Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“Who is we? Who was with you?”

“My roommate,” I said.

“And her name is?”

“Julianne Benton.”

DI Young wrote something else on her form.

“So you and your roommate snuck out of your building . . .”

I wanted to tell her to keep it down, but you can’t tell the police not to broadcast your business so you don’t get in trouble.

“. . . and you saw a man just after two in the morning. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

She made another note.

“And you’re sure of the time?”

“Well,” I said, “the news kept saying that the fourth victim in 1888 was found at one forty-five. We were on the roof watching the news on Jerome’s computer—”

“Jerome?” she asked.

Now I’d gotten Jerome into it.

“Jerome,” I repeated. “He lives in Aldshot.”

“Exactly how many of you were there?”

“Three,” I said. “Me, Jazza, and Jerome. We went to see Jerome in his building, and then the two of us came back.”

More writing.

“And you were watching the news at one forty-five.”

“Right. And they . . . I mean, I guess, you . . . didn’t find a body. So we waited for a while, about ten minutes or so, then Jazza wanted to go home, because it was creepy. So we ran across the square—”

“You crossed the square at two in the morning?”

“Yes,” I said, shrinking in my chair.

Detective Young pulled her chair in a little closer, and her expression grew a bit more serious. She nodded for me to go on.

“We had just gotten to the back window of Hawthorne and were climbing in, and this guy walked around the corner of the building. And he asked if we were supposed to be doing that—climbing back in the window. And I said it was okay, because we went there. He was creepy.”

“Creepy how?”

The more I thought about it, the less I could explain why the guy was so creepy, aside from the fact that he was hanging around the school. There was just something about him that made my brain twitch and gave me the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t be there. The guy was just wrong in every way . . . but that is not an explanation.

There’s something witnesses do that my parents had explained to me many times. Once witnesses find out that what they’ve seen might be important—that it might have something to do with a crime—their brains get out the crayons and start coloring things in, making things seem moody and suspicious and full of meaning when it’s entirely possible that nothing was going on. The noise in the night that you thought was a car backfiring is now clearly a gunshot. That guy you saw at the store at two in the morning buying lots of trash bags? At the time, you thought little of him. But now that he’s on trial for killing someone and chopping up the body in the tub, you remember that he was nervous and sweaty and shifty and maybe even splattered with blood. And you won’t be lying, either. The mind does this. It constantly rewrites our memories to accommodate new facts. This is why police and lawyers break people down to make sure witnesses report the facts and nothing but the facts.

In short, I felt I should have been better at being questioned by the police. I’d practically been trained for this. What I’d seen was a guy walking past our window. He could have been completely innocent. But still, all I had was “creepy.” If pushed, I could add “icky.” Out of place. Incorrect.

“Just . . . creepy.”

“Then what happened?” she asked.

“He said something about how we shouldn’t be out, and then Jazza came to the window and helped me inside.”

“And what happened to the man?”

“He walked away.”

“What did he look like?” she asked.

“He was, I don’t know . . .”

What did people look like? Suddenly I didn’t know how to describe anything.

“He was in a suit. A gray suit. And it was kind of weird . . .”

“In what way?”

“It just looked . . . weird. Old—”

“He was an old man?”

“No,” I said quickly. “His suit looked kind of old . . . ish.”

“In what way? Was it very worn?”

“No,” I said. “It looked new, but old. Just . . . I . . . I don’t know much about suits. Not super old. Not, like, historic. Kind of like . . . something on Frasier ? Or Seinfeld or something? You know, the show? It was like a suit out of a nineties sitcom. The jacket was kind of long and big.”

She hesitated, then wrote this down.

“Right, then,” she said patiently. “How old would you say he was?”

I imagined Uncle Bick, without his beard, maybe forty pounds lighter, in a suit. That was about right. Uncle Bick was thirty-eight or thirty-nine.

“Thirties, maybe? Forty?”

“All right. Hair color?”

“No hair,” I said quickly. “Bald.”

We ran through every option—tall, short, fat, thin, glasses, facial hair. In the end, I painted a portrait of a man of average height and weight, with no facial hair or distinguishing characteristics, who was bald and wore a suit that seemed to me a little out of date. And since it was dark and “crazy” isn’t an accepted eye color, I couldn’t help much on that front either.

“Stay here for just a moment,” she said.

She went away. I shivered and looked around. A few of the officers who were working in the library glanced over at me as I sat alone at the table. No one else, it seemed, had come in to report anything. It was just me. When she returned, she was wearing a tan raincoat and she had Inspector Cole with her. Up on the dais, Inspector Cole looked much younger. Up close, I could see fine wrinkles around his eyes. He had a steady, unwavering stare.

“We’d like you to show us exactly where you saw this man,” she said.

Two minutes later, we were on the sidewalk outside Hawthorne, staring up at the bathroom window. The screws were still on the ground. It was only now that I realized that we’d left our entire building vulnerable. A sloshy, queasy feeling came over me.

“So,” DI Young said, “show us exactly where you were.”

I positioned myself right under the window.

“And where was the man?” she asked.

“Right about where you are,” I said.

“So, quite close. Within ten feet.”

“Yes.”

“And your roommate?”

This was the first time DCI Cole had spoken to me. He was staring at me unblinkingly, judging me, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

“Was right here,” I said, pointing up at the window.

“So she saw him as well.”

“No,” I said. The queasy feeling got worse.

“She didn’t see him? But she was right in the window, wasn’t she?”

“I guess she was just looking at me.”

DCI Cole bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, looked from me to the window and back again, then waved DI Young to the side and spoke to her quietly. Then he walked away without another word.

“Let’s go back inside and go through this again,” she said.

So I returned to the library with Detective Young. I was given a cup of coffee once we sat down, and another officer came over and sat with us. I never got his name, but he typed a lot into a laptop as I spoke. The questions were more detailed this time. How did we get out of the building? Had we been drinking? Did anyone see us leave?

“We want to do an E-fit,” Detective Young finally said. “Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head wearily.

“It’s a way of producing digital images of suspects based on witness reports. Those pictures you see on the news? Those are E-fit pictures. We’re just going to go through your story one more time. You provide us with all the details you can remember. We enter them into a program that creates a digital image of a face, which we can then refine until it looks like the man you say you saw. All right?”