Injustice (16 page)

“I'm fine,” Kenny said.

“I don't mean ‘How are you?' ” she said. “I mean ‘How
are
you?' ”

“Okay,” he said. “I got a new job.”

“Still in the cafeteria?”

“No. In the library. How great is that, Nick!” He beamed at me. Kenny had been my gofer at the U.S. Attorney's Office before his arrest. He had spent a lot of time in the law library.

“Pretty great,” I said.

“Yup. Pretty great.”

“Kenny, have you ever run into a guy named Daryl Devaney?” I asked.

“Dipshit? Yeah, he was here. They moved him, though.”

“What's your impression?”

Kenny shrugged. “Just a guy. You know? He got sent to solitary a lot.”

“What for?”

“I don't know. Guys teased him a lot, you know? So he'd just react.”

“Did you ever stand up for him?” I asked.

“You mean with the guards or with other guys?”

“Guards.”

“No.”

“How about with other guys?”

Kenny gave me a complicated look. Maybe it meant that you don't stand up for a child killer. Or maybe it meant that Kenny had no capital to spend on anything other than keeping himself alive. I didn't often let myself think about Kenny's life in prison. He's a good-looking young man, and he's never been tough or aggressive, not a leader, so there were things about his reality that I didn't want to know. There were philosophical questions on the appropriateness of punishment that I didn't want to ponder.

We didn't stay very long. Lizzy and I hate going to see him there. I don't even know if Kenny likes our visits. Lizzy cried after we left.

We got back on the road and headed home. I was quiet.

“What are you thinking about?” Lizzy asked.

“I was thinking about Howland and Howland.”

“What about them?”

“I guess . . . I don't know. It might be silly.”

“Tell me.”

“I guess I was wondering what Tina would think about moving up north and opening a practice together and living in the cabin.”

B
arnaby was asleep when I came in. Tina was in the office working, so I heated a plate of leftovers and sat talking with her while I ate. I told her everything I'd learned about Henry's past.

“So do you still believe in him?” she asked.

“Of course I do,” I said. “A shy and lonely and confused kid with all that trauma in his past tangles with a vicious girl. I mean, regardless of whatever
actually
happened . . . You know?

“I know. And how was Kenny?”

“He's surviving.”

“Good,” Tina said. “Good. I'm glad.”

Tina didn't have the history with Kenny that Flora and Lizzy and I did. She and I had gotten together right around the time Kenny was arrested, so for her, his sins weren't offset by any lingering loyalty.

“Funny thing about loyalty,” I said.

“What's funny?”

“We've both seen it in court, haven't we? Parents, girlfriends, siblings. The ones who can't believe that a perp committed the heinous acts he's accused of. The ones with loyalty enough to disbelieve the laws of physics if they need to; to disbelieve that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west.”

“Um, yeah, I guess.”

“And then the other group. The ones who know the truth but will stick around anyway. They cry when the verdict is read. They'll be there if the perp ever gets out. But they're not fooled.”

“Yes,” Tina said, “I've seen some of those. They always had more cred when they argued and begged at sentencing. They're harder for a judge to ignore than the deluded ones.”

“And then there are the ones who start out loyal, disbelieving all the charges, but wake up one morning and see the perp as nothing but a scumbag.”

“Right,” Tina said, “the ones who stop coming to court.”

“I've even seen them keep coming to the trial, but they switch sides. First they're sitting on the defendant's side, the next day they're sitting with the victim.”

I was loyal to both Henry and Kenny. They'd both had a difficult childhood, and they both possessed endearing qualities you couldn't necessarily see on the surface. But they had little else in common, and my loyalty to Kenny was of a different species than my loyalty to Henry. I'd known Kenny since he was a kid. I'd partially raised him and taken care of him, so though he'd done horrendous things, I couldn't wholly cut him loose. I couldn't not love him.

Henry was a different matter. I was loyal to Henry because Lydia had loved him and Tina loved Lydia and I loved Tina. I understood that this chain of devotion affected how I thought of Henry. It made it easy for me to believe that whatever the facts were of the incident in Renfield twenty years earlier, Henry was the victim in a moral sense. I believed on faith that no cruel and vicious man hid under Henry's quiet and wounded surface. But if I were ever to learn something to change what I believed—if I decided that he had wantonly beaten and raped a high school classmate and/or killed Lydia in a jealous rage, my loyalty to him would be snuffed like a match in a monsoon.

My bond to Kenny had survived his bad acts. My friendship with Henry would not.

It was nice sitting and talking this way at night with Tina. We spoke the same language. Our philosophical spheres overlapped.

“So that town of Renfield . . .” I said.

“What about it?”

“It's not so different from up at the lake. Rural, small-town, quiet.”

“And?”

