The Second Mouse (2 page)

It turned out that the ex-schoolhouse was owned by Newell Morgan, father of Archie Morgan, the man of the beard and blue eyes, and Michelle’s last companion, who’d died of a heart attack, no doubt brought on by sharing some of her enthusiasms.

Archie had been the local high school custodian and was not in a position to own a house like this. It seemed Newell had made a provisional gift of the place to his son, in exchange for Archie’s functioning as a live-in caretaker who also did carpentry.

Clearly, however, that deal hadn’t extended to Michelle. Joe found an eviction notice, signed by a judge five months earlier, bundled with a sheaf of increasingly angry letters, informing her that she had until two weeks from today to vacate the premises.

That notwithstanding, the one thing they hadn’t found in all their poking about was packed bags, or empty cardboard boxes, or any other indicators that such a move was being contemplated.

A showdown had been brewing.

Three hours after his arrival, Joe settled on the living room couch—having made some effort to clean up the cat deposits, and therefore the air—and flipped open his notepad as Doug sat in an armchair opposite. Compared to some of the settings both men had worked in, this was unrivaled for serenity and comfort. What remained to be done in the short term was some follow-up digging while they awaited the autopsy results. For the ME, in large part, would dictate who got the case.

In the meantime, both men were treating it as a homicide.

“This is a funny one,” Joe began vaguely, referring to the unattended death, and still sensitive to his unofficial presence.

“They all are a little bit,” Doug only half agreed. “I haven’t done one yet that didn’t have a few questions we could never answer.”

Joe didn’t argue the point. “True, but this one will have a bunch of them if all the ME finds is liver failure.”

Matthews pushed out his lips in contemplation. “I could still live with it. What’s bugging you most?”

“How convenient it is. Newell Morgan loses his son and wants the house back; the girlfriend digs her heels in; the girlfriend dies. Pretty handy.”

“She was no health nut,” Doug countered.

Joe stared at the floor for a few moments. “True,” he admitted.

Matthews waited patiently, expecting something more.

“What I would like to know,” Joe finally said, “is what happened to the cat.”

Doug laughed briefly, impressed by the older man’s persistence. “Maybe it was an indoor-outdoor cat. Or maybe it found a way out.”

“How?”

“I noticed a torn screen by the back door, near the garbage cans off the kitchen,” Doug said patiently. “It wasn’t much of a hole, but I’ve seen cats go through less. And we don’t know how big it was. You gotta figure, with its owner dead, it must’ve freaked. That’s why it shit all over the place, and why it’s gone now. You know cats.”

In fact, Joe doubted if many people truly knew cats. He supposed that was part of their appeal. But he’d recognized the tone in Doug’s voice, and let the matter drop.

“You talk to the mother?”

“Yeah.” Doug didn’t sound too happy about it. “Kind of unavoidable, given that she raised the alarm, but I hate breaking the news to family members on the phone. She was pretty good, though. No hysterics.”

“And the friend who discovered her?”

“Linda Rubinstein. She’s an artist. I met her face-to-face, since she stuck around until I got here. Told me she didn’t touch anything, that she could tell Michelle was dead right off.”

“How? Most people can’t.”

“I wondered the same thing. She’s only an artist nowadays. She used to be an ER nurse in the city. Gave it up to find her muse.” He laughed.

“Is that you or her?” Joe asked.

Doug laughed. “The muse thing? Hey, I’ve got some artist in me. You should read my affidavits.”

“Oh, great,” Joe joined him. “I bet that goes over well. How did Rubinstein strike you?”

“Like, did she strangle the woman before calling us?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Matthews shook his head. “You should meet her. You wouldn’t go there. Come to think of it, maybe you should—meet her, that is.”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

The other man shrugged. “Purely in the interests of efficiency. If this case goes to you guys, you’ll do it anyway. She’s just down the road. Save you a step later; won’t cost you anything now. Win-win either way.”

Joe stared at him, the rationale being so unlikely, even from a team player like Matthews. Doug eventually caved in and allowed an embarrassed smile. “All right, so word’s out you and your girlfriend split up. Rubinstein’s single and good-looking. You can shoot me now.”

Joe couldn’t not laugh, although there was little humor in him about the truth of all that. He
had
been linked to a woman named Gail Zigman for almost twenty years, and the relationship had ended, at least romantically, just lately. The laughter was real enough, though, because while he’d been on the receiving end of the bad news—Gail had been the one to call it off—that it was such common knowledge was pure Vermont. It reminded him of what a wizened uncle had once said about the whole place being the only family with its own state flag.

