Bad News: A Zack Walker Mystery #4

by Linwood Barclay

  She smiled at me, reached over and touched my hand. ‘Claire’s my sister,’ she said. Claire, who’d gotten up to put some dishes in the sink, looked at Trixie over her shoulder. ‘And Don here is my brother-in-law. And’ – she nodded toward the living room – ‘you’ve met Katie. My little girl.’

  ‘You told me, a long time ago,’ I said, ‘that you didn’t have any children.’

  ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘I guess, first of all, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. I wanted to protect her. And also, a large part of me doesn’t feel I deserve to be called a mother.’

  Claire, sitting back down, said, ‘Miranda.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Trixie said. ‘If I were a good mother, a responsible mother, I wouldn’t have had to ask my sister, and her husband here, to raise her.’ She gave Don a warm smile and he gave a tired shrug.

  ‘Why are Claire and Don raising Katie?’ I asked. ‘It’s not just because of, you know, your choice of occupation.’

  ‘No,’ Trixie said. ‘That’s not it.’

  Everyone was suddenly very quiet. No one stirred coffee or cut cake. The only sound came from the TV in the other room.

  ‘I could never guarantee that Katie would be safe, living with me,’ Trixie said. ‘I’ve spent the last four years looking over my shoulder. The men, that man, coming after me, he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Katie to get at me.’

  ‘Are we talking about Gary Merker?’ I asked.

  ‘He murdered Katie’s father,’ she said. ‘And he’d like nothing more than to find me, kill me too. And Katie.’

  ‘Why?’

  Trixie opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out right away.

  ‘Is it because of that massacre at the Kickstart?’ I asked. ‘I’ve talked to the police in Canborough. I know about that night, when the three bikers were shot and killed. And how Merker, and his friend Leo Edgars, somehow managed not to get killed, saying they weren’t there at the time. How, after that, Merker bailed on his share of the drugs and prostitution, how he let the Comets run things, take over his share of the market. What happened, Trixie? Did Merker cut some sort of deal with the competition? Wipe out his buddies? Was that easier than trying to get them in on the deal, too? Did you see something? Are you a witness?’

  Trixie listened in quiet amazement. She was taken aback at how much I knew, I could tell that by the look on her face.

  ‘Is that why Merker’s after you? Because of what you know? And something you took from him?’

  Trixie got up, walked over to the row of hangers by the back door, fished something out of a jacket, and came back to the table. It was a piece of paper, folded over. She unfolded it.

  ‘This was the note that was left for me, in the basement, when we found Martin Benson.’

  I remembered her finding it, how she wouldn’t let me see it.

  ‘It’s not all as simple as it seems,’ she said, pushing the note across the table to me.

  It read:

  Dearest Candy or should I say Trixie?

  So sorry we missed you bitch. Ran into Mr Benson instead, looking threw your house. He didn’t know where you are. He’d of told us if he’d know. Leo’s all freaked, and hungry, so we have to go. But we know where you live, right? We’ll be coming hack. When we do you better have what you took from me or we’ll do you to bitch. I want all of it plus interest. Hows your little mini bitch? I bet shes a cutie. You’ll here from us soon.

  It wasn’t signed, but given that its author had mentioned ‘Leo’ in the letter, it might as well have been. And just because someone wasn’t a master criminal didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.

  Reading from the letter, I said, ‘“I want all of it plus interest.”’ I looked at Trixie. ‘What’s that all about?’

  She took a long breath. ‘I ripped him off,’ she said quietly. ‘To the tune of about half a million bucks.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said. ‘You took five hundred thousand dollars off this guy?’

  ‘Not all at once. A little bit at a time, so he wouldn’t notice. It was my going-away money.’

  ‘Is that the only reason he’s after you?’ I asked, ‘Just for the money? It doesn’t have anything to do with those three bikers getting shot?’

  The Bennets exchanged glances.

  ‘Oh, I think he’d like to talk to me about that too,’ Trixie said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Sometimes,’ Claire said, ‘I blame myself.’

