“I don’t rightly know.”
“Did he have a regular client he always visited?”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know. I just checked him in, didn’t quiz him much. He’d usually get down here in the evening, so he could be up and out early the next day, making his rounds, stay one more night, then head out the next day. So I guess he had a lot of customers in the area, but I never knew who they were. I was grateful for his business. We’re more of a seasonal operation, though we do get the overflow on the big school weekends. Eric was a small-town boy.”
Even as Tess and the manager spoke, Carl had slid the local yellow pages from the desk, opened it to CAMERA SUPPLIES, and jotted down every store listed. He then found a listing for PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIOS and did the same.
“So what happened to Eric?” the manager asked. “He go home?”
“I’m not sure. His in-laws”—it seemed only polite to refer to the Guntses this way—“said he went back home, somewhere in the South.”
“The South? This is the South. Maryland’s north.”
“It’s all below the Mason-Dixon line,” Tess said. “But I meant his original home.”
“Oh. I just assumed he always lived in Maryland. Now where did I get that idea? Boy, I haven’t thought of him in years. We had some real nice chats that winter, we sure did.”
“About what?”
“He told me all about his plans, even asked one time what kind of diamond I thought girls like best. ”Big ones,“ I said, meaning it as a joke. But he took everything so seriously. His eyes got all big and dark and he said, ”Not my girl, Mr. Schell. If I gave her a piece of chicken wire she’d wear it as if it were the Hope diamond. She loves me, not the things I give her.“ Oh, he was a literal boy in his way. You couldn’t tease him for anything.”
“The Hope diamond?” Carl spoke up for the first time since he had grunted his name. “Isn’t that the one that’s cursed?”
Mr. Schell looked perplexed. “I thought it was the big old diamond that Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor. But I could be wrong. Memory’s not what it was.”
By day’s end, Tess and Carl had canvassed almost every camera supply store and photography studio in the greater Spartina area. It seemed to Tess that they had questioned almost every person in Spartina who owned a camera, even those disposable ones.
“Modern society is too damn mobile,” she grumbled.
“What do you mean?”
“In the six years since Eric Shivers last visited this town, the jobs at these stores and studios have turned over four–five times.”
“Not the managers,” Carl pointed out. “Besides, what did you expect? The person we’re looking for moved on, most likely. You heard the man back at the motel. Eric Shivers couldn’t help bragging on his girlfriend. So some twisted minimum-wage slave takes it into his head to go up to Frederick and kill her. Then he moves on.”
“So how does he meet Alan Palmer if he’s working in a camera store?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s shooting studio portraits in Kmart. Lucy had one of those done about two weeks before she died. Maybe he’s selling hot dogs at Orange Julius.”
“Then why are we here?” Tess was getting angry at herself. She hated errors of momentum, mistakes born of rushing forward without taking time to think. It was the one thing she tried never to do. “What can we possibly find if we’re looking for someone who’s no longer in Spartina?”
“Something. Anything. Look, we turned Cecil County upside down looking for answers to Lucy’s death. And, best you could tell, the Frederick sheriff ‘s department did a pretty thorough job up there. So this is all we’ve got.”
“No, this is all we’ve got,” Tess said, pulling up outside an old dust-filmed photography studio in a business center that had fallen on hard times. The smiling graduation photographs in the windows of Ashe’s Studio Portraits & Fine Photography were clearly fifteen or twenty years old. Caps and gowns didn’t change that much over time, but hairstyles did, and makeup. It had been a decade or so since such full bushy brows had been considered fashionable for women, since lips had gleamed through so many layers of iridescent gloss.
Yet the man inside the studio was not as old as Tess expected. Mid-forties, perhaps, tall and thin with the posture of an al dente noodle, he would have been a college student himself when the window displays were put up. He looked surprised to see anyone enter his store—and not happily so.
“You lost? Need directions back to the interstate?”
“No,” Tess said, “we’re investigators—”
“From the state? I’ll have to see some identification.”
“I’m a Baltimore-based private investigator,” she said, pulling out her billfold and showing her ID.
“And him?” The man jerked his head toward Carl.
“He works with me. Maryland requires an apprenticeship.” The lie jumped out on its own, catching Tess off guard, as her lies often did, and irking Carl. She saw him frown, unhappy at the word, mouthing it to himself: apprentice. But the man’s assumption that they were “from the state” had jarred some instinct. This was someone who worried about trouble crossing his threshold. A particular kind of trouble, brought by a particular brand of authorities. State investigators.
“Are you Ashe?”
“Son of. What does Maryland want with me?”
“We’re looking for people who used to do business with Eric Shivers, a Maryland man who worked this area as a salesman.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah as in ”Yeah, I knew him,“ or ”Yeah, go on‘?“
Ashe had one of those faces that revealed its flaws gradually. His skin tone was splotchy and uneven, his nose a pointy little beak, his chin nonexistent. And his yellow-brown eyes bulged slightly, with so much milky white showing at the edges they made Tess think of deviled eggs gone bad.
“Both,” he said at last. “Although my dad was still alive then, so he was the one Eric dealt with.”
“I’m sorry to hear your father passed away,” Tess said. “Has it been long?”
