"I suppose this is about the Fayina," she said after Chamberlain had introduced himself at the door. A tall, blue-eyed blonde who looked younger than her sixty years, she was dressed in expensive, stylish clothes. “Come inside, Sheriff."
They entered her large living room, which appeared to have been professionally decorated according to some theme that involved an emphasis on terra cotta pots. She motioned him to a chair and seated herself on a sleek sofa behind a glass coffee table. An almost floor-to-ceiling window looked out from the living room upon conifers swaying slightly in the breeze while bushy-tailed squirrels played on the limbs.
"I heard about the discovery on my way back from France,” she said. “I'd been skiing at Morzine. It was reported in the London papers, you know. I couldn't believe it. After forty years. And murder!"
"How much do you remember of that day?"
"Not much. I didn't know Archie or Melissa well. Only Curtis. I worked as an accountant's secretary where Curtis was a client. That's how we met. I remember only that I'd been at work that day and tried to phone Curtis several times at his house and business. I forget why I needed to talk to him. And he wasn't at the little house he rented when I drove by after work. But I saw him the next day."
"Hank Axtell told me that you gave Larson an alibi."
"Hank Axtell! I haven't heard that name in years. . . . And yes, I did claim that I'd spoken to him on the phone."
"Why the lie?” asked Chamberlain.
"My employer knew I'd tried to phone him and failed. If I didn't say that I'd reached him later, Curtis's partners might wonder why he wasn't home when he claimed to be. He told me that he'd met secretly in Portland with a recruiter from an electronics company. Said he'd been thinking about quitting FRLS Video. But the fellow hadn't offered him as much as Curtis had expected, so he turned it down. He didn't want the others to know that he'd been thinking about leaving. Of course, it was all baloney."
"You sound sure."
"He told me later. Years later, when he was divorcing me. He'd been in Portland, all right, but with a prostitute. Why he felt the need to tell me that, I'll never know."
Chamberlain was beginning to suspect why.
"How did Larson appear to you the day after the Fayina disappeared?” he asked. “Did you see him before he supposedly learned about it?"
"Supposedly learned . . . ? Well, yes. I went to the house again the next morning and he was there. As for how he appeared, it's odd you mention it. He appeared all done in. And he was having trouble with his feet."
"What sort of trouble?"
"Like they were sore."
Would a walk from Tangle Beach make a young man's feet sore? Chamberlain doubted it. The distance—eighteen miles—wasn't that long . . . unless he wore inappropriate shoes, such as dress shoes or cowboy boots.
"What sort of shoes or boots did Mr. Larson wear in those days?"
"Shoes?” She laughed at the question. “Just regular shoes."
Suddenly her smile disappeared. She almost said something, but caught herself, and didn't.
"You think Curtis did it, don't you?” she asked. “You think he killed Norm and Melissa."
"What did you remember about the shoes?"
"N-n-nothing."
"If he did kill them, he involved you when he asked you to tell Hank that you talked with him at his house when in fact he wasn't there. It made you an accessory after the fact to two counts of murder. There's no statute of limitations, Ms. Taylor, and we will eventually get him—and anyone who helped him."
"I have two adult children, Sheriff. He's their father. One's an attorney."
"Archie and Melissa haven't had a chance to live the sort of lives you and your ex have led. No empire-building. No generous alimony. No children. And remember: He involved you."
She stood and walked to the window. For a minute she stared out. Chamberlain waited, saying nothing, doing nothing. She would now tell him everything or shut up completely.
"We were married for twenty-two years,” she said at last, still looking out the window. “I knew that he had affairs. Even in the beginning he didn't seem . . . well, deeply in love with me. It was strange, because he's an emotional man. . . . Then, in nineteen ninety, he started carrying on openly with Anna Udall. We had fights. And then he took a trip, and he came back looking very, very relieved—more relaxed and confident than I'd ever seen him before—and the next day he told me he planned to file for divorce. He took the greatest pleasure in telling me, had the biggest, ugliest smile on his face. Not until that moment did I ever hate anyone."
