Lie Down with the Devil (11 page)

“But you do need one occasionally?”

“I use a rental. Anything else you want to talk about?”

“Can we come in?”

“Do we have anything else to discuss? I gave you the file—”

“Yeah, we heard you had a sense of humor.” Big Mac spoke for the first time. He had an angry flush in his cheeks.

“What?” I said, meaning, What did I do?

Little Mac shook his head sorrowfully.

“I think we should just haul her the hell out of there,” the big guy muttered. He scuffed his foot on the porch step again, and I thought about asking him to take his smelly shoe off before I let him in the foyer.

Probably not a good idea. I moved back from the
doorstep, not graciously, I admit, and they shuffled inside. We gave each other the eyeball for a while.

I said to McHenry, or was it McDonough? Whatever—the big one. “Don’t blame me. It’s not my dog; I don’t even have a dog.”

“Why should we believe you?”

“Why shouldn’t you believe me? You want to see my cat?”

“Let’s sit down somewhere, okay? Maybe this is just some kind of misunderstanding.” Little Mac tried to smooth the waters, but I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust them.

I took the seat behind my desk because I wanted to keep them at a distance. Neither of the cops seemed to want to lead off the conversation. I wanted my coffee. Finally I decided that if I didn’t want to waste the whole day, I’d have to say something.

I tried turning a single word on its head. “Misunderstanding?”

“Who was the girl?” Big Mac said.

“What girl?”

“The dead girl in the morgue. I saw your face. You knew her, all right.”

“Hey, I’m the one who told you I knew her.”

“The one you called ‘Jessica Franklin.’”

I got a cold feeling in my stomach.

“A whole day,” the smaller cop said reproachfully. “More than a day wasted, and now we’re exactly where we started.”

“Jessica Franklin. That’s the name she gave me.”

“Hey,” Big Mac said, “there is no Jessica Franklin. We know all about it.”

“Guys,” I said, “there is no Santa Claus and I’m not gonna fight you over the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. But Jessica Franklin, the girl on your slab? She
sat right in that chair last Thursday night and cried her eyes out. Used up a whole box of Kleenex.”

Little Mac said, “So it would surprise you to know that Jessica Franklin, the Jessica Franklin who lives at the address you gave us, is alive and well.”

“Yeah, it would surprise me. Hey, it would delight me. And if my Jessica Franklin is alive and well, she can absolutely name your corpse. Because it would have to be a sister, a twin sister.”

Big Mac said, “Wrong. This Jessica Franklin is a nurse’s aide, works over at St. Elizabeth’s. She’s fifty-four years old and a model citizen. Only time the Allston cops ever heard from her was when she got her wallet lifted two weeks ago.”

Shit
, I thought.

Roz
, I screamed silently,
how the hell could you do this to me?

I said, “You showed her the dead girl’s picture?”

“We don’t exactly have a great photo of the dead girl. You show that kind of photo around, you get bad reactions.”

“But you described her,” I said.

“Old Jessica Franklin didn’t seem to know her.”

“Shit,” I said. “Believe me, this girl was good, really good, Academy Award level, a great little actress. Tears, the whole thing.” I was trying to take it in as I spoke. No wedding, no fussy mother, no cheating bridegroom. I was thinking fast.

Big Mac took something out of a folder. I recognized it.

“Looks good,” he said. “You got any more lying around?”

“Wedding invitations?”

“No, no, just the stationery. Print-it-yourself stuff.
It’s not embossed, just a good old ink-jet printer. Looks like you’ve got a new one.”

“Look, the woman, the dead woman, whoever she was, gave it to me.”

Little Mac said, “I called the place myself, this Fiore place in Saugus. They do a lot of weddings, but they never heard of this couple.”

Roz
, I thought.
Dammit, Roz.
Roz had been insistent that it was time for me to go back to work. She wouldn’t have thought twice about lying for a good cause, saying that a woman who called in out of the blue was “a friend of a friend,” a special case. But she was supposed to check out prospective clients.

How could I sit here and blame it all on Roz? I knew her foibles and I’d hired her; I’d trusted her to do the job.

“She wasn’t wearing an engagement ring,” Little Mac said.

“She was wearing one when I saw her. Alive.”

“Yeah?”

“A silver band, not a stone.”

