It's a Crime (20 page)

CHAPTER
25

“F
ollow me,” whispered Ruby.

She obviously didn’t recognize this as the title of Lemuel’s first book, which was good. But Will had been overtaken by doubt since the cold night they’d gone for ice cream, and her words set his teeth on edge. He covered by affecting an even greater lassitude than usual. “Where now?” he said lazily, his eyes half closed.

He was sprawled on the futon in the sunroom, which normally wasn’t used much. Will didn’t know why—maybe because it was on the third floor, at the end of the hall, away from everything; maybe because of the disconcerting skylight set into the roof; maybe because the thick-leafed plants looked vaguely like man-eaters. But since Pat’s friend Virginia had appeared early in the week, Ruby had tended to drift in here to get away from her.

“Wait till you see this,” said Ruby from the doorway, beckoning.

Will hoped she would produce nothing more than an uninteresting drug or even a faddy and expensive drug substitute, like clove cigarettes. (What a middle schooler in Hart Ridge would have access to, he had no idea.) But he feared she’d taken a new step in her revenge against Culp.

“You won’t believe it,” said Ruby. Outside the library, she carefully placed her finger on her lips, snuck a peek round the door frame, and then pointed with the top couple of joints of this same index finger. Will had to look twice to see what Ruby was trying to call attention to. Virginia was sitting in one of the club chairs reading. She was also poking herself hard in the thigh with the sharp end of a pen. Out in the hall, Ruby began to imitate her, again with the finger. Will turned on his heels.

The dislike between the two of them was kind of gross, really. It was true that Virginia sometimes looked as if she were going to break in half right in front of your eyes, but Will knew she wouldn’t, and it was Virginia’s plainspoken dourness that he respected. You had to make room in this life for scary stuff, which wasn’t going anywhere; it was here to stay.

Oddly Pat could be as spooky around Virginia as her daughter was. Pat handled her old friend more carefully than you would a normal person. So that night, when Virginia rose to do the dishes and Pat did not try to stop her or tiptoe around the subject in any way, he knew that something was up.

“I have something to tell you,” said Pat. She was practically jumping out of her chair, eyes bright, hands clasped with restless excitement. “Virginia and I are going to check out a wind farm tomorrow.” She glanced from Ruby to Will, evidently searching for a corresponding enthusiasm. “You’re going to thank us someday. It’s about time we harnessed the energy of the wind. I was thinking I would set up a fund for the LinkAge victims with the profits! Can you believe it? Me? Who would have thought? It’s all here, in stuff I got off the Internet. I always print everything out. I hate reading a screen. I just can’t get used to it. Do you have your own computer, Will? You should. That’s the only way to really learn how to use one. You have to fool around with it a lot. I have some of the cutest photos of wind farms. I hate to tell you what they remind me of. I may sound a bit raunchy. And such a crop of them!”

Ruby narrowed her eyes. “How long will you be gone?” she asked.

“It’s in upstate New York,” said Pat, “so we’re going to fly up tomorrow night to get an early start the next day. But we’ll be back before you know it.”

Ruby gave Will a significant look and said, “What time tomorrow?”

Will frowned. He knew he should not be as irritated as he was. It was a sign of nerves. He started to yawn, but remembered that his father had told him that yawning was also a sign of nerves. His mouth snapped shut. Then he was reminded of something else his father said: Keeping your hands in your pockets was an indication that you had something to hide. Will immediately took out his hands and crossed them over his chest. He started up the stairs that way. He was not sure that he intended Ruby to follow him, but she did. At the second floor, he started to follow her.

Once the attic door was shut behind them, Ruby prevented him from pulling the chain on the single naked bulb. She did not turn on the flashlight that lay in front of her. Instead they relied on the stripes that an outside floodlight cast through a side vent. They sat cross-legged on raw plywood at the top of the unfinished stairs. There was an odd sour underscent.

“We’ve got to move tomorrow,” she said, “while my mom is away…”

The words, borrowed from some movie, were self-important, irksome.

“…if we want to hit the Culps before they flee the country.”

Worse.

She was sitting amid all the equipment they had accumulated over the last couple of weeks. In addition to the flashlight, there were several printouts of a satellite photo from Google Earth, two pairs of black leather sneakers without a centimeter of white; two pairs of black leather gloves, two black turtlenecks, two pairs of black pants—leggings for Ruby, sweats for Will—and a pair of black pantyhose that Ruby had cut in two. Will had willingly helped with the logistics of the purchases, but the apparently endless supply of cash Ruby got from Pat made their efforts seem unreal. Ruby was a
child;
she was
playing.

“What, exactly, do you want to do with this stuff?” he asked.

“Get Neil Culp,” said Ruby.

“Right,” said Will. “But how?”

“I thought
you
were supposed to know what to do!” She, too, was querulous, as she always was when thwarted. “Can you cut a pane of glass?”

Will frowned, glancing unconsciously at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Although they could both see that it was still closed, they were keeping their voices low. He began to roll up his shirtsleeves.

“Just a small hole,” said Ruby, “so you can reach around and let me in one of the Culps’ windows. Or maybe you can cut a bigger one, so I could crawl in and then I could let you in the cellar door.”

