Fox is Framed (21 page)

“You called
me
, remember? They'll get the phone records.”

“Sure I did. To offer my congratulations. Then you started spouting a lot of nonsense about a body in the freezer at George's. I drove out here in the morning, meaning to check for myself, heard a noise, saw you running at me with a gun in your hand, and I shot you dead with the gun I bought when I started getting blackmail threats. Self-defense. That's as close to the truth as we can make it, Leo, and I think the story will hold up pretty well.”

It was too risky to try anything while we were driving. I didn't doubt Lucy would shoot me if I made a move, and even if she didn't, there was no guardrail and a drop of hundreds of feet to the rocks below. If I was going to take action, it would have to be at Chen's.

Eric had calculated against this, likely betting that the glimmer of hope he'd offered me, of walking away if there was no body, or choosing to be an accomplice, would discourage me from rash acts. There was no question for me of going along with their plan, of helping her to dump the body. He must have known that. I could only hope he was playing along with Lucy with the goal of setting her up, and that when he phoned Jackson, the police would show up instead.

It was after 4:00
am
by the time we arrived. Eric parked at the end of the long driveway in the turnaround near the front door. He got out first. My heart dropped as he took a gun from the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, a little snub-nosed revolver. He held it ready as I got out. As soon as Lucy was out of the car and had her automatic on me again, Eric put his gun away. He unlocked the door with a key he had, then quickly stepped inside and entered the alarm code.

We went into the living room. “Make that call,” Lucy told him. She took out a cheap cell phone still in its package, the prepaid kind that was for sale at gas stations and liquor stores in every marginal neighborhood where drugs were dealt and cheap, untraceable communication was in demand.

Eric tore open the package, powered up the phone, and thumbed in a number. “It's me. Sorry to wake you, but we're live with that thing we've been expecting. A quarter million in cash is the price. I'm at Chen's.” He gave Jackson instructions about my truck, letting him know the keys were on the table at his house.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we wait,” Lucy said.

“Unless you'd prefer we shoot you now,” Eric told me. “But we're not opening the freezer until she has the money in hand. That's the deal. Think of it as the mystery box at the auction. You've got to buy to find out what you have.”

“I don't even see why you'd pay her if it's empty.”

“A deal's a deal. If we knew in advance she was in there, I'd pay more.”

Motioning with the gun, Lucy directed me into a leatherette armchair set back from the massive central hearth. She and Eric sat on opposite ends of the matching couch facing it. I wondered how I'd misjudged him so thoroughly. The only light came from the hall. Lucy closed her eyes and after a few minutes was asleep, the gun in her hand, her chest rising and falling. Eric took his gun out of his pocket. I thought for a moment he was going to disarm her, and hope surged in me, but he just set the gun on his knee and held it there.

“So this is real,” I said to him. “This is you.”

“For about two months, I really believed I was a killer. At first, it tore me apart. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. But gradually, that feeling faded. Or I just got used to it. Probably the same way I got used to having lied when I identified Russell Bell. One day I was sitting in my office, thinking what if you put it in the balance—the world before and the world after? What difference does it make, one death? Once the idea came into my head, I realized I was right. It didn't matter. Not if I wasn't caught.”

“You don't think there'll be any difference between that and what you're planning to do here now?”

“Sure. This will be a choice. That wasn't. The whole thing was a setup by Russell, a sadistic game, and now he's dead. I don't feel bad about that, either.”

“Lucy shot him,” I said. “It wasn't Jackson. You don't have to protect him.”

“Anything's possible,” he said with a yawn, as if it didn't matter one way or the other anymore, if it ever did.

We sat in silence for a while, me digesting that, trying to master my fear. I kept vacillating between disbelief and the impulse to make a move. That would mean testing him, however, and despite what he'd said, I couldn't convince myself that he meant to go through with it. Or maybe he knew that in the end I'd go along with his plan to make me an accessory to murder after the fact. I wondered who the other girl in the picture was, what she'd done to end up tangled in such a mess. Somewhere, someone must be waiting for her to come back, but she never would.

