Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “You’re in an abstemious minority,” Michaelson said as they reached her. “Ninety-eight percent of the people in here seem to be smoking.”

  “I pick my spots,” Cindy said without looking up at him.

  “May we join you briefly?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you.”

  Michaelson pulled out one of the chairs for Marjorie, then seated himself between the two women. Cindy glared at him.

  “I said no,” she told him sharply.

  “Clumsy of me, I know,” Michaelson said. “But we don’t really have time for finesse. It is quite important that, without further delay, you give me the page you took from the Calvert Manor estate books.”

  This drew a shrug and a “Now what?” sigh from Cindy.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Not that I particularly give a shit.”

  “I’m talking about something that could endanger what’s left of your sister’s sanity and possibly her life,” Michaelson said.

  Cindy’s head whipped around and her eyes flashed. Michaelson got a particularly good look at the eyes because Cindy grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him several inches closer to her.

  “That’s not funny, goddammit,” she snapped.

  Michaelson made no effort to escape from her grip. When he spoke his voice was matter-of-fact, as if he were a young desk officer summarizing overnight cable traffic for a bored area director at the State Department.

  “On February the third of this year,” he said, “you were awakened by a fight between your sister and Preston Demarest. I’m not sure what point the battle had reached when you got there. It doesn’t matter. Somewhere along the line, either before or after C-Sharp hustled upstairs with alarmist speculations about Demarest’s intentions and your sister hysterically took the bait, you saw something that told you what the fight was about.”

  Cindy let go of Michaelson’s shirt and sank all the way back into her own chair.

  “You have me confused with Kinsey Milhone in B Is for Brainy,” she said. “I’m not that smart.”

  Michaelson smoothed his shirtfront, unknotted his bow tie, and with unruffled calm began retying it.

  “Nonsense,” he said affably. “The venue for the fight was the library, where at least one light was on even though it was the small hours of the morning. One volume of the estate books was pulled onto the worktable and opened in the lamplight to a particular page. You are in fact quite bright, but you didn’t have to be a genius to conclude that the fight had something to do with Demarest’s surreptitious interest in that book.”

  “Oh sure,” Cindy said, looking pointedly away.

  “Not so much to put together, really,” Michaelson said. “With Catherine contentedly sleeping, Demarest sneaks into the library and pokes his nose into a two-hundred-year-old bound volume of estate records. Being less than accomplished at this line of work, he doesn’t notice that Catherine has awakened and gone in search of him until she’s in the doorway, observing him in his compromising labors. She asks him what’s going on. Demarest is less than inspired when it comes to improvisation, so his answer is unsatisfactory. He resorts to bluster, angry reaction feeds on angry reaction, and in the midst of the altercation you come on the scene to figure things out. You knew that the page was important, although you may not have known why, so you took it out of the book and put it someplace where Demarest couldn’t find it.”

  Cindy turned back to him.

  “You’re making this up, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Not altogether. You see, there’s a core fact that needs to be explained. Demarest had weeks of opportunity after February third to find that page again, but he couldn’t do it. While Demarest admittedly wasn’t the brightest roman candle in the fireworks display, he should certainly have been able to find the thing again if it hadn’t been removed. Avery Phillips, moreover, knew that what he wanted Demarest to retrieve had been in the estate books at one time, which is why he conditioned his purchase offer on including them with the house under the obscure label mobiliers antiques. But he feared it wasn’t there anymore, which is why he had to buy the whole house. Conclusion: Demarest was after a particular page from the estate books, and he couldn’t find it because you had taken it.”

  Cindy held up her index and little fingers in a school yard horns symbol.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “Skip it,” Michaelson said. “I’m not trying to get you to admit anything. I know I’m right, and I know you know I’m right. What you also need rather urgently to understand is that Avery Phillips is not a dimwit. He wants the document, he’s coming after it, and when he does he’ll pick on Catherine.”

