It was an ordinary door—no ancient worm-eaten planks, no hand-forged iron hinges—just paneled oak, probably with a steel core. Ordinary, that is, except for the complete absence of a knob on the outside. No window or peephole either, but I followed the tingle in the back of my neck to a surveillance camera mounted above the frame. I used my thumb on a nacre button the size of a quarter. A dull gong thudded somewhere deep in the house.
“Who is it, please?”
A tense, reedy voice. I decided there was a speaker hidden behind the wrought-iron fretwork that decorated the wall on both sides of the door. The answer had come so quickly the owner had to have been standing near the mike when I rang.
“Amos Walker. I called earlier.” I flipped open my folder and held it up to the camera next to my face.
“One moment.”
It was a little longer than that while a number of snaps, clicks, clinks, and scrapes worked their way down from the top of the door to just below waist level. After that came a series of electronic beeps. I counted them. Not many alarm systems require ten digits to disarm.
The woman who opened it was almost as tall as I was, with broad square shoulders under a thin salmon-colored sweater buttoned at the neck and worn cape-fashion with her bare arms outside the sleeves. Vail Goss, Chester’s wife, had aged twenty years since her picture had appeared in the papers at the time of the investigation into her daughter’s death, but then she hadn’t looked young under the stress of the period, so there wasn’t much contrast. On the cusp of sixty, she was still what writers used to call a handsome woman. The lines in her face were barely skin-deep, her tight mouth wore a thin coat of orange, and her eyes were a smoky gray-green, the whites clear. Her jaw-length red hair looked natural. Each time she spoke, her high thin voice caught me by surprise. If someone pinched her she’d summon every dog in the neighborhood.
She pivoted away from the door—and from me. “Chet’s in the den. Can I bring you a refreshment?”
I said no thanks and stepped into an entryway paved with green and white tiles. She used the hand not occupied resetting the locks to indicate a door standing open at the far side of the room. I didn’t see her again after that.
As I approached the den, someone or something was grunting and panting inside. It sounded like a horse blowing after a hard gallop.
The room was small and octagonal, with a bump-out window beyond which more flowers drooped over a stone border. Framed community-service citations hung on the walls and a foot-high winged statuette on a pedestal hoisted a gilt globe on a small round table that seemed to have been designed to support it. A couple of easy chairs and a love seat, all upholstered in slate-blue squishy-looking leather, were pushed up against the walls, making room for the man jumping around in front of a forty-inch widescreen. His tennis whites were dark with sweat and he had a wicker basket shaped like a giant spoon strapped to his right forearm, which he used to smack a virtual ball toward an animated male figure on the screen. This character caught the ball on the bounce with an identical basket and returned fire.
I watched this for a while, my hands in my pockets. When it didn’t look like he was going to turn around any time soon, I spoke.
“You realize if I couldn’t see the TV, I’d think you were having some kind of seizure.”
He didn’t jump at the sound of my voice, although his back was to me and I’d raised it to be heard above the gasping and foot-thumping. With his free hand he scooped a cigar-shaped remote from a pocket of his shorts and flicked off the set and the DVD player using one button. He tossed it onto one of the shoved-back chairs, snatched a white towel off the arm, and mopped his face and the back of his neck. Then he turned to face me.
If Hour Detroit magazine could be trusted, Chester Goss was a few years older than his wife; he looked younger. Lean and tan, with vertically pleated cheeks and thinning dark hair cropped close, he looked like an advertisement for a prescription drug that promised you a life of hang-gliding, bike trips, and alligator wrestling despite your horrifying disease; when the drug companies sign a spokesman, they make sure he’s of a certain age and in excellent health. This one had a wide, humorous mouth, but whatever joke it was enjoying was lost on his eyes. They were as flat and gray as lead slugs.
He unstrapped the gizmo from his arm, watching me the whole time. “Jai alai. My PR guy talked me into taking a commercial DNA test, to reel in a sponsor. Turns out I’m Basque on my mother’s side. I’d thought I was as English as Gladstone’s pup. Naturally it led to an Iberian binge; I learned Spanish and Basque, vacationed in Madrid, ate bull’s testicles straight from the arena. This is the only thing that stuck. It’s brutal, even if you’re only competing against a cartoon. My face is too well-known to play a real game in the real world without interruption. Mr. Walker?”
“Guilty.”
He looked at a sports watch strapped to his left wrist. “Right on time. You must know how important that is to a former television programmer.”
I nodded. “Same time, same station.”
Goss slung the towel around his neck, flung the basket—I suppose it’s called a racquet—into a chair, and closed the distance to shake my hand. His grip was what you’d expect of someone who hops about batting around pretend balls with a simulated opponent. When he let go I flexed blood back into my fingers and pointed one at the gold statuette on the round table. “That’s the first Emmy I’ve seen outside a TV screen.”
