Strangers (20 page)

“I'll talk to the D.A. Meanwhile, keep what you told me to yourself.”

“Parfrey needs to know. He'll want to be present no matter who sits down with his client.”

Felix said, “Parfrey, but not Mrs. Hatcher or anybody else,” and went back to his crime-scene investigation.

 

19

It took me a couple of minutes to maneuver my car out the area. A few of the rubberneckers knew who I was by then; I had to run a minor gantlet of muttered remarks and then crawl and nudge past people who were slow to move out of my way. Christ, what a town this was. I was fortunate Joe Felix was not one of the hostiles, as I'd first taken him to be. But would he remain open-minded? Could I count on him as an ally?

Get out of Mineral Springs, Cheryl, I thought as I drove back downtown. Never mind you think you have nowhere else to go. Get out of here before the damn town rips your future to shreds.

At the Goldtown I rang Sam Parfrey's office and got a machine. Then I tried his cell and was shifted to voice mail. I left a message, asking for an immediate callback.

One-thirty by then. Three and a half hours until the appointment with Felix, and no guarantees he and Frank Mendoza would credit my theory or let me see Cody Hatcher even if they did. And if they didn't? Well, then I'd be out of it, hamstrung as far as any more investigation went. Nothing I could do in that case except exit Bedrock County, act as a long-distance advisor, and trust Parfrey to do the best he could.

Less than half an hour in the Lysol-smelling hotel room and I could feel the walls starting to close in. I got out of there and walked down Main, avoiding the Lucky Strike, and then circled a couple of side-street blocks. But it was too damn cold to keep wandering around—the wind was frigid and the only coat I'd brought along was lightweight. I picked up the car and headed out to the interstate and east along it for close to twenty miles, driving a little below the speed limit, killing time.

Just as I finished filling the gas tank at a roadside oasis, my cell rang and it was Parfrey. He sounded distracted, said something vague about having been out of touch because of some sort of litigation. His focus was much better, in an edgy, worried way, when I told him about Rick Firestone's murder and the appointment with Felix at five.

“I'll be there, of course,” he said. “But why? Not to act as your attorney?”

“No, I'm not under suspicion.” At least not by Felix, so far as I knew. “It has to do with Cody Hatcher.”

“The murder does? How? Cody couldn't have had anything to do with that—”

“No, but it affects him just the same. Enough, if we're lucky, to get the assault charges against him dropped.”

“My God. What makes you say that?”

I filled him in, essentially the same scenario I'd laid out for Felix. “Make sense to you?”

Parfrey was silent for a little time. Then, with a kind of wary enthusiasm, “Yes, it does. Cody's a scared, troubled kid, even if his mother doesn't want to believe it. I never thought he was capable of rape, but theft … yes. What was Felix's reaction? Did he suspect before that Cody might be implicated in the robberies?”

“Hard to tell with him, but I don't think so. At least not an active suspicion. Anyhow I'm pretty sure he's leaning that way now.”

“I won't be surprised if you're wrong.”

“Let's hope I'm not. From your sessions with Cody, do you think he can be talked into confessing?”

“Probably, if he can be made to understand it's his only viable option. He has no loyalty to anyone but himself, and that includes his mother.”

“You don't like him much, do you?”

“Frankly, no, I don't. Why does Felix want to see you at five o'clock?”

“I asked him to let me be the one to talk to Cody, with you present and the D.A. monitoring.”

“… Why? Why not just let me talk to him?”

“I'm the one who put it together, and as I told Felix, I've had experience with this kind of interview.”

“And Felix agreed?”

“He said he'd talk to Mendoza.”

“That
cholo
will never allow it,” Parfrey said.
Cholo
for the third time. Yeah, at least a borderline bigot.

I said, “I'm hoping he will if Felix
is
leaning and has enough pull with him. We'll find out at five.”

“And if the answer is no? What then?”

“Then it'll be up to you.”

