Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Uh-huh, that’s so,” said Hendricks, “but since you all let Mose Welch loose, they haven’t stirred from home. And if you swear out warrants against the three Cade boys, I can guarantee you they will disappear permanently, or at least until this show goes home and things get back to normal. For them, I mean.”

  “It would be good,” said Karp reflectively, “if we could lure them out. And grab them up in town or on the road.”

  “Lure them?” Marlene asked. “I could do my Streisand medley from the bandstand in the courthouse square. Do you think they’d be attracted by sophisticated song stylings?”

  “I think we need to hold that in reserve, dear,” said Karp, “if all else fails.” He got up and paced. Everyone watched him do it. “Let’s see,” he mused, “we know these people aren’t rocket scientists, so how hard could it be to schmeikel them?”

  “Pardon?” said Hendricks.

  “Oh, schmeikel? An old Norman French legal concept meaning to cozen, deceive, gull, shaft, bamboozle, generally in financial matters but by extension in any negotiation. And now that I think of it, you said something interesting there a while ago, Wade. You said the Cade boys holed up after we let Welch go. Because they’re afraid we’ll go after them next, since they really did it. Also, let’s assume they have a leak or leaks letting them know all about the evidence we have pointing their way.”

  “Leaks? What leaks?” said Hawes.

  “Hey, in a small place where everyone is related to everyone else, most of what we’re doing will become general knowledge before long. Believe me, it happens in New York and Washington, too. But this, what we’re planning now, absolutely can’t get out. It can’t go beyond the five people in this room plus one.”

  “Two can keep a secret if one is dead,” observed Marlene darkly.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Karp, “good advice from the Sicilian delegation.”

  “Who’s the plus one?” asked Cheryl Oggert.

  “The new judge. He’ll have to be in on it. I’m hoping that with enough hoopla and verisimilitude we can roll them, even if they hear rumors to the contrary. You’re going to have to be the key man in the deception, Stan.”

  “Deception? I don’t follow,” said Hawes, scowling. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, sorry. I thought it was obvious. The schmeikel. You have to go into the tank, and let them know that you’re going in. You have to find another Mose Welch, but a more plausible one, a more shocking one, and Cheryl here has to grind out publicity on it and all of us have to have our pictures taken, grinning like idiots. Once we’ve seemed to settle on the new suspects, and once Stan has told Floyd that he’s aboard, our real scumbags ought to come down from their impregnable mountain stronghold to join in the fun, just like they did when we had Welch.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment, digesting this. Then Hendricks asked, “Is that legal? Arresting someone like that just to get someone to come out of hiding?”

  Karp forbore to roll his eyes. “No, Wade, we’re not really arresting anyone. The persons involved will of course be volunteers. Legally, the whole thing will be a nullity. It’s analogous to those scam contests the cops in New York and the feds use to pull in fugitives. The cops send an official-looking letter to the fugitive’s last known address—congratulations, you’ve won the lottery, come to such and such an address and pick up your check. Or it’s season tickets to the Yankees. The mopes show up and get nabbed.”

  “They actually fall for this?” asked Oggert incredulously.

  “Every time. And these are streetwise hoods we’re talking here, not . . .” Karp searched for a nice way to put it.

  “Dumb hillbillies?” suggested Oggert.

  “Thank you,” said Karp with a grin, and to the group: “Well, what do you think?”

  “It might could work,” said Hendricks. “Who were you thinking of? I mean for the phony killers.”

  “Ideally, like I said, it should be someone both plausible and scandalous, so that the fake carries some weight. We want big publicity on this, and we want the Cades to really believe that they dodged the bullet again, that Stan here is bought and wired. I also want them to think it’s amusing. I want them to want to come to town and sit around in bars and chat about ain’t it awful how—”

  Marlene interrupted, “I know who you’re thinking of and I think it’s disgusting. How could you?”

  “It’s right, Marlene. You know it’s the only way to go.”

  “It still stinks on ice.”

  As the three others observed this exchange, confusion grew on their faces. Hawes said, “Would you mind telling us what you’re going on about?”

