He seemed momentarily lost. He opened and closed his mouth. Then he got up and left the room.
As I sat there I couldn't help feeling anxious. I wasn't worried about having sexual assault and battery charges brought against me. As much as Phil would love to send me to prison, I couldn't see him using a frame. He'd wait until he had a real crime. Besides, this whole thing would collapse on him if he tried bringing charges. I guess what I was anxious about was the level of hostility I was seeing. I had every reason in the world to expect it from Phil and his daughter, but from Frank Schilling and Tony Flauria? And from my own parents? With them it was more passive, but it was there all the same. You have dirty cops who get busted all the time and the world moves on. I wasn't the first and I'm certainly not going to be the last. Hell, Dan Pleasant was dirtier than I ever was and he had more blood on his hands. There've been a few people over the years who've died in his custody. They were lowlifes and nobody ever cared much about it, but in one way or another, I knew their deaths were convenient to Dan. Still, people smile and wave back to him on the street and vote him back into office every election.
It's funny, it wouldn't be this way now if Phil had died that night. The memory of what I did would've faded and the hard feelings would've worn away. The problem is Phil is there to face them every day. Every day they have to be repulsed once again by my crime. Because of me they have to feel awkward and self-conscious around him and try to pretend he's not some sideshow freak. There's just no forgiveness for that.
Phil didn't return to the interrogation room until after two in the morning. He looked more somber as he sat down across from me and could barely meet my eyes.
'Your friend Dan Pleasant was here,' he said. 'He looked over my report and remembered that one of his deputies had been assigned to check your parents' house periodically to make sure there were no problems. No surprise that his deputy claims to have seen Clara's Taurus parked near their house.' He hesitated for a long moment. 'I talked to my daughter also,' he added, 'and she admitted to me what she did. If you want to press charges against her and the two boys you put in the hospital, let me know.'
'I told you before, I have no interest in pressing charges. I just want to be left alone. And I don't blame your daughter.'
He met my eyes then. 'I don't blame her, either,' he said. "The only person I blame for this is you, Joe. Why don't you get out of here.'
I got up and left the room and didn't bother to look back.
Chapter 6
I didn't get to bed until three in the morning and I had a restless night of it. At times my mind would race with images from the past – things that I had thought I had long forgotten; other times I was closer to hallucinations. I wasn't quite awake, but I wasn't quite asleep either.
The stuff that went through my mind – Jesus; they were memories that should have stayed buried. At first it was only small stuff, small crimes, but still they were things I didn't want dredged up.
When my older daughter Melissa was three and a half – only a couple of months after Courtney's first birthday – she had cut herself on a broken glass. It was mostly a superficial cut, I think she needed a few stitches, but there was blood everywhere. Elaine was hysterical, and at the time I was out of my mind on coke and trying to place a bet with my bookie. You see, I had a chance to take Miami plus two and a half over Buffalo in a playoff game. The Dolphins had shut out San Diego the week before and how was I supposed to know Dan Marino would shit the bed and lose that game by nineteen points? So now I'm back there and Melissa's screeching like a banshee and Elaine's hysterical about us needing to drive right away to the emergency room, and I can barely hear my bookie over the phone. Remember, at this point
I'm coked up to the gills. So I unholster my gun and point it at them, telling them to let me make my fucking bet in peace. There wasn't a chance in the world I would have used my gun. I just needed them to shut up so I could make one more loser bet.
Other memories raced through my mind. They were things that I'm pretty sure happened, but I couldn't swear my life on it. I might have been mixing up different events, merging them into a single memory. Or I might've been making it up entirely. All I know is they seemed real.
One night I had broken into a hardware store with Dan and his boys. They had a safe that Dan thought he could break open, but he had trouble with it so we ended up carrying the safe out of the store and loading it on the back of his pickup truck. Now I'm riding with Dan and I guess we didn't secure the safe properly and the damn thing ends up tumbling off the back of the pickup and onto the road. It took five of us to pick it up in the first place, and now it's just Dan and me. He radios his boys who were in on the heist and the two of us are standing in the middle of the road next to the safe waiting for help to arrive. Dan's as calm as can be, making small talk about this and that, and I'm going out of my head with worry. I want us to drive away and leave the safe where it fell, but Dan insists on waiting. His boys show up and help us get it back onto the pickup, but I'm sweating bullets through the whole goddam thing, my heart beating like it's going to bust out of my chest.
And then there was another time a drifter stuck his nose into a liquor store that we were breaking into. Dan and his boys ended up taking the guy into one of their cars. I never found out what happened to that drifter. Dan had made a few jokes about the hole the guy had dug himself into, but that was all I ever heard.
Other memories snaked in and out of my consciousness. I had a doozy of a hallucination right before I woke up. I was back with Clara in her car. I had just knocked her sunglasses off and realized what was up. She was grabbing onto me like before, but I couldn't break free of her. I elbowed her and punched her until her face was a raw mess, but she wouldn't loosen her grip. I had no choice. I grabbed the car key from the ignition and started stabbing her with it. Stabbing her over and over again in the face. I must have stabbed her over thirty times, but she still wouldn't let go. And I noticed a chunk of her nose was missing, and how I could play tic-tac-toe on what was left of her face, and how much she now looked like her father…
I bolted up in bed and realized I was drenched in sweat. My bed sheets were soaked through. It was six thirty in the morning. I felt a dull throbbing around my temples and got up and made my way to the bathroom. I looked like hell; worse than if I was suffering from a bad hangover. My eyes had a hollowed-out look and my skin was sickly pale. The flesh along my cheekbone where I had been scratched had swollen and was looking pretty bad. I took some aspirin and then splashed cold water on my face until I felt better. Then I went back to my room, got dressed, and shuffled towards the kitchen.
My parents were both up. My mom was at the stove making eggs, and my dad was sitting at the kitchen table reading his newspaper and drinking coffee. My mom didn't bother to turn around. She greeted me with an unconvincing 'good morning' as she worked on her scrambled eggs. I could see my dad's eyes grow sick as he noticed the scratches along my cheek.
'You got in late last night,' he said.
'Sorry if I woke you.'
'I heard your car pull in around two thirty.'
'I'm sorry. Something happened last night. I couldn't help it.'
My mom had turned around. Her raisin-like face seemed to shrink as she stared at me.
'I told you not to go into town but you wouldn't listen,' she complained, a shrillness edging into her voice. 'What happened?'
I poured myself some coffee and sat down at the table across from my dad. I'd rather not go into this now,' I said. 'Could I have some breakfast?'