Clean Slate

Chapter 14

Bureau of the Bailiff was housed in a discreet suite of quiet offices in the basement of the St. Marys County Court House, next door to the Francis Furrow Judicial Annex. Though the Bureau did not deal routinely with the general public, people off the street – including probationers and parolees assigned to work program duty – could access the Bureau's offices via a broad carpeted stairway after going through the ground floor security screen. A secondary exit, for employees only, secured 24/7, was through steel doors and up stone steps emerging into the gated Court House employee parking lot. And – though few were aware of it – there was a third entrance. A plain unmarked steel door, tucked behind gray steel electronic transformers beside the granite Court House wall, led into a former utility pantry that had been walled off in one of the Court House remodelings that seemed to come promptly with the ascension of each new chief judge. From there a narrow wood staircase led down and switched back, appearing to dead-end into a wall. But that wall was, in fact, a door that led into a walk-in closet which, for years now, had been used to store office supplies, coats, firearms, ammunition, communications gear, dress uniforms, and other items required by the current Bureau Superintendent.

Earl Bucaro did not use his private exit very often. He frankly had little need of it. But he enjoyed knowing that he could simply disappear from the building whenever it suited him. It was part of his mystique, an element of his act that kept others off-balance. People on his team, and others within his purview, tended to behave better because they could never predict with absolute certainty where he might be.

And where he liked to be the least was in his office. Earl was a street guy, a hands-on man, a born doer. Not some book-reading, four-eyed clerk type. Desk work and bureaucracy bored him silly. Though he ducked what he could, and delegated like crazy, for the Superintendent of a fifty-person bureau there were paperwork duties he simply could not escape. Which compelled him to be at his desk this Thursday morning, determinedly hacking away at his computer keyboard one slow key-punch at a time.

"Superintendent?" Earl looked up. The work program scheduler, who doubled as receptionist, leaned in his open door. "Someone wants to see you. Program offender."

"Who?" Earl asked.

"Indecent exposure," the scheduler said, following the protocol requiring that the offense always be stated first: "Fant, Edward."

"Is he properly dressed?"

"Depends on your definition of ‘properly.'"

"Is his thing hanging out in plain sight."

"No, sir."

Behind this humorless exchange, Earl's brain was clicking up an image: the skinny offender who'd helped with the hooker papers the other night. That realization, combined with the fact that offenders normally avoided Earl like the plague – he was universally, and quite rightly, considered to be bad news – caused Earl to decide, contrary to his first impulse, that he needed to know what was on this jerk-off's mind. "I'll come out there," Earl said. "No – wait – send him in."

"Very well." On silent respectful feet the scheduler ducked away from the door. Earl rose and paced around to the front of his desk. His office was markedly lacking in personal effects. The Leroy Neiman prints of 1950s golfers were left over from his predecessor. Ditto the dark shelves of law enforcement reference books, all unconsulted. Who knew who had installed the flags in the corners: American to the left, St. Marys County in the center, and, to the right, the state flag with its defiant Confederate battle emblem. The only items owned by Earl were a cast iron dummy hand grenade, which did desk duty as a paperweight; a chrome table lighter fashioned from another disabled hand grenade, purchased on a whim at the Patton museum at Fort Knox; a framed copy of his original deputy sheriff commission, hanging on the wall behind his high-backed chair. This was surrounded by commendations, in calligraphy on parchment, from his deputy days: conspicuous bravery (bust-up of an armed robbery, one jerk-off dead); County Executive Letter of Merit (apprehended pair of Court House escapees near the Judiciary Square fountain; one dead, the other paralyzed); Chamber of Commerce Superior Citizenship Award (talked distraught husband out of his barricaded house, read the commendation, failing to add that Earl's real reward had come later, between the thighs of the man's wife).

Earl turned as Eddie Fant slipped in the door. The superintendent, watching him silently, felt grimly amused at the contrast between them. Where Earl was the smooth man with a deep tan, Fant was pale, gnarled, and grooved, as of collapsing in on himself. Earl's neat, pressed navy trousers and short-sleeve maroon golf shirt contrasted sharply with Fant's baggy nondescript dark pants, ratty high-topped gym shoes, and washed-to-death Old Navy teeshirt. Earl was groomed, aromatic, presentable; Fant not. Earl, though not tall, was bull-like, imposing, calmly masterful of everything in sight, whatever enemies he'd had long vanquished. Fant was a scuffler and a flunky, his worst enemy triumphant since his worst enemy was, in fact, himself. Earl was fifty, and Fant looked older, but probably wasn't. It's loser meet winner, Earl thought, without apology. Why this was so – why Fant ended up a dead-ender, while Earl had become a leader, was not for him to say, or even think about. His job was to make sure things stayed that way.

