Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests

by Inc. Mystery Writers of America

  “But these letters.” He heard the soft pat of her hand on her purse again. “His old boss at the mill says he’ll take him back. He can live with me until he saves enough to get his own place. He wants to learn welding; he told me he did.”

  That was part of the parolee’s criteria: a job, a place to live, a plan for the future. A life of purpose outside, no drifting. A con without a plan meant landing back inside, and 40 percent of them did anyway. He didn’t answer her, but she didn’t stop. And he wasn’t surprised by what she said next, not really. The day had that kind of feel to it.

  “I promised Danny I’d get the letters in on time. Even Reverend Stokes wrote one, telling Danny’s good points, how Danny helped at the church. The reverend believes in him.”

  Still, when he heard the name “Danny,” he reflexively stuck out his hand as if she could see the files in his milk crate. Danny. Danny Hartman?

  “What’s your son charged with?” he asked, making it casual.

  “He kept bad company,” she said, sounding like she was going to begin one of those long stories, and then stopped, simply saying, “He robbed a Seven-Eleven.”

  Yup. Danny Hartman. Jeff thought of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Of all the cars in all the towns in all the world, she gets into this one.

  “It was a bad mistake. Don’t think I’m making excuses for him, because I’m not.”

  He only nodded, hoping she’d quit, maybe fall asleep. The shadow of a car came out of the snow, and he let up on the gas, steering as close to the edge of the road as he dared. For thirty seconds after the two cars met, he drove in a whiteout, holding the wheel steady.

  “Prison’s been hard on him,” she said, and he heard her sigh again. Every time she spoke, the alcohol smell got stronger. “He’s never been cooped up before. He’s had trouble.”

  That was the truth.

  “But I know once he comes home, he’ll do good. When he gets outside again. He was a good boy.”

  “Mmm,” Jeff murmured.

  “His boy misses him too,” she said.

  There hadn’t been anything in the file about a son. Jeff glanced in the rearview mirror again. She was looking out the window, not that anything was visible out there. Snow billowed up behind the car like dust.

  Her eyes were far away. Her nose bent to one side like that of a boxer who was lousy at protecting himself. “I’ve been raising his son since the boy’s mother died the way she did.”

  The way she did. He loosened his grip and flexed his fingers, one hand at a time, then hit the radio’s Scan button. The numbers ran up the dial in a static blur, AM 540 to 1700. Nothing. He flicked it off, and she took it up again.

  “He’s a sweet little boy. I’m trying to be a better mother to him than…” She trailed off.

  He wanted to tell her to shut it, he’d heard hundreds of stories just like hers over his six years. He was the man who drove from Lansing in a crappy state car two times every month of every year, bad weather or good, an eight-hour drive up the middle of the state and across the big Mackinac Bridge strung between the peninsulas like a glittery web. Up to the prisons tucked as far away as the state could legally push them. Going so often that finally the other six took it for granted. “Jeff, will you take this to the new warden at Kinross next time you’re up there?” “Bring back beef pasties this time, can you, Jeff? From Sally’s.” Until finally, the UP became his, as regular as a mailman’s route.

  Twenty to thirty prisoners might pass before him in a day, and he hit one or two prisons a trip. Kinross, Marquette, Baraga, even Shingleton. Last year, in 1986, there were over 20,000 prisoners in Michigan, and a growing portion of them were housed in the UP. The new prisons were about the only thing that kept this stretch of nothing alive.

  What happened next wasn’t because of the prisoners waiting to con him in Marquette or the mothers and babies anxious to hear whether Jeff would set Daddy free; not the victims who somehow got lost in it all. Not because of the mothers like her. Or maybe it was. There was no reason; nothing changed. The snow, the warm car, her voice from the backseat.

  But the Cavalier drifted as if the steering had gone out, sliding like a graceful skater into the oncoming lane, then spinning backward across the highway into their own lane. Big lazy circles.

