Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “It’s an adrenaline rush. Nothing like it.”

  “Well, then, we’ll pray that God will help you see the truth. To see through the lies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your investigation. The Palatine case.”

  “Okay. I guess your prayers can’t hurt.”

  “Who knows?” Jake said with a cocky smile. “Since it’s the God of all truth and the Enemy of all deception that we’re praying to, our prayers may even help.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine” is what Jack Bauer and Chloe say whenever they don’t like a situation, such as having to cooperate with terrorists.

  I escaped by going over to the jukebox, a vintage Rock-Ola straight from the sixties boasting “Stereo” in ostentatious letters, like they’d split the atom. Three songs for a quarter, just like the old days. Rory told me he’d added new selections. I spotted one and selected C3: “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

  “Wow,” Jake said. “Takes me back to Nam.”

  I nodded. As we listened, Jake and I relived memories half a world away and almost a lifetime ago. Clarence was probably thinking of his brother who died in Nam. I found myself sitting in the Mekong Delta with Neal Crane, a Mississippi farm boy, and listening to Simon and Garfunkel in the evening, when it cooled down to the midnineties.

  I heard Neal’s twang as he said, “What’s up, bro?” and backslapped me with his big right arm. Neal and I would talk about friendlies and hostiles, about Old Miss football, about our dreams after the war, maybe living near each other and raising our families. Two months later Neal stepped on a land mine. He was gone.

  Rory waded into our sea of Garfunkel-induced melancholy to bring us burgers and onion rings. That quickly we were back at Lou’s, jibing and laughing again.

  Jake and Clarence turned down dessert, but it didn’t keep them from hefty bites of my huckleberry pie with French vanilla ice cream. Clarence took some extra insulin. I sipped my coffee. The pot Rory brewed for me was nice and dark, which is why I always go over the top and give him a 10 percent tip.

  “Okay if I talk about the investigation?” I asked, noting the closest people were sitting three booths away. “Off the record?”

  They nodded. I got up and put quarters in the jukebox to get cover from the Four Seasons, Turtles, and Monkees. There’s a speaker over our booth that projects into the room but allows us to hear each other.

  I told Jake about the solitaire game and the ace of spades.

  “At first I thought it proved he was interrupted. He was about to play the ace, but something happened—phone rang, somebody came to the door, he heard a noise outside, whatever. But now I don’t buy it. Interrupted before you turn it over? Sure. But after you see the ace? Nah. Phone rings, teakettle whistles, someone comes to the door, maybe you stop turning cards. But once you turn up an ace, you play it instantly, before anything else.”

  “You make it sound like a science,” Clarence said.

  “I was testing it last night. You see an ace, you play it, in a heartbeat.”

  “Yet there it sat,” Clarence said. “So what’s your point?”

  “Somebody else placed it, not Palatine. Probably the murderer. Pulled it out of the deck after he killed the professor.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Somebody sat down in front of the cards and messed with them … and maybe turned to type that stuff on the computer too. And why the ace of spades? Random? I don’t think so.”

  “Isn’t it the death card?” Jake asked.

  “Exactly. Symbolism.”

  “But who kills someone, then sits around fiddling with cards?” Jake said. “Why risk being caught?”

  “Maybe he was relishing what he’d done,” I said. “But he was unusually comfortable at a murder scene. Why wasn’t he more afraid of being caught? Consider the time involved with the rope, typing, messing with playing cards.”

  “It’s like he was waiting for something,” Jake said.

  “Waiting for him to die?” Clarence asked.

  “And when he’d waited long enough, he put the bullets in his chest. Then there’s the wineglasses.”

  “Wineglasses?” Clarence asked.

  “In the sink. You were off with Carp when I found them. Two wineglasses with a white wine residue. Couldn’t see fingerprints.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Maybe the professor had a guest earlier, came and went before the murder. But why wipe prints off the glasses? Could be the murderer was his guest. If they’re drinking together, he knows him.”

  “Then he’d have good reason to wipe the glasses,” Jake said. “His anyway.”

  “But where’s the wine bottle? Not in the house. Not in the trash. Nowhere. Manny searched, and he’s good. Looks like the killer took it. Why? Why take the risk of carrying a wine bottle from a murder scene if you don’t want to be noticed and might need to run?”

  We sat there quietly. No takers.

  “I’ve got questions too,” Clarence said. “Like, why didn’t the neighbors hear the gunshots?”

  “Could’ve had a silencer,” I said. “Then the shots aren’t much louder than a cough. Not enough to wake someone. If it was an apartment in the still of the night maybe, but not in a house next door or across the street.”

  Sherlock Holmes smoked while contemplating evidence and occasionally listened to himself play the violin. We sipped Rory’s dark Italian coffee. And listened to the Rock-Ola spin a 45, “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”

  “Ollie Chandler doesn’t understand, does he?”

  “Even Jake and Clarence don’t fully understand.”

  “Yes, but they know the One who knows all. And therefore they have a framework to understand what Ollie can’t.”

  “And yet he seeks the truth, doesn’t he?”

  “He seeks one kind of truth. The kind that leads to the incrimination and capture of others. He seeks truth that will expose them and justify himself. But does he seek truth that would expose himself?”

