by Lee Goodman
Whatever.
I’m halfway back through the door of the house, my slow and steady advance detectable only in time-lapse.
It’s springtime. The ice is off the lake up at the cabin. The days are warming and lengthening. Everything is settling down.
Daryl Devaney is a free man. In the wake of Henry’s conviction, Gregory Nations joined Tina in petitioning for Daryl’s full pardon. The petition was granted, and now Daryl’s civil lawyer is negotiating with the state for a hefty “wrongful conviction” award. Daryl may emerge from the whole thing a modestly rich man, which will be useful for him as he keeps paying lawyers to defend him in minor crimes like driving without a license and shoplifting. We’re hoping Peggy can keep him under control.
Peggy invited Tina and me down to Orchard City for Daryl’s coming-home party. I wish I could say we enjoyed it, especially since Tina, along with Daryl, was a guest of honor. But it was a sad affair. A few neighbors came, plus a few guys Daryl was in school with, and one elderly teacher from one of Daryl’s remedial classes in high school. Peggy rented a function room at the Orchard City Inn, and even though the room wasn’t large, the party felt as lost inside it as a BB in a boxcar. Peggy asked whether anyone had any comments to offer. One guy said something about remembering Daryl from school, then talked about his own children for several minutes, then said, “Let’s get drunk.”
Tina stood up and talked about Peggy’s perseverance and devotion to Daryl. To keep things going, I stood up and praised Tina for her dedication to the case. I talked about how she’d worked so hard, often late into the night, to “right this terrible wrong.” Then I said that now, though I was only meeting Daryl for the first time, I could see how her efforts were well spent and how certain I was that Daryl would put this all behind him and make up for lost time in living a good and happy and productive life. People clapped politely.
Calvin Dunbar is awaiting trial on three first-degree-murder charges. His gun, which was picked up at the scene in Flora’s kitchen, was identified as the weapon that killed Jimmy Mailing and Lydia. The NTSB is still hoping to locate the wreckage of Bud Billman’s plane, and possibly adding two more murders—Billman’s and his grandson’s—to the tally.
Over in the civil division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, several eagle-eyed lawyers are trying to find a way to get the five million back from the Seychelles. I have a personal interest in this because Tina, as executor of Lydia’s estate (and sole beneficiary), has brought a wrongful-death action against Calvin Dunbar. Tina says if she ever gets any money, she’ll probably put most of it back into the Innocence Project.
Rachel Sabin and I get together for lunch sometimes. She is respectful of my ongoing attempts to reconcile with Tina. She tells me Philbin is doing well: Since Henry was found guilty in state court and also charged in federal court, nobody even remembers Monica’s Hail Mary attempt to blame Philbin for the whole thing. Detective Philbin has emerged unblemished.
As for Lizzy, things aren’t all sunny. After coming so close to being another of Calvin’s victims, she got scared again and canceled her travel plans. Flora and I (along with Chip and Tina) are being attentive. We try including her in whatever we’re doing. I think she’ll be okay if we can keep her out of harm’s way for a change. She just needs to huddle a bit longer under the parental umbrella. She was always so smart and independent that she got ahead of herself. Mature and sophisticated though she is, she’s not quite done being a little girl. She is conflicted, though. She loved being my investigator/researcher, even though it almost got us all killed. She wants more projects.
Barnaby, too, is showing the effects of all this family trauma. He has bitten a few kids at preschool and has had a couple of tantrums that seemed to have no discernible trigger. We have him seeing a therapist who says he is responding to the stress the rest of us have exhibited. Secondhand PTSD, she calls it. It is absolutely essential, she says, to keep things as calm and predictable as possible. Tina and I have both reduced our work schedules to four days a week. She takes Friday off, I take Monday. So Barn is in day care only three days a week.
Chip and Flora are fine. Flora is resilient and shows no ill effects from her brush with Calvin Dunbar.
The Subsurface corruption probe is winding down. Not much has happened. A few legislators paid fines and are spending several months in jail. The public has lost interest. After the revelations about Calvin Dunbar, everything else is anticlimactic.
As for me, I’m mostly okay. But sometimes I wake up in the night in my bed at Friendly City, and my mind plays back to me when Sabin ran up the driveway and into Flora’s house covered in her own blood. I try to tweak this in my mind. I try assigning myself some role in that demented scene, because the awful truth is that Sabin concocted the scheme, drew the knife across her own scalp, and hurled herself into harm’s way, while I stayed safely back at the car. This gnaws at me. I want to have been the protector; the savior.
There’s one more postscript to the sorry saga of Lydia’s murder. It came yesterday in a call from Chip. “I’ve got more news,” he said.
“What news?”
“I talked to one of the agents from San Francisco,” Chip said. “City police just found an abandoned rental car in the parking lot at one end of the Golden Gate. Apparently, that’s a common thing, somebody renting a car and ditching it in the parking lot before taking the plunge. Turns out the car was rented to Tony Smeltzer.”
This made me unexpectedly sad. Not sad for Smeltzer, so much, he was bad news. Just sad at the futility of everything. Halfway across and all the way down, Smeltzer had said to me in the Fog City Tap that night. Poor guy. In my mind, the futility of his worthless life blends into all the other waste and sorrow. Now that he’s gone and apparently was never a threat to us anyway, I’m able to feel some pity for him.