I wanted to tell her about my musings—the idea of opening a small private practice together. Leave the city, go back to the north country. Barnaby could grow up in a rural paradise with parents who spent quiet days overseeing real estate transactions and innocuous misdemeanors, maybe even an adoption now and then, because right now Barnaby had two parents up to their eyeballs in murder and rape and the avarice of political corruption. I thought of poor Lizzy, so traumatized by Lydia's murder and possibly by a lifetime of my bringing briefcases full of violence and terror and woe into our home. Bad enough when it was just me, but now, with Tina, I'd doubled down.

No wonder Lizzy had chosen Flora's house of crystals and incense. Flora's house is thick with an aura of peace and spirituality (albeit an ill-defined spirituality of cosmic harmony and organic groceries), while Tina's and my house reeks sometimes with the atmosphere of anguish that lies so thick in courtrooms, and that clings like cigarette smoke, hitchhiking its way through our front door and into what should have been a refuge from a world so eager to rob its children of their youthful innocence.

Those are the thoughts I wanted to share with Tina. But they were too new and unformed:
A private practice up at the lake
, I'd say, and she'd brush it away like a gnat. I needed to think it through first, to decide if I was serious, and then to make a prepared pitch.

“Nothing, never mind,” I said. “It was an interesting day. It stirred up a lot of dust.”

“I'm sure,” Tina said. But she had already turned back to her work.

M
orning. Jake Voss, vice president for governmental affairs at Subsurface, was in front of the grand jury. In the weeks since Bud Billman's death, we had been calling him “Moby Junior.” Upton was questioning him.

MR. CRUTHERS:
What was Subsurface's position on the legislation?

MR. VOSS:
It was bad for the industry.

MR. CRUTHERS:
Basically raising taxes on gas production?

MR. VOSS:
Yeah.

MR. CRUTHERS:
By how much?

MR. VOSS:
Half a point.

Jacob Voss didn't want to be here. What we knew of the guy was that he was rabidly antitaxation and antigovernment. He was a hunter, drinker, fisherman, and former Golden Gloves champ. He was a lot like Billman: self-made, not afraid to get his hands dirty. Being called to implicate Subsurface in a grand jury hearing was probably, for him, like being asked to collaborate with the devil. He answered questions as though he had lockjaw.

MR. CRUTHERS:
And how much is half a point worth to Subsurface?

MR. VOSS:
Nothing. We're not a gas company.

MR. CRUTHERS:
Oh, right. You're not a gas company, you're an industry service company. So how much is it worth to your clients?

MR. VOSS:
Which ones?

The questioning was dreary. It was all about guys like poor Calvin Dunbar—though most of them less likable—who had sold their souls for a few thousand bucks.

The investigation had seemed huge and juicy at first, but with Billman gone, it had lost its intrigue. We could round up a few more legislators and a few more underlings at Subsurface, but except for the part about Jimmy Mailing's murder, it all felt silly.

There was nothing silly about the murder, though. The murder was perplexing because the cash changing hands was so small: a few thousand bucks in exchange for an implied promise to oppose a tax hike that these legislators were likely to oppose anyhow. And jail sentences would be short. So maybe it was about reputation: Someone valued his or her reputation enough to kill the only guy who knew all the dirt.

MR. CRUTHERS:
When was the tax hike first introduced?

MR. VOSS:
Twenty-eleven.

MR. CRUTHERS:
It didn't pass that year?

MR. VOSS:
No.

MR. CRUTHERS:
How about in twenty-twelve?

MR. VOSS:
It never came up for a vote.

MR. CRUTHERS:
But it passed this year?

MR. VOSS:
Yes.

MR. CRUTHERS:
And the delay of those two years saved the gas industry how much?

MR. VOSS:
Like five hundred million, I guess.

Now I was interested again. Billman and Voss had paid chump change to a few legislators even though the tax hike would eventually pass. But by holding it back just one or two years, they had benefited the industry immensely.

I
n the evening I called Lizzie. “I have your first assignment,” I said. “I want you to find out everything you can about that gas tax legislation.”

“Everything how?”

“Everything everything. Supporters, opponents, amendments, votes. Whatever. Start with the state's public information service, then go to the law library and have the librarian show you how to do a legislative history. Everything. Call me if you have questions.”

Lizzy and I hung up. I went upstairs. Tina was in our office. “Lizzie's going to do some research for me on the corruption case,” I said. “Be great for her. Be great for me.”

“That's nice.”

Tina was deep into her work. The state court had agreed to hold a hearing on her petition for access to all physical evidence in the Kyle Runion case. It was scheduled for the next afternoon. Probably best not to bug her, so I started on my own work and left her alone.

Tina's phone rang. She looked at the number and answered. “Oh, hey.” She got up and walked toward the door. “No, that's okay. I hoped you would.”

I assumed from her voice that it was Craig again. Her first husband. I'd never met him. He and Tina had met when they were teaching in the same elementary school on the West Coast. What she'd told me was that once she was in law school and looking toward an aggressive career in trial law, Craig no longer seemed enough for her. “He's kind of like a Muppet,” she'd said. “Warm and cuddly and full of love, but hard to take real seriously.”