Burn Out

by Marcia Muller

“Yeah. And then she checked herself into a rehab facility they recommended. By this morning she was gone. She’s probably in Reno or Vegas, helling around or selling herself. I’ve washed my hands of her. Sara’s real broken up about this, but she’ll get over it. You gotta go on.”

  “And what about Amy? Anything from her?”

  “Not a word.” He leaned in the doorway, and for a moment I thought he’d sag to the ground. “I loved that little girl, Sharon. I should’ve never let Miri run me off. I should’ve stayed and fought for the last of my nieces and nephews.”

  I went to him, took his hand, and drew him over to the nearest bales of hay. As we sat, I said, “You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

  “Anybody could’ve read the signs that she was headed for bad trouble. But not me, I was too offended at Miri, too dug down into my own unhappiness. Sara and I had two boys, you know—Peter and Raymond.”

  “I didn’t know. Neither of you has ever mentioned them.”

  “They’ve been gone a long time. Peter died in a gang shootout over in Santa Rosa. Raymond died of a drug overdose. I didn’t do so good by them, either.”

  Sadness welled up inside me—guilt, too. “I’m sorry,” I said, “and I understand how you feel. I had a brother, Joey. Always was a rebel and a loner. After he graduated high school, he took off and very seldom came home. Ma—my adoptive mother—got postcards occasionally, but that was it. And then he died all alone of a drug and alcohol overdose in a shack up near Eureka. Ever since then I’ve wished I’d done more. That any of us had done more. But we just . . . let him go.”

  “I’m sorry, Sharon. Us people, we’re all so careless. I don’t want to let go of Amy.”

  “Neither do I. I promise I’ll find her.”

  That night I dreamed of the pit again—only this time it was bigger. Impossible to place both my hands and feet on its sides and climb into the sunshine like a spider. I woke in a near panic, sat up, collapsed back on the pillows.

  Told myself, I will not allow this to get the better of me.

  Tomorrow I’d keep my promise to Ramon. Start an intensive search for Bud Smith who, my instincts said, was at the center of Amy’s disappearance.

  Maybe that would keep my nightmares at bay.

  Tuesday

  NOVEMBER 6

  The Nevada sky was cloudless as I coasted past the red-and-white sign welcoming me to Hawthorne, population 3,311. Larger than Vernon by far, and the county seat, but still a small town. Laid out on a grid, so I had no difficulty locating the Independent News building on D Street.

  The man I talked to was pleasant and friendly. Back issues on microfilm? No problem. They were going to put everything online someday, but who knew when that would be? Soon I was seated in a dusty room fitting reels onto a machine with fumbling fingers. How could I be clumsy at the act I’d performed so many times before I’d become computer literate? Another symptom of burn-out?

  I returned the films an hour or so later, having learned too few new details to justify such a long drive, except that Smith’s rape victim had remained too traumatized to identify her assailant.

  It was after two in the afternoon, so I asked about someplace to eat lunch. McDonald’s; everyplace else had stopped serving. I hadn’t had a Mickey D’s burger in years, and it was a strange experience: not what I now think of as a burger, but a different substance entirely. I blocked out thoughts of what that substance might be and ate it anyway.

  Back in the car, I checked my cell to see if it worked here—which it did—and consulted my notes. Got the number for the prosecutor in the Smith case from Information. Warren Mills, now retired, was home and willing to see me once I assured him that I was an investigator, not someone planning to write a book on the case. “Too damn much of that sensational crap going around these days,” he told me.

  Mills lived only a few blocks away on East Eighth Street. The house was a low-slung rancher, one of a number on that block that were probably built in the late forties before developers realized that the wartime boom in the Hawthorne economy—due to activity at the nearby munitions depot—was dropping off. I parked out front and went up a concrete walk bordered on either side by cacti and polished rock. Westernized, I believe it’s called, for yards that don’t require much water or maintenance.

