“Go on with the story, Hank.”
I wriggled deeper into the chair, luxuriating in the warm comfort of a seat by the fire. “I spoke with Hatton for the first time that night.”
Fourteen
I fumbled with my ringing cell phone, trying to keep one eye on the traffic while hitting the accept button instead of cancel. “Jensen,” I said.
“Hello, Detective Jensen. My name is Chris Hatton.”
I had been thinking pleasant, expectant thoughts about an evening at home with Jane and Sig, but those thoughts disappeared as soon as I heard his name. “Mr. Hatton?”
“Oh, I don’t stick on formality, Detective. It’s just Chris.” His voice was a pleasant baritone and had a slight trace of an accent that I couldn’t quite place. His accent had a lilting quality to it that sounded out of place in American English. He reminded me of one of those high-priced Scandinavian actors, like Peter Stormare or Stellan Skarsgård.
“Okay. What can I do for you, Chris? You know I’ve been looking for you, right?”
“Indeed, and I hope you don’t mind me calling. I got your name from my on-again, off-again girlfriend. You met her earlier today, so I’ve no doubt you understand the on-again, off-again part.”
“Are you calling for Ms. Tutor?”
“No, not really. I hate these damn cell phones, though. I’d like to meet you somewhere and talk face-to-face.”
I hesitated, pretty sure that I was talking to the person who’d lurked in the darkness of the cave, watching me. Something about the guy was just off.
“I’m not dangerous,” he said. “I have some information about Liz that might be helpful in eliminating her from your investigation.”
“What do you think I’m investigating her for? What kind of information?”
He cleared his throat. “It’s… Well, the nature of the information is private. It’s medical. I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. Couldn’t we meet somewhere? A diner? A coffee bar?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Hatton—”
“Chris, please.”
“—I’m on my way home. We could meet tomorrow at the Trooper substation in Penfield. Would that be convenient?” There was something about the conversation that had my Cop Radar pinging away in the background. It was all too coincidental. The timing of the call seemed…too good to be true.
The line was silent for a moment, and then it crackled as if Hatton was moving the phone around. “If this doesn’t interest you, that’s fine. You’ll find everything out in due course. I thought I’d save you a bit of leg work is all.”
“Tomorrow—”
“No. Tomorrow is out of the question.” There was a note of finality in his voice.
“Okay, okay,” I said, suppressing a sigh. “As luck would have it, I’m about two minutes away from Jay’s Diner in Henrietta. Would that work for you?”
“What a coincidence. I’m just down the road from there.”
I’ll bet it’s a coincidence, I thought.
“I can meet you there in five or ten minutes if it suits.”
Again, I found myself listening to the sing-song lilt of his buried accent and trying to place it. “That’s fine. I’m in plain clothes, but have short-cropped hair—”
“It will be easier for you to recognize me. I’m six foot nine, so I’ll probably be the tallest man there.”
I thought about the street fight, Cop Radar being drowned out by alarm bells.
“I know what you are thinking, Detective. Liz told me about your visit, and I know this is about that inane little argument with those two boys. I have a feeling the version you got from them has been…embellished.”
I could hear him breathing easily on the other end of the call, even as my own breathing accelerated. “There are a few questions I would like to ask you about all that. Given that everything is out in the open, I’d like to suggest, again, that we meet at the Trooper substation. It’s in the same building as the library on Baird Road if you are familiar with the Penfield area.”
The line hummed as Hatton hesitated. When he spoke next, his voice was cold and distant—angry. “That does not suit. I would not be comfortable there, and I would feel I had to bring representation. No, that just continues to escalate this very minor incident further out of proportion.”
“Minor incident? You put those two men in the hospital, Mr. Hatton.”
“It’s Chris, Detective. Just Chris. Let’s just meet at the diner, as planned, where I will be most comfortable.”
I shook my head. “I can assure you that if you did nothing illegal, the substation will be just as comfortable as any diner.”
“I said no,” he snapped. “And I didn’t put anyone in the hospital. Why, I never even got out of the car. We just exchanged philosophies about driving etiquette. Nothing more.” He sighed into the phone’s microphone, sounding like he was in a wind storm. “Now, do you want to hear the tale or should I just drive on?”
I grunted. The way he spoke was so strange, beyond the accent. There was something that felt put-on about his diction, his careful word choice. “If you only knew how often I’ve heard things like that—”
“Yes, yes. I know you hear a constant stream of lies in your profession, but I’m willing to bet you’ve developed a pretty sophisticated instinct for recognizing untruth. Am I lying to you now or not?”
“It doesn’t work over the phone,” I said in clipped tones.
“I understand that, Detective, that’s why I suggested we meet in person,” he said as if speaking to a recalcitrant child. “Meet or not?”
I let the silence spin out between us. I thought about all the promises I’d made to Jane to be careful—extra careful—on this case. The whole conversation was hinky, but Jay’s was a public place, and I was armed, after all. Coupled with my strength and size, I felt confident that if it came to a fight, I’d be in control. It’s one thing to outclass a couple of young men in a street fight, but it’s quite another to face a trained police officer who was a powerlifter on the side.
