Reversible Errors Page 12

  In the end, that was how you got them all to cop, by saying you understood, by nodding when they said, What choice did I have?

  “Not how I ever thought I was,” Gandolph answered now.

  “So how’d this happen?”

  Squirrel didn’t reply.

  “Rommy, what kind of stuff you use? Wack? You use wack?”

  “Man, you know. I don’t do much of nothin. Sometimes I sniff some paint is all. Only the last time I was in Manteko, the doc there, he said it wasn’t so good for me, said I didn’t have enough cells to spare.”

  “But you’ve dusted yourself now and then, right?”

  Squirrel agreed.

  “You think maybe you were dusted on July Fourth? Guys don’t remember much. And it makes them pretty ornery, Squirrel. Lot of nice dudes do a lot of bad stuff on PCP.”

  “Yeah,” said Squirrel. He liked that part.

  “Come on, Squirrel. Tell me the story.”

  Squirrel very briefly dared to look at him squarely.

  “Don’t bring no more ladies in here.”

  “No,” said Larry.

  “And can you shut that damn window there?”

  “Well, let’s talk some,” said Larry.

  In another fifteen minutes, he shut the window. By then, Wilma had brought in an army blanket. Squirrel hunkered within the folds, while Wilma sat in the corner, scratching out notes as Gandolph confirmed the basics: he saw Luisa through the glass as he was passing by Paradise. On reflection, his best memory was he’d taken a hit of PCP.

  “Okay, so you walk in there one in the a.m. What happened then?” Larry asked.

  “Man, I can’t hardly ’member none of this. Cause I was dusted and all.”

  “Come on, Squirrel. What happened?”

  “Man, old Good Gus. He say, like he always done, to get out.”

  “And did you get?”

  “Well, if I shot them all, how could it be I done git?”

  “And where’d the gat come from?”

  Rommy shook his head, truly puzzled by the question.

  “Man, I ain never had me any gun. Like to shoot myself soon as anyone else, how I always figure.”

  He probably had that right.

  “Well, you had a gun that night, right?”

  Gandolph stared at the gray enamel on the steel leg of the desk.

  “Seem like Gus have him a gun.”

  Larry glanced at Wilma. No one had said that. But it made sense. In Gus’s neighborhood, you wouldn’t want to just wait for the cavalry.

  “Yeah,” said Rommy. “Gus had him a pistol. Pointed it at me one time when he throwed me out. Winter, man, snowin and ice comin right down, and I’s standin shiverin and he tole me to git.”

  “So you knew where the gun was?”

  “Back under the cash register. Under them cigarettes and the Hershey bars in that glass thing.”

  “And that’s where you got it?”

  Squirrel looked around. “Man, can’t you turn the heat on in here or nothin?”

  Larry stood by the radiator. “Is that where you got the gun?”

  Squirrel nodded. Larry opened the valve and brought Squirrel over. Typical Task Force bungle, Larry thought. No one ever asked the family if Gus owned a gun, because each detective assumed somebody else had covered it.

  He left Wilma with Squirrel while he phoned Gus’s son, John. Somewhat warily, John confirmed that his father kept a revolver behind the counter. He didn’t remember much, except that Athena had insisted on it, but he put Larry on hold and in a few minutes had found the bill of sale in his dad’s files. Four years ago, Gus had purchased a .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a five-shot revolver—the murder weapon Ballistics had identified from the land grooves on the slugs at the scene. Nor had the techs, for all their searching, found any casings. With a revolver, the cartridge casings remained in the chambers.

  They always knew, Larry thought. The killer always knew something obvious that had eluded everybody else. He told Wilma to phone Greer and then called Muriel himself.

  11

  MAY 22, 2001

  Kind

  FOR ARTHUR, the thought of several hours alone with Gillian Sullivan had been enough to wake him for the day at 4 a.m., and on the road with her this morning, he had alternated between periods when he was hopelessly wordstruck or given over to garrulous babbling. Now his heart leapt at the sight of her through the mesh security window between the barred doors at the rear of the guardhouse. But his response was not to any of his private longings. It was the consequence for his client that fired every nerve. Arthur was hovering by the interior door, even before she’d been buzzed through.