“A few years back,” the man said, scratching his nonexistent chin. “Five, I think. And don’t be sorry. He was old.”
“What did Eric sell?” This was Carl, his voice too hard, too rushed. It was a traffic-stop voice, not the more consciously casual tones a skilled investigator used.
But the question, despite its argumentative edge, seemed to catch the man off guard. “What—I mean, you were the ones who came in here saying he was in photographic supplies, not me.”
“No, we didn’t say, actually.” Carl stepped forward, getting as close as he could to Ashe Jr., given the dusty counter between them. “We said he was a salesman. What did he sell?”
“Paper.” But it was a question in spite of itself.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know. I know Eric called on my father, but I never took much interest. I’m just sitting on this place until the market recovers and I can get a fair price for the property, put it into something a little more dynamic, you know? I’m not a photographer, and if I’m going to run a business, it’s going to be something a little exciting, with potential for real growth. This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Yeah?” Carl leaned forward, so he was nose to nose with the weedy, feckless man. “Well, join the club, buddy. Join the club.”
CHAPTER 16
“Did anything about that strike you as unusual?”
Carl stopped in his tracks on the sidewalk outside the photography studio. “Wait, I know that line. It’s from a movie. Don’t tell me. I can see the guy who said it, all serious and stone-faced. He’s a really famous actor.”
“No, I mean—”
“I said, don’t tell me. I’ll get it in a second. God, I’m so close. 48 Hours? No, no, that’s not it. One of the Godfathers?”
“Carl—” Tess was not inclined to touch people she did not know well, but she grabbed Carl
Dewitt’s left arm and swung him around. “I’m not playing movie trivia. I am not asking a rhetorical question. Let me repeat: Did anything about that strike you as unusual?”
“Yes,” he muttered, yanking his arm from her and rubbing it, as if she had left a stain on his sleeve. “You called me your apprentice, which is one step above flunky. Why’d you do that?”
Tess got into her car, waited for Carl to do the same, then started the engine and began to drive, although she had no destination in mind. They weren’t done with Spartina, she was sure of that much.
“The guy was clearly paranoid about state authorities. It was his first question: ”Are you from the state?“ I wanted him to feel safe with us, at ease. I told an expedient lie. I wasn’t trying to demean you. You’ve got no ID. What were you going to show the guy, your Blockbuster Video card?”
Carl folded his arms across his chest and thought about this. After several quiet minutes, he nodded, satisfied. “Just so it’s not what you really think.”
“He said five years.”
“What?”
“He said his father died five years ago ”I think.“ ”
“Five years, four years, six years.” Carl shrugged. “Not everybody is exact about dates.”
“When did your mother die?”
“Eight years ago February.”
Tess didn’t bother to say anything, just let him listen to the precision of his own words.
“If his dad died around the time Eric was here, it would be sharper in his mind. The two things would be connected.”
Tess nodded. “I think so, yes.”
“So why would he lie about it?”
“Because he doesn’t want us to associate him with Eric. And, by extension, Tiffani. The guy back at the motel couldn’t have been chattier about Eric, and Eric apparently was pretty chatty his ownself. That Ashe guy lied to us. People usually lie for a reason.”
“So let’s go back, jack ‘im up.”
Tess winced a little at the slang, picked up, no doubt, from a movie or a television show.
“We’re not cops, remember? We can’t drag Ashe to an interrogation room and keep him there for hours, playing mind games. My intuition about people is pretty good, but it doesn’t give us any legal standing.”
“So what do we do?”
“I know of only one place to go when I’m stumped.”
The Spartina Public Library was plain, with an emphasis on bestsellers, but it had the Internet connections Tess needed. Using the wireless modem that Dorie had installed for her at an astronomical price, Tess booted up her laptop and began searching the on-line archives of the Spartina Messenger, while Carl flipped through the bound paper versions. Like most newspapers, the Messenger had an on-line database, but it charged for retrieval of articles more than thirty days old.
“So what are you going to do?” Carl asked, distracted momentarily by a page of movie ads.
“Hey, that’s what per diem expenses are for.” Tess signed up for the archive service and began downloading the articles that popped up, beginning with an obituary on Ashe’s father.
“Look at the date.”
Carl leaned over her shoulder. “Son of a bitch. It’s seven years ago.”
“So he wasn’t doing any business with anyone six years ago.” Other Ashes came up, but not the ones Tess wanted. She noticed the Spartina paper had a police log, where petty crimes were listed by address. She tried the address of the photography shop. She found a dozen listings over the past ten years, but they were the kind of petty property crimes one would expect in a depressed business area: smashed shop windows, car break-ins. And the addresses were not precise, so it was impossible to tell if the crimes had affected Ashe’s Studio Portraits or its downtrodden neighbors. She narrowed the search to the months before and after Tiffani Gunts’s murder. Here she found three calls to the fire department for “suspicious odors,” which was mildly interesting but didn’t explain why Ashe Jr. had lied to them about knowing Eric Shivers.
A subdued voice on the PA system reminded them that the library closed at 5 P.M. on Friday nights. Tess checked her watch and quickly plugged Ashe’s name into the form for the local telephone directory. The number popped up, along with a link offering to map the way. Modern life was almost too easy.
