“But you—Oh,” he said. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Almost,” I said. “But it’s true, too. Vince—your only hope here is to let them all know you have that stuff, and you’ve put it someplace safe. And in the meantime,” I said, with a very small return to the shark smile, “I show it to my attorney.”
“Your attorney?!” he said. “But he might…I mean that—” He stopped himself mid-dither and said, “Is Frank Kraunauer really representing you?”
“He is,” I said. “And they can’t ignore him, can they?”
“No, not Frank Kraunauer, they’d
have
to…” he said. “But what will he—I mean, even so…What will he
do
with that stuff?”
“He’ll take it to a judge,” I said.
“No,” Vince said, the first forceful and undithering thing he’d said so far. “No, they would know it came from me. I could lose my job.”
For just a moment I was speechless. Lose his
job
? With his life on the line? And mine, of course, which was considerably more to the point. “Vince, you’re not thinking clearly,” I said. “They’re going to kill you. And then you’ll be
permanently
unemployed.” But he still looked stubborn.
“No, Dexter,” he said. “It’s wrong. I can’t let you make that stuff public. Think how it would look.”
“What do we care how it looks if we’re both dead?” I said. “And it might not go public anyway. Once the judge sees it, he’ll probably just throw my case out and issue bench warrants.”
“But he might not,” Vince said, and I really wanted to slap him. “It might get out and then—No, Dexter. There has to be a better way.”
“This
is
the better way; don’t you see?” I said. “This is perfect. For
both
of us.” And now I gave him my best imitation kindly smile. “It’s so simple. Kraunauer uses that stuff to prove that I was framed; I am free, and you are exonerated, probably even promoted.” I nodded at him to show that I regarded it as a sure thing. “I get out of jail for good, and Anderson gets my old cell. Happy ending all around.”
I could see he was wavering a little, so I leaned across the table to make my point. “Of course, there is an alternative.” He looked hopeful, so I went for the jugular. “You let them kill you, and they plant all sorts of incriminating stuff in your house—drugs, kiddie porn, dirty money from the evidence room. So you’re dead
and
disgraced. And I go to trial and spend twenty years on death row, wondering why I ever tried to help poor old Vince Masuoka, the bribe-taking pedophile junkie.” I spread my hands, and then leaned back to show I was all done. “Your choice, Vince. It’s up to you. Life or death. Shame or praise. All—or nothing.”
He goggled at me again, clearly not quite there yet despite my magnificent oration. I poured a cup of tea and didn’t look at him.
“I can picture Anderson standing over your cold dead body with that stupid smile of his and then, just because nobody can stop him,
zzziipp!
He opens his fly and pees all over your cold, dead—”
“All right, all right! Jesus, Dexter,” he said, his face twisted into a mask of disgusted anguish.
“Just sayin’,” I said. “You know he will.”
“All right, fine,” he said. He blew out a huge loud breath. It sounded like a radiator bursting. “I’ll do it!”
He looked relieved—and, it must be said, a little guilty, too. I didn’t care. I had worked so hard on him for something that was, to my mind, so simple and obvious, that it was hard to think of him as an intelligent creature anymore. I felt like I should scratch him behind the ear, say, “Good boy!” and toss him a cookie.
Instead I just nodded and said, “Smart choice. When can you get it to me?”
He shook his head, looking numb, and said, “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“Doing what, Vince?” I said sweetly. “Saving your own life?”
“I can’t…I, uh,” he said. He sighed. “I can bring it home with me tonight. After work.”
I nodded. But if there is a wicked thought to be had, we must assume that Dexter will have it first. So I said, “Can I suggest that you leave work early?”
“What? No,” he said. “I have a ton of work—I mean, we are shorthanded, you know.” He looked at me like it was my fault—and of course it was, in a way.
“Yes, I do know,” I said mildly. “But if you stay late, you’re giving Anderson a shot at you. And even if you leave on time, he’ll be expecting it, and…” I turned my hands palm up and shook my head. “We don’t know what he might do. Or when.”
“Oh…” he said, very faint and looking shocked again.
“So the best move is to do the unexpected, right?”
“Yes. Uh-huh, of course, okay,” he said, staring down at the table and clearly thinking very hard. He snapped his head up and looked at me, clear-eyed and determined. “I can leave at around three-thirty, dentist appointment or something,” he said.
