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  As we drove off the property, Deputy Wagner was back at his post. I rolled down the window of my cruiser and said to Wagner, “Fairbanks is guarding the property overnight. You tell him that under no circumstances do I want him to leave his post.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You tell him that’s a direct order from me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When we got back to the department, it was nearly midnight. Toots was standing at the copy machine while it spit out copies of a summary of his interview with Smoochie. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing. He was smart enough not to leave anything lying around the house. How about tomorrow morning we go out there together and give it another look? You have a good eye; maybe you’ll see something that I didn’t.”

  Toots nodded. “Sure.”

  “How did it go with Smoochie?”

  “Not much of an alibi. He confirmed that Daubner broke his arm, but he says it was an accident and he certainly didn’t kill him.”

  “What do you think?”

  Toots shrugged. “He’s got motive—Daubner beat the living hell out of him. And, it was the perfect time to kill him because everyone would naturally look at Johnny Earl as the primary suspect. Smoochie said he knew Daubner and Dena Marie were having an affair. That’s why he confronted Daubner.”

  “How about Johnny?”

  Toots pointed his pen in the direction of the jail. “He’s in cell number two, and he is not a happy camper.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “Not really. I listened to him piss and moan on the ride in. He’s worried that he’s going to get sent back to the pen.”

  “He ought to be worried. Do you want to tag-team him tonight?”

  “Sheriff, I’m whipped. How about we do it in the morning after we get back from looking over Daubner’s place?”

  I nodded. “Works for me. Of course, that means Johnny gets to spend the night in the Hotel Jefferson.”

  “Tough break. You want me to tell him that he’s going to be an overnight guest?”

  “No, I’ll tell him.”

  It had been fifteen years since I had even laid eyes on Johnny Earl. The last time we hooked up was during Christmas break my junior year in college. By the time I took over as sheriff, Johnny was already in the federal penitentiary.

  I unlocked the main security door and walked down the brick corridor to the cells. On this night, only Johnny and Fritz “The Masturbator” Hirsch were in the jail. Fritz had been convicted of exposing himself and masturbating in public. It was his third time through the system, and he was awaiting a mental evaluation and a trip to a state mental facility. Johnny must have heard me coming down the steps, because when I walked down the row he was leaning against the bars. He gave me a look of disgust, like when one of my errant passes skipped three feet in front of him. “Fran, what the hell is going on?” he asked impatiently. “Get me out of here.”

  I walked over to the cell and grinned. “When did you go bald?”

  He rolled his eyes. “A while back. That’s not really the issue right now.”

  “Sorry. But you were always so damn vain about your hair. It’s sort of funny.”

  “Yeah, it’s fuckin’ hilarious, Frannie, and it’s good to see you again, too, pal. Now get me the hell out of here.”

  “I can’t do that just yet, Johnny. You and Rayce Daubner had a little scrap at the grocery parking lot the other day, and now he’s dead. Given your history with him, that makes you a prime suspect.”

  He moaned and let his chin drop. “Goddamn it, Fran, they’ll send me back to the pen. I didn’t kill that asshole. I’m glad as hell he’s dead, but I didn’t do it. Besides, there must be two dozen people who had motive to kill him. Why are you jamming me up?”

  “I hope to God you didn’t, Johnny, but you know how the game is played. I’ve got to keep you in here until you’ve been questioned.”

  “Okay, fine, when do we get started?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “What?” he yelled. “Aw, Fran, no way. Tonight! Get me the hell out of here tonight. I didn’t do anything, and you’ve got me stuck down here with a guy who does nothing but pull his pork all night. He’s beat off three times since Toots put me in here.”

  Fritz looked up from his bunk and smiled, revealing teeth that were disappearing from soda rot.

  “We’re going to search Daubner’s place again first thing in the morning. Then we’ll get things rolling.”

  “This is a fuckin’ nightmare.” He went back to his bunk, rolled onto his back and covered his eyes with his pillow.

