“Tell them who you’re talking to.”
“I’m talking to you,” the old man said. “My lawyer.”
“You’re telling me this because you want to?”
“Yes.”
The tape had arrived in a plain envelope, postmarked from Chicago O’Hare. When Cain opened it, there was a handwritten note on white cardstock.
My instructions were to deliver this to you upon my client’s death, which condition has recently occurred. My duty to him is discharged, and I have none to you.
It had been addressed to the SFPD Homicide Detail, and Cain had been the one to open it.
On the screen, John Fonteroy was staring at the camera. His breath whistled around the oxygen tubes in his nostrils.
“Did anyone coerce you?”
“No—I don’t have to do this. I have the right to remain silent. I can die, silently. But I don’t want to. I want to speak.”
“Are you taking medications—pain medications—anything clouding your thoughts?”
“I won’t have them until we’re done here. They won’t help, though. They won’t stop what’s happening.”
“Did I tell you what to say?”
“You asked me not to say your name, and I won’t. But you didn’t tell me what I should say—you told me not to do this at all.”
“By making this statement, you could be prosecuted. I told you that. You understand that.”
“Yes.”
“How long do you have to live?”
“Too long,” he said. “Days. Maybe even a week.”
The assistant district attorney had paused the tape here the third time they’d watched it together. He’d asked Cain if he understood what she was doing, this twang-voiced midwestern lawyer. Cain had shaken his head, and the ADA explained it. She was trying to do them a favor. Her client was going to die, and she wanted to stay invisible. But she knew there would come a day when a judge or a jury had to see it, that this would have to be admitted into evidence. So she was laying the best foundation she could set down to overcome a hearsay objection. It might not work. All the rules of evidence cut against her. But her client hadn’t left her much to work with.
“Why are you making this statement, Mr. Fonteroy?”
“I’m afraid of Hell.”
Fonteroy looked into the camera, and Cain felt the old man’s fear. Hell wasn’t waiting for him; he was already in it. It was creeping up on him, hiding in every shadow. It was pumping through the tubes and into the port on his chest, yawning at him through the lens of the camera he was facing. He’d been feeling it consume him since 1985.
“Tell them what they need to know.”
“I had a wife,” Fonteroy said. “And a little girl. I didn’t think much, when I started taking the money. It was for them, is what I told myself. I was doing it for them.”
“You have to explain. Who was giving you money, and why?”
“They’d been looking for someone like me. They knocked on my door in ’eighty-one. Christmastime. I had something they wanted, and they were ready to pay. And—”
He glanced up at the IV above him and then, longingly, at the cup of water. He began to reach for it but stopped. It occurred to Cain, now, that the cup must have seemed very far away. That it must have been so heavy for him. The act of reaching—of holding on to it and bringing the straw to his dry lips—so burdensome. The combination of its proximity and its impossibility must have been maddening.
“And what?”
It took ten seconds for Fonteroy to turn back to the camera. Another five before he was focused again.
“And I was a coward,” Fonteroy said. “So I said yes. Maybe anybody would’ve done it. I don’t know. I just know I did.”
“What did you have to do for the money?”
“Look the other way.”
“When?”
“When they wanted me to. It’d be before a funeral but after the wake. When the coffin’s getting sealed and no one sees inside it again.”
“That’s all?”
“I took the money, and I didn’t look.”
“But one time, John, you saw.”
The man swallowed, and it made a dry sound, like rocks grinding against each other. His eyes shifted again to the cup of water.
“It was the Hanley kid, Christopher Hanley. The last visitation had just ended. They were waiting when I brought him into the back. They told me to step outside.”
“Did you do it?”
“I took the money—I took it, and I did what they told me.”
“But you saw something.”
“I saw through the back window—only a little.”
“But you saw. It’s not something you heard about. Not a hunch you had. You saw.”
Fonteroy nodded, or tried to.
“I didn’t know what they’d been doing. What they were doing with the coffins. No clue, until that day, when I decided to look. I swear to God, ma’am—until then, I didn’t know.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I should have tried to stop it, but I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was scared of them. You see a thing like that, and you find out what kind of man you really are. That’s what I’ve been living with since.”