Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “Well, someone must have led you in this direction.” He glanced almost tenderly at Laurel.

  “She tipped you off, didn’t she?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “What did she tell you about Bill, Harry?” Clayton said, cupping his hands around his knee and leaning forward in the chair like the family doctor.

  It suddenly dawned on me that this amiable thug thought I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know. Since Clayton’s only connection with Parks was the Candy Kane assault arrest, I began to wonder what it had to do with C.W. O’Hara’s murder.

  “Look, Harry,” Clayton said. “I’m trying to be a reasonable guy, but you’re still not cooperating. I asked you a question. What did that girl tell you about Parks?”

  “I don’t think I want to answer any more questions, Clayton,” I said. “What the girl told me is confidential information.”

  He laughed. “Confidential? She’s a whore. And you’re working for the Cougars.”

  “So arrest me.”

  He shifted his legs, spotted a piece of fluff on the knee and flicked it off with his fingernail. “I’ll tell you what I might do instead,” he said, looking at Laurel, “I might arrest her. You know, we found some flake in her purse. Not a lot, but I can probably see to it that there’s enough to get her on felony possession.”

  “You’d do that?” I said.

  He laughed again. “Hell, yes, I’d do that. I’ll take her downtown and use a stun gun on her tits, if you don’t quit fucking with me.”

  He didn’t stop smiling or change his tone of voice, but I took one look at his eyes and knew that he wasn’t bluffing. I also knew that if I didn’t tell him the truth he’d call me on it. Clayton already knew all about Bill Parks. He was trying to figure out how much I knew, though I’d be damned if I could figure out why. I said, “The girl told me earlier tonight that Parks was living here with C.W. O’Hara. Apparently O’Hara and Parks had spent the week fighting, and the girl was worried about them. She asked me if I’d come take a look. You know what we found.”

  “What did the girl tell you Parks and O’Hara were fighting about, Harry?” Clayton said.

  “About getting married. About having a baby. About the troubles he was having with the Cougars.”

  “That’s it?” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  Clayton glanced at the girl, looked at me for a second, then slowly got to his feet. “I hope you’re telling me the truth, Harry. I hope it for her sake.” He glanced at Laurel again. “If I find out different, you’ll be hearing from me.” He started to walk away, then turned back. “By the way, as of this moment, you’re off the case.”

  “That’s up to the Cougars,” I said.

  “I’ve already talked to the Cougars. Your number’s been retired. So stay out of it. Otherwise . . .” He pointed his forefinger at the girl, then drew the same finger down to his chest. “Bzzzzt!” he said, making a raster noise. He laughed out loud and walked away.

  16

  ALTHOUGH I didn’t understand the reason for his threats, talking to Sergeant Phil Clayton seemed an appropriate way to end an unforgettably ugly evening. Clayton went into conference with Larson after he’d finished with me. They spoke for about ten minutes, and I could tell that Laurel and I were part of the conversation from the way that Larson was eyeing us. As soon as they were through talking, Larson came over to the couch and told me that we were free to go.

  I took Laurel back to my apartment and put her straight to bed. She was still drowsy with drugs and badly shaken by the ordeal that we’d gone through. I thought she’d drop off immediately, but as I tucked her in, she grabbed my hand and pulled me down beside her.

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she whispered.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  I lay back on the bed and put my arm around her. After a time she fell asleep, but I didn’t drift off for a while. Sitting there in the morning sun, feeling the heat settling over me like a blanket, I couldn’t stop thinking about Parks—lifting his curling bar in front of that mirror, counting each good rep until he’d completed a set. Then doing another set, and another, late into the night. The sweat dripping down his ravaged, young-old man’s face, down his huge, muscular arms. The summer heat, like the heat that was stealing through the bedroom, enveloping him in its fire. He’d sat there for three days. And on the fourth day, he’d gone violently insane.

