Little Dead Riding Hood

by Blake Banner

  “There is more to Chad Norris than meets the eye. A touch of Professor Higgins.”

  She dropped the big tome back in the crate and I resealed it. “Let’s get this back to the station and go through it.” As we climbed the stairs back up to the hall, I sang, softly, “Oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

  Dehan snorted ahead of me. “Actually, Stone, I was referring to the play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, not the popular musical by Lerner and Loewe.”

  “Sure you were. That’s because you are Eliza to my Professor Higgins.”

  “Jerk.”

  “See? Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “Jerk.”

  When we reached the hall, I handed her the box and the keys to the Jag. “Give me five minutes, will you?” She made a question out of a frown and I said softly, “Guys stuff.”

  I opened the door for her and she went out to the car. I closed the door and went into the living room. He was sitting at the dining table, staring down at an open book. He spoke without looking up.

  “What can I do for you, Detective? There is no need to come and say goodbye.”

  I leaned with my hands on the back of a chair, looking down at him. He sighed and looked up. I said, “Camus, The Outsider.”

  “What of it?”

  “Were you trying to tell her who you were? Or were you highlighting what you both had in common?”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that, Detective.”

  “Define too much.”

  He laughed. “Excellent! You should be a lawyer.”

  “Let’s quit fencing, Chad. Your relationship with Celeste was a lot deeper—meant a lot more to you—than you have led us to believe. You can deny it as much as you like, but any jury in New York is going to see right through your denials. They’ve seen enough reality TV to recognize denial when they see it.”

  He held my eye a moment, then said, “A jury?”

  “You want to tell me why a guy who’s in love with a girl would lie about it?”

  He made a face of derision and snorted. “Any number of reasons!”

  “How about when that girl gets murdered one block from his house after he discovers she’s been having an affair?”

  He sighed and dropped his face into his hands. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for this?”

  He dragged his hands down until they were in a praying position in front of his mouth.

  I kept talking. “You lied to me before about your relationship and your feelings for her. That was a stupid thing to do, because it makes you look guilty. Give me one good reason I should believe you now.”

  He looked down at the book in front of him and closed it. “I can’t. I acted without thinking. I had feelings for her. She was a pain in the ass, she was difficult, she was wild and much too emotional, sometimes she was overwhelming. But when she wasn’t around…” He shrugged. “…I missed her. I guess I felt I needed her.” He frowned at me, as though I’d said something he disagreed with. “She didn’t get in the way of my studies. It actually helped me, having her around. And she was smart. We had conversations…” He smiled. “You can’t do that with a lot of chicks. But she was getting restless. She had nothing to do. She wasn’t academic. I was encouraging her to read. I’m not a fan of Camus. I never yet heard of an existentialist who invented a vaccine or a space probe. But she was into all that fancy foreign café society shit. So I bought her The Outsider.”

  “And you read it.”

  “I speed-read it so we could talk about it.”

  “You really cared about her.”

  “I’ve already admitted that, Detective.”

  “So when you found out about Rod…”

  “It was tough. I’m not the jealous type, whatever you may think. We had a row, she promised she’d been stringing him along. What I told you about that was true.”

  “Except you said you hadn’t called her, and you had.”

  He flopped back in his chair, eyes closed, then sagged forward and took a deep breath. “Yes, I had.”

  “What made you lie about that?”

  “After Celeste disappeared, I decided I had to reinvent myself as a hard-headed son of a bitch. I try to cultivate that image. If you do that enough, eventually the image becomes real.”

  “What did you talk about when you called her?”

  “I asked her where she was and if she was coming over. She said she was on her way.”

  “Did she say whether she had spoken to Rod?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody else?”

  He frowned, remembering. “Yeah… She said she’d had a big row with her brother and with her dad. That was why she hadn’t come earlier. She’d been in her room. She needed to be alone or something. Then she’d walked out and her brother had called her, telling her to come home. Her dad was freaking out, having an angina attack or something.”

