by Dan Ames
The Spook moved silently to the back door, gently twisted the doorknob, knowing it would be locked. If they locked the trailer, they would certainly lock the door to the house. He reached for the doorbell and stopped. A single flowerpot sat off to the side, near a downspout. It was a small clay pot with a single flower. He walked over, tipped it to the side, and picked up the key sitting underneath.
The key slid into the lock and the door opened without a sound. He stood in the kitchen, briefly overwhelmed by the combined scents of cooked sausage and old people. A block sat next to the stove with five knife handles jutting out. He selected the one with the longest, thinnest blade and went into the room with the television.
As he approached the man in the chair, he smiled at the thought of how sometimes the strangest opportunities arose in the middle of completely unexpected situations. Because right now, he was sort of happy.
He had killed all kinds of people. Innocent. Guilty. White. Black. Poor. Rich. Thin. Fat. But unless he was mistaken, this was going to be his first official Canadian.
Exciting!
6
“That’s impossible.”
Amanda Collins looked at me. She didn’t blink.
“There is no way anyone would have wanted Benjamin killed. He was just a kid.”
For the first time, emotion crept into her eyes and with them, a flash of anger.
“Just a dumb, innocent kid,” she repeated. “With his whole life ahead of him.”
The accusation was there, unsaid.
“Can you tell me anything?” I said. “Anything at all? Maybe Benjamin was friends with the wrong crowd. Maybe–”
“That’s just it, I can’t tell you anything, because I wasn’t there.”
The house had become silent. Deep shadows filled the living space.
“I wasn’t there,” she repeated.
Her lower lip trembled and I knew our conversation was about to end. Sure enough, she quickly stood.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “Not now. Not with you.”
I hesitated, surprised by the suddenness of her emotions. Finally, I stood and handed her one of my business cards. “Okay. My cell phone’s on there, and my email. Maybe if you think of something you can call me. I do want you to know that I’m going to find out what happened.” This time, the emotion came up on me suddenly, too.
Without waiting for a reply, I left, closing the door behind me. I got in my car, and pulled away, speeding through downtown Birmingham until I caught a light on Woodward. I slapped the steering wheel with my hands.
Why was I putting myself through this? Let it go.
That was the thing. I had to let it go. But I couldn’t now. I had to find out who this killer was. Or more importantly, who had hired him. My hope had been during the fallout from my last case that someone would manage to ferret out the killer’s role in the murder of the guitar builder. But no one had. Despite intense pressure from prosecutors.
So it was back to me.
The light changed and I gunned the Taurus. There was only light traffic on the freeway, and I made it back to Grosse Pointe quickly. I parked in the space behind my building, went in the back door and took the stairs to my office. The building was constructed in the 1920s and the first floor is a jewelry store. If I ever wanted to spend my daughters’ college funds, I could go in there and buy my wife a pair of earrings.
I unlocked the door that bore the name Grosse Pointe Investigations and went through the reception area to my office.
The file Ellen had copied and given to me was the official file on the Benjamin Collins case. I’d already been over it dozens of times and to say that it was slim reading was an understatement. But now, I went to my file cabinet and pulled out all of my files on the case. I hadn’t looked at some of them in years but now that I had a new, albeit very small, piece of the puzzle to work with I might see something new in the material that I had studied for years.
I made a pot of coffee using the last of my Peet’s blend. I used to have it shipped to me from the West Coast, but the chain had expanded and now there was one just down the block from me.
I waited until the coffee was done, poured myself a cup, and dug into the files. Most of the information contained in the documents was already committed to my memory. And stating that wasn’t a sign of my ego run wild. Because I was never a great student. It had more to do with the combination of two facts. One, I had read everything dozens of times front to back. And two, there wasn’t a whole lot of information to go on.
The parents of Benjamin Collins had both died in a plane crash in the Bahamas, approximately five years before his murder. The father had been an engineer, the mother a school teacher. Amanda was his only sibling.
After the plane crash, the kids had moved in with their only living relative. He was the father’s brother, a divorced stockbroker with a drinking problem. When Amanda was sixteen, she left home. Benjamin had stayed with the uncle, but was known as a loner at school. He hadn’t played sports, didn’t belong to any clubs and had virtually no friends to speak of.
A thorough investigation into the uncle had revealed nothing. The man worked all day as a financial consultant and drank himself to sleep while watching old movies. For Benjamin, he had been both useless and harmless.
I stayed at it until most of the coffee was gone and what was left had turned ice cold. A glance at the clock told me it was time to go home.
Instead, I called my best friend. His name was Nate Becker and he was a reporter for the Grosse Pointe Times.
“Lunch tomorrow?” I asked, after he finally picked up.
“Where?”
The thing about Nate is that he should have been a restaurant reviewer, because all he thought about was food. If you were having lunch with him, halfway into the meal he would make a comment about what he was doing for dinner. It was almost like the minute he realized a meal was in his grasp, he started planning for the next one. So instead of saying hello to me and asking how I was, he asked first about the restaurant. It was kind of a half-joke. Okay, it was maybe one-percent joke, ninety-nine percent serious.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How about that new Thai place?”
