by Harry Dolan
With a small shrug Hideaway went on. “It would be natural for Rachel to go looking for Beccanti, and then to start following him. Late one night he goes to Mr. Loogan’s house. She follows him in. It’s a charged situation, sneaking into someone’s house. The senses are heightened, the adrenaline’s flowing. She’s been fantasizing about killing Beccanti all along. Now she sees her chance, and she takes it.”
Loogan spoke up from the center of the clearing, where he stood braced against the handle of the shovel. “You’re lying.”
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Hideaway shook his head. “As it happens, I’m not.”
“You’re the one who followed Beccanti into my house. You’re the one who stabbed him.”
“No.”
“You stabbed him,” Loogan said, “and you took the disc he was holding, and the letter. The blackmail letter. Rachel Kent would have no reason to take those.”
Hideaway turned to Elizabeth. “You see how desperate he is to paint me as a villain.” He pointed casually at Loogan with the black revolver. “I don’t know about Beccanti having a disc, or a letter. If he had them, if Rachel saw them, who can say what she might do? She would have to make a quick decision—take them or leave them behind. She would need to get away.”
Loogan said nothing and went back to his digging. Hideaway waved the revolver dismissively.
“That accounts for Michael Beccanti,” he said. “Not my work, I’m pleased to say. Then there’s Adrian Tully. I’m supposed to have tricked him into driving out to a cornfield so I could shoot him in the head. A murder made to look like a suicide. One shot to kill him. Then a second shot, out into the field, to get gunshot residue on his hand.” He looked intently at Elizabeth. “How much luck have you had, finding that mysterious second bullet?”
She lifted her shoulders a fraction of an inch. “We haven’t found it.”
“Because it’s not there,” said Hideaway. “I certainly didn’t fire it. Adrian Tully was a troubled young man. Guilty over killing Sean Wrentmore. Despondent because he loved Laura Kristoll and Laura wanted nothing to do with him. Nobody murdered Adrian. He got a gun and drove himself out to a lonely place and made an end of it.”
Hideaway gazed thoughtfully into the dark woods. He turned the cylinder of the revolver absently and the clicks sounded out slowly in the quiet of the clearing.
“That leaves Tom,” he said after a while. “Tom can’t be explained away. I wouldn’t want to try. I killed him, of course.”
Chapter 39
“Sean Wrentmore was the cause of it,” Hideaway said. “Tom was wobbly about Sean from the start. Second-guessing himself. Maybe he should never have buried the body. Maybe it would have been better to own up to what had happened. Then the blackmail letter arrived and set him spinning. It was too much money and if he paid once he’d be paying for the rest of his life. He could lose Gray Streets; he could lose everything. Better to tell the truth now, while he still had a chance.”
Elizabeth bent forward, listening eagerly. Loogan stood unmoving in the grave. The rain was no more than a mist in the air.
“I didn’t think he could be serious,” Hideaway said. “If it was a matter of money, I could have given him a loan. Valerie had only asked him for fi fty thousand. I could have given him that outright. I offered to do it, that night at his office. But he’d made up his mind. He’d decided to do the right thing. I found him with a notebook open on his desk.
“He’d been writing it down—what he was going to tell the police. Nothing about me, he said. Nothing about Sean writing my books. He would leave me out of it. As if it wouldn’t all come out, once he told his story.
“It was easy to deceive him, to pretend to agree. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that is the only way. Why don’t you read me what you’ve got so far? I went around behind his desk, as if to read along over his shoulder. The bookshelf was there within reach. A volume of Shakespeare. I’d never noticed it there before. The symbolism appealed to me—the publisher of a pulp magazine, struck down by the Bard himself.”
