The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

Evidence first, Richie thinks. What’s he missing? And then it hits him: the lighter! What about the goddamn lighter?

  “The one thing I don’t get is my lighter,” he says. “How did it end up at the crime scene?”

  “Your lighter?”

  “Yeah, the Sinatra lighter I gave back to you. They found it somewhere near the body. And it had my prints on it. How did it get there?”

  She seems stumped. Either she’s a great actress or she really is going over in her mind what she did with it and what might have happened to it.

  “I dropped it,” she says.

  “The lighter?”

  “No, my purse. When I went to pull out my cell phone, I dropped the bag on the ground. The lighter was in the bag. It must have come out. It was in the side pocket.”

  He thinks back to when he gave it to her at lunch. After refusing several times to accept it, she’d finally relented and slipped it into her purse. But the bag had been by her feet, so he hadn’t seen exactly where she’d put it.

  “You didn’t notice it was missing afterwards?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t think about it, Richie. I didn’t want it back. I told you that.”

  He shakes his head, frustrated. Whether she’s lying or not, he needs her to tell the police that he gave her back the lighter, and that it was in her possession, not his. He doesn’t give a shit what Marty Lowenstein said.

  “You need to tell the police that, Beth. You need to tell them I gave you back the lighter and that you dropped it when you got out of the car.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Tomorrow. Call Madden tomorrow and tell him.”

  “I will. I’ll talk to Carolyn.”

  “Oh, so you’re on a first-name basis now.”

  “She’s okay, Richie.”

  “First thing tomorrow,” he says. “Tell him.”

  “I will. I promise. But I’ve gotta go now. I’ve got to meet with Mark’s half-sister Linda. She just came in.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “We were going to try for Wednesday but the coroner’s office asked us to hold off until the end of the week, they need more time to complete their inquest or whatever it’s called. So probably Saturday, but she came in. I don’t think they were close. Mark wasn’t close to Barb or their brother, Scott. But he liked Linda’s kids. He left them a little money in his will. Hundred thousand each. But when I told her they might not get it, she came rushing out on the first plane.”

  “What do you mean, not get it?”

  “Mark apparently wasn’t as flush as people thought. His personal lawyer, who he named the executor, seems to think he’d been living beyond his means for several years. He lost more in the 2008 crash than he told people. They’re still sorting through everything, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to be left with much. Basically the house and a company that has no sales and a burn rate of at least a hundred grand a month, maybe more. And even the house is mortgaged to the hilt.” She laughs. It’s the laugh of someone who realizes the joke’s on her but doesn’t care. “The good news is, it helps with reducing any motive I might have had for killing him.”

  “How ’bout an insurance policy?”

  “Oh yeah, he did have one of those. A million bucks. Big deal. I’m going to kill him for that kind of money? I don’t think so. I could marry that in five seconds. Easy. That’s what people seem to be forgetting here.”

  “But you thought there was more. You thought there was a lot more. That’s what’s important. That’s what they’re going to look at, Beth.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But I can always say I thought he was in trouble, which I did think.”

  She then reaches out and gives his arm an affectionate squeeze. “I gotta go, Richie. You hang in there, okay?”

  With that, she turns to leave, walking toward the entrance. As she’s approaching the finish line, he realizes that he forgot to ask her something. He sprints to catch up to her.

  “I meant to ask you something,” he says, now a little breathless himself. “Did Mark ever say anything about a guy named John Hsieh or Paul Anderson?”

  She ruminates a moment, but the names don’t ring a bell. So he throws out another one. But this time it’s the name of a company, not a person.

  “Isn’t that the company he bought?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “I don’t know. Bender’s been poking around. Wants to track these guys down. They don’t seem to be with the company anymore. Mark’s company, I mean. I have Lowenstein’s investigator working on it, too.”

  She looks at him, seemingly more interested in his face than in what he’s saying. She then leans forward and kisses him on the lips, barely touching them, and says softly, “I’m not lying, Richie. I believed you. Now you have to believe me.”

