The Deadline Page 3

  Morgan’s lips thinned. It was all just a con. He’d heard crooks deny their crimes since his first day on the beat at the Chicago Tribune. After a while, he stopped believing prisoners altogether. Reporters were easy marks for sociopathic inmates who were always screwing with the system, exploiting every soft spot. Young reporters, hungry for a big story or in a hurry to change the world, yearned to believe they could ferret out injustice, tip the scales back into equilibrium, and clear an innocent man’s name. Even Jefferson Morgan had that crusading spirit once, but he soon found out it never really happened that way. Cons had too much time to think up new ways to manipulate honest people.

  Gilmartin was lying, too. Morgan didn’t know why, but it didn’t matter.

  Except the cancer.

  Only that part seemed true. Gilmartin’s body was decaying in front of his eyes. Morgan recognized the surrender that follows every jolt of pain. He’d seen how it consumed the flesh, then snuffed out the light inside.

  Bridger’s face flickered across Morgan’s memory. His only child was just eight years old when he died of leukemia, two years before. Morgan found no comfort in death except that his little boy’s pain had finally ended.

  The old man tossed his cigarette on the grass and smothered it with a cheap shoe. Then Gilmartin turned to Morgan and looked deep into him. The severe old man, rough as a cob, had tears in his eyes.

  “The state docs said I only got another few weeks, a month maybe, before I die. They just opened the gate and turned me out like a sick animal they didn’t have no guts to shoot. That was a couple weeks ago. I’ll be feedin’ worms long before the first snow, but ... you’re the only guy what can save my name. You gotta believe me.”

  But Morgan didn’t.

  The high Wyoming sky was the color of worn denim, rendering Gilmartin’s pale features more sickly, more desperate. Morgan said nothing, but the old man must have seen misgiving in his eyes.

  Children giggled as they teetered and tottered, and Gilmartin’s gaze drifted toward them. A pain from somewhere deep inside him crawled across his brow like a poisonous black bug. His jaw tightened and his bottom lip quavered.

  When he finally spoke, the old man’s voice had softened, the words almost stuck in his raspy craw.

  “I never done killed that little girl ...”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sun was almost down.

  Claire Morgan gracefully balanced an open bottle of sauvignon blanc, a bowl of fresh strawberries and an empty glass as she glided across the back lawn.

  Her husband, still in his button-down shirt and work tie, loosened at the collar, lay in an Adirondack chair beside the immense lilac hedge, one bare foot in the cool grass. His eyes were closed.

  Through the screen door behind her bounded T.J., their new dog. He was a border collie, just eight months old, a housewarming gift from Morgan’s mother. She still lived in his childhood home outside Winchester’s town limits, where good sheep dogs are prized more than blue ribbons at the county fair. Upon making her gift, she’d told them a border collie was the smartest breed of dog. So after a few glasses of wine, they named the pup “T.J.” because Thomas Jefferson was the thinker most admired by Jefferson Morgan, a tired, journeyman newspaper reporter who had been named after the great man, too.

  T.J. nudged Morgan’s hand, begging with his deep brown eyes to be scratched under his furry jowls, where woolly puppy hair grew like sideburns. Morgan obliged.

  Claire stood over them, reading the wine label. A white tank top set off her tanned skin.

  “This is what we should call our little estate,” she said, handing him the bottle and glass. He sat up and read the label, too.

  “Annie Green Springs?”

  Claire cocked her head and gave him that look, the one that she gave him at cocktail parties when he wasn’t being as funny as he thought he was.

  “Stone Creek,” she corrected him, sitting down on the lawn beside his chair. Ever the artist, she drew pictures in the air for him. “It has a romantic feel, doesn’t it? A little brook murmuring beside a big house made of gray fieldstone, a meadow of blue lupine, some statuesque pine trees and maybe a mountainside where you see deer in the evening. Don’t you think?”

  Claire’s eyes were closed as she imagined it, painted it across the canvas of her mind.