  “Did she say where she was?”

  “On her way.”

  “You didn’t go to meet her?”

  “I was going to, but she said not to.”

  “What did you do when she didn’t turn up?”

  He shrugged. “I watched a movie, then went to bed. I assumed she’d gone to see Rod.”

  I frowned. “That didn’t strike you as odd behavior?”

  He laughed a nasty, harsh laugh. “No. That’s women. They can change their feelings in a couple of seconds: ‘Oh, I’m crazy in love with you, but oops! I don’t really like the way you bend your legs when you sit and, and oh wow! Your friend has such big, brown, vulnerable eyes, now I’m in love with him.’ That’s women. Nothing they feel ever has any real depth or substance. It is never constant or real in any meaningful sense. You just have to live with it. After a couple of days, I boxed up her stuff and moved on.”

  I grunted. “OK, Chad. Don’t leave town.”

  “I don’t plan to,” he said, opening his book again. “I plan to prepare for my exams, if you’ll let me.”

  Outside, a steady rain had started to come down. Through the windshield, I could see Dehan sitting behind the wheel. Rivers of silver light lay across the blacktop. I raised my collar, crossed the sidewalk and climbed in the passenger seat. I closed the door and she smiled at me.

  “So did you talk guys stuff?”

  “Yeah. He supports the Dodgers.”

  She turned the key and the engine roared. As she pulled away she said, “Anything else?”

  “He confessed that his feelings for her were stronger and deeper than he’d led us to believe. That it was in fact she who was growing bored, not the other way around. ”

  The windshield wipers squeaked and thudded.

  “He admitted he spoke to her on the phone?”

  “Yup. He called to see why she was taking so long. Quite a turn around from his earlier statement. She said she was on her way, and that Samuel had called her saying the old man was having an attack of angina.”

  She turned left onto Gleason, past the post office. “He was using his illness as emotional blackmail: Daddy needs his family with him, especially his youngest daughter. She was always his baby girl. She has to come back to the fold. He sends Samuel to go get her… That’s why she stopped to wait. Maybe she was planning to go back with him. Or, more likely, tell him to go take a hike...”

  I interrupted. “Go back to the station, will you?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I was hoping we could catch the inspector before he goes home.”

  “Sure.” She waited a bit. “Care to share?”

  “Yeah… I don’t know, Dehan. It’s a feeling. Chad opened up, he seemed to be sincere, but when I asked him what stopped him from going out to look for Celeste when she didn’t show up…” I shook my head. “It seems odd, doesn’t it? They are making up after a bad row, she has come close to cheating on him, he has come close to breaking up with her, but they got through it and now they’re fixing it…” I p
aused, visualizing it in my mind. “She’s on her way… She tells him, ‘I’m on my way,’ but when she doesn’t turn up, he doesn’t go looking for her. He just assumes she’s gone off with Rod. It doesn’t gel. It’s not congruent.”

  She joined the traffic on Watson, headed east. It was a wet blur of lights through spattered drops. The wipers squeaked and thudded and we crawled slowly toward Rosedale.

  “You asked him?”

  “Yeah, he said, women are like that. Their feelings change from one second to the next. Nothing they feel is constant or real in any meaningful sense.”

  She made a ‘maybe’ face. “Wow, that’s harsh, but he has a point. Not all women, but brother…”

  “Carry on that way and you’ll have the Thought Police after us. I certainly don’t believe he has a point. But, be that as it may, Dehan, it doesn’t seem congruent to me. He accepted it too easily, after the fight and the make up sex, and her spending most of Friday and the whole of Saturday there, when she is late returning, he calls her—note that he does call her—and then, at the last minute, when she is actually on her way, he gives up because of a stupid generalization: Women are like that.”

  We turned onto Rosedale and stop-started our way under the Bruckner Expressway. The rain grew heavier.

