“I started in a big practice-Barton, Turnbull and Pryce. This was a dozen years back. White-shoe firm, guys who talcumed their fingers to make the tips of their nails whiter. We had a big-ass corporate client. The wife of one of the directors ran off. Wifey was telling tales on the guy, that he was a wacko, sick. It didn’t reflect well on the corporation. Plus the lady’d appropriated a fat pile of bearer bonds to finance her new life.”
I said, “I can see where that might be embarrassing.”
“Legal action was a spotlight no one wanted. Someone in the firm had heard of Crandell, called him. Crandell looked like a successful businessman, a guy who’d started on the loading dock, now ran the firm. Bright smile, intelligent vocabulary, boardroom clothes. See, dealing with a guy like that, your standard white-collar types need to feel they’re passing the job over to another businessperson, like, ‘Here’s a problem in marketing, deal with it.’”
“Just don’t tell us how.”
“It’s business: Results are everything. Anyway, I met Crandell, not knowing what he was or did. Most people couldn’t tell, but I could.”
“How?” Harry asked.
“His eyes. If he looked at you steady, you couldn’t see anything off. But now and then I could see rabies sloshing around, like it was pooling behind his pupils. Does that make any sense?”
Yeah, I thought, if you’ve ever spent much time around psychos and socios. Many appeared as innocent as Salvation Army bell-ringers. But turn your back and they’d bite your spine in half.
“What happened?” I asked. “To the problem.”
“It all went away. Wifey stopped telling tales, the stack of bonds wandered home, a bit lighter. Happened fast, too. That’s all I know.”
Harry stared at Walls.
“So what’s your bottom line on having Crandell in our midst?”
The lawyer tightened his tie, smoothed down the front of his jacket. I saw the talcum beneath his nails.
“Someone around here’s got a problem, Harry. A big one.”
We got back to our desks at five. We drew straws-broken pencils, actually. Harry lost and had to run to the prosecutor’s office to see what he could do about Walls’s request.
I grabbed a cup of coffee that tasted like fried paste, sat at my desk, and tried to encapsulate the day into computerized notes, e-paperwork: who, what, where. It was a creative exercise to write case notes making us seem smarter and more in charge than two guys jerked back and forth across Mobile County by indecipherable events spanning four years.
A half hour later I dropped my head to my hands and massaged my temples. I didn’t want to head home, didn’t want to stay at my desk.
“Beer,” said something in my head, and I was forced to obey.
I pushed through the door of Flanagan’s, took the window table beneath the neon sign that hummed. Harry and I always joked that it didn’t know the words. The place was almost empty, heavy traffic not due for another couple hours. The juke was silent, praise be. Though there was one song on the box that blew me away, a haunting old piece called “Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant. Me and a retired sergeant from Records were the only ones who ever played it; he’d get tears in his eyes. I’d get melancholy, too, but the sweet kind. I have no idea why. I’d drop a quarter, play the song, and Harry’d look at me like I was crazy.
I scanned the bar, a few desultory drinkers, one staring at me, a slender, broad-shouldered black guy, young, thoughtful eyes in a cafe au lait face.
Tyree Shuttles.
After a moment’s hesitation, he ambled over. Shuttles had been a detective for four or five months and still looked uncomfortable in plainclothes, absentmindedly tapping the service belt he no longer wore, the street cop’s life-support system: weapon, baton, cuffs, ammunition, radio, pepper spray-twenty pounds of tools for every occasion. I’d worn what some guys called the “Bat Belt,” after Batman, for three years. Sometimes in the morning when dressing, my head thick with sleep, I still reached for the damn thing.
Shuttles pulled up a chair and we small-talked cases and street monsters and the revolving-door system, standard cop time-passers. Shuttles was kind of a tech head, telling me about new gadgets and gizmos in law enforcement.
After a few minutes I asked how things were going with the Carole Ann Hibney case, figuring I’d pass the news on to Harry.
Shuttles looked away. “It’s OK. Not much breaking, but we’ve got some leads.”
“Leads like?”
“Cell phone records for one. Regular johns. We’re going through them.”
“ We’re going through them, like you and Logan?”
“Well, mainly me,” Shuttles admitted. “The tough part’s the interrogations, like you’d expect.”
“Been there. You show up at a house and the john opens the door, with wife, three kids, and the family dog right behind him.”
Shuttles started laughing.
“What is it, Tyree?”
“I got a guy aside from his girlfriend, asked where he was on the night in question. He said-and I swear I’m not making this up-‘I think I was tied up that night, Detective.’”
I started laughing, and we traded a few other funny cop stories. I had five more years in the department, so I had more stories, plus the time to develop them, get the timing right.
Twice when a lull arose in the patter, Shuttles started to say something, seemed to think better of it, looked out the window. He finished his beer, said it was laundry night and he had to go shovel quarters into machines. He tried to argue me out of the tab, lost. We knocked knuckles and he drifted out the door.
I looked at his back as he left, wondering what he was trying to say.
My cell rang as I stood to leave a few minutes later, thinking I’d follow Shuttles’s lead, go home and do mindless tasks until I fell asleep. I checked the number on the incoming call.
It was Clair, her cell, not the morgue. I answered.
“Hi, Clair. I was going to call you in the morning. Your lead on the victim from four years back looks tied to today.”
“I hope it helps. You at home? Work?”
“Flanagan’s, about to head home.”
“I’m finishing up at the morgue,” she said. “Got a few minutes?”
“Want me to call Harry, see if he’s available?”
“Just you, please.”
“I’ll be right over.”
I rang the after-hours bell, was let in by a security guard. It was quiet as, well, death, a lone janitor running a mop at the far end of the hall. Clair was at her desk catching up on paperwork. She gestured for me to sit, dropped her lanyarded reading glasses. She brushed aside a lock of black hair and sipped from a cup of hot tea, Earl Grey, judging by the scent of bergamot. Her eyes stared at me through wisps of steam. For a microsecond I felt whatever slender bond held us, a rustling of molecules in the air.
“I’ve been worried about something, Carson. Debating with myself whether or not to…It’s never been my inclination to poke into people’s private lives.”
She picked up a paperweight, a dandelion trapped in a glassy half-round, moving it from one side of her desk to the other with nervous hands, a rarity for Clair. She cleared her throat, took a sip of tea.
“A few days back, after the Channel 14 soiree, you asked about a certain family.”
I suddenly felt an odd dread. “The Kincannons.”
“Yesterday you mentioned you’d split with your girlfriend, making reference to her taking up with another man, handsome and wealthy.”
“The guy’s got everything,” I said. “And a spare everything in the trunk.”
“Is it one of the Kincannon brothers, Carson?”
“Buck,” I admitted.
“Close the door, please.”
I complied, returned to my seat.
“Do you know much about them?” she asked. “The Kincannons?”
“Until I spoke to you all I knew was the name. I’ve seen it on some plaques down at the Police Academy. But something came to light: Harry worked with Buck Kincannon and the K-clan foundation a few years back, building a little ball field for underprivileged kids. Then the Kincannons wanted favors in return. Big ones. They thought they could buy people’s integrity. They were dead wrong in this instance. But the kids lost their field, teams, everything.”