Change-up

by John Feinstein

  Stevie waited while the clerk walked them through what forms they needed to fill out and answered their various questions. He decided this would be a good time to let Kelleher know he’d made it to Lynchburg and to the courthouse. He had punched two numbers when he heard the clerk’s voice. “Excuse me, sir?” she said, and pointed to a sign next to the desk that said No Cell Phone Usage in the Courthouse.

  “Sorry,” Stevie said, snapping the phone shut, hoping his phone faux pas wouldn’t turn the clerk against him.

  It took about fifteen minutes for the people in front of him to clear up their various problems, but it felt like an hour to Stevie. When he got to the desk, the clerk was giving him a funny look. Stevie figured she spent most of her time dealing with people who had issues with their cars, and Stevie clearly didn’t look like he had a driver’s license. He wished Susan Carol were with him, because she was so good at finessing situations like this.

  “What can I help you with?” the clerk asked.

  “Oh yes, thanks,” Stevie said, suddenly tongue-tied after rehearsing what he was going to say about a hundred times. “I’m looking for a police report on an accident….”

  “Were you involved in an accident?” the clerk asked.

  “No, no, not me,” Stevie said. “It’s an accident that happened in August of 1997, but I don’t know the exact date.”

  “Can you give me any more information?” the clerk said.

  Remembering what Kelleher had told him to ask for, Stevie nodded. “Yes. It was a fatal accident, two cars. The victim’s name was Analise Doyle.”

  The clerk nodded. “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard to find. Fortunately, we don’t have that many fatals around here. Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll have to go back into the archives, so it will take me a few minutes,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Stevie said.

  Five minutes went by, then ten, then fifteen. A man came in and looked at Stevie inquisitively. “Where’s Mabel?” he asked. Stevie guessed Mabel was the clerk. “Um, she’s in the back looking for something,” Stevie said, wondering if Mabel’s search was going to be interrupted.

  “Okay, I’ll come back in a while,” he said, and left, much to Stevie’s relief.

  Mabel finally returned a few minutes later, carrying a file. “Sorry,” she said as Stevie stood up and walked back to the counter. “Took me a while for a couple reasons. To begin with, this wasn’t a two-car accident, it was a one-car. Second, someone had the file out already this morning, and it wasn’t put back in the right place.”

  Stevie stared at her for a second, trying to digest the information she had just casually passed on to him. One-car accident? That made no sense. And who’d had the file out already today? Was another reporter onto the story?

  “Do you still want the file?” Mabel said after Stevie said nothing in response to her explanation.

  “Oh yes, sorry,” Stevie said.

  She pushed it across the desk in his direction. “You need to sign the sheet on the inside of the folder,” she said. “You can look at it in the room right next door for as long as you want. When you’re done, just bring it back to me.”

  “Can I make a copy of it?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s a legal document. Unless you have a court order or can show that you represent someone involved in the case, you can’t copy it.”

  “Even though it was twelve years ago?”

  “Even if it was a hundred years ago. There’s not much to it, as you’ll see. You can take notes on any information you need.”

  She opened the file to the sheet she had been talking about. “Sign your name there, and I’ll keep the sheet until you return the file. And I’ll need to see some ID. I don’t imagine you have a driver’s license, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Stevie said. “But I’ve got my high school ID and a passport.”

  “Either one will do.”

  He reached into his wallet and handed her his ID. She took it and printed his name, the date, and the time on the sheet right below the only other name on the sheet—the person who had been there just this morning! She turned the sheet over to Stevie. “Just sign next to where I printed your name and it’s all yours,” she said.

  Stevie nodded. He wrote his name slowly so he could study the name above it. The signature was scrawled and unreadable, but the printed name was clear: Donald Walsh.

  “Ma’am, do you remember what Mr. Walsh looked like?” Stevie asked.

  She shook her head. “There’s two of us that work in here. Janice must have pulled this for him. That’s why I didn’t know where it was.”

  “Is Janice around?”

  She shook her head again. “She has the early lunch today.” She looked at the wall clock. “She should be back in a while. You can ask her then.”

