Very Bad Men

by Harry Dolan

  “He’s probably here for the Art Fair.”

  “I don’t like the look of him. Do you have a gun?”

  Her handbag, on the table, was roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “Where would I put it?” she said.

  “All I’ve got is a Swiss Army knife. I’d rather have a gun.”

  “I don’t think you’ll need to shoot him.”

  “If I had a gun, I could let him see it and maybe he’d go away. If I let him see I’ve got a pocketknife, I don’t know what that gets me. Maybe a merit badge.”

  “He looks harmless, David.”

  “They all look harmless. I don’t like the cargo pants. Too many places to conceal a weapon. I’d like to go over there and make him empty out his pockets.”

  “I think you should stay put and drink your lemonade.”

  I nodded toward the entrance of Café Felix. “If he starts to come over here, you should duck inside.”

  “We’ll both duck inside. But he’s not going to come over here.”

  “I’ve got the knife. I think I could hit his femoral artery. He’d bleed out in about a minute. Does that sound right?”

  “I’d rather not find out.”

  Bridget was wearing sunglasses like everyone else—hers were rimless and black—but now she took them off and graced me with a look of concern.

  I smiled to let her know that I wasn’t really going to get into a knife fight in the middle of the Ann Arbor Art Fair. I wasn’t going to cut anyone’s femoral artery. And she relaxed, because David Loogan says some wild things now and then but he’s reliable. And the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and she was right to think I’d been kidding. Mostly.

  I took another look at the man in the plaid shirt and cargo pants. He was still under the awning, looking south toward the band playing Dylan. I brushed my fingers over my pocket to reassure myself the knife was there. And I revised my estimate. It wouldn’t take a minute for him to bleed out. Maybe thirty seconds.

  BRIDGET AND I moved on to other subjects. She asked after Elizabeth, who had been investigating a ring of book thieves: high school kids who’d been shoplifting textbooks from the university store and selling them to a used bookshop. The key question was whether the bookshop owner was in on the scheme or whether he was merely stupid and careless—and it wasn’t really a question, because one of the kids had already flipped on him. But all that was on hold, I told Bridget, because right now Elizabeth was looking into a murder on Linden Street.

  After a while Bridget’s latest squeeze stopped by, an ethereal woman with blond hair who lives off a trust fund and plays the lute in darkened coffeehouses on Saturday nights. Her name is Ariel or Amber, and I may be wrong about the lute. It may be a cittern.

  Eventually the two of them slipped off for dinner at Palio, but I stayed behind. The band had run through many of the more familiar Dylan songs and had started in on “Things Have Changed.” The unfashionable fellow across the street was still keeping me company. I noticed something now that I hadn’t seen before. He had a bandage wrapped around his left hand.

  I polished off my second lemonade and picked up the envelope I’d brought down from the hallway. Nine by twelve, no writing on the outside, sealed with a strip of tape. I hauled out my knife and unfolded a blade, and if the fellow in the plaid shirt was intimidated he didn’t let it show. One slice along the flap and the knife went back in my pocket.

  I drew out the thin manuscript—eight or ten pages clipped together. I read the first line and it turned out that Dylan was right. Things had changed.

  When I looked up, my companion was staring at me from across the street. And though he’d been loitering under the awning all this time, now he turned on his heel and headed south at a rapid clip.

  I jumped up from the table, nearly colliding with an older couple who’d been waiting for me to leave. The wife was fanning herself with an Art Fair brochure, and the husband was hefting a stone garden ornament, a jauntylooking duck, which he thumped down on the table to claim it.

  By the time I gathered up the envelope and the pages and my folder, I’d lost sight of my peculiar companion. I moved into the middle of the street, into the sea of tourists—all of them wearing sunglasses, half of them wearing safari hats. I bounced on my toes to get a better view. Facing south, I could see the stage where the band was playing on the eastern side of the street, and beyond it a line of food vendors. On the western side was a long row of artists’ booths—open tents of white canvas. Down the center were two solid lanes of people, one traveling away from me, the other approaching.

