Cal
“WHAT
is it?” Lucy Brighton asked as I returned the phone to my jacket.
“An old friend, a detective with the Promise Falls police,” I said. “He needs to see me.”
“What about?”
“Don’t know,” I said, doing up my pants, and feeling a little silly about it.
“You have to go right now?”
I nodded. I gave her a quick kiss. “Okay if I call you later?”
Lucy nodded. “Sure, yeah. I was thinking I’d have to do the rest of the funeral arrangements today, but that sort of falls to Miriam, don’t you think?”
“Have you talked to her? Since finding out she wasn’t in the car with your father?”
Lucy shook her head. “I hardly know what to say to her.”
“She hasn’t called you?”
Another head shake. She set her lips firmly together. “I’ll call her. After you leave. Tell her what I’ve done so far where my father’s concerned.”
“Okay,” I said. “Talk to you later.”
We walked to the front door. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Lucy said.
I saw that she was looking at Crystal’s bagged lunch. She must have set it down when she retied her shoe, then forgotten to take it with her.
“I swear,” Lucy said. “And with all I have to do today, I—”
“Let me,” I said. “I’ll drop it off for her by her lunchtime.”
“I can’t let—”
“It’s no trouble, really.”
Lucy told me which school, and when Crystal’s lunch was, and, grinning, said she would call ahead to let the staff know some really strange man was coming by with something for her.
I went out to my car. Duckworth had asked to meet me at Kelly’s, a downtown diner. I found him in a booth, a cup of coffee in front of him, and a plate, judging by the red smears on it, that had once had cherry pie on it.
We shook hands as I slid in opposite him. “How’s things, Barry?”
“Good, good,” he said, then pointed to the plate and grimaced. “Didn’t really have time for breakfast this morning.”
“The pie’s always been good here,” I said. “And you can never go wrong with pie for breakfast.”
“Maureen might be a bit skeptical about that,” Barry said.
“How is she?”
“Good.”
“And Trevor?”
Barry Duckworth smiled. “You’re good, remembering that. He’s okay.”
“You brought him in to work the odd time, showed him around. But that was a long time ago. I’m guessing he’s about four feet taller now.”
“He is, he is. And how about you? You settling in back here?”
“I suppose. Although I may be looking for new digs. I’m living over that bookshop that got hit with a Molotov cocktail last night.”
Barry blinked. “I don’t even know about that. I know about the bus.”
“What bus?” I asked.
We filled each other in. He mentioned the number on the back
of the bus, and I told him I’d heard about his news conference, about the strange series of events that seemed to be linked.
“Let me ask you this,” Barry said. “Is it possible what happened at your place is in any way connected to these other things?”
I thought about that. “No appearance of your infamous twenty-three that I noticed. It was pretty straightforward. Couple of yahoos blaming Naman for the drive-in thing because supposedly he has a terrorist’s name.”
“Assholes,” Duckworth said. “Anyway, the reason I asked you here . . .”
Barry reached into his pocket for something and laid one of my business cards on the table.
“I already have one of those,” I said.
“Guess where I found this,” he said.
It wasn’t as though I’d handed out a thousand of them since I’d returned to Promise Falls. But I had handed out a few. Most recently, to Adam Chalmers’s ex-wife Felicia. And I’d handed one to Miriam the night before when she found me in her house.
“Tell me,” I said. “It’ll save us some time.”
“At the Chalmers house. Adam and Miriam Chalmers. You know them?”
“I never met Adam,” I admitted. “Miriam, yes.”
“Many times?”
“Just once.”
“When was that?”
“For God’s sake, Barry, just tell me what’s going on.”
Barry Duckworth took a sip of his coffee. “She died last night. Looks like someone pushed her down the stairs. Broke her neck.”
You try to be cool, acting all the time as though nothing surprises you. But my jaw dropped. “What?”
He told me again.
I let that sink in for a moment. “And you found my card there.”
