Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  Late that night, I made love to her. It wasn’t very good for either of us. There were too many different feelings being played out, feelings that had nothing to do with sex. But it made me feel better, and I think it soothed her pride.

  The last thing she said to me, in the dark, as she turned away to fall back to sleep, was, “That’s another hundred bucks you owe me.”

  21

  I GOT up early the next morning, left Laurel a note saying that I’d be back at ten, and drove downtown to the courthouse to find George DeVries. It was barely eight thirty on a sultry Sunday, and the only thing moving on the streets, outside of me and a couple of patrol cars, was the blue morning haze, hanging like smoke above the tarmac. I parked the Pinto beside a meter on Main and walked over to the courthouse. It was two flights of hobbed brass stairs to the DA’s offices.

  The second floor hallway was full of that milky, morning half light that peeks in at southern exposures and puddles up on concrete. I splashed through it past the myriad offices of the DA’s staff. A surprising number of doors were standing open for so early on a Sunday, and I could hear the drone of desk fans up and down the hall. The only door that mattered to me was the one to George DeVries’s office, and it was shut tight. I knocked on the frosted glass insert, and to my satisfaction a lazy Southern voice called out, “Come in.”

  I opened the door, walked through a vacant anteroom and into DeVries’s office. George, in white dress shirt and speckled bow tie, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, was sitting behind a cluttered desk, leaning back in his chair and gazing out an open window at the hazy Mount Adams hillside in the distance. He didn’t turn around in the chair when I approached the desk, just let his head loll to the right.

  “Hi ya, Harry-boy,” he said in his Kentucky Colonel’s voice. “How’s tricks?”

  “Tricks are good, George,” I said, sitting across the desk from him.

  He smiled familiarly, and his skin wrinkled up like crumpled butcher paper. George had aged since I’d seen him last. He’d developed a paunch that popped the buttons on his clean white shirt, and his face had grown even more weathered with the years. He’d always looked like a red-haired Carl Sandburg. If the trends continued, I thought, I’d have to change poets—to Auden, maybe.

  “You’re up mighty early, aren’t you?” he said. “You got something on your mind?”

  “Bill Parks,” I said.

  George shook his head sorrowfully and swung his chair around to face me. “I’m getting a little weary of hearing that name.”

  “Who else has been asking?”

  “Who hasn’t?” George said. “The papers, the TV guys—you name it.”

  “How about Phil Clayton. Has he been asking?”

  “Phil don’t ask, Harry,” George said dryly. “He tells.”

  “He was in charge of Bill’s case, wasn’t he?”

  “No comment,” George said.

  “I already know that he was, George.”

  “Then why are you asking, Harry?” he said with his wrinkled grin.

  I’d played this game before with George, who was not famous for his scruples.

  “George,” I said. “You’re not going to give me a hard time about this, are you?”

  “I have to, Harry-boy,” he said apologetically. “I’m sorry, but this one is top secret. I’m afraid I can’t help you out at all.”

  George ducked his head and pretended to examine his manicure, but I could see that one little corner of his right eye was reserved for me.

  I picked up my cue. “That’s a damn shame, George, because I’m working for the Cougars now, and I know for a fact that they’d be mighty grateful for any help you might see fit to give me. Mighty grateful.”

  George stopped admiring his nails and looked up at me. “How grateful’s that?”

  “I think I can guarantee a couple of season tickets on the fifty yard line. And maybe a little something extra in the ticket envelope, to buy popcorn and beer with.”

  “Blue seats?” George said.

  “Any color you want, George.”

  He smiled so broadly I could see the gold bridgework on his molars. “That’s mighty white of you, Harry. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’re okay.”

  “Spare me, George.”

  He hunched forward in his chair, cribbed his hands in front of him, and put an earnest look on his face, like a car salesman closing a deal. “What do you need?”

  “A couple of transcripts,” I said. “I’d like to see the pretrials on Parks’s busts. He has two of them that I know of, both in December. One on an assault charge and the one that the papers are writing about—the drug arrest.”

