A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  She went to the hotel business center and signed on to a computer using the account of McShaller Systems, her consulting corporation. She read the Buffalo News, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Livingston County News. She scanned every article about Jimmy Sanders or Nick Bauermeister. They all had the same things to say about the case: Bauermeister had died of a single rifle shot fired through the front window of the house he shared with his girlfriend, Chelsea Schnell, age twenty-three. Police had interviewed neighbors, friends, employers, co-workers, and then begun seeking Jimmy Sanders for an interview because he’d had a fight with Bauermeister and been charged with assault. They had left messages, but had not connected with him yet when a man came forward claiming to have sold a .30-06 rifle and a box of ammunition to Jimmy at a garage sale a couple of weeks before the murder.

  Jane wrote down the name of the girlfriend and then looked up the address. She wrote down the name of the supposed gun seller, Walter Slawicky. The Livingston County paper, which was published in Geneseo, had seen fit to include a few details that the big-city papers had left out, including Nick Bauermeister’s employer, a storage company called Box Farm Personal Storage on Telephone Road near Avon. On the computer Jane ranged further in space and time, searching for the names of Bauermeister, his girlfriend, his employer, and the gun seller in any context, asking the engine to search the past five years up to the present day. Whenever she found anything she printed the page.

  When Jane had exhausted her search, she tried to assess what she had. The most interesting person to look at first would be the man she knew was lying to connect Jimmy with the crime. She found Walter Slawicky’s address online. He lived on Iroquois Road in Caledonia. She looked at views of the house from street level and from above, then signed out.

  Jane went back upstairs to her room, plugged her cell phone in to charge, set the alarm on it, and lay on the bed. She was asleep in a few minutes, still tired from the late night with Carey. At ten the alarm went off. She got up, dressed in a pair of black jeans, black running shoes, and a black pullover sweater. She took out a black baseball cap, but didn’t put it on yet. She wore a light gray hooded sweatshirt to counteract the unrelieved black, then took the stairs to the garage and got into her Passat.

  The drive from Rochester down Interstate 390 to Caledonia was easy and fast at night. Her car was small, dark, and nondescript, so she felt confident leaving it parked along the street in Caledonia where there were a few restaurants still open. The line of other cars at the curb would camouflage hers, and she expected to be gone before the bars closed. She took off her hoodie, put on her baseball cap, and got out to walk.

  Slawicky’s house was on the opposite side of the street, but Jane approached it by staying along the side where the shadows were deepest and hurrying past any building that cast light on the sidewalks. When she found the address she could see that the house had lights on. Someone must be at home. She crossed the street.

  As she approached the house she looked carefully in all directions to be sure there wasn’t anyone on the street and nobody standing at windows to notice her. She slipped into the yard, then moved along the tall, untrimmed hedge at the border of the property, letting it hide her silhouette.

  The house was an old one, probably from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with a sagging covered porch and tall, narrow windows that looked cloudy as though they hadn’t been washed recently, and wispy whitish curtains behind them.

  When Jane was as far back in the side yard as the first window, she glided silently to the side of the house and looked in. The window showed her a small dining room with an old table that had a number of rings in its finish from years of wet glasses, and a vase in the center with dusty silk roses in it—a faded red and a white that was now yellowish. A still-folded newspaper and pieces of junk mail were strewn around on the surface. She saw no signs of a recent female presence, and no female belongings. She was fairly sure no man would buy fake roses for his house. This looked like a house Slawicky had inherited from elderly rela­tives and never cleaned.

  Through a wide opening beyond the dining room table she could see a darkened living room where the changing glow of a television set was visible on the ceiling. She moved into the deeper darkness away from the dining room window and toward the living room. She picked a window on the television’s side where she would not have its glare in her eyes. What she had to minimize now was motion. If Slawicky’s eye caught movement he would be unable to keep from turning to look. She slowly moved her face close to the side of the house and brought only her left eye near the corner of the window.

  There he was in a chair in front of the television set. He was about forty-five to fifty years old, and his hair on top was retreating to the back of his skull. He was broad, and wore a light blue T-shirt that rose above his pants to reveal a round, hairy belly. There was a bottle of beer in his right hand and occasionally he lifted it to drink, but his eyes remained aimed at the television set, the pupils barely moving. When he drank, the pressure of the bottle to his mouth made his small round nose bob up and down.

  The furnishings in the living room were consistent with everything Jane had seen so far. The couch was swaybacked and the arms had ladders of frayed fabric where people had leaned on them. The chair where Slawicky sat matched the couch, and both looked as though they had been bought by an earlier generation, and inherited with the house. The chair was aimed precisely at the television screen. Jane caught a reflection in the dark window across from the television set, and decided get a better look from another angle.

  She moved around to the opposite window where she could see the television set. It was well over five feet wide, a plasma high-definition screen of the sort that she’d seen in stores for around four thousand dollars. In the two corners at that end of the room were pairs of detached speakers, two tall and two short. She had no idea of what those had cost, only that it was more than most people would have paid to hear every whisper of the inane commentary on televised games.

