Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

  “Because I was hiding.”

  Moberg stared at her until she began to feel hot, as if under a glaring spotlight.

  “You ever play hide-and-seek with kids?” he said. “You play hide-and-seek with kids, you know where they’re hiding but pretend you don’t.”

  “You think he knew I was there.”

  “Let’s just imagine for a minute that the Hammerman didn’t hear you climbing out from the blanket fort and crawling toward the kitchen, and didn’t hear you crash into the coffee table or open the sink cabinet and shove aside some cleaning products and squeeze yourself inside. You still managed to drip a trail of blood that led straight to your hiding place. Sounds to me like a dog not barking in the night.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Just that there is one fact in this case and one fact only: you were spared. I’m sure of it, little girl.”

  “I was hiding,” she said.

  “Someday when you’re not depressed you should read some eyewitness accounts of massacres,” he said, unflinching. “More times than not when someone survives it’s not out of their own cunning. The gunman firing into the facedown crowd doesn’t make six headshots and accidentally pass over the single survivor. He chooses the survivor and the game is to purposefully miss. There are few accidents with power like that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You can pretend you had some angel on your shoulder, but the fact is he walked into that kitchen covered in blood, holding a dripping goddamned hammer, and let you keep your life. Even left his flashlight burning on the kitchen floor, probably so you’d have a bit of light in your hiding place. You came here for truth? Well, that’s as close to truth as you’re gonna get.”

  Lydia felt her hands grabbing at the back of her neck, as if something was crawling there, but something wasn’t. She felt her memories being rewired.

  “Like it or not, Lydia, he helped you hide.”

  Just thinking about being swallowed beneath the sink, she was immediately greeted by a musty smell, and in the dark of her mind she could feel the hulking disposal, the pipes coated with fuzz, the pair of webby shutoff valves. And she could hear the O’Toole family dying—their breaths going guttural, then silent; their flesh growing heavy; and their bones settling with a crack.

  Ke-tick.

  “You know I tried,” he said, and Lydia wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He avoided her eye and his voice hovered near a whisper, as if some unspeakable secret had gotten the better of him. “They wouldn’t let me go after him. But I tried.”

  “Go after who?”

  “This is the powers that be,” he said, “all the way up to the capitol’s golden dome. They thought it would be a PR nightmare for the department if I was wrong. And everyone thought I was wrong. I’m not saying I was right. But the man had more to hide than anyone.”

  “Who?”

  “Your daddy.”

  “I should go,” Lydia said, but when she stood up a rush of fireflies pocked her sight and made her sit back down.

  “You mean you’ve never considered this? What could that shy old librarian possibly have to hide? Turns out plenty, but I was discouraged from pursuing any of my discoveries. Threatened, more like. You don’t want to hear this, you’d best go. I don’t get to talk much.”

  “I would know if it was him.”

  “Or you’d convince yourself it wasn’t,” he said. “Remember the simple truth that you’re alive. Think about it: what madman would have no qualms about slaughtering a mommy and a daddy and a ten-year-old girl, but then grow a set of commandments when it came to killing the little friend sleeping over?”

  “It wasn’t my dad,” Lydia said, picking a gray stain on the floor to stare at. “He’d never do something like that. Besides, the guy—the Hammerman? When Carol went scrambling down the hall he practically jumped through the ceiling. I heard the whole thing. That family portrait shattered and slid down the wall because he crashed into it when Carol surprised him. Because he wasn’t expecting her. Maybe he didn’t know there would be any kids there. My dad, on the other hand, knew Carol and I would be there. So it wasn’t fucking him, okay?”

  Moberg lifted a ballpoint from the table and leaned into his notebook and scrawled for a minute. Then he set down his pen and spoke.

  “That’s something,” he said, “but listen, murder is a sloppy business. Full of grunts and stumbles and bashing around. If he crashed into the wall it was probably due to adrenaline quivers or being on the cusp of killing your little friend. The worst kind of rush, you know? Or maybe he was expecting she’d hide and he wouldn’t have to kill her at all. Like she wasn’t part of his plans. Maybe he had to change those plans when suddenly she was screaming right at him.”

  Lydia listened to herself breathing.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Heard that before,” he said. “Tell me something once again. Did you see the Hammerman’s face? That night, did you?”

  “The lights were off,” she said, “and when he came into the kitchen, all I saw was his flashlight between the cabinet doors. But I would know if it was my dad.”

  “But you didn’t see the guy,” he said, “so it could’ve been anyone. Did you know your daddy had no alibi? That’s reasonable enough given that he was a single father with no social life outside of his groupies at the library, but still, no alibi is a good place to start.”

  “Of course he had no alibi,” she said. “He had to drive the Bookmobile through a snowstorm for that festival in the mountains, otherwise he would have lost his job. That had to take all night.”

  Moberg peeled open his notebook and scanned the pages with his finger.

