Very Bad Men Read online

  It crossed his mind that he could send his account to Kyle Scudder’s lawyer and spare an innocent man from being put on trial for murder. But in the big scheme of things it seemed unimportant. He didn’t feel any responsibility toward Scudder.

  There’s no justice in the world, his father used to say.

  But Lark felt strongly that he needed to lay claim to the death of Charlie Dawtrey. We all need to own our actions, he thought. Otherwise no one will ever know us. That bit of wisdom never came from his father. It was something his doctor was fond of saying.

  We all want to be known. We all want to be seen for who we really are.

  THE SUN GLOWED on the copper spire of Saint Joseph’s Church. The bell in the tower struck ten and Anthony Lark listened from his Chevy in the lot across the street. He could see the vestibule standing open, a pair of heavy oaken doors swung wide.

  Dozens of mourners had already gone inside, far more than Lark had anticipated. He had thought of Charlie Dawtrey as a man with a single son, but now he supposed there must be other children, a whole extended family. Lark watched them ascend the granite steps of the church.

  The woman from the Cozy Inn—Madelyn—arrived late. She had a teenaged boy with her, the one whose photograph hung on the wall of Dawtrey’s cottage.

  Lark saw them pass inside, and then he watched a sheriff’s cruiser draw up in front of the granite steps. A stocky deputy with curly hair stepped out on the driver’s side and walked around the front of the car, looking up and down the street. A second deputy—younger, slimmer—opened the rear passenger door and hauled out Terry Dawtrey.

  Dawtrey wore a gray suit that hung loosely on him, no tie. His dark hair was shaved down to stubble. His hands were clasped in front of him. A glint of sunlight caught the circlet of a handcuff on his wrist.

  Shackles on his ankles too. He hobbled sideways up the steps, one deputy close at his elbow, the other watching the street. When the three had disappeared into the vestibule, Lark started his car and rolled out of the lot heading west.

  WHITELEAF CEMETERY LAY at the foot of a hill studded with pines. Lark walked among the trees carrying his rifle in a rolled-up blanket. He had left his car a quarter mile back, on the side of a road that bordered the cemetery. He thought it would be all right. He had spotted another car parked nearby, a rusty Camaro half on the gravel and half in the weeds by the roadside.

  Lark found the spot he had picked out the day before, a smooth piece of ground in the shade of a white pine that offered a vantage on the cemetery below.

  The better part of an hour passed before the first cars arrived. Lark observed them from the ridge of the hill, where he sat with the rifle lying across his knees. As he waited for the sheriff’s cruiser, he had the sudden panicked thought that he had made a mistake. Maybe the deputies wouldn’t bring Terry Dawtrey here, maybe the service at the church was all that he would get.

  Lark watched the pallbearers gather at the rear of the hearse. A blacksuited funeral director arranged them on either side and they drew out the casket. Still no sign of the cruiser, and Lark thought seriously about lighting out for his car. He could find the cruiser on its route back to Kinross Prison and run it off the road. It might not be too late.

  The priest from Saint Joseph’s stood at the graveside, a small group of mourners around him. Madelyn stood a little apart, in a dark blouse and a long skirt. The boy from the photograph leaned against her.

  The pallbearers delivered the casket. The priest opened his Bible. And the sheriff’s cruiser, at last, rumbled slowly over the gravel of the parking lot.

  By the time Terry Dawtrey shuffled across the cemetery lawn, flanked by a deputy on either side, Lark had positioned himself under the boughs of the white pine. He lay on his stomach, the butt of the rifle at his shoulder, elbows and toes nestled in soft bowls of pine needles. Through the scope he followed Dawtrey’s progress across the lawn, but the stocky deputy obscured his shot.

  Lark rested his rifle on the ground. The deputies led Dawtrey to the far side of the grave, away from the other mourners. The priest began to speak, but his words came to Lark only indistinctly. Lark let his gaze wander over the lines of headstones. Only a few looked as if they had been tended. A plastic vase stood before one of them, filled with roses and fern.

