Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  Loogan’s voice called her, mild as the wind. The wind swept into the grave and cooled her brow. Her shoulder burned, her legs ached. A fragment of a leaf spun down and caught in her hair.

  Loogan’s voice: “Elizabeth. He’s done now.”

  She moved her legs, lazily, her gaze fixed on the revolver half buried in the dirt. She stepped her feet back along Hideaway’s spine. Eased herself backward up the broken slope. When she was clear of Hideaway’s body, Loogan was able to free his pinned leg and rise, unsteady. He bent over Hideaway and went through the man’s pockets. He found Hideaway’s keys, and the keys Hideaway had taken from James Peltier.

  From her seat on the slope Elizabeth said, “Take the gun.”

  “I don’t want the gun.”

  “We’re not leaving it in his hand.”

  Loogan trudged up the slope and tossed the revolver onto a clump of grass beside her. Then he knelt with Peltier’s key ring and unlocked her handcuffs.

  He reached for her arm to help her up and the pain knifed through her.

  “Wait,” she told him. “I think I dislocated my shoulder.” She felt tears coming and closed her eyes against them. “We can fix it,” she said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

  She heard the clink of keys as he put them in his pocket and knelt again beside her.

  “Are you kidding?” he said.

  “I’ll lie back. You bend the arm at the elbow—I can’t move it myself. Ninety degrees. Fingers pointing at the sky. Then you just pull the arm toward you.”

  Worry in his voice. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “You pull it gently, and you rotate it forward, like I’m throwing a baseball. I’ve seen it done.”

  She opened her eyes. He started to get up. “I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  She twisted around and seized his wrist with her right hand. “You’re going to turn frail on me now?”

  Elizabeth steered Hideaway’s Lincoln with one hand and rested the other on her thigh. She lifted her arm to reassure herself that she could. The pain was remote.

  She looked over at Loogan in the passenger seat. He had his head back and she could hear his breathing. He sounded exhausted.

  “Back there,” she said, after a mile had gone by. “The grave—”

  She left it at that, the question unformed.

  He sat up slowly, took his time answering. “Excavations are tricky. Unstable.”

  “It didn’t collapse on its own.”

  “I helped it along. Dug underneath.” The Lincoln’s tires hissed along the surface of the road. “His own fault,” Loogan said. “He shouldn’t have given me a shovel.”

  Elizabeth guided the car along a curve. “I didn’t know that was the plan. You said you were going to shoot him.”

  “I said I might have to shoot him.”

  They came to a traffic light, amber turning red. Elizabeth braked the Lincoln to a stop, though there were no other cars at the intersection.

  “It’s not far to the hospital, is it?” Loogan asked her.

  She watched the steady dot of red light. “I’m not going to the hospital. I can have my shoulder looked at later.”

  “I think we should go,” he said.

  The light changed. She looked around at him. He had his arms folded, his hands beneath his armpits.

  “I made a mistake,” he said.

  He unfolded his arms. The fingers of his right hand came out tipped with blood.

  “I thought he missed.”

  David Loogan walked into the emergency room of Saint Joseph Mercy under his own power. As the glass doors swept shut behind him, the overhead fluorescents burned suddenly white. He coughed into his open palm, saw blood, felt his knees give way.

  The bullet from Hideaway’s revolver had struck a chunk of rock in the wall of the grave. From there, it bounced. It entered Loogan’s body on the left side, under his arm; it glanced off a rib, flattened, tumbled through his lung, and came to rest an inch behind his heart.

  When the ER doctors got to him, they determined that his left lung had partially collapsed. They inserted a chest tube to relieve the pressure and reinflate it. After that, he needed surgery to repair internal bleeding. His surgeons decided against removing the bullet—it could stay where it was and do him no harm.

  In the long hours after his surgery, Loogan drifted in a medicated haze. Nurses came around periodically to test the function of his lungs. They made him blow into tubes. They obsessed over his breathing, ever on guard against the formation of phlegm. They woke him at odd hours to pound on his chest.

