The top of her convertible was up because she had left her purse and her keys in the car when she had arrived. Even she wouldn’t normally be so careless, but in a secluded mountain estate, she had yielded to the impulse not to have to keep track of her things while at the party. She got into the passenger seat and let herself sag against the vinyl, which felt warm and tacky against her skin. She rubbed the soles of her feet together and thought that she had even fewer things to keep track of now. She curled over, buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the shakes, her teeth chattering, throat whimpering, skin shivering. Then she felt better. She scrubbed at her face with her hands, remembering as she did so that she was wearing makeup.
She dug into her purse for the lighted compact her sister Grace had given her years ago and examined the damage. Her lipstick was long gone, her skin was blotchy, and her mascara and eye shadow were smeared. She popped open the glove compartment and retrieved one of the little wet foil-wrapped towels she kept there, a habit of her mother’s that had stuck with Clare throughout the years. After she mopped off her face, she used the compact light to check out the rest of her appearance, which was even more disreputable-looking than she had imagined. Her elegant pantsuit was crumpled, the jacket gaping open where her buttons had come off, one leg stained with something dark and unidentifiable—though from the smell, she thought she must have picked it up when she rolled into the trash can.
She snapped the compact shut and closed her eyes. She didn’t care if it was rude; she was not going back in to join the partygoers. She might not be sober enough to drive, but she sure wasn’t drunk enough to appear looking like she had been out for a roll in the clover. She could hide away here in her car, and when the rest of the alcohol had worked its way out of her system, she would drive home. Then tomorrow, she would call Russ and tell him that—
Her eyes snapped open. Call Russ. Holy cow, he needed to know about Malcolm’s little business venture. And that it sounded like Bill Ingraham’s ex-lover knew a lot more about his death than what he had read about in the papers. She fumbled in her purse for her phone, letting her grandmother’s voice—which was saying No lady would ever call after ten o’clock at night—wash away on a tide of exhaustion, relief, and the remnants of several kir royales.
As she pressed the send button, she had a flash of panic. What do I say if his wife answers? The phone rang. Once. Twice. She clicked it off, sagging back into her seat. Coward. Then she remembered. Friday. Dinner at his mother’s. Maybe he was still there. She called information for the number and dialed it, hoping against hope that she wasn’t about to wake Margy Van Alstyne, who might have retired early.
“Hello?”
Margy’s voice sounded crisp. Clare closed her eyes in relief.
“Mrs. Van Alstyne? Margy? It’s Clare Fergusson.”
“Clare Fergusson. Well, I’ll be. What can I do for you this hour of the night?”
You see? Her grandmother said. Calling after ten is an imposition. Clare repressed the urge to apologize and hang up. “I was just wondering…I needed to speak to Russ, and I recalled he said he was going to be at your house for the evening. Is he there?”
“Yes, he’s here.” Margy Van Alstyne’s voice sounded as if only good manners kept her from asking why St. Alban’s rector was calling her son at 10:30 on a Friday night.
“It’s business,” Clare assured her.
“Oh, it’s none of my—never-mind. Let me give him the phone. Here he is.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Russ had been lying back in his mom’s ancient La-Z-Boy recliner, watching Roger Clemens getting shelled by the Angels. He had stayed well past the time it took to replace a few boards on the porch and have dinner, enjoying the comforting familiarity of his mom’s house, where no one ever redecorated and the walls had been the same color since she moved in a quarter of a century ago.
Clemens had given up five runs in the last two innings, and the Yankees were going down hard. Now Mel Stottlemyre was marching out toward the mound. “Give him the hook, already,” Russ told the pitching coach. “Any relief pitcher could do better than that. My mother can do better than that.”
Stottlemyre was talking to Clemens, who was evidently arguing. Now the catcher was coming out to the mound. “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not the UN. Get him offa there.”
His mother walked into the living room, holding the phone and eyeing him speculatively. She clamped her palm over the handset. “It’s Clare Fergusson,” she whispered. “Says it’s a business call.” She handed him the phone.
“Clare?” His mother stood there watching. He frowned and shooed her away. “What’s up?” He glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you up?”
“No, I’m not spending the night. I was just hanging out, watching the Yankees lose to Los Angeles. What’s going on?”
“I’m at a party at Peggy Landry’s house.”
He listened for the usual background noises you could hear during a phone call in the middle of a party. Nothing.
“It’s a pretty quiet party.”
“I’m calling from my car. I can’t go in.”
“You can’t go in. Clare, you’re not making any sense.” A thought struck him. “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes, but that’s not why I—”
“You’re not planning on driving that car anyplace, are you?”
“No. Well, not yet. I’m going to wait here until I’m fit to drive again.”
He closed his eyes. Christ on a bicycle. “Okay,” he said, enunciating clearly. “Get out of the car and give someone your keys. Then ask Peggy Landry to fix you up with a ride home.”
“I told you, I can’t go inside!” Her whisper sharpened. “Will you please listen to me?”
