by Craig Smith
‘That .38 is yours?’
I shook my head. ‘Buddy told me one time it’s cold.
I expect it is, but once you matched it to the Masterson homicide and found my prints on it, you would have believed it was mine.’
‘Closing out our investigation of that case as well,’
Dalton muttered.
‘At that point Buddy’s only problem would have been controlling Denise Conway, who suddenly had five million all to herself, but somehow I don’t think that would have been a problem.’
‘I started doing some background on Mr Elder after you passed that polygraph, Professor. On paper he looked just fine, but when I called down to Louisiana I found out Denise Conway was his half-sister. They had the same mother, grew up together in the same house.
‘According to the mother Denise got married about three years ago. Husband had some money. Eight months later, poor soul killed himself.’
‘Police reopening that case?’
‘I recommended they take another look at it. I’ll tell you something else,’ Dalton added with a sly grin.
‘Your friend Mr Elder was plenty smart. He went to college just like his transcripts say, but their mother tells me Denise was the one in the family who tested off the charts. According to her, that girl was a genuine prodigy.’
‘Denise was behind the whole thing?’
‘Appears to be the case.’
GAIL ETHERIDGE DROPPED by one morning before I could get around much. She wanted to know if I intended to bring suit against the Beery estate. She wasn’t drumming up business, just curious, I expect, but I suggested she find our neighbour before some shark got hold of him and have a little talk with him.
If anyone deserved the mother lode, I said, it was Billy Wade. Gail said she would look in on him after she left me. ‘Be sure you do,’ I said, handing her a twenty,
‘and give him this for me if you will.’
Gail waved the bill at me. ‘What’s this for?’
‘He’ll know.’
Pocketing the twenty she told me, ‘I wanted to come by and apologize for not believing you, David.’
‘I didn’t have much of a track record,’ I said. ‘From your perspective it must have looked like pure self-destruction.’
‘Well, you can be an unbelievably stubborn man sometimes.’
‘No hard feelings, Gail.’
‘How are things going at school?’
‘They offered me three years’ salary if I’d just go away.’ Gail nodded at this with a vague look of satisfaction. She had probably calculated something like this and knew, too, as I did, that if I pushed I could get a lot more out of them and even keep my job. ‘I told them to go to hell. I said I’d go away for nothing.’
Gail’s satisfied smile curdled. ‘I take it you’re representing yourself?’
I laughed. ‘What gave me away?’
She appeared to want to give me some advice, but as I wasn’t paying for it she restrained herself admirably and changed the subject. ‘Molly’s going through with the divorce, I understand?’
My laughter caught in my throat. ‘Looks that way.’
‘I thought you two had worked things out.’
‘I was in trouble, Gail. Molly wouldn’t leave me until she got me out of it. That’s just the way she is.’
‘You’re a fool to let a woman like that get away.’
‘Molly’s not the most forgiving woman in the world.’
‘I guess I’m missing something.’
I didn’t answer her. Gail could think what she wanted.
I SPENT A WEEK IN FLORIDA once I was up and moving around a little. Molly and Doc were already doing business together. She had a broken down house, a genuine catastrophe, she was living in and a second under contract that she intended to patch up for the snowbirds. She seemed happy to be starting over, a bit uncomfortable with me around but too polite to say so.
Lucy was doing well in school, working three nights a week giving private lessons on Ahab to rich kids and training a couple of wild-ass quarter horses fresh off the racetrack for the owner of the stable. We had a talk one evening on a horseback ride about the lie Lucy had told me, the affair that never was. Her idea, she confessed.
It might well have been Lucy’s creation, or Lucy might have imagined it was, but we both knew her mother, if not in fact instigating it, had gone along with it. I didn’t care to point this out because Molly wasn’t really the one to blame. It was my fault.
‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘what your mother went through those first couple of years after you were born, Lucy?’
Jezebel skittered because she felt Lucy’s body stiffen.
We were walking suddenly on forbidden ground.
‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully.
‘You’re way ahead of me then.’
‘She never told you?’
‘She never told me, and I never asked.’
Lucy considered this for a long time without offering a comment.
‘I don’t know who was more afraid of the truth, Lucy, your mother or me. I guess I was always afraid if I heard about how she got through it, I wouldn’t be able to love her in quite the same way. I think she understood that or started believing it herself. We walked around your mother’s finest moment, the choice to give you life, and ended up turning it into something she thought she should be ashamed of.’
Lucy blinked.
‘What your mother did, coming off the streets and making a life for the two of you, not one girl in a thousand could have accomplished, and I made her think she had to keep it to herself.’
‘I don’t understand why she wants a divorce!’
‘You remember when I told you that silence is the biggest lie of all?’ Lucy nodded. ‘Well, our lies caught up with us, kid.’
I MET ROBERT THE REALTOR, who wasn’t an entirely offensive character. He and Molly were intimate. I could tell by the way he shook hands with me.
I had imagined something else for Molly and me when I got down to see her, but it wasn’t going to happen. A week into it and I knew the only thing Molly wanted was for me to take off. There were no words to erase our history together, and for a time it seemed there weren’t even words to talk about it. The night before I left we had dinner together in Naples.
