Racing the Devil (9 page)

IN THE END, HE DROVE ME
to an Avis Rent-a-Car, where I picked up a midnight blue Taurus two-door sedan. I thanked him for the ride, and he promised to look into the insurance angle. Then I went to the office to check my messages and make a game plan.

My office, Maverick Investigations, was on the third floor of a renovated boarding house a few blocks from Vanderbilt Hospital and University. Two doors led from the outer office, where my desk sat, to the rest of the apartment—shower, kitchenette, and a former bedroom that now housed surveillance equipment, a hodgepodge of indispensible gadgetry, and a walk-in closet for extra clothes and my theatrical kit.

My answering service had been inundated with calls, some from people offering support or condolences, some offering to “do me like you done that woman,” one from a fellow P.I. named Lou Wilder asking me to give him a call back, some from clients wanting to know how or if this was going to affect my work on their cases, two withdrawing their business, and a whole slew of reporters clamoring for interviews.

Ashleigh had the gall to leave a message of her own: “Hi, Jared. If you still want my help, I’m available. I hope there are no hard feelings, but, you know, it was my duty as a—”

With no small degree of satisfaction, I deleted her.

I returned Lou’s call and left a message on his machine. Then I pulled out my calendar to see what was on the schedule. I would have liked to devote the day to solving my own case, but unfortunately, the bills still had to be paid.

That morning, I tracked down a deadbeat dad and took a roll of photos of a client’s husband and his mistress. Nothing graphic; all I had to prove was opportunity and probability, which meant basically a motel room and a goodbye kiss.

After I’d filled out the reports, I dropped by Randall’s house to borrow a gun. He handed me a Colt .45 with rosewood grips and a blued finish. It was a little heavier than the Glock, and I spent a few minutes getting used to the balance.

“Don’t get caught with it,” he said. “I love that gun.”

“Geez, your concern is touching. Don’t worry. I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can.”

He looked hurt. “Keep it as long as you need it.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean—”

“Forget it. I’ll get us a couple of beers.” He stumped away toward the fridge as if his knee weren’t screaming in protest, but I knew better. I was sixteen when a construction accident shattered his patella, and I’d had twenty years to learn the patterns of my brother’s pain.

I also knew better than to bring it up again.

After the beer, I said goodbye to my brother and looked up the Hartwells’ address in the phone book. They lived in Bluefield, a semi-upscale neighborhood off Donelson Pike. Property values there had plummeted when the new airport was built, and after an avalanche of protests about the noise, the Airport Authority paid most of the homeowners for sound-resistant windows and extra layers of insulation. Since it was still early in the afternoon, I decided to drive by and scope out the neighborhood.

I had to learn more about the victim. Even in seemingly random crimes, like Bundy’s or Gacy’s, the victim is chosen for a reason. Maybe she’s a certain physical type. Maybe she risks her own safety to be a Good Samaritan. Maybe it’s just proximity. But something about her attracts the killer, and if you know what it is, you know a lot about the person who did the killing.

Out of all the women the killer might have picked, he had chosen Amy. Why?

In the movies, this is where the hero would take out his trusty crowbar, or his trusty skeleton key, and he’d wait until the Hartwell house was empty, and he’d force his way inside.

In real life, this is called Breaking and Entering, and it’s an offense for which one may spend a goodly portion of his life fighting off the advances of gorillas like LeQuintus.

Yes, I know. Gorillas are quiet, gentle creatures. But they are also very strong and not too bright, and if you make them angry, they can smash a person’s fragile little skull as if it were a pumpkin.

I wasn’t desperate enough to break into the Hartwell house. Not yet.

Instead, I parked down the street and watched, my air conditioner running to combat the heat. Visitors came and went with casserole dishes and cake pans. No one stayed long. At one point, Calvin Hartwell came outside and sat on the porch steps with his two girls, one arm around each. The smaller girl laid her hand on his shoulder, and he absently kissed the top of her head. The older girl sat stiffly, looking off into the distance, her body a hand’s-width away from her father’s.

