Past Crimes (28 page)

I
STOOD IN THE STORAGE
room of the Morgen, looking down at Dono’s casket.

Somebody had cleared the room of all the cases of food and whiskey, but it was still a small space. The casket and the flower stand with its wreath of white roses took the lion’s share. The mortuary attendant and I took most of the rest. Big Willard had to stand out in the hallway.

The lid of the box was closed. The attendant looked at me. I nodded, and he withdrew a hex key and unlocked and opened the top half of the casket lid. He and Willard walked silently back toward the main room of the bar.

Dono’s skin had a slight sheen to it, like the casket’s varnish. His gray hair was brushed back flat against his scalp. He didn’t look peaceful. He didn’t look angry. He had no expression at all.

The funeral home had dressed him in a navy blue suit with matching tie and white shirt. I didn’t know if the clothes were his or bought by Willard for the occasion. Dono had been shot behind the left ear, but that side was turned to the back of the box.

Someone came up in the hallway behind me. It was one of the junior attendants, returning with the sash for the wreath.

“Get out,” I said.

When I turned back to the casket, I saw that Dono had his wedding ring on. He must have mentioned it in the funeral instructions he’d left with Ganz. Even I wouldn’t have thought to hunt through the house for the ring, much less put it on him.

For your grandmother. If I’m going to see her again, I’d better be wearing it.

“You should have sent for me earlier,” I said. In the small room, my voice bounced around the walls, hollow. “You didn’t need the goddamn diamonds.”

There was no answer. I left him.

The main room was nearly empty. A couple of women in white shirts and black bow ties were setting up a buffet of food at the far side. The bar tables and chairs had been left in place for people to sit where they wanted. A microphone stand was in the center of the small stage.

The front door opened, and Willard and another girl in caterer’s clothes came in from the alley. They were both carrying cases of wine. Willard wore a brown tweed suit made of enough fabric to cover a small car. He closed the door behind them, and they took the cases to the bar. The girl began opening them while Willard made a circuit of the room, checking everything.

“We’re about set,” he said as he lumbered past me. “You want me to open up?”

“Yeah.”

He went back and unlocked the door and opened it wide. I stayed where I was, just out of the room.

There was a small crowd of people waiting outside. Jimmy Corcoran was first through the door, shouldering his way through the throng. He was followed by a couple of men I recognized, although they were a lot older than when I’d last seen them. Dono’s associates, from back in the day. They filed in, shaking hands with Willard like he was a retired heavyweight champ greeting high rollers at a casino.

Luce came in next, leading Addy Proctor. Addy was wearing a black sweater and gray pants, with a black knit shawl draped over her shoulders. Her spiky white hair looked like it was freshly cut. Luce had on
a black knee-length dress with two-inch heels, which made Addy look even shorter beside her.

Luce looked around the room and spotted me lurking in the side passageway. She gave me a sad smile. I smiled back. It made my face hurt.

Damn near all of me hurt. It had been only the previous afternoon when Hollis and I had left the island. We’d pounded the speedboat through the evening darkness down the straits as fast as we could stand it. When we finally reached Seattle, I’d dropped the exhausted Hollis off at a motel.

But I’d had one more stop to make before I could rest.

Finally I’d driven to Luce’s to crash. I had called Detective Guerin on the way, to offer him a deal. I would hand him Dono’s killer—and maybe more. And he wouldn’t arrest me until he absolutely had to.

Another handful of people drifted in from the alley. Family types, maybe neighbors or some of Dono’s old contracting clients. Ephraim Ganz came in, wearing a double-breasted suit in a dark purple-black. He looked a little lost. He peered around until he saw me and made a beeline.

“Hi, kid,” he said, shaking hands. “How you doing?”

“Thanks for coming, Ephraim.”

“I don’t think I’ve been in this place in twenty years. I hardly recognize it. ’Cept for that thing.” He pointed at the medieval tapestry.

I saw Hollis by the door, talking with Willard. Hollis had borrowed a dark blue corduroy suit from somewhere, and it actually fit him better than most of his own clothes. His face was still pink and swollen, but his cuts had scabbed over. He nodded toward the stage, and Willard patted him roughly on the arm and walked over. He ignored the microphone and let his rumbling mixer of a voice quiet the crowd.

“Okay,” Willard said. “Thanks for coming. Dono Shaw was a hell of a friend to me. In a good way, I mean. To lots of you, too. Dono asked that Luce—Miss Boylan—start us off today.”

He sat down. Luce walked to the stage. She looked good. Her blond hair was swept back from her forehead in sleek ribbons, held there by some mysterious product, and small silver earrings accented a thick chain around her neck. Someone, Corcoran maybe, whistled low.

