“Do you think Barry had a thing for Michelle?” Ben asked.
Duffy took a moment as if translating in his head. “It did occur to me, but I didn’t have time to ask. Barry said he was late for a meeting and would call me back in two hours. That was about forty minutes ago.”
“So we have time to eat,” I said. The server, whose name was Maureen (for some reason, it has become important that we know the names of our servers although they don’t know ours—not sure how I feel about that), had brought our drinks and said the appetizers would be on their way momentarily.
“You said you had news for me,” Duffy reminded me.
We filled him in on the conversation we’d had with Rod Wilkerson about Michelle’s murder and our suspicions, if they were even that developed, that Damien himself might have become jealous of his wife’s affairs and gone the instant-divorce route.
“It comes down to a question of timing,” Ben finished up. He turned to Duffy. “Do you remember the date that the body you think is Damien Mosley’s was discovered?”
Not so much as a blink. “September twenty-third, five years ago.”
“Rod said it was going around that Michelle had moved to West New York that summer,” Ben reminded us. “So if he’s right, and if Michelle was shot instead of moving, it’s chronologically possible Damien did shoot his wife. Assuming that was Damien at the bottom of the cliff.”
“It was,” Duffy said again. It is best not to argue.
Ben leaned back in his chair as a platter of soft tortillas and fillings for fajitas was placed in front of us. “It looks like we’re driving to Arlington, Virginia,” he said.
I was halfway to filling a tortilla, but I stopped to look at him. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’re not driving six hours to talk to one guy.”
“We’re not?”
“No. That’s why Skype was invented.”
Chapter 24
Since we had not actually checked out of the hotel, the room Ben and I had booked was the natural place for us to videoconference with Barry Spader, former Poughkeepsie tavern keeper turned Virginia . . . entrepreneur? I really wasn’t sure what business Barry was in now.
The room had been cleaned and neatened by the housekeeping staff, which was nice, although Duffy had seen it in its natural state and drawn whatever conclusions he’d drawn. Why did I care what a fictional character thought about my hotel room? It was a question most writers don’t get to ask themselves, and I envy them.
Once Barry had indeed called Duffy back on his cell, it had been suggested that we amble (in my car) back to the hotel following our lunch at Oakwood and meet with Barry face-to-pixel, which was the second best thing and saved us a very long car trip. Six hours in a vehicle with Duffy Madison . . . It was difficult enough spending a thousand words a day with the guy.
Barry, it turned out on my laptop, was a very average-looking guy with unremarkable brown hair sitting, as far as I could tell, at an uninspiring desk in a typical room. The leaves on the trees outside his window were starting to change color, and that was the most interesting thing about looking at the screen right now. I’d say more about him, but I’d have to get out a thesaurus for more words meaning regular.
“The thing is, I bought the club from my father,” he was saying now. His voice was . . . well, you know. “He was the guy who loved running a strip club. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like hiring girls to dance, and I didn’t like having to watch every guy who walked in to see if he was going to start trouble. I didn’t need to hang around in a bar. I don’t even drink. But it was the family business, and he was retiring, so . . .”
“What made you decide you’d had enough last year?” Ben, sitting in the hotel-issued desk chair to my right, was trying to conduct a dignified interview. Having three adult humans maneuvering around a laptop screen thirteen inches wide was lending the whole thing a slight air of farce, but Ben was in there pitching. “Why hadn’t you left years earlier?”
“I had a mortgage on a house and a mortgage on the bar,” Barry answered. “My father had taken out equity loans and listed the business as collateral. As soon as I could pay that off, I was out of there. The weather wasn’t keeping me in New York, either.”
“If the cold was a factor, you could have moved to Florida or Arizona,” Duffy piped up. I practically had to dive off the side chair so he could be seen. Barry was definitely looking from face to face on his end, and I figured we looked like we were being held prisoner on the back of a vinyl album cover. “There are many warmer climates than in Arlington, Virginia.”
Barry seemed to find Duffy odd. Imagine. That too was a disappointment. None of these Poughkeepsie High graduates recognized the guy who was supposed to have been in their graduating class! Didn’t Barry want to help me prove Duffy was crazy?
Barry narrowed his eyes and watched as my brain dropping situated himself in an area he thought was between Ben and me and I thought would come across as his disembodied head floating over us.
“I just got in the car and started driving south,” Barry told him. “When I got here, I looked around for jobs in sales because that’s what I was good at. I got one working for a company that makes cardboard boxes, and I stayed for a while. It’s been about a year and a half now.”
“Why did you stay?” I asked. I figured I had to get in on the conversation somehow; it was my computer.
“I got married,” he answered. “Met a girl I liked, and every time I thought I’d move on to a new place, I asked her to come with me, but she wouldn’t. So I stayed here instead. We’re married a little over six months now.”
Duffy coughed theatrically, indicating he believed we were getting too far off topic. Normally, on an investigation (or at least the only one I’d ever seen them work together), Duffy would defer to Ben, who was, after all, his boss. But without the need to report to the Bergen County prosecutor on this matter, Duffy was almost gleeful in his ability to do things exactly in the manner he wanted to do them.
