Blank Confession Read online

  Rawls wrote that down. “Address?”

  The kid gave him an address on the west side, an okay neighborhood bordering one of the wealthier suburbs. Rawls wrote it down.

  “Parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two of ’em?”

  “Three.”

  Rawls waited for clarification. The kid made him wait a few beats, then said, “Dad, mom, aunt.”

  “Who do you live with?”

  “Aunt.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My dad’s a SEAL.”

  “A navy SEAL?”

  “No, the kind you see at the zoo.”

  Rawls sat back and regarded the kid, whose face remained empty.

  “Are you sure you want to be making jokes, son?” Rawls said.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Where’s your dad now?”

  “Iraq. I think.”

  “And your mom?”

  “Fort Story. That’s in Virginia.”

  “Military brat, huh?”

  The kid just looked at him.

  “And your aunt? What does she do?”

  “Nothing. She’s retired.”

  “Who did you kill?”

  The kid didn’t say anything, same as the first time Rawls had asked him that question—instead, he reached for the metal ring attached to a hinge bolted to the tabletop and ran his fingers over it. The ring was there so that a potentially violent suspect could be handcuffed to the steel table, which was bolted to the floor. Rawls sat back and looked at his watch: 5:09. It didn’t matter. This time he was going to wait for the kid to speak, no matter how long it took.

  It took two minutes and thirteen seconds. The kid flopped the ring back and forth: Clank. Clank. Clank.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” the kid said.

  “You want something to drink? A soda?”

  “No thanks.” He was back to playing with the ring. “I just—” Clank. Clank. He took a deep breath. “You ever kill anybody?” he asked.

  Rawls said, “No, I never killed anybody.”

  “You’d feel bad if you did, though. Right?” The kid looked up. Once again, Rawls perceived something steely and sharp behind the curtain.

  “I suppose it would depend on the circumstances,” Rawls said.

  The kid took that in, nodded.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened,” said Rawls.

  The kid said, “Okay. I just moved here, and—”

  “From where?” Rawls interrupted him.

  “I was in Louisville for a while.”

  “You get in trouble in Louisville?”

  “Do you want me to tell you what happened or not?”

  Rawls sat back in his chair and peeked at his watch: 5:14. If he couldn’t wrap this up in half an hour, he’d have to call home and tell his wife to eat dinner without him.

  “Go ahead,” he said with a sigh. “Take your time.”

  4. MIKEY

  I am not a guy who sticks his nose in anybody else’s business, and I certainly did not want to get on the wrong side of Jon Brande, so I figured I’d hang on to his bag of whatever, give it back to him after school, and be done with it. I should have known better.

  Several weeks earlier, a junior named Leon Sullivan OD’d on something—the rumor mill said it was ecstasy mixed with LSD but, knowing Leon, it could have been anything. He had climbed onto the top of the school in the middle of the day and announced his intention to fly. It took two fire trucks and half a dozen cops to drag him off that roof. Leon never came back to school. I heard his parents sent him to some boarding school for druggies.

  I happened to know that Leon got the stuff—whatever it was—from Jon, but Leon never told anybody, so why should I? I may have a big mouth but I’m not suicidal.

  Anyway, after Leon’s monumental freak-out, the antidrug task force moved into high gear. We had special educational visits from narcotics detectives, antidrug movies, a big display in the front lobby with all sorts of drug information pamphlets and brochures, and even an antidrug “rally” in the gym, which was basically a nondenominational invocation by the youth pastor from Trinity Lutheran, and a stupendously lame exhibition by the cheerleading squad. Then came an invitation for all of us to come forward and pledge to remain drug free during our tender high school years. Out of the twelve hundred students at the rally, I think they got maybe thirty pledges, two of whom were hard-core stoners who goofed their way through the entire pledge. I’m pretty sure they were high at the time. There probably would have been more pledgers, but it was last period and the bell rang and the gym emptied in about one minute flat.

