“I’ve got that cute little Beretta,” she said. “Fits right in my pocket.”
“Been a while since you fired it.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes when I take those ‘Mommy time’ drives?”
“Yeah?”
“I go to the range on Freeport.”
I smiled. “You do?”
“Oh, I do.” She smiled back. “Some girls relieve stress with yoga. I prefer emptying a clip or two.”
“Well, you always were the better shot in the family.”
“Better?” She opened her paper again.
Truth was I couldn’t hit sand on a beach. “Fine. Only.”
Gabby came back in the room dragging Mr. Lubble by one lime-green arm. She placed him on the seat beside her and climbed up into her own.
“Did Uncle Bubba kiss Mr. Lubble good night?” she asked.
“He did.” I would have felt worse about lying to my child if I hadn’t already set the precedent with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
“Did he kiss me good night?”
“He did.”
“I remember.” Apparently the lying starts early and we call it creativity. “And he told me a story.”
“About what?”
“Trees.”
“Of course.”
“He also said Mr. Lubble should get more ice cream.”
“And chocolate?” Angie said.
“And chocolate?” Gabby considered the pros and cons. “Okay, I guess.”
“You guess, huh?” I chuckled, looked over at Angie. “That’s all you, by the way.”
Angie lowered her paper. She was pale suddenly, her jaw too loose.
“Mommy?” Even Gabby noticed. “What’s wrong?”
Angie gave her a weak smile and handed the paper to me. “Nothing, honey. Mommy’s just tired.”
“Too much reading,” our daughter said.
“No such thing as too much reading,” I said. I looked at the paper and then back at Ange, gave her a confused look.
“Lower-right-hand side of the page,” she said.
It was the Crime Blotter, an if-it-bleeds-it-leads section they served up on the last page of the metro section. The last item read: “Maine Woman Slain in Car-Jack.” I saw the lede then and put the paper down for a moment. Angie reached across the table and ran her warm palm along my forearm.
A mother of two was gunned down in an apparent carjacking in the early hours of Tuesday morning as she left work at BJ’s Wholesaler in Auburn. Peri Pyper, 34, of Lewiston, was approached by the suspect as she tried to start her 2008 Honda Accord. Witnesses reported hearing signs of a struggle followed by a gunshot. The suspect, Taylor Biggins, 22, of Auburn, was arrested a mile away after a police pursuit and surrendered without a struggle. Mrs. Pyper was flown by medevac to Maine Medical Center but was pronounced dead at 6:34 A.M., according to MMC spokesperson Pamela Dunn. Mrs. Pyper is survived by a son and a daughter.
Angie said, “It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything.”
“Patrick.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said again.
• • •
It was a three-hour drive to Auburn, Maine, and in that time, my attorney, Cheswick Hartman, arranged everything. I arrived at the law offices of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath and was led into an office with James Mayfield, a junior partner in the firm, who handled most of their defense litigation.
James Mayfield was a black man with salt-and-pepper hair, a matching mustache, and considerable height and girth. He had a bear of a handshake and an easy way about him that seemed authentic and unforced.
“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Mayfield.”
“You can call me Coach, Mr. Kenzie.”
“Coach?”
“I coach baseball, basketball, golf, football, and soccer in this town. People call me Coach.”
“And why wouldn’t they?” I said. “Coach it is.”
“When an attorney of Cheswick Hartman’s stature calls me up and says he’ll cochair my litigation on a case, pro bono, I sit up in my seat.”
“Yes.”
“He said you are a man who never breaks his word.”
“That was kind of him.”
“Kind or not, I want your word in writing.”
“Understandable,” I said. “I brought my own pen.”
Coach Mayfield pushed a stack of papers across the desk and I began to sign. He picked up the phone. “Come on in now, Janice, and bring the stamp.”
