Absolute rage kac-14

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  "Yeah. It's weird. Did you ever do this before?"

  "Of course not. This is my maiden flight. Don't talk now. In a little while time will stop. Don't be frightened."

  16

  "What did the judge say?" asked Karp.

  "Judge is not inclined to issue our warrant," said Hawes. "Judge says we haven't demonstrated the involvement of the union to the degree necessary to open the union books and the personal accounts of all the union's officers to the extent we asked for."

  "Christ! Why in hell does he think the Heeneys were killed? We have Floyd involved. What else does he want?"

  "Something besides the Cades," said Hawes, and added gloomily, "You have to admit he's got a point."

  They were walking down a pale green corridor smelling of disinfectant that could have been any hospital in the world, but was in fact the Robbens County Medical Center. They were going to visit Wayne Cade.

  "I don't admit any such thing," said Karp. "I should have been there. I assume the Sewer was present?"

  "Yeah, he was in good form, too," said Hawes, letting pass the small dig. He had grown a thicker skin in the weeks of working with Karp. "Very eloquent about the importance of the Fourth Amendment to our vital freedoms."

  "And Bledsoe bought it."

  "Well, yeah. He made the point, which was hard to argue with, that he'd been on the state court of appeals and the state supreme court for twenty years, and if an appeal had come up based on the exclusion of evidence produced by the present subpoena, he'd have been inclined to reverse. Seward pointed out that the only connection we have with the union is through Floyd, and the only inculpation of Floyd is the testimony of a pair of half-wit felons. Hell, they could've said the mayor was there, too."

  "He probably was, in this town," said Karp darkly. "Well, fuck it anyway, we knew it was a stretch. We'll just have to find the money some other way."

  They had arrived at a door guarded by a Robbens County deputy. Officer Petrie looked up from his ragged Guns amp; Ammo, glared briefly, and with a motion of his head informed them that the occupant was available for interview.

  They found Wayne Cade propped up in his hospital bed watching a NASCAR race on a television hung from the ceiling. He was still huge, but not as ruddy as he had been. Tubes entered his mound of bedclothes at several points.

  "You want to shut that thing off, Wayne?" said Hawes. "We need to talk to you."

  "I got nothin' to say," said Cade, nor did he still the roar of the track.

  Karp reached high and flipped the power switch off. He said, "Your cousins say you shot Lizzie Heeney in the head while she was sleeping. You want to comment on that?"

  "Yeah. My comment is fuck them, and fuck you, too." Cade stared at Karp. His eyes, like those of all the Cades, were small, close-set, tincolored. "That's your girl, ain't it? The one with that dog tore me up?"

  Karp said nothing.

  "Yeah, you're that one. You're that Jew lawyer from New York. Okay, here's a comment, lawyer man. When I get out of here, I'm gonna find that dog and gut-shoot it, and throw it on a slow fire, and skin it while it's still wigglin'. And then I'm gonna do the same thing to her, after every man I can drag in has fucked her up the corn hole."

  "Not a helpful attitude, Mr. Cade," said Karp. "It speaks to a lack of remorse. When had you planned on accomplishing these deeds? You know you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison, don't you?"

  "That's what you think, shitheel."

  "Well, Mr. Cade, given your current legal position, ordinarily I'd have to say you have a lot of balls, but in your case… exactly how many do you have now?"

  Cade roared, clenched his fists, made a move to leave the bed, grimaced in pain, and fell back on his pillows, yelling, "Petrie! Goddamnit, Omar, get these goddamn people out of my face!"

  "We'll try him first," said Karp after they left the room. "A conviction will give us a nice base for going after George Floyd and Lester."

  "You're pretty confident," said Hawes.

  "Yeah, aren't you? We have good forensics, prints at the scene, his prints on the cans and bottles along with those of the other two we know for sure were at the murders. We even have an I.W.Harper pint with all three of their prints on it, overlapping. Also, since all the DNA stuff from the shoes came back positive, there's a lock on Bo and Earl, and the bottle prints mean Wayne was at the party. We have the two cousin confessions. He killed the child with a gun. We have the gun, too."

  "But no prints on it, and no knowledge of how it came to be buried at Floyd's. We do know it was in the Guyandotte. They compared the mud on the gun and got a match."

  "Yeah, my darling wife was right on the money there, if a little late. And for sure I'd dearly love to have whoever saw them toss the piece and fished it out. And planted it on George. But you can't have everything."

  "I don't like it, though. It's just the kind of thing that screws up a case."

  Karp waved a dismissive hand. "But we don't need that for Wayne. We got Wayne without his gun."

  Emmett Heeney was driving the old red Farmall tractor, with Zak on his lap, steering and crowing with joy. The tractor towed a little stakebed trailer on which bounced Emmett's brother, his brother's girlfriend, her dog, and her other brother. Also in the trailer were tools of various kinds, fishing equipment, weapons, and a large picnic hamper. The Heeneys had acquired nearly forty acres along with their farmhouse; today Emmett and Dan were providing a tour of the land.

  It had not been a farm for a long time. As Dan explained, Red had not been interested in land and had been a little wary of accepting the title of landlord-so bourgeois! Rose had raised a garden, but the rest of the land had been allowed to follow the natural succession and had grown up in thickets of dogwood, white oak, bay laurel, above which young yellow pine were beginning to tower. There was still a good-sized apple orchard, which they now passed, descending a little hill toward a shallow stream that ran through a sparse, pale forest of beech and willow. Emmett stopped the tractor. They all unloaded and walked along a narrow trail through the trees and over an earth berm. There was a little pond there, made by damming the stream, with lilies in the water and a tiny beach.

