William Lashner - Falls The Shadow

“Relax,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing. Prickly, isn’t she?”

“Beth’s my partner,” I said.

“Well, that explains that. So who are you here for today, Victor? Another drug dealer? Another leg breaker? Or is some hard-luck angel looking to slime his way out of grand theft auto?”

“Today it’s your garden-variety murderer,” I said.

“Homicide’s in the Roundhouse.”

“We’re in the right place.”

“Is that so? The perp anyone I know?”

“François Dubé,” said Beth.

Did something flit through his eyes at the name, some fearful sense of recognition? Or was I only imagining it? It wasn’t easy to tell with his strangely haunted expression.

“I remember the Dubé case,” said Gleason, leaning back in his chair, crossing his hands over his chest. “Wife killer, tried about three years ago. Went down hard, I believe. Life. That was Torricelli’s case. Talk to him.”

“But Seamus Dent was yours,” I said.

It looked for a moment as if the squirrel he had swallowed was trying to scamper back up his throat. “There’s no connection,” said the detective.

“Sure there is. Seamus Dent testified at the François Dubé trial, put the defendant smack at the scene of the crime.”

“Oh, yeah, right. There might have been something about that in the file. But it didn’t have anything to do with what went down with the kid.”

“What did go down, exactly?” I said.

“Not totally clear. It happened in a crack house in Kensington, one of the floaters that flit from abandoned house to abandoned house. There was a rip-it-up about something. One rumor said it was over territory, another said it was over money, another said it was over a girl. Or maybe it was just because. There’s always a reason, isn’t there? It’s hard to find out what’s happening when the only witnesses are addicts, who scatter like cockroaches at the first pop of pistols. But we got a pretty good description of the fight before the shot.”

“Who was arguing?”

“The victim, Dent, and some self-styled gangster and rap impresario, went by the street name of Red Rover. There were hard words, hard knocks. Then, as Red Rover took a swing, Dent side-kicked him in the face. Hurt him bad, but not bad enough. On the floor now, Red Rover rolled over, pulled a Glock 9 from his belt, and shot Dent in the forehead. Western Unioned him to Nothingville.”

“And what happened to Red Rover?”

“He was tracked down at his mother’s place in Logan.”

“He say much when they found him?”

“Enough. He was told to put his hands up and surrender. He pulled out a weapon instead. Three in the chest.”

“So you never got a statement?”

“You’re catching on fast. We figured the way he played it was confession enough.”

“Maybe so, but you know the way we defense attorneys are, with all our hang-ups and all. We like the execution after the trial, not before. And a statement would have made things clearer. Anything dirty about the shooting?”

He shook his head. “Righteous. He was a hood, he killed that boy, he pulled a weapon. Not too many cops lost any sleep over it.”

“You learn much about the victim?”

“We knew he was dead, which was pretty much all we needed.”

“What did the autopsy show?”

Gleason leaned forward, curled half his upper lip in a sneer. “What’d I say? The autopsy showed a bullet through the forehead.”

“What I was asking, Detective, is whether or not the victim was clean at the time of the shooting?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters.”

“There was evidence of past drug abuse.”

“But his blood came up clean, is that it?”

“So they said.”

“You figure that one out?”

“Maybe he was strung out, maybe that’s what made him so ornery. Maybe he was looking to score, and Red Rover told him to pound asphalt. It doesn’t matter what he was on with a bullet in his head.”

“We heard that before he was killed,” said Beth, “Dent was taken up by some older guy. Someone who was trying to clean him up, straighten him out. It might have been a sexual thing, but apparently for a time he was straightened. Did you hear anything like that?”

“No.”

“Did you try to find out Dent’s situation at all?”

“Well, he wasn’t a sweet Leilani, if that’s what you’re saying. Look, we did what we needed to do. We investigated what we needed to investigate, we found the shooter, we took care of it. Now, I appreciate the visit, but I got work to do. In the time I wasted with you, another two cars were stolen off the street.”

“It’s nice to see they keep you busy.”

“If any other questions come up,” said Beth, “would you mind terribly, Detective, if we give you a call?”

“Do me a favor, little sister,” he said, “and don’t.”

It was the last sentence of Detective Gleason’s that stuck in my mind for some reason. His voice, like I said, was deep and southern, and he gave that last word a melodious lilt that struck me as something strangely familiar.

I let it rattle around in my head as I drove Beth back to the office. She wasn’t so encouraged by our outing, Beth, and not so happy with me, I could tell, and I could tell why, too. She was like my seventh-grade gym teacher who told me, when I refused to climb the rope, that he didn’t like my altitude. Well, Beth didn’t like my altitude either.

“Dent’s dead,” she said, “his killer is killed, that line of inquiry is buried. It was a wild-goose chase from the start.”

“I like wild goose. A nice pudding and some cranberry sauce and it’s like we’re in the middle of a Dickens novel.”

“Not to mention the billable hours.”

“Not to mention.”

“We don’t have anything, do we?”

“I told you at the start it was useless.”

“But still you took his money.”

“It wasn’t his, but yeah, I took the money. And if it’s hopeless, it’s not our fault. He’s the one who killed his wife.”

“Did he? Are you sure?”

“In the eyes of the law and jury, that’s just what he did. But see, look at me, I can cheerfully say I don’t give a damn. I don’t have to believe in my client; I just have to believe in the legal tender he’s tendering. A lawyer is really nothing more than a mechanic. Bring in your life, with all its troubles, and I’ll open the hood, poke around, see if any of the legal tricks at my disposal can fix the problem. It isn’t personal, I don’t make judgments about the quality of the car. I just roll up my sleeves. When was the last time your auto mechanic took it personally when your engine needed a valve job? He shakes his head, sure, clucks his tongue, and says all the right things when he tells you the bad news, like an oncologist with really dirty hands, but trust me, he doesn’t take it personally. Instead he takes Visa or MasterCard.”

“I didn’t go to law school to be a mechanic.”

“Yeah, but Atticus Finch was fiction and Darrow is dead. Ow.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Your self-righteous whining is starting my tooth to aching.”

“Good. Want me to give it a twist?”

That’s how we left it, with my tooth throbbing and the cracks in our relationship starting to show. And the truth was, I didn’t understand for certain where the new tension was coming from. I was the same cynical, opportunistic asshole I had always been. Since when had it bugged her so?

I thought about that some, and then, back in my office, I thought some more about Detective Gleason. There was something in the story he had told, in that desolate building and futile department in which now he worked, something in the way he defended the killing of Red Rover, something in the way he protested Beth’s insinuations about Seamus Dent’s sexuality. And somehow it was all contained in that last sentence, in that very last word.