by Brad Smith
She hesitated, and when she did, she was sure she heard a voice in the background. A shout of some kind, like someone saying hello. Keep it going, she thought. Don’t spook him and have him hang up.
“I thought he jumped the gun a little bit,” she said. “With the arrest.”
“How do you think I felt? How long you been a cop?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“Really? So you signed up when you were what—eighteen?”
“Close. You have a silver tongue, Mr. Cain.”
“Where are you from anyway?”
Shit, she thought. Why would he be the one to ask that? The handsome real estate mogul with the new Lexus and the cool homes and the BlackBerry from the future doesn’t ask, but the escaped killer does.
“Lowell, Maine. Why do you want to know that?”
“Hey, you know all about me. Can’t I ask a question about you?”
“But I don’t know all about you.” Her cell beeped then and she clamped her hand over the receiver, wondering if he had heard. She picked it up, read the text. on it—m “What was that?” Virgil asked.
“Setting my alarm,” she told him. “I have to get up in the morning and do some investigating, so you won’t think badly of me.” She realized that the phony explanation might sound as if she wanted to end the call, so she kept talking. “I was saying—I don’t know anything about you. What was the deal in Quebec? The guy you beat up. Why’d you do it?”
She could hear him exhale heavily, as if in deliberation. “He swindled a friend of mine. Took advantage of her and cheated her out of her property.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“So why didn’t he go to jail?”
“He’s rich. Sometimes rich people get away with stuff.”
“You referring to Alan Comstock now?”
“Nope. But it occurred to you quick enough.”
“Do you think he killed your wife?”
“I don’t know what happened that night,” Virgil said. “And if he’s dead, there’s nobody alive who does know. So that’s that.”
Claire put her cell on vibrate. Carrying it in her free hand, she walked over and sat in the wingback chair by the window.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. “How was your marriage anyway?”
“Why?”
“Because. I was in your house. It kinda looks like you guys had separate rooms.”
He was quiet for a few moments and she thought she’d gone too far. “Why would that matter now?” he finally asked.
“Just wondering. I mean, if you guys weren’t getting along, the argument could be made that you would be less likely to start killing people in a grief-stricken rage.”
“Well, I’m not in a rage, and I haven’t killed anybody. So I really don’t have to make that argument.”
“But you will have to eventually. Once they bring you back.”
“I forgot, I got Joe Brady on my trail. I got a feeling that boy couldn’t track an elephant through a foot of snow.” He hesitated again. Claire listened to his breathing. He didn’t seem to be hurried in the least. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you some details on my marriage if you tell me you’ll try to find out who killed Dupree and Comstock.”
“I intend to do that either way. You don’t seem to have a lot of faith in me, Virgil.”
“Hey, I want to have faith in you,” he assured her. “You might be all I got.” She could sense his hesitation. “As far as my marriage goes, I guess I can tell you the truth. Doesn’t much matter now anyway. A few months after Tom Stempler died— that’s Kirstie’s father—the immigration people came snooping around. Somebody dropped a dime on me, being here without a work visa or anything. There was a developer trying to buy the place and I suspect it might have been him but I don’t know that for certain. I was running the place pretty much on my own. Kirstie was living there, chasing her music. But she wouldn’t sell the family farm. I applied for a green card and got turned down, so one day she just said, let’s get married. So we did. End of problem.”
“So you were married on paper only? So you could stay in the country?”
“That’s it. You gonna add another charge to me?”
“Your plate’s pretty full as it is.”
“No shit.”
“So,” Claire said, wondering why she was pushing it. “It wasn’t a real marriage, it was just a thing of convenience.” She paused but couldn’t help herself. “You guys weren’t ever sleeping together or anything . . . um, like that?”
“You need a real marriage for that?” Virgil asked. “I don’t want to shock you, but I have slept with women I wasn’t even a little bit married to. Where is Lowell, Maine—somewhere in the 1800s?”
“All right. I deserved that.”
“Wasn’t Kerouac from Lowell?”
“He was. Do you read Kerouac?”
“I read On the Road when I was a kid. Like everybody else.”
“My grandmother knew his mother a little. They went to mass together.”
“You a Catholic?”
“Lapsed. What about you?”
“I’m nothing,” Virgil said. “Other than somebody in a lot of shit. Tell me how you’re going to go about this. Comstock had to have enemies and I would imagine there’s a lot of people who held a grudge against Dupree.”
“I’d say you’re right. And I intend to start tracking them down. I’m a few steps behind on this because the guy we had in custody broke out of jail and threw a monkey wrench into everything.”
Virgil ignored the shot. “You going to talk to Buddy Townes?” Claire was quiet for a moment. “What do you know about Buddy?”
“I heard he might be a good guy to talk to. Who is he?” Claire hesitated a moment longer. “Buddy Townes was Dupree’s private investigator, his go-to guy. He’s an ex-cop, lost his shield for drinking and doping, all that shit you see movie cops doing. Sometimes real cops do it too.”
“You’ll be talking to him?”
“I suspect I will.”
“Good. What else?”