  ‘Oh, stop,’ said Trixie. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

  Claire shook her head, dismissing her sister. ‘You taking off with five hundred thousand dollars? Okay, I’m not saying I specifically blame myself for that. But your life. How it’s turned out for you. I blame myself for that.’

  ‘Claire, we’ve been over this before,’ Trixie said. Claire sniffed and looked away, and I thought maybe she was going to cry. ‘Aww, come on.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Don told his wife. ‘You did what you had to do. You had to protect yourself. You had to get out of that situation.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. Looking across the table at Claire, I said, ‘What do you mean you blame yourself?’

  Claire sniffed again, took a deep breath. ‘Miranda’s my baby sister,’ she said, and smiled. ‘When you’re the big sister, you’re supposed to be there, you’re supposed to be looking out for the younger one. But I left. Our father was a – he was a monster. And our mother was a drunk. He beat her, he took the belt to us, and … that wasn’t all.’

  ‘Claire,’ Trixie said, reaching across the table to touch her sister’s hand.

  ‘When I was eighteen, I got away. I left. I couldn’t take any more,’ she looked down at the table, took a moment, and raised her head, ‘of the night visits. I wasn’t going to let him touch me again. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have anything, but I knew I had to get away. I figured I’d either kill him or I’d kill myself if I didn’t leave. I couldn’t count on my mother to protect me. She had her bottle to protect her, and who could blame her. It was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. The only one who could help me was me. So one night, I packed up what I had, which wasn’t much, and at four in the morning, I slipped away and never went back.’ She looked at her husband and reached over for his hand. ‘Don took me away.’

  But then her eyes shifted to Trixie. Her face started cracking. ‘And I left without my sister.’

  Don slipped his arm around her. ‘Come on, honey.’

  ‘If I had taken you with me,’ she wept, holding Trixie’s hand, Miranda’s hand, ‘maybe your life, maybe things could have been better for you.’

  ‘I got out too,’ Trixie said.

  ‘But not right away. You were only fifteen. You had to live with … you had to live with that for almost two more years.’

  Claire Bennet grabbed a couple tissues, dabbed at her eyes. ‘Every night I thought about you, cried myself to sleep worrying about you, praying that you’d leave too.’

  ‘I did, Claire.’

  ‘But you went from one bad environment to another. Bikers, strip clubs, drugs.’

  ‘As bad as it was, it was better than what I left behind,’ Trixie said, although she didn’t say it with much conviction. ‘I didn’t exactly have what you might call a high opinion of myself. I didn’t believe I deserved anything good. I felt worthless.’ She was holding back tears of her own. ‘But something changed when I had Katie.’

  ‘What changed?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d seen how Claire had managed to survive, to pull her life together,’ Trixie said. ‘She met Don, this wonderful, wonderful man.’ He couldn’t keep himself from blushing. ‘They got an apartment, they got a house, and finally they got this house, they have a life. A normal, decent, life. A safe life. And I thought, that’s what I want for Katie. I didn’t want her to have a life like mine. She was barely a year old when her father died, was murdered, by a man he thought was his friend. The
se were the people I was associating with, these were the people I was working with day in and day out. And this was the world I was going to bring my daughter up in?

  ‘And so I began to plan my way out. When I started working at the Kickstart, I was dancing. Shit, stripping. That’s what I was doing. But I’ve always had a head for numbers, and gradually I worked my way off the stage and into the room upstairs, showed them I could do a lot more than shake my titties.’

  Claire glanced in the direction of the living room, assured herself that Katie was occupied with the television.

  Trixie continued, ‘Wasn’t long before they valued me more for what I could do with their books than what I could do onstage.’

  She told me a tale of fraud, setting up dummy accounts, faking invoices, skimming from here and there, covering her tracks, trying to gather together enough money to make a life for herself and Katie.

  Claire said, ‘You haven’t told them what else they did.’

  ‘Claire,’ Trixie said, caution in her voice. ‘Everything in time.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Later,’ Trixie said.

