by Ian Rankin
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Deal,” said McCluskey.
They drank one drink apiece in an overpriced hotel bar. Reeve insisted on paying. The detective wanted a beer, and though Reeve knew he wasn’t supposed to touch alcohol, he ordered a whiskey. He knew he must be careful; his medication was back in Scotland. But it was only one whiskey, and he deserved it.
“Why La Jolla?” he asked.
McCluskey shrugged. “I don’t have an answer to that, except maybe why not. Guy rents a car, suicide on his mind. He drives around, and the world looks beautiful to him—so beautiful it makes him sad, which he hadn’t been expecting. And he decides, fuck it, why not now?” He shrugged again.
Reeve was staring at him. “You almost sound like you’ve been there yourself.”
“Maybe I have. Maybe that’s why I take the suicides. Maybe that’s why I like to spend some time with the still-living.” Then he shut up and sipped the beer.
“No note,” Reeve said. “I can’t believe it. The one thing in his life Jim ever loved was words, especially printed ones. I’m sure he’d’ve left a note; and a long one at that. A manuscript.” He was smiling. “He wouldn’t have wanted to go quietly.”
“Well, he created a news story in La Jolla. Maybe that was his way of saying good-bye, a final front page.”
“Maybe,” Reeve said, half-believing, wanting to believe. He finished the whiskey. It was a large shot, easily a double. He wanted another, so it was definitely time to leave.
“Back to the hotel?” McCluskey suggested.
“The motel,” Reeve corrected. “Jim’s motel.”
The room was as it had been.
They hadn’t bothered to clean it up and relet it, McCluskey said, because James Reeve had paid until the middle of the week, and they knew his brother was coming and would take all the stuff away.
“I don’t want it,” Reeve said, looking at the clothes spilling from the suitcase. “I mean, there may be a couple of things . . .”
“Well, there are charities who’ll take the rest of it; leave that side of things to me.” McCluskey toured the room with hands in pockets, familiar with the place. Then he sat down on the room’s only chair.
“Jim usually stayed in better than this,” Reeve said. “Money must have been tight.”
“You’d make a fine detective, Mr. Reeve. What line of work are you in?”
“Personnel management.”
But McCluskey wasn’t fooled by that. He smiled. “You’ve been in armed forces though, right?”
“How could you tell?” Reeve checked the bedside table, finding nothing but a copy of Gideon’s Bible.
“You’re not the only detective around here, Mr. Reeve. I know Vietnam vets, guys who were in Panama. I don’t know what it is . . . maybe you all have the same careful way of moving, like you’re always expecting a trip wire. And yet you’re not afraid. I don’t know.”
Reeve held something up. It had been lying beneath the bed. “AC adapter,” he said.
“Looks like.”
Reeve looked around. “So where’s whatever goes with it?”
McCluskey nodded towards the suitcase. “See that carrier bag there? Half hidden under those trousers.”
Reeve went over and opened the bag. Inside were a small cassette recorder, microphone, and some tapes.
“I listened to the tapes,” McCluskey said. “Blank, mostly. There are a couple of phone calls, sounded like your brother wanted to talk to some people.”
“He was a journalist.”
“So it says on his passport. Was he here covering a story?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t you found any notes? There must be a notebook or something.”
“Not a damned thing. I wondered if maybe that was another reason for the trip to La Jolla.”
“What?”
“To ditch all those kinds of things in the ocean. Clean break, see.”
Reeve nodded. Then he held up the cable and the recorder. “It doesn’t fit,” he said. And he showed the detective that the adapter wouldn’t connect with the small machine. “It just doesn’t fit.”
After the detective had dropped him back at his hotel, Reeve went upstairs to wash. He thought of telephoning Joan, but checked himself. In Scotland, it was the wee small hours of the following morning. He could phone her at 11:00 P.M. his time, but not before. He wasn’t sure he’d still be awake at 11:00 P.M. He turned on the TV, looking for news, and found everything but. Then he made his way back downstairs. He used the stairs rather than the elevator, feeling the need for some exercise. At the bottom, he felt so good he climbed back up to the tenth floor and then descended again.
In the restaurant, he had soup, a steak, and a salad. He looked in at the bar, but decided against a drink. The hotel’s gift shop was still open, though, and he was able to buy a detailed street map of San Diego, better than the tourist offerings he’d so far been given. Back in his room, he found a couple of bulky phone books in one of the dresser drawers, took them to the table, and started working.
FIVE
THE NEXT MORNING, REEVE WOKE UP early but groggy, and went to the window to check. The strange car wasn’t there.
He’d seen it yesterday evening, outside Jim’s motel, and had the feeling it followed McCluskey’s car back here to the hotel. He thought he’d spotted it in the parking lot; a big old American model, something from the sixties or early seventies with spongy suspension and faded metallic-green paint that looked like a respray.
It wasn’t there now, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been there before.
He showered and telephoned Joan, having fallen asleep last night without fulfilling his own promise to himself. They spoke for only a couple of minutes, mostly about Allan. She asked a few questions about the trip, about Jim. Reeve’s replies were terse; Joan would call it denial—she’d read some psychology books in her time. Maybe it was denial, or at least avoidance.
