The Last Dead Girl (21 page)

“I wonder if I really do. If I'd run into you when I was younger, I might've punched you in the kidney. Have you ever been punched in the kidney?”

“Not yet.”

“It hurts. Sometimes you piss blood. I haven't punched anyone in the kidney in years.” He looked through the window at the uniformed cop. “These young guys—they'd probably faint away at the thought of it. This one, Officer Tyler, is one of the best of the lot, but if you put him in a situation he hasn't read about in a book, he gets nervous. I asked him to pull you over for a broken taillight.”

“My taillights aren't broken.”

“I meant that he should break one. But of course he didn't. What did he tell you?”

“He said I failed to signal a turn.”

“Heaven help us all,” Moretti said. “I'm going to tell him to keep you here for another five minutes and then cut you loose. I don't care where you go, but if I see you following me again I'll get angry. And if I'm as corrupt as you seem to think I am, then you don't want to cross me. If I framed Gary Pruett, I can frame you. I can make a case that you killed Jana Fletcher, and Simon Lanik too. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He reached for the door handle but he didn't leave. He had one last message to deliver.

“You asked for the truth,” he said. “The truth is that Angela Reese is a sweet girl who got used by a creep who wound up murdering his wife. If Angela wants to be an artist, then I want her to be an artist. I plan to keep buying her paintings, and that's no one's business but my own. She doesn't need to know. You can spread any lies you want about me, to anyone you think will listen, but if you tell Angela what I've been doing, we really will have a problem. Things will get broken and things will bleed. You'll end up in a worse place than the back of a squad car.”

W
ednesday was a restless night.

Roger Tolliver called my cell phone around eight. I didn't answer. He left a voice mail message:
I heard from Frank Moretti. He urged me to get my client under control. I think you and I need to talk.

At nine it occurred to me I'd had nothing to eat since lunch. I found a box of spaghetti in a cupboard, and a jar of sauce—things Jana had left behind. I heated the sauce on the stove, got some water boiling, dropped the pasta in. I timed it for ten minutes. Strained it in a colander, fixed a plate, ladled on some sauce. It looked fine; it smelled good. And it was nothing I wanted to eat.

At ten I decided it couldn't hurt to go to bed early. At eleven I was still awake. I got up and took a shower, the water as hot as I could bear it. I walked into the living room, barefoot on the hardwood floor, toweling off.

I stepped on dried wax and it reminded me of the night Jana died. She had tried to use the two-by-four as a weapon against her killer. The candleholder. Four tea-light candles had gone flying. One of them landed right side up; the others spilled their wax across the floor.

Another Wednesday night, two weeks ago.

I got on my knees and traced my fingers over the lines of wax. Someday someone would scrape them away, but it wouldn't be me.

I finished toweling off, got dressed, and went out onto the patio. The air was cool. I walked into the grass, looked back at Agnes Lanik's half of the duplex. She had the lights on in her kitchen. I could see the pots of flowers I'd left for her, still on her patio.

I walked toward the woods and saw a spark of pale red light in the distance. It hung glowing in the air for a second and flared out. Then another spark. Then two more, rising up like silent fireworks. I stood and watched the show, points of light appearing and disappearing. I heard a sound behind me: the clap of Agnes Lanik's screen door. She came out bundled in a shawl and picked her way through the grass like she was walking over a field of stones. She stopped a few feet from me and we watched the lights together.

“SvetluÅ¡ky,”
she said.

Fireflies.

“I used to catch them in a jar when I was a boy,” I told her.

“Simon too. Did you remember to punch holes in the lid?”

Her accent was especially thick. “Lid” sounded like “leed.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Sometimes Simon had to be reminded.” She held the shawl close around her and shrugged her shoulders. A very European shrug.

“I'm sorry about what happened to him,” I said.

Another shrug. This one meant that the world was a hard place. Agnes glanced back at her patio and added, as an afterthought, “The flowers are nice.”

The lights slowed down and seemed to recede toward the woods. The day caught up to me and I felt tired. I yawned.

“Maybe you are thirsty,” Agnes said, and I thought we had our signals crossed, as if a yawn meant something different where she came from.

She turned abruptly and began to walk back to the house.

“Come in if you want,” she said. “Want” sounded like “vant.”

