by G. M. Ford
“Get out of here,” I said. “Take the rental.”
“You?”
I’d thought about leaving, but there was no way it would float. In the next couple of hours, state cops were about to start pulling electronic surveillance equipment out of city offices. Half of city government was on the lam. Two city cops were going to turn up missing. “I leave now, they’ll be waiting in my driveway for me when I get home.”
He nodded. “They’re really gonna hate misplacing two cops.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll probably be a while.”
Floyd wiped his dripping face with a soaked-through sleeve. Grimaced.
“Don’t forget the bag,” I said, pointing to the pale green pillowcase resting on the lawn. All the guns were in the bag. Floyd’s rifle and the police riot gun we’d broken down into pieces and thrown into the sack on top of the three handguns. We shook hands. A trickle of water fell from the flattened tip of his nose.
“I’ll see they get half a ferry ride,” he said.
40
THE TRUCK WAS RUNNING AND SO WAS SHE. RAMONA Haynes staggered out the back door of her house carrying a suitcase nearly as big as she was. She used both hands to swing the bag up onto the edge of the bed and then pushed it over the side. She looked up, breathing hard, and finally saw me standing there.
“You sorry son of a bitch,” she shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“Just wanted to see you off,” I said.
She started to lie, to tell me it just looked like she was leaving town, but changed her mind. She went back into the house. I’d changed into dry clothes. Found a yellow rain jacket in the cabin. Probably Claudia’s. It was too small to fasten, so I held it closed at the neck, listening to the rain smacking the hood. She came back out with a matching garment bag and rolling suitcase. Threw them into the truck.
“I’m going to—”
I cut her off. “You’re going to get your ass out of town while you still can,” I said. She started to open her mouth, but I kept talking. “It had to be you. None of the rest of those dolts could plan their way out of a paper bag. You’re the only one with the drive and the initiative to put something like this together.” She set her jaw and kept silent. “Your chin is red,” I said. “Must be the exertion that does it.”
She put her hands on her hips and sneered. “Well…that’s the only way you’re going to see it, isn’t it, then…you pathetic, impotent bastard?”
“Whoa, now,” I said. “I said I wouldn’t, not that I couldn’t. What say we don’t confuse the two?”
The rain rolled off the plastic jacket, wetting my jeans from the knees down.
She turned and started for the door. Stopped and turned back my way. “Do you have any idea what it is you ruined? I mean, do you have even the slightest glimmer about how many lives you’ve screwed up?”
“Like the Springers’?”
She began to shout. “They didn’t amount to anything,”
she screamed. “They were afterthoughts. Nothings. Their families didn’t give their whole lives to settling this valley. They haven’t spent a hundred thirty years trying to wring some sort of a life out of the land.” She waved her arms about. “They just show up one day and expect everything to come to a halt because they want to start their little fishing business.” She dropped a hand disgustedly to her side. “If you’d just stayed the hell out of it, we could have saved this town. We could have revitalized this whole end of the valley. And you—”
“And become millionaires in the process.”
Something in her snapped. She began to shout. “Why not? It’s my birthright. That stupid son of a bitch lost everything. Gambled it away in some stupid Indian casino, until I was left with nothing…nothing but”—she waved at the house—“this hovel and a few hundred useless acres of land that still technically belonged to my mother…or they would have taken that, too.” She kicked the door closed.
“Everything. The idiot lost everything.”
“You saw a way to put it all back together, didn’t you?” I prodded. “But you weren’t sure it could be done altogether legally. So you kept the property in your mother’s name and brought in Nathan Hand to handle any complaints.”
“It should have been easy,” she said. “Just one old man.”
“An old man who wouldn’t sell.”
“All we had to do was wait. He was ancient.”
“Except Nathan Hand got impatient and tried to hustle things along. So he shot the old man’s dog.”
Her surprise was visible. “How…” she started.
“Pissed the old man off, so, just to spite you, he sold it to the only guy he knew who wouldn’t sell it back to you at any price. A guy he figured you couldn’t run off, either.”
“We had him, too. He was no more that sixty days from going under.”
I already knew the answer, but I decided to say it anyway.
“And, just in case his life wasn’t fucked up enough already, you started running your number on him, didn’t you? And nobody escapes from that tender little trap of yours, do they?”
She brushed her hair back from her face. “He was easy,”
she said. “Just like the rest of you little boys. Stuck out there with those snot-nosed kids and that cow of a wife. His life coming apart. J.D. needed a shoulder to cry on.” She smiled.
“Unlike you, his equipment worked.”
“Same way you kept the Pinkerton guy from Loomis hanging around, while you kept trying to put the deal back together. Coming back over and over. The deal must have been good, or else the company wouldn’t have kept footing the bill, but I’m betting you were a whole lot better.”
“You’ll never know, now will you?” she sneered.
