Simple (9 page)

“Oh, you are in a needy state.”

“Freddie, don't torture me.”

She let a very long pause go by.

“I'll bring you takeout from somewhere,” he said.

“I'd rather go out. I need to see some life.”

He thought hard. “I've been on the road all day, and you know what would be a big treat … Would you be willing to drive?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, deal. Where do you want to go?”

“Well, here's the thing. I really want a big, sloppy pasta of some sort, but I also wish you would take me someplace nice, like Soba, even though what I really want tonight is old-fashioned spaghetti. Like Big Jim's.”

“Big Jim's tonight, Soba tomorrow, how's that? Okay?”

“That sounds really good.”

He plied her with liquor, made sure she was good and full, though he didn't have to push her to eat. The restaurant had two TVs going, and the Steelers preseason game was on, which they watched. Between plays, Freddie talked about five stained glass windows she'd unearthed in a house in Highland Park. She explained how she'd been tapping on walls and
knew
there was space behind the walls. She went outside and studied the brickwork, noting where the quality of the bricks changed slightly. She came back into the house to tap some more. Then very slowly she began ripping walls down. Encased, preserved, with brick on the outside and plaster on the inside, she said, were perfect, glorious stained glass windows that would rival those in a fancy church for detail. These, she explained, were not human figures but scenes—mountains and streams, deer, flowers.

She was comfortable with her body—statuesque, solid, and physically strong. All that goodness showed in the cropped pants and low-cut top—maroon or dark red, he wasn't sure what he would call it. He'd never bought her anything. He wondered if he tried to buy her a top, how to choose, what size to order. Her hair was light brown, tossed back, not so much styled as combed out of her face, and a good idea since she had a pretty face, very regular features and skin with a lot of color. She blushed a lot, which didn't go with the personality she was putting on. He let her talk. He pretended to watch the game from time to time. All the while he planned and planned in his head, thinking of what he would do, of all the things that might go wrong.

Now he was sitting in Freddie's kitchen and smoking. She liked him a lot. Women did. He made them laugh a lot, he opened them up sexually, he played a who's-chasing-whom game for a few months, then he was done with them and he went away and they never minded much—they still liked him. The lasagna woman, Carola, was a bit of an exception.

In high school, college, after—same thing. He lighted down for a night, flew away. And they let him. Most men don't know the truth—women might want to be tied down, but they also equally wanted this other thing: teasing, joking, laughing, sexiness that isn't going to last or cost them anything.

He's slept in Freddie's bed for two nights in a row—a break in his pattern. It feels practically like … marriage.

Last night, after Soba, she watched the news with him. She was trying to talk about ice cream, windows, old wallpaper. He shushed her, riveted by what he was seeing. He thought, as he watched, Look at the handyman, let it be the handyman. The thought ran repeatedly under all other thoughts, like a prayer. Now this morning, he's seen the early news and seen his prayers answered beyond his hopes.

Then a few minutes ago there was damned Mick on the phone, all worried that the boy was being mishandled by the police. Mick gave a long-winded explanation about how he knew the guy slightly and the guy was not well. So Todd kept thinking the phrase
damage control;
it was his prayer for the day. That and telling himself
stay easy
—which was more a matter of making others believe it was so.

Pacing in Freddie's kitchen, he thought for a moment he might just get into his car to keep watch over Mick. He could telephone Freddie later when she was awake. Or leave a note.

But then he heard a noise. She was up. Moments later, she was kissing him in the kitchen. And he thought, This is damage control, too.

*   *   *

IT WAS ELEVEN IN THE
morning when Colleen Greer, John Potocki, and Artie Dolan dragged into the office. “I want you to watch something,” he said. “This way.”

He took them to the dark small room that held a DVD player and put in the interview disk. “Just watch. Tell me what you think.”

“Where are Coleson and McGranahan?” Dolan asked, but with a tone that suggested he knew.

“They have the day off. They closed this.”

“Uh-huh,” Dolan said.

