State’s Evidence Read online

  I turned back toward the receptionist. Her eyes were popping wide and helpless. She opened a side door and guided me into a dark hallway and watched as I walked down it.

  All the doors I passed were thick and closed. The covering on the walls resembled woven weeds. The muffled buzz of an automatic typewriter ground out inhumanly perfect copy somewhere behind me. I tapped on the designated door and opened it.

  Loggins and Fluto were sitting face to face on opposite sides of a long walnut table that was surrounded by chairs and topped with a thick coat of polish and a crystal ashtray in the shape of a pentagon and the large, clasped hands of Tony Fluto. As I strolled into the book-lined room, Loggins’s thin lips pursed. “Come in, Mr. Tanner,” he invited cheerily. “I’m Lafcadio Loggins. Thank you for coming down on such short notice.” He stood up and shook my hand.

  “My pleasure,” I said, then glanced at Fluto.

  Loggins trotted out his courtroom smile. “Do you know Mr. Fluto?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  “Then I’m afraid you have acquired much misinformation.”

  “There’s a lot of it going around.”

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Sure.”

  Loggins and I spent some time getting comfortable; Fluto was already there. “I believe I have seen you in court the past two mornings,” Loggins observed after a minute.

  “Right.”

  “A shameful burlesque, was it not?”

  “I guess I missed the funny part.”

  Loggins inclined his head and shrugged. “I’m told you were once an attorney yourself.”

  “Right.”

  “Then you know what a travesty has occurred.”

  “Right.”

  There was more to be said, to that question and the one before it, but there didn’t seem to be any point in going into it right then. Loggins nodded several times, still not certain of my stance. I wasn’t certain of it myself. “I believe you are also the man who drove Mrs. Blair down from the lake, are you not?”

  I changed tactics. I shrugged.

  “And directed the estimable Mr. Tolson to young Augustus Quilk as well, am I right?”

  That time I didn’t even shrug. Loggins seemed resigned to my reticence. I was wondering what papers he read to get the information he had. “Tell me, Mr. Tanner,” he went on, “do you have a principal in this matter?” The cheer had left his voice.

  “What matter is that?” I asked.

  “The matter of Mr. Fluto’s prosecution for the crime of murder.”

  At the mention of the evil deed Loggins and I both glanced at the accused. The only visible reaction came from behind the narrowed slots that guarded his eyes. “I have no client, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  “Then you no longer have an interest in the case. Good.”

  I held up a hand. “I didn’t say that. Yesterday I made a lucky guess and came up with a witness and handed him over to the DA. A child. An obnoxious little brat, but nevertheless a child. Because of what I did, the boy is missing. Maybe dead, maybe not. Well, wherever or whatever he is, I’m going to find him. That’s my interest in the case. Not in convicting Mr. Fluto here, or exonerating him, either. Just in finding young Gus Quilk. And I’m as interested in that as I’ve ever been in anything.”

  Loggins glanced at Fluto, then nodded. For some reason both of them seemed pleased with my answer.

  “I’ll warn you now,” I went on, “that means I’m going to be seeing a lot of your client.” I nodded toward Fluto.

  “You think he knows something about the events of the morning?” Loggins asked.

  “It’s as good an assumption as any, better than most.”

  Fluto shifted position but I kept myself from looking at him. Loggins turned toward his client. “Shall I proceed?”

  Fluto shook his head. “Just him and me.” His voice was a growl of something wild.

  “I don’t think that’s wise,” Loggins protested. “The criminal charge is still pending. Tanner is or has been an agent of the district attorney. I should be present.”

  Fluto’s face reddened. “In court I do what you say. Out here you do what I say. Is the room clean?”

  Loggins nodded.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Loggins’s smile was extravagantly paternal. “Because of the nature of my clientele, certain branches of the federal government have, from time to time, concealed electronic listening devices on the premises. Not only in this office but in my home as well. Mr. Fluto is similarly plagued. These invasions are, of course, as illegal as they are fiendish. Nevertheless, they persist. I bring a gentleman in to sweep the building at least twice a month. The last time he did so was approximately forty minutes ago.”

