The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘How did you know Frank Patrick is my cousin?’

  ‘It said so in the article about Marty’s death.’

  ‘Oh.’ The media did mention the fact every so often, either because they found it suspicious and indicative of some Vast Government Conspiracy against innocent civilians, or because they simply thought it was cute. ‘I’m not trying to get you in trouble, David. I know it was twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘It’s not for me, it’s for my kids. I have to protect them.’ He leaned forward, blue eyes still shocking in the intensity of their color. ‘My ex-wife comes up for parole next month. I would really like to keep her in jail – not to be vindictive, but it would solve the whole question of whether or not she’s entitled to custody. But I have to assume she’ll be released, at least until she violates her parole by contacting that kid again, and I know she will; she’ll probably stop at the first pay phone outside the prison—’

  ‘David.’

  ‘Sorry. I mean, she’s sure to get visitation rights and there’s a good chance a judge will give her custody. Her parents will give her a place to live and her lawyer – she’s got a good lawyer – will harp on details like Anthony flunking English and Jake getting suspended for three days for using a cell phone in class and that concussion he had last fall, even though I bought him a helmet for the skateboard but he won’t wear it because it’s not cool. I took it away after that until he promised to but I think sometimes when I’m not home—’

  ‘David.’ She put one hand on his wrist, risking the disruption to her emotions that the physical contact brought on. ‘No one’s going to give custody to a parent who just got out of jail.’

  ‘They might if the other parent produced and sold drugs that caused the death of a kid.’

  This harsh reality settled over them. Now she understood why he always seemed to walk with his shoulders pressed down – not to downplay his height but because he felt the weight of his children’s future on them.

  She put her hand over his, and again felt that rush of blood from the contact. Despite that, she would not promise to keep a secret from Frank. ‘Your crime occurred twenty-five years ago. Hers was three.’

  ‘In the eyes of a lot of people, hers wasn’t much of a crime.’

  She didn’t know what to say to that, and fudged some more. ‘I already know most of what occurred twenty-five years ago. But if anything is going to … happen between us, I need to hear it from you, David.’

  He hesitated so long she thought he might refuse, and had time to ponder what she should do if he did. Could she really blame him for placing his kids above some new squeeze? Did she care? Could she, in good conscience, bed him anyway? After all, who was the dead Joe McClurg to her?

  But what if it did have something to do with why Marty Davis had bled out next to her car?

  What if it didn’t?

  ‘Yeah,’ David said again. ‘I was Bean.’

  She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, for fear he would stop.

  ‘As in bean counter,’ he went on. ‘DaVinci loved to hand out nicknames, like we were all Russian spies or something.’

  Or so that twenty-five years later, Ken Bilecki couldn’t remember Madison’s real name, only his assigned tag. DaVinci seemed to be a guy who thought ahead.

  ‘I set up two accounts for us, one at Ameritrust and one at Ohio Savings. We used the business account to pay the chemical supply companies, and our profits went into the other one, the checking account, so DaVinci could pay the rent and the other expenses. We’d all have to buy cold pills, spreading ourselves over every suburb down to Akron so that none of us went into the same store twice in six months. He kept track.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did.’ She sipped the hot liquid. Theresa drank coffee for caffeine, but tea for comfort. ‘Where is DaVinci now?’

  ‘No idea.’ He looked her straight in the eyes when he said it, too. But then, he’d been looking her in the eyes since they’d met, when he told her he knew Marty Davis through his wife’s case and had never heard of Doc.

  ‘It sounds like he ran your lives for about a year, and you have no idea what his real name is?’

  ‘He ran the business, not our lives. All I had to do was place the orders, write out the checks and buy Sudafed once in a while. I had nothing to do with cooking or selling the drugs. I’m not making an excuse, Theresa, I’m not saying I’m any less guilty than Marty or Lily. But DaVinci was good at keeping us separate, at assigning us only the tasks we needed to do. I never touched the meth, never took it, never sold it. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe that, but it’s true.’

