Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “In the car? The woman?”

  Miriam’s head went up and down a quarter inch. “Felicia.” Maybe thinking I was going to ask, she added, “His slut of an ex-wife. They kept in touch.”

  “No,” I said. “I saw her this morning.”

  Miriam’s damp eyes darted about, as though the answer were hidden here in the kitchen. “Then Georgina.”

  “Georgina?”

  “Blackmore. Georgina Blackmore. Her husband’s a professor at Thackeray. English something or other.”

  Another connection between her husband and the college. First Clive Duncomb, now a Professor Blackmore.

  “That little bitch,” she said.

  “Is the professor a friend of the head of security out there?” I asked. “Clive Duncomb.”

  Her eyes flashed for a second, then appraised me in a way they hadn’t up until now.

  “Why would you ask about him?”

  “You and your husband have entertained him and his wife, here, for dinner. You’re friends.”

  Miriam Chalmers eyed me with the same level of suspicion she’d displayed when first finding me in the house.

  “Why, exactly, are you here, in my house? You’re not with the police.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m private.”

  “You’re here at Lucy’s direction?”

  “Someone was in the house,” I said, nodding. “Since news broke of the disaster, and it became known your husband was among the victims, someone got in. To get something.” I paused. “From the room downstairs.”

  It was as though she’d been Tasered.

  “What?”

  She pushed back her chair so quickly ashes fell from the end of the Winston and landed on her dress. She got up, taking the cigarette from her mouth and clutching it in her fingers, and headed straight for the stairs.

  I followed.

  She’d only descended three steps when she caught sight of the bookcase out of its usual position, the secret room exposed.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “No, no, no.”

  She entered the room, saw the scattered DVD cases on the floor.

  “This isn’t happening,” she said.

  Miriam spun around, pointed at me. “Where are they? What did you do with those? What is it you want? Is it money? Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t have them. But I’m guessing you might know who would.”

  Miriam was trying to take it all in.

  “Get out,” she said. “Get the fuck out of my house and tell Lucy I can solve my own goddamn problems.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  WHEN Trevor Duckworth dropped off the Finley Springs Water truck at the end of his shift, he went around to the office to see if the boss was in.

  He wasn’t.

  “Do you have a number for him?” he asked one of the women in the office. A cell phone number was provided. He entered it straight into his own phone’s contacts list.

  But he didn’t call Randall Finley right away. He had to think about whether this was the right thing to do.

  It galled him that his father had been right. His dad had said the only reason Finley had hired him was that his father was a detective with the Promise Falls police. Finley wanted Barry Duckworth to feed him things, things about the department, that might help Finley when he went after the mayor’s job.

  Trevor’s dad had said no when Finley asked him directly. But now Finley was coming at it another way. He’d had a chat with Trevor a couple of weeks ago, let him know that he was friends with the family of Trevor’s former girlfriend, Trish Vandenburg.

  Finley described himself as Trish’s unofficial uncle. She’d told him things. She’d told him about the time Trevor had hit her in the face.

  It was an accident.

  Didn’t seem like it to Trish, Finley told him. She’d spent three days in her apartment waiting for the bruise to fade before she went outside. Trevor tried to explain that he’d thought Trish was going to slap him, so he’d brought up his hand to stop her, but ended up backhanding her.

  However it might have happened, Finley said, it happened. But the onetime mayor made clear to Trevor that he had done him a favor. Trish had been wondering about whether to report the assault to the police, but Finley had persuaded her it was a bad idea.

  But who knew? Finley said. She might change her mind one day. Trevor’s boss wanted the young man to know he’d keep his mistake under wraps as best he could, so long as Trevor was open to the idea of proving his gratitude.

  Now Trevor sat in his apartment, phone in hand, thinking that maybe this was his chance to even things up with Finley. A way to show how grateful he was.

  He made the call.

  “Hello?” Randall Finley said.

  “Mr. Finley, it’s Trevor.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Trevor Duckworth.”

  “Hey there, Trevor. How’s it going?”

  “Okay, I guess. Have you got a second?”

  “For you, of course. What can I do ya for?”

  Even though he was alone in his apartment, Trevor brought his voice down. “You remember that talk we had the other day?”

  “Which talk would that be?” Finley said. Taunting him, Trevor felt. He knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “You know. About Trish.”

  “Oh, yeah, that talk. Of course.”

  “I wanted . . . you said you did me a favor, and in return, you said if I ever heard anything that might be helpful to you, that if I passed it along, then we’d be square. You remember that?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I kind of heard something tonight, when I was home. Something that my dad was telling my mom.”

  Trevor’s hand was becoming slippery with sweat. He switched the phone to his other hand, put it to his left ear.

  “What did you hear?” Finley asked.

  “Okay, so you know the chief? Rhonda something?”

  “Finderman. Rhonda Finderman.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. So, three years ago, she wasn’t the chief. She was a detective, and she was in charge of finding out who killed Olivia Fisher.”