  Warren Mills answered the door—a tall, erect man with thick gray hair and black-rimmed glasses who, according to the newspaper accounts, must now be in his late seventies but could have passed for mid-sixties. He led me inside to a den with a big-screen TV. The furnishings were overstuffed and looked comfortable; framed photos hung on the walls—color shots of Walker Lake to the north, he told me.

  “Coffee, Ms. McCone? A soda?” He had a deep, rich voice that must have resonated in the courtroom.

  “Nothing, thanks. I’ve just come from McDonald’s.”

  “I should have offered you an Alka-Seltzer. Please, sit down.”

  I sank into a brown chair that enveloped me in an embrace that made it hard to sit up straight.

  Warren Mills settled on the couch, propped his moccasin-shod feet on a scarred coffee table in front of it. “You said on the phone that you’re a private investigator and interested in the Herbert Smith case. Why?”

  “He may have recently been involved in the abduction of a young woman over in Mono County. I’ve read all the newspaper accounts of his case, but there’s so much that seems . . . unsaid. And a friend of Smith’s claims that you yourself were uncertain Smith was guilty.”

  Mills nodded. “His confession was as false as I’ve ever heard.”

  “Then why did you accept his plea bargain and send him to prison?”

  “It was as if Smith was trying to talk his way behind bars. He insisted on his guilt, refused a lie-detector test when his public defender wanted to order one. I didn’t need to build a case against him; he built it for me. And of course the district attorney was hot for a quick trial and conviction. The rape and sodomy of a thirteen-year-old . . . small towns like this need to put crimes like that behind them and move on.”

  “The victim—”

  “I can’t tell you her name. But she was a nice girl from a decent, hardworking family. Too friendly and trusting, that’s all.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “The family moved away. She was severely damaged by the assault. And as you must know, you can keep the victim’s name out of the newspapers and court records but word gets out anyway and then it’s blame-the-victim time.”

  “Smith’s friend claims he was covering for his younger brother, Davey.”

  “The friend’s likely right. Davey Smith was a genius, had just graduated high school at fifteen, with a full scholarship to some college back East. My thinking is that Herbert—Bud, everybody called him—didn’t want to see Davey’s promising future disrupted, even if it meant going to prison for something he didn’t do.”

  “Why? If Davey was a rapist—”

  “You have to understand the way it was with the two of them. The mother died young. Father raised them well, but he had a fatal heart attack when Bud was sixteen. A young man, just starting out in life, and he could have put his little brother in a foster home, but he didn’t. Instead he quit school, picked up where the father left off, took whatever jobs paid best to support the two of them. That’s sometimes the way some family members are. Bud loved Davey, and I think he saw his brother’s promising future as a kind of a way of ensuring the family would go on.”

  “And where is this genius today?”

  Mills shrugged, shook his head.

  I said, “Bud Smith is working as an insurance broker in Vernon, on Tufa Lake. He lives in a double-wide trailer in the country—nice property, but nothing fancy. And he’s a registered sex offender. I guess his brother—wherever he is—didn’t have the same sense of family.”

  “He could be dead. Or incarcerated somewhere else.”

  “True.”

  Mills was silent for a long moment. Then:
“I imagine in your profession, Ms. McCone, you’ve had reason to regret certain of your actions.”

  Oh, haven’t I. Mr. Mills, you’ll never know how much I regret them.

  “Of course.”

  “So have I.” His eyes, behind their black-framed glasses, grew pained. “I regret not pushing harder to prove Bud Smith’s confession was false. I regret not looking more closely at Davey Smith. Whatever’s happened over in Mono County is not Bud’s fault.”

  “And Davey . . . ?”

  “My biggest regret: that I may have let a monster walk free.”

  He paused, seemed to listen to his words. “Talk with an attorney named John Pearl in Carson City.” He reached for a pad and pencil on the scarred coffee table and scribbled. “This is his office address and phone number. I’ll call ahead to say you’ll contact him. He may be able to tell you what I can’t.”

  I took the paper. John Pearl: Bud Smith’s former public defender.

