by Unknown
She approached his office cautiously and rattled on the jamb with her fingers. He looked up, his eyes gleaming in the shadows.
'Ms Parver,' he said with a nod.
'You busy?' she asked.
He thought about that for a couple of seconds and said, 'Yeah. I'm working real hard at being relaxed. I'm into sudden-death overtime at doing absolutely nothing.'
'It can wait,' she said, and started to leave.
'Too late,' he said. 'Come on in here and sit down. What's on your mind?'
'It's about the Stoddard case,' she said, looking across the chaotic mess of his desk. She noticed, lying in front of him, a small tape recorder about the size of a credit card and perhaps half an inch thick attached to a fountain pen by a thread of wire.
'What about Stoddard?' Vail said.
'I'm not sure, I think the case is still loose in places. Some of it, I don't… it doesn't quite…' She stopped, looking for the proper word.
'Make sense?' he offered.
'Yes. I know you want a perfect case.'
'I don't expect perfection from us mortals,' Vail said with a wry smile. 'Perfection is a perfect sunrise on a clear day. A baby born whole and healthy. Mortals have nothing to do with it.'
'Some people…' she said, and then aborted the sentence.
'Some people what?'
'It was a bad thought. I shouldn't have started—'
'Some people what, Parver?'
She took a deep breath and her cheeks puffed as she blew it out.
'Some people say you only go to court when you have a sure thing.'
Vail thought about that for a few moments. 'I suppose you might look at it that way,' he said.
'How do you look at it?'
He took out a cigarette and twirled it between two fingers for a while. Finally he said, 'What I expect is a case without any holes. I don't want to get halfway through a trial and discover we're prosecuting an innocent person. I want to know they're guilty - or forget it. If that's playing it safe, so be it. On the other hand, if we know, if we're absolutely, no-shit positive that the party is guilty, like Darby, I'll send them to hell or burn out my brain trying.'
'Can we ever be that sure, Marty?' she asked.
'What do you mean?'
'I mean, if it's not absolutely open-and-shut, can we ever be sure?'
'We're sure about Darby.'
'You're going to make a deal.'
'Because we don't have a case yet. Even with old Mrs What'shername's fantastic auricle sense. Rainey will have the son of a bitch back on the street before the time changes. I told you at the time, better to get him off the street for twenty years than have him back at Poppy Palmer's bar with two hundred fifty K in the bank.'
'Maybe that's what they're talking about.'
'Who are "they"? Who've you been talking to?'
She shrugged. 'I swear I don't even remember. Some smartass young lawyer at the bar in Guido's.'
'Did it bother you?'
'Made me mad,' she said, her forehead gathering into seams.
'That's being bothered.' He laughed and after a minute or so she joined him. 'Who cares what those loudmouth suits think, anyway?' he said.
When their laughter had run its course, he fell quiet again. She looked across the desk at him and it occurred to her that she had never, since she had started working for him, seen him really blow up. When he was truly angry, he became the ultimate poker player. His face became a mask. He quieted up. Only his eyes showed anything. His eyes did the thinking. They became alert and feral. Otherwise, his attitude had always been typically Irish: either 'Don't sweat the little ones' or 'Don't get mad, get even.'
His eyes were alert and feral right now.
'What's bugging you?' she asked, surprised that she had asked the question and concerned that perhaps she had crossed the line between business and personal things. He stared almost blankly across the desk, not at her, at some object on the other side of the room. He put the cigarette between his lips but did not light it.
'Stampler,' he said after a while.
'Stampler?'
'I saw him today.'
'Why is he bugging you?'
'Because he's a liar. Because he's amoral and he knows it and he's comfortable with it. Because he's a psychopathic schemer and a killer and he's about to be set free on our turf and he already knows who he's going to kill and how and when. And he knows I know he's going to do it and there's not a goddamn thing I can do to stop him.'
Her eyebrows arched higher and higher as he spoke, and when he finished, she said, 'Ooo-kaaay.'
'Nobody else knows this yet,' he said. 'Keep it to yourself until I go public with it.'
'Is that what the tape recorder was for? I mean, is that legal?'