He clicked off the game. “Go ahead.”
“I was in Malcolm’s room tonight. Here. At Peggy’s house.”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“Her nephew. He used to be Bill Ingraham’s boyfriend.”
“His boyfriend? He got out of his chair. The import of this statement struck him. “And you were in his room? What the hell were you doing in his room?”
“I’m trying to tell you!”
He pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go ahead.”
“I got talking with someone at the party about Peggy’s business, and about Malcolm, and I thought it would be a good idea to see if there was anything connecting him to Ingraham’s death—in his room.”
“How much had you had to drink at this point?”
“That doesn’t matter! Listen. Malcolm knows something about Ingraham’s death. I’m sure of it. And he’s selling drugs!”
He walked past his mother, who was methodically folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raiser, listening to his every word. He opened the fridge and grabbed a soda. “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t patronize me. I know he’s selling drugs because he was talking to someone in the room with him.”
That brought him up short. “This guy was in the room at the same time you were?” His mom’s head perked right up at that. He frowned at her.
“He and another man. The other guy was talking about Ingraham’s death. At least I’m pretty sure he was. He was scared. And then Malcolm gave him something, some sort of drug.”
He put the soda can down on the counter, unopened. “What did they do? Shoot up? Do you know what they were using?”
“No, not like that. Like a payment. Or a payoff. I didn’t actually see anything. I was hiding in the bathroom.”
He lifted his keys from a row of hooks next to the back door. “You were hiding in the bathroom.”
“Yes. And then the other man left, the one who was worried, and Malcolm started making phone calls to potential buyers. And to a friend named Poppy.”
The priest he knew spoke in a clear, well-organized way, one thought flowing coherently into another. But this garbled story…He couldn�
��t tell if she was drunk or delusional, or maybe had been hit on the head.
“He just stayed there on the phone, with the music going, and I needed to leave, because all I could think about was that I’d be in deep trouble if a drug lord found me in his shower stall while he was peddling his wares. Not to mention the way he was talking about how they were going to take care of the other man. So I climbed out of his bathroom window and—”
“You did what? Are you nuts?”
“It was the only way out. So I climbed out of his bathroom window, jumped onto a porch roof, and made it back to my car. I thought I had better call you, because you can get a warrant and search Malcolm’s room. He keeps the stuff under his bed. Oh, and he has a gun, too.”
He pocketed his keys. “And why is it you can’t go back into the house?” His mom had given up pretending to do work and was staring with undisguised interest at him.
“I threw away my sandals. And I lost two buttons on my top, and wiped off most of my makeup. I’m a complete mess.”
It was the first time he had ever heard Clare say anything that indicated she had any awareness of how she looked at all. If her story hadn’t been so completely bizarre, he’d have teased her about it. But she spoke with an earnest literalness that undoubtedly came out of a bottle but made her sound like a kid.
“Where are you right now?”
“In the passenger seat.”
“No, I mean where is Peggy Landry’s house?”
“Um, on the Old Lake George Road. You turn off at a place called Lucher’s Corners.”
“I know where that is. What’s her house number?”
“I can’t remember. Wait—” He heard the sound of papers flipping around. She came back on. “Okay, I got the directions she gave me. Number two thousand twelve.”
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. You stay put in your car. I’m going to come get you and take you home.”
“No! That’s not why I called! You have to come and arrest him! I wouldn’t have called for a ride. That would be imposing on you.” She said “imposing on you” in the same tone of voice someone might use to say “sacrificing your firstborn child.”
“I’ll just stay here until I feel sober enough to drive safely. Do not come out here to give me a ride,” Clare told him.
He wasn’t going to waste time arguing with a woman under the influence. Not over the phone, with his mom hanging on every word. “I’ll be there in about a half hour. Stay put.” He turned the phone off and replaced it in its cradle.
“Trouble?”
He nodded. “She needs a ride. And she thinks she may have some information about this murder we’re working on.”
His mother’s face changed from amused to worried. “Maybe you should call for backup.”
He shook his head. “It’s not like that, Mom. And Clare’s a little under the influence. I don’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone else. I’ll take her to her house and then head home from there.”
Margy got to her feet and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her hard and dropped a kiss on her springy white curls. “Don’t worry, Mom. There aren’t going to be any bad guys.”
She tipped her head back to look him straight in the eye. “That’s not the only sort of trouble out there.”
The Old Lake George road was familiar to him, part of the regular patrol route. When he had been in school—back around the Civil War, it felt like—the road had been mostly undeveloped, except for a few scraggly cabins inhabited by cranky loners. It had been, as its name suggested, a shortcut over the mountains toward Lake George, not a place anyone with a lick of sense would build on, back when the surrounding area was all devoted to dairy farming. Things started to change in the eighties, when a “pristine mountainside between a quaint Adirondack village”—he had seen the language in an ad his mother had sent him—and the old resort area of Lake George suddenly became a hot commodity. Overnight, neo-Adirondack lodges that would have given Teddy Roosevelt nightmares had sprung up along the road, interspersed with fake Swiss chalets and Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater rip-offs. One of the latter, whose architect had insisted on flat roofs to “blend in with nature,” had come to a spectacular end when a twenty-four-hour storm dumped three feet of snow on the area and the whole house collapsed in on itself.
