Glass Tiger (32 page)

‘I see my daughter as usual has bullied you into taking a glass of her lemonade.’ He held out his hand. ‘Harris Spencer. Glad to meet you.’

‘Brendan Thorne.’ They shook.

Spencer gestured him to the couch across from his easy chair. He sat back down. Thorne sat on the couch.

‘I’m retired from the Clinic, the freezer is full of walleyes and mallards, and you can play only so many rounds of golf. So these days I’m catching up on all the reading I missed over the years. Do you like to read, Mr. Thorne?’

‘Anything I can get my hands on.’

‘Good man. I read a lot of mysteries, all kinds. But especially medical mysteries. I’m addicted. But I’m rambling. How can I help you?’

Thorne opened with, ‘You must have seen dozens of drunk-driving accidents over the years. I’m sort of snooping into one particular one that happened on New Year’s Eve, 1966. A boy named Halden Corwin—’

‘Ran over a girl named Heidi Johanson. Damn!’ Spencer slammed a fist on his chair-arm for emphasis. ‘I’ve been waiting forty years for that other shoe to drop!’

Thorne set his lemonade on the arm of the couch. ‘What other shoe?’

‘I was only twenty-nine at the time, doing my very first tour of night duty at St. Mary’s ER. Life and death. Heady stuff. You remember your first one.’

Thorne could vividly remember his first night patrol in the Panama jungle. He’d been nineteen. Nothing had happened.

‘You probably know the basics. Corwin had always
been a sort of wild kid, but not a bad one. He was underage, but that night he’d been drinking at the Rainbow, then went out and stole a car, and ran over the Johanson girl by accident on a nearby country road. He plowed the stolen car into a tree a couple of hundred yards beyond. The sheriff’s men brought him to the ER.’

‘I didn’t know about him drinking at the Rainbow.’

‘He was out cold when they brought him in to us, but after he woke up he told me the only thing he remembered was being at the dance.’ He leaned forward, face intent. ‘His blood alcohol level seemed to me too high for him to be able to drive a car. Somehow he did. That bothered me. Still does.’

‘I thought no alcohol tests were run until too late.’

Spencer gave a little half-laugh. ‘I told you I was young and eager. I ran ’em myself and didn’t tell the police when he was arrested because I hadn’t recorded them so they couldn’t be used in evidence. Besides, I felt he had enough trouble.’

Thorne sipped his lemonade. It was good. The sounds of summer carried from behind the house. Spencer cocked his head.

‘The wife, kids, grandkids. God bless ’em, every one.’

Thorne said slowly, thinking it through, ‘If he was so drunk he was passed out, how did he remember the Rainbow?’

‘He wasn’t passed out – knocked out. His head hit the steering wheel when the car hit the tree. No seatbelt, of course. Twenty-two stitches. Retrograde amnesia, common with severe concussions. Sometimes part or all of the events shortly before the blow comes back, sometimes none of it ever does.’

Amnesia. In Corwin’s case, apparently permanent. Again the prickle up Thorne’s spine that he had felt leaving the Johanson farm.

‘What did he think happened?’

‘He had no idea. Even when he was all patched up and awake, he didn’t remember much beyond the Rainbow. Something about someone helping him into a car…’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe a false memory, maybe Heidi herself. I guess we’ll never know.’

Thorne said, ‘He and Gus Wallberg were teammates in football and hockey, and great buddies off the field. Why would he steal the car of his best friend’s old man? He could have just borrowed it. And since he and Terry Prescott had broken up, why weren’t Corwin and Gus Wallberg out together that night?’

‘Who knows? Maybe Gus had a date of his own.’

‘Good point. But then wouldn’t he have been driving his dad’s car?’

Spencer nodded. ‘It never came out, but some other kids claimed the two of them were drinking together at the Rainbow.’

‘Both of them drunk?’ mused Thorne. ‘Corwin maybe more so? You said he was a wild kid in those days. Maybe he was even already passed out in the car when they left the dancehall.’

Spencer kept it going. ‘And Gus Wallberg is driving—’

‘Hell yes,’ said Thorne eagerly. ‘It’s his father’s car. Wallberg goes roaring down the little country road, Heidi pops up in front of him, he hits the brakes, too late… WHAM!’

Spencer was really into their hypothetical reconstruction. ‘So it’s Gus who’s in a panic and runs into the tree.’

‘He’s the mayor’s son,’ said Thorne. ‘Maybe he’s already planning a life in politics.’

