Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set)

by Robert P. French

  He recovers his composure. “Yes. Why did you suggest to me that being beaten up by that gang might be associated with my investigation into Kevin’s death?”

  “Instructions from Mr. Wallace. Why don’t you ask him? He’s on the twelfth floor, in the palliative care ward.”

  “Thank you, Arnold.” He gets out and walks to the hospital door; it looks like he’s talking to himself.

  I check the mirror. The police car is right behind me. Two officers are approaching me, one from each side of the vehicle. Two others are trailing Cal.

  60

  Cal

  How are you feeling?” I ask.

  “A lot better than I did this morning. They’re probably going to discharge me around four o’clock. Did you get the evidence you needed on George?”

  “No. I’m afraid not. It looks like George wasn’t the one who killed Kevin.”

  “You’re not serious.” Brad has a look of amazement on his face. “How can you be sure?”

  “He was with Sandi at the time of Kevin’s death. They are each other’s alibi.”

  “Could they have been working together?” he asks.

  “We don’t think so and there’s other evidence. Besides, I think I know who killed Kevin and I’m going to need your help to prove it.”

  “Who?”

  I ignore his question. There’s something I need to know.

  “When I came here this morning with the police, you told us about last night. There was something you said that has been running through my mind. You said that George knew about your gun and made you give it to him.”

  In the pause, Brad says, “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “What d’you mean, how?”

  “You are five inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than George and you were on the wrestling team at school. How could George make you give him your gun.”

  “He didn’t force me physically.” Brad’s voice has dropped to a whisper. “He, uh… had something on me. It was about that money I owed him.”

  “Are you telling me that George coerced you into handing over a gun because of the loan he made you?” I’m pushing harder now.

  “Yeah, it was a lot of money. I couldn’t refuse him.”

  “So much so that you were prepared to give a gun to a man who had my daughter with him?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m sorry Cal. I didn’t think about Ellie being there. She was in the other room. He really had me over a barrel.”

  “But it wasn’t because of money was it?” I am standing up and am almost shouting now. My show of anger has got him off balance, now is the time to strike. But I don’t want to. I know the words will drive an eternal rift between us but I have to say them. Because, for better or for worse, I am a cop ahead of being a friend. “It was because George knew it was you who killed Kevin.” I yell.

  His eyes are enormous. “Come on Cal, you know I could never kill Kev. He was my best friend.” He’s breathing heavily and there is a slight dilation of his pupils.

  “You almost got away with it.” My voice is back to normal. “I was so sure it was George and I wanted to nail him for it. But George—and you for that matter—wouldn’t be likely to kill Kevin because of what it would do to QX4’s stock price and to the money that he had invested. But then I learned that QX4 had received approval for human trials of the Addi-ban drug before Kevin’s death. So I assumed that George knew about the approval and he decided it was better to kill Kevin and bury the secret of the illegal testing with him. Sure, the shares would take a big drop, but as soon as the approval was announced, they would bounce right back again.”

  “That makes sense,” he agrees too quickly. “You need to break his alibi, Cal. It’s ridiculous to think I would kill Kev.”

  “But George didn’t know about the approval. Sandi was the first person to learn about it. She tried to reach George but couldn’t. But she also tried to reach Kevin. He didn’t answer at home or on his cell, so Sandi called his mother who didn’t know where he was. So then she called you. She told you that she wanted to contact Kevin to tell him that the government approvals had come through. So other than Sandi, you were the only person to know about the approvals. Oh, except for Arnold, but I’ve eliminated him as a suspect.”

  “Cal, you’re crazy. Arnold loved Kevin; he would no more do it than I would. It’s got to be George.”

  “Yeah, I must admit, I could never really see Arnold as the killer but I had to check it out. Do you want to know what clinches it for me Brad? How I knew it was you?”

  “Humour me,” he says.

  “It’s been bugging me since last night. But when I was sitting in the police station this morning, for some reason it clicked into place.”

  “What did?” He is rattled now.

  “George got a call last night, from a disposable cellphone, telling him to clear out of his house. We couldn’t work out who called him, Steve assumed that one of the gang members, whom we didn’t catch, had called him. I never bought that. My theory was that only the blond guy at the top knew how to contact George, and he was dead. Then I remembered the call I got from you when I was on the way to arrest George. I trusted you and I told you where we were going.”

  “Why would I tell George.”

  “You knew that I was obsessed with the theory that George was the killer. But you knew that if we arrested George, we might find out he didn’t do it. But if you tipped him off and he got away, we would think that the murderer had escaped and stop looking. You’d be in the clear and George would owe you.”

  “Oh come on Cal, it’s circumstantial. A coincidence.”

  Oh, Brad. How I wish it was.

  “We can ask George when he wakes up.”

  He says nothing but his jaw is tensing.

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing. As I walked into the hospital, I got a phone call from one of the cops on the team, a guy called Nick Stammo. He got a court order and went over to your apartment; he found a cellphone. The number was the same number as the phone that called George at around nine last night. I’m willing to bet that when we do the forensics, your prints will be all over it.”

  He is sweating.

