One Good Deed

by David Baldacci

  Archer told him what the bartender had shared.

  “But as a parole officer if she saw you drinking at the bar, she should have turned you in for a violation.”

  “I know that! I’m wondering why she didn’t. And why would they hide that they were friends and all? When I brought Jackie over to stay at Ernestine’s I introduced them to each other. They acted like strangers till I did that.”

  “That is a puzzler.”

  “And now she’s gone.”

  Shaw started. “What? Who’s gone?”

  “Ernestine. Her clothes are all gone from her closet. I think she’s left town.”

  Shaw narrowed his eyes and rubbed his chin. “What else?”

  “Look, you know about her father?”

  Shaw shook his head, so Archer decided to fill him in on Carson Crabtree’s history and also about what he had found in the scrapbook.

  “So what do you think about that?” asked Archer. “Her father was a policeman. Then he ups and kills three men and confesses without giving any reason?”

  “And one of them was a Peeping Tom,” said Shaw thoughtfully. “You think?”

  “Well, it’s possible he was peeping on Ernestine. And maybe the others were too.”

  “But then why wouldn’t her old man say that in his defense? Hell, he might’ve gotten off scot-free if he had. I could see a jury siding with him over that, especially if he had a bunch of fathers on the jury.”

  “I don’t know,” said Archer. “But her mother killed herself later.”

  “Damn. That woman’s been through the wringer all right. Did she act surprised when she saw you at your first parole meeting even though she’d probably already seen you at the bar?”

  “Not a jot, no.”

  “Good poker face then.”

  “And then some.”

  Shaw looked thoughtfully at Archer. “Sheila Dixon?”

  Archer’s face collapsed. “What about her?”

  “She’s the mayor’s daughter you were charged and convicted with kidnapping, and false imprisoning and contributing to the delinquency of.”

  “Well, hell, I know that!”

  “You got a pretty short sentence comparatively.”

  “I worked a deal so she wouldn’t have to testify. And then I got paroled early. And dammit, for the record she told me she was twenty. I had no idea she was four days short of being sixteen. She didn’t look it, I can tell you that. And I swear on a stack of Bibles, we didn’t do anything. No fooling around or nothing. I just gave her a ride because she couldn’t drive.”

  “I know all that, Archer.”

  Archer’s jaw dropped perceptibly. “What! How?”

  “I spoke by phone with the lady and she told me the whole story. How she loved you, but you were a real gentleman. That she lied about her age and the car and pretty much everything else to get you on her side. And that her father browbeat her into lying about you, because he was worried it would sully his reputation having, as she told me he called her, ‘a slut’ for a daughter. And by the way, she’s still head over heels for you, though she’s married now and just had a baby.”

  “Well, damn,” said an astonished Archer. “Why’d you call her in the first place?”

  “Because I wanted to know what sort of man you were, Archer. See, what you do in the past can matter to what you do in the present and in the future. I believed you, in my gut. But it’s nice to have corroboration.”

  “You like your corroboration.”

  “In the detecting business, it’s damn important. Now the fact that she was still hankering for you shows that you got a real way with women, Archer, but the thing is, son, that’s not always good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a two-way street. Meaning women can have their way with you.”

  Archer thought about this and nodded. “I believe you might be speaking the truth there, Detective.”

  “I think I am, Archer. I truly think I am.”

  “Did Jackie see her father’s body?”

  “She did.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Funny you should ask. I’ve watched many a family member view their kin’s mortal remains. But I’ve never seen one who didn’t shed a single tear while doing so until yesterday.”

  “So what now?”

  “How much money you got?”

  “Nearly three hundred dollars.”

  “Well, lucky you, your bail is going to be set at two hundred dollars. We’ll go see the judge, you can enter your not-guilty plea, pay that amount over to the court, and you’re free to go for now.”

  “Why are you really doing this? I understand that you believe I’m innocent. And I’m damn glad of that. But you’re taking a chance here with me. You could torpedo your whole career over this. The easy thing would be to lock me up and throw away the key. Nobody would care.”

  “I would care, Archer. When I took a plane up in the air, I had a whole crew counting on me to make the right decisions. And I tried my best to do that very thing. And I signed up for this job to see that bad folks got punished. Putting the innocent in jail is something I have no interest in, because that would mean I made the worst decision of all. I might as well have put the damn plane in a nosedive.”

  “Well, I thank you for that.”

  “Don’t thank me just yet, Archer. We got us a long row to hoe.”

  Chapter 41

  AFTER PAYING HIS BAIL and entering his plea, Archer slept fitfully in his hotel room that night. His coming so close to being in a jail cell again had upset him more than he would have thought possible. But he had far too much in the troubling department to concern him.

  He awoke at six in the morning and managed to snatch a two-minute hot shower in the bath down the hall. He dressed and headed out to the Checkered Past for breakfast and a formulation of his plan going forward. The eggs and coffee were hot, the toast burned, the sliced tomatoes passable, and the slice of strip steak would have been of more use nailed to the bottom of his shoe than being eaten. And he loved every minute and bite of it because he was right now a free man. And he had no idea how long that would last. That just made a fellow appreciate things.

