A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page B

cover his guilt, he was bending it in the wrong direction; Smith was placing himself at the murder scene for the maximum amount of time possible. Israel Goldberg had said that he called his wife around two-thirty and then arrived home just before four. If you were Roy Smith and you were guilty, you would say that you left just after the phone call and that in the intervening hour and twenty minutes, someone else must have sneaked into the house and killed Bessie Goldberg. But in Smith’s version there was only a ten-minute window for someone else to have committed the crime.
    If the police were puzzled by this tactic—or lack thereof—theydidn’t show it, they just continued prodding him. Smith said that after buying cigarettes at the pharmacy, he got on what he thought was the bus back to Cambridge, but it was going in the wrong direction. Instead of getting off he rode to the end of the line, smoked a cigarette with the driver during the five-minute layover, and then rode back to Harvard Square. He said that he left a card with his landlady’s phone number on Bessie Goldberg’s kitchen counter in case she wanted more work, and that he worked for a lot of different people and that they were all pleased with his work and wanted him to come back to clean for them, and that he had a wallet full of phone numbers to prove it.
    â€œI ain’t hurt nobody, nothing like that,” he added.
    â€œYou what?” Chief Robinson said.
    â€œI haven’t hurt nobody, I’m not like that, I take nothing from nobody.”
    â€œWhy do you say you’ve never hurt anybody?”
    â€œI haven’t, I haven’t. I mean this guy here—“
    â€œWill you repeat that, Roy?”
    Before Smith could answer, Lieutenant Cahalane of the state police stepped in. “Do you want a drink of water, Roy?”
    â€œYes, please,” Roy answered. “When this guy come down here at this girl’s house he had a pistol all in my face, you know what I mean.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you go back to your house in Boston?”
    â€œWhy didn’t I go?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBecause I was drunk and I was still drinking and I was drinking when the police come by there, I sure was. And besides, I mean, I stay by my self anyway…. I got my own place, four rooms, you know, I go there when I get ready.”
    â€œRoy, what happened there?” Cahalane finally asked. “Now give us the whole story.”
    â€œBeg pardon?”
    â€œGive us the whole story of what happened in that living room.”
    â€œI told you, I told you.”
    â€œYou’re holding something back.”
    â€œMister, I’ve been working my whole life, you understand. I never put my hand on nobody…. I ain’t did nothing but drinking, so—”
    â€œYou weren’t drunk when you landed in Belmont yesterday morning, were you, at twelve o’clock noon?”
    â€œOf course not, I got drinking last night.”
    â€œYou know what you did out on Scott Road yesterday?”
    â€œYou all got the wrong man.”
    â€œWhy did you do it?”
    â€œYou got the wrong man, you can’t pin all that stuff on me, I ain’t did nothing. I ain’t did nothing to that woman yesterday in Belmont and no other Belmont and no other place. Look, I love myself, do you understand? I love myself. I ain’t going to stick my neck out—you kidding?”
    Smith’s only demonstrable departure from the complete truth came soon afterward, when he was asked about the name “Bell” on his mailbox. Smith claimed that it was the previous tenant, who was still getting his mail there; in fact it referred to Carol Bell, who had been his girlfriend and was the mother of his son, whom he called “Scooter.” Carol Bell had left him five days earlier without any forwarding address. Carol Bell had sent Smith to prison for six months for nonpayment of child support.