  “Sorry,” said Karp. “My wife is objecting to my plan, which she figured out because she knows my devious ways, as I know hers.”

  Marlene said, “He wants to use the boys. The Heeney boys.”

  Karp saw the ripple of revulsion replace the confused looks. He ignored it. “If they’ll agree,” he said. “And if the judge will go for it.”

  * * *

  Judge Honus Ray Bledsoe had not enjoyed retirement much, although he had a generous pension, a comfortable house with a garden in which he grew roses. The roses won prizes; they dared not do otherwise. He read widely; he gave an occasional interview; he recommended bright local kids to law schools; and he was bored. He had left the high court bench at age seventy-eight as he had promised himself he would. By no means a fearful man, he admitted to himself that he feared the loss of mental powers he had seen among many of his older colleagues. Appointed judges may in most places serve for life, and it is a sad peculiarity of their status that usually no one in their milieu is comfortable with telling them they have become senile, while many may benefit from manipulating them in their infirmity. The problem, Bledsoe thought, was that the victim of advanced age was the last person to know he was losing his sharps, and in his case no one was around anymore he could trust to tell him. His wife would have told him, but she was dead. His kids all lived away, and besides, they thought he was immortal, which he knew he was not, but was eighty-three all the same. So when Orne had called him about cleaning up Robbens, he had agreed to do a job he had thought about on and off for four decades, provisional to an interview, during which they had discussed points of law (Orne had been his clerk) and the events of the day. At the end Bledsoe had asked Orne in his characteristically blunt manner whether the governor thought he still had all his marbles, and Orne had said that in his opinion the judge had more marbles than anyone else in the state of West Virginia.

  Armed with this opinion, he had driven himself, in his 1985 Cadillac Seville, from his place in White Sulphur Springs to Windy Grove in Robbens County, where he shacked up (as he said) with Marva, his baby sister, who was living in the ancestral home. After a day of rest to recover himself (on Marva’s insistence, actually, since he felt fine), he had reported to the Robbens County Courthouse, where he terrified the staff, who had become used to Bill Murdoch’s slack ways. Judge Bledsoe disliked slackness, nor was he overly fond of fancy lawyers, especially fancy lawyers from New York, especially very large fancy lawyers from New York. Judge Bledsoe was, on the outside at least, a rather small man.

  Karp thought he looked, close up, like a rooster. The TV photo had been taken some years ago, it seemed. He had a cowlick, for one thing, which stuck up like a silvery crest, and wattles that got red when he was annoyed, which Karp thought might be most of the time. Maybe it had been a mistake to let Hawes do most of the talking. They were in Bledsoe’s chambers. Bledsoe had recorded his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the investigation so far (although Karp thought that was really none of his business) and with the arrest and detention of Moses Welch. His wattles had reddened at the mention of bribes, and reddened more when Karp had explained (in approximate terms) just how Murdoch had been dispatched. When they told him about the plan to apprehend the Cades, the red moved up his jaw and blossomed on his cheekbones. Karp imagined that if it reached his crown, it wo
uld detonate, like a thermometer in a cartoon.

  “You want this court to participate in a public fraud?” Bledsoe asked, his voice quiet but deadly.

  Hawes hemmed; Karp interjected, “Your involvement will be minimal, Judge. You have no reason to speak to the media and can refuse to comment if asked. Obviously, you’re one of the few people who need to be apprised of the plan. Also you’d be issuing the warrant. We’d want to have Sheriff Swett do the arrest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Swett will leak it to the Cades as genuine.”

  “If Swett is corrupt as you claim, then get rid of him.”

  “Good idea, but after the Cades are in custody.”

  “So your plan is to fight corruption by chicanery.”

  Karp took a deep breath and kept his face neutral. “Yes. Because given the time frame the governor has set, there are only two other alternatives. One is to let them get away with it. The other is to go up onto Burnt Peak and drag them out of there. I assume being a local man you know what that would be like.”

  “I’m not afraid of Ben Cade.”

