Very Bad Men

by Harry Dolan

  “You head home, son. It’s no good. The place I need to go is a long way off.”

  A REPORTER AND A CAMERAMAN arrived at the intersection of Third and Jefferson around two minutes after the senator slipped away. Elizabeth gave them no comment. They didn’t bother with me.

  Back at the house we found Sarah lying on the sofa watching the same reporter on the ten o’clock news. She wanted to hear all about what had happened, and while Elizabeth stayed behind to tell her, I went upstairs.

  I found a note on the dresser in the bedroom. Sarah’s handwriting. Lucy Navarro called. I gave her your cell. Any relation to E. L. Navarro?

  I powered up my cell phone, and before I could wonder who E.L.Navarro was, it began to vibrate. I flipped it open. She didn’t give me a chance to say hello.

  “Loogan, you’re a magician.”

  “How’s it going, Lucy?”

  “I heard from Callie Spencer. That’s how it’s going. She agreed to meet with me. She said you had called and persuaded her.”

  “I have a way with people.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her the truth. Told her you had the crackpot idea that Floyd Lambeau was her father.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “That’s all. If she agreed to meet you, she probably thinks she can convince you otherwise.”

  “We’ll see. I’ve got the meeting, that’s the important thing. Tomorrow at two at the Spencer house. I’m letting you know, just in case.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A hazy silence. Then: “You know what I mean, Loogan.”

  I knew. Because something in her voice had changed. It sounded grave. I remembered her theory about the Spencers—that they might have hired the man in plaid. That they might have arranged to have Terry Dawtrey killed.

  “Come on,” I said. “You think you’re going to ask the wrong question and—what?—the Spencers are going to make you disappear?”

  “I can’t rule it out,” she said.

  “Actually, I think you can.”

  “We’ll see. I’ll call you after, let you know how it goes. If you don’t hear from me, well, you do what you think is right. If I disappear, maybe you can find me.”

  Her voice had turned careless and light, but I thought I could still hear an undertone of gravity in it.

  “If you can’t find me,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind being avenged.”

  CHAPTER 24

  All men by nature desire to know. Aristotle said that in his Metaphysics. I picked it up in a college course on philosophy twenty years ago, the same course where I learned the meaning of Occam’s razor and a few other semi-useful bits of wisdom.

  All men by nature desire to know. It explains why parents snoop through their children’s diaries, why people slow down to gawk at accidents on the highway, and why I went with Lucy Navarro to her meeting with Callie Spencer.

  And even though I didn’t really believe Lucy was in danger, that was part of it too. I remembered the bullets that someone had left outside our hotel rooms in Sault Sainte Marie.

  I picked Lucy up at a quarter to two, and we arrived at the Spencer house right on schedule. We found Callie strolling in the sunlight on the lawn near the curved driveway; her parents were out for the afternoon, and her husband had driven back to Lansing.

  She took us on a tour of the house, through her father’s studio and her mother’s garden. As we wandered over the back lawn toward the guest cottage, she chatted about a proposal coming up for a vote in the Michigan House of Representatives, a law that would extend health coverage for children living in poverty. A reminder of the good she was doing in the state legislature, and a hint of what she might do in the Senate.

  Vines crept up the brown brick walls of the cottage, and a midsize silver Ford was parked on a gravel drive beside it. Ornamental grass grew along the path to the front door. The door opened into a large, high-ceilinged room. Stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen on the right, boxy leather sofas in the sitting area on the left.

  Callie Spencer led us past the sofas to a glass-topped desk beside a window that faced the main house. She waved us into a pair of upholstered chairs. Our tour was over.

  She set her eyes on Lucy Navarro and said, “You want to talk about Floyd Lambeau.”

  Lucy laid her sunglasses on the edge of the desk and drew a notepad from her bag.

  “That’s right.”

  “I can save you time,” said Callie. “You want to know if Lambeau’s my father. He’s not. It’s an old charge, made years ago by a nasty political opponent. There’s nothing to it.”

