The Whole Truth

  They were glad of one thing: The only steroids they found were cortisteroid pills used to treat asthma and allergies.

  “At least,” Robyn said before the trial, “his lawyers couldn’t claim a defense of steroid rage.”

  They asked Ray, “Why all the pills?”

  He had stories for that, too.

  “I collect them and give them to poor people,” was Robyn’s favorite.

  Her partner preferred: “People take too much medicine. I’m just helping them clean out their systems.”

  One day, Paul asked him, “All that medicine you like to take, Ray, which one is the bullshit pill?”

  How could Paul have known that this one sarcastic statement—out of all the others uttered by the frustrated cops and lawyers—would so offend the suspect that he would stop talking altogether?

  But that was the beginning of Ray’s long silence, a campaign he waged for many weeks, against a system that had finally stopped believing his lies. The problem was that without his lies, they didn’t have anything, except the bare fact of his part-time employment at a water taxi company and the meager contents of three backpacks.

  Immediately after Ray’s arrest, the detectives interviewed Donor Miller again, as well as other employees of Checker Crab. I turn next to those notes. Some of my “notes” are copies of the cop’s actual interviews and their arrest records. Some are just their best memories of who said what to whom. It turned out that the other employees—mainly young men and women—stayed away from Ray, considering him to be a freak. So they had nothing to contribute to the investigation, except that they hated it when Ray took out a boat for any reason, or slept on one, because he left messes behind him: food wrappers, unflushed “heads,” water left running from taps, grimy handprints on pristine fiberglass, and footprints on clean canvas, not to mention cigarette butts and ashes.

  “He didn’t actually grind out the cigarettes on the decks of the boats,” one of the girls said, referring to those boats whose owners rented dock space there. “But he’d smoke on boats where the owners told us not to, and he was real careless about where he flicked his ashes. I heard Mr. Miller yell at him a lot of times about that.”

  “Why did you put up with him?” Paul and Robyn asked Miller before he disappeared.

  “Hell, I got a soft heart.”

  “Yeah, and you never personally had to clean up after him, right?” retorted Paul Flanck. “Not with other employees to do it.”

  “Listen, he’s a worm, but even a worm’s gotta live, is how I look at it.”

  “You’re all heart, Donor.”

  “Like I said.”

  They asked how long Ray Raintree had lived and worked in the boatyard.

  “Year and a half, maybe two.”

  That’s what the other employees confirmed, although none of them had actually been employed at Checker for as long as that themselves.

  “Where’d he say he came from?” the cops asked. “What did he tell you about himself when he showed up here?”

  “He said he needed work and a place to bed down,” Miller answered. “I told him I couldn’t pay him nothin’, but he could work for a bunk.”

  “You’re all heart, truly.”

  “Hey! I gave him money to eat, too. You don’t see him starving to death, do you?”

  Once they had interviewed everybody at Checker Crab, the detectives had no place else to go.

  “Dead end,” said Paul.

  “I think he spontaneously generated out of thin air,” said Robyn. “Like on X-Files. He looks like something from that show. Maybe he can turn his skin inside out, or set people on fire without touching then, or maybe he’s actually some kind of alien insect, or a slug, or something.”

  “It’s too bad aliens didn’t abduct him,” her partner joked.

  On that, the partners were agreed: It appeared that the earth would be a better place without Raymond Raintree on it.

  All of that is in my notes, ready to transform into a chapter.

  On my desk, volume nine of the Encyclopedia Britannica still lies open to pages 452 and 453, where I have been researching the pineal gland. From the encyclopedia, I have learned what the Howard County chief medical examiner didn’t bother to mention, which is that in lower vertebrates the pineal has a structure like an eye, and that it’s a light receptor. Human eyes are thought to have evolved from it. Upon reading that, I wondered if it could possibly have anything to do with why Ray had amputated the child’s pineal gland. It sounds to me as if the pineal gland—also known as the pineal body, or the epiphysis cerebri—might also be the source of the metaphysical concept of the so-called third eye, which in some spiritual traditions is believed to “open” upon the advent of enlightenment. A spiritual adept whose third eye has opened is said to be the recipient of a pouring in of phenomenal intuitive abilities, of ageless wisdom, and even supernatural powers.

