Far From True (20 page)

“No other boyfriend,” he said.

“So she wasn’t involved in any other relationship?”

Victor hesitated, then said, “No.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think it’s anything.”

“That’s often what people say later. They say they didn’t think it was anything. But it turned out to be something.”

“She was kind of—it’s hard to describe—but sort of distant for a while,” he said.

“When was this?”

“Like, a month before it happened? Maybe three weeks. Just . . . she acted like she had something on her mind. I thought maybe it was the idea of getting engaged to me, but she swore up and down it wasn’t that. She said one time she wondered if she was a good person. Like she’d done something she felt bad about.”

“What did you think it was?”

Victor shrugged. “I thought maybe she’d spent the night with another guy. A one-night-stand thing. I might have pressed harder, but I guess I just didn’t want to know. But what happened to Olivia? In the park? That was some fucking maniac—that’s what that was. So I don’t even know what the point of your questions is. They’ve got nothing to do with what happened to her.”

“You might be right.”

“This, what you’re doing? You just want me to think you’re getting somewhere, but you’re never going to catch the guy. Why don’t you go after the others? The people who did fuck all? The ones who listened while she screamed.”

“It must be hard to get over,” Duckworth said, his eyes scanning the house and the property, the detached garage in the backyard. “How long was it before you started seeing anyone else?”

“Are you for real? You honestly came by to ask me when I started dating again?” Rooney turned away, spit onto the driveway.

The front door of the house opened. It was Mrs. Townsend.

“Oh, Victor?”

He turned around, said, “Yeah?”

“Sorry to interrupt. Before you go on your run, could you get me a garbage bag? I thought I had some in the kitchen, but they’re all gone, but I think there’s a package of them in the garage.”

“Sure,” he said, and the woman withdrew. He looked at Duckworth and said, “I help Mrs. Townsend around the place.”

“She was telling me. You do all the chores.”

“Most of them. Are we done here?”

“I guess,” Duckworth said.

“Okay, well, fine. See ya.” He started walking toward the garage, then stopped when he realized Duckworth hadn’t moved, that he was watching him.

“Is there a problem?”

“No problem,” Duckworth said.

Victor Rooney said, “Screw it. I’ll do my run first.”

He jogged past Duckworth and disappeared up the street.

Cal

I
had the radio back on and this time I found out more about Mr. Twenty-three. That was the instant nickname the media had given some nut who had killed forest creatures, fired up abandoned amusement park rides, and very likely blown up the drive-in. A reporter had stopped people on the street to get their reaction.

“I’m pretty freaked-out, to tell you the truth.”

“They better get this guy fast before he does something even bigger.”

“I knew it was terrorism. Isn’t that a verse or something in the Koran? Thou must kill everybody?”

I wondered sometimes why I even turned on the radio. I switched it off, choosing instead to occupy myself with my own thoughts.

I couldn’t, in good conscience, drag this case out much longer. Lucy Brighton had hired me for a day’s work, and I was prepared to run out the clock on this, but come tomorrow, we’d have to talk about how much more she wanted to spend. What I’d told her, that whoever took these discs probably wanted to bury them, was what I believed. This might be one of those problems that just went away.

I turned a corner and was about a block away from the Chalmers house when I noticed a car parked at the curb, taillights on, exhaust coming out of the tailpipe. A small black BMW coupe. I drove past slowly, and noticed there was enough light from the dash to make out Felicia Chalmers behind the wheel.

She was alone.

I stopped the car just ahead of her, put the car in reverse, and backed up until I was directly beside her. She glanced over, probably couldn’t make me out at first.

I powered down the passenger window, raised my hand, and did a downward motion with my index finger. She got the idea and did the same.

“Ms. Chalmers,” I said.

“Yes?”

I hit the interior light in my car for three seconds, long enough for her to get a look at me. “Cal Weaver. I came by your place.”

Her mouth made an O. “Right, yes, of course,” she said. And nothing else.

