Penance

by David Housewright

  “Oh, Mr. Taylor. I’d hardly think so,” she said, smiling at my suggestion. Then she glanced at her watch and told me it was time she returned to her office. Her heels made a pleasant echo on the marble floor as she walked away; I listened to them long after she was out of sight.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I STOPPED AT A hardware store for a can of putty and a pane of glass cut to fit my front window, the one the bullet had gone crashing through. Across the street from the store was a park with four softball diamonds, all of them idle. My friends and I used to play softball. We were pretty good, too; won a few tournaments, won a few league championships. Most of us had known each other since we were five years old and playing T-ball at Linwood Park. The game kept us together for nearly thirty years and while we played there was always time for dinners and parties and just hanging out; always time to have a few beers and talk it over. But families and jobs and the responsibilities of age eventually took their toll and one day there simply weren’t enough of us left to field a team. Soon after that there wasn’t enough time for anything. Now we get together once a year, at Christmas. I drove home depressed.

  I stood on the aluminum ladder outside my front window, fumbling helplessly with the glass, trying mightily—and unsuccessfully—to seal it securely in the frame without smudging it with putty. As I worked I reflected on the identity of the person responsible for the shattered window and realized that if anyone wanted to shoot me in the back, now would be a good time.

  “Hi, Taylor,” a voice called.

  I dropped the glass and putty knife and dived into the hedge that ran under the front windows.

  “Did you fall?” the voice asked, concerned. It belonged to twelve-year-old Tammy Mandt.

  “Don’t ever, ever do that again,” I yelled at her.

  “Do what?” she yelled back. Tammy was tough; she didn’t like to be pushed around. Yet she also was insecure; she looked down, away and over my head, but never directly at me.

  I gave her a hug. “I’m sorry. You startled me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and hugged back.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I insisted.

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  By the seventh “sorry” she was laughing.

  “May I take Ogilvy for a walk?” she asked.

  “Help yourself. His harness is on …” She didn’t wait for my directions but scampered into my house. I went back to the window. The job took twenty minutes more—constantly looking over my shoulder slowed me down—and when I was finished I wondered why I had even bothered; the glass was so badly smudged you could barely see through it. Still, it kept out the rain and cold. I stood under it, admiring my handiwork, as Cynthia Grey drove up. She was wearing a high-neck blouse with a lace-trimmed collar under my sweatshirt; a pretty woman dressed in lace can sell me anything she wants. I walked toward her and she walked toward me, but before we met, Tammy came out of the house calling my name.

  “Taylor, I’m going to take … Oh, hi,” she said to Cynthia.

  “Hi,” Cynthia replied.

  “I’m taking Ogilvy for a walk in the park now,” Tammy informed us.

  “Really? You can take rabbits for walks?” Cynthia asked with incredulity.

  “Well, yeah,” Tammy answered, apparently wondering why adults were so dense. She set Ogilvy on the grass and attached a fifteen-foot-long red leash to his harness. Cynthia knelt next to the rabbit and scratched his nose. Tammy regarded her suspiciously for a moment and then asked, “Are you Taylor’s new girlfriend?” Kids say the darnedest things.

  Cynthia blushed. She glanced at me and then back to the young girl. “Yes,” she said.

  “Okay,” Tammy said. “C’mon, Ogilvy,” she told the rabbit and gave his leash a tug. Ogilvy bounded off toward the street, Tammy hanging onto the red ribbon. They didn’t get far. Kids have a radar for this sort of thing and before Tammy and Ogilvy had made it to the boulevard, a half-dozen urchins appeared out of thin air and crowded around, petting the rabbit, asking questions, allowing as to how they always wanted a rabbit, too, and conspiring to get one from their parents.

  Cynthia watched with intense interest. She was smiling broadly when she came to me and wrapped her arms around me, hugging me tight.

