Craig Johnson - Kindness Goes Unpunished

There wasn’t that much traffic this late at night, so we made good time, and twelve minutes later I was sitting at Cady’s bedside. She had just been brought back from testing, and the nurse at the desk said that there wasn’t any substantial change but that the stimulus response was a very positive sign.

The gentle spring showers had gradually given way to sheets of rain splattering against the windows like waves in some fifth-floor tide. I sat there for a couple of hours before falling asleep to the sound, my chin resting on my chest.

When I woke up it was still raining, but there was someone else in the room. I blinked and looked at the man standing on the other side of Cady’s bed. His black trench coat and umbrella were still dripping, so he couldn’t have been there long and, when I glanced back at the doorway, I saw wet tracks leading to where he now stood. On the other side of the glass partition, the black man with the close-cropped haircut was talking to the nurse who had assured me earlier.

When I looked back to the man beside the bed, he was watching me with the brown eyes through the designer frames with the little red dots. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

He looked back at Cady. “You have a beautiful daughter.”

“Thank you.”

His eyes stayed on her. “I don’t suppose you remember…”

“Yes, I do.”

He nodded and turned to look at me. “Good. You know why I’m here?”

“I’d imagine it has something to do with Devon Conliffe?”

He came around to the foot of the bed. “You’d be right.” The detective pursed his lips and stuffed a hand in his pocket, the umbrella’s handle still over his wrist. “What can you tell me?”

I thought about it and about what Devon had probably told them. “I was a little angry…” I yawned, covering my face with my hand. “So I went down to the baseball game and tried to get the truth out of him.”

“And?”

“I’m not so sure there’s any truth in him.” I reached up and rubbed my nose. “I think he roughed me up more than I did him.”

He nodded. “That the last time you saw him?”

“Yep. Why?”

“Because…” He studied me closely. “About three hours ago, somebody threw him off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.”

They didn’t take me downtown. I’ve always wanted to be taken downtown, but I guess they didn’t think it was necessary, so we made an appointment for 9:30 in the morning. Henry showed up at 9:00 and handed me a cup of coffee. I told him about my conversation with the detectives.

I took the lid off, but the cup looked suspiciously like the one Lena had poured out on the sidewalk the day before. “I didn’t do it; did you?”

“No, but it certainly makes things inconvenient.” He took the chair on the other side of the bed.

“For whom?”

He sipped his coffee. “Devon, for a start.”

I grabbed a cab in front of HUP and headed across town to the police administration building; it was about four-and-a-half blocks from Cady’s. It looked a lot like two beehives and had a statue on the newly grown grass of a patrolman holding a child in his arms. They called it the Roundhouse, and it was all very impressive until I had to walk around the block to find a way in.

There was a bulletproof window with a sign in seven languages that said translators were available. I told the patrolman I was here to see Detectives Katz and Gowder and that I might need a translator. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor. There weren’t any chairs, so I stood along the wall and waited and read about Philadelphia’s most wanted. It looked like they had a lot more activity than we did in Absaroka County. I thought about Vic working here and figured her five years’ experience easily surpassed my twenty-three. After seven minutes, both Gowder and Katz appeared.

The coffee that I had bought from the vending machine was worthy of the Lena Moretti treatment, but I sipped it anyway and looked around at the floor-to-ceiling windows and at the benches and indoor trees. “Don’t you guys have a room with a chair and a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling?”

“Budget cuts.” Gowder was doing most of the talking this morning. His suit, shirt, tie, and shoes once again matched his skin; I bet his socks did, too. “That nose looks like it hurts.”

“I’ve had worse.”

Katz wasn’t saying anything; interested cop, indifferent cop.

“Why don’t you tell us about the ball game?”

I sat down on one of the benches and tipped my hat back. “I just went down to talk to him about a phone message he left for my daughter and to get a clearer idea of the relationship between them.”

“And did you get a clearer idea of that relationship?”

“I think so.” I thought about it. “On his end, not a remarkably healthy one.”

He leaned forward and crossed his arms. “Well, we’ll have to take your word on that, since neither party is available for comment.”

I set my coffee on the table in front of me and let a long moment pass. “Maybe you’d better speed this up. I’m starting to lose interest.”

Gowder smiled and looked down at my hand that had just relinquished the paper cup. “Big hands.” I waited. “The late Devon Conliffe had marks on his neck indicating that he might have been strangled by somebody with big hands.”

“That the cause of death? I thought it might have had something to do with falling off the bridge.”

“Deceleration trauma.” It was the first time Katz had spoken.

I didn’t have anything to hide, so I went ahead and told them everything. “I put him up against the wall in the restroom, and my hand was around his throat because he was trying to kick me in the groin.” I looked at the two of them. “Look, if you guys liked me for this you would have arrested me last night. I realize that taking a nap is not the best alibi in the history of the western world but, if we can figure out when I bought the cheeseburgers from O’Neil’s and check that against your time of death, then you guys can get started on catching whoever really did this.”

“Where were you after the baseball game and before the nap?”

I turned back to Gowder. “The hospital.” I shook my head. “I can appreciate what you’re up against, but when would I have tracked him and how would I have gotten him up there?”

Gowder smiled some more. “Like I said, you’re a big guy.”

Katz set his own coffee down. “What Detective Gowder is alluding to is that the killer would have had to have thrown Mr. Conliffe over the railing and across the PATCO lines. That, without Devon’s participation, would have been quite a physical feat.”

I leaned back against the bench. “What about suicide?”

“What about it?”

I made a face. “I only spent five minutes with the kid, and I could tell he had problems, plus what happened the night before last.”

Katz leaned in this time. “And what did happen night before last?”

I told them what Devon had told me, including his promise to tell the police. “What’d he say to you?”

“He said that you had gotten rough with him and that he had to kick your ass.” I sighed and looked down at the surface of the table. Gowder chuckled. “We thought it sounded a little funny, too.”

“What did he say about the relationship?”

The one detective glanced at the other. “Same thing he told Patrolman…umm…”

Katz finished for him. “Moretti.”

The smile was back, and he looked at Katz longer than necessary. “Moretti. How could I forget?”

“I’m assuming you’ve listened to the phone messages?”

Katz pulled Cady’s cell phone from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “We have. We also checked his cell phone, his home phone, and as much correspondence as we could find at his residence, all of it confirming that the relationship was indeed of a serious nature.” He adjusted his glasses and looked at me between the red dots. “Mr. Longmire, I want you to know how sorry we are for what has happened to your daughter, but there are going to be a lot of questions concerning this young man’s death.”