by Reed Arvin
Henry bristled; Elaine’s words, almost exactly. “I’m not going to deny that’s a factor,” he said, “but it’s a legitimate factor. It’s natural to want to get to the bottom of it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re worried about the old man’s credibility.”
Henry imagined his father toiling through his usual caseload of adoptions and bankruptcies. In every case, he had tried to put families back together, not tear them apart. “No, that’s not it,” he answered quietly. “It’s more complicated than that, somehow. It has a lot more to do with Boyd, actually.”
“The nutcase.”
“I’m using his real name from now on.”
“Please don’t tell me you want to protect him.”
Henry hesitated, saw the cliff, and stepped off it. “Yes, I do.”
“Oh, God,” Parker moaned. “Not that.” Henry didn’t respond; he could feel a lecture coming, and like clockwork, Parker delivered. “You know what my nickname was in law school, Preacher?”
“No, Sheldon, I don’t.”
“B.H.”
“I see.”
“Billable Hours.”
“Very quaint.”
“I was proud of it then and I’m proud of it now. I suggest you consider it a personal goal of your own. That’s if you want to survive around here.”
“As warnings go, that wasn’t what I’d call veiled.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. Look, I’ve seen this whole thing before. Half the students in law school come up thinking they’re going to be legal-aid heroes, protect the downtrodden, change the world. Then somebody waves an eighty-five-thousand-dollar paycheck in front of them, and they’d climb right over the backs of those inner-city blacks and Latinos trying to get to that cash. But once in a blue moon, somebody grows a conscience. They get a little crisis. It’s called success guilt.”
“You actually think this is just some pointless attempt to justify my good fortune.”
“I know it is. I’ve seen it before. And believe it or not, I’m going to let you do it.”
Henry spoke cautiously. “Why, may I ask?”
“Because I know you. I know that after you play out this little farce you’ll be back in my office happy to be there. I’m not going to lose you, Henry. I’ve got too much invested. So take this little trip. Get it out of your system. Find out there’s no Santa Claus or Mother Goose. There’s just work and winning and losing.”
“I’m not sure whether to thank you or not.”
“It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t. I’m not doing it as a favor to you. The fact is that you’re no good to this firm until you work this out.”
Of everything Parker had said, those words were the most disturbing; they were completely true, which meant Parker was inside his head. He profoundly disliked that feeling. “How can we work it?” Henry asked.
“You’ve been at the firm a couple of years, right?”
“Twenty-six months.”
“Which means technically we owe you fifteen, sixteen days of vacation. Technically. How many have you taken?”
“None.”
“Exactly, because none of our junior associates take their vacation. So here’s the deal. You’re taking yours, as of now. I figure I can sell the idea around here that you’re making us money on your own time. And I want every second you work on this case catalogued and billed to the estate. In quarter hours, and don’t be afraid to round up. If you want to burn vacation time in Kansas instead of St. Bart’s, that’s your problem. Accept?”
“I accept.”
“Remember, Henry, even this little scam has limits. If things get screwy, all bets are off. I don’t want to hear about sheriffs getting involved. If this thing goes criminal, the state seizes the estate and the court has to approve the fees. I don’t know what they pay lawyers down there, but it sure as hell isn’t our rate. You follow me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Meanwhile, I’m going to be spending my time up here thinking up exotic ways for you to make it up to me. They all involve picking up my laundry and other menial tasks you thought were beneath you.”
Henry grimaced; he had won, but the payback would be enormous. “Thanks, Sheldon. I guess.”
“Okay. Wait. Before you go, I got a message for you—some skirt named Amanda Ashton’s looking for you. Kansas Department of Environment, which fascinated me, because I didn’t know Kansas even had one.”
“What’s she want me for?”
“Some project she’s working on. God help you if the EPA gets hold of you. Sexy voice, though. I told her you were a busy boy these days. Number’s six-two-one-oh-four-four-nine, your area code.”
Henry was about to hang up, but he casually added, “I hear Elaine’s helping you with your portfolio. Pretty modern move for a guy like you. She’s not exactly old boys’ club.”
“I don’t care if she’s from Mars if she can make me money. I saw her numbers and they were impressive. Met her for a drink at Romano’s, and she laid it out for me. You were right, she picks stocks like Nolan Ryan threw fastballs. And looks a hell of a lot better. You don’t have a problem with me sending her some business, do you?”
“I’d feel better if you weren’t in acquisitions and mergers.”
Parker laughed, an earthy, experienced sound. “She invited me to her big soiree. I guess I’ll see you there. If you make it back, that is.”
“Touch her and you’re dead.”
Parker laughed again. “I’m a hard man to kill,” he said. “Stay in touch, Preacher.”
If I were going to play by the rules, I’d go find Roger right now, Henry thought. Boyd’s connection to Crandall was something he and the rest of the family deserved to know. But something had clearly happened to Ellen, and if it wasn’t Tyler, he wanted to find out what it was. Something terrible was etched on her face in tired lines, like her innocence had been drained from her soul. More and more he was convinced she was the hinge that moved the locked door he faced. He had rattled her at lunch, he had felt that. But he would have to be careful; she was no pushover. Roger would have to wait; he picked up the phone and dialed her house.
