If I Die Tonight Page 11

  There had to be something. Maybe there weren’t Crips around here, but there were gangs. Connor knew that much. Just this past summer, there’d been a robbery at the CVS: one of the windows smashed, a cash register emptied, a whole bunch of pills swiped from the pharmacy. The robbers were never captured, but everybody knew it was gang members, come into Havenkill from somewhere else, somewhere dangerous—Albany, Poughkeepsie, a real city. Connor had even heard that there had been gang signs scrawled in bloodred paint on the pharmacy wall.

  And so it had to be a gang member who had killed Liam. Because if it wasn’t a gang member . . .

  He didn’t want to complete that thought. It was dumb and paranoid, plus it was all Noah’s fault.

  Mom brushed past Connor on her way to the hallway. A rush of cold air flew off her, coat waving, boots pounding the floor. It was out of the ordinary and kind of terrifying, the speed of her step, like a runaway train. To slow her down, Connor said hi.

  She stopped, turned. Looked at Connor in the weirdest way, as though she was trying to figure out who he was.

  “Mom?” he said slowly. “Are you okay?” His phone vibrated—probably a new snap from Jordan, but he ignored it.

  Mom said, “Is Wade in his room?”

  “Yeah,” Connor said. “I think so . . .”

  Mom whirled around and headed down the hall and, seconds later, he heard her pounding on Wade’s door, so loud it made him want to cover his ears. What is going on?

  For several seconds he sat frozen, breath held, listening. Wanting and not wanting to hear.

  “Open this door now,” Mom said.

  Connor could hear Wade’s door opening, Wade’s questioning voice, then Mom’s, like a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. “I know what you did.”

  Connor held his breath. He heard some muffled words, Wade’s door closing. Then silence.

  Two years ago, Wade went crazy and stole Mom’s car. No one knew that Connor was aware of this, but he was. He’d been in his room and their mom had been out and he’d overheard Wade Skyping with one of his last remaining friends—this kid named Rafe Burgess who at the time was new and would talk to anybody.

  A lot of the Skype chat had sounded like bullshit to Connor: Wade claiming he was going to steal the extra key to Mom’s car, drive up to Albany, and buy a gun so he could shoot out the windows of their dad’s house. “And too bad if anybody’s inside when it happens.”

  Rafe had replied, “Oh, come on,” and Connor had been with him on that thought. Sometimes Wade could be the most dramatic person ever.

  But then a couple of days later, Mom’s car had gotten stolen . . .

  He took out his phone, looked at the new snap from Jordan. Two cops walking, with a weird-looking lady between them. She had on a shiny red coat and her hair was dyed rainbow—a strange contrast to a worn-out, pale face. She reminded Connor of an off-duty clown.

  She’s the one, the caption read. She owed the gangsta drug money. He took her car as payback.

  The picture disappeared in seconds, as all Snapchats do. Connor wished he’d screenshotted it so he could have looked at it longer. The woman could have been a druggie. A meth head. She sure looked like one. Connor took another selfie, captioned it, How do you know? Did the cops say so? Then he crossed his fingers—literally crossed his fingers and said a little prayer that Jordan would say yes.

  From down the hall, he heard his mother’s voice, angry and pained. “Why did you do this?”

  Connor’s stomach clenched up. What were they talking about?

  Connor’s phone vibrated twice: a text. He expected Malcolm again, but when he looked at it, he saw that it was from Jordan.

  My sister just texted me. She says the football team is gonna kill whoever did it. Come after him and kill him. They think they can get away with it.

  Connor texted back: Even if it’s a whole gang?

  There was a long pause, then another text from Jordan: The woman with the crazy hair is named Amy. She’s from Woodstock.

  Connor snorted. Figures.

  Down the hall, Wade was practically shouting. “. . . guidance counselor for therapy sessions every day . . . listening in on my phone calls and hiding all the freakin’ razors in the house and—”

  “Wade.”

  Another text came in from Jordan: So Amy told the cops it was a lone wolf. A weird kid in a hoodie.

