Injustice (9 page)

“One giraffe coming up.” I did my best, but it looked more like an octopus.

“My guys,” Tina said. She came into the kitchen and kissed Barnaby on the head.

“Sit,” I told her. I poured her coffee and put the not-very-heart-shaped pancake on a plate in front of her.

A phone rang. It wasn't a cell phone. It sounded odd. Nobody used the landline anymore. The phone itself had been pushed back out of the way, hidden behind accumulated kitchen clutter. There were wine bottles and soda bottles around it, waiting to be recycled, and newspapers, and an old toy of Barnaby's: a red plastic train that announced in a muffled tone, “Choose a number or a color,” every time someone bumped it.

I pushed things aside and answered the phone.

“This is Sun Goddess vacations with an exciting—” said a recorded voice.

I hung up, but I noticed the LED on the phone base was flashing. “New messages,” I said. “I wonder how long they've been here.”

“Good pancakes,” Tina said.

“Message received August ten, one-fifty-two
P.M.
,” the digital voice said. Then the message: “This is Sun Goddess vacations—”

Delete.

“Message received July seventeen, four-thirteen
P.M.
,” “Are you satisfied with your long-distance telephone plan—”

Delete.

“Message received July four, eight-oh-seven
P.M.
” And then the message:

“Tina! Oh my God, Tina,” the recording said. It took a moment for me to recognize the voice, not only because it was the last voice I expected to hear but also because it was unnatural, choked with terror or horror or grief. “I need to tell you,” Lydia said. “I can't even . . . I don't . . . The park. I'm coming to the park.”

And that was all.

D
etectives Sabin and Philbin came over and listened to the message. They let us convince them that the landline had become extraneous, that the answering machine was hidden behind recyclables, and that we'd never seen the flashing message indicator. I served them coffee.

“Why would Lydia have dialed that number, though?” Tina said. “She knows we never use it.” Tina looked terrible: tear-streaked again, pale, haunted.

“In moments of panic,” Detective Sabin said, “the mind plays tricks. It's probably just the old number that came to mind first.”

“Or else she dialed from her contact list—had both numbers entered there—touched the wrong one. It happens,” Philbin said. He helped himself to more coffee from the vacuum pot on the table.

Lizzy walked into the house. She looked at me and then Tina. Barnaby was sitting in Tina's lap. For a while after we found the message, Barn had tried to mop Tina's face with tissues, but now he was just burrowing into her, deeper and deeper.

“Quickest I could get here,” Lizzy said. “I was still asleep when you called.” She gently took Barn from Tina. “We'll go to the playground.” And they were gone.

Sabin said, “At this point, I'd say we can dispense with any idea that the crime was random.”

I said, “I wonder why she didn't call nine-one-one.”

Philbin played the message again: “Tina! Oh my God, Tina. I need to tell you. I can't even . . . I don't . . . The park. I'm coming to the park.”

“Hear that?” Sabin said. “It doesn't sound like she was in immediate danger. Just like she'd discovered something.”

“Something way bad,” Philbin said.

“Something repugnant,” I said.

“Something unbelievable,” Sabin said.

I reached for Tina's hand. She let me take it, but her fingers didn't wrap around mine.

“You two got any ideas what it could have been?” Sabin asked.

We didn't.

Philbin said, “Maybe she, you know, maybe she finds out her fiancé is doing something on the side. What do you think? Do you think that could be it?”

“No,” I said. “I don't think Henry was doing anything on the side, and—”

Tina jumped in: “—and that's not how she'd react anyhow. Lydia was strong. Ballsy. If she'd caught Henry stepping out, she'd be right in his face about it. Pissed, not traumatized.”

“Other ideas?” Sabin said.

No one said anything.

The detectives wanted to talk to Henry. They took the answering machine with them. Tina and I followed in our car.

Henry and Lydia's house was a ranch with a tidy yard. They had bought it a few months before the murder. Sabin played the recording for Henry. It shook him just as it had Tina and me. He groped his way to a chair like a man who'd been socked in the gut. “What does it mean?” he asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Philbin said.

“No. I have no idea.”

“Mr. Tatlock, we'd like permission to search your house.”

“My house?”

“Maybe get a hint what Lydia discovered. Figure out who she was.”

“Yes. Sure. Of course,” Henry said.

“You realize, Henry—” Tina said, but I grabbed her arm and squeezed. She stopped.

“What?” Henry said.

“Nothing.”

Tina was thinking like a defense lawyer. Even though Henry knew the law, and even though Tina had no interest in protecting him if he was up to no good, she'd been about to remind him that even though Sabin and Philbin were ostensibly looking for anything that could shed light on Lydia's panicky phone call, whatever they found would be admissible against Henry: Permission to search is permission to search. I was thinking like a prosecutor. I wanted to see what the detectives would find. This was working out great for the detectives, because there was no way they had probable cause to search for evidence against Henry. All they had against him was some vague suspicion triggered by the knowledge that he'd exchanged phone calls with a scumbag. But with this new discovery, the detectives were getting a freebie.

Tina sat with Henry in the kitchen while Philbin searched. Sabin helped search for a while, and then she sat in the kitchen, too. I followed Philbin around for a few minutes, and it was heartbreaking: the gloved hands of a stranger groping item by item through kitchen drawers and file boxes. In the closets, he patted down dresses; in dresser drawers, he probed the pockets of jeans and shook out sweaters that had been folded and stacked into tidy piles; he unrolled socks and oafishly invaded those little auras of privacy that clung to Lydia's bras and panties. Pocket litter, receipts, small notes, big files, and the miscellaneous accumulation of catchall drawers were collected for inspection. I went into the kitchen to wait with the others while Philbin continued his search. He searched the laundry, the bathroom, the trash cans. It didn't appear that anything of interest turned up.