  “Thanks.”

  If Mabel had any interest in why two men would show up on the same morning looking for the file on a twelve-year-old fatal-accident case, she didn’t show it. She pointed Stevie to the door that led to the adjoining room.

  “If you want coffee or a soda, there’s machines down the hall,” she said.

  He thanked her again. He felt the urge to drink some coffee, but he was already amped up enough. Clearly, there was something here—and someone else was a couple of hours ahead of him on the trail. He had work to do. And he needed to do it fast.

  13: BACK IN TROUBLE … AGAIN

  MABEL HAD BEEN RIGHT about the fact that there wasn’t much to the file. Stevie read quickly through the basics: The accident had taken place on August 13, 1997, shortly after midnight. The first officer to respond to the scene had been James T Hatley and, Stevie gathered, he had written the report. He wrote down Hatley’s name and badge number.

  According to the report, the car had been traveling east on state road 260 when the driver “apparently lost control,” Hatley had written, “and swerved into a tree on the right side of the road.” From what Stevie could glean, the car had slammed pretty much head-on into the tree.

  Hatley’s description of what the car looked like when he arrived was pretty gruesome. Stevie skipped quickly over those details until he got to the part where Hatley reported on the condition of the two people in the accident: “Both parties were out of the car when I arrived. A. Doyle was clearly DOS”—Stevie knew from TV that meant dead on the scene—“and a call was put out for EMS. N. Doyle had been thrown out of car and was conscious and reported pain in his rib cage and shoulder and had cuts and bruises on his face and arms. He was interviewed briefly at the scene before EMS arrived. He reported swerving to avoid an animal and losing control of the car. He said he did not know how fast the car was going when he skidded. The posted speed limit is 35 mph.”

  Hatley went on to describe the arrival of the EMS unit and their confirmation that Analise Doyle was dead. Based on what Hatley had written about the damage to the car, it was amazing that Norbert had survived at all, let alone with such minor injuries. Later in the report Hatley detailed his conversation at the hospital with Norbert Doyle:

  Mr. Doyle had been sedated after his wife’s death at the scene. He suffered two broken ribs and a separated collarbone, but his other injuries were minor. He repeated his story from the scene about avoiding an animal and skidding. He asked after his children, twins, two years old, who were home with a babysitter.

  An officer was dispatched to the home, and a Ms. Erin James reported that both children were asleep in bed and said her parents had come to the house to help her and that they would look after the children until N. Doyle’s release from the hospital.

  Hatley didn’t say how Erin James’s parents knew that she needed help, but Stevie guessed news of a fatal car accident traveled pretty fast in Lynchburg. Later in the report Hatley noted that Norbert Doyle was a “summer resident” who pitched for the Lynchburg Hillcats. There were, according to Hatley, no witnesses to the accident.

  Stevie read and reread the report three times. There was, as Mabel had alr
eady explained to him, no second car, and also no mention of a drunk driver. He looked at his notes. There really wasn’t much to go on. Maybe, he thought, he could find James Hatley and ask him if he had any other memories of that night. There were, it seemed to Stevie, holes in the report, most notably Hatley’s acceptance of Doyle’s story that he had swerved to miss an animal. Stevie had watched enough TV to know that in a one-car accident the police would at least consider the possibility that the driver had been drinking. And yet there was no mention of a sobriety test of any kind.

  He looked at the clock. It was already past noon. He needed to call Kelleher. He closed the file and walked back into the Automobile Records office. Mabel was nowhere in sight. Another woman was there talking to the man who had walked in while Stevie was waiting for Mabel to hunt down the file.

  When he saw Stevie, he waved a hand at the woman and said, “Okay, Janice, see you later.” He nodded at Stevie and walked out the door.

  “All done?” Janice asked.

  “Yes,” Stevie said, handing her back the file. “I understand someone was in before me today looking at this.”

  Janice nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  If she was any more curious than Mabel, she didn’t show it.

