The Ten-Mile Trials (21 page)

‘But that isn't what the kids say,' Julie said. ‘They say Ole told them when they started the cash-under-the-counter deal that he didn't want anybody thinking they were getting cheated. So he opened a special account book, kept it in a drawer and recorded their off-budget hours in it, said they could check it any time. And they all did, they got excited about how much faster the money added up if you kept it all and cheated Uncle Sam out of the taxes. They insist they never found a mistake. They've got this rationale about how kids shouldn't have to pay taxes till they're out of school, and are not at all apologetic about cheating the government. But they're very careful not to get cheated themselves.' She looked at Chris. ‘Great bunch of kids, right?'

‘Absolutely. Can't wait to hear their reasons for not paying taxes after they graduate.'

‘What does Arnie say?'

‘Arnie wasn't working today,' Julie said. ‘Seems to me wherever we are now, that kid is not. We're going to have to bring him in here for questioning, I think.'

‘But that younger Aarsvold kid, Axel,' Chris said, ‘he's a go-getter like his Dad. He ram-rods the kid part of the operation, sees to it they deliver fair value per hours paid. Doesn't want Dad getting cheated either.' He chuckled. ‘Everybody's got this twitch about fairness at the Yard & Garden store. Except they've decided Uncle Sam is a big sponge, so they'll gouge him every chance they get.'

‘OK. But who's lying about the schedule?'

‘I can't tell yet,' Julie said. ‘Dave Knowles is so self-righteous he sounds like he's handing down stone tablets every time he opens his mouth. Never did anything wrong ever, never even thought about it. And brought his sons up to respect his values. Not a blemish on the whole family.'

‘He's pretty cringe-worthy, all right,' Chris said. ‘But we watched his payroll records come right out of his computer. We're getting what the government's getting, I'm convinced of that. But Jake, you know how easy it is to check somebody else's card in and out on the clock. And the older Aarsvold kid looks a little strung out, to me. Could he be into tipping off the burglars in return for his drug supply? Of course he could. But I don't know how we'll prove it unless we turn one of them.'

‘Which we might do,' Julie said. ‘After all, Rosie got Ricky Anderson to narc on his pal Arnie Aarsvold, didn't she? So why don't we see if we can get Arnie to turn in his pal Numbie Knowles? I meant to ask you,' she asked Chris, ‘why do they all call that kid Numbie? Isn't his name Tony?'

Chris gave her a dumfounded look, opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, and finally said, ‘It's short for “Numb Nuts”, Julie. They claim he's no good with the girls.'

‘Oh, for pity's sake!' Julie said, and got up and went to the rest room.

‘Do you ever ask yourself what she's doing here?' Kevin asked Chris.

‘Listen, Julie pulls her weight,' Chris said. ‘She was raised by very conservative parents and she's in no hurry to change, that's all. Doesn't hurt to have somebody around here who's really nice, for a change.'

‘Oh, yeah, so what am I?' Rosie said. ‘Chopped liver?'

Aware that he had made a truly large gaffe, Chris unfurled his genius for the soothing answer. He leaned across his little pot belly, smiled into Rosie's eyes like the fondest of uncles, and said, ‘No, Rosie, you're simply the smartest redhead of them all, aren't you?'

Rosie snorted and said, ‘Yeah, sure.' But she wasn't really upset, she didn't want to be praised for good behavior anyway. She tossed her head another time or two, put the whole thing behind her, and asked him, ‘So what do you think? Are the daddies in on it with the boys?'

I happened to glance at my watch then, and said, ‘Aw, shit, it's five minutes after five.' Everybody looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

Kevin said, ‘Five after five on Thursdays
is
a bad time. I've always hated it myself.'

Speed-dialing Maxine's house and groping for my keys, I yelled, ‘I'm late for my kid! Everybody out!'

Maxine was nice about my being late and helped all she could – she had Ben all wrapped up ready to go, and was waiting by the door when I got there. Ben was pretty decent about the schedule change, too, for the first few miles, just doing a little knuckle-gnawing and whimpering to remind me he was hungry. But he lost patience with me at about the halfway mark, and for the rest of the trip home he told me exactly what he thought of underperforming fathers who strap their offspring into car seats and leave them there to starve.

