Harry Dolan (11 page)

“Certainly,” Hideaway said. “By all means.”

“I don’t need a drink,” said Loogan.

“You ought to have something,” Bridget said. “We’ve been drinking Chardonnay.”

There was a half-spent glass on the floor by her chair.

“Maybe I’ll have a Scotch.”

Laura stood up. “I’ll get some ice.”

“I’ll take it just as it is,” Loogan said.

She retrieved a tumbler from a cart beside the desk and poured Loogan three fingers from the bottle on the table.

“I think I speak for us all,” Hideaway said again, “when I say that Tom’s loss is a terrible blow—”

“He means Tom’s death,” said Bridget. “It’s Tom’s death and our loss. Christ, Nate, you always needed a good editor.”

Hideaway seemed to take no notice of her. “Tom was a vital man,” he said. “He has passed away from us far too soon, and with his passing it falls to us to look after his interests.”

“I believe that’s true,” Loogan said quietly.

“We must attend to the things he cared about,” Hideaway said. “One of those is
Gray Streets.
Tom was the wellspring, the prime force, the motive power—”

“Get the man a thesaurus.”

“—the architect of the magazine’s success.
Gray Streets
was the central project of his life. If it were allowed to decline, or to cease publication—”

“Nate’s point is, we don’t intend to let that happen,” said Bridget.

“It’s our understanding,” Hideaway said to Loogan, “that Tom thought highly of your abilities as an editor. Laura shares that view. No one can take Tom’s place, of course. But we’d like you to consider taking over some of his responsibilities.”

Loogan felt a wave of something like nausea pass through him.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“What we have in mind,” said Hideaway, “is for you to continue to do the sort of editorial work you’ve been doing, and to take a hand in the selection of stories for publication. You needn’t worry about being on your own. We would advise you.”

Loogan tipped his glass side to side, watching the light play over the amber liquid. Several moments passed in silence.

“You’re reluctant,” Hideaway said.

“Yes.”

“There are details to be worked out. You’ll have your own thoughts on how things should be managed. I’m sure we can come to an accommodation.”

Loogan rose from his chair. “I don’t think I want to talk about this now.”

“It’s all right, David,” said Laura, rising in turn.

“Let it rest, Nate,” said Bridget. “He’ll want some time to think about it.”

Hideaway stood up and Bridget followed suit.

“Perhaps I could speak to Mr. Loogan alone,” Hideaway said. “Just for a few minutes. You don’t mind, do you, Laura?”

Laura’s face was unreadable. “I guess not,” she said.

Bridget shook her head in disapproval, but she followed Laura out and closed the door of the study behind them. Hideaway got a glass and poured himself some Scotch.

“I handled this badly,” he said. “There are some things it’s easier to talk about one-on-one than in a crowd.”

He sipped from his glass. Loogan said nothing.

“Also, it’s too soon,” Hideaway said. “Tom has been gone for four days and we bring you here to talk about commerce. That’s my fault. The others wanted to wait. When I see something that needs to be done, I don’t like to delay. But it’s too soon. You think it’s unseemly.”

“It was certainly unexpected,” Loogan said.

“Was it?” Hideaway said. “You must have wondered what would become of
Gray Streets.
When we asked you to come here tonight, you must have assumed we had some motive. What did you suppose it was?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Hideaway swirled the Scotch in his glass. “Now I’m intrigued.”

“I thought you wanted to hire me to find out who killed Tom.”

The lines of Hideaway’s forehead crinkled. “Why would you think that?” “Don’t you want to know who killed Tom?”

“Naturally,” Hideaway said. “But I’m afraid I’m at a loss. Laura was vague about your background. She hinted that you had a checkered past. She even suggested that you might have been a criminal. I took that as a piece of whimsy.”

“That’s the way it should be taken,” Loogan said.

“So you were never a criminal. Am I to understand you were a policeman?”

“No.”

“Then why would I want to hire you to solve a murder? Isn’t that a job for the police?”

“Is that what you believe? I’ve read some of your books.”

“That’s fiction.”

“In a Nathan Hideaway novel, the police are never quite up to speed. They’re always a few steps behind.”

“Fiction, Mr. Loogan.”

“In a Nathan Hideaway novel, the protagonist is always an amateur detective,” Loogan said. “And he’s always a man who can be trusted with secrets. Secrets you might not want to share with the police.”

“I don’t think I’m following you,” said Hideaway.

“Now that Tom’s gone, we have to look out for his interests. That’s what you said. But that’s not an easy job, is it? Tom had his secrets. Is it better now we should keep them or reveal them?”

“Now I’m sure I’m not following you.”

“I wonder. Did you really ask me here to offer me a job?”

“Why else?”

“I think maybe you wanted to get a sense of me. To see if I was going to be trouble.”

“You really should listen to yourself, Mr. Loogan. You’re sounding very peculiar.”

“Maybe I’m wrong and you’re exactly what you seem to be. You’re just looking for someone to edit
Gray Streets.
”

“I thought I’d made that clear.”

“Maybe you’re guileless.”

Hideaway spread his arms out at his sides. “I’d like to think so.”

“I can almost believe it,” Loogan said, looking around at the chairs, at the bookshelves, at the desk. “If you had any guile, you would have picked a different room. You would have talked to me anywhere else but here.”

