Dirty Deals, page 20
Robin was still significantly pretty. She looked out of place in the trailer, next to a man with a bad goatee and a shaved head and black tattoos on his neck.
“I left Ervin a few weeks earlier. I left him for Caleb and we, well, we picked up where we left off. If that makes sense, Mr. August,” she said.
“So you were pregnant. But you were unsure which man was the father.”
“And so worried the world would find out.”
“But you did tell Caleb,” I said.
“Do you know what those bastards did?” said Caleb. “They slipped me crystal meth. I’d been drying out for over a week, and one of the cops tossed me a baggie and left the door open. I’m ashamed of this, I am, but I was depressed and crying. I knew I’d be in jail my whole life and I’d found out Robin was pregnant, and the deputy sheriff tosses me a baggie of meth. What was I supposed to do?”
“Eat the meth,” said Manny.
Caleb nodded. “I did. Like a starving man.”
“And the cop left the jail door open,” I said.
“It’s ludicrous. But yes.”
“That’s where the video of you attacking guards comes from,” I said. “You were high and on a mission to get the hell out of there.”
“Yes. Again, I’m not proud of it. But they baited me. I wasn’t backing down from my innocence and they needed more ammunition.”
“They used that video, and the video of the botched arrest, to coerce you into a plea deal. And the deal felt dirty to you, but it was too good to pass up,” I said.
“That’s precisely it. I know good terms when I see them.”
“They send you to Wallens Ridge, and Robin moves away from Lynchburg.”
Robin kept nodding. “I felt like Hester Prynne. I couldn’t live there anymore.”
“So Caleb is in prison,” I said, “and feeling worse and worse about the plea deal, and he wants to raise his own son, and he concocts a plan to break out.”
Caleb reached across the table with his one good hand to take the little boy’s fingers.
“The wildest part?” Caleb smiled. “My son Simon. Look at him. Does he look like me?”
“He looks more like Ervin,” I said.
“He’s Ervin’s son. Not mine. The wildest part is, I didn’t care. I would raise any child of Robin’s. I refused to remain incarcerated. Or, I refused not to try.”
Manny nodded his approval.
I rejoined. “You and the librarian hit it off. He’s quitting the prison soon and agrees to smuggle you in the trunk of his car. He thinks you’re innocent and he hates the place, and the plan goes smoothly. You return to Lynchburg to collect some money from your father’s safe deposit box. Good so far?”
Caleb looked out the window for a long time. Looked at the pink valentine and the corn beyond.
He said, “I will neither confirm nor deny the involvement of the librarian and my father.”
“Something I don’t understand. Why set Ervin’s house on fire?” I said.
Robin gave a dark laugh. “Oh no. Ervin did that himself.”
“Did he.”
“Ervin threatened to sue me if I didn’t let him see his son occasionally. He knew a court would never give him parental rights, and I didn’t want the drama, so we compromised. I visited and brought Simon every few months. Ervin never cared, though. He was always stone cold drunk. I was there that day, Mr. August. I’m the one who told Ervin that Caleb escaped prison. We were standing in the garage and his hands were shaking and he was trying to light a cigarette. I told him about Caleb and he dropped his Zippo lighter. He said he was going to kill me and I ran with Simon and he chased us. Next thing we knew, his garage was up in flames. I drove off. And of course he and his cop buddies spun the story to implicate Caleb,” said Robin. “Redneck bastards.”
“Meanwhile, Caleb tells Marky he’ll pay for rehab and then he vanishes into the blue. For months.”
Caleb grinned. “I lived in a tent at a Jellystone park in Kentucky. Nice weather for it. Enjoying my freedom. Making plans with Robin. Until she stopped returning my calls.”
Robin gave another dark laugh, like a woman who’d come to expect only awful things.
