The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  Two minutes later, he snaked out from under the truck and brushed himself off. “I checked the taillight about twenty times,” he said. “No idea that little light was still wired. Must run under the bed somewhere.”

  “Before we start congratulating ourselves, let’s see if it works,” I said.

  Together, we put our backs on the tailgate and pushed the truck up the little rise, until it sat at the top of an incline. He hopped in. “We’ll see soon enough,” he said. The truck began to roll downhill. I heard him pop the clutch and the hiss as the tires slid in the loose rock and then the smooth purr of the exhaust.

  I walked back to the Malibu and headed down the hill after him. Twenty minutes later, he was waiting for me at the highway junction. He got out. So did I.

  “It’s charging like hell,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” I said, “but do me a favor will you? Next time somebody tells you to run down and set somebody’s house on fire, you tell ’em to go to hell. Okay?” His natural inclination was to go with his stupid act. He looked down at his boots, kicked a stone with his toe and then suddenly pulled off his glasses.

  He pinned me with his white eyes. “I poured it mostly on the ground,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He replaced the shades, pulled himself up to his full height and took a couple of steps back in my direction. “I’m not about burnin’ up anybody’s babies,” he said in a tone of voice that invited me to challenge the statement if I dared. Fortunately, there was no need.

  “I know you’re not,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone back after the others were gone and put out the fire.”

  Above the sunglasses, his head wrinkled like a washboard.

  “How…” he started. “I never told a single…”

  “It’s the only thing makes sense,” I said. “If it wasn’t the Springers who grabbed the extinguisher and put out the flames, then, strange as it seems, it must have been one of the shooters. Anything else requires either one hell of a coincidence or direct alien intervention.”

  He smiled. “My mama’d vote for the aliens.” I wondered if she knew Monty.

  I gave him the thumbs up and stood and watched as he pulled out onto the highway and the sound of the truck faded to nothing.

  I got in and followed Whitey back toward town, feeling a tad better at having solved the mystery of the reluctant arsonist. That probably explains why I pulled into Linc’s Texaco station when I still had half a tank. He came skittering out of the station, wiping his hands. I stepped out of the car.

  “Fill ’er up,” I said. “And let’s you and me finish that discussion we started a while back about where it was Mr. Springer got that unleaded gasoline from. Except now we know he didn’t buy it himself…so…”

  The last part was wasted. He ran with long strides, his bottom low to the ground. Slammed the station door. I took this to mean the gas was self-service, filled her up, and then went looking for Linc, who seemed to have a disturbing propensity to come up missing at pivotal moments. No Linc. Both the station and the office behind were empty. Gas was eight-eighty. Much as it pained me to leave him a tip, I put a ten on top of the pump and weighed it down with a small rock.

  They sent the first team. No rookies, no would-be pensioners. Three cars. Six burly state policemen in body armor. The engine roar pulled my head up. The first cruiser slid to a stop about ten feet in front of me. In a heartbeat, the officers were crouched behind the doors, squinting down sights at me. “On the ground.”

  I put my hands over my head and dropped to my knees. A hand grabbed the back of my neck, pushing my face into the ground; a pair of knees landed in the middle of my back, driving the air from my lungs, leaving me gasping and shaking my head for breath.

  “Leo Waterman, you are being arrested and charged with the murder of Emmett Polster. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have a right to an attorney. In the event that you are unable to afford an attorney, one will…”

  They didn’t mess around. They rolled me over, right then and there, all six of them put me in a waist chain and shackle apparatus. I rode the fifty miles to Port Townsend bent nearly double, the handcuffs on my wrists attached to an eyebolt in the floor of the cruiser. I concentrated on my breathing. Counting in and out and trying to sink inside my skin, until the metal on my flesh stopped burning.

  34

  I WAS ON SUICIDE WATCH. THEY CAME BY EVERY FIF-teen minutes to make sure that I hadn’t decided to cash my chips. Orange paper jumpsuit. White paper slippers. They’d lengthened my wrist chains so I could shrug myself in and out of the jumpsuit, but not enough so I could wipe my ass. They said I’d get over it.

