Innuendo (17 page)

She saw two wide stainless-steel doors, one of which he pushed open. Immediately she breathed it in, the strangest of odors, at once medicinal yet also repulsively foul. And immediately she recognized it even though she'd never sensed anything like it before: the smell of death. Suddenly she found it difficult to breathe. Suddenly the strength ebbed from her legs. Dear God, could she really, truly go through with this? Was she going to make it?

Straight in front of her was a woman in a clean white jacket, a woman who smiled but didn't smile and who said something else. Martha glanced to her left, saw a wall of stainless steel with row after row of small square doors, some fifteen doors long and four high. Yes, she knew what that was, a cold beehive of the dead.

With a gentle nudge on her arm, the policeman drew her to a stop and there it was, a long bed, a gurney to be exact, with a sheet-covered figure reposed like a white shadow. Her eyes ran up and down the outline of a body, realized the head was up there, the feet down at the other end. Andy? Oh, please, sweetheart, don't let it be you. I love you, you know I do. You know I never stopped. Please let this all be a mistake. Please come back. I've missed you, I really have.

And then she felt Foster's grip tighten on her arm.

He said, “Okay.”

As neatly as if she were turning down a bed in the finest of hotels, the woman in the white doctor's coat pulled down the crisp sheet. First to emerge was the gorgeous hair, which in his childhood had been as white as cotton but was now in his adolescence the rich color of straw. Then came the forehead, John's forehead, wide and proud, with the slight scar right in the middle from when he'd fallen out of the hayloft. Next his eyebrows, flowing and golden. And then his eyes, once as blue as the sky, now closed and forever dark.

“Oh, God!” she sobbed as the world fell away

Rawlins hadn't been back
from Lake Harriet for more than ten minutes when he looked out of his cubicle and saw Foster leading a woman with shattered eyes into the Homicide Division. He looked at Foster, then at her, the blond woman whose face bled with pain, and Rawlins was sure all over again that this was the worst, that interviewing a parent after the murder of his or her child was the toughest part of his job. Closing a file on his desk, Rawlins rolled back his chair and pushed himself to his feet. This wasn't going to be fun. Having to confront a parent and ask some of the toughest, most frank questions about their kid never was, particularly in a case like this.

Rawlins grabbed a microcassette recorder from a shelf above his desk, then started after Foster and the woman. Some ten steps behind, he followed them around a corner and to the second door on the left, entering the small room just as Foster was helping Mrs. Lyman into one of the four chrome-and-plastic chairs gathered around a table. It was a small, claustrophobic chamber with horribly bland beige vinyl wallpaper, an overhead fluorescent light bright enough for an operating room, and a vent in one wall that concealed a video camera.

“Hi, Neal,” said Rawlins as he came in and headed for one of the chairs.

His face grave with compassion, Foster looked up briefly, then turned to the woman on his right and said, “Mrs. Lyman, this is Sergeant Steve Rawlins. He's my partner and he's actively involved in this case as well.”

Without raising her eyes to his, she nodded.

“I knew your son,” began Rawlins, his voice low, as he took a seat on her right. “I met him at a youth center here in town, and he was a very fine young man. My sincere condolences to you, Mrs. Lyman. Andrew's death was a big shock to me and has been very upsetting. You can be assured that Neal and I are going to do everything we can to find out what happened.”

She nodded again, this time a bit more forcefully, then stared at the grill on the wall vent. Following her gaze, Rawlins was about to say, no, don't worry, we're not going to videotape this, but then she bowed her head and rubbed her eyes with her left hand. She looked too stunned to cry.

“To fill you in,” said Foster to Rawlins, “we've just been to view the body. Mrs. Lyman came by herself, and she's headed back to her family farm this afternoon. She's kindly agreed to talk to us before leaving.”

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Lyman. We need as much information as possible, and anything you can tell us will be helpful, I'm sure.”

“Martha,” she said, mustering the smallest of voices through her grief. “Please call me Martha.”

“Of course.”

Lifting the tiny cassette recorder onto the tabletop, Rawlins asked, “Would you mind if I recorded this conversation?”

“No. No… not at all.”

He pushed a couple of buttons, placed the recorder on the table, and speaking into it, said, “This is Sergeant Steve Rawlins and I'm here with Sergeant Neal Foster and Martha Lyman, mother of Andrew Lyman. We're in a conference room at the Criminal Investigation Division in downtown Minneapolis. Is that correct?”

She nodded as she faintly replied, “Yes.”

“And, Mrs. Lyman, you understand English and you're speaking of your own free will?”

“Yes. Yes, that's right.”

Rawlins paused, rubbed his hands together. “I'm sorry to sound so formal, but the procedures for an interview are fairly rigid.”

“We just want to ask you a few questions about your son, Andrew Lyman,” said Foster, his voice buffed to gentle.

A handsome, stoic-looking woman, she nodded.

“How old was he?” continued Foster.

“Seventeen. Andrew turned seventeen just a few months ago.”

“And where was he raised?”

“On our farm a hundred miles east of here.”

“Was he the oldest? Youngest?”

“Oldest. We have two girls, both of them younger.”

“When did you last talk to Andy?”

“This past…” She wiped her eyes. “This past fall. Almost exactly a year ago.”

“Not at all since then?”

“No.”

“Do you remember approximately when and where your last conversation was?”

“Yes.”

“Could you tell us, please?”

“It was last October.” She took a deep breath, then hesitated before continuing. “October the tenth, to be precise. It was at our farm.”

Knowing the vague circumstances but nothing specific, Rawlins cut in, asking, “Can you tell us what that conversation was about?”

