She gave me a knowing smile. “If there’s something a man needs, I know it.”
I shifted backward, touched the door panel. “Is there anything you want to tell me about Troy?”
“I know men,” she repeated.
I caught her gaze and held it. She touched the bruise on her cheek. Her lips quivered.
“Where’d you get that?” I said.
“You think I’m ugly.”
“No, but I would like to know- ”
“I used to be hot,” she said. “My tits were like water balloons, I used to dance.” She pressed her palms to her chest.
“Ms. Hannabee- ”
“You don’t have to call me that. Miz. I’m no Miz.”
“Jane- ”
She wheeled, grabbed my arm again. Claw-fingers bit through the wool of my sleeve. No seductiveness this time. Desperation, as cold fear brightened her eyes and I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d once been.
“Everyone?”
“He’s the big one, Troy’s little. Troy’s my little man. It weren’t his fault he hooked up with the retard.”
“Rand’s the guilty one,” I said.
Her grip on my arm tightened further. “Zactly.”
“Did Troy tell you that Rand killed the baby?”
“Yeah.”
I glanced down at her fingers. She coughed and sniffed and removed them.
“He’ll get better,” she said.
“Who will?”
“Troy. You give him a chance and he’ll get better and go to college.”
“You think he’s sick.”
She stared at me. “Everyone’s sick. Being alive’s being sick. We got to be forgiving. Like Jesus.”
I said nothing.
She said, “You understand? About forgiving?”
“It’s a wonderful quality,” I said. “Being able to forgive.”
“I forgive everyone.”
“Everyone who hurts you?”
“Yeah, why not? Who cares what happened before? Same with Troy, what he did is over. And he didn’t even do it. The retard did.”
She turned in the seat, bumped her hip against the steering wheel and flinched. “You gonna help him?”
“I’ll do my best to be truthful.”
“You should,” she said. Leaning closer. Her scent was a strange mixture of old laundry and too-sweet perfume. “You could look like him.”
“Like who?”
“Jesus.” She smiled, ran a tongue over her lips. “Yeah, definitely. Put a beard on you, a little more hair and yeah, sure. You could be a real cute Jesus.”
CHAPTER 9
Tom Laskin’s clerk called me a couple of days later to check on my report. I told her I needed another week, picking the time arbitrarily, not sure why I was asking for an extension.
I spent ten more days on the case, interviewing the social workers and the eligibility officers who covered 415 City, visiting the project and chatting with neighbors, anyone who claimed to have something to offer. Each time, Margaret Sieff was out. Jane Hannabee had moved and no one knew where.
I visited the boys’ school. No one- not the principal or the guidance counselor or the teachers- had more than a vague remembrance of Troy or Rand. The last time either boy had been graded was a year ago. C minuses and a couple of D’s for Rand, which was social promotion; my testing had shown him to be illiterate with math skills at the second-grade level. B’s and C’s and D’s for Troy. He’d been judged “bright but disruptive.”
To the project workers, the young killers were names on forms. The residents all agreed that prior to his arrest, Rand Duchay had been viewed as a harmless oaf. Everyone I spoke to was certain he’d been turned bad by Troy Turner.
No divided opinions on Troy, either. He was seen as cunning, nasty, mean, “evil.” Scary despite his small size. Several residents claimed he’d threatened their children but the details were vague. One woman, young and black and nervous, stepped forward as I was leaving the project and said, “That boy done nasty things to my daughter.”
“How old’s your daughter?”
“Gonna be six next month.”
“What happened?”
She shook her head and hurried away and I didn’t go after her.
I asked to reinterview the boys but was blocked from doing so by Montez and Weider.
“They’re adamant,” Tom Laskin informed me. “Went so far as to file motions to keep you away.”
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“My feeling is it’s mostly Weider. She’s a manic shark.”
“She does talk fast.”
“Everything’s conflict with her, even when it doesn’t need to be,” said Laskin. “She says you’ve had more than enough time with her client, doesn’t want his head messed up before she brings her own experts in. Montez is a loafer, takes the path of least resistance. I could probably push it, Alex, but if I’m reversed I’d prefer it not be for something picayune. Do you really need more time?”
“Why would I mess up their clients’ heads?”
“Don’t take it personally,” he said. “It’s lawyer crap. Their basic premise is that you’re biased for the prosecution.”
“I haven’t spoken a word to the D.A.”
“It’s gamesmanship. They’re setting the stage so if you do say something they don’t like, they’ve precharacterized it as impeachable.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you when you get up on the stand. So when can I expect your compiled psychological wisdom on my desk?”
“Soon.”
“Soon is better than the alternative.”
I sat down to write my report, starting with the easy part- the crime scene, the background information, the test results. But even that was a struggle, and I hadn’t gotten far when Lauritz Montez called me.
“How’s it going, Doctor?”