“You don’t wear an engagement ring, I notice?”

That was Big Mac’s way of telling me he knew who I was, that he’d run a background check, that he knew I was engaged to an organized crime figure, that nothing I said was worth believing.

“Oh, yeah.” He yanked another item out of the folder, “And ‘Jessica’ gave you this photo, too?”

“Her fiancé, the man she hired me to follow.”

“Yeah, well, listen, after we had our little heart-to-heart over at Albany Street, we go back to the station and I’m feeling pretty good, you know, because we got a solid ID, a place to start, and I’m happy, you know? I’ve got this photo on my desk and guess who
comes along? Lieutenant Terrance. You know him?”

“No.”

“Stiff-ass guy, guy I’d like to impress for once. And you know what he says?”

“No.”

“He asks me: Am I a fan? I say, ‘Excuse me, sir, a fan of what?’ thinking he is no way asking me if I’m his fan because that’s kind of a stupid thing to say. So he points at this picture, this photo you gave me, and you said was a guy you followed around the other night. You know who this is?”

“I told you his name.”

“It’s some guy sings with a punk rock band.”

“But—I followed him.”

“The guy looked like this? Exactly like this?” He tapped the photo with his index finger.

“He wore a scarf. It was cold. It was dark.” I stopped because I could hear how lame it sounded. I’d expected the man to look like the photo. Dammit, he’d been with my client. She’d strolled him out of the restaurant, smiling up at her “fiancé.”

“And the woman paid you in cash?” Little Mac said.

“I accept cash.”

“You didn’t think it was odd?”

“She said she’d done some gambling at Foxwoods.”

He gave me a look, like how dumb is that? I didn’t blame him.

Big Mac said, “Let’s go back to the guy. You tailed him in a cab, you said?”

“Hey, I gave you his license plate.”

“Guess what? Stolen.”

They were landing so many direct hits, I felt boxed into a corner. “Did you run her prints, the dead woman’s?” It seemed like my only choice was to go on the offensive.

No response.

“Is an artist doing a sketch? So you can try it out on the real Jessica?”

“We’re not here to answer your questions,” Big Mac said. “You’re supposed to answer ours.”

“If we cooperate—”

Little Mac said, “Cooperation? That’s what we thought we were getting down at Albany Street.”

Big Mac said, “You made us look bad, Carlyle. Why are you lying to us?”

I could have told them I wasn’t lying. Again. I could have sworn on my mother’s grave and volunteered to take a lie detector test. Hell, I could have banged my head against the wall, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.

So I said nothing. And they took me downtown.

My anger level soared with each innuendo-packed question the Macs tossed my way. There was no point to the exercise beyond the naked display of power; they had decided to waste my time because they thought I had wasted theirs. They denied me a cup of coffee simply because I requested one. My head pounded till I thought it might explode, and when I finally demanded that they charge me or let me go, they let me sit for an hour and twenty-two minutes in an empty interrogation room to show me that they were in charge and I wasn’t.

No one offered me a ride home either. The Red Line into Harvard Square was crowded and steamy, full of the smell of wet wool and underwashed bodies. It wasn’t until the Central Square stop that I realized I was inspecting each boarding passenger, looking for Jessica Franklin.

I knew she was dead. She had lied to me from beginning to end. If she got on the T, if her ghost got on the T, I would grab her and shake her till she told me why she had lied. I tried to fill myself with righteous anger. The woman had lied to me and now I was in trouble with the cops. All because of her.

Every time I managed to stoke the flame of my
anger to a righteous burn, it subsided in a rush of sadness followed by a tide of curiosity. Why had she come to me, that sweet-faced child, with her plausible lies? Who was she? Who was Kenneth L. Harrison?

The minute I got home, I made coffee, adding milk till it was cool enough to chug. Then I hollered for Roz. Time for a reckoning. Yelling felt good, a release, a safety valve, and I knew perfectly well she could hear me. The house is old, the walls thin. I hear her plenty, especially when she and her mate du jour go at it hot and heavy on the tumbling mats she calls furniture.

When she didn’t respond, I abandoned my caffeine on the counter and raced upstairs. Moving felt almost as good as shouting. When Roz opened the door to her third-floor hideaway, she looked like a punk Cinderella in rags, her head wrapped in a ratty scarf, a shock of blue hair visible on the right side.

