There were no messages from Devon Conliffe.
I shuttled the dark thoughts toward the back of my mind and placed the notebook on the glass coffee table. I had been here two days and hadn’t called anybody. I wasn’t sure if word had gotten back to Absaroka County through the Moretti network, the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, or the Philadelphia Police Department, but I had a lot of explaining to do. I suppose I had been waiting till I could give some sort of hopeful prognosis and, now that Cady had given even an involuntary response, I should call.
I looked at the phone but just didn’t have the energy. I took a deep breath, lay back against the pillows on the sofa, and placed my cowboy hat over my eyes. Dog jumped on the couch uninvited and, after what seemed like a long time, we were both asleep.
I’d been dreaming a lot lately, and there were always Indians in my dreams, so it wasn’t surprising when I could see them from the corners of my eyes. I could feel the wind, the kind we get on the high plains that’s only a notch or two below hurricane force. I was leaning into the gale at the edge of some bluffs near Cat Creek. It was hard to focus; my eyes were thin slits with tears streaming from the sides. I turned my head a little and could see a Cheyenne brave who instructed me to lift my arms by raising his own. He wore a fringed and beaded war shirt with the bands of blue and white seed beads running up the arms, and I could make out a parfleche medicine bag painted red and black with the geometric wind symbol.
The old Indian half smiled, brushing an arm toward my face and forcing me to concentrate on what was in front of me. I glanced at the horizon as the lightning flashed like the seizures in Cady’s brain and swept across the sky in a silent electrical storm. I looked down into the canyon, and a chill shot from my spine like a fuse; there was nothing below us for at least three hundred feet.
The phone rang, and I lifted my hat to look at the greenish numbers on the microwave that told me that I’d been asleep for about an hour. A pang hit me as I listened to Cady’s recorded voice on the answering machine and heard the beep. “Walt, it’s Ruby. I hope you’re getting these messages…Vic said she got a phone call from her mother saying that there had been an improvement in Cady’s condition. I just wanted to check in and see if there’s anything any of us can do here. We’ve been trying to call Henry, but he doesn’t answer his phone either.” There was silence on the line as I sat there with my guilt and listened. “Vic is threatening to fly back there, so you better call us.” Another pause, and I would almost swear she knew I was listening. “Please call us. We’re worried about Cady, and we’re worried about you.” I was about to reach for the phone when the line went dead.
I sighed. If Cady’s situation stayed the same, there would be no going back; it was as simple as that.
I looked at Dog, and he looked back at me. “You want a hamburger?” He wagged, and I took it for a yes. I ordered us up four cheeseburgers to go from the leprechaun at the end of the block.
I went to the terrace doors and listened to the sporadic drops hit the leaves of the crab apple tree. It was a gentle rainfall that unfocused the hard edges of the city night, making all the surfaces glisten. It was only about fifty yards to the side entrance of Paddy O’Neil’s, so I figured I could get there and back without getting soaked. I watched the drops fall slowly past the yellow of the streetlights and into the widening pools on the cobblestone street. I looked up at the span of the bridge arching into Old City and listened to the steady thrum of the traffic.
Even over the blare of the Celtic band and the raucous crowd, the brogue wasn’t a generation removed. Black Irish; a handsome kid about Cady’s age with a wayward eye that kept tracking left. “Yore Cady’s fatha’, the sheriff?”
I looked up at the brim of my cowboy hat. “Yep.” He was like one of those bundles of baling wire that I had seen in Vietnam, the ones that went into the Vietcong tunnels with .45s and the balls of a cat burglar. “You O’Neil?”
He smiled a grin. “Hisself. Took the place over from me Uncle Paddy, the original O’Neil.” He handed me the bag full of cheeseburgers, and I noticed the tattoos up and down his arms. I paid him, with a little extra for his trouble. “Where’s ya daughter?”
I waited a moment, the hubbub of the bar swirling around me. “She’s not feeling well.” I leaned in and cleared my throat. “O’Neil, can I ask you a question?”
He wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “Ya?”
“You ever met her boyfriend, Devon Conliffe?”
His hands stopped working the towel. “Ya, I met ’im a couple’a times.”
I nodded, my face only a foot from his. “Nice guy?”
He worked his jaw for only a second. “Ya.”
“O’Neil?” He leaned in a little closer with the question. “You’re a liar.” He watched me for a second, then laughed and walked down to the other end of the bar to help the overworked waitresses. He glanced back at me only when I left.
Dog ate his cheeseburgers faster than I ate mine, so I gave him the last bite of my second one and tried to fade into another nap, but I suppose I was worried that I might oversleep and, as a result, didn’t sleep at all.
I finally gave up after an hour and called a cab. I looked at Dog from the door; he was watching me with his big, brown eyes. “They don’t allow dogs in the ICU.” He continued to look at me, and I was sure he understood every word. “There’s nothing I can do.” He sat. “I’ll take you for a long walk tomorrow.” He lay down, still watching me. “Honest.”
