Past Crimes (29 page)
Authors: Glen Erik Hamilton
I’d been living in the Rolfssons’ foster home for one hundred forty-two days. I knew the number exactly because I wrote it in the corner of each day on the Amazing Spider-Man calendar on my bedroom wall. I’d done the same thing every night at the Garbers’ house before the Rolfssons—it had been a NASCAR calendar there—and at the foster home I’d been placed at before that one.
Added up, it was two hundred twelve days plus one hundred seventy-seven days plus the hundred forty-two at the Rolfssons’ for a grand total of five hundred thirty-two. Five hundred thirty-three, really, counting the day that Granddad had been arrested at Farrelly’s.
Twelve hundred and ninety-four days to go, in his five-year sentence. But I tried not to think about that.
Out in the living room, Aidan and little Roberta were shrieking at each other over whose turn it was to have the beanbag chair. Aidan was seven, and Roberta was six and much smaller, but she usually got her way.
It was the same every night. Carl and Loreen would let the little kids fight it out until
Wheel of Fortune
started, and then Carl would tell them to hush up. Everything Carl said sounded flat. He never looked at any of us when he talked.
He and Loreen weren’t bad. Lazy, I guess. They liked to sit on the couch all the time. They took up most of it. But they never hit the little kids, and only Loreen would yell when things got too crazy. And they ordered pizza a lot.
There had been a fourth kid living with Carl and Loreen when I’d first arrived. A fourteen-year-old named Hunter. Hunter was fat—like Carl—but really strong and PO’d that he had to split his bedroom with a
turd
like me. He knew how
to punch in the stomach, where it wouldn’t show. The one time I’d tried to fight back, he’d hit me three hard smacks until I threw up on the lawn and had to clean up the mess with the garden hose before Loreen saw.
Carl and Loreen smoked pot a couple of times a week. Not in front of us. I knew because when I came home from school, the back patio would smell like old socks and burning wet leaves. Granddad used to cuss about the same smell wafting over from our neighbor’s yard, back in the house.
One night I went into Loreen’s purse and found the pot—I’d known what it looked like from cop shows—and took a few clumps of it out of her plastic bag. The clumps were sticky and smelled a lot stronger than the back patio did. I wrapped them up in a wad of paper towels to keep the smell down. Then I took a bunch of aluminum foil and wrapped it around the pot and one of Hunter’s toy guns.
The toy looked pretty stupid, all covered in foil with lumps where the pot was. But I didn’t know if the metal detectors at Ringdall High that Hunter was always bragging about—his new school was “
tough, turd,
” he said, it was “
hardcore
”—if the detectors would beep at anything metal or if they could actually see what stuff looked like inside kids’ bags.
In the morning I shoved the toy way down to the bottom of Hunter’s school backpack. About ten minutes later, he did his waddle-run out the door to catch the bus to Ringdall.
When I got home from school, Mr. Benbie was there. Mr. Benbie was the man from Social who shuffled me and other kids around homes. He was in the TV room talking to Aidan and Roberta, his thin body hunched forward and almost vibrating. He told me to have a seat—I plopped down in the beanbag chair—and Mr. Benbie went back to asking questions. Had they seen Mr. or Mrs. Rolfsson smoke anything, like a cigarette? The little kids kept shaking their heads no
without saying a word. Roberta was trying not to cry. Carl and Loreen were in the kitchen, talking in quick whispers.
When Mr. Benbie let the kids go and talked to me, I said yes, I knew what marijuana was, and no, I hadn’t seen any here. I told him I didn’t think Mr. and Mrs. Rolfsson did anything like that. They’d told us drugs were very bad.
Mr. Benbie asked the same questions a couple of times, in different ways. It was easy.
Pretty soon Mr. Benbie nodded and went into the kitchen. I stayed in the living room and played with Roberta and Aidan until he left, pushing Hunter along in front of him. Hunter was carrying his suitcase. His fat face was white and sweaty. As he glanced at us, I mimed taking a drag off a joint. His eyes got wide and his mouth opened, but Mr. Benbie was already shoving him out the door.
