Bad Move

by Linwood Barclay

  The ravine search turned up nothing. No Jesse. No scraps of clothing. No discarded shoe.

  On the fourth day, the story went in the direction everyone feared most.

  A woman about ten houses up from Jesse's, who rented out rooms, had gone looking for some overdue rent from one of her boarders, a man named Devlin Smythe. She hadn't seen him around for a couple of days, not since the news broke about that poor girl down the street. She had wondered if maybe he'd volunteered for the search, and that had made her hold off for a day on demanding the money she was owed. How would that look? she thought. A guy's trying to help find some little girl and you throw him out on the street.

  But she hadn't seen Smythe around, not even at night, and she began to wonder whether he'd skipped out on her for good.

  She went upstairs and banged on the door of his room, but there was no answer. So she used her passkey to go inside.

  It was as she'd feared. There were no shoes or boots by the door, no clothes in his closet. He'd packed up and gone, but not without leaving her a mess. There were dirty dishes in the sink, cereal bowls filled with ashes from his smoking. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. It was going to take a few days to clean up before she could rent to anyone else.

  How bad, she must have wondered, had he left the fridge?

  Sears wrote:

  She had been jammed in with a container of sour cream that had turned green, some wilted celery, and an open can of chicken noodle soup. It was a final resting place of such monstrous indignity that even hardened officers found themselves turning away.

  Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.

  Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together with a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.

  They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.

  He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.

  He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”

  He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.

  Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.

  It was on his right shoulder. Small, police said. Of a melted watch, in the style of Salvador Dali.

  I put the clipping down, went into the kitchen, and ran myself a glass of water from the tap. In the cupboard I found a bottle of Tylenol, shook out two caplets, and downed them. Standing there in the kitchen, where so much horror had transpired only a few days earlier, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't over yet.

  sleep never came to me that night. I kept running things through my mind, bits and pieces of conversation.

  How Earl claimed never to have lived downtown, that he'd come from the East Coast, or the West, I was trying to remember. But there was that night, when I'd blundered into his house and discovered his growing operation, and I'd happened to mention that this sort of thing had never happened when we'd lived in the city, on Crandall.

  Earl had said something along the lines of “You lived on Crandall? Nice area. There was that little fruit market down at the end of the street.”

  The inconsistency hadn't meant anything to me then. But it meant a lot now. Especially knowing that Carrie Shuttleworth used to take her daughter to that fruit market.

  It didn't have to mean anything, I told myself. There had to be at least a few guys in the world with tattoos of melted watches on their shoulders. Dali had pretty much made the melted watch an iconic symbol.

  And the chain-smoking. Millions of people chain-smoked.

  And the business about being skilled at electrical work. And the landscaping. That could all be coincidence, too.

  You wouldn't hang a guy based on evidence this flimsy.

  So why couldn't I sleep? Why did I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach?

  “why don't we do something on the barbecue tonight?” Sarah said. I was walking her out to her car.

  “That sounds good,” I said. It was also good to have my wife speaking to me again, even if it was only about menus.

  “When did you come to bed last night?” she asked.

  “It was late, sometime after midnight.”

  “You working on something new?”

  “Sort of. I was looking through some old clippings I'd kept, on the Jesse Shuttleworth case.”

  Sarah frowned, shook her head sadly. “With all we've been through, I can't even think about something like that right now. Why were you looking at those?”

  Across the street, Earl was throwing some gardening tools in the back of his pickup.

  “I don't know,” I said. “I guess I'm just trying to find some sort of focus.”

  Sarah got in the car, did up her seat belt. She powered down the window. “Why don't you pick up some burgers, stuff like that? For around six? And then, after, we can talk about that other thing you mentioned last night.”

  I nodded. I leaned down, kissed her through the open window, a little peck on her cheek, up close to her eye. She backed out and drove off, but didn't wave.

  Earl did, though. And started walking across the street. Earl never came across the street to initiate a conversation. I was usually the one who drifted over there.

  “Hey, Zack,” he said.

  “Earl,” I said, smiling.

  “I see things are getting back to normal, little bit more every day.” He put a cigarette between his lips, lit up.

  “For sure. Got to go shopping for another car. Insurance company's going to give us what the Civic was worth, but that doesn't amount to much. It was pretty old.”

  Earl stood three feet away from me, gazed up and down the street.

  “So,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  There was a slight breeze, and his smoke blew into my face.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  We watched two cars drive by, then a minivan. “Paul,” Earl said. “You decide to let him get that tattoo?”

  I shook my head. “No. He's too young.”

  Earl nodded. “I think you're right. That's too young. Got to be at least old enough to get drunk. That's how most people get their tattoos.”

  We shared a laugh over that one.

  “Well,” Earl said, “I got work to do.”

  “Same here,” I said.

