by Lee Goodman
“No,” Tina said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. Lyd loved him, we cared about him, Barn loves him. Maybe I even loved him a little. When we were in hiding together, I understood why Lydia loved him. Honestly, I did. And if Lydia was so wrong, and I was so wrong, then I have no idea what to think about anything. Like . . . like who is Henry? Who are you? Who is Chip, or Ethan, or Upton? And if I follow that far enough, I end up thinking, Who am I? Who is Lizzy or Barn? I feel like some junior high schooler discovering, I don’t know, sex or marijuana or e. e. cummings and realizing I never knew anything about life till this moment. You know? It’s crazy-making, Nick. And all I can do is keep the TV on to create noise, and to work my cases and play with Barn and try not to think about any of it. But you’re making me think, goddammit. So what I need you to do, sweetie, is I need you to talk about something else and eat dinner with me, and take Barn for the night if you need to—though I’d rather you not, but it’s your night, so you can if you want—and then go away, but call me up in the morning so I know you’re still alive, and Barn’s still alive, and I’m still alive. And you can ask me in the morning if it’s okay for you to come over for coffee, but you need to be okay with it if I say no. Can you do that?”
When I go home after dinner, I leave Barnaby with Tina. But in the middle of the night, I get up and drive over to park outside the house.
If Tina and I survive all of this as a couple, I’d love to take her someplace special. Italy, Hawaii, or maybe Baja, where we could see whales. Or the Galápagos. Yes, she’d love the Galápagos. I’d love the Galápagos. Barn would love the Galápagos: It doesn’t get any better than giant tortoises and seagoing iguanas when you’re four or five years old. Maybe Lizzy could come, too, and she’d take Barn off our hands for a few days so Tina and I could split the difference between a family vacation and a late honeymoon. Maybe if I offer to pay for Ethan . . .
These thoughts are triggered by staring down at the earth from thirty thousand feet. It always makes me sentimental, especially when I’m alone. And I’m alone on this trip, winging off to the annual conference of the FLSPC (Federal, Local and State Prosecutors Coalition) in San Francisco.
As I suspected, Gregory Nations doesn’t want my fingers in his pie, but having won that tiff with Monica, he now feels compelled to parade me around as a way of gloating his victory. “Nick, I have another press conference,” he said a few days ago. “Come stand with me.”
I did. It was awful. Rather than giving him the gravitas of federal enforcement, I felt like stage dressing. From now on, I’ll keep my distance. And in furtherance of that intention, I decided to get out of town for the week.
Henry Tatlock’s prosecution won’t be a complicated trial. The state’s case will look something like this: Kyle’s mother will take the stand to talk about her son going missing, and about the search, and about their family’s torment. Arthur Cunningham will talk about finding the body. Expert witnesses will talk about recovering and analyzing the DNA. Someone from the FBI will describe matching the crime scene DNA to Henry Tatlock in the national CODIS databank, which collects DNA profiles from all perpetrators in violent crimes. Gregory Nations will ask the FBI witness why Henry happened to be in that database. Monica will object because it refers to Henry’s expunged juvenile record, which is inadmissible. Gregory will shout. Monica will shout. The judge will shout. The jury will be removed. Everybody will shout some more. The judge will rule. The jury will be brought back, and the judge will instruct them about what to disregard and what not to disregard. The state will rest, and Monica will put on an unsuccessful defense that neither negates the DNA evidence nor overcomes the emotional testimony of Kyle’s family. The jury will convict, and then, sometime later, there will be a sentencing trial.
I fall asleep. I wake up when we start the descent toward San Francisco. I am scratching my cheeks. It’s Tuesday. I didn’t work yesterday, except to spend an hour on the phone with Gregory Nations’s DNA guy. Last Thursday and Friday, I had no important meetings and no courtroom appearances. I haven’t shaved since last Wednesday. Nearly a week.
I’m still groggy as we come gliding in over the bay. I doze in and out. We bank around. Looking out the window, I see the spires of the Farallon Islands far offshore. They look like shreds of a fantasy hovering in the mist. I know of the Farallons from a report Lizzy wrote in middle school about great white sharks. A population of them likes to stop by the islands every year to enjoy the annual seal-pup smorgasbord.
