He put his coffee cup down, eased himself out of his chair and picked up the telephone directory. He swung it a couple of times in one hand, and decided to use a double-handed grip to hit me, bouncing it off the side of my head so hard that I jerked sideways, upending my chair and crashing to the floor. My arm, still cuffed to the desk, was jerked violently in its socket. My shaken brain hazily registered him crouching down behind me. Then he pulled a hood over my head.
I know the things you are supposed to say, the things you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to ask for a lawyer. I didn’t say or do those things. I didn’t ask for a lawyer. I was hyperventilating into burlap that stank of vomit and something I’d never smelled before but recognized on an animal level: the smell of other people’s fear. All I could hear in my left ear, where he’d hit me, was a blast of static. The smell. The fear smell. The pit of my stomach was knotted tight, but everything else in my body was loose, not under my control. I needed to piss and I tried hard to hold it in, but somehow I couldn’t and urine began to leak out into my shorts. I pleaded with the detective to uncuff me so I could go to the bathroom, whimpering promises into the hood. I kept on and on, but there was no response. Gradually I accepted that I must be alone, and at some point he had left the room.
In one ear nothing but the roaring, in the other office sounds, somewhere nearby. Phones ringing, someone laughing. I knelt there, my forehead on the cool wet tile. When they came back, a long time later, I did not hear their footsteps.
I was crouching down by the desk in my urine-soaked pants, fishing for the chair with my uncuffed hand, when the hood was suddenly taken off. Blinking in the light, I found that the chair was lying on its side, just out of my reach. The sandy-haired detective was accompanied by another man, taller, thinner, with small features clustered at the center of a round flat face like a dirty white plate. They folded their arms and looked at me, approvingly.
—Now we’re making progress.
—I don’t know about that. Take a look at him. Looks like the stubborn type.
—Be careful what you wish for, son. You want to be a rebel, here’s where you end up.
—You’re in our house now.
—Where the fun ain’t got no end.
They uncuffed me and lifted me to my feet.
—Don’t you dare get piss on me, boy.
The sandy-haired detective examined his pants. The other one propped the chair back up on its legs and shoved it against mine. Sit down, he said. I sat down.
—Now stand up.
I stood up.
—Sit down.
I sat down.
—Now stand up. Sit down!
—Stand up!
—Sit down! Stand up!
—Sit down!
I half-crouched, braced in position, hesitating between sitting and standing. The thin detective swept my legs out from under me and I fell sprawling on the floor, hitting my head against the side of the desk as I went down. It was the surprise as much as the pain. It robbed me of my power to act. As I tried to collect myself, they hooded me again, shoved me down on the chair and began to shout. What filth I was. They knew what I’d done. They knew because they’d seen with their own eyes. What I’d done to that girl. I wasn’t human. I did not deserve the name. I was refuse, offal.
So cold, so sweet, so fair.
Was she dead? Leonie couldn’t be dead. I begged them to tell me what had happened.
—Because you don’t know?
—Stand up.
I tried to stand up. I could hear one of them moving round to my side of the desk. I flinched. No one touched me.
I AM SITTING AT THE DESK. THE HOOD IS OFF. My eye has swollen up. There is a roaring in my left ear. The detective opens a folder and starts placing photos on the desk like a tarot reader laying down cards. Black-and-white eight-by-tens of a woman, a female corpse. Lying on her back, the arms flung out. The skirt is lifted up over her face. Her old-fashioned underwear has been pulled down around the thighs. A second photo. The skirt down. Just her torso. Black everywhere. Black on the bedsheets, filling the great hole, the cavern of her chest. A third picture. Two feet, one bare, dirty or bloody, on the other a vintage shoe with a strap and a rounded toe. None of these are her clothes.
—What is all this, I ask.
—I got to show you her face? You need me to show you a picture of what you did to her fucking face?
This is not. They aren’t her photos. This is not her. This is not Leonie.
—These are old pictures. This all happened a long time ago.
—Can’t you cut the crap for a single minute?
He flips another photo onto the desk. We have always been here, sitting at the desk. We had always been here. He showed me another photo. Until then, I had not known what obscenity was. Not really.
That was what they had been looking at. All the cops clustered round the door, jabbing each other with their elbows to catch a glimpse, getting hard inside their uniform pants. All gathering round to take their turn with the real.
They told me it was time to confess, and when I would not, they cuffed my hands behind my back and walked me to the corner of the room, where they hooded me and ordered me to turn and face the wall. One of them hit me with something heavy, a sap or a nightstick. As I stumbled, they pushed me down on the floor. My mouth began to fill with blood. It felt as if I had bitten through my tongue. I coughed and spat into the filthy hood. They switched out the light and left the room.