  ‘Then, when the thing happened, when the others got killed, I had to get away right away. That night, I disappeared, with Katie.’

  ‘And ended up on our doorstep,’ Don said. There was no resentment in his voice, no sense that Trixie was a burden to them.

  ‘She was in trouble,’ Claire said. ‘It was finally my chance to make things right, to help her out.’

  ‘I asked them to take Katie,’ Trixie said, and now it was her turn to tear up. ‘I knew that Gary – Pick, we used to call him.’

  ‘I heard,’ I said, pointing my index finger towards my nose.

  Trixie shook her head at the memory of his personal habits. ‘Anyway, I knew Gary would figure out what happened to his money, that he’d be looking for me, that he’d put the word out, that he’d have everyone keeping an eye out for me. I knew Katie’d never be safe with me. And so Claire here, and Don, took her in.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Merker have been able to find her here?’

  ‘He never knew me by my real name, Miranda. Miranda Chicoine. When I got hired at the Kickstart, I told them my name was Candace. I don’t know, I guess when I applied for a job as a stripper, I didn’t want it to be Miranda who was doing it. So while I was there, I was Candace. When I left, I became someone else. I’ve always been hiding out from the place I’d last run from. My father wasn’t going to find me when I was Candace, like he’d even be looking. And when I didn’t want Gary Merker to find me, I became Trixie. But inside, I’ve always been Miranda.’

  ‘I abandoned Miranda years ago,’ Claire said. ‘When she turned up with Katie, I couldn’t say no. And Don didn’t say no, either.’

  He rubbed his unshaven face again, shrugged. Don was probably in his early thirties, but he seemed older, and wiser than his years would suggest.

  ‘And that’s why I couldn’t have my picture in the paper,’ Trixie said. ‘Worst fears realized and all that.’

  ‘I saw Merker’s mother, in Canborough,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t she a treat?’ Trixie said.

  ‘She said one of Gary’s old friends had called him, said he’d seen the picture in the Oakwood paper. She passed the message on.’

  ‘A real darling.’

  ‘About that night,’ I said. ‘When the three bikers were shot. Did you see Gary do it?’

  Trixie hesitated, shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘But he thinks you did? You said he’d be wanting to talk to you about that.’

  Trixie was about to say something when Katie ran in, her curly-haired head not reaching the top of the kitchen table. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. She sidled up to Trixie and pressed her head into her side.

  ‘It is getting to be dinnertime,’ Claire said.

  ‘Are you going to live here now?’ Katie asked Trixie.

  ‘Well, sweetheart, I’ll stay here as long as I can, but you know I can never stay for a long, long time.’

  Katie gave Trixie a squeeze, and then said to me, ‘Do you have two moms?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I do,’ Katie said, beaming.

  ‘You’re very lucky. I just had the one.’

  ‘Does she come and visit you all the time?’

  ‘Not anymore,’ I said.

  ‘Is she dead?’ Katie’s eyes danced.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You must be sad,’ Katie said. ‘I don’t want any of my moms to die.’

  No one could think of anything to say to that.

  ‘Are we going to have hamburgers?’ Katie asked.

  ‘Chicken,’ Claire said.

  ‘Is it with the icky sauce?’ Katie asked.

  ‘No. It’s the sauce you like.’

  ‘Okay,’ Katie said, and ran back into the living room.

  I looked at Trixie, and I guess she could sense a question. She said, ‘We’ve told her the truth, at least some of it. That I’m her mother, but I’m the mommy who can only come to visit once in a while. But Claire, even though she’s her aunt, is really more like her every day mother, so she calls her that.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. My next question for Trixie I blurted out before I considered its implications: ‘If your problems with Merker disappeared, would you become her every day mommy?’

  Claire’s head went up, and I saw something in her face at that moment. Fear, maybe. Fear of giving up a child she’d come to love as if she were her very own, in every way.