“That’s right.”
I thought about Lucy, and whether she’d yet tried to get in touch with Miriam about funeral arrangements. I hoped she wasn’t planning to drop in on her in person. But if the house was a crime scene, she wasn’t going to be able to get close to it. Still, a heads-up was in order. She’d be as stunned as I’d just been.
“Someone needs to know this,” I told Barry. “Right away.” I got out my phone and dialed Lucy’s house.
“Cal?”
“Something’s happened,” I told her.
“What?”
“Have you tried to call Miriam?”
“I’m kind of working up to it.”
“Don’t. Miriam’s dead.”
A stunned silence.
“You there?” I’d managed, so far, to avoid saying Lucy’s name in front of Duckworth.
“But wait,” she said. “You mean she
was
killed at the drive-in? They were right the first time? But you saw her. You told me you
saw
her. You
talked
to her.”
“I did. It happened later.”
“God, no.”
Barry ran a finger along his plate, gathered up a few crust crumbs and some leftover cherry pie filling, and licked it.
“Cal, how . . . ? Was she killed?”
“Yes. I’m going to have to tell the police why I was at the house.”
“You’ll have to tell them . . . about that room?”
“My guess is if they haven’t found it yet, they will.”
“Tell them whatever you have to tell them,” Lucy said.
“I’ll call you later,” I said. “I’ll know more then.”
My coffee arrived as I was putting my phone away.
Barry was tapping my business card. A slow, steady beat.
“I gave her my card,” I said.
“When?”
I hesitated. Even though I had Lucy’s blessing to tell Barry everything, it was in my nature to want to hold things back.
Barry said, “You know I could take you in. You were clearly in that house, maybe the last person to see her alive, and that could make you a person of interest.” He smiled. “But I like ya. So talk to me. When did you give her the card?”
“Last night,” I said. I gave him the time. Barry took out his notebook and scribbled something down.
“Why’d you go out to see her?”
“I didn’t.”
Barry cocked his head. “You weren’t going out there to see her husband, were you?”
“No,” I said. “I knew he was dead. The drive-in thing. I thought she was dead, too.”
Barry said, “So you dropped by to leave your card in case one of them came back to life?”
I explained that I was already in the house. That I had been hired by Adam’s daughter, Lucy Brighton. Told him why.
“You found the room?” I asked.
Barry, stone-faced, said, “We found
a
room.”
“They called it the playroom,” I said. “Adam and Miriam were part of the lifestyle.”
“The lifestyle.”
Now it was my chance to lord it over someone who didn’t know. “Sex with other couples. Looks as though someone busted in, got into the room, and took some DVDs. Home movies, it looks like. Right after the screen came down. Lucy asked me to get them back.”
Barry nodded slowly. “Did you?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought you were good at this,” the police detective said.
I forced a smile. “The client, wisely, I think, decided there wasn’t much point in investing a fortune in their pursuit. I have an
idea where the DVDs ended up and don’t believe they pose a risk. My guess is they’ll be destroyed.”
“Destroyed by someone else who was on them,” he said.
“That’s my thinking,” I said.
“You know who?”
I shrugged, drank some coffee. “I’ve got my suspicions. But I wasn’t sure that it mattered in the overall scheme of things.”
“It might now,” Barry said.
“It might,” I said.
“You going to tell me?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“I’ll pay for your coffee if you tell me,” he said. “You know what I make, and what a grand gesture that is.”
“I think maybe the guy who runs security for Thackeray might have an interest.”
“Duncomb?” Barry asked.
“You know him?”
“We’ve crossed paths.” He appeared deep in thought for a moment, then studied me. I had a feeling he was debating whether to trust me. We had a history—a good one, for the most part, going back to when we worked together—so I figured he’d eventually decide I wasn’t his number one suspect.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Your opinion.”
“Okay.”
