by Alex Finlay
“He’s gonna be fine,” Noah said, his hand on the steering wheel. He was one of those people who never lost their cool. She couldn’t recall a single instance when Noah Brawn had lost his shit. When she’d broken it off in college, he was as cool as a cucumber. It wasn’t that he lacked passion. His speeches on false confessions were the stuff of a brimstone preacher. Even his stump speech for mayor back in the day had some fire in it. It was just that his steady-as-they-go demeanor also revealed an emotional distance.
“I know,” Liv said. “I’m just so pissed. I mean, how hard is it to keep an eye on an elderly man with dementia?”
Noah just nodded as he navigated the dark roads to the rural highway. After a time he said, “So, I’m waiting.”
Liv looked at him quizzically.
“For you to say the magic word—pardon.”
Liv regarded him. He looked straight ahead, the profile of his strong jaw and his serious expression reminded her of segments from “A Violent Nature.” Maybe it was all the wine, but she decided not to insult his intelligence and deny that she wanted his help.
“Can you—help, I mean?”
“I’d like to.”
“But…”
He turned his head to her, then looked back at the road. “But assuming Turner resigns, which is probably a safe bet, I’ll be the new guy. I wasn’t elected into the office, so I need to tread carefully. It’s not just my decision. I’ve got to convince the pardon board, and two of the three members are Turner lackeys.”
“I understand,” she said, deflated.
“I didn’t say no. It’s just we’ve gotta be smart about it. I’m gonna need you to follow the usual procedures.”
“Easy enough. We’ve filled out the pardon paperwork twice, though I don’t think Turner ever looked at our submissions.”
“You can count on that,” Noah said. “But I will. Still, we need something new. Something that doesn’t look like I’m biased or that I’m just trying to stick it to Turner, who still has friends I need. Is there any new evidence?”
“Nothing concrete.”
“What about the video your daughter posted? Of the party.”
He’d obviously been keeping up with the online chatter about the case. Noah must’ve sensed her surprise. “Kyle told me about it,” he said. “Apparently he’s in the video.”
“Some think it shows the Unknown Partygoer, but who knows. The quality is terrible and all the armchair detectives haven’t come up with anything new.”
“Anything else?”
Liv exhaled. “Not unless Ron Sampson’s wife isn’t crazy.”
Noah narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she accosted me. Gave me a file. Said Sampson knew something, was going to talk to the filmmakers.”
Noah looked at Liv, his gaze skeptical.
“I know…”
“What’s in the file?”
“Nothing, as far as I can tell. It’s a page from some type of log and some blood tests.”
Noah veered into the lot of the nursing home. “Sampson’s wife, Susan, has had a hard time with his death. Even before, she was known to have a few drinks”—Noah raised his brows—“with her breakfast.”
“She did seem pretty out of it, though who am I to talk given my wine consumption tonight?”
Noah laughed. “Ron wasn’t a particularly good husband. Logan County actually scooped him up once when they did a sweep of one of the massage parlors.…”
Liv grimaced. “I’m surprised the internet mob never picked up on that.”
Noah shrugged. “They didn’t book him. You know cops.”
Yes, she did. They protected their own. The thought of a massage parlor with happy endings made her skin crawl. Sampson’s poor wife. No wonder she turned to the bottle or pills or whatever she was on. “She thinks Sampson was murdered,” Liv said.
Noah shook his head. “Everything’s the Kennedy assassination now.”
It was an ironic statement, since Noah himself had been on a speaking tour suggesting Danny had been railroaded, that the Smasher had killed Charlotte.
“But who knows,” Noah said. “If you want me to look at the papers she gave you, I’d be happy to. I know the file pretty well, so please send me a copy.”
“Definitely. But if there’s anything there, Evan will know.”
“You’ve got that right,” Noah said. He stopped the sedan in front of the entrance, not bothering to park in one of the spaces in the lot. At the front doors Liv saw Dennis Chang, shifting on his feet, looking irritated.
“You’re, ah, angry,” Noah said, politely not mentioning the lilt in her voice, what Maggie jokingly called her “wine voice.” “Why don’t you let me handle this?”
Liv didn’t argue.
Noah stepped out of the sedan and shook hands with Chang. They exchanged a few words. Noah patted him on the shoulder. Liv could see Chang’s demeanor shift from annoyed to accommodating.
Liv was sobering up, but she still wasn’t totally clearheaded. She lowered the car’s visor and looked at herself in the mirror. She smacked her own cheek lightly.
Noah returned to the car. “They’ve searched the grounds,” he said. “They think he must have slipped out after dinner, since the nurse saw him then.”
Liv shook her head.
“Chang said the last few times he wandered off, he went to your mom’s grave at the cemetery. They sent someone to check, but he wasn’t there. You have any ideas where he might go?”
Liv cataloged places of significance to her father: the cemetery, the house, maybe the plant.
“Apparently your dad was talking about your mom when they delivered his dinner. He said your mother had spent the last few days with him.”
Liv swallowed, realizing that her father had mistaken Liv for her mom. Everyone always said they looked so much alike.
