Done for a Dime (19 page)

She held out a business card.

“My name is Tina Navigato. I’m a lawyer. I’ve been hired by Toby Marchand’s family to represent him. Could I see him?”

Murchison took the card and read it. Her office was local, but he’d never heard of her. The areas of specialty listed beneath her name were estate planning and probate litigation.

“Come on back.”

He gestured for the desk officer to buzz them through, then led the two women down the long hall past dark offices into the squad room and, beyond it, the interview room in which Toby Marchand waited. Murchison opened the door and stepped back, letting the two women pass. He waited in the doorway, watching as the young man—rumpled, stiff, bleary—glanced up and spotted his mother. His eyes knotted, then his whole face caved in. She rushed toward him, wrapped his head in her arms, and pressed it tight to her midriff, stroking his hair, weeping herself now as she murmured, “Oh, child, my Lord, dear God …” Toby’s hands clung to her back, squeezing the white wool of her cardigan. Tina Navigato glanced away, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as she drew back toward the door and gestured that she wanted to speak with Murchison alone.

“If you’re not going to charge him, I’d appreciate it if you’d let him go home with his mother.”

“He can’t leave town.” Murchison pulled the door shut. Cops in the squad room were peering out at them.

“His mother lives in Oakland.”

“I’ll be clearing the scene in a bit. He can go back there.”

“That’s not his home.”

“He lives with his mother?”

“No. No. She just thinks it would be best—”

“What about the white girl? Ms. Lazarenko.”

Her eyelids narrowed. “I don’t know who you mean.”

“Your client’s girlfriend? Discovered at the scene. She’s at the hospital now, not doing so great.”

She glanced away, puffed her cheeks, then let out little spurts of air. A pensive, self-effacing gesture, childlike, strangely charming.

“I need to speak with my client, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

Her eyes didn’t seem quite as lovely now. The blue in them, the cold came out. “Are we getting off to a bad start here, Detective?”

“Came out wrong. Sorry.”

“As for the house, his father’s, I mean. After what happened, good God. Could
you
stay there?”

“We keep a list of local motels. Hotels.”

“These people aren’t made of money.” Even her voice was frosty. “You do intend to release him.”

“With the understanding he doesn’t leave town. He skips, I’ll swear out the warrant myself.”

She looked away again, shaking her head. “You can’t honestly believe he had anything to do with his father’s murder.”

Murchison smiled. Father, he thought. Came right out, like the honest-to-God truth. Probate lawyer. “The investigation,” he said, “is continuing.”

He opened the door for her again and, without comment, she slipped past him. Closing the door, he turned to find Stluka coming up from behind. He’d calmed down, and a familiar wickedness lit his eyes. His old self.

“That broad in the sweats—she a dyke, or just trying it on for size?”

Across the room, Holmes draped a willowy arm across the shoulders of Sarina Thigpen, soothing her as, with the gentlest pressure, he bent down to ease her along the corridor toward the lobby. Another officer brought Arlie out for his return to the isolation of the holding cells downstairs. Sarina, feet pointing one way, head spinning back, spotted her son and then her whole body pivoted. She reached out across the intervening space as Holmes collected her short, strong body in those arms of his, leaning down still farther to console her in whispers.

Murchison handed Tina Navigato’s card to Stluka. “She’s a lawyer.”

Stluka took it, read, then his jaw dropped.
“Probate litigation?”

Arlie Thigpen, hands cuffed behind his back, bristled at Stluka’s voice and glared back over his shoulder, one last look of defiance before passing through the doorway to the stairs.

“I need to work on the murder book.” Murchison turned toward the detective bureau. “Lot to sort through. Don’t want to overlook anything.”

Stluka was right behind him. “This kid’s already angling for what he’s gonna inherit?”

“I think his mother’s the one who hired her.”

“No,” Stluka said. “No. This means something.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t. I said—”

“Our instincts were solid the first time, Murch. Inside the house?” He tapped the business card against his knuckles. “Fuck me. We spent the last couple hours looking at the wrong son. So-called son. Whatever.”

Part II

Rip, Rig, and Panic

10

R
ichard Ferry had a sense of humor, but he seldom laughed. Too many times, he’d seen men use a laugh as a kind of bluster, a way to pretend they weren’t scared. Even men who knew they were about to die. He sometimes wondered if that wasn’t why jokes were invented in the first place—as a device, a probe, a way to expose a man’s defenses. Make him laugh.