“If your wife was missing, and you didn’t know where she was,
and you were hanging out with a friend of yours hoping she’d turn up, would you be sitting around watching movies? Because I think that’s what they were doing when I showed up last night.”
I took another sip of coffee.
“I think it’s unlikely,” I said. “Which one has the missing wife?” I asked.
“The professor. Peter Blackmore.”
“What’s the wife’s name?”
“Georgina,” Barry Duckworth said.
“She was killed in the car with Adam,” I said.
“Yup.”
“Did they know that when they were sitting around watching movies?”
“I don’t think so,” Barry said. “I broke the news.”
“You thinking maybe they weren’t watching a Bruce Willis festival?”
“I don’t think so. Blackmore hid the discs so I wouldn’t see them. So why, at a time when you have to be wondering what’s happened to your wife, do you sit around watching homemade porno?”
I thought about that. “This is going to cost you more than a coffee.”
“You want a piece of pie? I’m thinking I might have another.”
“Okay,” I said.
Barry waved the waitress over. “I’ll have a piece of the cherry,” I said. “Can you put some whipped cream on it?”
“Jesus, like I’m made of money,” Barry said.
“Sure thing,” the waitress said. “How about you?” she asked Barry.
“You got blueberry?”
“Yup.”
“I’d have a slice of that.” As she walked away, Barry said, “Maureen says I need to eat more fruit.”
“So what was the question?” I asked.
“Why do you sit around watching homemade porn when you should be worried about your missing wife?”
I gave that a second. “Because there’s something on the DVD that worries you even more.”
“Yeah.”
While Barry was thinking about that, I had something on my mind that I hadn’t decided to put on the table yet.
I was thinking about Felicia Chalmers sitting in her car down the block from Adam and Miriam’s house before I got there last night. Before Miriam showed up. Before Miriam was murdered.
I’d seen Felicia drive away in my rearview mirror.
Now I was wondering if she might have gone back.
CLIVE
Duncomb found Peter Blackmore in the professor’s office around ten.
“Where the hell have you been?” Duncomb asked him.
Blackmore was in the same clothes he’d been wearing the night before. He was seated in the computer chair behind his desk, staring absently into the room. Looking in Duncomb’s direction, but not seeing him.
“I’m talking to you,” Duncomb said. “I went into the kitchen after talking to Miriam—with some very good news, by the way—and you were gone. Where the fuck did you go?”
Blackmore mumbled something.
“What?”
“Driving,” he said. “I went for a drive.”
“For the rest of the whole fucking night?”
“I guess. I drove around. Isn’t this a free country?”
“You were supposed to go identify Georgina. Did you do that? Did you identify her?”
Blackmore eyed Duncomb as though he were speaking in a foreign language. “Did I what?”
“Identify her! For Christ’s sake, snap out of it.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t get around to it.”
“There’s things you have to do,” the security chief said. “You’ve got to go to the cops, identify her. Then they send her to the funeral home. What about her family? Have you called anyone in her family to let them know?”
“I told you,” he said. “I was driving.”
“Where did you go?”
Blackmore blinked a few times. “I don’t remember, exactly.”
“What are you even doing here at work? You shouldn’t be here.”
“Have a class,” he said, shuffling some papers on his desk without really looking at them. “I think.”
“Go home,” Duncomb said, coming around the desk. “You’re a mess.” As he got closer, he said, “Jesus, you reek. Have you been drinking?”
“Maybe a little,” he admitted.
“You can’t drive home. I’ll call you a taxi.”
“I don’t want to go home. I don’t like it there. Keep thinking Georgina will walk in.”
Duncomb grabbed Blackmore under the shoulders, hauled him up on his feet. As he did, he got a look at the professor’s hands.
“What’s that?”
“Huh?”
“On your hands. What’s that?”
Blackmore examined his palms as though he’d never seen them before. “I think that’s blood.”
“What happened?”