  Her words hover there, lingering, even after he watches her get in her car and drive away. Trying to shake them, he heads back to the track and does another couple of laps. But they keep following him, riding all the way back with him to Bender’s house. Only when he pulls into Bender’s driveway and puts the bike back in the garage do they abruptly vanish, for inside the house, he hears shouting.

  “You’re seriously pissing me off!” a male voice, vaguely familiar, screams. “Who gave it to you? Just tell me who gave it to you and nothing’s going to happen.”

  “I will not reveal my sources,” he hears Bender say. “I can’t. It’s the one thing I won’t do.”

  “Well, you’re going to fucking die then, motherfucker.”

  30/ CHUMPS LIKE YOU

  HE SLIPPED INTO THE HOUSE THROUGH THE ENTRANCE IN THE GARAGE, quietly passed through the laundry room, and headed down the hallway toward the living room. Edging closer, his back against the wall, he peeked around the corner and saw Bender sitting there, cowering on the couch, his hands over his head in a sort of modified fetal position.

  Tongan Number Two, Soul Patch, is towering over him, a mini baseball bat in his hand that Richie recognizes as one of Bender’s tchotchkes. Except it’s not a freebie from some start-up, it’s his own creation. Richie had seen it earlier, lying around somewhere. On one side, the bat has “OneDumbIdea.com” written on it in bold black letters and on the other, “Speak loudly and carry a small stick, you will go far,” a play on the famous Teddy Roosevelt slogan. Bender thought it was very clever. Now the Tongan is threatening to ram it up his ass.

  “You’ve got five seconds to tell me whose photo that was,” the intruder demands.

  “Mine, asshole.”

  The answer comes from Richie, now standing right behind the guy, who turns and faces him, his eyes lighting up. He’s not only shocked that there’s another person in the room but also that it’s Richie.

  “You,” is all he has time to say before Richie slams him as hard as he can in the stomach. If there’s one thing he’s learned over the years, it’s that a shot to the body can be just as effective, if not more so, than a strike to the face. And it doesn’t hurt your hand.

  The Tongan doubles over gasping, the air gone from him. He starts to crumple, like he’s been kicked in the nuts, but Richie doesn’t let him topple over. He picks him up and, aiming him toward one of Bender’s modernist paintings, chucks him at it, lifting him off the floor.

  Man hits painting. Man and painting go crashing to floor.

  “Hey, hey,” Bender says. “Watch out.”

  But Richie isn’t finished. He takes a look around the room and ponders what he wants to destroy next. The flat-panel TV mounted to the wall looks like a pretty good target and he nails it dead center, cracking the screen right in the middle.

  “Get the dog leash,” he tells Bender.

  He then gives the Tongan one more toss, taking out some vases on an accent tablet. By the time Bender returns with the leash, Richie’s on top of the guy and has him pinned to the floor. Bender sees it as an opportunity to get a few licks in with his foot.

  “What are you
doing?” Richie says.

  “Fucker kicked my dog. I’m kicking him.”

  He yanks the leash out of his hand—it’s one of those fancy retractable ones with lots of line—and tells him to make himself useful. After a brief struggle, they manage to hog-tie the guy.

  “What are you doing here?” the Tongan keeps saying. “What the fuck?”

  “You’re the fuck,” Bender says. “I invite you into my home. I give you twenty-five-a-pound Kona fucking coffee and this is how you treat me.”

  That’s when Richie notices that Bender has a big wet spot in his pants in his crotch area. He can’t resist asking what it is.

  “I fucking pissed myself and I’m man enough to admit it,” Bender says. “This fucker made me piss myself.”

  He then winds up with his foot to take another shot, but Richie grabs it midswing, almost causing him to fall over.

  “Cut it out,” he tells Bender. “What’s he doing in your house?”

