A Blind Eye

by G. M. Ford

  “Mama was nearly forty when he was born,” Corso said.

  “Lotta birth defects with mothers that age,” Rosen said. “Maybe that explains—”

  A noise from the woods brought the conversation to a halt. They hunched their shoulders and froze. Everyone ceased breathing and turned their attention toward the surrounding thicket. Waiting. Scanning the maze of twisted branches for any sign of movement. Another crack. This time farther away. And then another.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Corso said, taking Dougherty by the elbow and hurrying toward the path. They hustled along the fence line in silence. Wasn’t till the car came into view that anybody exhaled. Once inside, they got giddy. Making fun of their own imaginations as Corso backed out into the road. The kidding stopped when they saw the red and black Studebaker pickup truck blocking the road. Silence.

  “Uh-oh,” Rosen said.

  When Tommie de Groot stepped out of the truck holding his rifle in both hands, Corso thrust himself out from under the steering wheel and began to crawl over the seats toward the luggage in the rear. He was lying across the tops of the seats, shaking the clothes from his bag, when he heard the door swing open. He turned just in time to see Rosen step from the car and raise his open hand. “Young man,” the professor began, “I assure you that we—”

  De Groot never removed the cigarette from the corner of his mouth as he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Before the sound of the report, before the eye could register the muzzle flash, the back of Dr. Rosen’s head came off in a high-pressure spray of blood and bone and brain matter. The impact drove him one staggering step backward before he crumpled onto the road, his legs twisted up under him, like a discarded doll.

  With one hand Corso reached for the door latch, with the other he groped for the zipper at the bottom of his suitcase. “Come on!” he screamed at Dougherty. “Get your ass back here!” She didn’t need to be told twice. By the time he’d opened the rear hatch she was there, hurling herself out onto the ground just at the moment when Tommie de Groot let loose with another high-powered round. The bullet shattered the wind-shield and passed so close to Corso’s head the shock caused his ear to go numb.

  De Groot had covered half the distance between his truck and the Ford and was raising his rifle again when Corso put his hand on Deputy Sheriff Cole Richard-son’s gun and then somersaulted out into the road. As he thumbed off the safety, another round rocked the car and then went whining out over their heads.

  Corso took a single belly roll out to the left of the rear tire and fired a quick shot de Groot’s way. In the instant before he rolled back to cover, he heard the sound of metal slamming into metal and the unmistakable tinkle of broken glass. He put his chin on the ground and, from beneath the car, looked up the road. As he’d hoped, the feet were retreating. He reached over and pulled Dougherty to his side.

  “I think he’s leaving,” he whispered.

  Corso jacked himself to his knees and peered around the corner of the car just in time to see the red and black Studebaker throwing rooster tails of black earth into the air as it roared in a circle and disappeared from view.

  Dougherty grabbed his belt. “Dr. Rosen,” she said. Corso looked deep into her eyes and shook his head slowly. “No way,” he said, dropping to her side and taking her in his arms. They lay on the wet earth and listened to the sound of the truck as it slowly faded to silence. Only then could they hear the ticking of the Ford’s engine and the pecking of the drizzle on last season’s leaves.

  20

  Handcuffed, a person pretty much has to either lean forward or lie down on the seat, which was exactly what Corso had been doing for the better part of three hours when the cop jerked open the door and instructed him to sit up and turn, so his handcuffs could be removed.

  “It’s about fucking time,” Corso groused.

  The cop admonished Corso for both his language and his attitude as he removed the steel bracelets and stowed them in his pocket.

  Corso was still barking at the cop and rubbing his wrists when the other door opened and Dougherty slid into the backseat beside him. She started to speak, but Corso darted his eyes around the car’s interior and shook his head.

  She got the message. “Ah…”she said. “How about a little fresh air?”

  They got out on opposite sides of the car. “All right if I stretch my legs?” Corso asked the nearest Bergen County deputy.

  The deputy looked to his partner, who shrugged. “Hollister said to let ’em loose,” the second guy said. “Why not?”

