“You know him?”
“Everybody up here at least knows of him, and lots of people Below the Bridge do too.”
“Most of what you’ve heard is probably bullshit,” he told the lawyer.
“I take what most people say cum grano salis,” she said. “That’s Latin for ‘with a grain of salt.’”
“Me too,” he said. “That’s English for ‘also.’”
Maki smiled. “You’re not the macho beast some people make you out to be.”
He shrugged
“What’s Allerdyce’s part in this?” she asked.
“Consultant.”
“Wow,” she said. “That defies too much to even generalize.”
“You just did,” he said.
Her left eyebrow shot up. “Not macho. Smart and quick too, a cop who’s almost human.”
“Like some lawyers—not many.”
Sally Palovar said, “Hi,” when Maki showed him into the cabin. The women offered coffee, which he accepted, not wanting to hurry anything. The presence of an attorney during an interview almost always complicated questioning of any kind.
“I’m not recording anything,” he told Maki. “Today is entirely preliminary and off the record. I’m just trying to wrap my arms around this case.”
“Acceptable for the moment,” Maki said.
He decided to dive deep and fast, get everything out on the table and see their reaction. He started with the stolen blind and pulled no punches. “You took the pop-up and placed it on your property so it could be seen from the road but not from the house.”
Palovar looked at Maki. The attorney took her hand. Palovar said, “Placement was insurance to my way of thinking.”
“You guessed the theft would be reported, and you made sure the trail could be easily followed from Pattinson’s to your yard so Pattinson and his people would follow it, find the stolen blind, and call the sheriff, or us.”
Palovar said, “Yes, I did.”
“What if Pattinson had instead confronted your husband directly?”
“He didn’t,” Maki said. “Stay with reality.”
“You knew the blind would get the cops to the door, where they’d smell the dope, and that they’d call us in.”
“I didn’t know the exact protocol or cascade, but that’s what I hoped for.”
“You know your husband will try to implicate you.”
“I don’t care. This is all on him, not me. When he was still working, it was somehow manageable. He worked variable shifts and wasn’t in my space too often. I could cope and deal. Then he got the medical, was there all the time, and everything got worse—the dope, the hunting , the . . .” She stopped herself. “What he does is not hunting. It’s killing. He’s a pig who can’t stop eating.”
“Are you telling me your relationship—your marriage—was off the rails for a long time? Why didn’t you leave?”
“Catholic, for better or worse, until death do us part. Honestly I thought about killing him too many times to count, but the Church has rules against that too.”
“How many people bought licenses for him?”
“Me, our three kids, his mother, some old pals from the prison. I don’t know exactly how many, and he lies so much I don’t know what’s real and what’s bullshit.”
“Nobody objected to giving their tags to him?”
“I think some of us felt sorry for him, thought it would be good for him to have something to do, even if it was on the shady side.”
“There’s a wheelchair at the house. Does he use it?”
“It’s only a prop for his play. He gets around with a limp, but he does get around. Obviously. Sometimes he uses canes, but again mostly for show.”
“You’re telling us he’s mobile.”
“Have you searched the grounds?”
“We have found some interesting things.”
“Then you know the answer to your question. All those pits? He calls them deer digs. Our property? He calls that Ambush Alley. He’s been off the deep end on killing wildlife for a long, long time, ever since he shot a wolf and went on a three-day jerk-off fest with his sex vids.”
“You know about that?”
“Better those vids than me,” Palovar said. “I’d been down that road and didn’t care for it one bit.”
Service watched the women’s hands, saw nothing other than an attorney trying to steady a client’s jangled nerves. Even if there was something personal, why would he care, except that it might point at some motives for making this thing public now. Not your job to sort that out. Stay focused. “Can you tell me when your husband’s spree started?”
“Please don’t call him my husband. It began soon as we bought the house in ninety-eight.”
“Was he in kill mode before his medical retirement?”
“To some extent, it’s been as long as we’ve been married, but back then he didn’t push it in my face all the time.”
“He abuse you?”
She tightened her lips. “The thing is that prison guards always seem to know how to get what they want without leaving visible evidence. My husband is an artist when it comes to that. Maybe it’s occupational?”
“It’s not,” Service said.
“I hate all this,” Palovar said. “I feel filthy, and if he makes bail . . .”
Maki said, “We’ll have a protective order in place. And with his dope troubles, he’ll have to keep playing the innocent cripple desperate for pain relief or get his ass kicked in court.” The lawyer paused and added, “The drugs are off the table for my client?”
“You know the prosecutor will make the final call on that. I don’t think she’s going to be in this drug thing as long as she cooperates, but this deal overall is going to be a big-ticket item. The wildlife poaching alone is going to push two hundred grand.”
Palovar’s eyes went wide and blinking wildly. “Two . . .” she couldn’t finish. “They’ll take the house!”
“They could,” Service said. “They’ll definitely put a lien on it to hedge the state’s bet.”
