by Brad Smith
Claire ducked under the yellow police tape surrounding the house and approached the door through the back porch. She made a call on her cell to get the combination to the police padlock, then opened the door and went inside. The house looked as she had imagined it would: not particularly neat but relatively clean, in a single guy sort of way. Newspapers and magazines lying around, with copies of Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. She was surprised that Virgil Cain subscribed to the latter, but then admitted to herself that she had no reason to be. She knew virtually nothing about him.
There were dirty dishes in the sink. Off the kitchen was the living room, where the furniture was old and well worn, comfortable looking. There was a TV and a cheap stereo sitting on a rolltop desk, and beside them a stack of CDs—a lot of Merle Haggard, some John Prine, Emmylou Harris, somebody called the Louvin Brothers.
Claire went through the antique desk’s many drawers and compartments, although she knew it would have already been searched. She found photos and bills and some correspondence from an insurance company regarding the death of Kirstie Stempler. Apparently she had never taken the name “Cain.” Most of the photos were of Kirstie, whom Claire recognized from the media coverage of the trial, and a man she assumed was Tom Stempler. Some were of Kirstie as a little girl, riding a pony, perched on a tractor with her father, playing a toy piano beside a Christmas tree strewn with tinsel and popcorn and lights. There was one snapshot of Kirstie and her father and a woman, obviously her mother; they stood on the front porch of the house, looking quite serious and dressed formally, as if heading off to church or perhaps a wedding or some other formal occasion. Kirstie was no more than five, Claire guessed. She wondered who took the snapshot.
There was a picture of Virgil Cain there, a Polaroid of him standing on a hay wagon, captured in the act of throwing a bale onto an elevator leading into the mow of a barn. He had his shirt off and was sweating, his arms streaked in dirt, laughing at something as he lifted the bale of hay.
Inside a small drawer of the rolltop she found a valid passport and an apparently brand-new Visa credit card in Cain’s name. As Claire slid the drawer back into place she felt something shift inside it. She pulled it entirely out of the desk and turned it upside down. There was a false bottom to it. She slid the panel back and found ten fifty-dollar bills, folded and pinned with a paper clip.
She considered taking the items into evidence, but evidence for what? They had nothing to do with the case. Cain would be forced to surrender his passport if he managed to make bail, but Claire knew the chances of him making bail were nearly nonexistent. She put the items back where she had found them, secured the panel, and slid the drawer into the desk.
She went to the bottom of the stairs and stood there for a moment, asking herself what she was doing. Was she simply being nosy or was she looking for something that might contribute to the case against Virgil Cain? The line was fairly fudged, and since she couldn’t decide which side of it she was on, then she probably was indeed snooping, even if that was, technically, part of her job description.
She went upstairs anyway.
Cain’s clothes were strewn about the master bedroom, located toward the front of the house. A Toledo Mud Hens cap that looked as if it belonged in Cooperstown hung on a doorknob. A copy of a Robert Stone novel lay on the night table, bookmarked with a baseball card. Claire glanced at the card and did a double take at the photo on the front. It was Virgil Cain—a younger and leaner Virgil Cain—wearing the uniform of the Mud Hens. The stats indicated he had been a catcher.
The bedclothes were pulled carelessly back and the dresser drawers were open, the clothes tousled inside, and Claire realized that Joe and the boys would have given the place a going-over.
Two other rooms were obviously not used. Both had single beds and dressers of maple veneer and not much else. Aside from some wispy cobwebs in the ceiling corners and some dead flies on the windowsills, the rooms were pretty clean. But the fourth bedroom did seem to be in use. And by a woman. There were jeans and skirts and tops on the chair and dresser, even on the bed. There were dresses in the closet and lots of shoes. Three pairs of cowboy boots.
Claire had been under the impression that Cain lived alone but once again had no reason to assume that. For all she knew he could have been the leader of some hippie commune.