  Connor’s stomach dropped. He had to type his reply three times, because his fingers were so jittery he kept missing keys, his stupid phone autocorrecting it to nonsense.

  Wade’s door creaked open. Connor heard his brother say he needed to take a walk. He breathed in deeply, then typed: But Amy could be lying, right??? She’s some druggie from Woodstock, in deep with some gang. Nobody believes her, right?

  Wade swept into the room, angry-fast like Mom and all in black, a black hoodie . . .

  “Where are you going?” Connor asked.

  “Back soon.”

  Wade went out the front door. Connor got up and followed him, slipping out and into the freezing air before Mom could see him, closing the door carefully. “Wait!”

  Wade spun around, his face pink and sad, a purple-gray sky behind him. Just 4:00 PM and already the day was caving in. Connor hated fall.

  “What do you want?” Wade said.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’m just getting some air.”

  “Why was Mom so mad at you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know, Wade. Come on. I heard you guys screaming at each other.”

  “It was just something stupid I did a couple of years ago, okay? I don’t know why she’s freaking out all of a sudden but it’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “I am worried.”

  “Well don’t be.” He smiled. “Okay, buddy?”

  Connor didn’t answer right away, and for a while the two of them stood there on the path in front of their house, Wade all in black, that purplish sky haloing his black hair. A shadow, Connor thought. He looks like a shadow. “Wade.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you . . . Did you hear about Liam? About who ran him over?”

  Wade shook his head slowly. He took a step back, and Connor remembered the way he’d looked at him back in his room, when he’d asked him to pretend two nights ago never happened. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said, black eyes aimed at him. “Did you?”

  Connor held his gaze as long as he could. “Some people are saying it was gangsters from Poughkeepsie.”

  “Could have been.” Wade put his back to Connor and headed down the path. “You should get back inside,” he said as he made for the green Corolla Mom had given him, taking the key out of his pocket and opening the driver’s-side door. “It’s cold out here.”

  WADE WAS RIGHT. It was cold. Connor went back in the house. His mom was in the kitchen, talking on her phone. “I don’t know,” he heard her say. “I just don’t know.” Which was the theme of everything these days, wasn’t it? Nobody knew anything in this house, in this town. Connor grabbed his phone off the kitchen table and pulled his jacket out of the closet. “I have to pick something up at a friend’s house. I’ll be back soon!” he called out, without waiting for an answer. Once he was back in the cold afternoon, he unlocked his bike and jumped on it, taking off in search of his unknowable brother.

  PEARL TOOK AMY into the booking room, where the two state detectives were waiting for them. They exchanged niceties: chatter about the cold weather, Halloween plans, Amy’s music career. The man did most of the talking. All of it, actually. “You know, I used to love Dead Enz,” he said, name-checking Amy’s old backup band the way a true fan would. He looked directly at her as he said it and gave her a dreamy smile, eyes half closed and a little misty, as though he was seeing and remembering her at the same time. She often got this from men of a certain age, the ones old enough to remember her onstage with Dead Enz, wearing nothing but a kilt and electrical tape. You make a strong enou
gh impression your first time out of the gate, with some people it truly can last a lifetime.

  “I’m Detective Wacksman, by the way,” he said, still with the smile. “Feel free to call me Alex.”

  “I’m Detective Wind,” said the female detective, who was a good two decades younger, probably in diapers at the time Dead Enz split up. No first name for her, apparently.

  Amy stuck a hand out. “Nice to meet you,” she said. But Detective Wind just nodded at her and Amy had nowhere to put her hand. The room smelled of cleaning fluid, and Detective Wind’s mouth refused to lift at the corners and Amy felt like a suspect, queasy and tense.

  The booking room. Same place she’d first talked to Pearl and the other officers, with that drunk preppy cuffed to the bench, vomit stains on his oxford cloth shirt, head lolling, asking when “in the gaping depths of hell” his wife was going to get there, over and over again until the poor woman finally arrived. Back then, Amy had thought, At least I’m not her. Of course, Liam Miller had still been alive back then, and she’d assumed he’d stay that way. What a difference two days can make if the circumstances are awful enough.