Her kitchen was a mirror image of Jana's, with the same appliances and even the same table and chairs. The drink she offered me was a bitter liqueur called Becherovka. It tasted a little like cinnamon and a lot like mouthwash. She drank hers with ice and cut mine with a healthy dose of seltzer water.

She lit the oven as soon as we came in, and while I made peace with the Becherovka she filled a plate with some of the food her visitors had brought: roasted potatoes, pork goulash, sauerkraut, pierogi.

She warmed the plate in the oven and put it down in front of me. I picked at the food at first, then laid into it like a starving man, then made myself slow down again. Agnes tended to her kitchen, washing dishes, drying them, wiping off the counter. We didn't talk. I might have been playing a part: the traveler in a foreign land, lost on the road at night. She was the cottager who took me in and gave me a meal and sent me on my way.

I don't know what she wanted; maybe just companionship, something to ease the loss she was feeling. I think she would have been content to carry on in silence, but there were things I needed to say.

“Frank Moretti talked to you yesterday.”

She was scrubbing the stove top now. She nodded without turning around.

“Did he tell you his theory about how Simon died—that it could have been a robbery that went too far?”

“He told me.”

“I don't believe it,” I said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“That night, I spoke to Simon.”

“This I know.”

“He said he had a gun, but I never saw it. I wondered if he really had one.”

She finished wiping the stove, dropped the rag in the sink. I watched her shuffle through the doorway to the living room and out of sight. She returned a minute later with a small black pistol, a semiautomatic. She put it on the table beside my empty plate.

“Viktor, my husband—this was his. And another just the same. Simon had the other.”

I reached for the gun. Stopped myself. “Is it loaded?”

Agnes was sitting now, perched like a bird on the edge of her chair. She took a sip from her Becherovka, put the glass down carefully. Picked up the gun and thumbed a lever on the side to eject the clip. Her hands—skin and tendon and bone—moved with a slow grace. She put the clip aside, aimed the pistol at the floor, and pulled back the slide. A little round-headed bullet jumped from the chamber and skipped across the floor. She passed the gun to me.

I looked at the side of the barrel and saw some Cyrillic characters there, along with the more familiar Latin letters spelling out the name:
MAKAROV
. Just as Simon had claimed.

I remembered something else. “Simon told me his grandfather was involved in the black market, back in Czechoslovakia.” I held up the gun. “Is this what he sold?”

She took another drink of Becherovka, shook her head. “You hear about the black market, you think of guns. Or drugs. But this was after the war. This was under the Communists. My Viktor sold food, clothes, transistor radios. That was the black market. Those were the things men hid in the shadows to sell each other. The things they killed each other for.” She scowled and turned her withered face away from me.

“Simon didn't have his gun when they found him,” I said. “Moretti's not convinced he ever had one—”

She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Moretti is a policeman. He believes what he wants to believe.”

She was half right, I thought. Moretti wanted to believe that Simon's death was a random crime. But he couldn't really believe it, I thought. He was too intelligent and too honest. It was frustrating, trying to understand him. I found myself telling Agnes Lanik about how I had followed him, about our conversation in the back of the patrol car. “I practically accused him of framing an innocent man,” I told her. “But that's not what bothered him. He was worried that I might tell Angela Reese he'd been buying her paintings. And he was angry that I followed him. So that raises a question.”

“What question?” she asked.

“Where was he going today? What's he hiding?”

The lines on Agnes Lanik's ancient face arranged themselves into a look of disapproval. She levered herself up from her chair and took her glass to the sink. She bent at the waist like a crooked tree falling slow and picked up the stray bullet from the floor. She brought it back to the table, eased herself into her seat again, and held her hand out for the gun. I gave it to her.

“You are a child,” she said. “Simon was a child too. He believed in fantasies.” She held the gun up between us. “My Viktor used to brag about his Makarov pistols. He said he took them from two Russian soldiers he killed in the war. Simon believed him. After his grandfather died, I told him the truth. My Viktor never killed any Russians. He bought his pistols from a
zastavárna
. You would say a pawn store.”

“A pawnshop.”

“Yes. And they are not real Makarovs. They are false. Like false money. Counterfeit. Made in East Germany. I tell Simon this. He does not believe me. He would rather believe the fantasy. Like a child.”

Agnes laid the gun down. “You are very foolish,” she said. “This policeman, Moretti, he threatens you. He says he will make you bleed.”

“That's true.”

“But you want to know where he goes. So you will follow him again.”

