by Shane Lusher
I let it go at that, and walked down Capitol Street and then up to Elizabeth and the courthouse lawn. At the opposite end of the park, in front of the steps to the main entrance, a group of TV and newspaper people had gathered.
I walked over and poked one of them in the back. “Hey, Tuan,” I said.
The man turned around. Tuan Nguyen was the editor of the Pekin Observer, whose offices stood opposite the courthouse, not thirty yards away from where we stood.
“Hey, Dana,” he replied. He shifted his stance and pulled at the back of his trousers, tucking his shirt over the back of his vast waist. “You here for the press conference?”
I nodded. “If she’s pled not guilty now, then that’s probably all that anybody’s going to get out of her.”
Tuan looked at me. “Alisha Stamm? You know she claims somebody else did it, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking away from the building and out toward the oak trees in the park. “I don’t see that they’ve got much of a case. You think something’s in it?”
“Not a chance,” Tuan said. “I tried to get in to talk to her about it, but she’s not talking without her lawyer. And he’s not doing much talking, either.”
Just then there was a loud murmur at the front of the crowd, and a twenty-ish woman in a black suit appeared. I recognized her as one of the assistant state’s attorneys.
“I thought Glenn Holzel was handling all of the press himself,” I murmured.
“He is,” Tuan said. “On Alisha Stamm. That press conference just finished. They took her back over to County.”
“I just came from there,” I said. “They drove her the block and a half?”
“What, you think they’re going to have her walk over in chains?”
Tuan pulled out a spiral notebook. “This is Colby Trueblood,” he said.
The door to the courthouse opened again and two other men appeared, both of them in their sixties. I recognized the shorter one as the interim Sheriff, Randall Dubois. He was heading up the department until the election in November, and the man had never made me feel welcome whenever I’d inquired as to the status of the case.
Which was understandable, I suppose, considering that Tad had ousted Dubois in the general election six years before, but only because Dubois had been implicated in some kind of office theft that had, in both my opinion and Tad’s, been blown out of proportion.
Still, it had been good for Tad; out with the old, in with the new.
I didn’t recognize the other man. He was very tall, six-six or more, and wearing a light cotton shirt underneath a brown sports coat. He looked grim, his lips pressed together.
The ASA was speaking. As she spoke she tucked a strand of hair back behind one ear. Before she even got out the first sentence, beads of perspiration were visible on her forehead.
“Mr. Maclaren will be released today, and the investigation re-opened,” she said. “The Office of the State’s Attorney, as well as the Department of the Sheriff, are issuing an official apology to Mr. Maclaren and his family.”
Tuan wrote something in his notebook and then said, out of the side of his mouth,
“Probably the first time anybody’s said ‘Mister’ to that bastard.”
I nodded and tapped him on the shoulder. “Got to run,” I said. “I need to see if I can get in to see Stamm.”
“What for?” Tuan called out after I’d turned away. “They’re not going to let you see her.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
I listened to the press conference as I walked along the brick path through the park.
“Hannah and I want to express our full support for Sheriff Dubois and his organization,” the tall man was saying into the microphone. “While we are disappointed in this outcome, we have confidence that Colby’s killer will be brought to justice.”
The reporters behind me began speaking at once.
“Mr. Trueblood-“
“Tad Ely-“
“Outside help-”
I tuned them out when I got to Capitol Street and jogged down the block and a half to the sheriff’s department. When I got there, I saw a county sheriff’s van in the parking lot across the lawn. Two officers, a man and a woman, were just unloading Stamm.
She was dressed in the ubiquitous orange jumpsuit, her hands shackled in front of her. I saw that they’d left her feet free for walking.
I stopped jogging, but moved quickly across the grass toward the van.
She had changed quite a bit since I had seen her at the arraignment just weeks before. Ironically, incarceration had improved her appearance. She was still missing many of her teeth—not much you could do for that—but the lined puffiness of the meth face had receded and left her looking closer to her age of forty-five and less like an eighty-year-old homeless person who’d been out in the elements for a lifetime.
Her blonde hair had been washed, and she wore it pulled back into a pony tail. There was no make-up, but she had the kind of face that probably didn’t need it before the meth took hold, and so now she was just left looking like one of those women in photographs from the Dust Bowl in the thirties.
I’d just hit the asphalt not twenty-five feet away from them when she recognized me.
“Oh my God,” she called out. “What the hell is he doing here?”
The male officer turned and saw me.
“Sir, you need to stand down!” he called out. He took a step forward, and I stopped.
I held up my palms. “Hey,” I said, “I just want to talk.”
“Put your hands down, sir,” the officer said. He was wearing a name tag, but I couldn’t read it from that distance.
“Angie?” I said to the female guard. “Angie Hansen?”
