“Dead body in Unit Ten, he says. You baby-sit our witness here. I’ll go check it out.”
Benetti and I went into the motel office. There was just one chair in the room, one of those cheap plastic ones that are not designed for comfort. Neither of us took it.
She leaned back against the counter. She was wearing a blue ski parka and black pants. Her badge hung on a cord around her neck. She looked at me and smiled. “It’s been a while, Mr. Coyne.”
I nodded. “You must’ve set a record. You’ve been his partner, what, over a year, now?”
“Two years next month. We’re getting along fine. He figured out I wasn’t going to take any shit from him, so he stopped giving me any. He’s a very good cop, and as far as I can tell, he still hasn’t noticed I’m a woman.”
“He’s the best,” I said, “if you can take his personality.”
She shrugged. “He’s all business. Suits me.” She crossed her arms and rubbed them with her hands. “So you want to talk about it?”
I flapped my hands. “I’ll just have to tell him all over again.”
Benetti shrugged.
A minute later, the cop radio she wore on her belt squawked. She listened for a minute, said, “Got it,” and stuck it back into its sheath.
“He’s called in the troops,” she told me. “He wants you to sit tight.”
“Did he say—?”
She shook her head. “That’s it, Mr. Coyne. I’ve got to go fetch the desk clerk. Stay here, please. I’ll be right back.”
When she left I lit a cigarette and sat in the plastic chair. If you didn’t lean back, it was okay.
Benetti returned a minute later with the desk clerk. I stood up and offered the woman the chair. She shrugged and sat down.
“Now what?” she said to Benetti.
“Now we wait.”
A few minutes passed, and then a couple of vehicles with flashing lights pulled into the lot and stopped down at the end.
About a half hour later, Horowitz opened the office door. He pointed his finger at me. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I followed him down the walkway under the overhang to Unit Ten. The door was open and lights blazed inside.
Horowitz paused in the doorway. “Don’t touch anything, Coyne,” he said over his shoulder. “You know the drill.” Then he took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, snapped them onto his hands, and stepped inside.
I stopped at the doorway. They’d turned on the air conditioner. It was going full blast, so that the inside of the room felt almost as cold as the outdoors. It didn’t quite disguise the odor that still hung in the room, a combination of unflushed toilet and sour milk.
The wallpaper was yellowish, and a big print of a seascape was screwed to the wall over the queen-size bed against the far wall. A telephone and lamp stood on the bedside table. The big TV at the foot of the bed was still flickering silently. There was a closet with no doors, and no clothes hanging in it. To the left was an open doorway into a bathroom.
A young Asian man with two cameras around his neck was leaning against the wall, and a gray-haired man was squatting in front of the chair by the wall beyond the bed. He was wearing a tweed jacket and latex gloves.
The body was sprawled in the chair. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his arms dangled down over the sides of the chair. He wore chino pants and a plaid shirt and brown socks, no shoes. His chin was slumped down on his chest so that I couldn’t see his face. His hair was light brown and cut short, so that his scalp showed through.
He looked thoroughly dead.
It wasn’t Jake.
Horowitz spoke to the gray-haired man, who stood up and stepped away from the body. Then he turned to me and grinned. “Know him?”
“It’s not who I thought it would be.”
“This ain’t John Silver?”
“John Silver isn’t his name. Jake Gold’s his name. Except it’s not Jake.”
“You don’t recognize him?”
“I think I do,” I said. “I’ve got to see his face.”
He handed me a pair of latex gloves. “Put these on and come over here,” said Horowitz.
I snapped on the gloves, and when I moved closer to the body, I saw that his chest was splotched with blood. Not a lot of blood. Two separate stains on the plaid shirt, each about the size of a silver dollar, one high on the left side just under his collarbone and the other lower, dead center, just above the solar plexus. I knelt in front of him so I could see his face.
His eyes were staring down into his lap through his glasses, which had slipped down toward the tip of his nose. His mouth was open wide, as if he’d been stopped in the middle of a yawn. There was a black hole just under his left cheekbone, right at the corner of his nose. A little blood had dribbled out of it and dried there on the side of his face.
I looked up at Horowitz. “Yeah, I know him.”
He nodded and grinned.
“His name is Sprague,” I said. “Ed Sprague. He’s the police chief in Reddington.”
Horowitz turned to the gray-haired man, who I assumed was the medical examiner. They held a brief mumbled conversation, and then Horowitz puffed out his cheeks, blew out a quick breath, and started out the door. “Let’s go, Coyne,” he said. “We gotta talk.”
I followed him back to the motel office. Marcia Benetti was leaning back against the wall with her arms folded. The desk clerk was perched uncomfortably on the edge of the chair, staring at the floor.
Horowitz opened the door and said, “Hey, Marcia, get outta here and bring her with you. We’ll talk to her later. I need this room.”
Benetti shrugged, then nodded at the woman. As the two of them left the office, Benetti glanced at me over her shoulder and rolled her eyes.
Horowitz took the only chair in the room. He slouched back with his arms folded across his chest. “Tell me about John Silver. What’d you say his name was?”
