The little six-car lot on the north side of the building on Decatur was full, so I drove up the hill and made a U-turn in the next intersection and parked against the curb across and up from my place. I buttoned up the car and trudged across the cold, wet street, my hands jammed into the pockets of a jacket that had grown too thin and too light since I had left home that morning.
The wet pavement did me a favor. It was the sound of rubber on water, not the sound of the engine, that alerted me.
I looked up, startled, and the monster was there. A big car—a Cadillac, maybe, maybe a Lincoln; in the momentary paralysis of panic I didn’t register which—bearing down on me, headlights dead, grille gleaming in the street lights like a vicious maw.
My seeing it seemed to enrage it, because suddenly it growled and surged forward.
Instinctively, I lunged toward the building, toward home. The car swerved, as if locked onto me. I scrambled up the back bumper and across the trunk and onto the roof of a Camaro parked in the little lot. The car was wet and slick with the damp; I slipped on the low-pitched roof and went down on one knee as I tried to turn and get a look at my attacker.
The big car avoided a collision—obviously, or I would undoubtedly have been flung off of the Camaro. By the time I got my footing and got turned around, the monster had disappeared, no doubt having jumped the light at the corner, the intersection of Decatur and the Radial. If he wasn’t worried about little things like traffic lights, the driver of the big car had four choices: left, north up the Radial, opening into the north and northwest ends of the city; right, down the Radial and into central Omaha or onto the Interstate; straight ahead up Decatur and into the Benson district; or straight ahead through the intersection, bearing left onto Happy Hollow Boulevard and into the Dundee neighborhood.
Four ways to disappear fast, in other words, and four good reasons for me to not bother trying to follow him.
I climbed down from the Camaro, a good deal more slowly and less surely than I had clambered up it, and made my way upstairs.
I spent perhaps thirty seconds telling myself that my near-miss was just a dumb accident—almost-accident. A drunk. An idiot. A kid playing hot-rod games. By then the tall neat bourbon I had poured for myself was gone and my heartbeat was down to only three digits and my hands were almost steady enough that I could use just one hand to pour the second drink. I spent the next ten seconds assuring myself that the arguments presented in the previous thirty seconds were too fat-headed for even me to buy. Then I added some ice to the shorter drink I had poured, cranked up the heat a notch, and moved into the living room to do some thinking.
A guy in my line makes enemies. Down these mean streets, et cetera. I hadn’t sent too many crime warlords up the river or exposed more than my share of corrupt kingmakers or toppled an unreasonable number of drug empires. But I had gone out of my way to be annoying to a great many people over the past ten or fifteen years. Some of them were petty and some of them were powerful, and some day I may open my door and find one of them standing on the other side of it with a nasty surprise for me. But this, the monster car, wasn’t it. It didn’t feel right. The event lacked the memorable, instructive nature of a mob action: It would be too easily dismissed as an accident rather than an act of retribution. Nor did it have the grim, personalized air of a small-timer’s vengeance: It was too anonymous, and the instrument of revenge was all wrong. Being hit by a car, even a big car, is no guarantee of death.
The conclusion, then, was that the driver didn’t necessarily want to kill me.
Reassuring as hell.
Suppose his game had been to scare me. He succeeded. But what was his point? What was he trying to scare me away from—because no one ever tries to scare you toward something; it just isn’t done—and why?
Well, if I knew the what I’d probably know the why, and I might have a decent stab at guessing the who.
Clearly a three-drink problem. I polished off the second one and was heading for the kitchen to fix a replacement when the doorbell rang. I checked my watch. Only seven-thirty. These sunless days, and the fact that they were getting noticeably shorter, played tricks with the old internal clock.
Quickly, and quietly, I moved through the living room and down the hall and into my bedroom-office. There’s a file drawer in the desk. I’ve got one of those hanging-file racks in the drawer, with the file folders held in heavy green paper slings rather than merely being crammed into the drawer. That leaves a little bit of wasted space between the bottom of the slings and the bottom of the drawer. Enough space to conceal a .38 police revolver and a box of bullets.
