Finders Keepers (24 page)

21

When Holly comes back, she's got her iPad. “Mission accomplished. They're off to Teaberry Lane on the Number Four.”

“How did the Saubers girl seem?”

“Much better. She and Barbara were practicing some dance step
they learned on TV while we waited for the bus. They tried to get me to do it with them.”

“And did you?”

“No. Homegirl don't dance.”

She doesn't smile when she says this, but she still might be joking. He knows she sometimes does these days, but it's always hard to tell. Much of Holly Gibney is still a mystery to Hodges, and he guesses that will always be the case.

“Will Barb's mom get the story out of them, do you think? She's pretty perceptive, and a weekend can be a long time when you're sitting on a big secret.”

“Maybe, but I don't think so,” Holly says. “Tina was a lot more relaxed once she got it off her chest.”

Hodges smiles. “If she was dancing at the bus stop, I guess she was. So what do you think, Holly?”

“About which part?”

“Let's start with the money.”

She taps at her iPad, brushing absently at her hair to keep it out of her eyes. “It started coming in February of 2010, and stopped in September of last year. That's forty-four months. If the brother—”

“Pete.”

“If Pete sent his parents five hundred dollars a month over that period, that comes to twenty-two thousand dollars. Give or take. Not exactly a fortune, but—”

“But a mighty lot for a kid,” Hodges finishes. “Especially if he started sending it when he was Tina's age.”

They look at each other. That she will sometimes meet his gaze like this is, in a way, the most extraordinary part of her change from the terrified woman she was when he first met her. After a silence of perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.

“So—” “How did—”

“You first,” Hodges says, laughing.

Without looking at him (it's a thing she can only do in short bursts, even when she's absorbed by some problem), Holly says, “That conversation he had with Tina about buried treasure—gold and jewels and doubloons. I think that's important. I don't think he stole that money. I think he
found
it.”

“Must have. Very few thirteen-year-olds pull bank jobs, no matter how desperate they are. But where does a kid stumble across that kind of loot?”

“I don't know. I can craft a computer search with a timeline and get a dump of cash robberies, I suppose. We can be pretty sure it happened before 2010, if he found the money in February of that year. Twenty-two thousand dollars is a large enough haul to have been reported in the papers, but what's the search protocol? What are the parameters? How far back should I go? Five years? Ten? I bet an info dump going back to just oh-five would be pretty big, because I'd need to search the whole tristate area. Don't you think so?”

“You'd only get a partial catch even if you searched the whole Midwest.” Hodges is thinking of Oliver Madden, who probably conned hundreds of people and dozens of organizations during the course of his career. He was an expert when it came to creating false bank accounts, but Hodges is betting that Ollie didn't put much trust in banks when it came to his own money. No, he would have wanted a cushy cash reserve.

“Why only partial?”

“You're thinking about banks, check-cashing joints, fast credit outfits. Maybe the dog track or the concession take from a Groundhogs game. But it might not have been public money. The thief or thieves could have knocked over a high-stakes poker game or ripped off a meth dealer over on Edgemont Avenue in Hillbilly Heaven. For all we know, the cash could have come from a home
invasion in Atlanta or San Diego or anyplace in between. Cash from that kind of theft might not even have been reported.”

“Especially if it was never reported to Internal Revenue in the first place,” Holly says. “Right right right. So where does that leave us?”

“Needing to talk to Peter Saubers, and frankly, I can't wait. I thought I'd seen it all, but I've never seen anything like this.”

“You could talk to him tonight. He's not going on his class trip until tomorrow. I took Tina's phone number. I could call her and get her brother's.”

“No, let's let him have his weekend. Hell, he's probably left already. Maybe it will calm him down, give him time to think. And let Tina have hers. Monday afternoon will be soon enough.”

“What about the black notebook she saw? The Moleskine? Any ideas about that?”

“Probably has nothing at all to do with the money. Could be his
50 Shades of Fun
fantasy journal about the girl who sits behind him in homeroom.”

Holly makes a
hmph
sound to show what she thinks of that and begins to pace. “You know what bugs me? The lag.”

