“How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Lot of money.”
“Indeed.”
“For thirdhand information,” I said.
“That’s where the baseball cap comes in,” she said. “It was an antique, from the Columbus Red Birds. An old minor league team in town, back in the forties and fifties.”
“I’ve heard of them,” I said. “Before the Columbus Jets.”
“The hat belonged to Frank. Aaron inherited it when he died. It was the one thing he asked for after the funeral.”
“When was that?”
“Four years ago. Frank was in a car accident. He was terribly injured. He lingered for several months. He died at home, where we’d been caring for him.”
“We?”
“Mike, our son. Aaron’s father. But mainly the home health aides.”
“I see.”
“Aaron and Frank were close,” she said. “They used to go to Clippers games when Aaron was younger.” The city’s current minor league team, successor to the Red Birds and Jets.
“Frank had his own nickname for Aaron,” Dorothy said. “Boss. Called him that from the day he was born. ‘Hey, boss.’ Aaron used to run up to him. ‘Hey, Grandpa. The boss is here.’ ”
I nodded. “So he had the cap.”
“That’s right. And the point is, he was wearing it that night. After he came back to the house with the gasoline. At least that’s what Miller said. Said the witness had seen Aaron wearing the cap. It was Miller’s way of proving his information was legitimate.”
“The witness saw Aaron at the house with the gasoline? Doesn’t that just clinch it?”
“Miller told Aaron the witness saw him get cold feet at the last second. But that somebody else was there, and that person set the fire.”
“Does Aaron remember wearing the cap?”
She shook her head. “But the fact Miller knew about the cap got his attention. Our attention. How could he know that otherwise?”
“Where was Miller from?” I said.
“Columbus.”
“Could he have seen Aaron wearing it somehow? Before he went in?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Aaron hadn’t worn it in a while.”
“Miller have a motive for this mystery arsonist? Why he supposedly set a fire that killed three people?”
“Not that I know of.”
I thought of something else. “Wouldn’t everyone else at the party also have seen the cap?”
“He didn’t wear it there. He put it on afterward. Or at least, that’s what he surmises.” She paused. “He only wore it on special occasions.”
“Like burning down a house.”
“Like thinking about burning down a house,” Dorothy said.
“What made Miller think Aaron had that kind of money?”
“Aaron has a big mouth and a rich grandmother.”
Of course. Old Hickory and Young America.
I said, “What did Miller propose doing with fifty thousand dollars in prison?”
“He didn’t say. Just told Aaron that was the deal.”
“When did you find out about this?”
“About three weeks ago. I had driven up for a visit. Aaron didn’t want to put anything in writing or say it on the phone.”
“Smart.”
“After that, I contacted Aaron’s attorney. The one who handled his plea.”
“What’d he say?”
“She. She wouldn’t touch it. She said the same thing you did, that thirdhand was worse than no information at all. And even if the tip was usable, which she says it’s not, the payment made it a nonstarter. She called it borderline extortion.”
“What’d she say about the cap?”
“That it was intriguing, but inconclusive. Plus, it meant someone had positively identified Aaron at the scene of the fire. Clinched it, like you said.”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
“Karen Feinberg.”
“I know her. She’s good. If she won’t try to reopen it . . .”
“Then Aaron’s spending the rest of his life in prison,” Dorothy said.
I didn’t respond. I leaned back, taking another sip of coffee. Thought of what else I knew about the case. The street where it happened, Orton Avenue, was lined with off-campus rentals, many of them century-old brick houses that had once been single-family residences but were now chopped up into five or more bedroom-sized apartments apiece. Cash cows for landlords sopping up the gravy from Ohio State students. They were pits, a lot of them, though not necessarily firetraps, since it would be a foolhardy rental company that risked its investment literally going up in smoke. That hadn’t stopped a civil lawsuit against the company that owned the house, alleging that more working smoke alarms could have saved lives.
I said, “Pretty suspicious that Miller committed suicide right after telling Aaron about the witness.”
“Obviously.”
“Have you talked to Aaron since?”
“Not in person. There’s a prison e-mail system you can use. Faster than letters. We traded a few messages. He says Miller had gotten some bad news earlier in the day. Something about his sister.”
“People do commit suicide,” I said. “Especially in prison. Especially after getting bad news.”
“Yes, they do,” she said. “That’s what makes this even harder.”
“In what way?”
“Aaron’s father, Mike. Frank’s and my son,” she said. “He also committed suicide.”
I sat quiet for a moment, feeling stupid. I should have known this.
“When?” I said.
“Just a few weeks before Frank died. He turned the car on in the garage and rolled down the window.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I hate that response. But thank you anyway.”
“What happened,” I said. “If I may ask?”
“He’d hit rock bottom. His latest business had gone under. A food truck he started with a friend. ‘Olen-Tangy Tots.’ Variations on tater tots—tots with barbecue sauce, salsa, cheese.”
“Clever,” I said. The Olentangy River—the Old and Dingy—ran through the heart of Columbus and bordered Clintonville on the west. The same river Anne and I had been exercising next to a few hours earlier.
