“I didn’t say you deserved it.”
“You just did! Sowing and reaping. Tell me a parable. Of the lost sheep. Of the prodigal son. Go on, tell me.”
“You’re being a jerk.”
“Sorry I don’t like someone making me feel guilty after getting assaulted in the middle of the night.”
“And you think that’s why I’m here?”
He looked at the pure and innocent face of Alyssa and had no answer. “I have no clue why you’re here. I used to think that you found my—my rebelliousness—charming. Even if you’d never admit it. But now I feel like your little spiritual project.”
Alyssa just stared at him, her lips tightly pressed together.
“And if I am, I want you to try on someone else,” Jake continued. “You got that?”
“Yes.” She stood up and went to the door.
As it closed behind her, Jake called out her name, regretting his words, regretting that he’d sent her away.
But he was too tired and too woozy for regret this morning. Regret took work, and he wasn’t up for the task. Not now. Maybe not ever.
TWENTY-FOUR
June 2005
BRUCE HAD BEEN GONE for over an hour.
One moment he was sitting there, doing what he did best, and then the next thing I knew he was gone. Just like that.
We checked both bathrooms twice as well as the outside sidewalk of the bar, but he was nowhere to be found.
“Did he say anything to you?” Mike asked me.
“Nothing.”
“Can you call his cell?”
“I don’t even know if he has one.”
“Maybe he just wandered off and got lost. Or passed out.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He laughed. “Some things never change.”
“No,” I said. “Some things get worse.”
Mike drained his beer and thought for a minute. “You want to go check around and see if we find him? You know where my apartment is from here?”
“Two blocks that way?” I said, pointing west.
“Yeah. Let’s break up and try to see if he’s clumped over in some alleyway.”
We left the bar, and I headed right toward Mike’s apartment. It was close to one, and my head ached. I wasn’t sure if it was from the beer or from the cigarette smoke or from the memories. Or from worrying about Bruce.
Why’d you agree to let him come along?
I wasn’t sure about that. So far, it felt like all I’d been doing was baby-sitting him. But I still recalled his look the morning I was heading back to the airport, the morning he asked to come with me.
“I need a break, man,” he’d said with sad eyes and an empty stare.
I couldn’t tell him no.
The sidewalks were surprisingly busy in the neighborhood of Chicago known as Wicker Park. The night felt warm and close, refusing to let the tiniest of breezes out. Every alley I passed I looked down, occasionally walking down to see where it led. I passed Mike’s street and kept walking, figuring I’d do a sweep around his condo.
I reached a shaded street lined with tall trees and rows full of parked cars. How could anybody put up with trying to find parking down here? If you didn’t have a garage, it would be a royal pain. The lights on this street either were out or nonexistent—it suddenly got very dark. I passed rows of buildings, finding nothing. A woman walking her dog passed me. Maybe 1:00 a.m. in that neighborhood was like 10:00 p.m. everywhere else.
When I reached the corner I was going to head back to Mike’s apartment, but something out of the corner of my eye stopped me. I peered down the street and saw two figures standing and talking. I could only make out an outline, but one of the figures looked like Bruce. Tall with shaggy hair.
“Bruce!” I started walking toward them.
The other figure bolted down the street in a blur. Instead of following, I stopped, wondering if this was Bruce or if maybe I was interrupting something else. A secret tryst on the street or a drug transaction. But I was almost positive that the tall figure was Bruce. I kept walking toward him even as the other figure disappeared.
In the middle of the street, I could see that it was Bruce. He was standing there, not passed out, not even looking drunk, looking as though he had been with me the whole time.
“Who was that?” I asked. “Where’d you disappear to?”
“Sorry, man. I lost track of time.”
“We’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m not a missing puppy.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I just went out—for a walk, you know. Clear my head. Get some fresh air.”
“Smoke a joint?”
“Sure. Clears your head, you know.”
I stared down the street. “So who was that?”
Bruce shrugged in an awkward way. “I don’t know—some guy who wanted to see if I had any drugs.”
“Did you tell him the truth?”
“Nah. We were just talking.”
I stared at Bruce for a moment. “You’re not a very good liar.”
“Who says I’m lying?”
“I’ve played poker with you a thousand times, Bruce. Come on.”
“I’m not lying. Get off my back.”
We started walking back to Mike’s apartment.
“Bruce—”
I was going to tell him to go back home. To go back to the hole he had come from and stay there and stay far away from me. Baby-sitting was getting old, but this act of making me feel guilty for trying to baby-sit him was getting frustrating.
If you don’t want my advice, then back off.
“What?” Bruce said after a few minutes.
I thought of his apartment back in Redding. Of everything he had hoped for when he first moved there and all the disappointments it had brought. I knew nothing I could say would probably change Bruce.
