At the police station, Jason was moved from holding cell to interview room, then back and forth again. It lasted all day, and most of the questions were about Tyra. He knew better than to talk about that, so he didn’t. Besides, the cops were assholes.
Smith.
Martinez.
Late in the day, they left him alone, so he stared at the mirrored glass, thinking of Tyra. She was dead, he felt certain, though the cops had been careful to share nothing but their questions. How did you meet? When did you see her last? Why the fight? What happened to Tyra’s gun? They had other questions, too, but Jason learned early how to tune them out.
Eventually, a man entered that Jason didn’t know. He wore a suit and a wedding ring. “My name is David Martin. I’m captain of the homicide division.” He sat, lacing his fingers on the table. “The recording devices are off. It’s just us.”
Jason gave the man a dead-eyed stare.
“You’ve not asked for a lawyer. As a gesture of respect to your father, I’m here to suggest, most strongly, that you do.” The captain leaned forward, his features plain but intent. “Silence is not a valid defense. You should have an attorney.”
“I hate attorneys.”
“Everyone does until they need one.”
Jason shifted in the seat, chains rattling where his hands were secured to an eyebolt in the table. “The last lawyer I had talked me into a plea I should have never taken.”
“Twenty-seven months for felony heroin, a good deal by any standard.”
“Only if I was distributing. I wasn’t.”
“Still…”
“Have you ever been to Lanesworth?” Jason asked. “You would not be so glib if you had.”
“Very well.” The captain rapped on the mirrored glass. “We’re recording now.”
“I have nothing to say about Tyra Norris.”
“So let’s talk about this.” The captain withdrew photographs of the van and its contents. “Ninety thousand in cash, and enough weapons to fight a small war.”
“I’ve had enough of war.”
“So has the city.”
Jason studied the cop’s face. He seemed decent enough, smart enough. “Is my father behind the glass?”
“He can’t help you, son.”
“What happened to Tyra?”
The captain leaned back, considering. “What would you like to know?”
“How she died and why you think I’m the one who killed her.”
The captain drummed his fingers, then shrugged. “Some days ago, you rented a room from Charles Spellman.”
“Yeah, 1019 Water Street. It’s no secret.”
“Your room is on the second floor on the northwest side.”
“It is.”
“And you’re still the registered tenant.”
“What’s your point?”
Captain Martin didn’t respond. Instead, he placed three evidence bags on the table, each holding a Polaroid photograph. He fanned them out, and Jason paled. He’d known more blood and death than most, but that was another life in a different world. “That’s Tyra?”
“It is.”
Jason struggled to imagine it, but the shape of her was right. The hair. The cloudy eye. “I would never hurt Tyra. Not like that.”
“And yet…” The captain laced his fingers on the table, leaning close. “When we searched the Water Street house this morning, we found those photographs in your room, beneath your pillow, in fact.”
“I did not kill Tyra Norris.”
“We found this as well.” The captain produced a fourth evidence bag. In it was a scalpel, mirror-sharp and stained blackish red. “That’s Tyra’s blood on the blade. So you see … Murder weapon. Photographs.” The cop leaned back this time, sad but certain. “If there are mitigating circumstances, something from the war, something you think I should know about…”
Jason reached for the photos, but the chain was too short.
“Nothing?” the cop asked.
“No.” Jason could barely speak. “Nothing.”
“I’m sorry, son.” The cop gathered up the evidence, and stood. “I’m sorry for Tyra Norris, for her family, and for yours. It’s a bad case, truly horrible. That being said, you’re still your father’s son. If you think of something you’d like to say, either to him or in mitigation, I will always be willing to listen.”
Saying goodbye to Becky was not an easy thing to do. We were at the cars. She was standing close. “Why sophomore year?” I asked. “Why then? Why me?”
“You really don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Math class, first day.” Her eyes twinkled as she spoke. “Mrs. Ziegler called me to the board to work a problem. You remember?”
“What I remember is how much you’d changed over the summer.”
“Yeah, you and every boy in school. The legs. The boobs. But that first day in math class, you were the only one who looked at my face. You watched my face and you nodded and you smiled.”
