Читать книгу Claim of Innocence - Laura Caldwell, Leslie S. Klinger - Страница 16

T he first time he had gone to see the killing, the first time he had walked in that house, there was no emotion. That was what he noticed. The people there nodded at him. As if it were simple.

Everyone knew who he was. They seemed to expect him to know where to go, too. When he stood and looked around, feeling helpless—an unfamiliar emotion—someone pointed. He walked the hallway, trying not to think, trying not to blame himself. Other people were as responsible for the imminent destruction of this human being. The killing didn’t rest on his shoulders.

But he dropped the rationalizations quickly. He had been telling himself these things for years, especially about this killing, planned meticulously. And still he had done nothing to change it.

He kept walking. In his mind, his feet sounded like drums on the hard floor—bang, bang, bang—heralding something momentous, something terrible.

He had wanted people killed before this, had told others to kill. But he had never been there for the act.

Now, back in the present, that house a mere memory, he shook his head, tried to shake away the memories. It did no good for him to remember, no good at all. He told himself this all the time, and yet he kept slipping into these thoughts of the past. They sucked him in whole, so that he was entirely removed from today.

He sat up straighter in his chair now and shook his head again. In the back of his brain he heard a low bang, bang, bang—the drums still in the distance.

“Go away,” he said softly.

He had been trying to make retributions. But it hadn’t made a difference. He kept hearing the sounds, kept trying to wrench himself from that memory. But there was one thing in particular that wouldn’t leave him—the words the man had said in the minutes before he died. The feel of those words hitting his ear as he bent over him.

He sat even straighter now. Once again, he shook his head, trying to jar loose the recollection, wondering if the man had known his utterances would stick with him all these years. Was that what he intended? Or were they just more lies falling from the lips of someone who had already caused so much pain?

He tried to believe the latter. He had gone about his business after that day, although he became curious as to whether people saw it in him, whether they saw what he had done. All those years, he walked the streets of Chicago, a city as human as those living inside its borders, and he had wondered.