Penance (17 page)

“I’m looking for a …”

He glanced up wearily at my words.

“Never mind.”

Men were gathered in groups around six-chair tables, others sat alone, still others crowded the brass rail fixed to the stage, dollar bills set in front of them. Most were peering through cigarette smoke at the anatomically correct Barbie doll who swung from the pole in the center of the stage, nude except for pearls, stiletto heels and a toothy grin. Some were watching the highlights of last night’s football game on ESPN, their heads twisted toward the TV above the bar.

There was no sound except for the music the woman danced to. The men watched the show without comment, without smiling, without any overt sign of admiration or appreciation or arousal. Five men dressed in suits sat in a booth just to the right of the stage, two white guys and three Japanese. They could have been playing draw poker for what their faces gave away; they looked like they’d been sitting there for five hours. The audience did not even applaud when pearls finished her act and was replaced at the pole by a large brunette.

“Herrrrrre’s Joannie,” an unseen announcer intoned over the scratchy speaker system. No one seemed to care.

I found Cynthia Grey sitting alone in a booth watching Joannie, not really seeing her. She smiled at me when I caught her attention.

“Mr. Taylor,” she said.

“It doesn’t bother you,” I asked, “being alone in a strip joint with a bunch of overwrought men?”

She shook her head almost absentmindedly. “The only women in here who count are naked. A woman in street clothes might as well be invisible.”

“You sound like you’ve spent a lot of time in places like this,” I told her. She flashed me a look; was it anger? No. Exasperation. She turned back to the stage and I waved down a waitress, a tall young woman with blond hair and a mid-western smile—she looked like she had just finished feeding the chickens and was about to bake some bread. “Boy, is she out of place,” I said after she left with my order.

“She goes on in thirty minutes,” Cynthia assured me without expression.

I admit to looking at the waitress much differently when she returned with my Pig’s Eye beer.

“My kind of joint,” I told Cynthia. “Warm. Cozy.”

Cynthia did not respond, focusing instead on Joannie, who had begun drawing circles on the floor with her vagina.

“Why do they do it?” I wondered out loud.

“For the money, Mr. Taylor. Why else? They do it for the money.”

“It couldn’t possibly be worth it. I mean, how much can you make swinging from a pole, doing lap dances for fifteen bucks a throw?”

“Enough to pay your way through law school,” Cynthia said, then swung around, facing me.

“You interest me, Counselor,” I told her.

The waitress returned and I ordered another round; Cynthia was drinking ginger ale.

“Try not to judge people without getting to know them first,” Cynthia told me. “The woman who’s dancing now …”

I turned to look at Joannie.

“Her husband deserted her after their third child was born, left her penniless; said he couldn’t take the pressure of being a parent anymore.”

“What’s she doing here?”

“Surviving.”

The waitress hurried back with our drinks and asked if I wanted to run a tab. I told her no and took a five from my pocket. “Keep it,” I told her when she reached for my dollar-five change, and she actually smiled. (And you thought Cary Grant was slick.) When the waitress left, Cynthia moved to my side of the booth. (Cary Grant
and
David Niven.) She wrapped her hands around my arm and looked into my eyes.

“Like I said, you interest me, Counselor.”

Right on cue a plump man with short, graying hair slid into the booth across from us. Cynthia gripped my arm tighter.

“I’m Joseph Sherman,” the man said.

My first impulse was to wrestle him to the ground and start beating him about the head and shoulders. Instead I took a sip of my beer; not too much, I wanted the bottle full in case I decided to hit him with it.

“Harboring fugitives, Counselor?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she told me.

I chuckled and said, mostly to myself, “I guess she’s right.”

“Who?” Cynthia asked.

“This morning a woman told me that we don’t always do what’s in our best interests. I guess she’s right.”

I looked across the booth. Sherman was nervous, measuring every shadow, recording every ambient sound, swiveling his head back and forth to make sure nothing could sneak up on him, his right hand in the pocket of a brand-spanking-new silk sports jacket. He also wore tailored wool slacks, black dress shoes and a white cotton shirt that still held the original wrinkles. The guy’d just got out of the joint and he was better dressed than I was.

