"You're wrong!" I sob, spraying tears and spittle all over myself and them.
"Then you grabbed him and dragged him into the orchard, and you beat him with that towel bar!"
"The towel bar?!" I shriek.
"We found it when we found him. I'm surprised you didn't stab him with the sharp end!" snarls Howard. "Oh well, I suppose you did plenty of damage. I've never seen a more brutal beating in my life!"
I lunge, at nothing, set free my anguished screams. "Jamie! Jamie! Jamie! JAMIE!"
Howard and Lord stare at each other as I sink to my knees and dry heave. "Is he dead?!" I beg between retches. "Please, just tell me! I can't take any more! Please tell me if he's dead!"
Officer Lord puts his hands on his hips. "He's alive, Mr. Mattheis. They had him out at County in Woodland, but they had to fly him to Davis. He was a John Doe—nobody knew who he was, till we got there—he's in surgery. They're not sure he's going to pull through. And I'll tell you this, my friend," he adds, "If he dies within a year of this beating, you'll be charged with murder."
I begin to hyperventilate. "G-G-G-G-God help-p-p-p m-m-m-m-me! P-p-pl-pl-please! Pl-pl-pl-please, G-G-G-God!" I weakly beat my fists onto the dirty floor. "Did-did-did they r-r-r-r-rape him?"
They stare at me with something funny in their eyes, like they never expected me to behave like this. "No, Mr. Mattheis," sighs Howard. "He was not sexually assaulted."
Relief avalanches onto me, the one relief I can glean from this madness. They beat him, almost to death, but thank God, they didn't rape him.
And no, it's not the kind of sickening, possessive crap you hear about with boyfriends, husbands. That someone else inside my wife shit. I'm thinking about Jamie, how atrocious it would be for him to relive being raped and beaten. It was awful enough they beat him. They didn't rape him; they spared him that.
"Come on, sit down," Lord says calmly. "Tell us about the towel bar." He offers me a paper bag to put over my face.
It takes a few minutes for my breathing to normalise. "Jamie pulled it off the wall," I tell them. "He was upset... angry... and he ripped it off the wall."
"Did he threaten you with it?"
"No!" I bluster incredulously.
"Then why?"
"He just tore it off... he wasn't really thinking about it, he was talking to me while he was doing it. He was upset, like I said."
"How about that mark on your face?"
My hand flies to cover the small red bruise on my left cheek. "Jamie slapped me."
"So you were fighting."
"No! I didn't hit him back. He was upset, like I said."
"Yes, you told us. Hitting you. That's, uh, that's pretty serious."
Last night was probably the only time I'll ever see Jamie possess enough physical strength, to pry a towel rack from a wall, to hit me hard enough to leave a bruise. He's not a violent person. It was the insanity of having to relive his childhood, of having to deal with the fact that I had just watched his parents raping and abusing him.
"What exactly were you two talking, fighting, discussing, whatever-ing about?"
Now comes the hard part. I sigh, "Okay. It's a very long, complicated story."
"And we need to hear it," Howard nods at me.
"We were at The End. Jamie sings karaoke there with Stacy."
"Miss Pendleton tells us that Jamie was angry at you... you hadn't called him all day yesterday, she says. He thought you were planning to break up with him. Do you see where we're coming from, Mr. Mattheis? About him being needy?"
"He's not needy, and I wasn't going to break up with him! It was nothing like that! Something... happened. I was upset yesterday, not at Jamie, but..."
"But what?" prompts Lord.
"This... this is so hard." I see Jamie in the video. I can't believe I watched that thing. I didn't need to know how it ended! What, did I think maybe they'd all smile and have a group hug and say, "Just kidding"?
Did I think Jamie would live happily ever after?!
"We're waiting." Lord is doing a poor job masking his impatience.
"Somebody sent me a video," I say hoarsely, still holding down my nausea. "It was a video of Jamie. He was very young, about seven or eight, and he was being sexually abused."
The room becomes deathly silent, then Lord clears his throat. "Continue."
