The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 35

AIMEE TOMS STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD- or I thought she did, but I couldn’t be sure with her eyes hidden behind her mirrored sunglasses. Even when she talked to me, she didn’t move her head. Sitting behind the passenger seat, I watched her firm lower jaw work its way over a piece of gum that I knew, without asking her or seeing it, would be sugarless.

“So, what’s your story, kid?” she asked after we’d pulled out of the motel.

I didn’t kill them. I was there, but I didn’t do it, and I couldn’t have stopped it. The words sat there, drew me in with their gravity well, tried to shape my answer the way tracks shape the path of a train. But I wasn’t going to give in. I was going to try to tough it out. And if things became too frightening, I could always break down later.

“I’m just trying to make some money to go to college,” I told her. “I got into Columbia, but I can’t afford it.”

“ South Carolina?”

“ New York.”

“Never heard of it. The school, not the city. You look kind of collegey,” she observed. “Which is why I don’t understand why you’re getting involved in all of this.”

“All of what?” My voice cracked like her gum.

“You tell me.”

“I’m really sorry I trespassed yesterday,” I said, “but you didn’t seem to think it was a big deal then. Why is it a big deal now?”

“Trespassing isn’t such a big deal,” Officer Toms agreed. “On the other hand, drugs and murder- now, that’s a big deal.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. It didn’t sound convincing because the fear wafted out of my mouth, the hot vapor of fear in the cold air-conditioning of the car.

“Listen, Lemuel. Lem?”

“Lem,” I confirmed.

“Listen, Lem. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I look at you, I talk to you, I see you’re not a bad guy. Believe me, I’ve been doing this long enough- and it doesn’t take that long, I’m sorry to say- to know that good people get mixed up in bad things. Sometimes they don’t understand what they’re doing. Sometimes they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But instead of coming forward, they hide and lie and break more laws to cover things up.”

All of this came uncomfortably close to the truth, and I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t reveal that closeness. I looked out the window instead.

“All I’m saying,” she continued, “is that if you tell me everything that’s going on, I’ll do all I can to help you out, to see that you’re not punished for being a victim of circumstance. Even if you think it’s too late to talk, it isn’t.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “All I did was wander a little too close to a farm. I don’t see why it’s a big deal.”

“We can do it that way if you want,” she told me. She didn’t say anything else until we arrived at the station.

It looked like an old office building, and except for their uniforms, the cops inside might have been just generic weary civic employees. The air conditioner gurgled mightily but produced little cold air, and overhead electric fans turned slowly enough that documents would not dislodge from desks.

Toms had a hand on my upper arm and squeezed with a kind of firm sympathy. My arms were behind my back. She hadn’t cuffed me, but it seemed like a good idea to keep them back there out of respect or to acknowledge that I knew she could cuff me so there was no point in flaunting my freedom. As we walked down a pale green cinder-block-lined hallway, which looked like a forgotten annex of my high school, we passed a uniformed officer walking a handcuffed black guy in the opposite direction. He was just a teenager, really, tall and lanky with a shaved head and the ghost of a mustache. He might have been my age, but he had the hard look of a criminal in his eyes, violent and seething and apathetic. I cast him a glance as we passed, as though to say that we were both victims of an oppressive system, but the kid looked back with rage, as if he would kill me if he ever had the chance.

Toms shook her head. “George Kingsley. You get a good look at him?”

“Enough to tell he’d slit my throat just for the fun of it.”

“Yeah, he’s like that. The thing is, Lem, I knew him when he was this smart little twelve-year-old. His father had all kinds of problems with the law, which was why I knew him, but his mother’s a good lady who saw he got to school and stayed out of trouble. But this kid did more than just follow the rules. He was always reading and talking about stuff. The ideas, the political ideas, you’d hear from him, a kid of twelve or thirteen. He was going to fix all the problems in the world. He was going to be a politician and help the black people. And he knew which laws he would repeal, which he would pass. It was incredible.”

“I guess it didn’t do him much good.”

“As near as I can figure it, he was hanging with some of the wrong kids one day when one of them decided it was time to stick up a convenience store. Kingsley thought they were there for candy. This other kid, he pulled out a gun. Stupidest thing. I don’t think the others knew he was planning anything, but they wouldn’t lay it all on their friend. So Kingsley goes to juvie for deciding to buy a Snickers with the wrong people. He was only in for eighteen months, but when he came out he was different. It was like they’d beaten all the heart out of him. He went in this lively, engaged little spitfire, someone on track to maybe really change the world for the better, and he came out just another thug from the thug machine.”

