Smoke Screen (30 page)

“I know what you mean. You said he was squirrelly. Maybe that’s what we’re picking up on.”

“Maybe.” Suddenly he checked his wristwatch, then, moving quickly, he worked his feet into his sneakers. “This should time out about right. Come on. Hurry. Put your shoes on. Get your cap.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the police station.”

“Anyone who passes this way could spot this car,” Britt said. She was hunkered down in the passenger seat, her hair tucked up underneath the baseball cap.

The central police station sat atop a rise overlooking the Ashley River. Adjacent to the campus, which also housed the DMV, was a Marriott hotel. It was in the parking lot of the hotel that they were parked beneath a row of young live oak trees. From there, they could see the police department employee parking lot.

“I don’t think anyone in that building knows to look for this car,” Raley said.

“Except Pat Wickham.”

“And I’m almost positive he kept the information to himself.”

“You don’t think he called the police after we left?”

He shook his head. “We would have known it. Patrol cars would have been converging on that area in a matter of minutes. Even if we hadn’t seen them, we would have heard sirens. They would have formed a blockade around the vicinity. They probably would have put up a chopper, too.”

“And media would have been racing to the scene.”

“As you would know. No, I’m betting Pat Junior didn’t tell anybody that a fugitive from the law came to visit.”

“So why not?”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Although they were a safe distance from Pat Wickham’s car, which they could single out because they’d seen it in his driveway earlier that day, they had a clear view of it. His shift was almost over. He couldn’t leave without their seeing him. They hoped he wouldn’t notice the gray sedan. Raley doubted Pat Jr. would be looking. The last place anyone would expect to find Britt was within shouting distance of police headquarters.

“He was scared of you today,” she said.

“I wasn’t that scary.”

“He saw the pistol and went pale.”

“Yeah, but it was more than me and the pistol that had him about to pee his pants.”

“He was afraid of what Jay had told me.”

“Or would have told you if he had lived long enough.”

“Why would Jay’s deathbed confession be a threat to Pat Junior?”

“Maybe we’ll have an opportunity to ask him. There he is.”

Raley spotted him as he exited through a rear door. They watched him enter the parking area and weave his way through the rows of cars. To Raley his movements seemed furtive, but he admitted that could be his imagination. The man was nervous by nature.

He didn’t look in their direction as he unlocked his car, tossed his jacket inside, and climbed in. “So far, so good,” Britt said.

Their plan was to follow Pat Jr. and see where he went after hours. Probably he would go straight home, and this would be another dead end. But Raley felt that the man was hiding something; Britt sensed it, too. Following him might provide them with a clue.

Besides, staying cooped up with Britt in the small cabin for hours on end was becoming an uncomfortable test of his endurance. The intimacy of sharing small spaces with her was getting to him. He was constantly aware of her nearness. Each time she moved, he knew it. He woke up every time she stirred in her sleep, even though she was in another bed.

For five years he’d had only fleeting contact with women, never being with one for more than an hour or two, certainly not long enough to start recognizing her habits and anticipating her reactions.

Now he was surrounded by Britt’s femininity. Inundated by it. He was conscious of those little things that were purely female—her vexation over a chipped fingernail, the daintiness with which she sipped from her can of Diet Coke, the meticulous way she tied her shoestrings by making the ends perfectly even. He was captivated by these and a hundred other manifestations of femininity. Furthermore, he was enjoying them.

He found himself watching her when she didn’t know it, in a kind of fascinated trance, his thoughts more often than not veering toward the prurient. He should never have put his hands on her. Because, try as he might, he couldn’t forget how she’d felt, how she’d moved, how she’d wanted him. He couldn’t look at her mouth without remembering kissing it, or her legs without remembering how tightly her thighs had hugged him.

He excused that night on the basis of him being lonely and horny. But he’d been lonely and horny before, and as soon as he said thanks and left a woman’s bed, it was forgotten.

Not this time.