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  Janice shrugged. “Dressed in a suit, I remember that. Probably in his thirties. He seemed to think he needed to explain to me why he wanted the file—which he didn’t. Public document, you know. Ask for it, you get it.”

  “What did he say about why he wanted it?”

  “He said he had a relative who was involved. We get that a fair bit.”

  Stevie thanked her and turned to leave. Then he remembered something. “Any chance you know if I might find officer James Hatley over at the police station?”

  “No,” Janice answered, which stymied Stevie a little. Then she added, “He retired about two years ago.”

  Stevie’s heart sank. Finding Hatley would probably be impossible if he was retired. He probably didn’t even live in Lynchburg anymore.

  “If you really need to find him, he’s usually home around now. He tends to fish in the mornings, then go home around lunchtime.”

  All wasn’t lost. “Do you know where he lives?” Stevie asked.

  “I could tell you how to get there, but I don’t know his address,” she said. “Wait a sec.”

  She reached below the counter and pulled out a phone book. She opened it, ran her finger down a page, and said, “Here it is: fourteen Brill’s Lane. It’s no more than ten minutes from here if you’re driving.”

  “Could a cabdriver find it?”

  “Oh sure, I imagine so,” she said.

  Stevie wrote the address in his notebook, thanked her again, and walked back down the steps and out the door of the courthouse. It was a crisp fall day, and Stevie couldn’t help but think it would be a comfortable night for baseball in Washington. He pulled out his phone and dialed Kelleher.

  “Where have you been?” Kelleher asked when he picked up.

  “Sorry, I had to turn the phone off in the courthouse.”

  “Oh yeah, that figures. So, what have you got?”

  Stevie filled him in on what he had learned. Kelleher didn’t interrupt him except to say “Whaa?” when Stevie told him it had been a one-car accident and “Hmm” when he brought up Donald Walsh’s beating him to the file by a couple of hours. When he had finished, Kelleher said, “Well, you’ve got a lot to do, and so do I.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, first, like you said, you need to go talk to Officer Hatley. There are a lot of unanswered questions in that report.”

  “You mean like no sobriety test?”

  “Exactly,” Kelleher said. “Guy runs his car into a tree—even if he did swerve for an animal—how fast was he going? No mention of whether he was drinking, no mention of checking the skid marks to determine his speed.”

  “I wonder,” Stevie said, “if the drunk driver who killed Norbert’s wife might have been Norbert himself.”

  “Might explain why he talks about feeling guilty,” Kelleher said. “What you need to find out from Hatley is why Doyle wasn’t given a sobriety test, and why he didn’t try to find out how fast he was going. You slam your car into a tree hard enough to kill someone on the spot, you were going fast.”

  Stevie felt his stomach getting queasy—perhaps because he hadn’t eaten for almost seven hours; perhaps because the story was taking a scary turn.

  “I don’t think this cop is going to be too happy to hear questions like that,” Stevie said.

  “You’re right,” Kelleher said. “But if he’s retired, he may be more willing to talk. You go find him while I see if anyone in baseball has heard the name Donald Walsh.”

  “You think the guy is in baseball?”

  “No idea, but it’s a logical place to start. The name doesn’t ring a bell as anyone I know in journalism, but I’ll check around on that too.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you back after I find Hatley.”

  “Good. Be careful with him. Cops sometimes have mean tempers, especially if you’re questioning the quality of their police work.”

  “Great,” Stevie said. “I wish Susan Carol was here to charm him.”

  “So do I,” Kelleher said. “But you’ll be fine. Act fourteen and dumb.”

  “I am fourteen and dumb,” Stevie said.

  “Nah, just fourteen and in new territory. You can do it.”

  Stevie hung up and pulled Miles Hoy’s card out of his pocket and was about to dial his number when he realized his head was pounding and his stomach really was growling. He looked down the block and saw a McDonald’s. He put the phone back in his pocket. He knew he had to see officer James T. Hatley. But he didn’t have to do it on an empty stomach.

