The Judgment (21 page)

“Seems like a good idea,” I said, “if you’ve really got something to say.”

“Let’s talk.” Emphatic.

“All right. My afternoon’s pretty empty.”

He considered that for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve still got somebody else to check with, some things to get straight.”

“You know best.”

“What about tonight? We could meet someplace.”

Under ordinary circumstances, I could have rearranged with Sue. Not tonight. “I’m afraid that’s out,” I said.

“Tomorrow then, early.”

“Suits me.”

“What about out at your place, you know, where you live?”

I thought about it. What was he afraid of? “Let’s do it in my office,” I said. “That’s where I like to conduct business.”

“Okay, but no wires, and I don’t want your secretary listening in.”

“Be here at eight o’clock. She doesn’t come in until nine.”

Pause. “Okay. Eight o’clock then.”

“I never use a tape recorder. Don’t even own one.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

The remainder of the day held a few more surprises.

Clare Kelman came in at eleven-thirty sharp wearing sunglasses. She didn’t remove them. I asked her if she wanted to file her divorce papers, and she said she certainly did. We went into my office, and as Mrs. Fenton was putting them together and stapling them, I tried to make some small talk. Mrs. Kelman wasn’t having any. Once they were laid out on my desk for her to sign, I understood a little better. She was forced to exchange her sunglasses for a pair of bifocals, and I saw that her left eye was bruised and swollen nearly shut. She signed quickly and replaced the sunglasses without comment. Physical
abuse was not mentioned in the divorce suit. It didn’t have to be. The State of Michigan has no-fault divorce and a fifty-fifty division of property.

“Will these be filed today?” she asked.

“I’ll bring them over to the courthouse right after lunch.”

“Good.”

She turned and started to leave.

“Mrs. Kelman? I take it Jerry’s moved out?”

“No, I have.”

“I can get him out of there, if you want me to. All I have to do is file a separate motion with the court.”

“I’m enjoying being away from the house. Too many bad memories there,” she said, “ten years of them. He’ll have to sell it soon enough anyway, won’t he?”

“It looks like it. Tell me something, though. What made you put off filing earlier?”

“Oh, the usual. He promised it would never happen again, but it did.”

“Okay, Mrs. Kelman. See you in court. I’ll let you know the date. Give Mrs. Fenton your new address and phone number.”

So I was wrong. She didn’t need a marriage counselor, after all. She needed a lawyer.

I went over to Benny’s Diner, just managing to beat the noon crowd by a few minutes. As I gobbled a cheeseburger, I read quickly through the pertinent parts of the two Detroit papers, relieved to find nothing in them on Mark Conroy. The Port Huron paper could wait. I had to have something to help me pass the rest of the afternoon. When I finished there, I kept my word and delivered the Kelman filing to the Kerry County clerk’s office in the basement of the courthouse. Gladys Monk, the lady in charge, said we’d know about our court date in a week’s time, or not much longer, but that they were already running well into next year. Too bad about that. Clare Kelman would have to remain married a little longer than she might like.

Back at my office, I spent a good part of the afternoon working on the Higginses’ insurance claim. The way I read their policy, there was five thousand dollars coming to them on their son’s death. I drafted a letter to that effect for Frank to sign, as well as a cover letter from me as their attorney to give support to their claim. Then I spent some time staring out at the St. Clair River, counting the ore boats and freighters and thinking about the Conroy matter. The Victim Report could wait.

About four o’clock the office phones went dead.

Or who knows when it was exactly? There had been no calls for over an hour before that, which was fairly unusual, but it wasn’t until four, when Mrs. Fenton tried to phone out in order to let Frank and Betty Higgins know the insurance letter was coming, that she found the line dead. No dial tone, no white noise to let us know we were still plugged into the local exchange, nothing at all. Strange.

Mrs. Fenton asked me to try my phone. Same thing. The trouble was out there someplace.

“No wind, no thunderstorm, no lines down,” I said.

“I wonder what’s wrong.”

“Why don’t you go over to that insurance office downstairs and see if they’ve got the same problem?”

