by Evan Ronan
“Now times that by a million and you’ll understand what it’s like to be depressed and already suicidal and the love of your life does that to you.”
“So you killed her for it.”
He shakes his head. “No. I didn’t.”
I’ve had enough. Really.
“A few weeks before she dies, you put your hands on her. Julie was about an inch away from filing a restraining order against you.”
One corner of his mouth frowns. “Again, all my fault. We were at some party, and I saw her flirting with another guy. It set me off. I cornered her and accused her of cheating on me. I was bombed out of my mind and I’d gone off my meds. Bad combination.”
Another nail in the coffin.
Nick senses my mood. “Anyway, that happened and when I woke up I was ashamed of myself. Just fucking ashamed. I couldn’t go to school. I didn’t want to see my friends. By then they didn’t want to see me either. I cut myself off. Barely went to class. My grades were good enough it didn’t matter anyway. I tested out of my Finals so I was just on autopilot. It was only a few weeks left till graduation and the big party at the lake.”
He pauses to fortify himself.
“Tell me your story.”
“It’s not a story,” he says quietly, “it’s the truth. I was ready to blow my fucking head off.”
“Come on,” I say. “Your whole life was ahead of you. You had a full ride to college to play ball. As the homecoming king, I’ll bet you could have had any girl you wanted. Yeah, it must have hurt like hell when Julie dumped you but that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You think depression makes sense? Really?”
I don’t have an answer for that.
He shakes his head. “If depression made sense, there would be no depression.”
There’s a logic in there. Somewhere.
Nick rubs the back of his head. It makes for an odd gesture, like he’s rubbing sweat away but he’s not sweating.
“My friends started calling and texting me the night of graduation. Everybody wanted me to come out, even though I’d been such an asshole only a few weeks before. They were worried about me. Mom had reached out to a few of them, I think.”
We are coming to it. Nick’s cadence is slowing a bit.
“I didn’t leave the house though. I didn’t want to. Mom and Dad begged to take me out for dinner but I didn’t want to go anywhere. They left. I’m thinking about doing it. Right then and there. Blowing my brains out.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I got a text from Julie.” His voice cracks, like he just got another call from her. “After how badly I’d treated her, after everything I’d done, she still cared.”
He’s really struggling to get through this.
“I told her not to come. But she insisted. It’s all in the text messages part of the police file. You can read them, word-for-word, and see I didn’t want her to come over.”
This rings a vague and distant bell.
“What happened when she came over?”
“We talked for a while through the door. She was so insistent though, I think she knew I was close. I was real close. I knew where Dad’s gun was and how to use it. I didn’t come out and say what I was going to do, but I didn’t have to. She knew.”
“What happened?”
“She wouldn’t leave, so finally, I let her in.”
“And then?”
“As soon as I let her in, I regretted it. She got one look at me and knew I was going to hurt myself. She got her phone out to call my parents or friends—I don’t even remember now—and it pissed me off. It was my life to live.”
“Or to end.”
“Yeah. Or to end. I tried to grab her phone but I bumped her nose. She got bloody noses all the time. All she had to do was sneeze, and she’d bleed.”
“You’re saying she had a nosebleed and that’s how her blood got onto the carpet in your living room?”
“Yes,” he nods, not picking up on my skepticism. “Yes! Once we got the bleeding under control, I told her I didn’t want to live anymore and I just wanted her to leave. If I couldn’t be with her, I didn’t see how I could ever be happy again. And you know what she did?”
“What?”
“She got mad. I’d never seen her like that before. She started hitting me, screaming at the top of her lungs. She punched me, right here.” He points to his chest. “And I let her. She deserved to hit me and I deserved to be hit for what I’d done.”
“You’re saying that explains the bruising on your body noted in the police file?”
He nods. “She completely broke down. She screamed at me to come to the lake, that I couldn’t do this to her and our friends and my family. And I … I told her I’d come. She made me promise not to hurt myself. I hated to see her cry. I just wanted her to stop. I hated that I made her feel that way.”
“And?”
“That was it. We left, in separate cars.”
“So who killed her then?” I say, mockingly.
“I don’t know.” He slumps down against the metal table. No doubt he’s replayed this story in his head a million times in the last half decade. But talking about it with a perfect stranger has totally drained him. “I just heard about that guy who was picking girls up and …”
I give him The Look. “That would be convenient for you, wouldn’t it?”
Anger flashes through his eyes. But despair wins. His slouch deepens and he sits there like a slug, ready for anybody to come along and push him around.
“Alright, Nick, I’ve just about heard enough,” I say. “What I really don’t get is, if what you’re saying is true, why didn’t you take the stand and tell your story?”
“I’ll fucking tell you why.” His lips form a thin, angry line. “Because I was lost and part of me didn’t care what happened and not even my own father believed me.”
“Can’t say I blame him.”
