A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  Franklin-the-kid was given the intimate task of rolling each of my fingertips sideways across a damp black pad and then an index card. My hands trembled in his. A test? He handed me a Wash’n Dri wet nap, but it didn’t get the ink off.

  I assured Huber that I’d be in town for the full extent of the foreseeable future, and would be happy to answer any further questions he might have. He gave me his card, and asked me to call him if anything else came to mind, whether or not it seemed important.

  I thanked him, shook his hand carefully with my sooty fingers, and promised I would.

  I shoved my fists in my pockets as I walked outside, and only then realized that the note from Sembles’s door was still in my pocket.

  I stood outside waiting for Wilt and started to second-guess myself. Maybe now was the time to bust back into the station, hand the piece of paper over, and start telling them about the connection with the Rose Girls. But did I want them to know that the murderer knew me? Knew I was coming?

  Then I thought maybe I should wash my hands of the whole thing, get back to writing about what I was comfortable confronting—green beans and Jell-O, if it came to that.

  I mean, Lapthorne had a credible alibi, and for all I knew they’d find a kilo of slam and Sembles’s works under the kitchen sink and think I was there to tie off and fix. Worse, they might think I was making a delivery.

  My paranoia was not helped by the fact that Wilt’s trusty blue Gremlin reeked of dope. He got out from behind the wheel, unfolding his long legs to tower over the car.

  The knot of his wide paisley tie was pulled down to rest all scrunched at the third button of his shirt, his suit looking like it had been wadded up in a wet towel for a week. Simon got out of the passenger seat and moved to the back.

  “You buying air freshener from Cheech and Chong?” I asked.

  I shut the door quickly, in the hope that more of the atmosphere wouldn’t leak out and rouse the K-9 unit or set off smoke alarms in the station house. “Man, I’m glad you didn’t drive me over here. I’d be asking you for bail instead of a ride.”

  “Want me to roll down the windows?” Wilt asked, throwing the car into gear and pulling back onto the road.

  “Not until we’re over the border,” I said, “and thank you for coming to get me.”

  “Least I could do, considering I pushed you into it,” he said. “How was the detective?”

  “The questions were routine, I guess—where I was last night, what I was supposed to be doing with Sembles today, did I see anybody. When I left I had a sudden urge to go back in and tell them everything I know, not that I really know all that much.”

  “In my experience, you can always go back and tell more, but you never get the opportunity to take it back once you’ve started. I think you should hang on to what you know and see where it takes you, at least for a couple of days . . . not that you’re going to be listening to me for a while, if you’ve got any sense.”

  Wilt got quiet for a minute, then blurted out, “Listen, Maddie, I’m sorry as hell about this. I thought you were just jittery because you were a novice, and I didn’t respect the fact that you had what were legitimate reservations about pushing this guy to talk.”

  “Wilt, I didn’t listen to myself either. I was too pissed at Ted for suggesting I couldn’t handle it, when I knew I had no idea what I was doing. Don’t worry about it. You know where we’re supposed to be going?”

  “Got the address right here . . . Simon looked it up for me,” said Wilt.

  Simon turtled his head forward between the seats. “Figured I’d come along for the ride, get shots of the place in case we need them later,” he said. “How’re you feeling, Madeline? It must have been pretty awful to walk in there and find him like that.”

  I caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He looked even more pale, haggard, and concerned than usual, his round cheeks and bald head with its tonsure of dark curls giving him the air of a once-jolly-but-now-clinically-depressed monk who spent all his waking hours in a dim scriptorium. All he needed was a little brown hooded robe with the rope belt and sandals. The hair shirt went without saying.

  “I’ve had better mornings,” I said. “But so did Sembles, poor guy.”

  We pulled up right behind my car in front of the dead man’s little house and all got out.

  CHAPTER 36

  The two guys tailed me back, so we all got to the parking lot at work around the same time. Wilt and Simon started to head toward the Weekly, but I hesitated.

