Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  “Never. Paul would never do things like that.”

  “Well, he’s doing something. There’s a man going to prison who shouldn’t, and there’s one man dead, and there could’ve been two more today, and one of them would have been Angie.”

  “You’ve gone crazy, Carl. I don’t know if it’s that woman or you’re drinking again, but you’ve gone crazy, accusing Paul of murder.”

  “Paul? Why do you keep calling him Paul,” I asked. “How close are you to Paul?”

  “How dare you? I’m a wife and a good wife. How dare you? I’m not the one who lied and strayed.”

  “Alright, if you’re my wife and a good one, obey me in this.”

  “No, no, you are so wrong.”

  “Gwen,” I said in despair, no longer in anger, “you must.”

  She looked at me in a way that I’d never wanted her to look at me. “You are the one who is defying the ways of the Lord. And you are bringing destruction down upon us.”

  41

  When I got back to Jorge’s, I looked in on Angie. She was sleeping peacefully. I went into the other bedroom, drained of everything and grateful for a bed. I kicked my running shoes off and lay down for just a moment, planning to get back up and have a shower before I slept. But I didn’t get back up.

  There were a lot of dreams. The one I remember is the one where Manny showed up. He said, “It’s good to have your daughter safe.”

  Naturally, I agreed.

  “Though you probably shouldn’t consider any place around you as safe.”

  “I feel like I’m stumbling through the darkness,” I said. “Like in the desert, but worse. I know there are things happening out there that I need to know about, but they’re way in the dark, and I don’t have any idea what they are.”

  “That’s what humans do, stumble through the darkness. You have no idea, Carl, how much darkness there is, how much we are blind to. That’s why seeing the light is such a precious experience.”

  “Does it matter if the light is the true light? Can there be a false light?”

  “Any light will do,” he said gently. “After all, we have to sail on.” While I was considering that, he said, “I didn’t know all this would happen. Sorry.”

  “You really didn’t know?” I asked, remembering our first conversation about the case and then his rabble-rousing on top of the Mercedes.

  “Well, sometimes we don’t know what we know.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  “I was rereading the transcripts of your conversation with Jorge,” he said.

  “There are transcripts?”

  He gave me one of those “don’t be naïve” looks.

  “But with the music and the waterfall?” Their noise should have defeated any surveillance.

  Another look: of course not from where he was.

  “I thought it was interesting that he described himself as an ‘expert in treachery.’”

  That woke me. If CTM was after me, it might occur to Jorge to offer me up in trade. I got up and went to check on Angie. I wanted to lie down beside her to make sure that I could protect her, but she’s not a little girl anymore and that didn’t seem right. I went back to my room, took the blanket and a pillow from the bed, got my gun, lay down in the hallway, and slept on the floor in front of her door.

  In the morning, I called my half-brother, Arthur. We’re not very close. We only lived as brothers for four years or so. He disapproved of me in my wilder years, and even now his mild Methodism disdains what he considers the excesses of the evangelical community. But family is family, and he’s a good man. He and his wife, Veronica, agreed to have Angie as their guest, more willingly and happily than I expected. I got online and booked her on the first flight I could get to St. Louis, then called them back, and they said they’d be at the airport to meet her flight.

  I explained to Angie that I needed to keep her safe. “What about Mom?” she asked, meaning Gwen, of course.

  “She’ll be okay,” I said.

  “I want to call her,” she said.

  I thought about that. It was all so insane. Like a drunk or an addict, I wouldn’t stop. But to what was I a servant? Could it get sorted out in the end? It didn’t seem so. But I said, “Yes, of course, you can call her.”

  Angie smiled. Now it was all alright. I would die for her smiles. But I was on a course that would destroy them.

  “But,” I said, “you can’t tell her where you are.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . . ” Because she told the men who tried to kill us where we were. And she might well do so again. Or they might snatch Angie to force me to come to them. “Because . . . , ” I said, “you know about wiretaps and all?”

  “Of course,” she said. What would TV drama be without them.

  “Well, the people who came after us might be listening.”

  “Are they the government?”

  “No. I found that out for certain. In fact, you can’t tell anyone where you are, not your friends either. I’ll just tell the school you’re out sick.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to figure out something they’ll accept that’s not a lie. That you won a trip across America.”

  I knew a motel with weekly rates that was happy to take cash. I booked a room. It had a view of a parking lot and an expressway.

  I snuck back home while Gwen was at work and packed a couple of suitcases. The house was mine. Maybe she’d get half the value, maybe not. Maybe Jesus would touch her heart, and she’d see the light, and we’d live happily ever after. Skepticism was entering my view of the Christian way of life and marriage we’d both sworn to live by. It seemed that the husband wasn’t the head of the house after all, just like in any secular humanist, atheistic, falling-apart, modern American family.

  After I settled into my box of a room, my clothes neatly stashed in the closet and dresser, I called Teresa.

  She was happy to hear from me, though she was upset that I’d taken so long to get back to her.

  “Do you want me to find your husband’s book for you?” I asked.

  “Yes, absolutely,” she said.

  “Do you understand how expensive an investigation is? For starters, I want to do a real crime scene analysis. Have they cleaned it yet?”

