Cartwheel (21 page)

Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel some pity for Lily Hayes now, so Eduardo let himself feel it. This was the worst she’d ever had it, and things were likely to get a whole lot worse. And it was possible, of course, that she didn’t even believe she’d done it; it was possible, after all, that she had galloping undiagnosed autism or some kind of horrific chemical imbalance or that she had been sexually abused as a child. Most defendants Eduardo saw had had lives that were hard from the start, lives that would have required enormous effort and luck and preternatural goodness just to properly begin. Eduardo did not think that Lily’s life had been like that, but still, he had to acknowledge that it might have been. And even if it had not, she still might not know, not really, what she had done. Eduardo had encountered cases like that—when the perpetrator took a while to fully believe it—and he could imagine few things worse than enduring such a realization. A person who had murdered had ventured onto unmapped territories; he could not put his trouble into any kind of redeeming context, or situate it within any kind of myth; there was no consolation in the universality
or inevitability of the thing. It was irreducible, and the suffering a person must feel in such times went so far beyond the pale of normal human suffering—so far beyond the natural landscapes of grief and loss and heartbreak—that only generosity could be extended to him. He was utterly alone in what he’d done. All that was left was for the details of his interminable aloneness to be codified and solidified, made formal in court. For a man like Eduardo, who feared loneliness so mightily, this fate seemed worse than any.

“Can I have a glass of water?” said Lily. Her voice was froggish and lower than the last time he’d heard it.

“Later,” said Eduardo, spreading his papers out on the table. He always made an elaborate show of doing this, as though the papers belonged in a very particular order. “I have a couple of questions for you first.”

“You’re wearing a wedding ring today.”

Eduardo felt an instinctive pull to put his hand under the table, but he resisted it. “That’s so,” he said.

Lily tilted her head back to straight. “Perhaps congratulations are in order.”

Eduardo leaned back. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

“What’s that, some kind of therapy talk?”

Eduardo smiled benignly. “It’s just a reality.”

The bottom line was that whatever might be wrong with Lily Hayes was not what really mattered: Justice was on behalf of the dead, and on behalf of those who remembered the dead. It was on behalf of the notion that lives, even mortal lives, mattered.

“Tell me about your life here,” said Eduardo.

Lily looked at him evenly and licked her lips. “It’s pretty dull, actually.” Her voice cracked slightly, and Eduardo realized that, of course, she had not spoken all day. “You’re probably the highlight.”

Eduardo was glad she could still make a joke, though he did not smile at it. “Here in Buenos Aires,” he said. “Before all of this.”

“I’ve told you everything already.”

“Tell me again.”

“Tell you what?”

“You lived with the Carrizos?”

“You know I lived with the Carrizos.”

“And you liked them?”

“I like them.”

“Tell me again about the night Katy was killed.”

“I’ve told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

“I went over to Sebastien’s. We had a few drinks.”

“How many drinks?”

“I don’t know. A few.”

“Three?”

“Maybe more.”

“Maybe four?”

“Maybe five.”

“Maybe five. Okay. And you smoked some marijuana.”

“We smoked some marijuana, yes.”

“And where did you get this marijuana?”

Lily hesitated.

“I can absolutely assure you,” said Eduardo, “that this is the very least of your problems.”

“Katy gave it to me,” she said.

Eduardo raised his eyebrows. “Did she?”

“Yes. I don’t know where she got it.”

“I see,” said Eduardo. She was obviously lying about the marijuana—most likely trying to protect some idiotic study-abroad friend of hers from getting thrown in prison; even Eduardo occasionally found his nation’s drug policy somewhat overwrought—but it probably wouldn’t matter. And if it did, Eduardo would remember. “And what time did you and Sebastien go to sleep?”

“I don’t know. Four in the morning, maybe.”

“Four in the morning, you say. Okay.” If Eduardo had worn glasses, he would have taken them off now. Instead, he squeezed the bridge of his nose. “But you’re a relatively petite woman, and you’d had five
drinks, as well as some unknown quantity of marijuana. Can you really be sure of what time you went to bed?”

“I don’t know. It was late.”

