Very Bad Men

by Harry Dolan

  “You forgot to mention how well it fits on a bumper sticker,” she said dryly. “You’re not saying anything I haven’t thought myself. ‘A New Beginning’ is the least of it. Look at my website sometime. You’ll see I’m in favor of greater fairness in the tax code, reasonable spending cuts, sensible gun control, responsible health care reform, and sustainable environmental policies. Sometimes when I’m giving a speech, I worry I might float away on all the lofty generalities.”

  “What’s the point, then?” I asked her. “Why would you want to run for office?”

  She looked around as though she meant to make sure no one was close enough to hear us.

  “Someone has to,” she said mildly.

  “Is that supposed to be a serious answer?”

  “Someone’s going to be the next senator from Michigan,” she said. “I think I could do a passable job. There are other people who could do it—but they wouldn’t do better than I would, and some of them would do much worse. If I can prevent someone worse from getting into office, that’s half the battle. Ask John Casterbridge. If you could get him to talk, he’d tell you that what he’s most proud of are the things he’s opposed. From the big ideas that sounded good but would have been disastrous in practice, to the small idiocies that never saw the light of day because he quietly blocked them. I don’t make any grand promises, but if I’m elected I’ll try not to do any harm. And I might manage to do some good. Voters who expect more than that are kidding themselves.”

  Her brown eyes were steady on me till the end. Now they waited for my reaction.

  “That’s not bad,” I said. “You should put that into a speech.”

  She graced me with a smile that grew slowly, like the sun rising over water.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” she said. “And if you repeat it, I’ll have to deny I ever said it.” Her manner changed then. She’d been letting me see something real, but now she put it away and locked it down.

  She said, “I’m glad you could come tonight. I wish we could talk more, but I have to pay attention to my other guests.” She reached reflexively to touch my shoulder, and before I could say anything she moved on.

  When she had gone I looked around and spotted Elizabeth talking to Harlan Spencer. She was in the chair John Casterbridge had occupied only a few minutes before. The senator was nowhere to be seen.

  At the bar I picked up two tumblers of club soda. I held on to one and the other went on the low table beside Elizabeth’s chair. I lingered for a moment, listening to Harlan Spencer tell a story from his youth in Sault Sainte Marie, then bent down beside Elizabeth and told her I was heading out to get some air.

  The sounds of the party faded as I descended to the first floor. I passed one of the caterers in the entryway; she held the door for me as I went out.

  Too warm outside for a jacket. I took mine off and folded it over my arm. Strolled along the curve of the horseshoe driveway. The street was quiet. I walked around to the back of the house, past a fenced-in garden. A broad path of flagstones ended in a ramp that led up to a whitewashed gazebo. In the diffused light from the house I saw someone there, leaning against the railing—John Casterbridge.

  He waited until I set foot on the ramp and then spoke, his voice quiet but commanding.

  “Did they send you down to spy on me?”

  “No one sent me,” I said.

  “Because if that son of mine wants to police my morals, he can damn well come down and do it himself.”

  I stepped into the gazebo through an archway of hanging vines.

  “I’m just out for a walk,” I said.

  “That makes you a sensible man,” said the senator. He looked at the glass I was carrying. “What have you got there?”

  “Club soda.”

  Distaste turned down the corners of his mouth. “Pour it out. I picked this up from one of the caterers.” He moved aside to reveal a bottle of Jameson whiskey standing on the railing. “We’d better drink it before someone takes it away from us. Do you smoke?”

  “I never have.”

  “Just as well,” he said, bringing up a cigar he’d been holding discreetly at his side. “I’ve only got one. I gave up cigarettes thirty years ago, but I never lost the taste for good tobacco.”

  I draped my jacket over the railing and pitched the club soda out onto the lawn. The senator filled my tumbler from his bottle. He brought a shotglass out of his pocket and filled that as well.

  “Money or connections?” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Usually if you get invited to a shindig like this, it means you’ve got either money or connections. So which is it?”

  “Not money,” I said. “I guess it must be connections—to the Ann Arbor police.”

  “You’re here with that policewoman. Whaley.”

  “Waishkey.”

  “To talk to Callie about the lunatic who’s running around killing people. How’s that for slick?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “My daughter-in-law is a smooth operator,” said John Casterbridge. “She doesn’t want to be associated with a murder investigation, but she knows she’ll have to talk to the police at some point. So she’ll do it now, on the weekend, when no one’s paying attention to the news. She’ll do it here, rather than at City Hall, where there might be cameras waiting for her. She’ll get it over with, and by tomorrow it’ll be old news. That’s slick, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Sure.”

  “Probably Beckett’s idea. But Callie ran with it—she learns fast. She’ll do all right for herself. The press likes her.”

  He sipped from his shotglass. “You like her,” he said. “I saw you talking to her.”

  “We discussed politics. She’s an impressive woman.”

  “You want to tread carefully there, son. She’s taken.”

