The Judgment (22 page)

“And you left before they were through?”

“Yeah, they more or less drove me out of there.”

“Charley, I wouldn’t tell you this except that I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t us, but I’d say those guys, put a wiretap on your phone.”

“Oh, come on, Sue, they were from Michigan Bell. I saw their van. They had it on their hardhats. Michigan Bell wouldn’t do that.”

She shrugged, tried the spaghetti again, and pulled the pot off the stove. She headed for the sink with it, and dumped the whole of its contents into a strainer. Then she looked me in the eye. “Did you ask to see their ID?” She shrugged. “That could’ve been faked, too.”

“But they’d been downstairs at the insurance office. They fixed their phones. You’re not saying they put a wiretap on them, too?”

“No, they wouldn’t have any reason to do that, would they? But whatever was done to your phone would’ve been done to the nearest office to yours just to make the whole scam seem real. Think about it, Charley. Have you got a case that might interest somebody else that much?”

“I might have.”

“You know, for a hotshot lawyer, in some ways you’re pretty naive, you know that?”

“It’s always a pleasure to be complimented.”

“Now get out of here, and sit down at the table. I’ll be serving everything in two minutes flat.”

Maybe it was three. Not a moment longer, though. She came at me with salad and spaghetti, a plate in each hand, banged them down before me, and then she set a glass and filled it with a red liquid from a decanter that looked suspiciously like light Chianti.

“You can drink it,” she said, “and so can I.”

“What is it?”

“Cranberry juice. Try it. I think it sort of tastes like wine.”

Whether it did or whether it didn’t, the dinner was a grand success. As she herself sat down, she apologized for the modesty of the meal. “Been asleep all day,” she said. “I had to hustle this up from what I had on hand.” I assured her she was a great little hustler, and she gave me one of her raised-eyebrow looks.

She told me that because of the body out on Beulah Road, she’d missed the Higgins funeral. Maybe it was just as well. But then we just goofed around verbally, discussing personalities and situations. I told her one of the few Mark Evola stories she hadn’t heard from me. She countered with the latest on Dominic Benda: He was using some of his retirement money to buy his old patrol car from the county because he said he was more comfortable in it than he was in his living room. Stuff like that. We
knew we were skirting around the real issues, but that was all right. There’d be time for that later. Meanwhile, the spaghetti was fine. The meatballs may have tasted a bit more Swedish than Calabrese, the salad dressing may have come out of a Paul Newman bottle, and the cranberry juice—well, maybe only a
little
like wine—but the total effect was just right.

I think Sue’s confidence had been restored by our exchange in the kitchen. Although I wasn’t quite prepared to admit she was right about my visitors from Michigan Bell, she had made a good case, and she knew it. And she had shaken me up in the process. Score one for her.

What with dessert—ice cream from the freezer—and my after-dinner cigar, it was after nine before we got to the dishes and general washing up around the kitchen. I always take part. It was part of the bargain between us.

Somehow it wasn’t long afterward that we found our way to her bed. And Dr. Charley Sloan performed another miracle of sexual healing. Miracle? That may be an exaggeration. Let’s call it a successful operation. The important thing is that it got her talking afterward about the things that had moved her to invite me over in the first place. We lay together, the covers up around us, my arm around her, and we talked.

She admitted that they were probably right to send her home, that she was too emotionally involved in this case, and maybe too much in her work every day.

“I feel all this pressure to succeed,” she said. “I got a late start, Charley. I feel like I have to show them.”

“Them?”

“All right, the men. They’re who I work with. I admit there’s a definite gender thing involved here.”

We talked about that a little, nothing new there. Our attitudes were as much generational as anything else. A number of years separated us, important years, important experiences.

I, in turn, admitted that I was wrong to have taken on Sam Evans as a client. I explained to her how his father
had more or less trapped me into it. Then I told her about the scene with him when his son was released.

“He’s a terrible man,” she said. “Four years ago he let his little girl die, no doctor or anything. Then he just buried her like some dead animal or something.”

