Mark Costello - Big If

“She isn’t always stable mentally,” said Boone, two hands on the file in his lap. “She needs to be focused. She’s funny with her lies. She’ll admit to murder if you phrase it right, but not to the little things. She’s like a child, only worse. Kids can’t tell the difference between truth and lies, between what happened and what should have happened, fact and wish get all confused. That’s why you can’t polygraph a child.”

Christopher came back from the store carrying a white plastic bag. He got in, threw the bag on the seat. They took a side road out of Willingboro. There were signs along the road for deer, the leaping silhouette, shot up with little holes, rusting from the holes.

Boone said, “She was a minor Bureau source, not the mother lode. She did names and faces — adequate for background. The Bureau talked to the judge, got her home confinement, electronic monitoring, the ankle radio. The Bureau says her head was fairly clear at first, but you know how it is with these historical informants — they sit around, all cooped up, getting grilled by teams of strangers about what happened on a certain date a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, until finally they lose track of what day it is today. The Bureau sucked her dry and we did a deal. We gave them two spent dope informants and they gave us Little Flower. One of the dopers died of OD after that and the Bureau tried to renegotiate. They said, ‘You never told us he was an OD candidate.’”

Christopher said, “We were like, ‘ Duuh .’”

Boone said, “I told ’em, ‘Hell, the girl you gave me doesn’t even know what year it is.’ Last deal I do with them whiny bastards. I let my guy, Brian Ryan, run her for a while. These kids need experience and I feel a duty as a mentor. Bri did a nice job and then I figured I’d give Christopher some hands-on, which was a bit of a bum deal, I’m afraid, because she’s really going soft on us.”

“I don’t mind,” said Christophe, driving. “I learn from everything.”

“Tell Vi about the time you caught her lying on the rock.”

“It started with Bri.”

“But you’re the one who caught her. Tell the story.”

Christopher said, “She was obsessed with the EM unit on her ankle. When the Bureau got her home confinement, Probation came out and installed the hardware at her house. They explained it to her, and she kept explaining it to Brian like it was the seventh wonder of the world, this whole moronic explanation. ‘The ring on my ankle is a radio, Brian.’ He’s sitting there, listening to this. ‘My ankle radio sends a weak signal to the receiver in my phone jack.’ Bri is nodding, yeah, whatever, Little Flower. She’s says, ‘The weakness of the signal is the key. It will carry one hundred feet, no more. If I get more than one hundred feet from the unit in my jack, the absence of the signal will cause my jack to dial Colorado, where a mainframe will page my PO in Portsmouth. He will get the page, call my house to see if there’s a malfunction, and if I don’t answer, he’ll show up here or maybe ask the cops to send a car. If the cops don’t find me here, my PO will notify the judge’s clerk to get an absconder warrant. The warrant is the point of no return. Once they find me, boom, I go to Memphis.’ Poor Brian must’ve heard this rap twenty times. It was like hearing a child explain thunder.”

“It’s not that she lies exactly,” Boone said. “Half her stuff is on the money, half is in her head. Our job is to figure out which half. She gave Christopher a murder plot last month.”

“Said she knew a man named Gib,” said Christopher, “an ex-biker, who knew another man. She said this other man worked in a factory where they mill casino chips, Bally’s, Harrah’s, and, I think, Trump’s. Said the man had skimmed and stolen a million bucks in chips a little at a time from the assembly line. The chips were buried in a field outside Troy, New York. The thief himself had disappeared. Two brothers had killed each other looking for the chips. Hoodlums dug the fields at night, playing hunches. This whole vignette. She was great on detail, that’s what half-convinced me.”

Boone said, “My kids are good young agents, Vi. They spent twenty man-hours running down the lead, and it checked out, to a point. Yes, there are casinos and they issue chips, and yes, some chips go missing. We found the factory. It’s not in Troy, nowhere near, but there is a Troy and Gib exists, we know this for a fact. Then Christopher was watching cable one night at his place.”

“I saw a rerun movie,” said Christopher. “ Ice Heist . Ben Gazzara, Nipsey Russell, Barbara Eden. I’ve always been a Ben Gazzara fan.”

Vi said, “Let me guess. Casino chips, buried in a field.”

“But not in Troy,” said Boone. “That part was invented. Now, whenever she gives us information we check the TV listings before acting on it.”

They came to a small lake dammed between two hills. At the far end of the lake was a motel cabin court, seven wood-frame cottages on a dirt pullout in the pines. The cabins were dark brown, shingles green with age. Each cabin had a little saggy porch facing the highway and the lake. The road to the cabins was half washed out and deeply rutted, rocks and roots exposed. They parked in front of the last cabin.

“Little Flower’s parents bought this place in ’51,” Boone said. “She says it was really nice when she was a kid. They had perch in the lake, sunnies too, and families came to fish from as far away as Worcester, same families every year. They had their favorite cabins and reserved them in advance. They showed outdoor movies on Saturday at dusk. Don’t get her started on how nice it used to be.”

Vi saw the curtain move in the cabin window. “She knows we’re out here.”

“Yup,” said Boone, relaxing.

“It’s good to let her stew,” said Christopher.

“That’s right,” said Boone.

“The key to Little Flower is to make her think that you already know the answer to your question. If she thinks you don’t know, she’ll go off on a tangent. That’s why we always bring a file when we see her. She thinks we keep the answers in our files. Sometimes Bri forgot to bring a file and he had to stop at Staples, buy an empty folder and some typing paper. He wrote ‘Little Flower: Facts’ on the file, just for the intimidation value.”

Boone said, “That’s exactly right.”

“Another thing we do is sit in the car and talk before going in. She sees us and assumes we’re talking about her. She thinks we must know plenty, if we have this much to say.”

Vi saw the curtain move again.

“Lake is pretty,” murmured Christopher.

“Yes it is,” said Boone.

“I understand they dredged it.”

“Really?”

Vi said, “I think she’s pretty focused now.”

Boone banged on the cabin door.“Little Flower, Little Flower, it’s Boone Saxon from the Secret Service. Open up.”

They heard a woman’s singsong voice. “I’m in the shower—”

They waited on the porch. Vi saw fallen tree limbs in the straggle grass, pinecones everywhere, and rusted lawn furniture, separate little groups of chairs and tables in odd parts of the yards, two chairs facing each other over by the road, three chairs in conversation by a flaking silver propane tank. Vi didn’t hear a shower in the cabin.

Boone said, “Let us do the talking, Vi, and remember: don’t mention Erie, bowling trophies, or how beautiful these cabins used to be.”

“And the date,” whispered Christopher.

“That’s a good point — avoid the topic altogether, Vi.”

“What’s up with the date?”

Boone said, “Her home confinement time ran out last month. Legally she’s free. Probation came out and took her bracelet off. We came in as they were leaving and put a new one on. It connects to nothing, of course. We never said it did. On the other hand, we never said it didn’t.”