Madman on a Drum

by David Housewright

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she chanted as she wrapped her arms around me. “He made me call you, he made me. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I was glad she was apologizing to me. It meant I didn’t have to apologize to her.

  Jeannie was standing directly behind her. She was a tall woman and attractive, with freckles the same color as her hair. When she was a kid, everyone told her how cute the freckles were and she liked to hear it; not so much now that she was passing for an adult. She flashed a two-second smile at me.

  “There you are, McKenzie,” she said. “I thought we’d have to send the dogs out after you.”

  I told her that would have been nice, especially if one of the dogs had been carrying a keg of brandy around his neck.

  “I couldn’t help it, McKenzie,” Joley said. “You have to believe me.”

  I brushed the hair out of her eyes; they were tearless, bright, and clear. “Of course I believe you,” I said. With a voice like hers, how could I not? I led her back to the chair.

  “I don’t know how he got into the house,” Joley said. “I turned around and there he was. At first I thought he was a thief. Then I thought he might be a client who somehow discovered my true identity. He touched me, McKenzie. He did things with his hands. I was so frightened. Then he pushed me into a chair and said, ‘Maybe later.’ ”

  “Did you recognize his voice?” Jeannie asked.

  “No.”

  “Could it have been one of your customers?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t really be sure. He didn’t speak much. He said, ‘Maybe later,’ and then he told me to call McKenzie. He said I was to call him and tell him to come over to the house—that was about all.” Joley looked into my eyes. “He didn’t say anything about you or why he wanted you. After I called, he waited by the door. When you drove up, he went outside and started shooting. That’s the last I saw of him.”

  “Did you search the house?” I said.

  Jeannie grimaced as if I had insulted her, then let it go. “Tell me about the shooter,” she said.

  “He was dressed like the men who kidnapped Bobby Dunston’s daughter,” I said. “He was dressed like the man who killed Scottie Thomforde.”

  “He must really hate you.”

  “It worked in my favor. If he hated me just a little less, he might have waited until I rang the doorbell. I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

  “You didn’t recognize him, Ms. Waddell?” Jeannie said. “You didn’t recognize his voice?”

  “No.”

  A question came from behind us. “Do you know Thomas Thomforde?” We spun toward it. Harry was standing just inside the doorway. He held his ID in front of him like a shield.

  Jeannie shouted at her uniforms. “Can I get someone to secure the goddamned door? It’s a crime scene, for chrissake.”

  Harry smiled at her. “Good afternoon, Detective Shipman,” he said.

  Jeannie smiled back. “Good afternoon, Special Agent Wilson. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “There is an excellent chance that the case you are currently working is connected to a federal kidnapping case that I am working. I would be grateful, Detective Shipman, if you allowed me to sit in on your interview, perhaps share any evidence you might have uncovered.”

  “May I ask who called you?”

  “I did,” I said.

  Jeannie gave me a look that could have melted asphalt. “Certainly, if McKenzie says it’s all right, I’ll be happy to cooperate with the FBI,” she said, although the tone of her voice suggested otherwise.

  “You’re most kind, Detective Shipman,” Harry said.

  “Think nothing of it, Special Agent Wilson.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Ahh.”

  “What’s going on?” Joley said.

  “Mating dance,” I said. Both Harry and Jeannie gave me a look. Forget melted asphalt. Think about what’s in a deep, dark hole beneath the asphalt.

  “Do you know Thomas Thomforde?” Harry repeated.

  “Tommy? Sure I do,” said Joley. “I knew him when we were kids. I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, though.”

  “Was he the man who terrorized you?”

  “No. Why are you asking about Tommy?”

  Harry gestured with his head, and he, Jeannie, and I moved away from Joley. “Tommy Thomforde is missing,” he told us.

  “Missing or hiding?” I said.

  “We pulled our men off him to back up McKenzie when he delivered the ransom,” Harry told Jeannie. “No one has seen him since.”

  “His mother?” I asked.

  “She says she hasn’t seen Tommy since he left for work yesterday morning. Beyond that, she’s not being very cooperative.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Jeannie said. “One son dead.”

  Harry smiled at her.

  Jeannie smiled back.

  I brushed past both of them and went to where Joley was sitting. I knelt in front of her chair and took her hands in mine. “Joley, listen to me very carefully. This is important.”

  “What?”

  “Was Scottie Thomforde really here the night before last, the night Karen Studder and I spoke to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Joley pulled her hands out of mine. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

  “He knew I was looking for him.”

  “He was in the bedroom upstairs. He was listening. I’m sorry I lied, McKenzie. I didn’t know what else to do. Scottie and I… I didn’t want you to know that we were, that we were… I was embarrassed.” Maybe she could read my mind. Maybe the expression on my face told her that my brain was screaming at the contradiction, because she added, “The person I am on the phone isn’t the person I really am.”

  Probably it was cruel; I said it anyway. “Considering what you do for a living, Joley, I doubt anyone would have cared.”