“Let’s go,” she said to Carl, then winced, lest this prompt another cinematic reverie on his part. But his mind was elsewhere.
“I thought you said there was no reason to go back and talk to Ashe if we didn’t know anything.”
“Yeah, I know what I said. But people get squirrelly, sometimes, when you show up at their houses. They don’t realize how much of their lives”—she patted the computer—“are inside these babies. It’s one thing to drop by a man’s business, another to go to his home uninvited. Total power play.”
“You showed up on my doorstep, and it didn’t bother me at all.”
Tess didn’t have the heart to tell Carl Dewitt that this was only evidence of how odd he was.
Ashe lived in a raw new development surrounded by shiny fields of mud. A sign at the main entrance promised LUXURY HOMES STARTING IN THE $200s, which seemed a lot to pay for the shoddy skeletons under construction here. It was as if the first two little pigs went into the building business, Tess thought, and let their brother come along at the end and slap brick veneers on these palaces of sticks and straw.
Ashe’s house was the only completed one on his cul-de-sac. Two cars were parked in the driveway, a midsize Japanese car and the inevitable SUV. A child’s Big Wheel had been left behind the SUV, and Tess knew it was destined to be crushed beneath the SUV’s wheels one morning.
A tired-looking blonde still in her day-job clothes answered the door. A television was blaring in the background, and a child appeared to be trying to outscream it. The presumptive Mrs. Ashe looked at once apprehensive and hopeful. The corners of her mouth lifted, as if she had not quite outgrown the fantasy that Publishers Clearing House would show up on her doorstep. But her eyes drooped with the knowledge that all news was bad news.
“Henry’s in the family room,” she said.
This suited Tess. Family rooms were now customarily built alongside the kitchen, creating vast cavernous spaces that offered no privacy. Ashe would have to talk to them in full view of his wife—or risk her suspicions by asking them to go somewhere else. Tess didn’t know what secrets Ashe kept from his wife, but it was a good bet that he had at least a few going.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, lifting his eyes from the television set. It was tuned to one of the financial networks, a summary of the day’s stock market gyrations flowing across the bottom.
“Your father died seven years ago,” Tess said.
“You don’t have to tell me when my father died.”
“I think I do. Because when we stopped by your studio, you said he was the one who dealt with Eric Shivers. Well, Eric last visited here six years ago.”
Ashe turned his gaze back to the television, which was just a way of not making eye contact. “Gee, pardon me. I’m sorry that in the confusion of settling my dad’s estate and getting married and having a child I forgot when I met with some guy named Eric Shivers. I guess I’m just a bad, bad guy.”
Ashe was in a stuffed chair, his feet propped up on an ottoman. Carl walked over and kicked Ashe’s legs from their perch.
“Hey!” Ashe’s yelp made his wife turn from the kitchen, where she had been pretending not to listen while she tended something on the stove. Tess stepped forward, angling her body so she was between the two men. She hated this kind of macho posturing. It was so unproductive and so phony. Just more movie shit.
“You didn’t forget when you met with him,” she said. “You forgot that you met with him at all. That’s why we came back. We’re curious about why you’d lie about such a little thing. Unless it’s real important to you to distance yourself from Eric Shivers for some reason.”
“Look, I don’t know what Eric Shivers
has stepped in, but I haven’t seen him for years. We did a little business together. That’s all. He told me he would follow the regs, and I believed him. Did his price seem too good to be true? Yes. Could I afford someone else? No.”
Tess was confused. “Follow the regs?”
“When my dad died, the only thing I inherited was a photography studio. An old-fashioned, run-down, behind-the-times photography studio that wasn’t worth as much as the land it’s sitting on.”
“So?”
“So I paid Eric to clean it up, get rid of all the crap on the premises. There were gallons of chemicals and fixes, things I had no use for, things so old even people backward enough to be using them wouldn’t want to buy them. Eric said he would do it right, and I’d never have to worry about this.”
“This?”
“Investigators up my ass, trying to bust me for improper disposal of chemical waste. He promised.”
“So the last time you saw him six years ago—”
“He came to pick up his last payment.”
“In cash?”
“In cash.” Ashe shrugged. “He was a bargain. And he did what he said he would do. He cleaned the place out so I could put it on the market. Too bad the market went south. But if I ever do get a contract on it, I won’t have to sweat the inspection.”
“Except for the lead paint and the asbestos in the insulation,” his wife said matter-of-factly from the kitchen, as if she wanted to remind Ashe that she was there, within earshot, and she knew some of his secrets, if not all of them.
Carl frowned. “Doesn’t the law say you have to make full disclosure? Won’t you have to tell a prospective buyer that you once stored all sorts of chemicals and shit on the site?”
“What are you, anyway, real estate cops? It’s a photography studio. If a buyer wants an environmental inspection, he can fuckin‘ well pay for it.”
Tess took the lead back. Carl was too prone to tangents. “The last time you saw Eric—do you remember the day?”
“It was March, and winter was still hanging around. That’s the best I can do. Sorry.” His tone indicated he was anything but.
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