Indefensible

by Lee Goodman

  Circuit court judge. That would be okay. The circuits are one step below the U.S. Supreme Court. They don’t have trials, it’s all appeals. The judges spend most of their days writing decisions in quiet, pandered-to eggheadedness. I might like that.

  CHAPTER 16

  Lizzy is with me this week. On our way to school, I say stupidly, “So how are you feeling about things, Liz?”

  “What things?” she says with undisguised annoyance.

  “I don’t know. Your summer. The ugly stuff. All that.”

  She exhales loudly, the message being that I might as well flap my arms and jump from the roof. No chance of finding that soft spot today.

  We pull up in front of the school. Liz grabs her pack and is out, no kiss, no goodbye, door closed.

  I believe that objectively, Lizzy knows there is no connection between her having blabbed about events at the reservoir and Cassandra’s death. Through extensive interviews and investigation, we’ve established that, in errantly telling her tale, Lizzy did not use Cassandra’s name nor any other identifying information. And none of the people she spoke with could have passed the information on. So there was definitely a more efficient and malicious snitch, and Lizzy’s indiscretion had no real effect. But what the objective self knows and what the mischievous subconscious conjures can be different things indeed.

  As for me, it’s not a matter of my subconscious inventing facts for the purpose of validating my own feelings of guilt. I know what I know. If I had overruled the idea of dangling Cassandra as bait, albeit anonymously, she might still be alive. And my reason for not objecting: I wanted the excuse to stay in touch with her. Oh, how we are punished for our hubris.

  • • •

  Late in the afternoon, my intercom bleeps: “Kendall Vance on three.”

  “Take a message, Janice.”

  And later, “Captain Dorsey of the state troopers, Nick, line three.”

  I connect. “Gimme some good news, Captain.”

  “I have info on Seth Coen.”

  “Hang on.” I transfer the call and go into Upton’s office. We listen on speaker.

  “Three items,” Dorsey barks into the phone. “First, we’ve confirmed that it was Mr. Coen in the freezer. Second, it was all there—he was—the body. Nothing missing. Third, we found Scud Illman’s prints in the apartment.”

  “I love you,” I shout.

  “Not so fast. The prints were confined to the kitchen area. Apparently, whoever did the dirty work wore gloves.”

  “So we know Scud was there at the murder, but we can’t prove he participated. Right?”

  “Wrong. Scud’s prints could have been left before, after, or during the murder, but at least we have Coen and Illman verifiably linked. That’s something.”

  Upton has his feet on the desk, rocking in his desk chair. His office is less homey than mine. He has a wall of legal texts and one framed photo from his football years. There is a bookcase behind his desk where he has pictures of his kids and wife. They face me, the visitor, instead of sitting on the desk facing him. It’s quite formal that way, but on the desk, as always, is the sports page from today’s paper, opened to the scores and rankings, and I see that several items are circled in red.

  “What else?” I ask Dorsey.

  “The mud from Coen’s boots: It’s a match with the soil at the reservoir. I have this report from the state lab that talks about feldspars and pollen load composition, blah, blah, blah. Bottom line: It is verifiably from the Slippery River Valley and within a, quote unquote, reasonable proximity of the burial site.”

  “What the hell is a reasonable proximity?” Upton says.

  “It’s okay,” Dorsey’s voice soothes over the phone, “these guys are pros. We’ve had them on the stand before. I’ll talk to them.”

  “Good. It’s all good,” I say. “We’ve got Scud in Coen’s apartment, we’ve got Coen at the reservoir, we’ve got Scud’s car coming back to town that morning. We’re almost home. Anything else, Dorsey?”

  “Coupla things. The freezer meats, venison, rainbow trout, all of that, they seem to be what the packages say they are. As for the victim, he suffered a single gunshot to the back of the head. Dismemberment took place in the shower stall, by the way. Professional. No usable prints anywhere in the bathroom or freezer area. Hardly even any blood remaining.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Well, that tattoo on Coen’s hand. The medical examiner says part of it was recent, and parts were older, like it had been touched up or added to.”

