Chapter 30: Ask the Void - Lucidity

MADDEN WOKE THE NEXT MORNING LATER THAN HE WANTED TO. HE was supposed to meet Fremmer at nine-thirty at a coffee shop on Amsterdam between 78th and 79th. He had to rush to get over there on time.

Nine-thirty came and went. No Fremmer. As Madden sat waiting he thought about their encounter with Braden. People changed a lot in twenty years, they’d seen that with Bronsky, but they didn’t change that much. He remembered Ross Walker as a bigger man than Braden. Not necessarily that much taller, but he thought they had different bone structures. Plastic surgery could change someone’s look, sometimes radically, but Madden thought he’d have been able to tell if Braden had had major work done. He just looked like he’d had a facelift/neck lift combo, and some hair plugs. Whoever had done the work had done a good job, but Madden could still tell right away there was something off about his face—something didn’t quite look natural.

Their voices were different, too. Braden’s voice was more affected and not as deep as Ross’s. That was something he could have altered with practice. But Walker never struck him as the type of guy who would practice to be someone else or completely change his persona. The fact was if Fremmer had hit Ross Walker like he had, Walker would have made him pay for it afterwards. Missing hand or not, he would have tried to put Fremmer on the ground.

Madden once heard a story about Walker assaulting a guy on a golf course in Santa Clara. The guy had complained that Walker’s group was being loud and disruptive; they were intoxicated. When the guy got in Walker’s face, Walker head-butted him. They ended up wrestling to the ground and trying to pummel each other. The guy filed charges against Walker, but those were dismissed because the golfer and his playing partner refused to cooperate with the investigation. Everyone involved assumed that Walker had threatened further physical violence.

Last night, back at The Lucerne, Madden had told Fremmer what he knew about Ross and what he thought about Braden.

“I never had any close interactions with him so I can’t tell you one hundred percent. But my gut says it isn’t him.”

He could see this upset Fremmer, and he understood why. If Braden wasn’t Ross Walker then maybe Candace Epstein wasn’t Stacey Walker. That possibility had also crossed Madden’s mind. “But,” he told Fremmer, “my gut also tells me the Stacey connection is real.”

He warned him that DNA tests didn’t happen as quickly as they did on TV crime shows. Madden could pull some strings to try to expedite matters, but he couldn’t just walk in and say, Here’s a DNA sample we plucked off some woman in a hospital in New York, would you mind comparing it to those Stacey Walker samples you filed away? And while you’re pulling evidence, could you go ahead and pull some of Ross’s samples?

Just the thought of all the miles of red tape gave him a headache. Moving through official channels meant questions about whether the DNA samples were obtained legally. Braden certainly hadn’t willingly offered his sample. Neither had Candace. There were proper procedures for acquiring DNA evidence, and the police and forensic labs took those procedures seriously. Had Fremmer thought about all that?

He said he had. “But I figured we’d worry about it later,” he told Madden. “The most important thing is to get some hard evidence for Shelby. I was worried the contract had some onerous verification requirements but it’s pretty vague.”

“Do I even want to know how you obtained a sample from Candace?” he asked Fremmer.

“That part was easy. I bought a DNA test kit at Walgreens, went to visit Candace in the ICU, and when I was sure nobody was looking, I swabbed the inside of her cheek.”

“So how do you prove where the swab came from?”

“I recorded the entire procedure on my phone. I propped it up on the counter and hit record. The video file can be our witness if Shelby asks for more proof. Now you just have to get your own cheek swab from her daughter and then we send both into swabtest.com. It’s like $100 per test. They can have results in three-to-five working days, so we’ll have what we need to meet Shelby’s requirements for verification before the contract expires. The police can sort out the rest later. We can’t be late on this. From what I’ve read about Shelby, he won’t pay if you miss the deadline.”

Madden didn’t have the heart to tell Fremmer that he didn’t know how the daughter would respond to a request for a DNA sample. She might not love the idea. Also, Madden didn’t like the fact that Fremmer was so focused on the money. He understood it but didn’t like it.

Where was Fremmer anyway? He was sure they said nine-thirty. After ten minutes of waiting at the shop, Madden began to worry. They’d talked about Madden returning to California as soon as possible, but the earliest flight he could get a seat on was a red-eye that night. They’d meet for breakfast, then Madden could do a bit of sightseeing. He at least wanted to visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum of Natural History.

At nine-forty-two his phone rang. It was Fremmer calling from the same 347 number. He hadn’t changed it yet.

“Sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I was about to leave to meet you when this detective showed up. It’s taking longer than I thought, I might not be there for a while. I know you want to get down to the Memorial. Maybe you should just go ahead and we’ll meet later before you go to the airport. We still have to discuss your book.”

“Where are you? They pick you up?”

“No, I’m still at home,” Fremmer said. “He’s in the kitchen. I’m in the bathroom.”

“This about Braden? He’s pressing charges?”

“No. Not yet. But that dog walker or someone else called 911 last night.”

“What’d you say?”

“Not much.”

“Don’t say anything,” Madden advised.

“Now you sound like a lawyer.”