  We played miniature golf and Cynthia beat me three games straight, but the sun was in my eyes and my head still hurt and besides, I let her win. We roamed the shops on Grand Avenue and she bought me a bookmark that said: BE ALERT; THE WORLD NEEDS ALL THE LERTS IT CAN GET. I bought her a double-scoop French-vanilla ice cream cone. She bought me a sixteen-ounce T-bone at a pretty good steakhouse on West Seventh Street. I paid for the drinks at a jazz joint near Como Park where they know me; the woman fronting the house quartet dedicated a song to us from the stage, Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

  It was past one when we pulled into my driveway. I invited Cynthia inside. She declined, saying she had to get up early. So, we necked in the front seat for about fifteen minutes. I invited her inside again, she wavered, but finally pushed me out of the car and drove off. Damn. Maybe I should have hired someone to shoot at us.

  The digital display of my AM/FM clock radio with snooze alarm read 5:11 when the sound of my ringing telephone woke me from a Technicolor dream in which Cynthia and I were … Well, never mind that. The phone rang. It was Detective Martin McGaney.

  “Meet me,” he said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IF YOU STOOD on your toes, you could see the black roof of the Ramsey County morgue across the river from where Joseph Sherman fell; you could follow the meat wagon as it climbed Hill Street to Kellogg Boulevard, took the Wabasha Bridge across the Mississippi River and turned into Harriet Island where Sherman lay facedown on the dry earth.

  A tip was called into 911 about 2 A.M. The tipster, a man who suffered from a sudden, unexplained bout of amnesia when asked his name, said he and his girlfriend had discovered a body below the cliffs across the river from downtown St. Paul. A car was quickly dispatched, an officer located Sherman’s body and the mechanism that is a homicide investigation was shoved into gear.

  By the time I arrived the machine was humming along. The techs were already at work. One of them used a can of white spray paint to circle a .9 mm-casing found several feet from the body. Another took photographs; a strobe flashed like lightning across the graying sky, illuminating Sherman’s shattered skull and the dark liquid running from his nose.

  A large-caliber bullet had made a dime-sized entrance wound in the roof of Sherman’s mouth and destroyed his brain before leaving a baseball-sized hole in the back of his head. A .9mm Beretta was clasped tightly in his right hand. His left hand was between his knees, the palm turned outward. There were bloodstains on the front and back of Sherman’s red-and-white shirt and jeans. His shoes were splattered with mud.

  “Well, that’s that,” Casper said. “Suicide.”

  “Give me a light here,” I requested, bending close to the body, looking hard at Sherman’s wrists. I found contusions on both of them, just below the worn cuffs of his shirt.

  “See it?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” McGaney replied.

  “What? What are you looking at?” Casper stammered.

  I left the scene and moved to a bench about three hundred yards away to watch as the rising sun turned the city from gray to gold. McGaney joined me some time later and together we followed a taconite barge as it drifted lazily past, following the river to St. Louis or Kansas City or New Orleans or a hundred other places we would rather have been. Finally, McGaney said, “Talk to me.” And I did. I told him I had met Sherman at Le Chateau. I told him what he said to me and what I thought of his words. I told him Sherman had been carrying a Taurus.

  “Are you sure?” McGaney asked. “They’re very similar in appearance, a Taurus and a Beretta.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  We were soon joined by Casper, who seemed puzzled. “I just spoke
to the lieutenant,” he told McGaney. “I told her we identified the body. I told her it looked like a suicide.” Casper shook his head.

  “What did she say?” McGaney prompted.

  “She said to be sure.”

  “Good idea,” McGaney told him.

  “It’s suicide,” Casper insisted. “Isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” McGaney said.

  “What ‘maybe’? What did you see that I didn’t?”

  “Start with the gun,” McGaney told him. “He was still holding it; a man who shoots himself usually isn’t able to do that.”

  “Cadaveric spasm,” Casper protested. “I’ve seen suicides who go into spontaneous rigor mortis, who grip the gun so tight it leaves an impression in their hand. Haven’t you?”

  “I suppose,” McGaney said.

  “Yeah,” Casper grunted, waiting for more. “Yeah,” he repeated when none came.

  “Look at his wrists, goddamn it!” I shouted.

  “What about ’em?”

  “The marks on his wrists,” McGaney answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re the same marks handcuffs leave when you struggle against them.”

