MOSTLY MURDER: Till Death: a mystery anthology

by Lawrence Block

  “They’re still giving out the drug, Joss… someone’s still running the trial, obviously. But anything I find snooping around isn’t evidence that can be used in court. And anyone invested in the criminal justice system is going to get only so close to the truth… and then, I imagine, will be told to back off.”

  For a long moment there was silence. Then Hunter said, “I might know a journalist or two who’s itching for a Pulitzer. Let me see if maybe one of them would be interested in taking up the charge. Because to do something about this, you don’t need a private investigator… you need a knight in shining armor.”

  XIII

  “It’s been a hell of a day for you, Margie. We need to get you some dinner. And a drink,” said Hunter as Joss closed the front door behind them. “What do you say? I think you should stay at my place one more night… your stuff is still there, and you look all in. No need for you to drive home tonight.”

  “Okay.” For a moment, Margie lost herself in the fog of all she had just been hit with. She turned to Hunter, attempting a smile. “Dinner sounds great, but do you mind if we stop at the office? The locksmith said he had one more lock to change… the one on the back door. I know it’s obsessive, but it would help me feel more secure.”

  As they approached the front door of the office, Margie saw a light in one of the back offices. Larry’s office. She gripped Hunter’s arm and pointed silently to the long sliver of light that cut across the dark space.

  “Let’s go around the back,” he whispered. “And let me go first.” From a shoulder holster she hadn’t realized he was wearing, he pulled out a gun.

  The back door was open. Hunter pushed it wider, stepped inside and looked around, gun ready. Then he turned and beckoned to Margie. “Stay behind me.”

  They crept to the door. Larry’s office was cattycorner, Margie’s next door. From Larry’s office, they could hear someone moving around, muttering to himself.

  The scent of Larry’s aftershave was strong in the air.

  In two strides, Hunter was in the door of Larry’s office, the gun high. “Hands up, you son of a bitch. Step away from the desk, and maybe you can tell us what you’re doing here, before Mrs. Dowling calls the police.”

  Margie stepped around Hunter and gasped to see Pastor Dave cringing behind Larry’s desk, arms raised, round circles of sweat staining his white shirt. On the surface of the desk, Larry’s laptop was open.

  “Pastor Dave?” she asked, incredulous. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh God! Please don’t shoot. I’m so sorry, Margie. I didn’t mean to cause all this trouble and make all this mess, truly I didn’t. This was a—Larry made me promise on his death bed—that I would erase all the incriminating evidence from his computer, from his home.”

  “Incriminating evidence of what?” Hunter demanded. Margie touched his arm, and he lowered the gun, but only slightly.

  “His… his affliction.” Pastor Dave looked from one to the other. “At least, that’s how he saw it.”

  Margie stared in disbelief. “You broke into my house? You?”

  “Yes, yes, it was me… I needed passwords, and Larry said they were in the bedside table. But I didn’t break in, Margie. Larry gave me the key. He meant to give me the passwords, but… there was no time.”

  “You’re the one who flushed those condoms?” asked Hunter. In response, Pastor Dave nodded.

  “Oh my God,” Margie said, sinking down onto the couch. “How could Larry have kept this from me? How could I not have known?”

  “He didn’t want you to know,” Hunter and Pastor Dave said at once.

  “He worked very hard so that you wouldn’t know,” Pastor Dave continued. “Believe me.” He took a deep breath. “And believe me when I say I’ll pay for the window and the TV and everything else, Margie. I really feel awful about this. I encouraged Larry to talk to you. This all is not what I… well, this is not my typical kind of Christian duty.”

  * * *

  It was too late for dinner after all but not, fortunately, for a drink. They drove to the nearest bar, where Hunter ordered both of them beers and shots of whiskey. When she demurred, he insisted. “If anyone needs a drink, Margie, it’s you. Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  But the whiskey couldn’t answer her questions. “I just don’t understand, Hunter. If he knew I loved him, why couldn’t he come to me?”

  “You should ask your doctor friend that, kiddo,” replied Hunter. “I know he loved you, he loved the life he had with you, and he loved the business we all built. I told him he had to work things out with you, not with some whack-a-doodle drug.”

  “But why did you leave? I can understand why you fought…why did you leave?”

  “Because I told him I wasn’t going to stand by and watch the woman I loved live a lie. All secrets lead to lies. And that just wasn’t right.”

  “Hunter, what do you mean, the woman you loved?” Margie stared at Hunter, uncertain she had heard correctly.

  “Oh, come on, Margie, don’t say you didn’t know something, at least on some level. We were quite a threesome, if only subliminally. My ex-wife showed me that when she left and said she wasn’t going to be part of a triangle that didn’t need a fourth. She was wrong about a lot of things, but she wasn’t wrong about that. I had to back away. It wasn’t healthy. Because even if it worked in some weird way, it wasn’t what I wanted.”

  Margie blinked, uncertain how to respond. She couldn’t deny the feeling that her world was a better place with Hunter in it, but now wasn’t the time to deal with it. “Did Larry ever…?” Margie trailed off, afraid to ask the question.

