a few blocks over from me and we have crossed paths several times while she was walking her schnauzer and I was out jogging. Either way she doesn’t recognize me, nor does she see the name I gave on her screen of daily appointments.
“I’m sorry, Mister…”
“Calloway.”
“Mr. Calloway, I don’t have you on our schedule today. Are you a new patient of Dr. Ruthers?”
“No ma’am, I was here two maybe three weeks ago.”
She pages back through her patient registry for the past four weeks, shaking her head. “No, I don’t see you listed here.”
“Are you sure?” I ask in a raised voice. “There has to be a mistake. How could you not have any record of my last visit!”
She quickly becomes befuddled by my outburst. She turns the screen toward me, and pages back through the last several weeks of appointments. I try very hard to contain my grin as she flashes each screen listing all the names of the patients visiting Dr. Ruthers in the last few months in front of me. “See Mr. Calloway. We have no record of your visit.”
“This is just unbelievable. I can’t believe the incompetence.”
“If you like I can get Dr. Ruthers. Maybe he can clear up the confusion.”
I sigh heavily. “No, that’s quite alright. I’ve seen enough. I see how you treat your patients. Good day ma’am. You won’t be seeing me again.”
I ignore all follow-up questions and just leave. But I now have what I came for. I am able to confirm that Derrick Calloway does not use the name he went by thirty years ago. That is, assuming that Derrick Jones, is his assumed name. Mr. Jones visited the good doctor last Thursday, and shares the exact same birthday as Derrick Calloway, January 12, 1962. It shouldn’t be long now before I track him down. I punch in Derrick Jones into my iPhone. Three names appear, two unlisted. I narrow the search to a one-mile radius. Only one name remains, one of the two unlisted numbers. There is no address information provided either, but the app knows the address based on my search criteria. I change the criteria to a half mile. He’s still listed. A quarter mile, no listings. I get out a scratch piece of paper and plot the first point. I am able to narrow it down to four tenths of a mile. I walk a city block in one direction and follow the same exercise. I am further away than the first point, six tenths of a mile. I take a right and walk another city block. This time I am closer, only three tenths of a mile. I now have three points in relation to the unknown point I am trying to find. With some simple geometry I am able to triangulate the approximate location of Derrick Jones’ address.
Within a few minutes I arrive at the entrance to the Emerald Gates apartment complex. I visit the main office. I search for the mail center. It’s not here. I wander out of the office quickly, before I catch the attention of the leasing agent. I casually stroll over to building one. There is a breezeway in the center of the building on the first floor. I enter it to find all the mail boxes for the tenants in building one. None belong to Derrick Jones.
I continue around the complex, walking from building to building, looking for the man I have waited so long to confront. I pull up another image of Derrick Calloway… the image. He’s standing over her body. Blood is running across the floor towards him. He steps back. I am hiding under the dining room table, just a few feet from my mother lying unconscious on the floor. She doesn’t move, not even the subtle movement from drawing air into her lungs. I hear a voice, the voice of my father. He is enraged. He shouts at the man. Derrick has a bronze sculpture of an angel in his hand. He looks down at the heavy metal object in hand, then back towards my father who is out of my view. He drops it. It falls, bouncing off the hardwood floor just a foot away from the puddle of blood. Before the bronze sculpture comes to rest, he turns and leaves.
I still hear the sick thud of that metal cracking against my mother’s head. It haunts me as much as the image of Derrick Calloway, standing there in the dining room, confronted by my father. And then, standing in that court room facing his accuser, facing the jury, facing me. I hear the gavel. It is a very different sound, but it conjures the memory of that blunt object slamming into my mother’s skull, delivering the deadly blow.