I believe I have mentioned that I find this distracting. My nerves were so frayed by my son's noisy protests that night, that as soon as Trudy took him out of my hands I muttered something about checking the potatoes, and went out in the yard. Then to make good on my own excuse for fleeing the house, I walked to the end of a row of potatoes, squatted down, and shook my head over the lacy patterns being gnawed into the leaves of several plants. No matter how hard I try, I kept saying to myself, I can't possibly do everything right. After a few minutes, as my pulse rate slowed down, I began to realize I wasn't talking about the potatoes.

‘It's just what he has to do to get what he needs,' Trudy had said, more than once, about Ben's crying. She and I seemed destined never to be on the same page with this baby business. When she was first pregnant I had been over the moon with happiness, while she was worn down with morning sickness and worried about how deep in debt we were. Later, when the chemistry of pregnancy took her over and made her serene, I was bedeviled by worry for her safety and having bad dreams about a wolf. Before she went back to work she was hag-ridden with anxiety about leaving him, but I was certain Maxine would make it work. Now that Trudy was back in the swing of things, she was juggling job and baby like a champ, but I felt oppressed by the new schedule, crazy with worry that I could not do right by everybody and in grinding dread of the miserable trip home every afternoon.

And this case with all the fathers and sons in it was beginning to feel like a boa constrictor that I had been assigned to hold on to until it got around to strangling me. Given how long I'd been in police work, why did this particular crime cluster feel so personal?

Because, goddammit, I thought, it makes it so plain that you can try to do the right thing and still get everything wrong. Care for your son more than anybody else ever has and end up fighting him like an enemy. Want the best for your family so much you lose it all. What kind of a rotten, no-good, shitty deal is that?

A perverse mocking voice in my brain said, ‘Welcome to parenthood, baby – the lifetime deal with no guarantees, the gift that keeps on taking.'

I realized I was holding on to the pasture fence with both hands, shaking one of the posts as hard as I could. My hands were sore when I let go, and my shoulders hurt. I took several long, deep breaths before I turned and walked into the house, where Ben was asleep in his downstairs crib and Trudy was stirring something red in a pan.

‘That smells good,' I said. ‘Spaghetti sauce?'

‘Yes. You up to making a salad?

‘Sure.' I took down two wine glasses, got out the Shiraz bottle, and poured us each a glass.

Trudy said, ‘Thanks,' and took a sip, watching me over the glass. ‘Is this where I'm supposed to ask you if you had a hard day?'

‘No, I had the kind of a day cops have and that's fine with me. Can you tell me why I'm having such a hard time listening to Ben cry?'

‘Ah. He punished you again, huh?'

‘I know it's ridiculous.'

‘No. Here.' She got out lettuce and trimmings. ‘You chop and I'll talk. I think why it's so hard for you' – she stirred her pan again, tasted, and added things – ‘is that you never had a family so you thought when you got one it would make life perfect. Isn't that right?'

‘It
is
perfect,' I said. ‘I've got everything I want.'

‘Except it's driving you bananas. It's hard to leave your kind of a job right on the dot, and then after you break your butt to get over there and pick him up he rewards you by screaming at you all the way home. Some kind of perfect.'

‘It's the same for you. You slave over a hot kettle of DNA all day and come home to a screaming baby and a husband who's half out of his gourd. How come you can take it? Is it your sturdy Swedish heritage?'

She laughed, a big, spontaneous gust of amusement that sounded so good it made my toes curl. ‘My sturdy Swedish heritage? What a crock! I'm Trudy Hanson, remember? Raised by Ella, Our Lady of the Hairspray, dominatrix of many husbands? My sister Bonnie is the mother of the two kids from hell. Surely you haven't forgotten them? Or my Uncle Elmer, who wears women's clothes to family parties? He pretends it's a joke, and we all pretend to think it's funny. Stop and have a sip, we're not on a schedule now.' We stood by the sink, drinking wine a little too fast. She smiled at me and kissed me. ‘I never, ever, at any time in my life I can remember, thought that having my own family would make life perfect.' She took another sip, leaned against the drainboard, and sighed. ‘It's pretty good, though, isn't it? You and me and Ben, in our highly leveraged country place that I love so much.'

