The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

Steele seemed to want to say something else, but he just turned and pulled the front door open. A wash of cold air swept into the church.

  Louis stood up. “Six years,” he said, loudly.

  Steele stopped again and turned back to Louis. “Pardon me?”

  “Six years,” Louis said. “Six years and three months.”

  Steele stared at him, no emotion on his face.

  “You stole those years from me,” Louis said. “You stole my career from me. And you didn’t even do it because you thought I was a dirty cop or had screwed up so bad I wasn’t redeemable.”

  Louis drew a hard breath. “You did it because you lost control of a case and cops got killed and you needed someone to blame.”

  Steele was silent for a moment, then said, “If that’s how you feel, why did you agree to work on my team?”

  Louis reached into his pocket, pulled out his badge and held it up. “Because this is more important to me than you are.”

  Silence. Louis waited, his heart and head pounding.

  Steele gave him a tight nod. “Good,” he said. “Make sure you keep it that way. Goodnight, Louis.”

  It wasn’t much of a dinner. Fried pickles and a cheeseburger at Dagwood’s. And two shots of brandy to wash it down. Louis had switched to beer finally, sitting at the far end of the bar. Cops did that, sat in the rear, their backs to the wall so they could see trouble coming. But he didn’t see much trouble here.

  There was a pudgy man sitting four stools away, probably an auto mechanic, given the man’s nicked-up, oil-stained hands. He was nursing his beer and kept looking at his watch, like he had to be somewhere. Or not be somewhere. A beefy guy was chalking his pool cue, hustling a drunk in an off-the-rack suit but expensive wing-tips. A dime-store lawyer, maybe, looking for a win, any kind of win.

  Louis closed his eyes.

  Who does this kind of shit? Who profiles strangers in a bar? You got nothing better to waste your brain cells on, Kincaid?

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  Louis looked up. The bartender stood in front of him. Big hair, big curves, and big eyes the color of good brandy.

  “Have a bad day?” she asked.

  “Who in here didn’t?” he asked.

  He reached into his pocket for his money but got his badge wallet instead. He fumbled it and it fell to the floor. When he moved off the barstool to get it, he stumbled.

  “You all right?” the bartender asked.

  Louis stuck the badge in his jacket pocket and steadied himself on the bar. “Yeah. I’m calling it a night.”

  “You want a cab?”

  “I’m walking, thanks. Goodnight.”

  The night was cold, the wind-rustled trees still shaking off water from the day-long rain. He dug his hands into his pockets and walked as fast as he dared given his state. His head was pounding, and he was angry at himself for drinking too much. Worse, he was embarrassed, an emotion he didn’t feel very often. He had dropped his badge in a bar and he dropped it because he was drunk. The bartender didn’t see what it was, but it didn’t matter. It was sloppy. And he couldn’t help think that there was something more sinister behind the drop, like it was a Freudian slip of some kind.

  By the time he reached his house, he was shivering. He quietly let himself in and took a look into the parlor, where Nina was usually splayed out watching MTV. There she was, asleep on the sofa, with Issy curled on her stomach.

  He started toward the cat, intending to take her upstairs, but then Issy looked up, her gold eyes scornful.

  Well, what did he expect? Even cats found someone else to sleep with when they were ignored.

  He made his way up the stairs, unlocked his door and went in. The apartment was dark except for one light on in the bedroom, and he trudged toward it, shucking off his wet windbreaker to the floor.

  At the door, he stopped cold. For one beer-fueled moment, he couldn’t fathom what he was seeing—a sheet-wrapped body on his bed. His hand went automatically to the holster at his belt.

  But then the body moved and one arm fell free from the sheet. Louis let out a long breath and walked slowly toward his bed. For a second, all he could do was stand and stare because there, asleep on his bed, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  Joe was wearing one of his white T-shirts, and her face was partially covered by her light brown hair. He sat down on the edge of the bed, knowing it wouldn’t wake her because nothing ever did. In all the nights they had slept together, he had learned that while he would jump awake at the scrap of a branch on the window she would sleep through the howl of the worst winter wind.

