The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  Joan immediately, giddily pronounced the expedition a success, though it ended with Tynan and Henry, in sun-stricken euphoria, comparing battle scars while standing stripped to the waist in their small boat.

  In her enthusiasm, she declared that they should organize a Western barbecue on Henry’s patio and invite everyone Henry knew. He and Peter exchanged looks: neither could imagine Boog DeKlerk, Chief Grady, and Furst and Ordway rubbing shoulders without gunplay breaking out. Joan, a little sun-addled, was ready for their skepticism. “You two have been anti-social for too long. No shoptalk will be allowed. A real dinner party, then?”

  Tynan jumped in. “I volunteer my place.”

  Peter nearly crashed the truck. No one but Henry had ever visited Tynan’s work-in-progress, and he had seen only the outside, reporting to Joan and Peter that the house seemed a bit eccentric. (There had been a hint that Theresa had been in Tynan’s house a few times.)

  Tynan pressed Joan’s case. “This is a great idea. Invite Detective Mohlman, and how about that Officer Jackson?”

  “I didn’t know you’d ever met Jackson,” Henry said.

  “That’s the point, Henry.” Joan said. “We want to meet new people.”

  In the end, the guest list narrowed to Phil Mohlman and Officer Jackson and his wife. Phil said he wouldn’t attend if Boog DeKlerk did. Peter was glad not to have Furst and Ordway coming, suspecting that the state detectives would be uncomfortable as long as Vyne remained at large. Officer Jackson accepted the invitation immediately and said that he would bring along his wife, thereby adding some balance (civilian, gender) to the guest list.

  On the day of the barbecue, Joan and Peter left Coppermount in the F-150 to shop for supplies. As they turned onto Highway 15, Peter said, “Why do you think Tynan volunteered his house?”

  Joan gave him her you’re-the-bleedin’-detective stare. “Tynan is learning to relax with us, I’d say. He’s decided to be sociable. He bought a giant grill to cook whatever wildlife Henry is out roping. Whatever the house is like, say you love it.”

  “Understood.”

  Tynan had become the shepherd of Coppermount Drive. Sometimes his flock consisted of Henry alone but, as Joan and Peter agreed, his optimism probably kept the thinly populated neighbourhood alive. Whatever monastic compulsion set him walking in the desert, his mission evidently was to monitor and protect the inchoate community.

  The slow pace of their lives in Utah occasionally made Joan forget the unresolved horror of Hollis Street. It rushed back now. She turned to her husband. “Do you still intend to kill him?”

  Had Sir Stephen Bartleben or another colleague at the Yard asked this question, Peter would have replied, “I don’t expect to get the chance.” Even a year ago, he would have said the same to Joan. But not now. They shared a feeling that they had been in the West too long without results. They had a precise purpose in America, or at least Peter did. This gathering at Tynan’s house was important to both Peter and Joan as a celebration of friendship, but at the table would be most of the officers who had been drawn to Hollis Street that fateful day when Officer Jackson found the poodle soaked in blood. The manhunt would hover above them all until resolved. The chief inspector owed these people an honest answer, starting with Joan.

  “He has to be eliminated.”

  Joan wouldn’t let it go. “I find it odd that you’ve been preparing to kill a man you’ve never met.”

  Peter could only nod in reply. “Not only a ghost, but a ghost from two decades ago.” This answer was evasive, and he gave himself a minute to consider his bottom line. “Henry needs closure, and perhaps I do too. You should know — and the same goes for Phil and Henry — I’m ready to kill the bastard on sight.”

  It was the evening of the dinner, and Joan was chopping salad “fixins” in Henry’s kitchen. Henry himself was off in his Subaru, shopping for steaks and whatever else Tynan’s new barbecue could hold. Joan remained heightened to the haunting forces in play at this dinner, including the spirits of Theresa, the victims from Hollis Street, and Avelino González. The detectives at the party carried the scars of Hollis each in his own way, and each had agreed not to talk business tonight (and by “business” they meant death). For Joan, a positive mood was irresistible. Everything was so American. Every setting in Utah sprawled generously in a way that it never did in Britain and this dinner ranged with distinctly American energy from Henry’s house down to Tynan’s. Life seemed benignly peaceful on the desert’s edge. The sand threatened to erode the existing houses and the paced-out lots, but no one worried, for tomorrow the wind would carry the sand tidally away.

