Very Bad Men (38 page)

“You shouldn't have come here,” she said in a dry, empty voice. “I don't know you. I can't afford to trust you. If you think I'm going to fall into bed with you, you should think again. I've got better judgment than my husband, and more self-control. I'm not some frail little thing who needs to be consoled.”

She crossed her arms defensively. “You put on a good act,” she said. “So very kind. I don't need your sympathy. I don't like you. You know something now that can hurt me. I'm sure that makes you very happy. I hate it. If you've got any decency at all—and I suppose I'm crazy to think you do—you'll get out of here and forget all about what just happened.”

She kept her eyes on mine for most of the speech, but at the end she looked away. I wondered which thing I was supposed to forget—our embrace or her husband's infidelity.

I said, “I'm afraid I didn't hear a word of that. So if any of it was meant for me, you'll have to go through it again.”

Her chin dropped a little and I thought I could see her shoulders relax. “I don't think I will,” she said with a bitter twist of a smile. “Do you want a drink? I've got beer or wine. Or I could mix you something.”

“Beer's fine,” I said.

She took longer than she needed in the kitchen, digging around in the refrigerator, opening and closing cabinet doors. I left her to it, taking a seat on one of the two sofas. She brought my beer in a glass, and another for herself. She drank a sip of it and settled onto the other sofa. I watched her getting comfortable, tucking her right leg beneath her.

“Who is she, the woman?” I said. “Do you know?”

She frowned over the rim of her glass. “I'm not sure I want to tell you.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, leaning back against the cushions.

Another sip of beer and she said, “Julia Trent. She's his law partner.”

“Did you know it was going on?”

“No. But something usually is, with Jay. That's why I followed him tonight. He told me he was going for a drive to clear his head.” She tapped a finger against her glass. “Julia Trent. I never suspected her. I've always thought she's sort of a dried-up husk. The last one was at least younger than me, and prettier. That made it easier to take. What are you smiling at?”

“You can't expect me to let that go by,” I said. “Younger and prettier. I'll believe the first, if you say so. Not the second.”

“You're a charmer. But it's true. Jay's always had an eye for pretty women. And he doesn't try very hard to resist. It's his one vice.”

I took a long drink of beer and set the glass on a side table.

“Are you sure he doesn't have any others?”

Her brown eyes narrowed. “You're not still thinking he's the missing bank robber.”

“I haven't ruled him out. You said he was in law school at the time.”

“That's right. Harvard Law. A long way from Sault Sainte Marie.”

“Did you know him then?”

She shook her head. “I met him later.”

“So you can't tell me where he was on the day of the Great Lakes robbery. When did you meet him?”

“A couple years after the robbery, during one of the senator's campaigns. My father turned up at a lot of political rallies at the time. He was popular with the police unions. His endorsement was worth something. So the senator asked him to speak at some of his campaign events, and I tagged along. That's where I met Jay.”

I tilted my head. “And when you married him—what did your father think of that?”

“He thought I was too young. He advised me to wait.”

“That's interesting.”

“Just the way you would if your daughter was about to marry a bank robber,” she said wryly. “Look, you're wrong about Jay. I know his faults. They're not the ones you're thinking of. He didn't drive a getaway car for Floyd Lambeau. And if he did, my father wouldn't have covered it up. Not even as a favor for a senator.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“My father has integrity.”

I reached for my glass and took another drink. I didn't see any point in arguing with a daughter about her father's integrity. We watched each other for a while. Her eyes looked guileless, her lips made a pleasant line.

I decided to press my luck. “Let's talk about Floyd Lambeau,” I said.

Her expression darkened, but only a shade. “What about him?”

“Henry Kormoran said he saw you with Lambeau at the Great Lakes Bank.”

“We've been over this—”

“I know. Kormoran claimed he recognized you by your gorgeous smile, but your teeth were crooked back then. I've been thinking about that. Memory's a funny thing. If he thought he remembered seeing you, his mind might have filled in the details. If he got that one detail wrong, well, that doesn't mean you weren't there.”

Callie gave me a warm, open look. “Do you honestly think I helped Floyd Lambeau case the Great Lakes Bank?”

I waved the question away. “Alan Beckett asked me the same thing. He was spinning me just like you are.”

“How am I spinning you?”

“Kormoran never claimed that you cased the bank,” I said. “All he said was that he saw you there with Lambeau. Maybe it was a chance encounter. Or maybe Lambeau asked you to meet him. I think the situation would have appealed to him—having the sheriff's daughter there while he cased the bank. He would have seen the poetry in it.”

She didn't deny it. Her expression didn't change. I said, “If that's the way it was, it puts you in an impossible situation. On the one hand, you did nothing wrong. On the other, you've kept quiet for seventeen years about what really happened, and that makes you look guilty. And along comes Lucy Navarro, dredging everything up. That makes her a threat to your political career.”

“If you think I did something to Lucy Navarro—”

I raised a hand to cut her off. “I don't. But I think Alan Beckett might have.”

“That's not something I would allow—”

“He would have done it without telling you. He would have kept you out of it.”

I thought I saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes, but I could have imagined it. “No,” she said. “He wouldn't do that.” I waited for something more, maybe a defense of Beckett's integrity. I didn't get it. I watched her rise and knew our talk was at an end.

She led me to the door and I thanked her for the drink and told her good night. She didn't answer me. She let me get halfway down the walk before she said, “I'm sure you're mistaken.”

 

 

I GOT HOME after midnight and found Elizabeth sitting on the floor with the pages of her timeline scattered around her. A Mozart concerto played softly on the stereo. I sat beside her and slipped my arm around her shoulders. She turned to me for a kiss. We took our time about it.

“You taste like beer,” she said when it was done, “and you smell like strawberries.”

