It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  “You better. Call. Her mother,” said Will. He knew that rich people did not stay in police stations long. He was just hoping that this magic would extend to him. “Her name is. Pat Foy. Get the number. From Ruby. They live in Hart Ridge. In a big house. Really big. Believe me.” He was panting, and he smelled like the creepy air freshener in the police car that had transported him and Ruby here.

  “Where are your parents?”

  Will’s mind took a quick zigzag. “My father. Is on. A cruise,” he lied.

  This did not have the effect he had hoped. The cop merely nodded. His face was too white, as if he’d grown up in a basement. His ears were the smallest Will had ever seen. When the cop lifted his eyes from his paperwork, Will could see the pity in them. Will’s chest grew cold. He had always thought of himself as one sort of person, but the cop seemed to have recognized him as a different type altogether.

  “A mystery cruise,” Will elaborated, trying to conceal his breathlessness, that sign of nerves.

  Ruby still hadn’t moved. Her upper arms were pressed to her sides, and her forearms were crossed at a weird angle. Will wondered if she’d been injured, but didn’t think there’d been time. Her braids were coming loose. Elbows of hair stuck out here and there, and one hank in the back had pulled entirely free. It made her look as if she’d been in a fight—wounded, maybe, but also tough and hard.

  He tried again: “Ruby.” This time he’d found enough breath to catch her attention.

  “I’ve still got it,” she mouthed, without relaxing her odd slanted posture. Will realized then that she was protecting the paper she’d found at the Culps’ house.

  “Got what?” said her cop sharply. She was older than Will’s cop, and sturdier somehow, despite being female. Her face was covered with freckles. On her the uniform looked like a park ranger’s. She should have been out searching for lost children, not persecuting them.

  Where was Pat Foy, with all her energy, her sense of entitlement, her weirdness?

  Instead a girl appeared. For a brief moment Will in his confusion thought that she was the nurse from Lemuel’s hospital, the youngest one, who’d been on the night shift and who’d found him the foldout chair. She’d also told him there was a cafeteria on the third floor without implying he was too much of an idiot to know that hospitals had cafeterias. (Which he was.) This girl had the same exhausted confidence, and her bangs fluffed out over her eyes the same way, as if she’d blown on them from her bottom lip, and her hair was trapped in the same clip in the back. For a moment Will wondered if the world was full of competent young women ready to parachute in during crises.

  “What’s going on here?” asked the girl. “Ruby! Are you all right?” She looked small among all the desks. She was wearing a white jacket that sort of fluttered out at the hip and made you want to rest your hand there. “I hope you realize she’s only thirteen years old.” Her tone was severe. She herself must have been Will’s age, but that wasn’t stopping her. She had a natural imperiousness.

  “Rose,” said Ruby with wonder.

  “That’s Rose? Foy?” asked Will.

  “I thought you were good friends of theirs.” Will’s cop was disgusted. His creaky voice thinned to nothing. He had to clear his throat to say, “You’re such good friends you don’t know what they look like.”

  “Okay,” said the female cop to Ruby. “What exactly have you got there?”

  Ruby’s arms tightened.

  “You can’t just go around breaking into people’s houses,” said the cop. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you kids. Don’t you have enough stuff already?”

  “I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,” said Rose. “The Culps are friends of my mom and dad’s.”

  “Maybe you can tell me how you knew they’d been at the Culps’.”

  Gotcha, implied her tone, but Rose was unmoved. She said, “Ruby text-messaged me.”

  “I understand you took something from Mr. Culp,” said the cop.

  “I didn’t,” said Ruby.

  “Mr. Culp doesn’t know what it is, but he says he won’t press charges if you give it back.”

  “No, no,” said Ruby. “I didn’t take anything I shouldn’t have.”

  “Why don’t you just give it back,” said the cop impatiently, sounding for the first time like a real person. “It doesn’t make any difference to me,” she said. “But it sure looks like he’s offering you a good deal. Then we can forget the whole thing.”

  “Have you called Mom?” asked Rose.