  “What I don’t understand,” I add, “is how you could bring yourself to kill him.” A bigger truth I have rarely uttered.

  I wait. Thirty seconds, watching the cogs turn in his mind, then he lets it all out with a long sigh.

  “You have to believe me, Cal. I didn’t mean to.”

  I nod, “I know, I know.” I put as much sympathy into my tone as I can stomach,

  He draws a breath. “Kev called me on the Thursday evening, asked me to come over to his place and he told me everything about his illegal testing and the deaths. He was completely devastated. He couldn’t stop crying. He said that he was going to go to the police the next day and tell them what he’d done.

  “I couldn’t believe it at first but when it sank in, I realized that if he did that, the company would be closed down and I would be ruined financially.

  “I told him that he shouldn’t be hasty. We should think it over first. I appealed to his generous side. I talked about all the people at QX4, people he had worked with for years, people who would be out of work if he blew the whistle on himself. I got him to agree not to say anything, at least until after the weekend.

  “At midnight that night, after I had left Kevin’s, I called George to tell him what Kevin had done. He told me that no matter what pressure I had to apply, I had to keep Kevin from saying anything to anyone.

  “On the Friday, I called Kevin every hour but he wasn’t at work and there was no reply from his home. I even went round there half a dozen times but he wasn’t in. Then at the end of the day, Sandi called me, looking for him, and she told me about the approvals for the human trials. I tried to get hold of him all through the evening but no luck. I even went round there again but there was no reply.

  “I hardly slept at all that night. I called him early Saturday morning a
nd he was home. I told him I had to see him right away. He said that you were coming over and he was going to tell you what he had done. I begged him not to. I jumped in my car and raced over there. I got there just before you did. I was telling him about the approvals from the government when you arrived. While you were in the shower, I laid it all out for him. How he would ruin the company if he admitted to the illegal testing. How he could reformulate Addi-ban and just go ahead with the human trials when he was ready. But he just wouldn’t budge. When he went downstairs to talk to you, I listened from the top of the stairs and I couldn’t believe that he was going to tell you but you didn’t have the time to listen.”

  A wave of guilt crushes me. If I had taken the time to listen to Kevin, he would still be alive. My impatience caused his death. In a way Stammo is right: I did kill Kevin.

  “The reason that I hadn’t been able to get hold of him on Friday was that after we had spoken on Thursday night he had gone fishing at his parents’ cottage at the lake. Try and clear his mind, he said. His fishing stuff was on the coffee table, including his tackle box and that knife you bought him all those years ago. He was rearranging the stuff in the tackle box—you know how obsessively organized he was—and he told me he had decided he was going to go turn himself in to the police, that as soon as you got back from seeing Ellie, he was going to ask you to go with him.

  “After you left, I was beside myself. He was being so stubborn. I remember myself shouting at him. Didn’t he care that he was ruining me financially, just because something had gone wrong and a bunch of junkies and drunks that nobody cared about had died? How could he ruin QX4 and everything he’d worked so hard on for all those years? All he had to do was keep quiet and keep working on Addi-ban. For Christ sake, the government approvals had come through. But he just kept saying that none of that mattered, that he had killed people and he had to pay the price. I tried all ways to Sunday to get him to change his mind. I even told him about having every penny of my own money tied up in QX4 shares. D’you know what he said, Cal. Do you?”

  I just shake my head.

  “He said that he would ask his Dad to pay me what I had lost. His Dad! I told him I could never handle the humiliation of taking money from Mr. Wallace, cap in hand. I tried so hard to reason with him but he just kept fiddling with the fucking crap in his damn tackle box and saying the same thing over and over and over: ‘I have to pay the price, Brad. I have to pay the price.’

  “I snapped. I couldn’t help myself. It was like watching someone else do it. I snatched the fishing knife out of his hand and suddenly there it was sticking out of his gut. He fell back on the sofa and blood was pouring out of his chest. He tried to grab the knife and pull it out but he couldn’t. I just stood there like an idiot and watched him die. He was staring at me. He…”

  He looks into the far distance, a wild stare in his eyes.

  “What did you do then?” I ask.

  “What? Oh… I wanted to just run out of there but I managed to get myself under control. For some reason, I didn’t seem to have any blood on me. So I got a cloth from the kitchen and wiped my fingerprints off the handle of the knife. Then I took both his hands and put them round the knife handle and pushed it hard into his chest, so that it would look like he did it himself. It almost made me puke. After, I took the tackle box downstairs—he always kept it in the closet in the spare bedroom—and that was when I saw your jacket lying on the bed. There was blood on it and I just thought that…” His voice tapers off.

  We are silent, deep in our own thoughts.

  “Cal. Does anyone have to know about this? Can you help me out here? The police think it was suicide right?”

  I reach inside my shirt and pull out the tiny microphone and its transmitter. With a crushing sadness, I shake my head. “You know what Brad? You were right. It was all circumstantial. It was your confession that I needed. Positive think your way out of that.” As soon as the last sentence leaves my lips, I regret the meanness of it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You’ll never know how much.”

