Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (7 page)

I had a job to quit, and maybe two.

L
uster's place was east of the Vale on a pleasant cut of land between the Little Grassy and Devil's Kitchen lakes called Baker's Crossroads. The house sat atop a low hummock surrounded by crown vetch and big bur oaks at the edge of a narrow track of road called Knight Hawk. I guess a county commissioner owed a favor. At the bottom of the hummock was a lagoon, now nearly black with algae, and some knots of paling knotweed and loosestrife. A family of hackberries surrendered their mottled leaves and the autumn gusts caught them and tossed them around like ticker tape.

I left the bike at the bottom of the hill and got off and walked up. Some underemployed birds lifted off the road and fluttered southward on spotted wings, but otherwise nothing stirred. The lady at the mine was right: the house was as big as Soldier, with a little left over. You could have stuffed our place at Indian Vale into the little left over and still had room for a head or two of cattle. There was a car in the drive, a white Lincoln shining under coats of wax. There was a fountain with a statue of a naked lady and some neatly coiffed box hedges. There were some of those solar lights you stake in the ground to form a path to the front door, but a couple of the lights had been kicked over, and one of them had been stepped on and busted. Neither Jonathan nor the old man struck me as especially clumsy, and the sight of this small disorder made my throat tighten in an unhappy way.

I went up to the door and tried the bell and heard it
chime prettily behind the thickness of the wooden frame. I waited a moment, then checked my watch, rocking on my heels a little in an attempt to be casual. Then I knocked and tried the handle and the unlocked door swung open, the expensive weather stripping releasing its hold with a swoosh. I stopped being casual. I could smell what was inside immediately: a hint of smoke and the sharp tang of cordite. A house that big, maybe there was a shooting range inside. With the One Percenters, you never knew.

I went in to find it. I called out Luster's name and Jonathan's but nobody answered. I took a day or so to search the downstairs part of the house before I found the kitchen, where I slid a knife out from a wooden block on the counter. I was coming down with an anxious feeling, and a knife made me feel a little better about things. I went back to the front and climbed some thickly carpeted stairs into the upper reaches of the house and walked down a wide hallway and finally into a bedroom, last door on the left. It was a big, bright space with an odd kind of industrial Bandraster ceiling of exposed metal beams. There was a chifforobe and dresser and a closet that might have doubled as a hangar. There was a long gun mounted on the wall, an A. H. Fox double-barrel with scrolled engraving and an inspector's cartouche stamped 1906. A beautiful weapon. On the south wall was a wooden frame, and in the frame a chunk of coal the size of a derby hat. A bay window overlooked the oaky woodland spreading west and the rocky spine of the hills nearer the horizon. All that was interesting, but Luster was more interesting.

He was on the bed, on top of the sheets. On one of the acorn newels was a beaver-pelt Stetson. On the other was a
six-shooter in a patent leather holster. None of it had done him any good. He was in his boxers and shirtless, on his back, facing the ceiling with his feet and arms spread, and there were holes in the top of his chest and holes and blood spatters on the beams and ceiling directly above. Part of the ceiling had broken away, and the bedspread and Luster were covered in a thin white dust. Here and there, his blood and the powder had mingled to form a kind of plaster on his naked chest.

I checked his vitals but there wasn't any doubt about it. The skies had fallen. Matthew Luster was dead.

I
called the cops, and the cops came. Not just cops—
all
the cops. They surrounded the property: radio cars and county sheriffs' prowlers and evidence vans and Illinois State Police unmarkeds. They overran the cobbled driveway until the later cops were forced to park all the way down the steeply sloped lawn, so far out that technically they weren't even in Baker's Crossroads. An ambulance was grudgingly permitted to park in the grass near the front door.

