by Lee Goodman
He lifts his cup, and those lips vacuum off a couple drops of tea. I lift my cup and then I put it down. No way I’m drinking this.
“Who told you?” I ask.
A soggy blast of air explodes from Platty’s livery lips. “Jesus H., Mark Trail,” he says, referencing again my having shown up at the Elfin Grot in a Woolrich shirt, “you really don’t understand how this works, do you? Lucky fucking thing you got book smarts, ’cause you sure as shit don’t got street smarts. ’Course, you can get away with poking and prodding like that, ’cause nobody’s going to mess with you, federal agent. Don’t none of us need that kind of grief.”
“Lucky for me,” I say. I’m warming up to the guy. “Is there any hope of finding out whether Scud was working Upton?”
“Always a chance,” Platty says, “but it’s pretty slim. See, Scud Illman had moved up. He wasn’t a street hood no more, so he didn’t brag on the streets; learned to play his cards close. So the only guys who knew for sure if Scud was working Uptown is Scud and Uptown. One of ’em’s dead and the other ain’t talking.”
“Boy-shucks. What about who killed Scud? Any word on that?”
“Mark Trail,” Platty says, blowing in his tea. He looks up with an amused frown. “How ’bout this, Mark Trail: How ’bout I go downtown and sit at your big fancy desk like Mr. Big-dick while Miss January buffs my toenails? I’ll do that, and now you take a cab over to the Grot and warm a barstool for the next three days and get all your answers that way. Okay?”
Understood. I get a roll of cash from my pocket and start peeling off twenties. At fifteen of them, I look up at Platty, but he’s staring at the roll in my hand, so I keep going until I reach twenty of them.
He nods and leans sideways until his ass clears the seat, then he stuffs the cash into a back pocket. “Okay,” he says, “this is pretty fucked up. See, most of us, we just figured whoever Scud was working for didn’t trust him. Somebody didn’t want him going all witness protection. And maybe that’s it. ’Cept there’s this rumor out there.” He stops. I make a move to go for my roll of bills, but he holds up a hand to stop me. “No,” he says, “it ain’t that. It’s too fucked up even to talk about, but it’s your money, so here it is: There’s a guy out there.”
“A guy?”
“A guy some of us used to know. A loose cannon, if you know what I mean. He played by different rules. All these guys he did business with kept ending up dead. Decent guys. I knew some. And everybody figures it was him making ’em dead. At first it was nobody’s business, then it was people’s business, but everyone was afraid to hurt him. Word was, he was connected.”
“Connected how?”
“Yeah, exactly. ’Cause none of the big boys would own him. So who the hell was he connected to? Right?”
A cat jumps up on the table and turns circles, rubbing her haunches against Platty’s chest and her tail across Platty’s jowls. “Puss puss puss,” he says. He takes the saucer from under his teacup, pours in cream from the pitcher on the table, and sets it on the floor. The cat jumps down. Platty watches her lap the cream. His prodigious lips slacken, and his bent back bends farther, and for a second I think he’s going to tumble from the chair. But no. He’s just slouching as he watches the cat. It’s a tired slouch; more than tired, it is a slouch of utter exhaustion, and he exhales a long breath from a hundred miles inside of him. What I know at this moment is that the cat was Brittany’s.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He nods. “Anyhow,” he says, “anyhow, we figured someone finally hit him, this guy, ’cause he disappears and nobody hears nothing from him ever again. Except now. Suddenly, rumor is he’s back. Settling some old scores, maybe, or doing some new business. Who knows. And maybe I don’t believe it, but that’s what I hear. And what I hear is that this guy is maybe the one who did Scud Illman, and what I hear is maybe this is the guy who did Seth Coen. It’s what I hear.”
“And I suppose,” I say, “if I want to know who this guy is, you’re going to call me Mark Trail again?”
Platty laughs, but I’m beyond range of the spray. “Shit, no,” he says, “you’re missing the nuances. What the hell good am I if I can’t even give you the guy’s name? Right?”
