The Judgment (26 page)

“Hey, Charley!” he yelled. “How’s the girlfriend? She recover from the party yet?”

I forced a smile and nodded as I waved back at him.

Then he leaned back behind the steering wheel, waved again as the light changed to green, and pulled away. Would you call that impersonating an officer of the law, or just refusing to accept retirement? Either way, it seemed sort of sick. He couldn’t be much over sixty, maybe sixty-two,
having spent his whole working life behind the wheel of a Kerry County Police patrol car. He’d probably been back at the station, hanging out with his former fellow officers, or maybe at lunch with them. They’d get tired of having him around soon, and he might wind up as a security guard someplace in Port Huron. If I’d asked him how he liked retirement, he would have told me it was terrific. They ought to have mandatory psychiatric care as part of the retirement package.

I pulled into the office parking lot and found it right there waiting for me—a Ford van, blue but otherwise like the brown one that had made life miserable for me that morning. Who knows? Maybe they’d just given it a quick paint job. I jumped out of my car and walked over to it, determined to have it out with them, no matter who they were—tekkies, Mayor’s Squad, it didn’t matter to me at that moment.

It was empty. Nobody in the cab, and although there was equipment of some kind in the back, nobody was concealed there. Confused, still annoyed, I trudged up the stairs and walked into my office.

Mrs. Fenton pointed behind me to the couch. “This gentleman has been waiting for you for about fifteen minutes.” Something in her manner said that she approved of him.

He advanced toward me, a small man in his fifties, neatly dressed, what you might even call dapper.

Offering me his card with a modest smile, he said, “A mutual friend told me you might have need of my services.” He smiled again, looking like a gerbil with a secret.

The card read
ALONZO BRAGG, COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY SPECIALIST
. Beneath that was a Detroit phone number but no address.

I frowned, unable to think for a moment what a communications security specialist might be.

“I understand you had a surprise visit from Michigan Bell yesterday afternoon. They may have left some equipment
behind. Perhaps you might like me to look? They can be quite forgetful sometimes.”

It had to be Mark Conroy who had sent him over. “This mutual friend,” I said, “have you looked around his place?”

“Oh yes, this morning. It was very messy, bits and pieces left all over. He was sure you would have a similar problem.”

“Certainly, Mr. Bragg, do what you can.”

He brought up his equipment case, laid it on the coffee table, and unpacked it. When he finished, he had outfitted himself with a kind of electronic stethoscope that ended in a wand that could be pointed anywhere he liked. The entire contraption was powered by a battery pack he strapped around his waist. He smiled at me and nodded.

“Ready,” he said.

“Then go right ahead.”

He did, moving quite professionally and thoroughly through the room, covering it with the wand as he waved it this way and that.

Mrs. Fenton watched, fascinated by the entire operation. As he approached her desk, she stood up and moved away, taking a place beside me.

“He’s the most fascinating man,” she whispered. “We were having a conversation about astronomy before you came in, actually about the planets, the possibility of life on them. All very well informed. None of this UFO nonsense,” she added firmly. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was smitten.

He pulled her phone apart and took out a little half-inch dot of a receiver and transmitter, all in one. He found one just like it in my phone, too, but made sure that my entire office was otherwise clean. When he’d finished, he held them out in the palm of his hand for my inspection. They seemed impossibly small to do all that they were supposed to do.

“These are
very
nice,” said Mr. Bragg, “much better than that Brazilian junk I usually find. Would you mind if
I kept them?” He was almost giddy with anticipation.

“I have no use for them.”

“What about that item in the corner?” He pointed to the dish antenna.

“I’m holding that for the owners.”

“You never know.” He gave me an amused little smile then, as if he’d made quite a joke. “Now, I was told there’s also some question about your place of abode.”

“I suppose there is.”

He followed me over to my apartment building in his blue van, did a sweep of my three rooms and kitchen, and pronounced them clean. We walked together back down to the parking lot, and he explained that he really hadn’t expected to find anything in my apartment.

