He paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned back to me. “Nobody knows. Not me, not her family, and certainly not the police. If they did know, maybe they’d stop calling me all the time.”
It felt like the truth.
He twisted the knob and swung the door open for me. “Goodbye, Mr. Perry.”
5
__________
Outside, the air was thick with humidity, and a bank of angry dark clouds had gathered in the west. It was a heavy, cloaking warmth, and I opened the second button of my shirt and stood on the sidewalk and stared at the sleepy town square.
Joshua Cantrell is dead . . . bones found last winter . . . buried in the woods. Case still under investigation.
Without leaving the front steps of Child’s office, I took out my cell phone and called Amy at the newspaper. For once, she was there. I asked her to do an archives search for Joshua Cantrell.
“The guy who owns the house?”
“Owned. He’s dead.”
“Lincoln—”
“Run the search, please. I’d like to know when they found the body.”
I listened as she clicked keys and people in her office laughed over something. It took a few minutes, and neither of us spoke. Then she found the right article.
“Looks like a hunter found the body on the first weekend of December.”
“That’s just before Harrison wrote me the first letter. He knew. The son of a bitch knew.”
“Lincoln, there’s stuff in here . . . hang on. It says that Cantrell is related by marriage to organized crime. To the Sanabria family.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was recently informed of that.”
“What in the hell is Parker Harrison trying to do?”
“I have no idea, but I guarantee you he knew Cantrell was dead when he sent me out here. He knew, and he didn’t tell me.”
“You don’t think he killed him? That he’s playing some sick game now because the body was found?”
“I don’t know if he killed him, but, yeah, he’s playing some sick game—and I’m going to end it.”
I called Harrison from my truck and told him to meet me at the office. I didn’t say anything else. The clouds built overhead as I drove back to the city with both hands tight on the wheel and the stereo off, the cab of the truck silent. The rain started when I reached the stoplight across from the office and was falling steadily as I walked into the building, but the air was still warm, reassuring us that this was a spring, not winter, storm. Harrison was already inside, and he met me at the top of the stairs with a smile.
“When you said you’d be in touch, I was expecting a bit more of a wait.”
I didn’t say a word. Just unlocked the door and walked inside and sat behind the desk and stared at him while he took the chair across from me, waited while his smile faded and his eyes narrowed.
“What’s the problem?” he said.
“Did you kill him?”
If I’d been expecting a visceral reaction to that, I was wrong. He lifted his hand and ran his fingertips over the scar on his cheekbone, let his eyes wander away from mine. “No, I didn’t kill him. If you’re referring to Joshua Cantrell.”
“If I’m referring . . . listen, Harrison, you twisted prick, what the hell kind of game is this? Why do I need to play it?”
“Hang on, Lincoln.”
“Shut up. I shouldn’t have ever let you in the door, and when I made that mistake I definitely shouldn’t have been stupid enough to buy your story. It was a good one, though, compelling, and you reeled me all the way in with those questions about whether I believed in rehabilitation, whether I believed in the system. A nice, subtle guilt trip. I’m sure there’s a better word for it, some psychology term, and you probably know it because you had fifteen years to sit in a cell and read books and come up with games to play. But you shouldn’t have involved me, Harrison.”
I was leaning toward him, loud and aggressive, and if that made the slightest impact he didn’t show it. He waited till I’d wound down, then said, “I told you the truth.”
“Like hell you did.”
“Lincoln, I worked for the Cantrells as a groundskeeper for one year, and ever since I’ve wondered what—”
“Oh, stop it already.” I waved him off. “All that may be true, and I don’t care if it is or if it isn’t. What I care about is that you lied to me. You sat there and talked about Joshua Cantrell as if you didn’t have the faintest idea that he was dead. Talked about wanting to find him.”
“I said nothing about wanting to find him. I said I want to find her. In fact, I assured you he was not the reason she had stayed out of touch.”
“You already knew he’d been murdered and didn’t bother to tell me that. Like it’s insignificant information, Harrison, that the guy is dead and the woman is the sister of a Youngstown mob figure? How did you get tied up with those guys in the first place? Last I knew, the requirement was to be Sicilian, not Shawnee.”
“I was never tied up with them.”
“Sure.”
“I shared minimal facts,” he said. “That I will admit.”
My laugh was heavy with disgust. “Shared minimal facts? Shit, that’s brilliant. You should’ve been an attorney, Harrison, instead of a murderer.”
That seemed to sting him, and for a moment he looked entirely genuine again. Looked hurt.
“Would you have taken this case,” he said, “if you knew all of that beforehand?”
“No.”
“See, that was my reasoning. I didn’t think you would, but I knew if I could get you to go out to the house, to stand there in that spot under the trees and feel the energy of that place, that things might change. I knew that was possible, because I knew this one was meant for you, that you’d been—”
“Shut up!” I hammered my fist onto the desk between us. “I don’t want to hear any more of it. I’m not going to take the case. We’re done.”
I stood up and walked to the door and opened it for him, just as Child had done for me an hour earlier.
