Authors: Christopher Rice
The attorney introduced himself as Eric Reynard, but John recognized him from the news, defending celebrity clients who had been accused of various murders. He had a lantern jaw and a long, almost lipless mouth that gave him a blank and unreadable expression as he listened to John’s story. Patsy sat next to John, holding his uninjured left hand in both of her own. She had probably taken out mortgages on her home and her bar to afford the lawyer sitting across from them.
When John was finished, Patsy let out a long sigh, held his hand against her stomach as she blinked at the floor. As if silence of any kind made him uncomfortable, Reynard flipped pages on his legal pad. “Ray Duncan died of blood loss at the scene. Charlotte Martin just got out of about nine hours of surgery and is still in critical condition.”
In a timid voice, Patsy said, “Earlier, you said he had options—”
“All of this depends on who they decide to make an example out of. You or Ray Duncan. They’ve already turned up some interesting things on Duncan, and someone in the department is leaking them to the media, which tells me that someone at Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department wants to be done with the guy. And that’s good news for you, because if they hit you with anything hard, and I fight them, then Ray Duncan goes on trial, too. And embarrassment doesn’t even begin to describe what this has already brought to the department. Detectives Barkin and Lewis have already been suspended for the stunt they pulled with you and Charlotte Martin, and that’s just the beginning. My guess is their careers are over. The public-information officer is already grumbling things to the press about how they weren’t used to conducting investigations under that kind of media pressure.”
“What have they found on Duncan?”
“He bought a commercial-grade freezer the day after your little surprise late-night visit to Owensville. It wasn’t in his house when they searched it, but they did find an area in his cellar that has stains that might have come from the freezer’s drain port. He also ran an extra electrical wire to the nearest socket, which gave it about the amps it would need to keep a commercial-grade freezer running. Did a bad job, too. Like he needed to do it himself because he didn’t want anyone to know what was down there.”
Patsy said, “So they might not charge John with anything.”
“Oh, no,” the lawyer said. “They’ll absolutely charge him with something. They have to, given the rather spectacular manner in which he turned himself in. The question is, How severe will the charges be? An obstruction of justice conviction sentence can run from a year or more of prison time to several months of confinement—more commonly known as house arrest.”
A knock at the door startled Patsy so badly she jumped. The guard outside cracked the door, and John saw a well-dressed woman in an expensive suit. Reynard excused himself, rose from his chair, and slipped outside. Patsy got up and followed him to the door, remained standing there after he was gone. She held one hand to her mouth, as if he were a lover who had just told her he was going back to his wife.
Finally she lowered her hand from her mouth. “Where is he, John?” she whispered. “He could verify everything you’re telling them. Where the hell is he? Duncan’s dead. The least he could have done is send you some goddamn flowers.” He didn’t need her to say it to know that she was talking about Alex.
Just then, the door opened. Reynard took a step inside and stopped in his tracks, as if he needed sufficient space between himself and the two of them before he spoke. “Charlotte Martin died of a pulmonary embolism about an hour ago.”
They were struck silent. Reynard left without any discernible change in expression or feeling. Once again, John saw the look of quiet, almost serene concentration that had appeared on the woman’s face as she had stabbed her lover to death, as if all of her real emotions had retreated to a place deep inside of her at the first sign of murderous intent, never to return from the hiding places they found in the last seconds of her life.
Patsy said, “The cops had surveillance on my bar, but they pulled it after you turned yourself in. He could have called there. He could have tried to reach me, but he didn’t. Anyone with a TV knows you’re in here. He knows better than anyone that you’re in here for him. Maybe it’s time for him to do something for you.”
“I did this to keep him from killing Duncan. That’s been accomplished.”
“Do you really believe that, John?”
He looked up into her eyes, but his instinctive response was lost to him. Maybe it was fatigue or maybe it was the genuine fear in his sister’s eyes, as if his own convictions were about to push him past the reach of the last family member he had left.
“Why is it so hard for you to believe, Patsy? Why is it so hard for you to believe that I would take that kind of risk for someone else?”
Her eyes watered and she withdrew from the table and turned her back to him while she steadied herself. “Because I don’t want you to be that good anymore. I want you to come back, John.”
“From where?”
“Iraq. Dean’s room. Baton Rouge. Take your pick. But if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have stop being so noble all the time. You’re going to be just another person. Please tell me you’ll consider it.”
