The Bubble Gum Thief (36 page)

“Did you like Noel Draker?” Dagny asked.

“I don’t like or dislike anyone, really. It’s an impediment to my job. But I suppose I had a certain fondness for him. I often wonder whether things would have worked out differently if he had listened to a bit of advice I gave him at our first meeting.

“It was at one of his early charity events, a black-tie affair right here, at this hotel, in the Hall of Mirrors—the nicest room in the city. Everyone who was anyone was here—the blue-chip suits from Fourth Street and a lot of the politicians—judges, councilmen, commissioners, congressmen. I was chatting with Draker at the bar. It was rather endearing really, he simply didn’t have a clue how things worked. It was all well and good to throw charitable functions, but no one in that room really cared about the Children’s Defense League or building a new wing at The Christ
Hospital. I pointed out the politicians and told him, ‘That’s where you need to start sending your money.’ But Draker was a stubborn man. He found these people so odious, so distasteful, that for all the money he gave away, not a cent went to anyone that really mattered.”

“Anyone ever love him?”

“There was often a beautiful woman on his arm. It was never the same woman twice. I don’t think he was ever in love. Yet he always seemed like he was nursing a broken heart.”

“Who really knew him? His software developers?”

“His programmers loved him, but they didn’t know him. And that love faded once he pled guilty. Percy Reynolds liked him. Probably knew him as well as anyone. But when they found that memo, it must have broken Percy’s heart. He had actually believed his client. I think that’s why he gave up law and moved away.”

“Draker’s defense attorney?” Dagny had seen his name in the pleadings and newspaper articles about the case.

“He was the city’s best trial attorney, one of the few in town with a national reputation. Bit of an iconoclast. Highest-paid attorney at Dresser and Edmunds, the top firm in the city. Quit the firm the day after Draker was sentenced. Disillusioned, I suppose. He’d put his credibility on the line for Draker. The whole thing made Reynolds nearly as hated as his client. Poor guy had to leave town.”

“Where’d he go?”

“New Mexico, I heard. Truth or Consequences.”

April 26—Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

Under better circumstances, Dagny might have followed the sign to Trinity Crater, the hole in the ground created by the first nuclear bomb test in 1945. Instead, she kept driving south on I-25, past Polvadera and Socorro and a dozen other little towns full of busted barns and burned-out churches. New Mexico was beautiful and brown and broad and bare. A cool, dry desert breeze blew through the window, so clean and fresh and rich that one breath did the work of two.

The Professor had stayed in Cincinnati to follow other leads, so Dagny was traveling alone. Fumbling with the XM radio, Dagny settled on CNN and its nonstop coverage of Noel Draker, aka the Bubble Gum Thief, hoping she might learn something new, and relieved when she didn’t. When a talking head mentioned her by name and referenced “her lover, Michael Brodsky,” she changed the station.

Her lover.
It sounded so illicit. But what then? “Boyfriend” sounded like an infatuation. “Partner” sounded like a business arrangement. There wasn’t a word to accurately describe what Michael Brodsky had meant to her, just as there wasn’t a word to describe the pain she felt hearing his name.

Percy Reynolds lived in the bulbous hills between downtown Truth or Consequences and Elephant Butte Lake, a forty-mile-long reservoir created by a concrete dam on the Rio Grande. It wasn’t exactly lush, but it was green, and there weren’t any tumbleweeds blowing around. It seemed like as good a place as any to run away to.

Dagny pulled into the driveway, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. A barefoot man wearing red boxer shorts and a stained white undershirt answered. He was tall and thin and had long white scraggly hair, down to his shoulders. It had probably been a week since his last shower.

“Percy Reynolds?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He had a deep, authoritative voice, the kind God must have.

She showed him her creds.

“Figured.” He reached under his shirt and scratched his belly. “Well, c’mon in.”

Reynolds led her across a tile floor into the living room, where Dagny took a seat on the couch. “Drink?”

“Water.”