  I spotted a patch of plaid half a block away, but it was gone the next instant. I started off at a run, slipping between a pair of college kids in basketball jerseys, aiming for a landmark I had chosen: a gangly sculpture of a figure in bronze. But before long I got stuck behind a woman pushing a baby in a stroller, and by the time I reached the sculpture there was no plaid in sight.

  I pressed on, due south, past ceramic tiles and photographs of wildlife. I came to a booth selling Celtic jewelry and caught a glimpse of plaid turning a corner and disappearing behind a wall of white canvas. When I rounded the corner he was there, close enough for me to clap my hand on his plaid shoulder and spin him around. He tripped on the curb and fell backward onto the sidewalk. The safari hat went flying, his sunglasses were askew, and I could see he was wearing khakis, not cargo pants. There was no bandage around his hand. It was the wrong man.

  He said, “What the hell?” and waved me away angrily when I tried to help him up. He went after his hat, ignoring my apologies. I wandered back into the street. I thought about heading farther south, but I realized the man I was looking for could be anywhere now—down an alley, onto another street, into any one of a score of shops or restaurants.

  I decided to go back to the office. I had the folder and the envelope and the pages rolled into a tube in my left hand, and I unrolled them as I walked and brought the thin manuscript to the top. I flipped to a page in the middle and scanned the lines of type, catching random words: pushed, broken, table lamp, headache. It was all a jumble, but it didn’t matter. The opening line was enough; the rest was just detail.

  I turned back to the beginning and read it again, a simple declarative sentence:

  I killed Henry Kormoran in his apartment on Linden Street.

  CHAPTER 5

  The apartment had a steel-gray door with the number (105) on a plate above the peephole. The first thing Elizabeth Waishkey saw when she passed through was a chair overturned in the kitchen. Then a steak knife and drops of blood on the linoleum.

  The disorder continued in the living room, where a cheap coffee table was listing on three legs. The fourth was halfway across the room, lying on the carpet in front of the gas fireplace. A yellowed photograph lay nearby, its top corners torn away.

  The glass front of the fireplace sparkled with reflected light. A flat-screen television was tuned to CNN with the sound muted.

  A lamp shade rested on the cushions of a sofa. Elizabeth looked around for the lamp. Down a narrow hallway off the living room she found the broken remnants of a bulb. Two doorways at the end of the hall, and from one of them came a flash of light.

  She called out to Carter Shan to let him know she was there.

  From the doorway, she could see Shan standing at the foot of the victim’s bed, framing a shot with a digital camera. His brow furrowed beneath his brush-cut hair and he pressed the button. The flash brightened the room.

  There was a wallet on the night table by the bed. Inside, Elizabeth found a driver’s license that bore a picture of a man with a plain, pleasant face and eyes that twinkled for the camera. Henry Kormoran in life.

  She couldn’t see his face now. His body lay prone across the narrow bed. He had on a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and sweatpants. White socks with a hole in one heel. There was a bald spot at the crown of his head, and a single fly buzzing around the circle of pale scalp.

  The smell
had been faint in the hallway, but now it was strong. Rank and sweet, the smell of decay. It would have been even worse if not for the air-conditioning. A hot day outside, but in here the air was cool.

  The lamp that Elizabeth had been looking for was lying on the bed beside the body. Its cord was wrapped around Kormoran’s neck.

  Shan stepped around the bed to frame another shot. “You saw the mess out there,” he said.

  “I saw.”

  “Looks like the fight started in the kitchen. The blood on the floor, I don’t think it’s his. I don’t see any cuts on him.”

  “You think he grabbed the steak knife to defend himself.”

  Shan nodded his agreement. “And nicked his attacker. Then they move into the living room. One of them tackles the other, they crash into the coffee table, knock over the lamp. Kormoran breaks loose, runs down the hall.”

  “His attacker throws the lamp at him. That’s when the bulb breaks.”