  He sat still, just staring down at her.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Well, it’s about time,” she whispered. “I’ve been waiting here for hours.”

  “And now you’ll have to leave,” he said.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “I’m not allowed to have girls in the room after eleven.”

  Joe drew to a sitting position, raking back her hair with long fingers. “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.”

  His eyes dipped to her breasts. “Yes, you are,” he said. He pulled her close, crushing her against him, so close he could feel every rib in her body. It was a long time before she finally pushed gently away.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “You sounded like you needed me. I have two days.”

  “I’m so glad you came,” he whispered.

  She kissed his cheek, then his lips, and finally drew back so she could see his face.

  “How’d you get past Nina?” he asked.

  She frowned then smiled. “Ah, your gatekeeper. I told her we’re working together. She didn’t believe me. I had to show her my badge.”

  He cupped her face and kissed her again, a deep kiss that he hoped didn’t feel desperate. When he felt her melt into him, he slipped his hands under the T-shirt, hoping his hands weren’t too cold against her skin, hoping he hadn’t had too much to drink.

  It didn’t matter. Joe took charge, and he let her. She unhooked his holster and set the Glock on the dresser next to his badge wallet. She slowly undressed him, and then led him down into the bed. The sheets were cold. Her mouth was so very warm. After they made love, he lay there, watching the shadows move across the ceiling, listening to Joe’s even breathing. He was exhausted and emptied of every bad thought, image and memory. The mirrored closet was gone. Sammy was gone. For the moment, at least, for the moment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Abell was tolling somewhere, but Louis couldn’t see a church though he knew Grand Rapids had more than its share of them. He counted nine chimes and, on the tenth, he saw Joe emerge from the Biggby coffee shop carrying two take-out cups.

  “Sugar?” he asked, taking one cup.

  “Four, already stirred in.”

  He smiled as he popped off the lid. Partly, it came from the lingering memory of making love last night. But mostly, it was because she remembered how he liked his coffee. As he sipped it, he stole a glance at her, specifically at her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, still damp from her morning shower.

  It amazed him how quickly she could get dressed. When he told her this morning that he needed to go to Grand Rapids and retrace the steps of the PI Buchman had hired to dog Anthony, she had jumped out of bed. Fifteen minutes later, she was showered, dressed, and ready to go.

  It was sunny but no more than forty degrees. Joe was wearing black jeans and her old, black leather jacket, open to a man’s tuxedo shirt. She took a drink of her coffee then slipped on sunglasses. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “I want to retrace the PI’s steps.” Louis opened the thin neon-green file Bushman had given him.

  “Is that all there is?” Joe asked.

  Louis nodded. “Check out how he signs off his daily reports every night.”

  Joe glanced down and then looked back at Louis. “’End of report. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar?’”

  “Johnny Dollar was a PI fro
m the old radio days,” Louis said. “That’s how he signed off every program. He was famous for cheating his clients on the expense accounts.”

  “I doubt Bushman got the joke,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, but his PI actually did a pretty good job. His time logs are to the minute, he notes exact locations, and even describes the weather. But his surveillance only lasted for one week, from 6 a.m. Thursday, February 7 through midnight, Wednesday February 13.”

  “That was two months ago,” Joe said. “What good is this to you now?

  “Maybe nothing, but I have a hunch about something. According to the PI’s report, Anthony left his house every morning at 8:45 to go the cathedral, the time never varying by more than a minute. Every day at noon, his lunch was delivered from Luigi’s, and his black Lincoln Town Car never left the church parking lot all day. Until he left to go home, always at six-thirty on the dot. And every night, for six nights, the PI recorded: ‘Second story lights out at the Prince residence at eleven thirty. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.’”

  “Okay, you have a tight pattern,” Joe said.

  “He’s obsessive compulsive.”

