Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (17 page)

How to Marry a Ghost

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“I guess I am. I babysat for her, if that means getting on well with her. I like her. She’s intriguing and she has a lot on her plate at the moment.”

“How should I play it with her?”

He was looking at me intently like an anxious puppy waiting to be fed.

“What do you mean—‘play it with her’?”

He was shuffling a little, clearly awkward and embarrassed to be consulting me, but determined nonetheless. “I’ve always had a thing for her, since I was a kid. She was my surrogate older sister, she made time to do stuff with me even though she was ten years older. She never treated me like a kid. If she was going out fishing, she’d take me along—surfing, kayaking, she even taught me to shoot. We’d go down to the beach in February and it’d be freezing and there’d be no one else around and we’d slip around on the ice and shoot skeet.”

She even taught me to shoot
. So
he
knew how to shoot—and so did Franny. And Dumpster. And most likely they were all pretty nifty with a bow and arrow.

And it was high time I clamped down on paranoid notions like these when they entered my head.

“What’s skeet?” I asked quickly.

“Like clay pigeons. So anyway, she went away to the city and when she came back recently she was just so stunning and I was all grown up and suddenly everything changed—for me at least.

I’m crazy about her and I need to know if you think I have a chance, what with the age difference and all?”

“Well, how did it go the other night?”

He looked glum. “Fine—only she acted like I was still her kid brother. I was sitting there thinking she was so hot and she was saying stuff like ‘could you watch Eliza for me tomorrow, I have to go to Costco and stock up on canned goods.’ ”

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“Rufus,” I said, “she dressed up for you. She made herself look good. She could have gone out with you in her sweats or her shorts but she made an effort.”

“Oh,” he looked thoughtful, “you think that means she might be interested? So when do I make a move on her? Is the second date too soon?”

“When is the second date?”

“I haven’t called her yet.”

“Well, might that not be the first move? When she’s said she’ll go out with you again then call me and we’ll decide how you should play it. Now are you going to tell Evan Morrison about the bow and arrow?”

“I have to,” he said, “we’re not the only ones who saw it. All these construction workers, they’re going to talk. Word will get around. What we’d better do is make sure Dumpster knows they’ve been found.”

“We don’t know for sure they’re his,” I pointed out. “In fact we’re going to assume they’re not. And we don’t even know if it’s the murder weapon.”

“I’m going to take a closer look.” Rufus ran over to the construction workers’ trucks parked at the side of the clearing and lifted a short ladder from one of them. He climbed down into the hole and bent over the bow. I watched him from above.The bow was about five feet long and shaped in a double curvature. The arrow lying beside it was almost a yard long and made of wood.

“Wow!” said Rufus. “Look at that arrowhead.”

I couldn’t really see it from where I was standing and I wasn’t about to climb down into the hole. “What’s so special about it?”

“Well, it’s titanium for a start,” he said, “but I was thinking about the damage it would have caused. It’s got razor sharp planes and on penetration it would literally slice everything in its

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path—blood vessels, muscles, tendons.When they found Bettina she must have been in a pretty terrible mess.”

Suddenly I felt quite sick. I hadn’t exactly been Bettina’s biggest fan but I couldn’t help being horrified by the thought of her bloody corpse.

“I’m not going to touch anything in case I interfere with any fingerprints they might find,” said Rufus, “but my guess is this bow and arrow were wiped pretty thoroughly and whoever threw them in here was wearing gloves. But I wonder what happened to the quiver.”

“The quiver?”

“You know, where they keep the arrows.” He mimed reaching over his shoulder and plucking an arrow from something on his back. “It’s not here but my guess is there’s going to be something on this bow that’ll match something on a quiver in someone’s possession. DNA or whatever. Do you know where she was pierced? I heard it was in her back.”

“Rufus, stop it!” Dwelling on the arrow slicing through Bettina could unhinge me for the rest of the day. “I’m leaving. I have to be at Shotgun’s to start work this morning. Now, what am I going to tell your father and, more important, my mother about the progress on the house?”

