Suicide Season

by Rex Burns

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Sitting.”

  “How many?”

  Where the road’s curve pinched away in the rear-view mirror, I could make out a pair of shadows against the glare of the car’s windshield. “Two.”

  “You got a weapon?”

  I’d started carrying it. “Yes.”

  “Let’s get out and look at the river.” Bunch glanced at the cylinder of his pistol and moved the hammer off the single empty chamber.

  Unhurriedly, we opened the doors and strolled up the small berm and over it to the strip of asphalt that formed a bike path just above the high-water mark. A thick screen of trees curtained off the far bank and through the trunks I could see the flow of the river, muddy with spring runoff, spitting and boiling against shoals of boulders and then smoothing again where the bottom evened out in thick, black mud.

  “They’re coming.”

  Bunch stretched his shoulders and pretended not to watch the car move slowly toward us, its top glinting above the rise of ground. I tossed a rock or two toward a pair of mallards tipping their bottoms up in the shallows and waited.

  But nothing happened. The car’s roof slowed almost to a stop, hesitated, then gradually picked up speed and glided out of sight around the next bend, withdrawing like the nervous tentacle of something that waits hungrily in a crevice on the bed of the sea.

  “Damn!”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE THREAT HOVERED on the fringe of consciousness like a dark, blurred shape that disappeared when you turned to look at it. But which always came back so that you almost got used to it. Almost, but not quite, and the corner of your mind that guarded the thing would wake up if it moved or grew or changed shape in any way. But it wasn’t something you focused your whole life on; there were too many other things to do, and Carrie Busey’s death was the thing of the moment. It was not only a cold trail but one scrambled by the heavy feet of police detectives who had gone over the evidence first. We didn’t find much that the police had not already gathered, and Bunch had to use up a lot of good will and even go in debt here and there to get what he could out of official files and, equally important, unofficial gossip.

  “What it boils down to, Dev, is a killing that should have a motive but nobody can come up with one.”

  “It’s definitely not a stranger-to-stranger or a thrill killing?”

  “Everybody I talked to said it doesn’t feel that way.” He shrugged. “No evidence, of course, but that’s how they feel about it. They’ve still got their suspicions about Landrum.”

  That had shown up between the lines of the official investigation. Landrum and Busey had been seen together a number of times; and she frequented his apartment, even letting herself in with her own key, neighbors had reported. As cynical as it sounded, homicide detectives always looked closely at the friends and relatives of a victim as the most likely to have a motive. And half the time they were right.

  “They even think he might have hired somebody to do it,” said Bunch. “Hired somebody, set up his alibi, and then called her over there.”

  “He could have. But why? What the hell would he gain from killing her? And paying someone a lot of money to do it?”

  Bunch thought a minute. “Maybe he found out where the Aegis payoff is and didn’t want to split it?”

  I didn’t trust Landrum all that much either, but seeing him as the killer made no sense. “Then why did he panic and call us when he found her? Why not just wait until morning as he finally did, and leave us out of it altogether?”

  Bunch had no answer for that one, and it didn’t help his disposition. “Yeah. And the only reason he’d have done it—the only reason he ever does a damn thing—is for money. And if he got that much money out of it, he wouldn’t be wasting his time working for us at a hundred a day. Crap.”

  We pored over Landrum’s notes and the reports to Busey that dealt with his surveillance of Margaret. He had said that he was afraid whoever killed her would be after him because he must have turned up something.

  But he had not been able to spot what that something was, so his file came to us—for an additional fee, of course. “Hey, I put in time on this and it’s my property—you didn’t want in when you had the chance. Now you want to use my property, you got to pay for it.”

  “You’re already being paid—and what have you given us so far?”

  “I got a few leads! I’m talking to people. I’m out there knocking on doors, which is a hell of a lot more than you’re doing sitting on your butt in this office!”

  “Time’s getting short, Vinny.”

  “Five hundred.” He held up the manila folder, slightly soiled and leaking corners of paper. “Five hundred and you can have it. Otherwise, you can buss my buns.”

  “You’ve got the decimal point in the wrong place. You never did work worth five hundred bucks in your life. Make it fifty.”

  “Quality work, Bunchcroft! You wouldn’t know quality work if it bit you. Two-fifty. That’s it. Not a penny less.”

  “A hundred. Not a penny more.”

  “A couple a Jews—a Jewish tag-team, that’s what I’m trying to do business with!”

  “You can stop doing business right now if you want to. It’s your choice, Vinny. I didn’t want Dev to hire you in the first place because you just screw things up. You heard the man—a hundred bucks. Take it or leave.”

  “You bastard. You’re still a fucking cop, aren’t you? You really like pushing people around, don’t you?”

  “You’re not people.”

  “You know I need the money, don’t you? You bastards!”

  “Come up with some information, Landrum, and we’ll pay you for it. So far all you’ve done is take money and bring excuses. Here.” I wrote a check for a hundred. “Now disappear.”

  Bunch watched the door close hotly behind him. “You’re throwing good money down a rat hole, Dev. And that’s the rat.”

