Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  “You knew?” Christensen said.

  “No idea,” Dagnolo said without turning around. “You did?”

  “I wondered.”

  “You were ahead of us there, then.”

  Haygood moved across the room, removing the shade from a floor lamp. When she was done, she held the X-rays against its harsh light and set her eyeglasses up high on her nose, which wrinkled as she squinted at the shadow images on the murky blue skull. Christensen felt oddly alone holding the copy of Warren Doti’s suicide note.

  We stayed friends. That never changed even after the Alzheimer’s started and she stopped remembering. But that’s what scared me so much, her remembering. She talked a lot about things she knew, secrets she was supposed to keep. I knew she hadn’t forgot about us and she might say something to Mr. Vincent. That would of killed me, him being so good to me and Suzanne for so long and me having turned on him while he was away. Even with my wife so sick at the time, I’d of quit and moved off without any medical benefits before I let that happen.

  Christensen sat down in the chair across from Dagnolo’s desk. Across the room, the televised scene from Republican headquarters looked like a wake. Even without the sound, the body language and general lethargy of the people crossing the screen conveyed abject defeat. Even the bunting looked wilted.

  If to this day Mr. Vincent knows, he’s never said a word to me. The last conversation we had was the day after little Chip died, but he’s a gentleman and honorable in every way, and I doubt that he would of ever called me out. But I’ve come to understand that last conversation better now than I did at the time, and I cannot think of an explanation for the facts I’m about to give except one that I do not want to believe. But it’s facts that I feel should be known.

  Mr. Vincent came to me that day, the day after the boy got hurt so bad, and offered me this job running their operation up here at Muddyross. (If handling horses is your business, believe me, this is the job you want. Doubled my salary and guaranteed me work and Suzanne medical benefits for the rest of our lives.)

  Never said why, but said they were moving Gray and some others off the Fox Chapel property out here and wanted me in charge. I think he wanted me to go, too, because I knew where that horse was the day before.

  I can’t say I know what happened to the boy, because I don’t. I wasn’t there. Neither was Mrs. Underhill (Florence). What I do know is that we had trailered Gray down to Westmoreland for a show the day before, and we’d decided to rest him the day it happened. Gray never left his stall the day they say he threw Mr. Ford and his boy.

  I did not think the worst, even when he asked me to lie to the sheriff. I just figured they had their reasons and I respected that. But a few days ago two people, a man and a woman, came here asking questions about Mrs. Underhill and that horse in particular, and I felt Mr. Underhill should know about it. So I called him with their names and the license number of the old car the lady was driving, never thinking I’d be reading about her turning up dead. That’s when I put things together, when I knew something was wrong.

  With Suzanne gone and the kids grown and gone, it’s just me now. I’ve told what I know, these facts, as truthfully as I could, making my peace. So this is my decision.

  Christensen traced the signature, which was strong and certain. Something so grim shouldn’t make him feel so good, but it did. He looked up, certain now that he was holding the final piece of the puzzle. Let the bastards deny it now. Christensen stood up. “Carrie, look at this.” He crossed the room and handed Doti’s letter to her. “They weren’t riding the horse that day.”

  She laid the letter on a table without reading it and resumed her study of the X-rays. “I knew that.”

  “But it’s proof!”

  “No,” she said, nodding toward the table. “That’s a bunch of papers.” She cocked her head back toward the X-rays she was holding at arm’s length. “These are proof.”

  Christensen wheeled, his mind racing, surprised to see Dagnolo still at the window with his back turned. “So everybody who knew was bought off. Doti, Bostwick. You should check out the desk clerk at the morgue, the black guy. He was really curious why I wanted the files. I bet they paid him to keep an eye on things, just in case anybody got curious. What about Mercer? His people did the investigation.”

  “Sherm’s clean,” Dagnolo said. “His reputation for sucking up notwithstanding, he wanted this one as bad as I did. We just never had enough.”

  Christensen clapped his hands. “Until now!”

  The hollow report echoed in the sepulchral office. Dagnolo turned slowly, his face waxy and grim, and buttoned his tuxedo jacket. “Mr. Christensen—” He clasped his hands behind his back, opening a diamond-shaped gap in the front of his jacket. The district attorney’s eyes were everywhere but on his. “Let me be the first to say that this new information is important, and will add substantially to what we know about this case.”

  Suddenly formal and sincere, like an undertaker.

  Dagnolo shrugged into his topcoat. “You may be right, though. It’s information that may be better served in the hands of state or federal—”

  “You’re not going to do anything, are you?”

  Dagnolo nodded toward the television. On the screen, a wide shot of the riotous lobby of the Grant Hotel three blocks away. The crowd looked restless, waiting for the campaign’s inevitable crescendo, waiting for Ford Underhill.

  “These are powerful people,” the D.A. said. “From me, this is just a smear. Let’s not give them that. Let’s turn it over to an authority that—”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Haygood dropped the X-rays.

  “Stop right there, Mr. Christensen,” Dagnolo said.

  “You want me to start over with the FBI. You want them to do the dirty work for you.”