‘Even if no criminal charges are brought, his career ends right there, before it even starts. So…’

‘So his buddy Corwin is out cold on the seat beside
him. Comes from a lousy family, indifferent student at Rochester JC, probably’ll flunk out and get drafted for Vietnam anyway. So Gus slides Corwin into the driver’s seat, hikes back to the Rainbow, calls his old man… Good old Dad is a politician…’

Thorne ran down, stopped. Spencer was nodding.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here’s where it always falls apart for me, too. I just can never quite buy it. Gus would have had to run the car into the tree deliberately, so Hal would be blamed – his best friend. Even if Gus would do that, I can’t see Mayor Wallberg saying to him, “I’ll report that my car was stolen, son, and say you were home with your Mom and me all night.”’

‘Not enough heat for the mayor to do it,’ agreed Thorne, remembering that the man who had killed Alison and Eden lost his license for a few months, that was all. ‘Wallberg was mayor, a politician himself. He would have known that a drunk-driving hit-and-run charge wouldn’t stop a young man’s later political career, especially not in those pre-MADD days. Remember Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne? And that was years later.’

Spencer gave a low chuckle.

‘We started sounding like Kennedy-assassination theorists there for a minute, didn’t we? In reality, I can’t see Gus Wallberg letting his best friend take the blame for the accident, and I can’t see his dad letting him get away with it if he tried. Mayor Wallberg felt so terrible that it was his car killed the girl that he paid for Heidi’s funeral, her memorial service, everything. He didn’t have to do that. He even paid the family compensation for their loss. They bought that farm out near Elgin with the money.’

‘An unusual gesture, don’t you think? Like maybe there was some guilt mixed in?’ Which gave Thorne an idea. He asked, ‘Were any blood tests run on Heidi to see whether she had been drinking that night?’

Spencer looked surprised.

‘I’m sure not. She was the victim, after all. And she was only fifteen. And she was already dead.’

‘How extensive were her injuries?’

‘Terrible. Almost like she’d been run over deliberately. Couldn’t have been, of course. Corwin was too drunk to formulate such a plan. I was bothered enough by it that I attended her autopsy, but…’

‘Was there anything to support that idea?’

‘Only thing would be that the poor girl was three months pregnant at the time of her death. So two lives were lost. And there were whispers that it might have been Hal’s child. But three months before, he had been very involved with Terry Prescott, was going steady with her. Plus the fact that Heidi was two grades behind him. That’s a huge age-difference for kids in high school.’

‘And Terry married him before he went off to Vietnam. So obviously she didn’t think he was the father of Heidi’s child.’

Thorne’s tickle wouldn’t go away. If Terry believed Corwin was innocent of getting Heidi pregnant…

‘They didn’t have DNA testing then, but if Heidi’s body was exhumed, even now, could they run tests to determine—’

‘The point is academic,’ said Spencer. ‘She was cremated.’

Thorne packed his meager belongings. Sleep tonight, leave first thing in the morning. Again, a lot of driving to do. He felt his rage trying to rise again. He ruthlessly suppressed it. It didn’t serve him here. Not yet, anyhow. He didn’t need it.

Heidi had been carrying Gus Wallberg’s illegitimate child, and would have been demanding marriage – the mayor’s son was a real catch. That New Year’s Eve was just about as Thorne had pictured it – except the hit-andrun wasn’t by Corwin and wasn’t a hit-and-run. It was deliberate murder.

Three months pregnant. Wallberg would be frantic by then. Call Heidi up secretly, tell her to meet him on the country road near the Rainbow at midnight. We’re going to elope, don’t tell anyone. Get his best friend Hal – who he was maybe jealous of? – really drunk. Maybe dope his drinks. Get him into the car, at midnight speed down the country road – wham! Heidi’s gone.

And it worked better than he could ever have hoped. Hal Corwin not only had been passed-out drunk and couldn’t remember anything, he had ended up with retrograde amnesia from a concussion. Or was it just Wallberg’s good luck? Thorne wished he’d asked Spencer if the blow to Corwin’s head could have been deliberate, not just from accidentally striking the windshield. When Hal was arrested for vehicular manslaughter he didn’t fight it. He accepted that he must have killed the girl.

The mayor knew what his son had done. Knew that Heidi was carrying Gus’s baby. He not only paid for Heidi’s funeral and memorial service, he bought her family off with a new, prosperous farm so they would agree to Heidi being cremated, along with the fetus she was carrying. It would have been the mayor, also, who made sure Corwin got a chance to choose Vietnam over jail. They wanted him in a war zone where he would probably get killed.

