Very Bad Men Page 10

  “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” I said. “Dawtrey’s the one who shot Harlan Spencer.”

  “That’s true, but the others got off pretty lightly. Dawtrey spent all that time in prison and then, when he seemed to catch a break—when they let him out for his father’s funeral—he wound up dead. It makes me wonder if everything is as it seems. What really happened to Terry Dawtrey? Did someone orchestrate his release? Did someone plan his death? These are questions I’d like to ask Detective Waishkey, if I thought she’d answer them.”

  I showed her my empty palms. “I’m not going to answer them either.”

  “Come on, Loogan,” she said. “Give me something. What were you doing today on the hill above Whiteleaf Cemetery?”

  I listened to the murmur of the television and said nothing.

  “What about Sheriff Delacorte?” she asked me. “You and Detective Waishkey met with him this morning. What did he tell you?”

  I pressed a thumbnail into the side of my Styrofoam cup.

  “Is he happy about Detective Waishkey coming up here, asking questions? Did he try to warn her off the case?”

  This was a new idea. It made me frown. “Nobody tried to warn her off the case,” I said.

  She tipped her head to the side, curious. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  The sound of the television receded and I watched Lucy Navarro reach into the pocket of her shirt and bring out a folded tissue.

  “They put us on the same floor,” she said. “I’m in room 305. I have to walk past your room to get to the elevator. Earlier tonight I found something in the hallway outside my door. Do you want to guess what it was?”

  I picked up my apple, took a bite. Waited.

  “A bullet,” she said. “Nine-millimeter, I think.”

  She laid the tissue on the table and unfolded it. There were two bullets inside.

  “I found one outside your door too,” she said. “Are you sure no one’s trying to warn you off the case?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The magazines in the waiting room had mailing labels on the covers, with the same name on each label: DR. MATTHEW KENNEALLY.

  Anthony Lark held a copy of U.S. News in his lap. His left hand felt okay as long as he kept it still. If he flexed his fingers, the pain was like a steel wire being drawn through his flesh.

  He had a clean bandage on it, white gauze secured with tape. He had showered and shaved and was wearing a fresh blue button-down shirt and slacks.

  He glanced at the receptionist, saw her talking on the phone behind the sliding glass panel. He had no appointment, but she had promised she would try to get Dr. Kenneally to see him. She couldn’t interrupt the doctor during a session, but his current session would be over in a few minutes.

  So Lark waited in the dark-paneled room. Seven chairs—but only one other patient: a mousy woman trying to hide behind a copy of Entertainment Weekly.

  The air in the room felt thick and warm. Lark thought he had a fever, because of the infection in his hand. He needed antibiotics. Dr. Kenneally could write prescriptions; he had given Lark the pills he used to combat his headaches. The police knew about Lark’s hand; his injury had been reported in the news. So he couldn’t go to just any doctor. It came down to a matter of trust. So here Lark was, trusting that Dr. Kenneally wouldn’t turn him over to the police.

  Lark waited. The receptionist was still on the phone. The magazine in his lap concealed his left hand. He looked down at the white label, at the letters of Dr. Kenneally’s name. They troubled him.

  The letters in “Matthew” were a cool tan like the wood of a healthy tree after you’ve peeled away the bark, but the letters of “Kenneally” were a dark brown that verged on black. The letters of “Kenneally” divided themselves into tiny dots that skittered over one another like swarming insects. “Kenneally” ended in “ly”; it wasn’t an adverb, but it was like an adverb. And adverbs made Lark uneasy, because they swarmed.

  He turned the magazine over to hide the mailing label. What if he had made a mistake? Maybe the receptionist had seen his hand. Or maybe she had noticed him trying to hide it, and that had been enough to arouse her suspicions. Suppose she had already consulted Dr. Kenneally and he had told her to call the police. She had been on the phone a long time. Now, as he watched her, she turned and stared directly back at him.

