THE DETECTIVES TOLD Michael there had been a lucky break in the case. They’d picked him up at the apartment, taken him and Alice to the police station downtown, a squatty low-rise with tall, narrow windows, like coin slots. Michael sat in the detective’s hard plastic chairs in a small room with the camera high in the corner. A woman with cropped hair and large eyes had taken Alice from him on the way in. She had an ID tag slung around her neck that seemed to give her the right. Michael told the woman Alice was allergic to strawberries and the woman said she’d make a note about that but then didn’t. Michael said for Alice to be good for the nice woman. He’d come get her soon. Alice gave him a look of limitless blame over the woman’s shoulder and he’d waved to her until she disappeared through a set of double doors.
There were two detectives. Detective Murrow was fat and kind. Detective Lawrence was sinewy and gruff. They had their parts to play, he had his. That was one of the rules here. They first asked him what he’d been doing in the four years and eight months since the last time Robeson, the lead detective, had questioned him, and his answers seemed, even to him, oddly evasive and incomplete. “When I became a dad, things changed,” he said, finally. They tried to scare him with the usual deceptions and wickedness, saying his friends had told them this and that about his whereabouts on the night of the murders. That a witness had finally come forward and placed him in the ice cream shop parking lot late that night. They wondered if Michael might remember any more details to help them out. They had his statement from before, but they were looking for clarity. If he wasn’t there, then he needed to tell them where he was. No harm in that, right? Just clarification. Detective Morrow wanted to be his friend. “We know you didn’t intend to mislead us, but there are things here, Michael, that just don’t add up.” Michael tried to steady his Xanax-hands in his lap. What had he intended? Hardly anything he’d ever done.
The detectives knew all about his past: How he’d quit school in the fall, weeks before the murders. He’d been in juvenile detention a couple of times before that. Drug charges. Disorderly. He’d twice been picked up for breaking and entering, though they never caught him with any stolen goods. His dad had hired an attorney to pull his ass out of the fire. They knew quite a bit about his brother Andrew, too. “A cautionary fucking tale,” Detective Lawrence said.
“Can I smoke in here?” Michael asked.
Detective Morrow said they’d give him time for that later.
Just like before, Michael told the detectives he would try to help them. But the night is a smear in his mind, he tells them. Indistinct. But he will try to retrace his steps. To get it right. Maybe he saw something? Maybe. He was nearby. He wouldn’t deny that. He’d been out with some friends, first over to the Peter Pan Mini Golf, and then drinking beer, he told them, down along the creek like they sometimes did, about eleven. That’s when he saw the smoke.
“Right,” Detective Morrow said, sitting down heavily in a chair beside him. His midsection fat squeezed into a roll beneath his shirt. “You said that before, Michael. About the smoke. How can you see smoke at night?”
Michael said he didn’t know. Maybe he just smelled it, then.
Detective Morrow said, “Now, here’s the thing: Your friends have told us you were there, at the ice cream shop.”
He saw Lucinda talking and talking with her hands, like she did. The cigarette between her fingers tracing the air. The ashtray balanced on her naked belly. She could go on and on.
Michael wanted to help them, he said. He did. But back then he’d been high or drunk more than half those nights. Could they remember all the things they did when they were seventeen?
“Awful things happened to those girls,” Detective Lawrence said with his hard, sinewy face. He tapped a pencil on the table.
“Awful things,” Michael said, nodding. Why was he nodding? His skin tightened around his eyes.
“You didn’t want those awful things to happen, Michael,” his friend Detective Morrow said. “We think someone put you up to robbing the place. But then things went wrong. Things got out of hand.” Detective Morrow seemed to drift off momentarily to the place where things always got out of hand and girls never made it back to their beds.
“A clusterfuck,” Michael said. The tiny room blurred at the edges, drifted.
“Something like that,” Detective Morrow said, nodding.
“Like people just lost their minds,” Michael said.
“Some people did,” Detective Morrow said. “And some people got trapped.”
“What’s your daughter’s name, Michael?” Detective Lawrence asked.
“Alice.”
“Beautiful little girl.”
“Thank you.”
“How old is Alice? About four?”
Michael nodded. “Am I under arrest?”
“No, sir. You can walk out of here anytime,” Detective Lawrence said but didn’t mean it.
“Walk right out?” Michael smiled.
“Yes,” Detective Morrow said.
“But y’all don’t believe me.”
“We’re not sure what to believe, Michael.”
“Believe I was never there,” Michael said, like an incantation.