A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  “I’ve got an idea about your guest’s situation,” she’d said, blinking raindrops out of her long dark eyelashes, “something that might help him out, and I’m going downtown to check into it a little more.”

  Phooey, I’d thought, looking out past her at the rain; also, who knew what she was really up to? On top of that, she looked scrappy and determined even in her current wet, bedraggled state; good heavens, this woman annoyed me. But it was Chip she was talking about, so of course I went and got my raincoat.

  Now the three boys she’d pointed out stood huddled in a doorway of one of the closed shops on Water Street, while we sat in her Toyota in a dark parking lot half a block distant.

  “You’re sure?” I asked. “They were outside the church last night?”

  The boys pushed and jostled, smoking and roughhousing as well as they could in the tight space. I didn’t know their names, but the scruffy trio was a familiar sight most evenings on one downtown corner or another. I’d even seen them in snowstorms.

  “I’m sure,” Lizzie answered quietly. “I barely noticed them last night by the church, but when I was driving through town a little while ago …”

  She’d spotted them, and remembered. Her scarf slipped, exposing a deep bruise forming on her neck. Feeling my gaze, she touched it lightly. “Seatbelt got me.”

  But she didn’t want to talk any more about the accident she had been in. Then Sam spoke up for the first time from the back seat. “Those guys are trouble.”

  At the last minute, he’d hustled out and hopped into the car with us uninvited, still in work clothes and with his penlight stuck in his shirt’s boatyard-monogrammed breast pocket; seeing it reminded me of how much I wished he hadn’t quit the job.

  “One of their usual crew isn’t here tonight. But that tall one down there now is especially bad,” he added. “Harvey Spratt.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lizzie’s gaze returned to the youths. “I didn’t figure any of them for charity workers.”

  Sam still blamed Lizzie for the fix Chip was in, but even a hint that there might be other suspects was catnip to him. So he obliged her by naming the other boys horsing around in the doorway.

  “Not that you couldn’t get their names from Bob Arnold, too,” he added. “He knows ’em all real well.”

  To his dismay, though, once he’d ID’d the foursome she went on to grill him about Chip: Work? Hobbies? And the big questions: How did he get along with women? Any problems in that department?

  Oh, man. She sure sounded like a cop. It was all I could do not to skewer her with accusations right then and there, but if I did that, I might not get what I wanted out of her: help for Chip.

  So I shut up while Sam sighed impatiently. “I don’t get it. Why’s everyone so fixated on him? I had access to the weapon too, you know. We all did, everyone in our house.”

  Which was not at all the tack I wanted him taking. But she brushed his protest aside.

  “Look.” She thrust a sheet of paper out; he snapped his penlight on so we could all see it.

  “It’s a list of websites your friend visits regularly. The cop I was in the car crash with this afternoon gave it to me just before they put him in the ambulance, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting.”

  So she’d been riding with a cop when the accident happened; yet more evidence for the truth of the rumor about her. I glanced sharply at her. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “Huh,” said Sam. “That was fast work, getting hold of his browsing history.” He squinted at the list. “What’re all these weird numbers and letters, though?”

  “Private Web addresses. You name your website something gibberish-y, no one stumbles onto it by accident. Look at the handwritten notes by the Web addresses, though. If you went to the websites, you’d see those were their real names.”

  Sam frowned at the sheet again. “Aw, come on. Chip wouldn’t go for anything like this.”

  I looked, too. But not for long. After years in the money business, I’m not easily shocked, but just the names of those websites turned my stomach.

  “Anyway, isn’t that invasion of privacy or something?” Sam demanded. “Checking on what websites someone visits?”

  And why, I wanted to add, did that cop give the sheet to you? But we were here to help Chip, not express my indignation.

  Lizzie turned to Sam. “Maybe. Law’s murky on that point. But investigating the sites themselves isn’t invading anything, and that’s how that list got generated. He’s on the list because he’s visited them a lot. Sites,” she added, “where you can see pictures and watch videos of women being hurt, even killed. Where people go who like that sort of thing.”