  She did believe him, but only on that point. ‘Didn’t you all live together?’

  ‘In the same building, not the same rooms. I had my own unit. Marty and Lily shared one, but otherwise we were separate. They were only converted hotel rooms, not big.’

  ‘So you committed felony crimes with these people for, what, a year or two? And you never knew your boss’s real name.’

  ‘I never asked. I didn’t ask about a lot of things. It seemed safer that way.’

  She would not have believed this, except that Ken Bilecki, who had been so in love with the entire operation, had not known David’s name. She described him, and David quickly nodded.

  ‘I think I know who you mean. Bug.’

  Bug. What else? ‘Because he picked at the imaginary insects he felt running underneath his skin? That’s common in meth addicts.’

  ‘No, because he’d bug you to death about every little thing, especially about our … business. Hyperactive. It’s a wonder he stayed in school as long as he did – he only went to class to find more customers.’

  ‘He was your salesman, Marty the enforcer, and Lily the mule.’

  He looked at her with a pain in his face that could break her heart if she let it get close enough. ‘Why do you want to know all this, Theresa?’

  ‘I don’t want to. But Marty is dead, and there may be a problem with Lily.’

  This seemed to perplex him. ‘I thought you said she overdosed.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ She summed up what Oliver had told her, in extremely general terms. She should not be sharing such information with someone outside the M.E.’s office, but she had to make him see that his situation might be more than merely embarrassing. It might be dangerous. If Lily had been murdered, she was the second from their little circle of six inside the past week. David Madison might know who had killed Marty Davis, and surely it would be better for him to reveal that information through her than to be hauled into police headquarters and questioned. She had to make him see that.

  Though it wasn’t her job to interrogate suspects, she had watched her cousin do it. She tried a more open-ended question. ‘Tell me about the fire.’

  He sighed, coughed. She pushed the teacup toward him as he explained about the meth lab in the old hotel kitchen. His account matched Ken Bilecki’s in every respect. However, David had entered it only twice – once to see the original set-up, and then when it caught on fire.

  ‘We’d get in through the service entrance at the back of the building. If we walked through the old restaurant to get to it, it would be too easy to be noticed by other tenants if they happened to be in the lobby. This also made it easier to unload supplies from the back parking lot.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t work in the lab.’

  He frowned at this show of mistrust. ‘I didn’t. But I helped set up the equipment the first time. It required a lot of stuff. Anyway, I never went near the kitchen again until – that night. I came back from class – Economics of the Public Sector – about seven thirty. I came in through the front door that everyone used, started to go to the elevator and heard this boom. Like, loud but muffled, you know? I had no idea what it was.’

  So many years later, he still shuddered at the thought.

  ‘I could smell the meth, but that was not new. It had gotten into the ancient carpeting and wallpaper in the lobby until it always smelled of meth –
at least I thought so, but it could have been my guilty conscience. All the tenants were college kids and either didn’t know what it was, or did and knew better than to get involved.

  ‘I stood there for a second or two, hoping it might be a hot water heater or a gas line or somebody shooting at somebody, anything but the meth blowing up. I knew the chemicals were volatile, I saw all the warnings that came with the invoices. So I went back out again, down the alley to the back of the building. We used the service entrance. I had a key. DaVinci had changed the locks so we could use it.’

  ‘Didn’t the landlord—’ She stopped. He hadn’t noticed a meth lab in the kitchen; why would he notice a changed lock?

  ‘He lived in Youngstown, I think, and never came around. As soon as I got inside, I could see the flames through the kitchen door and the smoke practically pushed me back out. I remember dropping my books and pulling my shirt up to hold over my mouth and nose. I just wanted to check the kitchen, I figured someone had to be there. Even without chemistry courses I didn’t think stuff blew up by itself. My eyes watered from the smoke, but I could see him.’