He waited.
She turned to face him, took a deep breath, and said, “He'd gone to Tangle Beach.” A smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. “I'd never understood it before. Now I do. He'd married me so that I couldn't be forced to testify against him when the boat was found. He'd never gone back, you see. Tangle Beach, before that big motel, was almost inaccessible. So he must've believed the boat was there, on the beach, and maybe that anyone who saw it just dismissed it as an old wreck the authorities already knew about. But when he went back, for the first time since nineteen sixty-nine, he realized that it'd disappeared completely. He probably thought that the ocean waves had swept it back out to sea and sunk it."
Chamberlain stood. Interesting, he thought, but it didn't help him. It wasn't evidence against Larson.
"On one of the news reports that I heard,” she continued, “it said that Tangle Beach is like quicksand when it's wet."
"That's right."
"Soon after the Fayina disappeared, Curtis bought new deck shoes. I wondered why because he already had deck shoes. But after we married, I think I would've remembered if I'd ever seen that first pair. I don't. Now I realize why. Now I realize what happened to the first pair. They were blue, and his shoe size was eleven."
* * * *
The unmarked police car splashed over the wet Portland streets in late morning, a fifty-something-year-old plainclothes detective behind the wheel and Chamberlain beside him. The detective appeared to know the Portland streets as well as Chamberlain did the streets of Oldport, piloting the car with that easy confidence that only natural drivers possessed, as though man and car were seamless parts of the same entity. They tried to keep the silver Cadillac in view, but neither of them worried that it had gone so far ahead. Its destination had become obvious: PDX. So obvious, in fact, that the detective had asked someone back in his squad room to telephone ahead to discover if Curtis Larson had filed a flight plan for his private plane.
They were at the gates into the airport before the detective's cell phone tinkled and he spoke into it for a minute and then looked over at Chamberlain with a grin of satisfaction on his red Irish face.
"Mexico,” he said. “Probably the first leg of a trip to Brazil or someplace else where he can fight extradition."
"Good,” said Chamberlain. “The flight plan itself becomes evidence of a sort."
"You'd think someone smart enough to build a multimillion-dollar business would be smart enough to sit tight and let his lawyers handle things."
"You'd think. But he must've been living with the fear of the boat being discovered for all those years before nineteen ninety, when he finally returned to Tangle Beach to see for himself what became of it. And in nineteen ninety he didn't see it. No boat. Probably no mound; I think the little mound over the boat appeared as a result of the erosion caused by the winter waves of two thousand seven and two thousand eight. His first wife probably guessed right: He believed the ocean had pulled the boat back out to sea and sunk it."
"He shoulda sunk it himself the day he killed those two."
"Even on a calm day if he'd had a life jacket and been an excellent swimmer, it would've been difficult because the rocks cause such violence in the waves at Tangle Beach. And that day a storm was battering the coast. No chance of survival even for the best swimmer."
The detective stopped the car, looked around, and then picked up his cell again.
He told someone to ask PDX for the location of the hangar housing Larson's plane.
While they waited, Chamberlain continued: “After living with that stress every day for two decades, he was suddenly freed of it. He felt the unbounded joy of the reprieved. He divorced the wife he'd never loved and married a woman he wanted. He probably held all sorts of little personal celebrations. He's been living free of the haunting all these years. And suddenly, thanks to three kids strolling on the beach, his nightmare has come back. Worse for his having believed he was free of it. He's in a panic."
Chamberlain remembered Larson's reaction to the news, how he'd been no more shocked about the double murder than about the boat having been found.
The station phoned back the hangar's location, and the detective asked for backup. They waited seven minutes until a patrol car with two uniformed officers arrived. They then drove to the hangar.
Larson was inside, two suitcases on its concrete floor and the side door of the Cessna open, when Chamberlain and the three Portland cops said hello.
His dark complexion turned ashen, and he braced himself against the side of the plane. For a moment Chamberlain thought Larson would faint.