  He bent the magazine around to peek at the mailing label. The letters of “Kenneally” had spread apart into a million tiny fragments, jagged bits of black that leapt and jittered. Lark jumped to his feet and the magazine dropped to the floor. He stepped quickly past the reception window and reached for the knob of the hallway door. Without thinking he turned it with his left hand and the steel wire sliced through him.

  He heard the receptionist calling his name, but he didn’t look back. He clamped down on the pain in his hand and ran—along the hall, down the stairs. He slowed only when he hit the open air, his breath sawing through his lungs. Beads of sweat poured out of his scalp as he stalked across the parking lot to his Chevy.

  LARK STOPPED FOR GAS at a Marathon station near the north campus of the University of Michigan. He worked the pump with his right hand and kept his left down at his side, the long sleeve of his shirt covering most of the bandage.

  He had driven from Dr. Kenneally’s office to a shopping center nearby, where he had parked and let the car’s air-conditioning cool him. He had closed his eyes to rest for a moment and had opened them to find that nearly two hours had passed.

  Now, with his tank full, he drove south to a neighborhood of willows and oaks and green lawns that sloped up to stately white houses. The Spencer house stood taller than the others. The horseshoe driveway was paved with cobblestones and bordered by a low hedge. Lark saw a white van in the driveway. He knew what it meant. The van had a wheelchair lift. Harlan Spencer used it when he traveled, as he often did, appearing with his daughter on the campaign trail.

  Finding the van here meant that Spencer was home. Callie Spencer might be here too. There was a guesthouse in back of the main one, where she often stayed—Lark had read about it in a magazine.

  He circled the block and when he came around again he saw a car parked behind the van in the driveway. A woman stood by the driver’s door. Her hair shone silky black in the sun, and for a second he thought it was Callie Spencer. But Callie had short hair; it scarcely reached the base of her neck. This woman had pinned up her hair so that it only seemed short. She was taller, her skin not as tanned.

  He slowed the car. He recognized her. She walked toward the front door of the house, and he remembered when he had seen her: the night he went after Sutton Bell. She was one of the cops from the hospital.

  CHAPTER 15

  The door opened to Elizabeth’s knock. The woman who opened it had white hair and a lined, handsome face. She introduced herself as Ruth Spencer, wife of Harlan, mother of Callie, and led Elizabeth upstairs to her husband’s studio.

  The air in the house felt cool, though the temperature outside stood in the nineties. Elizabeth already missed the milder weather of Sault Sainte Marie. A sprinkling of rain had fallen that morning as she and David began the drive south. With a stop for lunch they made it in seven hours, the temperature rising as they drove.

  The trip north had raised more questions than it answered, and Owen McCaleb had made it plain that she was needed here. “We can’t worry about the Dawtreys,” he’d told her. “We need to focus on Kormoran and Bell.”

  As a first step, she had called Harlan Spencer, who had agreed to meet with her. She had dropped David at home, staying long enough for a shower and a change of clothes. Now she followed Ruth Spencer up to a large room with tall windows facing west.

  A row of canvases lined the eastern side of the studio, each one propped against the wall. There were landscapes and still-life paintings of flowers. Some realistic, almost photographic; others so rough that they bordered on abstract. An orange sunset in a deep blu
e sky. The vivid yellow petals of a daffodil.

  A table occupied the center of the room, cluttered with brushes and tubes of oil paint. An easel stood next to it, holding an unfinished canvas. Harlan Spencer dropped his brush into a porcelain cup, wiped his hand on an apron that lay in his lap, and motored his wheelchair across the room to greet Elizabeth.

  “You’ll forgive me,” he said. “I’ve been traveling for a week. I miss the paint when I go for more than a few days without it. Would you rather talk downstairs, or out in the garden?”

  “Not at all,” Elizabeth said. “Right here will be fine.”

  Ruth Spencer brought a straight-back chair in from another room and then went out again. Harlan Spencer rolled his wheelchair to the table, where a tray of iced tea sat amid the paint tubes and brushes. As he poured two glasses, Elizabeth saw a canvas she hadn’t noticed before. While the others rested on the floor, this one hung in a wooden frame on the northern wall. The image was familiar: a portrait of Callie Spencer in her twenties.