  Lark’s eyes trailed along the lines of stones and then jumped to the cemetery fence: pillars of cast concrete set at intervals with black iron bars running between them.

  Part of the fence cut across the slope of the hill beneath him, and someone had tied a strip of yellow cloth to one of the bars. The ends fluttered in a mild wind.

  The priest kept things brief, and when Lark focused again on the ceremony the funeral director was working his discreet magic, pressing a button to lower the casket into the grave.

  Some of the mourners went forward to reach into a mound of earth and cast handfuls of it onto the casket. Madelyn and the boy were among them. When the crowd began to disperse, the deputies led Terry Dawtrey to the mound so he could repeat the ritual, digging into the earth with his two cuffed hands, letting it drift through his fingers like dark rain.

  Afterward, Terry Dawtrey huddled together with the two deputies. A moment later they separated. Lark brought the rifle to his shoulder and watched Dawtrey begin to walk along a path leading away from the remnants of the crowd, with the slim deputy following at a respectful distance. The stocky deputy went to have a word with the priest.

  Lark peered through the scope and saw Dawtrey’s scuffed black shoes and the chains of the shackles skittering along the path. The scope trailed up and the crosshairs passed over Dawtrey’s laced fingers and the silver rings of the handcuffs. It trailed farther until the circle framed his face. Eyes intense, searching.

  Lark pulled back from the scope and took in the larger scene: Dawtrey hobbling toward the grave with the vase of roses in front of it, each step bringing him closer to Lark’s position. The slim deputy now several yards behind.

  He looked again through the scope, at Dawtrey’s bowed head, at the weary set of his shoulders. He put the crosshairs on Dawtrey’s chest, a patch of white shirt between the lapels of the jacket. His finger tensed on the trigger.

  A sharp series of pops broke the quiet—rapid like machine-gun fire. Lark jerked back from the scope and looked to his left to find the source of the sound. Sparks flashed in the distance, shooting up from the gravel of the cemetery parking lot. A pair of boys, laughing, danced back from the sparks. Cutoff jeans and tennis shoes. Open shirts revealing skinny, tanned torsos. Sixteen years old, seventeen at the outside. One of them set the flame of a lighter to a fuse and tossed something onto the gravel, and another series of pops lit up the air.

  Lark turned back to the scene on the cemetery lawn in time to see Terry Dawtrey squatting by the vase of roses, plucking something from the grass. Then the fingers of Dawtrey’s right hand touched each of his ankles in turn, and the shackles fell away onto the path. He shot up like a sprinter out of the block—no sign of hunched shoulders or weariness now. He touched right hand to left wrist, left hand to right wrist, and the circles of the handcuffs dropped into the grass. His arms pumped and he made straight for the strip of yellow cloth tied to the fence.

  Lark put his eye to the scope of the rifle, wobbled the crosshairs to Dawtrey’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. He drew back from the scope and shook the rifle as if that might solve the problem. Divided his attention now between the rifle and the scene below. Dawtrey closing on the fence. The two boys in cutoffs climbing onto bicycles and making their escape. Scattered mourners looking from Dawtrey to the parking lot and back. The stocky deputy pushing the priest aside, jogging past the mourners.

  The thin deputy tearing along the path after Dawtrey, drawing his pistol from the holster on his belt.

  Lark worked the bolt of the rifle and the useless cartridge flipped through the air and landed soft in the pine needles. Down below, Terry Dawtrey reached the fence and leapt up to
catch the high horizontal bar with two hands. The slim deputy shouted for him to stop.

  Dawtrey scrambled over the fence, landing awkwardly and pitching sideways into the slope of the hill. Clawing the wild grass to regain his feet. The deputy behind him, shouting through the fence.

  The butt of the rifle against Lark’s shoulder and the crosshairs on the open collar of Dawtrey’s white shirt. As Lark began to squeeze the trigger, Dawtrey’s chin tipped upward and a red-black spot appeared in the hollow at the base of his throat.

