Very Bad Men (9 page)

“She should be in bed,” Elizabeth said in a hushed voice.

“I tried to tell her she shouldn't wait up. She didn't go along.”

“Imagine that.”

“She's strong-willed.”

The girl is not my daughter, just as Elizabeth is not my wife and her house is not my house. But it's a near thing. It's close. It's
almost
.

A great many things about my life are almost.

One night a long time ago, I got into a fight with a very bad man on the top level of a parking garage. He died, and I was almost convicted of murder. Last year, Elizabeth and I got tangled up with another very bad man in the woods of Marshall Park, and I almost got her killed, and almost died myself.

These days I spend most of my nights in her bed. I eat at her table. I'm teaching her daughter how to drive. And though her house is not mine, it almost is. I come and go as I like. I pay half the mortgage every month. I keep a toothbrush and a change of clothes in the
Gray Streets
office, and on nights when I work late I sometimes sleep there, on a sofa in the storage room. But apart from that, everything I have is here, in this house.

I try to keep my distance from her work. Her colleagues in the police department have accepted our relationship—almost. But they'd rather not be reminded of me. Crime in the city of Ann Arbor is Elizabeth's business, not mine. Technically I shouldn't ask her about cases, and she shouldn't tell me.

Tonight, as Elizabeth sat back in the chair across from me, as her daughter slept a few feet away, I almost kept my curiosity in check.

“What did you find out about the man in the plaid shirt and the safari hat?”

Elizabeth touched the string of glass beads at her throat before she answered me.

“He wore a different hat when he assaulted Sutton Bell tonight,” she said.

“That's devious.”

She gave me the details of the attack on Bell. It didn't sound like she held out much hope of finding the man in plaid.

“We could've had his fingerprints,” she said, “but the Eightball Saloon has what must be the most efficient bartender in town. He wiped down the bar after Mr. Plaid left, and sent his glass to the kitchen to be washed.”

“Maybe he left his prints on the manuscript I gave you,” I suggested.

“Maybe.” She didn't think so. I didn't either.

“I pieced together a description from Bell and some of the other witnesses,” she told me, “but I don't know what it'll be worth. We'll work up a composite.”

I picked up a sketch pad from the coffee table, found the right page, and passed it to her. The page held a pencil sketch of the man I had seen at the Art Fair—hat and sunglasses and all.

“Sarah did this?” she asked me.

I nodded. “I only saw him from across the street. She did a good job with what I could give her. The basics are there: the length of his jaw, the shape of his mouth.”

“It should help.”

Elizabeth put the sketch pad back on the table and picked up a sheaf of papers lying there—a copy of the man in plaid's manuscript. I'd made it that evening, before I turned the original over to her. I'd done my best to preserve any evidence the pages might contain, even though I'd already handled them. I figured running them through a photocopier would be a bad idea, so instead I used a digital camera to snap a picture of each page, then loaded the images onto my office computer and printed them out. I thought I was entitled; the manuscript had been left at
Gray Streets,
after all.

It hadn't been left there by chance.

I understood it as soon as I read the first line.
I killed Henry Kormoran . . .
I knew that name. I knew a little something about the Great Lakes Bank robbery.

A few months back, I read a newspaper article about Callie Spencer and got curious about her history. I did some research on the robbery and found the details intriguing—especially the part about the fifth robber, the one who never got caught. I kept turning the scenario over in my mind, and eventually I used it as a springboard for a short story.

I published the story under a pseudonym in
Gray Streets
. The man in plaid must have read it there. I had to assume that was what brought him to the hallway outside my office door.

So I thought I was entitled to a copy of his manuscript. I don't know if Elizabeth agreed with me, but she returned the pages to the coffee table without comment. She had her own copy. I could see it poking out of a pocket of her handbag.

“Have you read it?” I asked her.

“Not all the way through.”

I'd read the thing twice while I waited for her to come home. I didn't like it either time.

“You should read it,” I said, “and we'll talk about it after.”

