The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  By this time Liz had appeared in their bedroom door wearing a sky blue pajama top of a synthetic that had all the qualities of satin, hanging on her like a coat of paint down to mid-thigh. He knew she wore only that top and nothing else, for that particular choice was her signal for what she had in mind, and he felt sorry to disappoint them both. As he cradled the receiver, he also hung his head.

  “Too bad,” she said. “You would have liked it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too, for that matter.”

  “Nice to hear.”

  “Can you be twenty minutes late?”

  “Wish I could.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said, offering an understanding face and sympathetic eyes. Being a policeman’s wife couldn’t be easy.

  He knew this and tried to cushion the blows whenever possible.

  They’d made it through the most dangerous years, the most stressful years, both of them straying from the marriage, but only once as far as he knew, though Liz for a much longer period.

  He’d never learned the identity of her lover and wondered if he ever would. As a lieutenant, the demands were on his time, the pressures more political in nature, the internal problems of his people leaving him feeling like a camp counselor. This call proved a little bit of all three. She wouldn’t want to hear about it. They both worked hard to leave their jobs at the office-an unattainable ideal, but one worth striving for.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “An hour if I’m lucky,” he said. “All night, if I’m really lucky.”

  He won a grin from her, a small but important concession.

  “Good for you.” Had they not been personally tied to the disappearances, it would have been out of bounds for her to ask if it involved Susan Hebringer, and Boldt might have felt uncomfortable about including her. But the rules had changed since the mother of their daughter’s classmate had gone missing, and Boldt thought maybe it was for the better-Liz deserved to know more about what took him away at 10:15 at night.

  He told her that LaMoia had called, that Daphne Matthews had jammed herself up, and that it needed untangling, but that yes, there seemed to be an unexpected connection to Hebringer and Randolf.

  “Then go,” she said, knowing this made no difference to his decision, and yet it did. “I’ll stay up and do some prayer work.”

  They came at life’s solutions from two different angles, but Boldt had finally settled into feeling right and good about it, believing that maybe one couldn’t exist without the other, that the material and spiritual were far more interconnected and yet entirely separate at the same time. He was still learning about her world; she’d given up on his the day she walked out of medical treatment for the lymphoma. And yet there was a meeting of the minds more often than not. “I could use that,” he said, wanting to support her efforts.

  She had something to say to him but kept it to herself, a coy grin taking the place of the words. He wanted to hear it but knew better than to ask. The secret to the success of their marriage these days was as much about knowing what not to say as it was knowing what to say. He admired her for her restraint.

  They shared a kiss. She smelled softly of the lotion that he knew her to spread all over her body prior to bed.

  This was a night of great sacrifice indeed.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Back at her place,” LaMoia answered, the two of them at a near run as they approached Homicide’s situation room. When Boldt shot him a disapproving look, LaMoia explained that they had a patrol guarding her dock.

  “Everyone else is here?”

  “Heiman, Gaynes, DeLuca, and Morse. Brandon’s home sick, Marsha’s still on pregnancy leave.”

  “Listen up!” Boldt shouted, addressing the gathering, as he and LaMoia entered the bland conference room that served as a staging area for major investigations. The four detectives were strewn around the room, Heiman in a chair, Gaynes propped against a file cabinet, DeLuca towering over a stack of equipment trying to get the room’s video projector switched off before Boldt realized they’d been watching a movie on TBS. The room smelled of coffee and old socks. The video went to a solid blue panel, though the sound of the action flick lingered for another few seconds until DeLuca found the right switch.

  “Research,” Morse said, winning a round of nervous laughter from his colleagues.

  Boldt managed to suppress a smile-the trick to effective leadership was to keep people guessing.

  “Here’s where we stand,” Boldt explained in a military-like tone. “Matthews had a call suggesting a possible lead in the disappearances. Name of the contact is Ferrell Walker, brother of the jumper-the case that LaMoia caught a little over a week ago. We have a sheet, including a Department of Licensing photo,” he said, indicating for LaMoia to pass out the flyers.

