Written Off (5 page)

In fact, it took almost two hours for us to reach Sunny Maugham’s little beach house. Duffy had indeed notified the Ocean Grove police, who reported no sign of activity in the area and no car parked in front of the bungalow. There was no garage and no driveway.

An Ocean Grove police car was already in front of the place when we got there, and I saw a few neighbors standing out on their doorsteps wondering what the cops were doing in the area. Ocean Grove is one of the quieter shore towns, even during the height of the season.

We hadn’t spoken much on the long drive down. I had pretty much plastered myself against the passenger side door, trying to stay as far away from this odd manifestation of a fictional character as possible. He, probably sensing my apprehension, stared straight ahead. Maybe he thought I was worried about his driving, which was so safety conscious I gave some thought to hiring him as my chauffeur.

My cell phone rang halfway down and I saw it was Brian calling. I don’t know why, but it seemed rude to take the call in the car. That was weird. Duffy Madison, or whoever he really was, made me act weird. That couldn’t be good.

There was one moment, right around Holmdel, when Duffy blurted out, “I’m concerned that Ms. Bledsoe might not be in her house alone. The Ocean Grove police aren’t hearing anything, but they don’t want to break the door down without a warrant or some indication of wrongdoing inside.”

I considered thanking him for the lovely images now bouncing around in my brain—a crime fiction writer’s mind is no place for the faint of heart—but didn’t respond. Words have always been my best weapons and my tools of choice. Now I was incapable of finding any that would help make sense of the situation.

Let’s recap, shall we? A man claiming to be the physical embodiment of my own fictional creation had invaded my life, insisting that he had come to being at the exact moment I’d started writing about the character with his name. He had the same job, under different circumstances, as my character. He looked roughly like I’d pictured my character. He spoke like my character. His demeanor was . . . you get the idea. And yet, he insisted he’d never read a word I’d ever written.

This guy wasn’t just disturbing every notion I had of reality; he was a really bad consumer.

“How can you be Duffy Madison?” I demanded of him in lieu of a response to his worries. “There
is
no Duffy Madison. I made him up completely from scratch.”

Not a flicker on his face, not a second when his eyes left the road. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I’ve never known anything else. It’s who I am.”

“But you have identification. Mr. Petrosky told me. Voter registration. Fingerprint files. A driver’s license. You have records with the Selective Service, for Chrissakes. If I just started writing Duffy four years ago, you can’t be more than four years old. How can you have any official paper trail at all?”

Duffy was driving at three miles over the posted speed limit; he must have been really worried about Sunny Maugham. “Wouldn’t your Duffy Madison have all those pieces of ID?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s a man in his thirties.”

“So am I.”

“You don’t remember a childhood? High school? College? I gave Duffy all those things, but you don’t remember anything before I started writing four years ago?” Duffy—my Duffy—was a logical man. If I could prove objectively that he was not who he believed himself to be, maybe we could figure out who he actually was.

“That’s about right, yes.”

We didn’t talk again until we reached Ocean Grove, and then it was just about directions to the house.

It was, as advertised, a small structure, one of four raised a few feet higher than they had probably been before the shore was ravaged by winds and rain. More or less a clapboard version of a tent home, it had a triangular roof and one or two rooms—it was hard to tell from the outside—with three steps
up to the front door. The four homes were surrounded on either side by much larger homes, clearly rental properties that leased by the apartment, as many as four flats in each house. Sunny’s little bungalow looked like it was the baby some of the bigger houses had spawned.

At the moment, it had police officers at its door and, I was certain, more in the rear, where there was a tiny yard with no fence. The cops didn’t have their weapons drawn, but I saw one rest his hand on his holster in anticipation.

“What happens now?” I asked Duffy. I opened my door because the air conditioning had gone off; I really wasn’t interested in getting out of the car and becoming involved in this scene.

“I’ll check in with the local police. I have no jurisdiction here or anywhere; I’m just a consultant.” Duffy got out of the car, then looked inside. “Come on.”