It was raining a little harder when I stepped out and, just before jumping into the taxi, I noticed the throb of blue tracer emergency lights that seemed to spring from the support cables of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; in the darkness, it looked like the body of the bridge was hanging in the saturated air. There must have been a wreck. I stood there for a second more, then decided it was somebody else’s problem and climbed in the cab.
There wasn’t that much traffic this late at night, so we made good time, and twelve minutes later I was sitting at Cady’s bedside. She had just been brought back from testing, and the nurse at the desk said that there wasn’t any substantial change but that the stimulus response was a very positive sign.
The gentle spring showers had gradually given way to sheets of rain splattering against the windows like waves in some fifth-floor tide. I sat there for a couple of hours before falling asleep to the sound, my chin resting on my chest.
When I woke up it was still raining, but there was someone else in the room. I blinked and looked at the man standing on the other side of Cady’s bed. His black trench coat and umbrella were still dripping, so he couldn’t have been there long and, when I glanced back at the doorway, I saw wet tracks leading to where he now stood. On the other side of the glass partition, the black man with the close-cropped haircut was talking to the nurse who had assured me earlier.
When I looked back to the man beside the bed, he was watching me with the brown eyes through the designer frames with the little red dots. “Hello.”
“Hello.”
He looked back at Cady. “You have a beautiful daughter.”
“Thank you.”
His eyes stayed on her. “I don’t suppose you remember…”
“Yes, I do.”
He nodded and turned to look at me. “Good. You know why I’m here?”
“I’d imagine it has something to do with Devon Conliffe?”
He came around to the foot of the bed. “You’d be right.” The detective pursed his lips and stuffed a hand in his pocket, the umbrella’s handle still over his wrist. “What can you tell me?”
I thought about it and about what Devon had probably told them. “I was a little angry…” I yawned, covering my face with my hand. “So I went down to the baseball game and tried to get the truth out of him.”
“And?”
“I’m not so sure there’s any truth in him.” I reached up and rubbed my nose. “I think he roughed me up more than I did him.”
He nodded. �
��That the last time you saw him?”
“Yep. Why?”
“Because…” He studied me closely. “About three hours ago, somebody threw him off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.”
5
They didn’t take me downtown. I’ve always wanted to be taken downtown, but I guess they didn’t think it was necessary, so we made an appointment for 9:30 in the morning. Henry showed up at 9:00 and handed me a cup of coffee. I told him about my conversation with the detectives.
I took the lid off, but the cup looked suspiciously like the one Lena had poured out on the sidewalk the day before. “I didn’t do it; did you?”
“No, but it certainly makes things inconvenient.” He took the chair on the other side of the bed.
“For whom?”
He sipped his coffee. “Devon, for a start.”
I grabbed a cab in front of HUP and headed across town to the police administration building; it was about four-and-a-half blocks from Cady’s. It looked a lot like two beehives and had a statue on the newly grown grass of a patrolman holding a child in his arms. They called it the Roundhouse, and it was all very impressive until I had to walk around the block to find a way in.
There was a bulletproof window with a sign in seven languages that said translators were available. I told the patrolman I was here to see Detectives Katz and Gowder and that I might need a translator. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor. There weren’t any chairs, so I stood along the wall and waited and read about Philadelphia’s most wanted. It looked like they had a lot more activity than we did in Absaroka County. I thought about Vic working here and figured her five years’ experience easily surpassed my twenty-three. After seven minutes, both Gowder and Katz appeared.
The coffee that I had bought from the vending machine was worthy of the Lena Moretti treatment, but I sipped it anyway and looked around at the floor-to-ceiling windows and at the benches and indoor trees. “Don’t you guys have a room with a chair and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?”
“Budget cuts.” Gowder was doing most of the talking this morning. His suit, shirt, tie, and shoes once again matched his skin; I bet his socks did, too. “That nose looks like it hurts.”
“I’ve had worse.”
Katz wasn’t saying anything; interested cop, indifferent cop.
“Why don’t you tell us about the ball game?”
I sat down on one of the benches and tipped my hat back. “I just went down to talk to him about a phone message he left for my daughter and to get a clearer idea of the relationship between them.”
“And did you get a clearer idea of that relationship?”
“I think so.” I thought about it. “On his end, not a remarkably healthy one.”
He leaned forward and crossed his arms. “Well, we’ll have to take your word on that, since neither party is available for comment.”
I set my coffee on the table in front of me and let a long moment pass. “Maybe you’d better speed this up. I’m starting to lose interest.”
Gowder smiled and looked down at my hand that had just relinquished the paper cup. “Big hands.” I waited. “The late Devon Conliffe had marks on his neck indicating that he might have been strangled by somebody with big hands.”
“That the cause of death? I thought it might have had something to do with falling off the bridge.”
