Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  “Crackers,” the cop said.

  Dorsey looked at the cop and frowned. “If, by ‘crackers,’ you mean that Mr. Crane has some mental health challenges, I think it’s a reasonable, though offensively phrased, conclusion.”

  The cop left.

  In the interview room, the female detective said, “So, you were going to have workshops or something for the kids?”

  “Yes,” Tom Crane said. “Something like that.”

  “And where were you going to do this?”

  “I don’t know. Outside, I guess, unless the Lord gives me a place. A vacant place.”

  “But you’d need electricity. And what if it rains?”

  “Extension cords,” Tom Crane said. “And tarps. But you’re right, inside would be much better. Do you know a place?” He looked around as if sizing up the interview room for his computer workshops.

  “And Tom, you don’t even have a car. What were you going to do with this equipment if you’d gotten it out of the store?”

  Tom Crane looked around the room again, but his movements were jerky now. He said, “I um, I um, I um, would have carried them.”

  The door of the observation room opened, and the same cop handed Dorsey a note. Dorsey read it, then pushed an intercom button and said, “Let’s take a break.”

  In the interrogation room, the male detective put his hand to his ear and said, “Let’s take a break.”

  Dorsey turned to me. “Two more of Lydia Trevor’s credit cards have turned up. One at Rivertown Super. A shopper tried to use it for groceries. The other was called in to the eight-hundred number on the card. The caller said he found it on the sidewalk in Rivertown.” We walked into the hallway. The interrogators came out.

  “Keep working on him,” Dorsey said to the detectives. “We’ll detain him on credit card fraud while we check this out. Meanwhile, call social services so they can catch Crane when we cut him loose. Poor guy’s family is probably worried.”

  Dorsey and I walked toward the exit. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think the guy found the credit card on the sidewalk, just like he says. I think the real perp realized it’d be nuts to use the cards, so he tossed them. Or maybe he was messing with us, trying to get us going in different directions. Notice he went all the way across the city to drop them, where it’s more likely someone would try to use one.”

  My phone jingled for a text message. I looked at the screen. It was from Lizzy: “Dad, where are you? We need you home with us.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Judge Baxter recessed the Jimmy Mailing trial for a week, but she didn’t disqualify the jury. I took over because Henry wasn’t up to it. Apparently, I wasn’t, either: I lost. Jimmy Mailing was acquitted of burglarizing the local offices of the Environmental Protection Agency. I hated to lose, but it was a minor loss on the scale of the big political corruption investigation under way.

  Six weeks after Lydia’s murder, Tina and I invited everyone over to our house for an end-of-summer barbecue. This time nobody canceled. We had reached the stage where we could pretend normalcy—the fake-it-till-you-make-it stage. We could talk about things other than the murder. Tina could laugh again sometimes. Henry was losing his hollow-eyed stare. Flora and Chip had stopped bringing over dinner in foil-covered baking dishes. If a hypothetical stranger stopped in to observe us briefly, he might leave again with no knowledge that anything had happened. But that was on the surface. Beneath the surface, we were in turmoil—one indicator being that Barnaby, who had been potty-trained for well over a year, was back in Pull-Ups.

  We made shish kebabs. Tina assigned each of us our own jobs. Ethan and I were in the kitchen cutting up peppers, onions, and zucchini.

  “Just between you and me, Nick . . .” Ethan said quietly as he stood studying a cube of zucchini.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t understand why anybody eats this stuff, do you?”

  “Zucchini? That’s easy,” I said. “We eat it because it’s easier to digest than sawdust.”

  “And tastes no worse than leaf mulch.”

  “Have you eaten leaf mulch?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t assume.”

  Tina came over to see how we were doing. “Lots of zucchini,” I said.

  “I know,” Tina said, “isn’t it great?”

  “Yum,” Ethan said.

  Chip maneuvered in beside me at the counter. He had a bowl of boiled shrimp to peel. He snatched a chunk of zucchini from Ethan’s cutting board and popped it into his mouth. “Man,” he said, “sure love zucchini.” I looked at him for an ironic smile, but apparently, he was serious. Ethan looked at me and smirked.