  “He’ll talk to you,” she said.

  “Great!” Arthur dashed back to his briefcase and swept up the pages of a draft motion to dismiss in another matter, which he’d been revising. Returning, he found her smiling at his eagerness.

  “Not yet, Arthur. He needs an hour or so.” Gillian explained Erdai’s circumstances.

  Somewhat chagrined, Arthur went to the front desk to make arrangements. When he had called the Warden’s Office to set up the visit, he’d expected problems due to the fact that Gillian was a convicted felon, a category of persons not always warmly welcomed as prison visitors. Instead, all the questions had focused on Arthur himself, because Erdai didn’t recognize his name. Erno had been cryptic with the prison authorities about his business with Gillian—they seemed to think it concerned his estate—and in the end, Arthur had been permitted to accompany Gillian on the supposition, which he never discouraged, that he was her lawyer. As a result, the lieutenant at the front desk now informed Arthur that in order to see Erdai, Gillian had to go back in with him. She frowned when Arthur explained. Apparently, she was counting on having endured the last of the cellblock.

  “Can I buy you lunch at least?” Arthur asked. He was starving anyway. Gillian agreed without any visible enthusiasm and lit a cigarette the second they left the guardhouse.

  “Did he tell you what he had? Erdai?” Arthur asked.

  “He said your client was innocent.”

  “In-nocent?” Arthur stopped in his tracks. His mouth, he realized, was hanging. “Did he explain that?”

  Gillian shook her head as she blew smoke into the wind.

  “Except, he believes your guy will get out and has done enough time. I assume he’s going to tell you somebody else killed those people. But he didn’t say who. Or how he knows that.”

  “And did you believe him?”

  “He asked the same thing, Arthur, and I told him no. Not that he makes a bad impression. He’s bright. That’s for certain. You can judge for yourself. My opinions are preformed, I suppose.”

  Being himself, Arthur tried several more questions, even after it was clear Gillian couldn’t answer them, but he finally fell silent as they walked to his car. Innocent. He was not certain exactly what he had been expecting to hear from Erdai. After rereading his letter to Gillian a dozen times, Arthur’s main speculation had been that Erdai, who worked at DuSable Field, which was not far from Paradise, had witnessed the crime or talked to someone who’d been there, and had new information. Yet, as always, Arthur had refused to listen when Pamela tried to engage him in hopes that Rommy was not guilty at all. Innocent. His heart was skipping around and to calm himself, he focused on the locale. He was at Rudyard, where people arrived because they did not know how to behave-they were thugs and liars and outlaws. Hopes notwithstanding, Arthur’s reasoning part told him that at the end of the day he was likely to share Gillian’s conclusion about Erdai’s veracity.

  Looking for a restaurant, they found thin pickings in the small town. Prison visitors were overwhelmingly poor and far more apt to brown-bag it than to eat much besides drive-in fare. The restaurant they settled on was dark and very large, a family place with linoleum tables grained to resemble wood. From the looks of it, Arthur suspected it had once been a bowling alley.

  Gillian ordered a salad. Arthur too
k the special, which was meat loaf.

  “It probably won’t be very good,” Arthur said as the waitress receded. “A place like this? It’s been cooked and overcooked. It’ll be like eating a cannonball.”

  When Arthur’s lunch was set down before him, he took his knife, as he always did, and separated everything on the plate—he gave the peas a space apart from the potatoes, and scraped the blade in a circle so that the brown gravy formed a precise pool around the meat loaf. Gillian, who was stubbing out her second cigarette with the arrival of the food, observed him with plain interest.

  “Force of habit,” he told her.

  “So I take it. And how is the meat loaf? As you feared?”

  He chewed a moment. “Worse.”

  “May I ask why you ordered it?”

