by Brad Smith
“Yeah.”
“Claire could find it,” Buddy said, putting the slip of paper back on the bar.
“Yeah, but I can’t find her,” Virgil said. “She took off this morning after Ronnie Red Hawk and she hasn’t returned my messages. Which is odd.”
“You two aren’t scrapping, are you?”
“No.”
“Maybe she’s someplace where she can’t get a signal,” Buddy said. “You could call the state police, ask them to send her a message.”
“I did think of that. They’re going to ask a lot of questions, though.”
“They probably are.”
“With my luck, I’d get Joe Brady and I’ve had enough of Joe Brady to last me,” Virgil said. He tapped the paper. “So the only way I can get the phone records is to go through the cops.”
“That’s the only way you can do it,” Buddy said. Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, he reached for the paper on the bar. “I need the date and time of day in question.”
“Are you saying you know somebody?”
“Come on, Virgil. Of course I know somebody.”
• • •
After Buddy made a couple of calls, he said they would have to wait to hear back, and they might as well wait at his place. He bought a twelve-pack to go and when they got to his cottage he opened two beers and proceeded to fry up a dozen perch he’d caught that morning in the little cove out front. Virgil sat at a wooden table that was covered with textbooks and papers and watched Buddy at the stove. He picked up one of the books. It was a volume of New York State Supreme Court decisions.
“What is this?” he asked.
Buddy, slicing potatoes and onions into a skillet, glanced over. “My homework.”
“No, seriously.”
“I can’t have homework?”
“You can have homework,” Virgil said. “You could have a belt too, but you don’t.”
“Up yours,” Buddy said. “I’m going to write for the bar. I’m sick of living hand to mouth. I got a degree in law thirty years ago, before I joined the force, so I’m going to try to pass the bar.”
“Well, well.”
“I’d be a good lawyer, Virgil,” Buddy said. “I’ve seen all the shit and heard all the shit and even caused my fair share of it. And I’m a lot smarter than I look.”
“I’d hire you,” Virgil said.
“The way you find trouble, you’ll probably have me on a retainer.”
They ate on the back deck, sitting on wobbly lawn chairs, plates balanced on their laps. Virgil nursed his beer; he had no idea how much more driving he would have to do before the day was done. Buddy kept pounding them back, with little apparent effect.
The sun was setting behind them as they finished the perch and potatoes, the last rays reflecting in a broad orange corridor across the surface of the river. The Hudson became noisy with the approaching dusk, with the constant croaking of frogs and the sporadic calling of loons. A pair of mergansers splashed down not fifty feet from Buddy’s dock and began diving for their supper.
Buddy ate the last piece of fish and put his plate on the low wooden table between them. He lit a cigarette and had a long look at Virgil, as if analyzing him. Of course, Buddy, for all his excesses and faults, was nothing if not an analytical guy. They’d been pretty quiet while they were eating. Now, with his belly full and beer in hand, he was apparently ready for some conversation, although not necessarily serious discourse.
“How long you owned that hat?” he asked.
Virgil couldn’t remember which cap he’d plopped on his head when leaving the house, so he took it off to have a look.
“A while,” he said, putting it back on.
“Since you played for them?”
“Yeah.”
“How long were you a Mud Hen?”
“Three years.”
“What did you hit?”
“Overall? Only .226. But I was hitting .260 when they let me go.”
“So why’d they let you go?”
Virgil shrugged. “Injuries mostly. That, and the off-speed stuff killed me. Especially the changeup. Word got around, I guess, and pretty soon that’s all I saw. But I was starting to wait on it. And .260 isn’t bad.”
Buddy took a pull on the smoke. “How was your arm?”
“Pretty good. I threw out thirty-one percent of base runners my last year. League average was twenty-three.”
Buddy smiled. “Tell me—what was your grade average your last year of high school?”
Virgil frowned. “I got no idea.”
