by Lee Goodman
“Nick, it’s okay. Settle—”
“Don’t patronize me, Captain. You said you’d keep me in the loop.”
“I said I’d keep you informed. And right now I’m informing you that I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
“Jesus H!” I yelled. My office door was open, and Janice, my admin assistant, looked in over the top of her reading glasses.
“If you’ll be patient—”
“I was patient. I’ve moved clear through impatience to arrive at irate. What aren’t you telling us?”
He was silent.
“I’m coming over to trooper HQ, Dorsey, and I won’t leave till you tell me a few things.”
“Don’t, Nick.”
“I’m on my way now.”
The phone went dead.
I felt powerless. I wasn’t really going to go over there. I thought of calling Pleasant Holly, the U.S. attorney, and I thought of calling Chip. But neither of them could do anything even if they wanted to.
To calm myself, I reread some files on the political corruption case. Upton and I were scheduled to have a conference with a cooperating witness first thing the next morning.
In the early afternoon, it became clear why Dorsey had been stonewalling. Henry got a call from a Detective Philbin at trooper HQ, asking him to come in for another informal Q and A.
CHAPTER 9
I drove to trooper headquarters with Henry.
Philbin was a jowly guy with sunken, disinterested eyes. He wore a suit jacket that made me think of the tarp you throw over a baby grand when you repaint the living room. He wore a wedding band that was sunk into the flesh of his finger like fence wire through the trunk of a maple.
“If you’ll just wait out here, Mr. Davis,” Philbin said to me, beckoning Henry back toward the interview rooms.
“I have no intention of waiting out here,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“I’m here as . . .” I stopped. I was about to say I was there as his lawyer, but for some reason, I changed my mind. Thank God I changed my mind. I was going off half-cocked, pissed at being stonewalled by Dorsey, helpless in the face of Tina’s and Henry’s grief, stunned by Lizzy’s sudden fearfulness. My reflex was to respond with belligerence, but I checked it. “I’m here as his friend,” I said. “And he is here voluntarily.”
“Whatever,” Philbin said. He asked if we wanted coffee, then pointed out soda and candy machines in case we were hungry. He led us into a windowless interview room and left the door open. The female detective stood in the doorway eating a yogurt. She looked like a much younger version of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“So, Mr. Tatlock,” Philbin said, “you told us earlier you were home at the time of Ms. Trevor’s murder, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“But Mr. Davis here—lucky you came along, Nick, you can confirm this—Mr. Davis thought you were at your office. True?”
“Well, I started at the office, but I ended up taking the memo home to work on.”
“What time was that?”
“Um. Five-thirty, say.”
“Any particular reason you went home instead of working at the office?”
Henry shrugged. “Home,” he said. “Home is home. You know?”
“Yeah,” Philbin said, “I hear that. And where was Ms. Trevor when you got home?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t there. We had plans to meet later at the park.”
“And I think you told us last time you can’t think of anyone who might be able to confirm your whereabouts between five-thirty and when you arrived at the park, about nine. Is that right?”
“Yes. By the time I got to the park, Lydia had already been, um . . .”
“Killed. Yes. How come you worked at home so long? I mean, the concert was starting at eight-thirty; Fourth of July and all, you had plans to meet your friends and family for fireworks and the concert. But you’re staying home working till nine? What’s that about?”
Henry looked at me for support. “Nick and I had a brief due first thing next morning,” he said.
“But what I hear,” Philbin said, glancing at me, “Mr. Davis had already written the brief. You were just reading it. So it takes three hours to read? What was it, like War and Peace ?”
“I was revising,” Henry said. “You know, tightening it up.”
I gaped at Henry. Any other time I’d have asked him what the hell needed tightening, but I kept quiet.