“I might.”

“To learn his secret.”

“Yes.”

The lines of her disapproval deepened. “What secret do you think he has?”

“I don't know.”

“Can he work magic, your Moretti? Can he bring back the dead?”

“No.”

“Then what good are his secrets to you and me?”

B
echerovka stays with you.

You drink it with a lot of rich Eastern European food, and it stays down, everything stays down, and it sends a thick fog through your brain and you drag yourself through the fog to your bed. But the next day, when you wake up around one in the afternoon, the Becherovka is still there, and it's not the way you remember it from the night before, soft and foggy. It's there pounding on your bedroom door, asking to see your papers, demanding to know what business you have in the Czech Republic. And when you finally throw off the covers and get up on your feet, it smiles a crooked smile and cracks you in the skull with the butt of its rifle.

Aspirin doesn't help. A shower doesn't help. Coffee doesn't help. More Becherovka might help, but I couldn't say for sure. I didn't have any more and I never wanted any more again. I wanted to bar the door and climb back into bed and sweat it out of my system.

Instead I made myself eat a bowl of cereal and checked my calendar. I had three home inspections listed for today. The first one I'd already slept through; the other two I could still make. But the prospect of crawling through attics and walking on rooftops in my current state was unappealing. I checked my bank balance and did some math and figured I was okay for now. I could afford to reschedule. I spent the next twenty minutes on the phone, making apologies.

My Becherovka headache hung on long into the afternoon. It followed me wherever I went in the apartment, so I decided to give it the slip. I went out driving.

I drove to the abandoned farm on Humaston Road, but I didn't stop there. I kept going and lost myself in a labyrinth of back roads. I didn't care where they were leading. I didn't care about the scenery. I tried to ignore the regiment of Czech soldiers marching through my head. I tried to let my mind wander, but it kept returning to one subject: Frank Moretti.

When I'd spoken to him the day before, I had more or less accused him of using Napoleon Washburn to frame Gary Pruett. His response had been enigmatic: neither an admission nor a denial.
You want to be very careful right now,
he'd said. A subtle warning, which had been followed by a more explicit one: that I should stop playing detective.

The more I thought about his reaction, the more I believed I must have hit a nerve.

Still, I had some doubt. Two things bothered me about the idea that Moretti had used Washburn to frame Pruett, one practical and one moral. The practical issue was something Pruett's lawyer had brought up when I talked to her. Moretti would have needed a way to contact Washburn, and there was no record of Moretti visiting Washburn in the county jail.

But how difficult would it have been to get around a little jailhouse record-keeping? Just yesterday Moretti had enlisted a young patrolman to pull me over for no reason. Wouldn't he have been able to persuade a guard at the jail to pass a message to an inmate? Or if he really wanted a face-to-face meeting, off the record, couldn't he have arranged one?

The moral issue was more complicated. I'd told Moretti yesterday that I respected him. It was true. So I had trouble accepting that he would ask Washburn to lie.

But maybe it wasn't so black and white.

As I drove in loops and circles along those back roads, I began to see how it could have gone. Moretti arrested Gary Pruett for murdering his wife. Suppose he believed Pruett was guilty but realized the evidence left something to be desired. So he reached out to Napoleon Washburn. He could have chosen some other inmate at the jail, but Washburn was being held in the cell next to Pruett's. More important, Washburn had been convicted of stealing a car and was about to be sentenced; he would have every reason to cooperate if it meant serving less time. These were things Moretti could have learned easily, assuming he had connections at the jail.

So he found a way to contact Poe Washburn. But did he ask Washburn to lie? Not necessarily. Maybe all Moretti wanted was for Washburn to try to get close to Gary Pruett, to get him talking about his wife, to see if he would confess. Maybe Washburn tried it that way; maybe he got nowhere. So he pretended. He made up a story about Pruett confessing.

By the time I worked all this out, I had doubled back to Humaston Road. I figured I'd done the best I could, if I wanted to go on respecting Frank Moretti. On some level the scenario I'd come up with made it easier to understand what I believed he had done. But I knew it didn't let him off the hook. If it was true, then he had never directly asked Washburn to lie—but he must have understood that he was giving Washburn a strong incentive to lie. There would be no reward for Washburn unless he said that Pruett confessed. Moretti knew that, and he must not have cared. Which meant he had a reason for not caring. I didn't know what the reason was. Not yet.

