by Tom Swyers
“His wallet wasn’t stolen. It was on him and full of cash. His watch and diamond ring weren’t stolen, either.”
“What were they after, then?”
“You tell me, D.”
“Why me?”
“You knew him better than anyone in town.”
“Well, I’m discovering that I really didn’t know him.”
“David, I saw the will that was offered for probate at the surrogate clerk’s office. You’re the executor and sole beneficiary. No wonder you didn’t want to tell me about it when I got to Salar’s apartment.”
“That’s not the will I prepared, Pete. I drew up a different one four months ago, and Salar revoked it by having Jim Fletcher draw up another one.”
“Well, everyone knows that you and Jim are friends.”
“I didn’t know anything about the new will. Go ask Jim. He’ll tell you. What exactly are you getting at anyway, Pete? Are you saying I conspired to kill Salar to inherit his estate, which amounts to a pile of garbage at this point?”
“I didn’t say that, David.” David noticed that Pete wasn’t calling him D now.
“Yeah, but I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re in Sherlock Holmes mode. Your flaring nostrils give you away.”
“David, your fingerprints were on the can of hair spray.”
David thought for a second. “Where did you find it? On the floor?”
“Yes, in front of Salar’s body.”
“When I found him, I had to sit down. There was no place to sit, so I sat on the floor. I had to move some bottles and cans. That must have been one of the things I moved. How do you know the prints are mine?”
“They match the ones on the key. Your prints and Salar’s are the only ones we found in the apartment.”
“Does that surprise you? Do you think he invited a lot of people to his apartment to sit on the bags of trash and watch the cockroach races?”
“You’re getting defensive, David.”
“You’re damn right I am, Pete. Do you really think I’d knock off my expert witness in one of the biggest cases of my professional life? That’s crazy!”
“What are you talking about?”
David proceeded to tell Pete about his personal-injury case against Helmsley Oil and describe Salar’s role in it. He wasn’t going to talk about Salar’s note. He couldn’t, even though it was evidence that could exonerate him by pointing the finger at someone else. In David’s mind, the note was subject to attorney-client privilege, even though Harold was dead.
“Look, David,” Pete said, “there are things that don’t add up to your involvement in Salar’s death, but you’re the only suspect we’ve got for now.”
“Suspect? You mean I’m more than a person of interest at this point? Maybe I need to get a lawyer.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s been a long week.”
“Don’t try to pin this on me because you can’t find anyone else.” David couldn’t help but think of the conversations he’d had with Pete over the past few years. The chief often had said the demands of the job were catching up with him. He couldn’t keep up with the criminals any longer. They were getting younger; he was getting older. The age differential between cop and perp only grew larger year by year. David saw him getting sloppy, taking shortcuts to justice. Pete was thinking about retirement. The only thing that stopped him was that he didn’t have anything to do once he left the force. That fear alone kept him on the job.
“I’m not trying to pin this on you,” he said defensively.
“It sounds like it to me.”
“I don’t want to argue with you, David. I’m going to give you your key back. We’re done searching the apartment. It’s no longer a crime scene. We found his laptop computer buried under a mountain of papers, and that’s good enough for now. We might need to come back if that doesn’t yield anything. Nobody wants to look through all that crap unless we have no choice.”
David’s stomach did a somersault at the thought that Pete had found Harold’s laptop. David needed it to find the killer and to litigate the case against Helmsley Oil. Now it seemed he needed it to defend himself, too.
“There’s one more thing . . . It’s very odd. The medical examiner ran a battery of tests. Salar’s blood tested positive for elevated levels of acetone, arsenic, and germanium.”
“Are you saying I tried to poison him, as well?”
“Stop it, David. I’m just letting you know. I don’t know if any of these chemicals are on anything in his apartment. Be careful in there.”
“Okay, thanks for the heads-up.”
With that, David turned and headed toward his car. He was fed up with Pete. Pete’s slip of the tongue in calling David a suspect upset him. It was like the history between them was fading. If Pete wasn’t his friend, he wondered if he really had any at all. All of a sudden, he felt old and alone. The thought of it all made him feel sick. He just wanted to go home and put it out of his head.
FIVE
Annie and David had both worked from home for years. Their paths crossed during the day, and they tried to have lunch together, but they were both focused on their work until Christy came home from school around dinnertime.
Annie had a routine. Every day she’d get up and ask David to boot up her computer and log-in for her while she took a shower. Then she’d rush down to the kitchen, her hair still wet, grab a bowl of cereal, and march off to her list of projects and appointments. Her daily schedule gave her day structure. Now that she’d been laid off, she had no schedule and no structure. After decades of knowing what to do, now she didn’t have a clue. It seemed to frighten her.