His resolve not to touch her again was as strong as ever, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to enforce. A car was more public than a motel room. So part of this mission was to escape the confines of their compact room before he lost his mind, his temper, or his control. The main goal, however, was to try to discover the source of Pat Jr.’s jitters.

Raley waited until the policeman had driven out of the parking lot before starting the sedan and following. He kept well back and let several cars get between them. But not too many. There was a lot of traffic. There had been a break in the weather; the humidity wasn’t as high as it had been. The pleasant evening had brought people out. Luckily Pat Jr. stayed in one lane and drove the speed limit.

After ten minutes, Britt said, “Not too exciting so far.”

“No, but he’s not going in the direction of home.”

Pat Jr. kept driving, eventually making a large loop around the city before heading into downtown and the historic district, where the streets became narrower and even more congested with motor traffic and death-defying pedestrians, who crossed against lights and often took their chances on the street rather than the crowded sidewalks.

Pat Jr. turned onto a side street off the main drag of King, then in midblock he entered a driveway that ran along the side of a nightspot. Raley and Britt looked at each other but said nothing. They didn’t have to. The club was well known in the city.

Raley drove past the drive, but when he looked down it, he could see the policeman wedging his car between two others. Farther along the street, Raley spotted a car leaving a coveted parallel parking slot. He wheeled into it and cut their lights, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed by Pat Jr.

They weren’t. He had walked along the side of the building toward the entrance of the nightclub but had stopped short of the corner and remained in the sliver of shadow against the exterior wall. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and made a quick call.

Seconds after he clipped his phone back onto his belt, a young man emerged from the door of the club. He walked straight to the corner of the building and turned. Pat Jr. greeted him with a smile. They had a brief exchange, then together walked quickly back to the parking lot. They got into a car—not Pat Jr.’s—and left, pulling out onto the street in front of the club and driving away, unaware that they were being closely observed.

The silence between Raley and Britt was thick with all the implications of what they’d seen. Eventually he said, “I think I knew. In the back of my mind. From the time I knew who he was. That’s why I was surprised when George told me he was married. And then today, he didn’t look at you.”

Sensing her misapprehension, he turned toward her. “He didn’t
look
at you.” He looked down at her chest before meeting her gaze to make sure she’d got his point. She had. She lowered her head with apparent embarrassment.

Raley said, “Lewis Jones looked. Delno looked.” I’ve
looked plenty.
“Pat Junior didn’t. That should have tipped me off.”

“He’s leading a secret life.”

“The wife and kids are for show.”

“It must be misery.” She pulled off the baseball cap and shook her hair loose. “I feel just awful, spying. Let’s go.”

“We can’t.”

“Sure we can.”

“No. We can’t.
Dammit!”
He rubbed his eye sockets, feeling as awful as Britt about what they were doing, feeling even worse about what he knew they had to do. “We can’t go, Britt. Because I just figured out that the whole thing started with this poor bastard.”

P
AT
J
R. DIDN’T SEE
R
ALEY UNTIL HE GOT BEHIND THE STEERING
wheel of his car and Raley splayed his wide hand upon the younger man’s chest. He cried out in fright.

“I’m not going to hurt you. But we’re going to talk, and every word out of your mouth had better be the truth. Understand?” Raley’s voice, while soft and calm, was also steely. Britt imagined the other man sensed his resolve. She could practically smell Pat Jr.’s fear as he wobbled his head in agreement.

“H-how did you know I was here?”

“Do you have your service weapon?” Raley asked.

He shook his head no, then nodded yes. “In…in the glove box. Were you following me?”

Raley opened the glove box to verify that the pistol was there, then closed the door of the compartment without touching it. “That’s not too smart of you, Pat, leaving your police-issue gun where anybody could break into your car and get it.”

“Why are you following me? What do you want?” By now, having realized that Britt was in the backseat, he addressed the question to her reflection in the rearview mirror.

