The Final Detail: A Myron Bolitar Novel (28 page)

“Not really,” Myron said. “Just that he thought I was the one who killed Clu and now wanted to kill him.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

“Once again, your name rears its ugly head.”

“He was a strung-out addict.”

“I see,” Win said. “So he was just ranting?”

Silence.

“Somehow,” Myron said, “I keep ending up in the middle of this.”

“So it seems.”

“But I can’t imagine why.”

“Life’s little mysteries.”

“I also can’t figure out how Billy Lee fits into any of this: into Clu’s murder, into Esperanza’s affair with Bonnie, into Clu getting thrown off the team, into Clu signing with FJ, into any of it.”

Win put down his snifter and stood. “I suggest we sleep on it.”

Good advice. Myron crawled under the covers and plunged immediately into slumber land. It was several hours later—after the REM and alpha sleep cycles, when he started rising to consciousness and his brain activity started going haywire—that it came to him. He thought again about FJ and about his having tailed Myron. He thought about what FJ had said, about how he had even seen Myron at the cemetery before Myron disappeared with Terese in the Caribbean.

And a big click sounded in his head.

He called FJ at nine in the morning. FJ’s secretary said that Mr. Ache could not be disturbed. Myron told her it was urgent. Sorry, Mr. Ache was out of the office. But, Myron reminded her, you just said he could not be disturbed. He cannot be disturbed, the secretary countered, because he is not in the office. Ah.

“Tell him I want to meet with him,” Myron said. “And it has to be today.”

“I can’t promise you—”

“Just tell him.”

He looked at his watch. He was meeting Dad at “the Club” at noon. It gave him time to try to rendezvous with Sally Li, chief medical examiner for Bergen County. He called her office and told her he wanted to talk.

“Not here,” Sally said. “You know the Fashion Center?”

“It’s one of the malls on Route Seventeen, right?”

“On the Ridgewood Avenue intersection, yeah. There’s a sub shop outside the Bed, Bath and Beyond. Meet me there in an hour.”

“Bed, Bath and Beyond is part of the Fashion Center?”

“Must have something to do with the Beyond part.”

She hung up. He got in the rental car and started out to Paramus, New Jersey. Motto: There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Commerce. The town of Paramus was like a muggy, jam-packed elevator with some jerk holding the door-open button and shouting, “Come on, we can squeeze in one more strip mall.”

Nothing about the Fashion Center was particularly fashionable; the mall was in fact so unhip that teenagers didn’t even hang out there. Sally Li sat on a bench, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips. She wore green hospital scrubs and rubber sports sandals with no socks—footwear sported by many a coroner because it made cleaning off blood and guts and other human debris easy with a simple garden hose.

Okay, a little background here: For the past decade or so, Myron had been involved in an on-again, off-again romance with Jessica Culver. More recently they’d been in love. They’d moved in together. And now it was over. Or so he thought. He was not sure what exactly had happened. Objective observers might point to Brenda. She came along and changed a lot of things. But Myron was not sure.

So what’s that have to do with Sally Li?

Jessica’s father, Adam Culver, had been the Bergen County chief medical examiner until he was murdered several years ago. Sally Li, his assistant and close friend, had taken his place. That was how Myron knew her.

He approached. “Another no-smoking mall?”

“No one uses the word
no
anymore,” Sally said. “They say
free
instead. This isn’t a no-smoking mall; it’s a smoke-free zone. Next they’ll call underwater an air-free zone. Or the Senate a brain-free zone.”

“So why did you want to meet here?”

Sally sighed, sat up. “Because you want to know about Clu Haid’s autopsy, right?”

Myron hesitated, nodded.

“Well, my superiors—and I use that term knowing I don’t even have equals—would frown upon seeing us together. In fact, they’d probably try to fire my ass.”

“So why take the risk?” he asked.

“First off, I’m going to change jobs. I’m going back West, probably UCLA. Second, I’m cute, female, and what they now call Asian-American. It makes it harder to fire me. I might make a stink and the politically ambitious hate to look like they’re beating up a minority. Third, you’re a good guy. You figured out the truth when Adam was killed. I figure I owe you.” She took the cigarette out of her mouth, put it back in the package, took out another one, put it in her mouth. “So what do you want to know?”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Myron said, “I thought I’d have to turn on my charm.”