“Okay,” said Philbin. “Time line we got goes like this: You’re at Nick’s barbecue with your fiancée. Then you and her leave at about four-thirty. You drive home, drop Lydia off, then head over to your office. Brings us to about five o’clock. At the office, you pick up some work and head right on back home and get there about five-thirty, by which time Lydia has left for the park. You stay home working without seeing or talking to anybody. Then about nine, you head over to the park, where you find Lydia’s sister and family sitting around wondering what the fuck’s going on. That summarize it pretty well?”
“Pretty well.”
“Mr. Tatlock,” Philbin said, “do you know a guy named Pursley? Aaron Pursley?”
“Yes,” Henry said. He sounded wary.
Philbin put a phone bill in front of Henry. Half a dozen calls to the same number were highlighted in yellow. “So, are you guys friends or what?”
“I wouldn’t call us friends.”
“What, then?”
“Mr. Pursley was doing some work for me,” Henry said.
The Ginsburg look-alike who had been leaning against the doorframe came and sat beside Philbin.
“What kind of work?” Philbin said.
“Investigating.”
“He’s like, what, a private investigator?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
I had trouble reading Henry’s face because of the scarring. But his body language was obvious. He was squirming. If he’d been wearing a blood pressure cuff, the mercury would have blown out the end of the tube.
“Investigating what?”
“Me. I’m looking for my biological family,” Henry said.
This was news to me. I’m not sure I even knew he was adopted.
“Lydia encouraged it,” Henry said. “I never really wanted to before.”
“Detective Sabin,” the Ginsburg woman said, introducing herself. She had a heavy New York accent. “Tell me, Mr. Tatlock, do you know if this Pursley guy is a licensed PI?”
“I didn’t think to ask him,” Henry said.
“How did you find him? The phone book, maybe?”
“No,” Henry said. “I hired someone else who I got from the phone book, but the first guy never found anything, so he gave me Pursley’s number. He said Pursley cost a god-awful lot, but he used unconventional techniques, which sometimes had more success.”
Detective Sabin put a rap sheet in front of Henry. “Aaron Pursley,” she said. “Or at least that’s one of his aliases.”
I leaned over and looked at the rap sheet with Henry.
“It’s a pretty good read,” Sabin said. “B and E, extortion, identity fraud, oh, and right here”—she snatched the sheet away, studied it a moment, then slid it back to us with her finger on one particular entry—“possession of and sale of a firearm with the serial number removed.”
Henry shook his head. He seemed surprised but maybe not surprised enough. He looked at me. “Nick,” he said, “I didn’t—”
“You see our concern,” Philbin said. “Best-case scenario, you innocently hired a guy you thought was a legitimate investigator to legally obtain some buried information. But I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Tatlock, I’d think as a federal prosecutor, you’d have had the—what do you call it . . . ?”
“Savvy,” Sabin said.
“. . . to be suspicious. Check his PI license or something. But that’s best-case. Worst-case is that this biological-family stuff is a crock, and you were buying an untraceable gun from Mr. Pursley for the purpose of shooting Ms
. Trevor. Or maybe, here’s another theory, you were having him arrange for someone else to shoot her for you.”
Henry sat paralyzed.
“Or here’s a second-to-best-case scenario,” Philbin said. “The bio-family stuff is true, but you contracted with someone, knowing he intended to obtain nonpublic information through—what’s the word you used, ‘unconventional’?—unconventional methods of breaking and entering, records theft, and perhaps violent intimidation.”
“I’m no legal expert,” Sabin said, “but I think that’d be conspiracy: hiring a guy, knowing he plans to break the law.” She looked at me. “Right, counselor?”
This was bad. We needed time to think it through.
“I’m not here as Mr. Tatlock’s lawyer,” I said, “just as a friend. So I’ll merely make the observation that if I were in his position, I’d invoke my right to counsel at this point.”
CHAPTER 10
Henry and I drove back to the office. I didn’t believe for a second he was up to something nefarious. I could see him being stupidly innocent—hiring a scumbag without bothering to think it through—but not intentionally criminal, and definitely not complicit in any violence.