“You saw the house?” he said without turning.
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t feel anything?”
“No, I did not,” I said. Was there a tug somewhere along my spine at that? Some twinge that comes from telling a lie? No, couldn’t be.
“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re offended. Sorry you feel betrayed.”
“I don’t feel betrayed, I feel stupid. I’ll give you this heads-up, though: I’m going to track down whatever police agency is investigating Cantrell’s death and tell them about your request.”
“You think I was involved?” He still had his head down, and now, standing above him, I could see another scar, long and ugly, across the back of his skull and neck.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but you’ve killed before, and you seem awfully fascinated with this couple, one of whom happens to be dead. I think the right cops ought to be told about that.”
“It’s my past that bothers you. That’s why you refuse to give me any credibility.”
“Yeah, Harrison, that does bother me. Just a touch. Sorry.”
“Let me ask you one question,” he said, keeping his back to me.
I was silent.
“Can a good man commit a horrible act?” he said.
I stood there at the door, looking at his bowed head, and then I said, “Harrison, get out.”
He nodded and got to his feet. “Okay, Mr. Perry. Goodbye.”
It was the first time he hadn’t called me Lincoln.
I stood at the door while he went through it, and then I crossed to the window and looked down as he walked out of the building and into a hard, driving rain.
6
__________
Amy was in my apartment when I got home, and she was cooking, some sort of Italian dish that had filled the rooms with a thick scent of tomatoes and garlic and made the place feel more welcoming than at any time I could remember.
; “Did anyone give you permission to touch my valuable implements?” I said, lifting a cheese grater off the counter. Amy had never cooked a meal in my apartment before.
“You want to be the only one to touch your implements, I can make that happen.” She shifted a pan on the stove and adjusted the heat.
“Seriously, to what do I owe this?”
“You sounded a little rough on the phone. Like it hadn’t been the best day.”
I listened to that, and watched her move around the kitchen, and I was grateful to see her there. She was right; it hadn’t been the best day—but those were the sort of days that could stack up on you easily, and it was a new and welcome thing for me to end them with Amy. It beat the hell out of ending it alone, with a bottle of beer and the mindless noise of some TV show.
“Thank you,” I said. “Really.”
“I wouldn’t say that till you taste this.”
“What is it?”
“I call it Mafia lasagna. In honor of the Sanabria family.”
“Weak humor, Amy. Very weak.”
She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face me. “If you’re interested, I’ve got a bunch of printouts discussing Joshua Cantrell—or at least the discovery of his body—over on the table. As for Alexandra, there’s not much out there. She’s the quiet one of the Sanabria family, I suppose.”
I walked over to the table and looked at the stack of papers there. Lots of articles. The discovery of Cantrell’s body had made plenty of news.
“I can’t believe the name didn’t register with me,” I said, flipping through the articles.
Amy turned to look at me over her shoulder, a few strands of hair glued to her cheek from the steam rising off the stove. After months of fighting to straighten her naturally curly blond hair, she’d finally given up again, and I was glad to see it. She’d looked too corporate with the straightened hair—an observation that had gotten a pen thrown at me once.
“You’ve been pretty removed from the news lately.” She pulled the oven open and bent to look inside, leaving her voice muffled as she continued to speak. “Can’t say the last time I’ve seen you with the paper.”
It was a good point. Ordinarily I would’ve read about the discovery of Cantrell’s body, and probably remembered the name when Harrison said it, but I’d stopped reading the papers and watching TV news shows back in the fall, when I was making all-too-frequent appearances in them. I hadn’t gone back to them yet, but now I was thinking maybe I should. It’s dangerous to be uninformed, as today had demonstrated.
“That’s just good taste,” I said. “You know the sort of crap they write in the newspaper these days. It’s a wonder they still refer to those people as journalists.”
She closed the oven and stood up. “I am close to knives, you know. Large, sharp knives.”
“Good reminder.” I moved the stack of articles out of the way. They could wait, or maybe I’d never read them at all. There was no need to. I’d taken a silly nibble today, but now I saw the lure and its hooks and knew better than to hang around. The Cantrell case didn’t need my attention, and I needed even less the attention of the Sanabria family.
“Food is almost done,” Amy said, “and you better realize the only reason I’m feeding you is because I want to hear the story. Not some half-assed version of it, either. The real story, with all the details.”
“You’ll get it,” I said, “but let me pour some wine first.”
It was a nice evening that turned into a nice night, and she stayed with me and we slept comfortably and deeply in my bed while another round of storms blew in off the lake and hammered rain into the walls that sheltered us. Amy rose early and slipped out of the house sometime before seven to return to her own apartment before starting the day. We’d been together a while now, but still we both clung to own routines and our own space, and I wondered at times if maybe that wasn’t the way it would and should always be, if maybe we were the sort of people who simply didn’t cohabit well. At other times, I’d come home and sit alone in the apartment and wonder why in the hell I hadn’t proposed.