I didn’t take my eyes off her and allowed the silence to go on.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“But then again, I could ask what you’re doing here,” Felicia said. “Looks like you’re going to the house.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m still working for Adam Chalmers’s daughter.”

“Of course.”

“Your turn,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” she said. “I can’t hear you that well over the engine.”

“I said, your turn.”

“Oh. I was just . . . I guess I was sitting here thinking about Adam.”

“Sure,” I said, nodding understandingly.

“It’s still a shock.”

“I can imagine.”

“And . . . I was sort of driving around the neighborhood, looking at the houses. I’m . . . I probably shouldn’t tell you this.”

I waited.

“I’ve been talking to a lawyer. He says I might have . . . that as
Adam’s only surviving former spouse, I might have some claim . . . you know what I’m saying. On the estate. Whatever there is of it.”

“I understand,” I said, tempted to add that everyone handles grief in their own way, but holding my tongue.

“So I was taking another look at the house, considering where it stands in the market. Nothing in this town’s worth as much as it was five or ten years ago.”

“I can imagine,” I said, the car still in drive, my foot on the brake.

“Anyway, nice to see you,” she said, and powered her window back up.

I took my foot off the brake and continued on up the street. In my rearview, I saw Felicia do a three-point turn and take her Beemer around the corner.

I parked out front of the Chalmers house. The light over the front door was on. Probably on a timer. But the rest of the house was dark. If Adam and Miriam had been leaving for a holiday, they might have left some lights to go on and off in the house, but that’s not the sort of thing you bother doing when you’re just going to the movies.

When I got to the front door, I reached into my pocket for the key Lucy had given me, and found two.

Right. Felicia had given me her old key to the house where she once lived. She said she was pretty sure Adam had changed the locks since their divorce.

Instead of using Lucy’s, I inserted the key I’d taken from Felicia, expecting some resistance. But it slid right in. I turned it, and opened the door. Immediately, the alarm system began to beep, warning me that if I didn’t enter the code in the next few seconds, it would start whooping loud enough to wake the neighborhood and connect to the monitoring service. I entered the four digits Lucy had told me, and the beeping stopped.

Flicked on some lights.

I was betting that if Chalmers never bothered to change the
locks, he’d never gotten around to changing that code, either. Which meant Felicia could have gotten into this house anytime she wanted. Or sent someone here on an errand, with that key.

I didn’t think she’d looked very pleased that I’d caught her parked down the street from here.

There’s always a strange feeling, walking into a place where the owners are no longer alive. You half expect one of them to pop out of a closet and ask what the hell you’re doing in their house.

I wandered first through the living room and into the kitchen, noticed that the red light was flashing on the phone that rested on the countertop. A message. There hadn’t been one when I was here before with Lucy. Someone had called who, evidently, did not know the homeowners were no longer available.

It could easily be a nuisance call. It was one of the pleasures, for me, of no longer having a landline that I wasn’t pestered all night by duct cleaners, driveway resealers, window installers, and people wanting me to go on a cruise.

I looked through the recent callers, those that had come in since Lucy and I had been here. There was only one, but it was an unidentified number.

I wanted to hear the message. But a four-digit code had to be entered to retrieve it. Given that most people don’t want to have to remember half a dozen passwords, I figured there was a good chance it was the same code I’d used for the security panel.

I tried it.

“You have one new message,” the voice said. “To hear your message, press one-one.” I did so.

There was a pause, then, “Adam, it’s me.”

A woman. Speaking very softly.

“I tried your cell. Where are you? We . . . I’ve been thinking . . . I don’t think I can carry on this way. . . . I just don’t . . . never mind. I have to go.”

End of message.

I wondered whether it could be Felicia. I just couldn’t tell. I
checked the time of the call, saw that it had come in between the time Lucy and I had left the house this morning and my arrival at Felicia’s apartment. I looked at the list of incoming calls, and made note of the number of the caller when that message had been left. I didn’t recognize it.

