Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  She talked to him about how two different men, Daryl Devaney and Henry Tatlock, Arthur’s twin brother, had been convicted of the crime. “Did you ever think about coming forward to save either of these innocent men?” she asked.

  “Why would I do that?” Arthur asked, genuinely confused.

  When the woman asked if he had known anything about Henry Tatlock before the DNA results became public, Arthur said, “My mom told me I had a brother who died when the house burned.”

  “After Henry Tatlock’s DNA was linked to the boys you killed, didn’t you figure out that he must be your identical twin?”

  Arthur shrugged again. “Guess I didn’t really think about it much,” he said.

  I’d watched one of the first interrogations of Arthur. Now, a couple of weeks later, it seemed he was regressing. He had obviously been intelligent: He’d been able to carry out these crimes and not get caught, and then he’d sat through Henry’s whole trial. But now he was becoming more and more infantile. He seemed to have trouble understanding questions, and his answers were childlike. The psychologist probably has an explanation for this, but I haven’t asked her yet.

  “Your name was Arthur Tunis,” the psychologist said, “but you changed it to Cunningham, is that right?”

  “Yes. My mother’s maiden name.”

  “Why did you change it?”

  Arthur looked around the room for a few seconds, and he looked at his hands and finally said, “My dad was a mean person. That’s why.”

  He didn’t say any more. Another interview was scheduled for the next day, but late that night Arthur Cunningham twisted a sheet around his neck and cinched it tight.

  CHAPTER 62

  Nighttime: It has been two months since the verdict in the Henry Tatlock trial. Tina and Barn and I are leaving for the cabin in the morning, but tonight I’m at Friendly City. I’m trying to sleep, but the combined effect of a thunderstorm and the mischievous wanderings of my thoughts keep me awake.

  I love thunderstorms, and I wish we were already up at the cabin, where I could hear the rain on the roof and see lightning lighting up the hills. I force my lids closed and pretend I’m there. But now everything is aloft in my mind like a flock of starlings startled from a bush: Henry, Daryl, Lydia, Philbin, and yes, Rachel Sabin.

  I expected to be gone from Friendly City by now, but Tina and I seem to have hit a snag. Something spooked her. I’m trying to figure out what went wrong, both in the short term and in a bigger time frame. I’ve taken it on faith that it was mostly my fault, though Tina claims it was hers, and the counselor tells us both to get over it. Anyhow, I’m stuck in the mental labyrinth of figuring out what “getting over it” means in the context of my life at this moment. There are all these new realities to accommodate, and ever-present dangers to guard against. Bygones are not always bygones. Call me paranoid: Calvin Dunbar and Arthur Cunningham may be gone from the equation, but if there is anything I’ve learned, it is that evil can come at you from any direction at any time. So the first item on my to-do list is (metaphorically) barricading the door against any further trauma during the delicate period of Tina’s and my rebuilding. I don’t know what barricading the door consists of. Maybe it means that if I see something coming, I hurl myself between “it” and “us.”

  The next item on my list, and the one I’ll spend the rest of my life pursuing, if necessary, is to be a friend to Henry Tatlock.

  I don’t think Henry blames me for believing he was guilty. In fact, I wonder if he questioned whether a dark shadow from his own soul—some unrecognized demon living within his body—might have killed Kyle. DNA doesn’t lie; he must have wondered. Maybe he wonders still. Maybe he thinks of Arthur Cunningham not as a separate being but as that dark shadow, a part of himself that cleaved off in the nick of time: one self to take the fall and the blame and the death, the other to persevere.

  My campaign to win back Henry’s friendship won’t be easy. He doesn’t want me for his friend now, and maybe he never will, but I’ll try. I’m not sure why it’s so important to me. I have to admit, I wonder if it’s selfishness: Am I simply wanting to believe that traumas can be overcome—that bad things can pass and life can get back to normal? Whatever. My campaign to regain Henry’s friendship will be glacial and constant and one day, I hope, successful.

  At about ten-thirty, I give up trying to sleep. I leave Friendly City and drive toward my house. I want to be near Tina and Barn, consoling myself that I really am father and husband, and that for tonight, at least, the Arthur Cunninghams and Calvin Dunbars of the world are held at bay.