  “He dropped off the Bookmobile in Breckenridge, then took the last ski bus into downtown, caught a cab, and made it home around midnight, even with the snow. That gave him plenty of time to walk over there. It coincides with the timeline. But the next morning, when he discovered the O’Tooles’ bodies, that’s when the real inconsistencies began. He stumbled upon the crime scene, up there with the most repulsive in the city’s history, and what did he do? Shoved the bodies around. Piled them aside, claiming to have been searching for you. Convenient then that he had the victims’ blood all over his clothes, his face, his hands. You know we picked pieces of brain off his shirt collar? Brain as in brain. We found bloodstains inside his pockets. But moving the bodies wasn’t enough, so he stormed through the house, touching everything in sight. His fingerprints were everywhere and bloody. Which brings us to the murder weapon. When we got there that hammer had been smeared so much by his sweaty hands that all the latent blood basically turned into paste and ruined any chance we had of lifting a viable print—other than his, of course. On the phone with the 911 dispatcher, he made sure to announce loud and clear that he was holding the very hammer that sure as hell wiped that family out. Called from the kitchen like ordering a pizza. Doesn’t look too good, does it?”

  “I’m sure there’s a reason,” she said.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Moberg said firmly, leaning forward in a pose that was as threatening as it was assertive. “Listen, I’m not doubting your sincerity here. And you may not want to hear this, but when you map out the serology of that crime scene, you know what you get? You get the distinct blood of the three O’Tooles. Then you get your blood on part of the carpet and the kitchen floor and beneath the sink. Then you get one other person’s blood—”

  “My dad’s,” she said. “Because he cut himself.”

  “When he was looking for you. I know. I’ve heard it. At some point after the killing, the Hammerman had dragged Carol’s body partway down the hall to just inside the bedroom doorway, right where her parents died, probably so she couldn’t be seen from the front window or door. Maybe he thought it would give him some time. And in the morning your dad showed up, didn’t see you anywhere, so he began searching for you, even going so far as to shove aside the bodies in case you were piled beneath them. In his panic, somewhere in ther
e he cut his hand, most likely on broken glass.”

  “But he told you all of this,” she said.

  “He sure did.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that your dad’s blood wasn’t on the bodies. It was only on one body. Dottie’s. No one else’s.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “No shit it doesn’t.”

  A plume of spite swelled in Lydia’s chest. Whatever she’d been expecting by visiting here, it was not this.

  “Are you saying—” she said, but had to restart. “When you say my dad’s blood was on Dottie’s body, were there other signs? I mean, do you mean that—?”

  “Nothing like that. I mean his blood was on her neck and face and shoulder and wrist and hand. And nightie. If it was just that, or just his tracks, or just your hiding, or just the hammer— If those were the only oddities, I may have written all of this off as coincidence. But there’s more. I don’t need to tell you that, after the murders, your daddy fled the city as soon as he could. He wanted to protect you. I get that. But the thing that always got me was his silence before he left. At the O’Tooles’ he stumbled right into the heart of the crime scene, knew all three victims, yet he had little to say about anyone involved. Tell me that doesn’t stink. The only way we were going to get any information out of him was to press charges, but that idea was crushed from above. Little Lydia had been through enough. Just ask Life magazine.”

  “I had been through enough.”

  “I know you had. Which is why in all those years, in all those press conferences, not once did the department ever raise public suspicion about your father. It might be that your misery gave him his freedom. You could be mayor of Denver with a history like that, I shit you not. But you see my point about your daddy.”

  More than anything Lydia saw how desperately her dad had tried to insulate her, to keep her safe, to erase a night that couldn’t be erased—at least before settling in Rio Vista, where he became a different man.

  “Maybe you were just frustrated,” she said. “No suspects were turning up so you settled for the cliché: blame the parents.”

  “That’s exactly what my colleagues in the department said. And for a while I believed them, because maybe all this circumstantial crap was really just in my head. For a time I let it go. I tried to focus on fishing and trains and a merciful God. But then a few months after the murders we got a phone call from the O’Tooles’ neighbor. You remember her? Agatha Castleton, a lonely old woman who’d lived across the street her whole life. I’d tried interviewing her twice before, but like the rest of the city she just seemed crippled by dread. Like the Hammerman was just waiting to get her next. I left her my card in case anything came up.”

  “And it did?”

  “The day before the murders, around lunchtime, Agatha was eating a sandwich by her window and guess who she saw whistling up the sidewalk and knocking on the O’Tooles’ front door? A man who looked and dressed just like your daddy. Which isn’t all that strange, given that you and Carol were such buddies, but the two of you were in school all day. So what was he doing there? Think about it. The murders happened late on Friday night, and your daddy had been at the crime scene Thursday at noontime. When I asked him, by the way, he told me he was just dropping off Carol’s mittens, which she’d left at the library. Said he stuck them in the mailbox on the porch and left.”

  “Carol was always losing things,” Lydia said, almost smiling.

  “Remember the Hammerman turned off the lights during the attack,” Moberg said. “The flashlight may have helped him find his way around in the dark, but the attack was so methodical that he was probably also familiar with the layout of the house, maybe because he’d been there before. A small detail, but it’s important. Now take a look at this.”

  From the back of his notebook Moberg pulled out a single black-and-white page torn from an old real estate catalog. It had been folded into quarters and its seams were beginning to tear. On each side was printed a dozen advertisements for properties, each with a small description and a photograph of the place for sale.