“Are you writing it off?”
I sighed.
Reporters didn’t make much, especially small town reporters like Nate. Plus, he had a kid with special medical needs. If my lunch request had something to do with a case I was working on and I was getting information from Nate during the meal then it was tax-deductible. Or so the theory went.
“Yes. But it’s only lunch. Let’s be reasonable.”
“Reasonable is not an option. I ate there yesterday. It’s really good food.”
Which was high praise from Nate. Usually, he was a pretty big food snob.
Suddenly, my company credit card and I both became very nervous.
“Okay, meet you there at noon, straight-up,” I said.
We disconnected, I locked up the office and headed home.
The Collins file was tucked underneath my arm.
7
If there is a better smell than my wife’s hazelnut pesto it has yet to be discovered. To walk in the door and be greeted with the smell of basil and garlic, the warmth of a welcoming kitchen, the sight of my gorgeous wife and the sound of my daughters’ voices never failed to remind me that fate has been far too kind to me.
“As usual, your timing never fails to impress,” my wife, Anna, said to me as I walked into the kitchen. She stood, leaning against the counter with a glass of red wine in her hand. Everything great about Italy is represented in my wife. Dark hair, beautiful, expressive brown eyes, and a body more beautiful than the hills of Tuscany. And probably just as bountiful.
Of course, the cliché of the Italian temper actually applied in Anna’s case. When Vesuvius blew, you had better run for cover.
I went over, kissed her, spied the bottle of wine and poured myself a glass.
“It’s a sixth sense,” I said, ref
erring to my wife’s conviction that I somehow instinctively know when dinner is ready because I have a knack for arriving just as she’s about to put the food on the table.
“Girls!” Anna called out.
I heard the footsteps racing down the hallway upstairs, and then Isabel and Nina came rushing down the stairs and into the kitchen. Isabel, the first born, came and gave me a hug. Nina, as befitting the baby of the family, ignored me and went straight to the food.
Both girls had inherited my wife’s fine Italian features, all dark hair and big brown eyes.
I forced a hug on Nina and we sat down together. The pasta was delicious and I heard all about the girls’ activities at school, including a spill for Isabel on the playground and a ‘mean’ comment from one of Nina’s teachers.
Afterward, the girls went back upstairs to finish their homework and I cleaned the kitchen while Anna watched me. She glanced over at the stack of files I had dumped on the counter near the kitchen doorway.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
I finished loading the dishwasher, started it, and refilled our wine glasses. We moved into the living room. Anna took the couch; I took one of the chairs that formed a semi circle around the fireplace.
“It is,” I admitted. “I met with Benjamin’s sister, Amanda, today.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I thought she lived overseas or something.”
“She did. She just moved back.”
“How’d that go?”
“As you’d expect. I didn’t learn anything, but I gave her my card. Maybe she’ll think of something.”
She tapped the side of her glass with a fingernail.
“And how are you doing?” she asked.
“Fine.”
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“I saw Barbie today,” Anna said, her voice flat.
Barbie is how she referred to Elizabeth Pierce, the woman I had been engaged to until Benjamin Collins’ murder. Needless to say, the relationship ended that night, along with everything else. I quickly realized that it’s pretty difficult to marry someone who won’t speak to you or return your calls.
“Where?” I asked.
The Pierce family was one of the wealthiest families in Grosse Pointe. Elizabeth’s father, Charles, had something to do with the auto industry. Her brother, Edward, had long since left Michigan. The family, I believed, still owned one of the monster mansions on Lake Shore Drive. Elizabeth, as far as I knew, had never married, and I knew she had bought a place in Grosse Pointe Farms, but I didn’t know if she actually lived there. Everyone knew that the Pierce family had homes all around the world, including spots in Aspen, Paris and Monaco, to name a few.
It was rare to see any of them in public.
“The village.”
I nodded. The little town of Grosse Pointe had a main street lined with the usual stuff; a Kroger, Trader Joe’s, coffee places, bagel shops and some clothing stores.
“Sort of near your office,” she said.
I caught the tone in her comment and smirked. “Well, she didn’t pay me a visit if that’s what you were wondering.”
“Are you sure she didn’t hire you to investigate her panties?”
A note here: my wife has a sense of humor that ranges from sarcastic to bawdy and back again.
It’s one of the reasons I love her.
“I don’t take on cold cases,” I answered.
Anna laughed.
“Speaking of cold cases,” she said. “Tell me about the files.”
I knew what she was asking. Ever since the conclusion of my last case, she knew I was going to be digging back into Benjamin’s murder.
“Just going back through the files again, looking at them in a new light,” I said. “The fact that someone had to hire this guy has a lot of ramifications.”
“Unless someone didn’t hire him,” Anna pointed out. “You’re making a bit of an assumption. Contract killers are probably psychos by nature. You don’t know that he doesn’t kill people for a living and also kill people for fun, as a hobby. Maybe even as practice.”