  “You know, guys,” I said finally, while we waited to cross the street, “I don’t think I want to go back in right now. I’d like to talk to my pal Kenny up at the Crown, if that’s cool. He used to be a cop, and he’s been talking me through this whole thing. I should tell him about all this shit today.”

  “You could probably use a beer, Madeline,” said Wilt. “Promise me you’ll eat something first, though, okay? And stay away from those damn pickled eggs.”

  “Pig knuckles it is, then,” I said, and Wilt patted me on the back.

  “You take care, Madeline,” said Simon, and the two of them walked toward the Weekly’s narrow glass door.

  Kenny was busy taping a much-photocopied sheet of paper up over the bar when I walked in. There were a bunch of buttocks with wings on them zooming around the page, with the legend “If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport!” in the center.

  “Charming,” I said, and he looked back over his shoulder at me with a big smile.

  “You would know, Madeline,” he said. “Set you up with a Shirley Temple?”

  “I’d prefer a boilermaker,” I said.

  “It’s too early for you to be drinking something like that,” he said.

  “I got somebody killed. I’m here to get the ‘I told you so’ part over with.”

  “I never say I told you so. Best way to increase your life expectancy.”

  “That and avoiding my company,” I said.

  He nodded, pulling a tall narrow glass out from under the bar and proceeding, in fact, to construct a Shirley Temple.

  “How old’s that grenadine?” I asked, before taking a sip.

  “I’d worry more about the cherry. Jar’s been here since I was in short pants.”

  I lifted the glass and swallowed some of the sweet, syrupy pinkness. “Hey, that’s actually good,” I said.

  “I can mix a drink. Surprise. You eaten anything since you threw up?”

  I blushed. “What’s it, on my shirt?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve smelled better breath. Not lately, of course,” he said, tipping his head toward the two old guys at the other end of the bar. “So. Who was it?”

  “Sembles,” I said.

  “You find him?”

  I nodded.

  “Nasty?”

  I was going to tell him about the thumbs and the scissors and the flies, but my stomach went all acid and my eyelids started to sting and I didn’t want to start crying in front of him again, so I just shrugged and dropped my head like there was something really interesting in the bottom of my glass.

  Kenny was quiet for a minute. He took one of my hands, held it palm-up in both of his, and looked over my still-darkened fingertips.

  “So you called the cops,” he said finally, giving it the local pronunciation: caps. “And they took you down to the station. Did you fill them in on all the background? Family ties and whatnot?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first.” I took my hand back gently and stirred my kiddie cocktail with the straw, miserable.

  “Finish that,” he said, “then wash your hands and I’ll bring you toast.”

  I went to the Ladies, thinking about my promise to call Lapthorne. Wishing I could call Dean instead.

  I should’ve gone back to work to talk things over with Ted, to thank Wilt again for coming to my rescue and Simon for being so reassuringly Simon-like. I knew that I wasn’t about to do any of that. The après-adrenaline exhaustion was going to keep my butt
glued to the barstool. I only wished Kenny had a cot in the place, the kind they have for naps in kindergarten.

  I scrubbed my hands in the skanky little chamber with some wetted rough brown paper towels and syrupy pink soap, which didn’t really help, then pumped some extra into my palm and got it into my mouth, tipping my head under the hot faucet so I could swish it through my teeth and spit.

  By the time I wandered bandy-legged back to my stool, Kenny had produced a plate of buttered toast.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t talk. Eat.” He stood over me with his arms crossed, waiting until I’d finished the last bite—slow going. For once in my life I had a complete absence of appetite.

  “So,” began Kenny.

  I looked down at the glossy surface of the bar and nodded, expecting that now I’d get my lecture.

  “I take it you have concrete evidence of Lapthorne’s whereabouts for last night?” he said.

  “How’d you know?” I asked.

