The Interview Room Read online

hands until his heart stopped beating. Instead of doing that, I kept reading.

  “Adam and Becky Friel, as well as Amber, were found with their hands bound behind their backs. Their feet were also bound at the ankles. David was the only member of the family who had not been bound.”

  “Wanna know how I bound ’em all up?”

  For the first time that evening I saw some emotion on his face. I saw pride. He was like a kid explaining how he had hit a long ball during his Little League game, just smacked the fucker right over the fences.

  “See, what I did was I snatched up the little one, the girl. I took her inside and held the knife to her throat like this--”

  He demonstrated, holding one thin finger up to his throat.

  “Told her mommy to go find something to tie the daddy up with. She couldn’t find no rope, but she did find some of that silver tape. Ya know, the kind they call duck tape, even though ducks ain’t silver. So I had he mommy tape up the daddy, and then I taped up the mommy. I taped the little one up last. I still didn’t even know the boy was in the house.”

  A laughed on the tape.

  “The mommy was real pretty. The little one, too. I thought about havin’ some fun with ’em, but then I thought that it woulda been stupid to waste time and take a chance like that. Stanley, this guy I used to do crimes with, he used to tell me that I had to start thinkin’, had to act smarter, or I would get caught one day. I decided to act smart and get the hell outta there. I had the knife already, but I looked around for somethin’ else I could use. All I found was a hammer. I started with the daddy. I gave him a couple pokes in the back with the knife, then four whacks in the head with the hammer. That was when the mommy started hollerin’ at me, first callin’ me a sonuvabitch, and then beggin’ for me to spare the little one. I shut the bitch up with a couple of pokes and four whacks.

  The little one was cryin’ by then, but quiet tears. I felt kinda bad for her, but hey, life’s a bitch, ya know? So I gave her a poke with the knife, and she gave her first real scream. That was when the boy came outta nowhere.”

  I pictured then (as I picture now) what it must have been like for David Friel. I figure he must have heard Gentry using threats to force Becky to tape up Adam Friel. He must have listened as both his mother and has little sister were bound by Gentry, and then as his parents were murdered. I can only imagine the struggle he must have felt, fear battling an urge to help is family somehow. When he heard his sister scream in pain he overcame his fear, he pushed it down and made a heroic effort to battle the intruder who was ripping his family apart.

  But he was just a boy.

  “I musta give the boy about thirty whacks. I was just so pissed off. Little fucker tried to bite me. Man, I can tell you that boy ain’t gettin’ no open casket funeral. His head looked like a popped melon.”

  Another laugh, like churning gravel.

  “Then I did the little one. When she saw me comin’ at her she started screamin’ again. One stick, two whacks. But she was still alive. Can you believe it? So I gave her two more whacks. She stopped screamin’, and I was about to split, but then I heard the little one gurlgin’. She was still alive! I gave her a couple more sticks and two big whacks. That did the job.”

  The whole time I was looking at his eyes, looking for some sign of humanity, some hint of remorse for what he had done. I saw nothing. His eyes were blanks, zeroes.

  He talked a little more. I asked a few questions, and he answered them.

  Toward the end of the interview:

  “Why did you kill them, Wade? Why didn’t you just take the car, if that’s what you wanted?”

  Silence on the tape as he thinks about it. I can still remember the way he shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know, man. They were doin’ what they were doin’, and I was doin’ what I was doin’. Nothin’ more than that.”

  I (the I who has high cholesterol and borderline high blood pressure) stop the tape. The interview ended shortly after that exchange. The rest of the story isn’t on the tape.

  The trial. The not guilty plea, and the attempt by Gentry’s court-appointed lawyer to have the tape declared inadmissible. It was a good thing I made sure to get Gentry on tape admitting that he was speaking to us sans attorney of his own free will. The tape was played for the jury. Gentry was found guilty, and in the penalty phase of the trial it took the same jury an hour to decide that he should die for his crime. I have long suspected that they decided on death a whole lot quicker than that, but wanted to make it look as if they had actually debated it.

  After the trial I didn’t see or hear from Wade Lee Gentry for twenty-two years. When I did see him again it was through a plate of glass. I watched as he was led into the death chamber. Time had thinned his body some (and he had already been thin before). His hair was thinner as well, shorter and mostly gray. He was clean-shaven. I was the only cop there who had been involved in the case. Beau Jacobsen had passed some years earlier after suffering a heart attack on the golf course. As for the others, I don’t know if they weren’t invited, or if they didn’t come because they wanted to put the past behind them, or what. There were a few others there, but no kin (either Gentry’s or the Friels’).

  After they strapped him to the table Gentry was asked if he had any final words. He raised his head up so that he could get a good look at his audience.

  “I don’t see nobody I know,” he said.

  I don’t know whether he really didn’t remember (or recognize) me, or if he was lying. I guess I’ll never know.

  “I just want for someone to tell my mama that I love her. Everyone else can kiss my ass.”

  He put his head down.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  Those were the last words of Wade Lee Gentry.

  They gave him the death cocktail; he gasped a few times, then went limp. Before too long he was officially declared dead. A scrap from a T.S. Eliot poem came to mind--

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  That might have been the end of Gentry and me, but for some reason I couldn’t let go of that particular ghost. Throughout all those years I always kept track of the evidence from the Gentry case. You never know. Some fluke could happen, some appeals judge could decide that there had been a problem with the original trial. It happens every now and again--some bastard gets a second trial after some years have passed, and lo and behold the evidence is missing. Sometimes it’s misfiled, sometimes it’s destroyed to make room, sometimes it’s been pilfered for illicit sale to morbid “memorabilia” sites with little in the way of ethics. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I made sure I always knew where the Gentry files were.

  After he was put down like the dog he was, I knew that there was no reason for the evidence to keep taking up space in the evidence room. I knew that one day it would probably be destroyed. I had to keep a piece of it. I had to remember. So I took the voice recorder and the cassette. I took them, put them in a shoebox, and put the shoebox in the back of my closet. In the years since no one has ever asked about a missing tape. I think most people have forgotten about it all.

  Not me.

  I put the machine back in the shoebox. I turn off the light and the garage returns to darkness. Making sure to lock the garage door behind me, I walk through the kitchen, which is dark except for those bars of moonlight. I stop in my tracks. I’m not thinking about brownies this time (though Mary does make them good). I’m imagining briefly what it would be like to find a hammer (like the one that Gentry had found all those years ago), to use it to smash the damn thing to pieces, machine, tape, and all. Instead I continue on to the bedroom I have shared with my wife, again passing the closed doors to the bedrooms where my kids once lived. I walk quietly to the closet, replace the shoebox, and climb into bed. I look at the clock. It reads 2:33 in red lights.

  Beside me Mary sleeps easily, her breathing steady and even. I tell myself, there in the darkness, that
I will never listen to that tape again. Even as I promise myself, I know that it’s a lie. Maybe I’m afraid that if I forget, then it will truly be forgotten. Maybe it’s some form of masochism. I’m not sure what it is. I just know that eventually I will again take that ghost out of the shoebox where it lives.

  I roll over on my side and put an arm around Mary. It is like this that I fall asleep.

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