Vanishing Act (24 page)

“G
et it,” Fell ordered. His gun was leveled at me. “Tell whoever is there to leave.”

“Right.” Zsa Zsa was barking again. The knocking had set her off.

As I stood up, I couldn't help thinking that it was too bad whoever was knocking hadn't waited a couple of seconds more.

Fell stood up too. He followed me out of the living room and down the hall.

The knocking got louder.

“I'm coming,” I yelled over Zsa Zsa's yapping. Surprisingly, Fell didn't say anything about it. The banging stopped. “Now what?” I asked Fell when we reached the front door.

Fell kept the Glock trained on my back. “I told you. Tell them to go away.”

I half turned toward him. “You could always go out the kitchen door.”

“Robin,” a voice on the other side of the door yelled. The pounding had started again. It was louder now. “Are you there?”

The noise seemed to unnerve Fell. He licked his lips. His gun hand was trembling. “Just do what I say.”

I raised my hands. “I was only making a suggestion.”

“Robin. Answer the door.”

It was Marks. I recognized his voice.

Fell nodded at me. “Go ahead.”

I swallowed. Suddenly I realized my mouth was dry. “I'm here,” I cried.

“Open the door.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

I looked at Fell.

“Tell him you're not dressed,” he whispered. “Tell him you have no clothes on.”

“I don't have any clothes on,” I repeated.

There was a short pause, then Marks said, “Fell's in there, isn't he?”

I turned back to Fell. “What should I say to him?”

“Tell him ... tell him ...” he repeated. He tugged on his beard with his free hand. “Tell him ... I'll shoot you if he doesn't leave.”

Terrific. “What happened to your other plan? I think I liked it better.”

“Just do it,” Fell shrieked.

“Sorry.” I took a deep breath and put my hand on the door to steady myself. “Marks, he says he's going to shoot me if you don't leave.”

I heard what I thought was a curse, but I couldn't be sure. Then I heard a “how are you?”

“Things were actually going very well up until five minutes ago. ”

“Fell,” Marks said. “Let her go.”

Fell didn't reply. His face was beaded with sweat.

“I know you can hear me.”

Fell blinked several times in rapid succession. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“Walk out the door now, and I'm sure we can arrange something,” Marks told him.

Fell motioned to me with the gun. “We're going back to the living room.”

“Fell,” Marks yelled. “Fell.”

But Fell didn't reply.

This time Marks's curse was audible.

“You really should talk to him,” I told Fell.

“I have nothing to talk to him about.”

“On the contrary.”

Fell cupped his free hand and ran it over his face. “God, what a mess.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Walk,” Fell ordered.

I stopped by the coffee table. Fell was about a foot away from me.

“Sit there,” he said, indicating the sofa.

“You should give yourself up, because in about twenty minutes this place is going to be crawling with cops,” I told him. As I sat down I noticed one of the sofa cushions was tearing along the outer seam.

Fell slowly lowered himself into the armchair across from me. “So what?” His eyes never left me.

I refrained from commenting that it made a big difference to me.

He poured himself a drink with his free hand and finished it in one gulp. “Go to the window and tell me what you see. Go that way,” he said, indicating my route with the barrel of his gun.

I got up and peered through the blinds. “I see Marks's car outside.”

“What else?”

I pushed the slats farther apart and looked down the block. Flashing lights were approaching from down the street. “Another cop car is coming.”

“That was fast,” Fell observed.

“They must have been in the area.”

In a little while the whole street would be swarming with patrol cars. My neighbors weren't going to be getting any sleep tonight, I thought as I let go of the slats. They were definitely going to be pissed.

“Sit back down,” Fell said.

I did. “You mind if I light a cigarette?” I asked.

“Yes. I do. Keep your hands folded in your lap. And be quiet,” he said as I was about to say something. “I need to think.”

Fell and I sat in silence for the next five minutes, listening to the crackle of the police radios and the muted mutterings of people talking outside. It was hard sitting there, watching Fell chew on the ends of his mustache, not knowing what was going on. I felt as if ants were crawling on my skin. I wanted to scratch myself, but every time I moved so much as a finger, Fell told me to cut it out.

“I never meant for this to happen,” he finally said.

“So you said. Several times.”

“Missy showed up at my office. We were supposed to have an appointment the next day, but I had to cancel. She asked me to wait for her, and I said I couldn't, I had to leave in fifteen minutes. I was walking out the door, when she came in with the ... the gun. She was out of breath. From running.” He raised the gun sligntly. “I thought this was a toy, something that she bought at Toys “
” Us. I don't know ... I didn't expect ... She wanted me to go to the dean and tell him what had happened with Jill. She said I had to do that, that it was the right thing to do, that otherwise people wouldn't know why Jill had acted the way she had.” “What did you say?”

