28
The rest of the day was a dead loss. My ISP seemed to have gone into meltdown, and I was reduced to working off the middling signal in a coffee shop, which was useless for the kind of searches I needed to do. The only interesting piece of information came from Aimee Price who, through various gossip channels, had found out why R. Dean Bailey, the scourge of gays, immigrants, the unemployed, the impoverished, and other dangerous threats to right-wing hegemony in North Dakota, had agreed to support Judge Bowens’s proposal to provide Lonny Midas and William Lagenheimer with new identities upon their release. It appeared that Bailey didn’t care much for colored folk either, and took the view that Selina Day, in a phrase beloved of barroom misogynists everywhere, had probably been ‘asking for it’ by going into that barn with two white boys. He was, though, torn between appearing to be tough on crime and not enraging the black community – especially one that might have links, however slight, to terrorists – and not condemning to a lifetime behind bars two white kids whose hormones, in his view, had just got the better of them. So Judge Bowens had played Bailey while promising him quiet support for any future political ambitions he might manifest, support that subsequently turned out to be closer to absolute silence. In order to facilitate the creation of the new identities, Bowens had contacted like-minded judicial figures in other states and, without going into too many details about Lagenheimer and Midas, had arranged a complex series of prisoner transfers between states on various political and compassionate grounds, like a huckster mixing the cards in a game of ‘Find the Lady.’
Night fell, and it came time to meet Walsh. He had left a message on my phone requesting my presence at Ed’s Ville, a dive bar northwest of Camden on Route 52, so named because the rear half of a ’58 Coupe de Ville was embedded in its side wall. This might have been considered a little tasteless given the number of alcohol-related accidents that had been ascribed to overimbibing at Ed’s, but most people preferred to look upon it as a token of black humor, just as no local ever referred to the bar by its proper name; to those in the vicinity of Camden it was universally known as ‘Dead-ville.’ It served good beer and better food, but it wasn’t particularly a cop bar, which was probably why Walsh had chosen it for our meeting.
The man himself was already mostly done with a Belfast Bay Lobster Ale when I arrived. Actually, strike that: From the glaze in his eyes he’d left the first one behind some time ago, and looked halfway to a good drunk. He had taken a booth and was stretched out along one side, the top button of his shirt open and his tie at half mast. His enormous feet overhung the edge, crossed at the ankles. They looked like a pair of midget canoes.
‘You’re late,’ he said.
‘Are we dating? If I’d known, I’d have made more of an effort.’
‘I wouldn’t date you if we were in jail, although I’d farm you out for cigarettes. Sit down. You’re intimidating me with your sobriety.’
I slipped in across from him, but I kept my jacket on and my shirt buttoned.
‘Hard day at the office?’ I asked.
‘You should know. You contributed to it.’
‘It’s a no-win situation with you. I was damned when I wasn’t giving up my client, and now I’m damned because I did.’
‘Your client’s a piece of shit.’
‘No, my client was a piece of shit when he was fourteen. Now he’s a small-town accountant who just wants to get on with his life.’
‘Unlike the girl he killed. How’s her life coming along? Oh, wait, she doesn’t have one, because she’s dead.’
‘Are we going to do this? Because if we are, I have some catching up to do before I can come over all boozily self-righteous.’
‘You don’t need booze to be self-righteous. I bet you came out of the womb all holier than thou. The midwife should have slapped you harder, then put you up for adoption with religious zealots.’
The waitress came over, but she did so hesitantly. It was clear that we weren’t yet having a good time, and she was uncertain if more alcohol was likely to remedy that situation.
‘He’ll have what I’m having,’ said Walsh. ‘And I’ll have what I’m having too.’
He laughed. The waitress didn’t laugh back.
‘It’s okay,’ said Walsh. ‘I’m a police officer.’ He fumbled in his jacket for his shield and showed it to her. ‘See, I’m a cop. They only give these to detectives.’
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘I feel safer already. Would you like to see some menus?’
‘No,’ said Walsh.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He needs to eat. Why don’t you just bring us the biggest burgers you have?’
‘Are you a cop too?’ she asked.
‘No, he’s a crusader,’ said Walsh. ‘He’s the white knight.’
‘Apparently I’m the white knight,’ I said. ‘You can take your time with the beers.’
She left us, relieved to be doing so. Walsh sighed and put his shield away. ‘My wife doesn’t like me talking to waitresses.’
‘I imagine waitresses don’t like you talking to waitresses either.’
‘She thinks every woman wants me as much as she does.’
Either Walsh was ignoring me or he was just so lost in thoughts of wives and waitresses that my presence had ceased to register for a time.
‘Give me her number and I’ll set her mind at rest,’ I said.
‘She’s great. You’d like her. She wouldn’t like you, but you’d like her.’
He drained the last of his beer and set the glass down on the table so heavily that it was a miracle one or both didn’t break.
‘So why the buzz, Detective?’ I asked.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when they opened again I could see that the glaze had lifted and his eyes were clear. He wasn’t drunk; he just wanted to be very, very badly, and he was tired enough that another couple of beers would make it happen.
‘You know how much closer we are to finding Anna Kore than we were when we started?’ he asked. ‘Nowhere. We’re nowhere near finding her. Nobody saw anything. The parking lot at that little mall she disappeared from doesn’t have cameras. We came up with a list of vehicles that were parked there at the time but it’s only partial. Of the ten that we’ve tracked down, eight were driven by women, and two by elderly men. They’re all clean, but we’re going to go back over them again tomorrow in case we missed something. That’s what we’re reduced to: raking over dead leads.’
‘What about the father?’
‘Alekos? We tracked him down today. He’s been living in a Buddhist retreat in Oregon for the last four years. Doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t use the Internet. The feds interviewed him and believe he’s clean. He was even allowed to speak to Valerie Kore on the phone this afternoon. He’s out of the frame for this.’
‘You still have Randall Haight,’ I said. ‘You have the envelopes, and his story.’
‘Allan took Haight’s prints this afternoon. We’ll use them for elimination purposes. There are prints on some of the photographs, but I’ll bet they’re Haight’s. The photographs themselves are at least second-generation, so whoever sent them probably didn’t take them. We’ll analyze the glue on the envelope in the hope of finding saliva traces, and we may get epithelial cells from the paper and the interior. It could be we’ll get lucky with a hair or an eyelash, but unless the DNA is in the system it’ll only be useful in the event that we pick up a suspect. The address labels were machine-printed, so handwriting analysis is out. For now, that glass is half empty, my friend, and that’s even assuming whoever has it in for your client is the same person who took Anna Kore.’
‘What about Lonny Midas?’
‘The mysterious vanishing accomplice? We’ve already been in touch with North Dakota, and they’re going to release copies of the records. They’ll be with us by Monday.’
I wondered if I could persuade Walsh to let me take a look at them.
‘I can hear your thoughts,’ said Walsh. ‘The answer is “no.” No, you can’t take a look at the records.’
‘That’s impressive. You should work the boardwalks. Have they kept track of Midas and Haight since their release?’
‘All we know for now is that Haight stayed in touch for a while, but Midas didn’t. The details will have to wait until we get the records.’
‘So they don’t know where Midas is?’
‘Indications are that they have no idea.’