VC04 - Jury Double

by Edward Stewart

  “Just as well. Potato chips are loaded with additives and chemicals. I’ll tell you what is good for you, though.” He pointed to a display rack. “All-natural carrot chips.” He handed the boy a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “Why don’t you go get some?”

  They carried their bags across the parking lot. He unlocked the car.

  Captive heat spiraled out, carrying a stale smell of baked upholstery. He placed his grocery bags in the backseat. Soy milk. Organic eggs. Oatmeal. Green beans. Free-range chicken. Good stuff. All fresh, nothing frozen.

  He lifted the bags from Toby’s arms. This was the fun stuff. Fresh fruit. Yogurt. Organic rice crackers. Healthful snacky things.

  Toby just stood there.

  “Come on, kiddo. Hop in.”

  The kid’s eyes were tired. “Mom’s going to be worried about me.”

  “Mom knows you’re getting good wholesome food. Wait till you taste my barbecued chicken.”

  “How does Mom know what you’re feeding me? I’ll bet she doesn’t even know where I am.”

  He crouched, eye-to-eye, man-to-man. “Forget your mom—you’re with me.”

  The kid’s fists slammed into him. The unexpected force threw him back against the car. His butt slammed down against asphalt.

  Two cars down, he heard a woman’s laugh. Something contracted along his spine.

  Never, you tell yourself. I’d never hit a child. Never in a million years. And then you hear a woman laugh at you and every promise you ever made to yourself or to your shrink is dissolved.

  He pushed up and swung. Fist connected with skull and Toby, white face of shock, dappled red, was spinning away from him.

  “Toby—get your goddamned ass back here!” He chased the kid, but his left hip felt as though he was running with a thirty-pound hacksaw in his cartilage. Horns blared. Brakes screamed. Wheels skidded.

  He lunged and caught the kid in a bone-crushing hug and pulled him up onto the sidewalk. Shouting and kicking and punching, the kid struggled to pull loose.

  A group of shoppers from Leroy’s Discount Pharmacy stopped to watch, safely out of range of fists and feet.

  He threw them an annoyed grimace. “Slight family disagreement, that’s all. Please go away.”

  “Doesn’t look so slight to me,” a big woman in pink overalls said. “What’s that in his hair?” She stepped forward.

  The man shouldered her away. “Everything’s under control.”

  The woman touched a fingertip to the side of the kid’s head. She stared at her fingertip. Her features scrunched into a knot. “That’s blood!”

  “What’s going on?” someone shouted.

  “This kid’s bleeding!”

  “I’ve had a small disagreement with my son. It’s resolved. Now I’ll thank all you good citizens to kindly butt the hell out.”

  The kid reached out and caught the woman’s arm. “He’s not my father.”

  “What?” She searched the young face for some sign that this was a tall tale. She saw nothing but pain and a desperate, wide-eyed honesty.

  “Call a cop!” she screamed to the gathering crowd. “This man’s a kidnapper!”

  Lieutenant Bill Benton gave the kid time, let him tell his story in his own way.

  Every now and then Benton typed an observation into the computer. The computer shared desk space with framed photos of his wife and four-year-old daughter.

  “Tell me something, Toby. If he wasn’t your father, why did you go with him?”

  The boy gazed at him, blond hair tousled, face swollen and bruised and betraying absolutely nothing.

  The tape recorder clicked to a stop. Benton snapped the cassette out. He lifted papers, searching for a ballpoint pen to mark the label. The desktop was strewn with photographs and still-unread sections of last Friday’s Scotsville Journal.

  “Did he threaten you?” Benton asked.

  The boy gave an abrupt shake of the head. “No.”

  “Offer you money?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What was it, then?”

  The boy seemed embarrassed. “He said he’d take me hiking.”

  Benton grinned. “I guess you don’t get too much hiking in New York City.”

  “No, sir.” No grin.

  “That’s why you came to Scotsville.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s see if your mom’s home yet.” Benton lifted the phone receiver and once again tapped in the Manhattan number. The machine answered. He waited for the beep. “It’s Lieutenant Bill Benton again. We’ve got Toby. Give a ring.” He left his number again, and pushed up from his chair.

