Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

Wood asked what he said first. He had watched through the mirror, but, of course, he could not see and, apparently, he could not hear. I owed Wood and I trusted him, so I told him. But Wood did not know what kind of apple the police had found in Lottie’s toilet that night, nor did he know what type Lottie had on the table or in her refrigerator.

  He got out the murder book compiled by the state police, a copy of the same one Pratt had used in his testimony. It did not specify type of apple, only the color, red, and the number of bites, best guess three.

  Wood called Lottie at his farm, but she could not remember. She liked jonathans, she said over the speaker, but she bought other kinds, too. “Anyway, Woodrow,” she said, “don’t you think I’ve remembered everything important about that night?”

  When he hung up, Wood looked at me with his bloodshot eyes. He said, “And you didn’t even have your goddamn tape on.”

  That pretty much summed up how I felt.

  I returned to the paper and wrote up the interview sans apple. Puking seemed like a thing to do about halfway through it, although whether it was from listening to his line of shit again on the tape or thinking about how he’d played me, I could not say.

  I didn’t puke. I stayed focused on the work long enough to proofread it and ship it to Marley’s queue, but by the time I left, the scent of scotch was in my nose, and I could damn near taste it.

  I didn’t drink then. I went to the Pug and had chicken-fried steak, macaroni and cheese, and some broccoli, but only some broccoli, because it is a heinous vegetable.

  When I finished the blackberry cobbler, it occurred to me how good a cigarette would taste. I was surprised; I hadn’t craved tobacco in years. Hank Jr. said it: All my rowdy friends were coming over tonight.

  I needed to figure out what I was going to do pretty quick. Otherwise, I’d soon be rooting through my paperbacks looking for the number of my last coke dealer.

  Sitting in the Pug, the last customer there, working a toothpick between sips of bitter coffee, I acknowledged that things had reached this point in no small part because I insisted on being at Lottie’s on the night before Halloween and then not owned up to it. The Program, however, frowns on regret as a waster of time and energy, and in any event, redemption never lays behind you.

  If I came forward now and confessed to seeing an apple in Lottie’s toilet, that would show I had been in the trailer. That would not only breach my promise to Moze; worse, it would also prove that he had committed perjury. That would, in turn, not only prove that Crandall and the cops were incompetent, it would vaporize whatever credibility they had left with the jury.

  I worked it down to three choices: write a story about what he said and how it fit into the investigation, tell Crandall about the interview and volunteer to testify about it but only it, or let it go. I could do any one of those things. I could do two of those things. I could not do all those things.

  I should have gone to a Meeting, but I knew how that would go.

  So you’ve got one detail that puts this guy inside the trailer as a participant. He told you himself, but you’ve got no way to prove it. The cops didn’t hear it, and you didn’t record it. It’s your word against his, and you think he could be a persuasive guy. You could print it, but it’s really obscure, it’d still your word against his, and your editor will want corroboration, which as you said, you don’t have.

  Well, okay. Don’t drink.

  I could’ve called Marley and probably should’ve, since that single stone would’ve killed any number of birds. I could tell him about the interview and tip him off to the story he would find on Monday. I could tell him about my dilemma and listen to another lecture about not taking advantage of technology. I could be told not to go to Crandall because we don’t make the news we just report it. I could be told I was a drunk and to let it go and not drink, just as though I’d gone to a Meeting.

  Janelle was a thought but not a possibility. I would be more than a little skeptical of ethical platitudes, which would be all one so young and inexperienced could offer, and, anyway, she was the competition.

  Running through the alternatives, I was reminded that I am well suited to my business. My nature and my work leave little room for friends, only sources, potential sources, colleagues, and competition.

  I had one number left I could still call, but now did not seem like a time to be too hasty.

  I went back to the apartment. I read a little Le Carré here and there as the night wore on. Perhaps Mr. Smiley would have a suggestion. I listened to a little of Miss Alison and the boys and Jerry Douglas, driving his sprung-string guitar. I dozed on the couch, still in my clothes, waking with a start, sweaty and clenched, each time that damned dream began about him walking free.

