Bad Move (10 page)

"Did you sign it?"

"Uh, no, no I didn't."

"So you didn't like what Mr. Spender was doing?"

"No no, it wasn't that at all. I just, I don't know, I didn't really care, I guess. Not at the time. Listen, what do you think happened to him?"

She glanced back at the scene. There were more cops now, a couple of them putting up yellow police tape. "It's a bit early."

"He might have tripped," I said. "On a rock or something, maybe he tripped, hit the back of his head, then rolled over into the water."

"Maybe."

"You think someone killed him?" I asked. "Because, you know, I mean, the whole reason we moved out here, well, it was to get away from this kind of thing. I'm sure it was just an accident, because, well -"

Something had caught Officer Greslow's eye. Two people coming through the woods, one holding a camera.

"Fucking press," she said. "How'd they find out about this so fast?"

I said nothing.

o o o

After Officer Greslow finished with her questions, she turned me over to a detective who asked me the same things all over again, plus what I did, how long I'd lived in the neighborhood, why I was down by the creek, what I'd had for breakfast. Really. He let me go after about ninety minutes, but not before reaming me out for walking all around the crime scene and possibly obscuring important footprints around where Samuel Spender had gone into the drink. The reporter and photographer from The Metropolitan left the scene before I did, and I suspected they'd be waiting for me out by the road when I came out, but they weren't.

I called Sarah on my cell. "They're finally done with me."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"So what happened? How'd the guy die?"

"I don't know. He had this big gash in the back of his head, and he was face down in the water, so I don't know, I get the idea the cops think somebody killed him, but it could have been an accident, easily. It's very slippery down there, he could have slipped on a rock or something, then fallen in the water and drowned. Did I ever tell you about, when I was a kid, this guy I almost found dead, but instead my friend found him? It was almost like this. Guy falls down, then drowns."

"Yeah, you told me."

"Anyway, I'm gonna walk home now, start writing something for you. What did you say, about six hundred words or something?"

"Listen," Sarah said, softly. "About that. They don't want it."

"Whaddya mean? I thought it was a great angle. Former reporter, goes on to write science fiction, finds a body. It's a perfect first-person thing. It would be what I believe you call an exclusive."

"I know, and I thought it was a great idea. But we've already heard back from Scott and Folks." The reporter and photog I saw. "And they've phoned in, say it's just some guy, might be murder, might not."

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, it happened in Oakwood. The main desk doesn't care about the suburbs. Nothing ever happens there."

"But something did just happen here."

"Yeah, but the way they see it is, even when something does happen in the suburbs, it's not worth running, because nothing ever happens there."

I stood there at the edge of the woods, where there were seven police cars lined up along the shoulder of the road, and said nothing.

"You there?" Sarah asked.

"Yeah. I'll talk to you when you get home."

o o o

While I would have been up for writing an account of my early afternoon adventure, I wasn't much in the mood for getting back to work on my book. But I sat down at the computer anyway, and there was an e-mail from my editor, Tom Darling. It was, for Tom, a fairly long message. It read, "Whr is it?" Tom was the kind of guy who could edit Moby Dick down to a news brief.

I wasn't overdue with the manuscript. My contract gave me nearly another month, but Tom was used to me handing things in ahead of schedule, so for me to be taking the time I was allowed was probably throwing him into a panic. The sequel to Missionary was already in the fall catalogue, so not to deliver it on time would be something of an embarrassment to Tom and those to whom he answered. I clicked on "Reply" and wrote, "Had computer virus, lost manuscript with only one chapter to go. Will have to start again. Hope this isn't a problem." And then I clicked on "Send."

Tom must have been sitting on his computer when my note arrived, because less than two minutes later I was notified of a new message. It read, "Dnt fck wth me." How a guy with these kinds of typing and people skills ended up as an editor with a name like Darling was beyond me.

I called up a chapter I'd been working on, but couldn't concentrate. I brought up a Star Wars computer game and tried to destroy the Death Star, but even the images of intergalactic explosions couldn't erase Samuel Spender, as I'd last seen him, from my mind.

So I turned away from the computer, looked at a shoebox full of receipts and tax statements, and tried to occupy my mind with financial matters. Soon I'd have to gather all my tax stuff together and try to figure out my annual return. Rather than hire an accountant to figure out all the possible deductions, I usually tried to do it myself, relying on bits and pieces of information gleaned from talking to others who worked from home, like Trixie.

She was a better person to talk to than most. She'd sat at the kitchen table and told me about her business as an accountant. She suggested that maybe it was time to stop getting free advice, much of it unreliable, and go to an expert. I could turn everything in the shoebox over to her, and she would find more deductions than I ever could. I decided right then and there to bring my shoebox over to Trixie. The truth was, I wanted to tell someone about what had happened, about finding my first body. I was, to put it mildly, a bit wired.

I decided to call her first.

I got out the phone book, then couldn't remember her last name. I wasn't sure I'd ever known her last name. For that matter, what was Earl's last name? I'm not good with names, first or last. You send me into a party, introduce me to a dozen people, and I won't retain so much as an initial.

I thought maybe if I looked up accountants in the yellow pages, when I came across Trixie's last name it would jump out at me. There were three full pages of them, and I ran my finger down one column after another, scanning, looking for a name that would make me go "Yes!"

Nothing.

I repeated the exercise, this time looking for an accountant whose office was on our street. No luck there, either.

So maybe Trixie didn't list herself in the yellow pages. Maybe it was a word-of-mouth thing. Or maybe clients were referred to her. The bottom line was, I wasn't going to be able to phone her at the moment.

