“Yes.” There was a lengthy pause, and I wondered for a moment if our call had been disconnected, or if she was just thinking.
“So, if you had to guess,” she finally said, “which one of the three in the bird murders do you think was the intended victim?”
“If you forced me, I’d say Robin Callahan because she’s the best known of the three, and she pissed a lot of people off.”
“That’s what I think,” she said, then there was another pause. “Do you mind if I call you back with any other questions I might have?”
“Of course not,” I said, and we said our good-byes.
I called Old Devils. Emily answered.
“You still feel sick?”
“Not terrible, but not great.”
“Stay home. It’s fine here.”
I was about to end the call but decided that while I had Emily on the line I could ask her some questions.
“Can I ask you some names and you can tell me if you’ve heard of them?” I said.
“Uh, sure,” she said.
“Ethan Byrd.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Haven’t heard of him.”
“Jay Bradshaw.”
“No.”
“Robin Callahan.”
“Yeah, of course. She was that insane newscaster who got murdered. I’m sure she’ll be the subject of an eventual true crime bestseller.”
“Why do you say she was insane?”
“I don’t know. I guess I heard it. She wrote the book about adultery, right?”
“Right,” I said.
After ending the call, I thought some more about Robin Callahan being the intended victim of the three bird murders. And even if there hadn’t been an obvious intended victim, there must have been someone that Charlie thought of first. He knew he wanted to emulate the A.B.C. killings, and he knew he wasn’t going to use the alphabet. If he decided that he wanted to kill Robin Callahan, then the way to cover it would be to find two more victims with names that suggested a bird. And Robin Callahan was a natural victim in the sense that she’d upset people. She advocated for adultery, and she’d wrecked at least two marriages.
In the afternoon I slept on the sofa. I dreamed I was being chased again, like I always did. Even when I was young, I would have these dreams in which I suddenly found out that my parents, my friends, my teachers were all monsters, and that I needed to run from them. In the worst dreams I found myself powerless to move, my legs heavy, my feet stuck to the earth. That afternoon, in my dream, the only person I wasn’t running from was Gwen Mulvey. She was at my side, and together we were trying to escape the murderous horde. When I woke up, I ran to the bathroom thinking I might be sick, but I wasn’t.
I dressed for dinner, tucking a blue checked shirt into a pair of dark corduroys, then putting on my favorite sweater, a cashmere roll-neck in black, the last gift I’d received from Claire, on the Christmas before she died. I stood in front of a floor-length mirror and, in my mind, I asked Claire how I looked. You look fine, she said. You always look fine. I imagined her running her fingers through my short gray hair.
What should I do? I asked her. About these murders?
It’s your mess, she said. You need to fix it.
It was something she used to say, although when she said it, she’d always be referring to herself. It was what she said after confessing to me that she’d gotten involved with drugs again. I told her I could help, and she said, Ugh, no. It’s my fucking mess and I need to fix it myself. I used to think this trait of hers—the way she owned her failings—was a good thing, but now I’m not so sure. Her life was messy, but the most important thing for her was to avoid confrontation, to not upset people, to take on all the blame herself. Hurting herself was fine, but she would go out of her way to not hurt anyone else.
It was her prime directive, the need to avoid collisions. To avoid letting other people take care of her.
It’s my fucking mess.
But she was wrong.
CHAPTER 24
I left the house without checking the weather and found that the snow had picked up. It was now coming down in thick clumps, sticking to trees and bushes, but melting on the sidewalks and roads.
Before heading to Brian’s house in the South End, I went to a wine shop on Charles Street and bought a bottle of petite sirah. I was halfway out the store when I turned around. I bought a bottle of Zwack, a Hungarian herbal liqueur that I liked. Then I walked to Old Devils, where Brandon and Emily would be getting ready to close up for the night. Before entering the store, I stood outside in the snow for a moment, peering through the window into the warm glow of the bookstore’s interior. Brandon was talking to a customer, and even though I couldn’t hear the specific words, I could hear the deep boom of his voice all the way out on the street. Emily was in the background moving back and forth behind the checkout desk. Friday nights and Saturdays during the day were the times when the three of us—the Old Devils Bookstore employees—were most likely to all be working, and it felt strange to be outside looking in. The world kept going, I guess.
