Isolated Judgment

by Jonathan Watkins

  “You got caught,” Darren said.

  “Yes. I do not know how. But we were found out.”

  “What happened?”

  Ludolf scowled, and Darren saw that the man’s watery eyes were growing less focused. The old groundskeeper was drunk. Darren handed him the bottle again.

  “They came and dragged Father out of our shop,” Ludolf said softly. “In the light of the day, with many people stopping to watch what was happening. One of them held me tight so that I could not run away. They made Father get on his knees in the street. One took out a pistol and shot him in the back of his head. I saw this. I saw all of this.”

  “That’s terrible, Lou. I’m sorry.”

  Ludolf waved his hand in the air as if to brush away the sympathy.

  “They told me that my mother and sisters were next. Unless I took them to every last Jew I had ever fed. I was a boy. You understand this? Not a man. A boy who saw his father murdered. So I did this for them. I saw many more murders because of it. Families. All of them shot. Babies. Babies were shot.”

  Ludolf had a wild look now, as the emotion of what he was saying washed over him. He upended the bottle and drained it in a final gulp. He tossed it onto the cluttered workbench and weaved on his stool.

  “I wish I had a cigarette,” he mumbled.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Daniel did. I picked his cigarettes out of my lawn always. He was careless.”

  “So you found the Judge...” Darren prodded, aware that he had gotten Ludolf drunk enough that there wasn’t going to be much more coherent conversation. Ludolf’s eyelids were heavy and he was slouching as if his body wanted to sleep.

  “I thought he was dead body. But he moved, in his American uniform. American soldier in Russian zone. In a Jew apartment. I found him. I found him...”

  Ludolf began to cry. He made no sound, but tears abruptly ran down his cheeks and his shoulders shook with the sobbing he was muffling. Darren watched him silently, suddenly uncomfortable.

  Well, you did it. You got the old man drunk enough to blather out his story. Feeling guilty about it now won’t help.

  Darren had taken very small sips of the whiskey, and had never asked for the bottle, instead letting Ludolf do the lion’s share of drinking. He stood up and looked at the slouching old man in front of him.

  “Why is it your fault Daniel died?”

  Ludolf weaved in place and wiped clumsily at his cheeks. His eyes didn’t seem to be staring at any exact spot. Sam appeared at the foot of Ludolf’s stool, and a nervous whine rose out of the dog.

  “Lou.”

  Ludolf closed his eyes and his hands slipped limply down to his sides.

  “Lou!”

  The old man stirred, his swimming pupils coming to rest on Darren. His face was an unfocused map of drunken confusion, and Darren felt even worse about prodding at him.

  “You said it was your fault. Why is this your fault, Lou?”

  “They will capture me,” Ludolf exclaimed. “They will all come running and see me and learn it is me. It is little Ludolf. Little Ludolf, who leads the Nazis to the hiding babies. They will shoot me in the back of the head.”

  “Lou—”

  Ludolf was suddenly on his feet. He grabbed hold of Darren by the front of his shirt and shouted, “The Israelis will hang me! They will hang Ludolf in the light of day with everyone watching!”

  * * *

  The Bass Tackler was full of blood.

  Chief Fish was still struggling for breath, hunched over with his hands on his knees in the water of Lake Erie. He reached out and rested one hand on the lip of the boat to keep it from drifting away from the shore, mindful not to touch any of the blood.

  “You should see a doc,” Gail Vanderhoot said. She was sitting cross-legged in the sand with a floppy-brimmed yellow sun hat on her head and a paperback book open in her lap. The plump, perennially cheery woman owned the island’s bookstore, The Page Turner. As she’d explained on the phone to the chief, there was no point opening until afternoon, so she’d retreated to her little spot on the eastern edge of the island with a Brontë book she’d read a dozen times before. That’s when she’d spotted the fishing boat drifting in the water, with nobody visible inside it.

  “I see Otto like clockwork.”

  “A real doctor,” She snorted. “A mainland doctor.”

