Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  More silence.

  “Maybe he . . .” Miles frowned. “I went to the bathroom right before I heard the noise. This son of a bitch must have snuck in here and taken it off the wall while I was in the toilet.”

  Denkerberg took some notes, then looked up. “My experience tells me that thieves look for four things. In descending order: cash, guns, jewelry, electronics.”

  Miles’s jaw clenched.

  “You’re the author of all these famous crime novels—I assume part of what you do requires you to be able to put yourself in the mind of a criminal?”

  “So?”

  Denkerberg gave him a hard look. “So imagine that you’re a sneak thief, a common burglar. Probably stealing to pay for your next drug hit. You come into the house, I don’t know, through a window or something. You walk into this room. What’s the first thing you grab?”

  Miles didn’t say anything.

  The detective pointed at a beautiful double-barreled shotgun hanging over Miles’s desk. “I’m not a burglar, I admit. But nevertheless my eye is drawn to that, Mr. Dane. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s a Purdy. A twenty-gauge English best gun.”

  “Best gun?”

  “That’s the terminology they use in the English gun trade to describe the highest quality custom-made shotguns.”

  Denkerberg strolled over to it. “Boy, that’s a pretty thing. Look at the detail in that little hunting scene engraved on the side. Pheasants flying through the air and such.” She leaned closer. “My heavens, that sure looks like gold inlay, too.”

  “It’s gold, yes.”

  Denkerberg wrinkled her nose. “What’s a gun like this worth?”

  “Seventy, eighty grand,” Miles said softly.

  “My heavens!” she said again. Sister Herman Marie’s favorite expletive, as I recall. Denkerberg turned to Miles. “Okay, let’s try this again. You’re an imaginary crook, looking to make a quick score. You walk into this room. Do you grab the eighty-thousand-dollar gold-inlaid shotgun? Or the black stick?”

  Miles shrugged. “Look. I got up to go to the bathroom a couple times. Let’s say the perp sneaks in here at three in the morning while I’m in the john. Naturally, that time of night, he thinks everybody’s in bed—until he hears the toilet flush. So he goes, Oh, shit! There’s somebody in here! What am I gonna do? He’s frantic, he’s in a rush, no time to think, he just reaches out and grabs the closest weapon to his hand and runs out the door.”

  “Hm.” Denkerberg squinted skeptically. I could see she didn’t buy it. I wasn’t sure I did either. “Alright, Mr. Dane, I know this is unpleasant, but could you tell me about discovering your wife? What happened then?”

  Miles slumped backward into the soft cushions. His eyes slowly closed. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his voice coming out in a hoarse whisper. “My legs just got all weak, and I couldn’t stand up.”

  “Did you touch your wife?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t check her vital signs?”

  Miles’s eyes opened. “Check her vital signs! Jesus! Have a heart, lady. She was dead as a doornail. Any fool could see that. You’ve seen her! My God! I couldn’t touch her when she was that way!”

  “Easy, easy,” I said softly.

  “And how long did you sit there, Mr. Dane?”

  He shrugged.

  “Mr. Dane.”

  “How should I know? Five minutes?”

  “You had no urge to pursue the murderer?”

  “I already told you. He was gone by then.”

  Denkerberg nodded. She jotted down some more notes, stubbed out her Tiparillo. “Can you think of anyone who would want to do a thing like this to your wife, sir? Enemies, anything like that?”

  Miles looked at me incredulously, then gave me a sardonic, angry smile. “Enemies? Jesus H. Christ, lady! She’s not some goombah from the Gambino crime family. A scumbag thief broke in and killed her. This is not a mystery.”

  “Is there anything else really pressing, Detective?” I said quickly. “As you can see, Mr. Dane is having a tough time keeping it together. I may need to get a physician to take a look at him, maybe give him a little something so he can get some rest.”

  I had the impression that if Detective Denkerberg had been carrying a prayer book, she’d have given me a good lick in the back of the head.