“It’s Gold,” I said. “Jake Gold. He’s head of the humanities department at Reddington Community College. Sprague was the police chief in Reddington. Jake’s my client, you know, so I cant …”
“Yeah,” said Horowitz. “Fuckin’ lawyers.” He shrugged. “So tell me what you can.”
I told him how Jake’s son had died in an automobile accident about three weeks ago, how they hadn’t been able to recover his body from the river, how Jake had told me he felt he had to get away from his wife for a while, how he’d struck me as depressed and manic, and how King’s Motel was apparently where he’d ended up. I told him that Jake had called from his room here for an appointment, that he said he had something to tell me that would blow my mind, that he’d failed to keep the appointment, and that I’d tried to call him but hadn’t succeeded.
“Which is why there was a message from you in his mail slot.”
I nodded. “He never returned my call.”
“So you came here looking for him.”
I nodded.
“What’s Gold’s beef with the police chief?”
“Far as I know, he didn’t have a beef. He held Sprague in high esteem. You think Jake killed him?”
Horowitz grinned. “What do you think?”
I shrugged. “I guess it looks that way.”
“Did the professor own a gun?”
“I don’t know. What kind of gun was it?”
“Small caliber. Twenty-two, probably.”
“So how do you reconstruct it?” I said.
“Shooter’s sitting on the bed holding his gun on the vic, who’s sitting in the chair. Shoots him three times. First one probably in the face, next two in the chest. Cleans up after himself, hangs the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, takes everything that ain’t nailed down, and leaves. No clothes in the closets, no toothbrush in the bathroom, no wallet in the dead guy’s pocket. No matchbooks with phone numbers written inside, no highball glasses with prints on’em, no crumpled-up notes in the wastebasket. Mr. Silver’s car is gone from the lot.”
“So.”
“So,” I said, “if he did have a beef with Sprague, and if he did end up killing him, Jake’s smart enough, I think, not to do it in his own motel room.”
“Smart enough to take the room under a phony name, pay cash, and smart enough to clean up afterwards, though, huh?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to think, Roger.”
“His son just died, you said?”
“Yes.”
“What was his frame of mind?”
“What do you think?”
“Angry,” said Horowitz. “Fired up.”
“Not really,” I said. “Like I told you, he was devastated, depressed.”
“You said manic, too.”
I nodded. “He had something to tell me. He was excited about it.”
“He didn’t give you a hint what was on his mind?”
“No.”
“Who was he mad at?”
“Just himself,” I said. “He was blaming himself. It was an automobile accident.”
Horowitz looked up at the ceiling. “Suppose it wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose it wasn’t an accident. Or suppose the professor got it in his head that it wasn’t.”
“You think Jake decided it was Sprague’s fault that those kids went off the road into the river and died?”
“Tragedies get people worked up,” said Horowitz. “They latch on to some crazy idea and end up doing things they never did before.”
“Mild-mannered professors turn into killers,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “Seen it plenty of times.”
“Do they turn into clever killers who remember to pick up after themselves?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Well, okay,” said Horowitz after a minute, “if it wasn’t your client, who, then?”
I shrugged. “From everything I could tell, Sprague was well liked by everyone out there in Reddington. He coached the kids’ soccer teams, went into the schools, knew everybody. I’ve seen him with kids. Teenagers, Brian’s friends. He was good with them. It was obvious they respected him. Hell, everybody seemed to like the guy, including Jake.”
Horowitz blew out a quick, impatient breath. “I don’t trust people like that,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Me, neither, actually.”
“Guys like that generally turn out to be phonies.”
“That’s been my experience,” I said. “Although Sprague didn’t seem like a phony to me.”
“When people figure’em out, all of a sudden they’ve got enemies.”
I nodded.
“Looks like that’s what happened here, huh?”
“Somebody didn’t like him,” I said. “That’s obvious.”
“So who besides Professor Gold would kill him?”
“Maybe you should talk to Gus Nash.”
Horowitz frowned. “What about Nash?”
I shrugged. “He and Sprague were friends.” I told Horowitz about seeing Sprague and Nash together at the police station the day after the accident and how a few days later Nash had bought me a drink. “I had the feeling neither of them wanted me snooping around,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I figured Sprague was just watching over his people, trying to help them heal after their tragedy. I got the impression he liked to be in control, didn’t like the idea of some Boston lawyer sticking his nose into things.”
“Hard to blame anybody for that,” said Horowitz.
“You should talk to the day man,” I said. “He’s the one I spoke with on the phone yesterday. He checked Jake in. He might’ve seen something.”
“We’re looking for him as we speak.”
“So when—?”
“The ME says he thinks it happened about forty-eight hours ago. Tuesday night sometime. When was that appointment you had with Gold?”
“Yesterday afternoon. He called me Tuesday.”