“I told her she needed to calm down. I told her she needed to get some counseling. All she did was laugh.” “And then?”

“Then I told her she had to stop this, that I needed to go. That I was going to be late for my appointment. She just laughed some more.” A vein under Fell's eye twitched. “I told her if she didn't leave and stop this nonsense, I was going to call security.”

“But she didn't.”

“No,” Fell whispered. “She didn't.”

The noise from the voices outside my house was growing. Individual words like ... hostage ... situation ... drifted into the house. I watched the lights from the police cars on the street streaming through the blinds, form patterns on the floor.

Fell swallowed. The noise was making him nervous. I asked him what happened next because I wanted to keep him talking.

“I walked toward the phone. She told me to stop. I didn't listen. She was standing close to me, close enough so I could touch her. She told me if I didn't stop, she'd shoot me, and I told her not be ridiculous and turned around, and I'm not sure, I think I accidentally hit the gun. It fell out of her hand and landed on the floor and went off. Melissa just stood there for a minute. And then she fell to the ground. It was like she was a balloon and someone had let the air out of her. I didn't believe it. I still don't. I expected people in the other offices to come running, but no one did. The noise from the construction site must have masked the sound.”

Fell gnawed on the tip of his mustache again. “I didn't know what to do. It was like being in a dream. I just locked up the office and left. I went home and drove my wife to her doctor's appointment and then I did some errands and came back home, walked the dog, and had my dinner. I don't think I believed what had just happened. I think I thought when I unlocked the office door, Melissa wasn't going to be there, you know? That she'd be gone. Only she wasn't.

“It's really kind of funny when you think about it.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “I was terrified I was going to be charged with sexual harassment. Now I'm going to be charged with murder. I must have sat in my office in the dark for two hours, looking out the window and wondering what to do.”

“And then you remembered they'd just poured the concrete.”

“I rolled her up in my rug and carried her out. My heart was hammering. I was positive security was going to come by. Part of me wanted them to.” Fell pushed his glasses up his nose with his free hand. “The funny thing is, I thought I'd feel worse than I did about doing it. The worst part was waiting to be caught. I expected to be,” Fell told me. “I did. Every time I saw her face on one of those posters I thought, today is the day. I waited and waited for the police to show up. I even told myself that if they didn't, I'd turn myself in, but they never came.”

“And you never turned yourself in.”

“Somehow the time never seemed right. I always had papers to grade or the grass to mow. And then an odd thing happened. I began to forget. Forget that she was in the foundation. I erased the idea from my mind. It was as if the whole event had never happened.”

“Until I walked through the door.”

“Exactly.”

I heard the squeal of another car's tires.

“They must have quite a crowd out there by now,” Fell noted.

“You should have gone to the police.”

“Maybe you're right. Maybe I should have, but it's too late now.”

“No, it's not. If you explain what happened, I'm sure you'll be able to work out a deal. Let me call my lawyer. He's very good.”

“It doesn't matter anymore,” Fell cried. “Don't you get it? My life is over. It can never go back to being what it was. Ever. I'm too old to start again. I don't want to.” Tears trickled down his cheeks. “I shouldn't have to.” He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand. “Enough of that.” He sat up straighter. He laughed. “You're going to enjoy this.”

I didn't like the sound of that. “What?”

“Get up.”

“Why?”

He gestured with his gun. “Because I say so.”

My knees were shaking as I stood.

“Come over to the chair.”

I stopped about five feet away.

“Closer.”

I took another step.

“Closer still.”

I took two more steps. By then I was standing directly in front of Fell.

“Over to the left a little.”

I did as told. The side of my thighs brushed against the arm of the chair. I was just thinking that if I were fast enough, I might be able to lean down and grab the gun, when Fell slapped gun into my palm, clamped his hand over mine, and jammed the gun's muzzle against his head.

The whole thing happened so fast, I didn't have time to react.

“I want you to shoot me,” he said.

The gun felt heavy in my hand. For some reason, I noticed Fell's hair was thinning on top.

“This is something you should do for yourself.” I tried to move my hand, but I couldn't. Fell's fingers enclosed mine like a vise.

“You destroyed my life. Now I want you to finish it.” He began to squeeze the trigger.

I made my fingers as stiff as possible, but I wasn't able to resist the pressure from Fell's finger over mine. My finger began to move back anyway. The metal bit into my skin.

“I'm not doing this,” I said through gritted teeth.

“You should have thought of that before,” Fell said as he pressed the trigger back another millimeter.

I managed to move the gun up a fraction of an inch as it went off.

“I
hear you're going to some of your classes these days,” I said to Raymond. The cut on his face seemed to be healing nicely.

“Once in a while,” he allowed. He clasped the box with the iguana close to his chest as if he was afraid his uncle would change his mind and make him give it back.