  Morgan smiled and sipped his wine. Sauvignon blanc had been Claire’s favorite since they’d met at the Chicago Tribune, where she worked as a clerk in the newspaper’s morgue. On their first date fifteen years before, took her to dinner at a stylish restaurant called Printer’s Row, among the reborn lofts and gracious old apartment buildings on Dearborn Street. He ordered sauvignon blanc blindly because it sounded French and elegant; Claire ordered Rocky Mountain trout, and he knew immediately he could love her.

  Later, filled with the new wine, he told her it reminded him of her hair: Soft, smooth and the color of yellow sand. She’d given him that look back then, too, for the first time. But he’d meant it.

  “Let’s see ... how much advertising would I have to sell at four dollars a column inch to buy your dreams?” he said.

  “Dreams are cheap,” she said, her eyes bright. “Mortgages are expensive.”

  Claire popped a whole strawberry in her mouth. With a gentle roll of her neck, she swept her long blond hair over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know, Claire. Your dreams always seem to have hidden costs,” Morgan said, tucking a wispy, errant strand of blond hair behind her ear. His fingers settled on her brown shoulder.

  “Hey, it wasn’t me who had this dream of running his own newspaper,” she teased. “I wasn’t the one who had the brilliant idea of selling a four-bedroom house in Oak Park to move West.”

  Morgan knew his wife felt uprooted by their move, but they had isolated themselves in their separate cocoons of grief after Bridger died. Things hadn’t gone well for them in the past two years, together or alone.

  “You’re right, as usual,” he admitted, avoiding another argument. “I guess my dreams have hidden costs, too.”

  Morgan gulped his wine and lay back in his chair. The canopy of cottonwoods above him reflected the last light of the day, framing a circle of oyster-shell sky. T.J. lay flat in the grass under his chair, asleep. Morgan smelled steaks barbecuing somewhere down the block and saw the smoke drift overhead. He closed his eyes again. He wasn’t hungry.

  Claire slipped her hand between his ink-smudged fingers and rested her head on his khakied hip. The ink wouldn’t wash off, an indelible mark of his trade.

  “Another bad Wednesday for my country editor?”

  Morgan groaned softly.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Morgan parodied a smile.

  “We missed deadline again, more than an hour. If we get any later we’ll be a monthly paper. My reporters disappeared after lunch. Three readers cancelled their subscriptions because I haven’t gone to church yet. The press broke down while I was out this afternoon. And the Post Office guys are starting to ask for a better brand of beer. Golly, things are just great. And how was your day, dear?”

  “I’m sorry, Jeff. Really I am,” Claire said, threading her fingers in his. Better than anyone else in his life, she understood why he was doing this. “Oh, well, maybe you can write-off the beer.”

  Even in the bad times, she could always make him smile. Morgan rolled the cool wine glass across his frustrated forehead. The missed deadlines, indignant readers, malingering reporters, a fickle press, low-grade bribery of federal officials ... none of that bothered him as much as the visit from Neeley Gilmartin. The old man was dying, that was certain. Almost as certainly, Morgan believed, Gilmartin was lying. His instincts told him so, but the old man and his crime haunted him.

  “Where did you go this afternoon?” Claire asked.

  “Huh?” Morgan opened his eyes and looked at her, disturbed from a distant thought.

  “You said the press broke down while you were out. Did that used-car guy call and
pull all of his advertising again?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But the week’s not over.”

  Morgan traced his finger around the rim of his wine glass, thinking. After a moment’s silence, he told his wife about his extraordinary visit from the convicted killer Neeley Gilmartin, how the abrasive old man had sought Morgan’s help to exonerate himself. He told her how Gilmartin had served almost fifty years in prison for killing a little girl, a crime he now says he didn’t commit. And he told her how the old man was probably dying, alone in his rented trailer behind the Teepee Motor Lodge, his ebbing life suspended between the grating hum of a spasmodic air conditioner and a black-and-white television that got only three indistinct channels, visited only by a Mexican maid who wouldn’t understand him even if he spoke.

