Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  “Yes.”

  He caught something in her tone. “You already knew that,” he said. “You’re watching her. You’ve got her under surveillance.”

  Elizabeth laid her palm on his shoulder. “David, come in and we’ll sit down.”

  “I don’t want to intrude on your Sunday afternoon.”

  “You should sit. You don’t look well.”

  As a concession to her sensibilities, Loogan leaned against the white railing of the porch. The November sun shone blindingly bright on the railing. It shone even under the roof of the porch, where by rights there should have been shade.

  “How long have you been watching her?” he asked.

  Elizabeth stepped back from him. She tossed the white towel over the white shoulder of her shirt. “We weren’t watching her. We were watching the Gray Streets building. The thing is, we had the national media in town for a while. Nathan Hideaway made a good story. There were photographers following Bridget Shellcross, and Laura too, and someone got the bright idea to break into Tom Kristoll’s office at Gray Streets. He was trying to get pictures to sell to the tabloids—pictures of the scene of one of Hideaway’s crimes.

  “So we kept an eye on the building after that. A patrolman drove by last night and saw Laura walking out the lobby door. You were with her. He followed you.”

  Loogan narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  “The department has an interest in Laura Kristoll,” Elizabeth said with a shrug. “There are people who resent her for withholding information about Sean Wrentmore’s death. There are people who welcomed the news that she took you home with her last night. They saw it as a sign that she’s resuming her sordid affair with her late husband’s friend. It casts her in a bad light. We had a meeting about it this morning.”

  “Really? Is that enough to warrant a meeting?”

  “It was a short meeting,” Elizabeth said. “I told them they were mistaken. They don’t understand your motives. You still think you’re in a story in Gray Streets. If you spent the night at the Kristoll house, you were there to play detective.”

  Loogan looked down at the railing of the porch. It seemed to glow less intensely. He could see cracks and chips in the paint.

  He said, “Is it time for you to remind me that this isn’t a story in Gray Streets?”

  “It’s never done any good before.”

  He ran his thumb along the rough surface of the paint.

  “You remember what Hideaway said about Adrian Tully,” he said. “That his death was just what it seemed—he shot himself. You don’t believe that, do you?”

  She came a step closer to him. “You don’t believe it, obviously.”

  “Laura killed him,” he said. “I know how she did it. Everything hinges on the second bullet. She convinced Tully to meet her out there, by that field, and she got into his car, and she shot him once in the head. And the second shot—that was to get gunshot residue on his hand. But you never found the second bullet.”

  “No.”

  “It didn’t end up in the field,” Loogan said. “Laura took it with her when she left. That’s what I realized last night. There’s a dartboard hanging on the wall of her garage, a thick one made of cork set in a metal shell. She took it with her when she drove out to meet Tully, and after she shot him she set the dartboard up by the side of the road. She would have had to prop it on something—something like a painter’s easel. There’s one of those in the garage too. Then she got back in Tully’s car and put the gun in his hand and fired the second shot through the open passenger window at the dartboard. The metal backing stopped the bullet and the cork held it and she took everything with her when she drove away. She got rid of the bullet afterward.”

  Elizabeth leaned against the railing beside him. She took the towel off her shoulder and busied herself folding it into a square.

  She said, “Do you eat chicken, David?”

  Time passed as he tried to make sense of the question. The sunlight seemed less intense, but the glass beads still glittered at her throat.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Some people won’t,” she told him. “But you don’t strike me as one of those. We’re having chicken for dinner. Sarah made it. She does most of the cooking around here. She seasoned it with lemon and pepper, I think. Baked it in a casserole with broccoli and rice. I’m sure there’s enough for three.”

  David Loogan pushed himself up from the railing. He no longer felt light-headed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come to your house. I shouldn’t have interrupted your meal.”

  She rose with him. “You’re not interrupting. We haven’t even started on the salad. You should come in and eat something, and we’ll talk. We can talk about anything you like. Even about Adrian Tully, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s why I came here,” he said.

  “I think you know better.”

  He looked at her soberly. “I’m not making this up, if that’s what you think. It’s all there in Laura Kristoll’s garage—the easel, the dartboard. She killed him.”

  Elizabeth stood close to him. “Of course she did. And she’s going to get away with killing him. It probably happened exactly the way you described. But the bullet’s long gone now. She’ll never go to trial. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be convicted. Tully’s death looks like a suicide. And if it wasn’t, if he was murdered, then Nathan Hideaway is a ready-made suspect. He killed Tom and wanted to deflect suspicion onto someone else. That’s his motive for killing Tully. Hideaway is Laura’s cover. He’s her reasonable doubt.”

  Loogan listened with growing impatience. “You don’t seem to mind that she’s going to get away with it. It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

  Her expression told him that he had said the wrong thing. She answered him in a voice empty of emotion. “I hate it.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” he said.

  She looked away. “We’re going to eat dinner, David. This isn’t a story in Gray Streets.”

  “I don’t know if I can accept that.”

  She opened the door to go in. “I don’t know if you can either, but you’re going to have to try. And I’m afraid we haven’t come to the worst of it yet.”