"His parents. His own parents!" I say wretchedly. "They forced him to make pornographic videos with them. They made him perform oral sex. They raped him, they also used foreign objects. His mother beat him, and burned him with cigarettes. They did it for years and years. And not only that, they starved him and kept him chained in his room... Don't you remember? Officer Tafford and Officer Bloom found him in his room. His parents were dead—murder/suicide. He was nothing but a skeleton. He almost died!"
"Yes, I remember that," Howard says thoughtfully. "Now, how did you get this video?" His eyes narrow.
"When I got home yesterday," I say, afraid of the new look in Howard's eyes, "My mother handed me a package. It was the video. There was no return address. I didn't know who had sent it to me."
"So you didn't know about this seedy video until you received it?" asks Lord.
"No! I didn't know!" I yell angrily. I know what they're insinuating now! "I'm not a paedophile!"
"But you watched it?"
As calmly as I can, I tell them what I told Jamie: that I kept forgetting it was an image, that Jamie was no longer there in that prison, being sodomised and tormented.
Amazingly, they seem to comprehend what I'm saying. "Please, go on," Lord requests.
"I didn't call Jamie all day because I was so ill, so traumatised... that video was horrible. It made me so sick. I couldn't talk to him... couldn't call him... I was just so..."
"Were you angry at him?" Howard guesses.
"I was hurt. Traumatised... seeing him doing those things... I know he didn't want to, but... it's so hard to talk..."
"Mr. Mattheis," Lord says gently, "Did you punish Mr. Pearce because of that video?"
"No!" I scream. "Listen to me, goddamnit! I did not do this to Jamie! Someone else did it. I'm beginning to think I know who!"
"Alright, then, who?" asks Howard.
"Yvette Feldman. She's the one who sent the video. She told me last night at The End. She came up to me and said, 'Did you get your package?'. She said a friend of hers, here, at this police station, gave her the video. She told me she sent it to me because 'Jamie is a pervert and he's corrupting me'!"
Lord and Howard stare aghast at me. "Mrs. Feldman sent it to you? You're sure about this?"
"She bragged about it!" I snap. "And she said, 'Tam do you really want that faggot to drag you to hell with him?'"
"But she didn't write her name or address on the package?"
"No."
"Hmmm." Lord ponders for a moment. "If she did this, we can pick her up for distribution of child pornography, but we don't know she did it—it's just your word. In fact, you could be charged with possession of child pornography."
"She sent it to me! I didn't know what it was!" Then I sob, "Please, I want to see Jamie."
"He's in surgery, I said. Can you think of anyone we should be talking to about Mrs. Feldman's involvement in this? Anyone at the bar aside from Miss Pendleton?"
"Talk to Stacy again! Maybe she remembers how Yvette talked about it, bragged about it."
So they go out into the hallway and interview Stacy again. "She didn't hear what you and Mrs. Feldman talked about. All she says is that Mrs. Feldman sat at a table with you for a few minutes. She says Jamie was very upset about that, that you didn't even invite him to sit with you, that he was wondering what was such a big secret that you couldn't include him, and that he suspected you wanted to end your relationship with him."
I shake my head violently. "No. Yvette said, 'I'd like a word with you'. I told her to fuck off—we've hated each other for years—but she said it was very important that she speak to me. She took me over to the table and told m
e she was the one who sent the video. When she did, I grabbed Jamie and took him out of there. I didn't drag him away. I was sickened! I wanted him away from that bitch!
"When we got home, I told him what Yvette had done, and we... we got into it. I said things... he said things... we were hurting, do you understand? ...and he slapped me. I apologised about watching the video, and he told me everything. He told me his parents abused him, made videos of it, and sold them to their friends. He was crying, he tore the towel bar off the wall, and... he was going to slit his wrists with it..."
The two policemen both sit back suddenly. "He was suicidal?"
"Yeah," I reply softly. Jamie, forgive me.
Howard leans forward again, "And did you help him accomplish...?"
"No!" I spit at him. "I did not!"
"It is a bit brutal for an assisted suicide," Lord observes wryly.
