“Exactly,” I said, but oh, did I feel like a heel lying to this old man: I hadn’t changed a single name; my notebooks were rife, were polluted, with the good citizens of Westlake, Maryland. Even down to Tooey Jones and his gut-wrenching tonic.
Earl exhaled heavily out of flared nostrils. “Before we get into this, I want to show you something.” He shuffled over to a credenza overburdened with stacks of papers and unopened mail. Humming beneath his breath, he sorted through one of the piles, his back toward me.
I was startled to spot an Irish wolfhound lounging silently beside the credenza, shaggier than the carpet itself and roughly the size of a grown man. From beneath its fringed bangs, it eyed me with soulful black eyes. Somewhere in the shadows, a space heater whirred to life.
“Ah, here it is,” Earl said and returned to the table. The sound he made when he dropped into the chair was like an old bicycle horn.
He handed me a grainy photograph of a man in cutoff jean shorts and a tank top, dragging a washrag across the windshield of a yellow Firebird. The man was perhaps in his midforties, although the picture was somewhat out of focus, making it impossible to tell for sure.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“My son.”
I had no idea where this was going, so I slid the picture back to him without saying anything.
“A careless affair in the days of my youth,” Earl said, taking the photo from me and looking at the photo with what I assessed to be a mixture of longing and regret. “It’s not necessary to go into that. I just wanted to show it to you because, for whatever reason, you sort of remind me of him. Not that you look anything like him, and to tell the God’s honest truth, I’ve never spent any time with the boy to know if you two share any of the same mannerisms. I guess maybe you’re how I sometimes think he might be.” He set the photo on the stack of papers atop the credenza. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I told him, though I still had no idea why he’d showed me the picture.
“That was my roundabout way of explaining why I’m about to show you this stuff. Because I feel a bit of a kinship to you, I guess, which means I trust you not to exploit me. You say you’re writing a book, and that’s just dandy, but I can’t have what I’m going to show you go beyond these walls.” He rattled a cough into one fisted hand before resuming. “I know you’re a stranger to me, and I may just be an old fool, but something is telling me I can trust you to keep that promise. That internal voice ain’t never steered me wrong in all my years. I hope you won’t be the one to prove it wrong.”
“I swear it,” I said. “What you tell me stays between us.”
Earl slid the accordion folder in front of him. “It ain’t so much as what I’m gonna tell you as it is how I came across what I’m going to tell you.” He undid the string and opened the folder. A ream of multicolored papers bristled from inside. He took out a slender stack of white paper held together with an industrial-sized paper clip and gave it to me.
I scanned the front page, seeing David Dentman’s name right off the bat, as well as his West Cumberland address and other personal information—social security number, telephone number, date of birth. “What am I looking at?”
“David Dentman’s criminal history.”
I peeled back the pages, skimming them as I went. “How did you get this?”
“I’m not going to say. It’s probably illegal, me just having that stuff, and I ain’t about to rat anyone out.”
“Then I won’t ask again.” I paused to read one of the pages more closely. “He’s had three arrests. If I’m reading this correctly, I mean . . .”
“Oh,” said Earl, “you’re reading it just fine.”
“Two for aggravated assault, another for—what’s ‘A and B’?”
“Assault and battery.”
“Jesus Christ.” I read closer. “What does ‘nol pros’ mean?”
“Latin for nolle prosequi. Means he was arrested but wasn’t prosecuted.”
“So he got off on all three charges?”
“So it says.”
“How come?”
Earl shrugged and rubbed his stubbly chin with one of his big grizzly bear hands. “Could be for a number of reasons. Not enough evidence against him. Or maybe the victims dropped the charges.”
“Who’re the victims?”
“I have no idea.”
I reread the pages. “The most recent arrest was only three years ago. That was the assault and battery. Are we talking bar fights here or . . . ?”
“No way to tell.”
“Is there a way to decipher . . . I mean, who were the arresting officers on these?”
“Can’t tell by reading that gobbledygook,” said Earl.
“So David Dentman has a criminal record,” I said. “Surely the cops looked into this after Elijah disappeared?”
“I’ll bet they knew about it. Sure.”
“So the guy’s nephew allegedly drowns, the body’s never recovered, and his statement’s the only thing they have to go on? Sounds awfully slipshod, doesn’t it?”
“There’s the woman, too,” Earl suggested. “She saw the boy down by the water and later heard a scream. Don’t forget.”
“Right. Nancy Stein. I spoke with her and her husband a few days ago. It was only after being interviewed by the police that she said she’d heard a scream. A wail, she called it.” I frowned, shook my head. “But she had reservations when I spoke with her, as if she’d been thinking about that wail and her subsequent statement to the cops for many nights since that day. I think she thinks that maybe they talked her into saying she heard Elijah scream.”
Earl was dragging a set of fingernails down the bristly side of his neck; he froze upon hearing my words and glared at me from across the dimly lit table. “Are you talking about a police cover-up?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just think that maybe whoever questioned Nancy might have accidentally put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head. Think about it. You hear a noise like someone crying out but think nothing of it. Later a bunch of cops show up at your doorstep and tell you the neighbor’s kid is missing and that he probably drowned in the lake. They ask you if you heard anything, maybe a shout or a struggle or a scream. And of course your mind returns to that one lone cry you heard—or thought you heard—earlier that day. Then all of a sudden you’re certain you heard it, and that’s what the police write down in their little notepads.”
“Sure,” Earl said. “I’ll buy it.”
“Did you interview David or Veronica for the newspaper articles you wrote?”
“No. Police wouldn’t allow it.”
“So who gave you all the details?”
“The officers at the scene. Later on, Paul Strohman’s office issued an official release that I used to check my facts.”
“Paul Strohman?” I had heard the name but couldn’t remember where.
“He’s the chief of police. Wait . . .” Earl dove back into his folder and thumbed through several more papers before he produced a newspaper clipping.
It was a brief write-up about the Westlake Police Department closing the investigation into Elijah’s disappearance, satisfied that it was an accidental drowning. Alongside the article was a granular black-and-white photo of Chief of Police Strohman. Even in the lousy picture, I could tell Strohman was good-looking and well put together. He was wearing a handsomely cut dark suit as opposed to the police uniform one would have expected him to be wearing, and he sported the Cheshire cat grin of a Washington lobbyist. By all accounts, Paul Strohman looked nothing like the police chief of some backwater mountain village.
David’s face loomed up into my memory like a ship breaching fog, firing questions at me as I stood in his living room: You a cop? Strohman send you here?