  Steve and Stammo walk in. The former gives me a smile, the latter a nod. Now we do have enough evidence to get a court order and really go find that phone. The bluff was risky, but it worked.

  So, I did it. I solved Kevin’s murder. The goal that has been my obsession for the last three weeks has finally been reached. I have fulfilled my promise to Kevin’s father and may, just may, have earned enough brownie points to find a way back into the VPD. But the victory is Pyrrhic. The elation I should be feeling right now is dust in my mouth. I would give just about anything for it not to be Brad. With Kevin and Roy gone, I really wanted him back as a friend, so my mind resisted accepting him as the killer. Arnold’s genuine surprise about the blood on my jacket eliminated him and forced me to accept that it was Brad. As Holmes said, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  But why? Why did it have to be Brad?

  61

  Cal

  The room feels very still. He is propped up against the pillows, his head slightly to one side, his gaunt hands beside him on top of the covers. I sit in one of the chairs beside the bed and take his hand as gently as I can. I am afraid that a harsh grip would turn it to powder, like the wings of a moth.

  “Hello, Cal,” he says without opening his eyes. “Have you come to tell me who killed my son?” His voice is strong, clear and fluent.

  I swallow. “Yes sir, I have.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was Brad.” Saying the words hurts.

  His eyes open wide and drill into mine. “Brad? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. He just confessed to it ten minutes ago.”

  “But why ever would Brad…” He shakes his head. His voice drops to a whisper. “I suppose that it was about money.”

  “Yes, sir. It was.”

  He shakes his head, a gesture of both amazement and sadness.

  “I was sure that you were going to say that…” his voice peters out.

  “…that it was Arnold?” I finish the sentence for him.

  He frowns, puzzled. “No. That’s ridiculous. Arnold is incapable of hurting anyone in this family. I was thinking of someone else entirely.”

  Who can he have suspected? He looks at me, eyebrows raised, wanting details about Brad.

  “There were some problems with the drug Kevin was developing and he wanted to stop working on it.” Sharing Arnold’s concern, I sanitize the story.

  He smiles. “Thank you for trying to keep it from me Cal… at Arnold’s request no doubt. But I know about the tests that Kevin performed. I know what went wrong, the deaths, everything. Now tell me about Brad.”

  I tell him the whole story. Every sordid detail. At the end, he squeezes my hand.

  “Alexander and Cleitus.” Even so close to death’s door his agile mind has drawn the perfect parallel from Henry V. Despite my Masters in Literature, I will never know the Bard the way Mr. Wallace does.

  “Thank you for unearthing the truth, Cal. My wife wanted it covered up but that was never my way.”

  In the silence, a question pushes itself to the fore.

  “Can I ask you something sir?”

  “Of course you may.” He chuckles. “Ask while I can still answer.”

  “As you probably know, I was beaten up by a gang of drug dealers. Afterward, in the hospital, Arnold asked me if it was because of my investigation of Kevin’s murder.”

  He chuckles. “Yes, I told him to ask you that. He didn’t know why either.”

  “Why did you, sir? It was partly right.”

  “When Kevin went to work at QX4, I invested some money in the company and put Arnold on the Board to keep his eye on things. A couple of years later when George Walsh came along with his millions, everyone was very happy to have him invest but I was suspicious of him. He seemed to invest without really checking the company out, which was most unusual. So I checked him out.


  “A former army friend runs a successful private inquiry agency. He gave me a very thick report on Mr. Walsh. There was no absolute proof of criminal activity but it was clear he was making a lot more money than his legitimate businesses could possibly generate. My source believed it was almost certainly drugs. I realized we had a viper in our midst. I tried without success to buy him out of QX4 but he would not budge.

  “When Kevin died, I felt sure that Walsh was behind it and when I heard that you had been attacked by a gang of drug dealers, I thought there must be a connection. I knew if Arnold planted the seed, you would follow it up. You see, I wanted you to prove independently that George Walsh murdered my son. I wanted that man dealt with.”

  I realize with a twinge that even Mr. Wallace has manipulated me.

  “It worked. He has been dealt with.”

  “What?”

  “Walsh. He’s been arrested for money laundering and kidnapping. More charges relating to drugs will be coming. The evidence is very compelling. He’s going to be spending most of the rest of his life in jail.”

  “You’ve been busy, Cal.”

  “Yes sir.”

  We sit in silence. It feels peaceful. Mr. Wallace has been a force in my life for the last twenty-five years and he is the closest thing I have had to a father.

  “I found my father, sir.”

  His eyes open wide. “How many surprises do you have for me today?” he asks. “Who is he? When am I going to meet him?”

  “I’m afraid that he’s dead. Killed by Walsh’s gang.”

  I tell him everything about Roy and I cannot help expressing my grief at his loss and my anger that I never knew he was my father until it was too late. When I finally run out of steam, he squeezes my hand and says, “Cal, when you think of him, remember the good times that you had, have compassion for him and know that he was trying to do what he thought was best for you, as much as he was able.”

  I absorb his words. Compassion: something that is in short supply on the streets of the downtown east side; something that is needed there.