The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  The Art Crime team back then contained only fourteen FBI special agents, and while the work could be exotic — once, Henry consulted with Interpol in Lyon — it wasn’t exactly street policing. Much of the time, the agents collaborated with museums and conducted their investigations online, governed by the processes and protocols surrounding the National Stolen Art File. Once a purloined painting or rare document made it onto the computerized NSAF, or to the international list maintained by Interpol, the team opened a case file, provided they found a strong American connection. Henry soon had his own lengthy list of stolen items to monitor. Most days, the process was dry and plodding, but at least he got to work in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  He and Theresa met at a party in Alexandria while he was still a trainee, on the day after he was informed that he would start in Art Crime. Their attraction was the usual American combo of coincidence, defiance, and optimism, and their respective moves east made their meeting feel preordained. It didn’t bother her that she was a year older, or that his corn-fed blondness (though in fact Utah doesn’t grow much corn, and he had shaved his head) made him seem even younger. His good looks, sincerity, and Mormon neatness gave her a package of sexy, if conservative, virtues to latch on to as she neared thirty. Henry played his self-deprecation card on their first date, making her laugh: “A fine arts degree from BYU requires writing your graduate thesis about velvet paintings of Elvis.”

  Theresa had moved to D.C. three years before, from the Ogden domain of her mother, Ruth. Her father, Mitchell, had moved there many years earlier. She was independent by nature and remained proud of the fact that she had won a position with a prestigious accounting firm without his help. Had she come to Washington for the accounting job, or to reconcile with her father? Henry was never sure; perhaps it was both. Mitch was high up in the federal government, probably CIA, and Theresa had lived with him for the first three months in D.C. Her parents had divorced when Theresa was ten, and through her teen years she saw her father fewer than twenty times. They later developed a correspondence, augmented by brief visits east, and her yearning for more contact built as she graduated high school. He supported her choice of the University of Denver for accounting, while her mother had to be content that Theresa hadn’t demanded to attend a university in D.C.

  Living with her father produced the reconciliation she craved. She eventually moved into a place with two girlfriends, but it was close to Mitch’s penthouse. Their relationship continued to thrive. When she and Henry hooked up, Mitch took no offence as the couple put more distance between him and his daughter. Henry didn’t know that he slipped $1,000 a month to Theresa for living expenses.

  The idyll had ended sixteen months ago, when Henry and Theresa moved out of their one-bedroom in Alexandria and trekked back to Utah. It was a parody of the Mormon diaspora, he always thought. Her formal diagnosis was degenerative emphysema. After a year of testing and runarounds in D.C., the sureness of the label gave Henry a cause to hold on to: like a good FBI man, he resolved to manage her case. Henry and Theresa remained stalwart, and decisiveness became their way of resisting misfortune.

  Emphysema wasn’t sexy. Her cough irritated co-workers at the D.C. insurance firm where she had taken up a job in management. There were some complaints, and regular queries about her coping. Within months, her affliction rendered her dysfunctional, a humiliating and cruel invasion. People didn’t understand: lung cancer, even from smoking, they could fix on, but not this sad, tubercular wasting that seemed melodramatized from an old Edwardian plotline. For a while, Henry comforted himself with images from the television ads for COPD. The drug companies urged him to believe that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was controllable; the patient would soon be tossing a football on sun-dappled lawns. Only, it was never that way for Theresa. She took extended sick leave, and her doctors recommended a drier climate. In this age of drugs for every disease, such advice struck Henry as quaint. Thousands of Easterners had moved west in the nineteenth century seeking the dry cure — Doc Holliday, for example. The Mormons had set up sanitariums and outpatient clinics for hundreds of tuberculosis sufferers in the nineteenth century. What was old was new; Utah still welcomed its share of health seekers, even prodigal sons.

  Theresa feistily rationalized their return, and Henry went along. It was necessary, so let’s get it done. We know the Beehive State; we will be welcomed back. We’ll have jobs. It was all very rational. Her cloying mother was her biggest problem, treating the return of her daughter as a victory in her tug-of-war with Mitch. Theresa bridled against the LDS community, which her mother promised to mobilize in support of her return. To Theresa, the church’s aggressive comfort was another form of motherly oppression. There would be no re-embrace of Mormonism.

  But Henry grasped the real point: their move back to Utah was permanent. He approached his superiors in the Bureau, and they were sympathetic. Salt Lake City had its own regional office and he could transfer, though he might have to take a drop in pay grade for the first year. Henry balked at the offer. The Bureau applied ineluctable rules to field officers, and Henry, as junior man in SLC, could be required to participate in investigations just about anywhere. Inter-agency collaboration, especially on terrorism dossiers through Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the West, made travel inevitable. In the end, Henry had taken the second job offered, a starting detective position with the West Valley force.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” Theresa said.

  They kissed, and he followed her into the kitchen.

  To Henry, who had learned to take Theresa’s COPD day by day, she appeared much better than average. When her coughing abated and she stood up straight, you knew she had to have been a runner. Theresa couldn’t run a hundred yards now.