“Please remember, Henry—”
“Hank,” I said. What the hell, in for a penny and all that.
“Please remember, Hank, I called you. I didn’t have to do this. I am coming forward to help you eliminate us and to explain Liz’s outlandish behavior.”
I pulled into the parking lot of the diner and sighed. “Yeah. I’m there now.”
“Fine, fine,” said Hatton. “Five or ten minutes.”
“That will be—” I stopped talking when I realized he’d hung up on me.
I went inside and sat in the last booth against the wall. I had a clear view of the entrance and the door to the kitchen at the same time.
He was right, he was easy to recognize. When he ducked through the front door, I knew it had to be him. He was wearing black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black T-shirt with what looked like Norse runes splashed playfully across the front in dark gray screen print.
He looked taller than six nine, but then again, he was incredibly thin. He looked like he was in his last few weeks of life, with one foot already in the void. At the same time, his frame was wide and large, what my mother used to call “big-boned.” His bones looked like they were pressed against his skin from the inside without the benefit of fat or tissue to soften the look. His skin had an ashy, unhealthy look, and his eyes were sunken into their orbits.
He scanned the room slowly, and when his eyes met mine, a flicker of recognition danced in his eyes. He walked gracefully across the diner with a small smile playing across his lips. He moved like a predatory cat or wolf, all grace and power. His eyes were fierce and sharp, but at the same time, friendly.
I didn’t stand as he approached. I had the Glock in my lap under the table and had my right hand resting on it.
He slid into the booth with a soft grunt. His eyes danced with humor. “Booths are not a tall person’s friend. But then you probably know that.” He held his hand across the table.
&n
bsp; I stared at his hand for a moment and then shook it. I could shoot with either hand, after all. My hand looked childlike in his grip.
Again, he flashed a disarming smile at me and then lowered his hand to the table.
I put my hand back on top of the Glock, my eyes scanning across his gaunt frame.
“I just finished a round of chemotherapy,” he said. “It can be brutal.”
“I hope it was successful.”
He nodded. “It was, but I didn’t ask you to meet me to lament about my health. I know you’d rather be at home with your family.”
“Yes,” I said. “How long have you known Ms. Tutor?”
He chuckled at the question. “Oh, it feels like eons some days. Other days, it feels like I just met her. She’s… Well, I can’t describe what she is to me. I’m not sure I know.”
“Do we ever?”
Again, he chuckled. “No, I suppose not.” He glanced over his shoulder at the rank of newspaper machines and the headlines screaming about the Bristol Butcher. “This isn’t really about those boys, is it? This is about that mess.”
“I’m here to listen to you explain things, not the other way around.”
He grinned and nodded. “Very well, Hank.” He sucked a deep breath in through his nose, his nostrils flaring like a dog searching for a scent, and then let the breath out in a rush. “Liz has changed over the years. I’m not sure I could still call her sane, whatever that means.” His eyes had wandered around the room as he spoke, but by the last word, they were again locked on mine.
I made that rolling, go-on gesture with the fingers of my left hand.
His eyes roved across my upper body, and he seemed to find my tense posture amusing. “She has these… I don’t know what to call them. Fits, I guess. She grows angry at nothing. She becomes acerbic—almost vicious. Her mood goes foul, and once it does, it stays that way for days or even weeks on end. Nothing I do—nothing anyone does—seems to be able to bring her out of these moods.
“I’m afraid she gets quite paranoid, and she views any visitor as a threat.” He shrugged and looked down at the table. “Many of her friends have tried, but she refuses to be helped.” His voice was mournful, resigned.
“Doctors? Has she been evaluated?”
“Oh, no,” he said, looking aghast. “Doctors are all out to get her, you see. They want to force her to drink ‘root juice’ that will sap her will and make her into their puppet.” The tall man sighed and shook his head, sadness all but dripping from his eyes. “She has told me this many times over the past few years. I am at a loss for what to do, to be honest.”
“There are ways to force the issue,” I said. “We can commit—”
“Hank, you’ve met her. Do you think a forced commitment will be of any use?” he snapped. “At any rate, she’s not dangerous. She is averse to human contact of any kind. The root juice can be applied to the skin, you see.
“The most she ever does is pretend to curse people.”
“But her quality of life would be better if she were treated.”
“Absolutely not. A forced commitment would just make matters worse, especially for me.”
The picture he was painting was clear and believable. I’d seen similar things in the past. But still…
“What did you need to know from her? She was in such a state by the time I arrived… Well, I couldn’t get much sense from her.”
I thought about her screaming that gibberish at us earlier in the day. “Unfortunately, it seemed the more we asked questions, the longer we stayed, the worse she got. By the end, she was jabbering nonsense words at us. The curse.”
He made a noise that sounded like half-grunt and half-laugh. “Yes. She was furiously washing her driveway when I arrived. With a mop and bleach. She kept saying something about getting the dust of your shoes off her property.”
“Like in the book of Matthew,” I said.
His face froze for a moment, and the muscles across his chest and shoulders tensed. Then seemed to relax. “Oh. The Bible, right?”
