“But you’re ethically obliged to tell him,” Lisa said. “I mean . . . aren’t you?”
“I’m convinced, Lisa,” I continued, “that the law school ethics class answer is the wrong one. So being the good lawyer that I am, I have concluded it’s time to do what we lawyers do best: to wit, split hairs. As long as Miles is unaware that we know his son is alive, then he can’t instruct us to ignore that avenue of investigation. I can then—in clear conscience and marching forward beneath the banner of the ethical guidelines of the State Bar of Michigan—send you out to pursue the investigation into this alleged long-lost son, and see where it leads you.
“This approach is ethically defensible because at this time the only evidence we have for this man’s existence is the word of an old man who may or may not be in a position to know what he’s talking about. So right now, we’re just conducting a simple factual investigation of moderate pertinence to the case. At such time as you get some results—if you get them at all—I will inform my client of his options. Because heaven forfend that I leave my client in the dark!” I smiled and lifted my Diet Coke in toast. “Ah, The Law. Consider its majesty.”
Lisa peered at me with an odd look on her face. “You look awfully pleased with yourself, Dad.”
I grinned. “You want to know something funny? I am, kind of.” My grin went away. “But that means you’d better get real busy as soon as we get back home.”
Twenty-nine
For two days after we got back to Pickeral Point, Lisa acted mysterious. She had installed herself in the spare office—the one I store old files in—and set up a phone and a desk in the corner, hiding herself behind piles of old bankers’ boxes. She didn’t talk, just stayed in there with the door closed. I just hoped this reclusiveness had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.
Late in the afternoon of the second day she walked into my office, and said, “Got him!”
“Got who?”
“Miles and Diana’s son.”
I smiled broadly. “How’d you pull it off?”
“Lots and lots of phone calls. Eventually, I called the New York Department of Vital Records and told them I was an ER doc and that I needed to find the birth parents of a John Doe who’d been adopted. I said that if he didn’t get a transfusion of some obscure amino acid from a blood relative within eighteen hours, he’d die. Of course they didn’t want to tell me without a court order, so I was all ‘Right now, dammit, he’s gonna die and it’s all on your head!’ Blah blah blah. That didn’t work, so I said his wife was threatening to sue for wrongful death if we didn’t get this amino acid, and she would name this bureaucrat personally in the lawsuit if he died. Boom, the waters parted. It wasn’t until after she gave me the name that she goes, ‘Wait a minute, if this guy’s a John Doe, how do you know who his wife is?’ ”
I laughed.
“Turned out his birth name was Unnamed Child van Blaricum.”
“Unnamed Child? Boy, the van Blaricums really went all gah-gah over him, didn’t they?”
“Apparently so. So then I walked downtown and called the New York Department of Social Services on my cell phone and told them I was a cop in the Pickeral Point Police department and if they didn’t believe me they could call information for the number and then call me back at the station. Then I went over to the police station and chatted up the girl at the front desk—you know the one I’m talking about? Regina, the one that’s sweet on you?”
“No she’s not,” I said.
“She is.” Lisa sounded indignant. “Anyway, while I was talking to her, I said, ‘Oh, by the way, a client’s probably going to call me while I’m here at the station.’ Next thing I know, the phone rings. ‘Oh, great, honey, she’s right here.’ Voilà, I’m an officer of the law. So based on my urgent need as a police investigator, this DSS caseworker gives me the history of Unnamed Child van Blaricum. According to her records, first he gets renamed David van Blaricum, then it’s changed to David Reid by a family who was thinking about adopting him but backed out somewhere between the name change and the adoption finalization, then when he was twelve years old he was finally adopted, and his adoptive parents inflicted the name Otto Gerd Heusenfelter on him.”
“That could come in handy,” I said, “if he ever decides to become a Nazi.”
Lisa laughed. “Then I called his adoptive parents, the Heusenfelters of Clinton County, New York. Farm country, up near Vermont. And the Heusenfelters said they haven’t talked to him in five years. Not since, get this, he got out of prison last time.”
