C T Ferguson Box Set

by Tom Fowler

  “To what?” Gloria said.

  “To your luck changing for the better.” She grinned, and we clinked our glasses, before each taking a sip of wine.

  “Apart from bad luck, I really do wonder why I haven’t met you before.”

  “I got back from Hong Kong about two months ago.”

  “That could explain it,” said Gloria. “I was finishing college while you were going overseas. How did you like Hong Kong?”

  “It was interesting. Old in a lot of ways, but modern and new in others. The food was fantastic. I managed to learn a lot while I was over there.”

  Gloria wrinkled her nose. “You went there to learn?”

  “I went to see the world. I stopped in a couple other places first, but I really liked Hong Kong. While I was there, I made a few friends, and they convinced me to stay for a while. Basically, what happened is it turned into three and a half years.” I met some hackers; we both had skills, and I had money to keep everyone in business. It worked out well for both sides until the police kicked the door down.

  “Why did you leave?” Gloria said.

  “The government wouldn’t let me extend my stay any longer,” I said.

  “That’s a shame.”

  “They’re commies. They don’t have a history of getting things right.”

  Gloria chuckled. “So now you’re back in the States. Living on your own?”

  “I have an apartment in Fells Point,” I said.

  “How do you pass the time during the day?”

  “I started working a few days ago.”

  “Working?” Gloria wrinkled her nose like she caught a whiff of a decomposing body in the next chair. “Why would you do that?”

  “It’s something of a long story.”

  “Did your parents make you work?” she said.

  “More or less.”

  She took a sip of her wine. I did the same, mostly to get rid of it. It wasn’t bad, just very average. “What are you doing? Consulting? Finance?”

  “I’m actually a detective,” I said.

  Gloria almost dropped her glass. “A detective? Why?”

  “I said it was a long story, but we still have plenty of wine left, so I’ll tell you.” I told her about Hong Kong, trying to help Americans while there, the arrest, prison, coming back home, and being forced to get a job helping people. To her credit, Gloria managed not to faint during the narration of my travails. I left most of the details in because I didn’t see the harm in telling her, though I skipped most of the prison story because I didn’t want to think about it. Toward the end of my tale, I refilled both of our glasses.

  “Wow,” she said when I finished, “I’m not sure I like your parents anymore. That’s an awful thing to do. Do you like being a detective?”

  “I’m still pretty new at it, but I must confess I’m not a fan so far.”

  “How long will you do it?”

  “Until I’ve made enough money from my parents so I don’t have to work anymore. I hope no longer than a few years.”

  “I hope so, too,” she said. “Do you work a lot? Do you still have free time?”

  “I believe in working smart, not hard,” I said. “Right now, I have one case. I don’t think I want to juggle several at once.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Enough about work,” I said. “Tell me about you. What were you doing while I was gallivanting all over the globe?”

  “Going to parties, openings, socializing,” said Gloria. “I’ve learned the piano a lot better, and I’m taking tennis lessons now.”

  “Ah, the life of a socialite.” I raised my glass toward Gloria. “Are you trying to become famous for being famous?”

  She smiled. I noticed her flawless teeth, each as white as the pearls around her neck. Either she had remarkable genes with respect to dental matters, or she had some work done. Maybe both. “I don’t really want to be famous,” she said, “I just want to have a good time with fun people.”

  “Are you having a good time now?”

  “Definitely.” She smiled. “This is much more interesting than looking at art that I really don’t care about.”

  I was about to agree when my cell phone rang. The caller ID indicated Rich. Why would he be calling me so late on a Friday night? I excused myself from the conversation with Gloria and decided to find out.

  “It’s after 10:30,” I said. “You’re keeping late hours.”

  “You should get down here,” he said.

  “Where is here, and why should I get there?”

  “Herring Run Park. You know where it is?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why am I going?”

  “We got a dead guy,” said Rich.

  “I can’t imagine what you need me—”

  “He has your business card in his wallet.”

  I felt my lungs deflate as the air left them. I looked at Gloria, who frowned in concern. Rich filled the gap in the conversation. “C.T.? You still there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m here. Is it Paul Fisher?”

  “You got it.”

  I let out a long, slow breath. “How did he die?”

  “Car accident,” Rich said. “You need to get down here.”

  “I’m leaving now.” I put my phone away. Gloria’s brows were still pulled into a frown. “I have to go. Something . . . unpleasant has happened in my case. Now it’s gone in a totally different direction.” I flagged down the waiter and handed him my card.

  She nodded. “OK. Wait a second before you go.” Gloria took a pen from her dainty purse, wrote her phone number on a napkin, and handed it to me. “Call me later. We can continue our conversation and see where else it leads.”

  I considered giving her a business card, but didn’t want her to laugh at my father’s terrible tagline. What the heck? She seemed interested enough to this point. I gave her one anyway. “My cell number is on there,” I said. “Sorry to have to run out like this.”

  “I understand,” Gloria said with a smile. I knew she didn’t, but I appreciated the effort.

  “You’re OK to get back?” I said as I signed the check.

