Something elusive was happening in the room. Above them, one of the fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed. Standing at the front of the table, Detective Lawrence shifted on his feet like an athlete. Detective Morrow sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, legs splayed. The door between them was a narrow slab of beige. Framed for a moment in the door’s small window, the face of the woman with the large eyes who’d taken Alice from him.
Detective Lawrence sighed the way he did before he threw something or ruffled his papers or walked behind you so you couldn’t see what he was up to. He blurred a little around the head and shoulders.
How long would this go on? What could he say to make it end? He looked toward the small window again and Andrew’s face looked back.
Michael’s bowels filled with sand.
“Michael? You okay?” Detective Morrow asked.
Michael nodded, unconvincingly.
“Let’s back up a bit. Who was there that night? Down by the creek with you?”
“Just friends, you know. Scott Carl, probably. A girl named Letty I used to hang out with.”
“Anybody else?”
“That’s all I can remember.”
“What if I told you they never saw you down by the creek?” Detective Morrow said. “Would that surprise you?”
He tried to imagine what might surprise him but came up empty. His jaw ached. He thought he could hear Alice calling him from some other room.
“We know you were there, Michael,” Detective Morrow said. “Who else was there?”
“I’d really like to help y’all,” he said, weakly. He was grinding his teeth again. He needed a cigarette.
“We know there were two other men. We know you didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“I saw him just sitting there on that picnic table,” Michael said. “He didn’t say much. Didn’t tell me which way to go, what to do, or anything like that. He was never good at that kind of stuff.”
“Who are we talking about here?” Detective Morrow said.
“Andrew busted my nose once. I had to go to the hospital.”
“Stay with me, Michael.”
“He didn’t mean to. It just happened.”
“Like with the girls?” Detective Morrow said.
“They weren’t supposed to be there,” Michael said.
“I believe you,” Detective Morrow said.
“So why were they there?” Michael asked. He knew something significant pivoted off the answer to this question. In one version of the night in his head, he hears the girls’ singsong voices in the parking lot, the jangle of car keys as the car starts, the first guitar chords of a song on the radio.
“I don’t know,” Detective Morrow said. “Who else was there who wasn’t supposed to be, Michael?”
Everything Detective Morrow didn’t know made Michael want to weep. His ignorance was unbearably large.
Michael watched the patterns of light on the white table, a trapezoid, rectangle. No names, the younger man had said. Whatever you put a name to would lose its power. It was the opposite of what most people thought, the younger man said. Sometimes not knowing was stronger than knowing. The older man Michael hated said that if that was true, then Michael was the strongest of all. The older man grinned. Michael thought it was all bullshit but he liked hearing the younger man talk, the cadence of his voice. Inviolable was a word the younger man used. Their bond was inviolable. Michael would regret it terribly if he even thought of breaking it. What are men, the younger man said, without their word?
“He has a real way with people,” Michael told Detective Morrow. “He could smile and get you to do just about anything.”
“Whose smile, Michael?” Detective Morrow asked. He put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. The detective looked at him as if he understood the struggles of someone who worked with his hands for a living, someone with responsibilities, a father, like the detective himself, who wanted to do the right thing but for some reason never could. Michael knew if he laid down his burden, the detective would carry it. And for a moment Detective Morrow’s bulk seemed to fill the whole room and Michael felt weightless, hardly anchored to the earth at all.
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