“Deceleration trauma.” It was the first time Katz had spoken.
I didn’t have anything to hide, so I went ahead and told them everything. “I put him up against the wall in the restroom, and my hand was around his throat because he was trying to kick me in the groin.” I looked at the two of them. “Look, if you guys liked me for this you would have arrested me last night. I realize that taking a nap is not the best alibi in the history of the western world but, if we can figure out when I bought the cheeseburgers from O’Neil’s and check that against your time of death, then you guys can get started on catching whoever really did this.”
“Where were you after the baseball game and before the nap?”
I turned back to Gowder. “The hospital.” I shook my head. “I can appreciate what you’re up against, but when would I have tracked him and how would I have gotten him up there?”
Gowder smiled some more. “Like I said, you’re a big guy.”
Katz set his own coffee down. “What Detective Gowder is alluding to is that the killer would have had to have thrown Mr. Conliffe over the railing and across the PATCO lines. That, without Devon’s participation, would have been quite a physical feat.”
I leaned back against the bench. “What about suicide?”
“What about it?”
I made a face. “I only spent five minutes with the kid, and I could tell he had problems, plus what happened the night before last.”
Katz leaned in this time. “And what did happen night before last?”
I told them what Devon had told me, including his promise to tell the police. “What’d he say to you?”
“He said that you had gotten rough with him and that he had to kick your ass.” I sighed and looked down at the surface of the table. Gowder chuckled. “We thought it sounded a little funny, too.”
“What did he say about the relationship?”
The one detective glanced at the other. “Same thing he told Patrolman…umm…”
Katz finished for him. “Moretti.”
The smile was back, and he looked at Katz longer than necessary. “Moretti. How could I forget?”
“I’m assuming you’ve listened to the phone messages?”
Katz pulled Cady’s cell phone from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “We have. We also checked his cell phone, his home phone, and as much correspondence as we could find at his residence, all of it confirming that the relationship was indeed of a serious nature.” He adjusted his glasses and looked at me between the red dots. “Mr. Longmire, I want you to know how sorry we are for what has happened to your daughter, but there are going to be a lot of questions concerning this young man’s death.”
Gowder raised his eyebrows. “His father is a judge with criminal appeals, and he has a lot of ties with the city’s current administration. Read: shitstorm.”
I thought about it. “What leads you to believe it wasn’t a suicide?”
“No note and, more important, even with the history of emotional problems, there’s no track record of attempts.” He looked at Katz, who shrugged.
“Look, Sheriff, you’re right, we don’t like you for this, but you had an altercation with the young man. He’s killed eight hours later a block and a half from where your daughter lives, and there you are without a strong alibi.” He laced his fingers together and looked at me from over the top of them. “We’ve done a little research and know everything there is to know about you. Marine investigator, one silver, one bronze star, Navy Cross…You’re a regular Audie Murphy.”
“Don’t forget my merit badge in macramé.”
He studied me for a moment and then continued. “More than a quarter century in law enforcement with backing from the state attorney general’s office, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, and the governor of Wyoming, all of whom seem to think you walk on rarified air.”
I watched the two of them. “So, what do you want from me?”
Gowder smiled again; I was trying to get sick of it, but it was a great smile. “We both have a half-dozen homicides in a case load…”
They needed an ally. The things you can always count on in law enforcement are that you’ll be underpaid, overworked, and looking for somebody to jump in the foxhole with you. “You guys hiring?”
Katz raised his head, and he was smiling, too. “We thought you might be able to assist us in that you have an advantageous position in connection with the case.”
I’d never get away with a statement like that in Wyoming. “You bet.”
We agreed to meet again in wind or rain, fair or foul, but mostly tomorrow at breakfast. They told me to keep Cady�
��s phone. I asked if I got a Junior G-Man ring, but they reminded me of the budget cuts.
When I got to Cady’s, Dog was happy to see me and was even happier when I found the extension cord that hung on the hook by the door. Clouds continued to threaten but nothing fell. I walked him up Race and took a left on Independence; there was a locked gate on the north side of the bridge. I looked at the open south-side walkway and decided to at least give it a try. There were two cruisers and a van from the crime lab unit still there.
I could see what Gowder had meant. There was a substantial railing and a light-rail track’s width across the high-speed train line, and only then the street below. Would have taken quite a throw; I figured Devon must have been moving about forty miles an hour when he hit the alley. The walkways looked to be twenty feet across, so there had been plenty of space to launch him, but who would he have trusted to join him that late at night?
There was a patrolman from the other side yelling at me to move on; he must not have gotten the memo. I waved and took Dog back down the walkway. At the bottom, we found a quirky subterranean passageway to the other side. We emerged just past the locked gate on the north and continued to street level, cut back on New Street, passed Saint George’s United Methodist Church, crossed Second, and stopped where the police barricade blocked the alley.
Kindness Goes Unpunished Page 8