The Art of Deception

Voices

“Hi, Mommy, I’m home,” LaMoia called loudly to the houseboat’s front door. He held up an Einstein’s Bagel bag, displaying it, knowing it was her favorite. “Trick or treat?” Matthews had yet to make a sound, but he knew she was in there, knew she wouldn’t want him waking the neighbors.

The front door opened slowly, the living room dark, Matthews looming as a gray figure in sweatpants and thin white Tshirt. She looked good despite herself-with no makeup and uncombed hair this was a Daphne Matthews he’d not seen before. But he liked it.

He attempted to pass the bagel bag through as an offering, saying, “You look like that kid in the Exorcist.” Standing at the door, he smelled the stale and closeted air from inside. But she wouldn’t accept the bag.

She said, “I’ve got all the Girl Scout cookies I need. How about a rain check, John?”

“I need your help,” he said. When a woman was locked up, he could nearly always find the key. He lived for such challenges.

He said, “I’ve got a riddle for you.”

“Pass.”

“Ah, come on.”

“I don’t want to play, Johnny.”

“Sure you do. And I’ll tell you why: Because you can’t stand anybody having the answers ahead of you, of being out of the loop, and I’ve got the answers, Matthews, answers you need. Believe it. You shut that door and I go to Boldt with what I’ve got.”

Sad eyes searched his face. The door opened a few more inches. LaMoia could taste victory. He said, “Little Joe knew you volunteer at the Shelter-do you remember that? Tonight he called your cell phone, a number he couldn’t possibly have turned up without a direct connection to you. Am I getting your attention?”

She swung open the door and LaMoia stepped inside.

“Love what you’ve done to the place. The Martha Stewart bomb shelter thing is fetching.”

“Fetching?” she said, as if he’d spoken a foreign language.

She locked the door’s dead bolt and latching hardware. LaMoia noticed the police bar to the left of the door, realizing she’d had it barricaded.

“Towels on the windows? Nice.”

“Lighten up.”

“Can I turn on a light?”

She said, “I like it this way.”

“That worries me.”

She snatched the paper sack and peered inside. “Sesame.”

“Toasted, with light cream cheese.”

“But how-?”

“Matthews, I know more about you than you even want to consider. Believe me.”

She looked askance at him. The bagel pleased her and he felt good about it. She lathered it up with cream cheese and took a ferocious bite. An appetite was a good sign. She spoke through a mouthful of food, uncharacteristic of her. “It’s a mandatory leave until they review it. I failed the Breathalyzer, did you know that?”

“I heard, yes.”

“A couple glasses of wine and I failed it. I was not drunk, John. I was scared,” she said. “But there you go.”

“Boldt’s on it. He’ll ramrod it through. It’s paperwork mostly. You’ll be back in the saddle in a day or two.”

“Four or five’s more like it. Meanwhile, I’m without my shield and my piece.”

He heard it coming then, realizing he’d been invited inside not for his offer of a bagel and shoptalk, but because she needed something from him. This wounded his pride.

“So, what is it?” he asked.

“A drop gun,” she said.

Her request hit him like a slap in the face. “You, of all people?” Matthews was the most vocal opponent of handguns on the department.

“Times change.”

“Not that much they don’t.”

“Funny what a good dose of reality will do for you.”

He said, “The Sarge asked me what I had to do with it.”

“You?”

“I got this feeling he thought we were … getting personal. Like that.”

“Us?” she asked.

“Not that it’s entirely unthinkable,” he said, in a tone meant to test her reaction. “I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility. You and me. I mean, stranger things have happened.”

“Name one,” Matthews said. She put on a pot of hot water.

Her movements seemed lighter all of a sudden, like she’d ditched a heavy coat. “You’re coffee, right?”

He said, “Eight … no, nine years we’ve worked together, and you have to ask what I drink?”

“It’s polite to ask.”

“Well it’s rude when two people have known each other as long as we have.”

“It’s espresso,” she stated. “See?” She was right, of course.

