A Dead Issue

by John Evans

  Dusty whistled a long fading note.

  “And that’s not all. There were eleven hundred-dollar bills in it along with my thirty-three.” I watched as that thought bounced around inside his head.

  “Eleven hundred? That’s weird.” He looked at me and frowned. “Really weird.”

  Dusty ran the length of his index finger, from knuckle to tip, across his lips wiping away some beer. Then he started to nod. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?” I demanded.

  “It explains why he was so interested in you.

  I felt suddenly weak.

  “Me?”

  “The whole thing was about you,” he finally said.

  I groped for a chair.

  Dusty studied me as I sat down. “He wanted to know why the son of the richest man in the state works at McDonald’s—why you do yard work, whether you and Jonah got along.” He paused. “He seemed awfully interested in what makes you tick.”

  I took a long swallow of beer, draining the can, letting my thoughts settle a bit.

  “What did you tell him?”

  Dusty gave me a wink and an uncertain smile. “I told him you’re an asshole.” He laughed, revealing a silver bead on his tongue. “I told him you like to piss off your old man by wasting your life at McDonald’s.

  “I also told him you and Jonah got along fine. We worked for him yesterday and everything was OK when we left.”

  “What time did you give him?” I asked, wanting to make sure our stories matched.

  “Around five.”

  Perfect. Everything was going to be OK as long as we told the same thing, but I was troubled with an ever-growing feeling that I was a suspect. Who else could he focus on? I was the one with a wallet full of money. Devereaux would always return to me, pecking away at my story, probing ever deeper into my activities, drawing nearer and nearer to the big lie.

  “What are we going to tell him when he finds out that Cash punched us in?” I asked after a long silence.

  Dusty raised his eyebrows and bit down on his thumb. “Don’t know,” he said at length. “But we sure as hell ain't saying nothing about looking for Stemcell.”

  “Tell them my car broke down and you helped me. That’s why we were late,” I said. “Our stories have to match—always. Don’t go getting creative when you talk to Devereaux. OK? Don’t come up with a story unless we agree on it.”

  “Count on it,” he smiled and gave me a wink.

  CHAPTER 20

  With my license held at police headquarters and a car that didn’t work, I asked Dusty to drive us to McDonald’s. I would rather have driven myself because I knew I’d be leaving early. I couldn’t wait to tell Cash that Waldo was lost in the unemployment line.

  As we neared McDonald’s, I felt a growing need to let Dusty know my plans. “I had lunch with my father,” I said, breaking a long silence.

  Dusty continued driving for a full block before asking, “Did he cut you off?”

  “He gave me a job.”

  I watched him drop into a thousand yard stare, driving on autopilot. I was pretty sure what was troubling him.

  “Dusty, we’re still in this together.”

  He was shaking his head, tuning me out with his own troubling thoughts.

  “I just have to get away from Cash,” I continued and knew how lame that must have sounded.

  “No,” he said, “you want to get away from me—because of last night.” He drove in silence for a while. “It will make it easier for you to turn on me when the time comes.”

  “Dusty, I’m not going to turn on you,” I said, but the fact of the matter was that the idea had crossed my mind. It was my plan B if Dusty decided to take off.

  He shook his head again. “Your father will step in,” he said, “get a lawyer for you. Plea bargain.” Dusty’s eyes shifted from the road to me and back again.

  “Dusty, the only reason I’d turn on you is if you left town. You’d look guilty, and I’d have to explain why to save my ass.”

  “Your father would throw me under the bus. You know I applied for a job at Cameron?”

  I did not answer and he continued.

  “I thought he might come out of the office to see what I looked like, but I was wrong. He wants nothing to do with me—he hates me.”

  It was more likely that my father hated what he symbolized. He was the embodiment of his ruined marriage. When I was two, my mother met Carson Bates, a promising actor with more time for fun than a struggling businessman. After a tumultuous year of fighting, she moved to Hollywood with her new lover. She was already pregnant. I was left behind with my father, who went on to develop Cameron Industries. Dusty was born in California where my mother developed the drug habit that killed her.

