Forgive Me

The Storm and the Telephone Booth

From the journal of Hampton Gilligan:

Marcus speaks of Robin with a sneer clutching his cheek; he believes perhaps more than I it was her husband. But now that I sit in silence-- accompanied by the storm outside the window and the storm beneath my scalp-- I can't believe Robin, OUR Robin would string her by her flesh and leave her to die in the alley.

-2/20/1920

The tree-man-- the stranger present at the foot of the protester and in the crowd of The Cherry Den-- was a shadow slithering through February. He rode the rain clouds and thunder bolts into the snow and stole from any curious eye. He was as unimportant as the rotting fish and pea cans brought up in the fishing net and tossed back into the ocean. And through life he went as fluid as grease dripping off a poor man's charred nose, never basking in a crowd or drawing gray eyes.

But I saw him; and if that wasn't enough, I saw him twice. I caught the honey slipping through the cracks. While I paid no heed to it, wasn't it enough to catch him? He thought so, anyway.

Four days after the murder of Becky Rim was swept under the carpet, the rain began. It was a warm, tropical storm and the clouds dripped liquid fire. Snow gathered up around porch steps sizzled like meat and dribbled down the Boston streets. No one dared brave the pond forming outside their window and it was deserted. Everyone that did gain enough courage (or stupidity, you decide) was swept away in rapids formed by an uneven terrain and disappeared into the ocean's depths.

Did I say everyone? An unfortunate lie. There was someone out that foggy night: a tree with a hazel suit and drenched bowler.

The stranger-- who I failed to mention was called Hampton Gilligan-- staggered his way down the outer city with his coat over his head and an arm around a notebook. He stayed close to the building walls; the water congregated in the center of the road where it made a bowl-like curve. Unfortunately, this still could not prevent the buildup of mud trenches, and where he walked there were plenty. Halfway to his destination, he more resembled a piece of fudge cake than a tree.

His muddy fingers grazed the handle of a dull telephone booth and he shut himself inside. Brown leaked off his soaked clothes and formed a puddle beneath his trembling feet. He caught a glance of his fine face in the reflection of the glass and cracked an amused grin.

"If I didn't know any better," he said aloud, "I'd say I look like something out of a bull's ass."

Hampton began to wring the rain out of his coat when another stumbling, muddy figure made its way toward the booth. It wore a purse-- a torn, wet, woman's purse-- over its face and, from the way it held its hands out in front of it, could not see a damn thing.

Its dripping hand grasped the handle and wrenched it inside the tight space, where it caught its breath. The telephone booth, like any other, was not designed to fit two wet strangers and groaned against their bodies. But they pushed back harder, managing to face each other perhaps two inches apart.

The stranger pried the purse from their head and shot Hampton an annoyed glare. His face was pink with anger and gloom.

"Why tonight, Ham?" Marcus groaned, shaking the mud out of his boots. "Of all nights!"

Hampton held up a discolored hand. "Before you whine, at least let me dry off."

"With the amount of mud you're tracking, you'll never dry off!"

"Exactly." He leaned his weight against the telephone and it snarled in response.

Marcus "harumph"ed and crossed both arms across his chest. "Alright, I get it. Just answer my question."

"I heard something about Becky."

At this, Marcus's ears perked and his neck tensed. The veins bulged. "What did you hear?" he said softly after a long pause, like he was tiptoeing around the words.

"That she-" He chose his next words carefully. "Something about an alley and iron wires."

To his surprise, Marcus burst into a series of wails that sounded more like constipation than grief. Hampton couldn't tell whether or not his eyes were full of tears or more mud.

He scratched at his arms beneath his coat and cried, "She's dead, Ham! She's gone and died! Murdered in cold blood in the alley! Suffering! Suffering!"

Hampton's eyes glazed over with red, pimple dots that drowned the smell of mud and petrichor in his nostrils. They scorched his skin-- laughed and mocked while they did it, too. He stumbled backward and knocked the back of his head against the wall. The red bled white and the world went fuzzy.

He shook his head, feeling his skull drifting beneath his skin, and laid a hand on Marcus's shoulder. He recognized the difference between he and Marcus, then. Marcus was a boy-- a boy with not enough bite in his choke to hold back his misery.

"Tell me everything you can," he said, surprised to hear his voice tremble.

"Y-you have to m-mark it first," Marcus stuttered, his every word spilling like rainwater from his lips.

"Marcus-"

"You promise you would! We n-need to figure out who k-killed her and Jesse!"

From his upturned breast pocket, Hampton withdrew a folded photograph, damp with rain damage but otherwise clear. Hands shaking, he unfolded the paper and gazed into the smug faces smirking back at him. They were all young-- barely adults and still holding onto the recklessness of early teen years-- and beaming with potential and excitement. There were eleven, maybe, and made up of mostly faces crossed with a bloody s***h. There was Jesse's face, though, looking full and high without the stitches of his scalp undone and sprawled on the concrete; he was barely visible under the pen scratch. Then there was Hampton leaning his elbow on the head of a little Marcus, who looked no more than seventeen and younger than everyone else. Becky-- was it Becky?-- had her heavily armored arms around Robin's neck. She was dressed in intimidating wear, marked with the stripes of law, but her round face was as warm as ever. Robin, however, looked no different than he had ever looked: sagging and grim, like he was trying to hide something terrifying from the eyes of the camera. Everyone else without the red s***h was bubbly and bright, but there were only two: a man with rough coveralls and an affectionate gaze and a man with a pristine suit and a hidden, loving smile.