“How much do I owe you, Mr. Bragg?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Our mutual friend has already taken care of it.”

T
he next day took me by surprise. It was Saturday. What with running from the tekkies, trying to free that lame-brained Evans kid from the fell clutches of the county cops, and all of the attendant difficulties with Sue Gillis, I had lost track of time—or the day of the week, anyway.

I got to the office a little after nine and was surprised to find the door locked. That meant Mrs. Fenton hadn’t arrived yet; Well, that seemed kind of funny. I let myself in and checked the answering machine for messages. There weren’t any. If Mrs. Fenton was sick, she would have phoned in by now. She may not have been very likable—her constant air of fussy disapproval sometimes annoyed me—but she was dependable.

So I made the coffee and settled down to read the newspapers. I hadn’t been at that very long when the telephone rang. Expecting it to be Mrs. Fenton, I was a little surprised when I recognized Stash Olesky’s voice at the other end of the line. Hadn’t we finished our business? Or was this something else?

“I tried you at home, Charley. Didn’t expect to find you at the office today. I hope it’s nothing too pressing.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“You were coming over to our place today—remember? The Michigan-Michigan State game?”

I glanced up to the top of the page of the
Free Press.

My God, it was Saturday, wasn’t it? No wonder Mrs. Fenton wasn’t around. “To tell you the truth, Stash, what with all that’s going on, I’d forgotten about it completely.”

“Listen,” he said, suddenly serious, “I hope you’re not holding that business with the Evans kid against me. No hard feelings?”

“No, no, no, certainly not. I’ve pulled too many fast ones myself to be put out by that. And I must say that was a pretty speedy little maneuver. Your timing was impeccable.”

“Oh, you mean the Annual Conference of Southeastern Michigan County Judges? That was just something I’d be more aware of than you would be.” He paused. “But how about it, Charley? Should be a nice little TV party. Not a mob of people, just a few. Some of them you know, and some of them you don’t. Come on by. You’ll have a good time. Lorraine’s cooking up a big spread for halftime.”

“Yeah, well, Stash, the only thing is that when we made that date, I thought Sue would be available, and she’s not.”

“The Evans thing, huh?”

“No, we got past that. But they’ve got her back on those gruesome child murders.”

“I thought they took her off. Sent her home.”

“Yeah, but they brought her back. It’s a pretty small force, as you well know.”

“Okay, then, Sue can’t make it. I might have to run out anytime, myself. And I hope that’s how it works out. It’ll mean there’s a break in the case. But what do women know about football, right? Come without her.”

“I’ve got a conference with a client at eleven.”

“Just so you’re here by one. That’s kickoff time. One o’clock, Charley. See you then. You know the address.”

And before I could offer any more excuses, he hung up.

The client I was meeting was Mark Conroy, and experience told me that when somebody really begins to open up, they soon find they have a lot more to tell. And if he didn’t, then I had a few questions that might stimulate
his memory. But what we really had to talk about was his proposed course of action, what could be done and what couldn’t. He would be trying to persuade me to come along and take part in this plan he’d worked out with Tolliver. I’d be trying to persuade him to drop it completely.

Conroy would be driving out to Pickeral Point, alone, and coming to my office. Whether we’d talk here or not, I wasn’t sure. Once bitten, twice shy. After all, I’d been out of the office more than eighteen hours. Somebody could have paid another visit during the night and rewired the place.

I closed up the
Free Press
and put it aside, then I hauled out a clean pad from the drawer and began making notes for my meeting with Conroy. About halfway through, my mind drifted off to more subjective matters. It bothered me a little that I had lost track of the day of the week. Was I such a workaholic that I just trudged off automatically to the office like some sort of programmed automaton? I hoped not. But then, this Conroy thing was big. Big politically, big news, and big in the sense that it was going to be damned tough to beat. It was going to take all I could give it, and that meant seven days a week.

