Parting Shot

by Linwood Barclay

  “I don’t give a damn about that. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”

  “But you don’t like it.”

  “I’m telling you I don’t care about that.”

  “How do you even know I went to Mike’s?”

  Duckworth sighed. He realized he was doing it again. Maybe, when you were a cop, there was no good way to ask your son questions.

  “I’d been there before, asking about tattoos. Because of that guy with the message on his back. I met Dolores. When I saw her in the trunk of Carol’s car, I recognized her, went back to talk to Mike. He asked if I was related to a Trevor Duckworth.” He tried to smile. “Should I have said no?”

  “Jesus,” was all Trevor could say.

  “So I figured maybe you’d met that woman in the trunk, even if you didn’t realize it. And now that you know who it is, maybe you noticed something, heard something, anything about her when you were at Mike’s.”

  “Good story,” Trevor said.

  “It’s the truth,” Duckworth said. “I just don’t want to get blindsided. Any connection you have to any of this, I have to know.”

  “You think I had something to do with this?”

  “I’m not saying that. Of course I don’t.”

  “You should be trying to find Carol instead of wasting time talking to me.” Trevor shook his head angrily. “I never should have got it.”

  “What?”

  “The tattoo. It was a mistake.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s how people feel sometimes, after they get one.”

  “Let me show it to you,” Trevor said.

  “It’s okay, you—”

  “No, really, I want to.”

  Trevor unbuttoned the cuff on his left arm and started rolling up his sleeve. When he couldn’t get it past his elbow, he said, “Shit.”

  He unbuttoned the front of his shirt halfway, far enough that he could slip it off his left shoulder.

  “There, have a look,” he said.

  Duckworth looked. It was pretty simple, as tattoos went. Four numbers. 6201. He felt sorrow and shame pressing down on him like a weighty cloud.

  “Want me to explain what it means?” Trevor asked.

  There was no need. Duckworth knew his own badge number when he saw it.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  CAL

  WHEN we got back to the beach house, we unpacked the groceries. I’d wanted to buy some beer, but I didn’t want to have to tell Jeremy he couldn’t have one, and I didn’t want to drink in front of him. At eighteen, he was certainly old enough to have one, despite what the laws of New York state might say, but given his troubles, it didn’t seem particularly appropriate.

  But I did buy some soft drinks and a bag of ice. I took enough cubes to fill two glasses before putting the rest of it into the freezer, and poured us a couple of Cokes.

  “Let’s sit on the deck,” Jeremy said.

  “Sure.”

  We took our drinks, and a bag of Doritos, outside and sat on some plastic garden chairs.

  “I didn’t even know Madeline had this place,” he said. “I guess she didn’t tell my mom because then she’d have wanted to use it.”

  “They have a complicated relationship?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. I mean, Madeline’s like my mom’s mom, but not really. Because Madeline mostly raised her, but I think my mom always kind of felt that she didn’t have to do what her aunt told her because she wasn’t her real mom.”

  “Okay.”

  “My mom had it pretty bad, though, before she went to live with Madeline. Her dad treated her like a slave. I know she seems kind of over-the-top at times, but there’s reasons why she is the way she is.”

  “I get that. We’re all products of our upbringing.”

  “So who’s Scott?” Jeremy asked.

  The question caught me off guard. “He was my son.”

  “So, like, he’s dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened to him?”

  I didn’t want to get into all of it, but I said, “He was goofing around on the roof of a building, getting high, and then someone pitched him off the side.”

  “Oh, man, that’s brutal. And your wife?”

  “She’s dead, too.” I looked out at the bay, tracked a passing seagull with my eye. “She was shot.”

  Jeremy clearly didn’t know what to say to that. He took a sip of his Coke, stuffed a couple of Doritos into his mouth.

  Finally he said, “Everybody’s got shit to deal with, don’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think you’ve got it bad, and then you find out other people got it worse.”

  “Yup.”

  “How long ago did all this happen?” he asked.

  “About five years.”

  “So, are you kind of getting over it by now?”

  “No.”

  “At some point, don’t you have to?”

  I smiled at him. “I don’t know that I want to. And even if I did, they come to me. Every night.”

  “Like, in your dreams?”

  I nodded.

  Jeremy drank more Coke, ate a chip. “Where are those books you brought?” he asked.

  “They’re in my case. Plus there’s about a thousand books on the shelves here.”

  “There’s games, too. Do you like board games?”

  “Some,” I said. “After I grill some steaks, you want to play Scrabble or something?”

  Jeremy considered that. “I guess. But I’m not very good at it.”

  “Well, neither am I. Look, I’ve got a call to make. I might walk down to the beach. You cool here?”

  “Sure.”

  I got up out of the chair. I already had my phone in my pocket, so I didn’t need to go back into the house. As I was heading for the stairs that led from the deck down to the beach, Jeremy said, “Mr. Weaver?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about your kid. You know, your son. And your wife. What was her name?”

