Dark of the Moon

he was hitting me with a chair, and he couldn’t get a good swing and I was running around, so he never did hit me square. The neighbors called the cops. There was a car in the neighborhood, and they got there in time. But he would have killed me.”
    “What set it off?” Virgil asked.
    “Basically, we were drinking, and started arguing,” she said. “I was working and he wasn’t and I told him he was a worthless piece of shit who couldn’t even pay the rent, and he punched my arm and I hit him with my purse, and knocked him down, and he just went off…completely out of control.”
    “What about the second time?” Virgil asked. “When he went to jail?”
    “That time, he choked the shit out of me,” she said. Her hand went to her neck, as she remembered. “He came home, drunk. I was asleep, he woke me up and wanted, you know, and I didn’t want to. He started screaming at me, and I wised off, and he jumped on me and choked me. He had some friends with him, out in the living room, and they heard the fight…One of his friends pulled me off, and then I wasn’t breathing so good, so the girlfriend of the friend called the cops, and they called an ambulance and they started me breathing again.”
    “That was all for the two of you?”
    “Yeah. When he was in jail, I moved. Changed my address and got an unlisted phone…but I saw him anyway. We had some of the same friends. But we were all done, and he didn’t come around anymore,” Johannsen said. “Good thing, too. He would have killed me, sooner or later.”
    “Did he ever mention his parents?” Virgil asked.
    “Said his mom was killed in a car wreck,” she said. “Didn’t say who his dad was.”
    “What about his adoptive parents…some people named Williamson?”
    She shook her head. “Oh…I thought they were his foster-care people, or something. They adopted him?”
    “Yes. When he was a baby.”
    “Jeez—I didn’t know that,” she said. “That makes it worse.”
    “Worse.”
    “Yeah. I met them two or three times, I guess, going over there with Bill. We used to go over there for beer—he had a key. But. They were like, total assholes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. Like they believed in slavery,” she said. “They used to tell him about how much he owed them—in money. Bill ran away when he was fourteen; he was living on the street when I met him. He ran away because they wanted him to work in their store all the time. They called it earning his keep, but most kids who are thirteen or fourteen don’t have to work sixty hours a week. That’s what they wanted. No kidding—they were assholes.”
    “Did Bill ever call himself Todd Williamson?”
    She shook her head: “Nope. He was Lane to all of us guys—the people he hung around with.”
    “Good guy, bad guy?” Virgil asked. “I mean, when he was sober?”
    “Not bad, when he was sober,” Johannsen said. She looked at her thumb; it had frosting on it, and she wiped it on the dumpster. “Bad when he was drunk. But that was twenty years ago. He was a teenager. You work in this store, you realize that a lot of teenagers are assholes, and a lot of them change when they get older.”
    “Think Bill would change?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. He was like a dog that you beat for ten years. Not the dog’s fault if he goes crazy.”
     
    S ANDY CALLED. “I got the grandmother. She’s home. I told her to stay there.”
    “Call her back, tell her I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.
     
    H E SAID GOOD-BYE to Johannsen and headed north, twenty minutes to an inner-ring suburban neighborhood, green lawns, cracked driveways, older ranch-style and split-level homes, two long-haired teenagers doing intricate and athletic bike tricks.
    Helen Lane, Williamson’s natural grandmother, was alone in her living room, watching television when Virgil pulled into the driveway. She came to the door, kept the screen locked: “I don’t know where Todd is. I don’t want to know. He was in jail for a while. Did he do something else?
    “Did he give you a hard time?” Virgil asked.
    “He’d steal money from me. He’d sneak into the house and steal,” she said.
    “How’d he find out you were his grandmother?” Virgil asked.
    “He was smart. Got his brains from my daughter,” she said. “I guess the Williamsons had a paper, maybe his birth certificate.”
    “Did he ever figure out who his real father was?”
    She frowned and said, “None of us knew who it was. I