Bad Things Happen Read online

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  test will confirm it, but none of that matters because Rachel Kent confessed this afternoon. We went around to ask her to submit a blood sample voluntarily and she refused, and two hours later she showed up at City Hall with her lawyer. She brought along the disc and the blackmail letter that she took from Beccanti after she stabbed him. Her lawyer thought they’d be worth something as bargaining chips. They were. From what I’ve heard, the prosecutor gave her a pretty good deal.”

  Loogan stared out at the gray sky. “Rachel Kent,” he said.

  “Rachel Kent,” Elizabeth repeated. “Hideaway had it right.”

  On the morning of the seventh day after his surgery, David Loogan walked out of Saint Joseph Mercy. He wore a new pair of chinos and a blue Oxford shirt, and a denim jacket against the November chill. He had left his leather coat in the woods of Marshall Park.

  The new clothes were a gift from Bridget Shellcross, who had visited him the day before. They had talked about Cass Hifflyn and about Michael Beccanti, whose funeral service she had attended earlier in the week. She had given Loogan her phone number, made him promise to call when the hospital discharged him. She would drive him home. The number was on a slip of paper in his pocket. He took a cab. The driver dropped him at his rented house. Yellow tape on the front door. He tore it away and went inside and opened all the windows. Upstairs he stripped the bed and put on fresh sheets and blankets and slept until late afternoon.

  He woke hungry, washed, and closed windows. Locked the door behind him and descended the steps with his car keys jingling in his hand, and then realized he had last seen his car in the lot of the restaurant behind Sean Wrentmore’s condo.

  He walked the twelve blocks downtown, taking it slow. Had an early dinner at a place he had gone to once with Tom Kristoll. Then a movie, something French and allegedly comedic. 3 2 2 h a r r y

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  It was a little after nine when he came out of the theater. A college crowd on the sidewalks. He strolled west along Liberty Street. Banks, restaurants, galleries. He came to Main, crossed with the light. He would turn south now if he wanted to go home. He turned north.

  Outside the café across from the Gray Streets building, a clutch of students loitered. Pierced noses, dyed hair, clouds of cigarette smoke. Loogan went by them, out of range of the smoke, and leaned against the frame of the café window. He looked up at the building across the street, at a window on the sixth floor. A rectangle of light. After a minute, a shadow passed across it briefly. It looked to Loogan like the figure of a man wearing a fedora. David Loogan dashed into the street, dodging through traffic, fumbling for his keys. He heard the long blare of a horn still echoing behind him as he cleared the lobby door, slapped the button of the elevator. He shot down the sixth-fl oor hallway and hit the Gray Streets door hard enough to rattle the pebbled glass. Keyed through and the first thing he saw was the open doorway of Tom Kristoll’s office. The desk lamp shining on the blotter, and behind the lamp a figure rising from the chair. Laura Kristoll. She took off Tom’s hat as she came out around the desk. She left his trench coat on. The coat squared her shoulders.

  “David, are you all right?”

  She met him in the outer office, laid her palm against his chest, lightly, as if her touch could tear him open.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I don’t like your breathing,” she said.

  “Sometimes I don’t like it myself.”

  “I thought you were in the hospital. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw your shadow from the street just now and I thought—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked down at the trench coat, then at the fedora she had tossed onto the secretary’s desk. “David,” she said.

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  “It’s not the first time I’ve thought it,” he said. “I mean, what have I had to go on? What have I really seen, with my own eyes? The body of a man on the sidewalk, covered by a blanket. A closed casket lowered into the ground. If this were a story—”

  “David—”

  “If this were a story, Tom would show up in the final scene. He would explain everything. We’d go off together for a quiet drink and he would explain—”

  Her fingers gripped the collar of his denim jacket.

  “David, don’t.” Her voice fading. “David, Tom’s dead.”

  He went home with her. Both of them silent in the car as she drove alongside the river. They rolled up the long driveway to the house and got out, and he followed her up the crushed-stone walk and through the door. She offered him a drink and he took a glass of plain water and she made him sit on the leather sofa while she built a fire in the antique furnace. She closed the iron grate and came to sit beside him, silently for a while, her head back, golden hair spread over the black leather. He looked up at the wooden beams that crisscrossed overhead.

  After a time she leaned close to him and he moved reflexively to put his arm around her. The effort made him wince.

  “Is the pain very bad?” she asked him.

  “It’s all right. It’s more a tightness.”

  The fire shifted in the furnace, crackling.

  “I should have come to see you at the hospital,” she said. “I was angry with you, but that’s no excuse. I had a hard time getting over what you said to me, that night in the car at Sean’s. Asking if I knew who killed Tom.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you that,” he said.

  “It hurt me,” she said. “But I suppose I deserved it. The way I danced around the truth of what happened to Sean. I should have been thinking 3 2 4 h a r r y

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  more of Tom and less about what I wanted. It seems absurd to me now, to think I could ever publish Sean’s manuscript. I’m fi nished with the whole idea. I want you to know that.”

  The shadows of the beams flickered on the ceiling.

