In the morning, she decided to follow up on something Loogan had told her about: Michael Beccanti’s visit to the offices of Gray Streets. She drove to the Gray Streets building, rode the elevator up, tapped on the pebbled glass of the door. Sandy Vogel let her in. Elizabeth thought she seemed subdued. She leaned against a filing cabinet with her arms crossed, a slender brown-haired woman in her early forties, dressed crisply in a matching skirt and jacket.
“He was here,” she said when Elizabeth asked her about Beccanti. “I came in to use the copier Saturday night, around eight. The lights were on. The door to Tom’s office was open. Beccanti was in there.”
“You recognized him?” Elizabeth asked her.
“Yes. He used to visit Tom. I didn’t remember his name, but he came out and introduced himself. I think he realized he had startled me. He served time in prison, you know.”
“I know.”
“He told me David Loogan had hired him to do editorial work. I didn’t know anything about it. He left quickly after that. It seemed a little strange.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Just the brain trust.”
“Pardon?”
“Things have changed here, with Tom gone,” Sandy Vogel explained. “David Loogan was supposed to take over, but there doesn’t seem much chance of that now, does there? In the meantime, there’s still a magazine to run. Most of the work has fallen to me, so far, but I’m not who’s in charge. That would be the brain trust. Laura Kristoll, Bridget Shellcross, Nathan Hideaway, Casimir Hifflyn. Officially, they’re a board of directors, though we never had a board when Tom was alive. I’m supposed to keep them informed about what goes on here.”
“So you told them Beccanti was here Saturday.”
“I sent them an e-mail that night.”
“Did you get any response?”
“Nathan Hideaway sent a reply Monday. He said it was fine, Loogan could hire who he liked.”
“And when you found out Beccanti had been stabbed?”
Sandy Vogel frowned. “I suppose I should have called you, though I don’t see what his being here had to do with his death. Except in the obvious sense.”
“What sense would that be?”
“David Loogan hired him to work here, and then David Loogan stabbed him. From what I’ve read in the papers, you don’t need me to work that out.” The woman’s frown deepened. “The truth is, I don’t care much for drama, or for mysteries. I like the stories we publish as much as anybody, but as for actual murders, real people dying—I’d like to stay as far away from that as I can. So you’ll forgive me for not rushing to the phone when Michael Beccanti died.”
Later in the morning, Elizabeth drove to Bridget Shellcross’s townhouse. She found herself less welcome than on her previous visit.
It started with Rachel Kent, who was doing stretches on the sidewalk in front of the house. She wore spandex and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She had obviously just come from a run.
“Is Bridget in?” Elizabeth asked her.
“She’s in. She’s not going to want to talk to you.”
“Why not?”
“Not for me to say.”
Elizabeth went past her and up the steps and rang the bell. Bridget Shellcross let her into the foyer, but invited her no farther.
“I hope this isn’t a bad time,” Elizabeth said, trying to get a read on the woman’s mood. “I’m here about Michael Beccanti.”
“Of course,” said Bridget tonelessly.
“Did you know him?”
Bridget stood with her hands on her hips and her feet apart on the tiles of the foyer. The light from the windows cast her diminutive shadow across the floor.
“I’m surprised you would come around here,” she said. “I’ve seen the news. Beccanti was stabbed in David Loogan’s living room, and now Loogan’s disappeared. You don’t need to look for suspects. You already have one.”
“We still need to talk to people who might have known Mr. Beccanti,” Elizabeth said. “It’s routine. Did you ever meet him?”
“I wish I was in a position to help you,” said Bridget, her tone suddenly grave.
“He was a friend of Tom Kristoll. You might have met him through Tom.”
“I wish I had some vital piece of information, something that could lead you straight to Michael Beccanti’s killer,” Bridget said. “Because then I would have the pleasure of withholding it from you.”
Her pixie hair seemed to bristle in the sunlight. “I’ve lived in this city for more than half my life,” she said. “I have friends here. One of them is a hostess at a restaurant downtown. She tells me that someone from the police came by with a picture of me and a picture of Tom, asking if we’d been seen together.”