  She screamed. He steadied his milk crate and rode it out. It ended when the passenger side slammed into a snowdrift and the engine killed. Just like that. Snow pressed against the windows and the light inside the silent car shifted to eerie white.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. She was rubbing her head, leaning against the snowy side of the car. She hadn’t been wearing her seat belt.

  “Can we move?” she cried out. “I promised him.”

  “I’ll see how bad it is,” he told her as he put his shoulder against the door. The car tilted toward the drift, raising the driver’s side.

  He checked the rear first, hunching his head close to his shoulder to protect his face. He’d bet the temperature wasn’t above zero. The right tire was buried in the snow. But it didn’t look so bad. Then he walked around to the front. The sliding car had rammed so hard into the snowbank that it had hung up. Cavaliers were front-wheel drive and no way could the front tires grab hold in this.

  Jeff knelt in the snow, leaning down and squinting at where the front axle should be. The snow was packed tight. When he shoved at it with a bare hand, it thunked like concrete.

  A muffled sound came from above him: a car door slamming. He started to rise; his foot shot from under him and he landed flat on his butt. By the time he hauled himself up on the front bumper, he saw her in the road waving at oncoming lights. A dark pickup swerved past, then stopped, and like a film that had been rewound, she ran after it, just as she’d run after Jeff, arms waving.

  She opened the pickup’s passenger door and climbed in. He wondered what she said to the driver that gave him permission to drive away from Jeff and his stranded car without offering to help or call a wrecker for him.

  But there it was, she was gone. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? In seconds, the truck’s taillights disappeared into the snow and he couldn’t hear a sound except wind in the pines.

  In his car, he first checked his files. His jacket still rested on the crate. Nothing had been touched. The backseat was damp with melted snow. She’d taken her purse and left an empty beer bottle on the seat. It must have been in her jacket pocket. He picked it up and dropped it in the plastic trash bag hooked over the glove compartment latch. Keep Michigan Clean, it said.

  Jeff wrestled in the front seat, putting on a wool jacket and hat, lined leather gloves, lined boots, and a scarf he tied over his mouth and nose. Then he pulled out the shovel stowed in his trunk next to a fifty-pound bag of sand and got to work.

  An hour later, the Cavalier was free. Jeff huddled in the driver’s seat, heater whistling, his eyes closed and hands tucked between his legs, waiting to come back to life. That took almost as long as digging out the car.

  He drove the Seney stretch slow and easy, never once glancing at the files he hadn’t read yet, not Danny Hartman’s either. He didn’t take his eyes off the snow-laden vista, watching for a dark pickup in a snowbank, a woman waving a black purse at traffic.

  He reached Shingleton, mostly shut tight, and stopped for gas. “You see a woman in a dark pickup in the last hour or two?” he asked the attendant, who wore a hat with earflaps even inside the station.

  “What you want to know for?” he asked.

  Jeff shrugged. “Her car went into a snowbank and I wondered if she made it okay.”

  “Haven’t seen a pickup or anybody like that,” the attendant said, and popped the top on a Coke can.

  ____

  HE REACHED MARQUETTE at noon. Seen through the snow, the ancient stone prison looked like a tortured dream. White-capped turrets, barred windows, and glass so thick it looked greasy. Cell-block wings—four tiers high—jutted off each side of the administration offices in the rotunda.

&
nbsp; He drove the length of the parking lot, but the only dark pickup was layered with a foot of snow. It had been there for hours. He pulled in next to it anyway and carried his milk crate up the long steps to the offices. Two men in heavy brown work suits shoveled the stone steps and sidewalks: trustees from Magnum Farm, the minimum-security camp a couple of miles southeast. Neither one of them looked his way.

  He balanced the crate against his leg while he opened the big oak door and stepped inside, letting it bump against his back. He had to wait outside the first set of iron gates for the guard to get off the phone.

  “Hey, Jeff. Fun drive today?”

  “You bet, Sam. What’s new?”

  “That a joke?”

  “Anybody been here looking for me?”

