JD05 - Conflict of Interest

by Scott Pratt

  “Don’t make fun of me. She’s still alive.”

  I saw Sarah walk out of the kitchen carrying a cup of coffee. She made her way over to our table, greeting the few remaining customers and smiling. Sarah the hostess. Sarah the glad-hander. It was such a different life than the one she’d lived for so long.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” I said as she set her coffee down on the table.

  “You ever heard of employees? They can handle it for a few minutes. I’ve been here since four-thirty this morning and haven’t had a break.”

  Sarah hugged Caroline’s neck, gave me the finger, and sat down. She was dark-haired and green-eyed, her skin still remarkably unblemished, especially considering all the abuse she’d doled out to herself over the years. She was forty-six and looked like she was in her early thirties. She was wearing black jeans and a purple T-shirt that said, “Don’t Bother, I’m Not Drunk” across the front.

  “How’s Grace?” I asked. Sarah’s daughter was three years old.

  “Cute as a button, mean as a snake.”

  “She comes by the second part honestly.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a jerk?”

  “Not since the last time I talked to you.”

  Caroline blurted: “Joe’s representing Richard and Mary Monroe.”

  I gave Caroline a look that said I didn’t want to talk about what had happened in front of Sarah while Sarah looked at me with raised eyebrows and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Really? The parents of a kidnap victim? Why would they need a lawyer?”

  “You ever heard of John and Patsy Ramsey?” I said. “You know how cops can be. They just want me to run some interference until things calm down.”

  “He’s going to help them find her,” Caroline said. She’s a pathetic liar, but Sarah acted like she didn’t notice.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Sarah said. “I mean, how do you go about finding a child that was in her bed one second and gone the next? Do you have any experience with this type of thing?”

  “None whatsoever,” I said as I chewed a piece of baked chicken. “And the answer to your first question is also no. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Sarah turned and looked over her shoulder.

  “He’s here again,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “This guy. Don’t look over there. He’s sitting in the corner by himself. This is the third day he’s been here. He gets his food and goes to the corner and he sits there for an hour. He stares at me.”

  “You want me to talk to him? Ask him if there’s a problem? Or are you just being paranoid?”

  “Don’t bother him,” she said. “He hasn’t caused any trouble. It’s just kind of creepy. I swear I know him from somewhere, but I can’t place him.”

  “I think I’ll go wash my hands,” I said.

  I stood up and walked to the restroom, which was only about ten feet from where the man was sitting. He looked down when I caught his eye, but I had the same feeling Sarah had described, a vague notion of recognition. He looked to be in his mid-sixties with short, salt and pepper hair and a prominent chin, wearing a button down, light blue shirt. His skin was pale and his cheeks hollow. Even though he looked away quickly, I saw his eyes, turquoise and intense. I went into the bathroom, washed my hands, and when I came back out he was gone.

  “Looks familiar to me, too,” I said when I sat back down at the table.

  “What’d you say to him? You ran him off,” Sarah said. “As soon as the bathroom door closed he made a beeline for the door.”

  “Didn’t say anything. I swear I know that guy from somewhere.”

  “See what I mean?” Sarah said. “It’s eerie.”

  The call from Charles Russell came at one in the morning. I was shooting pool alone in the game room in the basement. Caroline had already hit the sack.

  “Botts waited until midnight,” Russell said. “They kept the area under constant surveillance and hadn’t seen anything all day. He finally sent one of his men to look in the can where you left the money.”

  His words were clipped, his tone angry.

  “Whoever did this is a professional,” he said. “The can was sitting directly above a drainage culvert that’s buried two feet underground. Someone had tunneled up from the pipe, through the concrete. There was a false bottom in the trash can.”

  “So the money is gone?”

  “The money is gone.”

  “Any word from him?”

  “Nothing. He took my granddaughter, and now he’s taken my money. I swear on my mother’s grave I’m going to find him and kill him.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I went to bed with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach and woke up feeling the same way. We’d failed. We had a chance to get Lindsay back and we blew it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there must have been something I could have done, that there was something I should have noticed that would have made a difference while I was delivering the money.

  I went into the office the next morning but I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I surfed the internet for news about Lindsay Monroe and immediately found something disturbing. The same internet tabloid site that had put up a copy of the ransom note carried a story that said the police suspected both Richard and Mary Monroe of being involved in Lindsay’s abduction. The story, written by a woman named Blaire Reed, quoted anonymous sources and was long on speculation and short on specifics. It was blatant sensationalism, but at least there wasn’t anything about the ransom delivery. Botts and his people may have failed at getting Lindsay back, but they apparently knew how to keep their mouths shut.

  As soon as I finished reading the story, I picked up the phone and called Richard Monroe. I talked to him for a little while about how the kidnapper might have obtained his cell phone number and asked him to email me a list of the contacts from his cell phone and his relationship with each person.

