Wolf's Revenge

by Lachlan Smith

  “Do you get it now?” Car said, jarring me from my thoughts. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  I wanted to ask him where he’d been since Teddy’d been shot, but I knew the answer. I’d been witness to his acute discomfort during his increasingly rare visits to Teddy’s hospital bed, and then to his room at the rehab center. The trouble was that he didn’t know how to behave, and unlike me, he wasn’t willing to accept the readjustment of roles Teddy’s diminished capacity required.

  Car’s loyalty wasn’t the kind that could find an outlet now that Teddy no longer captained the ship. This didn’t mean, however, that it was dead.

  “You said Teddy never involved you in any illegitimate business. There were things you didn’t want to know.”

  “Fuck that,” Car said. “You’re going to need help. I owe Teddy. He protected you—that means you and his family are my responsibility. That’s how I see it. Don’t start with me, kid,” he said as I began to interrupt. “Teddy couldn’t keep himself from getting shot, and he was a thousand times more street-smart than you. You need someone on your side as ruthless as the people who’ll be coming after you if you’re going to have any hope of cutting loose from them.”

  Hearing him say this made the danger real in a way it hadn’t been before. I felt a chill, understanding that he was right. If I did what I intended—though I didn’t yet know how I was going to do it—there was no question Bo’s people would come after me, and probably after Teddy and his family as well.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I admit it. We’re going to need your help.”

  “You’re goddamn right you will. Now let’s get out of this dump.”

  On the street Car gave me a nod and we went our separate ways, promising to touch base after I’d had a chance to speak with my father about Sims’s evident involvement with Jane Doe in Edwards’s murder.

  Overhead, the sky was beginning to brighten.

  CHAPTER 7

  I went home to my outpost of gentrification high above the Tenderloin and showered as the sun came up. Wrapped in a towel, I eyed my bed speculatively, then thought better of it and dressed in slacks, a button-down, and the navy jacket I’d bought because it fitted me off the rack.

  I drank my coffee black, standing at the floor-to-ceiling window that made up one entire wall of my studio apartment, with a view of the Marin headlands across the Bay between the stiletto towers of downtown. Having put in what passed for a good night’s work, I was in no hurry to get to the office. I didn’t need to be in court again this week, and most of the work I needed to do was the kind that could be done while I watched the sunrise spread across the headlands. I had half a dozen relatively new cases that required the big-picture treatment: strategy decisions about what motions to file and what arguments to pursue, and whether or not to press for an early plea deal.

  My most urgent task, however, was deciding how much of what I’d learned could safely be shared with my father. After some thought, I decided that before I talked to him I needed to know everything I could find out on my own about Sims. With this resolution, I poured the rest of the coffee into an insulated flask and made the fifteen-minute walk to the office, picking up a breakfast burrito on the way.

  From public databases I confirmed that Sims had done six years for armed robbery and gotten out two years ago, a few months after my father’s release. It didn’t escape me that he’d been on the street in time to have pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Russell Bell, the snitch the DA had planned to use in my father’s retrial, a man whose own spell in prison had overlapped with Lawrence’s, Wilder’s, and Sims’s. That gun had later come into my possession in hard-to-explain fashion, planted on me by one of Wilder’s goons and later discovered in a search of my apartment by the police.

  My father had promised that he’d deal with Sims, but it seemed to me that if Sims had been involved in Bell’s murder, he’d been overly dismissive of the man. Excessive humility had never been my father’s weakness, however.

  Armed with these speculations, I called my father’s cell phone and left a message. It was before nine, and still early for him, so I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t pick up. Next, just to be sure, I tried him at the property management office in Oakland, but the call went straight to the answering service. Again, not a surprise. Lawrence spent as little time at the office as possible, and my brother, when there, never picked up the phone, preferring instead to screen out calls from tenants.

  Failing to reach Lawrence, I settled in to other work, sending polite emails to prosecutors that would never be answered, but which could later be filed with the judge to show that I’d asked for the discovery I wasn’t given.

  I tried my father again three more times that morning, and again after lunch, the calls ringing half a dozen times before connecting to voice mail each time. I included no details in my repeated messages but simply asked, with greater urgency in each, that he call me as soon as he could. Though I’d meant to leave work early after my sleepless night, I wound up at my desk past six. I picked up a Vietnamese sandwich on the way back to my apartment and fell asleep in front of the TV.

  Still my father hadn’t returned my calls.

  Friday morning I forced myself to wait until nine, eating breakfast at my desk, then repeated my earlier exercise, this time calling Lawrence’s home number as well as his cell and the rental office. Finally, with no more success than I’d had the day before, I resorted to trying Dot’s number, which was in my phone for emergencies. When even this attempt at contact proved unsuccessful, I’d become sufficiently concerned to call the hospital in San Rafael where she worked as a trauma nurse.

  I asked for the nurses’ station, and the person who picked up told me that Dot had been scheduled to work the overnight shift but hadn’t showed up, nor had she shown up for her previous shifts that week. “We rang and rang, but she didn’t answer her phone.”