"What do you want, turd?" Earl barked at Fant.

The offender stood dark-eyed, pulled in on himself. "Can I shut the door, sir?"

"Hell no. We got no secrets here at the bureau, turd," Earl informed him, voice clipped. "Spit it out, boy. I got a day to do here."

Fant glanced over his shoulder, ventured a step or two closer, and said, "You need to know, sir. . .them hooker papers? Not all of them got torched."

Earl squinted. "What're you talking about."

"Well." Fant shuffled on his feet. "While I was out there on the truck? Booklet fell through the crack in the tail gate. I jumped down and picked it up off the ground, stuck it in my pocket so I'd have both hands free to climb back up." He held up his crippled, four-fingered hand. "I need all the help I can get."

Give me strength, Earl thought. Walking around the offender, he shut the office door, then resumed his place by his desk. "So what're you telling me?"

"I found them in my pocket when I got home," Eddie said. "Thought you should have them." Reaching to his hip pocket, he came out with a wad of papers – thirty or forty pages, rolled into a raggedy tube. "I threw away the binder part," Eddie added.

Staring, Earl snorted. "You're telling me you stuck that wad of shit in your pocket and just sorta forgot about it?"

"I was busy," Eddie said. "Guarding the truck and all. And then that reporter showed up."

"Yeah, yeah, I remember." Pensively, Earl eyed the offender. No wonder you're always in trouble, Earl thought. You keep trying to sit at the grownup table. "So you're being a good citizen, is that it? Turning these in to me?"

"Yessir." Awkwardly, like a stick to a pit bull, Eddie extended the papers. Earl took them. The roll of documents felt moist in his hand. "I'm glad to be rid of them," Eddie added. "I know they're big trouble. I mean, you know, if they got out and all."

"Whyn't you just burn them up yourself?"

Eddie affected dark-eyed puzzlement. "I just thought, this way. . .you'd know for sure they were took care of, that they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands."

Uh-huh. "Well," Earl said, "you did the right thing. Thanks for coming forward."

But Eddie – as always, dumb as a box of rocks – did not take the hint. "It's just that. . . ."

"What?"

His bony shoulders rose in brief apology under the teeshirt. "Thought there might be a reward of some kind."

"For what?" Earl snapped. "Doing your duty?"

The shoulders rose again. Eddie looked sad-faced but somehow determined. "I figure, a man ought to get taken care of, for taking care of his friends."

"Really." Tight-lipped, Earl looked around the room, seeming to think it over; but what he was really doing was giving Eddie a chance, one last chance, to step back from this cliff. Because, once over. . . .

But Eddie just waited.

"All right," Earl said. Reaching his wallet out from his back pocket, he opened it, and smiled. "Here you go," he said, handing Eddie a crisp new $100 bill.

"Thank you sir," Eddie said rapidly. Even then, had his dim bulb blinked just a little bit brighter, causing him to change course, hand the money back, and swear eternal silence, Eddie might have headed off what he'd started hurtling down hill at him. But no; the green bill in his warm hand was too pregnant with possibilities of all kinds to hand back. He disappeared it into his pocket. "Anything I can help you with, you know, let me know."

"I'll do that," Earl said. Stepping toward the office door, he guided Eddie with a companionable hand on the offender's back. "Thanks for stopping by," he added, opening the door, walking Fant into the outer office. "Listen, you doing all right? You eaten today?"

"Not yet," Eddie answered. "I've had a lot of errands," he said, tone brave, eyes another story.

"Well," Earl said expansively, "we'll just fix you up. Terry!" he barked at the scheduler. "Give this gentleman a cafeteria chit, will you?"

The scheduler, though no doubt puzzled at the appellation and the offer, knew better than to challenge Earl, inquire, or even change expression. "As you wish, Superintendent."

"How about my friend?" Eddie asked hopefully. "Can I have one for her too?"

