The Vienna Connection

by Dick Rosano

  I was still afraid to look Miller in the eye but couldn’t resist as my own eyes swiveled toward him.

  “You mean while you and Axle were fucking her? What would I want with that?”

  “Axle!?” he said with a sneer. “Ha! You think he fucked the girl? Shit, he was so passed out.”

  “What?”

  “Axle’s a lightweight. Get a couple beers, throw ‘em back, and he passes out. Oh, yeah, he wanted her. But he tried to romance her, you know? Like he’s gonna seduce her or something. He’s talking to her and trying to put his hands up her skirt. She pushed his hands away and, after a few attempts, he just fell back on the bed dead asleep.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “His pants were pulled down.”

  “I did that,” Miller responded nonchalantly. “It’s called composition in photography class. You’ve got to style your subjects and pose them. So, while the girl just sat there – she was pretty drunk too – I unzipped Axle’s pants and pulled them partway down. She might have been drunk, but she saw what I was doing, and she laughed. She probably thought she was safe now that he was out cold, and that I was messing with Axle instead of her. But when she laughed, it kinda got me going, you know?”

  No, I shook my head. I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Yeah, so, I decided to switch my attention from him to the girl,” and then he laughed that evil laugh. “I just lowered myself onto the bed and climbed on top of her. She fought pretty good at first. It was hard to hold her still and get her clothes off at the same time. And when she started to scream, I had to silence her.”

  He gave me a cold stare.

  “I’ll do the same to you, you know,” Miller said quietly.

  “What,” I mumbled, “fuck me?”

  “No. Silence you.”

  His eyes were fixed on me, making me feel uncomfortable.

  “You think that was an accident, don’t you?” Miller asked.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He just laughed and looked past me to a spot on the stairway wall.

  “I didn’t intend to kill her, but it wasn’t so bad. She was pushing back too hard when I was on top of her. So, I pushed too.” He paused and smiled. “Yeah, I really pushed.”

  This last was said with a sadistic grin on his face.

  “My hands around her neck…that was probably what did it. Now I know.”

  “Know what?” I asked, suddenly frightened.

  “Now I know how to kill, and that I won’t be bothered by it.”

  Mason knew that he had to share this book and his recollections with the authorities. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, and he thought that he might just drop it off at a police station.

  He opened the door to his bedroom and checked the hallway before stepping through the door. The journal was tucked under his arm, but it was not well concealed. He didn’t want to have to explain it to his mother or sisters, so he hurried down the steps before anyone could intercept him.

  It was just past sunset when he got into his car. Driving away from the large suburban house that his parents had bought for the family – a house that had seen joy and sadness, love and tragedy – he wondered whether or when he would return. His father no longer lived there. He had an apartment in town that he shared with a young girl from his office. His mother alternated between tumblers of vodka and the pills that her doctor so willingly provided.

  The journal that Mason had been writing rested on the passenger seat beside him. It was just a small thing, he thought as he glanced over to make sure it was still there. But small though it was, it held massive things, facts and confessions that would take Mason from the comfort of his suburban life to the gray, sunless walls of a prison cell.

  Mason drove toward the local Maryland State police office. He still wrestled with the best way to present the book to the officer on night duty. He decided to be a man and stand right up at the desk and admit what had happened. But thoughts like these left him quivering. He changed the plan, thinking that he would walk into the lobby of the office, sorta aimlessly, and leave the book on whatever table he could find inside.

  No, that wouldn’t work, he concluded. The station probably had surveillance cameras and so he wouldn’t get away without being spotted, filmed, and returned for interrogation.

  Mason was still mulling over the best way to present his confession when he pulled the car into the parking space just beyond the glow of the tall lamplight in the lot outside the police station. He lifted the journal in his right hand and swung his legs out of the car, standing for a moment on the threshold of action, still with no clear idea of how to proceed.

  He wanted to do the right thing, but he trembled at the thought that he could be on his way to prison and would have drawn two of his friends into his confession.

  Clearly, Miller deserved it, but all Axle did was get drunk and fondle a girl.

  Still, in the distant glow of the lamplight, Mason lifted the journal and stared at it, then sighed. He sat back down in the driver’s seat, pausing once again, then swung his legs into the car and laid the journal back down on the passenger seat.

  “I know what I can do,” but the clarity of reason came as a last resort, not with the kind of conviction that he had wanted to reach.

  Mason drove out of the parking lot and toward his high school. He parked his car in the lot farthest from the school building and nearest to the forested area where a few nights before they had buried the girl. He pulled himself from the car and went around to the trunk to retrieve the shovel. As he reached for the tool, Mason recalled, that his father, the man who had abandoned him, had always insisted on keeping a shovel in the vehicle for emergencies.

  This sure seemed like an emergency.

  Mason carried the shovel and the book toward the spot where he and Miller had buried the girl. The earth at that spot still showed signs of being disturbed, but leaves had collected there, and squirrels had left the chewed hulls of the acorns scattered about. All in all, Mason concluded, the burial spot would probably not attract much attention.

