Gravewriter (16 page)

“I'm sitting on a jury,” Billy said.

Father Capricchio tried to lighten the mood. “You mean a sharp guy like you can't get out of jury duty?”

“It's a murder trial.”

The cold wind blew again down the priest's back. He said, “We are not speaking in hypotheticals, are we?”

“Most people think it's an open-and-shut case—that the defendant is guilty. But I don't think so.”

“You must follow the evidence, and your own conscience, of course.”

Father Capricchio thought back to the morning newspaper. He had seen
something
about a murder trial. In Rhode Island, maybe?”

“I looked into his eyes, Father,” Billy said. “And I didn't see it—whatever it takes to be a killer wasn't there. This kid has been in trouble, shot lots of dope into his own veins. He's a tough guy on the outside, but inside he's scared.”

Father Capricchio had no intention of talking Billy out of his hunch. He believed God planted hunches to tell people what they could not know by mortal means. Father Capricchio had a hunch that Billy's trial had pushed him closer to committing murder.

“He's innocent,” Billy said.

Father Capricchio sipped Moxie, thinking of what to say. Finally, he raised the courage to ask, “Do you believe that if you free this defendant, it will be okay to kill the man you hate?”

“We've already agreed that there's a balance in the universe.”

Father Capricchio rubbed the back of his neck. The skin was damp with sweat. He probed: “You said last time that this man killed your wife. How can this be? Why isn't he in jail?”

Billy was quiet a moment. “It's complicated.”

“Oh, bullshit it is,” the priest scolded harshly. “If you're unwilling to trust the sanctity of the confessional, and the vows I took to perform this sacrament, and my love of Christ, which brought me to the Church in the first place … uh, uh …” Father Capricchio wasn't sure where he was going with his outburst. Was he threatening to throw Billy out?

“The guy used to be a cop,” Billy explained calmly. “He took up with my wife after she threw me out.”

“Oh,” Father Capricchio said. His tirade had worked—no one could have been more surprised than he. He heard pills shaking in a bottle. “Is that medicine you're taking?”

“They ain't Tic Tacs.”

“Why did she throw you out?”

“After I gambled away my stuff, I started losing her stuff, too. She told me I was sick and tried to get me some help. I convinced her that therapy was working. We even had a little boy. Then I lost the house and the game was up. She took my boy and the cat I gave her, and started over without me. The divorce was easy—we had no assets left to split.”

“I hear a lot of regret in your voice.”

“It was all temporary—I had figured—until I could win a few bets, get out from under the mountain.”

“By gambling
more?”

“Father, once you owe these people, winning is the only way out,” he said. “But in the meantime, Angie—that's my wife—shacked up with this cop up on the East Side, in Providence. I didn't even know she'd been seeing anyone.” He sighed. “I was still working as a reporter, though by then I was just mailing it in, mining the same old sources every day for a new fact to be mounted atop fifteen inches of background, to make a story. It's hard to get away with that for long. Somebody I worked with posted a sign in the bathroom near my desk: ‘Reporters must wash hands after pulling articles from ass.' ”

“How cruel,” Father Capricchio said.

“I was juggling three bookies and a thin-skinned loan shark who thinks I miss payments to humiliate him—I don't pretend to understand
that.
On top of those debts, I was bouncing a dozen credit-card companies, using one card to pay off another.”

“Ugh,” Father Capricchio said, slugging soda. “I'd rather owe the loan shark.”

“And then my old man got sick—can barely butter his own bagel—and moved in with me.”

Father Capricchio chuckled gently, not making fun, just sympathizing. “We all have our crosses to carry,” he said, “but it sounds like you had enough to tow.”

“Mmmmm,” Billy said, sounding detached. “And then Angie was dead.”

He fell silent.

Father Capricchio held his breath and waited, waited. Pressure built in his chest. He passed thirty seconds without air, forty, forty-five.

“They had been at dinner,” Billy continued. “Angie and the cop.”

The priest closed his eyes and silently eased out the breath he had been holding. He inhaled deeply and smelled his sweat.