She’d been gone for almost an hour, and I’d fallen back into a surface layer of sleep, not quite awake but never far from it, either, when the tapping began. A gentle series of taps, five or six at a time, then a pause followed by another sequence. I don’t know how many sequences had passed before they finally carved into my brain and I sat up in bed and realized that someone was knocking on my door. Knocking, it seemed, with extraordinary consistency and patience. Never loud, never urgent, but never stopping, either. Tap, tap, tap, tap.
I got out of bed and tugged on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, made it to the top of the stairs as another calm sequence of knocks began, reached the bottom just as it came to an end. Then I had the door open and was squinting out into the harsh daylight and the face of a small, dark-haired man with a raised fist. There was a ring on his finger that seemed brighter than the sunlight behind him, some hideous collection of gold and diamonds so heavy that I hoped he wore one on the other hand to keep from becoming lopsided. He was getting ready to bring it back down on the door, continue the knocking, but when he saw me he just held the pose for a second and then slowly lowered the hand to his side.
“Good morning, Mr. Perry.”
I was barefoot and he was in shoes, but still I had a good four inches on him, and I’m not particularly tall. He was thin across the chest and shoulders, with small hands and weak wrists, and seemed like the kind of guy who would need his wife to open the pickle jar for him. Until you looked him in the eye. There, in that steady and unflinching gaze, was a quality I’d typically seen in much larger men, stronger men. Men who felt invincible.
“Did I wake you?” he said when I didn’t respond to the greeting. “I apologize. I’m an early riser, though. Always have been.”
He put out the hand with the ring and waited until I shook it, until my palm was firmly held in his, to say, “My name is Dominic Sanabria.”
I pulled my hand free and stepped forward, out of my doorway and into the daylight.
“I’m sorry you made the trip,” I said. “It was entirely unnecessary, Mr. Sanabria.”
“You don’t even know the purpose of my trip.”
“I know the source of it, though.”
“Do you?”
“A lawyer named Child probably gave you a call. Or somebody in the Medina County Recorder’s Office, though that seems unlikely. Either way, somebody told you I was inquiring about your sister’s home. That information is no longer correct.”
“Is it not?”
I shook my head. “I’ve learned the house is not on the market and will not be on the market, and I’ve passed that information along to my client. We’re done with it now.”
He reached up and ran a hand over his mouth, as if drying his lips, and then he spoke without looking at me. “Let’s go upstairs and talk—and I’d ask you not to continue lying to me. It’s not something I appreciate.”
He walked past me and headed up the stairs without another word, and I turned and hesitated and then followed, swinging the door shut and closing out the daylight behind us.
When I got to the top of the stairs he was already in my living room, standing in front of the bookshelf. He slid a Michael Connelly novel out with his index finger and studied the cover.
“I had a brother-in-law who was a big reader,” he said. “Not these sort of books, though. Not fiction. He was an anthropologist. Studied people. Studied the, what’s the word, indigenous types.”
He pushed the book back into place and turned to face me.
“He didn’t study me. Did not have the slightest desire to study me, or my people. Wanted very little to do with us. Oh, he was polite, you know, a hell of a nice guy, but he definitely wanted to know as little as possible about me and my associates and what it was that we did. I always liked that about him.”
I didn’t answer, didn’t say a word as he crossed to an armchair and sat carefu
lly on the edge of it. Dominic Sanabria was in my apartment. It was not yet nine in the morning, and Dominic Sanabria was sitting in my living room discussing dead men. I wasn’t going to require coffee to get my nervous system energized today.
“My sister is a very special girl,” he said, crossing his legs in a manner that would have looked effete from anyone but him. “A woman, of course, but I can’t help but think of her as a girl. She’s nine years younger than me, you know. By the time she was growing up, there was some awkwardness around my family. Some legal troubles that you might recall, or might not. You’re pretty young. Anyhow, my father, who was not without his faults but always loved his children dearly, he thought it would be best to send Alexandra away to school.”
I hadn’t taken a seat, hadn’t moved from the top of the stairs, because I thought it was better to simply stand there and listen. There are guys who bring out the smart-ass in me, the desire to throw some jabs back at them, show them the tough-guy bullshit isn’t as intimidating as they’d like it to be. Dominic Sanabria was not one of those guys. All I wanted to do was listen and get him the hell out of my home. Even while that desire occupied my thoughts, though, I hadn’t missed the tense shift. He’d referred to Joshua Cantrell in the past, and well he should—Joshua was past tense for this world, no doubt. Alexandra had received present tense. My sister is a very special girl . . .
“They found a school out east, somewhere in the Adirondacks, cost a friggin’ fortune,” he said, “but it was worth it, you know? It was worth it. Because Alexandra, she was always a special kid, but after being out there, being around those sort of teachers and those sort of . . . I dunno, experiences, I guess, it made a difference. She was a kind of, you know, a deeper spirit when she came home. A very compassionate person. She was not as close to the family as the rest of us were, but that was good. It was good for her to be around other people. Other influences. Every family has their darling, and she is ours.”
He did that thing with his hand again, running it over his mouth, the way you might if your lips were chapped and bothering you.
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