Kindness Goes Unpunished

by Craig Johnson

  She was another south Philly gem, with mall-chick hair, blue eye shadow, and rounded vowels. “Yeah?”

  “Could I get you to do me a favor?”

  “Prolly.”

  I took this for probably, tucked the scorecard under my arm along with the pencil, and pulled a crisp twenty from my wallet by way of the Durant State Bank ATM. “Could I get you to take the largest beer you’ve got in to a young man in that suite by the name of Devon Conliffe?” She took the twenty, which was a lot even by ballpark standards. “It’s important that he not know who it’s from.”

  “Wa’s goin’ on?”

  I duly translated and responded. “It’s a surprise.”

  She looked at me for a moment more and then looked at the twenty in her hand. “Awright.”

  “When you get done, I’ll be over there, and there’s another twenty in it if you tell me his response.” She practically left skid marks.

  Henry met me in the stairwell. “I am not going back in there.”

  “Okay.”

  He looked around, and I noticed that his eyes were dark searchlights scanning the distance and calculating all the odds. “Is he here?”

  “I’m about to find out.” We waited as the young woman entered the suite; there was a loud cry of drunken insouciance, and she rapidly reappeared without the beer. I pulled another twenty and handed it to her as she tucked her serving tray under her arm. “Success?”

  “Friends a youse?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She glanced at Henry and then glanced again; I was used to it. “I did like you said an’ tole him it was a secret admirer.”

  “Tall kid, brown hair?”

  She looked at me. “More blond.”

  “Right.” I nodded my head. “Wearing the blue shirt?”

  She continued to look at me. “White.”

  I nodded some more. “And the red tie?” It was a chance, but he seemed like the red-tie type.

  “Yeah.”

  I handed her another twenty. “Wait about ten minutes and give him another one, okay?”

  She shrugged and was off. I watched Henry watch the hot pants. “Restroom?”

  I took a deep breath. “Looks like the best shot we have at getting him alone.”

  “Before or after?”

  I stared at the doorway to suite 51. “Before. Nobody’s tough when they have to pee.”

  The Phils blew a double play at first, allowing the Small Red Machine two runs, and it was a brand new ball game. Personally, I was beginning to think that Devon Conliffe had a bladder like a sea lion’s. I had paid sixty dollars for the three most expensive beers in Philly and, so far, nada.

  Henry had walked to the area that overlooked an atrium to the concourse below. He was watching the game or appeared to be watching the game. He looked back at me, and I shrugged. I was about to order the two of us a couple of beers when Devon came out of the suite. He was pretty easy to spot; it was the smirk. Tall and thin, white dress shirt and a patterned red tie. He had blondish hair parted at the side, classic Waspish good looks, and all I could think of was the phone call I had listened to very early that morning. I said “yo,” and he actually nodded to me as he passed.

  “Yo.”

  It was the same voice as the one on the cell phone, and I signaled the Bear and disappeared into the restroom.

  I had cased the place; there was one row of sinks and mirrors along one side and urinals and toilet stalls along the other. He was just getting ready to unzip his pants and get down to business when I came around the corner. “Devon Conliffe?”

  He turned and looked at me, the smirk still firmly in place. “Yeah?” He said it like I should know. “Do I know you?” I kept coming toward him. He was looking a little closer now, but it was only when he saw the cowboy boots that he started to turn. I caught him with a hand to the closest shoulder, which propelled him to the far wall. “What the fuck! Who the hell are you?”

  I kept coming, and he tried to go to the right, so I caught him and pushed him back into the corner against the toilet-stall partition and the tiled wall. “My name is Walter Longmire.” He didn’t move, but his eyes flicked around the contained space. I stopped about two feet away. “You know who I am.”

  Maybe he was buying time, but I was fresh out. His face stiffened, and he tried to look around me again, thinking that somebody should be coming to his rescue by now, but I knew that when the Cheyenne Nation shut a door, it stayed shut.