“That’s a real tragedy,” I said, doing my best to sound as though I meant it. I was having a hard time focusing on George Kingsley’s problems when I had some doozies of my own.

“Yeah, it is a real tragedy. You want that to happen to you? You plan to head off to Columbus University, don’t you? How about the university of getting raped every night?”

She was trying to unnerve me, but what was the point? I was already plenty unnerved. I wasn’t some tough kid who needed to be scared straight. But I was a bit of a smart-ass. “If everyone knows that weaker prisoners are getting raped by more vicious prisoners,” I said, “how come no one does anything about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you can raise that with the warden once you’re inside.”

I didn’t want to think about Melford’s prison riddle, but that was all I could think about, because I now knew the answer. I understood what Melford had been getting at. I understood why we had prisons if they didn’t work. I understood why we put lawbreakers in criminal academies to turn them into more dangerous, more bloodthirsty, more alienated criminals. I knew why Kingsley had gone in a victim and come out a victimizer. Prisons were set up that way because they did work, they just worked at something more sinister than I’d ever realized.

We sat in a small interrogation room around a flimsy metal table that had been bolted to the floor. I guess the cops thought some thief might try to make off with it if they weren’t careful. The surrounding walls were all the same pale green cinder block as the hallways- except for the billowy mirror facing me. I had no doubt that someone could be watching from the other side, though I thought it unlikely that anyone would be bothered.

Toms sat across from me and leaned forward on her elbows. “Okay,” she said. “You know why you’re here.”

“No, I don’t,” I told her. “I have no idea why I’m here.” Only partially true. I had no idea what they knew and what they didn’t know. What struck me, however, was how calm I felt. Maybe it was because I believed Aimee Toms to be basically friendly and maybe because I’d faced scarier moments than this- a whole bunch of them- in the past couple of days. I felt okay. I felt like if I played it cool, the way Melford did, I’d be all right.

“Let’s talk about Lionel Semmes,” she said.

I felt myself suck in a breath. Not out of recognition, but out of exasperation. Lionel Semmes? There was yet another player in all this? How deep did all this go? “Who is that?”

Toms sighed. “You might know him as Bastard.”

“Oh, Bastard. Right. What about him?”

“Tell me about him.”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “I tried to sell him some encyclopedias, but he and his wife didn’t want to buy. I remember him because I don’t usually spend so much time with a family without making a sale. Plus he was kind of intense and creepy.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “That’s all. I don’t know anything else. Why?”

“Bastard wasn’t married, but he and his girlfriend are missing. No one has seen them since Friday night. As best we can tell, you are the last person to see them alive. That might or might not on its own make you a suspect. But then I find you at Bastard’s place of work being hassled by Jim Doe, Bastard’s employer. And then you were going around to Bastard’s neighbors asking questions about him. You can see how my mind is working here, can’t you?”

I suddenly felt dizzy. At the time, I had suspected the canvass of the neighbors to be a colossal mistake. Now I knew it. Why had Melford insisted I do it? I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of Chitra’s doubt in my head. Had he wanted me to be seen?

“I never did that,” I lied.

“We have neighbors who say they saw you yesterday, asking questions about Bastard and Karen. At least they say they saw someone who fits your description. We can do a lineup if that’s what you want, but I think we both know what the lineup will show.”

“Do a lineup,” I said with a shrug. I could think of nothing to do but bear down, act tough. I had to choke back a little smile because I could feel it happening to me the way it happened to the others. Here I was, nothing more than a suspect, but the system was already turning me into something else, something more badly socialized. If I stayed in prison long enough, I might even turn into something dangerous.

“We searched his trailer,” Aimee said. “We found blood samples.”

I studied her. She did not mention having found a dead guy with a comb-over, so I could only assume that Doe had removed him.

“We found lots of fingerprints, too. I suspect that some will be yours.”

“I already told you that I tried to sell them books. Of course some will be mine.”

She shrugged. “And what about the blood? Any thoughts?”

“Not really. No one was bleeding while I was there.”

“It could be theirs. Could be you killed them and cleaned up, but made mistakes.”

“That’s crazy. Why would I kill them? I don’t know them. How would I have gotten rid of the bodies? I don’t even have a car.”