  “Okay,” Fluto grunted. “Leave.”

  Loggins left quietly on loafers as soft as paws. Fluto looked at me with the vibrant eyes of visionaries and madmen. “I talked to some people about you,” he began bluntly.

  “What people?”

  “Some business associates up there in San Francisco. They told me you went up against Duckie Bollo a few years back.”

  “Sort of. Fortunately the collision wasn’t head-on.”

  “You took out one of his boys.”

  “Right.”

  “And now you’re trying to take me out. I’d like to know why.” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “That’s not the way it started,” I said. “No offense, but I’d never even heard of you before last week. And even then I wasn’t told the kind of, ah, business you were in. All I agreed to do was find a witness to a hit-and-run. Which I did. And then the witness didn’t turn out to be a witness, and the hit-and-run wasn’t a hit-and-run, and things got complicated.”

  “Is that straight?”

  “It’s straight.”

  “So why did you give them the kid?” The question carried an implication, and the implication seemed to originate in the basement, to carry dust and dung, to threaten death.

  I thought it over. “Partly I did it because I think crimes ought to be prosecuted and witnesses to crimes ought to tell juries what they saw.”

  “And that’s it?” Fluto bellowed. “A do-gooder, is what you are? You thought sending me to Folsom would mean a better world? Would mean justice?” Fluto seemed enraged at the prospect of my naïveté.

  Strangely, I found myself wanting to explain more fully. “It didn’t have anything to do with you personally,” I began. “Like I said, I didn’t even know who you were. To tell the truth, I gave up the kid because Ray Tolson said if I found the boy, then he’d drop the perjury charge against Mrs. Blair.”

  “An honest man. A man of passion. You gave up the kid for a lady. I like that.” He paused. “She stayed with you a couple days, huh?”

  “No comment.”

  “Hey. I like that, too. Teresa’s a nice girl.”

  “Hardly a girl.”

  “It’s good you wanted her out of trouble.”

  Fluto’s eyes had glazed, freeing his brain for recollection. I looked at him until he looked back. “Why did Teresa Blair do what she did in court yesterday?” I asked.

  “Hey,” Fluto demanded. “She didn’t do nothing but tell the truth.”

  I didn’t respond to the lie. Fluto squirmed to a new position and rubbed his lips as if to erase the words.

  “You seen her today?” Fluto asked suddenly.

  I shook my head. “Have you?”

  He shook his. That seemed to take care of the woman whose spirit floated somewhere between us.

  Fluto began to drum his fingers on the table. I looked at the spectral dance of the sunlight as it worked its way through the crystal ashtray, wondering whether I really wanted to know any more about Teresa Blair than I already did. “I guess this Tolson’s pretty mad about the way his case is going,” Fluto said finally.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “I guess he figures my people killed Grinder and snatched the kid.
So he wouldn’t help Tolson send me up.”

  “That’s about it.”

  “I guess he’s got every cop in the city trailing my boys, staking out my house and my business, searching for the kid.”

  “I guess so.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Fluto said needlessly, then fell silent again, his smile lazy and satisfied, as though he’d just solved a quadratic equation. I had nothing to do but look at him and wonder where all this was going.

  Fluto was, or had been, a handsome man. His head was triangular and inverted, wide and rather flat on top, capped with strips of thin, white hair combed straight back over a bare, rumpled crown. His chin was sharp, lightly scarred just off its tip and deeply clefted. His aquiline nose seemed slung from the black spikes of his eyes. Thick pouches of flesh had collected beneath his jaw and they rolled as he spoke. Like the rest of him, the face exuded strength and the doggedness of a pit bull. He had not been able to pass on that trait to his flabby-featured son in the outer office.

  Fluto caught me inspecting him. “I guess you figure I’m some kind of louse, huh, Tanner?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “Rumors. Wars start on rumors. Guys go to jail on rumors. Guys get killed on rumors, too. Well, the rumors about me ain’t true. I just run a business. I help people who need it. My kind of people. People who worked hard all their lives and whose luck ran out. People who been pushed and got a right to push back.”