  Hunter laughed. “Approach me? Are you kidding? I was many things to Larry… but the object of his lust, never. And Larry noticed that he wasn’t the Dowling I was most interested in.” His lips turned up in the smallest of smiles, and then his expression turned serious. “But there is something else I wanted to talk to you about. You mentioned you wanted to sell the business; you couldn’t manage it on your own. What if I bought the business, and we ran it together? Dowling & Dowd… not so much a resurrection as a reorganization?

  Margie turned the beer bottle around in her hands. The condensation ran down the sides, her fingers slipping on the glass. She was tired. Now wasn’t the time to make a major decision like this. And she could hardly process what Hunter was telling her.

  She closed her eyes and took a breath. There was still follow-up to do on the Holcombe case, especially if there was going to be an investigation into the ongoing prison drug trials. Plus, there were other details to attend to before she could wrap up the business… or decide to keep it open.

  She looked up at him. “I can’t answer you tonight, Hunter, but I promise I will consider it. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you never keep a secret, ever. What was it you just said… all secrets lead to lies?”

  Hunter clinked his bottle against hers gently. “As Ben Franklin said, two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.”

  Q&A with Anne Kelleher

  This is a very intricate story about two couples who both have secrets. How did you weave the threads together, and is this a typical example of your writing style?

  “All Secrets Lead to Lies” is definitely the kind of story I like to tell. I’m always fascinated by the way people understand the same events differently depending on what they know—or believe they know.

  Tell us about your background as a writer and what other stories have come before.

  I sold my first novel—Daughter of Prophecy—to Warner Books in 1993. It was promptly orphaned when the acquiring editor left. It finally came out in 1995—since then I’ve published ten more traditionally and five more with a small press. Last year I discovered the magic of self-publishing. and published a collection of short stories and my first nonfiction title, How to be a Happy Slob. Most of my fiction falls under the broad category of speculative fiction; I’ve done everything from epic f
antasy with a bit of science fiction thrown in to contemporary paranormal mysteries.

  What’s on your laptop now as a current project?

  My current project is the third book of my erotic contemporary romance, Wickham’s Fate.

  Where do you hang out online and how can fans find out about your other books?

  You can find me online mostly on Facebook. Check out my author page at www.amazon.com/Anne-Kelleher/e/B001H6SAXU or my personal website at www.AnneKelleher.net.

  As Good as a Rest

  by Lawrence Block

  Andrew says the whole point of a vacation is to change your perspective of the world. A change is as good as a rest, he says, and vacations are about change, not rest. If we just wanted a rest, he says, we could stop the mail and disconnect the phone and stay home; that would add up to more of a traditional rest than traipsing all over Europe. Sitting in front of the television set with your feet up, he says, is generally considered to be more restful than climbing the forty-two thousand steps to the top of Notre Dame.

  Of course, there aren’t forty-two thousand steps, but it did seem like it at the time. We were with the Dattners-—by the time we got to Paris the four of us had already buddied up—and Harry kept wondering aloud why the genius who’d built the cathedral hadn’t thought to put in an elevator. And Sue, who’d struck me earlier as unlikely to be afraid of anything, turned out to be petrified of heights. There are two staircases at Notre Dame, one going up and one coming down, and to get from one to the other you have to walk along this high ledge. It’s really quite wide, even at its narrowest, and the view of the rooftops of Paris is magnificent, but all of this was wasted on Sue, who clung to the rear wall with her eyes clenched shut.

  Andrew took her arm and walked her through it, while Harry and I looked out at the City of Light. “It’s high open spaces that does it to her,” he told me. “Yesterday, the Eiffel Tower, no problem, because the space was enclosed. But when it’s open she starts getting afraid that she’ll get sucked over the side or that she’ll get this sudden impulse to jump, and, well, you see what it does to her.”

  While neither Andrew nor I have ever been troubled by heights, whether open or enclosed, the climb to the top of the cathedral wasn’t the sort of thing we’d have done at home, especially since we’d already had a spectacular view of the city the day before from the Eiffel Tower. I’m not mad about walking up stairs, but it didn’t occur to me to pass up the climb. For that matter, I’m not that mad about walking generally—Andrew says I won’t go anywhere without a guaranteed parking space—but it seems to me that I walked from one end of Europe to the other, and didn’t mind a bit.

  When we weren’t walking through streets or up staircases, we were parading through museums. That’s hardly a departure for me, but for Andrew it is uncharacteristic behavior in the extreme. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is one of the best in the country, and it’s not twenty minutes from our house. We have a membership, and I go all the time, but it’s almost impossible to get Andrew to go.

  But in Paris he went to the Louvre, and the Rodin Museum, and that little museum in the sixteenth arrondissement with the most wonderful collection of Monets. And in London he led the way to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert, and in Amsterdam he spent three hours in the Rijksmuseum and hurried us to the Van Gogh Museum first thing the next morning. By the time we got to Madrid, I was museumed out. I knew it was a sin to miss the Prado but I just couldn’t face it, and I wound up walking around the city with Harry while my husband dragged Sue through galleries of El Grecos and Goyas and Velásquezes.