  The boy rose at the same time. Benton realized he was in the presence of manners.

  “You like magazines, Toby? We have a roomful.” Benton pulled open the frosted glass door. He spoke to the sergeant at the desk outside. “Herb, would you take care of Toby here? See he gets some magazines and a Coke or whatever he needs. And send Talbot in.”

  A moment later the man who claimed to be the boy’s father stepped into Benton’s office. He moved with a kind of defiant jock swagger and dropped into one of the Rutgers University–decal chairs. He shot Benton an openly sizing-up glance that was almost contemptuous.

  “Could I trouble you for some I.D.?” Benton said.

  The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a wallet as thick as his fist. He handed it across the desk. The wallet had a noticeable new leather smell. A ladder of credit cards swung free.

  Benton flipped through plastic windows, studying the faces that stared out at him. He angled the Gurney and Gurney company pass to the desk lamp. The photo glared with the same overfocused, angry brown eyes as the man sitting in his alma mater chair. Same tight lips. Hair shaved in the same skinhead cut. Benton wondered why the hell a businessman would want to look like a punk. “How long have you worked for Gurney and Gurney?”

  “Eighteen years.”

  “According to the date, your company I.D. was issued fifteen days ago.”

  “New I.D.s are issued annually in September.”

  “What brings you to New Jersey, Mr. Talbot?”

  “Annual vacation.”

  “Been to Atlantic City?”

  “Not yet.”

  If he was lying, if he was a freak preying on eleven-year-old kids, he showed extraordinarily careful planning to have a wallet full of fake I.D.s made up in the victim’s last name. “This driver’s license isn’t a month old.”

  “My driver’s license has a habit of expiring every four years, August twenty-seventh.”

  Benton ignored the sarcasm. It would be easy to lose the thread of civility; easy and a mistake. The man did not radiate trustability, but he could still be telling the truth. “I’m going to have to call your company.”

  “You’re not going to get an answer on Sunday.”

  “We’ll see.” Benton lifted the phone and tapped 9 for a line and 1 for long distance. He tapped in the Seattle area code and the cutesy company number ending in 1234.

  A machine answered, female. “You have reached the Seattle offices of Gurney and Gurney, attorneys-at-law. Office hours are Monday through Friday—”

  Benton pressed disconnect. “Is there anyone who can vouch for you? Someone at home maybe?”

  “I live alone.”

  Bill Benton swiveled in his chair. Outside the office window, the last sun of a perfect fall day reflected off the warehouse across the vacant lot. “Well, Mr. Talbot, looks like we have us a problem.”

  Cardozo typed the last words on the last of the blue triplicates: No further progress to report on this investigation at this time.

  It was an update on a tourist who’d been murdered outside an East 73rd Street singles bar in 1978. Cardozo pulled the report out of the carriage, signed it, added it to the inch-high stack.

  The phone rang. He lifted the receiver and propped it between his shoulder and ear. “Cardozo.”

  “Vince, it’s Tess.” She sounded antsy. “I thought you were go
ing to phone me.”

  “Was I? What about?”

  “That guy at the kids’ school—what have you found out? Was it Toby Talbot’s father?”

  “No further progress to report on Catch Talbot.”

  “I’m worried, Vince. I asked Mickey’s guard about Tuesday and Wednesday. Turns out Mickey had a window of opportunity both afternoons—two to five. And yesterday. Eleven-oh-five to one-fifteen.”

  Silence begat silence.

  “Something else bothers me,” Tess said. “He says Mickey has a pierced left ear.”

  “Does he look like the father?” Lieutenant Lars Fiumefreddo of the Scotsville police force was a big, practical man who smiled more and more as the months between him and retirement dwindled down. “Does he sound like the father?”

  “He and the kid have the same way of speaking.” Lieutenant Bill Benton glanced at the ventilation grille in the dropped ceiling, aware that it could carry voices out just as easily as it piped stale air in. “That’s about all. It’s a tone.”

  Lars Fiumefreddo’s eyes turned skeptical behind their thin, clean glasses. “You checked missing kids in Manhattan?”

