Indefensible (31 page)

“Seth Coen owed me rent,” Milan blurts with a sob. “And I don't know about any other body.”

I wait.

“JesusMaryandJoseph,” he says, making his way to a chair, where he slumps into a heap of misery. I knew he'd be easy. I stand in front of him, loading up my glare with the imposing weight of federal power. Normally, I'd have some compassion, but Milan's antic deprived us of the break we needed in this case, dragging it out long enough for Scud to end up dead, so now we might never figure out who pulled all the strings. Scud would have talked. He'd have told us who was responsible—who gave the order or paid the contract. But the weaselly, suspender-clad Milan fucked it up.

I let Milan sit there stewing while I call Dorsey, and I wait until he shows up with a couple of troopers. Milan is heaped into the chair. Every couple of minutes, he straightens a bit and says, as if it's something he just thought of, “I can't go to jail.”

“You want to arrest him?” Dorsey asks me.

“I haven't decided. You go ahead and take him on the theft
charges, then we'll see what spins out before I decide on the federal charges.”

Dorsey reads the Mirandas. Milan wants to talk. He tells us it was a small aluminum boat with an outboard. Yamaha, twenty horsepower, maybe. “Seth didn't have his own car,” Milan says. “He'd come and go with other people, or he'd just, like, have some car for a few days, then he'd have another.”

“What kind of cars?” I ask.

“I don't know. Like rental cars,” he says. Milan admits that when Seth turned up dead and nobody asked about the boat or towed it away, he waited a few weeks until things quieted down, then he put a for sale sign on it and parked it beside the highway. It sold in a couple of days.

“How much did you get?” I ask.

“Forty-five hundred.”

“How much rent did he owe you?”

“Around the same,” Milan says, his hands in motion again.

“Dammit, Milan,” I snap, “do yourself a favor here.”

He slumps down and doesn't say anything.

“How much did Seth owe you?”

“About three hundred.”

“Who'd you sell the boat to?”

“They gave me cash,” he whines. “I don't have a clue who it was.”

I have to leave for Turner. Dorsey's team stays with Milan to work on tracking down whoever bought the boat.

•  •  •

It all makes sense. The coincidence was too great that Seth and Scud were out poaching deer on one side of the reservoir the same night someone was burying Zander on the other side. No doubt Seth and Scud thought that by crossing to the untrammeled eastern shore, the chances of anyone discovering Zander's grave were zilch. It was their bad luck (and Cassandra's) that they pulled ashore near the unmapped path along the marsh where some bird-watcher
recently claimed to see a yellow rail. I'm betting that when the troopers locate the boat, they'll find traces of Zander—blood, hair, clothing fibers. His body was probably hidden under a tarp in the boat as it was trailered out from town, launched into the cold shallows of the reservoir, and zoomed across to a not so final resting spot.

Two X's on the map. Ninety minutes by road, ten minutes by water. Zander's killers, or at least the body disposers, have been identified: Scud Illman and Seth Coen, both dead.

I should call Chip and tell him, but I don't want to talk to him. So I call Dorsey back: “Nick here. Do me a favor and brief Chip d'Villafranca, would you?”

“Sure, but why don't—”

“Thanks, bye.” I end the call.

•  •  •

Stephanie Caplain is the guidance counselor at Lizzy's school. The most noticeable thing about her is that she beams an aura of maternal warmth. Her eyes have a hint of sadness; her voice is firm but entreating; and her smile is . . . well, it's nice. How many rattled adolescents, I wonder, have sobbed their woes into the substantial cushion of her bosom? Has Lizzy?

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Davis,” she says sweetly.

I mean to answer, but I'm experiencing a strange bout of lingual paralysis, and all I can do is blink a few times, looking back and forth between her and Lizzy. For a moment this undefined problem wipes away the niggling fear I've had since Kendall deduced that I'm the main suspect in Scud's murder.

“Lizzy needs to tell you something,” Stephanie Caplain says once we're settled in her comfy mango-colored office with the door closed. “It's difficult for her, so we thought if she and I met with you together, it might be better. Right, Lizzy?”