  “I didn’t hear it from one of your political opponents,” said Lucy. “I heard it from Terry Dawtrey, who claimed he got it from Lambeau himself.”

  Callie sat down in a swivel chair behind the desk. “That’s a new twist,” she said, “but it doesn’t change things. The story’s not true. There’s a reason no paper has ever printed it.”

  I watched her lean back in the chair, a lawyer confident of her case.

  She said, “Floyd Lambeau’s blood type was AB. You can find it in his autopsy report. It’s a matter of public record. My blood is type O. That’s public too. I did a campaign for the Red Cross once, encouraging other type Os to donate. Lambeau’s not my father because a type AB can’t be the father of a type O. It’s impossible. A type O has to inherit the O gene from both parents. A type AB doesn’t have an O gene to pass on.”

  Lucy made notes on her pad. Sitting beside her, I could see the page clearly. When I read what she’d written, my estimation of her rose by several points.

  “I’m glad you agreed to talk to me,” she said to Callie. “If I had turned in this story, I would have looked foolish.”

  Does she think I haven’t read Lambeau’s autopsy report? the notes on the pad said. Does she think I never looked up her blood type?

  “Maybe you’d be willing to clear up a few other things for me,” she said to Callie Spencer.

  Sorry I wasn’t entirely straight with you, Loogan, the notes said. Forgive me?

  Callie nodded her agreement, and Lucy went on. “I spoke to Terry Dawtrey in prison this spring. He claimed to know the identity of the fifth robber—the driver in the Great Lakes Bank robbery. Does that surprise you?”

  Callie looked skeptical. “Who did he say it was?”

  “He didn’t get around to telling me. He dropped some hints, though. I’m working on following them up.”

  “Sounds like he was trying to string you along.”

  “So you weren’t aware that he had made that claim?”

  Callie’s shoulders rose and fell. “How would I be?”

  “Is that a no?” Lucy asked.

  “That’s a no.”

  “Does it strike you as odd that your father was never able to identify the fifth robber?”

  That brought a hint of a frown to Callie’s face. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “Your father saw the driver outside the bank,” Lucy said, “but he could never give a description of the man.”

  I thought I heard an edge of impatience in Callie’s reply.

  “My father was shot in the spine that day,” she said. “He underwent hours of surgery. I think he can be forgiven for a lapse of memory.”

  “I didn’t mean to be critical.” Lucy shrugged the topic away. “Did you ever meet Floyd Lambeau?”

  Callie swiveled her chair sideways, laid a palm on the glass of the desk. “He gave a lecture at the University of Michigan once, while I was at the law school. I attended the lecture.” She lifted her fingers from the glass. “I’ve talked about that before. There’s no story there.”

  “You never met Lambeau on any other occasion?” Lucy asked.

  “No.”

  “So if someone told me they saw you two together, that would be a lie?”

  “Did Terry Dawtrey tell you that?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Henry Kormoran told me.”

&nb
sp; The answer surprised me, and I thought it must have surprised Callie too. But she said, “Then Henry Kormoran was lying. Or mistaken.”

  Lucy closed her notepad and laid it on the desk beside her sunglasses.

  “Don’t you want to know when and where Kormoran said he had seen you with Lambeau?”

  “You’re obviously eager to tell me,” said Callie.

  “The ‘when’ is intriguing: a few weeks before the Great Lakes robbery. The ‘where’ is even better—would you care to guess?”

  “No.”

  Lucy turned to me. “What about you, Loogan?”

  I thought of one obvious possibility. “At the Great Lakes Bank?”

  “Good guess,” said Lucy. “Kormoran told me he drove Lambeau to Sault Sainte Marie to check out the bank. I think you’d call it ‘casing the joint.’ They parked in front of a bakery across the street and watched the bank entrance for a few minutes. Then Lambeau sent Kormoran into the bakery to get him some coffee. When he came out, Lambeau was gone.

