Indefensible

by Lee Goodman

  I’m watching Neidemeyer speak. He has a gentle, phlegmy voice and disinterested eyes. “It worked out,” Neidemeyer says. “Best undercover we’ve ever had in this city. But after we work him for a year, we catch wind of something wrong. There’s chatter. He’s suspected. Any moment he might end up dead, so we have to move quick. We invent this big meet-up and put him at the center of it, and we put out rumors on the street so it takes some weeks before anybody figures out that he’s gone, and by then everybody’s pointing at everyone else, and we’re pounding on doors pretending to look for him, and word gets out that he’s screwed us. So he becomes an underworld folk hero.”

  “Everybody likes myth better than truth,” TMU says. “The myth is that he beat the system. He screwed the feds and he screwed the bosses. He’s living it up in some tropical paradise, flitting back to stir up trouble and then gone again.”

  “And the truth?”

  “Truth is that witness protection sent him to Helena with a new name and enough money to buy a couple of acres and a horse.”

  “And this obit . . .”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” TMU says. “It’s a bitchingly fast death sentence.”

  “It’s true?”

  “It’s true,” Neidemeyer says. “Mr. Donaldson, formerly Maxwell Patterson, alias Maxy, has been unquestionably dead for the past six years.”

  “Who knows this?”

  “Nobody,” Neidemeyer says. “Other than the three of us and maybe a couple guys running the witness protection program.”

  “Hmmm,” I say. “I guess not even Maxy himself knows it, because despite being dead, he somehow got his prints at a murder scene just two weeks ago.”

  • • •

  In my office, I lie on the couch, waiting for the Percocet to take effect. I’ve got another of the blinding headaches that my doctor said I should expect.

  So there is no Maxy. Does this mean there is no unifying source of evil to these crimes, no puppet master, or is it simply that we haven’t located him yet? I lie there on the couch with my palms over my eyes. I’m glad for the pain. It feels appropriate.

  Believing in Maxy was a way out for me. If Maxy killed Scud, then I had one avenue of hope that Upton was innocent. And if Maxy recruited the snitch from among his old contacts at the troopers, then it got everyone in my office off the hook, specifically Kenny.

  But how do a man’s fingerprints show up at a crime scene six years after his death?

  I yell for Janice. She comes in. I say, “I need a file. Immediately. Sooner. If you can’t get cooperation from whoever controls the archives, tell me, and I’ll kick some ass down there myself. Name is Maxwell Patterson. It was about eleven years ago. If you can’t find anything, call the Bureau and have them run the name. Get me whatever you can find.”

  I return to my couch and doze for an hour until I’m awakened by Janice coming in with a file she got from the FBI: Maxwell Patterson.

  “Love ya, Janice,” I say.

  “Watch it, buster, that’s harassment. Prepare to be sued.”

  It doesn’t take long to read. There was never a prosecution, just an investigation, an interview, and a conference with the suspect’s lawyer present. The Bureau never sought an indictment. The case seems to have dropped off a cliff. In effect, it did. Maxy went to work for us as an informant, and we closed the investigation.

  I take more Percocet and lie back down on the couch, trying to control the pain in my head. Then I’m up. I need to go have a look at the cup from Scud Illman’s car where Maxy supposedly left his fingerprints.

  Kenny drives me to trooper headquarters. He is quiet and clearly nervous. We don’t speak. I write out my request and show my shield, and the officer retrieves a small brown bag from the rows of steel shelves. It’s stapled at the top. I open it. Inside is a plain white paper cup, stained with coffee and dusted in fingerprint powder. I study the cup and the prints, walking a few steps to see it more clearly under a bulb in the poorly lit basement room. Suddenly, I get a wave of pain. I press both hands over my eyes. Kenny is right there. He has an arm around me and walks me to a chair. “Jesus, Nick, should I call someone?”

  “Comes in stabs,” I say. “Gone now. Doctor says it’s not unusual.”

