Gossip (27 page)

“Hey, skinhead,” a voice shouted. “Throw me your cigs.”

The cells were staggered and I couldn’t see into the cell opposite. I had to step up to my bars before I saw a bleached palm making a gimme gesture across the way.

“Sorry. Don’t smoke,” I said, in the guilty tone I used with homeless people on the street.

The hand withdrew. A bloodshot eye appeared between the bars. “Sorry? You ain’t sorry. White piece of shit. Must make you sick to be thrown in with niggers, skinhead.” His lower teeth were solid metal, gold or brass, with two artificial fangs. “You just another shit-eating faggot. You skinheads think you’re tough, but just a pack of Nazi Jew fags.” He stepped away from the bars, having no further use for me.

I took a loud, self-conscious piss in the saucepan toilet. Unfolding the mattress on its shelf, I saw the pattern of stains covering the middle. Of course. There was nothing else for men to do here. The wall beside the bed had been scratched by a fork or thumbnail with crude pictures of vaginas, breasts and guns. I wished I’d asked to keep my book, not because I thought I could read, but having a smooth, literate object at hand might remind me who I was. I covered the mattress with a sheet and lay down without removing my boots. Now I’m living this minute, I thought, now the next. Eternity stretched out before me.

I had broken with gravity tonight and hurtled through time, only to come to a dead halt at the dead end of a jail cell. I thought everything would catch up with me and I’d understand what it meant. But I couldn’t think in the racket of rap songs, a chant of bad moods that canceled each other out. I was canceled out. The music stopped when the lights were killed, but living voices called to each other. “Who you?” “Nobody you know.” “You righteous?” “More righteous than you, homeboy.” “Shut up, bitches. Save it for the suits.” When the voices died out, there were more private sounds: moans and splashes and farts. Even the toughest thug waited for darkness to ease his bowels.

What was I doing here? I seemed to have wanted this. Why? To make Bill’s death real? To punish myself? I seemed to be guilty of something. I wondered if maybe I had killed Bill and it had slipped my mind, as so much had slipped from my mind. Anything seemed possible tonight, everything was a dream. Looking at my hands, however, the cuticles rimmed with fingerprint ink, I assured myself I couldn’t have killed him or I would not be so stunned to find myself here.

Hatred began in the next hour. Not anger, but hatred, a cold fury with no clear object. I could blame myself for only so long, but found no other target smaller than the entire world. It resembled my last gasps of faith in college, when I was an atheist who still believed in God whenever I was. caught in the rain. Chilled and wet, water stinging my eyes while I bicycled home from a class, I’d think angrily, Go ahead, spit on me, punish me, make me suffer, as if my misery were not bad luck and poor planning but directed personally at me by a hidden power. There was only me and the universe, me and not-me, me and
It,
an egotism of suffering that made God necessary again.

God tonight was a police station. God was a zoo. The night light outside the bars resembled the dim glow of the reptile house where Bill and I had met. Except I’d become one of the reptiles, a cold-blooded thing outside time. And Bill existed nowhere at all. Yet we remained connected, more tightly now than when he was alive, trapped under the glass of his death.

The It that put me here had murdered Bill. There was no other explanation. I wanted a They who could do that, but this required such a vast They—cops and jailer and detectives, Pruitt and Lovelace, the reporters at the airport—that my old suspicion about Jeb Weiss seemed naive and sentimental.

I
DIDN’T SLEEP THAT
first night, so I never felt as if I woke up the next morning. The night leaked away in snores and groans, the flush of toilets and the constant fuming of one crack-raw voice cursing us all in a fever. Then the lights and music came back on and I was still here, in a cement box with a barred gate. Breakfast was wheeled into the lockup in covered trays like trays in a hospital. We ate in silence like dogs in a kennel.

“Jackson, Albert. You got counsel.”

“Washington, Ahmed. You’re going to the Roach Motel.”

“Park your ass here, kid. Chill.”