  Wacksman said, “Let’s go into the interview room, shall we?”

  “Interview room?”

  “It’s where we’re conducting all the interviews related to the case while we’re here,” Wind said, so cold and official, Amy felt as though she were at a press conference. She looked at Pearl, who simply shrugged. She wasn’t sure whether the intent of the shrug was to make her feel better or worse, or if there was any intent behind it at all.

  “It’s just a conference room, ma’am,” Pearl said. “There isn’t anything to be afraid of.”

  IT REALLY WAS just a conference room, with a window facing the street, a tree full of golden leaves taking up most of the view, the sky behind it pinkish with the first breath of sunset. Wacksman and Wind sat next to each other at one end of the large table with Amy directly across from them and Pearl standing in the doorway. She would’ve liked to have had Pearl sitting next to her, the way a lawyer might have been if this were an actual interrogation. Cold as the young officer had been acting lately, Amy still knew and liked her better than either of these detectives: Wind with her sedate clothes and her hard stare and her lack of a first name, Wacksman with his thick mustache that lifted obscenely when he smiled, like a skirt.

  This room smelled of the same cleaning fluid as the booking room. It made Amy wonder if they’d scrubbed the whole place down just before she’d come here, so they could lift her fingerprints off the furniture. She breathed in the piney chemical scent, feeling terribly alone. She tried smiling at Wind again, again unsuccessfully.

  Wacksman slid a microcassette recorder onto the table. “We’re going to be tape-recording you. Is that all right?”

  Amy stared at the tiny machine. “Yes,” she said. “I guess.” He clicked it on and Amy thought of the demo tapes she used to make, the spools turning. “I thought you just tape-record when you’re talking to suspects.”

  Wind smiled for the first time since Amy had met her, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “No, no,” she said. “We do this with important witnesses as well.”

  Alex Wacksman said, “Can you please state and spell your name?”

  She did, and when he asked her to state the date, she did that as well.

  “So getting things started, can you tell us what you were doing in Havenkill two nights ago?”

  “I was playing a gig.”

  “Where?” Wind said.

  “Club Halifax. In Hudson.”

  “Right,” Wacksman said. “So . . . from the looks of the report, you played a long gig there, after which you left for home. And when you were passing through Havenkill, the carjacker approached.”

  Amy looked at him. “Yes.”

  Wind glanced over at Pearl in a way that felt meaningful. Amy turned to look at her. The girl’s eyes were fixed not on the detective, but on her. She recalled the way Pearl had acted in the car—the suspicion in her tone, the chill in her eyes through the rearview. What do you know? What did you tell the detectives?

  “Okay, so can you give us the timing, please?” Wacksman said. “What time did your show end?”

  “Around one thirty in the morning.” She could feel Pearl’s eyes boring into her.

  Wind said, “Did you have anything to drink at Club Halifax, before or after your show?”

  “No.”

  “You’re positive?”

  Amy didn’t like this line of questioning. “I was working,” she said. “I was singing.”

  “Were there a lot of people there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Many adoring fans. Autograph seekers.”

  “Yes.” She breathed.

  “And you left at one thirty AM. You were heading directly home.”

  “Yes.”

  Wind stared at her, saying nothing. Amy stared back. Wacksman coughed. Then Pearl. This may have gone on for around ten or fifteen seconds, or it could have been an hour—Amy wasn’t sure. All she knew was the thickness of the silence, the way it roared in her ears. She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of a very sharp cliff.

  “Ms. Nathanson,” Wacksman said. “We really need you to tell us the truth.”

  And then she fell. “What, what . . .” she started to stammer. “What makes you think that, that . . .”

  “Officer Maze?” Wind said. “Can you please let Ms. Nathanson know what you told us?”

  Amy turned to Pearl.

