Suicide Season (22 page)

“Perhaps.” More likely gloating in ways that would be difficult for Mrs. Faulk to comprehend. But not impossible for me, because I knew that in all of us was the seed of that satisfaction in hurting someone. It seemed so long ago now that Susan had seen it surface in me, and it was still there when I thought about those two. The seed of willful destruction in all of us, my father had called it, whether the destruction of others or of ourselves. And, he’d added, the two were usually one. Words of wisdom from a man who was to destroy himself. Words, at least. And maybe words that only measured the limits of wisdom without leading us to the goal.

I gave Susan a final hug before we left and this time, with a silently mouthed hint from Bunch, she managed my name and we all clapped and smiled and she looked pleased with herself. In the car, Bunch broke the silence once to say, “She’s going to make it.” And I answered, “Yes.”

We were swinging with the column of traffic through the stoplight leading onto University Boulevard when, in the rearview mirror, I glimpsed a car that seemed vaguely familiar—a nondescript sedan of modest, tan color. I’d seen it in the mirror recently, and now it seemed to hover at a fixed distance behind us.

“What’s wrong?” Bunch didn’t look back but watched my eyes study the mirror.

“Maybe we’ve picked up the scumbags. Let’s find out.”

“Don’t rush it, Dev. Go on down to I-25.”

We did, arcing through the cloverleaf that fed into the northbound lanes. Behind, the tan car blinked its turn and followed, two or three vehicles back. I held my speed steady on the freeway, just over the fifty-five limit, which meant that ninety percent of the cars zipped past in the fast lanes. But not the tan one. Sometimes dropping back, shifting occasionally from one lane to another, the car always managed to glide closer with the approach of every off-ramp and to fall away when the exit had been passed.

“I think we got us one, Dev. I think we got a nibble.”

“Let’s see if we can hook him.”

Signaling the turn at the Sixth Avenue exit, I led the tan car south on Kalamath and into the tangle of over-and-underpasses that made that area a bewildering snarl of sharp turns and dead-end streets. Other traffic sloughed off heading for the factory or warehouse or distributor’s office that the roads serviced, but the tan vehicle, torn between coming too close or losing us on one of the sharp angles, hung at the edge of vision. Lumbering across an aged bridge over the South Platte, I led it through the Valverde neighborhood and finally to an almost empty stretch of pitted and forgotten highway that wound along the west bank of the river. There we stopped.

“What’s it doing?”

“Sitting.”

“How many?”

Where the road’s curve pinched away in the rear-view mirror, I could make out a pair of shadows against the glare of the car’s windshield. “Two.”

“You got a weapon?”

I’d started carrying it. “Yes.”

“Let’s get out and look at the river.” Bunch glanced at the cylinder of his pistol and moved the hammer off the single empty chamber.

Unhurriedly, we opened the doors and strolled up the small berm and over it to the strip of asphalt that formed a bike path just above the high-water mark. A thick screen of trees curtained off the far bank and through the trunks I could see the flow of the river, muddy with spring runoff, spitting and boiling against shoals of boulders and then smoothing again where the bottom evened out in thick, black mud.

“They’re coming.”

Bunch stretched his shoulders and pretended not to watch the car move slowly toward us, its top glinting above the rise of ground. I tossed a rock or two toward a pair of mallards tipping their bottoms up in the shallows and waited.

But nothing happened. The car’s roof slowed almost to a stop, hesitated, then gradually picked up speed and glided out of sight around the next bend, withdrawing like the nervous tentacle of something that waits hungrily in a crevice on the bed of the sea.

“Damn!”

T
HE THREAT HOVERED
on the fringe of consciousness like a dark, blurred shape that disappeared when you turned to look at it. But which always came back so that you almost got used to it. Almost, but not quite, and the corner of your mind that guarded the thing would wake up if it moved or grew or changed shape in any way. But it wasn’t something you focused your whole life on; there were too many other things to do, and Carrie Busey’s death was the thing of the moment. It was not only a cold trail but one scrambled by the heavy feet of police detectives who had gone over the evidence first. We didn’t find much that the police had not already gathered, and Bunch had to use up a lot of good will and even go in debt here and there to get what he could out of official files and, equally important, unofficial gossip.

