Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  “It’s still early.”

  “What are we drinking to?” she said.

  “Your daughter,” I said.

  “Oh Christ,” she said, opening the door wide. “In that case don’t be skimpy with the pour.”

  Mrs. Gaughan had been pretty once, the way a Roman ruin had been pretty once, but, like the Roman Empire itself, the structures of her face had now collapsed, leaving it pulpy and red. She was bundled like a sausage in her faded housecoat, and she wore a pair of fuzzy slippers with open fronts to ease her blue, swollen toes.

  She told us the story as we sat in her disheveled kitchen, three glasses, one hat, and an ashtray on the tabletop. They were estranged, this mother and her only child. Jessica was ungrateful, headstrong, too independent for her own good. In the last few years, after she married that Barnes, who couldn’t keep a job, they barely spoke. And when Jessica discovered she couldn’t have a baby, that made it even worse. Like Jessica was jealous of her mother, because the mother had been able to do the one great thing that Jessica never could. Sometimes Jessica needed reminding who was who, and Mrs. Gaughan was just the one to do the reminding.

  In the time it took her to tell us this, she smoked four cigarettes and finished off the bottle. She drank her liquor without ice and without water; she liked her alcohol neater than her life. And through all the talk, she ignored me completely. But she liked Stony, she understood Stony, they were having a party together, her and Stony, as she told us how miserable a daughter Jessica had been. That was the thing about Stony, he could draw it out of anyone, he just had that ability. It was one of the reasons I had brought him along.

  “And so you’ve got no grandchild to keep you company in your old age,” said Stony.

  “Good thing, too,” said Mrs. Gaughan, glancing my way. “It’s not like I was going to raise it, with her gone and her husband as worthless as tits on a nun. Been there, done that, and it was no picnic, believe me. Maybe we ought to get another bottle, Stony, make a day of it.”

  “We get another bottle,” said Stony, “we’ll be making a night of it.”

  “If you insist.”

  “Oh, you sly fox, Melinda,” said Stony.

  “So what do you think happened to your daughter, Mrs. Gaughan?” I said.

  “What do you mean what happened? Someone killed her. That’s why you’re here, right?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You ask me, it was that lawyer down in Philadelphia that did it. The one she was down there meeting. That ugly one in the tuxedo.”

  “Do you know why she was meeting him?”

  “For something bad,” she said. “For something awful, and she a married woman. But it had to be something like that if he killed her over it.”

  “I don’t think he did it,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m that lawyer.”

  “You?” She lowered her chin, staring up at me through iced eyes. “I knew I recognized you. I thought you were here to sue somebody. I thought that’s why you were getting me liquored up, so I’d sign your fee contract.”

  “Would it have worked?”

  “If Stony here bought another bottle, maybe. Though I signed two already, just to cover my bases.”

  “And who would you sue if you had the chance?”

  “The one who killed my daughter.”

  “And you think that’s me.”

  “The papers do.”

  “And the papers are never wrong.”

  “You came all this way to tell me you didn’t do it?”

  “No, ma’am, I came all this way to show you a photograph.”

  “Dr. Patusan is seeing patients all day,” said the office receptionist, heavy and pretty with limp brown hair. She sported a lovely smile behind her desk as she blew us off. “He won’t have time to talk to a lawyer.”

  “It won’t take long,” said Stony. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “Nadine,” she said.

  “Ah, Nadine. What a pretty name. Reminds me of a song I used to know. I’m Stony and this here is Victor. Now that we’re all on a first-name basis, can’t you perhaps squeeze us in for just a little meet-and-greet?”

  “What is this about?”

  “We have some questions about treatments for a childhood condition, something I believe is called Wilson’s disease. We understand that Dr. Patusan is the local expert.”

  “We do have some patients, yes.” She looked through her book. “The doctor’s schedule is very tight and there are patients waiting, as you can see. I could give you fifteen minutes a week from Wednesday.”

  “A week from Wednesday?”

  “Or a week from Friday, if that works better. Does that work better, Stony?”

  “Why don’t you pretend we’re drug salesmen with a bagful of gifts,” he said. “Then he’d see us with alacrity for sure.”

  “You’re not pretty enough to be drug salesmen,” she said with a smile.

  “Oh, now, Nadine, there you go, cutting us to the quick.”

  I looked around the waiting room as Stony tried his sweet talk on Nadine. Scattered about were kids and their mothers on colorful chairs, side tables piled with picture books, a little play area with plastic toys and a plastic playhouse, a bulletin board full of photographs of smiling kids. It hadn’t taken long for me to diagnose the daughter Jessica Barnes had told me about, with the excess of copper in her blood; the web will diagnose anything for you, even a hangnail. And it hadn’t taken much longer to find those few doctors in Lancaster who routinely treated Wilson’s disease. Dr. Patusan was the closest thing to Dr. Patticake. Duddleman had surely found it as easily as I had.

  “We have questions about one of his patients,” I said. “We won’t be long.”

  “Are you a parent of the patient?” she said.

