Penance Page 2

  “Good to see you again, Officer Taylor.”

  “Ex-officer Taylor,” I corrected her. “I’m a private investigator now.”

  “Ahh, that’s right. I’ve been reading about you. Tell me, how many men have you killed now? I lost track.”

  I winced at the question, considered a four-letter-word reply, thought better of it and said, “I need information concerning one of your former clients.”

  “I have no former clients.”

  “I want to know what John Brown’s been doing the past few months, where he’s been staying.”

  “Where he’s been staying? All things considered, you’re the last person I would give that information to. I might tell him you’re looking for him, though, the next time I see him.”

  “Well, hopefully, that won’t be for a good long time.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Before I could answer, a man in a rumpled gray suit appeared at the end of the corridor and shouted, “Hey, Grey!” Cynthia turned toward him. “You might want to wander up to sixteen. One of your clients is standing on the ledge; says he’s gonna jump.”

  Cynthia dropped her briefcase and ran as best she could in heels to the elevators. I retrieved the briefcase and followed. She was waiting for the courthouse’s notoriously slow elevator when I reached her side. I took her arm and directed her toward the staircase. She went up the stairs quickly, reached the sixteenth floor and walked instinctively to the prisoner holding room. She was barely winded; I was sucking air. A small crowd had gathered outside the room, afraid to enter. Cynthia pushed through the gawkers. I was right behind her.

  The holding room was essentially a conference room with large, old-fashioned windows befitting the age of the courthouse. A prisoner had opened one of the windows and crawled out onto the twelve-inch ledge where he squatted, looking down and holding onto the bottom of the window for dear life. Cynthia moved toward him. I attempted to go with her, but she put a hand on my chest and shook her head.

  “Hi, James. How you doin’?” she asked as she approached the window.

  “I’m not going to jail!” the prisoner screamed.

  “Certainly not,” Cynthia agreed.

  She leaned on the windowsill. I watched her mouth move but could not hear what she said to the prisoner, although she seemed to use his name a lot. She talked to him for what seemed a half hour, but when I glanced at my watch, I realized it was only a few minutes. After a few minutes more, the man slid back into the room and slumped in a chair next to the conference table. He was crying and shaking quite a bit. Cynthia closed the window and turned her back to it.

  “Trust me, James,” she told the man. He nodded and covered his face with his hands.

  I waited for Cynthia in the back of the courtroom. James had composed himself well enough to enter a guilty plea to misdemeanor domestic assault charges, but broke down again when the Ramsey County sheriff’s deputies laid hands on him to take him back to the detention center across the street.

  “You said I wouldn’t have to go back to jail,” he shouted at Cynthia as the deputies led him away.

  Cynthia packed her briefcase without comment while a trio of suits crowded around, waiting to take her place at the table.

  “Buy me a drink,” she said as she went through the courtroom doors, brushing by me without stopping.

  Cynthia Grey ordered a double Scotch, neat. She stirred it with her finger and turned the glass slowly clockwise, widening a circle of moisture on the table top, but did not drink; she dried her finger on a napkin.

  “You did well, getting that guy off the ledge,” I told her.

  “Thank you.”

  “What did you say that convinced him to come in?”

  “I told him we would work things out,” Cynthia said. “I told him it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He has a lot of criminal things pending, including a felony assault charge, and he’s spent a lot of time in custody—over two weeks. Some people can’t take jail. Not even for a day.”

  “Did you tell him he wouldn’t have to go back to jail?”

  “That’s what he wanted to hear.”

  “I would have wanted to hear the truth.”

  “You would have wanted to hear anything that would have gotten you off that ledge.”

  Cynthia picked up her glass, regarded the contents thoughtfully, then returned it to its place.

  “What exactly do you want, Taylor?”

  “Are you going to drink that Scotch?”

  “I haven’t had a drink in seven years and two months,” she replied.

  Yeah, I figured it was something like that. I hailed our waitress and asked her to remove the Scotch and bring the lady a designer water with a twist of lime. Cynthia did not protest. I felt slightly guilty for staying with my Summit Ale and slightly superior for having conquered my own drinking problems without resorting to abstinence.

  “You still haven’t told me what you want,” Cynthia reminded me.

  “I want you to tell me what you know about John Brown’s activities since he got out of the joint.”

  “So you can kill him?”

  “I don’t know quite how to tell you this except to come right out and say it: John Brown is dead. He was murdered Saturday night.”

  Cynthia fell back against her chair like someone had pushed her there, mouth agape, eyes wide. I knew what she was thinking.

  “Yeah, the cops thought I did it, too. Only I didn’t. To prove it, I’m going to find out who did.”

  Enough time passed for me to finish my Summit Ale while she worked it through. Finally she said, “Brown’s dead?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “And you’re going to find his killer? You of all people?”

  “I thought I’d give it a day or two, until a paying customer comes along.”

  She thought about it some more.

