Breaker (15 page)

Three days later, as I'm walking home with a gallon of milk, the police pull over to the side of the road, my old friends Delmar and Williams.

Williams steps out, a frown on his face, opening the back door of the squad car.

“Get in,” he says.

“What's this about, Officer?” I ask, smiling, numb from head to toe.

He walks over and slaps the milk out of my hand, the container rupturing on the pavement, sending milk spilling over the concrete and our boots.

“Get in the fucking car,” he says.

I'm too tired and empty to care, not thinking about all of the actual crimes I've committed over the years—merely thinking of Stephanie, assuming it's about that.

I sigh and bend over, slipping into the car. The cops don't say anything on the ride, the radio squawking out
domestic 4404 battery in progress…Lincoln and Pulaski…can I get a car…10-4, we're on the west side…disturbance on a bus here…disregard, he's good…6740, you still need a wagon,
and the houses are slipping past and my head is empty.

I find myself in a room with no windows, mirrors running down one wall, and it's all so cliché, every television show you've ever seen, the metal table, the angry cops across from me, one sitting, that's Delmar, one standing against the wall, that's Williams, arms folded. I wait for Williams to walk to the camera mounted up in the corner, wait for him to unplug it, but he doesn't.

“So, Ray, do you know why we picked you up?” Delmar asks, a folder in front of him.

“No idea.”

“You want to hazard a guess?” he asks.

“No.”

“Look, we know you fight, we're aware of what goes on in that warehouse, that you're picking up some scratch by pummeling some gangbangers. We don't give a fuck about that—good riddance to old garbage. If we wanted to raid that shit show, we'd do it. This isn't about that, okay?”

I nod. “Okay,” I say.

“We know a lot of shit goes down in Logan Square, that the Gangster Disciples are a major problem, and we're working on that. The Latin Kings, too,” Delmar says, peering into the folder. “You have a sister, Stephanie Nelson? You see her lately?”

I take a deep breath.

“She came by my apartment a few weeks ago. We don't talk all that often. She texts me now and then, but I don't see her every day.”

“You know what she does for a living?”

“Works at Target, last I knew.”

“Over on Diversey?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He nods his head.

“I want you to take a look at something.”

He slides the folder over to me, spins it around, and there's Stephanie pale as a sheet, in the tub, and he flips the pages over, her totally naked on a metal table, close-up photos of her wrists, and then something else—a photo of her chest, something under her left breast.

“Is this your sister?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He stares at me, looking for a reaction. I tear up, but to be honest, I'm dead inside, numb from all of this, the death and destruction.

“You don't look too shook up about it,” Williams offers from the wall.

“She's been a mess for a long time. Drugs, mostly. Dated a lot of losers, said she was clean, but you know….” I trail off.

“Was she a pain in the ass, Raymond?” Delmar asks, squinting his eyes at me. “I know how that is. My sister-in-law…”

“Oh man, here we go….” Williams offers up from the darkness.

“My sister-in-law, she can't keep a man, can't hold a job, but she's happy to come into my house and tell my old lady what a jerk I am, how I don't provide enough, and then, the nerve of her, she asks for a handout as she's walking out the door.”

I nod.

“Did you want her dead?” he asks.

“What?” I say, sitting up. “No. She was a screwup, but—why would I want to kill her?”

He looks down at the paperwork.

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

“I didn't even know she was seeing anyone,” I say, and I try not to grin, but I do, a slight laugh slipping out.

“Something funny?” Williams asks.

“Sorry, I'm just tired. My sister wasn't much of a lady, Officers, so when I said ‘seeing someone' like it was a proper relationship, what I meant was, fucking some dirtbag gangbanger who had her strung out on meth or crack or heroin, sucking dick for smack, pulling a train for her rent.” My eyes are blazing now, as I lean forward, Delmar scooting back.

“Ah, there we go,” Delmar says. “He's not a zombie—told you, Mike.”

Officer Williams chuckles from the corner.

“So, you haven't been over to her apartment lately?”

“No,” I say. “Never been. She moves a lot.”

“Interesting,” Delmar says, opening up the folder.

I rub my temples, a headache coming on.

“So Mrs. Lopez in 4F, she must have been talking about some other massive white guy that looked like death warmed over, black sweatshirt, black jeans, hair nearly white, like a ghost.”

I look down at my clothes—black sweatshirt, black jeans.
Damnit
—the old lady.

“What do you want, Delmar? My sister is dead; she killed herself. It was inevitable, right? She was a junkie and a whore. Not too surprising, the outcome. So why am I here?”

