Mister Death's Blue-Eyed Girls (7 page)

At the police station, the cops take me into this little room with cinderblock walls painted piss yellow. They tell me to sit in a chair facing a table. One sits across from me and opens a notebook. The other one sits off to one side, just out of my line of sight. He asks the questions. I have to turn my head to look at him.

"State your name," he says.

"Harold Novak."

"State your address."

"Forty-eight fifteen Forty-Third Street, Elmgrove." I want to ask him again why they've brought me here, what do they think I've done, but he doesn't pause between my answer and his next question. Nor does his face ever change. He's got one expression. Grim. One voice. Flat.

"Where were you at eight a.m. this morning?"

I shrug, trying to be nonchalant, getting back into my usual pose. Tough. Scared of nothing. Humphrey Bogart in
Key Largo.
"Driving around, I guess."

"Was anyone with you?"

"No."

"Did anyone see you?"

"Maybe. Probably. It's the last day of school, lots of kids were around. Some of them must of seen me." I shift my position but the chair's seat is hard vinyl and sort of slippery. I feel like I might slide off it. I wish I had a cigarette, but I left the pack in my car.

"Were you looking for anyone in particular?"

I shrug again. I could really use a cigarette. "I wanted to give this girl I know a ride to school."

The two cops look at each other like I've said something important. "What's her name?"

"Cheryl," I say. "Cheryl Miller."

They look at each other again.

"Did you leave your car on Chester Street and go into the park?" I nod. "I was thinking she'd come along and I could take her to school." It's getting hard to act nonchalant. Something bad has happened. Something to do with Cheryl. I can tell by the heavy silence in the room. I'm sweating now, worried, scared. The guy who's been writing everything down lights a cigarette. I wonder if he'd give me one. Probably not. "Is Cheryl okay? Is this about her?"

Instead of answering me they ask me another question. "Do you own a rifle?"

I'm getting scared now. Really scared. Something's happened. Something bad. I'm pushing stuff away, things I don't want to think about, things I don't want to know.

"Yeah," I say, still trying to be tough, but my voice sounds funny now, kind of squeaky, like it did when I was thirteen. "It's a twenty-two, what they call a cat and rat gun." I stare at the cop even though it makes my neck hurt. Why can't he sit where I can see him better? My heart's beating faster. I wonder if the cops can hear it. If that makes them think I'm guilty of whatever it is that's happened. "What's my twenty-two got to do with this?"

The one sitting across from me says, "We ask the questions. You answer."

"Did you have your rifle with you this morning?" the other one asks.

I shake my head. "No. It's home in my closet. I never take it anywhere unless I'm target shooting."

"Do you shoot a lot?"

"I'm on the rifle team at school. I practice out in the woods. With tin cans and bottles."

"Do you consider yourself a good shot?"

"Yeah, pretty good."

They look at each other again and I start worrying I've let them lead me into saying something I shouldn't have.

The cop takes a deep breath. "Did you hide in the park this morning and wait for Cheryl Miller to come along?"

I shake my head again, really nervous now. "Why are you asking me these questions? What's happened?"

It's bad, I know it is, and it involves Cheryl. Something's happened to her. I want to get out of the police station. I want to get in my car and drive as fast as I can. I want to leave this town. I don't want to hear whatever it is they're about to tell me. If I was a little kid, I'd put my fingers in my ears, I'd shut my eyes, I'd hide under my bed or something.

The one across from me puts down his pen and leans across the table. His breath still smells like coffee. "Don't play dumb. You know why we're questioning you. You know what you did, you cocky little bastard."

The other one starts talking and I have to turn my head back to him. "You took your rifle with you this morning," he says in that flat, grim voice. "You went into the park and hid near the footbridge. You waited for Cheryl Miller. When she and Bobbi Jo Boyd came in sight, you shot them both."

At first what he says makes no sense. You shot them both, you both them shot, shot you them both. The words roll round and round, like cannonballs. Them you both shot, both you shot, you shot them, you shot them both.

I grab the edge of the table to keep myself from sliding off the chair. No, no, no, what kind of lie is this? Cheryl and Bobbi Jo shot? Dead, are they both dead? The piss yellow walls close in on me. They're dead. Dead. It can't be true.

