Flame Out

by M. P. Cooley

  “You at home?” he asked.

  “No. Mom’s.”

  “She alive?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought we could sleep here, at least for one night, make sure the press have cleared out.”

  My dad thought that was a wonderful idea. “I have a key, so no need to wait up.”

  I hung up, and my mother emerged from her bedroom carrying a pair of pajamas. “Thought you might need something to sleep in.”

  “Oh, I can’t,” I said.

  “Go ahead. And there’s an extra toothbrush in the bathroom.” She pushed the blue-gray pajamas into my hands. “June, I’d like to continue the conversation, but after I’ve had time to think, and when you’re not in the middle of two cases. So let’s call a truce, at least until after the cases are done.”

  I didn’t know if it was a reprieve or a threat. I thanked her for the pajamas, went in and brushed my teeth with one of the four toothbrushes she had lined up on the sink, and changed for bed. Her pajamas, cotton and impossibly soft, protecting me against bleached hotel sheets, and my daughter’s sleeping breath rising and falling next to me lulled me into sleep.

  CHAPTER 19

  MY PARENTS WERE AWAKE AND DRINKING TEA AT THE DINING table when I got up. It was six a.m., but I hoped to be able to go home and change before the press showed up. My mother hadn’t bought a week’s worth of clothes for me.

  “Want some?” Dad said, raising his cup at me halfway before letting it drop back down. With dull eyes and the beginnings of a gray beard covering his pale face, he looked sick. It had been almost three years since his heart attack, but a trip to the cardiologist might be a good idea. The stress couldn’t be good for him.

  I declined his offer of tea. If I didn’t have coffee first thing, my brain never woke up. Tea would just confuse it.

  We talked through the day, my dad grunting one-word answers, my mother embellishing his statements, finalizing Lucy’s school plans, and offering salmon for dinner.

  “We can work around your plans,” Mom said a little too eagerly, but I was willing to give her points for trying.

  I grabbed my purse and notebook from the chair and gave each a little wave. With Lucy still asleep, no one was in the mood for hugs.

  The sun was up by the time I got home, and I moved quickly through my routine: coffee, shower, dress, coffee, and more coffee. I wanted to get to work, but I also wanted to get away from my quiet house. Before Lucy was born, Kevin would periodically go on assignment. The time alone was like a holiday. I watched five seasons of The Wire in eight days and ate Mexican food for dinner—Kevin, that freak, refused to eat cilantro. But when Kevin died, I became afraid of the quiet. Silence became a punishment. I poured my third coffee into a to-go cup and raced out to meet Hale.

  Hale and I decided to have a friendly early-morning conversation with Brian, bringing a file with a DVD labeled “Detroit airport” and a video labeled “Carfast Car rental” along with some prints. I’d used videos before—sometimes real and sometimes blank. Often you didn’t even have to push for a confession; the guilty blurted out explanations.

  We’d strategically timed our visit to Jake’s bar for 9:30 a.m. so we’d arrive after the post–swing-shift happy hour, people having a couple of beers before heading home, pulling the blackout blinds, and sleeping the day away. We congratulated ourselves when we arrived to find no cars in the parking lot, but our victory was short lived. The bar was closed.

  “The Medved family is celebrating Bernie Lawler’s release from his unfair incarceration and thanks the community for their warm support.” The last sentence had been wedged at the bottom of the page and was difficult to read. “Jake’s Bar will reopen tomorrow.”

  “Well then,” Hale said.

  I had Lorraine pull Jake’s address. Jake’s Camaro was parked in front of the house, half on the grass and half on the street, and we pulled up in front of the neighbor’s house. As we got out, we were greeted by a handyman, the same one who’d been hired by Maxim to do Bernie’s yard work. I could tell the moment he recognized us—he looked ready to drop his hedge clippers and run. I went with the assumption that the judge wouldn’t hire someone with outstanding warrants and decided to let him be.

  “Judge Medved isn’t here,” the man blurted. “He’s at the office.”