  He stepped toward her and the floorboards creaked beneath his feet. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’re not filled with righteous anger over the death of Adrian Tully. He’s not the reason you walked for miles to get here. You don’t care whether Laura Kristoll goes to prison for his murder. He’s not the one we need to talk about.”

  Somewhere beyond the porch the sun must have blazed, because the white glow came up again. Loogan put a hand against the door frame to steady himself.

  “No, it’s Tom,” he said. “I think Laura knew Hideaway was going to kill Tom.”

  When Loogan opened his eyes he found himself lying on a couch beneath a quilt. The gauzy white square of a curtained window floated in his vision.

  A girl sat in a chair nearby, her feet on a coffee table, a magazine open in her lap. She twirled a strand of raven hair around her finger. Sarah Waishkey.

  Loogan remembered Elizabeth guiding him into the house, sitting him down. He remembered deciding he would rest for a moment. He didn’t remember getting out of his denim jacket, but there it was, folded on the coffee table near Sarah’s feet.

  Loogan turned onto his side. “How long have I been asleep?”

  The girl looked up and closed her magazine. It was an issue of Gray Streets.

  “Not long,” she said.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Outside. She went to walk Lillian Eakins to her car.”

  “Lillian Eakins?”

  “Mom called her. She lives nearby. She came to take your temperature and listen to your lungs.”

  “She’s a doctor?”

  “Technically, she’s the medical examiner.”

  Loogan chuckled and threw off the quilt and s
at up. “I’m not dead.”

  “That’s what she determined,” Sarah said, putting the magazine aside. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired.”

  She smiled. “You got shot in the heart.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Close enough. You ought to take a rest. It’s over now.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “It’s over. He’s dead—Nathan Hideaway. My mom told me the whole story. You saved her life.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Loogan said.

  “What’s the other way?”

  “Her life would never have been in danger if not for me.”

  The girl made an impatient face at him. “You can’t be responsible for everything,” she said. “Do you want some iced tea?”

  He considered the question as he looked around for his shoes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Don’t get up. I’ll bring it to you.”

  He spotted his shoes beneath the coffee table, decided they could stay where they were. Sarah disappeared into the kitchen and came back a minute later with a tall glass of iced tea. Elizabeth came with her.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked Loogan.

  “He’s fine,” Sarah said. “I broke the news to him that he’s alive.”

  The girl left the glass on the table and went out again to the kitchen. Elizabeth settled into the chair by Loogan. Her fingers went to the glass beads at her neck.

  “We were talking about Tom Kristoll,” she said.

  “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said. “You’ve got dinner waiting.”

  She crossed one leg over the other. “We’re going to talk about Tom. You’ve got to get it out of your system.”

  Loogan reached for the iced tea. Took a sip. Elizabeth watched him patiently.

  “Laura came to see me the night Tom died,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  Her fingers worried at a bead. “It could have been,” she said.

  “Tom and I were supposed to meet that night,” Loogan said. “If Laura hadn’t come to see me, I would have been at Tom’s office when Nathan Hideaway got there.”

  “It could still have been a coincidence. Did Laura know you were supposed to meet Tom?”

  “Not from me. But Tom could have told her. Even if he didn’t, she knew Tom and I had a habit of meeting for a drink in the evening—usually at his office. She wanted to make sure I stayed away that night. She knew what Hideaway was going to do.”

  “It’s still possible she thought Hideaway was only going to talk to Tom.”

  “She knew what was at stake,” Loogan said. “She knew what might happen if persuasion didn’t work. I think she wanted Tom silenced, one way or another. Her motive was the same as Hideaway’s. She didn’t want Tom to go to the police about Sean Wrentmore. Laura was the one who edited Wrentmore’s manuscript. She put a lot of work into it. She thinks of it as her own, wants to publish it. She killed Adrian Tully because he knew about Wrentmore and she didn’t trust him to keep quiet. She let Hideaway kill Tom for the same reason.”

  Loogan studied the rim of his glass. “She lied to me at every turn,” he said. “She still pretends she didn’t know it was Hideaway who killed Tom. The worst thing is, part of me still wants to believe her. I’d like to believe she shot Adrian Tully out of revenge—because she honestly thought he was the one who killed Tom. That’s one of the reasons I came here. Part of me was hoping you’d convince me I was wrong about her.”

  Elizabeth shifted in her chair. “I wish I could. But Laura didn’t shoot Tully out of revenge.”

  “I know,” Loogan said softly.

  “She knew he didn’t kill Tom. There’s no doubt about that. Hideaway hit Tom with a copy of Shakespeare’s Collected Works. He took the dust jacket away with him so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints behind. Later we found a scrap of a dust jacket from the Collected Works under a seat in Tully’s car. It had to have been put there to frame him.”

  “Laura put it there,” said Loogan.

  Elizabeth was nodding. “If it was a piece of the same dust jacket, then she got it from Hideaway. If it was from a similar dust jacket, then Hideaway told her what book he used to knock Tom out—and that he took the jacket. That detail is one I never discussed with her, and it was never reported in the press. Either way, Laura knew that Hideaway killed Tom—at least she knew after the fact.”