“Well, it would be very nice for you if we could turn up some physical evidence placing somebody else at either murder scene.”
“You don’t have any physical evidence putting me there.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I wasn’t there. Remember?”
“I haven’t decided one way or the other on that, Mr. Cain.” She heard a rapping sound, like knuckles on glass. “Somebody at your door?” she asked. She opened her cell and checked for a text. Come on, Marina.
“All right,” he said. “I have to go.”
Claire got up and walked over to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Oh, come on. I’m not tired yet.”
“You’re back in bed, though. I just heard it.”
“I am back in bed.” She was afraid he would hang up. “Is this where you ask me what I’m wearing?”
“I know what you’re wearing.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Sure. Girl like you—T-shirt and panties. Probably some logo on the shirt—Yankees or Giants or something.”
“Not even close,” she told him. She looked at herself in the mirror, at her pink panties and her Mets T-shirt. Sonofabitch.
“I’ll be in touch,” Virgil said.
“Wait,” she said. “What if—what if I find something? I’ll need to get in touch with you.”
“Nice try,” he said, laughing, and he hung up.
She listened for a few seconds but he was gone. As soon as she hung up the phone, she felt her cell buzz. She looked at the screen.
got it
She called the station and Marina answered on the first ring.
“You’d better not tell me it came from Brazil,” Claire said.
“Did you say Brazil?”
“Never mind. What have you got?”
“You know the Broadway Lights Diner?” Marina said.
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“No. The only Broadway Diner I know is here in Kingston.”
“That’s it.”
“What?”
“That’s where the call came from. A pay phone at the diner.”
“What the fuck? That place is a few blocks from my house.”
“That’s where the call came from.”
Claire got up and walked to the window. The Broadway Lights Diner was a retro roadhouse, all vinyl and chrome and Wurlitzer jukeboxes. She could almost see it from her window. A diner. That explained the background noises.
“You there?” Marina asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on? Who was on the line?”
Claire thought about it for a moment. To tell Marina was to inform the department. Which meant Joe Brady. She was pretty sure the only way she would be able to keep talking with Virgil Cain would be to do it in confidence.
“Nobody,” she said. “Some guy asking me what I was wearing.”
“Ew—one of them.”
“Yeah. One of them. Thanks, Marina.”
She hung up the phone and pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and headed downstairs. It was going to be an exercise in futility but she had to go anyway.
When she got to the diner, the place was surprisingly busy, the after-bar crowd stopping in for burgers and fries. Driving there, she recalled there were three old-style phone booths in a row at the back of the place, glassed-in, with dial phones. Local calls were free. The booths were all empty when she walked in.
She talked to the waitstaff and a few customers. Some of them remembered a man using the phone, some didn’t. Some remembered what he looked like, others had no idea. No two people remembered the same. It didn’t matter.
Claire knew exactly what he looked like.
She walked outside and stood on the sidewalk, imagining which way he would have gone. It was only a half-dozen blocks to the highway and then beyond that was the forest. If she had to guess, she would say that’s where he went. Unless he’d gotten a vehicle someplace. She could call canine but it would be next to impossible to pick up his trail, with all the pedestrian traffic in the area. She headed home, resigned to the fact she would have to let him go for now.
But she was buoyed by the knowledge that, apparently, he wasn’t going very far.
SIXTEEN
When Virgil left the diner, it was just filling up. College kids, most of them three sheets to the wind, rowdy and raucous, talking trash back and forth across the restaurant. Virgil slipped out a side door and headed west out of town. He crossed the thruway a few hundred yards before the tollgate and walked along Route 28, staying mostly on the shoulder and hunkering down in a ditch whenever cars passed.
A mile or so along he angled to the north, crossing a hay field in the moonlight. He was taking a shortcut version of the route he normally traveled when he drove back to the farm from Kingston. He wasn’t particularly worried about pursuit; it was evident from his conversation with Claire Marchand that the cops were convinced he’d left the country.
Good thing, because she’d kept him talking longer than he intended. All he really wanted to know was whether there was somebody involved in the investigation who hadn’t already convicted him. But then she’d started talking about other things, personal things, and pretty soon Virgil was thinking about her legs, and her full mouth, and those eyes, intelligent and quick but with something else there, something guarded and wary. He’d seen that quality in horses before, horses that had been treated badly. It took a while to get close to them. Sometimes it couldn’t be done.
She’d wanted to know about his marriage. What did that have to do with the murders? Once or twice during the conversation it had occurred to him that she was trying to keep him on the line long enough to get a trace. But that wasn’t possible. She would have had to set it up beforehand, or during the call, and how could she have?
At least he had her word that she would look at other suspects. Whatever her word was worth. Of course, what else would she tell him? But he had a sense that she was being straight with him. And, if nothing else, she’d verified that the man named Buddy Townes was somebody who might know something.
He reached the back road that ran behind the farm in a couple of hours. He climbed the boundary fence and moved into the back pasture, where his cattle were settled for the night, herded up between the pond and the woods. He walked alongside the fence line and took a quick head count. He’d never lost a steer in the past, but with the news of him being on the run it was possible somebody decided there was free beef for the taking. The herd was intact, though.
