Cigarettes and an Orange Soda

I have to tell you a secret.

When I was younger I made a mistake. I haven’t told anyone because I was too afraid of what they’d think of me. But I am older now, and all the people who I let down have long since been returned to the ground. All these years I let the weight of my knowledge settle heavy on my mind like cement, coating my thoughts, weighing me down.

I was ten years old when I found the receipt. It wasn’t much, just a water stained scrap of paper that had slipped down behind the driver’s seat of our ‘72 Ford Squire station wagon. The receipt had settled among the cigarette butts and a scant handful of loose change that I stuck in my pocket. At ten years old I was obsessed with money, so the receipt was a welcome find. I always wanted to know how much things cost, how much money my dad had in his pocket (which I quickly learned to stop asking about because it was never very much) and what people spent their money on. 

Presumably, this fascination came from my mother, Maura, who felt that she had been wronged by our dismal financial situation and became resentful of my father’s inability to provide her with the level of financial independence she so desperately desired. She had been a gorgeous woman, and in my memories she is always fastening her single string of pearls around her neck, peering into a mirror with her rouged lips pressed tightly together in an expression of grim dissatisfaction.

My father is another story entirely. He was a sweet-talking drunk who promised us heaven but delivered hell. He was an exceptionally smart man, a smooth talker with slicked-back hair and a muscular build who had a way of making my mother feel like the most beautiful woman on Earth. His name was Chip and he insisted that was what I called him. I don’t think there was a single time in my young life that I ever referred to him as Dad, or Pop, or even Sir. He was Chip, plain and simple. Chip worked as an auto mechanic but for all the money it brought in he might as well have not have worked at all. When I think of him now I remember the smell of gasoline clinging to his flannel shirt and the scent of booze on his breath. My mother would occasionally remark in an incredibly exasperated tone that Chip had two jobs, one at the auto shop and the other at the bar, which I failed to understand as a boy but I knew it made my mother disappointed in him. As I got older Chip was rarely home and I think that was how my mother wanted it. When he was home they never argued or fought, they simply didn’t speak at all. My mother turned her cold shoulder to Chip and the house settled into an uncomfortable silence which lasted for a day or so until Chip got the message that no sweet talk could get him out of this and he left again, offering me a quarter for a Coke and ruffling my hair before he went.

I found the receipt late in the summer of 1975, which had turned out to be an oddly idyllic one for Chip and my mother. The Vietnam War had just ended and the entire country seemed a little less on edge. Chip had spent much of the previous year away from us, but when he came home to Sacramento, my mother and I both acknowledged that something in him had changed. He no longer smelled like booze. He held down his job at the auto repair shop and handed my mother a wad of green bills every Friday evening after he was paid. Sometimes I heard him turn the radio up and my mother would start laughing. That summer he even bought me a brand new bike and took me fishing. In fact, it was on our way home from our first family camping trip that I found the receipt in the car.

It was a receipt from a gas station in Tacoma, Washington, where according to the slip of paper, my father had purchased a bottle of Fanta soda and a pack of Camel cigarettes. Nothing about this stood out in my ten-year-old mind. My father enjoyed orange soda and I wasn’t all that surprised he had been to Washington in the time he had been away. Besides, the summer was going too well for me to start asking questions that could potentially throw my father off-kilter again. I kept the receipt in a box of my most prized possessions that I hid under my bed, not that it was all that likely anyone would bother to look for it. Occasionally I would take out the receipt and study it when I was alone. The bottle of Fanta was 25 cents and the pack of Camels was 33 cents. I repeated this like a bible verse, careful not to let my mother or Chip hear me. Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents.

In a week, that receipt became the only thing I thought about. I remember coming home from school to find my mother standing stone-still in front of the TV set, a cigarette held aloft in her right hand as she clutched her pearls with her left. The news anchor was detailing a murder that had happened in Tacoma, Washington earlier this year. The body of a young woman had just been found in a lake. Her car had been left abandoned in the woods nearby, the driver’s seat spattered with blood. Inside the car were an empty bottle of Fanta soda and a half-smoked pack of Camel cigarettes.