  Jed came at nine-fifteen that night. I heard him before I saw him. “This isn’t a hospital, Trooper…what is it?…Franklin. There’s no visiting hours for an attorney to see his client.” A door clanged. The voice was getting nearer.

  “You must be accustomed to nursing homes…what? How many years have you to go until retirement anyway?” He stopped in front of my cell. The turnkey was fifty or so, working his way toward pear-shaped. First cop I’d seen all night who didn’t look like an NFL linebacker. Jed waved a hand at the door. “Well…come on…open it up.”

  “No sir,” the cop deadpanned. “He’s on suicide watch.”

  “A client of mine? On suicide watch? Are you crazy? It’s your local prosecutor you should be keeping an eye on.”

  “I’ve got my orders.”

  Before they could start a full squabble, I said, “Paper and pencil, please.”

  Jed picked right up on it, reaching in his suit coat pocket and coming out with an eelskin notepad and a black Monte Blanc fountain pen. I wrote: #1 We need an absolutelysecureplace to talk. #2 Call this number. Find out what’s goingon. #3 Tell whoever answers that we’re going nuclear. I handed both items back to Jed. His face remained impassive as he tucked them back into his coat.

  It took an hour and a half. They had to get Billy Heffernen out of bed. He wasn’t amused. What Captain William Heffernen was was a hard-ass cop. Fair but completely by the book. If you were looking for sympathy, you better look in the dictionary. Before going out to duel with Jed, he stopped by my cell. He wore his trooper’s hat with the strap tight across the very point of his chin, like a Paris Island drill sergeant. He walked to the bars. I stood up and went over to meet him. “Well?” His eyes were trying to bore a hole in the back of my head. I held his gaze. “I didn’t kill anybody,” I said.

  “For Rebecca’s sake, I hope not.”

  “You give me a little help, and maybe I can help you put this to bed.”

  His eyes never wavered. “If you wish to make a statement, I’ll send for a stenographer.”

  I ignored him. “I need to know what Sheriff Hand did before he became sheriff. And I need the driving record of a guy named Ben Bendixon.” I spelled it.

  Billy Heffernen snorted once and marched off down the corridor.

  At five to eleven, a pair of uniformed Blutos marched me down the hall to Billy’s office. Seems Jed had refused the interrogation rooms, and the only other private space was the state police captain’s office. They left me standing five feet inside the door, then turned and left. Jed beckoned me over.

  “I called that number and delivered your message.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “The state cops threw everybody off the property. Ran warrant checks on everybody and of course Ralph and Harold had outstandings. Failure to appear on a failure to ap pear. Drunk and disorderly. The usual.” He waved a hand.

  “They’re already on their way back to King County. I called Evergreen Bonds to bail them out in the morning.”

  “What about—”

  “Everybody else is over at the Twilight Zone, whatever that means. He said to tell you that Narva was running her number as we spoke and it was a sight to behold. Also that they caught a few more things you just had to see. They’re holding tight.�
��

  “What—” I started.

  “No,” he said. “It’s my turn. Let’s talk murder.”

  “What have they got?”

  “It’s what you’ve got, and it’s problems,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as about forty eyewitnesses who say you threatened and chased the deceased a couple of days ago.”

  “Sad but true.” I told him the story. “What else?”

  “Such as a .-caliber police special revolver, registered to you, found in a drainage ditch a block down from the decedent’s house. Seems the attacker used the gun to bludgeon the decedent and the weapon shows traces of blood. They’re running tests on both the blood and the gun as we speak.”

  “Not good,” I said.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  I did. How last time I actually saw the . was the night I offered it to Narva, before we went into Spooner’s house to fetch Misty McMahon. How I’d put it back in the gym bag, which I last saw on the night Rebecca and I went over the cliff. I clearly remember reaching down for the shirt to bandage her arm and seeing the bag in the rubble. His turn to say, “Not good.” He leaned in close. “And what’s all this about a secure place to talk? We could have been doing this an hour ago.”