“Yeah, I heard about that afterward. I looked up the newspaper accounts.” I hesitated, then asked, “Tell me something, was Bud Billings involved in that case?”

“From first to last.”

“He got a conviction on criminal neglect.”

“Should have been manslaughter, from what I hear,” she said. “Anyway, Evans got off on probation.”

“They
got off. Mrs. Evans was charged, too.”

“She’s so much under his thumb, though.”

We were quiet for a little while.

“Charley?”

“Yeah?”

“You were so right about what you said on the telephone. You know, about it being inevitable that sometime or other we’d be in a situation like this Evans thing. It’ll probably happen again.”

“Probably.”

“When it does, let’s be careful. We’ve got a lot to protect here, don’t you think?”

In answer, I gathered her up and kissed her as tenderly as I knew how.

“Want to stay the night? I’d like you to.”

“I’ve got to get out pretty early. I’ve got an eight o’clock meeting tomorrow.”

“I’ll set the alarm if you want.”

“I never need an alarm clock.”

“Well, if you’re as sure as all that, then there’s no problem, is there?”

“None that I can see.”

“Maybe just one.”

“What’s that?”

“All that sleep I got today. I need something to tire me out a little, to put me to sleep.”

She giggled. Sue Gillis does not often giggle.

“A little exercise?”

“That might do it.”

She giggled again, and without really consulting on the matter, we came up on the idea of exercising together. We had a great time. I was proud of myself.

It had the desired effect on Sue, too. The last I saw of her she was curled up in a ball beside me, breathing deeply, in the last stages of wakefulness. She did manage to mumble one more thing.

“Charley,” she said—I wondered if she was talking in her sleep—“will you go with me to my parents’ on Thanksgiving?”

Without thinking much about it, I patted her on her naked shoulder and said, “Sure.”

A
t about five minutes to eight, I pulled into the parking lot outside my office, switched off the engine, and waited right where I sat. I was all alone, as I might have expected, but there was a steady stream of traffic, most of it headed north to Port Huron. As I hunched over the wheel and burrowed down into my coat against the cold November morning, I surveyed both sides of the street in search of anything out of the ordinary. Turning a little, I spotted a van parked across the street. Not Michigan Bell, but brown and unmarked, completely anonymous. It was the only vehicle parked on the block at this early hour.

I had lain awake some time after Sue fell asleep the night before thinking about what she had said about our visitors from Michigan Bell. I’d decided that maybe she was right. The mayor’s boys must really be worried enough to try something like that. All the time I’d been in Detroit, all the big cases I’d tried, I’d never had anything like it pulled on me—or not to my knowledge, anyway. How can you really be sure about a wiretap? But then, I had to admit that none of those big cases of mine were essentially political. This one involving Mark Conroy most certainly was.

Thinking about all this, I didn’t notice his big Cadillac until it turned into the parking lot. He brought it to a stop near mine. I was surprised to see that there were two people
in the front seat of the car. In the passenger seat, beside Conroy, was a middle-aged black man, very dark, very serious, very capable looking. Our eyes met. He didn’t smile, but he gave me a sober nod. Conroy jumped out of the car and headed over to me.

“What is it? Anything the matter?”

“I think we may have trouble.”

He listened as I explained as briefly as I could what had happened yesterday afternoon. He asked just about the same questions that Sue had, but somehow he managed not to tell me how naive I was. Instead, he gave me one of those ironic looks of his and said, “Friend, you’ve been wired. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not listening to us right now.”

“Out
here?”

“You notice anything out of the ordinary right now?”

“Yeah, there’s a brown van parked right over—”

He grabbed my arm.
“Don’t point!”

Without giving
it
a direct look, he casually noted the van’s location and turned us away from it.

“Okay,” I said, “what I think is, we ought to go back to your original idea and go over to my apartment to have this talk you wanted to have.”

“How do we know it’s not wired?”

“Got any other suggestions?”

