'Let's go.'
'Matty, let an old guy look out for you for once.'
'Come on, Vernon.'
'It's your nightmare, then,' the detective said. He'd been absolutely right about that.
Cowart remembered staring at the executive and his wife. There was so much blood it was almost as if they were dressed. Every time the police photographer's flash exploded, the bodies glistened for an instant.
Wordlessly, he had followed the detective into the kitchen. The boy sat there wearing sneakers and jeans, his slight torso naked, one arm handcuffed to a chair. Streaks of blood marked his body, but he ignored them and casually smoked a cigarette with his free hand. It made him look even younger, like a child trying to act older, cooler, to impress the policemen in the room but really only appearing slightly silly. Cowart noted a smear of blood in the boy's blond hair, matting the curls together, another tinge of dried brown blood on the boy's cheek. The kid didn't even need to shave yet.
The boy looked up when Cowart and the detective entered the room. 'Who's that?' he asked, nodding toward Cowart.
For an instant Matthew locked his eyes with the boy's. They were an ancient blue, endlessly evil, like staring at the iron edge of an executioner's sword.
'He's a reporter, with the journal,' Hawkins said.
'Hey, reporter!' the kid said, suddenly smiling.
'What?'
'You tell everybody I didn't do nothing,' he said. Then he laughed in a high-pitched, wheezing way that echoed after Cowart and forever froze in his memory, as Hawkins steered him out of the room, back out into the hurrying dawn.
He had gone to his office and written the story of the junior executive, his wife, and the teenager. He'd described the white sheets crumpled and brown with blood, the red spatter marks marking the walls with Daliesque horror. He'd written about the neighborhood and the trim house and a framed testimonial on the wall attesting to the victim's membership in an advanced sales club. He'd written about suburban dreams and the lure of forbidden sex. He'd described the Fort Lauderdale strip where children cruised nightly, aging far beyond their years every minute. And he'd described the boy's eyes, burning them into the story, just the way his friend had asked him to.
He'd ended the story with the boy's words.
When he'd gone home that night, carrying a copy of the first edition under his arm, his story jamming the front page, he had felt an exhaustion that had gone far beyond lack of sleep. He had crawled into his bed, pulling himself up against his wife, even knowing that she planned to leave him, shivering, flu-like, unable to find any warmth in the world.
Cowart shook his head to dispel the morning and looked around his work cubicle.
Hawkins was dead now. Retired with a little ceremony, given a pension, and released to cough his life away with emphysema. Cowart had gone to the ceremony and clapped when the chief of police had cited the detective's contributions. He'd gone to see him in the detective's small Miami Beach apartment every time he could. It had been a barren place, decorated with some old clippings of stories Cowart and others had written. 'Remember the rules,' Hawkins had told him at the end of each visit, 'and if you can't remember what I told you about the street, then make up your own rules and live by them.' They had laughed. Then he'd gone to the hospital as frequently as possible, taking off early and surreptitiously from his office to go and trade stories with the detective, until the last time, when he'd arrived and found Hawkins unconscious beneath an oxygen tent, and Cowart hadn't known whether the detective heard him when he whispered his name, or felt him when he picked up his hand. He had sat beside the bed for one long night, not even knowing when it was that the detective's life had slipped away in the darkness. Then he'd gone to the funeral, along with a few other old policemen. There'd been a flag, a coffin, a few words from a priest. No wife. No children. Dry eyes. Just a nightmare's worth of memories being lowered slowly into the ground. He wondered if it would be the same when he died.
I wonder what happened to the kid, he thought. Probably out of juvenile hall and out on the street. Or on Death Row beside the letter writer. Or dead.
He looked at the letter.
This really should be a news story, he thought, not an editorial. He ought to hand it to someone on the city desk and let them check it out. I don't do that anymore. I am a man of opinions and positions. I write from a distance, a member of a board which votes and decides and adopts positions, not passions. I have given up my name.
He half rose from his chair to do exactly that, then stopped.
An innocent man.
In all the crimes and trials he'd covered, he tried to remember ever seeing a genuinely innocent man. He'd seen plenty of not-guilty verdicts, charges dismissed for lack of evidence, cases lost by sheer defensive eloquence or stumbling prosecution. But he could not recall someone genuinely innocent. He'd asked Hawkins once if he'd ever arrested someone like that, and he'd laughed. 'A man who really didn't do it? Ah, you screw up a bunch, that's for sure. A lot of guys walk who shouldn't. But bust somebody who's really innocent? That's the worst possible case. I don't know if I could live with that. No, sir. That's the only one I'd ever really lose sleep over.'
He held the letter in his hand. I DID NOT COMMIT. He wondered, Is someone losing sleep over Robert Earl Ferguson?
He felt a hot flush of excitement. If it's true, he thought… He did not complete the idea in his head but swallowed swiftly, curbing a sudden flash of ambition.
Cowart remembered an interview he'd read years before about a graceful, aging basketball player who was finally hanging up his sneakers after a long career. The man had talked about his achievements and disappointments in the same breath, as if treating them each with a sort of restrained and equal dignity. He had been asked why he was finally quitting, and he started to talk about his family and children, his need to put the game of his childhood away finally and get on with his life. Then he'd talked about his legs, not as if they were a part of his body, but as if they were old and good friends. He'd said that he could no longer jump the way he'd once been able to, that now when he gathered himself to soar toward the hoop, the leg muscles that once had seemed to launch him so easily screamed with age and pain, insisting he quit. And he had said that without his legs' cooperation, continuing was useless. Then he had gone out to his final game and scored thirty-eight points effortlessly – shifting, twisting, and leaping above the rim as he had years earlier. It was as if the man's body had given him one last opportunity to force an indelible memory on people. Cowart had thought the same was true of reporting; that it took a certain youth that knew no exhaustion, a drive that would shunt sleep, hunger, love, all in the singular pursuit of a story. The best reporters had legs that carried them higher and farther when others were falling back to rest.
He flexed his leg muscles involuntarily.