  Promptly at eight on Sunday morning, I called. Crandall was as surprised and pissed about it as I was. To kill some time, he barked at me about having his home number and how I got it and the hour of the day.

  “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Mr. Ambrose,” Crandall said, “but I got a closing to prepare for tomorrow.”

  “Tell me you haven’t written and rehearsed it a hundred times since you walked into that trailer. Tell me you couldn’t do it for me right now and it wouldn’t last two hours.”

  A lifetime of cheroots made for ragged breathing on his end of the line.

  I said, “I got something you need to hear about. It might make you rethink at least a little bit of your close.”

  “Well, shit,” he said, “if it’s only a little bit, it can wait ‘til tonight.”

  As a drunk, I hate it when others insist on their terms.

  I hated even more the place. Failey is not big enough to have more than one dive, and Mal’s is it. As one would expect, it is dark and smoky, illuminated only by a couple of neon beer signs hanging over the mirror behind the bar and ventilated only by an open back door and a noisy industrial fan on a six-foot pole. Its patrons run toward surly drunks, miserable women, and frequent, if not legally habitual, criminal offenders, Austin County’s furtive element, drawn to the place by their instinctive appreciation of the privacy Mal’s’ ambience affords.

  The cops appreciate Mal’s, too, and, for the most part, leave it alone. Located one block from the courthouse and the jail, it often makes for one-stop shopping when they need to find or arrest one or more of their opposite number.

  When I arrived, I thought the only other person present was Mal himself. A lot of clientele call him Shellshock, but as a vet, I hate the reference. He is a skinny man with arthritic hips and knees that make him walk like his legs are wired to rebar. He wears black glasses and hair the color of fishing line slicked straight back. It is said that sunshine has not warmed his apparitional skin since 1973.

  Clad in a plaid shirt and jeans, he propped against a stool behind the bar, his arms folded, staring at nothing. Like him, the stool had bum legs. As he rocked it, it sounded like heartbeats. He did not return my nod, but then he rarely speaks to regulars either.

  Crandall lurked in a shadow at the back. On the lacquered, black tabletop in front of him were a bottle of Cutty Sark, a glass ashtray the size of a Frisbee, and his baby-blue porkpie. There were also two stubby glasses. The one closest to Crandall was half full, optimistic liquor backlit by neon, purple as grape juice.

  I let out some breath with a hiss.

  “We couldn’t’ve done this at your office or mine?”

  Crandall cocked his head and tipped it back. He looked at me with one eye squinted to avoid the smoke rising from the cigar in his mouth.

  “Fucking bother you, this place?” he said.

  He had hung his jacket on his chair and folded up the cuffs of his white shirt. Dark suspenders framed his torso above the table. One strapped down three cigars in his shirt pocket. He could’ve been dealing stud.

  “Makes me think of a Clint Eastwood movie,” I said. “We ought
to have a gunfight, winner gets the school marm.”

  “Shit,” Crandall said. “I was hoping more it’d bother you.”

  With the gnawed, spit-soaked end of the cigar, he gestured to the seat opposite him. I sat, put my arms of the table, and spread my hands.

  “Tonight we’re going to be honest with each other,” I said.

  “So long as this whole goddamned conversation—your end of it, my end of it—is completely off the record. Nothing said here tonight is to be used in any fucking story in any fucking way, attributed or unattributed.”

  “That why we’re sitting in this shithole alone on a Sunday night?” It was hard to avoid profanity with Crandall. “Isn’t this place supposed be closed on Sundays? State statute and all?”

  Crandall shrugged.

  “I’m the prosecutor.” He jerked his head back at Mal. “Mr. Brady and I have an understanding about certain legal defects in the manner of his operation.”

  “And you get to use the place for meetings you don’t want people to know about.”

