A Welcome Grave

by Michael Koryta

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When was it that you were planning to head back to Ohio?”

  “The plan was for tonight.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Oh, I’m afraid that’s not going to work.”

  “I’ve told you everything I can possibly tell you, and I’ll give you the written statement. If you need me for anything further, you’ll have my telephone number.”

  He made a face, as if he were getting ready to break some bad news and didn’t relish the task. That was a joke, though—he was enjoying it just fine.

  “I’m in a position where I could really embarrass myself here,” he said. “I mean, sure, you say it was a suicide. But right now, until I’ve done a little more investigation, that’s all I’ve got to rely on. Make me look awful bad if I cut you loose only to have my evidence team tell me it looks like you killed the guy. Then we’ve got to go find your ass, and I’ve got to deal with a bunch of cops in Ohio who are going to shake their heads at me, whisper to each other about this moron in Indiana who let a killer walk right out of his county.”

  He looked at me with flat eyes. “I hate to have people whisper about me.”

  I met his gaze. “You’ve got my statement. Unless you’re arresting me, I’m going to go home.” Home, suddenly, was sounding very nice, indeed.

  “Push comes to shove, eh?” Brewer said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you here. At least for a few hours, while we get this straightened out.”

  “You arresting me for murder?”

  He shook his head. “I’m considering this an equivocal death investigation, Mr. Perry. Suicide’s an option, as is murder. As is, I suppose, an accidental shooting. That’d be the gamut, right? Anyhow, I’m going to have to look at it from a few directions, make sure—”

  “I get the idea. But if you intend to keep me here overnight, you’re going to have to arrest me for something. And I don’t think you’ve got probable cause to say I killed that guy, Brewer.”

  He smiled sadly and nodded, as if I’d beaten him on that point.

  “That private eye license of yours,” he said, “is from what state?”

  Shit. I saw where this was going now and shook my head.

  “Well?”

  “It’s from Ohio.”

  “Oops. That’s no good. Because we’re in Indiana. And that dead guy out there? He’s in Indiana. And here you are, conducting an investigation in Indiana, without an Indiana license? My, my. I hate to say this, Mr. Perry, but that sounds like a crime.”

  “Not the kind you go to jail for.”

  This time the smile showed his teeth. “It’ll do for a night.”

  7

  The jail in Brown County was brand-new. The kid deputy provided this information after Brewer assigned him to the task of transporting me. When he got the news, the kid blanched noticeably, no doubt believing I was going to jail for offing the guy in the gazebo, and thinking about the few minutes he’d spent alone with me before Brewer had arrived. Once we were in the car, he kept glancing nervously in his rearview mirror, as if he thought a master criminal like me might somehow slip off the grate that protected the front seat and strangle him with my handcuffs. Maybe five minutes and fifty nervous glances into the ride, he decided he’d talk to me. Could be I’d pass on the chance to kill him if he was friendly enough, just thump him on the head with his own gun and steal his car. That was how the kinder master criminals did it.

  “Pretty fancy, really,” he said of the jail. “A lot nicer than the old one. We got all electronic locks now, more space, everything high-tech.”

  “And to think, I was worried about finding a place to stay tonight.”

  “It’s a nice place. For a jail.”

  “Lowest rates in town, I’m sure.”

  He kept up the stream of nervous chatter for the whole ride while I sat back and watched the dark countryside roll by. I wondered when I would make it back to Cleveland. Brewer seemed like a hardass, the type who would keep me as long as he could, but unless they were stupid enough to actually charge me with murder, that wouldn’t be beyond morning. Karen would have the news long before I made it back. They’d probably call her tonight, as I’d been helpful enough to provide Brewer with next-of-kin information for the corpse. After all, I’d been hired to facilitate a notification of death, and Matthew Jefferson had already heard of his father’s murder. Hate to think I was getting paid for nothing.

  I leaned back into the seat, ignoring the deputy, who was now telling me something about the perimeter security at the new jail, subtly trying to discourage me from attempting to break out of the place. Hopefully, when Brewer talked to Karen, it would loosen him up a bit. She’d support the story I had told him. Between that and the lack of physical evidence to suggest a homicide, he’d have to cut me loose in the morning. Son of a bitch probably would give me a fine for operating without a license in Indiana, though. That would be relayed to the Ohio licensing board, which would then fine me as well. Terrific.

  It took them half an hour to book me into the jail. I was allowed to keep my clothes, but I had to give up my belt so I couldn’t hang myself. They took me back into the bowels of the building through several heavy steel doors that shut with loud, hollow clangs. Doors in jails always make me think of hatches in a submarine—there’s a sense of finality when they slam shut behind you.

  I was alone in my cell, which was a plus, but there was a drunken hillbilly across from me who wanted to talk about my crimes, see what I was in for.

  “Moonshining,” I said, and then I rolled over on the bunk and put my back to him. Sometime in the hours before I fell asleep, it occurred to me that Amy had missed a hell of a trip.

  Brewer came for me early the next morning, probably running on no sleep, the way a good cop always seems to be. Brewer struck me as a good cop, just temporarily misguided.