“Tell them the truth. You came over and they were getting ready to pour the concrete.”

“No mention of the bow and arrow?”

Rufus shrugged. “Why complicate matters? I’m going to have a word with the construction workers and ask them to talk to the police but no one else. The fewer people who know about it the better. Think about Dumpster. And we don’t want Scott coming over here and getting involved.”

Without realizing it, I had been literally rooted to the spot with anxiety ever since I had seen the bow and arrow and when

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I moved to go back to my car, I was so stiff I nearly fell over. I drove slowly, my hands shaking slightly on the steering wheel, and I arrived at Mallaby in a state of high nervous tension. So nervous that I forgot all about Rufus’s suggestion that we keep quiet about the bow and arrow and blurted out what I had just seen the minute Shotgun opened the door.

I wasn’t prepared for his reaction.

“Do you have his cell phone number?” he asked without even saying hello. He was casually dressed in jeans and a dusky pink velour sweatshirt and his feet were bare. It was extraordinary, I thought, how his face could appear so gaunt and strained when his body seemed so relaxed.

“Rufus’s?”

“Yes, can you call him?”

I nodded.

“Do it. Now! Stop him telling Detective Morrison.Tell him to bring the bow and arrow here. Here, use my phone.”

But when I reached Rufus it was too late. Apparently Evan Morrison was already on his way to the building site.

“Do you think it was Dumpster’s bow? Were you going to try to shield him?” I asked Shotgun. “Wouldn’t that be obstruction?”

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” he said by way of answer. “Believe me, I want to find out who committed these murders more than anyone but I just wish there was someone else handling the case.

I don’t trust that man, Morrison. It’s ridiculous but I feel I want to make life hard for him. Arresting me was just insanity.”

“What happened exactly? Did they keep you in jail?”

It wasn’t the most professional start to our working relationship and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d told me he didn’t want to talk about it, but he smiled and said, “Don’t look so worried. I’m out now, it’s okay. And of course it wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs being led into a police station in handcuffs worrying

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that at any second a guy from the
Post
is going to jump out and take my picture. I was stripped and it felt like every single orifice of my body was searched. And they gave me one of those orange jumpsuits and led me down all kinds of ramps and corridors and buzzed me through steel doors and all the time I knew some guard I couldn’t see was watching me through a monitor. My lawyer showed up pretty quick to bail me out but they still managed to make me feel like scum.”

“And what about the arraignment?” I said.

“Total farce,” he said, leading me into the kitchen. “The judge more or less said as much. The minute Dumpster’s mother changed her story and then he stood up and gave me a cast-iron alibi, it was all over. And now you tell me the bow and arrow’s been found—assuming it’s the one that killed Bettina. Evan Morrison didn’t even have the murder weapon and I don’t own a bow and arrow yet he couldn’t wait to pin the blame on me. He’d have been closer to the mark if he’d tried to nail me for Sean’s murder given that I didn’t mention my Purdey was one of a matching pair.”

I looked at him. He poured a cup of coffee from the pitcher in the machine and handed it to me.

“You’re dying to know, aren’t you?” he said. “Why I kept quiet about it. Well, I’ll tell you. I gave that second gun to Sean about a month ago. I wanted him to have something of his grandfather’s. I knew he wouldn’t ever use it. Sean was the gentlest of creatures. He wouldn’t harm the proverbial fly but I think he appreciated the gift. It was an antique of sorts, a family heirloom, and Sean was sentimental in that way, much more so than I am.

He put it in a kind of makeshift display case in his room above the stables and he went so far as to invite me over to show me what he’d done and that was a pretty rare gesture on his part.”

“Did you know it was no longer there—after he was killed?”

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“I did. When I took Morrison to his room I saw it was missing.”

“But you chose to say nothing?” I was highly intrigued.