  “Heavens, no,” said Stony. “Victor and I are both still looking.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, with another sweet smile aimed at Stony. “But then, of course, Dr. Patusan would not be permitted to talk to you at all. You see, the HIPAA privacy rules are very strict. None of us can say anything about a patient to anyone who is not a parent or a guardian. There are no exceptions.”

  “No exceptions?”

  “None. And the penalties are quite severe.”

  “I’d like to show you a photograph,” I said. I put the picture I had shown Mrs. Gaughan on Nadine’s desk. “This is a friend of mine and I wonder if she was in this office a few days ago looking for Dr. Patusan.”

  The receptionist looked at the picture just long enough to recognize it before pushing it away. “Yes,” she said, her smile not as bright, “she was here.”

  “And did she get a chance to talk to Dr. Patusan?”

  “He wasn’t in that day. He was at a conference.”

  “I see. This woman, her name was Amanda Duddleman.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “She was murdered a few nights ago.”

  The receptionist’s face registered a good amount of shock, which I was expecting, and then her gaze lifted just a moment to a spot over my shoulder, and then she caught me catching her and she stared at me for a good long moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes, it is a tragedy,” said Stony. “She was a fine girl, and all we’re trying to do is trace her steps a bit. Now you say she was here when the doctor was out. Did she come back?”

  “No,” said the receptionist.

  “How long did she stay?”

  “Not long.”

  “And what exactly was she asking for?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  As they spoke, I turned around to see what Nadine had looked at as soon as she learned that Duddleman had been murdered. The bulletin
board, plastered full of photos. I walked up to it and gave it a good close look. All the smiles, all the bright dresses and baggy baseball uniforms, all the fabulous children with their brilliant futures. But it wasn’t the photographs, so many that each overlapped another in order to fit on the board, that most intrigued me. It was the one empty spot where the cork showed through. I stood at the board and gently pressed my fingers over the spot and waited as Stony and Nadine continued their chatter. I didn’t have to wait long.

  Nadine came up beside me, pulled a photograph from the top of the board, placed it over the gap, pinned it to the cork.

  “We don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” I said softly enough so that no one else could hear.

  “And that’s why you’re here?” said Nadine just as softly. “Not to get anyone in trouble?”

  “She was a sweet girl, Amanda. Like you. She came in here, you gave her a photograph, she ended up dead that night, and the photograph wasn’t on her anymore. They killed her for it.”

  “My God.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said. “And I won’t get you involved with the police, I promise.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes, of course. There’s a murder investigation.”

  “I could lose my job.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “My family depends on this job.”

  “I understand, I do. All I need is for you to do me a favor.”

  I have always found cemeteries comforting. No matter the Sturm und Drang we’re forced to suffer in our lives, we all end up in the same peaceful place, with fields of grass and tottering stone markers that detail the bare bones of our existences. We’re born, we die, maybe we procreate, and there it is; the rest, as we say in the law, is dicta. And yet, there are always lessons to be learned in a cemetery.

  Just then I was sitting in a car, inside the cemetery gates, not far from the august grave of James Buchanan, another son of Pennsylvania who became enmeshed in the brutal game of politics. I couldn’t help but ruminate on how the arc of Buchanan’s career seemed so closely to mirror mine. An unpromising start, a disappointing romantic life punctuated by a failed engagement, and then a swift, seemingly inexorable ascension to sparkling heights followed by an ugly, precipitous fall. Of course, James Buchanan’s height was the presidency of the United States of America and mine was the role of bagman for a second-rate congressman, and so, yes, there was that difference there, I admit. And Buchanan was supposedly gay, and he liked to tend to the White House tulips, and he presided over the disintegration of the Union, so maybe we weren’t as close as I imagined, though I do like tulips. But still, I felt a kinship. Buchanan is generally considered one of the worst presidents in the history of the Republic, and if there is one thing I can always relate to, it is failure.

  “If you weren’t in politics, Stony, what would you be doing?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You’d be dead?”

  “No, I’d be doing nothing on a beach somewhere, sipping piña coladas and slapping the rumps of local wenches.”

  “Wouldn’t that get boring?”

  “Not if you do it right. I did have a dream, once, but my father wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  “Old Briggsy was tough, was he?”

  “As horsehide. It was this game or no game for me, and so here I am.”

  “What was the dream?”

  “Oh, it’s silly, Victor. Spilt milk grows sour.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It wouldn’t have amounted to anything anyway.”

  “Go on.”

  “I always wanted to sing.”

  “Folk?”

  “Opera.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes. And I wasn’t terrible at it, either. For a time even, in my youth, I worked as a busboy at Victor’s in South Philly. You know it?”

  “With the singing waiters?”

  “That’s the one. Every once in a while I’d put in an aria or two.”

  “Wow, color me impressed. Let me hear.”

  “I’m out of practice.”

  “Oh, come on now, don’t be shy.”

  And so he sang, Stony Mulroney, with his eyes closed and one arm waving in the air like a flag atop La Scala. He sang something sad and sweet and all in Italian. Gad, it was awful.