Then they watched the DVD. They didn't discuss what they saw in between sections of it, but waited until they'd seen the whole of it.

“All right, now, talk to me,” Christie said.

“He did say yes, that he did it,” Colleen ventured.

“Did you believe it?”

“I don't know. I wanted to.”

“Because?”

“The tension. I wanted him to be able to breathe.”

“Hmm. Artie?”

“They must have had something, Coleson and McGranahan. They're okay, usually.”

Christie nodded.

Potocki said, “No detail. They were tired, I know, but they didn't get the detail—how he did it, what he saw. They didn't do the quiz.”

“You get the A-plus,” Christie said.

Colleen and Dolan grumbled at the same time that
of course
there was no detail, that that's
why
they had pointed to the tension of the confession and the fact that the detectives must have had physical evidence.

“They were tired,” Christie said. He didn't say that they wanted to hurry it up before he got back to work and rained on their parade. The idea that his men were trying to escape him made him feel awkward and ogre-ish. “Well, then, let's get the detail. Let's be sure. Artie and I will go to the jail and talk to the kid—why I say kid, I don't know. He's grown, twenty-nine.” He shook his head to clear it.

“You were bored on vacation,” Colleen teased.

He gave her a sharp look. She clamped her lips. “You and Potocki go back to the neighbors. Meet back here late afternoon, see what we have.”

“Autopsy?” Dolan asked.

“Detailed results tomorrow.”

“Forensics?”

“Monday, Tuesday.”

“How … how do you want us to talk to Coleson and McGranahan when they come in Monday—Monday, right? They'll see we've added to their reports.”

“I'll talk to them. I'll tell them I insisted on more detail for the hearing. It's on me.”

“What do you think of the kid—the suspect?” Potocki asked. “He's supposed to be a bit slow. Sometimes he seems it, sometimes not.”

“I agree. I want to meet him, see for myself.”

“Surprised you didn't go into the interview last night,” Dolan said slyly.

Christie just raised his eyebrows.

“What do you want from the neighbors?” Potocki asked.

“Anything that might reasonably explain this guy's confession. That's A. Then anything that might point a finger to an alternate suspect. That's B. If you come up with a C, that's okay, too. I don't want this going to court with this many holes in it.”

*   *   *

WHEN CAL AWOKE,
IT
was to a voice yelling, “Trays up!” and then a bang and a series of clangs he soon understood as the doors to the cells opening. He sat up in bed. Two men stopped in front of his cell. “You coming?”

“I don't know.”

“Got his beauty sleep.”

A voice came over the speaker, saying, “You two in front of 205, get out of there. Get moving.”

But one of them, a guy with long dreads, didn't hustle off. Instead he spoke toward the ceiling where speakers presumably could pick up his voice: “How's he going to know the drill if we don't tell him? He missed breakfast.”

“That's his business. Get going.”

The guy with the dreads moved finally, but he called back toward Cal, “A prisoner could starve himself in this place as a protest and nobody would know to save his life.”

Suddenly a man who seemed to be a guard stood in front of Cal's cell. “You want to eat, the mess is downstairs, see.”

Cal was hungry, but he didn't want to be around so many people. He peered out at the hallway and the stairs to the bottom floor of the pod. The process last night took hours, and by the time he had got here, he hardly looked at it.

“Come on,” the guard said.

Cal tripped out to the corridor. The guard stepped aside, then moved to behind him. He went down a set of stairs made of netted steel. The sounds—the harsh metal sounds of everything—bothered him, especially in his bad ear, which hummed.

“See that there line. You get in line. How come you have your watch?”

“They said I could.”

“I wouldn't leave it out of my sight if I was you.”

“Oh. Keep it on me?”

“If I was you. Your girl give it to you?”

He shook his head. His mother had actually given it to him for Christmas a year and a half ago. The sentiment he felt about it came from imagining her choosing it, wanting something of quality for him. It was the year he was striking out on his own, buying his place.

Cal took his place in line, third from the last. He picked up his tray.

The guy behind him said, “What did you did?”

