Very Bad Men (46 page)

“Didn't look like it, but we can check.”

“Maybe Lark made a mistake that night,” Shan offered. “He confused gray for blue.”

“Maybe Lark was mistaken about a lot of things,” McCaleb said. “I think the only way we're going to get a look inside Kenneally's freezer or his minivan is if he gives us permission. How likely is that?”

 

 

ELIZABETH AND I circled around and ended our walk where it began, in front of City Hall.

“We asked Kenneally to consent to a search,” she said to me, “but his lawyer jumped in and dismissed the whole idea. I don't know if he did it on principle, or if he thinks Kenneally's guilty.”

“So that's the end of it?” I said.

She turned to face me. “No, David. The reason I'm telling you about this is to let you know it's not the end. We're going to look into Kenneally's background, try to connect him with Floyd Lambeau and the Great Lakes robbery. I'm not giving up on this. But I don't want you to do anything. I know your first instinct when you leave here will be to head to Kenneally's house. But you won't help Lucy that way. If she's there, she's beyond your help. And if you go there, you'll make things harder for me.”

We parted there, at the steps of City Hall. She had to stay behind to wrap things up with Kenneally. I walked west as far as Main Street, which was the right idea, if I wanted to go home. Then I turned south toward the
Gray Streets
building.

The air in the office felt stale. I switched on my desk lamp and touched the necklace that hung there—Elizabeth's glass beads. They glowed blue in the light. I put up the window and heard the same saxophone I'd heard the night before, the winding notes of a Charlie Parker tune coming up from the street. I thought about Lucy Navarro. On Monday night, less than a week ago, she had called to thank me for setting up a meeting with Callie Spencer. We'd joked about what might happen if she asked the wrong questions.
If I disappear, maybe you can find me,
she'd said.
If you can't find me, I wouldn't mind being avenged.

I had her book on the corner of my desk, her vampire novel, right next to the bottle of Macallan that Alan Beckett had given me. I wanted a drink, because I didn't like the thoughts going through my head.

I didn't know where Matthew Kenneally lived, but I could find out. I didn't have my car; I'd left it at the Spencer house. But I could get it.

I stood listening to the music from the street and tried to think of a way around it.

If you go there, you'll make things harder for me,
Elizabeth had said.

That was true. If I went there, that made me the kind of man who couldn't keep his nose out of trouble, the kind who broke into people's garages and looked in their freezers. It would be bad for me if I got caught, and worse for Elizabeth.

She hadn't made me promise her. I took some comfort in that.

I picked up the bottle from the desk and carried it with me through the outer office to the washroom. I poured it in the sink, watched it spiral down the drain. A token gesture, really. Because I had a fifth of Glenfiddich in the deep drawer of the desk.

When I dialed Alan Beckett's number, I had my feet up on the windowsill and a glass balanced on my knee.

“I'm planning to commit a crime,” I said to him when he answered.

A grumble of annoyance came over the line. “I'd like to hear about it, I'm sure. But you've reached me at a bad time.”

“I thought you might like to come along,” I said. “You could bring your glass cutter. You might be useful.”

“Have you been drinking, Mr. Loogan?”

“Not so you'd notice. The crime I'm planning—it's a break-in. At Matthew Kenneally's house.”

The sound of his breathing. Then: “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“I'd like to have you there,” I said. “To see the look on your face when I find what I think I'm going to find.”

“I'm hanging up now. It would be lovely if you didn't call me again.”

“She asked me to avenge her, Al. You don't think I can walk away from that, do you?”

“Good night, Mr. Loogan.”

The line went dead and I dropped the receiver into the cradle. I raised the glass and studied the Scotch in the light of the desk lamp. A minute later I got up and went to pour it in the sink. When I got back the phone was ringing. I answered it.

“Did you change your mind, Al?”

After a moment of pure silence on the line, I heard a voice that didn't belong to Alan Beckett.

“Loogan, it's me.”

I regretted the waste of the Scotch then. My mouth was very dry. It couldn't seem to form words.

“I'm right outside,” she said. “Shall I come up?”

I moved to the window and looked down. Scanned the street and found a patch of blue: the roof of a minivan.

There's one possibility I left off the list of things to do in Ann Arbor on a Saturday night. Sometimes you can see magic.

Down on the street the front passenger door of the minivan opened and Lucy Navarro stepped out.

I
n the days that followed I slept late. I spent long afternoons watching television, flipping around through old movies. Once, I found
In the Heat of the Night
and stayed with it all the way through. Rod Steiger playing the police chief, Bill Gillespie. The way he inhabited his uniform, the way he walked when he carried Sidney Poitier's suitcase at the train station—he made me think of Walter Delacorte.

Around the time I watched the movie, they were burying Delacorte in Sault Sainte Marie. The turnout was small: one ex-wife out of three, a daughter from somewhere out west, a few deputies and their families. I heard about it from Nick Dawtrey, who attended with his mother.

When I tired of television I went for walks. One ambitious evening I got out the lawn mower to cut the grass. Halfway through, Sarah came out and insisted on taking over. I let her. I was supposed to be mending.

During the daytime, I had the house mostly to myself. There was always something in the refrigerator for me to eat. There was nowhere I needed to go, no one tied up in a basement waiting for me to find her. Lucy Navarro had left town. I didn't know where she'd gone and it was none of my concern.

The Ann Arbor police weren't pleased with her. She went to see them that Saturday night, after turning up at
Gray Streets
. She told them that on Wednesday around midnight a former boyfriend had appeared unexpectedly in the parking lot of her hotel. On an impulse she had driven off with him, and they had spent three days together in his apartment in Chicago, reigniting their old romance, cut off from the rest of the world. No television, no Internet. Only on Saturday had she bothered to charge her cell phone and check her messages; only then had she learned that people were looking for her.