While Reynolds went off to the kitchen, Dagny surveyed the room. There were seven empty pizza boxes piled on the floor; eight wineglasses held remnants of red wine in the small cavities just above their stems. Crumpled paper towels and napkins had been tossed about. The house smelled a lot like a Blues Traveler concert Dagny had attended in 1995. “I guess you had a party?” Dagny asked when he returned.

“No,” he said, handing Dagny a glass of water.

“Do you mind if we start?”

“I told you on the phone that this would be a waste of time, Agent Gray.”

“Yeah, well, I thought I’d give it the old college try, since lives are in danger, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Two hundred and fifty-six people on May first. Sixty-some thousand on May fifteenth.”

“I’ve seen the reports, yes.”

“And you know that Noel Draker is believed to be responsible for the crimes in question.”

“I am bound by the attorney-client privilege. Anything that I know about Mr. Draker is protected by that privilege.”

“There are limits to the privilege, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Please, call me Percy. A lawyer can and should reveal confidences when they reflect their client’s intention to commit a future crime. Mr. Draker never said anything to me that would indicate an intention to commit a future crime.”

“I’m a lawyer, too, Mr. Reynolds. And I believe that there are moral rules that supersede our profession’s self-selected ethical canon.”

Reynolds smiled. “If you wish to lambaste our profession, Agent Gray, then you’ve chosen the path to my heart. But this is the one time our profession got it right. If you take away the attorney-client privilege, no man will be free to speak with his lawyer, and if that happens, then no man can be fairly represented in court. And while I detest what my profession has become, I believe people should be fully and fairly represented in courts. A layman doesn’t stand a chance alone. Hell, even with a lawyer, he’s up a creek.”

There had to be some way to break through. “Your client kidnapped me, Mr. Reynolds. He shot me with a tranquilizer and kept me in a basement.”

“And he murdered your boyfriend, from what I hear. I understand your position, Agent Gray. You are a victim, quite possibly of my client. There are good reasons why we don’t let victims determine the ethical rules of representation. I feel awful for your loss. I feel awful for what happened to you. But I don’t feel responsible.”

“He raped a girl.”

“I doubt that.”

“We’ve kept it out of the news for the girl’s sake. She’s nineteen—a college student. Frank Ryder’s girl. You remember him. Your client shoved his calling card up Ryder’s daughter’s bloody vagina, Mr. Reynolds.” She paused to let him think about this. “That’s the man you’re protecting with your ethical canons.”

For a second or two, it looked as if Reynolds might break, but then he stiffened. “I’m sorry, but my principles are all I have.”

If asking about Draker directly wasn’t going to work, maybe she could take a different tack. “Why did you leave Dresser and Edmunds? You were the top trial attorney in the city. And you weren’t so old that you had to retire.”

“Why did you quit the law, Agent Gray?”

“It wasn’t what I had hoped it would be,” Dagny replied.

“It wasn’t what I hoped it would be,” he repeated. “Well, I guess I felt the same way.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “The more trouble the person is in, the more help they need. That’s the nature of the profession. When you take a client, it’s your duty to serve him to the best of your abilities. When I took Draker’s case, the firm didn’t care about anything except the money that came in the door. But then the Draker story got too big and the public got too angry. In the letters to the paper, people called me a ‘hired gun,’ a ‘pariah,’ a ‘devil.’ But around the office, it was worse. I’d overhear it in the hallways, in the bathroom stalls. There wasn’t a trial lawyer at Dresser and Edmunds who would have amounted to a hill of beans if I hadn’t been there to teach them.” His voice was rising, as if he were giving an anguished closing argument. “All the bankers and businessmen they represented were appalled and outraged that I represented Draker. Never mind that my partners
never would have had those clients if it weren’t for me!” Reynolds paused, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I got a little carried away.”

“No, Mr. Reynolds. Please continue.”