  “I’m glad of that, sir. I am. I have it on expert advice that doing the dragging would cause the biggest bloodbath since the Robbens County War, even assuming we could get official permission for an assault. I’m as big a fan of legal niceties as you are, Judge, but I wouldn’t want that blood on my hands, if there was any alternative. And I think we have one here.”

  Karp and Bledsoe played the staring game for a while, the judge’s mouth line bending down into a hair-thin parabola.

  “This how they do things in New York, Mr. Karp?”

  “When necessary, sir.”

  “All right. I want all this documented and signed by you two and anyone else with cognizance of it. Who does what when and where and to whom. That includes the putative suspects. I assume they’re on board?”

  “More or less.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re working on the details.”

  The judge grunted. “Well, make sure they know exactly what they’re getting into.”

  “Yes, Judge,” said Karp. “And, Judge? That would be a document you’d want to take some care of.”

  Bledsoe shot him a fierce look, then tapped his breast pocket, slowly, thrice. “It’ll sit right here, Mr. Karp. I think that’ll be all for now.” Bledsoe turned pointedly to some papers on his desk. Karp got up immediately and left, and after a moment’s hesitation, so did Hawes.

  * * *

  Out in the hallway, Karp said, “What’s the matter, Stan? You look like you’ve never been contemptuously kicked out of a judge’s chambers before.”

  “Never like that. I don’t think he likes you much.”

  “No, he made that very clear. Which is just another reason for me to take a low profile and you to take a high one. On the other hand, I have the impression that Judge Bledsoe is the kind of judge who, if he doesn’t like a lawyer, makes an extra effort to be scrupulously fair, as opposed to the kind who in similar circumstances will try to fuck you up. Let’s get out of here. I want to talk in the open air.”

  They found a bench in the courthouse square, in the shade of a huge oak. Karp said, “I meant it about you being the center of this thing. You have to convince Floyd that you’re going to do everything you can to pin this on anybody but the people who did it. Besides that, you’re going to have to play a corrupt bastard in front of a TV audience, the town, all your friends, and your family. And you can’t tell anyone about it until we have those people in custody. You understand that? Not your wife, not your parents.”

  “And you’re wondering if I can do it.”

  “Yeah, a little. I’m a control freak and I’m giving up control. It makes me jumpy. I guess I want to make sure you understand how miserable you’re going to be. And also this: undercover work, which is what this is, is the worst work in the world. I’ve seen it a million times in the cops. A decent guy pretends to be a scumbag all day, pretty soon he finds it hard to go back to being a nonscumbag. Every undercover detective I know has been divorced at least once.” Karp allowed a moment to let this sink in. “But if we’re lucky, it won’t last long.”

  “I can do this,” said Hawes. “I’m not worried about that. I’m not worried about a failure. What I’m worried about is, even if this works, and we get them, and we can convict them, and Floyd, and the rest, and you’re back in New York City, I’ll still be here. I’ll still be here with my family. And the Cades will still be up on that mountain, mad as hell, and looking for someone to hurt.”

  Karp nodded. He didn’t have a good answer to that.

  * * *

  This conversation stuck irritatingly in Karp’s mind and nagged at him during the even more unpleasant interview he and Marlene had that evening with Emmett and Dan Heeney, in the living room of their home.

  “You must be out of your mind if you think we’re going to do that,” declared Emmett at the conclusion of Karp’s pitch for the idea. “Get arrested for killing our family?”

  “It’s not a real arrest,” said Karp patiently. “It’s a scam. I explained that the Cades are holed up—”

  “I heard you. That’s not our business. Hell, maybe now is the time to blast those Cades out of there. Let ’em drop napalm on ’em, I don’t give a rat’s.”

  “Well, but that’s not going to happen, Emmett. The only way, the only practical and realistic way to bring those men to where we can get at them is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the law has made a big mistake again.”

  “Okay, but why us?” said Emmett sulkily.

  “It’s the most convincing scenario. It’ll get the kind of publicity they won’t be able to ignore. And, frankly, it’s so outrageous that they won’t believe it’s a scam. Also, you have an interest in it. I’d have thought you’d be glad to do it.”