“Perfect. Where should I meet you?”
He blinked. “Um,” he said. “My house? Like, a little after four?”
I tried to think of a reason that would be a bad idea. I didn’t come up with anything. No one would look for him to be at his house at four o’clock on a workday, and it would make him feel more secure, so I nodded. “All right,” I said. “I’ll come by to collect it a little after four.”
He looked away, staring out the front window of the restaurant as if he could see his childhood out there in the parking lot. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said again.
V
ince managed to get all the way back to his car without collapsing into a puddle of warm and spineless goo, and I got into my little rental vehicle with a full stomach and the added satisfaction of a job well done. Of course, there were still several hours before Vince actually brought the file home, and after seeing his performance at lunch I was sure he would spend the whole time in a cold sweat, changing his mind, wringing his hands, hopping nervously on one foot, and flinching at shadows. But in the end, he would see that this really was the only way, and I had every confidence that he would come through and bring the file. Well, perhaps not
every
confidence.
I started my car to get the air-conditioning going, and thought about my next move. It was nearly one-thirty, plenty of time left in the day for absolutely everything I needed to do—which, on sober reflection, was not really a great deal. Getting Vince to help had been my Main Event for the day, and everything else that remained was somewhat vague—important, yes, but still vague. The most imperative remaining item was keeping me alive, and although I do not minimize its importance, its parameters were, as I said, somewhat unformed. For no reason at all a synonym for
unformed
popped into my head:
inchoate
. I don’t know why I thought of that word right now. I didn’t need a synonym. What I needed was a sea change, a paradigm shift, an evolution in the zeitgeist, something to make the entire world get off my back and pick on somebody else for a while.
But if that happened as I sat in my car in a strip mall parking lot in North Bay Village, I saw no sign of it: No young man in bellhop’s uniform came to the car window with a telegram on a tray bearing a full pardon from the pope, there was no spontaneous parade in my honor, and no suddenly appearing billboards or mysterious skywriting with a simple but clear message, like,
You Win, Dexter.
Nothing but the traffic, and the sun, and the afternoon heat that somehow worked its way through the car’s air-conditioning and made the back of my shirt stick to the seat.
I sighed. This would have to be done the hard way, if it got done at all. By the sweat of my brow shall I something-something. I couldn’t remember the rest. I was pretty sure it was from the Bible. If it had been Shakespeare I would have remembered it better. But the meaning was both clear and relevant. Dexter had work to do, a lot of it, and as always, nobody else was going to do it for him.
My eyes fell on the custody agreement, and I thought,
All right: First, let’s clear away the trivia.
I picked up my phone and called Deborah again. Once again, she let it go unanswered. This time I left a message. “Very thoughtful of you not to answer. I don’t think I could stand to hear your voice now that I am free, dear sister,” I said, just to show that I could play the game, too. “However, I have the custody form for you. I will drop it at your house this evening, shall we say seven-thirty? If you’re not home, you can come get it from me tomorrow.”
I broke the connection and felt I had been too snarky and yet at the same time not nearly cutting enough. Are relationships with family members always so complex?
Next I called Frank Kraunauer’s office. I got through two layers merely by saying that I was a client. The third person I was transferred to was clearly the Ice Goddess at the massive desk who guarded the Inner Sanctum. I told her I had something important for Mr. Kraunauer and she said, in a voice filled with polite scorn and skepticism, “I’ll see if he’s available.” There was a small and refined
click
and soothing music filled my ear. After only a few minutes, the music stopped abruptly and Kraunauer himself came on the line. “This is Frank Kraunauer,” he said, quite unnecessarily.
“This is Dexter Morgan,” I said, and I realized I had unconsciously copied his stentorian tone. I cleared my throat to show that I didn’t know I’d done it, and said, “I have some very important information to give you,” I said. “Um, about my case.”
“Yes, that would have been my first guess,” he said dryly. “What sort of information?”
“Ah, actually, it’s in the form of a file,” I said. “On paper?”
“I see,” he said. “Where did this file come from?”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d rather not say on the phone.”
Kraunauer chuckled. “I can assure you the NSA is not monitoring my calls,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare.”
“Even so,” I said. “It’s a little bit, um…sensitive?”
