Truth and Lies (11 page)

I shook my head.

“So how come you lied to me about the other night?” Riel said. “How come you didn't just tell me how you were feeling? How come you didn't tell me that you'd gone out?”

The best I could do was offer a slow, rolling, ashamed shrug and a lame, “I thought you'd be mad.”

“Anything else you want to tell me, Mike?”

I had to look directly at him now. I had to if I wanted to win back his trust.

“No,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I didn't have anything to do with what happened to Robbie Ducharme,” I said. “I swear.”

Riel looked me over carefully. Finally, he gave a little nod. He glanced at his watch.

“Supper's going to be a little late tonight,” he said.

I watched him turn and head back down the hall. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then I heard him rattling pots in the kitchen. I wondered what he was thinking. Wondered what he believed and what he suspected. Wondered, too, why I hadn't had the good sense to just stay put that night.

Two days later, when I went by to pick up Sal before school, I was surprised to see Vin standing on the sidewalk in front of Sal's house. I was surprised, because Vin hadn't been hanging around with Sal and me much lately. But I wasn't blown-out-of-the-water shocked because, after all, Vin lived on the next street over from Sal. You could see the back of Sal's house from the back of Vin's. At least, you could in winter, when the trees had lost their leaves.

Vin spotted me when I was still a couple of houses away. He gave a wave and started up the sidewalk toward me. He had a funny look on his face—not funny as in amused, but a strange expression, a mixture of disbelief and something that might have been worry. I wasn't sure.

“What's up?” I said.

“You kidding?” Vin said. “Up until maybe twenty minutes ago, there were five cop cars here. Five!”

I glanced up at Sal's house. The place was small, with a wooden porch that needed a paint job and a weed patch out front where there should have been a lawn. The San Miguels didn't own the place. They rented it. And they sublet the top floor to an old couple. It helped them to cover their own rent, Sal said. I couldn't imagine five people living in a house that wasn't any bigger than the one I used to live in with Billy, and that was a whole lot smaller than Riel's. Or maybe Riel's just seemed bigger because he had hardly any furniture and no clutter at all.

Sal's house was quiet. So were all the other houses up and down the street. It was hard to imagine that there had been any cop cars there, let alone five.

“What happened?” I said. I had an idea, but I wanted to find out what Vin knew.

“It was his old man,” Vin said. “He got into some fight with the neighbor. My dad knows the guy. Says he's a real jerk. The guy says Sal's dad went after him with a pair of hedge clippers.”

I glanced up at the house again and wondered where Sal was. The five cop cars must have drawn a lot of attention when they pulled up. There wouldn't be much chance of keeping it a secret this time. If Vin knew, then a lot of other people knew, too. People would be talking about it. Kids at school would be buzzing—
Hey, did you hear about Sal's dad? Sal's crazy dad?

“Did they arrest him?” I asked.

“They took him away in handcuffs. Sal's mom was crying and trying to talk to them, but it all came out in
Spanish. What's the matter with the professor, Mike?” Vin always referred to Sal's dad as the professor. And even Vin thought it had to be hard for a guy to go from teaching Spanish literature and poetry in a university to cleaning office buildings. “Is he sick?”

I just shrugged. I'd made a promise to Sal. I wasn't going to break it, not even for Vin.

“Sal still home?” I asked.

Vin nodded. “Poor guy,” he said. “If you ask me, his dad's really flipped. I heard someone say the reason there were five cop cars is that Sal's dad wouldn't put down the hedge clippers when the cops told him to.”

Jeez
, I thought. That was serious. Cops didn't like it when you were threatening someone with a weapon and refused to put it down. I looked at the house for a third time and thought about how scared Sal must have been when it was happening.

“I'd better go see how he is,” I said. “You coming?”

Vin looked at the house too, his eyes big, like he thought the place might be haunted. He shook his head. “I gotta pick up Cat,” he said. Then, “Hey, Mike, that new girl, what's her name, the one with the red hair?”

“Rebecca?”

Vin grinned. “Yeah. Rebecca. She's kind of cute if you like that red hair and freckles thing. I saw that look she gave you the other day. What's going on? You finally find someone to replace Jen?”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I thought for a moment about which was worse—the look Jen would probably give
me if we ever met face-to-face again, or the look Rebecca had given me when she came out of the school the day before yesterday. To get a glare from Jen would be worse, for sure. I cared what she thought. I didn't even know Rebecca.

“So you don't have a thing going with her?” Vin said.

“You kidding?”

“What was that look all about then?” Vin said. “A girl doesn't give that look to a guy unless she has some kind of feelings for him, right?”

“A girl doesn't give that look to a guy she has
good
feelings for,” I said. “She's never even spoken to me, but she's already decided that I'm scum just because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And I had managed that little trick twice—once in the alley and once again in the school auditorium.

“Wrong place?” Vin said.

“I overheard her talking to Riel about what she saw,” I said.

“What she saw? What do you mean?”

I knew that I probably shouldn't say anything more. After all, she had been talking to Riel in confidence. Riel had made that clear enough. But she hadn't actually seen anything that could help the cops, so what did it matter? And besides, this was Vin, my best friend—well, okay, so I wasn't 100 percent sure of that right now, not with Cat in the picture. But one thing I did know: if I held out on Vin, refused to answer his question, it wouldn't help the situation. Besides, all Rebecca had seen were
just kids. In the distance. Coming out of the park. Kids who maybe didn't even have anything to do with Robbie Ducharme.

