by Harry Dolan
“I can almost believe it,” Loogan said, looking around at the chairs, at the bookshelves, at the desk. “If you had any guile, you would have picked a different room. You would have talked to me anywhere else but here.”
Chapter 12
The Web site of
displayed photos and biographies
of the magazine’s interns. The online images were too small to be of much use, but the original photographs were kept in a file in the outer office of Gray Streets. The secretary, Sandy Vogel, showed Elizabeth the file on Tuesday morning. The photos were in no particular order, but it didn’t take Elizabeth long to find Adrian Tully’s.
She had duplicates made that morning, and by the afternoon she and Carter Shan and a handful of other detectives had fanned out through David Loogan’s neighborhood and through downtown Ann Arbor, searching for anyone who had seen Adrian Tully on the day Tom Kristoll was killed. The canvass continued on Wednesday. The results were disappointing. Elizabeth found a waitress in a diner who thought she had served Tully breakfast, but couldn’t be sure what day it had been. There were a few other sightings of similar uncertainty. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Shan spoke to the girl who delivered the newspaper in Loogan’s neighborhood. She recognized Adrian Tully. She had seen him on Loogan’s block on Friday evening. Shan took the girl’s statement, and he and Elizabeth met with the chief the next morning to bring him up to date. Owen McCaleb stood by his office window, listening. He was fresh from a jog and hadn’t yet changed his clothes.
“It’s slim,” he said when Shan finished.
“I know.”
“I mean, what we have is Adrian Tully on Loogan’s street,” McCaleb said. “Not even near his car, right?”
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“He was walking along the street near Loogan’s house,” said Shan.
“That’s what the girl said. But we also know the time. Around quarter to six. Tully claimed he was at his apartment all afternoon and evening.”
“The timing fits with what Laura Kristoll told us,” Elizabeth added.
“She arrived at Loogan’s house around five-thirty. Tully could have followed her there.”
“And then he could have punctured Loogan’s tires and keyed his car,”
McCaleb said. “But the papergirl didn’t see him do it.”
“No.”
“And then he could have gone downtown to the office of Gray Streets,”
McCaleb said. “And out of jealousy, or just to be a prick, he could have told Tom Kristoll about his wife’s affair. He could have quarreled with Kristoll and hit him over the head and pushed him out the window. But no one saw him in the building, or even in the vicinity of the building.”
“No.”
“So right now,” McCaleb said, “what we’ve got on Adrian Tully is that he lied about where he was on Friday. I don’t see how we have enough to charge him with the vandalism to Loogan’s car, much less the murder of Tom Kristoll. We don’t have enough to get a warrant to search Tully’s apartment, and even if we did, there’s nothing to search for. Do we even know what Kristoll was hit with? What did the M.E. say?”
Shan smiled ruefully. “A blunt instrument.”
“Lovely.”
“That’s what Eakins wrote in her report,” Elizabeth said, “but when I talked to her she ventured a guess. She thought it might have been a book. In fact, it might have been the book on Kristoll’s desk—Shakespeare’s Col- lected Works. That one was hefty enough to do some damage. And the dust jacket was missing. The killer might have taken it with him. It might have been easier to take it than to wipe it for prints.”
“And if he took it, he’s had time to get rid of it,” McCaleb said. “So where does that leave us? Tully lied. You want to talk to him again?”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Shan said. “We tell him we’ve got a wit-8 4 h a r r
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ness who saw him on Friday evening. We don’t say where the witness saw him. Let him wonder. The point is, we know he lied to us. See if he changes his story.”
“Elizabeth?”
“It’s worth a try. I’d like to see what he says.”
McCaleb nodded. “All right. Do it.”
On the sidewalk across the street from Adrian Tully’s apartment building, two pigeons danced around a scrap of bread. One of them caught it up whole in his beak and then the other hopped in, wings fluttering, and made him drop it.
Elizabeth watched them from the car, with Shan in the driver’s seat beside her. They had gone up and knocked on Tully’s door, but there had been no answer.
Shan had his cell phone out. His thumbs moved rapidly over the keys. He had an ex-wife and a son who lived in a suburb of Detroit, and he kept in touch with them frequently through text messages. Elizabeth had met the boy, a twelve-year-old with his father’s slim build. The child’s mother taught voice lessons, and there was a rumor in the department that she and Shan had once been in a band—she had been the lead singer, he had been the drummer. It was a rumor that Shan would neither confirm nor deny. Elizabeth watched him grin at something on the cell phone’s screen. Then he typed a final message, put the phone away, and tuned the car radio to an all-news station. She turned her attention back to the pigeons on the sidewalk. The pair of them skipped along the concrete, trading the scrap of bread off between them. A dog appeared at the corner, an Irish terrier straining at its leash. The pigeons scattered. The terrier snapped up the bread as it passed. Elizabeth kept an eye out for the pigeons, but they didn’t return.
“It’s the third way,” she said.
Shan turned down the radio. “What’s that?”
“That’s how this is going to go,” Elizabeth said. “The third way.”
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“What do you mean?”