  I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Or the image of what he had done to his lover and to their child. He hadn’t just killed C.W. O’Hara. He’d killed a part of himself, too—his son, the coroner had said. Of course, men had killed their own before—in a rage, in a mad, infrangible moment. But there was an ancient ugliness about the crime. Sleeping with a woman like his mother. Fathering a child by her. And slaughtering both of them. It was like something awful painted in a cave, something conceived before the words to describe it, or for which the words wouldn’t do.

  And at the same time, it was horribly banal. He was a man who made his living acting out those violent rituals of hunt and sacrifice painted in the caves. He was a big, dumb, ferocious jock. A caveman in the flesh, who lived completely on the surface of life, completely through his muscles, who had no inwardness at all—unless his born-again lover’s attempts to convert him counted toward a conscience, or his demons, the drives that kept him building muscles and knocking heads, constituted character. As for C.W., she was probably just what Bluerock had said she was—a gold digger looking to snare a real live football player of her own. Any way you looked at them, they weren’t tragic types.

  And yet something about the sheer brutality of the murder affected me as if it were true tragedy, shocked me and held onto me as if I’d shaken hands with a live wire. It made the detective in me want to find out why it had happened. The rest of me, the sane part, was relieved to know that I probably never would find out—at least, not on my own. According to Clayton, the Cougars no longer needed my services. To be honest, I didn’t see how they did, either. They no longer had a reason to find Parks. And although I resented having a cop threaten me and was damn curious about why Clayton was so interested in Bill, I figured he was right. Parks did belong to the police now. And I would have to learn what had driven him mad, through the civilian channels, secondhand, in newspapers and on TV.

  ******

  I fell asleep beside Laurel and slept long into the afternoon. Around three, the phone woke me from a terrible dream about Parks. It took me a moment to recognize the bedroom and the girl lying next to me. I got up and went into the living room, with Parks still trailing me like a demon shadow. It was Petrie on the phone.

  “I’ve got to talk to you this afternoon,” he said, after he’d said hello.

  He sounded oddly out of control for such a tightly controlled man.

  “I thought you’d fired me,” I said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “A guy named Clayton. He said you told him I was off the case, as of this morning.”

  “Well, things have changed since then,” Petrie said grimly. “We very much need your help.”

  “Changed how?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. I’ll meet you at your place around six.”

  “What’s wrong with meeting at your office?” I said.

  “I’m not going near my goddamn office today!” Petrie said almost hysterically. “Look, do me a favor and don’t ask any more questions. I’ll explain everything tonight.”

  Only he didn’t have to explain it. I figured it out for myself when I fetched the afternoon paper from the hall. One look at the headline and I knew at once why Petrie didn’t want to go near his office and why he’d sounded so rattled. I also knew what he wanted to talk about. What I didn’t know was how I was going to answer him.

  With the newspaper in my hand, I sat down at the rolltop desk and read through the article a second time.

  FOOTBALL PLAYER WANTED IN BRUTAL MURDER, ran the headline, and
underneath, “Cougars Implicated In Drug Scandal.”

  I skipped over the details of the murder, which were all too fresh in my mind, and perused the paragraph about Parks’s alleged drug problems:

  A source close to the case has revealed that Parks was under federal indictment brought by the DEA task force looking into drug abuse in the NFL. Caught in a DEA sting operation last December, Parks agreed to testify before the grand jury in exchange for immunity on the drug-related charge. Although Cougar management has refused to comment on the case, the same source confirmed that team officials assisted in securing immunity for Parks.

  The writer went on to speculate, in the next paragraph, that the ordeal of preparing to appear before a grand jury had contributed to Parks’s apparent mental collapse. Although it wasn’t spelled out, the implication was that the Cougars were indirectly to blame for the murder.

  Although the evidence presented in the article was meager at best, my first reaction was to wonder whether the allegation leveled against the Cougar management was true. If the Cougars had helped Parks plea-bargain his way out of a drug charge, then Petrie had flat out lied to me on Friday afternoon when he’d assured me that the Cougars weren’t holding anything over Parks’s head.

