by Allen Eskens
“A good one?”
“Video footage. After Jeannie inherited the farm, Toke quit his job at Dub’s Repair. But then he bought himself a car, an old nineteen seventy GTO. On the evening that Jeannie died, he was at the shop working on that car. The shop has two surveillance cameras. We had exterior footage of him walking into Dub’s. And then they had an interior camera aimed at the office door, where they keep vehicle keys and cash. You can’t see Toke on that footage because he was working in a bay on the other side of the shop, but you can see shadows and movement cast off by the light where he’s working.”
I leaned back in my chair to study Jeb’s face. His words sounded sincere, or at least matter-of-fact, but I could see the doubt behind his eyes. “You think Toke killed Jeannie, don’t you?”
“I think Toke Talbert was a dog,” he said. “I think he looked at Jeannie and saw nothing but money, a big payday if he could keep the marriage together long enough. And…I think that if Toke did anything to Jeannie, we’ll never know.”
“And what about Angel?”
“What about her?”
“Why would she take those clonazepam? What happened that night?”
Jeb dropped his eyes to the table and twisted his wedding band around on his finger. “That’s my fault,” he said.
“How do you figure?”
“The day Toke died, Angel came by the office. I was there and we had a little chat. She wanted a copy of Jeannie’s suicide note. We had a copy of it in a file that we opened up after Jeannie’s death. I didn’t think it was a good idea to give it to her. You’re not a dad, are you, Joe?”
“I’m not,” I said, though I couldn’t help thinking of Jeremy.
“I got two girls. That’s what came to my mind when Angel wanted to have a copy of her mother’s note. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, Angel had the right to see what her mother left behind. I had no lawful reason to keep it from her, but I asked myself: if I were her father, would this be the right thing to do? Would I want my daughters to read their mother’s last words? In the end, I thought she had a right to have it, so I gave it to her. I wish I hadn’t.”
“You think her reading that note led her to attempt suicide?” I said.
“That picture—the one beside her bed—I found that under her pillow when I was trying to keep her alive that night. I also found Jeannie’s suicide note under that same pillow. So, yeah, I think that note pushed her over the edge. That’s my best guess. Otherwise, why would she have them tucked away together?”
Chapter 18
We got back to Buckley before noon, the town seemingly down for a nap. When Jeb dropped me off in the motel parking lot, I noticed Charlie’s Lexus parked two spots down from my door. As Jeb pulled away, I scanned the windows and saw a curtain jiggle shut in the room next to mine. Uncle Charlie and I were neighbors.
I had turned my phone off before we left for Mankato to visit Angel, so as I walked into my room, I turned my phone on to check for messages. I had one missed call from a number and area code that I didn’t recognize. That person left a message, and I played it.
Hi. This is Joette Breck. I have some questions about the story you wrote on Senator Dobbins. Could you call me back please?
And there it was again, that bubble of nausea that roiled my gut every time that goddamned lawsuit came to mind. I knew that my entanglement continued to live and breathe regardless of whether I gave it a thought—a monster lurking just beyond the corners of my concentration—but like a child with his hands over his eyes, a part of me wanted to believe that it would disappear if I could only keep it from the front of my mind. If nothing else, I might not feel sick all the time. I looked at the number that Ms. Breck left, took a couple breaths to calm my stomach, and returned her call.
“Ms. Breck?”
“Yes.”
“This is Joe Talbert.”
“Hello, Joe. Thanks for calling back. I have a few questions about the story you ran on the senator. First of all, you should know that as your attorney, anything you tell me remains confidential. You understand?”
“I do.”
I could hear Ms. Breck flipping through some pages, probably finding a good starting point for our discussion. After a few seconds, she continued. “Joe, according to the complaint, Senator Dobbins asserts that you made up all of the facts in your story. I guess we should start there. Did you make up any facts?”
“No. I didn’t. Everything in that article came from a reliable source.”
“And who is that source?”
“I can’t tell you that. The source has to remain anonymous. That’s the deal.”
“I understand,” she said. “But remember, anything you say will be confidential.”
“Why do you need her name? I gave everything to Allison Cress, my editor. She knows who the source is. She approved the story.”
“Allison’s not your attorney, Joe. I need to know all the facts in order to help you—the good and the bad.”
“I don’t feel comfortable about this. I gave my word. I told my source that no one other than Allison and me would know her identity.”
I thought of my source and the night I met with her, how she cried as she told me her story. We sat in my car on the top floor of the Mall of America parking ramp. It was a slow shopping day, so we had the floor mostly to ourselves, and a light rain further hid us from prying eyes. Her name was Penny, and we knew each other from our days in journalism school at the University of Minnesota. I didn’t know her all that well, but well enough to know that she was bright and funny and married.
She told me that after college she had gotten a job with a public relations firm and parlayed that into a position as a communications director for a state senator by the name of Todd Dobbins. And then, through a torrent of tears, she said, “I messed up, Joe. I messed up bad.”