  Crandall picked up the bottle and poured himself another finger of scotch. I felt his eyes land on me as he poured three fingers into the empty glass. He set the bottle down. He put his fist heel down behind the fuller glass and nudged it toward me with a flick of his index finger.

  It stopped close enough that I could easily pick the aroma of malt out of the background odors of stale beer and cigarette butts. I’d closely watched the ballet of bottle and glass and the tidal wash of liquid before I raised my eyes to meet his. Call them pouched, rheumy, dyspeptic.

  I pulled my arms back and put my hands in my lap. He saw it and smirked.

  “You’re going to make this just as hard as you can, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Crandall said. He jerked the cigar out of his mouth. “What say you? Deal? Or go home.”

  “I did not come here for a story.”

  “That may be a first.”

  “You’re damned right it is.”

  Crandall did not smoke or drink or look away from me once during the time it took to tell him about what was said during and after the interview. When I was done, he lit another cheroot and inhaled deeply. He tipped his head back, blew out the smoke, and watched it race for the door on the fan’s current. He fixed his eyes on the table and sipped a little scotch. He made a face.

  “Wood set this up,” he said and looked at me.

  I held his eyes and said nothing. Crandall waved his hand.

  “Yes, shit, I know. You don’t discuss sources. But you couldn’t’ve got into that jail without Wood.”

  He sipped scotch.

  “He’s afraid, you know,” Crandall said. “You know that.”

  The irony of my life is that it is less complicated when I don’t tell people things. That night, I yearned for uncomplicated life. I kept quiet.

  “Well, he is,” Crandall said. “He’s afraid because of me. I told him he ought to be.”

  My surprise must’ve been evident. Crandall took a drag off the cigar, picked tobacco off his tongue, and blew out some more smoke. He grinned at me the whole time.

  “You don’t think I’ve been doing this long enough I don’t know the weaknesses of my case?”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t fucking shrug at me. Who do you think interviewed Lottie Nusbaumer three times and talked to her damned near every day in between? Who do you think read the transcripts of every interview with her and every other damn witness a couple dozen fucking times and remembered every fucking detail?”

  He stopped and waited for me to respond, but I was done being drawn, that day at least. I waited, too. He finally shrugged himself and said quietly: “Who do you think told Lottie to take a long look at that dog fucker’s neck when she got on the stand?”

  “You told her to say that? About the cross and the chest hair?”

  “Nope.” Crandall shook his head once. “I opened up her awareness a little. She did the rest. For that fucking jury? It’s enough.”

  Crandall put his cigar out and tipped his hat onto his head.

  “I don’t need you,” he said.

  He was too abrupt. After a night’s worth of worry, cutting expectation in stone, I had trouble winding my mind around what he said. I put my hand on his arm before he could stand.

  “It’s even money now,” I said.

  “I read your damned story.”

  “You blew it, Crandall. You need this.”

  “And you, Mr. Ambrose, are starting to believe your own material.”

  He tendered his best fuck-you smirk.

  “You know,” he said, “technically, if it’s even money, given the presumption of innocence, that jury’d have to acquit.”

  It was a word I had too often heard in my head. Crandall removed my hand from his arm, but something he saw on my face made him pause.

  “How does that bastard know it was a Jonathan?” he asked quietly in the same tone a teacher uses to reason with an inconsolable child. “You think he saw a label?”

  The urge to look away made me blink.

  “If I weren’t so fucking tired right now,” Crandall said, “I ‘spect I could be pissed all over again. If I wanted to risk blowing out a fucking aneurism, I might even go so far as to remind you what an asshole you are, remind you we probably wouldn’t be in this shit if it weren’t for you.”

  “Yes, you would,” I said. “You’d still have to deal with the Bunny theory and Lottie’s lousy ID.”

  Crandall canted his head, giving me my due.

  “What you’re offering is the kind of evidence I fucking hate,” he began. “It’s not apparent. Takes too much explanation to demonstrate its significance.”