He stared down at it and then back to her. 'It's for reference,' he said, and ended that part of the conversation.
'What are you going to do about him?' she asked.
'If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be sitting here in the dark, I'd be over at Janie's scarfing down homemade spaghetti and thinking about what a lovely evening it's going to get to be later on.'
'Can I help?'
'Shana, you may have a short fuse and you may be hell on wheels in court, but this is not something you want to get involved in. This is not like looking at pictures of murder victims or going eyeball to eyeball with some drive-by shooter. This is devil's play and whatever innocence you still harbour will surely be destroyed if you come too close.'
She did not answer and a silence fell on the room. After a while she squirmed in her chair and cleared her throat and started to get up, and he suddenly sat straight up in the chair and snapped his fingers so loudly it startled her.
'Okay,' he said. 'Thanks for listening to that. I'm going over to Jane Venable's now and try to forget all of this for a few hours. As for Edith Stoddard, you're right. As Jane says, there's something wrong with the picture. Figure out what it is. I'd like to know, too.'
'Thanks,' she said, rather flatly.
'It's your case, Parver. Was there anything substantial you wanted to discuss?'
'No, just needed to talk, I guess, and here you were.'
'You want to talk some more?'
She smiled and shook her head. 'Nope, and I'm sure you don't, either.'
Vail stood up and stretched his arms. 'Absolutely right,' he said. 'Come on, we'll share a cab. I'll buy.'
'I'll pay my share,' she said, somewhat defensively.
'Hey,' Vail said, 'you want to be that way about it, you can pay the whole damn tab.'
Harvey St Claire watched the day dying through the farmhouse window. Near the edge of a pine thicket half a mile away he saw the beams of flashlights begin to dance in the dusk. They had been at the search for Poppy Palmer six hours.
'They're not gonna find her, Abel.'
'I know.'
'So why're we wasting time out here?'
'I could be wrong.'
Stenner had been seated at Darby's desk for two hours, painstakingly going through bills, mail, notebooks, everything he could find.
St Claire swung a wooden chair around and sat backward on it. 'No airline reservation. No cab ride. Her car's parked at the apartment -'
Stenner said, 'He could've driven her down to O'Hare.'
'No airline reservation,' St Claire repeated. 'And no sister in Texarkana.'
'To wherever she went.'
'No airline reservation -'
'Paid cash, gave a phoney name.'
'Her photo's been flashed at every ticket counter at the airport. Nobody recognized her.'
'Maybe she wore a wig.'
'You're a very strange guy, Abel.'
'I've worked for Martin Vail for ten years. You get to think that way after a while. It's the way he thinks. He hates surprises.'
'So if she ain't here and she didn't leave, where the hell is she?'
Stenner did not answer. He continued his boring chore in silence.
'Somet
imes I wish to hell I never heard of Miranda,' St Claire said. 'Sometimes I yearn fer a little Texas justice.'
'What is Texas justice?' Stenner said, and was almost immediately sorry he asked. He was carefully sorting through the stacks of opened mail on the desk. He had piled the day's delivery, unopened, on the opposite corner of the desk.
'Back when I was in the US Marshall's, this was, hell, eighteen, twenty years ago,' St Claire started, 'I got sent down to the Mexican border to sniff out a runner named Chulo Garciez, who got himself busted for running illegals across the border and selling 'em to migrant farms. Two of my best friends were carryin' him up to San Antonio and what they didn't know, Chulo's girlfriend had smuggled him a watch spring in a candy bar. Was a Mars bar, I think, or maybe a Baby Ruth.'
Stenner looked up at him dolefully for an instant and then went back to the mail.
St Claire went on, 'Chulo secrets this here spring in the back of his belt, knowing he would be cuffed behind his back in the back-seat of the car, and he picks the cuffs with the spring, reaches over the front seat, hauls out Freddy Corello's .45, puts two in his head, and empties the other four into Charley Hinkle, who was driving, jumps over the seat, kicks Charley out, pulls onto the verge, kicks Freddy out, and heads back to the border in the government car. They find it about ten miles from Eagle Pass right on the border. So I go down to the Border Patrol station in Eagle Pass and that's where I met Harley Bohanan, who was about six-seven and weighed two-fifty and made John Wayne look like a midget. Carried an old-fashioned .44 low on his hip, like Wayne.'