Horowitz scratched his eyebrow. “Okay. He called you Tuesday, said he had something to talk to you about. Something that would blow your mind. Wanted to—how did you say it?—tie up some loose ends first. So you set up the meeting for yesterday. Wednesday. Except he didn’t show up. Got his loose end tied up, all right. Then he disappeared himself.” Horowitz shrugged. “The deed was done right there in Unit Ten.” He let out a long breath, then pushed himself to his feet. “Well,” he said, “you ain’t much help, as usual.”
“What about Jake?” I said.
“We’ll find him.” He arched his eyebrows at me.
I shook my head. “I don’t know where he is or what his connection is to this.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
“Not without his okay. He’s my client.”
“Looks like he’s your killer,” he said. “You catch up with him, you better bring him in.” He sighed and pushed himself up from the chair. “Well,” he said, “let’s get outta here.”
He opened the door and steered me outside. It was still snowing, and both of us turtled down into the turned-up collars of our topcoats. Several more official vehicles had pulled up in front. Their lights were flashing and their radios were squawking, and a cluster of gawkers had gathered on the sidewalk. Stop-and-go traffic was squishing slowly over the wet pavement of Route 9.
“Gonna be a long fuckin’ night,” mumbled Horowitz.
“What happens now?”
“Now we go looking for Professor Gold. You hear from him, you be sure to tell him I’d like to have a chat with him, okay?”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m an officer of the court.”
Horowitz grinned. “Don’t you forget it, either.”
NINE
Around noontime the next day—Friday—Sharon Gold called. “Brady,” she said, “what in hell is going on?”
Her voice sounded hoarse and brittle, as if she’d been crying—or screaming—or maybe both—and might do so again at any moment.
“Sharon, listen—”
“Those two police officers just left,” she said. “The one with that evil smile, and the pretty one, and they’re asking these questions about Jake, and they won’t tell me anything, and … and I just don’t think I can do this anymore, Brady, I really don’t … .” Her voice trailed away.
“Is your mother still with you?”
“She left a couple days ago. It was bad enough when Jake was here. After he left, I had too much on my mind. I couldn’t stand her—her phony cheerfulness anymore. She was driving me nuts. I told her to go home. Told her I needed to be alone for a while.”
“Let’s have lunch,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Lunch?” as if she weren’t sure what the word meant.
“Sure. Name a place out there in your neck of the woods. I’ll meet you. We’ll have a nice lunch. We can talk.”
“Today? Now?”
“Why not? It’s lunchtime. I can be there in less than an hour.”
She cleared her throat. “Well, okay. That would be nice. I’d like that.”
Sharon told me how to find a place in Reddington near the campus where Jake taught. It was called Drago’s. She said it was a bit pricey for the students, so it shouldn’t be too crowded, and they even had a smoking section. I told her it sounded perfect. First one to get there would grab a table.
I walked in a few minutes before one. The place hummed with the muffled clink of dinnerware and the murmur of voices. Soft piano music came from hidden speakers. Chopin, it sounded like. Half a dozen men in business suits sat at a bar along the right-hand wall watching stock prices trail across the bottom of the muted TV. The dining section was separated from the bar by a front-to-back head-high partition. Leather-cushioned booths lined the inside walls. A row of tables along the windows overlooked a meadow that rolled away to a wooded hillside. There were white tab
lecloths and bunches of fresh flowers in little bud vases on each table.
A dark-eyed young hostess standing behind a podium smiled at me. I told her I was meeting Sharon Gold and gave her my name. She checked a list, smiled again, and led me to a booth toward the rear.
Sharon was sitting there twirling a glass of white wine around on the tablecloth. She looked up when I slid in across from her. She was wearing a pale green blouse with a thin gold chain around her throat. She’d tried some makeup tricks, but her eyes looked red and swollen and bruised, as if she’d spent more time crying than sleeping lately.
I told the hostess I wanted some coffee, then reached across the table and took both of Sharon’s hands in mine. “Are you okay?” I said.
“Me?” She laughed quickly. “Well, let’s see. My boy is dead, in the river somewhere, my husband has disappeared, my friend, our chief of police, he’s apparently been murdered, and these detectives are asking me questions that make no sense whatsoever. Should I count any of that? Because if none of that counts, then, oh sure, I’m terrific.”
I squeezed her hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Stupid question. I’m a bumbler from way back.”
She tried to smile. “That’s okay. Thank you for caring. I really—”
She looked up, and a college-age waitress wearing a white blouse and a short black skirt slid a cup of coffee in front of me. “Would you folks like to order?” she said.
Sharon asked for a Caesar salad and another glass of wine. I ordered a cheeseburger, rare, and asked her to keep my coffee cup topped off.
When the waitress left, Sharon said, “Have you talked with Jake?”
I nodded. “He dropped by a few days ago, told me you guys had decided to split for a while, and—”
“He told you what?”
“You were separating.”
“And did he happen to mention why were we separating?”
“Well, actually he said you, um, you two weren’t getting along, had stopped talking to each other, and he felt you were blaming him for what happened to Brian, though he realized he might’ve been projecting, but either way …” I shrugged.
“Why would he tell you something like that?”
“It’s not true?”
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