  “Awful thing,” Finley said. “Just awful.”

  “Yeah. So, I guess no one’s ever been arrested for that. And a couple of weeks ago, there was this other woman who got killed. Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary Gaynor.”

  “Yeah. My dad was telling my mom that it was the same person who killed both of them.”

  “Is that so?” Finley said.

  “Yeah. But my dad only just realized that, because he didn’t work the first murder, the Fisher one. But he was telling my mom that if the chief—Finderman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was saying that if Chief Finderman had been paying attention, she would have noticed the similarities between the two cases right away, but she wasn’t, or didn’t, and that kind of slowed my dad down.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Finley said.

  “But then he said, maybe he was expecting too much. Like, maybe it was just one of those things that fell through the cracks. I guess the chief wants some doctor to be blamed for both murders, and since this doctor is dead, it kind of closes the book on everything. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I do. Trevor, that’s really remarkable. I do appreciate this.”

  “You can’t ever say where you heard about this. You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And this squares things up, right? You’re not going to hold that other thing over my head anymore.”

  A pause at the other end of the line.

  “Mr. Finley.”

  “This is a good start, Trevor. A very good start. You keep your ears open and let me know what else you find out.”

 
; “Come on,” Trevor said. “That’s not fair.”

  “Anything else your dad has to say about the Fisher and Gaynor murders being done by the same person, you pass that along. If he starts making some progress there, you keep me in the loop. How about that?”

  “Jeez, I feel shitty enough about what I told you already. And I’m not home all that much anyway.”

  “Maybe it’s time you dropped by to see your parents more often,” Finley said. “Remember, there’s nothing more important than family.”

  FORTY

  BARRY Duckworth knew the name Peter Blackmore. Angus Carlson had mentioned it. He was the man who’d talked to Carlson after the meeting with Clive Duncomb at Thackeray.

  Blackmore had said his wife was missing.

  Seemed as though she might have been found.

  As Duckworth reached out to stop Martin Kilmer from entering the examination room to identify the body of the woman they had all, up to now, believed was his sister, Miriam Chalmers, the man’s cell rang.

  Duckworth was putting his own phone away as Martin reached into his jacket for his. As he glanced at the number, his eyes went wide. He put the phone to his ear and said, “Miriam? Jesus! Miriam!”

  Duckworth held his breath.

  Kilmer said, “Where are you? They told me—Jesus, what’s happened?” He shot a contemptuous look at Duckworth. “So you’re not dead? You realize how far I had to drive to find that out? I had a critical meeting today that I had to blow off. Yes, yes, of course, terrible thing about Adam. I’m going to have to turn around and head straight back. I swear, these idiot police were about to have me identify you. Let me know when the funeral is and I’ll see if I can move some things around. Yes, yes, okay. Good-bye.”

  He put the phone away.

  “Is the entire department incompetent, or just you?” he said.

  “That was your sister,” Duckworth said. “You’re sure.”

  “Of course I’m sure. Goddamn it, I drove all the way up here for nothing.”

  “Your brother-in-law’s still dead,” Duckworth said. “Just so the trip wasn’t a total waste.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe it’s Jimmy Hoffa. You might want to get your facts straight next time before you start sending people into a panic. How the hell do I get back to my car?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  “You sure you know the way?” Kilmer asked.

  “Just give me one second.”

  Duckworth entered the room, on his own, to take a look at the body. “Let me see her,” he said to the attendant.

  She pulled back the sheet.

  If this was, in fact, Peter Blackmore’s wife, he was going to have a difficult time identifying her from her face. There was little left of it. The trauma hadn’t ended there. The woman’s left shoulder and upper arm were crushed. There were several gashes across her upper torso.

  Her lower abdomen, right side, was spared any damage from the accident. Duckworth noticed three small moles, clustered within an inch of one another, that formed a rough triangle.

  He took out his phone, leaned in close, and took a photo.

  “That’s all,” he said to the woman. “Thank you.”

  • • •

  He endured more complaining from Martin Kilmer before driving him back to the Promise Falls police station, where the man had left his car. Then Duckworth went searching for Garth, in the police garage, to retrieve the purse and phone that ostensibly belonged to Georgina Blackmore. He looked at the woman’s license for a home address.

  On the way, he put in a call to Angus Carlson’s cell. The phone rang several times before it went to message. “It’s Duckworth. Call me when you get this. It’s about that professor who said his wife was missing.”

  He was putting the phone back into his jacket, still had it in his hand, when it rang. He brought it back out, put it to his ear.

  “Duckworth.”

  “It’s Carlson. Sorry. I just saw you called. Haven’t listened to the message. I was kind of in the middle of something.”

  “Blackmore. He talked about his wife.”

  “Yeah. Did he come in, make an official report?”

  “No, but I wanted to ask you if there was anything more to that. Anything else he might have said you didn’t tell me.”