  “He doesn’t hate you,” I said. “He just doesn’t know you.”

  I told him the details of my luncheon and how I was going to move back home. I made it sound more like a job description than reconciliation with my father. I was giving Dusty the same sales pitch my father had given me. Reconciliation would come later.

  At McDonald’s, we punched in and went quietly to work without direction from Cash. He was out of sight and I was happy not to have to face him right away. By now he had read the paper and knew Jonah was dead. I was certain he had questions about my timecard. The only thing I wanted was to use it one last time.

  Dexter came out of the men’s room, drying his hands on a piece of brown paper towel.

  “Dex,” I said as he passed the drive-thru station. He stopped and gawked at me, open-mouthed. “Cash wants me to check the bathrooms. Take over for a minute.”

  I left before he could say anything and I went into the back where Cash had his little office set up. He was sitting at his desk, which was little more than a flat surface piled with all sorts of papers that he had to keep pushing back to make a small work area for his crossword puzzle. He was startled by my unexpected appearance.

  “I’m on a break,” he explained.

  “Want me to come back in a few hours?” I asked but made no move to go.

  “No, stick around. I was just thinking about you. Let’s see . . . seven-letter word for insignificant person. That would be piss ant.” He looked up at me pointedly.

  “Actually, that’s two words—like flaming asshole.” I gave him a similar look, half expecting him to stand. I was bigger than Cash, but he had a ruthlessness about him that scared me. I had never backed down from him and did not intend to now.

  His lips tightened thoughtfully. “Flaming asshole—good! Actually that fits seventeen across. Spoiled rich guy.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I corrected him, “Flaming asshole goes in thirty-five down, night manager. Spoiled rich guy is former employee known as Waldo.”

  Cash’s eyes looked up from under his brow. “You telling me you’re quitting?”

  “You won’t have Waldo to kick around anymore.”

  He glared at me for a moment with cold, unblinking eyes. “We’ll talk about that in a minute. Right now I’m working on two down—dead white guy.”

  “Is that a threat?” I took a little step closer, closing the gap between us, advertising that I wasn’t intimidated.

  “No,” he answered, apparently unfazed by my anger. “Just working on a puzzle.” He slipped his pen into the folded newspaper and tossed it on his desk. He leaned back in his chair, propped his ankle on his knee, and stared at me for a while. “I’m missing some pieces, but the ones I have fit together real good, and I’m beginning to see the picture.”

  He leaned out of his chair to see behind me, and when he saw no one was there he continued. “Last night, you invited me to Miller’s. Remember? Took me a while, but I finally figured out you was jerking my chain, trying to confuse the issue while you guys made your escape.”

  I knew where this was heading.

  “Well, this ain’t the parking lot and this ain’t Miller’s. It’s my office and we’re going to talk.” He looked at me long and hard f
or a moment and shifted in his chair, settling in, and making me uncomfortable. “Let me lay out the pieces for you. Maybe you can help me fill in what’s missing. First of all Dusty asks me to punch you guys in like you’re here. He offers to pay two dipsticks under the table so it isn’t on the books. Like an idiot, I agree. Then you show up a couple of hours late and tell me that you were ‘moving things.’ Lamest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever heard. Then I catch you in the parking lot and I hear Dusty. We didn’t kill nobody! Him squealing like a pig and you looking like you swallowed a fuckin’ canary and trying to keep it from flying out your ass.”

  He stared at me—cold eyes boring into me. Without breaking eye contact, he reached for the folded newspaper on his desk and let it fall open, revealing the headline: “Local farmer found dead.” He glanced at it for a moment, letting the hollow, helpless feeling in me grow. I felt ready to implode and cave in on myself—crumble up on the floor in a heap. “My, oh, my! What a co-inky-dink! The dead farmer is none other than Jonah Heard—the guy you work for, the guy you were with the very day he died.”

