Bad Move (11 page)

I stared at him for a moment. "So you're thinking now that it wasn't an accident?"

"Mr. Walker, we've never thought it was an accident. Mr. Spender was a victim of homicide."

"I'd been thinking it was an accident," I said. Okay, maybe I'd been hoping it was an accident. I'd been telling myself it was probably an accident. That he'd tripped, bashed his head on a rock, then rolled over into the water. "You're sure?" I said.

Detective Flint poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue. His cheek bubbled out like he was Kojak eating a Tootsie Pop. "We have some experience with this kind of thing," he said.

"No, I wasn't suggesting you didn't, it's just, this isn't exactly downtown, you know? You don't expect this sort of thing around here."

"Yeah, well, sometimes we're a bit behind, but we do our best to catch up," Detective Flint said with sarcasm. "Mr. Spender was struck on the back of his skull with a blunt object with considerable force. There wasn't even any water in his lungs. He was dead before he fell into the water."

"I see."

"So you didn't see anyone at all."

"No."

"I understand from Officer Greslow that you knew the deceased."

"Not personally. But I knew who he was. That he was a naturalist, environmentalist-type person."

"You know anyone who might want to do Mr. Spender any harm?"

I half-laughed. "Of course not. Like I say, I hardly knew him, and ..." And I thought back to that day when our paths had crossed at the Valley Forest Estates offices, and I'd had to hold Don Greenway back from lunging at him.

"What?"

"It's nothing. I'm sure it's nothing."

"Why don't you let me be the judge of that?"

"Well, I don't want to go around accusing people of murder, I mean, that's pretty serious."

"Yes. It is."

"Well, you must know that he didn't have a very good relationship with the people at Valley Forest Estates. It was in the paper, letters and articles."

"Yes, we were aware of that. Do you know anything about that beyond what's been in the papers?"

I hesitated. Sure, Don Greenway was angry that day. But it's one thing to get a little hot under the collar, and another thing altogether to whack a guy in the head so hard his brains leak out. And not only that, if I sent homicide cops after Greenway, would I ever get my leaky shower fixed?

"One day," I said slowly, waving my hand in the air like it wasn't that big a deal, "when I was over at the Valley Forest Estates offices, I saw Spender and Don Greenway get into quite an argument."

"Greenway."

"He's the head of the company, I think. We bought this house from him. Our street's even named after him."

"What was this argument about?"

I told him. Flint made some notes in his book, flipped the cover over, and slipped it into his jacket.

"Do you think," I said, hesitantly, "that you could not mention that I told you this, if you're talking to Mr. Greenway? He's, uh, supposed to fix some things around the house here, and he might not be so inclined to do it if he knew I was, you know, ratting him out."

Flint's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "Ratting him out," he repeated.

"Yeah. Isn't that what you call it? Or squealed? Is it squealed?"

"Ratting him out is good," said Flint, who showed himself out.

o o o

I might not have my police terminology down pat, but I knew the words to describe how I felt: freaked out.

My friend Jeff might have found a dead guy, but I'd found a dead guy who'd been murdered. Surely this beat a guy who just got his head stuck in a storm drain and drowned. And yet I didn't feel even the slightest bit full of myself. What I felt was scared.

By how long had I missed encountering Samuel Spender's killer? Just because I'd seen him have an argument with Greenway didn't mean that had anything to do with his death. What if Spender had been the victim of some nutbar who would have been just as happy to kill me if I'd come along a little earlier? And what if that nutbar was still roaming around the neighborhood, which, up to now, had always been a crime-free paradise?

I needed someone to talk to about this. I tried Sarah at work.

"Dan. City."

I hung up. I was not talking to that asshole again. I walked to the front window, where Detective Flint was still sitting in the front seat of his cruiser, making some more notes before pulling away from the curb. Across the street, Earl's truck caught my eye. He was home.

He'd want to know about this.

The pickup was backed up to the garage, which was open, and the door from the garage to the laundry room was propped open. Earl was either loading up the truck or taking things into the house. It made no sense to ring the front doorbell, so I entered the garage, mounted the two steps to the laundry room door, and called in, "Earl?"

No answer. Maybe he was lugging plants or something through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had the same basic floor plan; you could go blindfolded into one you'd never been in before and find your way around.

I took half a step into the laundry room, called his name again, and noticed that in the space where I would have expected to find a washer and dryer, there was nothing. How long had Earl lived here? I guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to hang out in laundromats.

A gust of warm air went past me into the garage. The house was hot. Humid, really. "Earl?"

I heard some banging about in the basement. He was making enough noise that he couldn't hear me. I took a few more tentative steps into the house and could see moisture dripping down the insides of the windows. The basement door was only a couple of steps away, and I stood in its frame, feeling the warm humidity drifting up from there.

"Earl?" I shouted over the banging.

And then it stopped, abruptly. There was a moment's silence, then Earl's voice: "Who is it?" There was an edge to his voice.

I walked halfway down, to the landing where the stairs turned. "Earl, it's okay, it's Zack. I just had this detective over to my place, asking about that guy -"

"Don't come down here!"

But by then I'd reached the bottom step and could see that Earl's windows were not fogged as a result of some manufacturing defect.

He was on a short ladder, stripped to the waist, working on a string of lights suspended across the room, dangling a few inches below the unfinished ceiling. There was a network of temporary ductwork that looked like dryer hose, but ten times as thick. I could hear ventilation fans, and the glare from the dozens of light fixtures was nearly blinding. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but when they did I was able to focus on what appeared to be hundreds of long-leafed plants that took up nearly every square inch of floor space. I've never been much of a horticulturalist, but I knew enough to know these were not prize-winning orchids.

