Payback (9 page)

I heard a sigh. “Call me Chris. Please. And if you’re determined to know these things, then I’ll get you a copy of the medical examiner’s report. But I really wish you wouldn’t. Nothing good can come of it, Tyler. You’ve been hurt enough. You don’t need to dig at the wound any more.”

I felt the phone shake against my ear. My hand was trembling. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll wait for the report.” And I hung up the phone.

A moment later, I turned off the ringer.

T
WICE
IN
the next few days, I tried to leave the house, but my fear held me back. When the food began to run out, I had groceries delivered. With my phone turned off, I knew people would begin to worry. So deciding a preemptive strike was needed, I phoned Janie and told her I was fine and simply needed to be alone. I phoned her home number at a time when I knew she would be teaching so I wouldn’t have to speak to her.

I called Christian Martin to ask if any progress had been made on the case, but the answer was always the same. “It’s going to take some time, Tyler. Be patient. Let us work the clues. In the meantime, call me anytime you want. Even if it’s just to talk. Even if it’s just not to be alone.”

The kindness in his words always surprised me. My anger at hearing them always surprised me too. And even with the impatience and the frustration and the anger, I found myself feeling sorry for the man. He wanted to help me. I know he did. But when he asked for my patience, he was asking for something I didn’t possess. If he had asked for hatred, I could have sent him boxes.

After several days, I stopped calling even the detective. It was just another way I cut myself off from the world. And now that I felt entirely on my own, I had more time to wonder about the fear I felt when I thought of leaving the house even for a moment. I hadn’t been off the porch since the day I went to the cemetery.

As my body slowly healed and my remaining bruises faded, my fear of the outside grew. When the gardener came knocking for payment, I slipped him a check through the mail slot in the front door. I continued to have groceries delivered, paid over the phone with a credit card.

When my first week at home ended and the second week began, I knew I would have to find a way around the fear. I had an appointment with the doctor to remove the cast on my arm. It had been on almost six weeks. I could wiggle my fingers now through the end of the plaster cast with only a minimum of discomfort. I was healed. It was time to get the damn thing off.

On the day of my appointment, I phoned the doctor’s office and told his nurse I had gone to another doctor to remove the cast. I told her everything was fine, and I was sorry for canceling so late. I’m not sure the nurse believed me, but she didn’t have much opportunity to do anything about it since I ended the call before she could refer me to the doc.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I drew a hot bath and sank into the water, cast and all. With a pair of scissors, I dug into the slowly softening plaster until the water was milky around me. Finally, I was able to tear the cast apart with my fingers. And when it fell away completely, I breathed a long-drawn-out sigh of relief.

My arm looked pale and wrinkled from its sojourn beneath the cast, smaller than the other arm somehow. But when I flexed my wrist and fingers, everything worked without much pain. I stood in the milky bathwater and showered off the bits of plaster from my body before climbing from the tub. After drying off, I spent the next ten minutes cleaning the bathtub and throwing the soggy remains of the cast into the trash. I spread lotion on my arm to ease the itching, flaking skin, and once again wrapped in a bathrobe, my own this time, I stood at the kitchen sink, sipping a beer.

Sympathy and get-well cards were still coming in daily, but I immediately dropped them in the trash. I had made the mistake of opening one sympathy card. That was enough. The kind words had made me feel worse than I already felt. I refused to put myself through that again. Still, it was the fear that bothered me most. It was with me every second of every day. But at night it was infinitely worse. Inside the house I refused to let nighttime encroach at all. The drapes remained closed, and the lights remained on twenty-four hours a day. I felt helpless. Unprotected. I checked the locks on the doors and windows repeatedly.

At the beginning of my third week at home, it was my anger that finally convinced me to face up to my fear. My anger—and the medical examiner’s report that came in the mail.

I opened the official-looking envelope with the San Diego County insignia in the upper left corner and pulled out two sheets of paper. One was a note from Detective Martin. The note simply said,
The forms you requested may not be removed from the Medical Examiner’s office. What I am enclosing here is a recap of the coroner’s final report. Chris.