  Theresa took a breath. ‘Joe McClurg?’

  ‘I didn’t know who it was. I mean – I couldn’t tell. It was on fire. He was on fire.’

  And this very tall, very strong man shuddered again. She fought the urge to put her arms around him, lest she interrupt the flow of words. He seemed to have gotten past concern about his custody case or his job or anything else; she wondered if he had ever spoken of it to another living soul in the past twenty-five years.

  ‘He was by the center island, where we’d set up most of the equipment over the ranges. I couldn’t see any of it left except for some of those metal dowels that they’d attach the glassware to. I couldn’t tell, really, because every surface had become nothing but flames. At first I thought the kid was running up the aisle, trying to get to the door, but he was just flailing because then he stopped and took a step backward. He—’

  Here he paused again, and took a deep breath, pushing the words out even as they trembled. ‘He was completely on fire, like some kind of … cartoon, or movie or something. I couldn’t understand how he could still be on his feet, and just as I thought that, he toppled over.

  ‘I went in. I remember wondering how I was going to grab his hands to pull him out, since they were burning. I couldn’t use my shirt, I needed it to breathe. So I held the material to my face with my left hand and grabbed his arm with my right, which was stupid, since I’m right-handed.’

  Theresa turned his right hand, gently, until the palm faced upward. Only a few patches of scarred skin remained, and could have been taken for calluses. She stroked them with one thumb.

  ‘Even the floor burned, which I didn’t understand, linoleum burning. The chemicals must have sprayed all over in the explosion, like an oil spill on the ocean. The soles of my shoes got sticky – they were melting. I grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled.’

  His hand clenched in reflex from the memory. Theresa rubbed his fingers, trying to massage away the pain. It didn’t seem to work. ‘You were brave.’

  ‘No, I was stupid. I pulled him, but my hand felt like someone had stabbed it a hundred times. I stumbled and let go, and his arm fell back on me – that’s how I got the burn across my chest. I pushed it away and tried to grab his wrist, where the shirt had burned off, but it still felt like it was on fire to me. I was choking, and couldn’t see. The ceiling was on fire, the walls were on fire, the whole world was on fire, and suddenly I thought the upper floors would cave in and trap me there.’

  Theresa waited. She knew what would come next.

  ‘I left him.’

  ‘David—’

  ‘I got up and ran out. I left him there.’

  ‘You couldn’t have saved him.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he said, his eyes angry and wet. ‘I might have. I ran into Marty outside the door. He helped me put out my shirt. He asked if anyone else was inside and I said no.’

  ‘He’d have died if you’d let him go in. As you would have.’

  ‘I remembered to pick up my books on the way out, did I mention that? Even with my burned hands. Even with another person incinerating in the next room, I picked up my books from the rear hallway so that no one would know that I knew about that back entrance, so that no one would connect me with the meth lab.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  He wouldn’t look at her, and dug one fist into his eyes instead. This time she did not resist. In one quick, unthinking second she straddled his lap, wrapped both arms around his head and pulled his face into her neck. She felt wetness at her throat, and great heaving gasps of breath.

  After a few moments these subsided, but she felt no hurry to release him, enjoying the warmth and the smell of the short, silky hair her fingers found their way into. Just as she began to tell herself to get up and finish the conversation, she felt his lips on her shoulder and that decimated any remaining resolve. Words were crowded out in an instant.

  As she slid her tongue into his mouth and wrapped her feet around the lower rungs of the chair for leverage to pull her groin more tightly against his, it occurred to her that she hadn’t asked him if Joe McClurg had been the one called Doc or if he, David, had only asked her out in order to keep tabs on the investigation, hoping that Marty Davis’ past, and by extension his own, would not come up. But surely he could not be faking this, surely the way his hands crossed her back to bring her closer, pressing almost hard enough to bruise, could not be an act.