“It’s just something I’ve noticed,” she said. “You’re waiting for something to happen, and you expect it to go one of two ways. But you’re wrong, because there’s always a third way.”
The air in the car felt stale. She pressed a button at her side and lowered the window.
“Say you’ve applied for a job,” she said, “and you’re waiting to find out if you got it. Then the call comes, and you’re expecting a yes or a no, but it turns out the person you interviewed with is in a coma, and the board of directors resigned, and the new management wants you to come in and interview again for an entirely different job that you didn’t even know about before. That’s the third way.”
Shan lowered the window on his side. “And you think that’s going to happen with Tully?” he said. “We tell him we know he’s lying, and we expect he’ll either come up with a new story or he’ll break down and confess to murdering Tom Kristoll—”
“And it’s not going to be either of those.”
“What’s the third way, then?”
“That’s just it. You never know.” She nodded in the direction of a car coming down the street. “But we’re going to find out. Isn’t that him?”
“That’s him,” Shan said. “That’s his crappy little car. There he goes, turning into the lot of his crappy apartment building. Shall we let him go up first?”
“Sure. We don’t want to seem too eager.”
A few minutes later they were in the hall outside Tully’s door. Elizabeth knocked. Shan put on a pleasant, distracted expression—a bit of performance, Elizabeth knew, in case Tully looked through the peephole. There was no answer and no sound from within.
She knocked again. After a delay they heard Tully’s voice, as if from far off. “Who is it?”
“Detectives Waishkey and Shan,” Elizabeth said. “We need to speak to you.”
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Tully took too long to answer, and when he did it was, “Just a minute, please.”
Shan was frowning. He unsnapped the holster at
his belt and rested his hand on the grip of his pistol.
“Come on, Adrian,” Elizabeth said. “Open the door.”
“Just a minute.” Again, the answer seemed to come from far off. Shan stepped to the left side of the door and drew his pistol.
“Is this the third way, Lizzie?” he said quietly.
“Easy, Carter,” she said. But she reached to her hip for her own pistol.
“Open the door, Adrian.”
The silence inside stretched out, and then there was the sound of a dead bolt being turned. Elizabeth held her pistol down at her side. The door opened a few inches, then swung wide. Adrian Tully, grinning, showed them the palm of his right hand. His left hand held the receiver of a cordless phone. Shan said something under his breath. Elizabeth thought it was the word “idiot.”
“Sorry,” Tully said. “It’s my lawyer on the phone. He advises me not to talk to you. He says if you have any questions you can go through him. If you plan to shoot me,” he added, looking at Shan, “you ought to maybe wait.” He held up the phone and wiggled it in the air. “Witness.”
Shan scowled and holstered his pistol. Tully held the phone to his ear, listening, and then said: “My lawyer wants to know if he should meet us here, or if we’re going to the station.”
“The best we can hope for,” Carter Shan said, “is the third way.”
Elizabeth sat at her desk in the squad room of the Investigations Division, sorting through her mail and her messages. Shan, in a chair across from her, stared at the closed door of the chief ’s office.
“The first way,” Shan said, “is if Tully walks out of there with his hands cuffed behind his back.”
They had driven Adrian Tully from his apartment to City Hall. He’d b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n
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been silent during the trip. Tully’s lawyer—Rex Chatterjee—had been waiting when they arrived.
“The second way,” Shan said, “is if he skips out of there scot-free.”
Chatterjee had calmly and politely requested to speak with the chief. Lawyer and client were in McCaleb’s office now.
“The third way,” Shan said, “is if he walks out of there and I punch him in his smirky, goateed face. I think I like the third way.”
Elizabeth came to a pink message slip from Alice Marrowicz. Kristoll body released, it said. Funeral scheduled for Friday.
“You’re quiet, Lizzie,” Shan said. “What are you thinking?”
“Do we think Tully is smart?” she said.
“Not especially.”
“Yet apparently he knew we were looking at him.”
“Someone probably tipped him off. My guess is Valerie Calnero. She felt bad about giving us his name in the first place.”
“It could have been Sandy Vogel,” said Elizabeth. “She showed me the file of intern photographs. I didn’t let her see me take Tully’s, but she could have looked in the file afterward and seen which one was missing.”
“Either way,” Shan said, “it’s someone from Gray Streets. People in the Gray Streets crowd seem to look after their own.”
“Tully’s lawyer is Rex Chatterjee. Laura Kristoll’s lawyer is Rex Chatterjee. What does that suggest to you?”
“Laura Kristoll doesn’t want us to question Adrian Tully. Maybe we were wrong about him. We assumed he had a thing for her, but maybe it went both ways. They could have been involved, and they could have decided to get rid of her husband.”
“That’s one possibility,” Elizabeth said.
“Or it could be she wasn’t involved with Tully, and doesn’t know for sure that he killed her husband. But maybe she suspects he did, and it’s all right with her.”
“You’re a cynical man, Carter.”
“Or it could be she thinks he’s innocent.” Shan picked up a pen from the 8
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desk and tapped it against his knee. “And maybe he really is innocent, and we’re on the wrong track.”
