“So you drove across the bridge in the early hours of Saturday morning?”
“Oh, no. I left him in the car and went to bed. Well, not to bed; first I bundled everything up in plastic bags—his clothes, the rug he’d fallen on, the cleaning rags, his toothbrush—and put them in the backseat of the car. Then I sort of curled up for a while on the sofa. I may even have slept.
“At eight the next morning I got in my car and drove to Philip’s neighborhood. I kept thinking of him, lying there behind me in the boot. I kept wanting to check on him, as if to see if he was comfortable or something. Anyway, I pulled into a fifteen-minute space in the next block from his house, and I made a call with his cell phone to my home machine, letting it run for a few minutes. As if we’d had a conversation, you see? I know there are records of what tower a call goes through, but I wasn’t sure how accurate the positioning is, so I thought I’d better make it as near his house as I could. Then I came back here, slept for a couple more hours, and then sat just behind my curtains and watched the neighbors. They came and went a lot, since Saturday’s the big shopping day, but about eleven there was a gap of nearly forty-five minutes when they were all either away or inside with their doors shut. As soon as I had my window when I could say, That’s when Philip came to give me the story, with nobody able to contradict me, I left.”
“With him still in the trunk.”
“Unfortunately.”
“But you didn’t drop him then, either?”
“A sunny Saturday in Point Bonita? Never. I drove north, stopped at a motel at the far side of Lake Shasta, the Something Lodge”—Lakefront, Kate silently provided—“and checked in with a credit card, then turned around and drove back to Point Bonita.”
“You had dinner first.”
“I did, didn’t I? I had to leave signs that I was there, too late to fit in a drive back to the Bay Area. Did you talk to the waitress?”
“Not yet.”
“If so, ask her what I was doing. I did a very nice impression of a man wrapped up in the typescript he was reading. I’d hate to think my performance was wasted.” He added it with a touch of his old spirit.
Not a bad actor, his agent had said.
“And as soon as you signed for the meal, you left.”
“It was dark by then, and no one would notice my car gone from the car park.”
“Interestingly enough, someone used your room’s Internet connection while you were away.” Kate watched him closely, since there existed still the possibility of conspiracy here, but instead, his face went boyish with a smile of delight.
“It actually worked, didn’t it? Astonishing, considering my lack of skill on the computer, but a friend used to set hers to send an e-mail at a given time, and I figured that if it could do e-mail, it could do other things as well. I found the scheduler function and set it to download some enormous files, and, amazingly, it did. I take it you didn’t look at how much actual web surfing the machine was doing?”
“Not yet,” she admitted. “We would have eventually.”
“And I could have told you I fell asleep for an hour and a quarter.”
“But instead, you drove five hours south to Point Bonita.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you go the ocean road, or through the tunnel?”
“I was afraid someone would hear me, so I went down the cliffs, and Christ, what I would have given for a full moon. It was absolutely black and I was scared shitless, certain I’d go over those cliffs. I’d been out there a couple of weeks earlier with Philip—no doubt he was looking into that story, although he didn’t tell me that—and I knew all too well how high those cliffs are. It was starting to rain and I had to use the parking lights a few times when my nerves got too bad. But I made it, and broke open the lock—oh, I forgot to mention, I stopped at one of those enormous hardware stores off Highway Five and bought a pry bar, a pair of bolt cutters, and some other things, paying cash of course—and left him where the story said he should be left.”
“It couldn’t have been easy, moving him out of the car.”
“It was a fucking nightmare. I opened the trunk and thought I was going to pass out. He smelled. Like a meat shop. And he’d gone all stiff, inside the trunk, so it took me forever just to haul him out without scraping him on the car and leaving behind evidence. I left the sheets and towels in the car, sort of peeled them back so they wouldn’t drop anything from their outer surface onto him, and I put on gloves and a giant shirt and a knit hat that I’d bought earlier, so as not to leave my hairs or fingerprints on him. And then I pulled and yanked at him until I finally could get myself underneath him. I nearly dropped him then and there.
