Jude Read online

  “You need your privacy.”

  “It’s not as if we don’t spend all our time together anyway,” Davis said. “I usually go straight to bed after you leave.”

  “I barely see you guys. And the back bedroom has its own bathroom attached, so that’s no problem,” Lizzie added.

  “But …”

  “But what?” Lizzie prompted.

  Jude had nothing to say.

  “Then it’s settled. You’ll bring your things tomorrow.”

  Jude knew he should say no. But he didn’t.

  The next afternoon Jude brought his things, and that night he slept in a soft, clean bed in a room by himself. For a long time he lay awake listening to the silence. For the first time in years he couldn’t hear the sounds of other men’s dreams.

  He woke up feeling better than he had in ages, and the longer he stayed with Davis and Lizzie, the more the sense of well-being grew. It almost felt like he was part of a family. Unfortunately, none of Jude’s newfound contentment helped with his progress on Harry’s files. They refused to be anything but ordinary files. Davis and Jude found out that Harry spent too much money on his suits, but that he hadn’t taken a real vacation in eight years. When he went out to eat, he always went to one of two favorite restaurants. They saw that he gave a big check every year to the Police Benevolent Association and a smaller check to the local Fresh Air Fund, which took underprivileged kids out of the city for a week in the summertime.

  They tried calling the numbers that appeared most frequently on Harry’s phone bills and discovered nothing. Jude spent a whole afternoon blacking out the name on every document in the tax file, and Davis took it to his accountant and asked him to go through it and tell him if there was anything out of place. When the accountant called back, he said the only thing that was strange was that the guy was such a stickler and didn’t try to get around anything. “Is he a politician or something?” the accountant joked. Davis laughed dutifully and swore when he hung up.

  “This guy is the straightest, the most virtuous, most tedious bastard I’ve ever seen,” Davis exclaimed after more than three weeks of poring over the pages. “There’s nothing here. He pays his taxes so honestly you’d think he was trying to get a job at the IRS. He doesn’t spend more than he makes. He doesn’t seem to get any money that’s not from his salary. He doesn’t have any friends that aren’t cops or politicians. Jude, I’m starting to think—”

  “Don’t say it,” Jude said. “You can’t be giving up already.”

  “It’s been three weeks. We should at least start thinking about what else we might do.”

  “Let’s give this another week. One more week before we start looking at other things.” He said it calmly, but he felt desperate. He knew he was running out of ideas, and worse, Davis was running out of patience. Davis had been fine when they were visiting criminals and breaking into houses, but the monotonous labor of sifting through papers was draining his resolve.

  “Okay, one more week,” Davis said. “But I can’t work tomorrow night. I’ve got a dinner thing, so it’ll be just you and Lizzie.”

  Jude worked the next afternoon in the study—the same as always. And Lizzie made dinner when she got home, just like she had every night for the last three weeks. But dinner itself was different. It was the first time they’d spent together without Davis around, and Jude found himself telling Lizzie the whole story. Later he wondered why he hadn’t done it earlier. It was long overdue. They had dinner, and a bottle of wine, while he told her about growing up with his father and how he came to live with his mother. He got through the point where Anna announced she was running for mayor, and they moved to the living room with a second bottle of wine. At first he sat on the couch while she curled up in a nearby armchair, but soon Lizzie moved over to sit next to him. By the time he told her about Harry’s visit to the prison, she had reached out for his hand. He loved the feel of her hand in his, but he knew it was about to be withdrawn, because he wasn’t going to make the same mistake with her as he had with Davis; he was about to tell her about Benito.

  Jude described the first fight against the welcome committee. He explained how Lefty challenged him and how the fights just seemed to continue after that. Finally he told her about Benito. He didn’t soften it at all in the telling, but though she listened intently, he couldn’t sense any trace of revulsion.

  When he finished, they sat a moment in silence. Finally Lizzie said, “It’s amazing how, at the same time, you can be so much better a person than I am—I could never have done what you did for your mother—while you also have done something worse than I could ever imagine. The best and the worst. What does that make you?” she wondered.

  “Human, I think,” he answered, and she laughed.

  40

  NOW THAT SHE knew the story, Lizzie announced that she could finally help Jude and Davis sort through the papers. The next day she left work early, and she came straight to the study, where Jude was flipping through the pages of a folder for what felt like the thousandth time.

  “Okay, I’m ready to work,” she said, taking off her suit jacket and slinging it over the back of a chair.

  “Lizzie, I’m starting to think this is just a wild-goose chase,” he said. “We’ve gone over this stuff a million times. I don’t think you’ll find anything.”

  “Your faith in me is touching.”

  “You know what I mean. I’m just not sure there’s anything here to find.”

  “Give me a chance at least. Maybe all you need is a new set of eyes. Now, show me all the different folders you have.”

  He went through them with her.

  “Well, I might as well start with my strength,” she said. “Hand over the bank statements, please, and go get us something to drink. I’m dry as a bone.”

  By the time he got back with two beers, she was already deep into the bank file. He placed a beer in front of her on the table. She said, “Thanks,” and reached for it without even looking up.

