by Layton Green
Before Preach and Kirby could draw their weapons, the other man jumped off his stool as if lunging for Preach. The detective abandoned his gun and caught his assailant in a headlock. “Stand down!” he yelled.
Kirby tackled the goateed man, driving him into a row of bar stools that came crashing down. Preach wrestled the man in the Hornets cap to the ground. He didn’t resist. The girl screamed in the background.
Preach disentangled himself from the man who had rushed him. The thug was on his stomach, and the detective put a foot on his back and drew his gun. The other man was also on the ground. Kirby kicked him in the ribs and drew his weapon.
“Kirby! It’s under control.”
“I’m cool,” he said, breathing hard as he spoke.
“Get these two in cuffs.”
Neither of the thugs resisted, and Preach called in the incident as Kirby secured the men. Elvis and his friends were gaping from their bar stools, and the bartender had shrunk against the back wall.
As Preach started walking the goateed man to the police car, he saw a strange look in his eye, a gleam that looked an awful lot to Preach like satisfaction.
He thought about it for about half a second, the pointless, weaponless assault and the time it would take him to haul them in and fill out the paperwork.
He thought about it, and then he went cold.
Ari.
40
Preach fumbled with his phone as he sped away from the café, leaving Kirby to arrest the men when more help arrived. He dialed Ari’s number and then accelerated through a red light, siren blaring.
Straight to voicemail.
He made a fist over the phone and slammed it into the console. Stupid. He was so stupid.
There was a line of cars up ahead, unmoving. Preach strained for a glimpse of the delay, prepared to whip into the other lane. It was too dark; he couldn’t see the end of the line.
He swerved to pass the first few cars, realizing where he was at the same time a long, abrasive moan pierced the night, overpowering the siren.
A train whistle.
He cursed and thumped the dash again, then pulled right up to the crossing gate, helpless before the giant blur of the locomotive. He called the station and had them send backup to the bookstore, instructing them to take the bridge on Grumley Street that passed above the tracks. It was a crap shoot as to who would arrive first.
The gate finally lifted, and Preach passed so close to the metal arm it scraped the hood of his car. He gunned past the vehicles on the other side, took a sharp left onto Second, an even sharper left through an alley, and then he was parked on Millburn and sprinting to the bookstore. Incoming sirens pierced the night.
The door was locked. He banged on the glass for a good three seconds, then stepped back and prepared to kick the door in. As his foot swung forward, he saw a man running to the door.
Hands waving. Dreadlocks swinging.
Nate.
Behind the counter, Preach saw Ari hurrying to the front, watching the scene unfold with a worried, perplexed look. Three officers sprinted up the sidewalk as Nate unlocked the door.
“Are you okay?” Preach asked Ari. She was standing near the register, arms tense at her sides.
“I’m fine.” Her eyes flicked to the cops pouring through the door. “What’s going on?”
“No one’s threatened you?”
Her mouth gave an ironic twist. “Not this evening.”
Preach put his fingers to his temple, took a deep breath, then sent the other cops away with his apologies. He didn’t miss the grumbles and sidelong glances.
What was Mac playing at?
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said. “I thought . . . it was a false alarm. Why is your phone off?”
“It must have died,” she said. “I’ve been so absorbed I didn’t even realize. Funny, because I was about to call you.”
“You were?”
Her eyes sparked, and she laid a hand on his arm. “I found the literary reference.”
A frisson of excitement coursed through him. She was still holding his arm, and their eyes lingered before she pulled away. He realized she was carrying a slim paperback in her other hand, and that Nate was still watching them. “Let’s go to the back,” Preach said.
When they were alone, she unveiled the book she was holding. Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie.
“It took me a while,” she said, “but this is my best guess—if one thing fits. Have you read it?”
He eyed the paintbrush and the swath of blood on the cover. “No.”
He leaned over her shoulder as she opened the novel to the first bookmarked page. She said, “The victim in the novel was a painter named Amyas Crale. He was found dead in his garden with no visible wounds. The only clues near the body were a bottle of beer and his drinking glass. Both were empty. Sound right so far?”
“Yeah. It does.”
“I don’t suppose you found an empty bottle in a bedroom drawer?”
Preach had been staring at the novel. He jerked his head up. “And if we did?”
“Then it should have had a floral scent. Jasmine.”
He gave a slow nod, mouth tight. “It fits, but the evidence is still pretty sparse, compared to the others.”
“Which is what made me think of Agatha Christie in the first place. Especially her novels featuring Hercules Poirot, who was fond of proclaiming that a murder could be solved solely by analyzing the testimony of the witnesses—without even looking at the crime scene. Five Little Pigs is a prime example. But there were a few clues in the novel. The body, the empty glass and bottle at the scene of the murder, the bottle in the drawer. There was one more thing—if it fits, and your toxicology report comes back positive for coniine, I think we’ve got our book.”
“What’s the final clue?”
“A crushed pipette was found on a garden path near the body.”
“A pipette—you mean like a test tube?” he asked, remembering the small pile of broken glass he had found in the garden.