“How about some DNA?” Williams says. “Rule you out as a suspect. Not just the sperm we found up in her asshole and vagina, but the baby, right? All that. You mind?”

“Take my blood, take my saliva, whatever you want. I had nothing to do with this.”

They smile.

“Mikey, you mind?” Delmar asks, as his partner slips out the door to get a kit. “One more thing,” he says. “Take a look at this picture,” and he slides the photos back toward me, flipping a few over, tapping on the one of her left breast.

“See this?” he says. “Look close. Under the breast, between her ribs.”

I bend over and there's a one-inch slit, hardly even noticeable.

“She was stabbed, Raymond—right into her heart. Somebody tried to cover up the wound with some VetiGel, seal it up after it was over. Makes no sense. The wrists would have done the trick; that's suicide. But why this? Looks like insurance to me. Or maybe it was the first cut, the rest shortly after, as she's bleeding out. You'd have to get up close and personal—naked, something a lover might do, right? And the only blood in her apartment was in the bathroom.”

Williams is back with the kit, taking a swab from my mouth, pulling a blood sample from my arm, taking fingerprints with a digital scanner. It's over in a few minutes.

“I didn't kill her,” I say.

Williams walks out with the samples.

I sigh and decide to tell them everything.

“I called it in,” I mutter. “I went by her apartment to check on her. I have text messages—here, take my phone,” I say, placing it on the table. “I had no reason to do this to her.”

“What if you were the daddy?” Delmar says, frowning and crossing his arms. “We have this new DNA test, still in beta. In just a few minutes it can eliminate ninety percent of the suspects.”

“How's that work?” I ask.

“It doesn't run all of the markers, just eliminates the majority based on a few strands. I don't quite get it. It's like getting a partial fingerprint. If the swirl is way off, we know at once if it's not the same person. This narrows it way down.”

I stare at him, not quite understanding.

“You got any family in town?”

“My father has been gone for a long time; I assume he's dead. My uncle Tully is long dead. My brother died at a very young age of SIDS—you know that story, right?”

He nods his head.

“That's about it, for the men in my family. My mother gone many years now as well.”

Williams walks back in, looking pissed off.

“Stand up,” he says. “Put your hands behind your back, Ray.”

“Motherfucker,” Delmar mutters, standing up as well.

“What's going on?”

“You match. Not one hundred percent, but enough. We're putting you in a cell until it's done running the full scan, which will take four hours. But it doesn't look good, asshole.”

I turn around, my head spinning. It's impossible.

“You sick fuck,” Delmar says.

“Guys…”

“Shut up,” Delmar says, punching me in the side of the head—once, twice.

“Back off, Billie,” Williams says. “Get off him,” he adds, nodding toward the camera. He clicks the handcuffs tight and pushes me forward to the door, ramming my skull into the head jamb.

“Oh, you might want to duck, Boom-Boom,” Williams says.

For the next several hours I sit in a cell and wait, time expanding around me, two, four, six hours—who knows for how long.

I wait.

For what, I'm not sure.

It doesn't make sense. Why would my DNA show up? I can't figure it out. Am I being framed?

I sit in the cinder-block cell on a thin pad that rests on the bench, the cold in the concrete seeping up into my body.

Six hours later, Beavis and Butthead open the metal door and ask me to step out, saying that we need to talk. Back to the same room that has always been there, where there have been many conversations, confessions, and crimes figured out. It's starting to feel like I may never see daylight again, even after such a short stay. There is a permanence about everything, your free will tossed out, the metal locks, the metal doors, everything under surveillance, no freedom to do anything but breathe. The cops look softer now, they don't smash my head into the doorframe, and they don't yell at me.

They resume their spots, as I sit back into the metal chair—Delmar across from me, sitting down, flipping through his files; Williams leaning against the wall again, arms crossed, his face blank, showing no emotion.

“So, we got the test results, Ray,” Delmar says.

“And?”

He shakes his head from side to side, taking a breath.

“I don't get it. I thought for sure you were guilty. You weren't an exact match.”

I squint my eyes.

“What does that mean? I was a partial match? How is that even possible?”

He rubs his face. “Yeah, new tech, this is a first for me. We've only been using it a few months. It's not you, Ray, but it's somebody a lot like you. Somebody that's related to you, a very close relation.”

I don't get it.

“So what are you saying? As far as I know, I don't have any family members alive.”

