The Perfect Ghost (6 page)

I felt powerful driving, even though I stuck to the right lane while faster cars passed at high speed. The Cape’s skeletal structure was simple. Route 6, the spine, charged up the middle of the narrow ridge of land, with Route 28, intermittently called Main Street, reliably to one side, and Route 6A, the old King’s Highway, on the other, till they converged near the Orleans Rotary and Route 6 rolled on alone all the way to Herring Cove and the Province Lands.

After a stretch of multilane highway, the road narrowed abruptly to a scant lane in each direction, the only improvement over the old “Suicide Alley,” a strip of yellow warning markers that barricaded the median. Signs said to turn on your headlights even in daytime. The Land Rover behind me crept up my tailpipe, and my hands clenched the wheel.

The character of the road changed again, multilane, but stop-and-go, with traffic lights, cross streets, and drivers no longer in such a hurry. Art galleries and ice-cream shops prevailed over infrequent chain stores. I passed seafood stands, a chiropractor’s office, a billboard advertising a women’s clinic, and swept around the Orleans Rotary into Eastham, where all the streets seemed to be called Seacrest or Seaview. Some of the small shops sported colorful flags to show they were open, but more seemed deserted. Ladders leaned against windows. Workmen painted and repaired wind-scoured façades. This far up the Cape, past the bent elbow of the peninsula and nearing its clenched fist, fewer and fewer guest accommodations were open. Signs read
CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

I passed a gas station coupled to a garage that advertised a mechanic on duty. Maybe it was the same garage that housed the twisted remains of your car. That’s what usually happened, wasn’t it? They towed the car to a local garage. I wondered whether Caroline had viewed the wreckage during her brief pilgrimage. Maybe she’d encountered the cops who’d attended your funeral there. Maybe that’s why they’d seemed familiar. I remembered Detective Snow’s telephoned request for a callback. I should have taken his number with me, but I hadn’t. I glued my eyes to the road.

Eastham was gone in a flash. Wellfleet followed; Truro beckoned. I crept along, searching for Goshen Street. There it was, just up the street from the Dairy Bee. I turned left at the traffic light, right at the third intersection, left again. Willis Road, a tiny gravel turnoff, opened on the right, and the house was exactly as you’d described: a shingle-sided, dormered cottage with a steeply slanted roof, a doll’s house, a summer place barely winterized.

The blue-trimmed brick house next door was larger by half. Two fierce women, you’d proclaimed, and one elderly shaggy dog. Guardians of the key. One chatty, one terse, one incontinent. I prayed for the terse one.

At first glimpse I thought she was a man. I kept my eyes down and requested the key. I could hear the dog snuffling behind the door.

“His wife already cleared out the place.” The woman was huge and bearlike in a chenille bathrobe. A cigarette dangled from one corner of her mouth.

“I’m his business partner,” I said. “We have the rental till the end of the month. I called and spoke to someone named Ruthie?”

Her voice was nothing like Ruthie’s. No one would have dared call this woman by any name that ended in a cute diminutive.

She took a drag on her cigarette, and the ash glowed briefly. “Just a minute.” The door closed and the dog barked. When the woman reopened the door, I caught a glimpse of a standard poodle’s graying muzzle.

“You know that guy in the blue van?” the nameless woman asked.

I denied it with a shake of my head.

“Keeps driving by the house. Stopped a couple times, looked in the window. You gonna be there alone, you be sure and lock up. Windows, too. Ran the van smack over the ice crocuses, didn’t bother to stop.”

Sturdy blue flowers lined her side of the narrow driveway. I assured her I’d be careful and thanked her for the key.

“He comes back, I’ll call the police.” She slammed the door. Fierce, indeed.

I tucked the key in a pocket, grabbed the duffel in one hand, my laptop and the Bloomingdale’s bag in the other. Oh, the relief of flipping the lock after carting my belongings inside.

The foyer was cramped, the kitchen an alarming shade of yellow, the bathroom tiny. Exhausted, too tired to eat, I shoved clothes onto hangers in the smaller of the bedrooms. It was narrow, but the view was lovely, a small pond, a stand of oak and maple. You’d have chosen it over the drab larger room. I was sure it was the room in which you’d slept.