  After I hung up, I turned my attention to a stack of business cards Mary Monroe had left at my office the previous day. She’d picked them up in various places around her house – in the mailbox, on the porches, a few had even been slid under the front and back doors, all of them from reporters. She’d also showed me another two or three dozen messages reporters had sent to her on Facebook. Invariably, they all wanted to tell Richard and Mary’s “side of the story.” None of them had yet managed to get a hold of Richard or Mary’s personal email or cell numbers, but I didn’t think it would be long. One of the cards was from Blaire Reed, the reporter who worked for The World and who had written both the story about the ransom note and the story that speculated that the Monroes were behind their daughter’s kidnapping. I did some quick research on Blaire Reed. She’d done a lot of crime stories, most of them sensational, some of them utterly ridiculous. The World was one of the big national tabloids that are sold in grocery stores. I’d seen it hundreds of times and had never touched one. I dialed her number.

  “I have a proposition for you,” I said after I told her who I was.

  “How much do you want?” she said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You’re a lawyer about to offer me a story. How much will it cost?”

  “I don’t want money and I’m not offering you a story. How about a face-to-face? Tonight, nine o’clock, a little bar on Oakland Avenue in Johnson City called Pappy’s.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I hung up and checked my e-mail. Richard Monroe had already sent me the list of contacts from his cell phone. It was a long list that included friends, employees, business associates, doctors, lawyers, accountants, a dentist, two insurance agents, two hair stylists, a masseuse, three realtors, three luxury car salesmen, two florists, two lawn services, three landscape designers, two personal trainers, three catering services, four contractors, two liquor stores, two painters, two mechanics and a tree trimming service, plus all of the people who were involved in his life because of Lindsay, people like Ca
roline and the voice teacher and the violin teacher and people from Ashton Academy.

  As I was poring over it, my phone rang. It was Sarah.

  “Where are you?” She sounded upset.

  “In my office. Why?”

  “He’s back. The man who’s been coming in here for lunch. He’s standing right here in front of me. He wants to talk to both of us.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “He says he wants to talk privately. Can we come over there?”

  “Sure.”

  “Be there in a minute.”

  I met them at the door. He was about six-three, the same height as me, wearing the same clothes he had on the day before. He nodded at me as he walked past.

  “Who are you?” I said gruffly. “What do you want?”

  “I’m not here to do anyone any harm,” he said. His tone and demeanor were calm. I looked him up and down, trying to figure out why he seemed so familiar. “Can we sit down and talk like reasonable people?”

  I glanced at Sarah. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Why not?” They sat in the same chairs Richard and Mary Monroe had occupied twenty-four hours earlier.

  “I’m here about your father,” he said.

  “You knew him?” Sarah asked.

  My father had been dead for forty-five years. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam. He was there for six months, then went on a ten-day leave to Hawaii where he vacationed with my mother and his infant daughter, Sarah. I was conceived during that week. A month later, he was killed in action. I never laid eyes on him.

  “I want to tell you a story about a young man, only nineteen when he was sent to the jungle. Your father was a LRRP. Do you know what that means?”

  LRRPs, pronounced “lurps,” stood for “long range reconnaissance patrol.” The LRRP soldiers worked in small teams early in the Vietnam War. They were inserted behind enemy lines and tasked with intelligence gathering, clearing landing zones, kidnapping and ambush.

  “I was a Ranger,” I said. “I know what a LRRP is.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you served,” he said. “Did you see combat?”

  I nodded. “I was one of the first out the door when we jumped onto the airfield at Point Saline in Grenada.”

  “Then you know what kind of training your father went through, and you understand the terror of combat. In August of 1966, his company was operating out of a base not far from a place called Tuy Hoa. His team was inserted by helicopter near what was reported to be a large Viet Cong force that was planning to attack an air base nearby—”

  “You were there?” Sarah interrupted. “You were with him?”

  “I was there. Six of us rappelled from a helicopter into the jungle at midnight. We hid until daybreak and then started moving along a trail. We’d only been walking for about a half-hour when we were ambushed. Our point man was killed immediately, shot in the head, and our radio operator went down a few seconds later. We returned fire, but before we knew it we were flanked. A rocket blew my best friend to pieces. He and I were running for better cover and all of a sudden he just seemed to explode. The blast knocked me unconscious for a short amount of time – I don’t know exactly how long it was – but when I woke up, I realized I was the only one left alive. The Viet Cong had stopped firing, but I could hear them calling to each other. They were close, and right then, at that moment, I made a decision that changed my life. I started crawling away on my belly. I crawled until I couldn’t hear them and then I started running and I didn’t stop until my legs gave out. I was alone in the jungle with no radio, no way to contact anyone. I had some food and water, a weapon, and a rough idea of where I was, but I’d already decided I wasn’t going back. I couldn’t. I’d seen a dozen of my team members die and twice that many wounded, and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why. So I headed west. I made my way into Laos and eventually all the way to Malaysia. I settled in Kuala Lumpur and have lived there ever since. I married and raised two daughters. My wife is gone now, and my daughters are both married and raising their own children. I had a good life there, but I needed to come back.”

