Bad Move zw-1

by Linwood Barclay

  Let’s say Roger Carpington had killed Stefanie Knight. Waited for her inside her house. That would explain the broken glass at the back door. Maybe he already knew he was being blackmailed. Or Stefanie had threatened to expose him. To tell his wife. To ruin his political career. She had the ledger by this point. Maybe she was going to rip the lid off the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. He takes her into the garage, grabs the shovel from its hanging place on the wall, strikes her in the head with it. Runs.

  Okay, possible.

  I show up, find Stefanie. See the bloody shovel. And then I hightail it out of there.

  Carpington thinks, Hey. My fingerprints are on that shovel. I have to go back and get it before the police arrive.

  It would make sense. Except by this time, Carpington’s at the town council meeting. And according to at least one witness, never left the meeting.

  So someone else grabbed that shovel. It was either (a) someone helping cover Carpington’s tracks, or (b) a different killer, coming back to grab the shovel for the same reason Carpington would have: fingerprints.

  If it was someone helping Carpington cover his tracks, to keep him from being connected to the crime, then why did the shovel show up in the trunk of his car?

  But if the killer was someone else, and had that shovel, placing it in Carpington’s trunk was a stroke of genius. Its presence there was guaranteed to incriminate.

  But this killer would have to know that Carpington was a logical suspect already. This killer would have to know that a bloody shovel in the trunk would be just one more part of the puzzle.

  “That’s $14.56.”

  “Huh?”

  It was the cashier at Mindy’s. She’d rung through my groceries and informed me of my total. I handed her a twenty and held my hand out for the change.

  I was in another world.

  On the way back, I thought about the conversation Earl and I had had on the way to the Valley Forest Estates sales office. How he’d wanted to confirm that Carpington had been caught on film with Stefanie, how he’d even suggested that the councilman had a pretty strong motive to kill her.

  How, when we pulled into the parking lot, Earl asked whose car was whose.

  And how, once we’d gotten the jump on Greenway and Carpington, Earl insisted that I stay and keep them covered while he left with their keys and moved their cars behind the office.

  That would have been when he took the shovel from his pickup and put it in the trunk of Carpington’s car.

  The only thing I hadn’t worked out a theory for was why Earl killed Stefanie Knight. But I had enough.

  I started running, the grocery bag flopping at my side. I jogged all the way up Chancery Park, was struggling to catch my breath as I inserted my key into the door. I dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and grabbed the phone.

  I got the main police switchboard, then keyed in Lorenzo Penner’s extension. It rang three times before the voicemail cut in.

  “This is Detective Lorenzo Penner. Leave a message at the tone.”

  “Hi, it’s Zack Walker. Call me back as soon as you get this message.” And I left my number.

  I glanced at the clock. After five. Sarah would be home soon. Where were Paul and Angie?

  I’d grabbed the receiver off the phone so quickly when I’d come in that I’d failed to see the flashing message light. There were two, one from Paul and one from Angie.

  Paul said, “I’m at Hakim’s, hanging out, should be home by six.”

  Angie said, “I’m working in the school darkroom. I’m getting a lift, see you around five-thirty.”

  Ever since that night, we’d all been very good about letting each other know where we were going to be, and if we were going to be late.

  I unpacked the groceries, tore the wrapper off the ground beef and began forming patties. It looked as though Paul and Angie were going to join us for dinner, although with teenagers, you never knew until the last second who was actually hungry or not.

  So I made half a dozen. Paul, if he had any appetite at all, could be counted on to eat at least two. I rinsed lettuce leaves, cut up some tomatoes, glancing every few seconds at the phone, willing Penner to call.

  “Come on,” I said out loud. “I’m solving your goddamn case for you, asshole.”

  Maybe my message hadn’t been detailed enough. Maybe he’d think I wanted him to call back because I had more questions. I should leave another message. Tell him I’d found Devlin Smythe. That Jesse Shuttleworth’s killer was living right across the street from us. And that he’d killed someone else, too. A woman out here in Oakwood, whose murder at the moment was being pinned on somebody else.

  But first, I’d fire up the barbecue. While it was heating up, I’d try Penner again, maybe get the switchboard to try to find him.

  The phone rang. I had the receiver off the hook before the end of the first ring. “That was fast,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, hey,” I said.

  “Sorry, expecting someone else?”

  “Actually, yeah. I’m waiting on a call.”

  “Something going on?”

  “Sort of, but let me tell you all about it when you get home. How close are you?”

  “Another fifteen minutes, I’ll be there.”

  “Great, I was just about to get the barbecue going.”

  I opened the sliding glass doors, stepped out onto the deck with a plate of patties. I set the plate on the counter to the left of the barbecue, opened the lid, and turned the valve on the gas tank. I heard the familiar hiss of gas escaping from the jets in the bottom of the barbecue.