“Ervin shows up at my door. By then he’d already retired and moved out here, but he drives all the way to my apartment, Mr. August. He beats me, ties me up, tosses me into the back seat of his truck, and drives the whole night, a miracle we didn’t crash, bringing me and Simon here. He’s drunk and drinking constantly, stopping to pee on the side of the road, telling me we’re starting a new family. We reach his trailer and he doesn’t untie me. He locks me in the spare bedroom and keeps me there for eight days. Eight days, listening to Simon cry. It was hell on earth. Hell in a doublewide. Ervin kept threatening to kill him if I didn’t cooperate, or if I tried to run away. He would drink himself unconscious and Simon would crawl to my door and try to open it but we couldn’t, both of us crying.”
“But.” Caleb raised a finger. “He’d brought her phone with her. A burner phone, and we’d shared our location with each other. After a few days of no calls or texts, I followed the phone to its last known location. Here.”
“And you killed Ervin.”
“I feel no shame about this part. Ervin was standing at the pigpen, urinating on them. It’s true, I saw it with my own eyes, peeing on the pigs and laughing. This whole farm was falling apart. I crept into the trailer, found Robin locked in the spare bedroom. Simon staring blankly at the television. Of course he didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t open the spare bedroom door, but I spotted his Remington shotgun in the master, a round in the chamber. I took it, walked outside, and killed him.”
“One shot?” said Manny.
“First time I’d ever fired a weapon. I got close. One shot. Didn’t say a word to him, and I sat there until I knew he was dead. Made damn sure of it. I have no nightmares, no regrets,” said Caleb and he spoke the words like hammering the armor on again. “But here’s the part that amazes us both. Ervin is still lying dead at the pigpen, and I haven’t figured out how to unlock Robin, when someone knocks on the door. I peer through the window, and it’s a police officer. I tell Robin I have to run, that she’s safe now, and we’ll be together soon. But there’s another officer at the back door. I can’t flee. I’m busted. I walk outside, ready to be arrested, and you know what happens? The police officer smiles at me. He says, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Lane, sorry to bother you. We received a call from Chief Robertson, asking us to check on you as a favor to him. He says you’re an old friend not returning his messages and he's worried about you.’”
The boy, bored and restless, squirmed away from Manny and wobbled into the living room to play with cars.
“Cops didn’t know what you were supposed to look like,” said Manny.
“That’s right.” Caleb was grinning. “They both assumed I was Ervin. They said, ‘You look like you’re doing okay,’ and I said, ‘I am, thank you, my phone’s broken but I’ll get it fixed and call Chief Robertson,’ and they left. They never saw Ervin lying near the pigs. I broke Robin’s door down and we were reunited.”
“And you buried Ervin behind the shed. Poorly.”
“My first time burying a body. I didn’t dig deep enough. Animals have been back there half a dozen times,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”
“Are you going to turn us in?” Robin was focused on the next awful thing she expected to happen to her.
“Keep going with the story,” I said.
“We stayed here for that weekend, deciding what to do. Where do we run? Mexico? Canada? And a check came in the mail on Monday. Ervin was drawing disability. And I told Robin, as long as we remain in this trailer, the checks will keep coming. And wouldn’t that be something.”
“Can’t be much,” I said.
“No, but I’m a wanted man. It’s more than I can make, obviously. Robin said Ervin had no friends here. He lived alone, didn’t talk to anyone at the grocery store. It wouldn’t take much to fool the locals. If I shaved my head and grew a goatee…” Caleb shrugged.
“You duped me. Us talking and drinking lemonade out back, me the biggest idiot in the world, talking to the man I was hunting,” I said.
“I got away with it because you’d never met the real Ervin.”
“Still,” said Manny. “Humiliating for Mack. So embarrassing.”
It was, in fact.
I pointed at Caleb’s neck. “You even have the tattoos.”
He did another shrug. “I always wanted some. It took few weeks to ink the visible ones. A guy forty-five minutes north of here, and he never asked questions. He went off photographs online.”
“And you started pounding cheeseburgers,” I said.
“I drink weight-gainer shakes.”
“And occasionally you visit Skip James, who has a playhouse for Simon out back that he didn’t want me to find, but I did.”
“Wow.” Robin’s eyes widened. “You’re thorough.”
“And then,” I said, “you chopped off your arm.”
Caleb laughed and waggled the prosthesis.
