Penance

by David Housewright

  I let the ball bounce to rest on the asphalt and sat against the garage door. Maybe it would be better all around if I just quit the business and became an appliance salesman for Sears; Lord knows I don’t seem to be very good at this job. I had let a twenty-four-year-old college kid play me like a flute and now Randy was dead. And it was my fault. I had let C. C. Monroe and Amy Lamb and all the rest distract me. I would have seen it coming if I hadn’t been distracted; I would have been able to deal with the problem properly. Randy had depended on me and I had let him down.

  “Do one job, do it well, and then move on.” Who said that? Probably my father. He was always saying things like that and I always ignored him. I wondered what he would say if he were here now. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Yeah, that’s what the tough do. But Dad, tell me, what if you’re not tough? What do you do then? Shoot baskets?

  I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when Anne Scalasi drove up. She stopped her car at the end of the driveway and walked toward me, pausing to retrieve the basketball. She dribbled it.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I set the Minnesota State High School League record for assists in a single game?”

  “Frequently,” I told her.

  Anne set and fired. The ball banged off the rim and caromed onto the lawn. From the expression on her face, Anne had needed that shot. She sighed and sagged down next to me.

  “Sean told me about Randy,” she said.

  “What was it he used to say? ‘Easy come, easy go’?”

  “That’s what he used to say.”

  “He was a big boy, he knew the risks of his profession.”

  “Yeah, he did,” Anne agreed. “No sense getting upset about it.”

  “None at all.”

  “It was probably inevitable,” Anne ventured.

  “Remember the time the uniforms saved him?” I asked. “He cut off this guy’s line of credit, claimed the guy was into him for something like twice his yearly salary. The guy punched his lights out; nearly killed him. If the squad hadn’t happened by Randy would have bought it right then and there.”

  “True, that’s what would have happened and then we would’ve had to solve the case.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” I said. “You know, we didn’t solve crap.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ninety percent of the murders we investigated were so dumb, we usually knew who did it before we even arrived at the scene. How many times did we find the killer standing over the body, covered with blood, practically begging to confess? We got guys who killed people over ice cream cones, over which program to watch on TV, over whose turn it was to take out the fucking garbage. Yeah, we needed to be real detectives to solve those.”

  Anne took my hand and gave it a squeeze. We were friends again, just like that. All that was required to repair our relationship was to simply ignore the events that had damaged it in the first place. We could do that easy.

  “We’ve been through a lot, you and I,” Anne reminded me.

  “Too much.”

  “Way too much.”

  “Speaking of which, how are you and your domestic associate doing?”

  “We’ve decided to go our separate ways.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s been coming for a long time now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “Me, too.”

  “How are the kids taking it?”

  “They actually seem happy, especially my oldest. She thinks it’s the smartest thing her father and I have done in years. Who knows? I tried to talk to them, but I think they’re hiding their feelings, trying to put the best face on things. Either that or they don’t know what they feel yet. I certainly don’t.”

  “Anything I can do …” I volunteered.

  Anne squeezed my hand again. “You can pay the fifty bucks you owe me.”

  “What fifty bucks?”

  “The bet you made,” she reminded me. “The nine you dug out of your wall did not match the bullets that killed Brown or Amy Lamb.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid about bullets.”

  “Then who was shooting at me?”

  “Damned if I know,” Anne answered as she stood and walked to the basketball. She fired it from the lawn. Swish. An honest three-pointer. I rebounded and dished off to her. Swish. Another three-pointer.

  I said, “Double or nothing you miss the next shot.”

  “You’re on,” she replied and put it up again. The ball banked high off the glass, caught the front of the rim and fell in. “In your face, Mama!” Anne exclaimed, pumping her fist.

  “Luck, all luck,” I said and passed the ball back to her. She missed her fourth attempt. I rebounded, dribbled away from the hoop, spun and dropped a ten-footer. Anne rebounded for me.

  “It looks like Sherman’s suicide is going to hold up,” Anne said, bounce-passing the ball to me at the line.

  “No way,” I told her.

  “The medical examiner believes the wound, the area where the body was found, the fact that Sherman was a fugitive—he believes it all fits a pattern of a self-inflicted type of thing.”

  “The ME is nuts.”

  I took a jumper and missed.

  “He said it was a problem of interpretation,” Anne said. “He said the evidence could support suicide a lot more easily than murder. If I’m going to persuade him it was a killing, I need to give him more.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “It fired the bullets that killed Brown and Amy Lamb.”

  “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “What about Amy’s tape?”

  Anne’s skyhook hit nothing but net.

  “The ME figures she could have been referring to Sherman; there’s nothing to suggest she wasn’t.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Anne said, holding the ball.

  “There’s always Reverend Hoppe,” I said without much hope.

  “He has no alibi for Thoreau, but the good reverend claims he can prove he was in bed when Brown took it.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “Yep.”

  “Vivian Olson?”

  “Nope. Brenda Clark.”

  “‘Hell hath no fury …’” I quoted as Anne passed me the basketball. The foibles of man and woman never ceased to amaze me.

