Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  “Good,” said Elizabeth.

  “I opened the car when I got here. I wouldn’t have, but you never know. It didn’t do that fellow any good. He didn’t have a pulse. Once I knew that, I backed off.”

  “That’s fine,” Shan said.

  “Medical examiner’s looking at him now,” the patrolman said. “Eakins.”

  Lillian Eakins was in her indeterminate fifties. She was sturdy and un-stylish, her brown hair liberally streaked with gray. She had both doors of the victim’s car open and was squatting in the road on the driver’s side when Elizabeth and Shan came up to her.

  “Ugliness,” she said, without looking up. “Just plain ugliness.”

  “Hello, Lil,” Elizabeth said.

  “I suppose you’ll want to know who he is.”

  “We have an idea.”

  “I haven’t dug his wallet out yet. I haven’t wanted to move him.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll come around and look.”

  “Ugliness. I’ll get his wallet. You stay put.”

  “Never mind, Lil. I can see him well enough from here.”

  “What’s his name then?”

  “Adrian Tully.”

  Loogan said, “He told me you tried to rob him, and he had to kill you.”

  “Tom had a sense of humor,” said Beccanti.

  Though Loogan’s pulse had been racing, he felt it begin to slow. He lowered the knife, holding it by his side.

  “I helped him bury you,” he said quietly. “In a clearing in the woods.”

  Beccanti let out a short, sharp breath that might have been a laugh. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you’d better explain that.”

  Loogan rocked on his feet. He brought the knife up distractedly and trailed the end of the blade along his shirtsleeve.

  “Three weeks ago, Tom called me to his house and asked me to help him bury a body.” The blade clicked against a button. “Now that I’ve seen you, I can tell you that the man we buried didn’t look like you at all. He was shorter; he was blond; he had a tattoo on his wrist. But Tom said he was you. He said you had come to ask him for money. Five thousand dollars. And when he refused, you drew a gun. He slugged you in the temple with a bottle of Scotch.”

  “That’s a realistic touch—the Scotch.”

  “Sure,” Loogan said. “Tom was spinning a story, but there were elements of truth in it. He said you needed money because your girlfriend was pregnant. He went into some detail about how he met you, about the stories you wrote for Gray Streets.”

  Beccanti lowered his eyes thoughtfully. “Why would he lie?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “I’d say he didn’t trust you—but he asked you to help get rid of a body. I’d call that a sign of trust.”

  “He wanted a story that would satisfy me,” Loogan said. “But he didn’t want to reveal the dead man’s real identity.”

  The yellow lamplight left Beccanti’s face half in shadows. “They’re connected,” he said, “Tom’s death, and this other man’s.”

  “They must be,” Loogan said. “I might be able to figure out how, if I knew who he was—the man we buried.”

  Beccanti’s eyes gleamed through the shadows. “I think I can tell you that.”

  Carter Shan had his camera out. The flash lit the night periodically, like slow, patient lightning.

  Lillian Eakins stood with Elizabeth at the roadside behind the car. “Looks like one shot,” Eakins said, “just in front of the right ear. Contact wound. Gun’s on the seat there, thirty-eight revolver. A smaller caliber’ll bounce around inside the skull, but this went right on through. Punched a hole in the driver’s window.”

  “You think he shot himself?” Elizabeth said.

  “First impression—yes.”

  “Strange place to do it. He’s pretty far from home.”

  “There’s no telling what people’ll do. It’s a quiet spot anyway. Not a bad night for it.”

  Shan called them over. He lifted the revolver from the seat and opened the cylinder so all three of them could see.

  “Six rounds,” he said. “Only one spent.”

  He dropped the rounds into an evidence bag.

  To Elizabeth he said, “Do we think Adrian Tully was suicidal?”

  She made a noncommittal noise through closed lips.

  “If we were right that he killed Tom Kristoll,” Shan said, “then maybe he was overcome with remorse.”

  Staring in at the body slumped behind the steering wheel, Elizabeth said nothing.