“Some Mexican restaurant, a bring-your-own-bottle place—I won't eat there,” Billy said. He sounded annoyed. “This cop was
known to like the sauce. Three years ago, he nearly got fired after the Massachusetts staties bagged him for DUI on the turnpike.”

“Dee you eye?”

“Stands for driving under the influence,” Billy said. “Don't you ever leave that little booth?”

“In body only.”

“I don't know what kind of wine they had, but a waitress remembered a bottle of Captain Morgan, and their register receipt said they bought ten Cokes. How well does rum and cola go with taco salad?”

“They had an accident, didn't they?”

“Not an accident,” Billy said sharply. “A
crash.
There's a difference.”

Father Capricchio tugged off his white collar. It was getting warm in his confessional. He wet his lips with diet Moxie and then echoed, “They crashed.”

“The car swerved off a back road, traveled sixty-six feet into the woods, and rammed a white oak that had stood on that spot for ninety-four years,” Billy said. “After I cut the goddamn thing down, I counted the rings.”

Tears filled the priest's eyes.

“Angie was dead at the scene,” Billy said.

“God bless her,” Father Capricchio whispered under his breath.

“And the cop—that drunken son of a bitch—he lived. He got mangled, but he
lived.
His cop buddies who arrived at the scene to
assist
the local PD whitewashed the crime. They sat on the accident report for a week, protecting him. When they finally released it to the public, it said he had fallen asleep at the wheel. They never drew blood at the hospital to test his blood-alcohol level, so there was no way to convict him for motor vehicle homicide—there's no fuckin' proof.”

No proof?
“Then how do you know,” Father Capricchio asked, “that this
wasn't an
accident?”

Billy cleared his throat. He leaned closer to the screen. “I got
bumped from my reporting job pretty soon after,” he whispered. “I couldn't look at a police report anymore without seeing conspiracies and lies—poorly written ones, too.”

Father Capricchio heard the pill bottle shaking again. More pills? He wanted to speak up, but he slapped himself lightly over the back of the hand.

Don't be his mother.

“I was a shitty reporter at the end, but I had been good in my day,” Billy said. “I still had sources, people who owed me. I learned off the record that the original accident report—the one filed the night of the crash—had been intercepted
and rewritten.
They sanitized the paperwork. All copies of the original were obliterated—on paper and in the department computer. When I heard this, I tipped off a reporter buddy of mine. He investigated—the way I
used
to do it. He got the department to admit that the report had been rewritten, though they claimed it was only because the original had been misfiled and lost.”

“You don't believe them?”

“Christ! Would you?”

Father Capricchio frowned heavily. He was not supposed to lie—period. But certainly he must not in the confessional. He tipped back the soda can and drained it. He said, “I suppose I wouldn't believe them.”

“So instead of jail for killing my wife,” Billy said, “he got a disability pension.”

T
he moment Alec Black left the smoke-free mall for the parking garage, he satisfied a craving with an organic American Spirit cigarette. The smoke smelled like dry leaves in a campfire. He tried to think about the movie he had just seen—how he would have shot it better—but the plot was so dumb, the acting so flat, the happy ending so horribly Hollywood. His thoughts drifted back to the trial. He was a juror, the target audience of the production. What if the trial were a movie? What director would have cast a bug-eyed freakazoid like Peter Shadd in the role of defendant?

Only a genius, of course.

A Kubrik or a Kazan. Or Fritz Lang—Alec planned to be the next Fritz Lang.

He let the butt dangle between his lips, put his thumbs together, and made a window with his hands. If the trial were a movie, how would Lang have filmed the testimony from Larry Home? He panned his hands across empty parking spaces. Fritz would have shot it in black and white, naturally, starting with a close-up of the cell door—
shot in silence for thirty seconds—before slowing pulling back to reveal the three convicts.

Alec puffed his butt and looked around. At midnight, the garage was empty. He had exited the mall on the wrong floor. His car was one level higher.

He took a long drag and headed for the stairs.