Dammit! I couldn’t look cowardly around this guy; he wouldn’t let me write about him being heroic anymore. Yeah, I know it’s crazy. What about this situation
wasn’t
crazy? I got out of the car, feeling like the biggest sucker on the planet.

Duffy started to close his door but stopped, looked inside, and reached in. “Your phone,” he said. I didn’t think I’d need it, but I didn’t want it to feel like molten plastic when I got back in. Duffy leaned in, said, “Oops,” when he dropped it—“Oops”? Really?—and after a few seconds, handed me my phone, which was only the temperature of a freshly baked bagel. I shoved it into my pocket and felt it warm my leg, which didn’t need warming.

Without any further words or a look in my direction, he strode directly across the street to the house and spoke to the first officer he reached. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the officer pointed at the front door. I followed at a discreet distance (I wasn’t even a consultant) and stopped at the curb.

Duffy shook hands with one of the officers at the door who was wearing sergeant’s stripes. They spoke briefly, and Duffy nodded, pointed at me, and nodded again. The cop acknowledged his nod, then turned back toward the door and said something into the comm link on his shoulder. Duffy walked down the three stairs and came to stand next to me.

“They haven’t seen any sign of life,” he reported. “But they also have a decent view of most of the inside; it’s a small place. They don’t see anything disturbing or dangerous, or they would have gone inside already.”

“So what are they going to do?” I asked.

“They’re trying Julia Bledsoe’s cell phone again because there is no landline in the bungalow,” Duffy answered. “They want to see if they can hear the ringtone.”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” I suggested. “If she’s there, they’d probably see her, and if she’s . . . if something happened, her cell phone is either gone, out of power, or holding enough messages that the call will be sent straight to voice mail. What happens if they don’t hear anything?”

Duffy looked dubious. “They could try to get a judge to sign a warrant, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence to merit one.” He stopped talking and looked intently at the officers at Sunny Maugham’s front door.

One of them was punching numbers into a cell phone. He waited, phone away from his ear. The two other cops leaned in toward the front windows, one looking in, the other two with their ears to the glass.

All of a sudden, the two listening both stood up straight with a jolt. They looked at the sergeant with whom Duffy had been talking, who nodded and pointed at the front door. Then the officer who’d been looking through the front window positioned himself at the door, got his balance, and kicked. Hard.

“I guess they heard the phone ring,” Duffy said, not necessarily to me.

“No shit, Sherlock.” He gave me a quick reproving look; I’d forgotten that Duffy doesn’t care for profanity. My publisher’s idea. Get more women to read the books. Hey, it’s a living.

The cops, led by the sergeant, rushed into the tiny structure and then . . . nothing. We didn’t see anything through the front window but police officers walking around in a nondescript sort of pattern, and we didn’t hear anything through the open front door, which looked like it would require a decent amount of repair if Sunny was going to close and lock it again.

Neither of us said anything; it was becoming a learned behavior. We avoided eye contact and didn’t speak to each other. A stranger passing by would have thought we’d been married for fifteen years.

Finally, the sergeant appeared in the front door again and beckoned. “Mr. Madison?”

Duffy started toward the house and then turned and looked at me. “Come along,” he said.

I had the strangest urge to look around for the person he was summoning, but I resisted it and did not ask, “Me?” I’d like it noted that when given the opportunity, I avoided the cliché. “You sure it’s all right?” I asked him. Any excuse to not go into that house, if something had been found, would do.

“If it’s safe for me, it’s safe for you,” he said impatiently. “Let’s go.”

Because—and only because—I couldn’t think of a plausible reason not to, I started toward the house. Duffy, already on the front steps, stopped and waited again when he saw I was clearly not relishing the amazing opportunity I was being given and was lagging behind. But he didn’t say anything.

Eventually, I reached his position on the top step and waited for him to enter the house. But he, gallant as ever, waved an arm toward the interior. “After you,” he said.

Finally, I meet a man with some manners, and he’s an idea I got in the shower. There was almost something poetically ironic about that.