  Jon thought the whole thing was hilarious. As the primary supplier to the local stoner population, he knew exactly how many students were using drugs, and how much they were using, and how many of them were unlikely to quit using, no matter how many rallies and pledges and invocations they were exposed to. His customer base was well-established and recession-proof. The only thing that could seriously mess it up would be if he got arrested and thrown in jail.

  I should make it clear here and now that I was not one of Jon’s customers. I’d tried marijuana once with Marie, but I didn’t like it much. Besides, that stuff is expensive.

  Also—don’t laugh—I was one of the students who took the pledge.

  The rest of the day—the day Jon gave me the mysterious paper bag—as I escabullirsed from one class to the next, I didn’t think much about Shayne. My mind was more occupied with the bag in my backpack. I had this creepy feeling that something bad was going to happen, and I was right: Five minutes into the last period of the day, the principal’s voice came booming over the PA system telling everybody to report to the gymnasium.

  We all filed out of our classrooms like good little drones. I overheard a couple of guys saying something about a locker search. Like everybody else, I did an instant mental inventory of my locker. Nothing to worry about, except—uh-oh—was it against the rules to have Advil? Because I did have a bottle of headache pills in my locker.

  We were almost to the gym when I heard a dog bark. At first I thought, That’s weird, a dog in the school …then I realized what it was. Not just a dog, but a drug sniffing dog! And there I was with a paper bag containing who-knows-what stuffed in my backpack.

  I quick ducked into a lavatory, dug the bag out of my backpack, stuffed it deep into the trash can, then rejoined the march of the drones. The dogs never came into the gym—they were strictly on locker duty. For the next hour, we listened to a very bored cop deliver a very boring lecture on the dangers of using illicit drugs, while four other cops checked every one of the 1,300 lockers lining the halls.

  The official tally? They found a one-hit pipe in Gregg Houghton’s locker, a minibottle of Jägermeister in Brandon Sayle’s, some herbal diet pills in Yasmine Leach’s, and my bottle of Advil. I think the cops were a little disappointed.

  “Maybe if you tear through the back of my locker you’ll find an opium den,” I said.

  I thought that was pretty funny, but the cop I was talking to was not amused. All four of us all got hauled to the office and searched. Gregg had a little bit of something in a twist of foil in the back pocket of his jeans. The cops arrested him on the spot. The rest of us, they just called our parents. I was hugely relieved, congratulating myself on my quick thinking getting rid of Jon Brande’s paper bag, and not too worried about the Advil thing. My parents would think it was ridiculous, even though it was technically against the rules.

  I didn’t see Jon that day—my parents took me straight home. Fortunately, they were more pissed at the school than at me.

  “Imagine that. Advil against the rules!” my mom said, shaking her head.

  “They don’t make rules so you can break them,” my dad said, which made no sense whatsoever.

  I went out to the backyard to sit in the gazebo and watch the tree service guys cut up and remove our fallen tree. Yesterday it had been a beautiful towering elm, but the storm had snapped it off about six feet above the ground, revealing the inside to be hollow and rotten.

  My dad came out several times to offer suggestions to the tree guys. Dad was an engineer. He believed there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. I could tell he was kind of driving them crazy.

  After another hour or so the tree was gone. They had cut the stump down to a foot above the ground. Dad stood out there staring at that stump for a long time. I supposed he was trying to figure out how to get rid of it.

  But that was his problem. My problem was Jon Brande.

  The next morning, first thing, I went to the lavatory where I’d dumped Jon’s bag, but the janitor had taken care of that. The trash can was empty.

  5. THE INTERVIEW ROOM

  “I started school the day after I moved here,” said Shayne. “I’d switched schools before so it was no big deal. The idea was I’d stay here with my aunt and finish up the year here, then move back with my mom in the summer, and then maybe come back in the fall for my senior year.”

  “Why?” Rawls asked.

  The kid shrugged. “I just go where I’m wanted.”