Luce held up a sheet of paper. “This might not be what you’d hear at other services,” she said. “But you all know that Dono was not your ordinary guy. He told me once that this song was one he and his late wife held dear.”

She began to sing. She had a high voice, not perfect, but clear and strong.

There were surprised sounds from the crowd, and a brush of laughter from Dono’s associates at the back.

I knew the song. Dono had an old long-playing record of it, sung by three women, with only a bodhran keeping a steady beat to back up the voices. An ancient poem of madness and defiance. Not your average dirge.

Luce waited until the noise had quieted.

Luce’s last note died away. Her song had held everyone rapt, me included, and it was a moment before the applause started.

Over the sound of the clapping, there was a clunk from the back of the room. I turned to see Mike Tolan holding the door open for his mother, Evelyn, the family slipping in under the cover of the clapping. Davey let the door close itself. Luce walked across the room to greet them as Willard stood up again.

“So if anyone’d like to say anything, there’s the mike,” he said. “Whenever the mood strikes you. And if your mood needs some help, there’s the bar.”

Laughter from the crowd. Addy Proctor stepped up to the microphone and started telling a funny story about when she’d moved onto the block and finagled Dono into helping her fix her porch light. I joined Hollis by the door.

“You look like I feel,” he said.

“It’s almost over.”

“Christ, it’s just getting started. When word about the diam—about what happened at the island gets out, our lives are headed to hell in a bullet train. Every kind of cop you can name is going to want a piece of this.”

One of Dono’s legitimate clients was on the stage now, saying something about Dono’s work on his home and how Dono was a true craftsman. Nobody paid much attention. The guys like Corcoran and Willard at the back of the room, the ones with the really interesting stories about Dono, would never tell them. At least not someplace where the tales might count as evidence.

Luce had taken a seat at a table against the back wall, with Davey. Mike wove his way toward them through the crowd from the bar, carrying a bottle of Redbreast whiskey and shot glasses. He caught my eye and waved me over.

As I crossed the room, people kept stopping me—all of them citizens,
like the liquor distributor for the Morgen or the guy who fixed Dono’s truck. Each shook my hand and gave his condolences. I nodded and said thanks and excused myself. I’d done all the mourning I could for one day.

At the table Mike was filling the three shot glasses. Davey already had a tumbler in front of him. Mike clapped a big mitt on my shoulder and passed me a glass. I sat down. Luce gave me a short but serious kiss. Davey downed the last of his whiskey and held it out to Mike for a refill. His eyes were on the stage, where another speaker had taken the microphone.

“You gonna get up and talk?” Mike said to him.

Davey snorted. “You’re the one who always kissed Dono’s ass. You go. It’s your last chance.”

“Davey,” said Luce, glancing at me.

“It’s nothing,” Davey said. “Van knows it’s nothing, don’t you, Van?”

I sipped the whiskey. My throat was still raw from nearly drowning at the island, and the good liquor burned like acid. I set the glass back down.

“You and Dono never liked each other,” I said.

“Never liked?”

“All right. You hated him.”

Davey grinned. Now we were talking. “He hated me first.”

“But not best. Dono didn’t care enough about you to really hate you, Davey.”

Mike looked back and forth between Davey and me as we stared at each other across the scarred wood of the table. My fingers were tight around the shot glass.

“The fucker kicked you out of town,” Davey said.

“No. Leaving Seattle was my idea.”

“You might have stayed with me and Mike. Ma would have let you.”

“It was time for me to grow up. Take some responsibility.”

“Bullshit,” Davey said. “You’re making excuses for him. Do you know why Dono asked you to come home? He wanted to twist the knife a little.” Davey’s voice was high. People glanced over from nearby
tables. “Dono was giving the bar to Mikey. Yeah. The old fucker wanted to tell you to your face that you were disowned.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” said Mike.

Davey toasted him. “Congrats, little bro. Free drinks for life.”

Luce looked as puzzled as Mike. “No one else knew about that.” Her expression changed as she stared at Davey. “You were here at the bar. The night Dono told me he was leaving his share of the place to Mike.”

“Hey, it’s not like I meant to listen in,” Davey said. “I was headed out the back for a smoke, and I passed the office and heard Dono talking to you about Van. Of course I stopped.” Davey looked at me. “Sorry, man.”

“Must have been a shock,” I said. “Your brother getting the Morgen.”

Davey scowled. “It should have gone to family. To you.”

Something tickled at my brain, but I set it aside. It wasn’t important. Not yet.

