“Anytime,” Mikey responded, not an ounce of fear in his voice. Johnny, who was standing next to him in shock, truly believed that Mikey meant it.
“Come on. Let’s go home,” Johnny pleaded after the counselor took Paulie away. “Those guys aren’t playing around.”
“Neither am I, Johnny. Neither am I.”
He didn’t leave and Paulie never came after him. Somehow Paulie knew that Mikey was not a person to mess with no matter how old he was.
The afternoon was spent outside playing punchball or on the third floor playing dodgeball. The younger kids had their own punchball court. Mikey was always a captain and Johnny was his first pick even though he wasn’t the best athlete available. Patty was much better but Mikey could get her with his second or even third pick because she was a girl. Mikey counted on that. He made Johnny feel good and he didn’t lose anything in the process. Johnny suspected as much. It was part of the reason he wasn’t crazy about Patty always tagging along.
Sometimes Johnny skipped their own game to watch the older guys play on the big court. He loved watching Joey Maier snare a ball hit down the line with his right hand and flip it over to “Spider” at first. There was no hitting above the fielders’ heads on this court. You had to “punch” it through, and the shortest distance and the best place to try for a hit was down the third base line, which Joey patrolled and protected. Rarely did a ball get by him. He’d flip it underhand to first where Spider was a vacuum cleaner, always catching the ball with one hand, his left. Never missing.
They were his idols in those days. He spent hours emulating them, throwing the rubber ball against the concrete wall across the street from his house, picking up the return grounder with his right hand, flicking it back against the wall and snaring it on the fly with his left. In those moments, he was Joey and Spider all wrapped in one.
Saturday mornings they huddled in front of the television at Mikey’s house. It was a black and white, maybe fourteen inches, with a lot of fuzzy white lines. The Kellys were a brood, six kids in all, and they were scattered over the couch, chairs and floor, transfixed for hours on the Saturday morning lineup: “Fury,” “My Friend Flicka,” “Mighty Mouse,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Tales of the Texas Rangers,” “Roy Rogers” and “Sky King.”
Johnny always found a spot on the floor. Mrs. Kelly would walk among them silently handing out bowls of cereal. Johnny got Raisin Bran because Mrs. Kelly knew that was his favorite.
On Sunday after church, the teenagers played stickball right on his block, hitting towering shots sometimes two, three sewer covers long with that little rubber ball, the Spalding, and somebody’s mother’s broomstick. Only two guys in the neighborhood could hit it over three sewers, big Joe Coyle, who lived across the street, and Jimmy Hayes, who lived next door. People hung out of their windows just to watch those guys play. Years later, Boyle became a college football halfback and Hayes a basketball star, but to Johnny their best days were out there on the street.
Those were the only days of his life that were magical as he lived them. No worries, no cares. A life that was full. Things would change soon enough.
Four
Word of the murder of Lucy Ochoa spread through Bass Creek like wildfire. At first Rudy didn’t know who it was because Lucy had never told him her name. But as customers filtered in and out over the next week talking about the young woman and describing her, Rudy started to wonder. He only knew for sure when the Bass Creek Gazette finally obtained a picture of Lucy and published it on the front page a week after her body was discovered. Rudy was shocked. He went to the Gazette building, which was a block away from the hotel on Oak Street, and bought every paper for the last week. Then he carefully read everything about the murder of Lucy Ochoa.
According to the coroner, the murder had happened on Thursday, January 16th, or early in the morning of the 17th. Rudy retraced the days in his mind. That was the same night I was there! The time of death freaked him out even more. The coroner had estimated the time of death to have been somewhere between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Rudy knew he had locked up the convenience store at eleven and gone directly to Lucy’s trailer, but he wasn’t sure what time he’d left. He read further: Her throat had been cut, probably with a knife. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery.
After he’d read everything, Rudy sat and thought about it for a long time. He’d been at the murder scene during the time the murder was supposed to have happened. But Lucy was fine the last time he saw her. She didn’t seem to have any problems pushing him out the door. Should he go to the police with what he knew? That idea scared him. They were nice enough when they came in the store but he’d seen them beating up a guy on the street one night, a guy he knew to be a harmless old drunk, and they did it to other innocent people, too-he’d seen it on TV.
At that moment, it hit Rudy like a bullet to the brain that he might actually be a suspect and that the police might try to make him confess, just like they did to people on TV. I’m not confessing to nothing, he told himself. What should I do? Should I tell Mom? He’d have to tell her about why he was at Lucy’s house-and about the drinking. That just wasn’t going to work. In the end, he decided to do nothing. Nobody knows I was in her house, he concluded, and promptly tried not to think about it again.
By the end of the week, the police had analyzed all the blood samples: from Lucy’s body, the bed, the carpet and the pieces of glass. The neighborhood had been canvassed but most of the neighbors hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual that night. Pilar Rodriguez remembered someone with dark hair throwing up on her lawn somewhere around midnight, but she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. Maybe it was that kid from the convenience store-Rudy was his name-but she really couldn’t be sure. Farther down the block, a young man named Ray Castro said that he’d seen someone, a tall, dark-haired man, go in Lucy’s trailer sometime after eleven and then come stumbling down the street from that direction less than an hour later and puke in the Rodriguezes’ front yard. His friend Jose Guerrero had seen the same thing. There had been a third person with them that night, a guy named Geronimo, but neither knew his last name and he couldn’t be located. And neither of them mentioned his relationship with Lucy or that he’d headed that way after they’d all seen the dark-haired guy.
The only bombshell-and it really wasn’t a bombshell yet because the only person Harry Tuthill told was Wesley Brume-was the coroner’s aside to Brume that Lucy had had sexual intercourse that evening. He had managed to extract a semen sample and had checked for signs of rape. There were none.
On Friday morning, January 24th, Wes Brume was summoned to the office of Clay Evans IV, the Cobb County state attorney, to discuss the evidence in the Lucy Ochoa murder. The state attorney’s office was just down the block from the police department, so it was a short trip for Brume. The woman’s murder had already been headlines across the state and Clay wanted it solved and the perpetrator brought to trial while interest was still at least lukewarm. Too often the press reported the murder but not the aftermath. If a suspect was discovered early on, the story might continue for a while. But the only surefire way to keep the press on the story was with a trial. They loved trials the way normal people loved sex and they were teaching the public to love them too. Clay desperately wanted that publicity.
Clay Evans IV was a WASP-a fifth generation, blue-blooded Florida WASP. Great granddaddy had once been the governor. His own father had been a state senator from Cobb County and eventually secretary of state for Florida. There had been money once too-citrus groves as far as the eye could see. But granddaddy, the weak link in the family line, had sold all the land at a bad time and squandered most of the money, leaving behind just the blue blood and the arrogance. Clay’s poor father, the Third, had been forced by circumstance to go to work for a living.