He saw the attribution before he read the quote. It was toward the end of the article, an appropriate closer—CJ’s father stating how Eddie’s death had devastated the whole Baxter family, and how his heart reached out to the Montgomery family. And how no one should forget that there was a boy who had just lost his best friend.
CJ almost punched the screen, but at the last second he redirected his anger to the table on which the computer sat. In the quiet of the library, the attack sounded like a gunshot, and it sent Ms. Arlene scurrying to the area.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “What was that?”
CJ couldn’t have been more irritated at the interruption, but he’d brought it on himself. Gaining control over his breathing, he said, “Sorry, Ms. Arlene. I banged my elbow on the table.” For good measure, he rubbed his left elbow and affected a wince.
“Oh!” Ms. Arlene said, moving closer, which was the exact opposite reaction to the one CJ wanted. “Are you okay? Do you need anything? An ice pack?”
It took some convincing before the librarian was assured of his continued good health, and when she’d left, he added assaulting furniture to the list of things he would avoid doing in her presence.
Alone with his thoughts again, he reread his father’s statement. It was simple, and might well have been sincere, yet something about it rubbed CJ the wrong way. He just couldn’t put a finger on it. He looked through the rest of the paper for any other stories about the accident, finding only Eddie’s obituary, which he read through. It was remarkable only in its brevity.
He closed the file and opened the next in the series, scouring every page. No further mention of the tragedy. It wasn’t something he’d have noticed then—this absence of information. The only part of the paper he read as a ten-year-old was the comics. Now, as an adult far removed from the event, CJ found it all very odd. Small-town high school students were rarely shot to death by their best friends. One would expect a follow-up article or two.
He followed the paper through November with the same result, the same dearth of information. With a shake of his head, CJ left the computer to head to the restroom, walking past the front desk in the process. He avoided looking in Ms. Arlene’s direction. It was as he was washing his hands that an idea came.
He hurried back to the computer, finding and opening the file that held the paper that came out the week after Eddie’s death. The Baxters were politicians, regardless of the difficulty they’d had capturing and holding positions of power. From birth, a Baxter man was bred for the political arena; it was in the blood. And CJ was convinced that his father had used those skills, along with whatever cachet an influential family had, to make the whole thing go away. It was the only thing that made sense.
It would have had to have been done quickly, before an investigation could build up steam. With new eyes he scanned the pages, not sure what he was looking for. What he was confident of, though, was that few things left no paper trail. He also believed that some of the most suspect deals were done in the light of day.
He’d reached the second to last page before he found it. Two days after Eddie Montgomery’s death, the Baxter family donated two brand-new squad cars to the Adelia Police Department. A grand civic gesture lauded by both the mayor and the chief of police. Not a hint of scandal.
CJ’s smoking gun. The answer to the most important question that had dogged him for a quarter century: how much had his dad known? Apparently he’d known about all of it, and he’d known what to do to keep it quiet—to protect Graham in much the same way as Ms. Arlene thought she was protecting Adelia. What made it worse was that it was the sort of thing that everyone in town would have seen through. CJ suspected there were few in Adelia at the time who did not know what George Baxter had purchased. It seemed the only one who hadn’t known was CJ —except in some subconscious way that kept him from trusting anyone enough to tell them the truth. And he figured that this was a conditioning he’d been carrying with him since that day.
CJ sat there motionless, processing over and over again what he’d learned. The information was so new and so revealing that it jolted him, and he wasn’t sure what to do next. It was a complex question, and he doubted he could consider it properly while stuck in a library.
Chapter 19
He was beginning to think that a bar was the only place where he could think clearly. Since becoming a Christian, he’d wondered if he was supposed to find the sort of focus he found in a good bar in a church instead. He had his doubts, because even though he liked Sunday morning service at his church, and spending time with the guys in his men’s group, he could take the whole thing only in small doses. He and God had communed more than once about how uncomfortable he felt in any church building, and so far he hadn’t felt much in the way of a change in his opinion. He’d joked once or twice with the guys in his group that there was something wrong with him—like maybe the conversion didn’t take or something. Right now, though, he was simply looking to relax, take some time to consider the many problems that had become his bedfellows.
The problem was where to start. Two weeks ago he’d been a semi-successful writer with a crumbling marriage and a potential lawsuit brewing. Since then, things had deteriorated. Now he was also a man who could no longer ignore the murder and conspiracy that had defined most of his life. The one bright spot he could see was that, considered as a whole, he thought he was handling things rather well.
It was Monday, and a light night at Ronny’s. Rick was nowhere in sight. Sam, who usually worked the room while Rick stayed behind the bar, covered both jobs tonight. That meant keeping CJ and three other people happy. And in CJ’s opinion, Sam could pull and deliver a beer as well as Rick, which made him all right in his book.
CJ had hoped to find Dennis here, if for no other reason than for some company. He would also have been content to find Julie, but he realized that was for more than just the company. It bothered him that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and he hoped this showed growth of some kind. He attended a church with a heavy focus on grace—a reformed congregation that appealed to sinners, and CJ had no delusion that he wasn’t to be counted among the worst of these, as St. Paul had said—but he’d also found the theology lacking when it came to questions of personal responsibility. He supposed a happy medium existed somewhere, or that maybe he’d wake up one morning with the realization that grace did, indeed, trump all else, but for now he thought the poking at his conscience was a good thing.