“I have an espresso machine someone gave me for Christmas.”

“It was for your engagement,” he said. “It was Gaynes.”

“You remember that?”

He shrugged. He felt his face warm. “Regular’s fine,” he said, “if you’ve got it, if it’s not a problem.”

“A souffle? would be a problem. Black coffee, I think I can handle.”

LaMoia asked to use the head, revealing a perceptive understanding that this was a houseboat. She pointed around the corner of the galley, asking aloud if he hadn’t been here before. He answered obliquely, as if maybe he didn’t remember.

As LaMoia urinated, his eye wandered into her medicine cabinet, left slightly ajar. An orange-brown prescription bottle presented itself. A white cap that was childproof, but not LaMoia-proof. He zipped himself up, flushed, and used the resulting noise of washing his hands to cover his reaching in there and spinning that bottle around. The script was a year old.

His eyes danced nervously to the door, ensuring the lock was in place. Amitriptyline. Ten or more in there. He liberated two of them and slipped them into the coin pocket of his jeans.

Safekeeping. A voice in him cried out, What the hell are you doing? But the answer came instantly. Insurance. Relax. It doesn’t mean I’m going to take them. He shut the medicine cabinet door to the exact position he’d found it-ever the good detective. He looked himself in the mirror, astonished that the reflection came back absolutely normal. As he unlocked the door and joined back up with her, guilt spiked through his system like a series of tiny fevers.

“How ’bout I get you out of here and buy you breakfast at my favorite diner?” he asked.

“How ’bout you get me a drop gun?”

“Peepers are nonviolent. You’ve said so yourself when we’ve dealt with them in the past. Walker’s got this notion he’s part of the investigation. Grief does that, right?”

“Suddenly you’re the psychologist?”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re never wrong, John.” Sarcasm from Matthews would normally drive him from a room. When she got really pissed off she let her intelligence loose, uncaged like some zoo animal just waiting for the chance, and he knew better than to try to stand up to it. But this time he found himself unwilling to let her drive him out, for that would be a double win.

“Him having your cell phone number,” LaMoia said. “That’s what our focus ought to be. That’s gonna be what connects the dots here, Matthews, because that is the one thing impossible to explain. We solve that, we’ll know where to find him.”

“We’ll find him at the canal,” she said, “cleaning fish. Tomorrow morning.”

“No we won’t. He’s blown off work. You know that. My guess is he’s in the wind. He knows he went too far with his offer to help with the two disappearances. He’s gotta be hooked up to that somehow if he’s making that kind of offer. Mentioning it to you was a mistake.”

“He is not hooked up to the disappearances,” she protested.

“He’s a grief-stricken, sad excuse of a human being who’s lost and emotionally fragile and is trying to bait me into including him with information he doesn’t possess just so he can be a part of something. Right now, he’s a part of nothing. His sister’s murder is all he has left.”

“So explain him having your cell phone number.”

“He got it off the phone while in the car-it’s all I can think of.”

“For me, it adds up differently.”

“Surprise,” she said, again resorting to sarcasm.

Only then did LaMoia notice a massive tangle of wires and a tape recorder by the home phone.

“You know Danielson in tech services?” she asked.

“What’s the deal?”

“If I’m to get a restraining order against him, I need at least one of my refusals on tape. Welcome to the woman’s side of the new-and-improved stalking law. Same old, same old, you ask me.” She made herself tea and poured hot water through a funnel loaded with too much coffee. He didn’t tell her. She said calmly, “I need a weapon, and in case I have to use it, I don’t want it traceable.”

LaMoia churned inside to hear this. “You’re making me worried,” he said.

“I’m making you coffee,” she corrected.

He sampled her effort. It tasted bitter and burned. He told her otherwise. Tea drinkers. What did they know? “Are you going to ask?” he said.

“About your version of the cell phone number?”

“What else?”

“Okay, I’m asking.”

“He’s been inside the Shelter,” LaMoia said confidently.

