Bad Move zw-1

by Linwood Barclay

  “That’s a good rule,” I pointed out. “Remember that time you got cut?”

  “Don’t overload the circuits, make sure-”

  “Okay, okay, but that’s all good advice. It’s just commonsense safety stuff. I mean, I could have fallen down the stairs, and I could have broken my neck. The fact that I didn’t, that’s a good thing. It’s really the happy ending to this whole mess, if you want to know the truth. Remember how mad you got one day, throwing their backpacks down the stairs? I think the kids learned a valuable lesson today without there having to be an actual tragedy.”

  “I think the kids are thinking the real tragedy is that you survived.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I wandered over to look at the pastries. I felt like a chocolate cake. An entire one, just for me. I looked back over at Sarah, who had moved away from our cart to grab some pizzas in the frozen food aisle.

  And she had left her purse sitting in the cart, unguarded, where anyone could walk off with it. Maybe she was only going to be a second. But then she looked at the frozen juice, and some frozen vegetables, the whole time with her back turned to her purse.

  I returned to the cart and guarded her purse until she was done with the frozen foods.

  “What?” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Your purse,” I said. “Anyone could have walked off with it. You shouldn’t leave the cart unattended like that. You’d lose your cash, credit cards, everything. Wasn’t there something on the radio, some woman had her purse stolen in the grocery store, lost all the pictures she’d just had developed of her sister’s wedding?”

  “We carried the story on the Metro page.”

  “There you go,” I said. “So you already know, and still you leave your purse unguarded.”

  Sarah looked at me long and hard. “You need to learn to pick your moments better,” she said. “And another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  6

  Once I’d thrown the cups into the dishwasher after Trixie’d gone back to her place, I put on my walking shoes. I was going to try something new today. Walk before I got stuck at the computer. Maybe a little exercise first thing, filling my lungs with fresh air, would set me straight for the entire day.

  I set a brisk pace for myself through the areas of the development where construction was in full swing. Some days, I was a six-year-old boy again, transfixed by oversized trucks unloading lumber, workers swinging prebuilt roof trusses into place, the rhythmic hammers as roofers put down shingles. I could stand and watch for an hour or more, until someone started wondering whether I was a building inspector.

  But this day I longed for the restfulness that the creek offered. I wanted to meander along its bank, hear the sound of water trickling by as twigs cracked under my feet. Maybe think of a way to get back into Sarah’s good books. Maybe there was something I could get for her, like a gift certificate from a spa, or I could take her someplace nice for dinner, maybe back into the city to one of our favorite spots around the corner from our house on Crandall. No, maybe not. That would just lead to comments along the lines of “If only we had places like this where we live now.” I’d find something good in our new neighborhood. I’d ask around. Surely people in Oakwood appreciated fine dining, they could recommend something to me other than DQ or Red Lobster. Maybe if-

  I spotted the hiking boots first.

  The heels pointed skyward, the toes dug into the dirt. The soles, mud caked between the treads, faced me as I approached the bank of Willow Creek. It was an odd sight at first, given the angle from which I was strolling. The boots seemed planted into the ground there on their own, and it was only as I got close that I was able to see that they were laced onto an individual, who’d been hard to spot before, what with most of his body being underwater and all.

  I said something out loud, like “Jesus Christ” or “Holy shit.” I’m not sure. When you find your first dead guy, it’s like that cliche about when you’re in a car accident, and everything seems to move in slow motion. Of course, the dead guy wasn’t moving at all. The only things moving were me and Willow Creek as it flowed around the body.

  It was a man, in boots and jeans and a plaid shirt, and even though he was facedown in the shallow water, the crown of his head just barely above the surface, I had an inkling of who he was.

  Part of me thought that maybe, just maybe, he might still be alive, even though he had a very visible gash in the back of his head that offered a view of what I could only assume was brain. So I stepped into the water, grabbed hold of him by his arms, up close to his shoulders, and rolled him over. It wasn’t that hard, the water giving him a bit of a weightless quality, and once I could see his face I knew that the Mississauga salamander had lost its greatest ally.

  I pulled Samuel Spender up onto the bank, resting his body on its back. Lifeless eyes stared skyward. It was clear to me now that he was long gone. There would be no need, I thought, for any heroic mouth-to-mouth efforts at resuscitation.

  I thought of my friend Jeff Conklin, where he might be three decades later. I finally caught up to you, Jeff.

  I reached into my jacket pocket for the cell phone I carry around most everywhere. It wasn’t until then that I realized how upset I was by this discovery; my fingers were shaking too much to punch in the numbers. You might think that punching in 911 wouldn’t be that hard, but when your background is in journalism, and your wife still earns her living at a newspaper, you know that the first thing you do in an emergency is call the city desk. And that’s more than three numbers.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and dialed.

  “City.”

  “Hi. I need to talk to Sarah. It’s an emergency.”

  “Hey, is this Zack?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Dan. Remember we talked that time, when you pretended to hurt yourself on the stairs, and your kids called the ambulance? Sarah told us all about it. That was really something.”

