Читать книгу Trace Of Innocence - Erica Orloff - Страница 13

I rolled over in bed and, sighing, stared at my digital clock. Midnight. I couldn’t sleep.

Slipping out of bed, I pulled on my robe and padded into the dining area where I fired up my laptop at the table. I logged on to the Internet.

Out of the forty e-mails I’d gotten since the last time I’d checked, ten were spam. Fifteen were from my sometime boyfriend Jack; some were sexy messages telling me what he planned to do to me the next time we were together. One was from Mikey—he got to log on to e-mail every once in a while at prison. A couple were from Lewis. One was a ridiculous joke, solidifying my belief that he was several cornflakes short of a full bowl.

I clicked on my browser and plugged in “suicide king murder.” Site after site showed up—crime Web sites. The Internet, I’ve discovered, besides being a playground for porn fans, is also filled with rabid fans of gore. The bloodier, the better.

I clicked on a picture of David Falco. He was wearing a prison jumpsuit in court. Lawyering 101 says have your defendant show up in a suit and tie. You can ask the judge if that’s all right, and I’d never known a judge not to say a suit was allowed. Yet another example of his incompetent lawyer. I searched through the Internet for information on the case. The more I read, the more weary I got of the violence. I turned off the computer and opened my fridge. I poured myself a vodka on the rocks and drank it fast. I wanted to fall asleep. More than that, I didn’t want to dream.

Because in my life, dreams usually lead to nightmares.

I don’t know how C.C. does it every day. It’s bad enough I visit prisons on the weekend. They remind me, most times, of the way I imagine insane asylums were two centuries ago. It isn’t the drab walls and bars that bother me as much as the sounds of human misery.

When you walk into a prison, you hear the screams and yells of men in pain—either physically or mentally, or both. They scream because they don’t want to be there, they moan and yell because they’re crazy but aren’t getting any psychiatric help, and they fill the air with filth—curses and expletives—because they torment each other with it. The entire experience is unnerving.

Three days later, after Harry’s drop-by, I was ushered into a small conference room reserved for lawyers and clients. I waited a short time, and David Falco was shown into the room.

His pictures didn’t show how tall he was—about six feet. He had the build of a quarterback, athletic but not hugely muscular. He averted his eyes as he slid into the chair opposite me. The guard left his handcuffs on and said, “I’ll be in the hall.”

“Hi, David.” I smiled.

He nodded. His file told me he was thirty.

“I know C.C. told you we’re taking on your case. Joe Franklin will be your new defense attorney. The wheels of justice grind slowly, so I can’t say when you might expect results or even if we’ll win. But you have my word we’ll be relentless.”

He was still physically beautiful. But his eyes had dark circles under them. I don’t know how anyone sleeps in prison. You either learn to shut out the noise or you’re perpetually sleep deprived. Or both.

“So what’s your side of the story?”

He shrugged.

I knew that convicts closed themselves off. You had to do it to survive if you were a long-timer. The short-timers like my brother, my dad…they usually just got by with humor, making a few friends. But the long-timers were a different breed. I tried to imagine being in my twenties and drawing a life sentence—and being innocent. It would seem like a bad dream. A horror movie.

“Look…I know C.C. told you about me and Lewis. But I don’t know if she told you who I am. Who I really am.”

He looked down at the table. “I know who you are.”

“Then you know about my mother. Look…I became a criminalist so that I could put the bad guys behind bars. I’ve never been involved in a case like yours. I never cared. I run a PCR test. I take a tiny little microscopic sample of human tissue, and I run tests. But I never put a face or a story to a sample before. And now…now Joe and C.C. came to Lewis and me. And they told us about you. But I have to see for myself, hear for myself, your story. Or I can’t do this.”

David Falco was quiet for a minute or two. Then he spoke slowly, carefully. “I told the story so many times, and it got me these.” He held up shackled hands.

“But this time if you tell it,” I whispered, “it might get you out of those.”

His hands rested on the table, and I reached across and put my hand over the top of one of his. I gently squeezed and then withdrew. He clenched his jaw at my touch, and I just sat back and waited.

He stared down at the table, fixating on a spot. His eyes sort of glazed over, and he began to talk.

“I met this girl at a bar. I was working as a mason. A bricklayer. Followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. He died after I came here. Anyway…saw her a time or two. She was…screwed up. Troubled. We never slept together. I…I was looking for a girlfriend, a relationship. Not a one-night stand. But I liked her, and I wanted to help her figure her life out.”

I didn’t take notes. I just listened. Jack, my sometime boyfriend the cop, said taking notes made people self-conscious. They froze up, and I was certain if I took notes I wouldn’t get the full story the same way I would if Falco was relaxed.

“Go on,” I urged.