I raised my eyebrows. “No kidding. How interesting. Where did he do time?”
“It’s more like, where didn’t he go to prison. He was lodged at the Clinton County Jail for battery, then at Rikers Island, where he did a time-served bit for a burglary in the city, then he was a guest for six months at the Nassau County Diversion Center on Long Island. Assault, that time. Then the Volusia County Jail in Florida, for simple possession. Then CCI in Columbia, South Carolina, for aggravated assault. That was in 1992. But then I hit a wall. No records since then that I was able to find. Not just criminal, I mean no records, period. No credit bureau, no nothing.
“So I call his adoptive parents in New York again. I go: ‘What’s the deal, you said he got out of prison five years ago, but I can’t find a record of it.’ Direct quote from this Heusenfelter guy: ‘That son of a bitch hated us so much, he went and changed his name.’ I ask him, ‘To what?’ ‘Why the hell should I care? Biggest mistake we ever made, getting involved with that ingrate.’ So I checked around to see if there’d been an order entered to change his name. New York, no. Florida, no. South Carolina, bingo. I go back and check again under his new name. Lo and behold . . . tah-dah! . . . he’s back in New York in the midnineties, this time at Sing Sing for aggravated assault again. So I call the police department in the little town where the offense occurred, guess what he did?”
I shook my head.
“Beat a guy almost to death with a tree limb. The victim’s been in a wheelchair ever since.”
“A tree limb?”
“Gets better.” Lisa raised her eyebrows suggestively. “There’s one more conviction. Assaulting an officer. Guess where he served time?”
“Got me.”
“Yes, friends. Jackson State Penitentiary. Right here in the good old state of Michigan. Committed the crime over in Grand Rapids. Weapon of choice? Here’s the beauty part . . . he beat his victim with the handle of a posthole digger.”
My eyes widened. “He really likes to swing a stick, doesn’t he?”
“Yup. And guess when he got out?”
“Tell me.”
“Three months before the murder of Diana Dane.”
I leaned back in my chair. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mouth was hanging open. “What did he change his name to?” I said finally.
She tossed her legal pad on my desk. In the middle, scrawled in Lisa’s large, messy hand, was the name of Miles and Diana Dane’s son. Blair Dane.
“Dane, huh?” I looked up and said, “So if we painted him as the real killer in trial, I guess he’d be hard-pressed to go with the Gee-I’ve-never-heard-of-Miles-and-Diana-Dane defense.”
Lisa smiled broadly.
“Well this is great work, kid,” I said. “This is terrific. Now all we need to do is find him.”
Lisa’s face fell a little. “Yeah. Well, see, that’s where I’m hitting a snag.”
Thirty
It took her three more days, but eventually Lisa walked into my office with a grin on her face. “Success!”
As we drove out to the place where Lisa believed we’d find Blair Dane, I was comforted by the presence of my little Smith & Wesson.
It was an hour northwest of Pickeral Point, deep into farm country. We crested a low rise, and there in front of us, in the middle of a vast field, was a large, unpainted cinder-block building that looked something like a warehouse. From our view, it looked as though the building had no windows, and only on
e door.
“So this is, what, a cult kind of thing?” I said.
“Hard to say,” Lisa said. “They call themselves the Brothers of Christ, Reborn.”
In the field in front of the building a long row of men wearing shapeless brown clothes were bent over in a line, hoeing the hard, dark soil. If the men hadn’t all been white, it could have been mistaken for South Carolina circa 1850, a gang of slaves chopping cotton.
I drove down the straight gravel road that bisected the field and rolled down my window when I came abreast of the line of men. “Excuse me,” I called. “Where can I find Blair Dane?”
The men kept breaking dirt clods with the hoes, ignoring me, not even looking up. There was something trancelike about their movements.