  We explained that we were there to see Jake rather than the judge and the man relaxed visibly, wishing us good-bye and running behind a bush. The driveway of Jake’s house was dominated by Brian’s four-by-four. Wheelchair accessible, it was another indication about how far Brian had come in his recovery since his injury.

  “I was really hoping to avoid having this conversation with Jake hanging around,” I said.

  “C’mon. They’ll be delighted we came to them. Saved them that trip down to the police station.” Hale smirked. “For now.”

  We walked down the broad sloping path, widened to accommodate a wheelchair, an upward curve at the end gently depositing us at the front door. I rang the doorbell. No answer, although I heard a strange clanging echoing through the house.

  Hale punched the bell again.

  As the chime’s echo disappeared, I heard a voice. “We’re in the garage, Dan!”

  The clanging continued as we walked to the garage. The door slid up, Jake Medved gripping the strap.

  “Wouldn’t have opened the door if I knew it was you,” he said. He wore a sleeveless shirt. In his early seventies, Jake had reached an age when it was hard to develop muscle tone, and his arms were skinny, almost stringy. They were tanned a deep brown, a strange look in a bartender; they were usually as pale as deep sea creatures.

  Brian sat on a leg press, the weights crashing as he finished a set. Behind him sat a weight bench, barbell propped at its head, 150 pounds of plates loaded on to each end. Brian was wearing a green army T-shirt stained with sweat and gym shorts that hung almost to his knee. The clothes did nothing to hide his prosthesis, and I had a chance to study it for the first time. Unlike the heavy plastic versions I had expected, this one was sleek black metal with a curve at the end, aerodynamic, but in no way resembling a foot.

  Jake squinted at us. “Can I help you?”

  “We need to ask Brian some questions,” I said.

  Jake yanked at the canvas strap, preparing to pull down the door. “He doesn’t have to talk to you.”

  Hale raised his left arm and stopped the garage door’s descent. “The other option is for us to take Brian to the station and conduct the interview there.” He bumped the door back up. “Your choice.”

  “So this woman can try to stick my son with a crime the same way her father did Bernie?”

  “We never mentioned a crime,” I said.

  “Go take a walk, Dad,” Brian said, climbing down from the machine. He waved us inside. “Let’s go talk in the kitchen.”

  Brian didn’t wait for us, hurrying through a door leading to the house, his step even and free of the limp. Scuff marks dotted the concrete of the garage marking the path of his prosthesis, a circuit that traveled from the leg press to the barbells and back to the door, and the house’s hallway had square imprints cutting through the vacuum lines in the tan carpet. I caught sight of an army poster in his room as we walked through to the kitchen, updated with the pristine marble countertops perfect for noncooks.

  Hale, Brian, and I settled around the kitchen table, and I asked Brian about his whereabouts in mid-May.

  “Went fishing at Lake George,” he replied without hesitation, not asking for the specific dates.

  “Did you catch anything?”

  “Fish.”

  “See anyone while you were fishing?”

  “No one. Only me and the fish.”

  Who needed Deirdre? A confession was going to be impossible with a guy who had been trained to resist interrogation.

  Sliding doors separated the dining area from the backyard, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Jake, hose in hand, watering the three-foot patch of grass right outside
the glass. Lawn care was not his strong suit.

  “A lot of green up in the Adirondacks,” Hale said. “Must have been a relief after the desert. Were you in Afghanistan or Iraq?”

  Brian sat back in his chair. “Who told you?”

  “Picture at the bar,” Hale said. “Desert camos.” He looked down before meeting Brian’s eyes. “Your leg.”

  Brian spoke rapidly. “When I was over in Iraq, a sea of brown in every direction, I would dream of going to the lake. Quiet, with the hills providing plenty of defensible positions.”

  I laughed. “Defensible positions are key to a good time.”

  Brian glared. “They were where I was stationed.”

  I felt my misstep, but Hale picked up the slack. “And you worked with explosives?”

  “Yeah.” Brian smiled for the first time, unexpected and sweet. With his injury, I would have thought bad memories would outweigh the good. But his pleasure was genuine. “I signed up for another tour, made sure my brothers got home safe. Then this happened.” He pointed to his destroyed leg. “IED, hidden in a soda can.” He looked away. “Coke is life, right?”

