Murder in Pastel

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Murder in Pastel Page 10

by Josh Lanyon


  “No.” I hesitated, remembering Brett checking and rechecking his watch. Had he been waiting for someone?

  Observing me the sheriff said, “You sure about that?”

  “I didn’t see anyone.” Someone could have waited a few yards down behind the rocks or hid on the hillside, but Rankin could figure that much out for himself.

  “Uh huh. Then what happened?”

  “I was afraid it would take too long to get Brett free on my own. He was worried about the tide. I was too. I told him I was going for help. He—” I stopped and rubbed my chest.

  Adam bit out, “If you’re going to question him you should have a doctor present. He’s already had some kind of seizure.”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly.

  The sheriff didn’t say anything for a minute but clearly the more Adam intervened the worse it looked. “I appreciate that, Mr. MacKinnon. That’s why I’m permitting you to stay while I question Mr. Bari.”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “I’m all right, Adam,” I repeated.

  Adam folded his arms and clenched his jaw, as though physically restraining himself.

  “What were you and Mr. Hansen talking about on the beach for so long?”

  “My father. And it wasn’t for long. Maybe five minutes.”

  “Your father? What about him?”

  “Brett was curious about his disappearance. He had this theory Cosmo was murdered.”

  “What?” Adam ejaculated.

  The sheriff and deputy exchanged looks but all Rankin said was, “So you left Hansen and came running up the stairs for help and bumped into Mr. MacKinnon?”

  “Yes.”

  “MacKinnon was coming down the stairs?”

  I nodded.

  “But you, as Mr. MacKinnon says, had some kind of heart seizure about then, isn’t that right?”

  “I came up the stairs too fast.”

  “Uh huh. So you explained to MacKinnon that the dock had collapsed and was crushing Mr. Hansen, and he ran down to see if he could help. About how long before Mr. MacKinnon rejoined you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Sure, sure. You weren’t feeling too swift yourself. Do you have any recollection of time? Thirty minutes? Five minutes?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t feel long.” I turned to Adam for help. He didn’t respond. He looked pale and somber.

  “I’m sorry, Adam,” I faltered. “I know it’s my fault.”

  “How’s that?” The sheriff raised a brow.

  “I wasted too much time trying to dig him out. I should have gone for help straight off. But he begged me not to leave him. I didn’t realize—was it shock? Was he hemorrhaging internally? It can’t have been the tide.” I looked from one to the other. Their matching expressions dried the words in my throat. “What is it?”

  Sheriff Rankin said slowly, “You don’t know, do you?” He turned to Adam. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “No.”

  “Know what? What are you talking about?”

  “Your friend Hansen didn’t die of shock or internal injuries. Not from any dock falling on him anyway.” The sheriff said slowly, as though savoring the words, “He was murdered. Someone stove his head in with a rock.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Adam asked for the twentieth time.

  “It was mostly the shock, I think.”

  “You look like hell,” he said roughly.

  “Yeah, well,” I tried to joke, “I’m having a bad heart day.”

  Brett’s body had been removed. The sheriff and company had resumed combing the beach after the tide had retreated once more. They had questioned Adam for nearly two hours. Now there was nothing left for him to do, so he insisted on driving me the few yards to my cottage.

  Pulling up on the shell circle outside the garden gate, he turned off the engine. I didn’t know what to say to him. I stared at the dashboard. Brett’s Ray-Bans lay there. I felt a burning in my sinuses like I was going to sneeze. Or cry.

  “I can’t face that cottage tonight,” Adam said. “Can I crash here?”

  I swallowed dryly. Nodded.

  The phone calls began as soon as we closed the door. First Micky. Then Joel. Then the local paper. Adam took the calls, explained I was still recovering and fielded the expressions of sympathy and curiosity about Brett.

  From the leather sofa in the study I listened and wondered at how calm he sounded. Not sounded, was. Because he had something to focus on: me. Taking care of me. Not exactly flattering to be used as a grief substitute, but what are friends for?

  After a time Adam took the phone off the hook and poked his head in the study.

  “Are you hungry? You should eat something.”

  “I can’t right now, but you need to eat, Adam.”

  “I could use a drink.”

  I joined him in the kitchen. Adam had a drink while he heated a can of tomato soup. Sitting at the table, I watched him butter a stack of saltines as meticulously as though he was applying oils in short paint technique.

  The old refrigerator hummed noisily, the clock on the wall ticked slowly. Neither of us spoke.

  Adam ladled out the soup and we both made a pretense of eating, in hopes of encouraging the other.

  The evening had turned cold, mist rolling in from the sea and swallowing the cottages and gardens of the colony in gloom. It seemed very still. Ominously still. As though the entire world were hushed and waiting.

  Following our meal, Adam laid a fire in the study. I had another dose of medication and stretched out on the sofa; Adam took the chair by the fireplace. He was drinking Courvoisier, his glass winking in the firelight. He began to talk about Brett. He said Joel had introduced them two years earlier at an exhibition in Soho. Instant simpatico. They had left the Guggenheim and walked till they found a café with a small garden in back. They sat in the garden all night, talking and drinking cheap champagne. Brett had moved into Adam’s loft before the week was out. They had never spent a night apart in two years.

