Hollow Man (25 page)

“Your gun? So what?”

I took a deep breath. “What I mean is, it used to be my gun. My Smith and Wesson. But a week or so before all this happened, I sold it to him.”

“You sold him your gun?”

“I should have mentioned it when we were at the station, but I didn't think of it.”

Tristan kicked and wriggled. “No, no, he's lying!”

“I'm not fucking lying, you gave me a check for it.” I turned to Ledsome. “I didn't get it back from the bank yet, but when I do you can see. The memo line says ‘Smith & W'; it's for two hundred dollars.”

Tristan howled again, but Ledsome ground her knee into him to shut him up. “You done?” she snapped and, when he went limp, she stood. The two detectives moved forward, bent over Tristan, and pulled him to his feet. “Take him to the car and read him his rights,” Ledsome said. “Make sure he understands them, and that the in-car video records you.”

“Yes, ma'am,” they said in unison.

She pulled the radio from her belt and connected with dispatch. “I'm going to need EMS to my location. No emergency but get them started this way, please.” She helped me to my feet. “Quite a terrier, that guy. He got you good.”

“Yes,” I said, pinching my bloody nose. “He sure did.”

I kept out of the way as they searched the apartment. They found my Smith & Wesson in the dresser's bottom drawer, just as I'd said. I knew they'd test it for prints and find his, and not mine, because the night of the murder I'd worn gloves and he hadn't. After the shooting, I'd handed him my gun to hold for a moment. When he gave it back, I handled it carefully, not wiping it clean. I hadn't cleaned it since, nor touched it with my bare hands.

They found the crumpled-up map, too, right there in the trashcan by his bedroom door. They wouldn't get any prints off that, but they wouldn't need to. A thorough hand-writing comparison would show he'd drawn the map and written on it. No prints needed to show it was his.

I hated to part with any of the money—that was the hardest thing for me. But for authenticity, I just had to. My special girl, as I'd started calling her, had helped with that. In fact, now that I think about it,
that
was the hardest part: her using his bathroom, having his spidery little hands on her naked skin. That was sickening. But it'd bought her time to put some of the money in the space above his ceiling tiles in the bathroom, a place I couldn't get to. If he talked to the police, he'd have to admit that I couldn't get into his room because he always kept his goddam door locked. I consoled myself over the loss of a few hundred dollars by reminding myself that the money the cops found had blood on it, yet more evidence of his
guilt. And I congratulated myself for that touch, the kneeling beside a dying man to feel his pulse, to touch him as life left, and to dip my fingers in his blood and smear it on the bills that I knew I'd be leaving for the police to find.

Of course, the child porn in the little drawer helped. Not to connect Tristan to the crime but to paint him as a horrible human being. If there's one thing cops, prosecutors, and juries hate, it's a pedophile. And the media made sure everyone knew. He'd put that particular nail in his own coffin, of course; that wasn't my doing at all. But even sociopaths deserve a little luck now and again.

I saw Gus's wife, Michelle, a few times after Tristan's arrest, but I decided not to pursue her, an assertion of self-control that I was quite proud of. As for Gus, he's gone. He won't be found, by her or the police. Ever. He'd hate that, too, the permanent, unexplained disappearance, because he'd be much happier as a victim—all that drama and pathos, the adulation and adoration that comes when your faults are no longer around to annoy people.

As for why he's gone, well, it was his name I saw on Marley's computer. It was Gus who'd complained about me stealing one of his songs, and that's the real reason Marley didn't want him playing that night. Not a show of solidarity at all, so he'd lied to me about that. I should have figured it out. As for the song, sure, I'd heard him play it, early versions, stop-start versions in his den and my apartment. My version, the one I played and that he called “stolen” just wasn't. A few chords are similar, and I concede a similarity in rhythm and pacing, but that's all. Stolen? Hardly. If I write the words, “I'm not sure I want to be a killer,” am I stealing from Shakespeare because I used the words “to be”?

Like writers, musicians feed off each other's work and gain inspiration. If he really thought I'd stolen it, he should have said so to my
face. Going to Marley behind my back, sneaking around like that, well, it's the kind of stunt I'd pull. He really shouldn't have done that. I was supposed to be his friend, and he was supposed to be mine.

And speaking of that, it's not like I formed some devious plan to do away with him. Friends argue and fight. Well, anyway. You don't need to know that part of the story. It's not like you'd have good cause to believe me.

I split some of the money with my girl in green. After all, she'd put those bloody bills over Tristan's tub and made those anonymous calls to the police for me. Somehow her brother had found out about it all, though we weren't sure what or how much. Seemed like putting some money his way was a good move. I'd also come to trust her. Maybe it was because she'd sealed herself into this crime with me. If that seal broke, we'd both be done for and we knew it. But it was more than that. I told her stuff about me that I'd never talked about with anyone. Once she realized that I was empathy-challenged, there didn't seem much point hiding anything. It was, and always had been, the biggest and meanest skeleton in my closet, and she'd opened the door, seen my bare bones, and not run away screaming. I suppose I was too much like her brother to scare her and, of course, she wanted my help in helping him. To understand him, she needed to understand me because I represented one possible future for him. She didn't judge me; she just asked questions with her head cocked in that adorable way, her soft, wet eyes drinking me in as she listened. And I do love a captive audience.

She continued to try to understand me, and asked repeatedly about the reason I was in America in the first place. She didn't swallow the story everyone else seemed to take so easily. She knew there was more to it, and so I told her.