  “One last question, Mr. Dane. How long between the time you discovered your wife and the time you called Mr. Sloan?”

  “Ten minutes? Five? Two?”

  “And he got here . . .”

  “Like twenty minutes later.”

  “And the police got here . . .”

  “Ten minutes after that. Around four.”

  “So from the time of her death until the time we got here was less than forty-five minutes?”

  Miles Dane looked at her for a moment, then looked away. “Could have been longer,” he said vaguely. “Could have been longer.”

  Three

  As I eased Miles into the cab I’d called to take him to a room over at the Pickeral Point Inn, I said, “From here on out, you don’t talk to the police outside of my presence. Understood?”

  “Absolutely. I understand.”

  “And absolutely no talking to reporters.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t even discuss the case with your best friend. Given who you are, this thing is likely to go nuts in about five minutes. We’ll need to manage it very, very delicately. Okay?”

  “I heard you the first time.” He was sounding testy now.

  “Good. Mouth shut. We’ll talk later.”

  Pickeral Point, Michigan—where I’ve made my home for the better part of a decade—is a small town about an hour north of Detroit. It’s the county seat of Kerry County, a small, axe-head-shaped jurisdiction that hugs the St. Clair River, reaching from some of Detroit’s easternmost suburbs up into farm country. Keep driving north and you end up in the “thumb” of Michigan that sticks out into Lake Huron. Pickeral Point has a row of big houses on the river, mostly owned by people who made lots of money working in Detroit and are now taking it easy; it has a salt factory, a boat factory, a mile-long boardwalk, and the usual collection of civic buildings befitting its place as county seat; and it has a view of the river only slightly spoiled by the row of oil refineries and chemical plants on its Canadian bank. When the wind is right, we don’t smell Canada.

  The big freighters on the river—like most everything else—pass us by. That’s why I came here. When I left Detroit a few years back, I’d had about enough excitement for one lifetime. Pickeral Point is a quiet, pleasant, solid, modest, earnest little town—the kind of place where nothing much happens. But it’s close enough to Detroit that word of things gets out pretty quickly. I suspected that within a few days Miles Dane was going to be a big red pushpin on the map of newsrooms all over America.

  I just hoped Miles wouldn’t chum the waters.

  After the cab had taken Miles off to the hotel, I caught up with Detective Denkerberg, who was talking to the forensic technician outside the house. “Did you find the missing stick?” I said pleasantly. “The bokken or whatever it’s called?”

  Detective Denkerberg eyed me for a moment. “We’re still looking, Mr. Sloan,” she said finally.

  I gave her my card. “If you need to chat with Mr. Dane again, call me first.” I gave her a big smile. “Just for efficiency’s sake, of course.”

  “Of course,” she said dryly.

  Four

  I am a drunk. Off the sauce for seven years now, but once a drunk, always a drunk. Sadly, my daughter Lisa has the same disease coursing through her veins that I do.

  Lisa had figured out that she had a problem a lot earlier in her life than I had. She’d worked the program, she’d gone to the meetings, she’d done everything right. I figured if a contrary old guy like me could stay on the wagon for seven years after having spent several decades as a drunk, then surely it wouldn’t be so hard for Lisa. She was a
wonderful girl, with most of her mother’s best traits and none of her bad ones. Except the drinking, maybe. She’d been on the program for four years now. It seemed like she ought to be out of the woods.

  But a drunk is never out of the woods.

  Lisa had called me—collect—from New York at two o’clock in the morning, just an hour and a half before Miles phoned. The throbbing music and loud conversation in the background told me she was in a bar. And her slurred, maudlin speech told me she was plowed.

  She had told me that she was quitting law school. It was her last year at Columbia, a hell of a time to be washing out of something she’d put that much effort into, or that she’d done that well at. She’d been a top student, law review, clerked for a big Wall Street firm. And now suddenly this? It didn’t make sense.