“Anyway, I’m hanging out at her house with her, after she got off work. This guy shows up. Never saw him before. Didn’t give his name. I don’t even have a good description. He was just average. Everything about him was average.”

The way he said it, I knew that David Falco realized he was not average. He was very beautiful, and it had probably been a blessing and a curse his whole life. Outside, it had probably been a blessing. In here, a curse.

“Anyway,” he said softly, “I just got this weird vibe. Like these two were into head games with each other, and I was just…being used by her. She kept calling him tough guy—not using a name. Mocking him. So I said I was tired and got up and left. I was there maybe five minutes with them. On the way out of her apartment, I passed a married couple coming home from a night out. They said hi. They id’d me the next day when her body was found.”

“Can you articulate what was weird about them? About Cammie and this guy?”

“Articulate?”

“Explain.”

“I know what it means. Just don’t hear many big words in this place.”

I smiled at him. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s been a long time since I was treated like anything other than a dog in a cage…. I’m not sure what was so weird. I don’t know. I mean…he stared at her like he hated her. And she was saying all this double-entendre stuff. Like implying he was inadequate in bed. I don’t even remember. I was a little drunk, but I just felt like there was something going on there, and I didn’t want to be around it. I wish now I’d never met her.”

“Did you feel like…something sexual, like they wanted to involve you in something?”

He didn’t speak for a minute or two, then he just gave me a single nod. “Maybe,” he whispered.

“And you didn’t want anything to do with that.” I said it as a statement.

David Falco looked up at me. “No. In my whole life, I’ve been with three women. My high school girlfriend, a woman I met through my sister and a girlfriend who broke up with me maybe four months before the murder.”

I found it hard to believe. My eyes probably expressed that.

“I swear to you. I was always a one-woman man. And I just didn’t get into kinky shit.” He smiled at me. “And to be honest, now it’s been so long since I was with a woman, I can hardly remember.” His smile was a little shy. And sad. “Anyway, this girl, Cammie, she had a dark side. Honest to God, I was trying to listen, to be a friend to her.”

“Dark side, how?”

“I don’t know. She was a bartender at this place I stopped in once in a while if I was working a job that way. We’d talk and later at night, when the place got quiet, she’d say things to me, like, ‘You’re so good, and I’m so fucked up.’ But when I tried to tell her that she wasn’t, that she could turn her life around, her eyes would well up, then she’d make a joke or something, or she’d go down to the other end of the bar.”

“So why was she saying she was screwed up?”

“I never found out, but it always sounded big, like…something evil, or something really, really dark. I just felt kind of bad for her, this beautiful girl with some bad secret.”

“Did any of this come out in the trial?”

He looked at me and shook his head. “My lawyer wasn’t really interested in anything except maybe pleading me down to murder two.”

“Can you think of any reason…any connection she might have had, to the suicide king playing card?”

“No. And trust me, I’ve had a long time to think about that. Nothing. I draw a blank every time.”

“Did she use drugs that you know of?”

“No.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone might try to frame you?”

“No. Look…before this, I was an ordinary guy. This has been like a nightmare I never wake up from. When I was first put in jail, I would have this split second every morning when I would think, for just this moment, that it had all been a dream. I’d be waking up with thoughts of taking the dog for a walk, and then I’d hear something, like some guy in the next cell, and I’d realize where I was. I wouldn’t want to open my eyes.”

I watched him as he spoke, his eyes radiating grief.

“I wanted to kill myself. I lost my will to live. I had a life, a job, parents who loved me, a grandfather who believed in me and taught me a skill. I had my painting, my dog.”

“What kind of dog?” I asked, maybe for a minute looking to extend his memories and take him out of that prison.

“Oh.” He grinned. “The biggest, sloppiest mastiff you ever saw. Name was Gunther.”

“I have a cat. Siamese named Raphael. When I was a kid, my brother and I had a golden retriever named Honey.” I didn’t mention we got her after my mom died, to make us less afraid to go to sleep at night.

“After I got in here, my grandfather took care of my dog. ‘Just till you come home,’ he said. And then Gunther died. And then my grandfather died.” He choked off a sob. “Do you believe I’m innocent?”

I nodded. I did. “C.C. is convinced of it. She says you’ve earned a college degree since you’ve been in here. Says she can tell you’re, how’d she put it? Pure of soul. Says your writing is amazing. I’d like to read some of it sometime.”

“After maybe a year, I went from suicidal to numb. And then I realized I’d have to find something to make me get out of that bunk every morning or I’d be living this horror show in excruciating detail until I finally died—alone. So I forced myself to take a correspondence course, to write letters to my parents. My dad’s still alive. My mother got cancer three years ago and passed away. But my dad, he’s the one who contacted C.C. and Joe. Anyway, it’s not the existence I want, but it’s better—that being a relative term in this place. I try to picture myself as a monastic.”