  “Ethan,” I said, “has it occurred to you that Chip, being married to my former wife, is essentially my husband-in-law?”

  Ethan studied the two of us a second and, deadpan, said, “Actually, I think that would make him your step-husband.”

  I liked this kid. Overlooking (to the extent possible) that he was sleeping with my eighteen-year-old daughter, he seemed to be a good kid. He was a college sophomore who, like Lizzy, had a highly developed sense of social justice. Back in the sixties, the two of them would have been aboard a bus to Birmingham. In the eighties, they’d have been sleeping in an ersatz apartheid shantytown erected on some college green. But in the twenty-tens, it was the fading Occupy movement that had earned them both criminal records. I hadn’t decided if they were stupid or noble.

  Ethan was a nerdy, hyperintelligent kid who talked too much about his cause, but he laughed a lot and fit in well with us. I didn’t expect Liz to end up with him permanently, but it was nice having him with us, giving Liz her own support system, while I focused on being the rock that Tina and Henry needed me to be.

  Chip cleared his throat several times and kept glancing at Ethan. “Ethan,” he finally said, “could you give us a minute?”

  Ethan took his bowl of zucchini outside.

  Chip and I had been checking in with each other regularly. The FBI wasn’t involved in investigating Lydia’s murder, but as a member of the extended family, Chip was keeping tabs on it. If nothing else, he could make sure that anything Dorsey needed from the Bureau—lab analysis or access to data of some kind—would get hurried through without any red-tape delays.

  With Ethan out of earshot, Chip said, “Is there news, Nick? Have you heard anything?”

  “Zilch, you?”

  Chip shrugged. “I’ve made inquiries,” he said, “but Dorsey is strangely quiet. It’s almost like . . .” He stopped and shrugged again.

  “It’s like what?”

  “Like there’s something they’re not saying.”

  “Why should Dorsey keep anything from you?” I asked, but I had a pretty good idea of the answer. There was only one reason Captain Dorsey would obfuscate on a direct inquiry from a special agent of the FBI: There was something the troopers didn’t want our family to know. And the only thing I could imagine the police wouldn’t want us to know was that one of us was being investigated.

  An arm reached between Chip and me and placed a bowl of beef cubes on the table. “I . . .um . . . I marinated some beef. At home. Overnight,” Henry said.

  “Excellent, Henry,” I said, turning and laying a hand on his shoulder. Henry had started talking this way since the murder: in disjointed phrases, as if holding all the parts of an idea together in his head was more than his traumatized brain could manage.

  “Why don’t you carry that meat out to the table,” I said. “You can help skewer. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Henry went into the backyard where Tina and Flora were sliding stuff onto bamboo skewers. The backyard was narrow, compressed between two six-foot wooden fences. It is not a nice place to linger and enjoy the outdoors: too cramped.

  Tina and I lived in a renovated row house. The neighborhood was once workers’ housing for a textile mill, but now it’s all upscale. Granite countertops, custom hardwood cabinets, Viking appli
ances. Our home is on three floors, eaves to eaves, with identical ones on either side. The tiny backyard is about thirty feet deep.

  Henry and I barbecued the mound of kebabs, then brought them into the living room to eat because it was starting to drizzle, and the kitchen table is always cluttered, and we don’t have a real dining room.

  I banished ZZ to the kitchen because he was begging and getting his nose into everybody’s plate. Lizzy’s dog, Bill-the-Dog, wobbly and arthritic, watched from her bed, thumping her tail from time to time in case any of us felt inclined to free up a piece of meat.

  “What I read,” Chip announced, apropos of nothing anybody had said, “is that acupuncture is great for stress. I might give it a try myself.” What Chip actually meant but wasn’t saying, was that he’d heard it can be good for treating depression. He glanced at Henry.

  Flora said, “Yes, sweetie, that’s true. Maybe we could all get a group rate someplace.” This got a few chuckles. “In fact, I’m thinking of getting trained. Adding acupuncture to my practice,” Flora said. Flora’s “practice” was in counseling: relationship and personal issues.

