Hollow Man (22 page)

“The real bad guy.”

“Precisely. And something else crossed my mind.”

“Go on.”

“That Otto Bland didn't kill himself at all. That he was a risk, a liability to whoever planned the whole thing. And as a result, he found himself staring down the wrong end of a gun barrel.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Tristan, who'd sat opposite and stared at me throughout the conversation. “Our pretty bow just came undone,” I said.

“That was the lead detective?”

“Yeah, and she's overthinking this one.”

“She knows Otto didn't act alone, doesn't she?” He stood up and ran a hand through his hair. “Dammit.”

“Quite an irony, if you think about it. She didn't find the money, so she assumes he had someone else helping him. Or several someones, she didn't specify.”

“Fuck.”

“She's got no idea it's us, don't worry.”

“Right, okay, I'll just stop worrying.” He paced back and forth, making abrupt little turns like a toy soldier. “Otto's dead, and there's a smart detective breathing down our necks. How exactly do you suggest I relax? Drugs?”

I stood. “Hey, do what you gotta do.”

“Don't you worry, I will.”

An edge in his voice stopped me in my tracks. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

“I'm not going to prison for this. I'll do what Otto did if I have to, but no fucking way I'm going to prison.”

I couldn't resist. “Technically you might not, you could get the death penalty since it's capital murder.”

“So could you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “we both could. But we're not going to because we're keeping a low profile and I can keep an eye on the investigation.”

Tristan stared at me for a few seconds, then sank back into the couch. “Okay. Do you believe in the perfect crime?”

More shades of Gus
, I thought. “I don't know. You?”

“Maybe. If they'd blamed Otto for it, let it go when they found him, then I'd say we committed it.”

“And now?”

“Now, not so much.” He wiped a hand over his face. “This is really fucking stressful.”

“I know. But we just need to hang in there, we'll be fine. And maybe this is the perfect crime. I'm starting to think that there aren't specific elements that bring a crime to perfection, just because every crime is so different, so unique. I mean, the one thing they can all have in common is that the criminals get away. And so far we've gotten away with it. So as stressful as this feels, we just need to ride it out. And then, in a few days or weeks, we can look back and realize that we did, after all, commit the perfect crime.”

“No,” Tristan said quietly. “It can't ever be perfect.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone else has our money.”

I went to my room and sat on the bed with my guitar. I was torn between wanting to think about where we were, what was happening, and losing myself for a few minutes. I chose the latter and began to play those simple songs that I'd learned as a kid. They were songs that used only the essential chords of A, C, D, Em, and G, songs like
Sweet Home Alabama
and Van Morrison's
Brown Eyed Girl
. I strummed each one slowly, the way I had done a million times before, the way I'd first done, hesitantly and haltingly, when I was eleven years old and learning.

The familiar chords brought back the smell of my school's music room, a wood-beamed loft at the top of the school, a place of refuge for me and the few of us who liked to play music. Our days were structured at prep school, even our free time was regimented and restricted, but on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday mornings, after church, Arthur “Artie” Halliwell and I used to meet up there and play music together. He was a quiet child, in my class but a year older than I was. He was reed-thin and timid, and on the rugby field he drifted around like the wind was blowing him from play to play, his spindly fingers constantly hitching up the shorts that sagged from his minuscule waist. He and I didn't speak the rest of the week, we had no cause to, but the one thing we had in common was the refuge of that attic room. He was good, too, better than I was, which is the reason I let him play when I was there. I learned things from him, and I liked the quick squeak of the chord changes he made, the songs that were one step ahead of the ones I was playing.

One afternoon, about six weeks into the summer term, the music teacher found us up there. Mr. Flowers. I didn't know his first name, same for all the teachers, and didn't find out what it was until his death about six months later, in the middle of the next term. He was a tall, thin man, and the only person I've ever met to wear an Adolf Hitler–style mustache. With his light Scottish brogue, he came across as gentle and a little creepy, and always wore perfume. Not aftershave or cologne, but women's perfume, a sickly sweet cloud following him around the school. When he taught the young boys guitar, he'd have them sit on his lap so he could “make sure they had perfect form.”

That Sunday, he just watched us play. He made Artie nervous and, being in there with them both, I saw certain similarities between the two. The physical resemblance, the fragility of them both, the birdlike way they perched on their chairs. Flowers, though, was like a vulture, eyes pinned on Artie as he played, and though I was too young and naïve to understand what was happening, I knew
instinctively something was wrong when he asked me to leave and come back later so he could give Artie some private lessons.

That day repeated itself the next weekend, but the weekend after that, Artie declined to go to the music room with me. When Flowers found us buying candy at the tuck shop that afternoon, he seemed put out.

“Have you boys given up the guitar?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said. “Just not practicing today.”

Artie was staring at his feet.

“Why don't you both come to my study and practice?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. As far as I knew, the headmaster was the only one to have a study at the ninety-person prep school. “Where's that, sir?”

“My cottage,” he said. “I have a little music study set up, very conducive to practice and the understanding of music.”