  “It is odd,” she said, and then, “what are you suggesting, that he’s altered that part of the story because he went to meet her and found her with this Rod character? They had a fight and he killed her?”

  “It’s a very tempting theory, unfortunately, it’s not what the witnesses saw.”

  She was quiet for a while. We came out the south side of the bridge as the rain turned to a downpour. We turned right and crossed Soundview into Storey and moved slowly toward the station house as the rain drummed on the roof and pelted the windshield. She said, suddenly, “Well, hold on there a minute, Stone. What did the witnesses actually see?”

  I stared out at the deluge, aware that she was glancing at me for some kind of a reaction. When I didn’t say anything she went on.

  “They saw Celeste, real mad, shouting at some guy who seems to have got out of a white truck. They saw them argue. They saw him grab her shoulders. They saw her turn and leave, and him go after her. After that, everything was hidden by the dark and by the giant chestnut tree. We don’t know what happened after that point. As far as the actual killing is concerned, the witnesses saw nothing.”

  NINE

  Dehan pulled in front of the door to the station. I grabbed the Tupperware box from the back seat and ran through the rain up the steps to the main entrance with Dehan just a few steps behind. At the foot of the stairs that go up to the second floor, we bumped into Lenny, coming out of the detectives’ room. He stopped and stared at me a moment, gave Dehan a hostile glance and then said to me, “Look, uh, Stone, about earlier…”

  “Don’t sweat it, Lenny.”

  “No, I spoke out of turn. Just, you know, if it looks like somebody is questioning your integrity… You’d be the same, right?”

  “Sure I would. No harm, no foul.”

  “That’s big of you, man.” He slapped my shoulder, then paused to look at the box. He grinned, but his eyes were curious. “What’s that, your lunch box?”

  Dehan’s presence at my shoulder was intense. I wondered if she was going to say anything, but she just stood and stared at Lenny. I gave a small laugh, held his eye and was deliberately misleading. I said, “We checked Celeste’s room. These are some of her belongings. We found her computer.”

  His face hardened. “You found her computer in her room?”

  “I figured you’d looked for it there,” I said. “But it’s always worth a second look.”

  “I went over the room with the old man. I’d swear there was no computer there.”

  I smiled at him for a moment, then said quietly. “No, we haven’t found anything in her room yet. This was at her boyfriend’s house, Lenny. She’d left it there.”

  His voice was wooden. “Oh. What else do you hope to find there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you haven’t found anything… yet.”

  “Oh.” I nodded once. “Traces of Rod. CS team should be on their way back to the lab by now.”

  “…Rod…”

  “Yeah, you don’t know about Rod, Lenny. He only emerged in the last day. I have to go and talk to the inspector, but hang around and I’ll put you up to speed, if you’re curious.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, then shifted his stare to Dehan, then back to me. “Yeah,” he said in the same wooden voice. “I’ll do that. Catch you guys later.”

  He watched us start up the stairs, then pushed his way out into the rain. As we climbed, Dehan was staring at the steps like she was trying to read Chinese algebra. “Hang around and I’ll put you up to speed? Remind me why we’re going to see the inspector? Isn’t it because we suspect the guy you just told to hang around and you’d put him up to speed…? Have I missed something? Did I blink?”

  I smiled sweetly at her. “Apparently you did.”

  I knocked on the inspector’s door.

  “Come!”

  I pushed open the door and Dehan went in ahead of me. Deputy Inspector John Newman was standing by the window, putting on his coat. “Ah, Dehan and Stone, you just caught me. I was on my way home. My wife is making lasagna tonight, with fresh, home made pasta, and I am charged with getting some wine on the way home. I must not be late. How can I help you? What a frightful night, isn’t it?”

  “We won’t keep you, sir, but there are one or two points that have come up in the Celeste Reynolds investigation which suggest pretty strongly that the investigating officer at the time behaved, at the very least, inappropriately.”

  “Oh, Lord.” He frowned and rested his backside on the edge of his desk. He pointed at the big Tupperware box I was holding with some difficulty. “What’s this?”