“Not clever enough to keep him from losing everything. Mike never had a head for the business side, and his partner was skimming from the till. And all this as he and Molly, Aaron’s mother, were divorcing. And the drinking. He killed himself the day after the bank took the truck.”
“And this was right before your husband died?”
“That’s right.”
“So Aaron lost his father and grandfather back to back.”
“Yes.”
“Why did Aaron’s parents split up?”
“It’s complicated,” Dorothy said.
I nodded and decided to leave it at that. I was familiar with complicated divorces.
I said, “Aaron’s problems began after that?”
“That’s right. Drugs, alcohol, running with the wrong crowd. Hard to blame him, in hindsight.”
“The fires? They started then too?”
“Yes.”
“Houses?”
She shook her head. “Dumpsters, woodpiles, that sort of thing.”
“Classic cry for help.”
“You could call it that.”
“He was arrested.”
“He set a fire near campus. Trash bin in Pearl Alley. Police saw him running from the scene. He wasn’t quite eighteen, so he ended up with court-ordered counseling and a year’s probation.”
“Did it help?”
“He pulled himself together, got his GED, and started taking classes at Columbus State. Talked about transferring to OSU.”
“But.”
“The drinking got worse. He dropped out of school. Started setting fires again.” She paused. “Then came Orton Avenue. You know the rest.”
I s
at back in my chair. Looked at the wall of bookshelves behind her, crowded with thick volumes. I said, “So what would you like me to do?”
“This Eddie Miller,” she said. “His suicide doesn’t change the fact there’s a witness who could exonerate Aaron.”
“If he exists.”
“If,” she acknowledged.
“And if he does, you’d like me to find him.”
“That’s right.”
“Aaron willing to talk to me?”
“Of course,” she said. “Just keep in mind he doesn’t remember anything about that night.”
“Aaron’s mother.”
“Molly.”
“She know about Eddie Miller?”
“Aaron told her.”
“She’s on board with this assignment?”
“As far as I know. But just to be clear, this is not a family job, if I may put it that way. You’d be working for me.”
“I would have expected her to be here today,” I said. “Talking about this.”
“Molly keeps her own counsel,” Dorothy said. “She knows I called you.”
“It’s a bit of a wild goose chase,” I said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Miller’s suicide suggests he wasn’t entirely stable. Which suggests he might have been trying to scam Aaron.”
“I’m aware of that too,” she said. “Frankly, that’s true whether he killed himself or not. The whole thing sounds fantastic, and you could be excused for chalking it up to the desperate fantasies of an old woman. Except for one thing.”
I thought for a moment. “The cap,” I said.
“That’s right,” Dorothy said. “Without the Columbus Red Birds cap, we’re not having this conversation.”
I didn’t respond. I’d had clients before with desperate fantasies. Dorothy wasn’t even close. She seemed to know what she was asking, up to and including her insistence on being the one calling the shots. I wouldn’t have a problem taking her money, especially since, by the looks of her well-appointed home, there was no shortage of it. It was more the nature of the job itself. Reopening the Orton Avenue fire would not be easy. The only thing people in Columbus had wanted more than Aaron’s hide nailed to the wall of the criminal justice system was closure; shutting the book on a horrible episode that was the nightmare of every parent who’d ever sent a kid to college. My sniffing around would be the rough equivalent of informing the people in Sandy Hook that the shooter who’d killed twenty first-graders hadn’t acted alone after all. That the whole morass of pain and agony had to be revisited. Again.
Which in a way made my decision to take the job easy enough.
When you have as many detractors as I do, what’s a few thousand more?
4
Despite my decision, I was more than a little troubled as I walked out of Dorothy Custer’s house. The jobs I get rarely come neatly wrapped with bows on top. But this was like an empty box with a blank card inside. Aaron Custer had all the hallmarks of a troubled kid who made a tragic decision. The fact that Karen Feinberg had declined to reopen the case spoke volumes. The business with the Red Birds cap was intriguing but hardly airtight. The late Eddie Miller could have easily elicited a description of the cap somehow, then turned it around on Aaron to make him believe he was innocent. Dime-store psychics did it all the time. Why not conniving inmates?
I got in my Honda Odyssey and backed out carefully onto North Broadway. I turned east, drove up to Indianola, and went left at the light. Two minutes later I was parking in Indianola Plaza, and a minute after that was walking into Weiland’s Market. I grabbed a grocery cart, asked an employee for directions, then a moment later scooped up three containers of Weiland’s Own Smoked Rainbow Trout Spread, a favorite of Anne’s. I picked up packages of the store’s original brats and cheddar brats and more spreads, and spent a little time ogling the fresh fish lying on ice under the watchful eye of a full-sized model of a swordfish hanging overhead. I perused the meat, and in particular a special on pork roasts, but restrained myself. Getting soft in my old age. I completed my trip with two jars of Frog Ranch salsa made down in Athens, two bags of Crimson Cup coffee, and a couple bottles of red wine.
