It was important for Angie to get out of there on her own terms and on her own timetable. She was sure Frank would be checking in on her at some point that day, but she had things she had to do. He was a good man, and yes he’d saved her life, but neither one of them had any expectations of anything greater than what they’d already shared and found wanting. She didn’t allow herself to think that what she did might matter to him. When his house was sold he’d be a good man gone no matter what she did, explanation or no explanation. At least this way she’d have something to show for what happened.
So here she was, standing outside the hospital and waiting for a cab, a bonus day in a life that had come within a razor’s edge of being cut short. The cab pulled up in front and she put thoughts like that away. She’d booked it for the day, preferring its anonymity to her little red bread crumb of a Miata. She was holding herself in a brittle travesty of control and she didn’t trust herself to drive. She didn’t even want to think about going back into that house, but there were a lot of things she had to do and making herself presentable was only the first of them.
There was a negotiation to think about.
64
All Frank had wanted to do was sleep in. His phone had rung at nine am, a somewhat snarky call from Kelly Randall feigning surprise that he was where he was supposed to be and telling him that eleven o’clock would be ‘a really good time’ for him to come in and give a formal statement about the shooting. That should have happened yesterday, and Frank knew she and Comeau had given him a break, a lapse in procedure that could get them in a hassle with Williams. Frank decided to just get it over with. They still had to work for the man.
That didn’t mean he was just going to roll over and let things happen. He expected that Williams would be all over him. There was no way he was going in there alone, so as soon as he ended the call with Randall he called Laura Henderson.
At the station Brent had been conspicuous by his absence. Frank suspected that Randall or Comeau or both of them had orchestrated the timing of the statement just for that reason. They’d looked a little offended when Henderson had come in with him, but Frank wasn’t going to make any apologies for it. Given the history with Brent, and Cunningham’s reaction in the hospital parking lot, it was better to have Henderson there anyway. Randall would either understand that or she wouldn’t, but Frank figured she was smart enough to understand the precaution.
In the end it was an anticlimax, but Frank was still reassured that Henderson had been there. She’d taken her time with him and more importantly made sure that he took his time in reconstructing the sequence of events. Frank had no doubt at all that at some point Brent and Cunningham and probably Whittaker would be scrutinizing the entire statement, looking for any holes or vulnerabilities. In his heart of hearts he knew there was one, and it was glaring.
It had been a guess. He’d guessed that something was wrong with the way the big man in the cop uniform was confronting Cunningham. He’d guessed that unless he did something right now the man – whoever it was, put the cop uniform and the man’s physical size and the distance together and unlikely as it seemed it could have been Brent Williams. Whoever the hell it was he’d been about to kill Ed Cunningham. Frank had seen the gun and guessed his intent and in that instant everything was in motion with no way back.
He’d gone on instinct and intuition, and he’d gone early. If he hadn’t he or Cunningham or both of them would be dead, but no one who hadn’t been in that kind of situation would ever understand. Laura had settled him down, made sure none of those recriminations and doubts found their way into his statement. She’d upended her own schedule and met him at the door to the police station before he went inside. He owed her for that and they both knew it. The quid pro quo was what they were doing now. Laura wanted the charges against Stromberg dropped, and for some reason she wanted Frank with her when she confronted Whittaker. To confront Whittaker she first had to find him, and her phone call to his office hadn’t been helpful at all.
“Now what?” Frank asked.
“Now we go to his house.” Laura snapped, stuffing her phone back in her purse and starting the car. “I know you think Stromberg’s a piece of shit but he’s not going to spend one more night in jail than he has to.”
• • •
Whittaker’s house was only a few blocks away, and when they pulled up in front the blue Audi was sitting in the driveway. Henry never walked anywhere, so he had to be home. Given that Laura was hell-bent on getting Stromberg released Frank knew that if the Audi had been gone their next stop would have been Henry’s place at the lake.
The house was surprisingly prosaic for a man who affected bespoke tailoring and German sedans. It was an ordinary white bungalow with green shutters and a large picture window looking out onto a small, unkempt lawn. Frank glanced up, saw that some of the shingles on the roof were curling up or missing, had the wry thought that he was in no position to criticize Henry’s disregard of home maintenance. As unlike as Frank and Whittaker were, there were uncomfortable similarities as well. He shrugged off the thought and got out of the car, followed Laura to the front door. There was something in the way she approached the house that intimated familiarity and Frank watched absently as she impatiently pushed the doorbell. She waited for a few moments and pushed it again, then listened for signs of life inside.
“What is it with you people?” she asked. “Don’t any of you have a doorbell that works?”
“I don’t have a doorbell,” he told her.
She glared at him and tried the doorknob.
“Laura—”
“Relax. I bet Annika called to give him a heads-up. He’s probably hiding under his desk.”
The knob turned easily and she pushed the door open and went inside the tiny entryway. It really wasn’t an entryway at all, just a space opening to a small living room. The room itself was empty. From the way Laura was acting she’d been there before, and she just headed for a hallway at the far side of the living room.
