God'll Cut You Down (12 page)

“It’s not for broadcast, just so I can transcribe it later.”

“Yes, sir.”

You never really get used to a black person calling you
sir
, I think to myself.

“So, I guess my first question is, what happened with the crime? What actually happened? Between Vincent and Richard?”

“My son was incarcerated, and he got out and Richard was riding his bicycle up and down the road and he seen my son out in the yard and he stopped right here.” Tina points through the wall to the front yard. “And Richard asked him did he want to work for him and my son say yeah, and he went to work for him.”

“So, just a pedal bicycle?” Vallena had said a truck, and I wonder whether the difference makes any difference.

“Yes, sir,” she says. Maybe the truck came later. “And he had brought him home afterward. And that night he come pick him back up and took him down there to his home to get on his computer. And Vincent had told me that he made sexual advances toward him. And pulled a knife on him and stuff like that.”

“So did Richard pull a knife on him or did he pull a knife on Richard?”

“Richard pulled the one on him.”

“Wow.”

Richard in his crummy little house menacing Vincent with a knife. That scene didn’t appear in the district attorney’s version. Or in Vallena Greer’s. I stop worrying about small differences in the stories now that there’s a big one. The Richard I met boasted unconvincingly about “stomping” an anarchist and looked down the wrong end of a gun—can I imagine him actually pulling a knife on anyone? But Richard had been in Vietnam, and Earnest said he’d beaten up a woman, so perhaps I can.

“So after that,” Tina says, “I don’t really know. But that’s what my son told me, that he pulled it on him. So what happened in the house I really don’t know, but he had to defend himself.”

“Were you here when Vincent came back?”

“He came in crying, and said that a man was trying to—like I told you—molest him, and he pulled a knife on him. And I don’t know what happened down in that house because I wasn’t there.”

“Did he have any blood on him?”

“I didn’t see any blood.”

“Did he tell you the nature of the sexual advances?”

“No, sir.”

“Had he been working for Richard a long time?”

“No, sir. He worked with him one other time when he was younger, as I recall. Something like five years ago.”

Five years ago Vincent was sixteen, seventeen. There is a three-year jail stint between the two times he worked for Richard.

The door at the end of the hall opens and shuts, exploding light into the room like a camera flash. Tina’s face lights up, and I’m startled by how young she looks.

“Have you gone to see him since he’s been in jail?” I ask Tina, who has quickly returned to being a shadow.

“They haven’t let me see him. He been writing letters; they will not let his letters come through.”

“Really? Because when I talked to the district attorney he said you would be able to see him if you wanted to.”

“No, sir,” she says, warming up to anger. “I called—what’s his
name?—Eddie Thompson. I think he’s the captain. And he said I had to get a special visit. And he said he would give me one sometime this month. He said he had a lot he was doing right now, but I have called trying to get a visit and they would not let me have one.”

“So, Alfred Lewis—”

“That’s me,” says the darkness.

Lord! How long has he been there? I twist to the voice of Alfred, Vincent’s stepfather. My eyes focus to a silhouette of a slouched man on a couch.

“Hello? Hello,” I say. “You were here when Vincent came in on the night?”

“I was lying on the floor, watching the Cavaliers. Yeah, the Cavaliers and the Mavericks was playing.”

“So what did you tell Vincent?”

“No!” he snaps. “The
Spurs
and the Mavericks was playing for the play-off.”

“Okay. What did Vincent say? Was he crying?”

“Yeah, he were crying a bit. And holding his stomach like that.”

I can’t see the “like that” in the darkness.

I know Alfred led the investigators to Vincent’s hideout. I realize this topic—betrayal—could be a raw nerve.

“Because you knew Vincent was in trouble, were you scared to tell the police where he was? Or were you, like,
We’ve got to tell the truth
?”

“They asked me. I told them where Vincent was. They needed direction where he was, you know?”

Obviously not a raw nerve. It occurs to me that Vincent’s cousin’s still in jail as an accessory, but Alfred, who drove Vincent away, is not.