Afterwards we walked along the beach. I think in the dark with the wind around us to carry our words off to sea we could finally speak about things that mattered.
She said she was sorry she had put Lucy into the middle of things. She should never have done that. She was the one who had left the farm for a drive with Buddy the night Johnna Masterson disappeared.
‘It was my fault,’ I answered. ‘I should have said something. Instead, I just pretended to believe you both.’
‘When did you know?’
I laughed and looked out at the dark mass of ocean.
‘I knew from the start, Molly. I knew it from the moment Lucy told me she met Buddy at a frat party.
The kid is a terrible liar. It’s one of the things I love about her.’
Molly considered this for a moment. ‘Would it have made any difference if you had said something?’
‘You would have known upfront that whatever happened between you and Buddy doesn’t change how I feel about you.’
Molly walked for a while without speaking, and I thought she might be ready to give me another chance.
When she finally spoke, I knew all my chances were behind me. ‘When I look at you, David, I see that night all over again.’
I wondered if she meant the deaths of Buddy and Roger and Denise or if she was talking about the humiliation of watching herself on Buddy’s homemade video.
‘We beat them, Molly.’
‘We didn’t beat anyone. We survived.’
‘We survived together,’ I said.
‘I need to start over. I don’t want to carry that night with me for the rest of my life.’
At the airport the next mornin
g, Molly and Lucy were there to send me back into the winter. I got a hug from both of them, a daughter’s kiss from Lucy.
I PICKED UP WORK AT THE FORD dealership in DeKalb a few days later. I told Milt, ‘For a while.’
Then I gave him a wink. ‘And don’t ask me to lie. I won’t do it even if it costs me!’
Milt grinned with his big horse teeth. ‘You‘re giving me shivers!’
‘He was a good man, wasn’t he?’
‘Tubs? Tubs was golden, David. Look at the boys he raised if you don’t believe it.’
‘I never knew that until he saved my life,’ I said.
Milt smiled but he didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘When was that?’
‘The night I got shot.’
Milt tried to put it together, but he couldn’t understand how a man already in the grave could save his son’s life.
Back in the wastelands again, I got my wish and managed to put my name on the wall every month as the number one salesperson, but even stone-cold sober I wasn’t any Tubs Albo.
I kept in touch with Molly by e-mail. It was all business, selling off property a piece at a time, moving the date of dissolution back a couple of different times so we could settle things financially and have the divorce as the last event of our relationship. Lucy kept me informed about the more intimate matters of their life.
Oklahoma had offered her a full scholarship, and she accepted it. Molly sold the house they were living in and was shopping for another catastrophe she could resurrect. Robert bounced out of Molly’s life, and now there was a man named Ted, who was a cabinetmaker.
Fifty-something. Flat ass. Boring.
One day, in early June, I was working a couple in the closing booth when Milt called me out. ‘Got a customer wants a pickup. Won’t deal with anyone but you.’
I pointed at the desk where I had been working.
‘I’ve got buyers here, Milt.’
‘I’ll take the T.O. myself, David, no split. You go take care of the pickup.’
I knew better than to hope for what I was hoping, but I couldn’t help myself. Milt was conning me, and Milt didn’t play games when it came to making money.
There was no way he’d pull me off a close to go talk to some tire kicker about a pickup. So there was only one person it could be.
Two salesmen were keeping Molly company when I walked up. I doubt they were talking trucks.
‘You looking for a pickup?’ I asked.
Molly smiled at me the way she had the day I met her. ‘Might be.’
The salesmen left us, and I walked over to be close, though not daring to touch her. ‘What brings you north, Molly?’
‘I got an offer on the farm a couple of days ago.’
‘A good one?’
She smiled. ‘Good enough.’
I waited.
‘I thought before I took it I’d talk to you about it.’
‘The farm is yours, Molly. You don’t need to talk to me.’
‘That’s the thing. The minute I got the offer I knew we needed to talk. When I sell the farm that’s it. It’s all gone.’
‘I thought that was the point.’
‘So did I.’
‘Well, if you’re asking me my opinion, I’d say the only way to know is for the two of us to drive to the farm and take a look at it.’
She laughed. ‘That’s a long drive just for a look!’
I gave her a sly smile. ‘They’ve got motels between here and there if we get sleepy.’
She grinned prettily at the idea. ‘You can leave? Just like that?’
‘I can do any damn thing I feel like, Molly. I’m fear-less these days.’
‘I knew a guy like that once.’
‘Why’d you let him go?’
‘He got careful. That was part of it. Mostly he knew too much about me.’
‘Hard to forgive a man that, I expect.’
‘We need to talk,’ she said after a moment. ‘About a lot of things.’
I took her hand and held it for a moment to be sure she wanted me as much as I wanted her, and then I said, ‘What do you say we do that on the way home?’