That wasn’t the question, though. For the better part of a year, my life had revolved around Sue Gillis and the office. The man said that what you needed for happiness was love and work. I had both, so why wasn’t I happier? I’d never really thought much about it before. Since I’d moved up here to Pickeral Point, I’d been so busy putting my life back in order that I hadn’t really noticed how much it had shrunk in the process. In the old days the booze had fueled a manic cycle that had lasted just about two decades. A long time. Take away the booze, and there was sure to have been a downturn. I didn’t regret that. I made up for it by hard work, trying to build up this small-town practice so that it would support me, pay Mrs. Fen-ton’s salary, and the office rent.

And, perhaps against all odds, I had succeeded in coming
back from the abyss. After I’d won the Angel Harwell murder case, the clients came waddling in like a string of ducks on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Dr. Death trial had brought me a fair share of acclaim, too, and then there was the personal injury case I managed to finesse. I didn’t have the gold Rolex and the red Rolls anymore, but I had recovered a large part of my self-esteem, something no one can put a price on. And I was off the booze, one day at a time.

But now, with my confidence mostly restored and with an ongoing involvement with a woman who was first-class all the way, I seemed to want something more. Maybe it was the confinement of small-town life. Maybe I missed the glamor and the glitz of my glory days in Detroit. Or maybe it was something far deeper, something I couldn’t even define. Maybe inside me, somewhere hidden and unknown, there was a time bomb ticking, waiting to explode.

I decided to talk about it to Bob Williams. He was a friend. He was also my professional listener, my sponsor. It might be worth dinner to him. And I’d make it a point to look in on Stash Olesky’s TV football party. My circle of friends and acquaintances was really pretty limited—clients, people in the justice system, and whoever might show up at an AA meeting. There had to be more to life.

My sit-down with Mark Conroy turned out to be a walkabout. Even after Mr. Bragg’s thorough cleanup, Conroy was inclined, just as I was, to be distrustful of my four walls. I wondered how long it would take me to feel completely comfortable in my office again.

“What do you say we take a walk?” I suggested.

He nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

I took him down River Road, and for the first block he seemed moderately interested in a couple of the old mansions on the left. He also kept an eye open for any suspicious vehicles along the way. But gradually he warmed to the subject at hand, and in no time at all he was talking
as freely as he had in his Cadillac the morning before. He had some interesting things to say, though, and for the first time he revealed himself in ways I never would have guessed.

He began by saying he had the feeling that they had failed to convince me on the matter of the mayor’s complicity in the drug trade. I confessed I still had a few doubts on that count.

“What would it take, Sloan?”

“More than an informant you’ve got so tight by the balls he’d be willing to tell you anything you want to hear. How do you know he’s not just buying time to organize his departure? How do you know he hasn’t left town already?”

“Because LeMoyne’s got somebody sitting on him, somebody undercover, somebody we trust.”

“Every minute of the day?”

“Every minute of the day.”

“That must look a little strange. How can you be so sure you can trust him?”

“It isn’t a him, it’s a her, and that’s why it doesn’t look so strange. I trust her because LeMoyne trusts her. Any cop who would put herself in that sort of situation commands trust.”

“For that matter, how do you know Tolliver is on the level?”

I could tell I was getting to him. That was my intention. I wanted him to see the holes in this plan of his. (Plan? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like so much wishful thinking.)

“Sloan, look, I don’t know how it is for you, but in my business there are certain people you trust all the way, and certain people you don’t.”

“You seemed to trust Timmerman up to a point. You trusted the Mouse all the way. Your record isn’t exactly infallible, you know.”

He looked at me darkly and said nothing. Staring ahead then, he just .kept plodding along. While Conroy was not,
as far as I could tell, one of those arrogant individuals who thought himself above criticism, he obviously didn’t like to be reminded of his lapses in judgment. None of us do. It occurred to me at that point that this might turn out to be a very short meeting. I didn’t want that, and so I spoke up.

“Okay, look,” I said, “maybe that wasn’t exactly generous of me. We probably ought to start this discussion all over again.”

“Oh no.” He shook his head emphatically. “You didn’t say anything I haven’t told myself over and over again in these past few weeks.”