  “Otto’s a real enough doctor for me, Gail. Cholesterol and blood pressure pills require a genius.”

  “Well, good. Because Otto isn’t one. Genius doctors don’t get their degrees in Central America.”

  “You’re kidding. Is that true?”

  Gail offered him a conspiratorial wink but didn’t answer.

  Chief Fish straightened and pulled the boat the last several feet to the beach. He splashed up out of the water, grabbed the bow with both hands and heaved until he was sure the Bass Tackler was wedged far enough into the sand that it wouldn’t be sucked back out into the lake.

  He trudged up until he was close to Gail, and sat down heavily in the sand. His boots were swollen, water-logged and certainly ruined. His slacks were wet almost up to the crotch with frigid September lake water. He sucked wind haggardly, felt suddenly dizzy and lowered himself all the way down onto his back. Sprawled out and gasping, he mentally deducted the cost of a new pair of duty boots from the department’s meager monthly budget. Chief Fish never ran a deficit and, more often than not, was proud to tell anyone who would listen that he usually sent a sizable chunk back to the township’s general fund each quarter. The boots, he decided, would come out of his own pocket.

  “You stupid man,” she chided.

  “What? Why am I stupid?”

  “You should have had Casper come out and pull it in. You’ve got no business doing something like that.”

  “Casper’s on dispatch,” he said between breaths. “It can’t be left unmanned. Protocol says—”

  “Protocol says whatever you decide it says.” She sniffed. “You came out here alone because you’re a micromanager. You don’t trust any of your people to handle something that might actually require a decision being made. And look at you now, lying here like a gulping...”

  “Fish? A gulping fish?”

  Gail chortled and Chief Fish managed a smile himself. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and slipped them on. The sun was nearly at the noon-hour position, high above him in the blue. He squinted up at it and was quiet for a little while.

  “Is that what they say about me? That I micromanage?”

  “You do. You know it, too.”

  “But do they say that?”

  Gail sighed and set her book in the sand beside her. She had a little plastic sandwich bag full of grapes. She popped one in her mouth.

  “Don’t worry about the theys of the world,” she said. “That’s your problem, you know? Always fretting over what everyone else thinks.”

  “I know what people think.” He sighed. “There goes the guy with the family name and the empty pockets. The name gets me mentioned in the picture books Darlene sells to tourists, and the empty pockets guarantee I don’t get invited to the Higgins Gala.”

  The picture books sold in the island’s main tourist shop were glossy, glowing accounts of the island’s history and landmarks. There was a paragraph in some of them detailing the names of residents whose forefathers had served with Perry when he sailed out to fight the British in the War of 1812. Fish was a name within that list and, as such, the one thing nobody could question about the chief of police was his claim to being a true son of the island.

  “What do you care about parties thrown by rich people?” She snorted, and chewed another grape. “You need to get comfortable in your own skin, Fish. There’s no point living if you aren’t who you want to be.”

 
Fish barked with laughter. Gail squinted at him and cocked her head.

  “Did you really just say that?” He gasped, wiping at his eyes under the thick glasses. “That’s the worst fortune cookie crap I’ve ever heard, Gail.”

  Gail smiled and spit a grape seed into the sand.

  “In my head, it sounded a lot more profound,” she admitted. “So, what’s in the boat? Anything interesting?”

  Chief Fish sat up and stared at the Bass Tackler. The blood was on the inside, where the person who’d stolen it would have been sitting to steer. There was nothing else in there but a life vest and a big aluminum tackle box Fish hadn’t searched yet.

  He stood up and pulled out his phone. He had three separate numbers saved for the State Police.

  “Fish.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Anything in the boat?”

  He glanced at Gail in her floppy sun hat and cream capris. She was a full-bodied, care-free and friendly woman who could just as often be found in the town coffeehouse as she could at her store’s cash register. He genuinely liked her, but the truth was that Gail was one of the theys she’d told him not to worry over. She was flush with old family money and had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. If anyone on the island was prone to rushing off and blathering to everyone about Ben Roth’s blood-filled boat, it was the chatty bookstore owner chewing grapes at his feet.