Although she was pretty sure he wasn’t.
There was a Sony boom box on the dresser. On a whim, Claire hit the play button and heard a mournful intro followed by Neil Young’s voice, singing about burning his credit card for fuel.
There were more CDs there: apparently everything Neil Young had ever recorded, along with some Joni Mitchell, Neko Case, and Leonard Cohen. Claire powered the CD player off, and when she turned toward the door, she noticed a twelve-string guitar in the corner—and then it came to her.
This was Kirstie’s room.
But why would they have separate rooms? According to Cain, they’d been married only a year or so before she’d been killed. Of course it wasn’t unheard of for married couples to keep separate sleeping quarters. She and Todd might just as well have the last few years of their marriage, but by then she and Todd might just as well have lived on different planets. This was different, though; these two were practically newlyweds. Other than for the purpose of investigation, she had never been particularly curious about the intimate details of anyone’s married life, but there was something about this arrangement that didn’t quite fit.
There was something about Virgil Cain that didn’t quite fit either. He had been pretty collected in the interrogation room. At one point he had seemed more interested in Claire’s legs than in the predicament he faced. Claire had interviewed cool customers in the past, pathological liars and deluded dreamers and more than a few dyed-in-the-wool morons. Cain didn’t seem to fit into any of those categories. But maybe that meant he was just smoother than the others.
Time would tell. It always did.
When Jane got home from lunch at Le Select Café a little after two o’clock, Alan was already back from the studio. By the look of the kitchen, he’d enjoyed another monumental meal. The housekeeper worked every other day so Jane cleaned up the aftermath and then found him in the screening room, drinking gin and watching Sunset Boulevard. Neither activity was a good sign. Alan didn’t do well under hard liquor and, as such, turned to it only when he was angry or depressed, otherwise sticking to wine or the occasional imported beer, and then only in the evenings. And he had certain movies that he watched over and over again, depending on his mood and the circumstances of his life at the moment. Sunset Boulevard was his touchstone when things, especially of a professional nature, weren’t going well. It was obvious that he identified with Norma Desmond.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the familiar drama on the wall. He glanced up at her; then he returned to the movie.
“How’d it go?”
He waved his hand above his head, as if batting away a volleyball. “I walked out.”
“I had a feeling,” Jane said.
Alan put the movie on pause. On the big screen, Gloria Swanson had been laughing and now her face froze in a grotesque grin. “And why is that?”
“Because you left here at eleven this morning and you’re back at two. I don’t think you can cut a record that quick.”
“There was a time. I was in the room when Bobby Dylan recorded Like a Rolling Stone in one take. So don’t tell me.”
Jane knew that Alan was convinced he had been in the room when a lot of immortal songs had been recorded. Some of his stories were true, but Jane didn’t know which ones anymore. And she was quite sure that Alan didn’t know, either.
“So the French kid is the new Bob Dylan?”
“The French kid is a fucking brat. And his manager is an imbecile.”
“That doesn’t sound too encouraging.”
Alan took a long drink, more of a gulp, of the gin and tonic.
“I tried. I got there and t
hey showed me this list of songs. ‘Come Fly with Me,’ ‘You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You,’ ‘All of Me’ . . . and so on and so on. And we talked about the sound. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, that’s what they wanted. Well, I know this stuff like I know my own fucking DNA. And so I start laying it out. Who we’re going to need and for how long. And you know what they told me?”
“What did they tell you?”
“That there was no budget for a band.”
“Then what did they want you to do?”
Alan’s face twisted, not unlike Swanson’s on the screen.
“Digital synthesizers! They want Alan-fucking-Comstock to produce a big-band sound without a fucking band! I told that fucking frog cocksucker I would kick his ass all the way back to Paris. Who the fuck do they think they’re dealing with? Do I look like some techno geek?”
“Clearly not,” Jane told him. “Let it go. They obviously don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s better you found that out going in than two weeks down the road.” It was the standard speech she used whenever a project fell apart. She had been wearing it out in recent years.
