Spook

23

Steve Taradash was still doing that nervous, quit-smoking trick of his with a package of cigarettes. While I talked I watched him take one from the pack, roll it between thumb and forefinger, lay it on the desk blotter, and go through the slice-and-dice routine with his penknife. In the other chair Meg Lawton kept her eyes on me the whole time, a look of near anguish on her round face.

Eventually I stopped talking. Taradash said, “Rotten cancer sticks,” and swept the dismembered weed into his wastebasket. Without any sign of glee this time; his expression was bleak. Mrs. Lawton rubbed her palms over the silky material of her skirt, making a dry rustling sound.

She said, “It’s so hard to believe Spook murdered three people in cold blood. My Lord, he seemed so... harmless.”

“He was by the time you met him. Unstable personality unhinged by one psychotic episode, seventeen years of guilt and remorse and self-hatred.

“Until there wasn’t anything left,” Taradash said glumly, “but a walking vegetable.”

“Horrible,” she said. “I almost wish...”

“That we’d never found out the truth about him? So do I. Try to make a gesture in the spirit of the holidays, this is what you get. I should’ve left well enough alone.”

“Look at it this way,” I said. “If you had, Spook might never have been identified and nobody would’ve known what became of Anthony Colton. At least now the Mono sheriff’s department and the FBI can close their files on the case.”

“I suppose you’re right. Still... oh, hell, don’t misunderstand me, you and your people did a good job, I don’t begrudge the expense. It’s just that I’m feeling disillusioned right now.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“And I can’t help wondering if Spook got what he deserved out there in the alley, if Lightfoot and Valjean, if they’re the ones responsible, were justified in knocking him off.”

“Murder’s never justified, Mr. Taradash.”

“I’m not so sure I wouldn’t’ve done the same thing if a member of my family was shot down and I had a crack at the man who pulled the trigger.”

“Nobody knows what he’d do in a situation like that until he’s confronted with it. All I can say is that most of us wouldn’t give in to the impulse.”

“I wouldn’t,” Meg Lawton said. “I could never take a human life, not for any reason.”

“There’s another thing to consider, too. The man who murdered Spook also murdered Big Dog. Double homicide isn’t any less heinous than triple homicide... he’s no better than Anthony Colton. Worse in the eyes of the law because his crimes were premeditated.”

“Big Dog,” Taradash said. “You think he’d still be dead if I hadn’t hired you?”

“No question. He signed his own death warrant before we got involved.”

Taradash shook out another cigarette, began the ritual once more. “How’d he know who to blackmail? How’d Spook get recognized in the first place, after seventeen years?”

“No answers to those questions yet. We’ll get the rest of the story when the police make an arrest.”

“If they make an arrest.”

“They will. I don t think it’ll be long.”

Meg Lawton had been staring past her boss, through the window at activity on the warehouse floor — employees readying equipment for another indy film being shot in the city, I’d been told. Abruptly she said, as if a thought had just struck her, “Steve, what about... you know, a burial plot for Spook, some kind of marker?”

“You don’t expect me to go through with that now?”

“It’s not that I expect it...”

“We found out who he was, isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know. If you think so.”

“Well, I don’t know either.” Taradash jabbed his penknife into the cigarette; tobacco spurted like flecks of dry brown blood. He asked me, “What do you think? Should I go ahead, arrange to bury the poor bastard?”

“Not my call. I didn’t know Spook.”

“No opinion either way?”

“Sorry, no.”

“And where would we put him? Here? Mono County?”

I didn’t say anything.

“He was so sad,” Meg Lawton said, “so... damaged. It’s horrible, what he did, but he wasn’t really free all those years, was he? Didn’t really escape punishment? It just seems to me he ought to have a final resting place.”

“Maybe,” Taradash said, “maybe you’re right, I wish I could make up my mind.” He jabbed the knife blade again into the corpse of the cigarette. “I wish it wasn’t the Christmas season,” he said.

Meg Lawton said, “I’m glad it is.”

So was I. For a lot of reasons.