“It sounds as though he deserved it.”
“Not my call to make.”
“God’s call?”
“If he’s interested, sure. I lean toward a judge and a jury of the guy’s peers, though I’m not sure how I feel about a jury of twelve meth heads.”
I set my Coke on the coffee table. On a coaster, because I’m not an animal or something.
“This thing about Meadow . . .” she said. “What will you do?”
“Go back and ask questions. Annoy people. It’ll be like any normal Tuesday for me.”
She placed two fingers along my cheek and looked at me. “And you’ll push until you find something.”
“I’ll push until something happens.”
“And if it gets bad and people don’t like what you find?”
“I’ve got Woody. He likes beating people up.”
She sighed and kissed me. “You’re an idiot, Henry.”
“So I’m told.” I kissed her back.
7
Jerry Logue’s office was a single-wide off Route 232. A sheet of plywood posted in front of the trailer had Logue’s name and telephone number hand-painted across it, and next to that was a smaller sign that said you could find him on Facebook, if you were inclined to such things. An ancient Mazda Miata, the red paint faded to pastel except for a blue driver’s side door, was parked out front. Logue had been Eddie’s attorney to the trial, and obviously he had been worth every penny.
The reception room up front looked like the before shot from a show about hoarders who’ve kept magazines and microwave meal boxes since 1986. Papers were stacked high enough on his desk to let the breeze from a butterfly’s wings send them toppling. His computer was old enough to be steam powered. The ceiling fan overhead stirred around dust and the topmost layer of the paper stacks.
A toilet flushed in the back and a guy walked out, wiping his hands on his pants. He looked like the third-prize winner in a Dennis Franz look-alike contest: squat with a bald dome and fluffy dark hair enshrouding his head, several days’ worth of stubble across his face. His short-sleeved dress shirt had been white once, and his tie was a history of bad lunches eaten without care. He stared at me with surprise like the tour guide at a shitty museum no one has a reason to visit.
“You Jerry Logue?” I said.
“That I am.” His handshake was soft, clammy, and unpleasant. He took a seat behind the desk, shifting paper stacks around until he had carved out a view of me in a visitor’s chair. “What can I do for you?”
I told him I was checking into Meadow Charles’s murder on behalf of the Dolan family. He lit a cigarette, knocking the ash into a Styrofoam cup on the desk.
“You must be as retarded as Dolan, poking into that mess again,” he said. “Whole thing wasn’t nothing but a train wreck on roller skates.”
“If that’s how you feel, why did you take the case?”
“It sure as fuck wasn’t out of the kindness of my heart. Because there’s no official public defenders office in Parker County, judges assign the various local bloodsuckers to public defender cases when needed, and just so happens my number came up for Eddie Dolan. My caseload was emptier than a ticket taker’s smile, and the pittance they were paying was better than nothing, if only barely.”
Logue’s office felt like the set to a ’70s cop show, like Rockford or maybe Banacek would roll in at any moment, and they’d ask better questions than what I had. And why not? They only had an hour to solve their shit, and there’d be a Rice-A-Roni commercial on in a few minutes, anyway.
“Must be a goddamn chore to maintain this level of luxury,” I said.
He shrugged. “The whole county is a goddamn shithole of scumbag lawyers who’ll jump on anything that moves. Unless you’re hooked up with one of those firms with a franchise office next to a Vietnamese nail salon, you’re hosed. I cover the stuff I can get, and Eddie was that. I gave him the best I had.”
“You think he did it?”
“None of my fucking business. My duty was to offer him a vigorous defense. Which I was set to do, though based on the preponderance of evidence against the little shit-bird, I’d have had better luck defending Charlie Manson. Dolan taking a plea means he might still be alive when he gets out of prison rather than get driven out of the place in a pine box.”
“When did you tell him to plea?”
