Very Bad Men (44 page)

“If not him, maybe Jay Casterbridge.”

“I told you, Jay's not the fifth robber—”

I waved away his impatience. “Fine. But whoever was the fifth robber might be worth a look. And don't tell me you don't know who it was. I never bought that part of your story either.”

He didn't react to that, unless the lines on his forehead grew deeper. We were both silent for a moment, there in the shade of the gazebo, in the warmth of the late afternoon.

“Suppose I agree to ask around,” he said at last, “and suppose I come up empty.”

“Then I'll have to spill Sutton Bell's secret.”

“The press won't believe you, unless you can get Bell to talk to them.”

I nodded over my shoulder in the direction of the guest cottage.

“I'll start by telling Callie,” I said.

Harlan Spencer scowled at that, his eyes darkening, his mouth forming an ugly line, and it occurred to me that despite all appearances I was dealing with a dangerous man. I'd come here thinking I had nothing to lose. Knowing his secret gave me the upper hand. He was almost twice my age and he literally couldn't touch me, couldn't rise from his chair. Maybe he carried a gun—if the senator was right—but even that would do him no good unless he was willing to shoot me in broad daylight.

All this went through my mind as I waited for his answer. When I look back on it I think he probably would have agreed to do what I asked, to make inquiries about Lucy Navarro. But he would have hated it, and hated me.

I think he would have agreed, but he never answered me. I watched him carefully, waiting. But he was looking past me at the street in the distance. When he spoke, I didn't understand at first what he had said.

He said it again. “Take the gun.”

He must have had it in the chair. A nine-millimeter. I could have sworn I never took my eyes off him, but I didn't see him draw it out. Now he offered it to me, grip first.

Behind me, in the distance, the brakes of a car were squealing.

I got to my feet, spun around. Saw a car jump the curb of Bedford Road and come to a stop on the lawn. I knew it from the parking lot of the Winston Hotel. Lark's Chevrolet.

“Callie's in the cottage?” I said.

“Yes, god damn it,” said Harlan Spencer. “Take the gun.”

I took it and leapt over the railing of the gazebo, landing on my feet in the grass, the impact traveling up like a current to the wound in my side. Running full out, I watched Lark open the door of his car. I didn't know which one of us would reach the cottage first.

L
ark meant to go to Mira's apartment, but somewhere along the way he realized he wouldn't make it.

The blood had made his white shirt red. He buttoned his suit jacket to hide it before he got out of the car. His shoes touched the grass and it yielded beneath him, as though he might sink into it. He braced a hand on the car seat to lever himself out, and his palm came away slick and dark.

The air on his face revived him, though he might have liked it cooler. He might have liked to have more feeling in his legs, but they moved him onto the path that led to the cottage door. He fiddled with his sleeves as he went, and the gesture made him smile.

 

 

THE SUIT MADE Lark look young, like a boy on his first date. He moved stiffly in it. I thought he might be drunk.

The lawn sloped downhill and I gained speed as I approached him. I called to him and he seemed to notice me for the first time. He grinned. I remember that. Like you would if you saw an old friend unexpectedly.

By then I knew something must be wrong, but it was too late to stop. Momentum carried me into him, carried us both into the side of Callie Spencer's silver Ford.

His head jerked with the impact and his eyes closed. A ragged breath escaped him. The grin had gone from his face but now it returned. “I really wish you hadn't done that,” he said.

I stepped back from him and saw the blood on his hands. “What happened to you?”

No answer. His breathing shallow. I worked the buttons of his jacket and saw his blood-drenched shirt. A small hole in the fabric, an inch or two above his navel. “Who did this?” I asked him.

His eyes opened then, and the palm of his right hand moved to cover the hole. He looked me up and down, his gaze coming to rest on Spencer's nine-millimeter.

“You brought a gun this time,” he said, half amused. “Too late.”

I reached behind him and set the gun on the hood of Callie's Ford.

“Who shot you?” I said.