  She took the list back. “And who like doing those things, themselves. I guess a court will have to decide whether he had an expectation of privacy while viewing that material.”

  Her tone said she thought not, while I noted with interest her familiarity with phrases like “expectation of privacy.” She had some kind of law enforcement expertise, for sure. What kind, though, and why the hell was she hiding it?

  Across the street the young men grew tired of hunkering in the doorway and began venturing out; at each effort, the rain drove them back in again. Meanwhile, Sam wasn’t giving up.

  “Chip writes about all that stuff. I mean, researches it. Professionally. So he must’ve—”

  Lizzie watched the youths. “Yeah. Everybody’s got a reason for what they do. And research is always a big one.”

  She sniffed scornfully. “Do a bad deed, claim you’re writing a book about it,” she said, and when Sam tried to say again that Chip really was a researcher, she cut him off.

  “Oh? Is that why he lied about where he was last night?”

  That silenced him. I gazed uphill at the granite-block post office building on the corner. The massive old edifice with its high, arched entry, wide granite-slab stairs, and marble interior floors was once home to Eastport’s customs office, and sported no-nonsense iron grates on its street-level windows.

  Lovely, and familiar, I’d seen it a thousand times. Tonight, though, it reminded me of something I’d heard recently, something that—now that I’d been thinking about it without realizing it for a while—didn’t make sense. Only … what?

  While I tried figuring it out, Lizzie leaned back against the car seat. “Ah, this is all just getting impossible,” she said with sudden fatigue in her voice.

  I turned, surprised, as she went on. “Look, I’ve got a small confession to make. All I want is to find my niece.”

  “But?” I’d already known that.

  “But the state cop I was riding with earlier today is an old pal and he wants me to help him nail your friend.” Sam’s face flattened with outrage.

  “He thinks I might get info out of you. Now, he says he wants evidence that might help your guy, too,” she went on as Sam opened his mouth to blast her.

  “But that’s not what he really wants,” she said. “And you want the opposite.”

  Um, yeah, that about summed it up, all right. “So what are you going to do?” I asked, putting out a hand to keep Sam from coming right over the seat at her.

  She sighed heavily. “At first I wasn’t sure. I mean, I do need all the help I can get. From everyone.”

  That much was true. “So you were thinking maybe you’d play both sides? Tell us you’re working for our team, and the cop that you’re on his?”

  My own fists were clenched pretty tightly by then, too. The way she was going, it was a wonder those pants of hers weren’t actively ablaze. “Lie to us,” I added angrily, “some more?”

  Because the hell with it, she wasn’t just deceiving us, she was playing us. “You’re not out here to help Chip, you just want us on your side so maybe we’ll tell you—”

  What? I wondered suddenly. Because the fact was, there wasn’t anything more to tell. Before I could finish processing this thought, though, Lizzie half-turned to me. And as she did so, that butter-soft leather jacket of
hers fell partway open.

  If it hadn’t been such a good jacket, so generously cut and softly drapey, it might not’ve fallen open so far. But it was.

  Sam happened to be leaning up over the seat at the time and glaring sideways down at her. “Gun,” he pronounced flatly at the sight of the handgun in its black nylon shoulder holster.

  Me too; I just didn’t get the word out as fast as he did.

  “Okay,” Lizzie sighed. “Look, I’m a cop, all right? Or I was until last week, anyway.”

  She plucked a slim wallet from her inside breast pocket, let it fall open as she passed it to me. There was just one photo in the clear plastic photo sleeve: Lizzie in a patrol uniform, maybe five years younger than now, standing beside a handsome redheaded guy who was also in uniform.

  “That’s my partner there with me, Liam O’Donnell. Ex-partner. He died trying to stop a convenience store robbery a few years later. I’d been promoted by then.”

  “To?” I handed the wallet back.

  She tucked it away. “Detective. Youngest woman detective in the Boston PD until I quit. Couple days ago, that was.”