As I loaded the groceries into the back of the van, I reflected on the fact I had just spent three or four times what I should have, since my real object had been just the spread. Truthfully, the night Anne brought it, I had liked it OK at best. But the purchase was less about the product itself than trying to do something nice for her. I had not been in the habit of doing nice things for the women I’d been with in the past, unless you counted spending money I didn’t have on drinks and expensive meals in exchange for nights at their houses, where more times than not I didn’t behave well and left the toilet seat up to boot. It was going to be different with Anne.
At least that’s what I had told myself every day for the last four and a half months.
I awoke early the next morning, frisky with the knowledge I had a job, however fleeting Aaron’s case turned out to be. I’d fallen asleep reading World War Z, a zombie apocalypse novel I’d picked up for the same reason I’d purchased the smoked trout spread: to connect with Anne, who was teaching the book in her science fiction class at Columbus State Community College. The things we do for love, considering my tastes run more to biographies like Frank Custer’s book about Jackson. I placed the novel on the night stand, sat up, thumped Hopalong, lying beside me with an expectant twitch to his nose, then got out of bed.
A few minutes later, shaved and waking up after my first cup of coffee, I led the dog out the back door and waited while he watered a patch of daffodils that had sprung up randomly in the yard this spring. Hopalong had had a debilitating encounter with a shard of glass in the park more than two months ago, and thanks to a secondary infection followed by a cold and blustery March we had not been up to our usual neighborhood walks, let alone jogs. “Hobble-along,” the vet dubbed him with a smile. She thought he’d be up to speed in another couple weeks. She hadn’t commented on my own need to start exercising again, though I could have sworn at our last appointment I caught her frowning at the hint of a spare tire the winter’s inactivity had won me. I looked guiltily at my running shoes when Hopalong came back inside. Then I looked at the time and made a solemn promise to go out in the afternoon instead.
I was settled at my kitchen table with my laptop, looking up stories about the Orton Avenue fire, when Roy called.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he demanded.
“Polishing cutlery,” I said. “The dishwasher keeps leaving little specks.”
“Why I eat off plastic. Lucy and I are going on an expedition. Care to join us?”
“Where?”
“Downtown bike trail. North of the railroad tracks, east of the moon. Kind of hard to describe.”
“You’re going at night?”
“We’ve had trouble finding folks this spring. Figured we’d try some one-stop shopping.”
I thought about it for a second. “OK if I bring Anne?”
“A date in the woods? How romantic.”
“Just a thought.”
“She’ll have to sign a waiver.”
“Guessing she can manage that. If she comes.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“I don’t know what she’ll think of the idea.”
“Haven’t you been jogging on the bike trail with her?”
I confessed that I had.
“This is just jogging with drugs and flashlights. Tell her that.”
“I’ll be sure to do so,” I said.
After I hung up I skimmed some of my Internet search results, then started jotting down ideas on a yellow legal pad. Aaron Custer would be one of my first interviews, assuming his grandmother was telling the truth about his willingness to talk. I’d try his mom as well, despite the family tension I’d picked up from Dorothy. I’d pull whatever records were available from the case and talk to the arson squad and the cops, if they’d agree. Whi
ch I had my doubts about. Next would come relatives of those killed, the prospect of which didn’t thrill me. I could imagine their reaction to hearing what I was up to. And of course, the girl who survived. Helen? Another easy interview.
But the longer I sat and tapped the point of my pen on the yellow lined paper, the more I realized the hardest interview of all had to come first. And I would have done anything, including a full confession of my past sins in front of the marching band entrance on the north side of Ohio Stadium, in exchange for a pass.
But not this time, I thought. Dorothy had handed me the obligation I’d spent years trying to avoid. Time to face the music.
5
Just before 5:30 that afternoon, wearing a blue button-down shirt, a tie so old I couldn’t remember which ex-wife gave it to me, a navy sport coat, and a pair of khakis that had somehow shrunk a size or two over the winter, I left my house, walked a few blocks north up Mohawk to Beck, took a breath, then stepped beneath the lighted glass overhang outside Lindey’s, pulled open the heavy wooden door, and went inside. I smiled at the inquiring hostess and gestured toward the bar on the left. Two guys with drinks in their hands took their eyes off the women they were with long enough for a double take. I ignored them. I kept my eyes on the object of my pursuit, currently sitting at the end of the bar next to a brass railing. Where she sat almost every Friday after work, as I well knew. I began the long walk in her direction. There had been walls of fire-breathing three-hundred-pound linemen I’d feared less.
Her back was turned to me as she chatted with a man seated beside her. As I stopped I realized she hadn’t seen me approach, that there was still time to back out. I thought about it in earnest. Then I took another breath and tapped her on the shoulder.
As she turned and recognized me, her eyes went wide, just for a moment. My stomach flipped. Those big, beautiful blue eyes. Shock flickered across her face, as palpable as if I’d reached out and slapped her. She blinked twice. Then, just as quickly, the look of surprise disappeared. It was what she did, after all. She reacted to the unexpected with composure. Once upon a time I had done the same thing, only with a football in my hand instead of a microphone. It might have been what brought us together.
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