Son of a Gun (21 page)

At approximately one o’clock the following afternoon, an autopsy was performed by the Pima County medical examiner. It was learned that the deceased had been shot eight times,
twice in the shoulder and six times in the head. During the autopsy, my brother, who had just learned of my mother’s death from Connie, called the office and described our mother. The body was identified as Deborah St. Germain–Hudson.

I finished reading and sat staring at the empty fireplace. The ceiling fan clicked overhead and a siren sounded far away. In the morning I called Freeney to set up this meeting. He sounded surprised to hear from me after all this time, and said he wasn’t sure he could tell me much about my mother’s case, but he’d certainly be willing to try. He offered to give me directions, but I know this county by heart.

Freeney asks what he can do for me. I tell him I have some questions about the police report, then ask if I can record the conversation. He agrees, but I can tell by the way he looks at the recorder, his jaw setting tight, that it was a mistake.

I try to ask the first question, but begin to stammer. I’d always assumed she was shot from the front, that Ray walked in the door of the trailer and pointed the gun at her, and before he pulled the trigger, she had a brief chance for peace or terror or a dying thought. In my version of the story, she saw it coming. But when I read the police report Brian gave me, I realized that the detectives thought she’d been shot from behind. She never saw it coming. He shot her in the back.

I finally get the question out: “She was shot in the back of the shoulder? The back of the head?”

Freeney gives me a steady look, thinks for a while, and says he believes it was roughly from behind, at an angle. “Obviously, it’s been a long time. I’m trying to remember.”

“I have the reports.” I slide the folder across his desk and he flips through the pages. For a few long minutes the room is
silent except for the shuffling of paper. Above his desk hangs a motivational poster in praise of Risk. Framed certificates fill the far wall. One says he’s been certified in Truth Verification. I wonder what that test is like.

The silence gets to be too much. “I don’t expect you to reconstruct the whole thing.…”

“I’m just trying to find something.” Freeney doesn’t look up from the papers.

I fold my hands in my lap and wait. The window faces northwest, toward Tombstone, where dark-bottomed clouds mill in the sky, procrastinating. If a storm comes, it’ll come quick, a half hour of thunderclaps and torrents. The washes in the places past those mountains, the places where we used to live, will fill with rushing water, and the desert will smell as rich as fresh blood. I wonder how many dead bodies Freeney has seen. That’s what I should be asking: What does he do with them all? Does he still think of them, years later, or is there some kind of secret to forgetting?

Soon I can’t help myself. “I’m just trying to figure out, because the last page of the report mentions … there were fingernail scrapings, under … matching Ray’s DNA. Did it seem like there was a struggle?”

Freeney leans back in his chair and looks me in the eye. He’s professional and composed, all the things I wish I were, but not unkind. “Yeah,” he says. “They got into a scuffle.”

“So it seemed like an escalating thing.”

“Yeah. Heat of the battle,” he says. “How it started, or why, I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

“Sure,” I say, but I don’t believe that. By the time I’m done, I’ll know.

“There was some kind of struggle,” he continues. “Your mom fought back.” I almost want to smile. Of course she
fought back; if he’d ever seen her alive, he wouldn’t be surprised by that. His voice softens. “And at that point, the weapon was taken out.”

“Right.” The word comes out like a sigh. Another pause ensues. I ask about the liquor bottles. It’s always bothered me: the last time we met, when he was a detective and I was a kid and I thought he was tall and thin and had a mustache, he said something about bottles. He asked if Mom and Ray drank much, and the question surprised me, because my mother drank a glass of wine a few times a year, usually at the Japanese restaurant in Sierra Vista, that sweet plum wine they served. She’d order it guiltily, saying she never drank—as if we didn’t know that—but she loved that wine. I’d think of my friends’ parents in the bars on Allen Street every night, my father’s boilermakers in front of the TV when I went to visit, and her so apologetic about a glass of wine with dinner. The last time we met, when I said she didn’t drink, Freeney had said that they found a lot of empty bottles. The police report didn’t mention it. Freeney thinks for a minute, says he doesn’t remember anything out of the ordinary, nothing that would indicate that alcohol played a role in her death.

I ask about the gun. The police report lists dozens of items that were taken into evidence, from the scene of her death and the scene of Ray’s, and in the folder in my hands I have a formal letter requesting all of those items, along with other materials related to the investigation. But the one thing I want most isn’t mentioned anywhere: the murder weapon.

“Was it ever found?”

Freeney shakes his head. “He could have ditched it anywhere.” He leans back in his chair, one hand resting on his belt, near the holster. It must be a cop thing: Ray used to sit just like that.

I look at my notebook. I don’t have any more questions. I
haven’t learned much that I couldn’t read in the report, and I don’t know why I expected to. Why should he still think about a murder from so long ago, an open-and-shut case of domestic violence, when he must have seen so many others since?

I turn off the recorder and thank him for meeting me, but we both stay in our chairs. I thank him for his work on my mother’s case. He says he was just doing his job. I put my hands on the arms of the chair and begin to rise.

But Freeney keeps talking. He says he knew of Ray before the murder—he never met him, but law enforcement is a small world—and that all the signs of the investigation led him to believe that Ray didn’t plan it. When emotions get involved, he says, you just can’t account for what happens. He looks out the window. “And living in a place like that, away from society, out there in the desert … these things just don’t conform to logic.”

I know what he’s offering me. The recorder’s off; this is the unofficial version, his version, from a man who’s seen enough to know how these things work. He knows that you can seek the truth, dig up documents and artifacts, interview witnesses, examine the evidence, and use that information to construct a narrative that serves a purpose: this is how it happened. An official story. The truth. But it never really adds up; it never makes sense.
These things just don’t conform to logic
.

