Defense for the Devil Read Free Page B

Mitch had mentioned that he might stop off and see his ex, that he had a debt to pay, but everyone assumed he meant on the return trip and had thought little of it. He was due to arrive in Seattle on Friday and never showed up. Instead, he called and at first claimed that his car had broken down, but when his supervisor told him to rent a car and get to Seattle, he said his ex had thrown him out and he couldn’t get back in to collect the stuff until Monday because there were a hundred or more people around. When he didn’t show on Monday, the company sent Trassi, the company lawyer, to get the papers and find out what was happening.”
    Maggie stopped there and sipped her wine again. Her eyes were narrowed and a slight frown creased her forehead. “He told me they would give a thousand-dollar reward for the suitcase and briefcase, and the company would cover the damage Mitch had done to the inn. He described the briefcase and suitcase.”
    Barbara drank her wine and waited the few seconds it took for Maggie to resume. There was no point in prodding her; she knew what she wanted to tell, what she had to tell, and her report was as clear and precise as Barbara’s would have been.
    “I was tempted,” Maggie said. “Really tempted. My insurance is pretty limited, the minimum that I have to carry. So there’s a big deductible, and partial coverage. Anyway, before I could even ask a question, Mama and Papa Arno and Ray came rushing in, over from Eugene. I told Trassi I had to leave. He tried to keep me another minute or two, but the Amos were all over us, and he saw it was useless. I left with the Amos. We drove up to the inn, and Mama was crying, Papa cursing, like that.” She flashed her fleeting smile again. “It begins to sound like a farce here,” she said, almost apologetically.
    “They were all talking at once,” she said. “But what happened on Friday was that Papa Arno saw Mitch getting a drink from a hose near a shed, and he thought it was a bum who had stumbled out from the woods. Then he saw it was Mitch. He ran over to him and told him to turn around and beat it, but Mitch was muttering that he was going to kill me, and Papa Arno knocked him down. He thought he had to hide Mitch or someone would be killed that weekend. He shoved him inside the shed and told him to stay or he’d have him arrested. Mama and Papa Arno got together to decide what to do, and they called Ray and told him to wait at his house for them. When the rest of us went to dinner, they took Mitch to Ray’s house, here in Eugene. Ray told him to clean himself up and they’d talk on Monday, that if he showed up at the inn, he’d beat him to a pulp. Then he came over. But on Monday when Ray got home, Mitch had left. He broke some lamps, spilled beer, left a mess; we think he might have broken into Papa’s house, too, but he didn’t do any damage there. Then he hit my house,” she said furiously. “What if I’d been there with the girls?”
    Her hands were shaking again. Barbara patted one and said, “Easy. You weren’t, they weren’t. So he tore up the place, no one got hurt.”
    “Right,” Maggie said after taking another of her calming, deep breaths. “Anyway, Monday when I got home from Portland, there was a message on my phone machine from Ray, for me to call him back that night. And I called him from the hotel later. He told me Mitch had been there and was gone, and I began to cry, I guess, and I told him about the inn. He wanted to come over then and hang out, just be there if Mitch came back, but I told him that Tom Lasker was on guard, and he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s why Mama and Papa came over the next morning with him. We got to the inn and Mama went to pieces again, but Irene kept saying it was her fault, for leaving the place open to air out, and Tom was there telling everyone it was simple vandalism. I really wanted to tell them, at least to tell Ray that Mitch had been there, get his advice about what I