“Getting back to your time in Poughkeepsie,” he said, “I am curious about your involvement with a few people you knew from your high school class, your business, and your bowling team.”
“I was wondering what this was really about,” Barry said. “You’d texted me about Michelle Testaverde and Damien Mosley. What’s going on? They both sort of vanished out of Poughkeepsie around the same time, years before I left. Are they back?”
“No, and they won’t be coming back,” Duffy said. He was being more gruff and blunt than I was used to. It’s a tactic I write in for him very rarely, only when he believes a witness is not telling the truth. I wondered what Barry was lying about. “Both of them are deceased, and each of them was murdered.”
Ben’s eyes were riveted to the screen as Barry reacted. On the computer screen, there is always a slight lag in time, and you can hear your own voice echoing in the other person’s computer, so there was a pause right away. But then Barry heard what Duffy had said, and his head snapped back in his chair. His eyes grew wide.
“Deceased,” he said. “They’re dead?” There seemed to be no point in explaining that the two words mean the same thing; we all knew he was processing the information. If the news wasn’t a surprise to Barry, he was a very good actor and was wasting himself in a sales job in Virginia. “Somebody killed them? Who? Why?”
“Two excellent questions, Mr. Spader,” Duffy countered. His tone still indicated some impatience with the guy on the other end of the . . . Internet feed, or something. Hey, if I ever need to find out for a book, I’ll research it (Paula will research it). “What can you tell us about the time when both Damien Mosley and Michelle Testaverde were leaving Poughkeepsie?”
“Wait. Let me think about this. You mean you think it happened around then? It must be six years ago.”
“Five,” Duffy told him.
“Okay, five years ago.” Barry was shaking his head slightly with each word now. “That’s when they got killed? How come nobody knew
about it then?”
“Again, something I really wish I could answer,” Duffy told him. “What can you tell us that might help with all these questions? What was going on within the group, the bowling team, at that time?” Duffy did not ask if Barry remembered; that would be giving him too convenient a way out of answering. He assumed Barry remembered everything and could summon it at will. It’s Duffy’s way of thinking, and it simplifies my process enormously.
“Well, was that around the time Damien asked Michelle to marry him?” Barry asked. He was now, as Duffy had probably hoped, trying to be the good student in class who could help the teacher so he wouldn’t be mad anymore. I considered that an optimistic viewpoint, but I knew Duffy better than Barry.
“I am not certain when the proposal was made, but from what we have been able to determine, Damien and Michelle were married by the time they both were murdered,” Duffy said.
“Married?” Barry asked. It seemed an odd question. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen after an engagement?
“Yes,” Duffy said. “So the time line would seem to indicate that the proposal took place sometime before either of them disappeared from the area.”
But Barry was shaking his head. “No,” he told Duffy. “That’s not what happened.”
“I don’t understand.” Ben had decided to cut through the etiquette and hopefully move the conversation along. “What do you mean, that’s not what happened? Did Damien and Michelle stay here in Poughkeepsie after they were married?”
The headshaking was more emphatic. “No. You’re missing the point. It’s not the time line that’s the problem. You’re saying Michelle and Damien were married, and I’m saying they weren’t.”
The three of us on Barry’s computer screen looked at each other with what I’m sure looked like complete and utter puzzlement, because that’s what it was.
“Damien asked Michelle to marry him. I was there,” Barry said. “But they never got married. She said no.”
Chapter 25
“This explains a great many things,” Duffy Madison said.
I stared at him. Of all the things Duffy had ever said to me—and there had been some doozies—this was among the most baffling. I looked over at Ben, who seemed to have disengaged from our conversation, his eyes staring straight ahead like he was waiting for Dracula to walk in through the door of the hotel room.
We had finished up our questioning of Barry Spader after another ten or fifteen minutes, most of which was engaged in the three of us trying to wrap our heads around what he had been saying. Damien Mosley had gotten down on one knee at the bowling alley where the team’s league met, produced a ring from the pocket of his jeans, and asked Michelle Testaverde to marry him.
According to Barry, she had looked absolutely stunned by the question, which is not entirely unusual. But he said she also looked terrified, and that was not the kind of reaction a guy might hope to get to a marriage proposal.
“I’m not saying she was afraid of Damien himself,” Barry had said, “but the idea of being married to him, or maybe to anyone, seemed to horrify her. She actually took a step back, away from him, and set off the foul line buzzer on the lane. Damien didn’t understand right away, and he asked again. Michelle had to say no in front of everybody. It was not a fabulous night. Pretty sure we didn’t go back to the bar for a drink afterward.”
“What was their relationship like after that?” I asked. “It must have been kind of awkward to hang around with both of them.”
“I don’t think I ever saw them together in the same room after that night,” Barry said. “The bowling team kind of broke up. Michelle left first, and before they could find a replacement for her on the bowling team, Damien called to say he was quitting. We couldn’t find two more bowlers in time for the end of the season, so we just dropped out. I think everybody pretty much understood.”