  “Ever seen it before, Dorsey? Does it mean anything?”

  “Like a gang thing?”

  “Hold on one,” I say. I put Dorsey on hold, beep Tina’s extension, and ask her to come in for a minute. Then I put Dorsey back on speaker. Tina shows up. “You ever seen this tattoo?” I ask her, showing a drawing of the four-pane window. Tina’s specialty in drug crimes brings her into contact with a lot of gang-type offenders.

  “Never seen it,” she says.

  “Okay, I just thought—”

  “It’s not like I pay a lot of attention to their artwork.”

  “We were just—”

  “But if you really need to know, I know a guy,” Tina says.

  “What guy?”

  “An offender. Old guy, Fuseli, doing life for a bank withdrawal he tried to make at age seventeen. Felony murder. They left two dead on the floor. He’s a mentor now, counsels the newbies, works on paroles. He hates the drugs and gang culture in there, so he’s a good contact for what’s happening inside. The Bureau uses him. And he’s an artist. Most of the body art coming out of there, the good stuff, it’s his work. Your guy with the window, Seth Coen, was he in Ellisville Max?”

  “No,” Upton says, “he was down south in Alder Creek.”

  “Even so,” Tina says, “Fuseli might know if it means anything. Do you have some reason to think it’s significant?”

  Dorsey says, “I was saying, the ME thinks it was touched up or altered recently. Kind of strange for a guy in his late thirties. So we’re curious. But otherwise, no, no reason to think anything.”

  Tina taps her lips with a finger. I’m still thrown off by her hair—the menacing wedge. At first I thought of Tina as sweet and a bit innocent. Then came her haircut and her perpetual rime of anger. Then we took that helicopter ride together, with her hand resting reassuringly on my knee. Now I don’t know who she is.

  “Well, if you’re interested,” she says, “Fuseli would be the one.”

  We sign off with Dorsey.

  “If there’s nothing else,” Tina says, and she leaves.

  Upton and I sit with our feet on his desk. “How are the girls?” I ask.

  He exhales and shakes his head.

  “What?”

  “Like they’re juggling grenades with the pins halfway out.”

  “Growing up?”

  “They’re babies,” he says, “they think it’s a big joke. Butt cracks and navels on display. And here.” He gestures breasts in his sweet, fatherly inability to use the word.

  “You’re just old-fashioned,” I say. His girls are both in high school, a year apart. In the portraits on his bookcase, they look like porcelain dolls. In real life, they’re giggly, and Lizzy isn’t crazy about them. Walking mannequins, she calls them, not because they’re inanimate but because they’re always wearing something fashionable. Gag me!

  “You wait,” Upton says, “you’ll have your turn soon enough.” He laughs.

  I shrug. He’s wrong. Lizzy is different.

  “And speaking of babes,” he says, “you could do worse.”

  “Worse than what?”

  “Heeheehee.”

  “Tina?”

  “I see things.”

  “Hallucinations,” I say, and I feel my face redden. “Let’s get a search warrant for Scud’s place. We’ll execute first thing tomorrow morning when his stepkid is in school.”

  Upton’s cell rings. He looks at the number, and hi
s perpetual grin suddenly looks striven for. He glances up at me: “I have to . . .” Then he answers: “Hello, Mr. Jones . . . well, I’m with a colleague at the moment . . . yes, let’s talk later on . . . okay, then.” He closes the phone. “Okay, where were we?” he asks.

  “Search warrant.”

  “Right. Tomorrow.”

  I leave. I’m dying to know what the phone call was about, but since he didn’t volunteer anything, I don’t ask.

  CHAPTER 17

  Eight-forty-five in the morning. A few of Dorsey’s men cover the back and sides of Scud’s house, and three others knock at the front door. The door opens and they go inside.

  We wait a couple of minutes, then Dorsey radios that it’s all secure, we can go in.

  Scud’s street is an old GI Bill subdivision of starter homes and finisher homes. Some yards are tidy; some have dead cars rising from the dirt like topiary. Scud’s is one of the tidy ones. Flowers are planted along the front wall and the concrete walk. The front door has three glass panes in a stair-step pattern.

