I'll Be Gone in the Dark(15)

The experience had been gruesome and rattling for the kids. They spoke of it often, Dan wrote, mostly because they were angry—the well-known, accepted theory of what happened to Kathleen that night was wrong, in their opinion. They felt they knew the identity of her killer.

In fact, they had encountered him that night.

*





TERRY AND DAN ARE NOT ONLY COUSINS; THEY SHARED A HOUSE growing up. Dan’s family lived on the first floor; Terry’s, on the second; and their grandmother, on the third. Terry and I survey the back of the old place from the alley.


“How many people would that be?” I ask Terry. The house is about three thousand square feet at most.

“Eleven kids, five adults,” he says.

Just a year apart, Dan and Terry were, and remain, close.

“That summer was a real transition time for us,” Terry says. “Sometimes we stole beers and got drunk. Other times we messed around like when we were kids.”

He gestures at the slab of concrete that abuts the garage in the backyard.

“I remember we were playing hockey, or maybe basketball, that night.” The group comprised Terry, Danny, Danny’s younger brother, Tom, and two grade-school friends, Mike and Darren. It was a little before ten p.m. Someone suggested they head down the alley to the White Hen, a small convenience store on Euclid, about a block and a half away. They went to the White Hen all the time, sometimes three or four times a day, for a Kit Kat or a Coke.

Terry and I head north from the house. He spent so much time in this alley as a kid, he can spot all the little ways it’s changed.

“It was darker at night back then,” he says. “Like a cave almost. The branches would stick out and hang down more.”

An unfamiliar tree in a neighbor’s backyard draws his attention. “Bamboo,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

About fifty feet from where the alley intersects with Pleasant Street, Terry stops. A gaggle of preteen and teen boys shooting the shit, as Terry recalls them doing, can be raucous. They distracted themselves with goofball antics. This spot haunts him. Looking straight ahead you can see the mouth of the alley across the street.





“If we’d been paying attention, we might have seen her run by,” he says. “We might have seen him grab her.”


We cross the street to the alcove behind 143 South Wesley Avenue. The five boys were walking together in a straight line. Danny was on his right, Terry remembers. He puts a hand on the fence near the garage and rattles it.

“I think this is the same fence, but it was painted red then,” Terry says.

He thought he glimpsed a rolled-up rug near the garbage cans. Kathleen’s legs were very pale, and in the dark Terry mistook them for a light-colored carpet. Then Danny, who was closest to her, shouted.

“That’s a body!”

Terry and I stare at the spot alongside the garage where Kathleen lay on her back. It was clear immediately that her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled around her feet. There was a terrible smell. Probably her stomach gases, Terry guesses now. Darren, a “delicate kid,” as Terry describes him, walked slowly backward to the opposite garage with his hands on top of his head, bugging out. Tom took off toward the nearest back door, yelling for help.

The next moment is where the accepted narrative of Kathleen Lombardo’s murder diverges from Terry and Dan’s memory. They remember that Kathleen still had vital signs but died in the minutes between their discovery of her and the arrival of a swarm of police. They remember the detectives telling them they must have just walked up on the guy.

They remember a man emerging from the alley almost simultaneously as they discovered Kathleen’s body. He was tall and appeared to be of Indian descent. He wore a linen shirt opened to his navel, shorts, and sandals.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. Terry says the man never looked in the direction of the body.





“Someone’s hurt. We need to call the police,” Mike shouted at the man. The man shook his head.


“I don’t have a phone,” he said.

The chaos of the scene obscures the next sequence of events. Terry remembers the patrol car pulling up, driven by a skeptical uniformed cop with a mustache who asked sarcastically where the body was. He remembers the change in tone and urgent radio for help when the cop saw Kathleen. He remembers the cop’s partner, a younger guy, maybe even a trainee, leaning against the side of the car, retching.

He remembers Darren against the garage, his hands still to his head, rocking back and forth. And then a siege of lights and sirens, the likes of which Terry had never seen before or since.

Seven years later, Terry happened to carpool to a concert with a guy named Tom McBride, who lived a few doors down from the murder scene. Terry and Tom had been enemies as kids, in the way you are when you don’t know each other and go to different schools. Tom, Terry says, was a “public,” as the Catholic kids called them. But Terry discovered that Tom was actually a really good guy. They gabbed all night.

“Weren’t you one of the kids that found that body?” Tom asked.

Terry said he was. Tom’s eyes narrowed.

“I always thought someone in the neighborhood did it.”

An image came back to Terry, the man in the open linen shirt, the strange way he wouldn’t look at Kathleen’s body. The way he’d asked them what was going on here, when it was clear something horrible was.