Mercy River

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  But I wouldn’t reject the possibility outright.

  Back on Main Street, I dodged the volunteers shilling for various causes and headed north and west, where my phone’s map told me Tyne Street was located. I’d found the street sign and was walking past a Winnebago RV, searching for Henry Gillespie’s office, when a hand about the size and weight of a cinder block fell on my shoulder.

  “You.” Lester Beacham spun me around to stare up into his bloodshot and furious eyes. “Fuck Face. I know who you are now.”

  Fifteen

  “You’re a buddy of that little piece of shit,” Lester said, gripping my shoulder and shaking it for emphasis. “The Jap.”

  “I know you, too,” I said. “The sucker puncher.”

  “What was that shit you were pulling with me and Wayne last night? You fuckin’ with us?”

  Behind Lester, a Griffon County Sheriff SUV turned the corner and glided up the street. I tamped down my first impulse. Now was not the time to fit the big ape for a body cast.

  “Smile, Lester,” I said.

  He followed my gaze to the hunter-green vehicle. Its passenger window rolled down as it pulled alongside.

  “Everything all right here?” It was Deputy Roussa. She leaned slightly over the seat as she gave both of us the X-ray eyes.

  “Sunshine and lollipops,” I said. “Mr. Beacham here was just telling me how good Leo has it in your jail. He misses getting three squares a day.”

  Roussa didn’t twitch. “I’m sure not for long.”

  Lester’s hand slid off my shoulder. “Later for you,” he said with a beery exhalation, and moved off down the sidewalk.

  I turned to Roussa.

  “We got three empty cells at the station,” she said. “Enough room for you and Lester both, if needs be.”

  The window rolled up, and after another moment, Roussa broke the stare and the SUV cruised away.

  I was making a hell of an impression in Mercy River. Another day, and they’d put me in the town stocks. Or set the Rally volunteers to building gallows.

  Henry Gillespie’s office was his home, and vice versa. A two-story bungalow painted white on gray, with large dormer windows in the front. The kind of picturesque house that raised property values a notch or two on the block. Hanging from a post on the lawn was an honest-to-God shingle. h. h. gillespie, esq. legal services.

  I rang the bell. Knocked on the door. No answer. No cars or people on the street, either. I walked around the narrow wraparound porch to the side of the house. The first window looked in on a small and exceedingly cluttered office. Gillespie had skipped the digital revolution. I could have built a sofa out of the stacks of files and folders and binders.

  Somewhere in those towers of paper might be a hard copy of Erle Sharples’s last will and testament. And if I had a week to spare, I could probably find it. I gave up and moved on down the porch.

  Gillespie’s bedroom faced the backyard. It had the air of a longtime bachelor. A single dresser, covered with dusty acrylic awards. The closet door stood open to reveal an overburdened hanging rack. He’d made the bed by simply pulling the sheet and down comforter in the direction of the pillow. Everything in deep tones—mahogany furniture, midnight-blue bedsheets. Even the lamp was made of jet-black ceramic. A pile of paperback thrillers waited on the nightstand beside an empty water glass and an ashtray.

  It was all a little too familiar. My own place might have held different stuff, but it had the same simplicity, the same depressing ambience.

  That wasn’t a cigarette lying in the ashtray, I realized. It was a slim syringe.

  A used syringe might not mean anything. Zeke Caton had said Henry was old. There were a hundred possible reasons why an old man might be injecting himself, including diabetes. No other obvious indications of a junkie’s rig, no burn marks on the nightstand or surgical tubing poking out of the drawers.

  Still, it got me wondering if it was really birdshot that Gillespie had intended to buy at Erle’s shop early that morning.

  I circled the house, aiming to search—very carefully, keeping needles in mind—through the lawyer’s trash to see what I could see. Opioid addicts threw away a lot of telltale crap depending on their drug of choice, like bits of burnt aluminum foil or straws for inhaling. Or I might find empty bottles of insulin, and riddle solved. But Gillespie’s garbage bins were out at the curb for pickup. The neighbors would notice if I started making like a raccoon.

