Coming home to a family is different from coming home to just Laurie used to be. I think I like this new situation better, but it sort of makes me feel more mature than I want to be. It’s like I should light up a pipe and head to the den to read the evening paper.
We all sit down to dinner, but I don’t mention the pizza that will soon be making an appearance in this very kitchen. When we’re done, I quickly explain to Laurie what is going on.
“So you are taking Infante on as a client?” she asks.
“I think I should.”
“Of course you should. But you’re actually going to?”
“Yes; it’s the right thing to do.”
She smiles a great smile, and turns to Ricky. “Our little Andy is growing up.”
When Pete arrives, I have him watch Ricky while I pick up the pizza. He seems a little uncomfortable with the idea; Pete probably hasn’t been alone in a room with a nine-year-old since he was that age himself. But Pete and Ricky know each other very well; Pete was close with Ricky’s real father.
“What should I do?” he asks.
“Maybe he’ll be doing some homework, so you can learn something. And you can call in backup in case he starts to beat you up, right?”
I go out to get the pizza, just cheese, no toppings, the way the Pizza God intended. The number of toppings that they put on pizza these days is getting out of hand; Laurie turns it into a goddamn salad. Somebody has to step up and say enough is enough, and I’m the man for the job.
When I get back home, I see that Pete is in the den with Ricky, playing Madden football on the large-screen TV. Homework seems not to be happening. “What’s the score?” I ask.
“He’s up two touchdowns and is on my four-yard line,” Pete says.
“He’s terrible,” Ricky chimes in.
“Maybe we can talk at halftime in the locker room,” I say.
Pete extricates himself from the game, though it’s not due to my sarcasm. It’s more the smell of the pizza. While he’s chomping down his fourth slice, he asks, “What have you got?”
“You know that dog Cheyenne that was stolen and was with Downey when he got killed?”
“Of course I know about her; that’s all you ever talk about. Where did she turn up this time? The White House?”
“Her real name is Zoe—”
He interrupts. “Wow. That changes everything.”
“And she was owned by Eric Brantley.”
He does a startled double take so sudden that for a second I’m afraid he might choke on the crust. “How do you know that?”
“Not important, but it’s one hundred percent.”
He seems to eye me warily. “You know where Brantley is?”
I shake my head. “No.” Then, “What do you think this means?”
He thinks for a moment. “It’s interesting.”
“Say hallelujah,” I say. “Sherlock Holmes lives.”
We talk some more about it, but Pete has no more insight into it than I do, which is not a hell of a lot of insight. “I’m not running the Brantley case,” he says. “You want me to share it with the detectives that are on it?”
“No harm in it,” I say.
“Probably no help either. They’re pretty sure the bad guy is Brantley, and I’m sure that Infante killed Downey. I don’t see how the dog changes things.”
“The dog changes everything,” I say. “We just don’t know how yet.” Then, “Did you find out where Downey got those diamonds?”
He shakes his head. “Not yet. Best guess is he stole them … they’re big stones.”
“How much are they worth?”
“I have no idea, but they look sparkly to me. Downey must have had good taste. He had a good head off his shoulders.”
“Now you’re doing decapitation jokes?” I ask.
He shrugs. “How often do I get the chance?”
“I’m afraid I’ve got very little for you,” Sam says. He’s come over to give his report on his investigation into Downey’s phone activity.
“I’ve got to tell you, Sam. That is not an upbeat way to open a conversation. For future reference, I prefer things like, ‘Wait ’til you hear this, Andy,’ or, ‘Andy, you’re gonna love what I found out.’”
“Sorry,” Sam says, and I can tell he feels badly, so I back off.
“That’s okay, just tell me what you learned.”
“There was very little banking activity; if he received or sent any large amounts of money, it wasn’t through normal channels.”
This is interesting in and of itself, since Downey had those diamonds in his possession. He either paid in cash, or stole them, or maybe received them for services rendered. Of course, there’s always the possibility they have been passed down through the Downey family since Nehemiah Downey mined them hundreds of years ago, but it doesn’t help to consider that.
“Did he have the kind of money that would indicate he could have bought two large diamonds?” I ask.
“No way; he had twelve hundred dollars in the bank, and no investments that I could find. He didn’t own the house he lived in, and his car is six years old. Maybe the stones are fakes.”
“What else?”
“I’ve got the phone numbers of the people he called, and those who called him. I’ve attached names to most of them, although he received some calls from a few of those noncontract phones, so there’s no way to know who owned them.”
“Anybody interesting on the list?”
He shrugs. “Hard to know, but it didn’t seem like it. I’ve got the team on it, but they’re just names, you know? Difficult to tell if they mean anything. We’re going to start digging into each person to see what more we can find out.”
“What about the GPS? Where was he?” I ask, knowing that Sam checked the GPS records on Downey’s phone. He can technically only tell me where the phone was, not where Downey was, but the two are generally the same.
