Page 9

She and Tom find him snoozing in the fourth-floor lounge with a copy of a detective novel calledToxic Preyopen on his chest. Instead of a natty three-piece suit, he’s wearing a tired hospital robe over wrinkled pajamas with Hello Kitty faces on them. His hollow cheeks sport a salt-and-pepper beard scruff. His hair is half-long and half-bald. Plates of yellowish eczema shingle the bald spots. The skin of his face not covered with the patchy beard is so white it’s almost green. His body is skeletalexcept for the bulge of his belly, which is huge.Like a mushroom ready to sporulate, Izzy thinks. There’s a wheelchair on one side of him, an IV pole on the other. As they draw closer, Izzy realizes that Tolliver doesn’t smell very good. Actually, that’s not exactly true. Actually, he stinks.
They split apart without talking about it, Tom standing by the wheelchair and Izzy next to the IV pole, which is drip-drip-dripping some clear liquid into the back of Tolliver’s hand.
“Wake up, Cary,” Tom says. “Wake up, sleeping beauty.”
Tolliver opens his eyes, which are red and rheumy. He looks from Tom Atta to Izzy and back to Tom again.
“Cops,” he says. “I told that County Attorney everything I know. Wrote him a letter. Fucker sat on it. I’m sorry Duffrey got killed. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I have nothing else to say.”
“Well, maybe a little more,” Tom says. “Show him the letter, Iz.”
She takes out her phone and tries to hand it to him. Tolliver shakes his head. “I can’t take it. Too weak. Why can’t you let me die in peace?”
“If you can hold that book, you can hold this,” Izzy says. “Read it.”
Tolliver takes the phone and holds it close to his nose. He reads the Bill Wilson letter and then hands it back. “So? You think this guy believes I’m the guilty one? Fine. Even though I tried to take it back, fine. Let him come and kill me. He’d be doing me a favor.”
Izzy hasn’t thought that “Bill Wilson” might consider Tolliver the one guilty person… although she’s betting Holly already has. She says, “We want your help. Bill Wilson is almost certainly an alias. Can you tell us who might have written this? Who was close enough to Alan Duffrey to make such a threat?”
Tom says, “The letter might be bullshit, but if it isn’t, you could be saving some lives.”
“I’m no kiddie freak,” Tolliver says, and Izzy realizes he’s stoned to the gills. “I told the other cops that. And the DA guy, that fuck. The stuff they found on my computer, I only saved it so they’d believe me. Dumped it, then brought it back when I got sick. Duplicates of most of the stuff I sent to the Duff.” When he saysthe Duff, he raises his upper lip in a doglike snarl, and Izzy sees some of his teeth are gone. Those remaining are turning black. He reallydoesstink:eau de piss, eau de merde,andeau de mort. She can’t wait to get away and breathe some clean air.
“He had mags as well as the crap on his computer,” Tom says. “I’ve talked to Allen and read the file on the way over here. One of them was calledUncle Bill’s Pride and Joy. How’s that for disgusting?”
“If you did it—” Izzy begins.
“I did, and that fuck ADA Allen knows I did. Sent him a letter in February, after I got my diagnosis. Explained everything. Told him stuff that wasn’t in the papers. He sat on it. Duffrey should be out.Allen’sthe guilty one.”
“Ifyou did it,” Izzy repeats, “we don’t care how you did it. We care about who might have written this letter.”
Tolliver doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on Tom. Izzy isn’t surprised; when she works with a male partner, male subjects usually discount her. Women do, too.
“I bought the magazines on the dark web,” Tolliver says. “Snuck into his house—the basement bulkhead was unlocked—and stashed them behind his furnace.”
“Tell us who was close to Duffrey,” Izzy says. “Who might have been pissed off enough to—”
Tolliver goes on ignoring her. It’s Tom Atta he’s talking to, and gathering steam. “You want to know how I got the stuff onto his computer? I explained it all to Allen, but that fuck paid no attention. So once I made my peace with dying—sort of, I guess as much as anyone does—I told it to Buckeye Brandon.Thatguy listened. I sent Duffrey a notice that purported to be from the USPS. Misdirected package. Anybody knows that’s phishing,grandmasknow it’s phishing, but this dumbbell—supposedly smart enough to be chief loan officer, but about as smart as a busted light switch—this dumbbell went ahead and clicked on the link. Then I had him. I sent him a zip file tucked in halfway through his tax file. But I never meant for him to die. That’s why I came forward.”
“Not because you found out you were dying?” Even though this isn’t why they’re here, Iz can’t help herself.
“Well… sure. That had something to do with it.” He looks at her briefly, then switches his attention back to Tom. “Some of the blame has to go on the guy who stabbed him, right? All I wanted was for him to be on the Register when he got out. That promotion shouldhave been mine. It should have been mine and he stole it.” Incredibly, Tolliver begins to cry.
“KAs,” Izzy says. She thinks of tapping Tolliver on one thin shoulder to redirect his attention but can’t quite bring herself to do it. The stink of him has got her stomach sudsing. “Known associates. Help us out and we’ll leave you alone.”
“Talk to Pete Young in the loan department. Claire Rademacher, the chief cashier. He was buddy-buddy with both of them. Or Kendall Dingley, he’s the branch manager.” That doglike lift of the upper lip. “Kendall’s dumb as dirt, only got the manager job because his grandfather founded the bank and his uncle runs the Fire Department. There’s a park named after old Hiram Dingley, you know. I should have sent Kendall some kiddie stuff, too, everyone would have thought the Duff and the Dingbat were in it together, but I didn’t because I’m a good guy. I know you don’t believe that, but at heart I’m a good guy. The Duff used to suck up to the Dingbat like crazy. That’s why he got my promotion.”
Izzy is writing down the names. “Anyone else?”
“Maybe he had friends in his neighborhood, but I wouldn’t know about th—” He grimaces and lifts his pregnant midsection. He lets out a trumpet blast of flatulence, and when the smell reaches Izzy, she thinks it’s strong enough to blister paint.
“Christ, that hurts. I need to go back to my room. The morphine pump will have re-set by now. Roll my chair, will you?”
Tom leans forward into the stink and speaks low. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, Cary. If you’re telling the truth, you got an innocent man sent to prison and he got stabbed and it took him a day to die. You think you’re in pain?Hewas in pain and didn’t deserve it. I’d punch you in that grotesque gut of yours, but you’d fart some more.”
“My wife left me,” Tolliver says. He’s still crying. “She took my kids and left me. I did it for her as well as me, she was always bitching about we can’t afford this and we can’t afford that, and who’ll bury me? Huh? Who’ll bury me? My brother? My sister? They won’t answer my emails. My mother said—”
“I don’t care what she said.”