them, and there has to be a reason for a man to lie about a simple thing like that. Only reason I can think of is that the three of you were into something you wanted to keep private, something illegal, like stealing copper so that Frank could sell it for scrap.”
“I got nothing to say about that. You’re not my lawyer.”
“The three of you didn’t have two quarters to rub together. Frank and Nick were going out of business, and you were out of work. Stealing was one way to get by, and construction materials made sense because Frank could move the stuff for you. But what was in it for Nick? Why cut him in on it when he’s not taking any risk or bringing anything to the table? So I think maybe it’s just the two of you, you and Frank. Then someone killed Frank and Nick, which leaves you the last man standing, only you’re at the Farm, where it’s not as hard to kill a man as you might think. A Mexican kid named Ricky Suarez lands there on a drunk and disorderly, you get into it with him before he has a chance to say hello, and the next day you try to escape. There’s no way to paint that picture that makes you anything but a marked man.”
“I got antsy, that’s all. Saw a chance and took it,” he said.
“You told Kate Scranton that you knew you couldn’t escape and that you just wanted off the Farm. Only county lockup isn’t my idea of an upgrade. Lot more bad guys in here, guys who’d put a shank in your back as a favor or just because they’re bored. Man has to be pretty damned scared to take a chance like that, and after what’s happened to Crenshaw and Staley, I’d say you had good reason.”
He looked around again, licked his lips, and edged closer to the glass, his voice a whisper.
“I thought they’d put me in solitary.”
“Where you’d be safe.”
“Safer, anyway.”
“From who? Ricky Suarez, the Mexican kid?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. How could you not know?”
“Listen, I’m telling you,” he said, his shoulders hunched. “I don’t know. I just did my part and kept my mouth shut. I learned how to follow orders in the Army.”
“What was your part?”
“Steal the copper. Frank said he could move it, no problem; just mix it in with a bunch of different loads of scrap. We’d done it a couple of other times, small loads, just to see if we could make it work, pick up a few bucks, and it went okay, so Frank, he says it’s time to go big. I got a buddy working a job east of downtown. He tells me there’s no weekend security on account of the general contractor is going broke and laid them off. Saturday comes, and I drive right onto the site, load my truck, and I’m gone. Not twenty minutes later, some eager-beaver shit-head nigger with a badge pulls me over because I’ve got an expired tag. Can you believe the shit that happens to me, man?”
“Doesn’t seem right.”
“You’re damned straight it isn’t right!” he said, catching himself, pulling back and shutting down, realizing I was pimping him.
“What happened between you and Ricky Suarez?”
“Nothing.”
“How did Frank Crenshaw get his gun?”
He stared past me if I weren’t there.
“Who was giving the orders?”
He turned his head and coughed, looking at the ceiling.
“You left your house with Evan and Cara at eight-thirty in the morning, and you were busted four hours later. I don’t think that was enough time to kill them, bury them, and load your truck with stolen copper. You figured you’d do the job and go get them. Tell me where you left them. It may not be too late.”
He folded his arms across his chest, turned his head away, not saying a word. I let the silence work on him, watched him start to squirm, realizing at last there was another possibility.
“Look at you, Jimmy. You haven’t had it easy. Guy like you gets hit a lot growing up by an old man whose old man hit him a lot, I’d bet my last nickel that you’d do the same to your kids. That’s the way it works. We become the people we hate. And you’re full of hate and mad at everyone. I get that. But the people I talked to say you loved your kids; that you lived for them. That may be the one and only good thing about you. A man like that wouldn’t hurt his kids and wouldn’t just dump them while he pulls a job. No, a man like that would leave his kids with someone he trusted to take care of them. Who was it, Jimmy? Who did you give your kids to?”
“Do I look that stupid?”
“You tell me. A gun dealer named Eldon Fowler was robbed up at Lake Perry last month. The thieves were chasing him down a gravel road in the woods when he hit a deer. Fowler died of a heart attack, but that’s enough to make a case for felony murder since he died while a crime was in progress. The crime-scene investigators found paint on the trunk of a tree that came from a Dodge Ram. If Nick Staley, Frank Crenshaw, or you own a Dodge Ram, it won’t be hard to tie you to his death. Be better if you tell me now than if you make the prosecuting attorney put it together.”
His eyes burned, full and wet, as he spat on the floor. “You go to hell.”
Chapter Sixty-five
Kate told me that it takes five compliments to compensate for one insult, a commonsense rate of exchange that resonated as fair. Healing is slow, uncertain, and hard.
As I walked out of the jail, I wondered how many bad traits a lone good one could balance out, whether there was a cosmic calculator programmed with an algorithm to weigh and rank each of us, spitting out the results in this life or the next, if there was one. I wasn’t religious, didn’t belong to a church or a tribe, and didn’t pray or meditate, kneel or genuflect. Though I believed that there were all kinds of reckonings, that reaping and sowing were inevitable and necessary, I couldn’t do the math on Jimmy Martin, a man whose anger, hate, crimes, and fear threatened to consume his singular love of his children.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t killed his kids. People twist love in a lot of different ways, sometimes making it an excuse for murder. But the time line made it more likely that he had entrusted Evan and Cara to someone else. And that didn’t mean they were still alive. Joy and I had done the same thing with our son, Kevin.
Jimmy had admitted to stealing the copper, partnering with Frank Crenshaw to fence the goods, and staging an escape to protect him from an unknown but real threat. More important was his Nuremberg defense that he was just taking orders and that he didn’t know who was giving them, the latter claim believable but only to a point.
No one would confuse Jimmy with being the sharpest tool in the toolbox. His life had been a series of fuckups. He was the kind of man who could be trusted with doing one thing at a time and not much else. Steal the copper. Whoever was giving the orders forgot to tell him to check his vehicle tag first, exactly the kind of thing that Jimmy would never think to do, blaming everyone but himself when that’s what got him caught.
Three other things stood out from my interrogation. The first was his reaction to Nick Staley’s murder, the news giving him a kick in the head but not knocking him out, as if Staley’s death had been a matter of when and not if.
The second was his pain, not because of the beating he’d taken but because of his kids. It was raw and real and, I realized, the source of his fear. Ever the good soldier, he knew how to take orders and bullets. But it was different with his kids. He knew they were in danger and that the only way he could help them was to keep his mouth shut.
Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley had been killed to keep them quiet or because they had pissed off the wrong people. Had Jimmy not been arrested, he’d probably be dead by now as well. While it wasn’t impossible to kill someone in jail, it was complicated and messy, leaving whomever ordered the hit to trust the least trustworthy.
The easiest way to control Jimmy while he was in jail was to give him a good reason not to cooperate. There was no better leverage than his kids. Whoever had Evan and Cara would need to prove to Jimmy that they were alive and well or he’d have no reason to cooperate. Yet he was afraid for his life, knowing that his death would