  He delivered the remark gently, almost affectionately, without a hint of anger. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I could read nothing in his eyes.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” I said.

  “It might be good for her to let her hair down and live a little. God knows, we all should live a little. But you need to be careful.”

  “I think—”

  He raised his glass suddenly to silence me. I heard footsteps on the flagstone path.

  “Here comes the vice squad,” he said.

  I recognized the outlines of the man coming up the path. Narrow shoulders, broad hips. Alan Beckett.

  Casterbridge laid his cigar on the railing between us. I shifted a little to hide the bottle of whiskey. Beckett came up the ramp and into the gazebo, shaking his head wearily from side to side. “Senator, we’ve talked about this.”

  Casterbridge said nothing and took a drink of whiskey.

  Beckett reached calmly for the shotglass. The senator let him have it.

  “Who gave this to you?” Beckett asked.

  “Don’t be a bore, Al.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m capable of getting my own drinks.”

  Beckett glanced at me. I swirled the whiskey in my tumbler. He didn’t try to take it.

  Instead, he offered me a courtly nod. “Mr. Loogan, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve searched up and down the block. We found no one hiding in a bush, or behind a tree. No one with a rifle—or a weapon of any kind. We found an insurance salesman walking a schnauzer, but he had no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. In short, all quiet. Nothing to report.”

  I listened to his speech without reacting. He seemed disappointed and turned back to John Casterbridge.

  “Senator, I think it’s time to call it a night. I’ll have your car waiting.”

  “I’ll be along when I’m ready.”

  I thought Beckett might bow, but he only nodded again.

  “Of course.”

  He poured out the dregs of the senator’s shotglass and reached for the cigar on the railing. I snatched it up first.

  “This belongs to me,” I said.


  He smoothed his palm along his scalp and squinted at me. In the end, he decided to let it go, but the decision cost him. I watched him turn away and retreat along the path in the dark.

  I passed the senator his cigar and he settled it between his teeth. He dug in his pocket for a box of matches and fired it up, drawing smoke in a series of short puffs and letting it out in a long stream that twisted in the night air.

  “What was that about?” I asked him.

  He drew on the cigar again before he answered. “The horses have all run off and Al’s in charge of the barn door.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Some people think I should live forever.” He shrugged. “What was that guff about searching in the bushes?”

  “I expressed a concern for your daughter-in-law’s safety. I guess Al didn’t like it.”

  The senator held his cigar up to admire it. I thought he would say something more to me about treading carefully, but he seemed to have forgotten all that.

  He tapped the ash from his cigar and it drifted to the floor of the gazebo.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to Callie,” he said. “Her father’ll see to that. Don’t underestimate Harlan Spencer. The man can’t walk but he still goes to the shooting range. He’s deadly with a Glock, even now. Keeps one in that chair of his, tucked out of sight. No harm’s going to come to Callie Spencer in her father’s house.”

  He took a last draw from the cigar and extinguished the remnant under the sole of his shoe. He came out with another shotglass from somewhere and set it carefully atop the railing. Then he winked at me, reached for the whiskey, and unscrewed the cap.

  “Nice work, holding on to the bottle,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  By the time I saw the senator to his car, the temperature had fallen a few degrees and the stars were out. His driver was a young guy who moved with military efficiency; he held the door and the senator got in with a smooth, practiced grace. I watched the car travel down the drive and away.

  The other guests had departed and the caterers were cleaning up, under the direction of Ruth Spencer. I climbed the stairs to the studio and found Elizabeth talking with Callie Spencer. Jay Casterbridge sat beside his wife, and Harlan Spencer looked on from his wheelchair. Alan Beckett lounged in a club chair nearby. I stopped just inside the room, leaning against the door frame.

  Elizabeth had her long hair braided and pinned up. She wore a string of beads around her neck: black glass smooth as pearls. One of Sarah’s creations. Her black dress was cut modestly in the front, but deeper in the back to reveal her shoulder blades.

  She had brought along sketches of the man in plaid and a copy of his manuscript. Callie Spencer examined the sketches and passed them to her husband.

  “I don’t recognize him,” she said to Elizabeth. “I’ve read the news stories, and my father told me about your theory. You think this man may feel some connection with me.”

  “That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “He may have tried to contact you. Have you received any unusual correspondence lately? A letter or an e-mail that didn’t sound quite right?”

  “People send me odd letters fairly often,” said Callie. “The really strange ones go in a special file, along with the ones that are angry or threatening. Alan can get you those, if you like.” She turned to Beckett and he nodded his agreement.

  “Yes, I’ll want to see them,” Elizabeth said. “But if this man has written to you, I don’t think the letters would be threatening—at least they wouldn’t threaten you. They might express anger over what happened to your father years ago—anger directed at Terry Dawtrey or Henry Kormoran or Sutton Bell.”

  “I don’t recall any like that.”