“I had a beer with Callie Spencer,” I said. “That's probably her shampoo you're smelling.”

The corners of her mouth curled up. “Is that right?”

“I let her cry on my shoulder.”

“Aren't you gallant. What did she have to cry about?”

“Her husband's having an affair.” With Mozart in the background, I spent a few minutes going over the details of my night.

When I finished, Elizabeth said, “So now you think Jay Casterbridge is the fifth robber? And he abducted Lucy?”

“Either that or Beckett took her,” I said. “I could go either way.”

Elizabeth stared thoughtfully across the room. “I think you're wrong about Beckett.”

“I don't see why. On Wednesday he tried to bribe Lucy to give up her investigation. She rejected his offer. That night, she went missing.”

Elizabeth started collecting the pages of her timeline. “That's just it,” she said. “It happened too fast. When she rejected him, he had options. He could come back with a better offer. He wouldn't jump right into a kidnapping. I think it must have been someone else.”

“We're back to Jay Casterbridge, then,” I said.

She looked unconvinced. “Jay Casterbridge came here Wednesday night, because he'd gone through his wife's files and found Lark's letter.”

“Exactly. Lark's been going after the Great Lakes robbers. If Casterbridge was one of them, he'd have a reason to want Lark caught.”

“Only if Lark knew he was one of them.”

“Maybe Casterbridge wasn't sure what Lark knew,” I said. “What time did he leave here Wednesday night?”

“Around eleven-fifteen.”

“So he would have had time to get to the Winston Hotel.”

Elizabeth rounded up the last of her pages. “I still don't buy it. Jay Casterbridge could barely bring himself to give me Lark's letter. He was afraid his wife would find out he had gone behind her back. I can't see him engineering a kidnapping.”

A
nthony Lark slept late on Saturday. He drove out of South Bend just after noon.

He had his hunting rifle in the trunk of the Chevy, along with Walter Delacorte's pistol. Paul Rhiner's pistol was hidden beneath a newspaper on the seat beside him. Lark was wearing a suit bought off the rack the day before. Charcoal gray over a white dress shirt and a black silk tie.

Delacorte's money clip rested in his pocket. Even after the clothes and the hotel, it still held almost three thousand dollars.

Lark traveled east through Indiana on Route 20, turning north near Middlebury and crossing into Michigan around one o'clock. On Route 131, a few miles south of Three Rivers, he spotted flashing lights: a sheriff's cruiser had pulled over a speeder. Lark moved into the left lane and watched the lights recede in his rearview mirror.

He made himself stay on 131 for another twenty-five miles, then took Stadium Drive into Kalamazoo. He stopped at the first big discount store he came to—a Walmart Supercenter—and broke one of Delacorte's fifties to pay for a six-pack of bottled water and a set of screwdrivers.

Back in the car he opened a bottle of water and tried to decide if he felt a headache coming on. He shook a capsule of Imitrex into his palm, considered it, and then dropped it into his pocket. He keyed the ignition and cruised up and down the aisles of cars until he found one just like his own—a gray Chevy Malibu.

Parking three spaces away, he used one of the screwdrivers to remove the license plate from his rear bumper and swap it with the plate from the other Malibu.

From the Walmart he drove south looking for I-94, which would take him to Ann Arbor and Sutton Bell. He figured it would take about an hour and a half. The state police would be watching for him, but the new license plate might be enough to throw them off. The only thing better would be to have someone else driving.

He came to an intersection and eased on the brake. The red light must have mesmerized him, because the tap on his passenger window made him flinch.

He turned to see an unshaven man with wild salt-and-pepper hair and a camouflage jacket. The man held a cardboard sign that read HOMELESS VET—WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

To Lark, the letters were the color of grass in springtime.

 

 

“YOU DON'T LOOK comfortable back there.”

“I'm comfortable,” Lark said.

He lay curled on his side in the backseat, with a blanket from the trunk rolled up for a pillow. His suit jacket hung over the front passenger seat. Through the window he could see blue sky and the tops of trees rolling past.

“The radio bother you?” his companion asked. “I can turn it down.”

They were traveling east on I-94, with a baseball game playing on an AM station.

“It's fine,” Lark said.

“I don't want to keep you awake, if you're worn out.”

Lark could see the back of the driver's head, a snarl of salt-and-pepper hair. He didn't believe the man was homeless, or a veteran. A genuinely homeless person would have a bedroll or a rucksack, or something. More than a camouflage jacket and a cardboard sign.

“I'm all right,” Lark said. “Don't worry about me.”

He didn't intend to fall asleep; he didn't trust HomeLess Vet that far. He'd given the man one of Delacorte's hundred-dollar bills, and promised him another when they reached Ann Arbor. He'd been careful not to let him see the money clip. But he'd noticed something in the man's eyes, a spark of cunning and greed. HomeLess Vet hoped to get his hands on more than two hundred dollars.

Lark had hidden Paul Rhiner's pistol under the floor mat behind the driver's seat, within easy reach.

“What kind of business did you say you were in?”

Lark hadn't said, but now he thought it over. “Advertising,” he decided.

“No kidding,” said HomeLess Vet. “Like commercials, on TV?”

“Billboards,” Lark said.

That bought him some silence. What is there to say about billboards?

On the radio someone hit a long fly ball to center field and someone else caught it. Lark surveyed the litter of beer bottles on the floor behind the passenger seat. He'd bought a six-pack on Wednesday. Two of them were still unopened. They would be too warm to drink, though he was tempted.

Amid the bottles he saw a notebook. Not his own; this was a spiral-bound pad. It took him a moment to remember that it had come from Lucy Navarro's yellow Beetle. He had found it in her glove compartment and stuffed it in his pocket. Then tossed it back here. He reached for it now and flipped open the cover.