Dance for the Dead (2 page)

Judge Kramer felt like
applauding. His finger had been hovering over the fast fwd button,
but he knew that he wouldn’t have let it strike. Either you
listened to all of it or you were just another politician in a
costume.

Ambrose went on. “All
right. Now, Timmy, we have to talk about some unpleasant things, and
I’ll try to keep it short. What happened on the afternoon of
July twenty-third two years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

Schoenfeld prompted. “That
was the day when they died.”

“Oh,” said Timmy.
“Mona and I went to the shoe store after school. Usually we
came home at three, but that day we didn’t. After we bought the
shoes we walked in and everything had changed. I remember Mona opened
the door, and then she stopped and went, ‘Uh!’ Like that.
Then she made me wait outside while she went in alone. She was inside
a long time. I thought it was a surprise, and she was telling my
parents I was there so they could hide. So I went around to the side
of the house and looked in the window. And I saw them.” His
voice cracked, and the judge could hear that he was trying to keep
the sob from coming out of his throat in front of all these strange
adults, so it just stayed there, with the muscles clamping it in
place. Judge Kramer had heard a lot of testimony that had to be
forced out through that kind of throat, so he had become expert.

“They were covered with
blood. I never knew so much blood came out of a person. It was
everywhere. The walls, the floor. I could see Mona was in the next
room on the telephone. Then she hung up and walked into my bedroom. I
ran around to that window, and it was broken. All my stuff was gone.”

“What do you mean
‘stuff’?”

“My toys, my clothes, my
books, everything. They stole my stuff. She kept looking around my
room and frowning.”

“What then?”

“She looked up and saw me.
She ran out of the house and grabbed me. She took me to the car and
we drove away.”

“What did she say about
it?”

“She started to say that
my parents were called away, but I told her I saw them.”

“What did she say then?”

“She said that awful
things sometimes happen, and a bunch of stuff about how they wanted
me to be safe more than anything. I didn’t hear a lot of it
because I was crying and wasn’t really listening.”

“Where did she take you?”

“She had a friend. A man.
He used to come to the house to pick her up sometimes. She said he
was a lawyer. She took me to his house.”

“For the record, do you
know his name?”

“Dennis.”

“Was his last name
Morgan?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the name of
the street?”

“No. It wasn’t
anyplace I ever was before. We drove a long time on a big road, and
then at the end there were a lot of turns. By then it was night.”

“What happened there?”

“She put me to sleep on
the couch, but I could hear them talking in the kitchen.”

“What did they say?”

“She told him about my
parents. She said it looked like an abuttar.”

Abattoir, the judge translated.
No wonder Nina Coffey was all over Ambrose. This kid had looked in
his own window and seen his parents – or the ones he knew as
parents – lying on the floor butchered, and Ambrose was asking
him about spankings and dental hygiene. The man was a dangerous
idiot.

“What did he say?”

“He said she did the right
thing to call the police, and the wrong thing to leave. Then she said
a lot of things. She said it looked as though whoever came in wasn’t
even looking for them. They were looking for me.”

“What made her say that?”

“They broke into my room
at a time when I was usually home and my parents weren’t. She
said it looked like they tried to make my parents tell them
something. And then the only things they took were my stuff, and all
the pictures.”

“What pictures were
those?”

“My father used to take a
lot of pictures. Like when we were at the beach…” Here
it comes, thought the judge. The sob forced its way out, and there
was a squealing sound, and then the tears came in volume.

“Come on, Timmy,”
said Nina Coffey. “Let’s go take a break.”

Amid the sounds of chairs
scraping and feet hitting the floor, Ambrose said redundantly, “Let
the record show that we recessed at this point.”

There was another click, and the
recording began again. “We will continue now. It is six minutes
after eleven,” said the stenographer.

Ambrose said, “Timmy, I’m
sorry to ask so many sad questions.”

“It’s okay,”
said the little voice. There was no conviction behind it.

“You were at the lawyer’s
house. They didn’t agree, right?”