  “I don’t suppose you know what your sister has been up to,” said the cop.

  “Not exactly.”

  “She could wind up behind bars.”

  “Can I talk to her alone?”

  “Are you twenty-one?”

  Rose stared at her, then decided on evasion. “What does that matter?”

  The cop stood up. “You’re going to have to hand it over one way or another,” she said to Ruby, who shrank back into her seat.

  “No! No!” she cried. “It’s evidence!”

  “My father. Is in! The car!” said Will brokenly. “The Mustang. Down the road.”

  The cop sitting across from Will started shaking his head again, displaying his tiny ears, but Ruby’s cop was not distracted. She barked, “Tell Conner to get over there.” And, to Ruby, harshly, she said, “Okay, what did you take?”

  “You don’t have to give anything back to the Culps, do you?” Rose asked the cop.

  “We don’t have to do anything.”

  “Neil did it!” said Ruby to Rose excitedly. “Neil did everything, I mean. I can prove it. He’s the one who should be in jail. We can get Daddy out.”

  “What did you find?” asked Rose.

  Ruby’s eyes flicked to the right and to the left.

  “A piece of paper?”

  The flicking of the eyes again. But this time, Ruby nodded.

  “That’s why you went to the Culps’?”

  Another nod.

  “What an amazing girl you are. Is it…a letter?”

  “With highlights,” said Ruby.

  “Highlights?”

  “You know, like with a yellow marker.”

  “Yellow. Marker,” breathed Will.

  Even the cops were interested, puzzled.

  “Our Dad worked for Neil Culp at LinkAge,” explained Rose. “I suppose you know what a mess that is.”

  “Culp did work for LinkAge,” said Ruby’s cop to Will’s. “What’s your dad’s name?”

  “Frank,” said Rose, her mouth closing around the name.

  “He’s in jail!” said Ruby.

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me,” said the cop.

  Will had never hurt so much in his life.

  “Look,” said Rose, her eyes traveling around the room for help. “We’re all witnesses. I am.” She scratched at the air in Will’s direction. “He is.”

  “That’s Will,” said Ruby.

  “Will? You mean Will Samuel?” said Rose. She immediately shook her head as if to dislodge the information, there being no room for it. “If it’s evidence, you’re going to have to show the police anyway. Show me first, and then I’ll give it to them.” She looked up at the female cop. “Okay?”

  The cop shrugged and nodded. The room grew hushed: Everyone was very still so as not to interfere with the transfer. Ruby slowly straightened up, felt around under her arm, and just as slowly drew out a single piece of copy paper, unevenly creased.

  Rose carefully unfolded it and smoothed it out. “‘They’re on to us,’” she read. She looked up at her sister with inscrutable intensity. “Is this what you mean?” Her voice was disbelieving, unlovely. The note had flopped back, and she curled it slightly to stiffen it. “‘Clean up your e-mails,’” she read. “‘It’s a crime.’”

  “That sounds kind of familiar,” said Ruby’s cop.

  “Yeah,” said Rose. “It was on the news.”

  “What?” said Ruby.

  “Everybo
dy’s already seen this memo. It was quoted in the hearings, and it made headlines.”

  “Everybody?”

  Rose nodded. “The SEC, the U.S. attorney’s office. Everybody has always known about this.”

  The others in the room stared at the paper, silent.

  Will was filled with great disappointment. This was it. He had not done what he was supposed to, although he could not remember what that consisted of. Maybe there was no point, no point to anything at all.

  There was a crackle nearby, and a rasp. “That was Conner,” Will’s cop announced. “There’s a Mustang parked near the Culp place. But no one’s in it.”

  “I. Can’t. Breathe,” said Will, sliding toward the floor.

  CHAPTER

  29

  The nurse attendant, an oversize woman in oversize purple scrubs, pulled aside the curtain on the ER cubicle where Will lay on his side. “Put this on,” she said over the clatter of the rings on the metal rod. She tried to hand him a folded hospital gown. “Someone will be right with you.”