  We were silent as Brian pulled a paper towel from a roll propped in the middle of the table between the salt and pepper and mopped up sweat from his workout. “I got lucky, I guess. A leg is better than a head.”

  While we talked, his eyes darted to the file in front of me, squinting to read the labels on the videos. Hale had done a nice job of getting Brian talking. I wrote “GO ON” in capital letters in my notebook and slid it to where Hale could see.

  “You didn’t go out to eat? Buy bait? Go to a bar?” Hale asked.

  “I spend enough time in a bar, thanks, so my vacations include time away from the crap. And the bait shop . . . you stick your cash in a box and take the bait out of a cooler out front. The guy who owns the place hates getting up at five a.m.” He paused. “I did have dinner with my Uncle Maxim one night. Nothing fancy. Burgers up the road from the cabin.”

  I opened the file, putting the tape and the DVD in full view, and slid off the top sheet to reveal a picture of the Detroit airport concourse. The fluorescent tubes warping in the still photographs, bent waves capturing where the light had been, where it was, and where it was going. Our guy—Brian—was staring up, the hood of his sweatshirt hiding the top half of his face, long hair ghosting his chin.

  Brian remained silent, twisting the photo left and squinting.

  I could hear the front door open, Dan Jaleda calling out. There were footsteps down the hall, but instead of Dan, Deirdre marched in, her husband following close by.

  “Very nice, Officer Lyons,” Deirdre said. She wore a pressed white blouse over khakis, and her gray bob swung when she pointed a finger at me. “Less than twenty-four hours, and you’ve already picked up your father’s vendetta.”

  “I didn’t tell them anything, Aunt Dee,” Brian said.

  “And why were you being questioned in the first place? Brian, they could turn hello into a criminal case, if they wanted.”

  Brian half stood, wobbling briefly. Deirdre stopped her rant, gently guiding him back to his chair.

  Jake opened the back door and still had one foot outside the house when Deirdre started quizzing him. “Dan called, told me a cruiser was parked out front. Why didn’t you call me, Jake?”

  “I tried to reach Maxim—”

  “Of course. You called our brother, the ex-judge without a college degree, instead of me.”

  “This is none of your goddamned business, Dee,” he said. “This is family—”

  “And I’m not family?” She was furious. “I’m your sister. I worked in your bar—”

  “And never let me forget that it was beneath you,” Jake said.

  “And spent twenty years trying to get our brother out of prison.”

  “Your brother. My half-brother.” He marched around the table. “And you went on and on about how Maxim and I did such a shitty job keeping Bernie out of jail.”

  Brian tried to pull his father away, but it was Dan Jaleda who stopped the fight, resting his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  “Deirdre,” he said. “Police.”

  Deirdre and Jake turned on us, and whatever they might think of each other, the family resemblance was clear. Both looked as if they were ready to destroy us, Deirdre in court and Jake with his bare hands.

  “You need to get out,” Deirdre said to us. She began sweeping up the files, but Jake stopped her, pulling a fuzzy image from in front of the Parisienne in Vegas, our suspect dwarfed by the mock Eiffel Tower.

  “Got some pictures of my trip to Vegas, I see.” He slapped his son on the back, and Brian cringed, I suspected because his father was so obviously lying. “Sorry for not telling you before, big guy, but I snuck off when you went fishing.”

  “Really?” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  “Don’t say anything, Jake,” Deirdre said. Dan Jaleda peeked at the photos and shook his head, moving toward the far end of the kitchen and leaning against the counter.

  “What’s to say? Vegas is all the best things about America, rolled into one.”

  “Tell us about the van,” I said.

  “Jake,” Deirdre said.

  “Shut up, Dee. You’re not my lawyer.” He sat down next to us and pulled the folder close.

  “The van . . . I rented the van because the flight out was so awful.” Deirdre reached over and tried to grab the folder but Jake pulled it close. “I rented it because although I’ve been in the US over fifty years, when they hear w where a v should be, or vice versa, they assume I’m some Russian spy. It’s a whole lot better than it was in the eighties, but the TSA still want to give me the complete pat-down. So I didn’t want to fly again, decided to drive back.”