After a while he said, “Let’s see what they charge me with first.”
“Asshole,” she whispered, but he saw she was hiding a smile with the hand she had been using to hold back tears.
This time the interrogation room had a giant mirror on one wall. This time both detectives were sitting across from him at once. They had introduced themselves as Benay and Aaronson, and they were younger and less battle-scarred than the two detectives whose stunt had resulted in the death of two deceitful lovers. This time they were joined by the district attorney, Sam Colby, a sandy-haired man with beady eyes, and his petite blond ADA with slanted green eyes and a gravelly voice that made it sound like she smoked three packs a day.
No one played good cop or bad cop. They listened to John recount a truthful and unedited account of the past week with an almost prayerful silence.
When he was finished, John expected the detective to pepper him with questions, but it was the DA who cleared his throat and sat forward. To the detectives investigating Ray Duncan, John was simply another piece of potential evidence.
“You maintain that the only reason you gave a false confession was to prevent Alex Martin from making an attempt on Ray Duncan’s life,” Colby said quietly.
“That’s correct, sir.”
“So, it was not your intent to deliberately mislead the detectives?”
Reynard raised a hand, but John spoke anyway. “The opposite. I gave them a story with specific details regarding Alex Martin’s inheritance, details I thought were the basis of Ray Duncan’s motive for killing Mike Bowers.”
“A story that did not include any mention of Ray Duncan committing this murder?”
“That’s correct.”
“Why is that? You thought it would be best to get inside before you started to work your magic on this investigation?”
“Kind of like a suicide bomber,” one of the detectives grumbled.
John said, “Having seen their work firsthand I would say that title belongs to Ray Duncan, sir.” The detective reddened but nobody said anything, a silent consensus that it was the detective who had spoken out of turn.
Colby leaned back in his chair and gave Reynard a long stare. “This is sounding an awful lot like obstruction to me, Mr. Reynard.”
“I’m sorry. Was there a flourishing investigation of Captain Ray Duncan under way that John somehow derailed? He wasn’t even on your radar screen for this.”
“It has not been established that Duncan murdered Mike Bowers,” Colby said quietly.
“No, that burden will fall on me if you decide to put Mr. Houck on trial. And I’m highly confident that as soon as that freezer’s found, while you all rush around trying to plug the leaks in your department, I won’t have a very hard time of it.”
“That sounds like a threat,” the ADA said quietly.
“My job description is threatening to you, Sam? I don’t even know where to begin with that.”
Colby barked with laughter. The ADA looked to her lap, probably to avoid rolling her eyes, John thought. Once silence settled, the DA leaned forward, placed his elbows on the table, and studied John with squinted eyes and his hands clasped against his lips as if he were praying. “What is it you Marines say to each other when you want to shoot from the hip? ‘Permission to speak freely’? Something like that?”
“Marines don’t say that, sir. We’re encouraged to think critically and to give even commanding officers our point of view if we think it’s important to the mission’s success.”
“I see,” Colby said. “Does it bother you in the slightest that this guy already knew how to shoot? You took him all the way out to Arizona to train him how to
defend himself
and it turned out he already knew how to fire a gun. Does that bother you at all?”
John hesitated long enough to raise the interest of everyone in the room. Finally he said, “Maybe he just wanted practice.”
“Or he wanted you to believe he didn’t know how to shoot,” the DA said. “First he pulls the gun on Duncan in your trailer and his grip is so bad you think he’s going to blow his own head off. Then he chases Duncan out of the trailer park but never fires a shot. Then, miracle of miracles, you’re out in Arizona and he’s shooting cans off a rock well enough to scare you silly when he finally points the gun at your face.”
Reynard said, “I wasn’t aware Alex Martin was being charged with a crime here.”
“Oh, calm down, Eric. I’m not charging anyone with anything yet. I’m just asking some pretty obvious questions about the one guy who should be here but isn’t. Where do you think he is, John? Did you teach him how to survive in the woods?”
“I did not, sir. And I don’t understand what you’re implying.”
Colby said, “Can you not see that he wanted more from you than to learn how to shoot? Can you not see that he played the victim, played to your guilt, so you would be his protector? And now that you’ve done the job, he’s nowhere to be found. You don’t feel used at all, John?”
When Reynard placed a hand on his knee, John realized that everyone in the room seemed to have sensed the riot of emotions within him. Maybe Colby was shooting for some kind of outburst.
