“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a mess, Trixie.”
“Grab a chair.”
It was after that that I asked whether she was really an accountant, and offered my apologies about busting in.
“What is it?” Trixie asked. “Another backpack incident?”
“Worse, although it started out in a similar way. But things have sort of spiraled out of control. There are men, at least one, trying to find me and, I think it’s fair to say, kill me.”
Trixie’s eyebrows shot up a notch. “Why would there be men trying to kill you?”
“Well, for one thing, this.” I slid the ledger book across the table at her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Well, you’re the accountant. Maybe you can tell me.”
She opened the book. Her nails were long and bloodred, and I found that I felt just a bit feverish. Where her robe opened I could see the swell of her breasts, pushed up and out, courtesy of the spectacularly engineered corset.
“Let’s have a look. List of payments, money coming in, some names here. Wow, I think I recognize this guy. He’s a building inspector, comes here sometimes, likes to play doctor.”
“Okay.”
“So he’s getting paid five hundred every, it looks like, every week or so. And here’s another name I recognize. Carpington?”
“Roger. He’s a client, too?”
“No, I just recognize the name. From the paper.”
“He’s a town councilman. How much is he getting?”
“Well, right here he’s getting five thou.” She thumbed the pages. “His name pops up a lot, but it’s just one of dozens. Zack, where did you get this?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time,” she said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her booted legs.
“Sarah and I were shopping,” I said, and went through the whole thing. Taking the wrong purse, trying to return it, finding Stefanie Knight’s body, getting tracked down by Rick, the meeting with Carpington, the episode at the construction site. Trixie said barely a word, taking it all in, nodding slowly.
I finished with finding the ledger in Stefanie’s car, and Rick’s destruction of mine out front of McDonald’s.
“You’re in some kind of deep shit,” Trixie said, running her tongue across her top teeth.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s a fairly good assessment of the situation. Thank you.”
“Listen, don’t get snippy with me. Did I tell you to take Sarah’s purse to teach her a lesson?”
“No. Did I mention that, in addition to everything else that’s happened tonight, she thinks I’m impotent?”
“No, I think you left that part out. Are you? I could check.”
“She wanted to, you know, spend some time with me tonight, before she went to work, but it’s a bit hard to concentrate when you think the police might be looking for you and charging you with murder. I think maybe it’s time to go to the police.”
Trixie thought about that. “How did you get here, if your car’s blown up?”
“Stefanie’s car. Her Beetle. I parked it one block over.”
“So you not only stole her purse, but now you have her car? That’ll look good to the police. You’re not wearing her underwear, too, are you?”
I hadn’t thought about the incriminating aspect of driving Stefanie’s car all around town. I did not, it occurred to me, have the makings of a master criminal.
“But if I don’t go to the police,” I said, “how’m I going to protect myself from this Rick guy? He’s a total nutjob. He killed that Spender guy down in the creek, probably killed Stefanie, and he’s wandering around town with a python in his trunk.”
Trixie blinked. “Does Sarah know anything about any of this?”
I shook my head. “She’s noticed me acting kind of weird, but no. And she won’t be coming home from work until morning, she’s doing the night shift, and I farmed the kids out to friends’ houses.”
“You need some kind of backup,” she said. “You have a gun or anything?”
“Are you kidding? Do I look like someone who owns a gun? I don’t even know anyone who owns a-” I stopped.
“What?” Trixie said.
“I do know one person. Who owns a gun. Someone who owes me a favor. Someone who might let me borrow it.”
“Do you know what time it is?” Earl said when he opened his front door to me and Trixie. She’d changed out of her work clothes and into some jeans and a T-shirt, and had gone out of her house first, making sure there was no sign of Rick or anyone else at my house two doors down, then waved for me to join her. I ran across the street in a flash, ducked into some bushes as Trixie rang Earl’s bell.
“Let us in,” Trixie said. “Zack needs your help.”
“Where’s Zack?”
“He’s the one here, in the bushes. Turn off your front light.”
Earl was dressed in checkered boxers and a sweatshirt. He padded barefoot into the kitchen, where he found a pack of cigarettes and lit up.
“What the fuck’s going on?” he said, running his hand over his shaved head. He looked nervous. “You told, didn’t you?” he said, looking at me. “You told the cops about my business. How long before they get here?”
“I didn’t do anything like that,” I said.
“Did you tell that wife of yours? Did she call them?”
“That would be Sarah,” I said. “And no. I didn’t tell her. I’m here to ask a favor.”
Earl squinted. “A favor?”
“I need a gun,” I said. “I want to borrow your gun.”
“Forget it.”
“Earl, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. There are people looking for me tonight, and until I sort a few things out, I need some protection.”
Earl glowered at me. “You ever owned a gun?”
“No.”
“You ever fired a gun?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Zack, you ever even held a gun?”
I tried to think. Did toy guns count? And what about the G.I. Joe figures and accessories I’d had as a kid? Did that count for something?
“I guess, technically, no. All my shooting has been with a camera.”
