Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (7 page)

Nothing. Back to his car. He opened his trunk, pulling out the red plaid blanket he kept in a plastic zip bag. His eyelashes
were heavy with snow, his sweater layered with white. He brushed off as much as he could before he got back in the driver’s
seat and started the engine, switching the heater and blower to high.

In the backseat she rocked herself, and he pulled out the blanket, unfolding it before he passed it back. She grunted and
jerked it from his hands.

“We’ll sit here a minute until the windows clear,” he told her. He wiped the inside fog from the windshield with a bar rag
he kept beneath his seat, next to a sawed-off baseball bat.

Be prepared.

The snow had started at two that morning. Jeff knew because he’d been sitting at the pitted desk in his motel room, paging
through the Danny Hartman file.

He’d felt it, even inside, with the wall heater going like sixty. That weird softening and slowing down, like falling slow
motion into a pile of cushions. He’d risen and parted the dusty venetian blinds, big old-fashioned blades like those his mother
had wiped down every week with vinegar water. Flakes as big as bird wings drifted through the yellow lights in the parking
lot, dusting the cars. As innocent as a glass-bubble Christmas scene.

But that was then. This was six hours later.

“You doing okay?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Better” came her muffled voice. And then, “Thanks.”

She didn’t say any more, and when the defrosters had done their work, he pulled back onto what he hoped was the highway, hunched
over the steering wheel, trying to see through a windshield that kept slabbing up with the damn stuff, weighing down the wipers
until he had to pull over, get out, and shake them loose.

“Where are we?” she finally asked. The car was warm enough, so he slipped off his gloves. He smelled alcohol.

Jeff glanced at the odometer. “Seven miles along the Seney stretch of Highway Twenty-eight.”

The Seney was a twenty-five-mile straight ribbon of nothing. Pines lined both sides, leading off into swamps and more pines.
No towns, no houses. Deer or bear might wander onto the pavement, but that was it. Garner, before Jeff, had fallen asleep
on this road and been so busted up he had to leave the board.

“When’s the next town?”

“Shingleton, in about twenty miles. You can probably get a wrecker there. A phone, too, if you need to call somebody.”

She didn’t answer at first, then she asked, “Where are you going?”

He said it casual, like it was the truth. “Just past Shingleton. But I’ll make sure you get there okay.”

“I’m going to Marquette,” she said, as if he’d asked. “How far are we from Marquette?”

He glanced again at the odometer, knowing he was exactly 71.7 miles from Marquette. “Seventy miles or so,” he told her.

In his rearview mirror he saw her rocking again. Back and forth like his brother, who’d been a real mental case. She was between
forty and fifty, a big woman with hair plastered to her head. She wasn’t wearing any makeup.

“Shit,” he said aloud, pulling the wheel to the left to avoid a pine branch the size of a Christmas tree. The Cavalier slid
a little, and he easily corrected. He’d driven in this stuff all his life, not in the UP, but in lower Michigan, where they
were more likely to plow when it snowed.

He heard her whimper from the backseat, and he said without thinking, “Everything’s okay, just a little slippery,” reassuring
her as he would a passenger he’d invited into his car: a friend, one of the other board members, his sister.

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m just nervous,” she said, matching his unintended warmth. “I have to get there by ten.”

He was supposed to be there by ten, too, but his eighteen cases weren’t going anywhere. They’d been waiting for years. His
arrival carried all the expectations of the Coming. A few extra hours meant zilch.

“Do you think I can get a ride from that town… Shingleton, to Marquette?” she continued. “If I don’t get there by ten…”

He didn’t want to know where she had to get, or why, what tragedies her story held. He wanted a deadly dull drive, not this.
During the long, boring rides he did his final run-through of the cases, thumbing out files from the old plastic milk crate
on the passenger seat, one hand on the wheel, glancing between pavement and reports. Easy decisions dropped in the front of
the crate, tough ones slid to the rear for later, in a coffee shop or a motel room. Like the Danny Hartman case the night
before.

