Dig Two Graves

by James, Harper

  Evan didn’t say anything.

  ‘That sounds like there’s definitely gonna be somebody asking.’

  Evan glanced quickly behind at the car idling outside, flicked his head at it.

  ‘Maybe her husband. But he’s only a little guy.’

  The clerk’s face scrunched, a well-practiced gesture that Evan guessed was followed by a sharp intake of breath through his teeth if he had a harder sell on his hands.

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds dangerous to me. Her husband might have a gun.’

  Evan laid another two fifties on the counter.

  ‘And we just had the doors painted. If somebody kicks it in . . .’

  Evan didn’t mention that the doors hadn’t been painted since the place was built, same as the rest of the dump. He put another fifty on the counter. The clerk went to scoop the pile up. Evan put his hand on top of his to stop him.

  ‘And you call the room we’re in if anybody asks.’

  ‘No problem.’

  He lifted his hand and the cash disappeared under the counter. The clerk pushed an old-fashioned register across it towards him.

  ‘If you could sign in, please, Mr . . .?’

  ‘O’Brien. Liam O’Brien.’

  They parked on the far side of the lot in the shade of some trees—it wasn’t as if they’d be making a fast escape in the Taurus—then got settled into a room that would have benefitted from a thorough clean, or better still, an all-consuming fire. They ate their lunch in silence, Bella on the bed with her shoes kicked off and feet up, Evan in the single easy chair. It wasn’t only the sandwich that was too reminiscent of the one the clerk had sprayed him with that was giving him indigestion. They needed to talk about Merritt. It promised to be an uncomfortable conversation at best, her earlier statement that he couldn’t be involved leaving little room for doubt in her mind.

  ‘Tell me about Merritt.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Already there was a hint of defensiveness in her voice. He held up his hands.

  ‘I’m not suggesting he’s behind the attack the other night. But maybe someone he knows is. Somebody with a hold over him they could use if he inherits all your father’s money.’

  ‘You mean blackmailing him?’

  He shrugged, just throwing out ideas.

  ‘Maybe. We’ve got to start somewhere. What does he do for a living?’

  Her mouth turned down, a dismissive snort punching out of it.

  ‘He works’—she made quotes in the air with her fingers—‘for his grandfather.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘No. The other one.’

  Delivered in a don’t you know anything tone of voice. If he’d been asked, he’d have to have said it appeared not. It was getting more complex by the minute.

  ‘Who, Gerald Bloodwell?’

  ‘Uh-huh. The man that I’m supposed to be stalking.’

  ‘What does he do for him?’

  That got him a full-bodied laugh. She swung her feet off the bed, sat on the edge.

  ‘He sits around on his lazy ass playing with his toys. The latest one is a helicopter, for Christ’s sake. He’s waiting for his grandfather to die, basically.’

  It appeared Leon was doing a lot more than feeding her information about her father’s health. He was keeping her abreast of what was going on with the whole family. That included the fact that Merritt stood to inherit Gerald Bloodwell’s fortune.

  It wasn’t only her words that grabbed his attention—there was a strange note in her voice as well. The way she said his grandfather had an odd ring to it.

  But, more than that, unless Merritt was exceptionally greedy and grasping, he was unlikely to be behind a plot to kill Bella in order to inherit her father’s wealth—not when he was due to inherit from his other filthy rich grandfather. He wouldn’t jeopardize that, risk taking out a hit on Bella. He said as much to her.

  She did her best to keep the I told you so out of her voice and off her face.

  ‘At least you believe me now. Even if it is for monetary reasons and not because he wouldn’t try to kill his own aunt. You should try not thinking the worst—’

  Her mouth clamped shut. It was obvious what she’d been about to say and decided against—the worst about people.

  Maybe she realized what a stupid thing it was to say to a person in his job. She might as well say it to a homicide detective. Except it didn’t feel like that to him. It was more a case of people in glass houses . . .

  It was time to move on.

  So far all he’d done was go backwards in a big way. He’d unearthed a compelling reason why it was unlikely to be Merritt behind the attack. He didn’t want to talk about her sister, Blair, an even more contentious topic. That only left people who were already dead.

  ‘How did your sister’s husband die?’

  Too late he realized that if he believed the fake Detective O’Brien that Bella was involved, they were back to Blair being the suspect—but for revenge rather than money.

  The questions threw her for a moment.

  ‘Vance, you mean?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Has she had any others?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No. I wasn’t expecting the question, that’s all. It can’t be anything to do with him. He’s been dead for more than twenty years.’

  And you haven’t answered the question.

  He waited. She found something interesting to look at on the floor. He stood up, stretched his back. Went to look out of the window.

  ‘I think it might rain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought we’d talk about the weather seeing as you don’t want to answer my question.’

  She pushed herself off the bed, joined him at the window. Peered out at the sky.

  ‘You’re wrong. I think we’ll be lucky.’

  They shared a smile, then she came clean, surprised the hell out of him.

  ‘He committed suicide.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. People do it all the time. Even rich people with everything to live for. On the face of it, at least.’