“Were you close with Vincent?”

“We were close,” Alfred says. “Real nice. In the room, lifting weights in the morning time. We’d mostly stay in the house watching TV.”

“Did Vincent look at you as a father?”

“Yeah, he had good respect.”

“What about Vincent’s real father, who was he?”

“JD,” says Tina, a little reluctant about where this is all going.

Tina tells me she was on and off with JD for eight or nine years, but he left when she was pregnant with Vincent, her only child by him.

Up the hallway, the door opens again, shooting a blade of milky light into the room. I make out a wooden cabinet, with just one china teapot, behind Tina. The door shuts and the cabinet disappears.

“He was in jail twice before,” I say. “Why was Vincent in jail twice before?”

“People told stories on him, say he did something he didn’t do. I didn’t have money to get a lawyer, and they just really railroaded him for something that he didn’t do, that they didn’t prove, they just gave him time for it.”

“The first time would be something to do with the police, like threatening the police?”

“No, sir. Two police had jumped on him and they said he jumped on the two police.”

“Sure, and the second time had something to do with stealing some property or whatever?”

“Mexican money,” she says. “He was going with a girl and he had spent the night with her. She was a white girl, and the mother had some Mexican money that was stolen. And they say he did it, but he was not the only one in the house, and they did not get any Mexican money off of him.”

“Vallena said that for that particular crime, they wanted to get him because they were very angry because he was going out with a white girl.”

“Yes, sir. I think her uncle or her brother was in the police force, and they was mad because he was dating a white girl. And I reckon that’s why they laid that on him, the Mexican money. He wasn’t going to Mexico. What would he need with Mexican money?”

“What was her name, the girlfriend?”

“Daisy.”

“Daisy. And what’s her surname?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Daisy his first girlfriend?”

“I doubt it.”

“You doubt it.” I realize I’m beginning to sound like a lawyer, and Tina is the reluctant witness. “And was that his only white girlfriend?”

“I can’t really say.”

Tina’s eyes drift over to
Jersey Shore
.

“It’s said Vincent said to the police he didn’t know Richard was a famous white supremacist.”

“No one did.”

“So you’d never heard of it?”

“No, sir.”

“How long had you been living next to him?”

“I don’t know when he moved down there, but I been here eight years.”

No wonder Jim Giles believes Richard was a police agent. He was either the world’s most tolerant white separatist, or he had something else going on.

Once again the door at the end of the hall opens and shuts, nuking the room with light, then snapping it back to black.

I feel footsteps vibrating the floorboards. The steps are coming down the hall. The steps are getting closer. The virgin-white singlet and shorts float back into the room like a ghost and fall into the couch next to Alfred. It’s Justin McGee, Vincent’s younger brother.

“Another thing people said about Vincent,” I say, meaning that I read this on an Internet message board, “was the tattoos on his face showed he was in a gang called the Vice Lords.”

“He wasn’t in no gang, no, sir, no,” Tina says. “Not in no gang. He never did no gang stuff. He weren’t in no gang.” Tina touches the bone under her eye. “He had teardrops for his brother that passed when he was, like, a month old, and a butterfly on his face. I don’t see that’s no gang thing.”

“His brother died?” I ask.

“Yeah, that’s why he got the teardrops he had on his face.”

“How did his brother die?”

“Crib death.”

“A crib death? So that’s, like, a gang thing?”

“No, that’s a baby death. Crib death.”

My face heats up. I realize I processed
crib
as
Crips
, the black street gang.
Nice one, Safran, you dickhead.

“My child was not in no gang.” It seems very important to her that I understand this.

I peek at my notepad for more questions, but I can’t see my notepad. I guess I could ask why we’re sitting in the dark.

“What do you know of Vincent’s lawyers?” I improvise. “Precious and Chokwe. Have you spoken to them?”

“Yes, sir. Chokwe, he want to get a continuance on the trial because he said he already got something on when the trial is s’posed to start.”

“Have either Chokwe or Precious said what they are going to argue in court?”

“No, sir, I haven’t heard anything about that.”

