Deception

by Randy Alcorn

“The killer’s?”

  “Hopefully. But here’s the zinger. You know what I said about crime scene contamination? Well, remember that long strand of hair with that nice root on the professor’s body? We got a rush job on it. Guess whose hair?”

  “No clue.”

  “Kim Suda’s! Can you believe it? Hairnets should be mandatory. She crashes my scene, and then she’s careless enough to drop hair on the dead guy!”

  “I’ve got a general question about murder investigations,” Clarence said. “For my articles. Once you come up with suspects, how do you choose the most likely?”

  “Study them. Find out their background and habits, patterns and prejudices. People are predictable. A certain kind of personality exposed to a certain kind of circumstances responds with a certain attitude and behavior … including murder.”

  “Sounds deterministic, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll look it up and let you know.”

  “Not everything’s easily explained. Sometimes we deceive ourselves. Sometimes people deceive us.”

  “I’m a professional observer. A student of human nature. Everybody can be explained.”

  “You got to know my daddy pretty well, didn’t you?”

  “In such a short time, yeah, I did.”

  “You remember his background, the shame and humiliation, that he couldn’t take his family to eat in most restaurants, that he had to use a different restroom and drinking fountain. You remember how the cops tortured him in that Mississippi jail?”

  “Wish I could forget.”

  “So, given your philosophy of human behavior, how do you explain my daddy? How do you explain the man that he was?”

  I sat there pondering the question and fighting the lump in my throat. “Your daddy was the finest man I ever met. And … to tell you the truth, I can’t explain the way he was.”

  I sat there waiting for him to tell me it was God who touched his heart, Jesus who gave him the power to forgive.

  But he didn’t say it. He just sat there. All the responses I was ready to give were stuck in my ammo box. And the longer they stayed there, the weaker they looked. I thought about that old man, who played in the Negro Leagues. He knew Satchel Paige, can you imagine that? Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays—he knew them all.

  The corners of my eyes got hot and wet when I thought about that sheriff and his deputy and how they beat and tortured Obadiah Abernathy. I’d dreamed of getting my hands on them. I wouldn’t use a baseball bat or a fork on them like they used on him. I’d want to feel my fingers around their throats. I wouldn’t kill them maybe, but I’d make them wish they were dead.

  Obadiah Abernathy—I never detected an ounce of bitterness. He’d been dead years now. Other than that day to and from Seattle for a Mariners game and a couple of fishing trips, I never spent more than three hours with him. Yet he became more of a daddy to me than my father had in fifty years.

  But Mr. Abernathy’s gone now. He left a big space.

  “Ollie?” The voice was out of place.

  “Jake? What are you doing here?” I looked around to confirm that I was still in homicide.

  “When we were at Lou’s, I forgot to give you something from Carly.”

  As he put the white envelope in my hand, I cleared my throat. “I meant to ask you … how is Carly?”

  “Not so good. Her immune system’s getting weaker, and she keeps catching stuff. Pneumonia twice. Infections all the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “She’s in good spirits though. She’s an amazing girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She asks me about her Uncle Ollie.”

  “I’ve been thinking of dropping by.”

  “It would mean a lot to her.”

  Quick as that, Jake was gone. I opened the card. It was a white dog wearing four red sneakers, camera close to his snout. I laughed. Inside it said, “Saw this and thought of you, Uncle Ollie. I love you and miss you. Carly.”

  I drew my sleeve across my face and stood up. Not sure why I stood up, except that I wanted to do something.

  I see dead people. A lot. But I can’t stand to see a young woman like Carly waste away. The last few months, my coward’s way of not seeing her die has been not to see her at all.

  How do you find hope in a world where men like Obadiah Abernathy and girls like Carly Woods suffer and die?

  Clarence ran off to his daughter’s volleyball game. I dropped by a stop ’n’ rob to get two corn dogs and a thirty-two-ouncer. I sat in the parking lot guessing which customers were criminals and what crimes they’d committed. This is how cops while away time. But mainly, I thought about the Palatine case. I didn’t like what I was thinking.