His cottage was at the end of the rear driveway, one of four that belonged to the school. They were stone houses, small but attractive, and allocated to the more senior teachers at the school, the ones who were single. Which most were.

“Right, then,” he said. “Get your tuck and bring it to my place, with your guitars. See you both in a few minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and glanced at Artie. He was still staring at his shoes.

“He's a ponce,” I said to Artie, when Flowers had wandered off.

“I don't want to go,” said Artie.

“I don't think we have a choice,” I said. And we didn't. All of us, even me, had been programmed at boarding school to obey the teachers unquestioningly. To do otherwise risked detention, hours of “hard labor” in the garden, or a beating.

We showed up at four o'clock, leaving it as late as we dared and knowing we had to be back in the main school for five o'clock tea. Flowers sat in a leather armchair and watched us as we played, his only interruption to tell us what to play next. When we left together at ten minutes to five, I could feel the relief coming off Artie in waves. We
never talked about his “private lessons,” but I think Artie told himself they were over, that the visit to Flowers's cottage meant he was safe.

He was wrong.

The next day, Mr. Flowers appeared at the front of my class and announced, in his soft voice, that he was taking over as our Latin teacher. I looked over at Artie, but he didn't seem bothered, because what could the man do in a classroom of kids?

Nothing, as it turned out. He talked about Socrates for forty minutes, then sent us to wash up for lunch. We began to file out of the classroom, and we all looked back when Flowers raised his voice loud enough to be heard over the shuffling of feet.

“Halliwell, stay behind, please.”

I looked back and saw that the boy's face had turned pale, and his little body sagged as he retook his seat to wait for the empty classroom and Mr. Flowers's attention.

For the remainder of the summer term, I saw less and less of Artie. He sat quietly in class and didn't speak, on the few occasions I asked if he wanted to go to the music room, he just shook his head. I suspected he was still playing for Mr. Flowers, and on a couple of Sunday afternoons, I went looking for him. When he was nowhere to be seen, I assumed I was right.

I forgot about Artie and Mr. Flowers over the summer holidays, which I spent with my family in France. But when the winter term began in early September, Artie was nowhere to be seen. I asked around, and someone said he'd left the school for good, no idea why.

I had an idea, and I wasn't happy about it. Not so much because of what Flowers had done to Artie—I didn't fully understand it back then, and, if I had, I wouldn't have cared that much. No, I was mad about what he'd done to me. He'd taken away one of the few pleasurable interruptions in an existence that otherwise varied from mundane to miserable. I still went up to the music attic to play guitar, but Flowers never appeared. I was left alone up there with the smell of dust and floor wax, and the tunes I played by myself, to myself, for myself.

Flowers himself seemed angry, that term. He continued to teach music and Latin, and continued to smell like a woman, unaware or ignoring the wrinkled noses of the other boys. But he seemed intent on punishing me for Artie's absence, or perhaps for my unformed knowledge about what he'd done to the boy. Too often I found myself chided for messy handwriting, yelled at for fidgeting, punished for not listening. He was clever about it, too, not overtly bullying me but doing it incrementally, when no one else was there or when my misdeeds were real, and all he had to do was exaggerate them. Disproportionate punishments were common at the school, the severity of the crime depending on the whim or mood of the teacher. So to be ordered to scrub a bathroom floor with a toothbrush for taking too long to piss attracted no one's attention. Except mine.

Mr. Flowers died the day after my birthday, a birthday being the one day we were shown a modicum of humanity. Instead of whatever the sport was, we were allowed to go off on our own, or with up to two friends, for a walk in the Scottish highlands. My birthday always fell in cross-country season, which I hated, so I took full advantage of the custom and went walking. By myself. The second tradition was for the cook to make a large cake, which the birthday boy could share with his classmates. Often, a piece was delivered to friends outside one's class, maybe the captain of the football team as a way of sucking up, likewise to a favorite teacher. I took a piece to Mr. Flowers, catching him on his way out of the main school. He seemed surprised, but my downcast eyes and submissive tone made it clear it was a peace offering, or perhaps one of defeat, the way a vanquished soldier might give up his weapon to a captor.

He died that night, or in the morning. A heart attack was the word, and the headmaster gathered us all in the chapel to let us know. A tragedy, we were told, one that the school would recover from in due course. Stiff upper lip and carry on, we were told. John Flowers would have wanted it that way.

John Flowers. The first man I ever killed.

Tuesday morning crawled by. I was in court scrolling through the docket case by case, the weekly procession of misdemeanors and juvenile delinquents pretending to be sorry. I'd never seen the appeal of tattoos, but so many of these kids, some as young as twelve, had them all over their bodies. Ugly, blotchy, homemade tattoos, of course, because no professional artist would work with a kid. One little punk, a repeat offender according to his probation officer, had his area code,
512
, tattooed under his eye. A gang thing, and an absolute guarantee of a thug life.

A rare cool front had blown through central Texas, so at lunchtime I walked to a taco truck half a mile away, a place that made its own salsa. I sat at a picnic bench to eat and felt someone behind me. I knew who it was immediately, that soft perfume and the uncanny knack of appearing out of nowhere. She slid onto the bench beside me.

