by John Straley
The reporter held her notebook to her side and her head was turned toward the coffin. The social worker took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. She tried to speak but gave up and the raven called out from the shadows.
The principal finally straightened his shoulders and, wiping his eyes, said only that Sean was a quiet boy and he hadn’t known him well. He said that Sean had suffered a great deal in his life and he certainly didn’t deserve it. He said he hoped that Sean was at peace now.
I started to walk away. The gravediggers were sitting on the backhoe as Jane Marie, Blossom and I walked the path to the road. In a couple of seconds I heard the chomp of a spade. I saw my friend from Social Services standing a few feet away looking at another grave. I walked to where she was, my slick dress shoes slipping on the damp grass.
She was wiping her nose with a balled-up tissue as I came up and touched her elbow. She glanced at me, then stared back down to the grave.
“It’s so sad, Cecil. So many disturbed young boys with guns.”
I read the name on the grave. It was Albert Chevalier’s resting place. The tombstone lay flat in the ground. Grass had almost completely overgrown its edges so that only the name could be made out in the center.
“Albert was a disturbed boy?” I asked.
“Whoa!” she said, rolling her eyes toward the sky. “Scary. I don’t think I ever met a more twisted little guy.” She looked up at me, her bloodshot eyes incredulous. “I suppose it’s okay for me to say this now, but he was really a bent kid. We almost stepped in to take him out of the home and away from his parents. Albert was really frustrated, very withdrawn. I think he must have cleaned out all of the pets in his trailer park.”
“Cleaned out the pets?” I echoed.
She rolled her eyes again. “Whoa, big time,” and she leaned closer to me. “Albert used to kill small animals. Sometimes he took his own sweet time, if you know what I mean.” Her voice was low and confidential as if she were sharing some particularly juicy gossip.
“Frankly, I was surprised he was the victim of a crime. I always saw him the other way around. You know, I was expecting him to be where that Richard Ewers should have been. In jail the rest of his life.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. The trees above us gave out a long sigh.
“Of course, he’s dead now . . . Albert, that is, and poor Sean too. So many sad little boys.”
Somewhere the raven tittered and clacked.
“Cecil, do you think we’ll be judged for the things we failed to do?” my friend said, watching the men shoveling wet dirt onto Sean’s coffin.
I didn’t answer her but excused myself and walked down the hill.
Jane Marie went back later that day and put flowers and some comic books on Sean’s grave, but I had nothing to leave him. All I could think about were Sean Sands’s keepsakes and what the minister had said about justice.
13
At the bottom of the gravel lane leading back to town I saw a bearded man in a wheelchair. He was wearing blue jeans and a Burberry coat that tucked into the armrests of his chair. As I came closer his blue eyes locked on to mine.
“Younger, shit, man, I’m glad I caught up with you.”
Jane Marie was carrying Blossom, and they scooted around past me. Jane Marie squeezed my hand good-bye as she passed.
Teller nodded up the hillside with his chin so that his foot-long beard swayed away from his chest. “You just bury the Sands kid?” he asked matter-of-factly.
I nodded but he went right on. I had been Teller’s investigator. He didn’t really want to chat with me.
“George shot him. These cops! Don’t they give them some lessons when they hand out the weapons? Maybe George got mixed up when they told him ‘women and children first.’ What do you think?”
A sly raven flew from under the canopy of trees and landed on the gravel not twenty feet from where we were standing. He was a large bird with a crown of feathers on his head and almost a lion’s mane around his throat. He had what looked like a baloney rind in his beak. I knew Teller wasn’t really asking what I thought.
“Listen, Cecil, I know you’re in some kind of early retirement thing—”
“What do you mean by that?” I interrupted him.
“Well, you know, I’ve heard you don’t do much criminal work anymore, and trust me, I don’t blame you for that, I guess . . .”
I finally started to say something when Teller held up his hand. “It’s just, I know for certain that bastard George Doggy murdered Richard Ewers.”
I let the words sit like the gravel at my feet.
Teller turned so he was pushing his chair slowly away from the graveyard. “We had offers from movie people and tabloids. At first, Richard didn’t want the money. He said it would just bring more heat on him. I didn’t blame him, you know. I mean, I wasn’t particularly wild about him telling anybody anything. I figured the families might come back with a wrongful death suit. They’d use his statements to the press any way they could. Hell, even the fact of him getting the money might incite them to file a suit. But then Richard came up with a plan.”
Teller stopped talking and studied me for a moment. Then he pulled a check out of his pocket. It was made out to me for a thousand dollars. “Cecil, listen, I hate to dump this on you all at once. So take this. You know I’d feel better if we had a business relationship.”
I looked at the check and counted the zeros. Teller was impossibly hard to work for but he was generous with his clients’ money. In this instance he also wanted to make certain that anything he said to me would come under the umbrella of “work product” and attorney-client privilege. Once I took his thousand dollars, the privilege of what to do with the information belonged exclusively to Richard Ewers or his heirs and representatives. Even if I wanted to talk to the police, Teller could stop them from using anything I said in court.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the money.