  I inclined my head a little, wanting to see him up close; I saw the muscles tense in his upper body. I supposed he thought I was going to hit him, but I was wrong; he rabbit-punched a quick jab and popped my nose.

  I’m sure I looked surprised. I’ve been punched in the face numerous times, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. Henry had had the best shot when he popped me one in grade school but, other than that, a blow to my face has never been anything more than an irritation and a nuisance. Whatever it was that he had been expecting, it wasn’t me leaning in closer and whispering. “You do that again, and I’m going to pinch your head off.”

  Physical force having failed, he went back to negotiation. “Your daughter’s crazy.”

  “Bad conversation.” I could feel wetness on my face, and I guessed my nose was bleeding. “I haven’t really touched you, yet. You and I are going to have a chat, and we’re going to keep it civil so I won’t have to. Clear?”

  Some of the smirk came back. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I took a breath to clear the urge to grab him by the throat. “Tell me about last night.”

  “I don’t have to…” He was probably used to having his way, of simply changing his tone to obtain the upper hand, but he was in a different league now. He lurched from the wall in an attempt to get clear. I stuck my left arm out to stop him and watched his left retract for another shot at my face. I grabbed his wrist with my right and brought my left up and around his throat, effectively blocking his right arm against the wall with my side. He was almost as tall as me, but the extra seventy pounds I had on him flattened him against the tile. He tried to kick me, but I had prepared for that by turning my body a little away.

  “Don’t move.” He struggled some more and started to yell, but I closed my grip on his windpipe and the only thing that came out was a wheezy yelp. His eyes bulged, and I thought about how the thumb fits so well over the larynx, and with one good squeeze…I could feel the nausea in the back of my throat, rising up to tell me that what I was doing was wrong. I stood there swallowing the bile that kept reminding me who I was and of what I could forgive myself. It took a few seconds, but I lessened my grip and allowed him a little more air. His eyes stayed wide, but they didn’t bug quite as much as before. “Tell me about last night.”

  “Look, I didn’t do anything!”

  “Anything like what?”

  I let him swallow. “Anything to her.”

  “I don’t believe you.” He looked around wildly, thinking there must be some way out. “Tell me the truth.”

  His eyes began to well. “Look…”

  “The truth.”

  The first tears fell down his well-structured face, and I was feeling worse and worse. “It was an accident…We had a fight.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He looked directly at me, and in some frantic, twisted way, I think he believed what he said next. “I love her.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  He started to move his arm, probably to wipe away the tears, but I wouldn’t let him move. “She fell! We were having an argument, and I tried to grab her arm…” I watched him as he took a breath. “She yanked her arm away…And then she fell.” I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. “I haven’t even been home! I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days now.”

  My head was starting to hurt. “Why didn’t you stay with her.”

  He half howled. “I was scared!”

  I felt tired all over, and I released my grip, but he sta
rted to slide down the wall. He was openly weeping. I was too weak to hold him up, so I allowed him to slide to the floor where I joined him and sat down, my hands dropping to my lap. We sat there looking at each other.

  “Didn’t you care what happened to her?”

  He could hardly speak, he was crying so hard. “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do…I mean, she was just lying there.”

  “Did you even check to see if she was alive?”

  He wiped his face with a sleeve and stared at the floor. “I heard somebody coming, another guy, so I just ran.” He looked back up at me, and I wasn’t so sure I believed him. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I was scared.”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. My head hurt, and I was tired of talking, especially of talking to Devon Conliffe. I rolled to my side and stood up slowly; my left leg was still worrying me from a gunshot wound that I had gotten over four months earlier. I put my hand out and against the toilet partition, steadied myself, and took another breath. “Tell the police.”

  It took a second for him to respond. “What?”

  I looked at him. “Tell the police.” I watched him, not so sure he would, especially once he was out of the restroom. “You call the police and you tell them everything you told me. Understand?” He looked back at the floor, and I waited for a response. “Did you hear me?”