She’d admitted the two of them kept in touch. I was betting that when they did talk, Adam usually used his cell, as the phone bill had suggested. Even if Miriam knew he kept in touch with his ex, she probably didn’t like it.

Odd, though, that she would leave a message like that one. Felicia would have to know there was a good chance Miriam would end up hearing it.

The same would be true of any other woman calling here for Adam.

Maybe, when you were in the “lifestyle,” you didn’t worry about that sort of thing.

A thought that led me to pay another visit to the downstairs playroom. I could search through Adam’s e-mails later.

Hitting light switches along the way, I descended the stairs to the bookcase. Lucy had slid it shut, concealing the room, before we left the house earlier in the day. No sense leaving it exposed in case someone else decided to break in.

It really was a marvel of engineering. Despite being loaded with books, the shelves practically floated on hidden casters. You had to
put your back into it at first, pushing the case to the left, but once it was moving, it moved quite freely. The three-foot-wide doorway was revealed. I reached around inside, found the switch, and exposed the room to the light.

At a glance, nothing appeared to have changed since my first visit, suggesting that whoever had paid a visit here after the death of Adam and Miriam Chalmers hadn’t returned.

It really was some room. Erotic photos on the wall, sex toys in the cabinet, expensive camera equipment under the bed. There were two small tables on either side of the bed, each with a drawer. I found the same thing in each of them. Condoms. A wide assortment. Different textures, different colors, lubricated and nonlubricated.

If there was something to be found here, I wasn’t seeing it.

Then I thought:
Bathroom.

Visits to bathrooms followed sex the way heartburn followed pizza. I figured there had to be a downstairs bathroom where folks could clean up, take a shower.

I came out of the playroom, crossed the large rec room area full of games, entered a short hallway leading to a storage room, a furnace room, and a bathroom. Not some rinky-dink basement powder room, either. There was a large marble-tiled shower big enough for two to soap up comfortably. And beyond that, a handsome wood door to a small cedar-lined sauna.

Everything was sparklingly clean and tidy. There was a stack of perfectly folded towels on chrome racks bolted to the wall over the toilet. The contents of the medicine cabinet indicated this was strictly a bathroom for visitors. New toothbrushes still in the packaging. Unopened tubes of toothpaste. Scented soaps wrapped in tissue paper. Mouthwash and small throwaway paper cups.

There was nothing in the garbage can.

Nothing particularly helpful at all in—

“Hello? Adam?”

A woman’s voice coming from upstairs. At the front door. I hadn’t heard anyone knock or ring the bell.

I exited the downstairs bathroom, made my way to the stairs at a steady pace. I could hear footsteps, what sounded like high heels, coming into the house.

“Adam?” she shouted again, sounding uncertain, but also slightly annoyed.

I reached the top of the stairs. I didn’t see the woman, but I did see a leather overnight bag on the floor in the front hall. I was guessing the visitor had gone into the kitchen.

“Ma’am?” I said. “Hello?”

The heels turned, started marching furiously in my direction. When she materialized, she looked at me with a mix of fury and fear.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded. “Is that your car out front?”

She was late twenties, early thirties, and, not to put too fine a point on it, a stunner. Five-six, long brown hair, wearing a knee-length black dress that clung to her like a second skin. She looked familiar. I was pretty sure I’d seen her picture around the house.

I was reaching for my ID. “My name is Cal Weaver. I’m a private investigator and I’m here with the permission of Lucy Brighton, who’s the daughter of Adam Chalmers, and—”

“I know who the hell my stepdaughter is,” the woman said.

I said, “Excuse me?”

“I said I know who my stepdaughter is.”

I said, “Miriam Chalmers?”

“Who the hell else would I be? This is my house. And you better get the fuck out of it, but not before you tell me where my husband is.”