“You probably need one,” Madden said. “You should call your friend.”

“I did. He said the same thing.”

Madden didn’t reply right away. He was thinking about Fremmer’s cockiness; it worked both for and against him. In this particular case he thought it could get him into trouble.

“You’re not going to bring up anything about your thinking Candace is Stacey, are you?”

“Under normal circumstances I probably would. But I can’t. You’re the one who has to take credit for finding her. I don’t want to muddle that.”

Madden thought it was a good sign that Fremmer sounded so rational. “If things get tight,” he said, “or if the clock looks like it’s going to run out on us, I’ll just leak it to the press. I have a connection at the Chronicle.” Madden was referring to the reporter who wrote the article based on Bender’s piece on Shelby. “But before I tell anyone I want a few days back in California to see if I can make some progress in the search for Ross.”

Fremmer was OK with that. “Just do me a favor.”

“What?”

“When you go to the Memorial, look down into the reflecting pools and think about him.”

“Who?”

“Ross. Look down into the void in the middle of the pool and ask where he is. It will tell you.”

“Are you being serious?”

“No. But I know you’re going to do it. The void does that to you. Makes you ask questions you can’t answer. And who knows, maybe it will tell you. Maybe you’ll think of something you didn’t think of before.”

An hour later Madden was staring into the north reflecting pool of the 9/11 Memorial and thinking about Fremmer’s theory of the void. He was right. The void does do that to you. It was bigger than it looked in the photos. The pool was massive. But it didn’t tell him anything about Ross.

Then something strange happened. He was sitting down on one of the plain square slabs of concrete that served as benches at the memorial site, when his phone rang. It was Dupuy. He’d noticed a missed call from her when he got out of the subway, but he hadn’t called her back. He hadn’t spoken to her in almost a week.

“You’ll never guess who called this morning, back to back, literally within ten minutes of each other,” she said.

“Who?”

“Your buddies Bender and J.J.”

“Really, what’d they want?”

“Bender’s looking for a new lawyer. He wanted me to represent him. I passed, of course. Referred him to a colleague.”

She seemed to have already forgotten that Madden was the reason Bender needed a lawyer in the first place, that he was one who’d tipped Billings and the MPPD off to Bender’s Adderall cache.

“I don’t suppose he’s become aware that your boyfriend and I are the reason he needs a lawyer?” Madden asked.

“I don’t think so. He mentioned something about still trying to figure out who tipped off the police. He sounded really stressed. I felt bad for a minute. It’s quite the scandal. I assume you’ve been reading some of the articles.”

He had. The problem with a guy like Bender, a guy who’d built himself into a Valley powerbroker the way he had, with so much bluster and arrogance, was that everything was hunky dory until you tripped and fell. Now that he was down, all the people he’d alienated, insulted, or just plain ignored, relished seeing him lying there, prone and injured. They put their boots on and were now getting their kicks in, ribs first, then face.

Reading the articles, Madden at first enjoyed the furious indignation he’d helped ignite (“Blogger Accused of Trading Adderall for Access Fighting Charges and Fellow Bloggers’ Wrath,” was the latest headline he’d seen). But the more he read, the more he began to realize that a lot of these people now going after Bender were just as pompous and irritating as Bender himself. He wasn’t sorry he’d given Billings the tip, but he was sorry he hadn’t gotten as much pleasure as he thought he would from seeing Bender in a bind. He also realized the condition wouldn’t last. Notoriety had a power unto itself. Bender would rise again. He probably wouldn’t be quite the same, but he’d return, slightly reinvented.

“How ’bout J.J.?” Madden asked, wanting to move on to a new topic.

“He called my office. He wants to have coffee and talk about the case. You know, he’s still living in that house. He rented it for the rest of the month. He’s written four songs already. He’s looking for new material to work with. He asked if you wanted to come along.”

“Thanks but no thanks. You go ahead and be his muse.”

She was silent a moment.

“Hank?”

“Yeah.”

“You know after J.J. called I listened to that file you gave me again. That recording you got of Cathleen, Stacey’s daughter.”

“Why did you listen to it again after he called? You weren’t going to discuss that with him?”

“It crossed my mind for a second but you know I wouldn’t do that without asking.”

“The answer’s no.”

“No, I know. But I listened to it again and that’s really why I’ve been trying to reach you. There’s that part right at the end, the part where she asks her kid to talk with ‘papa.’ I listened to it with better headphones on this time and it struck me as kind of funny. Is the father Italian or European or something?”

“I don’t think so. She said they met at Chico State.”

“Well, listen to it again. You still have it, right? It sounds like pawpaw. Like the paw of a dog. When I heard it this time it just made me think that maybe she wasn’t talking to her husband.”

Madden was suddenly lost to thought. He thought he’d heard papa. But maybe she was right. Maybe it was paw-paw? But what did that mean?

“Hank, you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you? What’s that sound in the background?”

“I’m out of town,” he said. That wasn’t a lie, but what he said next was. He hated to do it. “I’m out at the beach. Half Moon Bay.”

“Playing hooky, huh?”

“Don’t tell my wife. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Listen to that again.”

“I will,” he said.