It's like the cop has kicked me in the guts, knocked the breath out of me, killed me. I shake my head, I say, "No, no, no, they can't be dead, no no no I didn't do it, I'd never never never—"

The cop in the chair, the one I can never see right, jumps up and grabs me, shakes me, shoves his big red face into mine. "You lying piece of shit," he yells. "She busted up with you, she had a new boyfriend, you made a scene in the park last night. This morning you got your rifle and you went to the park and you shot them."

I shake my head, I struggle to get myself together, I'm scared I'll piss my pants. He's twisting my arm, he's pulling me off the chair, he's threatening to hit me. All I can do is shake my head. I didn't didn't didn't. I didn't didn't didn't.

"You were seen on the footbridge," the cop shouts. "What did you do with the rifle?"

"Nothing! I didn't have it with me, it's at my house."

"We searched your house," he says. "The rifle's not there. What did you do with it?"

"I didn't do anything with it," I say.

"It's in your car, in the trunk, wrapped up in a blanket," the cop says. "Where you hid it after you killed Cheryl and Bobbi Jo."

"No," I say. "No."

"Tell the truth, son," the one sitting across from me says. His voice is soft now, his face calm. "Admit it. It'll be easier for you."

"I
am
telling the truth." I'm trying so hard to convince them but they don't believe me, they're sure I did it, they're so sure I begin thinking maybe I did do it, maybe I have amnesia, maybe I'm crazy, maybe they'll send me to Spring Grove.

Then I remember something. I lean across the table toward the cop sitting there. I do my best to look him in the goddamn eye. "Wait, wait," I say. "I saw this guy in the woods while I was sitting on the bridge. I didn't think anything of it, it was just a glimpse, but I saw him. Maybe he—maybe, I mean, you know, it could of been him. The one who did it." Even to me it sounds like a lie, something I made up.

The cops look at each other and laugh. "Oh, yeah," the one who sits where I can hardly see him says.

I try to tell them more, but there really isn't any more. I glimpsed a guy in the woods. I couldn't see his face. He was there and then gone like some goddamn Robin Hood. No wonder they don't believe me.

After a lot of yelling and a lot of threats, they take me into a small room with the same piss-colored walls to give me a lie detector test. A guy who looks more like a biology teacher than a cop is in charge now. He puts rubber tubes across my chest and belly to check my breathing, then he attaches little metal plates to my fingers to record how much I sweat, and then he straps something around my arm to record my blood pressure. I keep telling myself he's not going to electrocute me, but I don't trust him. Even though he talks in a soft voice, I know he's not my friend.

First he asks me if I like pizza. Really. That's what he asks. "Yes," I say kind of uncertainly, maybe it's a trick question.

"Is your nickname Buddy?" I answer yes, still suspicious.

"Did you just graduate from Eastern?" I say yes again, but I tense up, wondering when he's going to ask if I did it.

"Did you ever cheat on a test?" My heart speeds up because cheating might be a killer's trait. But I tell the truth, I say yes even though I want to lie and say I'd never do that. The lines on the chart shoot way up and way down. Does that mean the machine thinks I'm lying?

"Do you know Cheryl Miller?"

"Yes." The lines jiggle up and down even more than before, a bad sign for sure.

Then it comes. "Did you shoot Cheryl Miller and Barbara Josephine Boyd?" He speaks in the soft, sort of hypnotic voice he's used from the start.

It takes me a second to realize Barbara Josephine Boyd is Bobbi Jo. I'm really shaken up, so I take a deep breath and almost say yes because all my other answers have been yes. "No!" I say it louder than I mean to, and the needles jump and twitch and scribble wild crazy lines. Guilty lines, dark and jagged.

The man sighs and says, "Please don't lie, son. The machine knows you're not telling the truth."

I try to breathe normally, I try to relax. "I'm not lying. I didn't shoot them, I didn't." No matter how hard I try to control my voice, it rises. The needles go haywire, jumping and jiggling sharp peaks and valleys all over the roll of paper.

The man looks at me sadly as if I've let him down really bad. He shakes his head. He presses a buzzer. The cops come in.