  Crandall had dropped into full-blown analytical lawyer mode. He looked at me, but his eyes were unfocused and the profanity fell away.

  “It opens you—and me—up to an ugly cross.”

  He dropped into a close approximation of Reardon’s voice.

  “So, Mr. Ambrose, you were in that trailer tampering with evidence, breaking the chain of custody. The Defendant didn’t tell you what he meant by what he said, did he? It’s possible you misheard the Defendant. Correct? It’s at least possible? No? You don’t personally know who dropped that apple or when, do you? It could’ve been one of the kids, couldn’t it? Children—boys—drop stuff in toilets, don’t they?”

  Crandall shook his head a couple of times.

  “The mere fact that at this point I would go to all the trouble of putting you on the stand for one fact—that whole effort—underscores an area of weakness—that we have a tenuous ID. The risk the jury won’t get it or, worse, holds it against us—’cause young Moze probably lied on the stand—outweighs whatever corroborative value it may have. And we don’t even have much of that. Nobody bothered to find out what kind of apples Lottie had on that table. You need more reasons?”

  He pulled another cigar from his shirt pocket, peeled away the wrapper, and lit it with a kitchen match big enough to make me turn my head from the bright flash when it caught.

  “What the hell’s the deal with you and Pratt?” I said.

  The cigar glowed on his face as he inhaled. His eyes were wide in mock surprise.

  “No knocking you down, is there?” he said.

  “Can’t. I’m a big, round-bottom boy. What’s the deal?”

  He considered me first over the cigar then the glass.

  “I’ll remind you this is a meeting that never fucking happened,” he said. “Therefore, these will be words that were never fucking spoken.”

  I waited. On the stool, Mal rocked. Crandall tipped his chair back, sucked on the cigar, and looked away.

  “Years ago, I took a case to trial, my first and only other murder, and lost. Detective Pratt was the lead investigator. He was just beginn
ing to make a name for himself. It is one of the two fucking cases he can’t brag to a jury about. He blamed me. I blamed him. It was a shitty case.” He shrugged and growled: “Maybe both ways.”

  I leaned forward, extending a hand across the table.

  “And he torpedoed you because of that? And you let him do it because of that?”

  Crandall lowered his chair and leaned in toward me, the fire back in his eye.

  “Maybe you’ve noticed, Mr. Ambrose. We crimefighters are obliged to play these fucking games for keeps.”

  “And you’re going to let the cops—hell, Orlo—dangle out there so that jury can cherry-pick what it wants to let that guy walk?”

  “Why, Mr. Ambrose, you’re not careful, somebody’ll think you actually give a good goddamn about justice instead of just what’s under your fucking byline the next day.”

  “The question stands, Crandall.”

  “The fucking police must fend for themselves. The jury has had its opportunity to size up ol’ Bunny. A jury in a place like this—a small town, good people, church people, raised right—it wants to do the right thing. They know their duty. They don’t want fucking murderers walking among them.”

  I slumped back in my chair so hard it barked like a seal on the wood floor.

  “You acquainted with hubris, Crandall?”

  Crandall started to rise, then looked at me and sat back down.

  “Bet it hurts like hell,” he said, growling meanness back in his voice.

  I was rerunning the conversation in my head, trying to find another flaw in what he said. “I’m sorry?”

  He sat with his arms folded on the table. He lifted one lazy finger at me.

  He said, “A whole lifetime looking through the fence. You finally step away to come out and play, and what’d you know? Nobody wants you on the fucking team.”

  Whatever sympathy his gaze once held was long gone.

  “Lot of risk involved going from press box to player,” he said. “Things don’t go the way players want or expect. Why d’you think Wood’s afraid? Players have to step lively to make things work. They don’t have the luxury of setting back and sniping, like you bastards. Why d’you think Wood pulled that rash shit of putting you in with the Defendant? And then sometimes nobody wants you in the fucking game at all.”