  “It’s a gamble,” I admitted. “But he might come up with something yet.”

  We settled down to read through Vinny’s file.

  “You never spotted him when you were with Margaret Haas?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Bunch said grudgingly, “maybe he’s good at that, anyway. The damned sneak.”

  We were looking at the log sheet in his notes on Margaret’s activities, the day-by-day and hour-by-hour notations of what she did, where she went, and who she was with. I stifled the anger I felt swelling as I thought of Landrum spying on her; after all, I had done the same thing to her husband, and there was supposed to be nothing personal about it. Just get the facts, ma’am, and turn the facts over to the person who was paying you to gather them. But illogically, when Landrum did it, it seemed worse in an unclean way, as if his notes and photographs were an attack on her.

  “Here’s a shot of Loomis.”

  The photograph showed the portly man talking to Margaret in front of a restaurant door. His mouth was open on a word and his right hand pointed a stiff finger at her as she smiled slightly behind sunglasses. The notes gave the date and time and named the restaurant—the Promenade—just off Larimer Square. I recognized a table edge with its fragment of umbrella partly in the frame, and the brick that walled its quiet sub-level patio.

  “Maybe that’s why Loomis’s name was in Busey’s purse. She wanted to know what he was talking to Margaret about.”

  That made as much sense as anything else we came up with. The other photographs showed her talking to a few people: a woman in a business suit as they stood beside Margaret’s car, a store clerk helping her with a load of groceries in a supermarket parking lot, a smiling greeting to another woman as Margaret and the children strolled down the sidewalk. Many of the photographs were of me and her, sometimes with Austin and Shauna along, and I had to agree with Bunch that Landrum was good at this job. I could remember each place caught in the black-and-white frames, and, thinking back, recalled no sense of being watched and photographed. Of co
urse my eyes and mind had been full of Margaret, and that was a good excuse. Still, for a security agent with any pride, it was an insult; and it was intensified by the thought that instead of Landrum it could easily have been one of Aegis’s scumbags. None of which was helped by Bunch saying again, “Man, didn’t you really know he was there?”

  Only two of the photographs showed Margaret’s house, which wasn’t surprising, since Landrum would have a hard time loitering around inside the compound without being spotted. Most of the surveillance focused on the times she came out on various trips or errands, along with less routine trips: “01:44—return w/D. Kirk, kiss on porch. Enter alone. BR light out 02:18.”

  Thorough, the little bastard.

  “I don’t see a thing in any of this stuff, Dev. Except for you, there’s not a suspicious face lurking anywhere.”

  Which was the way I felt, too. The investigation was of Margaret, and only by hints and implications could we get a slight sense of Carrie Busey’s part in it, or her reactions to it. For one thing, she kept paying Landrum one way or another to stay on the job. For another, she was probably frustrated at the lack of any evidence. Perhaps she was even starting to come to the conclusion that there was no evidence to find, because the surveillance shifted from daily and complete to periodic—a check of Margaret’s shopping routine and tailing her through that, and once-a-day surveys of the house. Another document in the folder showed a weekly pay record to the gatekeeper on the evening shift to list car licenses cleared to visit the Haas address. That was the widely smiling college lad who was working his way through school, and at this rate he could afford Harvard. And deserved it. There were a few license numbers that I didn’t recognize, but most of them I did: mine for either the Healy or the Ford.

  “I don’t see anything either.”

  “That makes the score Ignorance, 1, Kirk and Associates, zip. Do you want to show this stuff to Margaret Haas?”

  There were reasons not to. For one thing, it would drag up a lot of painful memories, and for another she might be upset to know how detailed a picture of her life Landrum had gathered. But it was also possible that she could see something where we didn’t. “I suppose I’d better.”

  I arrived just after the kids were bathed and wrapped warm in their small robes and skittering their pajama feet across the rugs in hairy slippers made to look like rabbits and skunks. Shauna wore the rabbits, whose wagging ears were lined in pink rayon, and Austin wore the skunks.

  “Because he stinks,” giggled Shauna.

  “No, I don’t. And who wants silly old rabbits anyway!”

  “Children—Devlin didn’t come here to listen to you fuss.”

  That wasn’t entirely true; it was good to see them, and even their fussing brought a smile, stirring memories of me and my cousins and giving a hint of the continuity of human character. Margaret wore her hair drawn back from her face in a French twist that heightened the delicacy of her profile and the slender lines of her neck. And when she looked at me, those green eyes—large and dark in the light of the room’s scattered lamps—still held something of the depth and warmth that had filled them when we had been together last.

  We settled the quarrel over slippers by laughing at what ifs—what if the slippers were turtles, or what if they were monkeys, or big fat hippopotamuses. That led to story time, and story time to bed, and finally Margaret and I could share a long and uninterrupted kiss before I mixed her a gin and tonic.

  “I have something I’d like you to look at.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing to be that happy about, I’m afraid. Some photographs taken by the detective Carrie Busey hired to follow you.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “There may be something in them that could shed some light on her murder.”

