Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

A fter two hours and two pots of coffee, Donnally had separated Anna Keenan’s records into four stacks on his desk: school, personal, financial, and other.

“Other” was the tallest.

Donnally realized that his arms would’ve hurt a whole lot less if he’d had time to sort through Anna’s papers at Trudy’s, instead of having to carry the two suitcases up and down the hills.

Most of it looked useless.

Surveying the damp, musty heaps, Donnally remembered why he’d disliked paper cases like insurance scams, check frauds, and auto repair shop swindles when he was a cop. That was one of the reasons he’d passed on a couple of promotions and waited for a spot in homicide to open up. What had happened in a violent crime scene would be visible and measurable and reconstructable from the blood, from the angles of attack and defense, and from the markers of identity sloughed off by the killer. Everything would be right there in front of him, with the hypotheticals constrained by the evidence.

But paper was just words upon words, with their meaning sometimes only evident in the eye of the reader.

He decided to start with the least malleable: the numbers.

A file labeled “Appraisals” told him that Anna had gotten the house reappraised every March, just before the spring home-buying season, frenzied during those years by first-time buyers hoping to get into the market and rushing to catch the appreciation wave as it built among the tight inventory. If Charles was right about how she spent her money, the increase in home value of five or ten thousand dollars a year was enough to feed a lot of hungry people.

The original purchase agreement between Trudy and the seller called for seller-financing and a balloon payment in five years. But the handwritten ledger showed it was paid off in three years, four thousand dollars a month, in cash, and all long before Trudy moved north and went into hiding.

He couldn’t determine from the paper alone whether the source of the money for the down payment was marijuana profits or the stash from Artie and Robert’s armored car robbery. He imagined Trudy pulling up a floorboard or digging in the backyard, withdrawing stacks of money from her private bank, and slipping it to a seller happy to receive cash he wouldn’t have to report to the IRS.

Donnally laid out the purchase agreement, the payment records, and the refinancing papers side by side. The numbers were equal. Money in, money out.

A ledger of expenditures was in a folder of its own. Food, clothing, medicine, cash. Organized by dates, separated into years, with initials alone to identify the recipients. He matched them to Anna’s tax returns. She had taken just the standard deduction. None for mortgage interest or property taxes or charity, even though she had receipts from homeless shelters and the Salvation Army. Donnally guessed that she had forgone the deductions because they would’ve been a way of getting back the dirty money that she’d been trying to give away.

As he reached for the next stack, Donnally alerted to a break in the pattern of cars passing on the street. He then noticed a low rumble of an idling motor. He peeked between the curtains and spotted Deputy Pipkins parked in front of the house, blocking the driveway, the driver’s window open, his bandaged wrist exposed and looking like the result of a failed suicide.

Pipkins’s face wasn’t visible, but Donnally imagined him scanning the windows, either checking to see whether Donnally was inside or maybe hoping for eye contact in order to make a point Donnally couldn’t yet fathom.

Donnally heard his phone ring downstairs. He suspected it was Pipkins checking whether he was home. He let it go, then called the cafe on his cell and told Will that if Pipkins called asking for him to say that he was busy taking an order from a customer.

A minute after the ringing stopped, Pipkins climbed out of his patrol car and walked down the driveway carrying a KFC take-out bag.

Donnally smiled to himself. Whatever Pipkins was up to, he’d decided to do it in daylight. No way would he chance reaching into another spring-loaded trap.

Donnally’s cell phone vibrated after he’d walked to the rear dormer and was looking down into his backyard. It was Will reporting that a man sounding like Pipkins had called asking for him.

Ten seconds later, Pipkins came into view from the side of the house. Donnally raised his cell phone and videotaped the deputy as he walked toward the five-hundred-gallon propane tank that supplied fuel for heating and cooking. Pipkins pulled a crescent wrench out of his bag and kneeled down next to the copper fittings at the front.

Donnally raced down the stairs, arriving at the kitchen window in time to video Pipkins backing away down the driveway and snapping off the cover of a road flare. He struck it against the igniter button and then disappeared from view. Moments later, the burning flare came flying from along the side of the house and rolled to a stop five feet from the tank. Donnally stepped onto the back porch, ready to run over and grab the flare before it ignited the gas. He looked up at the pines bordering the yard. They were motionless in the calm air. He found himself rolling the dice again, this time with his own life, as he waited for Pipkins to drive off.

The rising whine of Pipkins’s engine sent Donnally running toward the flare. He dived and rolled, then drove the lit end into the dirt and covered it with his body. He felt the last of the smoldering chemicals eat through his shirt and singe his skin, but the smell of propane now surrounding him made him keep his body tight to the ground.

A few minutes later a gust cleared the gas for a moment and Donnally ran to the garage, retrieved a wrench, and retightened the fitting.

D espite the pain, Donnally felt a kind of relief standing in front of his bedroom mirror five minutes later, inspecting the craterlike wound on his stomach. Not just because his house hadn’t blown up, not just because he had evidence that would end Pipkins’s grab at Mauricio’s land, but because unlike the delusions of Charles Brown and Trudy and Sonny, unlike what awaited him in the attic, unlike the reconstructed life of Anna Keenan that seemed more fiction than fact, the burn was real and would remain real as a scar, as a piece of reality, that tied the crimes of a generation to this single day in his life.

As Donnally finished cleaning and taping the wound, he heard a car slow in front of his house, and then accelerate away.

He didn’t need to look out of the window to know that it had been Pipkins and what he had seen: the flare hanging by a fishing line from the porch roof and rocking in the wind.

D onnally returned to examining Anna’s records, now trying to follow the trail of cash payments, looking first for a code sheet to match the initials of the recipients shown on her ledger and then for an explanation for why she chose to give money to those she did.

He pulled out her calendars and organized them by year, latest to earliest, then opened to March 1986, the month of her death, thinking that if there were any leads to be found, they’d show up near the end. He had expected to find shopping lists, birthdays, scheduled meetings, and plans for spring vacation. There were none. It was a diary, not of her life or of her introspections, but of the lives that impinged on hers.

The last entry was on the day of her death. Father Phil claims that the problem has been resolved. He’s been reassigned to Holy Names in San Francisco. I told him that it wasn’t over and he was deluding himself.

Donnally wondered what sort of problem brings a priest to a teacher’s doorstep. Had she become Catholic and gotten involved in church politics? Had he been her confidant? Or she, his?