chain-smoked on an asthma puffer. He was almost a semi-tragic figure but not quite so tragic as Rory McIntyre, a sleepwalker who did a high dive off the third-floor balcony in the early hours of Foundation Day. They say that sleepwalkers wake up in midair but Rory didn't make a sound. Nor did he make a splash. He always was a good diver.
Howard takes a seat and doesn't seem surprised by the sound of my voice. Instead he stops, arches his neck and swivels his head like an old tortoise. I step in front of him. He blinks at me slowly.
“Hello, Howard, I want to talk to you about Rachel Carlyle.”
He smiles little by little but doesn't answer. A scar runs from one side of his throat to the other, just beneath his chins.
“She comes to see you. Why?”
“You should ask her.”
“What do you talk about?”
He glances at the screws. “I don't have to tell you anything. My appeal application is next Thursday.”
“You're not getting out of here, Howard. Nobody wants to set you free.”
Again he smiles. Certain people don't seem to match their voices. Howard is like that. It is pitched too high, as though laced with helium, and his pale face seems disconnected from his body like a white balloon moving gently in a breeze.
“We can't all be perfect, Mr. Ruiz. We make mistakes and we deal with the consequences. The difference between you and me is that I have my God. He will judge me and get me out of here. Do you ever wonder who is judging you?”
He seems confident. Why? Maybe he knows about the ransom demand. Any suggestion Mickey might still be alive would automatically grant him a retrial.
“Why does Mrs. Carlyle come here?”
He raises his hands in mock surrender and lowers them again. “She wants to know what I did with Mickey. She's worried I might die before telling anyone.”
“You're messing up your insulin injections.”
“Do you know what it's like to go into a diabetic coma? First my breathing becomes labored. My mouth and tongue are parched. My blood pressure falls and my pulse accelerates. I get blurred vision, then pain in my eyes. Finally, I slip into unconsciousness. If they don't reach me quickly enough, my kidneys will fail completely and my brain will be permanently damaged. Soon after that I will die.”
He seems to revel in these details, as if looking forward to it.
“Did you tell her what happened to Mickey?”
“I told her the truth.”
“Tell me.”
“I told her that I'm not an innocent man but I am innocent of this crime. I have sinned but not committed
“And how are the children going to judge you?”
He goes silent.
Sweat rings beneath his arms have spread out and merged, plastering his shirt to his skin so that I can see every freckle and mole. There's something else on his back, beneath the fabric. Something has discolored the material, turning it yellow.
Howard has to look over his right shoulder to see me. He grimaces slightly. At that same moment, I force him forward across the table. Deaf to his squeals that are muffled against my forearm, I lift his shirt. His flesh is like pulped melon. Angry wounds crisscross his back, weeping blood and yellow crystalline scum.
Prison guards are running toward us. One of them puts a handkerchief over his mouth.
“Get a doctor,” I yell. “Move!”
Commands are shouted and phone calls are made. Howard is screaming and thrashing like he's on fire. Suddenly, he lies still, with his arms stretched across the table.
“Who did this to you?”
He doesn't answer.
“Talk to me. Who did this?”
He mumbles something. I can't quite hear him. Leaning closer, I pick up the words, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not . . . never yield to temptation . . .”
There is something tucked inside the sleeve of his shirt. He doesn't stop me pulling it free. It's the wooden handle of a skipping rope, threaded with a twelve-inch strand of fencing wire. Self-flagellation, self-mutilation, fasting and flogging—can someone please explain them to me?
Howard shrugs my hand away and gets to his feet. He won't wait for a doctor and he doesn't want to talk any more. He shuffles toward the door, with his flapping shoes, yellow skin and shallow breathing. At the last possible moment he turns and I'm expecting one of those pleading, kicked-dog looks.
Instead I get something different. This man whom I helped lock away for murder; who flays himself with fencing wire, who every day is spat upon, jeered, threatened and abused . . . this man looks sorry for
Eighty-five steps and ninety-four hours—that's how long Mickey had been missing when I served a search warrant on number 9 Dolphin Mansions.
“Surprise. Surprise,” I said as Howard opened the door. His large eyes bulged slightly and his mouth opened but no sound came out. He was wearing a pajama top, long shorts with an elasticized waist and dark brown loafers that accentuated the whiteness of his shins.
I started like I always did—telling Howard how much I knew about him. He was single, never married. He grew up in Warrington, the youngest of seven children in a big loud Protestant family. Both his parents were dead. He had twenty-eight nieces and nephews and was godfather to eleven of them. In 1962 he was hospitalized after a traffic accident. A year later he suffered a nervous breakdown and became a voluntary outpatient at a clinic in north London. He had worked as a storeman, a laborer, a painter and decorator, a van driver and now a gardener. He went to church three times a week, sang in the choir, read biographies, was allergic to strawberries and took photographs in his spare time.
I wanted Howard to feel like he was fifteen and I had just caught him jerking off in the showers at Cottesloe Park. And no matter what excuses he offered, I'd know he was lying. Fear and uncertainty—the most powerful weapons in the known world.
“You left something out,” he mumbled.
“What's that?”
“I'm a diabetic. Insulin shots, the whole business.”
“My uncle had that.”
“Don't tell me—he gave up chocolate bars and started jogging and his diabetes went away. I hear that all the time. That and, ‘Christ, I would just die if I had to stick a needle in myself every day.' Or this is a good one, ‘You get that from being fat don't you?'”
People were trooping past us, wearing overalls and gloves. Some carried metal boxes with photographic equipment and lights. Duckboards had been laid like stepping-stones down the hall.
“What are you looking for?” he asked softly.
“Evidence. That's what detectives do. It's what we use to support a case. It turns hypothesis into theories and theories into cases.”
“I'm a case.”
“A work in progress.”
That was the truth of it. I couldn't say what I was looking for until I found it—clothing, fingerprints, binding material, videos, photographs, a seven-year-old girl with a lisp . . . any of the above.
“I want a lawyer.”
“Good. You can use my phone. Afterward we'll go outside and hold a joint press conference on the front steps.”