Then they questioned me, up one side and down another. They wanted to know about me and what I was doing snooping around at the residence. They wanted to know about the knife I was holding. I told them knives didn't fire bullets. When they were finally satisfied I hadn't done anything bloody they started to ignore me, distracted by the crime scene and trying to contain the chaos they themselves had created. I put the knife back in its block and wandered around a little, listening in on some of their talk. Then I slipped outside and wandered around the back of the house to see what I could see. No one stopped me or even seemed
to notice my presence. There were too many cops for anyone to think of policing anything. Every cop in the tricounties must have been there. There were cops in the grass. There were cops on the roof. The garage door lifted on its arm and a crowd of cops came burping out, as though the house had swallowed too many to keep down.

After a while, Jonathan arrived. His arms were full of groceries. The big cop with soft eyes from that first day at the Knight Hawk appeared out of nowhere to explain what had happened, and the groceries dropped from the boy's arms and some of the items rolled out of their bags and down the hill and into a ditch. A can of creamed corn floated away. Jonathan wept into his hands. Some things they don't prepare you for at business school. As I approached, both men looked up at me.

Jonathan said, “Thank God you're here.”

“I'm here,” I said. “I'm afraid I'm the one who found him. But I don't know what good I can do.”

The big cop stuck out his hand.

“You must be Slim,” he said. “I'm Sheriff Wince. Now that they've taken your statement, son, I'm eager we speak.”

O
n account of his name kept coming up, I'd asked my buddy in the Williamson County sheriff's about this Ben Wince. The story of how he'd attained office was a pretty good one, and here it is:

Wince was a local boy with a reputation for honesty, but it'd taken a botched suicide to win him his star. For twenty years, he'd languished away as deputy, and then one day Sheriff Edelson, who'd held the office so long almost no one could remember the last guy, began slipping into dementia.
And when I say “dementia,” I don't mean he left the house without shoes or forgot his Social Security number. This was the real deal. Edelson launched drug sweeps of churches, social groups, and preschools. He developed insane conspiracies and let them mushroom into office-wide investigations. When the federal government started spreading around some of that post-9/11 money, he used Randolph County's share to buy an armored antiriot vehicle. Got his office written up in the Chicago papers for that one, and not in a good way. Before long, even the major crimes unit of the Illinois State Police stopped returning his calls. Innocent citizens were harassed, and one night a high school boy was pulled from his car on a lonely county road and beaten nearly to death in front of his date. But even crazy behavior behind the county shield wasn't enough to stop the law-and-order crowd from voting him back into office.

Then, one morning not long before election day, Edelson was refilling his coffee at the station house when suddenly he paused to stare squint-eyed out the window. There was a squirrel on the sill, staring back. Edelson scowled at the squirrel. The squirrel scratched his nut. Edelson couldn't abide that. It was too much to endure, these derisive squirrels freely roaming the countryside. All his efforts at law enforcement had come to naught. He did the honorable thing: he unholstered his service weapon and shot himself in the head.

In one of those freak things, the bullet didn't kill him, but it did complete the job of scrambling his brains, turning him into a vegetable. The public took in the sad news, reflected soberly on what it all meant, and again returned Edelson to office. In a landslide. Only when a civil case was
launched by the parents of the assaulted boy, and a settlement quietly reached, was Felix Edelson shuffled quietly out of office for reason of mental incapacity, pension intact. Wince had been sheriff ever since, though a statistically significant portion of county voters apparently viewed his rise as opportunistic and he was reelected only by the slimmest margins.

W
e went into the house. Wince asked Jonathan to join us, but he refused and instead stayed outside, collecting his fallen groceries and shivering against the cold and an unfolding nightmare. A plainclothesman came huffing down the grand staircase, followed by a nervous-looking guy with no hair and a patent leather bag like in the movies.

Wince said, “Well?”

“He's dead.”

“Is there anything science
can't
do?”

The little guy ignored him. “With prejudice, too. I don't think I've seen one like this before.”

Wince said, “And here I thought you'd seen everything.”

The little guy didn't like that. He was one of those folks who wore his exasperation like a sign on his head. He rubbed his mustache with his thumb in a funny way and sneered and said, “Go on up. See for yourself.”