  “It’s possible that if this man wrote to you, his letters might not contain threats at all. They might sound ordinary. He’s killed two people, and tried to kill two more, but he spoke to Sutton Bell before attacking him, and Bell thought he seemed rational. If you got a letter from him, it might look like any other letter from a constituent. He might write to you about some issue that’s important to him.”

  Callie’s brow furrowed. “I’ve served two terms in the state legislature. I’ve received hundreds of letters from constituents. Thousands. I don’t see how they could help you.”

  “But you keep them, right? You file them away.”

  “Yes. But I can’t have you going through those files. And even if I could, what good would it do? You’ve just said his letter might look ordinary.”

  Elizabeth picked up the manuscript from her lap. “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, what I’m going to tell you is confidential,” Elizabeth said. “It hasn’t been reported in the press. I have to ask you not to repeat it.”

  “All right,” said Callie.

  Elizabeth looked around to Jay Casterbridge and the others, and they all nodded.

  “This is a communication we’ve received from the killer,” she said, holding up the manuscript. “It’s his own account of his crimes. It’s unsigned, and he’s careful not to give anything away about himself—”

  Callie interrupted. “But you think there’s something in there that could lead you to him.”

  “It’s not what’s in here,” Elizabeth said. “It’s what’s missing.”

  “What do you mean? What’s missing?”

  “Adverbs.”

  I’D READ THROUGH the man in plaid’s manifesto five or six times, but it was Sarah who made the discovery about the adverbs. Elizabeth and I heard about it that morning.

  Sunday morning at the Waishkey house means sleeping late. It means an excessively large breakfast. Sarah does most of the cooking, but once in a while I manage something simple. Scrambled eggs or French toast. Or, in this case, pancakes.

  I had butter melting in a skillet, and sausage links in a separate pan. Sarah sat at the table, slicing bits of apple into the pancake batter. Elizabeth was telling us about the man in plaid, who had robbed a pharmacy with a rifle the night before.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Sarah said.

  “That’s what happened,” said Elizabeth.

  “It’s a violation of the basic principles.”

  “Basic principles?”

  “The basic principles for robbing a store,” Sarah said. “We talked about this once. You don’t use a rifle, you use a handgun, because you can hide it until you need it. You keep the element of surprise. When you’re ready, you pull out the gun and wave it in the cashier’s face.”

  “I don’t remember this conversation,” Elizabeth said.

  “You want him frightened, and you don’t want to give him time to think. You use simple commands: Open the register. Give me the cash. You want an edge in your voice. If you sound calm, he might not take you seriously.”

  Elizabeth tilted her head. “When did we talk about this, exactly?”

  “Middle school,” Sarah said. “You were helping me write an essay. It was supposed to be ‘How to Make a Pie,’ but we strayed a little from the topic.” She finished slicing the apple and passed me the bowl of batter. “When he gives you the money, you need a free hand to take it. That’s another reason to use a handgun instead of a rifle.”

  “Middle school?”

  “Seventh-grade English class. I got a B. I could have had an A, if only you knew how to make a pie. So why would this guy use a rifle? Is it because he’s crazy?”

  I poured some batter into the skillet. Elizabeth was leaning against the counter beside me.

  “I’m not sure it makes sense to call him crazy,” she said. “There’s a logic to what he does. He used a rifle at Whiteleaf Cemetery because it was the only thing that would serve if he wanted to kill Terry Dawtrey from a distance. When he needed to hold up a pharmacy, he used the rifle again, because he already had it. Maybe a handgun would have been better, but the rifle worked well enough.”

  The sausage sizzled in the pan and I turned down the heat. Elizabeth
continued. “Holding up a pharmacy isn’t the same as holding up a convenience store. You can’t expect to get in and out as fast. Yelling at a pharmacist, waving a gun in her face—that’s not going to help. You want to attract as little attention as possible.

  “The man in plaid put his rifle in a shopping cart and rolled it through the store without anyone noticing. He asked for two things: an antibiotic called Keflex and a painkiller called Imitrex, which is used to treat headaches. The pharmacist gave him both and he put the rifle back in the cart and rolled it out again. No one got a look at his car. There were video cameras in the store, but they shot him from above, and the baseball cap he wore concealed his face.

  “If he’s crazy, it doesn’t seem to be doing him any harm. It’s not going to help me catch him. I don’t know what will.”

  “You’ll catch him,” Sarah said. “He’ll give himself away. He already has. It’s in his manuscript.”

  “When did you read his manuscript?” Elizabeth asked, frowning.

  Sarah shrugged. “The other day. You must have left a copy lying around.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Elizabeth said, looking at me. I focused on the work at hand, flipping the pancake in the skillet.

  “Does it matter?” asked Sarah.

  “Technically, it does,” Elizabeth said. “But we’ll let that pass. I didn’t find anything in his manuscript that hints at his identity. What did you see that gives him away?”

  “It’s not what I saw. It’s what I didn’t see.”