Harry Dolan (21 page)

“Sean Wrentmore wrote a novel,” Laura said.

The parking spaces on either side of them were empty. Loogan had the engine running and had switched on the heat.

He said,
“Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men.”

“That’s right,” said Laura. “Did Tom tell you that?”

“Not Tom. I have my sources.”

“It was somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred fifty thousand words,” she said. “That made it three or four times longer than it should have been. Sean sent it to some agents. They praised the quality of the writing. But they told him what he should have known already—no one was going to publish it. A first novel, by an unknown writer? At that length? It wasn’t going to happen.

“Sean gave Tom a copy of the manuscript. Tom liked it. That was early this year, before we met you. I read it too; it was a good book. But Tom didn’t let it go. I think he was smitten with it. He thought he could find a way to fix it. Do you know what it’s about?”

Loogan gave a vague nod. “Roughly. I’ve heard a summary.”

“Then you have an idea of how complicated it was,” Laura said. “There were too many characters, multiple story lines, long flashbacks. It was a love story. And a mystery novel. And a coming-of-age story.”

She stared out through the windshield, though there was nothing to see but a bare concrete wall. “Tom worked on the manuscript for months. Editing it, reshaping it. By the first week of October, he had pared it down to a hundred thousand words. He was ready to show it to Sean. He hadn’t told Sean what he was doing. I think that was his first mistake. By then, Tom was thinking of the book as his own. In a way, it was; he had been laboring over it.

“He wanted to meet with Sean in person, to explain what he had done. So he arranged for Sean to come to our house. He told him only that he had some ideas for cutting the manuscript, for making it publishable. That was his second mistake.”

She turned toward Loogan. “I wasn’t there when Tom met with Sean. He didn’t tell me about it beforehand. He told me everything after. But there was someone else there: Adrian Tully.”

Loogan had been sitting with his head back, his eyes closed. Now he opened them. “Why would Tully be there?”

“Adrian was a good copy editor,” Laura said. “Working with a manuscript of that size is a huge undertaking. Adrian was Tom’s second pair of eyes. If Tom made a cut in one chapter, it would have repercussions for the others. He needed someone to go over what he’d done, to see that it made sense.

“So he had Adrian there, at the meeting with Sean. By then, Adrian knew the manuscript almost as well as Tom did. He could help convince Sean to go along with the cuts Tom had made. Or so Tom thought. That was his third mistake.

“Because Sean didn’t like the cuts. Tom had dropped whole story lines; he had eliminated half the characters. It was necessary; there was no other way to get the length down to where it had to be. But Sean didn’t like any of it. The very idea that Tom had been editing his manuscript in secret made him furious. And then there was Adrian; he was part of it.”

She paused and Loogan thought he could hear her breathing over the hum of the engine. “It might have gone differently if it had been only Tom,” she said. “Sean admired Tom, respected him. But Adrian was something else. Here was this graduate student telling Sean how his book should be written. Sean was thirty-two. He had dropped out of college, but he had learned some things. He thought of himself as an accomplished writer, and not without reason. Now this kid was critiquing him.

“It set him off. The fight started when Adrian mentioned that some character or other was inessential to the plot. His tone must have been a little too casual. Sean didn’t like it. Adrian had the manuscript on one of those low tables in Tom’s study. Sean got fed up and kicked the table over. Then he was out of his chair, and Adrian was on his feet too. The pages were scattered over the floor. Adrian was annoyed. Sean took a swing at him.

“Tom got between them and broke it up. It was a pretty feeble fight, to hear Tom tell it. Slapping and scratching. Tom got them to calm down, and Adrian started picking up the pages, and it seemed like that was the end of it. It wasn’t, not for Sean. That’s when he went for his gun.

“Sean was the sort of person who liked to go to the shooting range on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t think he ever shot anything other than a paper target. Why he had the gun that day, I can only guess. Tom had invited him over to talk about cutting his manuscript. That was a serious matter, from Sean’s point of view. He was going into what he thought of as a hostile situation. Maybe he intended to take the gun out at just the right moment, a dramatic gesture to remind Tom that his work was not to be trifled with. ‘I’ll shoot us both before I’ll let you ruin my book.’ That sort of thing. Sean was a little odd. I could just about see him doing something like that.