  “Donna.”

  “Yeah, and her.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I descended the stairs, then took the level boardwalk that traversed the grassy area. Not wanting sand in my shoes, I kicked them off, left them on the boardwalk, and strolled out onto the beach.

  I looked up a number, then dialed.

  “Finch, Delray and Klein,” a woman said.

  “Grant Finch, please.”

  “One moment.”

  A pause, and then another woman. “Grant Finch’s office.”

  “Hi. Is Grant in?”

  “Mr. Finch is in a meeting. May I help you?”

  The whole world was in a fucking meeting. “My name is Cal Weaver. I’m a private investigator. It’s about Jeremy Pilford. He’s in my protection. I need to speak with Mr. Finch.”

  “Just a moment.”

  More dead air. Fifteen seconds later, a pickup.

  “Mr. Weaver?”

  “Mr. Finch, thanks for taking my call.”

  “Is everything okay with Jeremy? Is he all right?”

  “Jeremy’s fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  I hesitated. “We’re kind of on the move.”

  “Sure, of course. I was speaking to Madeline Plimpton. She mentioned that. No sense making it easy for the crazies. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m not sure how to begin,” I said. “I guess I need you to explain something for me.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I know I’ve come in at the tail end of this. I wasn’t around for the trial, I wasn’t part of the investigation, so the point I’m about to raise may have been addressed. This may be nothing, but right now, it seems like something.”

  “Okay,” Grant Finch said slowly.

  “I let Jeremy drive my car today.”

  “Oh. I don’t know if that was such a good idea. Operation of a motor vehicle violates the prov
isions of his probation. His license is suspended.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured that. But we were on a pretty deserted road, no one around this early in the season.”

  “Are you in some sort of vacation area?” he asked.

  I’d made a slip. “Like I said, on the move.”

  “Well, go on with your story, but I must caution you, Jeremy should not be driving.”

  “I get it. The thing is, I wanted to give him a chance to try driving a standard.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “A stick. You know. I’ve got a Japanese car. It’s got a standard transmission.”

  “I know what you mean by stick, Mr. Weaver. I’m just not getting the point yet.”

  “He was pretty terrible at it.”

  “That’s not at all surprising. Most cars these days are equipped with an automatic transmission. You and I may have learned that whole clutch and gas thing back in our youth, but it’s not something they teach in driver’s ed, far as I know. My daughter is twenty and she’s never driven a car with a stick shift.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  There was a pause at the other end. “Tell me where you’re going with this.”

  “Jeremy wasn’t just terrible at it. He stalled the car repeatedly. Just about shook my teeth loose, we did so much bucking. It was clear to me he’d never driven a stick in his life. Did this come up at all during the trial?”

  “I can’t say that it did.”

  “You know Galen Broadhurst’s Porsche is a stick?” I said.

  There was a pause. “I can’t say that I know that one way or another.”

  “You and Galen are friends, right? You’ve known each other a long time.”

  “It’s true that we’ve known each other a long time. I’ve acted on his behalf for years. And yes, we are friends. But that friendship is related to our business relationship.”

  “Had you ever had a ride in that Porsche, before the incident?”

  “I . . . I can’t recall.”

  “Well, take my word for it. The car is a stick. I saw Galen drive away in it, and I called him earlier today to confirm it.”

  “Mr. Weaver.” Grant Finch took a deep breath. “Surely you’re not going to suggest that Jeremy did not drive that car.”

  “I’m not quite sure what I’m suggesting. But it crossed my mind.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Finch said.

  Now there was a word you didn’t hear every day.

  “Why is it preposterous?” I asked, watching a sailboat pass in the distance.

  “As you said yourself, you haven’t been in on this from the beginning,” Finch said, starting to sound slightly patronizing. “Believe me, if I ever thought that was germane, this stick business, I would have raised it. But frankly, it was never even on our radar.”

  “So you didn’t consider this in the boy’s defense, not for a second.”

  “What did I just tell you? I formulated a defense, and it worked very well. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Jeremy is with you and not in prison.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” I said.

  “And Jeremy never brought this issue to my attention. You’d think if anyone was going to do it, he would have.”

  “I don’t think Jeremy even knew. The only time he ever got near the car, he was drunk, so he wouldn’t have remembered. He never took note of it. And it’s not something he would have intrinsically known. He’s not a car nut. Other people, people who are into cars, you just know an old 911 is likely going to be a stick shift.”

  “Listen,” Grant Finch said, unable to keep his impatience with me out of his voice, “if you had been there, at the trial, you would have heard testimony from several witnesses who saw what happened.”

  “What did they see, exactly?” I asked.

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “Humor me.”

  “At least five people from that party saw Jeremy get out from behind the wheel of that car. Blood from his forehead was on the steering wheel. There was a DNA match.”

  I said nothing.

  “And,” Finch continued, “earlier in the evening, he was seen in the Porsche, fumbling with the keys, trying to start it, before he was stopped.”