  “I guess it wouldn’t do any harm,” she sighed and then said more clearly, “I was informed by Corrections three months ago that Brown was paroled to a halfway house in Minneapolis. That’s all I know. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in four years. He wouldn’t answer my letters or return my phone calls. Apparently he thought I should have done better by him. He’s probably right. I didn’t have enough experience back then. If I defended him today, I’d probably get him off—at least get him a shorter sentence.”

  “There’s a happy thought,” I told her.

  “In this country, the law …”

  “I’m not interested in the law,” I said, interrupting her lecture, my voice calm. “And I gave up on justice a long time ago. What I need is an address.”

  She gave it to me.

  “A private investigator, an ex-cop: If not justice, if not the law, what do you believe in?” she asked as I wrote the address into a small notebook I carry.

  “I’m not sure I believe in much of anything,” I said. “Like a lot of people, I make it up as I go along. Mostly, I guess it’s a matter of what I can live with.”

  “If everyone felt that way …”

  I pushed myself away from the table.

  “No, wait, please,” Cynthia said. I waited. She looked down at her hands. “I apologize that I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I am about your wife and daughter.”

  “Thank you,” I answered and in a half moment relived their deaths at the hands of John Brown, who was so drunk he couldn’t tell the difference between red and green. He served four years, four lousy years. It should have been life. Now this woman was saying she wished she could have gotten him off. Well, it was her job, I suppose.

  “It’s getting to be a long time ago,” I told her. Yet that’s not how it felt.

  “Is it because of what happened to your family? Is that why you quit the cops?”

  “No.”

  “What then?” she asked, her eyes wide and glistening.

  “It’s not something I discuss with my friends much less …”

  “The lawyer who defended …”
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  “Strangers,” I said interrupting her, completing the thought.

  “Have dinner with me tonight,” she said.

  I was jolted by the invitation and answered too abruptly, “No.”

  “How long are you going to resent me for defending Brown?” she asked.

  “Until hell freezes over.”

  I have nothing against lawyers. After all, a sizable portion of my income is derived from law firms—gathering evidence, investigating witnesses, checking testimony, recovering stolen property, that sort of thing. And if many of the lawyers I work for are jerks, well, a buck’s a buck. But this wasn’t business. This was personal.

  Cynthia gave me a regal nod, but I didn’t leave. I sensed that offering the dinner invitation had been an effort for her and now I felt I owed her something in return. So I told her, “Taking the jumper off the ledge the way you did, that took guts. I admire you for it.”

  She nodded.

  Then I ruined it all by adding, “But that little contest with the Scotch? Really, Counselor, that was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.”

  “If you say so,” she replied curtly.

  I let it go at that.

  I left the tavern and made my way toward the public library, hoping I wouldn’t find a parking ticket jammed under my windshield wiper. Along the way I noticed a man pretending to examine a watch in a jewelry store window, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He was wearing a red ski jacket with blue lining—the old reversible jacket trick, I told myself, smiling.

  THREE

  IT WAS JUST A house, a large, old Victorian that needed paint in a ramshackle neighborhood where most of the homes could benefit from a little maintenance. There was no sign, no address plate, nothing to indicate who lived there. That was probably the way the residents wanted it. If the locals knew who their neighbors were, no doubt they would organize to force removal of the halfway house—there’s nothing like adversity to bring a neighborhood together. The more enlightened among us, of course, would accuse the locals of everything from shortsightedness to discrimination to hypocrisy. But then, none of us would want a halfway house for convicted felons next door, either.

  I parked on the street and followed the crumbling sidewalk to the porch. The front door opened before I could knock and a tall man with a prison pallor stepped outside, followed by a cloud of cigarette smoke and the faint aroma of coffee, extra black.

  “What do you want?” he demanded, startling me, moving in close, giving me a good look at a mouthful of decaying teeth.

  “I want to play point guard for the Minnesota Timberwolves, but I’ll settle for speaking with the administrator.” I backed away and dug in my pocket for the photostat of my license.

  He glanced at the ID. “Smart ass,” he said.

  “People keep calling me that.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “C’mon pal, no trouble for either of us, okay? Just tell the guy who runs the place …”

  He poked me in the chest.

  “Don’t do that,” I told him.

  “I don’t like you,” he said and poked me again. I tried to swipe his hand away but caught only air as he quickly pulled it back. He gave me a playground-bully smile and said, “You wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in the yard.”

  I believed him. I took another step backward.

  “You’re a fuckin’ pussy. I’m gonna kick your ass.”

  I took still another step backward and went into a free-fighting stance, weight evenly distributed, feet at forty-five-degree angles. I took a chance and kept my hands low. My left leg began to tremble slightly with anticipation. Or was it fear? It always does that, even when I’m just sparring, my groin protected with a fiberglass cup, my hands and feet encased in foam rubber.

  I’m not a big man. I barely passed the minimum height requirement for a police officer in St. Paul and several veteran officers refused to ride with me for fear they’d continually have to save my ass from various surly and much larger miscreants—small cops are challenged a lot. During my second week on the job, a dis. con. dribbled my head on the asphalt four times before I subdued him with the butt of my Glock 17. Soon after I began studying a combination of judo, karate and aikido. I pulled eighteen separate muscles attempting to master the basic kick and what I did to my hands, plunging them in and out of pea gravel to toughen their edges, I’m amazed my wife ever allowed me to touch her.