She shot me a half-amused look. “Will we?”

“I've been thinking. If you're going up north I think I should go with you.”

Her amusement turned to puzzlement. “Why would I go up north?”

“You'll see, once you've read it,” I said, and then I added the words I'd been rehearsing while I waited. “I don't want you to go alone. I know how things are, with budget cuts in the department. They might be tempted to send just one person. I assume they'll keep an eye on Sutton Bell, and that'll take a lot of manpower. So if they send you up north, I'll go with you.”

“David, what are you talking about?” She reached for her copy of the manuscript. “What's in here?” she said. “Why would they send me up north?”

I glanced at the sketch on the coffee table.

“Because the man in plaid has been there,” I told her. “Part of his story is set there—in Sault Sainte Marie. The opening pages are about Henry Kormoran, and the last line is about Sutton Bell, but the middle . . . the middle is all about Terry Dawtrey.”

T
he drive from Ann Arbor to Sault Sainte Marie is three hundred forty miles. Take Route 23 and I-75 and you can make it in a little over five hours, not counting stops. As you travel north beyond Flint and Saginaw, the urban gives way to the rural, and fields and trees come to dominate the landscape. Off behind those trees are sparkling lakes you won't see from the highway. There are cabins on the shore, places where city dwellers go to escape the heat of the Michigan summer.

When you approach the tip of the state's Lower Peninsula you find tourist towns that want to sell you stuffed moose dolls and T-shirts silk-screened with images of black bears. Every other shop boasts gourmet fudge. The Mackinac Bridge is a tourist attraction in itself—five miles of steel and cables passing over the straits that join Lake Michigan to Lake Huron.

On the other side lies the Upper Peninsula and fifty more miles of I-75 before you reach Sault Sainte Marie on the border with Canada. Elizabeth and I arrived in the evening on Thursday and drove out to the edge of the Saint Mary's River. We watched the light fade over the rough water before doubling back to check in to our hotel.

We'd made a late start. It had taken Owen McCaleb a while to make up his mind to send Elizabeth north. Then we had to pack the car and make arrangements for Sarah to stay with Bridget Shellcross. We didn't get on the road until midafternoon.

On Friday morning we rose early and drove to the Chippewa County Sheriff's office, a tan brick building on Court Street. The sheriff met us in the lobby. Walter Delacorte: six feet tall with broad shoulders and a stomach that bulged without quite seeming fat. He put on a pair of amber-lensed sunglasses and walked us down the block to a diner with a CALLIE SPENCER FOR SENATE sign in the window.

“You've come a terrible long way,” he said, “and you at least deserve a good breakfast. I'd hate to see you leave disappointed.”

The smell of bacon and strong coffee hit us as soon as we stepped inside. A waitress led us past a long counter to a booth in the back, away from the other customers. We made small talk over omelets, Delacorte inquiring about our drive and my line of work. He turned out to be a fan of crime fiction. Only after the waitress cleared our plates away did he and Elizabeth get down to business.

“I understand why you've come,” said Delacorte, “but I'm not sure I can help you. I've got my doubts about whether the man you're looking for was ever in Sault Sainte Marie.”

“Did you read the manuscript I sent you?” she asked him, unfolding a copy on the table. The man in plaid's manifesto. She had faxed Delacorte the pages before we left Ann Arbor.

“I've read it,” he said. “It makes a good yarn, and I can see why you thought you should pass it along. But I'm not convinced. Put yourself in my shoes.”

He tapped the pages with a thick finger. “Whoever wrote this claims to have murdered Charlie Dawtrey. But I've got a man in custody for that—fella named Kyle Scudder. He got into a fight with Dawtrey. That's a fact. It happened at the Cozy Inn over in Brimley. And a few hours later Dawtrey got beaten to death. There's no mystery about what happened.”

Delacorte leaned back and rolled his broad shoulders. His gray uniform fit him well; it seemed to have been tailored to accommodate his stomach. He had eyes of a lighter gray, and black hair streaked with silver.

