Indefensible (35 page)

“Poor guy” Fuseli is doing sixty to ninety on an armed robbery and two felony murder convictions, and the wheelchair doesn't change a thing. The chair exists in the context of the prison, which exists in the context of a life. He made his choices.

“Poor guy,” Tina says again.

Then I'm stroking her cheek without having actually decided to. “Compassion,” I say.

She reaches up and holds my fingers in hers.

“I'll go see him soon,” I tell her, and before I lose this thought, I take the notepad where Tina and I spent the night summarizing all the evidence in all these murders, and at the top, in big letters, I write, “Fuseli—compassion.”

Then Tina is on her way home, and I'm packing up to leave.

B
usy day ahead. I can't do anything until the working world comes to life, so I find an espresso shop and settle in with biscotti and a latte, and read the summary of evidence I wrote with Tina's help. It was a good exercise, going back through everything, because there are details I overlooked: There was the white “rental car” someone noticed on Cassandra Randall's street the night she was killed, and the bloody shoe print—visible only with luminol—in the bathroom of Seth Coen's apartment. And there were the frustratingly unsolved questions of who the hell is Maxfield Parrish and what Bernier Construction's role is. And now the question of how Kenny knows someone at Bernier.

About nine in the morning, once I'm sure Kenny has left for work, I drive to his apartment. I have a key.

And I have rubber gloves. I work systematically, starting at the glass-top dining table, which is covered with mail and breakfast dishes and bills. I search through all the paperwork, putting old phone bills into a box I brought along. I scrutinize credit-card statements and bank statements. The bank statements show several unaccountably large deposits. There are copies of
Popular Mechanics
and
Consumer Reports,
and there is the sales literature for the Jet Ski he's so excited about. There are old newspapers—sports sections and funny pages, mostly—with geometric doodles in the margins because Kenny always doodles when he reads the paper. The glass terrarium with his motionless snake is on a bookshelf.

I found him this apartment seven years ago when he aged out of the foster care system, abruptly cut loose at eighteen. I shudder to think what would have happened to him if he hadn't had Flora and me to help out. When he first moved in here, I came over a lot
to keep him company. He used to call me in the evening and talk endlessly, trying to keep me on the phone as long as he could. Sometimes I think I should have had him live with me a year or two until he was mature enough to better fend for himself. But Kenny got his footing in time. He has his own life.

When I'm done going through the papers, I make a quick check of cupboards and fridge, then I move to the bathroom, where I empty the wastebasket on the floor and rummage through old Kleenexes and dental floss and pocket litter. I look in the medicine cabinet. I look in the cabinet under the sink where cleaning rags hang from the plumbing. What I notice is that the bottom of the cabinet is a few inches above the bathroom floor. I poke it with my pocketknife, and sure enough, it seems loose, so I remove the Drano and plunger and toilet brush and everything else down there and try to lift out the plywood panel, but it won't come. It's dark, but I identify one empty screw hole and another that seems to have a screw in place. I get a screwdriver from the kitchen and am able to get the screw out. The panel won't come out entirely because of the plumbing in the way, but I peek in and don't see anything. I forgot to bring a flashlight, but I have a lighter, and lying on my stomach, I get a pretty good look. I see nothing. I pat around with my hand, just in case, but all I come out with is a sprinkling of mouse poop on the palm of my rubber glove.

I move along to the bedroom. Dresser, closet, bedside table. Next, the spare room where Kenny has his desk, which is piled with dirty laundry. There is also a bookshelf—he likes fantasy and mystery and is actually a faster reader than I am. On the wall are some framed pictures that Flora gave him: there is one of all of us at his high school graduation eight years ago (we all look so much younger); some pictures of us at the lake; and Lizzy's eighth-grade school portrait. I add more bank statements and some paper scraps to the box I'm carrying with me from room to room.