  “So you deserted,” I said.

  He nodded and frowned. “Yes, I deserted, and the longer I stayed gone, the more ashamed I became of what I’d done.”

  “But you shouldn’t have been ashamed,” Sarah said. “You couldn’t have saved anyone. You said they were already dead when you woke up from the explosion that killed your friend. Was it our father? Was he your friend?”

  “Before I started crawling,” he said. “I saw his dog tags, covered in blood, lying on the ground next to me. I picked them up, and I took mine off and laid them there.”

  It took me a few seconds to understand the ramifications of what he’d just said.

  “That means that you were reported as killed in action when you were still alive, and the man you switched tags with was reported as missing in action,” I said. “What is your name? Your real name?”

  “You have a son named Jack,” he said. “You named him after your father.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You named him after me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  My breath was taken away momentarily. I was so stunned I couldn’t talk, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think. It was like an epiphany, a sudden understanding that causes a person to have to reorder everything he’s ever believed or thought he knew. I looked across the table at Sarah, who was in a similar stupor. She was staring at me but I don’t think she could see me. My surprise quickly turned to denial.

  “You’re lying,” I said. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re trying to pull, but you’re obviously mentally ill.”

  “Look at him.” Sarah’s voice was just above a whisper. “He looks just like you. That’s why he was so familiar.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  Anger, my lifelong nemesis, was quickly building inside me. My stomach was beginning to knot and my vision was beginning to narrow. I could feel my thighs and hands trembling slightly.

  “He doesn’t look anything like me,” I said. “He looks like a sick old man who’s trying to get his jollies by playing some kind of psychotic joke on us. What is it? Did I represent some scumbag relative of yours? Some murderer who got convicted and you’re trying to get back at me?” I stood and pointed at the door. “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back. Old man or not, if I ever see you again I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  He took an envelope from his back pocket and started pulling out photographs and documents and setting them on my desk.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how difficult this must be for both of you. These two are pictures of your mother when she was a senior in high school. This one is of me and you, Sarah, when you were two months old, right before I left for boot camp. This is my driver’s license that was issued in 1965, this is my social security card, and this is my military I.D. card.”

  The face in the photo of him and Sarah convinced me. I had an old photo of my father sitting on a shelf in my den. It was taken in Vietnam before he was killed, or at least supposedly killed. The person in that photo was the same person that was peering out at me from the photo on the table, holding a baby and smiling. I looked at the old man, back at the photo, and over at Sarah, once again speechless.

  “I’ve been ashamed every day of my life since then,” he said. “Too ashamed to come back here. Too ashamed to admit what I did.”

  Sarah stood up and walked toward the bathroom. I heard her sniffle as she pushed the door open and I knew she was going in there to cry, which was something she did very, very rarely. I looked back at the man sitting across from me. His face reflected a profound sadness, but I felt no empathy. I can’t adequately describe what I was feeling at that moment. My emotions were so polarized, so utterly conflicting, that I found myself nearly paralyzed.

  I finally managed to say, “Who is lying in the grave at the V.A. that has your name on it? Whose family i
s probably still hoping that their son is alive somewhere? That he’ll miraculously show up one day. That he was brainwashed in some Vietnamese prison camp and doesn’t even know who he is anymore.”

  He reached back into the envelope and laid a beaded chain with a dog tag attached on the table. “His name was Lucas Venable. We went through boot camp and Ranger school together. He was the best friend I ever had.”

  “Have you bothered to contact his family? To tell them he’s dead? That he’s lying in a grave marked with someone else’s name?”

  His eyes watered and his lower lip quivered. “I’ve thought about writing to them a million times,” he said. “But they deserve more than that. His parents are still alive. They’re in a little town in Wisconsin called Fairfield.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The same way I found out about you. I didn’t even know I had a son until the internet came along. Your mother hadn’t told me she was pregnant. She may not have even known until after… until after—”

  “Until after you stole your best friend’s dog tag, deserted your unit and the Army and abandoned your family? Is that what you were about to say?”

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he said. “That isn’t why I came here.”

  “Why did you come here? Why bother? Why couldn’t you have just left it alone and let us go on believing you died in combat? That you were a hero instead of a coward and a deserter?”

  He folded his hands on the table in front of him. They were large like mine, the fingers long and thick. Unlike mine, they were covered in liver spots.

  “I just thought you should know the truth before I die.”

  I shook my head, incredulous now.

  “You came here to die?”

  “I was born here. I want to die here. I’d like to be buried next to your mother. I loved her dearly.”

  “Stop! Just stop right there.” I held up my hands. “You need to leave. Right now.”