According to Their Deeds (40 page)

“Okay.” Frank was very pleased. “I got you. That’s real good.” Then his smile deflated. “Except I’ve got bad news for you.”

“What is that?”

“I’ve got about two-thirds of a case against your guy Acevedo on that.”

“Angelo?” Charles was too tired to react.

“DNA for one thing, and that stuff we recovered, too. I’ve got a link between a guy he knew and the attic we found the stuff in.”

“I was afraid you would say that.”

Mr. Kelly was still figuring. “And he’d be in your shop, and he knows the alarm and everything else.”

“Wait,” Norman erupted again. “Where was the fire? Did you have a fire, Charles? What, at your place?”

“But Acevedo isn’t anybody Bastien would be blackmailing,” Mr. Kelly said. “So Acevedo’s working with someone else? I’m getting mixed up.”

“I’m getting mixed up,” Norman said.

“It comes back to the desk,” Charles said. “The man from New York, Edmund Cane. He was the agent for that other victim, the one I want to find. And Mr. Cane called the desk a Honaker.”

“Honaker?” Norman said. “It was a Honaker?”

“Does that make a difference?”

“No. No way that desk was worth a hundred five grand, even if it was a Honaker. But I don’t do furniture, so what do I know.”

“What do you know, Norman?” Charles asked. “John Borchard didn’t know. The only two people who knew that the desk was a Honaker were Edmund Cane and the FBI. I think Mr. Cane must have heard it from his client, and I think Mr. Kelly must have heard it from the same person as well. Norman, I think that was you.”

Norman Highberg tried to make sounds but nothing came, and his face contorted in an indecipherable expression. But finally, he choked out words.

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m not,” Charles said.

“You’re crazy, you both are. What is this? What are you doing here?” Now that the words had broken loose, they came in a torrent. “You’re both wacko! You think I even know what you’re talking about?”

But Frank was already moving on. “Okay, I can handle this. I’ll get Harry Watts in here. I should have called him before. I just figured Highberg’s DNA on the stuff we recovered was old, but it must have been recent.”

“I don’t have DNA!” Norman said.

“But look,” Frank Kelly said, “we need to get hold of Acevedo. Where is he?”

“Back in Alexandria,” Charles said.

“Does he know what you’re doing right now? I mean, does he know we’ll be after him?” He took a slow breath. “Where’s your wife?”

“I’m getting out of here,” Norman said. “This is too crazy.”

Charles rubbed his eyes again, and they were much redder and wearier. “Yes, Norman, go ahead. Leave.”

“What?” Frank Kelly’s head jerked up from his notebook.

“Leave, Norman,” Charles said. “I’m sorry. Just go away.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

Frank Kelly set his jaw. “Yeah. Get lost.”

Norman didn’t move, but then he did quickly, and left them.

“Okay,” Frank said. “Start over.”

Starting over took a great deal of energy. Charles had to wait to gather it.

“You killed Derek, and Patrick White, and John Borchard,” he said.

“Just keep talking.”

“I’m very tired,” Charles said.

“I’ve got a gun right here, and you’re only alive as long as you keep talking.”

“Norman knows you’re here and he heard everything I said.”

“I’ll deal with that when I have to. First, just talk. Start with the desk.”

“All right.” Charles kept his eyes on Mr. Kelly’s face, and not on his hands. “I always knew there were two people who wanted the desk. As I worked out what Derek was doing, I knew who they must be. John Borchard was obvious after I talked with Patrick White. The other person was elusive. I knew who he was; I just didn’t know his name.

“There was always the big question that I never saw an answer to. How did Derek get all these papers? When did he have time to find court records in Kansas and class records in Virginia, and how did he ever get bank records? And all those dozens of other papers? And then I knew who the other person must be. It was his spy, his agent, his burrower. There was one paper I had, a list of dates and amounts and people’s initials. It was his list of his payments to you. A lot of money, but not enough to outbid John Borchard for the desk. When did you know there were papers in the book as well?”

“Just keep talking.”

“It must have been when you talked with John Borchard, the evening that Patrick White was killed; or earlier, because you had Mr. Cane trying to buy the books on Monday.