I don't know much about guns either, but I recognized what Earl had in his right hand, pointed straight at me.

"Jesus, Zack," Earl said. "You ever heard of fucking knocking? And what's this about a detective?"

Chapter
7

My first instinct, in the hours following the discovery of Spender's body, even without knowing exactly how he'd died, was to give everyone a security lecture. Don't talk to strangers or pick up hitchhikers, make sure you haven't left the keys in the door, make sure you throw the deadbolt, obey your "walk" and "don't walk" signals, don't use the electric hair dryer while you're sitting in the bathtub, wait an hour after eating before swimming, never run with scissors.

But I sensed this was the wrong way to go. It had only been a couple days since the hidden car incident, and now that Sarah and I were speaking to each other again, I didn't want to set things back. My goal was tolerance. I would not let things get to me. I would let things go. Like water off a duck's back. I'd stop telling everyone how to behave. I'd mellow out.

I'd learn to chill.

When Paul and Angie got home, I told them what had happened down by the creek. Angie said, "Are you sure the guy was dead? Maybe he was just pretending to be dead to teach you a lesson about safe hiking." Then she ran for her camera and persuaded her brother to come with her so she could take her first pictures of a crime scene. On their way out, Sarah shoved a twenty into her hand and told her to buy her brother and herself some pizza for dinner, and to eat it at the restaurant, not bring it home.

"Oh God," Paul said under his breath to his sister. "They're going to go at it."

After Sarah and I had picked the drywall out of our fettuccine, and had dinner, Paul's worst fears were realized. There's nothing like brushing up against death to reinvigorate the lovemaking process. My disposition was definitely improving.

My resolve to be less of a know-it-all jerk was tested early the next morning, when I found the front door unlocked. Once Angie and Paul had returned from dinner, Paul had gone back out with his friend Hakim, sneaking from one movie to another at the multiplex, buying tickets for a PG show and then slipping into the theater showing an R-rated slasher pic where women with heaving bosoms kept falling down while trying to run away, so he wasn't in until after midnight. When I went down in the morning to get The Metropolitan, the bolt on the door hadn't been turned. And there, sitting within an arm's reach of it, was Sarah's purse. I nearly mentioned it to him at breakfast, but didn't. Next time, I'd just wait until Paul was home and go down and check the door myself.

Paul left for school at the regular time, but Angie hung in, going downstairs to put the finishing touches to a photography assignment. I noticed a hot smell as I walked past her bedroom. She'd left her curling iron on, which was resting atop her dresser, the cord still plugged into the wall. So I unplugged it. Made no mental note to rent a smoke machine to send dark billowing clouds out of her bedroom window, or arrange to have a fire truck parked at the curb for when she came home.

"Let it go," I said aloud as I emerged from her bedroom on my way downstairs to the study to get to work.

From the basement, she called to me. Her voice, coming from behind a door, was muffled. "Dad! Come down for a sec!"

In the brochure, Valley Forest Estates had called it a "wine cellar" or "cold room," a place to keep fresh vegetables or store fine bottles of white and red. The room was no more than five by seven feet in size, and we had turned it into a darkroom.

"Hang on," she said, making sure her film was safe from any invading light, then opened the door to admit me into the blackness. My eyes adjusted to the soft red light, the smell of developing fluid swirling up my nostrils. I was brought in occasionally as a technical adviser, having spent a lot of time in a darkroom when I worked in newspapers, but this time Angie just wanted me to see what she was doing.

"What's the assignment?" I asked.

"Just wait," she said, moving the white paper back and forth in the solution. Gradually, images began to take shape. "I love this part," Angie said. "It's like watching something being born. A lot of the kids, they've got these digital cameras, they do everything on the screen. It's kind of cool, but there's no suspense, you know? This way, half the fun is in the anticipation."

A street sign came into view. "Chancery Park." Then houses.

"It's our neighborhood," I said. "You took some pictures of the street. Isn't that nice."

But as each shot materialized, it became clear that Angie was up to much more than that. The pictures, all black-and-white, had a starkness about them.

"There are no people," I said. "The streets are empty."

"Yeah," said Angie. "I captured them just the way they are. And see how the trees look like twigs, and in this shot, I've lined up the houses so you can see how they're all exactly the same."

"Very effective," I said.

"I'm calling it 'Dying in Suburbia: A Study in Redundancy.' "

"It's good," I said quietly. "It's very good."

Angie was still on the same theme as I drove her to school later, since she'd missed the bus. She said, "How much longer are we going to live out here?"

"Excuse me?"

"How much longer? We've been out here, like, almost two years and when are we going to move back into the city? Would we be able to buy back the house on Crandall? It wouldn't have to be that house, although it would be nice, unless the new owners are, like, a bunch of psycho goths who've ripped out the walls and painted the ceilings black or something."

"Where did you get the idea we were moving back into the city?"

"I just figured, sooner or later, you'd see what a terrible mistake it was to move out here and we'd go back."

"What are you talking about?" I said, glancing over at Angie as I pulled away from a stop sign. "Who said this was a terrible mistake?"

"Well, first of all, the house is falling apart and -"

"The house is not falling apart."

"Mom said last night the ceiling fell right into the pasta."

"The ceiling did not fall. A small chunk of it fell because it was wet because there's a leak in the upstairs shower, which can be fixed, which does not mean the house is falling apart. And the builder has some two-year warranty or something, so don't worry about it."