Danny Hartman’s parole hearing was today, just like the other seventeen men waiting for Jeff. Chuck and Paula, the two other
board members on Jeff’s panel, had apologetically but firmly deferred the decision to him. Cop-outs. “You’ve dealt with him.
Whatever you decide, we’ll back you up.” It had happened before, and those were the cases he hated the most. Danny’s was the
only one that was all his on this trip. In six years Jeff himself had never begged off making a decision. That’s why Chuck
and Paula thought they could. The price you pay for dependability.

He represented the great State of Michigan, the man with the power. Yay or Nay. Yup or Nope. The Roman with the thumb: up
and you got a chance in the real world, at least until your next fuckup; down and you’re back inside until your number rolls
around again.

“My son’s parole hearing is today,” she said.

“Shit,” he said again.

“Yeah, I know,” she misinterpreted. “That’s where I’m going.”

“Can family members attend parole hearings?” he asked. He knew the answer, natch. They couldn’t.

“No. But I have letters.” She held up her purse so he could see it, patted it. “An envelope full of them. I was sick, so I
didn’t mail it to the parole board in time. I’m taking it. In person. That’s why I have to get there by ten. Before the hearings
start. They said they’d take it.”

He wondered who’d told her that.

“I had my gallbladder taken out,” she went on, her voice relentless from behind him. “The doctor said it was one of the worst
cases he’d ever seen. And then I thought his hearing was coming up
next
month, not this month. It got away from me, you know.” She sighed.

“But these letters.” He heard the soft pat of her hand on her purse again. “His old boss at the mill says he’ll take him back.
He can live with me until he saves enough to get his own place. He wants to learn welding; he told me he did.”

That was part of the parolee’s criteria: a job, a place to live, a plan for the future. A life of purpose outside, no drifting.
A con without a plan meant landing back inside, and 40 percent of them did anyway. He didn’t answer her, but she didn’t stop.
And he wasn’t surprised by what she said next, not really. The day had that kind of feel to it.

“I promised Danny I’d get the letters in on time. Even Reverend Stokes wrote one, telling Danny’s good points, how Danny helped
at the church. The reverend believes in him.”

Still, when he heard the name “Danny,” he reflexively stuck out his hand as if she could see the files in his milk crate.
Danny. Danny Hartman?

“What’s your son charged with?” he asked, making it casual.

“He kept bad company,” she said, sounding like she was going to begin one of those long stories, and then stopped, simply
saying, “He robbed a Seven-Eleven.”

Yup. Danny Hartman. Jeff thought of Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca. Of all the cars in all the towns in all the world, she gets into this one.

“It was a bad mistake. Don’t think I’m making excuses for him, because I’m not.”

He only nodded, hoping she’d quit, maybe fall asleep. The shadow of a car came out of the snow, and he let up on the gas,
steering as close to the edge of the road as he dared. For thirty seconds after the two cars met, he drove in a whiteout,
holding the wheel steady.

“Prison’s been hard on him,” she said, and he heard her sigh again. Every time she spoke, the alcohol smell got stronger.
“He’s never been cooped up before. He’s had trouble.”

That was the truth.

“But I know once he comes home, he’ll do good. When he gets outside again. He was a good boy.”

“Mmm,” Jeff murmured.

“His boy misses him too,” she said.

There hadn’t been anything in the file about a son. Jeff glanced in the rearview mirror again. She was looking out the window,
not that anything was visible out there. Snow billowed up behind the car like dust.

Her eyes were far away. Her nose bent to one side like that of a boxer who was lousy at protecting himself. “I’ve been raising
his son since the boy’s mother died the way she did.”

The way she did. He loosened his grip and flexed his fingers, one hand at a time, then hit the radio’s Scan button. The numbers
ran up the dial in a static blur, AM 540 to 1700. Nothing. He flicked it off, and she took it up again.

“He’s a sweet little boy. I’m trying to be a better mother to him than…” She trailed off.

He wanted to tell her to shut it, he’d heard hundreds of stories just like hers over
his
six years. He was the man who drove from Lansing in a crappy state car two times every month of every year, bad weather or
good, an eight-hour drive up the middle of the state and across the big Mackinac Bridge strung between the peninsulas like
a glittery web. Up to the prisons tucked as far away as the state could legally push them. Going so often that finally the
other six took it for granted. “Jeff, will you take this to the new warden at Kinross next time you’re up there?” “Bring back
beef pasties this time, can you, Jeff? From Sally’s.” Until finally, the UP became his, as regular as a mailman’s route.

