Penance (2 page)

“I knew you were a dangerous man when we met,” she said and chuckled.

“Yeah,” I told her. “You better be careful.”

TWO

I
FOUND A
meter with twenty minutes left on it near the public library and walked the two blocks to the Ramsey County courthouse in downtown St. Paul. I was looking for Cynthia Grey. Grey had represented John Brown four years ago. Since then she had become one of the best-known defenders of drunk drivers in Minnesota, often appearing on local talk shows to trash our DWI laws. I found her number among the eleven thousand, two hundred and twenty-one listings of attorneys in the Minneapolis and St. Paul telephone books. Her secretary said she was at the courthouse. It was Monday morning; all the weekend drunks were entering their pleas.

News of John Brown’s tragic demise rattled me, but it didn’t exactly break my heart and I had no real interest in finding his killer except that the St. Paul Police Department seemed anxious that I do so. For that reason I decided to give it a day or two. Besides, except for my chore for Randy, I was between jobs. I had just helped an insurance company catch a ring of crib burglars that specialized in antiques. The thieves targeted their victims by reading obituaries in the newspapers—they would call during the funerals and if no one answered, go burglarize the house. They would then take the antiques and sell them at flea markets across the Midwest. Armed with a list of stolen items, I’d haunted the markets in Iowa until I came across a dealer who admitted to buying some of the merchandise. With his help, I backtracked the burglars to Minneapolis. There were four of them and they were all now under indictment in U.S. District Court in Des Moines, charged with about two dozen counts of interstate transportation of stolen property. One of the victims whose heirlooms were actually recovered, an elderly woman with clear blue eyes, sent me a gross of chocolate chip cookies in gratitude. They were pretty good, too; I’ve been living off them for nearly a week now.

The courthouse, which also houses St. Paul’s city hall, was built in 1932 and has been in a constant state of disrepair ever since. I waited outside the revolving glass door as a team of workers sporting white hard hats came out of the building, looked up, then glanced at a blueprint that one of them unrolled like an ancient scroll. Across the street, a man wearing a blue ski jacket with red lining watched us over the top of a newspaper.

I found Cynthia Grey on the eighth floor, just outside the courtroom where citizens arrested for driving while intoxicated made their initial appearance. She smiled as she accepted the enthusiastic thanks of one of her clients. Her smile had all the sincerity of a beauty pageant contestant. I stood about twenty feet away on the other side of the corridor, arms folded, and waited.

“Don’t forget, Tony,” she interrupted him at last. “We have a deal.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely, no problem,” Tony told her, still shaking her hand.

Cynthia fished a white business card from the pocket of her jacket and handed it to him. He took it reluctantly. “This is the name of the woman who runs the treatment center,” Cynthia said. “She’s expecting you to call. So am I.”

“I will, I will, I promise,” Tony said.

“If you don’t call her, don’t ever call me again. And, hey. Next time take a cab.”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Miss Grey. No kidding. Thanks a lot.”

Tony turned and headed for the elevators, shoving the card into his pocket as he went. Cynthia watched him go. She sighed deeply.

“A lot of lawyers don’t want to dirty their hands doing drunken driving defense,” she said. “I was the same way. At first I took the cases because I was just starting out and I needed the billings. I didn’t like it, but I did it. I don’t struggle with it anymore. Now I realize that any time an accused drunken driver with an alcohol problem comes into my office, it’s an opportunity to get him some help. I’m doing the right thing. I believe in what I’m doing.”

She looked directly into my eyes. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

“It answers a question I’ve nursed for a long time,” I admitted.

Cynthia Grey had shoulder-length brown hair with matching eyes, slim features and long legs largely hidden by her black pleated skirt. She wore a matching black blazer over a white collarless blouse, a white handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket. Her leather briefcase was brown. She stepped halfway across the corridor and stopped. I met her there, my hand outstretched. She took it. Her hand was soft, yet there was nothing soft about her grip.

“Good to see you again, Officer Taylor.”

“Ex-officer Taylor,” I corrected her. “I’m a private investigator now.”

“Ahh, that’s right. I’ve been reading about you. Tell me, how many men have you killed now? I lost track.”

I winced at the question, considered a four-letter-word reply, thought better of it and said, “I need information concerning one of your former clients.”

“I have no former clients.”

“I want to know what John Brown’s been doing the past few months, where he’s been staying.”

“Where he’s been staying? All things considered, you’re the last person I would give that information to. I might tell him you’re looking for him, though, the next time I see him.”

“Well, hopefully, that won’t be for a good long time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Before I could answer, a man in a rumpled gray suit appeared at the end of the corridor and shouted, “Hey, Grey!” Cynthia turned toward him. “You might want to wander up to sixteen. One of your clients is standing on the ledge; says he’s gonna jump.”

Cynthia dropped her briefcase and ran as best she could in heels to the elevators. I retrieved the briefcase and followed. She was waiting for the courthouse’s notoriously slow elevator when I reached her side. I took her arm and directed her toward the staircase. She went up the stairs quickly, reached the sixteenth floor and walked instinctively to the prisoner holding room. She was barely winded; I was sucking air. A small crowd had gathered outside the room, afraid to enter. Cynthia pushed through the gawkers. I was right behind her.

The holding room was essentially a conference room with large, old-fashioned windows befitting the age of the courthouse. A prisoner had opened one of the windows and crawled out onto the twelve-inch ledge where he squatted, looking down and holding onto the bottom of the window for dear life. Cynthia moved toward him. I attempted to go with her, but she put a hand on my chest and shook her head.

