Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  I go to Tina and give her a hug. “Great work, babe,” I say.

  She responds with a tepid one-arm hug. “Thanks. I think it went okay.”

  Peggy comes and stands with us. She has a small handbag clutched against her waist. It seems incongruously dainty against this hefty woman, whose eyes are comically magnified behind thick lenses. She is different than the last time I saw her. With the DNA results, she has been stunned by the first blinding rays of optimism. It must be terrifying.

  I step away to let the two of them talk. Craig is gone from the room. Too bad. I wanted to introduce myself to him. I was going to shake his hand, hold on to it too long and squeeze too hard, and stand too close, holding his hand near my stomach, breathing on him, and being all inside his personal space. But he slipped out. The coward.

  Lizzy met with Calvin Dunbar. She calls me up, full of excitement. “He was so nice,” she says. “He explained the whole process to me. I took civics, like everybody else. I thought I knew stuff. But I guess I didn’t know anything about how it really works. Back-scratching. You know? What Calvin said—get this—he said that except for how there’s no smoke anymore, the smoke-filled rooms are as smoke-filled as ever, metaphorically speaking. Isn’t that great?”

  Lizzy chatters on about her meeting. She’s as happy as I’ve heard her in a long time. She feels grown up and useful. She says she’ll write up her notes for me. We make a plan to meet for lunch the next day, when she’ll “debrief” me.

  Chip calls. “I just forwarded you that report,” he says.

  “What report?”

  “From the SF station. You know, when they investigated Tony Smeltzer?”

  Smeltzer. I’ve scarcely thought of him since the DNA results from Kyle Runion’s murder. We had thought he killed Lydia and was after Tina. We were wrong. Now he was just a dead letter. I open the email from Chip. The report comes up with a couple of photos. One is an old mug shot, the other was surreptitiously snapped by the agent who investigated Smeltzer. Doughy face with eyes that are hooded and bulging. He reminds me of the old actor Peter Lorre. The report says Smeltzer got out of Ellisville back in January, showed up in San Francisco in April, and spent some time in a hospital there in June.

  The report states that Smeltzer hasn’t left the Bay Area since he first arrived. He had surgery for colon cancer this past spring, and his health appears frail. He has a job working in an auto parts store just outside of San Francisco, and he spends much of his free time in a local bar called the Fog City Tap. Occasionally, he’ll find a woman to leave with. The reporting agent, a guy named Laird, says he engaged Smeltzer in conversation and they shot some pool together. “The subject makes no bones about being fed up with everyone and everything,” Laird writes. “He makes frequent reference to taking a walk halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge one day soon.” According to the report, Smeltzer headed for the West Coast after getting out of Ellisville because the feds had nabbed both the stash and the cash when they arrested him years ago. Apparently, some of his old crowd has heartburn about that loss of assets, so Smeltzer figured he’d keep his distance.

  Lizzy and I meet at the Rain Tree. The place is packed. We stand inside the door, waiting for a table. Several parties are ahead of us, and within a few minutes, several more come in behind. New arrivals blow warm breath into their hands and stuff woolen hats into overcoat pockets. Wow! Brrr!

  Steve, the owner, comes over in his wheelchair. “Sorry for the wait, folks. We’ll seat you as soon as we can.”

  He spots me in the crowd and we exchange nods, then he goes over to the hostess and says something to her before rolling away to wherever he came from. A minute later, the hostess comes up to me and says quietly, “Mr. Davis, your table is ready.” Lizzy and I follow her to a table for two over by the windows.

  “Geez, Dad,” Lizzy says.

  I shrug modestly.

  We order a small pot of clams as an appetizer. Steve brings them on a tray balanced across his prosthetic knees. “Davis,” he says. We bump fists.

  “Thanks for the table.”

  He brushes the comment away with a flip of his hand.

  I say, “I’d like you to meet my, um . . .” I glance at Lizzy. She looks professional. She has obviously prepared for this meeting and wants be taken seriously. Her clothes are businesslike, her hair is brushed, and she wears a touch of mascara and muted lipstick. (Who is this girl?) She has a black folio in which, I assume, are the notes and the report she has prepared for me. In her left hand she holds a pen, dexterously twirling it through her fingers in a way I’ve never mastered.

