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CHAPTER 24

As the door closed behind Henry Smith, the case ran out of paths to follow. Dean could continue to poke at Josh’s and Corey’s statements, but the threat of a lie detector, the whole staging of the three at the station at the same time had not produced—had never had time—the necessary cracks to wedge open the wider story. The detectives would not be able to shock them again, and now they had practice.

Dean wrote up his reports on the interviews, answering Barry Archer’s return call during that task and telling him not to bother. Guthrie and Dean looked through the small amount of information Laura was able to obtain. McCord had a few speeding tickets over the years but no other arrests. The State Police had never investigated McCord or McCord’s Body Shop. After a quick lunch from Burger Palace, Guthrie and Dean extended their working Sunday and drove over to McCord’s estate. They pulled into the the long driveway and walked to the covered porch. As Dean raised his hand to knock, the door opened. McCord held it with one hand and smiled at the two detectives. He wore gray slacks, black dress shoes, and a white button up shirt, loosened at the collar and exposing the white undershirt.

McCord coughed into his hand and then said, “Good afternoon. What are you doing here?”

Dean extended his hand and held it for a second before pulling it back. McCord had not even thought about shaking it. Dean said, “Sorry to bother you, but we wanted to ask a few more questions about William.”

“Okay.”

“May we come in?” asked Guthrie.

McCord’s eyes brightened and his smile changed to a smirk. “I’m afraid not. We’ll have to do it here.” He gestured back into the house. “The wife’s cooking Sunday dinner, and some family are over.”

Dean glanced back at the driveway. His Nova was the only car in it. “It’s damned cold out here. We can be quiet.”

“Sorry fellas.” McCord stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind him. “I’ll stand out here with you though.”

“Sure. Sure. We’ll try to make this quick.” Dean had to go along with it. It turned up his suspicions of McCord, but he got the sense that did not matter to the body shop owner. “I’ll just come out and say it, then. Were you aware of any illegal drug activities that William was engaged in?”

“Billy and drugs?” McCord tilted his head back and looked down at Dean. “Seriously. Billy was about as clean as they come. Nice kid. Tried to do the right thing. If that kid was involved in illegal drug stuff, then my mom’s the godfather of Zion.”

“What about Alex, Alex Smith?”

“What about him?”

“Do you know him?”

“Course I do. Small town. He’s a brat.”

“Did he ever stop by the shop?”

“Yeah. He and Billy were friends. Why I don’t know. I guess when you’re making friends at that age, you don’t think of what assholes they’ll become later.”

Guthrie started bouncing up and down on his toes. “Seems like you know Alex a lot better than just in passing?”

McCord looked over at Guthrie. He sniffed. His nose was turning red. “You remember jerks like that.”

“Was he in the drug trade?” asked Dean.

“Why all these questions about drugs?”

The authenticity of McCord’s question fell flat. Dean was convinced right then and there that Zorn was not the only trafficker in town. He may not have had anything to do with Billy’s murder, but he had bought this mansion with drug money. Dean ignored McCord’s question. “When we saw you a few days ago, we forgot to ask about where you were at the night William disappeared. So where were you?”

McCord raised his hand and pointed to the door behind him. “I come home every night. The wife and I were probably watching TV. We usually do.”

“Did Billy have any trouble with any of the other employees?”

“No. We all liked him.”

Dean knew the momentum in the interview had shifted to McCord, and he was not going to get it back. “Did you have a fight with Alex on Friday?”

“I’m done. I’m cold, and I need to get inside.” McCord turned his back on them and took two steps to the door. He looked back and said, “Be safe out there.”

Dean knew he had scored a hit of some kind, but what it meant was still a mystery. The door closed, the weather stripping sliding across the stone entryway. The two detectives hustled back to the car and drove away.

As he warmed up, Dean was even more frustrated. He had learned new information, but how it meshed—if at all—to the murder of Billy was unclear. They had the car. The gun, which the lab confirmed launched the bullet lodged in the tree behind Billy’s bloody skull. The money. The Communist Manifesto. Pawned jewelry. Two drug traffickers. It all added up to a bunch of questions.

* * *

And the days passed. Winter’s clutch loosened, and Jenny went back to her mom’s and her “real” life in the city. The town quietly forgot about Billy, except his parents, who called every Wednesday at nine a.m. to see if any new developments had happened since the last call. Dean told them every time, “No.” He said it wearingly, worried that he would always have to say, “No,” to answers in this case. He drank extra on Wednesday mornings.

As the town thawed, so too did the crime. Guthrie investigated several more break-ins as they entered March. Dean pitched in, but his heart was not in it. He kept going back to Billy, his body left just after the new year began out in that clearing at the Pratt farm.

He drove by the farm at least once a week, slowing down and contemplating the lonely death, knowing all deaths were in the end lonely, but not being any sadder by that fact. He walked and searched the spot and the clearing where Billy died, hoping for a new clue, a new thread that might lead him to the killer.

He had driven by the Pratt farm in high school, when he was courting Cindy. One night, she had even snuck out of the house and met him, and they drove to a teenage hideout in the woods. They may have even been in Canada, which they joked about for years until their marriage fell apart. They made love—the first time for both of them. They were young, amateurs, awkward, but it was the best night of his life. Everything after was compared to that. He learned only years later that the site was not secret from the police, and Cindy had confessed to her parents within days. Wayne turned cold to him, but never told him he knew or why.

Then the war wrecked it. His life, his marriage, his country. Like the huts of nameless people in Vietnam, his life caught fire, and he was left with only ash.

He buried his grief in drink and Sadie. She smiled at him and told him he was perfect, and he ignored that he paid her, tried to believe what she said was real. The drink helped with that.