I looked out the big window, down on the street, and saw a Michigan Bell van parked nearby, which was more or less reassuring. Right on the job.

When Mrs. Fenton returned, she was waving her hands dramatically, slamming the door behind her.

“It’s a madhouse in there,” she said.

“The insurance office?” Whenever I peered inside, they all looked like mummies at their desks—no visible movement at all.

“There’s a crew from Michigan Bell just tearing the place apart. They say there was an irregular outage all through this grid area, something to do with the snow last night. Can you imagine? They’re not quite sure why, so
they say all this is partly diagnostic. Such a noisy bunch, really. They’ve just taken over downstairs.”

Irregular outage? Grid area? Diagnostic? I could tell she’d picked up a few new words. They didn’t quite fit well in her vocabulary yet, but she used then gamely.

“Well, maybe I’d better—”

I never got a chance to finish that sentence. I was interrupted by three hard knocks on the door. Before Mrs. Fenton could fly over to get it, it popped open, and in walked a big Michigan Bell hardhat, complete with tool belt and a dangling receiver.

“You folks having trouble with your telephones?” Then he spotted Mrs. Fenton. “Oh, yeah, you were downstairs, right? Said yours had gone out completely. How many lines you get in here?”

“Just one.”

“Frank! Joe! Come on in here. This one’s out, too.”

Frank and Joe tramped in, one of them carrying a length of telephone wire and the other a box of equipment.

“How many telephones?”

“Two,” said Mrs. Fenton, growing more flustered with each question. “The other one’s in Mr. Sloan’s office.”

He gave me a glance, no more, and a quick shrug. “Joe, go in there and try it.”

Joe went into my office, while the nameless boss went over to the phone on Mrs. Fenton’s desk, picked it up, and listened for a moment.

“You get anything, Joe?” he shouted.

“Not a damned thing,” Joe shouted back.

“Better take it apart.” He turned to Frank. “Toss the wire out, okay?”

Frank went over to the window and began tugging away.

“Lady, how does this open, anyway?”

“Not
that
way. Here, let me show you.” She bustled over to demonstrate how it was done.

“Al! Al!” It was Frank yelling down at another member of the crew through the open window. “Here, catch this.”

He threw a length of telephone wire out the window.

“Joe, how ya doin’ in there?”

“I don’t know. Can’t tell yet.”

These guys were driving me crazy. I turned to the guy in charge. “Look, how long is this going to take?”

“No idea, mister.” He was attaching the other end of the line Frank had brought over to Mrs. Fenton’s receiver. “See, this is the diagnostic part. We still don’t have a good fix on what really went wrong. Can you beat that? But we’re putting them back on line. Just takes a while is all.”

I grabbed my topcoat and asked Mrs. Fenton to hold the fort and lock up when she left. She seemed none too pleased about it, but she nodded and let me go without an argument. Occasions like this defined the distance between employee and employer.

I practically ran out of there and down the stairs. I caught a glimpse of Al running the line he’d caught back to the Michigan Bell van. Then I jumped into my car and drove to the library. I decided I could look up that material on Delbert Evans as well as Mrs. Fenton could. Maybe the Evans family was crazier than they seemed.

The reference librarian was helpful. She knew the year and was’ pretty certain of the season, if not the month. The Port Huron paper was on microfilm. A careful scanning brought me to the facts of the case. They were more or less as Mrs. Fenton had summarized them.

Annie Louise Evans, age seven, had been absent for over a week from school when the truant officer went to the Evans home to make inquiries. He was told abruptly by Delbert Evans that she had died from “a cold.” Thinking this highly unlikely and quite irregular, he reported it to the Kerry County Police. Evans was visited by an officer, none other than Dominic Benda, who asked to see the death certificate. When it turned out that no doctor had been in attendance either before or after the girl’s death and that she was buried in the backyard, Benda did the sensible thing and brought Delbert Evans in for questioning.

