The Crime Writer Page 19

  I slammed the trunk and turned for my car when I looked up and saw Mort filling his doorway, staring at me over the second-floor railing. I jerked back, startled, the soles of my sneakers scraping asphalt.

  Whether he’d caught a clear look at my face or seen me at his open trunk, I couldn’t tell. He came off his step, moving toward the stairs. I walked a few paces up the sidewalk away from him as if continuing on course, pretending to talk on the cell phone. The adrenaline surge left my senses heightened. I listened for his approach, waited to feel the vibration of his charging footsteps rising from the sidewalk. I sensed him behind, shadowing me maybe twenty yards back.

  You’re in the real world now. Watch that you don’t get yourself killed.

  When I risked a glance back, he’d turned off down another street. Keeping a full block between us, I followed. He got to the corner and paused, looking in the window of a clothing store. He took a pen from a slit by his breast, tugged something from his back pocket, and jotted on it. I crossed the street so I could make out the window display while keeping my reflection out of view. Mannequins draped with sequined dresses and cheap suits, a few broken down into inhuman segments and left floating in a mound of uncut fabric to the side. Mort gazed back up through the window, transfixed. A few of the mannequins were bare-chested or naked, stiff and pale like the dead. Was he admiring the smooth, waxy skin?

  Whatever he was holding slipped from his hands. He took a step back, still admiring the contorted human forms, then vanished around the corner.

  I waited a few minutes before approaching. He’d dropped a matchbook, the creased cover sporting a skull and bones. I crouched, picked it up, thumbed up the flap.

  Jagged writing on the underside.

  I SEE YOU.

  I rose sharply, breath firing in my throat. A movement in the window snared my attention. Standing among the posed plastic bodies, his leering face a few inches from the glass, was Morton Frankel.

  28

  Mort pulled back from the window, knocking aside a mannequin, and jumped off the display ledge, running for the door. I bolted.

  Dodging honking cars, I sprinted across the street, tangling up with a pissed-off biker on the far side. Mort was at the curb, waiting for a break in traffic. I yanked my cuff free from the bike chain and ran up the street. A bus was just starting to pull out from a stop. I drew beside it, banging the side and yelling. It stopped with an angry hiss, rear doors yawning. Mort hurdled the biker and kept coming.

  Afternoon commuters overloaded the bus. I shoved through them, tripping over paper bags and knees, waiting to hear the doors suck closed, but they held open on a lethargically timed delay. Horns bleated; the bus was nosed out into the slow lane.

  I stumbled up to the front, the bus driver now joining the protests. Through five or six arms dangling from straps, I saw the rear doors begin to slide closed.

  A thick hand snaked into the gap, blocking the rubber bumpers.

  As Mort pried the rear doors apart, the front ones opened in unison.

  I ducked down, slid off the front stairs on my ass, spitting out onto the curb in time to see Mort’s boot vanish up into the bus. The doors snapped shut with a pneumatic wheeze, and the bus veered out into a stream of traffic.

  Standing, I dusted myself off. The bus passed, Mort’s face a blur through the smudged side window. He caught sight of me and moved to the rear, bucking like a dog in shallow water. He cleared the people on the back bench as if parting curtains, leaning forward menacingly, breath fogging the glass.

  I stepped out into the now-empty lane, meeting his gaze as the bus accelerated through the intersection.

  His lips moved. I see you.

  “I see you, too,” I said.

  As I jogged back to the Highlander, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  Junior said, “I’m at the corner of Daly and Main. Gas station.”

  I was more relieved than I would have thought possible.

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “Ms. Caroline.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “That you leave me to get chased by a buncha black guys so you could break into a murderer’s Volvo.” He laughed. “Juss kidding, homes. I say I wandered off to get me some eats.”

  I hopped into my car and headed to pick him up. He’d managed to run nearly three miles. I found him sitting on the concrete wall by the bathrooms, smoking a cigarette. He was new to the game, still working on a cool-looking exhale. I parked and walked over. I debated telling him how worried I’d been, but it would have been awkward for us both.