  Rawls nodded. Another kid whose parents didn’t have time for him.

  “You know Jon Brande?” the kid asked.

  Rawls, keeping his face carefully expressionless, nodded. “I know Jon.”

  “How good do you know him?”

  “Well enough.” Rawls had had a few run-ins with Jon, but had never been able to make an arrest. “Is that who you killed?”

  The kid suddenly became fascinated by his fingernails. “I met this kid named Mikey Martin my first day at school.”

  “A friend of Jon’s?”

  “Not exactly. Mikey’s okay. Only he’s one of these guys, he says what
ever comes into his head, you know? His mouth gets him in trouble.” He stared down at the steel ring on the table. “He can be real irritating sometimes.”

  “Is he a little Mexican kid?” Rawls asked, remembering. “Wears a suit?”

  “Yeah. Only he’s not Mexican.”

  Rawls grunted, thinking of the smart-ass kid in the suit and tie who’d had the bottle of headache pills in his locker during the antidrug blitz at Wellstone High—the kid had sure looked Mexican.

  “I know who you mean,” he said.

  “We got to be friends, sort of, me and Mikey. That’s how I met Jon.”

  6. MIKEY

  Five hundred dollars.

  That was what Jon Brande said I owed for losing his bag.

  My big mouth said, “Is that retail, replacement cost, or just some number you made up?”

  I saw it coming and had a fraction of a second to regret what my mouth had done before Jon Brande’s fist smashed into it. My head snapped back and hit the side of the Dumpster, my glasses went flying off my head, and I sank down into a cushy heap of garbage. I was surrounded by torn-open trash bags. Bags I had pulled out of the Dumpster, ripped open, and rummaged through. It was disgusting—you can’t even believe the stuff that gets thrown in the trash in school. I found everything from I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it, to you-don’t-want-to-know—but I did not find Jon’s little brown bag.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Jon repeated.

  “I don’t have it,” my smashed-up mouth said.

  “Get it.” Jon turned his back and walked away. I managed to keep my big mouth shut. It took me ten minutes to find my glasses—they’d landed in the emptied Dumpster.

  Later, when I got home, I told my mom my mouth had run into a door. She gave me a look, like she knew it was no door, but she really didn’t want to know. My mom had run into a couple of doors herself back before my dad quit drinking. But for the past few years, everything had been cool at home, at least as far as my parents were concerned.

  Anyway, I still had this problem, which was that Jon Brande had decided that I owed him five hundred dollars, and I didn’t have it, or anything close to it. With nothing to lose, I talked to my sister.

  Marie was perched in front of her vanity staring at the mirror.

  “Jon is going to kill me,” I said.

  She said, “So?”

  My sister. I don’t know what she saw in the mirror, but here’s what I saw: a light-skinned, freckled girl with African features, straightened hair dyed jet black (its natural color was more like chocolate brown with a little bit of red), too much black eye makeup, and dark red lipstick that always found its way onto her teeth. Not that she smiled much.

  I said, “So my funeral will probably be, like, next Friday.”

  “That’s my hair straightening appointment,” she said.

  My sister. To her, life was a really boring movie. None of it real.

  “I was hoping you could, you know, talk to him?”

  She plucked an eyebrow hair. Her eyebrows were plucked to thin arcs, like they’d been sliced into her forehead with a razor.

  “He said you stole his inventory,” she said. She pronounced it like INNNNN-ven-tory.

  My sister.

  “I didn’t steal anything. He handed me this bag, and …” I explained to her what had happened, and how it wasn’t my fault, and how now Jon expected me to pay him all this money I didn’t have.

  Marie stared at me as if I’d been speaking Klingon.

  She said, “Well, don’t look at me. I don’t have it either.” Then she went back to tweezing her eyebrows.

  My sister.

  7. THE INTERVIEW ROOM

  “Every school I’ve been to, there’s been a Jon Brande,” the kid said.