“Ellen,” he said. “Henry Mathews. From yesterday, at the bank.”
There was a momentary silence. “How are you?”
“I need a minute of your time.”
Her voice was cautious. “Why don’t you drop by the bank later? We open at ten on Saturdays.”
“It’s a personal matter,” Henry said. “I’d like to come by now, if that’s okay.”
He could feel her thinking. “Is this a social call?”
God, she doesn’t let up. “I’m afraid not,” Henry said. “It’s about the Crandall estate.”
“All right. I’m putting on my makeup. We’ll have to talk while I finish.”
“That’s fine. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Henry made the short drive over to Ellen’s, pulled into the gravel drive, and walked onto her porch. He didn’t have to knock.
The door swung open, and Ellen, her makeup half applied, stood before him. The difference in her appearance was striking; without eyeliner and mascara she looked like the woman she was: someone twice his age. She nodded for him to come in and said, “Whatever it is, I don’t want to be late to work for it.” She motioned for him to sit and took her place in front of a mirror. With her back to him she picked lipstick out of a small bag and began applying it carefully. Henry disliked the arrangement; from the seated angle he could only see her face in the reflection, which placed him at a disadvantage. Ellen looked over at him briefly in the mirror, then began running lipstick along her bottom lip. “So you’re here,” she said. “So talk.”
Henry opened his briefcase and pulled out some aging, rumpled papers. He held them up, but Ellen’s gaze remained fixed on her mouth. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice casual.
“A loan agreement between the Cottonwood Valley Bank and Ty Crandall.”
“What of it? Tyler had a
lot of loans with the bank.”
“This is the loan that set Tyler up in business back in seventy-three. It’s for a great deal of money, money that Crandall was in a dubious position to ever repay. Without these papers, there is no Tyler Crandall. No king of Cheney County, no ruler of Council Grove. Just another mustered-out soldier with not much more than the shirt on his back. Whoever signed this loan was making a fool’s gamble, unless he knew something that isn’t in the documentation.” He held out the paper. “I’m going to come straight to the point, Ellen. The name at the bottom of this page is Raymond Boyd.” Ellen looked up at Henry, but she said nothing. “I checked, Ellen. You were working at the bank at the time of this loan.”
“How did you know that?”
I know it because the ever-helpful Frank Walters went to the bank at eight o’clock this morning to dig up your employment records. “I just know,” he said. “So therefore you know that Raymond Boyd preceded Schiller at the bank.”
Ellen stared back into Henry’s eyes a moment, then broke off and began rummaging in her makeup bag. She began applying eyeliner in quick, professional strokes. “I don’t follow you, Henry,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about why you felt the need to lie.”
Ellen looked at him with a hurt expression. “Is that why you came over here, Henry, to call me a liar?”
Henry leaned forward in his chair. She would have to do a lot better than that to deflect him. “I’m going to lay this out for you very clearly, so we don’t misunderstand each other,” he said. “There’s nothing personal here. I’m just trying to fill in some blanks. The fact is that you’ve known Boyd all this time. Obviously, you knew Crandall as well. You also knew that they had business dealings together at one time. It seems to me that you are the missing link, Ellen, and I want to know why you wanted to keep that a secret.”
Ellen set down her makeup. “I don’t know what you think you found out, but I can’t see what difference any of it makes now,” she said. “That paper, if it’s real, is from a very long time ago.”
“The papers prove that Boyd once held a position in this town. I don’t know what happened to him back then, but I do know that with Tyler Crandall dead, you’re the only witness to it that I’ve got.”
“Everybody knows what happened to him,” she answered. “He went crazy.”
“I think you know why. I want you to tell me.”
Ellen swiveled around on her chair, meeting Henry’s eyes. “Bang, I’m dead,” she said darkly. “You got me.” She crossed her legs and blotted her lips on a tissue; her makeup finished, the transformation was complete. She looked once again like the woman Henry had encountered at the bank. “All right,” she admitted, her voice calm. “I knew Raymond. It was twenty-five years ago. Big deal.”
Henry watched her face carefully; finally, there had been a break in her armor. It might lead to more, if he could keep her talking. But Ellen regarded her admission as insignificant. “Look, I knew him. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Let’s start with why you lied to me. If this is no big deal, then why not just tell me about it?”
Ellen gave him another reproachful look. “You’re still a boy, Henry,” she said. “There’s a lot you don’t know about things.”
“Enlighten me.”
“You know why I lied to you?” She laughed, a cool, detached sound. “I did it because that’s what Raymond would have wanted.”
Which means you knew Boyd well enough to know his inner desires. “What makes you say that?” he asked.
“Look, I knew him. But he went crazy. He’s not the person he was. That person died twenty-five years ago. I felt bad for him, so I left him alone. It doesn’t make any sense to make things worse for anybody now. I don’t know what Ty was trying to do with that will.”
“Did Crandall pressure Boyd to help him? Those early loans were way out of scale for somebody in Crandall’s position.”