  “Even when I was young,” he said, after he had finished, as I was cleaning the rotten notes out of my ear with a finger, “my voice wasn’t a thing of beauty. My father was right about where my true talents lay. I was made for this game and no other. It’s the vicious simplicity of it that I take to. Politics is a blood sport, and the goal is to make damn sure it’s the other guy with the knife in his neck.”

  “Is that another of Briggs’s Rules?”

  “Oh, no, Road Dog, that one is all mine. From hard experience. What about you? If politics doesn’t work, it’s back to the law with you?”

  “I always wanted to be a lawyer; it’s just that I can’t afford to pursue it as a hobby. What kind of car did you say she had?”

  “A Honda, old and gray.”

  “Like that?” I said, indicating a car pulling quickly out of an alleyway and heading onto Queen Street.

  “That’s the one,” he said, starting the Lincoln.

  I paid close attention to how Stony followed the gray Honda as it speedily made its way first through the twisty streets of Lancaster and then through a bucolic grove of trees before landing on the main avenue out of the city. As we passed through a gauntlet of outlets and fast-food joints and the aforementioned amusement park, he kept the Honda close, letting other cars and a truck slide between us, but never so many that we couldn’t keep track of who we were following. His technique was spot-on. It was amazing what you could learn from the inside of a matchbook.

  When Mrs. Gaughan turned off the main road into a piece of farm country, Stony slowed his pace and fell farther behind. We passed a series of fields, horses leaning their long necks down to pick at the grass, an Amish buggy. Finally, on a rural road called Irishtown, she slowed down her hurried pace and pulled into a drive beside a small farmhouse close to the road.

  Stony turned into another driveway, about sixty yards back, and set the car behind a thick, twisty oak in full leaf. The aged two-story farmhouse where Mrs. Gaughan had parked was in front of a much larger, more modern structure. The farm family that lived there had built a new house for itself but kept the old one for guests or renters. The ramshackle old place, set in the middle of nowhere, was as ready-made a place to hide as could be found in America.

  Dressed neatly now in slacks and a blouse hanging loose, her hair done, her shoes shiny, Melinda Gaughan climbed out of her car. She had played the part of the soused ruin to perfection, our Mrs. Gaughan, had lied with aplomb, but her reaction to the picture and subsequent lie of never seeing Amanda before had convinced me that the rest of her story was just as unreliable. And so the question was how to get the truth out of her.

  I had asked Nadine in Dr. Patusan’s office to do me just a small favor in exchange for my going away. It is amazing how much people will do to just get me to go away. I didn’t ask for the name of the child in the photograph she had given to Amanda Duddleman, I didn’t ask for any information she wasn’t by law allowed to give. All I asked was that she review the file and then call Mrs. Gaughan and tell her that one of the tests her granddaughter had taken showed an anomaly and that the doctor wanted her to make a new appointment immediately to have it checked out. That was all. And then we waited outside Mrs. Gaughan’s house, waited with two thermoses.

  I slipped out of the car with Stony’s camera, and under cover of the oak I focused the long zoom lens on the house. There was something in that photograph Nadine had given to Duddleman that had been dangerous, something Duddleman couldn’t wait to show me, somethin
g Amanda Duddleman had died for. I was going to see what it was even if I had to wait all day. But I didn’t have to wait all day.

  The front door of the small house opened and a little girl burst out, four or five, in jeans and a T-shirt and small white sneakers. She ran down the steps and spun around a spindly tree in the front yard and shouted something. A moment later Melinda Gaughan and a man in his thirties walked together down the steps, talking quietly, sadly. The grieving mother, the grieving husband, the daughter who doesn’t understand her own sadness.

  I focused the camera on the girl, young and smiling, with pale skin, swinging around the tree. Click click. I took some of the mother and the husband but focused mostly on the child. Click click. It felt wrong somehow, but I kept pressing the button. Click click. It was evidence, something I could use to convince McDeiss to save the little girl’s life. But I didn’t need any photographs to be convinced myself about what was what. One look was all it took.

  Click click.

  CHAPTER 39

  THE OPPOSITION

  I filched the memory card from Stony’s camera. Slipped it from the bottom while I was out of the car taking photographs of the little girl in Lancaster.

  I felt a slash of guilt when I snatched it—I considered Stony a friend, my shiny new friend, and he had been nothing but the supportive guide through my whole sordid political journey—and yet I stole the card anyway, yes, I did. I even covered it up by pretending to take a few shots after I had palmed the thing. Fake click fake click. Before she up and left the family, my mother repeatedly told me I was an ungrateful wretch.

  And yet I was not without my reasons.

  The moment we returned to the city and Stony let me out of his car, I hightailed it to Goodrich Camera on Fifteenth and slid the memory card across the counter. “I need some pictures made,” I said to the good-looking blond kid at the counter. “Could you tell me how many snaps are on the memory?”

  “Just a minute,” he said before taking the card in the back room. He returned a few moments later. “You have sixty-two.”

  I had taken about ten, and I guessed there were about as many of Bettenhauser. What were the other forty-two? “Print them all,” I said. “Eight-by-tens. And I’d like all the files transferred from the card to a disk. Can you do that?”