Authors: Jonathan Valin
It didn't take Laurel long to pick up on the change in my attitude. Her sensors were finely tuned to rejection. When I didn't respond to her advances, she sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, crossed her legs, put a hand under her chin, and stared at me with a melancholy smile.
"You ever been poor, Harry?" she said.
"I've been down and out a few times."
"It's no fun, is it?" she said. "To be afraid to open the mailbox, for fear you're going to find another bill in there that you can't pay. Or to be afraid to open the door at noon for fear that it's a certified letter from some collection agency that's about to take you to court. To be afraid to answer your phone in a normal tone of voice, for fear that the dun on the other end will recognize you and start jacking you around for dough. To be afraid to drive around the streets, 'cause there are warrants out on traffic tickets that you couldn't afford to pay. You ever been that poor?"
"No," I said softly.
"Well, I have," she said. "And I don't ever intend to be again. I've got to stand on my hind legs in this world, Harry, 'cause I've learned the hard way that no one else is going to be there to catch me when I fall."
I got up and walked over to the bed.
"No!" she said, holding up both hands to stop me. "I don't fuck anyone for charity. And I don't expect anyone to do that to me."
She lay back on the mattress, pulled the sheet over her, and curled up in a ball.
Late that night, I made love to her. It wasn't very good for either of us. There were too many different feelings being played out, feelings that had nothing to do with sex. But it made me feel better, and I think it soothed her pride.
The last thing she said to me, in the dark, as she turned away to fall back to sleep, was, "That's another hundred bucks you owe me."
XXI
I got up early the next morning, left Laurel a note saying that I'd be back at ten, and drove downtown to the courthouse to find George DeVries. It was barely eight thirty on a sultry Sunday, and the only thing moving on the streets, outside of me and a couple of patrol cars, was the blue morning haze, hanging like smoke above the tarmac. I parked the Pinto beside a meter on Main and walked over to the courthouse. It was two flights of bobbed brass stairs to the DA's offices.
The second floor hallway was full of that milky, morning half light that peeks in at southern exposures and puddles up on concrete. I splashed through it past the myriad offices of the DA's staff. A surprising number of doors were standing open for so early on a Sunday, and I could hear the drone of desk fans up and down the hall. The only door that mattered to me was the one to George DeVries's office, and it was shut tight. I knocked on the frosted glass insert, and to my satisfaction a lazy Southern voice called out, "Come in."
I opened the door, walked through a vacant anteroom and into DeVries's office. George, in white dress shirt and speckled bow tie, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, was sitting behind a cluttered desk, leaning back in his chair and gazing out an open window at the hazy Mount Adams hillside in the distance. He didn't turn around in the chair when I approached the desk, just let his head loll to the right.
"Hi ya, Harry-boy," he said in his Kentucky Colonel's voice. "How's tricks?"
"Tricks are good, George," I said, sitting across the desk from him.
He smiled familiarly, and his skin wrinkled up like crumpled butcher paper. George had aged since I'd seen him last. He'd developed a paunch that popped the buttons on his clean white shirt, and his face had grown even more weathered with the years. He'd always looked like a red-haired Carl Sandburg. If the trends continued, I thought, I'd have to change poets -to Auden, maybe.
"You're up mighty early, aren't you?" he said. "You got something on your mind?"
"Bill Parks," I said.
George shook his head sorrowfully and swung his chair around to face me. "I'm getting a little weary of hearing that name."
"Who else has been asking?"
"Who hasn't?" George said. "The papers, the TV guys -you name it."
"How about Phil Clayton. Has he been asking?"
"Phil don't ask, Harry," George said dryly. "He tells."
"He was in charge of Bill's case, wasn't he?"
"No comment," George said. "I already know that he was, George."
"Then why are you asking, Harry?" he said with his wrinkled grin.
I'd played this game before with George, who was not famous for his scruples.
"George," I said. "You're not going to give me a hard time about this, are you?"
"I have to, Harry-boy," he said apologetically. "I'm sorry, but this one is top secret. I'm afraid I can't help you out at all."
George ducked his head and pretended to examine his manicure, but I could see that one little corner of his right eye was reserved for me.
I picked up my cue. "That's a damn shame, George, because I'm working for the Cougars now, and I know for a fact that they'd be mighty grateful for any help you might see fit to give me. Mighty grateful."
George stopped admiring his nails and looked up at me. "How grateful's that?"
"I think I can guarantee a couple of season tickets on the fifty yard line. And maybe a little something extra in the ticket envelope, to buy popcorn and beer with."
"Blue seats?" George said.
"Any color you want, George."
He smiled so broadly I could see the gold bridgework on his molars. "That's mighty white of you, Harry. I've said it before and I'll say it again. You're okay."
"Spare me, George."
He hunched forward in his chair, cribbed his hands in front of him, and put an earnest look on his face, like a car salesman closing a deal. "What do you need?"
"A couple of transcripts," I said. "I'd like to see the pretrials on Parks's busts. He has two of them that I know of, both in December. One on an assault charge and the one that the papers are writing about -the drug arrest."
"They're the same case," George said with a wink.
I'd figured as much the night before. "You're on top of this, are you?"
George shrugged. "You're not the only one giving away tickets, Harry. I got a family to feed."
"Tell me about the case."
George leaned back in the chair, cupping his hands behind his head. "All I know is what I hear. I haven't seen the actual transcript. The DEA's got it, and for some reason, Internal Affairs is looking at it too. I guess maybe Phil got a little carried away on this one."
"Carried away how?"
"I don't know that."
I gave him a look.
"Honest Injun," he said, holding up one hand. "All I can tell you is the scuttlebutt I've heard."