  “Hold the phone, hold the phone,” Casper demanded. “Are you saying he was murdered? By a cop?”

  “Don’t jump to so many conclusions,” McGaney told Casper.

  “Anyone can get handcuffs,” I said.

  “Are you saying a cop did this?”

  “Keep your voice down,” McGaney warned.

  “Are you saying a cop did this?” Casper whispered.

  “Maybe,” McGaney answered.

  Casper pondered the possibility with great solemnity, weighing it carefully, considering its consequences to the department, to himself, and said, “No. It’s a suicide. No doubt about it. Suicide. The sonuvabitch killed two people, knew he was going down for it, couldn’t bear to go back to prison and did himself. I’ll bet a month’s pay that the gun he used was the same one that killed Brown and the Lamb girl.”

  “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t,” I said, but Casper wasn’t listening.

  “Suicide. That’s what I’m going to say in my report; you can say what you like.”

  I’d heard enough. I walked slowly back toward my Monza. If it came to it, Casper would be some defense attorney’s best friend.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Casper wanted to know. “The lieutenant said she wants to talk to you.”

  “She knows where to find me,” I shouted over my shoulder and kept walking.

  I sat in the car, listening to the engine idle. The cops couldn’t find Sherman; I probably couldn’t have found him even if I had looked hard. So, how had the killer? Maybe the killer hadn’t. Maybe Sherman found the killer. I had a thought. I shut down the Monza and went looking for McGaney. I found him standing just inside the yellow tape imprinted POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. The ambulance jockeys had loaded Sherman onto a gurney.

  “Just one second?” I asked, gesturing at the corpse. McGaney nodded and I asked the jocks to unzip the black vinyl bag. I checked Sherman’s wrists again. And smiled.

  “What?” McGaney asked.

  “His shirt,” I answered. “It’s old.”

  It was still early, but I swung over to Heather Schrotenboer’s apartment, anyway—I had things to do and I wanted to get her off my plate. I found her sitting on the stoop in front of her apartment building, cradling a coffee mug in her hands. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said. “The weatherman said it would get up to seventy-five degrees. Not many days like this left before winter.”

  “Do you have the money?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  I didn’t have time for this. “Good luck to you,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “I won’t.”

  I found a telephone that you can dial from your car in the parking lot of a minimart two blocks away. I called Randy.

  “Heather Schrotenboer,” I said and gave him the address. “One thing, though,” I told him. “I will be very, Very, VERY displeased if anything nasty should befall her.”

  The halfway house hadn’t changed much since I had been there last. Its concrete steps were still crumbling, it still needed paint and J. T. was still on the porch looking as surly as ever. Only this time he made no attempt to punch me out.

  “I’d like to see Elliot Seeley,” I told him.

  “Hey, Elliot, some guy to see ya!” he shouted through the screen door without moving.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  A moment later Seeley appeared. “Mr. Taylor, isn’t it?”

  “I have a couple of quick questions and then I’m out of here,” I assured him.

  “All right.”

  “When Sherman left last Saturday, what was he wearing?”

  Seeley shrugged. “Sports jacket, shirt, black slacks …”

  “What color shirt?”

  “White. Cotton, I think. Why?”

  Seeley had described what Sherman was wearing when I met him at Le Chateau. But not what he was wearing when he died.

  “Did he take clothes with him?”

  “Saturday? No, of course not.”

  “Have you seen him since Saturday?”

  “No, as I keep telling the police …”

  “Could he have come back without your knowledge, come back for some of his belongings?”

  “No. But he could afford to buy new ones.”

  “Maybe not. If his money was in a bank …”

  “It was.”

  “… he might have been too frightened to go near it. He would only have the money he had on him.”

  “He was flashing a pretty big wad,” Seeley told me. “Maybe a thousand.”

  Six hundred fifty of which he spent on a gun. “Thank you,” I said and headed back toward my car.

  “Pussy,” J. T. called as I walked away. I ignored him.

  Dot Ladner was not happy to see me.