But growth or not, everything that had hit him was a bit much to handle.
The jukebox sat silent, the TV above the bar turned down, so CJ had heard the low tunes of whatever music was on upstairs in Rick’s apartment, and now he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the flight of narrow stairs that connected the apartment to Rick’s business. CJ turned toward the restrooms, beyond which the stairs led to an equally narrow hallway as well as a large sign that warned patrons that even considering ascending the stairs was a mortal sin punishable by a non-gentle expulsion from the establishment. To properly reinforce this message, Rick had hung a framed photo of the last person who had tried to violate the sanctity of the bar owner’s abode.
Because of this, CJ was surprised to see Dennis come around the corner.
“H-hey,” Dennis said, walking up to the bar.
“Hey back,” CJ said. He looked at Dennis, then beyond him to where the hall disappeared toward the forbidden territory, but he didn’t ask the question he wanted to ask.
“Rick w-wants a bottle of M-Makers,” Dennis said to Sam.
The bartender slid a Seven and Seven in front of a guy sitting at the other end of the bar and then walked over to the liquor bottles and plucked a bottle of Maker’s Mark from its row. After a pause, he opened the cabinet beneath the display and extracted another bottle, both of which he set on the bar in front of Dennis.
“Save you a trip,” Sam explained.
“Thanks,” Dennis said. With both bottles in hand he turned and sta
rted off. After a few steps, though, he stopped and looked back at CJ. “Are you c-coming?” he asked.
So CJ slid from the barstool and followed Dennis up to Rick’s apartment. Before they’d reached the top of the stairs, CJ heard the faint music coming from beyond Rick’s door, gaining a clarity it didn’t have downstairs.
“Is that . . . ?”
“Sinatra,” Dennis confirmed.
When CJ stepped into the apartment—in just about every way a domicile that looked as if it belonged above a bar, save for the enormous flat-screen television lining one entire living room wall—he saw a trio of men at a round table in the room beyond, what was probably the dining room.
Dennis led CJ to the action, setting both bottles on the table with satisfying thuds.
“You’re a good man, Rick,” one of the other men said, even as he eyed the newcomer.
“Don’t I know it,” the bar owner agreed. Then to CJ, “Take a load off, CJ.”
“I thought we c-could use another,” Dennis said, almost apologetically as he sat down.
“The more the merrier,” Rick said.
The room was thick with cigar smoke. CJ went and sat down next to Dennis, feeling a hint of a smile tug at the corners of his lips. He’d already let the evening take some of the edge off the day, and now he was surrounded by a combination of quality cigar smoke and Ol’ Blue Eyes. It was enough to make a man giddy.
“CJ, this is Harry Dalton,” Rick said, gesturing to the man on CJ’s left. “Disreputable businessman and scourge of the otherwise lovely town of Winifred.”
Harry was lighting a cigar as Rick spoke. He pulled on it until it caught and held the flame, then leaned back in his chair with a thoughtful expression.
“The scourge of Winifred,” he said. “I like that.”
Harry Dalton was a rail-thin man who appeared made of pale shoe leather. He might have been in his fifties, but he’d ridden those fifty years hard. And yet the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth suggested he’d enjoyed the trip thus far.
“It’s a pleasure,” CJ said.
“Then you are far too easily pleased,” Harry remarked, reaching for the cards.
“And this piece of work is Jake Weidman,” Rick said of the man sitting between him and Dennis.
CJ had taken stock of Jake Weidman the moment he sat down, because it was obvious the man was made of money. He also wore a cowboy hat, which, while common in CJ’s adopted part of the country, was less so here. And he was the only one at the table wearing a tie, although by this point in the evening its knot had been yanked down to somewhere near the third button on his shirt.
CJ thought he did a passable job of keeping his face from changing expressions, even with his having stumbled upon the man whom Ms. Arlene had inadvertently mentioned—the Jake Weidman who had something to do with a proposed prison privatization.
“And what are you the scourge of?” CJ asked.
That prompted a smile from Weidman.
“Miscreants and evildoers of all varieties,” he said with an accent that placed him from somewhere near Boston, rather than from Texas, which was where CJ had been leaning.
“Jake runs all of the prisons in Franklin County,” Rick explained.
CJ nodded and thought about that while Harry began to deal the cards. Then he said, “And what exactly does that entail?”
“Mostly what you see here,” Jake answered.
CJ smiled and reached into his pants pocket for the roll of bills he’d taken to carrying since Janet froze him out of the checking account. He was glad Artie didn’t object to paying him in cash. But there was something bothering him—aside from his interest in the newly revealed head of all the prisons in Franklin County—and it wasn’t until he caught Dennis’s eye that it came to him. All of the men around the table were businessmen, albeit of varying degrees of success. Dennis didn’t fit that profile, and he was CJ’s age—younger than everyone else.
Dennis gave a halfhearted shrug before turning his attention to his cards, but Rick intuited CJ’s unspoken question.