Delmar slides a picture over to me, of a plain white van, a couple of photos actually, stacked up into a little pile.

“These are stills from a security camera in a bank across the street from Humboldt Park. We scoured the area—ATMs, banks, gas stations, anywhere there might be a camera running, that was actually taping—looking for this van.”

I look through the pictures, the license plates blurry—hell, the whole thing is blurry, hard to even tell if it's a Chevy or a Ford. The last three show a man stepping out of the driver's-side door.

“We talked to a few people in the area, and nobody got a license plate, at least not yet. I mean, how many white vans park in the area? Dozens, right? This guy—maybe in his late forties or early fifties, white, dark hair—could be anybody.”

I nod my head and stare at the photos.

“We went back today, to show some pictures around, this time of you.”

I look up at him, scowling.

“Just doing my job, Ray,” he says. “And while some people know you from the neighborhood, being so hard to miss and all, nobody ever saw you in association with this white van. But here's the weird thing. I like to put a few random pictures mixed in with the other mug shots and whatnot, just to keep the sample size honest—don't want somebody to make something up, right? And there was a picture of your sister in with the rest.”

I stare at him, and then look to Williams, who doesn't bat an eye.

“She's been in here a few times, you probably know that, not just here in this precinct but all over Chicago—possession, shoplifting, mostly minor stuff; we don't show her as ever having a felony.”

I take a breath.

“One of the ladies over by Humboldt Park, she makes a weird noise, she goes,
Huh,
and then hands the picture back to me. So I ask her what that's all about. You know what she says?”

“I have no idea.”

“She says that she saw
this
lady close to the van, maybe even getting in and out of it once—your sister. Says she thought at first they were like a father and daughter out doing charity work, the guy with a clipboard, census or something, maybe just taking a walk—they seemed to be together, close and all, laughing.”

I stare at Delmar, unsure of where this is heading.

“And then, she says they kissed. And she changed her mind, the lady, about who or what she thought they were to each other. Bit of an age difference, but you know—anything goes these days.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I say.

“So, now we're looking at your sister and the van, this guy, which is new. And I'm sitting here looking at these photos of the guy in the van, looking at pictures of you, looking at pictures of your sister. And something goes off in my head.”

“I could practically see the lightbulb,” Williams says.

“On a whim, I ask the DNA guys to run your sister's blood—we have plenty of that on file now,” he says. “No offense, just saying,” he continues.

I don't like where this is going.

“So, that's why it took us a little longer to get back here to you, had to see what showed up on her report. We already knew she was high, drunk, a mix of alcohol, weed, coke, and meth; she was having herself a good time. Or, it's supposed to look like that, anyway.”

I nod.

“I don't know how to say this, Ray, but Stephanie isn't your sister.”

I must not have heard him right.

“What?”

“The DNA, not even close. Obviously you thought she was your sister, but she's not a blood relative.”

I look down at the pictures spread out on the table, and realize for maybe the first time how different Stephanie looks. I just thought I was an aberration. We don't have the same eyes, the same bone structure—I'm much taller than her, pale skin where she's almost olive, her frame much smaller—so very different, in so many ways.

I look at the man in the van, the way he stands, his hair, his pale skin.

“Williams here thinks maybe she was adopted, and I kind of tend to agree with him. Not a bad theory. Any idea why your parents might not have wanted to have kids of their own? I mean, why have a child who dies, then adopt, if that's what happens, and then have you?”

I think of my older brother, dying as an infant, SIDS. Or maybe it was something else.

“Ray, any ideas?” Delmar asks.

I think of my father sitting at the end of the bed, my mother and her history of instability.

“Ray?”

Was Stephanie adopted? Maybe my parents wanted to stay together, but felt like maybe something was wrong with them. Is that why they killed my older brother?

“Ray, you okay, any thoughts?”

Why am I even still here? Was it just too suspicious, after the first child died, waiting until I got older, and then suddenly I shoot up into a monster they can't quite snuff out—dark, sullen, and exotic?

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm in shock here, I…I…I'm not sure.”

I look back at the pictures.

“Which leads me back to the DNA results, Ray. If it's not you, and it clearly isn't,” Delmar says, Williams nodding from the dark, “then who in the hell is it?”

I look at the pictures of the van. I think of my sister, or whoever she is now, her need for approval, seeking out dangerous men like Uncle Tully, the way that she crossed the line so easily, and so often. Did she know she wasn't our blood, essentially a stranger raised in our house, as if pulling someone in off the street?

“It's my father,” I say. “He's alive.”