“But maybe that was a long time ago?”
“Yes.”
“And when that didn’t work maybe you went to doing other things. Like what? Cats? Small reptiles? Then people?”
“There have been . . . experiments.”
If I’d been driving, I would’ve gone off the road. I sat very still on my ratty couch for what seemed like a very long time, my turn to try and think it through. I couldn’t begin to put myself in the shoes of a guy who had lined up and shot three children and an old woman, but I’d been through enough Meetings to have a few ideas about how sick minds work.
“So what’s talking to me do for you?”
“Frankly, not much.”
That was too quick and glib for that guy. I said, “Bet it does” and let microwaves steam his skull for a while.
“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t do anything.”
“Sure it does. You’re trying to manipulate me and, through me, your situation. That’s what makes you feel, isn’t it? Not the hurting. The manipulating. The controlling. You call the boy son. You teach him how to be a man. You talk him into shooting people.”
“You seem to know a lot,” he said distractedly.
He seemed to realize what he’d said and lightened up for the first time I’d heard.
“What is this?” he said. “Group?”
But I wasn’t letting up.
“And now the boy’s out of reach or you’ve tossed him aside, you’re looking for someone else to twist up. Like me?”
“You are not worth the effort, I’m afraid,” he said softly, as though talking to himself. Louder, he said, “I just need information from you.”
“Subscribe,” I said. “Tell me you’re not pounding your pud, right now, even as we speak.”
There was a long pause.
“You’re very crude,” he said before he hung up.
We gathered at the table in the paper’s library: Wood, Crandall, Marley, me. It was close to midnight.
After I had written the story about the call and Marley and I had saved it to disc and tucked the disc in the paper’s safe, we called the paper’s lawyer. Once she got over the time of night by assuring us she would double her hourly rate for the call, she advised cooperation. A fitness freak, she also suggested diet and exercise’d probably solve the rest of my problems. Officiousness is just one reason people hate lawyers.
I told Wood and Crandall the story twice and signed a piece of paper allowing them to obtain my phone records, but they wanted more.
“Thought you were going to tape your calls,” Crandall said.
“He calls out of the blue, and anyway, the recorder’s probably here, not at home where I am.”
“Meaning you don’t have a clue where a tool of your trade is,” Marley said. His tone was snider than I would’ve liked in front of those miles outside the fold.
“How many people have your home number” Crandall said.
“Excellent question. I don’t know.”
“Work it out,” Wood said.
“Before all this? Anybody I wanted to call me back after hours. The standing order here is: If somebody calls the paper, I’m not in, give them all the numbers I got. Since this? Damn near anybody’d talk to me about Aunt Lotty.”
“Meaning?” Wood asked.
I explained to them that because they wouldn’t tell me I had spent the weeks since the murders trying to find Lotty by calling anyone who had done business with her or who knew her socially and that I had worked in a widening circle from Lotty’s house. Since it was mostly farms out there and the population density was accordingly thin, I was out maybe 20, 25 miles by then.
“How many’ve you called?” Wood asked.
“Dozens, at least.”
“Where’s your list?” Crandall asked.
“List?”
“Of the fucking people you’ve called.”
“Didn’t keep one.”
“Where’re your notes on the calls?” Wood said
“Same place as all useless notes. Tossed.”
“Bullshit,” Crandall said.
“Don’t cuss,” Marley said.
Crandall pulled a cigar out of his pocket and started to peel off the cellophane.
“Don’t smoke,” Marley said.
“Well, fuck,” Crandall said.
He smiled amiably at Marley, then frowned at me.
“Here’s how your cross-examination would go: ‘Mr. Ambrose, you never saw the man who called you?’”
Crandall raised a hand to welcome me on stage.
“Come on now,” he said, “help me out.”
“No.”
“And you’ve never heard my client speak, have you?”
I rolled my eyes. Crandall turned his attention to Marley.
“Your honor, would you direct the witness to answer?”
Marley said, “Clay, let’s just get this over with.”
“No.” I said.
“No, you’re not going to play, or no, you’ve never heard my client speak?” Crandall said.
“No, I’ve never heard your client speak.”
“So.” Crandall paused for effect. “You cannot say that his voice and the voice of the person who called you are the same, can you?”
“No.”
“And the person who spoke to you on the phone never said to you, ‘I killed three children and shot Lotty Nusbaumer’?”
“He knew things,” I interrupted. “He knew Jake, called him ‘son.’ He talked about not feeling and suggested he hurt animals before he hurt people.
Crandall shrugged and continued.
“Many people knew Jake, did they not?”
“Yes.”
“Some of them would’ve been older?”
“Yes.”
“Some of them would’ve been men?”
“Yes.”
“Some of them might’ve called him ‘son.’”
“Okay. All right.”
“Maybe even his guidance counselor at school?” Crandall said and smirked. “He called us after you embarrassed his secretary.”
He started in on me again.