  “Note that the photo is a couple years old now. He was just a kid at the time. This guy’s gone seriously downhill. He’s wearing the street, looking about twenty years older. Last seen in dirty jeans and a ratty sweatshirt that zips up the front. Navy blue, or black maybe. Works day labor cutting up fish down at the fishing docks on the canal. Might have friends around there.

  Made a reference to Matthews that he was basically homeless, so that’s what we’re assuming. We’ve got to keep the patrol units on the construction sites and the hotels. We’ve got another on Matthews’s residence, so we’re a little short-handed in terms of uniforms available to us. You all clock out in an hour, but I want you to stay on this at least until two-until we find him, if we’re lucky. LaMoia has assigned each of you a section of the city. I want you to toss every homeless person you encounter until we find Walker, or where he might be holed up. Bring him in for loitering, vagrancy, public nuisance-I don’t give a damn, just get him in here.”

  LaMoia added, “Consider him dangerous. He carries a blade-a serious knife-like a goddamned sword.” He indicated his right side. “Over here, in a scabbard.”

  “Sounds like a fucking pirate,” DeLuca said. A couple of the others chuckled.

  Boldt addressed DeLuca. “Brian, you’ll work the bars around the canal.” He and LaMoia had worked out the assignments that went with the sheets. “But listen, I want all of you to get the word out on the street that there’s a Hamilton for information that proves good.”

  “Each of you grab a radio,” LaMoia said. “Along with cell phones, we’ve got no excuses for losing touch. No lost time: no doughnuts or burgers or fried chicken,” this to Morse, “no video games or talking up the waitresses a few minutes longer than necessary. Okay, guys?”

  “This is Hebringer and Randolf Walker’s talking about,”

  Boldt reminded. “Let’s not forget that.”

  If anyone had been thinking of throwing a wisecrack into the mix, Boldt’s comment stole the oxygen from the room.

  “Go,” LaMoia said, watching the four hurry and feeling a sense of power that his word counted for so much.

  Gaynes paused by her bosses. “You need a woman to hang with Matthews, I’m good for that. Whatever the hour, I don’t care.” She moved on, knowing better than to wait for a reply.

  “You?” Boldt asked his sergeant.

  “Something you said just now …” LaMoia tapped his temple with his index finger, “… you got the juices going, Sarge.”

  “Are you going to share this kernel of wisdom?”

  “I’m gonna skate by Matthews’s crib and roast a few marsh-mallows with her. Anything comes of it, you’ll be the first to hear.”

  “Why do I doubt that?” Boldt asked.

  LaMoia flashed him the trademark smile, a Tony Randall smile complete with the animated sparkle coming off the front tooth.

  “Get gone,” Boldt said.

  Voices

  “Hi, Mommy, I’m home,” LaMoia called loudly to the houseboat’s front door. He held up an Einstein’s Bagel bag, displaying it, knowing it was her favorite. “Trick or treat?” Matthews had yet to make a sound, but he knew she was in t
here, knew she wouldn’t want him waking the neighbors.

  The front door opened slowly, the living room dark, Matthews looming as a gray figure in sweatpants and thin white Tshirt. She looked good despite herself-with no makeup and uncombed hair this was a Daphne Matthews he’d not seen before. But he liked it.

  He attempted to pass the bagel bag through as an offering, saying, “You look like that kid in the Exorcist.” Standing at the door, he smelled the stale and closeted air from inside. But she wouldn’t accept the bag.

  She said, “I’ve got all the Girl Scout cookies I need. How about a rain check, John?”

  “I need your help,” he said. When a woman was locked up, he could nearly always find the key. He lived for such challenges.

  He said, “I’ve got a riddle for you.”

  “Pass.”

  “Ah, come on.”

  “I don’t want to play, Johnny.”

  “Sure you do. And I’ll tell you why: Because you can’t stand anybody having the answers ahead of you, of being out of the loop, and I’ve got the answers, Matthews, answers you need. Believe it. You shut that door and I go to Boldt with what I’ve got.”

