A Welcome Grave

23

There’s still no hard evidence connecting you to that money,” Joe said.

“That’s the good news. They don’t have to believe someone impersonated you, but they do have to prove otherwise.”

We were on the steps of my building, Targent and Daly gone.

“Yeah? Well how much circumstantial evidence do you think it’ll take to produce an arrest warrant?”

He didn’t answer that.

“I thought these guys helped me out last night,” I said. “When they shot up my gym, I thought they actually helped. Even Targent would have to believe that I wasn’t fabricating all of this. But it doesn’t seem to be the case.”

Joe shook his head. “It’s not, and that shouldn’t be surprising. Targent applied pressure to you yesterday, or at least Brewer did, with that arrest in Indiana. If you were lying, and wanted to convince him, you would have needed some kind of splashy evidence. Having a guy unload into your building wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? The phone call about Karen’s money came at the same time they shot up the place with you inside. All right. But if I’m Targent, standing back and looking at it, what I see is an overcompensated effort to prove you’re distanced from these guys. And Targent’s right—why are these guys going through you to get to Karen? It’s illogical. Unless the goal is simply to pull you inside.”

“Doran—if it even is Doran—he told me he had an associate who wanted to take me off the board. Gave me one chance to step away from it, and I ignored him. Maybe this is the reprisal. I passed on the chance to walk away, and now they’re going to cooperate. Bring me all the way inside.”

“You say anything to Targent about Doran?”

“Not yet.”

“Probably not the worst thing. We need something direct to connect him to Jefferson, anyhow. Targent isn’t going to be impressed with what we’ve got now, because it’s all rooted in a comment that guy made to you, a comment nobody else can support.”

I’d been sitting on the steps, and now I pushed off. Sitting felt useless. Targent and Brewer and people whose names and roles I didn’t even understand were active all around me, circling, tightening nets and laying traps, and I was doing nothing. Sitting on my ass in a parking lot, waiting for them to finish their work.

“We’ve got to get somewhere with this, Joe. This thing in Indiana . . . what if it’s not the end? There’s no reason to think it will be. Once they commit to making moves like that, drawing the police pressure down on me, why would they stop? If they keep setting me up to look like a suspect, then I’d damn well better have another one to give the cops.”

Joe nodded. “We’ll go back to the Doran case. Make something unravel. When it does, we’ll convince Targent to take him seriously.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I’ll make sure your commissary account is well stocked with cigarette money.”

It was a nice attempt at a joke, but neither of us laughed.

Donny Ward lived six miles from the winery where Monica Heath had died. His house had a buckling roof and a sloped foundation, and four dogs roamed the yard, slinking through grass that was about three feet tall. A thin trail of smoke rose from an old barrel that, judging from the accompanying odor, was used for the legal and environmentally friendly practice of burning trash. Joe knocked on the front door while one of the dogs, a hound with tattered ears, growled from the base of the porch.

“Good boy,” I said, and he bristled and snapped his jaws.

“Nice touch with the animals,” Joe said.

“You want to be the one to pet him?”

Nobody came to the door, and there was no sound from the property other than the growling dog.

“We can wait, or we can come back,” Joe said.

“I’m a fan of the latter option.” I was watching the dog, who had gathered the courage to inch closer to the steps.

We’d just turned from the door when a pickup truck came boiling down the lane, acrid black smoke puffing out of the exhaust pipe and rising above an old bed cover that didn’t match the blue truck. The driver pulled in just behind Joe’s car, and the dogs whirled around the truck with delighted yips and wagging tails. They were a mangy pack of strays, but they certainly loved this new arrival.

“This would be Donny?” Joe said.

“I’d imagine.”

We waited on the porch while the driver got out of the truck and played with the dogs for a few seconds. He was a lean guy, all sinewy muscle, wearing a sleeveless shirt even though the temperature was hardly above fifty. There was an Indians cap on his head, tufts of dark hair hanging out beneath it. When he was done with the dogs, he straightened up, adjusted the cap, and squinted at us.