I pushed through the door and greeted Brandon by offering him the bottle of Zwack.
“What?” he said, his voice high, dragging out the word.
“Peace offering,” I said. “I feel bad I’ve been so absent lately. You guys have been picking up the slack.”
“Yeah, we have,” he said and went back to show Emily.
I said hello to the customer, a young woman I recognized as a local mystery author who had given a reading at our store the previous year. Her name had suddenly escaped me.
“How’re things?” she said. She had large dark eyes close together in a narrow face. The fact that she parted her straight black hair in the middle made her look like someone Edward Gorey might have drawn.
“Things are fine,” I said. “What’s new with you?”
Before she could answer, Brandon had pulled Emily out from the back offices and was calling me over. “You, too, Jane,” he said. Her full name suddenly came to me: Jane Prendergast. She had written a mystery novel called The Owl Shall Stoop. We walked over to where Brandon was pouring out shots into the small water glasses we kept in the back.
“Come in to browse some books, and end up getting a shot,” I said to Jane.
“She’s part of the family,” Brandon said, and Emily, now holding her drink, flushed a deep red. Brandon looked from her to me, and said, “Oh.”
Emily said, “Jane and I are seeing each other.”
I said, “That explains why you’re always putting Jane’s books on the front table.” And now Jane looked embarrassed, too, and I apologized, and said that I was just kidding. The four of us drank. “To Old Devils,” I said.
Emily shuddered and asked me what Zwack was. I said I didn’t really know but that it seemed appropriate for the weather, like something a St. Bernard would bring you if you were trapped by an avalanche. I stayed a little longer but turned down a second drink. It was nearing seven, our closing time, and also the time that I was supposed to be in the South End. I suddenly didn’t want to go. It felt safe in the store, and I just didn’t know what was going to happen at Brian and Tess’s house. I texted Tess and told her I’d be there closer to seven thirty, and then I helped Brandon and Emily close up. Jane stuck around, waiting for Emily to get off her shift.
By the time I was walking across Boston Common toward the South End, the temperature had dropped some more, and snow was beginning to stick to the paved pathways. I passed the frog pond, lit up and full of skaters, then walked down Tremont Street, over the Pike, and into the South End. Despite the weather, it was a Friday night and people were out in force, filling the restaurants and bars. The Murrays lived in a bow-fronted brick town house on a residential street. Their front door was painted a dark blue. I pushed the doorbell and heard chimed notes from inside.
“Thank you, Mal,” Tess said, as I handed her the bottle of wine, wishing I’d brought them something more interesti
ng. “Come in, get warm. Brian’s upstairs making drinks.”
I walked up the narrow stairway, the walls adorned with framed covers from the Ellis Fitzgerald series. At the top of the stairs I turned and entered the large second-floor living room. Brian was standing and staring into the fireplace, where it looked as though a fire had just been lit. “Hey, Brian,” I said.
He turned. He was holding a glass of whiskey with his good hand. “What can I get you?” he said, and I told him I’d have whatever he was having. From a waist-high cabinet he poured whiskey from a cut-glass decanter into a lowball glass, added a small cube of ice from a bucket, and brought it over to me. On the coffee table between two sofas was a wooden block with cheese and crackers on it. We sat down, and he put down his drink in order to lean over to get himself a cracker.
“How’s the arm?” I said.
“If you live as long as me, it turns out you just get used to having two arms. It’s not so easy to lose one of them. Even temporarily.”
“Tess helps.”
“Well, yes, she does help, but she won’t let me forget that fact. No, I’m kidding. It’s nice to have her here. Tell me about the store. What’s selling?”