But actions might.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just—I’m just trying to look out for you, okay?”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just strange.”
“How so?”
“Nobody’s done that for a long time.”
TWENTY-FIVE
March 1994
“WANT COFFEE?”
“Only if you put some Kahlua in it.”
That was an attempt at being funny, but Sergeant Cooper’s face remained stiff as a corpse. Jake looked across the metal table and watched the sergeant shuffle through some papers. He looked like a military man, with lips that hadn’t smiled since he had arrived an hour earlier. They sat in a small, cold, colorless room that might as well have been a holding cell. It was the afternoon after the fight, or what should have more accurately been called the beating. After making notes from Jake’s account, the sergeant began asking a few questions.
“So you don’t know this Chad Hoving?”
Jake shook his head. “He plays basketball and baseball. That’s all I know.”
“Isn’t Providence a small college?”
“I still don’t know everyone.”
“You don’t play sports?”
“I played soccer my first year. Sat on the bench 99 percent of the time.”
“Who threw most of the punches?”
“It’s sorta hard to tell. Both of them did their share. And they weren’t just throwing punches. I think they did some kicking too.”
“And you didn’t provoke Brian at all?”
The sergeant looked as though he didn’t like Jake, didn’t believe a word he was saying.
“I told you—we’ve had our share of encounters. The last was at a party. It was nothing.”
“What’s ‘nothing?’”
“Nothing. No blows. I jammed a cigarette in his face.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yep.”
“Were you drunk at the time they came over?”
Jake thought for a moment. “I’d been out drinking. But no, I was fine.”
“Drugs?”
�
�No thanks.”
“You weren’t on anything?”
“No. But I think they might’ve been.”
This continued for a while, with the sergeant asking him specific questions about when they came over, what exactly transpired.
“Did they ever come into your apartment?”
“I don’t know if they ever stepped foot into the apartment. It was more like I was grabbed out of the entryway.”
The endless questions hurt his already pounding head, and he wished the police officer would go away.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Jake had been driven home around ten and had slept until noon. Alec and Franklin came over with lunch—Brown’s chicken, a lot of it. Around two-thirty, he’d gotten a call that the Summit police had picked up Brian Erwin and Chad Hoving at their dorm room on campus. Jake thought of the commotion the scene had surely made. Now he had to come down to the station, make a statement, and identify Brian and Chad.
“And none of your friends saw them?”
Jake shook his head.
“Where was your roommate, the one with you?”
“Our one roommate, David Kirby, went home this weekend. Probably a good thing too. Bruce was at a friend’s apartment. And Carnie—Paul—was out buying more beer. I think he might have been the first one to get to me. I’m not sure. I was out of it.”
“Out of it?”
“That’s what happens when you get your face pounded in.”
“How many times did they hit you?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said.
“Think.”
“Twenty, thirty times each? I’m not sure. Like I said, I know I got kicked too. My back’s got a big welt that looks like it came from a boot or something. They rammed my head back into the carpet.”
“You’re just lucky neither of them had a baseball bat.”
“Yeah.”
Rehashing this made Jake tired. He just wanted to get it over with.
The sergeant left Jake alone in the bare room for a few minutes, then came back and motioned him to stand.
“Look—this isn’t going to be easy. If you had an eyewitness—anybody—that would help us. A neighbor, a friend? Anyone?”
“I already told you—I don’t know which neighbors saw or heard anything. I didn’t see any opened doors. I was screaming for help.”
“They already got a lawyer.”
“Who?”
“Brian’s family.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Jake said. “Maybe the college sent him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s the school’s golden boy.”
“They won’t like this publicity then.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Let’s go and ID these guys, okay? It’ll be quick and easy.”
Jake stepped back into the apartment and could smell the fumes from the cleaning supplies that had been used for only the second time that year.
“This place actually looks nice,” Jake said.
“Dude, you look like Evander Holyfield after a long fight.”
Jake took the beer from Bruce’s hand and nodded to his roommate’s zany grin. “You look like Kurt Cobain’s love child.”
“So when are you going to hear anything?”
“They got charged and then bailed out of jail,” Jake said. “That’s all I know.”
“What about the college?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “They should be suspended. Or expelled.”
“Just wait,” Alec said, sitting on the couch watching television and drinking a beer.
“Wait till what?”
“It’s easy to suspend guys like us. But just wait. It’ll get a little stickier with them.”
“They just got arrested for home invasion,” Jake said. “I would hope it’d be a little easier.”
“Life doesn’t work that way.”
“For a Christian college it should.”
Alec cursed and downed his beer. His eyes glistened, and Jake knew he’d been drinking since lunch.
“Just you wait and see,” Alec said.
Jake looked around and noticed that Carnie was gone.
“He’s working,” Bruce said. “Regular Sunday night.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You going to class tomorrow?” Bruce asked.
