Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Gallagher raised a finger for the deputy to wait.

“I beg your pardon, Your Honor,” Repelmaus said, “but Mr. Breck is seeking to use this court to engage in a smear campaign that has no basis in fact. The church, the archdiocese, and the law firm each have a right to counter these baseless charges before-”

“What would you have me do, Mr. Regis?”

“It’s Repelmaus, Your Honor. I-we would ask that the court adjourn until we’ve had an opportunity to depose Mr. Breck so that we may prepare a point-by-point rebuttal.”

“I understand your concern,” Gallagher said. “But this is not a civil matter, it’s-”

I jumped to my feet. “No, Judge. Don’t even think about dealing with this slimeball.”

I felt my mother’s alarmed face staring up at me.

“Excuse me?” Gallagher said.

Now every head turned to me.

“Mr. Carpenter,” the judge said, “I know you and your mother have had a difficult few days, but you are out of order. Please sit.”

“With all due respect, Your Honor, no,” I said. “If you want to put me in jail, fine, put me in with Repelmaus, who’s just as out of order as I am. But if you allow him and his clients the slightest opening, they will keep this case from being solved forever. They’ve kept it from being solved for nearly sixty years, and they will persist, Phyllis Bontrager be damned.”

“My God, Your Honor, this-” Repelmaus began, but Gallagher rapped his gavel three times and shouted, “Quiet! You will be quiet in my courtroom, Mr. Regis. And you, Mr. Carpenter, will sit down now.”

I’d said what I had to say. I sat. Gallagher turned to a uniformed officer standing to his right. “Bailiff,” he said, “please remove Mr. Regis to my chambers.”

Repelmaus flushed red. “Your Honor, this is unnecessary,” he said as the bailiff moved alongside him. “You will regret this.”

When the chambers door behind Gallagher’s bench closed, the judge addressed Catledge. “Deputy?”

“May I approach?” Catledge said.

Gallagher waved him up. Catledge whispered something. Gallagher replied, nodding. Catledge turned and left the courtroom.

“Mr. Breck,” the judge said, “I assume you still have the note your mother left in her will.”

“It’s in a safe-deposit box along with other documents, such as canceled checks from Eagan, MacDonald and Browne payable to my firm, for services rendered, right up to October of last year.”

“About the time you arrived here, is that right?”

“Approximately, yes.”

Gallagher took off his glasses, set them down, rubbed his eyes with both hands, put the glasses back on. “You have subsumed much of your life to this cause, Mr. Breck,” he said. “All for the sake of a dead man.”

“For the sake of a dead woman, Your Honor.”

The courtroom doors swung open again. The gallery turned as one to see. Standing on the threshold amid a small phalanx of officers, with an eye swollen shut and his hands cuffed behind him, was Luke Whistler.

Standing behind him was Darlene.

She was hatless. The top two buttons were missing from her uniform shirt, and the fabric was torn where her badge should have been. A wad of gauze was taped haphazardly beneath her left eye. I wanted her to look around the room for me, but she kept her gaze straight ahead. In her outstretched arms she held a plastic evidence bag containing what appeared to be a wooden box.

“Order,” the judge said. “Mr. Breck, you may sit.” Breck twisted around to see the back of the courtroom. His eyes went wide. Gallagher looked at Catledge. “Deputy?”

Dingus rose from his seat, looking as flabbergasted as I’d ever seen him. “Your Honor, I apologize,” he said as he glanced from Gallagher to Whistler and back again. “Deputy Esper was suspended as of last night and should not be here now.” I watched Darlene for a reaction, but her face remained a hard blank.

“Sheriff, can you please tell me what’s going on here?” Eileen Martin said.

He ignored her, directing himself to Catledge. “Deputy, your orders were to take the prisoners directly to the jail.”

“Yes sir, Sheriff.” He glanced back at Darlene. “This seemed relevant to the matter in court.”

“Deputy Esper is not even-”

“Never mind, Sheriff,” Judge Gallagher said. “Deputies, please approach the bench and bring whatever you have.”

Catledge prodded Whistler forward. Darlene followed. The box she carried looked to be about three feet long, two feet across, and twelve or thirteen inches deep. On the front was a hasp for a padlock, but no lock. The three of them stopped at the railing.

Darlene spoke. “Lucas Benjamin Whistler, Your Honor.”

Whistler stared at the floor. “I want a lawyer,” he muttered.

“He killed my mother.”

A collective gasp rose from the gallery. I handed Mom a tissue.

“Your Honor,” Eileen Martin said, “this is highly irregular.”

“We passed irregular about twenty minutes ago,” Gallagher said. “Mr. Whistler, you shall have a lawyer. But now, please approach.”

Catledge, Darlene, and Whistler walked to the bench. Darlene set the evidence bag in front of the judge. “What is this?” he said.

“Your honor,” Darlene replied, “I attempted to apprehend the defendant approximately twenty-five miles west of the border crossing at Port Huron. He disobeyed my instructions to pull his vehicle over, forcing me to-”

“She nearly killed me running me off the road,” Whistler said.

“-take more forceful steps.”

“Then she just broke into my car, clear illegal search and seizure. You’ll be throwing this one out, Judge.”

“Since when do we have jurisdiction in Port Huron?” Dingus called from his seat. “You didn’t notify the state police?” He jumped to his feet. “Judge, I must ask that you allow me to remove these people immediately.”

“I would concur,” Eileen Martin said.

“Noted,” Gallagher said. “Sit.”

Dingus started to say something else, stopped himself, and sat.

“Deputy Esper,” the judge said, “is it true that you arrested this man some-what? — two hundred miles from your jurisdiction?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” she said.

“And where did you get this box?”

“It was in the trunk of the suspect’s car. I believe it’s stolen property.”

Gallagher studied the box and the three people standing before him. In the gallery we waited, dumbstruck. I thought of Darlene chasing Whistler’s Toronado, forcing him to the shoulder in the dark middle of nowhere. They must have struggled, I thought. How else could she have sustained a cut or Whistler a black eye? I wanted to ask her what had happened, why she had decided to go alone, why she had left me behind. I wanted to know how she had restrained herself from taking even more drastic action against the man she believed had killed her mother. I thought I knew what was in the box on Gallagher’s bench, but I wanted to see it for myself, not hear about it days or even weeks on, when the state forensics guys finished with it.

I stood. “Your Honor,” I said. “We can end this now.”

Gallagher looked at me, his eyebrows high over his horn-rims. “Just whose courtroom do you imagine this is?”

“We can solve this case right now.”

“We can, can we? I’ll humor you-what do you propose before I have the bailiff roust you from this courtroom forevermore.”

I glanced past him at the door to his chambers. He followed my eyes. “As you say, Your Honor, it’s your courtroom,” I said. “But we can solve this case as well as the one that’s half a century old. But you will need me, and you will need my mother.”

I looked at her. Her head was bowed over her handbag.