She sat at the foot of my bed before she left; she was going to tell me something and then she stopped herself and went home.
He told her about the McDonald’s: if he was going to kill himself, that’s where he would do it. But he’d told his sister the same thing. Who knows who else?
Sixty-milligram bottles of MS Contin, in a bag, in a doghouse.
I’m dimly aware of a cup of coffee growing cold in front of me on the counter, dimly aware of the television floating above me, bolted high on a metal arm. A newsman stands in front of some kind of palace, speaking in agitated tones about “a minor confrontation beginning to assume the dimensions of a crisis.”
Peter Zell and J. T. Toussaint, Detective Andreas, Naomi Eddes.
“All right, honey,” says Ruth-Ann, apron, order pad, one fist around the handle of a coffeepot.
“What’s this music?” I say. “Where’s Maurice?”
“He quit,” she says. “You look terrible.”
“I know. More coffee, please.”
And then, too, there is my baby sister. Missing, possibly dead, possibly in jail. Another catastrophe I failed to predict or prevent.
The television now shows jerky footage of a line of South Asian men behind a table, green military uniforms with gold epaulets, one of them speaking sternly into a microphone. A guy two stools down from me makes an agitated harumph. I take him in, a soft middle-aged man in a Harley jacket, a thick mustache and beard; he says, “You mind?” I shrug, and he climbs up onto the counter, balances awkwardly on his knees to change the channel.
My phone is shivering.
Culverson.
“Hey, Detective.”
“How you feeling, Henry?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m all right.”
The Pakistanis on the TV are gone, replaced by a pitchman, grinning obscenely before a pyramid of canned food.
Culverson runs through what he’s got so far. Theodore Gompers, in his office with his bottle, heard a shot fired at around 2:15, but by his own admission he was pretty drunk, and it took him several minutes to set out in search of the noise, and then several minutes more to locate the narrow storeroom, where he found Naomi’s body and called the police at 2:26.
“What about the rest of the staff?”
“It was just Gompers in there when it happened. He’s got three other employees at present, and they were all out, enjoying a long lunch at the Barley House.”
“Bad luck.”
“Yeah.”
I stack the blue books, spread them out, shift them into a square, like a fortification around my coffee cup. Culverson is going to do a ballistics workup on the bullet—on the off chance, the way-off chance, he says, that this gun was bought legally, pre-IPSS, and we can trace it. In the corner of my eye the bearded guy in the Harley jacket mops up egg yolk with a crust of toast. The TV pitchman scornfully tosses the canned food into the garbage, and now he’s demonstrating some kind of countertop vacuum sealer, dumping a bowl of strawberries in its stainless-steel funnel. McConnell, says Culverson, canvassed the rest of the Water West Building, four stories of office suites, half of them empty, no one saw anything or heard anything strange. No one cares. The old security guard says no one came in or out that he didn’t recognize—but there are two back entrances, and one of them leads directly to the rear stairwell, and the security cameras are long gone.
More clues. More puzzles. More facts.
I stare at the TV screen, where the pitchman dumps out his cardboard carton of blueberries into the funnel and switches on the machine. My counter-mate whistles appreciatively, chuckles.
“And the uh—” I say.
And then I’m just frozen, I’m sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Casco Bay and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.
“Palace?” says Culverson.
“The files,” I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. “What about the files?”
“Ah, yes, the files,” says Culverson. “The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we’re up the metaphorical creek, on that front.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can’t tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files.”
“Bad luck,” I say, I get out a pen, I’m writing, I’m getting it all down.
“Tomorrow I’m going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give ’em the bad news, see if they know anything.”
“I’ll do that,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.
He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes his head, as if to say, boy oh boy, huh? and I can tell he’s about to try to talk to me, have some sort of human moment, and I don’t have time, I can’t do it. I have work to do.
* * *
At home I peel out of the clothes I’ve been wearing all day—to the morgue, to the National Guard, to the scene of crime—and I stand in the bedroom and look around.