Hideaway turned his head sharply toward Elizabeth. “I thought I’d have to work myself up to it,” he said, “but it was easy. Easy to decide that I hated 3 0 4 h a r r y
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Tom Kristoll, with his summer parties and his hangers-on. His pretentious magazine, trying to pass off crime stories as literature. And then he discovers a genuine talent, and what does he do? Sean Wrentmore was a great writer. He wrote two books for me— The Heat of December and The Febru- ary Killers—and they got better reviews than anything I had ever done. He was the goose that laid the golden eggs, and Tom let some third-rate graduate student beat the goose over the head with a bottle of Scotch.
“How long does it take to reach a book down off a shelf ? A second? Two? Long enough to determine that Tom deserved to die. The deed itself didn’t take much longer. The first blow wasn’t strong enough. It stunned him and he started to shake it off and ask me what the hell I’d done that for. The second put him down. After that it was automatic: Throw open the sash of the window, lift him to the sill, push him out. No time for thinking.”
Hideaway raised his free hand, brushed thick fingers through his white hair. “I’ve thought about it since, though. I regret what happened, but I can’t quite manage to feel guilty about it. You could say Tom brought it on himself. When he decided to go to the police, he was putting me at risk. My publisher didn’t know about Sean. If the truth came out, my career would be over. So Tom was a threat to my reputation, my livelihood. What I did to him, you could almost call it self-defense.”
Elizabeth saw Hideaway watching her, as if to gauge her reaction. “You’re deluding yourself,” she said quietly. “There was no threat to your life. It wasn’t self-defense.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “But self-defense is a slippery thing. What Mr. Loogan did to that fellow’s son—Peltier. Would you call that self-defense?”
She leaned back against the tree, considering the question. But before she could come up with a reply, Loogan answered for himself.
“No,” he said.
Hideaway turned toward him. “Then how do you justify it?”
“I don’t.”
“But you must have had a reason for doing it.”
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“I wanted him dead.”
“A straightforward answer,” said Hideaway. “Let’s leave it at that then: I wanted Tom dead.” He looked candidly at Elizabeth. “I’ll make no excuses, just as Mr. Loogan makes no excuses about stabbing that old fellow’s son, or about leading the man on, promising to tell him his son’s final words. That was a minor lie, surely, but some might call it cruel.”
“It wasn’t really a lie,” said Loogan from the center of the clearing. “Peltier’s son did say something before the end. He said quite a piece.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“I don’t know. He had a mouth full of blood by then and he mumbled. I couldn’t make out a word.” Loogan paused thoughtfully and leaned against the shovel and in a deadpan tone he added: “Do you think I should have told his father that?”
Nothing but the sound of the night wind in the clearing and the silence of the misty rain, and then Nathan Hideaway tipped his head back and laughed. He laughed softly and for a long while, and then he got up and paced and didn’t speak—except once, when he stopped and shook his white-crowned head and laughed again and said, “The remarkable Mr. Loogan.”
Elizabeth fi tted the end of the twig once more into one of the handcuff locks. But her movements were mechanical and her thoughts were elsewhere. She thought of her daughter waiting for her at home, thought of the possibility that Sarah might never see her again, living or dead. Because it wasn’t hard to imagine what Hideaway intended to do. He would let Loogan dig to the bottom of the grave, let him excavate Sean Wrentmore. Then the black revolver—a bullet for Loogan, a bullet for h
er. After that, Hideaway could deal with Wrentmore’s tattoos at his leisure; he had James Peltier’s knife. Then cover up the grave again, with three bodies in it this time instead of one. Then walk down the path to his car and drive away, with nothing to tie him to the crime, nothing but a pair of glass beads that no one would ever find.
Elizabeth looked at David Loogan, up to his waist in the earth. She 3 0 6 h a r r y
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watched the motion of his arms and shoulders, the blade of the shovel rising. She felt the twig break in her fi ngers, because a twig is a poor tool for picking a lock. She squeezed her eyes shut then and let herself feel hope. Because Loogan had given her a message, just after he had begun to dig. Hideaway had been distracted for a moment; he had gone to investigate a noise, some small animal skittering at the edge of the clearing. And then Loogan had spoken to her. He couldn’t risk letting Hideaway hear, he could only mouth the words, but it was enough. The flashlight hung overhead; she could see his lips move.
