A Cold Day in Paradise

by Steve Hamilton

  “What in God’s name is wrong with you?”

  “And how did you get him to believe that my gun wasn’t real, of ail things?”

  Uttley just sat there looking at me, shaking his head like I was a lunatic.

  “And when did this whole thing start, anyway?” I said. “Does this go all the way back to when you asked me to be your private investigator? Was that all a setup from the very beginning?”

  “I think you need to see somebody,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. It’s obviously gotten to you.”

  “Here’s another question,” I said. “This one I really need you to answer. Would you have killed me if you had to?”

  He stopped shaking his head. He just sat there. He looked at me without blinking.

  “The night you sent Julius over,” I said, “he was just supposed to scare me, right? Is that what you told him? Leave the silencer at home, make a lot of noise? Don’t worry, his gun isn’t even real? You were right there behind him, weren’t you. You weren’t at the Fultons’ house. You didn’t call me. You were right behind him and you came along just as soon as you thought it was all over. And fortunately, I guess, everything worked out the way it was supposed to. But what if it hadn’t? What if I had just wounded him? What if I had disarmed him? If he had accidentally killed me, that one’s easy. You just shoot him. Tell the police you were trying to save me. But what if we had both been alive when you got there? Would you have killed both of us? I’m sure you had your Beretta with you.”

  He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out the very same gun. “You mean this one?”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Please put your gun on the table,” he said.

  “I don’t have it, remember? The police have it.”

  “I’m not stupid, Alex. You must have another gun.”

  “No,” I said. “Why would I need one? You’re no threat to me. And I’m no threat to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t kill me now,” I said. “That would ruin everything. You’d have to dispose of my body, or try to make up some wild story about me threatening you or something. It would all fall apart eventually. And Mrs. Fulton would not be happy about that, would she.”

  Just saying her name, I could tell that it registered. I could see it in his eyes.

  “And why are you no threat to me?” he said.

  “Because I can’t touch you,” I said. “You didn’t kill anybody. What am I going to say, arrest Lane Uttley because I think he made Julius do it? And by the way, Edwin isn’t even dead? It was all a plot and Mrs. Fulton is behind it, too? How far am I going to get with that?”

  I watched him as he thought it over.

  “I’m not here to stop you,” I said. “There’s no tape recorder, no police outside waiting to break the door down. I’m not going to stand in your way.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want you to tell me why you did this,” I said. “That’s all. Why did you put me through all this?” I watched him shift the gun in his hand. I knew the man wanted to tell me how it happened. Above everything else, in his heart the man would always be a lawyer. And lawyers have to talk. Especially about how smart they are.

  “Because you were the right man for the job,” he said. “But you have to understand. It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Tell me how it worked,” I said. “Tell me from the beginning. You owe me that much.”

  “It all starts with Edwin’s gambling problem,” he said. “That much you probably know. What you don’t know is how big his problem is. He was into those guys for a good half a million.”

  “That’s not that much,” I said. “Not for a Fulton.”

  “That was just the current total,” he said. “He had lots of other big debts in the past. He paid them all. He was draining money out of the Fulton Foundation. His mother found out. She threatened to cut him off if he didn’t stop gambling. He tried to stop, but he couldn’t. She put the squeeze on him, cut off a lot of the money. He fell behind on the debt, started betting even more, trying to win it back. The bookmakers, they started to lean on him a little bit. They wanted their juice every week, just maintenance on the debt. They’re all connected, of course. It’s all one big network.”

  “Of course,” I said. “So why kill two bookmakers? They’re just the frontmen. The debt would just get picked up by someone else.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell Mrs. Fulton. I told her it would be like that Hydra monster, you know, the one that Hercules had to kill? You cut off one head and two more grow back? But she was adamant. I think part of it was she didn’t want to pay those guys any more money. They were calling the house, making threats. They found out her private number and starting calling her. I think that’s what did it. She wanted them dead. And Mrs. Fulton gets what she wants.”

  “So hire a hit man,” I said. “Like any other rich person would.”

  “No. She didn’t want that. She said if we hired somebody, then that person would have an angle on her. He’d blackmail her. That’s the way she saw people. Everyone wanted a piece of her. All the things she’s been through, who can blame her? So she wanted a way to get rid of the bookmakers. Get Edwin away from gambling, if that was possible. And she wanted it to be clean. No loose ends.”

  “Did Edwin know about all this?”