“Only if you want to get me naked.” She waved a hand. “Ah, who am I kidding? Go ahead, Myron, fire away.”

“Injuries?” Myron asked.

“Four bullet wounds.”

“I thought there were three.”

“So did we at first. Two to the head, both at close range, either one of which would have been fatal. The cops thought there was only one. There was another in the right calf, and another in the back between the shoulder blades.”

“Longer range?”

“Yeah, I’d say at least five feet. Looked liked thirty-eights, but I don’t do ballistics.”

“You were at the scene, right?”

“Yup.”

“Could you tell if there was forced entry?”

“The cops said no.”

Myron sat back and nodded to himself. “Let me see if I got the DA’s theory right. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“I look forward to it.”

“They figure Clu knew the killer. He let him or her in voluntarily, they talked or whatever, and something went wrong. The killer draws a gun, Clu runs, the killer fires two shots. One hits his calf, the other his back. Could you tell which came first?”

“Which what?”

“The calf shot or the back shot.”

“No,” Sally said.

“Okay, so Clu goes down. He’s hurt but not dead. The killer puts the gun to Clu’s head. Bang, bang.”

Sally arched an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”

“Thanks.”

“As far as it goes.”

“Pardon?”

She sighed and shifted on the bench. “There are problems.”

“Such as?”

“The body was moved.”

Myron felt his pulse pick up. “Clu was killed someplace else?”

“No. But his body was moved. After he was killed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The lividity wasn’t affected, so the blood didn’t have time to settle. But he was dragged around on the floor, probably immediately after death, though it could be up to an hour later. And the room was tossed.”

“The killer was searching for something,” Myron said. “Probably the two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Don’t know about that. But there were blood smears all over the place.”

“What do you mean, smears?”

“Look, I’m an ME. I don’t interpret crime scenes. But the place was a mess. Overturned furniture and bookshelves, drawers emptied out, and blood everywhere. On the walls. And on the floor. Like he’d been dragged like a rag doll.”

“Maybe he was dragging himself around. After he was shot in the leg and back.”

“Could be, I guess. Of course it’s hard to drag yourself across walls unless you’re Spider-Man.”

Myron’s blood chilled a few degrees. He tried to sort and sift and process. How did all this fit? The killer was on a rampage to find the cash. Okay, that makes sense. But why drag around the body? Why smear the walls with blood?

“We’re not finished,” Sally said.

Myron blinked as though coming out of a trance.

“I also ran a full tox screen on the deceased. Know what I found?”

“Heroin?”

She shook her head. “El Zippo.”

“What?”

“
Nada
, nothing, the big zero.”

“Clu was clean?”

“Not even a Tums.”

Myron made a face. “But that could have been temporary, right? I mean, the drugs might have just been out of his system.”

“Nope.”

“What do you mean, nope?”

“Let’s keep the science simple here, shall we? If a guy abuses drugs or alcohol, it shows up somewhere. Enlarged
heart, liver damage, lung modules, whatever. And it did. There was no question that Clu Haid had liked some pretty potent chemicals.
Had
, Myron. Had. There are other tests—hair tests, for example—that give you a more recent snapshot. And those were clean. Which means he’d been off the stuff for a while.”

“But he failed a drug test two weeks ago.”

She shrugged.

“Are you telling me that test was fixed?”

Sally held up both hands. “Not me. I’m telling you that my data disputes that data. I never said anything about a fix. It could have been an innocent error. There are such things as false positives.”

Myron’s head swam. Clu had been clean. His body had been dragged around after being shot four times. Why? None of this made any sense.

They chatted a few more minutes, mostly about the past, and headed for the exit ten minutes later. Myron started back to his car. Time to see Dad. He tried the new cellular—count on Win to have “extras” lying about his apartment—and called Win.

“Articulate,” Win answered.

“Clu was right. The drug test was fixed.”

Win said, “My, my.”

“Sawyer Wells witnessed the drug test.”

“More my, my.”

“What time is he doing the motivational talk at Reston?”

“Two o’clock,” Win said.

“In the mood to get motivated?”

