Youth Turn
Copyright © 1996; 2018 by Peter Weiss
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
“You got yours. What you get now is silence. Long as you pay. Otherwise you can kiss your job and your wife good-bye. And you might as well kiss off your life too, cause when I’m finished talking to everyone, they’ll be interviewing your students one by one, boys and girls.
“A thousand dollars to start. Tomorrow. Here. Same time.”
“Melina,” Kagel said, but before the words came out, she was out of the car and trucking down the street.
Kagel sat dumbfounded. First he thought to kill her, but he could never do a thing like that. Next he thought to kill himself. It wasn’t the money—he had the money. But shame, fear and guilt took over. His life—he would have to pay and keep paying. He folded his head into his hands and he wept. How frail is the human condition.
The first police on the scene were two uniforms. They pulled up and with hands on guns went over into the embankment. The body lay limp, a pool of blood by the head. It was a clear-cut suicide, they decided.
Back at the patrol car they radioed for an ambulance, a supervisor and a forensic team. One officer interviewed people in the cars and the other, wearing latex gloves, reached through the open door into Kagel’s car. He found a school bag in the back and nothing else. In front, on the passenger seat, was a white envelope. He picked it up, careful to remember how it was sitting, and looked inside. Cash. His instinct was to return it to its place, but then, he reasoned, who would know? Cash? A plain envelope? Payoff money. But this guy was regular and just did himself in. He tucked the envelope into his pants pocket.
More patrol cars arrived, and the ambulance too, and these strangers began cleaning up the remains of Joel Kagel. In a bar after their tour, they would joke about the way the body looked, and, in a more serious tone, they would talk about the sadness of suicide. Latex gloves paid the tab.
Melina rolled her skirt at the waist and opened the top two buttons of her blouse. She took the lipstick from her school bag and with several deft strokes left a slick, smooth coat of red on her lips. She pressed her lips together, tossed the lipstick back in her bag and waited for the bus.
She wanted new lipsticks and new clothes and new roller blades. Virginia wanted things too. Maybe Sunday morning while her parents were at church, she and Virginia would do each other. Life is good, she thought.