“One thing I knew about the spy was that he was always showing up somewhere. Once Patrick White was exposed in the newspaper, a mysterious fellow victim approached him. Did you hear the recording that John Borchard had?”

“Just keep talking. Don’t ask questions.”

“I thought about it. If I had supplied Derek with that information about Patrick White, and then I saw the huge drama playing out in public, I would have been worried for myself. What would you do? I think you would have felt at risk. So you became Mr. White’s confidante, so that you could know everything he knew. Probably that was when you knew that there was only one way out of your business with Derek. How did you get into it in the first place?”

“I said no questions.”

“Well, it will come out. I can think of several ways you might cross paths. The Justice Department and the FBI, his collection of antiques and your job hunting them. It looks like he paid you a lot of money. And then, after the auction, you showed up at my shop. You were just following leads. One of them was that I asked Edmund Cane some pointed questions about who he was representing. It was just the next morning that you arrived. Just like with Patrick White, you wanted to be close to know what was happening. Looking back, I remember you following me in that one morning, and standing there as I turned off the alarm.

“I don’t know what you said to John, to get him to come with you to my shop, to recover the papers. Maybe you even told him you were with the FBI and you needed his help? I know that you gained my confidence, Mr. Kelly. I’m sure you could gain everyone else’s.

“I’m rambling, I’m sorry. As I said, I’m very tired. I guess that once you saw that the Patrick White scandal was getting out of hand, you saw the danger of Derek being exposed as the source. And, if Derek would do that to Mr. White, could you trust him yourself? So you ran a quick series of burglaries to camouflage your attack on Derek. Was it a rotten feeling for him, Mr. Kelly, when he saw you? Or did he not see you?”

“Just. Keep. Talking.”

“I’m almost finished. You went through such efforts to hide yourself. All those burglaries, that was really lots of effort, and risky, although you must have a lot of useful skills and you surely know how burglaries are done. But also keeping Patrick White so close that you could kill him if you needed to, and getting John Borchard to the bookstore.

“I also suppose that was you following us to the train station, after Edmund Cane called to tell you we were coming to New York. We had that suitcase of books, so you would have assumed we were packed for the night, and there wouldn’t be anyone in the building. You might really have been successful with making those all look like accidents.

“And now, I don’t know what you were planning next. You claim that you recovered the things stolen from Derek’s house and you’ve tried to involve Angelo, of all people. I think you were setting up the next death, where Angelo would kill me, but die himself somehow. And Norman? That was ridiculous. You recovered those stolen items from your own attic, and there wasn’t any DNA on them. Certainly not any that was months old. That was ridiculous, too.

“But at least it gave me a way to get you here for this conversation. So now I do have some questions, and you need to answer them.”

“I don’t need to do anything.”

“But you’ve been exposed now, Mr. Kelly. It’s over.”

“I don’t think so.” Frank Kelly tapped his fingers on the packing bench beside him. “I don’t think so, because it’s just the two of us sitting here. You could have taken this whole thing to Watts and D.C. Homicide yourself. So why are we just sitting here together?”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“It’s more than that. What papers did you have in that book, anyway?”

“Karen Liu’s checks, John Borchard’s overturned convictions, Patrick White’s law school paper, the list of payments to you, and Galen Jones’s drug connection. And one other.”

“Sounds like the top-sellers, there,” Frank said. “Borchard knew about Bastien’s secret drawer and so did I, so he couldn’t keep those first four papers there. Jones knew about the drawer, too. I think I know what the last one was. You looked through the papers that Borchard got from the desk. What were you looking for?” He waited, but Charles didn’t answer. “You wanted to know what he had on you.”

“I didn’t find anything.”

“You already had it. That one other paper.”

“I was afraid so,” Charles said. “I’d hoped it wasn’t.”

“That’s straight from the files at the orphanage, the FitzRobert place.” Frank Kelly folded his arms. “Let’s say I let you out of here alive. If this goes to trial, all that stuff will come out. Karen Liu is going to sink like a stone. But your main problem is that you’ve got homicidal maniacs in your family tree. Hey, sorry to be blunt, but that’s the clinical name. How’s your Dorothy going to feel when she finds out her mother was crazy, and that her son inherited it right down the line?”

Charles didn’t answer.

