False Witness (16 page)

Eddie smiled. He heard that one all the time.

Gravel crunched under their shoes, kicking up little clouds of dust in the still, humid air. They reached an overgrown parking lot directly behind the bar. A couple of burned-out abandoned cars lurked in the dark. Eddie pointed to a shadowy alcove where two buildings met at an angle. “There,” he said.

The kid squinted. “I can’t even see in there, man.”

“You don’t need to see to do what you’re going to do.”

He pushed the kid toward the alcove. The kid stumbled forward a bit before righting himself. “Fuck, I’m going. Take it easy, man.”

Eddie stopped and frowned at the back of the kid’s head. “The fuck you say?”

The kid turned to face him. In the dark, the younger man’s face seemed rat-like and strange. “Nothin, man. Just, you know, don’t push.”

Eddie’s fist connected squarely with the kid’s nose, knocking him on his ass in the gravel. “You don’t tell
me
, I tell
you
,” Eddie growled.

The kid rose shakily to his knees. “GUYS NOW – ”

Air
whuffed
out of the kid as Eddie drove a foot into his narrow chest. “Quiet, you fucking queerboy, or I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

Eddie couldn’t make out the kid’s features in the dark, but he saw his head bob up and down in a desperate nod. “Good.” He looked around – they were alone in the parking lot, sheltered from view on three sides. He unbuttoned the fly of his favorite pair of blue jeans, the ones he wore only on nights at the Golden Cage. Zippers held too much potential for injury.

The kid moaned softly beneath him. Eddie slapped him, but the only sound the kid made was a quick intake of breath.

“Get started, queerboy,” Eddie said roughly. “If I like it, maybe you’ll get your money. Or maybe not. I haven’t decided yet.” In truth, he had decided. He’d decided the moment he laid eyes on the kid in the bar. He doubted the kid would like his decision.

Pain exploded like a thunderclap in Eddie’s right kidney, and white light blossomed behind his eyeballs, as something hard slammed into his lower back. He staggered backward toward the burned-out cars, his thoughts racing.
Cover your back, face your opponent
. It had been drilled into him over two decades of karate training. When he felt the gritty hardness of a fender against his ass, he raised his fists and peered into the night.

“Come on!” he hollered, still dazed. The pain in his back was enormous, burning like a miniature sun. The kid must have had another crankhead lying in wait. Roll the customer, easy money – who’s going to tell the cops what they were doing in the alley behind a fag bar?
Well, they’re in for a fucking surprise
.

Another pain explosion, this time in the inside of his upper right thigh, dangerously close to his balls. Boot heel, had to be. Chickenshit motherfucker! Eddie dropped to the gravel, his right leg suddenly useless.
Get up
! he screamed to himself.
Get up, get up!

“Don’t get up, Eddie,” a voice said from above him, as if reading his mind. Blue light flooded his vision. Eddie’s eyes adjusted quickly to the soft glare of an LED flashlight, one of the big steel jobs. Above him he could see two men with dark hair and darker looks. One was gripping an aluminum baseball bat, the other held a chain in front of him. Both looked as bored as if they were waiting on a bus.

“Meet Kenny and Dougie Flo,” said the voice behind the flashlight. “Boys, meet Eddie Spanbauer.”

A pair of silhouettes each raised a hand in salute.

“Better wave back, Eddie,” said the voice. “You don’t want the Florence brothers mad at you. Believe me.”

Eddie blinked stupidly and waved. He thought back to the karate matches he’d fought over the years, the tests he’d taken, the hundreds of pine boards he’d broken. The men he’d put down in lock-up. He’d always believed that he was ready for anything, that he was a hardass. Now here he was on his knees in a black alley, helpless, waving like an idiot. Hot blood filled his cheeks as he realized his fly was open.

“What’s the matter, Eddie?” said the flashlight man. “Not so tough against people who can actually fight back?”

Eddie took a deep breath. This couldn’t be happening. He hurt people, people didn’t hurt him. Clarity suddenly came, accompanied by the horror that came with realizing where he was, what he was doing. Jesus, what if his wife found out? What if the
inmates
found out?

“Oh Christ,” he moaned, not even aware he was doing it. “Oh Christ, oh Christ.”

“I don’t know where Christ is, Eddie, but he’s not here. Just you, me and the Brothers Florence.” Jason Crowe turned the flashlight on his own grinning face. “And we have a lot to talk about.”