'Uh-huh.'
'I tell my story to ol' Harley and he says he knows Garciez and he is one bad-ass Mex and maybe he can help me and he puts me up in this awful goddamn adobe motel outside a town with roaches as big as wharf rats and no air conditionin'. Has a damn ceiling fan so big it'd suck yer eyeballs out. You had to keep your eyes closed when you laid under it.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Two nights later Harley is bangin' on my door at four in the mornin' and we drive out towards Quemado and right there on the river in a little boxed canyon there's a dozen wannabe wetbacks, all shot in the back of the head, stripping clean, even had their gold teeth knocked out. Harley is snoopin' around and suddenly he says, "One of 'em got away." Sure enough, we pick up some barefoot tracks and we follow them for a couple hours and finally come on this illegal cowerin' in a little cave in the desert. Poor son-bitch dyin' a thirst.'
'Uh-huh.'
'He tells us they were set up by a federalee captain name a… hell what was his name?… uh, Martino, Martinez, something like that, and a guy named Chulo, who was supposed to pick 'em up at the border and take 'em to find work on this side, only instead Chulo and the federalee started shootin' them. This fella just lucked out. Harley knows who this federalee is. That night we ford the Rio Grande - it's about a inch deep there - in his Jeep and the federalee is drinkin' in a cantina. We wait till he comes out and Harley grabs him like you'd grab a puppy by the back of the neck and throws him in the back of the Jeep and we drive back down to the river and he throws the Mex out into the river and then pulls down his pants. He pulls out that .44 and it don't have any front sight on it. Filed off. He goes into the chest on the back of the Jeep, takes out an old, dirty can of ten-weight motor oil, dips the muzzle of the .44 in the can, and then shoves this federalee down on the knees and bends him over and, as I stand here, swear't'God, sticks the muzzle of the pistol about an inch and a half up the federalee's ass and says, "Where's Chulo? I count't'three and I don't know, I'm gonna blow your brains out the hard way." '
'Uh-huh,' Stenner said, still examining the mail.
'An hour later we're outside a cantina on the US side. There's Chulo's truck and he's inside drinkin' beer and playin' with some little hot-stuff senorita and Harley pulls out a knife the size of Mount Everest and carves a hole outta the rear tyre on the truck. I stroll into the bar and order a Corona and I say, in Mex, "That truck out there's got a flat." Chulo gets up and stomps out the door, me kinda amblin' behind him. He goes to the back a the truck and he's leaning over examinin' the damage and Harley steps around from behind it with his .44 drawn and says, "Garciez, yer under arrest fer draft dodgin'," and Chulo jumps up and makes th' mistake of reachin' under his arm and kaBOOM, ol' Harley blows a hole through that sorry son-bitch you could drive his truck through. And y' know what ol' Harley says? "Costs twenty bucks a day to house a US prisoner and Chulo was lookin' at twenty years. Hell, Harve, we just saved the taxpayers about a hundred grand." That's what I mean by Texas justice.'
Stenner still did not look up from the bills and letters.
'That was some long story just to explain two words,' he said when St Claire finished this epic.
'Thought you'd appreciate the details,' St Claire said. 'Ain't like we're runnin' late for a ballgame or nothin'.' He walked to a window, threw it open, and sent a long squirt of tobacco juice out on the lawn.
'You were Darby,' Stenner said, 'wanted to get lost for a week or two, where would you go, Harvey?'
'I dunno. Hawaii. One of the Caribbean islands?'
'Can't afford it. Insurance company has him on hold, bank account's almost empty. He's surely maxed out his credit cards. And he was still here yesterday, mail's open.'
Stenner handed St Claire two phone bills. 'How about a little hunting trip?' he said. 'Red Marsh Lodge, on the Pecatonica River about eighty miles from here. Called them twice last month and just a couple of days ago, last entry on the bill that came today.'
He dialled the number.