  “Just don’t get lost,” the first guy said. “The brass is gonna want to talk to you guys again.”

  Corso and Dougherty walked side by side. Slowly. Silently. Working out the kinks all the way to the far end of Fredrikstown. Other than the town’s trio of streetlights, the place was completely dark. The town had closed its eyes and turned its face aside, as if to say these weren’t their people and therefore it wasn’t their problem. Mindin’ their own business appeared to be what the locals did best.

  Dougherty turned her back to the assortment of county and state police cruisers that littered the parking area. “I think we’re gonna ride,” she said in a low voice.

  “What makes you think so?” Corso asked.

  “They checked us out every which way but up,” she whispered. “They called people I supposedly listed as references on a bank loan I never even took out.” She paused for effect. “We checked out, Corso. Top to bottom. It was un-fucking-believable. Every damn person they called gave us a clean bill of health.” She reached out and bopped him playfully on the shoulder. “I don’t know where you got that ID from, man, but it was killer…absolutely killer.”

  Corso grunted and rubbed at his wrists.

  “You see the ambulance come by?” she asked.

  He nodded. It had taken Bergen County Rescue nearly three hours to bring Randy Rosen’s body down from the mountain. Corso’s guess was that the forensics team wouldn’t let the medics touch anything until they’d finished their business.

  About an hour ago, the orange and white lights bouncing off the cruiser’s headliner had brought Corso upright in the seat long enough to watch the aid car lead a grim procession down to the world below.

  The way Dougherty’s eyes turned down at the corners told him where this conversation was heading. “I was thinking,” she began in a small voice.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he interrupted. “No way we could’ve—”

  “Shut up, Corso,” she snapped. “I need to talk this out. So just listen to me and shut the fuck up.” Corso stopped rubbing his wrists and stuffed his hands in his pockets. She took a deep breath. “I can’t help feeling that man is dead because of us,” she said. She waved a hand in the air. “I know what you’re gonna say. How we’re all responsible for ourselves. How he was old enough…” She looked over at Corso. Her eyes were beginning to fill. “What is it you always say? After a certain age a man becomes responsible for his face.” Corso turned away. She was starting to lose it. “He didn’t have a face, Corso. It was all gone. It was…” The image left her momentarily speechless. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. She walked out from under it. “You’re gonna have to explain to me”—she began to sob—“how it is we’re not responsible for that poor man’s death…how that’s possible…how he wouldn’t be alive right now if we hadn’t come into his life this morning.” Her voice filled with anger. “Come on, man, tell me. Make it all better for me. That’s what you do, isn’t it. You make it all better?” She caught herself yelling. Looked back over her shoulder at the cops, who’d stopped bullshitting and were now staring in her direction. She shuddered in the night air. Hugged herself. “Sorry,” she said.

  He waved her off. “No, you’re right. If it weren’t for us, Dr. Rosen would be sitting in his living room, eating take-out Chinese or something.” He ran both hands over his face. “I don’t know if we were responsible, at least not in the way I use the word, but we s
ure as hell were players. That much is for damn sure.”

  “That’s not what you were supposed to say,” she whined.

  “I thought you hated it when I try to fix things.”

  “I do,” she said. “Except now. Now I wish—”

  “I should have picked up on it,” Corso said.

  “What was that?”

  “Rodney de Groot was scared. I thought maybe he was worried about Tommie…like maybe in a paternal way or something like that. But he wasn’t. He was scared of what Tommie might do if he knew we were looking into the death of his family. That’s why he got so uncomfortable so quickly and wanted us out of there. He was scared for all of us, himself included.”

  The front door to the post office opened, spilling a jumble of voices out into the night. A pair of New York State policemen stepped onto the porch.

  “What’ve they been doing in there all this time?” Corso asked.

  “Checking us out and arguing over jurisdiction,” she said. “This place is in New Jersey. Rosen was…”She brought a hand to her throat. “The shooting happened in New York.”