I called out again. One man looked up furtively, made a quick gesture toward the ugly concrete box of a building, then went back to his hoeing. “Nice folks,” I said to Lisa. “Very cheerful and welcoming. How much do you know about them?”
“Precious little. They’re all men. Except the chief hon-cho. Her name is Sister Beatrice. She used to be a Catholic nun, but left the order after some kind of scandal that nobody seemed interested in talking about.”
I parked the car, and we got out and knocked on the door. Eventually it opened, and a young man wearing the same shapeless tan clothes as the men in the field looked out at us. On closer inspection, the clothes looked homemade—right down to the coarse homespun cloth. The young man had a very large necklace hanging on his chest—a cross made of welded horseshoe nails—and his feet were bare. He looked at us, but didn’t speak.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “My name is Charley Sloan, and this is my daughter Lisa. We’re looking for Blair Dane.”
The young man still had the flat gaze of an inmate, the pale prison skin, the jailhouse muscles. “Wait here.” He closed the door.
We waited for about five minutes, then the door opened again. This time it was a different man. The second man wore the same necklace, the same homespun clothes—but on him they seemed to fit better, almost like a military uniform. He was about my age, late forties, with piercing blue eyes, gray hair, and a short gray beard. “My name is Jack. We’ve been expecting you,” he said, smiling pleasantly. His voice was gentle, but somehow commanding. He motioned us into an entry room lined with unpainted Sheet-rock.
“If you’d both take your shoes off, please, Sister Beatrice can spare ten minutes with you.”
“We’re here to see Blair Dane,” I said.
“Yes. That’s what Sister will talk to you about.”
“I want to talk to Blair.”
“Take your shoes off, please,” he said again. Friendly but firm.
When in Rome. We did as we were told, sliding our shoes into a large wooden rack full of identical work boots.
“This way,” he said, turning toward a staircase made of bare concrete block stairs that ran up the inside of the front wall. I can’t say what it was, but there was something ominous about the place, as though we were entering a prison or a fortress. At the top of the stairs we turned and found ourselves in an open, barrackslike room with no ceiling, just open joists holding up a corrugated steel roof.
Along one wall was a long row of bunk beds, while along the other wall stood a row of crudely built plywood cubicles, each with a desk and a chair inside. The windowless room was very dimly lit by two rows of bare incandescent bulbs hanging from the joists. The bulk of the floor was covered by a large straw mat of the sort seen in Japanese houses. At the far end of the mat a small white-haired woman sat cross-legged, reading a book. We approached and she looked up.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said.
Jack walked back downstairs without another word.
“Please. Sit.” She gestured at the floor in front of her. She was a wrinkled, brown-skinned woman of somewhere between sixty-five and eighty. Either she had a lot of wrinkles for a sixty-five-year-old, or she exuded an awful lot of physical energy for an eighty-year-old. I couldn’t quite tell which was the case. Her eyes were green and canny. She wore her glossy white hair in a bowl cut, and she was clothed in the same drab homespun as the others.
I grunted a little as I lowered myself to the floor.
“I find sitting on the floor to be excellent for the posture,” the old woman said, her tone chiding but jocular. “It keeps the joints limber, too. Even when you’re an old crone like me.” She smiled almost imperceptibly. “So you’re here about Miles Dane’s son.”
My eyebrows went up.
“We may look like flaky religious nuts to you, Mr. Sloan, but that doesn’t mean we don’t read the newspaper.”
“I was surprised you knew that he was Miles Dane’s son. How did you find out?”
“That’s what he told me when he first came to live here.”
“Ah. Well, I appreciate your taking time away from your studies, but I won’t take up another minute of your time if you could just point us to Blair. As I’m sure you heard, we’re here to talk to him, not you.”
The sprightly little woman nodded. “Sure. Unfortunately, that won’t be possible.”
“With all due respect, Sister,” I said, “that’s not your decision to make.”
“True enough. I’m simply conveying Blair’s wishes to you.”
“Where is he?” I said sharply.