  Henry watched her lean down to the oven and take out a beef tenderloin, which sizzled in the pan and sent garlic and rosemary vapours his way. A rasping fit caught her, and Henry moved quickly to grasp her hand in the oven mitt and guide the pan to the counter. She recovered and turned to give him another kiss.

  “How much time’ve you got?”

  “An hour,” Henry said. “But I’ll be back by eleven thirty.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Interesting. Interesting. I’ll tell you about it.”

  She smiled again. He didn’t always share his job life. “Can we eat out on the deck?” she said. It wasn’t really a question.

  Henry glanced at the kitchen table, which was covered in loose papers and ledgers. Theresa was a tax accountant now. Since moving back to Utah, she had built up a steady freelance business in the Salt Lake City area, doing individual and small corporate returns and setting up payroll records.

  They ate slices of the tenderloin with mango and avocado sauce, a salad, and rolls. Henry never took booze, and her condition made wine a bad idea, and so they drank ice tea. The landscape beyond the patio remained still and hushed. They had only three neighbours along Coppermount and, as usual, none of them were outside.

  The state of Theresa’s lungs constrained their conversation. She had once been the talker. Only recently had Henry embraced the reversal of roles, but he wasn’t a natural Scheherazade.

  “I tagged a murder today,” he said.

  That caught her full attention and, a bonus, suppressed her impulse to cough. The burden shifted to Henry to carry the conversation, and she grinned to encourage him. Against the desert backdrop, silent except for one bird who chirped in anticipation of nightfall, he launched into a twenty-minute monologue. The story gushed out. He covered the beheading of Gabriella Watson and described the bizarreness of investigating the double crime scene at Numbers 3 and 5 Hollis, where both killing floors remained awash in blood. He covered the quirky bits and the gore, his own suspicions, and the tension between Homicide and the Narcotics Unit. He finished by expressing his unease with the residents of the street and with the defunct street associ
ation.

  “The rule on Hollis is: nobody knows anything.” It had already become a refrain.

  Theresa had nodded him along, but now she said, “Henry, I’m having trouble figuring out whether the gaps in your story are because you’re dodging them or because you don’t know all the facts and won’t speculate.”

  “What do you want to know?” He thought he’d been thorough.

  “Where was her head found?”

  “You get to the heart of the matter fast.”

  Theresa raised one eyebrow. “Head of the matter? Did the killer leave it next to the body?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. Why do you ask that?”

  Her look showed that she considered the answer obvious. “The killer wasn’t in a hurry. He took his sweet time. That’s curious. Where was it found?”

  “In a plastic trash bag under the sink.”

  “Why do you think he left it there? It was a strange thing to do. Why be neat and tidy about it, if you’ve already spread blood all over the living room?” Theresa fetched a bottle of wine from the fridge, giving no hint that she was asking his approval.

  “Two living rooms, in fact,” Henry said. “This is all about sending a message. The beheading was an execution. This is about the drug business.”

  Theresa looked dubious. Saying nothing, he let her work through her logic. His joy at her good health made him patient. Theresa’s affliction frustrated her in many ways but also made her more reflective: she didn’t trust her lungs, so when she spoke she prepared her statements carefully. To him, her smoky voice was seductive.

  “What are you going to do when you drive back to Hollis Street?” she said.

  “I hope the rest of the people on my list are home so I can complete my share of the interviews and start on Phil’s list. I’ll hook up with Phil, if he’s around. This is the slogging phase of the investigation.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she replied, startling him. She bore a contemplative expression, almost mystical in the desert light.

  “Huh?”

  “I think you’re already near the heart of the case, Henry. You might find the killer tonight. Be careful.”

  He almost laughed. “If you insist.”

  Henry hadn’t seen this oracular side of Theresa before. When you are constantly short of breath, your short sentences all sound like pronouncements. She’s clearly into the mystery. Perhaps she possesses a better instinct for wickedness than I do.

  “The residents?” she asked.

  “Typical of ‘he was always such a quiet man’ neighbours,” Henry said. “More than the average number of busybodies. No one too broken up about the murder.”

  “The street association?” Theresa said.

  “What about it?”

  “What binds these people together, if anything? It’s important.”

  Henry had to go. He took a deep breath and checked for signs that her coughing was cycling back. Theresa seemed to be deep in thought — or she was fighting to control her lungs. “What’s that Agatha Christie story, Henry?”

  Although Agatha Christie wrote dozens of mystery tales, Henry knew at once the one she meant. Sometimes they read each other’s thoughts.

  “Murder on the Orient Express?”

  “That’s it. The passengers on the train conspire to eliminate a nasty guy.”

  “Why would the residents on Hollis Street band together to slaughter their own neighbour? Why not just call the police?”

  Theresa shrugged. There wasn’t time to debate her theory now. “Drugs arriving on their peaceful street. Indifferent but pretentious neighbours fearful of outsiders. Seem like a recipe for murder to you, Henry?”

  Henry prepared to go. He often gave the treasured desert landscape a final look before returning to work, but tonight his thoughts roiled with excitement and he rushed to his car. Even so, he paused there in the driver’s seat to contemplate his moves. He shouldn’t have discussed an active case with his wife, but he had no regrets. You don’t say no to an oracle.