  “Who won?”

  “Jersey,” she said. “They got the college president out of bed. Rosen’s got a mother in a nursing home down in south Jersey. The state cops are sending somebody from the college down there to tell her in person.”

  “Hey…you two,” someone shouted. Back at the cop car jamboree, the Bergen County deputies had been joined by a phalanx of multicolored state and county policemen who’d emerged en masse from the post office, where they’d been holed up for the past hour and a half. Corso and Dougherty began to wander that way.

  “The one in the tuxedo and the long coat is a New Jersey State Police lieutenant namea Hollister. Everybody kisses his ass like it was candy,” Dougherty whispered. “He’s the one threw his weight around and made sure Jersey got the case.”

  Lieutenant Hollister’s sartorial splendor suggested that he’d been socially engaged when he’d received the call. The pained expression suggested that there was a Mrs. Hollister somewhere, that she hadn’t been amused by the interruption, and that her husband had a pretty good idea who was going to pay for the indignity.

  The Rockland County Police and the New York staties said their good-byes and started for their cars. When Hollister began to walk toward Corso and Dougherty, the New Jersey contingent followed along in his wake.

  He introduced himself to Corso. He offered a hand, which Corso ignored. Half a dozen engines sprang to life. The misty air was crisscrossed with streaks of halogen. They stood and watched as the New York cops rolled out of the parking lot and back down the hill.

  “Sorry things took so long,” Hollister said. “You get something like this, something right along state lines, and all of a sudden a situation that ought to be simple turns out to be ticklish.” When he looked at the red-faced sergeant on his right, the entire New Jersey delegation began to study their shoes. “You combine the jurisdictional mix-up and the fact that the locals aren’t exactly forthcoming, and you end up with first-class cluster fuck.” He nodded deferentially at Dougherty. “Excuse my French, Miss Dolan,” he said. “I’m a little off my feed tonight. I was at the theater when the emergency call came through.”

  His eyes again lingered on the sergeant and then moved to Corso and Dougherty. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to be,” he said. “Preliminary reports from the lab say the scene played out pretty much the way you two say it did.” He stepped closer to Corso, put a hand on his elbow. “Only thing I’m still a little unclear on, Mr. Falco, is you moving the body from one place to another. You want to clear that up for me?”

  “He went down in the road,” Corso said.

  The bullet had taken Randy Rosen just under the right eye, busting out the socket and removing most of the back of the skull on its way out. Corso had carried the corpse in his arms like a sleeping child. His hands shook as he set the body among the damp weeds along the side of the road before getting back behind the wheel.

  Hollister twisted his head and eyed the Ford, which was parked in front of the store with the pair of bullet holes in the windshield. “That baby’s got a hell of a lot of clearance,” Hollister said. “You coulda—”

  “I wasn’t driving over him,” Corso interrupted. “Clearance or no clearance, the man deserved better than being driven over.”

  Hollister set his jaw and reluctantly nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean.” He sighed and began again. “From preliminary reports, seems Mr. de Groot has a history of psychiatric problems dating back to childhood. We’ve got an armed-and-dangerous out for Mr. de Groot and an APB on his truck. Something as exotic as a Studebaker truck we ought to be able to turn in a hurry. In the meantime, I’m going to send you two down to the barracks in Ramsey to make your formal statements. I’ve got a very unhappy stenographer on her way in right now.” He looked to his left. “I’m going to send Trooper Paris here with you, to make sure you don’t get lost on the way. You make your statements, you leave us information so we can find you when we need you, and you can go on your way. That sound okay to you?”

  They said it was. Dougherty was still shaking Hollister’s hand when they first heard the sound and everybody started doing the Chicken Little thing up at the sky. First the roar of the engine and then the whopwhop of the rotor blades slapping the air. Then the bright lights from above and the downdraft as the chopper began its descent. By that time, everybody had turned away from the hail of airborne debris and covered their faces with whatever was handy. The black bird landed among the remaining cars, the whine of its turbo deepening as it came to rest, the blades turning slower and slower until finally they came to a stop and the door swung open.

