by Shane Lusher
After that I dialed the sheriff’s office. Janine answered.
“How’d the deposition go?” she asked when I gave her my name.
“Not bad,” I said. “I insulted the opposing attorney.”
“Good for you,” she said. “Who can I get for you?”
“I’d like to speak to Percy,” I said.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Any idea when he’ll be back?” I asked.
“It’s Friday afternoon,” she said without elaboration. “Let me just put you through to Randy.”
“No!” I said, but I was already on hold. I held the phone away from my head and looked at it, thinking I should just hang up, willing myself to do so, but then I put the telephone back against my ear and waited.
A recording informed me just what I needed to do and which numbers I could call should I suspect my neighbor of cooking meth, truancy, harboring a felon, being in possession of child pornography, or if I wanted to apply for a license to carry a concealed weapon. It had gone halfway through the second time when Dubois picked up.
“Have you found Rassi yet?”” he asked. I heard the distinct click of a cigarette lighter.
“No,” I said. I got out of the car and watched the traffic going by on 29, the river on the other side of it. “He’s not returning my calls.”
“Dammit,” Dubois said with a sharp exhale. “This isn’t funny.”
“He’s probably drunk somewhere. He is on vacation, after all.”
“This is serious, Hartman,” Dubois said. “It doesn’t look good for him. He could lose his job.”
“I know that, Sheriff,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. Rassi really was staying away longer than was good for him, no matter what Randy Dubois may or may not have done.
“He shouldn’t have ever been in the position he was in,” Dubois said. “No offense to your brother, I can see what he was trying to do, but there’s a reason you’re supposed to wait before you make somebody detective.”
I didn’t answer that, mainly because I knew that Dubois was probably right. “Like I said,” I said finally. “If I see him, I’ll serve him the papers Percy gave me.”
“You just give me a call if you find him,” Dubois said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s that?”
“Come again?”
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.
I heard a window slam, and when Dubois responded he was panting a bit. “Do with him?” he asked. “He’s a goddamned subpoenaed witness to a lawsuit that has his name across the front of it. He’s already been suspended. He doesn’t come in today or tomorrow, and he’s out.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not being completely honest with me?” Dubois said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I told you, I haven’t seen him, and I haven’t spoken to him. I’ll let you know when, and if, I-”
“Because if you know something, and you don’t do anything, you can be charged with obstruction of justice.”
“In a civil case?” I asked.
Dubois didn’t answer, so I changed the subject.
“I was calling because I need some help with Colby Trueblood,” I said. “Do you know where Percy is?”
“You can talk to me about that,” Dubois said. “Percy doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
I waited for a moment, weighing my options. If I talked to Percy about it, he would most likely have to speak to Dubois, so he would find out sooner or later, anyway. Besides, the cocaine in Colby’s system was information Dubois knew I already had.
“You got something, you talk to me,” Dubois said.
“Yeah. Well, the thing is, I found a person of interest.”
“You mean a suspect,” Dubois said. “We only say person of interest when we talk to reporters.”
“I don’t know if he’s a suspect,” I said. “But his name has come up too many times to be a coincidence.”
“Who is it?” Dubois asked.
“Guy by the name of Jasper Stevens,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Dubois said. “That asshole?”
“You know him?”
“He’s a known person,” he said.
“He’s also the last person who saw Darren Roe alive,” I said. “So, Percy will be interested in it, too.”
“He’s a meth junkie we’ve had in a couple of times. Never had anything on him, though. He’s one of those guys who uses whatever he has as soon as he gets it. Why are you looking at him? You think he did it? I wouldn’t have pegged him for the violent type.”
“Why not?”
“Second thought, I guess anybody could be the violent type nowadays,” Dubois said. “But he was in here this one time, Jesus, about two years ago, and then your brother talked to him a lot when Darren Roe went missing. I believe Tad discovered he had an alibi.” Dubois paused for a second, then went on.
“Anyway, when he came in first, a few years ago, what had happened was that somebody had beaten the shit out of him and taken his stash. I mean really done a good job. Broke his nose, a few ribs, and he wasn’t walking straight. Wouldn’t tell us anything, though. Found him all bloody, sitting out in front of Gas Thru down on 98, by the river. The attendant called it in. The officer who picked him up said Stevens said something about how the guy needed it more than him.”
“I don’t think he even put up a fight,” Dubois said. His laugh was full of phlegm. “Anyway, I figured he’d come back to us sooner or later. What do you have on him?”
“He’s the one who sold the cocaine that wound up in Colby Trueblood’s body,” I said.
“Huh,” Dubois said. “That would be enough to bring him in. You got any proof? Any witnesses?”
“Nobody who would talk,” I said.
“Who is it?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You’d rather not say,” Dubois said. “And why would you rather not say?”
“Protecting an informant,” I said.