“He told her to go to the
police. Mona said they would just make me stay in a place where I
wouldn’t be safe. They talked for a long time, and I fell
asleep.”

“What happened when you
woke up?”

“The lawyer – Dennis
– he was talking on the telephone. I couldn’t hear what
he was saying. When he hung up, he and Mona talked some more. He gave
her some money. He had a lot of money inside of books on the
bookshelf, and some in his pocket. He gave her that too.”

“Then what?”

“The phone rang and Dennis
answered it, and talked to somebody else. Then we all got in the car
and Dennis drove. This time we drove all night and all the next day,
almost. Then we got to Jane’s house.”

“What is Jane’s full
name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where does she live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me about her.”

“We went to her house. She
put us in a room upstairs, and we went to sleep. When I woke up, she
made us breakfast. Mona was already awake.”

“I mean about Jane. What
was she like?”

“I was afraid of her at
first.”

“Why?”

“She was tall and skinny
and had long black hair, and she seemed to listen to people with her
eyes.”

Ambrose paused. “I see.
What did she do?”

“She and Mona talked for a
long time. Then I heard her say she would make us disappear.”

“Is that why you thought
she was scary?”

“No… maybe.”

“How long did you stay
with Jane?”

“A long time. I think Mona
said it was three weeks, but it seemed like a year. Then we all got
in Jane’s car and she drove us to Chicago.”

“What did she do then?”

“She stayed for a day or
two, and then one morning I woke up and she was gone.”

“Was Mona surprised?”

“No. Mona acted like it
was normal, and didn’t talk about her again. Mona and I lived
in Chicago after that. Mona was Diana Johnson, and I was her son. She
wanted me to be Andrew, but I didn’t like it, so I got to stay
Tim.”

“How did you live?”

“Like people do.”

“I mean, did Mona have a
job – did she go to work?”

“Yes. While I was in
school.”

“They called you Tim
Johnson at school?”

“Yes.”

“When did you start –
what grade?”

“Kindergarten. I had
already been in kindergarten, so it was the second time.”

“And you’re in the
second grade now?”

“Yes.”

“Were you afraid in
Chicago?”

“At first I was. It was
different. I was afraid the bad people would get Mona, and then I
would be all alone. But after a while I made some friends, and got
used to it, and I didn’t think about that part much anymore. I
was sad sometimes.”

“And Mona pretended to be
your mother for over two years?”

“I guess so.”

“What else did she do? Did
she still see anybody you knew from Washington?”

“No. She used to talk on
the phone a lot.”

“To whom? Jane?”

“No. Dennis.”

“Did you ever hear what
she said?”

“Once in a while, but it
wasn’t really okay. She would go in her bedroom and talk to
him. Sometimes she would tell me what she said.”

“Then a little over a week
ago something changed, didn’t it?”

“Yes. Everything.”

“You found out who you
were, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Ambrose.”
It was Schoenfeld’s resonant voice again. “Maybe we
should let Timmy tell us exactly what happened in his own words from
here on. I believe you’ve done an admirable job in laying the
groundwork, but now we’re in new territory, and I have no
objection to letting Mr. Phillips speak freely and tell us whatever
he can that will aid in the possible prosecutions.” Of course
not, thought the judge. Schoenfeld could be magnanimous. He had
already established that Timmy was Mr. Phillips, and nothing else
that anyone said or did from there on was of any consequence for
Schoenfeld.

“Thank you,” said
Ambrose. “Timmy, tell us what happened.”

“I came home from school,
and Mona was there, and so was Dennis the lawyer, and so was Jane.
Dennis said he had spent two years trying to figure out why anyone
would want to hurt my parents and me, and now he knew.”

“This was in Chicago?”

“Yeah,” said Timmy.
“He told me that when my mother died they had special doctors
look at her, and that she had never been to the hospital to have a
baby. He said he got to look at a copy of the birth certificate they
had at my school, and it wasn’t real. He said I wasn’t
adopted. They just drew a picture of a birth certificate and said it
was mine. He said that the reason they did that was because they
loved me very much and had always wanted a little boy.”

