If Only Dogs Could Talk

*Murder, Abuse, Strong Language*

1. Lesley and Detective Anderson

"I never knew the reasons how Dan treated the children like he did. 'Course, can't say the reasons how he treated hisself, neither. Stupid son' bitch. He'd get hisself tanked up till he was like a bull with brass knuckles, that was always his way. My ass got the scars to prove it."

"Back when you two was sharin' needles, huh?"

"That what you brought me in to discuss, detective?"

"No, we ain't here to discuss that, Lesley. I'm just wonderin' how reliable your testimony in '91 could possibly have been. Realistically speakin'."

"You got the files, don't you? Got the transcripts and whatnot."

"Sure, we got everything."

"So what - what else? You gon' try pin it on me now, boss? Ha! What about Ned? Him too? Maybe we was in cahoots."

"Who the hell's Ned?"

"Our dog. He was a snappy fucker. Till Dan beat him to death with a crowbar. Oh yeah, that was Dan for ye."

"What we're here to discuss is-"

"I know what we're here discussin'! Katy's dead. End of story. Shit happened forty years ago-"

"Thirty-one years ago, Lesley. And a month."

"Let me tell you somethin' 'bout Dan Collins, boss. Realistically speakin'. Between me, John and Katy, that man put more hurt on us than there is stars in the night. Katy? She'd barely healed a broken rib when she went missin'. Don't that illustrate the temperament of the man? Same man who had gamblin' debts of, oh, I can't even remember how many thousands of dollars. Same man who played cards with Terry Fields. Shit, you a youngster, you jus' a boy, detective. But you know what certain types of men in America like to do to little girls. What they'll pay to do. Now, you add up those things you'll find out what the logical answer is, same as everybody in the courtroom did way back when."

"See here's what ain't too logical, Lesley... It is true that Dan Collins - your ex husband - was one degenerate piece of shit, we got here a whole bunch of felonies prior to hisself gettin' the big bitch in Polunsky - rape, robbery, you name it. And it is true he owed a tonne of money to some of the state's more... impatient business owners. But the only person whose testimony I can find that alleges Dan had any kinda relationship with known child trafficker Terry Fields... is you.'"

"Okay. So?"

"So here's an exclusive that didn't make the 9 o'clock. Havin' dodged the law for 30 years, Terry Fields finally bought the farm - regrettably of natural causes - last year in a hospital in Munich of all places, and do you know what *die Polizei* found in an SD box buried under his house? A complete record of criminal transactions and activity from 1984 to 1991, including names, addresses, customers, associates... Polaroids of children. Some 27 in all, all missing in the states of Texas and Louisiana... Let me tell you, my man was thorough. Sick bastard even had some kinda physiological score system to pitch his prices with. But you know who's names and faces didn't show up, neither any son' bitch who was related in any way to them? Katy and Dan Collins."

"That's some bullshit."

"But that ain't even all. Katy's brother John - you remember your son John, don't you? April last year he gets pulled over by the New York state police on a DUI... I swear, you couldn't make this shit up - John passes the breathalyzer, but just as the officer is finishin' up the speedin' ticket, the song on the car radio starts stutterin'. And it's stutterin' and it's stutterin', John's pressin' all the buttons all haywire like, and the officer looks down and sees the radio's connected to this little pink iPod Nano. Just so happens the same kind deputy do-goody recognizes that's part of a flood of petty contraband - get this - by havin' read the HSI website. No other cop would have looked twice at it! Anyway, he tells John pop the trunk, there's a bunch of shit in it, nothin' that'd likely reunite him with his pa, but enough to warrant prints and a swab at the station. And this is where it gets interestin'."

"Oh, thanks for lettin' me know, asshole."

"Couple months go by, 'course, before NYPD get round to it, and on the day... *the day* Terry Fields dies, they score a five-finger print match on four armed robberies in the New York state area - your son, one could only conclude, has either never heard of a pair of gloves, or has the biggest hard-on for getting caught that I've ever seen. He's goin' down and he knows it."

"John wound up like his daddy, huh? Color my ass astonished."

"Wait... wait, Lesley. That ain't the end of it. Cos your boy got hisself an ace up his sleeve, and my oh my, the timing is fuck...ing...per...fection. He says, I wanna make a deal. City boys say, what you got to push gon' save your ass twenty-five to life? Well, as it turns out the little pissant got the goods. You can call it fate, fortune, God or whatever, but at the same time we here in Austin are learnin' all about what Terry Fields did and didn't do, who he did and didn't conduct business with, we get a call from New York. Seems your son's willin' to testify as to what really happened on Christmas Eve in the Collinses household... that being Dan, John, Katy... and you. John's here in the station right now, ready to spill what I'm bettin' will be some real tasty beans. You an old lady, ma'am, and you been fryin' your brains in brown since even before Nancy Reagan told you not to, but I'm sure even you can add up all those things and get to the logical answer... Why is your ass in that chair havin' to talk to a policeman today?"

