“Who’s ‘we,’ Tommy? You and—?”
“My mom. He hates Good Dog Trey, I seen him kick Trey, then when I told on him, he called me ‘retard’ and said I was too dumb to know anything, but when I see I know, he was a liar, and you can’t call people bad names, like ‘retard,’ that is a very bad name.”
So Lawlor had started his name-calling career young. “Your mom told you that?”
“Yep.”
“She’s right. It’s a bad word and Wade was a bad boy to say it.”
“Yeah, Colin called me that and I punched him, but they took my trucks away.” His lips trembled in remembered injury.
“Who’s Colin?”
“You know Colin. He has all this long yellow hair and he laughs like—like the wild animals on TV, like this!” Tommy gave an imitation of a hyena’s laugh. “They gave him drugs and now he’s in prison. That’s what he gets for using bad words.”
I was guessing that Colin had been a Ruhetal inmate with a treatable mental illness who’d stood trial, presumably for a worse crime than calling Tommy a ‘retard,’ although you never know.
I put Magda’s yearbook photograph on the table. The Star’s photographer had created a glossy out of it that made it look recent, modern. “Do you know this girl?”
“Of course I know her, silly. That’s Maggie! She lives next door to me, so I know her. Her brother, he’s the bad boy who kicked Good Dog Trey.”
“Is Maggie the girl you were watching at the lake?”
He pouted, not wanting to answer. Perhaps he assumed I was there to criticize him.
“If I saw someone lying in the water, I’d go watch her, too,” I said. “I don’t think watching is a bad thing. Tell me what happened.”
He inspected my face for any signs of anger, then blurted, “Maggie was lying in the water. I seen her, her hair was all floating around her head, like an angel. She floated, she didn’t say anything, she was sleeping. I wanted to see her eyes open, like when she lies out over by the lake on a towel, she does that sometimes, trying to make her skin turn brown, I watch her and then she opens her eyes and says, ‘That you, Tommy? I thought it was Prince Charming,’ and I laugh and she laughs, but then the police came, they said I did a bad thing. She never said, ‘Go away, Tommy, don’t be watching me,’ but it was very bad to watch her, that’s why they put handcuffs on me.”
He started to cry.
“It’s okay, Tommy,” I said quietly. “They took the handcuffs off, didn’t they? So they must know you’re a pretty good guy.”
He brightened again. “I am a pretty good guy, and when I’m good, I get my fire engines.”
He pulled a pair of red plastic fire trucks from his pocket and started running them across the table, making a little siren noise. I felt the hair prickle along the back of my neck. Leydon had come back from the locked ward, her speech incandescent with fire imagery. Was it from Tommy Glover’s fire trucks?
“You like fire engines, huh?” I said. “Do you like fires, too?”
“The firemen let me ride with them. Before. Now I have to stay here. Now they took my picture.”
I blinked. “The firemen took your picture?”
“No!” he shouted, pounding his trucks on the table. “Bad people stole my picture and now they won’t give it back!”
Fred heard the shouts and popped his head in through the door. “Everything okay here?”
“He’s upset about a picture he says someone took away,” I said.
“Oh, that. He had some old photo in his room and it’s disappeared. It’s not good to remind him about it. Come on, Tommy. No shouting, no getting upset, or we have to put your fire trucks in the garage for a week, remember?”
Tommy quickly stuck his fire engines back into his pocket. “Fire trucks are in the garage, Fred. They’re staying in the garage.”
“That’s the spirit. Maybe half an hour is enough for today, Vic.”
“You want me to go now, Tommy? I’m a lawyer. I’m here to make sure your rights are respected. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay. If you tell me to go, I’ll go. You get to choose.”
Tommy looked uneasily from me to Fred. “Vic says she’ll bring me jelly beans.” His tone was defiant.
“Jelly beans, huh? Maybe five more minutes, Vic. But no talk about p-i-x, savvy? Sometimes Tommy acts out a bit too much. We put the trucks in the garage, and when he’s behaved for a week, he gets them back.”
We were all pals now, apparently—no more ‘Ms. Warshawski.’ I turned back to Tommy. “Let’s see who else you know.”
Tommy recognized Miles Wuchnik and his face darkened. “He was here, he fought with the lady because I showed her my picture. She was so pretty, she let me touch her hair. The man got super-mad but I told him, mind your own darn beeswax, I’m talking to the lady.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. “So the lady with the gold hair saw your picture. What was in it?”
“Me. I’m in it. Me and the firemen!”