by Bill Cameron
“That’s not the way I see it. You’re qualified, you’ve got the experience.”
“The pension is what I’ve got.”
“So hanging out in a coffee shop all day is working out for you? Doing off-the-books insurance investigations? Chasing women half your age?”
She stays informed.
“Riggins has been helping us out. We’ve even got a federal grant coming through. We’ll be able to pay a small stipend. Simple case review, flag anything that stands out. No interviews, no testifying, just helping us stay on top of things. The detectives develop the evidence.”
“Maybe I like sitting in a coffee shop all day.”
“Well, think about it. Okay? You’ve got good eyes. You could help us out.”
I grunt. I can’t decide if she really wants me or is trying to do me some kind of half-assed favor. I decide to change the subject.
“Did you send someone to look for Jase?”
She seems to appreciate the change of topic. “He’d left. You should have called me first. I might have been able to get a car down there before he ran off.”
“Susan, you ever been down there?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know a scrotum face like me stands out. And anyway, I went looking for someone who might know Eager. It’s one of his hangouts. I wasn’t there to be furtive. You’re lucky Jase talked to me at all.”
She nods, conceding the point. “Do you think he was telling the truth?”
Nobody is ever honest with a cop, even a dried-up ex-cop. And Jase, no doubt, is an accomplished liar, which means he mixed in enough truth to avoid tripping himself up later but omitted everything important. “Maybe. I’m sure he knows more than he was telling, but where Luellen went probably isn’t it.”
“But beyond that ... he must know about the kitchen.”
“You have to figure.” And you have to figure he knows what Eager was doing there too, despite his protests to the contrary. Kids that age always know all the household secrets, and between his hints and Mitch’s revelations clearly there are a lot of secrets. I know none of them. For a moment I have the eerie sensation I’m chasing a ghost. Eager’s, or my own, who can say? Where I ought to be is back in Uncommon Cup. And what I ought to be doing is drinking coffee with Ruby Jane and getting past myself.
But Susan isn’t done with Jase. “Not too broken up about his father, I take it.”
“Shoot his Xbox, that’ll draw a tear.”
She chuckles and some of my tension lessens. Suddenly we’ve become two cops jawing about a case. Spinning out the threads, seeing what can be woven together. Been a long time since we talked to each other like colleagues.
“What all have you found out about Luellen and Danny?”
“Granger is Luellen’s maiden name.”
“Yeah, she’s mentioned it.”
“She’s from a small town in southern Oregon, but moved to Portland about four-and-a-half years ago. She worked part time at the women’s health clinic over on Southeast 50th until August 2004. Both her parents died in a car accident shortly after she came to Portland.”
August 2004 is also when the Tabor Doe dropped, but I don’t mention that. No need to wreck the mood. “I’m pretty sure Mitch’s father is dead too, way back. I know his mother died last year.” I think for a moment about the wheelchair I carried around in my trunk for several days.
“So whoever Danny’s grandfather is, he’s neither Mitch nor Luellen’s father.”
“Biological father?”
“So far, nothing on him. Danny’s birth certificate lists the father as unknown. But we just started looking.”
There’s only so much you can find out in a short morning, but sometimes you can sense when you’ve hit a wall. “You’re not going to find anything else.”
“It seems unlikely.”
“Mitch confirmed he’s not Danny’s real father.”
“The math didn’t add up.”
“So grandpa could be the bio father’s old man.”
“Whoever that is.”
“Luellen never struck me as someone with a lot of random sexual partners. She knows who the father is.”
Susan thinks for a moment. “Unless she was raped.”
It wasn’t a possibility I’d considered until that moment, but Susan might on to something. If true, it could explain a lot, everything from Luellen’s singular dedication to Danny to her flight from the police this morning. Hell, it might even explain the strange things Mitch said about their relationship.
“Skin, you need to come clean to me. I mean, that bit about watching Danny? Come on. What do you know about these people?”
I hesitate for only a moment. There’s no reason to stick with my earlier reticence. I’m already part of the investigation; Mitch saw to that. I shrug. There’s little enough to tell.
“They moved in a couple of years ago, late winter. Two and a half years, I guess.”
“Did Eager ever show any interest in them?”
The question embarrasses me a little, but after what Mitch said, it’s a good one. “I thought he was hanging around me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know he used to show up at my place a lot. We’d talk about nothing. He’d show me skateboard tricks and I’d patch him up when he wiped out. I’d try to draw him out about that day up on Mount Tabor.”
“For all the good that did.”
“Yeah.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know, Susan. I saw him running around with Jase a few times, but I didn’t think much of it. He lived in the neighborhood.”
“But Jase is older than he is.”
“Yeah, by a year or two. I figured it was hero worship or whatever.”
“If you say so.”
“I had no idea Eager had a relationship with Luellen.”
“What was that about the tagging?”
I sigh. I’m feeling like a fool, but it’s not like she wasn’t there. I describe my visit from Mitch a few months earlier, about seeing Eager’s tag on the front of the house.
“But you didn’t do anything about it.”
“I told Mitch to report it to the police.”
“Did he, that you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you didn’t tell him you knew who did it.”