“I promise, I was no saint.” Becky blushed, and dug a toe into the grass. “You seemed confident, though. Very self-assured.”
“But I wasn’t at all. No boy had ever looked at me the way those other boys did. Standing at the board, I could barely think straight. I still don’t know how I finished the problem. I kept asking myself, Why did I wear a skirt this short, a shirt this tight?”
“And that’s the reason you wanted to kiss me?”
“Not the only reason. Your life seemed so tragic from the outside: your brothers and the war, what people said about your mother. I liked the way you carried that weight.” She lifted narrow shoulders, smiling. “Plus the way you look in those jeans.”
“These?” I asked.
“Those jeans.” She pressed into me. “Any jeans.”
On the drive home, I thought of the things Becky had said, of her toes in the grass, and the small, possessive smiles. I’d have to break it off, with Sara, no question. It would be hard, I knew. She’d just lost Tyra. I didn’t want to pile on the hurt.
But maybe she wouldn’t care.
Maybe I was the smallest of distractions.
At home, I found the kitchen cold and empty, my mother on the sofa, drinking vodka. I’d not seen that in a while. “Hey, Mom. I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
“This time it’s okay.”
“Did you eat something?”
She held up the glass, then put it down. “Come sit.” She patted the cushion beside her. “How was your day?”
“It was fine. You know. Considering. Where’s Dad?”
“In his office, looking for lawyers, though what luck he expects on a Sunday night is for him alone to know.”
I studied my mother’s eyes. They were glazed. The vodka bottle was four inches down.
“How was your day?” she asked again.
“Mom, look at me.” She did it, but slowly. I thought, Pills, maybe, or maybe an earlier bottle. “What are you doing?” I asked.
She shook her head, but I knew the answer.
Hiding, I thought.
Like me.
At my father’s study, the door was closed, but I could hear him on the phone. “I don’t care what the fee is. His first appearance is tomorrow morning. I need you there.”
I felt guilty, but eavesdropping seemed a small sin, considering. When the call was over, I knocked on the door.
“Come.”
My father was unshaven and exhausted, with enough color in his face to hint at the frustration I’d heard in his voice. “Lawyers,” he said.
“Did you find one?”
“I believe so.”
“A good one?”
“An expensive one. Where have you been?”
“With a girl, actually.” I sat across the desk, which I’d only done once before in my life. Too much murder, he’d told me once, meaning files and photos and autopsy reports. “Will the lawyer help?”
“Who knows with lawyers?”
“He didn’t do it,” I said.
Across the desk, my father slumped more deeply into his chair. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“Sure enough to promise me? To bet your life on it? To bet your mother’s life?”
“Why would you phrase the question like that?”
“Because it looks bad, son. It looks really, truly bad.”
I went to my bedroom, but that image of my father stayed with me.
The helplessness.
The heartbreak in his eyes.
I needed to know what he knew, and could think of only one way to get the information. It was late, but that didn’t stop me. Dad was in his office, Mom in the bottle.
I walked through the front door, keys in hand.
No one noticed or cared.
It took time to reach Ken Burklow’s house. He lived across the city line in a small house on a neat street.
“Gibby. What are you doing here?”
He filled the door, surprised to see me.
“May I come in?”
He stepped aside to let me pass, then studied the street with cop eyes like my father’s. “It’s late. Are you okay?”
I’d thought I was. Now I wasn’t sure.
“Sit down, son. Before you fall down.” He put me on the sofa, and came back with a glass. “Drink that.”
“What is it?”
“Very expensive whiskey.” He sat across from me, a big man in jeans and loafers. “So…”
He let the word hang, and I found myself strangely uncertain. I’d come for answers about my brother, to guilt Ken if I had to. Instead, I was swept up in visions of my family as it had once been. Against the backdrop of now, it was too much, so I went elsewhere. “I think I have a girlfriend.”
“Is that really what you came to talk about?”
I shook my head, staring into the whiskey. “Dad thinks he did it.”
“Maybe he did.”
I looked up. He was serious. “What is it with you cops?”
“What is with you kids? Your brother put two bullets in a biker’s leg. You saw him do it. He’s trafficking illegal weapons. Is murder such a stretch?”
