Hit and Run (11 page)

“Take your average citizen—maybe the guy's no saint, but he's got friends, family, people who care about him and interact with him and know when he's acting normal or when something's got him all antsy. Okay, so one night he does something stupid. He drinks too much or tokes up and, wham, he hits something on the road. Maybe he doesn't even know what it is at the time. But eventually he's going to find out. It was all over the
news. And when he finds out, once he realizes what he's done and, for whatever reason, decides he's not going to go to the cops, he's going to start acting differently. Maybe he doesn't drive his car. Maybe he just keeps it in the garage. Maybe out of the blue he decides to get it painted. Maybe he starts drinking more than usual. There's always something that's going to tip off someone in that person's life that things aren't normal. You pair that up with the fact that his friends or family or whatever know what kind of car he's driving, and you'd expect someone to eventually say something. If you thought your friend Vin had been involved in something like that, you'd notice he was acting differently, right?”

I nodded. “Maybe I wouldn't run to the cops, though,” I said. It sounded terrible, especially because we were talking about what had happened to my mother. But it was the truth.

“Maybe you wouldn't,” Riel said. “Until you thought about it. Most people are all right, Mike. Most people want to do the right thing. But we got nothing. No one came forward. Best we could figure, maybe the car was stolen someplace else. A guy who stole a car would have a whole different group of friends—friends with maybe less incentive to come forward if a buddy did something wrong. So we checked Impalas that had been reported stolen. Did a pretty broad sweep, too. We didn't come up with any in the area, but we did pull one that had been reported stolen up in Simcoe the day before and was never recovered. After that …” His voice trailed off.

“You just gave up?”

“We hit a dead end. We don't quit when that happens. But other cases come up and they get assigned, and you have to try to clear those, too. Stuff happens. So even if you haven't closed that one, you can't give it one hundred percent of your attention.”

“So that's it?”

He studied me with fog-gray eyes. He was so quiet for so long that I figured that really was it, that he had nothing else to say. Then he surprised me. “I never met your mother, Mike. But I have a pretty good idea what she was like.”

Part of me wanted to tell him, No, you don't. You have no idea at all. But, I admit, I was curious.

“She worked hard,” he said. “She always got to work on time and never left until she had everything done. She was always cheerful. The people she worked with liked her a lot. She took courses on her own time because she wanted to improve herself so she could get promoted. And while she was working hard, she was looking after you all by herself and looking after your uncle, too, until he was old enough to look after himself. She kept the house spotless—I saw that the first time I walked into the place. It's an old house, but you could tell by how everything sparkled that she was making the best home she could for her family. She liked to read, too, and she tried to get you reading, didn't she?”

My mother did love to read. She loved it more than watching TV. She used to read to me every night when
I was little. When I got older, she'd get me to cuddle up to her and she'd ask me to read to her.

“How did you know?”

“There were two stacks of library books on the coffee table in the living room. One was kids' books. The other was books for adults—fiction and nonfiction. She was well organized. She always returned her books on time, didn't she?”

That earned him another look of surprise from me. He smiled.

“She had the due date slips tacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen,” he said. “She made sure you ate right—granola, not sugary cereals. Orange juice, not pop.”

“I got pop on special occasions.”

“She made her own jam.” When I looked baffled, he said, “I saw it when your uncle opened the fridge to get milk for his coffee. Looked like homemade strawberry jam. She ever bake bread to go with it?”

“Yeah,” I said, and my mouth watered just thinking about the smell from the oven. I looked at Riel with new interest. He was a lot smarter than I thought.

“It's not easy being a single mother,” he said. “You have to work pretty hard just to pay the bills. It's pretty rough for some single parents—they're so busy trying to meet their financial obligations that they don't have enough time to make sure their kids turn out okay. From what I know about your mother, she was the kind of person who would have been determined to make sure that
no matter what else happened, you went to school, did your homework, worked hard, and stayed out of trouble. Am I right?”

He was doing it again, trying to make me see myself through Mom's eyes. Only this time I didn't get mad at him.

He'd said he was sorry for how things had turned out for me. For all the stuff I'd lost, he meant. All the stuff that disappeared when Mom died.

“She wouldn't be too happy right now, would she, Mike?” he said. He stood up slowly. “You're in trouble right now, but you don't have to keep going in that direction. I just wanted to tell you that.”

“I threw those cakes away,” I said. I hadn't planned to say it. The words just popped out. Riel waited. “I didn't want to take them, but I did,” I said. “Then I threw them away.”

Riel didn't say anything. I don't know if he even believed me.

I sat there for a while after he left, then decided to go over to Vin's so that I could explain to him what had happened. Up near Danforth I spotted Jen. She wasn't alone. She was with a guy I had never seen before. She was holding his hand.

When you see your girlfriend holding hands with another guy, you've got a few options.

Option one: denial. Tell yourself you're not seeing what you're seeing. It's not what you think. Maybe she's landed the female lead in the school play and the guy whose hand she's holding is the male lead and they're rehearsing. Right out on the street where everyone can see them. But it doesn't
mean
anything. It's not real.

Option two: pretend you didn't see it. If you didn't see it, you don't have to deal with it. You can make believe she's still yours and yours alone, it's all cool.

Option three: deck the guy. What's he doing holding your girlfriend's hand? He must be pushing himself on her, because she's yours and she wouldn't hold some other guy's hand unless she was being forced to. And if some guy is forcing your girlfriend to do something she doesn't want to do, then the guy deserves whatever you
feel like dishing out to him.