‘It's better than good. It's wonderful, and I'll get used to the crying.'

She chuckled, a rich and satisfying sound. ‘I think you just pronounced the epitaph for all human life.'

We had a good savory dinner then, and spent a half-hour in the garden in the last of the long dusk. We were working side by side along two rows, weeding carrots and beets, when Trudy sat back suddenly and said, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I found enough DNA on the knife handle to test.'

‘Good for you,' I said. ‘I guess it must be the dead man's blood. What does that prove?'

‘That somebody stabbed him with his own knife, cleaned it off carefully, and put it back in the holster.'

‘Which means what? That these murderers are crafty, hard-hearted guys? I think I already shrewdly divined that.'

‘You probably did. But if I find a second set of DNA in the mix, you might be able to shrewdly divine which crafty, hard-hearted guy it was.'

‘Unless it was one of the bad-suit guys, who are not in any database.'

‘Until you catch them, sweetheart,' she said. ‘Then they will be.'

‘You're a great little motivator, you know that?' I leaned across the growing vegetables and faster-growing weeds to give her a quick, warm kiss that somehow turned into a longer kiss that began to get downright hot. At one point Trudy said, ‘Well, um, wait now . . .' and I said, ‘I know, but . . .' And in a blurry minute or two we'd left a pile of weeds lying neatly by each row and were upstairs hurriedly wiping off our dusty knees so we wouldn't wreck the bed during R&R. We were both giggly and vague during Ben's ten o'clock bottle, and the weeds, for once, dried up and blew away on their own.

I slept hard all night and woke at dawn in a miserable sweat, trapped in a recurring dream in which Trudy kept saying, ‘Ben's crying because you forgot to keep watching the pawnshop, Jake. It's the only way he's got to tell you that the bad-suit guys got away today, and it's all your fault.'

TEN

E
nough with the guilt, I told myself in the shower. Be logical, as Mr Spock would say. You're the only father your son has got, so make up your mind you're good enough.

‘We gotta bear down on this, my man,' I told Ben as I strapped him into the car seat. ‘Your screaming and my guilt are not a good combination.' He was at the top of his game, waving his fists at the sunshine slanting across his blanket. He crooned a new little babble he was learning how to do, a small vocalization to let me know how much he enjoyed these fact-filled conversations we were having during morning trips.

‘Actually guilt has it uses, though, if you think about it,' I told him as I drove to town. ‘Like reminding me that I'm probably not the only dad in Rutherford who can't stand the thought of being in the wrong.' Ben waved and kicked to congratulate me on that insight.

The message light in my office was already blinking. I debated three full seconds before I walked away from it. You never know what swamp lies steaming at the other end of a phone line, and I had some ideas I wanted to loft before wading into the slough.

Kevin was engaged in a landline conversation that sounded a lot too amusing for a police station. I listened politely for the few seconds it took to be sure the person on the line was female and was not a sworn officer. Then I placed my index finger an inch above the release bar of his phone, held up five fingers on the other hand, and said, ‘Five seconds.' He said, ‘Sweetie, may I call you back?' and hung up scowling at me, saying, ‘What, for Christ's sake?'

‘You still have the Krogstad twins today, right?'

‘And half of next week. Yes. Why is that a burning question?'

‘Any reason we can't put them to watching the pawnshop?'

‘Um . . . I don't think so. What's up?'

‘I've got a feeling. Humor me.' I was pretty sure all the personnel at the pawnshop had recently changed, so I didn't care any more that Gary had once worked the neighborhood. I did worry about the fact that the twins were a little short on experience of surveillance in general – but they were the least essential people in the building, and since they were already scheduled to cycle back to patrol, they had the least interest in the cases we were investigating. I thought I'd ask Kevin to lecture them again about the need to fade into the background, and they could remember that much for one whole day.