The Municipal Farm felt like a summer camp gone to seed compared to the Jackson County Jail with its two-person cells, barred slits cut high in the cell wall masquerading as windows, armed guards, and body cavity searches. I left my driver’s license and gun with a sheriff’s deputy, pocketing my claim check, and followed another deputy to a room where Jimmy was waiting. The room was not much bigger than a closet, with a wall-to-wall table and glass panel subdividing it and a phone we could use to talk to one another, someone else listening and watching, sight unseen.
He was shackled, hands and legs, his face bruised, his nose bent, probably broken, the down payment he’d made for attempted escape and assault with a deadly weapon. Twice before when I’d seen him at the Farm, he had carried himself with a swagger, relishing his defiance of the system, certain he could do the time and thumb his nose at his wife, the court, and anyone else who tried to tell him what to do. That was gone, the chains and the beating he’d taken bowing his stiff neck, leaving him tense, looking over his shoulder even though we were alone. He sank onto his chair, cradling the phone on his shoulder, anxious and jittery.
Adrienne Nardelli had questioned him and gotten nothing. Kate had tried manipulating him, then trusting him, and had a bandage on her neck to show for her trouble. It was my turn.
“You don’t look so good,” I told him.
“Bad night.”
“Escape and assault aren’t exactly good career moves.”
“Like mine was going anywhere.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley were in the same boat, career-wise, that is.”
He flicked his eyes at me, then down at the table. “I wouldn’t know nothing about that.”
“’Course you wouldn’t. How do you see this whole thing working out for you now?”
“What’s it to you?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I won’t lose any sleep over you. I’m just wondering how you see your options now that you’ve tacked two big-time felonies onto your theft charge. Your lawyer might have been able to get you a decent deal on the theft, maybe even probation, but now you’re looking at a serious stretch. And the whole thing with your kids, you not helping with finding them, the judge is going to screw you down tighter than tight.”
“I did what I did. Can’t do nothing about it.”
“True, but doing the time is the least of your problems.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying your biggest problem is living long enough to do the time. Nick Staley is dead.”
He squirmed in his chair, his color up and his eyes wide, then narrow and wary.
“Too bad.”
“You interested in how it happened?”
“Make a difference?”
“Not to Nick, maybe to you because he didn’t die peacefully surrounded by family and friends. He was shot to death in the middle of the night at his store.”
He sucked in a quick breath, pushing it out, fighting to stay calm. “Dead is dead. Got nothing to do with me.”
“Actually, I think it does. See, I’ve been piecing this together, trying to figure out what was going on between you and Nick and Frank Crenshaw.”
“Nothing’s going on. I knew them, that’s all.”
“A lot better than you let on. That’s the way it is in Northeast. Everybody knows everybody, at least that’s true for the families that have lived there a long time and you’re third generation.”
He jolted forward in his chair, the phone falling into his lap, fumbling with shackled wrists to pick it up.
“What if I did, so what?”
“So you lied about your relationships with them or at least you tried to make it sound like you hardly knew them, and there has to be a reason for a man to lie about a simple thing like that. Only reason I can think of is that the three of you were into something you wanted to keep private, something illegal, like stealing copper so that Frank could sell it for scrap.”
“I got nothing to say about that. You’re not my lawyer.”
“The three of you didn’t have two quarters to rub together. Frank and Nick were going out of business, and you were out of work. Stealing was one way to get by, and construction materials made sense because Frank could move the stuff for you. But what was in it for Nick? Why cut him in on it when he’s not taking any risk or bringing anything to the table? So I think maybe it’s just the two of you, you and Frank. Then someone killed Frank and Nick, which leaves you the last man standing, only you’re at the Farm, where it’s not as hard to kill a man as you might think. A Mexican kid named Ricky Suarez lands there on a drunk and disorderly, you get into it with him before he has a chance to say hello, and the next day you try to escape. There’s no way to paint that picture that makes you anything but a marked man.”
“I got antsy, that’s all. Saw a chance and took it,” he said.
“You told Kate Scranton that you knew you couldn’t escape and that you just wanted off the Farm. Only county lockup isn’t my idea of an upgrade. Lot more bad guys in here, guys who’d put a shank in your back as a favor or just because they’re bored. Man has to be pretty damned scared to take a chance like that, and after what’s happened to Crenshaw and Staley, I’d say you had good reason.”
He looked around again, licked his lips, and edged closer to the glass, his voice a whisper.
“I thought they’d put me in solitary.”
“Where you’d be safe.”
“Safer, anyway.”
“From who? Ricky Suarez, the Mexican kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. How could you not know?”
“Listen, I’m telling you,” he said, his shoulders hunched. “I don’t know. I just did my part and kept my mouth shut. I learned how to follow orders in the Army.”