My mind skittered to the penciled notes on the yellow pad. “2nd BST BD,” could be the second-best bedroom, in which case you’d have been talking to the owner of the house or the rental agency that handled the property. I envisioned the numbers and shook my head. You hadn’t paid any of those enormous sums for a one-month, out-of-season rental. You probably could have purchased every house on the street for money like that.

I went to bed early, but even with the grace of Ambien, couldn’t sleep. Such a long time since I’d left the nest and flown away, yet here I was, perched in a strange aerie. I tried breathing exercises. I tried counting. The plumbing gurgled, and a clock hissed and ticked. I missed the familiar noises of the apartment, the ping of the heating unit, the rain on the windowpane. It rained on the cottage roof at two in the morning, but there was no one to share the sound with, Teddy. I padded around the cottage twice, checking doors and windows, staring out the peephole.

I replayed your interview with Sylvie Duchaine in my head, recalling that old Hollywood credo about how films are made three times. Once by the writer, once by the director, and once by the editor. Our books were made three times, too, once by the subject who lived the life, once by you with your probing questions, and once by me in the written word. How would I ever manage it, handling your job as well as mine? Meeting, interviewing, a man as famous as Garrett Malcolm?

I heard the poodle bark around four thirty. It made me remember that girl, Barbara what’s-her-name, the French lit major with the dangly earrings who used to walk Pogo for you during your Tuesday office hours. I wondered whether you’d ever slept with her, an echo of my thoughts earlier in the day when I’d wondered whether Malcolm bedded Sylvie. Maybe you were right, Teddy, maybe I do brood too much about sex.

CHAPTER

eight

RE: Accident Report

SENT BY: [email protected]

SENT ON: March 30

SENT TO: Paul Jericho, Chief of Police

Paul,

Thanks for sending the AR. I’ll look it over. IMHO, Lennie did a fine job managing the scene. No way he knows the guy’s some big shot, and with so much going on, I would have done the same thing, started things in motion without waiting for the accident crew. The regional guys know that. It happens. You can’t keep the roads shut down forever. Things get screwed up, usually in tourist season, granted, but it happens. Sorry I was out of the loop that night, because I know you could have used all hands on deck.

I’m pretty much back on my feet. Had Lennie drive me to Blake’s funeral, which was quite a big do. Thought it might smooth Mrs. Blake’s feathers, but no guarantee on that. Lennie started the ball rolling on the vic’s cell phone records. Guy might have been texting. Old for that, not a kid, but if he was some kind of writer, he might have been texting, or even talking, and that could be why he lost control. Also, sent Lennie back to do a grid search, check for animal tracks. Maybe a deer ran out of the woods. Or a dog. It’s fine that he sent the wreck off to D’Arcy Brothers. They’ve got a good lockup garage, and damage-based analysis isn’t time-sensitive. You can leave it and come back to it years later. On trajectory analysis, it’s just measurements and formulas. Lennie filled in all the diagrams, so no sweat.

Next is BAC and toxicology. Tricky reconstructing a one-car fatal, but the tox will tell if he was drunk or doped. If this one’s going high-profile, you can try to expedite, but they’ll push back. No authorization for overtime.

I guess what troubles me most is Lennie didn’t bang doors right away to check wits and their memories ought to be fresh. I listened to the 911. I know you think I can ID everybody in town by voice, but this one’s got me stumped. It’s a bad stretch of road up there. Lennie says streetlights were operational and the vic had his headlights on, but if the guy was unfamiliar with the road, or speeding, and didn’t see the switchback-curve sign, even if the weather wasn’t bad, he wouldn’t stand much chance on that curve.

Shirley says thank you for the plant. If she hadn’t made me go to the hospital, I might have made it to the accident scene, but the docs say I wouldn’t have got much farther. This way, all I needed was a couple stents. Timing is never good for a thing like this, but the docs patched me up good. I’m home now, making phone calls from the couch, but I’ll be back at work before you know it.

E-mail with anything you’ve got. I’m happy to have something to do, but don’t let Shirley know, okay? She’ll take away my laptop.

