Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “We just figured out how they did it,” said Karp, moving, looking for a phone to call Wade Hendricks.

  * * *

  Royal Eberly lived in the coal company house he had been born in, a four-room wooden affair with a sagging porch. It was painted baby blue with white trim. Red geraniums bloomed in number-ten cans on the windowsills and in the center of a white-painted truck tire in the tiny front yard. A faded American flag flapped gently above the heads of Karp and Hendricks and Eberly, the latter rocking in a straw-back rocker, the others in straight chairs. Mr. Eberly was sixty-nine; Karp thought he looked eighty: hollow-chested, sunken-eyed, hands so knotted with arthritis that he needed both of them to hold the jelly glass of iced tea. They were all drinking very sweet iced tea as Mr. Eberly talked about the old days in the deep mines. He had worked with Hendricks’s daddy right here in this coal patch, Racke Creek, forty-eight years, man and boy.

  Mr. Eberly was a loyal union man. He thought the world of Lester. Lester had come up to the holler himself when Mrs. Eberly passed a few years back. Last time the whole family was together. A shame. His daughters had moved away, something he had not expected. People used to stay with their kin. Mr. Eberly blamed it on the television. He didn’t have a dish himself. Radio was good enough, music all the way from Nashville. He used to play a fiddle himself away back in them days, but now the arthritis had stopped that pretty good. He didn’t have that old-timer’s disease though, thank Jesus, he could recollect good as he ever done.

  Hendricks said, “Now, Royal, I hear you all got a bonus to your pension a couple of months back. Do you recollect that?”

  “Sure I do, and it come in right handy. New tires on the truck. New muffler, too. I still got some left. It warn’t no bonus though. It was research.”

  “Research?”

  “Yessir. What they said. How we’ns was all getting along and such. Give us a paper, you had to make little crosses in the boxes, with a pencil, if’n you had a ’frigerator and a TV. How you spent your time, an’ all. I didn’t mind on account it was the union askin’.”

  “And they paid you for this?”

  “Yessir. A thousand dollars.” He shook his head. “Lord Jesus, that’s how much I made my first two months in the mines. Age of sixteen and one week old. Course, they wanted half of it back. One of the union boys, Jordy Whelan, drove me into the bank and I cashed it.”

  “Did they say why you had to give half of it back?”

  “Oh, some gummint foolery he said. I didn’t really follow it, tell the truth.” A worried look appeared on the worn face. “There ain’t nothing wrong, is there? I mean, I won’t have to give none of it back, will I?”

  “No, you won’t,” said Hendricks. “That enough for you, Butch?”

  “Yes.” Karp spoke a few formal words into the tape recorder and switched it off.

  They interviewed six other pensioners that afternoon, all with the same story. The bank records showed that fifteen checks for $1,000 each had been cut and issued. Each recipient had given half his check back in cash to Jordy Whelan. The Cades said $7,500 had been paid out for the murders. The math was simple.

  * * *

  They drove by the union hall the next morning, with a Bronco-load of staties for backup. These were not necessary, as Jordy Whelan came along with no difficulty. Karp recognized him as one of the bruisers present at the cat-fish dinner at Rosie’s, sitting with Floyd and Weames.

  “This ain’t about not showin’ up for my speed ticket, is it?” Whelan asked from the back of the unmarked.

  “No, it’s not,” said Karp. “It’s about some union stuff. Have you worked for the union long, Mr. Whelan?”

  Whelan placed a forefinger the size of a spark-plug socket on his upper lip and thought. “Six years, about that. What kind of union business?”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” said Karp.

  They took him to the back of the Burroughs Building and into a disused office full of furniture from a bankrupt firm. They all sat on swivel chairs around a dusty fake-wood conference table.

  Jordy looked like an offensive tackle, an appearance supported by his having retained his high-school-team crew cut, a hairdo that left the sides of his head nearly bald. He looked to have added twenty pounds or so since the glory days, mainly beer-gut.

  “What exactly is it you do for the union, Mr. Whelan?” Karp asked when they were settled, provided with coffee or RC, and the tape machine was running.

  “Administrative assistant, Local Four. That’s the Majestic Two mine.”