“I was just going to clean the house,” she announced breathlessly. “Top to bottom. Honest.” She pays reduced rent in exchange for housework, but she cleans neither often nor well.

“I know I fucked up,” she rushed on, “but really, I was gonna do more than just check that a Jessica Franklin lived where she said she did. I was gonna run all sorts of checks, but then you told me to do that thing with the dead bodies in Vegas, remember? I thought that was more important.”

The Macs hadn’t been that loud. I wondered whether she eavesdropped on all my conversations. “But you said—”

“She wasn’t a ‘friend of a friend.’ A little white lie, you know? I didn’t think it would hurt. You needed to get back to work.”

“Did you suggest it, or did she?”

“I don’t— Is it important?”

“Yes, it’s important! Dammit, I don’t know what’s important. The girl is dead!”

Roz stared at the floor, then stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth. “I kinda think she suggested it. I put her off, said you weren’t taking clients, and then she said something about really needing to see you, and was there any way we could fix it. She sounded so nice, and— Shit! Cleaning the house, I guess I should stick to that, right?”

“I want to know who that woman is. Was. Why she lied.” I tugged my hair and concentrated on breathing. The impersonation was so detailed. It had seemed so real, the fussy mother, the prim father, the nasty anonymous note. Now they’d vanished like evening shadows, leaving behind a wild goose chase to the Cape and an unidentified body on a slab.

Roz shifted her feet uncomfortably. “I guess the cops will find out.”

“Those cops? Let me tell you, those guys are not exactly going to devote their lives to it.”

Oh, they’d do fingerprints. They’d get a police artist to do a sketch, put it in the newspaper. Maybe they’d get a match on the prints; maybe the perp would come forward. If not, they’d move on. I knew what it was like, how many cases they had, how many court appearances, how many hours they clocked. Hit-and-run clears are never a priority unless the mayor’s kid gets crushed. Boston cops are realists. They prioritize, go for the big cases, the murders, the high-profile stuff, not the small-paragraph, second-section crimes.

Yelling at Roz felt good, but it was nothing but a dead-end street. I was angry, but Roz didn’t deserve the brunt of the attack. I was angry at a dead woman, but more than that I was furious at myself, at my failure to read Jessica Franklin, to detect her massive and
creative lies. I pride myself on my ability to tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit. My pride had taken a direct hit.

I kept my voice low. “Okay, you saw her? Jessica?”

“Well, yeah. I let her in. I saw her leave.”

“Could you draw her?”

Roz brightened. “Sure.”

“Okay. Draw her; that’s number one.”

“Number two?”

“I followed a car Friday night. I want you to run the plate. The cops said it was stolen—”

“If the cops—”

“Roz, they aren’t going to follow up on it, because they think I’m lying to them. If I lied about who the girl was, then my whole story is a lie; that’s what they think. I want the details: Where the car was stolen, who reported it.”

“Okay.”

“So you draw the girl and I’ll make copies of the guy’s photo. I already scanned it. It’s in the computer.”

I’d glimpsed “Ken” through fogged car windows, under fleeting streetlamps, a man wearing a heavy coat. But his general appearance had jibed with the photo. If pseudo-Jessica Franklin had picked this photo, she’d picked it because the rocker looked like Ken, like the guy who was supposed to be Ken Harrison. Enough like the man she wanted me to follow that I’d take the bait. Therefore the photo would be good enough to show around.

Somehow I kept thinking that if I’d done my job right, if I hadn’t lost him on the Cape, things might have turned out differently. Maybe the phony bride would still be part of the world, pretending to be somebody else today.

“Okay, so that’s three.” Roz’s voice jarred me back to the present.

“Come downstairs,” I said. “And lose the turban. The house can stay dirty one more day.”

In my office I wrote out the address of the building “Ken” had visited prior to his trip to the Cape. “Number four: Go door to door, every single office in this building. Make a list of every outfit that rents space there, and see if anyone who works in the building recognizes either the drawing or the photo.”

“Right.”

“If they recognize the guy in the photo as a member of a band, keep on asking.”

“Shit,” she said. “Omigod, it’s like a publicity still. Crap, I think I’ve seen that band. I should have gotten that.”