  “Not at first,” he said. “She left it up to me. I had Prudell working for me, and he had this other guy, Raymond Julius. This guy was psychotic. He came to me a few times on the side, told me he wanted to be my private investigator. Said he’d do a lot better job than Prudell. Said he’d be willing to do anything that had to be done. That got me thinking. So I started asking him questions. What kind of things would you do? Would you do the tough things? The real dirty work? He said the dirtier the better. He told me about all these guns he had, all of them unlicensed. I asked him why he didn’t have permits, and he just started going off on the fed, the international plot to make a one-world government and to take everyone’s guns away, you know, all the psycho gun-nut conspiracy horseshit. So I tried leading him on a little bit, just to see how he would react. I told him I might be involved with an underground movement that was trying to fight the international conspiracy, and that we might need someone to do some important secret work for us.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  “I know it all sounds crazy. But this guy ate it up. I told Mrs. Fulton about this. That it might be a possible avenue to explore. She jumped all over the idea. She wanted it done as soon as possible. Have Julius kill the two bookmakers, then have someone kill Julius. Problem was, she wanted me to kill Julius. But I just… I couldn’t do it. So she said, have Prudell do it. But do it carefully, with no loose ends. Don’t let Prudell know what’s happening. Make it look like Julius is coming after him or something, so he has to kill him. But that was no good, either. I wouldn’t trust Prudell to kill a gopher with a shovel.”

  “So that’s where I come in?”

  “Mrs. Fulton knew about you. Edwin was always talking about you. She wanted details, so I told her everything I knew. You being a policeman, getting shot. She was particularly interested in that part. She wanted to know how it happened. She wanted me to find the news clippings. So I did. She read them all, and she told me that you would be perfect because you knew what fear felt like. That was the one thing you can always count on, she said. She knew from her own experience. The fear never leaves you.”

  “So you did have this planned out from the beginning,” I said. “Before you even hired me. Before you even asked me if I wanted to become a private investigator.”

  “Yes,” he said. He must have sensed the anger in my voice. He jiggled the gun in his hand as if to remind me that it was still pointed at me. “But remember, none of this was my idea.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You were just the helpless pawn in this game. So what happens next? You get Julius to kill Tony Bing
and I get to come see it? What was that for?”

  “Mrs. Fulton insisted on that. She said you needed to see it. Your fear needed to be fed. She has this really strange fascination with fear, Alex. I’m sure you’ve noticed it.”

  “We had a nice conversation about fear, yes.”

  “I told Julius that Bing’s bookmaking operation was just a small part of the network. The Mafia, the federal government, the European Common Market, it was all tied together. And even though Tony Bing didn’t seem like much in the big picture, we had to start somewhere. You know, everyone fights their battles where they can find them, all over the country. Send a message to the network. I told him we needed to make it dramatic. Lots of blood. Something that they would never forget. Of course, that was really for you, Alex. All that blood.”

  “So how did Edwin figure into all this?”

  “Edwin was supposed to see Bing that night. The five grand he had, that was just the weekly juice to keep him off his back. He went to the motel and then he called you. Simple as that.”

  “So he knew what was going on.”

  “He knew that you were going to help him solve his problem, that’s all. And that nothing would happen to you, in the end. I don’t know if he really knew about the disappearance idea yet. I think he honestly believed that killing the two bookmakers would solve his problem. Or if he didn’t know, at least he was trying to make himself believe it.”

  “And then Julius kills the other bookmaker a couple days later.”

  “He did. And I gotta tell you, this guy really got into it. I was worried he’d start killing people on his own, just because he loved it so much.”

  “The voice on the phone,” I said. “That was you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Nobody can recognize a whisper.” He dropped into a low raspy growl, the same sound I had heard on the phone. “Alex, do you know who this is?”

  “And you wrote the notes,” I said.

  “Naturally,” he said. “I used an old typewriter I found at a yard sale. Wrote the notes on them, and the diary. I had a key to Julius’s apartment. I told him it was all part of being in the underground. I needed access to his house in case he was captured.”

  “So the two bookmakers are dead,” I said. “And of course that doesn’t solve your problem.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Just like I told her. There were other men ready to pick up the debt. And they were even worse. Dorney’s body wasn’t even cold yet, they were already calling Edwin. So I’m thinking this has all been a waste of time so far. But Mrs. Fulton was happy. I swear to God, that woman was reborn all of a sudden. And then I figured it out. That whole thing with the kidnapping, when she was a girl, this was like her way of working that out. The fear of bad men or just men in general, whatever. That’s why she had to be here. It wasn’t just because she’s a control freak, she had to be here so she could be close to it. She wanted to be close to you, Alex. She wanted you right in the house. Originally, we were going to have Julius come to the house so you could kill him there.”

  “But then the police got in the way, right?”

  “Yes. We didn’t figure on them making you stay at your cabin with a cop waiting outside. And then later, when Maven thought you might be involved in the killings, we really didn’t want that to happen. You’ve got to believe me on that one, Alex.”

  “Your concern for me is downright touching.”

  “No, really. It didn’t do anybody any good. I was starting to lose my mind there for a couple days. I’ve got Julius calling me up every hour, wanting to know who he can kill next. I’ve got Mrs. Fulton calling me up, wanting to know when we can get Edwin out of town and then get Julius killed. And Edwin, he wasn’t too happy about his little disappearing act. He tried to back out of it. If his mother hadn’t been here to keep him in line, I don’t think we would have pulled it off.”

  “I suppose he’s very far away from here by now,” I said.

