Salt River (8 page)
THEY'D STABILIZED MILLY, sent her on up to Memphis, Doc said. Out of our hands now. He'd been sitting on the bench outside the office when I returned. We watched as lights went off and stores got locked up and cars pulled out toward home. Except for the diner now, everything was deserted. Framed in its front windows, anonymous heads bent over burgers, steak platters, pie and coffee.
"But
damn,
that felt good. Can't tell you how I miss it, Turner."
"Saving lives?"
Mind caught in memories, he was quiet a moment.
"Not really. It's more about knowing exactly what to do—the branching decisions you make, the way each decision, each change, calls up a sequence of actions—and doing it almost without conscious thought. Not much in the world that compares."
Doc would have gone on, possibly for hours, but it was right about then that Jed Baxter pulled up in his Camry. I met him at the street.
"Back so soon? And please tell me that the passenger in your backseat is merely sleeping."
"Damnedest thing," Baxter said. "Got a late start, so I figure what the hell, I'll grab lunch before heading out. And I stop at this mom-and-pop-looking place—out there right before you hit the highway?"
"Ko-Z Inn."
"Right. Nasty food."
"But filling."
"Ought to be their motto . . . So, after five or six coffees at the cafe and half an hour on the road, naturally I gotta pee, so I pull over. Do my thing, and when I look up, this guy's come out of the trees and is climbing in my car. Time I get there, he's got his head down under the dash poking around at wires." Baxter opened the back door. "Figured I'd bring him to you."
"Kind of a going-away present."
"For the one that's staying, right. Hope he's okay. Had to thump the sucker twice to put him down."
"Cuffs, huh?" Plastic, but police issue.
"Always carry some with me. Hey, you never know."
"That right arm's not looking too good."
"What can I say? Man didn't care to be cuffed. Laying there on the ground with his lights out, but he's still fighting at me."
"And you had to thump him again."
"Maybe. A little. You want the sonofabitch or not?"
Baxter and I hauled him in and laid him on the bunk in one of the cells. Doc sauntered in complaining that this didn't look to be much of a challenge, checked reflexes and pupils and the like, and said that in his hardly-ever-humble opinion the man was fit to be jailed.
Which left a couple of things hanging.
First off, since we had a prisoner, someone was going to have to hold down the fort tonight, which probably meant me.
Then there was the fact that this guy matched the description I'd got from Burl: medium height but looking taller because of being so thin, maybe 150, and what there was, muscle; hair light brown, long on the sides and back, not much left on top; blue-green Hawaiian shirt, heavy oxfords, khaki slacks.
So in all likelihood I had one of Milly's kidnappers (if that's what they were) and a killer (assuming that he shot his partner), all dressed up nice with his lights out, back in my cell. An enforcer of some kind? Runner? Or just hired help? I couldn't help but think how it turned out the last time something like this came along. I'd walked into the office to find June and Don on the floor unconscious, our prisoner gone. The fallout from that had rung in the air for some time, leaving behind a number of bodies, Val's included.
I called Don Lee to tell him what was going on, and that I'd take the night watch if he'd come in first thing in the morning. I sat there all night in the dead quiet drinking pot after pot of coffee, staring at the black window, and thinking about prison, how it was never quiet, how, surrounded by hundreds of others, you were as alone as it was possible to be.
But before that, I said good-bye again to Jed Baxter and rejoined Doc Oldham on the bench outside. The diner was closing for the night, Jay and Margie and Cook (the only name he'd admit to) making their final runs to the trash barrels in back. Pale rainbows shelled the few lights along the street, cyclones of flying insects pouring inexhaustibly into them.
"Sit here some days," Doc said, "and I half expect tumbleweed to come rolling down that street. Audie Murphy to ride in on his goddamn white horse. You know who Audie Murphy was?"
I did. Some of the first movies I remember seeing. Audie Murphy mugging and mumbling, Sergeant York doing turkey calls. All those grand films about war from a much younger, far more innocent nation, innocent not in the sense of guiltlessness but in that of immaturity, of callowness.
"We want so badly to believe things are simple, Turner. That good and evil are in constant battle and by Tuesday of next week one or the other will win. You've said the same yourself."
"Many times."
"And still—" He laughed, and had to catch his breath. "And still we are not exempt."
"No."
