Carla said sure. By then she was positive Vicky had screwed up her meds, smoked some dope, or both.
I think George put him up to it, she said. For a tease. But when he saw how upset I was, he was sorry and tried to make the kid stop. Only the kid wouldn’t.
Carla said, That doesn’t make sense, Vic. George would never tease you about a part. He likes you.
Vicky said, That kid was right, though. I might as well give up.
At this point in Carla’s story, I told her the kid had nothing to do with me. Carla said I didn’t even have to tell her that, she knew I was a good guy and how much I cared for Vicky. Then she started to cry.
It’s my fault, not yours, she said. I could see she was screwed up, but I didn’t do anything. And you know what happened. That’s on me, too, because she didn’t really mean to. I’m sure she didn’t.
Carla left Vicky and went upstairs to study. A couple of hours later, she went down to Vicky’s room.
I thought she might like to go out and get something to eat, she said. Or if the pills had worn off, maybe have a glass of wine. Only she wasn’t there. So I checked the lounge, but she wasn’t there, either. A couple of girls were watching TV, and one said she thought she saw Vicky going downstairs a little while ago, probably to do a wash.
Because she had some sheets, the girl said.
That worried Carla, although she wouldn’t let herself think why. She went downstairs, but there was no one in the laundry room and none of the washers was going. The next room along was the box room, where the girls stored their luggage. She heard sounds from there, and when she went in, she saw Vicky with her back to her. She was standing on a little stack of suitcases. She’d tied two sheets together to make a hanging rope. One end was noosed around her neck. The other was tied to an overhead pipe.
But the thing was, Carla told me, there were only three suitcases, and plenty of slack in the sheets. If she’d meant business, she would have used one sheet and stood some girl’s trunk on end. It was only what theater people call a dress rehearsal.
You don’t know that for sure, I said. You don’t know how many of her pills she might have taken, or how confused she was.
I know what I saw, Carla said. She could have stepped right off those suitcases and onto the floor without pulling the noose tight. But I didn’t think of that then. I was too shocked. I just yelled her name.
That loud shout from behind startled her, and instead of stepping off the suitcases, Vicky jerked and toppled forward, the suitcases sliding along the floor behind. She would have hit the concrete floor smack on her belly, Carla said, but there wasn’t that much slack in her rope. She still might have lived if the knot holding the two sheets together had given way, but it didn’t. Her falling weight pulled the noose tight and yanked her head up hard.
I heard the snap when her neck broke, Carla said. It was loud. And it was my fault.
Then she cried and cried and cried.
I got her out of the coffee shop and into a bus shelter on the corner. I told her over and over again that it hadn’t been her fault, and eventually she stopped crying. She even smiled a little.
She said, You’re very persuasive, George.
What I didn’t tell her – because she wouldn’t have believed it – was that my persuasiveness came from absolute certainty.
5
‘The bad little kid came after the people I cared about,’ Hallas said.
Bradley nodded. It was obvious that Hallas believed it, and if this story had come out at the trial, it might have earned the man a life sentence instead of a billet in Needle Manor. The jury very likely wouldn’t have been completely sold, but it would have given them an excuse to take the death penalty off the table. Now it was probably too late. A written motion requesting a stay based on Hallas’s story of the bad little kid would look like grasping at straws. You had to be in his presence, and see the absolute certainty on his face. To hear it in his voice.
The condemned man, meanwhile, was looking at him through the slightly clouded Plexiglas with a trace of a smile. ‘That kid wasn’t just bad; he was also greedy. For him, it always had to be a twofer. One dead; one left to baste in a nice warm gravy of guilt.’
‘You must have convinced Carla,’ Bradley said. ‘She married you, after all.’
‘I never convinced her completely, and she never believed in the bad little kid at all. If she had, she would have been at the trial, and we’d still be married.’ He stared through the barrier at Bradley, his eyes dead level. ‘If she had, she would have been glad that I killed him.’
The guard in the corner – McGregor – looked at his watch, removed his earbuds, and stood up. ‘I don’t want to hurry you along, Counselor, but it’s eleven thirty, and pretty soon your client has to be back in his cell for the midday count.’
‘I don’t see why you can’t count him right here,’ Bradley said … but mildly. It didn’t do to get on the mean side of any guard, and although McGregor was one of the better ones, Bradley was sure he had a mean side. It was a requirement for men charged with overseeing hard cons. ‘You’re looking at him, after all.’
‘Rules are rules,’ McGregor said, then raised his hand, as if to stifle a protest Bradley hadn’t made. ‘I know you’re entitled to as much time as you want this close to his date, so if you want to wait around, I’ll bring him back after count. He’ll miss his lunch, though, and probably you will too.’
They watched McGregor return to his seat and once more replace his earbuds. When Hallas turned back to the Plexi barrier, there was more than a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Hell, you could probably guess the rest.’
Although Bradley was sure he could, he folded his hands on his blank legal pad and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me anyway?’
6
I declined the part of Harold Hill and dropped out of Drama Club. I had lost my taste for acting. During my final year at Pitt, I concentrated on my business classes, especially accounting, and Carla Winston. The year I graduated, we were married. My father was my best man. He died three years later.
One of the mines he was responsible for was in the town of Louisa. That’s a little south of Ironville, where he still lived with Nona McCarthy – Mama Nonie – as his ‘housekeeper.’ The mine was called Fair Deep. One day there was a rockfall in its second parlor, which was about two hundred feet down. Not serious, everyone got out fine, but my father went down with a couple of company guys from the front office to look at the damage and try to figure out how long it would take to get things up and running again. He never came out. None of them did.
That boy keeps calling, Nonie said later. She had always been a pretty woman, but in the year after my father died, she bloomed out in wrinkles and dewlaps. Her walk turned into a shuffle, and she hunched her shoulders whenever anyone came into the room, as if she expected to be struck. It wasn’t my father’s death that did it to her; it was the bad little kid.
He keeps calling. He calls me a nigger bitch, but I don’t mind that. I been called worse. That kind of thing rolls right off my back. What doesn’t is him saying it happened because of the present I gave your father. Those boots. That can’t be true, can it, Georgie? It had to’ve been something else. He had to’ve been wearing his felts. He never would have forgotten his felts after a mine accident, even one that didn’t seem serious.
I agreed, but I could see the doubt eating into her like acid.
The boots were Trailman Specials. She gave them to him for his birthday not two months before the explosion in Fair Deep. They must have set her back at least three hundred dollars, but they were worth every penny. Knee high, leather as supple as silk, but tough. They were the kind of boots a man could wear all his life and then pass on to his son. Hobnail boots, you understand, and nails like that can strike sparks on the right surface, just like flint on steel.