“Sorry, Coach, but we will all have to move on with our lives,” Huttington replied. He addressed the rest of what he had to say to the court reporter, as if he needed to explain his reasoning to her and no one else. “Coach O’Toole made a dreadful mistake. But one bad act does not make him a bad man. I wish him the best in his future endeavors.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” O’Toole said before Meyers could silence him with a look.
“There was no ‘good purpose’ in allowing him to present his side publicly?” Meyers said to head off any more of his client’s remarks.
“Asked and answered,” Barnhill replied before Huttington could say anything.
Marlene stifled the impulse to shake her head and say something. She had to remind herself that she’d been introduced as a plaintiff’s investigator and was only there to observe.
When Meyers called in early January to tell Butch that he would be deposing Huttington, Marlene had decided to fly out to get acquainted with the players and help with interviews and any loose ends that needed to be tied up.
As much as anything, she just wanted to get out of Manhattan. The murder of Cian Magee had cast a pall over the holiday season. Other than the twins’ usual orgy of overdosing on e-presents and other holiday treats, the celebrations had been quiet and contemplative.
Jaxon had taken Lucy to the hospital after the fire, where she was given a mild sedative and treated for burns to her legs. Because of the tears and the drugs, it had been difficult to get the full story from her when Marlene and Butch arrived. Only when she fell asleep was Jaxon able to fill them in on the details such as he knew them. “Which isn’t much.”
However, it wasn’t until Lucy was released and returned to the loft that they heard about the Sons of Man book and its relation to the tape recording Jaxon had asked her to translate. Even then, it all sounded too incredible—a clandestine group of smugglers from a remote island in the Irish Sea who’d immigrated to America and established a crime empire?
“That borders on The Da Vinci Code fantastic,” Marlene remarked.
Almost as disturbing as the story was Lucy’s attitude around Jaxon when he visited the loft to see how she was doing. Marlene noticed Lucy’s reticence around him and several times saw her daughter giving him sideways glances, as if weighing something. But Lucy didn’t say anything and Marlene chalked it up to shock and grief.
When she got a moment alone with Jaxon, Marlene asked if he’d noticed anything about Lucy’s mood since the attack.
“You mean toward me? And yes, I’ve noticed,” Jaxon acknowledged. “I was the one who got her and Cian into this. Then I was late getting to Cian’s apartment. I was…looking for someone, and it took longer than I thought it would. Lucy hasn’t said as much, but I think she blames me. And to be honest, I blame myself, too.”
The death of Cian Magee had been front-page news for all of a day. The attack was obviously a homicide and arson, but the police had no suspects or a motive.
Jaxon had “pulled some strings” and kept Lucy’s name out of the press, but it hardly mattered. The media could not be bothered with the death of a bookstore owner and the story had died soon after.
Lucy had stayed in New York until Christmas day. After the presents were opened and a quiet Christmas dinner was picked at halfheartedly, she caught a taxi to LaGuardia and left for New Mexico to be with her cowboy.
Now it was January, the twins were back in school, and Butch was preoccupied with the bombing at the Black Sea Café and his obsession with the murder of the schoolchildren during Andrew Kane’s escape. Going to Idaho seemed like a great way for Marlene to escape herself.
Marlene had been picked up in an old sedan at Boise Airport by two of O’Toole’s players from the baseball team, Clancy Len and Tashaun Willis. The young black athletes had then wasted no time driving her north out of the city on a highway that within a few miles was climbing steadily into the snow-covered mountains.
Initially the land they drove through appeared to be barren—given over to rocks, brush, and stunted juniper trees. But as the road climbed in elevation, the increasingly steep hillsides were covered by a dense forest of pines and firs. “Over on the right is the Payette River,” Willis said, indicating the mostly iced-over water in the deep gorge to her right. “It doesn’t look like much of a river now, and I know that where you’re from, the rivers are big, deep, and muddy, but come spring runoff from the snow and the Payette will be raging.”
