A Song of Shadows (22 page)

‘Does he live far from here?’ asked Tyler.

‘Just a couple of miles away, on the other side of town. He has one of two houses on Green Heron Bay.’

‘Who has the other?’

‘A woman named Ruth Winter and her daughter.’

‘Local?’

‘Almost: she’s from Pirna. She moved here not long ago. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious.’

‘If you want to go out and talk to Parker, I can give you directions. It’s easy to miss the turn for the bay, especially when it’s getting dark.’

‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ said Tyler. ‘Right now, I’d like copies of all your paperwork, and then I’m going to check into my motel, take a shower, and go get dinner somewhere. Any suggestions would be welcome.’

Bloom recommended a couple of places as they marched over to where Welbecke stood, then together the three women headed to their respective vehicles. Bloom led the way back to her office. She had made the required copies before the detectives arrived, in anticipation of the request, and all other relevant information was already in the system, so the handover didn’t take long. Welbecke thanked Bloom as she left, and seemed to mean it. Bloom watched them drive away through the slats in her blinds. Preston joined her.

‘How were they?’ she asked.

‘They were okay.’

‘Both of them?’ said Preston. ‘The tall one looked like a bit of a bitch.’

‘No, she was okay too.’

‘Huh,’ said Preston, in a way that suggested the ways of the world never failed to surprise her.

‘By the way,’ said Bloom, ‘if Mr Parker calls again, either by phone or in person, you take a message, but you tell him I’m not available.’

‘Understood. Is he in some kind of trouble?’

Bloom saw her own reflection in the window, and caught herself smiling.

‘Mary, I think with him, trouble’s a perpetual state of being.’

31

R
uth Winter looked surprised and flustered to see Parker at her door. She was wearing an apron, and had flour on her hands.

‘Sorry, I’m running a little late,’ she said. ‘The girls are watching TV, and I’ve just started making the pasta. You’re welcome to come in, but dinner will be a while …’

She managed a smile, but it was clear that she didn’t particularly relish the prospect of having to entertain him and prepare dinner at the same time. He didn’t smile back.

‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’ he said. ‘In private.’

He could hear the sound of the TV coming from the living room. A woman’s voice was singing, but he couldn’t identify the song. It sounded saccharine, and he thought it might be from a later Disney movie, one of those that had largely passed him by.

Winter nodded and stepped outside, closing the door behind her. She was wearing a sweater and jeans beneath her apron, but she shivered as the wind from the sea struck her.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

His eyes went to the little hole on the doorframe.

‘Why did you take down your mezuzah?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Your mezuzah. It was on the doorframe when I first met you, and then it was gone. I was wondering where it went?’

He saw her bristle, but she tried to retain her composure.

‘There was a crack in the case, and I was worried about water getting in.’

It was a different explanation from the last, a new lie, and he was a man who had been lied to so often that he could almost ascribe to untruths a color and a shape, the way certain synesthesic musicians gave form and hue to notes.

‘Did you know Bruno Perlman?’

‘Who?’

‘Bruno. Perlman.’ He repeated the name slowly and distinctly. ‘The man whose body washed up at Mason Point.’

‘Why would I know him?’

The wrong answer, he thought, or the answer to a different question, but not the one that had actually been asked.

‘Do you know who I am Ms Winter? Do you know what I did for a living?’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time for this.’

She made a move for the door, but he blocked her way with his arm.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she said.

‘Helping you, if you’ll let me.’

‘I don’t need your help. I don’t even know why you think that I might.’

‘I’ve been a private investigator for more than a decade,’ he said. ‘Before that, I was a police officer, and a detective.’

‘And?’

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked through the glass of the door to her kitchen. She just wanted to get back inside, and away from this man.

‘I can tell when people are in trouble, when they’re frightened, when they’re hiding something. And when they’re lying.’

‘Get your hand down,’ she said. Her voice trembled slightly. ‘You’re scaring me. I want you to leave now. If you need to take your daughter with you, then I understand, but I want you to go.’

