Detective Freddy Sims was fat and bald. With his round belly and round head, he looked kind of like a snowman, only with big, bushy gray eyebrows. Also, he had these big unsnowman-like saggy bags under his eyes and thin lips that curled at one corner into a sort of permanent smile, as if he found the whole world kind of stupid and annoying but kind of funny at the same time.
He came into the room where I was sitting. It was a small room in the police station. It was white with soundproofing tiles on the walls and ceiling. There was nothing in it but a long table and chairs and a video camera hanging up high in one corner. I had seen a lot of rooms like this on television police shows. In the shows, police detectives interrogated people in rooms like this until the people burst into tears and confessed to murder. As you might guess, I was not happy to be there.
At least I wasn’t alone. After they arrested me at the barn, the police called my dad. He came straight from the Bolings’ house, still wearing jeans and a checkered flannel shirt. His eyes looked damp and bright as if he were in pain. I guessed he was. First his best friend dies, then his son gets mixed up in a murder? Not a good day for my dad.
Dad and I sat next to each other at the table. I tried not to pick at the bandage that was taped to my head behind my right ear. It covered the place where I’d been slugged, which was still throbbing and aching despite a lot of extra-strength aspirin.
The snowman-shaped Detective Sims sat across from us. There was a black folder on the table in front of him. Along the side of the folder, there was a label that read “Macintyre, H.” Macintyre was Harry Mac’s full last name.
Sims pressed the tips of his pudgy fingers together and looked down at them with that permanent little smile of his—as if he found his hands kind of silly somehow. Then he looked up at me. He went on smiling.
“You’re Sam Hopkins?” he asked—as if that was kind of amusing too.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice shook a little. Even though I hadn’t broken any laws, I was nervous to be talking to the police.
“As I understand it, our officers found you alone in an abandoned barn with the dead body of Harry Macintyre. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Detective Sims held up a fat finger, telling me to be quiet. I was quiet. “They tell me Mr. Macintyre had been shot with a 9mm automatic pistol.”
“I know, but . . .”
“The pistol in question was also in the barn.”
“Yeah, but I never . . .”
“And it had your fingerprints on it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know . . .”
“Now you and this Mr. Macintyre—they tell me the two of you are known to have had a fight recently, yes?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Detective Sims held up the finger again. “And as I understand it, Mr. Macintyre and his friends beat you up pretty severely.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing . . .”
“You know what the word motive means, don’t you, Sam?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Let me use it in a sentence for you so I’m sure you understand,” said the snowman detective, still smiling away. “Sam Hopkins got beaten up by Harry Macintyre, so Sam’s motive for murdering Harry was revenge.”
There was an explosion of horror inside me. “I didn’t murder Harry Mac!” I nearly shouted the words, the idea was so scary. “I wouldn’t murder anybody.”
“So what exactly were you doing at the barn with a dead body and a gun?” asked the detective.
“I already explained that to the officers who brought me here.”
“Well—now explain it to me.”
So I did. I told him how Jennifer had had a hallucination about demons and then I had had a dream and then the Bible had mentioned dreams and I’d remembered how I’d seen the tree and the lake and I went there because Jennifer said something terrible was going to happen and Harry Mac was in a box there and got killed.
When I finished talking, there was a long, long silence. Detective Sims tapped his fingertips together. He went on smiling. His bushy eyebrows bounced up and down on his round, bald snowman head.
“That’s your story?” he asked me finally.
“That’s what happened!” I insisted.
“A crazy girl had a hallucination about demons and whatnot. Then you had a dream. And it all came true.”
“Well . . . Yeah! Basically. Yeah,” I said. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. Was it really possible the police could think I’d killed Harry Mac?
Detective Sims nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s your story then.” He reached for the black folder and drew it closer to him. He opened it and scanned the top page inside. “Now let me tell you another story,” he went on. “We’ll see which one sounds more plausible. In my story, Jeff Winger and Harry Macintyre and Ed Polanski are a gang of thieves. They steal cars and burgle houses, then deliver the swag to a crew in Albany, who sell it off and give them a piece of the profits. Jeff brings you in and starts giving you lessons on how to be a thief too. But somehow you and Harry Mac have a falling-out, and Harry convinces the others to cut you out of the action. They give you a beating and send you on your way. So you decide to get your revenge on Harry, hoping the others will let you come back into the crew. So this morning at approximately eleven o’clock, you abducted Harry Mac. You took him to the barn. And you shot him dead.”