  “You don’t look convinced,” Eakins said, “either one of you.”

  “Three weeks ago. That’s when you buried him.”

  Beccanti sat in the chair with the lamp beside him. Loogan was on the sofa, the knife resting on his lap.

  “Yes,” he said, “it was on the seventh. A Wednesday night.”

  “That sounds right,” said Beccanti. “It was the Friday after that when Tom called me. He had a job for me. He seemed embarrassed about asking. He wanted someone’s place searched—a condo on Carpenter Road. No one would be home, he said, and I wouldn’t need to break in. He had a key.”

  Beccanti slouched in the chair, relaxed. “I went in that weekend, on Saturday night. Tom never told me whose place it was, but once I got there I found bills, credit card receipts. All in the same name. Sean Wrentmore.”

  “Sounds familiar,” said Loogan. “I think he’s on the list.”

  “What list?”

  “The Gray Streets list. I think he’s a writer.”

  “That fits,” Beccanti said. “Tom wasn’t interested in cash, or jewelry, or Sean Wrentmore’s stamp collection. He said if I found anything like that, I should leave it be. He wanted discs, CDs, flashdrives, any kind of storage media. But there was nothing like that in sight. There was no computer either, no laptop. Tom had already searched the place himself, I think. I was his backup. He needed me to look in places where he wouldn’t have thought to look.

  “That was never my strong suit, looking for secret hiding places. In the old days, I’d climb through your window and grab your wallet and your cell phone and your camera and I’d climb back out. But it’s amazing the things you learn in prison. I turned the key in Sean Wrentmore’s door at eight o’clock Saturday night and didn’t leave till Sunday morning. I unscrewed light fixtures, I peeled back rugs to look for loose floorboards, I took the fuse box and the telephone jacks out of the wall. I looked for things taped to the underside of drawers, the underside of furniture, the underside of just about everything.

  “When I was through inspecting the contents of the freezer and digging into the dirt of the potted plants, I had exactly one thing to show for all my efforts. I found it early on, behind the faceplate of an electrical outlet: a flashdrive, about as big as your thumb. I delivered it to Tom the following Monday in his office and collected my fee, and we never talked about it again.”

  Loogan laid the knife on the cushion beside him. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The house was quiet. Outside, there was a faint sound of rustling leaves.

  “I don’t suppose you know what was on the flashdrive?”

  “No,” Beccanti said.

  “I wonder if it’s still in his office.”

  Beccanti’s smile was mischievous. He reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a sleek plastic cylinder, the size of a cigarette lighter. He set it upright on the coffee table between them.

  “I did some searching this afternoon,” he said. “The office was closed, out of respect for Tom, but the cleaning staff still had to show up. I walked into Tom’s office like I belonged there, sat at his desk, and started reading a book. No one questioned me. When everyone was gone, I poked around a little. There’s a false bottom in one of Tom’s desk drawers. The drive was in there, and so was this.” Beccanti produced a key from another pocket and tossed it onto the coffee table.

  “That’ll get you into Wrentmor
e’s condo,” he said, “if you care to go there.”

  Loogan picked up the drive. “You said you didn’t know what was on this.”

  “I don’t. It’s a secure drive. You need a password.”

  Loogan slipped the drive into his pocket. He picked up the key, balanced it on the back of his index finger, and then walked it across the back of his hand. He passed it to his other hand and kept going, end over end, finger to finger. He stopped when he saw Beccanti grinning at him.

  He dropped the key in his pocket with the drive. “Is that why you came here, to give me these?”

  “That, and to see what you were like,” Beccanti said. “To see if we could help each other.”

  “Help each other do what?”

  “Find out who killed Tom.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave that to the police? That’s what I keep hearing.”

  Beccanti made a sour face. “I don’t intend to sit back and do nothing. Tom did me a lot of favors. He didn’t have to. That story he told you, about me asking him for five thousand dollars? That part was true. Only he didn’t refuse. He gave it to me, without a second thought. I owe him.”

