P. Parrish - Paint It Black

She nodded. “It went on for a while. . the stabbing. And the beating.”

“Did Mayo say anything during this time?”

It took her a minute to answer. “He said, ‘Motherfucking piece of shit. Don’t look at me.’ It must have been Heller he was talking to.”

She paused. “And he said, ‘Get it right this time, you idiots.’ ”

“ ‘Idiots’? Plural?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, idiots.”

“You were right, Louis,” Wainwright whispered.

“What happened next?” Louis asked.

“He dragged Heller out. I heard the door and Mayo came back. He asked me who I was and I told him I was an FBI agent and that I was there to take the missing person’s report.” She hesitated.

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “It was his voice. There was something in his voice that made me think I shouldn’t have been there.”

“Then what?” Louis asked.

She hung her head slightly. Louis watched the shirt breathe with her.

“I. . oh. Oh. He wanted to know what Lynch said about Tyrone Heller. He seemed very interested in how Lynch described Heller.”

Louis looked over at Wainwright, who was still taking notes. “What did you tell him Lynch said?”

“I told him Lynch thought Tyrone was a fine young man.”

“Did that seem to anger him?”

“No. . no. Wait. . wait. But then he asked me if Lynch had described Tyrone as a black man. He stressed black. I heard it in his voice.”

Louis glanced at Wainwright. This was new, too. But what did it mean? Louis waited for Emily to go on.

“At some point. .” she said, “it was near the end. . he said that he didn’t want to do this. He was. .” She paused. “He was almost kind about it, like he was apologizing.”

Her voice had grown small.

“What did that mean to you?” Louis asked.

“That he didn’t want to kill Heller. . or me. I’m not sure.”

“Go on.”

She was quiet for a minute. Wainwright stood up and came over to them.

“Farentino?” Louis said gently.

Her breath quickened. “He got mad. He was furious and he wanted to know if I knew what it was like to be black.”

Emily stopped but Louis didn’t say a word.

“He was shouting,” Emily said, “and then he asked me about fucking a black man.” Her words rushed out. “And then he said that thing about scraping people from wombs.” She shook her head slowly. “It was like a different person had come into the room.”

Her chest was heaving and Wainwright looked at Louis, concerned. Louis held up a hand to him.

“Then what?”

Her hands were curled into fists. “Nothing.”

“Think. What else did he say?”

She bowed her head. “I don’t know. Nothing. There was no more talk.”

Louis glanced at Wainwright, mouthing the word “gloves.” Wainwright understood immediately and rose. He returned from his office a few moments later with a pair of brown leather gloves. Louis slipped them on.

Louis picked up a letter opener and ran the tip lightly across Emily’s forearm. Her head shot up, and she sucked the cloth to her face, but she didn’t move.

He wrapped his gloved hand around the invisible cut, held it there for a second, and backed away. They waited.

“No,” she said softly.

A few more seconds passed.

“No, that’s not right,” she said finally. “Do it again. Without the gloves. He wasn’t wearing gloves when he touched me.”

Louis took them off and repeated the move, wrapping his fingers around her wrist.

Emily shook her head.

Louis looked down at his fingers wrapped around her arm. Tan against white. Suddenly he knew.

“What about this?” he asked.

He made the “cut” again with the opener, this time placing his own wrist flat against hers, rubbing.

“Yes!” she said. “That’s it. That’s what he did.”

Louis turned away. There was a rock in his stomach. The germ of an idea was there, but his brain couldn’t work fast enough to make sense of it.

It was like a different person had come into the room.

He stood with his back to them, eyes closed.

Do you ever think about what it must be like to be black?

Emily, on Dodie’s patio: He’s black.

Roscoe Webb: This was a white man talking to me.

“Louis?” Wainwright asked.

He turned. Emily had taken the shirt off her head. She was staring at him. So was Wainwright.

“He’s not white,” Louis said. “And he’s not black. He’s both.”

“Explain,” Wainwright said.

“He’s biracial,” Louis said.

“How do you know?” Emily asked.

“All of it,” Louis said. “He has two sides, almost like two people, living inside him.”

He paused. A sudden image rushed into his head. A man at the wharf. A knife flashing in the sun. Fish guts being dumped into the water.

He looked at Emily and Wainwright. “Tyrone Heller isn’t a victim,” he said. “He’s the killer.”

The rain beat down on the windows. Louis and Emily sat silent at the table, both lost in their own thoughts.

Wainwright hung up the phone and looked at Louis. “I told Horton what you said. He wants us downtown immediately. And there’s something new. They found Heller’s truck abandoned in a canal east of the airport. No body, no Heller.”

Wainwright got up and left the room.

“He might have skipped,” Emily said.

Louis was silent.

“If he goes underground again, we could lose him until he resurfaces,” Emily said.

“Shit,” Louis muttered.

Wainwright came back, carrying a computer printout. “Horton sent over Heller’s sheet. He’s got a history. Manslaughter conviction, 1979, Broward County, Florida. Served three years.”

“We need more,” Louis said.

“I’ll call over to Broward,” Wainwright said, picking up the phone.

“We may not have to,” Emily said.

They looked over at her. She was standing over the box on the table, holding a file. “He’s in here,” she said.

Wainwright stared at the file in her hand. “How did we miss it?” he asked.

“It was in the stack of black suspects,” she said.

“We put them aside after Roscoe Webb, after we decided we were looking for a white man.”

She flipped it open and scanned it quickly. Wainwright and Louis waited.

“It’s the first case,” she said. “Heller’s first murder-his own father.”

“Jesus,” Wainwright said.

“It’s from the Pompano Beach PD,” Emily said. “It’s where Heller was born, just north of Fort Lauderdale.”

She adjusted her glasses. “In 1979, when he was eighteen, Tyrone Heller stabbed his father four times. He fled, and the father died hours later. Heller was charged with manslaughter.” She paused. “Listen to this. His public defender wanted to plead him out on diminished capacity and got him a psych exam.”

“Is the medical report in there?” Wainwright asked.

Emily nodded. “Here’s the family history. Heller’s mother was white, father black. They weren’t married and Heller’s father denied paternity and abandoned the family. Heller was raised by the mother, whose three other children were white. He was the youngest. Here’s what the psychiatrist wrote: ‘As child, subject was target of emotional abuse and isolation by mother and siblings. Subject expresses rage against absent father and displays extreme episodes of depression and self-loathing.’ ”

She paused, looking up at Louis and Wainwright.

“Like he should’ve been scraped from his mother’s womb,” Louis said.

“All through his teenaged years, Heller tried to locate his father,” Emily went on. “He finally found him living in Fort Lauderdale, but the father again rejected him. That’s when Heller attacked.” She looked up. “They found the body in a bathtub, with the faucet running.”