  The house is bland and spotless inside. The furniture is the kind of generic stuff you buy when you have enough money and don’t know what else to buy. The kitchen is small. There are two bedrooms. The dining table is empty, and there are no unwashed dishes in the sink.

  In the living room a woman and a young boy sit on the couch. The boy is crying. His mother is on the phone.

  “You scared?” I ask the boy, and naturally, he doesn’t answer, so I say, “I’d be scared, too. But you know what? These guys, they’re just looking for some things. They won’t hurt you.” I look at the mother, expecting her to tell me to leave him the hell alone, but she seems not to notice I’m there.

  “Five of them, I think,” she says into the phone.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the boy, who is looking from his mother to the officer who guards them, then back.

  “How the hell would I know?” the mother says into the phone. “Come home and ask them yourself.”

  An officer in a flak jacket walks through the living room carrying a computer.

  “Our computer,” the woman says.

  “Mommy?” the boy says, looking up at her for comfort, but she doesn’t notice him. She’s in her late thirties. She isn’t sitting on the couch so much as giving up to it; everything about her—shoulders, cheeks, voice—seems to be slumping inward. She’s hard to get a fix on. Curled bangs, oversize T-shirt, sweatpants, weary, slow-moving eyes: It all seems to be a husk where she no longer lives. She’s watching the officer guarding her.

  “How old are you?” I ask the boy.

  “Seven.”

  “Seven! What’s your name?”

  “Colin.”

  “Well, Colin, how come you’re home today?” He is a sandy-haired boy with the top lip scar of cleft palate surgery. It gives him a quizzical look. Otherwise, he’s expressionless. He finally looks at me. He has brown eyes with a spot of green in the right iris.

  “I don’t feel well,” Colin says.

  “What grade are you in?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  Dorsey comes in and says, “Ma’am, it’s going to be several hours. If you’d like to go anywhere, we can call you a cab.”

  “I have my car,” she says in a blank voice, not looking at him.

  “I’m afraid we can’t release the car, ma’am.”

  “It’s my car.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  She starts crying. I walk into the master bedroom. The officers have the bed apart and the dresser drawers removed, and the closet door is open. The warrant authorizes a search for any weapons and for biological evidence—blood, hair, and any other DNA sources—from any of the three victims (Zander, Cassandra, and Seth Coen) and for textile or chemical evidence, such as fibers of the clothing worn by any of the victims. It also authorizes the search for receipts or documents and for physical or chemical evidence associating Avery Illman with the locations of the murders and/or the disposal of any of the three victims. Essentially, it gives us authority to search everywhere for almost anything.

  I go outside to the garage. Upton is there with a couple of officers. The overhead door is closed. The searchers have flashlights and are working their way through cardboard boxes and toolboxes and utility shelves. Everything I see suggests an average and tidy home. In the dim light, there is the smell of gasoline and moldering grass from the mower, with cool cement and mildew. It is a sad smell. I think of Colin with his reconstructed lip and two-tone iris. If, in his adulthood, he ever senses this distinctive smell in some other place, his years here will surge to memory: the time before Scud went to prison. I wonder what Colin calls him: Dad? Scud? Avery? Mr. Illman? When I get back to the office, I’ll look in Scud’s file, see if it tells me how long he’s been married to Colin’s mother.

  Upton sees me. “Nothing obvious yet,” he says, grinning as usual, shirtsleeves rolled up to expose beefy forearms.

  “What do we want to see before we go to the grand jury?”

  “Good question. With three victims, I guess . . . what? Something strong linking him to one of them. Or something less strong linking him to two. Or still less strong linking him to all three.”

  “If we could link Scud or Seth Coen to the Phippin victim, even without, you know, physical evidence . . .”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Some kind of pocket litter, maybe, or blood in the trunk of the car, ’cause we won’t find the weapon, that’s for sure. But if we can put the two of them together at the reservoir—Scud and Seth. Because right now we’ve got squat.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but ‘squat’ is one fingerprint, or drop of blood, or one hair away from conviction.”