  There was nothing left to say. It’s funny, I thought, how things have changed. For years, I was just an extra in the Johnny Earl Show. He owned Steubenville High School during our days there. I had been an all-conference quarterback, not because I deserved it, but because I quarterbacked the team that had Johnny Earl in the backfield. Our football, baseball, and basketball teams won ten conference championships when I played, and I got a plaque and a chenille patch for each. I got those awards because I had the good fortune to play with Johnny. He knew this. He had been worshipped like a god. Now, he was sitting in my jail, and I had control of his life. He had fallen out of a tree eight years earlier, hit every branch on the way down, and was now shocked that he had yet to hit bottom.

  I stopped by the radio room and instructed Sergeant Bobby Armor to tell Deputy Fairbanks not to leave that driveway. Armor smiled. Fairbanks was a whiner and not one of Armor’s favorites. “Will do,” he said.

  “How’s Johnny doing?” Toots asked as I was heading out the door.

  “Not two weeks ago he walked out of the federal penitentiary and probably thought there was a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel . . .”

  “And now he thinks it’s an oncoming train,” Toots said.

  “Yep.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MATTHEW VINCENT “SMOOCHIE” XENAKIS

  There was no short list of people who would have liked to see Rayce Daubner dead. Or, more precisely, there was no short list of people who would have liked to have taken a bat and beaten him until his mother couldn’t recognize him, beaten him until Jesus Christ himself leaned down from the heavens, tapped the beater on the shoulder and said, “Hey, pal, he’s had enough.” This, Jesus would do so the batter didn’t jeopardize his or her chances of getting into heaven for too thoroughly enjoying extracting the life from Rayce Daubner. It would have nothing to do with a concern for the deceased, since, based on my beliefs, he was getting nowhere near heaven. In spite of the considerable list of people who hated Daubner, I knew my name would be somewhere near the top.

  Thus, it came as no great surprise when Chief Deputy Sheriff Lawrence Majowski—his nickname is “Toots,” which I consider to be worse than Smoochie—and a scrub-faced deputy named Phillip Gearhard knocked on my door at nine fifteen on the night that Daubner’s body was found. My wife answered the door. I heard her ask, “What’s going on?”

  “We need to speak to your husband,” said Chief Deputy Majowski.

  “What about?” she asked.

  I walked in from the kitchen, and when neither deputy would tell her, I said, “They want to question me about the murder of Rayce Daubner.”

  Her eyes darted between me and the deputies. “Is this true?” she asked, backing away toward the staircase, the tips of both hands covering her open mouth. I felt sorry for her. She stood there, frozen.

  “Come on out in the kitchen and sit down,” I said to the officers.

  “We’d rather you come down to the station and talk,” Majowski said.

  My son ran out of the living room and into his mother’s arms. She crossed her arms over his chest and pulled him against her legs. I walked over to them and held both hands out in front of me to be cuffed. Majowski looked at me quizzically for a moment, then said, “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Xenakis. You’re not under arrest. We just want to ask you a few quest
ions.”

  As we rode to the jailhouse, I recalled the times I had fantasized about murdering Rayce Daubner and thought that perhaps this was not the best time to bring that up.

  I had watched a lot of cop shows on television. When you serve as a punching bag for kids who don’t have big lips and bad acne, you tend to spend a lot of time watching television. I loved the detective shows and knew cop jargon and how they squeezed confessions out of people. I was expecting to be put into a little room with a table, a chair, and a two-way mirror. The detectives would pace the room, shining the light in my eyes, while the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney watched from behind the mirror. Consequently, I was more than a little disappointed when they led me into the lunchroom. There were two empty soda cans on a food-stained table and a paper cup half filled with coffee, in which floated half a dozen cigarette butts, the filters smeared with lipstick. The room smelled of stale smoke and burnt coffee. The carpeting was worn and in bad need of shampooing. A refrigerator hummed and rattled in the corner.