  “And your duties?”

  “Oh, you know, keep everything runnin’ smooth. Sometimes I drive Mr. Weames places, and interviewin’. Sometimes.”

  “Interviewing?”

  “Yeah, you know, talk to the members, see if every-thing’s okay. Check on the pensioners. How come you’re asking this?”

  Karp in reply read off a list of fifteen names from a typed list. “Are these names familiar to you?”

  “Sure. They’re pensioners. Alwin, Murphy, Eberly, all those guys. What about them?”

  “They say that over a period of five days sometime in June of this year, you drove them to several banks in this county to cash checks the union had given them, and that you then took half of the proceeds of these checks, in cash.”

  “Uh-huh. What about it?”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Sure. It’s the givebacks. Some of the old guys don’t have cars, so I drive them.”

  “Givebacks?”

  “Uh-huh. See, it’s like when you go to the grocery store. The food, say, comes to twenty-four dollars and you give the girl a check for fifty, and she gives you it in cash, so you have, you know, for gas and cigarettes.”

  “Right. And who told you to collect the givebacks?”

  “Oh, that was Mr. Floyd. He’s the business manager.”

  “And you handed the money to him? It came to what?”

  “Seventy-five hundred, all told. Uh-huh, and I gave it to him it must’ve been a Friday, because the checks always go out on Friday and I recall it took a whole week to collect from all those old boys.”

  “Did he say what he wanted it for?”

  “Uh-huh. The basement in the union hall needed sealing and the guy was going to give us a break on the job for cash. Oh, and the rats, too.”

  “Rats.”

  “Uh-huh. Rats in the basement. He said it was for an exterminator.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Whelan,” said Karp.

  * * *

  Whistles, cheers, hoots of laughter, filled the Burroughs Building when Karp played the tape for the assembled team.

  “No further questions, Your Honor,” said Marlene.

  “Yes,” said Karp, “I have had many golden moments in court, but this is going to have a special place in the scrapbook.”

  “I want to be a fly on the wall,” said Stan Hawes, “when Seward gets this stuff. He’ll want to deal.”

  “Oh, he may want to,” said Karp obliquely. Hawes met his eye, then looked away. They had an unvoiced understanding. Hawes would do most of the trial work and get the credit and front to the press, but Karp would decide the major strategic moves. Karp could see that Hawes still bore a trace of resentment about this, but Karp was careful not to rub his face in it, and Hawes had enough sense not to bring the subtle hierarchy into the public gaze. There was a little eye action with Cheryl Oggert, too, Karp noted. Maybe Stan manipulating around the edges? Who knew? thought Karp; who cared?

  “Well, it looks like the police part of the operation’s just about over,” said Hendricks. “I guess the governor’s going to be happy about that.”

  “Yes, he will,” Oggert agreed. “I get a call from his budget people every other day. It’s like we’re going to have to close the schools if Robbens County keeps draining resources. I told them you’d be able to release everyone back to normal duty as of the end of this week.”

  “This is wise?” asked Karp. “We don’t wan
t to depend on the sheriff too much.”

  “We won’t,” said Hendricks. “We’ll keep the detectives, and we’ll still keep priority at the lab. But we don’t need thirty-six troopers anymore. What I mean is, we already arrested all the bad guys.”

  “Your show, Wade,” said Karp. “I just work here.”

  * * *

  Three days later, after the defense had perused the Whelan testimony, and after some remarkable findings had come in from the state laboratory, and after Wayne Cade had been transferred to the jail, still refusing to talk to anyone, including his state-appointed lawyer, a call came in from Floyd’s attorney, Milton Seward, asking Hawes for a meeting. Karp insisted it be held in the makeshift conference room in the Burroughs Building, rather than in Hawes’s office in the courthouse. When the state’s attorney expressed annoyance at this, Karp explained, “I’m the bad guy, Stan. Let me be the bad guy, with the meet in the bad guy’s castle. They still think you’re a patsy. I don’t want them to discover you’re not until George is sitting at his trial. It’ll be a Clark Kent moment for you.”

  “This is how they do things in New York?” said Hawes grumpily.