  “What happen?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “Big Brother got some moves.” He held up his hand, and we high-fived. “Even if he is old.”

  “I’m thirty-eight.”

  “Like I said.” He tapped the pack of Marlboro Reds against the heel of his hand awkwardly, a trick he’d probably just picked up.

  “When I was a kid, my grandfather caught me smoking and made me finish the whole pack,” I said. “Every last one. I got so sick I never smoked again.”

  “Yeah? Any other a’ them folk tales you got to tell?”

  “No. But why don’t you give it a go?”

  He shrugged. “’ Kay.” He teased out another cigarette and held it up ceremonially before lighting it. He went after it quick and hard, the cherry lurching several millimeters a pull. He finished, lit the next off the butt.

  After he’d smoked two more, I asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Great.”

  The next three cigarettes he seemed to enjoy even more.

  “How about now?”

  “Million bucks.”

  By the ninth he’d mastered the French inhale. By the thirteenth he was blowing smoke rings. He crushed the fifteenth on the wall between his knees, paused to stretch his arms happily to the sky, then lit up another.

  I climbed up on the wall, sat next to him.

  “Bum one off you?” I asked.

  Caroline looked me in the eye as if she were sizing up an opposing boxer. Her index finger moved from her chest to mine. “There’s no chemistry here.”

  “It’s just dinner,” I said.

  She crossed the shag rug and settled behind her desk, as if she felt better with a large object between us.

  I peered at the photographs on the bookshelves. Group-home kids of all ethnicities lined up for the Matterhorn, like a carefully cast Disney brochure photo. A crew of counselors around a campfire, kids sprawled in the foreground and across laps. On the side of the desk, there was a picture of Caroline laughing, arm around a black kid in his early teens. She was younger, her face unmarred yet by injury, and her beauty was radiant. I pointed at the picture. “Who’s that?”

  She slammed the photo flat and slid it into a drawer.

  I said, “I meant the boy.”

  She flushed. Her collar fluttered from the pivoting fan. With quiet dignity she reached back into the drawer, removed the picture, and propped it up again. “That was J.C. I had a lot of jobs before this one.”

  I checked my watch. “I called Kasey Broach’s apartment manager this morning. If his answering machine is to be believed, he’s available only from six to six-thirty. To implement the Caroline Raine home-visit rule, I’ve got to get moving. I’d love you to take up my invitation to dinner tonight, but your deliberation is getting unflattering, and I’m fragile.”

  Her lips twitched—not quite a smile. “Don’t invite me to dinner because you think it’s doing me some favor.” She stared at me evenly. “I’m just fine on my own.”

  “Yeah, you seem great—the picture of well-adjusted, just like me. That’s why I think you and I could use each other.” I walked over, paused by the door. “Eight o’ clock?”

  She gave me a faint nod.

  The counselor with the bitten-down fingernails stood just outside in the hall, pretending to tidy up the telephone table.

  She looked up as I passed. “You hurt her, I’l
l kick your ass.”

  “I hurt her,” I said, “I’ll help you.”

  29

  Kasey Broach’s family moved through the open doorway of partment 1B to a U-Haul and back again, toting lamps, trash cans, cardboard boxes. Strong family resemblance in the parents and the younger sibling, whom I recognized from the news. They moved in automated silence through the powerful beam of the truck’s headlights. Now and then one would halt along the brief path from truck to door and lean against a post, bending over as if catching lost breath.

  Frozen meals thawed in a translucent trash bag by the doorway. Kasey’s father paused to dump in an armload of toiletries—fraying toothbrush, faded razor, half carton of Q-tips—while his daughter wound a telephone cord around the base unit before stuffing it into a salad bowl. The logistics of loss. The awesome minutiae.

  The 110 rattled along behind a vast concrete barrier a half block away. A group of kids ran around the dark street, waving toy guns that looked real enough to get them shot by worn-down cops. Their laughter seemed to mock the somber procession of surviving Broaches.