  Loogan leaned back and propped his feet on the coffee table. “Still, maybe you’d be better off going to the police and telling them what you know.”

  “I have an aversion to dealing with the police,” said Beccanti. “And look who’s talking. I bet the police would be interested in hearing about how you helped Tom bury a body in the woods. They might decide it’s relevant to their investigation.”

  Loogan let that pass. He stared at the ceiling—white stucco turned yellow in the lamplight. Eventually he said, “How thoroughly did you search Tom’s office?”

  “Not very,” Beccanti said. “I turned up the trick drawer pretty easily. I didn’t look much further.”

  “Maybe you should try again. See if you can find anything else that has to do with Sean Wrentmore. I can get you in this time. They offered me Tom’s job. I imagine it comes with a key to his office.”

  “All right.”

  “And I’ll pay a visit to Wrentmore’s condo. If nothing else, maybe I’ll find a picture of him. I’d like to be sure he’s the one we buried.”

  “Does this mean we’re not going to the police?” said Beccanti gently.

  “Not yet. It’s like that rule that lawyers follow: When you’re questioning a witness in court, you never ask anything if you don’t know what the answer’s going to be.”

  “Is that what it’s like?”

  Loogan’s voice dropped low. “Tom had his reasons for what he did, for the secrets he kept. I don’t want to go to the police without knowing where it might lead.”

  Chapter 15

  ADRIAN TULLY’S PARENTS LIVED IN GRAND RAPIDS. THEY RECEIVED the news of their son’s death at three A.M. Saturday, from a Grand Rapids detective who had once been a classmate of Elizabeth Waishkey.

  They drove to Ann Arbor Saturday morning, arriving a little before noon. They had their daughter with them, a sullen girl of seventeen. Elizabeth spoke to them in Tully’s apartment. They were bewildered. Adrian had never talked about being depressed, had certainly never talked about suicide. Elizabeth got the impression that Adrian hadn’t talked to them about much at all.

  It was one o’clock when she left them. There was nothing more to be learned at Tully’s apartment. She and Carter Shan had searched it in the early morning. They had found nothing out of the ordinary, no evidence linking Tully to Tom Kristoll’s murder. No suicide note.

  By one-fifteen, Elizabeth was back at City Hall. She waved at the desk sergeant in the lobby, took in the bare details of her surroundings: a janitor pushing a broom across the floor, a woman on a bench with her head bowed. She was opening the gray steel door to the stairway when she heard a voice call her name.

  “Detective Waishkey.”

  She turned to see the woman from the bench approaching. A woolen coat covered her figure; her hair was in a ponytail; she wasn’t wearing her glasses. It took a moment for Elizabeth to recognize Valerie Calnero.

  Her face was pale. She had been crying. She said, “I need to ask you something.”

  “Come up to the squad room,” Elizabeth said. “We can talk there.”

  “I’d rather talk here,” the woman said. “I heard about Adrian. Did he shoot himself?”

  “You should come up.”

  “The news reports don’t say. They call it an apparent suicide. But I’d like to know, one way or the other.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Elizabeth said gently. “It’s not clear yet.”

  “Did Adrian kill Tom Kristoll? Can you tell me that?”

  Elizabeth let the steel door close. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Because less than a week ago you came to ask me about graffiti scratched into my car. I pointed you toward Adrian. I didn’t want to—”

  “I can understand why you’re upset,” Elizabeth said.

  “I didn’t want to,” Valerie repeated, “but you were only going to talk to him, you said. And now he’s dead.”

  “I can understand—”

  “Adrian’s parents are in town now. They want to talk to Adrian’s friends. What am I supposed to tell them? Should I tell them I drove their son to suicide?”

  “Valerie—”

  “Or that I got him murdered? I’d like to be able to nail it down for them.” Elizabeth put her hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “Come upstairs, Valerie. I know it’s a lousy time for it, but there are things we should talk about. You might know something that could shed light on Adrian’s death. Maybe something he said, or something about the way he acted.”