He sat in the rearward employee lounge of an empty suite of offices in an industrial park just off the Napa Highway, a mile north of Rio Mirada. The room was painted in earth tones and furnished with a table, two swivel chairs, a sink, a small fridge, and a microwave, plus a portable TV Ferry had bought himself. He’d lived there secretly for nearly two months, sleeping on the carpeted floor, sponge-bathing before dawn in the Men’s down the hall. He’d been given access by the real estate outfit that leased the offices—in the present case, leased to the phony plumbing company Ferry would identify as his employer if anyone bothered to ask.

Presently, he sat with a young man named Manny, whom he’d found and recruited for this particular job, exerting no small effort doing so. Given recent events, the kid resembled nothing so much as the most regrettable mistake Ferry had ever made.

“Look on the bright side, I guess,” Ferry said, shooting the boy one of his mirthless smiles. “Get sent back to stir, you won’t be just the big tubby firebug everybody lines up to punk. You’ll be a bona fide killa.”

“That’s not funny.” Manny pressed an ice pack against his eye. “And no way I’m going back to stir.”

He was a tall, soft, hulking boy—a man actually, but his mind had never quite made the passage—part white, part Black, the rest Filipino, a walking-talking totem of the U.S. Navy presence at Subic. It gave him one of those go-figure ethnic looks.

“I like that. Power of positive thinking.”

“Stop with the jokes already. This is serious.”

“Gee, you think?” Ferry checked the gun Manny wanted him to get rid of. The “weapon,” as it would now be known. A Smithy .357, two live rounds, four spent. Casings still in the cylinder. Plus a box of hollow-points to dispose of. “Some poor old fool, doesn’t haven’t jack to do with why we’re here, takes four in the back. Every cop in town looking for the guy responsible. What’s so serious?”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

Ferry slammed the cylinder shut. “You need some original material.”

“I’m asking for your help.”

“No, you’re making excuses.”

“Motherfucker hit me.”

Ferry shook his head in dismay. “See what I mean?”

Withdrawing the ice pack, Manny fingered the cold, wet skin left behind. “Yeah, well, I don’t make the fries.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You’re Mr. Fix-it.” He pressed the ice pack to his face again. “Fix it.”

“Come again?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

Manny made a whimpering sigh and leaned over to check his reflection in the chrome of the sink. The eye had swollen shut. Bruising rimmed the socket.

Ferry said, “Think you’ve iced that thing enough?”

“Still all swollen.”

“Yeah, well, you apply cold right off, might’ve had a shot at that. How many hours has it been?”

Manny shrugged and turned back to the portable TV. It was tuned to a Mexican channel,
Televisión Azteca
. This particular program was part of a genre known as
Los Mascarados
, which Manny loved. The heroes were masked wrestlers who served as vigilante avengers. The drama tended toward juvenile, the plots spectacularly stupid—almost as contrived as the wrestling scenes interspersed with the action. If one of the
mascarados
lost in the ring, he was obliged to remove his mask forever. It was considered a great disgrace, being unmasked.

The kid was born Manuel Turpin and by his eighteenth birthday had accomplished even less than your average blubbery, broken-home American teen. One night, that all changed. Using nothing more ambitious than gasoline in five-gallon cans and standard matchbook fuses, he set fire to seven houses under construction on the outskirts of Portland, in a suburban-sprawl subdivision near where his mother’s latest excuse for a boyfriend lived.

Manny was hard pressed to explain even to himself why he’d torched the buildings—only the framing and roof and subfloor were in place, but that meant exposed wood and plenty of cross-draft. Basically, he just liked watching them burn. He felt happy for once, freed of his shame as he stood there in the night, listening as the wood shuddered and screamed like an animal, the flames rippling up the four-by-fours with a palpable hunger—the fury of it, the quivering rays of heat, the mysterious sense of life—all set against the vast dark backdrop of Mount Hood.

