“And where do you work?”
“I’m an assistant manager at the Luggage Outlet on Richmond.”
“Okay.” I make another note. “And that’s your only employer?”
His eyes narrow. “No.”
I’ve caught him by surprise with the question. He scans the stacks of paper in front of me, probably wondering what else I have in there. Good. I want him to wonder.
“You have three jobs, isn’t that right?”
He nods slowly. “But only the Luggage Outlet is full time. I work nights and some weekends for Blunt Ministries, packing orders and duplicating DVDs, and there’s a friend of mine with a landscaping business who hires me on big jobs maybe once, twice a month.”
“Doing all that,” Bascombe says, “you must not have a lot of free time, Jason.”
“Not really.”
“So what’s your typical day look like? Take yesterday for instance. Walk us through that.”
“Yesterday wasn’t typical.”
“Just for instance,” I say. “Did you go into the Luggage Outlet at all?”
He shakes his head. “On Saturdays I go into the Blunt warehouse around ten-that’s off of Twenty-sixth Street-and I’m there pretty much all day, until maybe six or seven, depending on the volume of orders from the week. People order DVDs and over the weekend I do the duplicating and packaging; then the reverend will take them to the post office Monday morning.”
“The reverend?”
“Reverend Blunt. You know. . Curtis Blunt? He’s on the local radio.”
“Is that his church you were going to this morning?” I ask.
“He doesn’t really have a church. It’s more like a ministry. He has his show, and he makes videos of his teaching.”
“And he was with you yesterday?”
He shakes his head. “Not the whole day. He came by in the morning, but mostly I work alone. I get more done that way. The reverend’s really talkative when he’s there, so it’s hard to keep going.”
“What about lunch?” I ask. “You took a break, right? Where’d you go?”
“I’m not working three jobs so I can go out for lunch, man. I brought my lunch with me. That’s what I do.”
“All right, then. Why are you working three jobs?”
He shrugs. “Stupidity.”
Bascombe chuckles. “You wanna elaborate on that for us?”
“I’m working three jobs because, until about a year ago, I was spending money I didn’t have on a lifestyle I didn’t need. I had a mortgage and two car notes and about forty grand in credit card debt, which I was rolling from one card to the other. It kept growing and growing and I was barely making forty a year before taxes. So I said enough is enough.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I cut up the cards, sold the house, got rid of the cars, bought a junky used truck and started working sixty hours a week or more to put a dent in the debt. I’m getting out from under all that.”
“And what about your wife?” I ask. “You are married. I notice you’re wearing a ring.”
He lifts his hand and stares at the ring, like he’s only just noticed it.
“Yeah,” he says. “I am.”
“What did she think about all this?”
Young starts shaking his head in slow motion, a hard smile on his lips. “That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? You’ve got me here because of Simone.”
I give nothing away. “That’s her name? Simone Young.”
He snorts. “She doesn’t call herself that anymore, but yeah. Simone Young. And all this”-he waves his arm over my stacked papers-“it’s for nothing, because whatever story she told you isn’t true, okay? It’s not even her fault, though. It’s Candace, isn’t it? I saw her out there when the other detective brought in the coffee. Listen, that woman is a bad influence on Simone, and if you separate the two of them and just ask Simone what happened, she’ll eventually tell you the truth. But not with her mother in the room.”
“The truth about what?” I ask.
“Come on. I’m not stupid, man. I see what all this is. But you know what? It’s he said/she said, because nobody else was there.”
“What’s he said/she said?”
“You know what.”
Bascombe chuckles again, acting like he’s impressed with the performance. “You gotta spell it out for us, though. For the record.”
“What you brought me here for,” Young says. “I didn’t do it. I mean, that’s not what it was.”
“What’s not?” I say, raising my voice just a bit.
“Rape,” he says. “Okay? It wasn’t rape. I didn’t rape my wife.”
“All right. So tell us what did happen. Give us your side.”
“It’s not gonna make any difference.”
“Telling the truth makes a difference,” I say. “It always does.”
I risk a glance at the lieutenant, who’s on the edge of his chair. He raises an eyebrow ever so slightly and I answer with an imperceptible nod. This is going great. Better than expected. We’ve got him talking, and even though he’s being careful to speak of Simone in the present tense, the more he says, the tighter we lock him into a version of events.
And once he’s committed, every time we poke a hole in the story, he’ll be forced to change it, forced to improvise on the spot. The worst case scenario is that we can go to trial with clear evidence of deception. The best case scenario is that we run him back and forth through the inconsistencies so many times that he sees it’s hopeless and decides to come clean. We’re going for the best case scenario, needless to say.
“Seriously, Jason,” I say. “This is your opportunity to set things straight. We’re here to listen, and like you said, it’s her story versus yours. Only we don’t have your story.”
“Okay, fine. Here’s what really happened. Simone left me and moved in with a UH professor named Joy Hill. The idea was, she’d pay rent and that way Joy wouldn’t have to sell the house, because her husband had left her. But when I found out about this, I was like, ‘How are you gonna swing that?’ Because Simone was hardly making anything. She had some hours at a bookstore, but quit to take a job at this nonprofit center. Well, I looked that position up online and they listed the salary as eighteen grand a year. So I know this arrangement’s not gonna work.”
“You told her that? The two of you had a conversation.”
“We had a fight over the phone. I tried to explain the numbers to her, and she said I was treating her like a child-which is true, but she was acting like one. She knew I didn’t want a divorce and assumed that if it came down to it, I would hand over the money.”
As he talks, he leans forward, elbows on the table, staring into his cupped hands.
“I knew she’d have to come to me eventually, so when she did, I was ready. At least I thought I was. She still managed to surprise me, though: the amount she wanted was ten thousand. Ten! I told her there was no way, but we could meet and talk about it. That’s all I wanted, to talk. For the last six months, she’d barely acknowledged my existence. She wouldn’t take my calls. If I went over there, she wouldn’t answer the door. Now suddenly all that changes.”
He admits he went over there. Knew the lay of the land.
“So you met up in person. When was that?”
He pauses. “It was Veteran’s Day, whenever that was. We went to a restaurant and I remember on the TVs they were showing a lot of military stuff.”
I reach into my briefcase under the table, consulting the Filofax. “November eleven was Veteran’s Day. That was a Wednesday.”
“Right,” he says. “Anyway, she wanted a lot of money. A loan, she said, but we both knew there was no way she’d ever pay it back-and besides that, she’s my wife, okay? If I was going to give her money, I’d give it, not loan it. But I told her the money wouldn’t solve her problems. The solution was obvious, but it wasn’t that.”
“And the solution was what?”
“To move back in,” he says, wide-eyed. “Obviously. And I could tell she was listening, too, in a way she hadn’t before. We got married too quick, that’s the problem. We weren’t on the same page about a lot of stuff. But now she’d been on her own a little and she’d seen how hard it could be. She softened up some. I was like, ‘You just need to come home.’ But she said I sold her home. We couldn’t afford it, I told her, but my new place, that was her home now.”