  “You okay,” he says, not as a question but as an expression of caring.

  “Think so.” I sit with my face in my hands and with Kenny’s arm around my shoulders. After several seconds, he goes and picks up the cup, which I dropped, and I put it back in its paper bag. We return it to the evidence clerk. Kenny walks me back to the truck, holding on to my arm the whole way. He drives to the office and stops in front to let me out. As I open the door, he says, “Um . . .”

  I wait.

  In a barely audible voice, eyes staring straight out the windshield, he says, “I’m sorry.” He means about Lizzy.

  “Noted,” I answer.

  I go up to my office and lie down again.

  • • •

  There is no Maxy, meaning the crimes might add up to nothing more than small criminal acts by small criminal minds. This is what Kendall Vance said: There’s nothing Shakespearean about it. They’re all kind of boring. Kendall is wise. I wanted to believe in the syndicate, though, the idea of a single thread to pull and the whole thing comes apart. Maybe I liked the idea because it feels less threatening. It’s more containable, less spread out among us all.

  The central question is how Maxy’s fingerprints showed up in Scud’s car. A white paper cup with the fingerprints of a man who has been dead for the past six years . . .

  With this thought, I’m asleep.

  Then I’m awake, and I know the answer. I know who killed Scud Illman. Before I do anything, I drive over to see Kendall Vance. He’s still my lawyer, and I trust him. In the car loaned to me by the Bureau, I drive myself out of the parking garage and slowly through town. I have one good eye, and my palm is cupped around my forehead. When I arrive in front of Kendall’s office, there is a wood chipper by the curb. The noise of screaming blades feels like it will split my skull.

  “Jesus, you look awful, Nick,” Kendall says.

  “I just needed to get away from the office. Talk things through,” I answer. He guides me to a chair and I start talking. I tell him how the troopers found Maxy’s prints on the cup. I tell him about Kenny and my awful suspicions. I tell him what I’ve discovered about Scud’s exploitation of Colin, and what I learned about Brittany and how I’m finally convinced Upton had nothing to do with Scud’s death. I tell him all of my suspicions. He has new respect for me, because with Chip’s help, I probably saved his and Kaylee’s lives ten days ago.

  “Are you okay to drive?” he asks after I’ve talked myself out and headed for the door. “Do you need my help?”

  I wave the question away and make it out of his office. I feel like throwing up again, but I’m able to stifle it.

  How sad Kendall looks by the time I leave.

  The wood chipper is gone. I get in the car and drive. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go to my office. I don’t want to go anyplace. Where I do go is to Kenny’s. I walk around the apartment looking at things, touching things. His bed is unmade, and I lie down with my head on his pillow, breathing in the scent of this man I love like a son. I bury my bandaged face in the pillow and let it come. Sobs. It comes and comes and comes, and every time I think it has stopped, it comes again, this wellspring of sorrow that seems without a bottom. My boy. My Kenny.

  When I finally stand up, the pillow is wet. I go into the bathroom and come out. Then I call Kenny and catch him at work before he leaves. “I’m at your place,” I say. “I just needed to get away from everything. Why don’t you pick up Chinese takeout and a movie? Your choice. I’ll pay you back.”

  Kenny says he’d like that, watching a movie together.

  CHAPTER 51

  There are so many things I wish. I wish that Flora and I offered Kenny the stability of a permanent home instead of leaving him in foster care. One or b
oth of us probably could have gotten licensed as a foster home and had him live with us. Maybe we could have adopted him, but we were both busy with careers, and his existing foster family didn’t seem so bad, and he was a handful. I wish I’d been better at loving him. It wasn’t easy, because I think we got him too late. He cared about us and enjoyed being with us, but maybe the traumas of his younger years left him too impervious, and he never soaked in the idea of being loved. Or—since he wasn’t our son and he didn’t live with us, and since he was a difficult boy, maybe the love we offered him was more watered down than we knew.