  Bender tells him that he went outside because his dog was barking. And this guy was standing there. At first things were pretty civil. He asked whether he was Tom Bender, and he said, yeah, he was, what’d he want? He said he was one of the guys in the picture that he’d posted on his website and he wanted to know who took it and who gave it to him. Bender told him that was privileged information. But if he wanted to come in, they could talk about it, maybe Bender could shed some light on the case. Maybe he could help him.

  “You’re an idiot, man,” Richie says. “This guy’s a fucking criminal.”

  “You’re one to talk, bro,” Soul Patch retorts.

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “If you don’t start talking in five seconds, we’re calling the police and they’ll take your ass away. No one will care what you did to this asshole,” Richie says, referring to Bender, “but that dog’s another story,” pointing to Beezo, who’s lying on the ground on his side, whimpering. “They’ll fucking lock you up for five years for cruelty to animals. Vick-ify you.”

  “I barely touched him. He’s fine.”

  He doesn’t look so fine. If Richie had to guess, Beezo had himself a couple of cracked ribs and maybe some internal injuries. Bender is now on his knees next to him, trying to comfort him with something that sounds disturbingly like baby talk.

  “Dial 911,” Richie tells him.

  “Gladly,” he says, and gets up and starts to head toward the kitchen, where there’s a cordless phone hitched to a cradle on the wall.

  “Hold on,” their captive says. “You’ll let me go if I tell you my name?”

  Richie: “We’re going to need a lot more than your name, bro. But that’s a start. And I’ll tell you what, you answer a few questions and I’ll tell you where he got that picture.”

  “Okay.”

  The guy says his name is Edwin Martinez. He’s half Tongan, half Mexican. He has a record, but nothing involving “serious” violence, just possessing prescription drugs not prescribed to him. He peddled them, and McGregor was a customer. That’s how they’d met—at some gas station awhile back. Then McGregor decided to take things in-house. He offered Edwin a job and asked him whether he had any big friends, bouncer types. They started out doing gofer and “bodyguard-type” work. McGregor had them start checking up on his wife.

  “Did he say why he wanted you checking up on her?” Richie asks.

  “I don’t know, man. One time he called her a vampire. He was worried she was going to kill him or have him killed. He asked me to get a gun for him at one point.”

  “Did you?”

  “Nah, bro. I didn’t want to get into any of that shit. I gave him a name. That’s it.”

  Sometimes when he mentions McGregor, he refers to him by a nickname Richie hasn’t heard in a while, McGregs. Only he puts “Mister” in front of it.

  “I gotta get him to the emergency room,” Bender says from the other side of the room, now trying to give Beezo some water. “He needs medical attention, stat. Look how he’s breathing.”

  Richie looks. Beezo doesn’t seem any worse than before. “He’ll be okay,” he says. “Just got the wind knocked out of him. That dog’s a fucking horse.”

  Then he turns back to Edwin and says:

  “You put spyware on her phone?”

  “I didn’t. Mr. McGregs did.”

  “The day he was murdered, what happened?”

  “What do you mean, what happened?”

  “Did you follow her like you normally did?”

  “It didn’t work like that. We didn’t always follow her. We kept track of her on the map. We had her on GPS. We could track her calls, her emails, everything. I was the one who called you back that day you called her. I knew it was you,” he says proudly. “Freaked you out, didn’t it? Got inside your head, bitch.”

  “You do a shitty English accent,” Richie says.

  “I know.” He winces in pain. “Man, could you loosen this up? It’s cutting into my skin. I’m losing circulation.”

  “In a minute. Just tell us what happened the day he was murdered.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He tells Richie what he already knows. When Beth went to meet him for lunch, she borrowed her neighbor’s car and left her phone at home. But it took them a couple of hours to figure that out; they thought she was still at the house. McGregor was pissed when he found out she’d given them the slip. “You realize she’s probably with him right now,” he said. “And I bet I know where they are.”