The other sheet of paper was on official stationery with the same county insignia at the top. Below the insignia were the words Coroner’s Report: Case # 46G99, and the date. The date was two days after Spence’s death.

Scanning the sheet, I realized immediately that what I was reading was simply a summation of the coroner’s findings. It did not explain how the coroner arrived at his conclusions, only that he had. Obviously this paper was intended for police and legal personnel who perhaps had limited knowledge of medicine and forensic science. Still, the form held enough information to make me sorry I had requested to see it thirty seconds after I started reading. Detective Martin had been right all along. I was better off not knowing the truth.

Two sentences in and my vision was already blurred by tears. I snatched words and phrases from the paper like a toad snagging flies from the air.

…Spencer Allen Chang—Age 30—Chinese-American adult male.

…photographed before autopsy both clothed and nude.

…subject’s weight 169 pounds 8 ounces—length of body 6 feet 1 inch—dark hair—brown eyes—no scars, tattoos, moles, or other identifying markers.

…prior to assault, subject appears to have been healthy—no indication of drugs in system—no needle marks. No sign of anal penetration, rape, or sexual assault.

…subject identified by sister. Name: Jane Marie Chang.

…blunt force trauma resulting in death, three consecutive blows to the head, each blow causing brain damage, cranial fracturing, and catastrophic blood loss. Any one of the three blows would have proven fatal—subject immediately incapacitated—death followed in a matter of seconds.

…murder weapon found at scene of crime—iron bar 2 feet 5 inches long, circumference 3 inches, weight of weapon 2 pounds 12 ounces—iron bar matches the wounds on the skull. No prints….

…
no prints, no prints, no prints.
The words kept tearing through my head like mocking laughter.

Furious, I scraped the curtains aside and stared out the living-room window, letting sunshine into the house for the first time in days. The ME’s report lay crumpled in my fist.

He’s gone. He’s really gone. And they’ll never catch the fuckers who did it. Never.

I sat by the window until hunger drove me into the kitchen. I ate a bologna sandwich. Chips. Whatever I could find I didn’t have to cook.

With my hunger fed, anger finally drove me from the house. Fear be damned.

I threw on some clothes and grabbed my car keys from the dresser where they had been lying since before the night Spence died. Had it really been six weeks? Was that possible?

I stepped into the garage with my car keys in hand, their comforting, familiar jangle like an echo of the past, promising freedom, promising—revenge.

The agoraphobic terror I had been subjected to since my release from the hospital was gone. Just like that. The words on the medical examiner’s report had stripped it away like bark from a tree.

Tapping the garage door opener clipped to my visor, I blinked back the sunlight streaming through as the door slid open. The car purred around me like an old friend. Or a war buddy. With a grim smile, I pulled out onto the street and headed west.

I
PARKED
and stared out over the lawns from the interior of the car.

Doggie Park was busy. With wry amusement, I realized I had no idea what day of the week it was, but judging by all the happy dogs and happy dog owners scattered around, it must be a weekend. I took a deep breath and eased myself from the car.

The day was warm. The sun felt good on the back of my neck. I stared off into the distance at the public bathroom where everything had happened. There was no crime scene tape up, but after all this time, why would there be? Still, it angered me to think Spence’s life had been so cruelly stolen from him and now there was absolutely nothing left to show for it. It was almost as if his loss—and mine—didn’t matter at all. Our suffering had all been just a teeny hiccup in the universe. Didn’t mean shit.

Already seething with anger, that anger I now knew so well, I climbed the fence by the entry gate and sat on the top rail, just as Spence and I had done on that last night. Gazing out over the park, I tried to at least wipe the fury from my face. No sense scaring the crap out of all the poor, innocent schmoes walking their fucking dogs. Still, I suppose something in my demeanor separated me from everyone there. No one approached. No one nodded a “good day” to me as they strode through the gate, heading in or heading home, their dogs back on their leashes, already thinking about dinner, about work, about life.