“They say you killed John Brown,” I told him.

“He didn’t do it,” Cynthia answered, tightening her grip on my arm.

“Sure of that, are you?”

“He called me early this afternoon. He remembered my name; John Brown gave it to him. He explained what happened and I believe him. I knew we needed help and I thought of you.”

“How nice.” It suddenly occurred to me how tired I was. I felt a yawn coming on and let it go, yawning in Joseph Sherman’s face. He didn’t react the way I thought he would. Instead of becoming angry, his face cracked like he was about to cry.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Miss Grey said you would help me. Miss Grey said … she said you could fix things.”

I looked at Cynthia. “She said that?”

“Will you listen to him? Will you do that much?”

I turned back to Sherman. “Take your hand out of your pocket!” I shouted at him and like a startled child, he did. His hand was empty.

“Can I get you something?” the waitress asked, summoned by my voice.

“No,” I told her. “Sorry.” She smiled again but not as brightly and moved away.

“All right, I’m listening,” I said in what my daughter used to call my “indoor voice.”

“I didn’t do Brownie,” Sherman said. “I couldn’t kill him, as God is my judge, I couldn’t kill anybody. He was dead when I got back …”

“Tell it from the beginning,” I said.

“You’re not going to believe this …”

“Probably not,” I agreed. I looked at Cynthia, glanced at her hands, then back at her face again. She relaxed her grip.

“It really began six years ago,” Sherman said. “They say I hit a guy with my car, a politician named Friedlander.”

“I know all about Terrance Friedlander,” I told him.

“You do?” asked Cynthia, somewhat skeptically.

“I’m a trained detective,” I told her.

“I was framed,” Sherman continued, talking quickly and without confidence. “They say I got drunk and hit Friedlander with my car, only it wasn’t me.”

“I’m supposed to believe this?” I asked him. “Man, you pleaded guilty, remember?”

“My lawyer said to. He said they had me by the short hairs. He said if I didn’t make a deal they’d put me away for manslaughter, maybe. I was a drunk. I was an alcoholic. All this started comin’ down on me like heavy rain. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any friends and I didn’t have any money. What would you do?”

I ignored the question.

“Anyway, up in the Heights after I dried out, I got to thinking about it. Okay, maybe I’m not so bright, it took me a while, but I got to thinking. They said when they found my car it smelled of whiskey. I was a vodka man; that’s all I drank, vodka. Vodka is odorless. Okay, so now I start thinking some more. I ask myself, Who benefits most? Friedlander buys the farm, who gets the most out of it? Not me, man.”

“Who?” I asked.

“C. C. Monroe,” Cynthia answered.

Loud laughter came from a table in the center of the room where four young men looking like a college chess team were hooting over the silicone-augmented physique of still another dancer. It was matched by laughter of a different kind from two men who were leaning on the bar and chiding a third man who kept insisting that the Vikings needed a new quarterback, one who wasn’t black. One of his companions reminded him that Warren Moon won a division championship, which was a damn sight more than Gannon or Salisbury ever did. Still, the man was not to be pacified. He reminded his friends that the Vikes had a black coach, the Gophers had a black athletic director and a black basketball coach; that the city of Minneapolis had a black mayor—a woman to boot. “Is a white quarterback too much to ask? I need somebody to root for!”

Who said we have poor race relations in Minnesota?

“Well?” Cynthia prodded.

“I like Moon,” I said.

“Wha … what are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

“C. C. Monroe is a murderer.”

“Who says?”

“I say,” said Sherman.

“Uh-huh.”

“I know what you’re thinkin’. You think I’m a an ex-con, okay? You ain’t gonna believe me. Ain’t no one gonna believe me because I’m an ex-con. I’m nothin’, that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

The look in his eyes encouraged me to lean back in the booth and take hold of the Pig’s Eye bottle by the neck. I wondered what he’d been like before Oak Park Heights, before prison started working on him. Was he an amiable drunk or mean? Was he a clear and present danger or just a poor schlepper trying to get by? I wondered what he was like then because I knew what he was like now. Now he was a hardened criminal. Prison does that. We take the men and women who have the most difficulty functioning in society, the poorest, the least educated, the most socially maladjusted, and we lock them up in cages for years as if that’s supposed to rehabilitate them. It doesn’t. But it does change them, yes sir. It turns them into the most dangerous human beings on earth. And after we feel they’ve been changed enough, we abruptly release them, kick them back into the mainstream and tell them, “Be good.”