  I pull up in front of the house. The office light is on, but within a few minutes it goes out. I wonder if Tina looks out the window for me before going to bed. I have had the feeling that she is aware of my frequent vigil.

  The pestering thoughts that didn’t let me sleep at Friendly City are quiet now. I can feel Tina and Barn nearby. The rain on the truck roof is constant; crescendos of thunder come along intermittently. It’s comforting. I pull the sleeping bag over me and doze, but I wake up when a car drives past. I’m slumped down against the door. The cab of the truck is dark. I doubt anyone can see me. I go back to sleep. Then awake: another car. Or the same car a second time. And now a third time.

  The fourth time, it stops and parks on the same side of the street, maybe fifty yards in front of me. It’s an old beater of some kind, but in the darkness, I can’t make out any details. After about five minutes, whoever is inside opens the door. The dome light comes on. It goes dark again and nothing changes. Something doesn’t feel right. I reach into the glove box for my Glock and flashlight.

  I watch.

  A few minutes later the door of the car opens again. No dome light this time. A figure gets out, seeming unfazed by the rain. It goes toward the house, and even in the dark, I recognize the gait. It’s a sideways walk, one shoulder lower than the other.

  I get out of the truck. He doesn’t hear me. I angle toward him. “Hello, Smeltzer,” I say in a voice just loud enough to reach him. He startles and turns toward me. “Unfinished business?” I ask. He has no idea who I am. I don’t know if he can see my gun or not. I shine my light in his face. It’s him. He has come to kill Tina. After everything we’ve been through, it seems unfair that more evil has come calling. In a flash of thought, I wonder if it is something about me, something in my soul that calls to monsters like Calvin and Arthur and Tony Smeltzer. I wonder if I somehow beckon this evil to my loved ones—to Tina, Barnaby, Lizzy, Lydia, and Flora. I want to roar. Rage rises inside me, rage that this convict trespasses on my home where Barnaby, in slumber, tries to reclaim his already corrupted innocence; my home where Tina struggles to extract herself from labyrinthine traumas; my home where even I am not allowed to show up unannounced. But Smeltzer, this putrid piece of shit, trespasses here to visit his rage-fueled vendetta upon my family? To make the extermination of my loved ones the final act of his worthless, toxic existence?

  I shoot him. He falls. The crack of my gun is lost in the sounds of the storm. I walk over to him.

  “How?” he asks.

  I don’t answer. He dies.

  I drag him into the street. He can’t weigh much over a hundred pounds. The colon cancer has done its work. He was planning his farewell: He would kill Tina, and perhaps some others on his list, with his last bit of strength. He was probably hoping to end it all with suicide by cop. I position him right in front of Kenny’s truck. With headlights off, I drive forward until he’s fully concealed underneath.

  I sit in the truck trembling. I feel something I have no words for. With this act of gunning down Smeltzer, something has been severed. Ended. Maybe what I feel is no more than a flood of endorphins or dopamine, but tears stream down my cheeks. I welcome them, and I sit for some time in this perplexing euphoria that engulfs me like a mist. Maybe it is joy. I would love to stay like this forever, mythic guardian of all that is precious: I am perched atop my slain enemy, watching over the home where my loved
ones sleep.

  It is probably no more than a few minutes before I shake myself free of the reverie. Something needs to be done. I pick up my phone to dial 911. But I stop.

  I have to think it through.

  There will be an investigation. I’ll be cleared, of course; even if it turns out Smeltzer has no gun, I’ll get every benefit of the doubt. But there will be an investigation. Everybody will know that another assassin paid us a call. Tina will know. Lizzy will know. And whether he learns of the actual events or not, Barnaby will feel the reversal of our desperate attempts to recover normalcy.

  I will lose Tina. She will careen back into the mental whirlpool of another near miss, another reminder of her own mortality and of her sister’s murder and of our unceasing vulnerability. She must not know that this man—who’s supposed to be shark shit in San Francisco Bay—came back from the dead to hunt her down. I don’t want to be her hero. She wants no hero, she wants stability and consistency and safety.

