The Sleeping and the Dead (27 page)

“I think she was murdered somewhere else and brought back to your house in the trunk of her own car. I found drops of blood on the carpet. The killer took her into the house, staged her body, then locked the door behind him as he left, maybe to divert suspicion to you. Maybe he knew you and wanted to frame you out of revenge, or maybe he just wanted to throw the cops a bone, knowing that once they got an idea, they'd never let it go. But to do that, he couldn't lock the door with her key. Your wife's keys had to be inside the locked house to make the mystery work. So he went looking for a spare key, just like I did, and he found one.”

“How did he know we didn't know about the spare key in the flower box?”

“It was half buried. You couldn't see it.”

“So why did he keep it?”

He had me there. That part didn't make sense. “I don't know, but I don't think it wrecks the theory. Maybe he keeps it as a memento. Maybe he doesn't know you have an alibi a thousand miles wide. Or maybe he knows cops well enough to know they always go for the easy answer. In most cases, the simplest explanation is the husband did it. Most female murder victims are killed by husbands or boyfriends, so that's who the cops look at first. Stranger killings are rare, except in a botched robbery or rape. But since this was neither, they're going to fall back on you as the most likely killer, even if they can't explain how you did it. Can you blame them?”

“Oh, I don't blame them,” James sneered.

“They're just doing their jobs,” I said.

As he turned west on Summer Avenue, a patch of street light swooped across his face and I saw the tears coming down. He pushed the back of his hand across his nose and looked away to hide them.

 

37

W
ATERS'S PATROL CAR
WAS STILL
by the back door as we pulled into the parking lot, but now her blue lights were flashing through the rain. James looked at me, his eyebrows forming a question, which I answered with a shrug. Maybe Adam had finally found those pictures at Michi's house and told Waters to bring me in. James parked by the garbage Dumpster and I got out. Even if I was about to go down, at least I would clear James of the murder charge. The nobility of my mission gave me the courage, for once, to face whatever disaster was headed my way.

The rain had really begun to pick up and the whole of the sky from the south to the west was alive with lightning, but the storm was still too far away to hear any thunder. Waters was writing something on a clipboard propped against the steering wheel. An Asian man with short black hair sat in the backseat with his hands cuffed behind his back and the front of his dirty white T-shirt speckled with blood. His face was completely calm, betraying no emotion whatsoever.

I knocked on the glass with my knuckle. Waters looked up and rolled down her window. “Didn't you hear me banging on your door?”

“That's not Endo,” I said.

“What?”

I pointed at the man in the back seat. “That's Mr. Kim. He lives here.” Mr. Kim smiled and gave me a small bow with just his head. His lips and teeth were red with blood. James came up and held an umbrella over me. “Noboyuki Endo is Japanese. Mr. Kim is Korean.”

Waters stared at me for a moment with her pen still pressed to the clipboard. “Do you think I'm stupid or something?” she said. “The Mexican guy who runs the mercado called in a domestic disturbance. I run upstairs to find this old fucker beating the holy hell out of his wife. I bust him in the face to make him let go of her. Now she doesn't want to press charges. That's what these bitches always do. They just want you to pull the old man off, but try to take him downtown and they act like he hung the fucking moon. Did you know this son of a bitch is a preacher?”

Mr. Kim said something in Korean that didn't sound like a prayer. Then he spat blood on the back of the seat. Waters glared at him in the mirror and continued, “I was just about to call Adam because I couldn't get you to come to your door. He said you were supposed to stay put with the door locked. I'm just waiting on somebody to take over my babysitting job so I can drive this bastard down to 201 Poplar.”

“I don't need a babysitter. My friend here is going to stay with me tonight.”

Her eyes flickered over James, taking him in, appraising him in one glance. “You sure?” Her frown said she didn't like what she saw.

“I'll be fine.”

“What's your name?” she asked James. He told her. “Are you on television?”