He was silent for a few seconds, and I heard a rhythmic clacking sound—drumming his fingers on the desk, no doubt. “Mr. Morgan,” he said, “you haven’t been doing any amateur sleuthing, have you?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” I said. After all, Vince had done all the legwork.
“All right,” he said abruptly. “Can you bring it to me at the office? I’ll be here until about six.”
“I should be there around five,” I said.
“See you then,” he said, and hung up. No peaceful music this time, just a dead line.
I looked at my watch. I had killed an entire seventeen minutes, and accomplished just about everything definite I could think of. On the one hand, I was filled with a hard-earned pride at my industry and efficiency. On the other hand, I still had several blank hours before I met Vince, and no place to go other than a lethal hotel room at the far end of town. I sighed heavily and shook my head. For the first time I understood and appreciated the true joy of having a job—it gave you someplace to go! And when you were done there, you could go to a home, however squalid. Suddenly I had neither, and I truly felt it. This whole homeless-and-unemployed thing was becoming a true burden.
Still, I couldn’t just sit here in the parking lot with the engine running. Eventually I would die of exhaust fumes, or perhaps boredom. And with the price of gas what it is, I couldn’t afford it, either.
I thought about going back to the library, but that seemed almost as bad. I wondered about trying a few stops on my Food Pilgrimage. True, I’d just eaten lunch, but it was only sushi. Wasn’t I supposed to get hungry again in half an hour? Or was that only true of Chinese food? It could be both, if the recurring hunger was caused by rice. But it was probably MSG, and I was pretty sure Japanese food didn’t have any. In any case, I wasn’t hungry, and I was quite sure that a pro forma eating binge would be frowned on in the best circles.
I looked out the side window. The scenery hadn’t changed. I was still in a strip mall parking lot.
Was it really the library or nothing? In the time I spent languishing in jail, I had formed an ideal picture of freedom as something worth having, even striving for. As with all idealistic notions, the reality was proving to be quite different. I had a choice of doing nothing in a parking lot, or doing it in the library. I tried to revive my flagging enthusiasm for Sacred Liberty by reminding myself that I could also go back to my hotel room, or even drive pointlessly around the city. It didn’t work. My enthusiasm stayed flagged.
With one last heavy sigh to show that I was acting under protest, I put the car in gear and headed back to the library.
It took about twenty minutes to drive over the causeway, down U.S. 1, and back to the Grove. Nothing had changed when I got there, except that the parking spot in front of the library was taken now. So were all the other parking spaces. I drove around for a few minutes until I finally found a place down at the foot of the hill by the sailing club. I tried to put money in the meter, but it was jammed. It still had five minutes on it, though, and it didn’t seem to be ticking off the time. A meter that perpetually showed five minutes was a marvelous thing, a real stroke of luck. Perhaps my fortunes were changing after all.
I trudged up the hill to the library and went in. My seat by the back window was still available. I was literally being showered with good fortune. What a wonderful world we live in.
I sat and flipped through magazines I didn’t care about and scanned stories that bored me to tears. When I finally glanced at my watch and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed, I was stunned. It had seemed like an eternity. I flung down the magazines and went looking for something more substantial to read.
I found something better: books with lots of pictures. I settled on an art-history book that bragged about having over twenty-five hundred pictures, from cave to contemporary. Even on a day as slow-paced as this one, I could make twenty-five hundred pictures last awhile.
I sat back down with the book. I took my time with the pictures—and not merely because I wanted to while away a few hours. I have always liked art. In the first place, some of it is quite pretty. And even if you don’t always understand the picture, or the emotions it tries to convey, there is usually some nice, colorful something to look at somewhere in the picture. There were a lot of religious pictures in this book, many of them quite cheerfully gory. I particularly liked the pictures of saints with holes in them. The blood pouring from the wounds was presented in a very restrained and dignified manner, which is unusual for blood. Nasty stuff, and unpredictable. And the expressions on their faces, which could only be called Justified Anguish, were wonderful fun.
Altogether, it gave me a new appreciation for religion. Although to be truthful, I had always wondered at the blind and unfailing insistence on combining violent and gooey death with human worship. It almost made me wish I could join a church of some kind. What fun they had, especially with their saints! I would fit right in! Dexter the Saint Maker!