  We had a good time together two nights ago. The movie was awful, but he loved it. I drank a couple of beers, which, with the Percocet, knocked me for a loop. Kenny brought me a pillow and blanket for the couch. In my imperfect recollection of that drug-and-alcohol-induced fogginess, as we high-graded shrimp out of the stir-fry and then downed a quart of mint-chip ice cream, I see Kenny’s boyish grin unleashed from its constantly niggling awareness of his lesser status in my life. “How come we don’t do this more often, Nick?” he asked.

  How come, indeed?

  • • •

  In my office, I have the shades closed and the light off. I’m lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes. I yell for Janice a few times, but she doesn’t hear me through the office door, and getting off the couch feels impossible right now. I use my cell phone, peeking from under the towel long enough to dial, and call the office number.

  “Nick Davis’s office,” Janice says.

  “It’s me. Would you tell Upton I need him in my office for a few minutes?”

  A minute later, Upton comes in. “You wanted me, boss?”

  “Close the door.”

  He does. I don’t sit up, and I don’t take the towel off my eyes. I like it better here in the blackness.

  “You okay?” Upton asks.

  “I was sure you killed Scud,” I say.

  Silence.

  “I’ve concluded you didn’t. But you must have considered it.”

  Silence.

  “Did you take any actions to impede the investigation of Scud Illman, Upton?”

  “No.”

  “I’m inclined to believe you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You need to come clean about the gambling. The next blackmailer might not get so conveniently murdered. Do it in a letter to Harold, and do it soon. He’s not well, you know—could step down or check out at any moment, and who knows what the next TMU will be like. Leslie Herstgood would have cut your balls off. But Harold will go to the mat for you. Write out your story; go heavy on the stuff about your sad childhood and the culture of moral chaos in professional athletics. The letter will go in your file, and nobody will ever see it again.”

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “I’m busy, go away,” I say. I hear the door open.

  “Nick,” Tina says, “it’s important.”

  I take the towel off my face. Tina’s eyes are full and red. She looks from me to Upton. She says, “Captain Dorsey just called. They got a tip on the Scud Illman murder.” She walks to the couch, bends down, and takes my hand between hers. “It sounds authoritative, Nick. They claim that our own Kenny was the shooter. Apparently it was a drug transaction of some kind, and it went bad.”

  “An anonymous caller?”

  “Yes.”

  I sit up. “Are there inidit . . . indy . . . innoc . . .” This word I know so well, this word I use daily in my job, has fled my mind.

  “Indicia,” Tina says. “Yes, there are indicia of reliability. The caller gave motive—the drug deal—and he described where to find the gun, and he told them how he knows about it. It was a pretty complete narrative. Captain Dorsey’s people are getting the warrant.”

  I know that what I’m being told is true, that the case against Kenny will be tight, and that he will be convicted. I squeeze the hands that are so warm in mine. “I might as well go over to the apartment. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

  “What about Kenny?” Tina asks.

  “He’s still here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Glue yourself to him this second,” I say. “He’s impulsive. Make sure nobody talks to him till I get back.” It feels good to be giving orders, taking some responsibility. We leave Tina to keep an eye on Kenny. Upton drives me over to the apartment. The police are just arriving. They have the signed search warrant. I stand outside and watch. It’s very quick. They have the gun in minutes. It is a small, deadly looking thing that, I have no doubt, will test out as the gun that shot Scud Illman, which means it is the same gun that killed Seth Coen.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 52

  Friday afternoon. Spring has returned. From my office window, I see the highways leading out of town. Already they are clogged with urbanites making an early break on this Memorial Day weekend. They will go to lakes and mountains and rivers. They will fish and drink and boat and make love and fight; some will commit crimes or cause accidents, and others will be the victims of crimes or accidents. And on Monday evening, the survivors will stream back into town to resume the pace of life in this struggling urban utopia.