  Jane moved along the driveway to the garage. The big door was closed, but she could see there was a man-size door on the side, so she tried the knob. It was locked, so she took out her pocketknife, inserted the blade into the space between door and jamb by the strike plate, pushed to depress the plunger, then pulled the door open. Inside she could see the sleek, rounded, gleaming shape of a Porsche. She stepped in and read the letters across the back: Carrera. She moved along the car, and noticed that there was a slight cloudy residue on the rear side window where the dealer’s sticker had been poorly scraped off. The car was new. It had to cost around eighty-five thousand.

  Jane slipped out and relocked the door. As she stood there she saw a car slowing down and moving to the right slightly as it passed the driveway, as though the driver were planning to park. She moved around the garage to the back, and saw something else that didn’t belong, a lump under a tarp. She lifted it. This time it was a Jet Ski, bright and gleaming. She had no idea what those cost, since she detested them. She covered the Jet Ski again and moved along the side of the garage to watch the street.

  She caught the shape of a man moving from the street into the far side of the yard where she had entered, and, as Jane had done, stepping along the high unruly hedge to keep his silhouette shaded by its dark opaque shape. Jane prepared to run. The man was on the side of the yard she had come from, and that put him between her and her car. If she went, she would have to go left for a distance, sneak across the road into one of the yards, and run along the backs of the houses and out to the street where her car was parked.

  She pulled her black baseball cap down tight on her head with the brim low on her forehead to shield her eyes from moonlight and the faint light pollution from neon signs and distant streetlamps. She judged where the new man must be and stared to the side of that spot until she saw him move into it. He stood perfectly still for a mi
nute or more, and then began to move again.

  Jane stayed still. This man was trouble. He knew how to move in the dark without being easily detected. He took a few silent steps, then stopped and waited. He knew that if someone had heard him or sensed movement, then he must wait until the opponent’s mind had determined that there was nothing there—the impression must have been false or self-generated or unthreatening, because there had not been another to make into a pattern.

  He stepped away from the hedge to the side of the house. As he did, the light from the dining room window illuminated him for a second. He was tall, thin, almost stork-like, with very short blond hair. Hello, Ike. It was the man who had been tracking her and Jimmy in Allegheny, Technical Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He didn’t stop at the window for long, because in a moment Jane saw him appear at the rear corner of the house. She pulled back her head and crouched on the opposite side of the garage as he kept coming. She heard him open the smaller door of the garage and step inside.

  Jane stood and moved quietly up the driveway, across the street into the yard of the house opposite Slawicky’s. She walked along behind it to the street, stayed low as she came around the trunk of her car and into the driver’s seat, slipped the key in, and started the engine.

  As she drove along Iroquois Street away from Caledonia, she thought about her visit to Slawicky’s. Apparently what Sergeant Lloyd had been doing since he had lost the trail of Jimmy Sanders in the Alleghenies was looking more closely at the people who had some connection to the murder. Walter Slawicky, the man who had come forward to report that he’d sold Jimmy the murder weapon, seemed to have caught his attention. Sergeant Lloyd had just seen what she had—that the man who had implicated Jimmy Sanders in the murder seemed to have come into some money.

  15

  Chelsea Schnell sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover beside Daniel Crane, looking out the windshield most of the time but taking an occasional glance at him when she was sure her eyes wouldn’t meet his. He had taken her to the Escarpment tonight. It was even better than she had imagined it would be. The restaurant was built on a flat limestone shelf high above the Niagara Gorge in Lewiston. After the river washed over the falls, it ran onward through another seven miles of rapids and swift water to Lake Ontario. The river had dug a steep canyon there, three hundred feet below the restaurant’s patio, where she and Dan had sat for dinner on this warm summer evening. They had arrived at seven, when there was still plenty of daylight, and finished by candlelight three hours later.

  The quality of the food and wine had taken her off guard. She had only agreed to go with him because he had kept asking and asking, and she had run out of excuses. She hadn’t had the mental and emotional energy to brush him off again. Each of his previous invitations had been to very nice places, but when he had offered the Escarpment, she had finally given in. She had always wished that Nick would take her to a place like the Escarpment just once. No, she admitted to herself, just once wouldn’t have been what she wanted. Once she’d been there, she would have wanted to come on special times, maybe birthdays or anniversaries. The thought of an anniversary made her feel lonely and bereft, so she decided to distract herself.

  She said, “That was such a wonderful restaurant, Dan. Thank you so much for taking me.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “It was my pleasure.”

  She waited a few seconds, but he didn’t add anything, so she spoke again. “You were right that I should get out of the house once in a while.”

  “I knew you would like it,” he said. “You know another place that’s really nice? There’s a great restaurant—and I mean great—right outside of Rochester, in Pittsford. It’s been written up in a lot of food magazines. It’s where famous people go when they come to Rochester.”

  “What’s it called?” What famous people ever went to Rochester?

