“Sandor Arpad? What sort of name is that?
You’re not fucking with me, right?” Officer Marcus wrinkled his nose, flushed
pink, still unused to the warmth of his southern transfer. “Why would I be
fucking with you? That’s his name.” Detective Maria looks into the tiny portal
of the heavy steel interrogation door onto the babbling fat man within. His
long black hair is matted with restless sleep and grease, and his eyes are red
and puffy. He sits a densely gray room, fitting tightly into the wrought iron
chair that’s screwed into the floor. He slowly rubs his eyes.
“He turned himself in an hour ago.
He says he killed his best friend.” Marcus says.
“Not surprising. He looks like a
crazy.”
“He seems real broken up about it.”
Marcus replies.
Maria raises a dark eyebrow,
“Sympathy won’t get you as far here as it did up north, Officer.”
He nods, his face is blank and
focused into the window. Maria sighs and mumbles, “Let’s get at it. Figure out
what’s going on.” She opens the door abruptly, snapping the fat man out
of his eye-rubbing stupor. He looks at the entering officers with his mouth
slightly agape. He stared noiselessly, watching as though watching a terrible
car crash. Officer Marcus sat across from the man, in a parallel, nailed-down
chair. Maria stood at the corner of the table on Marcus’ side, her hand on her
hip and her mouth in a twisted pout. They take in the silence for a moment,
giving each other a minute before the discomfort sure to follow. Maria
punctures the thick, hushed coat that stains the grey, institutional walls of
the interrogation cell. “So tell us what happened.” The tearful man glares at her with an impotent
blend of despair and distrust. He wipes his nose with a long, loose sleeve,
once white, now a greyish yellow.
“Whenever you’re ready.” Marcus
adds. Sandor turns his round, speckled face towards him and nods sheepishly,
staring somewhere beyond the soft blue eyes of the aging northern officer. He
begins to compose himself, the opera of his confession brewing steadily inside
of him. Marcus tilts his head expectantly, but Sandor then broke from his
apparent readiness to push strands of oily hair behind his ears and sniff
persistently. He continued to futilely inhale snot until Detective Maria lost
her patience and forcefully slide the available swamp green box of tissues
across the table towards him. Maria pointed at it, her mouth hard and pressed
shut and her eyes exasperated. Sandor’s gaze went from the box to her, and with
a shake of his head, sniffed in one more time, harder than before, and
swallowed. He breathed in and began.
“Me and him had been fighting a bit
for a few days.”
“You and whom?” Marcus interjects,
Maria kicks him sharply in the ankle and growls, “He just got fucking started
talking! I do not want to listen to snot sucking again!”
Marcus grit his teeth and did what
he could to ignore the young, impatient detective and asked again, keeping
Sandor’s eyes in the view of his own, “You and whom, son?”
“My best friend. We’ve lived
together for a long time. But recently we started fighting.”
Sandor paused, waiting for a signal
that he may keep talking. Maria was quicker, “Keep talking.”
So he continued, “So we started
fighting. At first it was about little things, you know, maybe we were both
just in rotten old moods and were taking it out on each other. He started off
eating a bunch of my favorite snacks while I slept. I’ve been going to sleep
somewhat earlier lately because I saw on the news that you are more likely to
be happy during the day if you go to sleep early at night. Anyway, I could hear
him munching the first night, but didn’t think anything of it until I saw my
pantry was missing my favorite snack the next morning. You know those jalapeno
cheese-puffs?”
Sandor stopped his story to look
around at the two officers. Maria sighed and took a seat next to Marcus, no
longer able to stand the way she had been. She put her head in her hands and
pulled them down her face. Marcus answered, “Yes. They’re pretty good.”
Sandor’s tone rang with excitement,
“Yeah! So I was pretty mad when I saw that a whole new bag was gone! I looked
around for it and found the empty bag in the trash can. So I asked my friend
about it.”
