Extenuating Circumstances (26 page)

For a second I just sat there, breathing hard. There was blood up and down my jacket -his and mine. He'd been tugging so hard that I'd pulled out a handful of hair. I wiped the blood and hair off my hand, wrapped a handkerchief around the deep cut on my right hand, and got out. The kid was lying on the pavement by the driver's-side door, moaning and holding his bloody head with both hands. I reached down and grabbed him by the back of his windbreaker, dragging him around to the passenger side of the Pinto.

"Wha' the hell?" he said groggily.

Opening the passenger-side door, I reached inside the glove compartment and took out a pair of cuffs. I flipped Tommy T. on his stomach and cuffed his hands behind him, then tossed him onto the seat, slamming the door behind him. Before getting back in on the driver's side, I took a close look up and down the street. No one had driven by. There was no one else visible on the block.

I put the car in gear and drove slowly away.
 
 

In a few minutes we were on River Road, heading west toward Saylor Park. It started to rain. A slow drizzle that made the headlights glint on the dark, oily tarmac. To the left I could see the river lights guttering in the dark current. On the right the white clapboard houses of Anderson Ferry gradually gave way to gravel pits and open lots.

Chard had come around by then. He sat still on the seat, head bowed and bloody. "I didn't do nothing to you," he said bitterly. "I didn't."

"What about Kent and Kitty, Tommy? What about Ira Lessing?"

"I didn't do none of that, either."

"Yeah, you were just an innocent bystander."

"It was Terry that done Ira. Not me."

"You're lying, you little cocksucker."

The kid bucked, like I'd jolted him with a prod. If he could have gotten the razor, he would have attacked me again.

"I ain't no cocksucker," he screamed. "I ain't no fag."

I laughed. At that moment in his life that was all he could think to say.

"Terry was the cocksucker," he said. "Terry was the faggot. Warming up to that rich-ass son-of-a-bitch. Calling him his dad. I told him I could get in that man's crack anytime I wanted to. But he thought he had something special going. So I just had to show him -thinking he's better than me, 'cause he had some faggot that treated him nice."

I glanced over at him. "You took Lessing away from Terry?"

"Shit, yes, I did. Ain't my fault Terry was too stupid to see what was happening -until Lessing told him. That's what set Terry off. Hearing his big-deal lover boy tell him he wanted some of what I'd been giving him."

"How do you know that?"

For just a second he looked perplexed. "How do you think?" he finally said. "Terry told me when he picked me up that night. Crying and moaning and talking like he done killed his father -when all he done was kilt some worthless faggot."

I slapped the kid with the back of my hand. Hard. Right on his mouth.

He spit blood on the dash. "You take these cuffs off," he shrieked. "I'll hurt you so bad, you won't ever forget it."

"Is that how you used to talk to Ira?"

"Yeah." He started to laugh wildly. "I made him cry like a girl. I hurt him so bad he couldn't walk." He laughed for a long while, until he was sick with laughter. When he'd laughed himself out he sat back hard against the seat.

"You got the gun, so you think you're better than me. But you ain't better than me. You ain't nothing. Ain't no man better than Tom T. Chard."
 
 

A few miles outside of Saylor Park I turned off the highway onto a gravel access road that led down to the river. Chard hadn't said a word for some time. He knew what was coming, and he was holding out against it.

The road ended in front of a broken slab of concrete that had once been the foundation of a house. A little rise surrounded it, falling away in a field of weeds, broken pop bottles, and junk auto parts to a grove of maples along the riverbank.

It was close to five by then, and the dawn had just begun to turn the eastern sky violet. But the river and the maple grove were still deep in night. I left the headlights on to light the way, then pulled Chard out of the car and pushed him over the rise down toward the trees.

The handkerchief around my hand was soaked with blood. There was blood dripping down my arm from the cuts on my shoulder. But I wasn't thinking about my wounds; I'm not sure I was thinking at all.

"I ain't gonna die," Chard said as he walked down to the bank. "You can't kill me. Ain't no man gonna kill Tom T. Chard."

When we got to the maple grove he began to cry. He stood there facing me, his bloody face lit up by the headlights, and pleaded for his life.

"Don't do this, man," he said, sobbing. "Don't do this to me. I got money. Lots of money. You can split it with me." His eyes lit up. "You can have it all!"

"I don't want the money."

"What do you want!" he screamed, falling to his knees in the muck.

"The truth about Lessing."

He looked up at me, his hair plastered with gore. "I was there, okay?" His face contracted and he groaned like an animal. "He was just a fag, man."

"Is that what you told Terry?"

He looked up at me with a touch of defiance in his streaming eyes. "Yeah. That's what I told him. He was just a fag. Just something to whop on."

I shot him in the head.
He fell back in the weeds-what was left of him.