  It’s just what a superhero needs.

  That’s what we need, I think, a few supernatural powers to help us figure out Ray.

  Unfortunately, I don’t expect my own third eye to open, even by so much as a squint, that evening. I prop myself against a pillow. If I can’t read Ray’s past or his future by supernatural means, I’ll keep reviewing my own manuscript instead. Maybe it will trigger some intuition. Sometimes intuition is nothing more arcane than ideas inspired by experience lodged in unconscious memory.

  I reread my own words: “The Howard County state’s attorney, Franklin DeWeese said, ‘Ray can call himself anything he wants to, but if he’s the one who murdered that child, I’m going to call him a killer. And that’s all anybody needs to know.’

  “No, Franklin, it isn’t!” I throw the chapter aside, in frustration, before finishing even the first page. “It’s not all anybody needs to know!” Or, at least it’s not all my readers will want to know, and expect me to tell them. One of the reasons normal people read true crime books is to find out why people turn bad. Are they born that way, or does their family create them? Maybe Franklin could convict a man with no past, but I can’t finish a book about such a person.

  “Who is he?” I ask in total frustration.

  My deadline is zooming up, and I’m trying not to panic.

  Shame on me for agonizing about my own fate, when other fates are at stake. If there are clues in the notes and chapters I have just reread, they haven’t popped out at me. Maybe they will later. I am so tired, and yet I feel morally obliged to persevere. Maybe if I take a shower, that will revive me. When I feel fresher, I’ll reread the strangest interviews of all, the ones I, myself, had with Ray. They were the weirdest interviews of my life, and that is saying something, considering the villains I have known.

  Bleary-eyed, I appraise my office before leaving it.

  The top of my desk is three inches deep in manuscript pages from many different drafts of The Little Mermaid. Square in the middle of them, sits my telephone.

  Uncannily, while I am looking at it, it rings.

  I reach for it, but check out caller ID before picking it up. The little window says PRIVATE CALL, so there’s no name or number.

  “Hello?”

  There’s no response, though I sense somebody still on the line.

  I hang on a little longer, in case it isn’t a “breather,” and then I hang up in disgust. I hate it when that happens. People could at least say, “Sorry, wrong number.”

  The call punctuates my evening, putting a comma between the last chapter and the next. During the pause, I go take a shower, which is my favorite place for sifting through old information to get new ideas. Unfortunately, nothing comes to me, though I spend a good half hour washing the courtroom off my body and out of my hair. I step out of the shower, grab a towel, and partially dry off, and I’m still half-wet when I open my bathroom door and step back into my bedroom.

  I scream bloody murder.

  There’s a naked man lying on my bed.

  “Jesus, Franklin,” I exclaim, starting to laugh. “You cou
ld have knocked first.”

  He’s the only person to whom I have given carte blanche entrance past the guard house and into the cul-de-sac, and he also has keys to my house. We’ve been carrying on like this since just before the trial began, and nobody knows but us. It’s not as if it’s illicit—I’m single, he’s divorced—nor is it any particular conflict of interest for either of us. I suppose somebody prissy could make a case that it’s a potential conflict for me, because how can I write objectively about somebody I’m sleeping with, but I had already written most of the chapters in which he appears, long before our heads hit the pillows. And I haven’t changed a word of it. No, we keep this confidential because we hate the idea of the gossip, and it’s more fun this way. Secrecy is sexy. We’ve even agreed that if it ends, it’ll be so much easier to quietly slide away from each other without having to say a word about it to anybody else. No explanations. No chatter behind our backs. No sympathy or arched looks toward either of us. Just a good time and then a good-bye, if that’s how it plays out.