  My second reaction was to wonder if Parks had in fact testified, and if he had, whom he’d testified against. If Walt Kaplan had been named in Parks’s testimony, then I’d be taking my life in my hands if I started poking around in Parks’s life again. Worse, I’d be jeopardizing Laurel. As Bluerock had pointed out, people get mighty paranoid when indictments are handed down. And if Walt found out that Laurel knew about his drug dealing, she’d be a threat to him. Something would have to be done about that, whether I continued to work for the Cougars or not. Getting the girl out of town for a time would probably be the wisest move, although I had no idea how Laurel would feel about it.

  My third reaction to the article was to wonder who the unnamed source was and why he’d waited until after the murder to tell all. A drug bust involving a football player was front-page news—good publicity for the DEA and good gossip for the rest of the town and the league. Although the feds hadn’t shown any charity with Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene, it was possible that they’d been waiting to go public until after Parks testified before the grand jury. There was no indication in the newspaper article of whether Parks had actually testified. But he might have left camp on Monday in order to do so. He might have been sequestered for the week by the feds, in advance of a trial. If so, the whole thing had backfired horribly. If they’d been keeping him under house arrest at C.W. O’Hara’s home, they’d picked the wrong damn place. Because it was pretty clear from what Laurel had said, and from the grisly evidence of the murder itself, that something else had been going on in that house—something that had culminated in terrible violence. Of course, if they had been sequestering him, they would have needed a baby-sitter. Which made me think of smiling Phil Clayton, the man who shouldn’t have been on the spot. He’d acted as if he were guarding a secret, although I’d assumed that it had something to do with the Candy Kane arrest. I didn’t understand what that assault case had to do with a drug bust, any more than I’d understood what it had to do with a murder. But if I was going to have anything more to do with unraveling the Parks case, I figured I’d better find out.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Mike Sabatto, a sportswriter I knew at the Cincinnati Post. A secretary put me on hold, and while I was waiting for Mike to pick up, my call-waiting line began to buzz. I stared at the phone in disgust for a moment. Ever since I’d had call-waiting installed, I’d gone through the same routine. The phone wouldn’t ring all day, but as soon as I picked it up, I’d be deluged with calls.

  It had happened too many times to be coincidental. It gave me the certain feeling that the phone company knew something I didn’t. But then I’d had that feeling long before I’d ordered call-waiting. This time, I decided to forego my usual juggling act and let the second call go. It was lucky I did, because Mike picked up a moment after the call-waiting quit buzzing.

  I knew Sabatto well enough to drink with him whenever we found ourselves in the same bar. Balding, ungainly, and acerbic, Mike was as Catholic as Elmer’s sister, with a long-suffering spouse, six children, and that dour look of resignation that comes with the good Catholic life, like Continental Breakfast on the European Plan. Although he was barely thirty years old, he looked forty-five and acted it.

  After asking him about his wife and his kids and his St. Louis in North College Hill, I turned the conversation to the day’s headlines.

  “We knew he’d skipped camp four days ago,” Mike said when I mentioned Parks.

  “How come it didn’t make the papers?” I asked.

  “You’d be surprised what doesn’t make the papers,” he said with glee. “The Cougar front office told us that he had ‘personal problems,’ and to hold off on the publicity until they’d had a chance to talk to him. We don’t usually agree to that sort of thing, but in this case they made it clear that we’d be sorry if we didn’t play ball.” Sabatto laughed raucously. “Who’s sorry now, I ask you? If they’d been up-front about the drug thing, they could have saved themselves a black eye.”

  “I’m surprised one of you guys didn’t get wind of it anyway,” I said. “You didn’t have any trouble finding out about Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene.”

  “That’s ‘cause the DEA wanted us to know about them,” he said.

  “Why wouldn’t they have wanted you to know about Parks?”

  “They had their reasons,” Sabatto said mysteriously. “You know they don’t go public with everything. A lot of pretty nasty stuff is settled in closed chambers or out of court. We hear about it, but unless we can dig up sources willing to go on record, we can’t print it.”