Before I leave the bedroom, I upend his wastebasket on a sheet of newspaper. And there in the bottom, I find one chilling scrap of crumpled paper. I recognize it immediately; it was in my possession
for several hours one day last June, and during those brief hours, I consulted it many times because it seemed, in my besotted state of mind, to have meanings deeper than simple numbers and letters. It made me think of the flutelike
tinga tinga tinga tinga ting
of a hermit thrush, and of spring growth in rain-washed woods. It is the note, Cassandra's contact information, written in Dorsey's sharply slanted, no-nonsense writing, that he handed me in the Drowntown Café when I coyly offered to follow up with her.

Done searching now, I have found nothing that tells me who killed Scud or Zander or Cassandra, but while I was struggling an hour ago against the awful suspicion of Kenny's involvement, I'm now dazed by the awful certainty of it. Kenny is the snitch who sold Cassandra to her assassins. I am going to lose another son. I set my box by the door and go through the apartment again, putting things back the way I found them. In the bathroom, I screw the cabinet floor down and replace the cleaning supplies, then I prop myself over the toilet for the several minutes it takes the pit of nausea I'm feeling to rise almost to eruption and then subside. But it doesn't fade entirely. I straighten up, get my box, and leave the apartment.

F
rom Kenny's place, I drive to the city police headquarters to search again for recent pictures of Brittany Tesoro.

Screen after screen of children. The pictures are redacted so that witnesses and relatives can search the faces without becoming complicit in the atrocious intent of the photos. Bart Curry shows me how to restrict my search: We can scan by gender, approximate age, the date the images were intercepted, hair color, or race. We punch in the particulars for Brittany.

“All these missing kids,” I say.

“No, most aren't missing,” Bart says, “just exploited. The missing ones . . . at least someone's looking for them. But these kids, it's just intercepted kiddie porn. They never get recognized because most of them
aren't
missing, and decent folk who might recognize them and alert authorities . . . Decent people aren't looking at this shit.”

Bart watches over my shoulder a few minutes, then goes back to his desk. I keep searching, wishing I could step into the screen, slipping across rifts of time and space, to deliver the kids to safety. I go back to the setup screen and remove the age and gender parameters. I want to see them all. Screen after screen after screen. Sometimes as I click from one to the next, the images hang up a few extra seconds, and I stare at a child's face—this particular one is a puzzled African-American boy, about nine years old—I imagine he is hanging on, trying to squeeze through the time/space bars to reveal his secret;
almost there, almost there,
but before he makes it, the computer screen fades him into nothing.

What would a shrink say? That I'm searching this hellish catalog in hopes that, by rescuing one of these kids, I can redeem my own
failure to stand between my innocent Toby and Dr. Wallis's fascistic eugenics?

Goddamn him. Goddamn Doctor Wallis.

Maybe I'm looking for Toby himself. Screen after screen of these children. Screen after screen. I have the strange sensation of Flora here beside me. Two searchers trying to get themselves unstuck.

I don't find Toby, of course, but who I do find—and when I see him, it's no surprise at all, almost as if he is exactly the person I expected to find here—is a serious-looking, sandy-haired boy, about seven. He has the lip scar of a repaired cleft palate, and his left iris is brown with a splotch of green. It is Colin, Scud's stepson, posed in front of an old tie-dyed bedspread. Maybe if I keep searching, I'll find more pictures of him, perhaps posed with other kids, but I have no stomach for any more. The queasiness that almost got me at Kenny's apartment explodes with the grotesque suddenness of a lily blossoming in time-lapse. I barf most of it in the wastebasket, and immediately, Bart is behind me with his hand on my shoulder. He stays there as I blow out the pipes and sinuses.

“Bathroom's that way,” he says when I'm done.

When I return, the garbage bag has been replaced and the floor toweled off.

“It's pretty rough shit,” he says. “You okay?”

I nod, then I say, “In the old photos of Brittany: Is the tie-dyed bedspread the same?” I point at Colin's picture on the screen.

“I don't know,” Curry says. “I'll pull the file to look.”

“Call me,” I say, and I head for the door. Outside, I pause, getting my bearings, remembering where I left the car, then I speed across town, blue and reds flashing.

