Craig Johnson: Kindness Goes Unpunished

Henry nodded and glanced at the overweight mare with an appraising eye. “Looks fast.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “He is.”

“She.” Jo removed the bridle and the blanket and dragged a set of steps beside the horse, now munching noisily on a feeder full of alfalfa cubes. She handed a couple of brushes to the girl. “Get to work, Juanita.”

She led us toward the tack room/office but changed her mind and took us out toward the corral. “It’s so nice; I hate to be inside on a day like today.”

“I agree.”

I glanced back into the stables. “Is she going to be all right in there alone?”

Jo snorted a short laugh, the first sign of humor I’d seen in her today. “Unless Thunderbolt eats her.”

We pulled up at the fence, and she hooked a boot heel in the lowest rung, trailed her arms across the top, and looked at the two of us. She seemed more relaxed than in the firm’s offices or in Cady’s hospital room, our presence notwithstanding, so I decided just to ask what I had suspected. “Osgood is the father of your child?”

She stayed looking at me. “Was.” I nodded, but it took her a while to get going. “He wasn’t a bad guy, not in the beginning.” I nodded some more and looked at my boots. “Needless to say, it didn’t work out. He provided monetary support, but that was about it.” She pushed her hat back and pulled at a wayward lock behind her ear. “Oz found out about Devon’s drug problem and, when he left our firm, he got him the position with Hunt and Driscoll, essentially blackmailing Devon into money laundering. Devon was always delicate but, with the escalated drug use, he was threatening to cave on the whole deal. I’m sure that Oz didn’t kill Devon himself, but I’m just as sure that he had it done.”

I looked at the beautiful young woman and thought of her beautiful young child, and I made the mental note that the damage would stop here, but I needed information. “William White Eyes. I don’t have time for any more fictions; if you care about keeping him alive, you need to tell me everything you know. Now.” I fished the note from my pocket and held it up.

She looked at it and looked away, the tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. “Jesus…”

“He’s staying here?”

She finally spoke again. “Off and on. There’s a gardener’s shed on the trail.”

I stuffed the note back in my pocket. “Is he there now?”

“No.”

I let it settle for a moment. “That was a pretty quick answer.”

She shrugged and looked resigned. “You’re welcome to look, but there’s nothing up there. He borrowed a horse this morning and said that he wouldn’t be back.” She turned away again.

I looked at Henry. “A horse?”

“Yes.”

That was a twist I hadn’t counted on, William White Eyes riding off into the Fairmount Park sunset. “He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No.”

I stood there and watched as the tumblers fell into place. “You’re both from Gladwyne.”

She exhaled a soft breath of amusement. “We grew up across the street from each other.”

Katz and Gowder were seated at a table on the Valley Green Inn’s porch, which was located in yet another part of Fairmount Park, and were sipping iced tea as Henry and I walked up the steps and sat in the two empty seats next to the detectives. “How’d the inquest go?”

Gowder smiled and raised his glass. “Exonerated.” He pulled back his suit jacket, revealing both the badge at his belt and the. 40 at his armpit.

“Congratulations. I would’ve hated for you to lose your job by saving my life”

Katz had a large map of Fairmount Park laid out on the table, and I had my book with the photograph. Gowder leaned in and looked at the red spot where Katz now pointed. “This is our boy, huh?”

“Just below Rex Avenue.”

I looked at the map. “The next road north?”

“Yes, but it’s not as easy as that. There are access points here at Valley Green, Rex, Thomas Mill Road, and Wises Mill Road on the other side.”

I studied the light green section of the map where Wissahickon Creek curled its way north and west. “What’s this dotted line along the creek?”

Katz adjusted his glasses and placed his chin on his fist. “That’s Forbidden Drive.”

I examined the relatively innocent-looking road. “Why Forbidden Drive?”

Gowder and he both looked at me like I was an idiot. Katz spoke slowly, just to make sure I got it. “Because you’re Forbidden to Drive on it.”

“Oh.”

Henry and I looked at each other; we were thinking the same thing.

The Indian chief Tedyuscung was neither a chief nor an Indian, but he sat as a memorial to the Lenape who first occupied the area anyway. This particular rendition of Chief Tedyuscung was actually the third to occupy the rock overlooking Wissahickon Creek. He was over fifteen feet tall, with a hand at his brow to shield the sun so that he could watch the departure of his people who had seen the white man’s writing on the wall and had moved to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, of all places. His nose was broken and his peace pipe was missing, but the nobility of royalty was still there. Lesser beings had made their pathetic bids for immortality by scratching their initials in his sides, but he forever looks west and does not move. I took a tip from his book, and neither did I.

I had picked a small outcropping of rocks to the west of the chief and was huddled at the base of a black oak with the rain dripping off my hat and into my lap. The showers had started around ten-thirty and continued to drench the place for the next hour and a half. I had confiscated a hunting poncho from Cady’s place, one that I had given her years ago, and it was doing a pretty good job of keeping me dry except for my boots, which were beginning to squeak whenever I moved my toes.

It was dark, but I could still make out the profile of the big chief, and it wasn’t hard to see Henry in him, just as I’d seen my friend in the Indian statue at Logan Circle. The giant Indian was looking toward me but beyond to a place where I hoped to return. I watched as the sheets of rain fell between us, and I allowed my eyes to adjust for the thousandth time to the momentary blindness caused by the brief flashes of lightning and my ears to recover yet again from the thunder.

The outcropping provided a clear view of the area, of the trail leading up from below, the cut-off to the statue, and Tedyuscung himself. Other than the leaves, which blustered with the periodic wind, the only movement had been when I had stretched my legs from underneath the poncho more than an hour earlier, an event I had now convinced myself had blown my concealed observation.

I had been here for four hours, but William White Eyes or, more importantly, Toy Diaz, may have been here for five.

I thought about the course of events that had led me to wait for an informant and a killer in this small, tree-shrouded ravine in Fairmount Park as it crept up on midnight. Other than the obvious obligations of the law and its enforcement, I was here because I was attempting to save William White Eyes’ life in repayment for his saving Cady. I was here because of Jo Fitzpatrick and Riley, and because of the two men sitting in a Fairmount Park Services truck parked at the barricade near Valley Green Avenue, one of whom had saved my life in a bus station only two nights before. And, I was here because of Toy Diaz and what he had done to Cady, Vic, Osgood, and Devon.

Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency. I knew he would show as surely as the dark rain was falling around me, just as my aching legs knew they would receive no quick relief.