She resisted the urge to offer Henderson an explanation. She hoped that, left to her own devices, Henderson would work out a better story than Melissa could invent. Doing her best to look worried and then bored, Melissa counted slowly to three-hundred.
At that point she opened her purse. It held three things that wouldn’t ordinarily have been there, and she now took two of them out: a pack of Virginia Slims, and a book of matches. Tucking her purse under her left arm and raising the cigarettes and matches in her right hand, she turned sheepishly toward Henderson.
“Excuse me,” she stage-whispered, “is there a place where I can smoke without bothering anyone?”
“Sure,” Henderson said, offering Melissa an I’ve-been-there smile. “Straight out the back door, on the porch. There’s some shade and a place to sit and a butt-can filled with sand. It’s not fancy, but it should do.”
“Thanks,” Melissa said. She rose and headed for the hallway that would take her past the conference room and toward the back door. On the way, she stopped near Henderson’s desk. “Please don’t tell my husband,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I promised him that I’d quit, and I mostly have, but I’m afraid I’ve relapsed a little this past week.”
“Don’t worry,” Henderson said, giving her a thumbs-up.
Melissa walked down thirty feet of hallway, past the stairs and then the conference room door, to a kitchen that Lawrence had converted into an employee lounge and lunch room. Leading from that room to the back porch was a Dutch door, carefully preserved and clearly intended to look as if someone were actually about to set freshly baked apple pie out to cool on the lower half.
Melissa slipped out of the espadrilles she was wearing. She punched the general number for Jackrabbit Press into her cell phone and rested her right thumb on the SEND button. She pushed the back door open and then pulled it sharply closed, loudly enough for Henderson to hear.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed the SEND button and at the same instant began quietly backtracking. She heard a discreet burr from the reception area, followed by Henderson’s polished, professional voice saying, “Jackrabbit Press. How may I direct your call?…. Jackrabbit Press.…Hello? Is anyone there?”
By “hello” Melissa had gotten all the way back to the stairway. She began going up, moving as lightly as she could and praying that Henderson’s exasperation with the unresponsive caller would cover any stray creaks Melissa produced. She made it unchallenged to the top and for the second time in her life found herself facing, a scant dozen feet away at the end of the upstairs hallway, a solid looking, thoroughly contemporary mahogany door that announced in raised, pewter letters:
JACKRABBIT PRESS
Editorial Office
R. Thomas Quinlan Imprint
No yellow police tape barred the doorway. Perhaps fifteen feet down the wall from that door was its twin brother, this one marked:
OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER
John Paul Lawrence
Melissa now took the third unwonted item from her purse: the key to the first door, which Linda had given her. She strode to the door, worked the key laboriously into the lock, turned hard, pushed the door open, and went in.
***
He’s good, Rep thought as he listened to the gently but insistently probing questions that Pignatano asked in a serenely reassuring, carefully non-threatening tone.
“The single most helpful thing we could do at this point,” Pignatano was saying now, “is figure out where Peter is. That way, we can get him a lawyer he has confidence in—maybe me, maybe Mr. Pennyworth here, maybe someone else—so he can come in to the police and they’ll stop looking for him.”
“Won’t they arrest him?” Linda asked.
“They might, and that won’t be any picnic,” Pignatano said. “But it’s a lot less unpleasant if we’re in control of the process. Apart from everything else, if Peter voluntarily appears we have at least an outside shot at getting bail. The very worst thing would be for the cops to find him at a TraveLodge somewhere in western Kansas under an assumed name.”
“I can’t believe Peter would run away,” Linda said.
You probably can’t believe he’d carve Tommy Quinlan up like a Halloween pumpkin either, Rep and Pignatano thought simultaneously.
“Well,” Pignatano said, “we need to drill down a little deeper into where he could be, then.”
“I’ve wracked my brain,” Linda said, “I really have.”