  “I saw you and the kids fishing out at the quarry the other day,” Chief Deputy Majowski said, getting himself situated in a chair. “Catch anything?”

  “Bluegill and a bunch of smallmouth,” I said. “Little ones. We let them go. They were hitting the line about as fast as we could put them in the water. The kids got a kick out of it.”

  “It’s good to take kids fishing.”

  I assumed that one of the officers would be the good cop, the other the bad cop. This was a tactic used by television detectives all the time.

  But, to my surprise, they both seemed to be playing the good cop. “Can I get you a soda or a cup of coffee, Smoochie?” Deputy Gearhard asked.

  “No. I’m fine. Thanks.”

  On one hand, I was relieved. On the other, I was a little insulted. They didn’t really think I was capable of murder, which should have pleased me. I’m a good Christian man, or I try to be, and I had never wanted to be considered a murderer, but even a good Christian hates being looked at as a weakling. They were simply going through the paces. They had heard about my altercation with Rayce, and this was the obligatory interview. They didn’t seriously think I could have killed him. After all, I was little Smoochie Xenakis. Harmless little Smoochie. Did they think I was capable of killing anyone? No. They knew I didn’t have the guts. This was more humiliating than being duct-taped to the maple tree.

  Gearhard had turned a chair backward and was straddling the seat; Majowski was resting his forearms on the table, scribbling down something on lined notebook paper. “Based on the comments you made to your wife, you obviously know why we’re here,” Majowski began, looking up from his pad. “Rayce Daubner was found murdered this afternoon. The reason we want to talk to you, Smoochie, is because we heard that you and Daubner had a little go-round a while back.”

  “A go-round?” I asked.

  “A fight. We heard you and Rayce had a fight.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t a fight.”

  “I see. Well, if it wasn’t a fight, how would you characterize it?”

  “I wouldn’t characterize it at all. I just went out to his place to talk to him.”

  “I see.”

  “What did you want to talk to him about?” Gearhard asked.

  “I’d rather not say. It was a personal matter and not germane to anything we’re talking about here.”

  “Smoochie, this is a murder investigation,” Majowski said, a sharper tone to his voice. “I’ll determine what’s germane to the investigation. And right now you’re in the middle of it. So telling us that you’d ‘rather not say’ is akin to telling me that you’d rather not cooperate.”

  I looked at him but did not respond.

  “If it wasn’t a fight, then how did you end up with a broken arm and that gash over your eye?” Gearhard asked.

  “I fell.”

  “You fell?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I fell.”

  He smiled and looked over at Majowski. “How many times?”

  “Twice. I fell and broke my arm, then I fell and hit my head.”

  “Really? That isn’t what I heard. I heard that Rayce Daubner propped your arm on a step and stomped on it.”

  I shook my head. “No, as I told you, I just fell on it.”

  The two law enforcement officers looked at each other, both of them smiling. They thought I was lying. I didn’t blame them. I had been a social worker for years. During that time, I had interviewed dozens of women who obviously had been knocked around and punched. In some instances, I had been on the emergency squad run that brought them into the hospital. In the squad, they would tell me that their husband had struck them. But when they appeared in my office the next week, they would simply say, “I was mistaken. He didn’t hit me. I just fell down the stairs.” This was no different, except that I was telling the truth. However, the truth simply wasn’t as plausible as the rumors that had circulated around Steubenville.

  “So, Smoochie, did Rayce Daubner punch you when you went up to talk to him?” Chief Deputy Majowski asked.

  “No, not really.”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean?”

  “He slapped me a couple of times, but he really didn’t hit me.”

  “He did strike you, though.”

  “Slapped. He wasn’t really trying to hurt me, I don’t think.”

  “Uh-huh. You went up there to talk to him, and he hit you.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “But he didn’t break your arm.”

  “No. I told you, I fell.”

  “Did you fall because he slapped you?”

  “No. I fell because I tripped.”

  “How did you get those stitches in your head?”

  “I fell against the door of my van.”

