There was a good deal of confusion about what had happened. Johnny and I weren’t home when the police came by, not the first time. The girls next door, sorority sisters, said they’d heard noise in our apartment the night before, the sound of a scuffle, someone running down the hall. The forensics—the nature of the injuries, the shattering of the skull, the broken neck—together with the state of congealment—confirmed the impression that he’d fallen to his death from some sixty feet above, the distance from my balcony to the pavement, and that this had happened about two in morning. The lab tests showed alcohol in his blood, also Risperdal and amphetamines. The police found latents on my railing but of course there would be. He’d visited more than once.  His parents were wealthy, like I said, and insisted on a full investigation.

Despite the sorority girls, the detectives could not put Johnny and I at the scene, not definitively. Meanwhile, the dead boy had a history. A key to my apartment he’d never returned. Manic episodes, suicidal behavior. He‘d overjuked on his meds before, after a broken engagement, and driven his car into a pylon on the Galveston causeway. There was nothing to say he hadn’t come unhinged again. Suicide: entering the apartment while I was gone and pitching himself from the balcony.  Ultimately there was not enough evidence to prove either way. Even so, the investigation might have remained open if Frank Paris hadn’t stepped forward, insisting that on the night in question my brother and I had been with him at his apartment. Frank had a position at the university then—a one-year post. The parents called him a liar. They were grief stricken and wanted to blame their son’s death on someone. On Johnny and me, I guess, for luring him into our lives.

“This man,” my mother said. “This Frank Paris. Just because he testified, it doesn’t mean you owe him anything.”

“He has an apartment in Rome.”

“Rome?”

Her black eyes fluttered. She had a nice figure, my mother, more voluptuous than mine. She filled her dresses in way I’d always envied, ever since I was a child, but would never match.

“You’ve always been this way,” she said. “Off in some world of your own. But you get yourself in these situations with men. And your brother, he . . .” She hesitated. “Your poor brother, he does his best to get you out.”

I said nothing.

“This Frank Paris . . . a man his age . . . It might be good now,” she said. “But in a few years . . .”

I understood where she was headed. Most men don’t die all of a sudden but slowly, like old trees rotting from the inside—but I didn’t care. After what had happened, I couldn’t live in Dallas anymore, or even Houston. Texas society is a small town.

“I’m a pariah now.”