I reached down between the green slings and hauled out the gun, peeling it out of the rag I keep it in, throwing the rag into the bathroom as I passed it on the way to the front door. I keep the gun loaded. It soothes my paranoia, which at the moment was running high. I was ninety-nine percent sure that my bad-driver friend had had nonfatal intentions. But there was still that one percent or so that said, What if he didn’t miss on purpose, and has come back for another crack at it?
From inside the apartment, the door opens left to right—which made it awkward to open left-handed, but I managed it, keeping the revolver behind the door, out of sight—but not so far behind or out that I couldn’t bring it into play quickly if called upon.
The light in the brick wall just outside my door is dim and yellow, but it was enough to make Alexander Wayne’s blunt, ruddy features recognizable. I undid the useless latch on the aluminum storm door and let him in.
“Mr. Nebraska.” His voice was the same hearty boom it had been on our first meeting, but there was none of the heavy jolliness he had displayed then. He stepped onto the square of linoleum just inside the door. “Look, Nebraska, I need to—” He had caught sight of the gun, which I made no effort to hide as I closed, and locked, the door. “Er … is this a bad time?”
I looked at the weapon in my hand. “No.”
He frowned, perplexed, and glanced around the room as if to reassure himself that it was safe.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Wayne?”
“Well …” He unzipped his brown-leather car coat. “Would you mind if I sat down?”
“Not much. I was going to have a drink. Want one?”
His eyes were on the gun in my right hand. My hand was at my side, but it’s funny: A gun doesn’t actually have to be pointing at you to get your attention.
“Fine,” he said in a tone that said he didn’t really think it was fine at all but that he didn’t want to get into it with a lunatic who walked around his apartment all by himself heavily armed.
“Fine,” I said, and wandered into the little kitchen. I set the gun on the counter by the fridge. “Bourbon’s all I got.”
“Fine.”
“Ice?”
“Whatever you’re having. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“No trouble.” I went about the chore and surreptitiously eyed Wayne under the cupboards that separated the two rooms. He was certainly jumpy enough to have just come from trying to turn my best friend into roadkill on Decatur Street. Or was it just the gun? Or was it something else? If Alexander Wayne had been the anonymous driver, and if his intent had been murder, then I would have opened the door to the type of unpleasant surprise I was talking about a little bit ago. Wouldn’t I? But if he was trying to scare me away from something—say, investigating his son and his son’s relationship with Meredith Berens, of whose death Alexander Wayne may or may not now know—he might have decided to circle back and see how I was doing, scared-offwise.
If Wayne wasn’t my automotive friend … Well, then what was he doing here?
I slid the revolver into my back pocket and carried our drinks into the other room.
“Thanks.” Wayne sucked half an inch off the top of the glass, sat back against the sofa, and sighed. “Christ, what a night.”
“No argument here.” I wet my beak, but only just, and the drink was more tap water and ice than liquor. The two drin
ks I had already taken care of had done a swell job of smoothing out my nerves and I didn’t want them to start working on my wits. “I don’t mind the company, Mr. Wayne, but you can get lousy liquor almost anywhere.”
He grinned lopsidedly. “Do you know what I’ve been doing for the past”—he looked at his watch—“hour or so? Answering questions from the police. The police! And Thomas!”
“What sort of questions did your son have?”
The lopsided grin stayed fixed. “You know what I mean. They questioned my boy, too—and pretty intensely, from what he tells me.”
“Huh,” I said impassively. “What about, I wonder.”
The grin grew ragged. “You know that, too,” he said, pulling on the drink. “Meredith, Meredith Berens. She’s dead.”
“You’re right; I did know that. But thanks anyway for stopping by with the news.”
“You like to annoy people, don’t you? You like to pretend to be obtuse.” The grin was gone entirely, as was the overblown heartiness.