I shrug.
“The guy’s name,” he says, “is Maxy.”
CHAPTER 42
Maxy? But there is no Maxy. Maxy was the alias of an informant who either got whacked or went into hiding. Platypus is correct that nobody has heard from him in a decade. He’s a mythic figure; he’s the bogeyman, Sasquatch, or D.B. Cooper. He is smoke. He’s a figment.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard his name come up in matters felonious and mysterious, but never from a serious source, which makes me wonder if I’ve just wasted nine hundred dollars on a kook. (Though considering I’m trying to solve a murder that has baffled the FBI and troopers, and I’m hiding out from the FBI and trying to pin a murder on my friend and colleague, I may not be the best judge of kookiness.)
When I fled Platypus’s house, desperate to get out of his fetid kitchen, I scooted back across town, and now here I am at Kendall Vance’s office, sunk deep into the umber Naugahyde of his easy chair. It is the perfect place to be. The stink of Platypus’s depressing rooms followed me here in the Volvo, but it is replaced by the coffee fragrance wafting up from the mug between my palms. Last time I was here, Kendall gave me a paper cup. This time it’s ceramic, and as in Bart Curry’s office, I find myself soaking up the comfort of it.
I look at the documents and certificates on his wall of fame, and I feel a surprising fondness for Kendall, for his obvious commitment to charity and good works. I like it here, embraced in the protective wraps of our attorney/client relationship, and I am tempted to allow myself a metaphorical prance in the sunshine of that comfort. Prancing, I suppose, would amount to confessing all my festering secrets. Except that I have nothing to confess. I briefly consider confiding to him about Kenny’s illicit interest in Lizzy, but it’s just a momentary urge, and I recognize that it springs from this feeling of reaching a place of safety.
I do have one other thing I’m itching to confess, but it’s the one thing I can’t tell my lawyer, because it involves him. It is that I snooped in his cell phone log to see who Scud had called.
Beside Kendall’s desk is a wall safe, and I wonder what secrets he must keep in there: all the secrets of his criminal clients. “You must hear astonishing things,” I say to Kendall. We’re sitting at right angles, with our feet on the same hassock.
He shrugs.
“Confessions, I mean. Criminals unburdening themselves here in the unconditional . . . what? I guess you could actually call it a kind of love: attorney/client confidence. Love of an impersonal and unaffectionate sort. Am I right?”
“You’re kind of weird, Nick,” Kendall says, but he’s smiling, and he looks comfortable, and he’s holding his cup as cozily as I’m holding mine.
“You’re like a mini-god,” I say. “We come to you for absolution.”
“I’ve been called lots of things, but this . . .”
“So do you?” I ask. “Do you hear amazing things? Do you peek into the convoluted darkness of the human soul?”
“No,” Kendall says, “most crooks are just crooks. There isn’t a lot of convoluting going on. They’re simple. Boring. A guy wants money, he goes and robs a store or mugs somebody or embezzles from his employer. He’s angry or inconvenienced by someone; he shoots them or bludgeons them or kicks them in the face. Nothing Shakespearean about it. Truth is, Nick, I wish you or Upton had killed Scud Illman. That would at least be interesting. That would have convolutions.”
“How do you know we didn’t?”
He sips his coffee slowly and doesn’t answer for several seconds, then says, “You get a feel for things, sitting here,” and he looks around his office in self-important reference to the loftiness of being a defense lawyer. (But how can I criticize him for this? I’m the one who called him godlike.)
“Anyhow, you’re right about me,” I say, “I didn’t kill Scud. You might be wrong about Upton. And I’ve got a third suspect, but it’s my own private theory.”
Kendall takes his feet off the hassock and sits forward, watching me intently.
“I’m the only one who suspects her,” I say.
“Her?” He sits back and puts his feet up again.
“His wife.”