  They ate barbecued-chicken sandwiches and potato salad and drank beer and lemonade. After lunch, Emmett took Zak to the pond's edge and taught him the first lessons in fly casting, and to call dragonflies snake doctors. Then Emmett went with tools to repair the dam and clear culverts. Giancarlo sat on a rock with his pad and markers and drew the pond and the surrounding woods, adding to it many creatures not normally denizens of West Virginia. Dan and Lucy put in an hour's work helping Emmett. Afterward, they sat against a log cooling off, talking or not as the mood struck them. They were for whole minutes at a time extremely silly, which delighted both of them, since neither had logged much time in that country. Lucy had almost forgotten the extreme unlikelihood of her situation, and that the delight was likely to stop before too long. Dan, for his part, was still wondering why the colors were so extraordinarily bright, why time had become variable in its pace, why he was never bored anymore, why music seemed more lovely and compelling than it once had. In common with many alienated bright kids, he had taken LSD a time or two. This was like that, but not like as well-the intensity and peace without the speediness or paranoia. Somewhere in the lower reaches of his overintellectualized mind, the L-word began its slow rise to the surface.

  Zak caught a bass, which was admired, as was Giancarlo's drawing. Later that afternoon, Lucy went a distance away from the campsite to pee, and after emerging from the bushes, she heard Zak's voice coming from above.

  "You can't find me."

  She looked. "I can't. Where are you? In the tree?"

  "In the deer blind. Emmett showed me." There was a rustling forty feet above, and the boy's delighted face showed in the leaves of a tulip poplar. "Come on up. It's great!"

  Lucy found climbing rungs on the tree's other side and climbed up.

  "Wow, you're pretty invisi
ble. What're you going to shoot?" The rat rifle was couched in his arm.

  "Squirrels. They're considered varmints. You could eat them, you know. Emmett's going to show me how to make squirrel stew. I almost got a crow, too. Emmett's going to let me nail it to his barn if I do. And he's got a hunting bow, too, he showed me. This is what they use this blind for, bow hunting. It doesn't have a season. The deer come down to the stream there, through the laurel. They have paths."

  She riffled his hair. "You're having a great time, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, I never want to leave."

  "Oh, yes, I know just what you mean."

  When Karp returned to the Burroughs Building, he was not amazed to find his wife there, in the room with the state detectives, kibitzing and making herself useful, which was useful indeed. Karp did not believe there were three people in the country he would rather have involved in a criminal investigation than his own dear one, as long as she stayed continually under adult supervision. For the past several days Marlene had realized that she was not, in fact, made to lie around pools. Working on her tan was not enough work, it appeared. So she had started to show up and was accepted immediately by the staties as a colleague. Word had spread about her speckled background.

  Virtually all the person-power Karp had at his call had been directed at a single goal: tracing the $7,500 blood money to a source of funds controlled by George Floyd, Lester Weames, or both. He found her working on just this with Mel Harkness.

  "Any luck?" Karp asked, kissing the top of her head.

  "Zilch. I am prepared to state that at no time in the past six months did either of the two scumbags in question withdraw that sum in cash from either private or union bank accounts. Those that we know of, anyway."

  "Mel?"

  "I don't get my head kissed?"

  "Maybe later. Is she right as usual?"

  "She's right," said Harkness, a rotund, balding, bespectacled state police detective who looked like an accountant and was an accountant. "We got pretty excited there for a bit. We found a ten-grand check to cash written out, but then there was a ten-grand cash deposit a day later."

  "Why would they do that?"

  "Can't say. But if there's no net withdrawal, we can't attribute it to any illegal payoff. Of course, there's a million ways they could have done it that we can't trace. They could have used a kickback from a purveyor. They could have private accounts. The company could have slipped them the cash. They could have cashed in their piggie pennies…"

  "Unlikely," said Marlene. "I would be inclined to doubt that either of them spent their own money on this. Weames has a rep for cheapness. Neither of them spend their own money for anything, as far as I can tell. Car, travel, meals-it's all out of the union account. And perfectly legal, too. It has to be union cash, and since your judge won't let us look at the union books…"

  "He's not my judge," said Karp. "But let's think about this. They didn't expect an investigation by us, but they had to know that the feds would be interested in the union, since Red had said he was going to bring them in. The feds would want to look at the union finances, therefore they have to be a little careful. So no big cash withdrawals. What do they spend their money on, anyway, the union?"

  "Mainly pensions and health," said Harkness. "Salaries. Mortgage on the hall. Bonuses. Research. Very straightforward as far as the bank is concerned. It could be cooked as hell, but we can't tell from this."

  "Well, we'll just have to follow up every check they cut and make sure it's legit."

  "Better call in the marines, then," said Harkness.

  "He doesn't have marines," said Marlene, "just us." To Karp she said, "I bet you wish you were back chasing Beemer and the congressman now."

  "What congressman was that?" Harkness asked.

  Neither Karp answered. They were staring into each other's eyes, combining brainpower in a way that they hadn't in a while.

  "Smurfs," said Karp. "Why didn't we think of that?"

  "The old guys' spending money," said Marlene. "The bonuses." He grabbed her, they kissed.

  Harkness stared first at one, then at the other, a confused look on his face. "What're you two talking about?"

  "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 catfish 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 furnitu
re 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 everything'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."