“Well, even if you’re a hag, I’ll still buy Frank Weary’s kid a drink.”
I closed my eyes for a second, then decided to play along. “Just one?” I said, and the old man laughed.
“I like you already.”
*
I drove to the east side and found Peter Novotny at the bar at Wing’s. It was a Chinese restaurant that, improbably, had just about the best whiskey selection in all of Columbus. It was dim and warm, the bar flanked by deep booths upholstered in red vinyl. It was also empty, except for Novotny. He had to be close to eighty, the kind of old man with a full head of pure white hair and a good jaw, and I could tell he had been a heartbreaker at one time. I walked right up to him and sat down and said “Is this taken?” in my best Marilyn Monroe.
He spun around to look at me and broke into a huge grin. “Dreams do come true,” he said. He stuck out his hand and I shook it as he took me in. I was nobody’s dream, but I was no hag, either. “Real nice to meet you, Roxane.” He slid a glass toward me; he was also the kind of old man who ordered for everybody. “I didn’t roofie it, don’t worry.”
“That’s not funny,” I said, and he laughed.
“I’ll bet you ten bucks you can’t guess what it is.”
I swirled the amber liquid around in the glass and took a sip. “Smooth. Scotch whisky, light, not too peaty but a little salty.” I took another sip. “I have to go with something from the West Highlands. Oban fourteen-year?”
“Shit, sweetheart, you are Frank’s kid.” Novotny opened his wallet and slapped a ten on the shiny bar top.
“You were just trying to get me to say ‘Petey,’ you dirty old man,” I said, then nodded at the bar. “Also, the bottle’s right there.” I threw back the rest of the drink as he almost fell off his chair laughing.
I ordered another and we got to talking. Peter Novotny had been a cop years ago, that was how he knew my father. He retired after his thirty, took the pension, went private. Now he was really retired, except for the occasional records check for the law firm that had represented Brad Stockton. “That case was shit, though. This girl, Sarah? Nowhere to be found. And whether she could have helped the Stockton kid or not, it was the obvious defense, right? Her absence makes for the very definition of reasonable doubt. But no, he didn’t want to say one bad thing about his beloved. But you know, in my experience? It’s the innocent ones who’re the least helpful.”
“Really,” I said.
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said, “nor a psychic. But yeah. I wouldn’t have sent this case to the prosecutor without digging a little deeper. Sure, you got that knife, and it’s wrapped in Sarah’s jacket or shirt, something like that. But her blood’s not on it. Her parents’ is, but not hers. Not on the knife, and not on the shirt. How do you manage that? Plus, there’s no blood anywhere else in Stockton’s car or his house. A murder like that, things would have gotten messy.”
“So he got rid of his clothes.”
“Right,” Novotny said, “but then why not get rid of the knife, too? It just felt weird as hell, is what I’m saying.”
“You ever meet him?”
“Oh yeah,” Novotny said. “Lots of times. Nice kid, he had these long eyelashes, like, shit, no wonder the Cook girl was crazy for him. He was polite, too, real soft-spoken. But I think he must have been stupid, because he didn’t understand what he was facing. How often do you see a black kid thinking he could beat the system? He was shocked when the sentence came down, I remember. Tried to hang himself. But he was too tall.”
I thought about that. When everything went wrong, that had to be an incredible disappointment: not even being able to pull off giving up. “So you believed him,” I said.
Novotny polished off his drink. “I don’t know. I’m just saying what I’ve noticed. A guilty kid, he can tell you the hair color of the cashier who sold him the cigarettes he bought while he was busy not committing the murder, right? An innocent kid, one who actually was buying the cigarettes instead of committing the murder—he barely even remembers he bought any until you ask him about the receipt in his pocket. The Stockton kid could hardly say anything to help himself. No alibi, no idea who’d put a bloody knife in his car, no help at all.” He paused and looked at me. “I was him, I would have started making stuff up to fill the story in. But he didn’t. Like I said, stupid. All he wanted to know was if we found Sarah yet, like she was going to make sense of it for him.”
Novotny didn’t seem like the type to suggest someone’s innocence lightly. Cops never were. “What do you think happened to her?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” Novotny said. “None of her stuff was gone. No secret rendezvous in her e-mail. This was before all the kids had cell phones, so nothing there. No activity on her savings account. She’s probably dead, that’s all I can think. Otherwise how else did she vanish like this?”
“The million-dollar question,” I said.
He shook his head, his expression going serious. “This is one of those cases. The ones that stick with you. Nothing makes any sense. There must have been a hell of a secret, that’s all I can think. The Cooks were nice people, boring corporate jobs, no known enemies. And we got Brad saying he and Sarah were the love story of the century, but then we got Elaine’s family saying she was terrified of Brad. Sarah’s not here to settle it for us, so you look at her, maybe she did it. But she’d have to hate both her parents and Brad a whole helluva lot in that case, and there’s no evidence of that at all.”
“So she’s gone, and they’re dead, the end?” I said.
“Bah,” Novotny said. “I don’t know what to tell you, kid, if you were hoping for insight. That’s all I got. I don’t think the case was open-and-shut, not by a long shot. But Danielle Stockton would tell you she saw Jesus Christ himself if she thought it would help her brother out,” he added, shaking his head. “You’re wasting your time.”
“The execution is in two months,” I said. “I think it’s important to her to know she tried everything. There’s something to that, you know? So listen. What if I wanted to visit Brad Stockton in prison?”
“Then you’d fill out a form and wait to get put on the approved-visitor list like everybody else. Believe it’s form DRC twenty-ninety-six.”
“Are you saying I’m like everybody else?” I said.
He chuckled. “Okay, no. As a licensed private investigator, you—wait, you do have a license, right?”
“Petey, what do you take me for? Of course I do.”
“Okay, so you’d be entitled to visit in an official capacity if you have a written statement from the attorney of record.”
“Is that something you think you could help me with?” I said. “I’m impatient.”
Novotny grinned. “Yeah, okay. I can call the law firm.” He looked at me for a long time. “What did your daddy think, you being a detective?”