  The wastelands no longer intimidated her. She might even take a torch out into the dunes tonight.

  Peter had asked Phil Mohlman to bring the most exotic Belgian beer he could find in Salt Lake City, but the Bostonian hadn’t arrived, and Peter was getting thirsty. The doorbell rang. Joan put her knife on the counter and went to the door. Officer Jackson, in civilian clothes, came in with his wife, a thin woman in a white sundress, beautiful and beaming, whom he introduced as Wanda. Peter and Joan had the same thought: how nice it was to have spirited, and unscarred, youth in the house.

  Henry followed a minute later. “I dropped the steaks and some booze down at Tynan’s. Along with my Subaru, since our drive is filling up.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay down there?” Peter said — a rational question, but the words came out wrong.

  The women laughed, and so did Henry.

  “Yeah, Henry,” Joan said, “what are you doing hanging around your own house?”

  Henry pulled the collar of his shirt to one side. “I opened something lifting the box of liquor and supplies. We have to re-bandage.”

  “I’ll do it,” Wanda said. “I’m a nurse.”

  “So am I,” Joan said, “but it will go faster with two of us.”

  There followed a bizarre re-draping of Henry’s left shoulder by the two women right there in the kitchen, while Officer Jackson and Peter stared. Topless, Henry sat on a chair to be ministered to by a team of women in white. They might have been fabricating a plaster of Paris Adonis, or wrapping Henry for mailing.

  Peter wasn’t entirely at ease as temporary maître d’ in Henry’s home. He apologized for not having any beer to offer Jackson, and Henry apologized for the absence of hard stuff, which was down at Tynan’s. Jackson said he was content with soda water. Finishing with Henry, even buttoning his shirt for him, Joan gathered up the flowers the Jacksons had brought and assigned everyone a load for the safari to Tynan’s folly.

  “I’ll wait for Phil here, and we’ll walk down with the beer,” Peter said. Joan looked for signs that their conversation in the truck had upset him, and he in turn signalled that this would be a carefree evening without, as Joan had stated in adopted Americanese, “shoptalk.”

  But, perhaps from a lack of beer in his bloodstream, Peter started up as soon as Phil entered Henry’s house. “It bothers me that Boog still controls access to the grow house on Hollis.”

  “The lock box? I think it’s innocent. The Drug Squad has the superior claim to supervise the grow op house at Number 5. After all, it’s an active crime site as long as the case remains unsolved. Besides, Boog stepped up to the plate. He’s rousted every drug dealer in Salt Lake City to identify Tom Watson’s network.”

  “I’m speculating,” Peter conceded.

  Phil gave Peter a harsh, dismissive look. He’d really wanted to avoid theorizing tonight. His leg ached. He took out two of the Belgian brews and cracked them open. “You don’t mind warm beer, do you?” he said, taking a swig. “Let’s talk turkey, Cammon. What you’re suggesting is that Boog knew Devereau was the killer of the Watsons.”

  “I didn’t go that far,” Peter fired back.

  “Well, the answer is no. Yeah, he probably did know about the grow house. He monitors every ounce of Mary Jane t
raded in West Valley. But how could he admit that to Grady? Watson couldn’t have been smaller potatoes, so Boog ignored him. Those plastic bags of grass the killer left behind? Boog concluded that was all Watson had produced that week.”

  With this standoff, neither man ready to rehash the whole case, they picked up the beer cartons and headed down the slope. Phil turned to Peter. “I want you to know, Peter, I’ve decided to stay in Utah. I’m not going back to Boston.” Peter muttered in acknowledgement of his peace gesture.

  When they reached Tynan’s place, the women were gushing over the brilliance of his design. It turned out that Tynan possessed taste and his emerging creation was shaping up to be a showpiece. The rooms displayed the best of Western and Native sensibility, with exquisite weavings, Zuni pottery, and deep-carved furniture suited to a Mexican grandee. The sun at dusk deepened the apricot and pumpkin colours of the walls.

  Peter was given no time to admire the décor before he was pushed outside for the much-anticipated exterior tour. The plans of the house had forced some compliance with the other homes in the stalled development, but Tynan, with no fear of county assessors coming by, had made the changes he wanted. Each modification was an improvement on the standard blueprints.