“No place special that I can see,” Sam said. “He didn’t attend a criminals’ convention or anything. Hung out a lot in a bar on Market Street. He also spent a hell of a lot of time across the road from the foundation building, and he was definitely in there the evening he died.”
What Sam is saying doesn’t surprise me, but the fact that Downey so carefully staked out the building confirms the importance of his taking Zoe. It wasn’t any kind of impulse; it was a carefully planned and executed robbery.
Sam leaves to go down to the office; we’re going to have a meeting down there to officially get the team working on the case. I wait for Laurie to get home, and drive there with her, updating her on the way with what I know. It is a longer trip than necessary for that; I could tell her what I know in the time it takes to drive one block.
The group has already assembled when we arrive. In addition to Sam and Willie, there is Edna, my secretary turned administrative assistant. She made the title change herself, and if either of the titles implies that she does any actual work, they are as inaccurate as if she called herself Governor Edna, or Astronaut Edna.
Also here for the meeting is Hike Lynch, my associate, a brilliant lawyer with the uncanny ability to see the negative in everything. Next to him is Marcus, which means that Hike was the last to arrive. No one would willingly take a seat next to Marcus; except for Laurie, they would all be too afraid.
Laurie seems somehow exempt from the “fear of Marcus” syndrome, and she takes the chair on his other side. As always, he greets her, and only her, with a small smile.
Marcus is an outstanding investigator, which fortunately puts him on Laurie’s team. The only dealings I have with him are when he is called on to perform the vital task of preventing me from getting killed. He is extraordinarily good at that, since when it comes to toughness, he makes Luca Brasi look like Fredo.
I outline the parameters of the case to the team, telling them what we know so far. “We have one client, but we’re investigating two murders,” I say. “And I don’t believe that the answers will be
found in the Downey murder. Even though that’s the one our client is charged with, I think the key is the murder of Michael Caruso, in which Eric Brantley is the suspect.
“The two killings are tied together by a dog. She was owned by a murder suspect, and stolen by someone else, a few minutes before the thief became a murder victim himself. That is not a coincidence; there is a definite connection, and we have to find the link.”
“How strong a case do they have against Brantley?” Hike asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “They think it’s strong, but they’ve been wrong before. Just like they’re going to be wrong about Tommy Infante.”
“So you think Brantley is innocent?”
“Could be.”
Hike laughs. “Because of the dog, right? You think anyone who loves a dog that much must be a good guy.”
I think about it for a minute and realize that Hike is not far off in his assessment. “Let’s put it this way: someone will have to prove otherwise.”
We kick things around a bit more, focusing on how we might find Brantley before the police do. Laurie says, “I think we should be watching Stephanie Manning. You said Zoe went crazy when she saw her, and a dog wouldn’t act that way unless she spent a lot of time with her. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that she and Eric Brantley are very close.”
“So you think she could lead us to him,” I say, once again showing a mastery of the obvious.
“I do.”
Since we have no one for Marcus to pound into a pulp at the moment, Laurie assigns him to watch Stephanie. It’ll be a piece of cake for him. Even though Marcus is the scariest person in the western hemisphere, he has an amazing ability to go invisible when trailing someone.
“You okay with this, Marcus?” Laurie asks.
“Yuh,” says Marcus, understating the case.
I know very little about Markham College. That isn’t typical of me; I actually know a great deal about many of our nation’s finest academic institutions. For example, even though it’s only April, I can tell you which school Notre Dame is playing in their opening game. And I can probably predict three of the Heisman finalists right now, though not a pass has yet been thrown.
The thing about Markham that keeps it off my radar is that it pretty much doesn’t have a single team that I can bet on, or against. I’m not saying that reflects negatively on Markham as an institution; it is known for turning out leaders in fields as diverse as the sciences, math, engineering, and the arts.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t get you into a bowl game.
Of course, these days Markham is known for more than academic achievement and mediocre athletics. It has been plunged into the news in a way that this small northern New Jersey college has never been before. Markham may have turned out some very accomplished scholars, but right now none are as famous as Eric Brantley and the late Michael Caruso.
I’m here to see Professor Charles Horowitz, who runs the chemistry department at Markham. He was the person that both Brantley and Caruso reported to, which means he has been besieged with interview requests from the media. I read somewhere that he has been turning them all down, so rather than call him direct and get shot down, I called Robby Divine.
I originally met Robby while sitting next to him at a charity dinner. I have almost thirty million dollars, much of it inherited, but if that much money slipped through a hole in Robby’s pocket, he probably wouldn’t notice it.
He’s a multibillionaire and a graduate of Markham, but wealthy alums don’t necessarily impress the Markham administrators. Wealthy alums who donate twenty million dollars to the school do make an impression, however, and that is the category that Robby falls into.
It’s fair to say that they have an interest in keeping Robby happy, so when he called and said he would like Professor Horowitz to meet with me, the word made its way down to the good professor that he should do just that.