The higher they climbed, the windier the road became, but it didn’t slow Len down much. Marlene, who was no stranger to wild rides, nevertheless clutched the door handle nervously as the old sedan swung around blind corners and skirted sudden precipices. Here and there, patches of snow and ice could be seen on the pavement. To take her mind off thoughts of plunging off the highway and into the river, Marlene asked her escorts their opinion of Coach O’Toole.
“He’s the best,” Len said. “There wasn’t a lot of incentive for me to do well academically in high school. Where I come from on the South Side of Chicago, not a lot of kids go on to college. Those who try hard in school get a bunch of shit from the gangbangers for being ‘too good for the hood,’ so most just give up. I have to admit, the only reason I wanted to go to college was to play baseball until I could get noticed by a pro scout, only my grades weren’t good enough to let me attend a big school. But Coach O’Toole gave me a chance, and when I got here, he found me a tutor so that I could catch up. Now, I’m straight As.”
“Still planning on a baseball career?” Marlene asked.
Len took a moment to answer. “Some dreams die hard, and after I graduate, if I don’t get drafted, I might try to walk on with some team, just so I can say I gave it my best shot. But I’m not counting on it anymore. Someday, baseball or not, I want to be a teacher…just as long as I can make enough money to save my little sister, Tanya, from the South Side.”
“What about you, Tashaun?” Marlene asked. “Where are you from?”
“Believe it or not, right here in Idaho,” Willis answered. “There ain’t many of us brothers around here, but my father was in the air force, based out of Mountain Home Air Force Base down the interstate some from Boise. He was from Mississippi originally, but fell in love with this place and decided to stay.”
“He still here?” Marlene asked, hoping she didn’t sound nervous as the car swung around a corner just a few yards from the drop-off that plunged down to the river.
“Yep, he and my mom, two brothers, and a sister,” Willis replied. “He retired from the air force and teaches computer science at Boise Community College.”
“And what about your baseball dreams?” Marlene asked.
Willis laughed. “Hell, I can’t hardly get off the pine with the team we got here,” he said. “No, I’m a realist. I love the game, but after college, it’s going to be softball leagues for me. I want to be a teacher, too, and maybe I can coach a little.”
The group rode along in silence for a couple of minutes until Marlene asked, “What about these accusations against Coach O’Toole?”
“They’re bullshit,” Len exclaimed, “’scuse my language, ma’am.”
“Forget about it,” she replied. “I hear worse from my adolescent sons on an hourly basis, though I do appreciate your manners.”
“Anyway, it’s all a bunch of lies,” Len added, “made up by Rufus Porter. He’s the one that’s stirred this all up because he got kicked off the team. It’s a damn shame what they’ve done to Coach O’Toole; the university and the ACAA ought to be ashamed of themselves. I hope he wins his lawsuit for more money than they got.”
Marlene caught the hitch of emotion in Len’s voice. O’Toole’s players love him. Just like his brother, she thought. I remember from the funeral how devastated his former players were. She was about to comment on that when Len, who was looking in the rearview mirror, spoke.
“Looks like we got some crackers for company.”
A few sec
onds later, a big Ford pickup truck roared up alongside the sedan. Inside were three young men, all as bald as billiard balls. Two sat in the front seat but the third was leaning out of the cab window, pantomiming pumping a shell into the chamber of a shotgun. He aimed the imaginary weapon at Len and pulled the imaginary trigger, laughing as he looked back at his companions.
The two cars went around a blind corner and the faces of the three young men changed from laughter to panic. A semitruck bearing a load of timber was coming head-on from the other direction, and they were seconds from being obliterated. The driver of the pickup gunned the engine and swerved in front of the sedan just in time to avoid being crushed. For a moment, the pickup remained in front, as if the driver was recovering his wits, and then it rocketed off ahead.
“Speak of the devil,” Willis said with disgust. “That clown leaning out the window was good ol’ Rufus Porter himself, and those were some of his Aryan nation friends. That timber truck almost did the world a favor.”