“Hi, Dominic. Lunch looks good.”

“Hungry? You want something?”

“No thanks. Ate already.”

“Okay. Stalking me?”

“Kind of. I need to talk to you.”

“About?”

“Bobby.”

“What about him?”

“I need to know what to do. How to help him.”

I looked at her. Her face was serious, that alabaster skin seemed to shimmer in the sun, and the openness in her eyes made me want to kiss her, hold her, help her. I sometimes wondered if my condition was absolute, if there was perhaps a continuum of psychopathy so that I could find in myself the occasional glimmer of humanity that might allow me to truly connect with another person. It wasn't something I wondered about often, just because I didn't really believe it was likely. But in rare moments like this, when I felt (or thought I felt) something more than physical sensations, I really did imagine it possible.

“I don't know what to tell you,” I said. “He's in good hands with probation—they have all kinds of services set up. Drug treatment, gang awareness, family counseling if you want it.”

“That's not enough,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

“I'm a prosecutor. I don't fix people, I just…” I struggled to boil down my role in the juvenile system. It wasn't to convict and punish, not like in adult court. “I prove up the case so the probation department can go to work. Treatment in the community…if that doesn't work, a residential treatment facility somewhere. I'm just the intake guy, basically.”

She tilted her head and looked at me, like she was waiting for me to understand. It came slowly, like a tide creeping up a beach, and she waited patiently while I made the connections. I thought back to when she'd sought me out, always exhibiting a remoteness and calculation that made me wonder if she was like me. I'd understood at some level, even at the start, that she was looking to use me, and that was another count against, or for, her, another reason to think maybe she wasn't an empath. Even at my work, she'd showed up and played the sad sister to get me to help her little brother, manipulated me because she knew I'd do it, understood my compulsive and reckless nature. Exploited me the way I exploited others. And she knew I'd do it because she knew what I was, had recognized that in me. As she gazed at me with those lovely brown eyes, eyes so full of light and life, eyes so different from mine, I realized that she'd recognized
me for what I was because she'd lived with the same curse, lived with it day in and day out, and had done for the last twelve years.

She wasn't the psychopath, her little brother was. Bobby, the hollow boy soon to be a hollow man.

The fact that she was there, asking for my help, confirmed it. She loved him despite his affliction. She cared enough to target and seduce me. She wanted to save him, and she would do whatever she could, and no sociopath has ever been that unselfish.

“There's no cure,” I said. “I'm sorry, but there's nothing that you, I, or the system can do to change what he is.”

“There has to be,” she said.

“I'm sorry. He has to decide for himself what he wants to be, how he wants to deal with it.”

“How did you decide?”

“I didn't, not initially. My parents sent me away to boarding schools, places remote enough that I couldn't do much harm.”

“What do you mean?”

I smiled. “When you're in a small group in the middle of nowhere, it's hard to get away with bad things.”

“I can't send him to boarding school,” she said.

“I know. He'll have to figure it out for himself somehow. Maturity is his friend, so the issue is how much damage he'll do before he matures.”

“At the rate he's going…a lot.” She paused, then asked, “He knows, right? I mean, you knew at some point?”

“Yeah, when I was about his age I suppose.” I wanted to tell her, to explain, but this was weird. I'd never talked to anyone about it, never been open. Not because I was mortally opposed to the idea but because the situation had never arisen like this. The few people who'd suspected or said something saw my condition as a bad thing, a danger to them. Fair enough, too—it wasn't like I had a secret Santa Claus inside me itching to get out. But there, with her, it was a gift. A blessing. Something that she wanted to know about, not so she
could judge or avoid me but because she wanted just to understand. And telling her, well, that gave me a little power over her, maybe just influence; but nonetheless it was a bridge between us, not a chasm. “It's not a sudden realization,” I said. “You just know you're different, not sensitive like other people. You see people having emotions that you don't have and it makes you wonder.”

“Makes you take advantage,” she said. “He does that all the time, even with me. Does he…does he love me?”

“Not in the way you love him. He's not unfeeling toward you, but it's hard to describe.”

“What if he saw a therapist?”

“Then he'd manipulate the therapist unless he saw an expert, someone who knows about this stuff.”

“And then he'd get a formal diagnosis, and his life would be ruined.”

“I don't think they diagnose psychopaths before the age of eighteen.”

“Were you diagnosed?”

“I was. My parents never gave up hope I could be cured, so they spent a lot of money on me. Including a first-class ticket to America. Idiots.”

“See, I don't want Bobby talking about me that way.”

I smiled again. “Then don't be an idiot.”

We both looked up as a slicktop police car pulled into the parking lot and stopped with a screech of brakes, its nose pointed at us. The first person out of the car was Megan Ledsome, and two large, plain-clothes cops stepped out behind her.

“Dominic, stand up, please.”

“What's going on?” I asked.

“You need to come with us.”

“‘Please' would go a long way.”

She didn't smile, and I suddenly got that this was serious. “No jokes, Dominic. We got some new information on our capital-murder case. Information that means you're coming downtown with me. Now.”