  “Wouldn’t an economy car have been more practical?” Hale asked. “Better gas mileage?”

  Jake hesitated, nodding his head before breaking into a wide grin. “With a van I could sleep in the back! No hotel rooms.”

  I took notes rapidly so I would have exact quotes when we were nailing him for his lies. “And what happened to the van once you got back here?”

  “Stolen off the street. Probably someone from Troy.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “I couldn’t find the contact information.” He didn’t break eye contact as he said it, but I realized it was intimidation rather than honesty. “It was all in the van, and the van was gone.”

  “And what name—”

  Brian stood. “Shut the fuck up, Dad!”

  Jake opened his mouth and then snapped it closed. Deirdre grabbed the folder out of his hand and flipped through the pictures, facing the sliding door where the light was better. She held up the grainy photo from the Carfast agency, holding it an inch from her face and squinting. “There will be no more questions without me acting as counsel. For either of them.”

  “Does the same go for your husband?” I said. If I hadn’t been watching Dan for a reaction, I would have missed it, his jaw clenching and relaxing. He had no prosthesis, and unlike Brian, he was alive when Vera was killed and Luisa ran off. “Dan, we’d like to talk to you about your whereabouts the week of May twenty-third.”

  “Now you’re desperate,” Deirdre said. “I can’t remember where I was during a random period in May, but I can tell you where I will be next week. Filing a lawsuit against your father, and you, too.” She paced back and forth across the room as if she were making a case to a jury. “Why don’t you investigate the real crime here. Where was Luisa? And how did your father miss Vera’s murder?” A triumphant smile crossed her lips. “Go do your job.”

  CHAPTER 20

  HIGH FIVE!” HALE SAID, HOLDING OUT HIS PALM WHEN THE CAR was half a block from the house.

  I gripped the steering wheel. “I’m sorry. Were you in the same interview I was?”

  “It’s not what they said—”

  “Which was close to nothing, although I think we have them getting desperate about the van,
and finding out whether Judge Medved took Brian to dinner is at the top of my list—”

  “Brian’s leg,” Hale said.

  “The prosthesis?”

  “It wasn’t a normal prosthesis. One of those dynamic pieces, captures the energy of the user. Costs about ten times what the older models did, but truly state of the art.”

  I pulled to a stop at the light as cars sped past on the far side of the bridge. “It would still set off the metal detector.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” He bit his lip, trying to stifle a smile, but gave in, grinning. “Carbon.”

  I sat stunned, a car’s horn reminding me the light was now green. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty much,” Hale said. “I’ve flown into and out of the Albany airport often enough. The agents there don’t have full-body scans. If they sent him through a metal detector, he would sail through.”

  Crossing the bridge, I stopped, unsure whether to turn left or right. I wanted to track down the judge while at the same time trying to do an end run around Deirdre and confirm exactly where Dan was that week in May. Deirdre would take us apart in court if we didn’t explore all suspects, even if those suspects included her husband. Hale and I decided to divide and conquer.

  “Let me work my mojo,” Hale said. “Get pictures of Dan, Jake, and Brian, put them in front of the Carfast guy. Get their phone numbers, see if I can get a judge to give me a warrant, find out where the towers they were pinging on were closest.”

  “See if any were pinging in Las Vegas or New Mexico.”

  “It’s a long shot,” he said. “I’ll also visit Dan’s helpful assistant Ashley, try to get her to let me take a gander at Dan Jaleda’s calendar for that missing week. I’m betting Ashley has his days planned down to the minute.”

  “And I’ll try to get to the judge, hopefully before his family does. Find out if dinner at Lake George happened the way Brian said it did.”

  “NO, I DID NOT GO FISHING WITH MY NEPHEW,” THE JUDGE SAID. “Jake, he enjoyed it, said it was calming and good to have a steady source of food, but that is old world thinking, and his son, he apes whatever his father does.” Judge Medved leaned back in his chair, rocking contentedly. “Me, I like waiters who call me ‘sir.’”