  He knew her well enough by now to know that asking her to explain what she meant by on the face of it was likely to get them back onto talking about the weather. He filed it away, glad he’d put his big brain in that morning there was so much he was having to stuff into it.

  He was also reminded of her words earlier, talking about her sister.

  Blair’s stronger than she looks.

  Then he asked a question he had no expectation of getting an honest answer to.

  ‘Do you know why he did it?’

  He was tempted to put his hand to his forehead, press it against the window and yell, here it comes, a big fat lie. She didn’t disappoint.

  ‘No idea. Maybe the stock market dipped and wiped a few billion off the family fortune.’

  He wasn’t really listening, his mind too overwhelmed.

  Gerald Bloodwell’s only son had committed suicide. Did he blame his son’s wife, Blair? Her family? Bella’s flippant remark about the family fortune could be the reason. But so could any one of a thousand family problems.

  All he knew for sure was that if Bella knew, she wasn’t telling him.

  ‘Was it suspicious in any way?’

  ‘No. The police were satisfied that it was suicide.’

  She didn’t volunteer how he’d killed himself and he didn’t ask. It didn’t make a difference either way. But he couldn’t ignore the discrepancy between the words he was hearing and the ones already in his mind, courtesy of the man masquerading as Detective O’Brien.

  Ms Carlson’s brother-in-law died in suspicious circumstances.

  She was still staring out of the window. He guessed it wasn’t the sky that she saw with its possibility of rain, but something from the past, something with an absolute certainty of problems building like thunder clouds overhead. And it was his job to hold the shitstorm-proof umbrella. There was a melancholy no
te to her voice when she spoke and gave him the first insight into herself.

  ‘It’s partly why I’m not interested in money. Having it, flaunting it, wanting more of it. I know you’re thinking that’s rich coming from someone who’s going to inherit a ton of it. But I’ve seen what it does to people. I’ve seen how it does everything except make them happy. It changes them. They become obsessed with it. And they think they can do anything they like because they’re rich.’

  He tuned her out as she got into her stride, nodded along and contributed the occasional uh-huh and you got it. He caught the name Gerald Bloodwell in there at one point. He didn’t know who she was trying to convince, him or herself. Both of them, most likely. And it was muddying the waters again. If she was right about people becoming obsessed with it, wanting more of it for its own sake despite how much they already had, then maybe Merritt wasn’t out of the running after all.

  The diatribe on the evils of money and the people who have it and the people who want it was the only glimpse into her life, her raison d’être, that he was going to get. You don’t disappear and stay hidden for thirty years if you spill your guts at the drop of a hat, regale everyone you meet with your life story.

  So they watched TV and dozed a little and he spent some time thinking of ways to get her back home safely. It was dark outside when the phone rang and made them both jump. His heartbeat picked up as he answered.

  ‘Mr O’Brien?’

  There was something strange about the clerk’s voice. It was definitely him, but he sounded strained. There could’ve been a gun to his head. Except he didn’t sound scared, no tell-tale tremor in his voice. He sounded as if he was having trouble stopping himself from snickering. Despite that, Evan remembered who he was supposed to be.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You might want to come down to the office. And don’t forget to bring your wallet.’

  His pulse raced a little faster at the word wallet. The creep had something worth selling. It could only be one thing. He let himself out into the darkness of the parking lot, feeling good about removing the bulb from the overhead light earlier. He slipped around the back, skirted the whole building, came at the other room he’d paid for from the opposite direction. The door and frame were intact, no recent additions to the many scuffs and scratches in the paintwork. He headed for the office, wondered if the clerk was about to try to con him.

  The guy looked exactly like a person looking forward to doubling his earlier earnings in the next two minutes when Evan walked in. He stuck out his hand, palm upwards. Evan put a fifty in it. Nothing happened. He looked the clerk in the eye. The clerk looked right back. Without warning he snatched the note out of the clerk’s still-outstretched hand, took a couple paces towards the door.

  ‘You’ve told me all I need to know. You can’t be trusted. We’re leaving right now.’

  ‘Wait.’

  He stopped short at the insistent edge to the clerk’s voice. It wasn’t only the prospect of losing the fifty bucks. He knew something.

  ‘Somebody called.’

  He walked back, laid the fifty in the clerk’s hand, folded his fingers around it. Squeezed his whole hand good and tight until a hiss of pain told him the guy got the message.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It was the police. They were asking if anyone had checked in driving an old Ford Taurus with your license plate number.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  The clerk tried to give him an indignant look. It didn’t work out, looked like he’d eaten something that disagreed with him.

  ‘I told him no. What do you think? Then I called you like I promised.’

  Evan did the translation from slimeball to English.

  They didn’t offer me any money for the information.

  He was at the door when the clerk called out to him.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who it was called?’

  ‘You told me. The police.’

  The clerk was grinning now. With three hundred bucks in his pocket, days didn’t come much better than this.

  ‘I mean his name. Detective Liam O’Brien. Sounds like you’re looking for yourself.’