AFTER
interviewing Victor Rooney, Detective Duckworth picked up three coffees at the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through on the way to the Promise Falls courthouse. He parked around back. The courts were not in session this time of night, but the wing where the jail cells were located was a 24-7 operation. Duckworth had called ahead to let them know he wanted to talk to Bill Gaynor, and that his lawyer, Clark Andover, would be in attendance.

Andover had tried, without success, to get Gaynor out on bail while he awaited trial. He’d argued that Gaynor had never been in trouble with the law before and was an upstanding member of the community. The judge didn’t buy it.

Gaynor was due to be transferred to another facility, given that the local jail was not intended to keep those awaiting trial for extended periods.

“What’s this about?” Andover, dressed casually in jeans and a button-down collared white shirt, asked Duckworth.

“Like I said, a few questions,” the detective told him.

Bill Gaynor, a good five or more pounds thinner since Duckworth had last seen him, was brought to an interrogation room. He was wearing lightweight hunter green pants and a T-shirt. He and Andover sat side by side across the table from Duckworth.

“What’s this about?” Gaynor asked. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Gaynor,” Duckworth said, setting down a cardboard tray with three coffees. “There’s some creams and sugars here if you need them.”

Gaynor looked at his lawyer, then back at Duckworth.

“How are you this evening?” the detective asked, setting a coffee in front of him.

“How am I? Seriously? They wouldn’t even let me attend my own wife’s funeral. That’s how I am.”

Duckworth nodded sympathetically. “That’s a terrible shame. You’d have thought they could have found a way to accommodate you.” He pried off the plastic lid of his coffee, blew on it. “Mr. Gaynor, how long have you lived in Promise Falls?”

“What?”

“You didn’t grow up here—isn’t that right?”

“I grew up in Albany,” he said, ignoring the coffee in front of him. Andover, however, had reached for the third one and was tearing off the ends of two sugar packets. “When Rosemary and I were looking for our first house, we came here. Houses were more affordable here, and it was an okay commute to my work in Albany.”

“When was that?”

“That was around—it was in 2002.”

“And you’ve been in that house ever since?”

“No. We were there eight years. Then we moved to Breckonwood.”

“Your current residence.”

“
This
,” he said, looking around, “is my current residence.”

“Not for long,” Andover said, his eyes on Duckworth.

“And you were still commuting to Albany all that time? Every day?”

“Not every day. I usually worked from home one or two days a week. I have—had a lot of local clients.”

“That’s going to get cold.”

“I don’t want it,” Gaynor said.

“So, three, four years ago, you’d have been working from home, as you say, a couple of days a week.”

“That’s right. Usually Thursday and Friday.”

“Did you have a lot of people you did insurance work for right here in Promise Falls?”

Gaynor shrugged. “Maybe two, three dozen.”

“Those clients included the Fisher family. Isn’t that right?”

“Fisher?”

“Walden and Elizabeth Fisher.”

“Uh, yes, I think, maybe—”

Andover stepped in. “What’s going on, Barry?”

“I just wanted to know if Mr. Gaynor was the insurance agent for Walden and Elizabeth—she passed away recently, by the way—Fisher. Were you?”

“Yes,” he said. “There was a hundred-thousand-dollar policy on Beth—on Elizabeth—that was paid a while ago.”

“So you know the Fishers.”

“I do,” he said.

“So then you would also have known their daughter, Olivia.”

Bill Gaynor’s head slowly went up and down, once. “I did. But she didn’t have life insurance. Of course, she was on the family’s automotive policy. Their car insurance.”

“Right,” Duckworth said, taking a sip. “But even though Olivia didn’t have a life insurance policy, as someone who worked with the family on their insurance needs, I’m sure you must have reached out to them at the time of her death. To offer your sympathies, see how they were managing.”

Gaynor looked at his lawyer, as though seeking guidance. He said to Duckworth, “Well, sure, of course. I felt terrible for them.”

“And you kept in touch with the Fishers after.”

“Like I said, we still handled the life insurance policies for Beth and Walden. After Beth passed away, Walden canceled his policy. He said there wasn’t much need for it. He didn’t have anyone left to provide for.”

