As Dog Is My Witness (22 page)

“Uh-huh.” Justin might be a little farther down the
continuum than Ethan. There are degrees of everything, and no two
people are alike.

“So, did you kill that guy?” he asked, breaking the
ice with a sledgehammer rather than a well-placed pick and a little
melting action. Ethan’s social skills needed a little work.

We walked into Justin’s room. Mary had winced at the
question, but it didn’t seem to bother Justin at all. I guess he’d
been asked it so much lately, he had a conditioned response all
set, and people with AS love nothing better than a conditioned
response.

“Yeah.”

Ethan’s eyes widened a little, but he nodded.
“Why?”

That seemed to take Justin by surprise. “I don’t
know,” he answered. What did that mean? That he killed Michael
Huston and didn’t know why, or that the people who had told him to
confess to the crime hadn’t bothered giving him a motivation?

“That’s pretty weird,” Ethan said.

“Yeah,” Justin agreed.

Ethan looked around the room. “You don’t have any
video games?” he said.

“No. I don’t like them. The guns don’t operate
realistically.” Justin’s reasons for likes and dislikes centered
around his special interest.

Since Ethan’s special interest is more vague—he’s
into video games and TV shows—it’s easier for him to relate to
other things, but not as much as people who don’t have AS.

“My dad says you really like guns. How come you like
guns so much?” Ethan asked.

Mary and I stayed in the doorway, but Justin and
Ethan were acting like we weren’t there, so it didn’t seem to
matter much.

“I don’t know,” Justin said. “Guns are just so cool.
They do exactly what they’re supposed to do.” This is key in the
Asperger world—you can depend on something to be predictable, to be
exactly what you expect it to be all the time. There’s great
comfort in that. Little kids who have AS often don’t like toys that
start out as one thing and transform into something else— they find
that upsetting.

“How’d you get the old gun, the one that guy got shot
with?” Nice question, Ethan. Something I’ve been wondering
myself.

“I don’t know,” Justin said. For a guy who knew a
lot, he didn’t seem to know much about the most crucial night of
his life. “I just found it here in my room that day.”

I blinked a couple of times. “Wait a minute, Justin,”
I said. “You mean the gun just
showed up
here in your room
on the very day Michael Huston was shot?”

Justin looked startled, having forgotten the adults
in the room. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and
Ethan gave me a look that said, “Nice work, Dad.”

“I . . .  I . . .  I
. . . 

“Did it have, like, ammo and everything with it when
you found it?” Ethan had made a remarkable leap of understanding,
something he wasn’t supposed to be able to do, exhibiting something
close to empathy. It was my turn to be startled, but would Ethan’s
questioning work?

“The black powder and the ball were there,” Justin
said. “I had to come up with my own fabric patch, but that was
easy. I just cut a corner off my pillow case.”

Ethan closed the door to the room so they wouldn’t be
further disturbed by the clumsy adults, and I marveled again at his
read of the situation. This boy had potential I hadn’t recognized
before.

Mary looked at me a moment, and gestured toward the
living room. We headed in that direction.

“Your son is quite remarkable,” she said. “You said
he has Asperger’s too?”

I nodded. “Yes, but he’s surprising me in there.
Sometimes, you don’t know your own children as well as you
think.”

I hadn’t intended that to sound the way it did, and
Mary looked at the floor a moment. “I’m sorry.” I said. “That came
out wrong.”

“It’s all right,” she answered. “You didn’t mean it
like that. But it’s been very difficult.”

We sat on the sofa again, and I decided that if my
son was making progress with Justin in the other room, he had damn
well better have something to report when we got back into the car,
or I’d never live it down. “Have you heard from Kevin?” I asked
Mary.

She nodded. “Yes, he’s back in Indiana,” she said.
“He has exams, so he rode the bike all night and he’s back there.
He said he’d come home as soon as exams are over.”

“Did he say if he placed Justin’s bail?”

“All he said was that I shouldn’t worry about it,”
she answered. “I don’t like the way that sounds.”

Exams? This close to Christmas? That didn’t seem very
American. This country comes to such a grinding halt at Yuletide
that if aliens arrived from space on or near December 25th, we’d
probably ask them to come back after New Year’s. But I didn’t press
the point with Mary.

“What does Justin’s lawyer say?” My first rule is: if
the conversation gets uncomfortable, and that’s not what you’re
going for, change the subject. Okay, maybe that’s not the
first
rule, but it’s a rule.

“That I should have Justin declared incompetent, and
then contend he’s not able to stand trial.” Mary’s contempt for
that idea was evident in her voice. “Justin’s different, but he’s
not incompetent.”

“It’s never easy, is it?” I said, implicitly offering
support as one Asperger parent to another.

“It never is,” she agreed. “Justin’s father left when
he was six and Kevin was three. He couldn’t take the way Justin
was. He didn’t want to accept the fact that it wasn’t anyone’s
fault . . .  because if there really was something
wrong with Justin, he figured maybe it had come from him. And that
wasn’t going to be the truth, no matter what.”

On first diagnosis of AS, a lot of parents go into
denial, and most of them come out of it eventually. Some don’t.
Most of the ones who go into denial, I’m afraid, are fathers.
Sometimes, I’m not especially proud of my gender.

“I feel like apologizing for all fathers,” I told
Mary.

“Don’t,” she said. “He wasn’t a nice guy before,
either.” And then she didn’t say anything for a few moments.

“How do you think Justin got the gun?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Mary said after a thought. “He’s
been consistent in saying he found it in his room, but I know
that’s not true. He’s covering something up, but that’s the
confusing part. It’s not like him. He doesn’t have enough guile to
be deceptive in any real way.”