  “My parents will send the driver to get me,” Gloria said.

  Of course they would.

  I left the Red Maple, wondering what the hell had happened to Paul Fisher.

  Chapter 9

  When I came up Belair Road from downtown, I saw flashing lights from police cars and an ambulance on Chesterfield Avenue. Those streets form two borders of Herring Run Park, which ran all the way from Belair Road to Harford Road. It has a few baseball diamonds and also plays host to soccer and football games in season, but the bulk of it is covered by trees and two walking trails. Those pathways, usually dark at night, now had police cars and ambulances to brighten the way.

  The lights covered my windshield as I drove down the road, bathing everything I saw in blue and red. How did I get into this? Alice Fisher hired me because she thought her husband guilty of playing grab-ass at his office. He hadn’t. Now he was dead. Maybe it had been a legitimate car accident. Maybe not. The Fishers lived far enough away from Herring Run Park to make me wonder what Paul was doing there.

  I parked on the street near all the commotion. Residents stood in their front yards, talking to one another and taking pictures and videos with their cell phones. A couple of uniforms maintained the perimeter of the accident scene on my side. I showed them my ID. They merely looked at me until Rich walked up in plain clothes rather than a uniform. “He’s OK,” he said, and they waved me in. I lifted the yellow tape, and it hit me how I just walked into my first crime scene, or whatever they called this. The realization gave me pause. I had watched enough cop shows to know the things to do and not do at scene like this. None of them prepared me for actually being in one.

  “Glad you could make it,” Rich said.

  “Yeah, thanks for calling me,” I said. I still felt like I had walked in on some surreal movie. I would need to ask him about the suit later
.

  “Try not to touch anything,” Rich said, smirking.

  “I know what I’m supposed to do and not do.”

  “First accident scene, though, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” After a pause, I said, “isn’t this a crime scene?”

  “Where’s the crime? A guy drove into a tree.”

  We walked along Chesterfield, deeper into the sea of police cars, officers, and paramedics. I looked at the yellow tape. “POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS,” it told everyone. Nothing about a crime scene. I could see what happened as we approached. Paul Fisher’s car went off the road, down a long hill, and crashed into a tree. The driver’s side door was open. The body had already been bagged and put onto a gurney. Rich and I descended the hill toward the car. Once I got closer, I saw the windshield had been destroyed.

  “Looks like he went through,” Rich said.

  “No seat belt, then,” I said. “Interesting.”

  “Why is that interesting?”

  “Paul Fisher is a . . . was a happily married man with a good job. He was devoted to his wife. Their house was plain and boring. He’s not a risk-taker. He doesn’t seem like the type to go around without a seat belt.”

  “People surprise us sometimes,” said Rich.

  “Not often,” I said.

  We walked to the car. Because this was my accident scene initiation, I wanted to pay attention and not miss anything. That sounded good for all crime scenes, but I knew the mockery from Rich would be worse if I missed something important at the first one. Paul Fisher’s car hit the tree hard enough to crumple the front end. It struck to the right side of the center. The windshield looked like something heavy had gone flying through it. I wondered how fast a car had to go for a body to smash through. Should I know those details? The detritus Paul collected in his car had been thrown forward at impact, leaving a couple of coffee cups and other random trash scattered about on the grass. The driver’s and passenger’s seats were even with one another. The driver’s door was open, but I didn’t know if it had been found that way or if the police opened it to look around the car more.

  “Was the door open when you found it?” I said.

  “No,” Rich said, “I did it so we could look around. The ME already looked at the body by then.”

  “Pictures taken?”

  “Enough to fill a scrapbook.”

  “Body is beaten up?”

  “Like it’s been in a car accident.”

  I looked around some more. Nothing jumped out at me as suspicious. It certainly appeared as if Paul Fisher drove off the road, crashed into a tree, exited his car via the windshield, and died. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been here in the first place. He and Alice lived a good half-hour away. Why had his car veered into a tree? I strolled around and looked at the tires; they were all intact, taking a blowout of the table. The matter of Paul Fisher going through the glass bothered me, too. I had painted an accurate picture of him: a family man with a good job who appeared normal and careful in his everyday life didn’t drive around without seat belts.

  “Something bothers you, doesn’t it?” Rich said.

  “A few things,” I said. “No seat belt is one among them.”

  “We’ll figure it out. The ME is going to do an autopsy, and we’ll have several people going over the accident.”

  “Anyone tell his wife yet?”

  “No, not yet,” he said. “You want to go with me? You seem to know her. Maybe that’ll make it a little easier.”

  “It won’t,” I said, “but I’ll go.”

  It was after eleven-thirty when we got to the Fishers’ house. Rich and I got out of the Lexus and made our way up the sidewalk. “Ever have to talk to a sudden widow before?” I said.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Rich said.

  “Does it ever get easy?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “What’s with the plain clothes, anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” We got to the doorstep, and I knocked on the door. A light went on upstairs. Footsteps came down a few seconds later. Alice Fisher opened the door. The undone neck of her robe revealed a nightgown, and she wore a pair of pink slippers. She frowned when she saw me, then frowned more when she saw Rich’s badge. “Hello, Mrs. Fisher,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “May we come in?”

