Idyll Threats

by Stephanie Gayle

  “You’re here about Cecilia North.” She sat. All her office items were aligned at right angles. “It’s such a tragedy.” Tragedy is a word outsiders use to describe terrible events.

  “You were close?” Ah, Finnegan. He was winning me over today.

  “She often came to me for advice.” She rubbed her hands together. If she were playing poker, I’d call that movement a tell.

  “I thought Jenna Dash was assigned to help Cecilia?”

  Scorn pulled her lips back. “Jenna is in charge of surveys and studies. She hardly communicates with others outside of her data collection.”

  “How was Cecilia, once she got settled?” I asked.

  She set her hands flat on the desk. Her veins were ropy and very blue. “She tried hard. But she wasn’t always punctual, and time is money. She took two sick days when she only had one. And she spent too much time answering basic questions.”

  “Was she reprimanded?”

  “Ms. O’Donnell spoke to her, but nothing was added to her record.” How would she know? She saw me look at Finnegan and said, “Cecilia told me.” She’d left the lie too late.

  “Did she seem troubled lately? Worried?” I asked. She shrugged. “You’ve said you were close. I’d hoped you might know if something was bothering her.”

  “Things have been busy with the new crop of hires. We didn’t have a lot of time to be chatting.” I said nothing. She bit her lower lip and added, “Lately, she seemed distracted. I asked what was wrong, but she said she hadn’t gotten enough sleep.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to harm her?”

  She adjusted her stapler. “No, but you might ask Gary Clark. He spent enough time in her office.” There he was again. Gary Clark.

  “Is there anything else you can think of about her last days?” Finnegan asked.

  “She borrowed three dollars from me Friday to get a sandwich. She was going to pay me back, but—” She read our faces and said, “Of course, I don’t care about the money. It’s just so hard to believe she won’t be here again.” The crocodile tears came. I would’ve left her to sniffle, but Finnegan handed her a tissue. I gave her my card. Then I threw three singles on her desk. “I’m sure Cecilia would have wanted you to have them,” I said. She looked as though I’d slapped her. Good.

  Ms. O’Donnell gave us Cecilia’s office key after she warned us not to review any files in there, which were confidential. She said she couldn’t believe we’d find anything to help us. “She lacks imagination,” Finnegan said, as we examined Cecilia’s desktop.

  “And a heart,” I said.

  There was an aloe plant on the file cabinet. Pictures of friends and family on her desk. A greeting card urged her to “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty.” Finnegan tossed her daily calendar into a bag. I looked through her folders.

  “Are those the confidential, do-not-touch folders?” he asked.

  “Are they?” I held one up. “Gary Clark.” There was a picture. He was handsome in a preppy way. Blond hair, brown eyes, conservative shirt and tie. Mid to late thirties. Was this the man from the cabin? Maybe. It had been dark.

  “Is that the face of a killer?” Finnegan asked. “God, I hope so. I swear, the more clean-cut killers you get, the better guys like me look.”

  “Let’s see if we can find the real article.” Maybe in person I’d know if it was him. And maybe he’d recognize me. I bit my cheek. Ouch. I still had a sore. “I need to go to the gents. Find him, will you? Ask some basic questions, get a feel for him.”

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing. Sometimes after I have coffee I—”

  “Say no more,” he said. “I’ll meet you back here.”

  I used the toilet. Washed my hands. Imagined what Finnegan was doing. I should’ve gone with him. If Clark was the guy, I’d know. But then he’d see me. He’d ask questions. I crumpled my paper towel into a tight ball. “Fuck!” I tossed it at the garbage can. Missed. Instead of doing my job, I was hiding in the men’s room. And how long could I hide? I slapped my hands against the sink. The exposed pipes juddered.

  A man entered the bathroom. I pushed off from the sink and left to pace the hall.

  Two minutes later, Finnegan returned and said Gary Clark was at an insurance seminar until Thursday. “But, get this, his colleague asked if he’d had another car accident.” We walked to the elevators. “Why would police show up about a car accident?”

  “Look into it. You learn anything else? Is he married? What’s he drive?”

  “Didn’t ask, and a Honda Accord. Why?”