Acknowledgements
I wrote this novel because I was fortunate enough to meet Martha Ineichen a quarter of a century ago. I hope you like this one, darling. I want to thank the people who offered their insights after reading an early draft of this story: Shirley Underwood, Rick Williams, Harriet McNeal, and Burdette Palmberg. You helped me more than you know. A special thank you goes to my brother Douglas, who introduced me to Tubs Albo when it mattered; to Matt Jockers I have real gratitude for teaching me the delicate art of patching drywall. It’s a skill every novelist should possess. Much appreciation as well to Don Jennermann for a lifetime of encouragement in this hard, beautiful profession.
Finally I wanted to thank my agent Jeffrey Simmons and my editor Ed Handyside, the two men who brought this story to life.
About the Author
CRAIG SMITH lives with his wife, Martha, in Lucerne, Switzerland. A former university professor, he holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Southern Illinois.
His first novel, published in the UK as Silent She Sleeps and in the US as The Whisper of Leaves, won bronze medal in the mystery category of ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Awards.
The Painted Messiah and The Blood Lance, the first of his novels to chronicle the exploits of T.K. Malloy, have received international acclaim and been published across the globe in ten languages.
www.craigsmithnovels.ch
Also by Craig Smith:
The Whisper of Leaves
The Painted Messiah
The Blood Lance
International Best-Selling Action from Craig Smith
The Painted Messiah Craig Smith
A legend persists that, after the ‘scourging’, Pilate commanded that his victim be painted from life. Somewhere, the painting survives, the only true image of Christ, granting the gift of ever-lasting life to whoever possesses it.
Kate Kenyon, the wealthy young widow of an English aristocrat, has an addiction to mortal risk. She feeds it by engaging in the armed robbery of priceless artefacts with her accomplice and lover Ethan Brand. Their latest target is a priceless ‘Byzantine’
icon hidden in the tower of a chateau by Lake Lucerne. So far they have never had to shoot anyone. This time will be different.
Thomas Malloy is a retired CIA man looking for his first lucrative freelance assignment. His chance comes with a presi-dential favour to a rich but ailing televangelist. Malloy’s task seems simple enough: pick up the preacher’s newly acquired painting from a Zurich bank and get it to the airport. But, once in Switzerland, Malloy’s old friend, the enigmatic Contessa Claudia de Medici tries to warn him off his mission.
Sir Julian Corbeau is an international criminal holed up in Switzerland to avoid US extradition proceedings. He is also the sadistic head of the modern Knights Templar. He had the painting and now he desperately wants it back and swears to wreak a bloody revenge upon those who stole it.
As the contenders vie for possession the bullets fly, the body count rises and the secrets of the portrait gradually unfold.
TRANSLATED INTO FRENCH, GERMAN, ITALIAN, SPANISH, RUSSIAN, CZECH, POLISH, GREEK AND
TURKISH
OUT NOW ISBN: 978-1-905802-15-9 Price: £7.99
Craig Smith’s sizzling sequel to The Painted Messiah
The Blood Lance Craig Smith
Kufstein, Austria, 1939
At the foot of a mountain known as The Wilder Kaiser lies the body of an SS officer, his neck broken but his face a picture of bliss and serenity. The dead man is known to history as Otto Rahn, Himmler’s own archaeologist. Rahn’s pursuit of the legendary Blood Lance of the Cathars has not only led to his own downfall but set in motion a tragic chain of events reaching far beyond the holocaust.
Switzerland 1997
Lord Robert Kenyon is a wealthy financier and a senior member of a huma
nitarian order calling themselves The Knights of the Holy Lance. Whilst climbing the North face of the Eiger with his new bride, he is attacked and murdered and his young wife Kate left for dead.
New York City 2008
When billionaire Jack Farrell, long suspected of connections to European crime syndicates cuts loose after defrauding his own company, ex CIA agent Thomas Malloy is assigned to track him down. The trail leads to Germany and the Order of the Holy Lance. With his friends, former art thieves Kate and Ethan Brand, Malloy set out to unlock the secrets of the order: Malloy seeks his man; Kate must find the truth about what happened on the slopes of the Eiger eleven years before – and exact her vengeance. Their first step is to kidnap a corrupt lawyer, connected to the order, from his home in Hamburg. Things don’t quite run to plan – and all hell breaks loose.
OUT NOW ISBN: 978-1-905802-29-6 Price: £7.99
Scotland has a new crime detective: a big man with a big heart… and very few scruples
The Stone Gallows C. David Ingram
DC Cameron Stone spent three months in intensive care before he could recall what happened: the high speed pursuit of a vice baron through the night streets of Glasgow that took the life of a teenage mother and her child. Then the message from Audrey on the back of a ‘get well soon’ card announcing that she had left him and taken their young son, Mark, with her. Booze, anti-depressants and therapy have all failed to enable him to resume his old job.
So now Stone lives the worst part of town. He pays the rent by running errands for a private detective. His chores include tracking down a teenage runaway and surveillance for a woman who thinks her husband is sleeping with her sister. He’s also paid by his former colleagues to do the work that’s not quite clean enough for them to do themselves- putting the fear of God into any local scumbag who thinks he can’t be touched.