  “What was his timeline on the night his father was murdered?”

  “Anthony said he left the church at 7:30 after the evening service to go to dinner.” Louis pointed across the street to the Chop House. “I talked to the owner, who told me he comes in every Wednesday night, orders the same dinner and gin martinis and leaves at the same time. The owner verified his arrival and I saw the time stamp when he paid his bill. He left here at 10:15 p.m. and says he went home.”

  “Can anyone verify he went home?”

  “His wife. But wives can lie. Plus, she takes a medication that knocks her out.”

  “So, what are you thinking here?”

  “I think he killed his father right after the service and locked up that room, came here for dinner then went home. I think he was consumed with guilt and with his wife passed out on sleeping pills he left the house in the middle of the night to go back and reposition the body in a gesture of respect or something.”

  Joe took a drink of coffee as she considered this. “Okay, I get it now why we’re here. Because Anthony is such a creature of habit, you’re looking for some deviation in the PI report for that Wednesday two months from what Anthony did last week. If he did something different two months ago, maybe he did something different the night his father was killed. And if you can find it, you can break his alibi.”

  “Long shot, but yeah, that’s what I’m hoping.”

  Joe nodded to the green file. “Can I take a look?”

  While Joe read the PI’s file, Louis sipped his coffee, watching her. It hit him in that moment that she had jumped out of bed so fast this morning because the cop in her, the cop who had worked her way up in the Miami PD homicide squad, was hungry for meat. She had a sheriff’s badge, and she talked about how she loved her life, her dog, her cabin up in the woods. But she was here, and a part of him wondered if it wasn’t because of more than just him. She missed the rush of a homicide investigation.

  “Louis, look at this,” she said, holding out the file. “The PI says that on Wednesday night two months, Anthony left the restaurant at 10:02 but he didn’t get home until midnight.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s what got me thinking about this whole variation in the routine thing. Two months ago, he varied from his routine on one night. What did he do for those two hours?”

  She looked up at the street. “According to this report, he went for a walk.”

  Louis remembered what the Chop House waiter had told him, that on the night Anthony left, he had stood outside in the cold rain for a while. The waiter had assumed Anthony had then gone to his car. What if he had walked somewhere, just as he had on that Wednesday night two months ago?

  Louis looked up and down Monroe Avenue, then tossed his coffee cup in the trash. “Let’s see what’s around some of these corners.”

  Joe read from the report as they walked. The PI had recorded every move Anthony made, following him from the church at 7:30 until he pulled into the parking lot of the Chop House at 7:42. He exited the restaurant from the front door at 10:02, but did not return to his car. Instead, he walked north on Monroe Street, then turned west onto Lyon Street.

  Lyon was a long block of plain gray structures. On their left was a granite building with a blue awning entrance. On the right was a squat building with CIVIC AUDITORIUM carved into the façade and a four-story parking garage.

  Joe stopped suddenly. She looked up, pushing her sunglasses up on her head.

  “What’s wrong?” Louis asked.

  “This is where Anthony disappeared,” Joe said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The PI says he lost sight of Anthony here on this corner, Louis,” she said. “All he records is ‘Subject gone. Temperature now thirty-one, weather deteriorating. No vehicular traffic. Observed party of ten departing from Amway’.”

  “Amway? The cleaning stuff people?”

  Joe didn’t answer, walking back toward the blue awning. She pointed to a brass plaque near a double door. “They also own hotels,” she said. “This is the back entrance of the Amway Grand Plaza.”

  Louis looked down the block. It dead-ended into a concrete plaza with five flagpoles. Beyond that, the Grand River glimmered gray-green, in the sun.

  “Anthony had to have gone into the hotel,” he said.

  “Gee, what would a man do in a hotel for two hours before he went home to the wife who’s zonked out on pills?” Joe said with a smile.

  “Cherchez la femme,” Louis said.