  The munitions depot occupied a vast expanse of land on the outskirts of Hawthorne. Standard military buildings and cracked and weed-choked pavement were visible from the road, although I’d read on the Net that its golf course and officers’ clubhouse had now been turned into a public country club. Storage bunkers covered the land to the east like Indian mounds, and the landscape was stark and uninviting. I passed through the town of Babbitt, which had once been a bedroom community for base workers, and eventually came to Walker Lake.

  I drove north along the shore of the elongated body of water that was rimmed by sand-colored hills to the east. It was currently in ecological crisis, as Tufa and Mono Lakes in California had once been, primarily because the waters of its feeder stream, the Walker River, had been overallocated for agricultural use. Hy had done some work with the organization trying to preserve Walker, one of only five deepwater lakes in the world that are able to sustain a good-sized fishery, and had told me that if the water levels continued to drop, increased salinity would destroy its fish population.

  Today there were few boats on the lake, and its surface was flat and glassy. The weather had changed: dark clouds hovered over the distant hills—storm clouds that looked to be coming this way. Depression stole over me again, reminding me of all the things I didn’t like about my business: the long solo drives and flights; the empty nights in hotel and motel rooms in strange cities; the waiting. Particularly waiting for facts to surface that would allow other facts to materialize and establish the final connection. When that happened, the rush was unbelievable—better, even, than the first time my former flight instructor had put the plane into a controlled spin and the earth had seemed to rush up at us as we plummeted down. . . .

  It was an addiction, plain and simple. And addiction, unless it’s treated, inevitably ends up in self-destruction.

  I wasn’t going to become victim to mine. Never again.

  So what the hell am I doing here in Nevada?

  You promised Ramon you’d find out what happened to Amy.

  Carson City: the state capital, and a pleasant town. Not much of a gambling mecca; its big casino, the Ormsby House, had closed down well over a decade ago and since then cast a derelict shadow over the downtown. Renovation by new owners had seemingly been under way forever, as the project hit delays and snags of all kinds. If it hadn’t been so late in the afternoon I’d have driven by to see how much progress had been made, but I was more concerned with locating the law firm of John Pearl, on Fairview Drive, a couple of blocks from the state office building where Hy and I had said our vows before a judge.

  At first, when I stepped inside John Pearl’s office in a two-story stucco house that had been converted into suites for attorneys, I thought no one was there. But when I called out, a high-pitched, nasal voice that reminded me of a cartoon character—I couldn’t place which one—answered. With a voice like that, Pearl couldn’t have been too successful at trial work.

  He emerged from his inner sanctum: a short, chubby man in a rumpled blue suit. His face was round, his hair a grayish-brown mop that flopped over his forehead; his eyes were too soft and kind for a criminal defense attorney.

  “Ms. McCone,” he said, pumping my hand heartily, “Warren Mills said you’d be stopping by, so I stayed to catch up on some paperwork. Come in, sit down, please.”

  I followed him into his office. It was in minor disarray, like his clothing.

  “I’d offer you coffee but my secretary drank the last cup and forgot to turn the machine off. The carafe’s scorched. You can probably smell it.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I did. “That’s okay,” I said. “I had lunch at McDonald’s and I’m still recovering. Coffee could cause a serious relapse.”

  “McDonald’s.” His eyes—so help me—became nostalgic. “I haven’t had one of their burgers in years. When they first opened up in the town where I was born, I was in my teens. My friends and I used to go there and order two or three each, and before we’d eat them we’d splat the pickles.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know, splat. Take the pickles—they were terrible—out of the burgers and try to drop them out the car window so they’d land flat on the pavement. You never did that?”

  “Uh, not that I recall.”

  “Oh, well.” Pearl leaned back in his chair. “It was pretty stupid, but so were we at the time. Amazing, though: one of the splatters is now a state supreme court justice; another invented some gizmo that allowed him to retire at thirty-five; a third is a big financial planner in Reno. Then there’s me: I was the best pickle splatter, but I’m just a small-time lawyer.”