The scheduler looked at Earl, who nodded. "You have a nice day, Eddie," he said. The offender took the chits from the scheduler, bobbed his head in thanks, and scuttled out the door. It had not hissed fully shut before Earl was back before his computer screen, doing his hunt-and-hit thing for all the information he could locate on one FANT, EDWARD.

---

As the last interview of the afternoon slipped out the door, Abigail Heartwell closed her leatherine notebook and leaned back in the guest chair, stretching her long shapely bare arms. She'd left her blue jacket hanging at her desk, and wore a sleeveless white open-necked shirt with thin gold chains around her neck. "That's a tough one," she noted.

Mac, behind his desk, nodded. "Phillips always are," he said.

She smiled uncertainly. "‘Phillips'?"

"Anybody named Phillip," Mac said, "is bad news."

"That's a joke, right?"

Mac, riffling computer keys as he talked, replied: "Dead serious. Every single Phillip I've ever had was big trouble. Man or woman."

"You've had girls named Phillip?"

"Worst probationer ever," Mac proclaimed, "was a woman named Eliza Phillips."

Smiling, Abigail rose, smoothening her dress. "I like your approach," she said. "You don't come on all punitive."

Mac shrugged. "Way I see it, punishment isn't our job. There's judges, and court orders, for that. Our job is first and foremost to be sure the orders are followed. Then, beyond that --"

"Oh?" Abigail asked, a hint of merriment in her large dark eyes, "there is a ‘beyond that'?"

"For me there is. I try to guide the offender to an awareness that being a trouble-maker is a losing proposition. For all concerned. When we can get an offender to change his or her ways, we're protecting future victims. That's when we've really done our jobs."

"Tough challenge," Abigail observed, drifting toward the doorway to her office.

"Yeah, but it pays lousy," Mac replied. "So – you think you're getting the hang of how we do things around here?"

"You mean, have I discerned that, beneath a wafer thin veneer of plodding orderliness, this place actually operates in a state of barely controlled chaos?"

"That's very good, for just a couple of days in. You're a quick study, lady."

"I am," she agreed. "And you're a good teacher. I enjoy --"

"There you are," boomed a voice from Mac's open door, and in stepped a youngish man whom Mac did not recognize. Abigail did, though. Obviously. "I heard you hooked up over here," the man went on.

Pale, Abigail looked at Mac and said, with pressed lips, "Mac, this is Garry Overbye. He's --"

"Abigail's fiancé," Overbye cut in, with an expression for Mac that the PPO thought was unnecessarily defiant. Overbye was a trim rich-boy type, with very curly brown hair mopped atop his head, and fashionably silver spectacles, and a pale elongated face that seemed always in motion. He wore new sky blue jeans and a matching denim shirt with some kind of corporate logo on the breast. To Abigail he said, "So you done for the day? Let's go eat."

Looking at him, Mac felt disquiet. No, to be honest, more than that: dislike. Calmly he asked, "How'd you get back here?" just as his cell phone purred.

Overbye, clearly one always in search of offense, tossed a glare. "I told your girl out there who I was."

"Which is who. Sir," Mac added pleasantly, and his cell phone purred again.

Overbye tapped the logo on his shirt. "The Overbye Companies!" he sneered. "You know? Car dealerships? Six Flags? The Brillion Hotels?"

"This is a secure area," Mac said, hardly believing his own words: this Overbye guy in just ten seconds evoked some very dangerous feelings in him. His cell phone purred one last time. Mac, locking stares with Overbye, ignored it.

Abigail, taking her friend by the elbow, said nervously, "I'll walk out with you. G'night, Mac."

"'Night, Abigail. Good job today." As they disappeared into the hallway, Mac heard Overbye say: "Who's he? You dating him or something?"

Brother, Mac thought, picking up his phone. Abigail seemed so smart, so kind, so full of heart – but like many such women Mac had known, she had, it seemed, gotten herself entangled with an idiot. With that Mac made himself end his mental speculating. Abigail was a co-worker. That's all, folks.

His cell phone's caller ID said UNKNOWN CALLER, and posted a number in the 313 area code, wherever that was. Flicking buttons, he called the number back. It purred once and then a man's voice answered: "Your nickel, start talking."

Mac sat down behind his desk. "Hi, it's Mac McGladrey. You just called my phone here?"

"Yep, that's right." In the background Mac could hear road noise, engine sounds. "Carole Somers gave me your name and number, said to call."

"Oh, sure," Mac said. "You're the private detective, right?"