“Geronimo’s loaded,” Rick said. “And he’s a bad cardplayer.”
CJ’s eyebrows almost climbed clear off his forehead, and when he aimed a questioning look at his friend, Dennis said, “I won the lottery four years ago.”
CJ couldn’t have been more surprised had Dennis stood up on his chair and started singing show tunes.
“How much?” he asked.
“Twenty million,” Dennis said.
“Twenty million dollars?” CJ repeated.
“Tell him how,” Harry said to Dennis.
Dennis ignored the request for as long as it took him to take and expel a single deep breath. Then, as if recounting the purchase of a twenty-million-dollar ticket was as mundane as filling up at the 7-Eleven, he said, “I played the number of home wins the Sabres had over the previous six years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. I checked,” Jake confirmed.
“Tell him what you bought,” Harry said to Dennis.
“If I tell him, can we just play cards?” Dennis asked with a sigh. He looked at CJ. “Sabres season tickets.”
“Ten sets of season tickets,” Harry corrected.
At CJ’s puzzled look—especially as he hadn’t witnessed Dennis making any trips to Buffalo to attend hockey games—Dennis explained.
“I thought I owed them,” he said.
Maybe it was the deadpan delivery, or perhaps it was the fact that he’d just discovered that one of his closest childhood friends was a millionaire, but CJ found the moment extraordinarily funny.
He let go of a loud laugh that made him feel a whole lot better than he’d felt all day. When the laughing faded, he set the money he’d been holding on the table and took a peek at his cards.
“Dennis said you and Artie took an eleven-point,” Harry said, cigar jumping as his lips moved.
CJ nodded, still feeling a chuckle rumbling around in his stomach. “We did. Big boy too.”
“How far was the shot?” Jake asked.
“Maybe eighty yards.”
Harry rearranged the cards in his hand. “Your shot or his?”
“Mine,” CJ said.
“Artie would have taken him at a quarter mile,” Rick said. He held his cards in one hand while his other riffled through the bills in front of him.
“Without a doubt,” Weidman agreed.
CJ didn’t say anything. He’d known Artie was an experienced hunter, but not that he was considered a great shot. For some reason, that bit of knowledge made him even more grateful that the hardware store owner had let him take the deer.
He looked at his hand again and found a pair. The ante was a dollar, and CJ tossed his in. Once the action came back to him, CJ slid three cards across the table, then picked up the three that Harry dealt him. CJ raised on his three of a kind. Dennis and Harry both folded in frustration. CJ reminded himself that he was late coming to the game, and it appeared it hadn’t been Harry’s night, as evidenced by a pile of cash that had dwindled to practically nothing.
Poker had always fascinated CJ, principally because of what the game coaxed from the people who played it. And one thing he’d learned early on was that it didn’t matter how much money one could afford to lose. What mattered was seeing someone else sweep your money into their pile. CJ guessed that Dalton hadn’t lost more than a few hundred dollars tonight, and that likely meant little to him. Poker was a game of principle. And right now principle was rankling Harry Dalton.
Rick stayed in the game, while Jake spent time eyeing his cards, as if he expected them to change under his perusal. Finally, he met CJ’s five-spot and followed it with one of his own.
“I meet and raise you five,” he said.
CJ looked at the money in the center of the table and then at his hand, and the three sevens that hadn’t gone anywhere. A decent hand; it gave him a good shot. His free hand moved toward his money, even though an annoying and responsible vo
ice inside was reminding him that he was locked out of his checking account. He suspected he could call the bank and get them to release the block, mainly because he was the one who’d opened the account in the first place, but it was just one of those things that he hadn’t done yet. And another one of those things that was coming back to bite him.
“Can’t be shy my first time at the table,” CJ said, tossing his money in.
Rick looked at the growing pot, then back at his cards, and tossed them facedown on the table. “Well, this isn’t my first rodeo, and I’ve got no one to impress.” He left the table, disappearing into the kitchen.
When CJ looked at Jake, he found the man watching him, a sly smile on his face. Without taking his eyes off CJ, he reached for a ten-spot and tossed it in.
“Belle of the ball or wallflower?” Jake asked.
The corner of CJ’s lip curled upward as he met Jake Weidman’s gaze. He winked at Jake and threw in to match.
“Call,” he said.
When the cards came down, CJ’s sevens beat Jake’s pair of tens.
As CJ scooped the pot toward him, Jake chuckled and said, “You play cards like your father.”
The comment stopped CJ cold for a fraction of a second, but he recovered and finished gathering his newfound wealth.
With the others sliding their cards toward CJ so he could deal, CJ glanced over at Dennis.
“So you’ve got twenty million dollars,” he said. “Tell me again why we’re spending our evenings and weekends working on a house?”
His question seemed to hit Dennis in the sweet spot, because he looked down at the table, his brow furrowed. After several seconds, he looked up and said, “It’s something to do.”
“I could think of several other ways I’d spend my time if I had that kind of money,” CJ said, shuffling the cards and starting to deal.
It seemed like his friend took a long time to answer, and when he did it was with the tone of someone who had just realized something.
Don Hoesel Page 19