“All right,” he said appeasingly. “I’ll talk to her. You going to handle Newell?”

“Unless you object.”

“This is your gig, Doug. I wouldn’t have minded if you’d asked me to leave as soon as I walked in this morning.”

“Never crossed my mind,” Doug said candidly. “Okay, I’ll take Newell; you take the neighbor. I’ll give you the mom’s contact information, too, in case you want to follow up with her. And that’ll be that till Doc Hillstrom kicks in with her autopsy.”

Both men rose to their feet. Matthews scribbled down what he had on the women and handed it over to Gunther.

“By the way,” Joe asked, pocketing the slip of the paper, “where’s Newell hang his hat?”

“Bennington.”

Chapter 2

N
ancy Martin ducked out of sight as the oncoming car’s headlights swept across the windshield. She even cupped the cigarette in her hand, although she knew that the driver wouldn’t see its red glow as he drove by. He was probably too plastered anyhow, she thought sourly. This time of night, only cops and drunks were traveling Bennington’s streets.

And people like us.

“God almighty,” she murmured, her nerves jumping. “What the hell’m I doing here?” She paused, leaned forward over the steering wheel, craning to see any sign of life in or near the gloomy hulk of a building outside. “And what the hell’s taking them so long?”

Inside, Ellis Robbinson was wondering the same thing. Sweating in total darkness, brushed by cobwebs and smeared with dirt, he was breathing through his mouth, praying he wouldn’t be heard by the watchman standing just on the other side of the utility alcove’s thin panel door.

Footsteps shuffled a few yards down the corridor, and Ellis heard the distinct snap of a cigarette lighter flaring to life. That was something he could do with right now—a cigarette would ease things a lot, if only temporarily. The pseudo door, a sheet of luan hinged in place by layers of duct tape, allowed the seductive aroma of burning tobacco to drift in.

The large, sweat-drenched man jammed tight against Ellis shifted slightly, as if he, too, were responding to the smoke. The sole of one of his shoes scraped on the floor ever so slightly.

Ellis froze, straining for a reaction from beyond their stuffy, unexpected, providential hiding place. God damn Mel. He felt like slamming him in the ribs, just to make the point. Except that even Ellis, so prone to careless impulse, knew that now would not be the time.

Still, Mel was why Ellis was stuck here, scared and pouring sweat, hiding in the middle of the night on the top floor of a National Guard armory. The one place in town, except maybe a bank or the frigging police department, where getting caught would put you in the worst hurt of a lifetime. And for what? Stealing something Mel had hidden years ago as a janitor and which he refused to identify, claiming that it would be one of their best “tricks” ever. Ellis already knew the surprise revelation wouldn’t justify the risk they were taking—any more than it did with any of Mel’s other crazy ideas.

He was such an asshole.

Ellis heard the watchman finally move on, oblivious to their presence.

“That was cool,” Mel whispered.

Slowly, fearful of jarring the slightest object, Ellis raised his hand and wiped his glistening face with an open palm.

Jesus.

Mel eased the panel back on its flimsy hinges and stepped back into the corridor they’d been creeping along when first surprised by the watchman. The place smelled of Sheetrock dust and damp joint compound. The top floor of the armory was being remodeled, allowing, from appearances, for some updated wiring and new computer hookups. Which explained their hiding place: a triangular nook wedged under the staircase to the attic, otherwise jammed with metal racks, a spaghetti-like tangle of cables, and two servers with beady green glow lights that reminded Ellis of malevolent robots. Not that he hadn’t been grateful for their company—the unfinished closet had afforded them their only harbor when the watchman had suddenly come clomping up the stairs.

“Fifteen minutes, tops, before he comes back,” Mel whispered confidently, already moving up the last flight of steps to the attic. He added, “Assuming he doesn’t have someplace to sack out.”

Ellis rolled his eyes. With their luck, that would wind up being right under the window they’d used to break in.

There was a sealed metal door facing the top step. Mel pulled a thin, flexible putty knife from his pocket.

“Give me some light.”

Ellis took out a small flashlight and held it steady on the door’s lock.

“Move it over a little . . . so I can see into the gap.”

Mel positioned the blade in between the jamb and the door and began working to push back the lock’s spring bolt.

Minutes passed. Ellis kept thinking he could hear the watchman returning.

“Hurry up,” he urged.

