Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

That looked like a little more than coincidence. What if Muriel had been working with this guy to begin with?

  He looked back at NEO. Charis had already stumped out to her Hummer and driven away. Off to catch a killer, a game Bernal couldn’t play.

  He yanked the Post-it off. Then he looked at it. The “Sorry” was scrawled in pencil. But...

  He tilted it. The note had come from a pad. And was that the faint impress of the previous note on it?

  He fumbled in his glove box and found the pencil stub that had probably been used for the note. He examined it, but the Connoisseur hadn’t left tooth marks in it, or anything else of forensic interest.

  Working gently, barely touching the paper, he left a thin layer of graphite on the sheet. Everything got a tiny bit darker, but the slightly impressed letters stayed light. Pretty soon he could read them.

  “Dr. Kerakian. 2:30 Thursday, April 14.”

  That was still two days away. A quick online search revealed one Dr. Kerakian in the Cheriton area: a gynecologist. Bernal thought about this for a moment. He’d been clocked by a man, not a woman. This was annoyingly disconfirming. Coincidence again?

  He dialed the number.

  “Dr. Kerakian’s office,” a woman’s voice answered.

  “Hi.” Bernal adopted what he hoped was a light tenor that could be interpreted as either sex. He could only hope that the person who had made the appointment was not personally known to the receptionist. “I have an appointment? Um, on Thursday? At 2:30?”

  “And your name?”

  Bernal froze and almost hung up at that point. Instead, he turned, pulled the phone away from his ear, and yelled, “Please stop that, Sam. Please don’t make me take it away. What? No, lunch will be in a few minutes. Just let me—”

  “Here it is, Ms. Rennie,” the receptionist said. “Do you need to change it?”

  “No,” Bernal said. “I don’t think so. But I wanted to be sure. . . . Did I leave the lake number?” He’d flipped to a display of vacation homes at Lake Winnipesaukee. He rattled off the contact number for one of them.

  “No.” The receptionist read back a different number, which he scribbled down.

  “Oh. We’re back from the lake, and I didn’t want.. .”

  “Will there be anything else?” The receptionist made it clear that absolute clarity in backup contact information was not her highest priority. Bernal could hear a child crying in the waiting room, and someone was asking an increasingly urgent question.

  “No. Thank you. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

  _______

  With a last name and number, it didn’t take him long to fill things in. Maura Rennie, 37, single, 2561 Old Enfield Road, East Cheriton. Parents deceased. One sibling, a brother, John Rennie, 34.

  John Rennie. Was that him? The long-sought Connoisseur?

  He almost called Charis. But, no. She’d just read him a lecture. And despite what Charis had told him, all that entirely reasonable, sensible, and smart stuff, he was going to try to find Muriel. She had had some kind of arrangement with the Connoisseur, one that seemed to still be in operation. That was a route to find her.

  He thought the Connoisseur, very probably named John Rennie, might be able to get answers. Plus, he had to admit, it would be kind of nice to chat with the guy who had smacked him with the borzoi.

  John had no address. Only Maura did.

  30

  “Please go away.” The woman was fuzzed behind the screen door.

  “I need to see John. John Rennie. He here?”

  “I don’t . . . he’s not. . . oh, hell. You . . .” She stared more intently at him. “He’s not.”

  “I have something for him. Something he left with me.”

  “Don’t give it to me. I don’t have any interest in his stuff.”

  “He tends to have a lot of nice stuff, John.”

  “Sure, nice stuff. Bastard knows enough to have invented Antiques Roadshow. But that’s not the way his mind works. Dumbass from birth, and believe me, I’ve been there all the way along.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the side of the door, still not opening the screen. She wore a long-sleeved man’s shirt over a T-shirt and had curly red hair, too wild to be cared for easily. Crossing her arms brought her breasts into prominence. “Plus, you’re not here to return anything.”

  “No. I just want to see if he’s working with someone I know. Someone who’s missing. Someone I need to find.”

  “John never works with anyone. If you knew him, you’d know that. Please go.”