After that day it was just Roberta and Aidan and me living at the Rolfssons’. Carl and Loreen let me stay in my room most of the time, except when I had to help with the kids. I always said I had homework, and after the first couple of weeks they never checked to see if I was doing it.
Tonight it was language arts. The book was open on my bed. The assignment was to write something about the theme of the story we’d read in class. Instead I was concentrating on tying and untying knots in a shoelace using only one hand. I had two square knots and one granny in it already, but untying was harder. I worked at it while listening to the TV. The audience clapping for every guess sounded like waves.
At the Garber foster house, I’d been able to see Davey once in a while—that was the only good thing about the place—but at the Rolfssons’ I was farther away and Carl wouldn’t drive me. Maybe after school was over for the year, I could take a bus.
The doorbell rang.
“Who is it?” Carl hollered. He wouldn’t get off the couch for people selling stuff.
I just barely heard the answer over the blare of a commercial. Ron Benbie.
I was up and out of my room right away. Was it another kid? I’d have to give up half my bedroom. Carl heaved himself off the couch and trudged through the dining room to open the door. Aidan had snuck onto the beanbag next to Roberta. They were both focused on what was happening, just like me.
After a few moments, Carl stepped aside and Mr. Benbie came in.
My grandfather walked in right behind him.
He looked over Mr. Benbie’s shoulder and saw me. My head was spinning a little. Granddad had a beard. A big one. It was like fireplace ash. And his hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost down to his shoulders.
Next to Carl and Mr. Benbie, he looked like a wolf. Big and lean and mean.
“What’s wrong, Carl?” Loreen said over the TV.
“Nothing, Mrs. Rolfsson,” said Mr. Benbie, “just checking in.” Carl waved Mr. Benbie and my grandfather toward the kitchen. Roberta peeked at the men from behind me. I started toward Granddad, and he held up a hand to stop me.
“Pack up your things,” he said to me, his voice just like I remembered it.
“Why’s Mr. Benbie here, Van?” Aidan said.
“It’s good,” I said, and turned and ran down the hall toward my bedroom. I had a small canvas suitcase, given to me when I’d moved from the Social hall to my first foster home. I opened the suitcase and dumped out the old clothes inside and began stuffing it full of things I really needed. My Game Boy. A heavy leather coat, which was my grandfather’s but which I’d told the counselors was mine before they whisked me out
of our house to Social. A travel set of tools. And from under the bottom drawer of my dresser where I’d taped them, my set of lockpicks. I grabbed my school backpack and shoved the language-arts book into it and slung it over my shoulder and ran with it and the suitcase back down the hall.
The men were still in the kitchen. As I ran around the corner, Mr. Benbie kind of jumped a little. Carl turned around and put something he was holding into the freezer. A thick envelope, I saw before the freezer door shut. Mr. Benbie pushed something deeper into the pocket of his maroon jacket. The pocket bulged and crinkled.
“We’re done,” Granddad said to Mr. Benbie and Carl. They both said yes, quickly.
Granddad looked at me. “You’re ready?” I nodded. “Okay, then,” he said, and went to the front door and opened it. I followed him.
“Van?” Roberta called from the TV room. “Where are you going?”
“Bye, Berta. Bye, Aidan,” I said. Behind them Loreen called to Carl, asking what on earth was going on.
Granddad and I went outside. His big black pickup truck was parked at the curb. It looked freshly washed and gleamed like oil under the streetlights.
“I haven’t eaten,” Granddad said. “Burgers?”
I nodded.
He paused before unlocking the truck door. “You all right?” he said.
I nodded again and stood there, uncertain. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me and squeezed the breath out of me.
“Good to see you, boy,” he said.
He opened the door and got in. I wiped my eyes and face as I ran around the other side and jumped in, tossing the canvas suitcase into the backseat of the truck’s cab.
Granddad drove us south on Aurora and parked at Beth’s, a diner we’d been to a few times. It was open twenty-four hours, and I remembered that the last time we’d been there was for a breakfast before dawn, after he’d been casing a store most of the night.