He said Michelle and Damien were seen only separately after the proposal, and that once Michelle left the team, she was hardly seen by anyone at all. Like Damien’s supposed exit from Poughkeepsie, Michelle’s was noticed in the long term rather than the short. After a while, Barry said, people just realized they hadn’t seen either of the two for some time.
We thanked him for his help, which I thought just made everything more difficult to understand, and disconnected the computer connection so Barry could go back to his wife and his job in Arlington. Now Duffy was saying what he’d told us had helped to clear up a number of issues, and I was staring at him blankly, I’m sure.
“You know, just because I made you up doesn’t mean I understand you all the time,” I told him. Hey, I can use his delusion just as effectively as he can. “What do you mean it clears things up?”
“Well, consider it,” Duffy said. I groaned inwardly; it was going to be one of those Duffy lectures where I was supposed to figure it out for myself and therefore be taught a valuable lesson and gain self-esteem. I’d hated this when I was in second grade, and the technique had not risen in my estimation in the ensuing years. “If Michelle Testaverde declined Damien Mosley’s marriage proposal, we have solved a number of smaller questions that had arisen in this case.”
He waited for me to offer a guess. I didn’t. Ben continued to stew in his own juices, which wasn’t helping me much. I’d never really considered sharing a hotel room with two men, but if I had, I was sure I’d anticipated more fun than this.
Duffy realized I wasn’t going to answer and went to Plan B, which was just telling us—or me, since I wasn’t sure Ben was listening—stuff. “If they were never married, we can understand why it was impossible to find any recording of a marriage certificate in the area,” he began. “If they were never married, the fact that Michelle never seems to have lived in the West New York apartment makes more sense. As for the murders, again a time line is the biggest stumbling block, since no one so far has managed to pinpoint the date of the rejected proposal versus the time both Michelle and then Damien were murdered.”
Ben didn’t stop staring, but his mouth moved, and words came out, which I considered something of a relief. I’d been worried this situation had dropped him into some kind of investigator coma from which only clues could cause him to awaken.
“Did Michelle die first?” he asked. “Are we certain her murder came before Damien’s, if Damien really is the body at the bottom of the cliff?”
Duffy didn’t sigh; he wouldn’t show that kind of impatience with Ben. But he did take a moment before answering, and his voice had the slightest edge of frustration at our inability to see the obvious. I really shouldn’t have modeled him on Sherlock Holmes; I see that now. Encyclopedia Brown was so much more affable.
“Damien Mosley died from a gunshot wound to the head and then fell down a hill onto a poorly placed rock,” he said carefully. “The trauma to his head, indicated in the medical examiner’s report, did not include a bullet wound because of the damage done, but I am expecting a call from the North Bergen Police Department at any moment that will confirm or disprove my findings.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Ben noted. “Are we sure of the order in which the two people died?”
“We are not,” Duffy admitted. “It’s critical that we pinpoint the date of the marriage proposal from Damien to Michelle, which Barry Spader claims was rejected.”
“Claims?” I asked. “Do we have some indication that Barry is lying, or mistaken?”
“There is the fact that everyone else we have spoken to believed Michelle and Damien to be a married couple,” Duffy said. “When one witness says something happened, and no one else corroborates that information, it might not be suspicious, but it is certainly questionable.”
“Then we should go back to our sources,” Ben said. “Find out whether anybody actually attended the wedding, if there was one.”
“I’ll call Walt Kendig,” I said. “He’s probably watching us with binoculars now anyway.”
Walt was more than pleased to meet with us, particular
ly Ben, whom he had not yet met. I absolutely refused to let him anywhere near our hotel room whether there were two other men present or not, and Ben agreed that would be a poor maneuver. So we met at the same hipster diner near Walt’s office despite having had a fairly extensive lunch not long before.
Walt had not yet eaten, so he ordered a turkey club with sweet potato fries and a coke while Ben and I ordered coffee, and Duffy sufficed with a diet soda. I thought of the diet sodas at that Plaza Diner in Adamstown and was pleased to stick with the coffee. I didn’t really want either, but I hate to make a waitress work for nothing.
The corn muffin I ordered with it was an impulse. It was organic, too.
“I wasn’t at Michelle and Damien’s wedding,” he said while we were waiting for our orders to show up. Walt was watching Ben carefully. Ben doesn’t appear in any of the Duffy Madison books because he’s a real person, so Walt was least familiar with him out of the three of us. But the way he kept looking from Ben to me was a little unsettling. I was starting to think Walt might be an author groupie.
I’m told—and believe me, I’d never seen it in practice—that some readers become so attached to the stories they’re told in books that they latch onto the authors and believe they have a personal relationship with the person who provides those stories. I sort of understand it; when a book really gets to me, it can feel like the author is writing specifically to my brain. But I don’t think I’ve ever so much as written a fan e-mail to an author. Some of my writing friends have told me (and the stories are always about people they know, and not them personally) that some readers get so caught up in the attachment that they actually start to contact the author, try to ingratiate themselves and become a part of the writer’s life. It’s touching in its own way, but when it reaches the point of stalking, it can be seriously disturbing.
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