“And what the hell do you need a gun for anyway? How many enemies does a guy make writing space stories?”
“Come on, Earl. Don’t you owe me one? Did I make a call to Detective Flint after I left here the other day?”
Earl shook his head. “Look, I appreciate that. But what you’re asking, I don’t know.”
“Maybe you’re going to have to explain,” Trixie said.
And so I started in all over again, for the second time in the last hour and a half, although I gave him the Reader’s Digest version. For example, I didn’t tell him about trying to instruct Sarah in the fine points of purse safety. I said I’d found a purse.
“So I wanted to return it, and check the driver’s license, and it was a woman named Stefanie Knight, who works over at Valley Forest Estates.”
Earl turned away, shaking his head, and reached for a beer from the fridge.
“So I was trying to track her down, and left my name and e-mail address at her mother’s place, and then this psycho named Rick comes looking for me, wanting what’s in this purse, which at first I thought was all this money, but that turned out to be counterfeit, and then I figured it was this film-”
“Film?”
“A roll of film. Of Stefanie Knight and this councilman in the sack.”
“What councilman?”
I told him. “But it turns out Rick and his boss, Greenway, wanted something more than just the film, they were after this ledger.” I indicated it, on the table, as if I was pointing to Exhibit #1.
“So they’re after you for this ledger?”
“Yeah, that, and I sort of pissed off Rick, hitting him in the head.”
Earl sat down, alternating puffs of cigarette and swigs of beer. “You hit hi
m in the head.”
“When he came to my house, and Angie came home. It was a kind of self-defense thing, although I think, under other circumstances, he might have liked me. He read my book and really liked it.”
“That must have made you feel good. You never know when you’re going to run into a fan. I’ve been meaning to read it someday myself.”
“You kind of left out the most important part,” Trixie said.
“Huh?”
“This Stefanie Knight chick, she’s dead,” said Trixie.
“I was getting to that,” I said. “I’m having a hard time keeping it all straight. Maybe hanging off the roof of that house has made me forgetful.” Earl took a long drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke over our heads, and I continued. “That’s kind of why I’ve been on the run all night. She was murdered, and I’ve got her purse, well, I had her purse, and I’ve still got her car, and I think it’s going to take a long time to explain all this to the authorities. But I’m thinking maybe it’s time to go see them anyway.”
Earl said nothing for a moment. He was thinking. Trixie looked at me and shrugged. Finally, Earl said, “You need more than a gun, my friend. You need muscle.”
I smiled. “You have someone in mind?”
He returned the smile. “I might. Seems to me you need to pay another visit to this Greenway guy and Carpington and find out just what happened. We might have ways of getting the information out of them that the police aren’t really supposed to use. And if this Rick character shows up, we’ll have to deal with him as well.”
I felt a renewed sense of confidence.
“You know what might come in handy?” I said. “Some handcuffs.”
Trixie brightened. “How many pairs you need?”
I held up three fingers.
“I’ll get you two regular sets,” Trixie said, “and one fur-lined. Don Greenway always liked the soft kind.”
Earl and I looked at each other and then at Trixie.
“So he was a client.” She shrugged. “But he was a lousy tipper. Fuck him.”
25
Earl said he had to get dressed and do a couple of things before we headed out. First, I heard him go into the garage, do something with his truck, slam a tailgate, then he wandered past the kitchen door on his way upstairs to put on some clothes. In his absence, I gazed, tiredly, across the table at Trixie and thought how fortunate I was, in my time of trouble, to have a dominatrix and a pot grower to bail me out.
“Thanks for not judging,” Trixie said.
“What?”
“Back at my place. I was waiting for the lecture, the inquisition, why are you doing this, what kind of girl, et cetera.”
I shrugged. “I’m a bit past being able to point a finger. People in glass houses, you know.”
“Yeah, well, if having character flaws disqualifies people from throwing stones, how come there’s so much of it going on?”
“I guess people aren’t very good at recognizing their own faults. And I’m sure there’s much to recommend in your line of work. You get to work from home, you can choose your own hours, and you get to meet a lot of interesting people.”
“That’s certainly true. And you get to learn a lot about what makes people tick.”
“True.” I paused. “Like cream cheese.”
Trixie smiled. “You don’t want to know.”
“You’re right.”
“Things good between you and Sarah? Aside from her thinking you’ve got a problem with the hydraulics?”
“Yeah, they’re good. But after all this comes out, I don’t know. This has got nothing on The Backpack Incident, or when I hid her car down the street. I think I’ve been a bit of an asshole lately. A busybody.”
“Well, you’re an asshole, there’s really no question about that,” Trixie said. “But you’re a reasonably nice asshole, and I think Sarah’s a lucky girl.” And then, for reasons I wasn’t sure I understood, she looked away.
Earl appeared. He was wearing a Toronto Blue Jays sweatshirt, jeans, and heavy lace-up workboots that hadn’t been tied at the top. “You ready?”
I nodded.