The diner was busy. Granddad wore a brown leather coat, sort of like the one in my suitcase but new, and jeans and a T-shirt. His chest and arms looked bigger. I knew that weight lifting was something prisoners did. When he caught me staring, I pretended to be checking out the art that customers had drawn and taped to the walls.
“The beard look strange to you?” he said.
“It’s weird.”
“Well, enjoy the weird while you can. I’ll be taking a razor to it tomorrow.”
A booth in the back opened up, and we sat down. A waitress came and dropped off menus. Granddad ordered coffee for himself. “You still like milk shakes?” he asked me. I said yes. “Chocolate milk shake,” he said, and she went away.
“I’m out,” Granddad said to me. “Out out, not just parole. You know the difference?”
“Kind of.”
“My sentence was short. Short time like that, they don’t bother with jamming up the parole system. They just let you go when you’ve been in long enough, by their thinking.” He rolled a straw between his fingers. “They treat you all right? That man Benbie, his people?”
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.”
He nodded, still looking. I kept my eyes on the tabletop. There were little gold flecks under the clear plastic surface.
The waitress brought his coffee and my milk shake. We both ordered bacon cheeseburgers. I drank my shake, and Granddad blew on the steaming coffee.
“How’s school?” he said. “You passing all your classes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any sports? You’d been thinking about football.”
“No. I’ve been practicing,” I said. “I can do a Schlage lock now.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh? How many pins?”
“Just five. But fast.”
He grunted. He took a careful sip from his mug. “And where exactly do you practice this new talent?”
I let the straw fall back into the milk-shake glass. “Just around Carl and Loreen’s place.”
Granddad tilted his head, asking.
“Really,” I said. “Nowhere else.”
He poured some sugar into his coffee and stirred it. “You didn’t take my set from the house,” he said.
I shook my head. Granddad kept his lockpicks hidden in the pantry. I wasn’t allowed to touch them without him around. “I made a set.”
“How’d you manage that, now?”
“Out of some hacksaw blades. I bought them at Home Depot. And a file.”
Granddad stared at me for a long moment. I wondered if I was in trouble already.
“Well,” he said, “isn’t that something.”
A bunch of people came past us from the back entrance, talking loudly. One of the women in the group grinned at Granddad as she went by. Granddad turned a fraction to watch her as she walked away.
He turned back. “There’s something else I’ve missed,” he said under his breath.
“Did you have to fight people?” I asked. “In jail? On TV prisoners are always stabbing each other.”
He waggled a hand in front of him. So-so. “It’s never good, prison. But it wasn’t hard.”
“Not for you.”
“It was different this time,” he said. “Worrying about you being outside while I was in.”
His eyes were so dark it was hard to tell sometimes if he was really looking right at you. People told me I had the same eyes.
Granddad pressed one hand flat on the table. “I’ll be making some changes. Different ways of earning. No more face jobs.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I nodded to let him know I was listening really hard.
He shrugged. “A face job is when someone sees you. Even if you’ve a mask on,” he said.
Granddad reached across the table and tapped the plastic surface in front of me.
“I’m playing the safe hand from here out,” he said. “I’ll stick to quiet work. No more guns. Alone whenever I can manage it. And only with lads I trust when I can’t.”
“Like Hollis?”
He nodded. “It may not be as much money, but that’s a fair trade.” He leaned back and let out a big breath. “We’ll not be apart again.”
The waitress brought our cheeseburgers. Granddad cut his in half. I stared at mine, not really seeing it.
“Can I work with you, too?” I said finally. “I want to.”
He looked at me. There might have been a smile behind the bristles of his beard.
“You keep up with your schooling,” he said, “and we’ll see.”
I grinned and made my best effort to pick up the cheeseburger without it falling apart. Granddad started in on his fries.
“Granddad,” I said after a few bites. “Do we get to live in the house again?”
My grandfather set down his food and wiped his mouth. Definitely smiling. “Nowhere else,” he said.
W
HEN I WALKED OUT
of the King County Courthouse onto Jefferson Street, Evelyn Tolan was sitting on a concrete bench at the curb, her neat black curls pushed sideways by the wind. She saw me and stood, scooped up her handbag, and began covering the ten yards between us at a fast walk.