  I was unable to speak, so I picked up the paper and stared at the headline and pretended to read it like it was fresh news. I had the thing memorized. I had read and reread it several times earlier in the day, searching between the lines for anything that might connect me to the crime.

  “What were you moving? The body?” he asked at length.

  “No,” I managed to say with some conviction. “We were moving my things. I’m moving out of my apartment.”

  Dusty swung into the cramped space and crowded next to me. “That’s right,” he said without hesitation as if he had been part of the conversation and not afraid to advertise that he had been hanging outside the door eavesdropping. “He didn’t want you to know.”

  Cash eyed us suspiciously. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Because he’s moving back home with his father,” he said and I felt myself flush with anger.

  Cash absorbed this information for a moment and then let his satisfaction take over with a grin that spread across his face until his lips parted, showing his blinding white teeth. “And that’s why you’re quitting—because your old man offered you a job as a junior executive or some damned thing.”

  He savored the moment before continuing.

  “Well, well, well,” he said placing both feet on the floor, leaning forward. “Waldo’s going to be lost in the corporate world. How ‘bout that.”

  “OK. Checkmate. You win. I’m crawling back to Daddy. Anything else you want to say before I you see me for the last time?”

  Cash drew himself to his feet, slipped his thumbs into his belt and hitched his pants up.

  “Yeah, one more thing. Let’s hear about the murder.”

  It came out so matter-of-factly, so freely and without judgment or alarm, that I blinked in surprise. He could have been asking about last night's ball game.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “We were late for work. Late coming from Jonah’s, and now he’s dead. It looks bad. That’s what we were saying last night. Somebody might figure that we had something to do with it, but we didn’t.”

  Cash’s eyes shifted from me to Dusty and then back to me. “So what are you worried about then?” he asked. It was almost a challenge.

  “Look,” I explained, “we didn’t do anything, but it sure looks bad. We moved some of my stuff and then I realized I left my wallet at Jonah’s.”

  I could see Cash weighing my words and tone, not sure if he should trust me ever again.

  “We jumped in the car and went back to see if Jonah found it. When we got there, he was dead and we cleared out.”

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “Because it looks bad,” I explained.

  “Looks worse that you didn’t,” Cash said, and I detected a note of sympathy in his voice or maybe it was simple wonder at our stupidity.

  “Fact of the matter is,” I explained, “it’s too late. The cops already talked to us.”

  “What we’re asking,” Dusty said, “is for you to dummy up. We were at work. Time card proves it. That’s all. Then the cops can go find out who really did it.”

  Cash pondered this for some time. It sounded so easy that I actually hoped that something would be discovered to show that Dusty was right about someone else being in the house with us—someone who was upstairs and pushed Jonah from the top landing.

  “Why should I do that?” Cash asked.

  I couldn’t think of any reason why Cash should cover for us. He wouldn’t do it for his own brother.

  “Because we’d do it for you,” Dusty said so earnestly that it was laughable. And Cash did laugh. He threw back his head and let out a noise that sounded like he was choking to death.

  “Right,” he finally managed. His eyes jumped from Dusty to me. “I’m going to put my ass on the line out of friendship.” He placed his hands on his hips and surveyed us again. “Dusty, get back to work. Waldo, there’s the door. Don’t worry, I’ll punch you out—on account of we’re friends. What you want to do is figure out how much our friendship is worth.”

  CHAPTER 21

  This was the morning that was going to be the first day of the rest of my life. My goal was to pack up my things and move out. It would not take long. My apartment was furnished, and the only large item I owned was my television set. The rest would fit into a few boxes. My kitchen cabinets were stocked with a few dishes and some glasses. I didn’t need any of it. The refrigerator contained beer, petrified pizza, catsup, and a few Chinese take-out containers long overdue at the dump. I dropped them into a garbage bag and happened to look out the window.

