by Josh Lanyon
“Right.” I slid my gaze his way.
Jake was watching alertly. “What’s entailed in this healthy lifestyle?”
“Exercise. Diet. Medication.”
“There must be more to it than that.”
“Stress management. Lots and lots of sex.”
“Uh-huh. What else?”
“Various scenarios have been discussed.” I said tentatively, “Apparently the house in Porter Ranch is mine, if I want it.” I waited to see what he’d say. This was a fantasy I had never been unwise enough to let myself entertain. I couldn’t believe I was suggesting it now.
“The one with the swimming pool? Do you want it?”
“It’s too big for me on my own.”
He said casually, “Not an issue now, is it?”
“Are you sure?”
“Up to you. You’re the confirmed bachelor. I like domesticity.”
“Confirmed bachelor?” Mildly startled, I reflected on that.
“You like your space. Physical and emotional.”
“I wouldn’t mind…you.”
His smile was a mix of affection and skepticism. He added pragmatically, “The house sounds like a good idea. Not too far from Pasadena. Just far enough from Chatsworth. Pool for you. Big yard for the dog.”
“And the cat.”
“And the cat.”
“Natalie could move into my apartment above the bookstore. I think that would simplify things for her and Lisa.”
“It’s worth considering.”
I smiled, closing my eyes. Wait till Dr. Shearer got a load of my cardiac-rehab partner. She’d waxed long and loudly on her disappointment with me that morning.
I opened my eyes. “What was it you were going to tell me?”
Jake looked blank.
“When I arrived here today, you said you had something to tell me.”
He tensed. Closed his eyes and opened them. All at once, he looked years older. “Christ. I forgot. How the hell did I forget that?”
“You’ve had a few things on your mind.”
The expression in his eyes was bleak as they met my own. “It’s bad news.”
“Tell me.”
“Harry Newman is dead. He was shot to death.”
Chapter Eighteen
“It has to be a coincidence,” I insisted.
We were sitting on the sofa in the living room eating scrambled eggs. The sofa was one of two pieces of furniture. The other piece was a large, relatively new flat-screen TV.
When Jake didn’t respond. I said, “Newman didn’t exactly walk the straight and narrow. He could have pissed off the wrong people or stumbled into something.”
“I think it’s a pretty big coincidence. Newman wasn’t technically retired, but he wasn’t working any cases either.”
“But everybody’s dead.”
“Not everybody.”
“Mostly. Besides, I thought we were in agreement that Truffaut was the most logical person to have killed Stevens?”
“Truffaut made a very good suspect. And a convenient one, since he’s not around to argue,” he agreed. “But I wasn’t ever entirely sold on Truffaut as our perp.”
“This is news to me.” I started to put my plate down, caught his expression, and picked up my fork again.
“Truffaut had motive, sure. And he probably had means. Though we have no idea of his movements the night Stevens died.”
“It’s not in Argyle’s case notes?”
“Argyle had no information on Truffaut or the Cross of Rouen.”
“How could that be, if he talked to Louise Reynard?”
Jake’s voice was colorless. “Louise Reynard might not have confided that information. With Stevens gone and his sister and her lover denying everything, it’s not something she could prove — and it might have been dangerous for her to try.”
“Okay. Chris Powers is our culprit.”
“And that conclusion is based on what?”
I tried to read his expression. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“You said it. We’re running out of suspects.”
“We’ve still got Chris Powers. He’s got the strongest motive at this point. He’s planning to run for office, and his mother’s history is pretty shady. It could be a problem on the campaign trail.”
History. Reputations. Good names. Did people still kill to protect those things?
Blackmail simply didn’t seem like the motive it once had in these days of reality TV and tell-all memoirs.
“How would Powers know about Newman?”
“Jinx could have told him.”
“How would she know?”
“She knew about the PI Louise Reynard hired. I mean, she says she’d forgotten, but how could she? If we want to consider all the possibilities, Jinx had as much motive as anyone.”