“Mr. Ward?” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He sauntered up to the porch. “You here ’bout the dogs?”

“No.”

“Good.” He got a key out and unlocked the door. “Bitch lives up the road keeps calling the county, says I got feral dogs. ’Cept that’s ridiculous, you know? They’ve all been neutered. Well, one was spayed, you know, because she’s a female. But the point is, they all been fixed, they all got their shots. I have six acres here, and be damned if I’m going to lock these old boys in a kennel. You ever seen a dog in a kennel? I mean, really looked at his face? Breaks your heart, is what it does.”

By now we were all inside. He hadn’t asked for an introduction, just kept talking as he stepped into the house, and Joe and I followed.

“Breaks your heart,” he said again, tossing his keys onto a lamp stand beside the door. The house wasn’t as bad on the inside as I’d expected from the exterior. The couch had duct tape wrapped around one arm, probably to keep the stuffing in, and the ceiling showed water marks, but the place was clean enough. Past Donny Ward’s shoulder, a Crock-Pot and a bread maker sat on the counter, where I would’ve expected to see only a pyramid of empty Busch cans. There were framed photographs on the wall in front of us, all of them featuring a girl of maybe six or seven with a chubby face and a few missing teeth. More to Donny than initially met the eye, it seemed.

“So,” he said, turning to fully acknowledge us for the first time. “What are you gents needin’?”

“We’re private investigators,” Joe said. “From Cleveland.”

Donny smiled good-naturedly. “Private eyes. Ain’t that exciting.”

“Sure is. We hate to impose on you, dropping in unannounced like this, but we’ve got some pretty important questions about a man named Andy Doran.”

The smile stayed on his face. His eyes moved to the door, which was closed now, and he exhaled out of his mouth without opening his lips, a hiss of air escaping out of that smile.

“You remember Mr. Doran?” Joe said.

“Fellas,” Donny took a few steps away from us and into the living room, “I’d love to help you. Really would. But I’m done talking about that.”

“It seemed awful curious to us,” I said, “that Doran would claim you as a hard-and-fast alibi, when he hadn’t even seen you that night. Wasn’t like you two were good friends, either. You have any idea what the hell he was thinking?”

Donny shook his head. “Nah, I don’t. But like I said, I’m done talking about that.”

“You know he’s out now?”

Donny stared at me for a minute, wet his lips, and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Seems to me, one of two things has to be true. Either you told the truth to the police and Doran was just a first-rate dumb shit when it came to his alibi, or you lied to the police. And if the second is true, well, I’d imagine old Andy might want to pay you a visit. Don’t you think?”

Donny crossed to the front door, opened it, and gestured with his free arm for us to step outside. Neither of us moved.

“I’ve talked to him, Donny,” I said. “Good chance I’ll talk to him again, too. And I can tell you this—the man is angry. He told me he did five years in prison for someone else’s murder. One of the people he holds responsible? Man was killed, Donny. Tortured and killed.”

Donny Ward removed his baseball cap and held it in his hands, flexing the bill and staring at the grinning caricature on the hat as if looking for reassurance.

“I’ve got to make a decision,” I said. “Got to decide whether I believe that somebody set Doran up. If somebody did, then I think you’re a liar, Donny. And I need to know why. That’s all. Because I don’t think you made it happen. I don’t think you put all this in motion. But you can help me understand who did.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you.”

“More than fifty slashes, Donny. With a razor. All over the body. Pain like you or I cannot possibly imagine. That’s how it ended for the other guy Doran blamed for his prison stay.”

He was still staring at his hat.

“Son of a bitch shot my dog.”

I looked at Joe and then back at Donny Ward.

“Doran did?”

He shook his head, slipped the baseball cap back on, and used his heel to swing the door shut.

“Nah. The guy they sent to talk to me. I didn’t even know Andy’d been arrested yet. Hadn’t heard from the police. This guy, he got here first.”

“Who was he?” Joe said.

“Like I got his name? Like we exchanged business cards or somethin’?”

“You don’t know who sent him?”

He shook his head and walked into the living room, sat down on the couch beside the duct-taped arm.