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just—”

  “Tell you? Because I didn’t want to, that’s why,” she snapped. “I didn’t think it was any of your business. Although good luck with that idea, around here,” she added in disgust. “Look—let’s say that somebody here does know something about Sissy or Nicki, and some stranger comes around asking a lot of nosy questions. Who’re they likelier to tell, just a plain private citizen or a homicide cop?”

  “Yeah.” I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense, I guess.”

  She blew a breath out. “Well, thank you, Little Miss Expert on the Topic. So glad you approve. I mean, I might’ve told you before if I’d thought anyone in this town could keep their mouths shut for five freaking …”

  She took another deep breath, let it out slowly. “Anyway. If I quit my damn job so I could come up here and do what I thought was right—”

  She paused, composing herself. I recalled that in the past twenty-four hours she’d driven over three hundred miles, gotten involved with a murder, and been in a car accident.

  But when she spoke again, she was rock solid. “Well, I can’t very well start knuckling under to other people’s agendas right away, can I? So what I’ve decided is, I’ve got to stay straight with myself.” A small laugh escaped her. “Not very original, huh? But I’ve got no other option but to try finding out what really happened with your friend Chip, and then be perfectly honest about it with everyone. You, my cop pal …”

  Sam nodded slowly. “You mean play it straight. Not try to clear Chip or to convict him, or be on any side of it, yourself. Just …”

  “Yup. Just the facts, ma’am,” she replied.

  Yeah, maybe. But I still wasn’t convinced. For someone who wanted to be honest, she had an awfully good poker face, was my ongoing opinion. At the same time, I kept trying to capture the elusive memory I was still puzzling over, while half a block distant the enormous granite post office building stood smugly silent. Then:

  “Hey,” said Sam as across the street one of the boys in the rain-swept doorway suddenly seemed to notice Lizzie’s car. Its headlights were off but the wipers were still back-and-forthing slowly over the windshield; without them, we wouldn’t have been able to see at all.

  Glancing around as well as they could with the rain sheeting down, the guys who’d been crammed in the doorway stepped briskly into the weather, collars up, hands in pockets, hustling quickly toward the breakwater and away from the business district.

  Eyes narrowed, Lizzie waited for them to be out of sight on the other side of the post office building. Once they’d gone, we pulled out and crept slowly downhill after them, still without headlights.

  By the time we spotted them again, they were two blocks away: heads down, shoulders hunched, skinny, jean-clad legs scissoring in unison. Lizzie stayed well behind them: hands loose on the wheel, face more relaxed than I’d yet seen it, eyes bright. She looked interested, almost amused.

  Almost. We inched up outer Water Street where the shops gave way to houses on either side, the lights in their windows looking tiny and frail compared to the storm out here.

  “As you can see, I’m not one to ignore other reasonable possibilities, even when a slam dunk’s staring me in the face,” said Lizzie, touching the brakes briefly.

  The slam dunk being Chip; from the back seat Sam nodded in reluctant agreement. She kept the boys in view expertly, pulling nearer when they hurried ahead and falling back when the gale winds slowed them.

  “And when the victim’s a teenaged girl, and some local guys are eyeballing the crime scene like their own lives depend on it, well, I’d be stupid not to pay them at least a little attention, wouldn’t I?”

  “You sure they weren’t just curious last night?” I asked. “I mean, they’re just a bunch of teenagers, naturally they’d want to see what all the commotion was about.”

  She shook her dark, close-clipped head. “Not sure at all. But she was a teenager, too. Small town, maybe they knew her. I’m just sort of noodling around at this point, you know? Trying things out.”

  That much I did understand. Bottom line, snooping is just poking at things and waiting to see which ones poke back. “So what’re you going to do next?” Sam wanted to know.

  Lizzie answered casually. “Just follow them around a little, see where they go, what they do.”

