Clay: “You forgave her?”
DuPree: “Why not? It was . . . it was in good faith.”
Clay: “What was?”
DuPree: “The ID. Naturally she’s upset about it, kind of wanting to know how it happened and all.”
Clay: “And what did you have to say about that?”
DuPree: “Not much. I told her mistakes happen.”
Clay: “That’s it? Mistakes happen?”
DuPree: “Yup.”
Clay: “What about the tape?”
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DuPree: “Truth is I don’t know much about that. My lawyers are the experts.”
Clay: “So you didn’t pass on any theories to my wife?”
DuPree: “Not a one. Aside from mistakes happen. What I’m trying to tell you, Chief, is I just want to move on.”
Nell heard another faint sound, maybe the fastening of a metal snap, the kind on a holster. Then Clay said, “Sounds like the right move. Two things to remember, Mr. DuPree. One—Belle Ville’s not the place for you. Two—the book’s not going to help you with moving on. Message clear?”
DuPree: “Yup.”
A key turned; an engine fired. Clay said: “Get out.”
Then, after a long pause: “And there’s a third thing, so obvious it’s hardly worth saying.”
DuPree: “What’s that?”
Clay: “If you see my wife again, talk to her, make contact in any way, I’ll kill you.”
And then silence. Nell didn’t understand. When had this happened? She needed some sort of timeline, maybe going back twenty years; it snarled in her mind before she could even begin. But way more important, Clay’s brutality knocked her completely off balance—she finally knew from hearing him on this recording that he was capable of murder. There was more: DuPree’s lies—they threw her, too. DuPree hadn’t forgiven her at all, so why would he tell Clay that he had? And what had he said about theories: that he hadn’t passed on any to her? What about that scene of Clay and him down in the cells?
And when you’re locked up I hope she’ll be grateful. She’s
one hot babe.
Nell didn’t understand. She was missing so much. Was it possible she’d misheard the recording, or misinterpreted what she had heard?
She hit the back button, then play.
“Two—the book’s not going to help you with moving on. Message clear?” Was DuPree’s motive somewhere in there? Had there been a disagreement between him and Lee Ann, something that had set him off, caused him to—
Nell heard someone coming up the stairs, very fast. She pressed
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off
, tucked the recorder and note in her pocket, and turned, raising the gun. A man—not DuPree—ran through the open doorway, splintered door remains cracking under his feet. Clay? Yes, Clay: for a moment, she hadn’t even recognized him. Two men in full SWAT-team outfits charged in after him. They saw Nell, halted, snapped their rifles up, took aim. The
Guernica
reproduction fell off the wall with a crash.
“Don’t shoot,” Clay said, waving the men back. And to Nell:
“Drop that fucking gun.”
She dropped it.
Clay came closer. “Who’s here?”
“No one. Me.”
“I heard you talking.”
“I wasn’t.”
He faced her, probably looking expressionless to everyone else, but grim to her. “I told you to lock yourself in the bathroom.”
Nell said nothing, just tried to stop shaking. She could hear the SWAT men breathing behind their face shields; their chests heaved.
“Search the place,” Clay said, his eyes staying on Nell.
“There’s no one here,” Nell said. “Except Lee Ann. She’s . . . she’s in the closet.” Clay watched her face; his expression didn’t change.
The SWAT men hurried into the bedroom, rifles raised. Clay bent down, picked up the pink-handled gun. “This yours?”
“Of course not—you know that,” Nell said. “It’s Lee Ann’s.”
“Who got shot?” Clay said.
“Nobody,” Nell said. “He . . . he beat her. I told you.”
“Then what’s that?” said Clay. He pointed to a shell casing on the floor, bright and clear on the gleaming hardwood outside Lee Ann’s bedroom; how had she missed it? Clay moved closer to the shell casing, then spotted something else. Nell followed his gaze; and she spotted it, too: a drop on the floor, oblong, dark-colored—possibly a deep shade of red. And there were others, some bigger, some smaller, marking a trail to the front door. Clay had already taken that in. He moved into the bedroom. Sirens sounded, coming from all directions. Nell walked over to one of those deep red drops and
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touched it with the tip of her finger: not wet, or even sticky, but completely dry.