  I went back to the Justice Center, to the evidence room, and put in a request to check out something that had been processed. The clerk documented this in the chain of custody records. I walked out with a blue rope, still in its evidence bag, inside a plain plastic WinCo sack.

  I drove to George’s Marine Supply, between downtown and my home, one of two big nautical stores I know of. George was in. I showed him my credentials and handed him the three feet of rope, which CSI had cut through the noose while leaving the knot intact, since knots can be valuable evidence.

  George examined the rope like Tiger Woods examines a driver.

  “Bowline knot,” he said.

  I nodded.

  After a long pause, George said, “Polyester, three-millimeter fiber. A Marlow. Comes in four colors, all obnoxiously bright. There’s a fluorescent pink, a purple, and a greenish yellow. Then this here blue, with the red woven into it. It has a low-stretch polyester core with high-tenacity, good for tie-downs and control lines. It’s smooth to minimize friction through blocks and leads.”

  “You carry it?”

  “Used to but stopped three years ago. People want white and brown and conservative colors. I think David Strickland still carries it, over at Strickland’s Sail Shop on Eighty-second. I’ve got a Marlow catalog. Want me to look it up?”

  Within two minutes he produced a page with the four rope colors he’d described. He had an extra catalog, so he tore out the page and gave it to me.

  “Tell David Strickland hi from George.”

  I waved my thanks and sat in the driver’s seat for ten minutes, picking up a few scraps of corn dog with my fingertips and thinking. I swore, louder than I meant to.

  I wasn’t going to Strickland’s Sail Shop.

  A pessimist has many pleasant surprises, an optimist many disappointments. Pessimism is safer. After years of optimism that didn’t pan out, I find life less difficult when I keep my expectations low.

  But some days things go just right—beautifully, perfectly, to the point that I’m tempted to revert to optimism. You want to bottle those days and just break out into a big grin.

  This wasn’t one of those days.

  Jake Woods and Clarence Abernathy were probably winding down their afternoons with their families, looking forward to sitting around a campfire singing “Kum Bay Yah” and counting their blessings.

  Me, I counted roadblocks, annoyances, and uncertainties. I contemplated the meaning of the gnawing suspicion that had come over me at George’s Marine Supply. A suspicion I didn’t dare verbalize to anyone.

  So I made my way to Rosie O’Grady’s Irish pub, where they water the drinks like geraniums, but if you buy them by the bottle you can still get the real stuff. I was there by four thirty, several hours earlier than usual.

  My pessimism had nothing to do with my nagging suspicions and certainly nothing to do with not knowing where my older daughter is or even if she’s alive and not seeing my other daughter for nearly a year. Nothing to do with Kendra changing her plans and not showing up last Christmas and not inviting me over on my birthday, or hers. Nothing to do with the fact that I’d left two messages inviting her to come with me to Thanksgiving at Jake’s place, which was five days away and counting down. I hadn’t heard from her and didn’t expect
to.

  Rosie’s was heavy with the smell of tap beer and fried grease.

  “Hey, here comes the man. He’s early today. Must’ve gotten his quota of jaywalkers.”

  Not wearing a uniform saves me from these lines where I’m not known, but not at Rosie’s.

  “Hide your pipe bomb. It’s the fuzz.”

  This is a guy from the sixties who never stopped smoking pot long enough to realize we’re no longer called the fuzz.

  Some NASCAR wannabe named Mikey, dressed in a Jimmie Johnson T-shirt and hat and wearing a Lowe’s team jacket, stood up putting his hands in the air. “I didn’t do it!” he called, breaking into uproarious laughter.

  Sometimes even sober people do that when cops walk into a room. They think it’s original and hugely funny.

  In the years I was on patrol, no one ever said anything brilliant when I pulled them over. But in their memories, people are dazzlingly clever.

  Mikey isn’t done yet: “So I says to the cop, ‘I can’t reach my license unless you hold my beer and my cell phone.’ ”

  Another goofball chimes in: “Thank you, sir. The last officer only gave me a warning, too!” It falls flat. No laughter. He’s banished to the audience. Mikey is now king of Comedy Central, on stage by himself, a legend in his own mind.