“Did they find his body?” I asked Chip.
“Nope,” Chip says. “I guess the great whites got a free meal.”
This makes me uneasy, but I push the feeling aside.
And so it ends. The pathetic Tony Smeltzer has apparently written his own story, while the two monsters, Calvin Dunbar and Henry Tatlock, have been put away. The legacy of their crimes is hard to comprehend. So many lives are permanently changed by these murderers, and my family has borne the brunt.
CHAPTER 57
Lizzy calls me at work: “Dad, can we meet for lunch?”
“Definitely.”
“Rain Tree at one-thirty,” she says.
She looks great. Professional and confident. She has her briefcase with her, but I have no idea what she’s packing in it. We get a table and order clams. The springtime sunlight makes the river and the dam and the dining room look fresh and full of promise. That’s how Lizzy looks, too.
“About the sentencing hearing,” she says.
Henry’s sentencing, she means. It’s coming up in a few weeks. The only real question is whether he’ll live out his natural life as a wretched animal in a cage, or if the state will stick a needle in his arm and end the whole thing. Gregory Nations is asking for the death penalty because Henry refuses to give up any information about where he buried his other victims.
“Do you have a position?” Lizzy asks.
“No.”
“You could have a lot of influence,” she says.
Now I’m worried. I know this girl. She opposes the death penalty, and I know she wants to bring me over to her side. But I’ve already decided not to think about it anymore, and definitely not to get involved. I don’t have the stomach for it.
She’s right about my influence. Other than Judge Ballard, I probably have more influence over what happens to Henry than anybody. I’m a federal prosecutor, his former supervisor at work, and his former friend. I was nearly his brother-in-law. I’m family, and I am married to the lawyer who brought the Kyle Runion case back to light, which is what exposed Henry in the first place. Judge Ballard will make the ultimate decision, but he’ll want input (and cover). If
I take a strong stand at the sentencing hearing, my perspective could sway the decision.
“What are you proposing, Liz?”
“Lydia loved him,” Lizzy says.
“Well, that doesn’t justify—”
“Nobody’s talking about justifications. I’m just wondering what made him how he is.”
“Everyone wonders that, but . . .”
“We know he got burned in a fire and was abandoned at the hospital.”
“We do?”
“Yeah. He told me. They dropped him at the hospital and never came back. That’s got to mess with the head of a two-year-old. Right?
“He was two?”
“My God, Dad.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I asked him about his scars once. Didn’t you?”
“I, um, didn’t want to pry. But none of that justifies Kyle Runion,” I say. It’s a stupid comment, because that isn’t what she’s talking about. She’s talking about whether cruel blows dealt him at an early age triggered his psychopathic behavior, and if so, whether that’s enough reason for me to advocate life instead of death.
A couple of months ago, I’d have said absolutely not. I wasn’t interested in compassion, and I’d have happily plunged the lethal syringe myself. But that was back in the thick of things. Maybe I’m more objective now that Henry is put away and can’t hurt us again. I don’t feel as vulnerable.
But compassion?
My job isn’t about compassion. It’s about consequence and responsibility and protecting the public. Lizzy is the one with compassion: If a perp ever had so much as a hangnail, she’s all about how rough his life has been. She’s a pushover.
“What are you suggesting, Liz?”
“I thought I’d do some research. Maybe write something up for you to read to the judge.”
“Anybody can submit material,” I said.
“Really? I can submit it myself?”
“Sure.”
“Will you help me?”
Not in a million years, I think.
“Sure,” I say.
CHAPTER 58
I don’t know where to find Aaron Pursley, but I have an idea where to start looking. Pursley is the crooked, unlicensed investigator Henry hired in hopes of locating his biological family (or so he claimed). If that’s true, maybe Aaron Pursley can point Lizzy and me in the right direction.
I didn’t tell Lizzy I’m going to Rivertown, because she’d have wanted to come. I’m done bringing her along on my forays into the jungles of human corruption.
I know of a bar over in Rivertown: the Elfin Grot. It’s small and below street level, and on weekends it fills with the sounds of working-class drinkers trying hard to replace with beer everything that pours out of them as sweat and piss and revelry. I like the place. But now, midweek, it’s a different crowd. They don’t hang out; they pass through. The place is like a hub or a roundhouse for the comings and goings of people whose business, like the bar itself, is dark and subsurface. The place is long and narrow. Most of it is taken up with barstools and standing room, but there are a few tables in the very back. Business gets conducted at those tables.
I show up around five in the evening. I recognize the bartender from when I was here several years ago: a woman in her sixties, cadaverous, bluish hair. Maybe she owns the place.
“Huberly,” I say.
She squints at me. It’s not her name, but it will signal to her who I am, if she remembers.
“I need a guy named Aaron Pursley,” I say.
“I need a guy named George Clooney,” she says.
I think she remembers. That’s good. People here are suspicious of cops—federal or otherwise. But last time I came in looking for somebody, it worked out well. Maybe I won’t have to establish my bona fides again. I take out my business card and write on the back “About Henry Tatlock” and hand it to her. “If you see him, perhaps you could give him this.”
