Plain Heathen Mischief

by Martin Clark

  “Sure.” Standing up, he gave Lynette a sharp nod, briefly rested his hand on Sophie’s shoulder and, having accomplished what he came to do, left the room, his rubber-soled boots squeaking on the linoleum as he departed.

  “I put a lot of stock in Dixon Kreager,” she said to Joel.

  “He’s a remarkable man,” Joel replied. “Been awfully kind to me.”

  “So where do we want to start?”

  “How about the case involving Karl?” Joel suggested.

  “Whatever makes you comfortable,” she said. “I don’t mean anything by this, but is there a reason your sister’s here?” She glanced at Sophie and smiled warmly. “She’s welcome to stay, of course.”

  “She’s just concerned about me,” Joel said.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “As for Karl, his attorney approached me and tried to twist my arm, showed up at my workplace and gave me a sob story about Lisa and her kids, then basically threatened to sue me and Dixon if I didn’t play ball with them. They want me to say that Lisa attacked him, and that he hit her in self-defense. Otherwise they’re both going to claim I mishandled the boat and that’s how she got hurt. Do you think she would lie, turn on me after I kept him from beating her even worse?”

  Lynette raised and dropped her shoulders, exhaled heavily. “Difficult to say. It’s very possible though. Who’s the lawyer? Who’s representing Karl?”

  “His name’s Christopher Hudgins.”

  “Hmm. And he wanted you to lie?”

  Joel thought for a moment. “Not exactly. He asked lots of questions and more or less made it apparent what he was digging for.”

  “Did he threaten you or offer you a bribe?”

  “Again, he was very careful. I mean, I certainly felt threatened. There’s no doubt what he wants, what he’s intimating. He keeps pointing out I didn’t see what happened immediately before Karl cracked her—the split second right before—and that she was angry and arguing and slapped his finger away from her nose. Hudgins is trying to make it appear she was the aggressor.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “He also wanted me to talk to you and persuade you to drop the case.”

  “He—”

  “But that’s not why I’m here,” Joel hastened to add.

  “It’s unethical to threaten you with a civil action to gain an advantage during a criminal proceeding. I don’t care how he song-and-danced it, it seems obvious he’s squeezing you. I think I’ll give him a call and let him know I’m considering a report to the state disciplinary committee. Let’s see if that rattles his cage.”

  “I appreciate it, but he’s going to say he merely gave me the facts, outlined his clients’ position and tried to discover what my testimony would be. He doesn’t seem like the type who’ll be intimidated.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Let’s call his bluff. You think they really want to go after Dixon Kreager in this town? Think they really want to have Karl questioned about his past record? And what would they receive if they somehow pull off the impossible and win? Hell, she had a cut and a few stitches you accidentally caused—that’s their best-case scenario. What’s it worth? A thousand bucks maybe? Two thousand? And I’m confident Dixon’s insured.”

  “I’m not,” Joel said. “Insured, that is.”

  “You were working for him. As his employee, you’d be covered.”

  “I don’t want to bring Dixon any trouble. Or myself. I’m scared to death of lawsuits. I want to be clear of this as soon as possible.”

  “You’ll be fine. Our lad Christopher’s blowing smoke. You’re not folding, are you? Getting ready to take a hike and leave me holding the bag?”

  “No. I’m concerned, okay? But I’m sticking with you. I’ll take the oath and tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”

  “Good,” said Sophie, speaking for the first time. “You put the bastard behind bars, Ms. Allen. Joel will be there to do his part.”

  “I will,” he added. “I’m telling you all this so you’ll be prepared and can anticipate problems, not because I’m planning to change my story.”

  “I appreciate the notice,” Lynette said. “I’ll mention their threat to Dixon and make certain he’s insured. But they’ll never go through with it. Never. Not a chance. And I’ll light a match under Hudgins and see how he likes a little heat himself.”

  “There we go,” Sophie said, becoming animated.

  “I’ve already alerted Dixon,” Joel said. “He didn’t seem too concerned, but I still worry about dragging him into a lawsuit.”