  I checked the walls and ceiling. Over the past couple of days, I’d noticed an interesting phenomenon developing. Themore time I spent clandestinely watching people who had no idea their privacy had been compromised, the more paranoid I was becoming. Something karmic, I supposed. I lowered my voice. “I guess I’m getting a little paranoid about…you know…electronic eavesdropping.”

  He leaned closer. I put my mouth about an inch from his ear and, without naming names, told him everything. As I spoke, his mouth opened like a drawbridge.

  “You’ve got all this on tape?”

  I nodded.

  “Audio or video?”

  “Both.”

  “Are these devices still operational and in place?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  His lips curled into something between a sneer and a smile.

  “No way it’s admissible evidence. Not now. Not ever.”

  “I know.”

  “As a last resort, though,” he began, “as trading material—”

  I interrupted him. “It’s not the last resort,” I said. “I might have an alibi.”

  “For two-forty-eight this afternoon?”

  He read my surprise. “Stevens Falls police got a call about shots fired. Exactly two-forty-eight.” I wasn’t surprised. It made sense.

  “Yeah. For exactly that time.”

  “Tell me.”

  I did. He was incredulous. “Why in hell didn’t you tell the cops?”

  “Because what they’d do is call out to Stevens Falls, send Nathan Hand out to bring him in for them, which I’m pretty much willing to guarantee wasn’t going to get my ass out of here anytime soon.”

  “So…then the sheriff’s a question as far as you’re concerned.”

  “No question. The sheriff’s a player. Got pictures of that, too.”

  “But you’re not sure whether your alibi will come through for you.”

  “He’s a local. Part of the same group we’ve tangled with a couple of times. I figure it’s a crapshoot. He may and he may not.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then people in high places are going to start getting anonymous videotapes in the mail, and you’re going to be defending me on a whole raft of other charges.”

  Nine o’clock the next morning. French toast and scrambled eggs, my ass. The oiled cow flops and the puddle of yellow bile were right where the turnkey had left them at seven-thirty. A pair of necks I hadn’t seen before came waddling down the corridor, opened the cell door and handed me a white plastic bag filled with my civilian clothes. Took me by the elbows and levitated me down the hall and around the corner to the showers, then deposited me back in my cell and disappeared. Ten-fifteen. The same pair left me unfettered as they escorted me up to the third floor. A lineup. Me and five bruiser cops standing cheek by jowl beneath the bright lights. Jed went postal. Either they had to give up their belts and shoelaces or I had to get mine back. Not only that but he demanded a couple of suspects who, as he put it, “don’t look like the state’s paying them to take steroids.”

  Eleven-twenty. I had laces in my sneakers and a belt holding up my pants. Two of the other guys in the lineup now looked human. We did the lineup cha-cha for the fans behind the one-way glass. Step up, step back, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight. Back to the cell. But still wearing my civvies, so I felt pretty good about the situation. Noon. Straight up. I was busting the desk sergeant’s balls. Making him double-check every piece of my personal be longings before I would sign the receipt. Just about the time I’d finished stuffing everything back into my pockets, the sergeant’s eyes grew wide; he closed the window with a bang and double-timed it out of sight. I looked over my shoulder. Captain William Heffernen. Hat on even tighter than usual. Hands locked behind his back. Parade rest.

  “I’ve got a district judge standing outside waiting for your release, Leo. Why is that?” I reckoned how maybe it was charisma. Billy was not amused.

  “I’ve worked in the same district with the honorable Wayne Bigelow for twenty years, and in all that time, he’s never said more than twenty words to me. Now all of a sudden we’re on a first-name basis and he calls me every two hours for a progress report about you.”

