Far From True (22 page)

Cal

ONCE
Miriam Chalmers had kicked me out of her house, I phoned Lucy Brighton.

“Yes?” she said.

“You sitting down?”

“What is it?”

“Miriam’s alive.”

“What?” She said it so loud, I pulled the phone away from my ear.

“She just returned home, walked in while I was looking around. She’d gone to Lenox for a couple of days to think about her marriage, apparently, and didn’t know anything about the drive-in.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. “That’s . . . wonderful. I’m glad she’s okay. I just wish my father had also . . .”

“I know.”

A pause at the other end, and then, “If it wasn’t Miriam in the car with my dad, then who was it?”

“Miriam thinks a woman named Georgina Blackmore. Ring a bell?”

“No. There’s a professor at Thackeray with that last name, I think. But I’m not really sure. Cal, should I call the police? Tell them they’ve got it wrong? That it’s somebody else?”

“I imagine they’ll be hearing from Miriam herself pretty soon. I told her she should call her brother. Lucy, I don’t know that there’s
anything else I can do for you at this point. The missing discs, they’re really Miriam’s problem now.”

“Yes, I guess so. I’m going to have to call her.”

“A heads-up. She’s pissed you hired me. She wasn’t pleased to find me in the house. And she was beyond horrified when she realized someone had been into that room, and that the discs were taken.”

“I have to—what am I going to say when I call her? I mean, I’ve started making the arrangements for my father. He’s been moved to the funeral home. There are things to do, to plan, and—”

“Tell the funeral home. Have them call her,” I suggested.

“This is all so hard to believe. Cal, thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“It hasn’t been much,” I said, getting into my car. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. In the meantime, I’m heading home.”

“Okay, thanks. Good-bye, Cal.”

I keyed the engine and pulled away from the Chalmers house, thinking about Miriam. She’d looked more upset about the discovery of the playroom, and those missing discs, than she had about her husband’s death.

But it wasn’t my headache anymore.

There was a parking space set aside for me in the lot behind my building, but there was no access to my apartment from there. That meant I had to walk down a narrow alley that delivered me to the
main street, where I’d find the ground-level door to my second-floor apartment right next to Naman’s Books.

It was after ten, and the light was on in the store.

The jangling bell over the door announced my arrival. Naman Safar was perched on a stool behind the cash register, his nose in an old Bantam paperback edition of
The Blue Hammer
, by Ross Macdonald, while some opera I’d never heard of played in the background. He glanced up at me.

“Hey, Cal.” He tucked a strip of red ribbon between the pages, closed the book, and set it next to the cash register. “You’re up late.”

“Me? What are you doing open this late?”

Naman looked at his watch. “I guess it is kind of dumb. No one’s out shopping for books at this hour. But what am I going to do at home? Sit around?”

“Naman, turn off the lights. Go home.”

He nodded obediently. “Okay, okay.”

He slid off the stool, planting his feet on the floor. He turned off the CD player and then popped open the cash register. “Big day,” he said. “Twenty-nine dollars.”

“Well,” I said.

“E-books aren’t just killing new-book stores. They’re killing me, too. I hate those things, those little things with the screens. I hate them.”

A book resting atop the pile closest to me caught my eye. Another Roth, in paperback.
The Human Stain.
I picked it up. “Am I too late? Have you closed the till?”

“Take it.”

“No.” I glanced at the price Naman had lightly penciled on the inside cover. Five bucks. “Here,” I said, digging into my wallet. I had a five. “Take this.”

He looked at the bill. “Okay.”

As he was taking it from my fingers, we both heard tires squealing up the street somewhere. The gunning of an engine.

“I haven’t read that one, so I can’t tell you if it’s one of his good ones,” Naman said.

“Someone recommended it to me this morning,” I said. “The woman who runs the Laundromat up the street.”

The sound of that racing engine was getting closer. Then the sudden screeching of brakes.

We both looked out the store’s front window at the same moment. A black pickup truck had appeared, passenger side facing us. The window was down, and a young white man, probably in his early twenties, was shouting.

He yelled, loud enough for us to hear through the glass, “Fucking terrorist!”

I saw an arm come up. There was something in the man’s hand. A bottle, maybe, and what looked like flame.

“Get down!” I said to Naman.