“Because Chokwe and also Vallena, they are saying there is, like, a racial component to this. Do you think Richard took the knife to Vincent because he didn’t like black people?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it just that Richard was very messed up in the head, so even though he didn’t like black people, and he wanted to hurt Vincent, he was also sexually attracted to him?”

“Yeah.”

I think this might be called leading the witness. I change direction.

“Is it scary knowing that one of the possible consequences is he gets the death penalty?”

“Yes, sir,” she says flatly.

“Did you know that because Vincent changed his story it made it more damaging for him?”

“No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

I tell her what I was told. When it was a sex attack it was murder, and jail at most. When Vincent changed it to a fight over money, it became
capital murder and the death penalty. I ask her why she thinks Vincent changed his story.

“Scared, that’s all I can say.”

“He was scared?”

“That’s all I can say.”

Because that really is all Tina says, I end up leading again. “You mean the police tried to make him change his story?”

“Yes, sir.”

For the first time, Justin McGee, in his virgin-white singlet and shorts, butts in.

“He didn’t want people to think he was gay. That’s what I think.”

“Sure,” I say. “Because even if he was involuntarily attacked, maybe people in the community would think he was gay?”

“’Cause they had it all on the Internet,” Justin says. “They thought it was a relationship that went bad or something.”

“Do you think that it could have been that, Justin?”

“That’s what I think.”

“You think it was a relationship that went bad?” I blurt excitedly.

“Nuh-uh!” says Tina.

“No,”
Justin corrects me, “I think that’s probably why he
changed his story
.”

“Okay, sorry,” I say. Christ. Do I really want that badly to add gangs or sex to race? Still, to clarify: “Do you think there’s any chance he was in some relationship with Richard? You know, Richard paid him for sexual favors or anything like that?”

“No, sir!” says Tina. Passion courses through Tina’s voice on this particular topic, like nothing else we’ve discussed—not the prison visits, not the gangs, not even the death penalty.

Justin smirks.

“Fair enough,” I say. “And also—because of the violence of that crime—he wasn’t violent when he was growing up, or anything like that?”

Tina shakes a no.

“So were you quite surprised when you heard that he stabbed someone? He stabbed him, like, thirty times.”

Shock bolts through her face.

“Thirty times?” she says.

“I’ve heard between sixteen and thirty times,” I say.

Tina can’t hose down her shock. She seems to have forgotten I asked a question. I feel bad about having said it so bluntly. But I’m puzzled. Haven’t the police spoken with her? Hasn’t she read any reports about the murder her son’s accused of? Hasn’t anyone told her what happened? The best thing I can do is move on.

“I’m trying to get a picture in my head of who he is,” I say. Vincent never replied to my Facebook message, but I want to get a sense of him for the murder in my mind. “I’ve never met him. When did he leave school?”

“He left school,” Tina says, “he got the tenth grade.”

“When he was young, did he have interests? Like, was he into sports or music, or anything like that, or guns?”

“Basketball and stuff like that . . . sports.”

“Did he follow a particular team or did he like any particular player?”

Tina shrugs.

“And what about, like, movies? Did he like a particular sort of movies or particular actors?”

“He liked regular movies.”

“And what about music?”

“He liked regular music.”

“Did he spend lots of time in other places, like a bit of an explorer, an adventurer, so even when he was young, he would kind of go off and just do his own thing for days?”

“He was a homebody.”

“So what did he do at home all that time?”

“Watch TV.”

“What were his favorite TV shows?”

“Regular TV.”

Tina’s shut me out, maybe still dealing with the stabs. I ask a couple more aimless questions, and then realize I’m done. Who can complain about a mother wanting to think the best of her son? I crack my neck and thank Tina and the silhouettes of Alfred and Justin.

Tina says I can come back and ask more questions anytime I want. Despite everything, I think she even means it.

The sun clobbers me on the short walk from the side door of the house to the car. It’s pushed its heat into the concrete, too, so I’m hit from above and below, through my soles.

I burn my palm on the car door, opening up and sliding in.