  Still, I learned fast. I do not have a belt; I have not attempted to earn one. Nor am I interested in the virtues that martial arts are supposed to instill: control, courtesy, discipline, respect. I am interested merely in survival. When I had first approached the sensai at Dragons, my dojo in Minneapolis, he asked me why I wanted to master the arts. “So I can beat the hell outta people without getting hurt myself,” I answered. He looked at me like he felt sorry for me. He told me the arts must be used only as a last resort; he told me, “When hand go out, withdraw anger; when anger go out, withdraw hand.” I have tried to live by that philosophy ever since. Mostly, I’ve failed.

  “Pal, I’m the last guy you want to dance with,” I warned the convict. He didn’t believe me. He grabbed the lapel of my sports jacket. I grasped his hand with my left and pushed up on his elbow with my right. When his back started to arch, I pulled down hard on his hand and pushed the elbow straight up, flipping him on his back, his head thudding loudly on the porch floor. Nothing to it. If the PI gig didn’t work out, I could always get employment as a bouncer at a high-class strip joint.

  “This wasn’t necessary,” I told the convict calmly, listening to his pain and applying more pressure to his shoulder joint whenever he tried to move. “This did not need to happen.”

  Eventually, another man appeared at the door. “Stop it, stop it!” he screamed in a high, effeminate voice.

  “Are you the administrator of this facility?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I released the convict and stood up. “Hi. I’m Holland Taylor.”

  He ignored my outstretched hand and demanded to know what was going on.

  “Nothing,” my attacker told him, massaging his shoulder.

  “I told you what would happen if there was any more trouble, J. T.!” the administrator yelled.

  “No trouble,” I said, taking J. T.’s side. “We were just putzing around. I was showing him a karate hold.”

  “Yeah,” J. T. confirmed. “Thanks,” he said and retreated into the house, still kneading his shoulder. The administrator watched him go, not believing a word of it.

  “Holland Taylor,” I repeated.

  This time he took my hand. “Elliot Seeley. Now tell me what really happened.”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “He merely took exception to my looks. He’s not the first.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” Seeley said and I had the impression he was. “J. T. has had a difficult time adjusting, more difficult than most. He’s been in and out of prison nine of the past eleven years; I think he’s more comfortable inside than he is outside. Anyway, that’s my problem. What can I do for you?”

  I showed him my license. He wasn’t any happier to see it than J. T., but at least he didn’t poke me in the chest.

  “I’m looking for information about John Brown.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “When did you see him last?”

  Seeley sighed heavily, like he was repeating a story that already bored him. “Saturday night, about six-thirty.”

  “Where was he …”

  “He left here with Joseph Sherman in Sherman’s four-by-four,” Seeley said, anticipating my question.

  “Wait a minute …”

  “They said they were going to meet a man about a job. I didn’t believe them, but I didn’t stop them. And no, I haven’t seen or heard from Sherman since, and no, I can’t say where he might be hiding.”

  “Who is Joseph Sherman?”

  Seeley sighed again. “He was one of our residents. He was paroled to us about three week
s ago after doing six in Oak Park Heights. He and Brown roomed together while they were here.”

  “What was Sherman in for?”

  “Criminal vehicular homicide, same as Brown.”

  “Tell me about his vehicle?”

  “It was red.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I don’t know cars. All I know is he bought it a week after he got out with the money he made in prison.” Seeley shook his head in disgust. “He was paid seven bucks an hour, plus commissions, plus bonuses, plus college courses to do telemarketing work for companies like 3M. I guess he was a superb salesman. He walked out of the Heights with a check for sixty-eight thousand dollars and a bachelor’s degree.”

  I was just as annoyed as Seeley. “Who says crime doesn’t pay?” I asked, slipping the notebook from my pocket. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Mr. Taylor, I’ve already told you more than I should; I hope you understand.”

  I tried to protest.

  Seeley said, “Why don’t you ask the police? They know everything I know.”

  “The police?”

  “The St. Paul police,” Seeley repeated. “I told the two detectives everything when they were here.”

  “When was that?”

  “Early Sunday morning.”

  “The cops … a salt and pepper team named McGaney and Casper?”

  “That sounds like them.”

  “Sunday morning?”

  “I’m sorry. If you want to know anything more, talk to the police.”

  I slapped the dashboard of my Chevy Monza, then apologized to her. She had served me faithfully for fifteen years and one hundred sixty-two thousand miles; she didn’t deserve the abuse.

  The first step in any murder investigation is always to contact the last person to see the victim alive. The last person to see Brown alive was Joseph Sherman. Brown was killed in Sherman’s vehicle and now Sherman was missing. So why aren’t the cops looking for him, I wondered. Why did they bust my door at 6:00 in the A.M. if Sherman was such an obvious suspect? Why did they drag me to the stationhouse only to let me go a couple of hours later?