Jack in the Box

by Blake Banner

  She stood motionless for a moment, then climbed in the car. I got in behind the wheel and closed the door.

  She stared, first at the road ahead, then at me. “We’ll explore that possibility in a minute. Right now, it looks to me as though he had no idea who Jack was or that he was even dead, let alone murdered.”

  I grunted and turned the key in the ignition. The engine growled and I pulled out into the traffic, making for East 22nd and the FDR. “So what does it mean?”

  “It means the subtle manipulator here is Penelope. It’s what you said back at the hotel. The most convincing lies are the ones that are nine-tenths truth. It wasn’t Stephen she was in love with, it was Jack. Like you said, if she was falling for Stephen, why did it take them almost five years to get engaged and married? The answer is, she was still carrying a torch for the man she’d loved and murdered.”

  I negotiated Park Avenue and turned right onto East 23rd, then began to cruise toward the river. Dehan was saying, “She fell in love with him and misread his signals. Shaw said it himself: he was the one willing to provide her with an apartment on Riverside Drive. So he got the prize. Penelope read that as a sign that he wanted to give her a home, that he was falling in love with her. She built up this whole fantasy in her head about how he felt the same way for her as she felt for him, and went so far as to break up with her billionaire boyfriend to be with him. Then reality comes crashing in and Jack tells her to forget it. He only wants her for sex. He’s staying with his wife.”

  She stared at me while I chewed my lip. We came to the river and I turned left and north and accelerated toward the Bronx. Dehan went on.

  “So she kills him. And she thought she’d got away with it. Almost five years roll by and the case seems to be forgotten. She’s moving on, getting married, making a new life as Mrs. Pillar of the Community. Only next thing we show up, digging up the past. So what does she do? She’s subtle. She agrees to talk to us, but by careful phrasing she puts Shaw in the frame. He’s the perfect fall guy. Killing people is his trade.”

  “Killing is his trade.” I repeated her words. “You don’t like him for it anymore?”

  “When he said he wasn’t jealous, I believed him. And he was definitely shocked when he realized why we were there. Plus, Stone, she lied to us! On two scores: she told us she was going to marry Stephen, not Jack, and, confusingly, she told us she didn’t tell Shaw who she was planning to marry…”

  “But implied that he stalked her with the white van…”

  “So that we would conclude that he had had Jack killed.”

  I scratched my chin. It rasped. “We need to place her at the scene of the murder.”

  “We don’t know where the scene of the murder was.”

  “That is exactly right. We also need to connect her with the weapon.”

  “And we don’t know what the weapon was.”

  I nodded. “We are not even sure she had a motive. All we really know is that her story and Shaw’s don’t quite jibe.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “She’s not getting to you, is she?”

  I smiled. “Do I see your lovely brown eyes turning green, Carmen?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just guys can be really stupid when it comes to women like Penelope Peach.”

  I chuckled. “Girls can be just as blind when it comes to men like Grant Shaw. I think we’ve both been around the block often enough to be on our guard.”

  She frowned. “You still think he’s a possible suspect?”

  “I’m not sure yet, Dehan. I agree with you that Shaw is intelligent and subtle. When you say he freaked out, what I saw was a man in total control of his reactions. The conversation had reached a point where he no longer wanted to talk to us. So he shut down. His reaction could mean almost anything we wanted it to mean.”

  After a moment she grinned. “You thought I liked Grant Shaw?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I thought he was a jerk.”

  “But an attractive jerk.”

  “He’s got a kind of animal magnetism, but he’s not my type, Sensei. You should know that.”

  “I do. We’re straying a little off task here, Dehan…”

  “I can’t believe you were jealous…”

  “I wasn’t jealous. I just didn’t think his reaction was as telling as you did.”

  “The great Sensei, jealous…”

  I sighed, rolled my eyes and settled to driving while she grinned at me from behind her aviators.

  As we were pulling into the parking lot outside the station, my phone pinged to let me know I had an email. I read it as we crossed the road and made our way into the detectives room. It was from Helena. I dropped into my chair and read it to Dehan.