As he threw himself to the floor, the Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, hit the window of the bookshop. The glass and the bottle shattered simultaneously, and the burning rag soaked in, presumably, gasoline landed on a pile of books.

Flames erupted instantly.

The truck’s back tires squealed. The man who’d tossed the bottle let out a large whoop of victory as the vehicle sped off.

“Naman!” I shouted. “We have to get out!”

“My books!” he cried, stumbling to his feet. “My books!”

“Have you got an extinguisher?”

He looked at me with horror and panic. “No!”

“Get out!” I said again.

I dropped my copy of
The Human Stain
and pushed Naman toward the door, followed him out onto the sidewalk. I dug into my pocket for my phone to get the fire department.

I hated talk radio.

“I
keep hoping somehow I skipped over her,” Clive Duncomb said to Peter Blackmore. Duncomb had the remote in his hand, his thumb on the fast-forward button, bodies gyrating and tangling and untangling at high speed on the TV screen.

“You’re going so fast, it’s starting to make me sick to my stomach,” Peter said. “I can’t look at it anymore.”

“She’s not on that one,” Duncomb said, ejecting the disc. He picked up another one, glanced at what had been scribbled on it in marker.
Georgina-Miriam-Liz flying high.
“I don’t think it could be this one. This is one where the girls had the stewardess costumes. That was
after
the Fisher girl died.”

“You better check it just the same,” Peter said. “I can’t think about this. Why did that man answer Georgina’s phone?”

“One crisis at a time,” Duncomb said. But then his own phone rang. He looked at it, said to Peter, “It’s Liz.”

He put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”

“You find her yet?”

“Not yet.”

“We may have another problem,” Liz said.

“What?”

“Lucy called here.”

“Lucy?”

“Lucy Brighton, Adam’s—”

“I know who she is. What’d she want?”

“She said she knows you have it. That she wants it back.”

“It?”

“She says she doesn’t want any trouble if you return it.”

“That private detective,” Duncomb said. “He must have told her he suspects I’ve got the discs. What did you tell her?”

“I told her you weren’t here. What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. I’ll try to sort her out later. Set up a private meeting, show her the discs, destroy them in front of her, maybe. I don’t know. I can’t deal with this now.”

He ended the call.

The doorbell rang.

“Turn that off,” Duncomb said to Blackmore. “Put those discs away.” Once there were no longer naked bodies on the television, the Thackeray security chief opened the door.

“Well, whaddya know, it’s Detective Duckworth. Won’t you come on in?”

As Duckworth stepped into the living room, Blackmore was gathering together the discs and putting them into a cabinet under the television. He approached and extended a hand. “Hello. I—I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Peter Blackmore.”

Blackmore looked nervously at Duncomb, as though seeking permission to say anything more. Duncomb stepped in. “The detective here’s been out to the campus a couple of times.” He grinned. “Thinks we don’t know how to do our job.”

Blackmore said, “I don’t work with Clive. I’m a professor.” A pause, then, “English literature.”

“So it’s Professor Blackmore?” Duckworth asked.

“Yes.” He looked at the security chief. “We should tell him.”

“Peter, please.”

“About Georgina’s phone. About that man who answered. He—”

“Peter,” Clive Duncomb said, struggling to remain patient, “let’s see why the detective has decided to drop by.”

Duckworth said, “Professor, I understand you were talking to someone else from the Promise Falls police today.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Detective Carlson had interviewed Mr. Duncomb here, and you followed him out afterwards. About your wife. That she was missing.”

“I didn’t file an official report,” the professor said, glancing at Duncomb. “I just had some basic questions for him.”

“Did your wife finally turn up?”

Blackmore swallowed. “No, not yet. But . . . the last time I tried to call her—”

Duckworth reached into the plastic shopping bag and took out the purse. “Do you recognize this, Professor?”

“That . . . that looks like Georgina’s.”

“It has her wallet and ID in it as well,” Duckworth said. “And her cell phone.”

“Dear God, where did you find that?”

“It was in Adam Chalmers’s Jaguar. The one that was crushed at the drive-in last night.”

“Why would my wife leave her purse in Adam’s car?” he asked.

Duncomb said, “Oh shit.”

“I don’t understand,” Blackmore persisted.