  “Look.” Bernal was desperate. “Terrible things are happening. People are dead. And a friend of mine . .. it’s too complicated. But your . . . John Rennie could really help me out by answering a few questions. I mean, he hit me.” He pointed to the bruises on the side of his face. “Knocked me Out and stole my car and left me on a lawn overnight.”

  “He .. . what car? What model is your car?”

  “Dodge Ram. Red. Nothing sexy, but it gets me and my stuff where I need to go.”

  “And he hit you with a cast-iron doggie doorstop, right? A borzoi.”

  “Um, yeah. How did you know that?”

  She grabbed two giant handfuls of her hair and pulled. “Never mind how I know that.” She flipped the hook off the screen door and walked back into the kitchen. Bernal pushed it open, then caught it so it wouldn’t bang.

  “My name’s Bernal,” he said. “I’m not a cop.”

  “Maura. Like I couldn’t tell that. Only reason I’m talking to you.”

  “You,” he said. “You wrote the note. The apology.”

  “Look. I had no idea he’d, like, left you somewhere. He didn’t tell me that. He just had me pick him up at the mall parking lot. He was going to leave your car there, let you find it later. Jesus, I still can’t believe John hit you. He’s not like that, you have to believe me. Crazy. But just not that way.”

  Bernal remembered the man’s obvious terror. He’d been caught and had done what he needed to do to escape. “Fine. But I still need to talk to him.”

  “To hit him?”

  Bernal considered his reply. “Maybe.”

  “Turn him over to the cops?”

  “Not unless . . . no. I wasn’t actually thinking of that. He has information. He knows things I need to know. I think. He might have been hired by a friend of mine. I mean, I’m not sure. I just need to . . .”

  “Look, ah, Bernal.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “Maybe John’s not the only one who’s so stuck he’s doing stuff he sucks at. Um. Look, I can’t just sit here with you, and I don’t smoke anymore.” She swung around in her chair, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out two cans of Heineken. “This okay?”

  Bernal popped the top, took a swig. “Perfect.” And it was.

  The table was small. But she’d put a tablecloth on it I and a vase with a spray of miniature pink carnations. Real ones—Bernal had felt at the petals, assuming they were plastic, and now hoped she wouldn’t see the torn one. It was facing him. Chances were good she wouldn’t notice it until he left.

  “Maybe John has been working with someone,” she said. “Not like him. But... is that who you’re after? Who he’s working with?”

  “In a way.” Bernal wasn’t about to say that he was looking for the technologically retained ghost of a dead I person, so he had to figure out what he could say. “My friend’s . . . hiding out. Hanging low. She hasn’t committed any crimes but. . . there are people after her. I think she’s hired your brother to steal her some of her own stuff. She lives in a big house on Walnut Street and can’t get back to it.”

  “Must be nice,” Maura said. “To have stuff you want to keep. You don’t know where your friend is.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Reason for that? Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you. Wants to make a clean break.”

  Just what he needed: Maura sticking up for Muriel’s privacy. “Please. She’s in real trouble.” He stopped himself from saying “you have
to believe me,” because he’d never believe anyone who would say that.

  “Hmm. I’m not sure what that lady’s up to, that’s for sure. Warned John about her. But he never listens to me.”

  Bernal drank his beer, carefully silent. Damn. He was almost done, and he wanted another one, and he wasn’t about to ask her.

  “First, the hair.” Maura curled some of her thick, dark red hair around her finger. There was a glint of silver in it, which she scowled at. “This is real, my real color. Not a great color, really, and I’m going to have to give up on it, before it gives up on me. But . . . people go for red, because it’s obvious, and it looks easy. It’s not easy at all. Takes a while to learn to carry it off. Like learning a foreign language. You put the red on when you’re an adult, and you’ll always have an accent. So that was the first thing I thought when I saw her. Bright, flaming, curly red, not even remotely convincing. Big Gypsy earrings, the whole flouncing, fabricky thing. Some girls get old, they think Gypsy’s the way to go. And, sure, the chance to wear a couple of pounds of kohl and Morticia lipstick lets you cover up a lot of hard-winter potholes.”

