by Shane Lusher
Rassi waited for a moment. Then he raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the café.
“Okay,” I said. “We have to make it quick, though. I’ve got a social worker coming at ten.”
Molly's Cafe had been on Broadway in Pekin since before Main Street had been renamed Broadway, which everyone still referred to as Main Street. I never could remember when this had happened, but it was increasingly less and less important as the years wore on, and I found myself only thinking of it when I visited Molly's, usually in the company of regulars like Dave Rassi.
The original Molly had died when I was in college, not long before I’d met my future wife. Molly was an old Irishman who’d named the café after his deceased wife. No one called him Molly to his face, though—he’d gotten the nickname because the rumor mill had it that he liked to put on lipstick and a dress in his off hours.
Over the years it had changed hands, spawned a short-lived heritage movement in Pekin, before finally being purchased by a man from Pakistan who’d already bought the IGA across the street.
His name was Amandeep, and nobody liked him. Not, ostensibly at least, because he was from Pakistan, but because he rarely smiled. He also didn’t like to engage in conversation.
I couldn’t see anything wrong with that.
“At least the coffee's better than it used to be,” I said. I was twiddling a cinnamon stick in my hand and held it up to smell it.
Dave looked at me for a moment, and then said, “There's less bacon grease in it, at any rate.”
I looked around for the owner. Amandeep was sullen, I would give him that. He sat at the end of the counter, a newspaper in his hand, staring straight ahead out the window.
“How’s it going?” I said. “Dana Hartman.” I held out my hand.
He seemed surprised, as if he didn’t really know what to do with my hand, but then he shook it. Maybe most people didn’t do that with him.
“Amandeep,” he said and looked around the room once before coming back to me. “What can I get for you?”
Rassi ordered a Denver Omelet. I said I’d be fine with just coffee.
“Can’t be easy being green,” I said. I put the cinnamon stick in my pocket.
Rassi shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and looked around, even though no one else was sitting at the counter and the next table was at least fifteen feet away. “You listening?”
I spread my hands out in front of me. “Tell me.”
“Thing is, there have been too many killings in this county this year,” he said. “Roe, and now Sweeney, and two months ago there was Colby Trueblood.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maclaren was the guy, right? I saw the press conference yesterday.”
“Okay, then you heard about the big apology,” Rassi said.
“Is he suing?”
“Hell, I would,” Rassi said. “Know what his alibi was?”
I shook my head.
“He was in jail. He was in Peoria County the whole weekend when she was killed.”
“I thought he’d already been arraigned,” I said.
“He was. They entered a not guilty plea. We thought we had it all wrapped up, but two days ago his attorney came up with this bullshit that nobody bothered to tell us about.”
“You guys didn't know about it?” I said. “Don’t you vet the people you bring in before you go to the state’s attorney with the suspect?”
“Not we,” Rassi said. “I should say them. I wasn’t on it. Dubois had his own guys working on it.”
“I thought you guys all were Dubois' guys.”
“Dubois. It was just Dubois. We’ve only got two homicide detectives, and Dubois wasn’t giving it to me. He couldn’t give it to Percy Trueblood, either, for obvious reasons, conflict of interest, and all that.”
“Okay, but it seems like a massive mistake to me,” I said.
“It is,” Rassi said.
“Yeah, but didn’t anybody think to ask him where he was the night of the murder?”
“Of course they did,” Rassi said. “He said he couldn’t remember. He’d been drinking, apparently. Had a blackout. Anyway,” he continued. “Dubois always has this tendency to...push things in a certain direction when he wants. And there was a shitload of pressure on the Trueblood case.”
“Did he do that with Alisha Stamm?” I asked.
“Look, man, I told you-”
“I have no idea where this conversation is going,” I interrupted. “Let’s just cut to the chase, okay?”
Rassi looked around again. “Okay,” he said quietly.
We stopped speaking when Amandeep returned with Rassi’s omelet and set it down in front of him. Rassi gave him an expectant stare until he sighed and then returned to his perch at the window in the front of the diner.
“Okay,” Rassi said. “I’m looking at Roe and Sweeney because they’re still open cases. I’m also looking at Trueblood.”
“Which is also an open case now. Again.”
Rassi nodded. “Dubois doesn’t know what to do about it, and Trueblood doesn’t want him on the case.”
“Percy or Wayne Trueblood?”
“Wayne. Her father,” Rassi said. “Why would Percy have any say in it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He is a detective. And anyway, why would Wayne Trueblood have any more influence?”
“He should,” Rassi said. “You know him?”
“No,” I said. “I never saw him before yesterday, at the press conference. Tall guy, right? I just know he backed Tad and Kelly when they ran for office.”
“He owns half the county,” Rassi said. “Marquette County Insurance? That’s his baby. He sits on the board for half a dozen local businesses, most of them banks. He’s also got the Quiverfull.”
“What’s that?”
“An adoption agency,” Rassi said.
“Interesting,” I said. “So he’s Tazewell County’s version of Boss Hogg.”