  “Is he telling the truth?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” Morgan said. “These guys lie more often than they tell the truth. He couldn’t give me any hard evidence to prove he didn’t do it. I promised him I’d look into the story, that’s all. After I got back to the office, I went up to the attic to look at some of the old papers, to check it out. I mean, we’re talking about a murder almost fifty years ago. Never was a trial, so there’s not much to know for sure.”

  “But something about it still bothers you, I can tell.”

  “I’ve heard a million sob stories from these assholes. Bad guys never do the crime.”

  “So why worry?”

  “Maybe I’m getting too cynical. It’s eating me up. What good would it all be if I ignored the one truly innocent person who needed my help?”

  “Oh Jesus, Jeff, it’s not like your life’s been wasted. You didn’t get into journalism because you thought you could write a few words and make the world perfect. You’re more pragmatic than that.”

  “True, but I got into this business for something else. What the hell would it all mean if I missed that chance just because I got too numb?”

  The trees rustled above them. A breeze passed over them like a cool blessing.

  “What happened with this guy?” Claire sat up and swiveled in the grass to face her husband attentively.

  As Morgan retold the peculiar story in the fresh air of a waning summer night, he could almost smell the musty, yellowing Bullets, all hidden away in the vacant second floor of the newspaper’s ancient brick building.

  The cumbersome, hardbound books of old papers were stacked in a dark closet in a windowless room where the roof joists narrowed to a sharp corner at one end. Each was embossed in its rigid spine with the year covered by the newspapers inside, going back to 1904.

  The stories weren’t hard to find: A murder and its aftermath were was always front-page news in a small town.

  “Did you know anything about this case when you were growing up here?” Claire asked her husband.

  “No, but everybody always told us to stay off the Iron Mountain Bridge because it was haunted. We just figured the adults were trying to scare us into being careful. I never really knew why, until now. Trey Kerrigan was my best friend, and he used to tell me a little girl died there but, hell, he was just a kid, too. I thought he was pulling my leg. But I guess he would have known.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “His daddy was the sheriff of Perry County back then. Ol’ Deuce Kerrigan,” Morgan reminisced. “This was Ol’ Deuce’s first big case after he became sheriff. The biggest one he ever had, I imagine.”

  “A family thing, huh?”

  “His real name was Kelton Kerrigan Jr., but everybody in town called him Deuce because he hated to be called Junior almost as much as he hated to be called Kelton,” Morgan told her. “Damned if I know why he named his own kid Kelton Kerrigan the Third, but it wasn’t long before everybody just called him ‘Trey.’“

  “Perfect,” Claire laughed. “After Deuce comes a Trey.”

  “I remember going over to Trey’s house all the time when we were little and he’d show me his dad’s gun and his black leather holster hanging behind the door. I can still smell the leather and the gun oil. I was mildly impressed, but Trey, he was obsessed. He only wanted to be a sheriff like his old man. When we were in high school, he even joined the posse, like a cadet or something. I guess he got his wish.”

  “He became a cop?”

  “Got himself elected sheriff of Perry County, just like his daddy,” Morgan said. “I bumped into him down at The Griddle not long after we got here. He’s still the same. Still wants to be just like his daddy, a good ol’ boy who’d rather give a drunk a ride home than slap him in the drunk tank. You’d like him, I think.”

  Claire was always thinking of ways to ferret out hidden information. It was a gift that made her one of the most intuitive librarians the Chicago Tribune ever had. All the reporters sought her out, the way Morgan had first sought her out to help him on the Blue Island serial murders, the biggest story he’d ever covered. She might have made a good reporter, but she was content to sort through the old clippings in the morgue, deep inside the Tribune Tower. She understood what good reporters had to do, she just didn’t have the stomach for it.