She reached under his arm to take the handle of the door. He didn’t try to stop her.

‘Bruno Perlman was murdered,’ he said. ‘Before he went into the sea, someone put a blade through his right eye. It didn’t kill him – it seems that he died in the water – but it must have hurt like hell itself. It was an act of torture, probably designed to elicit whatever he knew. It takes a very particular individual to inflict that kind of pain on another.’

Her hand froze on the door handle. She still refused to look at him. He didn’t know where her gaze lay, only that it was elsewhere, directed within more than without.

He spoke softly. He was not trying to bully her, and he regretted that he had been forced to block her way into her home, but he needed her to listen, and he wanted to watch her as she listened. He wanted to be sure.

‘This is what I think,’ he said. ‘Bruno Perlman was coming up here to see you. Maybe he’d been in contact by phone or e-mail. Perhaps he even sent you a letter – I hear people still do that sometimes. Someone intercepted him, brutalized him, and then left him to drown, but his body wasn’t expected to wash ashore so soon, if ever. When you heard about the discovery of a man’s body at Mason Point, you may have suspected that it was Perlman, or you may not have, but you weren’t about to take any chances. There was only the slightest possibility that a connection could be made to you through your shared faith, but it was enough to make you remove the mezuzah.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, but her words had all the weight of gossamer, and the wind threw them to the sand and the sky.

‘If that’s the case,’ Parker continued, ignoring her, ‘– and, as I’ve told you, it’s what I think – then you probably already had reason to believe that Perlman was murdered before anyone else, and certainly before the mark of the blade was discovered during the autopsy. There is another possibility, of course.’

She waited. Her eyes briefly fluttered closed.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘The sooner you finish, the sooner I can get back to my child.’

‘The other possibility is that you killed Perlman yourself. You arranged to meet him at the parking lot, stabbed him in the eye, then dragged him to the edge of the bluff and threw him into the sea. He wasn’t a big man, and he might not have been expecting an attack from a woman, or you might have had an accomplice who did the hard work while you baited the trap. But that doesn’t ring so true to me, and it’s not what I sense from you. You’re frightened – I’m certain of that – but not of your involvement in a crime being revealed. I think you’re scared that whoever killed Perlman may come after you next, and your daughter too.’

Now she turned to face him for the first time since he had begun speaking.

‘Are you done?’ she said. She tried for boredom and contempt, and almost conjured up a good imitation of both, but failed at the latter.

‘Just about,’ he said. ‘If it’s all right with you, I will take Sam home with me, because I believe that she’s at risk in your company. You can have tonight to consider what I’ve said, because tomorrow I’m going to talk with Chief Bloom and tell her what I think. It could be that I’m completely wrong about everything, but I’ll let her decide after I’ve spoken to her.’

He lowered his arm.

‘If you’ll bring Sam to me, I’ll be on my way.’

She opened the door, but paused before reentering her house.

‘Why can’t you just leave us in peace?’ she asked.

‘You’re not at peace,’ he replied. ‘And you won’t be until you tell the truth.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she said, ‘you and your sanctimonious bullshit.’

‘My daughter. Please.’

She went inside, closing the door in his face. She reappeared after a minute or two, helping Sam into her coat, Amanda following behind them looking upset. Sam simply appeared puzzled. When she emerged, she took her father’s hand and said goodbye to Amanda and her mother. Only Amanda replied, and then the door closed again and the light in the hallway was extinguished, leaving the porch light shining upon them. Parker and Sam broke its cocoon and headed down the steps to the beach.

‘Why aren’t we staying for dinner?’ Sam asked. ‘Did you and Amanda’s mommy have a fight?’

‘We had a discussion.’

‘
Like
a fight?’

‘A disagreement.’

‘It was a fight,’ said Sam, with conviction.

‘What was the movie?’

‘
Mulan.’

‘Sorry you missed the end.’

‘It’s okay, I’ve seen it before.’

They walked on.