Her gaze was piercing. Elizabeth made herself meet it. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t me.”
“No. She said it was a man. She didn’t describe him, but when I imagine him he’s stout, slightly greasy, with a yellow shirt collar. He smells of cigar smoke. And there are others like him, scurrying around in cheap hotels, flashing my picture at desk clerks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I suppose you found out that Tom and I dated in college, and that gave you license to root around a little, see what you could dig up,” Bridget said. “Well, so it goes. But now, if you want to learn something about Michael Beccanti, I suggest you find a good picture of him and start making the rounds. You’ll get nothing from me.”
Her voice fell on the last words and then she turned and vanished through a doorway, leaving Elizabeth alone.
Outside, Rachel Kent was still stretching. An ornamental fence ran between the sidewalk and the house, and the fence had a metal rail along the top. Rachel had a leg up on the rail like a ballet dancer. She nodded as Elizabeth walked by.
“I told you she wouldn’t want to talk to you.”
In the early afternoon, Elizabeth called on Casimir Hifflyn. He invited her into his workroom, a large space, sparely furnished. He had a bookcase and a divan, a computer with a flat-panel monitor set up on an antique writing table, and behind that a pair of French windows looking out on the terraced lawn.
“Rex Chatterjee warned me about talking to you,” he said lightly.
“Is that right?” said Elizabeth.
“He and Laura sat me down last night. Rex mistrusts the Ann Arbor police. I suppose that’s a common affliction among lawyers. He seems to think I’m in danger of being framed. You’ve got four murders to account for. If I’m not careful, you’ll have me running around at night stabbing people, and shooting them, and throwing them out of windows. And, I suppose, clobbering them with liquor bottles. That would make me rather eclectic.”
“It would,” said Elizabeth.
“But I don’t mind answering your question about Michael Beccanti,” Hifflyn said. “I got the e-mail about him from the Vogel woman. I glanced at it and deleted it. That’s what I tend to do with most of her e-mails. If I did much more I’d never get anything done. When someone renews their subscription to Gray Streets, Sandy Vogel sends me an e-mail.”
“Did you know Beccanti?” Elizabeth asked.
Hifflyn rubbed his bearded chin. “I’ve been trying to remember if we were ever introduced. I don’t think so. But I remember someone pointing him out to me at a party once. ‘Don’t look now, but there’s Tom’s burglar’—something along those lines. Tom had some unusual friends.”
“What about Sean Wrentmore? Did you ever meet him?”
“Yes. He cornered me at one of Tom’s barbecues, years ago. Gave me a lengthy synopsis of the novel he was working on. I gather it’s the one Tom edited, the one Wrentmore got killed over. A great convoluted thing. I believe he was hoping I’d offer to read it.”
“I take it you didn’t.”
“I like to be generous with my time, but not that generous.” Hifflyn glanced at his writing table and smiled apologetically. “In fact, I’m rather pressed at the moment. Need to put more words on more pages. I’m sorry
to rush you out. I wish there were more I could tell you.”
“That’s fine.”
“I have to keep up a certain pace, or I’d never get through a book,” Hifflyn said as he led her to the front door. “Then I’d be in trouble. Nate Hideaway knocks out a novel every couple years, and his publisher is happy. Same with Bridget. But if I don’t manage a book a year, my agent looks at me like I kicked his puppy.”
Nathan Hideaway told Elizabeth he wanted to get out into the air. He took her along a path behind his cottage that led down to a wooden dock on the shore of the pond. They watched a trio of ducks glide slowly across the surface of the water.
“I tried to have a conversation once with Michael Beccanti,” Hideaway said. “This was last year, and if memory serves, he had just been released from prison. I did a reading at a bookstore downtown, and Tom showed up, Beccanti with him. They stayed afterward and Tom made introductions. The three of us went for a drink. I was thinking then of doing a book about a burglar, and I thought I might get some insight into the character. What does it feel like to climb through someone’s window, to know you could be caught at any moment? What would motivate someone to do that, again and again the way Beccanti had? I’m sure he could have told some stories. But I never got anything out of him.”