  She said, “I’ll give it to you if you want it. It’s all here, in a box in Tom’s study. The paper manuscript and all the discs, the backup copies. I don’t want it anymore.”

  He let out a long breath. “You don’t have to give it up, Laura. You worked on it. It’s yours. I won’t blame you for wanting to publish it.”

  “I’m done with it,” she said. “You should take it.” She nodded toward the furnace. “Or we could burn it.”

  “We don’t have to burn it.”

  At midnight she put him to bed in a guest room upstairs. He piled his clothes on a chair and slid under the covers and lay in the dark listening to her movements in another room, the clatter of cabinet doors, water running. Then a light from the hall and she came through his doorway in flannel pajamas and climbed in beside him and curled up chastely with a pillow and fell asleep.

  He woke in the night and listened to her breathing. Slipped out of bed and found his watch: twenty minutes after three. He went down to the kitchen and let the water run cold from the tap and filled a glass. He drank it outside in the air on the stones of the patio with the half-circle of woods deep around him.

  When he came in, he wandered through the downstairs rooms until he came to Tom’s study. The square shape on the desk was the box Laura had mentioned. He switched on a lamp and the discs glittered silver in the light. He slid them to one side and they glided one over another and uncovered the topmost page of Sean Wrentmore’s manuscript: Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men.

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  He counted the discs: seven of them. Plenty of backups. But a small voice in his mind told him that if there were seven, there could be eight. A halfhearted search of the desk turned up the drawer that Michael Beccanti had told him about: the one with the false bottom. The secret compartment held nothing. No incriminating eighth disc. He turned off the lamp in the study and wandered out to the living room. The fi re had gone cold in the furnace. He checked the front door to make sure it was locked,
then did the same for the back door and the patio door. All secure in the Kristoll house. Turning toward the stairs, he remembered the door to the garage.

  He went to check it, found it unlocked. Some impulse made him open it, made him flip the switch of the overhead light. A stark white bulb illuminated Tom’s Ford. On the walls, a motley collection of garden tools. A rake, a weed trimmer. Three shovels, all of them long-handled, none of them suitable for digging a grave. Other items, half-familiar. A lawn mower in a corner. A painter’s easel. The folding cot that he and Tom had used to carry Sean Wrentmore’s body. A dartboard.

  A glint of metal near the center of the dartboard. A piece of cork had been torn away and the steel backing showed through. Loogan touched the steel with a fingertip and felt an indentation. Shallow, rounded. Like the imprint of a bullet. Chapter 41

  “David.”

  “She killed Adrian Tully.”

  Elizabeth Waishkey had braids in her long raven hair. She wore a linen shirt open at the collar, a string of glass beads. Blue jeans torn at the knee. She stood at her front door, kneading a dish towel in her hands, as if he had interrupted her at some domestic chore.

  To David Loogan’s eyes, she shimmered like an angel. Her shirt was white, as was the towel. Unearthly white, glowing. The glass beads glimmered at her throat.

  “David,” she said, “you’re pale.” She came onto the porch and looked out at the street. “You didn’t walk here, did you?”

  Loogan had passed the restless hours of the night on the leather sofa in the Kristoll house, and in the morning he had let Laura drive him home. They had detoured past Sean Wrentmore’s condo, hoping to recover Loogan’s car, but it was missing from the restaurant parking lot. At home he made some calls and tracked it down—at the impound lot of the Ann Arbor Police Department. He would need to wait a day to pick it up. The lot was closed on Sundays.

  He didn’t explain all this to Elizabeth. He waved her question away.

  “No car,” he said.

  “How long have you been walking?”

  “I don’t know.” It seemed like at least two hours, though it shouldn’t have taken so long. After the first hour, it had occurred to him that he should have called a cab.

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  light-headed, and he felt light-headed now. That was probably the reason why Elizabeth Waishkey was shimmering.

  “You’re not surprised,” he said.

  She tipped her head sideways. “Actually, I am. I didn’t expect you to turn up on my doorstep. But now that you’re here, you should come in.”

  “I mean you weren’t surprised when I told you she killed Tully. You didn’t ask who I was talking about.”

  “David—”

  “Laura Kristoll,” he said. “I saw her last night. I went to her house.”

  “Yes.”

  He caught something in her tone. “You already knew that,” he said.

  “You’re watching her. You’ve got her under surveillance.”

  Elizabeth laid her palm on his shoulder. “David, come in and we’ll sit down.”

  “I don’t want to intrude on your Sunday afternoon.”

  “You should sit. You don’t look well.”

  As a concession to her sensibilities, Loogan leaned against the white railing of the porch. The November sun shone blindingly bright on the railing. It shone even under the roof of the porch, where by rights there should have been shade.

  “How long have you been watching her?” he asked.

  Elizabeth stepped back from him. She tossed the white towel over the white shoulder of her shirt. “We weren’t watching her. We were watching the Gray Streets building. The thing is, we had the national media in town for a while. Nathan Hideaway made a good story. There were photographers following Bridget Shellcross, and Laura too, and someone got the bright idea to break into Tom Kristoll’s office at Gray Streets. He was trying to get pictures to sell to the tabloids—pictures of the scene of one of Hideaway’s crimes.