“Not especially,” I said. “What I like better is people getting to the point.”
“Fine.” He got rid of some more liquor. “Meredith is dead and the police were questioning my son—and me, for that matter—about his relationship with her, this ‘engagement’ business, and so on.”
“Uh-huh.”
“From some of their questions—well, your name was mentioned. I got the impression that you may have spoken with them first.”
There didn’t seem to be any good reason to pretend otherwise. “With one of them, to be exact.”
He nodded, as if I had confirmed something. “That … assertive woman. Banner, I think her name was. And just what did you tell her to make her think my Thomas killed that girl?” There was something very similar to anger bubbling just beneath the surface.
“The cops arrested your son?”
“No. But from the questions they asked me about Thomas and Meredith, and from what Thomas told me about their questioning of him, I think there’s little doubt but that they suspect him. Strongly. And I think there’s little doubt but that you had something to do with that, Mr. Nebraska.”
“Don’t flatter me. Of course I told the police everything I know about Meredith Berens.” Banner knew I was investigating Meredith’s disappearance, and there was no point pretending otherwise, even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. The only private investigators who play cutesy with the cops on a murder investigation—or any other kind, for that matter—are the ones on TV. Or real-life ones who aren’t fond of their permits. “Naturally I told the cops about my meeting with you and your son this morning—about his side of ‘this engagement business,’ as you put it—and about his violent outburst.”
“You were provoking him,” Wayne shot back.
“Absolutely. I was provoking him to see what sort of a reaction I’d get. I saw.”
“Bah!” He didn’t really say “Bah,” of course. No one does, except perhaps in an affected, self-conscious way. But he made a disgusted sound, a disgruntled, frustrated kind of noise that amounted to about the same thing as “Bah.” And he drained his glass in an angry gesture. “This is pointless.”
“I’m inclined to agree. Look, Mr. Wayne, I can understand your being upset about the police questioning your son, but that’s a helluva lot better than what Meredith Berens went through, and anyway he’s not under arrest. Whether or not I tried to bias the cops against him, I’m afraid my opinion doesn’t really swing that much weight with them. They’ll conduct their own investigation and they’ll reach their own conclusions. Right now, they’re coming from the same place I was coming from this morning—a place from which they can see an awful lot of, shall we say, unusual factors in your son’s relationship with Meredith Berens.”
“ ‘This engagement business,’ you mean?” He was a little cooler now.
I nodded. “She says yes, he says no. Odd, to say the least, and she’s no longer in a position to hold up her side of the debate.”
“Oh, come on. If Thomas were engaged, don’t you think he’d tell me? I am his father.”
Donna Berens had said almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same tone of voice. The statement hadn’t proved anything then, as far as I was concerned, and it didn’t now.
“I don’t know what your son may or may not do, Mr. Wayne. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? I do know that Meredith Berens told Dianna Castelli that she was engaged to your son. I understand the Castelli woman is a friend of your son. It was she who introduced them in the first place. For what it’s worth, she doesn’t think Thomas killed Meredith, and she knows your son better than I do. Anyhow, whether there in fact was an engagement may be secondary.”
“Meaning what?”
“As I said this morning, if Meredith acted as if there was an engagement and refused to be dissuaded … well, her unintentional intended might have felt boxed-in, cornered, with only one way out.”
“Bah,” he didn’t say again, this time less vehemently. “That’s utterly ridiculous. The problem with people like you, and the cops, is all you deal with day in and day out is scum. Garbage, human garbage. So you begin to think the way human garbage thinks, and you begin to think everyone thinks that way, and that everyone, given the opportunity, is capable of murder or worse.”
“Everyone is. Capable, at least.”
“No, sir. Everyone is not. Most people have had the opportunity to kill someone. Most people have even had the motive. But most people do not commit cold-blooded murder. How do you explain that?”
