by Ed Gorman
I would have to contact them. In the rush of things I’d forgotten to touch base. A very bad oversight.
‘Listen, Lieutenant Cummins. I apologize for snapping at you.’
‘All right.’
‘But could you do me a favor?’
He glanced at the woman behind the desk, as if she was in charge. ‘If I can.’
‘Could you get a message to Chief Showalter?’
‘He’s with the city manager right now.’
‘Could you tell him that Dev Conrad would appreciate just fifteen minutes alone with Cory Tucker?’
Again, the eye contact with the woman.
Then, ‘I guess I could give it a shot.’
Tucker was in orange jail clothes and handcuffs.
Showalter hadn’t sent him to County yet. Cummins had explained that they had eight cells on the second floor left over from the old jail.
Fear, confusion and defeat were all visible in the college boy’s face as he thanked the blue-uniformed officer who seated him in the wooden chair at the wooden table on the opposite side of me.
The room was painted institutional green. Cigarette smoke from the old days still tainted the air.
‘Fifteen minutes.’ Not harsh, not friendly. She closed the door quietly.
He bowed his head. His wrists twisted against the cuffs. A curse was lost in his throat. He looked up. His dismay was palpable. ‘What’ll happen to me, Dev? This whole thing is insane. Showalter didn’t even ask if I was guilty. He just assumed I was.’
‘Standard stuff. Just trying to scare you. Jess and everybody else knows you had nothing to do with this.’
‘I figured you’d all know better. At least, I hoped you would.’
‘Think you can answer a few questions?’
‘I’m pretty scattered right now. It doesn’t feel real. But I’ll try and answer what I can.’
‘Thanks, Cory. The first thing I need to know is what they’re telling you.’
‘Telling me?’
‘Why they charged you?’
‘They found a rifle in my trunk. They seem to be sure it was the rifle somebody fired at the congresswoman.’
I had to play cop. Show no emotion. The setup was clear. Rage was my first and foremost feeling. Such a cheap, bullshit trick had been played on Cory. But for now it was working.
‘How often do you look in your trunk?’
‘Never. Unless I need to, I mean.’
‘Do you remember where you went yesterday?’
‘I worked for the campaign, mostly, except for an hour and a half when I worked the phones. One of the women got sick so I volunteered. I figured it’d be a good experience for me. I could include it on my résumé.’ Bitter smile. ‘Résumé. Like that matters right now.’
‘How about last night? Where did you go?’
‘A party at a friend’s house.’
‘Were there a lot of people there?’
‘Yes. I had to park – that’s it.’
‘What’s “it?”’
‘There were so many people there I had to park almost a block away.’
‘Is it a well-lit neighborhood?’
‘No. It’s kind of a slum. Fraternities rent it together and then have their parties down there. I’m not in a frat but some of my friends are so they invited me. That sounds like a good time to do it, doesn’t it?’
‘Perfect time. Somebody follows you around until they see an opportunity to slip the rifle in your trunk. How long were you at the party?’
‘A few hours. The girl I was hoping to see there didn’t show up so I went home early.’
‘Straight home?’
‘Yes.’ Then, ‘You should see my folks.’ Now came the tears. He was a good kid who loved his folks. He had no trouble empathizing with how frightening this would be for them. And embarrassing. He fought crying. The tears just shimmered on the blue eyes.
‘We’ve hired the best defense lawyer in Chicago.’
‘But my folks said the bond was half a million dollars. Who am I, Jeffrey Dahmer? My folks don’t have that kind of money and I sure don’t want them to mortgage the house or anything.’
‘The bond’s being handled.’ I was just working my way through my daily allotment of tall tales.
‘It is?’ I heard the first note of hope in his voice.
‘The Bradshaw family is putting up the money.’
Or they would, as soon as I leaned on them.
‘So I can get out of here?’
‘Five hours max, I’d say.’
He forced back the tears. Grateful tears this time. Then he fell into reverie. ‘I’m not perfect – I mean, I’ve shoplifted stuff in my life and I’ve done drugs I shouldn’t have, but that was all in high school. Something like this … My mind wouldn’t even work this way. I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I wouldn’t know how to.’ Then, directly to me, ‘Do you think the whole thing was staged?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
‘You were an investigator. Are you getting involved?’
‘Yes, I am. Of course.’
‘This’ll cost her the election. That’s the other thing. I can’t believe it. She did so well with the debate and all—’ Then, ‘Sorry, I’m being such a baby about this.’
‘You’re hardly being a baby. You’ve been charged with a major felony.’
‘Have you ever been arrested?’
‘Three times. And once I thought they were going to put me away for a long, long time.’
‘How did you get out of it?’
‘I hired the best private investigator I could. An old friend from my army days. He proved I’d been set up. That I hadn’t broken into our opponent’s private office and crippled his security guard in the process.’
‘But it was close?’
‘Close enough that I had to consider the fact that I was going to spend seven to ten years in prison.’
‘God.’
A tale nicely told. I was using up my allotment faster than usual.
And the tale had relaxed him, as I’d hoped it would. Carried him out of this smudgy little room and into the sunny autumn air where hardworking college kids like him should be.