  “You forgot I was coming over,” he accuses.

  No way I’m going to admit that’s true. For one thing, it would be rude, and for another, it speaks poorly of me to say I am such an obsessive worker that I could put this vision out of my mind for a minute.

  “You’re a vision,” I say, neatly avoiding the charge. The problem with dating trial attorneys is that they have a tendency to cross-examine. “You look like a sexy ad for sheets and pillowcases. Brown man on white linens.”

  “Come here,” he suggests, “and let’s see if you disappear.”

  I leap upon him without even stopping to dry off any further, and he laughs, and rolls me over until I am pinned damply against my own white sheets.

  “Where’d you go?” he teases. “I can’t even see you now.”

  I work a hand loose, and move it strategically.

  “Ah.” He closes his eyes, and smiles. “There you are.”

  As I’m showering for a second time, and he’s drying off, I talk to him through the shower door over the sound of the water, telling him what I’ve been doing for the last several hours. “Captain Giancola wants us to go through our notes on Ray, see if we can get any clues to where he might go.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Does that mean you are? Help yourself, silly.”

  “Want anything from the kitchen?”

  I peek my head out the shower door, and with a smug and satisfied smile I say, “I already have everything I need, thanks.”

  He lands a quick kiss on my lips.

  “You’re welcome,” the man says.

  “Franklin?”

  He sticks his head back in.

  “Why aren’t you more upset that Ray got away?”

  “Upset?”

  “Frustrated, angry, whatever.”

  He looks puzzled, then smiles at me. “I did my job. If they catch him, it’s still done. If they don’t, it’s not my fault.”

  “No offense, but you can certainly be cold-blooded when you feel like it.”

  “That’s why I’m the prosecutor.” On his way back out the door, he adds, “And no offense taken.”

  I dress again, and go back into my office while he’s fixing himself a late supper in my kitchen. I can hear pots and pans banging, and I know that soon rich aromas will reach me. He’s an omelette wizard. While Franklin works culinary magic, I pick up some chapters I think I’m going to have to redo, because they’re written in first person. Ordinarily, I don’t like to put myself in my books. I know my place: I am the detached observer, invisible behind the searchlight I am shining into the souls of other people.

  My stomach growling, I start to read.

  The Little Mermaid

  By Marie Lightfoot

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If you ever want to experience the luxurious thrill of freedom, all you need do is take a stroll near the Howard County Jail, adjacent to the courthouse. It is all part of a legal complex that sits in downtown Bahia, only three miles from the Bahia Boardwalk, which runs along the Atlantic Ocean. If you happen to be one of the six million people who visit the area annually, you can hop on a trolley and see it all, from the sight of an accused murderer in a courtroom, to string bikinis on the beach. If the trolley doesn’t appeal to you, it’s only five minutes by car or a half hour by boat, from ocean to downtown. A free man or woman can even wave up at the slits they call windows in the walls of the county jail, although you’d have no way of knowing if anybody waved back. They can see you from up there in their cells, but you can’t see them.

  The jail where Ray Raintree resided before and during his trial is a fifteen-story blond building only a short walk away from houseboats on the New River, and park benches and patio cafés. There are probably few places in the world where the juxtaposition of imprisonment and freedom is more startling than there, in downtown Bahia. What could possibly be more free than life on a boat on a river leading to the sea?

  Walking to my first appointment with Ray Raintree at the jail, I found myself staring up at those slits and thinking, Are you guys crazy? To give up all of this, for that? What were you thinking? There are approximately three thousand hours of sunshine in Bahia every year, and those fellows had managed to land themselves in the one place in town where the sun didn’t shine.