We talked shop for a while, then Tess came up the stairs and perched on the edge of the sofa that Brian sat on. She wore an apron and her face was red and shiny as though she’d been peering into cooking pots. The Murrays’ dog, a speckled hound called Humphrey, had followed Tess into the room, and after briefly sniffing at my outstretched hand, began nosing toward the cheese board.
“Humphrey,” Brian and Tess said at the same time, and he sat back on his haunches, his tail slapping the floor.
“What’s for dinner?” I said, and I studied the two of them as she replied. Tess’s eyes were bright, as though she was excited. Brian watched her the way he might watch a bartender, with slight disinterest, until, of course, you needed another drink.
“Have one more drink, the two of you, then come downstairs for dinner,” Tess said before she left. She squeezed my shoulder as she passed me on the way to the stairs, then slapped her thigh and Humphrey followed her out the door.
“I’ll get it,” I said and took Brian’s empty glass and mine to the liquor cabinet. I poured two fingers of scotch in his glass and a little less in mine. I added ice to each of our drinks then brought them back.
“I’ll break out the good stuff later,” Brian said. “I have a Talisker twenty-five-year-old around here somewhere.”
“Don’t waste it on me,” I said. “This tastes fine.”
“Well, we’re drinking midweek scotch and unless I’m mistaken, today is Friday, at least that’s what Tess said. I’ll break out something better later.”
“You ever thought of writing a book about drinking?” I said.
“My agent’s mentioned it to me a few times. Not because he thinks anyone’ll buy it, but because he thinks at least I might profit a little from the time I waste drinking the stuff.”
“Before I forget,” I said. “I just reread The Sticking Place.”
“What made you do that?” he said, but I could tell from his face that he was pleased.
“I was going through all my copies of your books, and I just cracked it open and began reading it. Didn’t stop until I finished.”
“Yeah, I think in retrospect that Ellis should have killed more people. I loved writing that book. You know, I still have readers who send me letters telling me that they pretend that book doesn’t exist. And I get letters telling me it’s the only good thing I ever wrote.”
“Well, can’t please everyone all the time.”
“That’s the truth. I remember when I wrote Sticking Place I showed it to my agent first. My agent back then. You remember Bob Drachman? He told me he couldn’t put it down, but that they’d never publish it. Ellis wasn’t a coldhearted killer, he said. You’ll lose half your readers. I told him I might lose half, but I’d get twice as many back. He asked for a second draft, one that wasn’t so brutal, so, of course, I added another murder.”
“Which one?” I said.
“I can’t remember. No, I do. I think it’s the guy she locks in the freezer and leaves there. Yeah, that was the one, because Bob admitted he liked that scene when he read the final book. Anyway, I told him to submit the manuscript or I’d look for another agent, and so he sent it in. They published it, and, guess what, the world kept turning.”
“And you probably doubled your readers.”
“I don’t know about that, but I didn’t lose many. And I picked up an Edgar, so there was that.”
“It’s a good book.”
“Thanks for that, Mal,” he said.
“You never wanted to write another one in the same vein? Another Ellis revenge book?”
“Nah, not really. Thing is, you only need to do it once, and then the reader knows that Ellis has this side to her. But if every time she lost someone she loved, she went on some kind of killing spree, then she’d be someone else. No, it only happens once. She gets broken. She gets her revenge, and she knows she can never let that side of her take over again. I did, however, write a book without her once, did I ever tell you about that?”
He had, of course, but I told him that I didn’t think so.
“Yeah, I wrote a standalone. This was a couple of years after Sticking Place, I think. It was another revenge book but with a guy this time. South Boston cop whose wife gets raped and murdered by a bunch of Irish thugs. He tracks ’em down and takes them all out. I wrote it in about two weeks, read it over, and realized I’d basically rewritten Sticking Place. So I stuck it in my drawer and forgot about it.”
“You still have it?”