“He gets that a lot.” I took his arm and started for the door. “We're going inside now.”

“Adam said for me to wait here,” Waters called after us.

“Suit yourself.”

“What was that all about?” James asked when we were on the stairs.

“It's complicated,” I said.

I paused at my door, listening. I heard a woman crying somewhere, just like before, only this time I was fairly sure it was Mrs. Kim two doors down. I unlocked the door and James followed me inside. I turned on the kitchen light.

“Your heat's working,” he observed. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. I locked the door and tossed my keys on the table. He stuck his umbrella in the sink and opened a cabinet like he lived there.

“I don't have any cups or glasses. If you want something to drink, there's a market downstairs.”

“Beer?”

“I won't argue with that.”

“I'll be back.”

I grabbed my laptop from under the couch and set it up on the table. My clothes were still wet but the apartment was warm enough and I was no longer shivering. While the computer booted up, I turned on Ashley's Leica—my Leica, I reminded myself, even though I still hadn't paid James the last five hundred.

I plugged the camera into my laptop and scrolled through the almost two hundred blank black images that had eaten up most of the space on the camera's memory card. I opened one and used the photo software to adjust the light levels the way Deiter had shown me. This image caused my heart to hammer in my chest. I recognized it, because I had just been there. It was a photo of James's kitchen. The next one was the hall. The next one the bedroom, as though the photographer were snapping photos every few feet. But the bedroom was empty. The photos continued, wandering through the house, back to the same rooms again and again. I stopped looking at them after the first twenty and scrolled to the end.

The last photo was different. It was my apartment, looking into the bedroom from the kitchen, the bedroom lit up by a flash of lightning. I had stopped even trying to figure out how these pictures came to be on the camera. The question in my mind now was why. What was it trying to show me?

I opened a second folder on my computer's hard drive, sorted the subfolders by date, and scrolled down to the folder titled Playhouse. It contained the photographs I had taken of the Richard Buntyn murder scene at Playhouse on the Square. After working that scene and collecting my money from Chief Billet, I had left, bought a deck of scag and was stoned out of my skull when Adam called me later the same afternoon to photograph the Ashley St. Michael murder.

I had forgotten both murders happened on the same day. I clicked through the photographs of James's bedroom from two years ago. Ashley lay on her stomach, right foot partially under the bed, right hand extended toward the closet, left hand under her body. Her face was turned to the left. She was wearing black heels, jeans and a green sweater. The heel of her left shoe was broken off. There was blood on her upper lip and the bottom of her nose, which had been broken in the struggle. A pair of Nike running shoes, laces knotted together, were wrapped around her throat and lay side by side at the base of her skull.

From my seat at the kitchen table I could see the lightning flashing in the sky outside my bedroom window. They were still only distant flickers, not the brilliant stabs of light that illuminated the night like day when a storm is right above your head. The only sound was the gentle unbroken roar of the rain hammering on the roof. I could see the floor of my bedroom where on two consecutive mornings last week I found my own running shoes lying with their shoestrings tied together. I could almost feel her there, watching me, willing me to put it all together. I stopped breathing, waiting for her to appear.

Maybe ghosts don't cast shadows. Not real shadows, anyway. Shadows on the mind. I breathed again and wondered where James had gone with that beer.

 

38

I
OPENED THE
L
EICA'S
INTERNAL
memory folder. Dozens of thumbnail images filled the screen, photos Ashley had taken that had never been erased. I clicked the first one on the list.

It was a party scene. I recognized several people, local business leaders and their spouses and dates at a fundraising dinner for the Boys and Girls Club. The next photo was a different party but the same people. Michi Mori posing with the mayor. Michi wore a red and white tuxedo and had his cane. He looked like a peppermint candy. The mayor had his arm around Michi's shoulder, dwarfing him. His attention was directed off camera at someone else.