  “Pushed by whom?”

  His shrug encompassed the world. “People who got the government pushing them to do this for safety and that for the ecology, people who got the unions pushing pay scales higher and higher while the workers turn out less product every year, people who got their big suppliers pushing costs out of sight and their big competitors dumping goods on the docks for next to nothing so they can grab the market. Them’s the guys I’m helping, Tanner. The guys do-gooders like you never think about. The guys who made America great.”

  “So you help them out by burning down their business?”

  Fluto’s lips thinned. “Hey. I don’t know nothing about no fires.” He paused. “But if I did, I’d tell you that no one’s ever been hurt in any of them fires. Not ever.”

  “How about the insurance companies? How about all the people who pay higher premiums because of the losses you cause? How about Phillip Vincent?”

  Fluto’s cheeks glowed red, then blanched. “Those insurance guys are crooks. Whatever they lose because of a few fires, they already made up turning down claims they should have paid. Vincent, he was different. But I ain’t here to discuss old business.”

  I started to say something, then stopped. Fluto had built a life out of that warped rationalization of benevolence and it would take a better sophist than I to knock it out of him. That’s why people like Fluto are both dangerous and ineradicable. They become criminals not out of need or desperation but out of conviction, out of a premeditated, preterlogical, almost genetic determination that crime is the only honorable mode of existence, the only way to retaliate against a government and a society they assume to be alien and oppressive. The mob rises out of that psychology, but Christianity and Nazism have their roots in alienation, too. Doctrine and ritual are the sanctuaries of the outcast, and I had encountered a lot of proof of that in this case.

  “Hey. Tanner. I got you down here for a reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “I want you to tell this Tolson that I didn’t kill Grinder and take the kid. I want you to tell him he’ll be wasting time trying to prove I did. He should be looking at someone else, see, at the guys who maybe decided to go up against me, who want me out of the way.”

  “Like who?”

  “There’s plenty of them around the Bay. A couple of the locals I’m checking out myself, but I can’t be sure. The business I’m in, people get jealous. They think they know more than an old man. That’s why I’m calling you in and the cops, too. I want the kid back, and it won’t happen unless we all look in the right place.”

  “Can’t you be more specific?”

  “Hey. The cops, the feds especially, they know who’s interested in taking over my business even better than I do. They got men inside all the operations, mine included, probably. So ask them. Someone’s on the move, that’s sure. First they try to take out my son Tony, and now this. You tell Tolson he finds out who decided to move against me, he finds the kid.”

  “But why would one of your enemies want to kill Gus Quilk? He was going to testify against you. To put you in jail, possibly for good.”

  “Yeah, well even assuming the kid said what they thought he was going to say in court, and I went up for a while, things would go on as usual. Plenty of guys like me run their business from a cell. You see, they had one real good reason for snatching the kid.”

  “What?”

  “The kid. Gus. He’s my … I’m his grandpapa. His nonno.”

  20

  The word dropped into the center of my brain, sending ripples toward its edge. “You’re Mary’s father?”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “And so you’re Teresa’s father, too.”

  “Sure.”

  “And Mrs. Goodrum? She’s your wife?”

  “My first one. Yeah. Goodrum was her second husband. A real loser. Hey. You know Charlene?”

  I nodded. “I saw her at the Silver Season. She thought I was you, I guess.”

  “Yeah? How’s she doing?”

  “Physically she looks fine except for the arthritis. Mentally, I’m not sure. Her whole life seems to have been compressed into a single day, about a week ago Thursday. I’m no doctor, but on the whole I’d say she’s as happy as any of us. Maybe more so.”

  Fluto’s eyes were closed. “She could have been somebody, you know? But she didn’t want it. I treated her like a queen but she just walked away. I still don’t get it. I moved back to El Gordo to be near her. Every year I called her on her birthday and told her she could come back. She never did. She just laughed and hung up on me.”

  “You should go see her,” I said.

  It was something he didn’t want to hear. He opened his eyes and rubbed them. “I should do a lot of things,” he muttered, then clenched his hands. His knuckles creaked and he rubbed them. “But it’s too late.”