I caught Jimmy Corcoran’s eye and waved for him to come over. He grimaced. Willard and Hollis trailed after him. Mike and Luce looked at me questioningly.

When the three men reached the table, none of them took a chair.

“Hello, Lucille,” Hollis said to Luce. “Thanks for hosting the party.”

Corcoran nodded at me. “Sorry for your loss, kid.”

“I need your expert opinion, Jimmy,” I said. “How good are the white-collar cops here in Seattle? The computer-forensics unit.”

Corcoran looked at me like I was nuts. “You wanna talk here?”

“Just the basics. If the cops had somebody’s computer, what could they find out from it?”

“Okaaay,” he said. “Well, unless the guy was some genius type, I’d say the cops could find everything. What’s on the computer and every place that it had been on the Web, by stripping the internal drives and hunting around the net for traces of the machine’s IP address. Stop me if I’m going too fast for you.”

“I’ll manage. So wherever the computer’s owner hid something—”

“The cops would find it,” said Corcoran. “Might take a while, but I’ll give the pricks credit. They’re good.”

Willard nodded. “The cops even got some pet geeks on call. Those guys just love to hunt each other down, like some kind of pissing contest.”

Luce looked at me. “You’re talking about the laptop.”

“What laptop?” said Mike.

“I found a computer,” I said, “which belonged to a man who planted bugs in Dono’s house. He recorded everything that happened in the house, for weeks.”

“The night Dono was shot,” Mike said. “Holy shit.”

“I had the computer in my hand,” I said. “But I had to stash it in the truck, and then the truck went missing.”

Hollis nodded eagerly. “You told me the cops impounded it while you were avoiding their company. Don’t they have the damned gadget?”

I shook my head. “The police never got the chance. They weren’t the ones who took the truck. And they don’t have the computer.”

“So it’s gone?” said Corcoran. “All that work for fucking nothing?”

Luce put her hand over mine.

“And you’ll never know who did it?” said Davey.

“I already know who, Davey,” I said. “You killed him.”

A
ROUND US THERE WAS
still the buzz of conversation. But it retreated, shrank down until it felt like only Davey and I were at the table. Even Luce seemed miles away.

“If this is a joke, man,” said Davey, “you lost me somewhere.”

“I should’ve been clued by the money,” I said. “Dono always kept a stack of cash in the house, for emergencies. But there was no money when I searched his hiding place the day he was shot. I knew that some cop hadn’t found and pocketed the roll. Any cop would have also tagged the guns and other illegal shit hidden there as evidence.”

Davey frowned. “So maybe Dono was broke.”

“You knew that hiding place from when we were kids, Davey,” I said. “And how to get into it.”

“I didn’t take any money when I got that bag of clothes and stuff for you, Van. I swear.”

“You’d taken it already, and spent it. You were throwing fifties around, here at the bar when we first met last week. And you bought Juliet that expensive necklace the day after. I should have looked more closely at that, too. Back when we were teenagers, every time you had cash in your pocket, it never lasted more than a day.”

“Van, you’re not thinking right,” said Davey. “I mean, you’re wiped fucking out.”

“But even with all that, I still didn’t see you for Dono’s killer. Until yesterday.”

“Look at you, man. You’re so spaced you can barely sit up straight.”

“I found the truck, Davey.”

I felt the crowd press in a little. It was hard to read Davey’s face. His bright blue eyes held mine steadily.

“When you brought me the duffel bag from the house, you told me you’d looked for the truck where I’d left it in the garage. You said that it was gone when you got there. That was a lie.”

“I never saw the damn truck,” Davey said, loud enough to make Luce and Mike lean back in surprise. “That’s why I lent you Julie’s car, thanks very goddamn much.”

“You went to the truck. You knew that the laptop was inside, that it might lead me to Dono’s killer. You knew all that because I was dumb enough to tell you why the laptop was important, why you had to risk going to the truck with cops hunting through every inch of downtown for me. The laptop was there, and you had to get rid of it.”

“Van, you’re not hearing me. I didn’t care about the fucking computer. Because I
didn’t shoot Dono
.”

“You had to get rid of the laptop. You couldn’t just remove it from the truck. It would be obvious who’d taken it. So you stole the whole damn truck instead. Jumped the engine and drove it right out of the garage. Ballsy.”

Davey was shaking his head no, over and over. But I thought I saw a flash of pride.

“You were in a hurry,” I said. “You had to meet me at the library. But you had to hide the truck first. Not a lot of places to do that near downtown, not if the cops might be combing every garage.”

Davey grabbed the bottle and poured himself another shot. Mike stared at his brother, looking as if someone had hit him in the back of the head with a plank.