My wrist and fingers ached, and I looked down at them. My injured arm still looked paler and smaller than the other one. When I returned home, maybe I would start exercising to get some strength back in that arm. Squeezing a tennis ball might help. Or light weights. Anything to get the blood moving and alleviate the pain and weakness of the healing bones.

Hearing the barking and the laughter and the hum of jovial voices around me, I began to feel a little better about being there. The moment I climbed down from the fence and stepped onto the lawn to approach the bathroom, my sensibilities changed. Fury once again settled in. And fear too. That old nemesis made a return appearance, waving all its flags and ringing all its bells. But I ignored it. Or tried to.

I had to see. I had to see where it all happened.

Ten feet away from the doorway to the men’s room, I could already smell the rank odor of stale piss and disinfectant. The offset entryway had no real door. Just an opening. One simply walked into the dim interior, did one’s business, hopefully flushed and washed one’s hands, then walked back out again.

Unless, of course, one was waylaid in the process by evildoers, as old George W. used to call the bad guys. As Spence and I had been waylaid.

The interior was empty, the floor wet with piss, the stench almost overpowering. I stared down at the green concrete floor where I had lain, in and out of consciousness, as Spence lay dead beside me, his blood seeping into a growing pool around him. I remembered the sticky feel of his cooling blood on my fingertips that night. My broken fingertips. I remembered the laughter of the three men, the whimpering of Franklin, the ring of the metal bar on the concrete wall, the flash of light tearing through the darkness from the cigarette lighter, held aloft in a fat brown hand.

I remembered the boot striking my chest, but I had no recollection of the injury done to my hand. Was it the same boot that stomped my hand, fracturing my fingers and wrist? Nor did I remember the paramedics carrying me away—no recollection of how long I had lain here before they did.

Nor did I know how long Spence had lain in his clotting, thickening blood while the police worked the crime scene. I never thought to ask Detective Martin that question, but somehow it seemed very important. It seemed like it should have been the
first
question I asked. The very first.

I did not remember the coroner’s van backing up to the bathroom door. Did not remember Spence’s stiffening body being peeled from the filth he was lying in and zipped into a black vinyl
body bag like so much garbage being hauled out to the curb. How could I? I would have been long gone by then. Taken to be treated, to be
cured
, while Spence remained behind, alone and still. And dead.

I tried to block it all from my mind—what I remembered and what I only imagined.

Still hearing happy barks and laughter outside, I stood in the middle of that public bathroom and wondered what to do next. Now that my fear was dead, now that my anger was more alive than ever, just what the hell was I supposed to
do
?

It seemed odd that my vision was clear, that no tears had come to blur it. My eyes were even adjusting to the dim light. I saw chips in the concrete wall and remembered the attacker striking the wall with the metal rod, remembered the ring of it, remembered the sting of the concrete chip the strike dislodged cutting into my cheek.

And moments later the fat man with the horrific mole on his face—or was it the skinny man with the moustache?—or perhaps it was the third man, the man I couldn’t remember at all—

—
whichever one it was, he found a better use for the weapon in his hand and turned it on Spence. I closed my eyes, recalling the sound of that first strike. The almost orgasmic sigh Spence made when his life suddenly seeped away. I also remembered the sound of the second and third blows, when Spence made no sound at all. He was already gone by then, I now knew. Already dead. Already lost to me.

I stood in the darkness of that reeking toilet and flexed my fingers against the pain of their healing. Then I clenched my fists so tightly my fingernails cut into the palms of my hands. The pain felt good. It felt necessary. Once more I felt the stickiness of blood against my fingertips. This time it was my own blood. I squeezed tighter, and my fingernails cut deeper into my palm. The pain made me smile.

Still amazed that no tears had dampened my eyes, I turned to the bar of sunlight spilling through the doorway. A shadow fell on the filthy floor. A man walked in, a terrier bouncing at his feet. He had his hand over his eyes, as if trying to adjust to the sudden darkness. I stepped out of his way as he moved toward the urinal in the back.