Bad Things Happen Read online

  She came close to him under the porch light and studied his face. There was no sign of deception in it. He returned her gaze curiously. Though she didn’t study him for long, she had time to think about when she had seen him last: only two days before, at the funeral of Tom Kristoll. She had time to recognize that she was pleased to see him now.

  Other thoughts occurred to her, all on their own: David Loogan had an interesting mouth. She could probably convince him to stay for supper.

  If he stayed, he would linger for a while afterward. Sarah would go off to do her homework. He would want to help with the cleaning up; it was consistent with the persona, with the flannel and the denim and the broadbacked sturdiness. He would volunteer to wash the dishes. He would stand at the sink and she would stand behind him—she was nearly as tall as he was—and his collar would smell freshly laundered and she would put her hands on his shoulders.

  Strange thoughts.

  And if he had something to do with Adrian Tully’s death, or Tom Kristoll’s, she would have to testify against him. She would be cross-examined. She would have to explain why she’d had a murder suspect as a guest in her home. She would have to account for every move.

  And did there come a time, Detective Waishkey, when you smelled the de- fendant’s collar?

  Under the porch light with David Loogan, she was able to find it amusing. She turned away from him to hide her smile. In reality, it would not be amusing.

  b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

  1 5 3

  She managed to get the screen door open. Loogan stayed where he was.

  “I believe you,” she said. “About Tully.”

  He was still regarding her curiously. He didn’t answer.

  “I should go in,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind if I don’t invite you to stay.”

  Chapter 21

  Ann Arbor has the street life of a much larger city. When the weather is fair, and sometimes when it’s not, the sidewalks along State Street and Liberty and Main bustle with people: hip, arty, confi dent people who walk to theaters and shops, bookstores and coffeehouses, who gather at sidewalk tables that spill out of restaurants.

  David Loogan found them fascinating. He thought it must be the university that produced them. The university made the city more prosperous and young and good-looking. It gathered all these people to itself and then it sent them out into the city where they ate fine meals, and attended plays, and greeted one another on the street with hugs and cheery shouts and back-slapping.

  On Monday night he watched them from a distance, from the top of a parking garage on Main Street. Laura Kristoll stood beside him. She wore a long, dark green coat and kept it hugged tight around her.

  “Ten days,” she said.

  Loogan looked down along the canyon of the street. At people gathering on corners at an intersection. At the streetlights refl ecting off the hoods of passing cars.

  “Tom’s been gone for ten days now,” Laura said. “It seems longer. Does it seem longer to you?”

  “Yes,” said Loogan.

  It had taken some convincing to get Laura out of the house. She had declined his invitation to dinner on Sunday night, saying she was exhausted. He decided to try for Monday. He suggested a jazz bar called the Firefl y b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

  1 5 5

  Club—it was sure to have live music, even on a Monday night. He would pick her up at seven.

  He got to the house early, while she was working on her makeup and her hair. He waited for her downstairs. When they left, she turned her key in the dead bolt of the front door. Loogan wondered if Michael Beccanti could get past a dead bolt. He wouldn’t need to; Loogan had unlocked the patio door. They stopped at a café for a light dinner and then went on to the Firefl y. A blues trio on the stage. The crowd was low-key. Loogan brought Laura to a table in the corner farthest from the bar, and she leaned against him and they were quiet in the dark.

  Later they walked to the garage where they had left his car. Waiting for the elevator, she put her arms around him and kissed him and started to cry. The car was on the fourth level, but they took the elevator all the way to the top and stood looking out over the concrete wall in the cool night and talking about Tom.

  “Do you think he was frightened?” she said.

  Loogan knew what she meant. From where they were standing they could see the building that housed Gray Streets; they could see the distance from the sixth floor to the sidewalk below.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think he was aware of anything by then.”

  She lifted her shoulders, buried her hands in the pockets of her coat. “I don’t know what I’m doing, David. I had a class I should have taught today, but I didn’t go. The chair of the department is an old friend. He insisted I take at least two weeks off. He wanted me to take the rest of the semester.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “What’s the point?” she said. “I’d rather be doing something. It’s just me in the house, and every minute I spend there reminds me of Tom—”

  The words seemed to catch in her throat. She bowed her head and looked away and Loogan watched her. He thought she would cry; she didn’t cry. She stood quiet and small and Loogan would have liked to comfort her, but he felt like a heel. He had lured her from her home and Michael 1

  5

  6 h a r r

  y

  d o l a n

  Beccanti was there now, rummaging through her possessions. He and Beccanti had worked out a plan—a plan with a secret signal, with cloak-anddagger nonsense. Loogan had a cell phone in his pocket; he had bought it earlier that day. He would keep Laura out as long as he could, and before he took her home he would dial Beccanti’s cell phone number and let it ring twice. He would need to be out of Laura’s sight to place the call, but he had worked that out too; he had made sure the gas in his car was low, so he had an excuse to stop at a filling station. He would be able to dial the number when he went inside to pay.