  “Yeah, it is, and, you know, people around here ask me that a lot, I notice. It seems to be polite code for ‘Is that some kind of Jew trick?’ Answer: yes, it is. So, when we go in on this, I’m going to ask you not to contribute anything. I want you just to sit there and look uncomfortable.”

  “Well, hell, that won’t be hard,” said Hawes sourly.

  * * *

  Milton Seward was known as the Sewer among the members of the West Virginia bar, both because of his frequent use of salty language and because one of his first major cases had been the successful defense of a group of speculating contractors and councilmen accused of rigging bids for the construction of the Wheeling waste-water treatment system. He was arguably the state’s premier defense lawyer at the time, a status to which he frequently adverted.

  When he arrived, with his client in tow, Karp again noted that of the two canonical premier defense-lawyer personae—(1) slick, pinstriped $2,500 suits, French cuffs, handmade shoes, $200 haircuts; (2) custom-made, monogrammed cowboy boots, cattleman suits, funny Stetsons, sideburns, lots of heavy jewelry—the Sewer had chosen the latter. Waal, Ah’m jest a shit-kickin’ good ole country boy who made good: that was the message. Karp thought that the people who chose (2) did so because they were generally short little fucks and the cowboy boots gave them as much as three inches.

  “What the hell you tryin’ to pull with this goddamn horseshit, Karp?” was the Sewer’s opening gambit.

  “What goddamn horseshit would you be referring to, Mr. Seward?” Karp inquired.

  The Sewer flung a sheaf of bound paper on the table. “This. This Whelan so-called testimony. You can’t use this.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because the whole fucking thing is a tissue of lies coerced under pressure, plus declarant is a mental incompetent. Jordan Whelan has an eighty-six IQ.”

  “Making him smart enough to be a bagman for your client, but not so smart that he’d ask a lot of questions. His testimony, which was in no way coerced, a fact we can demonstrate without a peradventure of a doubt, is amply confirmed by the testimony of a number, fifteen to be precise, of union pensioners, each of whom received a thousand-dollar fee for so-called research, half of which fee was given back to Mr. Whelan, who then gave it to your client, who gave it to the three Cade boys, for which remuneration they murdered the Heeney family.”

  Seward chuckled, as if Karp had told an amusing joke. George tried to paste a smile on his face, but it came out like the grimace of a man who had just bitten down on a bad oyster. “Well, Lord fuck a duck, you New York boys sure can come up with the stories. You know as well as I do that there is no way on God’s earth you can connect that union money with whatever money, if any, got passed to the alleged murderers. It’s all fuckin’ smoke, Karp.”

  “Not quite smoke, Mr. Seward. I wouldn’t call DNA evidence smoke.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, DNA?”

  “Gosh, Stan, didn’t we turn that over yet? Well, it just came in from Charleston last night.” Karp handed a thin manila envelope across the desk. Seward made no move to pick it up.

  “It turns out that little Bo Cade had five twenties left from that payoff when he was arrested. Did you know that your client has a habit of licking his thumb when he peels money off a roll? Well, he does. I observed him doing it myself. And when we took a close look at those twenties, we found some saliva traces on the bills. And there was enough cellular material in the saliva traces to give us DNA lines. It’s amazing what they can do with tiny little bits of organic material today. I guess your client, being an honest fellow, hasn’t kept up with the very latest in criminalistics. Now, we haven’t matched that DNA with anyone yet, but since you look like a betting man, Mr. Seward, with that fancy outfit, I’d like to bet you, say, a thousand dollars that we get a match off your client there. What do you say?”

  “Ah, that don’t mean shit,” Seward exclaimed. “Fifty different people could’ve touched one of those bills.”

  “All the bills,” said Karp. “Same traces on all five bills.” There was a brief, delicious silence.

  Then Floyd leaned over and whispered something in his lawyer’s ear. The lawyer whispered something back. Karp loved to see whispered consultations like this. It was so hard for even experienced rogues to get their lies straight on short notice.

  “Not admitting anything at all at this time,” said Seward, “but my client directs me to discuss the possibility that other individuals were involved in plotting these murders.”

