Hit and Run (19 page)

There had to be something. That's the thing that rooted itself in my mind. There had to be something because, otherwise, why would Billy be so worried? If there was no way the cops could find anything, why would Billy want me to get Riel to back off? Why would he even admit to me what he had done?

My brain just about exploded.

Billy was worried. He was worried because he thought the cops would uncover something if they dug
deep enough. That's why he wanted me to stop Riel. And if I didn't stop Riel …

I stood in the middle of nowhere, shaking when I thought about it.

If Billy wanted me to stop Riel, then it could mean only one thing. Whatever Billy had done—or not done—he knew more than he had told me. He was hiding something. But what? Had he lied when he said he didn't see who had dropped off the car at the garage? Was he afraid to tell because he was afraid of what that person might do to him—more afraid than of what the police might do? Maybe it was something different from what Billy had said. Maybe he'd got mixed up in a car-theft ring. Whatever it was, I was going to get it out of him. I turned around and started walking back.

It was nearly suppertime by the time I got out of the park, and my appetite had returned. I dug in my pockets. At the first corner store I passed, I bought a meat patty and ate it in about two bites. I was hiking along Cosburn, heading home, wondering what was in the fridge, when a police cruiser slid by, going in the opposite direction. It passed me, then did a U-turn and pulled up beside me. One of the cops got out.

“What's your name, son?” he asked.

“Why?” I hadn't done anything wrong.

He didn't get mad, and there was something funny about the way he was looking at me.

“What's your name?” he said again.

I told him.

“You need to come with us, Mike,” he said. “You're wanted at home.”

What? Billy had called the cops on me?

“What for?” I asked.

“They'll explain it to you there,” the cop said. He opened the back car door for me. “Come on, Mike.”

I got in. The other cop, the one who wasn't driving, radioed that they had me. Then nobody said anything. We just rolled along Cosburn, down to Danforth and then down my street.

There was another police car outside my house, and a police truck. On the side it said Forensic Identification. I saw Riel standing on the street, talking to one of the uniformed officers. He turned when he saw the squad car and came over and opened the door for me. I forgot about being mad at him. Mostly I was glad to see him. “What are you doing here?” I said.

“I went to the funeral this morning. You didn't show up, so I came by to see if everything was okay. When I got here, they were here.” He nodded at the cops.

“What's the matter?” I asked. “What's going on?”

“It's your uncle,” he said.

“What about Billy?” I asked. Then, because I couldn't think of anything else that made sense, I said, “Did they arrest him?”

Riel shook his head. He led me over to his car and opened the passenger side door.

“Sit down, Mike,” he said.

I sat, my legs sticking out the open door.

Riel glanced back at the house. Then he said, “Billy's dead.”

I laughed. It was automatic, because the first thing that popped into my head was: this is a joke. Except that Riel didn't even crack a smile.

“I'm sorry, Mike,” he said.

That's when I knew he wasn't kidding.

“But … what happened?” I asked.

Riel shook his head. “I don't know yet. The Ident guys are inside. And there's a couple of homicide detectives who are going to want to talk to you.”

Homicide? “Someone
killed
Billy?”

“Homicide gets called whenever there's a suspicious death,” Riel said. “Sometimes it turns out it was an accident or the person died of natural causes. But they have to check it out.” He glanced over his shoulder. Two men in business suits were coming down the walk toward us. “They're going to want to ask you some questions, Mike. Okay?”

The two detectives introduced themselves. Detective Jones and Detective London.

“What happened to Billy?” I asked them.

“That's what we're looking into, Mike,” Detective Jones said. “We're going to have to ask you a few questions, okay? You can have someone with you when we talk to you if you want. You want us to call someone?” It was only later that I realized that Detective Jones talked a lot like Riel—slowly, calmly, patiently.

There was no one I could call. I turned to Riel.

“You want me to stay, Mike?” he asked.

Neither of the detectives looked too happy about that. But Detective Jones said, “Do you want John to stay with you, Mike?”

I nodded. Then the questions started, a whole torrent of them, coming at me one right after the other. They kept asking and asking, and all I could think was,
Billy is dead. Billy. Dead.

“When was the last time you saw your uncle?”

The last time? “Yesterday. After school.”
When I was mad at him. When I thought I never wanted to speak to him again.

“You didn't see him this morning?”

I wished I had. I thought of all the things I could have said. “He was gone when I got up.”

“Was that unusual?”

I nodded my head yes. Billy was usually sprawled in his bed when I got up in the morning. Usually I had to wake him up so that he got to work on time.

“What about you, Mike? When did you leave the house today?”

“About eight, I guess.”

“Where did you go?”

I told him everything I had done today. I didn't tell him I had spent the whole day thinking about Billy.

“You didn't come back here at all?” Detective Jones said.

I wished I had. I wished I had never left the house. Maybe if I had stayed home, maybe if I had talked to Billy, things would be different now.

“What can you tell us about your uncle, Mike?” he asked.

Right now, I could have told them a thousand things. Little things. Like how Billy thought hot dogs with ketchup and relish was a balanced meal—ketchup is made from tomatoes, relish from pickles, so there's your vegetables right there. Or how Billy had no clue how to do laundry—all of his white socks had turned gray because he washed them with his jeans and T-shirts. Or how Billy charmed girls by singing them the one song he had written—he just put in a different girl's name each time.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Was anything bothering him? Did he seem preoccupied?”

I glanced at Riel.

“Mike?” Detective Jones said. “Was something bothering your uncle?”

I shook my head. Is it a lie if you don't come right out and say the words?

“When you saw your uncle last night, how did he seem?”

“He'd been drinking,” I said. An honest answer.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah. A little.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about him?”