“My guess is that you had help. I’m also guessing that whoever did it might have dumped the bodies in the waste lagoon, and as soon as we have enough evidence for a warrant, we’ll find out. It would explain what you were doing there.”

“Officer, you saw me. Did I look like I’d just hauled two bodies into a seething pile of pig crap? I was a little beaten up and a little bloodied, but I wasn’t covered with sweat.”

“Whatever,” she conceded. “The truth is, we don’t know. We’re working on theories. That blood might have been from Bastard and Karen. It might not. Karen’s mother hasn’t been seen for a couple of days, so she might have killed them.”

Karen’s mother, I thought. The third body.

“There are other possibilities,” she said. “Bastard was into stealing pets. The blood might be animal blood.”

“He was into stealing pets?” I tried to sound both surprised and disgusted. “What for?”

“Hell if I know. We had a bunch of complaints about it, but we couldn’t really prove anything. I talked to him myself, but…” She shrugged. “A lot of people were sure it was Bastard, but without evidence there wasn’t anything we could do. And if he was keeping any evidence he might have at his girlfriend’s trailer, in Doe’s jurisdiction, we were pretty well blocked since Bastard worked for Doe.”

“So you let him get away with it?” I asked. “He was taking people’s dogs and cats, and you just let him do it?”

“Like I said, there wasn’t much we could do legally- not without proof.”

“That sounds pretty lame to me.”

“Can we stick to the point here?”

“I guess so. It just seems kind of odd to me is all.”

“The problem is not that dogs and cats are missing. It’s that people are missing and might be dead. And I think you know something about it.”

“I don’t know anything about it. Should I have a lawyer?”

“You’re not under arrest,” she said.

“Then can I go?”

She appeared to be pondering this question when there was a knock at the door.

She excused herself and came back a minute later, shaking her head. “We just got a call that Bastard, Karen, and Karen’s mother checked in. They’re visiting relatives in Tennessee. I guess Karen called a neighbor who told her that everyone thought she was dead, and so she called into the police station.”

Melford strikes again, I thought. I tried not to smile. “So if they’re not dead, there’s no murder, and you no longer have to protect me from being wrongfully prosecuted.”

She winced. “Sure sounds that way, doesn’t it. But I have to tell you, I’m not convinced you’ve been honest with me. I don’t know what you’re up to, but take it somewhere else. I don’t want it going on around here.”

I didn’t say anything. There was no percentage in denying it again, and I didn’t want to nod as though she were right. “I guess I’ll go, then. But maybe you should take that pet business more seriously.” Why was I getting into this instead of getting the hell out of there?

“Look, we’ve got robbery and drugs and murder and rape aplenty to keep us busy. Missing doggies and kitties are pretty low on the list of priorities.”

“So a guy like Bastard can do what he wants so long as he denies it?” I applauded myself on the clever use of the present tense.

“Basically, yeah. Besides, next time you wander over to the hog lot, take a look inside. When you see how those pigs are treated, maybe you’ll get a new perspective. I mean, how different are they from dogs and cats, except they’re not cute and cuddly, right? So if it’s no big deal to kill one, why not the other?”

It was a good question, but I suspected Melford would say she was answering it the wrong way.

Only once I got outside did I wonder how I was going to get back to the motel. I went back in and told the cop at the front desk that I needed a ride.

“This isn’t a taxi service,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t ask to be picked up and taken here on charges of killing people who aren’t dead, so maybe someone can give me a lift back.”

“This isn’t a taxi service,” the cop said.

I conceded the point, told him I understood it was a police station, and asked if I could be put in contact with an actual taxi service.

“I’m not a phone book,” the cop said.

“Can you please tell me how I can get a cab?”

The guy shrugged, reached behind his desk, and handed me a yellow pages and then pointed to a pay phone. At least I had some coins so I didn’t have to hear how the cop was not a change machine.

With the cab on its way, I returned the phone book and went to wait outside. Five minutes later, the cab showed up. I told him to take me to the bus station, where I hoped I might still be able to catch Chitra. I slunk into the backseat and leaned against the torn leather, closing my eyes, almost ready for sleep.

When I felt the car slow down, I opened my eyes again, but we weren’t near the bus station yet. Instead we were on the grassy roadside- a ten- or fifteen-foot patch of crabgrass and weeds that separated the road from the algae green canal. I saw flashing blue and red lights as the cab pulled over. The car behind us was navy and white, and I recognized the stretch of road. We were in Meadowbrook Grove, and I watched Doe get out of his car and swagger over toward me.