Indefensible (40 page)

T
MU's office: He called me upstairs for a meeting even before I had my memo ready. I have a rough draft in my briefcase. It will have to do. Neidemeyer, the FBI section chief, is in TMU's office. He always strikes me as having the personality of a sack of concrete.

TMU looks terrible. He suddenly has become old, with pallid cheeks on a face from which energy and enthusiasm have fled. He doesn't get up when I come in. “Harold,” I say, “you look tired.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, “let's talk about who looks worse, shall we?” To Neidemeyer, he says, “Our boy Nick got into a tussle.”

“I heard.”

“We're proud of him,” TMU says, then bends toward his intercom and calls, “Coffee!”

Neidemeyer opens his briefcase and takes out some documents.

I open my briefcase and take out my memo about Upton.

A guy comes in with three coffees on a tray. We each take one. I smell raspberries, and I hold my cup to my nose and sniff.

“You like it?” TMU says. “I think it's refreshing.”

Neidemeyer puts his cup down on TMU's desk with a thunk of finality, but I take a sip of mine. I like it. “Harold,” I say, “that's nice.”

“Got to live it up, eh, boy?” He sips his raspberry-flavored coffee and smiles. “I'll start. We've got a problem: Some fingerprints were recently found at a crime scene where an underworld figure named Avery Illman was murdered.”

“I'm aware.”

“The prints belonged to a guy who went by the name of Maxy. Full name: Maxwell Patterson.”

Neidemeyer hands me one of the documents from his briefcase.
It is a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. At the top of the page, someone has written, “From
Helena Daily Record,”
and it is dated about six years ago. It's an obit for a guy named James Donaldson, resident of Helena, age forty-nine, who died at home following a brief illness. Mr. Donaldson, the article said, was a retired building contractor who moved to the Helena area from Los Angeles four years before. He enjoyed downhill skiing and horseback riding. He leaves a wife but no other immediate relatives.

“What's the connection?”

“How much do you know about Maxy?” Neidemeyer asks.

“He was an informant,” I say. “He worked his way into the heart of the beast, and then he disappeared. But every now and then someone claims to have seen him, and some people think he's active again.”

“He was a scammer,” Neidemeyer says. “A born actor but a fraud. He had a knack for getting people to trust him, getting himself into positions of responsibility. He moved around a lot to stay under the radar. We nabbed him, and our handwriting analysts tied him to some impressive jobs. We put together a very tight case. Lots of charges. Serious time inside, but it was all property crimes, nothing violent. So his lawyer cooks up this idea. Maxy buys himself a walk by going to work for us. He'll use his talents and get right into the middle of things, then he'll draw us a road map of who's who and what's what. So we agree to try it out for a while.”

I'm watching Neidemeyer speak. He has a gentle, phlegmy voice and disinterested eyes. “It worked out,” Neidemeyer says. “Best undercover we've ever had in this city. But after we work him for a year, we catch wind of something wrong. There's chatter. He's suspected. Any moment he might end up dead, so we have to move quick. We invent this big meet-up and put him at the center of it, and we put out rumors on the street so it takes some weeks before anybody figures out that he's gone, and by then everybody's pointing at everyone else, and we're pounding on doors pretending to look for him, and word gets out that he's screwed us. So he becomes an underworld folk hero.”

“Everybody likes myth better than truth,” TMU says. “The myth is that he beat the system. He screwed the feds and he screwed the bosses. He's living it up in some tropical paradise, flitting back to stir up trouble and then gone again.”

“And the truth?”

“Truth is that witness protection sent him to Helena with a new name and enough money to buy a couple of acres and a horse.”

“And this obit . . .”

“Pancreatic cancer,” TMU says. “It's a bitchingly fast death sentence.”

“It's true?”

“It's true,” Neidemeyer says. “Mr. Donaldson, formerly Maxwell Patterson, alias Maxy, has been unquestionably dead for the past six years.”

“Who knows this?”

“Nobody,” Neidemeyer says. “Other than the three of us and maybe a couple guys running the witness protection program.”