I drove by the farm again and then headed back into Rome, making my way to the south side of the city, to an unpaved street—to Poe Washburn's house with its cinder-block steps and shattered windows and burnt-out second floor. I had plenty of guesses, but I wanted to find Poe and get at the truth. This seemed like the place to start.

Someone had nailed a
NO TRESPASSING
sign to the front door. I walked around to the back, through a small yard bordered by scraggly hedges. At the rear of the house there were more cinder-block steps and a whitewashed door. Another
NO TRESPASSING
sign. The door was locked, but it was a simple spring lock, not a dead bolt. You could have opened it with a credit card. I used one of the blades of my Swiss Army knife.

When I swung the door inward and stepped inside, the smell hit me hard.

There's nothing like the smell of a house after a fire: it's not a clean, campfire smell; it's a chemical smell that worms its way deep into your lungs. I was in the kitchen where the fire never reached, but the smell was here, and a dampness too. The firemen had pumped water through the windows of the second floor, and the water had come through the ceiling. The drywall hung in shreds, and the wooden bones of the house showed through.

I stood in the spot where Poe Washburn had tackled me. He had come down the stairs through a cloud of gray smoke, he had seen me, and he had made a natural assumption: that someone had sent me to burn down his house.

Tell him I got the message,
Washburn had said to me.
Tell him he doesn't have to worry. I'm not gonna talk.

Tell who?
I'd said. Because I didn't know at the time. But I thought I knew now: Frank Moretti.

I couldn't quite make myself believe that Moretti had been responsible for the fire. But I could see how Washburn might have thought so.

I moved from the kitchen to the living room, as far as the bottom of the stairs. The burnt-chemical smell was stronger there. I didn't try to go up.

I went down instead. I found a door off the kitchen that opened on a set of wooden steps leading to a basement. The air was cooler there and the smell fainter. A space had been cleared in the middle of the concrete floor, and someone had laid down cushions and spread a bedroll on top of them. There was a pillow on the bedroll and clothes hanging on a rack nearby.

Next to the rack was a wooden chair with three items on the seat: an open carton of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a flashlight. Beside the chair I saw a Styrofoam cooler. No ice inside, just two longneck bottles of beer and a few inches of tepid water.

All this could have been left behind by a squatter, an opportunist who found a way in, just as I had. But I didn't believe that for a minute. I thought it had to be Poe.

Cigarettes and beer and a place to sleep. All the comforts of home.

•   •   •

I
left the basement and went out to my truck. Turned on the radio for company. The police were supposed to be looking for Poe Washburn, because he had assaulted me on the night of the fire. He seemed to have found a good hiding place—one where they wouldn't think to look for him.

I didn't care about the assault. I just wanted to talk to him. Maybe all I needed to do was wait. It looked as if he would be back. Otherwise, why would he have left anything behind?

I knew I could stay here and watch the house, but if he saw me parked out front, it might scare him off. More likely, he wouldn't approach the house from the front at all. If he was clever, he would park around the block and cut through the backyard. I might never see him.

The only way to be sure I didn't miss him would be to park my truck somewhere else and come back on foot. I would need to wait for him down in the basement. I might have to wait a long time, and there was no guarantee he would show. If he did, he'd be angry to find me in his house; I thought I could count on that.

There had to be a better approach. He wouldn't talk if he was angry, and I needed him to talk. I turned off the radio and sat in the truck under a sky of washed-out gray, and an idea occurred to me. It seemed like a long shot. I thought it might work, and then I thought it couldn't possibly work, and then my cell phone rang.

It was Roger Tolliver.

“You didn't return my call last night,” he said.

I thought I heard an edge in his voice, but I could have been wrong.

“I meant to,” I said.

“Detective Moretti told me you've been following him around.”

“That was just one time.”

“You probably shouldn't do that.”

“I'm not following anyone right now,” I said.

“That's good,” said Tolliver. “Why don't you come see me. We can talk about all the things you probably shouldn't do.”

“When?” I asked.

“The sooner the better.”

“All right. I need to take care of something first. It won't take long.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No.”

“Is it illegal?”

“I guess, if you want to be a stickler about it.”

“If it's illegal, don't do it.”

I reached for a pen lying on the truck's passenger seat.

“It's nothing,” I said. “I just want to leave Poe Washburn a note.”