I handed her a tissue from my console and turned in my seat to face her. She kept her eyes forward, fixed on the rain dotting my windshield. I wanted to say something comforting, but I had no idea what she had done. Besides, people opened up best when you gave them a silence to fill, so I waited.
“I had an affair, Joe. I don’t know why. I love my husband—you remember Mike, don’t you?”
I didn’t, although I was certain we had been introduced at some point. I nodded and said, “Yeah.”
“I love Mike. He’s a great guy. But there was something about Todd that…I don’t know.”
“Todd Dobbins? The senator you work for?”
“I quit this morning.”
I could see where this was going, so I asked, “What happened that made you quit?”
“We were…we’ve been having an affair for about six months now, and last night…” Penny started to lose it again but closed her eyes and took in some deep breaths to calm down. “Last night we were at his house. His wife was supposed to be gone. She told Todd that she was going to South Dakota to see her mother. And…well…I went to Todd’s house. He made a candlelit dinner.”
Penny looked away from me, her forehead resting against the passenger window, the glass laced with rivulets of rain. “I don’t know why I did it, Joe. I swear I don’t know why. I love Mike. We have a beautiful son. I don’t want this to ruin my marriage. You have to promise me that my name is never used. Promise me.”
“I promise. I won’t run any story unless I can do it without using your name.”
“I’m trusting you on this, Joe. I have to tell someone what happened. He can’t get away with what he did.”
“What did he do, Penny?”
“Todd’s wife came home. She walked in on us…you know. Joe, it was ugly. Todd started screaming at his wife like this was somehow all her fault. I gathered my stuff, but I couldn’t get out of the room. They were in my way. I was scared. She was yelling at him and she was yelling at me.”
“Did she try to hurt you?”
“No. That’s the thing. She was yelling, but she was heartbroken, not angry. And Todd kept gettin
g in her face. I just wanted to leave. And that’s when things got out of control.”
“What happened?”
Penny turned in her seat to face me, her eyes red and puffy from crying, but the tears were gone. “Todd called her some terrible names, and she spit on him. And then—it happened so fast it was like a blur—he punched her, hit her in the face as hard as he could. She dropped to the floor, and I thought he might have killed her. I’d never seen a man with that much rage. It was like he forgot that I was even there. I ran past them and left.”
I shook away the memory of my meeting with Penny and turned back to my conversation with Ms. Breck, weighing the promise I made to Penny against the juggernaut of problems heading my way. I didn’t want to break my word, but Ms. Breck needed to know about Penny. She needed to know that the story was true. “If I tell you who my source is and what she said, that will stay between us?”
Ms. Breck paused and then said, “I won’t give out that information without your permission.”
“I have your word on that?”
“Yes, Joe. You have my word.”
With that assurance, I told Joette Breck about the night when State Senator Todd Dobbins hit his wife in the face hard enough to send her to the hospital.
“I have copies of the text messages between Dobbins and Penny showing that he invited her to his house that night. I have the nine-one-one tape where Dobbins called for an ambulance. I have the police reports confirming the injury. These back up what Penny told me happened.”
“Except, the nine-one-one call and the police reports say that Dobbins’s wife fell down the stairs.”
“Of course he’s going to say that to the police. Dobbins isn’t going to admit that he smashed his wife’s face in. The facts line up. They prove that Penny was there that night.”
The phone went silent, and I assumed that Ms. Breck was letting the pieces fall into place. The story I wrote was true.
“He’s rolling the dice,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“This defamation suit—it’s all a huge gamble. Dobbins’s career is already shot. Your story killed him, politically. If he has any aspirations of climbing back up that ladder, he needs to reverse this story, turn it around. If he can make this about media lies and fake news, he can rally around it. But that strategy relies on you not being able to prove the truth of your story. It relies on you not revealing the identity of your source. He’s gambling that Penny won’t come out of the shadows. If she doesn’t, he may well get his retraction.”
“I won’t give up my source,” I said.
“I understand, Joe, but that paints us into a corner. It’s your word against his word—and his wife’s word. Remember, she’s backing up his version. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, those two were the only two people in the room. Without Penny, we have nothing.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to give up Penny, that was all there was to it. I thought back to that night in the rain, how she stared out at some thought, far away, and said, “Mrs. Dobbins didn’t deserve what Todd did to her. No one deserves that. I can’t let him get away with what he did.”
Then, as if Penny saw hypocrisy in her words—seeing the harm Todd had inflicted upon his wife without seeing the harm that she had caused, Penny added, “I know that what I did was wrong. I’m doing my best now to right it. That’s why I’m talking to you. But I don’t want to lose my family over this. I can’t lose them over this.”
It was Ms. Breck who spoke next. “Allison Cress mentioned that you’ve taken a couple days off.”
“Yeah, I…had a death in the family.”
“Joe, you should know that there’s a raging debate about what to do with you—and with Allison. They haven’t decided yet. You might want to think about taking a leave of absence for a while.”
“Why?”
“Look at this from their point of view. If you’re out of the office and not writing stories…well…”
“If I’m not in the office to mess things up, they might not need to fire me?”