The inside was one room, and it was not large. There was no television, no sofa. To the right, there was a tiny galley kitchen that included a microwave oven, a minifridge, and a two-burner cook top. In the center of the room was a fold-up card table with one chair (also collapsible) next to it. There was a folding beach chair leaning against the wall near the table. A thin line of sand led from the folding chair to the door in the back. Toward the back were towels hung on a line that ran across the room and flip-flops by the back door,
which led to a tiny porch. The back door was open, showing a small yard that had probably once been grass and was now mostly sand.

This is what upscale New Jerseyans can afford when they want to own a home down the shore.

The sergeant approached and looked at me, then at Duffy. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“My assistant,” Duffy said with no hint of irony.
Without me, there’d be no you, pal, and don’t you forget it
. Now in my own head, I was starting to sound like his mother. “Ms. Goldman is here to catch anything I miss and to chronicle anything we see. I assume that’s all right.”

The sergeant looked me up and down, which did not make me more comfortable. “If you say so,” he said. Then he looked at me. “Don’t touch anything.”

Resisting the impulse to thank him for the vote of confidence, I nodded.

“Come on,” Duffy said.

I reached into my back pocket for a reporter’s notebook, which Duffy had undoubtedly seen. I always have something to write on in case an idea comes when it’s not convenient. I don’t own a smart phone, and I don’t much care for voice recorders; they are not as reliable as paper. Paper never runs out of battery power. In my side pocket was a pen, so I got that out as well.

“Fire away, Duffy,” I said. He’d want to detail everything he saw that he considered relevant, and that meant everything. Luckily, I knew his method. I had invented his method.

He walked to the center of the room, next to the card table, and began revolving, very slowly, to take in every area of the room. “No sign of a struggle. No blood on any surface. No overturned furniture. No broken glass in the kitchen. No indications that any large furniture or rugs have been removed.” I wrote down the list in my own shorthand, which only I would be able to decipher later. Good penmanship is not the same as writing well.

Duffy often says that what an investigator doesn’t see is at least as important as what he does see. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it sounds good when I write it.

“Why would someone have removed a rug?” the sergeant asked. I knew why, but I let Duffy have his moment.

“It’s one of the safer ways to remove a body without being noticed,” he answered. “Quite often blood and DNA evidence go with the rug. Even a live victim being transported could be carried in a rug once sedated.”

The sergeant looked impressed and maybe a little concerned.

“What
is
in the room that’s relevant?” I asked Duffy, to get him going a little quicker. Even though I didn’t see any evidence of foul play—and it seemed Duffy didn’t, either—I wasn’t crazy about being here and wanted to begin the interminable journey back to Adamstown, where I was absolutely itching to get to those revisions.

Duffy redirected his attention to the room. “The room is used mostly as a staging area for days at the beach,” he said. “There is an usual amount of sand near the back door where people would leave and return, and a line of sand from the back door to the folding chair by the card table indicates that
it had been taken there after a trip to the beach. There is a futon near the back for those times when Ms. Bledsoe might want to spend the night. The kitchen does not appear to be fully stocked, although we will have to check the cabinets.” One of the officers, hearing that, immediately opened some doors and looked inside.

“Nothing special,” he said. Duffy walked over to him to see for himself, but the cop kept talking. “Cereal boxes, some dishes, some spaghetti. Not much.”

Duffy gave me a glance as he got a vantage point. “Enough food for one person who wasn’t planning to stay long or two who were only staying overnight,” he said, and watched me write it down. “Cooking implements for the most basic functions. Cleaning supplies under the sink, again very limited. Just kitchen surface wipes, dishwashing detergent, and glass cleaner. This was not set up to be a long-term residence for anyone.”

“That’s not a huge surprise,” the sergeant said. “These are beach houses. People come down for weekends, mostly. If you’re using it as a summer rental, you’re probably in one of the bigger houses, renting an apartment.”

“True,” Duffy noted. “But Ms. Bledsoe came down here on occasion for a purpose other than recreation. The only piece of furniture in the room that doesn’t have a coat of dust on it is the card table in the center, yet there are no dishes in the drainer. It’s unlikely Ms. Bledsoe, or anyone else, ate dinner here recently. No dust on the table means it was being used for some other purpose.”