“Don’t give me that shit,” Dubois said. “You want me to go get somebody, you better have a reason, and just because some unnamed person says Stevens sold Colby Trueblood some cocaine is not enough.”
“How about if I speak to the person again, and see if he’s willing to come forward?” I said slowly. “Isn’t that enough for you to at least bring him in for questioning? You don’t have to charge him with anything.”
“And then have him file a harassment suit against the county?” Dubois said. “He’s got free legal representation through his union. I don’t think so.”
“So, what am I supposed to do here?” I asked.
“You’re the detective,” Dubois said. “Go talk to him yourself.”
So much for calling in the cavalry. I thought about contacting Janine again and asking for Percy’s cell phone, but I didn’t feel that was what I needed at that point.
What I really needed was a couple of drinks, a good night’s sleep, and to get the hell out of town for a few days. I was tired of talking on the telephone.
By this time it was five to two. It occurred to me that I still had to pack. I might possibly have to go buy golfing clothes.
What the hell did people wear when they went golfing?
Hannah Trueblood pulled into the parking lot ten minutes later, circled twice and then parked her SUV next to my car after I’d gotten out and waved to her.
I went around to the driver’s side window, which she had opened. She seemed hesitant to get out of the car.
“Hi, Hannah,” I said. “Thanks for meeting up with me.” I looked at her and leaned in on the window and inhaled. I smelled wine through her heavy perfume, but her eyes looked clear enough. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and a pair of khaki shorts, but she looked like she hadn’t put on any makeup that day. Her face was swollen, but whether that was from crying or boozing or just a lousy night’s sleep, I couldn’t say.
“I don’t know if I should,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”
“You?” she asked, looking up at me as she put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. She laughed. “You’re the last person I would be afraid of.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “And why’s that?”
She shook her head, as if deciding something, rolled up her window and got out of the car. She bent to retrieve her purse and then closed the door and locked it.
“I can’t eat hamburgers,” she said. “Too many carbs.”
“Well, I figured that you’d be recognized in all of the places around here serving beef tartar,” I said. “You want to take a walk?” I nodded toward the woods behind the restaurant and the paths that led up to the park beyond.
“Why don’t we just drive around in your car or something?” she said, looking up at me. I realized then, perhaps for the first time, how petite she was. She couldn’t have been taller than five-one or -two, and must have weighed around 100 pounds.
My answer was to open the car door, move the garbage on the seat to the back, and then wait for her to enter before closing it behind her.
I took off up Route 116 toward Germantown Hills, running along Peoria Lake on our left. When I’d left the East Peoria city limits, I accelerated to the speed limit and turned off the radio.
Hannah had been staring out the front window, but in the four or five times I’d glanced at her, I could see that her eyes were flitting back and forth behind the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses.
“What are you afraid of, Hannah?” I asked her quietly.
“I’m not-” she began. “I told you already on the phone. My daughter. Someone killed her. That’s all. What do you know about it?”
“I don’t know much,” I admitted. “I’ve found out that she was adopted.”
“Who told you that?” she asked. Her head jerked over in my direction. “You’re not supposed to know that.”
“I take it this was a secret?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I said, “It’s public information.”
“No, it’s not.” She shook her head. “That type of information is sealed.”
“Why didn’t you want anybody to find out?” I asked. “There’s no shame in it.”
She snorted and then coughed and put her sunglasses back on, resuming her vigil out the car window. “What the hell would you know about shame?”
“Hannah, can I just ask you a few questions?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “Shoot.”
“I’m not sure if you know this,” I said, “But Colby had cocaine in her system the night she was killed.”
She looked out the window at the houses on top of the bluff and swallowed.
I coughed and pulled up the drive toward Vermilion College, did a loop and then turned back onto Route 116, going back toward East Peoria.
“Hannah?” I prompted.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
“Let’s get a quick drink,” I said. The clock on the car radio said two-twenty-five. There was time to get one or two rounds in and still make it back to Pekin.
“I told you, I can’t be seen at Applebee’s,” she said.
I looked at her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to be seen where we’re going, either, but for different reasons. Trust me, you’ve never run into any of the people at this place ever in your life.”
Thirty-Five
To say that the Back of the Yards was a hole would have quite possibly been an insult to holes. It sat off a back road in Creve Coeur, just south of East Peoria next to the river, on a dirt parking lot that turned to mud during the rainy or the melting season, which, owing to the fact that Central Illinois has only two seasons, frozen winter and scorching summer, was thankfully not very long.
The bar was a squat wooden structure anybody over six-foot-three would have had to hunch over to stand in, so it was good that most of the patrons had either never grown that tall or had seen to it that their growth was stunted early on so as to keep from bumping their heads.
It was a bar in the truest sense of the word: it had a long counter, stools around it, and no other furniture. There was a unisex bathroom and the floor was painted concrete, and there was nothing on tap.