I nodded.
He laughed and made a strange, pushing down gesture with his hands. “I’m not a religious man.”
I was not a religious man, either, but his reaction struck me as extremely strange. Anyone growing up in the modern world couldn’t help gaining some peripheral knowledge of the major religions. I believed that any American would recognize any of the first few books of the New Testament as something from the Bible without having to think about it. “There is a passage in the book of Matthew that says something about shaking the dust of your shoes off when you leave somewhere that doesn’t welcome you. But to be honest, it should have been my partner and I doing the shaking off of dust. She made it quite clear we were not welcome.”
He made that grunting-laugh sound again. “It does sound like something you and your partner should have done after your visit with Liz. Don’t take it to heart, though, sometimes she treats even me that way. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve been cursed.” He shrugged. “It’s just part of her new reality, I guess.”
He looked around the diner again, like he was looking for someone. “Where’s that partner of yours?” he asked with a wink.
“I didn’t feel the need to call him.”
He glanced at where my right hand lay on top of the pistol as if he could see through the table top. “Evidently.” His voice was sardonic, but he made a placating gesture with his left hand. “You needn’t worry in any case. You are safe with me tonight.”
I tilted my head to the side and looked at him for a drawn-out moment. It was a strange turn of a phrase, and it wasn’t very reassuring. “Back to Ms. Tutor. We were there to ask her if she still owned the 1965 Lincoln Continental that is registered in her name.”
Hatton made a little disparaging noise. “That was dishonest of you, Hank. We both know it is a 1966. Black with white leather interior. I love that car.” He folded his hands together on the table in front of us. “I am here to be honest, Hank. You don’t need to test me like that.”
I shrugged.
Hatton sighed with a little grin dancing on his face as if he realized I was never going to stop testing him until I ruled him out or saw him convicted of murder. “At any rate, she is still the registered owner of the car in question, but in truth, it is my car. I leave it in her name because I want her to have it when I pass.” He looked at me with a frank, earnest expression. “I am not a well man, as I think you can see. I am not well enough to put two young men in the hospital in some street fight. The idea is simply ludicrous.”
“Not even if the men in question called Ms. Tutor a bitch and a whore?”
He shrugged with what seemed like a practiced nonchalance, but there was something in his eye that sent chills down my spine. “You’ve met her, Hank. She can be a royal bitch when she’s in one of her moods. And on that day, she was in one doozy of a mood. She cussed that young man—the driver, I mean—up one side, down the other, and then back and forth a few times. She said some ugly things to him. Racially insensitive things, to be honest, and I was growing as cross with her as the young men were. I’ve been dealing with problems her mouth creates for years now. That argument was just another in a long line of arguments she starts and expects me to finish for her.” He sighed with an exaggerated bitterness that struck me as false.
“Let’s talk about how you ‘finished’ that particular argument.”
He smirked as if to say he knew every trick about interrogations I did. “I must say that my temper got the best of me. I wasn’t feeling at all well, and that tends to make me into a bear. I was angry mostly due to my irritation with Liz, but also in part because of how the boy reacted. He spat on her.” He looked at me in disbelief. “He spat on her.”
“Go on,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Well, we had a few words, it must be said. The boy challenged me to get out and fight with him, which was ridiculous, and not just because I’m so sick; we were waiting at a red
light in the middle of traffic. His brother seemed to get quite cross with him and got out on his side of their little shitbox car and began to yell and curse at the one who had challenged me to brawl.
“Before we knew what was happening, the first one seemed to snap, and he leapt across the hood of his car and started punching his brother. Needless to say, we were completely confounded by such behavior, and I drove away as soon as it was safe to do so.”
“You never so much as touched either man?” I didn’t believe Hatton for a second—if I put the surviving brother and Hatton side by side, it couldn’t be any clearer who was credible and who wasn’t.
“No, I assure you, I did not. As I said, I didn’t even get out of the car, and the boy never came to my side at all. The closest he got was when he spat on Liz.
“Oh, I’ve just remembered something. There was a witness—some old Yankee in a tiny little Chevy from the late seventies or early eighties. I misremember the name of the model, but it doesn’t matter because I’ve got something better—his license plate number. You can find the old Yankee who saw it all, and he will reinforce everything I’ve said tonight.”
“Why would you write down his license plate number?”
“I believed those two boys were going to do just what they did—concoct some story making Liz and me to blame for their actions. Probably some attempt to extort money from us.”
That was bullshit, but it would be easy enough to check out. With a small shrug, I dug my leather-bound pad out of my back pocket. “What’s the number?”
“I wrote it down on an old receipt. I seem to have left it in the Lincoln, but luckily, I drove the car tonight.” He leaned back in the booth, head held away from me at an extreme angle. Again, he tilted his head and squinted his eyes at me. “Say! You could see the car if you came out with me.”
I looked up at the dirty ceiling tiles, considering. He might just want to get me out away from people, but then again, why come here at all if his intention was malignant? Why not just waylay me on the road? He had to know we thought Tutor was suspect, and he had to know that bad behavior on his part during our meeting would only make our suspicions stronger.
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