We sat there quietly, beset by mosquitoes and the occasional errant moth. Cook emerged from the alley with his bicycle, mounted it, and rode off into darkness. Jay's truck pulled out and turned in the other direction. Once-bright red and yellow flames on the bicycle were mostly shadow. The truck's patches and layers of paint resembled, more than anything, fish scales; some were thick as artichoke leaves.
After a time, Doc said, "You haven't told anyone, have you, Turner?"
"No."
"Maybe you should."
I was silent. Who would I tell? And why?
"Yeah," Doc said, "you're right. It's none of their damned business."
Two months back, on the routine physical he'd been hounding me about for ages, Doc found something he didn't like. Probably nothing to it, he said, just those damn fool kids up at the lab with their e-pods. But we'd best repeat it. Then he showed up at the cabin late one night with a bottle of single malt. As usual, I'd heard his banger coming three miles down the road.
"Greeks bearing gifts—" I began.
"Are as nothing compared to an old man with a bottle of old whiskey. The old man is tired. The whiskey isn't. So we'll put it to work."
We didn't talk much more for a while after that. Then, along about the third pour, Doc told me, just flat out and plain, like he'd mention the weather or a dog he used to have. We drank some more, and as he was leaving he started to say something, then just looked into my eyes and shook his head.
I remember how warm and quiet it was that night, and how bright the stars.
SOME YEARS BACK I attended a wedding, one of the guys I was in the service with, and the last contact I had, I think, with any of them. We'd been through a lot together, and his take on it was close to my own:
getting through
meant we were now somewhere else. But his wife-to-be insisted that he have one of his "army buddies" there, so I became token grunt.
And it wasn't bad. He was marrying up, with a high-pay job awaiting him at the family firm. Even the house they'd be living in had been prepaid, so clean and white it looked as though it had been dipped in Clorox. The food was good and ample, the champagne excellent, the people, especially the women, attractive.
Barely into the ceremony, the preacher took a detour, leaving behind such commonalities as marriage vows and the couple standing there at the altar patiently waiting, to head off, instead, in praise of "the most important union of their lives," i.e., when they accepted Jesus Christ—a commercial announcement that went on for some time. But wind had been rising steadily, and as the preacher continued in his diversion, a powerful gust came up. It snapped the tableclothes, blew leaves sideways on the trees, and raised a twenty-foot dust devil into the air directly behind him.
A great moment.
Not that I have ever believed in portents, a belief that can only follow from the belief that there's direction at work behind the randomness of our world and lives. There are only patterns, and we make of them what we will. But sometimes, as with the preacher and the dust devil, events come together in a crazy, wonderful order.
I was thinking about that the following morning as I watched the storm build. Clouds with heavy bellies moved sluggishly about; far off I could see black pillars of rain, stabs of lightning.
Those were not the only storms building.
The guy back in the cell roused from his Van Winkle but had nothing to say, about the fake New Jersey driver's license we found on him, for instance, or about anything else except that he'd like his phone call now, thank you. He did accept a cup of coffee as he made the call, his end of the conversation consisting of
Mr. Herman, please,
the name of the town, and the word
sheriff.
Within the hour Marty was in my office.
Before retiring here, Martin Baumann had been a big-city lawyer in Chicago, corporate accounts, three-hour lunches, the works. To this day he only smiled when asked how or why, of all places, he picked this town, but once here, he soon discovered how desperately unsuited he was for leisure time and started taking the odd case. He and Val had worked together on more than one occasion, going from colleagues to friends in short order.
Marty just kind of
appeared
in the office, without fanfare, in that way he has. As though he'd been there for hours and was just now speaking up. "You have a guest, I understand, here at the B and B. Who has, of course, been advised of his rights, blah, blah."
Marty poured a coffee for himself and settled into Don's chair. Don was out on patrol. I'd been expecting to head to the cabin once he got back but now wondered if I might want to wait out the storm.
"What'd he do, anyway?"
I filled Marty in, and he shook his head. Took a slug or two of coffee. "Suckers wired money, you believe that? Right into my account, damn near by the time we got off the phone."
"Whatever's going on, these people do seem to be used to getting their way."
"Don't seem to be much up on how things work in small towns though, do they?"
"Neither were you, as I recall."
He shrugged. "Fast learner. What do we know about your sleepover?"
"That he's connected to someone who can wire money—"
"A lot of money."
"—fast."