Last night past midnight I woke in this room, in this same darkness, and Naomi was framed in the doorway, slipping her red dress over her head in the moonlight.
I’m pacing, thinking.
She put on the dress and she sat on the mattress and she started to talk—to tell me something—but then she stopped herself, “Forget it.”
I walk slowly in a circle in my bedroom. Houdini stands in the doorway, unsure, unsettled.
Naomi started to say something, and then she stopped, and then instead she said that, no matter what happened, it was real and good and right. And she won’t forget it, no matter how it ends.
I pace in a circle, snapping my fingers, biting at the ends of my mustache. Real and good and right, no matter how it ends is what she said, but she was going to say something else, instead.
In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi’s skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth’s fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.
I wake up with the dead yellow light of the sun filling my bedroom, with the next phase of the investigation having announced itself in my head.
A tiny little thing, a little lie to follow up on.
2.
It’s not my murder, it’s Culverson’s murder, but here I go again back toward downtown, back to the Water West Building, like an animal who’s witnessed some scene of violence and keeps on restlessly returning to the place of horrid fascination. There’s some goon marching in circles around Eagle Square, big parka and a fur hat and an old-fashioned sandwich board—DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID in big cartoon bubble-letters—and he’s ringing a bell like a Salvation Army Santa Claus. “Hey,” he hollers, “do you know what time it is?” I duck my head, ignore him, push open the door.
The old guard isn’t here. I t
ake the stairs up to the third floor, and I don’t politely call out hello from reception, I just go ahead on in and find Mr. Gompers behind his walnut desk.
“Oh,” he says, startled, and half rises, unsteadily, to take me in. “I, uh, I went over everything with the other gentleman last night. About poor Naomi.”
“Yeah,” I say. He’s graduated from a tumbler to a pint glass of gin. “Not everything, though.”
“What?”
My insides feel cold, like my organs have been removed, separated from one another, packed back inside me in mud. I slam my hands down on Gompers’s desk and lean in; he rears back, fleshy face retreating from my glare. I know what I look like. Unshaven, gaunt, the one dead eye with an uneven halo of brown puffy bruising around the clean white of the gauze.
“When I talked to you last week, you told me that the parent company in Omaha is obsessed with fraud prevention.”
“What? I don’t know,” he mumbles.
“Okay, well, here,” I say, tossing the thin blue book on the desk in front of him, and he flinches. “Read it.”
Gompers doesn’t move, so I tell him what it says. “You claimed that all your company cares about is protecting the bottom line. You said the board chairman thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven. But yesterday you told Detective Culverson that there are no duplicates of those files.”
“Yeah, see, we went to an all-paper system,” he mumbles. “The servers …” He’s not looking at me, he’s looking at a picture on his desk: the daughter, the one who went off to New Orleans.
“You’ve got the whole office checking and double-checking those claims, there’s no computer backup, and you’re telling me there’s no hard copies being made? No duplicate set squirreled away somewhere?”
“Well. I mean …” Gompers looks out his window, and then back at me, steeling himself to make one more run at it. “No, I’m sorry, there’s—”
I grab the glass from his hand and I hurl it against the window pane and it explodes and rains ice and gin and chips of glass onto the rug. Gompers stares at me, gaping like a fish. I picture Naomi—all she wanted was to write one perfect villanelle—see her fetching this man fresh bottles of alcohol from the corner store, and then I’m grabbing him by his lapels and lifting him out of his chair and up onto the desk, his blubbery neck trembling at the pressure of my thumbs.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Where are the copies?”
“Boston. The regional office. State Street.” I slacken my grip, just ever so slightly. “Every night we run off everything and overnight them. The overnights, they keep ’em in Boston.” He says the words again, pleading, pathetic. “The overnights … okay …”
I let go of him, and he drops down onto the desk, slides miserably back into his chair.
“Look, Officer—” he says, and I interrupt him.
“I’m a detective.”