“True. But not likely.”
“So you’re going to follow the money,” Anna said. She took a sip of wine.
I hadn’t yet articulated that thought, but it was in the back of my mind.
Follow the money.
Up until my last case, I had looked at all kinds of scenarios. I’d investigated criminals who had been on the streets at the time of the murder, even thoroughly researched sex offenders in the area. But I hadn’t really looked at murder-for-hire.
“Yes, I’m going to follow the money. I wonder how much contract killers go for these days.”
“I’m sure like everything else they’ve gone up quite a bit in price,” she said.
“I’m taking Nate out to lunch tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to ask him to help me on that direction. He’s great at sniffing out financial stuff.”
“You know, it would probably be cheaper for you just to buy a restaurant than to keep buying him meals.”
“I don’t know, it would be tough to maintain inventory.”
“Do you think he’ll be able to help?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’ve covered one end of the case front to back. But he can help with the other.”
“Following the money,” Anna said.
I nodded.
8
Judging by the small but complete line of cosmetics in the man’s bathroom the Spook figured the old guy was either a working transvestite, or a widower.
He was going with the latter.
The bathroom was small and mostly clean. It had a white tile floor and plaster walls with a sink, a shower, and a toilet that had one of those shag seat covers.
The Spook guessed that the wife’s death had to have been within the last year or two. Long enough for the man, now dead, to have gotten rid of most of his deceased wife’s belongings, but a few things here and there still remained.
Which was perfect.
First, the Spook cleaned his wounds with hot water and soap, then dabbed at them with hydrogen peroxide. The bleeding had stopped, and the puncture wound was nearly closed. The gash looked a lot better now that it was clean. There would probably be a pretty gruesome scar, but he didn’t mind that.
He smeared some anti-infection ointment on the cuts and popped a handful of Tylenol.
In addition to locating a trove of makeup at the back of the bathroom closet, the Spook had ventured into the dead man’s bedroom. On the top shelf of the closet, he had found a tin box, unlocked, that contained the man’s passport along with a .32 revolver that looked like it was about fifty years old. But the barrel was clean, and there was one box of twenty-five rounds. He could make do with that.
The name on the passport read Irvin G. Klapper.
The Spook propped the passport open to reveal Irv’s picture. The white hair wouldn’t be a problem, and he now had the man’s glasses. He’d had to clean the blood off the lenses, of course, and bend the frames slightly to adjust to his narrower head.
When it came to disguises, he was really quite good. They had an entire course at Langley that would put cosmetology schools to shame. He had done quite well. The Spook wasn’t worried about pulling it off. He even bet that somewhere in Mr. Klapper’s closet was the same shirt he had worn for his passport photo. That would be the perfect touch.
The biggest challenge was the weight.
The Spook was a slim man, wiry, with the kind of fast-twitch muscles that he had honed in order to speed his already legendary reflexes.
Irv Klapper had been a slow-twitch kind of guy, with a slightly doughy face.
No problem.
First, some cotton balls went in his cheeks, and then a layer of concealer with a bit of blush to try to capture Mr. Klapper’s clear case of rosacea. Next, he combined talcum powder with lemon juice and water, mixed it together in a bowl, and borrowed one of Irv’s combs to streak it through his hair. On w
ent the old man’s glasses, and the Spook felt pretty good about his appearance.
In the bedroom, he found a plaid shirt that closely resembled the one Klapper wore for his passport photo. Apparently, the dead man had very little need for cash because the only money the Spook could find was the sixty-three dollars in Irv’s wallet. He grabbed an extra shirt that he would tie around his midsection to give the appearance of a flabby gut.
All in all, he looked a lot like Irv.
He helped himself to a turkey and Swiss sandwich on rye bread, washed it down with a tall glass of water and decided it was time to go. He put the wallet in his pants pocket, grabbed the keys to the Buick and carried the passport and the gun out to the car. He popped the trunk and stashed the gun and ammunition in the spare tire well underneath the floor.
The Spook got behind the wheel, took one last look at the Klapper residence and pulled out onto the street. He immediately turned right, knowing that the tunnel to the U.S. was less than a mile away.
He saw several signs directing him to the border crossing and wondered if anyone drove anywhere else on this road because those were the only signs he saw.
This was not good. The Spook knew that. This was not how he liked to operate. He was a professional. Trying to cross the border with a homemade disguise was downright foolish. However, despite that knowledge, he liked his chances.
The line was short and soon he was handing over Irv Klapper’s passport to the customs officer. A woman with short brown hair and stubby fingers.
“Reason for visiting the United States?” the woman asked.
“I’m spending the weekend with my brother,” the Spook answered. “He’s in assisted living and hates it. He could use some cheering up.”
It was the voice that would make the difference. He had been practicing while waiting in line. He had to get the sound of an older man’s voice just right. He’d never heard the real Irv Klapper speak, he’d only heard the man gurgle once he’d slit his throat. The Spook made a mental note: the next time you kill someone who you are going to impersonate, let them speak first.