“As soon as the prosecuting attorney offered us something. I had this case for months because he got arrested in September but the trial, it didn’t get scheduled to roll around until June of the next year, and that whole time, the prosecuting attorney’s office would show up with some new something or another and offer a new deal, and Eddie kept saying he didn’t do it.” Logue took a cheap plastic comb from his shirt pocket and smoothed down the hair he had. “You know that January, when the legislature went back into session, a state senator from one of those shitty counties down in the state’s ass crack tried to have the death penalty reinstated? He called it the ‘Meadow Charles bill.’ Told people that if ever there was a set of circumstances that called for it, this was one of them. State hasn’t executed a son of a bitch since 1965.” He set the comb down and laced his fingers behind his head. “You got shit like that on the evening news, there’s no such thing as a fair trial.”
“Dolan stuck to his story the whole time, didn’t he? Never changed it until he took the plea.”
“Had to. Not like you can take a guilty plea and keep claiming you didn’t do it.”
“That never bothered you? How hard he clung to that?”
“Nope. I stopped thinking about clients being innocent or guilty when I still had hair. Besides, I’ve seen people flip stories so fast, you’d think you were riding a roller coaster. I kept telling him over and over the case didn’t look good, and I told his sister and the rest of his family that, and none of them cared. They swore up and down if Dolan said he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it.” Logue lit a fresh cigarette. “I’ve been trying to remember where I know you from. You’re that cop from the National Brotherhood bust-up. Helped send a bunch of them away. That you?”
“Ex-cop. And yeah, I was around for a piece of it.”
“Man, that made things exciting around here for a split second or two. What are you, some glutton for punishment, like seeing where you can stir the shit?”
“Just doing a favor.”
“Favor’ll get you hurt faster than anything else will. The Charles family won’t be happy about you poking your nose into their lives.”
I stood up and headed toward the door. “Thanks for the concern, but I can handle trouble.”
“It ain’t concern. I was just thinking you seem like you might be a bit of an asshole, and I’d have some laughs watching you get smacked around.”
“With charm like that, I bet strippers love to see you walk through the club door.”
He flipped me off on my way out.
Walking back to the Aztek, I lingered by Logue’s car and dragged my key along the driver’s side door. I figured it wasn’t like it would hurt the resale value.
8
Robert Charles’s house looked down on Serenity with a barely concealed sense of metaphor. Parker County had suffered through its McMansion phase of the ’90s, when development companies jerked off and splashed a five-bedroom pre-fab chunk of architectural spunk onto a lot just wide enough for a doghouse. The idea was to offer enough false hope and prosperity, you’d forget how everything else around you was going to shit. It hadn’t been successful.
None of that for Robert Charles, though. What he had was a genuine mansion, with a gate and an intercom, and through the wrought steel bars you saw the long, curved driveway and the house itself. It was an impressive piece of faux-classical architecture, three stories, sprawling out across several acres. If I were a betting man—and had the money to make a bet—I would have put ten bucks down there was a pool. Another five there was a tennis court.
I had called Charles earlier that morning an
d asked to meet. Actually it was his secretary who told me how busy Mr. Charles was until I mentioned I was investigating Meadow’s murder, and the why of it. That got me a direct connection to Charles, who invited me over to the estate in a tone so buttery and smooth, you could have spread it on a biscuit.
I told a woman’s voice on the intercom I was there to see Charles. The gates buzzed open, and the crackling voice told me to drive on to the main house. I wondered how many options there were.
The front door opened before I could ring the doorbell. A young woman in a gray jumpsuit identified herself as the housekeeper. I had expected a French maid’s outfit. Life, I know, is full of disappointment.
She motioned for me to follow her. Treading through the house, I hoped she got paid by the square foot. Marble and lacquered oak covered every surface with gold-leafed antique mirrors thrown in for good measure. Everything was spotless, buffed to a high shine, a celebration of old money.