  So I did my paternal duty, told her to go home, get some sleep, find a meeting first thing tomorrow, then buckle down and finish up.

  “No, Daddy,” she wailed. “You don’t understand. I haven’t even gone to class for the past month. It’s over. I’m already done. I’m cooked.”

  I have to mention a little bit about our history here. My first wife, Lisa’s mother, left me when Lisa was three years old. Both of us were drinking heavily at the time, and the breakup was about as far from amicable as it could get. After Lisa’s mother moved to California, I didn’t see Lisa anymore. My own life was a mess, I remarried, my law practice was busy, my drinking was gradually consuming me, and so I simply walked away from my parental obligations to my daughter. I didn’t see Lisa again until after she graduated from college. I can offer no excuse for this. But it’s what happened.

  In the past few years, Lisa had come back into my life, working for my firm one summer after college, visiting for holidays, and so on. But in many ways we still verged on being strangers.

  That said, all parents—even the miserable ones like me—have the highest hopes for their children. My daughter was attractive, smart, determined. I figured the Ivy League law school was just another step toward some sort of ideal life I’d imagined for her. And I admit, I wanted to believe that my bad behavior hadn’t hobbled her for life, that some kind of fairy-tale life might await her despite my many failings as a father.

  So that phone call—coming out of the blue as it did—made me feel like I’d been kicked in the heart. It made me feel cheap and ineffectual, a failure at the one thing in life that really counted.

  “Still,” I had said weakly. “Sweetheart, it’s the last year. Everybody takes it easy toward the end. There’s plenty of time. Just buckle down and . . .”

  There was some coughing and fumbling on the other end. Finally, Lisa said, “I was hoping you’d understand, Dad. I was hoping I’d get your blessing.”

  “Blessing?” I said angrily. “For what? Bless you, my child, for embracing failure? Bless you, my child, for being a drunk and a quitter. Something along those lines?”

  Long pause. “Screw it,” she said finally. “I don’t even know why I called. Like you were ever any kind of father anyway.”

  More fumbling noises. It took me a moment to figure out that she’d simply dropped the phone, walked away, letting it swing on its tether.

  Like you were ever any kind of father anyway. The things that hurt the worst are usually the things that are the most true. I sat there for a while listening to the bar noises, the unfamiliar dance music that sounded like it had been written by some thuggish machine and not by a human being—and my chest was filled with a nameless, hollow yearning. A yearning for what, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wanted to save her. All I can say for certain is that I had done my child a terrible wrong and that I had a lot to make up for.

  Then again, there are wrongs so large that you can never really make up for them. But I felt I had to try.

  I had a pretty sure instinct that the Miles Dane investigation was going to get hot, fast. There was a lot of work to be done if I was going to keep Miles Dane from getting burned by that heat. So I probably should have gone straight to the office and gotten started on the case.

  But I didn’t. Just then, Miles Dane didn’t seem like much of a priority. By ten o’clock I was on a plane to New York.

  Five

  I had never been to Lisa’s place in Manhattan, but I knew the address. After catching the bus into Manhattan from La Guardia, I took the C train up to 103rd Street, hiked over just past West End Avenue, and rang the bell outside the seedy-looking foyer of her apartment. The run-down condition of the place gave me a feeling of foreboding.

  I had pushed the button three times before an irritated female voice finally came out of the speaker. “What?”

  “Lisa?” I said.

  “She’s not here.” Her roommate, I assumed. I’d spoken to her a couple of times on the phone, but we’d never had anything you could have described as being an actual conversation.

  “It’s Lisa’s father,” I said. “May I come up?”

  “Who?”

  “Her father. Please let me up.”

  There was a pause. “Why? She’s not here.”

  My daughter’s roommate was beginning to annoy me. “For crying out loud, just open the door.”

  There was another long pause. Finally, the door let out an angry buzz.

