A Devil's Bargain Page 7

  Krane turned around to look the little freak in the eye and put the real questions to him.

  Reggie Chalmers was standing across the island counter from him, wearing nothing but a threadbare pair of dingy, yellowed underwear. Reggie’s body was thin, spindly, the body of someone who had never exerted himself beyond his own leisurely pursuits. A boy’s body, really.

  That’s what he is, Krane thought. A sick forty-year-old little boy standing here in his undershorts like it isn’t fucking weird as hell to do that.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Reggie said. “Where do you keep going? You never go out. Now you’re in and out all the time. Why are you accusing me of things I didn’t do?”

  “Where did you go three nights ago? You didn’t go to the movies, Reggie.”

  Reggie crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t look Krane in the eye.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I have an expectation of privacy. I have a right to autonomy. That’s a right I have as a—”

  “Not if your daddy says no.”

  “I have a right to personal articles and my...and my privacy to come and go...to...”

  “I think I get the point.”

  “...to be unencumbered by invasive prying!”

  Krane finished his coffee and set the mug in the sink. He didn’t turn back around. Staring at Reggie’s mismatched eyes and his plucked brows was disturbing. Instead he stared out at the woods beyond the wall as he said, “You know I won’t force it out of you, that’s why you keep lying to my face. If you’d been under my command back in the day, you wouldn’t have ever dreamed of lying to me, Reggie. Of course, you’d never have been there, would you? Even if you were sane and fit, there’s no way you’d have ever served.”

  “I have the utmost respect for the military.”

  “Jesus, don’t say that. Nobody wants your respect.”

  “Father has served on the Armed Services Committee for seventeen years.”

  Krane knew that very well. That fact, and the need for someone like Krane to devote every hour of his life to keeping Reggie safely hidden from the world, were the only things that had kept him from a life sentence in a military prison. The knowledge that this was true, that he owed what little freedom he had to Reggie’s father, had kept him from lashing out at his freakish charge on several occasions. His own continued freedom was irrevocably tied to safeguarding the well-being of a Senator’s misfit son.

  That in mind, Krane modulated his tone. He turned around, regarded the semi-nude genetic mistake he was responsible for and said, “Hey, you know what, let’s start this over. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  Reggie’s mismatched eyes widened but Krane couldn’t tell if it was from relief or suspicion.

  “Good. I didn’t do anything, John.”

  “Sure. Look, forget it. How about that trivia game? You want to do that in a while?”

  Reggie’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  “You said you hate that game. I always win.”

  “Used to. Used to always win. I’ve been reading some of the history books you recommended in the library. Hey, why not? You go get dressed and grab the game and we’ll play a few matches. I’ll make up the pot roast you like. It’ll be a way to kill the afternoon. No literature, though.”

  “No literature?”

  “You know I don’t stand a chance against you if it’s about books or poems or any of that shit.”

  Reggie’s answering smile showed his yellowed teeth. Krane thought the man looked like he’d dyed his hair and eyebrows to match those teeth. With his left eye, the eye that looked like it contained a drop of lemon sherbet beneath dirty glass, Reggie the Third might have been a cartoon character. The Yellow Man.

  “I’ll still beat you at history and pop culture,” Reggie said, suddenly confident, even at ease.

  Good, Krane thought. Keep him that way and maybe you can get him talking.

  “So get the game,” Krane said and made a show of shrugging his shoulders. “Then we’ll see who knows what.”

  Reggie spun away and Krane watched the pale length of him disappear through the door, then listened in silence as Reggie bounded down the stairs.

  Even if he never got any straight answers from the freak, Krane had covered his bases as best he could. He’d made a phone call, as protocol demanded when an emergency arose. He’d kicked the matter upstairs and been truthful about everything that happened over the last three days. That was all he could be expected to do.

  He wasn’t in charge anymore. Daddy was.

  Chapter Five

  “This is nothing but the old Detroit Okie-Doke,” Issabella insisted. “This detective caught a murder case and didn’t find anything that’s actually useful. So she said to heck with it and arrested the only witness. My client. It’s bull and you know it.”

  Bob Portidge rolled his eyes and flashed her a condescending smirk. He was a veteran of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, an old timer who wore red suspenders, a matching bow tie, and who often produced a little black plastic comb to manage his coif of thinning white hair.

  “Bullshit,” he said as the elevator doors opened onto the second floor of the Frank J. Murphy Hall of Justice. He held his hand out, ushering Issabella ahead. Bob followed, pushing a metal cart loaded with several dozen case files stuffed into cardboard boxes.

  “What?” she said once they were standing face-to-face again near a wall-mounted drinking fountain. Around them, lawyers, accused, and family members all milled about.

  “Bullshit,” he repeated, still smirking. “You never finish the sentiment. It’s always ‘bull’ with you, when what you mean to say is bullshit. I won’t wilt if you graduate to actual profanities, Issabella.”

  “Cute. But you know I’m right. It’s this ‘arrest the witness’ garbage that got the DPD pinned down under a Department of Justice blanket of oversight—”

  “Yesterday’s news, Issabella.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “I know no such thing.”