  My phone buzzed. A message from Ganz.

  Suit and tie for L.P. delivered to house. Can you drop off at sheriff? Arraignment at 4PM.

  Of course Ganz had gotten Leo a suit. He’d probably arranged for hair and makeup, too. I texted him back that I’d take the suit to the jail. It would give me another crack at Leo, now that I had learned about his sweetheart and her grudge against the murder victim.

  Deputy Thatcher led me through the back rooms of the station and unlocked a rear door with one of his many keys. He motioned for me to step out into a small fenced yard, the space for inmates to get their mandated time for outdoor exercise.

  “Wait here,” he said before closing the door.

  The dirt yard obviously doubled as a dog run, maybe for visiting K-9 units, or the deputies’ own hounds. A plastic doghouse was set into a concrete slab, too far away from the twelve-foot razor-wire fence to allow anyone to use it as a jumping-off point. A metal water dish for the dogs was similarly secured with one bolt right through the center. The whole area was about fifteen feet by twelve and had a fine view of the stark courthouse wall. All in all, only a fraction less dismal than the jail cells inside.

  A second door opened, and Leo came out.

  “Five minutes,” said Thatcher, and vanished back inside. Talkative.

  “How’s your head?” I said to Leo.

  “Hardly need it at all.” He put a palm against the wall and pushed, loosening up his shoulder muscles. “I’m sorry I got pissed before. Just angry at the scene, not at you.”

  “It can be both.”

  “I don’t need a sergeant to keep me in line, Van. Sometimes you forget that.”

  “Maybe I’m mad at the situation, too. You shouldn’t be in a box.”

  “The court thing, the arraignment. Ganz coached me.” Leo’s mouth twitched, whether in discomfort or amusement I couldn’t tell.

  “Ephraim might still be able to get you bail, if you agree to stay in the county until the trial.”

  “He seems expensive. You’re paying the tab?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh.” He glanced at the security camera, set high up the wall and covered with protective steel mesh. “Last I knew, you were looking under couch cushions for change.”

  “I found the right couch.”

  “You don’t sound so happy about it.”

  I wasn’t unhappy. But the money came with weight. A lot of people had died trying to get their hands on it. I’d found it surprisingly easy to give it away, in big handfuls.

  “How did you get the job at the gun shop?” I said.

  The abrupt change of subject caused Leo to raise one eyebrow, the other still immobilized by his swollen forehead. “I called the Rally office, asked if anyone in town wanted temporary help. I told them what I could do, so they put me with Erle.”

  “Dez told you the Rally could do that? Place people?”

  “Yeah,” he said after a second’s pause. I had to walk a careful line. Leo had a blind spot in the shape of a lithe brunette.

  “Who’d you talk to at the Rally office?”

  “I dunno. Some woman took down my info and called me back like two days later. Why?”

  I shrugged like I didn’t know. Better to have Leo think about it a while.

  “Erle was the town miser,” I said. “And he was rich. Robbery could be a motive.”

  “He didn’t get rich off selling duck decoys. Not from the amount of business I saw.”

  “Maybe another way, then. Did—”

  The door swung op
en. Thatcher stood there, with another deputy as backup. “Time.”

  Dammit. Our five minutes had turned into three. Thatcher must be sore from the reaming Yerby had given him yesterday.

  I jabbed a thumb toward the cells. “Ganz found you a jacket and tie for the hearing. Let’s get you out on bail and sort this out.”

  Leo leaned in close.

  “I need you to trust me, Van,” he said under his breath. “Leave town. Leave it alone.”

  He turned and walked into the building.

  Thatcher pointed at me. “Stay here.”

  Left in the dog run, I considered what Leo had said. He was right that he didn’t need anyone giving him orders. He wasn’t the same half-broken man who’d wandered into Seattle a year ago. He had focus now.

  But to what end? Did he know the history between his girlfriend Dez and the murdered man? He wanted me to trust him. I guessed that he must know. Leo would do just about anything to protect the people he cared about. In that, we were alike.