More photos of parties, openings, debuts, tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, fundraisers and gallery showings. The cream of Memphis society, presidents and vice presidents of industry and commerce, wealthy inheritors of old cotton money, graying politicians and their young wives, basketball players and tennis stars, authors, actors and directors, hot new artists and rappers, plus the tired old superstars who wouldn't go away. Ashley St. Michael had freelanced as an entertainment photographer for just about every publication in the city.

I found a photo taken at the governor's mansion in Nashville and spotted Cole Ritter in the background standing next to a tall, Arab-looking art dealer named Richard Buntyn. Richard was sipping red wine from a plastic cocktail glass and the gold watch on his hairy wrist, big as a can of snuff, caught the light of the flash. Just behind Buntyn and Cole stood their future murderer—Noboyuki Endo, leering out from the shadow of a Tennessee state flag.

I knew it was Endo, even though I hadn't seen him since he was a kid. Although the photograph couldn't have been more than four years old, he still had the same cruel yet vacant wedge-shaped face, eyes just a little too far apart, like the face of a cow, and two thick dark eyebrows that almost met over his nose. It was like he hadn't aged at all.

The door banged open and I jumped to my feet, sending my chair skittering into the kitchen cabinets. James almost dropped his bag of beer and nachos. I had forgotten to lock the door when he left. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,” he said as he recovered the bag from around his knees.

“You scared the hell out of
me
.”

“That cop was still sitting out there when I went down, but she's gone now. Are you OK?”

“It's nothing. A friend ordered police protection for me.” I pulled the chair back to the table and sat down. My hands were shaking, my fingers already trying to curl around a needle. I could almost smell the hot metallic reek of a spoon full of boiling dope. I rubbed my tracks, as though I could rub them out, erase them, make the sudden ache go away. They'd heal eventually, if I could just let them heal, if I could quit picking at the scab of my addiction.

He set the bag on the counter and unpacked a twelve pack of Bud and a six-pack of Michelob, a big bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa. Almost like he planned to stay for a few days.

“Why do you need police protection?”

“They think maybe the Playhouse Killer is after me.”

He walked to the door and locked it. “Why would they think that?”

“He followed me here this morning.”

“Really?” He reached into the bag and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Good man, I thought. He tossed them to me. “What does he want with you?”

“I wish I knew,” I said. While he put the beer in the fridge and opened the salsa, I clicked on the next photo and peeled the wrapper off the smokes. I still had almost a full pack of generics, but I'd take free Marlboros over generics any day. I blew the smoke out through my nose. “I don't think he's following me anymore. If he's smart, and I don't think this guy is stupid, he'll be a thousand miles away by now.”

The next image was hazy and gray. It had been taken in low light with a fast shutter. It took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. It was the backstage of the Playhouse on the Square. The only light source was the ghost light, stage front. The rest was shades of black. I bumped up the light levels and the scene jumped out. Endo was working Richard Buntyn's body headfirst into a malmsey-butt. The next three photos were variations on the same theme as he struggled with the body's dead weight, but in the last photo in the series, Endo was looking back at the camera.

“What are you looking at?” James asked. He unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Michelob and handed it to me. I set it on the table without drinking.

The next photo was clear enough. It was Endo from about two feet away, reaching for the camera. “That's the Playhouse Killer. Noboyuki Endo.”

“You were that close to him?”

“I didn't take these photos.” The words barely made it past my lips. Endo had killed Ashley St. Michael. I clicked on the next picture.

A black Reebok basketball shoe consumed most of the frame, but there were recognizable things in the background, a dresser drawer, and something else, blurry, maybe hair. Blond hair.

I clicked the next picture. We peered into James's bedroom from high up in a corner. I could tell it was shot from the closet, because I had taken a couple of photos from that angle myself. In the picture, Endo was leaning over her body, arranging the running shoes on her back.

James backed into the corner between the refrigerator and the couch. “Where did you get that?” he asked in a voice moaning and hollow with grief.