“I’d backed the car up to the emplacement, so I only had to move him about thirty feet, but I thought I’d rupture something by the time I finished. The only good part of it was that by the time I’d wrestled with him I was angry at him again, which helped.
“When I’d left him there, still all curled up like he’d been in the car, I put the padlock back on the door and hoped nobody would notice it for a while. I couldn’t face going back up the cliffs, so I drove very, very slowly out past the houses and through the tunnel, with my lights off until I was on the main road. I made it back to Lake Shasta at about five in the morning. I tell you, a motel bed never felt so good. But I only allowed myself to sleep for an hour, so I could sign for breakfast and check out early. Sunday was an absolute hell of exhaustion. By the time I reached Seattle I was a wreck—I only got there by drinking gallons of coffee and driving with the windows wide open, singing loudly all the while. A truly macabre journey.”
“What did you do with Philip’s clothes, the sheets, all that?”
“The clothes I dropped in a Goodwill box. And one of the places I stopped for coffee on Sunday, in southern Oregon, had a Laundromat a few doors down. I dumped a whole bottle of stain remover and some bleach into the wash cycle, ran it on cold, then put the stuff in the dryer and fed in a lot of quarters and drove away. They were good sheets, and as far as I could see the stains were nearly gone—someone will have quietly helped themselves to the lot.”
“What about the cell phone?”
“I smashed it underfoot, then fed its pieces into Puget Sound, along with the bolt cutters and the pry bar. And I even remembered to phone Philip a couple of times and send him an e-mail, as an innocent man would have done. It was eerie, hearing his voice on the answering machine.”
“Which leaves you with the gun.”
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “I know. Have I told you everything you want to know?”
“Philip’s pocket watch?”
His face shifted, and all the sorrow that had been kept at bay by telling the story swept in. He swallowed, blinking to keep his gray-blue eyes from filling. “I…Philip loved that watch. It had once belonged to one of Conan Doyle’s sons, or so he was told. Anyway, I couldn’t bear to smash it. It’s in my top drawer, downstairs.”
Which about covered it all. Except for one thing.
“You haven’t told me about Monica.”
The sorrow fled instantly from his face, replaced with raw fear; for the first time, the man with the gun looked as if, friendship or no, he might use it. “You leave her out of this. She had nothing to do with any of it.”
“I didn’t think she did. You did, however, make use of her visit to lead me astray. You wanted us to think she was a girlfriend.”
After a minute, his body grew less taut, his hand allowed the gun to lower again. “I hesitated to do that. I didn’t want to bring Monica into it in any fashion at all, but she happened to be in town filming a two-second bit on a television drama, and so she was convenient.” He added modestly, “Improvisation was one of my stronger points in my days as an actor. But I promise you, she did not know anything.”
“I believe you.”
He studied Kate’s face, and decided that she meant it. “So, was there anything else?” He was beginning to look cold, despite
the sweater, but Kate did not want to distract him by suggesting that they close windows.
She cast her mind back, and came up with small and insignificant details. “You didn’t use a wheelbarrow to move Gilbert to the emplacement?”
“A wheelbarrow? Good heavens no, how would I have got it in the car? I slung him across my shoulders. It wasn’t far, and as I said, I can dead-lift more than he weighed.”
“So,” she said, trying hard to conceal her apprehension behind a matter-of-fact question. “What now?”
“Now we go and meet your friends outside.”
“Really?” she said, her voice coming far too near to a squeak of surprise for an eighteen-year police veteran.
“Sure. I think we’re finished here, and I’m sure they’re itching to take a look at my floorboards.”
“They’ll give you the warrant as soon as you’re outside.”
“No need for a warrant. You’re welcome to look anywhere. Just please don’t leave too much of a mess.”
He stood up, and looked around as if to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. “Shall we go? You first.”
