by Brad Smith
“Well, he was in Canada yesterday, asking the police up there why they haven’t run you to ground yet. Apparently they’re watching your old haunts, among other things.”
“You let Joe drive all the way up there when you knew I was here?”
Virgil waited for Claire to say something and when she didn’t, he smiled again.
“So Joe checked out the license plates,” he said. “Tell me something, if a cop drove into the park, would the kid working there write down his license plate number? I’m thinking probably not.”
“What are you saying?” Claire asked. “You think Joe killed Mickey Dupree?”
“I think Joe Brady is a little too convinced I’m the guy,” Virgil said. “And I’d like to know why. Buddy Townes tells me that Dupree made a fool out of Brady in public, more than once. I’m guessing it wasn’t hard to do. I saw it with my own eyes at Alan Comstock’s trial. Doesn’t that put Brady on the list of people who might want to bump Dupree off?”
“Joe Brady didn’t kill Mickey Dupree.”
“You saying that because you think I did? Then why haven’t you called for a cruiser to come get me yet?”
“I intend to,” Claire said.
“What’s keeping you?”
“Well, it appears you’ve been doing some amateur police work. I thought I might pick your brain before I hand you over. I’m not worried about you escaping. That’s not going to happen again.”
He looked at the tabletop and said nothing.
“How’d you get that screen off anyway?” she asked. “In Kesselberg.”
“Remember the lighter you let me keep? The Zippo?”
“Yeah.”
“In a pinch, you can use it as a socket wrench.” Virgil looked at her now.
“Well, well,” Claire said. “You learn something new every day.”
“If I tell you something else you don’t know, will you let me go?”
“You could tell me the winning numbers for the New York State Lottery and I wouldn’t let you go.”
He shrugged, his expression indifferent. She might as well have been a waitress, informing him they were out of the sea bass. He raised the handcuffs and scratched the whiskers on his chin with the back of his hand. She realized that she no longer thought it was just a possibility that he could be innocent. But she wasn’t supposed to be making that kind of judgment. She was supposed to arrest him and take him in and let the courts decide who was guilty and who was not.
“So what do you want to tell me?” she asked.
“We have a deal?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “You think I’m going to lose my badge over you? I let you go and this time you really are going to disappear. My job is to bring you in. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“But you know I won’t disappear,” Virgil said. “I would’ve already. The way I see it, I take off and I spend the rest of my life waiting for a knock on the door. Or a pretty girl standing outside the shower with a semiautomatic in her hand.”
“You think flattering me is going to work?”
“I’m pulling out all the stops here,” Virgil said. “But hey, you are a pretty girl with a semiautomatic.”
She waited for him to smile. But this time he didn’t.
“Give me three days,” he said.
“What are you going to do with three days?”
“I want to talk to Buddy Townes again. For starters.”
“Why?”
“I told you. Buddy said he could name a lot of people who might have motive. But he couldn’t come up with the common denominator, you know, between Dupree and Comstock. Other than me. Well, I figured something out since then.”
“What?”
“We have a deal?”
“Stop asking me that. Why would I let you go?”
“Because you haven’t had any luck with this so far. If you’re not going to do your job, maybe I can do it for you.”
Claire pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I’ve heard enough. Let’s see if we can find a paddy wagon big enough for you and your ego.”
She punched in a number and waited. Then she told whoever answered to send a cruiser to the farm. She gave them the address and hung up. Virgil was looking at her.
“Did I hurt your feelings or something?” he asked.
“Now you’re flattering yourself.”
“All I meant was that maybe I could approach it from a different angle. You’ve got to admit that I have more to lose than you do.”
“That’s why you need to hire a good lawyer. You’re not the Lone Ranger. If you’re innocent, you get off. That’s how the system works.”
Claire pulled a chair out and sat down, keeping her distance. They waited in silence for a time. There was an uncomfortable feeling in the air, as if they had just had their first fight and neither was willing to make a conciliatory move.
“Would you mind if I check that the horses have water?” Virgil asked finally.
“We’ll wait here,” Claire told him.
But then she remembered that the last time she had been there, the trough had been nearly empty. Well, that wasn’t her concern. She wasn’t an agent of the SPCA; she had bigger issues to deal with. She put it from her mind and forced herself to think about her day. Capturing Virgil Cain had been the only positive. In the negative column, there had been yet another annoying Todd visit, and the rookie judge’s decision to kick Miller Boddington free. As soon as Boddington came to mind, she thought about all he’d done that he would never have to answer to. Abusing his own horses, depriving them of food. And water.
Jesus Christ, she thought, and stood up. “You try to run and I’ll shoot you.”
Virgil got to his feet. “You keep saying that.”
“Only because I mean it.”
He turned on a switch for a yard light, and they went outside and headed for the pump house. Claire had a small flashlight in her pocket and when they got there she shined it in the water trough. It was roughly a quarter full. They walked into the pump house, where Virgil turned on an overhead light and then hit the switch for the pump. It clanked noisily into action and ran for maybe a minute, and then sparks flew from the side of it and it stopped. Virgil turned the switch off at once and walked over to kneel beside the pump.
