Retribution (#3)

by M. M. Mayle

  The next best thing to going over everything with Audrey is setting everything down on paper, that old reliable aid he happened on early in the cause. No reason it shouldn’t work now, he encourages himself to believe as he approaches the High Street and spots a place called a chemist shop that might have what he needs. And while he’s in this neutral neighborhood he thinks to transfer the bundle of damp clothing from the rucksack into a curbside waste bin and call it good riddance.

  Armed with a fresh thick spiral notebook and a three-pack of ballpoint pens, Hoop hurries the mile or so back to the guest house and nearby pub. He beelines for the pub, where he sees that the same guy who had his usual spot in the guest house dining room has taken his usual table here, the postage stamp-sized one over by the window.

  Just as well. The table Hoop sits at instead is large enough that he can spread open the notebook and still have room for a Bushmills, a Newcastle, and the two bags of potato chips—crisps, they call them—that will do for supper.

  He wastes no time getting started, setting down questions as fast as they can be separated from the drone in his head. For openers:

  Who are these people, anyway—Emmet, Isaacs, Yates and the one whose name was never said?

  Are they all cops or is just the one with no name that did most of the talking?

  Who is this Hobbs woman that was named a know-it-all where he’s concerned and why were they talking about that other rock star’s death, that Rayce Vaughn, the doper?

  Why was the doper talked about in the same breath as the high muckety-muck lawyer, the accident that happened in the garage?

  Why so much talk about Aurora—Audrey—and the early days? Where were they going with that? What’s a defiler?

  What was the big deal about the lawyerwoman being called a prime target? They didn’t really believe Hoople Jakeway tried to finish her off just because she was a witness, did they?

  What makes them think the old woman’s death wasn’t an accident and how do they know her description of the El Camino was accurate?

  Who do they think chinked the opening next to the chimney with envelopes of doctored headache powder? What jackassed-fool would do a thing like that? And why was it talked about in a whisper like it was the biggest secret of all time?

  He fills three pages in minutes, leaving room after each question for an answer even though there are a lot of questions he doesn’t want answered. Not yet, anyway. The act of writing is a better calmative than the drinks and it’s making him understand that what happened today was exactly right because nothing was supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to do anything because he couldn’t have. There were four of them, after all, and it’s already been made plainer than plain that he should never take on more than one at a time.

  Did I go to that church dressed in my best clothes thinking I could separate the rock star from the herd?

  Did I go there thinking I’d have a better chance at the lawyerwoman than I did at the hospital?

  He went there to see and hear what he could. Learn from it and come away better than when he started.

  Did that happen?

  He muddles this till thirst takes hold of him. Must be from the potato chips. He shoves the notebook into the rucksack and steps up to the bar, only to discover that his pocket change won’t cover another set of drinks. When he dips into his still-damp wallet for a five-pound note, the bill comes out with the little plasticized card stuck to it—the rock star’s mysterious card that’s been kept in the money slot like it might be worth something someday.

  Now he sees it as just more questions he can’t answer and maybe doesn’t even need to answer. After he pays for his drinks he leaves the card on the bar, goes back to his table and picks up where he left off with the writing. When someone returns the card—flips it onto the table printed side down, the way it was left on the bar—Hoop looks up to see it’s the chunky guy who was sitting at the small table by the window.

  “You dropped that,” the guy says in passing—says in a rough-edged voice Hoop would know anywhere.

  All that practice at sitting still and doing nothing pays off better than a winning lottery ticket. All that pretending he’s interested in things he’s not, pays off too His hand is steady as he picks up the card, turns it over like he’s making sure it’s his, and reads at least one name made recognizable by today’s learning session.

  — THIRTY-FIVE —

  Evening, September 28, 1987

  Thirty minutes after leaving Terra Firma, Amanda finally speaks up. For both of them, as it turns out. She defines in no uncertain terms her nonsupport of the manufactured story linking Jakeway to Rayce Vaughn’s death, the only thing on anyone’s mind since it was cooked up.

  She takes a deep breath and continues: “And I don’t care that it’s a hotshot London lawyer—sorry, solicitor—and a seasoned New Jersey detective who came up with the idea. It’s not believable, Nate. I mean, who’s gonna believe Jakeway would forget about the supply of altered aspirin he dumped in the garment bag when he returned to the Chandler attic to wash away the coke spill? Am I supposed to believe he took care of the rafters but ignored the rest of the evidence and just went on his merry murderous way?”

  “No, you’re not. I don’t believe he would have either, because I’m not convinced it was Jakeway who applied industrial cleaner to the spill in the rafters,”

  “You think . . .”

  “Yeah, ever since that last run-through with Laurel and Emmet tonight, I’ve been thinking what you’re thinking—that if Jakeway was gonna bother cleaning up the one spill he sure as hell wouldn’t have overlooked the other—if you want to call the other a spill.”

  “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?”

  “No good reason to think of it until we started rearranging the details.”

  “And the physical evidence,” Amanda says, disapproval implied. “Are you thinking who I’m thinking . . . that David did it, or had it done?”