Just as Reynard began to make some comment about getting back to the business at hand, John said, “I did what I did so that I would feel better about what Mike did for me. That’s all. I don’t need a medal, or flowers, or a card. But if you think for one moment that Alex Martin was responsible for the murder of Mike Bowers, you are wrong, and I will testify to that from my own prison cell if I have to.”
After several minutes of silence that almost seemed respectful, the DA and his blond sidekick excused themselves. The detectives followed them out of the room without a formal good-bye. Once they were alone John said, “Are they really going to accuse Alex of murdering Mike?”
“I doubt it,” Reynard said. “But they may charge you with excessive integrity.”
They finally charged him with making false statements in a criminal investigation and sentenced him to a year of probation. It was the lesser charge, and Reynard was so overjoyed, John felt guilty for not being able to match his enthusiasm.
As they left the building, the reporters amassed outside erupted with questions. Patsy held him by one shoulder and led him toward a sand-kissed Ford Explorer driven by one of her female bartenders. But before they were inside the car, John heard one reporter, a pretty Asian woman whose perfect hair and designer suit suggested she was from L.A., shout a question loud enough to be heard above the rest, “What’s going to happen to Mike’s body?”
As they pulled away from the curb, Patsy said, “His parents. They won’t claim it.”
John thought,
If that won’t bring Alex out of hiding, nothing will.
From the guest bedroom in his sister’s house, John could see the necklace of headlights on Highway 62 and the pay phone he had called Patsy from, breaking a ten-year silence. Now he stared at the pay phone from afar like a dog awaiting the return of its owner. It was a place Alex could return to, a spot on the map they had made together in such a short time.
The rising sun had started to set the mountainous gates of Joshua Tree State Park aglow, and he hadn’t slept a wink. The night before he had spoken to Philip, who hadn’t heard a word from Alex, but who answered John’s questions without any of the sarcasm or anger John had come to expect from the guy. As the night wore on, John couldn’t help but contemplate the possibility that by depriving Alex of his opportunity for vengeance, he had effectively stolen the only thing Alex had to live for, the only purpose he had left. But now, as pale light washed the desert outside, he saw this as another grandiose fantasy. The truth was he needed Alex to answer the questions the DA had raised, but he had no idea where to find him.
Before the sun was fully up, he dressed hurriedly and slipped silently out of the back door. If Patsy heard him starting Eddie’s truck, she didn’t come rushing out of the house to stop him. The police hadn’t located her Jeep Grand Cherokee, which Alex was either still using or had dumped somewhere.
As morning broke, John drove west on I-10, and about an hour and a half after leaving his sister’s house, John was parked outside of a redbrick tract home on the northern edge of the city of Redlands. This was the address he had been given for a man named Charles Keaton, formerly known as Danny Oster.
He had brought Dean’s suicide note with him. He was about to read it again, to further delay the inevitable, when a short, chubby woman with a cap of steel gray hair walked up to Oster’s mailbox and unloaded its sizable contents. Her arms full, she turned on her heel and walked down the sidewalk.
When John called out to her, she spun and dropped several envelopes of coupons. He forced a smile and extended his hand before she could have time to recognize him from television. “My name’s John,” he said. “I was looking for Charles. Is he around right now?”
“I know who you are,” she said quietly. “I saw you on the news. Why are you looking for my brother?”
“I need to discuss something with him.”
She winced and blinked. He couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or anger or both. “You seem to have a lot of things going on in your life right now. Why don’t you just leave my brother alone? He already left the country because of you.”
Because he was unprepared for her candor, he said, “Your brother left the country because of what
he
did.”
“No!” she whispered. “
Your
brother was doing exactly what he wanted to until you caught him doing it.”
John could think of only one good way to end this, so he started for his truck. She must have assumed he was leaving, because she shouted after him, “He knows you were following him!” By then he had pulled Dean’s suicide note off the front seat of his truck and was crossing the street again toward her.
“I wasn’t following him,” he said.
“Someone was. Taking pictures of him outside the house. He figured it was you. That you knew he was back.”
John didn’t see the point of telling her that her brother had been followed by a PI someone had hired on his behalf but without his knowledge. Instead he handed her his brother’s suicide note. If she could meet him toe-to-toe about it without so much as a formal introduction, he figured she could handle reading his brother’s last words.
“What do you want?” she asked as soon as he was finished.
“I have to talk to your brother.”