Then the knock. The blue uniform. The voice neither harsh nor friendly.
‘Man, I feel so much better talking to you, Dev. Thanks so much.’
‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘You really think five hours max?’
‘Five hours max.’
This one wasn’t a lie. I believed he could be set free in five hours. Of course, if he wasn’t he’d see it as a lie.
He thanked her again as she stood aside to let him walk through the door.
It was unlikely she was used to this kind of politeness.
TWENTY-THREE
Mike Edelstein was one of those Big Ten college fullbacks who’d managed to keep in shape both physically and mentally. He was as fierce in the courtroom as he’d been in his glory days at Michigan State.
For once he wore his suit coat as well as his suit pants. Blue pinstripes today. Except in the courtroom, he rarely wore the jackets. At parties you’d see him get rid of it within ten minutes of crossing the threshold. He reminded me of Lou Grant on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. As he walked in, he said, ‘I finally found another judge who might have one of those little jerk-off machines under his robes.’
Mike, like most of us, had loved the absolutely true story of the Southern judge who managed to masturbate while his court was in session. The problem was two-fold: the machine made a faint whirring noise, and occasionally the judge started getting glassy-eyed and a little out of breath. Not only did a witness catch on to this, so did the cop who stood on the right side of the bench. His interpretation – a generous man – was that the judge was having medical problems. He was in his seventies. The witness, not generous at all, talked to a reporter about it and she suggested flat out that the old guy in the robes was somehow getting his rocks off. Intrepid reporter starts looking onli
ne for whack-off machines and finds the one, as it turned out, His Honor was using. His Honor was soon busted and relieved of his duties.
‘Judge Flannagan. Kind of a young guy, too. But I keep hearing this very small noise – maybe a whirring noise. And every once in a while his head rolls back and I swear to God he starts breathing hard and sweating. What’s that sound like to you?’
Then, before I could answer, ‘Pretty crazy shit, huh? Those little machines.’
‘You thinking of getting one?’
‘I’d need a big one, my friend. A very big one.’
‘A hotshot lawyer and modest, too. So what the hell are you going to do for Jess?’
He sat in one of the client chairs in my office. This was less than five hours after I’d called him. One of his clients had a private jet. Since Mike had saved him from doing a thirty-to-life sentence, he was a most generous benefactor.
‘I wish it was a slam dunk for the Tucker kid,’ Mike said. ‘He’s obviously been set up – unless he did it, of course – but that may not be easy to prove.’
‘You say things like that just so you can charge more, don’t you?’
The big bear smile. ‘You’re not half as dumb as you look.’
‘Hard to believe that Cory would buy a rifle. He’s pretty anti-gun. That part of Showalter’s story doesn’t work at all.’
‘I’m working on that angle. But I can hear Showalter’s version. Here you have a young man who’s anti-gun, who tells me he’s never even fired a gun of any kind before and you think that would be good for our case but, when you think about it, it can be argued very well the other way. He gets his hands on this rifle in some as yet undetermined way and does enough reading and enough practicing to know how to handle the rifle – he doesn’t need to be a marksman. Jess isn’t going to be shot, anyway. All he has to do is fire a few wild shots at her and it’s mission accomplished.’
‘So now Showalter will say that Jess was behind this directly? This wasn’t just some staffer acting on his or her own?’
‘That’s where this is heading, Dev. And if you’ve heard the news in the last half hour, so is the press.’
As yet, Edelstein didn’t know any of the background about Cindy or Grimes or the anti-government group. I spent the next fifteen minutes going through what I knew.
‘We need to get Grimes on tape.’
‘Easier said than done. But I’ll give it a try.’
‘How about Cindy? Can we get her on tape?’
‘I’m pretty sure we can. But she’s really scared.’
‘I don’t blame her.’
The door was closed. Impossible as it seemed, Abby’s hand had a distinctive sound – knuckles against wood.
‘Come in.’
Abby appeared.
‘You remember Abby, Mike.’
‘Of course. Hi, Abby.’
‘Hi, Mike.’
‘Abby, we’re going over everything we know up to date. How about sitting in with us for a while? You live here and know the ground a lot better than we do.’
‘And you’re a hell of a lot better looking than Dev, too.’
‘You sure he’s your friend, Dev?’
‘Yeah. If I pay him enough.’
Abby took a seat and it was back to work.
TWENTY-FOUR
Grimes didn’t answer his front door. He didn’t answer his side door. He didn’t answer his back door, either.
But his Ford was parked at the curb, which meant he was probably inside unless Cindy had taken him somewhere.
The back door was locked but the large window opening on the kitchen was not. A bad oversight for somebody as paranoid as Grimes.
I climbed through it, the dusty sheer curtains almost making me sneeze as they rubbed against my face. I remembered my first day of training for being an army investigator. The brisk colonel teaching the course said that when trying to sneak into a building of any kind, try not to sneeze. It sounded reasonable at the time and it still sounded reasonable.