  “I’d like you to meet my associate, Elizabeth Davis,” I say to Steve.

  “Elizabeth,” Steve says. He holds up a fist and Lizzy bumps it. She smiles, and I try to think whether I’m surprised to see a mouth of even white teeth instead of silvery hardware and colorful rubber bands. The passing of time made more sense to me back when I saw Lizzy regularly throughout the week. Now that she’s living full-time with Flora, weeks pass without a meeting in person. I haven’t gotten my mind around the new Lizzy.

  “Associate?” Steve says. “An associate with the same last name. And it looks like you and her are from the same cookie cutter, different batch.”

  “You caught us,” I say. “Lizzy’s my big sister.”

  “Daddy,” she says, and in her smile, I imagine the ghost of those braces. How many years have they been gone?

  “Anyhow,” Steve says, “honored to make your acquaintance, Elizabeth,” and he leaves us.

  Steve has done well with the Rain Tree. I hear him mentioned on the radio, and I see bits in the paper about his generosity to nonprofits involved in drug and alcohol rehab, social service projects, and veterans’ assistance. But his appearance hasn’t caught up with his economic and social standing. If he lingered in his chair on the sidewalk beside a tin can, you’d be tempted to drop coins into it.

  We finish the clams. I order a Reuben. Lizzy gets the Thai sesame salad with no chicken.

  “So, about Calvin Dunbar,” Lizzy says. “I’ve written up a report for you, just like a real investigator would.”

  “Aren’t you a real investigator?”

  “I don’t have an investigator’s license.”

  “Then let’s call you a consultant. They write reports, too. For now, how about you give me a narrative, and I’ll read your report when I get back to the office.”

  She takes her report from the folio. It’s inside a plastic cover, and I see it has a title page. She flips through. “The first thing is, I like this Calvin Dunbar guy. I can see how you two hit it off. He’s interesting.” She scans the first page. Reading it upside down, I see it says, “Background info on Source.” “He grew up in the South; went into the army after high school and trained as an airplane mechanic,” Lizzy says. “And he’s a diver. He went wreck diving in the Seychelles last year. I told him I was interested in diving, too, and he said maybe we could all meet up someplace for a diving vacation sometime. Anyhow, he went to college part-time after the service. Prelaw, but somebody offered him a job in insurance, so he went that way even though he was more interested in public policy. The statehouse thing—him running for office—it was a whim, he didn’t expect to win. Et cetera.”

  She looks up at me. “It’s sad he got involved in all that Subsurface stuff. He says it was so stupid. He didn’t even think of it as payoffs or anything. The Subsurface people liked him and just kept giving him money. So he ended up wanting to please them.”

  “You’re right, it’s sad.”

  “He really likes you, Dad. He says you treated him with respect and fairness. He never expected that. Anyhow, he even thought of killing himself when all this stuff came out and he felt so disgraced. But he says that was for cowards, so he decided to face the music.”

  Our meals arrive. Lizzy watches me bite into my Reuben. “How’s your cholesterol?” she says.

  “Are you planning to ruin my lunch, Liz?”

  “
Just saying.”

  I watch her with the salad. She has always been interested in nutrition, in a crunchy, hippie kind of way. She gets this from her mom. I used to make fun of her for it, but now that I’ve become a runner, I’m more interested in all her dietary notions.

  “So, about the legislation,” I say.

  Lizzy puts down her fork and pats a napkin against her mouth. “Some people wanted to raise taxes on the—quote-unquote—extraction and production of natural gas. And they get at the gas now by fracking, which is a whole ’nother ball of wax. But this bill didn’t address environmental stuff. Not at first, anyhow. It was all taxes.”

  “Who proposed it?”

  “A bunch of guys with backing from the governor. Their names are in here.” She taps the report. “Calvin says our taxes are way below the national average. Then Bud Billman and Subsurface Resources, Inc., started campaigning against the tax, and they wrote all these checks to legislators, and it got bogged down in committees and stuff.”

  “Which committees?”

  She taps the report again. “Here’s where it got kind of interesting . . .”