  “Believe me,” Lynette said, “he can take care of himself.”

  “I just hope we don’t wind up hurting innocent people,” Joel remarked. “Lisa, the kids.”

  “Yeah—if we leave him alone, they’ll have hospitalization insurance every time he punches one of them and plenty of money to pay for her plastic surgery. Or enough cash for a fine funeral with exquisite floral arrangements.” The words were steeped in sarcasm. “Am I getting warm? I’m guessing you’re hearing the same shopworn argument I’ve already heard from Lisa and heard in one shape or form a hundred times before.”

  “I’m not defending him,” Joel protested. “I simply feel sorry for her and the kids, okay?”

  “Let Ms. Allen handle those concerns, Joel. You’re the witness, not their counselor.” Sophie paused. “Or their minister.”

  Lynette lessened her tone. “Believe me, Mr. King, I don’t want Lisa to suffer any further. I’m sensitive to her needs and the balancing I may have to consider at some point. Right now, though, the hard line best serves everyone.”

  “Okay,” Joel said.

  “Okay,” Lynette replied. She glanced at a clock on her desk, didn’t make any effort to conceal what she was doing. “And you have some other issues? Something else you wanted to discuss?” She was pleasant, conversational.

  Joel rubbed his hands together and felt his joints freeze—his knees, ankles and knuckles solidified, lost their play—and his stomach seemed to vanish, leaving him with a vacant crater in his abdomen. The nausea he’d experienced at dawn briefly boiled, and his mind began to somersault and spew half thoughts and non sequiturs, misfiring. He was watching Giant . . . and Elizabeth Taylor was ladling water from a trough . . . and he careened to his mother at the library, reading Dr. Seuss. Then he was stopping to help a man in a green suit change a tire on a Buick, the man’s wife wearing her Sunday dress and an elaborate hat, fanning herself and sipping orange soda as she watched them labor beneath the scorching sun. The photo of Baker when he was a newborn, a buffalo nickel, an eight-track of Louis Armstrong singing “Hello Dolly,” the scent of his pastor’s robe when—

  “Joel, tell her.” It was Sophie, drawing him back. “Don’t just sit there like a bump on a log.”

  “Yeah . . .” he said, still partly missing, the tangents overtaking him.

  Sophie snapped her fingers and barked his name. “Joel!”

  “You’re sure,” he asked.

  “I thought you were,” she answered, agitated. “We came because you decided Ms. Allen was the person to help you.”

  “It’s a big decision. Hard to know what to do. I’m so nervous my head is about to explode,” he said, trying to contain the entropy.

  “I’ll be glad to help if I can,” Lynette offered. “You okay? You look pale.”

  “Yeah. Thank you. I’m just scared. I’ve gotten myself into a whale of a jam.”

  “Something other than the difficulties with Karl and Lisa?” Lynette asked.

  “Yes,” Joel said. He stretched his legs, undid his knees, rotated his ankles. Inside his skull, a stooped woman wearing a purple shirt and straw boater was feeding a swarm of pigeons, tossing the birds stale bread crumbs. “Give me a minute, please.”

  “Certainly,” Lynette said. “Would you care for some water?”

  “No,” Joel said. Here he was, bottom of the barrel, puny and dependent. How the mighty had fallen. He sat silently,
noticed a line of tiny black ants winding out of the baseboard, the insects creating a small, fluctuating S.

  Sophie was studying him, and it was obvious she loved him, always would. She touched the top of his hand, and the warmth and skin and humanity helped to anchor him and wring the last of the gibberish from his thoughts. “She is a good woman—you’re right. Talk to her, Joel.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Sophie encouraged him.

  A faint ache flashed at one temple, but the confusion had blown through and was gone, and Joel had control of himself again. “Okay.” He filled his lungs and sat erect, glanced at Sophie and began, his voice scratchy at first. He hadn’t gotten too far along in his narrative when Lynette waved her hand and interrupted him.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Hang on here. You need a lawyer—I’m not the person who should hear this. You understand my job, correct? I can’t help you or advise you or make any deal for you—I play for the other side. If you tell me something incriminating, I’m duty-bound to use it to your detriment.”

