Tell (4 page)

“I'm not supposed to be out that late,” I said. “I'm supposed to be home by 11:00 on Saturday night. I didn't want my mom to get mad at me.” I turned to her. “I'm sorry I lied, Mom.”

“Lying to the police is a serious matter, David,” Detective Antonelli said.

“I know. I'm sorry.” I didn't even have to pretend. I really was sorry—sorry that he'd found out.

“So now you're saying you
were
in that store approximately ten minutes before your stepfather was shot?” Detective Antonelli said.

“Yes.”

“This is an important question, David,” Detective Antonelli said.

“Maybe he should have a lawyer,” my mother said. That made me feel a little better. Maybe she thought I'd done something wrong, but at least she still cared enough to worry about what was best for me.

“Do you want to call a lawyer, David?” Detective Antonelli said.

I shook my head. “No.”

“David, where did you go after you left the store?”

“I went home.”

“Which direction did you go in?”

“I walked west.”

“On what street?”

“Main Street.” The bank machine where Phil had been shot was in the other direction.

“Did you hear anything?”

He meant, like a gunshot.

“No,” I said.

“Nothing?” he said.

“No.”

“Not a gunshot?”

“No.”

“You were in the vicinity when your stepfather was shot and you didn't hear anything? Can you explain that, David?”

“No,” I said. “Well, except that I walk pretty fast. I was probably all the way down by Second Avenue, maybe even halfway to Third, by the time it must have happened. And I was playing music on my Mp3 player. I play my music pretty loud.”

“Did you see anyone while you were walking, David?”

“I don't know. Maybe. Nobody I knew.”

“Nobody who could confirm where you say you were?”

“I don't know,” I said.

Detective Antonelli stared at me again for a few moments.

“How well did you get along with your stepfather, David?” he said.

He thought I'd done it. He thought I was the one who had shot Phil. Why else would he ask me that question?

“He was okay,” I said.

“That's not what we heard,” Detective Antonelli said. “We heard that you and your stepfather argued a lot.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Most guys I know argue with their parents. But that doesn't mean they go out and shoot them.”

“What kind of things did you argue about?”

I shrugged. “Regular stuff,” I said. “Chores. Curfews. Homework.” Mostly what happened was that my mother complained to Phil on the weekend about something I'd done during the week while he was on the road, and Phil yelled at me about it. Or Phil had a bunch of chores that he wanted me to do, and I got mad because he was mostly never home, and the minute he got
home he was like the evil stepmother— Cinderella, do this. Cinderella, do that. And I was Cinderella.

“Did he ever hit you?”

“
What
?” Phil was a jerk, but he wasn't that kind of a jerk. “No.”

Detective Antonelli looked at my mother for confirmation. My mother's face was tense. She looked at him, biting her lip. Chewing on it, really. She opened her purse and fumbled in it. I thought she was going for a tissue. She wasn't. She pulled out something and set it on the table in front of her. It was the gold-framed picture of my brother that used to be on Phil's key chain.

“This is the item I told you about,” she said to Detective Antonelli. “The item that my husband usually carried with him but that was missing from his things after he was…” Her voice trembled. “After he died,” she said finally. She took a deep breath. “I found it in the clothes dryer when I was taking clothes out of it. They were all David's clothes, including the clothes he was wearing on Saturday night.”

Geez, my own mother! What was she doing?

She turned to me. “Tell Detective Antonelli what you did, David. Tell him and tell me.”

Detective Antonelli looked at my mother for a moment. Then he looked at me. He said, “Do you want a lawyer present, David?”

“No,” I said. “But—” I glanced at my mother. “I want to talk to you in private,” I said. “I don't want my mother here.”

I had a pretty good idea how my mother must have felt when I said that. I was sure she was thinking the worst. But I didn't care. I didn't want her there.

She didn't want to leave.

“I'm his mother,” she said to Detective Antonelli. “I have the right to be here.”