Now we bank the other way, and I can see Alcatraz right in the middle of the bay. It hasn’t operated as a prison since the early sixties, but the buildings are still there, stark and ugly. It is nightmarish. I’ve read a bit. I know how the bureau of prisons operated a boat—a water taxi for the damned—taking prisoners out to Alcatraz and, in significantly fewer cases, returning them to the mainland at the end of their sentences. In drowsiness, I imagine myself captain of that unhappy ferry, transporting load after load of transgressors to their new life of exile, isolation, and futility.
Why do I imagine this? Why not imagine myself captaining a boat out to the Farallons, where, though the waves on its beaches turn crimson whenever sharks are on the hunt, at least it’s not about captivity? It is about the dramas of nature, not the pathologies of man.
Or the Galápagos: Why not captain a boat to the Galápagos? I’ll fill it with Barn and Tina, Lizzy and Ethan, maybe even Flora and Chip, and in happy familial sublimity, I’ll transport them all out to Alcatraz . . .
No, not Alcatraz: the Galápagos.
I wake up again when our wheels hit the tarmac.
CHAPTER 40
The conference badge has my name and city in letters too big to be missed, so I keep it in my shirt pocket and show it only when needed. It turns out I need it a lot, because a six-day growth of beard has me looking like nobody’s image of a federal prosecutor. Sorry, sir, attendees only in this area.
I skip the afternoon keynote and the evening reception. I go to my room, change into dirty jeans, a stained T-shirt, and an ancient fatigue jacket. I take a cab to a section outside the Tenderloin District.
I saw Tony Smeltzer in court once, but it was over seven years ago, and I was sitting back in the gallery. The likelihood of his recognizing me is nil, but for good measure, I take an eye patch from my pocket and put it on. Then I walk into Fog City Tap.
It isn’t what I expected. I had in mind a place like the Elfin Grot back home, where I’ve gone a few times to connect with a guy who was connected into the underworld. But where Elfin Grot is dark and reeks of spilled beer, cigarette smoke, and the body odor of nighttime drinkers who pack its narrow, low-ceilinged space, Fog City is bright and open and smells of charbroiled burgers. It is on the second floor, above a plumbing supply store. The altitude gives a view of the bay and the city lights through big windows. There are two pool tables.
I take a stool where the bar bends around the corner, so I can see the door and most of the room. My damn eye patch throws me off, though. I keep moving my head around to compensate. The bartender puts a cardboard coaster down in front of me. “Drinking?”
“What’s on tap?”
“Right there.” He points to a chalkboard on the wall behind the bar. It’s a long list of microbrews. Some names are familiar, most aren’t. I pick one: “Wet Snout Stout.”
“My favorite, too,” he says.
It isn’t that I don’t trust the Bureau and the local agent who sussed out Tony Smeltzer and deemed him a nonissue. It’s just that things don’t seem to be tumbling into place quite right. I don’t doubt that Henry killed Kyle Runion, so I don’t doubt that he could have killed Lydia, too. But the fact that they haven’t nailed Henry for Lydia’s murder leaves the possibility, however tiny, that someone else killed Lydia. Tina is my wife and I love her. Since I’m a law enforcement professional (albeit the white-collar kind) and I know a few things about how these people think and work, and since the FLSPC was meeting in San Fran th
is winter, and since Gregory Nations wants me as far away as possible, I decided to fly out here to this barstool and decide for myself whether or not Tony Smeltzer is, as the local FBI agent claimed, a feckless and sickly, washed-up ex-con who is letting bygones be bygones.
Unfortunately, whatever Smeltzer’s intentions, they don’t include a drink at Fog City tonight. After three beers in three hours, I drop some bills on the bar and head for the door.
“See you again, buddy,” the bartender says.
I sleep late and get to the conference about nine in the morning. I attend a seminar on social networking for prosecutors, a yearly update on SCOTUS rulings, a discussion on prosecuting elder abuse, and another on injuries in infants and children. I browse the exhibitors’ booths. I’m not interested in any of this right now. What I am interested in is anonymity (because how do I explain to anyone why I’ve shown up without shaving for the past week?) and in not getting worn down by too much listening and talking, because I need to be sharp and alert for my evening of barstool sitting.