  “I understand,” Joel assured her. “I know what you have to do. I also think you’ll be fair about it.”

  “You want to confess to me? To sign up for some damn serious crimes? I promise you I’m going to march straight to the FBI and the state police. I don’t have any other option.”

  “I recognize your responsibilities,” Joel said calmly. He was steady now, his mind intact. “But I believe you’ll help me as much as you can.”

  “Why would you think that? You’ve spent maybe an hour—total—with me. You don’t even know me.”

  “I had a good feeling about you the first time we met, and Dixon believes in you, and Sophie does, too. And I’ve prayed over it and decided you’re the person to approach with this. There’s also the fact I don’t have anywhere else to go. There’s too much on me, too much weight, and I’m fresh out of escape routes.”

  “I’m advising you against this. I’ll give you the name of a good criminal defense lawyer.”

  “No need. I’m going to keep talking, and you can either listen or not. Your choice.”

  “I want to tape you then. I’ll record what you say along with my advice to you, and I’m going to read your Miranda warnings as well.”

  “Sure,” Joel replied.

  Lynette left and soon returned with a tape recorder. She set it in the middle of her desk, slightly closer to him than her. She asked his name and social security number and cautioned him and told him not to confess and recited his rights and urged him again to see a lawyer, and the machine witnessed it all. He said he fully understood everything and was doing what he wanted, that he had to clear his conscience regardless of the consequences. He started his spiel a second time, went back to his drive from the Roanoke jail and the intentional Cadillac wreck. Lynette cut him off as he was describing Edmund’s performance at the emergency room, how there was a gleam in his eye and a reference to a “dollar-collar.”

  “You’re positive you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Joel told her an abridged story, a version that was wholly true but incomplete. He only informed her of his dealings with Edmund and Sa’ad and the jewelry, didn’t see any reason to dredge up his fraud and purpleshirted stagecraft in Roanoke, or reveal how he’d combined with Christy to pick the bones of the church’s insurance company. As far as he was concerned, Christy had rendered that issue moot when she’d snatched the entire check and left him dangling. He did add, almost as an afterthought, that the Virginia authorities were none too thrilled with him for contacting Christy before their deposition and would probably revoke his probation.

  “My goodness,” Lynette exclaimed when he finished. “What a swamp. And quite a fantastic saga. As we like to say, crime doesn’t pay.”

  “Hasn’t done much for me,” Joel said.

  “I told him from the outset he was acting like a fool,” Sophie remarked. “Warned him till I was blue in the face.”

  “She did,” Joel agreed.

  “So what are you expecting me to do?” Lynette asked, the recorder continuing to run.

  “Whatever you feel is correct. I’m leaving it up to you.”

  “Do you think the FBI would offer Joel a deal?” Sophie asked. “Could you check with them? He’s a small fish—certainly they’d rather get to Edmund and Sa’ad. There’s no telling what they’ve done. Once you got started, I bet you’d find so much crookedness that you could put them behind bars forever.”

  “I’ll review this with Agent Woods initially. I prefer to stay local.”

  “Okay,” Sophie answered.

  “But I can tell you exactly what the cops will want. Evidence. Something hard. Or maybe some cooperation—a body wire or a monitored phone call.”

  “Never, ever work,” Joel said. “They’re far too clever. They always frisk me. They never say squat on the phone, and they know the FBI’s listening. Sa’ad even whispers in the middle of town and runs the water at the restaurant’s bathroom. No, you can forget that, especially now with their antennae raised.”

  The recorder clicked off, two plastic buttons popping up simultaneously. Lynette flipped the cassette and restarted the machine. “So we have a problem. We prosecuting attorneys don’t like swearing contests, and I’m sure the U.S. attorney will share my view if this lands in federal court. We’d have you—a disgraced criminal preacher on the verge of doing a second jail stint—and your words, words that came only when you were about to get arrested for a very serious crime. Sa’ad and Edmund will deny everything, and we have nothing to support your version of events. Can you think of anything to connect these guys to your story?”