  For the next half an hour they worked in silence. Lizzie plunged in with a concentration and seriousness he would never have guessed at. She spoke only once, to ask him if they had the cancelled checks anywhere.

  “We have the registers,” Jude said. “And some of the oldest checks, but it would have taken all night to scan all the cancelled checks he had.”

  “Can I see what you have?”

  It was twenty minutes later before she spoke again. He was paging through Harry’s credit card bills, lingering over the purchases of jewelry. One, Jude was sure, must have been the engagement ring. Another must have been the wedding rings. He could trace the other purchases by anniversaries.

  “I think I’ve found something,” Lizzie said.

  Her voice was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that it took Jude a moment to realize what she had said. “You found something,” he repeated.

  “Come over here and take a look.”

  THAT’S WHERE DAVIS found them an hour later—in the study, bent over the papers.

  “What is she doing in here?” Davis demanded. “She’s not supposed to be in here.”

  Lizzie and Jude looked up.

  “Lizzie found it,” Jude said simply. “She found what we’ve been looking for.”

  Davis opened his mouth to say something, and it stayed open, but nothing came out.

  “Take a look at this,” Lizzie said. “You’ve just been searching for the wrong thing. You’ve been looking for deposits and expenditures—for money that he shouldn’t have had—but I stare at these things all day, and I was just looking for anything strange, and this is what I found.” She laid out thirteen bank statements in front of him and pointed. “Here and here and here and here, see these? These are all checks for between fifteen hundred and three or four thousand. They don’t exactly stick out here because he has car insurance every year that’s a thousand, and a bunch of other expenses that go up to twenty-five hundred. It was the three and four thousand that caught my attention, and when I
looked at the check register, look what I found.” She shuffled through and found a page and pointed. “There.” She flipped through to another page. “There.” Then another page. “There. They correlate to those thirteen checks. All of them made out to Cash. There doesn’t seem to be any regularity that I can find. The first one is the biggest, and it’s a lot of money, especially for back then. It was, God, more than twenty years ago. The next one comes six months later. The third, eight months after that. Then fourteen months. Then nine. There doesn’t seem to be any real pattern. Between the eighth and the ninth there was only a two-month lapse, and this here”—Lizzie found the sheet and indicated the check—“that’s the last. Thirteen years after the first, they stop. There’s not a single other check written to Cash since. That’s almost ten years without another check written to Cash. I tallied them up. Altogether they add up to forty-two thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money for a policeman, even spread out over thirteen years. Now, what I want to know is—what were those thirteen checks for?”

  In his excitement Davis seemed to forget the concern about Lizzie’s knowing the story. “That’s it. That’s it.” He swept Lizzie up in a great hug and then, to Jude’s astonishment, did the same to him. “So how do we find out what they were for?”

  “That’s the hard part,” Lizzie admitted. “But this is what we’ve come up with so far. We can make a chart and put down the different dates of the thirteen checks and the amounts, and then we’ll try to match it up with other things in his life—cases, friends, phone calls. We’ll have to go back over all the material again with an eye to those dates.”

  “All right. Let’s do it.” Davis slapped his palm down on the table. “Jude, let’s get to work.”

  “What about me?” Lizzie said. “I’m the one who found it. You can’t just get rid of me now.”

  Lizzie went out and bought a piece of poster board. On it she made a grid with the dates of the checks and the amounts in big black letters that they all could see as they worked.

  Then they each took a file. They checked the obvious places first, but Harry hadn’t declared the payments as any tax deduction on his returns, and they couldn’t see that there was any one phone number that correlated specifically with the dates.

  They made an outline of Harry’s career and promotions. He’d had only one partner after Jude’s father, and they weren’t partners for long. The exposure Harry got from heading up the investigation into Anthony’s disappearance seemed to jump-start his career. In less than six months Harry got his promotion to sergeant, then lieutenant, captain, all the way up to deputy commissioner, but they couldn’t connect the checks to his promotions.

  Jude went back—alone this time—to Mr. Levy, but he returned empty-handed. Davis tried calling the one partner Harry had after Anthony, explaining that he was looking into doing a piece on the commissioner. The man talked to him but disclosed nothing useful.

  There were times that Jude despaired of connecting the checks to anything—the pattern seemed so random—but Lizzie insisted that there was some sort of correlation behind the apparent disorder, they just hadn’t found it yet. That was how it worked—whenever anyone got discouraged, one of the other two would spur him or her on. For all their frustrations and disappointments, they were a team. They had passionate, cheerful fights over dinner and stayed up so late that, in their exhaustion, they burst into fits of giggles over the quirky things in Harry’s files.

  Two weeks passed, then three. Everything seemed wonderful … until the Saturday Jude decided to call in sick. His schedule at the diner had him working six days a week—every day but Monday. And every day he had to be there by 6 A.M. What with the commute, that meant he had to be up by four thirty.

  That Friday night they’d worked on Harry’s papers until eleven—then Jude intended to go to sleep, since they’d been up late the night before as well. But both Lizzie and Davis wanted to go out. They coaxed and cajoled and finally convinced him. Before he knew it, it was past two and they were all drunk. They didn’t make it home until three, and they all stumbled off to bed. But when his alarm went off, Jude knew he couldn’t manage his shift. He called in from the phone in his room and rolled over and fell back asleep.

