Cast of Shadows - v4 (17 page)

“Not a bother,” she said. “Alice, we’ll be back in fifteen.”

Up and down the two parallel hallways, Mary Mankoff quizzed Davis and Joan on their fictional biographies. They had a son who was seven, and they were doctors who were hoping to set up a general practice here in the country.

“Really? Well, out here in the country, you can never say no to a couple of new doctors.”

Joan tried to get the principal in the rhythm of answering questions instead of asking them, and Davis thought Joan sounded appropriately curious about such things as Iowa tests and the percentage of graduates from the high school that go on to university. Principal Mankoff even took them briefly into a classroom, opening the door quietly to a few tiny turning heads. She gave an apologetic wave to the teacher, who returned it with a curious but understanding nod.

Principal Mankoff counted off statistics on her hand — rank in the state, reading scores, ACT averages from the high school — and as they approached the office again, Davis wondered if he’d have to ask specifically, when they stopped at a narrow hall he hadn’t noticed.

“Let me just show you the library,” Mary Ann said. “We’re quite proud of it.”

The room was, indeed, large for a grade school, with books arranged across shelves along every wall, and also on four freestanding stacks that filled up one half. On the other side, fifteen or so children sat on tiny rectangles of carpet as the librarian read them a story about teenaged detectives foiling a smuggling plot. Mary Ann whispered that a locally famous author had donated the library. “He built one for the high school as well,” she said.

They stood for another moment as Davis and Joan pretended to marvel at the built-in shelving and brass plaques counting off the Dewey Decimals. Joan nudged Davis when her eye caught something in one of the stacks. She pointed and he saw it, too: a sign that read
BRIXTON SCHOOL ARCHIVES
.

Another teacher, a woman who, Davis presumed, was responsible for these children the other seven periods of the day, tugged at Mary Ann’s elbow. “Can I talk to you a second, Mary? About the assembly Friday?” Mary Ann excused herself and she and the teacher left through the narrow door to the hall.

Davis and Joan walked over to the archive shelves, and Joan quickly skimmed with her eyes and fingers the years on dozens of leather scrapbooks. Davis did the math in his head — Justin’s age today, Jimmy Spears’s date of birth — adding and subtracting from the current year in adjacent columns.

“There. That one. First grade.”

Joan spread the blue volume across the flannel-skirted lap she had forged sitting on her heels and flipped through the acid-free pages as Davis stooped behind her. Each page held, in pasted photo corners, a pair of class pictures, the students divided up by teacher. Unlike the class photos Davis remembered from his own school days, the children were not lined up on expandable bleachers, with short kids segregated on the gym floor. Instead, each class was represented by twenty individual head shots, with a similar picture of the teacher. Underneath each class was a typed listing of the students by row, cut out with scissors and taped to the page (carelessly, with yellowing Scotch tape), and Joan and Davis scanned the years and names together. She spotted it first:

Preston, P.; Spears, J.; Thoms, L.; Yaley, L.…

“There.” She pointed.

Davis looked at the photo. He checked the name. He looked at Joan. She shrugged. Young Jimmy looked nothing like seven-year-old Justin.

“Sorry for leaving you like that.” Principal Mankow stood over them. “I see you found our school history. That’s Jimmy Spears. There. Second from left. The football player.”

“Very interesting,” Davis said.

“You must be proud of him,” Joan said.

“We all are,” Principal Mankow said.

A half hour later, at a restaurant called, with extreme lack of irony, the Brixton Diner, Davis and Joan took opposite sides of a window booth, sliding themselves across benches made from nearly equal amounts of old red vinyl and blue vinyl patches. Weiss was to meet them here at 1 p.m., which was now.

The door frame was crowned by a bracket with a bell, and Joan and Davis, the only customers for the time being despite the lunch hour, turned together toward its tinny chimes. The man who entered was very short, with most of that lack of height in legs rather than torso, cursing him with a bit of a waddle. He was also hairy in undesirable places — up from his collar and out from his cuffs — but less so on the top of his pink and freckled head, seen through the thin mesh of his baseball cap.

“Hello, Judge Forak?” Rick Weiss said, shaking hands.

Joan squinted curiously at Davis but didn’t say anything.

