Death by Nostalgia

by Andrew Stanek

  “Shall we try the other side?” Alders said. “Although I’m not sure how much good it will do. I’d put out a public request for information, except the Chief wants as little media exposure as possible. He thinks the department will be a laughingstock if word about this murder gets out.”

  “Yes,” Felix shot back as the pair worked their way back to the bunker. “I’ve noticed the crime scene is not very well secured...”

  “Nothing I can do about that,” Alders replied. “You heard the Chief. No additional manpower for this investigation. It’s you and me. And quite frankly, I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be better off without you. If you steal anything from the crime scene, by the way, I’ll have you hanged.”

  “Me, steal?” Felix repeated innocently. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  They arrived back in the bunker and began to trace the other path. Like its brother, the path in the opposite direction started straight before curving, but unlike the other path, it did not have many branches. Occasionally Alders and Felix encountered a sturdy-looking door, but most were locked so they continued on their way. Ultimately, there was only one path that seemed to run unobstructed in this direction.

  “Do you think any of the suspects had keys to these doors?” Felix asked as they passed one.

  “I don’t know,” Alders grunted by way of reply. “There could be a whole second armory behind one of these for all we know.”

  After another minute of so of following the winding hallways, they walked up a small flight of stairs and emerged, blinking, into the afternoon sunlight. They were right next to what appeared to be a bathroom structure, some distance from the rear of the construction site.

  “Interesting,” Felix murmured, staring back towards the site. “This is quite some distance from the apartments. Still, you could have easily seen it from the rear fence.”

  Alders peered around himself. “Jack Kettering said he saw Davey Kempt loitering near the rear of the construction site. That would be in this general direction, wouldn’t it? We know Davey Kempt is lying to us about where he was at the time of the murder. He said he was eating at the fast food place, but Reva Hamilton didn’t see him while she was there.”

  “That doesn’t mean we know Davey is lying,” Felix pointed out. “It just means we believe Reva Hamilton.”

  “Well, maybe we should go ask around the fast food place and see if we can tell which of them is lying. It’s just across the street.”

  Felix shrugged and the pair started walking towards the establishment. As they went, they passed a small alleyway on the other side of the street with a large, open dumpster next to a larger, looming building. Felix walked past it without comment at first, then stopped and doubled back. In the next instant, he was shifting through the dumpster.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Alders asked as he watched Felix search through the trash.

  “I saw something a little unusual,” Felix answered, and after a few seconds’ more rummaging, pulled a large luminous construction worker’s vest and a hard hat out of the trash. Wiping refuse off the items with one hand, Felix offered them to Alders.

  “Clues,” Felix explained briefly.

  “Clues?” repeated Alders, looking at the dirty, waste-covered hat and vest with distaste. “What do you mean, clues? It’s a vest and a hat you found in a trash bin.”

  “Yes, but they’re also clues. Why would a construction worker leave his hat and vest in a dumpster this far from the construction site?”

  “I don’t know. How did you know they were in the dumpster?”

  “I didn’t, although I had a hunch something like this might turn up around here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Felix refused to say any more, however, and somehow contrived to force Alders to carry both items back to the parking lot, where he unceremoniously dumped them into the back of his car before they set off for the fast food restaurant.

  At the fast food establishment, there were quite a lot of patrons waiting to be served, many of whom got fairly annoyed with Alders, who impatiently cut to the front of the line and demanded to speak to the manager. Felix waited quietly while Alders explained to the store manager that he was a police officer conducting a criminal investigation and asked for access to store security camera footage. He was shown away to a back room and returned later.

  “Davey Kempt was here,” Alders announced on his return, “but he left at about twenty minutes to one. The demolition was at one o’clock sharp, so he would have had plenty of time to make a lethal visit to the bunker.”

  “It’s a bit of an odd thing to do though, isn’t it?” Felix replied as he bit into a greasy burger he’d acquired during the wait. He chewed thoughtfully. “Just before committing a murder, walk into fast food restaurant and eat lunch - when you know it won’t stand up as an alibi.”

  “He might not have known about the camera and counted on the staff to confuse the times if they were interviewed in the future.”

  “Possible, but doubtful. What about Reva Hamilton?”

  “She was in the restaurant until about five minutes before the demolition. She just missed Davey by two or three minutes.”

  “Which means she wasn’t telling the truth either,” Felix pointed out. “She said she was in the restaurant at the time of the demolition.”

  “Yes, but I doubt she could have gotten all the way to the bunker in just five minutes. Davey, on the other hand, would have had time.”

  “Hm... rather missing the point, I think.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” Alders snapped back, irritably. He felt his temper rising, anger not just with Felix but the whole case spilling over. “I think we ought to go have a strong word with Davey Kempt.”

  “Assuming it doesn’t conflict with our prior appointments, of course,” Felix commented. “I see here that we’re scheduled to go search Adriana Kettering’s room.”

  It took Alders several seconds to realize that Felix had once again pick-pocketed his phone and was flipping nonchalantly through his electronic calendar.

