Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder
Page 19
for fingerprints, and take blood samples from the carpet.
They were also photographing the upstairs hall, stairs, and foyer.
In their search for evidence that the intruder might have left behind,
they assumed they had an invitation to poke into any room or closet.
Of course they were in his house to help him, and Marty was grateful for
their efforts. Yet it was embarrassing to think that strangers might be
noting the admittedly obsessive way he organized the clothes in his
closet according to color-he and Emily both--the fact that he collected
pennies and nickels in a half-gallon jar as might a boy saving for his
first bicycle, and other unimportant yet highly personal details of his
life.
And he was more unsettled by the plainclothes detective in charge than
by the rest of them combined. The guy's name was Cyrus Lowbock, and he
elicited a complex response that went beyond mere embarrassment.
The detective could have made a good living as a male model posing for
magazine advertisements for Rolls-Royce, tuxedoes, caviar, and
stock-brokerage services. He was about fifty, trim, with salt-and
pepper hair, a tan even in November, an aquiline nose, fine cheekbones,
a dark-blue cable-knit sweater, and white shirt--he had taken off a
windbreaker--Lowbock managed to appear both distinguished and athletic,
although the sports one would associate with him were not football and
baseball but tennis, sailing, powerboat racing, and other pursuits of
the upper classes. He looked less like any popular image of a cop than
like a man who had been born to wealth and knew how to manage and
preserve it.
Lowbock sat across the dining-room table from Marty, listening intently
to his account of the assault, asking questions largely to clarify the
details, and writing in a spiral-bound notebook with an expensive
black-and-gold Montblanc pen. Paige sat beside Marty, offering
emotional support. They were the only three people in the room,
although unifor Lowbock, and twice the detective excused himself to
examine evidence that had been deemed relevant to the case.
Sipping Pepsi from a ceramic mug, soothing his throat while recounting
the life-and-death struggle with the intruder, Marty also experienced a
resurgence of the inexplicable guilt that had first troubled him when
he'd lain on the wet street with his hands cuffed.
The feeling was no less irrational than before, considering that the
biggest crime of which he could justifiably be accused was routine
contempt for the speed limits on certain roads. But this time he
understood that part of his uneasiness resulted from the perception that
Lieutenant Cyrus Lowbock regarded him with quiet suspicion.
Lowbock was polite, but he did not say much. His silences were vaguely
accusatory. When he wasn't taking notes, his zinc-gray eyes focused
unwaveringly, challengingly, on Marty.
Why the detective should suspect him of being less than entirely
truthful was not clear. However, Marty supposed that after years of
police work, dealing with the worst elements of society day in and day
out, the understandable tendency was toward cynicism. Regardless of
what the Constitution of the United States promised, a longtime cop
pronounced women--were guilty until proven innocent.
Marty finished his story and took another long sip of cola.
Cold fluids had done all they could for his sore throat, the greater
discomfort was now in the tissues of his neck, where throttling hands
had left the skin reddened and where extensive bruising would surely
appear by morning. Though the four Anacin were beginning to kick in, a
pain akin to whiplash made him wince when he turned his head more than a
few degrees in either direction, so he adopted a stiff-necked posture
and movement.
For what seemed an excessive length of time, Lowbock paged through his
notes, reviewing them in silence, quietly tapping the Montblanc pen
against the pages.
The splash and tap of rain still enlivened the night, though the storm
had abated somewhat.
Floorboards upstairs creaked now and then with the weight of the
policemen still at their assigned tasks.
Under the table, Paige's right hand sought Marty's left, and he gave it
a squeeze as if to say that everything was all right now.
But everything wasn't all right. Nothing had been explained or
resolved. As far as he knew, their trouble was just beginning.
. . . my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
At last Lowbock looked at Marty. In a flat tone of voice that was
damning precisely because of its complete lack of interpretable
inflection, the detective said, "Quite a story."
"I know it sounds crazy." Marty stifled the urge to assure Lowbock that
he had not exaggerated the degree of resemblance between himself and the
look-alike or any other aspect of his account. He had told the truth.
He was not required to apologize for the fact that the truth, in this
instance, was as astounding as any fantasy.
"And you say you don't have a twin brother?" Lowbock asked.