Six
“Dad didn’t believe me. Mom … checked out. Our lawyer, James Stanek, told me over and over that nobody would believe that story and if we stuck to it, I’d get life in prison.” He laughs bitterly and motions around himself. “So I got twenty-five years instead.”
That is some cold shit that thaws my hostility for a moment. What parent wouldn’t believe their child? What parent wouldn’t do everything to fight for their kid’s life?
Even if their child was guilty?
I’d never gotten to know Denise’s sister and brother-in-law. But the more I heard about them, the less I thought of them. Granted, this information was all coming to me from somebody with a Paul Bunyan-sized ax to grind.
“You could have hired a different attorney,” I say.
“Have you ever been severely depressed?”
I don’t answer.
“Do you know what it’s like to not be able to get out of bed in the morning? To literally not care what happens from one moment to the next because you feel like everything is pointless? Do you know what that’s like?”
I still don’t answer.
“That’s how I felt on a normal day sometimes. Now imagine the girl you love more than anything dumps you. You don’t stop believing there’s a chance to get back together. No. Because then life would have no meaning for you. You keep hoping. And then she’s murdered. And that’s it. You have no chance to be with her again. The one person who brought you joy … she’s gone forever.”
“How did you set the Apache record for receptions and TDs in your senior year if you were so goddamned depressed?”
“You’re applying reason to the disease again.”
I shake my head. “You’re going to have to try harder if you want my help.”
He shrugs. “When I was on the field or out on the court, I couldn’t think about anything else. I couldn’t focus on myself. All I had was the game. It was a distraction.”
That makes a kind of sense. But I still don’t believe his story.
<
br /> “So nobody believes your story, not even your attorney, and the trial goes to shit, so everybody pressures you to make a deal?”
He nods. “Dad said it was the only chance at a life.”
“And you listened to your father? Just like that?”
“Have you ever met my father?”
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. This kid is putting the blame everywhere except himself.
He waits for an answer.
“Never had the pleasure.”
“He never believed in me. He’s domineering. He always gets his way. The few times I tried to open up to him, he didn’t listen. He completely shut down and sometimes he would yell at me when I tried talking to him. I lost count of how many times he told me I wasn’t a man and I had to be tougher or everybody would walk all over me.”
Nick Carlisle is taller than me and in his prime carried about six percent body fat. Even now I can tell there’s still a lot of muscle packed under the pudge he’s collected the last five years. He was well-liked, the homecoming king, and had everything.
Everything.
I can’t imagine anybody walking all over this guy. Before. Now? I guess I can see it. And seeing it, I might have gained a microscopic speck of sympathy for him during our conversation.
But I still don’t believe him.
There is evidence tying him to Julie’s murder.
I clap my hands. “Just like that, you don’t put up a fight?”
He nods. “I was at a point where I had lost everything and everybody thought I had killed Julie. Even if I got off, I knew that people would still always think I did it. I’d lost my scholarship and lost interest in ball and I’d go through life with everybody thinking I was a murderer. I didn’t see any future for myself, and I honestly didn’t care what happened to me. So I just did what Dad and the lawyer said. I didn’t give a fuck. The only thing I cared about was not ruining my father’s reputation, so I took a deal.”
“Your father’s reputation?”
“It would look better if I took a deal,” Nick says. “That way he could say his son was innocent but the circumstantial evidence made me look guilty.”
Jesus.
He shakes his head. “Yeah. I was that out of it. I caved in and gave up on everything.”
“So why do you care now?”
He’s thrown by the question. “Huh?”
“You didn’t care what happened to you five years ago. Why do you care now?”
“I’ve gotten help.” He rubs his arm and looks down. “I feel better and I know I didn’t kill Julie. I wasn’t the best person or a good boyfriend but that doesn’t mean I deserve to be locked away for the rest of my life. I’m still young.”
“Any other reason?”
“Did you hear about the guy they just locked up?”
Oh, this again.
“He’s here, isn’t he?” I say.
Nick nods.
“Have you talked to him?” I ask.
Nick shakes his head no. “Maybe you could.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m innocent.”
“I doubt it.”
Nick looks away. “Aunt Denise said you would help.”
“Aunt Denise overpromised.”
I’ve had enough. I feel for the kid. Sounds like he had a fucked up home life and never got the treatment he needed.
But he did butcher his ex-girlfriend.
“Wait.”
I do.
“What?”
Nick looks up at me with those puppy-dog eyes and for a moment I see the teenager he used to be. Just a lost kid who put up a big happy front for all the world to see while he was torturing himself.
And holding Julie Stein emotionally hostage.
Nick takes a deep breath. “The prosecution’s story doesn’t make any sense.”
I don’t respond. Feel like I’m falling down a rabbit hole now.
I get up.
“There wasn’t enough of her blood in my house,” he says. “For anything other than a tiny nosebleed.”
I think about that. “So what was their theory?”