  Devereaux stood on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. He studied the house number for a moment before approaching the porch and then he labored up the steps as if carrying a queen-sized mattress on his back. I had a brief flash of an old black and white movie from the Fifties—The Mummy. Nothing high tech, no special effects; a guy wrapped up in toilet paper dragging one leg behind him. My grandmother could outrun him. The scary thing was his relentless pursuit of his victims. Nothing daunted him. You could outrun him, jump on a plane and flee, but sooner or later he would be at your door, hand outstretched, clawing at you. That’s the impression I had of Devereaux—relentless pursuit.

  He banged on the door like a bill collector, pounding with a force that could not be ignored. I stuck my head back into the refrigerator and said loudly, “Come on in!” letting him catch me by surprise—then my calm reaction would proclaim my innocence. I listened as the door opened and then emerged with a handful of pizza slices wrapped in foil. I dropped them into the bag. “Oh, hi. I thought you were Dusty.”

  “You didn’t see me coming up the stairs?” His tone was doubtful, but not challenging.

  “I heard you,” I lied.

  Devereaux’s close-set eyes took in the details of the room, and he leaned to the left to catch a glimpse at the boxes in the next room. “Cleaning out your refrigerator or leaving town?” His tone now had an undercurrent of suspicion.

  “Both,” I admitted and stood quietly trying to read a reaction in his face. He said nothing and looked at me until I was forced to break the silence. “I’m not going far. Just down the road to my new job—house sitter at the Cameron estate.”

  My turn. I waited for him to break the silence.

  “I came here to let you know that we got some answers.” He paused long enough for me to break into a sweat about whether the answers were good or bad. I was keenly aware of the game we were playing, and so was Devereaux. The unsettling thing was that he had so much more experience playing it. “I talked to the oil guy—Dave Morgan? He remembers seeing you at the top of Jonah’s lane. Thinks it was closer to seven when he pulled his truck onto the highway.”

  This was wrong. I had been trying to stick as close to the truth as possible. I knew I was at the top of Jonah’s lane around six. At that time, I still planned to punch in at seven. I frowned.
Either Morgan looked at the time wrong, or Devereaux was toying with me—seeing if I would change my story to match his facts.

  “He better have his watch checked,” I said. “I may have been off a few minutes, but not by that much.”

  Devereaux flipped through his notebook, possibly double-checking.

  “If he was delivering oil, the time gets stamped on the bill,” I offered.

  Devereaux paused and looked up from his notes at me. Then he flipped his book closed.

  “He wasn’t delivering oil,” Devereaux explained. “That’s one of the things I found out. He was buying Jonah’s truck for his son Brandon. You just missed them.

  Now it made sense. Jonah had decided to give up driving before he killed someone. He knew he was pushing his luck. If only we had been a few seconds earlier. We would have met Brandon behind the wheel of Jonah’s truck coming out of the lane and not his father following him in the oil tanker. I would have known that Jonah was home. I’d have knocked on the door, Jonah would have answered, and I’d have gotten my wallet and gone home. Jonah would still have been alive.

  “Guess how much the Morgans paid for that pile of junk?”

  “Eleven hundred dollars.”

  “Exactly. And in hundred-dollar bills. It looks like Jonah found your wallet and thought it was his own.” Devereaux said.

  We stood there for another awkward moment, shaking our heads. I pictured Jonah stuffing his money in my wallet and tucking it in his rear pocket with enough sticking out to be noticeable as he lay dead on his floor.

  “This creates a little problem for us,” Devereaux continued. “Nothing serious,” he assured me. “The problem is that when we clear up this case and release property held in evidence, Jonah’s money is in your wallet.”

  “And?”

  “And we could end up with a little dispute as to whose money it is,” he explained.

  “No dispute,” I said. “It’s Jonah’s money. I don’t want it.”

  Devereaux nodded appreciatively. “I was hoping you’d say that. You can save us a lot of trouble by signing a little statement to that effect.”