I didn’t stew long; sunshine and blue sky wouldn’t allow it. I got over to the house of correction, and after a short wait Troy Pepper was led into the interview area in his orange jumpsuit. He sat across the screen from me and pushed something under it. My notebook. I fanned the virgin pages. I put it in my pocket and looked at him questioningly. I drew a breath. “You don’t have to convince Fred Meecham. He’s working for you regardless. Hell, you don’t even need to convince me. I get paid one way or the other. But everyone else—cops, the judge, jurors—you need to sell them, and sell them good, because the way things are stacked up, you’re going down for murder.”
“They can’t do that.”
“Who’s ‘they’? I believe ‘they’ can and will. And you won’t end up back at this place. It’ll be Walpole, which makes life here seem like day camp.”
His face tightened, but he said nothing.
“I spoke with Lucy Colón,” I said. “Do you know her?”
He shook his head.
“She told me that Flora had been planning to tell you something. What was it?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did Flora tell you something when you saw her?”
He went on not answering. When he spoke at all he bit off his words, not letting anything like emotion creep into them. It was the way that prisoners talked; even their language was in jail. I had to find a way to bust it out, just to feel I was earning what I was being paid. If the man was guilty—or a fool—I still owed him my best shot.
“Well,” I answered myself, “I’m sorry you asked that, Mr. Rasmussen. Because it stirs up a painful reminder. Flora told me that she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. Didn’t say why but I think she found someone else. But you see, my sense of manhood couldn’t take that.” His eyes were on me, narrowed and dark. “A tiny little woman like that telling me she didn’t want me?” I went on. “Well, the hell with that. Be told off by some chippie? Me? I showed her. I made her love me. And afterward, I put a scarf around—”
Pepper got to the wire fast, grabbing at it the way I imagined he’d like to grab my throat, his fingers hooked through the mesh. I was glad for the barrier. I sat back down, letting my heart slow. He backed off, too, his face losing its tension again. We shared a new knowledge now, one that we probably each would rather have done without, but there it was. The man had the potential for sudden violent action. He let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Look,” I said, “I was pushing you, but I’m done listening to myself talk. If you want help on this, you’ve got to speak up, because we’re running out of time. The clock is ticking:” I hesitated, then said,”If Sonders can’t make a loan payment in a few days, he stands to lose the show.”
Some of the resistance left his face. I saw uncertainty in it now “Lose it?”
“To a couple of sharpies who think they’re the General Motors of carnivals. They hold a loan on the show, and if he can’t make the nut, it’s all going to come due at once. It’ll break him. His problem is the show’s shut down, and he can’t—excuse me, won’t take it on the road. He’s got some crazy notion he has to stay here to show solidarity with you.”
His brows drew together. “That’s dumb,” he murmured.
“You’re telling me? If I were Pop, I’d toss you over just on general principles.”
“Hey—”
“You ‘hey.’ What the hell have you done to earn anyone’s loyalty? Why should anybody give a rip about what happens to you, when you obviously don’t care enough about it to make a case for yourself?” I drilled him with a stare. “Or to confess?”
He put his good hand across his mouth and blew a breath against it, making a sound like steam escaping from a pressure cylinder. He lowered his hand and sat still.
“You should be singing like a bird, filling me up with more details than I can ever use, instead of me having to pull them out of you one by one. Fred Meecham has got to build a case, and from what I’m seeing, he doesn’t have anything to go on.”
He scowled at the floor, a restless man in a situation that gave no room to move. His eyes flicked up and met mine. “Flora and me were going to get together. Permanent. We talked about it. The show had a layover in Hartford. I took a bus up, and she met me. We walked along the river.”
“Wait.” I had the notebook out again. “When was that?”
“May, it must’ve been. All the trees were blooming, and there were birds. We walked and we talked and we set all the old stuff between us to rest.” With the telling, his voice had softened a little, and his body lost some of its tension. He looked at me only once in a while, and briefly, but he talked as though the events he was describing were happening right now. “We knew we wanted to be together. The idea was, when I came up this time, we’d do it and then she’d come on the road with me. She was going to ask this priest she knew. We’d get married and maybe travel with the show. Or that was the idea anyways.”
“She was willing to do that?”
“She wanted to try it. I said I could give Mr. Sonders notice and quit the show, get other work. She didn’t want that.”
“Did you tell anyone else about your plans?”
“You mean like Pop, or people in the show?”
“Anyone.” I almost said “relatives” but I remembered he didn’t have any “Or did Flora?”
“I don’t know that. I would’ve, when the time came. I didn’t want to jinx it.”
“It’d be helpful if there were someone else who knows about this.”
“Maybe … maybe she told the priest.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
“What about the restraining order?” I dropped it on him. His expression grew dark. “You had to figure I’d find out. It’d have been better if you’d told me about it.”
He furrowed his brow and looked away. “It was a mistake,” he said softly
“The court system didn’t think so.”
“My mistake, I mean. I shouldn’t have got so mad. When she told me about the baby, and … I didn’t even know. And anyways, it was too late, she’d already taken care of it. I didn’t know she didn’t want a baby. I gave her some money, said it was okay, we could talk when she was ready. She threw the money at me. I guess I got mad—but it was like I was mad at everything, you know? Not her. But … things.” His shoulders drooped. “She left. Didn’t tell nobody where. I didn’t even know she was up here till a month after. She got a court order for me to stay away, probably ’cause someone down there told her I was asking. But I wouldn’t have hurt her, not ever. I loved her.”
I wondered how many maggots doing life terms had fed themselves that line. I wanted to think he was telling the truth, but wanting isn’t the same as believing, and I wasn’t able to decipher any subtextual meanings in his silences and body language. I still had plenty of questions and blank pages in my notebooks when the guard came in and said our time was up.