  “They’re the same case,” George said with a wink.

  I’d figured as much the night before. “You’re on top of this, are you?”

  George shrugged. “You’re not the only one giving away tickets, Harry. I got a family to feed.”

  “Tell me about the case.”

  George leaned back in the chair, cupping his hands behind his head. “All I know is what I hear. I haven’t seen the actual transcript. The DEA’s got it, and for some reason, Internal Affairs is looking at it too. I guess maybe Phil got a little carried away on this one.”

  “Carried away how?”

  “I don’t know that.”

  I gave him a look.

  “Honest Injun,” he said, holding up one hand. “All I can tell you is the scuttlebutt I’ve heard.”

  “Then shoot.”

  “The assault complaint was phoned in last New Year’s Eve. It went straight to Clayton, just like it had been ticketed that way in advance. Phil busted Parks at the Caesar Apartments and just happened to find a shitload of cocaine on Parks’s person. Parks was given a choice—plead guilty to the assault, testify against his suppliers, and get immunity on the drug charge; or do the whole nine yards on felony possession and the assault to boot.”

  “So he copped the plea.”

  “Uh-uh,” George said. “Your buddy Bill is a stand-up guy.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “You’re telling me he didn’t plea-bargain?”

  “That’s what I hear. He confessed to the assault, all right. But he refused to plea-bargain on the drugs. He decided to do time on both charges.”

  That certainly blew Al Foster’s theory out of the water. And surprised the hell out of me. “Then what’s all this shit in the paper about grand juries?” I said. “What kind of crap is Clayton putting out?”

  “From what I hear, Clayton gave Bill a chance to think things over. You know, fifteen-to-twenty can start to look mighty long to you if you brood about it. Apparently Parks came around at the last moment. Or that’s what Clayton claims. He says the Cougars gave Parks a little push in the right direction.”

  I’d heard that story too. And according to Petrie it wasn’t true. Which meant that if Parks had gotten a push, it had come from someone else. “Did Parks testify?”

  George shook his head. “The docket says a mystery witness was scheduled to go in on Friday. You know what happened.”

  “He killed the girl instead.”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “I’m told she set him up,” I said.

  “Somebody did,” George said. “The assault bust was an obvious setup. They were after drugs from the start and they knew they were going to find them. All they needed was an excuse to make a search, and the assault was just the ticket. It must have been the O’Hara girl.”

  “It looks as if her friend was in on it too.”

  “I would think so, yeah, seeing that she was the one who took the beating.”

  “Can you do me one more favor, George?” I said to him.

  He rubbed his grizzled jaw and gave me a look. “You sure they’re going to be blue seats?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, for a pal...” he said.

  “Find out why Internal Affairs is so interested in Clayton.”

  He grunted. “
You’re not asking much, you know.”

  “I don’t need it right away. I can give you a day or two.”

  “A day or two, he says.” George laughed. “I’ll do my best, Harry. But there are no guarantees on that one.”

  “I trust you, George,” I said.

  ******

  I picked up an Enquirer in the courthouse lobby and read through the morning’s news on Parks. The frontpage headline read, MURDERED GIRL HELPED SET PARKS UP, and the article underneath it recapitulated most of what George DeVries had just told me. Apparently Clayton was still leaking news to the press—why I wasn’t sure. There was a paragraph on Parks’s career with the Cougars in which the allegation made in the Post on the previous day—that the Cougar management had helped Bill secure immunity on the drug charges—was repeated word for word. I could almost hear Petrie gnashing his teeth.

  There was nothing in the paper about Barb Melcher, however. Which was an odd thing for Clayton to withhold. In a way, she was more directly involved in the drug bust than C.W. had been. The arrest had taken place in her apartment; she was the one who had taken the beating, which had been the cue for Clayton to arrive on the scene; and if I didn’t miss my guess, she was the one who had taken the fall for her friend C.W. when the assault led to the drug arrest. It was pretty clear that Parks hadn’t blamed C.W. for his legal problems. He would hardly have moved in with her after the arrest and set up house for better than five months if he had suspected that she’d betrayed him. Up until Friday he must have assumed that the Melcher girl was indirectly to blame for his troubles, or that the whole episode was just very bad luck.