  “I thought you might have cared.”

  You can be such a jerk, my inner voice told me.

  No one spoke for a few moments, and I was working myself up to apologizing when Harry broke the silence. “Ms. Waddell, when did Scottie arrive?” he asked.

  “It was early.”

  “How early?”

  “Right after lunch. About one thirty.”

  “Did he make any phone calls?”

  “No, we spent the entire afternoon… He didn’t make any phone calls.”

  “At what time did he leave?”

  “About ten.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Waddell.”

  There was more talking to be done, mostly about the intruder who tried to pop me, and Jean Shipman did most of it. Afterward, Harry and I went outside and walked slowly to his car.

  “Where’s Honsa?” I asked.

  “It’s my case now,” Harry said. “He does his thing, the NOC stuff. This is my thing. Listen, McKenzie. We know that Thomforde made three phone calls to Bobby Dunston’s home. The last one was at six-oh-five, and he made the call while on the move.”

  “Which means Joley was lying,” I said.

  “Unless it was someone else on the phone.”

  “No.”

  “It could have been Tommy. The voice was disguised.”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you explain the discrepancies?”

  “I told you, Joley is lying. Think about it. If she was telling the truth, then logic would suggest that the moment Karen and I left her house she would have hurried upstairs to tell Scottie that we were looking for him. Scottie would have immediately contacted the halfway house and reported in. He didn’t. Instead, Scottie arrived at the halfway house at least two hours later. Is that logical?”

  “It is if he figured he was already screwed so he might as well get in one more good one before he was violated.”

  “How ’bout this: Mrs. Thomforde tells Scottie that Karen and I are looking for him. To protect himself, Scottie comes over here and convinces Joley to alibi him for the enti
re day.”

  “Why would she still be sticking to the story? Scottie’s dead.”

  “Two possibilities,” I said. “One, she’s frightened by the man who put a gun to her head and told her to call me. Two, she’s in on it.”

  “Three,” said Harry. “She’s not in on it, but having lied for Scottie the first time, she’s now afraid that if she tells the truth she’ll be implicated.”

  “Victoria Dunston said that the T-Man spoke to someone on the phone. Someone he called ‘babe.’ ”

  “Do you think Joley Waddell is the babe?” Harry said.

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Still, he could have been speaking to a man. Babe Ruth. Babe Winkelman. Babe the Blue Ox.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “We’ll pull Joley’s phone records and canvass the neighborhood, see if we can find a witness who saw Scottie Thomforde. It doesn’t make sense, though. Kidnapper has a million untraceable, why hang around to kill you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why risk revealing himself by trying to kill you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If he wanted both the money and you dead, why not take you off the board at the ransom drop?”

  “You keep asking the same question,” I said.

  “Whoever the second kidnapper is, this isn’t about being afraid that you might identify him,” Harry said. “He has a grudge. A big one. Big enough that taking a million off you won’t satisfy. Tell me, McKenzie. Who doesn’t like you?”

  “You want a list?”

  Harry took a notebook and a pen out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Seriously?” I said.

  He opened the passenger door of his car. “Sit. Write.”

  I sat, I wrote, jotting down names as they came to me, names of people who might want to kill me. It took nearly an hour. I was distressed by the length of the list and depressed by its quality. They were punks, all punks, even my upper-middle-class enemies. No one smart or audacious enough for a caper like this.

  I gave the list to Harry. He said, “Maybe you should lie low for a few day till we can sort all this out.”

  “I could do that,” I said. At the same time, I was staring across the street at nothing in par tic u lar, contemplating my next move. Harry hit me hard on the shoulder with the back of his hand.

  “Go home,” he said. “Lock the doors. Stay away from the windows.”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t go home; I doubted Harry believed that I would. Instead, I drove to the Thomforde residence. On the way, I took the time to call Nina on her cell phone. She was at Rickie’s. I told her that I was coming over and she shouldn’t leave until I arrived, and she said okay. I didn’t tell her that she might be in danger. I figured it was one of those conversations best had in person.

  Mrs. Thomforde answered the door when I knocked. I was a bit surprised when she hugged me and asked me to come inside.

  “Some of my friends are coming over in a few minutes,” she said. “I have to go to the funeral parlor to start making arrangements. The police said they would release Scottie’s body in a couple of days.”

  “I am so, so sorry,” I told her.

  She thanked me for my concern and offered coffee, which I accepted. I watched as she poured. Mrs. Thomforde was old-school, like my father. Time and experience had draped a cloak about her shoulders, the same cloak worn by many of her generation. She wore it to keep the hurt to herself, so as not to burden others with it. Any tears she had for her youngest son were shed in private. At the same time, there was a great tenderness to go with the reserve. I saw it in her eyes when I mentioned Scottie’s name.