  Miles Hoy was delighted to hear Stevie’s voice. When Stevie asked him if he knew where 14 Brill’s Lane was, Hoy laughed. “Sure I do. Jim Hatley’s place? I’ll be right over to get you.”

  It was shortly after one o’clock and Stevie was still finishing his vanilla milk shake when Hoy pulled up. He knew Hoy was going to ask why he wanted to see Hatley, so he was prepared when he asked the question: “The ladies at the courthouse thought he might have known my grandfather.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy Hoy, which was a relief to Stevie. Ten minutes after Hoy had picked Stevie up, he turned the cab onto a dirt road with a battered sign that said Brill’s Lane.

  “Easy to find,” Hoy said. “It’s the only house on the road. There it is up there.”

  He pointed to his right at what looked like an old farmhouse.

  “What’s Officer Hatley like?” Stevie said, suddenly realizing he should have asked Hoy if he knew him before they were almost on top of his house.

  “First, don’t call him Officer,” Hoy said. “He retired a sergeant. Beyond that, he’s like any cop—or ex-cop. He likes to hunt and fish, and he’s a no-nonsense guy. Not exactly a barrel of laughs.”

  “Married?” Stevie asked.

  “Was,” Hoy said. “His wife apparently left him. I think he might have had some kind of drinking problem years ago. That was before I got to town. They had kids, but they’re grown. He lives alone.”

  They pulled into a dusty driveway with a pickup truck sitting in front of the garage.

  “You’re in luck,” Hoy said. “He’s home. You want me to wait?”

  Part of Stevie did want him to wait, but he figured he was going to need some time with Sergeant Hatley.

  “Can you come back in about half an hour?” he asked.

  “Sure, kid.” He waved off the twenty-dollar bill Stevie had taken out. “I’ll just run you a tab, it’ll be easier that way.”

  Stevie got out of the cab and watched with some regret as Miles Hoy backed down the driveway and headed off. But he squared his shoulders and walked up to the front door. There was a screen door, and as he approached, he could see someone standing in the doorway. He could al
so hear barking—loud barking.

  “Mac, be quiet,” Stevie heard the man say.

  He didn’t open the door when Stevie walked up.

  “Can I help you?” he asked in a tone Stevie did not think sounded very friendly.

  Just looking at retired sergeant James T. Hatley was intimidating. He was huge, at least six foot three, Stevie thought. His head was shaved and he had a mustache and a goatee. He was probably in his midfifties, and he wasn’t smiling. The barking dog stood next to him. Stevie was a cat person, so he didn’t know breeds, but this one was big and looked mean.

  “Sergeant Hatley, I’m sorry to bother you—” Stevie began.

  “Then why are you?” Hatley interrupted.

  “I just need maybe five minutes of your time to ask a couple questions—”

  “About what?” Hatley said.

  “About Norbert Doyle and—”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you about Norbert Doyle or about the accident,” Hatley said. “It’s all in the report. There’s nothing more to say.”

  How did he know I wanted to ask about the accident? Stevie’s mind was screaming.

  “Yes, Sergeant, I did read the report—”

  “You’ve got fifteen seconds to get off my property,” Hatley said. “You should have told your cab to stay. Now you’re gonna have to walk.”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Stevie said. “Hang on for just a minute.”

  “Ten seconds,” Hatley said.

  “Just one question,” Stevie said, pleading. “Why didn’t you give Doyle a sobriety test?”

  “Time’s up,” Hatley said. “I’ll give you a five-second head start on Mac because you’re a kid. The guy said someone might show up, but he didn’t say there would be kids involved.”

  The guy? Stevie’s mind raced. Walsh! It had to be Walsh.

  “Please,” Stevie said, almost pleading. “Let me explain why this is important.”

  Hatley pushed the screen door toward Stevie and said, “Okay, Mac—go!”

  Stevie didn’t wait any longer. He turned and ran as fast as he could, keenly aware of the big dog right behind him. His backpack slapped against his back, and he knew the dog was going to run him down any second. He tried to lengthen his stride and felt himself trip. He went sprawling in the dirt and covered his head instinctively, waiting for the dog to attack.