“The murder of an innocent woman.”
“This is a discussion for your father.”
“He won’t talk about it.”
“Then be patient.”
“How, exactly? Jason’s my brother.”
Ken frowned more deeply, then stood and crossed to a collection of framed photographs. I was in some of them. So was my father. He stood for a long, reflective moment, and then lifted a frame from the shelf. “Did you know that I fought in Korea?”
“I did. I do.” So had my father.
“Eighth Army, Second Infantry Division, Ninth Infantry Regiment. That’s me on the end.” He handed me the frame. In the picture, a double row of young men faced the camera. Ken was grinning. They all were. “That was taken the day before we deployed. I was twenty-four years old, a newlywed, a recon sergeant. Most of the others were about your age.”
In the photo, Ken was wide and rawboned and lean, his face clean-shaven, the grin brash and self-assured.
He spoke as if reading my mind. “I wasn’t afraid of much.”
He took the picture back, and studied it with a distant expression. “By July of that year, we were on the Naktong River, not far from the city of Pusan. Ever heard of it?” I shook my head, and he shrugged. “Different war, different time. For us, though, it was about as real as real gets. North Koreans had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and pushed us into a defensive line along the river. Fighting was constant, weeks of it, day and night, as bad as you can imagine. By August, we’d taken heavy casualties, and were short on everything: troops, supplies, even ammunition. I was a forward observer, tasked to monitor NKA movements. That put me way out front, usually on a hilltop, usually exposed. The terrain was rough on our side of the river, our lines too thin to deal with the incursions, the coordinated attacks. Some days, every foxhole had someone in it that was dead or dying. Rifle fire. Mortar rounds. Even hand to hand, at times. I got cut off more times than I can remember, me and my crew alone on one hilltop or another. Sometimes I’d see North Koreans coming over the river, thousands of them, this wave of humanity determined to kill every last one of us.
“You wonder if there’s a point. Here it is. Our battalion had nine forward observers, people like me. By the time October rolled around, I was the only one left alive. We learned later that those were the bloodiest weeks of the entire war, that nothing else even came close. Five thousand Americans killed, twelve thousand wounded, another thousand MIA. Hell, the South Koreans lost forty thousand.
“I saw more heroism in those days than most men see in a lifetime, and I saw the bad stuff, too, the way men turned coward or turned cruel. Of the thirty-six in that initial platoon, only four of us came back alive. One killed himself a year later, Charlie Green, a corporal, a Kentucky boy. James Rapp robbed a bank, pulled eight years of hard time, then got out, stole a car the same day, and drove into a phone pole. Some said it was intentional, another suicide. No one really knows. The third survivor was from California, Alex Chopin, a good kid, a little flaky but solid in a fight. After the war, he lived rough for a while in LA, then disappeared into some kind of commune up the ass end of Humboldt County. As for me, number four…” Ken sat, his eyes dark and distant. “I lost my wife. I struggled.”
“You said there was a point.”
“People change. That’s the point. They change in wartime most of all.”
“Do you really think he killed her?”
“I think it’s possible.”
I put down the glass, and rose to my feet, dry-mouthed.
“Sit down, Gibby.”
“I think you’ve said enough.”
“You don’t have the facts, son, not about this case or your brother or what war can do to a man.”
“So give them to me.”
“I told you, kid. It’s not my place.”
“He couldn’t have changed that much.”
“War and prison and drugs.” Ken reached for my untouched glass, poured the whiskey into his, and leaned back. “You do the math.”
At home much later, I stayed awake for hours, afraid that if I slept, I would dream of a river and mud, and small men come for killing. I pictured Ken on a windswept hill—this friend of my father who’d fought young, and lost some piece of himself. He’d known war, as had my brothers; and without meaning to, he’d put some of that war inside me.
The Jason I’d known.
Jason as he might now be.
I didn’t know what to believe, so I twisted and turned, and each time I drifted, I started awake. Eventually, though, I slept, and the dreams that came were not of war or pain or prison but of Becky Collins, who smiled in the sun, her eyes like blue flowers.
Have faith, she said. Life is beautiful.
I woke in a sweat, hoping she was right.