I saw the others only when they were taken out or brought in, quick glimpses of pumpkin orange coveralls and dark faces. All appeared younger than I, all were black. They were allowed to keep cigarettes and even boom boxes, but I’d been denied everything except my toothbrush. As punishment for being white? I longed to see another white inmate, not from fellow feeling but to prove to a trace of old identity that my fear of the others wasn’t racist. I was not just physically but mentally afraid, frightened by what would become of my mind when I was thrown with them in the main jail, the Roach Motel. I fought my fear by hating them, their loud voices and angry music. Each time one was taken out to meet with a lawyer, I hated the white people who’d forgotten me: Brian the attorney, Nick in New York, even Agent Pruitt, who’d acted at the airport like he
wanted
to protect me. This was the city where Nancy lived, but only in name: I was in a different city, another dimension.

Time stood still, a time outside time, all present and no past or future. An hour that trickled out in seconds disappeared completely when it was over. I tried to kill time by reciting passages of poetry from memory: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep” and “Lullaby.” But the lines were full of holes, the remembered words so empty that I might’ve been chanting my multiplication tables.

“Eckhart, Ralph,” shouted a guard in the eternity after lunch. I had a name again. “You got meeting with counsel.”

He unlocked my gate. I was stunned to walk ten, then twenty yards, wobbling on sea legs down a long cinder-block corridor, into a low-ceilinged room cut in half by a counter with a foot-high divider down the center. The cop pointed to a short white man with a large, balding head and a blue suit with padded shoulders. He sat hunched over a legal pad at the far end, away from the only others there, an inmate and lawyer who glowered at each other like an estranged couple.

The man did not stand or offer his hand when I pulled out the chair across from him. He frowned at me while he quivered the pencil between his thumb and finger.

“Mr. Eckhart? Jack Freeman. Somebody else in the firm will be handling your case. I’m here just to get you out as quickly as possible.”

“Brian Golden called you?”

“Golden? I know no Golden. No, my wife asked me to take care of this. A friend of yours works for her.”

“Friend? You mean Nancy? You mean Senator Freeman?”

“Yeah, I’m Freeman’s husband,” he grunted.

Nancy had sent her boss’s husband to rescue me? My emotions came back to life, first joy, then shame that Nancy even knew I was here.

“We don’t have much time. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re being charged with the murder of William O’Connor. What did you say in your statement to the FBI?”

“Statement? What I told them when we talked?”

“No, your statement. Statement!” he barked. “What they put down on paper and had you sign.”

“I never signed anything.”

“You must’ve.”

“I didn’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“They interrogated me forever, but gave me nothing to sign.” This was another interrogation; I would spend the rest of my life being interrogated.

“So they weren’t holding out on me,” he muttered. “So then. Square one. Where were you Friday, the night of the murder?”

“I was in Washington. With Nancy in fact.” Nancy knew and I could mention her now.

“All night?”

“From seven that night to seven or eight the next morning.”

“Is she willing to say so in writing?”

“She should. It’s true.”

“And you told the FBI that?”

“No. I told them I was home. In New York.”

Freeman stared at me, his pencil quivering again. “Jesus Christ, man. Why?”

“I thought it’d make me a suspect. And I didn’t want to involve Nancy.”

“You didn’t want to inconvenience a friend, so you lied to the FBI? Do you have any brains at all?” he snapped.

“Yeah, it was stupid,” I snapped back. “I don’t know why I did it.” Had he read Bill’s footnote about his wife? “I didn’t think there was any way they’d know I’d come down.”

“Airline tickets? Credit card receipts? What century you living in? You had a perfectly good alibi and trashed it.”

“I took an unreserved train and paid cash.”

“Well, somebody must’ve seen you and reported it. Or they picked you out from closed-circuit monitors in Union Station or the Metro. Whatever, they must’ve known you were lying or they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of shipping you down. Didn’t the fact that it was the FBI tip you off that something was up?”

“They said they were just helping out.”

“The feds don’t just
help out.
I don’t get why they were even involved. Looking for possible conspiracy? I can’t get over that they never got a statement from you. You had no business letting them fly you down.”

“I’m not a suspicious person. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

“Well, it’s sure as hell happening now, so let’s get on with it. Anything else that might make you a suspect?”

“Only that I was fucking O’Connor. For four months.” I no longer cared what words I used. “I hadn’t seen him since February. But I wrote to him.”

