Who Needs Justice?

by Rex Bolt

  "Fuck."

  "It was touch-and-go for a while, especially with my mom. When they recovered they put the house on the market right away and moved to an apartment. It wasn't rational, but they felt vulnerable."

  "God damn it."

  "On a brighter subject," Kim said, "how come you're not involved with anyone? Or are you?"

  "What happened to the guy that beat them up?"

  "There were two. They caught them the next day trying to use my dad's credit card. There was no way my parents were going back up there to testify, so they pled guilty to a watered-down charge and served 90 days in the county jail."

  "Mother-fucker . . . What else, besides the house?"

  "Mom seemed a little slower, mentally. We never knew if it was early dementia setting in, or the incident."

  Christian said, "Well now I probably can't sleep. Which isn't the worst thing."

  Kim said, "You know what Chris? You look absolutely exhausted. Please go in, and I'll leave."

  "I'm good right here. I'm actually afraid of having a bad dream tonight."

  "A serious bad dream, or one because it didn't work out with Bethany?"

  "She leave the squash club with various guys, in your experience, besides that guy Jeff?"

  "Oh yes, she's very much out there."

  "That's what I figured. Lot of mystery to her."

  "Made more complicated no doubt by that body, which you were studying carefully during the match."

  "Don't you think most of them hit the ball too low on the front wall, though? She got mad when I told her that."

  "Probably. So are you involved with anyone Chris? Or you just fool around."

  "No. You?"

  "I've broken up with some nice guys. I can't put my finger on it."

  "Let me tell you something," Christian said. "You're never going to find that perfect package. Something's always a little off. You accept that, you move forward."

  "Interesting, Dr. Phil," she said. "So how come you aren't settled down?"

  Christian said, "Those two guys, anyone ever follow up what happened to them? After they got out of jail?"

  "No, that wouldn't make sense. Why would we want to?"

  "You're right," he said, "but if it were me, I couldn't help it, I'd be curious."

  36 - Extra Twenty

  When Christian woke up it was almost noon. At some point Kim must have set him up with a pillow and blanket, and he'd slept surprisingly well on the couch. She'd left a note, that she had to go to work and thanking him for the 'interesting' evening.

  He checked the Chronicle online to see if a washed-up body had made the news. Nothing so far. He had the backpack to deal with, and the phone.

  Was it logical to send a couple texts from the guy's phone, or make a silent call, from say the beach at Santa Cruz? On the one hand you might throw off the timeline and geography. On the other, they might track you and arrest you then and there if Damirko had been reported missing and they were on to his phone.

  So forget that. He opened the back of the phone and removed the battery, and with a small screwdriver pulled out the circuit board, or whatever it was. There were no doubt easier options, but the Sonoma County dump would do the job, and a bird in the hand was better than fooling around. He put the backpack in a garbage bag—fins, goggles and all—threw in the phone and tied it up and put it in the trunk. He stuffed an old rug he was tired of into the backseat area, so the backpack wasn't the only thing he'd be dumping, and drove up there.

  The dump was north of Petaluma, lush green hills all around reminding you of Ireland, and it was easy to miss the turn. The guy at the booth asked for his driver's license and he said he didn't have it with him. The guy said he needed something to verify he was a Sonoma County resident, so Christian handed him an extra twenty bucks and drove in.

  The operation gave you confidence, with giant payloaders gobbling up your trash almost as quickly as you dumped it. In fact you had to watch your step not to get run over by one.

  He stopped for gas on East Washington, bought a donut at the convenience store, devoured part of it and put the phone battery and circuit board into the bag with the rest of the donut and deposited it in the gas station's yellow dumpster, which took care of everything for now. Hopefully.

  He was thinking he'd have a hearty breakfast at Mel's on Lombard in the city, but he found himself angling once again toward the Mill Valley exit on 101 South, and he settled in at Starbucks.

  He'd made both the original and the revised lists sitting here, the original the day after Steiner gave him his news. The revised was two days after Donny, the day he'd met Allison. It sure seemed like a long time ago:

  1 Ray

  2 Donny *

  3 Riesling

  4 Birgitte problem

  5 Ike's guy

  6 Chip

  7 Eric Mossman's guy

  * Complete

  He had an envelope that had been sitting on the front seat of his car, no particular reason except he was mad about it. It was his health insurance statement, that when he read the fine print, charged him for tests last month that he'd never received. It was no money out of his pocket, since it was covered by his policy, but you wondered how many millions of people got hit with similar errors and never noticed. How could they charge him for something that never happened? Wasn't that criminal?

  He wrote his updated list on the back of the envelope:

  1 Ray - no

  2 Donny#

  3 Thad

  4 Chip#

  5 Jerry Smith

  6 Ike's guy

  7 Birgitte situation*

  8 Leslie parents

  9 dog guy?

  10 Pocatello driver ##

  11 Kyle ###

  #Complete

  ## Complete but mistake

  ### Good enough

  In sizing up the new list, Christian wasn't sure if he was up to it. All that work and stress to get to this point, and look what was still ahead.