  Sad eyes searched his face. The door opened a few more inches. LaMoia could taste victory. He said, “Little Joe knew you volunteer at the Shelter-do you remember that? Tonight he called your cell phone, a number he couldn’t possibly have turned up without a direct connection to you. Am I getting your attention?”

  She swung open the door and LaMoia stepped inside.

  “Love what you’ve done to the place. The Martha Stewart bomb shelter thing is fetching.”

  “Fetching?” she said, as if he’d spoken a foreign language.

  She locked the door’s dead bolt and latching hardware. LaMoia noticed the police bar to the left of the door, realizing she’d had it barricaded.

  “Towels on the windows? Nice.”

  “Lighten up.”

  “Can I turn on a light?”

  She said, “I like it this way.”

  “That worries me.”

  She snatched the paper sack and peered inside. “Sesame.”

  “Toasted, with light cream cheese.”

  “But how-?”

  “Matthews, I know more about you than you even want to consider. Believe me.”

  She looked askance at him. The bagel pleased her and he felt good about it. She lathered it up with cream cheese and took a ferocious bite. An appetite was a good sign. She spoke through a mouthful of food, uncharacteristic of her. “It’s a mandatory leave until they review it. I failed the Breathalyzer, did you know that?”

  “I heard, yes.”

  “A couple glasses of wine and I failed it. I was not drunk, John. I was scared,” she said. “But there you go.”

  “Boldt’s on it. He’ll ramrod it through. It’s paperwork mostly. You’ll be back in the saddle in a day or two.”

  “Four or five’s more like it. Meanwhile, I’m without my shield and my piece.”

  He heard it coming then, realizing he’d been invited inside not for his offer of a bagel and shoptalk, but because she needed something from him. This wounded his pride.

  “So, what is it?” he asked.

  “A drop gun,” she said.

  Her request hit him like a slap in the face. “You, of all people?” Matthews was the most vocal opponent of handguns on the department.

  “Times change.”

  “Not that much they don’t.”

  “Funny what a good dose of reality will do for you.”

  He said, “The Sarge asked me what I had to do with it.”

  “You?”

  “I got this feeling he thought we were … getting personal. Like that.”

  “Us?” she asked.

  “Not that it’s entirely unthinkable,” he said, in a tone meant to test her reaction. “I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility. You and me. I mean, stranger things have happened.”

  “Name one,” Matthews said. She put on a pot of hot water.

  Her movements seemed lighter all of a sudden, like she’d ditched a heavy coat. “You’re coffee, right?”

  He said, “Eight … no, nine years we’ve worked together, and you have to ask what I drink?”

  “It’s polite to ask.”

  “Well it’s rude when two people have known each other as long as we have.”

  “It’s espresso,” she stated. “See?” She was right, of course.

  “I have an espresso machine someone gave me for Christmas.”

  “It was for your engagement,” he said. “It was Gaynes.”

  “You remember that?”

  He shrugged. He felt his face warm. “Regular’s fine,” he said, “if you’ve got it, if it’s not a problem.”

  “A souffle? would be a problem. Black coffee, I think I can handle.”

  LaMoia asked to use the head, revealing a perceptive understanding that this was a houseboat. She pointed around the corner of the galley, asking aloud if he hadn’t been here before. He answered obliquely, as if maybe he didn’t remember.

  As LaMoia urinated, his eye wandered into her medicine cabinet, left slightly ajar. An orange-brown prescription bottle presented itself. A white cap that was childproof, but not LaMoia-proof. He zipped himself up, flushed, and used the resulting noise of washing his hands to cover his reaching in there and spinning that bottle around. The script was a year old.

  His eyes danced nervously to the door, ensuring the lock was in place. Amitriptyline. Ten or more in there. He liberated two of them and slipped them into the coin pocket of his jeans.

  Safekeeping. A voice in him cried out, What the hell are you doing? But the answer came instantly. Insurance. Relax. It doesn’t mean I’m going to take them. He shut the medicine cabinet door to the exact position he’d found it-ever the good detective. He looked himself in the mirror, astonished that the reflection came back absolutely normal. As he unlocked the door and joined back up with her, guilt spiked through his system like a series of tiny fevers.