  “Yeah? What have you got? A corpse. That’s it. You should bounce this back down to the cops and tell them to do their jobs before they rope you in the next time.”

  Bob laughed and rolled his eyes behind his bifocals.

  “Nice. Points for passion, but why are you wasting my time? Go talk to Sylvia, she’s the one who’ll catch the actual case. I’m just a prop for the arraignment, Issabella. Even if I wanted to kick the file back down, I don’t have any say-so.”

  She knew it was true. Bob was nothing more than the prosecutor who had been assigned arraignment duty in Judge Sherman’s courtroom that morning. His job was to be present in court. Beyond that, he could argue for a high bond if the issue came up. If the issue didn’t come up, he made sure each defendant was properly arraigned, properly lead away, and then he was done. Evidence, or lack thereof, had little to do with what Theresa Winkle was facing this morning.

  Issabella pushed on anyway.

  “I know the defendant,” she said. “She didn’t do it.”

  “Oh, you’re a witness? You can vouch on the stand that she was somewhere else? I think you might be conflicted out of being her lawyer if that’s the case.”

  “Give me a break, Bob.”

  “Not a witness, then.”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  His condescending smirk still fixed in place, Bob thumbed through the boxes of files.

  “Last name again?”

  “Winkle. Theresa Winkle.”

  When he had the thin file in hand, he opened it and began scanning the page.

  “Let’s see...puncture wound to the neck. Got the artery. Yikes. I guess there are worse ways to go, all in all...but not many.”

  Issabella waited while
he read the file. Down the hall, she could see the double doors that lead into Judge Tyler Sherman’s court. Sherman was an unlucky pull for her, she knew. Compared to the neighboring counties’ courts, which all tended to be quite conservative, Wayne County boasted a consistently liberal assortment of judges. You could get deals in Wayne County. There was room to argue and room to bargain.

  Not so with Judge Sherman. He, like Bob Portidge, was a veteran of the law. But unlike Bob, Sherman was facing mandatory retirement after his current term expired. Resentful of the age cap that would soon usher him off to irrelevancy, and having grown cynical with decades of dealing with the criminal element, he was no longer inclined to push prosecutors for reasonable plea bargains in order to ease his trial caseload. Whatever the prosecution offered, that was the best it was going to get.

  “Ah. Here we are.”

  She looked back to Bob. His smirk had grown into a confident grin. Issabella felt her stomach knotting.

  “What? Just tell me,” she said.

  Bob chuckled and made a show of snapping the file shut.

  “Your girl is cooked. There is physical evidence. If you were hoping I’d go easy on the bond argument, then I’m sorry. She stays locked up for the duration if I have anything to say about it. Which, of course, I do.”

  Bob pushed his cart of files down the hall, leaving Issabella alone with a deepening sense of looming disaster. Darren had been right. Detective North’s team of crime scene technicians had found something that somehow made it more likely that Theresa Winkle had murdered Gil Sharps. Likely enough that both a homicide detective and now a veteran prosecutor believed it satisfied the legal requirement of probable cause.

  She didn’t know how to process that, not right away.

  She walked numbly over to the bank of windows looking out on downtown Detroit. To her right, the Detroit River was a muddy ribbon. She stared at it and ran the situation through her mind.

  Today wasn’t about evidence or probable cause. Those issues were reserved for a future pretrial date and preliminary examination. The only issue she could raise at arraignment was bond.

  Issabella nodded to herself, focusing down on that single fact.

  The judge would want to know two things. Was Theresa a flight risk? And, if not, was Theresa Winkle a danger to the community? An affirmative answer to either question would doom her chances of getting out of jail. Guilty or innocent or somewhere in between, it didn’t matter today.

  Issabella took a minute to run through her bond argument. She sorted the important points from the rest, rewriting her future speech in her head. Once she was certain she knew what she wanted to say, she hefted her briefcase up off the floor.

  Right. Let’s get on with it.

  * * *

  When Senator Reginald Chalmers the Second lurched into view, Luther Fletcher hid his shock at the sight of Michigan’s senior-most Congressman. Hid it, reflexively and without effort, because Luther had spent his entire professional life keeping his emotions off his face.

  He stood and waited while the Senator crossed the room with the aid of a pair of metal forearm crutches. The static din of conversation from the diners seated nearby fell into a hush for just a moment, almost too short to have been noticed.

  Luther noticed. Had the senator?

  “Senator, it’s a pleasure to see you,” Luther said before taking his seat again. He glanced in the direction of the waiter who had been lurking, per his instruction, on the other end of the golden-lit dining room. The young man nodded and began walking toward the table.

  “That, sir, is a damnable lie,” Senator Chalmers said. “Nobody is pleased to see me anymore, Luther. Time is pitiless and she has savaged me.”

  The Senator looked, to Luther’s mind, like a swollen ghoul. He had never been a handsome man, not in the fifteen years Luther had known him. Even in his late-middle years, the Senator had been a fat-bellied and scrawny-limbed specimen. But now, seeing the seventy-seven-year-old for the first time in five years, Luther could hardly believe the degeneration that had occurred over that span.