“To show him
this
?” she said, pointing at the note. “
You
are the only one who didn’t know this!”
“Then let me tell him that I know now.”
“Stay right here,” she ordered him. She shuffled off down the sidewalk while she pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her khaki shorts. John politely turned away, as if she were about to take a pee against one of the trees, looked back after a few minutes, and saw she had walked all the way to the corner to place this call.
After what felt like an eternity, she walked back toward him, sandals slapping the pavement as she went. She said, “You ever heard of a town called Crafton?”
Crafton. Another mountain town, only this one was in the Sierras and at a higher elevation than Owensville. Fresh snow clung determinedly to its soaring pine trees and blanketed the winding highway that led into town. He’d read the advisory signs on the way up the mountain and pulled off at a service station to buy chains for his tires, keeping his sunglasses on and his baseball cap shoved down over his forehead the entire time. From what he’d been able to tell, no one had recognized him. By way of his sister, Danny Oster had asked John to meet him at a diner called Crane’s on the highway’s pass through town. John didn’t know if the place was named for someone with the last name Crane or if the owner was just fond of the bird. It turned out to be the former.
John’s heart was a steady hammer when he pulled into a parking lot next to the shiny Airstream trailer the diner was housed in. Inside, an elderly couple in matching plaid parkas whispered to each other over steaming cups of coffee. They were tended to by a heavyset waitress with a long black ponytail.
Danny Oster sat in a booth the farthest from the front door. He wore a black baseball cap and a black waffle print hunter’s vest over his plaid long-sleeve shirt. As John approached, Oster managed to keep eye contact, wetting his fat lips nervously with the tip of his tongue. But at the last minute, his eyes cut to the table, as if he thought John were about to strike him across the back of the head and he was prepared for the blow. Instead, John set Dean’s suicide note on the table in front of Oster, then took a seat across from the man.
Oster read intently, his wide eyes welling with tears. The waitress came, and John ordered coffee in the quietest voice he could manage. “You all right, Charles?” the waitress asked Oster when she saw his worsening condition. He gave her a polite smile and nodded emphatically, even as tears slipped down his cheeks. The waitress gave John an icy glare. Maybe she recognized him, or maybe she just blamed him for Danny’s little breakdown and no one in this town was fond of breakdowns. After she departed and Danny returned to reading, John stared out the window, which offered a view of more pine-shrouded mountains dusted white.
When he was finished, Danny Oster placed the note carefully on the table in front of him, as if it were written on old parchment that might come apart like a wet tissue. He used his napkin to wipe his eyes and blow his nose. And part of John wanted this to be it, wanted to just get up and leave and let this be as okay as things we’re ever going to get between them.
“Why did you come back?” John asked.
Oster steeled himself, studied John as he blinked the tears into submission. In a high-pitched nasal voice that took John back ten years, Danny Oster said, “Statute of limitations on statutory rape in California is ten years. That was the only crime I committed that day. What I did was wrong, but it wasn’t rape. And I didn’t run away because I was afraid of you, John Houck. I ran away because I knew what I had done was wrong.”
John didn’t argue. “You two were going to move away together? To West Hollywood?”
“You didn’t believe that part?”
“Maybe you were leading him on. Telling him what he wanted to hear.”
“I told him what I thought would make him feel safe. That’s always what he wanted—to feel safe.”
“So we didn’t keep him safe? Is that it?”
“No,”
Oster said in almost a moan. “I said it was what he
wanted,
not what he needed. What we want and what we need are two different things.” He went silent, as if waiting for John to strike at this cliché, but when John kept silent, too, Oster smiled and continued, “You know, I tried to read this book once. It was about physics, something about how everything in the universe is really a string and if it vibrates enough it turns from one thing to another. That’s how I used to think of your brother. He was like this string that was always about to vibrate out of this universe.”
Not even Patsy, or himself, had managed to speak of their brother with the same genuine affection Oster had just used. John felt a tremble in his chest, as if his throat were about to close up. “You expect me to believe you weren’t afraid of me at all? That you just ran away because you knew what you did was wrong?”
“I’m still afraid of you, John. But that was only part of it. I loved him, but I did something terrible to him. I convinced him that I could save him from everything he felt. And he felt so many things, all the time, that I should have known I never could have done that for him. I did know, really. I knew.”
