I didn’t call her, though. Instead, I got changed, climbed into bed, and sat there for a while, reading—well, trying to concentrate on reading, but really I was listening for Riel to come upstairs. I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it was two in the morning and I could see from under my door that the lights were still on downstairs.
I got up and tiptoed out into the hall. The door to Riel’s bedroom was still open, which told me that he hadn’t gone to bed yet. I went downstairs.
He was sitting exactly where I’d left him a few hours before. The only difference was that there were seven empty beer bottles in front of him now instead of five, and he had an eighth in his hand that he was working on. His eyes were even glassier now.
“Go back to bed, Mike,” he said, without even looking at me. He sounded like he meant business too, using that tone that was half-cop, half-teacher, half-guardian, half-drill-sergeant.
“It’s two o’clock,” I said.
He lifted the beer bottle he was holding and drank from it.
“You have school tomorrow,” I said.
He put the bottle down again but otherwise didn’t move.
I sat down at the end of the table, opposite him. That got a reaction. He stood up. I noticed that he was a little unsteady on his feet.
“Go back to bed,” he said. This time he shouted the words at me, really angry now, or trying to scare me, or both.
I stayed put. He thought because he was a teacher who bossed kids around all day and because he used to be a cop and used to wear a gun and could arrest people if they didn’t do what they were told, that he could bully me. He forgot that I used to live with Billy. He forgot that I had a pretty good idea what drinkers were like and that I wasn’t afraid of them.
“The reason you quit being a cop, does it have something to do with this woman who was murdered, Tracie Howard?” I said. “Billy said it was because you got shot and your partner got killed, but that isn’t the whole reason, is it?”
He stood at the other end of the table, swaying a little and holding onto the back of a chair to keep himself steady.
“You don’t want to tell me, fine,” I said. “Maybe I’ll call Susan and ask her. Or maybe your friend Detective Jones would fill me in if I asked him. Or maybe there was something about it in the papers. I’m not stupid, you know. I know how to use a library.” Well, I knew how to ask a reference librarian for help—I’d seen Rebecca do it a few times.
He held tight to the chair and looked down at the table. He didn’t say anything. I started to get a bad feeling. I had lived with Riel for a couple of months now. I thought I had a fix on him. He didn’t talk about himself all that much, but he was good at school, up at the front of the classroom. And he always insisted we sit down to supper together, and he’d ask me about what I had learned or how things were going with my job or with Sal or Rebecca, if I had heard from Vin and how he was doing, that kind of stuff. He gave me the impression that he really was interested, he wasn’t just going through the motions. Sure, he was strict. If I didn’t do what I was supposed to, I’d get a lecture. But he lightened up whenever Susan was around. He took her out at least once a week, and at least once a week she’d come over or he’d go over to her place. When he did, he always came back late. If I was up when he got back, I’d see a smile on his face. But I had never seen him like he was now. Now he was like a whole different person. A stranger.
“Fine,” I said. I stood up. “But I gotta tell you, you’re a real hypocrite. You’re always telling me, you got a problem, talk it out. Trust someone. Guess that only applies to other people, huh? Guess it doesn’t apply to you.”
I got nothing. No reaction. Fine. I shoved the chair back into the table and went upstairs again.
I lay in bed, wondering if he was going to sit down there drinking all night. I wondered if he was the kind of guy who, once he got good and started, just kept on drinking. That was something else I didn’t know about him. And that scared me too. Up until now I’d figured, sure, he could be a real pain with all his rules and clean this and clean that. But I always had the feeling I could count on him. Now I wasn’t so sure.
I don’t know how long it was before the light went on in the hall and I heard him come up the stairs. It seemed like forever. Then I heard it—a knock on my door and his voice, quiet.
“Mike, you still awake?”
I thought about not answering. But then I said, “Yeah, I’m awake.”
The door stayed closed, and he stayed on the other side of it.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” he said.
I said sure. I told him, come in.
He pushed open the door, but didn’t switch on the overhead light. When I sat up and reached for the lamp next to my bed, he said, “Leave it off, okay?” He pulled out the chair from my desk and sat down.
“I want to apologize for how I behaved,” he said. “I should know better.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew there was more coming. If all he’d wanted to do was apologize, he would have stayed at the door. Instead he had come in and sat down.
“Tracie Howard left two children when she was murdered,” he said. “One was twelve, the other was eight. They were from Tracie’s first marriage. When Tracie was murdered, she and the kids were living with Tracie’s second husband, a guy named Tom Howard. Tom Howard was the main suspect in her murder. He and Tracie had been arguing a lot—the neighbors said they heard them. They also said Tom had a real temper. He had no alibi for when it happened. He was having money problems, and Tracie had a nice insurance policy. When she died, Tom collected a lot of money—well, for a guy with his earning potential.”
I could see his eyes looking at me from the shadows.
“Tom said Tracie had been getting phone calls. Threatening phone calls. He said she called him at work one time, hysterical, because someone had tried to break into the house. He said she didn’t know who the guy was, he was a stranger. He said after the guy was at the house, Tracie found her cat dead in the backyard. Eviscerated. You know what that is?”