  “It’s called the Old Canal Inn. It’s built on the site of an eighteenth-century hotel. The road and the hotel were there before the Erie Canal, but I guess they want people to know it’s beside the canal. I’ll take you there.”

  “I wasn’t hinting to make you treat me again. I was just curious,” she said. “After the meal we had tonight, I can’t even think about food again for a few days.”

  “I liked the Escarpment too,” said Crane. “I’ve always liked it, but tonight it was at its best. It’s such a beautiful view anyway, but having you across the table made it even more beautiful.” He watched her for a reaction, but didn’t detect one, so he persisted. “I meant that, you know.”

  Chelsea could feel herself getting panicky. He was trying to be nice, but being with him made the interior of the car seem suddenly smaller. She felt an impulse to open the car door and get out, but the car was moving. She held her discomfort in check. “You shouldn’t be such a kiss ass. People will think you’re trying to make fools of them.”

  “Me?” said Crane. “I’d never do that to you. I do think you’re beautiful. I’m sure you can see that for yourself in the mirror every day, but it doesn’t hurt you to know that other people appreciate you.” He grinned. “You’re raising the property values around here, so it’s good for everybody.”

  “Always glad to help the real estate people,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else. You’ve been careful all through dinner not to talk about work. So tell me about your day at work. How was it?”

  “Good,” he said. “Business is always good. Whenever the economy starts looking up, people buy too much and don’t have anyplace to put the excess but storage. When the economy goes down again, they lose their big fancy homes and have to put all of it in storage.”

  “So they have to come to you no matter what.”

  “The smart ones don’t, but they don’t matter. There are so few of them that they’re not a big share of the market. How about your job? Are you back at work yet?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “I was thinking of going back this week, but my mother asked me to go on a little trip with her, so I told the bank I wasn’t ready. She was going to fly to Denver to help my cousin Amelia with her new baby, and she wanted me to go with her. At the last minute I couldn’t face it. I realized it would have been the same thing that kept me from going back to work—lots of questions about Nick and the investigation and what I feel, and people saying it’s too bad we weren’t married, because then there would be insurance. It would be even worse in Denver. I’d edge out Amelia and her baby for attention and everybody would feel bad for me instead of good for her. I’d rather be around people who have gotten tired of talking about it.”

  “It’s not that we’re tired of talking about it. We just—”

  “I am,” she said. “I should probably be ashamed of that, but it’s how I feel. I don’t want to go through the whole story over and over again for a bunch of new people, and relive everything to catch them up.”

  “I understand,” said Crane. “You can visit your Denver relatives another time after it’s all over.”

  She glared at him, coiling herself for a fight. Nick’s murder wasn’t ever going to be over. Death wasn’t a temporary setback. Her life had been marked forever. Saying that sometime it was all going to fade away was stupid. As the seconds passed she watched his face. He was trying so hard, and he had just made a small mistake trying to comfort her. He didn’t deserve a hysterical tirade from the same woman he had just bought the most expensive dinner in Western New York and tried to flatter and distract for over three hours. “It’s true,” she said. “Denver will still be there when I’m ready.” She noticed that he didn’t make the turn at Telephone Road. “I think you just went past my turn.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you there. Just a brief detour.” He kept driving, his eyes on the road. He seemed to be speeding up.

  Chelsea didn’t like the way
he avoided looking at her, and she didn’t like it that he had not asked if she minded taking a detour. She felt manipulated and trapped. But she was determined to remain silent, and give him enough time to realize she was irritated. Maybe then he would get around to discussing why she felt that way. The silence went on, and she began to suspect that she was more uncomfortable with silence than he was. “So what’s with the detour?”

  “I just have to stop at my place for a minute before I swing back your way. I left some papers at home that have to be in the office in the morning, and that’s in the direction of your place, so I can drop them off on my way home from there. I’m sorry to do this, but it’s payroll stuff, and it’ll save me a long trip later.”

  She ran his excuse through her mind and listened to the tone of his voice for evidence that he was lying to get her alone in a place where he could make an unwelcome move that would only cause them both embarrassment. She couldn’t detect anything. In penance for her suspicion she was inclined to be agreeable about this. He could just as easily have made whatever misguided advance he’d wanted at her house. She lived there alone now, and was always alone when he came to visit or pick her up.

  Crane turned a corner onto a knot of smaller roads, and she knew that they were in the space somewhere between the Country Club of Buffalo and the Park Country Club because she’d once worked a night job for a caterer, but she had lost her sense of exact location from being turned around a couple of times. The houses were all big now, most of them long and low, with huge lawns and tall trees, all at the ends of long driveways marked by rural mailboxes on posts, but then curving up to modern houses.

  Chelsea had always hated the mailbox where she and Nick had lived, because it epitomized for her the fact that she and Nick lived out in the sticks. She had to trudge all the way down the gravel drive in rain or snow to retrieve a few bills and a pile of garish ads for things she wouldn’t buy in a million years. But in this neighborhood, the mailboxes at the ends of long driveways symbolized the ownership of a big house on a vast piece of land.