  If he had to go with two, he'd say Thad and Smith, since Thad involved family and Smith killed someone. That left Ike's neighbor from hell on the sidelines for now, along with whoever assaulted Leslie's parents and the guy who threw the dog into traffic. He'd added that guy to the list because he'd gotten more worked up about it as the story unfolded. You had a 22-year-old kid on drugs from a good-old-boy San Francisco family, and it looked like he'd getting probation, tops, which was appalling.

  One thing he decided, he better not watch the news any more, or for that matter meet any new people who were liable to tell you their life story. You'd almost certainly end up expanding the list.

  He walked up the hill to the Mill Valley library and read the Jerry Smith return emails from the high schools, which he couldn't concentrate on last time because he was in the middle of Damirko. There were four now, two from school administrators blowing him off, and two from alumni coordinators, one at Montgomery High School and one at Piner.

  Montgomery was the more organized, and the contact person directed him to a tidy website that had all known alumni listed, and Smith wasn't on it. The Piner person said there was nothing they could email but they had a master binder with a database, one in the office and one in the Santa Rosa main library.

  Before he got off the computer, he looked around for fitness industry conventions and trade shows that Thad might attend. It was a bit overwhelming; there was a big one in Oklahoma City in May, but there were others all over the place too. He set up another gmail account and wrote the sales department of the Oklahoma convention, which was called World Fitness Expo 2012. He said he was starting a business in Boise, and he'd be interested in attending if he knew there were going to be other Idaho fitness people there.

  Christian hated to reverse direction and drive up to Santa Rosa, but he figured it was worth a shot with Jerry Smith, and if nothing else he'd be narrowing things down. He got hungry on the way and stopped at In-n-Out in Rohnert Park, though he wished he hadn't because it was so crowded he
had to park in a furniture store parking lot down the road.

  While he was walking to the restaurant the phone rang and it was Allison.

  "Chris!" she said. "We've been thinking about you."

  Christian said, "Really. In what way?"

  "Know what you need to do? Let go of those defenses. That's why you're so cynical."

  "I'm cynical 'a', because I haven't put enough distance on our little excursion, and 'b', that you calling out of the blue means you want something."

  "Fine, I won't even tell you why I'm calling."

  "Not to change the subject but how's my brother these days? All recovered?"

  "Floyd is great. He's coming out."

  "Oh, Jesus . . . That what you were calling about then?"

  "No. I'm playing an open mike tomorrow. The Red Raider on Polk Street, it starts at eight. Can you come?"

  "You know what, that one in Pocatello, I'm going to have that be it as far as open mikes."

  "Come on Chris, you can walk. We passed right by it on the way to your house that night, when your friend met you in the lobby. It would be so nice to have you there."

  "We'll see," he said, and hung up.

  +++

  The Piner High School directory in the reference section of the Santa Rosa library had a Jerry Smith, Class of 1976, listed at 4820 Mill Station Road in Sebastopol. The directory had been last updated in 2003. Christian googled around for the assessor's parcel number, entered it in the Sonoma County land records search engine, and boom, Jerry and Suzanne Smith were the current owners of the property.

  He asked the librarian if they kept old high school yearbooks, and she led him into a side room and opened a glass cabinet with a key. It was a surprisingly organized collection from the various Santa Rosa high schools, going back to the 1950's. He found Smith's Class of '76 yearbook, took it to the xerox machine and made of copy of his graduation picture, thinking it looked a lot like the one on the microfilm at the SF main library that was part of the original IJ article.

  Sebastopol was fifteen minutes away, between Santa Rosa and the coast. Christian took Highway 12 into the center of town, turned on Ragle Road and took a left on Mill Station. Sebastopol was once apple orchard country, known for the sweet Gravenstein, but vineyards had replaced most of the orchards over the last twenty years. Not quite prime Napa Valley conditions because of the marine layer, but excellent for supplemental grapes, and lucrative.

  Christian did a double-take when he saw Smith's property. There was a large modern house, easily 4000 square feet, set on a hill surrounded by several acres of vineyards. He could see a pool, a court of some kind and a barn that looked like it had been converted to a guest house. Christian thinking the barn was all he'd need.

  How could a dead-beat 28-year-old drunk driver end up here? He either married money or came into it, or somehow was successful himself, which would be even worse. He was clearly enjoying the good life while the Mossman family, what was left of them, quite likely was not.

  On the way out of town there were signs for the spring Sebastopol parade and Apple Blossom Festival, this weekend. Christian thought what the hay, let me show up at that.

  +++

  He got home and put on the 6 o'clock news while he made a sandwich. A blonde reporter was doing a live-remote from Ocean Beach, her hair being whipped around, and Christian stopped in his tracks, his mind racing. But the reporter was talking about the big off-shore storm that had arrived as predicted and was churning up huge swells. There were fire department trucks on the beach, the firemen watching the ocean with binoculars, because dozens of surfers were in the water taking advantage of the conditions.

  Christian watched the report to conclusion, switched channels and caught the end of a similar report and then checked online. So far, nothing about a beached Croatian.

  He took a shower and headed over to Weatherby's. Shep said, "My man. I saw you here last week with the black guy, looked kind of intense there, so I didn't want to bother you."