'Red Marsh,' answered a soft-spoken man with a slightly Swedish accent.
'Yes,' Stenner said. 'We're friends of Jim Darby's, Mr James Darby? We were supposed to go on this trip with him, but we thought we had to work. We got off early. Is he still there?'
'He's down riggin' out his boat. Take me a bit to get 'im back up here.'
'No, we don't want to talk to him. We thought we'd drive on up and surprise him in the morning. Do you have a double open?'
'Sure do. Cabin eight, right next to him.'
'He's in seven?'
'Nine.'
'Good. Now don't tell him about the call, we want to surprise the hell out of him at breakfast.'
'You'll have to get here mighty early then. He's takin' the boat out to the blind at four-thirty. Wants't'be there at first light. Most of the boys do.'
'You have a boat rental open?'
'Sure do.'
'Hold that for us, too. The name's Stenner. A. Stenner.'
'Abe Stenner. Gotcha.'
'Right, Abe Stenner.' He hung up, looked at St Claire, and almost smiled.
'We got him,' he said.
Later that night, in bed, with Jane Venable nestled under his arm, one of her long legs thrown over one of his, and her breathing soft and steady in his ear, Vail thought how quickly and naturally their first furious lovemaking had turned into an untroubled, easy partnership. The passion was always sudden and furious and overwhelming, but there was also a sense of comfort when they were together. Perhaps it was because they were both in their forties and love - if that was what this was, neither of them had tampered with the word yet - was like finding some small treasure each of them had lost and both had given up hope of ever finding again. For the first time in years, Vail was thankful when the day was over, when he could flee the office and come to her and delight in her presence. He lay on his back, half smiling, and stared up through the darkness at the vaulted ceiling. But soon his thoughts began turning in on him and they drifted away from Jane Venable and back to Aaron Stampler - or Raymond Vulpes - or whoever the hell he was, and he thought: Not this time, you son of a bitch. You did it to me once. That time was on me. This time it's on you.
Twenty-Seven
The fog was so cotton-thick as they neared the marshes guarding the river that Stenner was reduced to driving at twenty miles an hour. He leaned forward, eyes squinted, trying to discern the white line down the middle of the country road. H
e had missed the turnoff to the lodge in the soupy mist and they had to double back, driving slowly along the blacktop road, flicking the lights between high and low so they could see through the earthbound clouds. Eventually they saw the sign, a small wooden square at the intersection of the main road and an unpaved lane that disappeared into the trees. They were running late, four-thirty having come and gone.
RED MARSH LODGE, it said in black letters on a mud-spattered white sign. A thick red arrow below the letters pointed down the dirt road. Even on low beam, the headlights turned the fog into a blinding mirror and they crept through the forest on the winding, rutted road for almost two miles before the rustic main building of the lodge suddenly jumped out at them through the haze.
Quarter to five.
Walt Sunderson, a heavyset Swede with a florid complexion and a thick red moustache that dropped down almost to his jaw, stepped out on the porch of the log cabin. He was dressed in overalls and a thick flannel shirt under a padded Arctic jacket.
'Abe Stenner?' he called out, the word sounding flat and without resonance in the thick grey condensation.
'Yes, sir,' the detective said, getting out of the car.
'Just missed him,' Sunderson said in the melodramatic cadence peculiar to the Swedish. 'Darby hauled outta here ten, fifteen minutes ago. I got your boat ready, though, and a map of the marshes and blinds. Won't take you hardly any time at all to get rigged out. You can unpack when you get back. Don't even have to lock your car.'
'That's right civilized,' St Claire said, shoving a wad of tobacco under his lip with his thumb.
'Got plenty hot coffee, you betcha, ready for you in a thermos. Hope you like it black?'
They both nodded. Although Stenner preferred a pinch or two of sugar in his, they were eager to get started. Stenner and St Claire retrieved two shotguns in black leather cases from the trunk. St Claire was wearing a fur-lined ammo vest, its slots filled with 12-gauge shotgun shells. Stenner stuffed another box of rounds in one of the pockets of his army field jacket while Sunderson got the quart thermos. He led them down a long, narrow floating deck.