George, Raymond, and I were standing outside Noah's Ark. It was fifty degrees. That morning, in the cemetery at Melissa Hayes's funeral I'd heard a flock of Canada geese flying by. The first of the season. Spring was truly on it's way.

George looked up as he opened the back door of the Taurus. “I thought you liked ceramics?”

Raymond shrugged. “It's not bad.”

“I hear
you're
not bad.”

The compliment embarrassed Raymond. He ground his right heel into the pavement. “Miss Goldsmith is just being nice,” he mumbled as he studied the cracks in the cement.

“I don't think so. She showed me the bowls you made.” George slid the twenty-gallon aquarium he'd been carrying into the backseat of the Taurus. I handed him the bag with the tree branch, artifical grass, and hot rock. He laid in on the seat next to the aquarium. “I can't believe I'm doing this,” he muttered.

I pointed out that iguanas don't shed.

George grunted and closed the back door of the car. “This animal does not go out of his cage,” he told his nephew when he straightened up.

“I know. Except in my room. And outside. When can I get a collar for it?” Raymond asked me. His excitement made him look younger and softer.

“When he gets bigger.” I pointed to the box. “You'd better get in the car before Iggy gets chilled.”

Even though the box was lined with newspaper, there was no sense taking chances.

George and I watched him get in the Taurus.

“He seems to be doing better,” I said after he closed the door.

“A little,” George said. “Last week he went to a quarter of his classes so I guess that's progress. Of course he hasn't done any homework, but I guess that would be too much to expect.”

“Is that why you're getting him the iguana?”

“I'm getting him the iguana because my sister thinks it's a good idea.”

“And you don't?”

“No. I don't think that doing what you're supposed to do should be grounds for a reward, but I'm not going to argue with her. I'm tired of doing that.” George sighed. In truth, he looked exhausted. The weeks with Raymond had taken their toll. “And anyway, he'll be back home soon.”

“You're not going to keep him?”

“He needs something all right, but that something isn't me. I told you that.”

“Yes, you did.”

George changed the subject. “What about you? How are you doing?”

I thought. “Considering what happened, I'm doing okay. I feel sorry for Fell though.”

George snorted. “The guy could have stopped anywhere along the line. No one made him do what he did. Talk about a loser. The poor bastard couldn't do anything right, not even kill himself.”

“Yeah. Turning yourself into a Gomer has definitely got to suck.”

“If you want to do something right, do it yourself.”

“Is that one of your mother's sayings?”

“Hey, it applies.”

In this case George was right. It did. Miraculously, or not so miraculously, depending on your point of view, the fraction of an inch I'd managed to move my hand had allowed the bullet to graze Fell's frontal cortex before it had exited out the other side of his skull. Basically, he'd managed to give himself a lobotomy.

The
Post Standard
had run a picture of Fell in his hospital bed, bandaged head and all, while he was being charged by the D.A. Calli said she'd heard Fell's lawyer and the D.A.'s staff were chatting and a deal was imminent. Somehow I wasn't surprised. What would be the point of prosecuting someone who kept on asking when he could go to the zoo and see the monkeys?

George leaned up against a parking meter. “They're charging Bryan too, you know. Illegal possession of a firearm.”

“He told me at the funeral.”

George was about to add something when the cranberry-colored Infiniti that was driving up the street stopped in front of his Taurus.

Michael West hopped out and stood by the door.

“Nice color,” I said, alluding to the car.

He folded his arms across his chest. “I liked the old one better myself, but, hey, what can you do?”

“I hope you got a good deal.”

“I did. I even got a discount.”

“What brings you around here?” I asked. “This isn't your area.”

He shrugged. “Things change.” He pointed to my store. “That yours?”

I nodded.

He grinned unpleasantly and gestured up and down the block. “We're thinking of buying this up.”

I did a double take. “Why?”

“It's a good investment opportunity. How long is your lease?”

“Talk to my landlord and ask him.”

“I intend to.” He glanced at me meaningfully in case I hadn't gotten it.

“How's Tommy?” I asked. I'd actually talked to the kid about a week before down at a bar in Armory Square. He'd been so drunk, his friends had had to walk him out the door.

West adjusted the collar on his trench coat. “Tommy's fine. He's transferring to another school next semester.”

“I can understand that. So much has gone on here, he probably has a lot of bad memories.”

“You'll be hearing from me,” West said. He got back in his car and drove off.

In retrospect, maybe that business with the car hadn't been such a good idea after all.

“Another charming man,” I noted.

“It's amazing what you can do with money,” George commented. “How it cushions things for you.”

I thought of Tommy crying on my shoulder at the Blue Tusk and telling me how he hadn't known he'd hit the man until the next day and that he was thinking about going into the priesthood and working with the poor to make atonement.

I thought about his father telling me how he'd worked to build up his business for his son.

“Not always,” I said to George. “Not always.”