“What kind of letter?”

“E-mail. Angry.”

“Did you threaten him? Say you were going to kill him?”

I hesitated. “I may have said I
felt
like killing him. And there were phone calls. Two of them. The FBI told me Bill taped his calls. I don’t know if they were telling the truth or just out to confuse me. They got me very confused and rattled.”

“Okay. Tell me about that.”

I did and Freeman wrote it all down, their friendly, legal half lies, my naive gullibility.

He disdainfully shook his head. “You were a fool to go to them in the first place. You should have let them come to you.”

“I’ll know better next time.” I was sarcastic, but his scorn also made me feel that I hadn’t done this to myself after all. There actually was a
They
who had done it to me.

“All right,” he said when we finished. “Arraignment isn’t scheduled until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try to move it up. With a statement from Wenceslas, plus all the improper procedure and the way you fell between fed and D.C. jurisdiction, I’ll ask that charges be dismissed. That’s not likely, not with the case gone as far as it has. But we’ll argue for dismissal every chance we get. And my wife has offered to cover your bail. I think she’s making a big mistake getting that involved, but she insists. It won’t hurt having a U.S. senator in your corner.”

“That’s good of her,” I said, meaning it, yet unable to shake the sarcasm from my tone. I remembered something else I should mention. “I’m innocent, you know. I didn’t do it.”

“Fine,” he said, as if that were of absolutely no importance.

A half hour later, in a room upstairs, Polk, the black detective, took my statement with Freeman wearily looking on. Freeman insisted I keep to the facts: what time I caught the train, what time I saw Nancy, what time I left.

“This isn’t what you told the three-piecers,” Polk grumbled.

“Doesn’t matter what he told
them”
said Freeman. “You don’t have a statement from them. Will they be at the arraignment?”

When I was returned to the cellblock, I’d been out just long enough to be able to smell and even taste the smoked sweat stench again. I was still in jail, but I’d regained my future tense; I could imagine getting out.

My second night lasted longer than the first. The shock had worn off, and a man howled and banged in his cell all night long, going crazy with withdrawal. Another man screamed at him to be quiet, until the others shouted at
him
to shut up and ignore the poor pipe-bitch. I fell in and out of sleep. Having a future closed the past and I didn’t think once about Bill.

They came the next morning and handcuffed me again, clamping my wrists in front this time. They took me down a long corridor to an elevator with my neighbor, the boy with metal teeth. He was just a boy, fifteen or sixteen, softly padded with baby fat. His vampire fangs now suggested the toy teeth worn by kids at Halloween, except this child had an old, dead look in his jellied eyes.

Justice was arranged like a theme park here, police headquarters and courthouses in a single complex connected underground. Freeman waited for me upstairs. The courtroom was small, the proceedings quick and informal.

“The United States versus Ralph Eckhart,” said the judge, a stern black woman with a paisley scarf in the collar of her robe. I learned later that all the D.C. courts were federal, but it was a shock to hear I had not just a state but the whole country against me.

Freeman, Polk and a fluffy-haired man from the prosecutor’s office approached the bench and showed the judge various papers. There was nobody from the FBI. I stood behind them, watching the judge, wondering if she was part of the mysterious They who’d put me here. When she didn’t look at me, I turned toward the rows of benches like church pews. Someone’s girlfriend or sister sat up front—the vampire boy?—and a man in a sports coat who scribbled in a steno pad. Then I saw Nancy sitting in the back, her arms folded like she’d been dragged to church against her will. She tried to smile at me, but her lips stuck, her eyes remained pinched with fear. I saw myself in her eyes: pathetic and unshaven, a prisoner in highway safety orange.

“Improper procedure or not, Counselor, I cannot dismiss the charge. And no, I am not being swayed by the fact the arrest made the papers.” They conferred a minute longer and she declared, “Bail is set at twenty-five thousand dollars. Next case.”

The cop led me out. Freeman followed us to the elevator. Nancy remained in the courtroom.

“The judge didn’t drop the charges,” I said glumly.

“But she knows something smells or she wouldn’t set bail so low and grant you permission to leave the District. Just sit tight. We should have you out soon enough.”