David told her to look for work in the mornings and go off and do something else in the afternoons. In a sense, he was trying to give her life a new structure. But he was trying to protect her, too. The layoff spelled rejection to Annie. She was working through that feeling, trying to understand if there were a reason why she was chosen, or if it was something more random. In David’s mind, the last thing Annie needed was to compound the rejection of the layoff with the rejection of looking for a new job all day long. So he tried to kick her out of the house in the afternoon to give her a break. She’d work in the yard or go off to do volunteer work. Sometimes he joined her in doing anything she wanted, even if it involved shopping at the mall—something he detested.
Annie decided she would spend some of her afternoon time on neighborhood watch. It’s not that the neighborhood really needed it, but she felt a sense of purpose if she kept an eye on things. The day after the memorial service, Annie was getting ready to go out when she called down to David in his office.
“David, you need to come up here.”
“I’m in the middle of something. Can it wait?”
“No, there’s a strange person down the street.”
“It’s not a crime to be strange, Annie.”
“I’m going to call the police.”
“Wait a second. I’m coming up.”
David spun out of his chair and climbed the staircase, two steps at a time. He joined Annie in front of the dining-room window. It was an overcast, humid day. The street in front of their house was clear. But about thirty yards across the way, down a road that ran perpendicular to their street, a dark-blue car was parked next to the curb, facing them. The driver’s door was open. David and Annie saw someone wearing men’s dress shoes and slacks crouched toward the rear of the car.
“Did you see him?” David asked.
“Yes, I think so. I’m going to have the police come over.”
She went to grab the cordless phone from the kitchen.
Just then, the man stood up. He wiped his brow with his white dress-shirt sleeve and tossed his dark tie over his shoulder and looked toward their house. He was an African-American who seemed to be working on the rear of his car.
“Annie, could you wait a second?”
It was too late. She had already dialed, and the phone rang on the other end. She moved to
David’s side and looked down the street with David at the man, who was now on his cell phone.
“Hi, Elle, it’s Annie. Fine, thanks. There’s a strange man in our neighborhood, down the street. Never seen him before . . . I don’t know what’s wrong. He was crouching or kneeling behind his car door. Now he’s standing . . . Why, yes, it is a black man, now that you mention it . . . Okay, thank you.”
Annie hung up and looked at David. “They’re sending over a patrol car.”
The summers in upstate New York vary. Sometimes the days were cool ones, marked by high pressure pushing air in from Canada. Other times, they felt hot and humid with airflows from the West and Southwest. Most of the time, though, the summers divided themselves more or less equally between these conditions. But this summer had been unusually hot and humid. In fact, it had been markedly hot all across the country.
Hot summers led to hot tempers, and this summer was no exception. There had been two national incidents involving white police officers shooting unarmed black men. Racial tension was in the air and on the news everywhere across the country. It all prompted David to think hard about race relations. In his experience, whites and blacks rarely mixed socially; they kept to their own. It wasn’t intentional most of the time in his mind; it was just the way things ended up. Sometimes it was fed by mindless beliefs or assumptions about one another.
When David heard Elle ask Annie if the man was black, he felt angry. The seeds of a racial incident had been planted: a black man in a white neighborhood is out of place and needs investigation. Indigo Valley had nothing but white police officers, and in a few minutes, this would be a white-on-black situation. And, if the assigned officer thought the way Elle did, anything could happen in David’s mind.
David wasn’t happy with Annie, Elle, the police, or the man down the street. He was ticked off that all of them had interrupted his work, had forced him to step in and clean up their mess. On top of it all, he was ticked at himself. He’d decided that the world had enough bystanders, and he’d need to intervene and stop any potential racial incident if he could. Adding it all up, he had no choice other than to become involved now, even though it was inconvenient and uncomfortable. He was going to take the risk that this black man might somehow hurt him.
“I’m gonna go talk to him,” he told Annie as he moved toward the door.
“Oh, David, why don’t you wait for the police?”
“I can’t,” he said as he opened the door.
“Please, David.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said closing the door behind him.
Who knows what the man thought when he spotted David walking toward him? David had gone straight to work in his office without shaving. His hair looked like he had just woken up. He hadn’t showered, either. He was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, the kind they call a wife-beater. He had a pair of battleship-gray sweatpants on that matched the color of the overcast sky. He stopped to tie one of his white Air Jordans in the front yard before crossing the street.
The man spotted him approaching through his driver’s-side window and bent over to reach across the front seat.
Bang.
David flinched when he heard it, but he realized the man was still leaning over the front seat with his head on the passenger side. The guy wasn’t aiming anything at him.
Bang.
David didn’t flinch this time. The man glanced at him through the windshield. David looked around and didn’t see anyone else outside besides him and the man, still in the same position. It didn’t sound like a gunshot.
Bang.
David was practically over the man now—looking at him stretched across the front seat.
Bang.
The man was trying to slam the glove compartment shut. He finally succeeded and backed out of the car.
“Can I help you?” asked David.
The man straightened up and looked at David a few feet away. He was six feet tall, a few inches taller than David—wider, too, at the shoulders.
“What makes you think I need help?”
David was taken aback at the response and his tone of voice. “I, ah, I just figured you look like you could use some help.”
