The Wrong Man

11

Sally was surprised that the front door was wide open.

Nameless was plopped down by the entrance, not exactly sleeping, not exactly standing guard, but more or less accomplishing both. He picked his head up and thumped his tail at Sally’s arrival, and she reached down and stroked him once behind the ears, which was pretty much the extent of her connection to the dog. She suspected that if Jack the Ripper had walked in, with a dog biscuit in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, Nameless would have locked in on the biscuit.

She could just hear the final words of a conversation as she set her briefcase down in the small foyer.

“Yes…yes. Okay, I’ve got it. We’ll call you back later tonight. Don’t worry, everything will be okay… Yup. Later, then.”

Sally heard the phone being returned to its cradle, then Hope exhale and add, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“What was that about?” Sally asked.

Hope spun about. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You must have left the door open.”

Sally eyed the running clothes and added, “Were you heading out? Or just coming back?”

Hope ignored the questions and Sally’s tone and said, “That was Ashley. She’s really upset. Turns out that she really has gotten sort of involved with some creep in Boston and she’s starting to get a little scared.”

Sally hesitated for an instant before asking, “What does sort of involved actually mean?”

“You should have her explain. But, as best as I understand it, she had a one-night stand with the guy, and now he won’t leave her alone.”

“Is this the guy who wrote the letter Scott found?”

“Seems to be. He’s making all sorts of We were made for each other protests, when they don’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy sounds a little out there, but again, you should have Ashley explain it to you. It will seem a lot more, I don’t know, real, maybe, if you hear it from her.”

“Well, my guess is this is really a mountain being made out of a molehill, but-”

Hope interrupted, “It didn’t sound that way. I mean, we both know she can be overdramatic, but she sounded genuinely disturbed. I think you should call her back right away. It will probably do her some good to hear from her mother. Reassure her, you know.”

“Well, has the guy hit her? Or threatened her?”

“Not exactly. Yes and no. It’s a little hard to say.”

“What do you mean not exactly?” Sally asked briskly.

Hope shook her head. “What I mean is that I’m going to kill you is a threat. But We’ll always be together might be the same thing. It’s just hard to tell until you hear the words for yourself.”

Hope was a little taken aback. Sally was decidedly cool and irritatingly calm about what she was being told. This surprised her.

“Call Ashley,” she repeated.

“You’re probably right.” Sally stepped to the telephone.

Scott tried Ashley on her regular phone, but the line was busy, and for the third time that evening he got the answering machine. He had already tried her cell phone, but that, too, had only produced the sound of her voice breezily requesting the caller to leave a message. He was more than a little bit put off. What, he wondered to himself, is precisely the point of all these modern forms of communication if one simply gets nowhere more efficiently? In the eighteenth century, he thought, when one received a letter carried over distance, it damn well meant something. By being closer, he thought, everyone had gotten much farther away.

Before his frustration built further, the phone rang. He seized the receiver.

“Ashley?” he asked rapidly.

“No, Scott, it’s me, Sally.”

“Sally. Is something wrong?”

She hesitated, creating just enough of a dark space in time for his stomach to clench and the world around him to darken.

“When we last spoke,” Sally said, employing all her lawyer’s sense of equanimity, “you expressed some concern about a letter you found. You may have been justified in your response.”

Scott paused, wanting to scream at the professional reasonableness in her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Where’s Ashley?”

“She’s okay. But she might indeed have a problem.”

Michael O’Connell stopped at a small art-supply store before heading home. His stock of charcoal pencils was down, and he slipped a set into the pocket of his parka. He picked out a medium-sized sketch pad and took it to the counter. A bored young woman who sported an array of facial piercings, and hair streaked with black and red, was sitting behind the cash register, reading a copy of an Anne Rice novel about vampires. She wore a black T-shirt that said FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE on it in large, Gothic-style print. For a brief moment, O’Connell was mad with himself. He should have filled his pockets with many more items, given the lax attention the girl was paying to the comings and goings in the store. He made a mental note to return in a few days as he forked over a couple of worn singles for the pad of paper.

He knew the clerk would never think to examine the pockets of someone willing to pay for something.

Misdirection, he thought to himself. He remembered playing football in high school. His favorite plays were always those designed with some element of deception. Make the other team believe one thing when another was actually happening. The screen pass. The double reverse. It was the key to much of his life, and he embraced it at every opportunity. Make people underestimate you. Make them believe one thing was happening when really, something far different was at stake.

It was, he thought, the game that made it all worthwhile.

The clerk handed him some change, and he asked, “Who are the West Memphis Three?”

She looked at him as if the simple act of communicating was somehow physically painful. She sighed, “They’re three kids who were convicted of murder, of killing another kid, but they didn’t do it. They kinda got convicted because of the way they looked, and all the Bible-thumpers down there who didn’t like the way they dressed and talked about Goth stuff and Satan, and now they’re on death row and it’s unfair. HBO did a documentary about them.”

“They got caught?”

“It wasn’t right. Just because you’re different doesn’t make you guilty.”

Michael O’Connell nodded. “Right. It just makes it easier for the cops to look for you. When you’re different, you can’t get away with anything. But if you’re the same, you can do anything you want. Anything.”