"I did not try to kill him, and I did not assist him to kill himself," I sputter. "We apologised to each other, for everything we said, for my stupidity. I never should have watched that video. I felt like I was no better than one of the freaks his parents sold to! But we made up. Everything was okay, he promised..."
"He has a funny bite mark on the back of his neck," Howard says, his usually squinty eyes widening curiously. "Like a hickie or something. What's that from?"
"I really don't think it's any of your business!"
"Maybe you raped him."
"I'd like to put your lights out right now!" I snarl.
"But you won't," Howard says lightly. "You know better. Cowards like you never take on someone their own size."
"I wrote in those diaries a very long time ago," I say, weary to the bone. "I would never harm another living being. I write articles against animal cruelty. I volunteer at an animal shelter in L.A. I'm ashamed of what I wrote. I'd like to say I didn't write it, but I did. Or at least someone I used to be. I've changed."
"People don't change," grunts Officer Howard.
"Yes, they do. People do change. I know. I'm one of them."
"That's what they all say."
"You're testing me," I mutter.
"I'm trying to find the truth."
"The truth?" Alright, fuck it! "Jamie asked me to bite his neck the night before last."
"Was it a sexual thing?"
"It was," I reply, sitting straight and defiant, waiting for them to smirk and grin. "We had rough sex. He asked me to spank him and to bite him, and I did."
They say nothing. I think about Jamie, alone in a frozen orange grove, left for dead. I think about whoever did this to him. I think about his parents, how they left him alone to die.
And I say, "If Jamie dies, I'll never forgive myself. I begged him to let me go to work with him—I had a bad feeling—I didn't want him by himself." The tears roll down my face. "I shouldn't have listened to him. I shouldn't have let him be alone. If he dies, I don't think I can live. I've loved him all my life. I'll never love anyone else."
It begins to dawn on them.
"Mr. Mattheis," Howard asks, his voice shockingly gentle. "Do you still have the video that was sent to you?"
"It was horrible. It was evil... it was so evil, what they did." My stomach cramps again.
"Mr. Mattheis."
"Yeah?" I reply weakly.
"You still have that video at your house?"
"Yeah. It's at my house, in my VCR. I wanted to throw it away, break it..."
"You didn't, did you?" asks Lord.
"No."
"What about the package it came in?"
"It's there somewhere. I didn't toss it."
"Good."
It's been three or four hours since Jamie was found, and the cops cannot find anything solid against me. The diaries are not even close to pertinent, nor are the statements given by Mom, Stace and the Asshole. The D.A. refuses to press any charges. For a while, I'm terrified she's going to charge me with possession, but once I tell her how I received the tape, and how shocked and horror-struck I was, and how Yvette behaved that night about it, I am released.
I'm not going home. I can't possibly sleep until I see Jamie for myself, see if he's alive... breathing... and I'm sure once I've seen him, once I see what they've done to him, I won't be able to close my eyes anyway.
Officer Pete Bloom, Lloyd Tafford's old partner, comes to them, having just heard about Jamie's attack. He's retired from the police, but he still likes to drive around in his civilian car at odd hours, looking for suspicious activities or characters. "I saw three people, walking down Solano right about where Jamie's car was found. I recognised them, so I didn't think anything of it, except... it was strange, how they were walking around at two in the morning."
They ask Yvette to come in and talk to them. She admits she sent the video, and that she got it from one Officer Steven Cantrell. She bribed him with sex, she says, and he gave it to her.
"You have a bunch of them here at the station, Steve told me. Ever since they found the kid's parents dead and all that."
"Why would you do a thing like that?" Lord bemoans. "Why would you deliberately send Mr. Mattheis a videotape of his boyfriend being raped and abused?"
Yvette shrugs nonchalantly. "I thought he should see what his boyfriend is..."
"And what is that?"
"A cocksucking little fag!"
Every cop within earshot is taken aback. "He was a little boy!"
It doesn't phase her a bit.
"Are you involved in this beating, Mrs. Feldman?"
"No," she responds flatly. "I'd like to throw 'em parade though."
"So you know who they are?"
"Maybe..."
"Why don't you tell us?"