  “Listen, Dan, I need to talk to Sarah. Like I said, it’s an emergency.”

  “She’s just coming out of the M.E.’s office. What is it this time? The house on fire or something? Fire trucks on the way?”

  “Put her on the fucking phone, Dan.”

  “Yeah, sure, fuck you, too. Hang on.”

  Sarah took the phone. “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “What is it? What did you say to Dan, to make him tell you to fuck off? He hardly knows you. If he did, I could understand.”

  “Look, something’s happened. You know that environmentalist guy? The one who wants to save the creek?”

  “No.”

  “Spender. Samuel Spender. Didn’t I tell you about running into him when I went over to the sales office the other day?”

  “Oh yeah, I remember. That’s when you asked me about those other names. Benny something, and Carpington. So?”

  She still had a tone. I said, “That’s right.” I took a breath. At my feet, Spender’s battered head slowly listed to the left. “The thing is, I’m down by the creek, I was doing my walk-”

  “Must be nice.”

  “And I found him here. In the creek. He’s dead.”

  Sarah paused. “What?”

  “He’s dead. I just dragged him out of the water. He’s dead, Sarah.”

  “Is this another one of your tricks? Because if it is, I swear to God, I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to prove this time.”

  “It’s not a trick. I’m standing here, right over him. He’s dead like I’m a jerk.”

  I heard Sarah breathe out. “Whoa. Have you called the cops?”

  “No. I called you first.”

  Sarah didn’t question that.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll send someone out, and a shooter.” Photographer. “Call the cops as soon as you hang up, but you should write us something, freelance, about six hundred words, what it’s like, finding a body,
how you discovered it, how-”

  “I know the drill, Sarah.”

  “Okay.” A pause. “You’re okay, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Call me back when you can.”

  I hit the “end” button and then punched in 911. I told the operator what I’d found, where I was, and promised to stay put until police arrived. Moments later I heard a siren, then car doors opening and closing beyond a ridge of trees. “In here!” I called.

  There were two officers who responded at first. A male-and-female team. The woman, decked out in full uniform and belt and gun, with dark hair tucked up under her official-looking hat, took me aside.

  “I’m Officer Greslow,” she said. “You found the body like that?”

  “No,” I said, and explained.

  “So you moved the body.” I nodded. Officer Greslow didn’t look very happy with me.

  “His face was in the water, I was afraid maybe it had just happened, so I pulled him out. But once I had him out, I could see that Mr. Spender was, you know, dead.”

  “Mr. Spender? You knew this man?”

  “Well, I knew who he was. It’s Samuel Spender. He’s some environmental guy? He had this association, to protect the creek? You know, fighting the developers?” God. I had fallen into Valley Girl up-speak, ending all my sentences with question marks. Somehow, it made me sound guilty of something.

  “And you’re a member of this association?”

  “No. He was going around the neighborhood-I live just up there, over the hill, in one of the finished sections of the development-collecting names on a petition to stop houses from being built down around the creek here.”

  “Did you sign it?”

  “Uh, no, no I didn’t.”

  “So you didn’t like what Mr. Spender was doing?”

  “No no, it wasn’t that at all. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t really care, I guess. Not at the time. Listen, what do you think happened to him?”

  She glanced back at the scene. There were more cops now, a couple of them putting up yellow police tape. “It’s a bit early.”

  “He might have tripped,” I said. “On a rock or something, maybe he tripped, hit the back of his head, then rolled over into the water.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think someone killed him?” I asked. “Because, you know, I mean, the whole reason we moved out here, well, it was to get away from this kind of thing. I’m sure it was just an accident, because, well-”

  Something had caught Officer Greslow’s eye. Two people coming through the woods, one holding a camera.

  “Fucking press,” she said. “How’d they find out about this so fast?”

  I said nothing.

  After Officer Greslow finished with her questions, she turned me over to a detective who asked me the same things all over again, plus what I did, how long I’d lived in the neighborhood, why I was down by the creek, what I’d had for breakfast. Really. He let me go after about ninety minutes, but not before reaming me out for walking all around the crime scene and possibly obscuring important footprints around where Samuel Spender had gone into the drink. The reporter and photographer from The Metropolitan left the scene before I did, and I suspected they’d be waiting for me out by the road when I came out, but they weren’t.

  I called Sarah on my cell. “They’re finally done with me.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what happened? How’d the guy die?”

  “I don’t know. He had this big gash in the back of his head, and he was face down in the water, so I don’t know, I get the idea the cops think somebody killed him, but it could have been an accident, easily. It’s very slippery down there, he could have slipped on a rock or something, then fallen in the water and drowned. Did I ever tell you about, when I was a kid, this guy I almost found dead, but instead my friend found him? It was almost like this. Guy falls down, then drowns.”

  “Yeah, you told me.”

  “Anyway, I’m gonna walk home now, start writing something for you. What did you say, about six hundred words or something?”

  “Listen,” Sarah said, softly. “About that. They don’t want it.”

