“Who do you work for?”
Steve ignored the question. “—about unsolved murders, and I wondered if I could talk to you about Alex and Anthony.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, and Steve wondered what was going through the man’s mind. Was he remembering his sons? Thinking about how they died? Recalling what they’d been like as children?
It was a weirdly real moment, and Steve found himself, for the first time, fervently hoping that his father had not killed this man’s sons. What had been, moments before, a puzzle to piece together, an intellectual exercise, had suddenly become much more personal. And the truth was that he was not at all sure that his father was behind these murders. After going to Copper City, he’d been able to more easily picture his dad pushing his first wife off the bank building to her death, but the bustling impersonality of Utah’s capital somehow made it more difficult for him to imagine his father taking the lives of two young men in such a cold and brutal fashion. And the fact that Steve had spent his early childhood years here made it seem even less likely to him that his father would drive to a different part of the city in order to execute the brothers.
Frank Jones had still not spoken, and Steve cleared his throat. “I have some questions about your sons’ deaths. . . .”
“Go to hell!” the old man said, and broke the connection.
He’d probably slammed his phone down, Steve thought, and though he had no idea what Frank Jones looked like, he imagined a chubbier Harvey Keitel stomping angrily around a small, shabby house not unlike Lyman Fischer’s.
It was clear that this was not a subject Frank Jones wanted to discuss. Steve needed to talk to the man, though, and wasn’t about to let a little setback like this deter him, so he called a taxi and gave the driver Jones’s address. He was from California and had never taken a taxi in his life, but the service was a lot cheaper and a lot more convenient than he’d thought it would be. The driver—not Indian or Middle Eastern, as the cinematic stereotypes would have it, but a sulky white guy about his own age—took him directly to the Jones residence, a modest house in an older but well-kept neighborhood. He asked the cabbie to wait, telling him that this wouldn’t take long, and the driver shrugged. “Meter’s still running. Take your time.”
Walking up the short cement path to the porch steps, Steve wondered whether he was supposed to tip the driver. He was bad at figuring out that sort of thing and never seemed to know what was expected or what was appropriate.
He blamed his father for not teaching that to him.
Steve walked up the steps, knocked on the door. No answer. He tried the bell, heard not even a muffled ring from inside the house, and knocked again, louder this time. After a few minutes of this, it soon became clear that if Frank Jones was home he had no intention of answering the door. Steve was about to give up and go away, take the taxi to the site of the fire and then to the house of Issac Donovan, the man who had noticed the blaze and called it in, when he noticed an old woman in a bright housedress watering flowers on the porch of the house next door. Frank Jones and his wife had raised their kids in this house, and there was probably a good chance that the woman next door had been living here way back then.
“Excuse me!” he called, walking over.
The woman glanced up from her watering can. “Yes?” she said cautiously.
He stopped at the edge of her well-manicured yard. “I’m sorry to bother you, but would it be all right if I came up and asked you a few questions?”
“Depends,” she said. “If you’re trying to sell me something . . .”
“No,” he assured her. “I just have a few questions about your neighbor.”
She’d seen where he’d come from, and she looked over at the Jones house next door.
“I’m a reporter,” he said, the lie coming more easily this time.
Nodding, she motioned him over.
He walked between two low hedges. “I’m doing a story on unsolved murders, and I was hoping to speak with Mr. Jones about his sons, Alex and Anthony. He doesn’t seem to want to talk to me, though.” Steve stood at the bottom of her porch steps, looking up.
“I’m not surprised,” the woman told him.
“Why’s that?”
“Frank went through a lot with those boys, and after they died . . . Well, he never really got over it. Lost his job. Drove away his daughter. Took it out on his wife, though she stayed with him until the cancer took her, poor thing.”
She glanced around as if afraid of being overheard. “Those Jones kids were monsters,” she confided. “No one was surprised when they died badly.” She lowered her voice. “Personally? I always thought they’d be shot by the police while they were robbing a bank or something.”
It was wrong to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but the news lifted his spirits. Maybe the killings were justified; maybe his father had had a legitimate reason for doing what he’d done. It could have been self-defense. Or payback for a crime committed against him. Whatever the circumstances, Steve felt better about his father’s involvement—if his father had been involved—and, for the first time, he could imagine his dad doing away with the two losers.
“Can you think of anyone else who might be able to tell me more about Alex or Anthony or the fire?” Steve asked.
The old woman shook her head. “That was a long time ago. Most of the people who knew them are probably long gone.”
“Do you remember the names of any of their friends? Or enemies?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not sure I ever did know.”
“What about after the fire? Did the police ever question you or any of the other neighbors about the family and your opinion of the boys?”
“They did, but the officer who talked to me was no spring chicken. I’m sure he’s long since retired. I don’t recall his name anyway.”