  “Fabulous idea,” Chip said.

  Flora beamed at Chip. The two of them sat there holding hands like teenagers.

  We were silent for a while. Chip’s comment about treating stress had brushed against the reality that things were not okay in this family. Now we were caught between talking about it and not talking about it. I decided to steer us away. “Liz,” I said, “how’s the running going?”

  She shrugged. Liz was a dedicated runner, not a star, but passionate. She didn’t answer my question and avoided my eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  I saw her eyes fill. Ethan put an arm around her. “She’s scared,” he said.

  “Scared?”

  “To go out on her own.”

  “Even at your mom’s?” I asked. Flora lived outside of town in the rural suburb of Turner, where crime statistics are so low as to be barely measurable.

  Lizzy shrugged.

  “Yes,” Ethan said, “there, too. I run with her sometimes, but I can’t keep up, can I, Liz? Sometimes we go to the track at the high school and I sit on the bank and watch her, but . . .”

  “But running the track sucks so bad,” Lizzy said. She was tearing up.

  “You’re scared even during the day?” I asked stupidly.

  She shrugged

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said. “Maybe Ethan could . . .” I stopped to think. Then I continued, but it came out in an overexuberant rush: “Yes, that’s it. Ethan could bike when you run. Do you have a bike, Ethan? I have a bike. It’s old, but we could fix it up. Right, Flora? It’s out at your place, isn’t it? We could fix it, and Ethan could ride while Liz runs. How about that, you two?”

  Lizzy ignored me. “Hey, Barn,” she said.

  Barnaby was happily choo-choo-ing around the living room with a pull train. He looked up at Lizzy, who held her arms out to him. He got up and climbed into her lap, and she wrapped him tight in a hug that looked like it might squeeze him in two. Then she put him down on the floor, excused herself, and went upstairs. Ethan followed.

  Barnaby climbed up into my lap, and my arms went around him just as Lizzy’s had. I put my cheek down on his head. I felt something inside me. It was visceral; the primal drive to protect the young—to hurl oneself between the serpent and the babe; the ability (as it exists in urban legend) to lift the car off the child pinned underneath. And not just children: the clan, the tribe. We had been attacked, violated, slain. My cherished sister-in-law was dead; my beloved wife had not returned from the land of shock and sorrow. My friend and colleague Henry Tatlock was stupefied with grief. And now I saw that my daughter’s life has been plundered. The killer had made off with her youth, her joy, and her ability to live at peace inside her world. And all of us, including Special Agent d’Villafranca (Chip) and Assistant U.S. Attorney Davis (me)—we who ought to form the impenetrable bulwark against violent crime and who should guarantee a quick and vengeful response when one of us was made victim—we sat impotently waiting while Captain Dorsey conducted a witch hunt among our family, letting the real perp off the hook.

  Barnaby squirmed away. “Owie,” he whined. “You’re squeezing too hard.” He climbed into Tina’s lap.

  The party petered out. We weren’t talking about Lydia and the hunt for her killer, but we didn’t know how to talk about anything else.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’m going running.”

  “You don’t run,” Tina said.

  I patted my stomach, where there was a slight convexity above the concavity of my belt line. “It’s time,” I said.

  She was sitting in the kitchen paying bills. “We should just get rid of the landline,” she said. “None of us ever uses that phone anymore.”

  “I use it sometimes,” I said. “I mean, not for the phone. Just the fax when I’m working at home.”

  She held up the phone bill for me to see. “Is it worth forty-seven dollars a month?”

  “To work at home? Definitely.” I picked up my car keys from the table.

  “Why not just run from here?” she asked.

  “Too congested,” I said. “I’ll just go out along the river or over to one of the parks.”

  “Take ZZ.”

  I didn’t want to take ZZ, but I couldn’t think of an excuse not to.

  “And plastic bags for poop,” she said.