  Three suits emerged at a lope. By the time they hit the ground, lights had begun to show all over Fredriks-town. Curtains parted, people stepped out front of their houses as reticence was overcome by curiosity.

  The lead guy was about Hollister’s age, shorter and thicker, with a thick black helmet of hair that had to be dyed. He pulled a small leather case from his inside jacket pocket and let it flop open right in front of Hollister’s nose. “Special Agent in Charge Angelo Molina,” the guy said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  Hollister gave the ID a quick perusal and then pushed the hand out of his face. “What the hell is this?” he demanded. “I just got the goddamn jurisdiction settled with the New York boys. What interest could the Bureau possibly have in this?”

  “You called in for an ID on the weapon?” Molina asked.

  Hollister looked over at the sergeant, who nodded vigorously.

  “So?” Hollister said.

  Molina looked to one of his minions, who produced a piece of paper and handed it to Hollister, who turned his body so he could read it in the streetlight. As his eyes traveled down the page, his scowl deepened. When he looked up again, his jaw was set like a bass. He dropped his hand to his side and then pinned Corso with a look that would have burned a hole in a brick. “Damn good thing you boys got here when you did,” he said to Agent Molina. “I was just about to let this cop-killing son of a bitch go.”

  21

  I already told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  Corso stared straight ahead. He winked at the indistinct shadows huddled behind the black glass. “I bought the documents from a street peddler in Karachi,” Corso said. “Guy named Abdul.”

  “Abdul, huh?”

  “Garcia.” Corso spelled it. “Abdul Garcia.”

  “And you figured that was his real name?”

  “Guy looked honest to me.”

  Special Agent Fullmer was about thirty. Despite elocution lessons, his southern drawl kept leaking into his sentences. Despite careful combing, the back of his head was beginning to show the telltale signs of baldness. So was his patience. He flung a handful of documents at Corso. They floated to the floor like plastic leaves. “And you’ve never heard of an organization named Melissa-D. That’s
what you’re telling me?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Corso said. “Everybody in the news business has heard the stories. But that’s all they are…stories. There’s no such thing. I know a woman in Sandpoint, Idaho, named—”

  “Shut up!” Fullmer screamed. He walked over and stood behind Corso. “I’d like to wipe that smirk off your face, Mr. Corso. I truly would,” he growled.

  “I’m right here, Special Agent Fullmer,” Corso said. He rattled his manacles. “What say you get me out of this belly chain and give it a try?”

  His partner, Special Agent Dean, was pushing retirement. The bags beneath his eyes said that allnighters like this were getting too hard for him. Probably why he got to play the good-cop role. Lot less energy expenditure that way.

  “Don’t worry about it, Gene,” he said. “Wisconsin gets him up to that supermax at Boscobe, somebody’ll wipe that smirk off his mouth with a shitty dick.” The older man levered himself to his feet. “Besides which, his girlfriend’s already given us everything we need. We can’t hardly get her to stop talking.”

  Corso laughed out loud. Fullmer leaned into his face. “You think that’s funny, do you?” he screamed. “Funny, huh, do you?”

  “She wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire,” Corso said. “So why don’t you just hold the bullshit and do whatever you’re gonna do. Far as I’m concerned, the party’s over. You guys are getting to be a pain in the ass. My attorney’s meeting me in Wisconsin. Until that time, I don’t have anything more to say to anybody.”

  Fullmer’s face was so close Corso heard the ear-piece squawk. He watched as the agent straightened up and listened to the voice in his ear. Fullmer looked toward the black rectangle, frowned, and then listened again. “Let’s go,” he said to his partner. Dean headed straight for the door. Fullmer detoured over to Corso. He reached over and jiggled the chain that ran from Corso’s manacles down through a steel eyebolt in the floor. “Stick around, Mr. Corso,” he said with a grin. “We’ll be right back.”