Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  “Half an hour,” he said.

  By the time I’d dropped Randy off and parked the car in the underground garage, it was time to meet with Barry. He was already in a booth, and there were coffees and slices of cherry pie on both sides of the table. He hadn’t touched his pie yet.

  I sat down.

  “What’s this?” I said, looking at the pie.

  “Peace offering,” Barry said.

  “There’s no whipped cream,” I said.

  Barry raised his hand, snapped his fingers. The waitress came over and Barry said, “Could you bury this in Cool Whip or something, please?”

  She took the plate away and was back in under thirty seconds, the pie now largely obscured by white fluffiness.

  “How’s that?” Barry said.

  “Better.”

  “I’m sorry about your son. It made sense at the time. He was in the house, he lied about being there, and I don’t know what, but there was something funny going on between your boy and Mrs. Langley.”

  I said nothing.

  “But that earring,” he said. “They never managed to get a DNA trace off it. That, and those guys coming to your place, the gun. The case fell apart. I was doing my job, Jim. But I called it wrong.”

  He was looking me square in the eye.

  “If it had been me you tossed in jail by mistake,” I said, “I’d forgive you immediately. But it was my son. It’s going to take longer.”

  Barry nodded. “I accept that.” He paused. “So you’re back working for Randy. I didn’t see that coming. What, does he want his nose broken again?”

  “I never actually broke it,” I said.

  “Ha! So, you admit it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I have legal bills to pay, Barry. That’s why I’m working for him.”

  Barry had the decency to blush. “Okay.”

  “I’ve promised him a month or so. That’s it.”

  Barry nodded, and said, “Tell me again, this thing about the book and Conrad.”

  I laid it all out for him, slowly. How the guys who’d attacked me and Ellen wanted the copy of the disc Derek had found. So I’d thought it only made sense that they were the ones who’d come to the Langley house, to take away the computer Derek was given by Agnes Stockwell.

  Except I’d since learned that the day the Langleys were killed, Albert Langley had given the computer to Conrad Chase. At least, I was thinking, that was what Conrad had told Ellen. Albert knew that what was on its hard drive would be of interest to Conrad, and he should have sole possession of it.

  “So maybe the Langleys weren’t killed because of the computer,” Barry said. “It wasn’t there.”

  “Well, Ellen and I were nearly killed because of the disc, and we didn’t have it,” I pointed out.

  Barry put some pie into his mouth. “So if those guys had it wrong thinking you had the disc, they could have been wrong thinking the Langleys had the computer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How do you know Albert Langley gave Conrad the computer?”

  “Conrad told Ellen. When she gave him the disc.”

  Barry chewed his pie very slowly. “But Conrad could have been lying. Maybe he actually acquired the computer after the Langleys were murdered. Or”—he swallowed his pie—“Ellen is lying when she says Conrad told her he already had the computer.”

  “You think Ellen lied to me?”

  “I’m not saying I think that, I’m merely raising it as a possibility. Listen, I love your wife. Her French toast is amazing. If I could get my wife to leave, get Ellen to come live with me, I’d be a happy man.”

  “I thought you loved your wife.”

  “I do. But she can’t make French toast worth shit.”

  “Jeez, Barry, I think you’re off base here, about Ellen lying to me.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud. Okay, let’s assume Conrad told her. But he didn’t have to have told her the truth. Let me ask you this: Who knew there was a copy of this so-called book on a disc?”

  “Me, Ellen, and Derek, of course. Maybe his girlfriend Penny. Maybe her parents. Conrad figured it out, and there’s Illeana.”

  “The onetime actress. Did you ever see her in Messed Up?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Only thing she ever made during her short career that got her any attention, and that was mostly because she showed her tits. You can rent it at Blockbuster.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said, eating through the whipped cream so that I could find my pie.

  “What do you make of this Illeana?” Barry asked.

  “A wolverine,” I said.

  “Only met her once or twice, at things out at Thackeray. But she and her husband don’t want to talk to me. Too far down the food chain.”

  “Cut grass for a living and see what happens.”

  “Yeah, okay. So the reason I ask about her is, we got an ID off the dead guy in your shed, who your new buddy Drew put down, and his name was Morton DeLuca. From New York. And while we haven’t found his partner yet, we suspect he might be a guy named Lester Tiffin. They work together a lot, or so the NYPD tell us.”

  “Tiffin?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Illeana’s last name is Tiff.”

  “Yeah, I know that. She shortened it.”

  “This guy, is he related to her?” I asked. “An ex-husband, a brother, or something?” I tried to put it together. “She brought in hired help—family—to get the disc back? Didn’t know Conrad already had it?”

  “You’re getting ahead of me here. I’m going out there today to talk to them, to Conrad and Illeana. Not a word about this Tiffin guy to anyone, hear me? I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it, but I’ve kind of fucked you around of late.”

  “No shit. That’ll be fun, interviewing the college president and his wife.”