Wince looked at me. “You've already been up there, so you might as well come up with me. Besides, I want a word with you, just the two of us.”

I didn't want to—I didn't need to see any of that again—but this seemed like more than a polite request. Up we went, back down the hall and into the bedroom. The body was where I'd left it and the blood and its smell.

Wince said, “Holy shit.”

“That's understating things a little.”

Wince nodded agreement. He crouched down to take a look beneath the bed. There were shallow indentations in the carpet and numbered tents here and there to mark them. At last, he sighed and rose heavily again to his feet. There was a copy of the ME's notes on the bedside table. Wince picked them up, and looked at them a moment, and said, “Shooter under the bed, waited for him to lie down. Probably worried he'd be armed. Probably good thinking, too. There are more guns in the house than spoons. You saw the Fox over there?”

“I saw it. Thing's worth more than my house.”

“Both our houses added together.” He looked at the report some more and then looked at Luster. “Five in the chest, closely grouped, no misses. Pretty good work. Or pretty lucky.”

“Depends on which end of the barrel you were on.”

“That's a point,” he said.

“There's something else,” I said. “A burn mark on his upper lip.”

He stood over the bed and looked closely and didn't see it at first, but then he said, “Goddamn, you know what, I think you're right.”

“It wasn't there when I saw him yesterday.”

Wince snapped on a glove and carefully opened Luster's mouth and looked inside. Then he looked up at me.

“He's been shot in the mouth.”

“Head's intact, though.”

“Looks like small caliber. Little twenty-two, maybe. Basically a pellet gun. Not the gun that killed him, that's for sure. Killer scorched his lip with the barrel,” he said. “That's a good eye you got on you, son.”

I said, “Dwayne Mays was shot in the ear. Luster in the mouth.”

“After he was dead.”

I nodded. “After he was dead. Some kind of message? Dwayne listened to the wrong people, Luster talked to the wrong people? Or talked too much?”

“Could be,” Wince said. “Except Dwayne's wound was fatal, not an afterthought. And he was a newspaper reporter, not a broadcaster. You wanted to send a message, wouldn't you cut off his fingers or something instead?”

“Hell, I don't know. It was just an idea.”

Wince said, “My experience, things don't go down like that. The killer doesn't leave behind a playing card or a miniature dollhouse version of the crime scene or whatever they do in the movies. You wish maybe they would sometimes. It'd be easy to narrow a list of suspects down to, say, the guy with all the antique pocket watches.”

“Probably.”

“Well, don't feel bad. It's a common mistake. And look at the bright side, you've given me something to rub in that little shit Dunphy's face. He completely missed this business with the bullet in the mouth,” Wince said. He thought it over for a moment and then turned back to look at Luster's body and said, “You got any sense of what it's all about?”

“Me? Why would I?”

“Boy downstairs says you were working for the old man, poking around looking for this photographer went missing.”

I said, “Looking and looking badly. Truth is, I was on my way this morning to turn in my resignation. I'm not even sure what they thought I could do for them.”

“Me, either,” he said. “Least not yet. One thing, though, you've had yourself one hell of a day.”

“More like hell of an afternoon. Whatever's happening here is happening fast. Somebody's working with a sense of urgency.”

“Seems that way.”

“Maybe this is the part where you read me the riot act for mucking around in police business?”

He shrugged and said, “Maybe it is. And I guess I ought to. But way I see it is this—and let me know if I've got anything wrong here—Luster basically made you an offer you couldn't walk away from. The boy out there filled me in on the details. I don't know you'd find many cops would sneer at you for grabbing that deal, way our own pensions are going these days.”

“Thanks.”

“Don't thank me yet,” he said. “I'm not saying you were entirely above-board on this, either. Fact is, I think you weren't crazy about the assignment, but you went along anyway, thinking you could maybe ask a few questions and do a little light lifting and basically fart around until the police cleared the case or Beckett came home on his own or Luster came to his senses and called the whole thing off.”