Salvation Boulevard (17 page)

“We have to find the book. I want you to help me find the book.”

“But first,” I said, “let me look at the room and try to understand what happened here.”

“You don't believe me, do you, that the book was important?” When I didn't answer, she said, “The way I didn't believe him. Do you know anything about it?”

“Just the bit they found that was in the news. He said it was easy to disprove God, right?” Something I found doubtful. More than doubtful. Annoying and arrogant. That's what it was, arrogant.

“That wasn't the point. He said you have to start with one proposition or the other, that God exists or doesn't. If you say He does, that's a dead end. The dead end the world is stuck in now. But if you start with us, with humanity, and ask why we believe, especially in something that doesn't exist, then you can go somewhere.”

“I don't want to argue about this,” I said. “Let me get down to business, alright?”

“You're not listening,” she said.

“Yes, I am,” I said, irritated with her. Angry, because she was attacking my faith. “You're looking for a manuscript. Right? And you can't find it. Right? So stop looking for
paper
,” I said, as sarcastic as she'd been earlier, “and look on the
computer.
Nobody keeps things on paper anymore.”

“I'm not stupid,” she snapped back. “Of course, I looked on the computer. That's what I'm trying to fucking tell you. It's erased. It's gone.”

“What do you mean erased?”

“I mean erased.”

“A lot of stuff can be recovered,” I said.

“No, no, no,” she said. “Oh, no. Not this time. Somebody wanted his material gone. They deleted all his files, and then started duplicating his iTunes, over and over. There's ten copies of
Love and Theft
on there. They didn't just delete; they wrote over everything so it couldn't be recovered.”

“
Love and Theft
?”

“He was a Dylan fan. He had everything. Now there are ten copies of everything Dylan ever did on there.”

“All right, so maybe the book is gone. But let's get down to business. Let's try to figure out who killed him and why.”

“Don't you see?” she said. “The book is why. They killed him for the book.”

“I don't buy it,” I said. “I know why people kill. They kill for money, dope, sex, and because they're drunk or stoked, not over . . . ”

“Religion? Did you miss 9/11?”

“Well, then you're saying it points back to Nazami, and we're right back where we started.”

“Why a Muslim? Were you absent the day they taught the Crusades in high school? Did you miss that we're in a war against Islamic fascism, and we killed two hundred or four hundred or six hundred thousand in Iraq? Come out of your box. People kill for
ideas.
Do you remember Vietnam? World War II? All those wars all over the place during the Cold War? People kill each other over
ideas.
”

“Sit over there,” I said. There was a couch across the room, opposite the desk. The wall above it was covered in bookshelves, except for a sort of display area in the center.

“Why?” she asked. “Did I get to you? Did I make you think? Do you know of someone who would kill over ideas? Remember, you just had a Christian nut kill Emmanuel Goldfarb because he was defending the wrong person in court.”

She definitely knew how to push buttons, and she was stomping on mine. “Just shut up for a minute,” I barked at her. “Go sit on the couch. I want to do my damn job.”

She planted herself more solidly in the chair.

I stepped closer to her, reached out, and took her hands to pull her up. Her hands were smooth and dry and warm, and the contact between us was instant and complete and completely unexpected. I pulled to make her stand. She rose easily, ready, it seemed, to come wherever I wanted to take her as long as I had my hands on her. There was a moment there when we froze, looking at each other, holding hands. She was holding mine quite as much as I was holding hers.

Then I let go with one hand, gestured across the room, and said, “Please.”

We both let go, and she went across to the couch. I watched her walk. She knew that. She was a woman. When she sat, she curled her legs up under her, limber as a little girl.

 

I turned away from her and sat in the office chair. Here I am, I said to myself, where Nathaniel MacLeod used to sit, where he was sitting when he was shot. The entry door was directly to my right. Certainly, if the door opened, he would have known it.

Behind me, to my left, there was a window, a good-sized window. It let in a lot of light but didn't glare on the screen.

I looked directly to my left, at the wall beside me. I saw a photo of Nathaniel with Jimmy Carter. They both had saws and hard hats and were building Habitat for Humanity houses.

When Nathaniel was shot, the gun had been held to his right temple. Blood, scalp, some hair, brains, and bits of bone had splattered against the wall. The splatter pattern was outlined in chalk. Nobody had cleaned it up, and it had dried there. Carter had a splat of blood and something grayer right by his chin. Nathaniel's image had taken some of his own blood. Over to the side of the photo was the hole they made digging the bullet out of the wall. It had a chalk ring around it.

Now that it was quiet and Teresa and I had stopped going at each other, I could smell the stale odors of dried death and decay.

I wanted to put my hand to my own temple, holding something, a book, anything, and then drop my hand and release the substitute object. But it seemed too graphic an act to perform in front of his widow. Still, I raised my right hand slightly, then let it fall, and looked down. The chalk mark that marked where the gun had been found was not directly below. It was about eighteen inches to the right. Alright, maybe his hand hadn't fallen straight down; maybe the recoil had pushed it out and away. But no, the Webley-Fosberry is a strange gun. I'd never heard of one, so I'd looked it up. It's an automatic revolver with a complex mechanism that uses the force of the recoil to turn the barrel to the next cylinder, making it smooth and
steady, and in its day, it was a favorite of target shooters. Still, it was possible that he'd flung his arm out. People do all sorts of things at the point of trauma and death.

If someone had set it up as a suicide, they'd done a fairly good job. I didn't see any reason to doubt it.

So why had the story changed? Had Ahmad Nazami really walked into a police station and confessed? We were taking the position that he hadn't. And we were accepting, at least for the moment, his wild story of kidnapping and torture.