Mel straightened, momentarily abandoning his work. Ellis’s heart sank at the all-too-familiar reaction.

“What did you say?” Mel asked, looking down at him from the top step.

Ellis closed his eyes briefly. “I’m nervous,” he explained. “Give me a break.”

“You give me a break, numbnuts. And don’t tell me what to do.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t,” Ellis pleaded. “I promise.”

Mel seemed to consider that, weighing its value. “All right,” he finally conceded, and bent back to his task.

But it wasn’t going to work, not with one blade alone.

“You got a knife?” Mel finally asked.

Ellis felt as if he’d been standing there for hours. He fought back his initial one-word reaction, substituting instead “No.”

Mel grunted. “Me neither.”

“Maybe we should leave it. Come back another night,” Ellis suggested.

Mel gave him that look again. “Look around, dipwad. What’s it look like they’re doing here?”

Clearly, he expected an answer.

“Remodeling,” Ellis answered tiredly, unsure if being caught right now might not be preferable to this tiresome song and dance.

“Right. And what did I tell you might happen because of that?”

“They might find what you hid?”

“Very good. You still wanna come back later?”

Ellis almost answered truthfully, especially since he had no idea what they were after, and was beginning to care less.

But he didn’t—as usual. “No.”

“Give me your belt,” Mel said suddenly, looking down at Ellis’s waist.

“What?”

“Your belt buckle. That’ll probably work.”

Suddenly hopeful himself, if for totally different reasons, Ellis went along, tucking the flashlight under his damp chin and struggling to free the belt.

Mel grabbed it and went back to jimmying the lock. In a couple of minutes, there was a click, just as—for real this time—Ellis heard the watchman returning.

Both men eased open the attic door and stepped inside, closing it behind them with a snap that seemed like a hammer blow.

Whereas the closet below had been hot, this place was a cauldron—a holding tank for the summer’s daily heat. Ellis went back to breathing through his mouth, this time to keep from passing out. He barely heard the heavy footsteps pass below without pause.

“Okay,” Mel said eventually. “It’s over here, I think. Shine the light.”

“You think?” Ellis asked, his eyes stinging with sweat.

Mel turned around, grabbed Ellis’s right hand, and twisted it up painfully until Ellis was squinting into the glare of his own flashlight.

“What is it with you?” Mel demanded.

“Nothing. It just sounded like you weren’t too sure.”

“What the hell do you think? It’s been years since I stashed this shit. Nobody missed it then and nobody’s missed it since, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t grown feet, right? I mean, what the fuck do I know?”

Ellis carefully didn’t answer.

“You got a problem?” Mel persisted.

“No, no. It’s cool. It was no big deal. I just . . . I guess the guard threw me off, is all.”

Mel shook his head. “Damn. What a chickenshit.” He took the light from Ellis’s hand and headed off to a far corner of the immense attic, picking his way among piles of cardboard boxes, stacked crates, and assorted dust-covered debris. To give Mel some credit, there were signs of recent activity—holes drilled in the floor next to boxes of coiled computer cable and a scattering of tools.

Ellis wiped his face with his sleeve and followed as best he could, picking his way after the flashlight’s erratic halo, hoping he wouldn’t stumble over something or bang his head against the low, sloping roof trusses that periodically leaped from the gloom like swinging baseball bats. As was so common in the midst of one of Mel’s adventures, Ellis began wondering how and why he got into these messes.

Which was no mystery. It was Nancy. Had been ever since she’d joined them.

Suddenly, the light vanished altogether behind a half wall of junk. Ellis stopped to hear the sounds of something like a heavy tarp being pulled away and Mel softly exclaiming, “I’ll be damned.”

“You got it?” Ellis asked, unable to hide his surprise. Despite his anxiety, he couldn’t deny a growing curiosity about seeing whatever grail it was that had lured them this far.

“No shit, I got it. Right where I left it. These guys’re a joke, for Christ’s sake—fuckin’ military. I can see why they mess up all the time—can’t find their butts with both hands.”

Slowly, gingerly, virtually blind, Ellis eased himself around until he saw the light again, this time dancing across the surface of a dark wooden box shaped like a miniature coffin, complete with rope handles at each end.

“What is it?”

The pale orb of Mel’s face swung toward him, making Ellis instantly rue his own question. “You are such a dope. Can’t you read?”

He flashed the light across the box once more. Ellis saw a bunch of words and numbers stenciled on its surface, “M–16” most noticeable among them.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Guns?”

