John Katzenbach: Just Cause

The detective demonstrated in the night air, abruptly slashing the darkness with a swift chopping motion.

'… The man goes down like he's been shot. Gurgles a couple of times and that's it. He's alive just long enough to realize he's dying. A tough way to go. The wife starts screaming, of course, tries to run. So the kid grabs her by the hair, pulls her head back, and bingo. Real fast, she only got off one more scream. Tough luck, though. It was enough to alert a neighbor who called us. Some guy with insomnia walking his dog. We got the kid as he came out the front door. He was loading up the car with the stereo, television, clothes, anything he could get his hands on. Covered in blood.'

He looked out across the yard and said vacantly, 'Matty, what's Hawkins' First Law of the Street?'

Cowart smiled through the darkness. Hawkins liked to speak in maxims. 'The first law, Vernon, is never look for your trouble, because trouble will always find you when it wants to.'

The detective nodded. 'Real sweet kid. Real sweet psychopathic kid. Says he had nothing to do with it.'

'Christ.'

'Not that strange,' the detective continued. 'I mean, the kid probably blames Mr. Junior Exec and his wife there for what happened. If they hadn't tried to stiff him, you know what I mean.'

'But…'

'No remorse. Not a shred of sympathy or anything human. Just a kid. Tells me everything that happened. Then he says to me, "I didn't do nothing. I'm innocent. I want a lawyer." We're standing there and there's blood all over and he says he didn't do nothing. I guess that's because it didn't mean anything to him. I guess. Christ…'

He leaned back in defeat and exhaustion. 'You know how old this kid is? Fifteen. Just fifteen a month ago. Ought to be home worrying about pimples, dates, and homework. He'll do juvie time for sure. Bet the house on it.'

The detective closed his eyes and sighed. I didn't do nothing. I didn't do nothing. Jesus.'

He held out his hand. 'Look at that. I'm fifty-fucking-nine years old and gonna retire and I thought I'd seen and heard it all.'

The hand was quivering. Cowart could see it move in the light thrown from the pulsating police lights.

'You know,' Hawkins said as he stared at his hand, 'I'm getting so I don't want to hear any more. I'd almost rather shoot it out with some crazy fuck than I would hear one more guy talk about doing something terrible as if it means no more than nothing. Like it wasn't some life that he snuffed out, it was just a candy wrapper he crumpled up and tossed away. Like littering instead of first-degree murder.'

He turned to Cowart. 'You want to see?'

'Of course. Let's go,' he replied, too quickly.

Hawkins looked at him closely. 'Don't be so sure. You always want to see so damn quick. It ain't nice. Take my word for it this time.'

'No,' Cowart said. 'It's my job, too.'

The detective shrugged. I take you in, you gotta promise something.'

'What's that?'

'You see what he did, then I show him to you – no questions, you just get a look at him, he's in the kitchen – but you make sure you get into the paper that he's no boy next door. Got it? That he's not some poor, disadvantaged little kid. That's what his lawyer's gonna start saying just as soon as he gets here. I want it different. You tell them that he's a stone-cold killer, got it? Stone-cold. I don't wanna have anybody pick up the paper and see a picture of him and think, How could a nice kid like that have done this?'

'I can do that,' Cowart said.

'Okay.' The detective shrugged, rose, and they started to walk toward the front door. As they were about to pass inside, he turned to Cowart and said, 'You sure? These are folks just like you and me. You won't forget this one. Not ever.'

'Let's go.'

'Matty, let an old guy look out for you for once.'

'Come on, Vernon.'

'It's your nightmare, then,' the detective said. He'd been absolutely right about that.

Cowart remembered staring at the executive and his wife. There was so much blood it was almost as if they were dressed. Every time the police photographer's flash exploded, the bodies glistened for an instant.

Wordlessly, he had followed the detective into the kitchen. The boy sat there wearing sneakers and jeans, his slight torso naked, one arm handcuffed to a chair. Streaks of blood marked his body, but he ignored them and casually smoked a cigarette with his free hand. It made him look even younger, like a child trying to act older, cooler, to impress the policemen in the room but really only appearing slightly silly. Cowart noted a smear of blood in the boy's blond hair, matting the curls together, another tinge of dried brown blood on the boy's cheek. The kid didn't even need to shave yet.

The boy looked up when Cowart and the detective entered the room. 'Who's that?' he asked, nodding toward Cowart.

For an instant Matthew locked his eyes with the boy's. They were an ancient blue, endlessly evil, like staring at the iron edge of an executioner's sword.

'He's a reporter, with the journal,' Hawkins said.

'Hey, reporter!' the kid said, suddenly smiling.

'What?'

'You tell everybody I didn't do nothing,' he said. Then he laughed in a high-pitched, wheezing way that echoed after Cowart and forever froze in his memory, as Hawkins steered him out of the room, back out into the hurrying dawn.

He had gone to his office and written the story of the junior executive, his wife, and the teenager. He'd described the white sheets crumpled and brown with blood, the red spatter marks marking the walls with Daliesque horror. He'd written about the neighborhood and the trim house and a framed testimonial on the wall attesting to the victim's membership in an advanced sales club. He'd written about suburban dreams and the lure of forbidden sex. He'd described the Fort Lauderdale strip where children cruised nightly, aging far beyond their years every minute. And he'd described the boy's eyes, burning them into the story, just the way his friend had asked him to.

He'd ended the story with the boy's words.

When he'd gone home that night, carrying a copy of the first edition under his arm, his story jamming the front page, he had felt an exhaustion that had gone far beyond lack of sleep. He had crawled into his bed, pulling himself up against his wife, even knowing that she planned to leave him, shivering, flu-like, unable to find any warmth in the world.

Cowart shook his head to dispel the morning and looked around his work cubicle.

Hawkins was dead now. Retired with a little ceremony, given a pension, and released to cough his life away with emphysema. Cowart had gone to the ceremony and clapped when the chief of police had cited the detective's contributions. He'd gone to see him in the detective's small Miami Beach apartment every time he could. It had been a barren place, decorated with some old clippings of stories Cowart and others had written. 'Remember the rules,' Hawkins had told him at the end of each visit, 'and if you can't remember what I told you about the street, then make up your own rules and live by them.' They had laughed. Then he'd gone to the hospital as frequently as possible, taking off early and surreptitiously from his office to go and trade stories with the detective, until the last time, when he'd arrived and found Hawkins unconscious beneath an oxygen tent, and Cowart hadn't known whether the detective heard him when he whispered his name, or felt him when he picked up his hand. He had sat beside the bed for one long night, not even knowing when it was that the detective's life had slipped away in the darkness. Then he'd gone to the funeral, along with a few other old policemen. There'd been a flag, a coffin, a few words from a priest. No wife. No children. Dry eyes. Just a nightmare's worth of memories being lowered slowly into the ground. He wondered if it would be the same when he died.