  She popped a mint into her mouth from the tin of them on the car’s center console. “Hey, it could be they really were just curious. Maybe they weren’t up to anything suspicious last night. But the thing is, none of us know what your buddy Chip Hahn was up to, either, and he’s not saying.”

  I felt Sam stiffen with fresh anger behind me. “You just don’t know him the way—” he began.

  “Quiet,” she cut him off, snapping the wipers to high and the headlights on, peering around tight-lipped.

  The boys were gone. The wind yowled, hurling small objects around: a lobster buoy, a For Rent sign broken off from its signposts, a jacket with a red fake-fur collar that startled me badly, looking like something bleeding.

  “Yeah. You’re right, I don’t know him,” she answered Sam at last as the wind rocked the car. “But you know what?”

  The downpour eased slightly; we could see again. But no one was out there. They’d vanished like wisps of fog.

  “Your pal Chip’s got a big problem,” Lizzie said, “and the sooner you quit pretending that what’s coming next is all about his good heart, about how he couldn’t possibly have done the bad deed the cops’re thinking he did—”

  Out in the rain, no iffy-looking teenaged boys hustled along, not on Water Street or on any of the cross streets, as far up them as we could see. Finally she headed back toward downtown.

  “The clearer you see it, the better off he’ll be,” she said. “Because, trust me, his good heart’s not the issue here.”

  A limb broke off a massive old elm on the corner of Water Street and Adams, crashing down in front of us and bouncing once very hard on its splintered end, just missing the car. In the next instant, it was gone, tumbling away downhill toward the Coast Guard station building with its triangular gale flags snapping, across the breakwater from the lit-up boat basin.

  “I don’t know him,” Lizzie repeated, peering about one last time for the young hooligans. But there was no one, only a white foam bait box blown up from the harbor, tumbling along the rainy street. She met Sam’s gaze in the mirror again.

  “But the people who are questioning him now don’t know him, either. And if you want to help him, maybe you’d better open your mind to the possibility that neither do you.”

  “Bogie, come on.” David stood in the trashed living room. A row of engraved plaques, small trophies, and framed photographs had been swept from the mantel. Books flung from their shelves, a lamp smashed, papers from the desk stuffed into the fireplace a
nd set ablaze …

  In the glow from the flames’ sullen flicker, he spied a small silver clock Bogie’s frenzy of destruction had somehow missed. It chimed sweetly as he stared at it, nine clear bell tones.

  “Bogie, we need to get out of here, it’s late, she’s going to—”

  The house belonged to Mrs. Krause, who was probably at the gathering they were holding tonight at the high school for Karen Hansen, so people could get together and commiserate about her death. Her murder, David reminded himself numbly; it still didn’t seem real that such a thing could have happened in Eastport.

  “… fat old bitch.” Bogie’s voice, low and furious, came from the kitchen amid the crash of breaking glass. The teacher had sent a letter to Bogie’s dad about Bogie’s chronic absence.

  “Bogie,” David pleaded as a car hissed by in the rainy street outside, its headlights briefly strafing the ruined living room. He wasn’t even sure how they’d gotten here, only that Bogie had lured him with the promise of something cool, and the next thing he knew—

  “… here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty …”

  David’s blood turned to icy slush as an orange cat crept out from behind an overturned phone table with Bogie right behind it, thick hands outstretched. Spotting David, the cat froze.

  No! David thought as Bogie pounced on the animal, and then a lot of things happened at once: the cat squirmed and scratched Bogie on the face. Bogie yelled, flinging the cat away.

  And a key turned, loudly and unexpectedly, in the lock of the front door. Instantly Bogie was gone, out through the kitchen and the back door, down the steps and into the dark night, with David sprinting behind, leaving the squalling cat in the trashed house full of breakage and the stink of burning letters.

  “Yah!” Bogie shouted triumphantly as they ran, but David barely heard him, small bare branches slapping his face as they hurtled through the backyards, over fences, and between sheds.

  How? he wondered as he sprinted along, unable to believe he had just been part of a behavior so … so bad.