She does not recognize her son, her only child, and thinks that he is the old man from Massachusetts.
“Please,” she says, her voice cracking with pain.
The broken face suggests irreparable brain damage of an extent that wrings from Billy a choking sob.
Her one-eyed gaze travels from his face to the gun in his hand. “Please, Daddy Tom. Please.”
He is only fourteen, a mere boy, so recently a child, and there are choices he should not be asked to make. “Please.”
This is a choice to humble any grown man, and he cannot choose, will not choose. But, oh, her pain. Her fear. Her anguish.
With a thickening tongue, she pleads, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, where is me?
Who’s you? Who’s in here crawling, who is that? Who is you in here, scares me? Scares me!”
Sometimes the heart makes decisions that the mind cannot, and although we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we also know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering. In the years to come, he will never know if trusting his heart at this moment is the right choice. But he does as it tells him.
“I love you,” he says, and shoots his mother dead.
Lieutenant John Palmer is the first officer on the scene.
What initially appears to be the bold entrance of dependable authority will later seem, to Billy, like the eager rush of a vulture to carrion. Waiting for the police, Billy has been unable to move out of the kitchen. He cannot bear to leave his mother alone.
He feels that she hasn’t fully departed, that her spirit lingers and takes comfort from his presence. Or perhaps he feels nothing of the sort and only wishes this to be true.
231
Although he cannot look at her anymore, at what she has become, he stays nearby, eyes averted.
When Lieutenant Palmer enters, when Billy is no longer alone and no longer needs to be strong, his composure slips. Tremors nearly shake the boy to his knees.
Lieutenant Palmer asks, “What happened here, son?”
With these two deaths, Billy is no one’s child, and he feels his isolation in his bones, bleakness at the core, fear of the future.
When he hears the word son, therefore, it seems to be more than a mere word, seems to be a hand extended, hope offered.
Billy moves toward John Palmer.
Because the lieutenant is calculating or only because he is human, after all, he opens his arms.
Shaking, Billy leans into those arms, and John Palmer holds him close.
“Son? What happened here?”
“He beat her. I shot him. He beat her with the wrench.”
“You shot him?”
“He beat her with the lug wrench. I shot him. I shot her.”
Another man might allow for the emotional turmoil of this young witness, but the lieutenant’s primary consideration is that he has not yet made captain. He is an ambitious man. And impatient.
Two years previous, a seventeen-year-old boy in Los Angeles County, far south of Napa, had shot his parents to death. He pleaded innocent by reason of long-term sexual abuse.
That trial, having concluded only two weeks before this pivotal night in Billy Wiles’s life, had resulted in conviction. The pundits predicted the boy would go free, but the detective in charge of the case had been diligent, accumulating a convincing mass of evidence, catching the perpetrator in lie after lie.
For the past two weeks, that indefatigable detective had been a media hero. He received lots of face time on TV. His name was better known than that of the mayor of Los Angeles.
With Billy’s admission, John Palmer does not see an opportunity to pursue the truth but instead sees an opportunity.
“Who did you shoot, son? Him or her?”
232
“I s-shot him. I shot her. He beat her so bad with the wrench, I had to sshoot them both.”
As other sirens swell in the distance, Lieutenant Palmer leads Billy out of the kitchen, into the living room. He directs the boy to sit on the sofa. His question no longer is What happened here, son? His question now is,
“What have you done, boy? What have you done?”
For too long, young Billy Wiles does not hear the difference. Thus begins sixty hours of hell.
At fourteen, he cannot be made to stand trial as an adult. With the death penalty and life imprisonment off the table, the pressures of interrogation should be less than with an adult offender.
John Palmer, however, is determined to break Billy, to wring from him a confession that he himself beat his mother with the lug wrench, shot his father when his father tried to protect her, then finished her, too, with a bullet. Because the punishment for juvenile offenders is so much less severe than for adults, the system