Will was discomfited by the far-fetched scenario. “We might be able to just walk in,” he said.

“Why?”

“Most burglaries are inside jobs, you know.”

Ruby nodded, impressed with this expert knowledge.

“But then what would we do?” said Will reasonably. “You couldn’t get into their computer.”

Ruby shook her head. “Neil Culp and Riley Gibbs didn’t use a computer,” she said. “They passed notes.”

Passed notes? As if they were in math class? “You’re kidding,” said Will.

“My father said that Riley couldn’t even use a computer. Unlike my father, who could do anything. He was a whiz. There’s a plaque in his office that says so.”

Will was barely listening. Until this moment he had been unable to remember exactly what had first excited him about Ruby’s plan. Now, once again, he was startled by an atom of happiness. Here was something that might be worth doing. Many, many things were not worth doing; whole weeks could pass that offered nothing more than the emptiest of possibilities, like his unrealizable hopes about a job. But Culp’s boss couldn’t use a computer! Whatever space he’d been taking up in Will’s brain suddenly dwindled. Will was familiar with this incapacity. Lemuel couldn’t use a computer, either. Will was no haxor or whatever those computer nerds called themselves nowadays, but he didn’t know how Lemuel had survived without him. The man couldn’t handle a download. And look at Pat’s excitement about the simplest search on the Internet.

“Well?” said Ruby.

Will had a brief vision of throwing her to the ground as bullets whistled overhead. “Let’s see one of those printouts,” he said.

Ruby, who had been to the Culps’ estate once with her parents, pointed to one of the satellite photos. The polish on her little round circle of a fingernail was flaking. Along the river was a series of very long, narrow lots which made no sense until you realized the layout maximized access to the riverfront. Each of the houses dangled at the end of a long driveway as straight as a string.

The lots were covered with trees, so Will did not expect to have any trouble approaching the Culp estate. He could park on the road, sneak up the driveway, and then creep around through the thick trees. He had always been comfortable in the woods, and his night vision was good. He might not move as noiselessly as an early Indian—a legendary figure he had his doubts about, anyway; there were too many brittle crackling leaves in the world, too many tiny, snapping branches—but it was easy for him to picture slipping through darkness. He still had Frank Foy’s letter folded in his back pocket. Although he had not showed it to Ruby, it might be useful. In it Foy reminded Pat of the placement of the single alarm at the Culp mansion. Evidently he’d expected
her
to confront Culp.

“It’s outrageous, what they’ve gotten away with,” said Ruby. “We’re going to make them sorry.”

Will wanted to laugh. She sounded awfully self-righteous, considering that her father was in jail and she was planning to break into an estate on the Jersey shore.

CHAPTER
26

L
ate the next afternoon, after Pat and Virginia had left for the airport, Will found it hard to believe that he and Ruby would go through with their plan. For one thing, Ruby had disappeared. But soon she was back downstairs again, dressed in black, her hair braided and wrapped around her head. So Will changed into his new clothes, too. Then he went looking for something to cut out the weird tag at his waist and ended up making himself a sandwich with the pork left over from the night before, scraping off most of Chef Pete’s sauce.

“We’ll take the Mustang,” he said, watching Ruby pick at the skin on her thumb. Pat wouldn’t mind if he drove the Touareg, wouldn’t even have noticed most likely. But Will’s Mustang—okay, Lemuel’s—could feel like a shooting cork.

“I don’t think anybody will be mad at us,” said Ruby. She would not stop picking at her thumb.

“We don’t have to go,” said Will.

“Yes, we do,” she said. “We’ll be heroes. All the victims will thank us.”

“Could be.”

She was picking that skin raw.

“Maybe you should eat something.”

Ruby grabbed a bag of popcorn with rare obedience. “Virginia always makes me feel as if I’m about to commit a crime.”

“Well?” said Will. “Aren’t you?”

Ruby looked shocked for a moment, then giggled. “I guess so,” she said.

The phone rang, and the caller ID spit out a fizzy sound.

Ruby giggled again.

Will looked at the handset and saw a string of consonants, followed by “Corp.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” said the voice, which belonged to…Lemuel! “The flight takes a couple of hours, and we left Miami…When did we leave?” He was talking in a courtly fashion to someone next to him. “So when do we land? Of course I want another. I told you, you won’t be able to keep up with me.”

Will broke in. “Okay, okay,” he said. “When and where?”

By the time he got off, Ruby’s face had closed like a fist.

“I’ve got to pick him up first,” said Will. “Otherwise there’s no telling what he’ll do. We’ll be visiting him in jail.”

“My father is already in jail,” said Ruby, her voice little and hard.

By the time Will parked at the airport, his father had already pulled his luggage off the carousel and sat on it, legs spread wide. He didn’t look too bad, considering, but he was wearing suspenders over a waffled long underwear shirt like some old coot brandishing a shotgun in a southern gothic. “Will, my boy!” he bellowed. “I barely survived! My knees are too big for those seats!” Just the sort of nonsense he always came up with. Knees couldn’t be too big. They were probably the only part of you that couldn’t.

