The Ten-Mile Trials (6 page)

It was lucky that Ben was a very superior child, so I never begrudged what he cost me. I did remind my mate occasionally that fishing was fun and haying was donkey work, and any reasonable accounting would show that the Sullivans were getting paid well above top dollar.

‘Sweetheart,' she said, ‘if you don't like the bargain I made you're welcome to ask the bank for more money.'

‘Come on, you know there isn't a chance in hell—'

‘Exactly. So put a sock in it.' We had been through some version of this conversation several times and there was no need to repeat it this morning. The hay was not quite dry enough to put up and I had a job to do in town.

Minnesota law gives us forty-eight hours, no more, to hold a prisoner before he goes to court for his initial appearance before a judge. While this supports the important principle that justice delayed is justice denied, it could also lead to an understandable reluctance to arrest anybody on Friday. But there's wiggle room, in the form of a waiver, built into the law. So the first thing I did when I got to town that morning was hustle up to the Judge Sorenson's house and get his signature on a document saying we could hold the Marvin Street miscreants over till Monday.

I then went down to the jail to check on the prisoners, and was enchanted to learn that the underfed and overdecorated male half of this team of lawbreakers was named Hogarth Peter Weber. Clearly, his mama had expected a larger life for her boy. I found him taking his ease in the messier end of a double cell, his flamboyant arms partly covered by the jail's orange jumpsuit.

I asked him, ‘Your friends call you Hogarth?'

‘My friends call me Pete,' he said. ‘But you don't need to call me anything until after I've seen a lawyer.'

‘You called him yet? Because you'll be seeing the judge on Monday.'

‘And when I do, I'll ask for a court-appointed lawyer.' He knew the drill very well.

‘You're claiming you're broke? All that meth and pot in your house, that was free?'

‘None of it's mine except that little bit in the kitchen that the old lady was sucking on. That took my last dollar, that and the milk and cereal for her kid. Women and kids,' he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘they'll bleed you dry every time.'

‘Your story's so touching, Hogarth. But maybe you should be thinking about doing some good for yourself while you wait.'

‘And I could do that how?'

‘Easy. Cooperate with us now. Tell us all about the men who ran out of your house in the storm. Were they going to help you market the weed you were growing in your garage?' He smiled at me blandly and said nothing. ‘Tell me all about that and make nice with the judge on Monday, you might earn a chance to plead down from Murder One on that dead body in your garage.'

‘There's a dead man?' I watched his face while he realized I hadn't said it was a man, and that he'd just confirmed he knew all about the stiff in the garage. His eyes grew slightly more opaque, and a tiny sneer formed on his upper lip. He held on to his crazy arrogance, though, determined not to be knocked off balance by a little mistake. ‘I'm sure sorry to hear about that. The Brooklyn Dodgers must've had a little argument.' He shook his head sadly and clucked.

I knew right then that when Ray asked him about it later in court he would deny he ever said ‘dead man'.

‘The Brooklyn Dodgers? That's what you call your suppliers? Where can we find them?'

He wagged his right index finger. ‘After I get me a lawyer, you can ask him what he wants me to talk about.'

One good thing about an unrepentant sleazebag like Hogarth Peter Weber, he saves you time. You can see right away that he has grown a thick, impermeable shell, and the hollow space inside where his feelings should be is filled with smart-ass attitude and layers of greed and sloth. From that first conversation, I knew that Hogarth Peter was not going to cooperate in anything but his own defense. He would fight to the last ditch on the county's dime, and would finally go to prison anyway on at least some of the wide array of charges he was facing. He'd live a long time there at public expense and his every effort inside would be directed toward getting drugs and alcohol and sex, the only things left that interested his shriveled mind. He had become a costly waste of skin, and I walked away from him quickly when I realized I was fantasizing about turning Sam loose on him.