Joseph Sherman would be going back to prison. If not today then tomorrow; if not for John Brown, then for something else. He was just marking time outside and we both knew it. Joseph Sherman was born for the prison yard; he became its child the day the iron door first clanged shut behind him.

Suddenly I felt sympathy for him. And embarrassment for myself. He was right, I had dismissed him simply because he was an ex-con. I released my grip on the bottle. “I’m listening,” I told him.

Sherman smiled a slow, knowing smile; maybe he thought he had won something. “I know I don’t have no proof,” he said. “So, what I did was, when I got out, I called Monroe.”

“Why?”

“Blackmail.”

“No.”

“Yes. I figure this: I tell her I’m gonna call the cops, I’m gonna spill it that she killed Friedlander unless she pays me not to. She pays me, that’s my evidence. I take the money to the cops, they gotta reopen the investigation.”

“You’re not exactly a rocket scientist are you, Sherman?”

Cynthia was outraged by my remark. “Taylor!” she cried loudly.

Sherman was just as angry. “It worked, didn’t it, smart mouth?” he said. “It worked twice.”

“Did it?”

“This is what happened,” Sherman continued. “What I did, I kept calling Monroe’s campaign headquarters, kept calling for weeks until I finally got past this snotty receptionist. I tell Monroe what’s what, but she plays it real cool, see. She says go ahead, call the cops, call the media, she doesn’t care. Only the next day a man calls me; says he’s calling on ‘the representative’s behalf.’ That’s what he says. I say, ten thousand dollars. He says to meet him in the parking lot for the payoff at midnight Saturday. I bring Brownie ’cuz I figure I need a witness and ’cuz, well, you know, it was a little scary. So we leave the house and we stop and have a few beers and then we go to the lot—it was off West Seventh Street—and we wait. After a while, ’cuz of them beers, I gotta piss, so I went to the gas station. When I got back, it’s like a quarter past twelve, and Brownie is leaning against the door; I figured he’s passed out. Only when I shake him, God, the blood … I got scared and ran. What would you have done?”

“I would have waited for the cops.”

“They would have thrown me in jail.”

“What the hell do you think they’re going to do now?”

“You’re not helping,” Cynthia told me.

“Was anyone else in the lot?” I asked Sherman. “Any other vehicles?”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Witnesses? Someone who might have heard something, seen something?”

“There was this woman,” he answered, excited.

“What woman?”

“When I found Brownie, I saw her walking.”

“Away?”

“No. Toward us, toward the truck.”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t really know, ’cuz I was, I was scared, you know? I remember she was tall. Five-ten, six feet, that’s tall for a woman. Only I didn’t get a good look, what with Brownie, and I started running.”

“You carrying?” I asked him.

Sherman looked at Cynthia.

“I asked you a question,” I said loudly, startling him again.

Sherman nodded.

“Nine-millimeter?”

“A Taurus,” Sherman said.

Low-end semiautomatic, manufactured in Brazil, holds fifteen rounds, retails for about four hundred bucks. “Where did you get it?” I asked.

“I know a guy.”

“How much?”

“Six fifty.”

“You were ripped off.”

Sherman shrugged.

“You buy it before or after Brown was killed?”

“After,” he said. “After, I swear.”

“John Brown was killed with a nine.”

Sherman shook his head.

“Let’s go back to the frame. Why pick on you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you know C. C. Monroe?”

“No.”

“Marion Senske?”

“No. I don’t think so. In those days, I wasn’t exactly keeping up with, you know, current events, okay? But I don’t know those people. None of’em.”

“How did they get your car?”

“Must’ve stole it.”

“How did they get your keys?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I left ’em in the ignition. I was doin’ stuff like that back then, you know, ’cuz of the vodka.”

I turned to Cynthia. “You said he contacted you early this afternoon. When this afternoon?”

Cynthia looked at Sherman. “About one, one-thirty?”