Nell Zink - Mislaid

Back among his brothers, he saw an opportunity to be a hero after all. They all knew Byrdie had humiliated him by driving him from his room and refusing to hear him out, but he could still take the moral high ground. He bragged that he could have saved himself by naming names, but instead he protected Byrdie. He had not told the police it was Byrdie who ended up with both the teenage whore and the large quantity of drugs she had accepted in payment. He, Mike, had taken full responsibility for the events of the night. The buck stops here .

“That was right Christian of you,” Byrdie said. A short time later he sidled out of the kitchen as though to take a leak, crept up to his room, and called Lee.

Lee praised his presence of mind, set his alarm, and went back to sleep.

Byrdie regarded his large block of hash and several lesser items. He wished they were somewhere else. They had to vanish. But not by leaving the house on his person. It might be staked out. And not on his girlfriend’s person. That was too much to ask. Thinking of Grandma Fleming, he went to the refrigerator.

His solution was loosely based on her trademark dumplings. Ground beef, hashish, raw egg, and a little pancake syrup, rolled in cornflakes for a better grip. At the center of each ball, a peyote button and a cannabis flower, finely crushed. Five of them, baseball-sized, on a plate, looked to Byrdie like something raccoons would eat.

He carried them up to the meditation room on the top floor and softly opened the half-moon window. He could hear the ruckus from the kitchen below. His waited until his eyes adjusted to the dark. He positioned himself away from the window to make sure his movements didn’t attract attention and threw sidearm, hard. The first ball vanished invisibly into the night. He didn’t hear it land, but he felt sure it had crossed the garage roof next door and landed at least two hedges away. He heard a dog bark. He launched four more.

After meditating briefly, he returned downstairs to call his girlfriend. He asked her to come over, saying he needed “sexual healing.” That was in case his phone was tapped. When she arrived, they began cleaning his room.

Lee drove to Charlottesville at first light. He picked Byrdie up from a nearby gas station in silence. No one in the house had been awake to see him leave. Even the cops in the stakeout van missed his tiptoed exit through the bike room. Lee drove out to the bypass and checked them both into a nice motel.

Around nine A.M., the police cordoned off the house and began a comprehensive search. They interviewed every boy individually, except Byrdie, who was nowhere to be found.

The informant had lived in the house for months, so the boys naturally assumed he had witnessed every drug transaction during that time, along with a majority of instances of drug use. To preempt his accusations, they came clean. They were chatty as sparrows, convinced cooperation buys leniency. They detailed others’ narcotics-related activities and even their own as though they’d never heard of jail. You had to bark “Shut up already!” to get a chance to read them their rights. They would get bored waiting for their lawyers to show up and tell the investigators funny anecdotes about the time they dropped acid and swam in a fountain and campus cops took their clothes. They would get in this angry mood like they wanted their clothes back and could the FBI get on the case.

The Commonwealth’s attorney was getting frustrated. Their crimes were so petty and selfish. Buying a joint to smoke alone in your room! A single hit of ecstasy! He was almost ashamed for them. Had no one taught them to share?

He was the democratically elected head prosecutor of the city of Charlottesville. Since victims outnumber criminals, he favored victims. He knew there is no such thing as a victimless crime, whatever casual drug users might say. A person whose harmless actions are criminalized becomes a victim of the law. That paradox helped him out every day by showing him the unreality of his job.

Mike had confessed in writing to serious crimes. He had given a young girl twelve hits of acid. He had even conspired, he admitted somewhat bashfully, to bestow on her the honors due a fertility goddess, though nothing had come of it. Absolutely no one else had been at fault in any way. His confession was typed and signed, if only because he didn’t believe he had done anything illegal.

Mike was unknowingly committed to civil disobedience. He sincerely believed his persecutors would be exposed as criminals.

But then his parents showed up — nice, working-class folks from Long Island who had sacrificed much to send Mike to a Public Ivy to major in accounting. They alternated standing outside the house in tears and calling the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office from a pay phone to beg for mercy.

Mike asked if he could make another statement. He said he was very sorry for providing false information, but in fact it was Byrdie who had done all those things.

Mike’s fingering Byrdie was the first good news the Commonwealth’s attorney had heard all day. At last a credible suspect: the frat president who had waltzed off at the end of the night with the girl and the drugs, who was incommunicado and well known to the informant as a connoisseur of organic psychedelics.

He had the cops tell the other boys that Mike had accused Byrdie. Now several agreed that the girl’s name was Shadow. Probably an underage townie. No identifying marks. An indistinct person. Not a high school kid, at least eighteen. An anthro major if anything. Came with that freaky African guy who completely lost it at the party. Who on earth let them in? The wizard boy who had let them in remembered that Temple was a Jefferson scholar. A few remembered Byrdie’s barging in on a social event upstairs and spending time alone with the girl. Some remembered him, surely drunk and drugged out of his mind, attacking Mike with a sword, which might explain why Mike was afraid of him. Some remembered Byrdie sneaking the girl away unconscious.

Duly noted, their accounts began slow transmutations into misdemeanor plea bargains, suspended sentences, hours of community service, etc.

The prosecutor relaxed. He thought he could lean back and enjoy playing the big fish on his hook. But a search of Byrdie’s room produced nothing. Not a trace. His Jewish girlfriend had seen to that. Years of pre-Passover training, taking books off shelves to hunt for crumbs. The entire room appeared to have been wiped down. It smelled faintly of bleach.

As the day went on, the prosecutor began to feel a creeping sense of nascent professional embarrassment. He was staging a high-profile drug bust with no drugs. Thinking of the spotless room, he began working up a catchphrase for the press, something about “arrogant shit’s ass on a stick.”

He felt certain the dramaturgy of going to trial against Byrdie would benefit his career and justify his expensive sting operation. There was similar excitement among the rank and file. They might be looking at undreamed-of success: Not penny-ante possession cases, but heavy-duty hard drug dealing. Not just any white kid, but the crème de la crème. Not just drugs, but statutory sexual assault on a minor on drugs! But they needed corroborative evidence. For his own peace of mind, the prosecutor felt he should not lay himself open to charges of failing to question statements by loosely wound kids who may or may not have been tripping when they witnessed various events and/or confessed and/or retracted their confessions. With some it was hard to tell. Mike in particular was such a sweaty-palmed, incoherent little guy anyway. The hard evidence adequate to indict Byrdie was in the pockets and/or bodily cavities of a petite junior female named Shadow, whom it was incumbent on the police to find before she had a chance to excrete certain metabolites or douche her organs. It was still less than forty-eight hours since the party.