He recognized Peggy Landry’s house when he pulled into the long drive. She couldn’t have owned it long—it had been purchased and expensively renovated by a dot-com millionaire from New York City just a few years ago. He remembered the guy because he was constantly calling in intruder alerts during his summer stays, until Mark Durkee went up and pointed out that the open-air kitchen he had installed at the end of the pool house was attracting a steady stream of black bears.
The drive was still full of cars, but it was easy enough to pick out Clare’s god-awful Shelby Cobra. He pulled his truck into the nearest empty spot and got out. He glanced up at the facade of the house, three stories of vaguely rustic clapboarding rising up to a modern-cladded roof. He tried to picture Clare dropping out one of the windows, three sheets to the wind, and the image made him wince. An adrenaline addict, she had once described herself as. How she ever made it through a seminary and into the priesthood was a mystery to him.
He crunched over to her car. There was no sign of life until he bent down and peered into the shadowy interior. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He knocked on the driver’s door and opened it.
“I’m here,” she said loudly, bolting upright.
“Take it easy. You’re not asleep on duty.” The light from the house reached the interior of the car dimly, but even in the shadows, he could see she hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like she’d been dragged through the bushes backward.
“No, of course not, I was just—” She blinked several times. “Russ! What are you doing here? No, wait, I remember. Are you going to arrest Malcolm?”
He squinted past her into the tiny sports car. “I don’t think I can fit inside this tin can. Why don’t we get into my truck? We can talk there. Grab your purse and keys.”
She nodded, and a moment later they were crossing the gravel drive to his pickup, Clare muttering quiet “Ouch” noises as she, barefooted, picked her way across the stones.
As soon as they were both inside, he fired up the ignition and shifted into gear.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
“Taking you home,” he said, craning over his shoulder to see as he backed up. “Fasten your seat belt.”
“You’re supposed to be searching Malcolm’s room! Didn’t you hear anything I said on the phone?”
“Yep.” He threw his pickup into first and headed down the drive to the road.
“You can’t just drive away! There are illegal drugs in that house. And persons with knowledge of a murder!”
“You been watching Law & Order again, haven’t you?” He grinned at her. “Listen. I’ll give you a free tutorial on the way the criminal-justice system works in our country. I am a law-enforcement agent. Before I go into anyone’s house and search it, I have to get permission from a judge, called a warrant. I convince the judge to issue me a warrant based on evidence I can show or information I can give that will persuade him that there’s a reasonable chance I can find some evidence of a crime. Now, while it’s true that there are some jurisdictions where an honest cop can get a warrant based on his say-so, here in Washington County I have to deal with Judge Ryswick. And Judge Ryswick likes solid evidence before issuing a warrant. Especially when he’s asked to issue warrants against well-heeled businessmen. Judge Ryswick would be very unhappy with me if I woke him up and asked for a warrant to search Peggy Landry’s home based on a drunken woman’s statement that she overheard what she thinks was a drug deal while going to the bathroom. Although I admit that the fact you’re a priest is good. The DA always likes to tell juries that priests and bishops don’t normally witness crimes. To explain the scumball witnesses he has to put on the stand, you see?”
“I wasn’t going to the bathroom! I was hiding there. And I’m not drunk. I only had four drinks. Or five. I’m just a tad…tipsy.”
He laughed.
“Don’t patronize me!”
“I’m practically old enough to be your father. That gives me the right to patronize you. Plus, I’m sober and you’re not.”
She clicked her seat-belt buckle into place. He gunned the truck and turned onto the Seven Mile Road as she opened her mouth several times, inhaling sharply, as if she were about to light into him but couldn’t make up her mind where to start. Finally, she said, “You are not old enough to be my father.”
“I’ll be forty-nine in November.”
“Well, there you are. My father is fifty-eight.” She crossed her arms.
The fact that he was a lot closer to her father’s age than to hers was not a comfortable thought. “What the hell were you thinking of, leaping out a window onto a porch roof? You could have broken both your legs.”
“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice. I was planning—” She stopped and thought for a minute. “Actually, I have to confess that I didn’t go into Malcolm’s room with any plan for getting back out again. I wasn’t thinking very far ahead.”
“There’s a surprise,” he said under his breath.
She twisted in her seat. “Mal Wintour is selling drugs,” she said. “He’s got a stash in a suitcase under his bed. The man who was in the room with him said it must be worth a million.” She jabbed her hands reflexively at her French twist and whatever had been holding it in place slid and a quarter of her hair tumbled down. “Darn it.” She fumbled with a clip. “Just because I wasn’t in the same room with them doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.”
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