  “Nobody.” The big guard locked the gates behind him while he signed in, and another guard casually checked his crate for contraband. That done, the second gates opened into the rotunda.

  Prison offices circled the rotunda on two floors. It was Victorian-impressive, reminding a prisoner just what a wretched bastard he was. As Jeff stood there, two guards escorted a prisoner through the iron gates from one of the blocks. The guy gazed up into the rotunda like God was waiting up there to smite his ass.

  He turned to the left, toward the hearing room, nodding to a couple of guards he recognized.

  It took him five minutes to get ready. He pulled the files from the crate and set it in a corner, made sure he had extra pens, a pad of paper. A pitcher of water sat on the table; the ice had melted. He cleaned his glasses and cracked his knuckles, then sat at the conference table and waited.

  A new guard escorted Roger Batenzcheski into the room. Roger sat in the chair across the table, the only other chair in the room. It was bolted to the floor. The guard stood to the side, watching.

  “Roger,” Jeff said, opening his file while he watched the man. He hid his hope pretty well. He looked fresh groomed.

  “Mr. Willett, sir.”

  “Tell me what got you in here, Roger.”

  He didn’t flinch. “I stole a car out from under a guy.”

  “Ever try that before?”

  “A motorcycle once.”

  “Out from under a guy?”

  “From a parking lot.” He was a cool one.

  Roger had done everything right since: been a good prison boy, taken a few prison classes, kept his nose clean. He had a job waiting for him, a girlfriend with an apartment.

  “Did you know her before you ended up here?” he asked. It was the women who trolled for prisoner pen pals, thinking they were going to play savior, who were bad news.

  “Yes, sir. We been going together for two years before.”

  It was an easy one. “I’m recommending parole,” Jeff told him. Paula had screened Roger’s case at the office and she’d agreed. “You’ll receive official notification within thirty days. I don’t want to do this again with you, got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” He finally gave himself away. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I mean it,” Jeff said.

  Five more. Three he paroled, two he passed on for another twelve months. One of those lunged forward to upend the table on top of Jeff, maybe hurt him. Jeff didn’t flinch; the table was bolted to the floor too, just like the chair.

  He took a break and grabbed a cup of coffee in the staff lounge. The room smelled like stale popcorn.

  “Had a call about you this morning, Jeff,” the warden said, leaning into the room. He was slowing down, getting ready to retire.

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “Hard to make out. I think she was hoping you were ass-deep in a snowdrift somewhere and hadn’t showed up yet.”

  “That’s about what happened.” He dumped powdered cream into his cup. It floated.

  “Well, she’s hot to bring you some papers. I don’t know what. She wouldn’t tell me her name, but she knew yours. Mr. Willett, she called you. Know anything about her?”

  “News to me.”

  He walked around the old rotunda, listening to voices echo and thinking that if the prison were built today there would be an uproar against wasted space. For five minutes, he stood in front of a window that faced the road. There weren’t any vehicles moving out there, but at least the snow was letting up.

  When he returned to the conference room, the guard asked, “You want Danny Hartman next?”

  “Hold off,” Jeff told him. “I want to look at his file again.”

  “Okay. Salzer, then.”

  He granted paroles to Salzer and eleven others, rejected four, and was taking one case back to Lansing for discussion. Then only Danny Hartman remained. He took off his glasses and pinched his nose. “Give me ten minutes,” he told the guard.

  He opened the file as if it might give him a new clue. Danny wasn’t anything special. The 7-Eleven was his first major offense. The problems began after he landed in Marquette. Disobeying orders, fighting, being out of place, contraband alcohol—the typical laundry list of a malcontent. The guard ushered Danny Hartman into the room. He was twenty-eight years old, slight. Sullen and hunched. He sat with knees pressed together and looked over Jeff’s left shoulder. Nobody’s home, Jeff thought.

  “Danny.”

  He gave a single curt nod.

  “Tell me what got you in here,” Jeff said.

  Danny shrugged. “The Seven-Eleven, I guess.”

  “You’ve had some trouble here.”

  “Some.”