  I wasn’t sure how C.W. had convinced her friend Barb to take part in what was apparently an elaborate and dangerous charade. Maybe she hadn’t. It was possible that C.W. had only planned on provoking a loud argument with Bill—just enough of an excuse to justify Clayton showing up on the scene in response to a disorderly conduct call. It was possible that the assault itself had been an unplanned accident, the result of Parks losing his violent temper. Why Parks had attacked Barb rather than C.W. I didn’t know. Perhaps he had taken his wrath out on Barb because C.W., his usual target, had just told him that she was pregnant. Maybe the announcement of the pregnancy itself had triggered the fight. Laurel had said that Parks was none too pleased by the news, and C.W. had probably known that it would make him angry, although she might not have figured that he’d get angry enough to start swinging. And maybe the Melcher girl had stepped in between Parks and C.W. in order to protect her friend—and had ended up with two black eyes.

  Whatever the scenario, the fact that Barb and C.W. were on Donaldson Road, near the airport, when they crashed strongly suggested that Barb was trying to put as much distance between her and Bill as she could. I thought now that that was why she had looked so antsy in the evidentiary photos. It wasn’t disgust that I’d seen in her face, it was fear. She must have thought that Parks would pin the blame on her for bringing the police down on his head, and she’d wanted to get out of town as quickly as she could. It was just her bad luck that they’d hit an ice slick on the way.

  I wasn’t at all sure how C.W. had justified jeopardizing Barb Melcher and betraying Parks in the first place, but Petrie’s idea seemed as good as any. Maybe she had thought that getting Bill off drugs was worth the risk. She might have convinced herself—and Barb, too—that she was doing Parks a favor. Given her opportunistic nature, it was also possible that she’d used the occasion and the unexpected tragedy of Barb’s death to worm herself more deeply into Parks’s life.

  Even if that hadn’t been the plan, it seemed to have worked out that way. According to Laurel, Parks temporarily turned over a new leaf after the bust, giving up drugs, finding religion again, moving in with C.W., and contemplating marrying her. Of course, the honeymoon hadn’t lasted very long. Their love affair had been falling apart practically from the moment it began. Beyond a doubt, it would have ended even if Parks hadn’t found out that C.W. had betrayed him, although it might not have ended so violently.

  It had been clear all along that Bill wasn’t a very bright man. What I hadn’t recognized before was that he was also a naive and crudely sentimental one. C.W. had seemed to have little trouble, at first, manipulating him, presumably using her pregnancy, her sex appeal, a little old-time religion, and what small guilt Parks himself must have felt for the death of Barb Melcher to bring him to hand. He had foolishly given her his loyalty. Nor was she the only person in whom Bill had placed a misbegotten confidence. By anyone’s standards, he didn’t owe Kaplan a thing following the bust—not after the financial screwing that the Professor had given him. And yet Parks had refused to testify against his agent or anyone else. At least, he had refused at first. Unlike Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene, he’d been ready to go to jail for the rest of his life to protect his so-called friends.

  I didn’t pretend to fully understand Bill’s thinking, but from what I’d learned over the last few days, it seemed to me that he must have been a man guided chiefly, and stubbornly, by impulse. And whose instincts, in so far as they were governed, weren’t governed by reason but by the myths of the clubhouse. Stick by your buddies no matter what and they’ll stick by you. Although Bluerock was a much smarter man, I could see bits of the same psychology in him, just as I could see bits of C.W. and Barb in Laurel and her friend Stacey. I still had trouble seeing Parks as a victim—after what I’d found in that ranch house, I could never see him only as that. But it was becoming apparent that a lot of people had been jerking his lead, and that in the matter of the drug arrest at least, he had behaved more honorably than most of his friends.