Russell Snow, Detective Grade One

Dennis Port Police Department

One Arrow Point Way

Dennis Port, MA 02639

CHAPTER

nine

Let me set the stage for you, Teddy. Appropriate, right? Since Malcolm seems to be taking a break from movies to do a stretch of live theater.

Time: The present. Act One: The Old Barn at Cranberry Hill.

Malcolm’s personal assistant set the venue for the encounter, demanding we meet at the barn since the great director would already be present, reviewing production schedules, inspecting set designs, checking lighting plots. What a busy, busy calendar Malcolm kept! The PA hoped I appreciated that a person in Malcolm’s august position, with his many commitments, couldn’t take time to concentrate solely on a petty item like a scheduled interview. Whether Malcolm himself had urged him to put me off or whether it was the PA’s own snide initiative, I wasn’t sure.

The size and grandeur of the estate numbed my hands on the wheel and made me wish I’d rented a better vehicle to blend with the yew hedges and stone fences, the subtle glow of understated and plentiful old New England money. The driveway stretched for miles, crushed shells murmuring under my wheels, before dividing into a web of roadways. It came to me that those huge figures on the yellow pad could be estimates of the value of Malcolm’s property. Would you have checked that with a real estate agent? Such huge numbers, if they signified dollars, were likely to be associated with the director.

I followed the PA’s directions, weaving between four major structures: the Big House, the Red House, the Amphitheater, and the Old Barn. Distinguishing the Red House from the barn made for a bit of suspense, but I got there, and I got there early because I had the feeling Malcolm wouldn’t bother waiting if I were two minutes late.

No one was there, Teddy. How’s that for dismissive? I knocked, paced the perimeter, called a tentative, then a louder, hello, and finally entered through immense unlocked double doors. The barn’s interior was high and peaked like a church’s, but filled with the smell of sawn wood rather than incense. Instead of pews, there were sawhorses, stacked lumber, and several bright red fire extinguishers. Shelves sliced horizontally across one long wall: hand and power tools; coiled rope; buckets; boxes, cardboard and wooden, labeled and unlabeled, covered, open, bristling with electrical cords. The opposite wall was a vast open closet, topped by a shelf of wigs on blank-faced fiberglass heads. Ballerina tutus, monkish robes, scarlet satin gowns, and floor-sweeping togas hung from sturdy rods.

The costumes, colorful as they were, didn’t attract me the way the tools did. I fingered the edge of a jigsaw blade and inhaled the sharp aroma of oil and steel. I change a mean flat tire, tinker with balky toilets, fuses, and circuit breakers. One foster dad was an auto mechanic, but I basically taught myself, a good thing since I’d probably have more panic attacks than I do now if I were at the mercy of garage mechanics, plumbers, and electricians. I paced the width of the room twice, listening to my footsteps echo on the floorboards, and came to a halt facing a blackboard covered with overlapping drawings, designs for a stage set. A few sketches were drawn in chalk, more inked on paper, taped to the blackboard or thumbtacked along the wooden frame. Watercolor renderings suggested a variety of lighting schemes, some dreamlike, some strikingly vivid and real.

I jumped about three feet when a door slammed.

“Don’t ever smoke in here.” The PA, Darren Kalver, thin, thirtyish, with a straw-colored flap of hair and pale eyelashes, was alone, and his narrow mouth looked as unwelcoming as he sounded.

“I wasn’t. I wouldn’t.” I had no reason to sound as guilty as I did. The smell of the bearlike neighbor’s cigarette had brought on a faint urge, but I hadn’t succumbed.

“There was a fire when Mr. Malcolm was a child. He keeps extinguishers in all the buildings.”

“I’m not from the fire department.”

“I know that.”

I’d hated his haughty voice, even over the phone. You never mentioned him; you probably didn’t deal with underlings. He glared at me as though I were a particularly loathsome bug, explained in a pinched tone that Malcolm’s tight schedule had changed unexpectedly, but that we might manage to catch up with him at the Big House. He insisted on driving me to the new rendezvous; his way would be faster. I agreed, assuming he had some secret shortcut. What he had was a golf cart so he could crisscross the estate without benefit of roads.