The Fact of a Body Read online

  For a flickering second Ricky looks up. When Dixon sees his eyes, he knows. Their pupils are as wide as buckshot. Dixon’s got him.

  “I want you to look me in the eye”—Ricky looks away—“no, I want you to look me in the eye, Ricky, and tell me whether you know anything about Jeremy Guillory’s disappearance.”

  A shudder ripples across Ricky’s shoulders. Like the rattle a body makes when giving up.

  Then, suddenly: “I did it.” Ricky exhales. “I did it, I did it, I don’t know why I did it but I did it.” He drops his head to his hands. Just like that. That simple. Three days, and it’s over like that. Done.

  “Where’s the body?” Dixon says.

  “My closet. In my bedroom.”

  Without a word Dixon turns and exits the car. Shuts and locks the door behind him.

  Which leaves Ricky alone in the cruiser, having just confessed to murder.

  What does he think of? That night—the night he killed Jeremy—when all of the parents had collected their children and gone home, and Pearl had told him that maybe he should leave town, her face turned down as if she couldn’t bear to look at him, and she’d gone to lie next to her husband on the mattress in the living room, Ricky went back up alone to his bedroom in the dark. Joey and June were asleep in their bedrooms across the hall. The house was quiet. Ricky sat on the bed and he listened to the quiet.

  It was the first time in hours he’d been alone, the first time since Jeremy had rung the bell that afternoon. He couldn’t go to sleep—his heart was too keyed up for that—and he kept thinking of Jeremy. Thinking of how his eyes had been open when Ricky had grabbed him, and how they’d closed, as though on their own. He knew it was impossible, but sitting in his bedroom, knowing the boy was in the closet, he kept thinking he heard breathing. He kept imagining those eyes opening. Someone was watching him.

  There was a staircase off the back of his bedroom that led twenty feet straight into the woods. If Ricky wanted to get rid of the body.

  But instead, in the middle of the night, he crept downstairs to the kitchen and took a roll of aluminum foil. He taped and foiled his two bedroom windows, so the light was blocked.

  He couldn’t say who he didn’t want to see him, why he needed those windows gone. It was just that he needed the world smaller, closed and tight around him.

  That’s the feeling that must come back to Ricky now, in the cruiser, the clear bright winter sun beating through the windows, the inside of the car heating up. If the world could just stay this small, suspended. He stays inside the feeling for a long time, he doesn’t know how long.

  Until Dixon returns and says, “We’re going to the house.”

  * * *

  For days the street has been crowded with people, with dogs and police troopers and truck hitches for the search boats. But when Dixon and Lucky pull the cruiser up now, the street is empty. Ricky’s cuffed in the back, his head still tucked forward.

  “This is the house,” Lucky says. Dixon knows to stand down. This will be Lucky’s case after all. “The boy’s in there,” Lucky says. It’s not a question, but he looks at Ricky anyway.

  Ricky raises his head slightly. Nods.

  “All right,” says Lucky. “Let’s go.”

  Lucky doesn’t call an ambulance. He doesn’t rush. Later he’ll bring this moment up on the witness stand, tell the jury that of course he didn’t rush, he knew the child was dead. Repeat it twice, as if he’s justifying the decision to himself. It’s an odd moment to thorn into him, an odd moment for him to come back to. The boy was dead. Rushing wouldn’t have mattered any. Lucky could’ve called an ambulance, he could have run right in, he could even have skipped hunting the day before, and it wouldn’t have mattered: Jeremy was dead. Funny where the mind wants to lodge. Funny where it wants to think it can make a difference.

  Lucky gets out of the car.

  * * *

  The deputy who shows up with the video camera has pimples on his cheeks, that’s how young he is. Or at least that’s how I see him now, as I read the transcript. For the next few hours, this man will frame everything recorded through the camera’s viewfinder. He is the only person present who doesn’t say anything on tape, doesn’t react, just records. He is a mystery in this transcript, but—think what he sees. What he’s required to take in. I’d rather imagine him new to this; I’d rather think his eyes go wide. I see his skin scraped raw with razor burn and his neck as skinny as a chicken’s.