“As Raley says, we want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About your face,” Raley said.

“My face?”

“What happened to it?”

“It…I…I used to do a lot of cycling. I ran into a tree on my bike. Injured myself so bad, I gave up the sport.”

Raley didn’t move, not even his eyes. He continued to hold Pat Jr. with his resolute stare. The man turned his head and looked hopefully toward Britt. She slowly shook her head. “That’s the story you told, but that’s not what happened, is it, Pat?”

He swallowed, visibly and audibly.

“Tell us about Cleveland Jones.”

Pat Jr. let go of the small measure of courage he’d been clinging to. His misshapen face contorted with his effort not to cry. His marred lower lip began to tremble.

Britt could hardly bear to watch his meltdown. Raley had shared with her his theory on Pat Jr.’s involvement, how the whole sordid mess began with him. It wasn’t a pretty story, and what they were doing to him now was as cruel as holding a mirror up to his disfigured face. But it was also necessary. Raley had cautioned her not to let her compassion for the man’s plight soften her determination to wring the truth from him.

“He’s pathetic, yes. But he might also be the key that will open up everything,” he’d said. “We’ve got to get from him as much as he knows, and it probably won’t be easy. It for sure as hell won’t be pleasant.”

“I don’t look forward to it.”

“Neither do I,” Raley had said.

Now, no doubt feeling as rotten as she did about this ambush, Raley said, “Along with all his other crimes, Cleveland Jones was into gay bashing.”

Pat Jr. nodded.

“And you were one of his victims.”

Another nod. A sniff. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “He and two others.”

“Where?”

“Hampton Park.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“I…I’d…gone to the park. Actually, I was riding my bike. But I was…I stopped at the men’s room.”

“You and another guy had sex in the restroom,” Raley said. “Was this a date, like the guy tonight?”

“No. I went in. He was there. Older guy. We…” He shrugged self-consciously. “After, I left ahead of him. When I came out of the restroom, they were there. Three of them. They jumped me. Jones—”

“Did you know him?” Britt asked. “Had he done this to you before?”

“No. But I knew the type. I’d been warned, you know, by guys I hooked up with. Charleston is a fairly gay-friendly city now, but this was five years ago and there had been several recent attacks. More than the standard name-calling. Brutal, physical attacks. A bunch of local skinhead types had decided we weren’t fit to live,” he said bitterly.

“But you went out cruising anyway. In a public park, for godsake.” Raley sounded angry over the other man’s carelessness.

“I didn’t have a choice!” Pat Jr.’s ragged cry reverberated in the car. For a moment nobody said anything, then he repeated, “I didn’t have a choice. I hadn’t come out. My dad was a cop. He’d worked vice. He’d arrested guys like me who met in public restrooms, parking lots, whatever.

“At the dinner table, he and George McGowan would laugh about the homos they’d caught blowing each other. I laughed with them, knowing that’s what was expected.”

Watching him in the rearview mirror, Britt could see tears forming in his eyes.

“Then one day Dad caught me and one of my friends in my bedroom. I think he had suspected, but when the truth was right there…” He paused, shuddered. “He went berserk. He actually drew his pistol. I think he might have killed us if Mom hadn’t stopped him.”

Britt could only imagine this scene and the chasm it must have created between father and son, between husband and wife. The whole dynamic of the family would have changed after that. Gently she prodded him to continue. “Cleveland Jones and two others attacked you.”

He stirred, drew a breath, expelled it slowly. “I never got a good look at the other two. But Jones swung a baseball bat at my shin and broke the bone. Once I was down, he and the others kicked me. One got my nose with the toe of his boot. Pulverized it. I couldn’t breathe out of it for months.

“Before I passed out, Jones grabbed me by the hair and forced me to look up at him. He was grinning. ‘Suck this,’ he said, then used the end of the bat like a pile driver on my mouth.” He looked at Raley, then at Britt and, almost apologetically, added, “The surgeons put everything back as well as they could.”