“I know. I know you’ve tried to think of every conceivable place. But now let’s take that process to the next level. If he were in any of the logical places around Kansas City, the police would certainly have found him by now. We have to get outside the box and really use our imaginations, come up with some possibilities that wouldn’t occur to anyone the first time around.”
“All right,” Linda said, “I’ll try. Let me think.”
***
At the end of her eighth belly-churning minute inside the editorial offices, Melissa perched, baffled, on the edge of Quinlan’s desk. Sweat pearled her chin and the back of her light blouse stuck to sodden shoulder blades, for the undersized window air-conditioner on the other side of the room wasn’t on.
She hadn’t wasted her time up to now. Under Quinlan’s desk she had found a Scotsman mini-refrigerator with a tiny freezer and no ice trays. She had come across a bill from Hickman Mills Medical Laboratory that had apparently arrived with that morning’s mail. It demanded $154.75 for “Professional Services” that, according to a box checked on the bottom of the invoice, were NOT COVERED BY INSURANCE. Both suggestive, neither conclusive.
What she hadn’t found was the thunderbolt. The thing that had crystallized Peter’s thinking and galvanized him into action. She knew that it not only had to be here, but had to be in plain sight. But she couldn’t spot it.
She stood up and walked over to the desk that Linda used when she worked at the office instead of at home. Linda had said that when she’d talked to Peter Tuesday night she had started by pulling her desk chair out to one side and parking herself directly opposite the visitor’s chair where he’d been sitting. She’d wanted to pour her heart out face-to-face, without any barrier in between them. Melissa now pulled the visitor’s chair away from the desk a bit, angled it, and sat down in it as if she were Peter facing Linda.
She couldn’t imagine Peter’s eyes anywhere but on Linda as they talked and then clinched and kissed like a couple of teenagers in the back seat of dad’s Lexus. She pictured them coming up for air while Peter ecstatically imagined fatherhood and Linda suddenly felt her gorge rising. She mimed Peter stepping back, baffled and anxious, when Linda sputtered her hurried exit line, then Peter turning to watch as Linda hustled out the door.
Then Peter—what? She had no idea. Maybe he’d stood there gaping at the doorway. Maybe he’d wandered randomly around the office, idly fingering paper weights and glancing at the flotsam and jetsam of office life. Maybe he’d picked up a manuscript and scanned a page or two. No matter how systematically Melissa did it, any further reconstruction of his movements would amount to pure conjecture.
She rapped her knuckles on Linda’s desk. She had stood in this room herself, Tuesday night, not long after Peter had. Whatever he had seen she must have seen then, without noticing it. She tried to remember the way the room had looked to her that night, how it had seemed different than this morning aside from not being as stiflingly hot and close.
She looked again at the doorway to the hall. Then, quite deliberately, trying now not to reconstruct Peter’s movements but to jog her own recollection of the room that night, she racked her head back the other way, five degrees of arc at a time, noting each image that came within her field of vision.
Haphazardly laden bookshelves starting next to the hallway door and following the wall around its inside corner. Remainders, advance-reader-copies, and manuscripts spilling onto the floor. Quinlan’s large, L-shaped desk in front of the shelves, domin
ating that quarter of the office. No melodramatic note from Tuttle spiked to his chair this time, but the difference nagging at her went beyond that. A connecting door to Lawrence’s office just beyond the bank of shelves. The wall on the other side of that door, most of it taken up by an enormous calendar on erasable whiteboard showing editorial and production schedules for three titles. The intersecting wall along the rear of the building, with its window and non-functioning air conditioner—no wonder it felt so sticky in here. More shelves, canted a bit under the strain of—
Wait. She remembered Tuesday night as also rather warm, but she hadn’t felt herself suffocating in this room. She didn’t recall hearing the air conditioner. She shifted her eyes back to it. It wasn’t just off. It looked disused, somehow, as if it hadn’t been on for quite awhile. A naked bolt peeked through where one of the control knobs was missing. She walked over to the machine and flipped the ON button. Nothing. Not even a fan. She returned to her vantage point at Linda’s desk.