  It could damage Lizzy, too: She will retreat again, perhaps irretrievably this time, into her fears.

  And Barnaby: One more trauma, one more land mine on the disturbed path of his childhood, could prove catastrophic. I wonder what the triggers were that sent Calvin Dunbar and Arthur Cunningham and Tony Smeltzer careening so far off the path of decent behavior. I must protect Barnaby at all costs. I must protect him from becoming them.

  There must be no investigation. Nobody can know about this.

  Upton doesn’t answer his cell. I call on his landline and wake him up. “Who is it?” he says. “What’s going on?”

  “Upton, it’s me. I need your help.”

  We lift Smeltzer into the backseat of his own car. “I know some guys,” Upton says. “They’re waiting for me.”

  He gets into the driver’s seat. “I’ll follow you in the truck,” I say.

  “No, you don’t,” Upton says. “Go back to your hotel. It’ll be taken care of.”

  “Upton, I can’t let you—”

  “You can’t stop me,” he says. “I’ll come back for my car later. If anybody ever asks, I spent the night on your couch at Friendly City.”

  “But it’s my mess . . .”

  “Which is why you need to be as far from it as possible.”

  He drives away. I go back to Friendly City. I’ll never learn what happens to Smeltzer’s body. Upton will protect me.

  In my room at Friendly City, I shower and change and go to bed thinking that I’ll never sleep. But I sleep like the dead.

  In the morning I carry my things down to the truck, then I drive home and stop in the very spot where, just hours before, I sat in the truck above Smeltzer’s corpse, waiting for Upton. The day is promising. Tina and Barn and I will be at our cabin up north in a few hours. Lizzy and Ethan will meet us there. Maybe Chip and Flora will show up, too.

  I get out and walk toward the house. The door opens, and Barn runs out and jumps into my arms. “Daddy, you’re late.”

  “Sorry, Barn.”

  Now Tina is at the door. I put Barnaby down.

  “I was thinking about you last night,” Tina says.

  “I was thinking about you, too.”

  “Actually, I was missing you,” she says.

  “Likewise. Actually.”

  “It will be nice, all of us being together at the lake, now that everything is settling down.”

  “Yes,” I say. “It’ll be wonderful. Now that everything is settling down.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Daryl Devaney and Tina Trevor are fictional characters, but the Innocence Project is real. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the development of modern DNA testing finally made it possible to prove innocence (or guilt) years, and even decades, after a crime was committed. But as the character Nick Davis says, “The justice system doesn’t treat kindly continued claims of innocence once the jury has ruled and appeals have all been exhausted.”

  The Innocence Project was founded at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1992 to “assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing.” It is now a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization. Over the past twenty years, lawyers for the Innocence Project and its network of organizations have continuously chipped away at all the obstacles preventing the reversal of wrongful convictions, but it is still (as Nick says) a Sisyphean task.

  At the time of this writing, DNA evidence has been used by the Innocence Project and its network of organizations to free 316 wrongfully convicted prisoners, 18 of whom spent time on death row. The average time of incarceration for these vindicated prisoners is about thirteen years. Also, many other wrongful convictions have been reversed through the work of the Innocence Project on grounds other than DNA evidence. Learn about the project and read some of the stories at www.innocenceproject.org.

  LEE GOODMAN’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, where it received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize in fiction, and in Orion Magazine. Goodman is also a screenwriter and a former attorney. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and has taught fiction writing at the University of Alaska and Interlochen Center for the Arts. He has two children and lives in Alaska, where he operates a commercial salmon fishing boat during the summer.

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  Indefensible

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Lee Goodman

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  First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition September 2015

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  Cover images © iStockPhoto; Stockbyte/Getty Images

  Jacket Design by Pete Garceau

  Jacket Photographs: White Tiles © iStockPhotos

  Shadow of Person Walking © Stockbyte/Getty Images

  Author Photograph by Ted Goodman

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goodman, Lee.

  Injustice : a novel / by Lee Goodman. —First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3607.O577I55 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2014045974

  ISBN 978-1-4767-2803-2

  ISBN 978-1-4767-2806-3 (ebook)