  “Give me that,” Alders said irritably and snatched the phone back. “We’ll go search Adriana Kettering’s room first. I’ve got a friend down at the station who owes me a favor; I’ll ask him to go pick up Davey Kempt. We’ll interview Davey again when we get back.”

  After making his call (and vigorously trying to wipe Felix’s burger-grease stained fingerprints off his phone), Alders drove to Adriana’s residence in relative silence.

  “Here are we, 1000 Falstaff Drive,” Alders announced, his mood still somewhere between simmering and boiling. Felix got out of the car wordlessly. A large apartment building loomed before them. Alders walked up to the call box at the front of the entrance, pressed a few buttons, and announced himself. Jack Kettering’s voice responded and a few second later, the door buzzed and unlocked itself. They ascended one flight of stairs and stopped outside room 208.

  “So he shares an apartment with his sister,” Felix said softly, and without asking Alders knew that he was talking about Jack Kettering. A moment later, Jack opened the door. His eyes looked red.

  “May we come in?” Alders asked politely.

  “Yeah,” Jack said, his voice shaking a little. “Adriana’s room was that one,” he said, indicating a door.

  Alders thanked him politely and entered the room. Felix ambled in behind him, then looked around and made a disapproving sort of noise.

  “It’s a bit bare,” Felix remarked.

  Alders had to agree. Four plain white walls, completely undecorated, met his view. The only exception was a pair of framed diplomas hanging above a brown wooden writing desk in one corner. Adriana’s bed was neatly made, albeit decorated with colorful purple sheets, adjacent to a closet with a sliding mirror door. A large bookcase sat next to the writing desk, creaking under the weight of a battery of heavy-looking medical textbooks. The entire room was almost immaculately neat, save for the desk, which was blanketed with unsorted lett
ers, notes, and correspondence.

  Felix sauntered over to the bookshelf and started to leaf through it.

  “All textbooks, reference books, copies of academic and medical journals,” he said, leafing through them. “Did she have a private life at all, this Adriana Kettering?”

  Alders did not reply, but walked over to the writing desk. He looked briefly at the medical degrees, then turned his attention to the desk. He shifted a large pile of documents to reveal a laptop computer, though a request for a password stopped his attempt to search its contents. After looking through the notes on the desk, mainly consisting of medical notes, he began to search through the drawers. In the top drawer of the desk, he found a small photograph in a frame.

  “Look at this, Felix.” The picture showed eight people, six of them children or teenagers, and two adults, all lined up and smiling at the camera. A large man in the back with a bushy mustache was grinning in a rather strained sort of way, and Alders suddenly realized who they must be. “This is the whole group,” he said. “They’ve changed quite a lot; I’d guess this picture was taken fifteen or twenty years ago. This must be Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton,” he said, referring to the adults in back. “Mr. Hamilton has lost some hair and gained some weight. And these children in front - the tall girl must be Adriana, the little boy next to her is Jack. This tall boy must be Davey, the girl over there is Vicky, and that other boy must be Peter. But then who’s this?” he said, indicating another tall, fair-haired boy standing next to Peter Ulverson. “He’s someone who hasn’t appeared in our investigation.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s Peter’s brother, Oscar,” Felix answered. “He came up in conversation but he wasn’t at the construction site yesterday. At least, not as far as we know.” A minute or so passed as Felix examined the photograph from different angles, looking at each young face in turn. “I’ve said from the start that there’s a feeling of nostalgia about this case. Adriana called everyone to the apartments for a reunion, to try to reclaim something of their past lives, to try to put aside old differences in favor of even older friendships. The good old days. Nostalgia. But there’s no such thing as death by nostalgia.”

  “Well, maybe not, but I’m beginning to come around to your whole nostalgia thing. I don’t think it’s what killed her, but I think it may have been a big part of her thought process. Look at this.”

  A sheet on the top of the desk had caught Alders’ eye. He picked it up and held it out for Felix. It appeared to be a petition form, with dozens of signatures stretching down the page.

  “It’s a petition to save the 20th Street Apartments,” Felix commented as his eye ran down the list of names. He snatched up other papers from the desk. “She was collecting signatures. Actually, from the looks of things, she was orchestrating the campaign.” Alders, who had just found a stack of “Save Our Homes!” fliers with a picture of the apartments in a drawer, found himself agreeing.

  “That is interesting,” Alders remarked. “Jack!” he called.

  Jack Kettering appeared in the doorway.

  “Yeah?” he asked, then shrunk away. The sight of his dead sister’s room seemed to frighten him. Alders followed him out of the room, and Felix followed.

  “Was your sister a part of this campaign?” Alders asked him in the hallway, brandishing the fliers at him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “She started it. She went around collecting signatures trying to cancel the demolition. It was really important to her.”

  “Why were the apartments so important to your sister, Jack?”

  “I dunno,” he answered, his lip wobbling a little. “It just was. It was the place where we grew up, wasn’t it? Even though it might not have been the greatest place to grow up in the world, I mean, it’s home, isn’t it? That’s why she started these petitions and tried to collect signatures.”

  “You didn’t mention this before,” Alders said sternly.