Crime scene investigators
came; and soon the M.E. They took photographs, took measurements, took Lee Ann away. The SWAT team searched the whole building. Clay ordered the duty captain sent over from One Marigot. For a minute or two, Clay and Nell were alone in Lee Ann’s apartment. He gave her a look, intimate and strange at the same time. Nell knew she was looking at him in the same way.
“What happened to your arm?” he said.
“I’m fine.”
Clay opened Lee Ann’s freezer, approached her with an ice pack.
He moved as though to lay it on her shoulder, but stopped himself and handed it to her instead.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. Nell felt the weight of the recorder in her pocket.
Like so many electronic devices, it seemed to have a primitive intelligence, but this recorder had developed some sort of will, too: she felt its desire to come out in the open, get handed over to her husband.
Deputy Chief Darryll Pines walked in, a little breathless from climbing the stairs.
“What are you doing here?” Clay said.
Darryll looked surprised. “Didn’t you ask for the duty captain?”
he said. “I was on, noon to eight.”
A vein pulsed in Clay’s neck. “I want you to take Nell’s statement,”
he said.
“Whatever you say.”
“And I’d like to listen in, if that’s all right with you,” Clay said.
Darryll shrugged. “You can run the whole show, if you want.”
“I told you what I want.”
“Yes, sir.”
They sat in Lee Ann’s living room, Nell on the sofa, Darryll in an easy chair, Clay on a stool he brought over from the bar. Darryll took out a notebook, rested it on his belly.
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“So, uh, ma’am,” he said, “what was it brought you over here in the first place?”
“Lee Ann and I were supposed to meet for lunch,” Nell said. “She didn’t show up and I couldn’t reach her. I got worried.”
“This lunch date, what time was that?”
“Twelve-thirty, at Foodie and Company.”
“And you got here?”
“Around five.”
“What happened then?”
Nell told her story: the painter letting her in the building, finding Lee Ann’s door broken down, her first sight of DuPree, hunched over Lee Ann’s body, fumbling with her skirt.
“Rape kit,” Darryll muttered to himself. He made a note, the pen tiny in his thick fingers. “And then?”
“He saw me and said, ‘She’s dead.’”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“I accused him of murder.”
“Yeah? What was his reaction?”
“He said something about not letting me frame him again. Then he attacked me.”
“What did he mean by that—not letting you frame him?”
Nell felt Clay’s eyes on her. “I think he was referring to my eyewitness testimony in the Blanton case.”
“Oh, right,” said Darryll. “Stupid of me.” He made another note; it seemed to take a long time. “The attack—now, how did that go?”
Nell described the attack, not well. When she came to the part about the gun falling loose from the force of the blow, she glanced at Clay. He was watching her, no strangeness now in his expression, instead the husbandly expression of a man who cared. But he caught her glance and everything changed.
“So once you got the gun, he booked?” Darryll said.
“Yes.”
“Any idea where he—”
Clay’s cell phone rang. He answered, listened for thirty seconds or so, clicked off. “There are no bullet wounds on the body,” he said.
“But the gun was fired.” He turned to Nell. “Was DuPree bleeding?”
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“Not that I saw.”
“Any sign he’d been hit? Was he limping, for example?”
“No,” Nell said.
“Think she shot him?” Darryll said.
“We’ve got a shell casing but no bullet hole,” Clay said. “And a bloody trail leading out the door.”
Darryll nodded. “He come at her,” he said. “She put a bullet in him, but not in the right place, not enough to stop him. He did what he did, with a hammer or whatever, took it with him.”
“Something like that,” said Clay.
“I didn’t see a hammer,” Nell said.
“Or could have had a tire iron down his pant leg,” Darryll said.
“So now we go get ’im? Unless there’s more you want me to go over here, Chief.”
“Is there more, Nell?” Clay said. They exchanged a look. There was more, lots more, and she saw him registering that on her face.
But she couldn’t trust him. “No,” she said.
“Then we go get him,” Clay said.
“Thought of one more thing,” Darryll said.
“What’s that?” said Clay, looking impatient.
“Maybe not important, but I should of asked if there was anything special about the lunch.”