There was the other thing too—the thing with the man who had identified me. A month or so ago I would have called Vin first thing to tell him all about it—because Vin was my best friend. Always had been. Probably would be again once he got over Cat.

“Mikey?”

“If I tell you,” I said, “you've got to promise not to tell anyone else.”

“Hey, Mike … ” Vin gave me a wounded look, like I should know better. Best friends never ratted. Best friends never said things they shouldn't outside of the circle.

I told him about Rebecca first. “Maybe you saw it in the paper. There was a girl who said she saw kids in the park.”

“Rebecca with the red hair?” Vin said.

“Yeah. But she was too far away. She couldn't ID anyone. Just knows they were kids, that's all. But that's not the best part.”
Best
part? Make that
weird
part. “There was a guy too. A man. He called Crime Stoppers and said he saw a kid near the park that night. The cops showed him yearbooks from St. James, from Hillside and from our school. Guess who he ID'd?”

Vin peered intently at me and waited.

“Me,” I said. I even laughed. And I guess it was kind of funny, if you looked at it the right way. “You believe
that? The guy picked out my picture and told the cops I was the kid he saw near the park that night.”

Vin blinked. “
You
, Mikey? You were there?”

“No,” I said. “I wasn't there. That's the thing. I just happened to walk by the park that night and this guy saw me and contacted the cops. They sent a homicide detective to the house to question me and everything.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I couldn't tell him anything.” Jeez, didn't Vin get it? “I wasn't there, not in the park, I mean. I just went by there.”

“So you didn't see anything either,” Vin said. He shook his head. “A guy gets stomped and no one sees anything. Guess the cops pretty much hit a dead end, huh?” He glanced at his watch. “If I don't get moving, Cat's gonna give me a hard time all day,” he said. “That is,
if
she even speaks to me. She hates it when I'm late.”

“I thought she hated it when you pretend-smoked.”

“That too,” Vin said. “But she's cool, Mike. If you ever got to know her, you'd like her.”

I watched him go. Then I turned back to Sal's house. I had to go up there. Sal probably needed someone to talk to. And it was the right thing to do. But, man, how come the right thing always turned out to be the hard thing?

As soon as I had pressed the doorbell, I started to worry that Sal's mother would answer the door. Talking to Sal
would be hard enough, but I had no idea what I would say—what I
should
say—to Mrs. San Miguel. So I was relieved when Sal's face appeared in the little diamond-shaped window cut into the inner door.

Sal peered out at me for a second, then his face disappeared. I waited. Nothing happened. Should I ring the bell again? Or should I assume that Sal didn't want to talk to me, that he probably didn't want to talk to anyone? I hesitated, trying to put myself in Sal's shoes, trying to decide what I'd want my friends to do if my dad had just been taken away in handcuffs. I decided to ring again.

The inner door opened before my finger reached the doorbell. Sal pushed open the outer aluminum door and stepped out onto the porch. He closed both doors behind himself before he said anything. When he turned around again, I saw that his eyes were watery and red around the edges. I wondered how much sleep anyone ever got at Sal's house.

“You heard about my dad, right?” Sal said.

I nodded. “Vin told me what happened.”

Sal snorted. “Right. Vin. I saw him standing down there on the sidewalk. I kept waiting for him to come up to the house, but he never did.”

“He probably didn't know what to say.” I didn't tell Sal what I really thought, which was that if you'd known Vin for a lifetime, he could be okay, like he was when my mother died. But Sal hadn't known Vin for a lifetime. They had never been as close as Vin and I were … used
to be … maybe still were. “You know Vin. You need someone to jazz you, he's the guy. You need someone to think up the right thing to say when, well, you know—Vin's not so good at that.”

“Yeah,” Sal said. He sounded angry. He was probably thinking the same thing I was—that if it had been important enough, Vin would have at least tried. And since he hadn't tried …

“You okay?” I said.

Sal nodded. His head moved up and down slowly, like it weighed as much as a boulder.

“How about your mom? How's she doing?”

“See?” Sal said. “It's not rocket science.”

I blinked. “I don't get it.”

“Saying the right thing. You don't have to be a genius.”

Oh
.

“My mom freaked out,” Sal said. “At one point they all had their guns drawn. You have any idea what that's like, Mike, seeing a bunch of cops with their guns pointed at your dad? They called for a translator, but heck, it seemed to take forever. So they were telling me what to say to him and I was saying it. Then when they finally got him to drop the hedge clippers, they were all over him, pushing him down to the ground, putting handcuffs on him. You should have seen the way he looked at me. Like I was on their side or something.” His voice broke and trembled. I thought maybe he was going to start to cry, but he didn't. “They took my dad away in
handcuffs,” he said. “And my mom started to cry and cry. It reminded her of what happened back home.” Back home in Guatemala, he meant. “I called my aunt, and she called a lawyer. My mom's going down to the police station. I have to go with her. Her English isn't so good when she's upset.”

“Vin said nobody got hurt,” I said. “They'll probably let him come home, no problem.”

Sal didn't look convinced. “There were TV cameras here,” he said. “And reporters. It's going to be all over the news, I know it. So that gives my mom something else to worry about. She thinks Dad's going to lose his job.”

I didn't know what to say, but I knew I should say something.

“He can't get fired for something that has nothing to do with work.” That was the best I could come up with. And it was the way I thought things should work. But you never knew. I had lost the first job I ever had after I got into trouble with the police.

“It's not just that,” Sal said. “When my dad gets like this, when he gets all worked up, he can't stand to be closed in, you know?”