Riel looked at me. He shook his head as if he were finally waking up. He was still holding onto the gun barrel. He put his other hand on Mr. Henderson’s hand. He said, “Listen to me, Tom. I know you didn’t kill Tracie.” He told Mr. Henderson about the body that had been found in the woods in Caledon and about the bullet that had been found there too. Told him that the guy had been killed with the same gun that had killed Tracie. He said he knew Mr. Henderson hadn’t done it because the guy who had been killed had been seen with Tracie’s ring just before he disappeared. The guy went to meet someone and never came back.
“When that happened,” Riel said, “when that guy disappeared—when he was killed—you were in detention, Tom. You understand what I’m saying? I know it wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been.”
Mr. Henderson hadn’t let go of the gun. Riel kept looking at him. His eyes never left Mr. Henderson. Then he said, “Tom”—that’s all, just his name—and Mr. Henderson relaxed his grip on the gun. I figured he was going to let Riel take it, so I started to relax too. My elbow was throbbing. When I rolled over to sit up, it hurt so bad that I groaned. Riel glanced at me. He still had his hand on the gun barrel, but he looked relaxed too. Then he startled when Mr. Henderson wrenched the gun out of his hand and turned it on himself. I saw Riel move, but—BLAM!—the sound almost deafened me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I don’t know exactly what the cops and whoever else outside the door were doing, but I do know what it sounded like they were doing—going nuts. Someone hammered on the door. Someone—Detective Jones—shouted, “What’s going on in there?” He called Riel’s name and mine. Riel called back that everything was fine. He had Mr. Henderson’s gun in his hand. Mr. Henderson was on the floor where Riel had knocked him. He looked dazed lying there, rubbing his sore leg and staring up at Riel. Riel took the bullets out of the gun and put them in his pocket.
“You okay?” he said to me.
I nodded. My elbow hurt so bad I could hardly bend it, but, yeah, I was okay. Mostly I was relieved. For a while there I’d been pretty sure that Mr. Henderson was going to shoot Riel—and I’d been pretty sure that Riel was going to let him, right up until Mr. Henderson had turned the gun on me. And then I’d been pretty sure that Mr. Henderson wanted Riel to take the gun and shoot him.
Riel unlocked the door, and the place filled up fast with cops. A couple of them got hold of Mr. Henderson and put handcuffs on him. Riel got a pocketknife from Detective Jones, then kneeled down beside me and sliced through the duct tape around my wrists and ankles. After I peeled off the tape, he helped me to my feet.
“You sure you’re okay?” he said.
I nodded, even though my elbow was throbbing. I looked over at Mr. Henderson. He was on his feet now too, with a cop on either side of him, holding onto him. Riel went over to Detective Jones, and then they both retreated to a corner of the room to talk. Riel seemed to be trying to make a point, but Detective Jones kept shaking his head. Right after the cops took Mr. Henderson away, Riel came back to me and took me by the arm to guide me out of the room. I thought we were going home, but we didn’t, not right away. Instead, Riel took me up to Teresa Rego’s office and made me sit down. He got me some water and made me drink it. Then he sat down, and we waited for Detective Jones, who showed up after a few minutes and got me to tell him everything that had happened before he showed up and while I was inside the room with Mr. Henderson.
Mostly I told him the truth. What I mean is, everything I said was true, I just didn’t say everything that happened. For sure I didn’t tell him how scary it had been, how I’d been sure they both wanted it. The reason I didn’t is because it hadn’t turned out that way, so I figured that it didn’t matter. Not enough to tell the cops, anyway.
After I finished talking and Detective Jones finished writing down what I said, we went out to Riel’s car. Detective Jones got into his car to follow us home. I slid into the front seat of Riel’s car and, just like that, I started shaking all over. I couldn’t stop. Riel noticed. He reached over and zipped up my parka for me, then took off his scarf and wound it around my neck.
