The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  Dagny pulled into the driveway, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. A barefoot man wearing red boxer shorts and a stained white undershirt answered. He was tall and thin and had long white scraggly hair, down to his shoulders. It had probably been a week since his last shower.

  “Percy Reynolds?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He had a deep, authoritative voice, the kind God must have.

  She showed him her creds.

  “Figured.” He reached under his shirt and scratched his belly. “Well, c’mon in.”

  Reynolds led her across a tile floor into the living room, where Dagny took a seat on the couch. “Drink?”

  “Water.”

  While Reynolds went off to the kitchen, Dagny surveyed the room. There were seven empty pizza boxes piled on the floor; eight wineglasses held remnants of red wine in the small cavities just above their stems. Crumpled paper towels and napkins had been tossed about. The house smelled a lot like a Blues Traveler concert Dagny had attended in 1995. “I guess you had a party?” Dagny asked when he returned.

  “No,” he said, handing Dagny a glass of water.

  “Do you mind if we start?”

  “I told you on the phone that this would be a waste of time, Agent Gray.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought I’d give it the old college try, since lives are in danger, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Two hundred and fifty-six people on May first. Sixty-some thousand on May fifteenth.”

  “I’ve seen the reports, yes.”

  “And you know that Noel Draker is believed to be responsible for the crimes in question.”

  “I am bound by the attorney-client privilege. Anything that I know about Mr. Draker is protected by that privilege.”

  “There are limits to the privilege, Mr. Reynolds.”

  “Please, call me Percy. A lawyer can and should reveal confidences when they reflect their client’s intention to commit a future crime. Mr. Draker never said anything to me that would indicate an intention to commit a future crime.”

  “I’m a lawyer, too, Mr. Reynolds. And I believe that there are moral rules that supersede our profession’s self-selected ethical canon.”

  Reynolds smiled. “If you wish to lambaste our profession, Agent Gray, then you’ve chosen the path to my heart. But this is the one time our profession got it right. If you take away the attorney-client privilege, no man will be free to speak with his lawyer, and if that happens, then no man can be fairly represented in court. And while I detest what my profession has become, I believe people should be fully and fairly represented in courts. A layman doesn’t stand a chance alone. Hell, even with a lawyer, he’s up a creek.”

  There had to be some way to break through. “Your client kidnapped me, Mr. Reynolds. He shot me with a tranquilizer and kept me in a basement.”

  “And he murdered your boyfriend, from what I hear. I understand your position, Agent Gray. You are a victim, quite possibly of my client. There are good reasons why we don’t let victims determine the ethical rules of representation. I feel awful for your loss. I feel awful for what happened to you. But I don’t feel responsible.”

  “He raped a girl.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “We’ve kept it out of the news for the girl’s sake. She’s nineteen—a college student. Frank Ryder’s girl. You remember him. Your client shoved his calling card up Ryder’s daughter’s bloody vagina, Mr. Reynolds.” She paused to let him think about this. “That’s the man you’re protecting with your ethical canons.”

  For a second or two, it looked as if Reynolds might break, but then he stiffened. “I’m sorry, but my principles are all I have.”

  If asking about Draker directly wasn’t going to work, maybe she could take a different tack. “Why did you leave Dresser and Edmunds? You were the top trial attorney in the city. And you weren’t so old that you had to retire.”

  “Why did you quit the law, Agent Gray?”

  “It wasn’t what I had hoped it would be,” Dagny replied.

  “It wasn’t what I hoped it would be,” he repeated. “Well, I guess I felt the same way.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “The more trouble the person is in, the more help they need. That’s the nature of the profession. When you take a client, it’s your duty to serve him to the best of your abilities. When I took Draker’s case, the firm didn’t care about anything except the money that came in the door. But then the Draker story got too big and the public got too angry. In the letters to the paper, people called me a ‘hired gun,’ a ‘pariah,’ a ‘devil.’ But around the office, it was worse. I’d overhear it in the hallways, in the bathroom stalls. There wasn’t a trial lawyer at Dresser and Edmunds who would have amounted to a hill of beans if I hadn’t been there to teach them.” His voice was rising, as if he were giving an anguished closing argument. “All the bankers and businessmen they represented were appalled and outraged that I represented Draker. Never mind that my partners never would have had those clients if it weren’t for me!” Reynolds paused, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I got a little carried away.”

  “No, Mr. Reynolds. Please continue.”

  His tone softened. “Dresser was a dying firm when I joined. I brought it back to life. My first big trial was a doctor who had been arrested for killing his wife. The doctor was a pillar of society, well respected in the community, so it was a big case. And I won it. And I won the next trial, and the one after that. The line of people wanting to hire the firm stretched out the door. In four years, we grew from forty lawyers to seventy-five. I didn’t ask for credit. I didn’t ask to be managing partner. I didn’t even ask for a corner office. I asked only that I be allowed to try my cases.”

  “When Draker came around...”

  “By then, the firm was on top. They didn’t need the publicity. They didn’t want the publicity. You know, Draker went bankrupt paying off the creditors, so the last few months, I worked his case for free. Everyone at the firm was outraged. ‘Do you know how much you’re costing the firm?’ they’d ask. No one asked how much I’d made the firm over all those years. So I quit.”