  “Curious. Any pictures on his desk?”

  “Didn’t see.” He was giving me side-eye, so I stopped with the questions.

  We talked about small things on the return trip: graffiti tags near the middle school, and the burglaries that had occurred in the mayor’s neighborhood. I’d heard a lot about those, mostly from the mayor. But my mind was back at the insurance company. I’d have to send Finnegan again, or ask Clark to come to the station. Where he would see me. No, Finnegan would have to go back. My cheek throbbed.

  1530 HOURS

  At the station there was a spike in the chatter. Wright found us. His face was calm, but his eyes weren’t. “You need to see this,” he said.

  “See what?” We followed him. I noticed his shoes were worn at the heels. He walked heavy for a slim guy.

  “Revere found it.” He sounded annoyed.

  Wedged onto a rolling cart was a bulky television attached to an ancient VCR. Revere held a remote control. When we’d gathered around, he hit play. A bodega appeared on screen, the frame focused on the cash-register counter. The store was empty. Someone walked into sight. She looked up, right at the camera. Cecilia North. “When was this taken?” I asked. She looked down, at the cashier. Only the back of his baseball cap was visible.

  “August ninth,” Revere said. She smiled and handed the cashier a soda can. He hit a register key. “At Cumberland Farms.”

  She looked at something in the rows below her waist. Grabbed a packet and gave it to the cashier. She spoke, and then laughed.

  “Who’s the cashier?” Finnegan asked.

  “Donny Browning. Lives in Willington.”

  She smiled, waved, and left. Another person entered, an older white male. He headed for the back, out of frame in seconds.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  Revere hit the remote’s stop button. “That’s it.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Nine forty-two p.m. She told Donny she was going to see a friend.” The man in the cabin, no doubt.

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  She’d walked out of the store and gone to the cabin, where we met. Less than two hours later, she was dead. “No one’s said boo about meeting her that night,” Finnegan said.

  “Did the cashier come forward with this?” I asked.

  “No,” Revere said. He tugged at his dress-shirt cuffs.

  “How’d you find it?”

  He said, “Good old-fashioned police work.” I clenched my jaw. “I went door-to-door, covering all buildings within a two-mile radius.” We should’ve done that. We had done that, or so I’d thought. But we’d missed this. What else had we missed?

  “Good work. I want to see this Donny Browning.”

  “I can type up my notes in fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk to him myself.”

  “He worked the rest of the night. The tape shows him there until five thirty a.m.” Revere sounded like an exasperated parent, explaining a simple concept to a whining child.

  But I wasn’t his child. “Tapes can be faked.”

  “And destroyed, which he didn’t do. Honestly, this kid’s not bright enough to edit a videotape.” He looked annoyed. The others enjoyed this. Finnegan and Wright might think I was too hands-on, but they didn’t like Revere. And they sure as fuck didn’t like being upstaged
by him.

  “Pick him up,” I said to Wright. “Bring him in.”

  “Yes, sir.” He saluted me. His smile got wider as he walked past Revere.

  Forty minutes later, I met the cashier. Donny Browning had close-set eyes, a weak chin, and a baseball cap he had to be told to remove. His nicotine-yellowed fingertips would’ve outed him as a smoker if his stink hadn’t first.

  “So, Donny. You saw Cecilia the night she died.”

  His eyes jackrabbited about the room. “I want my lawyer.”

  “You have an attorney you’d like to contact?” What gas-station employee had a lawyer on call?

  “Yeah. Douglas Browning. My father.”

  I let him place the call. Twenty minutes later, his father came to the station loaded for bear. I must’ve looked furry, because he went straight for me. “Why are you interrogating Donny?” He wore his money: leather briefcase and a fancy, silk-blend suit.

  We talked in my office. I wanted home-court advantage. “Donny saw Cecilia North the night she was murdered. We want to ask some questions about his interaction with her.”

  “He’s already answered questions.”

  “We have a few more. Donny might remember something that helps us catch her killer.” That deflated him. He couldn’t fault our cause.

  “I’ll join you.” He brushed my office lint from his suit. “I’ve seen the news. Abner Louima. Seems you New York cops like to play rough with suspects.”

