Bad Move (37 page)

I recognized him as the male attendant who'd come to our house during The Backpack Incident. While he might have remembered coming to this address, he made no suggestion that we had met before. My face was too badly bruised and bloodied to be recognizable.

They ended up taking both of us to the hospital. Even though Sarah showed no obvious signs of injury, they wanted to check her out just the same. I told Paul to get in touch with Angie, let her know that we were okay.

"Does she think you're not okay?" he asked.

And tell her not to worry about going to school today, I said. Get one of the officers to bring you to the hospital to meet us once she shows up, I said.

Turns out all Sarah had were some tape burns on her wrists. Hospital officials would later tell the press that she was "in good condition," but I knew better. Nobody came out of something like this in good condition. I figured the nightmares would begin that night, and would be with her for a very long time.

The doctors and nurses had a fair bit of work to do on me. I needed stitches in three places on my face, my left eye was puffed up the size of an egg but the color of a prune, and I had an assortment of bruises all over my body from my tangles with Rick and crawling across the floor while still secured to a chair.

The police interviewed us separately. Needless to say, I had a lot more to get off my chest than Sarah, who was still pretty much in the dark, and was kept busy with detectives, including my friend Detective Flint, for a lot longer.

Hours and hours longer.

I started from the beginning. I'd considered, briefly, telling them I'd grabbed Stefanie Knight's purse by mistake, but knew I'd get caught in a lie somewhere down the road once they turned on the hot lights and brought out the rubber hoses.

I spelled out for them the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. The blackmailing of Carpington, the murder of Spender, how Stefanie was offered up for sexual favors. They'd found Carpington, by the way, sitting down by the edge of Willow Creek, listening to the sound of the water as it flowed by, and when two officers approached him, he turned to them and smiled and said, "It's beautiful down here, don't you think? They should never build homes around here."

The police wanted to know: Did I kill Stefanie Knight?

No, I said.

Did I know who had killed Stefanie Knight?

Not for certain, I said. But my money was on Rick. He certainly had an unlimited capacity for violence.

They told me that his full name was Richard Douglas Knell, that he was thirty-eight, and that while he'd spent much of his life working in construction, he'd also spent some time "inside" (where he did his reading), having kicked in a man's head outside a bar six years earlier. There was evidence that he'd acted, in some small way, in self-defense, otherwise the sentence would have been longer. He'd come back to work for Don Greenway, who'd been his employer years ago, and Greenway found a way to exploit Rick's special talents of persuasion.

"He liked snakes," I said.

My interrogators concurred. But Quincy, alas, was no longer with us. When they popped the trunk of Rick's car, they found he'd already squeezed the life out of Mr. Benedetto, and was in the process of digesting him. He'd only gotten to his knees, and when the panicked officers saw what they were dealing with, they unloaded several rounds into the snake, trying not to disgrace the body of Mr. Benedetto in the process, although they did nick his shoes. They'd remarked later, privately, that since Mr. Benedetto was already dead, it would have been interesting had they opened the trunk much later. They wondered just how much of the guy the snake would have managed to get down its throat. It would have been something to see, no doubt about it.

Anyone else on my list of suspects? they asked.

Well, there was Greenway, of course. Stefanie had decided, it appeared, to get out of Dodge, and she was leaving with her homemade supply of cash, plus a ledger for possible future blackmail purposes, and the roll of film. It wasn't clear whether she had the film because she was tired of being used for such seedy purposes, or simply hadn't gotten around to turning it in to Greenway for developing. I wondered where he normally had his film processed. Mindy's would do it for you in an hour, $6.99 for twenty-four exposures, another set of prints for two bucks.

I promised to hand over the negatives, still hidden in my Seaview model, and the ledger.

Earl's name never came up. As far as the police knew, I'd busted into the Valley Forest Estates office alone. I didn't have to bring Trixie into it, either. The police were left with the impression that I had something of a handcuff fetish. Later, when we compared notes about what we'd been asked, Sarah said to me, "When did you switch from sci-fi modeling to handcuff collecting?"

When the police finally decided to let me go home, with the proviso that they would be wanting to talk to me again, probably several times, I said to them, almost as an afterthought:

"You might also want to take a look in Carpington's and Greenway's cars. I don't think there's any snakes in them. They're out behind the Valley Forest Estates offices. You never know, you might find some interesting things in there."

"Already have," said Detective Flint.

o o o

I wondered whether they would charge me with something. There had to be lots of offenses to choose from. Not reporting Stefanie's death to them immediately, hindering prosecution, who knew? They take their time with these things, and I knew that if they wanted to lay charges, they might take months to get around to it.

But they didn't waste any time charging others. Greenway, who hadn't bothered to make a run for it that morning, who knew the game was over and simply waited for the cops to arrive, was arrested, as was Roger Carpington.

A couple of days later, with some fanfare, they announced that they were charging Carpington with the murder of Stefanie Knight.

They had found, in the trunk of his car, a bloody shovel. They'd run DNA tests on the blood, and it turned out to be, without a doubt, Stefanie Knight's.

And I thought: I'll be damned.

o o o

Life took some time to get back to normal. Sarah's bosses told her to take off as much time as she wanted, which meant she probably had about a week. In seven days or so, her editors would be calling to say "You okay? You think, you know, coming back to work and editing stories about murder and mayhem would help take your mind off things?"

There were insurance matters to deal with. We'd lost a car. There was a big hole in the basement wall, from my doing batting practice with the tripod. And there was the grisly matter of the blood-soaked carpet where Rick had fallen on his sword.

