Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  The non-mystery books were eclectic: science fiction by Robert Hein lein, an anthology of Mark Twain, the plays of Edmond Rostand.

  Loogan opened one of Nathan Hideaway’s novels and got a hint of Wrentmore’s personality. There were passages underlined, notes in the margins. Wrentmore would bracket off sections of dialogue and mark them stilted. He would circle a paragraph and write ugh! or god-awful.

  On the last page of one of Bridget Shellcross’s books—Roll Over, featuring art dealer Linda Lorenger and her golden retriever—Wrentmore had provided a two-sentence review: Shoot the dog. Run off with Linda.

  One of Casimir Hifflyn’s Kendel novels carried a series of blurbs on the opening pages. A Boston Globe reviewer had written: Grabs you by the collar and doesn’t let go. Wrentmore had lined through this and replaced it with: Punches you in the face and throws you off a moving train.

  There were similar comments in other books. Loogan sampled more of them, but stopped when he realized he was procrastinating. He had gotten what he came for—a sense of Sean Wrentmore. He wasn’t likely to learn much more by snooping through the man’s books.

  He took a last look around and then went out through the front door, the way he had come, into the cool gray of an October afternoon. He turned the key to secure the dead bolt, stripped off the plastic gloves he had been wearing so as not to leave his prints behind. He spotted movement on the sidewalk, a woman coming toward him—young, African-American, wearing what looked like nursing scrubs. She had a purse slung over her shoulder; she might have just come home from work.

  Loogan slipped the gloves in the pocket of his jacket, hoped she wouldn’t notice. He smiled sheepishly and waved.

  She halted a few feet from him, looking uncertain. “Are you a friend of Sean’s?”

  “I’m his cousin,” said Loogan. “Ted Carmady.”

  “Delia Ross.” She nodded a greeting and closed the distance between them. “I live next door.”

  “I came up from Dayton on business,” Loogan said, “and stopped for a visit. But Sean’s not home.” Wrentmore’s bio note in Gray Streets said he had grown up in Dayton.

  “I haven’t seen him for a while,” said Delia Ross. “I kind of wonder where he’s gone to.”

  “We haven’t heard from him in the last month or so,” Loogan said. “Not so long, really, but his mother worries. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in.” She had seen him come out, Loogan thought. No sense denying it.

  “Lucky you had a key,” she said.

  He held it up for her. “Sean keeps a spare outside, hidden under a rock.” With a wink, he added, “I probably shouldn’t tell.”

  That elicited a tentative smile. “His secret’s safe,” she said.

  “Do you know Sean well?” he asked her.

  “I wonder if anybody does,” she said.

  “He was always a loner, growing up. Still lives alone, from the look of things in there,” Loogan added, nodding toward the door. “Keeps the place neat, though. I wonder if he has a cleaning service come in.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone,” she said. “I think he’s kind of a neatnik.”

  Loogan put some mischief into his voice. “Any girlfriends? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s the first thing his mother’ll want to know when I see her.”

  “I couldn’t say for sure. But none that I’ve seen.”

  “He’s still writing, I suppose.”

  “Yes. That I can vouch for.”

  “I’ve read some of his stories,” Loogan said. “They’re pretty wild. Violent. But I guess that’s what people want to read.”

  “Do you know about his novel?”

  A short pause. “I know he talked about writing one. Is it finished?”

  “Yes. He’s still polishing it. But he let me read it.”

  Loogan smiled. “He must like you.”

  “I had to ask him three or four times before he let me see it,” she said. “He’s shy. I don’t know what he’d do if it ever got published. If it was a success. I don’t know how he’d manage being famous.”