  “You pay Teresa to keep her mother out there, don’t you? Twelve hundred a month?”

  “Twelve hundred. Yeah. Teresa won’t let me pay it all. Says I don’t deserve the honor. Whatever that means. You think it’s a nice enough place, this Silver Season?”

  “As nice as they come, I guess. Haven’t you ever seen it?”

  “Not since it was bare ground. I own the place. Me and some business associates. I was out there when we bought the land. I didn’t like it. I’m allergic to horse shit. My mama’s out there, too. She’s ninety-two. Just lays there all day, I hear, yelling for help. Maybe you heard her.”

  “I probably did.”

  “Teresa says I shouldn’t worry, that she don’t know what she’s doing or what they’re doing to her. You think that’s right?”

  The forlorn cry still echoed in my head. I thought the voice knew exactly what its world was like, but I didn’t tell that to Fluto. “I don’t know,” I said instead.

  Fluto unclenched his fingers and seemed ready to leave. “How about your son?” I asked quickly. “The guy who got shot? Is he Teresa’s brother?”

  He shook his head. “He’s family number two. See, I married Teresa’s mother when she was real young. Too young. She couldn’t understand the business.”

  “Where were you married?”

  “Here. El Gordo. We were locals. My old man ran a bar, hers was a shipbuilder. She was a Swede. Blond all over. We married up and had the kids right away. Things were real good till I had to move to Vegas. On business. Charlene wouldn’t go, so we split. Some people owed me favors, we got a dispensation. In Vegas I married the wife I got now. A sister to an associate of mine. A decent woman, a go
od mother, but not Charlene.” Fluto’s eyes clouded. “Then we had young Tony. He was trouble from the start. No respect for nothing. Vegas ain’t good for kids. I got tired of the town, tired of the people, tired of the business we did out there. I came back to El Gordo. I like it here. Good place for business.”

  The Chamber of Commerce would have been thrilled with the testimonial. “Mrs. Goodrum must have married again,” I said.

  “Yeah. To a loser, like I knew she would. They ended up poor as niggers.”

  “Her husband lost his business, I hear. A fire.”

  “Yeah. A fire. Real sad.”

  I couldn’t read him but I didn’t think I had to. “I offered her money,” Fluto went on. “Lots of it. She could have had anything she wanted.”

  “Except a clear conscience,” I said.

  “What’s that mean? Huh?” His hands made fists. Then he sighed and sat back down.

  “How did Teresa find out you were her father?” I asked.

  “I told her. How else do you think? I drove back here from Vegas and checked out the house and watched her go to school and waited for her after and told her who I was and how she could reach me if she wanted. She was sixteen. I gave her some money. We had a nice talk. Mary, she wouldn’t even get in the car with me.”

  “What did Teresa say when you told her who you were?”

  “Not much. She just got this big smile on her face and asked me if the car was really mine. A Continental, it was. Real leather interior. Sharp.”

  “And later on she went down to Vegas.”

  “Right. Teresa and her friend. I set her up in business but then things went bad and she came back here.”

  “You mean Frankie.” I tossed the snapshot on the table.

  Fluto’s eyes narrowed as he looked at it. “Who told you about Frankie?”

  “No one told me much about him. Why was he killed?”

  “That’s all over now. Old business.”

  “Did Mary ever go to Vegas?”

  “Naw. Charlene turned her against me, made sure she stayed home. And look how she ended up. I should have that husband of hers put out of his misery. Always with the hand out for a loan. Loan. Hah. He says he spends it on the boy but I know different. As soon as Gus comes in the business, this Quilk will get his. Believe it.” Fluto picked up the ashtray and banged it on the table. “But enough of this crap. What I just told you is confidential, Tanner. You know what I mean? My boy, Tony, he don’t know about my other family. Plus, some people around the Bay, they’d be real interested to learn that Teresa’s my kid. You said you gave up Gus to keep her out of trouble. Well, you want Teresa out of trouble, you keep quiet about what you know about my family. You might know some but you don’t know all. Just give this Tolson my message. The feds, too, while you’re at it.”