“Did you know Olivia well?” Duckworth asked.

Andover raised a palm. “Just what kind of fishing expedition is this, Barry?”

“Olivia’s murder remains unsolved. We haven’t given up on it. Mr. Gaynor, I thought it would be worth talking to you to see if you might remember anything that might help us in the investigation. Maybe Olivia confided in you. Told you something that didn’t seem important then, but does now.”

“I barely remember her,” he said.

“Maybe this will help.” Duckworth took from his jacket a reproduction of a three-by-five high school yearbook photo of the dead woman, placed it flat on the table. “This was from her senior year, before she went to Thackeray.”

He glanced at it. “Sure. I mean, I remember what she looked like, but I don’t even know if I ever had a single conversation with her. Does this have—you’re not thinking that what happened to Rose was in any way connected to her, are you?”

Duckworth tossed it back to him. “Do
you
think there might be a connection?”

“You think whoever killed Rose also killed the Fisher girl?”

Duckworth tapped the picture with his finger. “You notice anything interesting about her?” he asked Gaynor.

“Interesting?”

“Maybe it’s just me,” the detective said, “but you look at her hair, the shape of her face, she reminds me a bit of your wife.”

Gaynor studied the picture, then looked Duckworth in the eye. “What the hell are you talking about? What’s going on?”

“We’re done,” Andover said.

“Did Jack kill both of them?” Gaynor asked. “Is that what’s going on?”

“No,” Duckworth said. “I’ve pretty much ruled him out.”

“Then—” He stopped himself. “Jesus, you think
I
killed Rosemary? You think I killed my wife? And this girl? What the hell is wrong with you? I barely knew Olivia, and you know I was in Boston when Rose died. You
know
that!”

“Bill, enough,” Andover said, putting his hand on the man’s arm. “Enough!” He looked at Duckworth and said, “For God’s
sake, leave the poor man alone. You got someone out there killing animals and blowing up drive-ins, but you’re in here harassing a man who lost his wife. You must be proud.”

Duckworth retrieved the picture, put it in his jacket, pushed back his chair, and stood. “I want to thank you both for meeting on such short notice. You mind tossing those coffees in the trash on your way out?”

•   •   •

By the time he reached his desk, the phone was ringing.

“Duckworth.”

It was the front desk. “There’s a guy here wants to see you. Martin Kilmer. Says he’s Miriam Chalmers’s brother.”

One of the four people killed at the drive-in. Her body had yet to be positively identified. Duckworth said he would be right out.

Martin Kilmer was about forty, trim, six feet tall, and decked out in an expensive suit, a white shirt, a silk tie, gleaming black dress shoes.

“Mr. Kilmer, I’m Detective Duckworth.”

“I got a call from Lucy Brighton, my sister’s stepdaughter,” he said abruptly. “She told me about the accident. She identified her father, but didn’t identify Miriam. So I’m here. How the hell did something like this happen? A goddamn screen falling over?”

“We’re still trying to find that out.”

“I want to see her,” he said.

Duckworth said, “I’ll take you.” He put in a call to the morgue so that they knew they were on their way.

On the drive over, Duckworth felt the need to warn Miriam Chalmers’s brother that identification might prove difficult.

“Why?”

“Your sister sustained . . . the screen came down right on top of the car. A Jaguar convertible, with the top down. She wasn’t afforded much in the way of protection.”

“You telling me her face is all smashed in?” Kilmer asked bluntly.

“Yes.” Sometimes, trying to be sensitive was a wasted effort.

“Then how the hell do I identify her?” the man asked.

“Maybe other distinguishing features. A birthmark? A scar?”

“Christ, it’s not like I saw my sister naked a lot. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t married that son of a bitch.”

“You didn’t like Adam Chalmers?”

“No. He was too old for her, first of all. And there was his past.”

“His biker days.”

“I know they were long ago, but they go to character.”