He opened his mouth to answer and his expression darkened. He looked around helplessly. “What was his name?” He patted the pockets of his jacket. “I wrote it down.”

He fished a notebook from one of the pockets, opened it. Turned it around to me.

I scanned the list. Three familiar names: Kormoran, Bell, Dawtrey. And a fourth.

“Matthew Kenneally,” I said.

“That's him.”

“He's one of them?” I said. “One of the robbers?”

Lark nodded distractedly. “It's cooler now,” he said, “the wind.”

The wind wasn't any cooler. I dug my cell phone out and punched 911.

“You don't have to,” Lark said. “She already called.”

He nodded toward the door of the cottage and I turned to see Callie Spencer. She snapped her phone shut and came down the steps.

“Ambulance on the way,” she said in a quiet voice. “How bad is he?”

As if to answer, Lark slid down the side of the car, sat heavily on the ground.

I knelt beside him, returning my phone to my pocket. He had both hands over his wound. I pressed my hands against them.

“Cooler,” he said. “No. That's not right.”

Callie was down with us now too. She smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

“Not a cooler. A freezer,” Lark said. “He's got a freezer in his garage.”

“Who does?” I asked. “Kenneally?”

The smallest fraction of a nod. “He's got a minivan too. He says it's gray, but I don't trust him. I think it's blue.”

I leaned in closer to him. “Kenneally has a blue minivan?”

“And a freezer. I couldn't open it. I'm sorry.”

Lark's notebook lay on the gravel beside him. The pages fluttered in the wind.

I heard the low sound of a motor behind me. Harlan Spencer's chair. He would have had to take the long way around.

Far off, I heard the first note of sirens.

Lark tipped his head back against the car and smiled at Callie Spencer. “I don't think I'll make it to the redwoods,” he said. “But you should go.”

She glanced at me, confused. I shrugged. She turned back to him and brushed her thumb along his forehead. “All right.”

“They're really something,” he said. “Promise me.”

Her smile started in her eyes before it went to her mouth. It moved slow and it didn't dazzle. It was heartbreaking and fine, and if it was false then she's the smoothest liar I've ever seen. “I promise,” she said.

Lark never looked away from her, but his last words were for me. “He's got a freezer,” he said. “Remember.”

“I'll remember,” I told him.

“I tried to open it. I couldn't.”

“It's all right.”

The sirens were closer now. Lark's voice faded, but I could still make out the words.

“I'm sorry about the girl,” he said.

 

 

ON A SATURDAY NIGHT in Ann Arbor you can eat
ropa vieja
at the Café Habana or an Ethiopian feast at the Blue Nile. You can find dance clubs and martini bars and shops that sell chocolate truffles for thirty-two dollars a pound. You can hear a poetry reading or a symphony. You can see stand-up comics in a crowded bar in what used to be the basement of the VFW hall. You can attend the premiere of a new work by a local playwright, or the latest independent film.

I spent my Saturday night in the break room of the Investigations Division at City Hall. A windowless room with a scarred table and six mismatched chairs. A sofa with tattered cushions. The smell of strong coffee.

I saw Elizabeth early on. She came in to look me over, to make sure there was no fresh damage. She brought me pills—ibuprofen. I needed them. The pain in my side was a jagged, grinding ache.

Sarah came by sometime later, after the pills had smoothed over the worst of the jagged edges. She rode her bike and brought take-out from a Middle Eastern place. We ate hummus and fattoush, chicken shwarma sandwiches. She hung around for an hour or so.

After she left, I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes, but I couldn't sleep. I suppose I could have gone home. No one would have stopped me. But Ron Wintergreen, the first detective on the scene at the Spencer cottage, had asked me to wait here: I would need to give a statement. He had asked the Spencers to come in too, Harlan and Callie. Both were somewhere in the building. And I gathered, from the chatter among the cops who came by to fill their coffee mugs, that Matthew Kenneally had been brought in as well. I was a minor player; I would have to wait my turn.