A few miles farther, Len turned off onto another two-lane highway and headed northeast. They’d gone about twenty more miles, much of it paralleling a railroad track, when they passed a gravel road with a gated entrance and guard station. No people were visible, but they could see the Ford truck pulled off the road on the other side of the gate.
“That’s the property of the Unified Church of the Aryan People,” Len said contemptuously. “As you can see, our friends are the religious types.”
Another ten miles brought them to the town of Sawtooth, which, Marlene noted, had managed to retain at least some of its history. The entrance to Main Street was dominated by a tall wood-sided building that proclaimed in big white letters on a red background to be the Sawtooth Mercantile and Livestock Feed Store. Across the street was a saloon called the Cowboy Bar; as if on cue, two young men in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots sauntered out.
“I love it here,” Len added. “I hope to live here someday. The air is clean, the water doesn’t smell like the sewer, and for the most part, people treat you the same way you treat them. That’s one of the things that Coach O’Toole emphasized to all of us players: Be good members of the community if you want to be considered part of the community.”
“Sounds a lot like his brother,” Marlene replied. “How much farther to Coach O’Toole’s house?”
Willis pointed to a small mountain that rose beyond the town. “About a half hour,” he said. “Coach lives up there, past the university campus.”
As predicted, a half hour later, the group arrived at the entry of a long driveway that led to a large log home where smoke was curling up from the chimney. A pair of curious horses watched them from a snowy pasture as they rolled up to the house. Tall, red-haired Mikey O’Toole and his attorney, Richie Meyers, were waiting on the wide porch.
“I hope my two young friends here didn’t show you too wild a time,” O’Toole shouted as he walked down the wide steps to embrace Marlene. “Clancy is a city boy, but he seems to have lost all inhibitions about driving fast on our treacherous mountain roads. He’s the Mario Andretti of the University of Northwestern Idaho.”
“Please, coach, maybe ‘the Wendell Scott,’ at least he was a brother,” Len said, laughing. “But don’t worry, Coach, I took it easy on her. We did have one small run-in with some of our friends from the Unified Church of Racists and Morons, including favorite son Rufus Porter.”
O’Toole shook his head and apologized. “Sorry, Marlene, they really are in the minority, but our Aryan neighbors do like to make themselves stick out like sore thumbs.”
“Say, Coach, you mind if we go downstairs and watch the TV while you old folks catch up?” Len asked.
“Watch it with the ‘old folks’ comments, Clancy, unless you want to be running suicide sprint drills every day for a month when I get reinstated,” O’Toole said, laughing. “But go ahead, you know you don’t have to ask, and you’ve probably behaved yourselves about as long as you can stand. There’s beers in the fridge, but leave your keys with me, you’re spending the night. I’m about to throw some steaks on the barbecue. How many cows do you think the two of you can eat?”
“No more than two or three each,” Len said, and tossed his keys to O’Toole. “I’m not too hungry…. What’s for breakfast?”
O’Toole sighed theatrically. “I’ve gone into massive debt trying to feed these guys,” he said. “And there are a couple dozen more just like them on the team. But come on in, I’m forgetting my manners, making you stand out in the cold.”
Without being asked, the two baseball players took Marlene’s suitcases into the house, followed by the others. Then with a wave to the ‘old folks,’ they disappeared down a big spiral staircase, and the sound of a game on television soon wafted up.
The next day while sitting in the university meeting room, Marlene smiled at the memory of O’Toole’s banter with his players. Not exactly the sort to use sex and booze to recruit youngsters, she thought, and looked over at Huttington and Barnhill. So why were these two so willing to throw him under the truck for some racist jerk just because some fat-cat booster wants his boy on the baseball team?
Two hours after the deposition began, Meyers asked for a quick break so that he could go back over his notes and make sure he didn’t miss anything. Back on the record, he asked a few housekeeping questions and then finished with a question that Karp had suggested during their telephone conversation.
“We’re about finished here,” he said, and looked directly into Huttington’s eyes. “Is there anything else you can think of that would be relevant or significant regarding this case? Something I might have missed or was omitted?”
