Very Bad Men (47 page)

By Monday evening the news of Lark's death had faded into insignificance. Because on Monday afternoon Senator John Casterbridge held a press conference to announce that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

 

 

I WATCHED IT ON CNN. The senator had his son and Callie with him. He had doctors from the University of Michigan Hospital on hand to answer questions. He stood at a podium in an auditorium on campus and read a statement thanking his constituents for their support over the years. He talked about the things they had accomplished together, and the bright future he saw for the state. He assured them he felt fine, the disease was still in its early stages. So far, his symptoms were mild—small problems with his memory, nothing more.

It wasn't hard to believe. He handled himself well, spoke smoothly. I knew he was lying about the severity of his symptoms—because a week earlier he had gone on a mission to find his dead wife. But I didn't begrudge him the lie. It was nobody's business.

As he came to the conclusion of his statement he paused and brushed back a lock of silver hair. “This is not the end for me,” he said. “But it is the end of my service to this great state. I would have liked to serve out the remaining months of my term, but that no longer seems possible. So it is with sadness that I'm resigning my office, effective today.”

There were shouted questions, but the senator didn't answer them. He waved solemnly for the cameras and walked away from the podium, with Jay and Callie falling in beside him. The shot widened out, and you could see one of his doctors stepping up to the microphone. But the senator managed to dominate the frame, striding with his head high, until finally he passed through a door and out of sight.

Alan Beckett was missing from the scene, but I had no doubt he'd coordinated everything. The timing of the announcement was perfect. It shifted attention away from Lark and back onto the Senate race. The next few days were rife with speculation about who would fill the senator's vacant seat. By the end of the week the governor had chosen a well-respected former congressman. Everyone understood he was just a placeholder who would serve until Callie Spencer could be elected and sworn in. The polls were running solidly in her favor.

 

 

THE LAST DAYS of July gave way to August. With Lark dead, Sutton Bell brought his wife and daughter back home. Elizabeth showed him a picture of Matthew Kenneally from his college days. Bell said he didn't recognize him. Maybe he was telling the truth, but I think he would have said the same thing either way. Sutton Bell wanted to keep the Great Lakes robbery in the past.

The county prosecutor declined to bring an indictment against Matthew Kenneally for shooting Lark, on the sound theory that no jury would convict him.

 

 

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, the sixth of August, I looked in the bathroom mirror and realized I hadn't shaved in more than a week. I put a fresh cartridge in my razor and went to work. When I got into bed a few minutes later, Elizabeth glanced up from the papers she had spread across the sheets and ran a palm over my cheek. “Better,” she declared.

“You might have said something,” I told her.

She smiled down at her papers. “I like it when you figure things out on your own.”

I picked up a random page and she slapped gently at the back of my hand. “I've got these just the way I want them.”

The papers were copies of old files from the original investigation of the Great Lakes robbery. A lot of them had to do with Floyd Lambeau. I knew Elizabeth was trying to find a connection between Lambeau and Matthew Kenneally.

I reached for another page. “Does McCaleb know you have these?” I asked.

“Never mind what McCaleb knows,” she said.

Owen McCaleb had decided there wasn't much point in trying to connect Matthew Kenneally to a seventeen-year-old crime from another jurisdiction. He had discouraged Elizabeth from digging around, but he hadn't forbidden it.

So she was digging. The page I'd picked up held notes on Kenneally's background. He'd been born in Steven's Point, Wisconsin. His parents were Richard J. Kenneally and Mary M. LaFleur. Elizabeth had noted the date of his birth and the date of his parents' marriage. In the margin was a scribbled note:
Significant?

“What does this mean?” I asked her.

She glanced over. “It means you're being lazy.”

I looked at the dates again and worked it out on my own. “Kenneally was born seven months after his parents got married. So he was conceived out of wedlock.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Or he was premature.”

“And that's important?”

“I don't know what's important yet.”

Kenneally had earned his graduate degree at Johns Hopkins. But at the time of the Great Lakes robbery, he had been an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

“Did Floyd Lambeau ever teach at the University of Wisconsin?” I asked.

Elizabeth passed me a folder that held a list of Lambeau's lectures and teaching appointments spanning two decades. A yellow tab marked one of the pages.

“He was there for a weeklong seminar on Native American history,” she said.

I turned to the tabbed page. The seminar had been held a few months before the robbery. “It's him,” I said. “Kenneally was the getaway driver.”

She gave me an indulgent look. “Not long ago you thought it was Jay Casterbridge.”

“That was a guess. This is evidence.”

“It's not enough. Not yet.”

 

 

ON FRIDAY I WOKE at noon. I went downstairs and found Elizabeth and Sarah gone, all the curtains thrown wide, a whole lot of bright daylight streaming in.

Forty-five minutes later I drove in to
Gray Streets
. The mailbox in the lobby was stuffed tight, and I pried the envelopes loose and took them up to the sixth floor. While I was sorting through them the phone rang.

The voice on the line said, “I've been reading more of your magazine, Mr. Loogan.”

A woman's voice. It took me a moment to realize it belonged to Amelia Copeland. It sounded as if she might be driving—I thought I could hear wind rushing by. I imagined her tooling along in a roadster from a 1940s movie.

“I just finished a story called ‘Blood Over Jade,'” she said. “It's beguiling. And the dialogue—just gorgeous.”

“Gorgeous?” I said.

“Effervescent. You're an intriguing man, Mr. Loogan.”

“I don't mean to be.”

“Most people, when I offer them money, trip over themselves to collect it. But not you.”

I remembered now: She had asked me to call and set up a meeting.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I've been out of the office. Recovering from”—what was I recovering from?—“a disappointment.”

“A disappointment?”

“And a gunshot wound.”