  “I warned you in the car,” Pearl said quietly. “I told you not to embellish.”

  “What?”

  “You were the opening act.”

  Amy’s mouth felt dry. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. She was a witness. A victim. “Why are you treating me like this?”

  Pearl kept her gaze fixed on Detective Wind. “Doors opened at six PM. The main act was a Psychedelic Furs cover band and they went on at eight.”

  Amy closed her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. I was the opening act.”

  “No encores?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  Tears sprung into her eyes. “Why? Why do you need to know? Why are you even bringing it up, other than to humiliate me?”

  Wind said, “We’re bringing it up, Ms. Nathanson, because of the timeline. We now don’t know where you were between eight PM and the time of the accident. We don’t know whether you were drinking for hours before you got behind the wheel.”

  Amy looked at the detective, the ice in her eyes, the sharpness of her jaw that seemed to mirror Pearl’s, the two of them brass bookends on either side of her, Wacksman smiling beneath his mustache. She hated it here. “I wasn’t drinking.”

  “Most important, it matters because it means you lied to us,” Wind said. “If you lied to us about this show, how do we know whether you were telling us the truth about the boy in the hoodie? Or about Liam Miller rushing to save you?” Her gaze drifted to Pearl, then back to Amy’s face. “How do we know you are being truthful about anything that happened that night, other than the one thing you can’t lie about: that your car killed a seventeen-year-old boy?”

  Amy’s mouth felt dry, the cleaning fluid smell pressing in on her. She considered asking to call a lawyer, but then she remembered Liam’s parents—the hope they said she’d given them in her private message—and stepped away from that thought. “I’m not a killer,” she said. “And I’m not a liar.”

  “Prove it.”

  Under the table, her hands clenched into fists. Her fingernails dug into her palms. “I didn’t do any encores,” she said, that awful night replaying in her head. Such a crap bar it had been, and so loud, the mic fuzzy and people talking over her as she sang. No band. The manager of the place had called just two weeks ago, giving Amy no time to put one together. Beggars can’t be choosers, she’d thought. Every comeback has to start somewhere. And so she’d put on her vintage vinyl minidress and her hot pi
nk go-go boots. She’d colored her hair and slathered on her trademark red lipstick and driven to this club, which smelled of mold and stale smoke and had walls the color of old teeth, no doubt from years of cigarette pollution.

  She’d sung with some lousy piano player who doubled as a bartender—some kid who wouldn’t have known her from a crack in the tooth-colored wall and who played like both his hands had fallen asleep. “I sounded great.” She said it not to Wind and Wacksman, but to Pearl. “That’s not an embellishment.” She had sounded great—the clarity of her head voice, the soul of her belt. She’d been practicing for months, and if anybody in that club had bothered to listen they would have known that.

  Wind said, “So did you leave after your set?”

  Amy exhaled. “Yes.”

  “Where were you and what were you doing between when you left Club Halifax and when Liam Miller got hit?”

  That was it. The billion-dollar question. She put her hands on the table, her heart-shaped ring glistening. “How does that matter to the investigation?”

  Wind said, “Do you really want me to explain to you how it matters?”

  If only she hadn’t played that gig. If only she hadn’t gone out afterward, if she hadn’t done what she’d done. If only she had driven home right after the gig, if she hadn’t stopped the car until she was back over the bridge where people were decent and kind and didn’t get you into situations you had no right to be in. If only, if only. If only . . .

  Wacksman said, “Ms. Nathanson?”

  “I know.”

  “So, where were you?”

  “I played a private show,” she said, the words easing out of her. “A house concert.”

  “Whose house?”

  Amy took a breath. Why were they making her relive this? “I played a house concert. I was driving home after it was through and this . . . this monster grabbed my purse and—”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Detective Wind.

  “Why do you care?”

  Wind gave her a look.

  Amy spun around in her chair and glared at Pearl. “You could have warned me,” she said. “You could have told me you knew I hadn’t headlined instead of . . . of letting them spring it on me like this.”