I thought of the photos Frank had found in my truck and wondered.

Not long after, a silver Cadillac DeVille pulled up, and a woman with strawberry blond hair blown big like a Charlie’s Angel climbed out. Her black sheath dress rode high on her thighs and hugged the taut curves of her hips. She was muscular and lean, and there was something both sensuous and feral in the way she moved.

The girls hung back as the woman gave Hartwell a stiff hug. Then all four of them climbed into the Hartwells’ Buick Park Avenue. Nice car. Nice house, a vine-covered Victorian with arched glass panels on the second floor. The yard was landscaped with perennials, flowering shrubs, and grass so plush and green a dandelion would have been ashamed to grow there. Someone had put a lot of care into that yard.

With the family gone, I turned my attention to the neighbors. They’d probably seen me on TV, but most people have a hard time placing faces in unexpected contexts. It’s why you sometimes fail to recognize a co-worker you meet in the grocery store.

Besides, most people think once you’ve been locked up, you stay locked up until you’ve been convicted or found innocent. They wouldn’t expect me to be out on the streets. For once, I was glad it didn’t work that way.

I started with the house across the street. The name on the mailbox read,
Mitchell
. By the time a woman in her mid-to-late forties answered the door, sweat streamed down my face, and not just from the heat. I held up my Private Investigator’s license with my thumb partially covering the face and said, “Hello, Ma’am. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of . . .”

The door slammed. I knocked again.

“Go away,” said a muffled voice from behind the door. “We’ve already talked to the police.” “Ma’am, if you’d—” “Go away!”

I went. I didn’t know if she recognized me, or if there’d been so many cops and reporters around that she was tired of talking. Or maybe it was because I still looked a little like I’d been mauled by a rhinoceros. I took a chance it was one of the latter two and moved on to the next house.

There was no one home at the next two houses. At the third, an elderly man offered me a glass of iced tea and said he didn’t know the victim well, but that she always spoke politely to him. The little girls were well behaved, and the husband seemed to work long hours. They went to church on Sundays and on Wednesday nights, but he didn’t know where they attended. He wished he could be of more assistance, but he kept to himself and didn’t get involved in gossip. I thanked him for the information and the refreshment and moved on.

The fourth door I knocked on flew open, and a middle-aged woman with a disheveled red mane leveled a Beretta 9mm at my forehead. With the clarity that often accompanies impending death, I noticed that the barrel looked immense, a yawning hole from which the bullet would come hurtling toward my forehead. To a man about to have his brains blown out, it looked more like a cannon than a handgun. I forced myself to look beyond the barrel, where a pair of hazel eyes glared back with a wild-eyed, panicked sheen.

I took a slow, deep breath and tried to sound calm and congenial. “Ma’am, I’m—”

“I know who you are,” she said. “I saw you on the news. What are you doing here?”

“I’m investigating Mrs. Hartwell’s murder.”

“Liar! I could blow you away right now, and not a soul would blame me.” The weapon bobbled slightly. My bowels clenched.

“Ma’am, that may be true. But until the prosecutor proves me guilty, I have the right to try and clear myself.”

Her mouth twisted. “Not here, you don’t. Not in this neighborhood. If you’re not out of here in ten seconds, you won’t have to worry about going back to jail.”

I tried to look nonchalant as I backed slowly down the porch steps. I suppose I could have gone for the Colt, but there was no point getting into a gunfight if I could help it. Besides, a shootout in real life is nothing like a shootout in the movies. The bad guys don’t always miss, and the good guys aren’t bulletproof. Just my luck, the crazy bitch would shoot me, and then where would

I be?

The barrel of the gun followed me. “If you step foot in my yard again,” the woman said through gritted teeth, “I’ll kill you.”