“Ian, leave the gun here. Please.”
“I’ll carry it with me to the door, thank you very much. Once we’re out in the open, with witnesses, then I’ll let you have it. I promise.”
“You must give it to me then, Ian,” she told him. “Cops really don’t like it when a suspect walks out with a gun in his hand.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Go on now.”
Her spine crawled with tension, walking with a gun at her back, but he stayed too far behind her to give her an opening to seize it, and there were no distractions as they crossed the courtyard. The place was utterly still, even the earlier music now fallen silent; Kate knew that there would be a sniper and other officers out of sight throughout the apartments overlooking the courtyard. However, Nicholson took no notice, because the apartment complex was always still.
They reached the front door, the broad expanse of glass. Outside, silent as the courtyard, was an expanse of humanity: uniforms and plainclothes arrayed behind a sea of marked and unmarked departmental vehicles. In the distance, behind police tape, the inevitable pack of press. Al Hawkin stood in front of it all, out in the open next to Chris Williams. He was holding the phone to his ear with one hand, while the other rested on his gun. His weight was forward on his toes, ready for the approach he had heard coming.
Ian hesitated, stared out at the crowd. Kate measured the distance to his gun, but as if he had heard her, he shifted it. “God bless me,” he said. “Where did they all come from?”
“I told you, cops really don’t like it when you draw a gun on one of them. Al has been listening to us this whole time.”
“You’re wearing a mike?”
“It seemed a good idea,” she said, not exactly a lie. “Now, Ian, give me the gun.”
She thought he was going to argue, or maybe just turn back to the building. But he moved his hand an inch in her direction, then stopped.
“Can I ask one favor?”
“Your favors are about used up, Ian.”
“I’ll give you the gun, but can I walk behind you until we get to the car? I’m sorry, but having all those angry cops standing there, I’d really be happier if you were between me and them.”
“Ian, they’re not going to open fire with me standing there.”
“I know. Intellectually, I know, but going out there first, I’m afraid I would just piss myself. And if I’m behind you, Monica isn’t going to see my face a hundred times on the evening news.”
A little late to think about that, Kate thought. She put out her hand, unwilling to negotiate further. His hand wavered, then the gun tipped and came out to her. She took what felt like her first unconstricted breath in many hours.
She snapped the gun open and knocked the five bullets it held into her palm, pouring them into the front pocket of her pants. The gun itself she tossed backhanded toward the courtyard; it flew across the polished marble of the foyer floor and vanished.
Now she could afford to grant Nicholson his wish.
“You might want to put your hand on my shoulder, so you don’t trip on me if I have to stop.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”
She pushed the door open and stepped out; Nicholson moved with her, his left hand resting lightly on her shoulder. She halted, spread her arms, and opened her mouth to shout, “Hold your fire, he’s surrendering, he’s not armed.”
But only the first two words left her mouth. As Kate began to speak, Ian’s fingers tightened on her, pulling her body back. At the touch of his face against her right ear, at the murmur of his voice in her hair, she broke off to turn in his direction. But his hand was already in motion, sliding down and center as if to pat her on the back. When it reached a spot directly between her shoulder blades, he paused for an instant, gathering all the strength in his rugby player’s muscles, then shoved hard. Kate shot forward, staggering open-armed into the street before she fell. She rolled, recovered, and pushed her weight up on one arm in time to see Nicholson snatch a long, dark, gunlike object from the waistband of his jeans and lower it at the nearest cop, who happened to be Al Hawkin.
“NO!” she screamed, feeling his hand sliding down her shoulder, hearing the echoes of that English voice murmuring into her ear: “Can’t do planes, can’t do jail, I’m very sorry,” a moment before he propelled her out of harm’s way.
As the fingers of her free hand stretched out to him, the street exploded.