Mel laughed shortly. “Grab one end.”

Ellis hesitated. “Why not just take ’em out?”

“Gee,” Mel reacted caustically. “What a great idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Hand me the crowbar and we’ll get right to it.”

There was a telling pause as Ellis filled in the blanks—that there was no crowbar for good reason, that had they brought one, the noise of using it might’ve woken up the neighbors, to say nothing of alerting any watchman. Without comment, he took hold of a rope handle, weighed down once again by the proof of his own plodding thought process.

Mel couldn’t not drive it home. “That’s it, Einstein. Do what you do best. Lift.”

Clumsily, adjusting to the unbalanced load, they hung the box between them and began making their way as quietly as possible through the tangle they’d just traveled. For all the disagreements they shared, they worked well together, as they’d been doing for years, allowing for each other’s timing and gait like a couple of old dancers.

At the attic door, Mel, in the lead, paused and listened for the watchman through a two-inch crack.

“Hear anything?” Ellis whispered.

Mel looked over his shoulder. “Yeah—you.”

Ellis sighed. They went back more than ten years, from when he’d met Mel in an Albany drunk tank. There was nothing likeable about the man. He was a dismissive, belittling bully who routinely blamed his errors on others while taking credit for every success, deserved or not. But he had charisma, at least for Ellis, who wasn’t in that holding cell because of a single bender. He was a full-time drunk back then, a down-and-out ex-biker, and Mel’s offer of a place to stay in nearby Bennington had seemed like a hand up.

Which, in a perverse way, it had been. They didn’t share the same trailer anymore, not since Nancy moved in four years ago, but Bennington had become home. Ellis had gotten his drinking under partial control, was renting a cheap place at the Willow Brook housing project, and worked legitimately, if part-time, more often than not.

Normalcy like that hadn’t been his in a long time, and he owed it, initially at least, to Mel—even if his covert feelings for Nancy were the only reason now that he hadn’t moved on.

Because that was the irony of his situation. While Mel had once been his salvation, Ellis knew that staying with him would eventually be his ruin. But he couldn’t leave, because of his love for the other man’s wife.

“Okay,” Mel told him, tugging at the box. “Let’s go.”

The relative coolness outside the attic hit Ellis’s damp body like a blast of air-conditioning. They were in Vermont, after all—not famous for hot weather—and the summer heat struck people here as snow does the average Houstonian.

They worked their way down to the hallway and silently approached the top of the main stairwell, both of them craning to hear the watchman’s by-now-familiar tread.

But there was nothing.

Giving Ellis a sharp nod of the head, Mel started down the stairs. This was the point of no return, as Ellis saw it—if their nemesis appeared now, they’d have nowhere to hide, and not only would they be caught red-handed inside a government facility, but they’d be carrying stolen guns as well. Of all the various awkward positions Mel had put them in over the years, this had to be an award winner.

Outside, Nancy had run out of cigarettes, which meant she would soon run out of courage. She twisted around in the driver’s seat, looking for Mel and Ellis, looking for the cops, looking for a way out that wouldn’t get her in trouble with Mel later.

She hated this part—the waiting. She was always stuck here. The wheel man, Mel called her, as if he were Machine Gun Kelly. Except that most of the time, all he did was eventually saunter up to the car with Ellis in tow, after Nancy had gone almost nuts, with a bag of stolen goods or his pockets full of till money, and tell her to head home, as if he’d just gotten out of the movies.

He didn’t need a wheel man. He needed a cab. And she needed to stop doing this. She was seriously beginning to lose her taste for it.

Mel and Ellis reached the second floor landing, still to tomblike silence. Ellis noticed that even the sounds of the surrounding town were muted. It was too quiet, as if all the world had taken cover, knowing that something catastrophic was looming.

Still in the lead, Mel held up his hand and lowered the box in slow motion, with Ellis following suit. It touched the floor with a tiny bump. Ellis straightened, holding his breath, confused, watching his companion’s back as Mel quietly positioned himself at the corner where the wall met the staircase leading down. Only then did Ellis hear the tired footfall he’d come to dread. As the watchman entered the stairwell below, the echo of his approach reverberated off the walls and ceiling. Ellis expected Mel to order a retreat again and began looking around for a place to hide.

Instead, Mel stayed put, waiting.

That wasn’t good. Mel was no pacifist. He never shied from a brawl. But it had always been his rule to bring no violence to an operation. There was less resentment all around, he said, if all you did was steal the money.