His words were the same ones James Peltier had said to her earlier that night.
You’re going to survive this.
She raised her eyebrows and mouthed back, I am? Then he said something else. She couldn’t be certain of the words, but she thought she understood, because the thumb and index finger of his right hand made the shape of a gun.
I might have to shoot him.
There was nothing more, because Hideaway had turned his attention back to the center of the clearing. But Elizabeth believed she understood Loogan’s message. She remembered Laura Kristoll’s account of the night of Sean Wrentmore’s death. Wrentmore had worn a gun that night, a pistol strapped to his ankle. Laura never said what had become of the gun, but Loogan would know. Loogan had helped bury the body.
I might have to shoot him.
Elizabeth let herself hope. The gun was in the grave. Loogan was digging for it, and every shovelful of earth brought him closer to it. Moonlight fell on the hedges bordering Casimir Hifflyn’s front lawn. Raindrops clung to blades of grass. Carter Shan walked up the steps to the house and knocked on the door.
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When he got no answer he circled around through the side yard. He came to the terraced lawn in back and heard the chirp of his cell phone. He thumbed the talk button. “Shan here.”
“Checking in.” It was Harvey Mitchum. “I’ve driven by the Kristoll house and Nathan Hideaway’s cottage,” he said. “Nobody home at either place.”
“Well, it’s a Saturday night.”
“It surely is,” Mitchum said. “What about you? Any luck?”
Shan approached the French windows of Hiffl yn’s workroom.
“Bridget Shellcross is out,” he told Mitchum. “Her townhouse is deserted. Casimir Hifflyn’s car is in his driveway and there are lights on in his house, but no one answers the door.”
“Is that where you are now?” asked Mitchum. “Maybe I should come out there.”
“Hold on a second, will you, Harv?”
“Sure.”
With the phone in his left hand, Shan put a white cotton glove on his right and pushed at the French windows. Locked. Through the glass, he could see the figure of a man slouched in the high-backed chair at the writing table, one arm dangling toward the floor. Shan rapped his knuckles on the glass. The figure didn’t move.
Shan lifted his right foot and kicked solidly with the heel of his shoe at the seam between the two windows. A splintering of wood as the two halves burst inward. He slipped the open phone into his pocket and drew his pistol. Chambered a round and climbed into the room. He crossed quickly to the writing table and confirmed that the figure in the chair was Casimir Hifflyn. Shan searched with two fingers for the carotid artery. No pulse. He hadn’t expected one. The wound at Hiffl yn’s temple looked gruesome.
The second body lay near the doorway to the room. The writer’s lovely Mediterranean wife. One shot to the midriff and another to the chest. And one more that had punched a hole in the wall beside the door frame. 3 0 8 h a r r y
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The muffled sound of Mitchum’s voice shouting. Shan drew the phone from his pocket.
“What the hell’s happening?”
Shan said, “Sorry about that. I’m afraid I had to break in here. You’d better come. The chief too, and the medical examiner. Hifflyn’s dead. He and his wife both.”
He gave Mitchum the details and ended the call, and then with his pistol still drawn he cleared the house room by room, turning on lights as he went. No one lurking. By the time he made his way back to Hifflyn’s workroom he heard the first faint sirens.
He read the note on the writing table, an uncapped fountain pen beside it. I’m sorry for all of it—Tom and Tully and Beccanti. There’s no future now. I hope I have the courage to go through with this. Signed with Hifflyn’s initials. Streaks of matching blue ink on the fingers of Hifflyn’s right hand.
Four shell casings on the floor by Hifflyn’s chair. The gun lay beneath the table. Carter Shan knelt to pick it up. A semiautomatic pistol, thirty-two caliber. Nickel-plated. He handled it with white cotton gloves. The serial number was intact. In a short while Shan would call it in, have it run through the computer. He would learn that the pistol was registered to Sean Wrentmore.