“Richard wanted to give half the money to the Sands brothers. Mind you, he only had half the money. He was going to get the next fifty grand from the tabloid after he taped his interview. He said before he went to the papers he wanted to give the troopers information that he thought would get them off his back forever. He wouldn’t even tell me what it was. Believe me, I was against it but he insisted I arrange a meeting with Doggy.”
“Why did he want to give the money to the Sandses?”
“All he would say was that those boys deserved it. And that he couldn’t keep all of the money for himself.”
“Was he going to give any money to Jonathan Chevalier?”
“Not that I knew of. Chevalier had jerked him around at trial. All of that ‘It could have been him’ bullshit. Christ, that guy should have been horsewhipped.”
He let his words fade. For a moment we were both lost in our memories of that trial, then Harrison brought us back to the present. “This past spring I offered to set up a meeting in Ketchikan between Richard and George Doggy. That meeting was supposed to happen ten days ago.”
The raven hopped three times toward Teller’s shoe. The big bird still held the meat rind.
“Richard wanted to go alone. He didn’t tell his wife. He didn’t tell me much because he said no one could have the information until he got the money to Kevin Sands. I didn’t want him to do that. I agreed to it only if Richard wore a wire and taped everything that went on in the meeting.”
“Did he take the money to the meeting?” I asked the raven.
“He made it to Ketchikan. Richard said he was going to mail the cash to Sands as soon as he got to Alaska. He said he was going to settle all accounts only after he knew the meeting was solid and he was back in Alaska.”
“Those are the words? ‘Settle all accounts’?”
“Yep, those were his words. He got off the plane. He rode the ferry across the cha
nnel, he took a cab into town and rented a room in a hotel downtown. And that’s the last we know of him.”
I was about to ask an obvious question, but I didn’t. The raven dropped the rind on the ground, walked two stubby steps away and came rushing back. In that time I answered my own question.
“You didn’t raise an alarm because you didn’t want the tabloid reporters on it,” I told Teller. “You didn’t want them trying to uncover the story before you had possession of it.”
“We were acting in Richard’s best interests. I negotiated the next fifty grand and I’ll give them the interview. It’s a better story for those fuckers anyway. ‘Crazy Cop Kills Innocent Man.’”
I shook my head and looked down at Teller.
“Hey! It’s not for me, Cecil. The money goes to Patricia and Richard’s folks.”
“Why do you think George killed Richard?” I asked the bird again.
Teller reached into the pocket of his Burberry coat again and pulled out a piece of paper.
“On the day the meeting was to take place, George Doggy flew down to Ketchikan. When he landed there he reported that his handgun had been lost or stolen by the airlines. He reported that he forgot he was carrying a weapon until he got to the airport, and he was forced to check the gun through baggage in a special container the airlines keep for such things. When he showed up in Ketchikan, he claims the gun wasn’t there. And the interesting thing is that this lost luggage claim was made four hours after the flight arrived.”
The raven made a terrible clatter. He shook himself as if he had just been doused with water. Then the black bird hopped twice on the gravel and flew down the lane toward the corner of the road with the baloney skin in his beak. Just as he was about to disappear, he dropped the prize in the road and flew up into the trees.
“And you think George Doggy did this to cover himself?”
“Younger, you know him, he’s kind of like your old uncle or something. We’ve talked about this. I don’t hold it against you. But now it’s serious. You can’t let some sort of family loyalty stop you on this.”
Teller looked up at me as if he were commanding himself to walk . . . or me to crawl. “George Doggy killed Richard in what he thought was retribution for the deaths on the Mygirl. Doggy shot Richard, disposed of the gun and the body, then called in the phony theft of his handgun in case the body should be discovered later.”
I thought about George Doggy, and then I thought of where the raven had gone. The woods are a tangle of limbs and fallen trees, all but impenetrable. The bird could navigate by instinct and uncanny awareness of his surroundings. Despite my growing suspicions, I had always thought George Doggy would be lost trying to lead a life of crime. His instinct was not made for it. Or so I thought.
“The report of his missing gun would be too easy to tear apart. If it were phony, it would collapse. The timing stinks; there would be too many witnesses. It’s sloppy,” I said, piling up as many objections as I could come up with.
“Cecil, listen, you are working on making a case now. I need some belief, not your trademark skepticism.” Teller stopped the pumping motion of his arms and shoulders as he pushed the chair. He looked up at me with the headlights of his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Cecil.” His voice was softer now. “I’m angry. I’m not at my best. That’s why I need you.”
We traveled on in silence for a moment. A rock pinched out from under his chair’s tire. He stopped again.
“Christ, I’m tired. I haven’t slept. You drive this thing a while,” and he gestured vaguely down the road.
I stepped in behind him, took the grips of his chair and pushed him down the gravel road.
“And as far as its being sloppy,” the old lawyer went right on, “murder’s almost always sloppy, don’t you think?”
I had carried water for Teller during some of the worst months of my life. I had chased down foolish leads and organized mountains of paper. But he had never asked me to push his chair before. He knew that too and it was another example of how he used the chair to manipulate his audience. I felt strange tenderness for this old warhorse even while I knew he was conning me into working for him.