  “Like there’s something you could do about that,” Cindy said as anger and alarm flashed across her face.

  “There is, actually,” Michaelson said. “Avery and I have been dealing with each other for many years. He lives by his own rules, but he’s a professional. He doesn’t believe in wasted motion. Once he knows I have the thing, he’ll stop bothering other people for it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I just give it to him, then, if I had it?” Cindy asked, a gamine-ish little moue marring her features.

  “Because if you did that, I wouldn’t have any reason to keep quiet about why Preston Demarest was killed,” Michaelson said in a silky voice that Marjorie always found a bit chilling. “Or about how he was killed. Or about who killed him.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed, broken after about five seconds by a familiar voice.

  “Hey, people, what’s happening?” C-Sharp asked.

  Chapter Twenty

  No one who had seen C-Sharp cowering on the mezzanine late that afternoon, Michaelson thought, could have imagined the confident, smiling, almost charismatic figure who stood before them now. Testosterone all but splashing out of his ears, he was glowing from the rush of the successful performance, radiant with the memory of the cheers, exuding not just the thrill of acclaim but the awe of experiencing it at this level for the first time. Michaelson wondered, with a touch of poignance, if what he’d just witnessed would turn out to be the prelude to charted songs and performances before tens of thousands at a time or, instead, the bittersweet highlight of a dream that never quite happened.

  “Please join us,” Marjorie said to C-Sharp after several moments had passed without Cindy issuing the invitation. “You obviously gave the crowd here what they came for.”

  C-Sharp sat down at the table, pretending to shrug the compliment off but clearly pleased by it. A waiter hustled over and put what looked like bourbon and Coke in front of C-Sharp. He picked up the tumbler, sniffed it first, and smiled before taking a generous swallow.

  “Did I hear you say you figured out who killed P.D.?” he asked after the drink. “I thought the heat were chalking that one up to”—here C-Sharp closed his eyes and turned his face toward the ceiling, knitting his brows in an ostentatious display of concentration—“awww-toe ee-rotic misadventure.”

  “Or suicide,” Cindy said.

  “Same thing,” C-Sharp said. He switched to a surfer-dude smile and waited politely for the applause.

  “You may well be right,” Michaelson said. “If they were calling it murder, they would presumably have questioned me by now, for example. And they haven’t.”

  “End of mystery, then,” C-Sharp said with a boyishly mischievous grin. “Let’s talk some more about me.”

  “The police are only human, after all,” Michaelson continued. “It would be a bit awkward to say Demarest was murdered when there’s no apparent way for a killer to have gotten into or out of the room where it happened.”

  “Now see,” C-Sharp said, “that’s the limitations of reality for you. On The X-Files that would simply be no problem at all.”

  “It’s not actually all that much of a problem in the real world, either,” Mic
haelson said offhandedly. “But then there are some things the police don’t know yet. The shoes, for example.”

  “C-Sharp,” Cindy interjected with a kind of languid abruptness, “would you do something really special for me?”

  “Right here in front of all these people?” C-Sharp asked as his eyebrows reached heroically for his scalp.

  “Oh, that’s very naughty,” Cindy scolded playfully, tapping C-Sharp’s nose with the tip of her finger and favoring him with a point-blank volley of what Michaelson took to be her undiluted charm. “But I want something else. First.”

  “Name it.”

  “A Cohiba Panatela. You’ll go over to the bar and get one for me? Please?”

  “No shit?” C-Sharp asked, surprise and distaste competing for control of his expression. “I know stogies were chick-chic for about fifteen minutes two years ago, but that’s sorta been-there-done-that for you, isn’t it?”

  Cindy waited two beats, offering a look that Steichen might have photographed and titled Actors Studio Exercise no. 38: Ingenue Pouting. Then she spoke.

  “Not comp, ’cause then they’ll try to palm off a Monte Cristo on you. Just have them put it on my tab for tonight.”