  22

  I CALLED Bluerock from a phone in the courthouse lobby and arranged to pick him up on my way back to the Delores. At ten sharp I pulled up in front of his house. Otto was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of the front porch overhang, staring placidly at the quiet Sunday street, a case of beer lying at his feet like the family dog. Six or seven of the cans had been opened, and dead soldiers were scattered like cigarette butts on the porch slats.

  “Nothing like a good breakfast,” I said to him as I came up the walk.

  Bluerock grunted, then belched. “Yep,” he said. “Most important meal of the day.” He reached down, pulled a can of beer out of the carton, and tossed it over to me. “You look a little beat.”

  I opened the beer and took a sip. It was warm and flat, but it was wet. “It’s been a busy morning.” I sat down on one of the porch steps and drank the rest of the beer.

  “I’ve been doing some figuring, sport,” Bluerock said, as I drank his beer. “Whose idea was it to bring me in on this thing? Yours or Petrie’s?”

  “Mine,” I said.

  “And whose idea was it to dangle that carrot in front of my nose?”

  “You mean the extra year of playing time?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I came up with the idea,” I said. “Petrie agreed to it.”

  “Just like that, huh?” Bluerock said.

  “Just like that.”

  He stared at me with a disturbing smile. “I called Petrie this morning and told him his part of the deal was off. I don’t take pay for being a friend—to Bill or anyone else.”

  It took me a second to realize that he was offended. I’d offended him, by arranging for a payoff. If I’d thought about it the day before, I would have known better.

  “I didn’t mean any insult, Blue,” I said to him. “It’s just that it’s likely to be risky. I thought you deserved to be paid for that risk.”

  He took a deep, noisy breath through his nostrils. “I’m not going to get pissed at you, Harry,” he said, although he sounded plenty pissed. “But I want you to understand something. And I’m only going to say it once. I never did anything in my life that mattered to me just for money. And football matters to me. So do my friends. Got it?”

  “I got it,” I said.

  “All right then,” he said, blowing all the air he’d take
n in through his nostrils out through his mouth. “Let’s get started.”

  He got to his feet and stepped out into the sunlight. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with gaudily painted parrots on it, khaki safari shorts, gym socks, and sneakers. As big as he was, he looked like a hood on holiday.

  As soon as he stepped off the porch, his bulldog face turned mean. It wasn’t a meanness that had a direct object, either. It was an all-purpose mean. His huge brow furrowed, his gray eyes closed down to slits, his mouth shut like a car door being slammed. He was wearing his game face, and it couldn’t have been more impressive if he were holding a sign that said, Don’t Mess With Me.

  “Are we going to kick some ass?” he growled.

  “Well, not right this minute.”

  He shot me a dark look. “You better get ready to kick ass, sport,” he said ominously. “Because trouble is coming. Don’t you think for a minute that Walt doesn’t know what you’re doing, ‘cause he does. From what I read in the papers, he dodged a bullet with Bill. And he knows it. He doesn’t want you stirring up the waters. He doesn’t want you finding Bill. He wants Bill good and dead. And that guy, Clayton, you told me about last night, you gotta figure he’d be just as happy if Bill were out of the way. Less trouble. Less embarrassment. Easier to explain things.”

  “Blue,” I said. “We’re not on a rescue mission.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” he said. “But nobody’s proved Bill’s guilty of anything, yet—doing drugs or killing the girl.”

  It was true enough. Perhaps it was a testament to my prejudices, but the thought hadn’t even entered my mind.

  “I think you better accept the fact that he murdered her,” I said.

  “And you’d better accept the fact that if you want to find out the truth, sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to Bill. He’s the only one who knows, sport. Nobody else was there.”

  I nodded grudgingly. “What if he doesn’t want to talk?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Bluerock said. “There’s still a lot of ground between us and it.”