“That’s too many possibilities,” Elizabeth said darkly. “We don’t know enough yet. We haven’t talked to enough people.”
Just then the door of the chief ’s office opened. Rex Chatterjee emerged, brushing with pudgy fingers at his thick gray hair. Tully came out next and cast an airy look around the squad room before following Chatterjee out. Owen McCaleb watched them leave and then approached Elizabeth’s desk. “The upshot of that,” he said, “is that Adrian Tully is represented by counsel. He’s made all the statements he’s going to make. If we think he’s guilty of a crime, we should charge him and see how it stands up in court.”
McCaleb rolled his eyes. “Beyond that, it was a lot of bluster. Chatterjee was shocked and disturbed that the Ann Arbor police would come to a citizen’s door with guns drawn. He was expansive on that point. Before long he had you waving your guns in his client’s face.”
“Nobody waved anything,” Shan said.
“I know,” said McCaleb. “He was just making noise. We’re supposed to have it in the back of our minds that there could be a lawsuit. That’s supposed to deter us.”
“Are we going to be deterred?”
“No,” McCaleb said. “We’re going to get something more on Adrian Tully. Or failing that, we’re going to get something on someone else. It would be nice if we had a plan.”
“Elizabeth was just sketching one,” Shan said. “It involves talking to people and finding things out.”
McCaleb turned back toward his offi ce. “Let me know how that goes,”
he said.
Sifting through the papers on her desk, Elizabeth came to a green file folder and a typed note from Alice Marrowicz. Beneath the folder was a sheaf of papers clipped together: the list of writers and staff associated with Gray Streets.
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“These people we’re going to talk to,” Shan said. “Any thoughts on where we’re going to start?”
Without taking her eyes from Alice’s note, Elizabeth tossed him the Gray Streets list.
“I’ve got a copy of this,” Shan said. “There must be two hundred names here.”
“We ought to be able to narrow it down,” said Elizabeth. “Not all of them are local. And Tom Kristoll’s funeral is tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see who shows up. You’ll want to wear a nice suit, and try not to wave your gun around.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, Alice Marrowicz has done some of our work for us. Tom Kristoll published stories by convicts. I asked Alice to weed out their names from the master list. She found nine altogether. Seven are still serving their sentences. Of the two that are out, one is in California and the other is in a trailer park down in Saline.”
“A local boy,” Shan said. “What’s his name?”
“Zorro.”
“Dresses in black. Good with a sword.”
“Michael Beccanti,” Elizabeth said, opening the green folder. “It wasn’t my case, but I remember him. He did residential burglaries in the summertime, and got in by cutting through window screens. He always cut them the same way, in the shape of a Z. He got out of Parnall Correctional in Jackson a year ago.”
“Let’s go talk to Zorro then.”
“I don’t think it’ll take two of us.” She handed him Alice’s note. “Why don’t you get started on our friend from California. After that, you can look at the ones who are still inside. See what sort of contact they had with Kristoll and the Gray Streets crowd.”
She saw him frowning and added, “Don’t worry, Carter. I’ll call you if I need you.”
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The drive to Saline took her past fields of houses, places where prosperous young families would live. The trailer park was tucked away out of sight, but it was clean and well tended. The grass was trimmed, the cars were in good repair.
Elizabeth drove around to lot 305. The door of the doub
le-wide was a cheery red. The woman who answered to her knock wore sandals and sweats and a tank top. The tank top had been ironed. It was stretched tight by her swelling stomach.
“I’m looking for Michael Beccanti,” Elizabeth said.
“Who are you?”
Elizabeth showed her badge. “Detective Waishkey,” she said.
“Mike’s not here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Karen.”
“Does Mr. Beccanti live here?”
“Sometimes he does.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“It’s been a while. What do you want from him?”
“I need to speak to him.”
“So I gathered. He’s not here.”
Elizabeth put on a friendly smile. “How far along are you, Karen?”
The woman rested her hand on her stomach. There was a ring on her finger with a very small diamond.
“That’s a personal question, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think you should be asking me personal questions.”
“You’re right,” Elizabeth said. “It’s hardly my business. Are you engaged to Mr. Beccanti?”
“That’s another personal question.”
“I’m just trying to get the lay of the land. Mr. Beccanti lives here some-b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n 9 1
times, and it’s been a while since you saw him. Seems like a very casual arrangement.”
The woman crossed her arms over her stomach. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“You could tell me where to find Michael Beccanti,” Elizabeth said.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“I’m not going to lose sleep over what you believe. Mike served his time, he did his parole. He’s free of you people now. I’ve got a cousin in law school. I know how things work. I don’t have to talk to you, I don’t have to tell you anything about Mike, I don’t have to show you pictures—”
“I haven’t asked for pictures.”
“No, you haven’t. I guess I should be grateful.”
“Did someone else come around here, asking for pictures?”
“Another cop,” the woman said bitterly. “He seemed like a cop, anyway. He had a name like a gun. Luger.”