You could buy three things: cans of Pabst or cans of Pabst Lite or airplane bottles of cheap bourbon, and if you wanted water, or a glass, you had to buy one of those three things before you got it.
The Back of the Yards had doubled over the years as a watering hole for workers getting off their shifts from Caterpillar, and as a meeting hall for the local AmVets, whose slightly better structure down in North Pekin had burnt down in the eighties and never been rebuilt.
When we walked into the stale air punctuated by the tentative efforts of an oscillating fan in the corner, there were only two patrons sitting down at the very end, huddled together as if to ward off the cold. They turned bleary eyes in our direction, both men discarding me as someone out of place but male, and then stared at Hannah. We sat down as far away from them as possible.
The Beach Boys were playing on the stereo.
“What the hell is this?” she asked.
“Like I said, some place you won’t see anybody who cares about who you are.”
“This place is disgusting.”
I shrugged at this. Her reaction surprised me only because it had seemed to take her this long to figure out the bar wasn’t the kind of place she preferred to frequent. The outside of the building was pretty much a blatant advertisement for what was bound to be inside. Still, she sat, placing her purse and her elbows down on the bar.
The bartender came out of the bathroom and around behind the bar, picking up a towel as an afterthought in order to wipe his hands as he approached.
“What’re you having?”
The owner, Mike Schaeffer, was an old Army buddy of my father’s. Both had been drafted together in 1968 and sent over to Vietnam. Both of them had been hunters, and good shots, a sure way to wind up in infantry, and trudge your way through what is now known colloquially as “the shit,” unless you could come up with a way to get out of it.
My father had gotten out of it. He’d signed up for an electronics training course, which meant that he’d been in the Army for nine months longer, but also that his stint in Vietnam would be on the inside of a radio repair unit.
In country, he’d been shot at only once, seen Viet Cong from a relatively comfortable distance, and not gotten bloodied.
Mike, on the other hand, had gone straight in. He’d spent his time retaking the same series of hills near Da Nang for about a year and a half, bogged down in the mud, with his friends shredded all around him, and nearly lost a leg to a shrapnel hit and the ubiquitous jungle rot.
That, as someone once said, made all the difference. Where Dad had been comfortable living the rest of his life the way he’d started it, Mike had moved away from Tremont, been involved in some biker gangs in the seventies, and then come back to open up the Back of the Yards.
The name came from the Chicago neighborhood, which Mike said was where he’d gone before the Army draft board, and had stuck in his mind ever afterwards, because “it was the last time I was really alive.”
“Hi Mike,” I said. He squinted at me in the gloom, apparently having lost some of his eyesight since the last time I’d been in, which had probably been right around my twenty-first birthday.
“Dana?”
I nodded.
“Heard about your dad,” he said. “Sorry about him. Cancer’s a bitch. Got the same thing in my prostate. Goddamned Agent Orange.”
I wanted to tell him that my father’s cancer had never been the kind you were supposed to get from the herbicide they’d sprayed to defoliate Vietnam, but Mike was still stuck in that age, and I knew that it wasn�
�t good to try to rattle him out of it.
As long as it could still be the Back of the Yards in 1968, Mike stayed halfway sane.
“Thanks, Mike,” I said.
He stood in front of the both of us with his hands down at his side. He hadn’t acknowledged Hannah.
“I’ll take a Pabst,” I said. “Hannah? You want a beer?”
“What else have you got?” she asked.
“Pabst Lite, whiskey,” Mike said and waited.
“Do you have anything-”
I placed my hand on her arm and interrupted. “She’ll have a double whiskey on the rocks, and do you have some sugar?”
Mike nodded and walked away.
“I can order for myself,” she said.
“I know that,” I said. “I just ordered you the fanciest drink in the place.”
Mike fished a can of Pabst out of the refrigerator, popped the top and set it in front of me, then leaned down to scoop a glass through the ice machine. He set it down on the counter along with five packets of sugar and two tiny bottles of whiskey.
“Thanks, Mike,” I said.
He nodded and went back toward the middle of the bar, equidistant from Hannah and me and the two men at the other end, who had watched everything with the gaping interest of two salamanders sunning themselves on rocks.
When I looked up at them, they huddled back down and began speaking in low tones.
“You put enough sugar in it, it’s kind of like Southern Comfort,” I said quietly.
She sniffed and mixed her drink together and then looked at me.
“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time. So, please tell me what you know.”
“Fine,” she said. “But are you going to tell Wayne about this?”
I spread my hands. “I don’t work for Wayne.”
“You don’t think so?” She shook her head and took a sip of the drink. She winced at the bite and then took another sip.
“I’m not going to call him up and tell him what you tell me, if that’s what you mean,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, setting her drink down in the ring of water it had formed on the counter.
