And then, in late August, a boy named Indigo West came forward. Like a deus ex machina, he dropped from heaven and freed Mark from suspicion. He claimed to have witnessed the murder through the hallway door in Giles's apartment. Apparently, Indigo was only one of many people who had keys to Giles's apartment He had arrived at about five o'clock in the morning and wandered into one of the bedrooms. He slept most of the next day and woke to the sound of glass breaking in the front room. When he went to see what was happening, he said that he saw Giles with an axe in one hand and a broken vase in the other, standing over Rafael, who had already lost an arm. A large plastic dropcloth lay on the floor and was covered with blood. According to Indigo, Rafael was tied up and his mouth was taped. If he wasn't dead, he was almost dead. Unseen and unheard by Giles, Indigo ran back to the bedroom and hid under the bed, where he threw up. He lay absolutely still for at least an hour. He said he heard Giles walking around, and once he heard him just outside the bedroom door. When the telephone rang, Giles answered it, and not long after that, he heard Giles talking to someone in the hallway and recognized the voice as Mark's. He distinctly overheard Mark say that he was hungry, but the rest of the conversation was too low for him to hear. When the door slammed and all noises stopped, he waited for several minutes, crawled out from under the bed, and ran out of the building. He said he went to Puffy's and ordered a coffee from a waitress with blue hair.
Indigo was a seventeen-year-old heroin addict, but Arthur said that he repeated his story without variation over and over again, and although the police hadn't found a single blood stain in Giles's apartment, they had noted a stain on the carpet under the bed where Indigo had spent the night, and the waitress at Puffy's, who had had blue hair at the time, remembered him. She had noticed him particularly because he had been shaking and crying over his espresso. When confronted with Indigo West, Teddy Giles accepted a plea bargain. The charges against him were reduced to aggravated manslaughter and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Indigo West had been given immunity for his testimony, and neither he nor Mark was charged with anything. For a week the papers carried articles on the end of the case, and then it vanished from the spotlight. Arthur guessed that the D.A didn't want to risk going to trial with two witnesses of dubious character. Indigo West had already served a sentence for drug possession in a juvenile correctional institution. The boy was a mess, but I believe that he was an honest mess.
Nevertheless, there was a magical quality to his appearance. When I discovered that Lazlo was the person who had found Indigo, my astonishment diminished somewhat. With Arthur's blessing, Lazlo had pursued his own leads, which included talking to the gossip columnist who had printed the story of a witness. The columnist didn't know Indigo, but his stepdaughter had heard through a friend that a kid who spent every Thursday night at the Tunnel had heard through someone else that there was a third person who had seen the murder. The rumor chain led to Indigo West, whose real name was Nathan Furbank. The question was, why had Lazlo been able to locate a witness when the police had not? I couldn't help but attribute that success to the prodigious qualities of the Finkelman eyes, ears, and nose.
During the case, Violet had called Lucille regularly to give her news. Sometimes they spoke amicably, but more often than not Violet wanted something from Lucille that Lucille wouldn't or couldn't give her. Violet wanted Lucille to acknowledge the extremity of what had happened to Mark. She wanted animal pain, anguish, and desperation, but Lucille would only say that she was "worried" and "deeply concerned" about him. After Giles was sentenced, Lucille became even more tranquil. During her conversations with Violet, she blamed Mark's problems on drugs. The drugs had muted his feelings and his reactions. The most important thing was for him to stay off drugs. Lucille's defense of Mark wasn't unreasonable; Mark's drug use had always been a muddled issue. But while Lucille labored to stay soft-spoken and polite, Violet inevitably grew more and more upset.
One evening in late November, the telephone rang a few minutes after Violet and I had finished eating dinner. From the restrained tone of Violet's voice, I instantly knew that Lucille was on the other end of the line. Mark had stayed briefly with his mother and stepfather after the case was over. He'd then moved into a house with friends and found a job in a veterinary clinic. Lucille calmly told Violet that Mark had filched cash from one of his housemates and then stolen his car. He hadn't gone to work and he hadn't been seen for three days. Violet kept her temper. She told Lucille there was nothing either of them could do, but when she hung up the phone, her face was flushed and her hand was trembling.
"I think Lucille means well," I said to Violet.
Violet looked at me for several seconds, then she started yelling. "Don't you know that she's only half alive! Part of her is dead!" Her pale face and the broken cry in her voice shocked me, and I couldn't find an answer. She grabbed my upper arms and began to shake me, snarling through her teeth. "Don't you know that she was slowly killing Bill? I saw it right away. And Mark, my boy. He was my boy, too. I loved them. I loved them. She didn't. She can't." Her eyes opened as if she were suddenly afraid.
"Remember? I asked you to take care of Bill." She shook me harder as her eyes filled with tears. "I thought you understood! I thought you knew!"
I looked down at her. Her fingers had loosened their grip, but she was still hanging on to me, and I could feel the weight of her body tug at my arms for an instant before she let go. She was breathing hard from her rage, which was quickly turning into sobs. I listened to her cry loudly, and the noise caused a contraction in my chest, as if it were my own grief that I was hearing, or as if hers and mine were one and the same. She bent over, covering her face with her hands. I reached out for her and pulled her into my arms. The pressure in my lungs seemed unbearable. Her face was pressed into my neck, and I could feel her breasts against me and her arms hugging me tightly. My hand moved to her hip, and I let my fingers press the bone beneath it while I clutched her harder.
"I love you," I said. "Don't you understand that I love you. I'll take care of you, be with you forever. I would do anything for you." I tried to kiss her. I grabbed her face and pressed it into mine, tilting my glasses in the process. She gave a small cry and pushed me away.
Violet was looking at me with startled eyes. She lifted her hands as if she were pleading for something and then she lowered them. When I looked at her standing there near the turquoise table with a piece of hair falling onto her forehead, I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She was my hold on the world, what I suffered over and loved, and I knew in that instant that I was losing her, and the knowledge turned me cold. I sat down at the table, folded my hands, and stared at them without saying a word. I felt her eyes on me as she stood in the middle of the room. I heard her breathing, and a couple of seconds later, the sound of her footsteps coming toward me. When I felt her fingers touching my head, I didn't look up at her. She said "Leo" several times, and then her voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I, I didn't mean to push you away, I..." She knelt on the floor beside me and said, "Please talk to me. Please look at me." Her voice was hoarse and choked. "I feel so bad."