Hideaway fell silent and a leaf twisted through the autumn air and landed on the dock at his feet.
“Were you surprised when Sandy Vogel told you that he had been in Tom’s office?” Elizabeth asked. “That Loogan had hired him to work on Gray Streets?”
“It was unexpected, certainly. But I knew if we were going to put David Loogan in charge of the magazine, we would have to give him some latitude. Beccanti wrote for Gray Streets; maybe he had some talent as an editor that I was unaware of.”
“Suppose I told you Michael Beccanti didn’t go to Tom’s office to do editorial work,” Elizabeth said. “Suppose I told you he went there to snoop around, hoping to find something out about Tom’s death?”
“Is that true?”
“That’s my understanding. He and Loogan were working together, conducting their own investigation.”
Hideaway looked down at the water. “That should surprise me, but it doesn’t. Last week, when we offered Mr. Loogan the Gray Streets job, I spoke to him in private. He suggested I should hire him to investigate Tom’s death. I didn’t take the idea seriously. Apparently he did.”
He walked out to the end of the dock and then turned back. “And now Beccanti’s dead. The news reports take it for granted that Loogan stabbed him. What do you suppose happened? Did the two of them have a falling-out?”
“Not according to Loogan,” Elizabeth said.
“You’ve talked to him? I thought he was missing.”
“He is. We’ve been in touch by phone. He denies stabbing Beccanti, says someone else did it. Presumably the same person who killed Tom.”
“Remarkable,” said Hideaway. “Do you believe him?”
“It’s possible he’s telling the truth. What do you think?”
Hideaway scuffed his boot along a plank of the dock. “I think David Loogan is an unusual man. But Tom saw fit to trust him, so it doesn’t seem right to think ill of him. Last week I got an uneasy feeling about him, but it was nothing solid. And it still isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth said.
“I wonder if any of us really know who David Loogan is,” Hideaway said thoughtfully. “Laura doesn’t know anything about his past. Tom didn’t seem to care. And I suppose it could be a coincidence.”
“What could be a coincidence?”
“His name,” said Hideaway. “I’ve done a very unscientific search—in the Detroit phone book. There are almost a million people living in Detroit, and none of them are named Loogan. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe there are Loogans in California, maybe Texas is rife with them. Or maybe there are no Loogans in the United States, in North America, except for our David.”
A breeze came over the water and ruffled Hideaway’s white hair. “The thing is,” he said, “I’ve heard the name Loogan before. Only it’s not a name. It’s a piece of slang. Raymond Chandler used it in The Big Sleep. He probably invented it; he was known for inventing his own slang. Philip Marlowe used it, talking to Vivian Sternwood. A ‘loogan’ is a gunman, someone on the wrong side of the law.”
When Elizabeth left Hideaway’s cottage, she drove north and west, following along the course of the Huron River. Her phone rang as she crested a hill. It was Carter Shan.
“Where are you?” he asked her.
“About three minutes away from Laura Kristoll’s house,” she said.
“We’re not supposed to question Laura Kristoll.”
“I thought I’d risk it. I’ll be gentle.”
“You should get back here fast,” he said. “Something’s happened.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The matter of David Loogan has taken an interesting turn.”
“Have you found him?”
“No, but you should come in. You’ll want to hear this.”
Chapter 28
ELIZABETH WAS THE LAST TO ARRIVE FOR THE BRIEFING. CARTER SHAN met her at the door of the chief’s office; Harvey Mitchum and Ron Wintergreen were already inside. Owen McCaleb was leaning against his desk, talking quietly with an older man in a rumpled suit.
Shan passed Elizabeth a photograph as she came through the door—a mug shot of a man she recognized as a younger David Loogan. In the photo, Loogan’s hair was longer and curlier. He had a close-trimmed beard. He wore the expression of a man who has lost patience—the victim of a practical joke that has gone on too long. He held a small placard under his chin: a string of numbers and a name. The name was Darrell Malone.