  I rested on the couch and listened. That was all that was required of me fortunately; I didn’t have energy for more. The meds left me feeling dull and depressed. I watched Adam’s face in the flickering shadows, watched his strong, beautiful hands, listened to his voice. A million times growing up I had pictured him like this, sitting across from me, sharing his heart. Now he was here, even spending the night, but I could have been anyone. Or no one. I could have been Adam’s own shadow moving against the wall as he lifted his glass once more. It wasn’t me he wanted, it was Brett, stiffening up in a drawer in the county morgue.

  Outside the window the fog pressed against the glass, turning the night white.

  “He wasn’t like that,” Adam repeated. I realized I was nearly asleep. I repositioned myself against the arm of the sofa. “Not really. He had been hurt. Some of the things that happened to him in foster homes…physical and sexual abuse…like something out of the frigging dark ages.” He wiped the heel of his hand to the corner of his eyes. I saw the wet glittering there. My heart clenched and unclenched.

  Adam went on talking about Brett, not noticing when tears slipped past and trickled down his cheeks. I watched him through my lashes, losing the battle to keep my eyes open. He seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, receding into some untouchable distance…

  * * * * *

  When I opened my eyes again, Adam had fallen asleep in the chair. He was frowning at his dreams, his mouth slightly open. The cognac bottle was empty at his elbow. The fire had died down to gray ash. Cautiously I sat up. At some point he had thrown the Irish chain-stitch quilt over me. I stood up, wrapping it Indian style around me, and tip-toed upstairs.

  But once in bed, comfortable and alone, my brain kicked into gear. I lay there running everything over in my mind. On the bureau, my father’s photographed grin reappeared Cheshire Cat style as the room grew lighter and lighter. I mused over Brett’s suggestion that Cosmo had n
ever left Steeple Hill. Murder. That’s what Brett had been talking about. And now Brett was dead. Murdered.

  It still didn’t seem real. I tried to feel something. There was nothing there beyond a dull shock. A sense that it had to be a mistake.

  Why would anyone kill Brett? Maybe that was a rhetorical question. There were probably a number of people who might want Brett out of the way, but murder? Murder was such a drastic step to take. So risky. And so unnecessary, surely? Unless…Brett had been right, and Cosmo had not died a natural death. Suppose Brett had discovered something about that unnatural death? Wouldn’t that knowledge give someone who had murdered once, a reason to risk murder again?

  The problem was, how would Brett know anything about a ten-year-old murder? And if Cosmo had been murdered, wouldn’t there have been some suspicion of it in all these years? There had never been a hint.

  Another thought: if Brett was right, if my father had been murdered ten years ago, then he had likely been killed by someone I had known all my life.

  On this comforting thought I dozed off.

  When I opened my eyes again I was confused to hear someone tapping on my bedroom door. I was trying to work this out when the door opened. Adam stuck his head in and I remembered Brett was dead.

  “Morning,” I said, trying to focus.

  Adam came in and, to my surprise, sat down on the edge of the mattress. Cozy bedside chats had never been part of the big brother scenario.

  “How are you this morning? The truth.”

  “I’m fine,” I said truthfully. “How are you holding up?”

  He looked tired. His blue eyes were rimmed with red, and his head had to be throbbing, but he said, “I’m okay. Thanks for putting up with me last night.”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll call the doctor today, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take it easy, okay? Rest. If you’re not up to answering more questions—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have to prove anything.”

  I pushed up on my elbows. “Adam, don’t treat me like an invalid. I can’t live that way.”

  His face tightened. He nodded. There was something going on here that I didn’t understand. Maybe Adam didn’t know how to relate to me as a healthy adult. Maybe he didn’t want to relate to me man to man.

  To distract myself from this idea I asked, watching his face, “Adam, suppose I had known how Brett died?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Was it some kind of test?”

  I thought that he wouldn’t answer that either, but he said finally, bleakly, “I had to know.”

  “You thought I could have killed Brett?” For some reason this shocked me more than anything that had happened thus far.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t?” I bunched a pillow under my head and considered this. It blew me away, because I was so sure Adam couldn’t have killed Brett, yet for all I knew he could have been just ahead of me on the stairs, and not coming down at all. “Do you know now?” I inquired.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t know if I believed him or not. “Suppose I had killed Brett?” I was curious.

  Adam patted my knee beneath the blankets and rose. I guess there are some questions it’s better not to ask.

  Adam left after unsuccessfully trying to get me to eat breakfast. I tried to break it gently that I don’t eat breakfast. He argued that it was the most important meal of the day. I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not.

  I decided to forgo my morning swim, and logged on to my computer, but it was only after nine that my front door resounded beneath a peremptory knock. Sheriff Rankin nodded a genial good morning, asked how I was feeling, and invited me to accompany him down to the beach.

  On the way down he casually mentioned that he’d interviewed the paramedics who had examined me the day before. Until that moment I don’t think I really appreciated that I was a suspect in Brett’s death. There’s naiveté for you.