  “Kormoran waited in the car. He saw Lambeau walk out of the bank a few minutes later, accompanied by a young woman. They stood talking on the sidewalk and then they parted. She backed away from Lambeau, smiled at him, and went on her way. When Lambeau returned to the car, Kormoran asked who the woman was.

  “Lambeau wouldn’t tell him. ‘You don’t need to get too curious about her,’ he said. But Kormoran never forgot her, and years later when he saw you on television he made the connection. You were the woman from the bank. He told me he was sure of it, because he remembered the woman had a gorgeous smile.”

  Callie Spencer withdrew her hand from the desktop. In the sunlight I could see her fingerprints on the glass.

  “That’s a good story,” she said in a soft voice. “Far better than the one where Lambeau is my father. A person can’t choose who her father is. But if I helped Lambeau case the Great Lakes Bank, that would certainly make a good headline.”

  “So you’re denying it?” Lucy asked.

  Callie stood up and gazed through the window toward the main house. The sunlight made her face pale.

  “Yes,” she said, turning back to Lucy. “But don’t let that stop you from printing it. If I were you, I’d include the line about my gorgeous smile. That’s a nice detail. It really sells it. You’ll want to bury my denial in the last paragraph, and see if you can find a picture of me from back then. One where I’m smiling.”

  She walked around the desk, her heels clacking against the hardwood floor, and though she didn’t tell us to clear out, I understood that was the message. Lucy understood too. She picked up her bag and her notepad and we followed Callie outside. One shallow step took us down to the path with the ornamental grass beside it, and there Lucy turned back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot my sunglasses.”

  She went in to retrieve them, leaving me alone with Callie on the path. Callie looked down at the stones beneath our feet, and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I was thinking about the portrait her father had painted, the one on the wall of his studio. Callie Spencer in her twenties, solemn and determined, her lips together in a line.

  I said, “She’s not going to find a picture of you from back then where you’re smiling.”

  Callie looked up from the stones. “Probably not. I didn’t do a lot of smiling then. Crooked teeth. My parents’ insurance didn’t cover braces. I never got them until I was twenty-seven—four years after the Great Lakes robbery.”

  “So if Henry Kormoran really saw you smile back then—”

  “He wouldn’t have called it gorgeous.”

  I nodded toward the cottage door. Lucy had left it half open.

  “You could tell her that,” I said.

  Callie Spencer’s scowl was like the darkness under clouds.

  “I’ve already lectured her on blood types. Am I supposed to put her in touch with my orthodontist? She can write what she wants. It’s such an absurd story, I have to think people will see through it.”

  I thought it might be wise to change the subject.

  “How’s the senator?” I asked. “I saw him last night.”

  Wrong question. The clouds got darker.

  “He’s fine,” she said curtly. “Why’s your friend taking so long?”

  She mounted the step and pushed open the door. “Miss Navarro?” she called. Following behind her I saw Lucy turn from the desk and hurry toward us, her sunglasses held at her side.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Callie ushered her out silently, and the silence lasted through the long walk back to the main house. She stood by the crescent drive until Lucy and I were in the car and away.

  When we reached the tree-lined street I turned to Lucy. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Loogan.”

  “You didn’t forget your sunglasses.”

  She twirled the glasses around by the stem. “Sure I did.”

  “You didn’t need that long to find them. What were you up to in there?”

  Suddenly she looked very pleased with herself. “Do you think I was up to something?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say you were either searching—though I don’t know what for—or planting a bug. Which was it?”

  “Neither one.”

  “What were you doing, then?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  I gave her a disapproving look and didn’t say anything.

  “I swear to you,” Lucy said. “I went in, picked up my glasses, and stood by the desk waiting for someone to call me.”

  “Why?”

  “So Callie Spencer would think I was up to something.”

  CHAPTER 25

  She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” I said to Elizabeth that night.