  “What do you see there?” Moberg asked.

  Lydia studied the ads and found herself mildly distracted by how inexpensive the homes were and by how much her state had changed. Then she noticed that all the places were in the mountains—some weekend cabins, some year-round homes, some dying farms and ranches.

  “Turn it over.”

  When Lydia did she had to hold the page in the direction of the light to be sure of what she was seeing, but there it was in the lower left corner of the page. A small smudged photograph of her father’s house in Rio Vista, with a brief description: 2 BR A-frame, mtn. views, 8 acres, lrg. shop, school bus route. $19,950.

  “That’s your home in the mountains.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “That’s not the original that you’re holding. The original page is somewhere in an evidence box in Denver, sharing a shelf with a bloodstained hammer. The original was found crammed in the bathroom trash can, water-damaged to the point of being almost unreadable.”

  For a moment Lydia felt as if she was sitting in a rocking chair, about to teeter over.

  “You found this in the O’Tooles’ bathroom?” she said.

  “We found it the morning after the murders. Based on the other items in the trash, it had probably been there for a day or two. I’m guessing since your dad’s Thursday visit. You know, when he dropped off those all-important mittens.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Fuck.”

  Moberg chuckled. “Yes,” he said. “Fuck.”

  Lydia looked again at the image of the cabin where she’d spent most of her teenage years, the unhappiest years of her life. And she tried to determine whether the uneasy feeling she had at the moment was due to Moberg’s insinuations or to the memories evoked by this crumpled vision—or both.

  “It makes no sense,” she said. “We moved into the cabin because of the murders. So why would the O’Tooles have a picture of it?”

  “This is the question,” Moberg said. “Your father was up to something bigger than mittens over there, no doubt. Of course he claimed there were no interactions between them except those having to do with you and Carol. And there was no one alive to say otherwise. My first thought was that he and Dottie O’Toole had something going on. Lord knows she sowed her oats, but one look at your dad— I mean, did the guy ever wash his hair, let alone tie his shoes? It’s pretty obvious he wasn’t exactly her type, a fact made loud and clear through Dottie’s Tupperware circles. Did you know at the time she was screwing one of the Broncos? Third string, but still. Of course anything is possible, but I’ve always placed high doubts on Dottie going near a man like your dad. As did everyone else I interviewed.”

  “Go on,” she said, reluctant.

  “What seems more likely to me,” Moberg said, planting his elbows on the tabletop, “is that Bart O’Toole and your dad were up to something. That O’Toole needed a legitimate face for something he was putting together under the table. The problem with Bart is that almost everything he did was off the books, so it was hard to know whether he was working for lowlifes or he was a lowlife himself or just another asshole who wanted the good life without having to pay taxes. There were plenty of plumbing calls in the dead of night, but that doesn’t mean he was up to no good, you know? Maybe he needed your dad to sign a loan or to launder some paperwork, to milk the city or squeeze a contract out of the state. Maybe the cabin in Rio Vista was supposed to be collateral, or some kind of tax scam related to his plumbing venture. But no matter how deeply I dug I could never figure out the connection between them. I puzzled over the possibilities for months, going through public records and IRS files and library budgets, but nothing panned out. But to find a picture of your future house balled up in the bathroom trash can? That’s always been the answer without a question.”


  “Did you ever bring him in?” she said.

  “As a suspect? Never. I talked to him plenty in the weeks after the murders, but barely ever beyond that. The last time I saw your father was after you moved to Rio Vista, when you came here to the cabin to check out photos of suspects. I was hoping the different environment might encourage him to open up, but I couldn’t even get him to make eye contact with me. You’d know better than I do, but it seemed to me that he started losing it up there in the mountains. Maybe it was the altitude.”

  “They always blame the altitude.”

  “That or guilt,” he said. “Eventually my superiors in all their wisdom forced me to come up with hard evidence or else steer clear of him, mainly because they didn’t want to bring any more attention to the fact that the dreaded Hammerman was still at large.”

  “But you obviously didn’t give up on the case.”

  “I’ll tell you, I’ve lost sleep just wondering if we missed something. Some detail none of us in the department ever turned up.” He shook his head as if to rattle away the possibility. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we screwed it up somehow. Missed something. Because anyone who stepped foot in that house? Let’s just say I saw grown men lose it there, embracing each other as if they themselves had lost a child. One guy gave up his career in homicide and transferred over to property crimes. Just couldn’t deal with the magnitude of evil. That place was a bloodbath. It was hard to be there.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you know.”

  Moberg stared hard at Lydia, and this brash acknowledgment left her grunting with discomfort.

  “You can’t imagine the number of leads that came across my desk,” he said, more contemplative than she’d expected. “Ask me why I’m single. People sent me their grocery-store gossip and church scandals, all of them convinced that the Hammerman was their creepy neighbor or their bastard husband or their asshole boss. Even now it’s an open sore in the city—the Hammerman still at large after all these years. Can’t blame people for wanting to be part of the great return to order, I guess. I just wish . . .”