Maria
cut Sandor off, “What’s this friend’s name?” This question brought Sandor’s
mood back to its former bleak state, dragging his eyes to stare at the cold
steel table in front of him. They welled with tears. Maria pushed, “Tell us.”
Marcus added quickly, “We need to know bud. We just need to know.”
Sandor
whimpered out an answer, “Bennington.” “His last name?” Marcus and Maria said
simultaneously. “No. Both of his names.” Maria and Marcus looked at each other,
confused. Marcus asked hesitantly, “So his name is Bennington Bennington?” All
they got from the sad fat man was a curt, “Yes.”
“I’ll
go look this guy up. See if there’s anything at all. I’ll be back.” Maria
quickly excuses herself and scurries out of the room, glad to have an excuse to
leave Marcus with the loon who killed his best friend. Marcus prompts Sandor
again and Sandor continues.
“So
after I found that out, I confronted him and asked him very nicely not to do
that and that if he wanted some, I would share some with him if he just asked.
The first time he said that was fine, but he was very short about it and didn’t
apologize. And I thought you know, whatever he’s just in a bad mood today, or
something bad happened, and I figured I’d just drop it and leave it be. But the
next night he did it again. He was very loud all night, so I didn’t sleep well
and if I don’t sleep well and get to sleep early then what’s the point of
having seen that thing on the news? So I was grumpy when I woke up and my
stomach hurt a little for some reason and when I walked into the kitchen, I saw
that it was destroyed.”
Marcus
muttered, “Huh.”
Sandor
didn’t lose a step, “Yeah, right? Everything was tossed, food was everywhere,
the stove was still on, there was a really badly burnt pizza in the oven, I
mean it looked like a warzone. So I got real mad and shouted for him to come
in. And he did and I confronted him again and he got real mad at me. He-he…”
Sandor stammers off, his speech turning to bubbling and his bubbling turning to
tears. Sandor chokes on what was something between a burp and a sob. Marcus
swallowed nervously and Maria opened the door, “Officer Marcus. Would you step
out for a moment please?” Marcus responded quickly, “Yes. Excuse me one moment
Sandor.” He stepped out of the room.
The
moment Marcus shut the heavy door behind him Maria said, “There’s nobody called
Bennington Bennington anywhere. Just like I figured, and I’m sure you figured.
I’m telling you, he’s just hungry for attention.” She spoke with frustrated
speed and indignantly sharp eyes. Marcus peered through the looking glass into
the cell. This strange fat man was holding his face in his over-long sleeves,
which slowly darkened with tears. He shook sickeningly and Marcus wished to
understand. He clenched his jaw and then spoke to Maria, “There’s something
going on here. I think we need to figure it out. Before he hurts himself or someone
else.” His gaze returned to Maria and fixed on her hazel eyes and he saw her
hardness loosen, “Yeah. I guess we should.”
With that, they returned to the room together, sliding the heavy door
open and dipping into the cell.
As the
two police sat down, Marcus saw that Maria was about to speak. “So we looked up
your friend. We didn’t find him anywhere.” Sandor stared at the woman before him,
tears running down his cheeks, his eyes red and weak. He balled his hands into
fists that made a squish in his snotty sleeves. He answered slowly, “Well he
never did any crime. Of course you wouldn’t find him.” Maria was quick with the
rebuttal, “We found you. And your record is clean. You’ve never even had a
parking ticket. But we found you in the system.” Sandor watched Maria’s
unwavering face with the silence of a guilty toddler. There was no
understanding in his blurry eyes, but there was a tinge of fear. Maria pressed
on, “Did you give us the real name? Or is there no name to give?” In Maria’s
mind, she hoped that he was simply a mad man who killed his cat. “Did you even
kill anyone?”
At the
word ‘kill’ Sandor again returned to his persistent sobs. In hopes of
curtailing the limitless whimpers and wails of the fat man before them, Marcus
resumes the line of questioning that they had undertaken before checking the
name of Sandor’s purported friend. He reaches out to Sandor, who is now slumped
forward and dripping tears from his saturated sleeves onto the steel table and
taps his shoulder. In his head, Marcus wonders if Sandor feels dehydrated.