She left me in a rec room that looked like a middle-aged man’s dream academy. There was a mahogany pool table I would have bet my left nut was hand built; several pinball machines I remembered from my misspent youth but that looked fresh-from-the-factory pristine; original arcade machines for Pac Man, Pole Position, and Centipede; framed movie posters for sci-fi flicks from the ’60s I’d never heard of, and a TV large enough to be a wall.
Robert Charles walked in as I checked out a poster for The Atomic Man. Charles was in his early 60s but passed for younger, though I doubted that was entirely through hard work and clean living. His snow-white mane pulled away from a hairline so straight and even, it looked marked off with a ruler. He wore a polo shirt with the name of his bank stitched in where a pocket would have been, and khakis with a crease sharp enough to slice bread.
“An aficionado of film, Mr. Malone?” he said.
“I lose interest when I can see the zippers in the costumes.”
Charles motioned me toward an uncomfortable loveseat while he positioned himself in an oversized chair facing me. He crossed his ankle over his knee and adjusted the crease on his khakis.
“Your phone call surprised me, Mr. Malone. Brought back a lot of painful memories. It’s never pleasant when someone wants to talk about your daughter’s murderer, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t speak highly of Eddie Dolan.”
“Dolan’s changed his story. He’s saying now he didn’t do it.”
He drew his eyebrows together. It took work, and his skin grew taut in the effort. “I’m sure he’s tired of getting ass-raped on a daily basis, so of course he’s changing his story. No offense, but I couldn’t care less if he has a dick in every orifice, day in and out, for every moment of the rest of his prison sentence, considering what he did to my little girl. I believe you’re wasting your time with this. Eddie Dolan confessed. He beat my little girl to death, and he violated her afterwards. Let him rot in Mount Olive. My only regret is that West Virginia doesn’t have the death penalty. I’d have paid to build a new electric chair if they had let me pull the switch personally.”
Charles’s voice remained calm, smooth, measured. Never rose pitch. Never changed tone. Ever the businessman.
“Tell me about Meadow,” I said.
He smiled, and a shadow of sadness appeared behind his eyes. “Meadow was brilliant, but she struggled with her emotions. She felt things more than the rest of us. She picked up animals left on the side of the road. She would go hungry so someone else didn’t. We had a birthday party for her when she was eight, and she brought all her gifts and toys to me to donate to the women’s and children’s shelter because she said she knew she had enough, and she wanted those children to have something as well.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Charles, your daughter was also a heroin addict,” I said.
“She was. And that was her great struggle, Mr. Malone. She fought it hard, and at the end, she was winning. Which is why I can’t see a reason to let a piece of garbage like Eddie Dolan continue to drag her name through the mud. They might have shared a weakness, but I assure you they weren’t anything alike.”
Charles glanced toward a far wall where a photo of Meadow hung. She was dressed in tennis whites and a smile to own the world. A corner of Charles’s mouth twitched, and a flicker of something passed over his eyes, and then it was gone.
He walked to the minibar and poured himself a scotch. It was after noon, so why not? He took a long drink, refilled the glass, and said, “Something to help shake off the afternoon?”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” He returned to his chair and took another drink. “How long were you with the state police?”
“Sixteen years.”
“That’s a long time. You were shot, is that right?”
I nodded. “Right knee with a shotgun blast from a 12-gauge. Shattered a fair amount of the bone along with it. Doctors replaced the knee but told me I’d be lucky if I’d ever walk right again.”
“You seem to do well.”
“I hobble along at an adequate gait.” I leaned forward and folded my hands together. “If there’s a possibility that someone else killed Meadow, Mr. Charles, I want to find that out. This would be as much about giving your daughter real justice as it would be about righting the wrong for Eddie Dolan.”
Charles swallowed the last of his scotch and walked back to the minibar. He took a checkbook and a pen out from underneath and filled out a check and ripped it clean and handed it to me.
“My little girl’s already had justice, Mr. Malone,” he said. “The man who killed her is in prison, and this is what you can have if you walk away and let him stay there.”