  “So we kept an eye on the building after that. A patrolman drove by last night and saw Laura walking out the lobby door. You were with her. He followed you.”

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  Loogan narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  “The department has an interest in Laura Kristoll,” Elizabeth said with a shrug. “There are people who resent her for withholding information about Sean Wrentmore’s death. There are people who welcomed the news that she took you home with her last night. They saw it as a sign that she’s resuming her sordid affair with her late husband’s friend. It casts her in a bad light. We had a meeting about it this morning.”

  “Really? Is that enough to warrant a meeting?”

  “It was a short meeting,” Elizabeth said. “I told them they were mistaken. They don’t understand your motives. You still think you’re in a story in Gray Streets. If you spent the night at the Kristoll house, you were there to play detective.”

  Loogan looked down at the railing of the porch. It seemed to glow less intensely. He could see cracks and chips in the paint. He said, “Is it time for you to remind me that this isn’t a story in Gray Streets?”

  “It’s never done any good before.”

  He ran his thumb along the rough surface of the paint.

  “You remember what Hideaway said about Adrian Tully,” he said. “That his death was just what it seemed—he shot himself. You don’t believe that, do you?”

  She came a step closer to him. “You don’t believe it, obviously.”

  “Laura killed him,” he said. “I know how she did it. Everything hinges on the second bullet. She convinced Tully to meet her out there, by that fi eld, and she got into his car, and she shot him once in the head. And the second shot—that was to get gunshot residue on his hand. But you never found the second bullet.”

  “No.”

  “It didn’t end up in the field,” Loogan said. “Laura took it with her when she left. That’s what I realized last night. There’s a dartboard hanging on the wall of her garage, a thick one made of cork set in a metal shell. She took it with her when she drove out to meet Tully, and after she shot him b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

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  she set the dartboard up by the side of the road. She would have had to prop it on something—something like a painter’s easel. There’s one of those in the garage too. Then she got back in Tully’s car and put the gun in his hand and fired the second shot through the open passenger window at the dartboard. The metal backing stopped the bullet and the cork held it and she took eve ry thing with her when she drove away. She got rid of the bullet afterward.”

  Elizabeth leaned against the railing beside him. She took the towel off her shoulder and busied herself folding it into a square. She said, “Do you eat chicken, David?”

  Time passed as he tried to make sense of the question. The sunlight seemed less intense, but the glass beads still glittered at her throat.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Some people won’t,” she told him. “But you don’t strike me as one of those. We’re having chicken for dinner. Sarah made it. She does most of the cooking around here. She seasoned it with lemon and pepper, I think. Baked it in a casserole with broccoli and rice. I’m sure there’s enough for three.”

  David Loogan pushed himself up from the railing. He no longer felt light-headed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come to your house. I shouldn’t have interrupted your meal.”

  She rose with him. “You’re not interrupting. We haven’t even started on the salad. You should come in and eat something, and we’ll talk. We can talk about anything you like. Even about Adrian Tully, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s why I came here,” he said.

  “I think you know better.”

  He looked at her soberly. “I’m not making
this up, if that’s what you think. It’s all there in Laura Kristoll’s garage—the easel, the dartboard. She killed him.”

  Elizabeth stood close to him. “Of course she did. And she’s going to get away with killing him. It probably happened exactly the way you described. 3 3 0 h a r r y

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  But the bullet’s long gone now. She’ll never go to trial. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be convicted. Tully’s death looks like a suicide. And if it wasn’t, if he was murdered, then Nathan Hideaway is a ready-made suspect. He killed Tom and wanted to deflect suspicion onto someone else. That’s his motive for killing Tully. Hideaway is Laura’s cover. He’s her reasonable doubt.”

  Loogan listened with growing impatience. “You don’t seem to mind that she’s going to get away with it. It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

  Her expression told him that he had said the wrong thing. She answered him in a voice empty of emotion. “I hate it.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” he said.

  She looked away. “We’re going to eat dinner, David. This isn’t a story in Gray Streets. ”

  “I don’t know if I can accept that.”

  She opened the door to go in. “I don’t know if you can either, but you’re going to have to try. And I’m afraid we haven’t come to the worst of it yet.”

  He stepped toward her and the floorboards creaked beneath his feet.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’re not filled with righteous anger over the death of Adrian Tully. He’s not the reason you walked for miles to get here. You don’t care whether Laura Kristoll goes to prison for his murder. He’s not the one we need to talk about.”

  Somewhere beyond the porch the sun must have blazed, because the white glow came up again. Loogan put a hand against the door frame to steady himself.

  “No, it’s Tom,” he said. “I think Laura knew Hideaway was going to kill Tom.”

  When Loogan opened his eyes he found himself lying on a couch beneath a quilt. The gauzy white square of a curtained window floated in his vision. A girl sat in a chair nearby, her feet on a coffee table, a magazine open in her lap. She twirled a strand of raven hair around her finger. Sarah Waishkey. b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n