  “Kormoran reaches the bedroom, but there’s no way to lock the door. The killer pushes it in. He’s got the lamp. He hits Kormoran with it—there’s dried blood in Kormoran’s hair. Then he wraps the cord around Kormoran’s neck and strangles him.”

  The flash from the camera lit up the room.

  “You called Eakins?” Elizabeth said.

  “She’s on her way.” Lillian Eakins, the medical examiner.

  A last look at Kormoran’s license and Elizabeth put it back in the wallet.

  “How long do you think he’s been here?”

  Detective Carter Shan leaned in to frame a close-up of the neck. He was a slim, serious-looking man, medium height, tie clipped to his shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  “More than a day,” he said, “but less than two.”

  “What are you basing that on?”

  “Eyes are cloudy. Rigor has come and gone. Hands and face are just starting to swell. Flies on him, but no visible larvae.”

  “That’s all very scientific.”

  He lowered the camera and smiled faintly. “Also, his sister talked to him almost exactly forty-eight hours ago. Around six on Monday. She arranged to meet him yesterday for lunch but he never showed. She tried calling him and got no answer, so she came here today and convinced the apartment manager to let her in. She’s the one who found the body.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s a looker—I think she got all the best DNA in the Kormoran family. A little cold. I didn’t see any tears. I got her name and number. Told her she’d need to make a statement.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Good. Are you finished here?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I could use some better air.”

  She watched Shan tuck the camera into a pouch on his belt and the two of them walked down the hall to the living room. She breathed deep and looked around. Noticed something she had missed before: four small strips of masking tape on the wall above the fireplace.

  She dropped to one knee to study the photograph on the floor. A young Henry Kormoran, nine or ten years old, posing with his ball and glove. A man with an easy smile standing beside him, probably his father. She had the odd feeling that she had seen this image before today, that she should recognize the name “Henry Kormoran.”

  There were four strips of tape on the wall. Two of them had held up this photograph.

  “Where’s the other picture?” Elizabeth said aloud.

  Shan had already gone looking for it. She saw him pull something from between the cushions of the sofa. She got to her feet and looked at it over his shoulder.

  It was a five-by-seven print, a reproduction of a painting in oil. A portrait of a woman in her twenties. Dark eyes, tanned skin, long black hair parted in the middle.

  “Oh,” she said, drawing the word out.

  “Who is she?” Shan asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Give me a hint.”

  “She’s older now. Wears her hair shorter. She’s not smiling here, but if she were, you’d see a whole lot of white teeth.”

  “Give me another hint.”

  Elizabeth nodded toward the silent television. A pair of talking heads shared the screen.

  “Stay tuned to CNN and you’re bound to see her,” Elizabeth said. “She’s been getting lots of coverage lately.”

  “Callie Spencer?”

  “Callie Spencer. The next junior senator from the state of Michigan. If you believe the polls.”

  Shan laid the picture on the sofa cushion. “What does she have to do with Kormoran?”

  “You could say he helped launch her political career.”

  THE SKY WAS STILL LIGHT as Elizabeth drove to City Hall. Carter Shan had stayed behind at Kormoran’s apartment, looking after the scene until Lillian Eakins came to collect the body.

  Elizabeth took a roundabout route, avoiding the streets closed off for the Art Fair. She checked her cell phone as she drove, saw a message from David, but decided it could wait. She called Owen McCaleb, chief of the Ann Arbor police, to let him know she was on her way. He and some of the other detectives from the Investigations Division had already begun to build the file on Henry Kormoran.

  That’s what a murder investigation comes down to—details in a file, the shaping of a narrative. At City Hall, details were already being gathered: old news articles pulled from the Internet, faxed case files from the authorities in Chippewa County.

  They told the story of Henry Kormoran. Elizabeth didn’t know every detail, but she had heard it before. It was the story of a seventeen-year-old bank robbery.

  On a dreary October morning, five men drove up to the Great Lakes Bank in Sault Sainte Marie in a black SUV. The driver waited outside. The other four went in, gloves and ski masks, duffel bags to hold the loot. Floyd Lambeau, Sutton Bell, Terry Dawtrey, Henry Kormoran. Lambeau was the leader; he had a double-barreled shotgun. The others carried handguns.