“Detective. Variegated, they’re shutting the franchises one by one. They’re looking for reasons. Stamford. Montpelier. If that happens here, I don’t know what I’ll do. We have no savings. My wife and I, I mean.” His voice is trembling. “We won’t make it.”
I stare at him.
“If I call Boston and I tell them I need to see the overnights, and they say why, and I—” He breathes, trying to keep it together, I’m just staring at him. “I say, gee, I’ve got missing files, I’ve got—I’ve got dead employees.” He looks up at me, his eyes wet and wide, pleading like a child. “Just let me sit here. Just let me sit here until it ends. Please just let me sit here.”
He’s weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It’s exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy’s skirts.
“Mr. Gompers, I am sorry.” I rise. “But you’re going to get those files. I want to know everything that’s missing, and I want you to tell me, specifically, if any of the missing files were Peter Zell’s. Do you understand?”
“I will—” He gets himself together, sits up a little and honks into a handkerchief. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t try,” I say, standing, turning. “You have till tomorrow morning. Do it.”
* * *
I take the steps slowly back down to the first floor, trembling, shot, my energy expended, and while I was upstairs hassling Gompers the sky has decided to send down a miserable frozen drizzle, which slants into my face while I cross Eagle Square on the way back to my car.
The man with the sandwich board is still stalking the plaza, parka and fur hat, and again he hollers, “Do you know what time it is?” and I ignore him, but then he’s planted himself in my path. He’s holding up his sandwich board, DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID, raising it between us like a centurion’s shield, and I mutter, “Excuse me, sir,” but he doesn’t move, and then I realize it’s the guy from last night, from the Somerset, out of his Harley jacket now but still the heavy untrimmed mustache, red cheeks, doleful eyes.
And he goes, “You are Palace, right?”
“Yeah,” and I realize what’s happening too late, I reach for my shoulder holster but he’s already dropped the sign and he’s got something jammed up into my ribs. I glance down—a pistol, short and black and ugly.
“Do not move.”
“Okay,” I say.
The rain splatters steadily down over both of us, frozen in the center of Eagle Square. People are walking down the sidewalk, a couple dozen feet away, but it’s cold and it’s raining hard and everybody’s looking at their feet. Nobody notices. Who cares?
“Do not say a word.”
“I won’t.”
“Okay.”
He breathes heavily. His mustache and beard are stained in patches, dirty cigarette-yellow. His breath is stale with old smoke.
“Where is she?” he hisses. The gun is pressed painfully into my ribs, angled upward, and I know the path that the bullet will take, gouging through the soft flesh, severing muscles, slamming to a stop in my heart.
“Who?” I ask.
I’m thinking about Toussaint’s desperation move, with the ashtray. To make a move like that, Alison said, he would have had to be desperate. And now here is this man with his sandwich board: assaulting a police officer, use of a sidearm in the commission of a felony. Desperate. The gun twists into my side.
“Where is she?” he asks again.
“Where is who?”
“Nico.”
Oh, God. Nico. It’s raining harder and harder while we’re standing here. I’m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my assailant licks his lips.
“I don’t know where Nico is,” I tell him.
“Yes, you do, you do know.”
He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It’s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.
“Please listen to me, sir,” I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. “I do not know where she is. I’ve been trying to find her myself.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“Bullshit.”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t worry about who I am.”
“Okay.”
“I’m a friend of hers, okay?” he says anyway. “I’m a friend of Derek’s.”
“Okay,” I say, and I’m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I’ll be dead.
“
Where’s Derek?” I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, “You asshole,” and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.
He comes in close, hisses into my ear. “Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he’s dead because you killed him.”
“I didn’t—” my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. “No.”
“Oh, okay, so you had him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality.”
“I promise you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It’s funny, though, I’m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of did know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you’d asked. But I haven’t really had time to think about it. God, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.
“Listen, friend,” I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. “I promise you—no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?” He jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we’re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.
“I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know.”
He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, “You’re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan—”
Ben H. Winters Page 19