“Charlie told the nurse that they were going on a date tonight,” Noah continued, “and they had to be careful since her father didn’t like him. Any idea where he used to take your mom?”
Liv gave him a fleeting smile. “I do.”
CHAPTER 40
It was another ten minutes before they made it to the overgrown lot. The landscape was bleak: a cement field in the middle of nowhere, the old-fashioned drive-in movie screen covered in graffiti, the speaker poles rusted and in disrepair, jutting from the ground. All shrouded in darkness save for the headlights of Noah’s Mercedes.
Noah eased into one of the spaces. The lot was eerie, apocalyptic.
“We had some days here, huh?” Noah said, breaking the quiet.
Liv didn’t respond, but felt her face redden. They’d had sex in the back of her dad’s station wagon at this very drive-in. During a Molly Ringwald movie. The theater had gone out of business soon thereafter. She didn’t think there was a connection.
She surveyed the area, looking for her father.
“Can you pull to the back?” She twisted around, looking behind them. “My dad said they used to park near the concession stand so her father wouldn’t see him.”
Noah slowly turned the car around. “Why’d your grandfather hate Charlie so much?”
Liv continued to look out the window. Weeds surrounded the lot, sprouting through cracks in the asphalt. “My dad always said her father correctly thought she was too good for him.” She smiled.
Then she saw something move in the distance. “There,” Liv said, pointing to a figure near the shuttered concession building.
Noah stopped the car, and Liv jumped out. Her father approached, his hand shielding his eyes from the headlamps.
“Dad!” Liv threw her arms around him.
She pulled back and looked at him, making sure he was all right. Her father squinted, blinked as if confused. He stared at her face for a long time, not saying anything.
“We were worried about you.”
Noah walked over.
Her father’s expression brightened with a burst of lucidity. “Eddie
Haskell,” he said. In a surly tone, half playful, he added, “What in the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the night with my daughter?”
“I’m sorry, Charlie. How about we both get her home?” Noah walked to the vehicle and opened the back door.
Her father sauntered over. “All right. But I don’t want to see you out here again. She’s too good for you.”
After getting her father settled at the nursing home, Noah drove Liv back to Cindy’s house.
Before getting out of the car, Liv looked at him. “Thank you, again.”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, it means a lot. Especially after what I said to you the last time I was in Nebraska.”
“I deserved it.” He paused. “I was just going through a bad time. I thought Tommy looked so much like Kyle when he was little.”
“It’s okay. They’re both handsome boys.” She recalled the anger—the fear—when he’d asked her to do the test. She’d been back in Adair, dealing with another episode with her father. The documentary had just come out, and the town was riled up. The governor had refused to support Danny’s pardon, and Noah wanted a goddamned paternity test.
So she’d taken the test—told him she’d sent strands of Evan’s and Tommy’s hair off to an internet paternity testing company under a false name. It felt vile, like she was a guest on one of those awful talk shows where couples revealed the results of paternity tests on live television. When the results came back showing that Evan was the father, she emailed them to Noah. He’d asked that it be sent to a particular email address, one he’d likely made to keep any record of the discussion untraceable. Always the politician.
Noah looked at her as if he were going in for a kiss.
The thought repelled her. She opened the car door, keeping her distance. Making it clear that wasn’t going to happen.
“Good night, Noah.”
He nodded, his expression defeated. “Send me those papers Sampson’s wife gave you,” he said. “Maybe there’ll be something we can use for the pardon.”
Inside Cindy’s house, Liv went to Tommy’s bedside and watched him sleeping. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, praying he would never learn that the strands of hair she’d sent along with the paternity test weren’t Evan’s. They were Noah’s.
Excerpt from
A Violent Nature
Season 1/Episode 2
“They Just Got in My Head”
INSERT – A school photo of DANNY PINE in his football uniform.
INSERT – PRISON TELEPHONE RECORDING
EVAN PINE
I don’t understand. They said you confessed to hurting Charlotte. Why would you say that, Danny? It doesn’t make sense.
DANNY
(sobbing)
I don’t know why. I don’t remember, but I’d never hurt her. I, I, I—
EVAN
I know, son. I just don’t understand why—
DANNY
It’s horrible in here.
EVAN
I need you to stay strong, buddy. I’m getting you a lawyer. We’ll get this straightened out. But I need to know: Did those cops threaten you? Did they hurt you?
DANNY
I can’t explain why I said it. They just got in my head.
CHAPTER 41
DANNY PINE
Some people remember vividly where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. Or when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. Or when Princess Diana’s car crashed. Or when the planes struck the Twin Towers. Memories formed under intense emotions are seared into our thoughts, branded by the hot iron of trauma. Danny Pine had thought a lot about memory over the past seven years.
Everyone always wanted to know Why can’t you remember? At first it had been the police, though they thought he was lying. Then his parents. Then Dave, his ponytailed criminal defense lawyer. Then those filmmakers. Hell, even the generally uncurious felons at Fishkill. One of them, a psychiatrist convicted of manipulating patients into blowing him, even offered to hypnotize Danny. Ah, no thanks.