  He saw Elizabeth for a few minutes on Sunday afternoon, then for a longer visit on Monday evening. She told him about Casimir Hifflyn and his wife, found shot to death in their home in a scene staged to look like a murder-suicide. She described the handwritten note, the false confession. She didn’t have to remind him of Hideaway’s words: It’s a wonder what a man will do if you threaten something he cares about. Tell him you’re going to shoot his wife, and he’ll take responsibility for crimes he had nothing to do with.

  The next day Loogan had two visitors. The first was Sarah Waishkey, who came while he was napping in the early afternoon and left behind a present she had made for him: a wristband of braided leather.

  The second visitor was a cop named Mitchum. Loogan walked with him up and down the hospital corridors and gave him an account of everything Nathan Hideaway had said and done from the moment he appeared at Sean Wrentmore’s condominium. Mitchum scrutinized each move, from the shotgun blast that killed James Peltier to the final sequence of events at the grave site in the clearing in Marshall Park. Loogan emphasized that Hideaway had held on to the revolver even after he fell into the grave. He had been a threat to the very end. Elizabeth had acted in self-defense. Mitchum only nodded. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  Another full day passed before Loogan saw Elizabeth again. They sat by the window in his room, gray November sky behind the slatted blinds, and she told him about her visit to Nathan Hideaway’s cottage. She and Carter Shan had searched Hideaway’s belongings and found a blackmail letter similar to the one Tom Kristoll had received. In a cellar beneath the house they found an old cast-iron tub and traces of lye. They theorized that Sean Wrentmore’s body had wound up in the tub.

  His flesh is no longer attached to his bones, Hideaway had said.

  “We may never find the bones,” Elizabeth told Loogan. “I thought they might be in a sack weighted down at the bottom of the pond behind the cottage, but we sent a diver in yesterday. He didn’t find anything.”

  She had other news as well. An arrest had been made in the murder of Michael Beccanti.

  “It was Rachel Kent,” she said. “We found the detective she hired to spy on Bridget Shellcross. He confirmed the affair between Beccanti and Shellcross—and that Kent knew about it.

  “There’s physical evidence against her too. Tiny traces of blood and skin. She scratched her arm climbing through the slashed screen of the window at your house. The lab recovered a sample from the screen on Friday. The blood type is going to turn out to match hers, and eventually a DNA test will confirm it, but none of that matters because Rachel Kent confessed this afternoon. We went around to ask her to submit a blood sample voluntarily and she refused, and two hours later she showed up at City Hall with her lawyer. She brought along the disc and the blackmail letter that she took from Beccanti after she stabbed him. Her lawyer thought they’d be worth something as bargaining chips. They were. From what I’ve heard, the prosecutor gave her a pretty good deal.”

  Loogan stared out at the gray sky. “Rachel Kent,” he said.

  “Rachel Kent,” Elizabeth repeated. “Hideaway had it right.”

  On the morning of the seventh day after his surgery, David Loogan walked out of Saint Joseph Mercy. He wore a new pair of chinos and a blue Oxford shirt, and a denim jacket against the November chill. He had left his leather coat in the woods of Marshall Park.

  The new clothes were
a gift from Bridget Shellcross, who had visited him the day before. They had talked about Cass Hifflyn and about Michael Beccanti, whose funeral service she had attended earlier in the week.

  She had given Loogan her phone number, made him promise to call when the hospital discharged him. She would drive him home. The number was on a slip of paper in his pocket. He took a cab.

  The driver dropped him at his rented house. Yellow tape on the front door. He tore it away and went inside and opened all the windows. Upstairs he stripped the bed and put on fresh sheets and blankets and slept until late afternoon.

  He woke hungry, washed, and closed windows. Locked the door behind him and descended the steps with his car keys jingling in his hand, and then realized he had last seen his car in the lot of the restaurant behind Sean Wrentmore’s condo.