  “Judge Bigelow and I are socially acquainted,” I said. He leaned back against the pale green concrete blocks. He had me in a bind. Billy had a bullshit meter second to none, and we both knew it. On the other hand, there was no slack in him. He wasn’t going to wink at or ignore anything. Not jaywalking, not littering, not a thing. I had to be careful. I was still pondering my options when he said, “I hear you and Rebecca are having some problems.”

  If he was trying to push me off balance, he damn near succeeded. I felt the blood rise to my face. “I didn’t realize my life was an open book,” I said.

  “We talk,” he said.

  I squeezed the words, “That’s more than I can say,”

  through my teeth and then broke up a wonderfully strained silence by asking, “She know I’m in here?” He moved his chin about an inch…up and down.

  Billy gave me a break and changed the subject back to something easier to discuss—like murder. “I’m going to ask you a question, Leo, and I want an answer.” He could tell he had my attention. “Have they got a bad cop in Stevens Falls?”

  Having Billy Heffernen ask you about a bad cop was like having your significant other ask you if her butt looks big in a certain pair of slacks. One of those conversations pretty much destined to go nowhere pleasant.

  I hedged. “What gives you that idea?”

  “The way you sat here all night until you could send your lawyer after your alibi on his own.” He didn’t wait for me to comment. “And the way this whole thing shakes down. It stinks to high heaven. One minute somebody hands us a case where we’ve got you dead to rights, and the next minute it comes apart. That’s TV, Leo. The movies. That’s not how the job goes.”

  “You’re going to hate what I’ve got to say.”

  No expression whatsoever. “Well.”

  “Hand’s dirty as hell. Hand and Deputy Russell for sure.”

  He blew air out through his nose. “How—” he started.

  “I can’t give you any details, Billy. But I’m telling you…he’s dirty.”

  He read me chapter and verse about withholding evidence. I tried not to look bored. “How about, instead of threats, a little quid pro quo?” I said.

  “Like?”

  “Like you tell me what you found out about Bendixon and Hand.”

  He stared at me for a moment and then brought several sheets of paper out from behind his back. “Hand had no previous law enforcement experience whatsoever. The closest he ever came to the police was in when he was charged with negl
igent homicide in the death of one Alfred Klugeman.” He looked up. I kept my face still and my mouth shut.

  “Seems the old guy refused to move from a building that had been sold out from under him. Hand worked security for the real estate company.” Billy turned the page over. “According to witnesses, Klugeman was trying to elude Hand when he and his wheelchair went down twenty concrete stairs and broke his neck in three places.” He snapped the pages with his fingers. “You read between the lines on the rest of it and it says they didn’t have much of a case against Hand. The company settled out of court with the family. Hand got the gate along with everybody else connected with the acquisition. Top to bottom. No severance, no pension. No nothing.”

  “Bendixon?”

  “Vehicular negligence. Last August. DWI. Blew a twopoint-three. Lady in the other car lost a leg. Judge ruled he was too old for a state facility. He’s on home detention.” I pulled my notepad from my pocket. He read me the address.

  “I told you you’d hate it.”

  He snorted. “I’d rather it was you,” he said on his way out.

  Behind me the window banged open. The desk sergeant handed me a receipt for my car. “You give that across the street and the officer will return your car.” Bang. Twelve-ten. Rebirth. I squeezed out the door, squinting in the bright light. Jed, Constance Hart, the Honorable Wayne Bigelow. Arm in arm, no less.

  The judge clapped me on the shoulder. “For a while there, boy, I thought you were going to make me look bad.” Jed offered his thanks to the judge. Constance Hart gave me a hug and whispered that Misty was coming home for the weekend.

  Jed and I stood and watched as they meandered across the street toward the courthouse. “Nice job,” I said to Jed.

  “It was touch and go there for a while.”

  “Whitey needed convincing?”

  He shook his head. “Oh no. Mr. Hunley was quite willing, even anxious to give you an alibi for the time in question. The question was whether or not the authorities were going to consider him to be a credible witness. Without his mother’s cooperation, I’m not sure we’d be having this conversation.”