Dying Memories (4 page)

Chapter 8

Bill is thirteen when he finds his mom dead in their Astoria apartment. He had been hanging out with his buddies after school playing basketball, and when he enters the apartment he feels the stillness of it and knows something isn’t right. When he calls out to his mom there’s no answer. At this time of the day his mom should’ve been in the kitchen preparing dinner and she should be yelling back to him asking what he’s been up to. He takes several steps into the hallway before he sees his mom’s body laying crumpled next to the small dining room table his parents had set up off the living room. From the way her body lays twisted he knows at some level what has happened, that she’s been murdered, but he’s in shock and his brain refuses to process the information.

When he tries desperately to shake her back to life, he sees the damage that was done to her, but he can’t accept it. Her tongue thick and blue as it pushes out of her mouth, her dead eyes blind and bulging from their sockets, her skin ghastly white. And then there are all those deep ugly purplish marks along her throat and the side of her neck. It isn’t right for her to look like that. Alive she had such a gentleness and softness about her. Her voice, her manner, the way she’d smile at Bill when she’d kiss his forehead, even when she’d embarrass him by doing it in front of his friends. It just isn’t right for her to be left the way she was. When Bill finally accepts that his mom is dead—that someone had choked the life out of her—it’s as if his chest is made of tinfoil and has been crushed by a fist. He collapses alongside her body and sobs helplessly. Sometime later a neighbor enters the apartment and pulls him away. He has cried himself out that day, and hasn’t cried again since. It’s as if there’s nothing worth crying about in life after that had happened.

Later he spends hours being questioned by the police, mostly about his dad and how his parents got along. When he answers their questions it’s with shrugs or one word monotonic responses. He knows what they are trying to get at—whether his dad could have done this. He can’t accept the possibility. His dad might be a loud, boisterous man, and at times a bully, and yeah, he has a bad temper, but so do a lot of other men in the neighborhood. How many of them kill their wives? And yeah, his dad sometimes drinks too much, and many times throws away more money on the horses than they can afford, but he brings home a steady paycheck as a plumber and doesn’t seem to fight any more with his wife than what Bill observes with his friends’ parents, although he knows his mom always tried to keep them from fighting in front of him so maybe things were a lot worse when he wasn’t around. But still, he has to think his dad cared about his mom, even with how cruel he could act. Especially when drunk. The nasty cracks he made about his mom’s weight and how she was starting to look like an old hag, which wasn’t at all true. She was only thirty-eight and at most twenty pounds heavier than she should’ve been. Bill doesn’t tell any of this to the police.

His mom’s family is from Minnesota, and his dad’s family had all died off or moved away years ago. The detectives finish with Bill well before finishing with his dad, and since Bill is an only child and there’s no other family around they end up leaving him with a neighbor who had been good friends with Bill’s mom. It turns out that they question Bill’s dad, Frank Conway, until late into the night, and Frank doesn’t pick Bill up when they release him.

It isn’t until the next evening when Frank knocks on the neighbor’s door to retrieve his son. When the door opens, Frank nods to the neighbor, barely looking at her or Bill. Standing in the doorway, he appears unkempt, his hair greasy and his skin color not right, and he seems smaller and less substantial to Bill than he could ever remember. Frank’s lips barely move as he tells his son to gather up his things, that he’s taking him home.

When they leave the neighbor’s apartments, Bill tells his dad that he doesn’t want to go back into their apartment again. Frank stays silent until they approach their door.

“We can’t move until the lease is up,” he says. “And I don’t want to hear any more whining about it.”

That was the last thing he says to Bill that night. Frank ends up spending the rest of the evening sitting morosely in front of a TV set that stays turned off. Around midnight he stumbles off to his bedroom
.

Chapter 9

Thomas Roberson looked like he hadn’t had any more sleep the past few nights than Bill had been getting. Thin and bony with a small amount of scraggly hair combed over to cover his exposed scalp, he reminded Bill of the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Like the aforementioned Scarecrow, Roberson had a cheery demeanor, and showed Bill a cheery smile when he offered him some coffee. Bill gladly accepted, telling the lawyer the higher the octane the better. Roberson poured two cups from a coffee maker that he had set up in his small, cluttered office, and handed Bill a chipped but cheerfully bright yellow-colored mug. Both men took their seats then, Roberson behind his desk, Bill taking the leather-padded wooden chair opposite him.