She told the police she was sorry. She hoped she hadn't caused too much trouble.

Some of the elements of the story—the ones that could be readily checked—were true. The putative boyfriend, an architect named Railton, lived alone in an apartment in Chicago; he owned a blue Honda Odyssey minivan. The rest of the story was barely plausible, and Elizabeth didn't believe a word of it. Owen McCaleb listened to it silently, waited for Lucy to leave his office, and kicked a wastebasket across the room—the closest he's ever come, I'm told, to throwing a tantrum.

I knew Lucy was lying.

I'd like to say she told me the truth about what had happened, but when she came up to my office Saturday night she gave me the same version the police would soon hear. I watched her across the desk: her hair in a limp ponytail; dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn't slept in three days. Her face seemed thin and drawn, and I thought she had lost weight. She wore blue jeans and a turtleneck with long sleeves.

She tried to inject some life into her story, but it seemed like an act. Her usual energy was gone. When she got to the end, I did nothing to fill the silence. I'd brought the bottle out of the drawer again and filled two glasses; they rested on the desk between us. I sat with one foot propped on the open drawer and watched her reach for her glass.

“I'm sorry, Loogan,” she said. “You must have been worried.”

“Me?” I said, looking up at the shadows on the ceiling. “Why?”

“You must have wondered what happened to me. I feel terrible.”

I shook my head at the shadows. “I figured there must be an explanation, and if I just sat tight, everything would work itself out.” I looked down and saw her holding the glass. “And what do you know—I was right.”

She didn't seem convinced, but I wasn't trying to be convincing.

“Well,” she said, “I hope it wasn't too bad.”

“I hardly noticed. I've had my own troubles. I got stabbed, you know.”

She took a sip and returned the glass to the desktop. “I'm still catching up on the news,” she said. “But I heard you got shot.”

“No. Stabbed. With a bayonet.”

“The report I read said you were shot by Anthony Lark.”

“Goes to show you can't trust what you read. It wasn't Lark. It was an unidentified assailant. In a clown suit.” I stared at her soberly across the desk. “But you had no way of knowing that. You were in a love nest with an architect.”

A little life crept into her pale green eyes. She smiled. “My architect is downstairs, waiting in the van.”

I shrugged. “I could find a clown, if I needed one. What really happened to you?”

“Just what I said.”

“No. You didn't run off with an old boyfriend and leave the engine of your Beetle running. You didn't spend the last three days in his bed. I don't care how much lust you had to catch up on, you wouldn't have gone all that time without turning on the news. You wouldn't have forgotten that you were writing a story about Callie Spencer.”

Her smile receded. “I'm done with all that, Loogan.”

“You're not a reporter anymore?”

“I'm quitting the
National Current
.”

“To do what?”

“I've got a book contract.”

“You told me you were through writing novels.”

“I've reconsidered.”

I laid a hand on the blotter of the desk, a feeble attempt to close some of the distance between us. “What did they do to you?”

“No one did anything.”

She was lying. Someone had done something. Maybe Alan Beckett, or Jay Casterbridge, or Matthew Kenneally. Or all three of them, for all I knew. One of them could have grabbed her on Wednesday night. They could have stashed her somewhere—maybe in a house owned by Casterbridge Realty. They would have kept her bound, maybe drugged. Kenneally was a psychiatrist; he would have access to sedatives.

As for how the scenario had played out, I had only my wayward imagination to guide me. Maybe they had threatened her. Or the ordeal had worn her down. I imagined Alan Beckett leaning over her in some dark place, telling her this could all be over if she would just accept the offer he had made her. If she would drop the story about Callie and go back to writing vampire books.

And now she sat in my office, her arms crossed protectively. I tried to remember if I had ever seen her in long sleeves before.

“Show me your arms,” I said.

She uncrossed them, twining her fingers together in her lap. “Why?” There would be needle tracks if they had drugged her. Marks on her wrists from the rope or the duct tape, or whatever they had used. I wanted to see.

“Show me,” I said.

It would be easy to walk around the desk, take hold of a wrist, push the sleeve up her arm. I thought about doing it. Brought my foot down off the drawer. Lucy flinched at the movement, as if she was afraid of me, and I knew then that I wouldn't make her show me anything.

I went around to her slowly and she got to her feet. I put my hand out and after the smallest hesitation she put hers into it, warm slim fingers gliding over mine. She stepped close to me and I rested my chin on the top of her head.

“You can tell me,” I said, whispering the words to her hair. “I'll protect you.” A ridiculous promise, considering the job I'd done of protecting her so far.

Her head moved side to side.

“Was it Beckett?” I asked her.

She wouldn't answer me. We didn't say anything else, not in the elevator down to the lobby or between the lobby and the street. I opened the door of the van for her, and her architect nodded to me in a gentlemanly way. Closing the door, I stepped back and watched the van drive to the end of the block and around the corner.

The saxophonist was still at work in front of Café Felix. I walked over and dropped a couple dollars into the open case at his feet. I didn't recognize the tune he was playing, but it was something mournful.

T
he story of Lucy Navarro's reappearance was a pale, dull thing, and no one spent much energy reporting it. The
National Current
ran a paragraph on its website and nothing at all in its print edition. The tabloid had been more enamored of the story when it looked as if Lucy might have been murdered by an obsessed fan—a kid from Ohio who wanted to be a vampire.

The writers at the
Current
got a bit more mileage out of the news that Lark had died on Callie Spencer's doorstep—but even then I thought their hearts weren't quite in it. Members of the respectable press covered the story reluctantly. Most of them decided it didn't really have much to do with Callie: Lark was a lost soul who might have latched onto anyone. The pundits on the news shows all agreed that Callie had handled an unfortunate situation with grace. If anyone had asked me, I would have said the same.