  “Does any man seek such truth unless the King empowers him?”

  “There’s always much to be learned from watching them, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. Just as there was much to be learned from watching us when we walked that world.”

  I drove toward the professor’s house, preoccupied. Suddenly I realized I’d gone three blocks too far. It was an unfamiliar part of town. I turned around at the next driveway, circling quickly by a little hole-in-the-wall with an old beat-up sign. It said “Wally’s Donuts.” I braked and swung back into the parking lot, popping the car into park before it stopped, lurching. I looked at the donut box still sitting in the passenger seat.

  Wally’s Donuts.

  The guy didn’t speak English, but after I showed him my badge, he got me on the phone with Big Wally himself, who said he’d closed the place up at ten thirty last night, but they have a Wednesday night special on donuts in the dozen and half dozen boxes, and they probably sold six hundred donuts to eighty different people, and he’s bad with faces, and it’s all cash, no credit or debit cards, so no records.

  Back in my car, I stared at a donut and a box. I closed my eyes and walked through the scattered events of the night before, moving the jigsaw pieces around, trying to make them fall into place.

  They wouldn’t.

  6

  “The principal difficulty lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE NAVAL TREATY

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1:30 P.M.

  TAPED TO MY DASHBOARD are the words of Detective Hercule Poirot: “It is the brain, the little gray cells, on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within—not without.”

  I was searching inside myself, looking for the truth. I was pondering the professor but also thinking, inexplicably, of Jimmy Ross and Lincoln Caldwell. That irritated me.

  As a detective, sometimes you sense something’s w
rong, but you don’t know what. Something was wrong on my old case, and plenty was wrong on my new one. My little gray cells were telling me that.

  When I arrived back at the crime scene, I decided to call in more eyes to help me see what I was missing.

  “Jack? You’re in Lloyd Center area, right? How’s your case going?”

  “All done but the paperwork. Guy shot his wife’s boyfriend. He confessed. Open and shut. I hear we both got called to murders the same night. Yours as easy as ours?”

  “I don’t think so. We’re back at the house of the professor who lost his tenure last night. I need a second opinion.”

  “Noel’s with me.”

  “Bring him.”

  After I gave Jack the address, Clarence—pen and pad in hand—asked, “More detectives? Is it normal to do all this consulting?”

  “Never did it in the old days. But they’ve changed policy. We’ve had too many cases where something important was missed that other guys would’ve noticed. Someone who knows electrical work, plumbing, music, or art will pick up on things another detective misses. Phillips knows his Dell computers. Probably makes no difference, but it could. So we help each other out. It’s fun to get called to a scene where you don’t have to do the grunt work. You can just look around and throw out your ideas like you’re a character in a murder mystery.” I heard the sound of heavy shoes. Next thing I knew, one of those shoes stepped on my foot.

  “That’s inappropriate behavior,” I told Noel Barrows.

  Noel’s a good golfer, but it’s all in his arms and wrists. His feet are klutzy.

  “Sorry.” Noel smiled like a schoolboy.

  Okay, he’s a likable klutz. Especially likable at a poker game, where he’s as excited by a good hand as a little girl at her birthday party. He doesn’t know the meaning of a poker face. Which is why we always invite him back.

  Jack shook my hand, then saw Clarence, who you don’t have to be a detective to notice. “Clarence Abernathy, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Jack Glissan. My partner’s Noel Barrows. I used to love your column.”

  “Used to?” I heard the smile in my voice.

  “You’re still a great writer. I just read you more when you did sports.”

  “Jack started as a detective back when they solved crimes the old-fashioned way,” I said. “Killing a chicken and examining its entrails.”

  “Twenty years ago this month, on November 4,” Jack said, “Ollie and I started our three-year partnership as detectives.” He paused. “It was the worst three years of my life.”

  I laughed. “He’s joking,” I said to Clarence. “He loved me as a partner.”

  Jack shook his head, deadpan.

  “They assigned you to Ollie, Clarence?” Jack asked. “What’d you do to deserve that kind of punishment?”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking myself.”

  “Jack’s got lots of candles on his cake,” I said, “but the frosting’s still moist. And they say Abernathy’s okay too, once you get used to him. I haven’t gotten used to him. Okay, guys, look around the room. Tell me what you see.”

  “Guy was playing cards with somebody?” Jack walked over to the table by the computer. “No, looks like solitaire. They’re running prints on the cards, obviously. Was the computer on?”

  “Yeah. Interesting message typed in.” I handed him a printout of the supposed confession.

  “Sound like something he’d write?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The killer wrote it?”

  “Maybe.”

  Jack pointed to the two piles of student papers. “Gonna read ’em?”

  “Think it’s worth it?”

  “Probably not. But you never know.”

  I looked at Clarence. “You have to sift through lots of rocks and mud to find the gold.”

  He jotted it down. Maybe I’d have to read the Tribune after all.

  I played the professor’s message machine, with the Nietzsche quote. Jack raised his eyebrows and Noel grinned.

  “What a piece of work,” Jack said. “Guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but …”

  “Pretentious, wasn’t he?” I said. “Any advice?”