  “‘Dear Detective Stone, blah blah… attached is a list of students whom I remember as having been in my class at the time of Jack’s death. I cannot guarantee that it is complete. However, as far as I recall, these are the students I had at the time…’”

  I printed two copies and handed one to Dehan, then dropped into my chair, staring at the page without seeing it. I started to say, “We may be losing sight…”

  But Dehan interrupted me. “We have twelve names here. Two are girls.” She looked up at me. “This feels like a male crime to me, but I agree with you that we should be open to the possibility that it was a woman. The rest are all guys…”

  She sat, focused on the page, going through the names one by one. I wasn’t thinking about the list, or the names; I was pretty sure none of them would mean much to me. Instead I was thinking about what had brought all those names together, on that sheet of paper.

  Then Dehan looked up at me. “Dos Santos.”

  “Two saints?”

  “Of the saints, it’s Portuguese, not Spanish. Lenny dos Santos. I know that name.”

  “It does ring a bell. He’s on the list?”

  “Uh-huh… Fifty bucks says he’s got a rap sheet.”

  While she checked, I looked through the list: Saul Adebayo, Julio Borregos, Zee Brown, Julian Calatrava, Susan Carter, Ernesto Cortez, Ira David, Mohamed Eze, Maria Garcia, Peter Heseltine, Lenny dos Santos, Toni Sotomayor.

  There was a vague familiarity to several of the names. I thought aloud: “By the very nature of the classes, Dehan, more than one of these is going to have a rap sheet. That was the whole point of the exercise, after all.”

  She paid no attention to me. Instead she said, “You like apples?”

  I looked up from the sheet. She was staring at the screen. She thumped the enter key and said, “Well? Do you?”

  “Sure, I’m not…”

  She stood and walked over to the printer, came back with a couple of sheets of paper and tossed one of them at me.

  “Well, how’d ya like them apples?”

  She read aloud as I scanned through it. She was the only person on Earth who could do that without annoying me.

  “Leonard Arbuthnot dos Santos, twenty-nine years of age…” She shook her head. “This kid’s been in and out of detention centers since he was thirteen: shoplifting, mugging, possession… OK, he did time ’98 to 2004, for assault with a deadly weapon. He was charged with attempted murder, but there was a self defense angle and he pled to the lesser charge. Two years later he was charged with selling heroin but walked because the defense alleged the evidence was wrongfully obtained. He also beat a guy to within an inch of his life, but because it occurred concurrent with and as a part of the other offense, the evidence was also inadmissible. January 2015, he is arrested, charged and successfully convicted for the murder of Mahalia Campbell, AKA Cherry Cam, a prostitute. He was her pimp. She’d been skimming off the top to pay for her habit and he…” She looked up at me. “And I quote, severed her head with a kitchen knife.”

  “Oh…”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “Them’s powerful good apples, Dehan. Where is Mr. dos Santos now?”

  “Upstate, in Malone, maximum security. He injured three cops during
his arrest. He’s a very bad man.”

  “Upstate? That’s almost in Canada.”

  She was looking at her phone. “Yup, it’s on the border. Interstate eighty-seven, five or six hours. Road trip.”

  “Does it seem strange to you that it never occurred to Helena to mention this guy?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know. He hadn’t murdered anybody yet, and he’d been let off his previous offense on a technicality.”

  I sighed. “We’ll see when we get there, but I am willing to bet he is not the shy, retiring type. I’m willing to bet he stands out in a crowd.”

  She flopped back in her chair and stuck a pencil in her mouth as though it were a cigarette. “She’s just a crazy broad, Stone, with her head full of dumb-ass ideas about compassion and understanding, giving people a second chance, not judging people by their appearance. One of those New York liberals who never climbed out of her European car long enough to get mugged.”

  “You are a strange and disturbing creature, Dehan. Those are not dumb-ass ideas. I happen to believe in those ideas myself.”