  Abner Louima. The papers and TV were full of him. The Haitian resident of Brooklyn who’d been arrested, then sodomized with a broom handle by two New York police officers while in custody. No doubt people would be taking to the streets in protest soon.

  “We’re not in New York,” I said.

  Mr. Browning harrumphed and followed me out of my office.

  When his father entered the interview room, Donny looked scared. Mr. Browning sat at the same side of the battered table as his son. But he was careful not to touch him.

  Mr. Browning said, “Did they ask you anything after you called me?”

  “No,” Donny said. He squirmed in his chair.

  “May we continue?” I asked. No one objected. “Donny, what time did Cecilia come into the store?”

  “Ten o’clock or so.” He was off by almost twenty minutes, but that wasn’t a crime.

  “Had you met her before?” He shrugged, his hands limp in his lap.

  “Answer,” his father said.

  “We went to middle school together. And I saw her at the store sometimes. Mostly to fill her car with gas.”

  “How did she seem that night?”

  Mr. Browning put his hand in front of his son, as if protecting him from sudden braking. “You want my son to speculate as to Miss North’s mental state?”

  Stop grandstanding, Perry Mason. There’s no judge here.

  “It would be helpful to know if she was agitated,” Revere said. I hadn’t wanted him here, but he’d caught the tape. So he got to sit at the big boys’ table. He lounged in his seat, not a care in the world. Not his usual attitude. An act for the Brownings.

  “She seemed fine. She bought Pop Rocks and a Coke. They used to say that if you ate them at the same time, you’d explode. She said she was going to take a big risk.”

  “You’re sure she was joking about the candy?” Revere asked.

  “Sure. What else would she be talking about?” He pushed his lower lip out. The resemblance to a chimp was uncanny.

  “Did she say anything about this friend she was meeting?” I asked. “A name? Maybe she said ‘he’ or ‘she’?”

  “I don’t think so. I asked if she was headed out for the night or if she was going home, and she said she was meeting a friend. I told her to have a good night.”

  I leaned forward. “Donny, why didn’t you mention this? We’ve been asking everyone to come forward with any information they have.”

  His eyes started up like a pinball again. “I don’t pay much attention to the news. I didn’t know she was dead until this morning.”

  “But you didn’t call us when you realized.”

  Mr. Browning said, “Donny sold her a soda. I don’t think he thought that was going to help you find a killer.” He glanced at the walls, then down at his wrist. Checking the time. I’d had the men remove the large school clock from the wall my first week here. I liked to keep the men deposited in here guessing about the time, about how much they had left as free men.

  “Your son is the last person we know who saw Cecilia North alive. You think that’s irrelevant?”

  “I think you should be looking for this woman’s friend, the one she was meeting.”

  “The one we wouldn’t have known about if we hadn’t talked to Donny.” Not exactly true. But he didn’t know that. None of them did.

  “I think he’s told you everything he knows.” Mr. Browning looked at his briefcase. His small supply of patience was nearly spent.

  “Do you know any kids who hang out on the golf course?” I asked. Donny looked at his father, then away. “Do you?”

  “No,” he said, fast. Too fast?

  I left some breathing room for him to elaborate. He didn’t, so I asked, “Do you know anyone who owns a gun?”

  His eyes got skittish and he tapped the table. “Do you?” I repeated.

  “Dad,” Donny said. His voice crept toward a whine.

  Revere said, “Do you know who killed Cecilia North?”

  That took everyone aback. Donny recovered first. “No.” He bit a fingernail.

  “We’re through here,” Mr. Browning said. “My son answered your questions. I’m going to take him to his place now.” His place. So they didn’t live together.

  Donny took his cap from the table and followed his father from the room, eyes glued to the carpet. “Interesting,” Revere said.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  We exited the room to find Mrs. Dunsmore waiting, arms crossed. You could lose a dime in her frown lines. “I just saw Douglas Browning,” she said. It sounded like an accusation.

  “His son, Donny, saw Cecilia North the night she died,” I said.

  “Watch out for Mr. Browning. He’s a big-time lawyer. Sued the town years ago. Claimed building permits were being blocked unfairly. Got a quarter of a million dollars. Bankrupted the town and moved his family away.”

