Modesto

I just found out yesterday his name was Modesto. Even though it's a story I've been retelling to myself for almost 30 years. Strange to have a new element pop out after all this time.

I almost didn't find out. There was no internet back then. So after things settled down, the story eventually got lost in the back issues of local newspapers. But a journalist dug it up again 5 years ago and wrote a little article about it, that had the name and some other details I didn't know about. I found the article on the internet. Apparently the case is still unsolved.

Modesto was murdered. He worked in the coffee shop at the center. I've never remembered his face really, not even in the beginning, but I'm sure he served me coffee many times there. Two guys waited until closing time and hit him or cut him on the back of his head. Security found him on the floor at 4 in the morning, bleeding to death. Everybody was really shocked and upset about it at the center. There was even an official remembrance ceremony a day or two after it happened.

So why do I keep digging it up again? Why did I retell the story to myself again just last night as I was walking home from work? It always goes the same way, taking it step by step, talking it through in my head as if I'm telling somebody else the story. Maybe I think that by going over it one more time I'll find something I missed, a reason or an excuse, something that will let me off the hook a little bit. The thing is, I saw Modesto's murderers a few days after it happened, but I didn't do anything about it. I think that's why I've never been able to let it go.

The police sketches were posted all over, especially at the center, but around town too. Those two guys' faces were pretty well burned into my brain. It was an odd looking pair. One sort of a bushy-haired, Peter Lorre type, the other one taller and thinner. And then one day maybe a week after, I'm in the shopping mall, and there they are. Exactly like in the police drawings. I'm no undercover cop or anything, so they knew right away I'd seen them and started heading for one of the exits.

I started to follow them to where the bus stops were, but the problem was the packages. I had great big packages in either hand that I was carrying in these shopping bags with handles. I kept wishing I didn't have them, but I couldn't just leave them lying in the middle of a big shopping center like that. Then the next thing I knew they'd gotten onto one of the buses.

I thought about getting on too, but I was so loaded down that just manoeuvering onto the bus and digging the fare out of my pocket and everything wasn't obvious. I also had no idea where that bus was going, or what I would do about the situation if I did get on. There was another problem too. I was in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. So I couldn't really tell anybody what was going on in a coherent way. And I was scared. These guys were murderers after all.

So I didn't get on. I noted the bus number and its direction and decided to call the police. Unfortunately, though, I didn't know how to use a pay phone in that country, or what number I'd have to call. How could I get an operator? What would I say to one if I did?

I have an image in my mind of me walking with my big shopping bags to a counter where a man was selling perfume or something like that. I would have tried to explain to him that I had to make a telephone call, that it was an emergency and that I needed the police. Only I guess he didn't understand and he gave me the brushoff, and I was probably too shy and didn't insist enough on it. So I decided I'd go to the center instead. There would be people there who spoke English and could contact the authorities.

The next part of the story always feels kind of Kafka-like. Here I am bursting to tell the police I've just seen murderers, but I walk to the other bus stops at the front of the building and spend about 45 minutes on a bus to the center first? I think that's where the guilt comes from. Had I at that point already decided, maybe subconsciously, not to do anything, to just let the whole thing pass?

As I went over it again in my head, I tried for the hundredth time to fathom how I could have let the whole thing dissolve like that when so much was at stake. Thirty years later, the case still unsolved. I blamed it on those packages. The way I'd always told the story, they were snow chains for my car. All of a sudden I realized something that had escaped me for 30 years. If I didn't yet speak the local language, it must have been early on in my stay at the center, but if I was buying snow chains that day, I must have already had my car and started using it to drive up to the mountains, and therefore had it with me that day at the mall. I wouldn't have lugged packages like that home on the bus, I'd have driven. Suddenly those 45 minutes became 5.

At the center, I couldn't find anybody at first. It was Saturday. Finally I found Bill and I told him what happened. What he said surprised me. Well, he said, those two are surely gone by now. What could you tell the police? Why, they're probably not even on that bus anymore. Bill had been at the center for years, and I trusted him, so I took his advice. I didn't do anything. And I tried to forget about it, but obviously that hasn't worked.

After last night, though, I'm at least little bit off the hook as compared to before. Now I know I didn't waste time taking any bus, I drove my car. I got to a place where I could get help as fast as I could, and I asked someone I trusted what to do and I did that. At least I'd tried.

In the end, though, I still didn't do anything. And I still feel guilty. Maybe after talking it through again in my head for another 10 or 20 years one day I'll discover something else I forgot and get a little more off the hook. Or maybe one day I'll meet Modesto himself, and I'll ask him in person if he's ready to forgive me.