“Look, I was just working my desk. If Ty weren’t dead and Raymond weren’t crazy, you could ask them.”
“If Boyd was a bank officer twenty-five years ago, why doesn’t anybody remember him? Why didn’t anybody contact his family or something?”
“He only worked at the bank for a few months. He got sent here by the main branch. I suppose they could have helped him, but it was his first position with the bank. I imagine they just chalked him up as a flake and went on about their business.”
“But the people here,” Henry insisted. “How about them?”
Ellen’s face was implacable. “It didn’t take that long to forget him. He was always private anyway, shy. He wasn’t from around here. No family connection, nothing. He was at the bank such a short time a lot of people never met him in the first place. So one day he’s been fired, and a while later he shows up out at the park, not talking to a soul. You know how people are. They don’t like talking to somebody when they’ve been fired, and they don’t like talking to crazy people. After a while he just faded out of their minds. People die, people move away, people forget. But just to make sure, I started some of the rumors about him—you know, the stories about him being a gangster and all.”
“Those came from you?”
“All I had to do was start it. Once they got rolling they had a life of their own. Gangster, crazy man. It didn’t matter. I just wanted the name Raymond Boyd forgotten.”
“Why was that so important?”
She looked at him, and for a moment he could see a younger woman within her, a woman who would be humiliated to see what she had become. “Look, I wasn’t always like this,” she said, compressing a lifetime of disappointment into a single sentence.
“You mean you cared.”
“Not like you mean. I worked beside him. I knew him better than anybody else, so I did what I thought he would want. Or would have, if he could still think straight.”
“Why didn’t anybody help him? Why didn’t anybody get him some treatment or something?”
“Takes money,” Ellen said, standing and picking up her bag. “Like everything else in this damn life. You know, Henry, money?”
Henry calculated a moment, then decided to take a risk. “Look, I’m going to level with you. We both know Roger. There’s no way he’s going to roll over and play dead. But if I can find a meaningful connection from Raymond to Crandall, the will could be found valid. If it is, Boyd will have all the money he’ll ever need.”
“Do you think the money would make any difference to somebody who spends all day sitting on a park bench? Money!” she spat bitterly.
“It’s not only about money, Ellen,” he said.
“Oh really?” She gave him a mocking look. “All right then, where have you been the past twenty years? Why didn’t you help him yourself? How come the only time you or anybody else started trying to help him is when he got in Crandall’s will? You don’t work free, do you?”
Her words momentarily derailed him; she was right, of course. Boyd had mostly been a mere object of fascination to him, not a real person with needs and a future. In all those years the simple idea of helping the man had never occurred to him. Boyd’s gruff exterior and bizarre habits were sufficient to render him an outcast, and no one had possessed enough grit or plain compassion to push through that fact. After a moment he said, “None of us helped him. Not me, not anybody. I’ll take my blame. But you still haven’t answered my question. I want to know why you lied.”
“To protect him,” Ellen answered. “To protect him from people like you.” She pulled her little bag together and pushed by him. “I don’t have any more answers for you. I’m sorry. I’ve got to go. I’m gonna be late.” She stepped quickly through the door and stood on the porch. Henry followed her outside.
“One last thing,” he said. “You’re asking me to believe that you lied to me to protect him,” he said. “All right. That means you cared about him, Ellen. You cared more than anyone did.”
Ellen walked off t
he porch and got in her car and rolled down the window. “I’m not asking you to believe anything, Henry,” she said, starting the engine. She put the car in gear and drove off spinning her wheels, filling the air with a shower of dust.
First to Roger—I can’t put that off anymore. But then over to Boyd. He fingered a leather valise. If I show him the bank papers, maybe it’ll jog him into talking, remembering. He had parked and was walking toward the square, deep in thought, when his cell phone went off in his jacket. “What?” he barked into the receiver.
A female voice gave a shocked “Beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, sorry. You just surprised me. Henry Mathews here.”
“This is Amanda Ashton. I’m with the state department of environment. I’m going to be in Council Grove today, and I wonder if we could get together briefly.”
“Right, Sheldon Parker told me you’d be calling. Look, things are a little hectic around here. What’s it all about?”
“It’s nothing serious, but since I’m going to be there anyway I thought we could meet for a few minutes. It’ll be easier to explain in person.”
“All right. I’ll be busy most of the day. What time will you be here?”
The voice gave a short, slightly embarrassed laugh. “I’m at a pay phone in front of some cafe at the moment.”
“You mean you’re already here?”
“Well, yes.”
“You work fast.”
“Try to. So can we meet?”
“Look, I don’t really have an office down here. The building you’re in front of is the Trailside Diner. It’s as good a place as any. I haven’t had breakfast, come to think of it. I can be there in two minutes.”
“Wonderful. Shall I describe myself?”
“Just a guess, but I imagine you’ll be the one in the dark pants, white shirt, and dark green vest.”
“Excuse me?”
“The one with the short brown hair, wearing flats, and carrying a black government-issue briefcase. Oh yeah, and a puzzled expression.”