I was getting tired of having to answer that question, and maybe that was why I surprised the hell out of myself by saying, “Yeah, I drink too much.”
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Alcohol is legal.”
“If I tell you about the illegal stuff, you gonna slap cuffs on me?”
She shook her head. “You don’t do coke or heroin or anything like that?”
“None of those things. Chapel asked me this stuff, too, when I went to see him about the pictures.”
“He was asking for a different reason. He was asking to spare you embarrassment, maybe to anticipate possible blackmail. You’re saying you’ve used?”
I held up a hand and ticked off controlled substances. “I’ve done coke, pot, X, shrooms, dropped acid, and even eaten opium. That was when we were in Hawaii.” I brought the hand down. “Once each for all of it, and only ever on the tour. Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll say it again. Mikel never sold me drugs, never gave me drugs. He hated the fact that I drank, and he didn’t like me smoking.”
“Both your parents drink, or just your father?”
It was like being in the Larkins’ dining room all over again, except this time there was no Mikel, and Wagner was being played by a woman. I didn’t answer, but she waited me out.
“Both,” I said.
She leaned back in her chair, thinking. I finished my cigarette and crushed it out. Her eyes were on something past my shoulder, and I guessed this was what detectives looked like when they were trying to crack mysteries.
“Can I ask you something, Detective?” I said.
She came back. “Tracy.”
I needed a second, and then another, before I started laughing. “Detective Tracy?
She smiled, more amused at me than at the joke. She’d probably heard it a lot before.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What were you going to ask?”
“Is Tommy still a suspect?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Are you looking at any of Mikel’s friends?”
“We’ve talked to his friends. Their alibis check.”
“If you think it’s Tommy, why’d you let him go?”
“We didn’t have enough to charge.”
“So you don’t have evidence that he did it, but you think he did.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Mim. I’m saying he’s still a suspect, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because your father’s got three hours he can’t account for, roughly from the time your brother was murdered until the time he called in the nine-one-one.”
This was news. “Tommy’s the one who reported it?”
“He called from the condo to say his son had been shot. The first unit found him there, took him into custody. He was drunk, he blew a point one-nine on the Breathalyzer. To put it in perspective, you blew a point one-three when we picked you up.”
“I told you he’d been drinking—”
“No, you told us you thought he had, because your brother didn’t, and you’d seen bottles and cans throughout the condo.”
“You’re saying that my father shot my brother, then left long enough for me to come by and discover the body, and then he came back, got drunk, and called the police?”
“If I thought you were lying about the bottles, yes. But I know you’re not. That’s where it falls apart.”
“Only there?”
She ignored that. “We didn’t find a weapon anywhere, we didn’t find gloves, and Tommy’s GSR test came back negative.”
“GSR?”
“Gunshot residue.”
I remembered that they had swabbed my hands after they’d brought me in, too. Then I wondered how seriously they’d looked at me for my brother’s murder.
She turned in the chair, showing me her profile and raising her right hand, as if shooting my microwave. With her other hand she made sprinkling motions over her right hand and forearm. “When you fire a gun, traces of the charge get absorbed into the skin. The test is very simple, very accurate. Both you and your father tested negative.”
“And no gloves means what?”
“Either he ditched the gloves, along with the gun, or he didn’t do it. We’re still looking for the gun.”
For a long time I didn’t say anything, and it was like that morning, when I’d read in the paper that Tommy had been released. Surprise at what I was feeling, and relief, and more, and I didn’t know why I even cared. It bothered me that Hoffman was sitting there, telling me that Tommy was still a suspect.
“Why would Tommy kill Mikel?” I asked. “Mikel had been nice to him, Mikel was taking care of him. If he was going to kill one of us, it would’ve been me.”
“What if he learned that his son had been selling naked pictures of his daughter on the Internet?”
This time, I got really angry. “People keep saying that! Mikel didn’t do it!”
“Fine, give me proof.”
“I don’t—”
“Mikel had access to your home the entire time you were away,” Hoffman interrupted. “He knew enough about computers to set up the system here. He sold drugs, and apparently he did it only for the money, not for the product. Why not try to make a little extra off his sister?”
“There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to start! He was my brother, don’t you get that? He would never do that to me, he was always trying to protect me. And as for money—Jesus, all he had to do was ask.”
Hoffman didn’t say anything for a moment, giving me time to calm down.
“It wasn’t Mikel who took the pictures,” I insisted. “And it wasn’t my father who killed him.”
And as soon as I’d said it aloud, I discovered that I believed it. Tommy had committed a great many sins, but he could never have taken a gun and shot his son. It didn’t matter how drunk he might’ve been, it didn’t matter how provoked he might have felt. It never would happen. And if he wasn’t drunk, if he was sober when he did it, then we were talking about a level of premeditation that was beyond him. He wasn’t a planner. He was like me; life happened to us, we didn’t do things to life.
I sat there, and I thought about it and thought about it, and the only thing I discovered was that the more I thought about it, the more certain I became. Maybe it was utter bullshit, maybe there was no reason or logic to it.
But if the cops pinned the murder on Tommy, either because he was a drunk or a bastard or had one murder to his name already, it meant that the son of a bitch who
Hoffman gazed at me, and it was disconcertingly close to the looks she’d shot at me in the interrogation room three nights before.
After a second, I said, “Tommy knows what happened. He didn’t do it, but he knows what happened. He says he doesn’t remember, but I think he’s lying.”
“And you know this how, exactly?”
“Because I know how that works.”
“That’s not really something that’ll stand up in court.”
I fidgeted with my pack of smokes, trying to use my hands to keep my brain quiet. “My brother’s been