“Can you really be sure of anything that happened that night, for that matter? After so much alcohol and marijuana?”

“I mean, it wasn’t LSD.”

“I’ll make a note of that.” Eduardo made the note sardonically. He wouldn’t have had to make the note even if she’d said something real, of course. But he had found that the churning muscle of his memory was most formidable when he kept it a secret.

“I know I didn’t kill anyone,” said Lily. “And I know we went to bed late, anyway. It was late.”

“And you didn’t hear or see anything suspicious that night?”

“No.”

“But again, you wouldn’t necessarily remember.”

“I’m pretty sure I would remember hearing someone get killed, actually.” Lily was becoming agitated, though this wasn’t overt in her mannerisms yet; her distress was only faintly roiling her expression, like an animal ascending to the water’s surface from its depths. “I think it would probably make a real impression on me, in fact.”

“Lily,” said Eduardo, leaning forward. “I’m going to ask you to imagine something. If you had done this thing, why would you have done it?”

“I didn’t.”

“Let’s leave that aside for now. I’m just trying to get a sense of how this could have happened. I know you want to help Katy. I know you would have wanted to help Katy. Do you have any idea why someone might have done this to her?”

“No,” said Lily. “I didn’t do it and I would never have done it and I can never, never imagine why anybody would. And you can’t make me say that I can.”

Eduardo leaned back. “Okay, Lily. You didn’t do it, okay. But you have to admit that you might have.”

“I did
not
. I might
not
have.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re trying to trick me. You must think I’m really unbelievably stupid.”

“Nobody’s trying to trick you, Lily,” said Eduardo. Saying “nobody” rendered specific accusations vague while making the accuser sound slightly schizophrenic. “It really is a very simple question.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Lily snapped. “If I’d done it, I would have had the sense to flush the fucking toilet.”

Eduardo raised his eyebrows and opened his notebook.
If I’d done it
, she’d said. And even though Eduardo would have no trouble remembering it, this was one thing that he actually did write down.

“Okay, Lily,” he said. “You’re right. Enough speculation. I’m going to ask you a very frank question now. Forget
why
someone might have done this. Can you imagine
who
might have?”

She shook her head, her dirty ponytail swaying thickly. What insouciance that might have communicated in better times! “No,” she said.

“No, really? No, you can’t imagine a single other person who might have possibly done it? In the whole city? In the entire time you’ve been here?”

“No.”

“What about Carlos? I understand he has a drinking problem.”

“No.”

“No, he doesn’t have a drinking problem?”

“No, he couldn’t have done it.”

“What about Beatriz?”

Lily laughed joylessly. “No.”

“Sebastien?”

She glared at him.
“No.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Lily Hayes was not alone in her sureness: The police had not arrested Sebastien LeCompte after his initial interrogation, and in his gut, Eduardo did not believe that Sebastien had been present at the murder. Nevertheless, it seemed to Eduardo that Sebastien LeCompte
was somehow the crime’s original mover, standing off in the shadows, beyond the particulars of the evening; the ultimate cause behind all of the proximate ones. Since Lily’s arrest, Eduardo had gone three times to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion to try to speak with him. Each time, Sebastien LeCompte had seemed not to be at home—though this was unlikely, since every report about the kid suggested that he had neither friends nor gainful employment nor romantic involvements beyond Lily and possibly Katy, who were now respectively imprisoned and dead. It was much likelier that Sebastien LeCompte was hiding. But he could not hide forever.

“I know Sebastien,” said Lily.

“Do you? How well?”

“Well enough.”

“Not well enough to love him, though. So maybe well enough to know not to?”

Lily glowered.

“How do you think your friend Sebastien felt about Katy Kellers?” said Eduardo.

“I don’t know.”

“But if you had to guess.”

“I guess he probably liked her.”

“You said they were sleeping together.”

Lily looked at him witheringly. “
You
said that.”

“You mentioned in your initial conversation with the police that Katy had learned about the lawsuit against Carlos Carrizo from Sebastien.”

“She said she had.”

“Do you know why the two of them might have had occasion to see each other?”

“He did live next door.”

“Do you think they saw much of each other?”