“I’m figuring maybe Nathan Hand, too.” Despite her best efforts, I could see that I’d hit a nerve. “The way he deferred to you in public,” I said, shaking my head. “Money or no money, most men I know only put up with that level of crap from women they’re sleeping with.” Her lip curled as she opened her mouth to speak.
I’ll never know for sure if my guess about the sheriff was true. As Floyd and I knew only too well, Hand wasn’t going to be filling us in, and before she could utter another word, her eyes went wide; that pulled my head around. State cops. Two cars. Four cops. No guns this time. For questioning. Both of us.
41
BILLY HEFFERNEN DUMPED THE PLASTIC EVIDENCE BAG out onto the table. Five cameras, five mikes. All wearing little white tags that told where they’d been found and by whom. Jed reached over and touched the back of my hand. Don’t touch, was the message.
Billy’s ears were bright red. “And you’re going to sit there and try to tell me that you don’t know anything about this.”
“Perhaps you should take notes,” Jed suggested. “We’ve answered this query at least four times. My client has no knowledge of either that equipment or how it came to be found in whatever nefarious locations your minions supposedly uncovered it.”
Billy kept his eyes locked on mine. “We’re going to sort this out. Count on it.”
Jed yawned mightily into the back of his hand. “Sorry,” he said. He shot a glance my way. “It’s been a long week.”
Billy started in on a litany of the technological innovations by which the state crime lab was going to link the surveillance gear directly to me and thus seal my doom. I tried not to look smug. They were going to find nothing. No sales receipts, no fingerprints, no hairs, no nada. Whatever the crew’s moral failings, they were professionals. Way I saw it, if crime lab threats and hoping I’d touch the evidence were the best Billy Heffernen could muster, then Jed must have been right to begin with.
Jed had arrived at the Peninsula County Jail at about seventhirty Thursday night. Maybe six hours after they’d hauled me in for questioning. He’d looked tired. His tie was pulled down, the seat of his pants sagging a bit. He ran his hand over his head.
“Sorry it took so long,” he said.
“Thanks for coming again.”
“I’ve been out there for an hour,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Being threatened.”
“With?”
“Oh…a waltz before the judicial ethics committee…possible prison time for conspiracy…accessory both before and after the fact…which, of course, means…” he let it hang in the air like smoke.
“Yeah?”
“I mean, they brought out the first team, Leo. Hell, the Peninsula County DA himself is out there casting aspersions about both our mamas.”
“Which means?” I prompted.
“They don’t have shit,” he said with a smile. “I’ve never heard such a raft in all my life.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Stonewall,” he said. “You know the drill. You’d prefer not to speak other than in the presence of your attorney, and your attorney is going home for the weekend.” He started for the cell door.
I hated the idea of spending the weekend in jail. “Am I under arrest?”
“You’re being held as a material witness. As things stand right now, you’re not charged with anything.”
I did the math. Material witnesses can be held without bail or charge for seventy-two hours. I counted on my fingers. Thursday afternoon till Sunday afternoon, which, in the jurisprudence business, was the same thing as Monday morning.
“Yeah…go home,” I’d said.
Billy now scraped the electronic gear back into the evidence bag. Jed yawned again and got to his feet. “I take it we’re finished, then?”
Billy looked over at the assistant DA, who stood against the far wall. The ADA said, “Yes…for the moment, you can go.” Heavy on the “for the moment.”
I stood up and followed Jed toward the door. Billy stopped me with a hand on my chest. “May I have a private word with your client?” he asked Jed.
Jed looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. Jed and the ADA closed the door behind them. “I’m going to give you one last chance, Leo,” he said.
“For old times’ sake.”
“Call it anything you want.” The muscles along his jaw looked like knotted rope. He stood there staring holes in me. He was a good cop doing what the state of Washington paid him to do, so I tried to help him out.
“All I’ll say is this, Billy. There’s an old man here in this town who’s sitting in a rocking chair waiting to die, because everything that mattered to him is gone. And there’s a family over on the mainland whose husband and father doesn’t come home anymore because somebody shot him in the face and then burned his body to a cinder.” I took a deep breath.
“As far as I’m concerned, other than them, everybody else connected with this case is getting exactly what they deserve.”
Billy’s voice rose in this throat. “I’ve got two dead bodies. I’ve got a couple public officials upstairs pointing fingers at each other. A couple more who seem to have packed up and taken unscheduled vacations. And most interestingly, I’ve got two missing cops, who you claim are dirty, and who don’t seem to have packed a damn thing before they went missing in a city patrol car. You want to help me out here?”
“Justice has been served as well as it’s going to be,” I said.
“That’s not your call, goddammit,” he snapped.
“Sometimes…” I began. Thought better of it. Stopped. “I said everything I’ve got to say, Billy. Can I go now?”
He walked over and put his face in mine. “Listen to me, you arrogant bastard. I put my best crew on this. There’s no way—” Same old, same old. I interrupted.
“Me, too,” I said and headed for the office door. For the first time in four days, the rain had stopped. The air smelled like it had been washed and hung out to dry. My get-out-of-jail party had dwindled to one black Lexus. I got in.