  He inhaled. “Yes.” He glanced up at me again, and there was a strange look to his face. “That’s it?”

  I nodded. “That’s it.”

  I pushed off the partition and stood there. “You call the police and you tell them everything that was said between us.” I started to walk out but paused for a moment. “You tell them…Or you’ll see me again. You’ll see me again just out of the corner of your eye, and I will be the last thing you ever see.”

  The Bear appropriated a bar towel from the waitress as she passed. She stopped and peered at my face. “He didn’ like the beer?”

  I shrugged as I wiped my nose. “Some guys just can’t hold their liquor.”

  As Henry and I walked toward the escalators, he put a hand out and pulled the towel away. He tilted my head back and looked up my nostrils. “So, what does the other guy look like?”

  “I punched him in the fist with my nose, but I think he’ll live.” I pinched the towel over my nose and leaned against the escalator’s moving rubber railing, glad that something else was providing the locomotion. I looked back up at Henry. “I didn’t kill him.”

  The wide face nodded, inscrutable to the end. “Good.”

  As we were riding down, two men were riding up. The one in the front was silver-haired and was sharply dressed in a charcoal suit with a maroon tie and a black trench coat; behind him was a man with a tightly cropped haircut and a suit, tie, and overcoat all the same shade of dark tan. It was difficult to see where the clothes began and the man stopped. They stared at us as we rode closer; by the time we passed each other, I could see that the first man’s designer glasses had small, red dots on the frames that emphasized his large brown eyes. The second man smiled a very becoming smile, and I noticed the bulge of a shoulder holster at his left armpit. “Foul ball?”

  I rolled my eyes and nodded.

  We quickly made our way from the ballpark and walked toward Broad and the subway. Henry didn’t say anything, which gave me plenty of time to think, mostly about whether I believed Devon Conliffe.

  At some level, just about everybody lies to you when you’re a cop, whether they have a reason to or not—some little portion of the truth that they feel would be best omitted in their dealings with you. The only good thing about it is that you start being able to tell when people are doing it, and I was sure that Devon was. The kid obviously had a lot of emotional and mental issues to deal with, but I was having a hard time working up any empathy.

  I watched Henry pull out his cell phone before we got to the subway entrance and call Lena Moretti. I looked south at the big highway overpass that with a few right turns would take me back to Wyoming. I wondered when that would be, if ever. When I looked back, he was closing the phone. “No change.”

  I nodded, and we continued down the stairwell toward the thundering clatter of the Broad Street SEPTA line. We chose an almost empty car and sat across from each other on the orange fiberglass seats at the end. I finished with the bar towel and carefully folded it on my knee. My head was still pounding, and it was good to sit down.

  “Lena says she can stay as long as you would like and, if she has to leave, Michael can take over.” I didn’t respond. “She sounds very nice.”

  “Yep.”

  He watched me. “Are you okay?”

  I looked at the floor. “My daughter is in a coma, I think my nose is broken, and I’m about to have every policeman in Philadelphia after me. How could it be any better?”

  The train stopped at the next station, and a few more people drifted on and sat down. He looked at me but didn’t say anything until a few stops later. There were a lot of other people on the car now, and his voice was low. “I need to go to the museum and help with the installation this evening.”

  “I understand.”

  He waited a moment. “I can cancel the whole thing.”

  “No.” I smiled, but there was no joy in it. “One of us should be doing something constructive, don’t you think?”

  He smiled back, but at least his had some warmth.

  I abandoned him at City Hall and took a regional rail line over to University City and the hospital. It was getting late in the afternoon, and all I could think about were the hours that had been ticking by with no improvement, lowering our odds with every passing minute.

  It was clouding up to the west, and it looked like there might be a few showers in the evening. There was another street person at Convention Avenue, and I gave him the jacket. There were a few blood spots on it and it fit like a blanket, but he seemed happy. I thought about giving him the hat, but it was growing on me.

  When I got to the fifth floor, Lena and Dr. Rissman were waiting for me in Cady’s room; Lena was the first to speak. “She moved.”

