Isolated Judgment Page 13

  “You sure?” Tony said, already reaching for the bill between them. His eyes stayed on the wallet.

  “It’s a policy,” Daren replied. “We always pay for information. Only way to do business, Tony. So why’d you and Daniel stop hanging out, anyway? What caused you guys to have a falling-out?”

  Tony scratched at his goatee again, looking at the pair of them with a sudden skepticism.

  “You guys are cops, aren’t you?” he said.

  “God, no,” she blurted.

  “We’re lawyers, Tony,” Darren said, and plucked his Michigan bar card out of the wallet, holding it up. “We need to find Daniel. Not to hurt him or get him in trouble. What happened that makes this all weird?”

  Tony stopped squinting at Darren’s bar card, and he folded his arms across his chest, obscuring the declaration about engineers and their sexual alacrity. A slight bitterness pursed his mouth and he shrugged in resignation.

  “You know what? I’ll tell you. Honestly, I hate that guy. I hope you are cops and he is in trouble, because he deserves it if he is. Daniel sexually assaulted a friend of a friend last year. Raped her, I mean. He’s a piece of garbage. When we all found out, he was done. Cut off. That’s why I don’t have any idea where he is. If I did know, he’d need to keep one eye open, you know?”

  Issabella knew her opinion of their case had just taken a sharp turn, but she didn’t have the time to stand there and figure out if Daniel being a rapist was something that would cause her to rethink carrying on with the Judge’s bizarre, convoluted scheme. It certainly erased any sympathy she had for Daniel being skewered by a giant sword.

  Stop. You don’t even know if it’s true yet. And he’s not your client anyway. You’re not defending a rapist. You’re finding out who murdered him.

  She blinked and cleared her head.

  “What was her name?” she said.

  “Rebecca. Her name’s Rebecca. But that’s all I have to say. I don’t want to get her roped into something she doesn’t want to be a part of, okay?”

  Issabella nodded agreeably.

  “Of course,” she said. “But you said it was weird that we came here today. What did that mean?”

  Tony looked conflicted, and it had nothing to do with the wallet Daren still held in his hand. She could see that the young man was past that now—he was chewing over whether or not he would say any more, not out of a desire for easy cash, but from some obligation to a friend, or friends.

  “Did something happen recently?” she pressed. She respected him for his reticence, but she did have a job to do.

  While Tony looked consternated, Darren was staring at the ceiling. Well, not at it, she realized—through it, to some vague place far away. Issabella had been his partner in both work and love long enough to recognize when Darren was off in his own mind, piecing together suspicions.

  “A boat,” he said, his eyes still far away above them.

  “Huh?” Tony said.

  “But only back to where it came from. Then the ferry, of course. Then a car, most likely. The one he drove to get out there. Or a pickup. Hell, maybe a motorcycle. It doesn’t matter.”

  Tony seemed to come to his decision, because he stepped to the side and pointed down the hall.

  “Guys, maybe you should be going. I don’t want to get into whatever this is, you know? No offense.”

  Issabella nodded once. “Alright. But can I give you my card? In case you change your mind?”

  She had it out of her purse and in the air between them, when Darren pulled back into himself and looked at Tony with a crooked little grin parting his whiskers.

  “Tony,” he said, “why did he come to visit you? Did he need help? Yesterday. It was yesterday, wasn’t it? Did he involve you in all of this?”

  Tony’s expression drooped, and he looked away reflexively, as if it would prevent him from betraying anything. The engineering student put his hands on his hips and shook his head, still not looking at either of them.

  “I have things I have to do,” he insisted softly. “Okay? I’m not part of this.”

  Issabella saw Darren’s eyes narrowing, and knew that he was ready to bear down on the issue. He was focused on a line of questioning, now that he had pieced together things in his mind. She stepped forward and put a hand on his sleeve, breaking his concentration.

  While he looked a silent question at her, she said to Tony “It’s okay. You’ve been helpful. We actually have to get moving along, too.”

  When they’d stepped out on the porch, alone in the brisk September air, Darren said “Okay. Tell me why I got the ‘shut up’ hand squeeze.”

  “Confidentiality,” she explained. “Our client was quite clear about not disclosing Daniel’s...current condition. You looked like you were ready to forget that and just start grilling that kid. If he doesn’t know about Daniel, we don’t need to be the people who reveal it.”

  Darren seemed to consider it.

  “You might have noticed I’ve learned to trust the ‘shut up’ hand squeeze,” he said.

  “I noticed that, yes. It bodes well for our future together.”

  They got in Darren’s Lexus. The afternoon traffic was thick, and the wide sidewalks were heavy with college kids and joggers. Darren started the engine and thumbed the windows down.

  “Let’s eat and compare notes,” he said.

  “You know a place?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  He put the car in Drive, but kept his foot on the brake for a minute while he scanned the front lawns of the houses along the street. He stared at Tony’s house, his eyes lingering.

  “What?” she said, following his eyes along the road and not seeing whatever had drawn his interest.

  “Just a hunch,” he said, flashed her a smile and pulled away from the curb. “I think I’m winning our game, fair Izzy.”