  “You were over the worst of it then, of course, so they couldn’t tell a lot.”

  I nearly missed a step. I said, “You can talk to Dr. Hicks, he’s been my doctor all my life.”

  “I spoke to Doc Hicks,” Sheriff Rankin assured me. “He was willing to confirm that you do have an arrhythmia of the heart, and that given the circumstances you described yesterday it could in theory have triggered an attack.”

  “In theory?”

  “In theory.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs. The beach was pristine, except for the soggy yellow crime scene tape posted around the wrecked dock, which still lay crunched in the sand. Sky and sea and shoreline looked as vivid as though freshly painted, all the colors intensely dark in the unreal witchlight of the impending storm. Sandpipers left tracks across the silken dunes. The borough where Brett’s body had lain was washed smooth and flat by the tide.

  I showed the sheriff where Brett and I had stood talking.

  “Run me through it one more time, Kyle,” Sheriff Rankin invited. “You heard a sound like—?”

  “Groaning wood. Like something was tearing apart.”

  We ran through it one more time. From the moment Brett had hailed me on the beach to the moment when I collapsed on the steps.

  “Can I ask you something?” I asked.

  “Ask away,” the sheriff said laconically.

  “You must have examined the dock. Was it tampered with? How could it collapse like that?”

  “It was an old structure, Kyle. That dock was put in by Drake Trent. He was a big star back in the Forties. Used to own MacKinnon’s place.”

  “I know who Drake Trent was.”

  “I guess you would, at that.” He spat out a dark stream of tobacco juice. “But to answer your question, yep, that dock was tampered with all right. The post was sawn right through. All that had to happen was someone lean against it, and over she went. Like Lincoln logs. Tell me again what happened once Hansen was pinned down?”

  We went through that again.

  “How come neither you nor MacKinnon mentioned yesterday that Hansen claimed someone was trying to kill him?”

  I thought instantly of the missing weed killer.

  “I—because I guess we didn’t believe it.”

  “Might interest you to know the lab results Doc Hicks got from the night Hansen collapsed. Hansen was suffering from digitalis poisoning.”

  I stared at him, struck dumb in every sense of the word.

  “Digitalis; that’s what you take for your heart condition, isn’t it?”

  “Digitalis and Quinidine. Derivatives.”

  “Yeah. That’s what Doc Hicks said.”

  “You think I poisoned Brett?”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not.” I probably sounded more scared than convincing. “It would be stupid to use my own pills, wouldn’t it?”

  Rankin shrugged. “Murderers aren’t the brightest folks, contrary to those books you write.”

  “Look, I didn’t kill Brett. I didn’t bash his head in. I didn’t give him my heart meds.”

  “Didn’t you notice you had half a bottle of pills missing?”

  “Who says I do?” I tried to explain. “Even if the stuff was mine, I don’t take digitalis daily. Only when I have an attack. I haven’t needed it for quite a while.”

  “Where do you keep these pills?”

  “In the kitchen cabinet. What does it matter? Brett didn’t die from taking my heart medication.”

  “He didn’t take digitalis by accident, did he? Was there any way he could have accidentally got hold of your pills?”

  “No.”

  “So someone fed it to him. Probably slipped it in his drink the night of that party MacKinnon held for the Berkowitzes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No? Who knows where you keep your heart pills?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not a secret.”

  “Adam MacKinnon kn
ow?”

  “He does now. He got them for me yesterday. He had to ask though.” The memory of that reassured me.

  “Who else knows?”

  “It’s not a secret,” I repeated tersely.

  “Anybody have a key to your place?”

  “I don’t think so. Well, my grandfather probably does. Joel may.”

  “Joel Shimada?”

  I nodded. “He and Cosmo were pals from way back.”

  “You and Brett pretty tight?”

  “What?”

  “You and Brett,” he explained painstakingly, as to one a bubble or two off plumb, “you get to be pretty good friends?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “He was Adam’s friend and Adam’s my friend, so yeah, I made an effort.”

  “How much of an effort?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hansen told Vince Berkowitz that you and him were lovers.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Rankin studied me thoughtfully. “Well, maybe what he said was he believed you and him would be lovers before the summer was out.”

  Now I was mad. Sheriff Rankin had lied about Brett claiming we were lovers; he could be lying about this as well. Or Vince could be lying.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Did you get that from Vince?”

  He wiped his face as though I had spit at him. I felt moisture on my skin. It was starting to rain.

  “You don’t think Berkowitz is a reliable source?”

  “I think Vince—” I caught myself. “I think I’d have known if Brett and I were going to be lovers.”

  The warm summer rain freckled the sand, turning it dark.

  “Berkowitz says Hansen told him fucking you was the only way of keeping you and MacKinnon apart.”

  His tone was deliberately offensive, his words crude. I could feel the blood draining out of my face. “I don’t believe that.”

  “What is it that you don’t believe? That Hansen told Berkowitz? Or that he knew you and MacKinnon would be hump buddies before the autumn leaves were falling?”

  My lips were stiff. I had to work to get the words out. “Any of it. I don’t believe any of it.”

 

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