Judge Kramer stopped the tape
and backed it up to listen to the last exchange again. It was a hell
of a way to explain a kidnapping. In spite of everything, he had to
admire Dennis Morgan. After what he had seen, this little boy was
going to be an annuity for the psychiatrists for the next fifty
years. There was no reason to make it worse.

The tape kept running. “Then
he told you about your other parents?”

“Yes. Mr. and Mrs.
Phillips. They died when I was one.”

“And your grandma?”

“I knew about her already,
but I didn’t know she had died like all my parents. She had
been dead for three years.”

“Did Mr. Morgan tell you
that she had left you some money?”

“Yeah. He said that when
Mr. and Mrs. Phillips died she put all the family money in a big pot
and said it could only go to me. And when I was gone she hired a
company to take care of the money and keep looking for me forever.”

“Did she say what they
were called?”

“Trusty.”

Judge Kramer prayed that Ambrose
wasn’t about to drag an eight-year-old on a field trip through
a morass of legal terminology. What could the child possibly know
about trustees and executors?

“What happened last week
to change that? Did he tell you?”

“He said that the Trusty
had gotten tired of looking and waiting, and they were going to say I
wasn’t alive anymore. So he called Jane again.”

“I’m very curious
about this Jane. I understand about Mona. She was your nanny, and she
loved you. The lawyer, Mr. Morgan, was a very close friend of Mona’s,
right?”

“Yeah. They were going to
get married when the people came and got my parents. Then they
couldn’t because we’d get caught. That was why he looked
so hard to find out where I was really supposed to be – so Mona
could go back to being Mona and marry him.”

“But why was Jane doing
it? Did she know your parents?”

“No. Mona had to tell her
about them that time when we went to her house. Mona thought they
worked for the government, so the people who hurt them must be spies.
It took Jane a long time to find out that my parents didn’t
work for the government.”

“Then Jane was Mona’s
friend?”

“I don’t think so.
Dennis was the one who called her.”

Judge Kramer could imagine the
F.B.I, agent. He was going to make his career sorting all this out.
Not the least interesting question was why a prominent Washington
defense attorney had the telephone number of a woman who made people
disappear. They would be going over the record of Morgan’s
former clients right now to see if there were any on their Most
Wanted List.

Even Ambrose seemed to sense
that he had crossed the trail of an unfamiliar creature. “The
lawyer knew her?” he repeated. “Did he pay her?”

“No. Dennis said he tried,
but she had decided that so many people loved me that I must be a
fine boy.”

“Hmmmm…”

Judge Kramer had a vision of
Ambrose’s raised eyebrows, as he had seen them during
cross-examinations.

“Did anybody say anything
else about her?”

“Dennis. He said that from
then on we had to do everything that Jane said, exactly. It didn’t
matter what anybody else said, we should listen to her.”

“So she was the boss.”

“He said that he had done
everything he could to find out things, but the only way to solve
this was to walk into court and surprise everybody and say who I was.
He said the bad people knew I must be alive, so they would be
expecting me to come. Jane was the one who knew how to get us past
them.”

“So you all took an
airplane to California?”

“No. Jane said we had to
drive all the way or the bad people might see us. Every day we got a
new car. She would go to a place where they rented them, and then
drive all day and then leave it and rent another one. Then we were in
California.”

“What then? Did you stay
in a hotel?”

“No. Jane said that if
people were after me, they would be watching hotels near the
courthouse, because they would be expecting us to do that. So we went
to the courthouse right away.”

“What time was it?”

“About dinnertime. Jane
opened the lock on an office and we stayed there all night. I fell
asleep on a couch.”

“What happened when you
woke up?”

“I heard Dennis come into
the office. He had been out in the building by himself. He said they
had pulled a trick on us, and now we had to go to a different
building. So we ran out and got into our car and drove again. Jane
said on the way that it didn’t feel right.”