“Prime-time reality. I was up against American Ninja and the umpteenth reboot of Big Brother. Could’ve been worse. I started out in daytime. That would have put me in the category with Jerry Springer.”
“And you thought jai alai was brutal.”
He had a square smile. His teeth were perfect. What other kind of work he’d had done was strictly between himself and his specialists.
I asked him how Cutthroat Dogs was doing.
“I never check. If the ratings are good I don’t need to know it, and if they’re bad I don’t want to remind my sponsors they’re backing a dodo. I just signed on for three more seasons, so I guess it’s holding its head above water. The number of dangerous felons who have been apprehended based on tips from my viewers is a more accurate barometer of the show’s success. We just cracked a thousand.”
“Congratulations.”
“Congratulations to us all.” He used a corner of the towel to dab perspiration from behind one ear. “You know, my earliest sponsor insisted I call it Monsters Among Us; dropped me when I refused. That’s what they are, wild animals that prey on the weak. I was a year getting cable access under my title. I’m not sure whether the yellow-bellies were afraid of offending dog-lovers or cutthroats. Anyway, by the time the networks signed on, a dozen wannabes had sprung up with some version of the same thing. A successful title is the title of a successful show.
“Anyway, that’s what the boobs who run the tube think. As they see it, it’s always the public’s fault when the ratings don’t deliver; but it’s always the show that gets the axe.”
He excused himself to take a shower and told me to make myself at home. While he was gone I took the tour. He’d been commended by police and sheriff’s departments throughout Southeastern Michigan, two governors, the Detroit Police Officers Association, and the Michigan Bar. There was a framed photograph of him sitting in an easy chair opposite Mike Wallace; I remembered Goss had been one of his last interviews on 60 Minutes.
There was something missing, but I didn’t know whether to bring that up.
A distant whirring of water stopped with a clunk and he came back a few minutes later, wearing a pale yellow sports shirt outside gray slacks with a knife-edge crease, tasseled loafers on his feet. His face was ruddy and he’d slapped on something that smelled like sunned leather.
“You said on the phone you’re looking into April’s murder.” He tipped a hand toward a sling chair. I took it and he took the one opposite and crossed his legs.
“I’m hoping to clear up that sealed-evidence business.”
“May I ask who you’re representing?”
“That’s confidential.”
The corners of that humorous mouth turned upward a millimeter, spreading the pleats in his face. “I can guess: Some do-gooder out to reform our justice system, trying to reopen cases that were closed to everyone’s satisfaction years ago.”
“Something like that,” I said. “I don’t know about the do-gooder part, and I’ve never known everyone to be satisfied, ever.”
“My station gets letters and e-mails after every broadcast. The whole shop’s broken, they say, and what we need to do is raze it and rebuild it from the ground up. Better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to imprison one honest one.”
“That is the system.”
“Bullshit. I’d stake this house on the certainty that not one of those bleeding hearts lost a close relative to some cutthroat dog.”
His voice remained steady, but a flint sparked in his eyes. I moved a shoulder. “I don’t own anything I could stake against it. I wondered if you had any idea why the fact that your daughter wasn’t pregnant was withheld from the jury that convicted Daniel Corbeil.”
“Does it matter? They were out less than three hours and there wasn’t a single holdout all through the deliberations.”
“My client wants to know whether that would still be true if the defense could have used the evidence to cast doubt on motive.”
“Possibly not. But they all would have come around eventually. You should have seen their faces during summations. You could have cracked walnuts on eight of them.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Goss.”
“No. I have no idea why the decision was made. You’d have to ask the judge, but that would be difficult because he’s been dead for years. I suppose you could file a motion to unseal all the records; but that would take time and involve court costs your client can’t cover. Huron Valley doesn’t exactly pay its inmates minimum wage. You are representing Corbeil, aren’t you?”
I wasn’t, but if I told him I wasn’t, he’d jump to the next conclusion, this time the right one. Chrys Corbeil had already had her portion of what the media could do to a private citizen.
“Mr. Goss, can you tell me why there are no photos of your daughter in this room?”
He uncrossed his legs and stood up. “That’s it. Leave.”
I felt my eyebrows touch my hairline. “It was a—”
“I know what it was. You think I’ve stopped caring. I don’t need to decorate my home with reminders to keep the pain alive. Some days I wake up, full of relief that I had a ghastly dream. Then I remember, and it’s that first horrible day all over again fresh.”
“I didn’t—”
“If you’re not out of this house in two minutes I’ll file a restraining order against you. I may file it anyway.”
Still I kept my seat. “No judge would comply. I haven’t said or done anything that could be interpreted as a threat.”
“Don’t be so sure. Get out.”
Vail Goss was nowhere in sight, leaving me to undo all the locks and latches to let myself out. I didn’t mind. I had what I’d come for: The name of the man responsible for the seal.