“I’m going to sue them. You watch, they’ll be badmouthing me all over this industry because of this. I’m calling Walter today to have him initiate a suit. They’re not going to talk about me like that.”
“They won’t talk and who’s going to listen anyway?” Jane said. “Nobody has ever heard of these people.”
“Don’t you see?” Alan said. “That’s why they’ll talk. They’ll get media coverage by saying they fired the great Alan Com-stock. I’ve won seventeen fucking Grammys. Trading on my name! That’s how these people work.” His mind was racing now and he seemed to forget that Jane was in the room. “They had this planned all along. They knew I would never agree to this. They knew exactly what they were gonna do. Make me out the villain, as usual. I’m calling Walter, right after the movie. I’m making a preemptive strike.”
Having settled on a plan of action, he relaxed, if only a little, and sank back in his chair. He started the movie again. Jane left quietly and walked back to the kitchen. She took a banana from a bowl on the counter and looked out onto the property as she ate it. She decided to go for another run. Another six-plus miles. The marathon was only three months away.
Changing into her running clothes upstairs, she picked up the phone and called Walter’s cell number. She didn’t want to have to go through his secretary at the law office. She got his voice mail.
“Walter, it’s Jane. Alan might be calling you. He lost another job and he’s talking about suing the people. Some French management group. Could you just sit on it for a few days until it blows over? You know the drill. Thanks, Walter. You’re the best.”
She didn’t take the dogs this time. They were both pushing ten years old—getting up there for wolfhounds—and she wouldn’t allow them to make that run twice in a day. Of course they would try if she let them. Like a lot of people she knew, they never knew when to quit.
She was on her way back when she heard the shots. She was hardly surprised as it was part of the pattern. Gin, Gloria Swanson, and then guns. She was pissed off, though. He should have guessed that she had gone running. Would it kill him to err on the side of caution just once in his life? She swung toward the road and approached the house from the front.
He was on the deck, the bottle on the table beside him along with ice and tonic. Mounted on posts in the yard were several sheets of plywood painted with targets: one at twenty yards, one at thirty, and so on. Every couple of months he would have to replace the plywood, after reducing the sheets to splinters.
He had a long-barreled .22 revolver in his hand, and the 9mm Glock on the table. When Jane came closer she saw the nickel-plated Colt in his lap. It was a .32, with a short barrel and ivory grips. There was no mistaking it.
“You realize I was out there running,” she said.
“As long as you weren’t running between me and my target, you were safe.”
“That plywood doesn’t always stop the bullets,” Jane said.
“And you have half a bottle of gin in you, so you’re not exactly Annie Oakley.”
As if in reply, Alan emptied the .22 into the closest target. He smiled up at her as he reloaded from a box of shells on the table.
“I left Walter a message. Those French fuckers are going to get a surprise come tomorrow morning.”
“On what grounds are you going to sue them, Alan?”
“Wrongful dismissal.”
“You quit.”
“That’s what they’ll try to say.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“They set it up!” he snapped. “For Chrissake, they set it up so I would have no choice. Can’t you see that? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Jane couldn’t see it, but she knew enough to let it go. There would be no lawsuit. By Monday, Alan would forget all about it. If he finished the bottle of gin, he might forget about it by morning. He held the loaded revolver toward her.
“You want to shoot?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on. Have a go.”
“You know I don’t like to,” she said. She indicated the .32 in his lap. “Where did that come from?”
“It’s mine,” he said.
“But the police had it.”
“Yeah. And after I was acquitted, they gave it back.”
“They just handed it over? It’s a murder weapon.”
“There was no murder,” he reminded her. “Death by misadventure.”
“Right. I just thought they might hang on to it.”