  “That’s why I get the big bucks,” Barry said, washing his pie down with coffee. He reached for a napkin from the chrome dispenser, but there were so many jammed in there it shredded when he took it out. “Shit,” he said, and pulled out a handful. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth.

  “I looked up the Brett Stockwell thing,” he said. “That kid who went over the falls. Like you asked.”

  “Okay.” I was surprised he remembered.

  “Not that much in it. He fell, hit his head on the rocks below, snapped his neck, would have died instantly.”

  “But it was ruled a suicide.”

  “There was no note, if that’s what you’re asking. But there were no obvious signs of foul play, either. No one saw anything or heard anything. They think it happened in the evening, maybe not that many people around here, although the walkway over the falls is a pretty popular spot for joggers and cyclists and what have you. A lot of interviews were conducted, with his mother, teachers, even Chase, and it seemed like maybe he was a bit of a troubled kid. Intense, moody. And creative. That doesn’t necessarily mean suicide, but some of the indicators were there.”

  “Was there anything in the report that says he couldn’t have been thrown over the railing, pushed over?”

  “No. I suppose it could have happened that way, but there’s nothing that specifically rules out aliens coming down and tossing him over, either.”

  “So that’s it,” I said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “What? There was something else?”

  “There were fibers, just a few, on the railing. There are these concrete pillars spaced out along the bridge over the falls, then metal railings between them. On one of the concrete pillars, there were a few threads.”

  “From what?”

  “A shirt, a blouse, something. But it didn’t match anything the Stockwell boy was wearing. But those fibers could have been there awhile. Nothing to suggest there’s anything connecting the two.”

  I thought a moment, then said, “Here’s how it looks to me, Barry. Conrad Chase read that kid’s book. Was really impressed with it. Realized the kid was a literary genius in
the making. So maybe he offered to buy it off him, so he could pass it off as his own. Or maybe he decided to steal it outright. Either way, the Stockwell kid must have objected, or if he didn’t even know what Conrad had done, he was going to be pissed when the book came out and he saw that it was his. So Conrad had to deal with that situation. He had to kill Brett Stockwell. I think he threw that kid over the falls. I think he killed him. I don’t know what he had to do with the Langleys, but it seems pretty likely that this all has something to do with those two goons coming to our house the other night. But the thing I’m most sure of is, he killed Brett.”

  “Be nearly impossible to prove,” Barry said. “Even if you’re right, that he ripped off the kid’s book, and that could be proven somehow, it wouldn’t be evidence that he threw Brett over the falls. The best you could hope for is that, if the business with the book came out, he’d be ruined professionally.”

  That would be something, at least.

  “Hey,” I said, switching gears again. “If I was trying to find some sad-case kid from a couple of years ago, she’d have been around fifteen at the time, working the street, where would I go?”

  “You got a name?”

  “Sherry Underwood.”

  Barry wrote it down in his notebook. “What’s she to you?”

  I pondered a moment. “That’s hard to say. She’s someone I think I let down.” Barry looked at me. “Getting Derek back, getting him out of jail, I don’t know. I feel like we came so close to losing him, got him back from the brink. I wonder if it’s too late to do that for someone else.”

  Barry studied me a moment longer, then said, “I’ll check the name out later if I get a chance. I love doing all this legwork for you. In the meantime, you could try the Willows.” I’d heard the name, but wasn’t sure what it was. Barry said, “A drop-in shelter for kids, on Lambton. There’s a guy there, Art, ask for him, tell him I sent you. What’s this about, really?”

  I gave Barry half a smile. “It’s about how the mayor got punched in the nose.”

  LAMBTON STREET wasn’t that far a walk from the diner, so I decided to hoof it. The Willows was settled in between a store that sold T-shirts and posters to the younger crowd, and a shop run by a Korean woman that sold thousands of different kinds of beads for people who wanted to make their own jewelry.

  Half a dozen kids were milling around on the sidewalk outside the Willows. A couple of them were dressed all in black, their dark hair streaked with flashes of pink and purple, their lips and eyebrows adorned with silver studs and loops. The others didn’t appear to have adopted any actual uniform. It looked more as if they’d left home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Ripped jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. One of the girls was standing on the sidewalk in bare feet. The one thing they seemed to have in common was an air of abandonment, that they were here because no one else wanted to take them in.

  I went inside. There were about ten cafeteria-style tables set up, a couple of pinball machines, a video game, a bulletin board plastered with notes about places where one could sleep for the night or find short-term work. There was an opening in the back wall where kitchen workers could hand food through.

  There was also a raised counter to one side, a kind of rundown hotel check-in, and it was there that I spotted a man probably in his forties leaning over some paperwork. He had almost no hair on his head, but at least two days’ worth of growth on his face, and even before he spoke there seemed a sense of weariness about him.

  “Excuse me,” I said. He looked at me, still hunched over, resting on his elbows. “I’m looking for Art.”

  “You found him,” he said. “What’s the matter? Kids blocking the sidewalk?”

  “No. Barry Duckworth said you might be able to help me.”

  He sat up straight. “You a cop?”

