J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“You want anything?” Cavallo asks, lifting a half-eaten sandwich.

I shake my head. “There’s a question you have to answer, Stephen, before we can go any further. The other night after we talked, when you called me back with Englewood’s number, were you telling the truth about remembering him after the fact?”

He shifts in his chair. “Look. .”

“Just answer the question.”

“Yes and no,” he says. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because Englewood tried to have me killed.”

They both freeze.

“ What? ”

“After I left him, some guys in a black Hummer ran me off the road on Allen Parkway. They came down the embankment with guns drawn, and I had to hide in the bushes or they would’ve shot me. The only person who could have tipped them off is Englewood, and you’re the one who sent me to him.”

“You think I set you up?”

“I don’t think anything. I’m just asking the question.”

Cavallo sips her drink through a long straw, her eyes darting back and forth like she’s watching a show.

Wilcox gives her an incredulous look. “Are you hearing this?”

“There were shots fired on Allen Parkway,” Cavallo says. “Patrol responded, but nobody was on the scene. They did find some skid marks. That was you ?”

“Off the record, yes.”

“Well, I had nothing to do with it,” Wilcox says, “and I’m shocked you would even have to ask. All the time we worked together and you still don’t have a clue about what makes me tick.”

“I could say the same thing. But you said ‘yes and no.’ So explain the ‘no’ part.”

He curls in on himself, crossing his legs, tightening his arms over his chest, like the diagram labeled CLOSED in the body-language handbook. But he does talk. After our conversation, he says, it occurred to him to phone a colleague who’d worked the Nesbitt shooting, not to pump the man for information on my behalf but to report the contact. “I figured they’d want to know if questions were being asked.” Less than five minutes after that call ended, Wilcox got a call from Englewood, asking that his number be passed along. “Explaining all of that back and forth would have been too complicated.”

“So you lied to me instead.”

“I didn’t lie,” he says, his cheeks flushed. “I paraphrased.”

“Can one of you tell me who this Englewood guy is?” Cavallo asks.

We exchange a look and Wilcox shrugs. “You go ahead,” he says.

I summarize what I know about Tom Englewood, repeating his metaphor about the governmental High Road and the corporate Low Road, and that leads into an explanation about Andrew Nesbitt and his contested shooting.

“Why this matters to you,” I tell her, “is that when we found our headless John Doe on the basketball court, Lorenz noticed that the body was arranged with the finger deliberately pointing. He thought maybe if we followed the dotted line, we’d find the head. But just before he was killed, he worked out the real significance of that pointing finger.”

“Which was?”

In answer I produce a page from my own Key Map, identical to the one taken from Brandon Ford’s office, indicating the crime scene, then tracing the direction of the line until it intersects with Allen Parkway. “This,” I say, tapping the map, “is where Nesbitt was shot.”

She takes the map, studies it, then does her own impression of closed body language. “That’s a pretty big thing to omit from your report.”

“I didn’t,” I say. “Bascombe knows.”

“Well, he didn’t say anything to me.”

I tell her about our visit to Bea Kuykendahl’s basement office at the FBI, then produce the file on Brandon Ford, opening it up to the photograph.

“There’s something else. You told me they haven’t identified the guy I shot. The fact is, I got a look at the other one without his mask. The same man was there the night I was run off the road. He seemed to be the group’s leader.”

“And you have a description?” Wilcox asks.

“I have more than that. I have a photo.” I tap the picture on the table in front of me. “It was Brandon Ford.”

“But. .” His voice trails off. “What?”

Cavallo doesn’t say a word. She just glares at the photograph.

“So what you’re saying. .” Wilcox struggles with his thoughts, not wanting to speak them out loud. “Didn’t the DNA come back with a. .?”

“The lieutenant knows all this?” Cavallo says. “Wanda’s gonna crucify him.”

“You can’t say anything to Wanda.”

“March, I can’t not say anything.”

“This has to stay here. It can’t go beyond this table. I wanted you both here because I feel like I can trust you, and you both have a stake in this.”

“Not me,” Wilcox says. “It’s none of my business.”

“According to Englewood, it is. He told me something interesting as we were saying goodbye. He figured I wouldn’t live to share the information. He said we had a mutual friend, Reg Keller, and that he was an investor in Keller’s operation. Now the three of us brought Keller down, but it was you, Stephen, who uncovered all the financial shenanigans related to his shell company. So yes, you do have a stake, because in all that work you seem to have missed something. I think we all did.”

“What do you expect from us?” Cavallo asks.

“Very quietly, without raising any suspicion, we have to reopen that case. We need to know what the connection between Keller and Englewood was. And we need to see if anyone knows where Reg Keller is now.”

Wilcox shrugs. “Argentina, I thought. That’s the rumor.”

“That’s old information,” Cavallo says. “And it was never more than speculation. The guy who swindled Keller out of his money-Chad something-”

“Chad Macneil,” I say.

“Right. When he turned up dead in Buenos Aires, people thought it was Big Reg settling the score. I don’t think there was anything more to it than talk.”

“We need to find out. Can you check into that?”

She gives me a frosty look. “I think my days of carrying water for you are pretty much done, Roland. This was the last straw. Jerry was my friend.”

“Mine, too. I mean that.”

Neither one of them looks very convinced. I knew it would be hard, and I knew there would be some resentment to overcome. Somehow, though, I’d imagined that my revelations were strong enough in themselves to win both Cavallo and Wilcox over. Now I begin to wonder.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” Cavallo says. “I’m going to have to think it over. Frankly, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I’d feel comfortable withholding information from Wanda. You told your boss everything, so why shouldn’t I tell mine?”

“Do you think she’ll listen?”

“That’s not the point.”

“If I were you,” Wilcox tells her, “I wouldn’t say a word. The one part of this story I can attest to is this: there’s an enormous amount of outside pressure on the Internal Affairs investigation. I don’t know where it’s coming from, but I’d say there have to be some powerful interests involved. If it’s true that Ford, your homicide victim, is alive and kicking, and the database still came back with a match. . well, I don’t know what to think about that. But I’m not gonna breathe a word about it, if you know what I mean.”

“Because you don’t believe it?” she asks.

“Because I don’t know what to believe.”

“Listen,” I say. “I’m not asking either one of you to walk out on the limb with me. Only I can’t do this alone, not from the outside. What it comes down to is this: do you trust me?”

Silence.

“I’m serious. Do you trust me?”