Open Season (16 page)

He smiled, but there was less friendliness in his eyes. “I’ll have them ready.”

I left the store and began walking back up Main Street to the Municipal Building, swathed in the gloomy pre-evening winter light. I was not happy. It might have been last night catching up with me, or the frustration of tiptoeing through my own department with a major case, but Rubin’s coolness at the end made me feel I was increasingly surrounded by a bunch of people who’d just as soon see me disappear. That was starting to wear thin.

It was also about to change. Every rock I’d looked under had concealed more old, unanswered questions. So far, I’d found a dubious medical examiner, a career peeper, a clue-cluttered crime scenario, anonymous cash payments, mysterious three-day weekends; and now I’d just left a squeaky-clean septuagenarian with a did-he-or-didn’t he passion for the victim. None of these had been brought up before that I had ever heard, and I was beginning to think that if I couldn’t get at least one of them to lay me a nice fat egg, I was in the wrong line of work.

Of course, the largest question remained: if I did end up proving I was in the right line of work, who in the end was going to benefit? Ski Mask had set an elaborate plan into action, but what was his motivation? It was difficult to believe he’d put so many people through hell—not to mention causing the death of one of them—just to get Bill Davis off the hook. I had to assume that his interest was more in who he thought should be in Davis’s place. But that still didn’t give me much.

I spent the waning hours of the day doodling in my office, going over what I’d found, making charts on a large yellow pad. I made everyone I could think of Kimberly Harris’s killer and then tied him to what I knew. Of course, I ended up with mostly question marks. But the process was comforting and it helped kill the time. Tomorrow, with the trip to Connecticut, I felt things were going to change. I would stop turning over old earth and start digging in a patch of my own.

Most bachelors have their quirks, I suppose. Mine—at least one of mine—is to shop for food almost every day on the way home. The logic is that the larder rarely ends up holding unopened passing fancies that slowly graduate to botulism growth farms. But in fact I think I do it just to spend a few minutes of each day among the normal people of this world. Some men have their six o’clock martinis: I have my fifteen minutes in the crowded aisles of Finast.

I had parked my car after returning from this ritual and was crossing the street to my apartment, grocery sack in one hand, keys in the other, when I heard my name called. Frank Murphy was standing in the shadows under a tree.

“You don’t look too good.”

“It’s been a couple of action-packed days.”

“I won’t argue with that.” He climbed the steps to the front door with me, glancing at the bag. “You had dinner yet?”

“No.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come home with me. Martha’s fixing lasagna—right up your alley.”

“No. I’m bushed. I don’t think I’ll bother with dinner.”

“Sleep on an empty stomach? You’d never wake up. Come on, you don’t have to be sociable. I won’t even mind if you fall asleep at the table, but you got to eat.”

I shook my head again, but he tightened his grip. I looked up at him.

“Please. As a favor.”

He had more than dinner on his mind. “All right.”

I walked back down the steps with him, crossed over to his car and deposited my groceries in the back seat. That’s one advantage of Vermont winters—all the world is a refrigerator, especially if your car heater works like Murphy’s.

We’d been driving for five minutes before he spoke again. “So, any ideas?”

“Why the sudden interest?”

It came out sharper than I’d intended, and Frank lapsed back into silence. I didn’t want to be doing this. I needed rest and some time alone to think things out.

“Maybe there
are
some bad guys out there.”

I closed my eyes for a second. “What?”

“Maybe Ski Mask did save your skin. I mean, it’s not impossible. We never did find out much about Kimberly Harris. Could be all this is out of her past—a Mafia thing or witness protection or something like that.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Spare me.”

Murphy shrugged.

“Look, maybe he did sucker me with the gas thing, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be our main line of business. It’s like we’re standing knee-deep in shit and wondering where the smell’s coming from.”

Murphy groaned.

The predictability of it got under my skin. “Well, Christ, Frank. Wouldn’t you like to know what the hell is going on? I mean, we know goddamned well the Harris thing and Ski Mask are connected, and that we don’t have any other line on who the hell Ski Mask is. So why don’t we just face that and get on with it?”