“Jesus,” he said, scratching the side of his rubbery nose. “That’s when I was living with Mary out in Newton so who knows if it survived the move. But, yeah, I don’t remember throwing it out so it’s around here somewhere.”
“You talking about Mary?” Tess said, coming into the room. She was no longer wearing the apron, and it looked as though she’d put on some makeup.
“Yeah, the good old days,” Brian said. “Dinner ready?”
“Dinner’s ready.”
We went down to the ground floor and ate by candlelight at the dining room table nestled in front of the bay window that looked out onto the street. Humphrey the dog had been given some sort of treat and was busy chewing on it from his dog bed in the corner. Tess had made braised short ribs, and between the three of us we went through three bottles of wine before she brought out dessert, a clementine tart.
“Did you make this?” I said.
“God, no. I cook, but I don’t bake. Who wants port?”
“We don’t,” Brian said, looking at me. “Let’s have some of that whiskey I was talking about earlier. The Talisker.”
“You can have that,” Tess said. “I’ll have port.”
“Can I get it for you?” I said and stood up, banging my thigh a little against the edge of the table.
“Thank you, Mal, that would be lovely. There’s port down in our cellar. Bri, tell him which bottle he should grab. And the whiskey’s upstairs, I think.”
I was given my instructions and went down into the basement first to look for the port. I’d never been down there before; it was semifinished, the walls Sheetrocked, but the floor just poured cement. Along one wall was an enormous bookcase. I went over to look at it and found that it was entirely filled with books by Brian Murray, all the various versions, including foreign editions, of his Ellis Fitzgerald series. I stood, staring at them for a moment, aware that I’d had far too much to drink at dinner. The dim light of the basement made it feel like I was in a dream. Conversation at dinner had been entertaining, Tess and Brian using me as an audience for their slightly hostile, slightly flirty back-and-forth insults. But as I swayed in front of the bookshelf, holding what looked to be a Russian paperback edition of To Play the Villain, I kept thinking back to what Brian and I had talked about over drinks, about how much he clearly enj
oyed writing his violent revenge novels. How he’d written a second one and never published it. I wanted to get back to that conversation.
The other side of the basement was filled with floor-to-ceiling wine racks. Brian had told me to look for a bottle of Taylor Fladgate Tawny Port that should be in the upper right. I pulled several bottles out before I found the right one and brought it back upstairs and into the kitchen, where Tess was piling dishes in their enormous sink.
“For you,” I said.
I was not entirely surprised when, after she took the bottle, she thanked me, then placed it on the counter and pulled me in for a hug. “So nice to have you here, Mal,” she said, “I hope you’re having fun, too.”
“Of course,” I said.
She placed a hand along my jawline and told me how sweet I was. “Go get Brian his whiskey before he sobers up. I’ll open the port.”
I went up the stairs and into the living room. All that remained of the fire was a few smoldering embers in a pile of ash. The room was still warm. I walked to the liquor cabinet, crouched down, and opened it. Inside there were about a dozen bottles, all whiskey as far as I could tell. I found the Talisker and pulled it out. Behind it was a triangular bottle of whiskey called Dimple Pinch. It was the same scotch that had been lying at the feet of Nick Pruitt. I was sure of it. The shape of the bottle was so unique—three-sided and each side dented in a little. Thin wire encased the bottle. I dug further into the cabinet and found there were two more bottles of the same scotch, each unopened. This was probably Brian’s midweek scotch, the one he put in his decanter on top of the cabinet.
I stood, still holding the Talisker, wishing I was less drunk, wishing I could figure out exactly what to do next. I heard someone enter the room, but it was only Humphrey, breathing heavily, bounding toward the cheese and crackers still on the coffee table.
CHAPTER 25
With the whiskey between us, I listened to Brian tell the story of the weekend he spent getting drunk with Charles Willeford in Miami. Brian knew I was a fan of The Burnt Orange Heresy, so he’d told me the Willeford story many times. It changed a little bit every time.
Rules for Perfect Murders Page 18