“It’s the glass dropper used to fill a test tube. In this case, the pipette was used as a fountain pen filler.” Ari flipped to a page in the novel, then showed him the portion of underlined text where the shattered pipette was found. “Well?”
Preach was staring in grim disbelief at the passage, which had an unnerving correlation to the crime scene in Elliott Fenton’s garden. “You’re an excellent literary detective.”
Ari closed the novel. “So what now?”
“We go to my place while I figure out what the hell is going on.”
41
Preach followed Ari to her place again to grab her things, and then drove her in silence to his rental. His mind was buzzing with the discovery of the third novel, working furiously to fit the pieces together.
When they entered his house, he understood at once why Mac had sent two of his flunkies to jail merely to delay Preach at the Island Gold Café.
The house was trashed. Furniture overturned, papers strewn on the floor, cabinets emptied.
Ari stopped in the doorway, gaping at the destruction. Then, without a word, she dropped her bag and began cleaning up. The first thing Preach did, after taking a few deep breaths to control his rage, was to balance the tiny Jesus figurine on its pedestal. Then he used his emergency fingerprint kit to lift a few prints. He didn’t feel like having an evidence team invade his house only to tell him that, as with the prints from his desk, they had only found his own.
He put on a blues CD and helped Ari finish cleaning. “Bourbon or beer?” he asked, after they had swept the last broken dish into the dustbin.
“Both.”
He fixed the same for himself. She reclined in the hammock with her copy of Five Little Pigs while he made a fire.
With her black sweater and the beige knit cap covering her hair, he thought her face looked even thinner than usual, almost gaunt. But still beautiful. The ambient light from the flames gave her skin a golden hue, and her gr
een eyes blazed with intelligence.
Preach pulled up a chair next to the hammock, realizing someone had given him a clue by trashing his house. The search was too orderly, too thorough.
They were looking for something specific. His guess was one or more of the victims had possessed something incriminating, a document or a photo. And that someone thought Preach might have it in his custody.
“I don’t know when I’ll have time to read Five Little Pigs,” he said. “I may not have a job by Monday. You’ll have to be my expert; what’s the storyline?”
“As I said, the novel concerns the murder of a famous painter, Amyas Crale. His wife, Caroline, was convicted of the crime, but sixteen years later, convinced of her mother’s innocence, the Crales’ daughter hires Hercule Poirot to revisit the case. He interviews everyone who was present on the day of the murder—the five little pigs. They all had dirty secrets.”
“That fits with the theme of the questionable morality of the victims.” Preach rolled his empty shot glass between thumb and forefinger. “How does the physical evidence relate?”
“After learning of the affair, Caroline Crale put some coniine—presumably to commit suicide—in a bottle that once contained oil of jasmine. She hid the coniine in a bedroom dresser.”
Just like at Elliott’s house.
“The final reveal is complicated, but to boil it down: Amyas’s lover, Elsa, found the coniine and put it in Amyas’s glass of beer. However, when the body was found, Caroline thought her younger sister Angela had committed the crime, so she wiped all the prints away and replaced them with Amyas’s prints, to make it look like a suicide. However, Caroline put the prints on the bottle and not the glass. This is key because Poirot realizes Caroline didn’t actually know how the poison had been delivered.”
“So the lover did it,” he murmured, rising for a refill while the fire crackled. “Is there anything unusual about the novel? Something you think might have bearing?”
“The book was notable for Poirot’s use of logic alone to solve the crime,” she said after a moment, as if thinking out loud. “There’s also a brilliant red herring. You think it’s the sister all along—the evidence against her is so subtle, so devious, you’re sure you’ve figured out the killer.” She shook her head. “But Agatha’s too clever for that. She springs an even more devious surprise at the end, revealing the lover as the murderer.”
Preach tilted back in his chair, absorbing the information. “So how does it fit with the other two novels? If at all?”
Ari propped her arms on her knees. “All three books are focused on exploring the complexities of human nature—guilt and innocence, darkness and light, violence and retribution. In terms of craft, there was lineage: Christie admitted she drew heavily from the Sherlock Holmes tradition, which in turn was influenced by Poe’s Auguste Dupin. Poe, as we discussed, leaned on Dostoevsky. So there’s a progression there.”
There was also a message, Preach knew. Something loud and clear—if only he could read the language. He stood and paced the porch. “This is all too speculative.”
“Don’t give up,” she said. “We can do this.”
“Can we? We’ve lost three people already. You’re a law student, and I’m a detective who was suspended from his last job.”
He stopped pacing. She put an arm around his waist, drawing him into the hammock. He lay next to her, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath and see the shadows under the curves of her cheekbones. A current of desire crackled through him, and the air around them felt dense, more alive.
She leaned in to kiss him, but he sat up with an effort of will. “We can’t do this,” he said. “Not right now.”
She stared straight ahead, her face flushed. “Okay.”
He returned to his seat, within easy reach of his gun. “It makes us vulnerable.”
“Okay,” she said again.