  “My father always made us order the special. He thought it was the best deal. It made him frantic if we did anything else. I mean, you asked about my mother the other day? Stuff like that, ordering the special—I’m sure that’s why she left.” He swallowed hard on the meat loaf, which had formed like a cud. “I can see her point.”

  Gillian smiled broadly. His intent was to amuse her, but he knew he’d touched on one of the long-term difficulties he’d had as the child of such ill-matched human beings—he saw each parent’s point of view. He shared his father’s bitterness at his mother’s desertion, but he understood her indignity at being tethered to a person who often inflicted his anxieties on everyone else. His mother, however, was rarely as generous with Arthur. She found her son too much like his father, conventional and dismally unadventurous. By reminding himself that his mother was an eccentric, he had managed, with effort, to disregard her judgments, which went largely unspoken in any event. But now, nearing forty, he was increasingly haunted by her example—someone who had broken free of all traditional restraints to pursue the life she wanted. What did he want? The mystery of it seemed large enough to swallow him at times.

  “You gave me to think you were quite fond of your father, Arthur. When I met you at Duke’s?” She added the last words with noticeable care.

  “‘Fond’? In my life, my father was like gravity. I mean, without him the world would have just fallen apart.” These days, his father was Arthur’s favorite subject. Talk kept him alive for Arthur, the images near at hand. He understood what he was doing and how futile it was. But he couldn’t stop himself. That was what had gotten him into trouble in that first meeting with Gillian. Yet now, clearly as recompense, she sat against the leatherette backing of the booth, a cigarette between two manicured fingers, granting him unwavering attention.

  Harvey Raven had spent his entire working life as a second-line employee in a relative’s scrapyard, salvaging used auto parts. Somehow, it was a necessary element of all that frightened and concerned Mr. Raven to believe that if only a few things were different, his life would have been if not right, at least calm. If only he had gone to college. If only he had money. If only he were an owner of the scrapyard and not a working stiff. If only, if only—it was the slogan of his life. And who was to say he was wrong? All the time Arthur had spent in the law firm mixing with the well-to-do, the cultivated, the wellheeled, he had known they were clueless about people like him. They didn’t understand that desert thirst for money or the security it bought. They didn’t understand what it was to be at the world’s mercy. Arthur’s heart still reveled when he recalled his father’s exultant look at Arthur’s law-school graduation or at the news seven years later that Arthur was leaving the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to join the law firm at the astonishing salary of $100,000 a year.

  “People don’t think much about the valor of ordinary lives,” Arthur said to Gillian, “you know, of folks who are supposed to be just normal. But the older he got and I got, the more I saw how heroic my father was. I mean, it was basically a miracle that a man so scared for himself had managed to look out for other people and to care so much about them.” Arthur had now reached the point in the cycle where he felt his throat thicken and the pressure of tears, but he was, as ever, powerless to end this celebration.

  “And my father died with courage, too. He had liver cancer. It just ate him up. He went to the doctor and got the whole grim prognosis—six months left, most of it in terrible pain. And he was philosophical. To the end. I felt like grabbing him by the hospital gown. Jesus Christ, I wanted to say, you were scared of everything your whole life, you worried about stuff you never needed to worry about, you let it make you crazy, and now this? Now he was calm and accepting. And we had a great time, really, as a result. When he had good moments, we would laugh. It turned out we’d had a wonderful life together, when you added it up. He loved me. I loved him. He’d stuck with us, when maybe not every guy would have. I’d done the stuff he wanted me to do. He knew I’d take care of Susan. I mean, there was just so much gratitude from both of us.”

  Arthur, by now, had lost the battle. He averted his face to spare Gillian, but the tears poured from his eyes. He groped behind him for his handkerchief. When he had recovered, he saw that Gillian was now rigid, probably with horror.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “what an ass I’m making of myself. I cry all the time since my father died. I cry about TV shows. I cry when I watch the news. I keep trying to understand the logic. We need to love other people so badly and it only makes life unbearable when they’re lost. Is there any sense to that?”