Hampton fished around in his pocket for his red pen and drew it over the beauty of her stare. He saddened (more than he already had, of course) to see the only light left of a person smothered under an intense mark of death.

He turned the photograph over to reveal a series of lists detailing the deaths in the photograph. He began a new line, titled it BECKY, and turned his attention to Marcus, who was slathering his muddy coat sleeve over his eyes in an attempt to dry them.

"Go ahead," Hampton soothed, "and take your time."

Again, he was reminded of the youth spilling over Marcus's top as he sniffled and bubbled the words.

"It was David who found her," he began, controlling his sobs frightfully well, "and that alien woman. The one who keeps turning up. She's the one who told Gregory about it."

"She did?"

"David has . . . hasn't been well since. He was too ill to even get out of bed."

"Poor bloke," Hampton muttered. "He's always fancied her."

"The alien woman says she was visiting him at his office to talk. She doesn't say what about, just that they've had previous meetings and she wanted a quick word. Gregory didn't ask no more about it, just left it at that. Think he was staring at the dress she was wearing, the damn wad.

"They hear a scream-- right terrible one, she claims-- like someone's been strangled. 'He took off like a bullet, letting the wind guide him'."

Hampton jotted down:

-foreign woman recount, won't say reason for being there

-dressed seductively?

-scream

-coached? too wordy

"They get to Richmond," Marcus continued, "and she says he stops and listens to another scream. They round a corner and there she is, laying face-down in the dirt in a puddle of her own blood. She's got gashes down her belly and you can see those ribs! And around her's iron wire, cutting into her and bleeding her dry.

"She turns over, the alien woman, and pukes out her stomach while David's holding Becky's head. Kissed her, she says, and screams. Screams and screams and screams 'til he can't anymore. She runs for help, he's dragged away-- put up one hell of a fight, too-- and that's that."

-wire

-stomach scratched

-bled out

-foreigner runs for help

"Did they find anything important?" Hampton asked, gazing at Marcus from behind the rim of his nose. Just hearing the details of her gruesome death churned the contents of his stomach with a wooden spoon.

Marcus bobbed his head. "Few footprints (that weren't the detective's, of course), an empty wallet, and a knife."

"Sounds like enough to me."

"It was."

Hampton sat up, wincing when his shoulder banged against the telephone receiver. "They've already caught 'im? Without the detective?"

Marcus shrugged. "It was Robin's knife."

"ROBIN?!" It was now he stood to his full height, ignoring the sting of the booth's ceiling on his head and the clashes of lightning inching toward them. "THEY THINK IT WAS ROBIN?!"

Marcus cowered under his rage, thought it may not have been directed toward him and him alone. "How can they ignore the owner of the knife that killed her?" he squeaked, sounding about as much like a rodent as he looked.

"What about the footprints? Did no crazy personnel f*****g think about those?!"

"Size seven, Robin's shoe. They aren't stupid."

"But they aren't detectives."

"Does it matter?"

"If a man has been framed for the murder of his wife and might very well be headed to Charlestown for the rest of his life, yes, it does matter!"

They sat in antagonizing silence for what must have been less than a minute, but felt more like a lifetime to the men. The Winter Wind rammed his balled fist against the door of the booth and demanded entrance. There would be no calming of the rain and no clearing of the clouds; if I hadn't known any better, and not experienced it myself, I might have expected the storm to never stop. It was determined to extract the friends from the box and shred their skin into paper strips.

"What are we going to do?" Marcus said, hesitant at first but bold at his last word.

The boulders in Hampton's head swerved to avoid the plans he struggled to think of. "We can't let them throw Robin in the slammer when he hasn't done nothing."

"Wait, how do we know he hasn't done it?"

"Do you believe Robin-- dear, shy Robin-- your friend-- has done something so horrible?"

"Well," he bit his chapped lip and drew blood. "I haven't told you what he did yet."

"Why, what did he do?"

Marcus explained, then, the events of the previous week at the dinner theater: the wedding anniversary, the savings, the look on his face. Oh God, the look on his face.

When he finished his tale, clutching his arms and still dripping with something dead and white, Hampton said, "And that's why you think he did it?"

"I never said that."

"Then you don't think he did it?"

"I never said that neither."

Hampton threw his hands in the air and the lightning blazed like fire behind him. "It isn't evidence!"

"It's out of character, that's what it is."

"Not evidence."

"Tell me that isn't suspicious!"

"Suspicious, but not evidence."

"I ask it again: what are we going to do?"

Hampton thought about this for another moment, but this time it didn't take him long to give an honest answer.

"We wait," he whispered.

And the storm raged.