by Candice Fox
The boy burst into tears, then quickly tried to disguise the emotion behind his big, thin hands, wiping and rubbing, almost as if he was attempting to shove the emotion back into his face. Kradle kept his eyes on his sandwich.
‘Maybe I should give you guys a minute,’ Kradle said.
‘No.’ Shelley rubbed his arm, sending electric pulses deep into his bones. ‘Just listen. You need to hear this. It’s maybe . . . It could be my fault you were put away.’
Shelley Frapport drew a long breath and let it out slowly.
‘Paddy came home for dinner, barging in like he always did, throwing his stuff on the floor in the doorway and sitting down at the table, ready to be served. And I just said it. I said, “I want a divorce.” I told him I already had a lawyer.’ Shelley wrung her hands on the table, near Kradle’s. ‘That was the day your family was killed, John.’
Kradle listened to the rest, though he didn’t need to. He could see it playing out in the room around him. The crying and raging and arguing, the desperately uttered promises, the young boy kneeling behind the door of his bedroom trying to make sense of all the tension in the air and how it weighed against his parents’ constant reassurances that everything was normal and fine. Patrick Frapport, overweight, exhausted, mind-numbed and basically nocturnal, struggling through the daily jet lag of his previous gangland case and then being loaded with a triple homicide and a potential divorce just as he rose to come up for air. Kradle sat and imagined, perhaps in the very seat where Patrick had sat imagining, how the divorce would go. He saw the man pulling his books off the shelves in the living room, leaving hers oddly spaced among the fine dust, and loading the books into whatever would carry them, with the rest of his possessions, because getting boxes and packing tape would make it all too real. Carrying his stuff out to the car in laundry baskets and trash bags. Sniping with Shelley over who owed which utility bills, who should buy a new cutlery set. Moving into a loud, dirty motel where he could walk to work, because Shelley would need the car to take Tom to archery practice. He couldn’t do it. It was undoable. The gangland trial and the Kradle Family killings and his divorce and his stomach ulcer and his alcohol problem and his untapped trauma and anger caused by too many years on the job was a mass of blackness that threatened to strangle him. So Paddy let something give. He did it to save his home life, because he knew that even if he put everything he had into his cases, they weren’t going to fuck him on his birthday, stroke his hair in the middle of the night after he came back from the bathroom, tell him he didn’t look like a beached whale in his swimming trunks.
And Kradle’s case was the easiest thing to let give, because it was obvious. The husband did it. The husband always does it.
‘Things were okay for a while. Then, just before he died, I said it again,’ Shelley said. ‘I told him I wanted the divorce. Paddy had tried. He’d really tried. He was home every night and he was listening to me and . . . I just . . . My heart wasn’t in it.’
‘And he told you then that he’d phoned it in on my case?’ Kradle asked.
‘Not in so many words,’ Shelley said. ‘He just said, “I did really bad things for you. For us.” But I knew. I’d been married to that man for twenty years. Whenever someone would bring up the case, or they’d say something about it on TV, he would shrivel up like a prune.’
Kradle was afraid to ask his next question, so he just sat there with his eyes closed and the words on his lips, hoping and praying and willing the answer to be the one that he wanted. When he drew a breath he could taste the terror coating his tongue like acidic wax.
‘Did you keep Paddy’s case files after he died?’ Kradle finally asked.
‘The police came and took everything,’ Shelley said.
Kradle covered his face with his hands. He put his elbows on the table and willed himself not to scream.
‘But I have something that might help,’ he heard Shelley say. Her chair squeaked on the floorboards as she rose. Kradle rubbed his eyes, clawed his fingers down the stubble on his ruddy cheeks, trying to push everything back in, the way he’d seen the kid do. He heard the black dog get up. When he looked over, it was sitting at the side door of the house, the one through which Kradle had come, its ears pricked and listening to something rustling out there in the morning light.