"No, sir."
"No brother at all?"
"I'm an only child."
"Half brother?"
"My parents were married when they were eighteen. Neither of them was
ever married to anyone else. I assure you, Lieutenant, there's no easy
explanation for this guy."
"Well, of course, no other marriages would've been necessary for you to
have a half brother . . . or a full brother, for that matter," Lowbock
said, meeting Marty's eyes so directly that to look away from him would
have been an admission of something.
As Marty digested the detective's statement, Paige squeezed his hand
under the table, an admonition not to let Lowbock rattle him.
He tried to tell himself that the detective was only stating a fact,
which he was, but it would have been decent to look at the notebook or
at the window when making such implications.
Replying almost as stiffly as he was holding his head, Marty said, "Let
me see . . . I guess I have three choices then. Either my father
knocked up my mother before they were married, and they put this full
brother--this bastard brother--up for adoption. Or after my folks were
married, Dad screwed around with some other woman, and she gave birth to
my half brother. Or my mother got pregnant by some other guy, either
before or after she married my father, and that whole pregnancy is a
deep, dark family secret."
Maintaining eye contact, Lowbock said, "I'm sorry if I offended you, Mr.
Stillwater."
"I'm sorry you did, too."
"Aren't you being a little sensitive about this?"
"Am I?" Marty asked sharply, though he wondered if in fact he was
over-reacting.
"Some couples do have a first child before they're ready to make that
commitment," the detective said, "and they often put it up for
adoption."
"Not my folks."
"Do you know that for a fact?"
"I know them."
"Maybe you should ask them."
"Maybe I
will."
"When?"
"I'll think about it."
A smile, as faint and brief as the passing shadow of a bird in flight,
crossed Lowbock's face.
Marty was sure he saw sarcasm in that smile. But, for the life of him,
he couldn't understand why the detective would regard him as anything
less than an innocent victim.
Lowbock looked down at his notes, letting the silence build for a while.
Then he said, "If this look-alike isn't related to you, brother or half
brother, then do you have any idea how to explain such a remarkable
resemblance?"
Marty started to shake his head, winced as pain shot through his neck.
"No. No idea at all."
Paige said, "You want some aspirin?"
"Had some Anacin," Marty said. "I'll be okay."
Meeting Marty's eyes again, Lowbock said, "I just thought you might have
a theory."
"No. Sorry."
"You being a writer and all."
Marty didn't get the detective's meaning. "Excuse me?"
"You use your imagination every day, you earn a living with it."
"So?"
"So I thought maybe you'd figure out this little mystery if you put your
mind to it."
"I'm no detective. I'm clever enough at constructing mysteries, but I
don't unravel them."
"On television," Lowbock said, "the mystery writer any amateur
detective, for that matter--is always smarter than the cops."
"It's not that way in real life," Marty said.
Lowbock let a few seconds of silence drift past, doodling on the bottom
of a page of his notes, before he replied, "No, it's not."
"I don't confuse fantasy and reality," Marty said a little too harshly.
"I wouldn't have thought you do," Cyrus Lowbock assured him,
concentrating on his doodle.
Marty turned his head cautiously to see if Paige showed any sign of
perceiving hostility in the detective's tone and manner. She was
frowning thoughtfully at Lowbock, which made Marty feel better, maybe he
was not over-reacting, after all, and didn't need to add paranoia to the
list of symptoms he had recounted to Paul Guthridge.
Emboldened by Paige's frown, Marty faced Lowbock again and said,
"Lieutenant, is something wrong here?"
Raising his eyebrows as if surprised by the question, Lowbock said
archly, "It's certainly my impression that something's wrong, or
otherwise you wouldn't have called us."
Restraining himself from making the caustic reply that Lowbock deserved,
Marty said, "I mean, I sense hostility here, and I don't understand the
reason for it. What's the reason?"
"Hostility? Do you?" Without looking up from his doodle, Lowbock
frowned. "Well, I wouldn't want the victim of a crime to be as
intimidated by us as by the creep who assaulted him. That wouldn't be
good public relations, would it?" With that, he neatly avoided a direct
answer to Marty's question.
The doodle was finished. It was a drawing of a pistol.