  Dehan said, “It’s Celeste’s laptop. We haven’t examined it yet, sir. The reason we are here is that the original investigating officer on this case, Detective Leonard Davis, was a friend of the victim’s family. The family are, to put it mildly, sir, dysfunctional. We have a number of possible suspects for the murder…”

  He looked surprised. “Already?”

  I sighed. “That is kind of our point, sir.”

  Dehan plowed on. “It looks as though Detective Davis may have suppressed evidence in order to protect his friend, Celeste’s father…”

  He frowned. “Protect him from what?”

  “From the truth, sir, that his son might have killed his daughter.”

  “Good Heavens! You have stirred up this much trouble in just twenty-four hours? I am not sure if you two are my greatest asset or my greatest liability! What makes you think this? Please, make it brief. I must get home.”

  I said, “The briefest look at the case immediately throws up the need to examine Celeste’s phone records. I assumed that Detective Davis had requested those records back in the day, but they were not in the file. I asked him about them. At first he said he had no idea where they were, but then after I insisted, he said he would look at home. He came back next day, sir, with one page, saying that was all he’d requested. But it was a printout from an email that was over one hundred and eighty pages long. That’s six months of records.”

  He sighed and looked at his shoes. “So he had requested six months of records, removed the records from evidence and only showed you one page.”

  “Yes, sir. That page shows that in the short while before her death, she received calls from the landline at her home, her boyfriend’s cell and a burner cell. We have reason to believe that the burner belongs to somebody called, or using the name, Rod, and that she was having an affair with him.”

  “Can’t you get another copy from the phone company?”

  “That company is Verizon. They only hold records for a year, sir.”

  He sighed again. “And you think this Rod is Lenny, Detective Davis.�
�

  “That’s putting it a little strong, sir, but the possibility exists. He neglected to follow up witnesses, he also neglected to question Celeste’s boyfriend, failed to get this information regarding Rod, and he neglected to conduct a thorough search of Celeste’s bedroom, telling her father that it wasn’t necessary. I’ve had the crime scene team go over the room. There is a chance we may get fingerprints and DNA from her bed.”

  “Oh, Lord… This is a nightmare.”

  “Sir.” I hesitated a moment. “I don’t want to do anything about this just yet.”

  A flicker of hope in his eyes was rapidly replaced by a shadow of worry. “You don’t? Why?”

  “We don’t know yet what his involvement is. It may have been a simple, misguided desire to protect Sean Reynolds from yet another family disaster, or it may have been something considerably more serious than that. I’d like to get the results from the lab, and see what we can get from her emails before taking any action. It should shed more light on what Lenny’s involvement was, and give us a better idea of how to proceed.”

  He thought about it for a while, still staring at the floor. “Does he suspect that you are, so to speak, onto him?”

  It was Dehan who answered. “Yeah. He was pretty freaked out at the fact that we had found her computer, and that we were taking in her bedding for DNA testing.”

  He studied her a moment before saying, “I can’t put a tail on him without alerting the IAB. Plus it would cause a lot of resentment among the troops.”

  I smiled. “He’d spot it anyway, sir.” I frowned and puffed out my cheeks. “I’ve known Lenny a long time, we’re not friends, I don’t particularly like him, but he’s a good policeman. It’s a difficult call to make, sir, and I might well be wrong, but I can’t see Lenny being guilty of anything more serious than…” I spread my hands, “Extremely poor judgment. What I mean to say with that, is—I seriously doubt he will do a runner. What is much more likely, I think, is that he will come and talk to you.”

  He nodded, like that made a lot of sense. Then he looked up at me and nodded again. “Yes, thank you, John. I hope you’re right. Either way, it is hard to see a good outcome to this situation.” He looked at Dehan, like she might have an answer. “A good professional with a lovely wife, two great kids, why would he get himself caught up in something so… tawdry?”