  I pressed the red ignition button. Click. Nothing.

  I pressed it a second time, faster and harder, figuring this would force a spark. Again, nothing.

  We were going to have to use the old drop-the-lit-match-in-the-bottom trick again, I figured, and-

  “Zack.”

  I whirled around, startled. Earl was standing at the step that led up from the backyard to the deck. He was in a pair of dirt-caked jeans, his Blue Jays sweatshirt, and there was the familiar cigarette tucked between his lips. In his right hand, he held his gun. The same one we’d taken with us the other night.

  “Earl, Jesus, you scared the shit out of me there,” I said. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

  Earl took a step toward me, and I backed up, away from the barbecue, toward the door into the kitchen. “Earl, what’s with the gun?”

  “You know who I am,” he said. “When you saw the tattoo, you knew.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Earl.” As I took another step back, Earl moved forward. He was standing almost in front of the barbecue now.

  “I know you. And I know Sarah works for the paper. You mentioned one time she worked on the Shuttleworth thing. I know you guys follow the news, and that a melted-clock tattoo would mean something to you. Besides, I could see it in your face the moment you saw it.”

  I said nothing. I was listening to the almost noiseless hiss of unignited propane.

  “I gotta move on,” Earl said. “But not before I take care of a few unfinished matters.”

  I swallowed, hard. I took my eyes off the gun and looked into Earl’s. “How could you do it, Earl? Or should I call you Devlin from now on?”

  “Do what?”

  “How could you murder a five-year-old girl?”

  “She saw me.”

  “Saw you what?”

  “I was breaking into someone’s house, forced the back door open, and there she was in the yard, standing there. Says to me, you’re not supposed to do that. Says she’s going to tell. I tried talking to her, but she started to cry, and I had to stop her from doing that.” Earl shook his head. “Women are always ratting me out. Young, old, doesn’t matter.”

  “So you killed her.”

  “I had to hold my hand over her face to make her stop making noise. I told her to stop crying but she wouldn’t pay any attention.”

  “And Stefanie,
” I said. “Why did you kill her?”

  Earl’s eyebrows shot up. I guess he didn’t realize that I’d figured that part out as well.

  “That didn’t work out with her. We went out a couple times, nobody knew. But I don’t know, I just can’t figure out what it is about women. They don’t connect well with me. I don’t think many women have the capacity to understand, do you know what I mean?”

  I said nothing.

  “And then I found her looking through some of my stuff, she found these other IDs I had, for Daniel Smithers and Danny Simpson, and she asked about them, said she’d heard those names on the news, that they were other names some guy the cops were looking for had used. Stefanie, she was in no position to judge me. She fucked guys so they could be blackmailed. She was of very low moral character.”

  The smell of gas was reaching me, and I was further away from the barbecue than Earl. Couldn’t he smell that?

  “But I guess even Stefanie couldn’t abide a child-killer,” I said. “That’s why she was on the run. She was scared of what she’d found out about you. She was scared of what you might do. So she printed herself up some cash, grabbed the ledger with the idea of maybe selling it back to Greenway, and decided to get as far away as possible.”

  Smythe reached up with his left hand, took out his cigarette for a moment, exhaled. The tip glowed red as he put it back in his mouth and drew in. And I thought, No, he can’t smell it. He couldn’t smell that rotting food in his refrigerator. He had no sense of smell.

  “I broke into her house, waited for her. A long time. She didn’t have her car. And I took her into the garage to try to talk some sense into her.”

  “You decided to go back for the shovel.”

  Smythe nodded. “I just wasn’t sure I’d wiped down the handle. They got me on file, my prints were all over my room in the city. I hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, when you came over in the middle of the night with Trixie.”

  “And that gave you the perfect place to put it. In the back of Carpington’s car.”

  “And it worked. You did good. You told them to look inside, just like I said, didn’t you?”

  It had to be only a moment away. The gas was everywhere.

  “Yeah, I did just what you said.”

  “I’m sorry, Zack. You seem like a good guy. You could have ratted me out before, but you didn’t. I think it’s ’cause you’re a guy, and guys understand each other. I think you have good moral character, and I respect that. Which makes me feel bad about having to do this.”

  And he raised the gun in his right hand, pointed it directly at my chest.

  The fireball erupted right in front of his mouth, at the tip of his cigarette. The burst of flame enveloped his shaved head, then spread back through the air to the barbecue. I turned and dove for the open glass door, but I could feel the heat at my back, and the force of the explosion, which sounded like a thunderclap. I threw myself on the floor, face down, closed my eyes, and covered my head with my hands.

  The glass doors blew in, throwing shards across the kitchen and me.

  Somewhere behind me came a man’s screams of torment. And then, after a few seconds, there was nothing left to hear.