I took the cuffs off his wrists, took the money from his jacket. Rolled his body over to the bank, filled the coat pockets with stones, and pushed it in. I dropped the silencer in the river too. I got back in the car and drove up to River Road. There wasn't enough light for anyone to identify the car, even if there'd been someone around to see it. I pulled onto the highway and started east, back to town.

I stopped once at a roadside shelter, west of Delhi near the river, and cleaned the blood off the seats and dash with some rags I used to wax the car. I tossed the rags and Chard's razor in a barrel full of trash, pushing them down deep in the can and covering them over with junk. I used a spigot to wash out the cut on my hand and rewrapped it in a fresh handkerchief. There wasn't a thing I could do about my shoulder or my clothes until I got back to the apartment.

By then the dawn had begun in earnest, turning the sky white and the air a pearly gray. I sat down on a park bench next to a swing set and stared at the river, going to gold in the dawn. I sat there for quite a while. Then I got back in the car and drove home.
 

38

I didn't phone Len for a couple of days. I didn't talk to anyone.

On Monday, Carnova's trial began -and ended. It took all of thirty minutes for him to plead guilty before a panel of judges. Sentencing was scheduled for the following week, pending a mitigation hearing.

On Sunday morning I went to, the justice Center to talk to Carnova. I didn't expect him to agree to a conference, but he did. Maybe Kitty had mentioned me to him. Maybe O'Brien had. Whatever the reason, he recognized my name.

The meeting took place on the fifth floor, in the visitor's room. He sat behind a glass shield. His face had changed. It looked old now and weary. His voice had lost its wild young edge too. He sounded tired, resigned, as ready for death as an eighty-year-old man.

"You was a friend of Kitty's, wasn't you?" he said after we sat down across from each other.

"I knew her."

The boy swallowed hard. "She shouldn'ta never cared about me. I told her I wasn't worth it. She shouldn'ta cared."

I didn't say anything.

"I just wisht I coulda gone to her funeral."

"They wouldn't let you?"

He shook his head. "I got stabbed in the mess hall. Had to stay in the infirmary."

I ducked my head. "It's been tough for you inside."

"I deserve it," he said in his old self-dramatizing style. "Every bit of it. Ain't enough they can do to me now. I kilt my dad and I kilt my wife."

"You had some help," I said bitterly.

He knew exactly who I was talking about. "Tommy didn't do no more'n what I woulda done had I been in his shoes. He's just looking out for himself, like he always told me to do. Got to look after yourself first. Ain't no one else gonna do it for you. Just get to the head of that line and take what you can."

Tom T. Chard's philosophy of life.

"He had a . . . relationship with Ira Lessing, didn't he? Your friend Tommy."

The kid's face turned a little red. "It weren't no relationship. He mighta seen Ira with me sometimes, I guess. Ira was my friend."

"That's not true, is it, Terry?" I said softly. "Lessing had been going to see Chard for some time, behind your back."

The kid didn't answer me. He just sat there with a wounded, angry look on his face.

"You didn't know about that, did you?" I said. "Not until that night, when Ira told you."

"He didn't tell me nothing," the kid said angrily. "There weren't nothing to tell. Ira was my dad." The kid got up from his chair. "I ain't gonna talk to you no more."

He signaled to a guard and walked out of the conference room.

But I sat there for a while longer, thinking about Terry and Ira and Tom Chard. In its own way the murder had been a crime of passion -or passions. Crippled by his compulsions, Ira had courted his own death. And Terry had delivered it to him, with Tommy T. urging him on. Urging him to act like a real man-to give his lover what he really wanted, what he'd come to Tommy to get.

High on T's and B's, furious over being betrayed by his friend and his lover -on his birthday, no less Terry had started pushing Ira around, beating him the way Tommy did it. Only Terry was no expert; he wasn't Tommy T. He was just a jealous lover who was deliberately goaded into losing control of his violent temper. And who had lived in guilt and remorse ever since.

Guilt, remorse, and that one little secret he obviously intended to carry to the grave. The secret that had kept him from mentioning Chard to the cops. In the Byzantine world of homosexual hustlers, where the hustlers were "real men" and the johns were just fags to be used and discarded, Terry had committed the unpardonable sin of caring for a client. And then Tommy T. had come along and shown him just how stupid that affection was -just how easily it could be stolen away by a "real man."
 
 

It had started to rain when I came out of the Justice Center, a cool, gentle rain that chilled the air. In a week or two that burning summer would finally end and it would be fall.

I picked up the car in the justice Center lot and drove slowly down Main Street. I knew what I had to do, but it was going to be hard as hell to explain it to Len and to Janey -why I was going to testify about the doctored confession at the mitigation hearing.

I picked up speed on the expressway and headed for the Brent-Spence and Covington. With any luck I'd find both of them at the house on Riverside Drive. Then we could sit down and talk, about Ira and Terry and Tommy T.