“With our budget for overtime? We don’t have the manpower to patrol our own parking lot,” he replied. “You about to wrap it up here?”
“Just about,” I said.
I can’t tell you exactly why I wanted to go inside the fraternity house with the kid named Sonny Williamson. Maybe, like most people, I wanted to believe in the Orwellian admonition that human beings are always better than we think they are. Ask a street cop how often he has glanced in his rearview mirror at a handcuffed suspect whose clothes are stippled with his victim’s blood, hoping to catch a glimmer of humanity that will dispel his growing sense that not all of us descend from the same tree.
“You have an interesting name,” I said in the kitchen.
“Why’s that?”
“Sonny Boy Williamson was a famous bluesman from Jackson, Tennessee, same town that produced Carl Perkins,” I said.
He seemed to think about the implications of my statement. “Never heard of either one of them. What do you want to see?” he said.
“The bedrooms.”
“They’re all upstairs.”
“Good,” I said.
It was obvious he didn’t like embarking on a mission whose purpose was hidden from him. He stopped on the second landing and gestured vaguely down the hallway. “About a half-dozen guys sleep here, but they’re gone for the summer,” he said.
I looked down from the banister at the living room area below and the thread-worn carpet and scarred furniture. “Your parties usually take place down there?” I said.
“Right, when we have parties.”
“Remember a party about the time of spring break?”
“Not particularly.”
“Think hard.”
“I don’t remember,” he said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you guys sometimes call that ‘booze and cooze night’?”
“No, man, we don’t.”
I rested one hand on his shoulder, as a blind man might if he wanted someone to cross a dangerous street with him. “Show me the bedrooms, Sonny. I’ve got a lot of faith in you. I can tell you’re a guy who wants to do the right thing.”
The afternoon heat was trapped against the ceiling, the air motionless, gray with motes of dust. A drop of sweat ran in a clear line down the side of Sonny’s face. “See for yourself. It’s just empty rooms,” he said, flexing his back.
“But you know the one I’m interested in. She was stoned when she got here, then she loaded up again and probably couldn’t walk too well. So one guy probably offered to help her, you know, show her to the bathroom or give her a place to lie down. It would have been just one guy, right? She wouldn’t have gone upstairs with two or three. That would have caused all kinds of alarm bells to go off in her head, and besides, it would look bad. Who was the guy, Sonny? I don’t think it was Tony Lujan and I know she didn’t like or trust Slim Bruxal. Who’s the guy who walked Yvonne Darbonne upstairs?”
He had stepped back from me, causing my hand to drop from his shoulder. His neck was slick with sweat, his breathing audible in the silence. “I wasn’t there,” he said.
“How can you say you weren’t there if you don’t even remember the party? You mean you don’t attend fraternity parties?”
He stared at me dumbly, unable to reason through the question. I pushed open a bedroom door that was already ajar. The closet was empty, the drawers pulled loose from the dresser, the bed little more than a stained mattress askew on a set of springs.
“Is this y’all’s fuck pad?” I said.
“You’re all wrong on this.”
“Right. Were you one of them, Sonny?”
“One of who?”
“She’d already been raped earlier in the day. She was drunk and stoned and unable to protect herself. Did your buds say she was a good lay? Did you have a go at her yourself?”