  “With what you have, they’ll move swiftly,” Dagnolo said. “I can put you in touch—”

  “You bastard! My kids are gone seven hours already. You’ve got what you need. Do something.”

  “Do what? What have we proven here tonight? That Chip Underhill did not die in a horseback-riding accident. That perhaps someone killed him instead.”

  “That the family covered it up!” Christensen shouted. “Maybe the boy’s death was unintentional. But the others, the cover-up, that’s the evil here.”

  Dagnolo pointed an elegant finger directly at him. “Go back to my original question, damn it, the only one that matters right now: Who killed that child?”

  “Somebody in the house that day!” He turned to Haygood, who nodded reassurance.

  “But who?” Dagnolo said.

  Without thinking, Christensen swept his arm toward the television: “If I had to guess, it was your next governor.”

  The D.A. crossed his arms in silence as Haygood, the X-rays back in hand, walked toward him and waited.

  “You know this?” she said.

  It was reckless speculation, he knew, but as far as he was concerned the rules were suspended the moment the kids disappeared. Christensen shook his head, and turned toward Haygood. “It’s a guess. But didn’t you tell me it’s usually the father in cases like this?”

  Dagnolo waited.

  Christensen left no room for misinterpretation: “I think Ford Underhill killed his son.”

  The district attorney unfolded his arms, looking first at Haygood, finally at Christensen. A tight smile. “Prove it,” he hissed.

  In that moment, even as Dagnolo’s words dangled like a schoolyard challenge, Christensen spun toward the office door. Just before stepping into the corridor, he stopped and looked back. “You pathetic coward.”

  And then he was running despite the pain in his right foot, across the hall and
down the marble steps, across the courthouse lobby and into the street-level catacombs, ignoring Haygood’s frantic shouts from far behind as he raged toward the Grant Street exit.

  Chapter 42

  The entire block outside the Grant Hotel looked like a frat party out of control. Throngs of giddy, mostly drunken Democratic faithful celebrated beneath an enormous banner draped across the building’s marble façade: “Underhill—A Legacy of Progress!” Most wore Styrofoam boaters. Two halves of a costumed donkey wandered the sidewalk independently, the head dancing on blue-jeaned legs, the woman wearing the back legs and tail sipping white wine from a plastic cup beneath a Grant Street crossing signal.

  Christensen shoved past a knot of revelers and into the hotel’s revolving brass doors, which were in constant motion as the party moved indoors for Ford Underhill’s victory speech. Three of the faithful squeezed in with him, the tiny, triangular space filling immediately with the smell of booze and fizzy optimism. The door jammed briefly but soon revolved into a dense wall of Underhill campaign workers trying to make their way across the marble entrance and down the half-dozen steps on either side that led to the main lobby. Above it all hung a comically ornate chandelier the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

  The muffled voice of a warm-up speaker was talking about integrity and progress and the promise of a renaissance for all of Pennsylvania, not just Pittsburgh. His final, resounding applause line triggered a brass-band rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and a crowd convulsion that might have been a spirited attempt at dancing. Moving across the room was like trying to run underwater, only slower. Christensen felt a hand on his ass, found it attached to a smiling blonde with smeared lipstick. An Underhill campaign button was pinned strategically to her dress just beneath a deep gorge of cleavage.

  “This a great country, or what?” she shouted.

  He pulled away, threading himself into the gap that suddenly opened between a stalled TV camera crew and an enormous potted palm. Things were a little better on the stairs, with some discernible movement toward the rally below. “Your next governor will be down in a few minutes,” began a fresh speaker, a woman, but Christensen lost her next words in the dull roar they triggered.

  The speaker tried again but was interrupted by another round of “Happy Days,” the band seemingly caught on an endless loop. As soon as Christensen turned the corner into the main lobby, he recognized the speaker’s face as that of Allegheny County’s lone female county commissioner, a woman who had chaired Ford Underhill’s western Pennsylvania campaign. She was hard to miss, her waxy smile and sturdy hairdo dominating the room from the twenty-foot Jumbotron screen just behind the podium where she stood.

  A squat mushroom of a man in a blue blazer leaned against a nearby wall, his Grant Hotel Security name tag identifying him as Kurt. Christensen worked his way toward him, leaned as close as he could, and shouted above the din, “Kurt, where’s Ford Underhill now?”

  “Still upstairs,” Kurt shouted back. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Which room?”

  Kurt studied him. “Who are you?”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  Kurt nodded toward a bank of brass elevator doors, each one blocked by a behemoth with suspicious eyes. The Underhill campaign’s private version of the Secret Service. “Good luck,” he said.

  Christensen felt a hand at the small of his back, a gentle, insistent touch, and turned expecting to find the blonde again. Instead, Carrie Haygood, out of breath and sweating, grabbed his sleeve and said, “Come.”

  They moved away from the crowd. “He’s upstairs!” he shouted.

  Haygood led on, down another flight of steps. “Penthouse,” she said. She was a foot shorter than most in the crowd, but wider; Christensen found himself at times following little more than a depression in the sea of shoulders and heads, knowing only that Haygood was down there somewhere. They passed a sign at the base of the stairs: Laundry Services.