‘Helping a fugitive is a crime,’ Tom said.
Kradle said nothing.
‘I’m not going to let them arrest my mom,’ the boy continued. ‘Not for you. Not for anybody.’
‘It won’t come to that. I’ll be long gone before the police ever knew I was here.’
The boy didn’t look convinced.
‘My son was about your age,’ Kradle said. ‘Someone came into our family home while I was out and shot him dead. My wife and her sister, too.’
‘So why’d they arrest you for it?’
‘Because I was there,’ Kradle said. ‘Maybe only seconds after it happened. I went in and tried to save them but I was too late.’
‘If they locked you up for it, you must have done it,’ the boy said. ‘I mean, they . . . they have all kinds of stuff. Evidence and trials and stuff.’
‘I admire your unquestioning faith in the justice system,’ Kradle said. ‘I wish it was merited.’
‘All this stuff Mom’s saying about Dad, it can’t all be true. I was there too, you know. My dad was a good guy and he wouldn’t send an innocent man to jail.’
Kradle thought about telling the boy that it wasn’t as cut and dried as that. That sometimes good people got tired, made mistakes, looked the other way, went into denial. Good people could convince themselves of bad things, sometimes. The boy was doing a pretty good job of it right now, trying to convince himself that his father hadn’t sacrificed a human life to save his marriage. Kradle wanted to tell the boy that the easiest lies people told themselves were about the dead. But he didn’t want to crush that lovely, naive spirit, something he hadn’t encountered in many years.
‘I mean, say there is some other guy who really did do it,’ the kid said. ‘What’s your plan? You’re going to find him?’
‘Yes,’ Kradle said.
‘And you’re going to turn him in to the police?’
Kradle didn’t answer.
‘Why don’t you just get, like, somebody else to do that? Like, your lawyer or whatever? Or a friend?’
‘My lawyer has been working on my case for five years,’ Kradle said. ‘But sometimes it takes extra-legal activities to get to the heart of the matter.’
‘Are you going to turn him in when you find him?’ Tom asked again. Again, Kradle didn’t answer. The boy snorted a derisive laugh. ‘See? You are a bad guy.’
‘I’m starting to get the feeling I can’t win with you, kid,’ Kradle said.
Shelley Frapport came back into the room. She put a stack of papers onto the table and smoothed them out. ‘I dug these out of the basement yesterday,’ she said. ‘In case you came.’
‘I can’t believe you did this.’ Tom shook his head, his mouth twisted and mean. ‘You called off protection on our house. You got these things ready. How did you know he was going to come here, trying to look for evidence? He, like, could have been on his way here to kill us. To get revenge on Dad.’
‘I have an enormous gun under the couch,’ Shelley said.
‘You what?!’
‘There’s another one in the laundry.’ She nodded towards a door by the fridge.
‘Are you freakin’ kidding me?’ the boy yelled.
‘Your dad taught me to use them.’
‘What are these?’ Kradle touched the papers before him.
‘They’re phone records,’ Shelley said. ‘Paddy and I were fighting like crazy over the bills in the months after he took your case, while I was working out if I still wanted to be with him or not. I kept these. I hoarded them up. Here.’
Kradle looked at the pages, the highlighted and notated sections.
‘This number.’ Shelley pointed to the account i
nformation panel at the top of one of the pages. ‘This was Paddy’s work phone. I was always bugging him about getting the station to pay for the phone, the whole bill, but they wouldn’t because he didn’t use the phone completely for work stuff. I kept the papers because I wondered if my lawyer might want them. This is every phone call Paddy made and received in those months. Look at the date here.’
She pointed. Kradle saw numbers that he’d seen a thousand times before, numbers that always made his heart seize.
‘July eighth,’ Shelley said. ‘The day your family was killed. So from here down . . .’ She stroked the list of figures. ‘Almost all of these calls will be related to your case.’
They all leaned over and stared at the numbers.