"Then shoot."
"The assault complaint was phoned in last New Year's Eve. It went straight to Clayton, just like it had been ticketed that way in advance. Phil busted Parks at the Caesar Apartments and just happened to find a shitload of cocaine on Parks's person. Parks was given a choice plead guilty to the assault, testify against his suppliers, and get immunity on the drug charge; or do the whole nine yards on felony possession and the assault to boot."
"So he copped the plea."
"Uh-uh," George said. "Your buddy Bill is a stand-up guy."
I stared at him for a moment. "You're telling me he didn't plea-bargain?"
"That's what I hear. He confessed to the assault, all right. But he refused to plea-bargain on the drugs. He decided to do time on both charges."
That certainly blew Al Foster's theory out of the water. And surprised the hell out of me. "Then what's all this shit in the paper about grand juries?" I said. "What kind of crap is Clayton putting out?"
"From what I hear, Clayton gave Bill a chance to think things over. You know, fifteen-to-twenty can start to look mighty long to you if you brood about it. Apparently Parks came around at the last moment. Or that's what Clayton claims. He says the Cougars gave Parks a little push in the right direction."
I'd heard that story too. And according to Petrie it wasn't true. Which meant that if Parks had gotten a push, it had come from someone else. "Did Parks testify?" George shook his head. "The docket says a mystery witness was scheduled to go in on Friday. You know what happened."
"He killed the girl instead."
"That's the way it looks."
"I'm told she set him up," I said.
"Somebody did," George said. "The assault bust was an obvious setup. They were after drugs from the start and they knew they were going to find them. All they needed was an excuse to make a search, and the assault was just the ticket. It must have been the O'Hara girl."
"It looks as if her friend was in on it too."
"I would think so, yeah, seeing that she was the one who took the beating."
"Can you do me one more favor, George?" I said to him.
He rubbed his grizzled jaw and gave me a look. "You sure they're going to be blue seats?"
"Absolutely."
"Well, for a pal ..." he said.
"Find out why Internal Affairs is so interested in Clayton."
He grunted. "You're not asking much, you know."
"I don't need it right away. I can give you a day or two."
"A day or two, he says." George laughed. "I'll do my best, Harry. But there are no guarantees on that one."
"I trust you, George," I said.
I picked up an Enquirer in the courthouse lobby and read through the morning's news on Parks. The frontpage headline read, MURDERED GIRL HELPED SET PARKS up, and the article underneath it recapitulated most of what George DeVries had just told me. Apparently Clayton was still leaking news to the press -why I wasn't sure. There was a paragraph on Parks's career with the Cougars in which the allegation made in the Post on the previous day -that the Cougar management had helped Bill secure immunity on the drug charges- was repeated word for word. I could almost hear Petrie gnashing his teeth.
There was nothing in the paper about Barb Melcher, however. Which was an odd thing for Clayton to withhold. In a way, she was more directly involved in the drug bust than C.W. had been. The arrest had taken place in her apartment; she was the one who had taken the beating, which had been the cue for Clayton to arrive on the scene; and if I didn't miss my guess, she was the one who had taken the fall for her friend C.W. when the assault led to the drug arrest. It was pretty clear that Parks hadn't blamed C.W. for his legal problems. He would hardly have moved in with her after the arrest and set up house for better than five months if he had suspected that she'd betrayed him. Up until Friday he must have assumed that the Melcher girl was indirectly to blame for his troubles, or that the whole episode was just very bad luck.
I wasn't sure how C.W. had convinced her friend Barb to take part in what was apparently an elaborate and dangerous charade. Maybe she hadn't. It was possible that C.W. had only planned on provoking a loud argument with Bill just enough of an excuse to justify Clayton showing up on the scene in response to a disorderly conduct call. It was possible that the assault itself had been an unplanned accident, the result of Parks losing his violent temper. Why Parks had attacked Barb rather than C.W. I didn't know. Perhaps he had taken his wrath out on Barb because C.W., his usual target, had just told him that she was pregnant. Maybe the announcement of the pregnancy itself had triggered the fight. Laurel had said that Parks was none too pleased by the news, and C.W. had probably known that it would make him angry, although she might not have figured that he'd get angry enough to start swinging. And maybe the Melcher girl had stepped in between Parks and C.W. in order to protect her friend and had ended up with two black eyes.
Whatever the scenario, the fact that Barb and C.W. were on Donaldson Road, near the airport, when they crashed strongly suggested that Barb was trying to put as much distance between her and Bill as she could. I thought now that that was why she had looked so antsy in the evidentiary photos. It wasn't disgust that I'd seen in her face, it was fear. She must have thought that Parks would pin the blame on her for bringing the police down on his head, and she'd wanted to get out of town as quickly as she could. It was just her bad luck that they'd hit an ice slick on the way.
I wasn't at all sure how C.W. had justified jeopardizing Barb Melcher and betraying Parks in the first place, but Petrie's idea seemed as good as any. Maybe she had thought that getting Bill off drugs was worth the risk. She might have convinced herself -and Barb, too- that she was doing Parks a favor. Given her opportunistic nature, it was also possible that she'd used the occasion and the unexpected tragedy of Barb's death to worm herself more deeply into Parks's life.
Even if that hadn't been the plan, it seemed to have worked out that way. According to Laurel, Parks temporarily turned over a new leaf after the bust, giving up drugs, finding religion again, moving in with C.W., and contemplating marrying her. Of course, the honeymoon hadn't lasted very long. Their love affair had been falling apart practically from the moment it began. Beyond a doubt, it would have ended even if Parks hadn't found out that C.W. had betrayed him, although it might not have ended so violently.