Nearly everyone was convinced that the truth—what really happened to Charlotte—was packed away in the deep recesses of his brain, and if they could just unlock the memories …
It wasn’t like his mind was a complete blank. Initially all Danny remembered were flashes of the party at what’s-his-name’s house. Fragments. Running out the back door when someone yelled Cops! A bonfire in a cornfield. The dented metal kegs of beer. Then waking up in his bed, a jackhammer pounding his skull, his little sister standing there with a concerned look on her face. The police are at the door. Where’s Mommy?
But slowly other things came back to him. The ponytailed lawyer said those memories—Charlotte at the party, her face twisted in anguish, I need to talk to you—weren’t helpful, so he might best keep them to himself.
One thing Danny Pine wished he could forget was his first day inside after his conviction. Them stripping him down, delousing him, shoving a folded stack of prison blues into his arms. Entering the gallery. The rapists and murderers and other scum in the rafters calling down to him and the parade of newbies.
Fresh meat! Fresh meat! Fresh meat!
The sound of his cell door clanging shut on the sweltering top floor, where all the horrid smells of the prison found a home. Looking back, as traumatic as it was, the experience was hardly unique. Every month Danny saw it play out again and again.
He was a different person now. Not a better person, different. When he was transferred to Fishkill last year, he held his head up defiantly as he made the walk that first day. This time the hard cases chanted, Fresh Fish! Fresh Fish! Fresh Fish! Not the most original people in the world, prisoners. The young guy in front of him was crying. Danny didn’t even warn him to stop.
By now Danny felt like a hardened lifer, and what passed for famous behind these walls. He’d never seen the documentary. But he understood it had been a big deal. The prison library had newspapers. He also received letters, “fan mail,” and had visits from high-priced attorneys. His father said that the new lawyers were the real thing, not in over their heads, like Ponytail. More like Louise Lester, his post-verdict lawyer from the Institute for Wrongful Convictions. Celebrities were tweeting about his case, and virtually the entire country had turned against his hometown, particularly those two cops who’d interrogated him. Even the president’s daughter—that’s right, the president of the United States—announced she was on Team Danny. But slowly, the attention, like his hope, faded.
Now things had turned dangerous for him. Word spread that his parents had left him a fortune in life insurance. You did not want to be known as someone with a fortune in this place. Worse, he’d heard that Damian Wallace had a beef with him. He didn’t know why. But in here it could be anything.
The stretch of hall he was walking that morning was the most dangerous—narrow halls, crowded, only two cameras at each end, none in the middle—so he was on high alert. He walked the line, his eyes hunting for threats. Looking for Wally. The downtrodden line of blue shirts flowed past, no shoulder bumps, no hard looks, no scuffles to create a diversion for the guards.
After surviving the hall without a sharpened toothbrush in his ribs, he exhaled with relief. This place. This fucking place! Fishkill had once been a hospital for the criminally insane and Danny swore he was going mad. Would he ever roam outside its bleak walls?
His aunt was trying to get him approved to go to the funeral. Good luck with that. The warden wasn’t the most compassionate guy around. He’d once told Danny he’d started watching the documentary but had to shut it off. “I know bullshit when I see it,” he’d said.
As Danny clambered up the metal stairs, he wondered if he’d ever see the man again, the one who’d held his last hope of getting out. Of looking at the moon. Of sleeping in. Of getting a juicy fast-food burger.
The man had arrived at the prison unannounced, lied and said he was one of Danny’s lawyers. It was the same day the Supreme Court had denied
review of Danny’s case. Danny suspected the timing wasn’t a coincidence.
His name was Neal Flanagan, a greasy man in an expensive suit.
Flanagan said he worked for the governor, and for a cool mil Danny could be a free man. He didn’t actually say any of it, of course, probably scared that the prison recorded visits. No, he produced a sheet of paper with the offer written up. After Danny read it, Flanagan placed the paper in a folder and locked it in his briefcase.
“So do you think you can afford my rates?” Flanagan asked, pretending to be a potential new lawyer for Danny, a ruse for recording devices that probably didn’t exist.
“Where in the hell would I get that kind of money?”
“You’re famous.”
“I didn’t get any money from the TV show.”
“What about all those celebrities and do-gooders? They’ve got money.”
Danny rolled his eyes. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that something about the man, something about the whole thing, seemed legit. Well, not legit, but authentic. It didn’t seem like a setup.
“Look, when I get out, I’ll get plenty of offers. I can pay then and—”
“No work on credit, Mr. Pine. Talk to your father. Talk to your benefactors. And do it soon. This offer has an expiration date.”
“I make fifty-two cents an hour. And, even if I could borrow the money, how do I know you’re for real? What if I give you the ‘retainer’ and you just disappear?”
“We’d provide assurances.”
“What kind?”
“Get the money and you’ll find out.”
“Why? Why would he pardon me now, after everything…”
“Retirement planning.”
A week later Danny read that the governor was under investigation, and his attorney fixer—Neal Flanagan—had been indicted. And now the governor had resigned.
Retirement planning.
Danny had racked his brain about how to get that money. But he’d never told his father about the man, the offer, any of it.
He reached his cell and went inside. That was odd: his fat cellmate—who got off his ass only for food and to slug the three feet to the toilet—wasn’t on the bottom bunk.