  Evan could still hear him laughing halfway back to the room. He’d have liked to laugh with him. The thoughts running through his mind guaranteed it wasn’t going to happen.

  The car belonged to Liz. How did they get the license plate number? He wasn’t looking forward to breaking the news to Bella.

  9

  Everything went sideways as soon as he got back in the room, told Bella they had to get out.

  ‘Why? What’s happened? I thought we were meant to be safe here.’

  ‘Looks as if somebody’s been calling all the motels and hotels. They’ve got the car’s description and your license plate number.’

  That wasn’t strictly true. They had Liz’s license plate. It didn’t take her long to figure it out.

  ‘But it’s Liz’s car . . .’

  He watched the color drain from her face. She dropped heavily onto the bed, the headboard banging into the wall, a not uncommon occurrence in a place like this. He felt as bad as she did about the implications. That the men after her had somehow caught Liz and gotten the model and license plate number out of her, no prizes for guessing how they’d done it.

  Except he felt worse, of course.

  It had been his idea to move hotels. Liz didn’t know where they’d gone. And the men would’ve asked her. A number of times, each time more insistently. He got a too-vivid mental picture of the guy whose face he’d remodeled taking his anger out on Liz when she failed—or refused as they saw it—to give them the answers they wanted.

  He knew exactly when that implication registered in Bella’s mind. She looked up at him, a mix of horror and accusation on her face.

  ‘She wouldn’t have been able to tell them where we are. We should never have moved.’

  It was a stupid thing to say. Then she got out her phone, a pointless exercise. They both knew it. She called Liz’s number anyway, looked like she was going to throw the phone at the wall when it went straight to voicemail. He waited a long moment before he spoke.

  ‘We need to go.’

  ‘Why? Did the clerk tell them we’re here?’

  ‘He says not. But he’s the sort of creep who’s not going to lose any sleep over playing both ends. Or they might have heard something in his voice. The guy told him he was a cop, same as he told me. It might have rattled him. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do.’

  They left the room, hurried across the parking lot bent almost double as if they were trying to make themselves conspicuous. He got in the driver’s side. She went around to the rear passenger side keeping below the door line, opened the door and closed it again as if she’d slid onto the back seat. Then she flattened herself on the ground, rolled away into the bushes at the side of the lot, the car obscuring her from anyone parked watching. She wormed her way through them, into the trees behind. Inside the car he twisted in his seat, mumbled something under his breath to the empty back seat.

  It all felt like overkill. But it was better than actual kill.

  He drove out of the lot, turned right and hit the gas. She waited, ears straining, breath on hold. Nothing moved. She gave it five long minutes more, then threaded her way through the trees, moving parallel to the road. Fifty yards further down there was a gas station on the other side of the road, a diner and convenience store behind it. The lights in the convenience store were off but the diner was still open, people visible in the window seats. She hunkered down in the shadows of the trees to wait.

  Ten minutes later Liz’s car pulled into the gas station coming from the other direction. It drove through, parked behind the diner. She came out of the trees, darted across the road. He was waiting by the car.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Here, neither. Maybe the clerk’s an honorable creep.’

  They went into the diner, ignored three vacant tables in the w
indow, got one next to the rest rooms at the back. The waitress gave them a curious look. It takes all sorts. They ordered coffee and a stale Danish each. Then Evan phoned for a cab to take them to the airport, a quick efficient arrangement. The next one promised to be more problematic.

  He spent some time on Google maps, then called the Carlson Residence. It went to voicemail as he expected, the tone of the same woman’s voice informing him that calls from people like him were not welcome at any time of day or night, thank you. He tried another three times unsuccessfully in the hope that old man Carlson’s personal weasel, Aldrich LeClair, lived in and would be dragged from his bed. It didn’t happen.

  He called the chauffeur, Leon, instead. He sounded suitably annoyed at the lateness of the hour until Bella leaned over and called Hello and Evan told him what he wanted.

  ‘How did you get this number?’ LeClair said when he finally answered, irritation pushing aside the tiredness in his voice when he heard who it was.

  ‘It was pinned to the wall in the men’s room of a gay bar.’

  That was only in his mind.

  ‘You must have given it to me. Anyway, here’s what I want you to do . . .’

  An indignant spluttering sound came down the line, loud enough for Bella to hear. She stuck out her hand.

  ‘Here, let me.’

  He passed the phone across.

  ‘Hello, Aldrich,’ she said, her voice all sweetness and light. ‘We haven’t met yet, but I’m Arabella Carlson. Do what he asks or I’ll fire your sorry ass the minute my father dies.’

  She handed the phone back. There you go. He nodded his thanks, got ready to enjoy himself. A sullen silence came down the line at him.

  ‘That’s better. As I was saying, you need to arrange for Mr Carlson’s private jet to bring us back to Boston. But not to Logan. There’s a public use airport called Hanscom Field about two miles from Bedford. It’s only twenty miles from you. We need a private ambulance to meet us there, bring us to the house. You got all that so far, or do you need me to speak more slowly?’

  A deeper hostile silence filled the void between them.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got that.’