“I don’t understand,” Nell said.
“Reason for meeting, kinda thing,” said Darryll.
“We’re friends,” said Nell.
“Gotcha.” Darryll made one last note, missing the angry glance Clay shot him. Then he rose, a little unsteady, and started for the doorway, favoring his left leg. “Goddamn arthritis,” he said.
Nell hung the
Guernica
reproduction back on the wall. She couldn’t get it to line up straight.
Timmy drove Nell home. His uniform was crisply ironed and he smelled of aftershave; lots of it, but not enough to smother completely the Bernardine smell. For the first time, Nell realized she might end up living somewhere else, maybe far away.
She went into the house and immediately got a strange feeling, the feeling of revisiting a place lived in long ago. But this was her house, the house she loved, and lived in now, so what was going on?
She called Norah, got no answer. “Norah, I need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Call as soon as you get this. Please.”
Hanging up, she noticed the cruiser, still parked in the driveway, windows open, Timmy behind the wheel, eating an apple. She went outside.
“Timmy?”
He glanced at her quickly, dropped the apple out of sight, as though caught doing something bad. “Ma’am?”
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you having car trouble?”
“Don’t think so, ma’am.”
Nell remembered how Timmy had told Clay about her visit to the Ambassador Suites, and her voice hardened, despite Timmy’s fresh face and good manners. “Then what are you still doing here?”
He turned bright red. “Very sorry,” he said. “Orders.”
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“Orders?”
“The chief wants me to remain on location,” Timmy said. “For protection, what with the killer on the loose, and all.”
“I don’t think it’s necessary,” Nell said.
“Very, very sorry,” said Timmy. “Orders.”
“But it’s my house. This is my driveway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Timmy.
He looked miserable, but something in her didn’t want to relent, even prodded her to push harder, kick the car, key the shiny paintwork, make the kind of irrational statement that she had never even been tempted by in her life so far. Instead she turned on her heel and strode back in the house. She heard Timmy’s sigh of relief, but she was in the front hall by that time, door closed, so it must have been her imagination.
Nell went up to her office, sat down. She took out the digital recorder, listened once more. Easy to understand why DuPree had said nothing to Clay about the scene in the cells, but if Clay had been asking about that night, if events had really happened the way DuPree had told her and both men knew it, they why would Clay have called it a theory? It would have been a fact, a cold-blooded setup that explained almost everything. And why had DuPree told Clay that he’d forgiven her, that it had been a mistake? If the scene in the cells had happened, then the whole mistaken identity story would have been nonsense to both men. And therefore?
On a sheet of paper, Nell drew little boxes. Someone killed Johnny, and that someone was not Alvin DuPree. DuPree gets out of jail, soon kills Lee Ann. And someone shot Nappy Ferris—according to Sheriff Lanier, that case was now wide open. One known, two unknowns; at least to her. But in Johnny’s case, Nell was almost sure two people knew: Clay and Duke. She remembered Duke’s blush—
brighter than Timmy’s, although not much freshness remained on Duke’s face—when she’d suggested he knew the identity of Johnny’s murderer. And Clay was Duke’s best friend; they were like brothers, went way back.
Her pen trailed off the paper. She just wasn’t smart enough to figure this out; it required a brain like Johnny’s. That was the kind of
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cheap irony that had never appealed to her in art or in life. “Think.”
She said it aloud. What had she left out? Bobby, of course. She drew another box, wrote his name inside.
Bobby.
Had the tape been in his locker all those years? Once, at the police picnic, she and Bobby had worked the grill together. He’d told her a funny joke, made her laugh. What did the duck say to the horse? Answer: Why the long face? Had he been thinking at the same time:
Laugh, honey, but you don’t understand the most important
event of your whole life
? And, so much worse, but undeniable no matter what the play-out: Clay had known that, too, known the depth of her delusion.
Who else? Her world was divided, had been divided for a long time, between those who knew more about her than she did, and all the others. Who else was in that first group? Veronica? At that moment, Nell remembered Lee Ann’s last call:
I just want to thank
you for your help with Veronica Rice.
And then:
Whatever you told
her did the trick. We had a very productive talk.