"I suppose you saw the news on TV this morning,” said Chamberlain, walking up to him. “The media paid less attention to the discovery of the boat than they did to the discovery of that shoe."
Larson didn't say anything.
So Chamberlain continued: “It was well preserved. Even the dye. You could see it'd been blue. Of course, nothing unusual about a blue deck shoe. But a size eleven is a bit less common."
Still, nothing. Larson just stared at him.
"We have a witness,” continued Chamberlain, “that you had a blue, size-eleven deck shoe before the boat vanished and not afterward."
"Karen,” said Larson matter-of-factly.
"I'm guessing that when you landed on Tangle Beach, the wet ground was like quicksand. You jumped out of the boat to run toward the tall bank or down toward the boulders. But the wet sand sucked off one of your shoes. And you couldn't retrieve it. Pitch dark, wind-driven rain, slippery and sucking sand. A nightmare. So you walked back to Oldport with one shoe or maybe none. Nobody associated your appearance the next day with the boat because nobody knew the boat was grounded on the beach. But now we know. And a careful search of the beach by my deputies and Adams County reserve officers has turned up—what do you know?—a size-eleven blue deck shoe."
Larson said nothing.
Chamberlain tried to maintain an appearance and sound of confidence that he didn't feel. Larson had to break, or they had no case. A good lawyer could explain the attempted flight to Mexico. A good lawyer could explain everything. And during discovery, the D.A. would have to tell the good lawyer that the shoe they'd found had been put in the sand the previous day by Deputy Stan Hennessey on Chamberlain's orders after the sheriff had bought it in an Oldport clothing store and roughed it up himself.
"What I don't understand,” continued Chamberlain, “is how you hid on board that boat. It wasn't big enough."
"I didn't hide,” said Larson. “I joined them as they were preparing to leave."
And right then Chamberlain knew that the bluff had worked. They had him.
"They didn't want me joining them,” continued Larson. “But I didn't care. I wanted Melissa back. It was obvious to everyone that she wasn't gonna stay with Norm."
"So what happened?"
"For a long time everything was fine. Archie behaved civilly. Melissa flirted with us both. But then, after we'd been out for several hours, she said some things to me that she shouldn't have. And then Archie said some things. I went into the galley where Archie kept the pistol and got it. I shot him dead."
"And then Melissa to cover it up,” guessed Chamberlain.
"No. I would never do that."
"Then how did she get shot?"
Larson looked surprised at the question. “For the same reason I shot Archie: I was mad at her. I used to have quite a temper. I used to be impulsive."
Chamberlain told him that he was under arrest for two counts of murder.
"I'm not anymore,” said Larson as Chamberlain was putting on the handcuffs.
"Not what?"
"Impulsive."
Copyright © 2010 David Braly
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Poetry: LEGEND? by Jane Paynter
* * * *
* * * *
Legend says the knurled pine,
matriarch of this Maine cliff,
morphs into a vengeful hag
at the whip of fearsome storms,
snuffs the sturdy lighthouse beam,
beckons with her meteor eyes
and prances, caterwauling lays
that spell ships to rocky death.
She scorns the crews’ wild shrieks for help,
Saves mates and captain for her slaves.
—
Logic ridicules the tale—
squalls can blank the lighthouse glow,
storm winds wail come-hitherly,
lightning jags explain those orbs.
—
Logic wins; yet, storm dawn finds
witch footmarks on the strand.
—
Copyright © 2010 Jane Paynter
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Fiction: TONTINE by Peter Turnbull
This month we present a new story from a series Booklist has recommended to fans of John Harvey and Ian Rankin. Peter Turnbull's cops Hennessey and Yellich take on another case in the city of York. If, when you've finished this one, you crave more of Mr. Turnbull's distinctive style and appealing characters, check out the new novel in the series: Deliver Us From Evil (Severn House, June 2010).
