by Ford, G. M.
“Might be very interesting to have a look.”
“What say we repair back to the family manse and do just that,” she suggested.
The motion was seconded and thirded.
“One hundred forty-six thousand dollars and eighty-three cents,” she said, pointing at the computer screen. “Out of pocket in the past year and a half. He took her up to Providence in Everett. Gene therapy. That’s why it took a while to find.”
“Ibrahim didn’t have pockets that deep,” I pointed out.
“No . . . he didn’t.”
“And the only one of the five cases they were pressing against you where somebody does have that sort of loose change is the Harrington case, but they don’t have anybody they’re trying to spring from jail. Quite the contrary. They’ve already got their daughter’s murderer convicted and doing life without, over in Walla Walla.”
“Then what?”
“Clueless.”
“You know,” Rebecca said in a low voice. “I feel a little better about the whole thing now. I sorta don’t blame Ibrahim for what he did. We let people like him give their lives to public service, and then we nickel-and-dime them over the most precious things in their lives. It’s just not right.”
“He tried to tell me,” I said after a quiet moment.
“Who?”
“Ibrahim. The last thing he said to me was to the effect that family was everything. I think he was . . . you know . . . trying to apologize. Trying to tell me that he’d only done what he needed to do.”
“So who came up with the cash then? That’s a lot of loose change,” Gabe said. “Somebody had to set this thing in motion. And why?”
I just shook my head.
Rebecca pushed herself to her feet. “I’m on TV in the morning. I better see if I can put together something to wear.”
Gabe was chewing. I leaned back against the sink.
“You made handling the brother look pretty easy last night.”
“It was easy.”
I waited for Gabe to swallow. “How’d you know that cop?” I asked.
“He tried to nail an assault rap to me once.”
“Was he successful?”
“We’re standing here talking, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t sure whether the “we” referred strictly to Gabe or to both of us, so I segued. “Gabriella Funicello, huh?”
“You make any Annette Funicello jokes, and I swear to God, I’ll shoot you.”
I kept my mouth shut. I could hear Rebecca thrashing about in the bedroom.
“You take a lot of crap about your name as a kid?” I asked.
“For a while,” Gabe said. “Took a lot of crap about a lot of things. High school’s tough that way. I wanted to play on the football team, but they wouldn’t let me. You’d have thought I wanted to burn babies on the town square.”
“Where was this?”
“Topeka, Kansas.”
“What brought you out here?”
“Topeka was a tough place to be genetically ambiguous.”
“I’ll bet.”
“My family wasn’t much. Just livin’ hand to mouth. Havin’ a kid like me was hard on them. They weren’t exactly deep thinkers. There was nothin’ holding me there.”
“Is it better here?”
“Around here you could marry the family pet and nobody’d give a shit, except maybe the ASPCA. In Topeka you’d look out the window and there’d be a mob outside with shovels and rakes and torches . . . with a squad of reverends leading the way, riding your ass out of town on a rail, for the glory of God and the brotherhood of man.”
“So . . . you know . . . if you don’t mind me sounding like a Topeka preacher, what exactly is ‘genetically ambiguous’?”
Gabe grinned. “You know why I’m going to answer that instead of getting all up in your face, Leo?”
“Why?”
“’Cause you don’t really give a shit. Not like it bothers you or anything. It don’t threaten you. I can tell. You’ve just got a case of curiosity that killed the cat. You just can’t stand not knowin’.”
“Bad habit,” I allowed. “Damned near got me killed on numerous occasions.”
“I have no doubt,” Gabe said, without a trace of humor. “So anyway. Just so your little brain can be at rest: If you ask gene doctors about me, they’ll start to mumble something about my extraordinary combination of chromosomal genotype and sexual phenotype. If you recall from biology class, men are XY, and females are XX. I’m an other. I’m the exception to the rule. I’m both and I’m neither.” Gabe wagged a finger in my face. “But remember, asshole: my multitudes . . . we’re all Italian.”
“And . . . you know, like . . . You prefer . . . ?”
“I prefer not to.”
Didn’t seem the place for a snappy rejoinder, so I kept my trap shut.
“I was kidding before,” Gabe said after an awkward silence.
“About what?”
“When I said you guys didn’t need me anymore.”
“You think we do?”
“I work from the theory that if things seem nice and simple and cut and dried, I’ve probably missed something. You know what I mean? Every damn thing we needed fell into our laps like manna from heaven. And, oh yeah . . . the guy who really did it just happens to end up stone dead, so he’s telling nobody nothing, and everything’s rolled up nice and neat like a kid’s birthday present. The Doc’s exonerated. Her lawyer sues the crap out of the DA’s office and everybody but them goes away feeling fuzzy and fulfilled. Except that I still feel like I’m missing something here,” Gabe said. “Like when somebody tells you a joke and you just don’t get it, and you’re standing there wondering what in hell everybody else is laughing at.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s how I’m feeling too. We’ve got everything we need except the answers to anything.”