  She wanted the answers to those questions, but not enough to stop what she was doing. Hell, she couldn’t stop assaulting his mouth long enough to pull his shirt off even though desperate to feel his skin again—

  Two things happened.

  The door to the garage opened and her mother walked in.

  Then the phone rang.

  Theresa stared.

  Her mother stared.

  David gulped. His Adam’s apple moved against her arm, still wrapped around his neck.

  The phone rang again, and Theresa realized with a crushing disappointment that she had to do a few things right now besides kiss David Madison. She got to her awkward feet, greatly peeved.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ her mother said, cheeks bright red under the gray hair. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘Mom, this is—’

  David introduced himself. He did not stand up, indeed did not move, either because he didn’t know what to do or to try to hide the evidence of his excitement. Theresa felt a rough, nasty sort of hope that it was the latter and snatched up the phone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is this Theresa MacLean?’

  ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ To her mother, she said, ‘Come on in, Mom, it’s all right. I know this must be—’

  Then the man on the phone identified himself as a sergeant with the Cleveland police department, and asked if Theresa would please sit down.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said to the sergeant an hour later. ‘Though I seem to be saying that a lot lately. I really have to come up with a better response to explosions than endlessly confessing that I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.’

  The sergeant looked at her with an odd expression, and patted her arm.

  She choked her emotions down – not easily, as they’d been on quite the roller-coaster ride for the past hour – and tried to sound more professional. ‘How close were they to the bomb?’

  ‘On an inside staircase, I guess. It took out most of the second floor.’ She had never met this sergeant, a well-toned black guy with acne scars and gorgeous eyes. His name badge read Altman. ‘The other tenants were lucky. Most of them were downstairs waiting for dinner. Two were at work, and the other two were far enough away to be hurt but not killed. One’s in surgery now but expected to make it. Beltran’s the only one who died. He must have been right on top of it.’

  ‘So Frank and Angela were going to search his r
oom, but when he saw them he ran inside?’ Theresa asked.

  ‘Yep. A few seconds later, boom.’

  ‘Boom.’

  The sergeant leaned on the nurses’ station desk, and nodded at a security guard who walked by. The emergency room seemed to be functioning at its usual level of controlled chaos. ‘We figure he went for the explosives, either to hide them, or maybe to use them for some kind of stand-off. They detonated. Or he detonated them because he’d rather die than go back to the joint or because his wife left him, but I don’t go for that, really. Types like him never take themselves out. It would make life too easy for the rest of us.’

  ‘Why would Terry Beltran even have explosives?’

  ‘Who knows? You can learn a lot in the joint. Maybe he came out with a new skill, only he wasn’t too skilled at it yet.’

  ‘Why would he shoot Marty Davis, then? Why not put a bomb in his car?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘All I know is that the halfway house staff said no one was staying in Terry Beltran’s room except Terry Beltran, and that they don’t inspect the rooms because it doesn’t set the right tone for their felons’ little self-esteems. I said they might still have both halves of their halfway house if they had worried a little less about self-esteem. Let me tell you about the self-esteem of your average criminal. It’s pretty darn good. They all think no one matters but them and that they happen to be the baddest mother in the valley.’

  ‘Can I see him?’ Theresa asked. ‘I need to see him.’

  ‘Sure.’ The sergeant pushed off the desk and led her down the hallway. ‘But I have to warn you—’

  ‘He looks bad?’ Theresa tried to picture her cousin as a blackened, twisted fire victim, having burned as David Madison described the dead student—

  ‘His looks are fine,’ the sergeant said as he pulled back a curtain. ‘It’s his mood that’s bad.’

  ‘Like that’s news,’ Frank said.

  Her cousin had been stripped to the waist. Both arms and the left side of his face had red patches where some shiny ointment had been applied, and there was a bandage over one wrist, but otherwise he appeared blissfully unhurt. The worry she hadn’t acknowledged broke into a relief so sharp that tears came to her eyes.