There were a lot of zeroes on that check. It wasn’t “fuck them” money, but it was definitely “fuck me” money.
“This is generous,” I said.
“I’m a generous man. My bank sponsors Little League teams, donates to numerous charities, and we always pay our taxes on time. This is me helping with the state police retirement fund on a very personal level.”
I took a deep breath. I’d never considered myself a charitable cause, but I wasn’t so proud as to not be willing to give it some thought.
“What do you think this kind of money buys you, Mr. Charles?” I said.
“Peace of mind. The ability to go to bed at night and know my little girl’s killer will likely die in prison, suffering for what he did.”
I looked at the check again. I thought about Eddie Dolan, and his sister, and wondered about good and just causes, and doing the right thing, regardless of the price.
I folded the check in half and slipped it into my front jeans pocket. “I know how important it is to sleep well at night, Mr. Charles.”
He patted me on the shoulder. It was meant to be all friendly and jocular, but with a little more effort he’d have knocked me on my ass.
“Good choice, Mr. Malone. Or Henry. Do you mind if I call you Henry?”
“Do I get to call you Robert?”
He walked back to the minibar to refill his class. “Call me Bobby. All of my friends call me Bobby.”
“Are we friends now, Bobby?”
“I’m a businessman, Henry; everyone’s my friend until there’s a reason for them not to be. Now, though, if you’ll excuse me, I need to cut this short for a meeting in town.”
We shook hands. “It was good doing business with you, Bobby.”
“This isn’t business, Henry. This is keeping family safe and making new friends.”
He buzzed for the housekeeper and asked her to show me back to the front door.
I said, “Out of curiosity, Bobby, are there tennis courts?”
A smile broke across his face, and it caught up with his eyes as if maybe we’d found a common ground. “There are courts in the back of the house. Do you play?”
“Nah. Tennis is just ping-pong with you standing on the table.”
The smile faded, condescension in its place, and I remembered where I sat on the Parker County social list.
&
nbsp; “Well then. You have a good day, Henry.”
“I’ll try my goddamn-dest to.”
9
I didn’t have opportunities often to accept large, loose sums of money. In fact, it never happened, because that shit doesn’t happen in real life, except on the day when it does, and it was a gift horse I didn’t intend to study too closely. It was like a good time to go with the wisdom of both the ages and of Steve Miller: take the money and run.
The housekeeper navigated the way back to the front door. She didn’t wish me well on the way out or tell me to have a nice day. Maybe she hoped my day sucked. The hell with her. I was going home wealthier than I’d shown up.
A car pulled up behind my Aztek. It was a Porsche Boxster, the automotive equivalent of an eight-carat rock on your finger. I mean, I drove an Aztek for Christ’s sake, so cars obviously didn’t mean much in my world, but I appreciated the sleekness of the car’s lines and the way the sun gleamed off the wax job. I bet it sucked bringing groceries from the store, though.
The woman who came out from behind the steering wheel was on the good side of thirty, pale as buttermilk with lots of dark red hair, and sunglasses half the size of her face. A thin sweater hung loose around her neck, and she was dressed in a casual polo and blue jeans that could have kept me fed and warm for the winter.
She took off her sunglasses to reveal eyes as green as the lawn. “Are you here to see my father?”
“Is Robert Charles your father?”
“Are there any other sixty-something-year-old men in the house?”
“I didn’t see who’s mowing the grass in back. You never know these days. I work to never make assumptions. It makes an ass out of you and -umptions.”
From behind me, someone yelled, “Hey! Sis!”
We both turned to see Deacon walk out of the house. He began to wave, then paused and cocked his head once he caught sight of me, staring at us like a confused puppy. He gave the redhead a hug, then gave me one. I responded in that guy way, throwing my arms around him and pulling my pelvis as far away from him as possible and pounding on his back like he was choking on a bone.
She Talks to Angels Page 4