  “Devlin, I had absolutely nothing to do with that woman’s death!”

  “I know that—that’s not the point.”

  “Well, it certainly seems to be the implication.”

  “It’s not the implication at all.” The welcoming warmth that had been in her eyes was replaced by a mixture of anger and hurt, and I tried to explain. “There may be something in the pictures that has nothing at all to do with you. But something that put her in danger because of what she knew or might figure out.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, Margaret. I really don’t. Bunch and I are trying every angle we can think of to come up with a reason for her death. This is just one of them, and a long shot, at that. You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Tell me who these people are. Bunch and I will check them out and see if there’s any possible connection between them and Busey.” I spread the photographs out on the coffee table along with the list of her visitors. “Anything you can tell me about them.”

  “My God—was he watching me do all this?”

  “It’s not that hard with the right equipment. Even for Landrum.”

  “But so many! And I never suspected …”

  “There are a lot of you and me, and I didn’t spot him, either. That hurts my professional pride.”

  “It makes me feel”—she shivered slightly—”as if I’ve been fondled in my sleep.”

  There wasn’t much to say to wash away that feeling because she was right. In one view it could be fondling; but mostly it lacked even that quirk of passion. It was simply gathered data, factual and unemotional, and that antiseptic professionalism was supposed to sanitize any moral issue. “It was a business for him, Margaret. Just like a newspaper reporter.”

  “Or a concentration camp guard? Aren’t there laws against this sort of thing? Invasion-of-privacy laws?”

  “The pictures are all taken in public places. They show public, not private, behavior. Here’s someone I recognize: Loomis.”

  “Yes—we met for lunch. I wanted to talk about going back to school. The market for MBAs isn’t what it used to be, I found out.”

  “What can you tell me about these others?”

  She went over the rest of the photographs, naming those she recognized. “This is just the grocery clerk who helped me with my bags. Did that detective think I was meeting him for some purpose?”

  “He was making a record of all the people you spoke to.”

  “But why? I can understand him taking a picture of someone I went to lunch with or of someone I seemed to know. But why a store clerk?”

  Most likely for the same reason I was sitting here with Margaret and looking at the pictures—a fishing expedition for anything at all that Carrie Busey might find useful. I explained that to her.

  “That she might find useful! One shouldn’t think ill of the dead, but I’m beginning to dislike Miss Busey.”

  I turned to the list of license plates that the gatekeeper had sold Landrum. He had his contacts in the motor vehicle division, too, and the numbers had been translated into owners. “Here’s a list of names. Do you recognize any of them?”

  “Well, yours, certainly. What list is this?”

  “Visitors to your house.”

  “Did he go through my garbage as well?”

  “He would have, except he couldn’t get to it.”

  “It’s sordid.” She scanned the brief list. “Professor Loomis, again. He brought by some information on MBA programs. This is Beth, a friend whose husband works for McAllister. Sue Graham—she’s one of the carpoolers for Austin’s preschool. So is Anne. Edith Goodrich … oh yes, the real-estate woman.” She glanced at me. “I wanted an appraisal on the house in case I do move out to San Francisco.”

  She hadn’t mentioned that in a while and I felt a small stab at the thought that she was still considering it enough to have her house appraised. “Have you made up your mind about that?”

  “No. But I want a clear picture of all my options. And Austin’s parents have been more insistent lately—they’ve bought a place in Marin County. They keep telling me how wonderful it would be for
little Austin and Shauna.”

  “I was hoping you’d stay here.”

  “I haven’t made any decisions yet, Devlin. You understand that.”

  “And I haven’t tried to pressure you for any.”

  “I know. And I’m grateful—I need to make up my own mind about what’s best for the children.”

  “What about you?”

  “Yes. That too.” Her fingers touched mine. “Lately, that’s become a real puzzle.” She turned back to the list, dismissing that topic. “This name, Mr. Whelan, is the plumber. It was when the disposal backed up.” Her finger paused at the next one. “Efficiency Car Rental?”

  “That’s the vehicle’s owner. We haven’t yet traced who rented it.”

  “Oh.” She went through the few remaining names, most of whom were mothers of children that Austin and Shauna played with or who shared the driving chores in the preschool carpool. The only unidentified number was the rental, and Margaret turned it over in her mind, finally giving up. “I can’t place it at all. This car was supposed to have come to my home?”

  “On the eleventh.”

  She shook her head again. “I have absolutely no idea who it could have been.”

  I drew a circle around that one and stacked the photographs and the list in the manila folder.

  “Devlin … “ She frowned slightly and gazed at the fireplace with its half-burned log hidden behind the screen. “Is this the kind of work you do? This,” her hand gestured toward the folder, “photographing and note taking?”

  “Sometimes it is. Most of my work is preventive security. But, yes, I sometimes do just what Landrum does: snoop on people.”

  She was quiet and I could see her weighing the words before saying them, so that when they did come, I knew they were considered. “I suppose it doesn’t seem important to you. I suppose it wouldn’t have seemed so important to me, either, except now I’ve been the victim of it. Now it does seem important.”