Option four: tell her it's over. If she's going to be holding someone else's hand, you don't want her holding yours anymore. After all,
she'd
play it that way, wouldn't she? If she saw you clinging to another girl, you'd be out of the picture so fast you'd start to doubt that you'd ever been in it.

Then there's what I did, which was wheel around and start walking as fast as I could in the opposite direction. And the whole time I was marching away, I kept hoping I'd hear her call,
Mike, Mike, stop, it's not what you think.

It didn't happen.

Vin's mom answered the door. She's kind of tough looking. She's a waitress at a bar—has been forever. She wears a lot of makeup, even around the house, and she's got tons of hair, which she wears like one of Charlie's Angels on TV, only by now those angels are pretty middle-aged. Her voice is husky. Too many cigarettes and too much beer, Vin says. And she keeps strange hours—works until the bar closes at two in the morning, then comes home, does some housework, and sleeps until noon or so. She starts work at five thirty in the afternoon five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. Which meant she was still home when I got to Vin's house. It was better than having to face Vin's dad, though. He works permanent evenings at a Ford plant.

Usually Vin's mom is nice to me. She kids us a lot, me and Vin and Sal. Calls us a posse. Tells us, “Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” and then laughs because, according to Vin, there isn't a lot that his mom wouldn't do at least once. I guess grabbing boxes of cakes out of a bakery truck was one thing, though, because when she answered the door she didn't crack a smile, and when I asked if Vin was there, she stared at me for a moment before turning and calling him.

“Vincent!”

She never called Vin by that name unless she was good and mad at him. Vincent had been her father-in-law's name. Vin's mother never had anything good to say about Vin's grandfather. I don't even know why she agreed to name him after the old man.

While I was waiting for him—waiting to see if he'd even talk to me—she said, “What would your mother say?”

Jeez, it was that kind of day.

Vin slouched past his mom. She cuffed him on the butt. “You're not to leave this porch, do you understand me, Vincent?”

“Yeah.”

He didn't even look at me. He walked to the porch railing, his back to me. I was sure he wasn't going to say a word. His mother went inside. When the door clicked shut behind her, Vin turned around.

“She wants to ground me for life.” He sighed. “Still, it's better than my dad. He wants to kill me.”

Vin's dad came across real tough. He was a nice guy, though. Every so often he'd come up with baseball tickets and he'd take all three of us to a game, me and Vin and Sal. He knew all the players on all the teams. Vin said the only part of the newspaper his dad ever read was the sports section, and the only magazine he ever opened was
Sports Illustrated
.

“I didn't tell them anything,” I said.

“I know.”

In a lousy day, one good thing had finally happened.

“I mean, I thought you had when I saw you at the door this morning and those two cops were coming up the walk right behind you. But then I thought about it, and I realized you'd never do that. You never ratted on me before.”

“Riel says they probably asked around about who I hang out with,” I told him. “He says it's basic police work.”

He frowned. “How does he know that?”

“He used to be a cop.”

This was news to Vin. “How do you know he wasn't the one who ratted me out? He's seen us together.”

“I don't think so,” I said. And, after a moment, “He investigated the hit-and-run.” I didn't have to explain which hit-and-run.

“No kidding? So how come he's not a cop anymore?”

I realized I didn't know. The best I could do was shrug.

“Maybe because he was no good at it,” Vin said. “Or maybe they fired him because he couldn't cut it. I mean,
they never found out who killed your mom, right?”

I leaned against the porch railing and stared out at Vin's front lawn. It had more grass and fewer weeds than ours.

“He says they tried. He says no one saw anything.”

“You talked to him about it?”

I told Vin how it had happened.

“And?” he said.

Good old Vin. We've known each other since day care. He did a lot of stupid stuff—like stealing boxes of cakes from a bakery truck—but he was my best friend. He knew me better than anyone, even better than Billy. He knew when something was bothering me.

“He says the car that hit her was probably stolen. He says whoever did it probably didn't see my mom because it doesn't look like they tried to brake or swerve. He says maybe whoever did it had been drinking or maybe they fell asleep at the wheel.”

I could see Vin processing the information.

“And?” he said again.

“And I've been thinking,” I said. “Would you get high if you were driving a stolen car? Would you take the chance you'd fall asleep at the wheel?”

He shrugged. “I've heard of stupider stuff,” he said. “Besides, maybe he was a stupid car thief. Or a tired one.”

“If I was driving around in a stolen car, I'd be a model citizen,” I said. “I wouldn't want to attract any attention.”

“If you were driving around in a stolen car, you'd be anything but a model citizen,” Vin pointed out.

“A guy in a stolen car,” I said. “Doesn't brake … Doesn't even swerve.” It kept eating at me. “This is gonna sound crazy, but—” Could I say it out loud?

“You think whoever was driving
did
see her?” Vin said slowly. “He saw her, but didn't brake or swerve because…?”

“You think it's possible?” I asked. “You think someone might have
wanted
to kill my mother on purpose?”

Vin's eyes met mine. They went all soft.

“Your mother was the greatest, Mike. Remember those chocolate chip cookies she used to make?” He smiled at the thought of them, and I could almost smell the warm chocolate. “And she never got mad at us, no matter what we did. You always got the feeling that she understood, you know what I mean?”