Colin Fischer (15 page)

Colin smelled the inside
of the house better than he could see it. Stale tobacco smoke, mildew, and the faint
ammonia odor from a cat’s litter box in need of changing wafted out of the darkness. A man’s voice barked, “It’s open!”

Colin stepped inside, carefully inhaling through his mouth and trying to pretend each aroma that caught his nostrils did not represent a microscopic particle of filth being admitted into his body. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he caught sight of a balding man with a wispy mustache on the sofa, his feet propped on a glass coffee table, sipping from a can of beer. On the television, a tall man with a deep Texas accent dispensed psychiatric advice to a studio audience.

“Hello, Mr. Connelly,” Colin said. He tried to find something in the room that wasn’t vaguely unclean so he could focus on it.

“Mr. Connelly? Good one…” The man’s voice trailed off into a phlegmy, snorting laugh. This struck Colin as odd. His greeting hadn’t been meant as a joke.

“Is Wayne at home?”

The balding man sat up straighter, his eyes narrowing at the mention of Wayne. He assessed Colin with
SUSPICION
. “He ain’t supposed to talk to no one unless they’re from the school. Did the school send you?”

“I’m from the school.” Colin’s face was perfectly blank. This wasn’t so much a lie as being economical with the truth. It was much easier than deceiving his mother.

The man grunted. “Wayne, get your ass out here!”
he bellowed over the white noise from the television set. “Someone
from the school
wants to see you!”

A door opened somewhere in the back of the house. Heavy footsteps padded down the hallway, coming closer. Unconsciously, Colin sucked in a breath as Wayne shuffled into the living room.

“What the hell are you tal—” Wayne began to snap at the balding man, which struck Colin as a shockingly disrespectful way to address one’s father. But Wayne never finished the sentence because that’s when he saw Colin.

“You.”

“Hello, Wayne,” Colin said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Outside.” Wayne nodded toward the front door as he laced up a pair of cheap high-top sneakers.

The balding man swiveled his head without moving the rest of his body and caught sight of Wayne preparing to leave. He frowned. “Hey!” the man barked. “Cops said you gotta stay in the house.”

“Whatever,” drawled Wayne, motioning for Colin to join him in heading outside.

The balding man on the sofa wasn’t ready to give up. He gestured toward an old Bakelite phone attached to the wall. “Want me to pick up the phone and call ’em?”

“Yeah, you do that, Ken,” replied Wayne. “See if my mom still lets you crash here after you get her son sent back to juvie.” He finished with a laugh and headed
for the door. Colin laughed too. Marie had taught him that laughter was a form of social communication; in Colin’s mind, he was just showing his appreciation of Wayne’s joke.

Wayne clearly didn’t see it the same way. He grabbed Colin roughly by the wrist and dragged him outside.

“Hey!” the balding man—
Ken
, Colin mentally noted for future reference—shouted after them. “You come back here! I swear I’ll call the cops! I’m picking up the phone!” The aging screen door crashed shut, and Ken fell silent.

“Is he moving?” Wayne asked in a low voice.

“No, he’s still on the sofa.”

“I knew it,” Wayne said. He marched Colin a short distance, then forcibly turned the much smaller boy to face him. “What the hell, Fischer? You come here to rub it in?” He balled his large hands into tight fists.

“No.” Colin looked into Wayne’s eyes, ignoring the reflexive aggression. It was the polite thing to do. “I came here to prove you’re innocent.”

Wayne stood on the sidewalk staring at Colin. He blinked seven times before he finally replied. He wasn’t even trying to disguise his
CONFUSION
. “Come with me.”

Colin followed Wayne toward a local park, past what seemed like an endless line of one-story houses with bars on the windows, badly in need of fresh paint.
Trees on the route were sparse, the sidewalks mostly in disrepair, and the cars that whizzed by seemed singularly uninterested in the safety of pedestrians. There was a faint, biting whiff of motor oil in the air. On the whole, Colin found the effect tolerable—but just barely.

The park itself was tucked up against the edge of the Santa Susana Mountains that separated the San Fernando Valley from Simi Valley to the west. “I know where we’re going,” Colin said. “But they’ve closed the park down. The officials say it’s from lead contamination. There used to be skeet shooting here. But my father says that in the 1950s they tested nuclear rockets in the facility nearby, and it made the soil radioactive. Which is too bad, since they never ended up building the nuclear rockets.”

Colin had long been fascinated by the huge field lab tucked away in the hills behind his neighborhood. Owned and operated by a large defense contractor, during the Cold War the facility had been home to several small experimental nuclear reactors intended to power America’s space program. When he was eleven, Colin had packed three bottles of water and two energy bars and set off to investigate the site himself. Two hours later, Mr. Fischer received a call from the facility’s guard shack, informing him that his son was in custody. However, by the time his father arrived, Colin’s insatiable curiosity about the history of the space
program had led to an unofficial tour of the grounds from the lab’s director of engineering.
¹⁸

Wayne looked over his shoulder at Colin, who couldn’t read the expression at all. It appeared to be halfway between
AMUSEMENT
and
EXASPERATION
.

Wayne silently gestured to a hole that had been cut into the chain-link fence surrounding the park. Beyond it lay a green expanse of lawn, dotted with clusters of reddish-brown boulders that reminded Colin of photos of east Africa’s Serengeti Plain.