  Tynan had enlarged the standard patio windows beyond what Henry enjoyed in his house, so that a guest sitting in the living room felt little difference between indoors and the outside. Oddly, there was no piazza like Henry’s, merely a small wooden platform holding a barbecue, and beyond that sand and cactus. Peter supposed that Tynan, taking off on his nighttime strolls, preferred to step directly into the wilds, without transition.

  The biggest surprise was the widow’s walk the Mormon had added. It wasn’t quite the captain’s walk that Phil Mohlman recalled from New England coastal houses, since it clung to the back slope of the roof rather than the peak, but it allowed the observer on the platform to scan miles across the arid ocean. Inside, the guests climbed an iron spiral staircase — taking turns, since the quad at the top was only ten feet square — to admire the panorama.

  “I was in touch with the developers this week,” Tynan said to Henry and Peter as they descended from the platform. “They sent a man out at my invitation, and he liked what he saw of our row, with your place looking good, Henry, and mine nearing completion. He says the company will finish the two units between our houses this year and, with luck, move on to the other blocks. The recession in our community may actually be behind us.”

  This might be Tynan’s folly, Peter concluded, but the Mormon was admirably committed to the neighbourhood.

  At the long dinner table, Wanda and Joan each found a tissue-wrapped package on her placemat. Wanda’s was a small coyote fashioned in coral.

  “It’s a Zuni fetish object,” Tynan said. “The coyote represents laughter and mischief.”

  Wanda smiled and saluted Tynan with her glass of wine. Tynan and Henry weren’t drinking, and Mohlman stayed with beer. No one drank hard stuff.

  Joan opened her package to reveal a hummingbird carved in jasper. Peter had a start as he thought of the broken-winged polymer drone left behind by Ronald Devereau.

  “The hummingbird is for peace. Also, he can stop time,” Tynan said, and Joan smiled. Tynan declared, “I’m sorry, no roadrunner. It’s not a traditional fetish animal.” Joan flashed Peter a how-did-he-know-about-that look.

  Phil reached over and picked up the young policeman’s name card. “It says ‘Officer Jackson.’ That confirms it: Jackson has no first name.”

  “It’s George Theodore,” Jackson said. “All my names are presidents.”

  “My middle name is Abraham,” Tynan added. “Another president.”

  Peter chimed in. “My father was named George Frederick, after Handel. He despised Handel’s music and didn’t like Germans much.”

  “Hallelujah,” Jackson said, getting a laugh from Joan and Henry.

  Wanda Jackson leaned forward and spoke with mock solemnity. “I have you all beat. My middle name is Nevada.”

  “Not Utah?” Phil said.

  “No. My father and mother were watching a movie called Wanda Nevada the night I was … conceived. Wanda was played by Brooke Shields. Do I look like Brooke Shields?”

  The mood remained jocular, muted a notch, in Peter’s view, by the fact that the four policemen had Kelso Vyne on their minds. Tynan flirted with the two women. Henry remained quiet, content to watch. The Jacksons held hands. Peter sat back, the sun almost extinguished now, and mused on the confluence of fate. Henry had lost his wife, but now friends from the far-flung world had mobilized around him, not least of all Joan, who had broken through Henry’s grief with a natural ease that Peter could not match. Peter and Joan had somehow been destined for this place, and he was happy. He didn’t mind that they represented a fading generation, while Jackson and his wife were the future (both were Utah-born, young, and black). Perhaps there was too much baggage, too much old news haunting the Pastern house up the road, but Peter knew that friendship, two generations of it here tonight, was the key to Henry’s renewal. Tynan, in whose house they were communally gathered, looked over at Peter. He knew these truths, too.

  But Peter was bothered by another thought. If Peter’s summing-up was correct, where did Henry Pastern himself fit in this cosmos?

  CHAPTER 44

  Joan announced that she had forgotten the whipped cream for the dessert, and Wanda agreed to accompany her to Henry’s house to get it.

