I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at.
“I say, ‘I’ll tell you what a real man does. A real man stands up and admits when he’s done something wrong. A real man tells the truth, no matter what. While a little punk gangbanger, on the other hand, you know what he does? He runs away crying like a little girl.’ Which started to get his attention, I could tell. And then I say, ‘So how come you ran away like a little girl, Darryl?’ I don’t even give him time to answer. I just say, ‘You’re not even that fast, you know that? That cop who was chasing you, that old white guy? He used to play baseball. He was a catcher. You know how slow catchers are, right? That’s who was chasing you, and he almost caught you.’”
He stopped and put his hand up to me.
“No disrespect, Alex. It was all part of the story I was building.”
“I got it. Go on.”
“I say to him, I say, ‘Look, we’ve got you on this, Darryl. We’ve got a cop who’ll take the stand and testify that he saw you on the scene. Not just some Joe Schmoe from Hamtramck, Darryl. A cop who’ll sit there in his shiny uniform and tell everybody how it went down. If that’s not enough, we’ve got your fingerprints on the bracelet. You understand what that means, don’t you? We could take this whole thing to trial right now, and I’m pretty sure we could get anything we want.’ Which was a bit of a stretch, I realize. But you know how it works. Then I say, ‘Here’s your chance, Darryl. To stand up like a man and to make this a whole lot easier for everybody. If you do that, I’ll make sure it gets taken into account.’ This kid’s just sitting there. His mother’s telling him not to say anything, but I can tell he’s thinking it over. Me, I keep ignoring her, so maybe he’ll ignore her, you see what I mean? And I just ask him flat out, I say, ‘Come on, Darryl. Are you a man or not?’”
He paused for effect. Then he took another sip of his beer.
“That was the first time he spoke,” he said. “He sits up in his chair and he says, ‘I’m a man. Don’t forget it.’ So at this point, some guys would think they’ve got him on the hook, right? Yeah, you’re a man, that means you’re gonna tell me the truth now. Let’s have it. And then they get a big lie. So instead of that, I just had this gut instinct that I should keep pushing it. You wanna know why? It was something you said to me.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, when you were telling me how you were chasing him down those tracks, and he finally got under that fence, and he’s standing there on the other side. You said that as soon as he knew he had you beat, he just stood there and looked at you. Ice cold, you said. Like he was daring you to shoot him. Knowing that you wouldn’t. You remember that?”
“I do.”
“That’s all I needed to know about this kid. He ran, but he didn’t want to run. The second he didn’t have to run anymore, it was like he was pretending he never ran at all. So I say to him, ‘I don’t believe you, Darryl. I don’t believe you’re a real man. Because you ran down those tracks like a little girl, and you even threw that diamond bracelet away. You probably left a trail of piss all the way down the tracks, too. I don’t know, because we didn’t actually test for that. We didn’t run the forensics test for a little girl running away and pissing herself.’ I could tell I was getting to him. It honestly felt like he wanted to get out of his chair and start something. Which I would have been ready for, believe me. But instead he just says, ‘I’m a man, and if there’s something I need to do, I do it.’ Those were his exact words.”
He let that hang in the air for a moment. It didn’t sound exactly like the beginning of a confession to me, not any I’d ever heard. But I knew there was more.
“Now his mother’s having a fit, and he just tells her to be quiet. At that point I knew I had him. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was cutting the mother right out of the equation, but this guy was a child in name only. Only by the letter of the law. So I told him, I said, ‘Okay then, just between you and me, the two men in this room right now, you gotta tell me what happened. Start at the beginning and lay it all out for me.’ So he did. He said he was there at the back of the station when this woman came by.”
“What was he doing back there?” I said.
“What?” The interruption seemed to throw him off track for a second. “He was looking to rob somebody. It was a popular spot for young hustlers to bring their johns, he said. A perfect setup to rob somebody because they’re not going to go to the police.”
“Okay, I got it. Continue.”
“He said he saw her taking photographs of the building, and he told her there were some even better shots inside.”
“Wait, seriously? She went along with that?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “No, of course not,” he said. “It was just his first play. When she refused to go inside with him, he pulled his knife.”
“And what, dragged her inside? She didn’t scream?”
Bateman looked at me again. I wasn’t playing the rapt audience he was accustomed to when he told this story. And I knew he had told it, many times.
“The place was deserted back there,” he said. “Darryl was a strong kid.”
“Okay,” I said, still not quite seeing it. “Go on.”
“He takes her inside and up the stairs to the balcony.”
“Why go upstairs? That’s a lot of extra work, isn’t it?”
“He knew there were people coming in that door,” Bateman said. “He wanted to be out of the way, all right?”
“All right.”
“Then he stabs her with his knife. She was screaming at that point, so he just kept stabbing her. Then he took the bracelet off her wrist. He would have taken her money, but she’d left her purse in her car.”
“But he didn’t take the camera bag.”
“No, he didn’t. He said no way he’s gonna carry around an expensive-looking camera case. Might as well put a neon sign over his head.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“When he went outside,” Bateman said, “that’s when you showed up. The rest is history.”
“Did you ask him why he threw the bracelet away?”
“Pure reaction at that point. It connected him to the murder. So he threw it away.”
“But he didn’t throw away the knife.”
“Not when you were chasing him, no. He threw that away later.”
I sat there on his boat and worked it over it in my mind. There was a question I wanted to ask, a question that would get to the heart of things and make it all fall apart if it wasn’t really true. But I couldn’t come up with the question.
“The knife was in his pocket,” Bateman said. “He wasn’t about to try to take it out while he was running. It would have been a foolish move, even if he could throw it.”
“But he did throw the bracelet. That wasn’t in his pocket? And that wasn’t a foolish move?”
Bateman looked out at the water. I could tell he was getting frustrated. “Alex,” he said, “he threw it away on the spur of the moment, this thing that didn’t belong to him. He kept the thing that did belong to him. Then he threw that away later, when he had time to think about it. It’s really not that complicated.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. So that was his confession.”
“Yes. That was his confession.”
“He didn’t try to take it back later? Say you tricked him or you forced it out of him? I know that happens all the time.”
“No, he stuck by it all the way to the end. The prosecutor worked out a plea to simple second degree homicide, on account of his age, and I don’t know, maybe because he didn’t want to have to bring you back to testify.”