Carter & Lovecraft (11 page)
“None,” said Carter. “Never before. I was coming up to Providence anyway, so I thought I’d check it out. Work’s work.”
“You didn’t call him back.”
“I did, twice. Went to voice mail both times. Your techs will find my messages when they go through his cell.”
Harrelson nodded, still looking at the car rather than at Carter. He seemed distracted.
“What happened to him?” asked Carter. He wasn’t expecting a straight answer, if he got one at all.
“Don’t know. The ME’s gonna love this one.” He rubbed his neck where the shirt collar chafed the skin.
Carter hid his surprise. Harrelson actually wanted to tell him. “Oh?” he said, priming the pump. “Why’s that?”
“Only time I ever seen a body with foam on its lips like that, it wasn’t drugs. It was drowning.”
“In a parking lot?”
“In a dry parking lot, yeah.” Harrelson laughed. “It’ll be some kind of poisoning. Maybe his lungs filled. Breathing in chlorine gas can do that.”
“Maybe.” Chlorine gas was fractionally more likely than a man drowning in his car, Carter guessed. “This place have a chemistry department?”
“Yeah, but not a big one. Chlorine’s easy to make, though. They used it in World War One, didn’t they?” Carter shrugged. “Yeah, they did. Must be pretty easy to make.” Harrelson finally looked at Carter. “We’ll take a statement now, while you’re here. Take a look at your phone to check the call timings, too. Okay?”
* * *
Carter reached Hill’s Books just as Lovecraft was closing the place. “Well, hello,” she said, opening the door to his wave through the window. She smiled and frowned at the same time. “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”
“Work brought me up to Providence, so I thought I might as well stay over,” he said. “How’s business, partner?”
“Not so bad, partner,” she replied, letting him in. Her body language was tense, but happily so. She was having a hard time hiding a grin.
“What’s going on?” Carter asked slowly.
The grin broke out. “A coup,” she said, “an absolute solid gold coup. I’ve been hugging myself for the last twenty-four hours. Get this: two days ago I had an inquiry after a pretty obscure book,
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
by William Cecil, the Baron Burghley. Burghley was a big deal in the court of Elizabeth the First.” Carter looked at her blankly. She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, the client wants it in a first edition. A
first edition
.” Carter still wasn’t showing the requisite excitement. “That’s 1588, Dan! So I check it out, and all I find is that a copy came up for auction a year or two ago, and went for over thirty K. That’s too rich for this business. We’ve never dealt with anything that rare. So I put the inquiry to one side with half a plan to put it the way of some of the bigger fish and maybe wrangle a commission out of it
if
it happens.
“This morning I’m going through my e-mails and find a sales list from an English country house. They’re not going to auction. They want the money fast, so they got in somebody to price the books and just put them straight on sale, first come, first served.” She raised her eyebrows, encouraging him to speak.
He obliged her. “And they had this Armada book?”
“And they had the Armada book! First edition, not excellent condition, reboarded last century, good but not great binding, and going for … five thousand! That’s pounds, so about eight and half thousand dollars. The list was sent in the late evening there, so I’m guessing not many of the Brits are awake, and not many collectors outside the UK will be as interested as them. But time’s ticking. I didn’t have time to get in touch with the potential buyer, so I made an executive decision and bought it. Sale confirmed first thing next morning, UK time. Few hours later, the buyer agrees it’s the best copy they’ll realistically get, and pays out…” She could hardly stop herself from laughing. “Eighteen thousand! About nine and half thousand dollars gross profit for a few hours’ work. How awesome is that?”
“Especially since you never even saw the book.”
“I will
never
see the book. Got a colleague in the UK who’ll handle the exchange for me for a commission. Nothing big, three hundred and change, plus the courier expenses. Even then, we’re still nine thousand ahead.” She shook her head, excited by the retelling. “Weird never even seeing the book. I feel like a speculator. ‘Hey, stuff! Go from here to there, and make me some money.’”
“You look like you’d have burst if you hadn’t had someone to tell that story to,” said Carter, laughing with her.