“Hmmm,” I say. “I guess not even Maxy himself knows it, because despite being dead, he somehow got his prints at a murder scene just two weeks ago.”

•  •  •

In my office, I lie on the couch, waiting for the Percocet to take effect. I've got another of the blinding headaches that my doctor said I should expect.

So there is no Maxy. Does this mean there is no unifying source of evil to these crimes, no puppet master, or is it simply that we haven't located him yet? I lie there on the couch with my palms over my eyes. I'm glad for the pain. It feels appropriate.

Believing in Maxy was a way out for me. If Maxy killed Scud, then I had one avenue of hope that Upton was innocent. And if Maxy recruited the snitch from among his old contacts at the troopers, then it got everyone in my office off the hook, specifically Kenny.

But how do a man's fingerprints show up at a crime scene six years after his death?

I yell for Janice. She comes in. I say, “I need a file. Immediately. Sooner. If you can't get cooperation from whoever controls the archives, tell me, and I'll kick some ass down there myself. Name is Maxwell Patterson. It was about eleven years ago. If you can't find anything, call the Bureau and have them run the name. Get me whatever you can find.”

I return to my couch and doze for an hour until I'm awakened by Janice coming in with a file she got from the FBI: Maxwell Patterson.

“Love ya, Janice,” I say.

“Watch it, buster, that's harassment. Prepare to be sued.”

It doesn't take long to read. There was never a prosecution, just an investigation, an interview, and a conference with the suspect's lawyer present. The Bureau never sought an indictment. The case seems to have dropped off a cliff. In effect, it did. Maxy went to work for us as an informant, and we closed the investigation.

I take more Percocet and lie back down on the couch, trying to control the pain in my head. Then I'm up. I need to go have a look at the cup from Scud Illman's car where Maxy supposedly left his fingerprints.

Kenny drives me to trooper headquarters. He is quiet and clearly nervous. We don't speak. I write out my request and show my shield, and the officer retrieves a small brown bag from the rows of steel shelves. It's stapled at the top. I open it. Inside is a plain white paper cup, stained with coffee and dusted in fingerprint powder. I study the cup and the prints, walking a few steps to see it more clearly under a bulb in the poorly lit basement room. Suddenly, I get a wave of pain. I press both hands over my eyes. Kenny is right there. He has an arm around me and walks me to a chair. “Jesus, Nick, should I call someone?”

“Comes in stabs,” I say. “Gone now. Doctor says it's not unusual.”

“You okay,” he says, not as a question but as an expression of caring.

“Think so.” I sit with my face in my hands and with Kenny's arm around my shoulders. After several seconds, he goes and picks up the cup, which I dropped, and I put it back in its paper bag. We
return it to the evidence clerk. Kenny walks me back to the truck, holding on to my arm the whole way. He drives to the office and stops in front to let me out. As I open the door, he says, “Um . . .”

I wait.

In a barely audible voice, eyes staring straight out the windshield, he says, “I'm sorry.” He means about Lizzy.

“Noted,” I answer.

I go up to my office and lie down again.

•  •  •

There is no Maxy, meaning the crimes might add up to nothing more than small criminal acts by small criminal minds. This is what Kendall Vance said:
There's nothing Shakespearean about it. They're all kind of boring.
Kendall is wise. I wanted to believe in the syndicate, though, the idea of a single thread to pull and the whole thing comes apart. Maybe I liked the idea because it feels less threatening. It's more containable, less spread out among us all.

The central question is how Maxy's fingerprints showed up in Scud's car. A white paper cup with the fingerprints of a man who has been dead for the past six years . . .

With this thought, I'm asleep.

Then I'm awake, and I know the answer. I know who killed Scud Illman. Before I do anything, I drive over to see Kendall Vance. He's still my lawyer, and I trust him. In the car loaned to me by the Bureau, I drive myself out of the parking garage and slowly through town. I have one good eye, and my palm is cupped around my forehead. When I arrive in front of Kendall's office, there is a wood chipper by the curb. The noise of screaming blades feels like it will split my skull.