  Chief Fish nudged his glasses up with his thumb and slipped his phone back in his pocket without having dialed anyone.

  “Not a thing,” he lied. “Truth to tell, I think I just ruined a good pair of work boots for nothing. That boat is just as likely to have not been tied up as been stolen. Likely it just drifted on out and Ben forgot he never secured it. I don’t know.”

  Gail had her book back in her hands.

  “Well, Ben’ll appreciate it all the same...” She trailed off, her attention back on the exploits of rich Victorian love triangles.

  Chief Fish looked at the boat again, wondering how he was going to get it past her without her taking a peek inside. It occurred to him that he had a real crime scene inside that boat. Maybe he shouldn’t move it at all. Maybe he should call the State boys and yield the whole thing over to them. They’d be more than happy to get into something other than cruising around the water all day—and they had access to a real crime lab.

  If he wanted to run forensic tests on the blood and any prints, that same state lab would do it, but they’d make him pay for the service. The island’s little department didn’t even have an AFIS terminal, much less anyone qualified to do lab work. His mind drifted back to the monthly budget.

  “I guess I should make sure the store is still standing.”

  “Hmm? Oh. Yeah, I guess so, Gail. Hey, thanks for calling me about the boat. I appreciate it.”

  She shrugged as she gathered her things.

  “No worries, Chief. I’ll catch you later, right?”

  “You bet.”

  She gave him a quick hug and started back towards the tree line where she’d left her bicycle. Chief Fish watched her until she was out of sight. He waited another few minutes until he was certain she was truly gone.

  He walked over to the Bass Tackler. He was preparing to lean in and grab hold of the tackle box when he stopped, straightened up and stared out into the lake. Directly east—the direction this boat had come from, he had no doubt—was Wailing Isle and Judge Prosner’s mansion estate.

  Two lawyers rushed out there in the night and a boat full of blood wanders this way in the morning.

  Chief Fish frowned and plucked his notebook from his pocket. He began to write, occasionally glancing up as if the Wailing Isle might suddenly appear on the horizon and answer the creeping suspicions he was jotting down.

  When he was done, he slipped the notebook away and paced over to the rim of the boat.

  He leaned in and grabbed the tackle box in both hands. It was improbably heavy. He grunted with the effort of hauling it up and out of the boat.

  Chief Fish set it down in the sand. Kneeling down, he undid its clasps and opened the lid.

  Oh my.

  Sunlight touched the contents of the tackle box.

  He watched it dance and wink off the golden fortune that lay within.

  * * *

  Up until the hippie in the bloodstained hoodie shoved a knife under his chin and told him to relax, the most perilous day in Roy Conner’s life had been when he’d gotten electrocuted fifty feet above the factory floor of the River Rouge Steel Mill.

  A maintenance tech had finally responded to the ticket he’d put in to have the little air-conditioning unit in his ceiling crane fixed. That morning, as he hooked, lifted and ferried the huge spools of steel cable from one end of the plant to the other, Roy had enjoyed three hours of frosty, refrigerated comfort. He remembered reaching back for his newspaper behind the rig’s single seat. That was all he remembered. The tech had left the cover off the unit, and Roy’s blind fingers poked against the exposed leads of a two-hundred-and-twenty-volt power supply.

  Three years later, Roy had a negligence settlement north of two million, a charming three-bedroom bungalow perched above the shore of Put-in-Bay and something like peace of mind that he’d seen the worst life was going to throw at him. If he still stuttered and shook a little bit from the electrocution, what did it really matter? He was a solitary guy, always had been, and the fish he dueled with out on the lake didn’t seem to mind the way he trembled as he pulled them up into his boat.

  That peace of mind he managed to acquire was out the door and flagging a cab now that Roy had some weird-looking knife poking into the soft skin under his jaw.