I was still shaking when Riel got out of the car and stood on the curb, waiting for me. I got out and followed him up to the house. Detective Jones arrived right after us. Susan was already there. She opened the door and stood aside to let us into the front hall. For a couple of seconds she hung there, looking at Riel. Then she stepped in close to him and put her arms around his waist. He pulled her closer and held her. Her head rested against his chest, and they stood like that for a minute. Then she turned and looked at me and said, “Are you okay, Mike?”
I nodded, but I was still shaking.
Riel said, “He hurt his arm.”
Susan insisted on taking a look. She made me bend it and straighten it out. Then she said, “Nothing’s broken, but it’s going to hurt for a while. And you’ll probably have a nasty bruise.” She looked at Riel. “I made sandwiches,” she said. “And coffee.”
We all followed her into the kitchen and sat down. I took half a sandwich and ate it in about two seconds. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I ate a couple more right after that. Riel and Susan went into the other room. I heard them talking in soft voices. Detective Jones took a sandwich and then excused himself to make a phone call, which left me alone at the kitchen table.
Riel’s file folder lay on the table. It was thick with papers and photographs. I pulled out one of the photos. It was the same one I had seen in Emily’s room—Emily, Sarah, and their mother. I flipped open the file folder and then wished I hadn’t. The other photos weren’t nearly as warm and cheerful as the first one. They were photos of Emily’s mother—after.
I flipped them over and looked at the papers instead—a couple of police reports, it looked like—and the newspaper and magazine clippings. There were lots of them, about the murder of Tracie Howard, about what had happened to Sarah, about Riel, about Riel’s partner who had been killed. Then about the trial. A lot of the articles included pictures—pictures of Tracie, of Tom Howard. Of Tracie and James Corwin on their wedding day—Tracie in a wedding dress, James in a tux. Tracie and James with the two little girls, James with his arms around them, holding them all in close to him, looking pleased that they were his daughters.
“One big happy family, huh?” said a voice behind me. Detective Jones.
“Except she’s not smiling,” I said. I meant Tracie.
Detective Jones sat down at the table and reached for another sandwich. “As I recall from the file, she left him not long after that one was taken.” He flipped the picture over. There was a date on the back. “Yeah. She was out of that marriage about a year later.”
“Because she’d met Tom Howard?” It seemed funny to be calling him that when all this time I had known him as Mr. Henderson.
Detective Jones shook his head. “That’s the way James Corwin saw it. According to Tom Howard, he and Tracie knew each other, but that wasn’t the reason she left James. She just wanted out of the marriage. She took the girls, moved out, and went back to work.”
“Back to work? But James Corwin is loaded. She must have got money from him, from the divorce. And child support.”
Detective Jones shrugged. “What can I say? She signed a prenup. When she left him, all she got was a hundred grand. And the kids. She had an insurance policy she paid for herself in case anything happened to her, probably because James gave her a hard time about child support. He was always late making the payments. She had to get a lawyer after him. He just didn’t care. And this was a guy who was worth millions. He’s worth more now.” He shook his head. “That says something about Tracie and James’s marriage. You have to really not like a person to turn your back on that kind of money.”
Riel came into the room and sat down at the table. He looked tired.
“Where’s Susan?” I said.
“She had to get back to the hospital.” He picked up a sandwich but didn’t even take a bite of it. “Tom co
uldn’t have killed de la Rivière,” he said. “He was in detention when de la Rivière disappeared. He never made bail. There’s no way he could have done it.”
Detective Jones didn’t look happy. “Jeez, John,” he said, “it’s bad enough you went into that room. You know how much grief I’m going to get for that? But going off by yourself to see de la Rivière’s girlfriend—”
Riel looked surprised.
“Yeah, I found out about that, John.” He shook his head. “You’re a teacher now, not a cop. Remember?”
Maybe he didn’t, because he said, “Tom killing her—that made some kind of sense. The guy’s got a temper. He gets angry, lashes out at his wife and kills her without thinking. Then realizes he doesn’t have much of an alibi, so he does the best he can to point the finger at someone else. He doesn’t do a good job of it, but, hey, he didn’t mean to do it. That made sense. But a guy who hires someone to kill his wife? That’s planning. And if you’re planning it, if you’re going to hire someone to do it, you’re absolutely going to have an alibi and it’s going to be airtight. You’re going to have solid witnesses who can swear where you were at the time it happened.” He kept his eyes steady on Detective Jones. “You see what I’m saying, Dave?”