  “No,” she answered in a small, hoarse voice. She had flushed. The faint freckles on her neck now stood out, and her eyes, with the clear line of makeup and the cloud of blush on the lids, were closed. “No,” she said again, and took a breath. “You have a strange effect on me, Arthur.”

  “A good one?”

  “I can’t say that.”

  “Yeah,” he said, resigned to the facts.

  “No, no. It’s nothing about you. It’s me, Arthur.” She struggled with something, looking down at her long hands. There was still color all the way to her collar. “The gratitude you described, the admiration—I’ve never had that. Never.” She mustered a smile but not the courage to look at him. In a moment she asked if they could go.

  Driving back, Arthur did not say a word. After a few hours with her, he was beginning to gain a sense of Gillian Sullivan’s complications. Lord knows, they should have been apparent, given the mess she’d made of her life. But her demeanor, even now, seemed so serene and commanding that he was surprised to discover an unpredictable element to her personality. Her responses to him ran hot and cold. Accustomed to attempting to please women, he felt a little like a tetherball. Overall, though, she seemed to like him far more than he’d expected. Despite cautioning himself, he’d found that recognition exciting.

  When they arrived at the institution, Gillian still seemed unsettled. This time it was the prospect of going back in that appeared to bother her. She leaned forward in her seat, taking in the facility’s vast sprawl and shaking her head. Arthur apologized for forcing her to go through this twice.

  “It’s not your fault, Arthur. I knew what I was doing in coming here. It’s just been rather much to face. The memories.”

  “Kind of the ultimate bad time?” he said.

  Gillian, who was already fumbling again in her purse for a last cigarette, took a second to think.

  “People have their standard imagery about prison, don’t they? We all do. Everybody imagines certain parts will be especially dreadful.”

  “Like what? Sex?”

  “Certainly, sex. Yes. That’s standard-issue. The fear of living without it. The fear of homosexual encroachments. Most of the lesbian activity when I was inside took place among the staff. That’s the truth.

  “Sex ends up as just one more thing you’re cut off from. That’s the main form of punishment—separation. From people. From habits. From food. From life as you know it. That’s precisely what prison is supposed to be. There’s the irony, of course. After everything is said and done, after all the anxiety about incidental horrors, like getting mau
led by bull dykes, the real punishment is exactly what’s intended. It’s like suffering an amputation. You stop wanting. You just quit. I did. Desire is replaced by boredom. They bore you to death in there. You think, Well, I can get interested in anything, I’m bright. But because everybody is just marking time, nothing seems to matter. You know you’ve been sentenced to feel the weight of time passing, and you do. I had moments when I could literally hear the watch ticking on my wrist. Every second being lost.”

  Watching her, the harrowed look as she stared at the prison, Arthur, unwillingly, found himself crying again, silently now, a runnel descending each cheek. He wiped his jaw first with his hand and apologized once more, although by now she seemed unconcerned by his lack of composure.

  “Once I start,” he said.

  “Not at all. You’re very kind, Arthur.” She seemed somewhat struck by what she had said, and faced him fully. “Very kind,” she repeated, then looked down at her unlit cigarette and left the car.

  12

  OCTOBER 9, 1991

  Breaking the News

  MY NAME IS ROMEO GANDOLPH. I am 27 years old. I read and write English. I am making this statement freely and voluntarily. No one has promised me anything to make this statement. I understand that this statement is being videotaped while I read it.

  After midnight on July 4, 1991, I stopped in by Paradise which was a restaurant. The owner Gus was getting ready to close. Gus and I had been knowing each other for a long time. I had tried to steal money once from out of his cash register. He had chased me down the street and caught me and beat me bad. After that, whenever he saw me, he would tell me to get away from his restaurant. Sometimes he was like joking, but sometimes he was straight serious. Once when I walked into the restaurant, he took out a pistol. from under the cash register and told me to leave.