“Hey. Listen up.” Sandor lifts his head slowly, as though weighed down by heavy
balls of lead attached to chains. “Keep telling us the story. The story of what
happened. If you tell us, the guilt will go away.”
Sandor
stuttered, “R-r-really?” His face looked hopeful.
“Really.”
“O-Okay.”
With
that, Sandor finally took a sheet from the box of tissues that sat uselessly in
front of him. He blew his nose feverishly, looked into the tissue to see what
he had produced, balled it up and stuck it in his pocket. “What did he say when
he got mad at you Sandor?”
Sandor
breathed in deeply and slowly, making both of the officers recoil slightly, in
fear of another outburst. However, instead of more shed tears, he spoke, “He
was just very mean. He called me fat, and it’s not like I don’t realize that,
it’s just not something I really need to hear. I heard it a lot already and I
don’t need that from someone I’m supposed to love and who’s supposed to love
me. He said I was hopeless and that I was a failure. He said I didn’t have a
future and I didn’t even have an interesting past. I didn’t know what to say, I
was so stunned. It hurt so bad that I thought I was just going to cry, but I
didn’t want to break down in front of him after that. I got lucky though
because he stormed out when I didn’t answer. He said some word I didn’t
understand and left.”
“Tell
me Sandor.” Marcus said, “What is it that you do? For work, for fun, what do
you do?”
Sandor
seemed thrown off by the question, and Maria looked over at Marcus with an
expression of befuddlement that bordered on accusation.
The fat
man began, “Well… Uuh, for work I make websites for people. I was into that
stuff in high school when it all first started. I learned how to do it and
since then I’ve just kept up with updates and stuff. For fun I like TV. When I
was a kid I liked to play outside, make shootout scenes with sticks, but that
stopped as I got older, you know?”
Marcus
then asked, “What would you and Bennington do together?”
“Well,
before he started being real cold we would go to the park and goof around
together, sometimes we would play on the kid’s swings and stuff, or we would
listen to music together. We both really liked Elvis Costello and-and we would
listen to guys like Dean Martin in the dark for hours. We’d watch TV together.
We always got a kick out of Ellen. She just seems like a wonderful lady. I’d
like to meet her someday.”
Marcus
felt the familiar pang of a theory forming. He thought that he may have figured
it out.
“And do
you have any family or friends? People you, you know, see regularly other than
Bennington?”
Sandor
peered to his left, “My dad left when I was real little. My mom was pretty
nice, but she died a few years ago. I spent a lot of time in my own brain, just
thinking about stuff. I never really had any friends except for, you know.”
With that, Sandor choked again and clamped his eyes shut, this time fighting
back the tears that clearly welled behind his pink, raw eyelids.
Marcus
mulled over Maria’s theory that Sandor is doing this for attention. The man
seemed lonely, that’s for sure, but he didn’t seem to be particularly hungry
for approval or disapproval. He seemed to just be. Marcus then spoke, “So I
assume Bennington came back after your fight with him. What happened then?”
Sandor
took a deep breath and began the second act, “When he came back he was angrier.
But he didn’t break anything, he just came into the room where I was watching
TV. Ellen was on. He stood in front of it for a minute and when I asked him to
move, he turned it off. I got real mad then, you know, because he had been so
rude to me earlier and he’s been acting like a cold jerk and I stood up and
yelled. I-I yelled that I was going to kick his ass if he didn’t tell me why he
was being such a jerk. He laughed at me then, and I never heard such a cruel
laugh before, even in school, or even on TV. He said that I was too fat to
fight him and that by the time I got up I’d be dying of diabetes. So that got
me going and I stood up and I yelled about how he’s been so terrible lately and
how he needs to respect the place we share and clean up after himself and not
eat my stuff and not touch my stuff and how he needs to shut up every once in a
while.”