But there wouldn’t be much more avoiding. Today he had to look at the body.
He ate breakfast in a quiet corner of the restaurant. It was buffet-style, with the usual endless coffee. There didn’t seem to be many overnight guests, but a bulletin board in the reception area warned that the hotel would be playing host to a convention and a couple of large-scale civic meetings during the day. After three glasses of fresh orange juice and some cereal and French toast, he felt just about ready. Indeed, he felt so good he thought he might get through the day without throwing up.
He went out to the parking lot, not bothering to have the car brought out front for him. He wanted a good look around. Satisfied, he got into the Blazer and put his map on the passenger seat. He’d marked several locations—today’s destinations. The biggest circle was around his own hotel.
The green car was sitting at the exit ramp of a lot next to the hotel’s. It slid out behind him, keeping too close. Reeve tried to see the driver in his rearview, but the other car’s windshield was murky. He could make out broad shoulders, a bull’s neck, and that was about it.
He kept driving.
The funeral parlor was first. It was out in La Jolla, not too far from where the body had been found. The vestibule was cream satin and fresh flowers and piped music. There were a couple of chairs, one of which he sat on while he waited to be shown through to the viewing room. That was what the quiet-spoken mortician had called it: the viewing room. He didn’t know why he had to wait. Maybe they kept the bodies somewhere else and only hauled them up and dusted them off when somebody wanted to see them.
Finally, the mortician came back and flashed him that closed-lipped professional smile, no hint of teeth. Pleasure was not a factor here. He asked Reeve to follow him through a set of double doors, which had glass panes covered with more cream satin material. All the colors were muted. In fact, the most colorful thing in the place was James Reeve’s face.
There was a single open coffin in the room, lined, naturally, with cream satin. It stood on trestles at the end of
the red-carpeted walkway. The corpse was dressed only in a shroud, which made it look bizarrely feminine. The shroud came up over the corpse’s scalp. Reeve knew his brother had swallowed the Browning, angling it up towards the brain, so probably there wouldn’t be much scalp there.
They’d given James’s face the only tan, fake or otherwise, of its life, and there looked like rouge on the cheeks, maybe a little coloring on the thick, pale lips. He looked absurd, like a waxwork dummy. But it was him all right. Reeve had been hoping for a fake, a monstrous practical joke. Maybe Jim was in trouble, he’d thought, had run off, and had somehow duped everybody into thinking he’d killed himself. But now there could be no doubt. Reeve nodded his head and turned away from the coffin. He’d seen enough.
“We have some effects,” the mortician whispered.
“Effects?” Reeve kept walking. He didn’t want to be in the viewing room a second longer. He was angry. He didn’t know why, perhaps because it was more natural to him than grief. He screwed his eyes shut, wishing the mortician would stop whispering at him.
“Effects of your brother’s. Just clothes, really, the ones he was wearing . . .”
“Burn them.”
“Of course. There are also some papers to sign.”
“I just need a minute.”
“Of course. It’s only natural.”
Reeve turned on the man. “No,” he snarled, “it’s highly unnatural, but I need that minute anyway. Okay?”
The man went paler than his surroundings. “Why . . . uh, of course.” Then he walked back into the viewing room, and seemed to count to sixty before coming out again, by which time Reeve had recovered some of his composure. The pink mist was shifting from in front of his eyes. Jesus, and his pills were back in Scotland.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Quite . . .” The man swallowed back the word natural, and coughed instead. “Quite understandable. When will you want the body released?”
That had been taken care of. The coffin would travel to Heathrow on the same flight Reeve himself was taking, then be transported to the family plot in Scotland. It all seemed so ludicrous—burying a brother, traveling thousands of miles with the physical remains. How would Jim have felt? Suddenly Reeve knew exactly what his brother would have wanted.
“Look,” he said in the vestibule, “is there any way he can be buried here?”
The mortician blinked. “In La Jolla?”
“Or San Diego.”
“You don’t want to take the remains back?”
“Back where? He left Scotland a long time ago. Wherever he was at any given point, that was his home. He’d be as well off here as anywhere.”
“Well, I’m sure we could . . . burial or cremation?”
Cremation: the purifying fire. “Cremation would be fine.”
So they went through to the office to fix everything, including the expenses to date. Reeve used his credit card. There were forms to sign, a lot of forms. A bell sounded, signaling that someone else had come in. The mortician went to his office door and looked out.
“I’ll be just one moment,” he called, “if you’d take a seat . . .”
Then he came back to his desk and was briskly businesslike. First, he got the details from Reeve and canceled the cargo reservation from LAX to LHR. He called the transport company in England, and caught someone just as they were about to leave for the night, so was able to cancel that, too. Reeve said he could take care of the rest when he got back to Scotland. The mortician was obviously used to having to do these things, or things like them. He smiled again and nodded.
Setting up the cremation was like setting up a dental appointment. Would he want the ashes in an urn, or scattered? Reeve said he’d want them scattered to the four winds, and let them blow where they may. The mortician checked the paperwork, and that was that.