  We had the news on with the sound turned down to a mumble. I sat on the end of the sofa and she lay with her feet in my lap. She had spent most of her day staking out the clinic where Sutton Bell worked. No sign of the man in plaid.

  “Lucy’s clever, but not as clever as she thinks she is,” I said. “All she knows about being a reporter is what she’s seen in movies and read in books. She thinks if she acts like a character in a story would, she’ll be all right.”

  Elizabeth shut her eyes and smiled faintly. “Does she remind you of anyone?”

  THE SPENCER HOUSE occupied a corner lot on Arlington Boulevard, at the intersection with Bedford Road. When Lucy and I drove away that afternoon, we headed south, rolling gently downhill. I intended to drop her at her hotel and spend a couple of hours at Gray Streets. She had other ideas.

  “Hang a right, Loogan.”

  “What for?”

  “Are you in a hurry to get somewhere?”

  I hung a right, then two more, and we circled around again to Bedford Road and parked in the shade by the curb. From there we could see the Spencer house with its sloping lawn, and the guesthouse farther back. We could see the glimmer of Callie Spencer’s silver Ford.

  I powered the windows down and shut off the engine, and Lucy explained why she wanted Callie to think she was up to something.

  “I want to know who she talks to, but I don’t have any way of bugging her cottage. Despite what you might think, the Current doesn’t give its reporters eavesdropping equipment. So I had to improvise. If she thinks I planted a bug—”

  “—she won’t make any calls from the cottage,” I said. “But what’s to stop her from walking over to the main house and using the phone there?”

  Lucy tapped her sunglasses against her thigh. “If I’ve played this right, she won’t take the chance. I’ve been in the main house too.”

  A dozen objections occurred to me. “She must have a cell phone—” I began.

  “Maybe,” Lucy said. “But a little paranoia goes a long way. If she thinks her landline’s bugged, she might wonder how secure her cell phone is. I’m hoping she’ll get in her car and drive somewhere—talk to somebody in person. If she does,
I can follow her.”

  “What if there’s no one she needs to talk to?”

  “No. I’ve given her some things to think about. She’ll want to talk it over with . . . somebody.”

  The pause before the final word made me suspect she had a particular somebody in mind.

  “You think she knows the fifth bank robber,” I said. “You think she’s going to lead you to him.”

  She didn’t answer. I watched her fold her glasses and tuck one of the stems into the collar of her shirt.

  I said, “You told her Terry Dawtrey dropped hints about the identity of the fifth robber—hints that you were following up.”

  “That was a bluff. I wanted to give her something to worry about.”

  “And that stuff about Henry Kormoran seeing her at the Great Lakes Bank with Floyd Lambeau—was that a bluff too?”

  “No. That’s what Kormoran told me.”

  “The way I heard it, you never got to talk to Kormoran. He died before you could meet with him.”

  She stared out through the windshield, avoiding my gaze.

  “I may have given Detective Waishkey that impression,” she said.

  We watched a squirrel stand up on the curb, hesitate, then bound across the street.

  “How many times did you talk to Kormoran?” I asked.

  “Just once,” she said. “In the spring.”

  “And you think he was killed because of what he told you about Callie Spencer?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “How would anyone know what Kormoran told you?”

  “I brought it up with Dawtrey when I visited him in prison. He couldn’t confirm it, by the way. He and Lambeau saw Callie in Sault Sainte Marie, but as far as Dawtrey knew, she had nothing to do with the Great Lakes robbery.”

  The squirrel leapt onto the trunk of a maple and vanished into a veil of green.

  “Let me see if I can summarize this brilliant theory of yours,” I said. “Terry Dawtrey told you he knew the identity of the fifth robber, and you told him about Kormoran’s claim that Callie Spencer helped Lambeau case the Great Lakes Bank. Someone overheard all this in the visitation room at Kinross Prison and passed it along to the Spencers. And they arranged to have Dawtrey and Kormoran killed. Is that about right?”