“That I somehow incapacitated her at my house, carried her to her car right out front of my house when all my neighbors were home, then drove her to the lake where the graduation party was happening with, like, the whole fucking class no more than a few hundred yards away, killed her there in the parking lot, then dragged her corpse to the other lake that was half a mile away.”
I don’t say anything.
“If I was angry enough to kill her at my house, why didn’t I just kill her there when I already had her incapacitated?”
“Like you said—depression doesn’t make sense.”
“Why would I drive her to the graduation party?”
“So it looked like somebody else killed her.”
“Risky.”
It was risky.
“Maybe you were insane. Maybe you’re lying and telling the truth at the same time. Maybe she did get a nosebleed at your house, and she talked you into coming to the party, so you got in your car and followed her. Then when you got there, she said something and it set you off.”
But as I’m saying it, I realize that doesn’t fit the facts either. He would have had to bring a knife with him because Julie Stein was murdered in that parking lot.
He can tell I’m working it out.
“Do you remember how many times Julie was stabbed?” he asks.
A number comes to mind, plucked from one of the juicier articles I’d read to refresh my memory.
“Over thirty.”
“Thirty-seven,” he says. “Thirty-seven times.”
“So?”
“If I had the presence of mind not to kill her at my house, where I had the perfect opportunity, why would I stab her thirty-seven times in the parking lot where there were four hundred potential witnesses in shouting distance?”
“Like I said, you wanted to make it look like somebody else killed her.”
Without realizing it, I’m sitting down at the table again. He’s got me mildly interested.
“About three seconds after Julie passed by the bank at Lederock and Steel, you drove by in your car.” I point at him. “Yeah, I heard about that. I also heard about how you never drove back past the bank. You weren’t seen on the security footage again.”
“I went a different way home.”
“Why? Even though that was the most direct route from the lake.”
“Like I told the police, I drove around.”
“Or, you drove to the other lake, dumped the body, and came home from a different direction.”
He doesn’t answer that. Instead:
“She made me promise not to hurt myself and convinced me to come to the lake. But when I got there, I just couldn’t face all those people. I wasn’t up for it. When I wouldn’t get out of the car, she got real angry. Told me she was done trying to help. I got out of there, drove around, eventually wound up back home.”
“You killed her.”
He shakes his head no. “The neighbors saw me about an hour after we left.”
“Plenty of time.” I tilt my head. “Besides, if your story were this strong, the lawyer would have used it.”
“I needed to get on the stand and testify to make that argument.”
Impossible. Mirrors within mirrors, talking to this kid.
“An hour is a long time,” I say.
“We talked.”
Mirrors within mirrors.
I stand. “I don’t believe you.”
“Please,” he begs, then adds, “Mr. Owen.”
Seven
I don’t believe him.
I don’t.
But this thing about the little amount of blood in his house has piqued my interest. I consider asking to see Warren John Fereday, the pedophile who was just convicted, to put the screws to him and see if by some chance he is responsible for killing Julie Stein as well.
I’m sure he’ll just tell
me.
Right?
But alas visiting hours at the pen are almost over and I’ve got places to be.
I am going to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Carlisle tomorrow, that’s for damned sure. Sounds like Dear Old Dad did a real number on his son and sounds like Mom didn’t do enough to stop him.
I head back into town, get snarled behind some school buses, and am sweating out the clock as I drive as quickly and as lawfully as I can to the middle school.
I’m a few minutes late. Jump out of the car and call the pool hall as I hustle toward the track behind the school. I can hear the chatter of a small crowd before a sporting event.
Bernie answers again. “Owen’s Den—”
“Hey, Bernie. Can you put Tom on?”
“Oh, Tom, see, I don’t think he ever made it in.”
Tom is one of the few guys I have on the payroll. He takes classes at the local community college in the morning and picks up a few shifts a week at the pool hall. He’s about as reliable as a modem.
Shit, if he’s not there, that means it’s a free-for-all and by now Wally and Roy are ready to wrap up their daily grind of straight pool. I’ve got no one minding the store, with the inmate about to run the asylum.
I’m jogging through the parking lot, trying to make my daughter’s track meet in time.
“Bernie, can you do me a solid?” I can’t believe I say.
“Sure!”
“You can play all the pool you want, but I need you to man the register.”
“I don’t know, Greg … I had some things to do today.”
“Like what?” I’m halfway around the school and can hear the announcer come on the loudspeaker. The meet is about to start.
“I was thinking of taking in a—”
“Free pool for today and tomorrow, so long as you man the register till I get back.”
“You know what? I can see that movie another day. Don’t worry, Greg, I’ll people the ship.”
“You mean man the ship?”
“No, I mean people. Man is a sexist way of putting that phrase.”
“Bernie, you’re absolutely right. Thanks.” I hang up, hopeful that I might get twenty cents on the dollar here.
I make it around back. The stands are half-filled with anxious parents. Tammy, my daughter, stands in the middle of the football field. She is doing deep-knee bends and chatting with her friends and all of a frigging sudden, she looks like a woman to me.
