Killer Move

by Michael Marshall

  I hurried over to the big metal gates, pushed them open, and went inside.

  When I got to apartment 34, I hesitated. Getting my USB drive back, thus removing the evidence that I’d been in the apartment, was critical—even besides the importance of having copies of the pictures—so I could try to prove to the cops that something was going on. I was going in, no question. But still, I took a moment.

  Then I turned the handle. I did so in a firm, even fashion—and pushed the door open, stepping out of sight as soon as I was sure it was on its way. Nothing happened. Nobody came running out, nobody fired a gun.

  I cautiously stuck my head around. The door hung open, revealing the corridor beyond, bleached out by the light from the glass balcony door at the end.

  I walked down into the living room. Before I stopped in the middle of last night’s cigarette ends, near the two empty wineglasses, I already knew something was different. We ignore smells a lot of the time. We’re all about what we can see and hear. But before either of these cut in, part of my brain had caught onto something else. The place didn’t smell like Cass anymore.

  I looked at the bathroom door. It was a little chipped and could do with a lick of paint—but it no longer had a word daubed on it.

  I turned on the spot, being careful not to knock over the nearest glass, and stepped carefully over to the bedroom door.

  It was here that the loss of scent was most obvious. Whatever it was that Cassandra had worn, probably something cheap, it had gone. The bed had been made, too. Not excessively neatly, either, but exactly how it might have been made by a girl in a rush, setting the room vaguely to rights before hurrying out to a shift she was already running late for. I pulled the comforter back. The sheet underneath was white, a little crumpled. It could not have looked more normal. It was not soaked with blood. It was not suspiciously clean.

  Back in the living area the effect remained seamless. A low-rent apartment the morning after two people had made a night of it. Only one thing had been erased from this space’s experience—whatever had happened to Cass.

  I’m not dumb. I didn’t doubt my sanity for a second. I knew what had happened. Somebody had cleaned it up, removing all evidence that a murder had taken place—a murder that had been finessed and staged for my benefit.

  Suddenly afraid that the cleanup had extended further, I went over to the desk. My thumb drive was still sticking out of the USB port on the side of the laptop, thank god. I stuck it in my pocket.

  I took a few steps and sat heavily down on the sofa. I was relieved, terrible though that may sound. Cass was still dead—but I was now the only person who knew this. The evidence had disappeared. Whatever the world and its authorities might want to grill me over in the future, a murder scene was no longer one of them. I’d told Deputy Hallam to come meet me here, but now there was nothing to see.

  I wondered—was that why he wasn’t here? I couldn’t imagine the cop being involved in what was happening, but . . . what if his absence hadn’t been caused by his being otherwise engaged? What if he hadn’t come because he knew there was nothing to see?

  I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Or at least I had no evidence for it, and I needed to stick to things that I had some reason to believe or I was going to lose track of everything, including my mind.

  I realized that there was actually one other person who knew what had taken place here, and I believed the time she had spoken of had now come. I got out my phone, found her number in the INCOMING log.

  “So,” Jane Doe said, when she answered. “Does this mean you’re ready to listen now?”

  I was waiting out on the walkway when I saw her pickup park down in the street. It was a little after five and the air was softening. I was out there watching in case Hallam turned up. I was out there to smoke. I was out there because being in Cass’s apartment was making me feel wretched and confused.

  The woman walked quickly across the courtyard below without looking up, and I heard her feet pattering up the spiral staircase. The rhythm was even and fast. When she arrived at the third story and strode up the walkway she wasn’t even out of breath.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” she said, though her face was pinched and she looked wired. “What the hell happened to you? You didn’t look great this morning, but now you truly look like shit.”

  I turned and walked into the apartment. When we reached the living area I stopped and looked at her.

  She looked back at me. “What’s your point?”

  “Look in the bedroom.”

  “No need,” she said. “I trust the guys I put onto it.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “When you did your dumb split-and-run from Burger King this morning? This is what I was organizing.”

  She stuck her head around the bedroom door, appeared satisfied.

  “Her smell is gone,” I said.

  “Solvents. Blood is a bitch to clean up. They did it right, though, if all you’re noticing is a lack of something else. Seriously, what happened to you? You really don’t look good.”

  “I got hit on the back of the head,” I said. “I woke up in a disused building within a few yards of a dead woman. There was a guy with a gun. I thought he was going to kill me, but then he disappeared.”

  “What guy?”

  “Don’t know. Never offered me his card. He was very informal during the entire encounter. All I know is he killed a woman called Hazel Wilkins.”

  “Fuck,” she said urgently, but not in surprise. “What happened to him? Where’d he go?”

  “Don’t know that, either.” I remembered full well what had happened when I’d lashed out at her in the lot of the Burger King—otherwise I’d have done it again. “Listen, is it all going to be on a need-to-know basis? If so we’re heading quickly toward another parting of the ways. Either you talk to me or I’m leaving—because there’s other people I want to speak to.”

  “The police are not going to be able to help.”

  “That’s not who I meant.”