  I turned back to the house and Earl walked back across the street to his. I glanced back once and saw that he was watching me over his shoulder.

  Shit.

  now i was rethinking everything. Not just whether Earl was, in fact, Devlin Smythe. I'd pretty much made up my mind on that one. Now I was rethinking motives.

  Why had Earl agreed to help me that night?

  A man with a marijuana-growing operation in his basement had a lot to lose by getting mixed up in somebody else's business, especially if that business was likely to involve the police.

  Why hadn't he turned down my request for help? Or at the very least, just given me his gun to use? Why come along?

  I'd thought it was because, deep down, Earl had some sense of honor. I hadn't turned him in, and he owed me one. But now I had a feeling there was more to it than that. That maybe Earl had acted out of self-interest. That helping me out of a jam that night had provided him some sort of an opportunity. And it seemed to me that he had made this decision around the time that Trixie and I told him about the murder of Stefanie Knight, and the roll of film that showed her in bed with Roger Carpington.

  Why would Earl care about any of that? Who were these peop
le to him?

  Later, in the afternoon, I put in a call to Dominic Marchi. I was transferred a couple of times before we connected.

  I introduced myself, said I was looking into the Jesse Shuttleworth case with the idea of doing a freelance article on it for The Metropolitan.

  “I know that name,” Marchi said, referring to mine. “You're the guy, was in the house with his wife, the crooked development thing, nearly got killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Used to cover city hall a few years ago, too, am I right?” I admitted it. “I remember names,” he said. “Faces too. Anyway, I'm not your guy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I'm going to put you through to one of the detectives who's still working that case. Lorenzo Penner. Hang on, I'll try to transfer you. But if the line goes dead, call back the main switchboard and ask for extension 3120.”

  He conducted the transfer successfully. The extension rang twice, then picked up. “Penner.”

  I identified myself again, and for a second time admitted that yes, I was the guy in the house with the wife and the killer, et cetera. I told him I had questions about the Shuttleworth murder.

  “File's still open. We're still workin' it. What can I tell you. It's been nearly two years, but we check out every lead we get.”

  “There was something on the radio a couple of weeks ago, that Devlin Smythe had been spotted out near Seattle and Vancouver.”

  “Yeah, we had some tips, but they didn't pan out. We don't have any reason to believe he's out there any more than any other place.”

  “Do you think he could still be in the area?”

  “I suppose it's possible. But he would have had to change his appearance. The sketch we put out was pretty good, we think.”

  “Did you ever do up any other sketches, of how he might have looked if he'd done that? Changed his look? Like if he'd grown a beard, say?”

  Penner said, “Yeah, we did. But we didn't release them to the media because really, even your first sketch is still just that, a sketch. Once you start drawing different variations of what's already an artist's impression of someone's recollection, well, you see the problem.”

  “Sure, I guess. Did you ever do one as if he'd shaved his head, lost the moustache, anything like that?”

  “I think we did.”

  “How would you feel about faxing it to me?”

  Penner hesitated. “Mr. Walker, do you know something about this?”

  “I'm interested,” I said. “I've followed it from the beginning, and I've been thinking about maybe doing a book on the case.”

  “I thought you just wrote science fiction. That's what it said in the paper.”

  “Up to now, yeah.”

  “So, you think maybe this Smythe guy, he was an alien?”

  You see what I mean about respect and sci-fi writers? I didn't take the bait, and said instead, “Will you fax it to me, or not?”

  “Give me your number. Five minutes.” And he hung up.

  I sat in my study, staring at the fax machine for a good half hour before it rang, started doing its little hum.

  And then the sketch started sliding, scalp first, out of the machine. Then it beeped, disconnected. I took the single sheet out of the tray, turned it around, and looked at it.

  Howdy, neighbor.

  i kept coming back to the shovel.

  Walking over to Mindy's Market—it was only about a twenty-minute stroll—to pick up some ground beef and buns and some fixings for salad, I tried to work things out in my head.

  Let's say Roger Carpington had killed Stefanie Knight. Waited for her inside her house. That would explain the broken glass at the back door. Maybe he already knew he was being blackmailed. Or Stefanie had threatened to expose him. To tell his wife. To ruin his political career. She had the ledger by this point. Maybe she was going to rip the lid off the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. He takes her into the garage, grabs the shovel from its hanging place on the wall, strikes her in the head with it. Runs.

  Okay, possible.

  I show up, find Stefanie. See the bloody shovel. And then I hightail it out of there.

  Carpington thinks, Hey. My fingerprints are on that shovel. I have to go back and get it before the police arrive.

  It would make sense. Except by this time, Carpington's at the town council meeting. And according to at least one witness, never left the meeting.

  So someone else grabbed that shovel. It was either (a) someone helping cover Carpington's tracks, or (b) a different killer, coming back to grab the shovel for the same reason Carpington would have: fingerprints.

