Betrayers(69)

I let out a heavy breath, set the urn down, and went in there. Ullman was sitting with both hands on the steering wheel. All the wildness was gone; so were the tears. His eyes no longer bulged, didn’t even blink. His face was a literal mask of misery. Not self-pity—raw, naked misery.

I said to Runyon, “What happened?”

“He wasn’t trying to run. He came out here to kill himself.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Ullman said in an empty voice. “I thought this time I could, now finally I could, but I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m too much of a coward.”

“You’re a hell of a lot worse than that.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t you think I know what I am?”

Runyon said, “He had the piece to his temple when I got in here. Just kept holding it there, didn’t move when I took it away from him. Took me a minute to find the door opener.”

“Let’s get him inside.”

Ullman said, “Why don’t you just kill me? Couldn’t you do that? Make it look like I killed myself?”

“You’re not going to get off that easy.”

“I’d rather die than go to prison. I want to die. I ache to die.”

Runyon and I traded glances. Somebody might accommodate Ullman someday in whatever prison facility he ended up in. Child molesters and child porn addicts were bottom of the barrel inside the walls, primary targets for con vengeance.

We dragged Ullman out of the car and back into the house, sat him down on the living room couch. While I called the Daly City cops and told them what we had, Runyon went to close the front door; I’d left it wide open. He bent to look at the hanging chain plate, beckoned me over when I was done with the call.

“Plate tore out clean,” he said. “I think I can screw it back in so the damage won’t show.”

“I doubt that it matters now.”

“Why don’t I do it anyway.” He got out one of those multi-bladed pocketknives and went to work with the screwdriver blade.

I took up a stand in front of Ullman. The way he was sitting, motionless, the haunted eyes staring out from under drooping lids, he might have been a propped-up cadaver. His face was corpselike, too: the color and consistency of white wax inlaid with filaments of blood.

“I know you hate me,” he said, his mouth barely moving, “and I don’t blame you. But you can’t possibly hate me as much as I hate myself.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Every day for the past fifteen years, loathing myself. Do you know how many times I tried to put a bullet through my head? Dozens. Literally dozens. I came close once, but at the last second I couldn’t do it. I’m too much of a coward.”

“You said that before.”

The words kept running out of him in a hushed, barren voice, almost a whisper, as if he were confessing cardinal sins to a priest. “Cowardice and self-hatred. That’s why I started using cocaine. I thought that if I got high enough, I could pull the trigger or swallow pills or poison . . . something, anything, to end it. But all the cocaine did was make me hate myself a little less. And after a while it had the opposite effect. It made the sickness worse, the cravings even more intense.”

The taste of bile was in my mouth. I wanted to spit, swallowed instead.

“I’m sorry about Emily,” he said.

“Don’t talk to me about my daughter. Don’t say her name.”

“She found the little box in the school parking lot. I don’t know how I could have lost it; I was always so careful. Maybe I lost it on purpose, subconsciously; I don’t know. I was terrified when she came to me, told me she’d found it and took it home . . . terrified when you came here last night. But not anymore. Now I’m glad. I’m glad it’s almost over.”

He fell silent. The silence lasted long enough for me to think he’d run out of words, but he hadn’t. Not quite.

“There’s something else I have to say, something I want you to know.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “Save it for the police and your lawyer.”

“I never hurt a child, never touched a child. Never. Never wanted to. It was the looking I needed, that’s all. Looking. Looking.”

“We both know that’s a lie, Ullman. Men like you always want to do more than look, whether you act on the impulses or not. The only thing that stopped you was fear of getting caught.”

“No—”

“Your students, my daughter, every child you taught or came in contact with, you imagined up there on that bedroom wall. And not with some other pervert—with you. Always with you.”