The missing manuscript and the erased computer? Could that be the reason? As far as I knew, nobody had discovered that until an hour ago, when Teresa came in for the first time. When it was discovered, could it be included in a tale of suicide? Sure. If he killed himself in despair. What do writers despair about? Their work. So, logically, he could have destroyed his work as well as himself.

Somebody had staged the suicide.

Then changed their mind? Then gone and organized a kidnapping and used at least two thugs, plus a jet and a pilot. Why? What had gone wrong with the first story?

Why kill MacLeod in the first place? Over a book? By a professor?

More questions than answers.

I turned around. There was a display area centered in the bookshelves over the couch.

“That's where the gun was?” I asked Teresa. She nodded. “It's an unusual gun,” I said. “Why did he have it, and why on display?”

“Nathaniel wrote some mysteries.” She pointed to them, set up around where the revolver had been. Three paperbacks were on display, the covers facing outward. I got up and went close enough to read the covers.

“He used to have more copies,” Teresa said. “Three or four of each. I know, I set up his nice little display for him.”

There was only one of each. Their titles were
Strangled by Ivy
,
Leaded Glass
, and
Downfall of a Don
, all with the image of something
deadly—a gun, a dagger, and a bloody bludgeon—over some academic scene.

“Campus mysteries,” she said. “One horrible person gets killed; ten people all have motives. An amateur sleuth, a philosophy professor, of course, solves them. His girlfriend at the time—this was twenty years ago—bought him the gun. It's the gun that killed Sam Spade's partner in the
Maltese Falcon
—not
the
gun, the type of gun.”

“He kept it loaded?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let's walk this through,” I said. “Would you go sit at the desk.” She did, and I went to the door. “So, he's sitting at his desk. It's about two in the morning. Maybe three. What is he doing here, that time of the night? Was that usual?”

“No, not when we were together.”

“Was he an insomniac? Work all night? Have a deadline?”

“No. But . . . oh, maybe to meet the girlfriend.”

“Why here? You two weren't living together anymore. Home is always more comfortable and private. Anyway, he's here, at three in the morning. Someone comes to the door. It's locked? Unlocked?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“When I came, it was unlocked. I just opened it and walked right in.”

“Yes, of course, unlocked. He hated doors that locked automatically. He was always locking himself out if they did.”

I stepped over to the door. “So, I come in and . . . ” I walked toward her in Nathaniel's chair. “I take the manuscript? Except for the first page? And then I erase the computer with all your life's work on it, your e-mails, phone numbers, everything . . . and you let me. Is that likely? A backup, there had to be backup.”

“An external hard drive,” she said. “It's gone. It sat right here.” She pointed at the back of the desk.

“A person comes in,” I said, “and goes to the gun.” I took the few steps toward the other side of the room and reached for it, suiting my
actions to my words. “Knows it's loaded. Takes it down. All this time, Nathaniel sits politely at his desk. Doesn't yell or call 911 or fight back. Then the person tells him to sit still, and he comes up, right here.” I came up behind her and put my fingertip near her temple, not actually touching her, yet still she shivered. “And he shoots him.”

“Or she,” Teresa said.

“Right, or she,” I said.

“He would let a woman in,” Teresa said, “and sit there while she got the gun. Because men don't know enough to be afraid of women.” She turned and reached up and, wrapping her fingers around my outstretched index finger, turned it away from her. “A man, he would, I don't know, argue, get upset.” She still held onto me. “But a woman, he might laugh at her. Then she might shoot him”—she squeezed hard and spoke with anger—“just for laughing at her.”

It was as if she was telling me how she had done it. And why. If it had stayed a suicide, a fake suicide, I would have figured her for it, but it didn't account for all that happened with, and to, Nazami. Maybe Nazami was a nut job all the way and had made it up. Maybe two separate things had happened. Put in the possibles and spin them on a spindle and see what lines up in the slot machine. I said, “He would let you.”

“Yes, he would,” she said, her hot, dry hand loosening and tightening in a slow rhythm on my finger.

“And if you put the gun to his head, he wouldn't be afraid, would he?”

“Not really, no.”

“You'd had fights, lots of fights,” I said. I was certain they had. She'd shown me she knew how to push the buttons that lead to domestic madness.

“No,” she said.

“You don't have to lie,” I said with kindness, as if I thought that was just fine.

“No?”

“Not to me,” I said. “You had fights.”

“Yes, we did.”

“You loved him, and he hurt you.”

“Yes, you bastard.” Angry at him, angry at me, blending both of us together.

“You used to fight. Who hit who? You hit him, or he beat you?”

“He . . . ”

“Not you?”

“No,” she said, but she didn't even mean to be convincing.

“Not ever?” We were falling into the rhythm of Q&A. It was taking on a life of its own, with its own cadence, a ballad of love and anger, and all three of us dancing to it, she and I and the dead man too.

“Sometimes.” It was coming out of her beat by beat. “Yes, sometimes,” like the beating of her heart. “I hit him. I hit him a lot of times, but I couldn't hurt him.” She twisted my finger and tried to bend it. “Like I can't hurt you. It's not fair, you know, not fair at all that you can hurt me, and I can't hurt you.”

“But I don't want to hurt you,” I said.

“Yes, yes, you do,” she said, holding on to my hand and standing up, pressing against me. “You want to, you want to. I feel it every time I see you. I felt it just talking to you on the telephone.”

“So, you were angry at him?”

“Yes,” she answered, her mouth coming up to mine.

“And when he laughed,” I said and put my hand in her hair to pull her far enough back so that I could see the expression in her face and read her eyes, “you shot him?”

“Me, shoot him? I wish. I just wanted him to get mad enough to pay attention to me. Mad enough to put his fingers in my hair and pull it, like you're doing . . . pull harder . . . harder . . . hurt me . . . then throw me down on the couch and fuck me.”