I'll Sing for my Dinner (11 page)

“I saw you perform at the Kennedy Center some years ago,” he said. “I’m willing to provide a free consultation to understand the situation, if you’re willing to sing an aria for me.”

I laughed. “And here I was worried about how to pay you. Mr. Kerrigan, one of my problems is getting to you. I’m afraid that the second I present my passport to buy a ticket, I’ll be arrested.”

We worked through the logistics, and in the end, Jake bought a ticket to Denver for Kerrigan. We drove down on Sunday to meet him, and took him to dinner at a nice restaurant. But we didn’t talk about the case.

After we drove Kerrigan to his hotel, Jake waited downstairs in the bar while I spoke with the lawyer in his room.

I told him my story, pretty much as I had told Jake. At the end, Kerrigan said, “You said, ‘after Eddie’s death’, but you didn’t say who killed him, how he died, if you were there, or if you did it.”

Jake hadn’t questioned me when I skated past that part. I took a deep breath and said, “He was stabbed to death. I saw him die. I don’t know who did it, but I have my suspicions. And no, I didn’t kill him.”

He grilled me some more, then said, “I’ll take your case. I assume you have the means to pay me?”

“Yes, sir. Do you want me to sing for you now?” I said with a grin.

He chuckled, but continued to wait for an answer.

“All of my money was put in trusts when I was a minor. I called the trustee earlier today, and verified that I’m now in control of them. He also told me that the feds got a court order and flagged my accounts. I can get to the money, but it will trigger a call to the FBI.”

“Have the trustee transfer the funds directly to me,” Kerrigan said, handing me a piece of paper. “They’ll have a good time asking me where you are. Do you need any money from those accounts? If so, transfer that to me also, and I’ll get it to you. We can use Dave Thomas as a go-between. Your idea of my hiring him was a good one. Now, here is how we’re going to work this.”

He went on to explain our game plan.

The dreams that night were bad. It was like a medley of Cecille Buchanan’s greatest hits. Eddie, Alejandro, the man in West Virginia, the homeless shelter in Memphis, that filthy alley in Kansas City, and the trucker in Kansas. All the pain, the terror, the blood.

I hadn’t dreamed about the trucker before, and I woke, writhing in the throes of an orgasm. If none of my other experiences taught me how sick I was, he brought it home in a way I couldn’t ignore. How do you spend three days being terrorized and tortured, yet even the memory causes a massive climax?