  “Check students’ grades,” Jack said. “Who’d the professor fail last semester that kept him from graduating or made him lose a scholarship or go on drugs or take up shoplifting? Anybody with an ax to grind.”

  “It’s all about motive,” I said to Clarence. I pointed the guys toward the mantel. “Check out the pictures.”

  Jack looked them over. “He’s in half of these himself, mostly with students. Look, he’s ten years younger in this picture. Maybe five years in this one. And that one looks recent, judging by the gray hairs. It’s like he never took his pictures down. He only added. Check out that bulletin board. He’s got pictures tacked on pictures. There must be a hundred of them.”

  “One hundred nineteen,” I said. “Lots of them are group photos, so there’s got to be five hundred people in these, mostly students. Guess he hadn’t heard about photo albums. The place is neat and tidy, except for these pictures. Looks like a third of them were taken right here. Apparently he handed off his camera so he could be in them. Wanted to remind himself how handsome he was.”

  “And how young and attractive his students are,” Clarence said.

  Jack studied the pictures closely. “Did he have family?”

  “Father’s deceased, mother’s in a rest home. Brother’s a doctor. Manny checked into him. They fight a lot.”

  “Brothers do that,” Clarence said.

  Jack and Noel nodded. So did I. I haven’t talked with my brother for two years.

  Noel kept staring at the mantel. “Something’s fishy,” he finally said. He paused, looking side to side like we were under FBI surveillance. He whispered, as if a high-powered eavesdropping device were pointed at us. “Something’s really fishy.”

  “Am I supposed to ask, ‘What’s fishy?’ Noel, or are you going to tap it out on my foot in Morse code?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s fishy.”

  “You’re telling me nothing. Telling is when you get to the part after ‘it’s fishy.’ ”

  Noel turned and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you.”

  “Good,” I said. “I was just about to do a Jack Bauer and hook you up to battery cables.”

  “Don’t you love that show? Remember the one where Tony shoots the—”

  “Shut up and tell me what’s fishy!”

  “Somebody removed a picture,” Noel said. “See, there’s four on this side and five on that side.” He climbed on the hearth and pointed to the top of the mantel. “Look at the dust. They’ve been moved recently. I don’t think the dead guy did it, because everything else is … arranged just right.”

  “Symmetrical,” I said.

  “Couldn’t there have been an odd number of pictures to start with?” Clarence asked.

  “He’d have put one in the middle,” Jack said.

  Jack put his arm around Noel, twenty-five years his junior. “Good catch. Let him focus and he earns his paycheck.”

  “If we find that picture,” I said, “I bet we’ll solve this crime.”

  “There’s a possible witness here at those apartments with the view of Oak Street,” Manny told me on the phone. “She saw something, but she’s a case. Maybe you can charm her. She’s your type. Second floor. 205. Name’s Rebecca Butler.”

  Twenty minutes later Clarence and I were standing outside apartment 205. Painted lime green, the hallway was a fake clean with the smell of heavy chemicals that sterilize dirt without removing it. Four decades of cumulative neglect.

  I knocked.

  “Who’s it?” a woman’s voice shouted.

  “Detective Ollie Chandler. Police.”

  “That spic send you?” Still shouting.

  “Officer Domast? He’s my partner.”

  “Too bad for you,” she said, now peering through the fish-eye. “Don’
t look like a cop. Why should I believe you’re a cop? Show me a donut.”

  “Crack the door, and I’ll show you my badge.”

  “After you tie me up and rob me. Hold it up to the peephole.”

  I held up my badge.

  “Move it to the right. No the other way. No, not that close. You’re dumb enough to be a cop.”

  Finally the dead bolt snapped back, but the door didn’t open.

  I waited.

  “You didn’t open the door,” I called, not letting my voice in on my attitude.

  “You can’t open a door yourself? It’s not much harder than pickin’ up a donut.” Two donut cracks and we weren’t even in the door.

  “We can come in?”

  “It’s unlocked,” she called. “I’m watching my soaps.”

  We walked into a living room that looked like it had thrown up on itself.

  She was sitting, curled up in a seventies recliner, wearing sweatpants and a mustard-stained undersized T-shirt that showed way more than I wanted to see. She was surrounded by a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a jumbo bag of Cheetos, a liter of Pepsi plus two empties, and stained paper plates.

  Her eyes were close-set, squinty and molelike, as if she hadn’t seen the sun for a year. Her age was a difficult call. Forty-five? People don’t age as much when they don’t see the sun. Cheetos and Lay’s probably help the skin too with all that oil. Like her apartment building, she was showing forty years of cumulative neglect. If she’d been painted lime green, it would have been a perfect match.

  She didn’t look up until the commercial, ten seconds after we entered.

  “I’m Ollie. This is—”

  “Who’s the black guy?”

  “Clarence. He’s studying to be a cop when he grows up. Pretend he’s not here. He’s used to it.”

  “Can you dunk it?” she asked him.

  “I used to be able to,” Clarence said.

  “Too fat now, huh?”

  He said nothing, but his eyes spoke volumes. Forgoing handwritten notes, he flipped open his PDA, stylus in hand.