But what he noticed now, as Harvey Mitchum’s voice called to him from the front of the house, were the flecks of dirt that came off on the gloves. Dirt from the grooves that ran along the thirty-two’s barrel, from the head of the screw that attached the grip. Black specks on the white cotton. As if the pistol had been buried underground.
The broken twig lay somewhere on the bed of moss behind her, and Elizabeth had given up on picking the lock of the handcuffs. She had spent half an hour considering whether it might be possible to work her cuffed hands b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n
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around to the front of her body. She would have to tuck the chain beneath her bottom, slide it along her thighs, bend her knees just so. She might be able to do it, she thought, if she were a magician, if she had time to practice, if there weren’t an armed man watching over her.
Nathan Hideaway had returned to his seat on the fallen tree trunk. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the black revolver resting on the palm of his right hand.
David Loogan had sunk into the earth nearly to his shoulders. There were dark mounds of dirt arrayed behind him, on the far side of the grave. He had left the nearer side relatively clear, as if he wanted to keep an unobstructed view of Hideaway, and perhaps of Elizabeth herself. She watched him bend his back, and straighten it, and another shovelful of earth joined the rolling landscape behind him.
Every shovelful brought him closer, she thought.
I might have to shoot him.
She hoped that Loogan would give her a sign when he was ready. Her hands were behind her back, and they were going to stay behind her back, but her legs were free. If she had some warning from Loogan, she could scuttle along the ground or try to stand. She could distract Nathan Hideaway. Give Loogan a chance to aim and fire. She might be of some use. Loogan’s plan might work.
She glanced at Hideaway, saw him watching her. His eyes big and dark and unblinking in the dim light. When he spoke to her the flesh crawled at the nape of her neck, because he seemed to have read her mind.
“Hope,” he said.
She struggled not to react. “What?”
“Hope,” he repeated. “It’s a curious thing. Consider Mr. Loogan here. He wants to kill me. I’ve no illusions about that. Yet I’ve asked him to dig up a body, and there he is, digging. He must be sore by now, and exhausted, and thirsty, but I can’t even offer him a drink. He can take a break if he wants—I can give him that much. Would you like a break, Mr. Loogan?”
Loogan answered without pausing in his work. “No.”
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“No, he doesn’t want a break,” said Hideaway. “He’s
a single-minded man. He could have made a run for it in the woods. I would have shot at him, certainly, but he might have gotten away. Or he could have attacked me with the shovel. He might have had a chance, though a shovel is a poor weapon against a gun. But there he is, digging. As if digging is going to save his life. He has to realize that the grave he’s digging could end up being his own. So what motive can he have for going on? There’s only one. Hope.”
The dim light made wells of Hideaway’s eyes. Elizabeth regarded him warily.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him.
“I think you do. But never mind. I’ll make him the offer again. Take a break, Mr. Loogan. Sean’s not going anywhere.”
The motion of the shovel stopped then, the blade hovered in the air. Loogan’s expression turned grim. “No,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“You see how it is,” Hideaway said to Elizabeth. “His hope is leaving him now. Mr. Loogan and I have been playing a game. He’s been pretending there’s no gun in Sean Wrentmore’s grave, and I’ve been pretending I don’t know about the gun. But now it’s time to stop pretending. As it turns out, there’s no gun in the grave, and no Sean either.”
Hideaway rose from the fallen tree trunk and aimed the black revolver at Loogan.
“You can put aside the shovel now,” Hideaway said. “We’re through digging.”
Loogan hesitated for a few seconds, then brought the shovel up and tossed it amid the mounds of earth on the far side of the grave. Hideaway lowered the revolver, but it remained ready at his side. He said, “When Tom wrote out his story for the police, he drew a map too. X marks the spot in the clearing in Marshall Park. I took his notes after I sent him out the window. Burned them when I got home. But I made use of the map. I wanted to make sure Sean wasn’t found, so I moved him.”
Elizabeth had let herself forget the ache in her limbs, the weariness. Now it all flooded back. “Where is he?”