  I knocked on Lisa’s ugly brown door, Apartment 4D, after climbing an absurd number of stairs. I had to knock several times before a long, grudging series of clicking noises signaled that several locks were being opened. Then the door creaked open about an inch and a half.

  “Yes?” One red-rimmed eye glowered suspiciously at me. The chain was still on the door.

  “I was Lisa’s father when I pressed the buzzer about three minutes ago. It may surprise you to find out that climbing four flights of stairs has not changed that fact. Do you mind if I come in and wait?”

  The red-rimmed eye blinked. “For what?”

  “For Lisa to come back.”

  There was a loud television going in the background. “She’s not coming back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t know? She quit school. Left town last night.”

  “What!” My hope started draining out of me. “Where did she go? Back to California? To her mother’s?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Look, young lady,” I said. “I just flew all the way out here from Michigan. Am I being too Midwestern to hope that you might open the door so we don’t have to conduct this conversation through an inch-wide crack?”

  “I wasn’t aware we were having a conversation.” The eye continued to stare mulishly at me. “Lisa is not in New York. She’s gone. Deal with it, man.”

  The door shut in my face.

  Repeated banging on the door resulted only in the TV inside the room being turned up even louder.

  If Lisa had left for California, odds were that she was going back to stay with her mother. There was nothing more for me to do in New York. I went back down to the street and called the airport to see if I could catch an earlier flight back to Detroit. The listless voice on the phone told me that if I really wanted to, I could try standby . . . but all the flights for the rest of the day were overbooked.

  I hung up, walked down the street trying to figure out what to do next. After a while I passed a large chain bookstore. A thought occurred to me; I went inside and asked the young man at the information desk if he could help me find some books by Miles Dane.

  “Who?” he said.

  I repeated the name. He pecked at the keys on his computer, then shrugged. “Most of his stuff looks like it’s out of print. No, wait, his latest couple books are over at our warehouse. We could order one, you know, if you really want it.”

  “That’s alright.”

  “You might check out the Strand, downtown. They got all kind of old junk down there,” he said.

  I did as he suggested.

  The person I asked at the Strand—a huge, wonderful, ramshackle bookstore in the Village—was a great deal more helpful. H
e was about my age, with gray hair hanging down to his shoulders, a black turtleneck, clunky black boots—the perpetual graduate student look.

  “Oh, yeah!” he said. “Love Miles Dane! The old collector titles are flying out of the store right now. You must have heard the news, huh? Looks like he just whacked his wife.”

  So I was right. The news had already made it out of Michigan. And by the sound of it, Miles was already being touted by the media as the chief suspect.

  “Absolutely untrue,” I said. “She was killed, but he had nothing to do with it.”

  He frowned at me for a moment. “Well, whatever. Anyway, we’ve got a very rare first of Busted Knuckles. Not cheap, but, hey, pristine dust jacket and everything. And a really cool story, too. Very underrated. That one came out right after he shot that guy.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I said, my stomach suddenly rising into my throat. “He what?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know about that? Must have been like ’91,’92? He shot his editor at Padgett Books.”

  My heart started sinking. “Did this person die?”

  “Nah, nah, I think he just winged him or something. The guy didn’t even press charges.”

  I turned and started walking out of the store.

  “Hey, man,” he called. “What about that copy of Busted Knuckles?”

  Six

  I called Padgett Books and, after being shuffled around to a number of people, got through to a woman named Meredith Kline, who had a patrician English accent. After I’d explained who I was, she allowed that, yes, there had been an “incident” some years back involving my client. She seemed disinclined to talk about it, so I said, “I’ll be right over. It won’t take a minute, but I really need to get your statement on this matter.”

  Half an hour later I was taking an elevator up to the offices of the Padgett/Reinbeck/Dart Group International, PLC. According to the sign on the heavy glass door, the company owned what had once been about fifteen independent publishing companies, of which Padgett Books was obviously the flagship operation. A glass case next to the door of the spartan reception area contained a large display of Padgett’s recently published books.