“There’s a gravel lot off Steinbrueck Park,” I said to Mike, “under
the viaduct. It’s a pay lot where some of the cruise-line people leave their rides. Sometimes for weeks at a time. Just drop twenty bucks and your keys in the box, then pay the rest when you come back. A good place to stash a car.”

I tried a second sip of the whiskey. It was warm from being in my hand, and it went down easier.

“It’s the same place Davey and I would use when we were kids and we’d boost a car to go joyriding. Or to sell it.”

Davey was staring at me. His mouth was set in a thin line. It wasn’t pride I had seen. It was defiance.

“You drove the truck out of the garage,” I said. “And you took it to the best place you knew to hide it. Trouble was, I knew it, too.”

“You fucking punk,” muttered Corcoran from where he stood. Davey shrank back.

While I’d been talking to Davey, a group had gathered around us. Maybe a dozen men or more. Luce had left the table. If there were any citizens left in the bar other than Mike, I didn’t see them.

“Last night,” I said, “I went looking. I found the truck in the lot off Steinbrueck. The cops have it now. And Julian Formes’s laptop. You had to leave that in the truck. You couldn’t be carrying it when you met me.”

“Van,” said Davey. He reached a hand across the table, placed it on my arm. “Van. The truck might have been where you say, all right? But I wasn’t the one who put it there.”

“You were,” I said. “It’ll be easy enough to prove. Fingerprints in the truck, maybe. You must have caught a cab back to the library, probably from in front of the Marriott or the Edgewater. The driver will remember you.”

“Circumstantial,” Davey said. If I hadn’t been watching his face, I wouldn’t have made out the word.

Willard was behind Davey, his shadow falling across Davey’s shoulder.

Hollis nudged me on the shoulder. “No reason to talk about all this now,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “We can take our time later.”

I looked at Hollis and around the table at Corcoran and Willard and the others. Hard men. Angry.

“If anybody touches him,” I said, “it’ll be me.”

Hollis stared at me for a moment. He nodded and eased off.

I turned back to Davey. “Yeah, all of that is circumstantial,” I said. “But there’s still the laptop. Before long the cops will be able to listen to each of the recordings. Including the conversation between you and Dono, right before you put the gun up against his head. That will be as good as a confession.”

The bottle of Redbreast was almost empty. I poured the last of it into Davey’s tumbler. “Unless you want to say it to my face.”

He waited a long moment and then took the glass. His fingers were trembling. He wrapped his other hand around them.

“I told him,” Davey said. “I told Dono about that night with Bobby Sessions and those two skinhead freaks. I told him you pulled my ass out of the fire and I saved you right back, before they could blow you away. If Dono had a soul, he should be fucking proud of you.” Davey stared at his hands, holding the glass. “Instead you skipped town to get away from him, and now he leaves the bar to somebody else. He had to make it right.”

“And you had a gun.”

“I was wasted. I thought if Dono finally knew the whole story, he’d see that you deserved a fuck lot better from him.” Davey shook his head no again. “When I told him, his eyes went dead. And then I thought, ‘No,
I’m
dead. He’s going to kill me.’ He walked straight over to the side table, and I remembered that he kept a pistol in the drawer there. You showed it to me once.”

I’d probably told Davey about the gun way back when I’d shown him Dono’s hiding place. Just a kid, trying to seem cool.

Davey looked up finally, held my gaze. “I shot him. I didn’t mean to.” Somebody standing behind Willard cursed. Davey flinched at the sound. “I swear it.”

“You should have told me what happened,” I said. “Even if you couldn’t turn yourself in, you should’ve told me.”

“It was for you. I messed up, but I was trying to help. You know that, right?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what the answer was.

“Van,” Willard said. “Clear out of here.”

Jimmy Corcoran nodded. “We got this.” Someone behind him laughed, one single humorless bark.

I looked across the table at the press of men.

“Davey’s turning himself in,” I said.

“Dono is our guy, too,” said Corcoran. “Don’t make this into something worse.”

“Hey,” Hollis said to him.

I stood up. “Nobody’s stopped me yet, Jimmy.”

Willard edged forward, half a step. Corcoran smiled.

“The police are coming.” It was Luce. She elbowed her way through the circle. “I called them.”

We all looked at her. Was she bluffing?

“Detective Guerin said they have a squad car on the block already,” Luce said.

Hollis exhaled heavily. “Clever girl.”

“Lucky,” said Willard. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to Davey or to me.

Luce glared at the men. “No more trouble over Davey Tolan. He isn’t worth it.”

I took Davey by the arm and got him up. He was nearly limp with fear. We could wait for Guerin outside.

The men blocking our way moved, just enough.