"Remember anything?"
The detective stood up-as did Brolan-and extended his hand. As they shook, the detective said, "Remember anything you might have forgotten to tell me." He stared directly into Brolan's eyes. "Maybe later on you'll recall that you actually met the woman somewhere previously. Maybe you just didn't recognize this particular picture. That happens sometimes."
"But I don't know her, and I'm sure of that."
"Well," the detective said, "just in case anything like that does come up, please feel free to give me a call."
He handed Brolan a small white card with very unfancy typeset information on it.
Brolan nodded and took the card and right then realized that somebody had very crudely-but very effectively-framed him for murder for a second time.
"Talk to you again, Mr. Brolan," the detective said as he was leaving.
27
He was fourteen years old the first time he ever hurt a girl. The funny thing was, he hadn't planned on it happening at all.
Next door there was a twelve-year-old named Jessica. He'd known for a long time that she had a crush on him. She followed him everywhere and wrote him letters and was always asking him to join various neighbourhood clubs she invented. She also frequently asked him to come over when American Bandstand was on and dance the twist with him. This was in the summer of 1961. Later he would try to figure out why he did what he did, if there were some certain inspiration for doing it. But he could find none. It was a typical summer, a humid and furious green in the wealthy neighbourhood where he lived, and a pastel blue where his family had a cabin and sailed-blue water, blue skies.
There were woods two miles from his house, and sometimes he'd ride his bike over there and go hiking. He liked the woods, the secret hiding places, especially, where he could sit and watch people walk by on the trails below that ran along the edge of the river. The secret hiding places made him feel powerful, and he needed that sense particularly this summer. His parents were getting a divorce.
They'd always fought, but now there was violence. His mother had a lover. His father could not get over this fact. Several times he'd seen his father very savagely slap his mother.
Curiously, though, it was his father who always cried after such violence, never his mother. She went downstairs and had a drink of bourbon and smoked several cigarettes and stared out at the vast rolling lawn kept in shape by a coloured man none of them quite trusted. His father always disintegrated, going into the den and sobbing, the way a boy would sob. He always wanted to go in and put his arm around his father, but he couldn't because his mother would get angry and accuse him of taking his father's side and not hers.
Sometimes he would go downstairs and talk to his mother before she got drunk. "You don't have to go away with that other man, Mother. You can stay here. Things can be like they were. We can be happy again, just the three of us."
"Oh, baby," she'd say, touching his face gently, "baby, you're just too young to understand. But Dad loves you," she'd say. "Dad loves you. That's the only reason he hits you." Then she'd smile and say, "You've got to give Gil a chance. You'll like him once you get to know him. He played for the Vikings one year; did I ever tell you that?"
"You tell me that all the time, and I don't give a shit. I don't want to live with him!"
"Baby, you hurt me when you talk like that; you really do."
Then he'd go upstairs and stand outside the den and listen to his father stretch out on the leather couch. Usually his father would fall asleep. It was as if he could no longer face consciousness, and he'd just tune out.
By nightfall, she'd be dressed up and gone, moving through the summer dusk in the aqua Thunderbird with the white hardtop.
He'd make his father dinner. Oh, no gourmet dining to be sure-usually a chili dog with potato chips and maybe baked beans, the sort of stuff they always ate at the cabin. Then he'd take it up to the den, and he'd knock softly and his father would wake up and let him in. His father's law practice had pretty much gone to hell over the previous four months. He'd heard his father arguing bitterly with one of his partners on the phone about how his father wasn't carrying his load.
So, in the den they'd eat and watch TV shows, such as Perry Mason and Lawman and the Jack Benny and Andy Griffith programs. Both his father and he were big fans of Don Knotts. Whenever Don, as Barney, was called upon to hold down the fort while Andy was off doing something else, you just knew it was going to be a great episode.
And his father would try to explain. Ultimately he understood or thought he understood anyway. Impotence. "Do you know what that means?" his father would ask. "Sorta," he'd say. "Sorta."
They'd been to doctors, and they'd been to psychiatrists, and they'd tried all sorts of methods and techniques, but it hadn't seemed to help. His mother started drinking then and saying that in some way it was her fault, and then things just kept getting worse and worse until now.
Sometimes his father would start drinking, too, and that was the worst, because his father was an even worse drinker than his mother. After several drinks he was like a stranger, angry and violent-his handsome face distorted in rage-smashing things up with his fists and always ending up on the couch crying, crying.
When his father got like this, all he could do was watch. His father's temper was so bad that he was afraid to go up to the man. Afraid of really getting hurt. Sometimes the booze would make his father more or less unconscious. When this happened, he'd turn off the light and stand in the doorway listening to his father snore and then he'd say, "Good night, Dad. I love you." Then he'd close the door and go to his own room.
He usually didn't sleep till his mother got home. Deep into the rolling black night he'd hear the T-bird's engine on the drive below and see the wash of its headlights across his window, and then he'd hear the automatic garage door go up.
She always came in and kissed him goodnight. She always smelled of hard liquor and what he would later recognize as the moist scent of sex. He always pretended to be asleep. He didn't know what to say to her. He wanted to say, "You whore, you whore." But he wasn't sure that was true. He didn't know if it was her fault his father was impotent… or if it was his father's fault.
Six weeks before school was to start, his father made things easy for everybody by driving his new Chrysler straight into a bridge abutment at more than ninety miles per hour. Officially the word was accident, but of course he'd been drunk, and of course he'd meant to do it.
Three weeks later the incident with Jessica took place in the woods.
He had no idea how she'd found his hiding place near the clay cliffs above the water. He was sitting in the shade of a clay overhang, trying to escape the ninety-six-degree heat, when he looked up, and there she was. Dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff Levi's and a pair of white tennis shoes. Hands on hips. Very bold.
"You probably didn't think I knew about this place, did you?"
He shrugged. "Guess not."
"Well, there're a lot of things I know."
"Oh."
He closed his eyes, willing her out of existence. The air was heavy with humidity and butterflies and mosquitoes and bluejays and wrens and robins. Close by, the air smelled of spruce and maple and redbud; of wild ginger and ginseng and bloodroot. He often wished he were a deer and could bound through the bluffs and caves and mineral springs; the lakes and gorges and forests. That was his most profound wish-even more than being like Steve McQueen or Marshall Matt Dillon-to be an animal, to appreciate nature and know nothing of the human heart.
"Is it all right if I sit down?" Jessica asked.
"Guess so."
As she took two steps toward him, he realized again that Jessica was blooming suddenly. Small but distinct breasts played against the white cotton of her T-shirt, and her summer-tanned legs were getting long and shapely. Even her blue eyes had changed somehow-were more knowing, inscrutable. She used to be just a kid. But now she was something more than that, even if she wasn't quite a woman yet.