“But I don’t know what he intended. What I know is that after his tussle with Adrian he went for the gun. Tom wasn’t paying attention. He had scooped up some pages from the floor and had gone to his desk to sort them out. But Adrian saw Sean groping around at his ankle and realized what he was doing. The bottle of Scotch was there at hand. It had gone over with the table. Adrian picked it up from the floor. Sean got the gun free of the holster. I don’t know if he meant to shoot or just to show the gun. But Adrian didn’t wait to find out. He hit Sean with the bottle. Struck him on the temple. Hit him again after he went down. Before Tom could react, it was over. Sean was dead.”

 

 

 

Loogan drove south in the cool night, then west, then aimlessly past rows of tranquil houses. Laura rested her head against the passenger window and Loogan thought she might fall asleep, but after a while she sat up and closed the vent in the dash and unbuttoned her coat.

He thumbed a lever to scale back the heat, switched on the radio, and scanned through some channels before switching it off.

“There are things I need to ask you,” he said.

“You sound very solemn, David,” she said. “Is that the way it’s going to be?”

“There are things I need to understand, so I can figure out what to do.”

Loogan steered the car around a corner. The streets were dark with old rain.

“Adrian killed Sean Wrentmore,” he said. “Did he kill Tom too?”

Laura fiddled with the hem of her coat. “He said he didn’t. He swore he had nothing to do with it. I believed him at the time. But now I think he must have done it.”

“Because he shot himself?”

“It makes sense, in retrospect. That detective—Waishkey—she thinks Adrian and Tom might have gotten into an argument. I don’t think Adrian would have killed Tom deliberately, but if it were an accident . . .” She let the thought trail off. “And afterward Adrian would have been troubled. He had a conscience. He was in bad shape the night Sean died. Tom said he sat on the floor with his knees up and stared. Couldn’t speak. Tom had to send him home.”

Loogan knew very well what had happened next. Tom had called him for a favor. Asked him to bring a shovel.

“Do you know where Sean Wrentmore ended up?” Loogan said.

“I know Tom buried the body. I know you helped him.”

“What was the point?” he said. “Why not call the police?”

“Tom didn’t see any sense in ruining Adrian’s life. It was all a mistake. Adrian was defending himself, or thought he was. No one meant for Sean to die.”

“That’s just it. The police could have been persuaded to see it that way. But Tom covered it up. And even after Tom died, you didn’t tell the police about Sean. Why not?”

“I had my reasons, David.”

Loogan felt an anger that tightened his chest, roughened his voice. “You’re just like your husband. He told me the same thing.”

“It’s true.”

“That’s not going to do it. I’m going to need more than that.”

Her fingers were still fussing at her coat. He reached over and seized hold of them.

She drew back, startled. He returned his hand to the wheel and slowed and brought the car to a stop along the curb. “You’re going to tell me the truth,” he said.

“It’s not simple, David. It’s not easy to explain.”

“Take as long as you want. I think I’ve been patient so far.”

 

 

 

Loogan had parked under a burned-out streetlight. The car idled in the dark.

Laura was silent for a time and then said, “Tom wanted to be a writer.”

“I know,” said Loogan. “He told me once.”

“He thought he wasn’t good enough.”

“He told me that too.”

“I think that’s wrong,” Laura said. “I think things could have gone differently. But he sank too much energy into
Gray Streets.
I don’t think he meant to. That wasn’t the plan, when we were younger. We both wanted to be writers, but both of us went off track, somewhere.”

She reached for the hem of her coat, caught herself, and folded her arms across her middle. “Plans go wrong,” she said. “That’s something Tom used to say. I remember when we were starting out, when the magazine was first beginning to catch on. A reporter came to interview us. I think he was expecting a typical literary journal, but we were publishing mysteries and crime stories. What was the theme? he wanted to know. If we had to describe a
Gray Streets
story in one sentence, what would it be? Tom had an answer ready, almost as if he had expected the question: ‘Plans go wrong, bad things happen, people die.’ ”

A car passed on the street, tires hissing like static on the pavement. Laura had paused and Loogan was watching her in profile. Her lips pressed tight together, her chin came up. She was a woman trying not to cry.