Fog City again. I sit on the same barstool, and my friendly bartender slides the coaster in front of me and says, “Wet Snout Stout?”
“Please.”
I feel good here. He brings me my beer. “Anything to eat, buddy?”
“Yeah, a burger?”
“How?”
“Medium.”
“Fries?”
“Definitely.” I sip my beer. A little later, a waitress comes over with the burger and fries. Later, when the bartender brings my second beer, I reach across the bar and offer my hand. “Nick,” I say.
He shakes. “Malcolm.”
We exchange snippets of conversation for two hours. After a third beer, I put some bills on the bar—the tip is generous—and I leave.
In the morning I sleep late again, then attend two seminars (“Identifying, Recovering from, and Preventing Burnout in Emotional and High-stress Jobs” and “Reaching Out to Your Public”).
I get to Fog City earlier this time. I sit on the same stool. Malcolm points at the tap. I nod. He draws the beer and brings it over with a coaster. “How was your day, Nick?”
“Unremarkable. Yours?”
“Awesome. I surfed all morning.”
A half hour later, Tony Smeltzer comes into the bar. I recognize him before I can see his face. He has that drooping shoulder and sideways walk. He joins some guys at a table. When I get a look at him from the front, I see his soft oval face and bulging eyes. I stare at him, willing him to turn and look at me, but he doesn’t, so I call the waitress over. On a bar napkin, I write “Ellisville,” and I say, “Tell that guy over there I’m buying his next drink, whatever it is, and give him this.”
A few minutes later, Tony Smeltzer is on the stool beside me. “I don’t recognize you,” he says.
“I was in transit,” I say, “coming out of Alder Creek on my way to Leavenworth. I was only in Ellisville for, like, a month. I’m Nick.”
“Tony,” he says. “But I still don’t remember you.”
I tap my eye patch. “I didn’t have this. But I remember you. You got that shoulder thing.”
“You live here?” he asks.
“I guess I do now. I got a brother here.”
He is silent for a few moments, then says, “Well . . .” And he stands up.
“Wait,” I say, and in a quiet voice so nobody else can hear, “I’m, um, looking for something to get involved in. You got anything going on?”
“Shit,” he says.
“Or do you know of anything?”
“I’ll tell you what I got going on,” he says. He lifts his shirt. There’s a bag strapped to his stomach. “This is what I got going on. They pulled out half my plumbing, but not soon enough. Chemo is what I’ve got going on: puking, drinking Pepto, and shitting out a hole in my stomach is what I got going on.”
“Whoa. Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to—”
“Soon as I got out of Ellisville. I’m not so old, you know? I could still do some things. I’m smart, you know? And career people always used to tell me: They’d say, ‘Tony, you got management potential.’ ” He makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “So I could have done stuff. Had a family. Been in charge of something. But no. Before my feet even hit free ground, I could feel my insides going haywire. Fucking prison docs missed it back when it wasn’t too late. You know?”
“Jesus, that sucks,” I say. “When did they, um, you know, operate?”
“When? It was last June, but that’s not the point. The point is, to hell with them all: To hell with prison docs, COs, everyone. Hell with all that cold weather back there, hell with the rotten stinking economy back there, hell with the junk and the users and the suppliers. Hell with cops and lawyers and judges and inmates. Hell with bitches who say they’ll stick around but don’t. You know? Hell with you. Hell with me.”
I say, “I know what you mean, brother.”
“No, you goddamn don’t know what I mean. When you’re like this”—he taps his stomach—“and like this”—he shows me bandages on both arms from IVs—“then you’ll know what I mean. But I’ll tell you this, man: If you find some action and you need a guy, come get me. I was going to try straight, I shit you not. Keep my ass out of trouble. But the hell with that. I’ll do anything now. I don’t care. It’s not like I got anything to lose. I’ll go in with barrels blazing and not think twice. Because if you ask me, it’s better than a long walk on a short pier. You know? Go out with gusto. Am I right? Better than a walk on the Golden Gate. Right? Halfway across and all the way down. And I’ll tell you this: It’s sure as shit better than what’s in store. Tubes sticking out every hole I got and a few extra besides. You know? So come find me if you hear of something and you need a guy. I don’t care what the hell it is, I’m in.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Do that,” he says. He gets up and goes back to his table.