  “I want to see the locker where you kept Sherman’s belongings,” I said. When Dot didn’t respond quickly enough to suit me, I started toward the basement. She followed after me. We stopped in front of the wooden locker with BUILDING stenciled across the front. I pulled on the lock. It was still secure, but the base plate wasn’t. The screws had been removed. I pulled on the handle. The door swung open easily and smoothly, taking the lock with it. I stepped inside, yanked the string that operated the overhead light and found assorted pieces of furniture, most of them stacked on top of one another. Everything was covered with dust—everything except a large carton. I opened it; it was filled with clothes. The top layer had been tossed in anywhichway, without consideration for wrinkles, yet the clothes on the bottom of the carton were neatly folded. In between I found a wrinkled white cotton shirt. The shirt smelled of body odor. I left the clothes where I found them, closed the carton and then the door, and warned Dot to leave things just as they were.

  I had Cynthia’s office telephone number but not her address, and the news I had to give her you give in person—whether you want to or not. I found her firm in the phone book. Hers was an understated ad. It said simply: Grey & Associates, Attorneys at Law and listed her address, suite and telephone number. No punctuation. The ad on the facing page, however, had enough punctuation for a dozen law firms:

  ACCUSED OF A CRIME?

  DON’T TAKE IT LYING DOWN!

  CALL TOM CROWDER!

  FREE CONSULTATION! ANY TIME! ANY DAY!

  Experienced Criminal Defense Lawyers!

  DRUNK DRIVING—DRUG CHARGES

  SEX CRIMES—ASSAULTS

  MISDEMEANORS—GROSS MISDEMEANORS

  FELONIES OF ALL KINDS!

  “We’re in Your Corner Fighting for You!”

  Certainly inspired me to trust.

  So many of the lawyers I’ve worked with over the years are pompous, self-absorbed, litigation-happy nitwits who do little more than clog the system with niggling actions in a never-ending search for the mother lode—
a deep, deep pocket that’s held in low regard by a jury. They’re not attorneys, they’re prospectors: They measure success not in cases won or lost, nor in justice served, but rather in the amount of damages awarded, in billable hours, in nuggets of gold. Even then I wouldn’t mind so much except that there are so damn many of them and so comparatively few legitimate cases. As a result, lawyers are forced to create work for themselves by encouraging ordinary citizens to litigate over every little thing. This fosters an environment in which people take no responsibility for their own actions, where every problem or slight—real or imagined—can be blamed on a second party or a third or a fourth, who often is required to pay and pay big.

  I have a grudging respect for criminal attorneys, even those who have attempted to make me look silly on the witness stand. And I give little credence to critics, who, in their anger and frustration, often accuse them of corrupting the law, of using obscure technicalities and loopholes to pluck hardened thieves, rapists and murderers out of prison so they can pillage the nearest day-care center. Criminal attorneys, after all, are doing a job necessary to the survival of our civilization—they are providing equal representation under the law. If that means defending loathsome scum as if their own lives depended on it, well, that’s certainly what I would expect from my attorney. As for civil lawyers, it’s like they all took ancillary courses while studying the law: Litigation 101—How To Get Rich by Accident.

  Cynthia Grey had offices in one of the oldest buildings in downtown St. Paul, a former convent remodeled to serve lawyers, accountants, advertising agencies and other small businesses. Its six floors were all adorned with marble ceilings, huge windows and hardwood—plenty of hardwood—most of it carved, projecting an image of permanence and style. The conference rooms, with their fireplaces and grand pianos, polished chandeliers and book-lined walls, only enhanced the image.

  “Grey & Associates” was actually just Cynthia, two legal secretaries and two freelance attorneys who occasionally helped out when the workload got too heavy for Cynthia to carry. The secretary who greeted me at the door was obviously not pleased to see me—just drop in, unannounced, without an appointment, without even calling first? What was I thinking? She was ultracool, ultramodern, with sharp features and black hair that fell to the middle of her back. She wore a teal silk blouse. At least I think it was silk. It was shiny, anyway. She did remarkable things for the blouse; the designer would have been pleased. I shouldn’t have stared but how often do you see teal?