  He had to share his exhilaration.

  Henry got out of the Subaru and tried his smart phone there in the driveway. Sometimes reception was feeble out on the desert’s edge. He found the coordinates for Chief Inspector Peter Cammon in England and keyed in a text message.

  Peter Cammon, more than twice Henry’s age and with vastly more experience, was the greatest detective he had ever encountered; Henry idolized him. They had met in Washington during Henry’s biggest FBI case (his only big case) and had kept in touch since, emailing every month or so and talking three or four times over the past year. They had batted about the idea of Henry and Theresa visiting England but hadn’t followed through, and in fact the younger man wasn’t quite sure where the relationship stood now. Henry recognized that Peter in retirement was a reluctant mentor, having seen just about every kind of crime — and too much blood — over almost five decades of police work. Henry could understand the need to push all that violence into the past, but he always felt, even at that great distance, that his British friend was restless in retirement. Peter claimed that he was busy working on his father’s personal papers down in his renovated air raid shelter — Theresa was amused by this image — but Henry dared to wonder out loud, “Why isn’t Peter working on his own memoirs?” More, he sensed that Peter Cammon still had something to contribute, something to prove as a police detective. Just as Henry Pastern did.

  “Hi Peter! Hope UR keeping well. How are the memoirs? Just to let you know, I have latched on to a good case. More to follow. Cheers.” Henry pressed send but was a bit unsure whether the message had connected.

  At the cottage in Leicestershire, where it was the middle of the night, Peter Cammon read the email and snapped off an unintentionally formal reply: “Keep me informed. Peter Cammon.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Henry returned to Hollis Street with a brilliant sunset at his back, but he ignored it, never glancing in his rear-view mirror. His chat with Theresa had put him in a buoyant frame of mind, and he sensed opportunity. There were homicides and there were homicides. His murder cases thus far had been ordinary domestics or vehicular manslaughter. Now he was working in the centre ring of the Watson extravaganza. His aim tonight was to complete as many interviews as possible, including some of Phil’s “odds.” He would make himself the go-to expert on the Hollisites.

  It was near dark when he passed through the gates. A morbid hush reigned on the dead end street; the neighbours had gone to ground. Jackson’s cruiser sat in front of the grow house, a warning to the curious. The Second House remained taped up and dark. Jackson himself was likely in Number 3. A lurid homicide had cleared the street, but the ghouls and rubberneckers had yet to find their way to the perimeter.

  Henry parked behind the cruiser, locked the Subaru and walked down to the home of Albert Torrent at 16. Torrent, a widower, was about seventy and dyed his hair a walnut brown, which came across orange in the setting sun. The interview was perfunctory. He had seen nothing, having slept through the night. He had never served on the street committee and only attended the annual barbecue because the “damn organizers” insisted on holding it at the Wazinskis’, next door. Did the detective know that the committee had been defunct “for months”?

  Henry moved rapidly on to Number 15, where Mr. and Mrs. Bross had resided from the day the street opened for business. He was Barney, she was Althea. Henry learned nothing new. The Brosses paid their street dues, but neither had ever served on the Hollis Street executive. They had seen nothing suspicious. “Be glad to continue helping,” Barney Bross said, but he wasn’t smiling as he said it.

  Henry pondered the two-storey at Number 13, which his map identified as belonging to Ronald Devereau. He hesitated, knowing that Phil had mentioned a brief contact with Devereau.

  His mobile rang and it was Phil. “Where are you, Henry?”

&
nbsp; The front lamps along the street came on, all except the bulb in front of the Second House. Hollis Street was marginally more attractive at dusk.

  “Standing alone in the middle of a deserted street. Did my last interview of the evens. No confessions,” he joked.

  “I finished Starr, Henneker, and Devereau. I hoped Starr might have seen something, living next door to the action, but wouldn’t you know, he took a sleeping pill that night. With my mastery of interview technique, I established that he took two pills.”

  Henry’s spirits sank. He had hoped to finish the witness list and control the summary report. But his optimism, and his sense of camaraderie, rose again as Phil said, “I’ll feed you my notes and you can write ’em up. Follow up, too. I’ve got Boog to take care of. Where’s Jackson?”

  “Down at the Watson place. I’ll check on him. What’s new?”

  “You know that the last couple to live in the death house were both dance instructors? Obviously not Mormons.”

  Henry ignored the feeble humour. “Any thoughts at this point, Phil?”

  For all his joking, Phil was in a downcast mood. “It’s shaping up to be a gang hit. Tom Watson will be found dead, I predict. Then the battle with DeKlerk will start in earnest. He’ll maintain that this is all drugs all the time. I’ll argue a double homicide makes it mine. Well, let’s hope for bodies.”

  Phil hung up but called back a few seconds later. “Sorry, Henry. I should have said ‘ours,’ not ‘mine.’” He didn’t wait for Henry to acknowledge his apology. “And Henry, if you see the FLIR wagon go by, text me.”