“The man with you in the restroom, what happened to him?”

“While they were working me over, he ran away. I’d never seen him before, never saw him again. I lay there for almost an hour, but it seemed like ten. Some kids doing dope happened on me. They called 911, then split, too.

“The ambulance took me to the hospital. My folks were notified. I was barely conscious, about to go into surgery, but Dad leaned over me and said, ‘I told you it was dangerous to ride your bike at night.’ That was his way of clueing me in to the lie we’d tell. I’d had a biking accident.”

Another car pulled into the parking lot, sweeping its headlights across them. Two well-dressed young men got out and walked along the alley toward the entrance of the club. “Nice place?” Raley asked.

Pat Jr., surprised by the question, replied, “I hear it is. I’ve never been inside. I’m still not out. Officially.”

Raley picked up the story. “Pat Senior covered your beating with a lie, but privately he wanted to catch the guys who’d done it.”

“Right,” Pat Jr. said. “I guess he still loved me. I was gay, but I was his son. Maybe it was more of an honor issue with him than love. Anyway, when they’d reduced the dosage of painkillers so I could think straight, Dad brought several books of mug shots to my hospital room. He promised they were going to get the guys who’d done this to me and make them sorry.”

“‘They’?”

“Dad, George McGowan, and Jay Burgess.”

“He admitted to his best friends and fellow detectives that you were gay?”

“I suppose. He must have. George McGowan has barely spoken to me since. His contempt is plain. Jay never paid much attention to me one way or the other. I was beneath his notice even before this happened. I saw through him, and I think he knew it. Anyhow, Dad enlisted him and George to help flush out my attackers. I could only identify Jones, and did so as soon as I saw his most recent mug shot.”

“How long before they found him?” Raley asked.

“Couple of days. Dad called my hospital room and told me they had him in custody. He said Jones had copped an attitude, denied the attack, said he wouldn’t go out of his way to bust a queer, but Dad was certain they’d get a confession out of him by the end of the day, and that, if they didn’t, he’d get Cobb Fordyce to throw the book at this little Nazi. His exact words.”

“What day was that?” Britt asked.

He looked at them in turn, then reluctantly said, “The day of the fire.”

Raley leaned toward him, and Britt was struck by the difference between the two men. Raley’s superior size and physicality would cause Pat Jr. to feel threatened even if that weren’t Raley’s intention. The younger man recoiled, leaning as far away from Raley as he could.

“Did they get a confession out of Jones?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your dad mention that Jones had two skull fractures when they arrested him?”

“No.”

“Did he call you with progress reports?”

“No. I didn’t hear from him again. Just that once when he told me they would be interrogating Cleveland Jones until he cracked.”

“What happened while they were interrogating him?”

“Nothing!” Then he repeated it with a firm shake of his head.

“But you suspect—”

“I don’t suspect anything.”

“That’s bullshit, Pat,” Raley said, with heat.

“I was in the hospital for weeks. I was on painkillers. Groggy. My recollections of the fire aren’t even clear, so how would I know what took place before it started?”

“You don’t want to know.” Raley’s accusation struck hard. The other man lowered his head to avoid Raley’s piercing gaze. “You don’t want to know, because then you’d have to acknowledge that seven people died because you got blown in a public men’s room.”

“Raley.” Britt’s softly spoken chastisement went unheard because of Pat Jr.’s harsh sob. His shoulders shook. The raw, choppy sounds of his weeping were heart-wrenching.

“You’re right. I didn’t want to know,” he said miserably. “I heard that guy didn’t die because of the fire, but I never asked Dad about it. I can’t tell you any more because I don’t know any more. If they knew I’d told you this much, they’d kill me.”

Raley pounced on that. “Who? George McGowan? Was he there when your dad interrogated Cleveland Jones? He and Jay Burgess?”

“I don’t know,” Pat Jr. sobbed.