  “How ’bout I get you out of here and buy you breakfast at my favorite diner?” he asked.

  “How ’bout you get me a drop gun?”

  “Peepers are nonviolent. You’ve said so yourself when we’ve dealt with them in the past. Walker’s got this notion he’s part of the investigation. Grief does that, right?”

  “Suddenly you’re the psychologist?”

  “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re never wrong, John.” Sarcasm from Matthews would normally drive him from a room. When she got really pissed off she let her intelligence loose, uncaged like some zoo animal just waiting for the chance, and he knew better than to try to stand up to it. But this time he found himself unwilling to let her drive him out, for that would be a double win.

  “Him having your cell phone number,” LaMoia said. “That’s what our focus ought to be. That’s gonna be what connects the dots here, Matthews, because that is the one thing impossible to explain. We solve that, we’ll know where to find him.”

  “We’ll find him at the canal,” she said, “cleaning fish. Tomorrow morning.”

  “No we won’t. He’s blown off work. You know that. My guess is he’s in the wind. He knows he went too far with his offer to help with the two disappearances. He’s gotta be hooked up to that somehow if he’s making that kind of offer. Mentioning it to you was a mistake.”

  “He is not hooked up to the disappearances,” she protested.

  “He’s a grief-stricken, sad excuse of a human being who’s lost and emotionally fragile and is trying to bait me into including him with information he doesn’t possess just so he can be a part of something. Right now, he’s a part of nothing. His sister’s murder is all he has left.”

  “So explain him having your cell phone number.”

  “He got it off the phone while in the car-it’s all I can think of.”

  “For me, it adds up differently.”

  “Surprise,” she said, again res
orting to sarcasm.

  Only then did LaMoia notice a massive tangle of wires and a tape recorder by the home phone.

  “You know Danielson in tech services?” she asked.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “If I’m to get a restraining order against him, I need at least one of my refusals on tape. Welcome to the woman’s side of the new-and-improved stalking law. Same old, same old, you ask me.” She made herself tea and poured hot water through a funnel loaded with too much coffee. He didn’t tell her. She said calmly, “I need a weapon, and in case I have to use it, I don’t want it traceable.”

  LaMoia churned inside to hear this. “You’re making me worried,” he said.

  “I’m making you coffee,” she corrected.

  He sampled her effort. It tasted bitter and burned. He told her otherwise. Tea drinkers. What did they know? “Are you going to ask?” he said.

  “About your version of the cell phone number?”

  “What else?”

  “Okay, I’m asking.”

  “He’s been inside the Shelter,” LaMoia said confidently.

  “Your name, your address, your cell phone, they’re tacked up on a bulletin board somewhere. Am I right? It talks like a street person, it walks like a street person … Who’s to question his being down there?”

  “Nice theory, but it’s women only, John.”

  “Guys must wander down into there now and then, whether it’s looking for some girl or thinking it’s coed.”

  “Sure they do, you’re right.”

  “So, one of them was Walker. Maybe on purpose, even. Very intentionally when you weren’t there. And he lifted your-”

  She interrupted, stuck back on the earlier part of his suggestion. “It would explain his watching the Shelter.” She was thinking about the figure in the parking garage. What if those street kids had merely told her what they thought she’d wanted to hear? What if it had been Walker up there looking down on her?

  More to the point, why did she feel so uncertain about sharing that Nathan Prair had been lurking at the end of her dock? She answered that question immediately, knowing that she hadn’t been completely innocent with Prair, had not remained 100 percent objective with him during counseling. Not that she’d ever done anything that could be remotely construed as a come-on, not even close, but something about him had made her tack a few more minutes onto a session, had given him the benefit of the doubt when evaluating an answer. Later, she had wondered if she’d allowed herself to be charmed-an egregious error, an unforgivable sin, for any psychologist. She knew Prair’s presence on her dock had to be mentioned, but not now. Not LaMoia.