“It wasn’t Miriam in the car,” Duncomb said to his friend. “It was Georgina.”

Blackmore started to go weak in the knees. The detective put his hand on the professor’s elbow and led him over to one side of the room. “I’m very sorry, Professor, but I think Mr. Duncomb is right.”

Duckworth guided him to the couch, where the man collapsed. “Oh, Jesus, no. Oh dear God. I thought—I thought she was just mad at me. That she’d gone off for a few days. Georgina was very high-strung. Clive thought she was angry with me.”

“Angry why?” Duckworth said.

“Just some disagreements, that’s all.”

“Professor, I’ll need you to make an official identification of the body. We already know it’s not Miriam. She contacted her brother a short while ago. She was out of town. She’s alive.”

“Jesus,” Duncomb said.

“I have a picture,” Duckworth said gently. “On my phone. It shows three tiny moles on the lower abdomen, making a kind of triangle.”

Blackmore began to moan.

“May I show it to you?”

Blackmore nodded. Duckworth got out his phone, opened the photos app, held it in front of the professor.

“Oh, God, yes, that’s her.”

Duncomb’s phone rang. As he looked to see who it was, both men turned their heads.

Duncomb was staring at the word
Miriam
on the screen. “It’s my wife,” he told them. “I’ll be right back.”

He slipped out the front door, put the phone to his ear, and said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Adam is dead,” Miriam said.

“I just found out you weren’t with him. You couldn’t have called? You couldn’t have let anyone know it wasn’t you?”

“I didn’t know! I get home. I find some man in my house poking around. He tells me my husband got fucking crushed to death!”

“Who told you? The police?”

“Weaver. A private detective.”

“Him,” Duncomb said.

“Lucy hired him! Why does she have some private eye searching my house?”

“Miriam, listen to me.
Everyone
thought you were dead.
I
thought you were dead. You and Adam.”

“The son of a bitch. I think he was with Georgina. They thought Georgina was me.”

“It just got confirmed. I’m at Peter’s. The police are here. He just found out. He’s devastated.” He paused. “A little more so than you are.”

“I’ll grieve in my own way, on my own time, Clive. I’ve got too much else to think about right now, like who was in my house this morning when Lucy came over here.”

“Weaver told you.”

“Yeah. Was it you? Was it you who broke into the house? And got into the room downstairs? Someone took the discs. Please, God, tell me it was you.”

“It was me,” Duncomb said.

“Oh, thank God!”

“Soon as I realized Adam—and you, I thought—had been killed at the drive-in, I knew I had to get in there and get those discs. Adam had given me a key long ago, and the code, when you guys took that trip to Switzerland and wanted me to check in on the place. I knew that sooner or later, Lucy, or someone else going through the house, would discover that room and find the discs. I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I guess, given the circumstances, it was a smart thing to do.”

“I called Peter right away, told him we had a problem. He’d been sitting by the phone, waiting for Georgina to call. God, what a turn of events. I didn’t even know she and Adam were seeing each other outside of . . . you know.”

“The sex?” Miriam said.

“Yeah, outside of the sex. I’d been worried about Georgina. She’s been acting funny lately, having second thoughts. I even thought at one point that she’d gotten in and taken the discs.”

“I think what was going on,” Miriam said, “was that she wanted Adam to herself and didn’t want the rest of us to know.”

“Maybe. Maybe that was it.”

“What have you done with the discs?” Miriam asked. “Tell me you’ve destroyed them.”

“Not yet. Peter and I have been watching them.”

“I don’t believe you two. You think Adam and I are dead and you’re sitting around getting off on what we did together?”

“No!” Duncomb said. “Listen to me. I needed to go through them, make sure we had them all.”

Miriam went quiet.

“You there?”

“I’m here,” she said.

“There’s at least one missing.”

“What are you saying?”

“One of the sessions where we brought in those other girls, put the roofies in their wine. Lorraine, and—”

“I remember. Just get to it.”

“I can’t find the one where we had the Fisher girl. The one who was killed in the park and—”

“Mr. Duncomb!”

Clive Duncomb spun around. Barry Duckworth was standing on the front step of Blackmore’s house.

“Get off the phone,” Duckworth said. “You’re needed in here. Your friend’s going to pieces.”