My greatest hope was that Car, having missed us at Gainer's house, had waited to see Jackson arrive and drive away in my truck, and that he would follow Jackson here.

And so we sat in silence. He kept the gun pointed in my direction, Lucy snoring at the other end of the couch, his own eyes remaining open. After another hour, the sky began to brighten. In the predawn light, the noise of the waves beneath the balcony seemed to draw nearer. I'd almost convinced myself that he wouldn't do it, that it was a bluff, and then Lucy started awake and he leaned down and kissed her on the lips. Her eyes widened in surprise and she reared away from him. “I've always wanted to do that,” Eric said.

I recognized the rattle of my truck's engine as it pulled up outside. Jackson Gainer came in with a duffel bag in his gloved hand.

Lucy rose. Jackson stared at her for a moment, his eyelids heavy, the skin beneath them appearing bruised. “Here it is,” he said, hefting the bag. “One hundred thousand.”

For the first time Lucy seemed uncertain. She must have wondered if she'd miscalculated. Three of us, only one of her. “I thought you said a quarter million.”

“This was all I could get together on such short notice.”

With sudden decision, she crossed to the hall and took the bag from Jackson.

He pretended to offer my keys to me, then tossed them to Eric. “Why don't you move it while I have a look downstairs,” he said to his brother. “There's a pullout up the road a bit. Make it look like he walked onto the property.”

“Let's do this first,” Lucy said.

“You got your money,” Eric told her.

He walked out, handing his gun to Jackson as he went. I remembered Lucy's comment the other night about Eric turning his back while others did the dirty work for him.

“Eric,” Lucy said sharply. But he was already out the door.

She had her gun in her hand and seemed to want to do something with it.

“Don't shoot Leo yet,” Jackson warned her. “You're going to need the two of us to carry the body, if there is one. That's if Russell Bell wasn't a liar. I've been of the opinion all along that he was. I know Eric feels the same way. Leo, what's your bet?”

“Mine is that if she and I go down there, neither one of us comes back up.”

Jackson seemed entertained by this. “What's the deal the three of you worked out before you called me? No body, you live? Body, you either help us dispose of it or you die? Only, if there's no body, how do we know that you'll keep your mouth shut about tonight?”

“That's your problem,” Lucy said.

I didn't like him already knowing the terms of the deal they'd discussed.

“Leo's used to keeping nasty secrets. Think we can trust you with this one, Leo?”

“Sure. Here's a deal for you. We all go home and sleep in our beds, and we keep quiet about this. Eric refuses to testify when they charge my father with the murder of Russell Bell, and I don't say a word to anyone about tonight. I drop her off at the bus station in San Rafael.”

“I like that. You respect my family's privacy going forward, and we respect yours. Otherwise it's your word against Eric's and mine. I don't know how far you'd get, but you could cause us some problems. I'll give you that.”

“You two go on down ahead of me,” Lucy told us.

“After you,” Jackson said, nodding for me to go first.

The downstairs was a single open room, with a wall of windows facing the sea. The postdawn shadows of the headlands fell across the water. The room was divided between a TV and sitting area on one side, and exercise equipment on the other. Down here, the impact of the waves on the cliffs was felt rather than heard, and the salt smell was somehow stronger.

A small kitchen took up the end of the room opposite the window, the part that was below the grade of the surrounding property. Inside a walk-in pantry, a chest freezer hummed. Jackson threw open the lid and stepped back. “Leo, why don't you clear out all this crap so that we can see what we've got.”

Frozen dinners, seafood, and meats filled the freezer nearly to the top. I began taking the items out and stacking them on the floor.

Halfway to the bottom, I lifted a box of steaks and saw a patch of blanket showing through the gap. The blanket, once a creamy white, was stained dark brown with old blood.