MONDAY
The body first; always the body first. George Hennessey pondered the corpse which in life had been a well-set middle-aged man, round of facial features, silver haired, dressed casually, in gardening clothes as befitting the place of his death, just outside the potting shed in his garden. A flower pot lay broken beside his head as though death had come whilst he was potting a bulb. And when it had come, it had come violently, the matted blood at the side of his head said so, and the spade at his feet was clearly the murder weapon, the blood on the stout steel blade said that as well. Hennessey pondered the wider scene, the blue-and-white police tape about the corpse, the slender figure of Dr. Louise D'Acre kneeling over the corpse, examining the wound; the line of white-shirted police officers walking slowly side by side across the expanse of lawn, which lay behind the house, under a fierce, early September sun. Behind him Sergeant Yellich spoke to a tearful cleaning lady, too far away for him to overhear their conversation. She sat on a bench beside the large bay window of the house, clutching a handkerchief to her nose and eyes, as Yellich, in a lightweight summer jacket, stood a short distance from her, not crowding her, but close enough to enable him to speak to her without raising his voice.
"The blow on the head, I'd say.” Louise D'Acre stood and mopped her brow with her forearm. “I'll have to get him to York City, but I'd say that there had been more than one blow to the head. He would have gone down with the first blow, the others were just to make sure. There's no other obvious cause of death, that I can make out, no defensive wounds, no sign of a struggle. But that's really your department.” D'Acre remained expressionless, totally focused on her work. She was a woman in her forties, short-cropped hair, dark but going grey. She was, in Hennessey's eyes, ageing gracefully. “I'll do the p.m. as soon as,” she continued. “As soon as you can release the body."
"Finished?” Hennessey asked the scene-of-crime officer who stood close by holding a camera with flash attachment.
"All finished, sir."
"Looks like you can have the body now.” Hennessey returned his attention to Dr. D'Acre.
"Good.” D'Acre peeled off her latex gloves. “I'll get back over to York City and await him.” She stooped to pick up her black bag and walked away from th
e crime scene. Hennessey watched her go, admiringly. He then walked away from the corpse to where two constables stood holding a body bag and clearly awaiting instructions. “You can take him away now,” he said to the constables. “Take him to York City Hospital, Department of Pathology."
"Very good, sir."
Hennessey approached Yellich and the cleaning lady.
"Mrs. Outram, sir,” Yellich explained. “It was she who found the body."
"I see.” Hennessey smiled at Yellich. “Thanks. Quite a shock for you, Mrs. Outram."
"Oh . . . a shock. You know, I'm fifty-three years of age and this is the first corpse I've seen. I was hoping to get away with it. Not seeing a corpse, I mean."
"Ah . . . I see. So when did you find the body?"
"When I came to work, as I have just told this young man. I do’ for Mr. Street three days a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays . . . arrive about eleven a.m. to do his lunch and then clean for an hour or two in the afternoon."
"Anybody else in the house?"
"No. Mr. Street never married."
"Not a poor man, though.” Hennessey surveyed the house, late Victorian, he thought, covered in Virginia creeper, at that time of the year glowing a pleasing deep crimson against the brown brick of the house.
"No, he's a rich man. Was a rich man. Business, you see . . . he was a businessman."
"And you found him close to eleven this morning?"
"Nearer twelve. Came in, just started to prepare his lunch, had it ready, just a salad, that's what he likes in the summer. Hadn't seen him so I went looking. Wasn't in the house, so I went looking for him in the garden. He loved his garden, just look at it, not a blade of grass out of place, not a weed to be seen, and he won't employ a gardener. His garden is his pride and joy, he loved it. . . . It was the family he never had; he had a need to care and protect something . . . no family so he cared for his garden. Found him . . . phoned the police."
"Doesn't sound like a man anyone would want to batter to death?"
"Well, he always seemed to be a fair man. He must have been hard-headed, he wouldn't have survived as a businessman without a hard head, but I always found him to be fair and reasonable."
EQMM, September-October 2010 Page 11