  “Why did you move all the way out here?”

  “I was married once, to a wonderful lady who moved out while I was asleep. She left a note behind that said ‘I love you, but we both know that you’re better off alone.’ This is a good place to be alone. And I always liked the name of the town. You can have your truth, or you can have your consequences. That’s kinda the way life is.”

  “Have you found the truth?”

  “The more important question, Agent Gray, is whether you have.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Well, then I guess you’re going to have to keep looking.”

  “Even though the consequences are so huge, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “The consequences are always huge, Agent Gray.”

  “I wish you didn’t speak in riddles.”

  “What can I say? I’m still a lawyer.” Reynolds scratched his head through the long white hair that didn’t make him look like much of a lawyer at all. “When Noel Draker dies, I hope you keeping looking for the truth, Agent Gray.”

  “When and if Noel Draker dies, it will be too late for the truth.”

  “It’s never too late for the truth, even if you’ve already suffered the consequences.”

  There was nothing more to be gained from the conversation. Dagny told him she was ready to leave, and he walked her to door.

  As she headed to her car, Reynolds called out, “Good luck, Dagny Gray. I hope you save lots of lives. And find that baseball, too.”

  The baseball again. She turned around. “Find the baseball?”

  “Waxton’s ball.”

  She fixed her gaze on him. “I should find Waxton’s ball?”

  “If you can,” Reynolds said.

  “You’ve talked to Draker?”

  “I
can’t answer that. Any conversations I’ve had with him are privileged.”

  “Draker told me to find that ball, too. You’ve talked with him! Recently!”

  Reynolds shrugged. “Privileged. Sorry.”

  “If I had a board and some water—”

  “Hypothetically, if I talked to him, we didn’t talk about any future crimes, so again, it’s privileged. And hypothetically, if I talked to him, it was so that I could urge him to stop. Beg him, really.”

  “And hypothetically, I assume, he said no.”

  “Hypothetically, he did. Hypothetically, it left me despondent. As maybe you can see, I’ve been on a bit more of a bender than usual. He’s not a bad man, Dagny. He’s just a broken one.”

  “Not broken enough for my tastes.”

  “Ten years, for a man like that, with murderers and gangbangers—”

  “Not broken enough—”

  “A learned man, scraping for survival—”

  “It doesn’t justify—”

  “Trapped with a bunch of savages who called him Reed, because he was the only one who could read above a fifth-grade level. An educated man, locked in a place empty of knowledge. Indifferent guards—”

  But she wasn’t listening to him anymore. “You know what no one did to the man? No one killed him.”

  Reynolds nodded. “You’re right.”

  “And you had the man here, at your house, and you didn’t stop him. And you won’t give me the slightest help.”

  “There’s nothing about any of this that isn’t tragic.”

  “And if I subpoena your phone records? Talk to your neighbors?”

  “It wouldn’t help. I wish it would. But you’d just be wasting your time.”

  Reynolds turned around and disappeared into the house. Dagny climbed behind the wheel of her car and put the key in the ignition. Every step of the investigation had led to another, but now she didn’t know where to go. To Nashville, to find out more about the children? To Bethel again, now that she knew Draker was born there? Things seemed easier with Victor or the Professor at her side.

  She looked into the rearview mirror and saw the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. Maybe it was time to go home. The whole endeavor was absurd—crisscross the country, track down Draker, avenge Mike’s death. How did this ever seem remotely possible? It was lunacy, aided and abetted by the Professor’s massive ego, Victor’s naïveté, and the confluence of circumstance. If the Professor hadn’t saved the life of the president’s father thirty years ago, she would have attended Mike’s funeral. She would have visited his grave. She would have gathered photographs and mementos and placed them in a box. She would have received flowers and condolences. She would have grieved the way normal people grieve after they lose a loved one. And maybe she would have even shed some of the sadness from her eyes.

  She was lost in thought when a dark sedan pulled up next to her. Brent Davis climbed out of the car and headed toward Reynolds’s door.

  “Hey!” Dagny called, rolling down her window.

  Brent turned around and smiled. “You stalking me?”

  She stepped out of the car. “I was actually here first. Get the cheesecake, by the way.”

  His smile grew, and when she extended her hand, he embraced her instead. It was awkward, but not unpleasant, even comforting.

  “I guess you came out here for the same reason I did,” Dagny said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck. He gave me nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “Everything was privileged,” Dagny said. “Doesn’t matter that people have died, or that more will.”

  “Typical lawyer,” he said, and then added, “Not that all lawyers are—”

  “They are. Believe me. How’s life with the Fabulous? Fabee got any leads?”

  “There are so many people involved now, you wouldn’t believe it. They’re tracking down everything. Talking to Draker’s grade-school teachers. Looking at his college transcripts. They think they have a make on his shoe from a print in Salt Lake, so they’re trying to figure out where he might have bought it. Stuff like that, only thousands of things like that. Fabee’s got two hundred people going through Draker’s financial records, hoping to trace them to a base of operations. It’s crazy. There’s so much going on that no one can put it all together. Too much information and not enough processing. Maybe the Professor was right.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If a thousand people working a case are too many, I think it’s pretty clear that three people aren’t enough.”

