Reversible Errors

  Instead, he reached out for her hand.

  “You were so good at this,” he said.

  32

  AUGUST 7—8, 2001

  Obvious

  SHORTLY AFTER FRIDAY midnight, Erno Erdai died. Arthur received the news when Stew Dubinsky called him at home early Saturday morning for a comment. Arthur expressed condolences and then, recalling his duties as an advocate, praised Erno as a man who’d found the courage to set right past wrongs in life’s final moments. Rarely had Arthur uttered words with less sense of whether they were true.

  Nonetheless, his role as Rommy’s representative required him to attend the funeral mass for Erno on Tuesday morning at St. Mary’s Cathedral. Summer, this year especially, was a slow news time, and Erno’s death occupied center stage in the local press, notwithstanding Genevieve’s revelations and the Court of Appeals’ opinion. Given that, it was no surprise that the Reverend Dr. Carnelian Blythe had somehow been engaged to eulogize Erno. The Archdiocese had also rallied to Erno, and Monsignor Wojcik, the rector at St. Mary’s, officiated. But the star was Blythe, who was magnetic in the preacher’s role that had first brought him to prominence nearly forty years ago.

  Reverend Blythe was a genius in many ways. Most white people in Kindle County had laughed at Blythe at some point, amused by his excessive rhetoric and his twenty-four seven state of rage. Arthur was no exception. Yet he also remained mindful of Blythe’s many achievements, not only the legendary feats, like walking with Dr. King and forcing desegregation of the county’s schools, but less celebrated accomplishments, such as a free breakfast program for poor children and several redevelopment projects that had changed the faces of neighborhoods. Perhaps what Arthur admired most was the voice of hope and identity Blythe had long provided to his community. Arthur could still remember at the age of eleven and twelve tuning in the Reverend Blythe’s Sunday broadcasts to listen to him lead a congregation of thousands in intoning,

  I AM

  A Man.

  I AM

  Somebody.

  As Carnelian Blythe’s voice rocked from his depths, young Arthur felt every bit as inspired as the members of the Reverend’s flock.

  But Blythe’s aptitude for engaging the press might have been his most unrivaled skill. If Blythe was there, so were the cameras—he was good for fifteen seconds on the evening news any time he opened his mouth. Arthur could hardly object. The Reverend had kept Rommy’s story on the front page, when the media would almost certainly have lost interest were his cause championed by anyone else. Yet Arthur still felt his client would be better served if he kept his distance from Blythe’s fulminating.

  After the final hymn, Blythe followed Monsignor Wojcik and the family from the Cathedral, bowing his bald head as Erno’s casket, bearing a spray of white flowers and the Stars and Stripes, was delivered to the hearse. The photographers, never with any sense of propriety, crowded in. Collins, the nephew whom Arthur recognized from his mug shot, was the first of the six pallbearers. In his suit and tie, he appeared every bit the solid citizen he was said to have become. He lifted a gray glove to his eyes as the box disappeared into the vehicle, then went to comfort his aunt and his mother, both dressed in stark black. Together, the three moved toward the limousine that would follow Erno’s remains to the cemetery.

  As soon as the family was on its way, Blythe began repeating much of his eulogy verbatim for the cameras that surrounded him on the Cathedral steps. Arthur snuck away, stopped by the lone reporter who recognized him, Mira Amir from the West Bank Bugle, who beat Stew Dubinsky to almost any story of note. In response to her questions, Arthur assured her that Gandolph would be filing a motion for reconsideration of the Court of Appeals order dismissing the habeas. Arthur prophesied success, but had little to say when Mira pressed him for the specific grounds he would raise.

  Returning to his office, he was glum, discouraged about Gandolph’s case and, inevitably, morose with the feelings for his father that had arisen from the occasion. On his desk, Pamela had left a stack of documents at least eight inches high and an explanatory note. For the last two days, following up on Gillian’s suggestion, Pamela had been attempting to identify anyone in the travel industry in Kindle County who had been referred to as Pharaoh, or by any name that might have sounded anything like that. She’d had no luck after spending much of yesterday on the phone, and at Arthur’s suggestion, had journeyed today to the Department of Registration to examine the rolls of travel agents in the state.