Detective Antonelli stared at me. “Are you sure, David?” he said. “You have the right to have a parent here in the room with you.”

“I'm sure,” I said.

“Do you want another adult here with you?”

“No.”

“I'm staying,” my mother said. “You can't talk to my son without me present.”

Detective Antonelli stood up. He said, “May I speak to you outside for a minute, Mrs. Benson?”

It took my mother a moment before she got to her feet and followed him out of the room. Five minutes passed. When the door to the interview room opened again, Detective Antonelli came in alone.

“Your mother is waiting for you outside,” he said. “David, you have decided not to have a parent or any adult present with you. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“If at any time you change your mind about that, tell me. I will stop asking you questions until you have been able to talk to your parent or to another adult and, if you want, to have that person here with you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said and then asked, “My mother can't see me, can she?” I looked at the mirror on the wall and wondered if she was on the other side, watching.

“No,” Detective Antonelli said.

“She can't hear what I'm saying?”

“No, she can't.”

I looked at him, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking. I didn't know him well enough. Besides, he was a cop. Cops have a special way of talking and looking.

“How do I know?” I said.

“You have my word, David. Your mother can't hear what you're saying and she can't see you. I'm being truthful with you, David. Why don't you be truthful with me? Tell me about your stepfather.”

“He liked to gamble. He liked to play poker.”

“That's not what I mean, David.”

“This is important,” I said. “I can tell it my way, right?”

Detective Antonelli's eyes were dark and sharp. He never took them off me when he was talking to me or when I was talking to him. He didn't take them off me now as he leaned back in his chair and said, “Yes, you can tell it your way.”

So I told him about Phil and how much he liked poker. He liked it so much that whenever he told me to do something and I didn't want to do it, he always said, “Tell you what. Let the cards decide. We'll play a hand of five-card draw.”

If Phil won, I had to do whatever stupid chore he had in mind for me. If he lost, he didn't necessarily have to do it instead, but neither did I. Sometimes, “just to keep it interesting,” as Phil would say, we played best two out of three.

I gave Detective Antonelli an example.

About two weeks earlier, my mother went into the garage to try to find something
that she had brought with her when she and Jamie and I had moved into Phil's place a little over six years ago. I couldn't remember what she was looking for. I'm not even sure she told me what it was. But I do remember that she couldn't find it and that she said it was because the garage was such a mess. It was piled with stuff that, according to her, she hadn't seen Phil use even once since we'd moved in. She muttered about it all week. She said that when Phil came home for the weekend, if he did one thing and one thing only, he was going to clean out the garage.

When Phil came home that weekend— one week before he got shot at the bank machine—they had an argument about the garage. Phil said what he always said: “I'm away from my family all week, working hard to put food on the table, a roof over everyone's head, clothes on everyone's back. When I come home for the weekend, I expect to relax. I
deserve
to relax.”

But my mother didn't back down. She wanted the garage cleaned out.

No way, Phil told her. It was a whole-weekend job, and if she thought he was going to spend the whole weekend doing chores after he'd just spent the whole week working, she was going to have to think again.

My mother still didn't back down. She was here all week, she said. She had to look at that mess. Worse, she had to try to find stuff in that mess. And, by the way, she told Phil, “I work too. I put in twenty-five hours a week at the store. Plus I keep this house clean. I take care of all the details. I make sure there's food in the fridge and in the freezer so that you can eat good home-cooked meals when you're here.” My mother was a good cook. “I make sure there are clean clothes in your closet and clean socks and underwear in your drawers. I even do beer runs so that there'll be plenty on hand when your friends come over.”

Phil didn't say anything to that. Instead, he looked at me. He said, “David, I've got a little job for you.”

“No way,” I said. None of the stuff in the garage belonged to me. I didn't see why I should have to clean it out.

“I'll play you for it,” Phil said.

It was such a big job that I wasn't sure I wanted to play him. I didn't want to take the chance I'd lose.