Lizzy is sitting on the couch with her hands palm-down on either side of her. She won't meet my eyes.

“Lizzy wasn't sure whether to tell you at all,” Stephanie says, “but
we decided together that she really needed to tell one of you—you or her mom, right, Liz?”

Lizzy nods.

“So why don't you go ahead, sweetheart,” Stephanie says.

“Yes,” I add helplessly.

“Okay,” Lizzy whispers, but her lip starts quivering, and I feel mine start to quiver in response.

Liz looks up, and her eyes are full of tears, and she looks back down at her lap and says, “Kenny.”

“Kenny? Our Kenny? What about him?”

“Bothering me.”

“Bothering you? Bothering you how?”

She doesn't answer.

“Did he . . .”

“No, he just . . .”

“What?”

“Wants.”

“And he . . .”

“Pesters.”

“Oh, geez. And he persists?”

She nods. “It's so gross,” she whispers. “He's like my, you know, brother.”

“How long?”

“Not too. First I tried to, you know . . . I didn't take him seriously. But now . . .”

I gaze at Liz for a while. She and Stephanie Caplain are waiting for me to say something. Lizzy is in her little-girl getup. She shuns fashion; her outfits are usually T-shirts and jeans, preferably with holes in the knees. Or running clothes. But sometimes she wears a goofy combination of striped kneesocks and a blouse with ruffles. She looks about nine years old right now.

“Daddy?” Lizzy says.

I'm not here to give a legal opinion. I'm here to give fatherly comfort and support. And wisdom. Obviously wisdom, because if she were looking just for comfort, she'd go to Flora. Flora for comfort,
me for wisdom. And maybe me for my relationship to Kenny, because though he's close to all of us, it's mainly me. He's my problem child, my wayward son, my project. Naturally, I'm Lizzy's choice; I'm levelheaded and judicious. I'm wise. Father knows best.

“Jesus H.!” I yell. “I'll give him a mouthful of bloody Chiclets, the son of a bitch.”

F
riday morning. I've decided to do nothing about Kenny until I can talk to Flora.

After leaving the guidance counselor yesterday, Lizzy and I drove home, and she went for a run while I made dinner, then she worked on homework. To my amazement, before sealing herself into the hermetic capsule of her bedroom—there to do who knows what until she went to bed at who knows when—she agreed to a game of Parcheesi with me.

At work now, I skulk from the elevator to my office and get the door closed without having to stop and talk to anyone. I buzz Janice. “Janice, would you inform Ed Cashdan that I'm not able to make it to the weekly wrap-up and I'd appreciate his taking charge?”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Good morning, Janice.”

“You usually ask Upton to sit in when you can't make it.”

“I'm aware of that.”

There are voice messages on my cell phone and voice messages on my office phone and While You Were Outs on my desk. And no coffee in my cup, but if I can hold out till after ten o'clock, the lawyers will be at the wrap-up and I can sneak over to the coffeepot. I work my way through the messages: TMU wants to see me, Kendall Vance wants to see me, Kenny wants to get together for that movie-and-beer night we talked about, Dorsey wants to talk, Platypus wants to talk. The White House called and would like to speak with me, if I'd be so kind as to call back at my earliest convenience. And finally, Chip d'Villafranca called less than eight minutes ago, and he's on his way over right now.

Everything comes into focus. Chip has been trying and trying
to reach me, and I've been stiff-arming him. Now, sick of the run-around, he is getting more aggressive. It's obvious. In addition to all the evidence against me—the evidence Kendall itemized—I've apparently increased Chip's suspicions by consistently dodging his attempts to speak with me. I'm certain he wants me for questioning about the murder of Avery “Scud” Illman. Maybe he's already been to the judge and gotten an arrest warrant. He's such a big guy, Chip, but he's gentle. He'll murmur earnest apologies as he takes my wrists in his meaty hands and snaps on the bracelets behind my back.
Is that okay, Nick?
he'll say.
Are they lose enough? Are you comfortable?

“Why stick around?” I say aloud into the quiet of my office. I'm no match for the FBI if they really want to pick me up, but I could put an extra day or two to good use. I take my briefcase, walk out the office door, and—knowing I might never set foot in the place again but with no time to wax poetic—leave by the back staircase and drive away.