  “Where’d you manage to dig up the source on Parks?”

  “A DEA guy phoned in the whole story right after the murder.”

  “You wouldn’t know his name, would you?”

  “I’m not supposed to,” Mike said, “but for a friend...His name is Clayton. Phil Clayton. He’s a local cop, a narc in the Second District who was detailed to help the DEA out with the Cougars. From what I hear, he was more or less in charge of Parks’s case.”

  “Do you know what he got Parks on?” I asked him.

  “Possession of controlled substances is what I hear. I guess that means cocaine.”

  It was a safe guess. “Do you know who Parks was scheduled to testify against?”

  “Some local dealers.”

  “And did he testify?”

  “That I don’t know,” Mike said.

  17

  AFTER I finished with Sabatto, I tried calling George DeVries at the DA’s office to see if he could tell me whether Parks had testified before the grand jury, and whom he’d testified against. But it was almost four thirty by the time I phoned, and George was never one to spend a long Saturday at the office. When I couldn’t rouse George at home either, I called Lieutenant Al Foster at the CPD. Although Al hadn’t heard anything about Parks and the grand jury—or claimed that he hadn’t—he did confirm that Clayton was a narcotics agent.

  “I don’t know why you’re asking about him, Harry,” Al said in his achy, high-pitched voice. “But I’ll tell you this—he’s not a guy you want to fuck with. Believe me. He’s built up quite a rep in the Second District.”

  “A hard case?”

  “The hardest. He uses people up. Turns them, bleeds them, then hangs them out to dry. And Clayton always ends up getting a commendation.” Al laughed mordantly. “It’s a helluva world, isn’t it?”

  “A helluva world,” I said to myself.

  “Do yourself a favor,” Al said. “Steer clear of him. At least, for the next couple of weeks.”

  “Why for the next couple of weeks?” I said.

  “There’s something in the works. An in-house thing. Clayton may get his ass fried. That’s all I can tell you now. And if you tell anybody that
I told you that much, it’s the last help you’ll get from me.”

  “It’ll be our little secret,” I told him.

  I hung up and stared morosely at the desk. Apparently Clayton wasn’t just a dangerous cop, he was a crooked one. At least, that’s what I took Al’s comments to mean. He’d compiled a hell of an arrest record in the Second District—good enough to get him a job with the DEA. And now his methods had landed him in some trouble. Thinking back, I realized that he’d acted like a man in trouble the night before. At the time I couldn’t figure out what he had to be worried about. Hell, I couldn’t figure out what he was doing at the ranch house, at all. But if Parks had been Clayton’s case, then the O’Hara murder would have given him plenty to worry about. You don’t get a star next to your name for cutting a deal with a psychopath. Maybe that was why Clayton had implicated the Cougars in the plea-bargaining process. Maybe he’d been trying to spread the blame for his mistake. On the other hand, he could have been telling the truth.

  I took the Candy Kane rap sheet out of the desk and went through it again. According to the papers, the drug bust was made in December. So was the assault arrest. And both collars were made by Clayton. It was obvious that the two were connected, although I wasn’t sure how. But I had the gut feeling that the Candy Kane arrest was a stalking-horse. God knew, that the case was flimsy enough. I’d thought that from the moment I’d seen the rap sheet. A charge pressed without a complainant, with a hostile party as the only witness. And one thing more—something that had occurred to me as I was reading through the report again. I’d almost come up with it the day before, when I’d talked to Laurel in the pizza parlor. It was the date of the assault arrest—December 31. According to Laurel, Parks had moved in with C.W. O’Hara at the end of December, right after she’d told him about her pregnancy. By all rights, Parks should have been with the O’Hara girl on New Year’s Eve, not with some stripper named Candy Kane.

  The surest way to find out what was really going on was to talk to George DeVries, who would have access to the pretrial material in both cases. Since he wasn’t available, my next best bet would be to talk to Candy Kane herself. I was about to call the Caesar Apartments to see if Candy was still living there, when Laurel wandered into the room.