  “Because he slapped you?”

  “No. I was trying to leave, and I fell against the door. He wasn’t anywhere near me.”

  “Bullshit,” Gearhard said, his voice climbing. “You expect us to believe that you went up there, he knocked you around, and yet none of your injuries were the result of the confrontation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Here’s what I think happened,” said Gearhard. “I think that you found out that Daubner had been giving it to your old lady.” He made a phallic symbol with his forearm and fist and made one, sharp upward motion. “You went out to Daubner’s place to defend her honor, and he beat the living shit out of you. He obviously wasn’t trying seriously to hurt you, because if he was, he could have killed you. I’m betting that he slapped you around, like a cat toying with a mouse, until he got tired of playing. He busted you in the face and you went down, maybe smacking your head on a step or the sidewalk. And while you were on the ground, he stomped on your arm and snapped it.” His eyebrows arched, and he awaited a response.

  “I told you what happened,” I said. “I fell. Twice.”

  They left the room for a few minutes, then came back in and repeated the questioning process. They asked the same questions, and I gave the same responses. Gearhard’s frustration seemed to grow. Majow­­ski appeared unaffected. After several rounds of questioning, ­Majowski said, “Smoochie, I don’t really believe you. I think it’s obvious that Deputy Gearhard doesn’t either. I find it wildly improbable that you sustained your injuries from simply falling.”

  They asked for a detailed accounting of my whereabouts for the previous twenty-four hours. I gave it to them, along with a list of people who could verify that I had been nowhere near Jefferson Lake State Park. “We don’t have any more questions right now,” Majowski said. “But we’re going to want to talk to you some more as our investigation progresses. You’re free to leave, sir.”

  They had been glad to give me a ride to the sheriff’s department for questioning, but I was on my own to get home. Fortunately, I lived only about twelve blocks away, so I just walked. The downstairs was dark when I got home. A light burned in our bedroom. When I unlocked the door and pushed,
I heard Dena Marie moving upstairs. By the time I had removed the key and locked the door from the inside, she was standing on the landing of our staircase. She looked at me and began to weep. She must have been distraught. I assumed the reality of the situation had been overwhelming and had given her cause to think. Tears began rolling down her cheeks. I walked up the steps to where she was standing, her hips leaning against the banister. I moved behind her and gently wrapped my hands around her. I hugged her, then moved my hands upward until they covered her breasts. I kissed her neck and held her close. “Don’t worry, my darling, everything will be all right.”

  I led her back to our room. I brushed away her tears, and we made beautiful love together. I love her deeply, and I believe, truly believe, that she loves me with all her heart. Her eyes give her away. She has been hardened by years of confusion, and though she puts up a harsh and hardened front, her eyes betray her. They are beacons that reveal how deeply and completely she loves me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DENA MARIE CONCHEK ANDROSKI XENAKIS

  I hate my husband’s living guts.

  I hate him with the searing white heat of Main Street in hell. If water were hate, I’d be the Pacific Ocean. If granules of sand were hate, I’d be the Sahara fucking Desert.

  He’s the kindest, most thoughtful, most decent, gentle, caring man I have ever met. He buys me cards and writes me love notes and hides little gifts around the house for me to find. There is hardly a month that goes by that I don’t get flowers. He absolutely adores me. He worships me. I’ve never been treated so well in my life.

  And I am so consumed with hate for him that my stomach churns, acid boils in my throat, and my bowels clench up.

  He’s a good Christian and a deacon in the church. He is careful with money, and he built us a house that is nicer than any place I have ever lived. He adopted my two children from a previous marriage and is a wonderful father. He takes them camping and fishing, and they adore him. I’ve never seen him drink anything harder than a beer. He doesn’t smoke or gamble or swear. He would die before ever raising a hand at me. He works around the house, cooks, does dishes, and helps the children with their homework. He has more patience than anyone else alive. He calls me “sweetheart” and, without question, the thought of being unfaithful to me has never crossed his mind.