“Like what happened to the pair of hitters who tried to make it look like she killed herself and then tried to take her out again at Harborview? The UPS guys. They leave the country or what?”
“Same van ran Ibrahim down,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Then those guys are still around, and this ain’t over.”
“Unless this whole mess has somehow or other accomplished whatever it was set in motion to accomplish.”
“Like what?”
“Not a hint.”
“Then we’re running blind, and blind makes me nervous.”
I thought about it for a while and finally had to agree. “Yeah . . . I guess we just take things one at a time. Let’s see what happens with the news conference tomorrow and then go from there.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
I left Gabe standing in the kitchen and started up the hall toward the bedroom. Rebecca had dumped out the whole plastic bag of clothes I’d brought from her house. She was down on her knees rummaging through the mound.
“Do you have an iron?” she asked.
“Top shelf in the hall closet.”
“I’m going to look like the wrath of God,” she groused.
I walked over to the bed, grabbed one of the disposa-phones from the paper bag, and stuck it in my pocket.
“Yeah,” I said. “But your strength will be the strength of ten because your heart is pure.”
“Get out of here,” she growled.
I did. When I strolled back through the kitchen, Gabe had gone upstairs. I took the phone out into the backyard and dialed the number Eagen had given me. Right to voicemail of course. I told him what was going on and that it was time to pull his head back into his shell, ’cause, for the time being anyway, we had things firmly under control. The second it was out of my mouth, I knew it was the kind of thing you never wanted to say out loud. That’s probably why I was still talking when the machine hung up on me.
Gabe shouldered the nearest photographer out of the way. The newshound would have ended up flat on his ass, except there wasn’t enough unoccupied space in the hallway to fall down
. I had one hand locked on Rebecca’s elbow and was using my hip as a battering ram as we fought our way toward the elevator. The air was heavy with shouted questions and shuffling feet. I kept us moving down the corridor, hip-checking people out of the way as we moved along.
A junior member of Nancy’s firm was waiting with my car in the building’s garage. All we had to do was get there. We had a little over an hour to get back to my place. Prior to the news conference, Nancy had negotiated the terms under which we would surrender the newly discovered evidence. My place. One o’clock. We would hand the stuff over to duly appointed officers of the court, and we’d already worked up the formal deposition I was required to give concerning how the material had come to be in my possession. After that, the DA’s office would review the situation and, after due diligence, respond accordingly.
We made it with ten minutes to spare. I left Gabe to person the gate, let Rebecca in the back door, and headed out to the garage, where I pulled the red tote down from the shelf and carried it back into the house. Gabe buzzed me from the gate to tell me our guests were there.
They arrived en masse. Nelson and Krauss in one car, a pair of nerds from forensics in a county van. And, just to add sufficient gravity to the situation, Prosecuting Attorney Paul Woodward decided to grace us with his most august presence. Woodward and a pair of toadies arrived like Caesar conquering Gaul. The toadies waited out in the driveway. Woodward immediately got busy giving orders. Make sure of this; don’t forget that. Has this been accounted for? Let the record show, I kept my mouth shut. For a while anyway.
The nerds had their very own Igloo cooler. They put all the files inside, and one of them looked over at me. “Do these require refrigeration?” he asked me through the mask.
I tried, but couldn’t help myself. “Nah,” I said. “Those are already the cold hard facts.”
The nerds chuckled behind their masks. Woodward couldn’t stand it.
“We’ll let you know what our findings are,” he said.
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a blue thumb drive and a chrome key.
“Be sure to let us know what you think of these.”
From the look on his face, you’d have thought I was trying to hand him a dog turd.
Wish I could tell you that what followed was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but truth was that Nancy and I had choreographed the scene in advance. Because both she and Rebecca were officers of the court, she decided it would be best if I did the talking.
The nerds headed for the front door with Gabe in tow. I dropped the thumb drive and the key into the palm of Woodward’s hand.
“The key is to the storage unit. The thumb drive contains pictures I took with my phone on the day I found the storage locker. There’s times and dates on them. Your techies are gonna tell you straightaway that the pictures haven’t been doctored, and you’re going to find out that the files are genuine too, and when that happens the first thing you’re going to do is to throw Mr. Durka under the bus. That’s what guys like you do. They get out from under at somebody else’s expense.”
His smooth face twisted in anger. “You’d know about guys like me, wouldn’t you, Mr. Waterman?” He swept a hand around the area. “Living here in baronial splendor on money stolen from the Seattle taxpayer.”
“My father was never convicted of stealing anything,” I said. “He just did what everybody else was doing at the time. He just did it better than they did.”
He opened his mouth, but I raised my voice a notch and kept talking. “But before you throw Mr. Durka to the wolves, I want to run something by you. Yeah . . . Mr. Durka took money from somebody to steal files. There’s no doubt about that. Why somebody would pay for such a thing is a complete mystery. What isn’t a mystery is why Mr. Durka agreed. He did it because his daughter has a rare childhood disease called Sanfilippo, and because children are everybody’s weakest link. People will do things for their kids they wouldn’t otherwise dream of doing.”