  “Sleep well?” he said as the jailer let me out of the cell and they led me through a series of doors and into a small conference room. It had shackles attached to the walls, sure, but was a conference room just the same.

  “Are we done with this stupidity yet?” I answered. “Because I’d really like to be northbound sometime before noon.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  The jailer left, and then it was just Brewer and me. He’d changed clothes, was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt now, cop casual. His face was covered with a day’s growth of beard, though, so he hadn’t taken much time at home before rolling back out for the second round with me.

  “I’ve done a little research,” he said. “Sounds like you were a pretty good cop. You’ve had some big-deal cases as a PI, too. That’s good. Makes your witness testimony a little more reliable.”

  “Don’t you wish you’d been nicer now?”

  He tapped a pencil on the table in front of him. “Thing that makes me curious, though? Is why a smart detective like you would neglect to mention some damn interesting things during that witness testimony. Things like your arrest for assaulting the dead guy’s father. Things like the romantic relationship you had with the dead guy’s stepmother.”

  “Too many irrelevant details can make a statement murky.”

  “You think this is a game where we sit around and trade wise-ass remarks?”

  “It’s shaping up like that.”

  “Not anymore.” He leaned forward. “Yeah, I’d say you neglected to mention some pretty damn interesting things last night, Mr. Perry. You told me you were here to tell Jefferson his father was dead.”

  “I was.”

  “You didn’t mention that you were also here to tell him he was inheriting many millions.”

  “That’s family business. I’m not interested in sharing anyone else’s financial details, Brewer.”

  “Of course you’re not. Now, let’s review what you told me last night, shall we?” He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and glanced at it. “You told me, and repeate
d this several times, that Matthew Jefferson already knew his father was dead. That this was, in fact, the first thing he said to you when you encountered him.”

  “That’s right.”

  Brewer slapped the notebook down. “Now, if he knew his father was dead, it would stand to reason that he could also imagine he had just become a very wealthy man. Odd motivation for a suicide, don’t you think?”

  “He’d been estranged from his father. Could be he had no idea he was getting any money. Maybe that was part of his emotional problem. Not only had he lost his father, he’d lost a fortune.”

  “If he’d been estranged from his father, as you also indicated last night, then why had he received three phone calls from the man in the last few weeks?”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. He wasn’t bluffing; I could tell that from his face. If he’d called a judge at home and gotten an order for the phone records, he could have had them easily enough by this morning.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Brewer said, watching me.

  “I suppose.” I kept my voice neutral. It was more than interesting, but I didn’t want Brewer to think I cared. Hell, did I even want to care? Right now I just wanted to make my way through about three more locked doors and into the parking lot.

  “And the money?” Brewer said. “Those millions that were supposed to go to the son? Well, now that the son is dead, it appears that money goes right back to the widow. The same widow to whom you were once engaged.”

  He spread his hands and pushed away from the table. “You know, if I were the paranoid sort, I’d be seriously questioning whether I could believe your description of what happened, Mr. Perry.”

  “I hadn’t seen Karen Jefferson in years, Brewer. Call the Cleveland Police Department, ask around. Trust me, they would have checked our relationship out pretty thoroughly after her husband was murdered.”

  “I will indeed be on the phone with Cleveland. But right now I’ve got you to deal with. And I want to know why in the hell you would have taken this job. Or—and this is the really interesting question—why in the hell you would have been asked to take this job. You and this woman break off an engagement, you beat the shit out of her future husband and lapse into years of silence with her. Then the husband gets murdered and suddenly you’re a friend of the family?”

  “I’m not a friend of the family. I’m a guy who’s doing a job.”

  “Notification of death, that was your job?”

  “I had to find him, too. Nobody knew where he was.”

  “Except his father.”

  I shrugged.

  “Yeah,” Brewer said. “The father knew where the son lived, because he’d been in contact with the son. Or somebody from that house in Pepper Pike had been. And if the father has been talking to the son, well, shit, doesn’t it seem odd he wouldn’t have mentioned that to his wife? ‘Hey, hon, remember that kid I lost track of for a few years? Well, the boy’s living in Indiana now, works at an apple orchard . . . ’”

  We sat in silence and traded stares for a few minutes, Brewer tapping that pencil off the table again.

  “Last night you told me the dead guy had been estranged from his father, and that turned out to be untrue. Today you tell me you’ve been estranged from the soon-to-be-rich widow. I wonder if that’s true? I’m just thinking out loud, is all.”

  “As flattered as I am to be included in your thought process, I’d really like to be on my way.”

  “Like I said, don’t be in such a hurry.”

  I stood up. “Release me or charge me with something, Brewer. Something a little better than operating without an Indiana PI license. Or get me an attorney and a telephone so I can start making calls to the media about how you’re holding me without charges.”

  He sat there and looked at me, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just thoughtful. “You think we’re all a bunch of hicks, don’t you? Think I’m some redneck cop without a clue, bored of busting up meth labs in barns?”

  “No, I don’t, Brewer. I actually think—had been thinking, at least—that you’re probably a pretty good cop. Pretty smart. But I hate to see a good cop and a smart man waste his time.”