  30

  With any luck, the for sale sign on the front lawn won’t be there that much longer. We had an open house last weekend, and quite a few people came through. Needless to say, we had a fair bit of repair work to do before putting the place on the market. There was several thousand dollars’ worth of damage out back. Loads of glass to replace. The eaves were bent out of shape, the deck was pretty much destroyed, and several rows of bricks were badly chipped. The contractors-not from Valley Forest Estates-did a respectable job. If you didn’t know what had happened at our address, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, some people toured through because they did know what happened here. There’s a certain notoriety factor. It wasn’t clear when we listed the house whether this would work in our favor, or against.

  A few things:

  The barbecue was a write-off. We haven’t bothered to get a new one yet. I’ve read even more stories about the transformation food undergoes when you barbecue it, the cancer risks, health issues. I don’t think you can afford to ignore that kind of thing. I was eating too much red meat, anyway. I’ve taken a lot more interest lately in eating healthily.

  Our insurance company is making noises about dropping us.

  Sarah’s editors asked me to write them an exclusive about finding the killer of Jesse Shuttleworth. Plus, they had an opening for a feature writer, and I jumped at it. Like I’d told Sarah, if we were back into a mortgage, we’d need two steady incomes. They also offered me a chance to write a monthly column in the book pages on new SF releases; I said I’d like to review all sorts of books, and they weren’t too excited about that, given my nonliterary background.

  We learned, upon house-hunting in our old neighborhood, that Mrs. Hayden, who’d lived just down from us on Crandall, and who liked to point out the paper’s misdeeds to Sarah whenever they ran into each other, had recently passed away. We felt badly that we hadn’t been informed. She was a sweet old lady, and we would like to have paid our respects at her funeral.

  As it turned out, her children put the house up for sale. We had always admired it. A porch out front, beautifully carved railings, separate garage tucked around back. No gaping door out front big enough to accommodate a Winnebago.

  We put in an offer.

  Our real estate agent suggested going in with something $15,000 under what they were asking, and Sarah and I conferred quietly, and came back and said we wanted to offer $10,000 more. The agent wrote it up.

  And there’s the business of Earl, or Devlin Smythe, as I always think of him now. He didn’t make it to Emerg alive. His head, police told us, was a burnt marshmallow.

  I took one of my walks down by Willow Creek the other day. It’s the most beautiful part of the neighborhood, still untouched as it is by development. It’s up in the air whether houses will ever be built along its banks, but there’s a greater chance now than ever before that they won’t be. The Oakwood Town Council has decided to reopen all deals it had made with Valley Forest Estates, now that corruption charges had been laid against one of its own and Don Greenway was being charged with murder. Greenway was the one who’d ordered Rick to kill Spender, after all, and even though Rick was no longer around to cut a deal and testify against him, Carpington seemed prepared to say anything in a bid to reduce his sentence. There are new environmental hearings scheduled, and a raft of lawsuits between Valley Forest Estates and the town are under way.

  The Suburban has been running stories with all the details, but I don’t read that many of them. I just want to get out of town, put all this behind me. One thing that has allowed me to move forward is the knowledge that my stealing Stefanie Knight’s purse wasn’t what led to her death. Smythe was already in that house, waiting for her to come home, before I’d blundered my way into this mess at the grocery store. It was even possible, although this was not a point I went out of my way to make, that her killer, and Jesse Shuttleworth’s, might never have been uncovered but for my foolishness.

  I walked back up our street, smiled at the housecoat lady as she watered her driveway, and saw that Sarah was home from work. Her Camry sat in the driveway. We haven’t bothered to replace the Civic, figuring we won’t need but one car when we move back downtown. We’re putting the insurance money toward the new house. I wandered up onto the lawn, ran my hand along the top of the For Sale sign, then rounded Sarah’s car as I headed for the front door.

  As I came up alongside the Camry on the passenger side, I happened to notice, glancing through the window, that the keys were still in the ignition. It could have been Sarah’s set or, possibly, Angie’s. One or the other of them had forgotten to remove them, and the Camry sat there, a statistic just waiting to be added to the stolen-car lists.

  I stared at the keys, wondering what, if anything, I should do about them, when Sarah
came out the front door, smiling.

  “Hey,” she said. “They accepted.”

  “Great,” I said. She was referring to the Hayden family. The house on Crandall was ours.

  “And some agent’s coming by with an offer on this place at seven,” she said, coming up to the driver’s door of her car, facing me across the roof.

  I opened the passenger door, leaned in, took out the keys, walked around the car, and handed them to her. “Here,” I said. No lecture, no smartass comment, no rolling of the eyes, no shaking of the head.

  “Thanks,” Sarah said, pocketing the keys, and smiling with amusement at my restraint. “You keep acting this way, people will start wondering whether you’re such a big asshole after all.”

  And she reached her hand out to mine and led me inside.

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