“You ready for another?” Malcolm asks.
“No. I’m good. Do you know that guy?”
“Tony? He’s here a lot. He’s always venting. But he’s not a bad guy. He buys rounds. He tips good.”
I toss the eye patch into a trash can outside Fog City. At the hotel, I take a shower and shave. Smeltzer didn’t kill Lydia. The poor schmuck was just out of surgery for a colostomy, and he certainly wasn’t dragging women off into the woods and shooting them. I’m not worried about him. I doubt Tina still holds a spot anywhere near the top of Tony’s long list of hated people.
CHAPTER 41
Trial. News vans with telescoping microwave antennas park in front of the state court building. Judge Ballard has announced a ban on cameras in the courtroom, but reporters and cameramen populate the hallways looking for anyone to interview.
Yesterday was jury selection. Monica Brill tried to exclude anybody who had experienced a violent crime or sexual assault, either themselves or through a friend or relative. She excluded anybody who had recently lost a loved one or who had ever lost a child. She excluded anybody who watched horror movies and anybody who worked in child protection or law enforcement and anybody with young children at home. Gregory Nations excluded anybody who, either themselves or through a friend or relative, had experienced a disfiguring injury. The judge excluded anybody who had read about the case or who knew any of the lawyers, cops, or likely witnesses. And he excluded anybody with ethical objections to capital punishment.
Now, the first real day of trial, I look at these twelve jurors and two alternates. They’re curious and nervous and eager to do the right thing. Each of them thinks of himself or herself as more insightful, more ethically balanced, and more earnest than the other thirteen. Each of them either pays attention to no news at all or only to national news. They know what DNA is but have no training in either human genetics or forensic science. They believe themselves capable of understanding a discussion of probabilities. And they all claim to be able to judge someone on the evidence regardless o
f the way the person looks.
Among the fourteen of them, there are five college degrees, one graduate degree (fisheries management), two GEDs, six women, eight men, three African-Americans, three retirees, no Asians, two Hispanics, four divorcées, no Native Americans, four of predominantly northern European descent, four of predominantly southern European descent, one of Eastern European descent, no Australians or South Pacific Islanders, no Scandinavians, one stamp collector, five with some degree of obesity, two with health concerns that could require brief absences from the courtroom, one who confesses to a drinking problem, two who work in retail, one in food service, two in office work, two in construction, building trades, or labor, none in factory work, none in health professions, two unemployed, and two in management.
Gregory gives his opening statement: The state will prove that Henry Tatlock kidnapped and killed Kyle Runion.
Monica gives her opening: The defense will prove he didn’t.
Gregory and I are getting along okay because a few days ago I declined my seat at the prosecutor’s table. He doesn’t have to worry about my elbowing in on his moment in the spotlight, and I don’t have to worry about putting up with his suffocating self-aggrandizement. Though I’m sitting in the gallery, as far as the judge is concerned, I’m allowed into the club anytime there’s a conference between judge and lawyers.
Gregory’s first witness is a police detective from Orchard City, where Kyle Runion lived. He talks about getting the call regarding a minor who was several hours late getting home from school, and about mobilizing the missing child response procedure, and about how his department pulled out all stops trying to find Kyle. Gregory does a good job directing the detective through all this, eliciting a description of the urgency and emotion when a child goes missing, and I find myself picturing the whole thing. I picture police cars screeching up in front of the house and the school and the bus stop. I see tracking dogs hurried to the scene and given items of Kyle’s to sniff. I picture high-intensity lights set up in the field to look for clues, I see detectives and officers hurrying in and out of the Runion home without knocking and without wiping their muddy shoes on the mat. I see Kyle’s parents sitting in shock at the kitchen table as relatives and friends arrive. I picture cops knocking on the doors of friends, teachers, and neighbors.