Trace Of Innocence. Erica Orloff

“I told the story so many times, and it got me these.” He held up shackled hands.

      “But this time if you tell it,” I whispered, “it might get you out of those.”

      His hands rested on the table, and I reached across and put my hand over the top of one of his. I gently squeezed and then withdrew. He clenched his jaw at my touch, and I just sat back and waited.

      He stared down at the table, fixating on a spot. His eyes sort of glazed over, and he began to talk.

      “I met this girl at a bar. I was working as a mason. A bricklayer. Followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. He died after I came here. Anyway…saw her a time or two. She was…screwed up. Troubled. We never slept together. I…I was looking for a girlfriend, a relationship. Not a one-night stand. But I liked her, and I wanted to help her figure her life out.”

      I didn’t take notes. I just listened. Jack, my sometime boyfriend the cop, said taking notes made people self-conscious. They froze up, and I was certain if I took notes I wouldn’t get the full story the same way I would if Falco was relaxed.

      “Go on,” I urged.

      “Anyway, I’m hanging out at her house with her, after she got off work. This guy shows up. Never saw him before. Didn’t give his name. I don’t even have a good description. He was just average. Everything about him was average.”

      The way he said it, I knew that David Falco realized he was not average. He was very beautiful, and it had probably been a blessing and a curse his whole life. Outside, it had probably been a blessing. In here, a curse.

      “Anyway,” he said softly, “I just got this weird vibe. Like these two were into head games with each other, and I was just…being used by her. She kept calling him tough guy—not using a name. Mocking him. So I said I was tired and got up and left. I was there maybe five minutes with them. On the way out of her apartment, I passed a married couple coming home from a night out. They said hi. They id’d me the next day when her body was found.”

      “Can you articulate what was weird about them? About Cammie and this guy?”

      “Articulate?”

      “Explain.”

      “I know what it means. Just don’t hear many big words in this place.”

      I smiled at him. “Sorry.”

      “It’s okay. It’s been a long time since I was treated like anything other than a dog in a cage…. I’m not sure what was so weird. I don’t know. I mean…he stared at her like he hated her. And she was saying all this double-entendre stuff. Like implying he was inadequate in bed. I don’t even remember. I was a little drunk, but I just felt like there was something going on there, and I didn’t want to be around it. I wish now I’d never met her.”

      “Did you feel like…something sexual, like they wanted to involve you in something?”

      He didn’t speak for a minute or two, then he just gave me a single nod. “Maybe,” he whispered.

      “And you didn’t want anything to do with that.” I said it as a statement.

      David Falco looked up at me. “No. In my whole life, I’ve been with three women. My high school girlfriend, a woman I met through my sister and a girlfriend who broke up with me maybe four months before the murder.”

      I found it hard to believe. My eyes probably expressed that.

      “I swear to you. I was always a one-woman man. And I just didn’t get into kinky shit.” He smiled at me. “And to be honest, now it’s been so long since I was with a woman, I can hardly remember.” His smile was a little shy. And sad. “Anyway, this girl, Cammie, she had a dark side. Honest to God, I was trying to listen, to be a friend to her.”

      “Dark side, how?”

      “I don’t know. She was a bartender at this place I stopped in once in a while if I was working a job that way. We’d talk and later at night, when the place got quiet, she’d say things to me, like, ‘You’re so good, and I’m so fucked up.’ But when I tried to tell her that she wasn’t, that she could turn her life around, her eyes would well up, then she’d make a joke or something, or she’d go down to the other end of the bar.”

      “So why was she saying she was screwed up?”

      “I never found out, but it always sounded big, like…something evil, or something really, really dark. I just felt kind of bad for her, this beautiful girl with some bad secret.”

      “Did any of this come out in the trial?”

      He looked at me and shook his head. “My lawyer wasn’t really interested in anything except maybe pleading me down to murder two.”

      “Can you think of any reason…any connection she might have had, to the suicide king playing card?”

      “No. And trust me, I’ve had a long time to think about that. Nothing. I draw a blank every time.”

      “Did she use drugs that you know of?”

      “No.”

      “Can you think of any reason why someone might try to frame you?”

      “No. Look…before this, I was an ordinary guy. This has been like a nightmare I never wake up from. When I was first put in jail, I would have this split second every morning when I would think, for just this moment, that it had all been a dream. I’d be waking up with thoughts of taking the dog for a walk, and then I’d hear something, like some guy in the next cell, and I’d realize where I was. I wouldn’t want to open my eyes.”

      I watched him as he spoke, his eyes radiating grief.

      “I wanted to kill myself. I lost my will to live. I had a life, a job, parents who loved me, a grandfather who believed in me and taught me a skill. I had my painting, my dog.”

      “What kind of dog?” I asked, maybe for a minute looking to extend his memories and take him out of that prison.

      “Oh.” He grinned. “The biggest, sloppiest mastiff you ever saw. Name was Gunther.”

      “I have a cat. Siamese named Raphael. When I was a kid, my brother and I had a golden retriever named Honey.” I didn’t mention we got her after my mom died, to make us less afraid to go to sleep at night.

      “After I got in here, my grandfather took care of my dog. ‘Just till you come home,’ he said. And then Gunther died. And then my grandfather died.” He choked off a sob. “Do you believe I’m innocent?”

      I nodded. I did. “C.C. is convinced of it. She says you’ve earned a college degree since you’ve been in here. Says she can tell you’re, how’d she put it? Pure of soul. Says your writing is amazing. I’d like to read some of it sometime.”

      “After maybe a year, I went from suicidal to numb. And then I realized I’d have to find something to make me get out of that bunk every morning or I’d be living this horror show in excruciating detail until I finally died—alone. So I forced myself to take a correspondence course, to write letters to my parents. My dad’s still alive. My mother got cancer three years ago and passed away. But my dad, he’s the one who contacted C.C. and Joe. Anyway, it’s not the existence I want, but it’s better—that being a relative term in this place. I try to picture myself as a monastic.”