  “The office? No. Tomorrow, I think.”

  “Well, stop them.”

  “Alright. When will I see you?”

  “As a CSI, I get a hundred and fifty an hour. For the rest, sixty an hour. If you hired me through an attorney, he’d be charging you probably two, two fifty, and a hundred. It easily gets up into the thousands. Are you prepared for that?”

  “The university,” she said. “They were going to pay for the crime scene stuff anyway, and the stolen book, that was on their property, so they’re sort of responsible. I’ll ask them. I’m sure I can get most of it.”

  “Fine then. The first thing I’ll want to do is go to the scene.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” she said.

  “No. It’s slow, meticulous, boring work. I want to do it without interruptions.”

  “But I know things. I can help.”

  “You really want the book?”

  “Yes, yes, I do.”

  “Then let’s be professional about this.”

  I had copies of the original crime scene analysis from back when they thought it was a suicide, before Ahmad Nazami had turned up and supposedly confessed. There were photographs, sketches, and notes. It had been a relatively cursory job. Giving the police the benefit of the doubt, you could say that was because it seemed so cut-and-dried.

  Worse, they hadn’t come back when the conclusion had changed. Possibly because the integrity of the scene had been largely destroyed by then. All sorts of people had trampled in and out, the body had been removed, and who knows what else had transpired. So anything they found on a second go would face serious challenges in court. Still, they should have.

  Since an ind
ependent investigation had already been authorized and the money earmarked, Teresa got the go-ahead. A full investigation and a search for the missing book was another matter, requiring an additional appropriation. It was being considered.

  This time, I brought a campus security officer to be the witness. I record what I’m doing, as I go, with a voice-activated Dictaphone, and I use a JVC GR-X5 for both video and stills. When we arrived, I announced my name and his, the location, date, and time. I noted that I had been there previously with the widow of the deceased and that she had moved certain items pursuant to the new investigation, the search for the manuscript. Then I videoed the scene.

  After that, using the police and campus security photos, I restored the scene as best as I could to how it had been before Teresa had moved things. I wore latex gloves throughout the process. Then I divided the room into quadrants and began a search and an examination.

  I began with the desk and the computer and dusted for fingerprints, especially on the keyboard. Both Nathaniel and Teresa had touched the keys, but I was hoping to find a third set that belonged to neither of them. Perhaps Plowright’s or Hobson’s. No matter how contaminated the crime scene was, there would be no explaining how their prints got on MacLeod’s computer. I dusted the screen and the cord that had gone to the backup device.

  There were lots of prints.

  They would have to be sent to a fingerprint analyst, along with Nathaniel’s and Teresa’s, for elimination. And Ahmad’s. If his were there, it would implicate him. If they weren’t, it would tend to be exculpatory. Any that remained would point to someone else.

  “We have had,” I said into my recorder, “two narratives for this crime. The first was a suicide. There were, and are, a set of facts consistent with that narrative. I am now going to ask Oliver Noble, a security officer of the University of the Southwest assigned to me today, to occupy the place of the deceased. Officer Noble, could you sit in this chair please?”

  I put the camera on a tripod at the back of the office. I took my gun, removed the clip, then demonstrated for Noble and the camera that the chamber was also empty. I had him hold the gun in his right hand and put the barrel to his temple. I had him hold a piece of yellow cord against his left temple and ran the other end to the bullet hole.

  “This is creepy,” Oliver said.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said, then explained to the camera that the cord illustrated the trajectory. “In addition, according to the original notes, the victim’s fingerprints were found on the gun, and there was powder residue on his right hand, all consistent with, and supporting, the theory of suicide.”

  “Now,” I said, rolling up the cord, then walking over to Oliver’s right side, “we have a second theory of the crime. That it was a homicide. That a second party fired the gun. The nature of the wound, the stippling around the entry, and the trajectory of the bullet”—I took the gun from Oliver but held it in the same place—“still demonstrate that the gun had to have been fired from here, in this position, against the victim’s head.”

  “However,” I said, “how are we to account for the victim’s prints on the gun and the residue on his hand. Oliver, with your permission,” I said, taking his hand.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  Continuing to narrate each step of the way, I put his hand around the gun and put my hand over his. “Now,” I said, “I am going to force Officer Noble’s finger to pull the trigger,” and I began to squeeze.

  “No fucking way, man!” he yelled and flung the gun out of his hand. It clattered across the desk and banged up against the wall. He glared at me, his face full of fury.

  I looked at the camera and said, “This is a demonstration of how hard it would be to force someone to fire a gun into their own head. In this case, even though we had thoroughly demonstrated that the gun was unloaded and of no danger, our stand-in reacted with a violent reflex of resistance.”

  “Wow,” Noble said, “very slick. Yeah, nobody would let somebody do that.”

  He was great. I hoped I would get to use the tape in court someday.

  “So what the fuck did happen?” he asked.

  Narrative number three.

  If you can’t get a living man to fire a bullet into his own head, leaving evidence on his hand and on the gun, you have to kill him first, then use his dead hand to fire a second shot. That meant two shots, two bullets, and two bullet holes.