I noted the name on the mailbox as I left—L. Falcone—and sauntered toward my car as if I didn’t give a moment’s thought to her and her 9mm. There was an itch between my shoulder blades where I half expected to feel the impact of a bullet. I’ve known guys who say being shot doesn’t hurt at first. It’s only later that it feels like someone’s set your flesh on fire. Others say it hurts like hell. I don’t know which is right, or what determines which way it happens.

Adrenaline, maybe.

The arrow in my chest had hurt a lot, though. I had no desire to add a bullet wound for comparison.

The house I’d parked in front of was a gray stone cottage with a peaked and gabled roof. What my mother used to call a gingerbread house.

Glancing back, I saw that Ms. Falcone had vanished back into her lair. What the hell, I thought. Live fast, die young. I turned up the walkway to the cottage and knocked on the front door.

At first, I thought I’d struck out for the umpteenth time.

Instead, the door cracked open and an odd, persimmon-shaped face with a wide, thin-lipped mouth, small bump of a nose, and eyes like oversized black currants peered out. An unruly mass of white hair, most of which had been twisted into a loose bun, gave her the look of a finely coifed cotton-top marmoset. The top of her head barely reached my chest.

“Yes?” Her reedy voice hardly carried across the porch.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am,” I said. “I’m . . .” I looked into those wizened eyes and faltered. “I’m investigating the murder of your neighbor, Amy Hartwell.”

“Are you a policeman?”

“No, Ma’am,” I said. Impersonating a policeman is against the law. “I’m a private investigator.” “Let me see your license.”

I showed it to her, not flashing it as if I had something to hide, but not leaving it out for her to linger over.

“McKean.” Her dark eyes glittered with something that might have been fear, but her voice never wavered. “Isn’t that the name of the man the police think killed her?”

Brave. Spunky. I liked her immediately, with her little monkey face and her bright eyes. “Yes, Ma’am,” I said. I am a reasonably good liar, but not to little old women who look like somebody’s great-grandmother. “They think I did it. But I didn’t, and that’s why I’m here. To prove that. I don’t mean anybody any harm, Mrs. . . .”

“Drafon. Birdie Drafon.”

“I don’t mean you any harm, Mrs. Drafon. I just want to find out what happened to Mrs. Hartwell and why whoever did it wanted me to get the blame.”

I didn’t have to try to look sincere. I meant every word. Mrs. Drafon looked at me with those black currant eyes as if she could see clear into my soul and said, “Of course, dear. Come right in.”

I
’
M AFRAID MOST
of the neighbors wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, even if they wanted to.” Mrs. Drafon poured fresh-squeezed lemonade into a pair of frosted glasses. “It’s not like the old days when everybody knew everybody and we all got together after church on Sundays. Back in those days, anybody could have told you almost anything about anyone. Nowadays . . .” She pursed her lips. “A person could be dead a week and nobody would know until the stench reached the street. I hope you like a twist of lemon. Henry always liked a twist of lemon in his drink.”

She gestured toward the picture of her late husband, Henry Drafon, whom I had already learned more about than most folks know about their daddies.

“A lemon twist is fine,” I said.

She set our drinks on coasters on the coffee table and sat primly on the edge of her chair. “I always say, there’s nothing like an ice cold lemonade on a hot day.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Of course, Henry always preferred beer. Still, he did like his lemonade.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” I suppressed a smile. “So, tell me. Did you know Mrs. Hartwell very well?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She lifted her bony shoulders. “I’m not sure anyone knew her very well. But I think you could say we were friends. Yes, you could say that.”

“When you say ‘friends’ . . .”

She wrapped her simian fingers around the frosted glass and sipped at her lemonade. When she had swallowed, she said, “Not the kind of friends who go out shopping or to restaurants together. But the kind of friends who share a cup of coffee and a bit of gossip. She was very unhappy, and I think she needed someone to confide in. You know how it is. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe men don’t need that sort of thing.”