  “Now that you’ve discovered museums,” I told Andrew, “you may take a different view of the Museum of Fine Arts. There’s a show of American landscape painters that’ll still be running when we get back—I think you’ll like it.”

  He assured me he was looking forward to it. But you know he never went. Museums are strictly a vacation pleasure for him. He doesn’t even want to hear about them when he’s at home.

  For my part, you’d think I’d have learned by now not to buy clothes when we travel. Of course, it’s impossible not to—there are some genuine bargains and some things you couldn’t find at home—but I almost always wind up buying something that remains unworn in my closet forever after. It seems so right in some foreign capital, but once I get it home I realize it’s not me at all, and so it lives out its days on a hanger, a source in turn of fond memories and faint guilt. It’s not that I lose judgment when I travel, or become wildly impulsive. It’s more that I become a slightly different person during the course of the trip and the clothes I buy for that person aren’t always right for the person I am in Boston.

  Oh, why am I nattering on like this? You don’t have to look in my closet to see how travel changes a person. For heaven’s sake, just look at the Dattners.

  If we hadn’t all been on vacation together, we would never have come to know Harry and Sue, let alone spend so much time with them. We would never have encountered them in the first place—day-to-day living would not have brought them to Boston, or us to Enid, Oklahoma. But even if they’d lived down the street from us, we would never have become close friends at home. To put it as simply as possible, they were not our kind of people.

  The package tour we’d booked wasn’t one of those escorted ventures in which your every minute is accounted for. It included our charter flights over and back, all our hotel accommodations, and our transportation from one city to the next. We “did” six countries in twenty-two days, but what we did in each, and where and with whom, was strictly up to us. We could have kept to ourselves altogether, and have often done so when traveling, but by the time we checked into our hotel in London the first day we’d made arrangements to join the Dattners that night for dinner, and before we knocked off our after-dinner brandies that night it had been tacitly agreed that we would be a foursome throughout the trip—unless, of course, it turned out that we tired of each other.

  “They’re a pair,” Andrew said that first night, unknotting his tie and giving it a shake before hanging it over the doorknob. “That y’all-come-back accent of hers sounds like syrup flowing over corn cakes.”

  “She’s a little flashy, too,” I said. “But that sport jacket of his—”

  “I know,” Andrew said. “Somewhere, even as we speak, a horse is shivering, his blanket having been transformed into a jacket for Harry.”

  “And yet there’s something about them, isn’t there?”

  “They’re nice people,” Andrew said. “Not our kind at all, but what does that matter? We’re on a trip. We’re ripe for a change...”

  In Paris, after a night watching a floor show at what I’m sure was a rather disreputable little nightclub in Les Halles, I lay in bed while Andrew sat up smoking a last cigarette. “I’m glad we met the Dattners,” he said. “This trip would be fun anyway, but they add to it. That joint tonight was a treat, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been for them. And do you know something? I don’t think they’d have gone if it hadn’t been for us.”

  “Where would we be without them?” I rolled onto my side. “I know where Sue would be without your helping hand. Up on top of Notre Dame, frozen with fear. Do you suppose that’s how the gargoyles got there? Are they nothing but tourists turned to stone?”

  “Then you’ll never be a gargoyle. You were a long way from petrification whirling around the dance floor tonight.”

  “Harry’s a good dancer. I didn’t think he would be, but he’s very light on his feet.”

  “The gun doesn’t weigh him down, eh?”

  I sat up. “I thought he was wearing a gun,” I said. “How on earth does he get it past the airport scanners?”

  “Undoubtedly packing it in his luggage and checking it through. He wouldn’t need it on the plane—not unless he was planning to divert the flight to Havana.”

  “I don’t think they go to Havana anymore. Why would he need it off t
he plane? I suppose tonight he’d feel safer armed. That place was a bit on the rough side.”

  “He was carrying it at the Tower of London, and in and out of a slew of museums. In fact, I think he carries it all the time except on planes. Most likely he feels naked without it.”

  “I wonder if he sleeps with it.”

  “I think he sleeps with her.”

  “Well, I know that.”

  “To their mutual pleasure, I shouldn’t wonder. Even as you and I.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  And, a bit later, he said, “You like them, don’t you?”

  “Well, of course I do. I don’t want to pack them up and take them home to Boston with us, but—”

  “You like him.”

  “Harry? Oh, I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Quite.”

  “And she’s attractive, isn’t she? You’re attracted to her.”

  “At home I wouldn’t look at her twice, but here—”

  “Say no more. That’s how I feel about him. That’s exactly how I feel about him.”

  “Do you suppose we’ll do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you suppose they’re having this very conversation two floors below?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. If they are having this conversation, and if they had the same silent prelude to this conversation, they’re probably feeling very good indeed.”

  “Mmmmm,” I said dreamily. “Even as you and I.”

  * * *

  I don’t know if the Dattners had that conversation that particular evening, but they certainly had it somewhere along the way. The little tensions and energy currents between the four of us began to build until it seemed almost as though the air were crackling with electricity. More often than not we’d find ourselves pairing off on our walks, Andrew with Sue, Harry with me. I remember one moment when he took my hand crossing the street—I remember the instant but not the street, or even the city—and a little shiver went right through me.