  “I wish I’d found C. C.’s videotape when I searched Thoreau’s house,” Anne said. “I don’t know if it would have made any difference, but I wish I’d found it.”

  “You mean you didn’t?”

  “I told you I didn’t,” Anne reminded me, shooting a layup and passing me the ball.

  I froze at the line and pondered her words. They didn’t make sense. If Anne really hadn’t found the tape, hadn’t left it for me to find … I started dribbling the ball.

  “Taylor?” Anne called. “Taylor!”

  I stopped dribbling.

  “You’re zoning out on me.”

  “Sorry. I have a few things on my mind.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  THIRTY

  AFTER I SHOOED Anne out of my yard, I called Paul Aasen. He picked up, answering smoothly, “Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, this is Paul Aasen. May I help you?” He hung up when I identified myself. I called back.

  “You have sixty seconds,” he barked after I begged him to listen to my story.

  “Answer this question first: Heather’s gun, was it a nine-millimeter?”

  “Yes, it was. She claims her father gave it to her several years ago, that she never used it before, that as far as she knows it has never even been fired. You have fifty seconds.”

  “All right, consider this: Heather shoots Randy in her apartment, claiming self-defense. Physical evidence at the scene, the presence of a weapon, for example, seems to corroborate her story …”

  “Y
ou have forty seconds.”

  “Plus, there’s testimony confirming her claim that Randy was, in fact, threatening her over a considerable sum of money.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Now, perhaps she can explain why she made no effort to return the money. Perhaps she can explain why she did not call the police when she knew he was coming; why she waited for him in her apartment; why she shot him six times.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “However, can she explain why she tried to kill me and another woman two nights before?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How much time do I have left?”

  “Forget that. Repeat what you just said.”

  “Late Wednesday night someone shot at me and a lawyer named Cynthia Grey in my home. At first I thought the shooting was connected to something else I’m involved in. Now I know better.”

  “Can you identify Miss Schrotenboer as the assailant?”

  “No.”

  “Can the lawyer … Miss Grey?”

  “No.”

  “Quit pulling my chain, Taylor …”

  “I have something better than an eyewitness. Something unshakable.”

  “What?”

  “I have a bullet fired from her gun.”

  That stopped him. After a few moments of thought Aasen asked, “Where is the bullet?”

  “Sergeant Mankamyer of the St. Paul Police Department has it.”

  “He is their forensic firearms specialist?” Aasen asked.

  “Hmm. Did the St. Paul PD recover the bullet?”

  “No, I pulled the bullet out of the wall myself and brought it to them.”

  Aasen said, “The constructive-possession rules …”

  “They don’t apply,” I insisted, cutting him off. “Maybe you can’t prove that the bullet came out of my wall. But you certainly can prove that the bullet came from her gun. Put her in front of a grand jury and ask her how that’s possible if her gun was never fired before, if it never left her possession. I’m curious to hear her answer.”

  “So am I.”

  “Something else. Heather once told me she wondered what it was like to kill a man. Question her friends, her classmates. I bet you’ll find she made the same kind of statement to others.”

  “I don’t know if that is enough to convict her for killing Mr. Sullivan.”

  “Probably not. But it’s enough to arrest her and once she’s in custody, you know how it works, we might find out that she’s not as smart as she seems.”

  “I will arrange to secure the bullet from St. Paul and have our own forensic experts compare it to the bullets removed from Mr. Sullivan’s body. If there is a positive match we will proceed from there.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Taylor.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Aasen.”

  Freddie slept in a king-size bed with a Victorian canopy and silk sheets; both were the color lingerie manufacturers call peach though it doesn’t resemble the fruit at all. Still, the color contrasted well with Freddie’s complexion. I sat at the foot of his bed and watched him sleep, playing with the Colt Commander he had left on the small marble-topped table next to the bed. Freddie owned a condominium in Uptown Minneapolis, not too far from Lake Calhoun; you could see the lake from Freddie’s balcony. The condo was on the eighth floor of what was advertised as a “security building,” but Freddie and I both knew better and I found myself wondering why a man in his line of work wasn’t more careful. On the other hand, my house wasn’t exactly Fort Knox, either.

  “Hey, Freddie,” I said, tapping his foot with the barrel of the gun, amazed that anyone could sleep this late into the day. He did not respond so I tapped harder. “Hey pal, the sun is shining, the birds are singing …”

  “Go ‘way, Taylor,” he mumbled and rolled over. That got me laughing and my laughter must have shot a load of adrenaline through him because he popped up, wide awake, looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, shit.”

  “Man, it’s late afternoon. What are you doing in bed?”

  “I was partyin’ last night.”

  “Hanging out with your journalist friend?”

  “What you want?”

  I waved the Colt in his general direction.

  “This ain’t your style, man,” he grumbled.

  “You asking or telling?”

  Freddie pulled the sheet tight around his throat like it was bulletproof and repeated, “This ain’t your style, man.”

  “You never know,” I told him. “A man with a large bump on his head is liable to do anything.”