“What was your part?”
“Steal the copper. Frank said he could move it, no problem; just mix it in with a bunch of different loads of scrap. We’d done it a couple of other times, small loads, just to see if we could make it work, pick up a few bucks, and it went okay, so Frank, he says it’s time to go big. I got a buddy working a job east of downtown. He tells me there’s no weekend security on account of the general contractor is going broke and laid them off. Saturday comes, and I drive right onto the site, load my truck, and I’m gone. Not twenty minutes later, some eager-beaver shit-head nigger with a badge pulls me over because I’ve got an expired tag. Can you believe the shit that happens to me, man?”
“Doesn’t seem right.”
“You’re damned straight it isn’t right!” he said, catching himself, pulling back and shutting down, realizing I was pimping him.
“What happened between you and Ricky Suarez?”
“Nothing.”
“How did Frank Crenshaw get his gun?”
He stared past me if I weren’t there.
“Who was giving the orders?”
He turned his head and coughed, looking at the ceiling.
“You left your house with Evan and Cara at eight-thirty in the morning, and you were busted four hours later. I don’t think that was enough time to kill them, bury them, and load your truck with stolen copper. You figured you’d do the job and go get them. Tell me where you left them. It may not be too late.”
He folded his arms across his chest, turned his head away, not saying a word. I let the silence work on him, watched him start to squirm, realizing at last there was another possibility.
“Look at you, Jimmy. You haven’t had it easy. Guy like you gets hit a lot growing up by an old man whose old man hit him a lot, I’d bet my last nickel that you’d do the same to your kids. That’s the way it works. We become the people we hate. And you’re full of hate and mad at everyone. I get that. But the people I talked to say you loved your kids; that you lived for them. That may be the one and only good thing about you. A man like that wouldn’t hurt his kids and wouldn’t just dump them while he pulls a job. No, a man like that would leave his kids with someone he trusted to take care of them. Who was it, Jimmy? Who did you give your kids to?”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“You tell me. A gun dealer named Eldon Fowler was robbed up at Lake Perry last month. The thieves were chasing him down a gravel road in the woods when he hit a deer. Fowler died of a heart attack, but that’s enough to make a case for felony murder since he died while a crime was in progress. The crime-scene investigators found paint on the trunk of a tree that came from a Dodge Ram. If Nick Staley, Frank Crenshaw, or you own a Dodge Ram, it won’t be hard to tie you to his death. Be better if you tell me now than if you make the prosecuting attorney put it together.”
His eyes burned, full and wet, as he spat on the floor. “You go to hell.”
Kate told me that it takes five compliments to compensate for one insult, a commonsense rate of exchange that resonated as fair. Healing is slow, uncertain, and hard.
As I walked out of the jail, I wondered how many bad traits a lone good one could balance out, whether there was a cosmic calculator programmed with an algorithm to weigh and rank each of us, spitting out the results in this life or the next, if there was one. I wasn’t religious, didn’t belong to a church or a tribe, and didn’t pray or meditate, kneel or genuflect. Though I believed that there were all kinds of reckonings, that reaping and sowing were inevitable and necessary, I couldn’t do the math on Jimmy Martin, a man whose anger, hate, crimes, and fear threatened to consume his singular love of his children.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t killed his kids. People twist love in a lot of different ways, sometimes making it an excuse for murder. But the time line made it more likely that he had entrusted Evan and Cara to someone else. And that didn’t mean they were still alive. Joy and I had done the same thing with our son, Kevin.
Jimmy had admitted to stealing the copper, partnering with Frank Crenshaw to fence the goods, and staging an escape to protect him from an unknown but real threat. More important was his Nuremberg defense that he was just taking orders and that he didn’t know who was giving them, the latter claim believable but only to a point.
No one would confuse Jimmy with being the sharpest tool in the toolbox. His life had been a series of fuckups. He was the kind of man who could be trusted with doing one thing at a time and not much else. Steal the copper. Whoever was giving the orders forgot to tell him to check his vehicle tag first, exactly the kind of thing that Jimmy would never think to do, blaming everyone but himself when that’s what got him caught.
Three other things stood out from my interrogation. The first was his reaction to Nick Staley’s murder, the news giving him a kick in the head but not knocking him out, as if Staley’s death had been a matter of when and not if.
The second was his pain, not because of the beating he’d taken but because of his kids. It was raw and real and, I realized, the source of his fear. Ever the good soldier, he knew how to take orders and bullets. But it was different with his kids. He knew they were in danger and that the only way he could help them was to keep his mouth shut.
Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley had been killed to keep them quiet or because they had pissed off the wrong people. Had Jimmy not been arrested, he’d probably be dead by now as well. While it wasn’t impossible to kill someone in jail, it was complicated and messy, leaving whomever ordered the hit to trust the least trustworthy.
The easiest way to control Jimmy while he was in jail was to give him a good reason not to cooperate. There was no better leverage than his kids. Whoever had Evan and Cara would need to prove to Jimmy that they were alive and well or he’d have no reason to cooperate. Yet he was afraid for his life, knowing that his death would eliminate any reason to keep Evan and Cara alive, making solitary confinement the safest place for him and for his kids.
I ran through it again and again, each time coming to the same conclusion. Whoever had Evan and Cara wasn’t trying to kill Jimmy and, therefore, hadn’t killed Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley. Someone else was collecting dead bodies, someone who had a stake in the theft ring. Which meant that Jimmy was into something else heavy enough that his kids’ lives hung in the balance.
The third thing was Jimmy’s reaction when I told him about the Dodge Ram. He was cornered but didn’t know what to do except fight.
The county jail was at Thirteenth and Cherry on the east side of downtown. Lucy and Kate had insisted on driving me, but I’d refused and had taken the bus. It was a small-scale declaration of independence, one I made to have time to think things through on my own and to remind myself that there was still such a thing as my own time, my own way, my own life.
The week was piling up on me, and my body was vibrating like a tuning fork. It was late afternoon, the sun surrendering to grimy clouds that matched the fog creeping into my brain. The October air had quickened, turning cold, smelling of rain. I cinched up my jacket collar and began moving, wrestling with the possible permutations, hoping I couldn’t walk and shake at the same time.
I started with Frank Crenshaw and Jimmy’s construction materials recycling operation. Crenshaw didn’t strike me as management. From his lazy eye to the failure of his business to the short-tempered murder of his wife, he wasn’t a guy who would know how to put together a stolen-goods ring to pay the bills.
Nick Staley was a better choice. He knew the importance of diversifying, buying rental properties, and he was willing to rob Peter to pay Paul, diverting rental income to his grocery. Most of all, having been an Army sergeant, he was a man used to giving orders. Using Jimmy to steal construction materials and Crenshaw to fence them had to have been his idea. That’s what he brought to the table in return for his cut, that and his son, who had to know what was going on and was likely doing his bit for the cause.
Like any plan that looked good on paper, it was undone by human foibles and overlooked details. With Jimmy, it was an expired tag. For Frank, it was the pressure of crossing a line he never imagined crossing and a wife who rejected his midlife career change.
And for all of them, it was Frank’s gun that pulled loose the final fatal thread, unraveling Braylon Jennings’s investigation of Cesar Mendez. Brett Staley was Jennings’s confidential informant, making him the nexus between his father’s operation and Mendez. If Mendez found it necessary to have Frank Crenshaw killed to protect his gun trafficking, he’d likely have felt the same about Crenshaw’s partners, forcing Brett to act as his proxy.
I liked that mosaic until I tried to fit in the piece with Eberto Garza’s name on it. If Brett Staley had killed his father, why would he wait in the store all night only to kill Eberto? It made more sense that Brett hadn’t killed his father, that instead the killer was waiting for him to close the circle. Perhaps Mendez had sent Eberto to check on things at the grocery, and in the dark, the killer, exhausted and stressed from killing one man and waiting for another, had shot Eberto by mistake.
It was a way to make the piece about Eberto Garza fit, but it felt like I was squaring a round edge. That was a lot of killing to hide the origin of a single gun. It was like shooting your dick off because you had an itch in your crotch.
There was another problem. Jimmy had to have taken his orders from someone. If it was Nick, he had no reason to lie about it since Nick was dead. Conclusion: Nick was taking orders from someone higher up in the chain of command, and Jimmy didn’t know whom that was.
Isolating Jimmy from that information was insurance against him giving it up, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to figure it out. If Ricky Suarez frightened him enough to stage an escape, he must have suspected that Cesar Mendez was on top of the totem pole.
I was migrating north and west, aiming for the Transit Plaza at Tenth & Main with no more of a plan than to take the Number 24 out Independence Avenue, get off, and keep walking until I found Cesar Mendez or he found me. As plans went, it was a lousy one, but it was the best I could do.
I reached Main and turned north, passing a parking garage, feeling more than seeing someone behind me, his footsteps matching mine, keeping a distance I guessed at ten feet for half a block. I stopped at the traffic light at Twelfth and Main, not turning to see what he would do. There were three other people on my corner and more crossing toward me, plus traffic moving in all four directions, making a daylight attack unlikely.
“I hear you’re looking for Cesar Mendez,” a voice said from behind me.
I turned around. It was the hostage negotiator, Jeremiah Quinn.