Very Bad Men (41 page)

“You could have gone with them,” I said.

“I almost did, but then I thought it over. If someone wanted to kill you, would you want to be with your wife and daughter, or as far away from them as possible?”

“I see your point.”

He used his good hand to brush his long hair out of his eyes. “Apart from that, I have obligations here. The clinic where I work is short-staffed as it is. They can't afford to give me an indefinite leave. And they don't mind having the police watch the place. The patients there can be a little rough around the edges, especially late at night.” After a pause, he added, “The way I look at it, the clinic took a chance, hiring me. I don't want to let them down.”

I nodded and watched him turn to stare at the wall opposite the windows, at a cluster of photographs hanging there. The largest was of his daughter, a tow-headed girl with blue eyes.

“The police suggested I stay at a hotel,” he said. “But this house has an alarm system, and there's a car out front whenever I'm here. The truth is, I feel like I need to be here. Otherwise it's like I'm abandoning the place. Does that make sense?”

“It does to me.”

Bell studied the photographs and seemed to search for something more to say. I thought he looked at ease in his surroundings—a decent man living out a plain, middle-class life, a man who cared for his family and didn't want to abandon his house. Then I remembered what he had been once, and a question occurred to me. I found myself asking it out loud.

“How did you get mixed up in the Great Lakes robbery?”

He turned back to me, shifting uneasily in his chair. “I was twenty. I was an idiot.”

“Most twenty-year-olds don't try to rob a bank,” I said. “There must have been more to it. I know Floyd Lambeau recruited you. How did he convince you?”

His head moved side to side. “You wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.”

I watched him thinking about it. After a time he said, “The thing about Floyd . . . he never tried to convince me to do anything. He had a way of sitting back and listening. And he had kind eyes.” Bell hesitated. “I'm not expressing this well.”

“Go on.”

He thought about it some more. Then: “Everyone knows now that Floyd Lambeau was nothing but a con artist. Of course I didn't know that when I met him. I was in college. He was a guest lecturer in one of my classes—a course on Native American culture. He was only there for three or four weeks, talking about living conditions on Indian reservations. A lot of them are plagued by high unemployment. Alcoholism. The kind of poverty you usually find in Third World countries. The class met in the evening, and a few people would get together afterward, and Floyd would take us out to a coffeehouse or a restaurant. The first time I went, I did it to impress a girl I liked. But later she dropped out, and I kept going. I liked to listen to Floyd talk. I had no experience of the things he talked about, but he was obviously very intelligent. And he was soft-spoken. He seemed humble.”

Bell scratched the side of his face with his good hand. “One night the others in the group had left and it was just me and Floyd. I remember sitting across from him with a lot of empty glasses spread over the table between us. I remember him looking at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, as if he regretted not paying more attention to me sooner. I remember him asking me a question: ‘What do you want out of life, Mr. Bell?'

“I had to think about it. What did I want? I was a kid from the Midwest with an accountant for a father. My mother had raised four kids and never worked outside the home. They had struggled to save money to send me to college—the same college my father had gone to. I was a member of his old fraternity. No one had ever asked me what I wanted out of life, and the best answer I could give was that I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to get a degree and work in a profession. Maybe I'd be an accountant. Maybe a doctor. I wanted to meet a girl in college like my father did, and I wanted to marry her and have a family.

“That's what I told Floyd, and he listened, and at the end he said, ‘That sounds like a very respectable life, Mr. Bell.' And as far as I could tell, he meant it. He wasn't mocking me. He wasn't questioning the worth of what I wanted. But I was.

“ ‘It sounds like a very ordinary life,' I said.

“His smile was slow and gentle. ‘There's nothing wrong with an ordinary life.'

“And then he had me, though I didn't know it yet. I said, ‘I want something more.'

“He laughed, but the laugh was gentle too. ‘You must be careful, Mr. Bell,' he said. ‘It's not something to be done lightly—wishing for an extraordinary life.'

“He didn't say anything more that night. It was only later that he told me about the Rosebears—two brothers falsely accused of murdering a woman in Ohio. It was only later that I found out what he meant by ‘an extraordinary life'—that he wanted me to help him rob a bank so we could use the money to make sure those brothers got a good legal defense—so they weren't at the mercy of some overworked, court-appointed lawyer. When Floyd told me that, I thought he was nuts, and I let him know it.

“He gave me that same smile. ‘I'm sure you're right, Mr. Bell. I shouldn't have asked you. Don't give it another thought.'”

Bell moved his left hand back and forth over the maplewood table. “Floyd didn't mention it again,” he said, “and not long after that, he was gone, on to a different college. But he left me a phone number so we wouldn't lose touch.
Don't give it another thought,
he'd said, but of course I did. One night I called him and we ended up talking about it—just hypothetically. About the morality of it. We figured that since the money people deposit in banks is insured, no one would really lose anything. And no one would get hurt—we agreed on that. We would bring guns to scare the tellers, but at the most we might fire a shot in the air. We wouldn't actually harm anyone. And it could mean the difference between life and death for the Rosebear brothers—that's what Floyd kept saying. I'm sure now that he never meant a word of it; he always intended to keep the money for himself. But I wanted to believe. And somewhere along the line it changed from something Floyd and I were just talking about to something we were going to do.”

Bell shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes to let me know that he'd given me all the explanation he could. “I was twenty,” he said again, “and I wanted something more than an ordinary life. Which is just another way of saying I was an idiot.”

His eyes opened and settled on mine. “This isn't what you came here for.”

No, it wasn't. I realized I'd been stalling because I didn't know where to begin. I regarded him across the corner of the table and said, “We need to talk about Lucy Navarro.”