  Bernal was stunned. “Naomi Wilkerson.” Had he been chasing after a complete side issue? Charis would have said he never did anything else. He remembered Naomi stealing something from the table at Muriel’s funeral. Muriel’s oldest friend. Had she just taken advantage of her knowledge of Muriel and what Muriel owned to loot the house after her friend’s death? Jesus. He felt the air come out of him. He’d talk to her. But the chances that she would be able to tell him anything useful had suddenly grown much less.

  Maura looked down at her own hand. It was big and rough, but she kept the nails nice. She had deep lines on either side of her mouth. Her life had not been easy or happy. But she worked with it.

  “You know her, then.”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “I never asked about his work, never. Didn’t want to know, and believed him every single goddam time he told me he’d given it up. I promised Mom I’d look after him, even though he’s older than me. She knew. Hell, one time getting trapped in a culvert section at a construction site where he was building a ‘secret hideout,’ and you knew this kid was trouble. And I inherited the trouble when Mom died. She had some heart thing, I never did figure out exactly what, and she went when we were just on our way out of high school. Not a lot of money for college, which is how I ended up working office supplies at the SuperMax. Not a bad job, really, but not what I had originally planned.”

  Bernal shifted around. The chair he was sitting on wasn’t particularly comfortable. Maura sprawled on hers like an empress being fed grapes by a slave, her thighs tight in her faded jeans, but his had all sorts of odd bumps in its back. He looked down, to see lion-clawed feet. Nothing like you’d expect from a kitchen chair.

  Unless it was a chair in the kitchen of an antiques thief known as the Connoisseur. “What’s this doing in here?” he asked.

  “It’s a chair, bro. Your ass is in it. Otherwise you’d be on the floor. Want another beer?”

  “You bet.”

  She hesitated. “You prefer bottles? Or ‘on draft’? I got draft in cans, that’s it.”

  “Never mind the socioeconomic status indicators,” Bernal said. “Just give me the goddam beer.”

  He’d gotten her to grin. It felt good. They clanked cans and drank simultaneously.

  “I’ll bet you don’t usually store his stuff for him.” Bernal was sure the chair was from Muriel’s house. And, what’s more, that he’d seen it: it had been the chair at the desk in her bedroom.

  She sighed. “No. Damn thing was in my car. And my car was in the shop. John always has problems with cars. He drives like an old lady. An old lady who’s trying to bulk up and has ’roid rages. So he’d picked this chair up, using my car, bashed the thing into a wall somewhere, and took it in for body work, hoping to get it fixed before I noticed. Like I wasn’t going to notice that my car was gone. And I know Frankie, I do most of the arrangements for repair, and I went to school with his brother Dan. He let me pick it up, no charge. I can pull out a damn door dent and do the repaint, no need to pay those ridiculous body shop charges. John was never smart with a buck.

  “It’s weird, about him. He hid a lot. Cops chased him around at night. He had a rule, one that worked for him. Don’t look at them. Sounds like a little kid, huh? But it’s not that ‘you can’t see me if I can’t see you’ thing at all. He’d hide. But ... he explained this to me once ... I don’t know why. I think it’s got to do with the way we see things. Faces are something that we always see, even if they are not really there. So a face, with eyes, gets seen, even if nothing else does. It’s an unconscious thing. So he wouldn’t look. Once he was hiding in the bushes, and a cop even stepped on him. He thought that was it, but he didn’t move, and the cop, if he felt him, figured it was something else, and moved on. So he got to rely on it. Maybe he’s bashed up my car before, and I didn’t notice. Could be.” She jerked her head and listened.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Bernal said.

  “Ha. He’s the one who’s in trouble. You sure you don’t want to do something to him?”

  Bernal got up. “I just want to talk to him. There’s something I’m after.”

  “Finding your friend.”

  “Urn, yeah. And . . . can I call you?”

  “What?”

  “After I clear this up. Can I give you a call?”