“Does he have any friends—anybody who might be using
him to cover up for themselves?” A kid with Asperger’s in the
Midwest almost took the rap for counterfeiting because guys he
thought were his friends told him he wouldn’t get into trouble.
Another young man, in England, took “samples” home from his job at
the jewelry store because “friends” thought it would be a good
idea. But Mary shook her head, “no.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
Meanwhile, raucous laughter from Justin’s room convinced me the
guys were getting along just fine.

“Sounds like they’ve found some common ground,” Mary
said.

“Justin seems like a nice kid,” I told her, and she
looked surprised.

“A lot of parents wouldn’t want their son to hang
around with an accused murderer,” she said, reminding me of Abby’s
comments the night before.

“If I thought he was a murderer, I wouldn’t be crazy
about it, either,” I told her. “I just wish I could figure some of
this out.”

The door to Justin’s room opened, and Ethan walked
out, still doing that high-pitched braying he thinks sounds like a
laugh. Asperger’s kids sometimes simulate the emotions they think
they’re supposed to be having, and Ethan had gotten into the habit
of pretending to laugh. By now, it was hard to tell these attempts
from the real thing.

“See you, Justin,” he said over his shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” came the response.

Ethan walked to me and tapped me on the shoulder like
he was Jimmy Cagney and I was Pat O’Brien or some other sidekick in
this picture.

“We found out what we need to here,” he said. “Let’s
go see the widow.”

“
J
ustin didn’t find the gun
in his room,” Ethan told me in the car. “He didn’t?” I was reduced
to straight lines like this because I was stunned by my son’s
newfound ability to take command of a situation.

“No. He found it in the base of the grandfather’s
clock in his living room, and he found it there after the guy was
shot. He didn’t want to tell anybody because he figured whoever
left it there would get into trouble.”

It certainly wasn’t Mary Fowler, and if Justin hadn’t
put the gun there himself, that left only Kevin. But Kevin was in
Indiana, right?

“What was he doing looking in the grandfather clock?”
I asked.

“He and his brother used to hide things in there when
they were little, and Justin hides some magazines from his mom in
there.” I didn’t need to ask what kind of magazines. Hormones do
not discriminate against people with AS.

“How did you get him to tell you this?” I asked
Ethan, genuinely interested.

“It was easy,” he said. “I just got him talking about
guns, because that’s what he likes.”

“When I got him talking about guns, he wouldn’t tell
me anything,” I told Ethan.

“You’re a grownup,” my son informed me. Strangely, it
was the first time I’d been accused of such a thing in quite some
time.

“Why are we going to Karen Huston’s house?” I asked.
Amazingly, I’d been recast. No longer in the role of Sam Spade, I
was now playing Dr. Watson to my son’s Sherlock Holmes.

“We need to find out why she thinks her husband was
in the Mafia.” Ethan hadn’t ever seen the
Godfather
movies
or
The Sopranos
, so his view of organized crime came from
Fat Tony on
The Simpsons
and Edward G. Robinson parodies in
Bugs Bunny cartoons. Pop culture references guide our lives—and
his, too.

“Why? I’ve talked to the gangsters, and
I
think her husband was involved with them. What difference does it
make why
she
thinks so?”

He glossed over the idea that his father had been
consorting with gangsters, since he wasn’t really listening to what
I was saying.

“Because she’s hiding something,” my son said.

“And you think you can get her to tell you.”

“Justin told me.”

“Justin has Asperger’s. You know how to talk to him.
What are you going to say to Mrs. Huston?”

But he had lapsed back into mumbling to himself. I
caught the words “Spider-Man” and “evil plot.”

After about five minutes of self-immersion, he turned
to me abruptly. “Why doesn’t Dylan like me?” he asked.

“What makes you think . . . 

“
Dad
,” he said, exasperated.

“Okay,” I admitted. “Dylan doesn’t like you. Do you
like Dylan?”

He thought about it. “I don’t know Dylan,” he
concluded. “Dylan doesn’t like you because he doesn’t know you,
either,” I said.

“I’m not always making fun of him,” he pointed
out.

I sighed. “We’ve talked about this before, Ethan,” I
said. “People make fun of what they don’t understand. Dylan thinks
you’re weird, and he can’t figure out why, so he makes himself feel
better by making fun of you. There’s not much we can do about it
except point out when he’s being a jerk.”

“He’s always being a jerk.”

“Maybe you do know if you don’t like Dylan.” He
laughed.

Ethan was silent the rest of the way to Karen
Huston’s house. He didn’t mutter, either. I think he was digesting.
I know I was.

Karen was, naturally, surprised to see us, since I
hadn’t known we were coming, either. I was surprised, because
Rezenbach was there, dressed in a way he must have considered
casual—a blue blazer, gray slacks, and a light blue button-down
shirt. He had clearly lightened up by not wearing a tie. It would
be rude to say he looked as relaxed as Jackie Mason at a Hitler
Youth rally. So I won’t say it.

I was too busy, anyway, wondering what Karen’s lawyer
was doing in her house on a Saturday, dressed like he was about to
go cruising with his wife Lovey, Gilligan, and the Skipper,
too.

There wasn’t much time to think about that, because
Dalma was advancing on me. This time, though, the dog wasn’t
growling, wasn’t baring teeth, wasn’t even looking the least bit
adversarial. In fact, bouncing toward Ethan and me, she looked
downright friendly.

“Don’t worry about her,” Karen said. “She knows you
now. It usually takes three or four visits, and then she’s your
best friend.”

“She doesn’t know
me
,” my son helpfully
pointed out. There is no one better than a twelve-year-old with
Asperger’s at puncturing any sense you might have that you know
anything.

“She loves kids,” Karen said. “She likes them the
first time she meets them. And she can spot the mean ones, so I
know she’s going to like you.”