  “Not really. Like I said, at first he was concerned—then he said it was probably nothing, she’d show up sooner or later. Why, what’s going on?”

  “I’ll get back to you if I need anything else,” Duckworth said, and ended the call.

  Before leaving the office, he made one other call, to the manager of the hotel in Boston where Bill Gaynor had been attending a conference when his wife was murdered. From his previous discussion with the manager, Duckworth had learned Gaynor’s car had not left the hotel parking garage at all during his stay. Also, he’d been seen in the hotel throughout the weekend. The detective was wondering whether there were any holes that could be punched into Gaynor’s alibi.

  “Front desk.”

  “Sandra Bottsford, please.”

  “I’m afraid she’s not here right now. Can I have her call you?”

  Duckworth left his name and cell phone number. “She’ll know what it’s about.”

  Then he set off for Peter Blackmore’s house.

  It was a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of town. There were lights on behind the curtained windows, and what looked like the bluish light from a television.

  Duckworth parked at the curb, got out of the car, taking the purse Garth had retrieved from the trunk of Adam Chalmers’s crushed Jaguar, which he had tucked into a plastic grocery bag, and headed for the front door.

  FORTY-ONE

  Cal

  ONCE Miriam Chalmers had kicked me out of her house, I phoned Lucy Brighton.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “You sitting down?”

  “What is it?”

  “Miriam’s alive.”

  “What?” She said it so loud, I pulled the phone away from my ear.

  “She just returned home, walked in while I was looking around. She’d gone to Lenox for a couple of days to think about her marriage, apparently, and didn’t know anything about the drive-in.”

  “Oh my God,” Lucy said. “That’s . . . wonderful. I’m glad she’s okay. I just wish my father had also . . .”

  “I know.”

  A pause at the other end, and then, “If it wasn’t Miriam in the car with my dad, then who was it?”

  “Miriam thinks a woman named Georgina Blackmore. Ring a bell?”

  “No. There’s a professor at Thackeray with that last name, I think. But I’m not really sure. Cal, should I call the police? Tell them they’ve got it wrong? That it’s somebody else?”

  “I imagine they’ll be hearing from Miriam herself pretty soon. I told her she should call her brother. Lucy, I don’t know that there’s anything else I can do for you at this point. The missing discs, they’re really Miriam’s problem now.”

  “Yes, I guess so. I’m going to have to call her.”

  “A heads-up. She’s pissed you hired me. She wasn’t pleased to find me in the house. And she was beyond horrified when she realized someone had been into that room, and that the discs were taken.”

  “I have to—what am I going to say when I call her? I mean, I’ve started making the arrangements for my father. He’s been moved to the funeral home. There are things to do, to plan, and—”

  “Tell the funeral home. Have them call her,” I suggested.

  “This is all so hard to believe. Cal, thank you for everything you’ve done.”

  “It hasn’t been much,” I said, getting into my car. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. In the meantime, I’m heading home.”

  “Okay, thanks. Good-bye, Cal.”

  I ke
yed the engine and pulled away from the Chalmers house, thinking about Miriam. She’d looked more upset about the discovery of the playroom, and those missing discs, than she had about her husband’s death.

  But it wasn’t my headache anymore.

  There was a parking space set aside for me in the lot behind my building, but there was no access to my apartment from there. That meant I had to walk down a narrow alley that delivered me to the main street, where I’d find the ground-level door to my second-floor apartment right next to Naman’s Books.

  It was after ten, and the light was on in the store.

  The jangling bell over the door announced my arrival. Naman Safar was perched on a stool behind the cash register, his nose in an old Bantam paperback edition of The Blue Hammer, by Ross Macdonald, while some opera I’d never heard of played in the background. He glanced up at me.

  “Hey, Cal.” He tucked a strip of red ribbon between the pages, closed the book, and set it next to the cash register. “You’re up late.”

  “Me? What are you doing open this late?”

  Naman looked at his watch. “I guess it is kind of dumb. No one’s out shopping for books at this hour. But what am I going to do at home? Sit around?”

  “Naman, turn off the lights. Go home.”

  He nodded obediently. “Okay, okay.”

  He slid off the stool, planting his feet on the floor. He turned off the CD player and then popped open the cash register. “Big day,” he said. “Twenty-nine dollars.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “E-books aren’t just killing new-book stores. They’re killing me, too. I hate those things, those little things with the screens. I hate them.”

  A book resting atop the pile closest to me caught my eye. Another Roth, in paperback. The Human Stain. I picked it up. “Am I too late? Have you closed the till?”

  “Take it.”

  “No.” I glanced at the price Naman had lightly penciled on the inside cover. Five bucks. “Here,” I said, digging into my wallet. I had a five. “Take this.”

  He looked at the bill. “Okay.”

  As he was taking it from my fingers, we both heard tires squealing up the street somewhere. The gunning of an engine.