Not that I believed that. She had cried on the phone that morning. Cried when she realized Dan Hale hadn’t killed her brother.
Scratch Jinx.
As though reading my mind, he said, “Did you believe her when you talked to her on the phone?”
I nodded.
Jake said patiently, “So even if Jinx did remember Louise hired a PI, she might have forgotten his name. Fifty years is a long time, and they’ve been busy years for her. If she did know about Newman and feared a revelation on his part, why wait till now to get rid of him?”
“I don’t know. We’d have to ask her. Look, I freely admit I don’t believe Jinx killed Newman. I’m sure she didn’t kill her brother — because she believed Dan Hale killed him. And if she didn’t kill Jay, she had no reason to kill Newman. That still leaves her son. Chris Powers has plenty of motive, and he threatened me.”
“Chris Powers has an alibi.”
“What?”
“He’s got an alibi. Newman was gunned down Saturday morning when he went for a bike ride. Powers was sailing with friends at the time of Newman’s death.”
“He could have hired someone.”
“True.”
I could see he didn’t buy it. He had already worked this out.
“The motive can’t be the Cross of Rouen, or it would have shown up by now.”
“The motive is the same thing it’s always been.”
I picked my glass of orange juice off the floor. Sipped it. Considered. “I guess I’m more tired than I thought, because I’m not following this. I thought we were agreed that Stevens was killed for the cross?”
“We were. Newman’s death changes everything.”
“And you won’t consider the idea that it was a coincidence?”
“I know it wasn’t.”
I was getting a very bad feeling. “Okay. So the motive for Newman’s death is…fear of exposure? Somehow, as he reviewed the case, he figured out who killed Jay Stevens? He obviously wasn’t above a little bit of friendly extortion. Did he try to blackmail someone?”
“I think so. That’s my guess. I don’t have any proof.”
“I don’t believe Eve Truffaut cares enough about her father’s reputation to commit murder to protect it. So that leaves Chris Powers — who apparently has an alibi. Who else is left?”
Scout padded over, snuffling my orange juice and nearly knocking the glass over. I steadied it. My head jerked up, and I stared at Jake.
“No way. Why?”
“I don’t know why. At least…I’m not certain.”
“You’re sure he’s our guy? Why?”
“Because the only person I told about Newman was Nick Argyle. Hell, I showed him a photo and said Newman was trying to break in to the bookstore. I practically hand-delivered him.”
I swallowed hard. The orange juice had turned sour in my stomach.
“I don’t think so, Jake. Argyle’s not the type. He was a good cop. You can tell —”
“No, you can’t tell,” he said harshly.
I could see how hard this was for him. He liked Argyle. Maybe identified with him.
“This isn’t making s
ense to me. If he killed Newman, he killed Stevens. Stevens had to have been killed for the cross, and I don’t believe for one minute that Argyle would have stolen that cross. I don’t care how valuable it was. He wasn’t — isn’t — that type.”
“No. He wasn’t that type.”
I didn’t get his tone of voice at all. “Do you think in his obsession to put Stevens behind bars —”
I stopped and reconsidered that obsession. I remembered Dan Hale saying how Argyle was at the club all the time, his eyes eating alive Jinx — or someone — on the bandstand. I thought about Argyle — seemingly unmarried and living alone — the house with no photos, no woman’s touch.
I sat up straight. “Jesus. Argyle’s gay, isn’t he?”
His voice was quiet. “I don’t know. I think so.”
“He was in love with Jay Stevens.”
“I don’t know that either. Clearly he was obsessed with him.”
“Even if you’re right, why kill him?”
Jake shook his head.
I remembered Argyle saying that Louise Reynard had never confirmed hiring Newman — he’d tried to discredit Newman. There had to be a reason for that.