The body had been positioned with the knees bent to the chest, the head bowed so she would fit. Someone had wrapped the blanket around her in this position, then wound the blanket with thick nylon climbing rope, presumably the one that had been used to haul her off the rocks. The rope and the blanket together were encasing her in a tight cocoon. A towel bound her head. The only exposed flesh was at the feet, which were visible through the gaps where the ends of the blanket had been folded over. The skin of her heels was grayish, covered with ice crystals.

“Have a look,” Jackson said to Lucy. “Then we'll get her out of here.”

As Lucy stepped forward, Jackson stepped back, took the gun from the pocket of his coat, and extended it toward the back of her head.

She'd craned onto the balls of her feet to see into the freezer. Hearing my shout, she turned, diving to the floor as Jackson's revolver discharged into the wall. Plaster dusted them both. Lucy flipped onto her back as she landed, holding her automatic in both hands.

She squeezed off five shots at point-blank range, the bullets slicing into Jackson's groin, tearing bloody furrows up the front of his coat, blasting off a chunk of his jaw that created a look of openmouthed startlement as he fell.

“Arrogant prick!” she shouted, rolling away from the spreading dark pool. She got to her feet. “You thought you could take me?”

She now pointed the weapon at me. “Don't move or you'll be on the floor, too.” She picked up her duffel bag and Jackson's revolver. Her scraped elbow was starting to bleed.

The gunsmoke stung my nostrils and eyes. “You've got the money. Just go.”

“This can't be happening,” she cried. “This wasn't how it was supposed to be.”

“He was supposed to shoot me with your gun, not get shot with it, is that right?” I said. “That would have wrapped things up nicely. Jackson kills me, and the bullet in me matches the ones that killed Russell Bell from your gun. You'll have to go to plan B.” I didn't know what plan B was, and I doubted she did, either.

“I
didn't
kill Russell. I told you that.” She was jittery, agitated, and I wondered what kind of drugs she was used to taking. She looked like she needed a fix. “How strong are you?” she said. “Can you carry her?”

I had no choice but to agree.

I dragged the freezer away from the blood and tipped it over to get her out. Through the blanket, the frozen flesh was numbingly cold and hard as rock, but the climbing rope provided me with places to grip. Bracing the heavy mass against my thighs, I started for the stairs, one painful step at a time.

“Why're you taking all this trouble?” I said between grunts. “Who is she?”

She'd thought it through quickly. “Nobody special. Just somebody I met. No one would have missed her, but the photograph's in the press. If they find one of us dead, they'll expect to find us both. And if they don't, they're going to be looking for the one they can't find. And now evidently we're going to leave behind this god-awful mess.”

“They'll be looking for you no matter what, after what's happened.”

“Maybe, but there's a difference between looking and expecting to find.”

I heaved the body step by step back up to the main floor, resting frequently, exaggerating how heavy she was. I wanted to give Car a chance to show up and save the day.

Halfway up the stairs, the towel came off the dead woman's head, exposing the glistening mess of her face, her dark hair matted in a dark encrustation of frozen blood. No one deserved to end like this, I thought. No one.

Outside, I got the body to the cargo area of the Cherokee, put my shoulder below it and with one heaving motion tipped it up. “Now what?” I asked.

“Now we wait for Eric to come back.”

I sat on the bumper, head hanging. Four feet away, Lucy held the revolver in my face. I thought of where I was supposed to be in a few hours: with my father, helping him rent a tuxedo for the city hall wedding he and Dot had hastily begun planning in the giddy hours after the not-guilty verdict. I heard the crunch of footsteps coming nearer.

“I left the truck at the turnout,” Eric's voice said. “Where's my brother?”

I didn't look up. There was only one way this could end for him. And only one way it could end for me.

Lucy shot him. As soon as she did, making the only move I could, I rushed her. I was nearly on top of her when the gun in her hand spoke in bright winking flashes. She stepped aside, and I stumbled and fell where she'd been standing.

After a while I rolled over, my legs pushing the gravel. My heels slipped in it, and my arms wouldn't obey me. There didn't seem to be much blood on my shirt, but I felt dizzy, and my hands and feet were cold.