“You have no idea.”

The Club.

Brooklake Country Club, to be more exact, though there was no brook, no lake, and they were not in the country. It was, however, most definitely a club. As Myron’s car made its way up the steep drive, the clubhouse’s white Greco-Roman pillars rising through the clouds, childhood memories popped up in fluorescent flashes. It was how he always saw the place. In flashes. Not always pleasant ones.

The Club was the epitome of nouveau-riche, Myron’s wealthy brethren proving that they could be just as tacky and exclusive as their goyish counterparts. Older women with perpetual tans on large, freckled chests sat by the pool, their hair shellacked into place by fake French hairdressers to the point where the strands resembled frozen fiber optics, never allowing it, God forbid, to touch the water, sleeping, he imagined, without putting their heads down lest they shatter the dos like so much Venetian glass; there were nose jobs and liposuction and face-lifts so extreme that the ears almost touched in the back, the overall effect bizarrely sexy in the same way you might find
Yvonne De Carlo on
The Munsters
sexy; women fighting off old age and on the surface winning, but Myron wondered if they doth protest too much, their fear just a little too bare in the scar-revealing, harsh overhead lights of the dining room.

Men and women were separated at the Club, the women animatedly playing mah-jongg, the men silently chewing on cigars over a hand of cards; women still had special tee times so as not to interfere with the breadwinners’—i.e., their husbands’—precious leisure moments; there was tennis too, but that was more for fashion than exercise, giving everyone an excuse to wear sweatsuits that rarely encountered sweat, couples sometimes sporting matching ones; a men’s grill, a women’s lounge, the oak boards memorializing golf champions in gold leaf, the same man winning seven years in a row, now dead, the large locker rooms with masseur’s tables, the bathrooms with combs sitting in blue alcohol, the pickle-and-cole-slaw bar, cleat marks on the rug, the Founders Board with his grandparents’ names still on it, immigrant dining room help, all referred to by their first names, always smiling too hard and at the ready.

What shocked Myron now was that people
his
age were members. The same young girls who had sneered at their mothers’ idleness now abandoned their own foundering careers to “raise” the kids—read: hire nannies—came here to lunch and bore each other silly with a continuous game of one-upmanship. The men Myron’s age had manicures and long hair and were well fed and too well dressed, kicking back with their cellular phones and casually swearing to a colleague. Their kids were there too, dark-eyed youngsters walking through the clubhouse with hand-held video games and Walkmans and too regal a bearing.

All conversations were inane and depressed the hell out of Myron. The grandpas in Myron’s day had the good sense not to talk much to one another, just discarding and picking up what was dealt, occasionally grumbling about a local sports team; the grandmothers interrogated one another, measuring their own children and grandchildren against the competition, seeking an opponent’s weakness and any conversational opening to jab forward with tales of offspring heroics, no one really listening, just preparing for the next frontal assault, familial pride getting confused with self-worth and desperation.

The main clubhouse dining room was as expected: waaaay too overstated. The green carpeting, the curtains that resembled corduroy leisure suits, the gold tablecloths on huge round mahogany, the floral centerpieces piled too high and with no sense of proportion, not unlike the plates traipsing down the buffet line. Myron remembered attending a sports-themed bar mitzvah here as a child: juke-boxes, posters, pennants, a Wiffle ball batting cage, a basket for foul shots, an artist wanna-be stuck sketching sports-related caricatures of thirteen-year-old boys—thirteen-year-old boys being God’s most obnoxious creation short of television lawyers—and a wedding band complete with an overweight lead singer who handed the kids silver dollars shrouded in leather pouches that were emblazoned with the band’s phone number.

But this view—these flashes—were too quick and thus simplistic. Myron knew that. His remembrances were all screwed up about this place—the derision blending with the nostalgia—but he also remembered coming here as a child for family dinners, his clip-on tie slightly askew, sent by Mom into the inner sanctum of the men’s card room to find his grandfather, the undisputed family patriarch, the room reeking of cigar smoke, his pop-pop greeting him
with a ferocious embrace, his gruff compatriots who wore golf shirts that were too loud and too tight, barely acknowledging the interloper because their own grandkids would do the same soon, the card game trickling down, participant by participant.