“What it boils down to, Dev, is a killing that should have a motive but nobody can come up with one.”

“It’s definitely not a stranger-to-stranger or a thrill killing?”

“Everybody I talked to said it doesn’t feel that way.” He shrugged. “No evidence, of course, but that’s how they feel about it. They’ve still got their suspicions about Landrum.”

That had shown up between the lines of the official investigation. Landrum and Busey had been seen together a number of times; and she frequented his apartment, even letting herself in with her own key, neighbors had reported. As cynical as it sounded, homicide detectives always looked closely at the friends and relatives of a victim as the most likely to have a motive. And half the time they were right.

“They even think he might have hired somebody to do it,” said Bunch. “Hired somebody, set up his alibi, and then called her over there.”

“He could have. But why? What the hell would he gain from killing her? And paying someone a lot of money to do it?”

Bunch thought a minute. “Maybe he found out where the Aegis payoff is and didn’t want to split it?”

I didn’t trust Landrum all that much either, but seeing him as the killer made no sense. “Then why did he panic and call us when he found her? Why not just wait until morning as he finally did, and leave us out of it altogether?”

Bunch had no answer for that one, and it didn’t help his disposition. “Yeah. And the only reason he’d have done it—the only reason he ever does a damn thing—is for money. And if he got that much money out of it, he wouldn’t be wasting his time working for us at a hundred a day. Crap.”

We pored over Landrum’s notes and the reports to Busey that dealt with his surveillance of Margaret. He had said that he was afraid whoever killed her would be after him because he must have turned up something.

But he had not been able to spot what that something was, so his file came to us—for an additional fee, of course. “Hey, I put in time on this and it’s my property—you didn’t want in when you had the chance. Now you want to use my property, you got to pay for it.”

“You’re already being paid—and what have you given us so far?”

“I got a few leads! I’m talking to people. I’m out there knocking on doors, which is a hell of a lot more than you’re doing sitting on your butt in this office!”

“Time’s getting short, Vinny.”

“Five hundred.” He held up the manila folder, slightly soiled and leaking corners of paper. “Five hundred and you can have it. Otherwise, you can buss my buns.”

“You’ve got the decimal point in the wrong place. You never did work worth five hundred bucks in your life. Make it fifty.”

“Quality work, Bunchcroft! You wouldn’t know quality work if it bit you. Two-fifty. That’s it. Not a penny less.”

“A hundred. Not a penny more.”

“A couple a Jews—a Jewish tag-team, that’s what I’m trying to do business with!”

“You can stop doing business right now if you want to. It’s your choice, Vinny. I didn’t want Dev to hire you in the first place because you just screw things up. You heard the man—a hundred bucks. Take it or leave.”

“You bastard. You’re still a fucking cop, aren’t you? You really like pushing people around, don’t you?”

“You’re not people.”

“You know I need the money, don’t you? You bastards!”

“Come up with some information, Landrum, and we’ll pay you for it. So far all you’ve done is take money and bring excuses. Here.” I wrote a check for a hundred. “Now disappear.”

Bunch watched the door close hotly behind him. “You’re throwing good money down a rat hole, Dev. And that’s the rat.”

“It’s a gamble,” I admitted. “But he might come up with something yet.”

We settled down to read through Vinny’s file.

“You never spotted him when you were with Margaret Haas?”

“No.”

“Well,” Bunch said grudgingly, “maybe he’s good at that, anyway. The damned sneak.”

We were looking at the log sheet in his notes on Margaret’s activities, the day-by-day and hour-by-hour notations of what she did, where she went, and who she was with. I stifled the anger I felt swelling as I thought of Landrum spying on her; after all, I had done the same thing to her husband, and there was supposed to be nothing personal about it. Just get the facts, ma’am, and turn the facts over to the person who was paying you to gather them. But illogically, when Landrum did it, it seemed worse in an unclean way, as if his notes and photographs were an attack on her.

“Here’s a shot of Loomis.”