  For a second, he thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Sure. You have the number, I guess. And most of the time I work over at the Super Max on Scott, if you feel the yen for some jelly bean pens or something. Just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “You look like you’re right in the middle of something. Right?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Not a good time to add stuff to your plate. I don’t want to get lost in the shuffle. So call me when . . .”

  “Right. That makes sense. When I’m done.”

  It was silly, how good it made him feel. He picked up the chair and stepped out on the porch to talk to John Rennie, the Connoisseur.

  31

  Rennie hopped back from the open hatch of the Geo Metro when he saw Bernal come down the steps. “What the hell—”

  “It’s been a bit of work,” Bernal said. “You’re a hard man to find. Though I bet you thought it was impossible. Remember me?”

  “I . . .” Rennie looked exactly as he had when Bernal had seen him the night Muriel disappeared, slender, with the neatly trimmed gray hair that made his age hard to judge. His sweatshirt was from Jacob’s Pillow and showed stylized dancers leaping through space. “You’re . . . the guy . . .”

  “The guy you hit in the face with a hunk of iron? Yeah, that’s me.”

  It had been kind of an intellectual puzzle, finding the Connoisseur. He was a guy who might have information about what Muriel had been up to and what had happened to her. But now that Rennie was in front of him, Bernal was furious.

  “I. . . I’m sorry.” Rennie shifted his weight in his impeccably white sneakers and looked everywhere but directly at Bernal.

  “You’re sorry?” Bernal found himself yelling. “That’s it? That’s what you have to say? I was just standing there.. . . What the hell do you know about the judicious use of force? You could have killed me, you moron.”

  “No, really, I’m sorry.” Rennie’s eyes, to Bernal’s dismay, were full of tears. He blinked, then shut his eyes deliberately a couple of times. “I just didn’t ... I didn’t know what to do. I was ... your friend stole my car; I had a plan, and the car was gone, and I had to get out of there, right then. I brought your car back. Didn’t I? I brought it back.”

  “Did you check me out? See if I was okay?”

  “You were gone! On the lawn, there. I did look. You were gone, and the sprinklers were on. Everything was quiet, and you’d gone on your way, or someone had picked you up. No cops around, no ambulance, no one out, nothing. I l
eft your car.”

  Bernal thought about how the car had seemed to appear while he was in the house, washing up. He’d thought he just missed it on his way in but hadn’t been sure.

  “And that makes it all okay?”

  “No. Not okay. But I did the best. . . you got my car stolen. You left me no choice.”

  Despite himself, Bernal had been cooling down, but this attempt to evade responsibility sparked him up again. “We all have choices. Don’t we? You could have decided not to hit me with that stupid metal dog. You could have.”

  “Yes. I could have. I don’t know what else to say.”

  For an instant, Bernal thought about just hitting him. He didn’t really even know how to hit someone and knew he’d probably hurt himself in doing it, but it was the only thing that really made sense.

  A hint of motion at the edge of his vision caught his attention. He looked up at the house. Had that curtain been up before? He sensed someone, far enough back in the room to be invisible.

  Then he snapped back to Rennie. That was exactly what had caught him the last time, a moment of inattention, and Rennie had clocked him.

  But Rennie stood right where he had been. Bernal set the chair down, and Rennie winced. “Please. The concrete . . . you’ll scratch the legs.” He reached into the open hatch and pulled out a blanket. He laid it on the sidewalk and placed the chair carefully on it.

  Punching Rennie was no way to get Maura to like him, Bernal figured. If that was important. If that mattered.

  “You didn’t arrange with Muriel for her to take the car?”

  “What? No! I Was just minding my own business when someone ran up, hopped into my car, and took off with it.”

  “First of all,” Bernal said. “It wasn’t your car. It belonged to a guy named Alistair Smithson. And you weren’t minding your own business, you were breaking into a house.”

  “Okay, fine.” Rennie sighed. He too looked up at the window with the pulled-back curtain. Maura had kept Bernal from hitting Rennie. Maybe she was keeping Rennie from running away. “I knew I should have left the area when I saw you wandering around the side of Muriel’s house.”