  ‘Well,’ said Trixie, ‘I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I think, the way my life seems to be going lately, one threat just gets replaced by another. The thing is, I could never be any better a mother to her than my sister has been.’

  And some of the fear bled away from Claire’s face. Maybe this was best for her, that her sister have a life of uncertainty, so that she could keep raising Katie in relative normalcy.

  Trixie tapped my arm. ‘Let’s you and me take a walk. Claire, you okay for dinner, if I take a walk with Zack?’

  ‘Sure, go ahead. I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

  Trixie motioned for me to follow her out the front door, onto the porch. We leaned against the posts that straddled the steps. I chose the one I’d not whacked my head against. We crossed our arms and looked at each other.

  ‘I’m glad you found me,’ Trixie said.

  ‘I’m a regular Sherlock,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t even need Lawrence’s help,’ she said. ‘You’re good.’

  ‘I hate to call him for everything.’

  ‘Come on.’ We went down the steps, walked around the house and towards the barn. As we passed it, I saw my car, the Virtue, parked around back, where it couldn’t be seen from the highway.

  ‘That car of yours,’ Trixie said, ‘has been nothing but a pain in the ass.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I never would have let you steal it had I known. Yours, by the way, has been trouble-free, despite your bundle of recall notices.’

  Trixie made a face that said Go figure. She pointed to mine and said, ‘Sometimes you try to start it, it won’t go.’

  ‘It hasn’t been doing that for a long time. I thought it was all fixed. I’ll have to get it looked at.’

  ‘Good on gas, though,’ she said.

  Two dirt ruts with a strip of grass down the middle carried on beyond the barn and into the field. I took the left rut, Trixie the right.

  ‘How’s Sarah?’ she asked.

  I grimaced. ‘Things could be better.’

  ‘How much of it’s my fault?’

  I appeared to be doing calculations in my head. ‘I was going to say about seventy-five per cent, but that’s not fair. The fault is all mine. I have to accept responsibility for the decisions I’ve made, including those to help you.’

  ‘But those are the ones that have landed you in the doghouse.’

  I smiled. ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I’ve told you more than
once that Sarah’s lucky to have you, even though, at times, I’d have to concede, you are a bit of an asshole.’

  ‘Yeah, well, all the polling we’ve done would seem to indicate that.’

  We walked a bit further, and I stopped and looked back at the house in the distance, so tranquil.

  Reading my mind, Trixie said, ‘I wish I could stay here forever.’

  I looked up at the sky, and a large bird caught my eye. ‘Look at the wingspan on that one,’ I said, pointing. ‘That’s a huge bird.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think it’s a hawk,’ I said.

  ‘Looking for field mice, anything else it can find,’ Trixie said.

  We stood out there a few more moments, not saying anything to each other. Finally, I said, ‘You have to come back, you know.’

  ‘You think?’ Her response was laced with sarcasm.

  ‘The police, I’m not sure they’re convinced you killed Martin Benson. They told me he’d probably been zapped by some sort of stun gun before his neck was slit. We know it was Merker, and we know he’s got stun guns. He’s been trying to sell them to the cops.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve got reasons for your actions. I’m sure, you get a good lawyer, you can work things out.’

  ‘I’ve got one,’ Trixie said. ‘Guy named Niles Wagland. He’s pretty good.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I mean, look at your situation. You were scared for your daughter’s life. Running away, making sure she was safe, it’s not totally unreasonable. And there’s got to be plenty of evidence against Merker. The note he wrote, for one thing. They’ll test it for prints, do handwriting analysis, who knows, but they’ll be able to figure out it was him. And once they’ve got him in custody, they’ll reopen those murders in Canborough. The guy’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. And then you’ll be able to get on with yours.’

  ‘I don’t know, Zack. There’s a small matter of five hundred thousand dollars.’

  ‘Is Merker going to tell the cops about that? Could he even prove it’s his? That you took it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Trixie, you can’t keep running. From Merker, from the police. You need to face these things, sort them out. You need to do it for Katie.’