When I was finished signing a page, Janice notarized it. By the time I was done, she’d notarized fourteen pages. The contract was, in its essence, quite simple—I agreed that I was working for the firm of Dufresne, Barrett and McGrath as an investigator on behalf of Taylor Biggins. In that capacity, anything Mr. Biggins said to me fell under attorney-client privilege. I could be charged, tried, and convicted if I ever discussed our conversation with anyone.
I rode out to the courthouse with Coach Mayfield. The sky had that milky blue cast it got sometimes before a nor’easter, but the air was mild. The town smelled of chimney smoke and wet asphalt.
The holding cells sat in the bowels of the courthouse. Coach Mayfield and I met Taylor Biggins on the other side of the bars, where the jailers had left a wooden bench for us.
“Yo, Coach,” Taylor Biggins said. He looked younger than twenty-two, a stringy black kid wearing an extra-large white T that draped his body like a dinner bell over a toothpick, and drooping jeans he kept pulling up over his bunched-up boxers, because they’d taken his belt.
“Bigs,” Coach Mayfield said and then to me: “Bigs played Pop Warner for me. Baseball and football.”
“Who’s this?”
Mayfield explained.
“And he can’t say nothing to nobody?”
“Not a word.”
“Throw his ass in a hole if he does?”
“Without a flashlight, Bigs.”
“A’ight, a’ight.” Bigs wandered around his cell for a minute, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. “What you need to know?”
“Did someone pay you to kill the woman?” I asked.
“Nigger, what?”
“You heard me.”
Bigs cocked his head. “You saying, was I put up to this dumb shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Who the fuck would do what I did if they was thinking straight? I was high as a motherfucker, man. I been whaling on the clear for three days.”
“The clear?”
“The clear,” Bigs said. “Meth, cheese, crank, whatever you want to call it.”
“Oh,” I said. “So why’d you shoot her?”
“I wasn’t trying to shoot nobody. Ain’t you been listening? She just wouldn’t give up the keys. When she grab my arm—pop. And she stop grabbing my arm. I just wanted to take her car. I got a friend, Edward, he buy cars. That’s all it was.”
He looked out through the bars at me, already heading down a dark corridor’s worth of DTs, his skin shiny with sweat, eyes wider than his head, mouth taking quick, desperate breaths.
“Walk me through it,” I said.
He gave me an injured, incredulous look, like I was putting him out.
“Hey, Bigs,” I said, “besides Coach here, you’ve got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country looking into your case because I asked him to. He’s capable of cutting your sentence in half. You understand?”
Bigs eventually nodded.
“So answer my questions, dickhead, or I’ll make him go away.”
He wrapped his arms around his abdomen and hissed several times. Once the cramps had subsided, he straightened and looked back through the bars at me. “Ain’t nothing to walk you through. I needed a car that’s easy to chop. A Honda or a Toyota, man. Those parts give for years—swap ’em out on a ’98 or an ’03, don’t matter. Shit’s interchangeable as a motherfuck. I’m in the parking lot, got me a black hoodie and these jeans, ain’t
no one seeing me. She come out, go to the Accord. I run up, let her see my black face and my black nine? Should be enough. But she talks shit at me and she won’t let go them keys. She just keeps holding on, and then her hand slips and hits my arm? And, like I said, pop. She drops. I’m all, ‘Ho, shit!’ But I need my clear, so I grab the keys. I get in the car and punch it out of there but all these shields start blowing into the lot, cherry bars flashing. I didn’t even get a mile before they box my ass up.” He shrugged. “That’s it. Cold? I know it. If she’d just given up the keys, though . . .” He bit down on something and looked at the floor. When he looked back up, tears poured down his face.
I ignored them. “You said she talked shit. What’d she say?”
“Nothing, man.”
I came to the bars. I looked through them into his face. “What did she say?”
“Said she needed the car.” He looked down again and nodded several times to himself. “Said she needed that car. How’s anyone need a car that much?”
“You know any bus lines run at three in the morning, Bigs?”