  The Senator’s abdomen was a bloated bag, while his once-scrawny arms were now little more than dry pallid skin stretched across bone and terminating in large, spidery hands. His head was like an overripe gourd, too heavy and sagging under its own weight, so that his chin was imperceptible among the folds of flesh mashed against his shoulders. Atop that misshapen head, the only remaining sign of his youth; the Senator’s short, thinning crop of hair was a rich and shining red. From a bottle, Luther assumed, but still a very close approximation of the fiery hue the old man had once sported naturally.

  “You got here first, as always,” the Senator said. “What have you ordered?”

  “I instructed the waiter to bring us his ‘86 Henri Jayer Échezeaux. And here he is now.”

  They watched in polite silence while the young man poured a sample for the Senator, who made what Luther considered a show of sniffing the glass and swirling the wine inside his mouth. When he was done, he set the glass back down and inclined his head toward the waiter.

  Two glasses were poured, the bottle was left on the table, and Luther was again alone with Senator Chalmers.

  “You arrived first, on an hour’s notice, without complaint and even remembered my love affair with Burgundian wine. Luther, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was you who requested this meeting and not the other way about.”

  “I’m ever at the Senator’s call.”

  “And it’s all billable,” the Senator murmured over the lip of his glass.

  “And it’s all billable.”

  The Senator glanced around the room and said in a hushed tone, “Do you think they’ll look askance at the two of us drinking so early in the morning?”

  “I’ve smoothed the way. One of their chefs is prepping the dinner menu entrees as we speak.”

  “Excellent. Breakfast food is for men who think having callouses on their hands is something to aspire to. Heh. You remembered the last time I told you that, apparently.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Your attention to detail hasn’t waned.”

  “That’s kind of you to say, Senator. How have you been?”

  Senator Chalmers had been fine. Yes, the mood in DC had changed, but the rules of the game had not. Yes, he still could be found, every chance he got, out on the eastern waters of Lake Michigan. And still very much Captain, even if he relied on others to physically guide his sixty-foot yacht, Determination.

  “That’s why I never moved to DC like the rest. The Potomac’s for river rats. You can’t feel the bigness of things on a river. Lake Michigan? Finest body of water in all the world. Once you’re out of sight of the shore, you might as well be on the ocean, but with no damned salt spray to foul everything up.”

  Luther offered no dispatches on his own life and the Senator did not ask.

  The salads came and with them a ceramic bowl full of thick, breaded calamari. No, the Senator was not particularly remorseful that his golfing days were behind him. That, he assured Luther, had been nothing more than a career necessity. Business was conducted on the green, so to the green Reginald Chalmers had gone.

  “Hell, I’ve been around so long they come to me wherever I am if they want something. Even if the legs were good, I’d have given it up. That’s a masochist’s pursuit.”

  The entrees arrived, and Luther took measured bites of his almond-and-sausage-stuffed chicken breast while he watched the Senator devour a huge ribeye steak in a visceral rush that seemed to typify the word carnivorous.

  When it was over, and only the last third of the wine remained, the Senator blotted his maw with a soiled napkin before tossing it with finality onto his empty plate. A signal, Luther knew, that pleasantries had been dispensed with.

  “You haven’t asked about Reg
gie.”

  “How is your son?”

  “The same. He is what he always will be.” The Senator’s tone was an equal mixture of disdain and resignation. “Some things you can grow out of. Some things you can’t.”

  “Is Reggie the reason we’re meeting?”

  Senator Chalmers scowled and took a long swallow from his third glass. His sallow cheeks had grown ruddy, his eyes slightly glazed.

  “You know the Chalmers were born in coal mines, don’t you?”

  “I know coal was the beginning of your family’s fortune, yes.”

  “Do you reword everything until it’s as palatable as applesauce?”

  “Not always. My apologies.”

  “After coal and Kentucky, we ranged north. Michigan timber. That got the Chalmers name on the map. Of course, we haven’t logged so much as a single tree in over a hundred years. The industry changed. We diversified. Pop scanned the horizon and spotted a need. Then he filled that need. Maybe you know this already. You probably do. When Ford’s factories got converted over to making bomber planes, every one of those birds were fitted with Chalmers Whats-Its and Chalmers Whose-Its. We’re a world of smaller and smaller moving parts, Luther. A clockwork of ever shrinking, ever more complex cogs.”

  Luther nodded along, a tight smile fixed in place. If it took the Senator reciting the Bible from Genesis to Revelations to get to the point at hand, Luther would wait it out. There was too much at stake, too many questions that needed immediate answers.

  “Reggie will never run the family business,” Senator Chalmers finally said, and Luther perked up. “He will never run for office or do any damned thing that can be considered a success. We tried that already and it was pitch black failure and calamity.”

  Luther nodded his head and said, “Is your son in some sort of trouble again?”

  “Trouble? Without doubt. The only question is how deep he’s in it.”

  “How can I help?”

  Luther watched the Senator slurp another mouthful of wine, noted how the decrepit old man’s red-rimmed eyes clouded over with doubt. He was hesitating.