  Rawls nodded. It was true. He had run into more than his share.

  “I try to avoid them,” the kid said. He kept flipping the steel ring back and forth. Clank. Clank. It was driving Rawls nuts.

  “You sure you don’t want a Coke or something?” Give the kid something else to do with his hands.

  “I’ll take an orange soda if you got it.”

  Rawls left the interview room and walked down the hall to the soda machine. No orange soda. He bought a Mountain Dew. Maybe the caffeine would make the kid talk faster. On the way back he stopped and phoned home to say he would be late.

  “Some kid walked in to confess to a murder,” he told his wife. “I’m still trying to figure out who he thinks he killed.”

  “I hope you like cold fish,” she said.

  “What kind of fish?”

  “Cod.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just one of those things.”

  “I understand,” she said. But he knew she didn’t.

  Back in the interview room, the kid was still playing with the steel ring. Clank.

  “Mountain Dew,” the kid said, looking at the can.

  “You don’t like Mountain Dew?”

  “Dew’s okay.” He popped open the can and took a sip.

  “You were telling me about Jon Brande.”

  “Oh yeah. You know he sells dope, right?”

  Rawls nodded. “We know about Jon’s little business. One of these days we’ll catch him with the goods.”

  “Well, he gave Mikey his stash the day of the locker search and Mikey lost it for him.”

  “Did you see the drugs?”

  “No. I just saw Jon give Mikey a bag. Anyway, Mikey lost it and got punched in the mouth for his trouble, and Jon decided to make him pay for the dope. That’s how I got involved.”

  8. MIKEY

  I dressed extra-careful the next day: navy-blue suit, powder-blue shirt, black tie, my signature cuff links, and my two-tone (brown and black) wingtips. I guess I was thinking that maybe my split lip would attract less attention if I dazzled them all with fashion.

  It didn’t work. It got around school in a nanosecond what had happened. Instead of looking at my suit, everybody was staring at my mouth.

  At least I didn’t have to go around explaining it. Except to the new kid, Shayne, who was not yet hooked into the local information superhighway. He didn’t say anything to me in class, but later on at lunch, as I was trying to eat a taco without ripping open the cut on my lip, he finally asked me what had happened to my face.

  “I got in a fight.” I thought he’d be impressed.

  He wasn’t. “It looks like you led with your mouth.”

  “I tend to do that,” I said.

  Shayne tore open the bag of chocolate chip cookies he’d bought for lunch. He stuffed one into his mouth and chewed, staring thoughtfully at my mouth.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I said, “Say, Shayne, I was wondering …since we’re such good friends and all …do you have five hundred dollars I could borrow?”

  Shayne took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “You mean because we’ve known each other a whole two days?”

  I liked how he could be sort of sarcastic, only not in a mean way.

  “What do you need the money for?” he asked.

  I told him.

  9. THE INTERVIEW ROOM

  “I told Mikey I’d talk to Jon.” The kid looked at Rawls with a flat expression. “I mean, even if Mikey hadn’t shoved the bag in a trash can, he would have gotten caught with a bag full of whatever when he got hauled down to the office. So either way, Jon would have lost his stash. I thought maybe he’d listen to reason if it came from somebody other than Mikey. Mikey kind of pisses people off, you know?”

  “I’ve met him,” said Rawls. “The school locker thing.”

  “Are you the one who busted him for having Advil?”

  Rawls shrugged. “He broke the rules.”

  “Stupid rule. You bust a kid for Advil while Jon Brande is selling weed.”

  Rawls agreed. The prohibition on Advil and other over-the-counter drugs was ridiculous, but it was his job to enforce the law—even minor infractions of a high school’s “zero tolerance” rules.

  “When we catch Jon with the goods, we’ll bust him, too,” he said.

  Shayne clanked the ring back and forth a few times. “I tried to talk to Jon about the Mikey thing,” he said.

  “How did that go?”

  Clank.

  “Not well.”