“But he’s going to do time in jail, right?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. A jury could be sympathetic to a wheelchair.”
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, this is a nightmare,” Sally Palovar said. “I work for a magistrate, a man of honor, and here I am up to my neck in . . . shit!”
He tried to refocus and calm her. “What I need is for you to help me understand how your husband operated, every incident and kill you can remember, every detail no matter how inconsequential it may seem.”
Maki said, “And in return for this, she gets what?”
“I will recommend no fish and game charges of any kind. Her licenses were bought under duress. The theft of the blind was a desperation move made to attract help.”
Maki said, “She’s filing for divorce. If Sally testifies, a jury may see her testimony as sour grapes and vengeance.”
“Understood,” Service said. “What I want is to have her husband cold on facts and data. Between our stuff and the drug felonies, the prosecutor will hammer him until he spits it all out, admits guilt, and throws himself on the mercy of the court, of which there will be none.”
“You don’t know Jesper Buckshow,” Palovar said.
“He doesn’t know me,” Service came back.
“You’re going to try to break him?” Maki asked.
“My goal is to win the war before the battle even starts.”
“Tavolacci’s a fool, but he’s not incompetent. He has gotten a whole lot of assholes off,” Maki said.
“Sandy and I have gone head to head many, many times over the years.”
“How many has he won?”
“None when I’m the principal officer.”
“That’s a little too mano a mano for my taste,” Maki said.
“The record is the record.”
Maki said, “You just nailed the legendary Croatian. Word’s everywhere. And sixty-eight citations in one cam
p in one night. You’re on a roll. Nobody nails this many big cases in such a short period. Not nobody, not no how. Pride goeth before the fall.”
“In or out?” he asked Sally Palovar. “I need a lot of details before I interview your husband.”
Palovar looked at her lawyer but pointed a finger at Service like it was a pistol. “In, but you can’t lose this one.”
He took out his tape recorder. Maki nodded. He said, “Start remembering.”
Which she did, well into the evening, for the record, on tape. At one point Maki fetched Allerdyce into the house and made soup for them while Sally Palovar talked and talked. And cried and cried, and lamented, and cursed her husband.
Service listened and thought, This is how a priest must feel. After awhile he found himself relying on the recorder. The oceans of detail were too much to write down. Transcripts would allow him to sort the information and data and organize it all into a logical, orderly case.
Sally talked, Maki and he listened, and Allerdyce seemed especially absorbed by her story. It was pushing ten when they drove out of the camp.
They traveled in silence. “Got an opinion on what you heard?” he asked his partner.
“Better prolly shoot some pipples den put t’ru court.”
Service couldn’t disagree. “Do you know where Tavolacci’s camp is located?”
“Wah, I know da place. It belong to da clown’s daddy, Berard.”
“Still alive?”
“P’etends ’e is, eh.”
Allerdyce despised Tavolacci, who had been his lawyer when he had accidentally shot Service during a scuffle as Service was trying to arrest him. He blamed the lawyer for not getting him a lighter sentence and less time in prison.
CHAPTER 44
Marquette
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 28
Snowbound Books was a magnet for reading addicts, the curious, the bored, wannabe intellectuals, social misfits, aspiring authors, and people just looking for a quiet place to meet in a space that was public, private, and homey, all rolled into one small store.
It took twenty-six telephone calls to find Hamnet Eyquem, who had been Jesper Buckshow’s supervisor at the time Buckshow was granted full medical disability and retirement by the state. Eyquem was less than enthusiastic about a meeting but eventually acquiesced to Service’s insistence and his understated professional-to-professional appeal for cooperation.
The man was in his mid-fifties, tall, broad shouldered, and looked more fit and alert than many corrections people still on the job.
“Service,” he greeted the man. “Eyquem?”
The man nodded, did not proffer a hand. He seemed uptight, even more in person than on the phone. Professional tight wrapping, an emotional shield. “I want to ask you about Jesper Buckshow.”
Service noticed they were in front of a line of books by Henry Kisor. The author’s main character was a U.P. lawman named Martinez, an Indian raised by whites and forever seeing the world from different and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Service admired the character, envied his ability to see sides so clearly. Not so different from talking to a corrections guy who spent his professional life warehousing the people cops and COs arrested and helped put there. Both jobs were under the umbrella of law enforcement, but there was little similarity other than perhaps a sense of right and wrong, and process of law. At least he hoped so.
“What about him?”
“You were his supervisor when he retired.”
“Only on a technicality. He was off the job eight months before the paperwork was final, and I was newly promoted and inherited him. There wasn’t much face time.”
“But there was some.”
“More than I would have liked.”
Squeezed tone in the voice, almost exploratory. Sometimes you had to wait out something like this and other times you had to George it. “Why do I get the feeling you’re skating around something?”
“Are you impugning my integrity?”
“We’ve got some heavy stuff going with your former employee, and I don’t have time to foxtrot on eggs. Buckshow is in deep trouble, and we need all the leverage we can get.”