“Guess I have to, even looking like this.”
“Did you call your parents?”
“Not yet.”
“You going to?” Bruce asked.
“I doubt it.”
Jake drifted between sleep and worry. He would close his eyes and find himself thinking or perhaps dreaming about fists punching him in the face over and over. He would wake up and see the glint of the alarm clock reading five minutes later than when he last saw it. A light in the hallway leaked into his room, so he would stare at the crack and try and slow his mind down.
The bed across from him was still empty; Carnie was either working unusually late or at a bar somewhere. Neither explanation made sense. Maybe he just felt bad about what happened to Jake.
At twelve-thirty, almost an hour after he had gone to bed, or tried to go to sleep, the phone woke him up. Someone answered, then Bruce knocked on his door and said it was for him.
Jake picked it up.
“Hey man, it’s Alec.”
“Yeah.”
“I just thought you should know—the guys made it back here on campus. Word is that the charges are being dropped.”
Jake sat on his bed and rubbed a hand over his forehead. “How do you know?”
“They were talking to some people tonight. Laughing about it.”
“They’re being dropped. As in—?”
Alec cursed. “Yeah, as in getting off. As in beating me unconscious and then allowed to go back to the cushy life they have.”
“My head hurts.”
“This place makes me sick. Those guys shouldn’t be allowed within ten miles of Providence.”
“Things will get sorted out.”
Alec cursed again, this time even louder. “Man, don’t you care? Brian saw me tonight and laughed. I swear I wanted to kill that—”
“Easy, man.”
“Well, somebody’s gotta deal with this.”
Jake cleared his voice. “We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
“I told you, didn’t I?” “The college hasn’t made a decision yet.” “Oh, yeah, they have.”
It was too much for Jake to listen to. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said.
But sleep wouldn’t come. Not for a very long time.
TWENTY-SIX
June 2005
I GOT OUT OF THE CAR and stared at the building radiating the afternoon sun.
I’m going to see him whether he likes it or not.
I didn’t care if Franklin had a title of Vice President on his business card or an assistant named Brenda who didn’t return my calls or even a schedule booked by the minute. This was the same guy I’d bailed out of trouble our junior year when someone took a WWF wrestling jump into his parents’ glass dining room table. I’d blamed myself, and it worked. Franklin gave me the money to give to his parents for the table. This was Franklin, and he was one of us and always would be. His passive-aggressive behavior was getting old.
I noted the sign on the front of the building. I wasn’t positive what Andersen Investment Corporation did except deal with finances. They probably took people’s money and tried to make money with it. Franklin had always had money, so he was used to spending it. I could see his resume. Background: wealthy kid. Occupation: spoiled brat. Specialty: using ATM machines.
The five-story building was glass with a black outline. I entered the main door; a registration desk blocked the hall leading beyond the main foyer.
A woman looking at the flat-screen monitor behind her desk took a few seconds before glancing at me. She took a few more before asking, “May I help you?”
Yeah. How about trying to show a little l
ess attitude?
“I’m here to see Franklin Gotthard.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes.”
I did. I made the appointment myself.
Franklin’s assistant begged to differ.
“What is your name again?” the receptionist asked me, holding the phone in her hand.
“Kurt. Kurt Cobain.”
“Okay,” the young woman said into the receiver. “It’s a Kurt Cobain.”
She waited, oblivious, stupid. Then she got a puzzled look over her face, the first bit of life I’d seen on her chubby cheeks so far.
I decided not to wait.
I dashed away from the desk and past the main open lobby into a narrow hallway. A set of elevators was to my right, but I ignored those, running to get away from the front, then slowing down to a casual pace. At the end of the hallway, another set of elevators greeted me. I got on and selected floor three.
The offices were fancy and corporate, but still basically a bunch of cubicles surrounded by offices on the edges of the building. I walked past a guy who looked like an escapee from a Dockers commercial.
“Excuse me. I was looking for Franklin Gotthard’s office. Am I in the right place?”
He looked at me and thought for a minute. “Franklin who? What department does he work in?”
“I’m not exactly sure.”
“Head down the hall and ask Lisa. She’s sitting at the main desk with a headphone attached to her head.”
Lisa, a redhead who saw me coming and continued talking on her headset, didn’t keep her eyes off me even as I approached her desk and waited.
Finally she spoke. “Are you lost?”
“I was looking for Franklin Gotthard.”
“He’s up on the fifth floor. We peons work down here.”
“Thanks. Any idea where his office is?”
“Get off the elevator and take a right. You’ll walk right into it. Can’t miss.”
“Nice headset,” I told her, thanking her and departing.
So far no armed men had intercepted me. I half wondered if the receptionist had even called anybody. I could be a terrorist carrying a bomb strapped across my chest. What sort of security did a place like this have?
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