  Dixon sizes him up, shakes his head. Already he and the police photographers have been up to the bedroom to photograph the scene. It’s fine that the department’s started to add video, but they treat it like a shit job for the new cops.

  “You ready?” Dixon says. I see him snap on latex gloves and unfold a clear bag marked EVIDENCE. The kid had better have seen a dead body before. The last thing they need is the cameraman getting sick.

  “Ready,” the boy says. He doesn’t sound it.

  “I’ll get the suspect,” Lucky says—his words suddenly formal, now that there’s going to be a tape.

  When Lucky comes back he’s got Ricky beside him, cuffed. Ricky’s shuffling along, won’t look up. He flat-out stops at the front door. Then he crosses the threshold.

  “Roll the tape,” Lucky says.

  It’s on.

  “What I want you to do now,” Lucky starts, then stops. “What I want you to do now, Jeremy—”

  (This little slip, calling Ricky by his victim’s name, is the only sign Lucky is nervous. The only sign of how big this moment is for him. Later the transcription clerk will mark it with “[sic].”)

  “We’ll let the cameraman follow you inside and I want you to take me up to the room where this happened and I want you to show him the room and I don’t want you to touch anything, OK? I know there’s some guns in here and, like I say, I don’t want you to touch anything.”

  Lucky looks expectantly at Ricky.

  “Uh-huh,” says Ricky.

  They go.

  It’s a tight fit, the three of them walking up the staircase, the cameraman right behind Ricky. The film will be dim on the television screen later, their bodies almost shadows, Ricky’s black shirt a spot of dark night in the dusky light. The camera angle makes the ceiling seem lower. The walls tighter. The men climb wordlessly, one crisp step after another. They reach the bedroom.

  “In here?” says Lucky.

  Ricky nods, then remembers he’s supposed to answer out loud. “Yeah.”

  “You got anything to add before we go in?” Lucky says to Dixon.

  “Yeah, gimme a minute,” Dixon says. Maybe now that the moment’s about to go down, he’s got doubts about handing it over to Lucky. This was his find. He’s the one who told Lucky to get moving, wasn’t he? He’s the one who got Ricky to confess. Or maybe he just wants to make sure, again, that the arrest stays airtight. Whatever the reason, he goes through it all again. Says, “Ricky, when you were arrested back up at the gas station and you got in the car with me, did I ever threaten you, or anything like that?”

  Ricky shakes his head. Then: “Nuh-uh.”

  “Was I polite to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I just said, ‘Ricky look me in the eyes man to man,’ and I advised you of your rights. And everything you said to me was voluntary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then.” Dixon nods to Lucky. They’re ready.

  The men step into the room. “Cut the tape,” Lucky says, and the boy fumblingly obliges. Then to Ricky: “Show me the closet.” Ricky starts to move. “No, don’t walk over there. Point at it.”

  Ricky does.

  “The child’s in there?” Dixon again. He knows the answer. He was up here before, when Lucky went to get Ricky. But he’s watching Ricky now. Watching the small lines of distress that have started to crack through his body.

  “Yeah,” Ricky says.

  “He’s just in there, or—”

  “I got him in some blankets.”


  Lucky steps forward and motions for Dixon and Ricky to leave the room. Then he walks to the closet. Its door is white, chipped paint with a dirt crust. It’s wide-open. Inside there’s a bundle of blankets. Not really in the shape of a body. Just a bundle. He waits until he can feel the cameraman behind him. He nods. The camera starts recording again. Lucky speaks each word carefully and slowly. “It’s 3:35 p.m. We are back in the room. The date is February 10, 1992. We are back in the southeast bedroom of Ricky Langley and our photo division has finished taking their still photographs and we are about to remove the blanket or quilt or whatever it is that Ricky Langley advises that he covered the body up with.”

  He shines a flashlight into the closet. The beam cuts through, touching the bundle with yellow. Then it moves to the side so the camera can see the shape. Lucky steps back into the frame, reaches in. “We are going to put this—it is a Tweety Bird curtains or bedspread I place in this bag.”