‘There might be leads in there.’ Shelley gestured wildly to the pages when Kradle didn’t respond. ‘It . . . it has to help, right?’
Kradle folded the pages into a bundle and held them in his hands. He had travelled what seemed a million miles to this place, expecting so much. Expecting to grab the man who had put him away by the throat and wring the truth from him. Expecting to look at the files, the notebooks, the photographs and interview sheets relating to the murders of his family. Expecting to hear confessions, promises, revelations. But all he had were tales of a dead man and some phone records that sat so lightly and hopelessly in his hands.
That wasn’t true. He also had a sandwich and a glass of milk.
Kradle nodded encouragingly to Shelley, ate half the sandwich and gave the other half to the dog. Kradle was so hungry he didn’t taste the sandwich, though he was aware in some deep, quiet corner of his mind that it was the first time he’d experienced peanut butter in half a decade. He stood and tucked the phone records into his back pocket.
It was then that he realised the boy’s phone was no longer on the table where his mother had placed it. Kradle lifted his eyes from the empty space where it had been, lying face up, the screen blank, and saw the same cold blankness in the child’s eyes.
‘Sorry, dude.’ The boy shrugged. He took the phone out of his lap and put it back on the table.
Kradle heard the front door of the house being kicked in.
CHAPTER 26
‘It was fifty thousand dollars,’ Brassen kept saying, hunched over the cinderblock and plywood coffee table dominating the living room in his trailer. ‘That’s life-changing money!’
‘Yeah, it’s going to change your life, all right,’ Celine sighed. ‘It’s going to change everything about your goddamn life.’
She sat in the big, plush recliner chair opposite Brassen and held her head, just as he was doing, trying to accommodate the physical weight pounding in her brain with her horror at the man’s situation. Celine had hired Joe Brassen to work on death row exactly for the reasons Trinity assumed she had. Because he was punctual, efficient, methodical. Joe paid attention to detail, and detail was important, because the men they dealt with had little to no hope left in their lives. If anything slipped through, even so much as a smuggled shoelace or a single hoarded pill, it could mean an inmate was planning to take a life – either a guard’s or his own.
She’d ignored Brassen’s past – the unanswered questions about his firing from the Las Vegas Police Department, the written cautions from his boss over in medium security about racist remarks – because all she cared about was his ability to keep the inmates and her colleagues alive.
Now he would be lost. He would end up an inmate, the only remaining question being where. The psychologically crushing monotony of protective segregation, a hothouse of corrupt cops, paedophiles and child killers separated and locked away from the rest of the prison; or in general population, where his past as a prison guard would have him dead within the first month by shanking or stomping in the yard.
Celine was sitting across the shitty coffee table from a dead man who was breathing his last free air.
Trinity stood by the flyscreen door, refusing to touch anything in the cluttered trailer. Celine could see Keeps’s silhouette on the porch, sitting and stroking Brassen’s huge, hideous dog.
‘Didn’t it occur to you,’ Celine said, ‘that fifty grand was a hell of a lot of money just to let an inmate use a phone?’
Brassen shrugged. ‘You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I figured he had a girlfriend and his Nazi pals were paying for them to talk. I didn’t question it.’
‘You didn’t question it because you’re a Nazi,’ Trinity said distractedly, tapping away at her phone with one thumb. ‘You liked Schmitz. You liked what he stood for. And you liked his money.’
‘No,’ Brassen whined. ‘I’m not a Nazi. Celine, you can tell her. It’s me, boss!’ He tapped his chest. ‘It’s me. Joe. You know me. I’m not into killing people.’
‘So long as you consider them “people”.’ Trinity smirked.
‘Can you just let me do this?’ Celine turned and glared at her. ‘What did you bring me in here for?’
Trinity shrugged and brushed invisible dirt from Brassen’s trailer off her jeans. She wandered into the tiny kitchenette to ogle the filthy frying pans and takeout containers on the countertop, as if they were artefacts from a strange, forgotten civilisation.