  “No. I’m trying to find out what happened to a young girl. She might have come to a place like this.”

  Art said, “Let me guess. You’re trying to find your daughter.”

  I shook my head. “No. Not mine. Somebody else’s.”

  “You a detective? Trying to find somebody’s kid?”

  “No,” I said, getting annoyed. “It’s not that at all. This is someone I ran into a couple of years ago, someone I tried to help, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Sherry. Sherry Underwood.”

  He nodded right away. I expected him to have to think about the name for a while. “Yeah, sure, I remember her.”

  “She comes to this shelter?”

  “She did, for a while. But then she was gone. Someone’s here for a while, then they take off. Happens all the time. No one exactly gets their mail sent here.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “Listen,” he said. “I run this place to help these kids out, not rat them out to parents and others who fucked them over and turned their backs on them.”

  “It’s not like that. I just needed to know.”

  “I can tell you this much. She had a mother who was useless and a father who wasn’t there and she gave old guys blowjobs and let them fuck her so she’d have money to eat, and when I last saw her she was high, which is how these kids pass a lot of their time, because if you had to live like they do you’d want to be high a lot of the time, too. I’d love to be able to tell you her story’s unique, but it’s not. What else can I do for you?”

  “Do you know what happened to her after she stopped coming here?”

  “She married a prince and lived happily ever after,” Art said. “Look, I don’t know, and good luck trying to find her. I’ve got a staff of four, a constant parade of heartbreak, and we do the best we can.”

  “Sure,” I said. “How about any of the men who might have been her customers? Do you know who any of them might have been? You ever see any of them around here?”

  “If she’d ever tried to run her hooking operation out of here, we’d have kicked her out. But I’d see her in here after, sometimes, counting her money, writing stuff down in her little notepad.”

  I was pretty sure I knew that notepad. I’d written down my name and number in that notepad.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE MAYOR planted his tree, nearly putting the spade of his shovel through the foot of a seven-year-old, and on the drive back to city hall said, “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m keeping my schedule pretty clear through the day. A couple things in the morning, but they’re in the building, then I’m leaving the afternoon wide open, getting ready for my announcement in the evening. You okay to work tomorrow night?”

  “Your wish is my command,” I said.

  “You know,” Randall Finley said, “when you’ve already told your boss you’re going to quit on him first chance you get, it gives you a lot of fucking latitude, doesn’t it?”

  “Works for me,” I said.

  Because he had nothing else on for tonight, Randy said I might as well take the Grand Marquis home with me. Saved calling Ellen for a lift, or seeing whether Derek could pick me up with the truck if he and Drew were done for the day.

  As I was coming out of the underground parking, there was a thin, silver-haired woman standing there, and when she saw me behind the wheel, she flagged me down. Powering down the window, I recognized her as Elizabeth Hunt, Conrad Chase’s literary agent. Who’d met up with him after the Langley funeral.

  “Mr. Cutter,” she said. “I’m so glad I was able to catch you. I was told I might find you at city hall.”

  “You’re looking for me?”

  “I wonder,” she said, almost apologetically, “if I might have a moment of your time.”

  I was blocking the ramp and there was no obvious place to pull over, so I motioned for her to come around to the passenger side and hop in. She walked around the front of the car and got in next to me.

  “I’ll just pull ahead,” I said.

  “Oh, just drive around the block a
couple of times,” Elizabeth Hunt said. “Then you can drop me off right where you found me.”

  “Sure.”

  “So you’re working for the mayor now. I understand from Conrad that’s a job you used to have.”

  “At one time,” I said. “You’re still here. I saw you at the funeral, but figured you’d have gone back to New York by now.”

  “I’m still staying at my place on the lake. This is supposed to be a bit of a holiday, but Conrad’s found a way to make it a busman’s holiday,” she said, and then smiled awkwardly. “He’s nearly finished with his manuscript and he’s a bit anxious as he nears the end of the process. I don’t know whether you know a lot about writers—I’m sure you do from your wife—but sometimes they need a bit of hand-holding.”

  That was a bit hard to picture with Conrad, but I let it go.

  “And I just wanted to say, I hope you and your wife are all right, after that horrible incident out at your house the other night,” she said.

  I glanced over at her. “Yes,” I said. “We’re fine.”

  “And your son, the charges have all been dropped.”

  I nodded, made a right turn.

  “You must be wondering what the hell I want,” she said.

  “I figure you’ll get to it,” I said.

  “First of all, I have to tell you, I’m here because Conrad asked me,” she said. “I told him, ‘Conrad, don’t worry about this,’ but he can be very persistent. And a bit of a pain in the ass.” She sniffed.

  I had no idea where this was going, but decided I’d just drive.

  “Conrad thinks very highly of you,” Elizabeth said. “He has a great deal of respect for you.”

  I looked over at Elizabeth. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Evidently, your opinion’s important to him.” There was something in her voice that suggested she was as surprised as I was.

  I shook my head. “He has odd ways of showing it.”

  “He says you don’t believe he wrote his first book,” she said bluntly.