  “That’s one of my early works,” Harlan Spencer said.

  Elizabeth sat and accepted the glass he offered her. “You started painting after—” She left the thought unfinished.

  “Yes,” he said. “After. I never had any interest in art as a young man, and if anyone had told me I should be a painter I would have laughed. But a bullet in the spine makes you reconsider things.”

  He had a deep, resonant voice, the voice of the sheriff he had been, not the artist he had become. He sat straight in the chair, his broad shoulders held stiff. His open collar revealed a sinewy neck, and the muscles of his right arm were prominently defined. His other arm rested on the arm of the chair, supported by a brace so that his fingers could work the chair’s controls. His legs, beneath the fabric of his pants, were long and wasted thin. His brow was deeply lined and his fringe of gray hair had been shaved close to his scalp.

  “It became clear early on that my legs were never going to carry me again,” he told Elizabeth. “My right arm and hand were weak, but the physical therapists had high hopes for them, and they thought I might regain some function in my left hand too. My wife sat by my bed and made a list of occupations for a one-armed man. Not a long list. But ‘painter’ was on it.”

  He sipped from his iced tea and held the glass balanced on the arm of his chair.

  “I’ve learned since that some determined souls get by with even less than I’ve got. If their fingers don’t work, they hold the brush in their teeth. But back then, looking over the list we made, it occurred to me that one hand would be enough to hold a gun to my temple. I might have done it if I hadn’t had my wife and daughter with me.”

  Elizabeth looked up at the portrait. The expression was one of determination: steady eyes, lowered chin, lips together in a firm line.

  “I understand your daughter dropped out of school to help with your recovery,” she said.

  “Callie moved back to Sault Sainte Marie to be with us. I told her she shouldn’t, but she wouldn’t listen. We set up a studio in her mother’s sewing room, and in the afternoons Callie would sit for hours and I would try to paint her. I knew nothing about mixing color or brushwork. I learned everything by trial and error. We made a deal that if I could paint a portrait that satisfied her, she would go back to law school.”

  He nodded toward the painting. “After months of failures I managed one success. So she moved back down here. Eventually her mother and I followed, so we could be close to her.”

  Elizabeth spotted a newspaper among the clutter on the table. The story of Henry Kormoran’s murder occupied the front page.

  “You’ve been reading up on my case,” she said to Spencer.

  “Old habits,” he said.

  “The paper didn’t mention this, but Kormoran had a small print of Callie’s portrait in his apartment.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Where could he have gotten it?”

  “I had an exhibition a few years ago,” Spencer said. “That painting was part of it, and the gallery made reproductions to sell. The company that printed them did another run this year, after Callie declared her candidacy for the Senate. You can find them in card shops now.”

  “Can you think of any reason why Kormoran would have had one?”

  Spencer stared up at the painting, considering his reply. “I think in a strange way he felt connected to my daughter. He wrote me a letter once, telling me how sorry he was for his part in the Great Lakes robbery. This was after his release from prison. Kormoran was a sad case. He came from a good family, and when he got into trouble they were ashamed of him. They got him a lawyer who made a plea deal, and after he served his time they didn’t want anything to do with him. I think he believed that getting involved in that robbery was the worst thing he had ever done. It wrecked his life and poisoned his relationships. But he saw Callie’s success as a sort of silver lining. It was one thing he could point to that his actions hadn’t ruined. It’s pitiful sometimes, the things we cling to.”

  His eyes came back to Elizabeth.

  “You feel sorry for him,” she said.

  “I feel sorry for all of them. Kormoran, Bell, even Dawtrey. They were kids and they got caught up in something not of their own making.”

  “They were twenty-year-olds. Don’t you think they should have known better?”

  Spencer set his iced tea on the table beside him.