“I’ve been reading your articles dealing with my client with interest,” Roberson said, his voice just as cheery as the rest of him.

“I would’ve guessed you would.”

Roberson nodded, then scratched high along his forehead before turning tired bloodshot eyes back to Bill. “That was a good stroke of luck finding that woman,” he acknowledged. “Amazing, really, having a daughter named Jenny murdered at age eleven. In your story you said this woman, Janet Larson, and Gail look a lot alike. Is that true?”

“Could be sisters.”

“Did she by any chance say anything else that you might’ve left out of your story that could be, uhh, useful?”

“No, sorry, everything was in there.”

Roberson nodded, his cheery smile cracking a bit as he cleared his throat and said, “Let me return the favor and give you something that might be useful to you. A colleague of mine represented Trey Megeet.”

Bill stared at him blankly until Roberson reminded him that Megeet was the homeless man arrested for stabbing an MIT scientist to death in front of a group of horrified Harvard Square onlookers. That was a year and a half ago. Against his lawyer’s wishes Megeet pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty years. With the victim being Chinese and the attacker African American and the inherent racism with how the media treats victims of different skin color, the story barely made a blip. From what Bill remembered the
Tribune
covered it for maybe three days, which was a day longer than either the
Herald
or
Globe
. He had to think hard to recall the basic facts of the crime.

“I don’t understand why you think this would be of interest to me,” Bill said.

“There are similarities between Trey Megeet and my client,” Roberson said. “They both appear sane outside of their one fixed delusion that caused them to murder an innocent person.”

“I thought Megeet was mentally unbalanced, as well as a drug addict.”

Roberson brushed the comment away. “Not according to my colleague,” he said.

For a long moment Bill sat quietly staring at the lawyer sitting opposite him while Roberson offered his strained but cheery smile. As best as Bill could tell what Roberson wanted was for the
Tribune
to write articles about this so-called connection to prejudice a potential jury pool, maybe make them think that this was a believable and common form of mental illness. But he also saw how this would make good copy, even if it would be complete bullshit.

As sincerely as he could muster, and trying hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, Bill asked, “Are you suggesting that whatever Megeet has is contagious and that your client caught it?”

Roberson had his hands folded in front on his desk and he absently started rubbing vigorously on the knuckles of his right hand. They were thin and bony hands, with barely enough skin covering them. Bluish-green veins stood out starkly.

“Well, no,” Roberson said, a slight rush of pink coloring his cheeks. “When I read what you discovered about Gail, about that other woman in her same building, it made me think of the similarities with Megeet, and after careful consideration. I thought maybe it would be helpful for you to know about it also.”

A fleeting shadow passed over the lawyer’s eyes that all but said there was something else.

“There’s something else,” Bill said.

Roberson shook his head. The pink in his cheeks gone, replaced by a muddled whiteness. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “That’s it. That’s why I called you.” He handed Bill an index card that had Megeet’s lawyer’s name and contact information.

“Is your client faking?” Bill asked.

Again, Roberson shook his head. “She believes what she’s saying. I have no doubt of that.”

“Have you had her examined?”

“Yes, of course. Outside of this one delusion and subsequent depression, nothing.”

“Has your client ever been pregnant? Maybe had a miscarriage?”

Roberson’s lips compressed into a grim line. “Her parents claim no. I don’t believe that’s the case.”

“Anything traumatic happen to her before the shooting?”

Sighing softly, Roberson said, “Not that I’ve been able to figure out.”

“Why Kent Forster? Why target him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything that you do know that you can tell me?”

As with before, something subtle flickered across Roberson’s eyes. He shook his head, said, “Sorry, nothing.”

“Can I talk to her?”

The lawyer hesitated for a moment, then showed a smile that was both apologetic and cheery. “I’m not sure that would be in the best interest of my client, at least not right now,” he said. “But I promise you I’ll consult with her and we’ll see what the future holds.”

Bill stood up, shook hands briefly with Roberson observing how much the lawyer’s skin felt like dried parchment paper. There was something else there, something Roberson wasn’t telling him. Bill wondered what it was, but decided he would figure it out for himself.

Chapter 10

They have the funeral for Bill’s mom in Minnesota to make things easier for her family. They don’t stay with relatives, though, instead spending two nights in a cheap roadside motel. Frank seems distracted and doesn’t talk much, either before or after the funeral, not that his wife’s relatives seem to want to talk to him either. They all mostly keep their distance from one another. Bill can tell that his mom’s family want to ask him questions, but none of them work up the courage to do so.

