The Final Detail: A Myron Bolitar Novel

by Harlan Coben

  “Barbara Cromwell.”

  The officer blinked. “This a joke?”

  “No.”

  “One of your athletes is interested in dating Barbara Cromwell?”

  Myron tried a little backpedal. “I might have gotten the name wrong,” he said.

  “I think maybe you have.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You mentioned Ron Lemmon before. The old sheriff.”

  “Right.”

  “Barbara Cromwell is his daughter.”

  For a moment Myron just stood there. A fan whirred. A phone rang. Hobert said, “Excuse me a second,” and picked it up. Myron heard none of it. Someone had frozen the moment. Someone had suspended him above a dark hole, giving Myron plenty of time to stare down at the nothingness, until suddenly the same someone let go. Myron plunged down into the black, his hands wheeling, his body turning, waiting, almost hoping, to smash against the bottom.

  CHAPTER

  36

  Myron stumbled back outside. He walked the town square. He grabbed something to eat at a Mexican place, wolfing it down without even tasting the food. Win called.

  “We were correct,” Win said. “Hester Crimstein was trying to divert our attention.”

  “She admitted it?”

  “No. She offers no explanation. She claims that she will speak with you and only you and only in person. She then pushed me for details on your whereabouts.”

  No surprise.

  “Would you like me to”—Win paused—“interrogate her?”

  “Please no,” Myron said. “Ethics aside, I don’t think there’s much need anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sawyer Wells said he was a drug counselor at Rockwell.”

  “I remember.”

  “Billy Lee Palms was treated at Rockwell. His mother mentioned it when I visited her house.

  “Hmm,” Win said. “Wonderful coincidence.”

  “Not a coincidence,” Myron said. “It explains everything.”

  When he finished talking to Win, he strolled the main street of Wilston seven or eight times over. The shopkeepers, light on business, smiled at him. He smiled back. He nodded hello to the large assortment of people passing by. The town was so stuck in the sixties, the kind of place where people still wore unkempt beards and black caps and looked like Seals and Crofts at an outdoor concert. He liked it here. He liked it a lot.

  He thought about his mother and his father. He thought about them getting old and wondered why he could not accept it. He thought about how his father’s “chest pains” were partially his fault, how the strain of his running away had at least tangentially contributed to what happened. He thought about what it would have been like for his parents if they had suffered the same fate as Sophie and Gary Mayor, if he had disappeared at seventeen without a trace and were never found. He thought about Jessica and how she claimed she would fight for him. He thought about Brenda and what he had done. He thought about Terese and last night and what, if anything, it meant. He thought about Win and Esperanza and the sacrifices that friends make.

  For a long time he did not think about Clu’s murder or Billy Lee’s death. He did not think about Lucy Mayor and her disappearance and his connection to it. But that lasted only so long. Eventually he made a few phone calls, did some digging, confirmed what he already suspected.

  The answers never come with cries of “Eureka!” You stumble toward them, often in total darkness. You stagger through an unlit room at night, tripping over the unseen, lumbering forward, bruising your shins, toppling over and righting yourself, feeling your way across the walls and hoping your hand happens upon the light switch. And then—to keep within this piss-poor but sadly accurate analogy—when you find the switch, when you flick it on and bathe the room in light, sometimes the room is just as you pictured it. And then sometimes, like now, you wonder if you’d have been better off staying forever stumbling in the dark.

  Win of course would say that Myron was limiting the analogy. He would point out that there were other options. You could simply leave the room. You could let your eyes get accustomed to the dark, and while you would never see everything clearly, that was okay. You could even flick the switch back off once you turned it on. In the case of Horace and Brenda Slaughter, Win would be right. In the case of Clu Haid, Myron was not so sure.

  He had found the light switch. He had flicked it on. But the analogy did not hold—and not just because it was a dumb one from the start. Everything in the room was still murky, as though he were looking through a shower curtain. He could see lights and shadows. He could make out shapes. But to know exactly what had happened, he would have to push aside the curtain.

  He could still back off, let the curtain rest or even flick the light back off. But that was the problem with darkness and Win’s options. In the dark you cannot see the rot fester. The rot is free to continue to eat away, undisturbed, until it consumes everything, even the man huddled in the corner, trying like hell to stay away from that damned light switch.

  So Myron got in his car. He drove back out to the farmhouse on Claremont Road. He knocked on the door, and again Barbara Cromwell told him to go away. “I know why Clu Haid came here,” he told her. He kept talking. And eventually she let him in.

  When he left, Myron called Win again. They talked a long time. First about Clu Haid’s murder. Then about Myron’s dad. It helped. But not a lot. He called Terese and told her what he knew. She said that she’d tried to check some of the facts with her sources.

  “So Win was right,” Terese said. “You are personally connected.”

  “Yes.”

  “I blame myself every day,” Terese said. “You get used to it.”

  Again he wanted to ask more. Again he knew that it wasn’t time.

  Myron made two more calls on the cell phone. The first was to the law office of Hester Crimstein.

  “Where are you?” Hester snapped.

  “I assume you’re in contact with Bonnie Haid,” he said.