“What’s wrong?” Claire asked.
“Probably a loose connection,” he said. “Pump needs new bearings and it vibrates a lot. I have to tighten the wires every now and then. Can you hand me that screwdriver on the windowsill?”
Claire found the screwdriver and gave it to him. He removed the cover from the connection box and began to tighten the screws. It was a clumsy procedure due to the handcuffs, yet he never suggested she remove them. Claire felt odd, standing there with the Beretta in her hand, watching while he fixed his water pump.
“So you’re an electrician too?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know how to do that?” she asked. “Just a smart guy, I guess.”
“Shit,” he said, standing up. “I’m trying to make a living off a hundred acres. Nobody’s going to call that smart. This isn’t exactly prime farmland around here. If I get enough rain, but not too much, I can grow enough hay and grain to feed my stock. Make a few bucks on my soybeans, maybe. Send a couple dozen steers to market come fall. And if everything goes right, I might have just enough money to be dumb enough to try again next year. If that’s smart, I’d hate to see stupid.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Well, I used to play ball but I got too old for that,” Virgil said. “And I don’t think I’m cut out for punching a time clock. I guess I could be a cop but apparently to do that you have to keep threatening to shoot people all day long, and I’m not interested in that either.”
“You could always be a comedian.”
“You think so?”
“Or you could just answer me. Why do you do it?”
Virgil walked over to the pump switch, hesi
tated there as he tried to come up with a reply. “I just stumbled into this, trying to help a friend, but the truth of the matter is, I like being a farmer. Pretty simple, eh? I don’t know, maybe I was born in the wrong century. I’m not good with abstracts. When I’m working, I need to see that I’ve accomplished something. You got a field of hay, for instance. You cut it and bale it and then put it in the mow. There’s no . . . theory to it.” He shrugged. “I like how it makes me feel at the end of the day.”
He hit the switch and the pump kicked into action again. This time it ran fine. Claire could hear the water gushing into the trough outside. Virgil walked to the window, his face half-cast in shadow and his eyes narrow, his brow creased. Claire had the feeling that he was almost as worried about his farm as he was about himself. He was a farmer because he liked the way it made him feel at the end of the day. Claire tried to remember the last time she had felt that way. “Tell me what I don’t know.”
He never moved a muscle, just kept looking out the window. She was about to ask him again when he spoke. “Whoever killed them, knew them,” he said.
“That’s it? That’s always been the assumption.”
He turned. “But you also assumed they were killed by somebody who had it in for them. They weren’t. They were both killed by somebody they trusted. That’s the key. Think about it—somebody walked up to a guy Dupree’s size and drove a steel shaft into his heart, and he just let them? There was no struggle in that sand trap, right? And Comstock is armed to the teeth and still somebody shoots him six times with his own gun.”
“With Dupree, he was whacked in the head first. Probably with the golf club that killed him.”
“From the front or the back?”
“Front.”
“Same thing then. He wasn’t afraid of the guy.”
Claire thought for a moment. “And if it had been you who showed up, they wouldn’t have let you get close.”
“Yeah.”
“So this theory exonerates you? At least to your way of thinking.”
“To my way of thinking, I had already exonerated me. It’s you people I need to work on.”
Claire smiled at that. He turned away, glancing out the window again, watching the trough as it filled.
“Tell me what happened in Quebec. Who was the woman who lost her house?”
He kept his eyes on the pipe gushing water outside, and she could tell he was deciding whether to tell her the story. “Her name was Madeleine Jones,” he began. “She raised me. Small town south of Montreal that you’ve never heard of. She had a little bungalow on ten acres on the edge of town. Used to be an orchard but the trees were all dead by the time I got there. Place was overgrown.”
“Where were your parents?”
“My old man split. My mother was killed in a plane crash. Going on vacation to Mexico with some guy.”
“So Madeleine Jones adopted you?”
“Yeah, something like that,” he said, dismissing the details.
“Anyway, after I left home they started developing the area. Town was a bedroom community for people who worked in the city. Typical stuff. This lawyer Finley kept trying to buy the property so he could turn it into a subdivision. Madeleine wouldn’t sell. She didn’t have two nickels to rub together but she wouldn’t sell. She didn’t want it all bulldozed. One thing led to another and then she met up with this guy, allegedly some handyman or something, and they started seeing each other. Romantically, you know? He was quite a bit younger than her. She was getting up there, and her mind was starting to go, I guess, and somehow this handyman ended up with the title to the property. Well, you can figure it out. The handyman was working for Finley. Next thing you know, Madeleine is out on the street. They basically stole the place out from under her. I was playing ball in Toledo at the time, or maybe I could have stopped it. She filed charges against Finley and the handyman, but they had their bases covered. She lived the last couple years of her life in a little apartment in town, over a Chinese restaurant. After she died I ran into Finley one day and well, again, one thing led to another. As it sometimes does.”