"So you can punish them?" she jeers. "They did the world a favour! They exterminated a disgusting little insect! I'm only sorry they didn't kill Tam too, that overgrown, bleeding heart faggot!"
"They didn't kill Mr. Pearce, Mrs. Feldman."
"Too bad," she shrugs arrogantly.
"But he may die... It sounds to us like you knew about this attack before it happened," Howard snarls at her. "That makes you an accessory. We can charge you with conspiracy and depraved indifference. You could go away for quite some time."
Yvette gasps and says, "Steve... he was going with them to do it."
"With whom?" Lord asks.
She won't say a word more, until she sees an attorney. They arrest her, for distribution of child porn.
They know something's off. The station doesn't keep items from cases on the property longer than five years or so. The child porn videos found in Jamie's childhood home were either erased, destroyed, or warehoused somewhere off site.
"Try again, Steve," snaps Officer Lord. "Where did you get the video?"
Very clumsily, Cantrell states that he got it from his cousin in Davis. "He bought it off the guy's parents back in '87 or '88. I found it and recognised him. Then I told Yvette about it. She wanted a copy so she could see for herself. I told her I got it from the station and that I couldn't share it, but... I went ahead and gave it to her."
"Did you participate in this beating?" they ask him.
"No. I was just out with them for drinks last night," stammers Cantrell. "Then they started talking..."
"Who started talking?"
"Yvette, and her brother Ray, and her husband Benny, and some other people. They started talking really loudly—we were all wasted—they asked me to come along. They were going to find James and Tam and just... razz them a little, just for fun. I didn't want to get involved. I'm an officer, after all."
Not for long. Having nothing to prove he's directly involved, depraved or indifferent to a violent crime, they fire Cantrell, then charge him, too, with distribution. It's a paltry victory, but it still gives me a lift.
At my suggestion, the police locate the three dudes who bashed Jamie twice in high school. Guy number one now lives in Davis, works just a few blocks from the UC Medical Centre. But he's got an alibi. When they reach him on his cell, he's
at Pismo with the wife and kids, and has been there for almost a week. Guy number two was killed in some accident in Sacramento in 2002. Guy number three now lives in Utah.
In the presence of their lawyers, Yvette and Cantrell backstab each other. She names him as one of the three who abducted Jamie. He names Benny. When she calls Cantrell a liar, he too names her as one of the three kidnappers. She emphatically denies it.
Then, Mrs. Cooke, the lady who runs the bakery on our main drag in Sommerville, calls in with a tip: her very first customers upon opening her door at six the morning of the beating were Ray Battle, Steven Cantrell, and Lydia Rocha, a friend of both Stacy and Jamie, who, like Ray and many other "friends" of ours, is now living away from Sommerville but back in town for the holidays. The three came in, ordered some maple bars with chocolate milk, and talked in hushed tones about "Jamie". Mrs. Cooke says she heard Lydia speak threateningly to Cantrell, and the words, "the little queer won't be found until it's way too late".
It doesn't take much effort to get Cantrell to rat Lydia out, as long as it's understood that he "really didn't want any part of this thing. I only drove," he whines.
"Lydia's been mad at them for years. And she's been hot for Tam since high school," Cantrell reveals. "She once had a crush on James, but it was brief, and then she liked Tam—she couldn't believe they were spooning. She thought it was disgusting. She was the mastermind. She's the one who wanted them dead—both of them. But when we got to James's house, Tam had left, and it was only James."
thirty-eight:
jamie
(december 30)
In the ER at County Hospital in Woodland, the docs insert a pleura-vac tube to siphon the blood out of my chest where my ribs have punctured my left lung and caused it to collapse. When they realise I have internal injuries and their CT scanner is on the fritz, they put me in a chopper and fly me to Sacramento, to UC Davis.
In the OR, they lay me on my side and stitch up my ruptured left kidney, then they flip me over and stitch up the laceration along the right side of my head, By the grace of God, the MRIs reveal no brain injuries or other internal trauma. Miraculously, my spleen wasn't touched. They put my right arm and right hand back together and encase them in plaster. They ease the arm into a sling because my collarbone is broken in half.
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