"That's it? Okay. Guy I spoke to was an attorney—"
"Honor among thieves?"
"An associate out of Crafft and Bailey, in St. Louis. Basically a messenger boy, but with a hardball firm."
"Not to mention confidentiality."
"What confidentiality? I haven't even spoken with my client. How could confidentiality possibly apply?"
"Point taken."
"I'll ask, if I need it back." Marty did a quick rim shot on the desk edge. "I went looking. Amazing what you can find out these days with a sidelong glance. Crafft & Bailey takes up a full two floors in a downtown high-rise, one of those places full of hardwood panels and polished mahogany rails that serve no purpose. You go in, and there'll be this huge room full of desks and cabinetry and down at the far end of it, on the horizon, a single human being."
"You've been there."
"More times than I care to think about. Cities are full of them. Places you could put up four or five extended families and most of the city's homeless. Empty—except, of course, for the fine appointments."
Unsure whether or not that was a pun, I remained silent.
"Good old C&B's what the boys in the club like to call a full-service firm. One thumb in the insurance pie, defending corporations, another in plaintiff's litigation, raking it in on contingency fees. List of clients as long as the building is tall. That's the public face, and one wing of the thing. The other wing has maybe five, six clients."
"One of them being Mr. Herman."
He tilted his head in question.
"That's the name our . . . guest, as you call him . . . brought up when he made his call."
"Of course." Marty refilled his cup, tasted, then poured the coffee out and set to making a fresh pot. "Not one of them—all of them. In some guise or another. And not Herman, but Harmon. Larry, born Lorenzo, Harmon. Owns huge portions of St. Louis, Chicago, and points between."
"We talking Monopoly?"
"We're talking numbers, off-book gambling, unsecured loans, escort services, strong-arm security. Anything on the borderline between legal and otherwise, he runs it. Or his crew does. Man himself doesn't go near the action. Golfs, drinks coffee, visits his mother every morning. Two children, son about thirty, owns a ring of low-end apartments, furniture-rental stores, and the like—a very
big
ring. Named Harm, if you can believe it. Hard to say if the man's got a weird sense of humor or if he's just plain stupid oblivious. Daughter's—get this—Harmony. Word is she's so ugly everyone calls her Hominy."
"That's who the man in my cell tracks back to."
"Looks like."
"And you got all this off the Internet."
"Well, I may have made a call or two."
"We're a long way from St. Louis or Chicago. What's the connection?"
Marty poured fresh coffee for us both, set mine down on the desk. "Why don't I go talk to my client and find out?"
ETHICS BE DAMNED, as Doc would say. As he did say, in fact, when he arrived that morning to check on our guest. I had a presumed kidnapping, a presumed murder, a presumed assault or two. Doc: "What you have is a mess." Nothing presumptive about that.
The man's name was Troy Geldin and he hailed from Brooklyn, the old Italian section right across the river from Manhattan, now well in thrall to gentrification but resisting. State called about the time Marty emerged, an hour or so before Doc showed. They'd run prints for us. No sheet, which meant Geldin was smart, lucky, or both, but he'd done time eating sand in the elder Bush's war and we had his prints as mementos.
To this day I've no idea what Marty said to the man. I was little more than halfway into the initial sentence of my spiel when Geldin spoke over me. "My lawyer has advised me to cooperate. After due thought and with promise of immunity, I am prepared to do so."
Prepositional phrases and "I am prepared" didn't sound much like Geldin's native language, but then, neither did much of what followed. At first I assumed that he'd been coached, by Marty, or by his contact during the phone call when he'd said so little. Later I came to think that, whatever the reason, something vital had shifted inside him. He had changed elementally, and something that he himself may not have suspected was there, something deep within, had begun moving to the surface. I'd seen it happen before, both in the jungle and in prison. A prickly, nervous man turns suddenly calm. The one who was always talking sits silent, smiling.
Thus it fell to me to wake Judge Ray Pitoski out of a sound sleep (albeit now almost noon), assure myself that he was sober enough to remember, and have him, as our factotum district attorney, agree to grant Geldin immunity in exchange for testimony.
That testimony came measured out in drams, like a seaman's ration. Every few sentences Geldin would pause and look from Marty to me, whether to gauge the value and effect of his testimony or to allow his next phrases to settle into place before he spoke, I couldn't tell.