So what? So…why hadn’t this room seemed like a sweltering precursor of Purgatory Tuesday night? She swept her gaze back the other direction—and she had it. The connecting door to Lawrence’s office hadn’t been closed, as it was now, but ajar. The resulting draft had cooled the room just enough to take the edge of the heat.
She strode across the room. She pushed the connecting door open. And caught the thunderbolt right between her eyes.
Mounted on an easel in front of Lawrence’s desk, the painting had to be four feet high by twelve feet long. It depicted a sparkling warship—a destroyer, Melissa guessed, although she certainly wasn’t an expert—cutting proudly through a white-flecked, sunlit sea. Large white letters along the prow read U.S.S. LIBERTY.
Even if Tuttle’s note hadn’t monopolized her attention Tuesday night and she’d noticed the painting, it probably wouldn’t have clicked. With the discoveries of the past two days, though, her epiphany was so complete and at the same time so grotesque that it took her breath away. Understanding snapped into place. Not for nothing was she married to a guy who’d gotten his bachelor’s degree in Twentieth Century History. During the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and four Arab countries, Israeli warplanes had attacked and severely damaged the U.S.S. Liberty, killing several crewmen. Israel had pled that the attack was a tragic error, and the United States had accepted that assurance. The U.S.S. Liberty had nonetheless become an icon for some of the more ferocious strains of antisemitism lurking in the slimy sub-basement of American life.
The implications appalled her, but a thrill of elation mingled with the disgust. Peter hadn’t killed Quinlan. He was innocent. Linda wins, logic loses.
Peter had seen this painting. He had imagined it hanging in the entrance to the Jackson County Public Library extension. He had realized in an instant’s insight that Lawrence might be trying to pervert the naming of the new library wing to serve his own bigotry. Maybe he’d wondered if Linda somehow knew about this, felt guilty about it, if that was what had her vomiting her guts up.
But Melissa didn’t need to push her theory that far. Peter being Peter, worshiping at the altar of Words, capable of seeing God’s hand in well-wrought similes and humble verbal by-play, needed no more than the painting itself to galvanize him. One shattering instant of realization, and Peter would have concluded that the very next thing he had to do was find out whether, buried in the boilerplate of impenetrable legal documents, the official name of what everyone was calling the proposed Liberty Memorial Library Wing was the “U.S.S. Liberty Memorial Wing.” Because if that was what was going on, Klimchock had to be warned not to send Peter’s name to the Finance Committee first thing the following morning. That was why Peter had run off. And Melissa knew with apodictic certainty that he hadn’t paused for some triviality like killing Quinlan on the way.
Okay, ladies, she thought, mission accomplished. Exit, stage rear.
Melissa scurried out of Lawrence’s office and pulled the door closed behind her. She hustled toward the door from the editorial offices to the hallway. She reminded herself to keep under control, to open the door slowly so as not to attract attention. In the depths of her superego, though, a panicky, guilt-ridden, plaid-skirted schoolgirl with Ripple on her breath was screaming, Get out of here! She jerked the door open.
She had time to see the bearded, expressionless man in the blue uniform who was waiting outside, and time to notice the large Remington revolver he was holding at his side. She had time to read the unsurprised and indifferent eyes of someone who knew his business and was in no particular hurry.
What she didn’t have time to do was scream. She opened her mouth to yell, but before the first well-rounded decibel could form in her throat the man stuffed a large, bunched, woolen sock deep into her mouth.
Choking and furious, Melissa stepped backwards, preparing to turn and run toward Lawrence’s office. The man shook his head, once, unconcerned.
She spun on the ball of her right foot. A lancing pain shot through her left arm as the man seized it with his left hand. Effortlessly he crab-walked her toward Linda’s desk and pushed her roughly into Linda’s chair. She barked her right thigh painfully on the front edge of the seat and her ribs on the top of the chairback as she slammed into the seat.