  “That’s it, bro,” Edwin tells Richie. “She must have come home around three thirty, because the phone started moving again right before four.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “She went and did yoga like she usually does on Fridays. And then she got her nails done at a place down the street from the yoga studio.”

  “Do you know for a fact she was there? Or are you just saying that’s what the GPS told you?”

  “We went to check on her around five or so. I saw her car. And later I saw her go into the nail salon. She was talking to a woman, her neighbor, I think, and that woman left, and she went in the nail place. She waved to me. I mean, the whole thing was a fucking joke. That’s what people don’t understand. It wasn’t like we was being menacing or anything. Everything was kind of out in the open.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I called Mr. McGregs to tell him. But he didn’t pick up so I left a message, saying, you know, where she was and that we were going to go home unless he needed anything else. He usually let us go around six on Fridays unless there was something special going on.”

  “Did he usually pick up?”

  “Most of the time, yeah.”

  “But you didn’t think anything about it at the time? That it was unusual?”

  “The next day, yeah. I thought shit, the dude must have been dead, that’s why he didn’t answer. But at the time, no, bro.”

  “You send me text messages from her phone?”

  The question confuses him.

  “On Ms. Hill’s phone? Why would I do that?”

  “Could you?”

  “What?”

  “Send a message with the spyware?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know all that shit. I’m not technology savvy, bro. Look, that’s it. That’s all I’m saying. I gave you plenty, now you gotta gimme something. And loosen this fucking thing up,” he says, holding out his hands.

  “He’s licking my hand,” he hears Bender say. “He seems a little better.”

  Richie: “One last thing.”

  “Fuck your one last thing.”

  “Paul Anderson,” he says. “Name ring a bell?”

  “Yeah. The queer dude, Paul. Mr. McGregs bought his company. He and this Chinese dude. Didn’t talk much English.”

  “You ever meet them?”

  “Yeah. Couple times. The Paul dude was around more.”

  “You said he was queer—as in gay?”

  “Se
emed like a homo to me. Sometimes, you know, we wondered about Mr. McGregs.”

  “Wondered as in what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he liked dick. He had the nice suits and Lacoste shirts and looked all well groomed and shit.” He lets out a little snicker. “Sometimes, you know, these guys with the hot wives got all these problems and you think maybe the dude’s got some issues. I tell you, bro, that’s one sweet piece of ass. I know you had it, so I know you know. I got respect for that, bro.”

  Respect? Richie has an urge to smack the guy but allows Edwin’s poor excuse for a compliment to pass.

  “You ever follow Paul around?”

  “Fuck no. Look, I’m done here. Call the fucking police I don’t give a shit. I can’t feel my fucking hands.”

  “Why you so concerned about the photo?”

  “You saw a picture of you linked to a murderer you’d be concerned too, bro. I can’t get that shit off the web. I shoulda sued this cocksucker for defamation.”

  “Please do,” Bender says from across the room. “I would enjoy that.”

  “But why’d you want to know who gave it to him so bad?”

  “’Cause she played us, bro. By that I mean you, too. I just got a bad vibe. The way she took her friend’s car and all that. She was real calculated, and it got me thinking she’d been cookin’ this thing up for a while. As soon as I saw that photo, that’s what I thought. So I had to know if she was the one who gave it to him. If she did, I’d know for sure.”

  “Well, like I said, it was my photo.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Bender says.

  The fucking guy just can’t contain himself.

  “Yes, it was,” Richie says firmly, then explains how he had Ashley and her boyfriend come over and take pictures after he saw Edwin and T-Truck sitting outside his apartment.

  Bender can’t quite believe it. Neither can Edwin. “For real, bro?”

  “The cops took the photo from me. I assume Madden or one of the other detectives gave it to him,” he says, nodding in Bender’s direction. “It’s called an intentional leak. Designed to stir things up, flush you out. All they wanted was to question you. They didn’t have anything on you. But now they’re going to think you had something to do with it.”