“Why, because I’m a black man in a white neighborhood?”
Where did that come from? It made David regret his decision to get involved altogether. “No, because I, ah, I thought you might be having car trouble.”
“You mean, if I was a white man, you would have come out to see if I needed help?”
Now, David felt incredibly uncomfortable. All he wanted to do was help. If he’d known that he’d have to examine his racial views before he could help, he would have stayed inside. But he knew the man had a point. If he had been a white man, maybe Annie wouldn’t have called him upstairs, though she may have called the police. But David wouldn’t have gone outside to help if it was a white man, police or no police. He had work to do. It all made him feel guilty for a split second, but he shook it off. He knew he had good intentions. He was out there to prevent a racial incident with the police. The irony that this guy seemed intent on inciting one with him did not escape David. He looked at the rear driver-side tire and saw that it was flat. There was a scissor jack under the car, but it hadn’t been raised. The lug wrench sat on the ground beside it.
“Let me help you change that tire,” David said as he moved toward the jack.
“I can do it myself.”
“You’re not dressed for it. You’ll get yourself all dirty.” David bent down and grabbed the cross-shaped lug wrench. He found an end that fit and tried to turn one of the lugs. It wouldn’t budge. Beads of sweat appeared on his tan shoulders.
“Not as easy as it looks, is it?” the man said.
David looked up at him. The man was smiling.
“Rusted on,” David said, standing up. He looked around. He spotted a rock the size of a softball in the neighbor’s flower garden fifteen feet away and went around the car to grab it.
“I can get them off,” the man said.
David fetched the rock and turned back toward the car.
“Really? I don’t see one of the lug nuts off yet. What have you been doing out here?”
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he moved to the lug wrench, put his hands on it, and grunted while trying to turn the lug nut. He stopped, caught his breath, then tried again. Still stuck.
David returned and offered the rock to the man. “Here, take the rock and pound the end of the lug wrench while I try to turn it.”
The man took the rock. David squatted down and grasped the lug wrench with both hands and said, “Go ahead, and hit the end of the wrench now.” The man bent over and started pounding the wrench as David used all of his might to turn the lug nuts. The pounding helped to loosen the rust. Finally, one lug nut turned.
“One down, four to go,” David said.
They repeated the process until they got all the lug nuts loosened. They both stood up. David faced the man and wiped his brow with one hand. He smiled; the man was poker-faced.
“Nicely done,” David said as he held his right hand out. The man looked at it for a second, unsure if David wanted to shake his hand or if he wanted the rock. David wanted to shake it but settled for the rock. “I’ll put the rock back. Why don’t you get the spare out of the trunk?” The man nodded and gave David the rock.
The man walked to the rear to open the trunk. David moved around the front to return the rock when he noticed the glove compartment had popped open. He saw what looked like a handgun inside it. His stomach turned to knots. He told himself to keep moving; don’t stop to confirm what he thought was there; don’t show the man that he might have seen it. David’s mind raced as he walked. Who is this guy? Did he break down, or is he here for another reason? He placed the rock back where he’d found it. Turning to face the car, he looked at it closely for the first time. David knew his cars and recognized the square frame of a late-model Ford Crown Victoria. And then he spotted the giveaway as he wal
ked around the front—a driver-side spotlight mounted flush with the hood, where the driver’s door met the windshield. Standard-issue unmarked law-enforcement vehicle. But what agency? Given the skin color of the driver, he wasn’t with the Indigo Valley police.
David returned to the flat tire and bent down to attach the arm to the jack screw. The man had leaned the spare against the car and was standing with his arms folded.
“Is the parking brake on?” David asked. He would have checked himself, but he wasn’t going to stick his head in the car and get anywhere near that gun. Besides, if the man checked, it would give him a chance to shut the glove compartment to conceal it. Then again, he might reach for it, but he’d had that opportunity before and had chosen to hide it in the glove compartment. David bet that history would repeat itself.
The man sat in the front seat. David heard the clicks of the emergency brake being engaged. The man reached over the armrest. Then David heard the bang of the glove compartment. The man exited the car. David looked up at him. No sign of the gun. David began turning the jack screw. The car moaned as David raised it. When the tire was off the ground, David spun the lug nuts off with the wrench. He removed the tire and stood up. Down the street toward the house, he saw a police cruiser make the turn and slowly approach.
David and the man looked at each other. David said, “I’ll handle this.”
The police cruiser was almost parallel to the man’s car on the other side of the two-lane town road when Chief McNeal rolled down his window. McNeal’s mouth was open as he looked at both David and the man. His eyebrows popped up.
With his peripheral vision, David saw the man’s head quickly spasm from side to side like he was shivering. David sensed the man was warning McNeal off—meaning that they somehow knew each other. David did not look away from McNeal, who was trying to keep a straight face. He decided to let things play out between the two men.
McNeal stopped his Dodge Charger cruiser next to them. “Everything okay here?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you, officer,” the man said. “I just had a flat, and he’s helping me change it.”