  They went in, finding their way to the lobby. It was a marble and mahogany-paneled two-story palace with a soaring ceiling and a Versailles-worthy chandelier. The lobby was quiet on this Sunday morning—an old lady in a wing chair near the fountain reading The New Yorker and a young couple in parkas, just coming through the front doors, dragging their wheeled suitcases.

  Louis beat the couple to the front desk. The young clerk’s smiled faded when Louis showed his badge and explained why he was there.

  “I don’t think I’m allowed to divulge our guests’ names,” the clerk said.

  “Actually, it’s up to your discretion. But you’d be doing us a big favor,” Louis said. “Why don’t you call your boss?”

  The clerk called a manager who ushered the young man aside and gave Louis a tight smile. “Who is it you’re asking about, detective?” he asked.

  “Anthony Prince.”

  The manager’s fingers froze over his computer keyboard. “Oh, I can assure you he’s never been a guest here.”

  “Can you check anyway?” Louis asked.

  The manager pecked at the keyboard, then smiled with satisfaction. “Anthony Prince was not a guest at our hotel on that night two months ago or on any other night.”

  Damn. But that didn’t mean Anthony didn’t meet a woman who was already registered here.

  “I’d like to talk to your night desk employees,” Louis said. “Can you give me some names?”

  The manager looked like he had bad gas pains. “This is about the elder Reverend Prince, isn’t it? I saw it on the news.”

  Louis couldn’t answer the man’s question, but he could ask one. “Did you know Jonas Prince?”

  “Not personally, but I know of him and his son,” the manager said. “If either of them was ever a guest of this hotel, I would know it. Why, we were just talking about the crime yesterday in the lunch room and no one said a word about ever meeting either of them.”

  Louis handed the manager his card. “I’d like you to talk to your night shift anyway. Discreetly. Let me know if you learn anything different.”

  “I will, officer.”

  Louis walked back to Joe. She was sitting in a wing chair and had the neon-green file open on her lap, flipping through the photographs the PI had taken.

  “He said Anthony was never registered here,” Louis said.

  “You be
lieve him?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah. But Anthony could have met someone here.”

  Joe held out a photo. “Take a close look at this photo the PI took,” Joe said.

  Louis took the picture. It was fuzzy, taken about a half-block away with a night-vision camera, but clear enough to show the back entrance of the hotel. It showed a crowd of people in formal wear, clustered under the blue awning waiting to get into taxis and limos in line at the curb.

  “That has to be the party the PI mentioned leaving the hotel,” Joe said. “The PI lost Anthony at the back entrance, in that crowd. I think he got into one of those cabs.”

  “Let’s get back to the car,” Louis said.

  They hurried back to the Explorer. Joe went to get more coffee while Louis called Camille. It wasn’t possible to make out the names on the taxis in the PI’s photos, so he gave Camille the time and date stamped on the PI’s photo and asked her to check out any cab that picked up a single male fare at the back entrance of the Amway Grand Plaza.

  By the time Joe returned to the Explorer with two more coffees, Camille had reported back.

  “Great Lakes Taxi picked up one man at 10:16 p.m. at the back hotel entrance.”

  “Where did he drop him off?” Joe asked.

  “The corner of Wealthy Street and College Avenue.”

  Wealthy Street . . . it was the same road that wound through the neighborhood around Jonas Prince’s lakefront cottage. But as they drove to the corner of Wealthy and College Avenue, Louis could see that the western end of Wealthy was very modest in contrast. It was a neighborhood of old rental apartments and small wood-frame bungalows.

  He pulled to a stop at the corner where the taxi driver had said he left Anthony. Nothing remarkable. Just three corner-lot homes and an old, two-story red brick apartment building.

  “I still think he was seeing a mistress,” Louis said. “But without an address we’ll have to canvass the whole neighborhood.”

  During the drive over, Joe had been silent, turning her attention to the Prince case file. She looked up and pointed to the red brick building. “He went in there, apartment 2-B.”

  “How do you know?”