I went over to the women's side of the jail to find Gloria Funk in the infirmary. She had been weeping and distraught when I'd seen her being led out of her house, and though she'd had some repair work done on her battered face – she was wearing a pressure bandage over the top of her nose and another on a cut on her cheek – she seemed even more strung out than she had been at the house. Besides withdrawal pains, her jailers told me, she was suffering from extreme anxiety about her little girl. Watching her sniffling in her bed, I thought how many questions about the dead man in the garage could be cleared up quickly by Gloria Funk, if she had enough sense to seize the day. So I walked to the end of the corridor and called Ray Bailey's cell phone.

He answered from what seemed to be a cavernous space, faint echoes of his voice bouncing back at me from cold steel and tile. I said, ‘You're still in the autopsy room? What's up with that body that it's taking so long?'

‘Well, five or six bullet holes, and another wound track that he hasn't decided about yet. Plus nobody can find any match on his fingerprints. Pokey's having a wonderful day, working on a nonperson full of holes.'

I told him where I was and described the difference between the two prisoners.

‘Weber's never going to give us anything he doesn't have to, but the woman seems to be very anxious about her little girl. I thought she might ID the body and tell us what went on there and why they killed him, in exchange for a chance to see her kid. What do you think? OK if I ask her a couple of questions?'

‘Oh, hell, yes,' he said. ‘No use getting all technical about the lines of authority now. Way things are going this year, you and I might end up cleaning the toilets.'

I wanted to suggest that we not complain about the taste of cat food until we were actually eating it, but he had already given me the concession I wanted, so I let it go and walked back to Gloria Funk. She was in a ward with three other women, who were getting very sick of listening to her cry.

‘God, get her out of here, will you?' the thin freckled one said. ‘She's driving everybody up the wall.'

‘Because nobody will
tell
me anything,' Gloria wailed, clutching at me, trying to grab my hand. ‘I don't even know where my daughter is. Can't you at least tell me that?'

‘She's being taken care of temporarily by Child and Family Services,' I said, ‘and she can be transferred to your mother's custody as soon as your mother is ready to take her. Gloria, would you like to come upstairs and visit with me a while?'

‘Oh, sure, visit,' the freckled woman said, perversely switching sides now that I was trying to do what she'd asked. ‘Don't tell him
nothing
, honey.'

But Gloria still had some speed in her system; she desperately wanted to talk to somebody, and I was there. I put a robe and handcuffs on her and we walked up to the visitor's lounge, where I cuffed her to the table leg and sat down across from her. I borrowed a family-size box of tissues from the attendant's desk, because her nose and eyes were running water like hillside springs. I believe she was the dampest woman I have ever interviewed, and I have talked to some world-class weepers.

But the lounge didn't work for her; she kept peering nervously over her shoulders. ‘Gloria,' I said, ‘there's no recording equipment in here, this is just a visiting room for families.'

‘Sure, but how do I know who's listening?'

Her alarm seemed genuine and I was afraid she might change her mind about talking to me, so I called a guard to bring her upstairs to an interview room in the investigative section.

‘Now,' I said, once we were locked inside the small soundproof room, ‘you don't need to worry about being overheard in here.' I tried to make light of the fact that this conversation would be recorded, as the law requires. After I read her the Miranda warning, I said the date and our names and told her, ‘We're being recorded for your protection as much as mine, so you can be sure I won't do or say anything inappropriate.' The stiff formality sounded so ridiculous, spoken to this forlorn woman in these grim surroundings, that I sat still for a few seconds, uncertain how to proceed. What the hell would be an appropriate thing to say to a woman with a meth habit and a beaten face? I wished I had somebody to monitor the interview on the outside, but there was nobody around on a Saturday and I decided the DVD would be enough.

I've watched that conversation several times since that day, and it always confirms that my judgment was correct. That recording is more than enough, I believe, to make anybody watching it think twice about the pleasure of vice in general and meth in particular. I still find it hard to watch. It isn't every day you get a glimpse of the way light-hearted folly can lead to genuine soul-sucking despair.