But of course, it wouldn’t do. I could never sit through an entire service without giggling. Seriously, how can people actually believe such things? And in any case, the altar would almost certainly burst into flames when I entered.
Ah, well. At least religion was responsible for some nice pictures, and that should count for something. If nothing else, the pictures whiled away the time for me until around three-forty-five, when I left for my rendezvous—if not with destiny, then at least with some very nice drapes.
Vince Masuoka had a small house in North Miami, at the end of a dead-end street off 125th Street. It was painted pale yellow with pastel purple trim, which really made me question my taste in associates. There were a few very well-barbered bushes in the front yard and a cactus garden lining the cobblestone walkway up to his front door. His car was in the driveway when I arrived, so at least he hadn’t decided he would rather work late than save my life and his.
I rang the bell and he opened the door immediately. He was so pale and sweaty that for a moment I wondered whether he had food poisoning, and I felt a brief surge of near-panic because I had eaten the same things at lunch that he had. But he grabbed my arm with a very strong grip and pulled me inside so powerfully that I ruled it out and settled on mere nervous collapse.
Sure enough, the first words out of his mouth revealed that he was teetering on the brink of total disintegration. “Dexter, Jesus, you wouldn’t believe—Oh, my God, I don’t even know how—I mean I nearly…Holy Christ I gotta sit down.” And he collapsed onto a very stylish Deco chaise longue, patting at his brow with a paper towel.
“Fine, thanks,” I said cheerfully. “Do you have the file?”
He blinked at me with reproach, as if I hadn’t appreciated his suffering enough. “Anderson was right
there
—I mean, he nearly
saw
me! With the
file
!”
“Nearly?” I said. “But he didn’t, did he?”
He sighed, long and painfully. “No, he didn’t,” he admitted. “But, my God. He was…I hid behind the, you know the closet by the coffee room?”
“Vince,” I said. “Do you have the file?”
He shook his head. “Of course I do. What have I been saying?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I have it right here,” he said, waving a limp and sweaty arm at a strange yellow-painted end table. The legs were giraffe necks and the handle of the one small drawer was an elephant’s trunk, and the whole was so distracting that I had to squint to see that, as advertised, a manila folder lay neatly on top of the table. I managed to show quite commendable restraint, by stepping calmly over to pick up the file, rather than leaping through the air and snatching it with both hands, as seemed more appropriate.
I opened the folder and leafed quickly through it, page by page. I paused after only the first few pages: Vince had been wonderfully thorough. The file started with the initial incident report, and went on step by step through the long and many-faceted paper pathway that our wonderful System of Justice demands. It was all here, every step, and even to the casual eye it was clear that most of the scribbled signatures were done by the same messy hand, though the names were different. And by a remarkable coincidence, that ubiquitous sloppy handwriting looked an awful lot like Detective Anderson’s. I looked at Vince with a raised eyebrow. “How on earth did they get away with this?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously. “I know, right?” he said. “I mean, anybody can tell—and, Dexter, that’s not even the worst of it!” He jumped up off the chaise and leaped to my side, eagerly snatching away the folder and flipping to a page near the bottom of the stack. “Hear—lookit
this
!” he said with a kind of triumphant shock.
I looked. The page in question was the lab report, submitted by V. Masuoka, who signed his name in the same hand as the officer who had signed the incident report. Even better, “Masuoka” was spelled wrong: M-A-S-S-O-K-A.
“Shame on you, Vince,” I said. “At your age, you really should know how to spell your own name.”
“That’s not the half of it!” he said. “Look—he has me using luminol. We haven’t used that stuff in years, we use Bluestar now.
And,
” he finished triumphantly, “he spelled
that
wrong, too—with an ‘A’ instead of an ‘I.’ ”
It was true. And as I gently pried the folder out of Vince’s sweaty grip and examined it with a little more care, I saw that the whole thing was almost as shoddy. I found myself sharing Vince’s shock; to frame me was one thing, but to do such a terrible job at it was unforgivable. Really, a child could do better work. Either Anderson was truly an overgrown case of arrested mental development, or he was such an arrogant and dim-witted buffoon that he thought he’d done it well enough to get away with it. A moment’s serious reflection led me to conclude that the second explanation was correct. Anderson was so completely brainless that he didn’t realize just how stupid he really was.