“What made you come back so soon?” Will asked, exasperated. Lemuel wasn’t due till next week.

“It was great for a while,” he said. “But I got bored.”

“You can’t leave a boat at sea because you get bored,” said Will.

“Why not?” said Lemuel, standing up and kicking his suitcase. “Who says?”

“How did you get to land? Swim?”

“Ha!” said Lemuel. “I’m no fish.” As he spoke, he nonchalantly but covertly allowed Will a glimpse of the Swiss army knife cradled in the palm of one hand. He then raised his eyebrows and gave a secret nod, as if to suggest that he’d had it with him on the plane—maybe even on the boat—which was of course impossible, though where he might have picked it up, Will had no idea.

“Come on,” he said. “Ruby’s waiting.”

When Will had spotted his father in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs, he felt as if he’d never actually seen him before. That’s because Lemuel, when he wasn’t in a coma, was always coming at you or ducking away from you or somehow involving you so much that you were more aware of your reactions than his.

Will picked up Lemuel’s suitcase, which was heavy and wheel-less, with a handle on the top. This close, Will could smell the alcohol. Even before Lemuel had ended up at the bottom of the stairs, he hardly ever got noticeably drunk, just sodden and slow. His skin was spongy; his face, red.

He got into the back of the car meekly enough, although he did yell, “My knees! My knees!” Then he asked, “Are we going to take this little lady home with us?”

Lemuel always tried to act the gentleman around kids and females, and Ruby was both. But Will wished he would just shut up.

“No one is taking anyone anywhere,” said Will. Which was the absolute truth, because where
was
he supposed to take his father? Back upstate, as he seemed to expect? Then how was Will going to get to Rumson? He found himself heading west, toward Hart Ridge, as if the other two impulses were canceling each other out.

“Your mother was one class act,” said Lemuel. “So I never knew what she was up to.”

“Where are we going?” hissed Ruby, squirming in her seat.

“I vote for some sustenance,” said Lemuel.

Will pounced. “That’s a great idea. A nice place by the water.”

“We’ll get some seafood. Maybe a beer,” said Lemuel blandly.

“Sure, sure,” said Will. He’d find some restaurant on the shore to park his father in for a while. He looked for an exit. He could take the turnpike south.

“Look. Perth Amboy,” said Lemuel, reading a sign. “I was once in a great bar in Perth Amboy. I stopped for directions and ended up staying the evening. I think they served food, too.”

There were four signs, three arrows. What on earth did they point to? Fortunately the Mustang responded so quickly it could have been alive. Will merged left in the nick of time.

“Yeah, that was an awfully good bar,” said Lemuel. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

He sounded more speculative than manipulative. Will had never seen him descend into any kind of savagery, no matter how drunk he was.
And that was because Lemuel had always already got what he wanted.
Will could not believe it when he caught sight of his father drinking straight from a bottle of rum in the backseat. “What are you doing?” said Will.

“It’s all right. It’s duty free. My choice was that or perfume. Of course if I’d known I was going to be seeing the little lady here…”

Lemuel seemed to have expanded to take up the entire back. He must have been buckled into the middle seat belt—or maybe he wasn’t wearing a belt at all. Will didn’t want to know.

“We’re not going to stop at Perth Amboy,” said Will shortly. “We’re going to Hart Ridge by way of the Jersey shore.”

“By way of the Jersey shore?” His father’s voice boomed. “What kind of way is that? Oh, you are your father’s son.”

Traffic was heavy, worse than any Will had ever seen, and he had a flash of insight into the SUV/rolling living rooms: They might be handy if you were barely moving.

“Before the cruise, I never paid enough attention to rum,” said Lemuel. “I’m glad I got a chance to rectify the situation.”

He was smacking his lips.

“I never could follow that goddamn mystery on the cruise. There were clues and deathbed utterances and oversize plastic weapons lying around everywhere. A lot of short underpaid foreigners were running around, babbling like idiots. Half the time they’d be cleaning your stateroom, and the other half they’d be saying something like ‘The pretty songbird was seen with the captain on the night in question.’ I was supposed to memorize a bunch of nonsense, too. I remember something about a casino and a button that looked like a chip or vice versa. They were always trying to get those poor suckers into the casinos.

“I never could keep any of my lines straight. So they soon gave up and loaded me down with matches. Nice ones, too, considering they were supposed to be clues. I still have some. I’ll give you one. I’d wander around, go from bar to bar, and if anyone spoke to me, I’d hand over a matchbook. Sometimes I’d stand in the middle of the main deck and demand rum at the top of my voice. Those mystery nuts loved it. They’d crowd around, and I’d give them all matches. I never did have to pay for a drink. Other times, I’d waylay a guy at night and force him to take a few extra books. A couple from New England complained that nothing made any sense but I don’t know what they expected. We were all just floating in a floating chamber of vice.”

Ruby was squirming so much she was making the seat squeak.

“I thought you said you got bored,” said Will.

“I was exaggerating,” said Lemuel. “Is that what it’s called? Yeah, exaggerating. I haven’t slept in days. I’ve got to get a little shuteye.”

Then he passed out.