The big mean one grabs me, twists my arm way up behind my back, manhandles me out of the room and down some steps, and locks me up. "Think about it for a while, you little son of a bitch," he says. "When I come back, you better be ready to confess. We know you did it."

"And here's the thing, Harold," the other one says. "We've got ways to make you talk." He pounds a fist into the palm of his other hand. No Mr. Nice Guy now.

They leave me in the cell. I hear them laughing as they go upstairs. "Sorry little piece of shit," one says.

And it's true. I am, that's all I am now. It's like I've lost myself somewhere. Nothing seems real. Not even me.

Hours pass. No food, nothing to drink. No cigarette. They come back and take me to the interrogation room. They ask the same questions over and over again. I give them the same answers. Sometimes they confuse me and I don't say what I mean to say.

They give me the lie detector test again. Same questions. Same crazy zigzag marks on the paper.

Then I'm in the cell and it's dark out. I lose track of time. I think I've been here a week, but when they finally let me go, it's only been forty-eight hours. They tell me my gun was in my closet just like I said. They say it wasn't the gun the killer used. They say I passed the lie detector test after all. I can go home. They act like it was just a game. No hard feelings, nobody hurt. Just a few questions, a little roughing up, nothing to worry about.

When my mother and father come for me, they act like they don't know me anymore. They're uncomfortable. They don't complain about the way the cops treated me, they don't seem to notice the bruises on my face.

Maybe they think I did it. I tell them I didn't, I tell them I didn't even know what happened until the cops told me.

They don't want to talk about it. My mother says maybe I should spend a few weeks at her brother's farm in West Virginia, a place I hate but which now seems better than Elmgrove.

Reporters surround my dad's car. They point cameras, blind me with flashbulbs, holler questions. And all the time I'm sitting in the back seat, trying to understand that Cheryl is dead. I will never see her again, never hear her voice, never kiss her.

The cops, my parents, my former friends, they all think I killed her. Me. Buddy Novak, the kid who's always blamed for everything. Cheating on tests, writing cuss words on buildings, loitering, causing trouble, being a bad influence, skipping school, speeding, drinking beer behind the gym. And now this. This. The one thing I haven't done. Would never do.

My arm hurts from being twisted, my face is bruised, my belly aches. I slide down in the seat and hope no one will see me.

E
LLIE
finally slows down. She collapses under a tree in someone's yard. It's like she's been shot too. I drop down beside her. We start crying again. Huge, gulping, suffocating sobs. Sobs torn from our hearts, from our guts. Sobs that hurt.

Then Ellie is on her feet again. "Come on," she says. Her nose and upper lip are covered with snot, her eyes are swollen.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"Your house." Ellie wipes her nose on the back of her hand. "I don't know where else to go. Mom's at work. And Mrs. Boyd—how can I face her? Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God." She hides her face in her hands. Tears seep through her fingers, run down her face, and drip on her blouse. She sits down again and so do I. Grass scratches the backs of my bare legs. I don't think I can run anymore. Or walk. Or even stand up. My bones have dissolved.

How could this happen? Something this bad? This horrible? This unreal? You read about murder in the paper, you hear about it on TV, a man killed in a robbery, a woman strangled by her husband. Someone stabbed, someone beaten, someone shot. Murder happens far away, in cities or desolate places. It happens to strangers and you say how sad, how awful, and then a commercial comes on and that's that, you forget. You watch
I Love Lucy
and laugh, you watch
Gunsmoke
and Matt Dillon catches the killer before the show is over. You go up to bed before the news comes on to remind you of the woman's body found in an alley. You fall asleep in your safe little house, and you know all your friends are sleeping in their safe little houses and you'll see them at school tomorrow. And you forget the woman in the alley who will never sleep in her safe little house again.

But not this. You won't forget this. It will be a part of you forever. This day ... this day will never end.

 

I glance at Ellie. She's soaked with sweat, and tears are running down her face again. Cars, trucks, buses whiz past. I hear a blast of music from a convertible. A girl rides by on a bike, stares at us, glances back every now and then.

Finally I ask Ellie why she was so mad at Buddy.