  The records she’d assembled were carefully grouped: the rosters of corporate travel departments, the membership of a local travel industry trade association, and microfiche copies of the registration forms of four travel agents. Here, unlike most states, travel agents were licensed by law, a process that required an Associate’s Degree, a passing grade on a statewide exam, and proof of good moral character, which, generally speaking, meant no history of felonies or of stealing clients’ money. According to a vivid account in her handwritten note, Pamela, in order to identify travel agents licensed in 1991, had had to return to the predigital era in the Department basement, where the mold count had nearly been enough to choke her and the microfilm reader had left her with a brutal headache.

  Arthur picked up the gray copies of the registration forms she’d printed out. Ferd O‘Fallon (‘Ferd O?’ Pamela’s paste-on note read). Pia Ferro. Nick Pharos.

  Faro Cole.

  It took him only a second to place the name and he ran up the stairs to Pamela’s office. She was on the phone and he jumped around, waving his hands until he had forced her to get off.

  “That’s the guy Erno shot!”

  To be certain, he made Pamela dig the police reports from the shooting out of the file drawers in the corridor. Once she had, they sat in her spare office, a narrow space in beige laminate, where every flat surface had been surrendered to irregular piles of cases and statutes and draft briefs. In a corner, she’d added a Shaker rocker, adorned by a bold red blanket bearing the stitched image of the University of Wisconsin badger. She used the chair as a resting place for her coat and stray volumes she hadn’t gotten around to returning to the firm law library and Arthur cleared it off, laying the blanket over the metal heat registers with the tender reverence Pamela thought it was due. He sat and Pamela rested her feet on a desk drawer. Together, as they’d done for hundreds of hours before, they noodled. It was Faro, not Pharaoh. A travel agent. It seemed so obvious now. Pamela, in fact, was chagrined with herself.

  “Rommy said it was F, a, r, o,” she said, “and I laughed at him.”

  “If your worst mistake as a lawyer is not taking spelling lessons from Rommy Gandolph, your career’s going to turn out okay,” Arthur told her. There was a more important question than trying to figure how they’d been so dumb. “Where do we find him?” Arthur asked.

  Sick of dusty basements, Pamela urged paying one of the Internet search companies that had compiled a database of public records in all fifty states. His partners had begun to question the expenses mounting in a losing cause, but Arthur was even more impatient than Pamela for answers. What came back, however, after Faro Cole’s name was entered and various detailed searches were ordered hardly seemed worth the $150 they had spent. There was a sketchy credit report showing little more than an address from 1990 and the data, last updated in 1996, that had appeared on Faro’s driver’s license. As for the myriad additional records QuikTrak supposedly canvassed, there was not a further hit in the fifty states. Faro was no longer licensed as a travel agent here, or in the other thirteen jurisdictions which certified agents. Faro Cole had never been to court—never sued, never bankrupt, never divorced, never convicted. He had never taken a mortgage or owned real estate; he had never been married. In fact, if QuikTrak was correct, he had not even been born, nor had he died, anywhere in America.

  “How is that possible?” Pamela asked after they’d submitted the last search for birth information.

  Arthur watched the screen. As before, once
you saw the answer, it seemed obvious.

  “It’s an alias,” Arthur said. “Faro Cole is an alias. We’re looking for somebody else.” And with that, one more thing was obvious, too.

  They were nowhere.

  ON WEDNESDAY, Larry was off, as he had been most days since the court’s decision, burning the comp time he’d accumulated chasing around nights on the Gandolph case. He and his guys were finishing a new house near the top of Fort Hill and today Larry’s taper hadn’t shown. He had to don the face mask himself and sand drywall all day, dirty, tedious work in which the fine plaster dust seemed to penetrate even his pores.