  “Is it any good?” Loogan asked. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s wonderful, but it’s hard to describe,” she said. “The main character is an artist. He’s dropped out of school and he’s back in the town where he grew up. He falls in love with a woman who writes children’s books. But there’s also a pickpocket, and the pickpocket is mixed up with a corrupt cop. The cop is blackmailing him—threatening to expose a crime he committed. Only he didn’t really commit it—you find that out in the end.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, recalling. “Anyway, the artist and the pickpocket become friends, and together they steal the children’s writer’s manuscript so the artist can illustrate it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but in the book it makes sense. There’s also a lot of other stuff. The artist’s father has just died, and you find out he was an alcoholic, and there are all these scenes that flash back to the artist’s childhood and when he was a teenager. And there’s a sweet love story, about the artist and his high school crush, and they never quite get together.”

  “It sounds complicated,” Loogan said.

  “It is. The manuscript is twelve hundred pages long.”

  “Wow.”

  “And there’s some violence in it, but you wouldn’t call it a crime novel. I don’t know how you’d categorize it. I think that’s part of the problem. Sean showed me a rejection letter from an agent. She said she loved the writing, but she wouldn’t know how to sell it.”

  “Even so, it sounds like an intriguing book,” Loogan said. “What’s the title?”

  “Liars and something,” said Delia Ross. “Let me think. . . . Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men.”

  “I’d like to read it. Do you still have the manuscript?”

  “I’ve got it on disc.” She hesitated. “The thing is, Sean made me promise not to let anyone else see it. I wouldn’t feel right about giving it to you without his permission.”

  “I can understand that. I wouldn’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.” Loogan glanced at his watch. “Well, I guess I’ll come back another time. Be nice if I knew where to look for him. Do you know if he’s working these days? At a day job, I mean. He must do something to support his writing habit.”

  “He told me he sells things on the Internet,” she said. “Used books, stuff like that. Must do all right with it. I always suspected he was living on a trust fund or something—that his family was secretly wealthy.”

  “Not us,” Loogan said. Though for all he knew it might have been true.

  She went quiet and took a step back as if she would leave, then turned her head to stare at the door of Sean Wrentmore’s condo.

  Loogan said, “Is something on your mind?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It’s just—well, Sean is kind of an odd character. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You say you haven’t heard from him in a month,” she said, “and I think it’s been almost that long since I’ve seen him. Do you think he’s traveling?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If he’s on vacation, he forgot to stop delivery on his mail. His box filled up and the other day I emptied it out. I’ve got quite a pile of it on my dining-room table.”

  “It’s nice of you to keep it for him.”

  “I don’t want to overreact, but . . . you don’t think something happened to him, do you?”

  Loogan raised his eyebrows. “Well, I wouldn’t want to overreact either.”

  “I don’t want to be paranoid. On the other hand—I don’t know if you’ve noticed this about him, but Sean is kind of a paranoid man.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Only I’m not sure what he’s paranoid about.” She brought her purse off her shoulder, reached into it, and took out a ring of keys. She held one of them up.

  “Would you care to guess what this opens?”

  Loogan smiled an
d shrugged. “What?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s for a padlock,” she said. “Sean gave it to me a few months ago, after we had become friendly. He gave me the number of a storage unit too, and the address—one of those self-storage places you see along the highway. He said if anything ever happened to him, I should go there and have a look, and I’d know what to do.”

  “That’s . . . cryptic,” Loogan said. “You didn’t ask him to explain?”

  “Of course I did. He wouldn’t. Like I said, he’s a character.”

  “You were never tempted to go and see what was there?”

  “I was tempted, once or twice,” she said. “It didn’t seem right. It’s silly, but I thought that somehow he’d know, and he’d take it as a betrayal. Then other times I thought, Maybe there is no storage unit. Maybe it’s his idea of a joke.”

  Loogan tilted his head. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Delia Ross looked doubtful. “Do you think we should?”

  “I don’t see what harm it could do.”

  She drove her own car and Loogan followed. They got onto the interstate but got off again after only three or four miles. They drove past a lumber-yard and a printing plant, and there was the storage place, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The gate stood open. The buildings were long blocks of concrete with gravel lanes running in between.