Plastic made these financial transactions so much easier.
The mortician handed over a clear cellophane bag—Jim’s effects.
They shook hands in the vestibule. Reeve noticed that the new client wasn’t anywhere to be seen, then just as he was leaving, the double doors to the viewing room opened and the man came out.
He was broad across the chest and neck, with legs that tapered to pencil-thin ankles. Reeve ignored him and stepped outside, then hugged the wall beside the door. He looked along the street, and there was the green car, not twenty feet from him. It was an old Buick. He was still standing to one side of the door sixty seconds later when the man came out. Reeve grabbed for a hand, wrenched it up the man’s back, and marched him across the pavement to the car, where he slammed him onto the hood.
The man made complaining noises throughout, even as Reeve started searching his jacket pockets. Then he made out a few words, punctuated by gasps of pain.
“Friend . . . his friend . . . Jim’s . . . your brother’s.”
Reeve eased the pressure on the arm. “What?”
“I was a friend of your brother’s,” the man said. “Name’s Eddie Cantona. Maybe he mentioned me.”
Reeve let the man’s hand go. Eddie Cantona lifted himself slowly from the hood, as though checking the damage—to both himself and the car.
“How do you know who I am?”
Cantona turned towards him and started rubbing his elbow and wrist. “You look like him,” he said simply.
“What were you doing out at La Jolla?”
“You saw me, huh?” Cantona kept manipulating his arm. “Some gumshoe I’d make. What was I doing?” He rested his bulk against the wheel well. “Same as you, I guess. Trying to make sense out of it.”
“And did you?”
Cantona shook his head. “No, sir, I didn’t. There’s only one thing I know for damned sure: Jim didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”
Reeve stared at the stranger, and Cantona returned the look without blinking.
“I liked your brother a hell of a lot,” he said. “Soon as I saw you, I knew who you were. He mentioned you to me, said he wished you could’ve been closer. He was mostly drunk when he talked, but they say drunk men speak the truth.”
The words rolled out like they’d been rehearsed. This was what Reeve wanted, someone who had known Jim towards the end, someone who might help him make sense of it all. But what had Cantona said . . . ?
“What makes you think,” Reeve said slowly, “my brother was murdered?”
“Because he’d no need to rent a car,” Eddie Cantona said. “I was his driver.”
They sat in a bar two blocks from the funeral parlor, and Reeve told Cantona what McCluskey had told him—how suicides like to make a break.
“If he was going to commit suicide, he wouldn’t’ve wanted to do it in your car,” Reeve said.
“Well, all I know is, he didn’t kill himself.” Cantona shot back his second Jose Cuervo Gold and sipped from his iced glass of beer.
Reeve nursed his orange juice. “Have you talked to the police?”
“Sure, soon as I heard about it on the news. That fellow you were with, McCluskey, he took a sort of statement from me. Leastways, he listened to what I had to say. Then he said I could go, and that was the end of it, haven’t heard from the police since. Tried phoning a couple of times, but I never catch him.”
“Did my brother ever tell you what he was working on?”
Cantona shrugged his huge rounded shoulders. “Talked about a lot of things, but not much about that. Usually when he was talking he was drunk, which meant I was drunk, too, so maybe he did talk about his work and I just didn’t take it in. I know it was to do with chemicals.”
“Chemicals?”
“There’s a company out here called CWC, stands for Co-World Chemicals. It was to do with them. I drove Jim out to talk to someone who used to work there, a scientist sort of guy. But he wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t let Jim over the door. Second time we tried, the guy wasn’t at home. On vacation or something.”
“Where else did you take him?”
�
�Well, there was another scientist, only this one wasn’t retired. But he wasn’t talking either. Then I used to take him to the library downtown, that’s where he’d do his research. You know, take notes, all that.”
“He took notes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You saw his notebooks?”
Cantona shook his head. “Didn’t have anything like that. Had a little computer, used to fold open, with a little bitty screen and all. He’d put these disks in there, and he was all set.”
Reeve nodded. Now the cable made sense: it was to recharge the battery on the computer. But there was no computer, and no disks. He ordered another round and went to use the telephone next to the toilets.
“Detective McCluskey please.” His call was put through.
“McCluskey here.” The voice sounded like it was stifling a yawn.
“It’s Gordon Reeve. I’ve been talking with Eddie Cantona.”
“Oh, yeah, him.” There was a pause while the detective slurped coffee. “I meant to tell you about him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You want the truth? I didn’t know how you’d feel finding out your brother had spent his last few days on earth rattling around every seedy joint in San Diego with a bum at the steer-ing wheel.”
“I appreciate your candor.” A rustling noise now; a paper bag being opened. “And I apologize for disturbing your breakfast.”
“I had a late night; it’s no problem.”
“Mr. Cantona says my brother had a laptop computer and some disks.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“The cable in his room was an adapter so he could charge the battery.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Am I boring you?”
McCluskey swallowed. “Sorry, no. It’s just, like, what do you want me to say? I know what that old bum thinks; he says your brother was killed. And now he’s got you listening to his story . . . and would I be right in thinking you’re calling from the pay phone in a bar?”