“The person who spoke to you on the phone, he didn’t tell you he’d shown Jake Danvers how to kill people?”
“No.”
“The person who spoke to you on the phone, he didn’t tell you he’d actually hurt small animals, did he?”
“No.”
“He just said there’d been experiments, correct?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t tell you what those experiments were?”
“No.”
“It was you suggested small animals, was it not?”
“Yes.”
“And just so we’re clear here, you’ve never seen the man who called you on the phone twice, have you?
“No.”
“And as a result, you can’t say here today that the man seated next to me, my client, is the person you spoke with on the phone.”
“No.”
“Either time.”
I sighed. “No.”
Crandall pursed out his lips. He put the cigar in his mouth, pulled a match from his pants pocket and fired it up. He looked at Marley through the smoke as he exhaled.
“Without a recording,” he said, “see what we got?”
He rose, putting on his porkpie hat.
“Somewhere in this fucking building is a story about those calls already written for tomorrow’s paper.” He looked again at Marley as he put on his coat. “Without a recording, see what you got?”
In the old days, an editor killed a weak or dead story by literally driving a spike through the paper it was typed on. In 1994? No longer so.
When Wood and Crandall left, Marley wen
t to the safe, pulled out the disc, and waved it at me. “This is on you. I can’t risk our credibility, not for no more than this tells us.”
He jammed the disc in the drive to erase it. As the drive grunted and whirred, he said, “Don’t know which I hate more: talking to those bastards or this.”
Mad as I was then at Crandall, Marley, and me, I doubt I could choose either.
“Take a ride,” Wood said.
He called me at the apartment. It was a Monday, just after six. In the morning. Wood calling me early at home put me on red alert, but there was also something in his voice, a quickening, Dill might say, dropped like a magician’s silk over the vengeance he’d kept cupped in his palm since the night before Halloween.
“And we’re going where?” I said, hoping it sounded casual.
“Tell you in the car. Bring your tools. Tell Bob you won’t be in this morning.”
“He’ll want to know why.”
“He’ll like why. Be outside in five.”
Wood pulled up in four. He was driving his car, the unmarked squad. Moze rode shotgun. Wood had shucked the brown, polyester, jump suit. Both he and Moze were in their best, two-tone-brown threads and wide-brim, fireplug lids. Without turning to look at me, Moze tossed a thumb over his shoulder to tell me I’d sit in back.
“Anybody puked back here lately?” I asked for openers.
Nobody laughed.
“Bring a camera?” Wood asked.
“Hell no,” I said, leaning forward to see if I could see anything in the front seat that would tell me what was going on.
“What’d I tell you about your tools?” Wood said.
“Jesus, you sound like Marley.”
Wood looked at his watch. Moze held up a 35 millimeter by the strap.
“He can use ours,” Moze said.
“For what?” I asked.
Wood gunned it, knocking me back into the seat. It sighed a puff redolent of Pine-Sol, urine, and vomit. The citizens of Austin County always elect a working sheriff.
The sun was not yet up, and, on this day, it would not be out. But I am a child of the Midwest, and I need not light to know what kind of day it will be. In my bones, I knew it would be damp and not-quite-freezing cold. It would be set out against some relentless, unblemished shade of gray. It would be the kind of day that by noon would leave me weary of packing around this life’s fat ass. It would be the kind of day that, had it fallen in February, after weeks of such days, would paint across my tongue for hours at a time the cellular memory of scotch’s smoke and husk. It would be the kind of day that I might have to seek out not one but two Meetings and maybe call Marley in between.
Yet even as the gruel that was to be that day’s light seeped up over the horizon, flowed out over the dirty ochre of the flat, stubbly fields we passed by, and puddled in the brown towns we drove through, you could tell, Wood and Moze were jazzed. Give them tuning forks, you could’ve heard the cosmos’ chord.
“You got him,” said I, not even a question.
Wood’s eye in the rearview mirror was hard, shiny, and dangerous, kind of like looking closeup at the round end of a ballpeen hammer. Then, the eye closed and looked back toward the road.
“Maybe,” he said.
“What’s maybe? You call me at this unholy hour. You’re both wearing pressed chocolate and mocha, and we’re headed toward Indianapolis. Maybe? Shit.”
Wood and Moze looked at each other. Wood smirked.
“Okay,” he said, “here it is.”
Late the previous Friday, just before closing, a criminal-defense attorney named Marcus Reardon called the Indianapolis office of the FBI. The Rear, as he is known among the law-enforcement community throughout the state, specializes in high-profile cases. His reputation among cops and prosecutors is based more on the stunts he pulls and the publicity they generate than the quality of his representation, and his batting average is much lower than he or other members of the clans would lead you to believe. The last special agent left in the office accordingly accepted the Rear’s call with some reluctance.