“It’s my fucking property. I bought it. I have a permit for it. So I told Mickey Dupree that I wanted it back.” He put the loaded revolver on the table and had a drink of gin, spilling a little on his shirt. “Poor Mickey. There’s a piece in the paper about the guy that killed him. Virgil Thomas Cain. They always give killers three names, don’t they?”
“Not always,” she said, and she went in the house.
SEVEN
After talking to Brady and the woman, Marchand, Virgil was driven to the Ulster County Jail outside of Kingston by two uniformed cops in a marked cruiser. The jail was a newer building of red brick and glass. It looked like an insurance office or a community college.
The cops took him inside, still cuffed, and presented him to a petite black woman with cropped hair and gold-framed glasses seated behind a counter. One of the uniforms gave her some paperwork.
“He’s here for the night,” the other uniform said. “Got a court appearance in the morning.”
The woman glanced at the paperwork, then immediately gave Virgil another look. “Then back here?”
“Probably.”
“Probably not,” the woman said. “We have a population problem here. We can stick him in transition for the night, but we got no bed for him long-term.”
“Well, whatever works for now,” the uniform said.
“No sense me processing him if he’s just gonna be here overnight,” the woman said. She looked at Virgil. “What’s in your pockets?”
Virgil brought out his cigarettes. The woman opened the package, saw the steel Zippo wedged inside. She glanced at the uniforms.
“How early in the morning?”
“Early.”
She handed the cigarettes back to Virgil. “Keep these, sugar, but there’s no smoking in the cell. You can smoke in the yard. I’m not doing possessions paperwork now and then ten hours from now for a pack of smokes and a Zippo looks like Humphrey Bogart once owned it. Okay?”
Virgil nodded. The woman had another look at the paperwork and then hit a button on the desk, and a minute later a guard came through the door behind her. One of the uniforms took the cuffs off Virgil and the guard led him into the jail.
They went down a long corridor and through a doorway, back outside into the fading daylight, into a yard maybe a hundred feet square. Inside, a couple dozen prisoners wearing stenciled overalls milled
about, a few others sitting on the grass or on benches. The guard left Virgil there without a word and went into an office with large glass windows overlooking the yard. Virgil watched him talking to two other guards and then saw the first guard glance at a computer monitor. After reading what was there the guard turned and, like the woman at the desk out front, had a second look at Virgil.
Virgil sat on a bench, the setting sun on his face, and lit a cigarette. He realized he should have asked to make a phone call. He needed to make arrangements to get his hay off. Maybe, instead of hiring the Tisdale kid, he could call in some favors from his neighbors. Asking for help was not something he was any good at, but he couldn’t afford to hire things out right now. The farm was his; it became Kirstie’s after Tom Stempler had died, and then Virgil’s after she was killed. But it came with a lot of debt. After her father died, Kirstie took out a mortgage on the place and spent the money recording an album in Nashville, an album that was never released. That was before she got involved with Alan Comstock, which didn’t cost her anything.
Other than her life.
He thought back to the conversation with the two detectives at the station. They’d come off as smart cop, dumb cop, but he was pretty sure they weren’t doing it on purpose. The woman was a looker, beautiful in a world-weary fashion, as if she’d seen enough of life that she’d decided to keep it at arm’s length. She seemed genuinely concerned that Virgil get proper representation, but he reasoned she was interested in that just so the conviction down the road would be clean and tidy. She appeared to be very efficient and thorough—a bloodless characterization that Virgil wasn’t sure fit her or not. He suspected that somewhere beneath the cool exterior might be some warm coals. All he knew for certain was that she had great legs.
He fell asleep on the bench. When he woke, the yard was cast in shadow. One of the guards was standing outside the office, talking with some of the prisoners. Virgil rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day.
He heard shoes scuffing on the gravel path and looked up to see a gangly redhead approaching. The guy was young, maybe twenty-one or so, and his hair was shaved short on the sides, longer on top. He had a tattoo on his neck and several more up and down both arms. He was grinning like the village idiot.