“Jesus, you look awful, Nick,” Kendall says.

“I just needed to get away from the office. Talk things through,” I answer. He guides me to a chair and I start talking. I tell him how the troopers found Maxy's prints on the cup. I tell him about Kenny and my awful suspicions. I tell him what I've discovered about Scud's exploitation of Colin, and what I learned about Brittany and how
I'm finally convinced Upton had nothing to do with Scud's death. I tell him all of my suspicions. He has new respect for me, because with Chip's help, I probably saved his and Kaylee's lives ten days ago.

“Are you okay to drive?” he asks after I've talked myself out and headed for the door. “Do you need my help?”

I wave the question away and make it out of his office. I feel like throwing up again, but I'm able to stifle it.

How sad Kendall looks by the time I leave.

The wood chipper is gone. I get in the car and drive. I don't want to go home. I don't want to go to my office. I don't want to go anyplace. Where I do go is to Kenny's. I walk around the apartment looking at things, touching things. His bed is unmade, and I lie down with my head on his pillow, breathing in the scent of this man I love like a son. I bury my bandaged face in the pillow and let it come. Sobs. It comes and comes and comes, and every time I think it has stopped, it comes again, this wellspring of sorrow that seems without a bottom. My boy. My Kenny.

When I finally stand up, the pillow is wet. I go into the bathroom and come out. Then I call Kenny and catch him at work before he leaves. “I'm at your place,” I say. “I just needed to get away from everything. Why don't you pick up Chinese takeout and a movie? Your choice. I'll pay you back.”

Kenny says he'd like that, watching a movie together.

T
here are so many things I wish. I wish that Flora and I offered Kenny the stability of a permanent home instead of leaving him in foster care. One or both of us probably could have gotten licensed as a foster home and had him live with us. Maybe we could have adopted him, but we were both busy with careers, and his existing foster family didn't seem so bad, and he was a handful. I wish I'd been better at loving him. It wasn't easy, because I think we got him too late. He cared about us and enjoyed being with us, but maybe the traumas of his younger years left him too impervious, and he never soaked in the idea of being loved. Or—since he wasn't our son and he didn't live with us, and since he was a difficult boy, maybe the love we offered him was more watered down than we knew.

We had a good time together two nights ago. The movie was awful, but he loved it. I drank a couple of beers, which, with the Percocet, knocked me for a loop. Kenny brought me a pillow and blanket for the couch. In my imperfect recollection of that drug-and-alcohol-induced fogginess, as we high-graded shrimp out of the stir-fry and then downed a quart of mint-chip ice cream, I see Kenny's boyish grin unleashed from its constantly niggling awareness of his lesser status in my life. “How come we don't do this more often, Nick?” he asked.

How come, indeed?

•  •  •

In my office, I have the shades closed and the light off. I'm lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes. I yell for Janice a few times, but she doesn't hear me through the office door, and getting off the
couch feels impossible right now. I use my cell phone, peeking from under the towel long enough to dial, and call the office number.

“Nick Davis's office,” Janice says.

“It's me. Would you tell Upton I need him in my office for a few minutes?”

A minute later, Upton comes in. “You wanted me, boss?”

“Close the door.”

He does. I don't sit up, and I don't take the towel off my eyes. I like it better here in the blackness.

“You okay?” Upton asks.

“I was sure you killed Scud,” I say.

Silence.

“I've concluded you didn't. But you must have considered it.”

Silence.

“Did you take any actions to impede the investigation of Scud Illman, Upton?”

“No.”

“I'm inclined to believe you.”

“Thank you.”

“You need to come clean about the gambling. The next blackmailer might not get so conveniently murdered. Do it in a letter to Harold, and do it soon. He's not well, you know—could step down or check out at any moment, and who knows what the next TMU will be like. Leslie Herstgood would have cut your balls off. But Harold will go to the mat for you. Write out your story; go heavy on the stuff about your sad childhood and the culture of moral chaos in professional athletics. The letter will go in your file, and nobody will ever see it again.”