“Ah, I told Ken, but he doesn’t get it. Difficult for him to think down to a level where nine thousand is a big deal. That’s not a criticism. It’s just the way it is.” Talking about it reduced her excitement a little and the words no longer flowed, but broke against the rocks as the torrent of her enthusiasm subsided.
“I haven’t eaten,” said Carter. “Have you?”
“No. No chance this afternoon.” She brightened. “I am going to buy you dinner, to celebrate my business acumen and all-around genius.”
“No,” said Carter, “the
business
is going to buy us dinner to celebrate your business acumen and all-around genius.”
“That’s kind of the business.”
“It’s the least it can do.”
Carter took a brusque phone call from the Providence Police Department the next morning, asking him to come in as soon as possible.
He had suffered a bad night’s sleep again, and was beginning to think he and the little studio over the shop would never get along very well. This time the dreams had been chaotic and so metamorphic that he could barely remember any of the cavalcade of faces and events he had been dragged through by his unconscious mind. All through them, he had a feeling of being observed. It was nothing to start with, no worse than the sense of being under the eyes of the proctors during a school exam. As the dreams, the many, many twisting and interconnected dreams, writhed on with him as an unwilling passenger, however, the observation became first critical, then antagonistic, and finally fully malevolent. He’d awoken—he’d
dreamed
he’d awoken—to find the figure from his first dream in the building sitting on the end of his bed, face turned away. Then he’d awoken again, alone. He did not remember ever suffering from such double awakenings before.
He arrived at the station house, identified himself, was badged as a visitor, and taken to an office. When he was shown in, his stomach sank. Harrelson was there, looking uncomfortable, and so were two other men, one white, one black, both in their forties. Carter made a mental bet with himself that the white guy with the silver foxing at the temples was Harrelson’s lieutenant, and the slim black guy in the nice gray suit was his captain.
“Mr. Carter,” said Detective Harrelson, “I’d like to introduce you to Lieutenant Piers—” The white guy with the silver foxing extended his hand. Carter shook it. “And Captain Aspinall.” The slim black guy in the nice gray suit extended his hand. Carter shook it.
“You’ve been on the job, Mr. Carter, so we’ll skip to the chase,” said Aspinall. He took some report sheet from the desk against which he was leaning. “In your statement, you said you had never heard of the deceased, James Belasco?”
“That’s correct,” said Carter.
“Never met him? You’re sure?”
Carter was beginning to regret the good food and wine of the previous evening. He’d gone straight to bed when he got back. Maybe an hour’s research on Belasco would have stood him in better stead.
“I’m sure. Or, if I have met him, it would’ve been casually and his name never came up.”
Piers said nothing, but watched Carter steadily. Carter had a feeling this had all gotten the captain’s attention too early in the investigation for Piers’s comfort, and there was something too mild to be real resentment there as a result.
Harrelson handed Carter a photograph, a blowup of a license picture. “Recognize him?”
Belasco didn’t look comfortable in the picture. He was in his fifties, and probably used hair coloring. The immediacy of the DMV photo had robbed him of the opportunity to organize his hair properly, and the parting looked a lot like a comb-over. Belasco must have hated that picture.
Carter shook his head. “No. He’s pretty distinctive. I think I’d have remembered him.” He handed the picture back. “And I have no idea what the danger he was worried about was, or even why he called me when there must be a hundred PI offices between Providence and Red Hook.”
This caused a pause, and the exchange of significant glances between the police officers. Carter knew better than to ask why; they’d get around to it any minute.
“We pulled the camera feed from the parking lot,” said Harrelson. “It’s not great quality, and Belasco’s car was in the corner of the frame. We got some usable images, though.”
He opened the file and produced prints of time-coded images. “Here’s Belasco getting into his car.” The code read 12:57.
“The camera angle’s too high to see him in there. Take a look at this.”
It was simply a picture of the silver Ford Focus sitting there, timed at 13:01. There was something wrong about the picture. Carter looked hard at it.
Harrelson passed him the next. It was identical to the last, but the code was 13:04. No, not identical. The shadow was different. It took Carter a moment to understand why that should be. “What’s going on with the suspension? Why is it higher on this one?”