•  •  •

It is afternoon. My phone chirps with messages: Chip, TMU, Tina, Kendall. I listen to Chip's first. “Nick,” he says, and his voice is strained to the point of hysteria. “This is deadly serious. I need you to—”

I delete it. I don't want to hear him say he's out hunting for me.
Whether I find something within the next couple of days or not, I'll surrender myself.

I go to Dorsey's message. “Nick, it's me,” he says. “We found Scud Illman's wife's car. Some pretty weird shit. Call.”

I will, but later. Right now I call Bart Curry.

“How you feeling?” he asks.

“Better. Did you . . . ?”

“Yes. I pulled the pictures of Brittany Tesoro. You're right: same tie-dyed bedspread. How did you know?”

“Police work,” I say. “Here's the address.”

“What address?”

“Where the pictures were taken. Where the perv lives. Except he doesn't live there anymore, he's dead.”

“You know this?” Curry shouts. “You know this guy?”

“Of course.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” and now he shouts it, yelling it to the whole office full of cops. “Oh my God, we finally friggin' found one. Oh, sweet Jesus.”

I give him the address. It is possible Scud was doing the camera work someplace else, but I'm betting it was right there in his basement. We'll know soon.

“Come back to the station,” Curry says. “We'll need you to swear for the warrant.”

“You won't need a warrant,” I tell him, “just meet me there. And bring protective services. There's probably a minor on the premises.”

I had waited until I was almost at Scud's house to call Curry. I didn't want cops beating me to the scene. Now I pull up in front of the small house with the tidy yard and the old fifties-era front door with its three stair-step windows. Such a humble place. It's odd that a guy like Scud could go around ruining lives for profit but profited so meagerly.

Mrs. Illman is home and comes to the door when I pound. Her hair is pulled back tight, as always; same jeans, same sweater, same shoes. We stare at each other a couple of seconds. She knows something has changed.

“We found dirty pictures,” I say.

The effect is almost imperceptible. This woman has survived by making herself impervious to hope and despair, but something slackens in her by a millimeter.

“The police will be here any moment,” I say. “Get a lawyer and tell him you want to cooperate as much as possible. If you aren't involved in the pornography, you can probably stay out of jail.”

She nods.

“And I'll need your shoes,” I say.

“My shoes?”

“A shoe print found in Seth Coen's apartment,” I say, “it was invisible to the naked eye. I'm betting it matches these deck shoes you always wear. Am I right?”

She shrugs.

“That makes you an accessory to murder,” I say, “but you've got your hands full enough as it is. I'm guessing that when Scud told you he needed help cleaning up because he got a little carried away, telling him no wasn't exactly an option. I'm also betting he wasn't squeamish about threatening Colin, am I right?”

“How?” she whispers.

“Toilet paper. You must have been a chambermaid, Mrs. Illman. Sheraton? Hilton?”

“Milltown Square.”

“Old habits,” I say. “In Seth's bathroom, you left the TP folded into a point.”

“Scud,” she says. “We met when I was at the hotel. I showed him how we do it. He says to me he's as good as all those rich scumbags. So at home, I always did it in a point like that.”

Her bottom lip is quivering. She takes her shoes off and is about to hand them to me but stops. Shoes are personal things. “Would you like a bag?” she asks.

“Please.”

She retreats into the house, then returns with the shoes in a plastic shopping bag.

Two city police cars pull up outside.

“These guys are going to want to search your house. I think you should let them.”

Bart Curry comes toward me across the lawn. I hold up a hand to stop him. He waits.

“One question, Mrs. Illman. Just between you and me, scout's honor, did you kill your husband?”

She finally meets my eyes. Hers are watery. The rigidity that has served her all these years is back in force. But her mouth spreads a millimeter in a pale shadow of a wistful smile. “I wish I had,” she says.

I nod at Curry, and he approaches. “She has requested a lawyer,” I tell him, “but I think you'll find her cooperative in other respects.”