  “They were taken in by a con man,” he said. “Floyd Lambeau fooled a lot of people—and some of them didn’t have the excuse of being twenty. The man could talk. He gave lectures on Native American history all over the country. I understand the University of Michigan once offered him a tenure-track job. He turned them down. His résumé said he had degrees from Princeton and Berkeley, but when they looked into that—after the Great Lakes Bank, after I shot him—it turned out he’d never been to either one. Never attended any university at all.”

  Sunlight from the window gleamed on Spencer’s scalp and made shadows on his brow. “Lambeau was forty-eight at the time of the robbery, and he’d been scamming people all his life. College students were his favorite targets: smart, idealistic kids. They’d come to his lectures and stay afterward to talk. He’d collect them and meet with them in little discussion groups. Salons. Most of them were white and privileged, and he’d play on their sense of guilt. In Floyd Lambeau’s version of history, Europeans were always the villains. As for the victims, well, he didn’t mind changing it up. Sometimes it was the Indians being exploited—Lambeau claimed to be Chippewa. Other times it was endangered species, or the environment.

  “But there was always some cause Lambeau claimed to be fighting for, some movement or charity that needed support. It all sounded legitimate to the kids in his salons, and when they put up their money the checks were made out to leagues and foundations. But the money ended up in Lambeau’s pocket.”

  Spencer paused to worry his thumb over a spot of dried paint on the arm of his chair. Then he resumed his story.

  “He could have gone on like that indefinitely, I think. He had a nice racket going, and no one suspected anything. But there were limits to how much he could take in with his fake charities, and he was looking for a bigger payoff. And the money was only part of it. I think Lambeau couldn’t help but push things. It must have amused him, manipulating these college kids. How far could he get them to go?

  “When he recruited Kormoran, Bell, and Dawtrey for the Great Lakes Bank job, he appealed to their sense of justice. He said he needed the money for a noble cause. There was a case in the news at the time—a pair of Chippewa brothers named Rosebear who had been arrested for murder. They were accused of raping and killing a white woman in Dayton, Ohio. There was a witness who claimed to have seen them leaving the woman’s house in a hurry that day, and their fingerprints were all over inside, and one of them had left DNA behind in the victim’s bedsheets.

  “It looked like a strong case—except for the fact that the Rosebear brot
hers had a legitimate reason for being in the house. They were working for the victim, refinishing her basement. As for the DNA, one of the brothers said he was having a relationship with the woman, a completely consensual affair. And as for the witness, he was an employee of the woman’s husband, who happened to be a prominent businessman with political connections. Some people suspected that he had found out about his wife’s affair, killed her in a rage, and paid one of his employees to put the blame on the Rosebear brothers.

  “That version of the story was probably true, and it was the version that Kormoran, Bell, and Dawtrey heard from Floyd Lambeau. The Rosebear brothers were facing the death penalty. They couldn’t begin to afford a proper legal defense. It would take far more money than Lambeau could hope to raise through donations. Desperate measures were called for. Lambeau promised that every penny from the Great Lakes robbery would go to help those two brothers. It was a lie, of course: He never intended to give the money away. But Kormoran and the others believed him.

  “Lambeau filled their heads with grand ideas. They thought they were going to save the lives of innocent men. But when the robbery went wrong, it was as if his spell had been broken. Henry Kormoran realized it early; he dropped his gun and ran. They found him a couple miles away, trying to hitch a ride. Terry Dawtrey held on to his gun. He was tougher than the others; he came from a working-class background. I think that’s one reason Lambeau chose him.

  “But I shot Lambeau, and then Dawtrey came out with the bank manager as a hostage. Sutton Bell had a choice to make. He realized, too late, that the whole thing was crazy. He made the right call, shooting Dawtrey in the leg. Things might have gone much worse if he hadn’t.”

  “Bell seems to have come out of this in good shape,” Elizabeth said. “He’s got a wife and a daughter. A respectable job. I’ve talked to him. He’s a likable man.”

  Spencer nodded. “I’ve talked to him too. I think he’s created the kind of life he might have had if he’d never met Floyd Lambeau. If things had gone differently, the others might have done the same. Even Dawtrey.”