Steve continued to ask questions, but the woman—Lurlene Langford, she said her name was—had nothing to reveal, so he finally thanked her, walked back to the taxi, and gave the driver the address of the apartment building where the Jones brothers had perished. It was a Target shopping center now, he discovered, so there was no point in even stopping, and Steve told the cabbie to continue on to the next address on his list: the home of Issac Donovan, the man who had first reported the fire. On the way, he thought about how Alex and Anthony had died. The coroner’s report stated that they had burned to death, but that seemed vague to him and unsatisfying. Even if they had not been shot, stabbed or strangled, with the fire set to cover up the true cause of death, there had to be a reason why they had not run out of the apartment at the first sign of trouble. An apartment was not large. Why had they both remained inside rather than dashing out the door or jumping out a window? It had been ten o’clock in the morning. Even if they’d still been asleep at that late hour, the smoke or the heat should have awakened and alerted them. Perhaps they’d been out of it. Drunk. Or stoned.
Or they’d been drugged insensate by someone else.
Or restrained so they would be unable to flee.
And they’d experienced every torturous second of their death, gasping for breath as smoke overpowered the oxygen in the air and filled their lungs, screaming in agony as their skin burned and peeled like cheap lead paint.
He called Sherry on his cell, told her that the meeting was going to run longer than anticipated and he would get a ride back to the hotel; she didn’t need to pick him up. He ended the call quickly, before she could ask any questions. He had a lot of ground to cover today, and he could get more done if he didn’t waste time trying to get back to the college and pretend to be coming out of a conference room.
“Can you wait for me again?” Steve asked the taxi driver as he pulled up to an assisted-living center.
The cabbie tapped the meter, grinning. “You’re my best fare in three weeks. Stay as long as you want.”
Steve looked at the displayed amount. The miles and minutes were starting to add up. It was
now up to the amount he’d thought his original ride to Frank Jones’s would cost. If he stayed here for any length of time, it would probably be cheaper to call for a new cab when he was finished. On the other hand, this was an old-folks’ home. And if his meeting with Donovan went anything like the previous stops on today’s itinerary, he’d be in and out in a matter of minutes.
“Wait here,” he said.
“No prob, Bob.”
He stayed longer than expected, and definitely longer than was necessary. Issac Donovan remembered the fire clearly and gave a coherent, detailed account of what had happened and what he’d done. But he had no real information to impart—nothing new, at least—and the only reason Steve remained in the de pressingly bare room was because he felt sorry for the ex-custodian, who was obviously starved for company. Something about Donovan’s situation reminded Steve of his father’s, and guilt also conspired to keep him there.
After finally getting away, he tried some of the other names on his list—a witness named in one of the articles and the two reporters who had covered the story—but only one of the reporters was home and he barely remembered the case. The day was getting long, and Steve needed to get back, so he gave the cabbie the address of his hotel.
He thought ahead to Tempe and Tucson. Why had he invited Sherry along? He’d be able to talk to a lot more people if she weren’t there. He wouldn’t have to cram everything into such a short period of time, and he could keep on going from nine o’clock in the morning until nine o’clock at night, instead of having to pretend that this was a real vacation.
Why had he brought her? Guilt. Because he hadn’t been spending much time with her lately and she deserved to be treated better. And because she tethered him, because he needed the connection with her to keep him grounded, keep him focused, keep him from drifting too far into himself.
And because he knew he couldn’t do anything rash with her along.
He remembered how it had felt to squeeze the life out of Lyman Fischer and promptly pushed the memory away.
That was not something that would ever happen again.
The cabbie dropped him off—last minute instructions—at an Italian restaurant two doors down from the hotel. Steve paid him, threw in a ten-percent tip, though he didn’t know whether that was necessary, and thanked the driver before walking up the street to the hotel.
A scene greeted him there when he arrived. On the short red carpet in front of the lobby, a little boy stood sobbing uncontrollably while his mother hugged him tightly. A middle-aged man who must have been the boy’s father and a uniformed hotel employee were bending down in the center of the parking lot before them, looking at something on the ground. The hotel employee was holding a shovel.
Steve’s curiosity must have shone in his face, because the mother said without prompting as he approached, “My son’s puppy was killed.”
Steve nodded his sympathy, assuming it had accidentally been run over by a car, but the woman offered, “Strangled.” She’d lowered her voice as though the boy wouldn’t be able to hear if she spoke quietly, but of course he did, and his wailing intensified. She held him more tightly. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “It’s okay.”
Steve felt cold. A dead puppy? He thought of Sherry’s apartment and automatically looked up at the window of their room. As he’d feared, as he’d somehow known, she was there, staring through the glass between the parted drapes, her attention riveted on the scene in the parking lot. She hadn’t noticed that he’d returned, and he quickly walked into the lobby and took the steps two at a time as he headed to the second floor and their room.
Sherry was turning away from the window as he entered.
He walked over to the window, looked out. The hotel guy was carrying the puppy’s body across the parking lot on the shovel. “Someone killed a little boy’s dog. Strangled it.”
“Oh,” she said, uninterested. “That’s what’s going on down there.”