“Harrison, help me with one thing. I’m not sure I remember, but did Richard ever mention seeing Jonathan Chevalier the night of the killings? I mean did he ever talk about Chevalier before Chevalier’s testimony at trial?”
“No, Richard never mentioned Chevalier. He was sure pissed off after Chevalier testified on direct, though. Come on, you remember, Cecil. My cross of Chevalier was the coup of the case. I chopped Chevalier up, and then he nearly wet himself trying to help us. Why the hell are you bringing that up now?”
As we rounded the corner, the raven landed on the ground right in front of us. The bird’s hackles were distended and he seemed to have grown to twice his normal size. This raven roared at us as if he were trying to wake us.
“Sorry,” I said, “I was just thinking.” We moved in a wide arc around the angry bird. “One other thing: In all the other suspect materials, the drug enforcers and the mafia killers, we never really considered the possibility of murder/suicide on the Mygirl?”
“Oh, I thought about it, Cecil. But that leaves the fire. Who started the fire? Maybe Richard, but I couldn’t defend him that way. Nobody’s going to buy that he burned the evidence but didn’t commit the murders. Why? “
“I’ve been thinking about the Mygirl a lot, is all,” I said.
“You said it yourself, Cecil. The Mygirl is done with. We’ll never know. I’m quoting a great investigator when I say, ‘What would the guilty party say, but that somebody else has done it?’ Besides, the sides have switched now and we are hunting the hunters. I want you to talk to Doggy. I want you to memorialize your conversation as thoroughly as possible.”
This was the code Teller used to let me know he was expecting me to surreptitiously tape my conversation. The Board of Ethics made it impossible for him to ask me to do so directly, but it was not illegal in Alaska for me to secretly tape on my own. We had played this game before.
I left Teller on the street in front of the hotel downtown, where he had a van waiting to take him back to the airport. Then I walked across the parking lot to the state building and through the back door to the police station. I asked to see Lieutenant Pomfret. Surprisingly, the desk clerk buzzed me straight in and pointed me back toward Pomfret’s office where the large man sat behind a tiny desk.
“Younger, people keep dropping around you like flies. What’s up with you? It’s like the plague around you.”
“I dunno, Lieutenant,” I said rather smartly.
“Cecil, I’m going to want to get a full statement from you about the incident with Kevin Sands.”
“It was an accident.”
“So I’ve been told. Your buddy George Doggy has been in here already.”
I didn’t much care for the way Lieutenant Pomfret said the words “your buddy.”
Pomfret leaned forward. “What did Kevin Sands say before he died? Just informally. You know, what did he talk about while he was on the boat?”
“He was angry with George Doggy.”
“Did he say why?”
“I think it had something to do with the fact that George had just killed his brother.” I tried my best to keep a damper on my sarcasm.
“Anything else? What else went on between Doggy and Kevin?” Pomfret was still leaning forward, which had to be an uncomfortable position for him, sitting down with his gun around his waist and all.
“Who are the suspects here, Lieutenant? Can I ask that?”
“Cecil, the witnesses keep dying, and you and your buddy George are still alive. That’s getting to be a problem for me. Now, you can tell me about Kevin’s conversation or I can think about whether you are obstructing justice.”
I cleared my throat. “Kevin Sands wa
s angry about the death of his brother. He also said something about deserving to keep the money.”
“The money Chevalier had been giving away?” Pomfret leaned back, picked up a pencil and made a show of taking a note. Now I was certain Pomfret was tape-recording our conversation.
“I suppose that was the money he was referring to. He seemed exasperated that Doggy hadn’t really cared about finding the money in the first place. Then he asked to speak to Doggy in private on the back deck. Kevin was holding my daughter in his arms. When I got to the back deck, all I heard him tell George was ‘I won’t tell,’ or words to that effect.”
Pomfret looked sad now, as if he were turning a corner he didn’t want to see around. “Sands said he wouldn’t tell? Do you know what he was referring to?”
“I do not,” I said and waited. The lights hummed, casting a sickly light down on Pomfret’s jowls.
“Why did he want to talk to Doggy in private?”
“Don’t know,” I said, conscious that my answers were getting shorter.
“Now, Cecil, I have to ask you flat out. You know you are not in custody. You can walk out of here anytime you want. That door to my office is not locked, and you can walk out anytime you want. You realize that, don’t you?”
My stomach tightened as I heard Pomfret clear himself of his Miranda obligations.
“Yes,” I said.
Roy Pomfret laid his pencil down in a practiced, offhanded gesture as if he wasn’t really worried whether I was a murderer. “Did either you or George Doggy push Kevin Sands overboard? You can tell me the truth, Cecil, and I’ll do my best to help you through this.”
I have listened to hundreds of hours of confession tapes. The officer always lets the subject know they can walk out anytime they want. This makes the interview “non-custodial,” and hence there is no need for the standard warnings that your rights are about to be tested for their usefulness. I have also listened to dozens of well-heeled corporate lawyers facing the same situation, and I chose to answer in their style rather than babbling about my rather ambiguous innocence with regard to Kevin Sands’s death.