“Man showed up in the morning. Not a real big guy, dark-looking, Italian maybe? But strong. Stronger than a damned bull. He got out of his car and came up to the porch, and I let him inside. He told me the police would be coming to ask about Andy. Told me I should say I hadn’t been with him. That it’d be, you know, easier on me anyhow, not having to deal with going to court and all. I said he was shit-house crazy, thinking I’d lie like that when a man could go to jail. He got out this bag he had with him and started pulling out cash. I don’t know how much. Seemed like he’d never run out. He stacked it all up on the table over there and said, ‘You sure about that?’ ”

Joe and I were still standing, but Donny Ward didn’t look like he was even aware of us. He was picking at the duct tape idly with his fingers, eyes on the wall.

“And I told him, I said, ‘You get out of my house, get back in your car, and drive straight to hell.’ Because I wasn’t about to send a man to jail in exchange for some dollars, you know? I wasn’t. And this guy, he just piled the money back up and put it in the bag, had this little smile on his face. Once the money was all gone, he reached down into the bag and took out a gun. Stuck the gun up in my eye and reached out and grabbed me by the balls. You heard that expression, somebody’s got you by the balls? Well, this son of a bitch actually did it. Just reached out and took my nuts and squeezed, and I thought I was gonna die. Couldn’t breathe. He kept squeezing, and he kept the gun in my eye, and he asked . . . he asked how much I love my daughter.”

Donny Ward looked up for the first time since he’d begun to talk, a quick jerk of his head. His eyes didn’t go to either of us, though, but beyond, to the wall where the photographs of the little girl with the gap-toothed smile hung.

“I got a daughter, but she don’t live with me. Her name’s . . . well, that don’t matter. She’s my daughter, you know? She’s my daughter. And he said . . .”

He stopped talking and wiped at his eyes and looked away. His hand was tight on the duct tape; a strip of it pulled loose and clenched between his fingers, leaving a sticky sheen on his skin.

“I had a big old bluetick, best dog you ever seen. When this guy let up on squeezing me, he took his bag and opened the door and walked out on the porch. Otis was out there, waitin’ on me, way he always did. When he heard the door open he’d come running. And this guy, he just lifted the gun and shot him. Shot him right in the center of his head. Turned back to me, cool as anything, and said, ‘You think about your daughter, Donny.’ And then he started to walk away and before he got in the car he yelled back at me, said, “You best have that dog cleaned up before the police get here.’ ”

Donny Ward’s voice broke at that point, and he stopped talking. For a long time he sat there picking at the duct tape. Joe and I let him sit. We didn’t look at one another.

“We’re going to find this guy, Donny,” I said.

“I wouldn’t want that, I was you.”

“I do want it. And if I see Doran again, if I have a chance to talk to him, I’ll tell him that you weren’t a part of this.”

He cleared his throat. “He already knows that.”

“What?”

“I did what I did because I was scared. Scared for my daughter. But that don’t mean it was easy to take. I watched Andy go to prison, and I knew he hadn’t killed that girl. That ate me up pretty good. Kept at it, too, didn’t just go away after a year or two, you know? Well, a while back my daughter’s mother moved. Went out of state, married this guy . . . He’s good to my daughter. I don’t know if I thought she was safer or not. I’m not about to go to the police, tell them what happened or anything. I’d still worry. Fact is, you go and get the cops and bring them back here, I’ll call you liars.”

He looked at us with a challenge in his eyes, but Joe and I didn’t say a word. After a few seconds, Donny continued.

“Time went by, and I kept thinking about Andy, and . . . I just felt like I needed to say something to him. Make him understand? ’Course he wouldn’t understand, sitting there in prison, but I had to try. So I got one of those blank cards and I wrote him a note. All I said was that I did it because they threatened my daughter. I didn’t sign it or nothing, but I figured he wouldn’t have trouble guessing who wrote it.”

I looked at Donny Ward and thought about Alex Jefferson, about the handiwork with a razor and a lighter.

“It’s probably a damn good thing you sent that letter,” I said.