  He stood looking down at the street with his hands in the pockets of his black leather coat. He breathed the cool air. His right hand closed around a folded paper in his pocket. That was part of the plan too. He hadn’t mentioned it to Beccanti; it was a small touch of his own. He thought he should question Laura as long as he had her to himself. Two birds with one stone. The paper was a prop, a way of broaching the subject. He crumpled the paper in his pocket. The plan was ridiculous. He should take Laura home now and forget all about it. Call Beccanti and warn him and then have nothing to do with him again. He watched a green light turn to amber down on the street below. He felt Laura beside him, her hand slipping into his pocket, her palm warm against the back of his hand. She looked up at him, her face close to his own. Her fingers touched the paper. “What’s this?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “It’s something.”

  “We should go,” he said. “We’ve been up here too long.”

  “You’ve gotten very serious, David. What are you afraid of ?”

  Without hesitating he said, “Parking garages.”

  “Really?”

  “They’re dangerous. Forty percent of all violent crimes take place on the top levels of parking garages.”

  She smiled and looked over her shoulder. “There’s no one here but us.”

  “That’s the way it starts,” he said. “You think you’re safe and you drop b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

  1 5 7

  your guard, and when you’re not paying attention someone sneaks up on you.”

  Her fingers gripped the paper in his pocket. “I’ll protect you, David. I won’t let anyone sneak up on you.”

  He watched the upturned corners of her mouth. She tugged at the paper and he slowly relinquished it. With her eyes locked on his, she brought it out and opened it and smoothed it against the top of the concrete wall. Finally she looked down. “What is this?”

  He shrugged. “Just some notes I made, a few weeks ago.”

 
She read the first sentence aloud: “ ‘Someone Tom Kristoll identifies as Michael Beccanti was killed on the night of October seventh in the study of Tom’s house on the Huron River.’ Well, that’s a promising beginning. You’ve got my attention, right out of the block.”

  Loogan leaned against the wall. “I can improve on it,” he said. “It wasn’t Michael Beccanti who died. It was Sean Wrentmore.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, let’s go on. ‘The dead man had a pistol strapped to his ankle—why?’ That’s a good question. ‘He had traces of blood and skin under his nails, indicating a struggle with his killer.’ A valid inference.”

  She brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. “ ‘Most likely he would have scratched his killer on the face, neck, arms, or hands. Tom has no scratches in any of these places. . . . Laura Kristoll has no scratches anywhere on her body.’ Well, that’s good detective work, isn’t it? Remind me to question your motives the next time you ask me to strip naked in my offi ce.”

  Loogan watched her read through the rest silently. He focused on the last line he had written: I know next to nothing about Tom and Laura Kristoll.

  “David,” she said. “You could have asked me about this before. I would have told you.” She passed the paper back to him. “Do you want me to tell you now?”

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” she said. “It’s getting cold up here. And it’s dangerous.”

  1

  5

  8 h a r r

  y

  d o l a n

  “Sean Wrentmore wrote a novel,” Laura said.

  The parking spaces on either side of them were empty. Loogan had the engine running and had switched on the heat.

  He said, “Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men.”

  “That’s right,” said Laura. “Did Tom tell you that?”

  “Not Tom. I have my sources.”

  “It was somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred fifty thousand words,” she said. “That made it three or four times longer than it should have been. Sean sent it to some agents. They praised the quality of the writing. But they told him what he should have known already—no one was going to publish it. A first novel, by an unknown writer? At that length? It wasn’t going to happen.

  “Sean gave Tom a copy of the manuscript. Tom liked it. That was early this year, before we met you. I read it too; it was a good book. But Tom didn’t let it go. I think he was smitten with it. He thought he could find a way to fix it. Do you know what it’s about?”

  Loogan gave a vague nod. “Roughly. I’ve heard a summary.”

  “Then you have an idea of how complicated it was,” Laura said.

  “There were too many characters, multiple story lines, long flashbacks. It was a love story. And a mystery novel. And a coming-of-age story.”

  She stared out through the windshield, though there was nothing to see but a bare concrete wall. “Tom worked on the manuscript for months. Editing it, reshaping it. By the first week of October, he had pared it down to a hundred thousand words. He was ready to show it to Sean. He hadn’t told Sean what he was doing. I think that was his first mistake. By then, Tom was thinking of the book as his own. In a way, it was; he had been laboring over it.

  “He wanted to meet with Sean in person, to explain what he had done. So he arranged for Sean to come to our house. He told him only that he had b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

  1 5 9

  some ideas for cutting the manuscript, for making it publishable. That was his second mistake.”

  She turned toward Loogan. “I wasn’t there when Tom met with Sean. He didn’t tell me about it beforehand. He told me everything after. But there was someone else there: Adrian Tully.”

  Loogan had been sitting with his head back, his eyes closed. Now he opened them. “Why would Tully be there?”

  “Adrian was a good copy editor,” Laura said. “Working with a manuscript of that size is a huge undertaking. Adrian was Tom’s second pair of eyes. If Tom made a cut in one chapter, it would have repercussions for the others. He needed someone to go over what he’d done, to see that it made sense.

  “So he had Adrian there, at the meeting with Sean. By then, Adrian knew the manuscript almost as well as Tom did. He could help convince Sean to go along with the cuts Tom had made. Or so Tom thought. That was his third mistake.