Reardon says to the agent the guy has retained him. The guy—the Rear won’t identify him to the agent by name—is willing to turn himself in. The guy didn’t do it, Reardon says; he’s got people who’ll testify to where he was the night of the murders, and it wasn’t at some old lady’s trailer. But, Reardon says, the guy knows the cops are looking for him ’cause, yes, he does know Jake and his family and people he knows are telling him the cops are asking around for him. He assumes Jake gave the cops his name.
The guy will turn himself in, he’s a law-abiding citizen, the Rear says, but he’ll turn himself in only to feds. He’s afraid, Reardon says. He’s pretty sure there are lynch mobs roaming the plains of Austin County, and he fears local authorities will turn him over to said mobs if his arrest is not well publicized.
Well, says the agent, we have no reports of Austin County lynch mobs, but if you’re saying you and your boy know my colleagues at the state and local levels are going to find your boy sooner or later and you want to bring him on over, sure, we’ll take him.
Well, there’s just one thing, says the Rear. The guy’s got family and he wants to spend his last few hours of freedom with them.
You’re saying he won’t be here till ten or what, the agent says, now in sputtering awe of the size of the brass balls Reardon just pulled out of his pants.
Naw, Reardon says, how about I just deliver him to your office Monday morning, say, around nine, so he can be arraigned promptly the same day. Also, the Rear says, between now and then, if you guys try and squeeze any family or friends you may have knowledge of, he won’t show on Monday.
And the Rear hangs up.
The feds call McConegal, McConegal calls Wood, Wood calls Crandall, and Crandall calls everybody, raising all sorts of hell about Reardon obstructing justice and abetting a felon and threatening him with not only an arrest, but also a trip to the state Supreme Court’s disciplinary commission.
“See how that bastard’s going to make blood money without a fucking license,” Crandall is reputed to have said.
In the end, Reardon called Crandall. Wood was with Crandall, listening on the speaker. Reardon told Crandall he didn’t know where the guy was ’cause the guy hadn’t told him. Crandall was pretty sure Reardon hadn’t asked either, but before he could express that suspicion, Reardon put it to Crandall one lawyer to another: “You want him or not? Something or nothing. Best I can do.”
I suspect he risked an aneurysm accepting the deal, but Crandall took something.
“So,” I said, “assuming the guy actually shows up, you charging or just questioning?”
“Assuming it’s who we think it is, charging,” Wood said. “Murder and felony murder, three counts each. Attempted murder and attempted felony murder, one count each. Some other stuff to keep him wrapped up.”
“Felony murder?”
“He killed them in the course of a break-in.”
“Could put him at the front of the line for some volts,” Moze said cheerfully.
Wood glared at him, and he stopped smiling.
“Actually, it’s the amps the condemned wants to avoid,” I said. “Or maybe the watts. I forget.”
They were a tough crowd: Moze didn’t like being corrected, especially by me, and Wood didn’t think jokes about the death penalty were funny. Anyway, they use a needle nowadays.
“Best talk to Crandall about that,” Wood said.
“You guys act like the case is strong,” I said. “He confess?”
Moze glanced at Wood, who kept his eyes on the road.
“Off the record?” Wood said.
“At this point? Hell no.”
“No comment.”
“That’ll look like yes.”
Wood gave me hammer eye in the mirror again.
“Way too pretentious. How about ‘police’?”
“Jesus Christ,” Moze hissed. Wood smiled.
“The answer is no, of course not, we haven’t talked to him yet.”
“Then what makes you guys so confident?”
Wood said nothing.
“The kid ID him?”
Moze carefully watched the strip malls and the big-box stores of the greater Indianapolis metroplex roll by. He seemed intent on not missing a single one of the commerce barns big as football fields on either side of the highway. Wood kept his eyes on the road.
“Lotty saw him,” I said.
“We don’t have him in custody yet,” Wood said finally. “Maybe we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.”
I took out my notepad, made a few notes. I caught Wood watching me in the mirror. We crept along with the rest of rush-hour traffic, inching toward a skyline of a couple of dozen or so skyscrapers. Locals take great pride in them, but they seemed juvenile and curt by the standards of the Loop.
The phone call, the ride over, the use of their camera, the information: I was feeling a little creeped out by their generosity.
“How’m I getting back to town exactly?” I asked.
“With us,” Wood said.
“And he’s getting to Failey how exactly?”
“With us.”
“You, Moze, him, me,” I said. “All of us together in this squad.”
“What’s your point?” said Wood.
“Squad’s not that big. Where’s his lawyer going to be?”
“Don’t know.”
“Probably not with us.”
“No, probably not.”
“You and Moze probably can’t ask him about the case. In the car, I mean.”
Wood and Moze looked at each other. Moze raised his eyebrow.
“No,” Wood said. “He’s represented, and his lawyer probably won’t want him talking to us unless he’s present.”
“But,” I said. “And, of course, I speak only hypothetically, I could talk to him if we—him and me—are both in the car.”
“I suppose,” Wood said. “Speaking hypothetically.”
Fourth Person No More Page 16