The phone rang inside and Buddy got to his feet. “Ballplayers,” he said. “You know your stats from Little League on, but you don’t have a clue how much money you’ve got in your pocket right this minute, do you?”
“How much money I’ve got in my pocket doesn’t matter,” Virgil told him. “By the way, my on-base percentage was over three hundred.”
Buddy laughed and went inside and Virgil could hear him talking on the phone for several minutes. When he came out, he was carrying two unopened cans of beer in one hand and his cell phone and a sheet of foolscap in the other. Tossing a beer to Virgil, he sat down in the lawn chair and put his phone on the table.
“The phone number the kid gave you is with Verizon,” he said, looking at the paper. “And it’s registered to a woman named Martha Jones.”
Virgil smiled.
“You know her?” Buddy asked.
“Nope,” Virgil said. “She doesn’t exist.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“She’s the character Olivia Burns was playing in the movie.”
“All right,” Buddy said. “So she bought a phone plan under a bogus name so the paparazzi and other assorted riffraff couldn’t track her down. Probably standard procedure for actors.” He glanced at the paper again. “You’re looking for the night of the fifteenth, from ten o’clock on, right? She made two calls, one to a landline in LA listed to a guy named Curnew, the other to a cell phone in Chicago, under the name Burns. A relative, I assume.”
Whoever Olivia Burns had been calling, Virgil doubted that those people had any involvement in her death. There was too much geography in the way. “What about incoming calls?”
“Sixteen,” Buddy said.
“Sixteen?” Virgil said, leaning forward to look at the foolscap. “Are you sure about that?”
“The records don’t lie,” Buddy said. “Sixteen calls.”
“You got the numbers?”
“I got one number,” Buddy said. He offered the paper forward so that Virgil could see. “The same person called her sixteen times in—well, roughly an hour and a half. The last call was made just after midnight. The phone has not been used since.”
Virgil opened the beer Buddy had tossed him and took a long drink before asking the obvious question. “So who made the calls? You have a name?”
“No name,” Buddy said. “Well, not a person’s name anyway. The phone plan is registered to a company out of New York City.” At this point he handed the paper to Virgil. “The company’s called Big Deal Productions. Gee, that sounds like somebody in the film business, Virgil.”
Virgil took the foolscap and read what Buddy had jotted down there in a nearly illegible scrawl. Two calls going out and sixteen coming in, all of the incoming from the same number. All from somebody employed by the company shooting Frontier Woman.
“I suppose,” he said slowly, his eyes still on the numbers in front of him, “I suppose there’s a chance that the person who called her sixteen times in an hour and a half had nothing to do with her death.”
“Yeah—about the same chance as me not finishing this beer,” Buddy said, and he took a long slug from the can to drive home his point.
Virgil nodded as he got to his feet. He carefully folded the foolscap in half, then quarters.
“Where you going now?”
“Find Claire,” Virgil said. “And tell her this. Or find out who has the phone that matche
s this number, and tell her that.”
“How you figure to do that?” Buddy asked. “You got a plan?”
“I got about half a plan.” Virgil indicated Buddy’s cell phone on the table. “Can I borrow that?”
Buddy thought about it for a couple of seconds and then handed the phone over.
“Watch yourself,” he said.
“Hey, I know what I’m doing,” Virgil said. He turned to go but then stopped, looking at the phone in his hand. “Um . . . you’d better show me how to use this thing.”
• • •
It was nearly six o’clock when Claire drove into Watertown from the south, parked in the city police department lot, and went inside. Chief Heisman was still in her office, despite the hour, hunched over her desk and inexpertly typing something into her computer.
“You’re back,” the chief said, glancing up briefly before returning to the laptop. “Looking for more information on Ronnie Red Hawk?”
“No,” Claire said. “This time I’m looking for Ronnie Red Hawk.”
Heisman cocked an eyebrow but continued her search-and-peck at the keyboard. “And you have reason to think he’s in the Watertown area?”
