THE INTERVIEW ROOM
Mike Ramon
© 2015 M. Ramon
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Ghosts always come in the nighttime. That’s how it works I think. They come after the sun goes down, in the quiet hours of the night (or the early hours of the morning), when your defenses are low. Sometimes they come for you while you’re lying in bed, in those thin hours when sleep flirts with you but just won’t come. Sometimes they come when you are sitting on the couch, sipping at a beer and catching a replay of the ballgame. They come back like a motherfucker, don’t they?
I don’t know; maybe it’s just me.
The real bitch about it is that my worst ghost doesn’t ever come for me on its own. For some reason that I don’t think I will ever understand, not even if I live to see the big one-double-oh, I take that ghost right out of the shoebox I keep it in (carefully stashed at the back of my closet), and ask it to come back to me. And so it does. Every time.
So it is tonight.
I carry the box where my worst ghost lives, tiptoeing out of the bedroom that I have shared with my wife for thirty-eight years. Mary sleeps like a coma case, would sleep through a goddamn atom bomb, but I move quietly just the same. As I step softly down the carpeted hallway I pass the doors of two empty bedrooms where our children once dreamed, before they left our home to live their own lives. I once convinced myself that I would turn one of the bedrooms (probably Lindsay’s; it was bigger) into a study, but I guess if I was ever going to do it I would have done it already.
I slip through the dark kitchen, where bars of cold moonlight fall across the linoleum floor. I consider making a pit stop at the fridge to sneak some of Mary’s brownies, but I don’t. I know she will have counted them, and if the count comes up even a single brownie short in the morning I’ll catch holy hell.
At the back of the kitchen I turn the deadbolt and swing the door to the garage open, closing it softly behind me. The hinges give out a short, sharp squeal in protest, and for a brief moment I freeze, certain that Mary will hear it. Then I push the silly thought away; I could turn the kitchen into a makeshift bowling alley and roll me some strikes, and she would probably sleep right through it.
It takes me a few seconds to find the cord to the bare lightbulb. It never seems to be where you expect to find it. Against all odds (and praise the gods) I do find it, and hard yellow-white light fills the garage, most of which is taken up with Mary’s Kia. My Chevy Caprice is parked out at the curb. (When I bought the Caprice eight years ago Mary shook her head and said, “What, were they all out of Crown Victorias?”)
At the back of the garage is a beat-up table that hasn’t been cleaned in ten years or more. I pull the chair out and take a seat, setting the shoebox down on the table. For a moment I pause with my hands on the lid of the box, thinking that I could just go back to the bedroom. I could stuff the shoebox in the back for the closet, climb in bed and maybe not have a nightmare tonight.
Even as I think it, I know that’s not what is going to happen.
I lift the lid off and set it aside, then reach in and take out the old hunk of plastic. It’s about the size of a brick, a relic of its time. It’s hefty, all right, but nowhere near as heavy as a brick. Even so it feels like I’ve set down a great weight when I lay it on the table.
Don’t do this.
The thought shoots through my mind. But I will do this. I always do this.
I think that maybe the batteries will be dead, and if they are that will settle it. I really will take the damn thing back to the closet and try to get some sleep. I have no idea where to find spare batteries in the house, or even if there are any. It’s been maybe a year since the last time I came out here with the thing, and maybe the batteries are dead, maybe they have corroded. That happened with one of our old DVD remotes, and the remote was useless after that. The white junk that leaked out ruined the thing. Even after cleaning it out and putting in fresh batteries it refused to work.
Maybe it would be for the best if that were the case now.
But I know I’m not that lucky. I hit the button on the side of the device, and I hear the machine whir to life. Through the little window I can see the wheels of the cassette rotating. Nothing but tape hiss at first. Then I hear myself clearing my throat. Not the me that is sitting at a table at the back of a garage on Cedar Street, but the me that is nervous about the imminent birth of my first child (Frankie, my boy), the me that still plays a pickup baseball game every few weeks in the warmer months. The me that knows nothing of ghosts.
I (the I that hasn’t played a ballgame in over twenty years) close my eyes and listen.
“This is Detective Jim Willis. The date is September 6th, 1985. The time is, ah…10:15 p.m. Sergeant Beau Jacobson is also present. This is an interview with Wade Lee Gentry, Caucasian male, d.o.b. July 7th, 1953.”
A moment of silence, broken by the sound of a riffling of papers. A cough (I can’t remember for sure who it was that coughed; I think it was Beau.)
“Mr. Gentry, do you acknowledge that you have been read your Miranda rights, and that you fully understand these rights?”
“Yeah, I was read ’em.”
That voice is like gravel. My long ago self speaks again:
“You understand that you don’t have to make a statement to myself, nor to anyone else, without an attorney present. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you wish to make a statement anyway?”
I already knew the answer to that question. I had started recording because Gentry told me he wanted to talk, and that he didn’t want any lawyer. So yeah, I knew, but I wanted it on tape.
“Yuh huh. I wanna talk to ya.”
“Okay then. Some preliminaries.”
More paper riffling as that me read from a handwritten report made by the arresting officers. Later it would be typed up, but there hadn’t been time enough for that. Things had moved too quickly.
“Today at 5:48 p.m. a citizen called emergency services to report a possible crime in progress. She stated that approximately twenty minutes prior to her call she had seen Amber Friel, the five year old daughter of neighbors Adam and Becky Friel, riding her tricycle in the driveway of the Friel home. Five to ten minutes later the caller heard shouting from the Friel house. When she looked out her window to see what was going on, she saw Amber’s tricycle lying on its side in the driveway. Amber was nowhere in sight.
The caller thought that the shouts were likely just a family squabble, and returned to the meal she was in the middle of cooking. Several minutes later she heard a series of screams that were suddenly cut off. She rushed back to the window. That was when she saw a man described as approximately 5-foot-9, with a thin build, with long, bushy hair and a scruffy beard, bolt from the Friel home and jump behind the wheel of Adam Friel’s 1975 AMC Gremlin and drive off, I quote, ‘like a bat out of hell’.”
I can see him now, just as clear as if all of this had gone down just yesterday. He fit the caller’s description to a T. I remember the way he just sat there, listening with absolutely no emotion at all. I might as well have been reading a grocery list.
I’ve listened to the recording so many times that I know exactly how long to skip forward to get past the next few minutes of the interview (we never used the word “interrogation” with a perp; “interview” put them more at ease). I hit the fast forward button,
skipping past the part where I read how Officers Benoit and Mercer were dispatched to the scene; how on the way to the Friel home address they had passed the very Gremlin the neighbor had reported the suspect fleeing in; how a twenty minute chase had followed, ending only when Gentry, who was behind the wheel, lost control of the vehicle and skidded into a telephone pole. Gentry had come out of the deal just fine, with just a few minor scrapes and bruises to show for it.
I hit the play button.
From the tape the younger me reads from another report, this one written by Officers Cooper and Fagen, who arrived at the Friel home around the same time that Wade Lee Gentry was fighting to steer clear of a collision with a telephone pole:
“Officers Cooper and Fagen entered the Friel residence at approximately 6:25 p.m. They found four individuals lying on the living room floor. They were all deceased. The victims have been identified as the four members of the Friel family. Thirty-two year old Adam Friel; twenty-nine year old Becky Friel; twelve year old Steven Friel; five year old--”
My voice falters and cracks on the recording. I (the younger I) clear my throat and continue:
“Five year old Amber Friel.”
And when I looked up at him he still had that bored look on his face, that “are we done yet?” look. I wanted more than anything in the world to squeeze his neck with my own two