  “I don’t even know where he is,” he said. “It’s like in that witness relocation program. You get a new identity. Plastic surgery, maybe. All it takes is a lot of money. Mrs. Fulton said it felt good to be able to disinherit him without even having to die.”

  “So with Edwin gone and the cop not outside my door every night anymore, you finally had your chance to end it, right? What did you do, tell Julius that I was part of the conspiracy, too?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Although this time, all we wanted to do was scare you. I told him to take the silencer off, make a lot of noise, really shake you up. You see, I had found out that you were actually spying on me. And on Julius, as well. We had to scare you so it would get back to Brussels.”

  “Brussels?” I said. “In Belgium?”

  “Yeah, that’s where the headquarters is. Didn’t you know that? Ask any gun nut. The international conspiracy all reports to the secret main office in Brussels.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I just thought they made waffles.”

  “Some of the stuff these guys believe, I tell ya, it’s amazing. Anyway, I told him I had a plan for how we could really scare you. All he had to do was put on a blond wig and pretend he was some guy named Rose who shot you before. Somebody who should still be in prison.”

  “And how did you make him believe my gun wasn’t real?”

  “That was easy. You’ve been afraid of guns ever since you got shot. You can’t even touch one anymore. Which really got him going, you being one of the people who want to take his guns away, and you’re not man enough to even touch one yourself. So you carry a fake, just in case you have to bluff somebody.”

  I almost laughed. “You set him up. He didn’t have a chance.”

  “I guess not,” he said. “It all worked out like I had planned. I mean, just like Mrs. Fulton had planned. It was self-defense. You’re home free. No loose ends.”

  “And you were right behind him,” I said. “You probably went right to his house, planted the typewriter and the news clippings and the fake diary you wrote with that whole story about him stalking me and becoming Rose somehow. And then you followed him to my cabin. As soon as it was over, you showed up. With your gun. And if things hadn’t gone right, you would have had to use that gun, am I right?”

  He looked away for an instant and then back at me. “Mrs. Fulton told me I would have to kill somebody if it didn’t work out right. If he accidentally killed you, I would have had to kill him. And if you were both alive, then I would have had to kill him and maybe you, too, depending on how it happened. I was trying to think of a way I could just kill him, Alex. You know, drive up, shoot him right away, like I thought you were in danger. I didn’t want to kill you. I know I wouldn’t have done it. You have to believe that.”

  I sat there thinking about it. There was a long silence. His gun was still aimed at my chest. There was a sudden pop from the fireplace.

  Finally, Uttley cleared his throat. “How did you figure it out?”

  “The diary,” I said. “It was all wrong. This guy is supposed to be obsessed with me. You’d think he’d be writing pages about me every day. And if he really contacted Rose, there would be lots of details about that. When and where and how. You glossed right over that. But I guess that makes sense. You knew they could check it. They’d find out that he never really talked to him. But so what? They’d just figure he made it up. I was starting to think that myself. Even though there was stuff in those notes that only Rose and I knew. Or so I thought. When I saw him today, he started talking about how he said some things he shouldn’t have. I thought he was just talking about me and Franklin. But now I’m thinking, he must have said some of the same damned things to his defense attorney. I’m sure you had no problem finding out who that was. And I’m sure you had no problem finding him and pretending to be someone else and making up some story about why you wanted to know what he said. What was it? Were you a journalist? Another defense attorney working on a similar case?”

  “You’re close,” he said. “I w
as an editor for one of the law reviews. All I had to do was get him talking. You know how lawyers are.”

  “And of course the fact that you didn’t say anything on the telephone that one night. You knew it was being recorded. And that business in the note about knowing the policeman was there. It all makes sense now when I look back on it.”

  “I suppose it does,” he said.

  “And when I was out looking for Edwin,” I said. “You insisted on helping me, remember? When I was ready to quit, you made me keep driving. I didn’t realize it at the time, but you were leading me right to that boat. You knew that somebody had to find it before the rain washed his blood away. What did he have to do, anyway? Cut his finger?”

  “No, he had a whole pint of it in a bag. Rich people like to store up their own blood, you know, in case they ever need a transfusion. They don’t like to use common blood.”

  “So what’s in this for you, Uttley? Why did you do all this? No, let me guess. You’ll be working down in Grosse Point now, right? Some nice job at the Fulton Foundation?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “No more chasing ambulances in this charming little frozen wasteland.”

  “And I get to live with all these wonderful memories, right? Two weeks of terror and then I kill somebody?”

  “You get more than that, Alex. You do deserve some compensation, after all.”

  “What, are you going to pay me?”

  “No,” he said. “You get Sylvia.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Alex. We all know what was going on. Just think, now she’s not married anymore. Edwin is dead. She’s all yours.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “All right, then. I guess I’ll let you finish your packing.” I stood up. The gun barrel followed. “I wish you’d put that gun away. It’s starting to get on my nerves.”

  “You’re just going to walk out?”

  “What else can I do? Like I said, I can’t touch you. I know what happened, but I can’t prove any of it. So I might as well just leave.”