“Tom had a plan for Sean’s manuscript,” she said quietly. “He worked on it for a long time, and he wanted it published. The plan didn’t go the way he expected, but that wasn’t his fault. A bad thing happened to Sean Wrentmore, but when it was done, it was done. There was no reversing it. Whether Tom told the police or not, it couldn’t make any difference to Sean. But if Tom told the police, he would have to tell them the whole story.”

Head bowed, her hair obscured her face. “I don’t know what the legal consequences would have been, or what the newspapers would have made of it,” she said. “But I know that Tom wanted the manuscript published—his version of the manuscript. And if he had gone to the police, that would never have happened. Sean wasn’t close to his family. I don’t think he shared his writing with them. But they would have had to agree, if the book was going to be published. And why would they agree, once they found out how much Sean hated what had been done to his manuscript?

“So Tom didn’t go to the police. I don’t know if he thought about what it would mean to Sean’s family. They would never know what had happened to Sean. As for the manuscript, a handful of people may have read Sean’s version, but memories fade. And the edited version was very different. I think Tom would have waited a few years and then published it under his own name, or under a pseudonym.”

She brought her palms up to rub the weariness from her eyes. Loogan focused on the delicate lines of her fingers as they passed down along her cheek. “But plans go wrong,” she said. “Bad things happen. Tom died, and then it was up to me to decide what to do. Maybe I should have told the police about Sean, maybe I should tell them now. But none of that can make a bit of difference to Tom.

“Tom wanted to be a writer,” she said. “The closest he came to what he wanted was when he edited Sean Wrentmore’s novel. I’ve got the manuscript. I’m going to keep it in a trunk in the attic, and in a few years I’m going to discover it—a forgotten work by Tom Kristoll. And one way or another, I’m going to get it published, because that’s what he wanted.”

Chapter 22

IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN-THIRTY WHEN LOOGAN DROVE LAURA KRISTOLL home. He stopped for gas along the way and made his call to Michael Beccanti. Cloak-and-dagger.

When they reached the house, Laura invited him in for a drink. She embraced him before he left, and held on to him for a long time. She didn’t ask him to stay.

He was back on his street, at his rented house, at around quarter to one. He got out and locked the car. The driver’s door gleamed in the streetlight. The graffiti that Adrian Tully had scratched there had been smoothed away and painted over.

He looked up at the porch and there was the X that Beccanti had cut in his window screen. He would have to attend to that.

Inside, he left his coat on a kitchen chair. He ran the tap until the water was cold and drank two glasses. He kicked off his shoes at the foot of the stairs. Got his cell phone out of his pocket: no messages. He could call Beccanti now, he knew the man would be awake, but he didn’t feel up to a conversation. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

He went upstairs and brushed his teeth. His eyes in the mirror looked weary. He set the alarm on his night table for nine in the morning, hung up his shirt, folded his pants on the dresser, and crawled into bed.

When he woke, it was from a dream. He and Tom Kristoll were in the woods of Marshall Park. A flashlight tied to a branch shone down into Sean Wrentmore’s grave. Tom had cast aside the shovel and from somewhere had produced a thick sheaf of pages. He pressed them on Loogan.
Tell me this isn’t brilliant,
he said. The title page was streaked with dirt from Tom’s hands. Loogan tried to brush the dirt away and only made it worse.

Suddenly a ragged hole, the size of a dime, appeared in the page. A circle with black edges. Loogan, bewildered, brought the manuscript closer to his face. The hole went straight through; it pierced every page of the manuscript. Through it, Loogan could see the figure of Sean Wrentmore standing in his grave, smoke rising from the barrel of his nickel-plated gun.

Only then did Loogan hear the shot. It startled him awake and he sat up sharply in his bed. He heard his alarm go off, but it was dark outside the window. The clock read 2:09. Then Loogan realized it wasn’t the alarm. His cell phone was ringing; he had left it on the night table.