“Susan, you don’t have to live next to the guy. Mitch is mostly just one endless pain in the ass. I thought Eager was in some kind of dog fight with Jase, so I figured I would talk to him about it the next time I saw him. And as it happened, today was the first time I’ve seen him in a year.”
“Did you look for him after he tagged the Bronstein house?”
“A little, here and there.” A few visits to Burnside, and O’Bryant Square in addition to my fruitless call to Charm. “I didn’t see the point in pushing it.”
“Obviously there was a point. If Mitch is to be believed, he targeted the boy this morning.”
“What do you want me to say, Susan?”
“I just think you were behaving irresponsibly.” So much for collegial discourse. I suppose this is her stab at me for holding out about my sideline in childcare, but I can’t read her face. It’s blank.
“Oh, Jesus Christ. Are you kidding me? I had no reason to think anything was going on but a teenage spat.”
“You know Eager’s history.”
“Better than you do, goddammit. A little spray paint on Mitch Bronstein’s front porch wasn’t cause for calling out the National Guard.”
She knows I’m right, but I also know she’s a little right too. Obviously I missed a lot playing footsie with Eager, all the while babysitting for Luellen and dodging Mitch whenever I could. Across the street, I saw unremarkable domesticity. Husband, wife, two kids. All they lacked was the dog. But what the fuck did I know?
I don’t speak again until we turn on to my street.
Things have changed since this morning. The street is open, the barricades gone. Hardly any ca
rs are parked along the street, a sight I don’t expect to see repeated in my lifetime. There is a patrol car parked in front of my house, though, along with two vans belonging to the crime scene examiners. Warning tape crisscrosses the porch. Moose and Frannie are waiting on the walkway leading back to Mitch and Luellen’s kitchen door when we pull up in front of the house.
“What’s the plan?”
“Thanks for your help, Skin. I’m sorry things didn’t go better at the hospital.”
“So I’m dismissed.”
She pauses, then surprises me. “You can come in with us, if you like. Perhaps you can tell us if anything seems out of place.”
She’s assuming I’ve spent enough time inside the house to know. “A lot seems out of place today.” She smiles, eyes weary, and I follow her up the walk to the back door.
The kitchen isn’t in too bad a shape. There are dishes in the sink and a skillet of coagulated eggs on the stove, fingerprint powder on the counters and cupboard doors. A couple of spilled drawers. Trail of dried blood on the floor, gouge in the plaster where the bullet was extracted. But not the disaster I expected. Justin Marcille, primary examiner for the state, is there boxing up his kit. He looks at me like I’m covered in my own vomit. I guess he still remembers the last time we spoke. He draws himself up, five feet, seven inches of irritable French Canadian and faces Susan.
“We’re packing up, Lieutenant. We should be out of here in another ten minutes.”
“Anything of interest?”
“Nothing obvious that you haven’t already seen. I’ll have a prelim for you tomorrow, but it’s going to be a while before we process everything.”
“Give me the highlights.”
Justin frowns. From experience, I know he doesn’t like to speculate until he’s had a chance to review the evidence. But he also knows cops want to know anything they can, as soon as they can. “There are points of disturbance in the foyer, front hall, dining room and kitchen. We collected material from each location, but I have no sense yet of how much of it is relevant. A lot of latents, of course, mostly partials. Don’t be in a hurry there.”
“I understand. Maybe you could help us with something. We’re looking for a phone number. Did you turn up an address book, anything like that?”
Marcille thinks for a moment. “Nothing like that, Lieutenant. The warrant—”
“We’re working on an amendment.”
“Fine.” A couple of others join us from the dining room. They’re PPB criminalists, but I don’t recognize them. After my time, I guess.
Susan nods. “What about the computers?”
I whistle. “Computers? Who wrote that affidavit?” Then I realize they’re interested in Mitch’s state of mind. Emails, letters, anything that might shed light on what happened this morning. I wonder if they’ll find nudie shots of his girlfriend Lynn from work.
Justin ignores me. “A couple of laptops. Password protected, so you’ll have to wait till the IT guys can get at them. Won’t be a problem, but you won’t get anything today.”
“How about a cell phone?”
“There was one charging in the study. But you’re stuck there too. It’s got a PIN.”
Susan’s lips go thin.
“Check with IT in the morning.”
Time is ticking. Tomorrow morning could be too late. “Tell you what, Justin. See if you can expedite IT. We need that phone number, and the computers or the cell phone is our best bet for it, okay?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
She turns to us. “We might as well have a look around.”
I wonder where the amended warrant is, but I don’t say anything. Neither does Frannie Stein, but Moose has a question. “What are we looking for?”
“A cell phone number for Eager Gillespie.” Moose’s eyebrows raise a fraction of an inch. He knows Eager too. “An address book would be great, but I’m not hopeful about that.” Her eyes stray to the fridge, which is a mess of photographs and coupons. Magnetized block letters, C-A-T and B-I-R-D and D-A-N-N-Y spelled out in primary colors. One of the N’s is a sideways Z. “Maybe a sticky note somewhere. Or check to see if the house phones have speed dial numbers programmed.”
“Frannie and I can take upstairs.”