"John's here now? Can I speak to him?"

"Are you serious?"

"You're the one doin' all the yappin', baby. My story ain't changed, and it never will cos it's the truth. Truth is, Dan took Katy to Terry on Christmas Eve, 1990. I saw him beat the livin' shit outta her before he-"

"But you didn't see him carry her out the house, now, did ye? Says here you passed out on the couch-"

"I didn't pass out. Dan kicked me in the goddamn skull, but not before I seen him gag Katy and throw him over his shoulder."

"You were unconscious. The next thing you recall is goin' upstairs to John and Katie's room - this is somewhere between two and four in the mornin' - John's fast asleep in the top bunk but Katy ain't nowhere to be seen. You look around the house and Dan ain't home neither. He turns up around 5AM with a load on, he changes his clothes, then leaves the house again. You don't see him till January 2nd, the day before we nab his ass. Nobody ever sees Katy again. I got all that right?"

"Yes."

"And this is two weeks after your husband hosted a poker game at your house where reportedly two men besides Dan were present, a tall dude with a blonde mustache who you say you'd never seen before, and sicko extraordinaire Terry C. Fields. Do I got all *that* right?"

"Yes."

"No... No, ma'am, I don't believe I do."

                                          ***

2. John and Detective Anderson

"Can I get a Coke?"

"So, Mr. Collins, disregardin' a few speedin' tickets and a subpoena in Hawaii for an unpaid tab at  Ikaika's Tropical Tiki, looks to me like you've been a veritable law abiding citizen for all of your life. Help me out here, how is it that at the ripe ol' age of forty-three you suddenly decide to change from John Sweeney Collins into John fuckin' Dillinger? Albeit an unbelievably stupid version of him. Damn, most men in mid-life crisis get theyselves a Porsche and a woman who'll give 'em handjobs in it outside their ex wife's house, but you, my man, you seem to have got yourself dead set on bein' the one givin' the handjobs - to bangers and bitch-makers in a bunk bed in Attica. I can only suppose naivety on your part of just how, let's say, *carnally adventurous* those boys can get with soft-spoken, outta shape republicans."

"I explained to your peers in New York-"

"My what? Shut the hell up, boy, y' ain't in New York now. They tell me you got goods... all right, I'll hear it, but I'm tellin' you straight, the goods better be *better* than good, or I'll slap your ass back to Manhattan for pervertin' the course of justice. Last thing you want is that mustard on your beef, 'less you're aiming to cook slop and wash drawers till you're ninety."

"I'll tell you what I remember."

"You do that. It's Christmas Eve, 1990... Shoot."

"Ma was worse. Sure, Pa hit us, usually when he was drunk, but that wasn't as often as Ma made it out to be. Ma would use the dog's collar when she went at us. She was always high, day in, day out. But if I'm honest, I can't say I didn't deserve it. I was haywire back then. Ma and Pa even told me I was getting a lump of coal under the tree that year and they actually followed through. The biggest lump of coal I've ever seen, God knows where they found it. But Katy was a good girl. Pa bought her a dollhouse- not one o' them plastic Barbie ones, a proper Victorian style dollhouse, the one she wanted. It must have been Pa got it for her, Ma wouldn't have remembered Katy's name if you'd asked her in 1990. Pa always got Katy what she wanted."

"Hey. Angela Lansbury, we ain't here so you can fuckin' reminisce. Tell me what happened that night"

"Ma and Pa had a fight about a poker game he'd had a couple weeks prior."

"Terry Fields."

"No, Terry Fields wasn't there."

"How would you even know who Terry Fields was? What were you - eleven, twelve?"

"I knew because the two other players at the table were women. That's what the fight was about. Yeah, Pa was in debt, but not to those two, they were just a couple o' drunk broads he happened to stumble home with. Ma and Pa were at each other's throats about it for the next fortnight, but it all came to a head on Christmas Eve."

"Go on."

"Ma was screaming, going for him, scratching his face like a damn bobcat. He flung her face-down on the floor and kicked her in the back of the skull. She stopped moving. He fell to his knees beside her and started pleading: 'Im sorry, Lesley, I'm so sorry,' he kept saying it over and over. Katy's bawling her eyes out, trying to scramble over Pa's shoulders to get to her, Ned's barking, I'm panicking, it's pandemonium. Then, outta nowhere Ma flips over with a needle she must've had a hold of under her stomach... It doesn't hit Pa. It grazes past his cheek and tears straight down Katy's neck and opens it."

"Okay. All right. 'Course you realize that'd just be her word against yours. Your mother's a skag head, but that trumps a three-count felon ten times outta ten."