“I'm not sure what I can tell you,” he said. “I don't really know her.”

“She saved your life last week,” I reminded him, “outside the Eightball Saloon.”

He focused on his left hand in its brace, as if he were remembering. “That's true, but I didn't talk to her that night. I've never really talked to her.”

“I know she tried to interview you—about what happened at the Great Lakes Bank.”

“She tried. But I don't do interviews.”

“She spoke to Terry Dawtrey and Henry Kormoran,” I said. “She was working on a story about the Great Lakes robbery. And three nights ago she disappeared. Somebody didn't want her to write that story. I think it might have been the fifth robber. The getaway driver.”

Bell shook his head. “I can't help you there.”

“Dawtrey claimed to know who the fifth robber was. But you don't know.”

“I don't.”

“I want you to look at a picture for me.”

He started to protest. “It's been seventeen years—”

I took a sheet of paper from my pocket, a page torn from a copy of
Newsweek
. I unfolded it on the table.

“That's Callie Spencer,” Bell said, “and her husband—the senator's son.”

“Jay Casterbridge,” I said, nodding. “Could he have been the fifth robber?”

A pained expression passed over Bell's face. “I can't help you.”

“Imagine him younger.”

He pushed the page away. “I just don't know. Do you think I'm lying?”

I studied his eyes. No answer there. I refolded the page and returned it to my pocket.

Looking at his hand resting on the table, I realized I wanted to bring the heel of my palm down hard on his broken fingers. I wanted to shout at him. Instead I made my voice quiet.

“I think Lucy may be dead soon, if she isn't dead already,” I said. “She saved your life. You owe her. I think you know something about the Great Lakes robbery—maybe not the identity of the getaway driver, but something that could help me.”

“I don't—”

I went on in the same voice, empty of hope. “It's something you don't want to tell me, because you've put it all behind you. You think it's in the past, but it's not. Not for Lucy.”

“I'm sorry. You're asking the wrong person.”

“No, I don't think so. Dawtrey got thirty years for what happened at the Great Lakes Bank, and Kormoran served six years. But you served two and a half.”

“Dawtrey's the one who shot Harlan Spencer—”

“Kormoran didn't shoot anybody, but you made out better than he did.” I leaned closer to him. “You're a lucky man. But I don't think it was luck. I think you knew something, and you used it to get a better deal.”

Bell's head bowed and his eyes went into shadow. “I wish you'd let it lie.”

“I can't.”

“What I know won't help you.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But you're going to tell me.”

E
lizabeth learned about Lark's aborted attack on Sutton Bell a little before five o'clock. She heard the details from Shan, who heard them over the phone from Owen McCaleb. Her first instinct was to head back to Ann Arbor, and Shan agreed, but McCaleb told them to keep plugging away at Helen Lark's list of names.

“I've already got everyone looking for Lark here,” McCaleb said. “I want you to stay there and find us a lead.”

Their next stop was a duplex with a pair of dead ash trees in the front yard. This was where Lark had lived after he left his mother's house and before he rented his apartment in Ann Arbor. Elizabeth and Shan had driven by earlier in the day but had found no one home. Now they found a beat-up Firebird in the driveway.

The owner of the Firebird was a guy Lark had gone to school with. Glen Gough answered the door wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and smoking a cigarette. He got a guilty look on his face when Elizabeth showed him her badge—as if cigarettes weren't the only thing he ever smoked. He seemed relieved when he found out they were there to talk about Lark.

“Is it true what I'm hearing on the news?” Gough asked, leading them inside. “He's some kind of serial killer?”

Elizabeth pretended she hadn't heard the question. “What sort of person was he in school?”

Gough plopped himself down on a ragged sofa. “Honestly? He was always a little weird. Kept to himself.”

“So you weren't friends?”

“I don't know if he wanted friends. He was never one of the guys. For a long time, I thought he was a fag.”

“Is that right?”

Gough nodded, brushing at the cigarette ash that had fallen on the cushion beside him. “I guess he wasn't though, because of the way he fawned over Susanna Marten. You know about her, right?”

“Yes,” Shan said.

“He used to follow her around in high school. Even signed up to work on the yearbook because she was one of the photographers.”

“What about after high school?” asked Elizabeth. “Did you see him much?”

“We worked some temp jobs together. Then back in May he was on the outs with his mom—she was mad at him for selling his dad's boat. I told him he could stay here. I needed help with the rent.”

“What was he like to live with?”

Gough dropped his spent cigarette into a mug on the coffee table. “Honestly? He was kind of a slacker.”

Elizabeth looked around at the shabby furniture and the giant flat-screen television. At Gough's uncombed hair and slouching form. “Is that right?”

“Yeah, he never really went anywhere. Except to work.”

“Did he ever talk about Susanna Marten?”

Gough shook his head. “I tried once, because I knew they'd been close right up until she died. But he turned cold on me, like I didn't have any right to say anything about her.”

“What about Callie Spencer?” Elizabeth asked. “Did he ever talk about her?”

“The chick who's running for Senate? No. But if he saw her on the news he'd always watch. And if he got one of his headaches he'd go looking for her, flipping through the channels as if seeing her would help.”

Shan broke in. “Did he get a lot of headaches?”

“He got 'em all the time.”

“Did he take anything for them?”

“Sometimes he'd fill a towel full of ice and put it on his forehead.”

“But you didn't see him take pills?”

“Sure, he took pills, but I couldn't tell you what they were. You should ask his doctor.”

That got Elizabeth's attention. “He was seeing a doctor?”

“A shrink. Sometimes Anthony would pass along his psychobabble—about how we all want to be known for who we really are. Stuff like that.”