“Not a good reason, no,” Claire said. “But he’s gone on a walkabout and I hear he owns property east of here. Some sort of retreat where he goes to—I don’t know—talk to the bears and the birds and the frogs and the turtles.”
“And you’re thinking he might talk to you too, when he’s done with the turtles and whatever.”
Claire looked around and saw a chair against the wall, just inside the door. She went over to sit in it. “Actually, I’m thinking he may have gone there to chill out after he killed a couple of women down in the Kingston area.”
That was enough for Heisman to abandon whatever she’d been typing. She hit a couple of keys and then shut the laptop. “If you have a warrant for his arrest, why doesn’t my department know about it?”
“I haven’t gotten to the warrant stage yet,” Claire said. “Right now I just want to have a conversation with the man.”
Heisman leaned back in her chair and rested a pair of heavy brogue shoes on the desktop. She had huge feet. “But you suspect him of killing two people?”
“At the very least,” Claire said. “That’s just down in my neck of the woods. Bill Sully tells me there’s a theory that Ronnie spiked some crystal meth that took out a character named Syracuse Sid a few years ago.”
“We were never able to prove that,” Heisman said.
“If something is true, it’s true whether you can prove it or not.”
Heisman nodded, regarding Claire cautiously for a moment, as if there was something not right about the equation. “So you’re here to beard the lion in his den.”
Claire shrugged.
“Tell me something, Detective,” Heisman said then. “Is the state police department overwhelmingly shorthanded at this time?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Then why in the name of Jesus would you even consider going after a murder suspect holed up in the wilderness all by yourself?”
“Like I said, I just want to talk to him,” Claire said. “The man loves to babble and you and I both know the more a suspect talks, the better the chance he’ll say something to incriminate himself. And that’s even more true when the suspect in question considers himself to be the chosen one. This guy is delusional.”
“Which is a pretty good argument for backup right there,” Heisman said.
“No,” Claire said. “He’s not going to talk if I go in there with a team of officers. First he’ll clam up and then he’ll lawyer up.”
“I wasn’t suggesting a team,” Heisman said. “I’ll go with you.”
Claire got to her feet. “I appreciate the offer. Let me sleep on it. I’m going to get a room and go looking for him in the morning.”
Heisman stood now as well. “Up to you,” she said. “Just so you know, I’ll never forgive you if you get yourself shot in my bailiwick. I hate it when I have explaining to do.”
Claire smiled. “I’ll bear that in mind. Now I need you to show me where this little retreat is.”
“Ronnie’s retreat is anything but little,” Heisman said, indicating a large area map, maybe six feet square, on the far wall. “Come have a look,” she said.
• • •
Claire got a room at the Comfort Inn a few blocks from the interstate. She ate an early dinner at a diner alongside a ball field a couple of blocks from the hotel, then bought a copy of the local paper at a corner store and went back to her room.
The paper didn’t have much to offer. The city council was squabbling over the same things that Claire imagined every city council in the country was fighting over—crime, zoning issues, budgets, who insulted whom in the course of the previous day’s squabble. Those quoted in print were variously outraged, insulted, or mortified, depending upon their respective roles in the dealings in question. One woman claimed to be “gobsmacked,” a word Claire had always admired but never thought to use. She glanced at the sports section to see that the Mets were a depressing twelve games under five hundred. Claire despaired of them ever winning again. She did the word jumble in the classified section in less than a minute and tossed the paper aside, got an outside line, and dialed Virgil’s number. No answer. It was a quarter past eight; he was probably fixing a tractor or feeding calves or wandering about the property as he sometimes did in the evenings, seemingly without purpose, although Claire knew that his mind was always on what needed to be done the following day or week or month. There was a lot more going on in that head of his than he’d like her—or anybody else—to believe.