“We are. That’s why you’re going to Connecticut.” His voice was gloomy. “I was just hoping we could do it quietly.”

I clamped my teeth and stared at the traffic ahead. This was stupid. I was right; he was right. There was a momentum building in this case; Ski Mask was our main line of business; Harris was the obvious avenue to pursue. I wasn’t all by myself. I was just feeling as frustrated as I’d ever felt.

When Murphy spoke again, his voice was quiet and slow—confessional. “I owe you an apology.”

“What for?”

“I’ve been acting like a jerk on all this.”

I couldn’t disagree, so I kept quiet.

“I remember the morning it all started—black rapist strangles white girl—I couldn’t believe it, complete with bondage, drugs, and stolen underwear. It was straight out of a horror movie. I remember thinking we’d never hear the end of it. The networks would grab it, and some headline lawyer from New York would show up. I’d end up looking like some Alabama redneck nigger-stomper, fat gut and all.”

“Jesus, Frank, where did you get that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was just suddenly there. It was like Korea: when your tour was nearly up, you just knew something dumb was going to get you killed. You lost perspective—you got paranoid. Didn’t that happen to you?”

“Yeah, I felt it.”

“But not as bad, I know. Some guys really flipped out, probably wound up getting killed just because of it. I guess I was somewhere in-between. Anyway, it was the same feeling with this Harris thing. I felt like an ant trying to get out from under a giant foot in time. I felt its shadow right over me.”

He paused.

“Pre-retirement crazies?”

He gave a short laugh. “I guess. It’s not getting any better, in case you haven’t noticed. That trial… Well, not the trial, but the whole process lasted a full two years. All along, I kept expecting something to foul up, something that would turn on the spotlights. I did everything I could to speed it up—Christ, I’ve never been so efficient. That paperwork didn’t sit ten minutes on my desk. And when it was finally over, I couldn’t believe our luck. We’d actually pulled it off—nice and neat and legal as hell.”

Again, he paused and then sighed. “And up she pops again, like a cork to the top, three months shy of the exit door.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, or even if saying something might break the spell and deprive him of whatever comfort he was getting from all this.

“The real joke is I don’t even want to leave. If I could, I’d happily die at my desk. Florida to me is like one big cemetery, waiting to swallow me up.”

“Then don’t go.”

He looked over at me and smiled. “I envy you that. There was a time I’d have said the same thing. But things change. Martha or no Martha, I’d probably have found some hole to die in. Might as well be Florida.”

I looked out the window. We were getting close to his house. I’d have said Frank Murphy was the one man in this world to whom self-pity was foreign. I guess he was right: things change.

The car pulled into Hillcrest Terrace. “That didn’t sound too good, did it?”

“Nope.”

He parked and killed the engine. “I’m not even sure I meant it. It’s kind of like standing belly-deep in the pool and wondering if you’re half dry or half wet.”

Somehow, for no reason—or for all sorts of reasons—I started giggling. “You are losing your mind, you know that?”

He laughed with me but briefly. “I wonder sometimes. Five years ago—maybe more—you couldn’t have caught my coat tails. Now… I don’t know. I seem to have run out of spit.”

I rubbed my eyes, took a deep breath and stretched. “Oh, hell, Frank, it happens. Don’t beat yourself up. Dive in… or get out.” I started laughing again.

He smiled and started up the car.

“Where’re we going?”

“I’m taking you home. You do need the sleep.”

A LONG-STANDING MAXIM
holds that overly tired people don’t sleep as well as they do normally. I didn’t have that problem. I slept for twelve hours straight and woke up in the same position I started out in—on my stomach, fully clothed. I won’t claim I felt refreshed, but at least I could function.

I washed, changed my clothes, and packed a bag. Assuming Beverly Hillstrom was as efficient as I thought she was, the Kimberly Harris samples had probably arrived in Brattleboro sometime during the night.

When I got to the office around 10:30, Murphy, as was now becoming his habit, found me in the hallway. “I took you home to go to bed, not take a vacation. What have you been doing?”