  But Davis and Lizzie didn’t know he had stayed in bed. He was always gone by the time they woke up, so they assumed he had gone to work just as always. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have been talking about him—and he certainly wouldn’t have overheard their conversation.

  He was going to the kitchen to get some breakfast, and he was just outside the door when he heard his name. He stopped instinctively and caught Davis saying, “Sure, I think Jude’s a great guy too. But he’s not like us.”

  He could see them sitting at the kitchen table. Lizzie’s back was to him, but Davis was sitting facing the doorway, where Jude stood. The only reason Davis didn’t see him was that Lizzie blocked most of his view.

  Lizzie’s voice was a murmur Jude couldn’t make out, but he knew she must have offered some kind of defense, because Davis replied, “I know he didn’t do it. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Guilty or innocent, nothing will ever change the fact that he did time in a state prison. That never gets erased from his record. Even if he moves to the other side of the country, it’s there. He has to put that down every time he goes for a job, when he applies for an apartment, hell, he probably has to put it down if he wants to buy a dog. He’s always going to be an ex-con.”

  Lizzie spoke again, but her voice was even lower this time, and Jude had no chance of hearing the words.

  “All I’m saying is that he can’t stay here forever,” Davis replied. He paused, then said, “I don’t want to tell him to leave either, but it’s my responsibility. I’ll take care of it.”

  Lizzie’s chair squealed against the floor as she shoved it back from the table and went over to the sink. Jude tried to draw back, but the movement caught Davis’s attention, and he looked up right into Jude’s face. Davis flushed and opened his mouth to speak, but Jude shook his head, laid his finger on his lips, and pointed to Lizzie. Then he backed away from the doorway and retreated to his room.

  A few minutes later there was a soft knock on his door. Then Davis opened the door. “Jude?” he said hesitantly. He took a step into the room and said, “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” Jude asked, folding another T-shirt and stuffing it into his bag.

  Davis stood there a moment, watching Jude pack. Then he said, “I didn’t mean for you to hear it that way.”

  Jude just continued folding clothes.

  “You don’t have to go right this second.”

  “I’m going to leave my stuff here for the day, if that’s all right,” Jude replied. “I’ll come back for it tonight, when I’ve found a place.”

  “Of course. That’s fine. You can take as long as you need. I mean …” Davis flushed again. “I mean, if you need a few days …,” he faltered, then went on. “Listen, I’m sorry you had to overhear that. It’s not the way I wanted this to happen. And I didn’t mean for you to leave so abruptly, but … maybe it’s for the best. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Completely,” Jude replied.

  “She doesn’t … she’s naive. She doesn’t understand how the world works. I’m afraid she might be getting ideas. But you understand why that would never work—how impossible that is.”

  “Impossible, or just inconvenient for you?” Jude asked.

  “I don’t think I deserve that,” Davis said. “I’ve tried to help you. I’ll still try to help you—anything I can do. It’s just that … I’m sorry, but I want something better for my sister than to see her fall for an ex-con.”

  “Is that how you think of me?” Jude said.

  “It’s how the world thinks of you,” Davis replied. “And we live in the world.”

  Jude snapped his suitcase closed. “I’ll be back for my stuff later. It might be best if you and Lizzie weren’t here.”

 
“But how am I going to explain it to Lizzie if you just disappear?”

  “I’ll come back tonight to say good-bye,” Jude said. “I owe her that much. But after that I’ll be out of your hair.”

  JUDE STUDIED THE apartment listings on the bus into town. He chose three to go see. They were all small and shabby, but the last one was small and shabby and cheap and available immediately, and he signed the lease.

  Then Jude took the bus back to the house. Thankfully, he found it empty. He retrieved his bag from his room and then went to the study and started to collect the folders. He secured them with rubber bands and loaded them into the cardboard boxes. After he was finished packing those, he looked at the grid that Lizzie had done of the checks and the dates. After a moment’s consideration, he bent the slippery poster board into a loose tube and secured that also with rubber bands. It was almost evening when he tucked the poster under one arm, shouldered his bag, and carried the stack of boxes to the bus stop. Jude wanted to avoid the spectacle of leaving with all his belongings packed and slung over his back. He especially didn’t want Davis to offer to drive him to his new apartment. What if Davis insisted on helping him carry his things up? He would see the dingy studio with the kitchen appliances lined up along one wall and two grimy windows opposite. Davis would pity him. And he didn’t want Davis’s pity. He didn’t need it. Davis would never understand that, for Jude, as cheap and shabby as the room was, it was his.

  Jude took the bus, walked the five blocks to his apartment, climbed the three flights, and finally dumped the boxes on the floor of his room. He was exhausted and wanted to sit down, but there was nothing to sit on. There wasn’t a scrap of furniture in the place—just the boxes and his bag sitting there in the middle of the empty room. He unpacked the folders and lined them up along the wall. Then he unrolled the poster and put folders on either end to help flatten it out again. He took his clothes out of the bag and put them away in the closet, and that was as much unpacking as he could do. Tomorrow he would go shopping.