He watched her walk into the bathroom, debated whether to ask about the dead puppy in her apartment, and finally decided to let the matter drop.
By the time she came back out, he was on the bed with his shoes off, watching CNN.
“Where do you want to eat?” she asked brightly.
Twelve
They had only six days total for this vacation, and two of them were gone already, but he decided to spend an extra day in Salt Lake City.
Bad idea.
He had no real leads to follow up on, but gut instinct told him that if he dug a little deeper something might turn up, and he was a firm believer in gut instinct.
Who was he kidding?
As Will never tired of pointing out, he was probably the least spontaneous person on the planet. He planned his weekends a week ahead of time. He didn’t need a BlackBerry or any sort of day planner because he always kept a schedule in his head. But he had been getting better lately. This trip was pretty spontaneous, even if he had had a week to prepare for it. He’d shown up at Sherry’s apartment—
and seen the dead puppy
—on a whim. Yesterday, cruising around the city in the taxi, he’d flown entirely by the seat of his pants.
And Lyman Fischer’s murder certainly hadn’t been planned out.
Or had it?
Because not only had he told no one about his trip to New Mexico, he had made that trip in the middle of the night, had lied to Sherry about being sick during that time, and had taken a plane headed for Houston that happened to stop off at Albuquerque, so that anyone trying to trace his itinerary by computer would assume that he had gone to Texas.
He didn’t want to think about that, wouldn’t think about that, and he told Sherry that he had one more meeting today and then he was through. “I have to do this,” he lied. “This is a very important account. That’s why they sent me.”
“How long’s it going to be?” she wanted to know.
“Quicker,” he promised.
He took the car this time. Sherry had seen everything she wanted to see in Salt Lake City, and she hadn’t had much fun by herself anyway, so she was just going to lounge around the pool and read until he returned. He left shortly after nine, while she was still getting into her bathing suit, and he gave her a quick kiss on the lips and an even quicker one on her exposed left breast before taking off. She laughed, pushing him. “Get out of here.”
There were a couple of people who hadn’t been home yesterday, and he pulled the car into the empty parking lot of a shopping center that hadn’t opened yet and made a few quick calls. One of the men, Gil Patrick, identified in an article as a friend of Alex Jones’s, was home and willing to talk, though only on the phone. That was good enough for Steve, who asked a few generic questions to gauge the man’s mood before querying, “Did the brothers have any enemies who might have had it in for them? Do you have any ideas about who set the fire?”
What he wanted to know was whether his father’s name would be one of those mentioned, whether Patrick knew about any beef his father might have had with the Jones boys. Once again, he had one of those weird moments as he thought about his red tricycle and their blue house and realized that if his dad had set the fire, he had come home afterward and both Steve and his mother had seen him, had been there, had talked to him as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Patrick considered the question. “Not really,” he admitted. “I thought it might be this guy named Elijah at first, but he was real squirrelly and would’ve bailed once the heat was on, and he didn’t. Tony and Alex did have a lot of enemies, though. They were selling coke at that time, and they used to cut it, which pissed off a lot of their customers. But . . . I don’t know. It could’ve been a lot of people. Tony’s girlfriend might know more about it than I do.”
“What’s her name?”
“Anna something. I don’t remember. It was twenty fuckin’ years ago.”
“Do you have any idea where she is?”
“No.” There was some sort of commotion in
the background, what sounded like a shouting woman, followed by a series of knocks and static. “Sorry,” Patrick said, his voice suddenly louder. “Gotta go.”
Anna, Steve thought as he listened to the click and then the dial tone. He turned off his phone. There’d been no Anna mentioned in any of the articles or reports he’d read, and while it was possible that the police file contained such a reference, he did not have access to that information. On impulse, he dialed Frank Jones’s number. The old man answered on the first ring, and Steve said, “I’m looking for Anna, Tony’s old girlfriend.”
“Anna French?”
He’d been hoping for such a response, figuring that if he asked quickly, without introducing himself, he might find something out before Jones hung up. “Yes,” he said.
The old man must have recognized his voice. “Go to hell!” he yelled before terminating the call.
Anna French. He had a name now, and Steve drove to the café by the college, the only place he knew for sure that he could get Internet access, and he used one of the programs from work to call up information about her. Either she hadn’t married or she’d kept her maiden name, because he found an entry for “Anna French” almost immediately. A photo even came up, and to his surprise he recognized the woman. He’d seen her before, though he had to read her stats in order to figure out where: She was one of the students whose reunion booklet he was assembling.
This was where people usually expressed their what-a-small-world platitudes. But it wasn’t a small world, and he was starting not to believe in coincidences.
According to the information on his screen, she was now an instructor at the school. He didn’t understand why a student at a religious college who went on to become a teacher would hang around with an apparent lowlife like Anthony Jones, but stranger things had been known to happen. He took out his cell and was about to call, thinking that, with the booklet, he even had a legitimate reason to contact her.
Then he flipped off the phone.
His Father's Son Page 14