“You’re thinking the husband,” Detective Jones said. “The first one. James Corwin. You know where he was when it happened?”
“At a political fundraiser,” Riel said. “A gala. With over five hundred of the most influential people in the country.”
Detective Jones sighed. Riel got up and went to the fridge.
“You want something to drink?” he said.
“I’ll take a pop,” Detective Jones said.
“Me too,” I said.
Riel stood with the fridge door open. I waited. When he swung the fridge door shut, he had three cans of pop in his hand. He looked at me. I gave him a little smile. Inside, I felt a big one.
“What about motive?” Detective Jones said. “Tracie and James had been divorced for three years. He gave up any claim to the kids. Never even tried for custody. As far as I’ve been able to tell, he had no contact with Tracie or the kids. Put that together with a blue-chip alibi and you get nothing.”
Riel handed the cans of pop around.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “That’s why we never went after him. He was out of it.”
“He called Sarah,” I said.
They both turned—Riel to the left, Detective Jones to the right—and stared at me.
“More,” Riel said.
“The whole time Tracie was with Tom Howard, Sarah and Emily’s father never contacted them, not even on their birthdays or at Christmas,” I said. “But he called Sarah a couple of weeks before Tracie was shot. Tracie was going to change Emily and Sarah’s names legally from Corwin to Howard.”
Riel stared at me. Detective Jones said, “How do you know this, Mike?”
I told them about meeting Neil and what he had said to me. Riel looked at me.
“The Emily you know from the community center is Emily Corwin?” he said.
I nodded.
“But you never told me it was the same girl.”
I glanced at Detective Jones, who shrugged and looked at Riel.
“Oh,” Riel said, the tone of his voice and the look on his face telling me that I didn’t have to explain. Except that I knew I would, eventually, because I’d kept quiet not for the reason he thought, not only because I wanted to save his feelings, but because I wanted to save myself.
For a while nobody said anything. Detective Jones took a swallow of pop. Riel looked down at the table. I looked down at the picture again. Tracie Howard—no, she was Tracie Corwin then—standing next to and a little in front of her husband James. Her left hand rested on Sarah’s shoulder. Something glinted on it. Her ring. Her diamond ring, the one that had been taken when she was killed. One of James’s hands was around Tracie’s waist. The other one was on Emily’s shoulder.
I looked at that photograph. Then I pulled out the one of Tracie and James on their wedding day. I looked at newspaper pictures of him too, from the press conferences later, after Tracie had been killed, after Sarah had been shot, when he was attacking the police for incompetence. I looked at them one by one while Detective Jones chewed on a sandwich and Riel sipped his ginger ale. When I flipped back to the photograph of James and Tracie Corwin and the two kids, I became aware that Detective Jones was sitting forward, frowning at me.
“Is something wrong, Mike?” he said.
“She said he had it for as long as she could remember,” I said. “But he didn’t. Or if he did, he didn’t wear it.”
“What are you talking about, Mike?” Riel said. He looked a little off balance, like he was still bothered that I hadn’t told him who Emily was.
“Nothing.” But was it? Was it really nothing? “She said he likes to keep what’s his. She said he’s got everything tagged and cataloged.” Everything he owned—his jewelry, the art on his walls, his books. His kids.
“She?” Detective Jones said.
“Emily.”
“What are you trying to say, Mike?”
“The ring Corwin gave Tracie, it was really expensive, right?” I said.
“It was insured for a bundle,” Riel said.
“And when Tracie died, it disappeared?”
“All of her jewelry was missing,” Detective Jones said.
“Mike, you were there,” Riel said. “You heard what Paula said. De la Rivière had it.”
“And then he was killed and the ring was never found,” I said. “Right?”
“He could have sold it before he died,” Detective Jones said.
“He told Paula it was worth a lot to him, remember?” Riel said. I remembered. But I also remembered what Emily had said.