  “The guy,” she said. “What did he look like?”

  “Slim. Strong in the upper body. Early fifties. Ed Harris with hair.”

  “His name is John Hunter,” she said. “I don’t know what he told you, but you’d be wise to disregard it. He just got out of a stretch in jail for murder.”

  “He’s already killed again,” I said. “So that doesn’t tell me much I didn’t know.”

  “Look, I don’t have the details, but I know he’s a very bad man.”

  “Says who?”

  “One of the people who employed me.”

  “Employed you to fuck me up? Why would I trust them? Or you?”

  She pulled out her cell phone. Hit a few buttons, waited, and then held it out to me. “Recognize this guy?”

  I saw the face of a middle-aged man, not too slim, dark hair swept back. “David Warner.”

  “No. He’s an actor. His name is Daniel Bauman.”

  “Well, he’s the guy I met in—”

  “I know.”

  I opened my mouth, shut it again. I realized that Steph and I were in Krank’s pretty often—and it was all too possible that a stooge could have been told to go there, perhaps even night after night, and wait until a chance came to talk to me: at which point I could be lured on the promise of the sale of an expensive house. It was bait I’d be bound to take.

  After which . . . everything else followed.

  The actor calls the office. He gets Karren instead of me, plays that out for the initial assessment (about which he doesn’t care), then insists on dealing with me direct. This appeals to my vanity and I’m ready to be convinced to come out to the house, prepared to be left waiting and eventually stood up—setting me up for photographs that make it look like I’ve been peeping at my coworker . . . except that the photos hadn’t actually been taken that night but several days before. In preparation.

  “How do you know this guy?”

  “I hired him. Have I just watched you
work out why?”

  “To pretend to be David Warner, to provide a window during which my whereabouts were unknown and in which I could have taken those pictures of Karren White.”

  “Good for you. I’d get Bauman on the phone to confirm all that to you, but he’s not picking up. Which is . . . worrying me a little.”

  “Who are you? And don’t give me more of the Jane Doe crap—I don’t care about your name. I mean what are you?”

  “I’m administrative support,” she said. “Edge work. Cleanup where required.”

  “Are you some kind of cop?”

  She laughed, a short, sad sound. “No. Ex-army. Left with skills that aren’t valued in civilian life. I bummed around for a while, getting in trouble. Then I was recruited for this.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I get paid to provide a buffer between certain situations and the real world. Containment, and holding up the scenery. Once in a while I play a part, like being a waitress at some lame-ass restaurant for hicks made good. Have you really got no better idea of what’s going on?”

  “I got modified,” I said.

  “Bingo.”

  “Then what?”

  “The plug got pulled.”

  “And you don’t know why that happened, or why Cass got killed or by who, and that’s why you’re scared.”

  She cocked her head. “Well, well. Maybe you aren’t that dumb at all.”

  “Oh, I’m dumb enough. But here’s something else you don’t know. The guy who coldcocked me? He showed me an old photo of a bunch of people. One of them is now dead. Tony and Marie Thompson were in the picture, too. He evidently wants to talk to them real bad. I think maybe he’s on the way to do it right now.”

  The woman blinked.

  “Sorry,” I said, with bitter satisfaction. “Should I have mentioned that before?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Ten minutes later we were driving fast back up toward St. Armands Circle. She’d made me wait in Cass’s apartment while she went out onto the walkway and made a call. I heard her raise her voice. I gave it another minute and went out. She was gripping the railing, looking down over the entropy spreading over the courtyard below.

  “I don’t need this shit,” she said. “I could just vanish, right now.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Expiation,” she said. “Heard of the concept?”

  “No.”

  She smiled in a sour, unattractive way. “Not much call for it in the condo-selling business, I guess.”

  “You want me to Wikipedia the word? Or you could just drop the condescension and talk in straightforward sentences. We asshole Realtors can do that at least.”

  “I’m done with this,” she said. “I thought I’d be okay with it, but I’m not. It’s wrong. And for that, and for other sins to be taken into consideration, I have not yet done what I should have, which is bug the fuck out.”

  “So just tell me what the—”

  “I’m not telling you shit. I’m going to kick you up the chain of command, and then I’m done.”

  She parked on the Circle, in one of the spaces around the central park. She started to walk away, and I, good local citizen that I am, noticed that she hadn’t remembered to pay for parking even though there was half an hour before restrictions ended. I told her so.

  She smiled in possibly her most patronizing way yet. “I have immunity,” she said.

  I’d assumed that once we got here we’d be heading to the Columbia (perhaps because I’d seen the place in the picture the man with the gun had shown me), but in fact she set off across the central area.

  “Jonny Bo’s?”

  She didn’t answer. She strode across the road and straight over to the restaurant. She didn’t enter the sidewalk café area, however, but went around the side, toward the staircase up to the restaurant—where Steph and I had our anniversary celebration what seemed like a month before. There was a young woman standing behind the welcome desk at the top. She appeared not to recognize the woman I was with, at first, and started fretting about reservations. The woman just pushed right past her.