In Mineral Springs again, I got rid of another half an hour in the Horseshoe. The casino was not getting much play. A bored dealer at an empty blackjack table near the entrance glanced at me without recognition, so on impulse I sat down and played for a few minutes—and dropped twenty-five dollars, losing the last two hands with a nineteen and a twenty to a pair of blackjacks. That kind of luck is why I seldom gamble.

I went on into the restaurant, parked myself at the nonsmoking end of the counter. Two cups of coffee and a mediocre cheese sandwich: twenty more minutes down. A sour-faced woman on one of the other stools knew who I was; the look on her face said she would like nothing better than to spit in my face. On my way out, a bantamweight in cowboy clothing leaned out of a booth and said loud enough for the rest of the customers to hear, “We don't want you messing around here trying to turn rapists loose, mister. Go back where you come from while the gettin's good.”

I didn't answer him, just as I hadn't paid any attention to the sourpuss. Any sort of comeback to half veiled threats would only have provoked more of the same, and I was not about to say or do anything to worsen an already volatile situation.

More and more people in this wasteland of strangers knew me now. Some of the more nasty-minded might even suspect me of having had a hand in Rick Firestone's murder, word of which would have already spread. Pariah. Enemy. Maybe I was overreacting, turning paranoid, but I had the feeling that if this were seven or eight decades past I'd have had to worry about being lynched. Or fired on again from ambush, this time with intent to kill. Even in this fine enlightened age of ours, I would not want to be caught anywhere alone in or around Mineral Springs after dark.

*   *   *

Sam Parfrey was already at the sheriff's department, sitting hunched on the bench in the waiting area, when I walked in at ten minutes of five. He'd clothed himself in what passed for a conservative lawyer's outfit in this part of Nevada: light blue sports jacket, gray slacks, a bow tie the same color as his reddish hair. But it didn't do much for his professional image; the clothing was a little on the threadbare side, and he still looked rumpled and ill at ease and very much like what he was—a disillusioned small-town attorney unsure of himself and his role in a combustible criminal case.

The deputy on duty behind the bulletproof partition was the same jowly one as on Thursday. He directed a daggerish look at me through the glass. I ignored him, went over and sat down next to Parfrey.

“Felix and Mendoza went in ten minutes ago,” he said. “Together upstairs in the D.A.'s office before that. Mendoza didn't look happy.”

“Say anything to you?”

“No. Looked right through me.”

“Well, we shouldn't have long to wait now.”

Except that we did. It was almost fifteen minutes past the hour before the jowly deputy was given word to buzz us in. Parfrey had worked himself into a state by then, fiddling with his silver-and-turquoise ring and making nervous little position shifts on the bench. I would not have wanted him representing me in a courtroom on a criminal or any other matter; emotional control is a must for a lawyer to be successful in front of a judge and jury.

Once we passed through the metal detector the deputy said, without getting up, “You know where it is,” and followed us with that stabbing glare as we crossed to Felix's office. The hell with him.

Felix and the D.A. were both on their feet when we entered. Frank Mendoza was a round-faced, round-bodied Latino in his mid-thirties, clean shaven, well barbered, well dressed in a suit and string tie and shoes so shiny you could have seen your reflection in them. Parfrey had been right about him, I thought. Ambitious, self-important, small-pond politician, the kind that leaks hubris. His appearance and demeanor made Parfrey seem even shabbier and ineffectual. It was plain that he didn't think much of his fellow attorney; he kept up the pretense that Parfrey was not even there by focusing entirely on me. In Mendoza's presence, and the sheriff's, Parfrey's own disdain was masked. But his nervousness showed through and his stance was deferential, almost meek. The weak intimidated by the strong.

Mendoza made no offer to shake hands with me or to indulge in any of the usual amenities on a first meeting. He said aggressively, without any preamble, “Sheriff Felix is of the opinion that your story has merit and you should be allowed to interview Cody Hatcher. I disagree.”

“It's not a story. Hypothesis based on fact and inference.”

The correction seemed to annoy him even more. “I have no patience with outsiders coming into my county and stirring up a hornet's nest by conducting an amateur investigation.”