I remembered something else. Something that, strangely enough, seemed even more significant: Alonzo’s butting into an investigation that was not his own. Butting in for his own personal reasons. Argyle had stated Louise Reynard made a nuisance of herself after Stevens disappeared, but why would she be a nuisance to Argyle? He was working robbery-homicide. He wouldn’t have been in charge of Stevens’s disappearance. Shouldn’t have. And yet there he’d been. The whole time.
I said, “Without Newman we’re never going to be able to prove any of this.”
Scout bumbled up with those big feet and sat down, leaning against Jake’s leg. Jake absently scratched him behind his ears. “Yes, we are.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Meaning what exactly?”
“I don’t know why Argyle killed Stevens, but he killed Newman to cover up the first murder. If he was willing to kill twice, I don’t see him stopping there. He’s not about to — can’t — risk discovery now.”
“Quit trying to spoon-feed it to me. Tell me whatever the hell it is you’re thinking.”
“Argyle called me this afternoon, not long before you arrived, and told me he thought he’d figured out where Stevens might have hidden the cross. He wants to meet tonight.”
“Where?” I asked with foreboding.
“The Tides.”
I stood up. “Come on, Jake. He’s setting a trap for you. A nighttime meet on a lonely deserted beach? Jake. He’s afraid of what Newman might have told you, and now he’s coming after you.”
Jake nodded.
“You know that. So…call the cops.”
Nothing.
I sat down again. I felt winded. “You’re not going to call the cops.”
“No.”
“Great. Just fucking great.” I scowled at him. “After all this, I’ll be damned if you’re not going to go out there and get yourself killed. Why? Because you feel loyalty, affection for this ex-cop you didn’t even know two weeks ago?”
He let me come to a full stop before saying, “I can’t explain why I feel like I need to do this, but I promise you I’m not going to get myself killed. Okay?”
“Not really.” I eyed him narrowly. “But if I can’t stop you, I’m sure as hell going with you.”
* * * * *
The tide pulsed against the naked shingles of bone white beach. The stark moon burned high above hanging from the rafters of clouds — an ugly, lightbulb moon casting harsh chiaroscuro shadows on the sand dunes and crumbling, grassy hillside.
The café was dark and silent, like a black cardboard cutout silhouetted against a big paper moon. The nearby pier gleamed skeletal in the bright moonlight as the midnight water rushed around its pylons.
I watched Jake stride down toward the rickety structure, and I steadied the pistol on my forearm and watched the shadows.
We had argued a lot about this, Jake and I, and the compromise had been that he was going to meet Argyle whether I liked it or not — and whether he liked it or not, I was going too. The first compromise of this new life together — and hopefully not the last.
Something moved in the deep shade at the end of the pier. My gaze sharpened. My heart thumped hard against my breastbone, but that was okay. It was a normal scared-shitless heartbeat.
We were a couple of hours early, but I didn’t trust that. However wily we thought we were, Argyle was the fox and we were the hounds.
“Nick?” Jake called.
Nothing moved, nothing but the tide soughing against the shore. Was there a more desolate sound?
“Okay, Nick,” Jake said. “We both know why I’m here.”
There was a slide of sand and pebbles to the right of me, and Argyle came down the slope at a half run.
I nearly shot him then and there. Partly because I’d thought he was under the pier and he startled the hell out of me, and partly because I wasn’t sure whether Jake’s affection for the old man might prove hazardous to his own health.
I didn’t shoot. Well concealed in the rocks, I waited, and Argyle strolled past me, lean and easy moving like a much-younger man, like the man he’d once been. Steady and purposeful.
Jake turned to face him, his hand resting on his hip, where he was wearing his pistol beneath the open jacket.
I didn’t think Argyle missed the significance of that, though his voice was almost friendly. “I didn’t think you’d come, son.”
“Sure you did.”
Sure he did. Jake identified with old Wyatt Earp there, and I was pretty sure the feeling was reciprocated.