  “So this cop says to me, ‘Sir, your eyes look red. Have you been drinking?’ So I says, ‘Officer, your eyes look glazed. Have you been eating donuts?’ ”

  Pretty soon everybody’s putting in their two cents, shelling out their cop stories.

  I picked up my beer and moved to the far end of the bar, resisting the temptation to head-butt somebody onto the pool table.

  Billy the bartender approached, supposing I must need a new beer after the long walk. He was right. His face was a doughy pool of flesh in the eerie light of the Michelob neon. There were shreds of red peanut skins between his teeth.

  To some guys, a bartender’s like a priest or therapist. To me, he’s just a pharmacist with a limited inventory. Sometimes I talk with Billy. Not tonight.

  The guys three stools away suddenly got louder. They’re funny drunks. I’m a quiet drunk. Funny drunks think everything’s hilarious. They’re Seinfeld, only he got the breaks and they didn’t. Being such accomplished humorists apparently makes them feel better about the affair their wife’s having or that their kids are doing drugs while they pour their miserable lives away at Rosie’s.

  I ask for another beer and point to where I’m about to vanish, then walk into the cool darkness to a small table where no one will be tempted to sit by me. In the safety of the darkness I pull out what I keep stashed in my trench coat’s inner pocket: orange foam earplugs. I put on my black fedora to make me feel Bogart-like, sitting in the shadows.

  Sometimes I just sit there and think about Sharon. I drink to stop thinking about her, but as I drink I think about her more. Sometimes, just for a second, I fall under a spell that she’s home waiting for me. And Kendra’s a little girl who adores her daddy. What am I doing here with these drunken bums and the bartender with peanut skins on his teeth when they’re waiting for me at home?

  So I stand, stagger a little, and remember Sharon’s dead. And Kendra’s lost. Then I sit down again. Next thing I know it’s half-past Cinderella, and somehow I’m home, falling into bed. Most times I don’t recall hitting the mattress. I wake up and wonder where I am. These days I seem to lose two or three hours routinely.

  It’s now 5:15, morning after my latest binge. I wake up to the cranial jackhammer. Seeing me bonding with Mr. Coffee, Mulch already has bacon fantasies, but my thoughts are limited to French roast, my drug of choice.

  As the little gray cells start to wake up, I contemplate the jerks in the bar, trying to remember what they really said and what I really said and rehearsing what I should have said and indulging my fantasy of taking them all out with a series of head butts.

  Wouldn’t have been worth the paperwork. And then there’s anger management.

  After two eighteen-ounce cups of French roast, the sun still wasn’t threatening to rise. I lacked sufficient fuel for takeoff, so I cooked a round of bacon and eggs, with blackened English muffins. I decided to do what I’d been dreading since leaving George’s Marine Supply yesterday afternoon. I knew what I’d find when I looked in my garage, but I still hoped I was wrong.

  I stepped onto the back porch, Mulch at my feet, but I felt dizzy and needed to sit. I thought about sitting on my grandfather’s back porch and him teaching me to tie knots, including the bowline. I didn’t know Grandpa well, but those knots he taught me were more than I ever got from my father. Dad threw me a ball once. He got mad when I threw it back too low. Said he wasn’t going to waste his time with a kid who couldn’t even toss a baseball.

  I pulled myself up, leaning on Mulch, and opened the door to a pitch-black garage. I turned on the wimpy overhead light. The hundred-watt bulb was fifteen feet up, nearly worthless, barely enough to illuminate the velvet Elvis I bought roadside in Arizona twenty years ago as an anniversary gift for Sharon. I grabbed a flashlight and looked on the shelves, past toolboxes, hoses, and transmission fluid. I pointed the light up to the storage platform behind me, built to take advantage of the dead space. It was full of boxes of junk Sharon had asked me to toss. Miscellaneous sailing paraphernalia reminded me how, after Sharon died, I bought that used sailboat. I’d been out in it three lousy times in two years. Finally sold it.