“We live in an ever-litigious society. Blame that for my reticence. You bust your balls for thirty years, and then you have to watch your back. Lawsuits can come both from sleazy cons and worthless officers.”
The voice sounded like one who had been burned by such suits. “Buckshow fit into one of those pigeonholes?”
“Both, if I had to be candid.”
“He wore stripes.”
“Unearned, in my view. My chickenshit predecessors were afraid of him and promoted him, when they should have sent him out on his keester. Buckshow was one of those anal types who filed grievances against anyone about anything and everything. You never knew what the man would do next or how he would react, other than in his own self-interest, which is the alpha and the omega with that one.”
“I heard he had some sort of punch-up with an inmate.”
Eyquem sighed. “He had dustups with everyone, but mostly verbal. He had the power and used it as a weapon.”
“The name I heard was Tyrene.”
“You live in the jungle, bullshit and artificial power will take you only so far. If you insist on keeping to the Hardass Highway, you tend to get back what you put in.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Only God and those two men know. You’d have to ask them.”
“Talent’s still around?”
“Gang-banger, lifer, a reptile in human flesh. Thing is that the man that came here, whatever he once was, seems someone else now.”
“Found Jesus?”
“Muhammad, Buddha, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Easter Bunny, who knows? He arrived angry and snarling, me-against-the-whole-world; he stayed that way for a long, long time, and one day out came someone entirely different. Angry and warlike one day, mellow and at peace the next. I’ve seen this happen before, but never expected it from T-Rex, which is what others call him. I guess aging reduces testosterone, and one day the resident looks around and thinks, Hey, life here ain’t all that bad, it could be a lot worse. Buckshow saw this as a weakness in the man and as a chance to use what he seemed to think of as leverage to show other inmates his ruthlessness and power as the king of the cellblock.”
“You don’t know what went down between them?”
“Don’t want to know. I’m retired, and I no longer have to swim among the turds in the cesspool. I like my life; all that other business is behind me and locked in a box that I’m never going to open again. Not for anyone, not for any reason.”
Service gave the retired Corrections Department lieutenant the litany of Buckshow’s transgressions. Eyquem listened and shook his head.
Service asked, “You think his wheelchair’s a scam?”
“Based on all the other stuff you’ve caught him doing, I’d say it has to be. But I’m not a doctor. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me that he would game the system. Word on him was he was always a stickler for making others follow the rules, so much so that it made me wonder, you know, protesting too much and all that? Listen, if you really want to know what happened, you’d have to talk to T-Rex. He’s the only one who knows for sure.”
“You think this Talent will talk to me?”
“You can ask through channels, but after this, please leave me the hell alone. Buckshow is not worth another second of my time.”
“I take it you won’t be showing up in court as one of his character witnesses?”
This drew a slight smile. “I’d be first in line to give the man a lethal injection,” Eyquem said, “and God forgive me for that.”
“We don’t do that in Michigan.”
“Damn pity,” Eyquem said.
“He’s not killed any human beings,” Service reminded the retired corrections officer.
“You don’t have to stop a man’s heart and brain to kill him,” Eyquem shot back. “You can hound a m
an until all he wants is death, and when you reach that point, you’ve killed him.”
They finished their conversation while standing in front of a used fourvolume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Service was fascinated by the sheer size and touched the collection. A clerk whispered, “That’s a facsimile of the 1936 edition. An original of that edition is priceless. Took from 1857 to 1928 for the first edition to come out, and that was in ten volumes. By 1936 they reduced the type size and got it down to four volumes. Fifteen and a half thousand pages, 178 miles of type, fifty million words, and pushing two million illustrative quotations.” Talk about a commitment. The editors would have made first-rate corrections officers.
Service walked away thinking, must’ve been nice to work in a time when commitment could be gracefully stretched over decades. Cops had no such freedom or leisure. This case with Buckshow was pressing, and he was still thinking in the back of his mind about Cair and the bizarre night experience at the man’s house, two garage fires, and so damn many active major cases he was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate and sort them all out.
• • •
Late afternoon, and after a dozen more phone calls, Service found himself with a deputy warden at Northern Michigan Prison. The man had veins in his nose and tousled hair and listened politely until he got his spiel all out. His name was Hass Remington.
“Buckshow, eh? I’ll ask T-Rex myself. Me and him been knowing each other a long, long time.”
Two hours later, Grady Service was in a small beige-and-maroon room with a very large black man with dead eyes the color of brown chalk and movements so slow and deliberate he wondered if the man was on prescription meds.
“Appreciate this,” Service began.
“Ain’t no big thang,” the man said. “I got me the time.”
Service thought there was the slightest hint of a smile. “You remember Buckshow?”
“I ’member, yah.”
“There are legends here about you and him.”
T-Rex nodded solemnly. “Bullshit like money inside this place, sayin’. Get along in here, man got learn to be like tha’ blond bitch wit’ the long-ass hair tell stories till her tongue get sore.”
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