“And you went to jail and he didn’t?”
“That’s right.”
He turned to look at her then. He shrugged and at that moment Claire’s cell phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket and answered.
“It’s me,” she heard Todd say. “I just wanted to tell you . . . I needed to tell you that . . . that I was happier with you than I ever was at any other time in my life.”
“Not now,” she said into the phone and hung up. She looked at Virgil and almost smiled. He and Todd were roughly the same age, with similar backgrounds. However, they might as well have been from different planets. Todd wouldn’t know how to fix the old pump, and he wouldn’t have the inclination to learn. Instead, he’d pay somebody a thousand dollars to come out and install a new one. And he’d put the thousand on his credit card.
She saw a flash of light in her peripheral vision and turned to see a vehicle pull in the drive up by the house. It was the county police.
“Shit.”
“What?” Virgil asked.
“There’s a cruiser here.”
Virgil had a look. “Well, you called them.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
“Shit,” she said again. “They must have been doing a drive-by and saw the house lights were on.” She bit her bottom lip, struggling with something. Then she turned to him, and after a moment she put the Beretta in her coat pocket and walked over and unlocked the cuffs.
“You just got done telling me how dumb you are. Well, I’m giving you a run for your money, doing this. But I know if they lock you up again, it’s going to be case closed, at least to people like Joe. We don’t have the budget to be investigating murders that have already been solved.”
She took her card from her jacket and put it in his shirt pocket. “My cell’s on there. You find anything, I’d better be the first to know.”
Virgil rubbed his wrists and nodded to her. It seemed he was too surprised to speak. “Get going. You got three days.”
“The trough isn’t full.”
“I’ll fill the damn trough. Go.”
So he went, out through the door and toward the barn, where the darkness soon took him in. Claire stood alone in the little shed, stunned by what she had just done.
And already regretting it.
TWENTY-FIVE
It appeared one of the horses had attempted to eat the new fedora. Apparently it hadn’t proved as tasty as it looked. It was lying crumpled in the dirt of the Boddington corral, with teeth marks in the brim and the crown trampled by the horses’ hooves.
Miller Boddington was twenty feet or so from his hat. He was in a seated position, with his back against the wood fencing. His linen suit was streaked with dirt, and draped across his lap was the bridle that had presumably been used to strangle him. His expensive Italian loafers were a few feet away; he must have kicked them off while struggling to stay alive.
His thoroughbred broodmares were milling about in the corral, unnerved by all the police and forensics people on the scene. One of the uniforms was holding the mares back from the body. Julie Hansen was taking pictures while Claire stood just inside the gate, looking at the dirt of the corral, still damp from the recent rain.
“Any footprints?” she asked.
“Lots,” Julie said. “All wearing horseshoes.”
“Maybe that’s who killed him,” Claire said.
“Would you call that justifiable homicide?”
“I might. And we could all go home.” Realizing there were no human footprints to obliterate, Claire walked closer to the body and had a look. Miller Boddington did not appear as arrogant now. His face was pale blue, his eyes half-open.
“Any idea of time?” Claire asked.
“Nothing close,” Julie said. “But I would ballpark it as last night. See the color of his fingertips? Been a while.”
“What about cause?” Claire asked.
“Marks on his neck, I’d say strangulation,” Julie said. “Too early to say, though. But those reins would have done the job.”
“Oh, the symbolism,” Claire said.
“He who lives by the horse, dies by the horse?” Julie said.
“Something like that.”
“I heard he had all those charges dismissed yesterday,” Julie said. “And this happens less than twenty-four hours later? That’s a little too coincidental.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Claire said. “It’s too coincidental.”
Claire wanted to talk to the groom who found the body that morning, but apparently he was tending to some horses on another part of the estate. Claire doubted he could tell her any more than she could see by looking at the corpse. She left the forensics unit to their work and walked up the hill to the Boddington house, a huge redwood mansion on a rise above the farm. Claire had heard over the years that it was a Frank Lloyd Wright design but had always assumed that was a Miller Boddington falsehood, like so many others.
A state trooper was standing on a side porch, talking to a skinny guy with a reddish soul patch. The guy’s name was Henri, Claire learned, and he was the Boddingtons’ chef. He had arrived at eight thirty to an empty house, he said.
“Where’s the wife?” Claire asked. “What’s her name again?”
“Suzanne,” the chef said. “She leaves me a note, says she has gone to the city. She spends many nights there. Some days I come to cook, I have no one to cook for.”
“When did she go?”
“The note does not say. It is just a note.”
“I’ll need to see it,” Claire said. “Were you here yesterday afternoon? Or evening?”
“No. I arrived in the morning and the madame sends me to the farmers market. For the fish and the chicken. She tells me I am okay to come this morning. Not last night.”
“But she didn’t tell you she was going to the city.” “No,” the chef said emphatically. “I tell you already, the note tells me this.”
“Settle down,” Claire told him. “What, you need to go sauté something?”
“But I already tell you. Do you not listen to me?”