Tom and Kathy Ferbey’s house was a wartime bungalow in the kind of neighborhood that real estate agents liked to call “transitional.” It had a lot of newer upgrades: roof and windows, vinyl siding the color of pea soup, and fake stone on the foundation to hide sixty-some years worth of cracks. Unlike the majority of other houses on the block, the Ferbeys’ lawn had been watered and mowed at least a few times over the blazing summer, and the driveway was free of dead vehicles slowly bleeding their vital fluids onto the concrete.

It had taken three phone calls and four frustrating days to set up the interview with Kathy, but Sam was finally here in her living room, drumming his fingers on an end table while she fussed over coffee in the kitchen. He felt like a kid who was forced to go to church with the family before opening his presents on Christmas morning. Not that he had anything to worry about, he was just impatient – no one was going to scoop him this time. Kathy said she hadn’t talked to anyone else in the media, but Sam had sworn Tess to secrecy after the initial call, just in case. She’d been sweet enough to oblige. She was a real sport.
Flowers said my bad blood with Dunn was over a woman; was he right?

He scanned the living room as he waited. It looked like a display room at IKEA, inviting and yet somehow lifeless at the same time. Sam had seen plenty of homes like it during his time in Calgary, where money and class didn’t necessarily go hand in hand. The nouveau riche had no problem plunking a million dollars down for a huge house that they proceeded to fill with Costco furniture and art prints from Walmart.

A small, silver-framed photo on the shelf of the TV stand caught Sam’s eye. Most of the pictures in the room were of Josh Ferbey at various stages in his young life, large and with pride of placement on the walls and shelves. But this one was of Kathy and Tom on their wedding day. They looked impossibly young. Tom sported a mullet and the type of sparse moustache favored by young men to whom shaving is still a novelty. Kathy’s hair was piled to the point where it almost doubled the height of her head. Their bodies faced each other, but their smiling faces were turned toward the unknown photographer. Whoever it was, Sam thought, they had been overpaid for their work, even if all they got for it was a piece of the caterer’s prime rib.

There were a couple more shots of Tom on the fireplace mantle. One showed him in long robes, standing with a choir in the nave of a church with bright red carpet. The other was a group shot of a beer league hockey team.

Kathy emerged from the kitchen with an old-style coffee tray laden with a carafe, china cups, and sugar and cream dispensers made of cut glass that caught the early afternoon sunlight. The woman was a lot like her house – a bit on the small side, well kept, attractive enough in a low-rent sort of way. She was obviously fastidious, which made up for her lack of sophistication in Sam’s eyes. As far as he was concerned, white trash was a state of mind, not a socio-economic circumstance.

Kathy laid the tray on the coffee table between them. Sam smiled, hoping he seemed charming. This would be a tough interview, with more than a few tears, and she could very well clam up on him if he came across as anything less than wholly sympathetic. “Thank you, I’m dying for a cup,” he lied as she poured for him. He’d finished his fifth double-double of the day on his way over. He glanced around the room. “You have a beautiful home.”

Kathy smiled demurely, but Sam caught a flash of pride underneath it. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a work in progress for some time now. Since Tom died, really.” Sam saw the corners of her smile jump as she said it, briefly turning it into a grimace of pain, but she recovered quickly. “I started with the roof last summer, and things just kind of grew from there. It seems like there hasn’t been two weeks go by that we didn’t have some contractor or other underfoot. They just delivered the furniture last week.”

Sam studied her for a moment. This was far harder for her than she was letting on. Best to tread lightly.

“Well, you’ve done a beautiful job. This is the kind of place I’d love to buy if I could afford it.”

She seemed genuinely touched. “Is it?” she asked, her brown eyes wide. “Is it really?”

“Sure. It’s like one of those makeover houses on the HGTV shows. The ones where they do the big reveal at the end.”

Two matching trickles of tears escaped the corners of Kathy’s eyes. “Thank you. That means a lot. More than you can know.” She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin from the coffee tray.

Her gratitude was enough to make Sam uncomfortable for a moment. Then it dawned on him.

“Tom liked those shows, didn’t he?” he said quietly.