He headed back out into the evening. As he walked down the street, he took a modest inventory of information he’d acquired. There is a small fringe to society, he told himself, where one can travel with relative impunity. Stay away from the chain store with the security guard. Work at the service station where the owner is willing to cut corners and look the other way. Avoid robbing something from a Dairy Mart or 7-Eleven, because those places were robbed all the time and might have an off-duty cop moonlighting with a twelve-gauge hiding behind a two-way mirror. Always do what was unexpected, but only just so, which kept people off balance, but not alert.

Never rely on others.

It all came naturally to him, he thought.

Michael O’Connell trudged up the street to his apartment house, then up the stairs. As usual, the hallway outside his door was filled with the mewlings and meowings of his old neighbor’s cats. As always, she had put bowls of food and water out for the animals. He looked down and several scurried out of his path. They were the smart ones because they recognized a threat, even if they couldn’t quite determine what it was. The others milled about. He knelt down and held out his hand, until one of the least suspicious cats moved close enough for him to scratch it on the head. With a quick and practiced motion, he seized the cat by the scruff of the neck and carried it into his apartment.

The cat struggled for a moment, trying to twist and scratch, but O’Connell kept it firmly in his grip. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a large ziploc bag. This one would join four others in his freezer. When he reached a half dozen, he would dispose of them in some distant Dumpster. Then start in again. He doubted the old woman’s ability to keep an accurate count of her pets. And, after all, he’d asked her politely once or twice to limit their number. Failing to follow his suggestions, especially when so generously put, was in reality what was killing the cats. He was merely the agent of death.

Scott listened to his ex-wife and every second grew angrier.

It wasn’t that his instincts had been ignored, nor that he’d been right all along. It was the orderly tone in her voice that infuriated him. But he decided that arguing with Sally wasn’t going to do any good.

“So,” she said, “I think, and Ashley does, too, that perhaps the best thing would be for you to go to Boston and maybe bring her home for the weekend, so she can really get a handle on what sort of problem this young man is likely to cause her.”

“Okay,” Scott said. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“A little distance usually gives one some perspective,” Sally said.

“You would know,” Scott dug back. “How’s your perspective?”

Sally wanted to respond with equal sarcasm, but decided against it.

“Scott, can you just go pick Ashley up? I’d go, but…”

“No, I’ll go. You’ve probably got some court hearing or something that can’t be postponed.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“The drive back will give me a chance to really sound her out, anyway. Then we can come up with a plan or whatever. Or at least some sort of plan that’s a little more comprehensive than merely bringing her home for the weekend. Maybe all that’s called for is for me to go have a talk with this guy.”

“I think, before we inject ourselves into the problem, we should give Ashley every chance to sort it out herself. Part of growing up, you know.”

“That’s the sort of totally reasonable and sensible point of view that I truly hate.”

Sally did not answer. She did not want the conversation to disintegrate any further. And she recognized that Scott had some legitimate claim to being upset. It was the way her mind worked, seeing every word spoken as if it were light reflecting through a prism, with any particular shaft being important. This made her an excellent attorney and upon occasion a difficult person.

“Maybe I should go tonight,” Scott said.

“No,” Sally said quickly. “That would have an element of panic in it. Let’s just proceed steadily.”

They were both quiet for a moment. “Hey,” Scott asked abruptly, “do you have any experience with this sort of thing?”

What he meant was legal experience, but Sally took it a different way. “No,” she said suddenly. “The only man who ever said he would love me forever was you.”

There had been a story in the local paper over the past few days that had captured much attention in the valley where I lived. A child, thirteen years old, had been placed in the tenth of a series of foster homes and had died under questionable circumstances. Police and the local district attorney’s office were investigating, as was every ham-fisted news outlet for miles. But the facts of the case seemed murky, so dark and conflicted that the truth might never emerge. The child had died from a single gunshot wound, administered at close range. The foster parents said that the boy had found the father’s handgun and been playing with it when it discharged. Or perhaps he wasn’t playing with it but had committed suicide. Or perhaps the set of brand-new bruises on the child’s arms and torso that the autopsy revealed meant that he’d been beaten or held down while something far more evil had taken place. Or perhaps the gun had been the source of a struggle between child and adult, discharging in an accident. Or, even darker, perhaps it was murder. Murder prompted by rage. Murder prompted by frustration. Murder prompted by desire. Murder prompted by nothing more than the lousy hand that life sometimes deals to those least equipped to bluff their way out of trouble.

It seemed to me that the truth is often impossibly elusive.

Each day for a week, the black-and-white photo of the dead child stared out at me from the pages of the newspaper. He wore a beautifully wry, almost shy smile, beneath eyes that seemed bright with promise. Maybe that was what drove the story, gave it the impetus that it had, before it was swallowed up and disappeared in the steady march of events; there was something dishonest in the death. Someone was cheated.

No one cared for the child. At least, no one cared enough.

I suppose I was no different from everyone else who read the story or heard it on the nightly news or discussed it over the proverbial watercooler. It hit anyone who had ever looked in on a sleeping child and imagined how fragile all life is, and how tenuous our grip on what passes for happiness can truly be. I guessed, in its own way, that this was what slowly became apparent for Scott and Sally and Hope.