  “Yeah, he’d be my first choice. Would’ve been just like him to simply eliminate the problem as he saw it.”

  “And very much in character for him to want to protect Laurel—a holdover from the old days, I’d say—but if that was the case, his good intentions totally backfired because when that spill got washed away her level of concern skyrocketed and—terrible irony there—by attempting to spare her he may have left himself wide open . . . Godness Agnes, what an awful thought . . . terrible . . . No, don’t go there, don’t go there at all . . . It does make sense, though, his getting rid of the spill, I mean, and it probably wouldn’t be that hard to prove, would it?”

  “Who’d want to? What would be the point? As far as the present investigation is concerned, the cleanup never occurred.”

  “Oh, wow. See how far ahead of me you are? I hadn’t even gotten around to that.”

  Whatever advances he’s made toward thinking this through have come at a cost. His inattention to road signs has them stalled in traffic entering the Dartford Tunnel instead of on a more westerly approach to London, where they might at least be creeping along. If Amanda is aware of this blunder she doesn’t show it when she picks up the thread.

  “So as it stands, Detective Grillo’s going to the Yard with Laurel’s statement that omits mention of the cocaine residue the appraiser caused you to identify and some unnamed facilitator caused to be removed, and leaves out your discovery of the coke disguised as aspirin in the garment bag, and dwells only on Grillo’s quote-unquote belated discovery of an altogether different stash of coke in the Chandler attic,” she says, disapproval again implied. Heavily implied.

  “Yeah, that basically covers it, and just so you know, I’m with you a hundred percent. There’s not one goddammed thing I like about all this contrived shit.” He smacks the steering wheel for emphasis. “I’m sorry I ever went along with it. Any of it. I should have said no at the start. I should have convinced Laurel to take the risk and tell Colin what we discovered in the beginning. I should’ve
convinced Colin to be content with just our knowing what really happened to Rayce and to keep quiet about it or suffer the consequences.”

  “Do I know what you mean by consequences?”

  “I believe you do.”

  Traffic jerks forward at a start-and-stop pace mimicking the way his thoughts are forming up.

  “While it’s all very noble, this wanting to clear Rayce’s name, to remove the suicide stigma and refute supposition he reverted to drug use, I don’t think it’s worth all the shit it’ll inevitably attract.”

  The briefest contemplation of that shit causes him to make another wrong turn, head north instead of west after clearing the tunnel. This time she appears to notice his disabled sense of direction.

  “Nate . . . honey . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Watch where the hell I’m going.”

  “That too, but don’t beat yourself up over this. And stop trying to put out fires before they start because there’s bound to be one you can’t get ahead of. By that I mean when everything comes out. And it will.”

  She’s right. Regardless of internal manipulations and deliberate omissions, the end of this nightmare and the capture of Jakeway will mobilize an unprecedented media offensive. There’ll be no stopping it; there’ll only be counteracting it and steps have already been taken in that direction with the enlistment of Brownie Yates to document the story when the time is right—and what a job Brownie’s going to have ahead of him.

  They cover another mile or two in the wrong direction before she speaks up again, this time wondering how long he’s had negative feelings about the contrived statement Detective Grillo is so eager to deliver.

  “Not long,” he answers, “not long enough. I was on board when I left the church this afternoon. I thought it was the perfect plan, I thought we were doing the right thing—the only thing, under the circumstances. I was all for it later on when I went over some fine points with Emmet and Laurel at the house. Then, as I said earlier, I started having second thoughts. Questions like yours started cropping up and now I’m full of doubt. Grave doubt.”

  “Is there any way to stop it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. We’re too far along, too late to unfuck it, as Rayce would say.”

  Amanda gives no clue to what she’s pondering as he uses up the next fifteen minutes working his way into familiar territory. If he remembers correctly, Cheapside will become Holburn, Holburn will become Oxford Street and that will get him to Park Lane and the hotel.

  They’re in sight of the Dorchester before she speaks again.

  “Know what? Rayce is a revenant too,” she announces right out of nowhere.

  “Revenant? What are you talking about? Rayce didn’t write that tune, that’s—”

  “I’m not talking about the song, I’m talking about being a revenant. Like Colin—a person who returns after a long absence. You can’t have failed to notice that it almost seems like Rayce has come back and I don’t mean just because his final album’s getting continuous airplay or because of all this maneuvering behind the scenes about the actual way he died, I mean because he really inhabits us, I mean because even you have taken to quoting him like you did a few minutes ago.”

  “And you can’t have failed to notice that the word ‘revenant’ has more than one definition, Nate says. “It also describes someone returned from the dead with attendant ability to terrorize the living. Like Aurora. We’re never without her either, you may have noticed.”

  “I choose to ignore that definition and I don’t let Aurora’s endless presence rule me the way some people do.”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing! Excuse me all to Helena, but the way you’ve been driving this trip’s taken forever and I was just trying to pass the time with something that didn’t have the intensity of prepping for admission to law school and maybe I should’ve been spotting punch bugs or naming farm animals that start with the letter ‘x’ instead of qualifying people for revenant status and don’t think that lets you off the hook because even though it wasn’t a long absence, you could be one too, you did come back, you know, and now that I think of it, Laurel could be one because she came back in a sense—she came back to what she most believed in and what she really wanted to be . . . I wonder what the collective noun is for revenant? . . . Wait, I’ve got it, a resurgence! No, a rejuvenation, a revitalization, a resurrection . . . A re-vival of revenants. That’s it!” She chortles with satisfaction and blows kisses to an imaginary audience.