  “Because Sean didn’t like the cuts. Tom had dropped whole story lines; he had eliminated half the characters. It was necessary; there was no other way to get the length down to where it had to be. But Sean didn’t like any of it. The very idea that Tom had been editing his manuscript in secret made him furious. And then there was Adrian; he was part of it.”

  She paused and Loogan thought he could hear her breathing over the hum of the engine. “It might have gone differently if it had been only Tom,”

  she said. “Sean admired Tom, respected him. But Adrian was something else. Here was this graduate student telling Sean how his book should be written. Sean was thirty-two. He had dropped out of college, but he had learned some things. He thought of himself as an accomplished writer, and not without reason. Now this kid was critiquing him.

  “It set him off. The fight started when Adrian mentioned that some character or other was inessential to the plot. His tone must have been a little too casual. Sean didn’t like it. Adrian had the manuscript on one of those low tables in Tom’s study. Sean got fed up and kicked the table over. Then 1

  6 0 h a r r

  y

  d o l a n

  he was out of his chair, and Adrian was on his feet too. The pages were scattered over the floor. Adrian was annoyed. Sean took a swing at him.

  “Tom got between them and broke it up. It was a pretty feeble fight, to hear Tom tell it. Slapping and scratching. Tom got them to calm down, and Adrian started picking up the pages, and it seemed like that was the end of it. It wasn’t, not for Sean. That’s when he went for his gun.

  “Sean was the sort of person who liked to go to the shooting range on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t think he ever shot anything other than a paper target. Why he had the gun that day, I can only guess. Tom had invited him over to talk about cutting his manuscript. That was a serious matter, from Sean’s point of view. He was going into what he thought of as a hostile situation. Maybe he intended to take the gun out at just the right moment, a dramatic gesture to remind Tom that his work was not to be trifled with. ‘I’ll shoot us both before I’ll let you ruin my book.’ That sort of thing. Sean was a little odd. I could just about see him doing something like that.

  “But I don’t know what he intended. What I know is that after his tussle with Adrian he went for the gun. Tom wasn’t paying attention. He had scooped up some pages from the floor and had gone to his desk to sort them out. But Adrian saw Sean groping around at his ankle and realized what he was doing. The bottle of Scotch was there at hand. It had gone over with the table. Adrian picked it up from the fl oor. Sean got the gun free of the holster. I don’t know if he meant to shoot or just to show the gun. But Adrian didn’t wait to fi nd out. He hit Sean with the bottle. Struck him on the temple. Hit him again after he went down. Before Tom could react, it was over. Sean was dead.”

  Loogan drove south in the cool night, then west, then aimlessly past rows of tranquil houses. Laura rested her head against the passenger window and Loogan thought she might fall asleep, but after a while she sat up and closed the vent in the dash and unbuttoned her coat.

  b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

  1 6 1

  He thumbed a lever to scale back the heat, switched on the radio, and scanned through some channels before switching it off.

  “There are things I need to ask you,” he said.

  “You sound very solemn, David,” she said. “Is that the way it’s going to be?”

  “There are things I need to understand, so I can figure out what to do.”

  Loogan steered the car around a corner. The stre
ets were dark with old rain.

  “Adrian killed Sean Wrentmore,” he said. “Did he kill Tom too?”

  Laura fiddled with the hem of her coat. “He said he didn’t. He swore he had nothing to do with it. I believed him at the time. But now I think he must have done it.”

  “Because he shot himself ?”

  “It makes sense, in retrospect. That detective—Waishkey—she thinks Adrian and Tom might have gotten into an argument. I don’t think Adrian would have killed Tom deliberately, but if it were an accident . . .” She let the thought trail off. “And afterward Adrian would have been troubled. He had a conscience. He was in bad shape the night Sean died. Tom said he sat on the floor with his knees up and stared. Couldn’t speak. Tom had to send him home.”

  Loogan knew very well what had happened next. Tom had called him for a favor. Asked him to bring a shovel.

  “Do you know where Sean Wrentmore ended up?” Loogan said.

  “I know Tom buried the body. I know you helped him.”

  “What was the point?” he said. “Why not call the police?”

  “Tom didn’t see any sense in ruining Adrian’s life. It was all a mistake. Adrian was defending himself, or thought he was. No one meant for Sean to die.”

  “That’s just it. The police could have been persuaded to see it that way. But Tom covered it up. And even after Tom died, you didn’t tell the police about Sean. Why not?”

  1

  6 2 h a r r

  y

  d o l a n

  “I had my reasons, David.”

  Loogan felt an anger that tightened his chest, roughened his voice.

  “You’re just like your husband. He told me the same thing.”

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s not going to do it. I’m going to need more than that.”

  Her fingers were still fussing at her coat. He reached over and seized hold of them.

  She drew back, startled. He returned his hand to the wheel and slowed and brought the car to a stop along the curb. “You’re going to tell me the truth,” he said.

  “It’s not simple, David. It’s not easy to explain.”

  “Take as long as you want. I think I’ve been patient so far.”