She picked up the remote and flipped through the channels until she found a black-and-white movie, with Myrna Loy and William Powell swilling gin and cracking wise while a young Jimmy Stewart lurked in the background. She settled in to watch for a while, thinking that William was a little too old for Myrna. She tried Virgil again at nine and then once more at ten, but there was still no reply. She wondered where he could be. Maybe he’d come home and gone to sleep and she’d missed him. He didn’t have a phone upstairs. Claire was a little surprised he had one at all.
By the time she dozed off, she’d decided to go after Ronnie Red Hawk by herself in the morning. For some strange reason, she’d determined that he was hers to take down. It had nothing to do with sharing the credit with Chief Heisman or anybody else, it was just that she felt he was her responsibility. Not only that, but she was reluctant to put anybody else in the man’s path.
She would go it on her own.
TWENTY-ONE
The cabin had been built against the rock face of a low-running cliff and looked east to the rising sun. The exterior was constructed of logs of white pine, which Ronnie had paid a considerable cost to ship from northern Ontario. A couple hundred feet from the main cabin was a smaller building, which housed the generator. The shed was heavily insulated; from the front porch of the cabin one could barely hear the steady rumble of the diesel engine.
Ronnie sat in the front room eating Cap’n Crunch from a bowl and watching television, flipping from one morning show to another. He was on his second bowl of cereal. He’d come to the cabin three days earlier, after his last conversation with Kari Karson, intending to fast for a week and clear his head. So far, he’d been unable to deliver himself to the fasting part of his plan. In fact, he’d been eating prodigiously since Billy had dropped him off in the limo. Steaks and lobster and chicken and pizza. A lot of pizza; Billy had found some frozen ones, new on the market, that really did taste like they came from a pizzeria.
Ronnie wasn’t exactly roughing it. The cabin was every bit as nice as his penthouse suite back at the Red Hawk Hotel. He’d had it built two years earlier at a cost of just under a million dollars. Of course, the price had been high because the place was set back two miles from the nearest road and all of the building materials had to be hauled in over a rough lane that had been bul
ldozed through the center of the two-thousand–acre parcel. The place had three bathrooms, central air, satellite television, and a walk-in freezer that would hold enough food for a bivouacking army.
Only Billy knew what the retreat was like and Billy wouldn’t tell tales about it, not if he wanted to have a future on the planet. The other Indians back at Running Dog were under the impression that Ronnie came here to live in a traditional tepee and to fast on a rocky crag for days on end. Those Indians didn’t need to know the truth. Ronnie had given them virtually everything they had. He wasn’t under any obligation to give them truth as well. What the hell would they do with it?
Maybe he would begin his fast tomorrow. He’d told Billy to pick him up on Monday, which meant he could still go three days without food, three days to try to figure out where his head was at after this latest assault on his heart.
If nothing else, he knew he was finished with actresses. Kari had been nothing like he’d imagined. She was neurotic and self-centered. Strangely enough, Ronnie had expected that of her, and he could have handled it. However, she was also ordinary, and that he hadn’t counted on. He’d fallen in love with her, admittedly from afar, because he’d been convinced that she was a special person—that she was, in fact, like Ronnie himself. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, if she were anything like Ronnie, she would have loved him from the start. Secondly, if they had truly been soul mates, she wouldn’t have proved to be so pedestrian. In the end, she had turned out to be no different than the dozens of cocktail waitresses working at the casino. Not only that, but—up close—her skin was not that great.
But none of that changed the fact that Ronnie had, right up until he had met her, loved her, and unconditionally. A broken heart takes time to heal.
After finishing the second bowl, he decided he needed to go for a walk. If he stayed in the cabin he would keep eating until Billy had to haul him out of there on a travois. He got out of his robe and pulled on pants and a T-shirt. He tucked a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 in his belt—in case of snakes or a rogue bear—and started down the narrow road out front. Fearful of the copperheads he’d seen occasionally sunning themselves on the rock outcroppings near the cabin, he stayed on the gravel lane. It was still cool in the forest, and he descended toward the south in mottled shade, thinking he would walk to the paved county road two miles away, and then back.