“Okay. Skin, what do you think?”
I’ve only ever been in the kitchen and living room, and on the rear patio. But I know Mitch has an office on the first floor overlooking the back yard, likely where Justin found the cell phone. Frannie and Moose head up stairs as I lead Susan through the dining room and down a short hallway to the office.
The crime scene team doesn’t seem to have spent much time in here. No powder residue, just the ordered disarray of a room someone actually uses. The furniture is Swedish, lots of blond wood and visible fasteners. Two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, half full of books, mostly popular fiction but also a mix of titles I suppose Mitch uses for work. Fundamentals of User Interface Design, 21st Century Value-Added Metricity. Someone may know what that means. The DVDs under the flat-screen television opposite the desk make more sense to me. Mitch seems to favor series television. Lost, Buffy, The Shield. I’d almost consider asking to borrow some of it, except that would mean talking to Mitch.
Susan isn’t interested in Mitch’s taste in entertainment. She starts with the desk. I move to a four-drawer file cabinet.
“Skin, any ideas on Mitch’s password for IT?”
“No.”
“Come on. Anything? Just a guess?”
“‘ITHINKIMJESUS.’ All uppercase. Maybe an exclamation point at the end.”
“Can you be serious for a minute?”
“Susan, I hardly know the guy.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“Look in the desk. Maybe he writes it on a notepad or something.”
“Would Mitch do that?”
“It’s a stupid thing to do, so yeah, he would.”
I catch myself smiling when she sighs. But I also hear her pulling open desk drawers. I open the file cabinet, flip through a row of folders that seem to be connected to his work. A bunch of company names, some I recognize. The folders have sketches and handwritten notes in them, as well as color printouts of what look like magazine ads and billboards. The second drawer has more of the same. Mitch does a lot of work for environmental groups, Nature Conservancy, 1000 Friends of Oregon. Probably thinks that makes him a radical. The third drawer is dedicated to tax records, IRS and Oregon Department of Revenue returns organized by date and going back to the late 90s. “Susan, tax records here. Maybe you can figure something out about Danny from them.”
“I’ll let the DA know.”
The fourth drawer is bills. Comcast, Qwest, Portland General Electric. Familiar stuff. I start to close the drawer, then have an idea. I look through folder after folder, find what I want near the end. Verizon Wireless. Susan comes up behind me.
“What do you have?”
“Cell phone bills.”
I open the folder and pull out the most recent bill. They’re on a family plan. Four phones. I flip through the pages. “Bingo.”
“What?”
“You think Danny carries a cell phone?”
“Seems like they’re starting younger and younger, but age four would be a stretch.”
“Not according to this. They’ve got four numbers on their plan, one assigned to Daniel Granger.”
“That could be Eager.”
I memorize the number, then hand her the bill. She writes each number in her notebook. “He doesn’t use it much. He only called Luellen’s cell, at least on this bill.”
“Can you do anything with his number?”
“Call it.”
“What if he doesn’t answer?”
“I’ll see what we can do about tracking it.”
It’s not much, but an hour ago we didn’t even know Eager had a phone. Maybe she could get a line on his location. I haven’t kept up with the technology since I retired
. Cell phones have had GPS in them for a while now, but how accurate it is I can’t say. I also don’t know if it works if the phone is turned off.
“What’s next?”
Susan takes a second to answer. “We’re good now. Thanks for your help.”
“Susan—”
“What do you want me to say, Skin?”
There’s nothing she can say. I signed the papers, I took the pension. I no longer work for the Portland Police Bureau.
Unless I want to come review cold case files for a stipend.
Her attention returns to the sheaf of pages in her hand. I head for the door. “See ya around, I guess.” I don’t know if she hears me.
Three Years, Three Months Before
I’m Your Man
Hard to say what surprised Eager more: that the man in the parking lot was a cop, or that he was Eager’s old man. Cop was bad enough. Cops had this habit of going all wiggy when you stole their shit. Anyone’s shit, though Eager had met cops who’d glance left while he ran right so long as some green passed hands. Hell, one graveyard five-o let him make off with the climate control cluster from a Honda CRV for the Jackson in his pocket and half an ounce of pot.
But that asshole hadn’t been his old man.
For the bulk of his thirteen and three-quarters years, he’d been only vaguely aware he even had a father. His mother rarely acknowledged the existence of Big Ed Gillespie, a name she’d mention in the same tone one might use to talk about the little man from under the basement stairs who crept out at night to spirit away naughty children. Eager couldn’t remember ever seeing his father. There were no pictures of him in photo albums or on the computer. After a few wine spritzers, Eager’s mother might admit a past life in southern Oregon—Eager and his sisters were all born at Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls—and would sometimes grumble about a “leathery fuck who ruined her goddamn life over a goddamn prank.” Not Eager’s father, someone else, though it was never clear exactly who the leathery fuck was. The rest of the time the kids may as well have hatched from eggs for all Charm was willing to reveal. If asked direct questions about Big Ed she would only say, “I’ll roll in dog shit sooner’n discuss that asshole.”
But now he was here. First on the porch last night, hollering and banging, and today outside Hawthorne Auto holding the girl up by her neck.