  She opened the door wider and let us in. We walked into the living room. Alice turned on a light and stood behind a recliner, her arms crossed under her chest, the robe wrapped tightly around her. “Would you like to sit down?” Rich said.

  “No,” she said. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It’s about your husband, Paul. We found his car wrecked in Herring Run Park. It’s in northeast Baltimore. I—”

  “I know where it is. What’s wrong?” The light on the end table reflected in the tears welling in Alice’s eyes. She had to know where this was going.

  “Mrs. Fisher, I’m very sorry to tell you this, but your husband is dead.”

  “No!” Alice cried. “No, no, no, no, no.” She ran to me and buried her head against my shoulder. She kept muttering denials through her tears. I put my arms around her and let her cry. This poor woman had been through a lot. First, she thought her husband was cheating on her, then I discovered her gambling problem, and now her husband was dead. Right now, I wished Paul Fisher had been a rotten and unfaithful husband. It might have kept him alive.

  Alice cried on my jacket for several minutes before pulling back. “You’re . . . sure it’s him?” she said, wiping her eyes.

  Rich nodded. “We are.”

  “What happened?”

  Rich told her the details. “We need you to come with us to identify the body.”

  Alice shook her head, looked at me, and sobbed again. “Why did this happen?” she said. “You were supposed to follow him.” She punched me in the shoulder, the same one she had been crying into up until a moment ago. “Why weren’t you there? Why weren’t you there!” Alice drew her fist back to punch me again. I caught it when it got near me, looked at her, and watched her dissolve into tears again. She put her head on my upper chest and cried for a few more minutes.

  When she finished, she looked at Rich. “I’ll go with you. Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

  “Take as much time as you need,” Rich said.

  Alice went upstairs. Rich and I sat in the living room and waited. I couldn’t find anything to say. The room felt so empty it didn’t seem right to talk. Rich must have felt the same way because we sat in silence. All I heard was our breathing and a clock ticking in the next room. About ten minutes later, Alice came downstairs in a sweater and jeans. It looked like she had been crying some more. She grabbed a tissue, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and threw the tissue away. “Can we go now?” she said.

  “Of course,” Rich said. “You can ride with us. We’ll have someone take you home.”

  “All right,” Alice said, and we left.

  Alice went to see the medical examiner. Rich offered to go with her, but she declined. She asked me to go with her. I looked at Rich, who shrugged at me. I agreed to go along. Alice needed the moral support. She knew what happened, but only on the surface. She would have more questions soon, and a look at the body would do nothing to alleviate them. If anything, it would only create more.

  We entered the medical examiner’s office. I noted the lack of a putrid smell in the air. This place must have had a ridiculous ventilation system. The ME on duty was a lanky, fiftyish man named Dr. Sellers. He had a full head of gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He gave us a sympathetic smile as we walked in. Alice simply looked at him. I didn’t think she knew what to say. “This is Alice Fisher,” I said. “She’s here to identify her husband’s body.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Fisher,” Dr. Sellers said. He had a slight Boston accent. We walked to the tables. Three had bodies lying atop them, all covered by white sheets. Dr. Sel
lers pulled back the sheet on the right. I stood a few steps back, but I could tell it was Paul Fisher. Cuts and bruises covered his face. I took a deep breath—this was my first dead body. Alice saw him and bawled again. “Is this your husband?”

  She nodded a few times and tried to say something through her tears, but I couldn’t understand it. It must have been good enough for Dr. Sellers because he frowned and draped the body with the white shroud again. Alice turned around, took a few steps toward me, and slumped forward. I caught her and let her sob on my shoulder some more. Dr. Sellers looked at us for a moment, then went back to his work. Alice cried for a few more minutes and then straightened, wiped at her eyes, and smoothed her hair. I found a box of tissues and gave her a couple. “Can you wait for me in the hallway?” I said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  Alice nodded and walked out the door into the hallway. Dr. Sellers took a break from his work and regarded me. I took another deep breath and showed him my ID. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m suspicious due to her husband dying in a car accident.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” he said. I’ve only done a prelim, but injuries are consistent with that kind of trauma. Broken bones, contusions, lacerations. His face is bruised and cut from the windshield, and I found some glass in it. Looks like a car accident to me.”

  I frowned. I had hoped Dr. Sellers would support my suspicions. The car crash still felt wrong to me. “Any drugs in his system?” I said.

  “We won’t know for a few days.”

  I nodded. “Is there any chance he was dead before the accident?”

  “You mean, like a heart attack?”

  “No, Doctor. I mean, could he have been killed, then the accident staged?”

  Doctor Sellers sighed. “I doubt it,” he said. “The body was pretty fresh when it got called in.”

  His opinion was discouraging. “I presume your full findings will be in your report?”

  He nodded. “I’ll have it finished in a day or two, pending the tox screen.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you, Doctor.”