  “Not just after,” Loogan said. “She knew before. She knew what was going to happen to Tom.”

  “You may be right. She and Hideaway may have been working together all along. But no one’s going to prove it to a jury. Because Laura has a good lawyer, and even if she had a bad one he would argue that Hideaway killed Tom without her knowledge, and then killed Tully and framed him, and she had nothing to do with any of it.”

  Loogan sat back against the cushions of the couch. “I don’t suppose it matters that Hideaway denied killing Tully. That night in the clearing, he said Tully was a suicide.”

  Elizabeth rubbed beads of glass against her chin. “It would be better for us if he had ratted Laura out,” she said. “I guess it’s possible he didn’t know. Maybe he told her the details of how he killed Tom, and she decided on her own to frame Tully. When Hideaway found out about Tully’s death, he might have suspected Laura without being sure. But I think the truth is simpler. He knew what she had done, but he felt a kind of odd loyalty to her. So he was discreet that night in the clearing—he confessed to his own crime and kept quiet about hers.”

  The light outside the window faded and the colors in the room seemed to dim. David Loogan let his head tip back against the cushions.

  “So Laura’s not going to suffer any consequences.”

  “She’s going to have to live for a long time with her husband’s ghost,” Elizabeth said quietly. “That’s something. As for the manuscript she edited, I think I can make sure it’s never published. We’ve got it on the disc Rachel Kent gave us. I’ll see that Sean Wrentmore’s family gets a copy. They can block its publication.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “It might be all there is.”

  Loogan closed his eyes. “You and I know she killed Adrian Tully. Maybe I could get her to talk about it. I could wear a wire.”

  “She’s not going to confess, David.”

  “There has to be something I can do.”

  “You can let it go. It’s not your problem to solve.”

  Slowly he opened his eyes. Elizabeth had gotten up. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. The sleeves of her white shirt were rolled to her elbows.

  He said, “Are you going to tell me I can’t be responsible for everything?”

  “You already know that,” she said. She took her right hand from her pocket and held it out to him. “I’m going to eat dinner with my daughter. Are you going to join us?”

  At one in the morning a gust of wind set a branch scraping against a pane of glass and the sound woke David Loogan from a doze. He sat up on the couch and the light from a lamp in the corner showed him he was alone in the room. A blanket and pillow lay on one arm of the chair beside him, a towel and a toothbrush on the other.

  He made his way upstairs and found the bathroom by the glow of a night-light. There he made use of the toothbrush and took care of other business. In the hallway after, he passed a half-open door, caught a glimpse of moonlight on the folds of a blanket.

  Down in the kitchen he poured himself a glass of milk and stood drinking it in the light of the refrigerator. The remains of the chicken casserole occupied a small covered dish on the top shelf.

  Three apples stood in a row on the counter. After dinner, there had been juggling—Sarah Waishkey demonstrating her skill. Then there had been several games of Scrabble. There had been a movie, a Western on a cable channel. There had been popcorn. No one had said anything about Loogan staying. No one had said anything about him leaving.

&
nbsp; Loogan drank the last of the milk and drifted into the living room. He spread the blanket on the couch, arranged the pillow. He heard a sound from the window, the branch scraping again. He pulled the curtain back and checked the window lock. All secure.

  He made a circuit of the downstairs rooms, checking every window. The kitchen came last. Two windows facing the street. He had grown careless by then; he almost missed the movement on the lawn. He looked again and saw two figures on the sidewalk beneath the elm tree.

  He turned the bolt on the front door and went out onto the porch without thinking. The night air was absolutely still and there was no sound. Even his footsteps on the floorboards were silent.

  A streetlight cast the shadow of the elm over the lawn, and in the shadow stood two men he recognized. Neither of them seemed quite right. Jimmy Wade Peltier was thinner than Loogan remembered, and paler. The contours of his skull showed through the flesh of his face. Nathan Hideaway had diminished somehow too, though he was still tall. He had the same wide mouth and square jaw, the same crown of white curls, but there was something insubstantial about him. It was difficult to distinguish him from the shadow of the elm.

  Neither of them made a sound, but there was something between them, some debate going on. Jimmy Peltier gestured with his butterfly knife. Hideaway had his black revolver. Loogan thought he was witnessing the prelude to a fight, but it turned out to be something else. A bargaining session. It ended with an exchange: Peltier took possession of the revolver; Hideaway accepted the knife.

  As Peltier began to back away, he seemed to notice Loogan for the first time. A grin took hold of his mouth and he raised the black revolver triumphantly, the muscles of his arms tense beneath his torn shirt. He spun on his heel and darted soundlessly across the empty street. Nathan Hideaway saw Loogan at the same time. He stood still on the lawn and let Loogan approach him. He wore the same woolen sweater and corduroy slacks he had worn in the clearing.

  The two of them watched Jimmy Wade Peltier jog down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Loogan lost sight of him, but Hideaway stayed focused on him for a long while.