  * * *

  Issabella watched Darren claw a hunk of lobster out with the little fork they’d provided him. She wrinkled her nose.

  “You know,” she observed, “in the Old Testament, that thing is labeled an ‘abomination.’”

  “So?” he said, and dipped the hunk of white flesh in a little cup of melted butter.

  “So they forbade eating abominations. It was frowned upon.”

  “Like, eternal damnation frowned upon? Or just feel vaguely guilty afterward frowned upon?”

  “Hmm. I’d have to check the statutes.”

  Darren paused with the buttery lobster meat suspended on the fork in front of him. He looked up at the bright afternoon sky. They were seated on the sidewalk patio of a restaurant named the Real Seafood Company, right downtown on Main Street. That stretch of Ann Arbor appeared to be a march of fine restaurants and taverns, the whole expanse of it congested with traffic and shopping pedestrians. The buildings were old brick but well-maintained. The sidewalks were wide and clean.

  Darren finished his survey of the heavens and gave her a wink before popping the lobster in his mouth.

  “I don’t hear any thunder,” he said as he chewed. “I think maybe the abomination prohibition got repealed. Reformed? Probably reformed. How’s the chicken?”

  The chicken was stuffed with sausage and pecans, roasted and coated in a light brush of herbs that Issabella found to be exquisite. They ate in silence for a little while as the dinner rush thickened around them and the sun dipped closer to the peaks of the buildings behind Darren. She watched the local shoppers and chewed her food.

  “This is a really nice town,” she said after a while. “I’ve never been.”

  “I came here for a lecture once,” he said, and used a shiny metal thing to break a crab’s leg.

  “At the law school?”

  “Circuit court. Judge’s chamber. He was perturbed about something I�
�d done. A motion, maybe. I don’t remember. You sure you don’t want to try this?”

  She wrinkled her nose again.

  “I’m not a seafood person.”

  “For shame.”

  When the plates were cleared, Issabella sipped a glass of pinot grigio while Darren downed his second Crown and Seven. It was one of those pleasant, early autumn evenings where the warmth of day still lingered just enough to keep a person from wanting to rush off to something else. Soon enough, the cold would come and then the snow, and everyone would be layered against it, bent forward, heads down, rushing from doorway to doorway. Best to linger now, while it was still possible.

  “So,” he said, breaking the silence. “A rapist.”

  “Maybe,” she cautioned. “We don’t know for sure.”

  “Still.”

  “I know. It makes this not very much fun anymore. I already hate enough of my clients. This seemed like it would be a nice break from reality.”

  “Let’s compare notes and see who’s winning.”

  “I don’t have any notes. We haven’t learned anything. Other than the possibility that our client’s nephew was a monstrous little sex offender.”

  Darren sipped his drink and was quiet.

  “What?” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “We’ve been used, Izzy.”

  He took another sip and smiled at her. She considered what he’d said. The foot traffic was thinning out, though there were still plenty of college kids milling about from bar to bar. Their waiter appeared and Darren ordered them another round.

  “Oh,” she said, once it clicked. “Ohh. That son of a...”

  “This was my thought, too.”

  She slapped a palm down on the table, hard enough to shake her wineglass but not spill it.

  “Judge Prosner knows what Daniel did,” she blurted in amazement, now that it was all unraveling in her mind. “He found out somehow and moved Daniel onto the island. That crooked old creep is...”

  Darren nodded along with her.

  “Using us to see if Daniel’s murder is connected to an unreported rape,” he finished for her. “If it is, you can bet he’ll just sit on the information forever and rely on our confidentiality agreement to make sure the Prosner name never gets besmirched with what Daniel did to this Rebecca woman. And if it isn’t connected...”

  Issabella shook her head in mystified disgust.

  She said, “He’ll find some way to make sure the killer gets discovered. Something underhanded, so Ludolf doesn’t also get discovered. But he’ll make sure someone pays. We’re just here to see if he can get justice for his nephew without tarnishing his own sterling reputation. And if he has to, he’ll choose the reputation over seeing his nephew’s killer prosecuted.”

  Their drinks arrived, but neither Darren nor Issabella made any move to touch them.

  “He tried to ruin my livelihood over a commercial,” Darren chuckled, without any real mirth. “And all the while he’s using his island to shelter alleged Nazi collaborators and rapists. My faith in the judiciary is shaken, Izzy dear.”

  “We should drop this case,” she said. “Return the check. Tell Judge Prosner he’s a creep. And walk away.”

  “Rein it in, Tex. We still need to find out who did this.”

  “I know. It’s just...”

  She felt used. Clients lied all the time—that was just an annoying fact of the business. Issabella never took it personally when what a client told her and what the facts of a case told her turned out to be outlandishly different. Criminal defendants were facing harsh realities, and often they had to work through a string of lies and half truths before the court system had them cornered enough to force them into facing reality and coming clean about whatever they had done.

  That was business, and Issabella did her best not to let it outrage her personally.

  But this was different. This was a state supreme court justice. This was a man who had spent his long, distinguished career holding himself out as a paragon of civic virtue and personal integrity.

  And he’s got us both roped into this nonsense now. He didn’t hire us because we’re competent. He hired us because he assumes we’re unethical.