“So here’s a deal. We just walk away. You don’t tell anyone about me, and I don’t tell anyone everything I know. Just pretend we never had this conversation.”

“I don’t think I’d feel very safe about that.”

“You can make some arrangements. Write the whole long story and put it in a safe place where it goes to the newspaper if anything ever happens to you. I admit it’s messy but I don’t see any alternative.”

“You would have killed three people and nothing would happen to you?”

“They were not nice people. Right?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does. You could almost say they got what they deserved.”

“And would you get what you deserve? You’ve killed two people in the last two days. What kind of homicidal maniac have you become?”

“Hey, watch it,” Frank said. “Did your man Angelo get what he deserved? Aren’t you all about second chances, Beale? Why didn’t you drop those papers in the police department’s inbox the day you found them? Because you didn’t want Borchard or Liu to get shoved out the same window that poor Patrick did. I’ve been reading you like a book.”

“I think at this point, Karen Liu is ready to face her charges.”

“You should worry more about yourself.”

“It would be very hard on Dorothy to know the truth,” Charles said. “But we’ll get past it.”

“Get past it? I think you’re underestimating what this will do to her. She’s going to realize that your William killed himself because he inherited a defective mind from his mother. Think about something like that long enough and you might go crazy.”

“How did you get that paper?” Charles asked.

“I looked in her file at the orphanage.”

“Then you’ve made a mistake,” Charles said. “We’ve seen her file. Her mother never killed anyone. She and Dorothy’s father were missionaries in China. They died there when she was an infant.”

“This was a separate file. It was marked closed. You never saw it.”

“I know what file you mean. We never did see what was in it. But it wasn’t Dorothy’s. It was William’s. Didn’t you know that we adopted him?”

The telephone in his pocket rang again. He reached for it, but even faster Mr. Kelly had his hand inside his jacket.

“Don’t touch it.”

Charles put his hand down. “My wife is getting very worried. She doesn’t know where I am.”

“Who does?”

“No one.”

Mr. Kelly shook his head. “Then there’s something else going on here. Why would you walk into this room if you knew you were never coming out? You should at least have kept Highberg in here.”

“I wanted him away from danger.”

“Where’s the paper you talked about? The list of money Derek Bastien paid me?”

“I have it with me. I didn’t want it found before I talked to you. You see, it’s part of the reason I didn’t give the papers to the police either. I can’t save you from your punishment, Mr. Kelly, and I wouldn’t. But I was hoping there was something I could do to rescue you. Something.” He sighed. “You’re right. I am all about second chances.”

“Then you’re all about being a complete idiot. You’re going to save other people and you can’t even save yourself?”

“For whatever you’ve done to me,” Charles said, “I forgive you.”

The door opened.

A long gray mustache looked into the room, and Galen Jones’s bright eyes above it.

Frank Kelly suddenly smiled. “Jones? Right? Galen Jones. What do you want?” His eyes stayed on Charles. “We’re just talking antiques.”

Mr. Jones hesitated. “I was meeting Beale. I’m making a chess table for him. It’s ten o’clock, right? Thursday? Highberg said you were up here.” His eyes stayed on Frank Kelly. “Something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Mr. Kelly said. “He’ll be done in a few minutes. You could wait downstairs.”

“Okay.” Mr. Jones stood for a moment more. Then he shook his head. “What’s happening?”

“I said nothing.” The smile was gone. “Get lost.”

“Highberg said you were talking about Bastien’s desk.”

Charles nodded slowly, and his eyes stayed on Galen Jones. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

Mr. Jones visibly tensed, and his eyes went to Frank Kelly’s hand resting on his lap, but tense and not at rest. “What are you—”

“I said get lost!”

“Nobody talks to me that way!”

The hand twitched. “If you don’t—”

Jones stepped forward. “I’ve had enough of you.”

Mr. Kelly’s hand moved, deliberate and threatening. His eyes were full on Galen Jones.

But another hand moved fast. With all his strength Charles pulled at a box on the bench beside him and hurled it as hard as he could. Its whole weight seemed to hang for an endless moment in the space between them. Then it half caught Frank Kelly’s shoulder but didn’t slow or veer, and an awful, heavy blow hit him full in the face, carrying him and his chair backward, still in the same shattering crash, all the way to the floor.