“That’s a good question, ain’t it?” said Harrelson.
“Nobody gets in or out after Belasco,” said Piers, “but it bellies down on its shocks, and then rises up again. CSU estimate you’d have to put at least three other adults in there to do that.”
Carter handed the pictures back, confused by what he’d just seen, and by why they were showing them to him. “I can’t explain that.”
“It gets better,” said Aspinall and nodded to Harrelson.
The next picture showed the car’s passenger door open. A man in a dark overcoat and a hat was leaning in. There was something shiny on the passenger seat. It took Carter a moment to realize it was a shoe, one of Belasco’s shod feet. “That’s how we found Belasco, lying across the seats,” said Harrelson. The time code read 13:06.
So did the code on the next one, taken some thirty seconds later from the video. The man standing by the car, Belasco lying still in the car, presumably dead. The man had a phone to his ear.
13:06.
“Holy shit,” said Carter.
The officers thought he was reacting to the realization that Belasco was not the one who had called him. True, that was part of it, but what concerned Carter most was he recognized the man in the hat and coat.
He had been sitting on Carter’s bed that morning.
* * *
After he left the Providence PD precinct building, far more confused than when he entered, Carter went for a long, meandering walk to clear his head.
He wanted to think he was reading something into nothing. All he had of the man he had dreamed of was two momentary glimpses, once in silhouette, and once turned away. One man in an overcoat and hat looked pretty much like another. There was just something about it, though. There wasn’t a single view of the man’s face, and—despite it looking like he had bare hands in the recording—there were no unaccounted-for fingerprints on the door handle, glass, or the phone itself. He must have been wearing latex gloves, or even painted out his fingerprints with latex solution.
The timing was irrefutable, however. Whoever the stranger was, he had undeniably watched Belasco die (die
somehow
—the ME was taking her time over it), walked over, calmly taken Belasco’s phone from his corpse in broad daylight, called Carter to bring him to the scene, and walked away. Whoever he was, he knew full well where every camera in the vicinity was. He was only on the parking lot camera, and he’d kept his back to that. Every other camera in the vicinity had been checked, and he wasn’t on any of them. There were gaps in the coverage so it certainly wasn’t impossible to walk away undetected, but it was unlikely, unless those gaps had already been discovered and a safe path plotted.
All of which meant that whatever had happened (Carter couldn’t quite bring himself to accept that it was a homicide, not while the cause of death remained unsettled) had been exhaustively planned and the area reconnoitered. Carter was sure he had never met or heard of Belasco, and the evidence was that the ignorance was mutual. Carter’s number was only found in the call log of Belasco’s phone, not the contact list. In the recording, the man plainly tapped in the number with the thumb of his right hand, his left hanging empty by his side. There was no notebook, card, or scrap of paper to consult. So, the man in the overcoat and hat had entered Carter’s number from memory. It was a small, unusual detail in what was becoming a large, unusual case.
The biggest question in Carter’s mind was not why Belasco had died, how Belasco had died, or who had been complicit in that death. It was, why Carter? Why drag him into it? If the timing had been very different, he could have believed it was an attempt to frame him, but the timing almost seemed to go out of its way to exonerate him from collusion immediately. Harrelson didn’t strike Carter as the sharpest detective he’d ever met, but he was no chump, either. It was simple and quick to eliminate Carter as a suspect, and so it had proved.
Carter entertained paranoid ideas of it being an unnecessarily complicated double plot to frame him for murder after having first framed him for coming up with a perfect alibi, the second stage of the plan not yet having gone into operation. His paranoia never persisted for long, however; there was enough shit happening in the world already without having to imagine more.
Specifically, there was somebody out there who would want to bring him right into the middle of a police investigation, and knew just how to do it. That much was indisputable, and demonstrated that he really didn’t need to be paranoid. Somebody clever was out to get him, although what “get” meant in this case was beyond Carter. In his experience, motives were simple. There was greed, there was jealousy, he’d seen plenty of revenge played out in gang-related crimes, there was even sadism, and sometimes there was flat-out stupidity, which was a pretty powerful motivator in itself.