Barnhill scoffed. “What kind of a question is that? President Huttington has been completely forthcoming with both the ACAA investigation and your rather lengthy deposition today.”
Up to this point, Meyers’s demeanor had been polite and reserved. But now he fixed Barnhill with an angry glare, which made the other attorney laugh nervously and look quickly away. “Mr. Huttington, I asked you a question,” Meyers said tightly. “This is a deposition and you must answer my questions, even if your attorney objects. And do remember you’re under oath.”
Barnhill scowled and began to say something, but Huttington waved him off. “That’s okay, Clyde, we have nothing to hide here.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Kip,” Barnhill agreed, though the smile he tried to assume looked almost painful. “Nothing to hide.”
Marlene got the distinct impression that a message had just been passed between Huttington and his attorney. Indeed, it made her wonder what they were hiding.
“Your answer?” Meyers demanded.
Huttington blinked at the tone. Nice timing, Marlene thought. Richie’s sending his own message.
“Uh, no, I can’t think of anything to add that would be relevant or significant,” the university president replied.
Meyers smiled like he’d just caught Huttington in a lie. “You’re sure?”
Recovering his nerve, Barnhill angrily retorted, “Are you implying that President Huttington is lying?”
“Not at all,” Meyers replied, his tone suddenly light again. “People sometimes forget when they’re asked something in an uncomfortable circumstance, such as a deposition. So I was just making sure he’d had plenty of opportunity to answer the question completely and honestly.”
“Then your question has been answered.”
Meyers grinned. “Indeed. Thank you, that’s all.”
Huttington and Barnhill stood up quickly and left the room without saying anything more. Meyers looked at Marlene. “How’d I do?” he asked.
“Perfect,” she replied. “Butch would tell you he couldn’t have done it better himself.”
“He’s a great coach,” Meyers replied.
“He had a great coach, too,” Marlene noted, looking out the window. Big flakes of snow were floating gently to the ground. She shivered. “Someplace around here where a gal can get a hot cup of c
offee?”
“You bet,” O’Toole replied. “There’s a great little Basque coffee shop around the corner.”
They got up from the table and walked out into the hallway just in time to see Huttington and Barnhill confronted by an olive-skinned man wearing a bright red beret and carrying a wooden cane. “Where is my daughter?” the man demanded in heavily accented English.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Santacristina, we’ve been over this; I have no idea regarding the whereabouts of Maria,” Huttington replied. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He started to move toward his office but Santacristina blocked his way.
Barnhill took a step toward the man. “I believe there is a restraining order that prohibits you from coming within one hundred feet of Mr. Huttington. Now, do I need to summon the police?”
“Summon whoever you want, Barnhill,” Santacristina shot back angrily. “I’m sure the newspapers and television stations will enjoy the story of the father who was arrested for asking a married university president what happened to the student he was having an affair with.”
On cue, a campus police officer appeared from inside the president’s office. “Is there a problem here?” he said to the men.
Marlene expected that Huttington would have the angry man thrown off campus or in jail, but instead the university president shook his head. Glancing nervously in the direction of Marlene, O’Toole, and Meyers, he said, “No, it’s all right, Officer. Mr. Santacristina’s daughter, Maria, was a student intern in my office. She was reported missing by her father last spring, and he now labors under the mistaken impression that I know something about her disappearance.”
“She was more than a student intern, wasn’t she, Huttington?” Santacristina demanded. He pointed to the university president with his thick wooden stick. “This man used his position and smooth words to lure a young woman into an illicit affair. What would any father think?”
“Thinking might actually be wise before ‘any father’ goes around making more wild accusations,” Barnhill retorted. “Or shows up drunk at a university dinner party thrown in honor of Mr. Huttington and makes a scene in front of all the guests, which is what got him slapped with a restraining order…an order, I might add, I am about to invoke if he doesn’t get out of our way. Or maybe it’s the Immigration and Naturalization Service I should call.”
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