  I stopped rummaging and shone the flashlight around the garage. I passed Elvis and held the beam on an old blue plastic box by two studded snow tires. I stood over it, hands shaking.

  I opened the box, pushed aside a block and tackle, some lures and line, and found a couple of ropes.

  I pulled one of them out, laid it on the cement floor, pushed back Mulch, and aimed the flashlight. The rope’s end had been cut neatly by something sharp. Stretching it out, I guessed that three feet had been cut off, recently, since even in a dusty garage the cut fiber was still sparkling clean.

  The rope was bright blue, with a red weave. Polyester with three-millimeter fibers. A Marlow.

  I’d bought it three years ago at Strickland’s Sail Shop.

  9

  “I do not think there are any insuperable difficulties. Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE ADVENTURE OF WISTERIA LODGE

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24

  MY IDEA OF FUN is not discovering that the rope around the neck of a murder victim is mine. I sipped coffee at my kitchen table, pondering it.

  Finally, I picked up that thought and set it on a shelf, making room on my mind’s tabletop to spread out Professor William Palatine. Who was he? And what made me think I was supposed to already know?

  By all accounts, Palatine was brilliant, accomplished, and occasionally charming. He was popular among the students—especially intellectuals and females. Female intellectuals? They were crazy about him. Even so, I wouldn’t want to trade places with William Palatine. Not sure how much Teacher of the Year and a Princeton diploma means when you’re alive, but I’m pretty sure I know how much they matter when you’re dead.

  In the absence of determinative evidence, you have to know the victim to figure out the most likely person to have killed him. That’s why I had to get to know Professor Palatine. Especially since the last phone call he ever made was to me.

  Had I been home that night, maybe Palatine and I would have chatted. Or maybe he would’ve said, “There’s a man with a gun; he’s 5’ 10”, carrying a box and wearing a Pizza Hut jacket. The name on the jacket is Reggie.”

  Jake tells me death’s not a hole, but a doorway—that dead people are now alive on the other side. He said that about Sharon. I hope he’s right. For her sake anyway. I don’t know what I hope about me. Or the professor.

  I’m a trained observer of the real world. I know nothing about what lies beyond the senses. This much I do
know … when a man is lying on his living room floor with a few gallons of his blood soaked into a blue carpet that’s now dark purple, he is not mostly dead, but as Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, “he’s all dead.”

  Solving a murder is a final gift to the deceased. Whether they know about this gift, or whether they can ever know anything again, is a matter of debate, a debate Jake and Clarence love to engage me in.

  If Palatine has a soul and there’s a God, then it’s God’s job to judge his soul. Even though I have the distinct feeling I wouldn’t have liked him, when it comes to the crimes against his body, if anyone’s going to get him justice, it’s me.

  That’s what I do. I get justice for the dead.

  After moving from the kitchen to my office, down the hall past the bathroom, I opened up files of photocopied letters Palatine had sent. Many of them appeared to be love letters, saying how his heart was pierced and he felt a fire within and how he hated to be separated from her, blah, blah, blah. Yet not one of the letters addressed a woman by name. If I’d written love letters to Sharon, I’d have put her name on them.

  And why make the photocopies? What was his future use for them?

  The professor’s signature was there on other documents in his files. It was fancy and borderline illegible. Only the Wand the P were clear—except the Dr., which was prominent and unmistakable.

  I spent the next hour reading various things written by him in school papers, as well as two introductions online from when he was a visiting lecturer in the ivied halls of academia.

  I read again the printout of his supposed “I deserve to die” confession on the computer screen.

  I went to the shelf and got down my Webster’s dictionary. I looked up the word judgement.

  I stayed home all afternoon, making phone calls, trying to reconstruct Palatine.

  Manny and I are both on T-Mobile, for the free minutes, since we can exchange a dozen calls a day. In the last three hours this was call six.

  “You know his stupid habit of not putting a name with the number?” Manny asked. “I’ve been calling all the numbers on papers in his desk. A real estate agent, plumber, and computer tech. A student named Brandy who said she had no idea why he had her phone number. He’d never called. But there was another number. A private detective.”