She takes the card. “Are you drinking?” she says. I wasn’t planning to, but cash needs to change hands somehow.
“Granddad. Neat,” I say.
She pours it. I down it. I drop fifty on the bar and leave.
Pursley calls me a couple of days later. I tell him what I want. He agrees to meet.
“Can I come?” Lizzy asks.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the guy’s a crook, and I shouldn’t be meeting him myself.”
I see her deliberating whether to argue. She doesn’t.
The Elfin Grot is nearly empty. Huberly eyes me from behind the bar and tilts her head toward the very back. Pursley is waiting. I immediately dislike him. It’s a pet peeve of mine: felons, crooks, and scumbags who wear business suits. Aaron Pursley wears a blue pinstripe. It’s conservative. His tie is silver gray. He stands and I shake. His hand doesn’t match the outfit. The hand is coarse, and he squeezes aggressively. He’s screwing with me. “Henry Tatlock: very unfortunate business,” he says.
“To put it mildly.”
“An acquaintance of yours?”
“He was.”
“And what do you want from me?” Aaron asks.
“I guess I want to buy out Henry’s contract.”
“Meaning?”
“Henry told me he hired you to find his biological family. I want whatever you found.”
“If I haven’t found anything, are you hiring me to continue the investigation?”
“No,” I say. I know what this guy does. He pays bureaucrats and functionaries to provide him with confidential information. He intimidates and threatens those who won’t play ball. When necessary, he hires someone to break in and get what he can’t find through other means. Now the rumor mill has it that he’s hooked up with some pimple-faced whiz kids who can hack their way into most anything. “I’ll buy whatever you’ve already got,” I say, “but I’m not interested in becoming your conspirator for more than that.”
This pisses him off, but he doesn’t walk away. I hold a few more cards than Pursley does. He knows that if I decided to investigate him, he’d be out of business, maybe even in jail.
He’s cockier than I expected, though. He sits all comfy in his fancy threads. He wears a knowing smirk, like he’s got something over me. Strange. Maybe the guy is protected somehow—why else would he feel safe taking Henry’s case when Henry was still a prosecutor? And why else would he be here with me? I know he’s not working for the Bureau, but maybe he’s a confidential informant for the state. A stoolie: I bet that’s it. I bet they have a deal with him that so long as he keeps it low-key and doesn’t commit any violent crimes, they look the other way.
No matter. I can’t do anything about it if he’s got a deal with the state, but if the guy is doing business by mail or Internet, then it goes federal. I can have Chip or Isler look into it. It would be great fun bringing him in for questioning.
“I ended up carrying a balance for my work with Mr. Tatlock,” Pursley says. “If you’ll zero that balance, I’ll consider you the client. I found a few things before his troubles began. Not a lot. Obviously, I discontinued my investigation when all that unpleasantness surfaced.”
“Obviously,” I say, mocking him.
He pauses to stare at me, then says, “Listen, Davis, you can buy what I’ve got or not. I don’t give a shit. But you’re starting to piss me off.”
I consider this. The reason I feel so free to annoy him is that I don’t really want whatever he’s got. I don’t want to know any more about Henry, I don’t want to feel compassion for the monster, and I realize now that I agreed to do this only to give Lizzy the illusion of my willingness without actually being willing. I’m intentionally disrespecting Pursley to drive him away so I can go tell Lizzy I’ve struck out.
Now, having glimpsed my real motivations and intentions, I’m stuck. If I don’t behave and make an honest attempt with Pursley, then I’m lying to Lizzy. Humble-pie time: “I apologize, Mr. Pursley,” I say. “I’m repulsed by Henry Ta
tlock and I’m taking it out on you.”
Pursley is gracious, which makes it worse. Now I’m hating myself for legitimizing the scumbag. “How much does Henry owe you?” I ask.
“Three hundred fifty should do it.”
I’m incredulous. I expected thousands. Maybe I’ve misread him.
“I never had to really do anything,” Pursley says. “No extraordinary measures.” (By which I assume he means everybody’s kneecaps are intact and no locks were picked.)
I hand him the cash and buy us both a drink. His is beer. Mine, again, is Granddad.
“Here’s what I know,” Pursley says. “Thirty-seven years ago, a kid of around two years old was brought to the ER at Milltown General. He had catastrophic burns on his face and hands. According to medical records, he should have died. Here’s the sick part: Doctors could see that the burns were a day old”—my contempt for Pursley diminishes a notch; he is apparently human enough to be repulsed by this stunning cruelty—“and whoever brought him in just vanished. Poof. Never seen again. And that’s why the first PI that Henry Tatlock hired didn’t find anything. There’s nothing to find.”
“But the police—”
“I’ll get to that. So the kid spent months in the hospital, then went into foster care, and after a few years, he got adopted. But who wants a kid that looks the way Henry looked and has all that medical shit going on? No, sir. Everybody wants a beautiful and healthy baby.”
“I know the rest,” I say. “He got adopted by a couple who were too old to adopt.”
“Done some research yourself?”