He shook his head.
“The woman you killed? She worked two jobs. One in Lewiston, one in Auburn. Her shift in Lewiston ended half an hour before her shift in Auburn began. You seeing it now?”
He nodded, the tears coming off him in strings, shoulders quaking.
“Peri Pyper,” I said. “That was her name.”
He kept his head down.
I turned to Coach Mayfield. “I’m done.”
I stood by the door while Coach Mayfield conferred with his client for a few minutes, their voices never rising above whispers, and then he picked his briefcase up off the bench and headed toward me and the guard.
As the door opened, Bigs yelled, “It was just a fucking car.”
“Not to her.”
• • •
“I’m not going to give you a bunch of bleeding-heart bullshit about Bigs being a great kid and all,” Coach Mayfield said. “He was always high-strung, always shortsighted when it came to the big picture. Always had a hair-trigger temper and when he wanted something, he wanted it now. But he wasn’t this.” He waved out the window of his Chrysler 300 as we drove through the streets with their white-steeple churches, broad green commons, and quaint B&Bs. “You look behind the face this town puts up, you find a lot of cracks. Unemployment’s double-digits and those who are hiring ain’t paying shit. Benefits?” He laughed. “Not a chance. Insurance?” He shook his head. “All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.”
“Gone in Boston, too,” I said.
“Gone all over, I bet.”
We drove in silence for a bit. While we’d been inside the jail, the blue sky had turned gray. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. The air felt like it was made of wet tin foil. No question—snow was coming.
“Bigs had a shot at going to Colby. They told him if he spent a year at community college getting his grades up just north of acceptable, they’d hold him a place on next year’s baseball team. So, he buckled down.” He looked over at me with eyebrows raised in confirmation. “He did. Went to school days, worked nights.”
“So what happened?”
“Company he worked for shitcanned everyone. Then after a month, they offered them their jobs back. It’s that cannery right over there.” As we rolled over a small bridge, he pointed to a beige brick building along the banks of the Androscoggin River. “Only the unskilled labor got the offer; the skilled labor just got dumped. But the company offered the unskilled their jobs back at half their previous hourly wage. No bennies, no insurance, no nothing. But plenty of overtime if they wanted it, long as they didn’t expect time and a half or any of that commie bullshit. So he takes the job back, Bigs. To make his rent and pay for school? He’s working seventy-hour weeks. And going to school full-time. So guess how he stays awake?”
“Crank.”
He nodded as he turned into the parking lot of his law firm. “The shit that cannery pulled? Companies pulling that all over town, all over the state. And the meth business? Well, that’s booming.”
We got out of his car and stood in the cold parking lot. I thanked him and he shrugged it off, a guy far more comfortable with criticism than praise.
“He did a piece-of-shit thing, Bigs did, but until he started tweeking, he was not a piece of shit.”
I nodded.
“Don’t make it right what he did,” he said, “but it didn’t come from a vacuum.”
I shook his hand. “I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him.”
He shrugged that compliment off, too. “Over a fucking car.”
“Over a fucking car,” I said and got into my own car and drove off.
• • •
At a rest stop just over the Massachusetts border, I stopped for something to eat and sat in my car with it and opened my laptop on the front seat. I tapped my keyboard to bring it out of sleep mode. A pleasant tingle coursed over my scalp. When I reached the home page for IntelSearchABS, I entered my user name and password and clicked my way to the Individual Search Records page. A little green box waited there for me. It asked for a name or alias. I clicked on NAME.
Angie would kill me. I was supposed to be done with this rogue shit. I’d gotten my laptop back. I’d gotten my laptop bag and my picture of Gabby. I’d gotten my answers about Peri Pyper. It was over and done with. I could walk away.
I remembered Peri and myself having drinks at the Chili’s in Lewiston and the T.G.I. Friday’s in Auburn. Less than a year ago. We’d traded childhood anecdotes, argued over sports teams, jabbed each other for our political differences, quoted movies we both loved. There was zero connection between her whistle-blowing and her getting shot by some dumb, fucked-up kid in a parking lot at three in the morning. No connection whatsoever.