  He bought a five-cent newspaper and sat on a bench reading the headlines, learning nothing of interest and actually growing even more depressed than he currently was by some of the news stories. But he used the paper to also shield himself from folks passing down the sidewalk. He was hoping one of those would be Ernestine Crabtree, but he never saw her, even though where he was perched was directly on the path from her house to the Courts and Municipality Building.

  For the second time since he’d been here, the sky was cloudy and it looked like it might start raining again. At two minutes to eight he got up and headed to the Courts building.

  The front doors had just been unlocked, and he set up his surveillance post in the lobby behind a poster on an easel telling folks about a drive to aid war widows. Archer dropped fifty cents in the can attached to the poster.

  Eight thirty came and went. So did nine o’clock. Then ten o’clock. Then eleven.

  Finally, he took the stairs up to Ernestine’s floor and headed to her office door. From the looks of her house, the woman had left town. But, like Shaw had taught him, he needed confirmation of that.

  The parole office door was locked. And there was no sign on the door telling why the office was closed. He knocked several times and peered through the upper glass, but it was opaque, and the only thing he could tell was that there was no light on inside.

  A matronly woman came out of the office across the hall carrying a bunch of file folders.

  “Hello, ma’am?” said Archer.

  “Yes?” she said, smiling.

  “I was here to see Miss Crabtree, but she doesn’t appear to be in. Door’s locked.”

  The woman frowned at Archer. “Here to see Miss Crabtree, are we?” She might as well have tacked on, You ex-convict, you.

  “Yes, ma�
��am.”

  The woman glanced at the door and then at the clock on the wall overhead and her expression changed to confusion.

  “The door’s locked, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you try knocking?”

  “I did indeed. I’ve been out here a while. I hope she’s not ill in there or anything.”

  “Hmm. Wait just a minute.”

  She went inside her office and returned with a key in hand.

  “I work in the court clerk’s office, but this key will fit all the locks in the building.”

  “Well, that’s handy,” said Archer. “Wouldn’t mind having a key like that.”

  “Hmm,” she said disapprovingly. “What were you in for? And don’t say some petty crime. I’ve heard it all before. And don’t lie and say you’re innocent or misunderstood.”

  “No, ma’am. Fact is, I was a bank robber.”

  She looked at him with a new level of respect. “Indeed? Well, that’s where the money is, after all.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She unlocked the door, swung it wide, and said, “Miss Crabtree? It’s Mrs. Gibbons from across the hall. Yoo-hoo. Anyone in here?”

  Clearly, the room was empty.

  Archer also noted that the big, squat Royal typewriter was missing.

  Archer said, “You want to check the ladies’ bathroom down the hall, ma’am? I, uh, can’t do that.”

  “What? Oh yes, of course.”

  As soon as she left, Archer looked in the wastebasket and searched the desk. Other than office supplies and parole office forms, the only thing in the drawers was a small book. He picked it up and read off the title: “A Room of One’s Own.”

  He remembered it as being her favorite one of Woolf’s works.

  He slipped the book into his pocket when he heard the woman returning.

  “She’s not in the bathroom,” she said when she appeared in the doorway.

  “She might be sick at home.”

  “Well, if so, she should have let someone know. If this is your day to meet with her, tell me your name so you won’t lose credit.”

  “No, ma’am, it’s not my day. I was coming by to tell her that I got a job.”

  “Really, where?”

  “Slaughterhouse.”

  “Hmm. Knocking in hogs’ heads, I suppose.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You sure you were a bank robber?”

  Archer held up two fingers in the form of a salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Hmm.”

  He left her there and walked out of the building.

  He sat on a bench and opened the book to a page whose corner had been turned down.

  A sentence was underlined. He read it off: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

  Archer kept staring at those words as though they would cause everything in his life to instantly make sense. It didn’t work.

  He imagined there were two ways to leave Poca City. A car or a bus. If she had left by bus, he might be able to check that, or Shaw certainly could. If by car, that would be more problematic.

  Car?

  He hoofed it over to Fulsome Street, hoping to beat the rain, which he did. Mostly. The heavens burst open just about the time he made it to the garage. He shook off the rain and slapped his hat against his thigh and watched as rainwater turned reddish brown by the dirt ran in meandering rivulets down the asphalt.

  Well, this whole place could use a good cleaning.

  The Nash sat in its space. And according to Shaw this vehicle was a veritable bastion of evidence. Mostly against him.

  Now, he was no trained detective, it was true. But Archer had spent years of his life in another part of the world noticing little details that might save his life and that of his men. A machine gun muzzle barely visible under a mess of straw. A Panzer barrel edging out from the tree line. The too-intense stare of a villager who was trying to hide something. A wire leading to a bomb that looked like only a bit of plant vine. And then in prison it was sort of the same. A shiv sticking out from the cuff of a shirt, a guard clenching his baton a little too tightly before bringing it down on someone’s skull, a group of cons edging a bit too close for comfort.