Kathy nodded, her hands trembling in her lap. “He always wanted to be a handyman type. He’d watch those shows and talk non-stop about everything they were doing, like he knew what he was talking about. Then he’d talk about renovating this place, how he wanted to give Josh his own separate suite downstairs that we could rent out after he left home to join the NHL, and how he’d fix up the outside so that we didn’t look so much like our neighbors. So that our place stood out, so that it was
special
.”

Sam nodded. “Sounds like he was pretty special himself.”

The dam burst so suddenly that Sam was caught off guard. Kathy’s façade crumbled and her body started to shake with great, wracking sobs. Tears flowed freely now as she wrung the cloth napkin in her hands, seemingly forgotten. Sam restrained an urge to sit on the new sofa beside her and wrap an arm around her shoulder; it wouldn’t be professional. Still, he’d been in enough situations like this one that he knew he needed to just let her go.

After several long moments, Kathy finally heaved a massive, shaky sigh and blew her nose into the cloth napkin (something Sam guessed she would have been horrified by under any other circumstances). It was enough to get her back under control a little.

“I’m so sorry,” she said bleakly.

Sam shook his head. “Nothing to be sorry for.”

She looked at him as if just noticing he was there. “What?” she asked. “No, I don’t mean for that. I was apologizing to Tom.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Kathy looked up at the ceiling and sniffed hard. “I was such a bitch to him,” she croaked. “God, what was wrong with me? He’d watch those shows and dream about how nice our house could be, and you know what I’d do? I’d pick at him. I’d tell him to stop dreaming because we could never do any of that stuff on his salary. Can you believe that? I didn’t even have a job, and there I was, shitting on him for having a dream. What was
wrong
with me?”

Sam sat silent; Kathy seemed to be speaking to herself more than to him. Best to let it play out.

“Nothing he did was ever good enough. If we were short on money, I’d nag him about it. If he worked overtime to get some extra cash, I’d complain about how he wasn’t home, or how he was missing Josh’s hockey game. I was even harping on him right up until the week before he died, because he had the audacity to go and lose his cell phone. He couldn’t win with me. And you know what the worst thing is? I couldn’t even tell you why. We never went hungry, he never hit me, never cheated on me. And God, he loved Josh so much. No kid could ever have asked for a better father.”

She broke down again, though not as bad as before. Sam let her sob for a few minutes. He’d been taking notes the whole time, though mostly what she was giving him was the kind of puff stuff he hated. Reporters always wanted to turn murder victims into heroes – the high school kid was “well loved” or had “an incredibly bright future,” the middle-aged woman was the perfect mother and/or a pillar of the community. In reality, they were all just people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, no better or worse than anyone else. But a scoop was a scoop, and Sam was the guy holding the handle on this one.

Kathy regained her composure with another hard sniff. She sat back in the couch, collapsing into the soft cushion. “Sorry. This time to you, not Tom.” She smiled weakly. “I asked you here for an interview, and this is turning into a therapy session.”

“It’s fine, really,” he said. “But I assume you asked me here for a reason. You haven’t talked to any of the media at all during this whole thing and you didn’t attend any of the trial. Why now?”
And why me?
he wanted to add, but decided not to. Not yet, anyway.

Kathy blinked. “I thought you would know why I called you now,” she said, looking mildly confused. “I was waiting for the guilty verdict.”

Now it was Sam’s turn to be confused. “I’m sorry, I think I’m missing something here. Why did you wait for the verdict?”

“That’s what Sergeant Palliser told me to do. He said he didn’t want to see me anywhere, in person, on camera or in print, until the trial was over. And now – ” She teared up again. “Now I understand why. Those savages killed him! That could have been me! Or
Josh!
” She made the sign of the cross over her bosom.

Sam nodded. “Chuck was a good man. I interviewed him a couple of times during the trial. He mentioned you and Josh, actually. How concerned he was about you both.”

“If only he’d been more concerned about himself,” Kathy said, dabbing away tears again.

Sam was silent. A Montreal reporter had written Palliser’s obituary for the Canadian Press; Sam and a couple other Calgary reporters got a “with files by” nod. By all accounts, Palliser was a lone wolf – hardly surprising, given his line of work – with no surviving family and very few personal ties. His job had been his life for more than twenty years, risking his own safety to get people like Rufus Hodge off the street. And what did he get for it? There wasn’t enough left of him for an urn, and even if there had been, there was no one to send it to.