“The lag?”

“The money stopped coming last September, along with a note that said he's sorry there isn't more. But as far as we know, Peter didn't start getting weird until April or May of this year. For seven months he's fine, then he grows a moustache and starts exhibiting symptoms of anxiety. What happened? Any ideas on that?”

One possibility stands out. “He decided he wanted more money, maybe so his sister could go to Barbara's school. He thought he knew a way to get it, but something went wrong.”

“Yes! That's what I think, too!” She crosses her arms over her breasts and cups her elbows, a self-comforting gesture Hodges
has seen often. “I wish Tina had seen what was in that notebook, though. The Moleskine notebook.”

“Is that a hunch, or are you following some chain of logic I don't see?”

“I'd like to know why he was so anxious for her not to see it, that's all.” Having successfully evaded Hodges's question, she heads for the door. “I'm going to build a computer search on robberies between 2001 and 2009. I know it's a longshot, but it's a place to start. What are you going to do?”

“Go home. Think this over. Tomorrow I'm repo'ing cars and looking for a bail-jumper named Dejohn Frasier, who is almost certainly staying with his stepmom or ex-wife. Also, I'll watch the Indians and possibly go to a movie.”

Holly lights up. “Can I go to the movies with you?”

“If you like.”

“Can I pick?”

“Only if you promise not to drag me to some idiotic romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston.”

“Jennifer Aniston is a very fine actress and a badly underrated comedienne. Did you know she was in the original
Leprechaun
movie, back in 1993?”

“Holly, you're a font of information, but you're dodging the issue here. Promise me no rom-com, or I go on my own.”

“I'm sure we can find something mutually agreeable,” Holly says, not quite meeting his eyes. “Will Tina's brother be all right? You don't think he'd really try to kill himself, do you?”

“Not based on his actions. He put himself way out on a limb for his family. Guys like that, ones with empathy, usually aren't suicidal. Holly, does it seem strange to you that the little girl figured out Peter was behind the money, and their parents don't seem to have a clue?”

The light in Holly's eyes goes out, and for a moment she looks very much like the Holly of old, the one who spent most of her adolescence in her room, the kind of neurotic isolate the Japanese call
hikikomori
.

“Parents can be very stupid,” she says, and goes out.

Well, Hodges thinks, yours certainly were, I think we can agree on that.

He goes to the window, clasps his hands behind his back, and stares out at lower Marlborough, where the afternoon rush hour traffic is building. He wonders if Holly has considered the second plausible source of the boy's anxiety: that the mokes who hid the money have come back and found it gone.

And have somehow found out who took it.

22

Statewide Motorcycle & Small Engine Repair isn't statewide or even citywide; it's a ramshackle zoning mistake made of rusty corrugated metal on the South Side, a stone's throw from the minor league stadium where the Groundhogs play. Out front there's a line of cycles for sale under plastic pennants fluttering lackadaisically from a sagging length of cable. Most of the bikes look pretty sketchy to Morris. A fat guy in a leather vest is sitting against the side of the building, swabbing road rash with a handful of Kleenex. He looks up at Morris and says nothing. Morris says nothing right back. He had to walk here from Edgemont Avenue, over a mile in the hot morning sun, because the buses only come out this far when the Hogs are playing.

He goes into the garage and there's Charlie Roberson, sitting on a grease-smeared car seat in front of a half-disassembled Har
ley. He doesn't see Morris at first; he's holding the Harley's battery up and studying it. Morris, meanwhile, studies him. Roberson is still a muscular fireplug of a man, although he has to be over seventy, bald on top with a graying fringe. He's wearing a cut-off tee, and Morris can read a fading prison tattoo on one of his biceps: WHITE POWER 4EVER.

One of my success stories, Morris thinks, and smiles.