“And notice there was no talk of motive,” I said when we’d ridden too long without speaking. “It’s just that you didn’t have anybody to vouch for your whereabouts. That’s what caught their attention. They poked around, found the Pursley thing. But they’ll figure out pretty quick they’re fishing a dry hole. And trust me; those two are homicide dicks: As soon as they decide you’re clean on the shooting, they’ll drop the Pursley bullshit. But we will still need to brief Pleasant.”
Pleasant Holly. Our boss. The U.S. attorney. Whether it was innocent or not, she needed to know that an assistant U.S. attorney had gotten entangled with a guy like Pursley.
“There goes my career,” Henry said.
“It’ll work out, Henry. Trust me.”
I had worried about Henry imploding after the murder. He never struck me as a conqueror; he seemed vulnerable, even fragile. It was one of the things I liked about him. But he was surviving. He was depressed—who wouldn’t be?—but he kept coming in to the office and did his job well enough not to get sent home. Maybe I had underestimated him.
Now I was concerned all over again. Because if a guy loses his fiancée and then his career, he might be left wondering who he is and what he’s got left to live for.
Next morning at the Bureau, Upton and I sat in on the questioning of a guy named Calvin Dunbar. He was a former legislator who wanted to turn himself in on corruption and bribery violations. Chip was there, along with a DOJ lawyer from the public integrity section.
Dunbar showed up with his wife and his lawyer. It was perplexing. We were investigating a number of legislators for taking bribes from Subsurface, but Dunbar wasn’t one of them. He’d simply called the Bureau one day and confessed.
We talked to Dunbar in the conference room. “I lost my soul,” he said.
“Can you be more explicit?” I asked.
His wife held his hand, gazing at him as though he were taking the oath of president.
“I profited from the public trust. I took money for influencing legislation.”
“Why are you coming forward?”
“I’ve been tormented,” he said. “I’m not making excuses, but I was in desperate financial straits. They don’t pay legislators squat. You know that, right? And the cost of campaigns; and it’s a full-time job; more than full-time. And I put so much time into it that my insurance business—that’s what I do, I have a brokerage—was in trouble, and I’d let my clients down, and like I say, I lost my way. The money was offered, and I took it. I mean, I’d have voted how I voted regardless; I think I would have, but I let my state down; I let my wife down”—he turned to look at her—“and I let myself down.”
“Yes, Mr. Dunbar,” Chip said, “but—”
“You have this corruption probe under way,” Dunbar said, “and I see all these legislators I served with getting subpoenaed, getting called in, and at first I was terrified, certain I’d be next. It ate me up. I couldn’t sleep, could barely eat. Then one day my phone rings and I realized I wanted it to be you guys. I wanted to stop being afraid, and I wanted to . . . I don’t know, I wanted to confess. I’d become someone I loathed.”
Calvin Dunbar wept. Then he tried to collect himself, and he gazed into his wife’s clear eyes. “Whatever you do to me,” he said, “it will be better than what I’m doing to myself. The night after I called you guys last week, I actually slept for the first time in forever. I mean, I’d actually thought of taking my life. And other things: It wasn’t just the money from Subsurface. It’s like, when you’re a legislator, everybody loves you. You feel powerful. Like the rules don’t apply to you. Everybody wants something, and they’re willing to pay. Money, sure. But women, too. Young girls, even. I’ve seen it. I can name names. And I proved myself weak. I mean not the underage ones”—he looked at his wife, his eyes pulpy, his words coming out staccato—“never the underage ones. I’ve confessed everything to Kelly. She’s heard all this. She’s forgiven me.”
Their hands were knit together. Kelly was small and pretty, young, with wavy blond hair. She wore a red Scandinavian vest over a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. On the open market, she’d be gone in a second. I wondered about Tina: If I were this transgressor, would Tina . . . ?
“I’ll go to jail,” he said. “I almost want to go to jail. I’ll name names, tell everything I know. Not that I know much: They were clever, Subsurface was. It was all very subtle, you know? Hard to pin down.”
All this came out with intermittent tears. The rest of us waited for him to finish before starting in with questions.