  “Cohiba Panatela,” C-Sharp muttered, giving the table an I’m-really-being-a-good-sport-about-this slap as he rose. “Not Monte Cristo. Got it.”

  Cindy turned back toward Michaelson as soon as C-Sharp was out of earshot.

  “All right,” she snapped decisively. “The shoes. You’ve got maybe five minutes. Let’s hear it.”

  “When Marjorie and I drove up to Calvert Manor the day of the murder, Demarest was shoveling snow off the porch roof. Yet when he came downstairs a few minutes later there wasn’t a hint of damp on his shoes. He walked across a parquet floor without leaving so much as a water spot. How did he manage that, do you suppose?”

  “He was the kind of guy who ironed his underpants,” Cindy said. “Figure it out.”

  “I have. He changed shoes before he came down. He apparently had an extra pair there because he was—”

  “—shacked up half the time with Cathy, right,” Cindy said with exasperated impatience. “Okay, he changed shoes. So what?”

  “So the police didn’t find an extra pair of his shoes upstairs,” Michaelson said. “They found the pair that he must have changed out of in a gym bag in his car. Where the murderer put them in the confusion while everyone was running out of the house.”

  “Time-out,” Cindy said, making a palm-on-fingertips signal with her hands. “Rewind. Take two. What are you talking about?”

  “The murderer got to the room where Demarest was killed by going along the porch roof,” Michaelson said. “Wearing Demarest’s shoes. That’s why all the footprints the police found on the roof matched his shoes. If the footprints had been made in snow or mud, the police might have been able to tell that some of the prints were left by someone else, lighter and with a smaller foot. But all they had were partial damp outlines, so there was nothing to distinguish the traces left by Demarest himself during his snow shoveling from those the murderer left.”

  “Hellll-ooohhh,” Cindy said in a scornful singsong. “Planet Earth to old fart. You can’t get into the room where Armani-boy was killed from the roof.”

  “True,” Michaelson said as he pulled out the floor plan and unfolded it on the table. “But you can get into the adjoining bathroom from there. And the bathroom leads to the murder room.”

  “Except that the bathroom door was closed and locked from Preston’s side,” Cindy said.

  “Right,” Michaelson said. “After he was killed.”

  “Why after?” Cindy demanded. “Let alone how, which looks like another biggie. Seems to me he would have locked it himself, to make sure no one intruded on him while he was beating his meat.”

  “I think the sexual activity he had in mind was emphatically nonsolitary,” Michaelson said. “Given what he planned to do, I think on the contrary that he ensured intrusion by the person he planned to do it with. Which is why he let the murderer in.”

  “My eyes just officially glazed over,” Cindy said.

  “Someone accusing me of murder?” C-Sharp asked cheerfully as he returned. “Here’s your stick, sunshine. I even had the bartender clip it for you.”

  Michaelson turned his attention to C-Sharp while Cindy yanked an ashtray and matchbook from the center of the table and set about lighting the cigar.

  “Until this afternoon I was actually quite sure you were the killer,” Michaelson said. “I assumed your friends downstairs either weren’t paying attention or were covering for you, and that you’d managed to slip outside and somehow get to the roof without leaving any trail.”

  “Not guilty,” C-Sharp said with the now-familiar palms-out gesture as he sat down.

  “I know. You couldn’t possibly have faked the pathological terror you obviously felt up on the mezzanine a few hours ago. Your morbid fear of even modest heights puts you in the clear.”

  “Hey, don’t remind me about this afternoon unless you want a meal, six drinks, and two peyote buttons all over your suit,” C-Sharp said. “But I’ll take being off the hook, even if it’s only your hook.”

  “You’re welcome,” Michaelson said evenly, glancing out of the corner of his eye at Cindy. “And we might as well clear half the human race while we’re at it. No one went upstairs during the conference call, and no one climbed onto the roof from outside. An expert might have been able to manage it without leaving a trace anywhere at ground level, but no one at Calvert Manor that afternoon was in the expert category. The murderer had to be on the second floor of Calvert Manor when the conference call started. So we can start calling the murderer ‘she.’”