  Pause. Then: “Oh Christ, Myron, what did you do?”

  “They aren’t telling you everything, Hester. In fact, I bet Esperanza barely told you anything.”

  “Where are you, dammit?”

  “I’ll be in your office in three hours. Have Bonnie there.”

  His final call was to Sophie Mayor. When she answered, he said three words: “I found Lucy.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  Myron tried to drive like Win, but that was beyond his capabilities. He sped, but he still hit construction on Route 95. You always hit construction on Route 95. It was a Connecticut state law. He listened to the radio. He made phone calls. He felt frightened.

  Hester Crimstein was a senior partner in a high-rise, higher-bill, mega New York law firm. The attractive receptionist had clearly been expecting him. She led him down a hallway lined with what looked like mahogany wallpaper and into a conference room. There was a rectangular table big enough to seat twenty, pens and legal pads in front of each chair, billable no doubt to some unsuspecting client at wildly inflated prices. Hester Crimstein sat next to Bonnie Haid, their backs to the window. They started to rise when he entered.

  “Don’t bother,” he said.

  Both women stopped.

  “What’s this all about?” Hester asked.

  Myron ignored her and looked at Bonnie. “You almost told me, didn’t you, Bonnie? When I first came back. You said you wondered if we did Clu a disservice by helping him. You wondered if our sheltering him and protecting him had eventually led to his death. I said you were wrong. The only person to blame is the person who shot him. But I didn’t know everything, did I?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Hester said.

  “I want to tell you a story,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just listen, Hester. You might find out what you’ve gotten yourself involved in.”

  Hester closed her mouth. Bonnie kept silent.

  “T
welve years ago,” Myron said, “Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms were minor-league players for a team called the New England Bisons. They were both young and reckless in the way athletes tend to be. The world was their oyster, they thought they were the cat’s pajamas, you know the fairy tale. I won’t insult you by going into details.”

  Both women slid back into their seats. Myron sat across from them and continued.

  “One day Clu Haid drove drunk—well, he probably drove drunk more than once, but on this occasion he wrapped his car around a tree. Bonnie”—he gestured to her with his chin—“was injured in the accident. She suffered a bad concussion and spent several days in the hospital. Clu was unhurt. Billy Lee broke a finger. When it happened, Clu panicked. A drunk driving charge could ruin a young athlete, even as little as twelve years ago. I had just signed him to several profitable endorsement deals. He was going to move up to the majors in a matter of months. So he did what a lot of athletes did. He found someone who’d get him out of trouble. His agent. Me. I drove up to the scene like a madman. I met with the arresting officer, a guy named Eddie Kobler, and the town sheriff, Ron Lemmon.”

  Hester Crimstein said, “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Give me time, you will,” Myron said. “The officers and I came to an understanding. It happens all the time with big-time athletes. Matters like this are swept under the rug. Clu was a good kid, we all agreed. No reason to destroy his life over this little incident. It was a somewhat victimless crime—the only person hurt was Clu’s own wife. So money changed hands, and an agreement was reached. Clu wasn’t drunk. He swerved to avoid another car. That’s what caused the accident. Billy Lee Palms and Bonnie would swear to it. Incident over and forgotten.”

  Hester wore her annoyed-but-curious scowl. Bonnie’s face was losing color fast.

  “It’s twelve years later now,” Myron said. “And the incident is almost like one of those mummy curses. The drunk driver, Clu, is murdered. His best friend and passenger, Billy Lee Palms, is shot to death—I won’t call that murder because the shooter saved my life. The sheriff I bought off—he died of prostate cancer. Nothing too strange about that or perhaps God got to him before the mummy. And as for Eddie Kobler, the other officer, he was caught last year taking bribes in a big drug string. He was arrested and plea-bargained down. His wife left him. His kids won’t talk to him. He lives alone in a bottle in Wyoming.”

  “How do you know about this Kobler guy?” Hester Crimstein asked.

  “A local cop named Hobert told me what happened. A reporter friend confirmed it.”

  “I still don’t see the relevance,” Hester said.

  “That’s because Esperanza kept you in the dark,” Myron said. “I was wondering how much she told you. Apparently not much. Probably just insisted that I be kept totally out of this, right?”

  Hester gave him the courtroom eyes. “Are you saying Esperanza has something to do with all this?”

  “No.”

  “You’re the one who committed a crime here, Myron. You bribed two police officers.”

  “And there’s the rub,” Myron said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Even that night something struck me as odd about the whole incident. The three of them in the car together. Why? Bonnie didn’t much care for Billy Lee Palms. Sure, she’d go out with Clu and Clu would go out with Billy Lee and maybe they’d even double-date or something. But why were the three of them in that car so late at night?”

  Hester Crimstein stayed the lawyer. “Are you saying one of them wasn’t in the car?”

  “No. I’m saying that there were four people in the car, not three.”

  “What?”

  They both looked at Bonnie. Bonnie lowered her head.

  “Who were the four?” Hester asked.

  “Bonnie and Clu were one couple.” Myron tried to meet Bonnie’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look up. “Billy Lee Palms and Lucy Mayor were the other.”