  I couldn’t trust my ears. “What?”

  “She moved her leg.”

  Rissman was next. “She reacts to environmental stimuli. There’s still no eye response, but this is very, very good.”

  All the heat came back to my face, making my nose throb even more, and I looked around for a place to sit. I collapsed on the nearest chair and looked at Cady. Lena was crying by the bed and trailed a hand down to my daughter’s foot. Her leg moved, and the sounds erupted from my throat. “When?”

  Rissman was kneeling by my chair, and he looked at the wall and the floor before again finally settling on my left shoulder. “About five minutes ago. What happened to your nose?”

  I leaned back. “I get nosebleeds.” I looked at Cady. “She’s going to make it.”

  “Let’s not get too carried away; she’s moving, and that gives us a lot better odds than before…”

  I looked at him, at the silver bristles of his hair, even if he wouldn’t look at me. “Hell, yes.”

  He nodded. “I just don’t want you to jump to any conclusions; this is a long road, and at any given time it could just stop.”

  I took a deep breath. “I like the odds better now.”

  He patted my shoulder as he stood. “Well, they are certainly better than before.” He smiled a shy smile at Lena’s shoulder. “I’m going to run another series of tests in about an hour, which means the two of you will be looking at an empty bed for the majority of the evening.” He glanced back to me, making eye contact for only a second. “I think you should go home and get some rest.”

  We shared a taxi to Old City, where she dropped me off at Cady’s place. I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it. She handed me my hat, and I popped it on over the Phillies cap. I’m sure I was a pretty sight. Before the cab pulled away, I remembered to ask. “Did you call Henry?”

  “I left a mes
sage.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Speaking of messages, you’ve got a lot of them on her answering machine. I hope you don’t mind that I listened to them, but I thought it would help if I copied them all down for you on a note pad. It’s by the phone.”

  “I guess I need to call Wyoming.”

  I stood on the Bread Street cobblestones where we had taken our walk. It seemed like decades ago. Night and the city—I found myself wanting to ask her in but realized that the poor woman had a life of her own. “Thank you again.”

  She leaned forward, looking up through the half-light of the cab. “It wasn’t anything.” She ran her fingers through her hair, and I was still amazed at the bluish gloss.

  “Yes, it was. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten through last night without your help, let alone today.” I could see her eyes half closed in pleasure, like a cat being stroked. The smile was there, a soft and easy smile. I didn’t want her to leave without some arrangement to meet again. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

  “Deal. I’ll meet you at the hospital?”

  I nodded and closed the door. The driver was doing some of his paperwork, so we waited for a moment on either side of the window, and I had a strange twinge of something as she looked at me again. I extended my hand; she sat there watching me as the taxi started off down Bread, took a left on Quarry, and disappeared.

  The skies were looking more threatening, and I wasn’t sure if it was thunder I was hearing in the distance or the train on the bridge. I turned and walked to Cady’s door, reached above the junction box, and pulled down a note with the key. Lena had filed it so that it would now operate smoothly in the lock. I opened the door and was immediately mauled by Dog.

  I gave him the ham that had been left over from Lena’s picnic basket and figured I could always get a couple of hamburgers from Paddy O’Neil’s—me too, for that matter. There was a menu, which gave me the luxury of phoning in my order. I opened the fridge and there was a six-pack of Yuengling, so I popped a bottle out and drank it while I looked for the bathroom. I took a shower and got out some clean clothes from my duffle, which I’d left next to the sofa. There was a clock on the microwave that told me I still had three and a half hours before Cady would be back in the ICU, so I got the pad from beside the phone and read the numerous and assorted messages from practically everybody in the Cowboy State. Most of them were from Ruby and Vic, but there were also ones from the Ferg, Lucian, Sancho, Double Tough, Vern Selby, Dorothy, Lonnie Little Bird, Brandon White Buffalo, Dena Many Camps, Omar, Isaac Bloomfield, and Lana Baroja.