  “Sure,” she said with a deadpan face. “Me too. I was just kidding. When was the last time you were mugged, by the way?”

  “I have never been mugged. But that has nothing to do with not getting out of my European… Call upstate, wiseass, make an appointment and book us in somewhere comfortable. I’m going to call Helena and ask her about this guy.”

  “Sure thing, boss. Whatever you say, boss.”

  I called Helena. It rang twice and a fruity, fluty voice said, “Aloh, Magnusson residence here. How may I help you?”

  “Hello, Ebba, this is Detective Stone. May I speak to Mrs. Magnusson, please? It is quite important.”

  “Yoh, one moment please.”

  Fifteen seconds later, Helena came on the line. “Hello, Detective, I gather you received the list.”

  “Yes, there is one person on the list I am interested in. I wonder if you could tell me a little more about him.”

  “If I can, of course.”

  I glanced over at Dehan. She was talking into the phone and scrawling something on a piece of paper. I said, “Lenny dos Santos.”

  “Oh yes, Lenny.” There was a smile in her voice. “He was amusing. We used to laugh a lot with Lenny.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, he was funny. Quite outrageous. I seem to remember he was talented, too. Of course no discipline, and no desire to understand grammar, or the mechanics of language.”

  “Sure, but I am more interested in what kind of relationship he developed with you.”

  “With me?” She sounded surprised.

  I repressed a sigh. “Yes, of course. Did he admire you? Did he display affection toward you? Did he ever try to see you or talk to you alone, outside of class?”

  There was a small laugh. “I have no idea if he admired me. He never spoke about my books, if that is what you mean. Displays of affection? He was big and noisy, and he was always embracing the girls in the class, me included, but not more than the others. I never saw him outside of class, Detective. If he ever made an attempt to see me, I was blind to it, or he was too subtle.”

  “Mrs. Magnusson, I need you to try a little harder. This is very important. Was there ever anything unusual, or that struck you as odd, in Lenny’s attitude toward you?”

  Again the laugh, with a faint patronizing whiff to it. “What have you done, Detective? You scanned the list and found the black student, and now he is your prime suspect? If you are suggesting that Lenny, or any of my students, was my husband’s killer, I am afraid you are very much off track. Lenny was a kind, sweet, noisy clown who was incapable of hurting anybody.”

  “I see. I have just a couple more questions, Mrs. Magnusson, and then I’ll let you get on. I notice here on the list Saul Adebayo and Mohamed Eze. Would I be correct in saying that they were both black?”

  “Yes, Detective. Is that relevant?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Magnusson, it is. Because neither of them is a suspect. The reason that neither of them is a suspect is that neither of them is doing time in a maximum security prison for murdering a prostitute by cutting off her head. Lenny, on the other hand, is. He killed her, Mrs. Magnusson, because he was her pimp and she was stealing money from him to feed her heroin habit. Forgive me if I am a little brutal, but it seems to me that you need to face up to some facts and get real. Cuddly Lenny dos Santos had a rap sheet for violence going back to when he was a child. Now please, take that on board, assimilate it and give it some serious thought. Then please contact me and let me know if anything in his behavior toward you was unusual.”

  She was very quiet. After a moment she said, “I see. I’m sorry. I will give it some thought.”

  “Thank you.”

  I hung up and looked across the desk at Dehan. She looked smug and had her pencil stuck in her mouth again. “Dumb broad, head full of crazy dreams.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She wasn’t aware of him behaving in any particular way. He was big and noisy and cuddly. He could probably have gone in there with a chainsaw and she would have thought it was cute. What have you got?”

  “Nine tomorrow morning. I booked us into the Kilburn Manor, in the heart of Malone. We’re in the Judge’s Suite.”

  Mo’s voice intruded on us. “Course you did. Course you are.”

  I smiled over at him. Dehan stood and grabbed her jacket. “We better get moving, I also booked us a table at the Riverside Steak and Seafood Restaurant. And it’s a five hour drive.”

