“He’d be out in the yard, hour after hour, staring at us, you know.”
“Yes, he told me. He said he was over here.” She paused to reflect. “The gun? You asked about the gun? He found it where I had hidden it.”
“Did he ever tell you why he came over here?”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, rubbing her cheek. She made Saul think of a peeled tangerine. “I was just glad he wanted to do something. That he wanted to go somewhere. I couldn’t look after him.”
“He did it off and on for a whole year.”
“Well, it gave him a place to go.”
“A place to go?”
“Yes. I was at work, and he was old enough not to go to school — said he wasn’t learning anything — and I couldn’t think of anything to do with him, so, you know, he came over here. I guess he thought you cared about him and could maybe give him a place to be.”
“We just got used to it,” Saul said. “To him, ” he corrected himself.
“God-damn,” Brenda suddenly erupted, a high keening wail. “I told and told him about guns, like I was in the NRA or something, and I sure damn well trained him to respect them. I just whacked it into him. You saw me trying to knock some sense into him. Made me feel terrible! If you didn’t hit him, he wouldn’t notice. ‘Guns don’t kill people,’ I told him, ‘people kill people.’ This last time I hid that.22 so no one could find it, in a shoe box.” She looked up, and her face took on a sudden fearful radiance. “No one. But then he did.” The on-the-spot Channel Seven Mobile News van was speeding up the driveway, followed by Channel Three’s news van. Maybe there would be a helicopter and skycam shots, and a direct-feed breaking-news story from the crime scene. Finally, the occasion felt like a movie premiere. Brenda touched her hair. The poor woman — what did she think she was doing, trying to get on television? Attract the talent scouts?
“Miss Bagley?” The police investigator, the detective — Saul was having trouble remembering his name, maybe because of the distraction of the weapons, and each time he saw one of them, the cop looked unfamiliar — took her aside for some questions and a statement and an identification. Saul overheard him asking her about a suicide note. They were certainly interested in suicide notes. Well, responsibility, after all. Cause and effect, after all. A villain, a fall guy. Saul suddenly wondered if maybe — just maybe — there might be one, might be a suicide note. Mentioning him. Barely readable, scrawled, but still scratchily specific. The Channel Seven reporter, whom Saul recognized as Traci McMahoney, hurried away from the mobile news van in a rather purposeful beeline toward him, followed by the camera and sound men. Involuntarily, he stood up straight and cleared his throat.
She was extraordinarily pretty, a small-town former beauty queen probably, with blond hair arranged in an expensive feathery style, startlingly blue eyes, and a strange expression of artificial concern. She was the visual antidote to Brenda Bagley. In spite of himself, Saul felt charged up, on the verge of a statement. Also in spite of himself, he gazed at her as she approached him. She had great legs with excellent calf definition. She worked out somewhere. They all did, now. Guiltily, he turned, looking for his wife. About ten feet away, Patsy had Mary Esther in hand, but Patsy was also checking on Saul. Mary Esther was sobbing quietly. Patsy’s bangs were falling down over her sad eyes as she then hefted Mary Esther from one arm to the other. What was she being sad about? Gordy’s death? That Saul had stared helplessly at the Channel Seven reporter? No. Saul had — they both knew it — a tendency to misstate himself in situations involving the stress of public speaking, so he flashed her his brimful-of-confidence expression; she did not seem immediately reassured.
The other news team, the one from Channel Three, had gone over to wait to interview Brenda until after the detective had finished with her, but this one, the Action News Team from Channel Seven, had stayed here. After Traci McMahoney had set herself up so that the house showed in the background, but before the videocam was rolling, she asked Saul if he’d be willing to answer a few questions on-camera. He nodded. She aimed herself at the lens, touched her hair, and then did her intro. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks man, Gordon Himmelman, who lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. The young man had shot himself in the front yard of one of his former teachers, Saul Bernstein. So far there was no explanation as to why he had taken the trouble to bike over to his teacher’s house to shoot himself. No suicide note had yet been found.
Ah, Saul thought. So that settles that.
Traci McMahoney pivoted toward Saul. “You were his teacher.”
“Yes.”
“And in what subject?”
“Language arts.” Saul looked at her and at the microphone, then at the sound guy. He felt something coming on, something wrong. “Last year. Not this academic year. Last academic year. He had dropped out.”
“How were his grades?”
“His grades? It was a. . remedial class.”
“Oh. In that case, how well did you know the young man?”
“Pretty well. I don’t know. How well does anybody know anyone?”
Traci McMahoney frowned. “Had he threatened you? Had he threatened anyone at school?”
“No. Not exactly. He had written those illegible notes of his. He once called me a shitbird.”
Traci McMahoney moved the microphone away from her mouth. Quietly, confidentially, she said to Saul, “We can’t put words like that on the air.”
“I know,” Saul said. “I was just telling you what he said.” His eyebrow itched. He scratched it. “I thought I had just better tell the truth.”
“Okay,” she said, still conspiratorially, sotto voce. Then, resuming her professional voice, she said, “Had he seemed depressed to you?”
“Depressed? No. That wasn’t like him. At least I don’t think so.”
“What about these notes you mentioned?”
“Oh, the notes? He wrote notes in class about how much he didn’t like school. He once called me a kike, but he didn’t really mean it. I don’t even know where he found that word.”
Traci McMahoney shifted her weight on her great legs, expressing impatience and dissatisfaction. She gave off a scent of some wonderful perfume redolent of the Elysian Fields. It made Saul think of Tahiti, where he had never been. Patsy never wore perfume; she had allergies. Brenda’s perfume, by contrast, smelled like the perfume counter in a drugstore. Saul intuited that the interview was not going well, however, and that the fault was probably his. He would try to do better. He wanted to please Traci McMahoney.
“What were you doing when it happened?” she asked.
“I was standing in front of the bedroom window,” Saul said, “listening to my wife tell me about my mother’s affair with the yard boy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Traci McMahoney said. She dropped the microphone again. “Can we start over? Let’s start over. You don’t need to go into details like that. It’s distracting to the viewers. Let’s start over. And let’s try to stay on-message. This’ll be the second take. This is all on tape anyway. We’ll do some editing. Thank God this isn’t an on-the-air breaking-news report.”
Once again she did an introduction. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman. Boy, man. Which was he? This time they ran through the same questions one after the other, but Saul remembered not to mention his mother and not to say anything about shitbirds or kikes.