  “Ah-h-h, no,” said Rose, who was perched on the edge of the green chair beside him.

  The attendant gave her a hearty smile. “Your girlfriend is a little shy,” she said. “Come on, girl, let’s both leave, and he can change in peace. We can join this po-lice here.”

  They both glanced at Will’s escort, who was leaning dispiritedly against the wall.

  “It’s a possible punctured lung,” said Rose. “He has to be brought to X-ray immediately.”

  Will was still lying down, the folded gown clutched to his chest.

  “Calm down,” said the nurse attendant to him. “Take slow, even breaths. Okay, what happened?”

  “Complainant’s bodyguard was forced to subdue him,” barked the cop.

  “He kicked me,” said Will. “And kicked me.”

  “I’m a first-year med student,” Rose lied as she pried the gown from his fingers.

  His heart leapt straight to his head. “Rose,” he said, his voice thin and dreamy.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Rose.

  “Ruby. Always. Gets. Her. Way. Too,” he said, closing his eyes.

  The next day Will awoke hazily to see Ruby standing over by the window of his hospital room. Because she was looking out, he could see only her back framed against the soft morning light, but he recognized her tightly combative posture. Then his eyes closed. When he woke again, the phone was ringing. It was Rose.

  “I know you’re not supposed to talk,” she said, “but I wanted to know how you were.” She proceeded to have both sides of the conversation, stopping only to confirm the happy ending of the story she was relating. His left lung had collapsed because his chest cavity was filled with air, she explained. The pressure had started to affect his right lung. An intern inserted a chest tube and suctioned him out. The lung filled for the first time in hours.

  Rose was trying hard to be cool about her role, but the story itself still carried her away. Will was quick to adopt this outside view of his experience. It was not that he didn’t remember the events of the evening before. But he’d gotten a peek at the abyss a person could tumble into. Any alternative was attractive, and Rose offered a powerful one. If she got to be the white knight, he remained solidly worthy of rescue. He had not led Ruby astray in his ignorance.

  “Is Ruby okay?” he asked, his chest aching.

  “Sure,” said Rose. Still voluble from her triumph, she told him that Ruby had simply walked into the Rumson house and grabbed some papers off Neil Culp’s desk. The document that excited her was confidential because it came from Culp’s attorney, but it was nothing more than a copy of the now infamous note, with a promise that an outline of possible interpretations would be forthcoming. In any investigation, the “smoking guns” are copied endlessly and referred to in many of the other documents. As long as Ruby had found anything from the case—as opposed to, say, household bills—she was not likely to come away without inflammatory material.

  The light at the window seemed to dim, then darken. It was only now that he fully understood the insignificance of Ruby’s memo. He’d always thought that she was, at least in part, playing make-believe. But it turned out that he had been just as childish. And he’d had a real audience—cops, criminals, victims. What could be worse? There was no clue to unearth, no evidence to secure, no mission to pursue. There was no mystery.

  From where he lay, head elevated to ease his breathing, he could see through the window a gloomy green bough nodding, as if in agreement. He watched all of its different types of nods after getting off the phone. When another nurse attendant came in to take his temperature and blood pressure, he asked her what happened to the girl who’d been there that morning.

  “No children allowed on this floor,” declared the attendant.

  “She’s not a child, exactly,” said Will.

  “No one at all allowed in the morning,” she said.

  That would never have stopped Ruby, thought Will, turning away.

  “Look,” said the attendant. “Here are some visitors.”

  Pat and Lemuel were at the door.

  “Will, my boy,” said his father. “Are you all right?”

  “Mom and Dad will make everything better,” said the attendant.

  When an embarrassed silence fell, Will realized that Pat and Lemuel had been uncomfortable even before the attendant had spoken. They had walked in uncomfortably. Partly that was because of the difference in size. Lemuel was big and swollen-looking, teetering a little in his ruined cowboy boots, and Pat was quite a bit shorter, with clothes that fit like a candy wrapper. But there was also a sort of shrugged-off intimacy between them. They were so pointedly not together.

  “What happened to you?” said Will.