“I have no idea.”

“But if you had to guess.”

Lily sat back in her chair. “This conversation is getting a little boring,
you know?” She cocked her head to one side. This was not, in fact, an original pose for a young person in custody. Defendants might not always be so direct, but Eduardo had seen the rest of it often enough—the attitude, the facial expression, the body language, all of it designed to say:
I’ve got bigger problems than you
. But they didn’t. Lily Hayes certainly didn’t. Lily Hayes had never had a bigger problem than this one. It was quite possible that, before this, she’d never had any real problems at all.

“Boring?” said Eduardo. “This conversation that is trying to establish your guilt or innocence in the question of the murder of your roommate? These questions that are designed to get us closer to knowing who killed her? They bore you?”

Lily drooped her head and said nothing. Her ponytail looked deflated. “Can I have some water?” she said.

“No.”

“I have a right to water.”

“I have some emails I’d like to read you first.”

Lily paled. “No,” she said.

Eduardo did not like doing this. Lily Hayes was young and she was lost and she’d done the most horrific thing imaginable, for reasons that were probably inscrutable even to her. She was in a strange country and she was probably never going home. Eduardo had not planned on reading her the emails today. But if she was already going to be combative, then he would have to be, too. He would have had to do it sooner or later, anyway, and one could even argue that it was better to get it over with. Fulfilling the inevitable early was often—although, of course, not always—a kind of mercy.

Eduardo cleared his throat and flipped to the most important email: a missive Lily had written to her father her first week in Buenos Aires. It was something of an introduction to Lily’s world; as such, it would serve as a natural introduction to the state’s case, and Eduardo would likely quote it during his opening remarks.

“ ‘The roommate,’ ” Eduardo read aloud in English, “ ‘is Katy. She spends a lot of time reading her economics textbooks. She’s brokenhearted
from the recent departure of her boyfriend—right in time for junior-year study abroad, and she’s surprised!’ ” Eduardo delivered all of this deadpan. In another context, he thought, this might be hilarious—his ponderous voice with its notable accent reading the words of a simpering, self-righteous young girl. “ ‘You’d think she never watched a CW teen soap growing up,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Then again, neither did I—you wouldn’t let me!—but I turned out reasonably savvy, I like to think.’ ”

Eduardo glanced up at Lily. Her face was stony. If anything was breaking anywhere within her, he could not see it. He hadn’t been sure he was going to continue, but now he decided he would, because he could see that Lily did not remember what was coming next.

“ ‘She’s probably the most typical person I’ve ever met,’ ” he went on. “ ‘Her life has been really easy. You can just tell. She is from California, after all.’ ” Eduardo put down the paper. Lily’s face was implacable and still. Perhaps there was the faintest suggestion of something unearthing itself, but whether this was fear or anger or self-pity or true and genuine remorse, it was very hard to say. “You thought Katy’s life was easy?” he said.

Lily nodded shakily.

“Do you still think Katy’s life was easy?”

At this, Lily began to cry. Eduardo did not like to do it, but he pressed on.

“Should I read to you from the autopsy report? And then we can talk about whether Katy’s life was easy?”

“No. Stop. Please stop.” Lily’s face was flushed and patchy. In spite of everything, Eduardo did not like to make her cry. This wrenching and diabolical thing that she had done would be with her forever; it would cast itself backward into her past; she would have to understand—and everyone else would have to understand—that it had actually been with her all along. Her parents would remember her as the addled, orthodontiaed teenager she had once been, and it would be there. They’d remember her as a quick-witted preadolescent and a chubby-limbed toddler and a squalling, wrinkled infant, and it would
be there; her mother would remember her pregnancy—the minor lightning of the child quickening, gathering itself into its life—and would find that it had been there, too. What Lily had done to Katy would blacken Lily’s whole life—its singular irreducibility would stain every soccer game and family outing and first kiss—just as it would elevate Katy’s whole life, transforming every moment, no matter how small-minded or mundane, into something fated and futile and grand. Everything for both of them had been straining toward this dreadful black horizon; it had been everywhere, it had been everything, even if neither of them had known it.