The appliances were a couple of decades old. The refrigerator made so much noise it probably kept the neighbors awake at night. A week’s worth of dirty dishes was piled in the sink. A linoleum floor was scuffed into oblivion. A clock radio sat on the counter, along with a spice rack. A calendar with a sweet painting of Jesus on it hung from a tiny nail on one of the ancient wooden cupboards. The year was 2001. I wondered if his wife had hung it there. It was hard to imagine Grimes doing it.
The place smelled of the dirty dishes, beer and cigarette smoke.
I was just starting to move into the front of the house when Grimes appeared, pointing one of those old Savage carbines my dad and uncle used to carry when they went out and had a good time blasting away at deer, something they could never convince me to do.
‘What the hell do you want?’
‘You lied to me last night. You know who came to see you. He wanted the recorder. He thought you had it.’
‘You better not say anything like that to poor Cindy. She’s out of her mind already. Dave, he told me about the recorder the night the Bradshaw woman got shot at. Told me how scared he was. He said he just wanted out of his little group. Said he made the recording for his own protection. I thought of goin’ to the police but I knew if I did he’d be in trouble.’ Right there before me he went from tired to wasted. ‘He didn’t say so, but he likes to hide shit. He’s like a little kid. He tells me about stuff he’s got hidden but he never tells me where it is. But I got a pretty good idea.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He’s got this trailer. I bet if you went through it carefully you’d be surprised what you’d find.’
I explained that I’d been out there but hadn’t gone through the place thoroughly. ‘Go back, then. Look it over real carefully.’ Then, ‘Shit. I need t’sit down.’
I followed him into the living room. He set the Savage down carefully on the couch and sat next to it. I took the armchair where you could sink to the vanishing point.
‘All I give a damn about is Cindy.’
‘I know that.’
‘Dave’s a good kid except he got mixed up with that group. All that crazy crap they talk. Revolution and all that. They’re just the other side of what those hippies were like. Afghanistan was what fucked him up.’
‘I’m sorry, Grimes. But now I want to hide Cindy somewhere.’
‘I already arranged that. She’s at this old friend of hers.’
‘I’d like the phone number.’
He made the kind of sounds lungers make.
‘I told her to stay away from the cops. I made her promise. I told her that if she loved me she wouldn’t go to the police.’
He was right. Why the hell not? All over the western United States there were law enforcement officers signing on to anti-government groups. But no section of the country was exempt from the hysteria these people generated. Why not the Midwest?
‘That’s why they want the recorder. Dave probably named the cops in the group.’
‘The son of a bitch who busted me up, I’d like a crack at him.’
‘You should hide out someplace else, too, until this is over.’
‘If the cops’re involved in this, when do you think it’ll be over? They won’t rest till they get that recorder. And by the way, I ain’t goin’ anywhere. This is my place. I worked half my life payin’ for it and I ain’t about to run away.’
He was right. He wasn’t running anywhere. He wouldn’t even be walking anywhere. His years and his life had all caught up with him. Only one thing mattered to him now and that was Cindy’s safety. But the responsibility of that had completely depleted him. He still had it in him to give out with raspy curses but there wasn’t jack shit he could do about defending himself, let alone Cindy.
He yawned and then his head teetered to the right side of his shoulder. Just yesterday he’d been strong enough and tough enough to run away to his car when his two friends from the Skylight had confronted me. Now he could barely stay
awake. He needed to go back to bed. I kept thinking of his heart problems.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’
He yawned again. ‘Why?’
‘You need to go back to bed.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because you can barely stay awake. This whole thing has worn you out.’
‘The hell it has.’
‘I’m sick of arguing with you, Grimes. You need to sleep. Cindy’s as worried about you as you are about her.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She say that?’
‘She didn’t have to say that, you grumpy old bastard. Haven’t you ever seen the way she looks at you?’
The unthinkable. Tears in his eyes.
‘Nothin’s been the same since my wife died.’
‘I’m sorry, Grimes. You’re through until you get some sleep.’
Again his head teetered to the right. ‘Yeah, I guess maybe I am.’
I got up, walked over to him and held out my hand.
‘I’m going to help you get to bed.’
But even with tears in his eyes he was belligerent. ‘I don’t need no help.’
‘Right. So stand up then.’
‘What?’
‘Stand up.’
‘Just get the hell out of here, you son of a bitch. This is my place and nobody gives me orders in my place. Now go.’
His irascibility made him suddenly sound much stronger than he was.
‘You won’t stand up because you’re too weak to.’
‘Weak? The hell I’m weak.’
And with that he did his angry best to show me that he was too strong and too proud to accept any help from somebody like me. He put a hand on the arm of the couch and began the process of pushing himself to his feet. He almost fell over.
I grabbed his right arm, holding him up.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘where the hell’s your bedroom, Grimes?’
TWENTY-FIVE
The ride out to Dave Fletcher’s Airstream was pleasant. I was heading there again because of what Frank Grimes had said about Dave Fletcher’s habit of hiding things. This time I’d search the place.
It was another elegant autumn day.
As I left the car and approached the trailer I had a feeling of isolation; maybe it was the crows and the sudden and utter silence in this small valley. Not even the fall colors of the trees were quite as bright here. I had a schoolboy memory: the land around the House of Usher. Poe’s sense of desolation.