“Not hardly,” Rassi said. “He’s a good guy. He helps people out, and it makes you want to help him, too.”
“Is he clean?” I asked. “It seems to me that he’d be one of the prime suspects, but me not being a cop-”
“Why would he be a suspect?” Rassi asked. He cut into his omelet and began shoveling bits into his mouth.
“Isn’t it always a male relative?”
“Sometimes,” Rassi said. “But it’s not him. He’s the last guy you would look at. He’s got an alibi anyway.”
I looked at my watch. “Whatever you say,” I said, picking up my cup of coffee and finishing it. “I have to be home in twenty minutes.”
Rassi ignored me.
“He’s a good man,” he repeated. “And his daughter was killed. Shouldn’t that be enough for you to be interested?”
I looked at him. “Let’s not go there,” I said.
I wanted to tell him that since my son had died, I didn’t really value human life as much as I used to. I wasn’t about to try to explain that to him, though, because I didn’t completely understand it myself.
Instead I said, “So what, you want me to help you solve the murders of two junkies-”
Rassi held up his hand. “Darren Roe was no junkie. He had a job, and a wife, and-”
“And you also want me to help you solve the murder of the local prom queen.”
“She wasn’t the prom queen,” Rassi said. “She played the flute in the marching band.”
“So you do want to run for sheriff,” I said. Rassi had finished his food, and so I stood up. “I need to get going.”
Rassi put a pile of bills down on the counter. Amandeep nodded and came over.
“Keep the change,” Rassi said.
“Have a nice day,” Amandeep called out as we walked through the door onto the sidewalk and into the sweltering heat and got back into the car.
“Why would you want me to help you?” I asked once we’d driven past the park and the Lagoon and were headed back out toward the mall. “Don’t you guys have people
to do this? Can’t you call in for outside help?”
“From who?” Rassi asked.
“I don’t know—State Police? The FBI?”
Dave shook his head. “They don’t do that. Besides, everybody around here is hush-hush about it. Nobody thinks any of it is related.”
“But you do,” I said. I shook my head.
“What?” he asked. We were stopped at a light. He gestured vaguely with his right hand.
“How are they related, Dave?” I asked as the light changed to green and we followed Broadway out toward Springfield Road. Corn and soybeans and an occasional single tree alternated on either side of the road. “Roe and Sweeney, sure. Same M.O. But Colby Trueblood? I just don’t see it. Not from anything you’ve told me.”
“Call it intuition,” Rassi said.
I sighed. “Well, you're going to have to do something,” I said. “Dubois is corrupt, but not any more than the judges or any of the other politicians around here. Besides,” I said, rolling down my window. “I've known you for long enough. I know that down inside, you're a weasel.”
“Fuck you,” Dave said.
“Thing is, even if you solve all of these crimes, you can’t look like a weasel while you’re doing it. That’s what Dubois knows.”
“Dubois knows that if he solves things quick, people like him,” Rassi said.
“Exactly that.”
“Even if the wrong person goes up for it.”
“Welcome to the real world, Dave,” I said.
“So what, you don’t care?” he asked. “Come on, man. It’s his daughter. A seventeen-year-old girl got killed.”
“I never said I didn’t care.”
“Would you vote for me?” he said.
“Depends on what you did for me,” I said.
“So what is it?”
I hesitated. “Alisha Stamm,” I said. “You want me to, whatever, look at these cases, come up with some theory? Then I want the files on her. Not just all the shit the state’s attorney and the defense get on discovery. I want all that other stuff you guys don’t tell people about. I want the electronic parts, and I want the scraps of paper the patrol officer wrote on.”
Dave was shaking his head, swallowing quickly, about to say something.
“Otherwise, I don’t do jack,” I said. “I haven’t got time for this.”
“You’ve got more than time,” Dave said. “You work what, once a week?”
“I have Erin to take care of,” I said. “Besides, this whole thing is completely absurd.”
Dave laughed. “Absurd? ‘Ohh myy, this is just so absurd.”
We didn’t speak until we’d driven a mile or so. Dave turned left off Springfield Road and onto Franklin Street, a crossroads in the middle of a thousand square miles of cornfield.
“Well?” Dave said.
“Well, what?”
“You want it?”
“Ah, Christ,” I said. “I never should have come back here.”
“What was it you told Tad? ‘I want to start over’?”
I had wanted to start over. I was running from a dead child and a wife so estranged I hadn’t even heard from her in six months, which meant that it was all over.
I hadn’t counted on a dead brother and a nine-year-old ward, and sharing that ward with a woman who wasn’t about to vote me in for the father of the year award.
“You’ve got a custody hearing next month,” Rassi said. “Think about how it would look if you solved Colby Trueblood’s murder. That would make you a fine, upstanding member of the community.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” I said. “It would make me a man impersonating a police officer.”
I looked away from him, out the window.
At the double-wide down the road from the farm an obese woman wearing a purple shirt that read "One in the Oven" in pink was manhandling an equally obese child out of a car seat and into a stroller. I noticed that the stroller had a cup holder.