I want to see Platypus because the best way to convince everyone I didn't kill Scud is to prove that someone else, specifically Upton, did. Maybe Platypus has found something. But before I can talk to him, I need to live up to my part of the bargain. I drive over to city police headquarters.

Tony Silva and Bart Curry are the two dicks who worked the case of Platypus's missing granddaughter. Silva isn't in, Curry is. Curry invites me into his office (a real office, surprisingly; I expected a cubicle or maybe just a desk). He studies my business card. “Not too often you guys come down from your mountaintop,” he says.

“No, you're thinking of the FBI,” I tell him. “They're the stuck-up ones; us guys in the U.S. Attorney's office, we drink Bud.”

“Settle for coffee?”

“Music to my ears.”

He gets the coffee. I tell him about Platypus's granddaughter and how I promised the guy I'd make some inquiries.

“Platypus,” Curry says, “poor schmuck. He's desperate. They're all desperate: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Living hell. It's
cold, though, that case, and Platty just won't hear what we're telling him.”

“Which is?”

“Missing kids like that, generally speaking, you get 'em back quick or you don't get 'em. That one though, Brittany Tesoro, we found those pics of her on the Internet, which at least told us something.”

“Told you what?”

“There're only a few reasons kids go missing: There're the runaways, but we pretty much ruled that out. After that, kidnapping by a noncustodial parent is most common, but it's not a factor here. Then there's kidnapping by some screwball with an empty nest they're trying to fill, but those are rare, and they go after infants and toddlers. Brittany's too old. That leaves the pervs and entrepreneurs.”

“Entrepreneurs?”

“Sex trade, kiddie porn, baby sellers. Those pics of Brittany; they tell us she was with an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneurs aren't exactly sentimental people. It ain't easy keeping a girl Brittany's age hidden, if you hear what I'm saying.”

“I see.”

“Is it cold in here?” he asks. He points at my coffee cup, which, I hadn't realized, I'm pressing against my cheek, creating a little spot of warmth in a cold, shitty world.

“Are you still working it?” I ask.

“Yes and no. You know how it is.”

I do know how it is. There are newer cases that still have the possibility of saving a life.

“How did you find the pics?” I ask.

“One-in-a-million chance,” Curry says. “We found her in the national database. The Bureau has a team that works this stuff, mostly Internet, but some in print. They search it out, catalog it, crop it for the face shots so we can search by age, gender, race. We found her there, but the Bureau didn't have any leads. They pulled the image off the Internet, but it dead-ended. They couldn't trace it.”

“How long ago?”

“At least a year. Maybe more.”

A year. We both know the truth.

“Fucking A,” Curry says quietly.

“Fucking A,” I agree. I like him. He's a bland-looking guy, a little doughy, but with the crusty edge cops need to have. His face is kind, though, and while he's built walls against the tragedies of his daily fare, he doesn't pretend it's not all tragic. “Have you looked in the database again for another picture of Brittany?”

“Not specifically. We've looked for others, but you know, you generally have to search for one at a time. You need to have a good eye. Some people can really pick them out. Not me. You want to try?”

“Yes.”

I didn't plan to get involved. I'm just here to get an update for Platypus, but strangely, I want to see all those lost children. I want to be their witness, as if, by descending into that catalog of unfathomable heartbreak, I might help bring them home.

Curry tries to put me on the site. He enters his personal authorization code, except it turns out the database is offline for updating. “Come back in a couple of hours,” he says, “we'll try again.”

I tell him I'll be back in the afternoon. I hope Chip won't have found me yet and I'll still be at large. From city police headquarters, I drive toward Rivertown to see Platypus, and from the car, I dial one of the calls on my list.

“This is the White House, how may I direct your call?”

I ask for the deputy chief of staff, and I'm transferred to another receptionist, who asks my name and the purpose of my call. I'm put on hold, then a man picks up, and in a voice sounding as warm and intimate as if he knows me, he says, “Nick! Hi, Vinny Sherman here. Glad you called. I suppose you've heard?”