‘Did Amanda’s mommy do something bad?’ asked Sam.

‘Why would you say that?’

‘Because you only fight with people who do bad things.’

‘No, she didn’t do anything bad. I think she may be in trouble, but she’s too scared to ask for help.’

‘Are you going to help her?’

‘I’m going to try.’

‘Good.’

Sam stumbled slightly on the sand, and when he stopped to make sure that she was all right, he saw that she was looking at the small of his back, where the gun lay. He thought that his shirt was concealing it, but he figured that the wind might have revealed its shape beneath the material. His daughter did not remark upon it, but she remained silent for the rest of their walk home.

32

O
nce again Steiger stood on the dunes above the house, and watched Parker and the little girl depart. He had been feeling apprehensive all day, but could not pinpoint the source. He put it down to the fact that he was not yet in possession of all the information required to make a decision on how to act. Yes, he had been given permission to kill the Winter woman, but the problem of the detective still remained, and now he had a child with him. Steiger was not above killing children – Steiger was not above killing anything – but this whole business had already grown too fancy. Others had made it so. Steiger would have dealt with it differently from the start: kill Perlman, kill Tedesco, kill Winter, and vanish. He would not even have left bodies to be found.

But then Perlman’s remains were washed ashore, and Oran Wilde became a pawn in the game. Steiger would not have chosen to go down that route, to take an already complicated situation and add further layers of complexity. It was, he thought, to do with degrees of intelligence. Steiger did not consider himself a stupid man, but neither did he believe himself to be brighter than he was. He had come to realize that there were those in the world who were so clever that they regarded simplicity as beneath them. If they had to connect two points, they invariably chose to do so by adding a third, making a triangle. The Jigsaw Man was just such an individual. As a consequence, Steiger had decided not to work with him again. Once this job was done, he would inform Cambion, who always acted as his intermediary in such business.

He could no longer see Parker and his daughter – he assumed that was who the girl was. They were lost in the gathering dimness between the two houses, and the farther away they got from him, so did his agitation begin slowly to dispel. Parker, Steiger believed, was the cause of his disquiet. The man was uncommon, strange. He should have been dead. The detective was like a broken insect that continued to crawl across the floor, waiting for the second blow that would put it out of its misery. Steiger had shadowed him throughout the day, even following him to the police department in town. Steiger had dearly wanted to know what was being spoken of inside, and it was only good fortune – and, perhaps, instinct – that caused him to linger after the detective departed, so that he was nearby when the car carrying the two women arrived. Even without the telltale motor pool vehicle, he smelled them as detectives, and his concerns only increased as they followed the chief of police out to Mason Point.

Steiger didn’t hang around. He made a call to the local undertaker, claiming to be a relative of Perlman’s, and was informed that the body had been removed to Augusta for autopsy. After that, it was easy for him to make the final connection and surmise that something about Perlman’s body had aroused the suspicions of the state police.

Steiger’s feet were almost submerged in the soft sand of the dunes. He shook them free, and sought firmer ground. He did not enjoy the proximity of the sea. He could not swim, and so the ocean had always been a threatening presence, a dark mass that called to him, inviting him to test himself against it, immersing himself inch by inch until finally he would no longer be able to feel the sand and stones beneath his feet, and he would drown.

Sometimes in his dreams, he would find himself floating in an infinity of black water – oddly safe, as long as he did not struggle – and slowly become aware that a presence was emerging from the depths below, ascending toward the surface, coming to consume him, and he would wake just before he saw it, before he felt its jaws close upon him, and he knew that neither did its form matter nor any physicality he might project upon it, because it would always be the same in essence: it would be his own death.

The dunes, too, were a part of this threat: formed by the sea, and so to him neither land nor water, and composed of organic and inorganic matter, of that which had once lived and that which had no life at all. Seen from a distance, the dunes took the form of hidden vertebrae, as though they concealed beneath them a creature lost to time and memory, but one that, if woken, would want only what all such beasts want: to bite, to tear, to feed.