Playing Nice With God’s Bowling Ball
N. K. Jemisin
Playing Nice With God's Bowling Ball
N. K. Jemisin
“I didn’t mean for anything to happen to Timmy.” Jeffy Hanson sat before Grace in a chair big enough to swallow him, his head bowed and hands limp in his lap. “I told him not to feed it like that. I told him what would happen.”
“Let’s just start at the beginning.” Detective Grace Anneton gave Jeffy a reassuring smile, though he didn’t lift his eyes to see it. In spite of herself, Grace felt sorry for the kid. She knew better; he could be some sweet-talking little punk, trying to snowjob her with his big, brown, puppy eyes. Or a sociopath, already skilled enough at seven years old to emulate emotions he didn’t feel. She shouldn’t feel sorry for any confessed murderer, no matter how improbable the murder sounded. But she did.
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “It was for my mom. The card. I wanted to get it back from Timmy. You know Monster Fusion King?”
Grace sifted through her memory and came up with an image: a sign in the window of the local convenience store. MONSTER FUSION KING SOLD HERE! “Some sort of card game?”
He nodded. “Me and Timmy, we get new packs on Fridays. Timmy always gets four or five. I only buy one. My mom used to give me an allowance, but when Dad went away and we moved here to the city she had to stop. We don’t have a lot of money anymore.”
“So how do you get a new pack every week, Jeffy?”
“Mom gives me lunch money. But at lunchtime I get water instead of juice and I save up what’s left and I use that to buy my pack for the week.” He looked up at Grace, a different sort of guilt flickering in his eyes. “Do you have to tell my mom that?”
Grace smiled and made a mental note to check for a financial motive if the kid’s confession turned out to be more than a load of hooey. “I don’t think we’ll have to tell her that, Jeffy. So. This all started when Timmy got a card you liked?”
“No.” He looked down at his hands again. “I mean, yeah, he always had cards I liked, but that wasn’t what started it. Timmy was a real collector. He even got MONSTER KING magazine. He had almost all the cards ever made.”
“I see. And how many cards did you have?”
He shrugged a little. “Not so many.”
Of course. “So this started last Friday when you got your new pack?”
He nodded. “I got a really good card, the Cuckoo Chimera. It’s a special contest card, only a few ever made. Only I didn’t know that, not then. Timmy said he’d trade me for three of his repeats—ones he already had, I mean. I said yes.” He frowned and squirmed in his seat.
Grace read his restlessness. “I’m guessing it was worth more than three cards.”
“Yeah. My friend, Eduardo, said he saw one for three hundred dollars on eBay.”
Holy shit, Grace thought. I gotta start collecting cards. ”When did you find this out, Jeffy?”
“At school on Monday. That’s when I talked to Eduardo. A lot of the kids in my class are into Monster King.”
“I see. And you got mad.”
“No.” He looked up at her, frowning again. “I didn’t care about stuff like that. Timmy was my friend. But that night when I got home, my mom was crying.”
“Why?”
“Her car—it’s really old—broke down at work. She said she couldn’t afford to get it fixed. My dad, he…” Another of those little shifts of discomfort. “He doesn’t send money to take care of me like he’s supposed to. He doesn’t think I’m his.”
Grace’s eyebrows shot up. What kind of parents would tell their child something like that?
“They argued a lot, before he left. Sometimes I listened.”
“I see. So your mom was upset.”
“Yeah. She couldn’t afford to get the car fixed unless she took money out of the rent and if she did that we’d lose the apartment.”
“That must have made you feel really bad.”
An unhappy nod. “I asked her what she needed to fix the car and she said, ’Three hundred dollars.’”
Definitely a financial motive. And definitely more than manslaughter. Grace kept her voice even. “So then you wanted your card back.”
“Yeah. I called Timmy that night and told him I knew he’d made a bad trade and it wasn’t fair and we should reverse it. And he said it wasn’t his fault I didn’t know about the contest cards.” Jeffy’s brow tightened. “And then I told him about my mom and he said yeah, right it was a good story but he wasn’t falling for it and too bad, so sad.” Jeffy looked up at her. “I got mad then.”
“I can imagine.” Revenge motive too, maybe. Damn, the poor little brat might be looking at murder one. “So what did you do, Jeffy?”
“I told him I’d do anything to get the card back. I offered him everything I had—all my cards and my roller blades and even my Click-n-Go robot set. But he said he was going to keep the card because in a year it might be worth twice as much. He said he would only give it to me if I gave him something really, really cool for it. And then he laughed and said I’d never be able to give him anything that cool because I was poor, so that was like asking me to give him the moon or a black hole or something.”
Grace shook her head. Kids could be real little monsters sometimes. Then she shoved that thought aside; she was feeling sorry for the kid again.
She leaned across the table and folded her hands. “Jeffy, when you came into the precinct, you told the officer at the front desk that you might’ve killed Timmy Johnson. Is this why you killed him? Because he wouldn’t give your card back?”
Jeffy frowned again. “No. I told you, I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”
“But if you were angry with him—”
“I wasn’t, not once he said what he wanted. I gave it to him and I told him how to take care of it. But he didn’t pay attention.”
Neither had Grace, apparently. She frowned in confusion, trying to figure out what she’d missed. “Gave what to him, Jeffy?”
“I already told you,” Jeffy said, with an exasperated air. “Timmy said he would give me the card back if I gave him something like the moon or a black hole. I couldn’t think of anything else, and the moon was too big, so I made a black hole and gave it to him. It was just a little one. But he started feeding it this giant stuffed panda he got from Coney Island last year. The panda was even bigger than he was. I tried to stop him. I told him it was too big. But he dented the special container it was in, and the black hole got loose and ate him.”
Then, apparently oblivious to Grace’s stare, the boy burst into tears. “I told him to be careful.”
****
In the observation room, Grace rubbed her face with her hands. Beyond the one-way glass, little Jeffy sat with his head down on his folded arms.
“So the kid is crazy,” said Captain Dewitt.
“Not necessarily.” Taliafero, Grace’s partner, regarded the boy through the glass. “Could be a cry for attention or some bullshit like that. He killed somebody but can’t say where the body is; no, wait, he only thinks he killed him; no, wait…” He shook his head. “Prank, maybe. Or just a flat-out lie.”
Grace shook her head. “Put a kid that age in front of a cop and they might tell little white lies, but not the kinds of whoppers this kid is spinning. He actually believes what he’s saying.”
“Could he be…” Taliafero waved a hand. “I don’t know, confused? Maybe the Johnson kid fell into a sinkhole. This kid sees what happens, doesn’t know the word for it and calls it a black hole. And he feels guilty because maybe he wished something bad would happen to little Timmy ’cause little Timmy’s an asshole, and he comes up with this story.”