked him dinner. The two of them—and a thousand others—sitting down to eat their Hamburger Helper in front of the TV, only to find this beautiful, shell-shocked woman crying about her baby who was locked in a motel room with a fifteen-year-old boy. What were those people thinking as they stared at Edie, at this whole mess of a life?

The poor woman…

The poor child…

Maybe they felt a fleeting pang of pity. But more than that, I bet they thanked God it wasn’t them on the screen, that their world was safe, secure. Tomorrow they could get up and go to work. Come home again to watch somebody else’s life fall apart on the television or in the newspaper. Little did any of those people know, I thought as I gazed at Edie’s grief-twisted face, how close they were all the time. That one day you could make a choice that seemed like a good one in the moment, only to
end up careening down a dark road you never intended to take. Like me when I kissed Edie that first night. Like my mother when she rolled down her window and stared up at Roget’s badge.

Fate.

Chance.

“So what happens next?” the silver-haired reporter was asking. “Will the police agree to this boy’s unusual demands? For now we can only wait and see. And pray that this terrified mother gets her child back unharmed. We will continue with live updates as this story unfolds. In Holedo, this is Jonathan Market. Channel Three News.”

All three stations returned to regular programming, and Jeanny and I walked to the window again. We had more company out there: Marnie’s car, my father’s truck. I scanned the lot, and my eyes landed on my father first. I pointed him out to Jeanny. He was standing away from Edie, flanked by three officers. Snow dusted his shoulders and melted on top of his hatless head. His face puzzled itself up in confusion, more lost than I had ever seen him look. It was impossible to hear what the police were saying, but I guessed that they were asking him questions.