Deanna Yeller remained still.
“You see, from the beginning I never bought the robbery angle,” Myron said. “You were quick to call your son a thief, Deanna, but the facts didn’t back it up. He was a good kid. He had no record. And he was smart. There was nothing to steal out there. Then I thought maybe it was a drug deal gone bad. That made the most sense. Alexander Cross was a user. Errol Swade was a seller. But that didn’t explain why your son was there. I even thought for a while that Curtis and Errol had never gone to the club, that they were just scapegoats. But a fairly reliable witness swears he saw them both. He also said he heard tennis balls being hit at night. He also saw Curtis and Errol each carrying one tennis racket. Why? If you’re robbing the place, you carry as many rackets as you can. If you’re doing a drug deal, you don’t carry any rackets. The answer was obvious in the end: they were there to play tennis. They jumped the fence not to rob the place, but because Curtis wanted to play tennis.”
Deanna lifted her head up. She was hollow-eyed. Her movements were sparse and slow. “It was a grass court,” she said. “He’d watched Wimbledon on TV that week. He just wanted to play on a grass court, that’s all.”
“Unfortunately Alexander Cross and his buddies were outside getting high,” Myron went on. “They heard Curtis and Errol. What happened next is not exactly clear, but I think we can probably take Senator Cross’s word on this one. Alexander, high as a kite, created a conflict. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of a couple of black kids playing on his court. Or maybe he really thought they were there to rob the club. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Errol Swade took out a knife and killed him. It might have been self-defense, but I doubt it.”
“He just reacted,” Deanna said. “Stupid kid saw a bunch of white boys, so he stabbed. Errol didn’t know any different.”
Myron nodded. “They ran away then, but Curtis got tackled in the bushes by Valerie Simpson. They struggled. Valerie got a good look at Curtis. A very good look. When you are fighting with someone you believed killed your fiancé, you don’t forget the face. Curtis managed to break away. He and Errol jumped the fence and ran down the block. They found a car in a driveway. Errol had been arrested several times already for stealing cars. Breaking in and hot-wiring one was no problem for him. That’s what first gave it to me. I talked to the officer who supposedly shot your son. His name is Jimmy Blaine. Jimmy said he shot the driver of the car, not the passenger. But Curtis wouldn’t have been driving. That wouldn’t make any sense. The driver was the experienced thief, not the good kid. So then it dawned on me: Jimmy Blaine didn’t shoot Curtis Yeller. He shot Errol Swade.”
Deanna Yeller sat still as a stone.
“The bullet hit Errol in the ribs. With Curtis’s help they managed to round the corner and crawl in through the fire escape. They made their way to your apartment. By now sirens were sounding all over the place. They were closing in on all of you. Errol and Curtis were probably in a state of panic. It was pandemonium. They told you what happened. You knew what this meant—a rich white boy stabbed at a fancy rich white club. Your son was doomed. Even if Curtis had only been standing there—even if Errol told the police that it was all his fault—Curtis was finished.”
“I knew more than that,” Deanna interjected. “It’d been almost an hour since the murder. The radio already said who the victim was. Not just a rich white boy, but the son of a United States senator.”
“And,” Myron continued, “you knew Errol had a long record. You knew it was his fault. You knew he was going away for good this time. Errol’s life was over, and he had no one to blame but himself. But Curtis was innocent. Curtis was a good boy. He’d done everything right, and now because of the stupidity of his cousin, his life was about to be flushed away.”
Deanna looked up. “But that was all true,” she insisted, sparking up just a bit. “Can’t deny any of that, can you? Can you?”
“No,” Myron said. “I guess I can’t. What you did next probably didn’t take much thought. You’d heard the police fire two bullets. You saw only one in Errol. Most important, Curtis didn’t have a record. His mug shot wasn’t on file. His description wasn’t on file.” He stopped. Her eyes were clear and on him. “Whose gun was it, Deanna?”
“Errol’s.”
“He had it with him?”
She nodded.
“So you took the gun. You pressed it against Errol’s cheek. And you fired.”
She nodded again.
“You blew his face right off,” Myron continued. “I wondered about that too. Why would someone shoot him up close in the face? Why not in the back of the head or the heart? The answer is, you didn’t want anyone to see his face. You wanted him to be an unrecognizable lump. Then you put on your big act. You cradled him in your arms and cried while the police and the senator’s hoods came crashing in. It was so simple really. I asked the medical examiner how they identified Curtis’s body. She scoffed at such a ridiculous question. The usual way, she told me. The next of kin. You, Deanna. The mother. What else did they need? Why question that? The cops were thrilled you didn’t want to make a big deal over it, so they didn’t look too closely. And just to cement your plan, you were smart enough to have the body cremated immediately. Even if someone wanted to go back and check, the evidence was ashes.
“As for Curtis, his escape was easy. A nationwide manhunt began for Errol Swade, a six-foot four-inch man who looked nothing like your son. No one was looking for Curtis Yeller. He was dead.”
“It wasn’t quite that easy,” Deanna said. “Curtis and I were careful. Powerful men were in this. The police scared me, sure, but not as much as those men who worked for the senator. And then the papers all made that Cross boy out to be a hero. Curtis knew the truth. If the senator ever got a hold of my boy …” She shrugged away the obvious.
Myron nodded. He’d thought the same thing too. Dead men tell no tales. “So Curtis spent the next five years underground?” he asked.
“I guess you could call it that,” Deanna said. “He roamed around, scraped by on whatever he could. I sent him money when I had some, but I told him to never come back to Philadelphia. We’d arrange times to talk on public phones and stuff. He grew up on his own. He lived on the streets, but he was well-spoken enough to get some decent jobs. He worked for three years at a tennis club near Boston. He played all the time, even hustled a few games. I saved up enough for him to get a little plastic surgery done. Just some little touches, you know, in case he ran into someone he knew. Like you said, he got a lot bigger. He grew an inch and put on thirty pounds. He also wore those sunglasses, though I always thought that was going a little too far. No one’s gonna recognize him, I thought. Not anymore. It’d been too long. Worst thing happen, someone might think he resembles a dead boy they used to know. I mean, five years passed. We thought he was safe.”