cooperate.
“What did she tell you?” I said.
My voice sounded thin and strange. The voice of someone I was neither familiar, nor entirely comfortable with.
“She talked about the rail yards, about a man. Showed up in your neighborhood one day. A white man, big, with shoulders.”
Diane’s words jump-started the images that slept somewhere inside. The movie reel danced, flickered, and began to turn. Silent all these years, the man was back, grinning at the boy, now grown. Mocking the passage of time. As if that had changed anything.
“The rail yards are at Grand and Central,” I said.
Inside the boy was still kicking and screaming. But I moved forward. No real choice in the matter.
“In the middle of my old neighborhood. Some older kids had boosted a Good Humor truck and dumped it there. Free ice cream, you know. Nirvana for a pedophile. Anyway, that’s where he took her.”
I shook my head, but the movie continued to play.
“The back of his skull was shaved. Heavy forehead, pale white skin, small eyes like black raisins. Face was pitted, covered on one side with a birthmark. Sounds scary, huh?”
Diane nodded.
“Thing was, he had a bag full of string licorice. Remember that stuff? I loved the red kind. So did Nicole. That was how he took her, I think. Trolled around the ice-cream truck and then used the licorice.”
“You found them?”
“I was a couple of years older. Fourteen, maybe. I guess I knew the basics of sex, but I had never seen it. Didn’t think it would be like that.”
“It isn’t, Michael.”
“At the end of the rail yards is a place we used to call ‘the swamp.’ Pretty much what it was. Ran right under the tracks. He had her sitting on a rock, head down, his hand in her hair, forcing her mouth onto him. I remember seeing him turn first toward me, then her face followed. She was crying, but there was a freight train rolling overhead so there was no sound. Well, there was plenty of sound, just nothing from her.”
I took a pull on the beer, but it had no taste. The movie played, the train rolled. No sound but plenty of pictures. Diane inched closer, knees touching mine, took up both my hands, and held them close. I didn’t pull away anymore.
“I wasn’t a big kid,” I continued, “but I was probably the toughest in a tough neighborhood. Wouldn’t have mattered. The guy was huge, would have killed me. Still, when I saw him, saw Nicole, the world went black. It used to happen when I was a kid. Things would get fuzzy, sort of a hot mist. Then just black. After that, it was like I was outside myself. Watching. Waiting to see what might happen.
“I guess I got lucky, grabbed at an old piece of board. Had a big old nail on the end. Caught him with it just above the temple. Man fell like a wall of bricks. Knees first, chest, then his head. With a slap on the ground. I was on top of him. Actually, both of us were. Me and Nicole. Beat him until we couldn’t lift our arms.”
I finished off the beer. The buzzer rang at the front door. Diane got up, paid the pizza guy, and set out plates. Then she sat down, took my hands in hers again, and waited.
“I think he was dead,” I said. “Pretty sure. I think the nail did it. It was early spring, a Friday afternoon after school, and we left him there. I remember his tongue just peeking out between his lips. Ran like hell. Left him in the swamp. Goddamn freight train was still running overhead.”
I picked up a piece of pizza and took a bite. Tasted like nothing, too.
“What about after?” Diane said.
“There was no after,” I said. “That night we had a huge rainstorm. Mudslides, flooding. Monsoon-type shit.”
I stopped for a moment and felt the rain again, black and cold, dropping straight down from the sky, hammering on the roof, tearing at my bedroom window. I stayed in there, alone, thinking someone, somewhere was angry. And I wondered at whom.
“We couldn’t even get near the swamp for a week and a half,” I said. “When we did, Nicole and I, the water was still and deep. The entire ledge where we left him was washed out. If he was still there, he was under a lot of water and a lot of mud. If he was alive…well, neither one of us ever saw him again.”
“So you really don’t know?”
“If I killed him? I always figured I did. Unless and until I see that face again, that’s how I look at it.”
I shrugged.
“Some people can kill. Others can’t. I found out early on that I belong in the first group. I’m okay with that.”
“How about Nicole?”
I shook my head.
“Hard to say. The years went by. We’d talk about it every now and then. But we mostly left it alone. Seemed easier that way.”
“Usually is. And now?”
“Now I need to talk to John Grime.”
“You think he has an answer for you?”
“Depends on what the question is. Right now, I think it’s worth a try.”
Diane urged me softly to my feet. I let her. She led me into the bedroom, closed the blinds, and put my world on hold. We didn’t have sex. Instead, we made love. For the first time. When we were done, I thought the tears were mine. Until I realized they were hers.
CHAPTER 43
Illinois executes its killers inside a grim pile of brick just outside Chicago called Stateville prison. Death row itself, however, is located four hundred miles away, inside an even grimmer pile of brick called Menard. I flew into St. Louis, hired a car, and drove back across the state line. Diane knew the warden down at Menard and made the first phone call. He had no problem with my request to visit Grime, but only if the killer indicated, in writing, he wanted to see me. According to the warden, Grime had not taken a visitor who wasn’t an attorney in more than five years. Still, I scratched out a note, sealed it up, and sent it down to the prison. A week later my phone rang. Grime gave the okay. So here I was.
“Empty your pockets into the tray.”
The voice bled through a wooden speaker on the wall. A plastic tray was shoved through a metal slot set in a piece of opaque Plexi. I dumped my pockets into the tray and slid it back through. A few minutes later the disembodied voice returned.
“Pass through for shakedown.”
A lock turned to my left, and a door opened. I walked into a larger room with three correctional officers: two females and one male, sitting in three cubicles and not smiling. One of the females pointed to a door on my right.
“In there. Take your pants off and wait.”
I walked into the room and waited. Kept my pants on. After a few minutes, a correctional officer with a shaved bullet for a head muscled through. He didn’t have rubber gloves on, and I felt immediately better.
“You’re supposed to have your pants off.”
“And why would that be?”
Bullet-head smiled.
“Mostly we do it just to see if people will comply. Gets boring out here. Let me just pat you down and we can go in.”
Five minutes later I was in a small holding room, a visitor’s badge clipped to my chest, waiting.
All prisons are basically the same. Some more so than others. Especially if they are old. Menard had housed more than a hundred years’ worth of human suffering. Anguish and fear, sweat, piss, and bedsprings sharpened into