  “I know. The keys were left in the ashtray.”

  “Right.”

  “And even after that, Galen Broadhurst left the keys in the car.”

  “A decision he has to live with the rest of his life,” Grant Finch said. “Don’t think for a moment he isn’t haunted by that every single day.”

  “Yeah, I met him yesterday,” I said. “He seems pretty tormented.”

  Finch let that one go. “Despite that lapse in Galen’s judgment, the real responsibility, I’m afraid, rests ultimately with Jeremy.”

  “You say at least five people saw him get out of the car after Sian McFadden had been run down.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many people witnessed him getting into the car?”

  Was that a sigh I heard? I was clearly trying the man’s patience. “It would seem self-evident that if he was getting out of the car, he had, at some earlier point, gotten into it,” he said. He made no effort not to be patronizing.

  “That’s not my point,” I said.

  “What is your point?”

  “The point is when he got into it.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m still not getting you, Mr. Weaver.”

  “Did he get into the car before the crash, or after the crash?”

  “What?”

  “Let me ask you this. You say five people saw him getting out of the car. No one saw him getting into the car. How many people saw the actual accident? How many saw him hit Sian McFadden with the Porsche?”

  “No one,” Finch said without hesitation. “It doesn’t matter. Mr. Weaver, let me ask you something. If someone rams your car in the parking lot, and you get out and see a driver in the other car, do you need to have seen him get into that car to know who hit you?”

  “Why do you sound more like a prosecutor than a defense attorney?”

  “I’ve had just about enough. I did everything I could for that boy. Jeremy is free today because of the work I did.”

  “Are you telling me it never occurred to you or anyone else to look at the whole stick-shift thing?”

  “Even if someone had mentioned it, which they did not, it would have been a non-starter. You can’t structure a defense with two wildly divergent strategies. We can’t suggest he was never in the car at the same time we concede he was but was not responsible for his actions.”

  I thought about that.

  “Are you still there, Mr. Weaver?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Look, forgive my tone. I can tell by what you’re saying that you’re concerned for Jeremy. Believe me, we all have been, from the very beginning. No one more than Gloria, who was willing to sacrifice her reputation, to be ridiculed, in fact, to save her son. At every step of the way we’ve acted in his best interest.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So I appreciate your bringing this to my attention, but I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “But how do you explain it? How do you explain the fact that Jeremy could not drive my car? At least, not without a lot of instruction. And that was sober. How did he get behind the wheel of Galen Broadhurst’s car and, drunk out of his mind, instantly master the art of a manual shift?”

  “The fact is, somehow he did,” Finch said. “Have you considered that he was putting you on?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe he was having some fun with you. Maybe he does know how to drive a car like that, but pretended not to.”

  When I didn’t say anything right away, Finch said, “Mr. Weaver? You there?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you hear what I said? Maybe he was just pretending not to—”

  “I heard you.”

  “Although I can’t think of a single re
ason why he would do that,” Finch said. “Can you?”

  I was about to say no, I couldn’t.

  But then something occurred to me.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Finch,” I said, ending the call.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  BARRY Duckworth would have asked his son about why he’d tattooed his badge number onto his shoulder, but his phone rang.

  “Duckworth,” he said.

  “Hey, it’s Shirley.”

  “Oh, hi,” Duckworth said.

  “I’ve got that picture of Carol Beakman circulating, but now I’m doing somebody else’s job. You called in wanting info on some guy named Cory Calder? They left it with me since they think I don’t look busy enough.”

  “I’m always happy to hear from you,” Duckworth said, his eyes still on his son, who was doing up the buttons on his shirt and rolling down his sleeve.

  “Okay, he’s thirty-one, date of birth September twentieth, 1984, he lives at 87 Marshall Way, he—”

  “Hang on,” he said. “You sending all this to me?’

  “Of course. Nobody writes anything down any more, Barry.”

  “Okay. Main thing I want is an address. That a house or an apartment?”

  “It’s a house.”

  “Thanks. What about a car?”

  “I’m finding a 2007 Chrysler van. Black. Plate number in the stuff I’m sending you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s just official stuff. You want me to google him?”

  “Would you?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Duckworth put his phone back into his jacket.

  “I thought I heard Carol’s name,” Trevor said.

  “Yeah. There’s nothing new. Her picture’s being circulated.” Duckworth rubbed his hand hard over his mouth, squeezing his lips together. He pulled it away and said, “So, tell me about that.”

  He was pointing at his son’s shoulder.

  Trevor shrugged. “I was looking for a way to honor my hero.”

  Duckworth closed his eyes for a second, shook his head. When he opened them, he smiled. “Gonna be hard to rub off.”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said. “I’m thinking maybe I could add some numbers to it and try to get a cell phone to match it. Or turn it into a zip code.”

  Duckworth lowered his head. “I’m sorry about the last couple of days. All I’m trying to do is my job. I go where the investigation takes me.”