“Lose your car, too?” someone asked.

Alec jerked his head around. A man fell into step with him toward the stairwell. He was dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, black sports coat, and tight black leather driving gloves—just as Alec was dressed, except for the gloves.

“You scared the shit outta me,” Alec said. He chuckled and patted his hand over his heart. “Didn't hear you behind me.”

“Daydreaming?” the man asked. He smiled.

“Thinking about a movie.”

“I saw you in the theater. I saw the same film. Not much to think about, was it?”

Alec dragged on his cigarette. He didn't remember the man from the theater. “It was a dumbed-down adaptation of a pretty good book,” he said. “The relationship between the senator's wife and the mandolin player wasn't sexual in the book. It was emotional. His free sprit was supposed to teach her about the limitations of being a political wife, despite the money and the fame. The movie squeezed out the subtlety from their kiss on the roof, and then the director had to paper over the lack of character development by introducing the bodyguard as a heavy. There was no heavy in the book. It's too bad. But that picture will probably make a hundred million dollars.”

“Wouldn't the studios make as much with a good
story?”

“You'd think.”

Their footsteps echoed through the garage. A pigeon flapped overhead. They watched it nestle in a nook between steel beams.

“Spare a smoke?” the man asked.

Alec fished the soft pack from his jacket. He shook a butt from the pack and offered it to him. “Organic,” he warned.

“I'm easy,” the man replied. They stopped walking long enough for Alec to flick his lighter and put flame to the cigarette.

I'm easy? What the hell does that mean?

Was this guy trying to pick him up? In a parking garage outside the mall and the megaplex? Alec was straight, though he realized his style of dress and his finicky tastes in the arts could jam a person's gaydar and thus give the wrong impression.

The stepped together up the stairs.

“You know a lot about film,” the man said.

“Studied it in school,” Alec said, adding a white lie to put his sexuality in context: “My girlfriend says I'm the next Fritz Lang.”

The man blew smoke and laughed. “What's a film student doing at the megaplex? You should be at the indie theater.”

He hadn't flinched at Alec's mention of a girlfriend. Maybe the guy just enjoyed free tobacco and enlightened conversation. “I'm just killing time,” Alec confessed. “I'm on jury duty and I can't stop thinking about the case.”

At the garage's top level, Alec's twenty-year-old Volvo faced the railing across a wide swathe of white concrete unevenly lighted by flickering fluorescent tubes. To the left, the open-air garage overlooked a highway interchange. Even at midnight, cars streamed off Route 95 in a sweeping cloverleaf that flowed into downtown Providence. Beyond the highway, Federal Hill clubs and restaurants brightened the hillside with colored lights. Parallel rows of glowing yellow dots marked the residential streets of Mount Pleasant.

Alec flicked ash on the floor. “I'm parked down this way,” he said.

“So what about your case?” the man asked, keeping pace with Alec. “Is he guilty?”

“I'm not supposed to talk about it.”

The man sucked hard on the butt and drew his cheeks in. Exhaling, he said, “There's nobody here. I'm just interested. You can tell me now and kill me later, if you're afraid I'll squeal.” He raised an eyebrow at Alec and smiled. The man's green eyes were narrow and sleepy.

“I think the prosecutor is full of shit,” Alec offered. “I can say that much.” He drew on his cigarette. There were just four cars on the entire level. “Which car is yours?”

“The Taurus,” the man answered instantly. Raising his voice above the grumble of a trailer truck on the street below, he asked, “Why is the prosecutor full of shit?”

“They all are, aren't they?” Alec replied. “They care about convictions—their won-loss records—not the truth.”

Which of those cars was a Taurus? Didn't look like any of them were. Alec quickened his pace. The man jogged a step to catch up, then matched steps with Alec, as if he expected a ride home. A prickling sense of danger combed down Alec's back. Who was this guy? Alec put his head down and marched double time for his car, fishing his keys from his pocket. “Well, take care,” he said, bidding the man good-bye without a glance, and lunged for his car.