  The sound of the gunshot reached Lark and he squeezed reflexively and the rifle fired just as Dawtrey dropped to his knees on the slope. The bullet passed harmless over his shoulder. Lark let the rifle touch the ground and looked down at the slim deputy standing with his pistol between the bars of the fence. Smoke rising from the muzzle. Lark could hear the deputy’s curse traveling up the hillside, could see the man’s face turn away in an ugly grimace. Could see him jam the pistol angrily into his holster.

  Dawtrey lay moveless in the grass, the top of his stubbled head no more than twenty yards down the slope. Lark, on knees and elbows, retreated from the ridge of the hill, dragging the rifle with him. A babel of voices below. The stocky deputy shouting orders.

  Lark stayed low until he was well back from the ridge. Then he wrapped the rifle in the blanket and started walking back to his car.

  THAT EVENING the shooting led the news. The notorious Terry Dawtrey gunned down by a sheriff’s deputy in the course of an attempt to escape. Lark watched the coverage from his hotel bed. A bag of melting ice forgotten, his headache only a distant rumor.

  The woman with the wondrous smile turned up on one of the stations. A reporter called to her from a crowd, asked for her reaction to Dawtrey’s death. But she shook her head somberly and gave no comment.

  At midnight Lark switched off the television and reached for his notebook. He found an empty page and used his Waterman pen to sketch an outline of the day’s events—because we all need to own our actions.

  Around one o’clock the notebook tipped forward onto his chest. He blinked out of a doze and turned onto his side, found the pen where it had rolled onto the bedspread. He paged back through the notebook until he came to his list: Henry Kormoran. Sutton Bell. Terry Dawtrey. The red letters breathed on the page. Kormoran and Bell were living in Ann Arbor. Lark would let himself sleep late in the morning, and then he would drive down and find them.

  After a moment’s hesitation he drew a line through Dawtrey’s name. He felt entitled, even though things hadn’t gone exactly as planned.

  He had wanted the man dead, and the man was dead. It didn’t matter how you got there, just so long as you got there.

  CHAPTER 4

  Here’s what I remember about that day. Wednesday, July fifteenth.

  The day the manuscript came to me.

  I was in my office at Gray Streets, editing a story. My cell phone hummed at six-thirty in the evening, creeping along the surface of my desk. I left it alone for a moment, searched for a particular page, and wrote a sentence in the margin. Then I picked up the phone and saw Elizabeth’s name on the display. I flipped it open.

  “Lizzie,” I said. “How would you spell ‘wrassling’?”

  The question didn’t faze her. “Like ‘wrestling,’ only with an a.”

  “I tried that, but it didn’t look right. Now I’ve got it with two s’s.”

  She thought it over. “That’s vulgar,” she said. “And colloquial.”

  I swiveled my chair, propped my feet on the windowsill, and said in my most serious tone, “What are you wearing?”

  I knew the answer. I’d seen her that morning when she left the house. She had on slacks the color of her raven hair, and a simple white blouse. And a necklace of glass beads—a mate to the one draped over the arm of my desk lamp, but in green rather than blue. Glass-bead necklaces are the only jewelry she ever wears. Her daughter makes them.

  Elizabeth chuckled at my question. “This isn’t that kind of call, David. I wanted to let you know I’ll be late tonight. Business.”

  “Not the book thieves again.”

  “Not them. Worse. A body in an apartment on Linden Street. Looks like it’s been there a while.”

  “Homicide?”

  “Strangled with a cord, is what I hear. Carter’s already there. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  “I’ll wait up.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I will anyway. Be careful.”

  We said good-bye and I closed the phone, but it buzzed again before I could put it down.

  I opened it. “I’m not here.”

  “I can see your feet in the window,” Bridget Shellcross said. “Why don’t you come down. I’ve ordered two gimlets.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  I closed the window and gathered the pages of the story I’d been working on, sliding them into a folder.

  On my way through the outer office I passed a stack of envelopes on the reception desk. Manuscripts from hopeful authors. I left them there. In the hall I turned to lock the door and my gaze fell briefly on the black letters on the pebbled glass: GRAY STREETS. DAVID LOOGAN, EDITOR.