  “For example?”

  “Other individuals, an individual associated with the union. At the highest level. Suppose we were to say that this individual was the prime originator of the murder plot, who made the money available, who directed the murders, who used my client’s good offices as an unwitting intermediary.”

  “You’re talking about a plea in exchange for testimony, are you?”

  “Well, what the fuck do you think I’m talking about? I’d like to know what your position would be on that?”

  “My position on that would be that if your client pleads guilty to the top count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, and if he testifies to the material involvement of Lester Weames, we will place that fact into the cognizance of the sentencing judge.”

  “You’re fucking joking.” Seward had a face made up of semispherical units, not unlike that of W. C. Fields—little round nose, little round chin, full cheeks—and now all these turned rosy.

  “I am deadly serious.”

  Seward looked at Hawes. “Stan, what the fuck . . . are you gonna sit there and let him get away with this? I mean, are you the goddamn state’s attorney here, or what?”

  Hawes said nothing. Seward turned on Karp again. “Okay, then listen to me, Mr. New York! You got a lot of horseshit, is what you got. I don’t give a fuck what kind of DNA trickology, what kind of lying testimony from a bunch of no-account hillbillies, you bring into court, I will personally guarantee you that no Robbens County jury is gonna convict George C. Floyd for these murders.” He stood up. “Let’s go, George. We’re done here.”

  * * *

  “He might have a point,” said Hawes. “Those citizens who don’t think George Floyd is man of the year are scared silly of him.”

  “You’re thinking change of venue?”

  “It’s worth a look.”

  “No, it’s not. The whole point of this exercise is to bring justice to this county. Justice has to be done in this place, and seen to be done. If we have to run somewhere else, it’s not the win we need.”

  “We could lose.”

  “Bite your tongue, and cheer the fuck up, Hawes. We are going to pull George C. Floyd’s shorts down in open court and whip his heinie for him.”

  They walked out into the main suite. Harkness seemed to be the o
nly one at a desk. The chair Marlene usually occupied was empty.

  “Where’s Marlene?” Karp asked.

  “Oh, she’s gone. She got a phone call and just dropped everything and ran off like her hair was on fire. She said to tell you she was going to the city, but she didn’t say which one.”

  Karp knew which one. He learned the rest of the story early that afternoon, when Lucy showed up at the office.

  “Mom called me,” said Lucy. “Billy called her here and said that Jeb had got off the property and bit Mrs. Winchell next door. She got the truck out of the shop, drove herself to Charleston, and got a plane back to the City through Pittsburgh.”

  “Oh, Christ! There goes the college fund. Was the old lady badly hurt?”

  “Oh, no. She wasn’t like attacked. According to Billy, Jeb just likes to roam, and he roamed into Mrs. Winchell’s backyard, and her Scottie dog went for him, which of course Jeb ignored, and then Mrs. Winchell came out and tried to shoo him off with her cane, and I guess that constituted assault with a weapon in his dog mind, and he gave her a nip on the hand. Really it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Uh-huh, and I bet your mom will be making just that argument in front of a judge and a contingency-fee lawyer who’s already picking out the color of the Rolls. Why did she call you and not me?”

  “Sheer mortification, since you were always going on about something like this happening and ruining us. Also, she wanted me to collect Gog. I’ll be watching both of them at Dan’s place with the boys. The boys are in paradise. We’re going huntin’ ’n’ fishin’ this afternoon. I figured you didn’t need to worry about them while you’re involved here.”

  Karp raised an eyebrow. “You’re, um, planning on staying there, huh? Setting up light housekeeping?”

  “Yes, and what you mean by that is, are you sleeping with him? What do you think?”

  He studied the ceiling tiles. “Your mom thinks it’s unbridled teen lust out there.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s sort of gross when your mom leers at you, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, and I wish she’d cut it out. The problem is she’s been preparing practically her whole life to be the understanding and helpful mom of a gorgeous lust bucket like she was when she was my age, and what she gets is virginal me, floating slightly above the ground. It must be quite vexing.” Lucy paused and gave him one of her deep looks. “You really don’t want the details of my—ha ha!—sex life, do you?”