  “I checked. Nothing. The kid’s eleven. Legally, that’s a person, not a kid, and they don’t list him till he’s been gone forty-eight hours.”

  Lars Fiumefreddo stared a moment at his coffee. “Worst-case scenario. You give the kid back to Talbot, and Talbot turns out not to be Talbot, and an abuser to boot. Or a kidnapper. Your worst case is unacceptable.” He laid the plastic spoon across an ashtray. “So you keep the kid in protective custody overnight. Tomorrow someone in Manhattan or Seattle will answer the phone and one way or the other you’ll have verification.”

  “And if Talbot is the father, he sues.” Bill Benton didn’t want it to be his wrong judgment call that spilled more red ink on the county books.

  “You’ve got reasonable doubt. The man was seen beating the kid. The kid says it’s not his father. I.D.s can be faked. You’re looking out for the kid’s welfare. Any judge or jury in the state would give you a medal.”

  It was dark in Bill Benton’s office. The big man who might or might not be Catch Talbot was sitting in shadow, so still that he hardly seemed to be there at all.

  Bill Benton flicked on the overhead light. He crossed to the desk. “You can go, Mr. Talbot.”

  The thin wood arms of the Rutgers chair creaked, taking all of the man’s weight as he pushed up. “Where’s Toby?”

  “Toby’s going to stay with us for the night.”

  The face darkened. “What the hell are you trying to pull?”

  “When we can’t make telephone confirmation, in a case like this, we prefer to play it safe. As a father I think you can understand.”

  The man stood regarding Bill Benton with no expression whatsoever, then turned and socked the door open and vanished.

  A sign in the Sixth Precinct on West 10th Street stated: ALL VISITORS MUST STOP AT DESK. There was no choice: the desk blocked the corridor. On the other side of the barricade, a half dozen uniformed cops drifted in and out of cubicles.

  “Excuse me,” Mark called.

  Experienced eyes deftly avoided his.

  Behind him, a bicycle fell over with a clatter. One of the cops, startled, looked around. Eye contact. “Help you?” The offer was grudging.

  “Yes, thank you. I’d like to report a—”

  “Excuse me.” A gray-haired woman rose from a chair. “I’ve been waiting twenty minutes.”

  “What’s the problem?” the cop asked.

  “I was walking down Charles Street, and this”—she held up a two-foot square of inch-thick plywood—“this falls out of the top story of 162 and almost kills me.”

  The cop shook his head. “You want Department of Buildings and Maintenance.”

  The woman was indignant. “It’s not a question of maintenance. Some idiot’s throwing crap out the window—they could hit a cop, for Chrissake.”

  “Ninety-five Jay Street, lady.” The cop scrawled the address on the back of a Chinese restaurant flyer and shoved it across the desktop. His eyes came around to Mark. “What’s your problem?”

  “I’d like to report a missing child.”

  “Child’s name, residence, age, and how long missing?”

  “Toby Talbot, Six Barrow Street, eleven years old, two days.”

  The cop turned. “Hey, Lou, we got a missing kid.”

  A redheaded woman in blue jeans stuck her head out of a cubicle. She held a bagel in one hand, coffee in the other. She glanced at Mark, squeezed around the desk, and gestured with the bagel. “Upstairs.”

  Mark followed her up into an office with three metal desks. She sat down, searched a drawer for a grimy-looking triplicate form. She wound it into a model-T electric typewriter. “Who’s missing?”

  He repeated Toby’s name, age, and address.

  She typed with two fingers. “Sit down.”

  He sat.

  She nodded toward the half-chewed bagel. “Have some bagel.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What’s your relationship to Toby?”

  He flashed that if he wasn’t a relative she’d throw the case to the Department of Parks. “Uncle.”

  “When was Toby born?”

  “Twelve years ago, this Wednesday. And I have a photo.” He laid the snapshot on the desktop. It showed Kyra, himself, and Toby at Coney Island. “That was taken a little over a year ago.”

  “We’ll get to the photo in a minute. When did you last see Toby—day, place, and hour—and what was he wearing?”

  Anne didn’t have to invent a headache; she had one. Her brain was running in overdrive, disaster scenarios tumbling over one another. She pushed her pecan pie away, untouched. “I’m going up to the room.”