“Henry!” she called, “Are you in here?”
She was about to turn into the hallway when Henry Whittaker stumbled around the corner and nearly collided with her. One tail of a stained white dress shirt was draped outside the waistband of his dark dress pants. Frank’s first thought was that they’d walked in on one of Whittaker’s little affairs. Then he saw the half-empty vodka bottle held loosely in his left hand. Laura turned to Frank, her eyes wide, but he just shook his head no.
“You okay, Henry?” he asked.
Even Whittaker thought the question was absurd.
“I’m just jim dandy, Frank. You?”
“Not too bad,” Frank allowed. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”
“Me too.”
Henry swayed a little, looked around the kitchen like it was a party and he was expecting to see other people there. All Frank could see were sharp, hard edges. Laura caught his warning glance and stayed away as he casually walked up to Whittaker and put his arm around his shoulder. Whittaker looked bemused by the gesture but didn’t resist.
“Laura and I have had a long morning,” Frank told him. “Okay if we sit down for a minute?”
Frank was already steering him back into the living room, land of soft cushions and a thick rug.
“Sure, Frank,” Henry murmured.
Frank was trying to remember if Henry kept guns in the house. He’d never seemed the type but Frank got a light grip on his arm anyway, just enough to keep him upright and moving. It took a long time for them to lock-step shuffle to the big couch against the wall facing the window. Frank got them turned around and they collapsed backwards onto the couch. Frank took his hand away and slid a little sideways to get some space between them. Henry mumbled something that sounded like ‘what do you want?’
“Nothing, Henry. Just thought we’d drop by for a drink,” Frank took his time reaching for the bottle. “That okay?”
Henry nodded slowly and let him take it from him. Fr
ank took a quick shot, straight from the bottle, and handed it back to him. Laura was looking at him like he was crazy. Henry nestled the bottle in his lap and leaned close into Frank.
“I can’t piss, Frank,” he hissed, “I keep trying but I can’t. It hurts.”
Dehydrated, Frank thought.
“Shit,” he said, made a show of fumbling for his phone. “I forgot. I’ve got to make a call.”
He glanced in Laura’s direction but she was already moving, on her way to sit beside Whittaker and keep him propped up and distracted. Frank waited for her, then got up and went down the hallway to Whittaker’s den. He made the first call and then remembered to call the hospital to check on Angie. She’d already been released, something he hadn’t expected to happen that soon. He swore to himself, vaguely guilty that he hadn’t checked earlier. He reminded himself that Angie had been shaken up but okay, the hospital overnight a precaution. In the meantime there were other things he had to do. He put the phone away and looked around him.
Whittaker’s home office was a mess, a perfect fit for the man himself. Two walls were taken up with bookshelves, the only furniture an old-fashioned wooden desk, a fake leather swivel chair, and a credenza behind the chair that didn’t match up with anything. An antiquated computer monitor shared desk space with a keyboard. Various legal documents and papers covered virtually everything else.
The vodka bottles weren’t a surprise but the sleeping pills were. Whittaker had tried to make a hard way out as easy as possible. Frank got the reasoning, just an attempt to put himself peacefully to sleep and never wake up. If he’d been left alone long enough it might have worked.
The pills were garden variety, non-prescription sleeping pills, still lethal if you took enough of them and washed them down with a lot of eighty proof alcohol. For some reason Whittaker had cherry-picked through four or five different brands, lined them up in a row on his desk. One was unopened. Frank rattled the others in turn. From the sound there were varying numbers of pills remaining in all of them. Frank riffled half-heartedly through the detritus on the desk, didn’t see anything resembling a good-bye cruel world note, not that he’d really expected one. He’d never liked Whittaker much but at least once he and Whittaker had been in the same place. Whittaker had a reputation as an All-World drinker, and given that level of expertise Frank unkindly wondered just how serious he’d been about taking himself off the planet. There were other ways that were more decisive. Fuck it, Frank thought. Everyone’s a critic. Regardless of technique there had been a hard, lonely decision somewhere along the line.
Frank went back into the living room and got a glimpse of just how ruthless Laura Henderson could be. She already had legal papers laid out on the coffee table and she was handing Whittaker a cheap ballpoint pen.
“This isn’t rocket science, Henry,” she told him. “Drop the charges.”
She wasn’t going to let something like an attempted suicide get in the way of what she had to do. Whittaker gave her a bleary look, then finally took the pen and signed his name in a slow-motion, trembling scrawl.
“And here,” she told him, flipping to the next page and pointing to another line at the bottom. For a moment Frank thought Henry was going to balk, but he just meekly leaned forward and signed his name all over again. The term diminished capacity came to mind, but Frank decided that was Laura Henderson’s problem, not his. He heard a car pull up outside and a moment later the front door opened and Jeff Wagner’s tall, cadaverous figure stood framed in the doorway. The only things missing were a black-cowled robe and a scythe.
“This better be good,” he growled.
Wagner hadn’t been happy about Frank’s phone call, but he’d come. Laura looked up from the couch, surprised.