  His realizing all these things before they could impact him, giving him a bare moment to react, and to live—those experiences had rewired Archer’s brain, bestowing on him a level of skillful observation to perhaps successfully accomplish what he was about to attempt.

  Shaw had said that in the Nash’s trunk were the imprints of what had appeared to be the gold bars, their weight pressing down on the soft carpet in the trunk. And along with that were grains of the gold dust. Clearly that had been the haul from Tuttle’s safe. Shaw had told him on the way to the police station that pictures of all this had been taken and would be used as evidence in a trial.

  In my trial.

  He checked the car, which was unlocked, but the keys were not inside, and the trunk was locked. He managed to work the back seat free and was able to access the trunk that way. He used his Ray-O-Vac light to look at the trunk carpet. He could make out the bar impressions and a bit of sparkly particles in one corner; he concluded the latter represented fragments of the gold dust.

  He climbed free of the car and shut the door.

  He looked at the Nash’s tires and lower half of the car and saw they were mud splattered. He felt the engine. It was cold. And the car couldn’t have been driven during this latest rain because it had just started not five minutes ago. He peered under the car and saw the hardened and now dried mud caked there, too. That meant the Nash had been driven during the big storm, on the very night that Lucas Tuttle had been killed. He wondered where it had been driven to, and who had been driving it.

  As far as I know, only one person has the keys. Jackie Tuttle.

  But she hadn’t mentioned going anywhere that night. She was at her house waiting for her father. Ernestine had gone home at eleven, and Jackie had gone to bed. Or so she had said.

  She had asked him to leave the keys in the glove box when he returned the car that day, and he had done so. Now, there was no law against driving your own car whenever you wanted, but still. Yet with the keys in the glove box, anyone could have driven the car.

  Including Ernestine Crabtree.

  He could fathom no connection between the parole officer and Lucas Tuttle. But there had seemed to be no connection between Ernestine and Jackie, either. And now that he knew there was, that meant the connection between Ernestine and Lucas Tuttle would probably run through Jackie.

  He walked around the car and stopped at the passenger side. He opened the door and sat in the seat. He rummaged in the glove box but found nothing useful. When he closed it back up, he looked directly down and saw it near his shoe.

  It was a bit of a yellow flower bud on the floorboard. He picked it up and looked at it more closely. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but it looked an awful lot like it could be from the flower beds at Marjorie Pittleman’s place. That would make sense because Jackie knew her and had visited the place.

  But why is the flower fragment in the passenger seat? Was it from my shoe when I was over there with her?

  But if that were the case, the bud wouldn’t have looked as fresh, he figured.

  He drew a long breath and then stopped before he let it out. Then he drew two more breaths. He wasn’t doing his combat ritual exercise. He was taking in a scent.

  Ever since his time as a scout in the war, Archer’s senses, particularly hearing and smelling, had been heightened. The bolt of a rifle sliding back or the collective breaths of a hundred men about to attack. Or the smell of cordite flung into the air from a brigade in arms marching. Or simply the scent of fear that oozed from anxious men at every deadly encounter.

  He recognized the scent he was now inhaling. And it was not Jackie Tuttle’s.

  It was the same one Ernestine had been wearing when he had gone to his first parole meetin
g.

  He climbed out of the Nash and shut the door.

  He couldn’t be certain that Ernestine had been in the car. She couldn’t be the only woman in town to wear that perfume. But if it had been her, what was she doing in the Nash? Then again, he had just found out that the two were great friends. So maybe they had made a trip in this car to the home of Lucas Tuttle on the night he was murdered.

  Archer left the garage and set off for Eldorado Street. He viewed Jackie’s house from a distance, looking for any sign of her being there before heading up to the front door. He knocked and knocked and then called out. He went over to the window that she had been at before and rapped on the glass there. He peered inside a crack in the drapes.

  He couldn’t see or hear anything.

  Archer looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He went around back and used his knife to unlock the woman’s rear door. He called out when he got inside but heard nothing. He looked quickly through the house and found nothing. A search of Jackie’s closet showed that her clothes, or at least a great many of them, were still there. But he didn’t see a suitcase. Only he had never been in her closet before, and thus didn’t know if she even had one.

  He glanced at the bed where they had lain together.

  Shaw’s words—or warning, rather—came to his mind.

  Women can have their way with you.

  He did find the Nash’s car keys hanging on a peg next to the back door.

  That was convenient, because he couldn’t exactly walk every place he needed to go.

  As he was leaving by the back door, he pulled out his pack of cigarettes but saw that it was empty. He spotted the garbage can and lifted the lid. It was half full of rubbish. He tossed the empty pack in there and was about to put the lid back on when he saw the wadded-up paper next to an apple core.

  He pulled the paper out and straightened it. On it were written a series of letters and numbers. He studied the paper a moment longer and put it in his pocket.

  Next, he went to the houses on either side of Jackie’s and knocked at the doors. No one was home at either place. Archer wanted to determine if anyone had seen Lucas Tuttle drive up to Jackie’s house at nine that night. Well, he wouldn’t get an answer to that right now. He wasn’t sure anyone even lived in them.