  “Because otherwise that’s the first thing you would have told me when you walked in here—I understand you that well, at least, Maddie. You think you’re a softie, but in the clinch you see things black and white. If the guy didn’t have an alibi, you would have ratted him out the minute they got you down to the station. Even with what I told you, how he was in jail and all of that. So why don’t we start with what that alibi is, proceed to the events of the day, and see where we can go from there.”

  So I told him about the phone calls from Ellis and Lapthorne, that morning and the night before. He nodded when I described how clean the sofa was under Sembles, and after asking me whether I’d checked to see if the house had a basement or an outbuilding, agreed that he had to have been killed elsewhere.

  “If I was still on the force, I’d get the phone records, see if anyone else called Sembles last night,” said Kenny, “but whoever it was could just as well have shown up at the house, so that’s not necessarily important. Tell me more about how he looked when you found him.”

  I described the whole deal with Sembles’s thumbs, the scissors stuck in his neck, how his body seemed to be laid out for presentation. Kenny asked me about the whole Struwwelpeter reference, and I explained that Sembles had mentioned it the night of the fair.

  “So this is the second one with a story behind it—some kiddie thing, am I right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s messed up,” he said.

  “It’s all messed up.”

  “Even more so.”

  “Oh,” I said, “and there was a note on the front door. I figure he couldn’t have written it, but it had my name on it, and it’s why I went into the house even though he didn’t answer the door.”

  Kenny was silent for a minute, digesting that. “Okay,” he said finally. “That’s the most important piece of information we have, Maddie.”

  “The creepiest, anyway.”

  “Madeline, the note means that whoever did it is aware of you . . . of your appointment, your involvement. How many people knew you were gonna be up to Sembles’s?”

  “Well, I told Lapthorne last night. Other than that, there were just people at work . . . Ted, Wilt, and Simon.”

  I explained about the deal with the shadows in the photographs, then ran the whole meeting at work by him, plus my phone call to harass Sembles.

  “And nobody else was in the room with you? Just those three?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you tell them about the thing with the thumbs? How Sembles had been threatened with that?”

  I shut my eyes and thought about it, running back over the conversation in Ted’s office, sitting at Wilt’s desk.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t even tell them today, after it all happened. I haven’t told Lapthorne about it, either.”

  “Do those three at work know you didn’t talk to anyone else about going to see Sembles?”

  “No.”

  “Tell them you did. Tell them you talked to everybody and your mother about it after you got home last night.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the information that you were going to have this meeting today had to come from one of those three people, Madeline, and we don’t want to confirm that for them.”

  “And if I didn’t tell them about the thing with the thumbs, either one of them knew it already, or he told someone who did,” I said. “Like Schneider.”

  Kenny cocked his finger like a pistol and clucked his tongue.

  “So what do I do now?” I asked.

  “I think you go back to work and make a point of convincing those three that you don’t know shit. Tell them you were on the phone all night with everyone you know. If there’s any way you can find out what they were doing last night, great, but don’t ask specifically. Especially Simon.”

  “Simon?”

  “I don’t like the sound of those ‘extra’ photographs he had, Maddie. And think about his hands. The killer’s a lefty, remember? Those guys have all been in here for drinks after work, over the years. He’s got those black fingernails on his left hand, am I right? Some kind of chemical?”

  “Amitol,” I said, trying to remember which of Simon’s hands it was and feeling awful about it.

  Kenny sighed. “I know. He seems like a perfectly nice guy. But you can’t rule anybody out as the conduit for this, or the suspect. . . .”

  “Like Schneider,” I said.

  “Like even your cousin.”

  “C’mon, Kenny . . .”

  “Just saying.”

  The front door of the Crown banged open.

  “Madeline! Thank God you’re all right!” Lapthorne said, rushing over to me.

  “Speak of the devil,” said Kenny, as Ellis pounded in behind.

  CHAPTER 37

  Lapthorne Townsend. Damn glad to meet you,” said my cousin, reaching across the bar and giving Kenny a solid handshake. “It’s good to know Madeline’s with someone who can be trusted.”