And there was some other damage that the insurance adjusters weren't equipped to handle. Sarah didn't want to talk to me.

She was there for me, of course, while I recovered from my injuries. She'd make me tea, bring me an ice pack, get me a glass of water to help me wash down my Advils. But she didn't have much else to say, and I couldn't blame her. I'd nearly gotten us both killed by being a busybody. I'd nearly turned our kids into orphans.

They weren't that pleased with me, either, but they were more upset that their mother and I weren't speaking. Or that their mother wasn't speaking to me.

"I'll talk to her," Angie said to me.

"Thanks, honey," I said. "But I just think it's going to take some time."

"How much time?"

When I crawled into bed next to Sarah, she flicked off her light, turned her back to me, and pulled the covers up around her neck. I stared at the ceiling for an hour or more before finally falling asleep.

It was during this time, while still awake, that I started thinking about things that I had no business worrying about. For me, this should all be over, and yet ...

Roger Carpington. They'd charged Roger Carpington with murder. They'd found the shovel in the trunk of his car.

I'd seen that shovel. It had been there, on the floor, next to Stefanie Knight's body. How had it traveled from there into the trunk of Roger Carpington's car?

Maybe, after I'd left, he'd come back. Maybe he was concerned that he'd left his fingerprints on it, so he came back, snuck inside, grabbed the shovel and threw it in his trunk.

I suppose.

Except by the time I'd left Stefanie Knight's house, there was an Oakwood Town Council meeting under way. Carpington's wife had told me, when I'd phoned his house looking for him, that the meeting had started at 6:30 P. M. The councilman would have had to excuse himself in the middle of a council meeting, drive across town, retrieve the shovel, drive back across town, take his seat again in the council chambers.

And he couldn't have grabbed the shovel after the council meeting, after I'd seen him, because by then the police were already at the scene. Sarah had phoned when I was at the interview with Paul's science teacher - Ms. Winslow or Wilton or whatever - and told me she'd sent a reporter to cover it.

The next morning, after a nearly sleepless night, I phoned the town clerk.

"Did Roger Carpington leave during the council meeting for a long time?" I asked.

"I'm not sure I should be answering your questions, Mr. Walker. This is a police matter."

"I'm only asking the one question. Was he there for the whole meeting, or did he skip out for a while?"

The clerk sighed. "He was there the whole time."

"Thank you."

I called my good friend Detective Flint and told him what I had uncovered. He was not impressed. "Mr. Walker, really, you've done more than enough. We can look after this investigation on our own, thanks very much."

"But what about that shovel? I saw it with my own eyes. I was there, in the garage, and saw it."

"You must have the times screwed up, then. Maybe you were in her house earlier than you think. Listen, Mr. Walker, once again, we thank you for your help and all, but we've got our guy."

o o o

So I let it go.

Maybe I was wrong about the time. Or maybe, just like there could have been a second shooter on the grassy knoll, there was a second shovel.

Did it really matter?

Carpington was a weasel. Did it make any difference, if they were already going to send him away for five years for municipal corruption, if they left him there for another five for murder? What was it to me?

I mentioned to Sarah, in the kitchen, that we should go away. Leave the kids with her parents, go someplace for a week or two. Maybe rent a cottage, or spend some time in New York. She could use her contacts in the entertainment department to wangle some tickets to a couple of shows. Or maybe even Europe. Spend a week in London, or better, a week in Paris. How did that sound? Tom Darling thought the Missionary sequel was going to do better than expected, what with - I hate to say it - all the media exposure I'd gotten in the last week. So there was bound to be a little extra money coming in.

Sarah said she didn't know, and went outside.

o o o

I wanted to throw a little party. Okay, "party" is too strong a word. But I wanted to do something for Trixie and Earl. Have them over for a drink. I mentioned this to Sarah.

"So we're going to throw a bash for a pot grower and a hooker," she said.

"Well," I said, "to the best of my knowledge, she just ties them up and spanks them, but she doesn't fuck them."

"Oh, my mistake. I'll get out the good china."

But she was actually pretty decent about it. At some level, Sarah seemed to understand that once I was in this mess I'd created for myself, I had to find a way out of it, and that Trixie and Earl were the unlikely pair who'd been there when I needed help. So we invited them over for a Wednesday evening, early. Trixie explained that she had a nine o'clock, and there was a lot of prep work. Costuming and all. Sarah made a lasagna and we uncorked a few bottles of wine.

Earl had said no, at first. He was glad to have helped out, but he wasn't sure he felt comfortable coming over. He knew Sarah was pissed. But I leaned on him a bit, reminded him that, up to now, I'd managed to avoid mentioning his role to the police, and I was pretty sure they weren't going to hear about him from Greenway or Carpington, who'd both hired high-priced lawyers and weren't saying a word to anyone.

Trixie, too, had concerns about coming over. "Sarah knows what I do?"

"Yeah."

"And the kids?"

"I'm less sure. I haven't told them directly. But they're not stupid. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but as long as you're not going to be their guidance counselor, I think it's okay."

And so they came. We even invited over some of the other neighbors, the ones who'd stood out on the sidewalk the morning everything happened. We thought they might like to get to know what we were like when there weren't so many emergency vehicles around. We finally met the people directly next door, in the house between ours and Trixie's - the Petersons - a couple who worked as control room technicians for a Christian television network. I so wanted to tell them what their other neighbor did for a living, but held my tongue.

We didn't all sit around the same table. It was informal. You grabbed a drink, scooped out a heap of lasagna and some salad on a plate, and ate it wherever you wanted. In the kitchen, in front of the TV, whatever.