My mother said, “One of you is going to clean the garage or neither of you is going to get a meal out of me for a month.” It was totally unfair. I was the one who would suffer the most if she refused to cook. Phil was away five days out of seven. She scowled at us and left the kitchen.

“Come on, Davy,” Phil said, needling me. He knew I didn't like to be called that. “We'll play best two out of three.”

“Okay,” I said. I knew my mother wasn't bluffing. She was angry about the garage and she wanted the job done. “On one condition.”

Phil looked at me. “Now you're giving me conditions?”

“It's for Mom,” I said. “The loser
has
to clean out the garage, even if it's you. Deal?”

Phil thought for a moment. “Deal,” he said. He stuck out his hand and we shook.

Phil dealt the cards. I won the first hand—a pair of queens to his pair of nines. Phil won the next hand—three jacks to my pair of fives and pair of sevens. The next hand was the one that would decide whose weekend was ruined. I discarded three and tried to keep from grinning when I picked up the three replacements that Phil dealt me. One of them was a king. I added it to the two kings I already had in my hand. I was picturing Phil cleaning out the garage when there was a knock on the back door. The door opened and Jack appeared in the kitchen. “Hey,” he said when he saw us, “I thought the game was tonight.”

“It is,” I said. “We're just playing a couple of hands to see who has to clean out the garage.”

“Talk about high-stakes poker,” Jack said with a laugh. He went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. He was watching us the whole time.

Phil discarded four cards—I definitely had him. I didn't bother trying to keep a poker face now. He drew four from the deck.

“Read'em and weep,” I said, throwing down my cards. There were my three kings staring up at Phil.

Phil turned over his cards. Four aces. I couldn't believe it.

“Looks like someone has his weekend cut out for him,” Phil said, grinning as he collected the cards from the table. “You ready to go to the car show, Jack?”

I slapped the table with one hand. Damn! I glanced at Jack. He shook his head.

“Is that why you did it?” Detective Antonelli said. “Because you lost and you were mad at your stepfather? Because you had to spend the weekend cleaning up
his
garage?”

I told him, “You don't understand. I didn't do it.”

“You said I could tell it my way,” I said to Detective Antonelli.

“You can, David,” he said. “But I'd like you to stick to the point, okay?”

“I am,” I said.

So I told him what happened next.

Phil was still grinning after he gathered the cards and got up from the table. He said to Jack, “I have to go upstairs and change
my shirt and grab my wallet. I'll be with you in a minute.”

Jack told him to take his time. He leaned on the counter, working on the beer he'd taken from the fridge.

“Do you guys do that a lot?” he said.

“Do what?” I said. “Play cards?”

“Play for stuff,” Jack said.

I nodded. Jack took another pull of beer.

“What do you play for?” he said.

“Chores, mostly. Stupid stuff, like cleaning out the garbage cans or taking the empties back to the beer store. And big stuff too. Like shoveling the driveway after a major storm. Or, one time, painting the downstairs bathroom with Mom.”

“And today?”

“Today it was cleaning out the garage. It's going to take me all weekend.”

Jack looked thoughtful as he sipped more beer.

“Is the split pretty much even?” Jack said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does Phil win maybe half the time and you win the other half?”

I thought about it. “He wins way more often than I do,” I said. I thought about it some more. “When it's really big stuff, like today, he almost always wins,” I said. I looked at Jack. I was pretty sure he was going to say something else, but just then Phil came back and the two of them took off.

I spent the whole day cleaning out the garage. Then, because I didn't want to spend all day Sunday working on it too, I decided to work right through and finish the whole thing on Saturday night, no matter how long it took. I was making pretty good progress. By 10:00, all I had left to do was take out the bags of garbage and sweep the garage floor. I'd cleaned it up so well that Phil could even park his car in the garage now if he wanted to. He hadn't been able to do that for as long as my mother and I had been living there.