“Looks good doesn’t it.” He ran his finger underneath the forearm, up to the hand. A seam I hadn’t noticed parted, and he worked to wiggle the blocky thing loose. No wonder I’d always thought it looked big and heavy—his entire hand was inside. A grisly magic trick, pulling one hand off to reveal another. His real hand looked shriveled and pale, like limbs look coming out of a cast. He flexed his withered fingers, wincing with the pain. “They get stiff in there.”
“Ay dios,” said Manny.
Caleb thunked the prosthetic hand on the table. The fingers didn’t budge. “To be more realistic, it’s a hard prosthesis. I can’t move them.”
“You wear that thing all day.”
“All day, even working out back in case…” He nodded at me. “In case I get visitors.” He stood and rinsed his arm in the sink, and washed out the plastic, because it smelled like sweat. “You wouldn’t believe the options online, for ordering prosthetic hands.”
“This is preposterous.”
“Maybe. But it’s my best shot.” Caleb shrugged again. He liked doing that. “We had a scare when the lady from social services came by. She does quarterly checks, and she’d met Ervin once before. We chatted for thirty minutes about my lifestyle, and the only thing she said about my appearance was that I looked healthier. We knew we’d done a convincing job then.”
“You really attend Alcoholic Anonymous,” I said.
“You bet. It helps. Somewhere inside me is a man who still craves shit he shouldn’t have. It’s not alcohol, but it’s something.”
“Mr. August, you told me on the phone that you were the only man who wanted to help Caleb,” said Robin. She was leaning across the table toward me, her brows knotted upward. “Now you know he’s truly innocent, and he’s out here doing his best. His absolute best. He’s happy. We’re happy.”
“It’s true, I am. To be honest, Mr. August, I don’t even mind the fake hand. I was high on meth that night. I’m at least partially responsible for Kim Harper’s death. It’s my penance. I’m not dodging my culpability in this,” he said.
“What’s your long-term plan?” I said.
“Save enough money to move. Probably to Mexico. I like it here a lot. This lifestyle suits us both. We’re a little happy family. Simon likes feeding the chickens. But we know this is temporary. Sooner or later the world will catch up, and we need to be gone by then. I texted everyone in Ervin’s phone, and asked for twelve months of privacy, so hopefully…” He raised his hands, palm up. “Hopefully we have six more months."
I finished my lemonade. I stood and set the glass in the sink. Looked out the window. Looked at the heart Robin had made for Caleb. Looked at their little piece of earth. A small farm spoiling under Ervin, now orderly, and profitable and happy. I walked to the corner and picked up the Remington and felt the young couple tense. I racked the slide five times to eject three shells.
“Where’s your pistol?”
“Where’s my pistol,” he repeated.
“You have a pistol. Tell me where.”
He swallowed.
“Above the microwave. In the cabinet,” he said.
I found it. The pistol he’d worn under his shirt last time I was here. A Glock 19. Probably Ervin’s service piece.
“No more guns in the house?”
“No sir,” said Caleb. “He only had those, and I can’t buy one.”
I walked through the screen door, onto the back patio. Manny followed. He wore his own Glock, smaller than Ervin’s, in his holster. We walked to the chickens, hideous things without intelligence making low bobbling noises.
Above us the azure never ended.
“Let’s grill a pig,” said Manny.
“I don’t know how.”
“Shoot one in the head and put it over some fire and eat bacon.”
“What about the skin?”
“Cut it off,” said Manny.
“You and I would make terrible farmers.”
“What about cops. We good at that?”
I turned to peer at the doublewide trailer.
“Still to be determined.”
“Even if he didn’t kill Harper, they can’t go back to Lynchburg,” said Manny.
“No. They’d be stained with it. He’d be at odds with the entire Court Street. And he’s broken too many laws. He escaped from prison, impersonated a cop, falsified his identity, wrongfully cashed government checks.”
“Killed Ervin.”
“I don’t mind that part,” I said. “But Mother Justice might.”
I stared at the animals a few minutes, like they had answers, and we walked back to their home and sat in the Adirondack chair on the rear patio. Inside, the television was making noise and so was Simon. The adults were quiet. Manny was too, and it gave me time to think. Think about guilt and innocence, and the work of growing up, and second chances and justice and duty and weeping Skip James and his little playhouse and Kim Harper and Samantha Miller and her Sunday School class calling for Caleb’s head because he was Presbyterian and my role in it all.