Keeping to the fencerow along the lane, he made his way up behind the barn, where he stopped to watch the house and the road out front for thirty minutes. When he had arrived at the same spot two nights earlier, he’d waited there for more than an hour, until he was reasonably certain nobody was watching the place. It had been easy to take the Jeep and drive away unnoticed. And if there was no surveillance before, there would be none now. Virgil Cain was in Canada.
He walked around the barn and stopped to look at the horses in the front pasture field. They were standing sleeping beneath the big maple tree along the lane. Virgil could see that the skinny mare was among the bunch, apparently having settled in.
Virgil approached the house cautiously. He had discovered the police lock the last time, and so he went in through the basement window, as he had then. It was pitch-black in the house but he couldn’t risk a light. He went upstairs and into the bathroom, stripped down, and took a long shower. Getting out, he decided not to shave. For one, it was a tricky business in the dark, and two, a beard might be a good idea, given his circumstances.
When he walked into his bedroom for some clean clothes, he remembered that the woman—Claire—had confessed to being there. He stood quietly for a moment, imagining he could smell her perfume. Did she even wear perfume, or something of the sort? At work? Probably not, but he thought he could detect something.
He knew he needed to get his mind off the sexy cop and on to keeping himself out of her reach. Because all she wanted to do was lock him up.
He got dressed and went downstairs. He was suddenly tired. The only sleep he’d had in the past thirty-six hours was the nap he’d taken in the cab of the tractor trailer he’d hitched a ride with, heading south from the border area after ditching the Jeep. He’d approached the driver at a truck stop parking lot and convinced him that his old pickup had given up the ghost and that he would lose his job at a chicken farm near Saugerties if he didn’t make it back there by morning. The driver was not the suspicious type, and, besides, anyone out looking for Virgil would not have considered his heading back to the scene.
He decided not to risk sleeping in the house. He went into a cupboard beneath the basement stairs and found an old sleeping bag. He pulled on a jacket and went up to the kitchen, risking the refrigerator light long enough to grab four eggs and a half-pound of bacon. He took down a frying pan from a hook above the stove. After putting everything in a canvas bag he remembered matches. He no longer had his lighter, having tossed the broken pieces in the Hudson after slipping the jail in Kesselberg. It took him a while, operating in the dark, but he finally found a pack. On his way out, he took down a pair of binoculars from a hook by the back door and put them in the bag.
Walking past the south end of the barn, he smelled fresh hay. He went inside and saw two full wagons parked in the runway. He went up the ladder, and where the moonlight showed through the cracks between the barn boards he saw that the north mow was half-full of freshly baled timothy from the field he had cut three days earlier. Three days. It seemed to Virgil he had traveled a thousand miles in that time. He pulled a handful of hay from a bale and held it to his nose, smelled the sweet, pungent aroma.
“Mary Nelson,” he said. “Aiding and abetting.”
He went out through the barnyard and retraced his steps to the woods. It was probably four o’clock or so, he guessed, when he got the
re. Dawn wasn’t far away. Virgil found a spot along the edge of the woods and spread out the sleeping bag on the ground. Hungry as he was, he wouldn’t risk a fire until daylight. He was too tired to cook anyway. He stretched out inside the sleeping bag and was asleep in minutes.
Suzanne showed up around five o’clock in the afternoon and persuaded Jane to come home with her. Jane had spent the previous few hours wandering around, occasionally talking to the cops and to Walter, who arrived shortly after noon with a platter of sandwiches and coffee from a local deli. Jane was not in the mood to eat. She offered the sandwiches to the cops and the forensics people and they cleaned them up with little encouragement.
The CSI unit was there all afternoon. There was a considerable amount of blood on the deck. Jane wanted to hire someone right away to come in and clean up but was told she wouldn’t be able to do so for a couple of days at least. The unit placed yellow tape around the deck. A woman named Julie informed her that they intended to dust the entire house for fingerprints, a massive task given the size of the place.
“What makes you think the guy was in the house?” Jane asked.
“We don’t, necessarily,” the woman replied. “But we can’t not do it. I also need you to check for any missing items. Jewelry, cash, credit cards. Passports. Anything at all.”
Walter stayed with her while she went from room to room.
“I’m supposed to look for things that are no longer here,” she told him. “There’s something contradictory about that.”
The search turned up nothing and they ended up in the sitting room. Jane felt suddenly light-headed and she stretched out on the sofa. Walter stood by the window, looking down at the police van in the drive.
“Our esteemed police force has a lot to answer for,” he said.
“They had this guy and he made monkeys out of them.”
“You really think it was him? The guy that killed Mickey Dupree?”
“Who else would it be? Who else had a grudge against Alan?”
“Come on, Walter. A lot of people. Two days ago he was in a screaming match with that French kid’s manager.”
“I doubt the man would shoot somebody for calling him a fucking frog. No, I’m afraid it was this Cain. The cops are going to have a tough time explaining this one away. The irony is, maybe for the first time in his life Alan actually does have a legitimate reason to sue somebody. And he’s not here to do it.”