Injustice (46 page)

“Huberly,” I say.

She squints at me. It's not her name, but it will signal to her who I am, if she remembers.

“I need a guy named Aaron Pursley,” I say.

“I need a guy named George Clooney,” she says.

I think she remembers. That's good. People here are suspicious
of cops—federal or otherwise. But last time I came in looking for somebody, it worked out well. Maybe I won't have to establish my bona fides again. I take out my business card and write on the back “About Henry Tatlock” and hand it to her. “If you see him, perhaps you could give him this.”

She takes the card. “Are you drinking?” she says. I wasn't planning to, but cash needs to change hands somehow.

“Granddad. Neat,” I say.

She pours it. I down it. I drop fifty on the bar and leave.

Pursley calls me a couple of days later. I tell him what I want. He agrees to meet.

“Can I come?” Lizzy asks.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because the guy's a crook, and I shouldn't be meeting him myself.”

I see her deliberating whether to argue. She doesn't.

The Elfin Grot is nearly empty. Huberly eyes me from behind the bar and tilts her head toward the very back. Pursley is waiting. I immediately dislike him. It's a pet peeve of mine: felons, crooks, and scumbags who wear business suits. Aaron Pursley wears a blue pinstripe. It's conservative. His tie is silver gray. He stands and I shake. His hand doesn't match the outfit. The hand is coarse, and he squeezes aggressively. He's screwing with me. “Henry Tatlock: very unfortunate business,” he says.

“To put it mildly.”

“An acquaintance of yours?”

“He was.”

“And what do you want from me?” Aaron asks.

“I guess I want to buy out Henry's contract.”

“Meaning?”

“Henry told me he hired you to find his biological family. I want whatever you found.”

“If I haven't found anything, are you hiring me to continue the investigation?”

“No,” I say. I know what this guy does. He pays bureaucrats and functionaries to provide him with confidential information. He intimidates and threatens those who won't play ball. When necessary, he hires someone to break in and get what he can't find through other means. Now the rumor mill has it that he's hooked up with some pimple-faced whiz kids who can hack their way into most anything. “I'll buy whatever you've already got,” I say, “but I'm not interested in becoming your conspirator for more than that.”

This pisses him off, but he doesn't walk away. I hold a few more cards than Pursley does. He knows that if I decided to investigate
him
, he'd be out of business, maybe even in jail.

He's cockier than I expected, though. He sits all comfy in his fancy threads. He wears a knowing smirk, like he's got something over me. Strange. Maybe the guy is protected somehow—why else would he feel safe taking Henry's case when Henry was still a prosecutor? And why else would he be here with me? I know he's not working for the Bureau, but maybe he's a confidential informant for the state. A stoolie: I bet that's it. I bet they have a deal with him that so long as he keeps it low-key and doesn't commit any violent crimes, they look the other way.

No matter. I can't do anything about it if he's got a deal with the state, but if the guy is doing business by mail or Internet, then it goes federal. I can have Chip or Isler look into it. It would be great fun bringing him in for questioning.

“I ended up carrying a balance for my work with Mr. Tatlock,” Pursley says. “If you'll zero that balance, I'll consider you the client. I found a few things before his troubles began. Not a lot. Obviously, I discontinued my investigation when all that unpleasantness surfaced.”

“
Obviously
,” I say, mocking him.

He pauses to stare at me, then says, “Listen, Davis, you can buy what I've got or not. I don't give a shit. But you're starting to piss me off.”

I consider this. The reason I feel so free to annoy him is that I
don't
really want whatever he's got. I
don't
want to know any more about Henry, I don't want to feel compassion for the monster, and I realize now that I agreed to do this only to give Lizzy the illusion of my willingness without actually being willing. I'm intentionally disrespecting Pursley to drive him away so I can go tell Lizzy I've struck out.

Now, having glimpsed my real motivations and intentions, I'm stuck. If I don't behave and make an honest attempt with Pursley, then I'm lying to Lizzy. Humble-pie time: “I apologize, Mr. Pursley,” I say. “I'm repulsed by Henry Tatlock and I'm taking it out on you.”

Pursley is gracious, which makes it worse. Now I'm hating myself for legitimizing the scumbag. “How much does Henry owe you?” I ask.

“Three hundred fifty should do it.”

I'm incredulous. I expected thousands. Maybe I've misread him.

“I never had to really
do
anything,” Pursley says. “No extraordinary measures.” (By which I assume he means everybody's kneecaps are intact and no locks were picked.)

I hand him the cash and buy us both a drink. His is beer. Mine, again, is Granddad.

“Here's what I know,” Pursley says. “Thirty-seven years ago, a kid of around two years old was brought to the ER at Milltown General. He had catastrophic burns on his face and hands. According to medical records, he should have died. Here's the sick part: Doctors could see that the burns were a day old”—my contempt for Pursley diminishes a notch; he is apparently human enough to be repulsed by this stunning cruelty—“and whoever brought him in just vanished. Poof. Never seen again. And that's why the first PI that Henry Tatlock hired didn't find anything. There's nothing to find.”