I opened my mouth to try to answer him, but I couldn’t. It felt like there was something blocking my throat. All I could think about was getting taken off to jail. Charged with murder! Locked up for life! I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.
Finally, my dad spoke for me in his usual quiet, serious, and thoughtful way.
“Detective Sims,” he said, “you can see my son was struck very hard on the back of his head, can’t you?”
“Yes, of course I can, but . . .”
My father did to the detective what the detective had done to me: he held up a silencing finger. “You must know he couldn’t possibly have done that to himself.”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“So that means you know someone else was in the barn with him.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Someone who must’ve abducted Harry Mac because at the time he was abducted, my son was in church, reading in front of the entire congregation.”
Detective Sims shrugged. “Okay. So maybe he had an accomplice who did the actual kidnapping, but . . .”
My father’s serious face creased with a small, quiet smile of his own. “Only you know that’s not true, don’t you, Detective?”
This time the detective didn’t answer at all. He went on smiling as before, but I could tell that, behind his smile, he was annoyed.
I watched almost without breathing. What was Dad talking about? Why was he making the detective mad?
“You knew my son was hanging out with Jeff Winger,” my father went on in the same quiet tone. “You knew Winger and his thugs beat my son up. That’s the sort of thing you might have heard around town. But you also knew Winger gave my son lessons in breaking locks and stealing cars. That’s inside information. I’m guessing you had an informant in Winger’s gang, someone who was talking to you about the whole thieving operation.”
“Reverend Hopkins . . .,” Detective Sims began.
“I’m guessing that informant was Harry Mac,” my father said.
For the first time, Detective Sims stopped smiling. His cheeks turned red—just slightly, but I could see it. And his eyes got dark too. He still looked like a snowman, but now he looked like a really, really angry snowman.
And I was thinking: What? Harry Mac? An informant? How did my dad figure that out?
“You know what the word motive means, don’t you, Detective?” my dad said then. “Let me use it in a sentence so I’m sure you understand: Harry Mac was informing on Jeff Winger and Ed Polanski, so Winger wanted to shut him up and that was his motive for killing him.”
My dad and Detective Sims sat looking at each other through another long silence.
And now the horror inside me was almost instantly transformed into hope. I realized what had happened, what my dad had done. And I thought, Whoa! Dad! Bring it on! My dad was a better detective than the detective.
Finally, Detective Sims cleared his throat. “I’m not saying your son acted alone. But his fingerprints were on the gun and . . .”
“My son was knocked unconscious, Detective,” my father said. “Anyone could have wrapped his hand around that pistol. In fact, why knock him out in the first place unless you wanted to do exactly that?”
“Wanted to do exactly what?” said Detective Sims.
“Frame my son for murder,” said Dad. “I mean, if my son had fired that gun, wouldn’t there be powder residue on his hands? Blood-spatter stains on his shirt? Did you find anything like that?”
Again, Detective Sims didn’t answer. And again, I thought: Whoa, Dad! Powder residue? Blood-spatter stains? Where’d he learn about that stuff? My dad never even watched cop shows on TV.
And Dad said, “My son couldn’t have been there to abduct Harry Mac—he was in church at the time. And he obviously didn’t fire the gun that killed him. That pretty much leaves my son’s version of events as the only plausible version there is.”
Detective Sims looked at my father across the table and said nothing. There was nothing he could say.
Now my dad turned to me. “Sam, do you have anything else you want to tell the detective?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I told him everything I can think of.”
My father’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed back from the table and stood up. He was so tall, he looked to me like his head was going to brush the ceiling. He looked down—way down—at Detective Sims.
“Are you going to arrest my son?” he asked.
I held my breath as I waited for Detective Sims to answer. After what seemed to me the longest silence of all, the detective finally said, “No. No, not today. But if he gets in any more trouble—if he even gets in my way—we’re going to take up this issue again. I may not have him on murder—not yet. But I’ve got enough to charge him with being part of Winger’s gang.”
“Except you know he wasn’t,” my father said. “Because Harry Mac was your informant, and he told you what happened.”
Detective Sims didn’t answer.
“Well, in that case, I’m taking him home,” said my father. Then to me he said, “Let’s go, Sam.”
Believe me, he didn’t have to tell me twice.