  “I didn’t think it was important-”

  “It’s important because it puts her interests in direct conflict with Will Hamilton’s,” said Alders tapping his foot and turning to Felix. “Remember how eager he was to get the buildings torn down? Imagine waiting twenty years for something like that, and just when it seems like it’s about to happen, here comes Adriana Kettering, trying to smash your hopes again. And Will Hamilton doesn’t have a good alibi for the time of the murder.”

  “But what’s the point of attacking her literally as the building is being demolished?” Felix asked. “He’d already won at that point, surely.”

  “Good point,” muttered Alders, looking a little put out. “I’m going to have another quick look around. See if there’s anything we missed.”

  “Jack,” said Felix as Alders left. “Who is this?” he held out the photograph of the eight boys and pointed to the unidentified eighth person.

  “That’s Oscar, Peter’s brother,” Jack commented.

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  “No, not in a long time. Years and years.”

  “Do you know what happened to him? Where he is and what he’s doing?”

  “He joined the army, like Peter. He was quite a bit older than us - he was about Addy’s age. I don’t think he was career military like Peter was, though. Oscar said he was joining up because he wanted to go to college. I don’t know what happened to him. You should ask Peter.”

  “How well would you say you know the other people in this photo, Jack?”

  “Very well. Except maybe Oscar, I think I know them very well. I knew them all for years. Even though we might have drifted apart a bit, yeah, we all knew each other well.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know. Thank you.”

  Alders reemerged from Adriana’s room.

  “Nothing else of interest,” he said gruffly. “We could spend forever looking around that room; I don’t think we’ll find much. I’ve just had a phone call. Davey Kempt is at the station. We probably ought to go interview him. Oh, but before we go - Jack, when you said you saw Davey Kempt near the back of the construction site, where was he exactly?”

  “He was leaning against the back fence, I guess, I can’t say exactly where.”

  “And did your sister seem like she had more money than usual before she died? Unusual spending, anything like that?”

  “More money than usual?” Jack repeated. “No, no. Why do you ask?”

  Felix and Alders exchanged significant looks.

  “Just an idea,” came Alders’ short reply. “Thanks for your cooperation. Let’s go, Felix. Davey Kempt is waiting for us.”

  Chapter 7

  “Davey! Welcome back,” Alders exclaimed with mock enthusiasm as Davey sat back down a bit uncomfortably in the interview room.

  “You wanted to speak to me again?” he asked a bit nonchalantly.

  Alders gave him a large fake smile that did not suit his growing and thinly suppressed anger. “We just wanted to clear up one or two irregularities from when we last spoke. Just a few hours ago, you told us that you were in the fast food restaurant at the time of the demolition.”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “Well, that restaurant has a security camera, and I can now say with certainty that you weren’t in the fast food restaurant. You left twenty minutes before the demolition. So where were you, Davey?”

  The look of cool unconcern that Davey seemed to wear all the time slipped a little.

  “I - I don’t know.”

  “A witness saw you on the far side of the construction site, Davey. What were you doing there?”

  Davey said nothing.

  “There’s an entrance to the tunnels that leads straight to the bunker on that side of the old apartments. Did you go in there, Davey?”

  Again, he said nothing. Alders stood up.

  “Did you kill her, Davey?”

  “No, I didn’t kill her,” he burst out. “Look, alright. Here’s what happened. I finished eating before one o’clock and I left the fast food place. I walked
around to the other side of the construction site because I didn’t want anyone to see.”

  “To see what?” Alders pressed, but it was not Davey that replied.

  “To see that you’d started smoking again?” Felix asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” said Davey with surprise. “How did you-”

  Felix reached into the folds of his baggy jacket and drew out a packet of cigarettes and a box of nicotine patches.

  “You dropped these the last time you were here,” he said vaguely. “I’ve been meaning to give these back to you.” Alders glowered at Felix, but Davey seemed to accept this explanation without question.

  “Right, well, I’ve been on the patches for a while. Everyone knew that I’d tried to quit smoking and they were all really supportive, Adriana in particular, I mean, but it’s really hard to quit. The patches don’t stop the cravings and I just - I just had to go take a smoke. So I walked around to the back of the construction site where there wasn’t anyone to see me and I lit up.”

  “And you want us to believe that’s all you were doing back there? Smoking?”

  “No, no, wait. So I was smoking, right, and then I saw Adriana off nearby. I stubbed out my cigarette as fast as I could because I didn’t want her to see me smoking, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was heading towards the opposite building. There’s an old entrance to the tunnels there, like you said, and I saw her go into the entrance.”

  “What time was this?” Alders asked sharply.

  “I don’t know. Five minutes to one, maybe? Anyway, I wanted to know what she was doing there, because it was almost time for the demolition and I figured it was dangerous, like we said, so I went after her.”

  He looked from Alders’ face to Felix’s as though desperate to find someone to believe him.

  “And then?” Alders prompted.

  “I followed her. It was pretty dark in the tunnels so I couldn’t see very well, but I followed her. I tried shouting at her. She didn’t hear me; it was pretty loud above us. The demolition hadn’t started yet, but the crowd was making a lot of noise and there was machinery, I think. I lost sight of her and then - then the demolition started. Everything was shaking, and it got really loud, but I still heard it.”