  “I wish,” she said, stopped, started again. “I think when you look back on your life, you’ll find that there are one or two moments that change everything, that set you down a path that you just can’t get off of. You don’t recognize these moments at the time they take place. Sometimes you won’t even know that they took place at all until years and years later. Like with Scottie. I should never have bought him that drum kit. If he hadn’t played the drums, he would have kept playing hockey and baseball with you. He wouldn’t have met Dale Fulbright. He wouldn’t have gone to prison. He wouldn’t have… I don’t want to believe it, McKenzie. I know it’s true what they say about Scottie. That poor little girl and Bobby Dunston—I never liked him, but for this to happen, for Scottie to be involved. I just don’t want to believe it.”

  “I don’t want to believe it, either.”

  “People keep asking questions. The police. The FBI. Who were Scottie’s friends? What did he do? Where did he go? I don’t know the answers, McKenzie. I don’t know anything. He wasn’t staying with me. He was at the damn halfway house. They should be asking questions over there. The person who runs it. Roger something…”

  “Roger Colfax?”

  “Even he was here asking questions about where Scottie went and who he knew. If he doesn’t know the answers, how am I supposed to? If Scottie had been staying here, if he had been with me, maybe, maybe… I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Thomforde didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared into her coffee mug. Finally I spoke. “They can’t find Tommy.” I said “they,” not “we”—I wanted to maintain the illusion that I was merely a family friend offering my condolences. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think maybe Tommy was involved in the kidnapping?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Mrs. Thomforde, when we were at the Silver Bucket the other day, Karen Studder said that Scottie went out to a bar the Saturday night he was supposed to be at your house. You said it wasn’t true. It was true, though, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know who he went with?”

  “Tommy,” she said. “He went with Tommy. I thought it would be all right, two brothers having a beer together. I thought Tommy would take care of him. I thought…”

  “That night at the Silver Bucket, right after Karen and I left, you made a call on your cell phone.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Who did you call?”

  “Tommy. Why?”

  I didn’t say. Mrs. Thomforde closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she said, “You never know when those moments will sneak up on you, McKenzie. You never know when a decision will change your life.”

  I called Harry as soon as I left Mrs. Thomforde and repeated what she had told me. Turned out she had already confessed pretty much the same thing to him earlier. Still, he thanked me for the information. Then he told me to go home. “You’re interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation,” he said.

  Like I haven’t heard that before.

  16

  I found Nina in her office at Rickie’s, sitting behind her desk, her elbow planted on the blotter, her chin resting in her hand, a pair of readers perched on her nose as she tapped a pen on top of the intimidating sheaf of papers in front of her. She looked up when I entered, grinned, dropped the pen, and slid the glasses off and into her top desk drawer so deftly that only a semiprofessional investigator might have noticed it.

  Nina came around the desk and gave me a soft, moist kiss. “Hey,” she said. “What’s the surprise?”

  “Surprise?”

  “You said not to leave until you arrived.” Nina raised and lowered her eyebrows Groucho Marx style. “You have something in mind, big boy?”

  “Yeah, about that. I was thinking that you’re due for a nice vacation. You’ve been working much too hard lately.”

  “Hmmm.” Nina raised her eyebrows again and smiled brightly. “You know, Erica is going off on her band trip tomorrow. Toronto. Five days.”

  “You should go with, listen to her play.”

  Nina’s smile was replaced by a frown. “Are we talking about the same thing?” she said.

  I asked her to sit down. She sat. I explained what had happened at
Joley’s house. I told her that the FBI now believed that Victoria’s kidnapping and the two subsequent attempts on my life might have been perpetrated by someone who was trying to settle a grudge against me. She wondered what that had to do with her.

  “If the FBI is right—and I’m not convinced they are—this person is using people I care about to get to me. First Victoria Dunston, then Joley Waddell. I’m afraid next he’ll go after you and Erica.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because I love you.”

  Nina gave it half a dozen beats before she replied. “You can be such a jerk, McKenzie.”

  “What did I say?”

  “I love you.”

  “Nina—”

  “You can’t say that while we’re walking around a lake or holding hands in front of a fireplace or standing on the damn street corner. No, I have to be in danger before I hear it.”

  “I’ve said I love you before.”

  “When?”

  “Dozens of times.”

  “Name one.”

  “It’s not like I keep track.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Nina, you’re missing the point.”

  “The point is that one of your crusades has gotten you into trouble and now you’re bringing it into my place. I don’t want you to do that. You need to keep your business out of my place.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “McKenzie, I am not going into hiding just because you’re in trouble. No way. If I did that, I’d spend the rest of my life on the lam—is that what you call it, on the lam?—because let’s face it, you’re always in trouble. If we were talking about Erica, that’d be different. Fortunately. Erica is leaving the country tomorrow at about ten o’clock with a dozen chaperones and about a hundred of her closest friends, so she’ll be all right. As for me, I have a business to run, and since we are fast approaching the dinner hour, I suggest you get out of here and let me run it.”

  The conversation had not gone the way I had expected. I decided to try again. I reached across the desk and took both of Nina’s hands in mine. I squeezed them gently.