  I nearly missed the envelope in the hall, propped beside the door frame. It looked like just another manuscript. I picked it up and tucked it under my arm with the folder.

  Down the stairs, five flights, through the lobby, out onto the street, and the sea of humanity was like something from a Third World capital.

  Every July, over the course of four days, half a million people pass through the streets of downtown Ann Arbor. They look like tourists in a foreign city, and like tourists they’re here mostly to eat and shop. Hamburgers and pizza, kabobs and funnel cakes. Sculptures and paintings and handmade jewelry. The Ann Arbor Art Fair. Half a million people, and most of them seemed to be milling around between me and Bridget Shellcross, who had somehow secured a table across the street in front of Café Felix.

  When I reached her she rose and kissed me on the cheek. She had to stand on tiptoe to manage it. Bridget is something over five feet tall, and the something is roughly the thickness of a blade of grass. She wears her brown hair short and artfully disheveled, and though she tends to dress in black, today it was an ivory-colored blouse and a burgundy skirt.

  Bridget is a mystery writer, and a few months back she became the publisher of Gray Streets after buying the magazine from the widow of the previous owner. She lets me run things as I see fit. About the only time I see her is when we get together for a drink.

  I dropped my envelope and folder on the table and we sat, and I asked her how she would spell “wrassling.”

  A sip from her vodka gimlet—there was another in front of me, but I didn’t touch it—and she said, “I’d need to know the context.”

  I opened the folder and handed her the story I’d been editing. “Page six, in the margin,” I said. She found it and read it silently. I knew it by heart.

  The phone rang and when I answered it a voice told me to hold the line, and I held it like a Cuban fisherman wrassling a marlin.

  She laughed, but not so much that she was in danger of spilling her drink.

  “This is Fletcher’s new story?” she asked me.

  “Yes. He thinks he’s the next Raymond Chandler. Leans heavily on the similes, so I figured one more wouldn’t hurt.”

  Bridget flipped through the pages. “You’ve done a lot of tinkering with this.”

  “I have a theory about editing. You can do anything you want with a manuscript, you can rewrite it line by line, as long as your handwriting is very small and very neat. If the pages look tidy, the author’ll go along.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “It helps if the publisher backs you up.”

  “Don’t drag me into this.”

  I took the pages back from her. “You think Fletcher will object?”

  “I imagine he’ll scream bloody murder, but I’ve never met the man. D
o what you want. If he doesn’t like it, he can send it to Ellery Queen. See how far he gets with them.”

  The waitress from Café Felix had been waiting for a break in our conversation. Now she asked me if there was a problem with my vodka gimlet.

  “It’s fine,” I told her. “But it seems to have lost its way.” I slid it over in front of Bridget, who surrendered her empty glass.

  “David’ll have Scotch,” she said. “Neat.”

  I shook my head no. “David’ll have lemonade.”

  The waitress left, and by the time she came back the crowd in the street had thinned a little—people drifting south to listen to a band playing covers of Bob Dylan songs. An overlong harmonica solo turned out to be the opening of “All Along the Watchtower.”

  Bridget caught me staring across the street. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I drank some lemonade. “There he is again.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you see him? He’s wearing sunglasses and a safari hat.”

  She frowned. “David, they’re all wearing sunglasses and safari hats.”

  “He’s standing under the awning of the gift shop there, holding a bottle of water.”

  “They’re all holding bottles of water.”

  I waited for her to follow my gaze and pick him out. He looked about thirty years old, with wide shoulders, a short neck, a lean jaw. He stood with his head slightly bowed, the way tall people do sometimes when they don’t want you to notice they’re tall. But he was no more than average height. He wore a plaid shirt and cargo pants.

  “What do you make of him?” I said to Bridget.

  “Well,” she said, “he has no fashion sense.”

  “Notice how he looks around, taking things in. But he’s not looking over here.”

  She decided to humor me. “That’s suspicious.”

  “I’ve seen him before. Earlier today, outside Starbucks. I think he’s been following me.”