“So you say” was the best he could come up with.
I threw a thumb at Krauss and Nelson. “You can have one of your boys here look it up for you. And guess what? The county insurance carrier won’t pay for the treatment the girl needs to stay alive, so Mr. Durka did what he had to do, as a father. And you know what, Mr. Woodward, I don’t think you want to be the villain of that little bedtime story. I’m thinking the sooner this thing fades into the woodwork, and the less public heat Mr. Durka takes, the better it will be for you come next November’s election.”
Nelson and Krauss were shuffling around in the corner of the kitchen, looking like they’d rather be strolling the surface of the sun.
“Are you finished?” Woodward sneered.
“Not quite,” I said. “I’ve got one more thing you can do for me.”
“What would that be?”
“You can take these two bozos,” I said, nodding at Nelson and Krauss again, “and get the hell out of my house.”
He went into a long bullshit speech about how the material would be subjected to the most rigorous scientific inquiry ever known to man and how if and when they reached their conclusions we either would or wouldn’t be notified, after which he flounced from the room, with Krauss and Nelson trailing along like flotsam. Gabe followed them out. Nancy stayed for another fifteen minutes or so and then made her exit. I closed the gate behind her.
The most rigorous scientific inquiry known to man took a little less than three hours. By the time the six o’clock news hit the air, Woodward had changed both his suit and his point of view. The lead story was about how Woodward’s crack investigative team had unraveled a Machiavellian plot designed to thwart the ends of justice. Cue the music.
How they now believed an unnamed county employee had stolen police files for his own ends and had thus very nearly brought about the ruin of much-decorated county medical examiner Dr. Rebecca Duvall, who, but for the sterling work of Woodward’s team, might have been spuriously convicted of the crime.
He went on for a while. The good news was that Ibrahim Durka’s name never came up. Woodward got himself out from under by announcing that the matter was an ongoing investigation and therefore not something he could go into any detail about. He finished up by saying that the final disposition of Dr. Duvall’s employment status was a matter for the King County Council and the mayor, but that his investigation had found no culpability whatsoever on Dr. Duvall’s part, other than perhaps in the departmental protocols for the delivery of evidentiary material, which he was recommending be rigorously reviewed.
“He just had to find something,” I said as he walked away from the microphones.
“He’s right. We need to figure out something else.”
“New budget item,” I joked.
“Fat chance,” she said. She leaned over and rested her head in my lap. “You know what I saw on TV?”
“What?”
“They said that on the night you pulled me out of my house, you’d showed up on the porch with flowers and candy.”
“It was Valentine’s Day.”
“Seems like forever ago.”
“Big bouquet from The Flower Lady and a two-pound box of Fran’s.”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said with a big grin.
She laughed and then stood up and took me by the hand.
“I think you should be rewarded for your thoughtfulness.”
“I think so too,” I said.
I’d like to tell myself it could have ended right there. That there but for fortune the whole matter could have been declared null and void, and everyone could have just gotten on with their lives.
A few days after Rebecca and Gabe had moved back to her place, I met with Eagen again down by the river. As usual he was late, so I spent twenty minutes standing on a carcinogenic riverbank, hopping up and down, trying to keep warm in a thirty-mile-an-hour gale, before he finally put in a guest appearance.
“I don’t know what kind
of fire you guys lit under Woodward’s ass, but you’ve got him hopping around like a scalded rat.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said.
Eagen turned around, put his back to the wind, and turned up his collar. “I saw the results of the tests Woodward had done. Those are the genuine files you found. Haven’t been tampered with.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Duran’s dead. His mom cleans apartments for a living, so paying a hundred and forty grand to bribe a city employee is pretty much out of the question for her. Delaney—the stuff you found is the actual material from his file, all of which makes him out to be guilty as hell, so he’s goin’ nowhere, not to mention the fact that both his brothers look like they’re going down for felonious assault on Snowdrift Dawson. Terrence Poole’s doing life without for killing a grocer in Springfield, Oregon. We know where to find Frost.”
“Which leaves us with the Harringtons.”
“Who’ve got absolutely no reason to want anybody out of jail.”
“The coroner’s leaving the Durka hit-and-run open-ended.”
“Which means what?”
“It means he met his death by misadventure, which leaves them a lot of leeway if they ever catch the guy and have to charge him.”
“Any word on the van?”
“Not yet.”
“You see the scene?” I asked.
“I dropped by.”
“Son of a bitch was still on the throttle when he hit that bench.”
We stood without saying anything for a while. The wind whistled around us, pushing my hair around, lifting pieces of litter from the ground, swirling debris and unanswered questions like pinwheels.
“I’m gonna let it go,” I said.
“I didn’t think you had that much sense.”
“Anything I do is just gonna make it worse on Ibrahim’s family.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything for a good bit. “And you’ve got no idea what all this shit was actually about?”
“Less than zero.”
“Worst friggin’ conspiracy I ever saw.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Makes no damn sense at all.”