Why was he asking that? Did the cops know something? Did they suspect something?

“What do you mean?” I said again.

“Maybe he was upset about something. Depressed. Anything like that?”

I glanced at Riel again. This time the two detectives exchanged glances.

“Look, Mike,” Detective Jones said, “we're just trying to find out what happened to your uncle.”

What had happened to him? I realized then that they hadn't actually told me. I wasn't sure that I wanted to know, but I figured I owed it to Billy to ask.

“How did he die?”

Detective Jones glanced at Riel. So did I. Riel sighed. Then he shrugged, like he knew something bad was going to happen and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Looks like asphyxiation,” Detective Jones said.

“You mean, like he was smothered?”

There was a heartbeat of a moment before he answered.

“He was hanged, Mike.”

I think my brain stopped working right then. I couldn't wrap my mind around what he had just told me. Hanged? Billy?

“You mean, he killed himself?”

“We're looking into it, Mike,” Detective Jones said. “That's why we really need you to answer our questions.”

“Anything you can tell the detectives about Billy might help them figure out exactly what happened,” Riel said.

Billy. Hanged. That decided it.

“I saw him yesterday after school,” I said. “He was in the kitchen when I got home, and he had been drinking. We talked about my mother, about how she died.” This
didn't seem to surprise the two detectives. Riel must have filled them in on my family background. “Billy was upset because I had been talking about it to Mr. Riel. He wanted me to just shut up about it, and I told him I wouldn't.”

“Was there something in particular he didn't want you to say, Mike?”

I told them everything. There was no reason not to. Nothing worse could happen to Billy now. Nothing worse could happen to me, either.

The detectives took notes while I talked. When I had finished, they asked me a few questions. Then they asked me to go to the police station to make a statement.

“Can it wait until tomorrow?” Riel said.

They said it could. Just as they were finishing, a woman showed up. She said she was from Children's Aid.

I remembered what Billy had said to me. You want to end up in foster care, Mikey? Is that what you want? Like I was the one who was going to put me there if I didn't keep my mouth shut. Only it wasn't me who had done it. It was Billy. Billy, who was hanged.

“I'm not going with her,” I told Riel.

“You have any other relatives in the city?”

I shook my head. I didn't have any other relatives, period. Riel stood there for a few moments, his hands in his pockets. Finally he said, “You want to stay at my place tonight, Mike? We can make other plans tomorrow.”

I looked at the woman from Children's Aid. She was older than my mom had been, and she looked like she was going to collapse under the weight of the huge
purse that hung off her shoulder. She frowned when Riel made his suggestion, but she didn't say no. Instead, she took Riel aside and talked to him. They talked for a long time. The whole time, the woman was scribbling in a folder. When she finished talking to Riel, she called one of the detectives over and talked to him and made more notes. Then she pulled out a cell phone and made a call. Finally she gave Riel her card. Then she walked back up the street to her car.

“You can't go in the house yet,” Riel said to me. “If there's anything you need for tonight, you can tell Detective Jones and someone will get it for you when they can. Okay?”

I told the detective, as well as I could remember, where to find my toothbrush and my backpack and some clean clothes. Then I got into Riel's car and we drove to his house.

“You hungry, Mike?” he asked as he unlocked the front door.

I started to say that I wasn't, but by now it was way past suppertime and, except for that one patty, I hadn't eaten all day.

Riel showed me upstairs to a spare room that had a couch, a small TV, and what looked like a million books in it.

“This folds out into a bed,” he said. “You'll find sheets and blankets and a pillow in the hall closet. Bathroom's second on the left. You can chill out with some TV if you want while I get dinner ready. If you want to
talk—about anything at all—I'm in the kitchen, okay?”

He left the room so quietly that it took me a moment to realize that I was alone. I sank down onto the couch, reached automatically for the remote, and clicked the TV on. Right away I clicked it off again. Billy was dead. Billy, who never listened when you told him to do something, who always had a thousand excuses why he couldn't fix the screen door or hang his jacket up or spend more money on groceries than on beer. Billy, who used to take me down to the park with him when he was thirteen or fourteen and I was three or four. Who'd push me so high on the swing that I thought I was flying. Who took me into the pool with him down at Monarch Park. Who used to take me to swimming lessons when Mom was busy. He even used to read to me, although I don't remember seeing him with a book in his hands again after he was out of school. Billy, who stood right beside me at Mom's funeral, his hand on my shoulder, squeezing it, letting me know that I had to be strong, that I could get through it. He was twenty-one when Mom died. His main interests were girls, drinking, having fun, and working just hard enough to pay for all three, and there he was all of a sudden with an eleven-year-old nephew to look after and, okay, so he never actually turned into a parent, but he didn't complain, either. He never tried to pawn me off on someone else. When I played in a soccer league, when I still cared about that stuff, he was there, cheering on the sidelines. Billy. My uncle, who was more like a big brother. Billy was dead.

I looked around the room. It was like the rest of the house, clean and bare, like no one lived here, not really. I went downstairs and found Riel in the kitchen, cutting chicken into little pieces.

“You like stir-fry, Mike?”

I told him I'd never tried it. He tossed me a red pepper and a green pepper and asked me to wash them and cut them into small chunks. I was glad to have something to do. The radio was on, tuned to one of those golden oldies stations. I chopped, he cooked, and before I knew it, we were sitting at the kitchen table, eating. I surprised myself by having three helpings.

“You holding up okay?” Riel asked when the last of the stir-fry was gone.

I said I was, but it was a lie. Sure, I had wolfed down supper like there was a famine coming and everyone knew it, but I couldn't control my stomach anymore than I could control my mind. And my mind was spinning out of control. Suddenly it felt like everything I had just shoveled into my stomach was going to come spewing out again.