Irregardless of what we thought, he was not, well, not. . . what we thought. In fact, he'd never done anything like this before. Sure, he'd lost his job a while back, after twelve years—but so had a lot of others, these days. And when his wife left, well, unlike the other, he'd seen that coming.
Hollis and he went way back, to grade school. He'd been the geeky kid back then, good grades, scrawny, out of step, always reading. Hollis was anything but, but he'd stepped in one day when the top bully, guy looked like a pug dog, had been beating on him. Not because Hollis had any feelings for him, mind you, or any sense of its being wrong, but because Hollis'd had his eye on this bully, figuring he was the one to take down. And here was his chance. Teachers came, it looked like Hollis was a hero, taking up for him. Not finessed—but sometimes finesse just happens, you know?
Anyway, that changed things for him. Year later, he was linebacker on the team. Still not fitting in, but he was good enough that they moved over to make room for him. Meanwhile Hollis went on getting into trouble, tiptoeing around this huge crater, shouting down into it. He was getting bigger, Hollis was shrinking. Took to cigarettes, got behind some serious drinking. Didn't see much of each Other for a long time then, but he heard things from time to time: Hollis was boosting cars, was on the run, was doing time.
Not long after he lost his job, they met up again, neighborhood bar on Atlantic that he liked because they had no music or TV and, late morning, early afternoon, there'd be a lot of women coming through, usually in groups. They didn't recognize each other at first. Guy on the next stool looked up like him to watch three young women in gym clothes enter and said, "Lesbo bar is what I'm thinking." They took a closer look at each other then and realized.
Wasn't much catching up done, not a lot of talking either, after the first hour or two, but it was good to have a friend, someone to sit with, drink a few beers, someone with free time like him. And yeah, he had been wondering what Hollis did to get by, what gave him all that free time, but it's not the kind of thing you ask, once the first hints get ignored, right?
They got pretty tight over the next month or six weeks.
One afternoon, almost night really, they'd had five, six beers by then, he guessed, and the after-work crowd had started drifting in, Hollis's phone went off. He laughed at all of them reaching for their phones, then realized it was his and skipped outside to answer. Came back in time to buy the next round, and along about the third sip maybe, Hollis asked if by any chance he might be free the next couple days and up to picking up a nice chunk of change. Naturally he asked for doing what. His man had just canceled on him, Hollis said. He had a pickup to make, and sure could use the company. Nothing to it. And it paid three hundred clear.
So he said yes and found himself in this godforsaken place, no offense intended.
Things started going wrong from the first. Their flight was delayed, the woman across the aisle puked in her plastic tray of beef tips, some kid kept kicking the back of his seat. The first rental car stalled out two miles from the airport in Memphis. They had to call, wait over an hour, then take whatever was available, which turned out to be this clunky van that pulled hard to the right.
He didn't know what Hollis's intentions were, he was looking for someone, he knew that—then for something he couldn't find. By the time they got to the first house, where the old lady was, he was getting crazy, tearing up everything, hitting her—just once, but it didn't take much. It was like you could see that kid on the playground coming out of him all over again, you know? And it kept on getting worse. At the second place, he watched the woman while Hollis went through the house getting angrier all the time. It was when he realized Hollis planned on taking the woman that he got . . . not scared, but. . . sick. Physically ill. Heart pounding, skin crawling. Like he was going out of his body, leaving it behind.
He was in the backseat and he kept asking Hollis to stop this, take her back, this was just flat-out crazy, and Hollis kept telling him to shut up. At one point, scooting forward in the seat, he kicked the woman's purse, which was on the floor by him. Something heavy in there. He took it out, told Hollis to stop the car, and when Hollis laughed, he shot him.
He figured there had to be a farmhouse or something somewhere, he'd carry him there and get help if he was still alive, but there wasn't. And he couldn't. He was going to call, get help for the woman too, but when Hollis died, he just got scared, really scared.
Hollis had made him memorize that phone number and name, in case anything happened to him. To Hollis, that is. He was just supposed to call, say where they were, nothing more.
And that was it. He stopped talking and sat looking down at the table, lost in thoughts of Brooklyn and the past, maybe thinking how far away that past seemed now, or maybe just used up, empty. I stopped the tape. The light outside was muted, tentative. I could hear wind coming down Main Street, the shake of roofs, the shudder of doors and windows. I smelled dust, and rain. And I felt all about me the sadness of endings.