Looking up, wide-eyed, Melissa saw the man raise his left hand above his right shoulder. Saw the sweaty, hirsute knuckles on the back of the hand. Saw from his face that he did this not in anger, not impulsively, but with the indifferent efficiency of a natural force, like a cold front scattering children at play as it moves through an autumn afternoon. Saw that he wondered whether she’d gotten the message. And without meaning to or thinking about it, told him with her eyes that she had.
Chapter 24
Rep, at roughly this point, was taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. This was a pre-arranged signal, and he prayed Linda would pick it up. She did.
“I just thought of something that might help, but it’s a very difficult part of the story for me,” Linda said. “What happened between Tommy and me is something I’m still trying to come to terms with. There are times when I can’t even believe I did it. I hate to seem wimpy, but Rep, would you mind stepping outside for a few minutes?”
Perfect. Murmuring “Of course” he stood up and moved toward the conference room door.
“Most certainly,” Lawrence said at the same time, rising instantly in his turn. “We’ll both go. What you say will be for Mr. Pignatano’s ears alone.”
Nuts, Rep thought. They hadn’t anticipated this snag when they’d worked out today’s plan. He’d have to improvise. Hobbling a bit on his still tender ankle, he walked Lawrence into the hallway and headed for the reception area, doing his best to look like a husband who expected to see his wife there. He tried to show mild surprise—not shock, not overdoing it—when he didn’t.
“Excuse me,” he said to Henderson, “do you know where my wife went?”
“Ladies room?” Henderson said uncertainly. “She had to step away.”
“Well,” Lawrence said, “when she comes back please tell her that Mr. Pennyworth and I are waiting for her in my office upstairs. Mrs. Damon wants to be alone for the moment with counsel.”
“Certainly, Mr. Lawrence.”
Alarm bells rang shrilly in Rep’s head. In one sentence he had lost control of the situation and he didn’t know what to do about it. The plan was to use the chat Lawrence wanted with Linda as cover for a search of Jackrabbit Press. Now, all of a sudden, Rep felt like the one being gamed. Lawrence had the initiative; Rep was reacting. He could turn and run right now, but he wasn’t going to leave Linda and Melissa alone in this building. Lacking any better ideas, he followed Lawrence upstairs.
“Is your father still alive, Mr. Pennyworth?” Lawrence asked, glancing over his shoulder at Rep.
Worse and worse.
“No. Dad died when I was sixteen.”
“I am sorry to hear it. It’s devastating to lo
se a parent before his time.”
“‘Before his time’ would be debatable in dad’s case,” Rep said. “He died of forty Camels and six cans of beer a day plus forty-odd-thousand miles a year on the road. Those are choices.”
“He wasn’t your hero, then?” Lawrence asked as he opened his office door and gestured for Rep to enter.
“When he died I thought dad was a loser,” Rep said. “After I got a little older, I realized that sometimes just getting out of bed and going to work in the morning can be heroic.”
“An insight worthy of Saul Bellow at his very best,” Lawrence said. He strode over to a highly polished Empire desk in the center of the room and nodded toward the canvas in front of it. “What do you think of the painting?”
Rep, who had hung just inside the door, now walked over to look at the artwork. He’d had a lot of practice keeping his face straight, but he didn’t quite manage it now. A smile played across Lawrence’s lips.
“Hung in the conference room downstairs,” Rep said evenly, “I’d call it an eccentric curiosity that’s not to my taste. Decorating the main entrance to the Liberty Memorial Wing of the Jackson County Public Library, it would be an abuse of history.”
“Correction,” Lawrence said. “The U.S.S. Liberty Memorial Wing. Three letters buried in fine print that no one has noticed—and no one will.”
“Except Peter.”
“A pity, but unimportant. Don’t you think the brave American sailors who gave their lives on June 8, 1967 should be remembered?”
“I certainly do. But they shouldn’t have their memory hijacked to serve a racist agenda.”
“Why is the agenda racist—because our sailors were murdered by Jews instead of Arabs?”
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