  To see the apartment, I wouldn’t require the harried manager’s goodwill after all. What I required was perhaps more nerve than I could muster. This was an opportunity that my trial had robbed me of having with the Bertrands. A chance to speak to the bereaved and offer what little anyone could under such circumstances. For a moment I hated who I was for how it would taint my approach here. And I hated my ulterior motive, a seamy lining to a dark cloud.

  The mother, a stout, well-put-together blonde, glanced over at me a few times, and I realized I must be creeping them out, watching behind my car’s tinted windows with Kasey’s killer still at large.

  I approached, keeping a respectful distance. “Mrs. Broach? I’m—”

  “Yes.” She paused, a stack of dresses, still on their hangers, draped over her arm. “Andrew Danner. I recognize you.”

  “I’m so sorry to intrude. I know it’s quite odd, my coming here and…and…” The hallway light over Kasey’s door had been broken recently, judging by the bits of glass kicked to the side of the jamb. The coldness of such preparation made me shiver. That’s why the Broaches were using headlights for illumination now—because the killer had broken the hall light in anticipation of dragging out their daughter’s unconscious body.

  “Well?” her husband said from behind me. “What are you here for?”

  In the distance, the street kids shouted back and forth in prepubescent sopranos. “I got you! I shot you dead!”

  A small choke came out of nowhere, seizing my throat, shocking me. I pressed my lips together, trying to find composure.

  Mrs. Broach dropped the dresses on the ground, stepped forward, and embraced me. She rubbed my back in vigorous circles, in-finitely more effective than I’d been when Lloyd had broken down. She was soft, slightly damp with perspiration, and smelled nicely of conditioner. For a moment she blended into my own mother, April, Françoise Bertrand, cooing accented forgiveness.

  I pulled back, blinking against the headlights, and said, “I don’t even know how to begin. Except to say that I’m so sorry for what happened to Kasey. And I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  Kasey’s sister—Jennifer, if memory served—stood in the doorway, chewing gum and swiveling a lanky leg on a pointed toe. The news stories had made much of the fact that she was a freshman in high school, which put almost two decades between her and her big sister. Jennifer looked as if she wanted to cry but had no more energy for it. Somehow she summoned it, pressing her hand to her top teeth and hiccupping out something between a moan and a sob.

  “Come on inside,” Mr. Broach said.

  We went in, stepping over half-packed boxes and strewn clothes.

  Mr. Broach looked around and said gruffly, to himself, “How do you know what to keep?”

  They sat on a couch that had been shoved away from the wall, I on a large overturned earthenware pot. Where to start?

  “I was a suspect in your daughter’s murder,” I said.

  Mrs. Broach said, “We know. Bill told us.”

  Bill Kaden. Right.

  “He said you still are a suspect,” Mr. Broach said, “but I don’t think you did it. I watched your trial. That tape you made showing you sleeping the night our Kasey was killed? Bill thinks it implicates you more. I think the opposite.” He looked at his wife. “We understand how you could have gotten to the point of questioning yourself.”

  Here we were, just a couple of old friends dismissing the notion I’d murdered his daughter.

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  “I’m simply stating my opinion. We certainly don’t presume to judge.”

  Mrs. Broach sat sideways on a hip, tilted over her daughter, one hand smoothing Jennifer’s hair behind her ear. “Kasey’s in a better place now. Joshua 23 says God keeps all promises. All promises. One way or another.”

  “I’m glad you can find some peace in this. I doubt I’d have your strength.”

  “We have experience,” Mr. Broach said. Then his eyes watered, and he coughed into a fist. “We lost our boy, too, five years back.”

  I must have looked stunned.

  Mrs. Broach picked it up. “No, no. Tommy died of leukemia.”

  Some people get it with both barrels, can barely catch their breath before fate reloads. And others skip through life stepping on the heads of others, swinging the world by its tail.

  Jennifer was staring at me. “Did you do it?” she asked.

  “No. I did not.”