  He got to his feet and unlocked the door, held it open for me. I was halfway through it when he reached out and took me by the arm. It was a slow motion, almost gentle, but his grip was like a pair of forceps. His slender fingers closed around my elbow, his thumb finding a pressure point there and grinding against it. He held me like that and leaned his face sideways, looking up at mine.

  “Last night you suggested I check the dead man’s thumbs for hammer impressions.”

  “Did you?”

  “Uh-huh. And they were there. I found that out, and I thought, shoot, that is one smart guy we’ve got sitting in the jail. Started to feel bad, you know? Then I began to wonder if it wasn’t too smart. Hammer impressions on the thumb. Hell of a thing to think of in the first hour after witnessing a traumatic event like that.”

  “I’m a detective, Brewer. It’s kind of ingrained in me by now.”

  “Coroner tells me that the hammer impressions could have been left by someone placing the gun in the victim’s hand and using his thumb to pull the hammer back. Said it would have had to be done very fast, immediately after the shot was fired, but that it might be possible to leave those impressions and then freeze them when circulation stopped.”

  I reached down and wrapped my fingers around his wrist, pulled his hand from my elbow, and then used my forearm against his chest to push him back. I moved just as he had—aggressive disguised as slow and gentle. He kept his eyes on me and didn’t attempt to resist. I turned away from him and walked through the little hallway to the next locked door. Then I looked back at him expectantly. After a moment’s pause, he walked down and unlocked this door, too.

  “It’s been a blast, Brewer. Damn shame we’re never going to see each other again.”

  “Oh, we most certainly will. I intend to be present at your murder trial.”

  He had those eyes that never told whether he was kidding or serious.

  8

  The sun was a smashed ball of red in my rearview mirror when I reached Cleveland. I made one stop for lunch, as I’d missed out on a tasty jail breakfast, but otherwise stayed on the road and kept the speed up, not really caring if I got pulled over. When you’re a suspected murderer, tickets don’t mean a damn thing. Lincoln Perry, highway rebel. I needed to get a tommy gun, be ready to go down in a hail of gunfire if it came to that.

  I came up I-71 into the city, heading for the west side, and home. When I got to Brookpark, though, I pulled off onto I-480 and started east. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before, unshaven and tired and stiff, but I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. After seeing a guy blow his brains into a pond and spending a night in jail, waiting for some cop to lock his fingers into my arm and call me a murderer, I had a few questions of my own. A detour to Pepper Pike seemed very much to be the order of the evening.

  The house and all its windows were gleaming in the sunlight when I pulled into the drive, the glass reflecting a crimson glow back into my eyes. I got out of the truck and laid my hand against the hood, feeling the searing heat of an engine that had been driven long and hard. The longer you spend around a machine, the more human it begins to seem. Like that old Steve McQueen movie where he’s the engineer on the navy ship. Sand Pebbles, was it? Good movie. He loved that damn ship engine. McQueen dies at the end, though. Trying to save a woman, if I recall correctly. Probably should have stuck to the engine room.

  I walked up the path to the house and onto the porch with my head down, thoughts of McQueen and engines running through my head, and when I reached the door I saw it was already open, Karen looking at me with red-rimmed eyes.

  “I heard you drive in.”

  “Yeah?” I went in without waiting for an invitation, walked past her, and into the living room. I dropped down into the same couch I’d taken on my last visit an
d waited for her to join me.

  She came in a minute later, after shutting the front door and fastening all the locks. I heard her do it—the snap of the dead bolt, the rattle of the security chain. I listened to that and thought about the way she’d rushed to the door at the sound of my truck and how she’d spilled the wine during my last visit when the phone rang. Pretty damn jumpy.

  “They told me what happened,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but they were the sort of jeans and sweatshirt that you pay three hundred bucks for in a store where all of the employees have their nails done weekly and none of them has ever purchased a rock album.

  “Who did?”

  “The police in Indiana. They called me last night.”

  “Did they tell you they were keeping me in jail?”

  Her eyes went wide. “No. What? No. They just said . . . the detective said that he needed to get your statement and needed me to verify that what you said was true.”

  I grinned. “They took their time verifying it. Thoughtful enough to allow me a comfortable cot behind bars while they sorted it out, though.”

  She tugged the sleeves of the fancy sweatshirt down past her wrists.

  “Lincoln, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this would happen. You hadn’t even told me you were going to Indiana.”

  “For the amount of money you were throwing around, I thought I should make the notification in person.”

  “I understand. I just can’t believe what happened.” Her hands now out of sight, tucked into the sleeves, she folded her arms across her chest, hugged them under her breasts. Her eyes passed over me only in flitting glances before settling on some more reassuring, inanimate object in the room. The base of the floor lamp seemed to be her favorite.

  “It was pretty surprising,” I agreed, watching her with a hard stare. “The crazy bastard put the gun in his mouth and blew out a nice chunk of his skull. He was closer to me than you are now when he did it.”

  Her eyes rose, surprised by my description. “How awful.”