“Robbie,” she said with a hint of desperation in her voice when she noticed I was in the room. “Come turn this off.” I remember walking over to the TV, switching it off and turning back to her, but she couldn’t meet my eyes. I knew it was unlikely she had seen the receipt since I had kept it in my box. We never spoke of it again, but the news never stopped. There was a constant stream of words and images surrounding the murders, her face covered newspapers, her name became household. We were bombarded by images of the woman’s family asking for information, offering a reward, begging for justice for their only daughter. There wasn’t solid DNA evidence back in 1975. They didn’t know they had their answers right in front of them, just like I had mine.

It was a warm night on the 19th of June, the month blooming into the summer of 1975. Julia had likely become friendly with the killer, or so they speculated. She drove him to the lake. They split a pack of cigarettes and a soda. Camels. A bottle of Fanta.

Then she had been stabbed. Strangled with a belt. The killer had taken his time, they said. He was methodical. He watched her suffer. He might have enjoyed it.

My brain blocked it out and replaced it with the only thing I really knew: Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I knew.

Shortly after I found my mother in front of the TV, I realized Chip had gone back to his second job. He came home in the early hours of the morning, knocked over lamps and cursed loudly, causing my mother to rise from her bed and threaten him to be quiet because I had school in the morning. I started spending more time with my friends after school, riding bikes around the neighborhood or shooting basketballs in the park. I didn’t want to go home. When I looked at Chip I didn’t see my father anymore, he was replaced with the phrase that rose in my mind like an angry tide: Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents.

The TV stayed off for weeks, even when I begged to watch the Rams play football on Sundays like Chip used to, or even an hour of Saturday morning cartoons. Our house had returned to that familiar discordant silence. I was at my friend Tom Riley’s house when I first found out about the murder trial. His father was a lawyer and his mother a paralegal, so they paid close attention to cases like this one that had garnered national attention. The victim, Julie Dunfrey, only 24 years old and a vision of beauty with her blond hair and blue eyes, had captured America’s heart and now the public was out for blood. They wanted a killer so they could hang him from the gallows, send him to the chair, right the wrongs that had been done. An eye for an eye. I spent most evenings of that week at Tom’s, keeping one eye on the trial while we did homework or listened to his record collection.

I came home one of those nights to find my mother standing in front of the TV set again, watching the trial. She had a glass of red wine in her hand which went flying across the living room carpet when she heard the door shut behind me. “Hi Mom,” I greeted her uncertainly, to which she replied “Shit, Robbie. Get me a towel. Turn that damn TV off.” That was the only time I had ever heard her swear. I got her the towel, but the stain never came out and the TV never came back on. 

Coverage of the trial continued over the next few weeks. They had found their victim, Ernie Caldwell, a 20-year-old man, who seems no more than a boy to me now, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The gas station owner testified that he had seen him loitering outside the gas station the night of Julia’s murder, even going to far as to say he had come up to her car and asked if he could bum a cigarette. In his pocket they had found a few crushed Camels. Ernie also kept a knife in his belt, but he swore it was only for protection. “Protection from what?” the prosecutor had asked. “You’re not the one who needed protecting, Ernie. That girl whose life you ended, she was the one who needed protecting.” The prosecutor was relentless, a sharp man named Geoffrey Beckett, who was well known in the criminal law circuit. Tom’s parents spoke of him with a sort of reverence since he was a friend of theirs, alleging that he had never failed to convict a suspect. I was too young to understand that Ernie had never stood a chance. In my mind I thought maybe I was the one who was wrong. Surely other people had gone to that gas station and purchased a soda and cigarettes. Besides, Chip was from California, where I lived. Even though I had seen the receipt, it was possible my father hadn’t actually committed the crime. You have to understand, I was only ten years old.

I watched as Ernie’s mother had put her hand on the bible and swore her son didn’t do anything, that he had come home around ten that night to put his baby niece to bed. She sat in that witness chair and cried the tears that only a mother who knows her child’s life is about to end can cry. Ernie was a black man who had been circumstantially linked to the murder of a white woman. It didn’t matter that Ernie didn’t fit the idea of the date-night murder scene they had concocted, or that his fingerprints didn’t quite match those they found on the passenger side door handle. There was nothing she could do to change the jury’s mind. All the while, I sat glued to Tom’s TV, my heart beating out an anxious rhythm. Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents.