The story ran off and on for more than a month. The body was exhumed. The autopsy, which was held in Port Huron, proved the cause of death was pneumonia. There was a good deal of public indignation expressed. But Delbert Evans simply insisted he knew how to take care of his own. He was sorry Annie Louise died, but those things happened. They had done what they could for her. What Mrs. Evans had to say on the matter was never mentioned. It rated an editorial in the
Times-Herald
on criminal child neglect, and in the end that was the charge against Mr. and Mrs. Evans, both of them. They were brought to trial a month later and represented by a Hub City lawyer named Krantz, whom I’d never met. Delbert Evans must have shown more regret in court than he’d shown earlier, and Mrs. Evans was said to have cried copious tears. In any case, though they were found guilty, they were put on probation for two years and placed under the supervision of a social worker. The fact that they had a son, Samuel, played a part both in the granting of probation and in the decision to have a social worker keep close tabs on them.

It was an ugly story, something that might have been common a hundred years ago but today seemed primitive, if not downright eerie. Could it have anything to do with those little bodies in the snow? If anything, old man Evans had shown nothing but indifference throughout all three tragedies, and Mrs. Evans seemed nothing more than a cipher and a sidekick to her appalling husband. But could he have washed their clothing and groomed them? Would she have done it for him? Certainly they appeared to have known how to clothe and bury their own dead daughter right in their backyard, didn’t they?

I spun the microfilm back to the first report on Annie Louise Evans’s burial, noting the newspaper’s date and calculating the probable date of her death. What I came up with was more or less the same month and date that Lee Higgins, the first victim, was found a few days ago.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, but if it was, it was still unnerving. There was no question that Delbert Evans
was a loose cannon on the deck, capable of unleashing tremendous rage, an unstable man furious at the world. Maybe he wouldn’t give a good goddamn about bathing and grooming the little children and then wrapping them in plastic, but surely Mrs. Evans was his accomplice in all things and would do whatever he ordered her to do.

I wondered if Bud Billings had noticed the coincidence and if it had been he who questioned Evans about his daughter’s death and had worked the case from first to last. I wondered if maybe he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Maybe Bud and I should have a talk.

Like a lot of men, I don’t buy roses often, probably not often enough, so when I showed up at Sue’s door, freshly, showered and shaved, and thrust the bouquet at her, she seemed quite overcome.

She made a big production of it, leading me into her kitchen, selecting the right-sized vase, filling it, cutting the bottoms of the stems, instructing me as she went in what ought to be done and why.

“Now,” she said, “where’ll we put them?”

She led me into her living room, or actually the part of it that served as a dining area. The dozen roses in their vase were a little too big for the small dining room table, since we had to eat on it, too, so she chose a place on her bookcase.

“They’ll get some light here,” she said, “and open up all the way.” Then she threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug, burying her head in my chest. “Oh, Charley, thanks. They’re just what I needed.”

Supplied with my usual Diet Coke, I stood in the kitchen doorway and talked about some of the events of the day. Some of them: I steered clear of my session with Judge Brown and my encounter with Delbert Evans at Kerry County Police Headquarters. I’d let her bring up the Evans business when and if she wanted to.

For somebody named Gillis, Sue makes pretty good spaghetti.
As she stirred the sauce and dropped the pasta into boiling water, I got around to telling her how our phones had gone dead and how the crew from Michigan Bell tore things apart. Keeping things light, I made a real routine of it. In my drinking days, I was known as a pretty good barroom storyteller, and I thought I was doing a good job of it this time, mimicking Joe and Frank and the boss, throwing my arms around to demonstrate the chaos they created. But I noticed about halfway through that she got a kind of funny look on her face. She was frowning but curious, nodding for me to continue. I ended the story kind of lamely, put off my pace by her response. She said nothing, just busied herself with her cooking, dipping a fork into the boiling water to pull up a ribbon of spaghetti to give it the chew test.

Then she threw me another puzzled look. “You say the phones just went out all of a sudden?”

“We didn’t notice until around four, but Mrs. Fenton pointed out that we hadn’t gotten any calls for at least an hour.”

“And these guys were right on the spot to fix it?”

“That’s right.”

“And they couldn’t tell you what had gone wrong?”

“No, the guy in charge kept saying all this activity was ‘diagnostic’”