“Hi, James. How you doin’?” she asked as she approached the window.

“I’m not going to jail!” the prisoner screamed.

“Certainly not,” Cynthia agreed.

She leaned on the windowsill. I watched her mouth move but could not hear what she said to the prisoner, although she seemed to use his name a lot. She talked to him for what seemed a half hour, but when I glanced at my watch, I realized it was only a few minutes. After a few minutes more, the man slid back into the room and slumped in a chair next to the conference table. He was crying and shaking quite a bit. Cynthia closed the window and turned her back to it.

“Trust me, James,” she told the man. He nodded and covered his face with his hands.

I waited for Cynthia in the back of the courtroom. James had composed himself well enough to enter a guilty plea to misdemeanor domestic assault charges, but broke down again when the Ramsey County sheriff’s deputies laid hands on him to take him back to the detention center across the street.

“You said I wouldn’t have to go back to jail,” he shouted at Cynthia as the deputies led him away.

Cynthia packed her briefcase without comment while a trio of suits crowded around, waiting to take her place at the table.

“Buy me a drink,” she said as she went through the courtroom doors, brushing by me without stopping.

Cynthia Grey ordered a double Scotch, neat. She stirred it with her finger and turned the glass slowly clockwise, widening a circle of moisture on the table top, but did not drink; she dried her finger on a napkin.

“You did well, getting that guy off the ledge,” I told her.

“Thank you.”

“What did you say that convinced him to come in?”

“I told him we would work things out,” Cynthia said. “I told him it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He has a lot of criminal things pending, including a felony assault charge, and he’s spent a lot of time in custody—over two weeks. Some people can’t take jail. Not even for a day.”

“Did you tell him he wouldn’t have to go back to jail?”

“That’s what he wanted to hear.”

“I would have wanted to hear the truth.”

“You would have wanted to hear anything that would have gotten you off that ledge.”

Cynthia picked up her glass, regarded the contents thoughtfully, then returned it to its place.

“What exactly do you want, Taylor?”

“Are you going to drink that Scotch?”

“I haven’t had a drink in seven years and two months,” she replied.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. I hailed our waitress and asked her to remove the Scotch and bring the lady a designer water with a twist of lime. Cynthia did not protest. I felt slightly guilty for staying with my Summit Ale and slightly superior for having conquered my own drinking problems without resorting to abstinence.

“You still haven’t told me what you want,” Cynthia reminded me.

“I want you to tell me what you know about John Brown’s activities since he got out of the joint.”

“So you can kill him?”

“I don’t know quite how to tell you this except to come right out and say it: John Brown is dead. He was murdered Saturday night.”

Cynthia fell back against her chair like someone had pushed her there, mouth agape, eyes wide. I knew what she was thinking.

“Yeah, the cops thought I did it, too. Only I didn’t. To prove it, I’m going to find out who did.”

Enough time passed for me to finish my Summit Ale while she worked it through. Finally she said, “Brown’s dead?”

“So they tell me.”

“And you’re going to find his killer? You of all people?”

“I thought I’d give it a day or two, until a paying customer comes along.”

She thought about it some more.

“I guess it wouldn’t do any harm,” she sighed and then said more clearly, “I was informed by Corrections three months ago that Brown was paroled to a halfway house in Minneapolis. That’s all I know. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in four years. He wouldn’t answer my letters or return my phone calls. Apparently he thought I should have done better by him. He’s probably right. I didn’t have enough experience back then. If I defended him today, I’d probably get him off—at least get him a shorter sentence.”

“There’s a happy thought,” I told her.

“In this country, the law …”

“I’m not interested in the law,” I said, interrupting her lecture, my voice calm. “And I gave up on justice a long time ago. What I need is an address.”

She gave it to me.

“A private investigator, an ex-cop: If not justice, if not the law, what do you believe in?” she asked as I wrote the address into a small notebook I carry.

“I’m not sure I believe in much of anything,” I said. “Like a lot of people, I make it up as I go along. Mostly, I guess it’s a matter of what I can live with.”

“If everyone felt that way …”

I pushed myself away from the table.

“No, wait, please,” Cynthia said. I waited. She looked down at her hands. “I apologize that I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I am about your wife and daughter.”

“Thank you,” I answered and in a half moment relived their deaths at the hands of John Brown, who was so drunk he couldn’t tell the difference between red and green. He served four years, four lousy years. It should have been life. Now this woman was saying she wished she could have gotten him off. Well, it was her job, I suppose.

“It’s getting to be a long time ago,” I told her. Yet that’s not how it felt.

“Is it because of what happened to your family? Is that why you quit the cops?”

“No.”

“What then?” she asked, her eyes wide and glistening.

“It’s not something I discuss with my friends much less …”

“The lawyer who defended …”

“Strangers,” I said interrupting her, completing the thought.

“Have dinner with me tonight,” she said.

I was jolted by the invitation and answered too abruptly, “No.”

“How long are you going to resent me for defending Brown?” she asked.

“Until hell freezes over.”

I have nothing against lawyers. After all, a sizable portion of my income is derived from law firms—gathering evidence, investigating witnesses, checking testimony, recovering stolen property, that sort of thing. And if many of the lawyers I work for are jerks, well, a buck’s a buck. But this wasn’t business. This was personal.

Cynthia gave me a regal nod, but I didn’t leave. I sensed that offering the dinner invitation had been an effort for her and now I felt I owed her something in return. So I told her, “Taking the jumper off the ledge the way you did, that took guts. I admire you for it.”