He sighed. “No, but I may come up with some ideas once we get there.”

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but I told him to follow me over there. Then, as an afterthought, I gave my address just in case we should get separated in traffic.

No need to worry. Conroy stuck to my rear bumper like a tick on a dog. As we moved swiftly into traffic, I looked in the side mirror and saw the brown van start up and try desperately to make a U-turn to follow. The guys on their way to work in Port Huron weren’t giving an inch. The van was marooned, probably for a minute or so. That gave me a chance to hang a left onto a side street
with Conroy close behind—then a right and another left, and so on, until I was fairly sure we’d lost the brown van. Then I drove the four or five blocks to my place in a direct route and at a reasonable speed.

When we got to my street, the brown van was there waiting for us. Or—who knows?—it may have been that one exactly like the one near the office had been there all the time. I didn’t see it at first, might not have noticed it at all, because it was parked in a row of cars opposite my building. As I drove past on the way to the parking lot entrance beyond, I turned for a look inside it, but there was nothing to see, no one at all in the front—as I should have expected.

I led Conroy into the lot. He pulled his car into the space beside mine. Conroy and his companion hopped out. Exchanging looks, the two seemed not so much agitated or angry as annoyed.

We stood between the two cars for a moment or two, saying nothing, looking tensely toward the street we’d come from.

“You saw it, of course,” I said.

“Sure I saw it,” said Conroy.

“How’d they get here so fast?”

“They know your address. They must have a whole file on you by now. Or maybe they got it when you gave it to me in front of your office. They’ve got directional receivers, pick up anything.”

“It’s a power move,” said the big black man. “They just harassin’ our ass now.”

I began wondering specifically who “they” were.

“Well, what do you want to do?” I asked. “I could take you over to that diner where we talked before.”

“Too many people there this time of day.”

“Lot of noise, cover up our conversation.”

“Too many ears, too. No, let’s do it here. We’ll see what we can do to mess things up for them.”

My apartment is in one of two identical buildings that share a single parking lot. It’s sort of project housing for
the middle class. The same builders did a complex just like it on the other side of town, and that’s where Sue lives. They keep the elevators running, the toilets operational, even liven up the halls a little with the kind of prints and posters found in frame stores. I keep the place fairly clean, but I don’t have much furniture, and what I’ve got is strictly utilitarian. No pictures on the wall, no framed personal photos or mementos of any kind scattered around. Some of that stuff is in boxes in the closet and up against the walls. All in all, even though I’ve been there nearly three years, the place looks like I had just moved in, or was about to move out.

When I unlocked the door and swung it open, I caught the look of sudden consternation on Conroy’s face as he stepped past me and got a view of the interior. He seldom held anything back except the facts. “Just look at this,” he said. “And I thought all lawyers were rich!”

“Now you know the truth.”

He grabbed the big man and pulled him over.

“You haven’t met LeMoyne yet.” The way Conroy said it, he made it sound like it was my fault.

The man’s name was LeMoyne Tolliver. He gave me a strong handshake, murmured something friendly, but withheld anything like a smile.

“I trust him,” said Conroy. “You can, too.”

Then without asking permission, or explaining what he was up to, he embarked on a tour of the place. I followed him.

“Is that your only phone in the living room there?” he whispered from the bedroom.

I nodded and followed him into the living room and watched, astonished, as he tore the telephone apart. He looked it over and tossed it aside.

He continued on his way, looking into the spare bedroom, and then he went on to the bathroom. It took only a moment to turn on the shower full blast and both faucets in the sink. Returning to the living room, he switched on the TV set and turned up the volume—the last half hour
of the
Today
show. And, beckoning to both of us, he led the way into the kitchen.

“You got a radio in here?”

“Sure.”

“Turn it on.” He looked around. “What about the dishwasher?”

“What about it?”

“If it works, turn it on.”

“But it’s not full.”

“Turn it on.”

So I got down the detergent, shook it into the little chamber, did the settings, and threw the switch.