  The tape is awkward from this point on. Lucky narrates every step. He must want so badly to get it right. He lifts layer after layer and each time shows the blanket to the camera before putting it in the bag.

  But see that first bag, waiting in the corner to be taped up, the plastic bag with EVIDENCE written right across it, no doubt what’s in the bag? It will be mislabeled, and switched with a bag of clothes cut carefully from Jeremy later. See the bag Lucky fills next? It will be mislabeled, too, and combined with a bag that contains nothing of significance.

  I’ve seen a clip of this tape. I’ve watched Ricky and Lucky and Dixon climb the porch steps of the Lawson house—seen Ricky, with his hands bound, walk to the front door Jeremy had walked through a few days before. The confession that was shown to me at the law firm, the tape that launched me into this story, was filmed right after this, when Dixon and Lucky brought Ricky back to the police station. He looked like a rabbit, his eyes darting, the handcuffs just restraining him locked at the waist. The rest of his words come through the staccato flash-time of memory, as though my body could absorb only in jolts, in gulps with swallowed black in between.

  Only the transcript—only looking at it now—settles the memory.

  The blue blanket is the last sheet Lucky lifts on the tape. “Covering the lower portion of the victim is a blue bedspread with some figure on it—maybe Dick Tracy with a gun in his hand, multicolored. At this time we are removing it and we see the remainder of our victim.”

  The camera doesn’t linger. It catches the blond hair and then falters in the face of the boy. But on Jeremy’s lip right now—too small for the camera to catch, and no one’s looking at him that closely, no one wants to look at a body that closely—there is a single dark pubic hair.

  When they cut the samples from Jeremy’s white T-shirt, the samples Calton Pitre will remember for decades, they’ll find semen stains on his shirt. That semen will match Ricky’s. But this hair on his lip? It isn’t Ricky’s. They’ll test it twice. Twice the answer will come back: not Ricky’s.

  Ricky killed Jeremy; that we know for sure. And the pubic hair might have just fallen off a blanket. But those blankets don’t belong only to Ricky. There’s too many of them. They must be from Joey’s and June’s beds, too. Maybe the hair could have been transferred to them in the laundry.

  But maybe not. Does the hair belong to Terry, who, right this moment, is still alive, has not taken his son for a ride, is out of the house at an unknown location while the police perform their search? Does the hair belong not to the convicted sex predator, the one people now know to fear, but to the father who may secretly be a predator, too?

  Lucky keeps narrating. “You can observe a sock which appears to be in the mouth of the victim. Our victim is dressed in a white T-shirt, light blue or turquoise sweatpants with a yellow stripe around the bottom, white socks and the boots that the mother said he was dressed in were here.”

  Teal. Lorilei describes those sweatpants as teal. Four days ago she lifted them from the dryer and folded them, matching the edges of their waistband together, creasing the small legs into a careful package. She stacked it with that T-shirt. She took the clothes to the dresser she and Jeremy were sharing at Melissa’s and she laid the pants down in the bottom drawer, the T-shirt in the drawer above. She laid them down carefully. As if she were laying down a child.

  All these clothes Jeremy is wearing—all these pieces of evidence—have history. The evidence holds the life they had together. It holds her love.

  “Also, in the corner of the closet,” Dixon continues, “you can see the BB gun. Which the mother described as belonging to the victim, Jeremy.”

  Back in the station, Lorilei brings her head to her hands and sobs.

  Ten

  New Jersey, 1986

  I have only the barest of retellings of this next story to work from—told to me once by my mother years afterward and never repeated—with little memory of my own to offer. So let me construct the story from these traces. It is the year after my mother told us about Jacqueline. Now we are on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, where we have rented a house for the summer and have brought my grandparents with us. Elize is four years old, a doll of a child, with long blond curls and a kewpie nose. Lately she’s been modeling for the British clothing company owned by friends of my parents, and she wears, now, one of the white flounced dresses the company favors. Perhaps she has on the one with the green satin sash that matches her eyes. It is early evening, and the house bustles with activity as the adults dress for dinner. My sister has wandered off, a rare moment alone, and she climbs up on one of the grand upholstered chairs of the house’s formal living room. It was a captain’s home in the island’s whaling days, and dark oil portraits of his long-dead daughters line the walls, each with a dour expression and a golden name placard screwed beneath her: PRUDENCE VIRTUE CHASTITY. My sister turns around to look at each of the funny faces and makes a face back at one of them. She tries to imagine what she’s been told: that each one was once a child, just like she is.