I nodded.
“Funny thing, though. Tom was never home when Tracie got the calls. And from what we were able to find out, all the calls came from a couple of pay phones near where Tom worked. And the cat? Tom said Tracie buried it in the backyard. If she did, we never found it. She didn’t tell her kids about any of this either. They said their mom told them Ginger—that was the cat’s name—Ginger ran away. You can see how none of this made Tom Howard look too good. You can see it, right?”
I said I could.
“One time when we talked to him, he said the kids were scared. He said every time they heard a car come by the house, they got scared someone was going to come and shoot them the way their mother was shot. The older one in particular. She was the one who came though the door first that night—she and her sister had gone to a friend’s house after school and the friend’s mother dropped them off. The older one was first through the door. She was the one who found her mother.” He paused a moment, squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “Tracie Howard was shot four times. Twice in the head, twice in the chest. There was an awful lot of blood and not a whole lot of face left. You understand what I’m saying?”
I said I did.
“So the older kid, the one who found her, was pretty traumatized. And what she heard from Tom and from the neighbors, probably from the TV at first too, was that a stranger had killed her mother. Tom kept telling us how scared she was. Said she woke up every night with nightmares. Said she even wet her bed one time. Couldn’t stand to be alone anywhere, especially in the house. That kind of thing.”
I had a pretty good idea how she felt.
“Tom Howard was pretty high-strung himself,” Riel said. He was talking slowly, carefully. It reminded me of the way Billy used to talk when he’d had too much to drink but was trying to make you think that he hadn’t, that he had it all under control. “He was mad at the police because we
were investigating him. He showed up at the police station and caused a real disturbance. He was lucky he wasn’t arrested for that. Another time, we went out to the house to talk to him and he blew up at us. Told us that unless we had a warrant, we could get off his property and stop scaring his kids. It took a lot of talking to get him calmed down, to make him see how he wasn’t helping himself any.”
He stopped for a moment and looked down at the floor. He shook his head slowly. Then he said, “One day we had to go out to the house again, ask him one more thing, you know, like detectives are always doing on TV. Marty—that was my partner at the time, Marty Tennant. A good cop. Seven years on the job, new to homicide. Marty knocked on the door. We were doing it by the book, being cautious, you know. Marty was on one side of the door, I was on the other, you know, because Tom could get pretty excited when cops were around. Marty knocked on the door, and the next thing you know, we heard a scream. It sounded like one of the kids, so Marty goes for the door.” Riel shook his head slowly. “The way they make it seem later, when they’re asking all those questions—did you do this, did you do that—they make it seem like you’ve got all the time in the world to think. But you don’t. The whole thing took, I don’t know, five, maybe ten seconds. I see Marty move in front of the door, like he’s going to open it. I open my mouth to say who we are. I remember that because I remember thinking that’s what Marty should have done, he should have identified us. But before I could say anything, BLAM! Right through the door—a shotgun blast and Marty goes flying backward. He’s down, you understand? Caught it right in the chest. We just wanted to talk to the guy, and he’s shooting at us.” Riel’s voice faded for a moment. He looked down at the floor again when he continued. “I think about it now, and it’s like one of those kids’ toys. A kaleidoscope. You know, all those pieces, all shifting around. Marty’s on the ground and there’s blood everywhere. Someone inside opens the door and I see the barrel of a shotgun. That’s it, just the barrel, pointing at me, and I yell, ‘Drop it.’ But I still see it pointing at me so I shoot. Then someone screams. Then there’s another shot and I’m down.”
He looked up at me.
“I didn’t even know what happened until a couple of days later. I woke up in the hospital, and before too long my boss is standing there. He tells me that Marty’s dead. He tells me that Tom Howard shot me. Then he tells me that Tom Howard didn’t shoot Marty. It was his stepdaughter who did it—Tracie’s older kid, the twelve-year-old. She heard our car pull up, but she didn’t recognize who we were and we never identified ourselves. She panicked. She thought we were going to kill her. So she grabbed the shotgun. She’s twelve years old, you understand? I didn’t even know she could lift the thing, let alone shoot it. And the reason Tom shot me is … is that the girl was still holding the shotgun when I saw it. I shot her. Tom says after I shot her, he believed I was going to shoot him too. He said he was defending himself, his home, and his family.”
Jeez.
“Not that it matters what was going through his head,” Riel said. “It all comes down to the same thing. Marty was dead, and I shot the little girl. Left her a quadriplegic—paralyzed from the neck down. That was it for me. I never went back to homicide. When I got back on my feet, I transferred to traffic services, the detective office there. I heard the girl died last year. Tom Howard was eventually tried for Tracie’s murder. When he was acquitted …” Riel’s voice trailed off. He shrugged. “I wasn’t very effective after that. I decided, maybe I should do something else with my life.”
Something like become a teacher.
“They never made another arrest in the Tracie Howard murder. Except now they have another guy killed with the same gun that killed Tracie. Okay?”