  I’m in my office, but in a few hours, Tina and I will join the throng. We’re going to the lake for the long weekend, and on Sunday we’re having a barbecue there, and we’re hoping many people will come to enjoy the day with us. Flora and Chip will be there, and they’re bringing Lizzy and her friend Homa. Upton says he’ll be there with his family; Kendall and his wife are coming with Kaylee.

  From here I can see the highways, and far on the horizon the mountains, and just across the river Rokeby and the other decrepit redbrick mill buildings built here because of the river, which provided cheap power and easy transportation. The mills are the womb from which this city grew, and those jobs were the teats on which it suckled and from which, when money dried up and jobs went overseas, it was rudely weaned.

  It was a rough quarter century.

  I will soon have a better view than I used to. Leslie Herstgood, facing a bitter confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate, withdrew her name as nominee for the seat on the appeals court. I didn’t appreciate the irony until Tina pointed it out: Leslie, former U.S. attorney from this city of shuttered textile mills, met her downfall as a lawyer for the overseas child-exploiting, worker-killing sweatshops that put our city on the economic skids. Good riddance, Leslie Herstgood. She remains employed at her old law firm, but Herstgood has been removed from the firm’s name.

  This time, the president selected me for the vacant seat on the circuit court. Assuming I make it through the confirmation process—and why shouldn’t I?—I’ll be moving to the office three floors above this one. Below me will be Two Rivers; below him, Pleasant Holly, who has been designated the acting U.S. attorney following TMU’s resignation for health reasons two months ago. A floor below Pleasant, I expect, will be my good friend Upton Cruthers, whom Holly has selected to replace me as head of the criminal division.

  • • •

  Five murders. The killing of the innocent and lovely Cassandra Randall has been officially attributed to Seth Coen. The Bureau’s investigation of the white rental car has turned up a renter who, on further investigation, is revealed to have died in Iraq twenty years ago. It’s an alias that Seth probably acquired while he was in Iraq, probably lifting identification papers from a dead compatriot. The name has followed him around for years; it shows up on some miscellaneous documents taken from the apartment where Seth was found in the freezer. Seth, as a hunter and an army sharpshooter, had the skill to make the shot that killed Cassandra. His motive was that he and Scud believed Cassandra had seen them burying Zander Phippin.

  It was determined almost immediately that Lizzy’s ill-advised blab on the day we found Zander’s body was innocuous. She never spoke Cassandra’s name, and everything that she told my staff dead-ended at the office doors. There must have been a more malevolent snitch. Someone revealed Cassandra’s ident
ity from within one of the agencies, someone who was present at the reservoir, or who had access to proprietary information. The identity of the snitch has not been officially determined.

  Another murder, the killing of Seth, is attributed solely to Scud. What I alone know is that Scud’s accomplice in concealing the murder and destroying the evidence was his wife. I’ve decided that for this unintentional felon, time served as Scud’s wife is sentence enough. Her debt is paid. Case dismissed.

  The disappearance and presumed murder of Brittany Tesoro, and the similar disappearance of two other kids from Rivertown, also remain unsolved. Carrion-sniffing dogs have been working the area where Zander Phippin was buried, but we haven’t found anything, and we found no trace of these kids in Seth’s boat. Though we know Scud was involved, we don’t know whether he worked alone.

  Regarding Zander Phippin, the Bureau believes that the new drug boss in the city had him abducted. He was interrogated and tortured, held for a few days without food or water—probably in a storage closet of some kind—and in his efforts to escape, he got oil paints all over his hands. Scud was given the body for disposal. This new drug boss is Percy Mashburn, whose ascent has been meteoric. He is thirty-five but looks younger. He has spiky hair and black-frame-glasses, and he is said to read new-age poetry and to dabble in painting landscapes. He has a penchant for buying art prints. Those who have been inside his house say he especially likes the surreal and oddly sentimental work of the early-twentieth-century artist named Maxfield Parrish; it appears Percy Mashburn occasionally used that name as an alias. But Percy has disappeared.