  He couldn’t leave the journal with the police, and he certainly didn’t want to give it to his mother. “It would kill her,” he thought. It was the first truly confident thought that he had had in the last few days.

  But he could give the journal to the girl.

  He set about removing the top layer of dirt in a small circle. He only wanted enough space for the book and didn’t want to create a new excavation that might attract attention. He reached about a foot to eighteen inches deep, about a foot across. He looked at the book one more time, then dropped it unceremoniously into the hole. Pushing the dirt back into the hole, Mason sought some relief for his action.

  He didn’t get it.

  Chapter Thirty

  May 17

  Bethesda, Fifty Years Earlier

  After returning home from school the next day, Mason lay for a long time on his bed. He was passing in and out of a troubled sleep, his head on the pillow, when a knock came to the door.

  “Mason?” It was his mother’s voice. “Are you okay?”

  After debating whether to ignore her or answer her call, Mason rose from the bed and pulled on the door handle. But instead of talking to her there, in the hallway, or in his room, he stepped past her and headed straight down the stairs toward the living room, where he plopped down on the couch.

  “They sent me for more beer,” Mason said.

  “Who?” his mother asked.

  “Miller,” he replied, “and…”

  But he stopped suddenly in mid-sentence. He put Axle’s name in the journal and now he was sorry he did that. He would make up a name to tell his mother.

  “Miller and Adam.”

  His mother, Libby, sat down beside him. She cradled a tumbler of vodka in her hand.

  Mason was terrified of his friends, especially Miller. He was so terrified that when he felt the need to confess to his mother what had happened that night, he cou
ldn’t use their real names.

  “There was this girl in the room, and Adam and her were fooling around. He had his hand on her, uh, her…”

  “Breast?”

  “Yeah, well…” Mason was having trouble being too detailed with the subject in front of his mother.

  “Damn it, Mason! What have I told you?!”

  He paused, absorbing his mother’s growing anger, afraid to go on but knowing that he had to.

  They were sitting on the couch in the living room of the family home. Ever since that night at the party, Mason hadn’t slept well and seemed constantly preoccupied. His mother tried to reach him at different times, but Mason resisted conversation. On this particular evening, she broke through and her son began to tell her the story of that party and what happened that night.

  “When I returned with the beers, the girl was spread across the bed, legs pulled apart awkwardly, and her underwear was wrapped around her ankle. Her head was tossed to the side and Adam was passed out on top of her left arm, his pants unzipped.

  “Shit, Mason. This is disgusting…”

  “The girl, too, was passed out,” he said, interrupting her. Mason was perched on the edge of his commentary and was afraid that any reaction from his mother might break his concentration and his determination to get through this.

  “Miller was standing at the foot of the bed…”

  “That’s kind of gross, Mason,” his mother opined, taking a sip of the vodka. “He was just standing there? What, staring at two drunk kids having sex?”

  “Yeah. No, wait, no,” he said, as if he was recovering a bit of a memory.

  “He was zipping up his pants and buckling the belt around them.”

  Soft, ambiguous images flitted across the screen of Mason’s memory as he reclaimed and organized the pictures into a logical sequence.

  “What do you mean? What happened?” she pressed.

  “He was staring down at Adam and the girl, but he rubbed his crotch and adjusted his jeans as he looked at them.”

  “Did he have sex with the girl, too?” His mother asked. Then, with some irritation in her voice, she continued, “Did you have sex with her, too?”

  Mason did not respond immediately, his mind lost in trying to recall everything from his memory.

  “Yeah, I know…” he began, but then realized what his mother had asked.

  “No, no. No,” he blurted out. “I didn’t touch the girl. I went to get beer. But Adam did. He must have. His pants were pulled down…and maybe Miller.”

  Mason thought for a moment.

  “Miller was…he was pulling up his pants and rubbing his crotch. It was like he…he had…”

  “He raped her, too. Didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Mason said, casting his head downward. “Then he gets this camera…”

  “A camera?” Mason’s mother was growing anxious and disturbed by his rendition of events. Her hand shook as she reached out to set the now-empty vodka tumbler on the table.

  “Yeah. He had this camera in his pocket. Everybody laughed at him at school because Miller had this little camera that he carried around all the time. He took pictures of the track team and the cheerleaders – mostly the cheerleaders, and mostly when they weren’t looking. So, he pulled out this camera and – flash, flash – he takes a couple of pictures of Adam and the girl on the bed.”

  “Wait a minute, Mason,” his mother interrupted angrily. “Stop saying ‘the girl.’ She has a name, you know. What is it?”

  Mason hesitated before answering.

  “I don’t know, mom. I don’t know her name.”

  “Jesus Christ! You screwed this girl and you don’t even know her name?”

  “I didn’t screw her, mom,” he nearly shouted. “I told you. I…I just…”

  Mason wasn’t sure what to say next.

  “Adam was lying there…and Miller, well, he was just tucking his in when I came back in the room.”