“It’s Dana Hartman,” she said to the male officer. She had her hand on the chain tethering Stamm, who was holding her head down now, her shoulders scrunched together.
“I know who it is,” he said. He glanced in her direction. I noticed his hand down at his side, near where his gun would be, if he had been wearing one. “That’s why he needs to back off.”
I took a few steps backward, onto the lawn. “I just want to talk to her.”
“There are channels for that,” he said as he backed up and took one of Stamm’s arms. “You should know that. You can’t talk to her out here.”
I ignored him and looked over at Stamm. “Alisha,” I said.
She looked up at my face, and then away.
“Will you talk to me?” I said.
The male guard cursed under his breath and then nodded at Angie. They began shuffling Stamm up the stairs next to the van.
“Alisha,” I said again. “What if I told you I’m willing to believe you didn’t kill my brother?”
She turned, held between the guards, at the entrance to the building.
“What good would that do me?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
“I just told you,” I said. I took a step forward and then stopped myself. I was surprised to find that I felt no anger toward this person.
Whether it meant I was convincing was another thing.
“Well, isn’t that just wonderful?” she said. Angie had gotten the door open, and they were moving her inside. “Now that I’m being sent up the river, you’ve got what, issues of conscience?”
“No,” I said. “I could care less what happens to you, if you did it. I just want the right person to go away for it.”
“Sir,” the male guard said. “We are taking the prisoner inside.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I said.
She didn’t respond to that. The door shut before she had a chance. She looked back in my direction, her face drawn. She shook her head, and then the guards pulled her back into the interior of the building.
My phone went off in the pocket of my suit coat. I pulled it out and answered it, looking off toward the muddy brown of the Illinois River.
It was Kelly.
“Hi,” she said.
; “Hey.”
“It’s your day, remember?”
“Yup,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I’ve got an autopsy in twenty minutes.”
Kelly was a gynecologist at Pekin Hospital. She was also the county coroner. She’d run next to Tad during the election, and like Tad, she was always short on staff.
We’d gone to high school together, hung out in the same crowd. We came a few inches close to hooking up, and then high school ended and we didn’t see each other for nearly twenty years. Now she was grown up, with a child herself; the kind of woman who knew exactly what she wanted. And one of those things wasn’t me.
“You remember what we talked about?” she asked.
Kelly took issue with, well, basically everything about me. She had issues with my lifestyle, with my habits, and with my employment, which was, though lucrative, a thing I devoted little time to.
I seemed to have that effect on women. My wife hadn’t liked me much either, at the end.
I ignored her. “Who are you autopsying?” I asked.
“I’m serious,” she said. “It’s one thing to have one or two beers.”
And another to drink the way that you do.
“I know,” I said. “See you in a few.”
Four
Tuan had just finished piling another layer of bacon on a monster BLT when the phone rang.
It was Jasper.
“Hey, Tuan!” he called out from the speaker.
Tuan put down the frying pan, careful to remove the last piece of bacon with his thumb and forefinger before placing the pan back down on the stove, and put his headset on.
“Tuan!” Jasper called out again.
Tuan smiled. He enjoyed making people wait when they called. For most people, everything was urgent only because they didn’t have anything better to do whenever they needed his services. They didn’t realize the plethora of things they could be doing instead.
And this was what was keeping his rent paid, and his living room full of Apple products, and bacon on his BLTs.
* * *
“I’m here,” Tuan sighed, choosing a red tomato from the windowsill over the counter. No way real tomatoes looked like this. He couldn’t recall specifics, but it seemed that tomatoes used to have blemishes, in some early, archaic era of his past.
“What do you need?” he asked, surprised Jasper hadn’t begun speaking already.
Now they sprayed the hell out of them, and waxed them to the eyeballs, and you had to buy organic if you wanted them to taste like anything other than cardboard.
“Man, you’re not gonna believe this,” Jasper began.
Tuan sighed again. Rarely had he heard anything from the likes of Jasper that he didn’t believe. Jasper was a forklift driver, which meant steady income, which was rare, but Tuan was not yet convinced that Jasper’s income was steady because he knew what he was doing or because he showed up every day.
This was, in and of itself, a rare quality in a tweaker.
“What, Jasper?” Tuan screeched into the phone, realizing that Jasper seemed to be playing with him. “What could possibly be so amazing that you have to take a half an hour to tell me about it?”
He would start growing his own. He had a yard that needed mowing all the time anyway. He’d turn over the soil and plant shitloads of tomatoes. Fertilize them with dead fish, or whatever you used.
“Sweeney’s dead,” Jasper blurted out, finally bursting with his information.
Tuan placed his knife down carefully next to his plate and leaned back against the counter.
“Tell me about it,” he said quietly. “Wait.” He stood up and drew the curtains and sat back down again. “Tell me where you are first.”
He nodded to himself at the answer, and then said into the phone:
“Meet you there in half an hour.”