“Is this even legal?” I said. “What if I solve these cases—and that is one massive if—and it all gets thrown out of court on a technicality?”
“The sheriff is allowed to hire any outside consultants he sees fit,” Rassi said. “As long as they're reasonably qualified, and not felons.”
“Problem is, you’re not the sheriff,” I said.
Dave waved his hand. “I already cleared it with Dubois,” he said. “Officially, you’re a consultant. Think of it as an undercover op.”
I laughed. “Fine. Undercover Hartman. I don't even want to ask about carrying a gun.”
Rassi switched on his blinker and turned right into the lane. “Nobody said anything about me being on board,” I said. “Officially, I'm still thinking about it.”
“So, you're on board,” Rassi said as he rolled over the bridge.
According to my watch, it was 9:45, and I still wanted to vacuum the house, but when we pulled in there was a late model Volkswagen Golf sitting in the driveway.
“Looks like your social worker’s already here,” Rassi said. “I’ll wait.”
“Aren’t we done?” I asked. “I still need to get in that jog before it gets too hot.”
“It’s too hot already,” Rassi said. He got out of the car and walked over into the shade of the willow tree. “I’ll wait.”
The social worker’s name was Karen Caldwell. She was sitting on the porch fanning herself with a file folder when I walked up to her.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said.
She was a stocky thirty-something with a stub in her nose, a face that looked like it was given to laughing, and the smoothest brown skin I think I’d ever seen.
“No problem,” she smiled. “I like to come early. Most of my clients tend to be late.”
I unlocked the door and motioned her inside. “Let’s get you in out of the heat.”
“They tend to be late,” she said again as she followed. “Which means that when I get there I also get to see the things they have to pick up that they don’t want me to see.” She giggled. “But from the looks of this living room, I’d be surprised if I found anything to worry me.”
“Just don’t look in the garage,” I said.
She spent a total of ten minutes going through the house. I remained in the living room, to give her the chance to snoop and also the feeling that I had nothing to hide.
Which I didn’t, other than the empty beer bottles in the garage. Thankfully, she didn’t go out there.
When she finished, she came back into the living room and sat in the chair next to the couch.
“Well?” I asked. “Did I pass?”
She nodded, sipping from the glass of water I’d offered. “You’re clean.”
I looked at her. “And the, um, issues?”
She set down her glass. “You mean the assault and battery or the drinking?”
“Both,” I said. “Anything that could prevent Erin from getting to live with me.”
She smiled. “Seriously? Other than that one thing, you don’t have to worry. It’s not like you have a history of violence. It’s not good, of course, that you hit the doctor. But considering?”
“Considering that it was a one-time event?” I asked hopefully.
“Considering what’s out there,” she said and leaned forward. She paused for a moment, looking me up and down. “For example. Do you know how many people let their dogs defecate in the house?”
“No clue,” I said. “Damn.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “What can I do to, ah, speed up this process?”
“You just keep clean,” she said. “Don’t get arrested for drunk and disorderly, and you should be fine.”
“What about Kelly Davos’s input?”
She stood up.
“Now that,” she said. “That could be a problem.”
“How so?”
She shrugged. “Stable environment, experienced mother. A woman,” she said.
I must have looked startled,
because she continued, “Yeah. We don’t like to say it, but it’s true. You’re screwed if you’re a man.” She clapped me on the shoulder. “But don’t sweat it. You just get on Kelly’s good side, and everything should work out fine.”
She stopped at the door.
“Would you have any problem with joint custody?”
“With Kelly?” I asked.
She nodded.
“None at all. It’s the ‘temporary’ part that has me most worried.”
“That’s good,” she said. “And you don’t need to worry.”
Rassi was still standing under the willow tree when we walked out onto the driveway.
“Karen,” he nodded.
She smiled. “Dave,” she said. She looked at me and mimicked holding a phone.
“I’ll give you a call next week,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “Bye.”
We watched as she got into her car and then drove away, giving us a little wave as she passed by the porch on her way out the lane.
“Give you a call next week?” Rassi said. “You guys were only in there ten minutes and already she’s calling you next week?”
“Funny, Dave,” I said.
“Hey, she’s not bad looking,” he said.
“Why are you still here, Dave?” I asked.
“You know, you really ought to cut that thing down,” Rassi said, pointing to the apricot tree next to the driveway. “You know what rotten apricots do to a paint job?”
“My grandfather planted that tree,” I said.
“So what? When was the last time anybody ate any apricots around here?”
I looked up at the tree, the green buds of the new fruit just beginning to swell in the branches. “Dave,” I said, looking back at him.
“Got time for another quick drive?” he asked.
We’d just pulled out onto Springfield Road when Kelly called.
“And?” she said.
“Hello to you, too,” I said.
“Hi. And?”
“Everything went fine. She says I have nothing to worry about,” I said.
“Really,” Kelly said. “Was the house clean?”
“The house is always clean, Kelly,” I said. “What’s up?”