  “The famous cousin,” Kenny said. “The lovely Ellis. Willkommen. Bienvenue. Céad míle fáilte.” He took a few steps back, grabbed a Labatt’s Blue out of the cooler, and slid it toward us.

  Lapthorne, at the corner of the bar’s L, snapped the bottle up neatly with his right hand.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, smiling.

  A test to see which hand he’d use. I rolled my eyes at Kenny, who gave me an infinitesimal shrug before leaning an elbow on the bar and pursing his lips at the sight of Lapthorne’s splendid tweed jacket and Guccis.

  “How’d you guys track me down?” I asked Lapthorne.

  “I tried reaching your office. They kept saying they expected you back at any moment, so I finally gave up and we jumped in the car.”

  “We hit the Weekly first,” said Ellis. “They sent us here. What happened? Excuse me for saying so, but you look like shit.”

  “You should see the other guy,” I said.

  “Good Lord!” said Lapthorne. “He actually threatened you?”

  “That would have been tough,” said Kenny, polishing a glass and then holding it up to the light, “seeing as how he was already dead.”

  “Good Lord!” Lapthorne said again, shaking his head and grabbing my shoulder. “I wish to hell you had waited for me to come up, Madeline. If anything had happened to you—”

  “Our Maddie can think on her feet,” Kenny cut him off. “Don’t get your panties in a knot.”

  When worlds collide, I thought, fully expecting one of them to whip it out and piss on me to entrench his territory.

  Ellis shot me a look of sympathy. “Let’s get you home,” she said.

  Lapthorne looked at me. “May I extend the invitation to Kenny?”

  “Thanks, but I’m a working stiff,” he said, looking at his sorry customers down the bar. “Somebody’s got to keep an eye on these boys.”

  “You’ll be missed,” replied Lapthorne, ticking the moisture-beaded neck of his Labatt’s with an immaculat
e fingernail. “Madeline’s been filling me in on your many talents.”

  Kenny’s lips curled back into a rictus of contempt only the career drunk could confuse with a smile.

  “Excuse me while I visit the head,” said Lapthorne.

  Once the men’s room door, such as it was, had closed behind him, Kenny leaned across the bar and caught my elbow.

  “This guy, Maddie,” he said, “I know he’s family, and I’m sorry for the disrespect, but Jesus Christ, Lappy? Kind of name is that?”

  Ellis smiled, then walked over to the jukebox so Kenny could insult her paramour in private.

  It pissed me off. I mean, okay, Lapthorne was wearing the tribal uniform: the pink Brooks shirt with the tiny monogram stitched on the cuff, the shoes no more durable than giftwrap. Fuck-you clothes. I-needn’t-dirty-my-hands-with-employment clothes—the kind that quietly let you know the wearer’s dividends roll in like clockwork and he lives damn high on a hog you’ll never make the acquaintance of.

  But as much as his ensemble spelled “useless pussy” to Kenny, so Kenny’s white-on-white short-sleeved dress number with the built-in collar tabs sealed his fate as a peasant according to Lapthorne. The thing was all synthetic, see-through enough that one could trace the outline of the big man’s sleeveless undershirt—both tops tucked into a pair of black slacks a little too shiny, a little too meticulously pressed. One didn’t need X-ray vision through the bar to know he wore heavy black cop shoes, spit-shined wingtips built to last through the next hundred-year flood.

  That Lapthorne’s jacket was a good twenty years old, that his cuffs were frayed and his shoes scuffed just enough to show what he supposed was a proper masculine disdain for the dictates of fashion, would do as little to bridge the sartorial divide as his knowing Kenny arose each morning at six to achieve that Marine Corps crease running perfectly down the front of each trouser leg. There wasn’t going to be any clasping of hands for a chorus of “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land.”

  And then I just thought, You are really sick. You got someone killed and you’re thinking about shoes. But it wasn’t fair of Kenny to dismiss Lapthorne. That mattered.