  Around noon, he felt his pager vibrating. The number went back to McGrath Hall. Police brass. If he’d been doing something worthwhile, he’d have ignored it, but today he took the break. At the other end, the secretary answered, “Deputy Chief Amos’s office.” Wilma Amos, Larry’s long-ago partner on the Task Force that investigated the Fourth of July Massacre, was now Deputy Chief for Personnel. As far as Larry was concerned, Wilma and the job deserved each other, but she had maintained a rooting interest in the Gandolph case and had called a couple of times after Erno surfaced to get the inside stuff. Larry thought she might have been delivering an attaboy on the Court of Appeals decision, but when she came on the line, she said she had some news that might interest him.

  “My sister Rose works at the Department of Registration,” Wilma said. “A little girl came in there yesterday who said she was a lawyer in Art Raven’s firm. Looking for information about travel agents in 1991.”

  “Nineteen ninety-one means Gandolph, right?”

  “That’s why I’m on the phone, Larry.”

  “And does your sister know what Arthur’s associate got?”

  “Rose helped her print out the registration forms. Made copies. I was going to send them over, but they said you’re off, so I thought you’d appreciate the page.”

  “I do, Wilma.”

  She was ready to read him the names on the forms. Larry got a pencil from Paco, his chief carpenter, but he stopped writing once she mentioned Faro Cole.

  “Crap,” said Larry. He explained who Faro was.

  “What does it mean that he’s a travel agent?” she asked.

  “It means I missed something,” Larry answered.

  Agitated, he went back to work. At first he thought he was upset because he’d fanned on something as obvious as Faro being a travel agent. But there was more to it. With nothing else to preoccupy him, he kept thinking it all through as he bossed the sandpaper over the seams. By the end of the afternoon he was stuck on an idea he didn’t especially like.

  Around four, Paco and his two guys knocked off, and Larry decided to walk the three or four blocks down to Ike’s, the cop hangout where Erno had plugged Faro Cole. Maybe if Ike’s wasn’t nearby, he wouldn’t have bothered. But there were worse ideas than having a cold one on a hot day and putting his mind at ease.

  Larry did his best to clean up, but a floury dusting of plaster remained in his hair and on his overalls as he headed down the hill. The area was yuppying-up in a hurry. A lot of the locals were arriving home early to make the most of the daylight, and the men and women with briefcases looked like they’d been to the golf course, not the office. Larry’s college degree was in business. Now and then, over the years, when he’d thought about the money he might have earned, one of his comforts was that he didn’t have to half garrote himself every morning with a necktie. What a world. You just couldn’t count on anything.

  Ike’s was no more than a hare-bones tavern. No ferns or hardwood here. It was a long dim room with poor acoustics and the distinct yeasty odor of spilled beer. There was an old mirrored bar of cherry, booths along the wall upholstered in red plastic, and picnic benches in the center of the floor. Ike Minoque, the owner, was an ex-cop who’d gotten shot in the head and gone on disability in the early ’60s. Guys from Six began to hang out to help him out. Now Ike’s was a destination for anyone on the job in Kindle County. There were two groups who arrived here during the week—cops, and ladies who liked them. When Larry came on in 1975, one of the old guys had said to him, ‘You get two things with this job you don’t get with most others—a gun. And girls. My advice is the same both ways. Keep it in the holster.’ Larry hadn’t listened. He’d shot two guys, albeit with justification. On the other score, he had no excuses at all.

  The Code said nobody ever talked about what went down at Ike’s—the tales told or who you left with. And as a result, you learned stuff here they couldn’t teach in the Academy. Guys lied a lot—they covered themselves with false glory. But there were plenty of boozy confessions, too: when you hadn’t covered your partner, when you got so scared your body failed you. You could cry about fucking up, and laugh about the world of bean brains who were out there just waiting for the police to find them.

  When Larry entered, several voices rang out. He shook hands, taking crap and giving it, and worked his way back to the bar, where Ike was drawing drafts. The two projection TVs in the barroom were showing reruns of Cops.

  As several other men and women had done already, Ike congratulated Larry on the outcome of the Gandolph case. This thing with Erno had bothered a lot of people—it always did when anybody who called himself part of the brotherhood went bad.