  Hester Crimstein looked as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four. “Lucy Mayor?” she repeated. “As in the missing Mayor girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Myron kept his eyes on Bonnie. Eventually she raised her head. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  Hester Crimstein said, “She’s not talking.”

  “Yes,” Bonnie said. “It’s true.”

  “But you never knew what happened to her, did you?”

  Bonnie hesitated. “Not then, no.”

  “What did Clu tell you?”

  “That you bought her off too,” Bonnie said. “Like with the police. He said you paid her to keep silent.”

  Myron nodded. It made sense. “There’s one thing I don’t get. There was a ton of publicity about Lucy Mayor a few years back. You must have seen her picture in the paper.”

  “I did.”

  “Didn’t it ring a bell?”

  “No. You have to remember. I only saw her that one time. You know Billy Lee. A different girl every night. And Clu and I sat in the front. Her hair was a different color too. She was a blonde then. So I didn’t know.”

  “And neither did Clu.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But eventually you learned the truth.”

  “Eventually,” she said.

  “Whoa,” Hester Crimstein said. “I’m not following any of this. What does an old traffic accident have to do with Clu’s murder?”

  “Everything,” Myron said.

  “You better explain, Myron. And while you’re at it, why did Esperanza get framed for it?”

  “That was a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “Esperanza wasn’t the one they intended to frame,” Myron said. “I was.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Yankee Stadium hunched over in the night, crouching shoulders low as though trying to escape the glow from its own lights. Myron parked in Lot 14, where the executives and players parked. There were only three other cars there. The night guard at the press entrance said he was expected, that the Mayors would meet him on the field. Myron moved down the lower tier and hopped the wall near the batter’s box. The stadium lights were on, but nobody was there. He stood alone on the field and took a deep breath. Even in the Bronx nothing smelled like a baseball diamond. He turned toward the visitor’s dugout, scanning the lower boxes and finding the exact seats he and his brother had sat in all those years ago. Funny what you remember. He walked toward the pitcher’s mound, the grass making a gentle whooshing sound, and sat down on the rubber and waited. Clu’s home. The one place he’d always felt at peace.

  Should have buried him here, Myron thought. Under a pitcher’s mound.

  He stared up into the thousands of seats, empty like the shattered eyes of the dead, the vacant stadium merely a body now without a soul. The whites of the foul lines were muddied, nearly dirt-toned now. They’d be put down anew tomorrow before game time.

  People say that baseball is a metaphor for life. Myron did not know about that, but staring down the foul line, he wondered. The line between good and evil is not so different from the foul line on a baseball field. It’s often made of stuff as flimsy as lime. It tends to fade over time. It needs to be constantly redrawn. And if enough players trample on it, the line becomes smeared and blurred to the point where fair is foul and foul is fair, where good and evil become indistinguishable from each other.

  Jared Mayor’s voice broke the stillness. “You said you found my sister.”

  Myron squinted toward the dugout. “I lied,” he said.

  Jared stepped up the cement stairs. Sophie followed. Myron rose to his feet. Jared started to say something more, but his mother put her hand on his arm. They kept walking as though they were coaches coming out to talk to the relief pitcher.

  “Your sister is dead,” Myron said. “But you both know that.”

  They kept walking.

  “She was killed in a drunk driving accident,” he went on. “She died on i
mpact.”

  “Maybe,” Sophie said.

  Myron looked confused. “Maybe?”

  “Maybe she died on impact, maybe she didn’t,” Sophie continued. “Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms weren’t doctors. They were dumb, drunk jocks. Lucy might have just been injured. She may have been alive. A doctor might have been able to save her.”

  Myron nodded. “I guess that’s possible.”

  “Go on,” Sophie said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  “Whatever your daughter’s condition actually was, Clu and Billy Lee believed that she was dead. Clu was terrified. Drunk driving charges would be serious enough, but this was vehicular homicide. You don’t walk away from that, no matter how far your curveball breaks. He and Billy Lee panicked. I don’t know the details here. Sawyer Wells can tell us. My guess is that they hid the body. It was a quiet road, but there still wouldn’t be enough time to bury Lucy before the police and ambulance arrived. So they probably stashed her in the brush. And when it all calmed down, they came back and buried her. Like I said, I don’t know the details. I don’t think they’re particularly relevant. What is relevant is that Clu and Billy Lee got rid of the body.”

  Jared stepped into Myron’s face. “You can’t prove any of this.”

  Myron ignored him, keeping his eyes on Jared’s mother. “The years pass. Lucy is gone. But not in the minds of Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms. Maybe I’m overanalyzing. Maybe I’m being too easy on them. But I think what they did that night defined the rest of their lives. Their self-destructive tendencies. The drugs—”

  “You’re being too easy,” Sophie said.

  Myron waited.

  “Don’t give them credit for having consciences,” she continued. “They were worthless scum.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t analyze. And I guess it doesn’t matter. Clu and Billy Lee may have created their own hell, but it wasn’t close to the agony your family experienced. You told me about the awful torment of not knowing the truth, how it lives with you every day. With Lucy dead and buried like that, the torment just went on.”