  He chuckles.

  “I’m going to try this case,” I blurt.

  Upton was watching the agents at work, but now he pins me with his openmouthed, jaw-thrusted, Willem Dafoe grin. “Try it yourself?” he says. “Of course you are.” He fakes a one-two punch to my stomach and says, “I’ll watch your back, man. Count on me.”

  There is a noise. We all startle. Sunlight blasts in under the overhead door as it automatically rises, and we’re blinded by the sudden brilliance. Fingers over my eyes, I make out a car in the driveway. Its front doors open, and two men get out and lift hands into the air. There is shouting. I see an officer with weapon drawn approach from the house. “Drop the weapon.”

  The men don’t respond.

  “Drop the weapon,” someone yells again. One of the men looks up at his hands, where he and I, and apparently the screaming officer, all see something small and suspicious. The man smiles, and I recognize the red hair and pudgy cynical downturn at the corner of his mouth and eyes. It is Scud. He dangles the item between thumb and forefinger for us to see that it is not a weapon but a remote control for the overhead door. It dangles for a moment, then Scud’s fingers open, and as it tumbles, his evil squint finds me, and his eyes and mouth draw down farther in recognition and self-satisfied amusement.

  The remote smashes on the pavement, and the door winds back down, and it seems very dark.

  Outside, Scud is searched for weapons. I hadn’t paid any attention to the other guy, the driver, but now I see it’s Kendall Vance, soulless defense attorney to sociopaths and moralizing defender of Tamika Curtis (the meth-lab assistant) and others of her ilk, whom he sees as mewling victims of circumstance, done wrong by society. Scud has apparently retained him as his lawyer. Kendall submits docilely to the pat-down, and then he walks up to Dorsey and says, “I assume you have a warrant?”

  Dorsey stands like MacArthur on the beach. “We do.”

  “May I see it?”

  “We presented it to Mrs. Illman inside.”

  Kendall turns and walks toward the house, but Dorsey says, “I’m afraid you can’t enter until we’ve finished. It will be a while.”

  They have a brief stare-off, then Dorsey turns away and says, “Back to work, I guess. Mr. Illman, you and your lawyer may observe from t
he yard. You may not enter the house, nor the garage, nor approach any closer than, let’s say, twenty feet while we’re conducting our search. If you want to speak with your wife, I’ll have her come out, but if she does, she won’t be allowed to reenter until the search is finished.”

  “I’ll expect an inventory of seized property,” Kendall says.

  “Naturally,” Dorsey answers.

  Kendall looks at me and says, “How you doing, Nick?” Then he looks at Upton and says, “Upton.”

  “Upton?” Scud says, his face breaking into a grimace of boundless amusement. “Uptown? Uptown Cruthers in the flesh?”

  “Do I know you?” Upton asks Scud.

  “ ’Course not, but we know guys in common. Guys you’ve put away. You’re talked about. Uptown Cruthers. They make jokes. Busting balls. Like they’re going to do something to you, like they got something over you. Like you’re, you know, vulnerable.”

  “Shut up,” Kendall says to Scud. “Don’t talk to anyone.”

  “I mean, I’d never do nothing myself,” Scud says. “And I tell them leave the guy alone, he’s just doing his job. Right? Friggin’ retards, they think—”

  “Shut up, Scud,” Kendall says.

  “—they think they can influence things. Like if they—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “—like if they cap the right guy—”

  “One more word and you can find a new lawyer.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Scud says, looking at Upton, “I’ve been advised by counsel to shut the fuck up. Suffice it to say, they’re all retards.”

  Chip, who was has been studying the flower garden, gets right in Scud’s face. “Was that some kind of threat?” he asks in a tired voice. “Were you threatening a federal officer?” He outweighs Scud by a hundred pounds, and I wonder, looking into the creases under his eyes, if he has picked this moment to let it all get to him and, with us watching, is about to wrap his beefy fingers around Scud’s neck and squeeze.

  Scud smiles innocently up at Chip. “ ’Course not. Just repeating what I’ve heard on the street. I wouldn’t think of—”