  And I couldn’t leave until I knew whether he was throwing away his life.

  I looked up at the sky. The mist had finally relinquished the valley, and for the first time today I saw breaks in the clouds. A good omen, some would say. I didn’t believe in harbingers for good or ill. But I’d take sunlight where I found it.

  Sixteen

  Constable Wayne Beacham stood beside his refurbished police sedan outside the low symmetrical rectangle of the courthouse. He leaned on the car’s roof as he talked into his handheld radio. He saw me coming up the sidewalk and straightened abruptly. By the time I passed him he’d closed his conversation and hung the radio back on his belt, next to his service piece.

  “Hold up,” he said as I angled toward the courthouse door.

  “I’m due inside.”

  “It can wait. You’re a friend of Leonard Pak’s.” The constable’s eyes looked hollow, like all the traffic control around the Rally was costing him shut-eye.

  “Not a secret,” I said.

  “Do you work for his lawyer?”

  “I work for myself.”

  “So you aren’t a PI,” Beacham said, as if he’d caught me in a lie, “but you’re harassing people in our town. Trying to kick up shit.”

  “Which people? Your brother Lester? He’s hell at kicking, too, after he gets the first punch in.”

  “If you keep on with this, I will jail you for intimidation so fast it’ll give you windburn. Yerby can add witness tampering to the charges against Pak.”

  Beacham may have been as penny-ante as a cop could get, but he was still a cop, and on his home turf. He had every advantage. As much as I might enjoy telling him in explicit detail what he could do with his baton, it wouldn’t help me or Leo. I held my tongue and walked up the short path between whitewashed ornamental boulders to the courthouse door.

  Inside, a sheriff’s deputy waited, detector wand at the ready.

  “Is this SOP for bail hearings?” I asked as I submitted to a search for the third time in two days.

  “Mostly for trials,” he said, “but when somebody we all know gets killed . . .” He shrugged, and I took his meaning. People were mad, and pretty much everybody around here owned a gun. No sense in trusting angry people to make smart choices.

  “You’ll have to surrender the blade,” he said. I handed over my multi-tool as an older woman in a floral sweater and pink skirt emerged from a room farther down the hall, wheeling a small cart with a stenograph machine on it. The deputy hurried to assist. I followed their slow train through the double doors into the courtroom.

  Like the building that surrounded it, the room was purely functional. Two tables for the lawyers, a bench for the judge, stackable chairs arranged in rows to form a gallery with an aisle down the middle. A dozen townspeople, none of whom I recognized, occupied seats in the gallery. Leo’s hearing would be the entertainment that kicked off their weekend.

  Ganz had the left-hand table. He was dressed as simply as I’d ever seen him, in a dark blue suit that might have come off the rack, and a flat maroon tie. The papers laid out in front of him were separated into plain manila folders. His thousand-dollar calfskin attaché case was notably absent.

  I took the gallery seat directly behind Ganz.

  “How are we looking?” I said.

  “I’m looking just as I should. You look like what you are. Please sit on the other side of the room, toward the back.”

  “I’m sure the town constable set his brother on Leo. Maybe to soften Leo up before the arrest. There’s something in that.”

  “Not right here, and not right now. Go.”

  I went. I was choosing another seat when a woman entered the room from the hall and marched to the table opposite Ganz. They nodded politely to each other. She was dressed as conservatively as he was, in a coral-colored suit jacket and skirt, but on her it wasn’t a costume. Both attorneys approached the stenographer, who began to note down some of what they were saying.

  Deputy Thatcher emerged from a side door, along with Leo and Deputy Roussa. Lieutenant Yerby brought up the rear. He spotted me in the gallery and gave me a hard glare before taking a seat in the front row.

  Roussa waited until Leo was seated next to Ganz, and left through the same door. The blue suit and darker tie that Ganz had brought for Leo fit him well. With his hair pulled back, Leo could have been a bank teller, if it weren’t for the vicious bruise still marking his forehead.