So he is. Today. But that doesn’t mean he has to like it, and I’m expecting quite a bit of resistance. I’ll probably be called on to use a significant amount of the Andy Carpenter charm. Fortunately I have it in ample supply.
If I called central casting and asked them to send down a chemistry professor, he would look nothing like Charles Horowitz. Horowitz is at least six foot six, maybe 190 pounds, and he can’t be more than forty years old. He looks like he’d be more at home on a basketball court getting a rebound than hunched over a Bunsen burner or microscope or whatever the hell chemists hunch over.
“I hope this isn’t about Eric Brantley,” he says.
“Your hope is about to be dashed,” I say.
“I’ve told the police everything I know, which isn’t much.”
“Then let’s start not with what you know, but what you think. Do you think Brantley killed his partner?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Just a feeling I have. I simply don’t see him capable of that kind of violence. He and Michael were best friends, which makes it even harder to believe, but that’s not what I base it on. It’s just not Eric.”
“Why did they leave their jobs? Were they fired?”
He thinks for a moment, though that shouldn’t be that tough a question to answer. “Not really, though by the time Eric left, I would describe it as a mutual parting.”
“What caused it?”
“I’m not really sure. Eric just seemed to lose interest in what he was supposed to be doing. His research work slacked off, as did his teaching. It was uncharacteristic, to say the least.”
“Do you have any suspicions about what was going on?”
He nods. “I think both Eric and Michael were doing work not sanctioned by the university, which they chose to keep from me. They were here long hours, but the output that we were shown never corresponded to those hours.”
“What kind of work did they specialize in?”
“Eric is both an organic and physical chemist, absolutely outstanding. We were lucky to have him as long as we did; he would have been welcomed at any institution, and certainly could have called his shot in private industry.”
“And Caruso?”
“Talented, probably on my level, but not in Eric’s league. Very few are in Eric’s league.”
I ask Horowitz the obligatory questions about whether he has knowledge of Brantley’s whereabouts, and he says that he doesn’t. I believe him, though I’m certain he would not tell me if he did know.
As I’m about to leave, I ask, “Did you ever meet Eric’s dog?”
Horowitz smiles. “Zoe? I certainly did; Eric made bringing the dog to work a condition of his employment. He loves that dog … she is very sweet. What happened to her?”
“Well, I would say she’s been leading an interesting life.”
For Stephanie Manning, things had gone from horrifying to surreal. First came the news that Michael Caruso was murdered. She had met Michael a bunch of times, of course through Eric, but really didn’t know him that well. Eric didn’t talk about his work much, and Stephanie always assumed that was because he correctly gauged that she wouldn’t understand any of it.
But Stephanie had never been connected to any kind of violence like that. A distant cousin of hers had once been raped, but Stephanie was just ten at the time, and she hadn’t really fully understood the implications. She also had never met the cousin, so she wasn’t emotionally impacted by it.
Then, right on the heels of the news about Michael was the revelation that Eric was a suspect. She just assumed that it was a terrible mistake, and that he would explain things to the authorities in a way that would clear him.
Following that, the third of a three-punch devastating combination was learning that Eric was missing. That’s not how the police characterized it; “missing” implied that he might somehow also be a victim. It was clear they thought he had fled out of fear of prosecution.
But Stephanie didn’t believe it, not for a second. Eric was innocent; Michael was his closest f
riend in the world, her excluded. In fact, they were two of the only friends that Eric, a true loner, had. That, coupled with the fact that Eric was as gentle a soul as she had ever met, precluded his guilt. It made no sense that he would run, rather than stay and prove his innocence.
So the truth, she feared, had to be worse. Whoever had killed Michael must have been after Eric as well, and either captured him, killed him, or caused him to go into hiding.
Stephanie was a logical person, and could not hide from the fact that Eric’s being in hiding made little sense. He shouldn’t be so afraid of the people that killed Michael that he’d need to run; if he turned himself in to the police, and told what he knew, he would be protected.
So every day the situation grew more frightening, and more surreal. Just seeing Eric’s picture on every newscast, with the announcers talking about him like he was a murderer, was hard for her to process as reality.
But if Eric was okay, then he was watching those newscasts as well, and he was not reaching out to anyone. Not the authorities. Not Stephanie.
Stephanie stayed home as much as she could; as a freelance features writer, her time was pretty much her own. She did not want to leave the phone, in case Eric called her. He had her cell number if she went out, but service in her area was occasionally spotty, and she didn’t want to take a chance on missing his call.
So she was home when the UPS truck pulled up and the driver walked to her porch, carrying a small package. She signed for it and saw that the sender’s name was Robert Boyle. It was a name that was vaguely familiar to her, but she couldn’t place it.
She opened the package, and inside was another, smaller package. She opened that as well, and took out a cell phone, the kind that you can buy at a store without signing a contract.
Stephanie’s hand started to shake at the realization of what this meant, so much so that she had to steady herself to turn the phone on. She knew without a doubt that it was from Eric, and that meant that he was alive.
Who Let the Dog Out? Page 6