She was sick with shame, that's what it came down to, and rightly so. She would remember for the rest of her life, she said, and I believed her, the way her four-year-old girl had reached out to her in terror, begging to be allowed to stay with her mother. She remembered every one of the child's pleas and repeated them to me, word for word, until I almost begged her to stop.

‘And I couldn't do anything,' she wailed, as her nose grew redder and her eyes swelled shut. ‘People were holding on to me and holding on to her, and what could I do? I was helpless.' And the terrible thing, she wanted to make sure I understood, was that her child had always trusted her completely. ‘I mean I know you think I'm a terrible person because you found me in that house with all the dope and everything – but I mean, listen, I always took care of my baby, she knew she could count on me.' And she meant it, too, this heedless young woman who had ‘kind of run with the wild crowd,' she admitted, in high school, but dropped out and got a job when she found herself pregnant. She'd had to fight to keep the baby because everybody kept reminding her she had no means of support. ‘And they were right about that part. Boy, flipping burgers just doesn't cut it once you've got a kid.'

But against all the evidence, she saw herself as a reliable parent, a rock that her child could cling to. ‘I mean I wasn't going to give away my own baby. Duh, what kind of a lowlife would do that? Besides, nobody gets all shocked any more if you're not married, and I knew I could manage some way. I was like, hey, babies are fun! And she was, my Tiffany, she's always been a smiley little charmer, all my boy friends have loved her.'

Her mother had helped her at first, but Gloria lost her counter job at McDonald's for wisecracking and making too many mistakes, and then got fired from Kmart for hiding out in the stock room with the cute boy with the pricing gun. ‘But really you have to do something at those places, they're
so
boring.' After she lost the second job, though, her mother said it was time for some tough love. She put their clothes out on the porch in two plastic sacks and changed the locks on the house.

‘And then for a while,' she said, trying for a light-hearted shrug that looked incongruous with her battered face, ‘we lived here and there, with friends.' Till Pete, one sunny day last October, found her in the park where he was idly toking up and she and Tiffany were feeding bread to the geese. They shared a nice, giggly afternoon, and he took them home with him. Not to the house on Marvin Street – Pete lived in a small apartment then.

‘Was he dealing from there?'

‘Just a little pot, enough to keep us in smokes and make enough on the side for, you know, food and stuff.' She made a little gesture that waved away the seriousness of food and stuff, then chewed her lip silently for a few seconds and finally said, reluctantly, ‘And he arranged for me to turn a few tricks to keep us going when we were short.'

Early in the spring, though, he met some guys in a bar and came home and told her they were ‘moving up'. Three months ago, give or take, they had moved into the house on Marvin Street. ‘And business, like, picked up.' Big, dangerous-looking men brought bags of weed and started Pete on his delivery route. They set up the grow operation in the garage, taught Gloria how to tend the plants, and began bringing gear and supplies for the meth lab on the second floor. Gloria believed Pete had been making pretty good money since then, but she couldn't be sure. He gave her what she needed to buy groceries and run the house, but never a regular cut. Once, when she tried to have a conversation about money, Pete got very angry, called her a cunt, and shoved her around, so she never had the nerve to ask again.

Lately, Gloria said, she had been ‘rethinking her relationship' with Pete. (She actually said it just that way.) Pete had stopped being any fun at all a while back, and they'd had to give up their sleeping quarters on the second floor of the house because the men needed it for ‘producing product'. Well, from then on they had to live all crowded together on the first floor.

The men who brought the supplies and took away the money were creepy and threatening. They talked funny and got mad when she didn't understand what they said. ‘They helped themselves to anything in the refrigerator, too. Never even asked. And they were so weird – the way they wore those plastic gloves all the time and yet smelled terrible, left their filthy socks and underwear all over the place, and changed clothes wherever they happened to be standing. Pete said if I didn't want to see it, I could leave.'