“Restraint. Good breeding. Religion. Fear. There are probably two-dozen different reasons for every individual on the planet, Mr. Wayne. The fact that I’ve never chosen to murder someone doesn’t mean I’m incapable of it. It just means I haven’t had a strong enough motivation. Or I haven’t been pushed hard enough.”
“And Meredith Berens pushed my son ‘hard enough,’ is that it?”
“That could be it. Or not. I don’t know. Neither do the police. That’s why they have to ask questions, and why I had to provoke your son this morning. We don’t know. But we want to know. And I have the feeling we will.”
He held my eyes for a long time. Then he looked away, looked at the empty glass between his big, fleshy hands, and carefully set the glass on the coffee table in front of him. “My son is all I have, Nebraska,” he said quietly but strongly. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for him.” He looked at me again. “Everything. I don’t want to see his life ruined by this.”
“If he’s innocent—”
“I’m not as old and senile as I might look,” he cut me off. “Whether or not he’s innocent doesn’t matter, does it? Being under suspicion, and being charged and tried, if it should come to it, is more than enough to ruin him, innocent or not. Being close to it, losing someone he was fond of, has been hard, very hard. A long time ago …” He paused.
“A long time ago?”
“I was thinking about Thomas’s mother. Her loss was extremely hard on him. He was very young. I think losing a friend, a girlfriend, like this is going to be doubly hard on him, because of that. And to be questioned about her death, grilled by the police …” He shook his head.
“All of Meredith’s friends are being questioned, Mr. Wayne, or will be. What makes your son special?”
“He’s my son,” the big man roared. “And I won’t let him be crucified by you or the police, or that silly little girl who called herself his fiancée. Do we understand each other, Nebraska?” His features were twisted into a grotesque parody of his other, palsywalsy, somebody’s-uncle face. Its ruddiness was now blood-red, white in the deep creases around his mouth and across his forehead.
“Take it up with the cops,” I said. “It’s their party.”
“They know my feelings. Now I’m talking to you—and you can carry it back to your client, too. I will not have Thomas dragged through the mud. You find out how much it’ll take for the girl’s mother to keep her nose out
of it. Hers, and yours. And then you go to your little girlfriend on the police force and you tell her you were wrong, about Thomas and the girl, about everything. You tell her there is no way my son had anything to do with that little bitch’s death.”
I fought to keep my voice, and my dander, down. “I told you, Wayne: The cops don’t dance to my tune.”
“You sicced them on my boy,” he insisted. “Now you can call them off. Understand? You get hold of that broad, whatever her name is, and you call her off! Do you understand?”
I understood very clearly, or thought I did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As it happened, Dianna Castelli lived not far from me, in a narrow, old two-story in Dundee. After Alexander Wayne had left—in an older, which is to say bigger, LTD that may or may not have been the car that nearly had me as a hood ornament—I had sat in my chair and nursed my weak drink and thought and got nowhere. I picked up the phone and dialed Koosje’s number, hitting the disconnect button with my thumb before the call went through. What would be the point? I asked myself. Small talk is easy when things are easy between two people, hard when things are hard. Things were hard between me and Koosje just now, no denying that. And I didn’t have the vaguest idea of where to begin to get things back on track.
That was the one good thing about my relationship with Jennifer, my sort-of wife: I knew and always had known just exactly how things stood with us. I knew that we could have a marriage in more than just name if I would give up my residency here in this Paris of the Plains and join her in her endless quest to be in the “in” place with the “in” people doing the “in” thing.
Trouble is, “in” doesn’t stay “in” very long, and I don’t have the kind of energy it takes to keep after it.
I looked up Dianna Castelli in the book and dialed her number.
It occurred to me that, if the police hadn’t gotten around to talking with her yet, as they surely would, Dianna might not yet know about Meredith. And even if it turned out that she did know, it was a good excuse for my calling. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, after the events of the day—the scene in the morgue, the scene after the morgue, my nearly becoming just another spot on the pavement, and Alexander Wayne’s odd visitation—I needed someone to talk to.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 15