  “Yeah,” said Larry, “I didn’t shed any tears when Erno took off on the highway for hell.” The morning paper was on the bar next to him. Below the fold, there was a photo of Collins and the others rolling

  Erno’s casket into the hearse. It had taken all Larry’s self-control not to go down to St. Mary’s yesterday with a sign reading ‘Good Riddance.’

  “Son of a buck was not my cup of tea, either,” Ike said. “Something about the way he missed the job. You know, like mom kept him home when the other boys went out to play. I thought he had the wrong idea about things. Easy to say now. But,” said Ike with a smile, “Erno wasn’t all bad. Bought a hell of a lot of beer in here.”

  Ike resembled an elderly beatnik. His hair was gone on the top, but the snowy sides overflowed his collar, and he wore a goatee. He had a long apron, which might not have been washed in a month, and the eye that he’d lost when he was shot was a pure milky white and moved now and then for reasons of its own.

  “Were you around the night he plugged that guy?” Larry asked him.

  “Around? Yeah. But I was doing the same as I’m doing now. I didn’t see nothing until I smelled the gunpowder. Isn’t that a pisser?” asked Ike. “That .38 probably shook plaster off the walls, but the first thing I remember is the smell.” Ike looked into the barroom. “Gage over there was standing not three feet from the both of them. He seen it all.”

  Once he got a beer, Larry drifted over that way. Mike Gage worked Property Crimes in Area Six. His picture was in the dictionary next to the term ‘good cop.’ He was one of those blacks with a permanent part in his hair that looked like it had been applied with a chisel. He was a quiet type, church on Sunday, six kids. Larry had a theory that the quiet guys did the best on the job. Larry himself, especially when he was younger, was just too damned excitable. Mike was even. A lot of policemen tended to run bitter. In general, the job seldom turned out to be the adventure you hoped for. Even your kids got old enough to realize you weren’t the legend you wanted to be in your own mind. It was paperwork and boredom, getting passed over in favor of the connected, and making far less money than half the creeps you snagged. And by the time you got hip, you had too little going to move on to anything else. But Mike was like Larry, excited to see the shield when he picked it up every morning. Gage still thought it was a great deal, helping people be good rather than bad.

  Mike was with a bunch of other guys from Six, but made room on the bench beside him. One guy with Gage, Mal Rodrigues, extended his fist across the picnic table, and Larry gave it a knock, ballplayer style, celebrating last week’s victory again. It was noisy in here—Creed was pounding out of the speakers—and in order to be heard Larry had to
get close enough to Mike to cuddle. They talked about the case for a minute, what a strange guy Erno had proven to be.

  “Ike says you were right there when Erno popped that character— Faro Cole?”

  “Larry, I’m on the job long as you, and truth be told, that’s as close as I’ve come to a bullet.” Mike smiled at his beer. “The fool Erno shot—Faro?—he’d been wailing like some Iraqi woman, and Erno got the pistol out of his hand and pushed him outside, then all the sudden they were back in here and bang. Not three feet from me.” Mike pointed toward the side door where he’d been sitting.

  Larry asked one of the questions that had been bugging him for a while: Why was a complaint never lodged against Faro for threatening Erno?

  “We all figured Faro for past tense. And Erno didn’t want charges anyway. Once we took the gun, Erno started in bawling over the body.”

  “I thought Erno was saying self-defense.”

  “He was. But he kept telling us leave the guy alone.”

  “Not too logical.”

  “You’re Homicide, you tell me, but I didn’t think shooters were where you went for logic.”

  Larry took a second. Better sense told him to stop now, but at the age of fifty-four he still hadn’t figured out how to heed the voice of caution.

  “Here’s the thing, Mike. Today, I’m starting to have bad dreams. I need comfort on one thing. You think you could make this guy? Faro?”

  “Four years, Larry. Maybe Mal could. He had Faro’s head in his lap for fifteen minutes while we were waiting for the mercy wagon.”

  “Lemme buy both of you a beer at the bar.”

  Ike had put today’s Trib away and it took him a second to find it.

  “This bird,” said Larry, displaying the front page to Gage and Rodrigues, “this one. Just check me out that he doesn’t look like the guy Erno shot.”