“This way.” Wayne pointed, leading Colin to a part of the park that couldn’t be seen from the road.

“I like this park,” said Colin as the two boys found a large, flat boulder on which to sit. “But it would be better if there were lions.”

If Wayne had an opinion on the relative value of lions, he didn’t share it. Instead, he simply said, “Talk.”

So Colin did.

It took Colin
less than five minutes to lay out his case: why it made no sense for Wayne to have brought the gun to school and why he believed the school authorities and law enforcement had singled Wayne out. As Colin explained it all, he carefully watched Wayne’s
body language, how the boy went from crossing his muscular arms across his chest to drumming them against the boulder. He leaned forward to listen with growing
INTEREST
, flashes of
INDIGNATION
, and occasional ambiguously directed
ANGER
.

“At this point the police have nothing but suspicion based on past behavior,” Colin finished. “If they had any real evidence, they’d have arrested you by now.”

“When they took me in, they did one of those gunpowder tests,” said Wayne, furrowing his brow and looking off to his upper right, as people often did when they tried to access their memories. “They said it came back positive.”

“Anyone within fifteen feet of that gun when it went off would test positive for GSR,” Colin insisted.
¹⁹
“They were trying to trick you into confessing. It’s a classic interrogation technique.”

“You know a lot about this stuff. Your dad a cop or something?”

“No, I just like mysteries.”

Wayne looked down at his own hands before looking
back at Colin. “I’ve been kicking your ass since first grade, and now you want to clear my good name? You think if you help me, I’ll leave you alone?”

“I think if I help you, I will solve the mystery.”

Wayne stared at Colin for approximately fourteen seconds. Colin thought it would be rude to look at his watch, so he timed the interval by counting his heartbeats instead. Then Wayne laughed. This time, Colin decided to let him laugh alone.

“Fair enough, dude.”

Colin didn’t quite understand what was fair or not fair about it. It was an objective fact—although he knew that many people had trouble discerning facts from a point of view. “What other questions did the police ask you?”

“The cops kept asking me about
La Familia
.”

Colin furrowed his brow, remembering the spider-web tattoo on the police detective’s neck and a series of articles Colin had read in the local section of the
Los Angeles Times
. His father kept suggesting that the family cut the subscription to save money and get their news from the Internet, but Colin enjoyed the tactile sensation of reading a physical newspaper. It somehow made the news feel real. “That’s a Latino gang based in the North Valley,” Colin recalled.

“Very good,
vato
,” Wayne said, using the East Los Angeles Chicano slang term for “man” or “homeboy,” despite the fact that Wayne didn’t appear to be Chicano
and Colin wasn’t a homeboy. “They said the gun was used in a drive-by last year in Van Nuys. Kept asking me if I run with those guys.”

“Do you?” Colin asked. He tried to get a better look at Wayne’s neck. Was that a tattoo or a mole?

“Oh yeah,
ese
. Blood in, blood out.” Wayne affected an exaggerated Spanish accent. He turned his head just enough to reveal the mole. “
Viva la raza
!”

Colin processed this new information and created a new Notebook entry.

He had always assumed Wayne was of Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Perhaps Wayne was mixed race, or one of his ancestors was a San Patricio soldier.
²⁰
As he prepared to ask a follow-up question about Wayne’s Latino brethren, Wayne snorted loudly. “What are you, stupid?”

“No,” Colin replied. “I just have a hard time knowing when people are joking.”

“Well, I don’t. I know those dudes. Drugs, guns, dog fighting—and then there’s the bad stuff.”

Colin nodded, knowing very well what “the bad stuff” was from the articles he’d read. “Is that why you left school on the first day? To meet with them?” This was pure conjecture on Colin’s part, what television detectives might call a
fishing expedition
. It was not his preferred investigative technique, but it sometimes produced useful results.

“You ask a lot of questions,” Wayne said.

“Yes.”

“No.” Wayne’s answer was short and declarative. His expression was blank. Wayne was either telling the truth or he was a gifted liar. Either way, he had nothing more to say on the subject. Colin knew he would have to accept Wayne’s denial—his metaphorical fishing expedition had landed a boot.

He was deep into planning the next step of his investigation when it occurred to him that he should share his plans with Wayne. “We know what we have to do next.”

“Bend over?” Wayne interjected. He looked
BITTER
.

Colin raised an eyebrow. It was a gesture he’d learned from Mr. Spock, perfected through hours of
practice in front of a mirror. In this case, it meant he was unable to see the utility of bending over now, or why Wayne would even consider it. “No,” he said as though he had given Wayne’s suggestion its due. “We find out who bought the gun and trace it to someone who was in the cafeteria when the shooting took place. The police asked me about gang activity at West Valley too, which suggests someone at school has at least some connection to
La Familia
or knows how to contact them.”

“Is that all?”

Colin was busy fishing through his backpack for a map of the San Fernando Valley’s bus routes, so he didn’t see the look on Wayne’s face and the sarcasm written there. A shame in some respects because it was the closest anyone’s expression had ever come to matching Colin’s cheat sheet exactly.

“It’s not,” Colin said as he produced the map. “Do you know where we can find a
La Familia
gun dealer?”