“I thought Sean might have loaned it to Dumpster. They were close in some ways and Dumpster was pretty vocal in his admiration of the gun.”

“So you were covering up for Dumpster there too? Do you really think Dumpster was involved?” I was appalled to hear this.

“I don’t know what to think,” said Shotgun. “I know Dumpster was at Mallaby the night Sean was killed. He was putting up shelves. But I have no idea how long he stayed. He could have been gone by eight o’clock and I wouldn’t have known, the place is so huge. But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t with me in the house the night Bettina was killed. He usually makes his presence known whenever he arrives and he didn’t. So it looks as if he lied at my arraignment and there’s got to be a reason.”

I couldn’t help noticing that both he and Franny were protective of Dumpster. I wanted to tell Shotgun what Franny thought Dumpster was up to, about the dealing and how Dumpster was Detective Morrison’s informant, but I decided that I had said quite enough for one morning and it was high time I steered the conversation in a more professional direction. I was about to bring up his book when he turned to me.

“So are
you
going to run to Detective Morrison and tell him Dumpster was lying?” I shook my head. “No? Well, that’s obstruction too, isn’t it? And it doesn’t really make any difference if I tell them I gave my other Purdey to Sean. They don’t seem to have found any shell casings and without those they can’t identify which gun fired the fatal shot. Morrison can take my Purdey that’s in the mudroom, or the one he found in the woods, or any other twelve-bore shotgun and he can say ‘This is the
kind
of gun

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that killed Sean Marriott,’ but he can’t prove it’s the actual one.

Tell me something.”

I looked up, wary now that he had claimed me as his accomplice in obstruction.

“If I write this book—correction, if
you
write this book—

who do you think will be the market for it? Why would anybody want to read the damn thing?”

I bristled instinctively. He was the one who had said he wanted to do a book in the first place. But then he had just acknowledged that I would be doing the writing and that was more than a lot of my subjects were prepared to admit.

“You’re a world-famous musician—” I began.

“
Was
a world-famous musician,” he jumped in. “I haven’t had a gig in fourteen years.”

“There’s a big nostalgia market.”

“So I’ll only be read by the follicularly-challenged, hard of hearing seniors who were once my fans? There’ll just be a large-print edition?”

“Is that how you see yourself ?” I challenged. Was that why he had a fashionable razor cut? Had he had his once luxuriant locks shorn because he was going bald? Although whatever the reason, it suited his fine-featured face.

“I’m okay about my age,” he said, “the last thing I want to do is go around in the kind of flamboyant gear we all wore forty years ago. I’m almost sixty. If I wore fringed leather jerkins and earrings and studs and long flowing scarves, I’d look grotesque. I saw a member of my old band being interviewed on TV the other night and he had hair down to his shoulders and most of it was dyed fuchsia—yet his face was lined like an old hag’s. He looked ridiculous.”

The time was fast approaching when I would have to come clean with him.When I would have to tell him that the only rea-

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son publishers would be interested in his story would be if he told what really happened the night the groupie was found dead in his room. Suddenly I was apprehensive. What if he refused to talk about it? What if all my time on Long Island had been spent on a wild-goose chase?

“Do you miss it?” I was too chicken to plunge right in and ask him about the groupie as Bettina no doubt had.

“Miss what? The rock ’n’ roll circus I used to be part of ? Not at all.”

“You don’t?” I was amazed.

“Oh, I miss jamming with the boys after hours, but going out on the road, the actual performing? I never really enjoyed all that like the rest of them. I was in it for the music itself, nothing else.

If I could have cut the live performances and just gone into the studio to record every now and then, I’d have been happy. And as for the publicity, the intrusion into my private life, that was something I really abhorred. I”—he searched for the right word—“I
detested
it.”

I could tell he meant it. So how was he going to feel about me getting him to rake up as much detail as possible about his private life for the book?

“But don’t get me wrong,” he went on, “I’ll promote the book. I know it has to be done when you’ve got a product to sell.