I had no idea whether Tina would stick by me in similar circumstances. Things were out of kilter between the two of us. It had been worse since her lumpectomy and worse yet in the wake of Lydia’s death. I knew that, with everything going on, I needed to pay more attention to her and to be more present. I wanted to leave the interview that very moment, to drive to Tina’s office and wrap her up in my arms with a promise of enduring love and commitment. Save that thought, I told myself.
Calvin’s lawyer finally laid a hand on his shoulder. “Enough for now, Cal,” he said. He handed around some papers. The top sheet was a bank statement showing a deposit of forty-five hundred dollars. The next two were the same.
“In good faith,” the lawyer said, “Mr. Dunbar is offering this confirmation. Three years running, he received forty-five hundred dollars from someone he believes was with Subsurface Resources, Inc. And yes, we do assume that restitution will be part of whatever agreement we make here.”
CHAPTER 11
Nothing happened in Lydia’s murder case for several weeks. Presumably the troopers were still investigating the Aaron Pursley matter, and I assumed they had brought Pursley himself in for questioning. But if they found anything, they didn’t tell us about it. Pleasant Holly returned to town. She’d been in D.C. for a nationwide meeting of U.S. attorneys. Henry and I briefed her.
Lizzy, it turned out, liked my idea about having Ethan bike along with her when she ran. They were living in Turner with Flora, biking and running every day. Ethan was starting back at the university in a couple of weeks. Lizzy was taking a gap year. She’d had big ideas about traveling and volunteering on distant continents, but with a new boyfriend, and now with Lydia’s murder, she didn’t seem in any hurry to leave.
Tina and Henry were both holding their own.
And me: Several mornings a week, I went to the pistol range for twenty minutes before work; a few evenings a week, I’d take ZZ to Rokeby Park, where I recorded license plate numbers in the parking lot and kept an eye out for suspicious characters. Between times I was immersed in the Subsurface matter. It was an exciting case, a big case. The grand jury was cranking out subpoenas and indictments. They had just subpoenaed Bud Billman, the CEO of Subsurface Resources, Inc.—our main target, the
quarry, the trophy that we all wanted stuffed and hanging on the wall. We had also subpoenaed Jimmy Mailing, the Subsurface “fixer” who had been acquitted of burgling the EPA offices.
I often took work home. Tina and I shared an office on the third floor of our house. We each had a desk. Hers looked out the front window. The house is on a hillside, and she could see the sprawling city across the river and the rooftops of the Aponak and, slightly to the west, Rokeby mill buildings. Her desk is always tidy and clear. She keeps on the desk only what she is working on at the moment. My desk is different. I have two, actually, one pushed endwise against the wall and the second at right angles abutting the outside end of the first. It creates a cul-de-sac, a harbor where I have everything close at hand. Tina calls it my cockpit. “Are you planning to be in your cockpit all evening, or are you going running?”
It’s nice when we’re both working there in the evening. Barnaby is in bed a floor below; ZZ is snoozing on the rug and occasionally thumping his tail as he chases bunnies in his sleep. We like to work with the overhead light off, just our desk lamps creating two commingling spheres. I’ll often watch Tina when she’s at her desk, her back toward me. Sometimes, in the reflection from her window, she sees me watching her, and several times this unplanned game of peekaboo has ended in the bedroom. But not so much anymore.
I was in our office one evening a week after Henry was questioned about Aaron Pursley. Tina put Barn to bed, then came upstairs with her briefcase.
“I had a habeas petition denied today,” she said.
“Which case?”
“Devaney.”
“Grounds?”
“Exhaustion. The judge says we still have a remedy in state court.”
“Do you?”
“Yes and no. The DA keeps coming up with procedural obstacles, so we tried going to federal.”
“What obstacles?”
“Chain of custody, statute of limitations, harmless error, absence of a constitutional error. You name it. It’s been going on for years. The guy languishes in prison, and the state won’t let us test for DNA.”