  The crowd thinned and Christensen caught up. “He’s upstairs, I said.”

  “I know.”

  “Carrie—”

  “Just follow.”

  Past the men’s and women’s rest rooms. Past the Pittsburgh Room and its mounted collection of historical photographs. The rally was directly above them now, the band still blatting its mindless tune, as they moved deeper into the hotel’s basement. Haygood opened an unmarked door and they were met by a wave of damp heat and the smell of powerful detergent. From the dim hallway they burst into a fluorescent room alive with industrial washers and rumbling, tumbling dryers. Haygood led him across a floor piled with mountains of monogrammed hotel towels and bed linens.

  “My mother’s domain,” Haygood said over her shoulder, her voice clear and strong above the roar of machines.

  “Thirty-three years down here, never more than $6 an hour. How she managed me and my sister and paid for my medical school—” She shook her head. “I worked here weekends and summers, housekeeping, but still.”

  “So you know where you’re going?”

  A look.

  “I mean, you must know every inch of this place.”

  They rounded a corner and Haygood stopped in front of a nondescript elevator door. “Express,” she said. “Take us right to the penthouse.”

  He wanted to hug her. “You’re sure they’re there?”

  “Election nights, they always are.” She grinned. “Personally short-sheeted George Wallace there in sixty-seven.” Her grin faded fast. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  He nodded. Haygood nodded back and poked the elevator call button. The door opened with startling speed.

  “There’s a long hall,” she said. “Main elevators are at the far end. That’s where they’ll be watching people coming and going. This one opens in a little hallway off to the side, right near the suite. Get off and turn right. Don’t stop. You stop, they’ll be on you, hustling you out. The penthouse door’ll be open, I expect, so you just walk right in like you belong. Understand?”

  “Don’t stop,” he repeated.

  Christensen followed Haygood onto the elevator, seeing his stark reflection in the mirror that filled its back wall. His clothes were filthy from the fight in the mountains. Pine needles and small twigs clung to his hair. Somehow, in all that had happened in the last twelve hours, he’d acquired a deep red scratch just beneath his left eye. He looked like a man coming off a nasty bender.

  Haygood stabbed the button marked 17 and turned toward him, eyes alive behind her Ben Franklin specs. “Remember now what my momma always said.” Waiting until she had his full attention.

  “How’s that?” he said. For the first time, he noticed the manila envelope in her hands.

  Haygood held up the packet of X-rays and photographs as the elevator started to move: “He who hesitates is lost.”

  Chapter 43

  Brenna swept the flashlight’s beam across the top of the brick wall, looking for security cameras. If there was going to be a blind spot anywhere on the Underhills’ sprawling Fox Chapel property, she figured, it would be at this low corner of the estate, well off the main road. She’d parked her car maybe two hundred yards from the gate, followed a small stream into a stand of oak trees, and walked until she found the place where the estate’s wall ended. To her right, the ground dropped suddenly into the gorge in which Floss Underhill might have died. She turned and scanned the trees behind her, satisfied that the area was unmonitored.

  She turned off the light and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The kids were here. She knew that as surely as she knew they were okay. Not that she hadn’t imagined the worst; she had. But after fifteen years dealing daily with the criminal mind, she couldn’t make any other scenario fit with the known facts and her mother’s intuition. Simply, Taylo
r and Annie were somewhere behind this wall. She believed that. Or, at the moment, maybe she just needed to believe something.

  The flashlight rattled against the gun as she shoved it into the pouch of Jim’s Pitt sweatshirt. Once over the wall, she’d leave the light off while she looked around. Why advertise her movements to the security creeps watching the monitors?

  The lowest spot of the wall was maybe six feet high. She rolled a large rock to the wall’s base and stood on top of it, and with one good jump was able to hoist herself over—finally, a practical payoff for all those noontime Centre Club workouts. She dropped through the dark and into the hedge that rimmed the estate’s rear gardens, her landing announced by the noisy crackling of branches and her own muttered “Shit!” Did the Underhills have dogs? Trying to remember.

  The main house and the massive garage loomed just up the hill, silhouetted against a bright three-quarters moon. Only one window on the house’s second story was lit, a wan yellow beacon among the dozen or so backside windows in the great gabled roof. From where Brenna stood, downhill and looking up at its wide rear veranda, she couldn’t tell if any of the ground-floor rooms were occupied. From the faint glow, she guessed at least some were.

  The path was wide and clear, so she followed it into the center of the gardens, her hands groping for cold-steel reassurance in the sweatshirt pouch. To her right, the massive gazebo rose like a state capitol dome in the moonlight—the place where, for her, this nightmare had begun ten days earlier. How had it come to this in so short a time? How could illusions die so quickly?

  The dirt path turned to gravel as it approached the house. Stepping carefully, she moved toward the wide stone steps that rose from the garden to the veranda, where she had first heard Ford Underhill’s pained version of his mother’s difficult slide into Alzheimer’s and his father’s noble struggle to manage her care. Now that version sounded so contrived. What had happened to her instincts?