But it’s all connected.
This should not be about that, a voice said. You’re just pissed off. And when you’re pissed off, you lash out.
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes. I saw Beatrice McCready’s face—pained and prematurely aged and possibly crazed.
Another voice said, Don’t do this.
That voice sounded uncomfortably like my daughter’s.
Leave it be.
I opened my eyes. The voices were right.
I saw Amanda from my morning dream, the envelopes she’d tossed in the bushes.
It’s all connected.
No, it’s not.
What had I said in the dream?
I’m just the mailman.
I leaned forward to shut down my computer. Instead, I typed in the box:
Kenneth Hendricks
I hit RETURN and sat back.
PART II
Mordovian Rhythm & Blues
Chapter Nine
Kenneth James Hendricks had several aliases. He’d been known, at various times, as KJ, K Boy, Richard James Stark, Edward Toshen, and Kenny B. He was born in 1969 in Warrensburg, Missouri, the son of an aircraft mechanic stationed with the 340th Bombardment Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base. From there, he’d bounced all over the United States—Biloxi, Tampa, Montgomery, Great Falls. First juvenile arrest occurred in King Salmon, Alaska; the second in Lompoc, California. At eighteen, he was arrested in Lompoc on charges of assault and battery and charged as an adult. The victim was his father. Charges dropped by alleged victim. Second arrest as an adult, two days later. Assault and battery again, same victim. This time his father pressed charges, maybe because his son had tried to cut off his ear. Kenny had been halfway through the job when his father’s shrieks alerted a neighbor. Hendricks did eighteen months for the assault, plus three years’ probation. His father died while he was in prison. Next arrested in Sacramento for loitering in an area known to be popular among male prostitutes. Six weeks later, still in Sacramento, his third assault arrest. This one for pummeling a
man at the Come On Inn along I-80. The victim, a Pentecostal deacon and prominent political fund-raiser, had a hard time explaining how he’d come to be naked in a motel room with a male prostitute, so he refused to press charges. The State of California revoked Kenny’s parole anyway, for being under the influence of alcohol and cocaine during his arrest.
When he got out of prison in 1994, he’d picked up a Waffen SS tattoo at the base of his neck, courtesy of his new best buddies in the Aryan Brotherhood. He’d also picked up a dedicated criminal trade—all his arrests for the next several years were for suspicion of identity theft. The more sophisticated personal computers grew, the more sophisticated Kenny grew with them. Couldn’t quite tame the old ways, though, and in ’99 he was picked up for rape and battery of a minor in Peabody, Massachusetts. She was seventeen or sixteen, depending on which time of night the rape actually occurred. Kenny’s lawyer fought hard on the issue. The DA realized that if he put the victim on the stand, what was left of her would just get chewed to the marrow. Kenny ended up pleading to the reduced charge of sexual battery on an adult. Because the state took rape so seriously, he was given two years, less time than he’d done in ’91 for snorting a couple of lines of Sacramento blow and chugging a six of Bud. Final arrest was in 2007. He was caught receiving fifty grand worth of TVs he’d purchased with a stolen identity. The plan had been to sell them out the back door for five hundred dollars less than he’d paid using the corporate credit card of one Oliver Orin, owner of the Ollie O’s chain of sports bars, several of which had just finished structural renovations. I had to hand it to him—if anyone could order fifty K worth of plasma TVs without raising an eyebrow it would be a guy like Oliver Orin. Because of his priors, Kenny was convicted and sentenced to five years. He served just short of three. Since then, no convictions.
“But a nice man, all the same,” Angie said.
“A charmer, no doubt.”
“Just needs snuggle-time, a good hug.”
“And free weights.”
“Well, of course,” Angie said. “We’re not barbarians.”