  “I don’t care about you,” the hippie whispered. Absurdly, Roy realized that it was meant to reassure him. It wasn’t an I don’t care about you, so killing you will be an afterthought for me, buddy boy. It was more of an I don’t care about you because whatever crazy thing I’m involved in here, it ain’t about you, buddy boy.

  “Oh-oh-okay.”

  “Jesus, relax.”

  “Ah-ah-I’m trying.”

  He was. But with his back pressed up against the wall of his living room, and the hippie looking like he’d just performed an impromptu and clumsy surgery on someone, the scene was making it difficult to do anything but panic. The hand that held the knife had several rings on the fingers, though Roy couldn’t make out what they were—was one a dragon? He didn’t dare look down at them to confirm. If he looked down, he’d see the blade at his throat. He’d lose his shit outright if he stared at the knife.

  So he kept his eyes locked on the hippie’s. The hippie, which was the only label that sprang to mind even though Roy knew it was probably wrong, had the hood of the bloodstained hoodie pulled up over his head, but his face was clearly visible. He’d have had a forgettable face but for the beard, which was where Roy suspected he’d gotten the hippie idea. It was a very thick brown beard that continued maybe a whole foot and a half under the man’s chin. It was pulled into several different tufts, each of them bound with little rubber bands and cut even at the ends, so that each separate tuft looked like one of those shaving brushes old-style barber’s used.

  Lou Albano, Roy remembered. Captain Lou Albano wore rubber bands in his beard back in the day. He wasn’t no hippie. I don’t think, anyway. He was a wrestling promoter. Hippies don’t like wrestling, do they? That’s a very American sport.

  The guy, who probably wasn’t actually a hippie at all but who was definitely the type of person who broke into homes covered in blood and pointed knives at people, smirked.

  “Ah-ah-ah-ah?” he mimicked in a fake stutter.

  “Whu-what?”

  “What are you, like an epileptic or something?”

  “Nuh—”

  “Nuh-nuh-nuh,” the not-a-hippie aped.


  Roy hadn’t ever suffered the childhood derision of being a stutterer. It hadn’t been part of him until the electrocution, so he’d never formed his self-image around it. He was a grown man who saw himself as putting up with a new disability the only way a man could—by getting on with life and not feeling sorry for himself.

  So as far as Roy was concerned, the mocking didn’t sting. It didn’t make him relive shameful ridicule from his youth, or the heart-sinking panic of being called on in middle school to stand and recite the names of the first five presidents. He had been spared all of that, so he regarded people who mocked that sort of disability the same way as any other half-decent and un-afflicted person saw it. Roy decided he hated the not-a-hippie.

  “Yuh-you’re a fuh-fucking cocksucker,” he said.

  The not-a-hippie seemed stunned for just a second, and Roy was certain he’d just killed himself with that little bit of outrage. But then the knife wasn’t at his throat anymore and the guy holding it out in front of him was chuckling.

  “That’s more like it, man,” he said, and used the knife to point at one of the chairs around the little dining table under the big bay window. “Sit down, okay? I don’t want to do nothing to you, dude.”

  Roy sat down and the man in the hoodie stepped over to the wall, at the edge of the window. Roy had installed heavy brown drapes over it once he’d decided that some mornings he was a little too hung over to put up with the sunrise beaming its glorious self straight into his life. The man nudged the edge of the drapes aside and peered out the window, keeping himself pressed against the wall. He looked like someone in a bad Hollywood movie—the bank robber taking a cautious peek out at the army of cops assembled after the dippy teller has pushed the silent alarm button. That was the sort of crap that kept Roy away from the movies. People did incredibly stupid things in movies. Roy wouldn’t ever push some damn button and risk getting shot to death for a job that probably paid about as much as McDonald’s.

  “Goddammit,” the guy in the hoodie hissed, and pulled himself back against the wall, letting the drapes fall back in place. His face was all mixed up with sudden panic. “That cop is still down there. Why the hell do you even have cops on this island?”