He turned slightly to take in the long braids and the wily smile of the same young man who had urged him to eat. He didn't say anything.

“You ain't going to answer. That's bad manners. Bad manners get you trouble.”

“Nothing.”

“Right,” the guy laughed. “Least you know what you supposed to say. Some people already saying you totally green.”

Last night is a blur. He remembers coming in through a garage and having to sit in the boxy chair he thought would electrocute him just like that. Right. Yes. The man who worked it just kept telling him to sit tight, but some woman told him, “Think of it like an X-ray. We're checking out your insides.”

When the episode with the chair was over, he told her he still didn't understand.

She relented. “Guns, knives, razors, drugs. Hidden anything.”

He held out his hands.

“Right. Clean as the day you were born.”

Yes, he does remember. There were rooms with people peering out at every turn. Some were waiting to be arraigned, as he was; some were waiting to be released. Everybody was curious, looking at him. There was a big desk, like at a school or a … hospital with workers behind it. They took his photo. They took his fingerprints.

Yes. No blackouts. He can remember. They made him sit in one of those rooms with a bunch of other people. He tried to listen to everything to figure out what the officers were doing. Checking arrest history. Checking fingerprints. Checking his name. He was pretty sure they said to each other he wasn't in the system, some phrase like that.

Now he looks at the men in line ahead of him. What did they do to land in here? Not just drunkenness and fighting and drug possession. These guys up here on his pod looked rough.

They all wore red uniforms just as he did.

Right. Last night, before the harsh soap and delousing liquid, the man who issued uniforms tried to take his watch. He lied and said it was worth only thirty bucks, so they let him keep it. He remembers.

Now Cal got his tray and sat down at the only seat he could see at a quick glance. There were small white metal tables around the pod floor—each seated four men. The man sitting directly across from Cal was middle-aged, white, or looked white, and he was neat looking about his person, and alert, but at second glance that alertness was the nasty sort. His eyes glittered. His smile was mean. He said, “Nice watch.”

Cal didn't answer. Lunch was two hot dogs on a bun, a pile of greasy fries, and some kind of Jell-O thing that seemed to have fruits tumbled in it. Cal began on the meal, planning to eat it all because he wasn't at all sure he wanted to come out of his cell for dinner. For a long time now, he'd been a solo guy, doing everything on his own. All these people talking and looking at him made anxiety rise in him. It took the form of a ball of anger and nervousness making its way up his digestive tract, fighting the food that was on its way down.

“So this is the badass came in last night?” The question came from the man to his right. He was large, pale, and sloppy, with messy long hair.

The man who had commented on his watch said, “Can't you tell?” The two laughed.

“He doesn't want to talk,” said the guy with the dreads, passing. “I tried him.”

“That's Levon,” said the man across from him, pointing. Cal could see Levon went to sit with other African American men. There were significantly fewer white guys here, no surprise.

“I'm Sidney,” the man continued. “This here joker next to me is Boreski. Some guy named Shiron is going to come up to you sooner or later and ask what you need to buy. Whatever you buy, I get half or the whole. I watch out for you. That's all you need to know for today. Otherwise you'll be overwhelmed.”

The two men laughed.

There was a lot of noise, but Cal was pretty sure he heard Sidney ask, “You ever think you'd end up here?”

“No,” he said.

“And we know already: You didn't kill that chick.”

Cal shrugged his shoulders.

“You don't think you're better than anybody else, or do you?” Boreski asked. “'Cause that doesn't go down real good.”

Cal thought, I am in grade school all over again and I am going to be beaten.

“You can tell him your secrets,” Boreski said to Sidney. “This guy don't talk for anything.”

Cal liked hot dogs. These were not particularly good—he wasn't sure why, maybe something about the way they cooked them. In spite of the fact that they didn't taste particularly good, he kept eating. He looked forward to downing the Jell-O and getting back to his cell. The whole place reminded him of a gray playroom for oversized children with its two TVs mounted up high and the “easy” chairs made of blue plastic and the sets of white tables and metal chairs for everything else.