“I’m afraid I’m one of these crazy old bags who doesn’t intimidate easily.” Sister Beatrice laughed. “Let me tell you a little about this community. Back when I was still in the Church, I was involved in prison ministry. What I saw was lacking in the lives of most of the boys I met in prison was discipline. Oh, prison offers discipline, but it’s a discipline based upon threat and punishment. What I recognized was that once these boys left prison, they needed a regime with the sort of austerity and lack of choice that is found in prison. But it had to be motivated by other means. Lacking the lash and steel bar here, we find our discipline in the teachings of Jesus Christ.” She held up her Bible. “The Gospels are a rather stringent and radical set of teachings, if one bothers to really read them. Here we do read them. And we act upon them.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“Sarcasm will not help your cause here, Mr. Sloan. Please listen. You might learn something.” The little woman’s smile faded for the first time. Her bright green eyes seemed quite cold once her teeth stopped showing. “To participate in this community is to renounce things. I understand you’re an alcoholic, Mr. Sloan.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Pay attention please, Mr. Sloan. I already told you I read the newspapers. As a recovering alcoholic, you have made a choice to renounce certain temptations the world has to offer. I gather that you have the sort of personality which allows you to pull that off successfully. Most of these boys”—she waved at the long row of empty bunk beds—“do not. Their renunciation of the world requires a shepherd. I am that shepherd. I don’t make choices for them, I simply provide a herd in which they can live, protected, in essence, from themselves.”
“You’ve protected Blair from himself?”
“Blair is not a fool. He has been a career criminal, but he was rather a good one. He has recognized these flaws in himself, and he’s here to fix them. If he can’t fix them, he’ll stay here until he dies. If he does fix them, marvelous, then he will return to the world.”
“This is all laudable,” I said, “but I’m attempting to save an innocent man from false imprisonment. I believe Blair can help me achieve that.”
“No, Mr. Sloan. Let’s not be naive. What you want is a sacrificial goat. You want to hand the jury a plausible alternative suspect. You want to drag him down. And I won’t let you do that.”
“Ah. So now it’s your choice, not his.”
“That’s ultimately immaterial. If he goes back to the world, he’ll lose his soul again, as sure as I’m sitting here.”
“I can subpoena him.”
The cool green eyes locked onto mine.
“And I can hide him.”
“You’ll go to prison if you do.”
This got me a big smile. “Look around you, Mr. Sloan. I live in a house made of bare cinder block. No windows, no doors, no TV, no family, no privacy, and precious little ventilation. I’ve lived here for thirteen years. Do you honestly think the idea of a few weeks in the poky frightens me?”
I had to admit, it probably didn’t.
“That may be. But do you want to destroy all of this, Sister? All the good works you’re doing here?” I made a wide sweep with my hand. “I can make that happen. If I have to.”
“I’m sure you’re a good lawyer, but no you can’t. This endeavor is bigger than me.”
Seeing I was making no progress, I decided to shift gears. “I’m sorry, Sister. I don’t mean to be overbearing. I’ve got a lot of weight on my shoulders right now. If I’m barking up the wrong tree here, I’d like to know so I can move on to something else. Can you at least tell me your impressions of Blair?” I said. “What kind of guy is he?”
“He’s like a lot of men here. Troubled. His upbringing was wretched and loveless. He doesn’t trust easily. Like most criminals, he’s overly impulsive. He’s easy to anger. That’s the bad part. But he’s also very bright and very articulate. More self-aware than your run-of-the-mill thug. That’s why he’s here: He recognized, during his latest sojourn in the penal system, that the reason he had such a tough time was not that the world was unfair, but that he had a problem dealing with the world. He is determined to fix that problem. He has come to understand that only through work, discipline, renunciation of desire, and faith in Christ can he hope to become a happy and productive person.”
For the first time, Lisa spoke. “Let’s put it out in the open then, Sister. Do you think he killed his mother?”
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