  With the women gone, the four cops and Elder Tynan couldn’t help drifting to the object of the manhunt. As detective emeritus at the table, Peter might have presided over the conversation, but he consciously held back. He was restive, uncertain about something he couldn’t quite pin down. For, two nights ago, Peter had seen José Mariana’s big black Escalade slowly cruising the neighbourhood around Coppermount; it hadn’t stopped, nor had the driver seemed to spy Peter. Was it possible that the Mexican bodyguard was still supplying Henry with cocaine, Peter had wondered? He doubted it, nor could he believe that José was in league with Kelso Vyne in any way. Peter was a good judge of hard men, and José was a benign force when it came to Henry and Peter. Once a bodyguard, always a bodyguard?

  But Peter saw no way of introducing this variable without spoiling the camaraderie around the table. Now Mohlman filled the void.

  “What do we think about the trail of robberies that Vyne has launched since Denver? We’ve all been beating the bushes. Furst and Ordway are watching Utah, Arizona, and Colorado, and all of ViCAP. Rogers at DEA is taking care of the feds. We’ve got all levels covered, seems to me, but how are we going to catch him?”

  Jackson showed that he had been paying attention. “There was a drug heist last week in Tempe that Ordway thinks resembles Vyne’s MO.”

  Peter broke in. “Brockhurst at the Kansas Highway Patrol has been monitoring everything in his jurisdiction, given the Crispin Breach and Wichita incidents. Vyne seems to like Kansas.”

  Henry had been listening with equanimity. “Peter, we talked the other day about whether Devereau is panicking. He can’t be reaping much profit from raids on these cheapjack drug operations. Is it worth the risk to him? Does everyone think he’s lost it?”

  Phil, somewhat irritably, Peter thought, summed up the consensus. “Henry, it’s not that he’s panicking. Vyne’s still the same vicious bastard he was before. The thing is, he’s moving fast, and we have to keep up the pressure. Maybe we should put Homeland Security in charge. They can spread a bigger net.”

  Jackson glanced at Henry. “I don’t want to speak out of turn. I don’t know, gentlemen, but I was there in Number 3 with Henry and Phil …”

  Mohlman, who had taken a liking to Jackson, said, “You were the first on the crime scene.”

  Jackson proceeded: “We all hold the picture in our minds of the head in the trash in the Second House. It was the handiwork of a madman. But Num
ber 3 was worse in some ways. It was a home, furnished, decorated, lived in. The man who slaughtered Gabriella Watson was way out of control. He couldn’t stop himself. He was intent on punishment and desecration from the moment he knocked on that aluminum door. Detective Mohlman is right. Why would he change?”

  “The motive for what he did has always evaded me,” Phil commented shaking his head.

  “He’s psycho. I think he’s capable of anything,” Jackson added, thinking of the pools of blood in both houses.

  Peter, having had several bottles of beer, unwisely said to Jackson, “Did you know that DeKlerk continues to control the lock box at Number 5?”

  Phil glared at him. “Yes. Furst and Ordway have enlisted me to check on the Watson residence from time to time. Number 5 remains part of the active Drug Squad investigation under DeKlerk’s old group. I hope you’re not suggesting again that Boog knew the killer’s identity all along.”

  “No,” Peter said. He knew that he was off base continuing to provoke Mohlman on the lock box details, but more and more he found himself thinking of Boog DeKlerk. He backed off for the moment. “You’re right, Phil, DeKlerk is merely fighting to save his career. If he knew anything about Vyne’s whereabouts, why wouldn’t he turn him in and score points?” He paused and added, “I still think one or more residents knew about the drug operation on their street and may have suspected Vyne of killing the Watsons …”

  “We interviewed them multiple times,” Phil responded. Peter had gone too far in implicitly criticizing West Valley Homicide’s work. Mohlman stood up. “I’m going for a walk.” He strode out to the darkness of Coppermount Drive.

  Tynan, who had kept silent for a long time, said, “I’m surprised Joan and Wanda aren’t back.” He began to clear the table.

  Less than two minutes after Phil’s departure, a shotgun blast opened up the desert silence. Peter and the other men turned to the source of the shooting.

  The back of Henry’s house.

  Peter instantly knew that it was Kelso Vyne. He further grasped that Vyne had seen the ad in the Deseret Star. Peter’s stratagem had driven him over the edge. Peter, Henry, and Jackson made eye contact, with the same thought.