Twenty to thirty prisoners might pass before him in a day, and he hit one or two prisons a trip. Kinross, Marquette, Baraga,
even Shingleton. Last year, in 1986, there were over 20,000 prisoners in Michigan, and a growing portion of them were housed
in the UP. The new prisons were about the only thing that kept this stretch of nothing alive.

What happened next wasn’t because of the prisoners waiting to con him in Marquette or the mothers and babies anxious to hear
whether Jeff would set Daddy free; not the victims who somehow got lost in it all. Not because of the mothers like her. Or
maybe it was. There was no reason; nothing changed. The snow, the warm car, her voice from the backseat.

But the Cavalier drifted as if the steering had gone out, sliding like a graceful skater into the oncoming lane, then spinning
backward across the highway into their own lane. Big lazy circles.

She screamed. He steadied his milk crate and rode it out. It ended when the passenger side slammed into a snowdrift and the
engine killed. Just like that. Snow pressed against the windows and the light inside the silent car shifted to eerie white.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. She was rubbing her head, leaning against the snowy side of the car. She hadn’t been wearing
her seat belt.

“Can we move?” she cried out. “I promised him.”

“I’ll see how bad it is,” he told her as he put his shoulder against the door. The car tilted toward the drift, raising the
driver’s side.

He checked the rear first, hunching his head close to his shoulder to protect his face. He’d bet the temperature wasn’t above
zero. The right tire was buried in the snow. But it didn’t look so bad. Then he walked around to the front. The sliding car
had rammed so hard into the snowbank that it had hung up. Cavaliers were front-wheel drive and no way could the front tires
grab hold in this.

Jeff knelt in the snow, leaning down and squinting at where the front axle should be. The snow was packed tight. When he shoved
at it with a bare hand, it thunked like concrete.

A muffled sound came from above him: a car door slamming. He started to rise; his foot shot from under him and he landed flat
on his butt. By the time he hauled himself up on the front bumper, he saw her in the road waving at oncoming lights. A dark
pickup swerved past, then stopped, and like a film that had been rewound, she ran after it, just as she’d run after Jeff,
arms waving.

She opened the pickup’s passenger door and climbed in. He wondered what she said to the driver that gave him permission to
drive away from Jeff and his stranded car without offering to help or call a wrecker for him.

But there it was, she was gone. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted? In seconds, the truck’s taillights disappeared into the snow
and he couldn’t hear a sound except wind in the pines.

In his car, he first checked his files. His jacket still rested on the crate. Nothing had been touched. The backseat was damp
with melted snow. She’d taken her purse and left an empty beer bottle on the seat. It must have been in her jacket pocket.
He picked it up and dropped it in the plastic trash bag hooked over the glove compartment latch.
Keep Michigan Clean
, it said.

Jeff wrestled in the front seat, putting on a wool jacket and hat, lined leather gloves, lined boots, and a scarf he tied
over his mouth and nose. Then he pulled out the shovel stowed in his trunk next to a fifty-pound bag of sand and got to work.

An hour later, the Cavalier was free. Jeff huddled in the driver’s seat, heater whistling, his eyes closed and hands tucked
between his legs, waiting to come back to life. That took almost as long as digging out the car.

He drove the Seney stretch slow and easy, never once glancing at the files he hadn’t read yet, not Danny Hartman’s either.
He didn’t take his eyes off the snow-laden vista, watching for a dark pickup in a snowbank, a woman waving a black purse at
traffic.

He reached Shingleton, mostly shut tight, and stopped for gas. “You see a woman in a dark pickup in the last hour or two?”
he asked the attendant, who wore a hat with earflaps even inside the station.

“What you want to know for?” he asked.

Jeff shrugged. “Her car went into a snowbank and I wondered if she made it okay.”

“Haven’t seen a pickup or anybody like that,” the attendant said, and popped the top on a Coke can.

____

H
E REACHED
M
ARQUETTE
at noon. Seen through the snow, the ancient stone prison looked like a tortured dream. White-capped turrets, barred windows,
and glass so thick it looked greasy. Cell-block wings—four tiers high—jutted off each side of the administration offices in
the rotunda.