“Christ, Nick, you’re shooting in the dark,” he says, spitting the words in an instantaneous change of mood that has me sitting up on alert with my feet off the hassock. “These are people’s lives. Do you like being a suspect? Look at you, you can’t go back to your office; you’re sleuthing around and trying to get the goods on one friend, Upton, while your other friend, Chip, is supposedly trying to arrest you.”
“Just trying to do my job, Kendall.”
“No, you’re goddamn not doing your job,” he snaps, “you’re just spreading the misery. If you and the Keystone Cops were doing your jobs, you’d have solved this by now. What’s so goddamn wrong with the simple theory that the drug organization killed Scud? The meth makers, the heroin dealers. He knew too much, and they whacked him. End of story.”
“That’s fine, except—”
“He was my client,” Kendall says. “Maybe I knew a few things about him.”
“We have no leads,” I say. “Nothing to tie anybody Mob-like to this. But they’ve got circumstantial against me, and I’ve got motive up the wazoo against Upton. Scud was blackmailing Upton, for cripe’s sake, and if I could find one shred of physical or circumstantial evidence against Upton, I’d go to the grand jury in an instant and convict his ass. As for Scud’s wife, why not her? The woman makes Morticia Addams seem like Mr. Rogers. And she’s the only person alive with more motive than Upton: namely, that she had to live with Scud, the sociopathic, murdering son of a bitch. And she had opportunity, just like Upton had motive. She lived with him, and who else could have had access to that gun? Remember, he was killed with his own gun, or at least with the same gun that killed Seth Coen.”
“It’s all bullshit,” Kendall says. “Haven’t you guys got anything? What did forensics turn up?”
“Zilch.”
“Zilch from the body and the scene both?”
“You know I can’t discuss that, Kendall.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nick, this is real life happening here. Get over yourself.”
“Go to hell.”
“You go to hell.”
“You go to hell.” After a second to consider the ridiculousness of this I lift my feet back onto the hassock. “Zilch from the body,” I tell him. “And we’ve never actually figured out where he was killed.”
He looks at me, confused.
“That’s right,” I say. “Scud was a floater at the dam, but we’ve never found where he got whacked.”
“Geez. I just assumed . . . No wonder you’re groping in the dark. Let’s think it through. I can put my own investigator on it, I suppose, but let’s think first.” He gets up and goes to his desk and takes out a legal pad. “Okay, the body was found when?”
“For pity’s sake. If the FBI can’t—”
“Work with me, Nick.”
“And the state troopers. I’m on borrowed time here, Kendall.”
“My hands are tied,” he says. “I’m working blind here, just like you. Let’s at least pool what we know. We know he was found at the dam on a Monday at—”
“You pool it,” I tell him. “Pool it right where the sun don’t shine. You want to chase the Mob, then chase the Mob. I’m chasing Upton and the dolorous Mrs. Scud. See which of us passes Go first.”
“You goddamn idiot,” he says, resorting to his steely-eyed stare. “I’m trying to help you.”
He seems desperate. So much for that comforting moment between attorney and client. Kendall, I realize, is my second kook of the day, thinking he can theorize his way to the crime scene. “I’m a man on the run,” I say, “so I have to run. Forgive me. I see how earnestly you want to help, and that is a great comfort to me. Let’s talk this evening, okay? You do your investigating, and I’ll do mine, and we’ll pool. I promise.”
He nods and I head for the door, but before I’m out, he says, “Wait. About Lizzy. Kaylee keeps asking me if she can see her again.”
“Of course,” I say. “Lizzy would like that. We’ll do it as soon as things settle down a bit, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and I wonder if it is hard for Kendall, the father of a girl with special needs, to remind me, the father of a girl with a million things going for her, that we talked about getting them together. I promise myself I won’t forget again. Someday soon we’ll get the girls together. But talking about Lizzy brings to mind this other problem I’ve been avoiding thinking about: One day soon I need to have it out with Kenny over his atrocious overtures to Lizzy. I leave Kendall’s office and call Bart Curry to tell him I won’t make it back over this afternoon. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow, assuming I’m not in prison.