He was
breathing quickly and heavily by now, worked up by the recollection. His tone
was rapid and his eyes were made all the more intense by the cracks of red
webbing slung over them. The officers glance quickly at each other, not sure of
what to say during this pause. They both decide to wait the silence out.
Sandor’s breathing normalizes a little and he continues, “So I told him to shut
up and he gets this real angry face and he grinds his teeth all menacingly. So
I egg him on, saying stuff like ‘what?’ and ‘you got something to say?’ and he
screams at me at the top of his lungs, h-he says… He says…”
Sandor
breaks off again, a low and quiet wail coming from deep within him. He hangs
his head and, as soon as the moan fully leaves his body he starts
hyperventilating. He wraps his arms around himself, tears freely falling into
his lap.
“Oh
jeez.” Maria exclaims. Marcus gets up and stands behind Sandor’s chair. He
gently pats Sandor’s back and says, “Let it out, son. We want to know. We can
help you if we know.”
That
comment makes the shivering fat man angry and he yells, “Help me? Help me how?
Are you going to bring him back?” His hyperventilation becomes a loud and
snotty snarl, in through the nose and out through an angry mouth. Ever the
patient man, Marcus calmly says, “We can’t bring him back. But we can help you.
You could be in a lot of trouble here. We can try to alleviate that.” Sandor
slowly calmed down. Marcus stayed behind him, hand on his shoulder. Maria
watched the two of them.
“When
he screamed at me...” Sandor trails off and starts again, “When he screamed at
me he said he never really liked me. He said he only used me for my stuff and
because I was also so willing to ‘be his b-bitch.’ He admitted some stuff to
me, some real terrible stuff. He said he was the one who peed in my camp tent
in fourth grade and that he was the one who drew gross stuff all over the
school bathrooms and then convinced the other kids to say it was me to get me
in trouble and then he told me th-that h-h-he’s the one who killed my puppy
when I was a little kid! He leaned in real c-close to my face and with a big
smile he told me! He said he fed it rat poison he found under a shelf! My mom
hit me so much after that and she never ever let me have another puppy! She
never believed me that it wasn’t me!”
Sandor
huffed frantically and tears streamed down his cheeks.
“I-I
had a rage tunnel. I don’t remember what I did or said, but when I came back, I
was holding a knife and he was gone. I panicked and cried for a while and then
I c-came here. I killed him… I killed my only and best friend.” Sandor slowly
raised his head. His eyes had red rims and were wet. His hair, disheveled and
greasy. His lips pouted in pain. He looked to the officers for something. Even
Sandor was unsure of what. Perhaps it was sympathy, perhaps it was scorn.
Marcus walked around the table to Maria and whispered in her ear. Her eyes lit
up. Marcus was certain now. Then he said, “You came here right after the
murder?”
“Yes.”
Marcus
chewed the inside of his cheek. “You said he was gone. What did you mean by
that?”
“He
disappeared. He was g-gone…”
“Where
did he get the name Bennington Bennington?”
“I-I
gave it to him when I met him.”
“Where
did you meet him Sandor?”
“I
asked him to come and be my friend when I was six. He came and he was nice to
me. He was the first to ever be nice to me.”
“Where
did he come from?”
“H-He…”
Sandor broke off, the realization creeping over him. Tears streamed, but they
were different now. Of a loss more profound than the death of a friend. Marcus
pushed for an answer, “Where, son?”
Resigned
and heartbroken, Sandor gave the true answer, "A better place.”
Maria
stood out of her chair and spoke, “Alright Sandor. It’s time to go. We’re going
to try to find some counselors to recommend to you. Let’s go. She reaches her
hand out to him. He looks up at her for a moment and takes it. His hand is
slick with sweat and tears. Maria cringes, but holds it in, showing no sign of
disgust. As she leaves with him she looks at Marcus with a dual look of triumph
and sorrow. Marcus gives her a little nod. As the cell door closes behind her,
Marcus sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. What a day.