  If it was someone helping Carpington cover his tracks, to keep him from being connected to the crime, then why did the shovel show up in the trunk of his car?

  But if the killer was someone else, and had that shovel, placing it in Carpington's trunk was a stroke of genius. Its presence there was guaranteed to incriminate.

  But this killer would have to know that Carpington was a logical suspect already. This killer would have to know that a bloody shovel in the trunk would be just one more part of the puzzle.

  “That's $14.56.”

  “Huh?”

  It was the cashier at Mindy's. She'd rung through my groceries and informed me of my total. I handed her a twenty and held my hand out for the change.

  I was in another world.

  On the way back, I thought about the conversation Earl and I had had on the way to the Valley Forest Estates sales office. How he'd wanted to confirm that Carpington had been caught on film with Stefanie, how he'd even suggested that the councilman had a pretty strong motive to kill her.

  How, when we pulled into the parking lot, Earl asked whose car was whose.

  And how, once we'd gotten the jump on Greenway and Carpington, Earl insisted that I stay and keep them covered while he left with their keys and moved their cars behind the office.

  That would have been when he took the shovel from his pickup and put it in the trunk of Carpington's car.

  The only thing I hadn't worked out a theory for was why Earl killed Stefanie Knight. But I had enough.

  I started running, the grocery bag flopping at my side. I jogged all the way up Chancery Park, was struggling to catch my breath as I inserted my key into the door. I dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and grabbed the phone.

  I got the main police switchboard, then keyed in Lorenzo Penner's extension. It rang three times before the voicemail cut in.

  “This is Detective Lorenzo Penner. Leave a message at the tone.”

  “Hi, it's Zack Walker. Call me back as soon as you get this message.” And I left my number.

  I glanced at the clock. After five. Sarah would be home soon. Where were Paul and Angie?

  I'd grabbed the receiver off the phone so quickly when I'd come in that I'd failed to see the flashing message light. There were two, one from Paul and one from Angie.

  Paul said, “I'm at Hakim's, hanging out, should be home by six.”

  Angie said, “I'm working in the school darkroom. I'm getting a lift, see you around five-thirty.”

  Ever since that night, we'd all been very good about letting each other know where we were going to be, and if we were going to be late.

  I unpacked the groceries, tore the wrapper off the ground beef and began forming patties. It looked as though Paul and Angie were going to join us for dinner, although with teenagers, you never knew until the last second who was actually hungry or not.

  So I made half a dozen. Paul, if he had any appetite at all, could be counted on to eat at least two. I rinsed lettuce leaves, cut up some tomatoes, glancing every few seconds at the phone, willing Penner to call.

  “Come on,” I said out loud. “I'm solving your goddamn case for you, asshole.”

  Maybe my message hadn't been detailed enough. Maybe he'd think I wanted him to call back because I had more questions. I should leave another message. Tell him I'd found Devlin Smythe. That Jesse Shuttleworth's ki
ller was living right across the street from us. And that he'd killed someone else, too. A woman out here in Oakwood, whose murder at the moment was being pinned on somebody else.

  But first, I'd fire up the barbecue. While it was heating up, I'd try Penner again, maybe get the switchboard to try to find him.

  The phone rang. I had the receiver off the hook before the end of the first ring. “That was fast,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, hey,” I said.

  “Sorry, expecting someone else?”

  “Actually, yeah. I'm waiting on a call.”

  “Something going on?”

  “Sort of, but let me tell you all about it when you get home. How close are you?”

  “Another fifteen minutes, I'll be there.”

  “Great, I was just about to get the barbecue going.”

  I opened the sliding glass doors, stepped out onto the deck with a plate of patties. I set the plate on the counter to the left of the barbecue, opened the lid, and turned the valve on the gas tank. I heard the familiar hiss of gas escaping from the jets in the bottom of the barbecue.

  I pressed the red ignition button. Click. Nothing.

  I pressed it a second time, faster and harder, figuring this would force a spark. Again, nothing.

  We were going to have to use the old drop-the-lit-match-in-the-bottom trick again, I figured, and—

  “Zack.”

  I whirled around, startled. Earl was standing at the step that led up from the backyard to the deck. He was in a pair of dirt-caked jeans, his Blue Jays sweatshirt, and there was the familiar cigarette tucked between his lips. In his right hand, he held his gun. The same one we'd taken with us the other night.

  “Earl, Jesus, you scared the shit out of me there,” I said. “You shouldn't sneak up on people like that.”

  Earl took a step toward me, and I backed up, away from the barbecue, toward the door into the kitchen. “Earl, what's with the gun?”

  “You know who I am,” he said. “When you saw the tattoo, you knew.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about, Earl.” As I took another step back, Earl moved forward. He was standing almost in front of the barbecue now.