  “Do you have plans when you get out? A job? School?”

  The kid shook his head, still looking over Jeff’s shoulder.

  “Anybody out there have a job for you?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “You have family waiting for you?”

  “Nobody.”

  Jeff moved papers as if he were reading Danny’s file. “What about your mother?”

  Danny stared back, hard. “My mother doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “But she’ll help you?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not her problem.”

  “I’m beginning to think you like this place,” Jeff said, leaning back.

  “It sucks.”

  “Then it’s up to you to have a plan for resuming your life after prison,” Jeff said, and waited. He closed the file. Sometimes that scared them and got them talking.

  Finally, Danny mumbled, “It was supposed to be set up.”

  “Who by? What was it?”

  “It didn’t work, that’s all.”

  Jeff waited again, but Danny’s lips pinched tight. The kid was done. That’s all she wrote.

  “Anything else you’d like to say?” Jeff asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then the board is extending your term for another twelve months,” Jeff said as he wrote out the terms. “You’ll have another hearing then. This gives you a year to clean up your act. Obey the rules, straighten up. Put together a job, a place to live, school, whatever. A solid plan.” Jeff thumped his finger on the table. “Help me out here. Are you hearing me?”

  Danny nodded, and there was nothing else Jeff could do but let him go. He nodded to the guard, who motioned for Danny to stand and then escorted him out. Danny didn’t look back.

  “Late day,” Sam commented when Jeff signaled for him to open the iron gate.

  “Yeah. I got a late start. Things look pretty quiet around here.” He shifted his milk crate to get past Sam.

  “Like the tomb. I saw a plow go by an hour ago, but I’d stay in town tonight if I were you. See you in a few weeks.”

  It was dark outside, but the snow had finally quit. By the prison lights he couldn’t see if the sky had cleared up or if more snow was on the way. Six inches of snow was piled on his car. He brushed the worst of it off with the scraper from his glove compartment and got in. The Cavalier’s engine cranked twice before it started, rough at first. Then he drove to a motel on the edge of town, drank two glasses of bourbon, ate a bag of Cheetos from the machine in the lobb
y, and slept until nine the next morning.

  He found the sheriff’s phone number at the front of the motel’s phone book. “I gave a middle-aged woman a ride partway up the Seney stretch yesterday,” he told the woman who answered. “She struck off on her own, and I was concerned about her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “I haven’t heard about any lost women, so she’s probably okay. You can call back later if you want, once all the plows have been out.”

  “Thanks.”

  He drove slow between Marquette and Shingleton. The plows had pushed the snow into banks and the traffic had picked up from yesterday. He wore sunglasses against the bright white and squinted into every pickup he met. He passed two sedans and a semi off the road before he reached Shingleton.

  The lights were on in Steve’s Tavern, and he pulled in. The parking area was the best-plowed spot in town. It looked sculpted.

  “Old Milwaukee,” he told the bartender, who obviously lived behind the small bar. “Are you Steve?”

  “Bill. Steve’s my dad. He died ten years ago.” He was using a rag like the one under Jeff’s car seat to wash beer glasses.

  “Were you working yesterday?”

  “Ain’t nobody else but me.”

  “I gave a woman a ride. Her car went off the road on the Seney stretch. She was heading to Marquette.”

  The man rolled his eyes. “Big? Nose like this?” He pushed his nose to the side with a forefinger.

  “That’s her.”

  “Fenn Schultz brought her in. I can tell you, she didn’t get to Marquette yesterday. She spent the whole day in here with Fenn, tossing’em back and shooting pool. They left together about six.” He shook his head. “And that’s all I know.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jeff drank his beer and glanced now and then at a soap opera on the television above the bar. He used the men’s john, which was cleaner than he expected, and when he came out, the bartender was waiting for him. He held a thick white envelope.

  “This might sound crazy,” he said, “but the woman you mentioned? She dropped an envelope on the floor. It’s addressed. You’re the only one who’s asked about her. You wouldn’t be Jeff Willett, would you?”