  “Hey—”

  “Drop it, babe.”

  “Hang on, shouldn’t you be working here tonight?”

  “I resigned. Didn’t I say?”

  It was early yet for the first sitting, and the restaurant was only half-full—couples looking at menus and trying not to whistle between their teeth at the prices. The person I still half thought of as a waitress, Jane Doe, whatever her name really was, wove straight across the room and into the corridor leading to the restrooms. She walked past both without slowing, however, making for a door at the end, which I hadn’t even noticed before. There was no marking on it, not even a sign saying private, which figured. Say nothing, and most of us are too dumb to question anything. There was a little keypad on the side panel, painted in the same color as the wall. The woman rapidly tapped out a six-figure number, and the latch clicked.

  On the other side was a narrow staircase, turning sharply to the right. I followed her up, but abruptly stopped halfway when I saw her reach into the back of her jeans and pull a handgun out from under her shirt. Something happened to her posture, too, becoming looser, rangier, as if readying for sudden decisive action. I let her go up the last set of stairs by herself.

  She got to the top, where the wall stopped, making space for a half-height divide in expensive-looking wood. She turned, looking into a space I couldn’t see, holding the gun low in her hand where it couldn’t be seen by whoever was on the top floor. She glanced down at me, gave an upward nod, and disappeared from view.

  I went up the remaining steps, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to turn around, go find my car, and drive back to the house to grab anything that seemed necessary to starting a new life somewhere else.

  But I didn’t want a new life. I wanted my old one back.

  That meant I could not run.

  At the top I stuck my head cautiously up over the divide. I saw a big open space that ran the length and width of the building. A handful of couches, shabby chic, angled for discretion. A few dining tables with pert little chairs. A couple of big skylights made it light and airy. Artfully battered floorboards, paintings that were well above the usual local standard. At the back was a waitress station, to one side a discreet dumbwaiter.

  The fabled upper dining room, I guess. And at the far end, three people I recognized. The Thompsons and Peter Grant—my boss.

  They turned to look at me as if I were a low-echelon waiter bringing an undesired check.

  Peter Grant watched me walk up. A week ago it might have seemed cool, encountering my boss in this locale. The guy who would have found it so felt like a previous incarnation of me, however, one long dead and unevolved for the present circumstances.

  “Sir,” I said.

  His gaze was cool and unreadable. Not unfriendly, exactly. But not friendly, either.

  “I still think this is a bad idea,” he said, not to me, and then left. Nobody said anything to cover the sound of his feet going down the wooden stairs.

  Meanwhile the woman I’d come with took up a position on the side of the room. Her feet were planted apart, her hands together at her waist. Her gun had gone back to where it had come from, but I didn’t think it would take her long to retrieve it should the need arise.

  “What does he look like?” Tony asked me.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” Marie said. “I agree with Peter. I don’t think this conversation should be taking place. Rise to the occasion or we’ll kick you out right now.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “What does he look like?” Tony asked again. He appeared to have ignored the entire exchange.

  “Assuming you mean the guy who hauled me out of The Breakers, he’s . . . just a guy. Dark hair with touches of gray. When I saw him he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Early, midfifties. But I don’t know.”

  “He’s f
ifty-three,” Tony said absently.

  “You know him.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “He appears to feel more warmly about you guys. He actually seemed very keen to renew your acquaintance.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He showed me a picture.”

  “A picture?” Marie’s beady eyes were on me through a drifting cloud of smoke. The cigarette looked like it was held in a large bird’s claw, but I noticed for the first time just how thin the wrist supporting it was.

  I nodded through the big window. “Outside the Columbia. You plus the Wilkinses and Mr. Grant. And David Warner. Looked like you were all having a high old time.”

  Tony kept pushing methodically forward. “Jane says he killed Hazel Wilkins. That you saw her body.”

  I glanced back at the woman at parade rest on the side of the room. She kept looking straight ahead. “She’s really called Jane?”

  “I have no idea,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, he killed Hazel. He admitted it, though he didn’t seem proud of it. He had the body there, in the corner. And he’d done something to David Warner, too.”

  This had them both far more interested. “Done what?”

  “I don’t know. The place where he took me had blood on the floor, and a broken chair. But he said Warner had escaped.”

  “Did he mention anyone else? Names of the people he’s working with? Accomplices or partners?”

  “He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who needed any.”

  The Thompsons looked at each other.

  “No,” Marie said firmly. “It can’t just be him on his own. He was a loser. Was then, will still be now. He can’t be doing all this by himself.”

  She turned back to me. “Anything else? What else did he say to you?”

  “Not much, but he showed me something. About his body. Someone had carved a word on it.”

  “We’re done here,” Marie said, turning away.

  I was aware that Jane whatever-her-name-was had started to listen more closely.

  “He woke one morning with no recollection of what had happened the previous night,” I said. “The night that photograph outside the Columbia was taken. And the cops turned up at his house soon afterward and arrested him for murder.”