  She worked at the Tribune until Bridger was diagnosed with leukemia. Suddenly, her vast world shriveled to the size of an eight-year-old boy’s bedroom, and then later, to the confining, sanitized space of a hospital room. In many ways, she remained trapped there in that empty room, alone, without light to warm her. Morgan’s grief had gone its own way. Day by day, Claire pushed her invisible walls back ever so slightly until now, two years later, she might have room to dance, if not to dream again, like before. The grief never left her, just gave her room to breathe.

  “Could he help you?” she asked now. “It’s almost fifty years later. The old files should be open by now. There might be all kinds of evidence and investigatory stuff that would never have been printed in the paper. Maybe it would prove the old man’s story one way or the other.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “But first I want to talk to the reporter who covered the killing.”

  Claire, apparently surprised by the possibility, held a strawberry in midair between the bowl and her soft lips.

  “He’s still around?”

  Morgan poured himself another glass of wine, then looked in the grass for Claire’s glass.

  “Old Bell’s byline was on every one of the stories I saw. And they were great stories. He talked to everybody, and they talked to him. He wrote with this extraordinary eye for emotional detail, like nothing we do today. Bell would tell me straight. He’s a newspaperman and he was there. How’s that for a primary source?”

  Morgan looked over the arm of his chair into the lawn, holding the wine bottle aloft, still searching for a vessel to fill. Claire sat with the bowl of strawberries between her legs. She plucked a fat red one from the bowl and studied it.

  “So why’d they bust this Gilmartin guy anyway? What evidence did they have?”

  “There was no physical evidence. The body was badly decomposed. The sharp rocks in the river had torn her up pretty bad. Ol’ Deuce wasn’t even sure what killed her. He just knew she was dead and too far from home to get there herself.”

  “Yeah, but what led them to this particular guy?”

  “A couple snitches said they witnessed Gilmartin threatened the girl’s father after a fight over a card game. It came out later that Gilmartin owed them some money.”

  “They didn’t have much, did they?” Claire remarked, holding a strawberry at her husband’s lips. “The say-so of a couple shady characters who had an axe to grind. Nothing to physically link him to the crime. Only circumstantial evidence that a crime was committed at all. No murder weapon. No idea if this guy ever had any opportunity to kill the girl. It’s all pretty flimsy.”

  Morgan opened his mouth and closed it quickly around Claire’s finger. She pulled it away, almost embarrassed.

  “Well, I only know what I read in the paper,” he said, wiping strawberry juice from his lips. “If Ol’ Deuce had more evidence, he did
n’t share it with Bell Cockins. But remember, this was fifty years ago, this was a small town, and when it came to busting criminals, cops could do more with less. If Gilmartin made such a threat and Aimee turned up dead, that was enough to lock him up while they made a better case.”

  “So much for civil rights,” Claire huffed.

  “Who’s going to stand up for some low-life, unemployed punk who might have killed a little girl? Not here, baby, not here. And look around, Claire, because it hasn’t changed all that much.”

  Winchester hadn’t changed much, it was true. They lived in a sixty-year-old California bungalow, built from plans sold in the Sears and Roebuck catalog with pre-cut lumber and hardware shipped by train from the Midwest. It was functional, a house reduced to its simplest form. Its low, broad proportions rooted it amid the giant cottonwoods that lined Rockwood Street. Two bedrooms, a living room that spilled into the dining room, exposed beams of natural oak that suggested the strength of character that comes with simplicity. And, finally, there was the small room with sloping eaves at the top of the stairs, big enough for Morgan’s books and a small desk.

  It was, in all ways, a simple house to meet their simple needs, if not their dreams. No pretentions, no dark corners, no hidden spaces.

  Crickets chirped in the tall grass beside the fence. The sun was weakening, moving on. High clouds, lined in red, scudded across the evening sky. Claire sat silently, caressing T.J.’s head in her lap. His long, happy tail drooped in the damp grass and his eyes lolled as if he were dreaming about a heaven with endless meadows of wildflowers where a million butterflies begged for a puppy to chase them.

  Morgan poured his third glass of wine and held the near-empty bottle out to his wife.