Jake was holding me and murmuring soft reassurances. I wanted to ask him to do one of the things the man had done in my dream, but I was too ashamed. I couldn’t go back to sleep the rest of the night because of the aching need inside me.

~~~

Chapter 11

Jake

I drove Cecily down to Denver and Kerrigan met us at the courthouse. At my insistence, and with Kerrigan’s blessing, she was wearing a diamond engagement ring. She was linked with a dead drug dealer. I wanted to change that dynamic by linking her to a war hero, businessman and rancher, a pillar of his community in America’s heartland. I also hoped being her fiancé would get me a little more consideration as far as access to her than being a boyfriend would.

She kept toying with the ring, looking at the diamond, then looking at me.

“Were you really a war hero?” she asked.

“They gave me a slew of medals. If they’re finally worth something, then I’ll milk it for all it’s worth,” I said.

“You didn’t need to get such a large diamond,” she said. Indeed, it looked a lot larger on her slender finger than I thought it would.

“I plan to recycle it sometime,” I said. “In a more romantic setting.”

That brought a small smile to her face.

“Jake, no matter what anyone says I did, or how disgusted you might feel, I really do love you. That part of what I’ve told you is real.”

She didn’t say anything else until she kissed me and said good-bye when we reached Denver. From the look on her face, and the fierce way she hugged me, I didn’t think she expected to ever see me again.

We met Kerrigan, and then walked in to the FBI offices. Kerrigan introduced himself, and the agents who were there to meet us took him and Cecily inside. I had to wait. And wait. Kerrigan emerged alone three hours later.

“They’ve decided to put her in protective custody,” Kerrigan said. “I thought they might pull something like that. Come on, I need to file a couple of motions with the court.”

“What kind of motions?” I asked.

“First, an injunction to prevent them from moving her out of Denver. The second is to protest them holding her at all. The last thing we want is to have her transferred back to Baltimore. I don’t think she’s paranoid to have concerns about her safety.”

“She was running scared when I first met her,” I said. “She had all that money in the bank, and she had only eaten three times in five days. A lone girl hitchhiking across the country, staying in homeless shelters and hippie crash pads. She won’t talk about it, but I’ve read about the drug culture. It seems they don’t give a damn about human life.”

“Baltimore is one of the murder capitals of the country,” Kerrigan said, “and most of those are involved with drugs. I’ve done some research into her ex-boyfriend, and he was investigated in connection with at least a half-dozen murders. The cops never got enough evidence to arrest him for anything, but it gives you an idea of the environment she was in. When they found his body, there was a kilo and a half of cocaine in the apartment, along with marijuana, an ounce of pure heroin, pills, and enough guns to start a small war.”

He went into the court clerk’s office and filed his papers. When he came out, he said, “One of the things the agents pressed this morning was that she is a suspect in his murder. I think they’re trying to pressure her into telling them more than what she’s giving them. Your testimony about her physical state six weeks later may help. The cops found over a hundred thousand dollars in cash in the bedroom where he was killed. If she killed him, it would be inconceivable that she didn’t take the money before she ran.”

The judge handed down the injunction against moving her that afternoon. A date for a hearing on the feds holding her was set for two weeks later. For the time being, she was where she had worked so hard to escape.

The feds petitioned to close the hearing, so I didn’t get to see her. Kerrigan said she looked pale and thinner than he remembered. He also described her as listless, until the judge asked her if she had anything to say. Kerrigan said she evidently had been rehearsing for that moment, and she gave the performance of her life. She told the judge that she had run from Baltimore because she was afraid for her life, named the FBI agent on Jimenez’ payroll as justification, and castigated the feds for making her a scapegoat for their incompetence in controlling the drug trade in Baltimore.

“She also said that she had more faith in her war hero fiancé to protect her, than she did in a bunch of federal bureaucrats who couldn’t find a marijuana joint in Baltimore with a flashlight and a roadmap,” Kerrigan told me. “I liked that one.”

So did I.

“The real zinger,” Kerrigan said, “was her allegation of corruption within the FBI. The U.S. Attorney went nuts. The judge asked if she mentioned this in her interview with the FBI, and she said no. She said that she had been on the run from two criminal enterprises, the drug dealers and the FBI. She said she was afraid to talk to agents from the Baltimore office, or go back to Baltimore, because she knew there were more corrupt agents, but didn’t know who they were.”

“She’s had a long time to think about all this,” I said.

“Yes, and her reasoning is sound. There isn’t a thing the U.S. Attorney can say to refute her logic. They have to haul the agent she named in for investigation, and they have to investigate her allegations that there are more agents on the take. If they send her back there now, and she gets killed, the stink will reach into the highest levels of the FBI.”

He put a hand on my arm, “Mr. McGarrity, the judge asked her if she was well, and she said no. She said she can’t eat because of the stress and her fear for her life. I moved to have a medical evaluation done, and the judge granted it.”

“She was twenty pounds thinner when I first met her,” I said.

“Christ,” he said. “She’s skinny already. She must have been nothing but skin and bones. Do you know if she has a history of an eating disorder?”

“Do you mean if she is anorexic? I doubt it. She’s been trying to gain weight. She eats almost anything; she just doesn’t eat a lot. She’ll order a cheeseburger with bacon and give me half to save room for a slice of cheesecake. And she’ll give me half of that, too. I mean, where would she put it? Even if she got fat, she still wouldn’t weigh anything.”

“Well, we’ll see what the judge decides. They did allow me to give that violin to her. The FBI tried to object that the bow could be used as a weapon, and she asked if she was under arrest or in protective custody. She also asked the U.S. attorney why they expected her to tell them anything when they kept threatening to charge her with murder. Then she asked the judge if that was a violation of her Miranda rights. ” Kerrigan grinned. “And then she said, ‘Oh, I guess it couldn’t be a Miranda violation, since they’ve never informed me that I have any rights.’ The judge went ballistic.”

I knew she didn’t want her guitar exposed to the judicial system, but I figured my old violin wouldn’t be a great loss. I drove back to Greeley, and sat around and worried.

Three days later, Kerrigan called me.

“Go pick up your girl,” he said. “Dave Thomas will meet you at the jail and sign her out as my representative.”

When she came out, she threw herself into my arms and kissed me. One of the guards handed her the violin.

“Good riddance,” the guard said. “I hope you don’t end up back here, missy.”

Outside, I asked, “What was that about?”

Gaily smiling, she said, “There isn’t an instrument better for conveying emotions than the violin. I’ve been playing funeral dirges almost non-stop for three days straight. One of the guards told me everyone in there is practically suicidal, including the guards. So when they came to let me out, I played an Irish jig for them.”

What followed next were weeks of hauling her down to Denver to talk with federal prosecutors. Kerrigan flew out for every meeting, and I had images of the meter running and the charges piling up.

Now that she wasn’t hiding anymore, she got a credit card, a cell phone, and opened a bank account in Greeley. I guess she transferred money into it from her trust, because she went shopping and bought herself a wardrobe that didn’t include any cowboy shirts. The elegance of the way she dressed to meet with the feds made me feel rather scruffy.

One reason for the dress-up was that she took me to dinner in Denver or Boulder on every trip. The finest restaurants, places I didn’t have much experience with. I could see the way she was raised, the kind of atmosphere she was used to. I protested that she was being too extravagant, and she said she was paying me back for all the food I fed her, and all the trouble she cost me.

Then she said, with a bright smile, “Would you rather punish me? We could do that instead.” So I shut up and ate fancy steaks and crab and lobster.

But when we were back in Greeley, she put on her jeans and cowboy boots and acted like the girl I had fallen in love with. She wrote a couple of new songs about her time in jail, and sang them for the audience at the Roadhouse. One was heart wrenching, the other had everyone in stitches.

One day the phone rang at the house, and when she answered it, I immediately knew something was wrong. The conversation on her end consisted of a lot of ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am’. Until the end.

“No, I don’t want you to come out here, and I’m not going to Connecticut. It’s not that I don’t love you, but obviously we don’t agree on how I should live my life. And until you’re ready to admit that I’m an adult, and we can have a conversation instead of a lecture, I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

I raised an eyebrow when she turned to me after hanging up. She ran her hand across her face, and grabbed a hand full of hair and started pulling on it.

“My parents. Somehow they got your number,” she said.

“I’m in the phone book.”

“Well, that’s kind of silly. You open yourself up to just anyone calling you.”