Before they left, Henry pulled a box out from under the bed. “This is stuff from her office,” he said. “They called a couple of weeks ago and asked me to come pick it up. I haven't looked through it.”

The detectives carried the boxes of evidence out to the cruiser.

“Who knows,” Sabin said. “Nothing jumps out. We might find something on the laptop.”

I asked Henry if he was going to be okay or if he wanted to come
home with Tina and me and hang out for the day. He said he thought he'd be okay, but maybe he'd come over later. As we drove away, he stood on his front steps, looking as forlorn as a man can look. His arms hung lifelessly at his sides, back hunched a bit. He was wearing one of his bowling shirts, which I always thought made him look dumpy. I had no idea what he'd do once we left, but from the look of him, and from what was going on in his life, it was hard to imagine him doing anything other than going inside and falling apart.

O
n Monday morning, the office was abuzz with the news that Bud Billman, the CEO of Subsurface who'd been under investigation and subpoena, had died in a plane crash. He was piloting his own small plane to meet his family at some island off the coast. His youngest grandson had been in the plane with him.

I called Upton and Chip. We needed to talk about what this meant for our grand jury investigation. We agreed to meet for lunch at the Rain Tree, a local restaurant that had become my second office.

Upton and I drove together. Chip was already there. The restaurant is in a cavernous room on the ground floor of the Aponak Mills building. Aponak and Rokeby were the two biggest of the textile mills that created this city. They're huge redbrick factories rising straight up from the eastern shore of the Aponak River. Some sections are condemned. The renovated portions are taken over by office space, senior housing, a convention center, shops, and restaurants.

The Rain Tree always smells the same: the aroma of grilled burgers and onions and something else that, when you recognize it, brings back the feel of childhood summers. It is clam broth. Rain Tree's specialty is steamed clams served in the pot and accompanied by dishes of melted butter.

The restaurant was crowded and noisy, as it always is at lunch. They don't take reservations, but whenever there's a line, the owner shamelessly moves cops and veterans to the top of the list. He's a disabled vet who lost his legs in Vietnam.

We got a table and ordered some clams.

“What are they saying about the crash?” Upton asked.

“Too soon to know,” Chip said. “The plane went down in the ocean. They'll probably never recover the wreckage. From what I've heard, those V-tail planes are flying coffins.”

“Sad,” I said. “Why would someone even . . .”

“Bud Billman was that kind of guy,” Upton said.

“What kind of guy?”

“Balls to the wall; screw the niceties; don't slow down. Something gets in your way, bowl it over.”

“Just like Subsurface,” Chip said. “If it needs drilling, drill it. If it needs fracking, frack it.”

“Yes, like that,” Upton said, though I could see Upton and Chip were coming from different places. Upton was referring (admiringly) to Billman's aggressiveness and free-market exuberance. Chip was referring (disparagingly) to Billman's arrogance and disregard for environmental regs.

I said, “Billman was like, ‘If a legislator needs buying, buy him.' ”

“Self-made guy.”

“Bootstraps.”

“Didn't get where he was by following rules.”

“I didn't know he was a pilot,” I said.

“He was everything,” Upton said. “Pilot, wreck diver, kiteboarder, big-game hunter, you name it.”

“What do you think,” Chip said, “death wish?”

“No,” Upton said, “the opposite. He thought mortality didn't apply to him.”

“Rules didn't apply to him,” I said.

“Or environmental regs,” Chip said.

“Anticorruption laws,” Upton said.

“Lung cancer,” Chip said.

“How's that?”

“He smoked like a chimney.”

“Still,” I said, “you hate to see it.”

“Death of a legend.”

“And especially the grandson,” I said.

“Especially the grandson.”

“Especially.”

Bud Billman
was
a legend: A high school dropout, he found work with a drilling operation, poking holes through the tight gas shales underlying our region. He learned the industry and decided he could do it better. He went out on his own, founding Subsurface Resources, Inc. When fuel prices soared, the industry redefined itself around the nucleus of Subsurface's logistical know-how and Billman's political savvy. He was ruddy-faced, gregarious, profane, and apparently could be quite charming, though I never had the pleasure.

“So what do we do without him?” I said. “Our strategy is defunct. We were going to cut deals with the small players to get their testimony against Billman.”

“I guess we just—”

“This looks like trouble,” a woman said. She approached the table. It was a lawyer named Monica Brill, partner in a local firm. She wore spike heels, lots of mascara, and scarlet glue-ons. She specialized in criminal defense. There was a story about her that had made the rounds, though nobody knew whether it was true. She had been cross-examining a police officer, badgering and taunting him. The prosecutor was a new assistant DA who was in way over his head and kept missing legitimate objections and offering up bad ones. Monica ridiculed the prosecutor for every bad objection, then resumed hammering on the witness, who got so befuddled that his answers to the simplest questions were incomprehensible. His voice trembled, he was red in the face. Finally, the judge interceded. “Ms. Brill,” he said, “I think we should take a—” But before the judge could finish, Monica Brill swung to face him and snapped, “Do you want some, too?”