AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He nodded vigorously. “I know, right?” he said. “I mean, anybody can tell—and, Dexter, that’s not even the worst of it!” He jumped up off the chaise and leaped to my side, eagerly snatching away the folder and flipping to a page near the bottom of the stack. “Hear—lookit this!” he said with a kind of triumphant shock.
I looked. The page in question was the lab report, submitted by V. Masuoka, who signed his name in the same hand as the officer who had signed the incident report. Even better, “Masuoka” was spelled wrong: M-A-S-S-O-K-A.
“Shame on you, Vince,” I said. “At your age, you really should know how to spell your own name.”
“That’s not the half of it!” he said. “Look—he has me using luminol. We haven’t used that stuff in years, we use Bluestar now. And,” he finished triumphantly, “he spelled that wrong, too—with an ‘A’ instead of an ‘I.’?”
It was true. And as I gently pried the folder out of Vince’s sweaty grip and examined it with a little more care, I saw that the whole thing was almost as shoddy. I found myself sharing Vince’s shock; to frame me was one thing, but to do such a terrible job at it was unforgivable. Really, a child could do better work. Either Anderson was truly an overgrown case of arrested mental development, or he was such an arrogant and dim-witted buffoon that he thought he’d done it well enough to get away with it. A moment’s serious reflection led me to conclude that the second explanation was correct. Anderson was so completely brainless that he didn’t realize just how stupid he really was.
I closed the folder and gave Vince a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “This is wonderful, Vince,” I said. “You have truly saved the day.” And I wondered whether I’d laid it on too thick, because he seemed to swell a few sizes, and he actually blushed.
“Well, I, you know,” he said. “I wanted to help, and…I mean, this just isn’t right, and everything I ever worked for, you know.” He paused and rubbed at the corner of his eye, and I realized with horror that he was on the verge of tears, and who knows what other terrifying manifestations of emotional excess. Sure enough, he sniffed, and said, “What else could I—”
“And it absolutely is,” I said, cutting him off before he could burst into a chorus of I Pagliacci, followed by grabbing my hands and leading us in a rousing fit of tears and a communal singing of “Kumbaya.” “This is just what the doctor ordered.”
“That’s…that’s…I mean, because…” he said, pausing as he visibly filled up with even more emotion.
I took the pause as an opening for my getaway, and began to move toward the door. “Thanks, Vince,” I said. “You have saved us both. Bye!” And I was out the door before he could say more than two more confused syllables.
As I started up my car and drove away I saw him standing in the doorway, gazing mournfully after me, and I was filled with immense relief that I had escaped an episode of naked sentiment that could only have been humiliating for both of us. I did wonder why I should feel so strongly about it, and because I have studied the endlessly fascinating subject of Me for such a long time, I came to a simple conclusion. One of the things I liked about Vince was that he generally faked all the human rituals and expressions. He had a terrible phony laugh, and a habit of making suggestive remarks that were so clearly synthetically generated I marveled that he got away with it. In other words, as far as simple person-to-person interaction went, he was an awful lot like me.
And to see him like this, floundering helplessly in the savage grip of genuine feelings, was very disturbing, because on some deep level I had been thinking, If it can happen to Vince, it might happen to Me! and that thought was nearly unbearable.
Still, Vince had brought home the bacon when the chips were down and my fat was truly in the fire. I tried to think of more food metaphors, and wondered whether that meant I was already hungry again. I looked at the dashboard clock; it was nearly five, which was bad news all around. In the first place, it meant I probably was hungry again, and in the second it meant rush hour was already in full swing.
I went up onto I-95 South anyway, hoping for the best. As usual, I didn’t get it. Traffic was crawling along at a pace a snail would have laughed at. I had hoped to drive straight down to the MacArthur Causeway and then over to Kraunauer’s office to deliver the file. After ten minutes and only about half a mile, I got down onto surface streets and headed over to Biscayne Boulevard instead. The traffic was moving better there, and I got to the causeway and all the way to Kraunauer’s office in only about forty minutes.
It was eight minutes of six when I stepped off the elevator and began the elaborate ritual of getting myself passed through the layers of insulation around the Great Man, and the Ice Queen herself nudged me through the door and into the Presence just as the clock began to tick through the last minute before six o’clock. Kraunauer was at his desk, packing things into a gorgeous leather briefcase with one hand and speaking on a cell phone with the other. He looked up at me and blinked, as if surprised. Then he nodded, placing a heap of paper into the case and holding up one finger to me to indicate, Just a minute.
“Sí. Sí, comprendo,” he said into the phone, and to show that I am no slouch as an investigator, I immediately concluded that he was speaking Spanish, which meant that the person he was speaking with probably was, too. I patted myself on the back for my burst of acumen; if I was this sharp, I would lick this thing yet. “Sí, seguro, no hay problema,” he said. “¿Quince? ¿Es suficiente? Bueno, te doy quince,” he said, and he broke the connection and put the phone down. He put both hands on his desk and turned his full focus on me. “Well, Mr. Morgan,” he said, with a truly brilliant imitation smile. For the first time in my life, I had met somebody who could fake it better than I could, and it made me feel almost dizzy, like a young boy facing a famous quarterback. “Sit down. Tell me what you’ve brought me.”
I didn’t really need to sit down; I’d imagined I would just drop the folder, give a brief explanation of its provenance, and dash away into the evening without taking up too much of Kraunauer’s valuable—and therefore expensive—time. And I wondered whether I was generating billable hours that would be added to a fee I was quite sure was already astronomical. But I was just a bit intimidated by his awesome faux sincerity, and felt I should do what he told me. On top of everything else, Brian was paying, and to be honest, I was not pleased with him for dropping me so carelessly into a firing range with a bull’s-eye on my forehead and a bevy of drug-crazed Mexican assassins on the other end. So I eased carefully into the unquestionably pricey chair across from Kraunauer.
“Well,” I said, “this is a folder of documents from the police file on my case. Um,” I added, “they’re all originals.”
“Really,” he said, raising one carefully barbered eyebrow. “How did they come into your possession?”
“One of my friends in forensics,” I said, conscious of a slight exaggeration. Vince was my only friend left in forensics—maybe my only friend left anywhere. It made me truly grateful that I didn’t actually need friends. But telling all this to Kraunauer wasn’t necessary. Aside from painting an unflattering picture of Dexter, it was also not something Kraunauer really needed to know. So I skipped to the chase and held up the file. “The documents are all filled with deliberate falsifications, forgeries, and fiction. They altered my
friend’s report—um, rather clumsily, too,” I said. He didn’t seem to feel the sting of that insult the way I did, so I shrugged. “And when my friend complained about it, they threatened him.”
Kraunauer leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, the picture of an erudite man deep in thought. “Threatened him how?” he said.
“At first with losing his job,” I said. “Then with violence. At the end, he says he was afraid they might even kill him.”
“Exactly who made these threats?”
“Mostly Detective Anderson,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Kraunauer said. He frowned as if remembering something. “That’s the name of the officer who arrested you.”
“No coincidence,” I said. “It’s the same guy.”
“Hmm,” Kraunauer said. He tapped his fingertips together rhythmically and looked very thoughtful. “He’s obviously willing to go pretty far over the line to keep you in jail.”
“At this point,” I said, “I don’t think he can even see the line anymore.”
Kraunauer thought for just a second, and then he sat up straight and leaned over his desk. He took a business card from a small pile of them nestling in a little silver stand, plucked a fountain pen from the desk beside him, and scribbled on the back of the card. “My cell phone,” he said. He handed me the card. A phone number was on it, in still-drying vermilion ink. “You can reach me here twenty-four/seven.”