  It was a set and well-practiced speech, but I couldn’t figure what it was designed to accomplish.

  “I doubt that,” I said. “You have your own practice; you’re your own boss. What type of litigation do you do?”

  “Whatever comes my way. Family law, mainly.” He paused. “No criminal law. I quit the public defender’s office down in Mineral County after the Herbert Smith case. Which, Warren Mills told me, is why you’re here.”

  “Yes.” I explained why I was interested in speaking with those who were involved in it.

  When I finished, Pearl said, “The opinions of Herbert’s friend and Warren Mills are essentially the same as mine. Herbert—Bud, as he was called—struck me on first impression as a badly frightened but innocent young man; he stood by his confession with the tenacity of a bulldog. He resisted all my efforts to help him. Tried twice to fire me.”

  “And this confession came how long after the rape?”

  “About three days, after the investigative officers identified the tire tracks at the scene as having been made by his truck. When they took him in for questioning, he gave them a plausible explanation: he’d been out there taking photographs of the munitions bunkers for an article a friend was writing on the history of the depot. But no one could locate the friend—if he ever existed—and when the sheriff obtained a search warrant for Bud’s home, there was only one camera, in a closet, covered in dust and containing no film. And in the trash was a bloody shirt with a piece ripped from it that matched the fabric the girl had torn from her rapist’s clothing.”

  “So they arrested him—”

  “Not immediately. The shirt was a size smaller than most of Bud’s, and his brother, Davey, had been seen talking to the girl in town that day. The investigators began to focus on Davey and that’s when Bud confessed. He didn’t ask for an attorney, so the public defender’s office assigned him to me. From the beginning he was stubborn and uncooperative. I voiced my doubts to the DA and Warren; Warren was willing to listen, but the DA at that time—he’s deceased now—was a real hardnose. I arranged for the best plea bargain I could, but it was still too much prison time for an innocent man.”

  Like Warren Mills’ eyes when he spoke of his regrets, John Pearl’s were bleak. “That was the end of my illustrious career as a crusading defender of the poor and powerless. I couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. So here I am.” He spread his arms out at his
disheveled office.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about the case?”

  He considered. “Not really. Except that Davey Smith acted the wide-eyed innocent throughout, and as soon as his brother went to prison, he took off for some college where he’d been given a full scholarship. One thing I do know: if he ever shows his face around here again, I myself may be in need of a public defender.”

  The rain broke as I was passing the munitions depot. There were a number of motels in Hawthorne, and the man in the newspaper office had recommended a casino that served a great chicken-fried steak—a favorite of mine—as well as an old-time saloon. I’d stowed a small travel bag in the Land Rover, in the event I’d have to stay over.

  Well, why not? First the motel, next a good meal, and then a chance to elicit some gossip from the townspeople.

  Slim’s Tavern, across the street from the casino where I ate, was definitely old-time—decorated with genuine mining, railroad, and military artifacts from the town’s colorful past. At ten o’clock it was reasonably crowded and noisy from both the patrons’ voices and the clank and whir of the small bank of slot machines. I chose a seat at the bar between two lone men in cowboy hats who looked to be in their midforties, and ordered a beer. You don’t drink wine in a place like that, not if you want any of the locals to talk with you.

  The man to my left stared straight ahead, hunched over his glass of whiskey. Not a talker, I thought, and probably brooding about something. The man to my right gave me a friendly glance, then threw a few dollars on the bar and left.

  Well, hell.

  I nursed the beer, trying not to breathe too deeply of the smoky air—one of the drawbacks of Nevada casinos and drinking establishments—and checking out the place in the backbar mirror. It was mostly an older crowd, forties on up—my target age group. The brooder ordered another whiskey and continued to stare. A leather-faced, strong-jawed man in a baseball cap squeezed onto the vacated stool to my right and ordered a beer and a shot, calling the bartender by name. Then he looked at me and asked, “You new here, or just passing through?”