  “So he’s not popular?”

  “Not here. But it’s best to stay on his good side. Assuming he’s got one.”

  “Hmm. Any word on when the carpenter is coming?”

  “Carpenter? What carpenter?” she asked.

  “The one who’s supposed to swap the nameplate on my door.” When I’d arrived in mid-January, I was informed that changing the nameplate required the town carpenter. Forms to be filed, work orders to be placed. Mrs. Dunsmore filled out the forms and orders. I wondered if she’d even obtained the forms.

  “He’s working at Town Hall this week.” She didn’t miss a beat.

  Unlike the rest of us. God, if Revere hadn’t pounded the pavement, we’d still be wondering where Cecilia went between the time she left her parents’ house and wound up dead. And they still didn’t know about the cabin. I bit my cheek. Ouch.

  In my office, tilted back in my chair, I contemplated options. How to get them to the cabin. Call in a tip? Or cut out the middleman? Leave a pink slip on Wright’s desk, saying Cecilia had been seen at the cabin. He wouldn’t check who took the tip call until he’d swept the cabin. My gut rumbled. Manufacturing evidence. Did I want to start down that path?

  “Needs must,” my gran used to say when I’d complain about chores.

  I used the phrase on rookies, years later, when they’d moan about having to interview a drunk whose pants stank of his own filth. “Needs must,” I’d say, and the men would laugh and say, “Ah, lay a little more of that Irish wisdom on us.”

  I missed that camaraderie, the quick laughter at jokes heard a hundred times. Idyll wasn’t friendly despite the locals’ insistence
to the contrary. Newcomers were subject to suspicion. And I had secrets to guard. I didn’t trust my men here to keep them. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  I could put the pink slip on a desk before any of them arrived tomorrow.

  Needs must.

  I breathed hard and sharp through my nose as I crunched up, turned to the right, punched fast. Back down to the floor, inhaling through my mouth. Crunch up and to the left. Two more punches in sync to a sharp exhale. Sometimes, when my brain got stuck in a revolving door, I’d work it loose with exercise. My gut was feeling it. My brain remained mired, like those animals that got trapped in tar pits and turned to fossils. I crunched down and up. I wasn’t a fossil yet. I sat up and shook my head. A drop of sweat spun off my hair to the carpet. Time for push-ups.

  Rick had challenged me to a push-up contest two weeks into our partnership. I laughed, sure he wasn’t serious. “What you afraid of, Sasquatch? Losing?” he’d asked. I’d checked the room to see if there was some joke I didn’t get. Nearby, Detective Lee shrugged. So, after more taunts from Rick, I’d agreed to set my hands on the less-than-clean linoleum and complete a set of push-ups until one of us gave out. The son of a bitch had surprised me. His arms were wiry and he fought for it, but eventually he’d collapsed, cheek to the floor, and had said, “Christ, were you a Marine?” And I’d kept doing reps, just to show what a good sport I was. When I’d stopped, he’d given me his hand and helped pull me up. “Guess that makes you the muscle,” he’d said, his smile revealing a chipped tooth. “That makes me the brains.” And he’d insisted on buying me a soda, which was the traditional prize awarded in the station. The prize for closing a stone-cold case or for winning the March Madness pool. Always a goddam can of soda from the wheezy, tilted vending machine.

  I stopped, my elbows bent, stomach quaking. A soda can. I’d seen soda cans inside the cabin the night I’d tried to hook up with Leo Wilton, where I’d met Cecilia North. She’d bought a soda that night. One of the cans could be hers. Could have prints. Could put her at the scene. I pushed myself up and toward the shower. If I hurried, I could make it into the station before the others. And fake a note pointing them to the cabin.

  A half hour later, I sat behind my desk. My office plant stood at attention as I tried my hand at forgery, again. This was my eighth attempt at replicating the floral script of our tips line coordinator, Joanne. I botched the victim’s name, making the C’s spike too hard. No good. Checked my watch. Fuck. Wright would be at his desk in twenty minutes. A knock at my door. Damn it. I fanned my folders over my handiwork and said, “Come in.” Billy entered, looking all of sixteen years old.