“I fell,” he said absently. “I pulled over at one point. Thought I was going to be sick. And I was.” He smiled, as though proud of his ability to predict the near future. “I went down on my hands and knees. Think I cut my hand on the gravel.”
“Jesus, we have to get you out of here.”
“What good news?”
“Huh?”
“You said you had good news you wanted to tell me.”
“I can tell you later when you’re sober enough to remember it.”
“No, tell me now. I could use some cheering up.” He leaned in toward Duncomb, as though confiding a secret to him. “I’ve had a lot of tragedy in my life lately.”
“The discs,” Duncomb said. “The one we were looking for in particular, that we worried we couldn’t find?”
“The one with Olivia?” Blackmore said, his voice going up.
“Keep your damn voice down!” he whispered. “Yes, the one with Olivia.”
“What about it?”
“Adam had already disposed of it. It’s gone. It’s been gone for months.”
Blackmore’s eyes did another round of furious blinking, as though he were coming out of a deep sleep. “Wait, what? What did you say?”
“There’s no video with Olivia Fisher. Or any of the other girls. Adam got rid of them. He only kept the ones with us. Bad enough if anyone had ever seen them, but at least they wouldn’t have run the chance of seeing us dragged in for questioning.”
“So Miriam didn’t have them?” the professor asked.
“No. They’re gone.”
“Oh.”
“Come on, Peter. It’s one less thing for us to worry about.”
Blackmore dropped back into his chair. “I suppose,” he said.
“Suppose? Come on. We’re fine. Everything’s good now.”
Blackmore swiveled in the chair and looked up at Duncomb. “No, Clive, it’s not. We . . . did bad things . . .”
“Water under the bridge, my friend.”
“How do you live with her?” Blackmore asked.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Liz. How do you do it?”
“Peter, don’t go there.”
“How many men do you figure she’s been with? I mean, she was a whore, right? You told me that’s what she was.”
“I never called her that. She ran a business, she—”
“Yeah, a
whore
house. How do you . . . how do you live with someone that unclean?”
“You need to stop talking, Peter.”
“Don’t you feel that way? I know I feel that way. Unclean. The things I did with her. The things we all did with each other. Sometimes, at night, in bed, it’s like I can feel insects crawling around under my skin.”
Blackmore was as easy a target as Duncomb had ever encountered. Sitting there, right in front of him. Duncomb drove a fist straight into the man’s face. It knocked him, and the chair, over. Blackmore’s arm caught his keyboard on the way down. It landed on his head.
Duncomb pulled the chair out of the way and hovered over Blackmore.
“Don’t you ever talk that way about Liz again,” he said.
Blackmore put his fingers to his lip, pulled them away, looked at the blood, then looked back up at Duncomb.
“Did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Did you kill Olivia?”
“Jesus, Peter, I swear, you keep talking like this—” Duncomb raised his fist again.
“Go ahead,” the professor said. “Hit me again. Go on. I won’t try to stop you. But harder this time.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’ve never seen things more clearly. Hit me again!”
“Keep your voice down!”
“Go ahead! Beat the living shit out of me! I want to
feel
something! Come on!”
Duncomb crossed to the other side of the office, closed the door to reduce the likelihood anyone would hear what was going on. Blackmore was struggling to his feet, his head appearing above the desk. Once he could see his onetime friend, he smiled.
“I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
Duncomb stared.
“You know why? Because I’m a man with nothing left to lose. A man with nothing left to lose has no reason to be afraid.”
Duncomb kept his eyes trained on Blackmore for another five seconds, then said, “You need to get your shit together, Peter. See to Georgina. Take care of things. We have nothing to be worried about. We’re going to get through all this.”
“Just because those discs are gone doesn’t mean those things never happened.”
Duncomb chose his words carefully.
“You think you’re beyond being afraid. Trust me when I tell you, you’re not.”
He left the office, not bothering to close the door.
Blackmore shouted after him, “I’m not your puppet anymore! You hear that, Clive? No more!”
Duncomb kept walking.