  Lizzy stops. Captain Dorsey has just walked over to us. He stands a few feet away, waiting for an opening to approach. Things got awkward between Dorsey and me when the troopers zeroed in on Henry and I still thought he was innocent. I haven’t seen Dorsey since before the DNA revelations.

  “Dorsey,” I say, trying to sound as if there’s no weirdness between us. “Where you been lately?”

  “This looks like a nice father/daughter lunch,” he says pleasantly. “I won’t interrupt, I just wanted to say hello.”

  “I guess you guys were right about Henry,” I say. “I should have listened.”

  Dorsey shakes his head at the sadness of it, his bald expanse sparkling with reflected light from the windows. “Very bad business,” he says. “You have my sympathy.”

  “Thanks, Captain.”

  “But I do want to give a little heads-up.” His eyes shift toward Lizzy. “If you could call me when you’re done with lunch.”

  “How about I just go to the girls’ room?” Lizzy says. She gets up and leaves.

  Dorsey looks around, spots an empty chair, and pulls it over. He sits, leans in close. “We’re working together with the Bureau on this Kyle Runion/Henry Tatlock thing. There were unsolved cases in other states: disappearances that looked similar to the Runion abduction. We tried to fit them to Daryl Devaney but never got anywhere. One of them actually took place after Devaney got convicted. So now we’re trying to fit them to Henry Tatlock.”

  “And?”

  “Expect a call from one of my detectives,” Dorsey says. He stands and slides the chair back where he got it. “Good to see you, Nick.”

  Dorsey leaves, and Lizzy is back a minute later. She senses the shift in my mood, and we eat in silence for several minutes.

  The waiter comes to take our plates away. “Did you save room for dessert?”

  “The cheesecake,” I say.

  Lizzy clears her throat, camouflaging the world “cholesterol” within the cough.

  “Second thought,” I say to the waiter, “just decaf. What about you, Liz?”

  “Tea, please.”

  “Subsurface,” I say to Liz. “You were about to say?”

  “Right. That first year, the tax increase has all the votes needed to pass, even though Subsurface was fighting against it. But at the last minute some rep nobody ever heard of tags on an amendment. The rules let them do that. And the amendment has all these environmental restrictions, even though they already decided against all that. So it got kicked back into a committee, and it was dead for the year.”

  “Who’s the representative who added the amendment?”

  Lizzy tapped the report once more. “His name is Porter. And the next year the very same thing happened again. Same legislator, same amendment, same result.”

  “Did you talk to Porter?”

  “Not yet. I called his office and left a message. I’ll keep—”

  “No,” I say, “you have to lay off of it for now.”

  “But, Dad, I—”

  “Liz, we think something big might be going on. Until we’ve figured it out, I don’t want you getting any closer to it. You can work with what you already have, but don’t go interviewing anyone new. Okay?”

  She scowls at me, and then she nods.

  CHAPTER 37

  Judge Matsuko denied Tina’s petition for a trial in the Daryl Devaney case. He wrote a lengthy opinion that talked about how Daryl had confessed and pleaded guilty and never filed any attempt to withdraw his plea or appeal within the time limits. Matsuko wrote: “. . . furthermore, seeing as there has been no constitutional error and no malfeasance on the part of the state, our focus shifts from protecting the defendant to protecting the criminal justice system itself . . .”

  It went on discussing the importance of finality, and of the crushing burden to the court system if all convictions became “negotiable.”

  Tina is stoic. “It’s pretty much what I expected,” she says.

  I am over at “our” house, picking up Barn for a father-and-son Sunday. Barnaby is in the living room, watching cartoons. Tina and I drink coffee in the kitchen. I look through the mail on the kitchen counter while we talk. I’ve already been upstairs to get some clothes, all the while scanning the landscape for evidence of my new nemesis, the Muppetish, granola-crunchy, wife-stealing playground monitor named Craig. I’ve found nothing.

  “You expected to lose?” I ask.

  “Definitely,” Tina says. “Matsuko would be way out on a limb. If somebody is going to overturn this ‘conviction,’ he’d much rather see the state supreme court do it. Or the federal court. If you study this decision, he kind of gives a blueprint for how the next court should decide in Daryl’s favor.”