I never did see Wintergreen again that night. Owen McCaleb turned up instead, looking harried, his shirt wrinkled, his tie loose. By then it was nearly eleven. I'd scrounged up a pen and a legal pad and had written an account of the last minutes of Anthony Lark's life. McCaleb read it through, tossed it back across the table at me, and told me to sign and date it. When I'd done that, he told me to go home.

“You don't want to ask me anything?” I said.

“No, I don't,” he said, scraping his chair back from the table. “I figure I'd better not.”

He began to rise, then reconsidered. Crossed his arms over his chest and let me have a long stare. “If I did want to question you,” he said, “I'd start by asking what you discussed with Sutton Bell this afternoon.”

I tapped my fingers softly on the tabletop. “I talked to him about the Great Lakes Bank robbery,” I said. “I'd rather not get into specifics.”

“No. Bell didn't want to either. As for Harlan Spencer, he admitted you came to ask him about the missing reporter, Lucy Navarro. But of course he doesn't know anything about her, so apparently the two of you sat around drinking iced tea and talking about how green the grass was and how blue the sky. Does that about cover it?”

“We didn't actually drink the iced tea,” I said.

He smiled without any humor. “I'm glad to have that detail straightened out. But I think we'd better leave it there. Because if I were to inquire too closely, I might discover you've been conducting your own private half-assed investigation of Lucy Navarro's disappearance. And since you're living with one of my detectives, that discovery might reflect poorly on her.”

“Lizzie hasn't done anything wrong—”

“I trust she hasn't. But she's chosen to associate with a man who can't keep his nose out of trouble, and if I thought too much about that, I might begin to question her judgment.” He stood up and collected my statement from the table. “So, no, I don't want to ask you any questions. I don't want to hear whatever line you'd try to feed me. I'd rather you just went away.”

 

 

I WENT AWAY—out of the break room and down the hall to the stairs. I ran into Elizabeth there; she had come from questioning Matthew Kenneally. She walked with me down to the lobby and out into the night.

It had cooled into the low seventies and the streetlights lent everything a crisp, unreal appearance. The cracks in the sidewalks were sharply defined, and looked as if they had been put there on purpose. Away south we could hear hints of music and voices—nightlife on Liberty Street. We turned our backs on it and walked north.

“Did you find anything in Kenneally's freezer?” I asked her.

“We haven't looked,” she said.

“Are you waiting for a warrant?”

She took my arm. “There's not going to be a warrant, David. Lark saw a freezer in a garage. It's a huge leap to say there's a body inside. No judge is going to make that leap.”

“And Kenneally won't consent to a search?”

“Kenneally doesn't have to consent to anything. He's got a lawyer telling him so. The whole notion that he's the fifth man from the Great Lakes robbery—he claims it's nothing more than a wild allegation Lark made.”

“Do you believe him?”

“It doesn't matter what I believe,” she said. “What matters is what I can prove.”

E
lizabeth and Shan had accompanied Kenneally to the University Hospital, where an ER doctor had checked him over and put a brace on his broken finger.

Kenneally's wife had contacted the law firm of Harris and Chatterjee, and Rex Chatterjee himself had been cooling his heels in an interview room when Elizabeth and Shan brought Kenneally in to City Hall. After consulting with his client privately, Chatterjee announced that Kenneally would be willing to make a statement.

Kenneally then led them through the events of the late afternoon, beginning with his discovery that Anthony Lark had broken into his study. In a flat, detached tone, he described Lark's erratic behavior, and his bizarre claims about the Great Lakes Bank robbery and the abduction of Lucy Navarro. When Lark drew a gun, Kenneally said, he had feared for his life and the lives of his wife and children. He had grabbed for the gun on instinct, and in the ensuing struggle it had gone off.

Rex Chatterjee sat impassively all the while, a pudgy man in a tailored suit. When Kenneally finished, Chatterjee swept his fingers through his gray hair and said, “Surely you won't be charging my client with any crime? I can't imagine a clearer case of self-defense.”