Roberson was doing life in Waynesville for bludgeoning a rich old lady to death on Wieland Avenue in Branson Park. She supposedly woke up and caught him creeping her house. He also raped her, possibly before the bludgeoning, perhaps after, as she lay dying on the floor of her upstairs hall. The case was a slam-dunk. Roberson had been seen in the area on several occasions leading up to the robbery, he had been photographed by the security camera outside the rich old lady's gate a day prior to the break-in, he had discussed the possibility of creeping that particular crib and robbing that particular lady with several of his lowlife friends (all given ample reason to testify by the prosecution, having legal woes of their own), and he had a long record of robbery and assault. Jury said guilty; judge said life without parole; Roberson swapped motorcycle repair for stitching bluejeans and varnishing furniture.

“I done plenty, but I didn't do that,” he told Morris time and time again. “I
woulda
, I had the fuckin security code, but someone else beat me to the punch. I know who it was, too, because there was only one guy I told those numbers to. He was one of the ones who fuckin testified against me, and if I ever get out of here, that man is gonna die. Trust me.”

Morris neither believed nor disbelieved him—his first two years in the Ville had shown him that it was filled with men claiming to be as innocent as morning dew—but when Charlie asked him
to write Barry Scheck, Morris was willing. It was what he did, his real job.

Turned out the robber-bludgeoner-rapist had left semen in the old lady's underpants, the underpants were still in one of the city's cavernous evidence rooms, and the lawyer the Innocence Project sent out to investigate Charlie Roberson's case found them. DNA testing unavailable at the time of Charlie's conviction showed the jizz wasn't his. The lawyer hired an investigator to track down several of the prosecution's witnesses. One of them, dying of liver cancer, not only recanted his testimony but copped to the crime, perhaps in hopes that doing so would earn him a pass through the pearly gates.

“Hey, Charlie,” Morris says. “Guess who.”

Roberson turns, squints, gets to his feet. “Morrie? Is that Morrie Bellamy?”

“In the flesh.”

“Well, I'll be fucked.”

Probably not, Morris thinks, but when Roberson puts the battery down on the seat of the Harley and comes forward with his arms outstretched, Morris submits to the obligatory back-pounding bro-hug. Even gives it back to the best of his ability. The amount of muscle beneath Roberson's filthy tee-shirt is mildly alarming.

Roberson pulls back, showing his few remaining teeth in a grin. “Jesus Christ! Parole?”

“Parole.”

“Old lady took her foot off your neck?”

“She did.”

“God-
dam
, that's great! Come on in the office and have a drink! I got bourbon.”

Morris shakes his head. “Thanks, but booze doesn't agree with
my system. Also, the man might come around anytime and ask me to drop a urine. I called in sick at work this morning, that's risky enough.”

“Who's your PO?”

“McFarland.”

“Big buck nigger, isn't he?”

“He's black, yes.”

“Ah, he ain't the worst, but they watch you close to begin with, no doubt. Come on in the office, anyway, I'll drink yours. Hey, did you hear Duck died?”

Morris has indeed heard this, got the news shortly before his parole came through. Duck Duckworth, his first protector, the one who stopped the rapes by Morris's cellie and his cellie's friends. Morris felt no special grief. People came; people went; shit didn't mean shit.

Roberson shakes his head as he takes a bottle from the top shelf of a metal cabinet filled with tools and spare parts. “It was some kind of brain thing. Well, you know what they say—in the midst of fuckin life we're in fuckin death.” He pours bourbon into a cup with WORLD'S BEST HUGGER on the side, and lifts it. “Here's to ole Ducky.” He drinks, smacks his lips, and raises the cup again. “And here's to you. Morrie Bellamy, out on the street again, rollin and trollin. What they got you doin? Some kind of paperwork'd be my guess.”

Morris tells him about his job at the MAC, and makes chitchat while Roberson helps himself to another knock of bourbon. Morris doesn't envy Charlie his freedom to drink, he lost too many years of his life thanks to high-tension booze, but he feels Roberson will be more amenable to his request if he's a little high.

When he judges the time is right, he says, “You told me to come to you if I ever got out and needed a favor.”

“True, true . . . but I never thought you'd get out. Not with that Jesus-jumper you nailed ridin you like a motherfuckin pony.” Roberson chortles and pours himself a fresh shot.