She nodded, started to speak, then stopped, and tried again. “We… we found out Andy was…”

When she failed to say anything, Rawlins interjected, “Gay?”

“Yes, exactly. That was when we found out our son was gay.”

“Which was, what, a shock? No surprise?”

“The first. It was a shock. A big shock.” She shook her head slightly and helplessly shrugged her shoulders. “I never even imagined.”

“And what happened?” pressed Rawlins.

“He left.”

“Left?”

“Our farm. Our home. He left that very night.” Taking a deep breath, she let the air come out in one long, pained exhale. “It was very difficult, very awful. Trust me, it's not something any of us is proud of. We all said things we shouldn't have, and… and Andy left.”

There was, Rawlins knew for a fact, far more to it. Over the course of his brief friendship with Andrew, Rawlins had gleaned some of the details, all of them ugly, all of them painful, and he could now see all of that and more etched in the fine lines of Martha Lyman's face. Rawlins couldn't imagine what it must have been like for young Andrew, tumbling out of the closet and landing at his parents’ feet and at their mercy.

“I… I thought they were going to kill me,” Andrew had confided in Rawlins. “I really did. But I guess it's my fault. I guess I deserved it.”

As he told at least part of what happened, Andrew had been close to tears. And Rawlins hadn't doubted him one bit, for sex between boys in rural Minnesota was anathema to farm and family and church.

And now, sitting in the small room in City Hall, Rawlins, Foster, and Martha Lyman were going to have to revisit that night, searching the memory thereof for any details that might be relevant to the present nightmare.

He asked, “What do you mean he left?”

“Andy…” She wiped her eyes. “Andy ran away.”

“Did he go to a friend's? To an aunt's? An uncle's?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Andy just walked down the drive and… disappeared.”

“So you had no idea where he went?”

“None. I called everywhere I could think of. And I drove around too. I thought he'd be back the next morning, or even within the next day or two. A few days later he called and apologized, but he didn't come back. Eventually I assumed he came here, to The Cities, but I never knew for sure. I never heard a word. Not until last night when you,” she said, nodding her head slightly to Foster, “called.”

“Not a letter or anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

Foster cut in, asking, “How about the local police—did you contact them?”

“At first no. My husband, John, didn't want me to. He said it was none of their business. He said it was a family thing.” Martha Lyman slowly shook her head. “I don't know. I think we did it all wrong, made every single mistake possible. Actually, I think—no, I know that my husband didn't want to have to tell the police what the fight was about, and—”

“What do you mean he didn't want to have to tell them? Was he embarrassed? Ashamed? Angry?”

“All of that, actually. John just didn't… didn't approve. I mean, he still doesn't.”

“Of what?”

“That life.”

“Homosexuality?”

“Yes, and… and,” she said, as if she were quickly changing the subject, “like I said, I thought Andy would come home in a day or two. When he didn't turn up after a week, I went to the police myself.”

“You mean alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't your husband go with you?”

“Because… because…”

At first Rawlins thought she was going to say because he was harvesting the corn. Or tilling the field. Instead she looked right at him and told him what could only be the flat-out truth.

“He didn't come with me then for the same reason he didn't come with me today—he never wanted to see Andy again. And frankly, I'll bet he's—”

She cut herself off, then just sat there in silence. Rawlins studied every little flinch of her face. He's what? Glad that his boy is dead?

Rawlins waited and waited, and when she said nothing, he asked, “So what did the police say when you went to them?”

“Not much. I guess there wasn't much they could do. I told them Andy ran away—I didn't say why—and they filed a report, checked around some, but…”

Rawlins asked, “Has this been a difficult thing for your family, Andy's coming out as gay and then running away? What has the last year been like in your family?”

“You have no idea,” she said, shaking her head as she stared at the plain laminate surface of the table. “It's… it's been awful. Just awful. I haven't stopped thinking of Andy, I haven't stopped worrying about him, not for one single minute. It's… it's…”

“What?”

“Well,” she said, perhaps voicing the truth for the first time, “it has destroyed my family”

Rawlins wanted to come back to that, the night the Lyman family exploded. He wanted to know specifically what had happened. And he wanted to know exactly what had been said. But not yet. He didn't want to seem too antagonistic, too adversarial. In other words, he wanted to postpone her shutting down, which they always did at some point.

Rawlins glanced at Foster and nodded.

“Martha,” said Foster, “could you describe Andrew for us? What kind of young man was he? Was he kind of a happy guy? Sad? Did he have many friends? Was he very social?”

“Andy was… sweet. He was just always kind. And gentle. That's why I can't understand… understand… how…” Her bottom lip started to quiver, and she pressed her right hand to her mouth as if to stuff back the pain. “I don't understand why anyone would have wanted to hurt him.”

“He never got into any fights at school?”

“Andy? Never.”

“So he didn't have any problems with other kids that you knew of? No, I guess you might say, rivalries? No enemies?”

“Everyone loved Andy. The girls and the boys. I mean, there was always a girl who had a crush on him because… well, he was cute. And he was always popular with the guys because he was the best quarterback at school. You know, on the football team. Frankly the team wasn't any good, but he was their star.”

“How about his grades?” asked Rawlins.

“They were okay B’s and C’s mainly, every now and then an A.”

“What year was he in?”

“Last year he was a junior.” She shook her head. “I wanted so much for him to graduate, to get his high school diploma. I wanted him to be the first of our people to go to college.”

“What about drugs?” asked Foster. “Is there much of that where you come from? Was he ever involved in anything?”