  Mason’s mother sat quietly for a few moments, processing her son’s words, and thinking about how to lecture him on respect for girls and proper behavior. Words like ‘sex’ and ‘rape’ had already been uttered, but Libby seemed more focused on rescuing her son from this predicament than on the welfare of the girl. She recalled his mood for the last couple of days and wondered if that night had, itself, taught him a lesson that she would not be able to equal.

  “What then? You just left her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what?” She was afraid to hear that Mason stayed after the other boys had left, what might have happened next.

  “What?” she repeated.

  Mason bent forward and cradled his forehead in his hands, weeping.

  “She’s dead, mom.”

  She leaped to her feet, startled by the unexpected news.

  “What do you mean?” she shouted.

  She paced side to side, each time returning to hover over her son, staring with horror at what he was saying.

  “Miller planned everything. We buried her.”

  “You what?” his mother shouted. “Oh, my God, oh, my God! Oh, my God!! Mason, what did you do? What are we going to do? We have to tell the police?”

  “I can’t, mom. They’ll kill me!”

  “The police won’t kill you!”

  “No. Not the police. The guys! I can’t rat them out!”

  “Rat them out! Mason, you’ve killed a girl!”

  “Mom, mom, oh, please, no! I can’t! You don’t understand. I didn’t do it. You don’t understand!”

  Mason saw that his mom was coming apart, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that Miller took more pictures, including of the girl’s body in the grave they had dug.

  His mother resumed pacing, mumbling to herself about the neighbors and their circle of friends. How her husband had abandoned her and the kids for “that slut” at the office. How the people at the country club would stare at her when this became public. How she would have to use all of her powers and all of her husband’s family money to salvage her son’s life.

  “Mom, please, sit down. I need help,” Mason pleaded.

  “You sure do, you sure do,” she said with a frighteningly blank look, almost without feeling, and then she resumed her pacing.

  “Where am I going to go? Where are you going to go?” she said aloud, not realizing that her question was double-edged. Would she have to move her family and start over somewhere else, and would her son go with her or end up in prison.

  “What about these guys, Adam and Miller? Are they students at your school?”

  “No,” Mason replied. He found it easier to lie once the greatest sin had been confessed. He wanted to hide his friends’ identities, fearful of what they would do to him and not willing to give them up so fast.

  “Then where?”

  “What?”

  “Where are they?” she prodded. “Where do they go to school?”

  “What the hell does school have to do with this, mom?” he shouted.

  “Nothing, nothing,” she continued, once more pacing the room. “But we have to turn them in, right? They’re the ones who did it? Wait, where did you bury her? The body?”

  Mason ducked that question and the others that followed. He sat with his mom, parrying her queries as best he could as the fire that had burst within her at the first news slowly died down to a grieving simmer. After another thirty minutes, she had moved on to survival rather than righteousness, and dropped the idea of reporting to the police.

  “I can’t…” she began, then stuttered. “I don’t know…,” again stopping short of a complete sentence. “What are we going to do?”

  Mason sat red-eyed and worn out on the couch. He heaved his shoulders at her questions but, otherwise, didn’t reply.

  “We’re going to have to do something,” she said, draping her arm over Mason’s shoulders. “I need to think.”

  Then she stood and walked clumsily up the stairs to her bedroom. Mason stayed behind, slumping on the couch,
and leaning his right arm over the edge.

  Morning came and Libby hadn’t slept but she had formulated a plan of action. She returned to the living room to continue the conversation that she had broken off six hours before, only to find Mason no longer on the couch.

  She climbed the steps to reach the bedrooms, turned down the hallway toward her son’s room, and knocked softly. There was no response, so she turned the knob and pushed the door open to see her son curled up under the covers. The light of the rising sun was peering at him through drapes left open at nightfall. She went to his side and shook him.

  “Mason, we have to talk. I have an idea.”

  But Mason didn’t respond. As she sat on the edge of the bed to push him again, she kicked something on the rug. It was an empty bottle of the tranquilizer pills that she had grown addicted to since her marriage broke up.

  She shook Mason again and still got no response.

  Mason’s two younger sisters awoke that morning to the deathly shriek of their mother at their brother’s bedside.

  Libby Terrell wore black at her son’s funeral. She avoided the attentions of her former husband, the one who found his bed warmed these days by the young secretary from his law firm. But Libby clung tightly to the two daughters who tried to support her through their own grief.

  She hadn’t gone to the police. Whatever her plan was that morning a few days ago didn’t matter. She was not going to tell anyone what Mason had confessed to the night before. They hadn’t gotten far enough into the conversation for her to know where the girl was buried, so what could she tell the police?

  But she did look for the boys who had been with Mason that night. She didn’t bother with scouring the news or the faces of the kids at Mason’s school, since he said the other boys – Adam and Miller – weren’t students there. And with only first names, she didn’t know where to begin.

  Instead, Libby read every newspaper report of teenage crime and misbehavior, hoping to stumble onto events involving someone with those names.

  No such clues turned up. Libby’s energy flagged and her resolve was interrupted by frequent bouts of sobbing. Her determination to find the boys was lost. She was slowly losing her mind.