A Welcome Grave

9

I made it only to the end of that long, winding driveway before a pair of spotlights lit up the darkness, blinding me with harsh beams. I winced and slowed, shielding my eyes with my forearm. When I brought the truck to a stop, the spotlights went off, and then someone’s knuckles rapped on my window.

After a hard blink that sent white squares floating through my field of vision, I lowered the window, and after one more blink I was staring into the face of Hal Targent.

“Mr. Perry, how are you?”

“Tired, and going home. You want to clear those cars out of my way?”

“No, I want you to clear yourself out of your truck.”

I looked away from him and leaned back in my seat, frustration building through me and threatening to spill over. I wasn’t ready to deal with more of this. Not another cop sweating me over things I had nothing to do with. Not tonight.

“Get out of the truck, Mr. Perry.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?” He leaned in the window, and I could smell cigarettes on his breath.

“There’s no reason for me to get out of the truck, Targent. What the hell do you want?”

“Just want to talk. Easier to do that if you get out here with us.”

“I’m going home.”

He hooked his forearms over the door, leaning his entire upper body in through the window, into my space. I felt my hands go tight on the steering wheel, but I kept my eyes straight ahead, out the dark windshield. My vision had cleared enough to show me the two cruisers parked side by side in the driveway, blocking my exit. They couldn’t have followed me here, not when I was coming in straight from Indiana. That meant they were either watching Karen’s house or they’d happened to stop by, conveniently found my truck in the drive, and waited to ambush me on the way out.

“Last I heard you were in a jail in Indiana,” Targent said. “Came back and went right to see the widow, huh?”

“I was working for her.”

“So I hear. So I hear. Pretty funny, you working with her just a few days after you told us what a bitch she was, said you hadn’t seen her in years.”

“I hadn’t seen her in years. And I didn’t call her a bitch.”

Targent nodded absently. “Sure, sure. I spent a while on the phone today with a detective from Indiana, name of Brewer. Said he enjoyed some conversation with you.”

“He’s a lovely man.”

“That was my take, as well. Has some funny ideas, though.” Targent’s face was almost touching my own, lit with a green glow from the dashboard lights.

“Yeah, he does,” I said. The truck was in park but still running, and I stared at the gearshift and thought about dropping it into drive and hammering the accelerator, seeing if I could clip Targent’s toes before he got out of the way.

“Man proposed a theory to me that was damn near wild,” Targent said. “I mean, this is some made-for-TV-movie shit. He has two stars in it, a couple of old loves who reunite, secretly. Has things between them heating up again, and then they get this crazy idea to kill the woman’s husband. Why? Well, he’s in the way, of course, but there’s more than that. Turns out the poor bastard’s filthy rich, and the leading male character—in this Indiana guy’s version, I think you get the starring role—he’s had a hard-on for the husband for a while. Assaulted him once before, in fact. So, the couple, they take the husband off the playing field, right? But, shit, that’s only good for half the money. Other half goes to his prick kid, who was never even around. Don’t seem right. But what if the kid turns up dead himself? Be damn convenient. Now, here’s where the plot starts to slip away, in my opinion. Here’s where it goes from feature film to the made-for-TV shit. The man and woman try to fake the son’s suicide. A suicide, even though there’s no apparent motive for him to do it, and even though he’s standing to inherit millions. Then—and this is where the Hollywood directors would really get pissed, because the story’s losing all credibility—the only witness to the suicide is the same guy who’s a suspect in the husband’s murder.”

Targent chuckled and shook his head. “I mean, is that not ridiculous? A suspect in the murder, the rich widow’s old love, he just happens to be the only witness to the kid’s suicide? That’s reaching for it, don’t you think?”

“Get the hell away from my truck,” I said, and I dropped the gearshift out of park and into drive.

“Now, slow down, Perry. I was just explaining the Indiana guy’s theory. It’s not my own.”

“Away from the truck.”

“No need to hurry. I’m afraid your driveway’s blocked.”

I took my foot off the brake and got the truck rolling slowly. Targent walked with it, his hand still on the door. Then I moved my foot to the gas pedal, and Targent stepped away from the window before I started dragging him. The cruisers were parked about forty feet in front of me. I cut the wheel left and pulled off the drive and onto the lawn. There were some ornamental bushes blocking me from open grass. I drove right over them. There’s a reason I have a Silverado instead of a Toyota Prius, and it’s found in moments like this. Clear of the fancy bushes, I cut the wheel back to the right and hit the gas again, felt the tires tearing up the wet grass as I drove around the cruisers, over another set of bushes, and then popped back onto the driveway.

“She’s got money and gardeners,” I said aloud. No need to feel bad about a little lawn damage. Then I was pulling out of the driveway and back onto the street. An engine roared to life behind me, but nobody turned on the flashers, and I thought that was probably a damn good thing—one night in jail per week is plenty.

“What have I told you about mulch?” Joe said. “You can’t just throw it down in clumps and knock it around with the rake. It’s got to be smooth and even. Like a blanket.”

I looked up at him from my hands and knees, sweat dripping down my face, and resisted the urge to impale him with my rake. He was sitting on a lawn chair maybe ten feet from me, wrapped in an oversized parka that he shouldn’t have broken out of the closet for another two months, sipping a cup of coffee and glaring at my work.

“Listen,” I said, “you already used up a good portion of my patience making me rototill the damn garden. That’s something you do in the spring, Joe. Not the fall.”

“If you knew anything about winterizing a garden, you’d know that’s not true. You do it in the fall and again in the spring. Makes a world of difference.”