“Sleeping.” I reached through Maxine’s small sliding-glass window and pulled out a daily report. The night had been blessedly boring. “What’s the rush?”

“Brandt thought it might be nice if you got on your way in the predawn darkness, especially since you’ll be carrying a cooler marked Caution—Human Remains.”

“So they came?”

“Yeah; about three hours ago. It’s in the fridge. I put it in a brown paper bag.”

“They pack that stuff in dry ice, Frank. You could have just shoved it under my desk.”

Murphy scowled. “It doesn’t matter.”

I shook my head, opened my office door, and turned on the light. Murphy turned it off. “You don’t have time. You’re leaving.”

I closed the door with a sigh and retraced my steps to the hall. Murphy left me to get the cooler. He returned carrying a grocery bag. “See? It doesn’t look weird.”

I shook my head and relieved him of it. “I’ll take your word for it.”

He escorted me out the door and to my car, looking around as if Katz would swing by on some vine, camera in hand. The mother-hen routine was a far cry from yesterday. Not that I was complaining, but I was still a little wary. I could only imagine last night’s conversation must have been a huge weight off his shoulders.

He put his hand on the car door as I was about to open it. “You think someone ought to go with you?”

“I don’t see why. I might be gone several days.”

“You and what’s-his-name, you mean.”

The thought had occurred to me. I looked at him closely. “Is this a complicated way of inviting yourself along?”

He beamed. “Yeah.”

“What about Brandt?”

He walked over to his car and got a small overnight bag out of the passenger seat. “I already cleared it with him… and Martha.”

The drive to West Haven takes about three hours, a straight drop south on the interstate. The weather was beautiful, cold and blue skied, and we shared a good mood. I was happy to have him along, and happy to see him out from under his self-imposed cloud. Comments about the end of the road and living on borrowed time go with the territory of old age, and Frank didn’t hold a candle to my mother, who in her mid-eighties was complaining that God had just forgotten her.

But it was a sliding scale, and Frank had temporarily slid himself too far down. I felt he was back now; still fearful of bad news but committed to finding the answer.

The University of West Haven is an unpretentious collection of ugly concrete buildings scattered across the top of a hill with no view. We got directions to the Business Administration Center, where the guard insisted we would find Dr. Kees, and parked in front of a gray and largely windowless five-story cube that was still very much under construction.

We got out and stared at it. There were other cars in the lot but not many. In fact, the entire campus had a forlorn, empty look to it.

“What do you think?” Murphy asked.

“Well, Hillstrom’s office is over a dentist. Maybe this guy likes abandoned buildings.”

He gestured to the back seat. “Should we take the stuff?”

“Might as well. I don’t want to lose it now.”

The red-and-white cooler, free of its brown bag, did indeed have Caution—Human Remains taped on one side. On the other was a happy penguin and the words Chilly Willy.

We picked our way over the construction-site debris that lay scattered across the frozen mud and entered a doorless front lobby. The buttons for the elevator hadn’t been installed yet. Nor, for all we knew, had the elevator. We began to climb the stairs, the clatter of our footsteps echoing off the bare concrete walls.

On the fifth floor, we found a door and behind it a wall of warm air. We walked down the unfinished, uncarpeted hallway, looking through doorways as we went, vaguely following the sound of a radio. We found it, and the young woman in cowboy boots listening to it, about halfway down. She was standing at an equipment-jammed counter, dropping blood from a pipette into a row of tiny saucers in perfect rhythm with the music.

She finished and smiled brightly at us. “Hi. Can I help you?”

Murphy and I looked at each other. “Does Dr. Robert Kees work here?”

“Sure does.”

She clomped out of the room and down the hall, leaving us surrounded by a truly impressive hodgepodge of gleaming, metallic, totally mysterious machines. The radio sounded tinny and cowed by its competition.

She returned in a couple of minutes, followed by an athletic middle-aged man with thick, swept-back black hair. He smiled broadly and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Bob Kees.”

We introduced ourselves and he looked at the cooler. “Is that your friend?”

“Both of them. Maybe all three of them. Actually, that’s why we’re here; we don’t know how many are involved.”