“Smith’s friend claims he was covering for his younger brother, Davey.”
“The friend’s likely right. Davey Smith was a genius, had just graduated high school at fifteen, with a full scholarship to some college back East. My thinking is that Herbert-Bud, everybody called him-didn’t want to see Davey’s promising future disrupted, even if it meant going to prison for something he didn’t do.”
“Why? If Davey was a rapist-”
“You have to understand the way it was with the two of them. The mother died young. Father raised them well, but he had a fatal heart attack when Bud was sixteen. A young man, just starting out in life, and he could have put his little brother in a foster home, but he didn’t. Instead he quit school, picked up where the father left off, took whatever jobs paid best to support the two of them. That’s sometimes the way some family members are. Bud loved Davey, and I think he saw his brother’s promising future as a kind of a way of ensuring the family would go on.”
“And where is this genius today?”
Mills shrugged, shook his head.
I said, “Bud Smith is working as an insurance broker in Vernon, on Tufa Lake. He lives in a double-wide trailer in the country-nice property, but nothing fancy. And he’s a registered sex offender. I guess his brother-wherever he is-didn’t have the same sense of family.”
“He could be dead. Or incarcerated somewhere else.”
“True.”
Mills was silent for a long moment. Then: “I imagine in your profession, Ms. McCone, you’ve had reason to regret certain of your actions.”
Oh, haven’t I. Mr. Mills, you’ll never know how much I regret them.
“Of course.”
“So have I.” His eyes, behind their black-framed glasses, grew pained. “I regret not pushing harder to prove Bud Smith’s confession was false. I regret not looking more closely at Davey Smith. Whatever’s happened over in Mono County is not Bud’s fault.”
“And Davey…?”
“My biggest regret: that I may have let a monster walk free.”
He paused, seemed to listen to his words. “Talk with an attorney named John Pearl in Carson City.” He reached for a pad and pencil on the scarred coffee table and scribbled. “This is his office address and phone number. I’ll call ahead to say you’ll contact him. He may be able to tell you what I can’t.”
I took the paper. John Pearclass="underline" Bud Smith’s former public defender.
The munitions depot occupied a vast expanse of land on the outskirts of Hawthorne. Standard military buildings and cracked and weed-choked pavement were visible from the road, although I’d read on the Net that its golf course and officers’ clubhouse had now been turned into a public country club. Storage bunkers covered the land to the east like Indian mounds, and the landscape was stark and uninviting. I passed through the town of Babbitt, which had once been a bedroom community for base workers, and eventually came to Walker Lake.
I drove north along the shore of the elongated body of water that was rimmed by sand-colored hills to the east. It was currently in ecological crisis, as Tufa and Mono Lakes in California had once been, primarily because the waters of its feeder stream, the Walker River, had been overallocated for agricultural use. Hy had done some work with the organization trying to preserve Walker, one of only five deepwater lakes in the world that are able to sustain a good-sized fishery, and had told me that if the water levels continued to drop, increased salinity would destroy its fish population.
Today there were few boats on the lake, and its surface was flat and glassy. The weather had changed: dark clouds hovered over the distant hills-storm clouds that looked to be coming this way. Depression stole over me again, reminding me of all the things I didn’t like about my business: the long solo drives and flights; the empty nights in hotel and motel rooms in strange cities; the waiting. Particularly waiting for facts to surface that would allow other facts to materialize and establish the final connection. When that happened, the rush was unbelievable-better, even, than the first time my former flight instructor had put the plane into a controlled spin and the earth had seemed to rush up at us as we plummeted down…
It was an addiction, plain and simple. And addiction, unless it’s treated, inevitably ends up in self-destruction.
I wasn’t going to become victim to mine. Never again.
So what the hell am I doing here in Nevada?
You promised Ramon you’d find out what happened to Amy.
Carson City: the state capital, and a pleasant town. Not much of a gambling mecca; its big casino, the Ormsby House, had closed down well over a decade ago and since then cast a derelict shadow over the downtown. Renovation by new owners had seemingly been under way forever, as the project hit delays and snags of all kinds. If it hadn’t been so late in the afternoon I’d have driven by to see how much progress had been made, but I was more concerned with locating the law firm of John Pearl, on Fairview Drive, a couple of blocks from the state office building where Hy and I had said our vows before a judge.
At first, when I stepped inside John Pearl’s office in a two-story stucco house that had been converted into suites for attorneys, I thought no one was there. But when I called out, a high-pitched, nasal voice that reminded me of a cartoon character-I couldn’t place which one-answered. With a voice like that, Pearl couldn’t have been too successful at trial work.
He emerged from his inner sanctum: a short, chubby man in a rumpled blue suit. His face was round, his hair a grayish-brown mop that flopped over his forehead; his eyes were too soft and kind for a criminal defense attorney.
“Ms. McCone,” he said, pumping my hand heartily, “Warren Mills said you’d be stopping by, so I stayed to catch up on some paperwork. Come in, sit down, please.”
I followed him into his office. It was in minor disarray, like his clothing.
“I’d offer you coffee but my secretary drank the last cup and forgot to turn the machine off. The carafe’s scorched. You can probably smell it.”
Now that he mentioned it, I did. “That’s okay,” I said. “I had lunch at McDonald’s and I’m still recovering. Coffee could cause a serious relapse.”
“McDonald’s.” His eyes-so help me-became nostalgic. “I haven’t had one of their burgers in years. When they first opened up in the town where I was born, I was in my teens. My friends and I used to go there and order two or three each, and before we’d eat them we’d splat the pickles.”
“Do what?”
“You know, splat. Take the pickles-they were terrible-out of the burgers and try to drop them out the car window so they’d land flat on the pavement. You never did that?”
“Uh, not that I recall.”
“Oh, well.” Pearl leaned back in his chair. “It was pretty stupid, but so were we at the time. Amazing, though: one of the splatters is now a state supreme court justice; another invented some gizmo that allowed him to retire at thirty-five; a third is a big financial planner in Reno. Then there’s me: I was the best pickle splatter, but I’m just a small-time lawyer.”
It was a set and well-practiced speech, but I couldn’t figure what it was designed to accomplish.
“I doubt that,” I said. “You have your own practice; you’re your own boss. What type of litigation do you do?”
“Whatever comes my way. Family law, mainly.” He paused. “No criminal law. I quit the public defender’s office down in Mineral County after the Herbert Smith case. Which, Warren Mills told me, is why you’re here.”
“Yes.” I explained why I was interested in speaking with those who were involved in it.
When I finished, Pearl said, “The opinions of Herbert’s friend and Warren Mills are essentially the same as mine. Herbert-Bud, as he was called-struck me on first impression as a badly frightened but innocent young man; he stood by his confession with the tenacity of a bulldog. He resisted all my efforts to help him. Tried twice to fire me.”