But Corwin wasn’t killed in Vietnam. He thrived. Became a hero. Later, became a mercenary. But then his wife Terry was killed by a drunk driver – just as he believed that he, drunk and in a stolen car, had killed Heidi. All he could do was retreat to a hermit’s life in the big woods.

Meanwhile, for the Wallbergs, him becoming a mercenary was almost as good as him becoming dead. He would never return to Rochester, would be as absent from Gus Wallberg’s life as Heidi was. Here was where, to Thorne, it got grotesque. After he became governor of Minnesota, Wallberg initiated a long-term affair with Hal Corwin’s daughter. Physical infatuation? Love? Or a subconcious further destruction of Corwin?

Thirty-nine years later, Wallberg got presidential ambitions and broke it off with Nisa. But that wasn’t enough. What if Corwin’s memory returned? What if Corwin realized his buddy Gus had made a girl pregnant, had murdered her in a panic, then had set up his best friend Hal to take the rap for it?

Wallberg voiced his fears aloud, mostly to himself, just once. But Damon Mather, with his ambitions, was there to hear it. The wheel started to turn. Mather tried to kill Corwin.

Now they all were dead. Gus Wallberg was safe. He was President of the United States. If Thorne went to the
media, the administration’s spin doctors would get going. It’s all lies. It didn’t really happen that way. Where is your proof?

His proof was cremated in Rochester. His proof was dead on a mountain in Montana. Thorne couldn’t touch Wallberg.

But Terrill Hatfield didn’t know that, and Hatfield was Thorne’s real target. He could be manipulated through his own ambitions. It would be enough. It would have to be enough.

One more debt to pay. Thorne called Whitby Hernild’s clinic in Portage. Hernild himself answered the phone.

‘Clinic.’

‘This is Thorne. Hal Corwin is dead.’

There was a long, unexpected pause, then Hernild blurted, ‘My God! That’s terrible! When? How?’

‘When he killed Kurt Jaeger.’

Still strangely subdued, almost detached, Hernild said, ‘I was… afraid it might be Hal behind the gun.’

‘I shot him just as he took his own shot. But even so he hit who he aimed at. He wanted to avenge his daughter’s murder. He was no psycho. But he should have been after Wallberg, too.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say. I don’t understand.’

‘Because I’ve pieced together what Wallberg did to Hal on New Year’s Eve forty years ago.’

‘Hal had amnesia. He could never remember that night…’

Thorne told him. All of it. Hernild was almost wistful.

‘Is there anything you can do about it?’

‘No. Even if Hal was still alive, he couldn’t do anything. There’s no proof for any of it. So Wallberg gets away with it.’

Thorne hung up feeling, not purged as he had
expected, but oddly unsettled. But he had done what he considered his duty to the man he had been manipulated into killing. He had cleared Corwin’s name with those who mattered – his best friend, and the woman who had thought of him as a surrogate father.

Except that Janet was still a prisoner.

Jennifer Maplewood was fifty-eight years old and lived in a gated community with armed guards. But she was sure she was going to be murdered in her bed by rapists. After one of Jennifer’s thrice-weekly sessions, Sharon Dorst always badly needed her twenty-minutes downtime before her next patient.

She wasn’t going to get it this day. She had just closed the outer door behind Jennifer when it opened again to admit someone else. She turned, irritated.

‘I see patients only by appointment…’ She ran down. It was Thorne. She grabbed him and hugged him, then stepped back, red-faced. ‘I was… ever since you…’

‘Me too.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘I know you felt you let me down when Hatfield got hold of your session notes. You didn’t. We’re square. But I need a favor from you.’

‘Anything.’

‘Hatfield is doing to another woman what he threatened to do to you. I need his home address. You have FBI connections. Can you help me?’

‘Give me two hours,’ Sharon said. Her face tightened. ‘And call me when… when you’ve made her safe.’

Because she knew that then she would make more phone calls to her FBI contacts. Calls she should have made weeks ago.

Driving home to his temporarily empty house well after dark, Terrill Hatfield was a happy man. His imminent
accession to power had turned his wife on in ways he hadn’t dreamed possible. Yesterday Cora had read coy remarks in a
Washington Post
column to the effect that Terrill Hatfield would be announced as the new Director of the FBI in the President’s Fourth of July speech. Last night she had given him the best sex of his life. This morning she had packed her bags and had flown down to Atlanta to lord it over her mother and two sisters.