“Where to?” Jed asked.
“Home,” I said.
42
WE STOOD ON EITHER SIDE OF THE KITCHEN SINK, where we could keep an eye on Alicia and Adam running around the backyard. Claudia Springer held her cup of tea with both hands. “I got a card from Rebecca,” she said tentatively.
“New address and phone number?”
She nodded and blew the steam from the top of her cup.
“We’re going to try something different for a while.”
Anyway, that’s what we were telling people. I still wasn’t sure what the problem was, so I was definitely a bit fuzzy as to why we needed separate residences in order to process the situation…whatever the hell that meant. She’d been gone when I got back. She rented an apartment somewhere in ever-so-trendy Belltown. Hired movers to come and get the stuff she wanted. Said it was only temporary, but my insides told me different. Except for the past year, I’d spent the majority of my adult life living by myself. And yet I felt totally unprepared for the empty feeling inside my body. It was as if there was no place in the house that was mine, just a succession of spaces that invited me to move on to the next. We’d agreed to let a couple of weeks pass before we talked about it. I figured I could live with it for that long. At least, that’s what I was telling myself.
“I saw on the news”—she took a sip of tea—“about the scandal in Stevens Falls. The TV station and how everybody was bugged and everything. And the steamroller thing blocking the door and that naked guy with the note.”
So had everyone else in the Pacific Northwest. The tape had played for the better part of nine hours before a city maintenance crew had managed to jackhammer their way through the wall. By that time, half the people on the peninsula had recorded the juicy parts. The media were having a field day. The cops found Tressman holed up in a roach motel in Aberdeen, trying to work up the courage to blow his brains out. Yesterday, when I spoke with Judge Bigelow on the phone, he said that he’d heard they were rolling over on one another like trained seals. Blaming each other for the scheme and the dirty work on Nathan Hand. Claudia set the cup on the counter. “Was that…uh…us?”
she asked.
The question seemed vague enough, so I nodded.
“You can’t talk about it, can you?” she said.
“If you want, I can tell you why it all happened,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
So I laid it out for her, filling in the gaps with my best guesses. Part fact, part fiction. About people who wanted to get out of a dying town so badly that they were willing to bend the rules a bit. How I figured that the Pinkerton guy from Loomis probably stopped at the Chamber of Commerce on his way into town. Probably even told her why he was there. I was guessing that Ramona had bestowed her fair charms on Pinkerton early in the game. That scenario fit with Monty saying Pinkerton never slept in his room and explained why he blabbed to her about the lack of environmental regulation. Haynes was a smart woman. She saw the possibilities right away. Loomis or no Loomis, her mother’s property was worth fifty times what anyone else imagined. As long as they had the whole thousand acres. It didn’t take much imagination to see how Ramona Haynes convinced Tressman, Weston and Polster that this was their big chance to get out of town with their pockets full. All they had to do was buy up the rest of the property. Anybody who didn’t sell, they’d foreclose on. Of course, the sheriff had to go. They needed a sheriff of their own. I was betting that when it came out in the wash, Haynes had known Nathan Hand from her time in Chicago. Maybe even worked with him before he was fired. Told her how Hand hired Bobby Russell so he’d have an endless supply of unemployed thugs at his disposal for things like shooting up houses and tearing out fences.
Things fell into place. The Hoh dragged their feet for eighteen months and then turned Loomis down. That gave Haynes and Tressman and the rest of them time to acquire the remaining property. “Except for Ben,” Claudia said.
“Except for Ben,” I repeated.
“Who—” she started.
I held up a hand. “I can’t do who for you,” I said. I’d rehearsed this part, so I was ready. “All I can say to you, Claudia, is that I believe the disposition
of those people directly responsible for J.D.’s death would satisfy you.”
“You know who did it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you know what happened to them?”
“I didn’t say that, either; I said I believed you would be satisfied.”
She picked up the cup. Took a sip and set it back down on the counter.
“Okay,” she said. “Maybe somewhere down the road, when this is all ancient history…” I kept shaking my head until she stopped.
She took a deep breath. “Was J.D. having an—”
I cut her off. I’d put in a lot of time on what I was going to say when we got to this point. Maybe it was like Floyd had said. Maybe trust was just an illusion we used to keep the darkness at bay and we’d all be better off barricaded in doorless buildings. Or maybe old Ben Bendixon was right when he said that trust was real, but only the horrific specter of war and death was sufficient to bond men in a truly inseparable manner. While I wasn’t sure of the answer, I knew I wasn’t about to send this young woman out into the day with any less faith in mankind than she’d walked in with.
“No,” I said. “If you noticed any change in his behavior, it was just because he had more than he could handle.”
Claudia cocked her head. She was about to do that searchmy-eyes thing when the kids burst through the back door and saved my ass. I picked Adam up and set him on the counter beside me. Alicia ran to the refrigerator and threw open the door.