  He’s as close to helpless laughter as he’s been in he can’t think when. Amanda is rivaling Colin for imaginative wordplay and surpassing herself as a chaser of gloom. She’ll be thanked profusely when they’re alone—right after he places a call to Detective Grillo to determine if it really is too late to unfuck the situation.

  Grillo’s reportedly not in when Nate places a call from the Dorchester to the Weald Guest House in Middlestone. “No, no message. I’ll try later,” Nate says to a desk clerk who informs that later lasts another ten minutes, that the switchboard shuts down at eleven and won’t operate again until seven in the morning.

  “Shit,” Nate says instead of goodbye and hangs up.

  That brings Amanda from the bedroom, where she was undressing

  “Problem?” She says. “Anything I can do?”

  “Yeah, keep doing what you were doing while I watch,” he rather grunts. Seven in the morning will come soon enough.

  — THIRTY-SIX —

  Late evening, September 28, 1987

  Colin watches Laurel tell her brothers and sister goodnight from the distance he’s maintained throughout most of the evening. Not that he’s been aloof or all that physically removed—he’s been instantly available if needed—but he has felt like something of a fifth wheel whenever focus shifted to the double burial conducted today.

  All of the Chandlers have repeatedly thanked him for arranging the transfer of their deceased parents to what they refer to as neutral ground. Neutral ground, to distinguish from the biased ground where their reviled grandmother is buried. But to Colin, neutral ground distinguishes the two hard-won plots at St. Margaret’s from the place he had in mind when the transfer idea first struck. He was thinking of a spot here on the estate, near to the specimen copper beech Laurel so loves, a spot Emmet talked him out of lest a gravesite be contested one day in a property settlement. Just like a solicitor, that.

  The goodnights are taking forever because they all know these are actually goodbyes being said. There’ll be no time for this sort of thing in the morning when university schedules not only dictate a quick return to the States, but necessitate an obscenely early departure for the airport.

  Colin enters their sphere and adds his voice to the farewell chorus before Laurel shoos the three visitors up the back stairs much as she would Anthony if he dawdled too long. She returns with him to the kitchen table for the dregs of tea gone cold and the last few crumbs of an Eccles tart. His close scrutiny reveals her on the edge of too thin even for a rock star’s taste, too near to pallid to be explained away by the extraordinary number of rainy days they’ve suffered lately. And her dark eyes gleam a spark too bright and her smile beams a bit too brave to be entirely believable.

  “You cannot possibly imagine how glad I am to have my parents so near to the place where I embarked on my greatest happiness,” she says, her expression taking on full believability. “I know . . .” She flutters a hand at him, “I know they’re not really there—you won’t hear me talking to them, nothing like that—but I know whenever I visit that spot I’ll feel their presence . . . I absolutely know I will.”

  Her statement is no more fraught with emotion than any he’s heard today and that includes a stunning pair of eulogies by a girl who never knew the one parent and remembered the other mainly as a broken old man. But for some reason, what Laurel said just now is getting to him in a way Emily’s tender remarks and the gruff-covered tributes made by Laurel’s brothers failed to do
. Maybe it’s the wedding reference that’s stirring him, making him see her the way she was before tragedy took over.

  “What?” she says. “You’re looking at me funny. Shouldn’t I be smiling? Shouldn’t I be happy?”

  “Happy’s good. No complaints there.” He shakes off the wedding memories for now.

  She blots up tart crumbs with a moistened finger as he knew she would, refuses his offer to get her something solid to eat, insists that one last swallow of cold tea will satisfy her thirst.

  “What’s keeping you here, then? Something need squaring away before we go upstairs? Something I don’t know about?”

  “As a matter of fact there is something you don’t know about. And that’s only because I just found out.”

  Can’t be too bad, her smile’s still there. “And that is?”

  “I don’t want to go ahead with this . . . this deception, because that’s what it is, a deception. If I’m going to break the rules, I’d rather say nothing of what we know about how Rayce died. I’d rather go with my initial instinct to suppress the information and—”

  “Yeh,” he cuts in, “but wasn’t that because you were afraid how I’d react and as you’ve now seen—”

  “That was the prime reason at the time, yes, but now I have other reasons. Now I’m afraid the fallout will be worse than this . . . this bomb we’re about to drop. And, of lesser importance, I’m afraid things have gone way too far with this protecting me from my sins of omission. Ridiculous, really, because I no longer have a professional reputation to protect, and even if I did, I’d be far better off telling the truth, admitting I held back evidence, explaining why, and accepting the consequences. Only in Emmet’s worst-case-scenario was I ever facing a jail term. A severe reprimand was a good bet, but as I just pointed out, that no longer matters so . . .”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, as Amanda would say.”