He wanted to say something else, to explain, but he didn’t want to make false promises. There was a reason cops didn’t do well in relationships.
Instead he squeezed her hand and took a swallow of bourbon. His phone buzzed with a new email. He pulled it up and noticed the oversize signature block first: Deborah Kingfisher, Director of the Nondenominational Center for Social Services. Belker’s homeless shelter.
Detective Everson,
I found someone at the center who recognized J. T. Belker. I think it’s best if we discuss in person. Please contact me at your convenience. I will be in the office tomorrow morning after nine.
“What is it?” Ari asked.
He closed out of the email. “The little pig who had none.”
42
Preach fueled up at Jimmy’s Corner Store the next morning, restlessly skimming Five Little Pigs while waiting for Deborah King-fisher to arrive at work.
He had dropped Ari at the law library, and she promised to take an Uber to the bookstore for her evening shift. He lectured her again about staying in a crowd, and asked Officer Haskins to watch the bookstore.
His stomach roiled from trying to figure out the angles in the case. Three cups of coffee didn’t help, ratcheting up his tension to another level.
He checked the time as he inhaled the aroma of fresh pastries and watched two new people enter the café, a greasy-haired rocker and a young Asian woman with a scroll tattoo running down her back. That was the tedious part of being a cop. Watching the exits and the people around him at all times. Observing, never at rest.
8:45.
He downed his coffee and reached to close the novel. His gaze lingered on a passage of text Ari had starred and underlined. Elsa, the lover, was relating a conversation with Amyas Crale about divorcing his wife, Caroline. Elsa said she was sorry Caroline was going to be upset, and Amyas replied:
“Very nice and reasonable, Elsa. But Caroline isn’t reasonable, never has been reasonable, and certainly isn’t going to feel reasonable. She loves me, you know.”
I said I understood that, but if she loved him, she’d put his happiness first, and at any rate she wouldn’t want to keep him if he wanted to be free.
He said: “Life can’t really be solved by admirable maxims out of modern literature. Nature’s red in tooth and claw, remember.”
I said: “Surely we are all civilized people nowadays?” and Amyas laughed. He said: “Civilized people my foot! Caroline would probably like to take a hatchet to you. She might do it too.”
Preach tucked the book under his arm as he rose. Agatha Christie got it, he thought. She understood the way the world works.
And so did Ari.
The smell of ammonium and unwashed bodies assaulted Preach in the hallway of the shelter. He braced for the worst as he entered Deborah Kingfisher’s office, expecting to learn that an ex-con saw Belker talking to a hit man for hire, or overheard him mumbling in his sleep about killing his publishers.
Dressed in slacks and a denim jacket, Deborah shook his hand in greeting, her eagle medallion dangling against the hollow of her throat.
“Thank you for emailing me,” Preach said.
“I’m not sure how much help this is, but I found someone who remembered him. An ex-employee of the center who moved to Florida.”
“Can you give me the contact information?”
“She prefers to remain anonymous.” Deborah’s voice was hard, unapologetic.
Preach let her stew. Surely she knew he could make her divulge the name.
She lifted a sticky note off the desk. “According to my friend, she was working the night shift this last August when Belker walked in close to midnight.”
Preach tensed. August 23 was the date in Belker’s journal when he had written that he had “Taken that first all-important step.”
Deborah continued, “She said he looked jittery, almost giddy. She thought he was on drugs. She was about to call the cops when he asked her who she thought needed the most help at the shelter.”
“Come again?”
She shrugged. “That’s what she sai
d. He insisted on an answer, and she told him there were proper channels for that sort of thing. He flashed a wad of cash and said he wasn’t interested in proper channels. He wanted to help someone in need, that night, right that very moment.”
Preach stared at her, unsure what to think. “And she gave him a name?”
“She introduced him to a woman who needed help. Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
“And what happened?”
“She doesn’t know. Belker and the woman met briefly in a conference room—less than a minute—and then Belker walked out. The woman left the center an hour later, and never came back.”
Preach folded his arms. “I have to know who he met with. You understand this is a murder investigation, and that I can subpoena your contact?”
She handed him the sticky note. The name Angie Simpson was written in blue ink. “That’s why she gave me this.”
Preach drove straight to the Creekville address that a quick records search on Angie Simpson had produced. He prayed he wasn’t about to uncover a body rotting in a cellar.
The street was firmly on the poor side of town, but it was working-class poor: tidy strips of lawn fronting matchbox houses, flowers in the windowsills, pride in owning a few square feet of the American Dream.
A woman in her late thirties answered the door, dark hair pulled into a bun. The tendons of her forearms were ropy, her nails short and unpainted. An abundance of glossy lipstick made her mouth look greasy.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Preach said, squinting against the sun. The day was crisp and still. “I’m looking for Angie Simpson.”
Her eyes were wary but not unkind. “That would be me,” she said, in a strong rural accent. “Can I help you?”
Preach flashed his identification, and she took a step back. He spoke quickly, trying to soothe her. “I’m looking for information on a man named J. T. Belker. It concerns an ongoing investigation. Do you know him?”