“Your name, your address, your cell phone, they’re tacked up on a bulletin board somewhere. Am I right? It talks like a street person, it walks like a street person … Who’s to question his being down there?”

“Nice theory, but it’s women only, John.”

“Guys must wander down into there now and then, whether it’s looking for some girl or thinking it’s coed.”

“Sure they do, you’re right.”

“So, one of them was Walker. Maybe on purpose, even. Very intentionally when you weren’t there. And he lifted your-”

She interrupted, stuck back on the earlier part of his suggestion. “It would explain his watching the Shelter.” She was thinking about the figure in the parking garage. What if those street kids had merely told her what they thought she’d wanted to hear? What if it had been Walker up there looking down on her?

More to the point, why did she feel so uncertain about sharing that Nathan Prair had been lurking at the end of her dock? She answered that question immediately, knowing that she hadn’t been completely innocent with Prair, had not remained 100 percent objective with him during counseling. Not that she’d ever done anything that could be remotely construed as a come-on, not even close, but something about him had made her tack a few more minutes onto a session, had given him the benefit of the doubt when evaluating an answer. Later, she had wondered if she’d allowed herself to be charmed-an egregious error, an unforgivable sin, for any psychologist. She knew Prair’s presence on her dock had to be mentioned, but not now. Not LaMoia.

She feared the CAP sergeant might resolve the situation with a baseball bat, and no one needed that.

“It’s open this time of night, right?” he asked.

She answered with a don’t-ask-me-to-do-this look.

“The Sarge wants him in for questioning. I want answers how he got your cell number. Call whoever it is you gotta call down there, and let’s get the flock out of here. It smells funky in here, you know that?”

“Boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.”

“Yeah,” he fired back at her. “That’s what they say.”

It came together for Matthews slowly, like learning the steps to a dance. Not something she could jump into, this idea of Walker in the Shelter. Like so many times before in other investigations, she found the early information too much to process as a whole, a stew stirred up that had to settle before being tasted, its in-gredients properly understood. For LaMoia, it wasn’t stew but spaghetti, and he was throwing it at the wall as he always did, waiting to see what stuck. For him, she was part of the mix-he’d thrown her up there, too, by including her in his theory.

LaMoia didn’t develop theories so much as test them. He didn’t put his work on paper, he put it in the field, and that pretty much explained to her why she found herself strapped into the passenger seat of his Jetta shortly before midnight. Another of LaMoia’s wild hairs, and she along for the ride, as much for the company as anything else.

“You feeling better?” he asked. LaMoia drove fearlessly-his approach to so much of life. She envied him that, while at the same time hated being his passenger.

“I resent you dragging me along, John.”

God, he loved women.

She fought against the silence that followed. She said, “Your mind goes to strange places when you feel yourself under attack.”

“You’re safe with me,” he said in the most serious voice she’d ever heard him use. “Always, and forever. No one will ever get to you with me around, Matthews.”

She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She glanced out her side window only to have her focus shift and the mirror image of her glassy eyes superimpose itself. LaMoia gallant? Who would have thought?

She said, “Making statements like that can get you in trouble.”

“I’m always in trouble,” he said.

He won a private smile from her.

“From here on out you’ll stay at my loft. End of discussion.”

She laughed into the car. “That’ll be the day.”

“No, that’ll be tonight. That’ll be until we clear this thing.”

She searched his profile for any indication he was kidding.

The car drifted through yet another greasy turn, and she made no attempt to steady herself. Instead, she settled into the seat, wondering how and why everything suddenly felt a whole lot better.

“Pack a bag.” He reached across and took up her left hand-an impossibly caring gesture for John LaMoia. She did not recoil, did not tease him. For an instant they met eyes. He squeezed her hand gently, ran his thumb down her palm. She felt it to her toes. “I know you think I’m crazy. That’s all right, Matthews. You, and everyone else.” He flew through traffic, colored lights reflected in the black shine of the wet street. “This too shall pass.”