  I’m amazed. I hadn’t appreciated how strategic Tina was. When she says that Matsuko provided a blueprint, what she isn’t saying is that she provided him the pieces of that blueprint in her brief and her argument. She apparently knew just what she was doing, knew she was going to lose at the superior court and was setting up the game for the next round.

  “More coffee, Nick?” She comes over with the pot and fills my cup. This second cup of coffee is a good thing. She’s inviting me to linger.

  What the fuck is going on with you and Craig?

  I almost say it. I’m aching to say it. She is a clever legal strategist, mother of the best little boy in the world, and wife of an adoring husband who is head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and former nominee to the U.S. circuit court of appeals. And while I may be kind of bovine in tending to the emotions of my fair feminine flower, I think I’m trainable. I think I’ve shown myself willing to learn, to listen, to strive. Would she trade me in for him, captain of nothing but a third-grade classroom? Really?

  I hold my tongue. No sudden moves. No demanding she give me answers. As with Tina’s strategy for Daryl Devaney, I must play with my eye on the next round. While that may be how appellate lawyers think, it isn’t how we trial lawyers think. We want to be up in everybody’s face. We want to shout, wave our arms, put on a show.

  I manage to hold myself back. “Good coffee, babe,” I say. “Are you going to appeal within the state system or habeas back to federal court?”

  “Not sure,” she says. “Probably state.”

  I nod. I wish I could stay here, talk legal strategy in the kitchen with Tina, play Chutes and Ladders with Barn. Maybe all of us go out for burgers later.

  Barn and I had a good day. We did some shopping, went to the library, where I read him a zillion books, then went “home” to Friendly City. I made him dinner and put him to bed.

  Morning now. I consider playing hooky and hanging at home with Barn, but there is way too much going on at the office. So I drop him at day care, and I collect a hug and a kiss before releasing him into the melee.

  I’m back at the FBI for a confer
ence. Upton and I arrived together. Isler is here. Chip plays host, pouring coffee for everybody. Gregory Nations is here, too. Philbin and Sabin show up. I say, “Hi, Philbin, how you doing? I guess you were right about Henry, and I was wrong.”

  “Forget about it,” Philbin says. “The guy was family. Nobody expects you to be objective when it involves family.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I look at Sabin and say, “Hi, Rachel.”

  I’m watching Philbin out of the corner of my eye. I can tell he notices this bit of familiarity and lodges it in his mental file cabinet. Obviously, I’m enjoying strutting my new, special friendship with Sabin. Then, like a slap, I realize he’s probably not the least bit surprised. Rachel Sabin might have told him all about our meeting at the Rain Tree, and about our walk in Rokeby Park—how she took my arm, holding on to me, rubbing her shoulder against mine as we crossed the ice and made our way slowly back to the cars, and how the cadence and pitch of her voice changed as we walked—from crisp and businesslike to warm and confidential—and how the change in her voice was timed to the tightening of her hand on my arm and the slowing of her pace. She probably told him, too, how my voice had changed in response to hers, and how my hand came up briefly and squeezed her hand where she held my arm.

  They were playing me again. I can’t believe I fell for it twice. I’m just their listening device inside the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Damn them both. I turn away and sit at the conference table. “Let’s get this started,” I snap to nobody in particular. “I’ve got work to do.”

  Chip brings us all up to speed. The investigation of other juvenile abductions is federal because it involves interstate crime. Chip summarizes what they know of those other disappearances and how frustrated they’ve been, trying to develop a lead. He gets into a lot of detail, but I have trouble following. I’m not sure if my problem is that I’m so angry after realizing that Rachel, this smart, attractive, age-appropriate woman who befriended me at the moment of my marital upheaval, is using my woebegone state to play me like a fiddle. Or maybe I’m put off by what I’m hearing from Chip. It’s too horrible. The man who was my friend, colleague, and very nearly my brother-in-law not only killed Lydia and committed unspeakable acts against the innocent Kyle Runion, he apparently also traveled to other states to pick up other boys who were never heard from again. A year before Kyle disappeared, a kid in Ohio disappeared, a seven-year-old named Nathan Miller. Another case: a boy from New Hampshire. Although the Bureau hasn’t been able to put Henry in Ohio or New Hampshire, neither can they exclude the possibility.