I told her about Mr. Flowers, the first pedophile I'd encountered, about his picking on my friend and then on me. I left out the details, but she got the picture of his sickness. I left out the details of his death too, the monkshood that I picked on my birthday walk,
the poisonous leaves I covered the plate with, and the fact that he died the same way Agrippina killed Emperor Claudius. I so wanted to tell her about that, the wonderful irony of a perverted Latin teacher dying in agony like a Roman king. But I didn't think she'd appreciate it; she wasn't ready for that.

I did tell her about the second pedophile I knew, Gary Glasscock. His name would be funny if he'd been anything but a child molester. He was the gamekeeper on our estate. A short, red-faced man who waddled from side to side when he walked. I always wondered, with all that walking he did for his job, how he stayed fat. To everyone else, he was a jolly fellow, and his penchant for littering the woods with empty bottles of Navy rum was overlooked because he managed such fine pheasant shoots.

When I was fourteen, he took an interest in me. He showed me the tracks that the game followed and showed me how to build a quick but good hide for shooting pigeons. He taught me that the best time for pigeon shooting was the evening, during a snow storm. I went out three times in those conditions, and he was right, the birds would swoop into the trees and flee when I fired, but turn back immediately because of the wind and snow. I could just shoot and reload, shoot and reload, until the barrels got too hot to touch.

It was in one of those hides that he made his move. One minute I was looking out over the decoys we'd set up, the next he was behind me, panting. I looked back and saw his trousers around his knees, his face redder than usual and his tiny dick standing to attention. I was fourteen and had only a dim awareness of what he might be doing, but my secondhand experience with Mr. Flowers was still fresh. For some unknown reason, gamekeeper Gary had been unable to contain himself any longer and threw his body on top of mine. He weighed a hundred pounds more than I did, and I crumpled under him, face down. His fetid breath pumped into my ear, my cheek, as his hips ground against me, and the more I fought to get away, the louder he grunted, as if my squirming was for his benefit. I would never forget
the sweet stench of rum on his breath and his bulging eyes that shone with desperation and lust. It took me a full minute to elbow and kick him off, and I wanted to shoot him right there and then. I probably should have, but I didn't know what the ramifications would be. More than that, I'd been lying a lot to my parents—and been found out a lot—and I simply didn't think they'd believe me. And if they didn't believe me, the police wouldn't. The oldest son of landed gentry could get away with a lot, but not cold-blooded murder.

No, his murder needed to be accidental.

Glasscock's role in the pheasant shoots was as the backstop, the flag man. He'd stand on the edge of the wood and try to change the mind of any pheasant that didn't want to fly forward, flapping and shouting to turn it around. Which put him about twenty yards from whichever gun was stationed on the flank. His last outing was when I was sixteen. I'd wanted it to be the year before, but the situation had never been quite right, the timing and positioning not close enough for an accident.

But on December 26, a snowy Boxing Day a few months after my sixteenth birthday, the beaters were pressing through Box Wood, with me on the flank and Gary in his place. We were at the midpoint, and so far all the birds had taken off and flown straight and true. Then I heard the familiar flap and squawk of a pheasant closer to me, the crack and rustle as it headed out of the trees, this one sideways instead of forward. Almost immediately it banked toward me, like it was trying to sneak back into the safety of the woods. Gary Glasscock raised his flag and started waving to deter that turn, but the pheasant stayed low and ignored him. I'd waited long enough, buried the image of that man on top of me for too long, and the threads of planning and impulse wound together in an instant, pulling my gun up, swinging it across, and putting a deadly dose of lead shot right into his fat, leering face.

I left out the colorful descriptions when I told this story, but I don't think she bought the mock regret. She knew better.

In the days and weeks that followed Tristan's arrest, I gave several statements to the police and to my boss about what happened and couldn't foresee any problems upsetting Tristan's upcoming trial. Except one Monday afternoon, when I walked past Maureen's office and saw Detective Ledsome inside.

“Hi, Dominic.” She spoke quietly because Maureen was on the phone with someone else.

“Detective. I meant to call you.”

“I told you, I'm married.”

“Funny. It's about my gun. I was hoping to get it back.”

“It's evidence; you can have it after the trial.”

“Why can't you just use photos in the trial? I've done that a million times; you don't need the actual gun.”

“Not my call. Speak to the prosecutor.”

“I will. So, you ever find that money?”

“No. We did find a couple of bags that we think they used to transport the money, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the victim, Ambrosio Silva, used a couple of camouflage bags to carry it in. We found two just like them.”

“Where?”

“Did you know Tristan had a storage unit?”

I thought for a moment. “You know, maybe he mentioned it when I moved in. I'm not sure.”

“Well, he does. We found the bags in a filing cabinet, along with a laptop we're processing. And a little box of child porn, to match the sick stuff in his room.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep. Locked in a little gun safe, again inside the filing cabinets in his unit.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I'd planted the former, not the latter. Just for the record.

“You know,” she said, “one thing struck me. About the gun.” The
timber of her voice changed and set me on edge. “You said in your statement that Bell was trying to get past you, so he could get the gun and shoot you. That's why you were fighting.”

“Right. He threatened to shoot me, yeah.”

“Thing is, when we found it, the gun was unloaded. He put it in your dresser, so he would have known it was empty.”

“I guess.”

“Yeah. Just weird.”

“Maybe he was going to grab it, load it, and shoot me.”

“Seems a slightly drawn out process given the circumstances, plus we didn't find ammo for it in the apartment. None at all.”

“Maybe you didn't look hard enough.” I shrugged and started back to my office. “Or maybe he used it all up on that guy he shot.”

“That's cold, Dominic,” she called after me. “Just plain cold.”