TWENTY-TWO
Wednesday evening, little more than forty-eight hours after she had watched Ian Nicholson die, Kate lowered herself onto the armchair in her living room and decided that yes, her lungs had decided to go on breathing. She was shaky and fragile and there was still a high-pitched ringing in her ears; she hadn’t managed to choke down an entire meal since Monday; a long, dreary process of departmental hearings lay before her; she was regularly overwhelmed with the self-loathing of having allowed herself to play into Nicholson’s hands; and she knew without a doubt that if Ian Nicholson were to miraculously appear before her, healthy and grinning, she would strangle him with her bare hands for dumping her back into the shit. But she kept reciting platitudes, telling herself that this too would pass, that she would one day feel as if she belonged here once more, that he’d have managed his suicide one way or another without her.
In a minute, Lee came in with a full wineglass in her hand and set it near Kate’s right hand. Kate cocked an eyebrow at it. “I shouldn’t,” she said.
“Days like this are why God invented wine.”
“I like your therapeutic method better than the department counselor’s,” she replied, and swallowed deep. Lee went away. A few minutes later Nora came in and stood with her feet between Kate’s, her two hands braced on Kate’s knees, studying Kate’s face. Kate was struck by an overpowering urge to sweep the child up and wrap her arms hard around that warm little body for an hour or so, but comforting a mother in that way was a burden no child should bear. So instead she ruffled the mop of curls and allowed Nora to climb up into her lap unaided, and after one firm hug, forced her arms to draw back and drape loosely around the child leaning against her chest.
“Are you sad, Mamakay?”
“I’m not sad, exactly. But sometimes you see someone else who’s really sad, and it makes you a little less happy, you know?” The unnecessary tragedy of it all, Gilbert and Nicholson, Raynor and Billy Birdsong, all the lives ruined, for nothing. She pulled herself away from the maudlin reflections of society’s failings.
“So what did my little monkey do today?” she asked into the warm hair.
“I played and I worked.”
“I hope you did both really hard.”
“I did. We looked at paintings in school and I helped Jon and Lalu make cookies and, and Bet’ny’s having a birt’day party and Mamalee says I can go, we’re going to ride ponies down at th
e beach and have a cake and eat hot dogs!”
At this last revelation, the blond curls came off Kate’s shoulder so Nora could witness her mother’s astonishment, and Kate obediently raised her eyebrows and put her mouth into an O. Satisfied, Nora lay back against her, and Kate smiled: For the daughter of a cook like Lee, hot dogs were every bit as thrilling as ponies.
“When is this magical affair?”
“Sattiday.”
The funeral was scheduled for Saturday, the fall of the curtain on Ian Nicholson’s final performance, a play scripted, directed, and acted by him. The black gunlike object had been a long-barreled butane lighter, all its deadliness in the stance and attitude of the man wielding it. She’d watched the film clip, and even knowing what it was, she would have sworn he had a gun. Not a bad actor, indeed.
From where she lay on the ground, her hand outstretched as if to snatch him back to safety, she had seen five rounds hit him. As the sheets of glass behind him shattered and exploded into the calm marble foyer, she had seen five bullets reach their mark, each impact tugging him this way and that before his muscles gave way.
She had scrambled to her feet and run toward him, careless of the possibility of further shots; knelt beside him; taken his hand—his right hand, the left one being a bloody mess—and held it, looking directly into his eyes. Gray-blue eyes, holding hers as he felt the end come for him; a look of mild surprise, a glimpse of something resembling humor, and the brief pressure of his fingers on hers. Then, nothing.
She blinked, looked into Nora’s green eyes, the child frowning as she shook Kate by the shoulder. “You’re not listening to me,” she accused, and Kate shivered.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, what did you want?”
“I said, can you come to Bet’ny’s party with me and Mamalee?”
“I’ll have to see if I can. I have something I really have to do that afternoon, but if I can come, I absolutely will.”
A moment’s pout, and then Nora was back against her shoulder. A cop’s daughter, she had already begun to learn that sometimes life came first, and sometimes death did.