“Emily says her father has this thing about stuff that belongs to him. He had everything identified and tagged and cataloged and insured,” I said. I looked at the photograph again.
They were both watching me, waiting again.
“Tracie Howard’s ring was stolen when she was murdered. De la Rivière showed it to his girlfriend, but he didn’t give it to her. Then James Corwin starts wearing a great big diamond ring on the third finger of his right hand—after Tracie is dead,” I said.
“Say that again,” Riel said.
So I said it again, and this time they both looked at the pictures. Detective Jones shook his head. “It’s not the same setting.”
“He could have taken it to a jeweler and had it put into another setting.”
“If it’s the same diamond,” Detective Jones said. “And even if it is, if he was smart, he would have taken it out of the original setting before taking it to a jeweler. If he had taken in the whole ring, we’d have a chance of identifying it. But the diamond alone? Diamonds all look pretty much alike and, as far as I know, you can’t positively ID a diamond.”
I looked at the ring glinting on James Corwin’s finger.
“Actually,” I said, “you can.”
They both stared at me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Another day, another dollar, huh?” Teresa Rego said when I reported for work on Friday night. She was doing her end-of-the-week review of the bulletin board just inside the main doors of the community center, taking off old announcements and posting new ones. “What would we do without you?”
My community service order had ended a few weeks back, but I was still there, working a couple of hours a day, a couple of days a week, and being paid for it. If anyone had told me when I’d started at the community center that the day would come when I’d actually look forward to filling my bucket with hot water and soap, and that I’d be doing everything the way Mr. Henderson had taught me, even when he wasn’t there to make me do it over again, I wouldn’t have believed it. But there I was, heading up to the third floor to get started. The only difference was that I had my own key to the utility closets. And, of course, there was another caretaker in charge, a laugh
-a-minute young guy who said he was really an actor—a comedic actor—and that he was just doing this until his agent got him some real work. He said, believe it or not, pushing a broom was better than waiting tables. Right. He had been there for two weeks already, and I was still waiting to see him with a broom in his hands. It didn’t matter to me, though. Teresa knew I was doing a good job. I showed up on time, I did what I was told, and I did it well, the way Mr. Henderson would have.
Besides, it was Friday night. Rebecca was going to meet me after work. We were going to watch videos at her place. Just thinking about walking to her house with her made me feel good all over. Rebecca liked to hold hands. And it was warmer out tonight, so maybe it wouldn’t be her mitten in my glove. Maybe it would just be her bare hand in mine. I figured it would be a bumpfree night. I figured it would be smooth sailing.
I was wrong.
I finished mopping and started to set up chairs in the big meeting room on the main floor for a recital that was supposed to happen the next day. There were a couple of women at the front of the room going over the arrangements and another woman over in one corner where the piano was, checking out the music she was going to play. I’d set up maybe half the chairs when I turned around and saw her standing in the doorway. Emily. I hadn’t seen her since she’d confronted Mr. Henderson in the basement. She’d been gone by the time I got out of the boiler room. But now here she was, her eyes kind of red, like maybe she’d been crying. But when she zeroed in on me, her whole face pinched and hard and sharp, I knew she wasn’t sad. No, she was angry.
“They arrested him,” she said.
At first I thought she meant Mr. Henderson, because they had arrested him. They arrested him for holding me in the boiler room, and also on a weapons charge. Riel said he wasn’t sure what was going to happen about that, though. He said probably Mr. Henderson did what he did because he couldn’t see any reason to go on. First he’d been accused of killing Tracie. Then, by the time he was acquitted, Sarah was in the hospital and Emily was back with her father. And even though he’d been found not guilty, a lot of people still believed that he’d done it and had gotten away with it. James Corwin had made sure of that. Mr. Henderson—Howard—had changed his name, even his appearance, so that people wouldn’t look at him or remember his name and think he was a guy who’d got away with murder. Then, after Sarah died, he finally got up his nerve to look for Emily. Riel had to explain to me why Mr. Henderson had all of a sudden resigned from his job.
Dead and Gone Page 15