  “How about the first? That French girl you dated?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe I did.” I parted my hair, showed the seam of scar tissue. “But I can’t know for sure until I work out what really happened.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing?” Mr. Broach asked.

  “What I’ve been through…I think maybe I could help find out more about your daughter’s death. I’ve been looking around, and I’ve found a few leads.”

  Mr. Broach said quickly, “Have you told the police?”

  “I’m sharing everything with them as I go. But they’re working the case day and night and have a lot of leads of their own, too. So I figure I might as well stay involved, see that nothing slips between the cracks.”

  “How can we help?”

  “Well,” I said, looking to each of them, “can you tell me about Kasey?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Broach said, “we can do that.”

  She spoke first, detailing Kasey’s habits and lifestyle, but soon they were all chiming in with small memories, smiling. A box of tissue circulated. The man in 1A had been out the night of her death, but Trina Patrick had been home in 1C. She’d been watching a game show, volume up loud, augmenting the experience with a table red, and had heard nothing. I asked about Morton Frankel and brown Volvos and recent boyfriends, and we all grew politely frustrated at our inability to get traction.

  Mrs. Broach leaned into her husband, and he held her. “She was a wonderful girl. Sunday school. Youth group. Some trouble in her teens, but who didn’t have that? Her job worked her hard, but she still found time for outreaches, short-term missions. Always had a hand out for others. Her brother, when he was diagnosed, they run the test on family members, you know? None of us matched.” Mrs. Broach waved a hand to encompass the three of them on the couch. “But Kasey did. She was Tommy’s angel. She went in time after time, shots in the hip, needle this thick, never complained, not once.” Her fingers were trembling, and when she spoke again, her voice cracked. “We had three children. We’ve still got one. We’re blessed.” She pressed her face to her daughter’s and squeezed her hard around the shoulders. Jennifer wore an expression I’d seen once in a photo of a makeshift raft that had come apart en route to Florida. A Cuban girl bobbed among the flotsam, clinging to a tire, the sole survivor and not sure that she wanted to be.

  “Do you mind if I take a look at Kasey’s room?” I asked.

  Mr. Broach, t
ending to his wife, waved his assent.

  Kasey’s furniture had been broken down, and maybe half of her possessions had been boxed, though there was no discernible order to the packing process. A picture of Kasey with her brother, thin and bald, was taped to the inside of her closet door so she’d see it every morning as she dressed. Her mattress leaned against the wall, the unhooked headboard and slats propped against it. I closed my eyes, imagined Morton Frankel approaching the bed through darkness, toting a canister of sevoflurane and a face mask. Kasey’s brief, terrified struggle before the gas took effect. The Volvo he could’ve parked right out front where the U-Haul was now. I walked over and fingered down the blinds, noting the motel-style proximity of parking spaces to doorways. Five steps through darkness and he’d have had her passed-out body in the back of the wagon. It would’ve been easy to time so no one would notice.

  On the windowsill a cluster of key chains the size of a fist pinned down a petite monthly calendar. I flipped through. It was unused, purchased, I guessed, for the cheesecloth-filtered pictures of wildlife at play. In the midst of the key chains and charms, only three keys—car, apartment, mailbox.

  A silver thimble hooked to the ring caught my eye.

  I plucked it from the tangle, letting the other baubles swing.

  A recovering alcoholic’s reminder that even a thimbleful of booze counts as a slip.

  The tiny bathroom had already been packed up. I searched out the box of meds and dug through it, finding little more than Aleve, Tylenol, and various antacids.

  No Xanax.

  A recovering alcoholic wouldn’t want to mess with benzos. Yet the autopsy had revealed Xanax in Kasey’s system.

  I walked back out. The Broaches were doing their best to get into packing mode again, but clearly our conversation had thrown them off.

  “Kasey was a recovering alcoholic?” I asked.

  Mrs. Broach flushed—not a favorite topic of discussion. “Well. As I said, she had some problems in her teen years, right after Jennifer was born. We got her help.”