The photograph showed the portly man talking to Margaret in front of a restaurant door. His mouth was open on a word and his right hand pointed a stiff finger at her as she smiled slightly behind sunglasses. The notes gave the date and time and named the restaurant—the Promenade—just off Larimer Square. I recognized a table edge with its fragment of umbrella partly in the frame, and the brick that walled its quiet sub-level patio.

“Maybe that’s why Loomis’s name was in Busey’s purse. She wanted to know what he was talking to Margaret about.”

That made as much sense as anything else we came up with. The other photographs showed her talking to a few people: a woman in a business suit as they stood beside Margaret’s car, a store clerk helping her with a load of groceries in a supermarket parking lot, a smiling greeting to another woman as Margaret and the children strolled down the sidewalk. Many of the photographs were of me and her, sometimes with Austin and Shauna along, and I had to agree with Bunch that Landrum was good at this job. I could remember each place caught in the black-and-white frames, and, thinking back, recalled no sense of being watched and photographed. Of course my eyes and mind had been full of Margaret, and that was a good excuse. Still, for a security agent with any pride, it was an insult; and it was intensified by the thought that instead of Landrum it could easily have been one of Aegis’s scumbags. None of which was helped by Bunch saying again, “Man, didn’t you really know he was there?”

Only two of the photographs showed Margaret’s house, which wasn’t surprising, since Landrum would have a hard time loitering around inside the compound without being spotted. Most of the surveillance focused on the times she came out on various trips or errands, along with less routine trips: “01:44—return w/D. Kirk, kiss on porch. Enter alone. BR light out 02:18.”

Thorough, the little bastard.

“I don’t see a thing in any of this stuff, Dev. Except for you, there’s not a suspicious face lurking anywhere.”

Which was the way I felt, too. The investigation was of Margaret, and only by hints and implications could we get a slight sense of Carrie Busey’s part in it, or her reactions to it. For one thing, she kept paying Landrum one way or another to stay on the job. For another, she was probably frustrated at the lack of any evidence. Perhaps she was even starting to come to the conclusion that there was no evidence to find, because the surveillance shifted from daily and complete to periodic—a check of Margaret’s shopping routine and tailing her through that, and once-a-day surveys of the house. Another document in the folder showed a weekly pay record to the gatekeeper on the evening shift to list car licenses cleared to visit the Haas address. That was the widely smiling college lad who was working his way through school, and at this rate he could afford Harvard. And deserved it. There were a few license numbers that I didn’t recognize, but most of them I did: mine for either the Healy or the Ford.

“I don’t see anything either.”

“That makes the score Ignorance, 1, Kirk and Associates, zip. Do you want to show this stuff to Margaret Haas?”

There were reasons not to. For one thing, it would drag up a lot of painful memories, and for another she might be upset to know how detailed a picture of her life Landrum had gathered. But it was also possible that she could see something where we didn’t. “I suppose I’d better.”

I arrived just after the kids were bathed and wrapped warm in their small robes and skittering their pajama feet across the rugs in hairy slippers made to look like rabbits and skunks. Shauna wore the rabbits, whose wagging ears were lined in pink rayon, and Austin wore the skunks.

“Because he stinks,” giggled Shauna.

“No, I don’t. And who wants silly old rabbits anyway!”

“Children—Devlin didn’t come here to listen to you fuss.”

That wasn’t entirely true; it was good to see them, and even their fussing brought a smile, stirring memories of me and my cousins and giving a hint of the continuity of human character. Margaret wore her hair drawn back from her face in a French twist that heightened the delicacy of her profile and the slender lines of her neck. And when she looked at me, those green eyes—large and dark in the light of the room’s scattered lamps—still held something of the depth and warmth that had filled them when we had been together last.

We settled the quarrel over slippers by laughing at what ifs—what if the slippers were turtles, or what if they were monkeys, or big fat hippopotamuses. That led to story time, and story time to bed, and finally Margaret and I could share a long and uninterrupted kiss before I mixed her a gin and tonic.

“I have something I’d like you to look at.”

“What?”

“Nothing to be that happy about, I’m afraid. Some photographs taken by the detective Carrie Busey hired to follow you.”