Our agreement, such as it was, was that if Argyle shot Jake — if Jake went down — I would empty my gun into Argyle. I had promised I would not hesitate. I wouldn’t. My only hesitation was the terrible temptation to shoot Argyle now — in the back — before he ever had a chance to kill Jake. In one corner of my brain, I was horrified at myself. And in the other, I was judging whether, as easy a target as he made in the moonlight, I was a good-enough shot. The last time I’d been target shooting was with Jake. That had been over two years ago.
Besides, I wasn’t sure whether Jake would forgive me.
“So you want me to tell you where the Cross of Rouen is?” Argyle said. “That it?”
“You sound like you think you know.”
“I don’t know for sure,” Argyle said. “The tide has probably moved it quite a bit in half a century. I threw it off the edge of the pier.”
Jake had known the truth, had hours to come to terms with it, and yet I could hear in the flatness of his voice that he had still hoped… “You threw it in the ocean.”
“Wasn’t any good to me. Near as I could figure, it wasn’t any particular good to anyone in five centuries. And my fingerprints were on it. And Jay’s blood.”
“You’re confessing to killing Jay Stevens?”
“I think you already figured that out, son. You’ve got your pal hiding in the rocks back there. I guess you know most of it by now.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I couldn’t believe how calm Jake sounded. “I don’t know why you killed Stevens. It obviously wasn’t for the cross.”
“Now that, I think, is the one thing you do know absolutely for sure. I think you know exactly why I killed Jay.”
The ocean filled in the silence.
“Because you were — because you loved him.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it love,” Argyle said wearily. “Maybe. I wouldn’t have called it love back then, that’s for damn sure. But I wanted him, all right. I wanted him so bad, I’d have let him go and take the damn cross with him, if he’d just have…”
He stopped.
Jake said, working his way through it, trying to understand, “You couldn’t afford for anyone to know.” And then, astonishingly, “Things were different in those days.”
“That’s true, but that wasn’t why. That was why I couldn’t come forward. Not ever. But believe it or not, I didn’t intend to kill Jay. He was so…shocked, so…repulsed. I saw myself through his eyes. And what I saw there —” Time had not dulled that anguish, that fury. It still burned bright. “I hated him. Hated what I was. I never hated anything so much. I grabbed the cross off the bed, and I hit him with it. Once. Only once. He folded up like a house of cards. He died right there in my arms.”
Even over the tide I could hear his hard, labored breaths — as though he’d been running all his life to reach this rendezvous.
“Then what?” Jake’s voice sounded thick.
It seemed to take Argyle time to find the words. “Then I put him in the floor right where he’d hidden the cross. Him and his clarinet. I nailed it up again. I took the cross. It was wet with his blood. And put it under my jacket, and I walked out of the hotel and drove down to the beach — drove here — walked out on the pier and threw it into the water. And that was that.”
When Jake didn’t respond, he said, “No one saw me. No one…questioned it. Until you. Until you came along asking about Jay. Digging up the past.”
“And Harry Newman?”
“It took fifty years for Harry Newman to figure out what was underneath his nose the whole time. When he did finally figure it out, he thought he’d found a way to fund his retirement. Don’t waste your time feeling bad about Harry Newman.”
“Why kill him if you were just going to turn around and confess?” Jake’s voice was hard, but I heard the undernote of pain.
“Because I didn’t plan on confessing.”
I stared at the tense outline of Jake’s silhouette. He had to know. Even I knew.
I saw Argyle shake his head. “I’m seventy-nine years old. I can’t go to prison. I didn’t stay silent fifty years to blab my story in a court of law now. I thought if I got rid of Newman, that would be the end of it. It was already too late. He’d already told you too much, and you were connecting the dots to the rest. You’re good, Jake. You remind me of myself at your age.”
I saw his shoulders move, saw him reach up to his shoulder holster. Jake drew his pistol, stepped into firing stance, and shot him in the chest. The blast echoed off the sandstone cliffs, seemed to reverberate forever.