  He walked the twelve blocks downtown, taking it slow. Had an early dinner at a place he had gone to once with Tom Kristoll. Then a movie, something French and allegedly comedic.

  It was a little after nine when he came out of the theater. A college crowd on the sidewalks. He strolled west along Liberty Street. Banks, restaurants, galleries. He came to Main, crossed with the light. He would turn south now if he wanted to go home. He turned north.

  Outside the café across from the Gray Streets building, a clutch of students loitered. Pierced noses, dyed hair, clouds of cigarette smoke. Loogan went by them, out of range of the smoke, and leaned against the frame of the café window. He looked up at the building across the street, at a window on the sixth floor. A rectangle of light. After a minute, a shadow passed across it briefly. It looked to Loogan like the figure of a man wearing a fedora.

  David Loogan dashed into the street, dodging through traffic, fumbling for his keys. He heard the long blare of a horn still echoing behind him as he cleared the lobby door, slapped the button of the elevator. He shot down the sixth-floor hallway and hit the Gray Streets door hard enough to rattle the pebbled glass. Keyed through and the first thing he saw was the open doorway of Tom Kristoll’s office. The desk lamp shining on the blotter, and behind the lamp a figure rising from the chair. Laura Kristoll.

  She took off Tom’s hat as she came out around the desk. She left his trench coat on. The coat squared her shoulders.

  “David, are you all right?”

  She met him in the outer office, laid her palm against his chest, lightly, as if her touch could tear him open.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I don’t like your breathing,” she said.

  “Sometimes I don’t like it myself.”

  “I thought you were in the hospital. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw your shadow from the street just now and I thought—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked down at the trench coat, then at the fedora she had tossed onto the secretary’s desk. “David,” she said.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve thought it,” he said. “I mean, what have I had to go on? What have I really seen, with my own eyes? The body of a man on the sidewalk, covered by a blanket. A closed casket lowered into the ground. If this were a story—”

  “David—”

  “If this were a story, Tom would show up in the final scene. He would explain everything. We’d go off together for a quiet drink and he would explain—”

  Her fingers gripped the collar of his denim jacket.

  “David, don’t.” Her voice fading. “David, Tom’s dead.”

  He went home with her. Both of them silent in the car as she drove alongside the river. They rolled up the long driveway to the house and got out, and he followed her up the crushed-stone walk and through the door. She offered him a drink and he took a glass of plain water and she made him sit on the leather sofa while she built a fire in the antique furnace.

  She closed the iron grate and came to sit beside him, silently for a while, her head back, golden hair spread over the black leather. He looked up at the wooden beams that crisscrossed overhead.

  After a time she leaned close to him and he moved reflexively to put his arm around her. The effort made him wince.

  “Is the pain very bad?” she asked him.

  “It’s all right. It’s more a tightness.”

  The fire shifted in the furnace, crackling.

  “I should have come to see you at the hospital,” she said. “I was angry with you, but that’s no excuse. I had a hard time getting over what you said to me, that night in the car at Sean’s. Asking if I knew who killed Tom.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you that,” he said.

  “It hurt me,” she said. “But I suppose I deserved it. The way I danced around the truth of what happened to Sean. I should have been thinking more of Tom and less about what I wanted. It seems absurd to me now, to think I could ever publish Sean’s manuscript. I’m finished with the whole idea. I want you to know that.”

  The shadows of the beams flickered on the ceiling.

  She said, “I’ll give it to you if you want it. It’s all here, in a box in Tom’s study. The paper manuscript and all the discs, the backup copies. I don’t want it anymore.”

  He let out a long breath. “You don’t have to give it up, Laura. You worked on it. It’s yours. I won’t blame you for wanting to publish it.”

  “I’m done with it,” she said. “You should take it.” She nodded toward the furnace. “Or we could burn it.”