He cut the tomato into slices, pulled a wad of lettuce off the head next to his plate, and then mashed it down with the top of the bun over the pile of bacon. Then he carried the plate into the living room and sat down in the recliner, in front of the television. He took a bite of the sandwich and then set it down, chewing carefully.
Tuan had read that you should chew each bite a hundred times before swallowing. He’d once gotten as high as fifty before the soupy-sweet mixture in his mouth had reminded him of the black vomit he’d seen once at a college party, and he’d had to stop and spit it out.
Now he’d settled for twenty-five. He had trained his mouth to do this over the course of a month, and now he didn’t have to think about it. Anyone observing Tuan from the outside would have thought that he was contemplating something peacefully, or meditating, when in reality he was just waiting the allotted number of chews.
He swallowed and picked up the sandwich again.
“Shit,” he said out loud to the blank TV.
Wednesday
Five
Central Illinois in July is an unforgiving, muggy place filled with hundreds of miles of corn and soybeans, with precious little in between. It's not unusual for humidity to rise to 100%, at which point, defying logic, it doesn’t rain. Instead, the vapor pressure hovers over the cracked, powdery ground, swirling up heat lightning and clouds of dust storms that roll for miles across the prairie in their promise of precipitation only to move on at the last thirsty minute.
I was standing on the back porch with my second cup of coffee that morning. It was seven o’clock, and the sun was still creeping its way up above the horizon, but the air was already hot and thick. I’d just set the cup down on the railing when my cell phone rang.
It was Kelly.
“Did you drink last night?” she asked.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said.
“Did you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Good,” she said. “Because there’s a social worker coming to check out the house.”
“What?” I said. “When? Which house?”
Kelly and I had agreed that it would be best to keep Tad’s house in Pekin, so that Erin had her old home to go back to, but I spent most of my time out at the farm I’d inherited from my father. Tuesdays were one of my days, and Erin had spent the night here.
“Ten o’clock,” she said. “To the farm.”
“Aren’t they supposed to let us know ahead of time?”
“They just did,” she said. “Don’t tell me you have something to do.”
I watched a sparrow glide up over the cottonwood tree in the creek bottom, split down the middle from a lightning strike ten years before. The bird ducked for cover just as quickly as it had risen as a hawk swooped up from nowhere out of the field.
“I was going to try to get in to see Alisha Stamm,” I said.
She sighed. “Dana, this is important.”
“I know it is,” I said. “Does Erin have to be here? I thought you were going to come get her at eight.”
“I am,” she said. “No, she doesn’t have to be there. Just make sure everything is straightened up. And maybe you could tell them that you’re looking for a job.”
“I have a job,” I said. “I own a business.”
“You work once a week,” Kelly said. “How do you think that looks to them?”
“I work once a week making more than most people make in a month,” I said. “Why should that be a problem?”
She sighed again. “They like it when people have full time jobs.”
“Kelly,” I said. “This is my life. This is what I do. It’s why I left Chicago.”
I didn’t really see the point in working fifty hours a week. I’d done that before, and if Jake hadn’t fallen out of that bed, I would still be doing it.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “I’ll be there at eight. Bye.”
“Kelly?” I said.
“What?”
I waited in the silence, trying to figure out something to say.
She sighed loudly. “I just wonder if you even really want to get
custody of her.”
She hung up at that.
I watched the water in the creek, bubbling along merrily just thirty yards away from where I sat. There was no wind, not even the hint of a breeze, but there was still that kind of popping noise the old-timers said was the sound of the corn growing. I’d always thought it was the dew evaporating, or settling, depending on the time of day, because the corn popped all the time.
Other than that, there was nothing. Diddly. Central Illinois sure wasn't Chicago.
“Shit,” I said to the merry sound of the gurgling creek.
I picked up my empty cup and went back inside, closing the sliding glass door behind me.
I had the kind of air-conditioned headache that felt as if someone had dripped glue into my ears and then sealed them off with cotton balls, but I didn’t dare open the windows, which was what I wanted to do.
Within five minutes my skin would be cold and clammy, and I already wanted a cigarette, but the house would remain sealed. Erin was still asleep, and God forbid she should wake up all in a sweat.
She didn’t mind the heat so much, she’d told me, if she was outside and she’d gotten prepared for it. If she were getting ready for a bike ride, say, or a jump in the creek, which she still did on occasion, although it was beginning to creep her out.
But I’d opened the windows often enough, and I knew that hell hath no limits when you’re dealing with a nine-year-old girl whose dreams are disturbed by rising temperatures.
I got a garbage bag from the drawer in the kitchen and went into the living room to clean up the coffee table, which was loaded with bottles of Sam Adams. That was just about the only thing you could get in Tazewell County by way of beer, other than Heineken, that wasn't Bud or Bud Lite.