  That settled it. It was Friday now. I’d last spoken to my father Sunday night. I closed up the office and ran down the steps, lacking the patience to wait for the balky elevator. I jogged the eight blocks to the garage near the freeway where I kept my car because downtown parking was beyond my budget. Thankfully, the engine started on the first try. Ten minutes later, I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael.

  It was a blustery morning, and I kept both hands on the wheel as gusts of wind lashed the windshield. It wasn’t raining, exactly, but a light mist kept materializing on the glass, hardly more substantial than the fog my breath made on the inside surface. I was sweating despite the chill, my bowels tightening with fear. Maybe they’d gone out of town on a bender and would return in a few days from Vegas or Mexico, hungover and annoyed with me for worrying about them.

  I’d been to the condo only a few times. The place had been Dot’s before she’d married my father, and I’d sensed he still didn’t feel at home there, preferring to spend his days at a handful of favorite bars in Oakland and San Francisco, where, presumably, he managed the real business Wilder had charged him with. Though he’d resisted my inquiries, I suspected he was responsible for far more than collecting rents and putting in maintenance calls.

  I had no spare key, but Dot’s next-door neighbor did. She was a woman past retirement age, with a bichon that she kept tucked under her arm. Initially suspicious, she grew alarmed when I told her I was Lawrence’s son. She hadn’t seen my father or Dot all week, and she’d thought they’d been away. I pointed out that Dot’s car and both motorcycles were in their parking spaces. Though Dot’s entrance was mere feet away, the neighbor made sure her own door was locked before trudging down from the stoop.

  She rang Dot’s bell and knocked repeatedly on her door, though she’d been standing on her front porch for the last five minutes watching me do exactly that. Conceding there was no one home, she at last turned the spare key Dot had entrusted to her in the lock, and we stepped inside.

  “Oh, no,” she said, drawing back. I smelled it, too, like meat
left out on the counter for several days. For a moment I could go no farther. The dog let out a whine and thrashed its paws in the neighbor woman’s arms, trying to scramble down.

  I took a step, then another, my head turning left, then right, searching out the telltale signs of the violence I already knew had been done in these rooms. It seemed to me that this had happened before, that I was only retracing my steps or someone else’s. Dirty dishes filled the sink, food crusted on the plates, and flies buzzed in the garbage can.

  I took the stairs slowly—both a man of thirty-six and a child of ten coming home with my backpack heavy on my shoulders—reached the top, then turned down a hall that in my vision seemed to stretch and meld to become the hallway of my worst memory, my vision narrowing to the point where my mother’s blood pooled on the floorboards, set off by the whites of her eyes and the shattered bones that had pierced her cheeks. Her empty stare suddenly snapped into focus to become the death gaze not of my mother, but of Dot Cooper, with two bullet holes in her chest.

  I came back to myself and found I was standing in the doorway of the bedroom looking down at the body of my father’s wife where she’d tumbled either just before or just after she’d been killed. Her eyes were open, and her mouth, too, was open, as if caught in a cry of surprise. She was wearing her nightgown, and the fabric was now stretched stiff with blood across the bloated front of her. The smell was bad, the astringency of spilled blood mixing with the high sweetness of decay, underlaid by a meaty tinge that seemed to invade my body through the very pores of my skin even though I was trying to hold my breath.

  So he’s killed her, too, was my thought. I didn’t see my father anywhere and assumed he’d once more fled in his guilt from the scene of this murder, leaving me for a second time to stumble on the ruins he’d made of a good woman’s life, someone who’d deserved far better than she’d received from him.

  Then I saw him. One naked foot was visible near the door to the master bath. I stepped into the room, my feet-that-were-not-my-feet carrying me gingerly around the dark rust stain on the carpet, where I could look over the edge and see my father fallen, also in his pajamas. Now I saw the blood and brains and skull bits blasted across the wallpaper on that side, dried trails running down to the floor from the place where the blast had concentrated, as though someone had thrown a balloon filled with the stuff as hard as he could against the wall, and there it had burst.

  My father, on the floor, lay with what remained of his face turned upward, both blue eyes intact, somehow retaining their sadness despite the opaque film of death. The blinds were pulled and no lights were on. The stillness of the scene was inviolable. I had a terrible urge to go out the way I’d come and gently close the door behind me, the way you do when you’ve intruded on an intimate scene.

  With the door closed behind me, it almost seemed that the black disorder of the universe could still be contained and prevented from overflowing out of that room, spilling through the door, and pouring in a torrent down the stairs into the world to consume us.

  CHAPTER 8

  My father’s body was laid on a slab, then incinerated to a pound or so of ash. Maybe it wasn’t even his ash. My brother, sentimental, had an idea of scattering the remains on our mother’s grave. They don’t let you scatter ashes just anywhere, I told him, and in any event, why force them to spend eternity together? If Caroline Maxwell had lived, she’d have left him by now and married some other man, probably been divorced again. But Teddy didn’t want to hear it.