The next few weeks when they’re back home the detectives investigating the murder come almost every day to their apartment. Neither of them look like cops to Bill, at least not like the ones he sees on TV. The one who seems to be in charge is a thin man who moves stiffly like he has a bad back, and looks more to Bill like he should’ve been a dentist or pharmacist than a cop. The other one is a large, round man whose eyes always seem to be drifting closed as if he were falling asleep. When they come over they nod bleakly to Bill, and then his dad hurries out of the apartment with them. Bill understands that his dad doesn’t want to speak to them in front of him.

After a couple of months or so the detectives stop coming by altogether, and shortly after that Frank starts drinking again. It is three months after his mom’s death when Bill notices his dad giving him a dull bleary-eyed stare. Frank has been drinking heavily that night and he demands that Bill tell him what he’s thinking.

Bill stares back at him, confused, and tries walking past him to get to his bedroom. His dad pushes himself out of his chair. He staggers on his feet but moving fast he lurches forward and grabs Bill by the arm.

“Goddamn it, you tell me what you think!” he roars, his breath stinking heavily of whiskey.

 “Let go of me!”

“You think I killed your mom, don’t you!”

“That’s what the police think, so why shouldn’t I?”

His dad’s hand flashes out in a blur, hitting Bill with a backhanded slap that breaks his nose for the first time. The blow sends Bill hard to the floor where he sits dazed as blood leaks from his mouth and nose. Frank stares at him for a long time after that, then mutters for his son to quit his whining, that he hardly touched him. Frank falls back down into his chair, his eyes becoming little more than small black points
.

Chapter 11

When Bill returned back to the
Tribune
, he stopped off to talk with Carol McCoy who was the
Tribune’
s research information analyst, and asked if she could pull out for him whatever she could find on Trey Megeet. After that he did some research of his own to fill in the sketchy memories he had of the incident. The man Megeet murdered was an MIT professor named Tim Zhang, and according to Megeet, Zhang murdered his wife in a hit and run accident. Megeet did have a wife who was killed by a car while crossing the street, but there were no witnesses to it, and no one was ever charged. At the time Megeet worked as a stockbroker. His wife’s death and the subsequent depression he suffered caused him to lose his job. He was living on the streets for over three years before he murdered Zhang. Afterwards he insisted that he witnessed Zhang running down his wife, but that wasn’t possible—he was at work at the time and Zhang was at a conference in California.

After better familiarizing himself with the case, Bill headed off to see Jack O’Donnell who looked his usual pasty, disheveled self with his shirt wrinkled, the sleeves as always rolled up, his hair in the same disarray as if he’d just come out of a windstorm. Jack sat frowning severely at his computer monitor. He glanced with indifference at Bill before staring back at his computer screen, and asked whether Bill had had a fruitful meeting with Hawes’s attorney.

“An interesting one, anyway.”

Bill told him about it, which got Jack’s full attention. He made a face over the suggestion that there were similarities between Megeet and Hawes. “Superficial at best,” he said. “Megeet’s wife was in fact killed in a hit and run. She was real. Hawes’s daughter was purely imaginary.”

“Maybe so, but he was still delusional about who he blamed. And supposedly they’re both sane outside of their one delusions.”

“I don’t buy that for one second,” Jack said, smiling derisively. “I’d bet anything if you spent ten minutes with them you’d find them both batty as all hell.”

“That might be true, but this is going to make damn good copy even if it’s all bullshit. And more important, I had the feeling that Roberson was offering a trade. We write about this and he’ll try harder to let me meet his client.”

“Then do what you have to to make that happen.”

Jack had already tuned him out as he turned back to stare fixedly at whatever it was that was on his computer screen. Bill returned to his desk where he made a few phone calls, finding out that Trey Megeet had been sent to MCI Cedar Junction in Walpole. A few more phone calls and he was able to put a request in to visit Megeet. He had no idea if Megeet would accept the visit, but at least he’d give it a try.

His phone rang. It was Emily calling to say hi, and to thank him again for the coffee and éclair. While he shot the breeze with her an email came in with the subject ‘about your meeting today’. He opened it up. The message was short, simply saying:

You’re treading in dangerous waters. Be careful. –yer pal, G
.