“But the police—”

“I'll get to that. So the kid spent months in the hospital, then went into foster care, and after a few years, he got adopted. But who wants a kid that looks the way Henry looked and has all that medical shit going on? No, sir. Everybody wants a beautiful and healthy baby.”

“I know the rest,” I say. “He got adopted by a couple who were too old to adopt.”

“Done some research yourself?”

I nod.

“Tatlocks,” he says. “They just wanted some cheap labor. Maybe it was better than where he'd come from, maybe it wasn't. But it can't have been any bed of roses. Old man Tatlock supposedly raised hunting dogs, but the state kept seizing the dogs for cruelty. They were always malnourished. You kind of get the impression Tatlock treated the boy like one of the dogs. From what I learned about the Tatlocks, the good Lord knew what He was doing when He made them childless . . .” (
The good Lord?
Again I recalculate who this guy is.)

As Pursley talks, his enunciation and grammar become sloppy. He's obviously a guy who works hard at appearing refined, though it doesn't come naturally.

“Family services was always sniffing around the Tatlocks,” Pursley says. “They finally removed Henry when he was, um, twelve, I think, on account of neglect. The old man died like a month later, so I guess the social workers figured it was safe to put Henry back with the mother. She wasn't exactly Mother Teresa or nothing, but at least she kept him fed and clothed and didn't beat on him.”

It's a horrible story. The incomprehensible cruelty of not bringing him to the hospital immediately, the abandonment at the ER, the adoption into a loveless home of animal cruelty and neglect—it doesn't
excuse
anything, but maybe it begins to explain a bit.

Pursley goes to the bar and returns with a shot of whiskey for me. “Included in your payment,” he says. He has another beer for himself. “Back to your question about the police. They tried to figure out who dropped the kid at the ER, but no luck. Nobody saw the car. Nothing about his clothes gave any hint. Today there'd be video surveillance. Back then there was squat. Cops tried researching fires around the state, but nothing turned up. Maybe it wasn't even a house fire. For all they knew, the kid fell into the fireplace or into a burn pile or something. So, zilch, zip, zero. Dead end.”

“Dead end?”

“Dead end. End of the trail.”

I expected more.

“I've got this,” Pursley says. He hands me a thin manila folder. “It's what Mr. Tatlock gave me when I started.”

Pursley and I shake hands. He doesn't squeeze as hard this time. I leave.

I
call Lizzy from the road and give her the news.

“Thanks, Dad,” she says. “It's something.”

“Yes,” I say. “Something.”

“What will you recommend to the judge?” she asks.

“Nothing. I take no position. I'll write up an objective narrative and submit it. That's all I'm willing to do. What will you do?”

“I don't know,” Lizzy says. “I have to think. The poor kid. He really suffered.”

“Lots of people suffer,” I say. “It doesn't turn them into child killers.”

“What's in the folder he gave you?”

“I don't know. I haven't looked.”

“I'll look,” she says. “Maybe there's something there. Can you bring it over? Mom's making dinner.”

This sounds good. The Dunbar event did something to my mind, as if it created another room up there—a disturbed place I need to visit from time to time. A shrink would call it PTSD. I don't know, but I love going into Flora's kitchen, where Sabin took down Dunbar. I feel peaceful there.

I give Lizzy the folder. She takes it upstairs to her room. Bill-the-Dog lies in the living room by the woodstove. She has a big cedar-smelling bed and doesn't stand to greet me anymore when I come over, though she gets up for her dinner and to take care of business outside. I scratch her ears. One day soon Lizzy and Flora will have to decide what's most humane. My eyes water as I think
about this: too much sadness. I sit down on the floor and stroke her for a few minutes before going back to the kitchen to help Flora with dinner.

Dinner is noodles with a mushroom stir-fry, salad, red wine. We get it on the table and Flora calls up the stairs to Lizzy, but we don't wait. She comes down ten minutes later with the Tatlock file.

“Not much here,” she says. “It's mostly some notes that Henry made, and a few newspaper articles about house fires in the state when he was a baby.”

“Dead end,” I say.

“But there is this,” she says. “Henry sent away to one of those companies that tells you about your ethnicity.”

“He sent his DNA?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“How ironic,” I say.

“I know, right? So here are the results: They didn't find any close relatives, but in this section called Ethnicity Analysis, it says he's most probably—like eighty-nine percent likely—of northern European lineage, especially from someplace around Latvia or Lithuania. The Baltics.”

“Interesting,” I say, “but it doesn't tell—”

“So I have a theory,” she says.

I thought it was over. It's not over. She's pursuing it, and I'm still getting dragged in. “Okay, Lizzy, tell me.”

“Northern Europe? Lithuania? Latvia? Think about it, Dad. He must be from Lukus County. Right? Those farmers who settled at Slippery River Valley back in the 1800s, you told me they were all from around there, right? It makes perfect sense: Where besides Lukus County could a two-year-old kid get burned up like that and nobody tells the cops and nobody takes him to the ER, right, Dad? You told me yourself how isolated and suspicious they were, and how it's only started to change recently.”

I watch Lizzy as she says this, and for a moment the sound of her words feels disconnected from the movement of her lips. I have the
sensation of watching a movie. I feel exhausted. The idea of going back into all of this sickens me. “No,” I say.