Elizabeth was still studying the photo when the briefing got under way. She half listened as McCaleb introduced the man in the rumpled suit. She caught the man’s name—Roy Denham—and that he was a detective, retired, from a city called Nossos in upstate New York.
She put the photo aside and focused on Denham as he began to tell his story. He had weary eyes and the rough voice of a longtime smoker, but he spoke with assurance, without consulting any notes.
He said, “Darrell Malone—the man who calls himself David Loogan—was indicted nine years ago on a charge of second-degree murder. The charge stemmed from an incident that took place on a night in June, on the top level of a parking garage in the center of Nossos. Patrolmen responded to a 911 call placed from one of the garage’s emergency phones. They arrived on the scene to find a man dead from multiple stab wounds, a woman seriously injured, and Darrell Malone holding the knife.
“The dead man turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old named Jimmy Wade Peltier. He had a long list of prior arrests, from assault to auto theft, and had been released from prison only six weeks earlier. The injured woman was a dental hygienist named Charlotte Rittenour, a pretty girl, blond, twenty-eight years old.
“We got the story out of Malone. He was very cooperative. He had a minor injury, a superficial cut to his arm, and after that had been treated he was brought to the station house and my partner and I questioned him. He waived his right to counsel; he was eager to talk.
“It turned out he and the girl had been on a date. Dinner and a movie, and then they had gone up to the top of the parking garage to look at the stars. Jimmy Peltier caught them up there and tried to steal their car. The problem was, their car—both their cars—were parked on a different level of the garage. They were standing next to a car when Peltier approached them, but the car wasn’t theirs. They tried to explain that to him, but it only made him more agitated. Later, when we tested his blood, it came back positive for both alcohol and methamphetamine.
“Peltier had a knife. He had grabbed hold of the girl’s wrist. Malone tried to reach for the knife, but Peltier slashed him. At that moment the girl, Charlotte, managed to struggle free. She ran toward the elevator, and Peltier followed her, caught hold of her hair, put
the knife to her neck. Malone chased after them, but before he could do anything, he watched Peltier draw the blade across the girl’s throat and push her to the ground.
“There was a struggle after that, and Malone managed to get the knife away from Peltier. The coroner found seventeen separate wounds on Peltier’s body. From the position of the wounds, it was clear that some of them had been delivered after the man was down. Malone never tried to deny it. He told us he had left Peltier bleeding on the ground, had gone to call 911—he found an emergency phone on the next level down—and when he came back he found Peltier moving, so he stabbed him some more.
“The girl, Charlotte Rittenour, survived. Her wounds, though serious, weren’t as bad as they first appeared. She had tucked her chin down toward her chest as Peltier slashed her with the knife, so most of the damage was to her chin and her cheek. She needed extensive surgery, and her face was never the same, but when she had recovered enough to talk to us, she confirmed Malone’s version of events. She was grateful for what he’d done.
“Malone always maintained that he had been defending her, and himself. He said he had done what any reasonable man would have done, and there were plenty of people who agreed with him. My partner and I were tempted to help him out with his story, but there are limits to what you can do, no matter how much sympathy you feel for a man. And there was the physical evidence, the seventeen wounds. The coroner said that if it was self-defense, it was the most thorough case of self-defense he had ever seen.
“The county prosecutor had to make a decision—and he had to think about Jimmy Peltier too. Peltier was a louse, but he had a mother and a father, and no matter what crimes he had committed, on that night or before, he deserved some consideration. No jury had sentenced him to death; Darrell Malone had made that decision on his own. The prosecutor decided to charge Malone with second-degree murder, thinking he would plead to manslaughter and serve minimal jail time.
“But Malone wouldn’t plead, and the case was scheduled for trial. In the meantime, Malone was a free man; a sympathetic judge had granted him bail. Malone had his own business. He was trained as a structural engineer, and he worked as a consultant on building sites. He earned good money and had put a lot of it away. Some of it he paid to his lawyer, and some he took with him when he vanished.
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