“I wouldn’t put it in those terms, but, yeah, it might cool the situation down a bit.”
I’d been pacing around my room as I talked to Ms. Breck, but her suggestion that I was on the bubble over losing my job turned the bones in my knees to jelly, and I had to sit down. “How long are we talking?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I felt queasy again. “I’ll talk to Allison.”
After I ended my call with Ms. Breck, I flopped backward onto the bed. A leave of absence; there goes my paycheck. And for how long? After the bar exam, Lila would go back to work, but could we get by on what little she made? What if she didn’t pass the bar, and what if my leave turned permanent? I didn’t want to call Allison, but Ms. Breck seemed to think it might help me save my job in the long run. Who knows, maybe Allison would put the kibosh on the whole idea. I sent her a text:
I’m thinking about taking a leave of absence. Your thoughts?
I spent the next ten minutes staring at my phone, waiting for a reply. Then it came:
That might be for the best.
Chapter 19
How was I going to explain to Lila that I no longer had a job? I wasn’t fired, but I also wasn’t going to bring home a paycheck for a while. Should I even tell her? She was under enough pressure to pass the bar exam. This was bad.
I lay on my bed in that crappy motel, thoughts of my professional demise floating around my head, when a new thought suddenly emerged, an image of Vicky Pyke gesturing out to a sea of green and saying, “This is your farm.” Was that possible? Could it be that I was wallowing in that darkest hour that came before the proverbial dawn?
Jeb had mentioned an attorney in town—Mullen—who could tell me about the Hix estate. The time had come to pay Mr. Mullen a visit to see what lay behind door number two. Whatever it might be, it had to be better than the shitstorm swirling behind door number one. I looked up Mullen’s address on my phone—only a few blocks from the motel. It seemed like everything in Buckley was only a few blocks from everything else.
Mullen’s office, a small box made of yellow brick, had tiny windows that lay hidden behind a row of overgrown shrubs. It was the kind of place that would go unnoticed unless you were looking for it. I walked past it on my first trip down the street and had to look twice before I saw the small sign on the door that read LAW OFFICE. The structure did not instill confidence.
I checked the doorknob and found it locked. I knocked and waited. I was about to knock again when I saw a Post-it that had fallen to the ground. It read: If you need me, call me. Below that it gave a number.
I called.
“Hello?” a deep voice answered.
“Hello. I’m trying to reach Bob Mullen, the attorney.”
“You reached him. What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping to make an appointment or talk to you. My name is Joe Talbert.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Hello?” I said.
“Joe Talbert? As in…”
“As in the son of Toke Talbert. I was told to come see you. I’m at your office.”
“I’ll be right there.” He hung up without saying goodbye.
A noise from across the street drew my attention to an old Victorian house that stood on a large corner lot, its siding painted the blueish-green color of oxidized copper. I hadn’t taken stock of all the houses in Buckley, but from what I had seen, that house was probably the nicest in town. I heard the noise again—the creak of a door—and I saw a man exiting the house. He was older, maybe seventy or so, with a bald head and a full beard. He carried a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.
He made his way down his front walk, his eyes on me, his gait slow and careful, as if he had bad knees or a rusted hip. He transferred his sandwich to his hand with the water bottle so that he could avail himself of the handrail as he descended the steps to the street level. At the bottom
of the steps, he paused to catch his breath. Then he crossed the street, heading to his law office.
“Mr. Mullen?” I asked.
“None other.” He pulled out a key and unlocked the door. “Come in.”
The inside of his office was no nicer than the outside: paneled walls filled with faded pictures, brown carpeting worn thin by foot traffic, and dingy ceiling tiles that sagged with age. The office had a small, unmanned reception area where a metal desk, something he probably purchased at a school auction, sat barren except for a computer monitor. Beyond the reception area, another office opened up, a larger office with a handsome wooden desk, stacked full of papers, and four metal cabinets lining one of the walls.
I waited in the reception area as Mr. Mullen cleared files off the top of his desk. As I waited, I walked to one of the pictures on the wall, an old photo of Anwar Sadat, the former president of Egypt shaking hands with President Jimmy Carter. The two men were talking casually, while a cadre of other men smiled and chatted in the background. I wondered why this photo rated a place on the wall of this small-town lawyer―then I saw it. One of the men in the background bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Mullen. I looked at the attorney and back at the picture.
“Is this you?” I said, pointing.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Mullen looked over his shoulder as he slid papers into one of the file cabinets.
I went to another picture and saw him in the background of a handshake between India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and a man whom I believed was Cyrus Vance, the former secretary of state. I walked around the reception area looking at picture after picture spanning the late seventies to the early nineties, dignitaries and heads of state posing for photos, and there, in the background of each, was Bob Mullen.
He put the last of his files away and invited me into his office.
“Those are some great pictures, Mr. Mullen.”
“My wife put those up. And please call me Bob.” He pointed to a chair and we both sat down.
“Were you in the State Department?”