His tone softened. “Dresser was a dying firm when I joined. I brought it back to life. My first big trial was a doctor who had been arrested for killing his wife. The doctor was a pillar of society, well respected in the community, so it was a big case. And I won it. And I won the next trial, and the one after that. The line of people wanting to hire the firm stretched out the door. In four years, we grew from forty lawyers to seventy-five. I didn’t ask for credit. I didn’t ask to be managing partner. I didn’t even ask for a corner office. I asked only that I be allowed to try my cases.”

“When Draker came around...”

“By then, the firm was on top. They didn’t need the publicity. They didn’t
want
the publicity. You know, Draker went bankrupt paying off the creditors, so the last few months, I worked his case for free. Everyone at the firm was outraged. ‘Do you know how much you’re costing the firm?’ they’d ask. No one asked how much I’d made the firm over all those years. So I quit.”

“Why did you move all the way out here?”

“I was married once, to a wonderful lady who moved out while I was asleep. She left a note behind that said ‘I love you, but we both know that you’re better off alone.’ This is a good place to be alone. And I always liked the name of the town. You can have your truth, or you can have your consequences. That’s kinda the way life is.”

“Have you found the truth?”

“The more important question, Agent Gray, is whether you have.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Well, then I guess you’re going to have to keep looking.”

“Even though the consequences are so huge, Mr. Reynolds?”

“The consequences are always huge, Agent Gray.”

“I wish you didn’t speak in riddles.”

“What can I say? I’m still a lawyer.” Reynolds scratched his head through the long white hair that didn’t make him look like much of a lawyer at all. “When Noel Draker dies, I hope you keeping looking for the truth, Agent Gray.”

“When and
if
Noel Draker dies, it will be too late for the truth.”

“It’s never too late for the truth, even if you’ve already suffered the consequences.”

There was nothing more to be gained from the conversation. Dagny told him she was ready to leave, and he walked her to door.

As she headed to her car, Reynolds called out, “Good luck, Dagny Gray. I hope you save lots of lives. And find that baseball, too.”

The baseball again. She turned around. “Find the baseball?”

“Waxton’s ball.”

She fixed her gaze on him. “I should find Waxton’s ball?”

“If you can,” Reynolds said.

“You’ve talked to Draker?”

“I can’t answer that. Any conversations I’ve had with him are privileged.”

“Draker told me to find that ball, too. You’ve talked with him! Recently!”

Reynolds shrugged. “Privileged. Sorry.”

“If I had a board and some water—”

“Hypothetically, if I talked to him, we didn’t talk about any future crimes, so again, it’s privileged. And hypothetically, if I talked to him, it was so that I could urge him to stop. Beg him, really.”

“And hypothetically, I assume, he said no.”

“Hypothetically, he did. Hypothetically, it left me despondent. As maybe you can see, I’ve been on a bit more of a bender than usual. He’s not a bad man, Dagny. He’s just a broken one.”

“Not broken enough for my tastes.”

“Ten years, for a man like that, with murderers and gangbangers—”

“Not broken enough—”

“A learned man, scraping for survival—”

“It doesn’t justify—”

“Trapped with a bunch of savages who called him Reed, because he was the only one who could read above a fifth-grade level. An educated man, locked in a place empty of knowledge. Indifferent guards—”

But she wasn’t listening to him anymore. “You know what no one did to the man? No one killed him.”

Reynolds nodded. “You’re right.”

“And you had the man here, at your house, and you didn’t stop him. And you won’t give me the slightest help.”

“There’s nothing about any of this that isn’t tragic.”

“And if I subpoena your phone records? Talk to your neighbors?”

“It wouldn’t help. I wish it would. But you’d just be wasting your time.”

Reynolds turned around and disappeared into the house. Dagny climbed behind the wheel of her car and put the key in the ignition. Every step of the investigation had led to another, but now she didn’t know where to go. To Nashville, to find out more about the children? To Bethel again, now that she knew Draker was born there? Things seemed easier with Victor or the Professor at her side.