‘Remember that camping trip to Big Bear?’ Brassen’s eyes were huge and pleading across the gloomy space, like those of a cornered deer. He gave a desperate laugh. ‘The team-building thing?’
‘I remember you and Jackson having a grand old time getting drunk together, fishing in that creek. You remember Jackson? The guy whose wife and kid were almost taken out by a sniper because of you?’
Brassen eased a huge sigh.
‘You don’t need to remind me that you and I have a warm history, Brassen,’ Celine said. ‘I like you. I’ve always liked you. Somehow it got by me that you were a racist asshole deep down inside. I guess when people come into my life . . .’
Celine didn’t continue the thought out loud. That when people came into her life who she liked or cared for, even just a little, she ignored everything unpalatable about them because she feared losing them so badly. She was too down about Brassen to think further about the string of cheating, gambling, idiotic and emotionally abusive boyfriends her habit had brought into her life over the years. The convicted conman currently sharing her home.
‘Tell me what happened,’ Celine said. ‘How did all this start?’
‘Look,’ Brassen sighed, ‘they didn’t pick me because I’m, like, some kind of KKK guy. I don’t attend meetings. I don’t talk to them online. I’m not one of them. It just started with Schmitz wanting some stuff that other inmates were getting from me. Certain candy bars. He stopped me on the row and said he heard I got some Cashew Crush bars for Donahue, and I said, yeah, did he want some? Ten bucks each. Then I started bringing him the paint for his artworks. Then, you know, he wanted a letter brought in from the outside. Wanted it to get past the mailroom.’
‘Where did you have the letter sent?’
‘My place.’ Brassen massaged his brow. ‘It didn’t seem like such a huge leap, you know?’
Celine did know. She had heard the story a thousand times, of inmates securing small favours from guards that they later parlayed into bigger favours. One day an inmate was asking you for an extra napkin with their dinner tray, and a few months later you were letting them and another inmate have sex in a storeroom once a week on your watch. Celine had taken years of hurt from her colleagues for never allowing an inmate so much as an extra packet of sugar with his morning coffee ration.
‘Did you ever have contact with anyone who worked for Schmitz in person?’ Celine asked.
‘No,’ Brassen said. ‘He’d ask for stuff, and I’d have somebody send it to my place. When he wanted the cell phone I went out and bought it from Walmart.’
‘And what about the baseball team?’ Celine said. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Schmitz just said he wanted certain people at the baseball game that day.’ Brassen swallowed hard. His eyes were glisteni
ng. ‘I figured he was organising something inside the prison. Like, they were going to start a riot or something. Have key personnel all tied up seeing their families after the game so they could get it off to a good start.’
‘You were fine with them starting a goddamn riot at Pronghorn?’ Celine barked.
‘It was fifty grand!’
‘Jesus, Joe!’
‘Our riot procedure at Pronghorn is foolproof.’ Brassen wiped hard at his eyes. ‘It was going to be a storm in a teacup. As soon as they kicked off, we would knock ’em down, same as always.’
‘Somebody could have been hurt!’
‘I need the money, Celine!’ Brassen gestured to the walls around him. ‘Look at this goddamn place!’
Celine looked.
‘My father died last year. Left me seventy thousand bucks.’ Brassen’s lip was trembling. ‘I pissed it away into the slot machines in three weeks.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I got problems.’
‘No shit,’ Celine said.
‘How could I have guessed what they were really going to do, huh?’ Brassen said. ‘How could anybody have guessed that?’
‘Do you have any idea what they’re going to do now?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing?’ Celine insisted. ‘I mean, all those phone calls you facilitated. All those letters you delivered. You never saw or heard anything that would give you even a hint as to what they’re going to do?’
Brassen shook his head helplessly. ‘I . . .’ He swallowed hard. ‘The only thing I ever saw was some drawings.’