  “I have a letter,” Joel offered.

  “Oh?” Lynette keened her head.

  “From them,” Joel added.

  “What kind of letter?” she asked.

  “About meeting them to return the Las Vegas jewelry.”

  “They’re so brilliant that they wrote you a letter detailing the crime?”

  “Well, uh, sort of. It’s in code.”

  “I see,” she said warily. “And let me speculate—it’s typed, not signed, and they aren’t mentioned by name.”

  “True,” he said. “But it has a Las Vegas postmark.”

  “Wow. There’s the break we’ll need,” Lynette answered, her tone not as cynical as her words. “Bring it by, and I’ll take a look at it. It’s probably a waste of resources to check for prints and DNA, but we’ll see what happens. Anything else?”

  “I know Edmund drove Joel to Montana, to my house,” Sophie offered. “I was there, I saw him myself. Driving a white Cadillac that was dented and wrecked.”

  “We’ll require more than Edmund being generous to his former preacher and transporting him across the country as a favor.”

  “I would think the little things add up after a while,” Joel suggested.

  “They do,” Lynette replied. “They add up to something little. Get my drift?”

  “The only other connection is that I went gambling with them in Las Vegas. I saw a program on the Travel Channel about casinos, how they video everything with this ‘eye in the sky’ camera, so I’m sure we got filmed. We were playing blackjack.”

  “How long ago?” she asked.

  “Several months. I can check the exact dates. It was at the Mirage Hotel.”

  “Still doesn’t prove much. Unless they gave you the jewels on camera, and I’m certain we’re not going to be so fortunate.”

  “Hardly. By the way, I flew to meet them under an assumed name. At their insistence.” Joel’s voice was spiritless. “I realize that doesn’t help matters any.”

  “You lie a lot for a man of the cloth,” Lynette said.

  “I was trying to . . . to get on my feet and take care of my sister and her boy.” Joel was ashamed, everything about him downtrodden.

  Lynette sighed. “I wish we had more.”

  “But I do have proof, don’t I?” Joel
suggested. “I had the jewelry. What could be stronger evidence?”

  “You had the jewelry. We’ve got to show some irrefutable link to them. Otherwise, the state is left with the last-ditch accusations of a convicted scoundrel stacked against the denials of a member of the bar and a successful businessman.”

  “But how could I have gotten the jewelry and known how to engineer a scam like this? No judge or jury’s going to think I was working solo.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt who you were conspiring with, not just leave the jury with a hunch you probably, might have, could have, should have gotten some assistance. We’re where we started, Mr. King. We have your word, and it’s a very compromised word even on a good day.”

  “You believe Joel, don’t you?” Sophie asked her.

  “Actually, I do. But it’s not what I believe, you know? It’s what I can prove, and I’m afraid the fine folks who call the shots are going to want more than you can provide.”

  “Meaning what?” Joel asked.

  “I’ll pass the information along and see what the reaction is. But honestly, you’re not bringing much to the dance. My guess is they’ll use what you’ve told them, say thanks, and bust the hell out of you for insurance fraud. They’ll take you federal. You can pull the time after you’ve finished the six-month probation violation in Virginia. Sorry.”

  “What am I facing?”

  “I have no idea. It does help you’ve come forward, but I wouldn’t count on fishing for several seasons.”

  “You don’t think they’ll blame him for the museum, do you?” Sophie asked. “The painting?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out. They’re under a great deal of pressure and scrutiny. And they’ve got him in exclusive possession of stolen goods and lying about where he obtained them.” Lynette wasn’t sounding sympathetic.

  “You know I didn’t rob a museum. I probably could account for where I was, if I have to. There’s no way I’m guilty of anything involving their stupid art—you know it and they know it. And what about their promise to me, telling me to help them and they’d take care of me?”