  The key fit the padlock on unit 401. Delia Ross stood back and let Loogan raise the door. Two feet up and it stuck in the track, and he lowered it and hauled it up again, and when it finally ran up all the way there was a moment absolutely bereft of drama.

  “You know, I half expected to find a body,” Delia said.

  There was an old china cabinet with broken glass in the door. Several wooden straight-back chairs. A number of cardboard boxes labeled BOOKS.

  The boxes were closest to the door. Loogan opened one of them and found that “books” was a euphemism. There were girlie magazines inside: copies of Playboy and Penthouse, five years out of date. Delia stood looking over his shoulder but made no comment. He tried another box and was rewarded with actual books. Philosophy textbooks—Introduction to Ethics; A Theory of Justice.

  “Those are mine,” she said. “I gave them to Sean a while back, thinking he might be able to sell them. I guess he didn’t.”

  “You were a philosophy student?” Loogan said.

  “Still am,” she said. “Medical ethics. I defend my dissertation next month, and then with any luck I’ll get a teaching job. And then it’s good-bye nursing.”

  Loogan looked in each of the boxes, hauling them out onto the gravel in order to get at the ones farther in. There was another box of magazines, but the rest were books, and uninteresting books at that. Textbooks and paperback novels and book club editions. Hardly worth storing.

  “Well, I’m here,” Delia said, as Loogan moved the last of the boxes back inside. “And I’ve had a look around. But I haven’t a clue about what to do.”

  “Maybe it was a joke all along. I could believe that.”

  “I could believe it too,” she said. “But did you notice the space over here?”

  Loogan had noticed it. In the front of the unit, on the far right, there was an empty space on the floor about two feet square.

  “What do you make of it?” he said.

  “Looks like there was something here once. Another box, probably.” She squatted down. “You can almost see an outline in the dust.”

  She stood up again. “Maybe there was something here—the thing I was supposed to come here and see. Maybe Sean took it away.”

  It was possible, Loogan thought. Or maybe someone else took it away.

  “Well, if he did,” Loogan said, “he’ll have some explaining to do next time I talk to him. That is, unless you’d rather I didn’t mention this to him. Coming here, I mean.”

  She laughed. “No, I guess you can tell him. I think I’m going to ask him myself. Find out what he had in mind.” Her expression grew serious. “He’ll turn up, right? He’s just gone off somewhere. You don’t think anything happened to him.”

  “He’ll turn up eventually,” Loogan said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Chapter 18

  ON SATURDAY EVENING THE LOCAL NEWS HAD A THIRTY-SECOND UPDATE on the apparent suicide of Adrian Tully. There was footage of the empty cornfield and the narrow lane where Tully’s car had been found. Footage of Tully’s parents in their son’s apartment—Tully’s father expressing the family’s grief, his mother holding up a framed portrait of her son.

  David Loogan watched it on a small TV in the kitchen of his rented house. He already knew about Tully’s death. He had gone to visit Laura Kristoll that morning, to tell her he would accept the job as editor of Gray Streets and to ask her for keys to Tom’s office. While he was with her she received a call from Tully’s parents, who asked her to pass the news along to their son’s friends. She hung up the phone and sank into a chair and was dull-eyed and quiet for a long time. Eventually Loogan got the bare details from her: Adrian had shot himself sometime during the night. She would rather not talk about it. Did he mind terribly? She thought she would like to lie down.

  He let himself out of the house and drove to a hardware store and had duplicates made of the keys. Then he drove to Saline, to the trailer park where Michael Beccanti’s girlfriend lived. Beccanti wasn’t there and his girlfriend, Karen, regarded Loogan darkly. But she let him leave the duplicate keys and he went on from there to Sean Wrentmore’s condo.