  “I’m really sorry about that, Taylor.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “What you gonna do?”

  “Depends, Freddie. Depends. I have a few questions to ask. You going to answer them?”

  “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

  I smashed the toes of his right foot with the barrel of the Colt.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “Tell me about Dennis Thoreau.”

  “Who the fuck is Dennis Thoreau?” he squealed, rubbing his foot.

  “He’s an asshole, just like you.”

  “Man, I don’t know no Dennis Thoreau.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. I didn’t even bother asking him about Brown, Sherman or Amy Lamb. Freddie was a goon, a leg-breaker, a head-basher, maybe a killer, too. He killed the three Filipino thieves. But he could have killed me and he didn’t, which meant he probably hadn’t killed anyone. At least not recently. Something else. Freddie would not have kept the gun after doing Brown. Keep evidence? Of murder? Freddie was just not that careless.

  Of course, I could be wrong.

  “Pick up the phone,” I told him.

  Freddie hesitated.

  “Do it,” I said softly.

  When he uncradled the receiver I asked him if he knew Marion Senske’s private number. When he nodded, I told him to dial it.

  “Man, I don’t work for that bitch no more.”

  Freddie’s statement infuriated me, although I couldn’t tell you why. I thumbed back the hammer on the Colt and screamed, “Call her or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

  Freddie proceeded to set the Olympic record for the seven-digit dial. The phone rang five times before Marion answered it. “Yeah, this is Freddie … No, man … Listen … I know that … Would you fuckin’ listen?” Freddie yelled. “Taylor’s here … Yeah, Taylor. He’s got a gun. He wants to talk to you.” I shook my head no. “He doesn’t want to talk to you … How the fuck should I know? … Yeah …Yeah, a gun …”

  “Tell her the police found Joseph Sherman this morning,” I said.

  “Who’s Joseph Sherman?”

  “Tell her.”

  “The cops found Joseph Sherman this morning,” Freddie repeated.

  “Tell her he’s dead.”

  “He’s dead … No shit?”

  “Is that what she said?”

  “No, that was me,” Freddie admitted.

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothin’, man.”

  “Tell her it looks real good that the cops will pin Amy Lamb and Brown on Sherman and close the case.”

  “Taylor figures the cops will … She heard you,” Freddie told me.

  “Tell her that leaves Thoreau.”

  “That leaves Thoreau.”

  “Tell her I’m willing to make a deal.”

  “He says he’s willing to make a deal … She wants to know for what.”

  “She knows for what.”

  “You know for what … How much?”

  “I’m a reasonable man. Make me an offer.”

  “He’s a reasonable man … Ten thousand?”

  I shook my head no.

  “He don’t like that,” Freddie said into the phone. “Fifteen?”

  I shook my head.

  “He wants more … Twenty is as high as she’ll go.”

  “She’ll go higher,” I sai
d.

  “You’ll go higher … Twenty-five,” Freddie told me.

  I shrugged.

  “Yeah, he’ll go for that … Where? When?”

  “Thirty minutes. C. C.’s office in the State Capitol.”

  “He says thirty minutes … She says that’s unacceptable; she and Monroe are leaving for a fund-raiser in thirty minutes.”

  “Hang up the phone, Freddie.”

  Freddie hung up the phone.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  I gave him a telephone number and told him to dial it. He did. While it was ringing I had him pass me the receiver.

  “They’re selling you out, honey,” I told the woman who answered.

  “What are you talking about?” Meghan Chakolis asked.

  “Looks like the governor’s office is worth more to them than you thought.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “C. C.’s office in forty-five minutes,” I said and flipped the receiver back to Freddie, gesturing for him to hang it up.

  “Aren’t we having fun now,” Freddie said.

  I briefly contemplated the incredible damage I could inflict on his body. I could fix it so Freddie never walked again, never bent his elbow to raise a glass, to feed himself. Ahh, hell. Now we both knew how vulnerable we were.

  “I don’t figure we’re even Freddie,” I told him. “I figure you still owe me big time. But I’m satisfied and I’m willing to let it go at this—busting your pad, letting you know I can take you out anytime I want. You don’t agree, you know where to find me.” Freddie watched me suspiciously, until the realization of what I said hit him. He smiled. Then he laughed.

  “You got ’em,” Freddie told me. “You got ’em, that ain’t no lie. They may be white, but you got stones like a brother.”

  “I have a few things to do, Freddie. I don’t want to see you around when I do them. Understand?”

  He didn’t say if he did or didn’t. He just kept laughing.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE ONLY SOUND I heard in the State Capitol Office Building was the noise I made myself. I took the elevator to Blue and padded quietly down the corridor to C. C.’s office. C. C. was sitting in a chair in front of her desk. Marion Senske was sitting in C. C.’s chair behind C. C.’s desk, a shaft of light from C. C.’s desk lamp giving her face a hard edge to go with the scowl. She did not speak when I arrived, acknowledging my presence instead by sliding open the top desk drawer, withdrawing a thick, oversized envelope and tossing it on the desk. I went nowhere near it.