  “You’re not having your pie?” Shoshana looked shocked. “It’s good.”

  “You have mine.” Anne left the coffee shop. “I’m going upstairs,” she told the guard. “Really.” She took the elevator up to her room. She dredged Kyra’s cellular phone from its hiding place in the closet and took it into the bathroom. Tapping in Kyra’s number, she locked the door and turned on the bath water.

  “Please leave a message at the beep,” Kyra’s recorded voice was saying, “and one of us will get back to you.”

  “Hi. It’s me. Look, I’m worried. Are you okay? Is Toby okay? We need to talk, but you’d better not phone me. I’ll call tomorrow morning around seven, okay?”

  She phoned her own apartment and left the same message. Then she phoned Mark and got his machine.

  “Hi. It’s Anne, Sunday evening. Would you check with the École Française tomorrow and see if Toby showed up for school? I’ll phone you tomorrow at eight P.M. sharp.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Monday, September 23

  Fifth day of trial

  9:40 A.M.

  LIEUTENANT BILL BENTON LIFTED the receiver and dialed Kyra Talbot’s number in Manhattan. He got the machine again. At the beep, he gave his name and phone number and asked Mrs. Talbot to phone as soon as possible.

  He looked at his watch. Nine-forty. Over two hours till anyone would be answering a business phone in Seattle.

  He went down the corridor to Lars Fiumefreddo’s office. Lars was off for the day and the shrink had commandeered his space. She’d pushed two chairs together to form a makeshift bed and Toby Talbot, looking blissfully distant from earthly woes, was curled on his side clutching an inflatable pillow.

  “He’s asleep,” Sondra van Orden said. Sondra was the county equivalent of a traveling priest: she served four police jurisdictions as psychiatric evaluator, youth counselor, and—if a cop needed it—short-term therapist. “I gave him a mild over-the-counter sedative. Can we talk outside?”

  They went to the water cooler. She downed half a cup of Bear Springs’s finest.

  “I ran a polygraph,” she said.

  “And?”

  “Toby’s lying about everything except his name and h
is age. The needle jumped off the chart.”

  “Is that surprising? You said he’s upset.”

  “True; he has conflicts with his dad to resolve. But there’s a measurable difference between upset and lying. This is lying.” She dropped her paper cup into the trash. “I also ran a polygraph on Catch Talbot.”

  Benton was startled. “When?”

  “I finished twenty minutes ago.”

  “Why?”

  “He said you’d ordered it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  She shrugged. “Talbot may have lied about that, but he’s telling the truth about his name, his residence, and his relationship to Toby. The polygraph says he’s Toby’s father.”

  “What if he knows how to beat the polygraph?”

  “Bill, you’ve done your job. The polygraph results are on record. Let the kid go and thrash it out with his dad.”

  “It’s the thrashing that worries me.”

  An explosion of voices echoed down the corridor. “Hey, Lieutenant! There’s a man in a hurry to see you!”

  The man in a hurry was the man who had just convinced a polygraph he was Catch Talbot. Now he was trying to push past the sergeant into Bill Benton’s office.

  “You won’t find me in there,” Benton said.

  He wheeled around, red-faced and panting like an attack dog. “I passed that lie detector and I want Toby.”

  “I understand, and you’ll get your son.” Bill Benton was wondering how the hell he was going to stall Talbot till someone answered the phone in Seattle. “But I’m going to have to ask you to wait just a little longer.”

  “I’ve been waiting since eight o’clock last night.”

  “Your son can’t be moved right now.”

  “Why not?”

  Benton waited for Sondra van Orden to speak up. She didn’t.

  “Toby’s asleep,” Benton said.

  “Asleep at a quarter to ten in the morning?” Disdain rippled. “What the hell did you people do, drug him?”

  Benton shot Sondra a beseeching glance: Help me out of this.

  She was no help at all. “Bill, we have no legal right to hold the boy.”

  Shrinks, Bill Benton reflected, should not be allowed to get night school law degrees.

  “If you’ll come this way, Mr. Talbot.” She led Talbot around the bend in the corridor. Benton followed.