It was cold outside, a breeze coming sharp and purposeful off the water and into downtown. Evelyn had put on a beige cardigan over the demure blue dress she’d worn to Davey’s preliminary hearing. It had been two hours since the hearing had ended. She had a tense and drawn look that made me suspect she’d spent every minute since watching the courthouse entrance until I showed.
“I want to talk to you,” she said.
For the past three days, I’d done little except talk, or wait around until somebody official wanted me to talk some more. Most of it had been done in the building I’d just left. On the first day, right after Dono’s wake, Guerin and Kanellis had taken me into custody, against the outstanding warrant for fleeing the scene at Formes’s homicide. They didn’t book me, and there was no need for me to make a phone call. Ephraim Ganz had been at the wake. I waited in a county cell until Guerin arranged for the warrant to be canceled, at which point he walked me
across the Fifth Avenue skybridge between the jail and the courthouse and straight into an interview room.
Since then I’d been at the courthouse eight or ten hours each day, talking to SPD, state detectives, a handful of assistant prosecutors, a captain sent by the JAG office at Fort Lewis, and a suit from the Justice Department who wanted to determine if the line had been crossed on any federal laws. Everybody wanted to know about Formes and his bugs, and the diamonds, and about the bodies of Boone McGann and Alec that the state cops had recovered from the little unnamed island in the San Juans.
And I told them my story, over and over. McGann and Alec must have been in on the robbery. They’d hidden their share of the diamonds on that island in the San Juans. When the two thieves learned that the cops had picked up their trail after Formes’s murder, they kidnapped Dono’s old friend Hollis Brant in order to steal his boat as emergency transportation to the island. I’d arrived at Hollis’s marina just in time to see McGann drive the boat away from the dock, but by the time I’d found a speedboat to follow them, they were already out of sight. Out on the island, the two men had killed each other over the fortune in stones. If Hollis hadn’t managed to get free and call me on the boat’s VHF radio, there’s no telling what would have happened to him.
Guerin’s people finally broke the encryption that Julian Formes had on his thumb drives. They found the recording of Davey shooting Dono.
I had asked Guerin if their final conversation had been as Davey had described it. He said yes, that Dono had become furious when Davey had told him about Bobby Sessions and the two skinheads and that Dono had threatened violence. The detective said that even if the recording was deemed admissible, it might do just as much to excuse Davey’s actions as to convict him. And that the prosecutor considered the whole incident with the skinheads to be a wash, too far in the past and too complicated to bother trying to get any charges to stick. To Davey or to me.
Guerin also asked me if I wanted to listen to the recording. I had already decided I could live without that.
The various law-enforcement agencies all settled on the same conclusions. Davey had unknowingly set off a chain reaction. With Dono in a coma, Alec had to abandon his original plan of tailing my grandfather to the diamonds. Alec told Formes to stop listening to the bugs, and Formes went to retrieve his gadgets and ended up gifting me with a two-day headache. When crazy Boone McGann got to town, he and Alec settled on the direct approach—kill Cristiana Liotti for her share and kill Formes because he was a loose end.
The cops and I agreed on one last thing: If Dono hadn’t already been shot, Boone and Alec would have killed him, too. After they’d squeezed the location of the diamonds out of him.
Maybe that was the reason I couldn’t summon any real hatred for Davey. My grandfather had been a marked man, long before Davey got shitfaced and stupidly confronted him. As bad as Dono’s last days had been, his passing had been easy compared to what Alec and Boone might have done to him.
Ephraim was present at each interview, making sure everyone understood that I was fully cooperating. The cops didn’t really believe me. But what I was telling them did fit the evidence, and once scuba divers working for the state police started finding black rubber cylinders full of diamonds two hundred feet down, the atmosphere relaxed a little.
Evelyn Tolan followed me as I kept walking down Jefferson. My body was stiff from sitting for too long. Evelyn hurried alongside as we both wove through the early-evening sidewalk traffic.
“If this is about Davey, you should go home,” I said.
“He made a mistake, a terrible one. But he meant to help you.” Her voice was tight.