World of difference, my ass. I turned away from him, shaking my head, picked the rake up again, and knocked some more mulch around. Joe’s wife, Ruth, had produced the finest flower gardens in the neighborhood before she died. With her gone, he’d taken up the task, even though he’d never so much as glanced at the flowers before. Not surprisingly, Joe brought more intensity to gardening than most. Now, with his shoulder and arm far from functional, he’d recruited me to do his winterizing. I hadn’t minded the idea until he’d dragged the lawn chair out and made it evident that he intended to supervise.

“Have you even been listening to me?” I said.

“Yes. But it’s a lot easier to listen when you’re doing the work right.”

I went on spreading the mulch and talking, taking him through my experiences in Indiana and up to my encounter with Targent the previous night. His eyes implied that his focus was on the mulch, but he grunted occasionally, following along.

“So now I’ve got cops in Indiana and up here wanting to tie me to not one but two homicides,” I concluded.

“That’s a pretty solid day’s work, even for you. One homicide I would’ve expected, but two is overachieving.”

“I got the feeling the cops were pretty impressed, too.”

“And Karen?”

“Is she impressed?”

“No, I mean how is she holding up?”

“Not well. Or, maybe, as well as you could ask her to, considering what kind of family she married into.”

“You say that with such satisfaction.”

“Did I?”

“Uh-huh. And I hate to add bad news to your . . . You know, I don’t think you got those perennial bulbs deep enough.”

“What bad news?”

“I told you six inches, minimum, LP. You’ve got to go deeper to hold them through winter. Fall planting is all about depth.”

“I went six inches.”

“I don’t think—”

I sighed and turned around. “Joe? What bad news?”

He scowled at the flower beds again and then refocused on me. “Doesn’t affect you, really, but it’s not encouraging for Karen’s situation.”

“Explain.”

“Cal Richards called me the day you left for Indiana. Seems Targent asked him about you, wanted to get his take on whether you had it in you to work someone over with a razor blade.”

Cal Richards was a Cleveland Police Department homicide detective we’d worked with over the summer.

“Let me guess—Cal told them to slap the cuffs on me?”

“Nah, I think he must’ve been fresh off vacation or something, in a good mood, because he told them to quit wasting time looking at you. They assured him you weren’t a serious option. That may have changed after the suicide in Indiana, but that was what they told Richards.”

“Okay.”

“Richards told me—with the required threats of what would happen if I disclosed the information, of course—that Targent and his team are interested in some conversations Jefferson had with his broker or investment planner, whoever the hell his financial guru was.”

“Yeah?”

The breeze picked up, lifting Joe’s thinning gray hair off his forehead and blowing the steam from his coffee off the rim of the cup, whipping it away into an overcast sky. Joe’s tone was casual, but his face had changed, darkened and tightened.

“According to this guy, Jefferson was trying to determine how much cash he could put together, and how quickly. He wasn’t offering reasons, and he told his financial geek to mind his own business when the guy inquired, but he was interested in liquidating as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”

I frowned. “He was a corporate attorney. Could be he’d helped put something together that was getting ready to come down around him, thought his assets would be seized in the investigation.”

Joe grunted, but it wasn’t in approval. I’ve spent long enough with him to translate the grunts.

“If he was worried about some sort of investigation, don’t you think that would have come out by now? Someone would have stepped forward and said they’d been looking at the guy. And I don’t recall anyone being tortured with a razor blade and a lighter during the fallout from white-collar crime, do you?”

“Half of the mob’s activity could be considered white collar. But I do see your point. What’s your take, then?”

He shrugged and drank some coffee. “Handful of reasons for a guy to want to turn assets into cash overnight, LP. You suggested one, and maybe another is that he was planning to take off, run from something. But there’s no evidence to support that. So what’s left? What would you do with all that cash?”

I rocked back on my heels, hunkered down there over the garden like a catcher guarding home plate, and stared at him, getting the idea.

“A payoff,” I said. “You’re thinking someone was extorting him?”

He shrugged again. “That struck me as a possible motivation for the conversations with his financial guy. And if that was the case, well, maybe the debt wouldn’t end with Jefferson. That’s why I mention Karen.”

I thought about it, remembering her obvious fear, her nerves exposed like the bare ends of downed power lines, jumping and sparking at the slightest shift in the wind. Was it money? Was someone pressuring her for money?

“Don’t make too much of it,” Joe said. “I just threw it out there, that’s all. It was the only detail of any significance that Richards could offer.”

I knocked mulch off my gloves and removed them. Joe stood up and folded the lawn chair by bracing it against his thigh and using his good arm.

“I’d say it would be a fine idea for you to keep your distance from all this, LP.”

“A little late for that advice, but, yeah, it’s my plan.”

He scowled at the flower beds one last time and shook his head. Utterly unimpressed by my work but figuring that it would have to do till spring.

“You have therapy this afternoon?”

“Not till tomorrow.”

“Okay. Well, I’m going to head down to the office. Might make some calls to our favorite attorneys and see if they have anything new on their plates. Sometimes those guys can stand a reminder to send some business our way.”

It was something he could help with, something he could engage in, and I waited to see if he’d take the bait.

“Not calling around about Jefferson, I hope,” he said.

“No, I won’t do that.”

He nodded and then began to walk back to the house. “Thanks for the help with the yard. And good luck, Lincoln.”

I said goodbye and walked back out to the street, unlocked my truck, climbed inside, and started the engine. Good luck. Same thing I’d said to Karen the previous night. Before I’d walked away and left her to deal with her problems on her own. Coincidence? Sure it was. Sure.