I stepped out the front door and far enough into the yard to see Trixie's place. Her Acura was in the driveway, plus a new, small Lexus, in black. So she had a client. I didn't want to bother her when she was in the middle of doing somebody else's books. I could wait until they left.

Down the other way, the housecoat lady was out watering her driveway again. I hadn't forgotten her first or last name, because we'd never been formally introduced. I would nod hello as I walked by, and that was good enough for me. I'm not sure what kind of conversation you can expect to have with someone whose only goal in life is owning a driveway clear of microscopic debris.

Nothing doing across the street at Earl's house, although even from here I could see that he was probably adding his name to the list of those who were unhappy with the work done by Valley Forest Estates. His windows remained cloudy, no doubt condensation trapped within the center of the glass. In our old house, we had windows that had been put in about twenty years ago, and peering outside was akin to looking through a pair of dirty eyeglasses. You might expect that sort of thing with an older place, but it was a real surprise to see it in a house as new as Earl's. I looked back at our own home, scanning my eye across the first- and second-story windows, wondering when I could expect the same thing might happen to them.

I couldn't get a very good view, standing as close to the house as I was, so I went out to the curb to take in the whole picture, and while I couldn't see anything wrong with the windows, I noticed for the first time that the framing around the front bay window was slightly crooked, and that the house numbers over the double garage were not centered properly. Honestly.

The front door of Trixie's house opened and a well-dressed man, mid-fifties I'd guess, came out. He was a bit tentative about it, glancing out to the street as he did so. He reached into his pocket for his keys, unlocked the Lexus with his remote, then strode quickly from the front door to the car. As he did so, his eyes happened to lock on mine.

"Hi!" I said. I may have my faults, but I'll always say hello to people.

He looked as though I'd just shot him with a dart. He quickly got into the car, where he was obscured by heavily tinted windows, backed out onto Greenway, then headed down the street, the Lexus making a deep, throaty roar the whole way.

The guy looked rattled, no doubt about it. Maybe Trixie'd told him he was going to have to pay a lot more in taxes than he'd budgeted for. Maybe he'd have to turn in the Lexus.

If he was rattled, maybe Trixie was, too. Maybe this was a bad time. I went back into the house.

I swung by Kenny'S Hobby shop to see whether a model I'd ordered, of the dropship the Marines use to fly from the mother ship to the planet's surface in the movie Aliens, had come in. I could have phoned, but going in person to check gave me an excuse to wander the shop and see whether any other new things had arrived. Kenny catered to a variety of hobbyists - model railroaders, slot car fans, fliers of radio-control airplanes - but his selection of SF-related kits was fairly extensive for a full-range hobby store.

My model hadn't shown up. "Maybe next week," said Kenny, who was leaning over the counter, mini-screwdriver in hand, trying to reattach a wheel to a metal reproduction of an old Ford Thunderbird. "You ever wonder," Kenny asked, not taking his eyes from his work, "why men have nipples?"

I thought about that for a moment. Not about the question itself, but at the sorts of things that preoccupied Kenny. "Not really."

Kenny bit his lip and held his breath, not wanting the tiny screw to slip from its hole. "It just doesn't make any sense at all. They don't do anything, they serve no purpose." Then: "How's the house?"

"Shower's still leaking into the ceiling in the kitchen, drywall's falling into the kitchen. The tub taps drip, the wind whistles sometimes around the sliding glass doors. The caulking around our bedroom window is useless. I don't even bother to take down the ladder. I'm squeezing caulking in every couple of weeks."

"There's another guy, lives in your neighborhood, says he's had trouble with his windows, and wiring problems, you know? Breakers popping, that kind of thing."

"We haven't had that. Yet."

I asked Kenny if he had the latest issue of Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, which he didn't, so I said I'd see him later and got back in the car.

Driving home, my thoughts turned to Angie. Our problems with shoddy house construction were minor compared to hers. Her world was falling apart. Paul had adapted to our move out here much better. He made friends more easily, didn't place a lot of demands on them. As long as they were interested in playing video games and didn't have any moral qualms about sneaking into movies that they weren't supposed to see, that was good enough for him. He'd even struck up that semi-friendship with Earl, developed an interest in gardening and landscaping. Not that things were perfect with Paul. His marks were lousy. School bored him. There was that upcoming appointment with his science teacher. And now, there was this new development about Paul wanting to get a tattoo.

He and I would have to talk.

Maybe, I thought as I drove through the streets of Valley Forest Estates, I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd dragged us out here out of fear and delivered us into mediocrity. And then I shook my head and decided that my initial instincts had been right - the recent corner store robbery downtown reinforced my decision. Just because the suburban architecture was bland didn't mean our lives had to be. We still had our interests and our passions no matter where we lived. We didn't have to give those up just because we no longer lived downtown.

The evidence that we were safer here than downtown was still overwhelming, and I had that thought in mind when our house came into view and I spotted the unmarked police car parked at the curb out front.

o o o

"Did you see anyone else near the creek before you found Mr. Spender's body?"

His name was Flint. Detective Flint. Short, squat, in an ill-fitting suit, wearing a hat like you'd expect to see on Lee Marvin back in the 1960s. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and he'd turned down my offer of coffee. His hands were busy making notes in a small reporter's pad.

"Uh, no, I didn't see anyone," I said.

"Not coming out of the woods as you were going in, headed for the creek?"

"No, I didn't see anyone at all. You think he was down there with someone?"

"Well, there was someone else down there with him at some point," Detective Flint said, pushing his hat back further on his head. "Mr. Spender didn't bash his own head in."