  “Whaddya mean? I thought it was a great angle. Former reporter, goes on to write science fiction, finds a body. It’s a perfect first-person thing. It would be what I believe you call an exclusive.”

  “I know, and I thought it was a great idea. But we’ve already heard back from Scott and Folks.” The reporter and photog I saw. “And they’ve phoned in, say it’s just some guy, might be murder, might not.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, it happened in Oakwood. The main desk doesn’t care about the suburbs. Nothing ever happens there.”

  “But something did just happen here.”

  “Yeah, but the way they see it is, even when something does happen in the suburbs, it’s not worth running, because nothing ever happens there.”

  I stood there at the edge of the woods, where there were seven police cars lined up along the shoulder of the road, and said nothing.

  “You there?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll talk to you when you get home.”

  While I would have been up for writing an account of my early afternoon adventure, I wasn’t much in the mood for getting back to work on my book. But I sat down at the computer anyway, and there was an e-mail from my editor, Tom Darling. It was, for Tom, a fairly long message. It read, “Whr is it?” Tom was the kind of guy who could edit Moby Dick down to a news brief.

  I wasn’t overdue with the manuscript. My contract gave me nearly another month, but Tom was used to me handing things in ahead of schedule, so for me to be taking the time I was allowed was probably throwing him into a panic. The sequel to Missionary was already in the fall catalogue, so not to deliver it on time would be something of an embarrassment to Tom and those to whom he answered. I clicked on “Reply” and wrote, “Had computer virus, lost manuscript with only one chapter to go. Will have to start again. Hope this isn’t a problem.” And then I clicked on “Send.”

  Tom must have been sitting on his computer when my note arrived, because less than two minutes later I was notified of a new message. It read, “Dnt fck wth me.” How a guy with these kinds of typing and people skills ended up as an editor with a name like Darling was beyond me.

  I called up a chapter I’d been working on, but couldn’t concentrate. I brought up a Star Wars computer game and tried to destroy the Death Star, but even the images of intergalactic explosions couldn’t erase Samuel Spender, as I’d last seen him, from my mind.

  So I turned away from the computer, looked at a shoebox full of receipts and tax statements, and tried to occupy my mind with financial matters. Soon I’d have to gather all my tax stuff together and try to figure out my annual return. Rather than hire an accountant to figure out all the possible deductions, I usually tried to do it myself, relying on bits and pieces of information gleaned from talking to others who worked from home, like Trixie.

  She was a better person to talk to than most. She’d sat at the kitchen table and told me about her business as an accountant. She suggested that maybe it was time to stop getting free advice, much of it unreliable, and go to an expert. I could turn everything in the shoebox over to her, and she would find more deductions than I ever could. I decided right then and there to bring my shoebox over to Trixie. The truth was, I wanted to tell someone about what had happened, about finding my first body. I was, to put it mildly, a bit wired.

  I decided to call her first.

  I got out the phone book, then couldn’t remember her last name. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known her last name. For that matter, what was Earl’s last name? I’m not good with names, first or last. You send me into a party, introduce me to a dozen people, and I won’t retain so much as an initial.

  I thought maybe if I looked up accountants in the yellow pages, when I came across Trixie’s last name it would jump out at me. The
re were three full pages of them, and I ran my finger down one column after another, scanning, looking for a name that would make me go “Yes!”

  Nothing.

  I repeated the exercise, this time looking for an accountant whose office was on our street. No luck there, either.

  So maybe Trixie didn’t list herself in the yellow pages. Maybe it was a word-of-mouth thing. Or maybe clients were referred to her. The bottom line was, I wasn’t going to be able to phone her at the moment.

  I stepped out the front door and far enough into the yard to see Trixie’s place. Her Acura was in the driveway, plus a new, small Lexus, in black. So she had a client. I didn’t want to bother her when she was in the middle of doing somebody else’s books. I could wait until they left.

  Down the other way, the housecoat lady was out watering her driveway again. I hadn’t forgotten her first or last name, because we’d never been formally introduced. I would nod hello as I walked by, and that was good enough for me. I’m not sure what kind of conversation you can expect to have with someone whose only goal in life is owning a driveway clear of microscopic debris.

  Nothing doing across the street at Earl’s house, although even from here I could see that he was probably adding his name to the list of those who were unhappy with the work done by Valley Forest Estates. His windows remained cloudy, no doubt condensation trapped within the center of the glass. In our old house, we had windows that had been put in about twenty years ago, and peering outside was akin to looking through a pair of dirty eyeglasses. You might expect that sort of thing with an older place, but it was a real surprise to see it in a house as new as Earl’s. I looked back at our own home, scanning my eye across the first- and second-story windows, wondering when I could expect the same thing might happen to them.

  I couldn’t get a very good view, standing as close to the house as I was, so I went out to the curb to take in the whole picture, and while I couldn’t see anything wrong with the windows, I noticed for the first time that the framing around the front bay window was slightly crooked, and that the house numbers over the double garage were not centered properly. Honestly.