"Won't just be my word. Ask my daddy."

"Daniel? What makes you think he gon' corroborate your bullshit now? If what you say's true, son' bitch done thirty years protectin' your mama."

"Ha! Protectin' what? Man, you yahoos don't have a clue, do you? You think he'd keep his mouth shut for that two-bit skank? Hell no. Look Detective..."

"Anderson."

"Anderson. My father was a hundred grand in the hole, you wanna know who to? Des Ilkovich. You know the name."

"Yeah, I know, the real estate asshole. He got screwed by PETA for drowning that chimpanzee tryin' to shoot a commercial."

"That's him. Lost his business overnight. But he had another, substantially more lucrative venture with some bangers at Polunsky. He just needed someone on the inside to keep an eye on it, and since Pa owed him more than he could ever hope to pay, and that the likely alternative would be the unhappy marriage of his balls and a pruning saw, he did what he had to do... Don't ask me what they did with the body, I was twelve. It was past my bedtime."

"All right, John. The one thing you got goin' for you is that I don't believe you got the brains to fabricate that. But the question remains, why would your pa fess up now?"

"Ilkovich is dead, detective. And my daddy's hot on his heels with the cancer in his colon."

"You're in touch with him?"

"Every week since his diagnosis. He'll fess up when he knows I did too. Can I please get a Coke? My blood needs a sugar level or I get real woozy."

                                         ***

3. Daniel and his Cellmate Dion

"Shit's metastisized, whatever that means. Crawled up my ass into my liver, as I understands it."

"How long they gave you?"

"Like, six months. They can't know for sure."

"Tough break, brother. They lettin' you out on - what is that called - compassion grounds or whatever?"

"I dunno, man. I didn't ask... Ayo Dion. Ask you suttin? You ever killed a dog?"

"Say what?"

"A dog. I know you banged in Chicago, but did you ever kill anythin' that wasn't a man, you know, like a dog?"

"I killed alotta men who was dogs... Why would anyone wanna kill a dog, my boy?"

"There are reasons."

"Aight."

"Yeah... So... Do you think vengeance is a sin if the vengeance you exact is on a dog?"

"What the fuck? What dog? Like a sniffer dog?"

"No, a Staffy."

"A what?"

"A Staffy."

"A Staffy? Muh'fucker you been huffing old newspapers in the library again? What you want revenge on a Staffy for?"

"I don't want no revenge, man, I already did it. You ever heard of Gelert?"

"Shit you shave with?"

"Gelert. Gelert. The dog from the folk-tale, asshole. Not Gillette."

"Aight. Sure. Gelert the Staffy."

"Yeah, the Staffy. This boy's name was Ned. See, a time ago me and the missus got into somethin' of a domestic. I was drinkin' a lot at the time, playin' alotta cards, not payin' her much attention etcetera. So, Christmas Eve we gets into it, she says some shit, I says some shit, you know how it goes, but the kids got spooked, like by the severity of it all. They cyrin', they bellyachin' - that's John and Katy, by the way, John's the eldest. And Ned's scared too, he's still just a puppy, cowerin' off in the corner. Anyways, I decides I gots to get outta there, just go for a drive, clear my head, think through the situation, so I do. And I drive around and I drive around, I guess in my absence John's took it upon hisself to... I guess in his little big brother's mind, rescue his sister. I'm drivin' home now and I see 'em both on the bridge near their Grandma's house, it's where John must've been takin' her, right, and they got Ned with 'em too. John's got Katy sat up on the ledge, he's fixing her buttons or her backpack or somethin', and I'm thinkin' damn, John, be careful, so I beep my horn. A quick beep, hardly a beep at all, really. But it frightens Ned. And Ned jumps up and knocks Katy off the bridge into the river."

"She die?"

"Yeah. So we goes home and I kills Ned with a crowbar. I disappear for a few days, I wonder what the fuck happened. And I'm still wonderin' that. I'm still... wonderin'... that. Did Ned kill her or did I? Or did her baby mama? She shoulda been watchin' them but she was passed out on the couch with a needle stuck in her arm. Ain't she culpable in a way? What about John? He the one put her up on the ledge. More I think of it, more it seems to me Ned was the only one didn't make a conscious, contributive decision all night... Shit, it's just a dog. Only a dog. My son's askin' me for help, he needs my help, and alls I can think about is that dog. And the blood. And how the stupid son' bitch wouldn't fight back."

                                             ***

4. If Only Dogs Could Talk...

Ned would say, 'I did it. I killed her, Dan.' Ned would say, 'But if only you hadn't beeped your horn... If only you'd arrived a minute sooner-

and seen John pack a lump of coal into Katy's backpack and tighten the straps around her.'