He went over to the kitchen drawers, opened the middle one, reached in toward the back, and brought out his gun. “Let’s go see if we can solve a few of your problems,” he said, tucking it into the top of his pants.
“Maybe you could go over some of this with me again,” Earl said, shoving in the cigarette lighter and waiting for it to pop. “This girl, the one who’s dead, was on film boffing this guy?”
“Carpington.”
“A councilman? For the town?”
“That’s right.”
“So, they just liked to record the moment or what?”
“My guess is Carpington was being blackmailed.”
“So he finds out, he loses it and kills this girl?”
“It’s a motive, but I don’t know. He just didn’t seem the type. I went to see him earlier tonight, at town hall, and he didn’t seem to have it in him.”
Earl nodded. The lighter popped and he lit his cigarette. “One thing I’ve learned, Zack, is that people are often not what they seem. They can surprise you.”
I thought of Trixie. And, for that matter, Earl. Both of them ended up being in lines of work that had caught me off guard.
Earl slipped the gun out of his pants and slid it across the seat toward me. “Hold that and get a feel of it.”
I took the gun in my right hand, startled, initially, by how heavy it was.
“See that little thing there, the safety? Make sure it stays set that way so you don’t shoot your nuts off. But if you think you’re going to have to use it, you move it”-he reached over-“like that.”
“Got it,” I said. I put the safety back on, slid the gun back across the seat. “Maybe you should be the guy who uses this. And I’ll ask the questions.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Earl, holding his cigarette between his lips as he turned the ignition. “Where we going?”
“Last time I saw Greenway and Company they were headed to the sales office. That was more than an hour ago, but they might still be there.”
“Why don’t we troll on by,” he said, rolling the truck out of the garage and slipping back out momentarily to close the garage door. We turned left on Chancery and drove to the entrance to the Valley Forest Estates, where the sales office was set up.
“Drive by once,” I said.
Earl slowed only slightly as we passed the office. Out front were Carpington’s Cadillac and Greenway’s Lincoln.
“Looks like Rick isn’t there,” I said with some sense of relief. “I don’t see his car around. He may still be looking for me. I think he thinks I have the ledger.”
Earl did a U-turn at the next intersection and came back slowly. “Whose car is whose?”
“The Caddy is Carpington’s, and the Lincoln is Greenway’s.”
“Let’s pay ’em a visit,” Earl said, turning the pickup in to the sales office lot. The gravel crunched under the truck’s tires. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed. My breathing grew quicker and shallower.
“Earl, I don’t know if I can do this,” I said. “I gotta be honest with you. I’m scared. I’m out of my league. These clowns kill people to get what they want.”
Earl gave me a gentle punch in the shoulder. “Don’t worry, pardner. The ones who should be scared are these asswipes.” He nodded toward the office. “We’re gonna get the jump on them.”
I swallowed, hard, took a deep breath, and opened the truck door. We strode toward the office, shoulder to shoulder, Earl holding his gun down at his right side. Three sets of handcuffs, which Trixie had run across the street to fetch before we left Earl’s, jingled in my jacket pocket. Trixie had decided against giving me the fur-lined ones for Greenway, since it would be a dead giveaway where we’d gotten our restraining devices. She claimed not to have much use for him, but didn’t see any advantage in advertising her disregard. I couldn’t argue with that.
Earl, between puffs, suggested we circle the building once. Peeking through blinds, we saw Greenway behind his desk, lecturing a sheepish Carpington sitting across from him. All the other rooms were dark, indicating to us that we had only two people to deal with.
“But Rick might be coming back at any time,” I whispered.
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Earl whispered back.
We came back around the front of the building and I gripped the handle, squeezing gently and pushing to see whether it was locked. It was.
“Knock,” Earl said.
I rapped on the door. There was some stirring inside, then Greenway’s voice from behind the wood. “Who is it?”
My mind raced. “Rick!” I said. I forced my voice a little lower, trying to approximate Rick’s tone.
“Where’s your key?”
Would Rick have the patience to explain? I decided not. “Just open the fucking door!” I shouted.
I heard the bolt turn back, and once the door had cleared the latch, Earl put his boot to it. The door swung wide into the darkened outer office and Earl forced his way in ahead of me, gun slightly raised at two o’clock. Once we were both inside, I closed the door and locked it, and saw Greenway sprawled out on the floor and Carpington standing in the door of Greenway’s office, looking more or less petrified.
“Both of you,” Earl said, sounding very much in control, “in one place, please.” He motioned, with his gun hand, for Greenway to get up and back into his office.
“Please don’t shoot us,” Carpington whined.
“Shut up,” Earl said, shoving Greenway ahead of him into his office. He took his spot back behind his desk while Carpington retreated into the chair across from it.
“Cuff ’em, Zack,” Earl said. And I thought, If only I had a nickel for every time someone has said that to me. By now, I’d have five cents.
Carpington was wide-eyed with horror, while Greenway tried harder to look composed, thinking maybe if he exuded confidence we’d be unnerved, that maybe he knew something we didn’t. It might work. Even though we had the drop on them, I was definitely unnerved.
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