"Mr. Stillwater, the gun with which you shot this intruder--was that the
same weapon taken from you out in the street?"
"It wasn't taken from me. I voluntarily dropped it when told to do so.
And, yes, it was the same gun."
"A Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol?"
"Yes."
"Did you purchase that weapon from a licensed gun dealer?"
"Yes, of course." Marty told him the name of the shop.
"Do you have a receipt from the store and proof of pre-purchase review
by the proper law-enforcement agency?"
"What does this have to do with what happened here today?"
"Routine," Lowbock said. "I have to fill out all the little lines on
the crime report later. Just routine."
Marty didn't like the way the interview increasingly seemed to be
turning into an interrogation, but he didn't know what to do about it.
Frustrated, he looked to Paige for the answer to Lowbock's inquiry
because she kept their financial records for the accountant.
She said, "All the paperwork from the gun shop would be stapled together
and filed with all of our canceled checks for that year."
"We bought it maybe three years ago," Marty said.
"That stuff's packed away in the garage attic," Paige added.
"But you can get it for me?" Lowbock asked.
"Well . . . yes, with a little digging around," Paige said, and she
started to get up from her chair.
"Oh, don't trouble yourself right this minute," Lowbock said.
"It's not that urgent." He turned to Marty again, "What about the Korth
thirty-eight in the glovebox of your Taurus? Did you buy that at the
same gun shop?"
Surprised, Marty said, "What were you doing in the Taurus?"
Lowbock feigned surprise at Marty's surprise, but it seemed calculated
to look false, to needle Marty by mimicking him. "In the Taurus?
Investigating the case. That is what we've been asked to do?
I mean, there aren't any places, any subjects, you'd rather we didn't
look into? Because, of course, we'd respect your wishes in that
regard."
The detective was so subtle in his mockery and so vague in his
insinuations that any strong response on Marty's part would appear to be
the reaction of a man with something to hide. Clearly, Lowbock thought
he did have something to hide and was toying with him, trying to rattle
him into an inadvertent admission.
Marty almost wished he did have an admission to make. As they were
currently playing this game, it was enormously frustrating.
"Did you buy the thirty-eight at the same gun shop where you purchased
the Smith and Wesson?" Lowbock persisted.
"Yes." Marty sipped his Pepsi.
"Do you have the paperwork on that?"
"Yes, I'm sure we do."
"Do you always carry that gun in your car?"
"It was in your car today."
Marty was aware that Paige was looking at him with some degree of
surprise. He couldn't explain about his panic attack now or tell her
about the strange awareness of an onrushing Juggernaut which had
preceded it, and which had driven him to take extraordinary precautions.
Considering the unexpected and less-than-benign turn the questioning had
taken, this was not information he wanted to share with the detective,
for fear he'd sound unbalanced and would find himself involuntarily
committed for psychiatric evaluation.
Marty sipped some Pepsi, not to soothe his throat but to gain a little
time to think before responding to Lowbock. "I didn't know it was
there," he said at last.
Lowbock said, "You didn't know the gun was in your glovebox?"
"No."
"Are you aware that it's illegal to carry a loaded weapon in your car?"
And just what the hell were you people doing, poking around in my car?
"Like I said, I didn't know it was there, so of course I didn't know it
was loaded, either."
' "You didn't load it yourself?"
"Well, I probably did."
"You mean, you don't remember if you loaded it or how it got in the
Taurus?"
"What probably happened . . . the last time I went to the shooting
range, maybe I loaded it for one more
round of target practice and then
forgot."
"And brought it home from the shooting range in your glovebox?"
"That's right."
"When was the last time you were at the shooting range?"
"I don't know . . . three, four weeks ago."
"Then you've been carrying a loaded gun around in your car for a month?"
"But I'd forgotten it was in there."
One lie, told to avoid a misdemeanor gun-possession charge, had led to a
string of lies. All were minor falsehoods, but Marty had enough
grudging respect for Cyrus Lowbock's abilities to know that he perceived
them as untruthful. Because the detective already seemed unreasonably
convinced that the apparent victim should be regarded instead as a
suspect, he would assume that each mendacity was further proof that dark
secrets were being concealed from him.
Tilting his head back slightly, staring cooly yet accusingly at Marty,