  Valerie Calnero’s mouth was set in a stern line. She shook her head slowly and began to back away.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  Upstairs, Elizabeth brewed some coffee and typed a report on the Adrian Tully crime scene, and another on her conversation with Tully’s family. The squad room was largely deserted. When she finished her paperwork, she took out the case file on Tom Kristoll’s murder and began to page through it.

  The sound of a soft voice made her look up.

  “I don’t want to bug you.”

  It was Alice Marrowicz, her mousy hair in a ponytail, the sleeves of her sweater enveloping her hands.

  “You’re not bugging me, Alice.”

  “You were out late last night, that’s what I heard.”

  She dragged a chair toward Elizabeth’s desk and sat down.

  “I’m not snooping around or anything,” she said. “I want you to understand that. But I’ve heard things.”

  Elizabeth closed the Kristoll file. “What are you getting at, Alice?”

  “Adrian Tully.”

  “What about him?”

  “I heard he was found dead in a parked car by a cornfield in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s been on the news,” Elizabeth said.

  “I heard he died of a gunshot wound to the head. There was stippling around the wound. Tests turned up gunshot residue on his hand and on the sleeve of his coat. The gun was on the seat beside him. A box of ammunition in the glove compartment.”

  Alice paused for breath and then continued. “So there’s every indication of a self-inflicted wound. But then there are one or two things that don’t fit. I heard, for instance, that Tully’s prints are on the gun, but not on the bullets. And not on the ammunition box either.”

  She leaned forward in her chair, her voice growing more animated. “So on the one hand, it seems like a suicide,” she said. “But on the other hand, it wouldn’t be that hard to fake. If you knew him, if you were in the car with him. If you were fast with the gun. One shot to the head, point-blank. Then you put on a pair of latex gloves and wipe your prints from the gun. You remove the spent shell, put it in your pocket, and replace it with a fresh round. You roll down the passenger window, put the gun in Tully’s hand, fire a second shot out into the field. Now he’s got residu
e on his hand and there’s still only one spent round in the gun. You stash the ammo in the glove compartment, leave the gun on the seat. You’ve planned all this in advance, so you’ve got another car waiting nearby to make your escape.”

  She looked at Elizabeth expectantly. Elizabeth obliged her with an encouraging smile.

  “It’s not a bad theory, Alice. I’ve had some thoughts along those lines myself—”

  But Alice was shaking her head. “You’re missing the point. It’s not my theory. I didn’t work it out. I read it in a mystery novel.”

  Elizabeth’s smile faded. “What novel?”

  “The question you want to ask is: Who wrote the novel?”

  “All right. Who?”

  “Bridget Shellcross.”

  “It’s a cliché,” said Bridget Shellcross. “A murder staged to look like a suicide. Every mystery writer uses it sooner or later. I used it in my second book.”

  The door to Bridget Shellcross’s townhouse had been answered by a woman with a pageboy haircut. She was tall and athletic and dressed for a workout; her bare arms were well toned. She led Elizabeth to a sitting room decorated with designer furniture: squarish shapes in leather with bands of dark wood and burnished metal.

  Bridget rose from a divan to greet Elizabeth. She wore a stylish black suit fitted to her sprightly frame. The tall woman—whose name turned out to be Rachel Kent—left and returned with bottled water and a tray of raw vegetables and hummus. Then she slipped off to sit in a corner.

  Bridget had resumed her place on the divan. “In my first book,” she was saying, “I used a different cliché altogether. One of the cops investigating the crime turned out to be the killer. No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Elizabeth.

  “I wrote the first one when I was twenty-three. It was based on a short story I’d done, something Tom Kristoll published in Gray Streets. He encouraged me to work it up into a novel.”

  She shook her head thoughtfully. “Poor Tom. His death was a cliché too—another murder made to look like a suicide.” Her eyes locked on Elizabeth’s. “You think they’re related.”