“Is this what they call the Old Boys Club?” she asked.
“Shit, Laura,” Wagner snorted. He brushed past Frank and waited for Laura to make room for him on the couch. “We don’t even like the sonofabitch.”
Laura started to say something but bit it back. She shot an impatient glance at Frank, then took out her phone and went into the kitchen.
“Frank, if you want to do something useful,” Wagner said, “get me those pill bottles. I want to see what Henry’s gotten himself into.”
Frank did what he was told. When he came back Whittaker was lying down and Wagner was perched awkwardly on the couch’s edge, his medical bag on the floor beside him. Frank put the assortment of bottles into Wagner’s outstretched hand.
“What’s the matter, Henry? Couldn’t make up your mind?” Wagner squinted at the labels in turn, rattled the bottles. One of them hadn’t been opened at all but the others had been. One sounded nearly empty but Frank couldn’t tell from the sound how many were left in the others.
“What do you think?” Frank asked.
“I think,” Wagner told him, “that if he’d really wanted to kill himself he’d be dead by now.”
Frank wasn’t so sure. Middle aged drunks who lived alone were a pretty high-risk category. If he and Laura Henderson hadn’t barged in on him Whittaker would have had hours or even days to go to sleep the way he planned. What bothered Frank was that he understood it. Wagner looked down at Whittaker and frowned.
“You get these all in one place?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t anybody say anything?”
“Yeah, the girl at the checkout counter.” Whittaker managed a slurred, feeble laugh. “She told me to have a nice day.”
“You going to tell us why you did this, Henry?” Frank asked.
Whittaker looked up at Frank, nodded slowly and then finally spoke.
“Karen’s dead. She’s dead because of me.”
For one surreal instant Frank thought Whittaker was confessing to killing her. Henry Whittaker was a lot of things but he wasn’t a killer. Or maybe he was. Twenty plus years as a cop had taught Frank that almost anyone could do almost anything.
“What are you telling me, Henry?”
“I already told you. It’s my fault she’s dead. People are dead because I was a fucking drunk and I didn’t do my job. I didn’t save that kid and I should have.”
“What kid?” Frank glanced at Wagner, got a perplexed shrug. “Henry, what the hell are you talking about?”
So Henry Whittaker told them. Some of it was incoherent, sometimes he doubled back on himself and explained something he’d already told them, and once all the junk in his system got to him and he nearly passed out again. When he came out of it and finally finished talking his face was slick with tears and sweat.
Laura walked out of the kitchen into a stunned silence. She put her phone away, oblivious to what had just happened.
“Bastards. They’re trying to stall me.” she snarled. “Brent Williams is suddenly out of town and can’t be reached, big surprise, and no one else will take the responsibility for releasing Stromberg.” She held up the documents Whittaker had signed. “I’ve got what I need, Frank. I’m going to camp out in Brent’s office first thing in the morning. He has to show up sometime.”
“I’ll meet you there.” Frank told her.
“Are you kidding? I heard about your little showdown with Brent.” She put the papers in her briefcase and headed for the door. “I want to get Stromberg out of jail, not start World War III.”
“Little late for that,” Wagner told her. “It’s already started.”
65
“You all right, Frank?”
The last thing Frank needed was Billy Dancer standing on his doorstep. Frank had only pulled into his driveway a couple of minutes ago. Billy must have been sitting at his place watching the house.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Billy.” Frank stood his ground. He wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation. After Laura had left Whittaker’s place it had taken a half hour of wrangling with Jeff Wagner before Jeff agreed to burn a couple of favors and find a place to stash Henry Whittaker. Wagner didn’t want to babysit Whittaker and neither did Frank, but somebody had to. They’d b
oth come up with Jimmy Slade’s name at the same time.
“I heard what happened.” Billy said. “They said you killed somebody.”
“He was trying to kill me, Billy.” Frank tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. From the abashed look on Billy’s face he hadn’t succeeded. “Look, I’ve got to get some rest.”
“Oh.” Billy said awkwardly. He looked down, actually shuffled his feet. “Sorry I bothered you, Frank.” There was no recrimination in his voice at all, just the recognition that Frank Stallings had better things to do than talk to him. Billy didn’t even raise his head, just turned around and lumbered down the rickety steps and back across the driveway.
Billy’s long, shambling strides had already carried him into the field that separated their houses. Frank thought of calling him back but changed his mind. He’d just turned away one of the—maybe—three people in town who would have given a shit if he’d had his head blown off. That’s three too many, he thought suddenly, wasn’t sure where that had come from.
Frank was about to close the door when the little red Miata pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of him, dust billowing around the cockpit. Frank didn’t feel like visitors, not even Angie. He closed the door behind him and came down the steps to meet her in the driveway, but she was already out of the car.
“You’re supposed to be in the hospital,” he told her.
“No, I’m supposed to be doing my job.” she reached back into the Miata and handed him a sheaf of papers. You’ve got an offer on your house! Way over asking!”
Justice Page 22