She laughed. “That's grand. You can tell me about it over dinner. Are you free?”

“Today?”

“Say five o'clock. At Gratzi. Do you know it?”

“I know it.”

“Delightful. See you then.”

I hung up the phone and said “Delightful” to the empty office. I spun my chair in a slow circle, trying to work out what had just happened. Amelia Copeland's money was supposed to buy my cooperation. The last time she called, it was because Alan Beckett wanted me to convince Lucy to drop her story about Callie Spencer. But that couldn't be what he wanted now. Lucy had already dropped her story.

The chair came to a stop. Maybe I was overanalyzing this. Maybe Amelia Copeland simply liked
Gray Streets
. Sometimes things are just as they seem.

 

 

I SPENT THE AFTERNOON sorting mail and editing manuscripts, and at five I walked over to Gratzi and found Amelia Copeland waiting for me at a table on the mezzanine, wearing men's trousers with a silk blouse and pearls. She ordered the
orecchiette alla rustica;
I had the
penne con pollo
.

Our conversation hopped from subject to subject. She quizzed me on my knowledge of the classics: Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers. She showed me pictures of her grandchildren: good-looking kids who rode horses and played hockey and softball. She wanted to know what it was like to be shot, and I told her about Anthony Lark. She'd heard of him but hadn't followed his story.

“I don't keep up with the news these days,” she said. “Too dreary.”

When the waiter cleared our plates away she ordered espresso and tiramisu for both of us and got down to business. She asked me if
Gray Streets
had a foundation.

“I didn't know it needed one,” I said.

We lingered for another thirty minutes and I heard all about the tax advantages of nonprofit foundations. When we got up from the table I had the name of a lawyer who could set one up for me. Then her foundation would make a grant to my foundation, and we'd be off and running.

A few high clouds had drifted in over Main Street when we left the restaurant. She told me she had parked in a garage nearby. We walked there together, making companionable conversation. In the elevator of the garage I finally got around to asking her the question that had been nagging at me. “Ms. Copeland,” I began.

“Amelia,” she said.

“I've been wondering, Amelia, how you found out about
Gray Streets
. Did someone ask you to contact me?”

People look away from each other in elevators, but Amelia Copeland met my eyes. “If you know enough to pose the question,” she said, “you must have an idea of the answer.”

“Alan Beckett.”

“Alan Beckett, naturally. Now there's something I've been wondering too. What did you do to offend him?”

The doors slid open and we stepped out. “Did I do something to offend him?” I said.

“Something made him change his opinion of you. Two weeks ago he had nothing but good things to say, but now he thinks you're a very disagreeable man.”

I had some ideas about his change of opinion, but I kept them to myself.

“He must have his reasons,” I said. “But if that's the case, why did you call me today?”

I watched her scowl. “Alan Beckett is a glorified errand boy,” she said. “I don't take orders from him.” Her expression brightened. “Besides, he's wrong about you.”

We'd been walking up a ramp along a row of cars, but now she stopped and said, “Here I am.” Over her shoulder I could see a bright red Mazda convertible, an updated version of the roadster I had imagined her driving. I pictured her tooling along with the wind ruffling her gray hair and the ends of a long scarf flapping behind her.

She smiled and said it had been a pleasure to finally get together, and I agreed.

“You'll be in touch?” she asked. I told her I would.

Then with a little nod she turned away and walked past the convertible and climbed into the vehicle parked next to it.

A blue minivan.

W
hen I got home I found Elizabeth waiting on the porch for me, sitting at ease in a patio chair with her bare feet on the railing. She had on jeans torn at the knees and one of my white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She seemed still and calm, but her eyes were alive, the way they get when she has news to tell.

When I sat next to her she said, “All this time, we've been asking the wrong questions.”

A butterfly landed on the railing by her feet. I waited.

“All you have to do is look at the timeline,” she said. “The Great Lakes robbery, seventeen years ago. Floyd Lambeau died. Matthew Kenneally got away. The other three were arrested—Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, and Henry Kormoran. Flash forward almost a year: Terry Dawtrey went on trial at the courthouse in Sault Sainte Marie. His father, Charlie Dawtrey, was there every day. During the breaks, he spent time in a park nearby.”

“That's where he met Madelyn Turner—Nick's mother,” I said.

“Exactly. Madelyn was forty years old. Charlie Dawtrey was pushing sixty. He'd spent his whole life going from one menial job to another. But a few weeks after the trial, they were married. Why? That's the question I should have been asking all along. Even Walter Delacorte saw it. Do you remember?”

I remembered. Walter Delacorte sitting across from us in a diner in Sault Sainte Marie. Elizabeth had asked him why Madelyn's marriage to Charlie Dawtrey ended.
You'd be better off asking why it started,
he'd said.

“She married him because she felt sorry for him,” I said. “That's what she told us.”

Strands of raven hair fell across Elizabeth's cheek. “If you feel sorry for a man, you let him cry on your shoulder. Maybe you even take him to bed. You don't usually marry him and have his baby. Madelyn Turner lied about Charlie Dawtrey. She didn't meet him by chance. She went looking for him. She couldn't help it. They had something in common.”

Elizabeth took a folder from a little glass-top table beside her chair. She handed me the page I'd looked at the night before, the one with the names of Matthew Kenneally's parents. Richard J. Kenneally and Mary M. LaFleur.

“The M stands for Madelyn,” she said. “LaFleur was her maiden name.”

She rose and went to lean against the railing. “Madelyn grew up in Sault Sainte Marie,” she said. “Moved away when she was nineteen and pregnant with Matthew. Richard Kenneally took her to Steven's Point, Wisconsin; he had an administrative job at the university there. He passed away when Matthew was in his teens. Eventually Matthew went off to college and Madelyn moved back home to Sault Sainte Marie.