  “No kiddin’,” C-Sharp said. “Blows me away, man. But you know what? Everyone on the second floor except P.D. himself was on the phone during the call. On. The. Phone. The which there ain’t any of in the room where P. D. bought it. Phones, that is.”

  “Two,” Cindy said, making a basketball ref’s count-it signal with her left hand. “And everyone on the phone is on record as saying something at least every five minutes.”

  “What I’m sayin’,” C-Sharp said. “So what’s your pitch? That one of the ladies traipsed around on the roof, got into P.D.’s room, aced him, started a fire, got out again, somehow locked the doors behind her, got back to where she was in the first place, and got back on the phone? All in five minutes? Tell ya somethin’, bro: never happened.”

  “The phones, of course,” Michaelson said, smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand. “You’re absolutely right. Why, I never even thought of that. You’ve saved me from a very embarrassing blunder.”

  “Hey, no charge, man.” C-Sharp drained his bourbon and Coke and pulled himself from his chair. “Well, got to hit the little boys room and talk to the guys before last set. See ya.”

  He ambled off, swimming through a sea of admiration on his way. The three people still at the table watched him until he had disappeared around the far end of the stage.

  “Hm,” Michaelson said then, looking again at the floor plan. “Shall we see if there’s some way around C-Sharp’s searing insight about the phones?”

  “Not interested,” Cindy said.

  “Do you think C-Sharp might be interested? Or the police? Or Avery Phillips?”

  “I thought Avery Phillips was interested in documents, not floor plans,” Cindy asked impatiently as she waved rich blue smoke away from her face with her left hand and settled back with the cigar poised pertly between the first two fingers of her right. “Which do you want to talk about?”

  “The document, if I have to choose,” Michaelson said. “I wanted it when I walked in here. I still want it.”

  “How much do you want it? And I mean that just the way it sounded.”

  “If you give me the estate book page I d
escribed,” Michaelson said, “I’ll make sure Phillips knows I have it and that he stops looking for it at Calvert Manor.”

  “And?” Cindy prompted.

  “And I will not tell the police, or Phillips, or anyone else, that Catherine Shepherd killed Preston Demarest.”

  Sighing with relief and sagging back in her chair as if a year’s buildup of tension had just flowed out of her body, Cindy consigned her cigar to the ashtray. Then she reached into a small backpack that was apparently serving as her purse tonight and pulled out the large Bible Marjorie had seen on her second trip to Calvert Manor. She opened the cover and began delicately removing the protective glassine flyleaf. If she flips to a weirdly apropos passage in Proverbs or Judges, Marjorie thought, I’m definitely stepping up my church attendance.

  Cindy didn’t. When she had the glassine off, she began, as Michaelson and Marjorie looked on in breath-held fascination, to unwrap the stiff, yellowed paper that had been slipped over the Bible’s cover as an impromptu, homemade dust jacket. Michaelson almost gasped as he suddenly realized that Cindy had treated centuries-old parchment that could crumble to dust from the slightest touch like dime-store construction paper, creasing and folding it to fit the Bible and now, just as causally, exponentially increasing the stress on the brittle document by reversing the process. He winced. He fully expected to see this document utterly demolished before his eyes in the next few seconds. The danger struck him as chillingly symptomatic: history being literally destroyed not by malice, not even by stupidity, but by indifference.

  As Cindy pulled the paper away, Michaelson could see familiar, faded script on the side that had been hidden. Not quite calligraphy by eighteenth-century standards, but a fair hand in any age. He pretended to scratch his nose so that he could hide a quick intake of breath behind his fingers. A palm-sized chunk of parchment chose that moment to come off in Cindy’s hand and disintegrate on the table.