He had not heard a more accurate description of his brother, and the fact that it was coming out of the man he had almost killed cleaved something inside of him. The best he could do was close his eyes and draw some deep breaths until the prospect of crying in front of Danny Oster became too humiliating for him to give in to.
When he found his voice, John said, “I knew he was gay. But I never acted like it was a real thing because I thought I could change it. I thought
he
could change it.”
“You were jealous of him,” Oster whispered.
“What did you say?”
“You thought he was getting away with something.”
“You’re saying I wanted to do what he was doing with you that day?”
“Hell, no,” Oster said, voice steady but eyes wide with fear at John’s growing anger. “Your brother did other things.”
“Yeah. Drugs.”
“No, back then.”
“What, Danny? What did he do?” Just as John had hoped, Oster winced at the sound of his real name, but after a deep breath he steadied himself, lifted his eyes to John so John could see they were drained of fear.
“He cried. He cried for your mom and dad every day. He said he never saw you cry for them once.”
Nothing he thought to say in response to this made him feel anything other than sick to his stomach, so he said nothing.
The idea that he envied Dean’s grief seemed too insane for John to comprehend, especially when he considered that Dean’s wild emotions—his vibrations, as Oster had dubbed them—had led him down a path of relentless self-destruction. How could John envy
that
? And the deaths of their parents now seemed to be buried beneath so many other losses that John could barely brush his fingertips up against any of the feelings associated with them. But maybe this was how epiphanies really came to a man—not with a burning bush or a lightning strike, but with a seemingly obvious and simplistic statement that forces him to look at the ground at his feet instead of the distant horizon he has been searching for most of his life.
For a long while, neither man spoke. John knew he didn’t have much more in him. It was almost three-thirty in the afternoon, and he’d been driving since the crack of dawn. He couldn’t bring himself to say good-bye because he didn’t know how you said good-bye to a man who had occupied so many different positions in your life. He felt more tired than he had ever been in his life. So he excused himself and said he would be back in a few minutes. He told Oster he was going to use the pay phone outside, which was the truth, but he didn’t tell him this was just an excuse to say a hurried good-bye once he came back, without sitting down, without extending his hands, without doing any other neat gesture a therapist might recommend to achieve “closure.”
Outside, the cold air hit him with force. He’d left the house in a T-shirt and jeans and had picked up a cheap sweatshirt with the word
Yosemite
written on it in multicolored cursive letters. As he listened to the phone ring, he realized he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Patsy what he had just done. He just wanted to make sure she wasn’t worrying about him. She answered breathlessly, as if she had run for the phone.
“I don’t believe this. Where the hell are you?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m coming back soon.”
“Hurry.”
“Why?”
“Because I was just sitting in front of my computer looking at a wire article that says they found my car.” She gave it a second to sink in, but it didn’t register. “My car! The Jeep! Christ,
Alex’s
car. The one he stole in Sedona.”
“Where?”
“Hold on,” she said, and he could hear her footsteps on the tile floor, a clack of keys on the keyboard as she scrolled through the article. “The Sierras. They found it crashed off the side of Highway 129.” John turned slightly and stared out at the highway next to the phone booth, saw without needing to look for it, the giant sign that labeled it Highway 129. Patsy read aloud,
“‘Believed to be vehicle that was being used by fugitive Alex Martin, who is still wanted for questioning in…’ Here you go, ‘some hikers found it this morning about ten miles west of…’ some town I’ve never heard of.”
“What town?”
“Crafton.”
He hung up on her. He couldn’t see Oster from where he stood, and that was a good thing, because he knew the expression on his face would betray the rage and confusion inside him. When the pay phone rang he jumped and started away from it, back toward the diner, convinced now that Oster was hiding something monumental.
When he opened the door to the diner, he found Oster sitting in the exact same spot, his hands laid flat on the table in front of him. He had politely folded the suicide note shut, and as John approached the table a second time, he was surprised to see the man crack a weak smile.
Because it seemed likely the only option available, John took a seat for a second time and said, “Do you have family here?”
“My mother retired here.”
“You’re staying with your mother?” John asked, but Oster’s attention was focused on Dean’s suicide note, which he slid across the table toward John.
“My mother died three years ago,” he said. “My sister and I have been trying to sell her place, but we haven’t had much luck.” But there was a tense edge in his voice now, which suggested he had noticed the change in John. When John looked up, Danny Oster, aka Charles Keaton, blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. Then he said, “Well, I need to get going.” He stood up and started to leave.