  Christian said, "Ray. He lays on the act, but he's got a good heart. I've known him since junior high school."

  "And last we spoke, if memory serves, you felt like you had an issue."

  "Yeah, a guy on me to an extent. But that got resolved."

  "Shit . . . You mean, definitively resolved?"

  "I guess. There's a Part B guy, but pretty sure he'll be a non-factor now that Part A got handled."

  "Jiminy Christmas."

  "The main thing tugging at me now, I met a woman I think I could marry. Sounds insane of course, after one date."

  "That's how it can work though," Shep said. "You just know. Or so they say."

  "What makes it more complicated is two things, the first of which is I can't sleep with her. She's the little sister of someone I used to know."

  "I hear you there, brother. I'm not sure I'd be able to either. What's the second complication?"

  "I won't be around."

  "Oh yeah. I almost forgot about that. Sorry."

  "I try to forget about it too. I'm even successful sometimes."

  "How long has it been now? Since they told you."

  "It was a Monday, a month after the Niners lost to Seattle, which I unfortunately ended up at . . . so let's see . . ."

  "Man, don't remind me, the Seahawks of all teams. What keeps eating at me is why’d they kept letting those guys kneel during the anthem? No backbone in the ownership."

  "I'm thinking February 20th. So we got March 20th, and what are we now, April 6th? Seven weeks, give or take."

  "I probably already asked you this . . . but you supposed to be deteriorating yet?"

  "Maybe. I threw away all the 'what to expect' paperwork they gave me, on purpose. I did a hard workout yesterday, kind of a cross-training thing, and got yelled at by my doctor's secretary. I felt decent after though."

  "You don't think . . . there could be any chance they fucked up?"

  "Hard to imagine, though I won't lie it hasn't crossed my mind once or twice lately."

  "What'd you say you went in with in the first place? Without getting graphic? An intestinal something-or-other?"

  "Yeah."

  "How's that coming along?"

  "It's gone. The symptoms, anyway."

  "So maybe . . . you had the goddamn flu and some moron mixed up a test sample . . . or entered the wrong patient in the computer."

  "I give that possibility five percent. Up from zero admittedly. The thing is, I don't want to know."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Meaning . . . I don't want to go in and get my death sentence re-affirmed, which it almost surely would be. And if it were miraculously overturned . . . that wouldn't be the greatest either, at this point."

  Shep stared at Christian with his mouth open.

  Christian said, "It would actually, kind of . . . screw things up."

  Shep said, "Uh-huh."

  "Crazy as that sounds," Christian said.

  +++

  When he got home he was going to call Kim, but he found a re-run of a reality show he liked, so he waited until it was over. The show was about a blended family, and in this episode one of the teenage daughters builds up to asking the stepfather if she can call him 'Dad', because he has been there for her more than the real dad has. Several of the characters end up crying, and Christian cried too.

  "I was hoping you'd call," Kim said. "That last night wasn't it."

  Christian said, "There's this performance tomorrow I told someone I'd be at. Nothing in it for you though."

  "I love live performances."

  "Well, okay then, if you insist."

  Kim said, "I saw Bethany tonight at the gym, and I mentioned you."

  "You did?"

  "She said if it ever got serious I needed to ask you about your skeleton in the closet. That was how she phrased it."

  Fuck.

  "What gave her the idea it could get serious?"

  "I told her I wanted it to."

 
; Christian was silent.

  "Uh-oh," Kim said. "Does that change me coming tomorrow night?"

  "No, we're good," he said, and he gave her the information and got off.

  37 - Free Radical

  Christian woke up Wednesday with a lot of energy. There were familiar smells in the air when it was going to be a warm spring day, and this was one of them. People were walking around the neighborhood in shorts, rare for a morning in San Francisco.

  He felt so good that he repeated his run to the bridge-and-back twice, the way he'd described it in the restaurant the other night. He was tired but exhilarated at the end. Christian was thinking the Damirko workout may have upped his fitness level.

  After lunch he called Bethany in the office. "What skeleton in the closet?" he said.

  "Chris, I only know Kim from checking me in at the squash club. But she's a sweetheart. It was something I needed to say."

  "Okay, listen, I'll buy you a drink when you get off work. I want to ask you something."

  "I guess we could. Just one though, because we have another league match tonight."

  "I get it, you're in training," Christian said.

  +++

  At 5:35 Bethany came out of the medical office building, Steiner right with her. He saw Christian, shook his head and kept going.

  "Billy's turned into a grumpy old man," he said.

  "Okay, let's not keep going there," Bethany said. "Did you have somewhere in mind?"

  Christian knew a bistro in Laurel Village, a few blocks away. At this hour you'd see private-school moms from Presidio Heights, dressed in L.L. Bean type gear, in there getting blitzed.

  "So Kim," Bethany said when they were set up. "I can't wait to hear where that one came from."

  "She picked up on my appreciation of your match, actually. Funniest thing, it turns out I knew her sister years ago."

  "Well you have to be frank with her Chris. She's hung up on you, that's pretty obvious."

  "People look up to their older sisters' friends, so that part might be artificially induced. Either way, things are haywire, like I'm being punished for something."