  “Well, you thought wrong.” Emmett crossed his arms.

  Marlene said, “Emmett, I know it’s an awful thing to ask you to do, and I was truly disgusted when Butch brought it up. But he’s right when you consider the alternatives. What you need to do is think about what your dad would’ve wanted you to do. What would Red Heeney have done?”

  Emmett made no response to this. A silence ensued. Then Dan said, “He’s worried about Kathy.”

  “I am not!” snapped Emmett.

  “Yeah, you are. You’re thinking of what she’ll be thinking while everyone else thinks you killed our family. And you’re thinking about what her parents will say, what the town will say.”

  “Oh, that’s such horseshit! You always think you know what I’m thinking.”

  “I do. And what am I thinking, huh?”

  Emmett looked startled. “Well, too bad, you can’t, you weren’t even here when it happened.”

  “No, but I could’ve hired it done,” said Dan. He said to Karp, “That’s a plausible scenario, isn’t it? Everyone knew my dad and I didn’t get along. So we say I hired a drifter to do it. I didn’t want him to kill my mom and Lizzie, but he did, and then I confessed just now out of remorse. You’re still looking for the drifter. Would that work?”

  Karp’s glance flicked briefly between the two brothers. “Yeah, that would work fine, if that’s how you want to do it. We could put out fictitious wanted posters of the make-believe drifter.”

  “Ah, that’s so dumb,” said Emmett. “How in hell would someone like him find a damn contract killer? Not one person in this whole town would believe it. The Cades would laugh themselves sick.”

  Dan said, “Well, you don’t know dick about it, do you? Butch is the expert. He thinks it’ll work.”

  “You ain’t doing it,” said Emmett with finality. “If anybody does it, it’ll be me.”

  * * *

  “What do you think,” asked Karp somewhat later as a trooper in an unmarked police car drove them home, “was that a little brotherly manipulation we saw there?”

  “Who, Dan? I don’t think so. He really would�
��ve done it because he’s genuinely noble. He’s Rose Heeney’s kid down to the bone. Plus, he doesn’t give a shit what anyone in this town thinks about him. Emmett does. He’ll do it, mainly to stop Dan from doing it. But ten to one, he’ll tell his girl.”

  “No bet,” said Karp, and then dejectedly, “This is not going to work, is it?”

  “It might,” Marlene said, but without enthusiasm. “But I never want to hear another lecture from you on the ends not justifying the means. Meanwhile, it’ll depend on how fast the McCullensburg grapevine is against how stupid the Cades are. You have a shot. Even if it does work, however, you’re not going to love it, are you?”

  “No. The idea that once we have probable cause for an arrest, we can’t in fact arrest an individual without the potential for a huge disaster . . . it makes me break out in hives. I hate it. And I hate what it makes us do. Like this crap with the Heeneys.”

  She saw how upset he was, and instinctively she leaned closer to him, ran her arm through his, clutched his hand. “Yes, you’re a law-and-order fellow, with law first.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. But the concept clearly hasn’t penetrated to every corner of the world, including here. We can but hope things improve. You know, you’re going to laugh, but ever since I got here, I’ve been having a sort of déjà vu, a sense that I’ve been in this kind of place before. You recall I mentioned that earlier? And I just tonight figured out where it was. It was something you said when we were planning this. The mountains, the lawlessness, the families, the vendettas . . .”

  “Where was it?”

  “Sicily. No wonder I felt right at home.”

  “Sicily, huh? Gosh, Marlene, you really know how to cheer somebody up.”

  “Thank you. It just occurred to me also that the miners are not going to take the arrest of Emmett very well. For the dissident faction, he’s sort of the crown prince, the son of the martyr.”

  “What are they going to do about it?”

  “No, you’re still thinking New York. There, when people protest, it’s a bunch of liberals with placards. In extreme cases, a riot, stores get trashed, and everyone goes ‘Oy vay!’ Here they use dynamite and everyone’s armed to the teeth. But I have an idea.”