I find the building I’m looking for. D. Jones, number 1321. I search for just a minute before I arrive at his door. I’m nervous and begin sweating profusely. I have a heavy object in my backpack, one that is very similar to the one that clanged against the hardwoods of my childhood home that evening; very similar but not exactly the same. I knock on the door. I hear movement inside and the muted sounds of a man cursing to himself about the nuisance at the door. Finally the man reaches the door. My senses are on edge. I hear the clinking of the security chain sliding across the top of the door as if it’s attached to the side of my head. It’s followed by the twist of the door knob and the latch retracting. My pulse quickens as I stand there, waiting for the confrontation I have avoided on six separate chance encounters in the past. My knees begin to buckle and I feel the blood draining from my head. I’m about to faint.
The door swings open. I stand there in a stupor as the face I have etched so deeply in my consciousness stares back at me blankly. Then, as I stand there in silence, I see it. Those two piercing eyes widen only slightly, his long thin nostrils flare just a touch, but the corners of his mouth do not turn instinctively to force a smile. Instead they drop and a sullen look washes over his face.
“What the hell do you want?” he says with disgust seeping through his words.
I stand there saying nothing, but the moment I dreaded the most has already come and gone. He recognizes my face. How is that possible? I was seven when my mom was murdered, almost ten by the time the trial concluded, and Derrick Calloway received his sentence of fifteen years for second degree murder. The D.A. went for the lesser crime because they couldn’t prove intent and didn’t want to jeopardize their case. To let a guilty man walk, it was unfathomable. Those were the words the D.A. used when explaining his decision to my father.
I feel my blood flow returning to normal. The dizziness and nausea are gone. I swallow as I lower my backpack off my shoulder. The weight of the object inside causes it to swing wide as I try to steady it. Derrick Calloway just stares at me in disbelief, surprised that I had the guts to approach him. He is a hardened criminal now, a product of the system. I reach down into the bag and retrieve the bronze effigy, the very weapon used to slaughter my mother in front of me. I feel its heavy weight in my hand. In my mind I hear the sickening thud of it cracking open my mothers’ head. I close my eyes for a moment. I don’t want to mess this up. I only have one chance to make things right.
The image from thirty years ago is painted vividly in my mind’s eye. I see Derrick Calloway turn and run. I am sitting quietly under the table with a Hot Wheel fire truck in one hand. It is 8:20pm, well past my bed time. It is dusky outside, but enough light is penetrating the sheer curtains pulled across the window that I can see my mom lying face down in a pool of her own blood. I see the huge wound from the massive blow on the back of her head. My father steps across her body. He uses a napkin to gingerly pick up the bronze statuette lying on the ground. Then he kneels next to my mother’s body. The blood soaks into his pant legs on the floor. Carefully, he takes the statuette, still holding it with the napkin, and nestles the base of it methodically into the gash in the back of her head. He then drops it next to her body and runs into the kitchen. When I hear him pick up the phone, I quietly sneak out from under the table and run upstairs. I am able to contain my tears until I dive into my bed, where I sob for the next thirty minutes.
I open my eyes and stare at Derrick Calloway, the man who served ten years for killing my mother. In my hand is the bronze figure that sat on our living room mantle for the first seven years of my life, was used to snuff out the life of my mother, and then spent the last thirty years in an old storage box in our attic. My father had methodically planned it all, down t
o the very last detail that would frame an innocent man.
“Mr. Calloway, I know that this is the definition of a little too little, a little too late… but this is the actual weapon used to kill my mother.”
Calloway’s angry scowl turns into a look of bewilderment. But he says nothing so I continue.
“You did a very good job making the replica of this angel, but there are a few slight differences. The wings on yours have sixteen feathers on each side; the original only has fifteen. The original looks down and to the left and its face doesn’t smile. Yours does and it looks straight ahead.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you telling me this?” Calloway stares at the bronze statue in my hand he had heard described in detail over the phone some thirty years ago, when my father had custom ordered a replacement for the one he claimed to have lost.
“I knew all along. I was so young. I didn’t know what to do. Then as time rolled along, and I got old enough to act on what I knew, I just didn’t. They would ask why I didn’t speak up sooner. The longer I waited the worse it got. I felt that I had passed the point where I could say anything. So I didn’t.”
Calloway’s look of disgust returns.