  The local news ended at seven o’clock and Loogan switched off the TV and cleared away the remnants of his dinner—takeout Chinese. He spent some time scrubbing dishes, and then built a fire in the fireplace and settled in with a copy of Gray Streets. He was reading one of Sean Wrentmore’s stories, about a trio of bank robbers who botch their getaway and hole up in a convenience store with an exotically beautiful Latina clerk and four customers as hostages. The police surround the store and there’s a standoff—

  Loogan heard a knock on his door. He put down the magazine, padded through the kitchen, turned on the porch light. Michael Beccanti grinned at him through the small square of glass in the door.

  He worked the locks and let Beccanti in.

  “Are you on your way to the office?” Loogan said.

  “I’ve already been there,” said Beccanti.

  “How did it go?”

  Beccanti shrugged off his overcoat. Underneath he looked academic: slacks, dress shirt, houndstooth jacket. He said, “David, your manners. I’ve spent hours ransacking an office for you. You could at least invite me to sit.”

  Loogan drew out a chair for him at the table. He brought him a beer in a longneck bottle and microwaved the leftover Chinese food.

  When half the beer and most of the lo mein noodles were gone, Beccanti said, “No one’s called here then?”

  “No,” said Loogan. “What do you mean?”

  “I had some minor trouble at the office,” Beccanti said, and when Loogan made a sour face, he added: “No need to panic. I didn’t expect to see anyone there on a Saturday, but the secretary came in to use the photocopier.”

  “Maybe you should have gone in later,” Loogan said. “That’s what I expected you to do.”

  “Going later would have carried its own risks. If I had the lights on at two in the morning, someone might have wondered why—especially in that building, given what happened to Tom. I would’ve had a harder time explaining my presence there. As it was, I stuck close to the truth. I didn’t have much choice, since I’d been to the office before and I had to assume the secretary might recognize me. I gave her my real name and told her I was doing some work for you—reading manuscripts.”

  “The interns usually do that.”

  “Well, you’re in charge now, and you have your own way of doing things,” Beccanti said. “I didn’t let on that I had keys. I told her you’d been there earlier to let me in. I could tell she wasn’t convinced. I advised her to call you if she had questions
—that’s why I asked if anyone had called. I told her I was finished for the night anyway and got out of there. I think she was relieved.”

  Beccanti paused, turning the beer bottle in a slow circle on the table. “I didn’t take anything out with me,” he said. “There was nothing to take. If Tom had any more secret hiding places in his office, it’s beyond me to find them. I checked everywhere I could think of, riffled the pages of every book on his shelves. Nothing.”

  Beccanti took a drink and put the bottle down. “You wanted me to look for some connection to Sean Wrentmore, and I went in there with the half-baked idea that I might find he’d been erased—deleted from the files of Gray Streets. But there’s a folder on him, just like all the other authors. Manuscripts for each of the stories he wrote for the magazine, some routine correspondence. I didn’t bring it. You can go in and read it for yourself. I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

  “I wouldn’t expect the entire file to be gone,” Loogan said. “But if something had been removed from the file, we’d really have no way of knowing.”

  “True enough,” Beccanti said. “In any case, Wrentmore’s still on the Web site too. I checked it on Tom’s computer while I was there. His stories are still up, and his biography. There’s no picture, but there might never have been one.”

  “I don’t need a picture,” Loogan said. “I found one in his desk. It was a match. Sean Wrentmore was the man Tom and I buried.” He filled Beccanti in on the time he had spent at Wrentmore’s condo, his conversation with Wrentmore’s neighbor Delia Ross. The twelve-hundred-page novel Delia had described—Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men. Their trip to Wrentmore’s storage unit, and the mysterious empty space where a box might have been.

  “What do you think was in the box?” Beccanti asked.

  “Who knows?” Loogan paced between the table and the kitchen counter. “Maybe it was just a copy of Wrentmore’s novel, and he wanted Delia Ross to try to get it published if something happened to him.”

  “You said she read it. Doesn’t that mean she already had a copy?”