It took six weeks to trace it back to him, by which time half the local papers, abetted by the wise use crowd and nameless law enforcement sources, had all but convicted a local cabal of militants, radical anarchist ecotage types. Manny, luxuriating in the wrong headedness of the blame, nonetheless came to find the rhetoric alluring. Especially that one word, repeated like a drumbeat:
terror
. It appealed to him in a way he could explain no better than he could the erotic rush he’d felt, standing out there in the darkness, eye-to-eye with the fire.

I am an instrument of terror.

It gave substance to the emotions roiling inside, a sense of himself as one of a kind. That new sense of calling, it gave him something solid to hold on to when two special agents—tough-talking Mormons wearing flannel suits and clip-on ties—showed up at the house. His mother and her boyfriend had headed off for an impromptu weekend alone on the Columbia River. The FBI claimed an anonymous neighbor had called in the tip, but Manny would always suspect it was his mother’s boyfriend who’d dropped the dime.

Virtually the first thing asked was, “Do you, Manuel—can we call you Manuel?—do you have or have you ever had any affiliations with the environmental underground?”

Manny couldn’t say yes fast enough. So scared he couldn’t stop crying, he secretly hoped, once his name went public, the movement would step forward and claim him as one of their own. They’d done it before; he’d read about it. But the movement disavowed him instantly. The U.S. Attorney, though, was three steps ahead on that one.

“The radical underground prides itself,” the government’s press release said, “on its clandestine communication channels. The suspect himself affirms his connection to environmental terror groups. Those groups have not offered one shred of evidence to disprove that fact.”

The perfect ploy—can’t prove a negative and can’t disprove the possible. And so Manny got to be who he claimed to be and was promptly despised by all. Meanwhile, prosecution and prison inflicted their customary indignities. He did thirty months, reentering society punch-drunk, flinchy, shabbily tattooed.

Unmasked.

Ferry took a sip of orange juice from a carton he’d bought at a nearby minimart, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “How many punked-out jailbird junkies does it take to screw up a perfectly good plan?”

“He
hit
me.”

“He was old. If you’d bothered to look, probably could’ve seen the punch coming from, I dunno, Mars?”

“You weren’t there.”

Ferry rummaged in the paper sack at his feet, broke off a piece of an apple fritter he’d bought at the same minimart, tossed it in his mouth, and chased it with another swallow of OJ. “You’re absolutely right. I wasn’t there. Which brings us back to my favorite question—why were you?”

Ferry had identified the kid, researched him, tracked him down. He’d come across the Portland arson story in an Internet posting. First stop, the mother. She’d married the boyfriend by that time and was apparently unaware, unconvinced, or unconcerned that her new husband had likely been responsible for her son’s imprisonment. Ferry pretended to be a private investigator working for an insurance company that had a claimant pretending his fire had been set by their son. From what Ferry could tell, the mother—source of Manny’s Black and Filipino genes—had more vested in her latest marriage than her son. And to his new stepfather, a cracker from the Cascades, Manny meant less than nothing. Like everyone else in Manny’s life, they couldn’t disclaim him fast enough. But as Ferry thanked them for their time and got ready to go, the mother stood up with him and said, “I’ll walk you out.”

In the front yard, she confided that a few months earlier she’d received a one-page letter from Manny, postmarked from a town in Northern California called Susanville. “There’s a prison there,” she added. “Basically, he asked for money.” As she turned to go back inside the house, she added, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell Manuel I gave you that information.”

The trail in California proved complicated. Manny wasn’t in custody at the Susanville Correctional Center and never had been. He’d taken half a course for big rig drivers at the local community college, then disappeared. Given the fact that he could be anywhere, Ferry decided to employ the help of law enforcement. It continued to amaze him how trusting some cops could be once they recognized you as a former member of the tribe.

He told them he was working for the family, trying to get the young man home for a little tough love. The cops he befriended confided that Manny’s name was related to arson fires throughout timber country. In Susanville alone, pipe bombs took out a log loader at a chip mill and a hijacked truck had been set afire. But Manny’s name came up across the state in Arcata, too, where a tree farm run by the Humboldt State agriculture department had gone up in flames. Then back to the foothills, a town called Quincy, where they wanted him for questioning in a torch job involving two more lumber trucks in a storage yard. Despite the legwork, the pattern gratified Ferry. Showed the kid still wanted to be known as the next great solo eco-warrior. And he had the good sense to keep moving.