  Meanwhile, Dot’s sister had arrived in town and arranged a memorial service, at which, as the funeral director informed us as politely as possible under the circumstances, the Maxwell family wasn’t welcome. While the Coopers of Ohio struggled to come to terms with their grief, we held our own shabby funeral home visitation for Lawrence.

  I sat in the front row while the sad music played, surfing the Internet on my phone. Teddy, beside me, was likewise silent, his movements slow, like those of someone who’d been drugged. Tamara had decided to stay home with Carly, no one having yet figured out how to explain to her the sudden death of her grandfather and his wife. Car stopped by and spent a few minutes pacing between the chairs and the urn, then offered his condolences to Teddy and shook my hand, whispering in my ear, “Let’s talk.” But no one else came, not even the police detectives whose inquiries I’d so far stonewalled.

  Neither Teddy nor I had mentioned Jack Sims to the police. I hadn’t even told my brother about our father’s promise to deal with Sims, or what he’d shared with me about his idea for escape. I couldn’t know whether he’d been targeted by someone within Bo’s organization, or whether the killing had been ordered by a person outside. I didn’t yet know which nightmare I hoped was true.

  The morning after the funeral, I walked out of my office and a homeless guy, familiar and harmless, stepped into my path. I had a buck in my pocket and gave it to him. As I did, he slipped something to me. It was a “crack phone,” as we’d called them at the PD’s office, the prepaid kind you could buy at any corner store, no data plan, no frills. I quickly slipped the phone into my pocket, circled the block, and headed straight back to my office, abandoning my plans for a mid-morning coffee.

  At eleven-fifteen it rang, and I pressed “Talk.”

  “You know who this is,” the voice said as soon as I’d answered.

  Wilder had a Southern-accented voice, higher than I expected, but I knew the regionalism was a put-on. He’d grown up not in the Deep South, but in Southern California, where he’d honed the arts of grand larceny, extortion, and murder from an early age. He’d made his connection with the Aryan Brotherhood in his twenties during his first extended stint behind bars, also acquiring there a spread of tattoos that, according to photos introduced in evidence at one of his trials, covered the gorilla-like masses of his upper body with swastikas, lightning bolts, and nooses.

  Upon his release from that first imprisonment, he’d earned a reputation for brutality and cruelty notable even within that hateful syndicate, eventually rising to control the biker drug trade in most of the state, a position that he continued to hold despite the life sentence he’d earned a few years ago for a series of remarkably brutal and brazen murders.

  “The man who killed my father,” was my response.

  “You’ve got no business accusing me,” he said in a reasonable voice, soothing and convincing and all the more dangerous for being so.

  I made no reply. But it didn’t matter. Wilder went on: “If it makes you feel better, I can verify exactly where I was at the moment your father was killed. They keep good records of my movements. Very detailed. Anyway, I was calling to pay respects, not to invite abuse.”

  “And not to warn me I might be next, right? If you did, there was no need to call. As usual, the message came through loud and clear.”

  Again, Wilder went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’m contacting you directly in an effort to avoid any mistakes. Misunderstandings can be unfortunate. That’s because they generally need clearing up.”

  “Right.” Anger made my voice break. “The way someone had a misunderstanding with my father, and it’s been ‘cleared up.’ Believe me, I understand you.”

  He didn’t bother telling me I might be wrong.

  “I’m a businessman first and foremost. Always have been, underneath it all. Now, personally, I don’t have much more to lose. Sure, they could put me on death row, but I’m used to living with a target on my back. Fuck, my life expectancy’d probably increase if I got moved to North Seg. So there’s not much they can take from me. You, on the other hand …”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Your man Jack Sims made abundantly clear what I have to lose.”

  “How’s that?”

  His surprise sounded genuine. Just in case he truly didn’t know, I told him about Sims’s clumsy but effective intimidation at the baseball game, and my father’s determination to deal with him. Wilder remained silent as I spoke.

  �
��And that was the last conversation I had with him. Either he approached Sims, or he didn’t get a chance to,” I said, wrapping up.

  “It may be Sims is a problem,” Wilder at last responded, seeming to choose his words with care. “But if your father thought he could take things up directly with him, that was his mistake. Your pops ought to have known better.”

  “So Sims killed him.”

  “If he did, his balls have grown a lot bigger than when he was in here. Now I’ve got to ask you something real important, and if you lie to me, Maxwell, I’m gonna know it. I understand you’re the one who found the bodies, and the one who called the cops. In the heat of the moment, did you tell them anything about Jack?”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, does it?” I answered through gritted teeth. “No, I didn’t tell them anything.”

  “That’s good. Jack always was a man of limited imagination. It served him well behind bars, but a man’s got to have brains in his head to thrive out in the world. You’ve told me some things I didn’t know. One way or another, justice will be served.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means just that.”

  I had the sense of being caught in a whirlpool. If Sims had killed my father and Dot, I didn’t want him dead. Such an outcome would only emphasize the meaninglessness of their slayings. I wanted the killer alive, spending the rest of his days in prison.

  I switched gears. “Tell me why you’ve got me representing Jane Doe.”

  His tone was one of quiet anger. “You really think you got a pair, don’t you?”