  I went over and kissed her on top of the head. “Wish me luck.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “Maybe I’ll start, too.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Lizzy was at her mom’s. Barnaby was upstairs in bed. Tina loved this time of night, when she could burrow into her work, a cup of tea or glass of wine at hand. She wouldn’t mind being alone.

  I drove to Rokeby Park. ZZ was dancing on the front seat, excited about getting out and zooming around in the park.

  “You’ve got to stay, Z,” I said. He sat and tipped his head at me, incredulous. “Sorry, boy.”

  I took my Glock service revolver from under the seat and put it in my pocket.

  Lights over the paved trail made pools of amber every several hundred yards, but with stretches of darkness between. Tree trunks and leaves beside the path glowed pale, giving the illusion of openness, but not far off the trail, a crosshatch of shadows offered concealment to anything or anyone with the patience and cunning to linger.

  I walked through the culvert tunnel, and on the far side, I found the site of Lydia’s murder. It had been lit up with floodlights and flashing blues and reds during that terrible night less than two months ago, but now, like vines and saplings reclaiming a jungle clearing, darkness concealed the fact that anything of note had happened here.

  I kept walking.

  There were a few people out. Several men jogged past. Two female runners approached. I tried to smile at them, making the point that I was a friend, not a foe, but they looked straight ahead.

  There was a bench off the trail. I sat there to see who would come along. A solitary woman ran past. This worried me: I watched her disappear up the path into shadow, and I thought of calling after her, of urging her to be wary.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, I started walking back toward the car. I passed two guys in hoodies. They smiled. I nodded.

  Morning. I left early and stopped at the FBI before work. I got buzzed in and took my Glock down to the basement. The range manager reviewed some things with me about grip and stance, and I proceeded to inflict a few flesh wounds on a paper silhouette. Nothing fatal; it’s harder than it looks on TV.

  I arrived at my office with the smell of gunpowder in my nose. Walking past the office that had been Tina’s, I got the familiar tingle of nostalgia. While she’d worked there, three doors from my own office, the boundaries of propriety between supervisor and subordinate had collapsed into a heap like clothing at the foot of a bed. We had gotten involved, fallen in love, and gotten
married. We’d been together five years now, which was approaching a record for me. We haven’t had an easy time of it. I sometimes think that if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so quickly, the naughty thrill she got from dating her boss would have given way, and she’d have moved on.

  Henry had taken over Tina’s office after she left. Next to Tina’s/Henry’s office was my friend Upton Cruthers. I stopped in his doorway to visit for a minute.

  “How do, boss?” he said, smiling his bony-faced, jaw-thrusted, stubble-chinned grin. If you stuck a corncob pipe into that grin, I’m sure you’d be able to smell salt air and a deckload of cod.

  From behind the door, a voice said, “Nick-Nick-bo-bick.”

  I stepped inside and saw Cicely, one of Upton’s daughters, sitting in the corner at an old student desk that Upton had brought in for her. She would spend a couple of mornings a week with Upton, who kept her busy with word-find puzzles and mazes and some drawing projects until his wife came in around eleven to take her to the occupational therapist.

  “Cicely-bidicily,” I said.

  She laughed. Her face had a smile of sublime joy. “Nickle-Nickle-fartsicle,” she said.

  “Sis!” Upton snapped, but she just laughed.

  Cicely was twenty-two. She had overdosed on crystal meth at seventeen and stopped breathing. EMTs had revived her, but her recovery had plateaued pretty quickly.

  “You keep an eye on your dad for me, will you, Sis?” I said.

  “Nick-wick.”

  I walked past my office to the coffeepot. I loved walking through the criminal division in the morning, listening to the noises of smart people deep in their work of protecting society: the clicking of keyboards, quiet conversations, phones chirping, printers rolling out page after page of elegant legal arguments crafted by clever minds.

  Coffee in hand, I went into my office and called Dorsey.

  “Good morning, Nick,” he said. “What can I do for you?” Did I hear reluctance in his voice, or did I just imagine it?

  “You can tell me what the hell is going on,” I said. “The wellspring of sharing and cooperation seems to have hit a drought, Dorsey. You’re concealing something.”