“Hello,” Davis said.

He took a seat next to Davis. “What did you find out? Should I notify my banker to expect a deposit?” He said it with a derisive snort that suggested to Davis that Weiss didn’t have a bank, much less a banker.

“He’s not our guy,” Joan said.

The bottom half of the man’s face went slack while the top half became scarlet and taut. “What do you mean? You sent around a bad drawing of Jimmy Spears and I showed you where to find Jimmy Spears.”

“It’s like she told you,” Davis said. “He’s not our guy.”

Rick Weiss slapped his palms on the tabletop and pressed his fingers hard against the Formica until his cuticles were bleached. “You’re trying to rip me off.”

“It’s not like that,” Joan said.

“I knew it! There ain’t no money.”

“If we were planning to rip you off, would we even bother to meet you here?” Davis was disgusted with having to defend himself. He muttered the next at low volume, knowing it should matter, sure that it wouldn’t. “This is a courtesy.”

“It’s him. It’s Spears, I’m telling you.” Ricky was fighting the temptation to yell, and so his words came out in a hoarse cry. He was blaspheming the local hero. He produced a piece of paper with a picture of Spears, clipped from the Brixton weekly paper, pasted next to one of the sketches Davis had posted on the Internet. “Jimmy’s capable of just about anything. I know the man, known him since we were kids. He thinks he’s special.
Entitled
. You should hear the stories some of the girls used to tell about him. What he forced them to do. How he took advantage because he was this big football star, even back then. High school football is big around here, and that fame, I think it went to his head. Made him psycho or somethin’. Like I said, you should hear the stories. I could get some girls I know to tell you firsthand…”

Davis didn’t want to hear stories. “Jimmy just isn’t the man we’re looking for.” He took a fifty-dollar bill he’d preplanted in his shirt pocket and slid it across the table. “For your trouble.”

Weiss crumpled the fifty in his fist as if he was about to throw it back. He didn’t. “Screw you, Forak.” He pushed himself up from the booth and waddled toward the door. He pointed at Joan. “And screw you too, bitch!” The waitress behind the counter cringed as the door slammed and tinkled behind him. She looked at Davis and mouthed an apology. On behalf of the whole community, he assumed.

That night, back in Lincoln, at the Marriott by the airport, in the bar, under a baseball game on TV, Joan also told Davis she was sorry.

“Sorry?” Davis wondered aloud. “For what?”

“I wanted it to be him,” she said. “I thought it could be him.”

A gulp of the Macallan leaked down Davis’s throat so quickly he didn’t even taste it. He took another sip and let it sit on his tongue. “I didn’t. I mean, I wanted it to be him, but didn’t think there was much of a chance.”

“Seriously?”

Davis shrugged. “Football star by day, rapist/killer by night. It seemed a little far-fetched. The guy who killed AK was a sick bastard. Not everyone’s All-American.”

“Varsity practice is where you find the sickest bastards around, in my experience,” she said. “But if you thought it was a dead end, why are we here?” Davis peeked to see if she was smiling. She was.

He had hoped this lead would be the one, of course, but he realized now Jimmy Spears wasn’t the only reason he had come all this way. He realized now that it was for a moment with her like this — alone, in secret, a little bit illicit — in a strange bar, miles from home, an elevator ride from a pair of rented hotel rooms — no smoking, king-sized — one in his name, one in hers.

“You never know,” was all he said.

To Davis, Joan looked ready to confess, though to what, he could only guess. He had imagined the two of them intimately together — frequently, in fact — but allowed himself only glimpses before banishing the image and reproaching himself. His dreams brought to life other boys and men who must have had her: high school infatuations, college toys, med school flings. He envied them all. And he hated the monster that had taken Joan in Houston, hated it almost as much as the thing that had stolen his daughter from him.

“Speaking of sick bastards,” she said, “have you looked at Justin’s psych reports?”

The “bastard” crack stung. He understood Joan’s sense of humor, loved it even, but since she’d first confronted him with evidence of Justin’s unique sort of illegitimacy, he’d been defensive about flippant references to the secret they kept, and despite her willingness to come along on this trip, a little hurt at the degree to which Joan’s efforts as accomplice continued to be reluctant, and even sarcastic. Plus he felt responsible for Justin. Paternal, in a way.