  In her fist, she grips a prize recently acquired: a five-dollar bill.

  My mother walks in from the kitchen, a glass of red wine in her hand, her hair still wound around white plastic rollers, her black dress still unfastened in the back. “There you are!” she says. She sips the wine distractedly. Then, noticing: “Sweetie, where did you get the money?” She must be thinking my sister took it from her open purse or from her dresser drawer. An innocent mistake, cause enough for a gentle lesson.

  But: “Grandpa gave it to me” is what my sister says.

  “Oh?” my mother asks. She still thinks this will be a sweet story. There is a penny candy store on the island where one cent will buy a single sticky Swedish Fish or a gummy bear, and already my grandfather has taken us there once, and paid a quarter each for us to fill white paper sacks. He indulges us, just as he did my mother and her brothers while they were growing up. He always had candies in his pockets for them. My sister is too little for the tooth fairy, but maybe, my mother reasons, she got the five dollars by fetching his cap for him, or his cane. My mother decides to play along. “And how did you earn that?” she says.

  “I sat on his lap,” my sister answers.

  The whispers that follow are sheathed knives, fierce contained urgency. Voices are not raised; doors stay closed. Behind one, I am questioned, and I know to keep my voice low, that my parents do not want my grandfather, grandmother, or brother to hear. I answer simply. Yes, my grandfather has touched me. Yes, it’s been happening for years. They ask more questions—where, what do I remember, what did I see around me—to determine how long. Five years is the answer. I begin to cry. Not because of what happened. But because now my mother knows. Some part of me has been waiting for this—but more of me is terrified. I am convinced that we will all be safe if she just does not know this about her father. I am convinced it is my job to save her from that. That to say out loud that a father is capable of this would be the most terrible thing.

  They ask enough quest
ions of me, then my sisters, to determine the loose outline. Then we all go to dinner.

  * * *

  Can this be? Can this be right? Can they lead us all to a big round restaurant table laid with a red-and-white-checked cotton tablecloth—the restaurant we go to in these years has my grandfather’s name, Vincent’s—and pull out a chair for the man about whom they have just learned this? Can they sit across from the woman, his wife, my grandmother, whom they will decide to keep this secret from to protect? How many times during that dinner do they see my grandfather’s hands, and wonder what those hands have done?

  Or am I mistaking my own interest in the past for theirs? Can my parents sit across from him and never, never imagine the actions that lie behind the words they have been told, never see the story unspool before them?

  I know only what happens next: My parents never tell my grandfather what they have learned. They never tell my grandmother, either. They give, somehow, no sign that anything is wrong. We finish the vacation. We go home to the gray Victorian house. My parents stop asking my grandparents to spend the night, and the abuse stops without anyone’s saying anything. They arrange the memory as carefully as a script.

  And from there, as before, my father drives the big gray Chevrolet across the George Washington Bridge and into the Queens neighborhood where my mother grew up. As before, he pulls in front of the burgundy-awning door of the brick row house where my mother was a child, where my grandfather waits, a newsboy cap on his head, a vinyl jacket pulled around him, ready for his outing. My father holds out his hand to my grandfather and accepts the wooden cane with the other. As before, my father gives the old man his shoulder to lean on, and they creep their way to the car. He hoists my grandfather up over the running boards, then tucks the cane beneath the seat. My father slams the chassis door, walks over to the driver’s side. He carries my grandfather back over the bridge to us.

  The people in this story still want to believe they can control the past, wipe it clean just as a crime scene is scrubbed. They want to believe that that scene, scrubbed, becomes just a bedroom. My parents tell me now that they had consulted a psychologist who told them that the best thing they could do for their children was to model unaffectedness. Model that what happened had no impact.