Past Crimes Read Free Page B

leaned down and spoke to me, saying the same thing a few times before I got it. He was telling me that I couldn’t see my mom right now. That we’d be going home for a while. His home, not the apartment Mom and I shared.
    I’d asked why. When he finally answered, there was a stone solidity to his words that I knew the truth behind it, even if I couldn’t understand.
    “She’ll be here,” he had said.
    And there she stayed. Even after she died and was buried and long gone, I felt she was still in the hospital, somewhere just out of sight. The six-year-old me would feel that forever.
    If Dono died here, would he occupy the same corner in my mind? I didn’t want to find out.
    The big automated glass doors leading from the street slid open. Guerin and Kanellis came in. Kanellis spotted me first. Something was different about their vibe, just from their walk. Kanellis stood up straighter. Guerin looked grim.
    “Sergeant Shaw,” Guerin said, “you’ve been keeping things from us.”
    They sat in chairs on either side of me. Guerin left a seat in between us. Kanellis sat close. Guerin was carrying a blue manila folder. It was thick, maybe thirty or more pages.
    Kanellis smirked. “Your grandpa is a very bad guy.”
    “I know Dono’s got a record,” I said.
    Guerin opened the folder and looked at the first page.
    “Your grandfather has a business license as a general contractor and electrician,” he said. “He’s held that for twenty-three years. And there’s a stack of building permits and a number of other public records that have his name on them.”
    I sat, waiting for what I knew would come next. Guerin turned the pages, reading from the top of each one.
    “Arrested on suspicion, armed robbery. Suspicion, breaking and entering. Conviction, armed robbery. Conviction, grand larceny.” Guerin looked up at me. “He served four and a half years on McNeil Island for those last two, since it was a federal currency depository.”
    “Your granddaddy must have really pissed off the judge,” said Kanellis. “McNeil was hard shit, back in the day.”
    “Before my time,” I said.
    Guerin turned once more to his pages. “Arrested on suspicion, burglary. Twice on that. Suspicion, aggravated assault. Suspicion, grand larceny again. And one last count, for possession of an unregistered firearm. Fourteen months in King County.”
    The detective showed me the top sheet on the stack. It must have been Dono’s first arrest record, or at least his first in the United States. His face—young, handsome, and mocking—both front view and profile, in a mug shot over a reader board with his name and booking date in 1973 spelled out in uneven white plastic letters. The reader board said POLICE — ALLSTON MA. Sometime before Dono and my grandmother and my mother, just a toddler then, had moved across the country to Seattle.
    I was fascinated. Dono hadn’t kept any photos around the house. I’d never seen him as a young man before.
    He looked a little like me.
    Guerin raised his eyes from the page. “And speaking of guns, the pistol on the floor had your grandfather’s prints on it. We also found another .38 Special upstairs, and a shotgun hanging by a strap under the coats in the kitchen. The pistols were registered to a man who passed away at age ninety-three, eight years ago.”
    Guerin closed the blue folder and put it on the chair next to him. “You didn’t say a damn thing about any of this. Which makes me wonder if you’re mixed up in his work. Maybe all the way.”
    It was almost nostalgic. Cops asking me what I knew about my grandfather’s night work. I hadn’t had to play this game since I started middle school.
    “How old is the last charge on that list?” I said.
    He didn’t have to look. “Eighteen years.”
    “Right.”
    “Just because he hasn’t been busted again, that doesn’t make him clean,” Kanellis said. “Clean guys don’t keep guns hidden behind the laundry soap.”
    I said, “Dono