  Darren seemed to be charting her inner thoughts, because he reached out and folded a hand over one of hers.

  “He knew me,” he said with a reassuring grin. “Not you, kid. He was betting on my lack of scruples. If you weren’t around, I’d be irretrievably disreputable.”

  She returned his smile and, not for the first time, saw the decency Darren Fletcher kept secreted beneath his carefully arranged veneer of sarcasm and devil-may-care recklessness. He seemed to have a perfectly attuned barometer inside him that was set to measure her level of distress. Whenever it registered that she was truly upset in some fashion or another, an earnestness overtook him. It wasn’t feigned or manufactured. It just wasn’t deployed unless needed, and somehow that made it more valuable to her.

  She squeezed his hand in hers and pushed the duplicity of Judge Prosner out of her mind.

  “Okay,” she said. “What now?”

  “Back to the lair of the sinister goatee.”

  “Um, why? Tony’s not going to tell us anything else.”

  Darren sipped his untouched drink.

  “Finish your wine,” he said. “This will be easier if your inhibitions are clouded.”

  * * *

  Chief Fish was in the basement of his ancestral home, beneath the two floors of polished hardwood his grandfather had masterfully put down, beneath the sweeping oak rails that ran the length of the staircases, beneath the big bay window with its view of the lake his father had told him was “ours, Timmy. As much as anything like this can belong to a man, this lake is ours, son. Don’t forget that. Keep it close. Give it to your son, and tell him the same.”

  He felt the weight of it all above him as he pulled the string that brought the ceiling bulb to life. Not just the weight of the place. The weight of what was owed. Money to the banks to fend off foreclosure. And more. He owed his name to a son. He owed his family the promise of continuation, of legacy. The likelihood of that debt being satisfied seemed as remote to him as the debt he owed the banks ever getting wiped from the books.

  He’d never been good with women. He was awkward and reticent and...and they just didn’t like him. Not in that way. As a young man, he’d made a few faltering attempts at romance, all of them disastrous and humiliating. With no taste for that sort of embarrassment, Fish had buried the notion of companionship away, refocusing all of his energies on his role as chief of police. A few times he’d explained to people that he was “married to his job,” but that just got him sympathetic looks, so he stopped saying it and instead dismissed questions about plans of family with “I guess I just haven’t met the right girl yet.” If the officers under him pitched around suspicious theories, Fish couldn’t stop that. It was just another slight on top of other slights, all of them more bearable than the thought of agonizing through a blind date and watching some poor woman grow increasingly disinterested in the near-blind, stooped and nervous man sitting across from her.

  The basement was a musty vault of spiderwebs, water-stained cinder blocks and heaps of family heirlooms. His grandfather had built the house. His father had added the sweeping deck along the back and the wood stairway leading from the lawn, down the bluff and to the beach. His father had implored him to make the basement his own project, to finish it with paneling and carpet and the amenities that would make it as charming as the rest of the estate.

  Chief Fish bit back the sour taste in his mouth and walked to the corner where a large workbench stood, covered in piles of old family albums, boxes of books and other forgotten things. He had no interest in finishing the basement. And even if h
e had, what then? Who was going to appreciate it?

  He moved two of the boxes aside, until he could get at the tackle box he’d stolen from Ben Roth’s boat. He pulled it forward until it was at the edge of the workbench, and opened the lid.

  “You gotta ge...get it back to wh...wh...where it come from.”

  Roy Connors, it turned out, was a very amicable man. After the chief had confessed what he’d done, and how he’d managed to destroy all the evidence in the boat, Roy hadn’t burst into the indignant tirade Fish had half-expected.

  “That kid...” Roy had said after a while of silence, digesting what the chief had told him. “Stuh...stupid. Just plain stuh...stupid. Not mean. Duh...duh...don’t know wuh...what he did. The blood. Yuh...you gotta find out.”

  Roy wasn’t going to ruin him. He wasn’t going to tell anybody. But before the chief left his living room, Roy had insisted that the situation had to be made right. The tackle box had to be returned to whomever it belonged to. And if someone had been hurt, or worse, Chief Fish had to find out.

  “That old juh...judge. He might...he might be hurt, Chief. You geh...get out there. Do yuh...you’re job. You might get fuh...found out, Chief. Buh...but you’ll be able to li...live with yourself.”

  That had been a day ago. Chief Fish had not done as Roy bid, though it wasn’t because he still intended on keeping the treasure the tackle box contained. No, that terrible scheme was done. The reason he hadn’t rushed off to the Wailing Isle was because, in his heart, he didn’t feel like a cop—had never felt like a cop.

  The worst trouble he’d ever dealt with in an official capacity was driving drunks home and telling them not to come back for their vehicles until they sobered up, or occasionally returning troublemaking teens to their parents. When vacationers had too much to drink at one of the local bars and someone threw a fist, Chief Fish dispatched whoever was on shift with him to deal with it.

  When he had cause to recognize the way he avoided conflict while maintaining a job that demanded he was in charge of dealing with conflict, he’d told himself he was an administrator, really. Administration was vital, and it had its place just as surely as the officers he directed out into the world had theirs.