He’s also warning me. If I keep pursuing this, expecting to find an answer, expecting the who and when and how to lead me to a why, it’ll never end. There is no why.
Why
is such an asshole of a word.

I could stop now, put this behind me, try to move on. Do I really need to see what I’m about to ask for: the rest of the report, the things they took from that trailer, the jewelry they took off of her body? A thousand miles from here, I’ve built a
different life. I don’t need to be circling this place, sifting through the past. Freeney has a point, and I know he means well. He seems like a kind and decent man, although it’s not that hard to seem like any kind of man. But Freeney doesn’t understand, because that body he found out in the desert years ago wasn’t his mother.

I hand him the letter. He reads it, says he’ll send me whatever he can find, but most of it has probably been destroyed by now. We exchange business cards and he walks me out. At the door he shakes my hand and says goodbye. On my way across the parking lot, I look out past the jail at the cloud shadows on the mountains.
A place like that, away from society, out there in the desert
.

But how far is it to a place like that? High Lonesome Road is about a mile east of here, and it leads straight north to Gleeson. She died just on the other side of those mountains, two turns and twenty miles from Freeney’s office.

As I leave the sheriff’s complex, I see a small plane circling in the sky to the east, above the community college airport where my mother did her pilot training. Once, on a solo flight, she flew into a summer storm like the one brewing right now. The clouds blew in from nowhere, and she found herself blind inside them, panicked, longing to see the ground, some kind of landmark. But she couldn’t find anything, and soon she couldn’t tell which way was down. It was as if the sky had swallowed her. It occurred to her that she might die.

She thought of her sons. We were almost grown, and there were worse ways to go—it was peaceful there in the cloud, and at least she was on an adventure, doing something she loved. But she wanted to send a message to us, as she always had before she jumped out of planes, in case she didn’t make it.
She didn’t have a pen or paper, and knew a note would burn in the crash. So she closed her eyes and concentrated, sent us a message through the air:
Boys, be strong. I love you
. Then she prayed.

The sky opened the moment she said Amen. She was out of the cloud; she was safe. After she landed, driving home, she kept thinking of that moment in the cloud, the sense of peace. Later that night, when she told me the story, she asked if I’d heard her message. I told her the truth: I hadn’t heard anything.

Days pass, hot and stormy, as I wait for Freeney’s package. I talk to Laura on the phone, read books I’ve already read, sit on the stoop watching trash blow by in the empty street. When I can stomach it, I dig through the box of my mother’s things. I find some photos that my mother must have taken of Uncle Tom and his kids. After Max, before Ray, my mother had custody of her brother’s children for about a year. Tom was in trouble again, unemployed and bingeing, and the state took his kids away. My mother brought them to live with us. I was still grounded from the pellet-gun incident, so she made me babysit when she was at work.

Tom came to visit on the weekends. He and my mother would take the kids out to the horse corrals. The boys, Sean and Eric, were only four and five, scared of horses, and they held their father’s hand and hid behind his legs and watched the animals with faces full of awe. I think Tom was scared of the horses, too, but he didn’t show it to his kids. He would tell
the boys funny lies, that horses were dinosaurs, that he could speak their language. Leighanne, the oldest, just a few years older than her brothers but more like a mother to them, smiled and played along, although she knew all about horses by then, things my mother had taught her, how to feed them halved apples from her flattened palm, to keep a hand on their rumps when you walked behind them and stay close to their hind legs so they wouldn’t kick.

My mother loved to watch her brother with his kids. It was the only time I ever saw her recede like that, making herself scarce, becoming an observer. She would disappear into the barn, where it was cool and dark and sweet with the smells of alfalfa and leather, and she would stay there until I began to worry about snakes. Every few months we’d catch one hiding in the pallets, and she almost got bit once, not paying attention, arms full of hay, hearing the rattle too late and coming face-to-face with it, coiled between the slats, tail shaking so fast it was invisible, more of a hum than a rattle. She handled it well, didn’t panic, backed slowly away until she was out of reach. Then she grabbed a rake, pinned its head to the ground, and cut it off with a shovel.

She’d come out of the barn, holding flakes of hay, and she’d hand them to Tom so he could fling them to the horses and let his children see him taking care of something. He was clean at the time. We all hoped it would stick.

A man behind a bulletproof window takes my ID and directs me to the Tucson Police Department records office, where a woman behind another window stares at me and says nothing. I tell her I’m looking for a police report. She asks a few basic questions, but I don’t know the answers, only that a body was found and the approximate date.

“Do you know who it was?”

“My uncle.”

Her face retains its bored expression; she’s used to this, has seen it all. I’m starting to prefer this response. “Was he killed?”

“I don’t think so.”

She hands me a form. I sit and fill it out, then hand it back to her. She glances at it and asks if I know where he was found.

“An abandoned building. I don’t know what part of town.” My brother called me after it happened, told me the story secondhand, said only that it was somewhere in Tucson.

She says she’ll see what she can find, and returns a few minutes later, dangling a document from two pinched fingers. She charges me fifty cents and slides the paper through the gap in the window, looking directly into my eyes and holding it for a long, unnerving second before she tells me to have a nice day. I wait until I’m outside, in my car in the parking lot with the air-conditioning blasting, to read the report.

In October of 2005, the caretaker of an abandoned house in central Tucson went by to check on the property and noticed that a window had been forced open. He called the police. The responding officer entered the building and found a dead man lying on a mattress next to syringes and a spoon. On a nearby shelf were a prison release card and papers bearing my uncle’s name. The officer took pictures, collected evidence, called the medical examiner, and left. That’s it; that’s the end of the report. The police report of my mother’s death is more than fifty pages. Uncle Tom got two.