Okay? What did that mean?
He stood up, crossed to the door and hung there for a moment, looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should be acting more responsibly.”
“You’re doing okay,” I said. “Considering.”
He leaned forward, out of the shadows and into the light from the hall. I saw him smile just a little. “The press will eventually get hold of this,” he said. “They’ll dredge it all up. You understand that, right?”
I said I did. I didn’t know what else to say.
After he left my room, I lay there thinking about how I had seen the scar on his chest one time and, before that, what Billy had told me. Billy had said Riel quit being a cop after his partner was killed. That part was more or less right, even though it didn’t happen as fast as Billy had made it sound, but it wasn’t close to being the whole story. Billy had said that Riel’s partner had busted down an apartment door, that Riel was supposed to be backing him up, that Riel had frozen, that he hadn’t fired a single shot. That was all wrong. All of it. I should have known. Billy always got things wrong. He probably had it all confused with about a million cop shows and cop movies he’d watched. The way Billy had told it, Riel had come off looking like a coward. That wasn’t right either. One thing about Billy’s version, though—thinking about it now, it seemed to me like it would be easier for Riel if what Billy had said were true. It’d be easier for him to blame himself for being a coward than to live with the fact he had shot a twelve-year-old girl and left her paralyzed.
CHAPTER NINE
If it were TV instead of real life, the whole story would have been splashed across the front page of the newspaper the next day. But I scanned every headline on every page—even the little headlines in the “In brief” columns, and found no mention of the body they had found in the woods, no mention of Tracie Howard, no mention of John Riel.
Riel woke me up at the same time he usually did. His face was pale and his eyes were puffy, and he drank two cups of coffee instead of his usual one while I ate my granola, but other than that he seemed okay.
I didn’t say anything to Sal or Rebecca about what had happened. It didn’t seem right to tell them something that had been so hard for Riel to tell me. At lunchtime I headed for the pay phone in the cafeteria and dialed the number for Emily’s cell phone. She picked up on the second ring.
“How come you didn’t call me back sooner?” she said, sounding mad.
“Something came up.”
“Well?” she said. “Did you get anything?”
“Not much,” I said.
She wanted to know what I had got, exactly, so I told her about the colored contact lenses and the hair dye. She liked that.
“So the guy has changed the color of his eyes and the color of his hair,” she said. “What do you think, he’s a fugitive from justice?”
Yeah, right. I was getting the idea that Emily liked to make things exciting, liked to pretend she was living in a TV show.
“What else?” Emily said. “Where does he live? Is he married?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out,” she said. It came out like an order. “Find out and I’ll give my wallet to you instead of taking it to the police. Come over to my house tomorrow, one o’clock.”
“I work until one.”
“So come at two. You can do that, right, McGill?” Pushing me now with that rich-girl way of talking she had.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
“Be where?” said a voice behind me. I almost dropped the phone and, of course, Rebecca noticed that. She also noticed the nervous, guilty look on my face that I was working hard to hide. I dropped the receiver back onto its cradle. “Who were you talking to?” she said. Only instead of sounding casual about it, like she was interested but not dying of curiosity, she sounded the way my mom would have if she’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. And stupid me, all of a sudden I acted like I was five instead of fifteen.
I said, “No one. It’s nothing.”
Rebecca did the same thing my mother would have done in the same situation. She crossed her arms over her chest, tilted her head to one side, looked hard at me, and said, “You were talking to no one?”
&
nbsp; “No one important,” I said. Then I smiled at her and said, “You look great.” I reached for her hand. She snapped it away from me.
“You were talking to no one important who, I suppose, you’re planning to meet nowhere,” she said. “Or should that be nowhere important?”
Okay, now I had to decide whether the best way out of this was to get angry—hey, it’s my life, my business, jeez, my personal, private phone call—or to apologize and, what the heck, tell her the truth. Except I had this picture in my mind of what would happen if I told her that I’d been talking to Emily Corwin, who, let’s face it, Rebecca hated. I’d say, I’m going over to Emily’s place tomorrow, no big deal. And, of course, Rebecca wouldn’t let me leave it at that. She would want the whole truth. She’d want to know why I was going there. Then I’d have to tell her what had happened the last time I was there—and she would want to grill me on that, exactly why I’d gone there, exactly what I’d done there and, most importantly, why I hadn’t told her about it. I’d try to keep her focused on what had happened with the wallet, that Emily had taken me up to her room—how she’d made sure the housekeeper knew I had gone up there—and had shown me those earrings, how she threatened to say I had stolen them too, how she was having a whole lot of fun getting me to do whatever she wanted. But I knew what Rebecca would fix on: You were in her room? You were in Emily Corwin’s bedroom? And, boy, would she be mad about that. And, let’s face it, I couldn’t really blame her. I’d react the same way if I found out she’d been in some guy’s bedroom. It doesn’t matter how innocent it is, it never sounds that way to someone who wasn’t there, especially when that someone already hates the person whose bedroom it is.
“Really, it’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just a thing I have to do. For Riel.”
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