Joel Goldman - No way out

“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.