By September of 1975, Ernie was serving a life sentence and Chip was nowhere to be found. My mother had stopped wearing her wedding ring and started going to work as a secretary during the day and waiting tables at night. On the weekends she slept till noon, leaving me to conjure up my own breakfast. I was left to spend much of my time alone. By December I had all but forgotten the trial. I made sure to keep myself busy. Life had begun to resemble some sort of normalcy, despite the fact that my father had up and vanished and my vain mother had succumbed to work herself to the bone. It was near Christmas that Tom’s parents invited my mother and me over for a holiday party. They complained they hadn’t seen much of me since the trial had ended, which caused an anxious twisting in my gut. My mother delighted in any sort of social event, taking care to choose her most flattering dress and fastened her single strand of pearls around her neck.

It was at the Riley’s party that my mother was introduced to Geoffrey Beckett. Since she had refused to watch the trial she did not recognize his face, but I immediately went cold when I saw him. He was wearing an expensively tailored suit and had a new Rolex on his wrist, which my mother touched lightly with her fingertips as she laughed her most endearing laugh when he told her a joke. It didn’t take much for a man to fall in love with my mother. Despite her age she was still magazine-pretty, having maintained her curves and grace despite working eleven-hour days the past few months. My mother had also always had a nose like a bloodhound for money, and Geoffrey’s scent was intoxicating. Yet all I saw when I looked at him was Ernie’s mother on the witness stand, crying for her son. Again my heart hammered that familiar tune: Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents. I couldn’t meet his eyes.

Geoffrey married my mother in May of 1977. We sold our house in Sacramento and moved with Geoffrey to Los Angeles. The ceremony itself was small but spared no expense- Geoffrey had been married twice before and thus his family did not feel the need to make the trip out to California to see his latest bride. I was grateful for that, seeing as I could still barely manage to hold a conversation with Geoffrey. It had gotten easier, day by day, but he was a constant reminder of the secret that buzzed in my ear, droning on and on. 

As I got older, I spent more time with my academics and less time at home with Geoffrey and my mother. I joined the debate team at school, studied for the SAT, and in the spring of 1983 I was accepted into the Harvard School of Law. I had a plan to rectify the pit of guilt that had been eating away at me ever since I found that receipt in the back of Chip’s car. First, I had to become a lawyer. That was a simple, non-negotiable fact. Then I had to convince the district attorney in Tacoma to reopen Julia’s case, which meant I would have to present new evidence. I had to hand over the receipt. The fingerprints were another problem I had yet to solve, as Chip had never been booked for anything so his prints weren’t on file, and we had sold our house and with it most of his possessions. My best bet was to track him down somehow, but doing that without my mother or Geoffrey knowing was going to be a challenge. And god, I already feared the moment that Geoffrey found out what I’d been hiding all these years. That I had known he’d sent an innocent man to prison. Maybe he would forgive my mother, but more than likely not. I was likely about to ruin our lives for the sake of my conscience. But in the nucleus of that anxiety, I remembered Ernie, who had spent almost eight years in prison by now. Eight years he could have been home with his family, watching his niece grow up, making his mother proud.

While I was in the middle of trying to pass the bar exam, Ernie died in prison. An accident, they said. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody was there to protect him.

After Ernie’s death I lost my motivation to reopen the case. There was nobody left to save. I didn’t see how turning Chip in, even if he was still alive, would benefit anyone. I was only on course to ruin our lives. My mother and Geoffrey both died in the summer of 2002. And so it went, my secret has stayed with me all these years.

It’s been forty-five years since I found the receipt. It’s still in that shoebox with my baseball cards and photographs. Decades have passed since it has seen the light of day, and yet I still know it by heart, that terrible string of words that I could have used to make things right. Tacoma, Washington. June 19, 1975. Fanta 25 cents, Camels 33 cents. 

I could have saved a man’s life, but it would have meant ending another. 

At ten years old, who was I to decide whose life was more precious? Ernie’s or Chip’s? My mother’s or Geoffrey’s?

All these years I have lied to myself, saying there was nothing I could do. I was only ten years old. But that's not the truth, and now we both know it. I let a man die over cigarettes and an orange soda.

I even have the receipt to prove it.