And he asked himself again,
Why is she here?
He considered the question when she agreed to come along, then again on the plane after they had wordlessly negotiated a sharing agreement for the armrest, their forearms pressed together.

“What about it?”

“You’re not concerned?”

“He’s a kid. Kids get in trouble.”

“Some kids do, yes. That’s why we call them ‘troubled.’ ”

“What are you getting at?”

“Aren’t you at all concerned that Justin has the genes of a killer and, at
seven years old,
already exhibits many of the warning signs of being a violent person himself?”

“Are you trying to say we made a monster?”

“Well, first of all, knock off the ‘we’ shit, Kemosabe.” Joan gestured for another Cabernet. “Second of all, aren’t
you
worried about it? Christ, Davis. Look at what’s happening. This kid is messed up.”

“Feh. Nature. Nurture. There hasn’t been a single cloning study that shows a hereditary link for the kind of violence you’re talking about. Genetics have nothing to do with it, Joan. If there’s ever been a killer who had a killer for a son, it’s because the child learned the behavior from his pop. Or because their socioeconomic circumstances were similar. Not because he scored the evil gene.”

“Stealing. Fascination with fire. Cruelty toward animals. That’s three of a kind, Davis. Jackpot.”

“You won’t convince me with mixed gambling metaphors.” He pinched his eyes. “Cruelty to animals? What are you talking about?”

“The neighbor’s dog died.”

“And?”

“The mother thinks he might have had something to do with it.”

“What about Morrow?”

“He’s not so sure. Justin denies it. Morrow likes him. Thinks he’s just bored.”

“Well, there you go. Probably a coincidence.”

“How can you be so flip about this?”

“His own psychologist isn’t worried.”

“And how worried do you think Morrow would be if he knew the truth about Justin?”

Davis’s glass was still half full of whiskey but he had the bartender’s attention so he ordered another round. The drinks were sipped more or less in silence and without regard for the man with the mustache and the expensive suit and the tiny leather notebook sitting alone at the table farthest from the door but in a chair with a good view of the bar.

They walked to Joan’s room and stood outside it for a long moment, as if something might be decided there, as if either one of them could change the entire trajectory of their lives with a smile, a raised eyebrow, an embarrassed laugh.

“Who’s Judge Forak?” Joan asked, and their eyes became tethered long enough for both of them to be comfortable with it.

“I have no idea,” Davis said. He laughed with a nervous release.

“Hunh,” Joan said, turning a few degrees toward the door, but letting her eyes float in her head, locked to his face like a compass to north.

“Good night, Joan,” Davis said finally.

“Good night.”

“He’s not giving you the money?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Rick Weiss hurled himself into the back of a kitchen chair and its legs belched against the linoleum. “He’s an asshole. An asshole that’s trying to rip us off.” He slapped the underside of the table with his knees.

“But it’s him, right? Jimmy Spears? Jimmy’s the guy he’s looking for?”

“Of course it’s Jimmy,” Rick said. “A rich judge like him don’t come all this way just to say no thanks. He could’ve done that on the computer.” He pushed aside the mail in dull number 10 envelopes and opened up the September 20
Sports Illustrated,
paging through it without glimpsing a single photo or headline. Peg, his wife, sat down across from him, her pale face lined and worried, but not yet betraying that she had already run up a six-thousand-dollar debt with Visa that she had planned on paying with the bounty on Jimmy Spears’s head.

“Then why won’t he pay?” Peg squealed.

“Asshole,” Rick said.

“Asshole!” Peg said.

“Fucking crooked judge!” Rick said.

Every Saturday night, Ricky and Peg watched a TV show that profiled bank robbers and murderers and molesters on the lam, and twice they phoned in tips that, privately, they knew to be thin as 20-weight oil. When Peg came across the composite Davis had created at a crime stoppers Web site, however, she was certain they were clutching a pot of gold with both hands.

“Who does this look like to you?” Peg had asked that day, handing him the printout.

“Hell,” Rick said, curious, having not yet read the vague paragraph Davis had written to accompany his query. “That’s Jimmy.”