  “We don’t have to burn it.”

  At midnight she put him to bed in a guest room upstairs. He piled his clothes on a chair and slid under the covers and lay in the dark listening to her movements in another room, the clatter of cabinet doors, water running. Then a light from the hall and she came through his doorway in flannel pajamas and climbed in beside him and curled up chastely with a pillow and fell asleep.

  He woke in the night and listened to her breathing. Slipped out of bed and found his watch: twenty minutes after three. He went down to the kitchen and let the water run cold from the tap and filled a glass. He drank it outside in the air on the stones of the patio with the half-circle of woods deep around him.

  When he came in, he wandered through the downstairs rooms until he came to Tom’s study. The square shape on the desk was the box Laura had mentioned. He switched on a lamp and the discs glittered silver in the light. He slid them to one side and they glided one over another and uncovered the topmost page of Sean Wrentmore’s manuscript: Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men.

  He counted the discs: seven of them. Plenty of backups. But a small voice in his mind told him that if there were seven, there could be eight.

  A halfhearted search of the desk turned up the drawer that Michael Beccanti had told him about: the one with the false bottom. The secret compartment held nothing. No incriminating eighth disc.

  He turned off the lamp in the study and wandered out to the living room. The fire had gone cold in the furnace. He checked the front door to make sure it was locked, then did the same for the back door and the patio door. All secure in the Kristoll house. Turning toward the stairs, he remembered the door to the garage.

  He went to check it, found it unlocked. Some impulse made him open it, made him flip the switch of the overhead light. A stark white bulb illuminated Tom’s Ford. On the walls, a motley collection of garden tools. A rake, a weed trimmer. Three shovels, all of them long-handled, none of them suitable for digging a grave.

  Other items, half-familiar. A lawn mower in a corner. A painter’s easel. The folding cot that he and Tom had used to carry Sean Wrentmore’s body. A dartboard.

  A glint of metal near the center of the dartboard. A piece of cork had been torn away and the steel backing showed through. Loogan touched the steel with a fingertip and felt an indentation. Shallow, rounded. Like the imprint of a bullet.

  Chapter 41

  “DAVID.”

  “She killed Adrian Tully.”

  Elizabeth Waishkey had braids in her long raven hair. She wore a linen shirt open
at the collar, a string of glass beads. Blue jeans torn at the knee. She stood at her front door, kneading a dish towel in her hands, as if he had interrupted her at some domestic chore.

  To David Loogan’s eyes, she shimmered like an angel. Her shirt was white, as was the towel. Unearthly white, glowing. The glass beads glimmered at her throat.

  “David,” she said, “you’re pale.” She came onto the porch and looked out at the street. “You didn’t walk here, did you?”

  Loogan had passed the restless hours of the night on the leather sofa in the Kristoll house, and in the morning he had let Laura drive him home. They had detoured past Sean Wrentmore’s condo, hoping to recover Loogan’s car, but it was missing from the restaurant parking lot. At home he made some calls and tracked it down—at the impound lot of the Ann Arbor Police Department. He would need to wait a day to pick it up. The lot was closed on Sundays.

  He didn’t explain all this to Elizabeth. He waved her question away.

  “No car,” he said.

  “How long have you been walking?”

  “I don’t know.” It seemed like at least two hours, though it shouldn’t have taken so long. After the first hour, it had occurred to him that he should have called a cab.

  He had gotten lost a little at the end, had gone in circles. He had felt light-headed, and he felt light-headed now. That was probably the reason why Elizabeth Waishkey was shimmering.

  “You’re not surprised,” he said.

  She tipped her head sideways. “Actually, I am. I didn’t expect you to turn up on my doorstep. But now that you’re here, you should come in.”

  “I mean you weren’t surprised when I told you she killed Tully. You didn’t ask who I was talking about.”

  “David—”

  “Laura Kristoll,” he said. “I saw her last night. I went to her house.”