“Fordyce was there, too, wasn’t he, Pat? He’d come over to the police station to throw the book at Jones if he didn’t confess. Wasn’t that the plan?”

“I told you, I don’t know. I
swear
!”

Raley eased up and sat back against the passenger-side door, staring hard at the other man but giving him a moment to collect himself. When the crying had subsided into an occasional sniffle, Britt asked, “Why did you get married, Pat?”

Raley answered for him. “For the same reason he became a cop. It’s part of his cover.”

Pat Jr. looked over at Raley, obviously impressed that he had guessed so accurately. “I made a pact with Dad.”

“After the fire?” Raley asked.

He nodded. “He made me swear that nobody would ever know about the incident in the park. My attacker was dead, and he was nobody’s loss. It was over, he said. But it could never happen again.

“He told me to enroll in the police academy. He and his friends would make certain I got a spot. He told me to get married and have kids. He told me I had to stop…stop being a fag.” He gave a caustic laugh. “As if being gay was something I could reverse or turn off.”

“Why did you agree to this pact?”

“I owed him, didn’t I? Even though I had disgraced him, he and his friends had come to my defense. So whatever Dad said to do, I did. It would have been selfish of me not to.”

“It was selfish to deceive a woman into marrying you,” Britt said.

He looked back at her and nodded forlornly. “She was a girl from my mom’s church. Brought up very strict. She was younger than me, and innocent. She didn’t know exactly what to expect from a husband, so I wasn’t a disappointment to her.”

“The children?”

“I can do it when I have to.”

“She doesn’t know?”

He shook his head, looking at her imploringly. “She can’t find out, either. I can’t do that to her.” Then to Raley, he said, “Please. She’s great. Truly. I don’t want to hurt her.”

Britt felt that the lie he was living was more hurtful to his family than the truth would have been, but that was a conversation for another time.

Raley said, “You told us earlier today that Pat Senior didn’t enjoy being a hero.”

“He didn’t. That fire ruined his life,” Pat Jr. said with vehemence, showing more mettle than he had up to that point.

“How do you mean?” Britt asked.

“Just that. He was never the same after, and it was more than what happened to me in the park that changed him. He didn’t like all the attention heaped on him. The commendations, the praise, the spotlight. Burgess and McGowan got off on all that. Fordyce used it to get himself elected AG, but Dad just wanted it all to go away. It didn’t. Things really got bad after—”

He stopped and looked nervously at Raley, who asked, “After what?”

“After the business with you and that girl.”

“What do you know about that?” Britt asked.

“Only what everybody else knows. What the newspapers said, what you reported on TV.”

“Did your dad talk about the Suzi Monroe case?” Raley asked.

“Not in my hearing, but I knew he was investigating it. That was the last big case assigned to him. After that, he became depressed. More so every day. Drank a lot, alone, late into the night. Most mornings I think he woke up still drunk. He started missing work. Nothing Mom said seemed to get through to him.”

“Did she know about you, Jones, the park?”

Pat Jr. shook his head. “She believed the bicycle story because that’s what Dad told her. But I think she always suspected there was more to it. I guess she wanted to think I’d been
cured
after being caught in bed with my friend. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

There had been a lot of denial going on in the Wickham household. Britt thought that was a terrible way to run a family.

“Okay, go on,” Raley told him.

“Well, Mom could see that Dad was getting more depressed by the day. She begged him to get counseling, but he refused, said he could work it out by himself, but he never said exactly what ‘it’ was.

“George and Jay tried to boost him. Took him fishing. Stuff like that. But nothing they said or did helped. He sank lower and lower. One night I woke up to a strange sound. I found him sitting out on the back porch, crying his heart out. I’d never known him to cry before. Never. But I’ll never forget the awful sound of it. I crept back to bed. He never knew I had witnessed that.” He paused to wipe his nose again. “The very next night, George and Jay showed up at our door to tell Mom that he’d been fatally shot.”