I wasn’t exactly honest with Kendall when I told him there was zilch evidence from Scud’s body. Truth is, I haven’t followed up. All I know is that Scud was shot with the gun that killed Seth Coen. I’ve never looked at the medical examiner’s report. Now, though, since I have two suspects of my own—Upton Cruthers and Mrs. Illman—it’s possible there’s some orphaned bit of evidence that would mean everything to me but mean nothing to the investigators because they don’t have the right suspects in mind.
I drive to the trooper headquarters. It’s a risk, but a small risk. I don’t know many people over here, and since I doubt the Bureau considers me a fugitive, they won’t have spread the word to be on the lookout. Dorsey probably knows, but so long as I avoid him, I’m okay.
At the front desk, I show my ID and explain my interest in seeing the medical examiner’s report from the Scud Illman murder.
“Have a seat,” the desk clerk says, “it will be a few minutes.”
I sit. She types. I wait.
“Nick,” says a familiar voice behind me, “thanks for stopping in. Let’s go to my office.”
I follow Dorsey toward his office, and I have the silly notion to bolt out a side exit as we walk down the corridor.
“How you been, Dorsey?” I say stupidly, because it’s all I can think of. I feel light-headed. If I had to stand still for a few seconds, my knees would give out. I expect that any moment, someone will step up behind me and snap on the cuffs, or Dorsey will do it himself.
He steers me into his office.
“You’ve spoken with Chip?” I ask, my voice strange to me.
“Sit down,” Dorsey says. “You feel okay? You look green around the gills.”
“I’m fine.”
“Forensic report right here,” he says, turning the computer screen for me to see. “Not much to go on. The river washed away most of the trace. We pulled a few fibers, but nothing unique.”
“What about the ME’s report?”
Dorsey clicks some tabs, and the medical examiner’s report comes up on the screen. Gunshot wound to the head . . . entry at left temple, the report says.
Dorsey is probably enjoying studying my reactions as he leads me, like a bull with a ring in its nose, into the slaughter of self-incriminatory behavior.
(How did Mr. Davis react on reading the medical examiner’s report? the prosecutor will ask, and Dorsey will answer: He was cold and detached and showed no emotion. Or else Dorsey will say, He was sweating and panicky. I’m sure he knew we were on to him.) Whatever I do, I’m fucked.
What I find, though, is that the details of the report create an eye-of-the-storm calm inside me, and I’m more at peace than I’ve felt in days. I’m not faking it. I’m here and focused. I continue reading: The report describes the region of the brain the bullet traveled through, then concludes, exited through the right occipital region.
“So if the bullet exited and he was dumped in the river, how did they match it to th
e gun that killed Seth?”
“Keep reading.”
The next paragraph is headed Gunshot wound #2. This one entered in the left shoulder, traveled down through the chest region, and lodged in the lower-right rib cage. That’s where the slug was recovered and later identified.
“Odd that both bullets entered from the left side,” I say.
“And did you notice the angle?” Dorsey says. “Both of them traveled downward through the body.”
“What does it mean?”
“Well I kind of tricked you,” Dorsey says. “I didn’t show you the cover sheet. Look.” He scrolls up to page one. The page is a form: victim’s name, identifiers, height, weight data, and location of body. The fourth line is cause of death. The ME has typed in, Suffocation.
“Are you kidding me? He was strangled?”
Dorsey pages forward. “Read.”
I read: Victim’s larynx and cricoid cartilage are crushed with some tearing of the pharynx, and with a submucosal hematoma . . .
I skip forward.
. . . indicating the probable cause of death was suffocation from loss of airway, consistent with a prodigious blunt trauma directly to throat, which conclusion is born out by the above-mentioned bruising and subcutaneous hemorrhage with the region . . .
“He was slammed in the throat? What do you think he was hit with?”
“Beats us,” Dorsey says. “A fist, a stick, a bat. Who knows?”
“Did you know all this?”
“Of course. Why didn’t you?”
“I, um . . .”
“You lawyers,” he says, “we’ve sent you all this.”