  I had Oliver, who was now beginning to enjoy himself a great deal, assume the pose in which MacLeod’s corpse had been found. MacLeod had bled profusely. The splatter pattern, what was left of it, and the blood evidence indicated that he had stayed in one place. It wasn’t conclusive, but that seemed to be the case.

  I put the gun in Oliver’s hand, the way I had before, with my hand over his, to determine what range of motion I could get without moving the body.

  If I had killed MacLeod by standing beside him and shooting him in the head, then wanted to restage it as a suicide, where would I aim the second shot. My first choice would have been out the window. The bullet goes away, far, far away, and there’s no bullet hole. I opened the windows and tried to determine if, by bending MacLeod’s arm—Oliver’s arm—over his back, I could get a clear shot through the open windows. It seemed exceedingly difficult, and I demonstrated that with the yellow cord again.

  An easier, and more likely, direction to shoot would be in the victim’s natural range of motion, a cone-shaped space, biased to his right. The door and a blank wall were directly to his right. It was easy to see that there was nothing there.

  By raising the victim’s arm, however, it would be easily possible to fire into the books on the shelves above the desk. How many times in my life had I heard the story of the soldier who had the Bible his mother gave him in his breast pocket, which stopped the bullet that would have struck his heart? The atheist’s books would also have stopped a bullet. Then the perpetrator could have collected the book, or books, along with the bullet itself, removed them, and replaced them with other volumes. There had to be a couple of thousand books in there, and who would know if one, or two, or three were out of place?

  Teresa might.

  My mind slid easily, and without conscious effort, into fantasies of how that would play out, starting on the couch or leaning on the desk . . . now that Gwen had stopped being my wife in the terms we both understood that to mean.

  The aromas of tobacco and burgers and the peculiar way people sweat under a polyester uniform, coming off of Oliver, all two hundred and forty pounds of him, brought me back to what I was there for. A damn good thing I’d come here with him, not her. Much better for my concentration.

  Would firing a bullet into a book leave some sort of trace? I didn’t know offhand. I would have to get a few and test fire into them. Not Bibles, of course, but secular material.

  The most natural shot, given the position of the body, was under the desk. I had Oliver move out of the chair. I set up a small, portable battery lamp to illuminate the area and began to examine the floor underneath, taping my search. There was dirt and dust and a crumbled receipt, which I put in a baggie and marked.

  And there they were. Little bits of paper, like confetti, with letters and bits of letters on them. And what looked like, possibly, charred edges. It would have to go to a test lab to be sure.

  The killer had put some books on the floor, wrapped MacLeod’s dead hand around the gun, and fired into them. Possibly the deceased’s own work, the missing copies of his mystery novels. They’d been right beside the gun. It would have been natural to grab them at the same time.

  Both sides of the desk had drawers in them. The set on the right ended eight inches from the floor, but the ones on the left only cleared it by about a half-inch, and I couldn’t really see underneath them.

  I photographed the desktop, disconnected all the lines to the computer, and took everything off that was likely to fall. Then Oliver and I carefully lifted up the desk, which weighed a ton from all the papers in it,
and moved it out toward the center of the room.

  There, amidst ancient dust and old crumbs, was a shining silver cross.

  I was ready to take bets it was Nicole Chandler’s cross.

  42

  I was wearing a sports jacket to cover the gun that I now carried all the time.

  When I entered her house, Teresa came to me and kissed me on the cheek. The kiss itself was polite and restrained enough to be a simple greeting, but her body came in closer than was appropriate for someone who wanted to be just a client—and stayed there longer.

  I’d set a line of proper conduct between us. It had the effect of putting both of us in that state of aroused awareness that makes every point of contact—the spot where her breast touched my chest, the feel of her thighs on either side of one of mine, and her hand on my arm, placed there so casually in such a normal position for that kind of greeting—electric and hypercharged.

  “Let’s sit down,” I said, breaking the contact, “and I’ll tell you where we are.”

  “I’d like to know that,” she said.

  When Gwen spoke, her voice was a single tone that delivered just one message. When Teresa spoke, or even looked at me, there were layers upon layers and aromatic hints of distant flavors. Some complimentary, some contradictory.

  In this case, there were at least seven varieties of curiosity. A simple one that wanted information about the investigation. A more anxious one about where we stood. That held both a faint, hidden trace of hope and a tight anxiety about being rejected. There was an earthy subtext that was wondering what it would be like to be rutting on the couch. Yet another, less necessary to disguise, about getting the book that she sought, and with all that, a kind of child’s eagerness to just hear a story.

  I sat in one of her living room chairs and put my attaché case on the floor beside me. She asked me if I would like anything to drink.

  “Water,” I said. “Or club soda.”

  I watched her walk away into the kitchen. She was wearing a gray skirt and a lighter gray top, a snug cotton spandex blend, with a white mesh vest over it that played hide-and-seek with her prominent nipples. The skirt hung to just above her knees, reasonably proper, but it clung to her shape so closely that I knew no more than a thong, if anything, could be underneath it. She brought me a bottle of imported sparkling water and a glass with ice in it.