J Bertrand - Back on Murder

She moves slower than a reluctant snail, but she does move, her hand sliding into the drooping cardigan pocket, returning with a tiny sliver of a phone, which she thumbs open without glancing down. She punches a speed-dial button and puts the phone to her ear.

“Baby?” she says. “I’m still at the school. Yeah. Listen, the police are here looking for you. I don’t know… All right, here you go.”

She hands me the phone.

“It’s Roland March,” I say. “We met yesterday. I was wondering if we could have a chat.”

“Right.” He sounds wary. “You want to meet at the church?”

For some reason I don’t, and I tell him so. “How about I drop in wherever you are?”

“All right.”

“You’ll have to tell me where that is.”

A long time passes. His wife looks up anxiously while Cavallo consults her watch.

“Mr. Robb?”

“I’m… I’m sitting in the van. Outside James Fontaine’s house. Trying to work up enough nerve to go knock on the door.”

I walk alongside the red church van, giving the roof a nice tap, then climb into the passenger seat. Robb doesn’t even glance over. His eyes are fixed on the house across the street, a rather palatial brick mansion dating from the late seventies or early eighties with concrete lions on either side of the front steps. Not the crib I’d have expected for a Klein High weed dealer, but I can’t think why not. Where else is he going to live? We’re in the suburbs, after all.

I rap the plastic dash with my knuckle. “You really shouldn’t be doing this. For one thing, you’re not exactly keeping a low profile.”

“I’m not really trying.”

“For another thing – and I shouldn’t even be mentioning this – we’re already keeping an eye on this kid.” I crank the rearview around, glancing back at Cavallo, who’s still behind the wheel, leaving this one to me. “Putting up flyers is one thing. That’s great. But conducting your own stakeout? Not so much.”

“I’m not here to spy on him,” he says. “I wanted to confront him.”

“Won’t he still be in school?”

He looks at me for the first time. “He’s on suspension.”

“Didn’t the school year just begin? He didn’t waste any time.”

Robb wears cargo shorts today, along with Converse sneakers. His black T-shirt imitates the popular milk advertisements, but says got JESUS? instead. After meeting the wife, something tells me he chooses his wardrobe for ironic effect.

“Let me level with you,” I say. “When I saw you yesterday, something didn’t seem right. You were squirrelly. Like our being there made you nervous. So I started wondering what you’d have to be nervous about. Why don’t you save me the trouble and just tell me?”

“I’m not nervous about anything.”

“Really? ’Cause let me tell you something. What you’re doing right here, it’s abnormal. This is not how people react to situations like yours, not when they’re on the level.”

He runs a hand through his spiky hair. “How do they react?”

“Not like they’re guilty.”

“That’s how you think I’m acting?”

“Am I wrong?”

He reaches out and straightens the rearview mirror, reclaiming the territory. “How am I supposed to answer a question like that?”

“You have a guilty conscience, Mr. Robb. I want to know why.”

Human physiology is a funny thing. No matter how cool we think we’re playing it, most of us don’t have poker faces. Our tells can be ludicrously on target. Robb’s a perfect example. His top lip clamps down over the bottom, forcing the tuft of hair on his chin to pop out like porcupine quills. He’s literally biting down the words, and he has no idea.

“Come on,” I say, jabbing his arm. “Just tell me what you’re holding back. You’ll feel better.”

He turns toward the window, head shaking imperceptibly.

“You want to find this girl, right? So help me out. Don’t hold anything back. It’s not fair to Hannah.”

He lets out a breath. “Hannah? You don’t even know her.”

“Then tell me about her, Carter. Fill me in.”

His breathing comes hard and heavy, the muscles in his forearms flexing, struggling to hold himself together.

“Come on.”

Then I hear it, the sound I love. The gasp of capitulation, a long exhale that leaves him smaller than before, hunched over and broken. In the interview room, this would be the moment the guys on the far side of the glass slap each other’s backs. When they give that sigh, it means everything is about to come out all at once.

“This,” he says, his voice quiet, “this is all my fault.”

“Meaning what?”

“I encouraged her. I thought I was doing the right thing.” There’s a plea in his eyes. “You have to understand, when I first came to the church, nobody was on my side. What I found here wasn’t at all what I expected. You’ve got this big, famous church – all my seminary friends, when they heard I was coming here, said I’d hit the big time. But what I discovered… It was all so comfortable. So complacent. The kids go to nice schools, they drive nice cars, they have nice lives to look forward to. It was all so nice.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I say.

“Christianity, it’s not about being nice. It’s about sacrifice. All they wanted, though, was an ordained baby-sitter, like I said before.”

“I thought you were trying to be funny.”

“I was, but it’s still true. The parents… The church, what they all wanted was some help with keeping the kids in line. Keeping them insulated. Sheltered and safe. ‘You’re young,’ they’d tell me. ‘The kids relate to you. They look up to you.’ And they wanted me to use that to help them out, you know? Or they’d get me to lay down the law, then behind my back the parents and kids could bond by talking about how unreasonable I was. That kind of shocked me, but it happens.”

As interesting as all this is, I don’t need a lecture on how hard being a youth pastor is. “Can we steer this back to Hannah?”

“Like I said, Hannah was different. Her mom was, too, at first. They understood God didn’t put us on this planet to be cozy and quiet. We have to be outward-focused. We have to be missional.”

Cavallo would know what that means, but I don’t – and I’d just as soon not find out. “Again, could we stick to the matter at hand?”

He stops me with a raised finger. “It’s relevant. There was a sermon I did – I speak to the youth group on Sunday nights, I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you know the Narnia movies started coming out, and all the kids were eating that stuff up, so I did a talk about that line from C. S. Lewis – you know, about Aslan? ‘He’s not a safe lion, but he’s a good one’?”

My eyes glaze over.

“Anyway,” he says, realizing I’m not tracking, “the point is, God doesn’t want us to be safe. He wants us to do good. There’s a big difference.”

“Right.”

“So Hannah hears this, and it’s like a light bulb goes on in her head. This was – what? Three years ago? She would have been, like, fourteen. But she really woke up and started living her faith.”

I’m not looking for ancient history, but sometimes there’s no choice. You have to let them tell the story in their own way.

“There was this girl,” he says, “named Evey, short for Evangeline. She and her mom relocated here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the kid was really messed up. Evey ran away from home, got into drugs and who knows what else. She was Hannah’s age – but that’s all they had in common. I don’t know the whole history, but I think there’d been some kind of abuse, she’d been sexualized way too young and had this weird, kind of creepy maturity. The other kids in the youth group, they wouldn’t go near her. I think they were afraid, and to be honest I was, too.”