  “Where are Victor and the Professor anyway?” Brent asked.

  “Victor’s back in Arlington, going through Draker’s finances—trying to do the same thing Fabee has two hundred people doing.”

  “And the Professor?”

  “Talking to people in Cincinnati.”

  “Like who?”

  “He talked to Frank Ryder last night.”

  “Does Ryder know what happened to his daughter?”

  “No. His daughter hasn’t told him, and we’re not going to.”

  “Did Ryder say anything interesting?”

  “Not really. Said he discovered Draker’s fraud while comparing an old printout of sales figures to the computer database. Noticed a discrepancy and realized that someone had changed the numbers to cheat Systematic out of its share of the profits. Ryder claims he was outraged, so he went to some of the company’s biggest shareholders with what he found.”

  “Before he went to his bosses?”

  “Before he went to his bosses, and without notifying Systematic.” Dagny saw Brent raise his eyebrows at this. “Yeah, you’d think he’d go to Systematic first to tell them they were being cheated.”

  “What was up with that?”

  “My guess is that he didn’t go to the shareholders at all, but that he went to a lawyer, either to protect himself or to see how he could profit from the mess. And then the lawyer set him up with some shareholders, promising him a kickback from the proceeds of the lawsuit.”

  “Any evidence of this or just speculation?”

  Dagny shrugged. “The Professor said he had a nice house.”

  “Are you guys going through Ryder’s books?”

  “Why bother? If anything illegal happened with the lawsuit, the statute of limitations has long run out; and anyway, there’s a more important criminal to deal with.”

  “So where are you going now?” Brent asked.

  “I haven’t got a clue.”

  “I’m going to Nashville in a couple of days. Want to meet up there?” he suggested.

  “Try to figure out why he went after the kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe. Let me check with the Professor.”

  “Just let me know,” Brent said, starting toward Reynolds’s house.

  “It’s a waste of time, Brent. He’s not going to give you anything.”

  “I know. But I’ve got to put a check mark on a form.”

  She nodded. “It might be worth looking at his phone records, talking to his neighbors. Just in case Draker tried to talk to Reynolds.”

  “We’ve done that already. Nothing.”

  Reynolds was telling the truth—he just wouldn’t tell all of it.

  The sky was blue and almost clear, save for the thin wisp of a cloud that seemed to follow Dagny up I-25, dropping a light rain too soft for her to keep the wipers on, but enough to require an occasional swipe. Every few minutes, a car would pass the other way and the driver would wave hello. Nobody waved in DC. New Mexico felt like a different planet.

  The cloud wasn’t the only thing following Dagny. A black Navigator appeared behind her on the horizon, then gained on her. When it pulled within a car length, Dagny tapped her brake. The suggestion was not taken, and the driver drew even closer, tailing just a couple of feet from her rear bumper. Dagny grabbed her Glock and pulled to the side of the road. The Navigator parked behind her. Dagny marched toward the driver’s side of the Navigator, leading with her gun. A young
man with curly brown hair jumped out of the car, hands in the air. He was tall and gangly, wore a dark suit, and couldn’t have been older than twenty-five.

  “Jesus Mother of Mary, don’t shoot!” he yelled, trembling so much that he fell back against the side of the SUV.

  “Who are you?” Dagny demanded. The man started to reach his hand toward his back pocket. “Hands up!” she shouted, grabbing him by his arm and spinning him around so his chest was against the car. She cuffed his wrists and removed his wallet from his back pocket. He slumped to his knees. “Travis Bickelford?” she asked, reading his driver’s license.

  “I’m not here to hurt you!” He was crying, not just a few tears, but hysterical sobs. “I’m not. I’m not. I swear to you. Please, please.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  Bickelford spun around to face Dagny. He tried to wipe his tears away with his shoulders, but with his hands cuffed, they wouldn’t reach his face. “I’m hoping to make you very, very rich,” he stammered.

  “Explain,” she demanded with her gun still pointed at his chest.

  “Can you lower the gun?”

  “I could,” she said. But she didn’t.

  “I work for Harvey Lettleman. Do you know who Harvey Lettleman is?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “He produces movies. Big movies. Did you see Catbird’s Fall with Angelina Jolie? That was his film. A Moon to Rise? Three Strikes and Out? Help me out here.”

  “I’ve heard of those movies.”

  “Well, he produced them. He’s big. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of him. Lettleman Films? He’s got four Oscars. Two for sound, but still...Look in my wallet. I’ve got business cards.”

  Dagny fumbled through Bickelford’s wallet, past two condoms, several hundred dollars in bills, and a picture of Bickelford with Christina Aguilera. His business card seemed legitimate. Raised letters and no perforations.

  “Why are you following me?”

  “Harvey wants the rights to your story.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I swear I’m not. Your story is killer.”

  “You’re wasting my time because of this?”