  Prison cultures are notoriously idiosyncratic. Different wardens, different ways. But as a general rule, the worse the crime the greater a prisoner’s “privacy.” Crimes against children, particularly, are likely to get prisoners placed in solitary confinement to protect them from the rest of the convicts, all of those sterling, virtuous characters who have so much room to be self-righteous. Heaven knows, someone who murders a middle-aged clerk at a convenience store doesn’t want to be seen associating with a child molester. Goodness no.

  The “privacy” accorded to the most heinous criminals often means that interviews are conducted in private as well, and not out in the bullpen with everybody and their mother. Literally, their mothers. Sometimes, these more private interviews are held in side rooms that might be otherwise entirely empty except for a table and a couple of chairs. There will be a guard observing, if not actually in the room.

  My preference is for the guards to be as close as possible and heavily armed without being so obtrusive that they inhibit the person I am trying to interview. The killers are usually shackled, hands and feet. They can grab a cigarette, but they can’t grab me. If they are real-life counterparts to Hannibal Lecter—completely out-of-control psychopaths who will attack anybody at any time with anything including their own bodies—then I won’t go in a room with them, not even with a whole armed battalion; instead, I interview them through heavy security.

  I had heard that Ray Raintree was not like that.

  I decided it was safe to be in the same room with him, provided there was an armed guard seated there, too. If a guard keeps perfectly still during an interview, then the prisoner usually forgets the guard is there. That’s when killers really start talking.

  The first time I interviewed Ray Raintree, it was that kind of layout: a burly guard in the corner of a big empty room with muddy gray walls, no windows except for one in the door, three gray metal chairs, and a card table set up for Ray and me in the middle of the room.

  The card table made me feel uneasy.

  It put me too close to Ray, even though we both pushed our chairs back on the cold cement floor, and leaned our bodies back, like a couple of introverts looking for space. It was too casual, that table, especially with my cup of coffee and Ray’s can of cola sitting on it.

  My tape recorder didn’t get much that first time, only the sound of my own voice trying to get a conversation started, and the sound of Ray playing his acoustic guitar in reply.

  At my request, he didn’t smoke.

  The guitar was a battered old thing. The design around the hole was mostly worn away, and the edges looked like somebody gnawed on them. Even so, it was slightly amazing th
ey’d let him have it. Some prisons do lean in a bit for those who are condemned to die, as they believed he would be, and should be. They also make a few small concessions for those who are in solitary and who are tractable, as Ray was reported to be. Evidently, he wasn’t giving anybody any trouble.

  There was a sour animal scent in the room, from all the men who had sat there sweating into their orange jail jumpsuits.

  I had been told that after he was arrested, Ray wouldn’t stop talking to the detectives—one story piled atop the next—but the first time I interviewed him he wouldn’t say “boo” to me, which was just as well, because I might have jumped out of my skin.

  “Hello,” I began.

  I sounded more confident than I felt.

  In response to my greeting, Ray strummed a C-major tonic chord: CEG.

  I recognized it only thanks to the enforced piano lessons of my childhood: ten years of lessons and practicing, to turn out a woman who panics if she tries to play for anybody other than herself.

  I interpreted that chord to mean, “Hi, yourself.”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Ray.”

  He strummed a C-major subdominant chord: FAC.

  It seemed to say, “What the hell, I got nothing better to do.”

  “How are you doing in here?”

  C-Major dominant chord: GBD.

  I recognized the chords, all right, but I couldn’t translate them into English. That one might have meant, “Okay,” or “What a stupid question,” or “The food in here really sucks.” I didn’t fool myself into believing we were having an actual conversation.

  “I don’t know how much you know about me, Ray, or what your lawyers have told you about my work?”

  He began to pick out a tune one string at a time, plunk, plunk, plunk. “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that one.

  I’d heard he had a warped sense of humor.

  He switched to playing, “I wish I was in the land of cotton . . .”

  Again, I tried not to let my surprise show. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but I couldn’t believe he was referring to me. How would he have known that, anyway? There’s always a little biographical information about me on the covers of my books, but he couldn’t have read them; he was illiterate.