  They were looking for a big score. It wasn’t enough to empty the cash drawers. They wanted what was in the vault. Money from the casinos.

  They went in fast and loud, got the customers and tellers down on the floor. Dawtrey, following Lambeau’s orders, dragged the bank manager back to open the vault. But it took longer than anyone expected.

  Kormoran was watching the doors, and he saw someone coming. His job was to make sure no one entered; if anyone did, he was supposed to force them down to the floor with the others. But he wasn’t expecting what he saw: a cop in a gray uniform. Harlan Spencer—the sheriff of Chippewa County.

  Spencer’s wife had been nagging him to open a certificate of deposit. This was the morning he’d decided to get it done. He parked his unmarked cruiser across the street and saw the driver of the SUV watching him. Something about the driver’s demeanor put Spencer on guard. As he approached the vehicle his hand strayed unconsciously to his service weapon, a nine-millimeter Glock.

  Before he reached the SUV, it sped away. The driver was never found. He was the only one of the five who got away.

  Henry Kormoran panicked. He had the crazy thought that if he ran fast enough he could catch up to the SUV. He left his gun on the floor of the bank vestibule and stepped out into the bleak daylight with his hands raised. Spencer had his Glock drawn now and ordered Kormoran onto the ground.

  Kormoran turned and ran. His raised hands saved him. Spencer was reluctant to shoot an unarmed man in the back. Instead he returned to his cruiser, started it up, jacked it out into the middle of the street with its lights flashing, and called for backup on his radio.

  Floyd Lambeau was the next one out of the bank, holding his shotgun one-handed and dragging a teller with him, his forearm tight across her throat. He looked up and down the street as if he expected to see the black SUV tear around the corner at any moment. When it didn’t, he headed for the nearest car, a compact Ford whose driver couldn’t move forward because of the sheriff’s cruiser but couldn’t move back because of the cars behind him.

  Standing behind the driver’s
door of the cruiser, Spencer called out to Lambeau, telling him to drop the gun. At the same moment, the teller got hold of Lambeau’s thumb and bent it back. He howled and she twisted away from him, and when he brought the barrel of the shotgun up, Spencer shot him in the heart with the Glock.

  By the time Terry Dawtrey and Sutton Bell came out, Spencer had moved the teller and the driver of the Ford out of the open and into a shop down the block. Lambeau’s body lay in the street. Back at his cruiser, shielding himself behind the driver’s door, Spencer heard the wail of sirens in the distance. He wondered if help would reach him in time. It seemed unlikely.

  And here was Terry Dawtrey, with a revolver pressed against the temple of the bank manager. And Sutton Bell standing behind them, a black duffel bag weighing at his left side.

  Spencer told them calmly that they’d come to the end of the line. Dawtrey laughed and said they would take the cruiser. He would blast the bank manager if Spencer didn’t turn over the keys.

  Spencer told him it wasn’t going to happen. Dawtrey repeated his demands as if he were speaking to a slow child. He drew back the hammer of the revolver, and Spencer, his Glock steady, willed the bank manager to make a move. But the manager was made of less stern stuff than the teller. His eyes pleaded and Spencer knew he wasn’t going to be any use.

  A shot rang out, louder than the sirens. The bank manager pitched forward and Terry Dawtrey was on his knees, left hand pressed against his thigh, blood seeping through the faded denim of his jeans. It took a second for Spencer to understand what had happened: Sutton Bell, realizing that things had gotten out of control, had turned his gun on Dawtrey. Now Bell held his arms up to surrender. His revolver, still smoking, tumbled from his fingers and fell to the ground. Spencer came out from behind the door of the cruiser, and the bank manager ran toward him, obscuring his view of Dawtrey. Spencer pushed the manager aside and saw the muzzle of Dawtrey’s gun.

  Dawtrey’s first bullet sliced through the sleeve of Spencer’s uniform. The second struck his left shoulder and turned him around. The third slammed into his spine.