We passed a newspaper stand. A city-council fight over a new stadium had pushed the police search for the remaining diamonds below the fold since yesterday’s edition. In another week everyone would have moved on and the reporters would stop knocking on the door at Dono’s house. I started off again, downhill toward the water.
Evelyn kept up, the wooden heels of her flats slapping the concrete. “Davey’s not strong enough to survive in jail.”
“He’ll have to be.” Though not for very long. Davey’s public defender
would probably plea-bargain the second-degree-murder charge down to manslaughter. With the overcrowded state prisons, Davey might be out in three years.
“You could at least ask the judge to set his bail at a sane amount at the arraignment tomorrow. Please.”
“If I were Davey,” I said, “I’d stay inside.”
“Because of … of Dono’s friends?”
“Yes.”
“But you can talk to them. Ask them not to hurt Davey. They’ll listen to you.”
“Some of those guys knew Dono longer than I did. They’ll do what they want.”
“You won’t even try,” she said, catching my arm to stop me. She was so tight that she was almost vibrating. “Damn you.”
“Go home, Evelyn.”
“How can you do this? You owe Davey your life.”
I looked at her. The same wide blue eyes as her eldest son. I felt the tiniest rush of anger, just at the resemblance. “What did he tell you?”
“Everything. He told me about those drug dealers you were mixed up with after high school. And how he went out to find you and get you to stop. He saw you panic and shoot one of those men.” She glanced around quickly, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper. “For Lord’s sake, Van, you murdered someone yourself. How can you judge Davey so harshly for his mistake?”
I started laughing. Evelyn stared at me like I’d just drop-kicked a kitten.
“I’m more worn out than I thought,” I said. “Should have seen this coming.” I steered Evelyn toward the park on the opposite side of the street. We jaywalked across. I sat on a stone bank that edged a section of elevated lawn, and after a moment she sat down next to me.
“Evelyn,” I said, “Davey lied.”
“I know what happened,” she said. “I looked up the news story, from ten years ago.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it wasn’t my drug deal. And it wasn’t me holding
the gun. Davey called me, two nights after our graduation.” I gave her a short rundown of that night’s events. I mentioned Bobby Sessions and a few other details that Evelyn might have remembered from that long ago.
Her expression moved away from its taut anger to something like dread. “But you left town,” she said. “Right after that.”
“Dono caught me when I came home,” I said. “I didn’t tell him what Davey had done. I should have.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like. Ask Davey someday how it felt, the first time he pulled the trigger.”
She stared at me. “You think he shot your grandfather on purpose.”
“Your son’s a lost cause, Evelyn.”
“Dono attacked Davey. It wasn’t his fault.”
“It never is. He killed that skinhead back when we were kids. It didn’t shake him up much. He killed Dono. He has to pay for that.”
“He’s your friend.”
I stood up. The sun was down behind even the lowest buildings, and the center of the city was rapidly growing dark.
“See you at the arraignment,” I said.
“I know why you’re giving your half of the bar to Michael,” she said.
I turned back.
Evelyn nodded. “Your lawyer called us. He told Michael you had signed over the deed.”
“That’s what Dono wanted.”
She shook her head, jaw clenched. “You know what you’re doing to Davey is wrong. I think you’re trying to make yourself feel less shameful.”
“Mike’s getting the bar,” I said, “because Dono always took care of family.”
Evelyn blanched. She opened her mouth and closed it again.
“When my mother fled Dono’s house, he kept her in his will,” I said. “When I left Seattle, he did the same for me. It didn’t matter that he and I had almost torn each other apart. I was still blood.”
“That’s—” Evelyn said. “Michael was his employee.”
“When Luce told me Dono was going to leave the bar to Mike, I thought the old man was cutting all ties with me. Hell, Davey overheard Dono talking to Luce, and even
he
jumped to that conclusion.
“But Davey had it wrong. Dono was planning to tell me about the diamonds he’d stolen. That could be his legacy to me, if I wanted to claim it. Which left Dono free to give the bar to Michael.” Evelyn was looking down at her lap. I waited until she met my eyes. “Something for both of his boys.”