  “Sounds good.” I stood. “What are you doing tonight, Mo, anything nice?”

  “Take a hike.”

  We stepped out into the midday sun.

  SEVEN

  Malone should have been a nice town, and pretty, but it was hard to escape the feeling, as we entered the town on Route 11 and drove onto Main Street, that we had slipped into a Stephen King novel. There was nothing you could put your finger on: the Mobil gas station was perfectly normal, and yet wore a strange air of desolation in the gathering dusk. The family restaurant looked cozy and friendly, but its roof looked strangely outsized, and seemed to loom over the building. And as we approached the church tower, tall and very dark in the dying light, for a moment it looked to me like a vast, horned goat’s head on a long, thin neck. And where the sky glowed a faint, dark blue through its arches, it looked to me like the goat’s eyes.

  “What is it about the northeast of this country that is so sinister at times?”

  “You getting all freaky and weirded out, Stone?”

  “Are you?”

  “Nope. Cool-headed empirical realist, that’s me. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necesitatem.”

  “Is that the only thing you can quote in Latin?”

  “Yup, but it applies: don’t let your imagination run away with you. It’s probably just the presence of the maximum security facility up the road, but you’re right, there is a kind of eerie feel to this town.”

  I smiled at her. “Nothing a good, hearty meal and a bottle of wine can’t take care of, huh?”

  “You bet…”

  But she didn’t sound very convinced.

  We passed the church, which was massive and made of dark gray stone, and turned left onto Clay Street, and at the end of Clay Street, half concealed among trees, were the steep, gabled roof and portico of Kilburn Manor. We climbed out, grabbed our overnight bags from the trunk and walked down the narrow path under the overarching shadows of the trees.

  Kilburn Manor was in fact a B&B, but it was decorated and set up like a very luxurious old manor house. The manageress greeted us at the door and, as she led us up the stairs to our room, paused at practically every piece of furniture to tell us about its origins and its provenance. They were all antiques, she told us, including our vast, four-poster bed, which dated right back to the witch hunts.

  We dumped our bags, showered, changed and went out for dinner to the Riverside
Steak and Seafood Restaurant, which was just a short walk from the B&B. The walk confirmed the impression I had gotten from the car, that Malone was a strange and slightly desolate place.

  On the way, Dehan linked her arm through mine as we walked.

  “I think,” she said, “that what has complicated things has been Penelope. I think she’s like this charming whirlwind that goes storming through people’s lives, and it’s only after she’s gone that they realize how much disruption she has caused.”

  “That’s a nice image.”

  “And what we are seeing here is the evidence of where she passed through Jack, Helena and Grant’s lives, and because we are looking for evidence of a murderer, we think that is what we’re seeing.”

  “Interesting.”

  “But, much like the case of the arms in the lock up, what we are actually seeing has nothing to do with the murder or the killer. The killer was elsewhere, observing the scene, and his interest was not Penny…”

  “But Helena.”

  “Yup. Only in the lock up case, the killer had us seeing what he wanted us to see. In this case the killer is not that smart, he was just lucky. Penelope provided a kind of smoke screen, or at least a distraction,”

  We had come to a bridge on the long, strangely desolate Main Street, where ancient, cast iron streetlamps with elaborate curls and twists stood in strange silhouette against their own, dim, limpid light. We paused a moment, waiting for a gap in the sporadic traffic, and crossed to the far side, where the restaurant stood, spilling warm amber light onto the sidewalk.

  We pushed inside into the warm. The lights were low, and the dark wood of the walls and the bar gave the place a certain gloom. A young waitress met us with a bright smile and showed us to our table near where a fire was burning in a grate. We sat and I looked around. We needn’t have booked. The place was largely empty, and, beside a murmur of conversation and some very quiet country music, it was almost silent.

  We took the menus she offered us, Dehan ordered a beer and I asked for a Martini, dry. I smiled and added, “It’s not the same as a dry Martini, or a dry martini with a small ‘M’. It’s two parts gin to one part Martini, over two large rocks, with an olive in it.”