“As for Terry Dawtrey,” he said, “that's no mystery either. They let him out of prison for his father's funeral and he made a run for it. One of my deputies had to shoot him. I wish to hell it hadn't happened, but there it is. It doesn't need explaining. Now you come along with this story that's supposed to have been written by a man who was at the cemetery that day.” The sheriff's finger tapped the manuscript again. “He claims to have been on the hill with a rifle. Says he fired a shot at Dawtrey and missed. But nobody I've talked to saw him there. He's a phantom. So what am I supposed to do with this information? You might just as well tell me that my car runs because there are gremlins turning the wheels.”

Elizabeth nodded toward the manuscript. “If he wasn't there, then how do you explain this?”

“It's a piece of creative writing.”

“It's pretty detailed.”

Delacorte's eyes looked kindly. “I agree, it's not bad. But there's really nothing there you couldn't pick up from the news coverage.”

“The man who wrote this described how he killed Henry Kormoran,” Elizabeth said. “And he didn't get it from the news, because he wrote it before Kormoran's body was discovered.”

“Then it sounds like he killed Kormoran. That's for you to work out, down there in Ann Arbor. And I'm responsible for the Dawtreys up here.”

“He also made a threat against Sutton Bell on the last page. And Bell was later attacked. Bell, Kormoran, and Terry Dawtrey were all involved in the Great Lakes Bank robbery. Doesn't it make sense to assume these cases are related?”

The sheriff ran his tongue over his front teeth thoughtfully.

“I don't doubt that they're related,” he said. “Maybe you've got a copycat on your hands down there. Maybe he heard about Dawtrey getting shot and decided it was a wonderful thing. Maybe he thought someone should take out Kormoran and Bell too—and figured he was just the man to do it. But that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to take credit for the Dawtreys too. So he wrote up this story.”

“So it's fiction?”

“As far as the Dawtreys are concerned. I've got no reason to think otherwise. The evidence just isn't there.”

The waitress came by to refill our coffee. Delacorte loaded his with sugar and cream.

“Could we talk about the evidence, then?” Elizabeth asked him.

He stirred his cup. “You've come all this way. We can talk about anything you like.”

Elizabeth smoothed back a lock of her hair and said, “I'm curious about Kyle Scudder, the man you think killed Charlie Dawtrey. You said they got into a fight. What started it?”

“The usual,” Delacorte said. “They got into it over a woman. Gal named Madelyn Turner. She and Dawtrey were married for a while, years ago. They've got a son, around fifteen years old. The boy stayed with her after the marriage ended.”

“Why did it end?”

“You'd be better off asking why it started. Charlie Dawtrey was already pushing sixty when he met Madelyn; she would've been forty or so. He was never any prize. Worked at lousy jobs all his life. But Madelyn was considered a beauty in her day. She went through a string of men. Some of them wealthy, successful.

“She lasted about three years with Dawtrey, then took up with a fella named Alden Turner and stayed with him seven years before he passed away.”

Delacorte drank some coffee before continuing. “I don't think Dawtrey ever really got over her. They stayed in touch—they had the son together. Kyle Scudder started seeing her a few months ago. I suspect he didn't realize the difference in their ages. Madelyn's in her mid-fifties now, but she tries not to look it. Scudder is forty-two. They met when she hired him to do some landscaping at her house. He fell for her. Got to be jealous of her spending time with Charlie Dawtrey. He caught them together at the Cozy Inn that night. The fight started when Charlie put a hand on Madelyn in a way Kyle Scudder didn't like.”

“What does Scudder have to say?” Elizabeth asked. “Does he admit to killing Dawtrey?”

“He denies it. Says he was with Madelyn at her place all night.”

“What does she say?”

“Depends on when you ask her. At first she said Scudder followed her home from the Cozy but she didn't let him in—because she was angry about the way he'd treated Charlie. Then she changed her story. Said she and Scudder spent the night together.”