“You know,” she said.
I remembered Evelyn’s reaction when I had leveled with her about Dono’s chance for recovery. She was a strong woman, accustomed to hardship and loss. But the news had nearly floored her. She’d said Michael’s name, because her first thought was for her younger boy. Who had lost his father.
“I guessed some of it,” I said. “You and Dono, twenty-three years ago. Why don’t you tell me the rest?”
She was very still. For a moment I thought that she wouldn’t say anything, just stay there like a bird frozen in front of a snake, hoping it would go away.
“It was after Joe and I had parted,” she said, “before he left town for good.”
“Just after I came to live with Dono.”
“You and Davey were so young.” Evelyn’s slim fingers worried at the strap of her purse. “I hadn’t meant to get involved with your grandfather. He was trouble. But he was also strong, and I wasn’t, not right then.” She stopped, waiting until the shiver was out of her voice. “Dono and I had broken things off before I ever knew I was pregnant. Marriage was out of the question.”
“You’ve never told Mike?”
“No.”
“But Dono knew.”
“I asked him to let us be.” She stood up. “You’d been living in Dono’s house less than a year, but already I could see his influence on you, Van. I didn’t want Dono to have the same hold over Michael.”
I smiled, without much in it besides the baring of teeth. “Not that it mattered. Mike turned out fine. So did I.” I nodded up the street, toward the windowless block of the jail. “Davey’s the rotten branch on the tree.”
“Your grandfather was a criminal.”
“Yeah. And I imagine he put some money in your pocket every few weeks. For Mike. You ever say no to that?”
Evelyn’s face twisted. “You can’t tell him. Michael is happier as things are.”
Dono had wanted Mike to know the truth. Wanted what was left of his family provided for and brought together.
But the truth had turned poisonous. Mike’s brother had killed his father. Who the hell would be richer for knowing that? Not Mike, and not Davey. Sure as hell not Juliet or their kid.
I looked at Evelyn. “You’re right. Better to let it alone.”
“He can’t ever know,” she said.
“Forever’s a long time. For now you and I can carry the weight.” I looked up Third Avenue. If I walked fast, I could be at Luce’s apartment in time to have a quick dinner with her before she started her night at the Morgen.
“Tell Davey to stay where he is,” I said.
I walked away. Evelyn stayed where she was, standing rigid in the cold wind.
*
THREE DAYS LATER THE
city of Seattle, King County, and Washington State had all decided they’d seen enough of me. The county prosecutor signed off on sending me back to the army for local duty. The next morning I locked up Dono’s house—my house—with the new police lock I’d installed and handed Addy Proctor the keys. She gave me a hug.
“I’ll fight off the squatters,” she said. “Just come back safe.”
Luce was waiting at the curb in her old Audi, the engine idling. She had the top down, even though the day was too new to even hint at being warm.
“Nothing else?” she said after I’d squeezed myself into the passenger seat.
“Nope.” I had my passport and papers and the clothes on my back. “Pretty much what I arrived with.”
Luce grinned. “I’d say you’ve got a bit more than that.”
I looked at her, then leaned across and kissed her. “Let’s go.”
She drove us up and over the hill to Madison and the I-5 Southbound exit.
“November twelfth,” she said after a couple of miles. “Six months.”
“Yeah,” I said. The day my enlistment was due to end. Officially.
“Will you be in Afghanistan then? Or here?”
“I don’t know. I’ll be attached to the Second here at Lewis for a while, until Davey’s case is settled. Then the cops will tell the army I’m all theirs.”
“And you’re sure the army won’t punish you? For being AWOL?”
“Oh, they’ll punish me. At least until they’re free to rotate me somewhere more useful.” By tonight I’d probably be baby-sitting a new class of boots on behalf of their drill sergeant, waking them every ninety minutes to do push-ups and yell cadence. But it beat a stint in Leavenworth.
Luce was quiet for a while. About the time we hit the S-curves through Renton, she said, “You won’t re-up?”
She was picking up the jargon. I looked at her. She kept her hands at ten and two and her eyes fixed straight ahead. Her blond hair whipped behind her like a pennant.