His county. Right. “I'm not an amateur,” I said. “I was a police officer in San Francisco for twenty years and I've been an established private investigator even longer. But then, you already know that from Sheriff Felix.”

“None of that alters the fact that you have no official standing here. The sheriff should not have allowed—”

“We've been all through that, Frank,” Felix said. Parfrey may have been intimidated by Mendoza, but the sheriff wasn't; the only intimidator in this room, maybe the only one in Bedrock when push came to shove, was Joe Felix.
His
county, if it was anybody's. “Makes no difference who this man is or what his standing is or why I let him get involved. The point is, he's done a good job without overstepping or breaking any laws.”

“That remains to be seen. It's still against protocol—”

Felix cut him off again. “What he's found out and what he thinks it means adds up so far. If we've got the wrong man in jail for those assaults, I want to know it and so do you. Same goes for who's behind the robberies and the Firestone homicide.”

“Of course. Naturally. But it's your job, and mine, to make those determinations. I don't see any need to allow this man access to the prisoner, when you and I can question him ourselves—”

“Been all through that, too. I thought it was settled.”

“To your satisfaction, not to mine.”

“We're wasting time, Frank.”

Mendoza had lost the argument before Parfrey and I came in; he was not going to win this replay and he knew it. Now that he'd indulged in some face-saving political bluster, he had no choice but to give in. “All right,” he said. “But something worthwhile had better come of it. If not, then it's entirely your responsibility.”

“You've made that plain enough,” Felix said. “So you don't want to be a part of it? Don't want to monitor the interview?”

“I didn't say that. Don't put words in my mouth.”

Parfrey made a small noise in his throat that might have been a suppressed chuckle. He no longer seemed quite so nervously deferential. The weak taking perverse pleasure in watching one of the strong get taken down a peg by another even stronger.

Felix came around his desk. “Okay,” he said to me. “You get what you asked for. But watch what you say to Hatcher. Don't put words in
his
mouth. I'll break it up if you try.”

“I won't.”

“Same goes for you, Mr. Parfrey.”

“Yes. Understood.”

“Then let's get on with it.”

 

20

Interrogation rooms all seem to be cut from the same mold. Almost every one I've seen, in large cities and small towns alike, looks pretty much the same: bare walls, a table made of wood or metal bolted to the floor and outfitted with bar arrangements for those prisoners deemed violent enough to require handcuffing during interrogation, and three or four hard chairs to match. Many have two-way mirrors; this one didn't, just the four empty walls and single door painted a uniform grayish-white. What it did have were a pair of video cameras mounted in opposite ceiling corners, both switched on to allow Felix and Mendoza to view the proceedings on a closed-circuit TV monitor.

Parfrey and I were shown in first. Neither of us sat down while we waited. The atmosphere in the room was close, overheated; you could hear the forced air from the building's furnace hissing in through a wall duct.

Four minutes had passed by my watch when a deputy brought Cody Hatcher in. The deputy didn't say anything, just sat the kid down in one of the chairs at the scarred wooden table, and then went on out. Cody blinked at me, looked at Parfrey, and then slumped a little and stared at the tabletop. Parfrey and I sat down close on either side of him, our chairs turned so that we were facing him. I could almost feel the watching eyes of Felix and Mendoza behind those cameras.

In his standard jail jumpsuit, Cody appeared thinner than in the graduation photo in Cheryl's living room. And older than nineteen, as if his incarceration had preternaturally aged him. He still wore the soul patch, but his upper lip showed whitish: either Parfrey had advised him to shave off the straggly mustache, or he'd been allowed to do it on his own initiative. The faint resemblance to the uncle he'd never known seemed slightly more pronounced in the flesh. Disconcerting, in a way, because even after twenty years the images of Doug Rosmond alive and dead were uncomfortably clear in my memory.

Without lifting his head, Cody said, “What's going on, Mr. Parfrey?” His voice had a raspy catch in it, thick with the mix of emotions that were reflected in his expression—fear, sullen defiance, resignation, with the fear dominating. “Who's this guy?”