Tony visited one night. They sat on the front porch in the first evening warm enough to be comfortable, or force themselves to be comfortable wearing jackets and hats.

“I’m surprised to see you,” said Dean. “I mean, it’s what, weeks since you’ve been here.”

Tony shrugged. He seemed much younger to Dean than he actually was. He still had his athletic build. His face unmarked by gravity, where Dean’s had begun to show, if only just. Tony smiled and drank from the Pabst Blue Ribbon can. “I avoid Zion if I can.” The age difference was not about the churn of time, the incessant pull of gravity, or blind luck. Instead, it was in their experiences that told on them somehow, that served as a map of their paths through life.

Dean nodded. “I wish I could.” He rocked in the aluminum, blue and white plastic lawn chair. “You avoid Dad, though, that’s what you’re doing.”

“Isn’t he Zion? But you know we have détente there.” A thaw had been underway for some weeks.

They talked about work. Tony was cryptic, as most FBI guys are about their cases. He was a lot like the other G-men Dean had worked with in the past, particularly New York, but he lacked the superiority complex. “Do you know what I do?”

Dean cracked open another beer he pulled from the cooler beside him and handed it to Tony and then opened another for himself. “You’re a lawyer for the FBI.”

“Well, yeah, dip shit. But do you know what I do for them?”

“I assumed you helped ready the cases they brought to trial.”

“Yeah, that’s the gist of it. But I guess I’m not making myself clear. I work with the counter-intelligence team. I help prepare cases against Americans or foreign agents working on American soil. Make sure they get to the prosecutors ready to go.”

“Huh. Does it keep you busy?”

“More than you’d like. But I wish I were in the field.”

Dean sat with this, wondering about how many foreign agents—spies—were in the U.S. “Like spy stuff?”

Tony nodded. “We’ve got more than enough people in this country willing to betray it to the Soviets.”

“No surprise there.”

“Maybe.” Tony got up and walked inside.

Dean sat there until he returned, contemplating his brother. The middle child scorned by his parents, though the scorn was really only their father’s. Now working for the government, living not far from their hometown, but far enough. After Tony came back out and sat down, Dean asked, “Seriously, though, why today? Why are you on my porch right now?”

Tony took a drink. “Last week, a mentor of mine at the Bureau had a heart attack in the office.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. It was awful. Died right there on the spot. Died surrounded by work and broken relationships. I thought to myself that’s not how I want to go. I don’t want broken things in my life.” Tony tugged at his pants. “I don’t want that.”

Dean waited for his brother to continue, but the pause was long and he began to think about it in terms of a police interview. He decided to ride it out, to let Tony tell him whatever it was that was still lingering there at his own pace.

Tony downed the rest of the can. “Another?”

“Only if you spend the night here.”

Tony nodded and Dean opened the cooler and grabbed another, which he handed to him. His brother cracked it open. “Thanks.”

Dean acknowledged the thought by raising his can.

“So I’ve got broken relationships. Some bad. Some worse than that. I started trying to fix them with Mom and Dad, but I want to get there faster. So you’re next.”

“Me? Why me?”

His brother laughed.

“Ours is the least broken.” Dean leaned back in the chair.

Tony tipped his can in salute. “Glad you feel that way. I always worried you thought like Dad.”

“Shit. You had a better understanding than I did of what was going on over there. Anyone with a lick of sense would’ve stayed out of that jungle.”

They continued to talk, moving inside as the cool became cold. Dean shared with Tony some of his experiences, which he only loosened up about with the addition of whiskey. He told him of his unit’s long hump across the Long Ho Valley and up the Quang Ho ridge. Told him about Lee and Rider and Stitch and Paxton. How they had marched and macheted their way from map point to map point, directed by commanders who seemed to have no sense of the reality of the terrain, of how hard and long it took to march a mile.

He told him of the battle of Quang Ho, on a hill designated 425. It was a battle like so many battles, but it was his battle. And all along, as he was telling Tony, he could not think of why, after all these years, his brother would be the first family member to hear this story. He had shared it a number of times with other Vietnam vets, ones who had been in the thick of things, knew what combat in those jungles and on those hills meant. Not Cindy. Not his dad. No, his brother Tony, the one who had deferred service.

Dean had never been more alive than during that battle. An army company had been ambushed as they were in the valley between hills 425 and 427. The company had established a perimeter to hold off the attacks. More importantly, low cloud cover prevented any air support. Only the marines were close enough to come to their aid until the Hueys and Phantoms could fly in.

And so Dean and his pals, Kilo Company, marched and then charged hill 425, which turned out to have an entrenched ring of NVA bunkers. Machine gun by machine gun they grenaded and shot and stabbed their way to the top. Losing Stitch and Paxton and others. Dean’s platoon, the first, and was told to hold the mountain top while second and third platoons worked their way to the army guys still down in the valley. Before they got there, the cloud cover lifted—at least long enough for the helicopters to evacuate the army and drop off artillery on hill 425 while the napalm burned the enemy on 427. Dean’s platoon had blown the top off the mountain to flatten it for that artillery.

Kilo Company held the hill for two days against counterattacks, were bombed mercilessly with mortar fire, watched jets—two times the cloud cover lifted to allow them—napalm again the NVA lines, and heard the screaming of burning men alive above the roar of jets and fire. Dean held the hands of his comrades dying before the helicopters could swoop in and save them.

Drunk, the two brothers eventually wearied themselves into silence. When Dean woke the next morning, heart throbbing and mouth dry, Tony was gone. A small note on the kitchen counter read, “Thanks.”

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