  “All rise,” Thatcher said.

  Everyone stood. A matching door on the opposite side swung open to admit the judge in his black robes, followed by a young man who I guessed was a clerk.

  “Court now in session, Judge Clave presiding,” the deputy intoned.

  Judge Clave was somewhere near sixty years old and spare, his thin hands protruding like hawk’s talons from the folds of his robe. His close-set eyes gave the impression of a man who not only expected disappointment, but might even crave it.

  “Be seated.”

  We did, as the door to the hallway opened again.

  Luce Boylan walked in.

  My breath caught at the sight of her. I probably wasn’t the only one. The courtroom seemed to hush as she walked quickly to take the same chair I’d recently occupied, behind Leo and Ganz.

  What was she doing here? I wanted to follow her to the front of the room, but the clerk was already speaking from his desk in the corner of the courtroom.

  “Criminal case for arraignment,” he said, his voice as clear as a cantor’s.

  The judge broke in almost before his clerk was finished. “Counsel has previously stated their appearances for the record, am I right?” The stenographer said yes. “Then let’s get to it. Defendant, state your full name.”

  Ganz nudged Leo, who stood again. “Leonard Tae-Hyun Pak.”

  “This is an arraignment for you, Mr. Pak. I am going to read the indictment, which is brief. As follows: The state charges, count one, murder in the first degree. On October tenth of this year, the defendant did knowingly and with malice aforethought kill and murder Erle Franklin Sharples.”

  The gallery audience was silent, waiting. In a town this size, all of them must have known Sharples well enough to make his murder a personal thing.

  “Count two, assault of a law enforcement officer. That on or around the same date, the defendant did attack a town officer during the commission of his sworn duty. The prosecution has chosen to forgo the lesser charge of resistance, is that right?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said the DA from her seat.

  They weren’t tagging Leo with attempting to flee the arrest. Maybe the DA didn’t want to distract from the murder charge. Or maybe it was some ploy to nullify a lawsuit against the town for mob violence, or against Constable Beacham for excessive force.

  Judge Clave read on. “Mister . . . Ganz. Have you discussed the charges set forth in counts one and two with your client?”

  “Yes, I have, Your Honor,” said Ganz.

  “And does yo
ur client wish to enter a plea at this time?”

  “Yes. My client has chosen to plead not—”

  “Guilty,” Leo called out.

  “Leo,” I said automatically, but nobody heard it over the sudden buzz in the gallery, and from the tables. Thatcher ordered quiet in the court. Within seconds we were all straining to hear.

  “Say that again,” the judge commanded Leo.

  “I’m pleading gui—”

  “Your Honor, my client’s mental state must be considered here,” Ganz broke in. “As you can see, he has been seriously injured and has a hist—”

  Leo started to speak again, but Judge Clave made a motion, and this time the call for order was nearly a bellow.

  “You first.” The judge pointed at Ganz. “Anybody else talks and they are going straight into a cell next door. I won’t accept it.”

  Ganz nodded, his face as solemn as a mortician’s. “Your Honor, Mr. Pak’s actions are astounding to all of us. He and I had discussed and decided upon a plea of not guilty, and I ask the court to consider his state of mind and physical health at this stressful moment. Additionally, defense has had little time to review discovery, or even to collect—”

  “There will be time for all the discovery later, Mr. Ganz. Or before any plea discussions with the district attorney.”

  “If the court would allow us time, at least, to ensure that Mr. Pak has had medical treatment.”

  The DA decided to risk the judge’s wrath by speaking up. “Mr. Pak has already been examined by a doctor, Your Honor.”

  “And deemed to have suffered a concussion less than two days ago,” Ganz said without pause. “A short checkup is hardly enough to ensure a full recovery.”

  “Mr. Pak,” said the judge, “do you understand the charges against you? And that your guilty plea means forgoing a trial?”

  “Yeah,” said Leo.

  “Has your lawyer discussed the possible sentencing that might result?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes or no, Mr. Pak.”

  “Yes.”