“What do you do, Mr. Kilmer?”

“Stocks,” he said, as if that explained everything.

Duckworth’s cell rang. “Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah, hey, Barry, it’s Garth.”

Garth worked in the police garage. Actually, a wing attached to the police garage, where vehicles damaged in accidents were towed and inspected.

“Hey, Garth.”

“You know that old Jag from the drive-in?”

Duckworth glanced at his passenger, who had used this opportunity to take out his own phone. He was looking down at the screen, sweeping his finger in an upward direction. It didn’t look like e-mails. More likely an app for stocks.

The detective pressed the phone more tightly to his ear. “Yeah.”

“Okay, so, it was crushed pretty bad. They managed to get the bodies out, but we’ve been going through the car, and it took some doing, but we finally got the trunk open, which wasn’t easy since the whole back end of the car kind of got all smooshed together. We were kind of anxious to get in there so we could stop the ringing.”

“Ringing?”

“Like a cell phone. We could hear it in the trunk. Figured one
of the two deceased—well, most likely the woman—must have left her purse back there since the interior of one of those cars is so damn tiny. There was another phone, up by the driver, but it was all smashed to pieces.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why I was calling is, we pried open the trunk, and it was a purse, and we figured you’d want to return it to the family or something like that.”

Duckworth said, “Okay, I’ll get back to you.”

He ended the call, put the phone into his pocket, and said to Kilmer, “Sorry.”

“Hmm?” Kilmer said, glancing over.

“I’m done.”

Kilmer put his own phone away. “How far away is this place?”

“We’re here,” Duckworth said.

•   •   •

Duckworth’s favorite coroner, Wanda Therrieult, wasn’t on duty. They were met by a young, pasty-looking woman Duckworth thought was a student picking up some part-time hours. She wasn’t qualified to perform an autopsy, but she could run the office alone until one needed to be done, at which point Wanda would be called.

She consulted her computer, then said, “Okay, um, Miriam Chalmers . . . okay, I know where she is. Hang on. If the two of you could wait here.”

The body, Duckworth explained to Kilmer, had to be moved to a viewing area. While they waited, Kilmer went back to studying his phone.

“Were you and your sister close?” Duckworth asked.

“Not particularly,” he said, not looking up.

“Were you in touch?”

Kilmer glanced up. “Christmas, sometimes. Weddings. Things like that.”

“Did you come for her wedding to Adam?”

“No. I wasn’t invited. No one was. They got married in Hawaii.”

“Oh,” Duckworth said.

A door opened. “We’re ready,” the young woman said. “She’s just in here.”

The two men moved toward the door, Duckworth in the lead. He caught a glimpse of a pair of naked feet on the table when his phone rang yet again.

“Damn,” he muttered. “I’m really sorry about this.” He took out his phone, wanting to check the caller’s name, figuring that whatever it was, it could wait.

It was Garth again.

“Hang on,” Duckworth said to Kilmer, turning and blocking him from going into the viewing room. Into the phone, he said, “What is it, Garth?”

“Okay, don’t be pissed. Maybe I shouldn’t have done this, but I did it, so sue me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The phone started ringing again, so I figured, shit, maybe I should just answer it, so I opened up the purse, found the phone, and answered it. I said hi, and it was some guy, and he said, ‘Who’s this?’ And I said, ‘Garth Duhl.’ Which, I guess if he’d never heard of me, would seem kind of odd.”

“What did he say, Garth?”

“He says, ‘Where’s Georgina?’ And I say, ‘What?’ And he says,
‘Where’s Georgina? Where’s my wife?’ And I say, ‘Who is this?’ And he says, ‘This is Peter Blackmore. Why are you answering my wife’s phone?’ So I tell him that somebody would get back to him, and I hang up, and I look through the purse, and I find a driver’s license, and you’re not going to believe this.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Duckworth said, ending the call. He looked at Kilmer and said, “We’re not going to do this now.”