“Kinda funny, amigaso. Both Ervin and Caleb kept telling you to leave the other one alone. Except both were Caleb,” Manny said.
“Yeah.”
“He played you, and you didn’t pick up on it.”
“He’s convincing,” I said. “Like Sarah Underwood told us, he’s sharp.”
“But you found him.”
“Meh.”
“Now all you gotta do is, take him in.”
“I wish you’d quit bringing that up.”
Manny grinned. “I like it when you don’t know what to do. Makes this humble Puerto Rican feel better about himself.”
“I know what I want to do,” I said. “I just don’t know how.”
“While you’re thinking,” said Manny, “I’ll pick us a pig to slaughter.”
32
Late that night, Sheriff Stackhouse unlocked the door leading to our basement. The door swung wide, revealing four men below, staring upward, their faces swollen in various spots from their fight with me and Manny. Four men kept hostage for twenty-four hours.
Stackhouse held a riot gun taken from her trunk.
She said, “Move backward. Face the wall and touch your noses to it.”
“Sheriff. Come on, now, this here won’t do. You’ve got to let us out. How long have we known each other?” said Robertson.
“Now,” she said, and the men obeyed. She walked down the steps, followed by Manny, then me. Manny and I held pistols, in case. The riot gun wasn’t loaded, so we wouldn’t go deaf. Ronnie followed last. The basement looked yellow from the naked overhead bulbs, stark shadows where we blocked the light. Piles of blankets where they’d passed the time. “Robertson. You and your jackasses are in deep water. We know what you did. We know you framed an innocent man, we have proof of it, and you’ll be lucky if you don’t spend hard time. Defense attorney Ronnie Summers is behind me and she believes your best offer will be five years, more likely ten.”
“Sheriff. Don’t do this. We were trying to help a fellow cop, got’damn it. The boy made a mistake, is all,” said Robertson.
Stackhouse took two steps forward and used the riot gun like a bat. She cracked Robertson above the ear and he staggered to his left and he cursed but didn’t fall and she said, “You talk out of line again, Jake, and next time I won’t miss your ear.” Robertson’s skin opened and blood welled. “You have one way through this that doesn’t involve prison. If you’re smart, you’ll keep quiet and listen.”
Stackhouse nodded at me over her shoulder. My cue.
I said, “Deputy Marshal Martinez and I flew to Indiana. To arrest Ervin. We all know he was drunk and accidentally killed Harper. He’s guilty of murder. Caleb James isn’t.” I paused and Robertson said a really bad word under his breath. It stank down here. “We had a long talk. Me and Ervin. And the truth is, I couldn’t do it. Ervin is thriving. He’s doing great. He’s off alcohol and working his little farm, and wants to be left alone. Even though he’s the one who shot Kim, we flew home without him. Seems to me Ervin has paid enough. He’s still there and wants you to leave him be for a full year. Maybe he’ll return then. You follow all this so far?”
Tension had drained out from the four men. Two of them sagged against the wall.
“Yes, I follow you, August,” said Robertson. “I’m obliged for it. Ervin, well, he wasn’t like a son to me, but close to it.”
“So we’ll leave Ervin out there all alone. But in order to make this work, Robertson,” I said, “you and I need to come to a new deal. And I set the terms.”
33
Monday morning.
Georgina Princess, Kix, and I drove to the dog park near Lynchburg College, a mile from Court Street. Kix was skipping school for the event and he was worried his grades would suffer.
We unloaded in the parking lot and walked through the fence, and I unleashed the hound. Georgina Princess understood this was a place to run wild and she did, tearing away from the dirt patch near the gate and frolicking into the verdancy beyond. She had shade trees and a doggie water fountain to investigate, as well as a Cocker Spaniel, a brown Labrador, and a Golden Retriever to harass. Kix thought this a riot and trailed her, and every few minutes Georgina Princess would do a fly-by, Maverick style, and knock him clean off his feet.