  “To me?” said Lemuel.

  “You weren’t in the car.”

  “I went looking for you,” said Lemuel. “And I found a pay phone at a fancy grill a couple of miles away. The next thing I knew, I was waking up at a place called the Hide-Away.”

  “That’s a motel,” said Pat. “Not too bad, either.”

  “I spent the night alone, of course,” said Lemuel gruffly.

  “Oh!” said Pat. “Well, I had to get the kids back to Hart Ridge.”

  Will contemplated the two of them with a stone face. “What happened to Ruby?” he asked.

  “She’s grounded,” said Pat, still hanging back. “For at least a dozen years. Which means no visitors.”

  Will blinked. Visitors? Could she possibly be referring to him? He refused to believe it. Yet a shutter seemed to close at the back of her eyes.

  “Hart Ridge may be a little lonely,” she said, sneaking a spooky smile at him. “It turns out that Virginia has to disappear to write a book about disappearing. But she’s still out there.”

  “Out there?” Will repeated blankly. “Out where?”

  “She’s on her way to New Zealand,” said Pat.

  “You remember Lydia Bunting?” roared Lemuel. He was leaning against the bathroom door.

  “Of course!” said Pat, perking up.

  “She was on the cruise.”

  “Wonderful!” Pat’s voice soared. “I thought she was supposed to kill herself!”

  “If so,” said Lemuel, “she must have changed her mind in time. She was just married, and she stowed her husband in her cabin somehow. I guess they thought they could get a free honeymoon. He kept pretending not to speak English. Or maybe he really couldn’t, I forget. But it was a big ruckus.”

  Will found this sudden joviality incredibly irritating. “You’re not supposed to be drinking,” he said.

  “But I’ve given up so much already,” said Lemuel.

  “Like what?”

  Lemuel thought for a moment. “Crank,” he said. “Betting on football games. Running around with women.”

  “The doctors told me you’re trying to kill yourself,” said Will.

  “Come on,” said Lemuel. “I’m trying to have a good time
. Though it might come to the same thing in the end.”

  “I hate all these phrases like dead to me, might as well be dead, and a living death,” said Pat, her half circle of a smile unfaltering. “I don’t care whether you see a person or not. It all counts as life.”

  What this meant, Will did not know, but Lemuel seemed to accept it.

  “Virginia Howley didn’t kill herself,” said Pat.

  “I guess the world is full of people who haven’t killed themselves yet,” said Lemuel.

  Pat looked around the hospital room, then cried, “I nearly forgot! Look what I got for you!” She finally approached Will’s bed and handed him an iPod, still in its origami-like folded white box. “Isn’t it adorable?”

  Will turned it over as if to read the back. The iPod, he realized, was a goodbye present. His stay in New Jersey was over.

  “I still don’t know what you were doing at the Culps’,” said Lemuel.

  Will did not look up. He didn’t have the heart to answer.

  When Pat responded at last, she sounded like a windup doll: “The kids thought they’d look for…oh, you know, evidence at the CFO’s estate. Neil’s bodyguard attacked Will, which he didn’t even get in trouble for because supposedly Will was trespassing. I tried to tell the cops that I’d sent the kids down for an edger I left behind—”

  “I’ll kill that Neil Culp,” said Lemuel.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Will. At least the nurse was long gone.

  “What were you thinking?” said Lemuel.

  “Uh…We thought we’d help,” said Will in a low voice.

  “Who? Who were you trying to help?” Lemuel turned on Pat. “Was it that criminal husband of yours? Hasn’t anyone figured out yet that it was wrong of all those assholes to take hundreds of millions of dollars from his company? Or is that still up in the air?”

  “He’s not exactly…,” said Pat. “It’s hard to know what that means…There are degrees…” She drew herself up, saying—and it was about time—“I suppose he is a criminal.”

  “You did just what Bud Caddy would have done,” said Lemuel to his son.

  “I wasn’t Bud Caddy,” said Will. “Ruby was.”

  “You’re older, you’re the boy, you take responsibility.”