Chapter 12

THE WEB SITE OF
GRAY STREETS
DISPLAYED PHOTOS AND BIOGRAPHIES of the magazine’s interns. The online images were too small to be of much use, but the original photographs were kept in a file in the outer office of
Gray Streets.
The secretary, Sandy Vogel, showed Elizabeth the file on Tuesday morning. The photos were in no particular order, but it didn’t take Elizabeth long to find Adrian Tully’s.

She had duplicates made that morning, and by the afternoon she and Carter Shan and a handful of other detectives had fanned out through David Loogan’s neighborhood and through downtown Ann Arbor, searching for anyone who had seen Adrian Tully on the day Tom Kristoll was killed.

The canvass continued on Wednesday. The results were disappointing. Elizabeth found a waitress in a diner who thought she had served Tully breakfast, but couldn’t be sure what day it had been. There were a few other sightings of similar uncertainty. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, Shan spoke to the girl who delivered the newspaper in Loogan’s neighborhood. She recognized Adrian Tully. She had seen him on Loogan’s block on Friday evening.

Shan took the girl’s statement, and he and Elizabeth met with the chief the next morning to bring him up to date. Owen McCaleb stood by his office window, listening. He was fresh from a jog and hadn’t yet changed his clothes.

“It’s slim,” he said when Shan finished.

“I know.”

“I mean, what we have is Adrian Tully on Loogan’s street,” McCaleb said. “Not even near his car, right?”

“He was walking along the street near Loogan’s house,” said Shan. “That’s what the girl said. But we also know the time. Around quarter to six. Tully claimed he was at his apartment all afternoon and evening.”

“The timing fits with what Laura Kristoll told us,” Elizabeth added. “She arrived at Loogan’s house around five-thirty. Tully could have followed her there.”

“And then he could have punctured Loogan’s tires and keyed his car,” McCaleb said. “But the papergirl didn’t see him do it.”

“No.”

“And then he could have gone downtown to the office of
Gray Streets
,” McCaleb said. “And out of jealousy, or just to be a prick, he could have told Tom Kristoll about his wife’s affair. He could have quarreled with Kristoll and hit him over the head and pushed him out the window. But no one saw him in the building, or even in the vicinity of the building.”

“No.”

“So right now,” McCaleb said, “what we’ve got on Adrian Tully is that he lied about where he was on Friday. I don’t see how we have enough to charge him with the vandalism to Loogan’s car, much less the murder of Tom Kristoll. We don’t have enough to get a warrant to search Tully’s apartment, and even if we did, there’s nothing to search for. Do we even know what Kristoll was hit with? What did the M.E. say?”

Shan smiled ruefully. “A blunt instrument.”

“Lovely.”

“That’s what Eakins wrote in her report,” Elizabeth said, “but when I talked to her she ventured a guess. She thought it might have been a book. In fact, it might have been the book on Kristoll’s desk—Shakespeare’s
Collected Works.
That one was hefty enough to do some damage. And the dust jacket was missing. The killer might have taken it with him. It might have been easier to take it than to wipe it for prints.”

“And if he took it, he’s had time to get rid of it,” McCaleb said. “So where does that leave us? Tully lied. You want to talk to him again?”

“That’s what we were thinking,” Shan said. “We tell him we’ve got a witness who saw him on Friday evening. We don’t say where the witness saw him. Let him wonder. The point is, we know he lied to us. See if he changes his story.”

“Elizabeth?”

“It’s worth a try. I’d like to see what he says.”

McCaleb nodded. “All right. Do it.”

 

 

 

On the sidewalk across the street from Adrian Tully’s apartment building, two pigeons danced around a scrap of bread. One of them caught it up whole in his beak and then the other hopped in, wings fluttering, and made him drop it.

Elizabeth watched them from the car, with Shan in the driver’s seat beside her. They had gone up and knocked on Tully’s door, but there had been no answer.

Shan had his cell phone out. His thumbs moved rapidly over the keys. He had an ex-wife and a son who lived in a suburb of Detroit, and he kept in touch with them frequently through text messages. Elizabeth had met the boy, a twelve-year-old with his father’s slim build. The child’s mother taught voice lessons, and there was a rumor in the department that she and Shan had once been in a band—she had been the lead singer, he had been the drummer. It was a rumor that Shan would neither confirm nor deny.

Elizabeth watched him grin at something on the cell phone’s screen. Then he typed a final message, put the phone away, and tuned the car radio to an all-news station. She turned her attention back to the pigeons on the sidewalk. The pair of them skipped along the concrete, trading the scrap of bread off between them. A dog appeared at the corner, an Irish terrier straining at its leash. The pigeons scattered. The terrier snapped up the bread as it passed. Elizabeth kept an eye out for the pigeons, but they didn’t return.

“It’s the third way,” she said.

Shan turned down the radio. “What’s that?”

“That’s how this is going to go,” Elizabeth said. “The third way.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just something I’ve noticed,” she said. “You’re waiting for something to happen, and you expect it to go one of two ways. But you’re wrong, because there’s always a third way.”

The air in the car felt stale. She pressed a button at her side and lowered the window.

“Say you’ve applied for a job,” she said, “and you’re waiting to find out if you got it. Then the call comes, and you’re expecting a yes or a no, but it turns out the person you interviewed with is in a coma, and the board of directors resigned, and the new management wants you to come in and interview again for an entirely different job that you didn’t even know about before. That’s the third way.”

Shan lowered the window on his side. “And you think that’s going to happen with Tully?” he said. “We tell him we know he’s lying, and we expect he’ll either come up with a new story or he’ll break down and confess to murdering Tom Kristoll—”

“And it’s not going to be either of those.”

“What’s the third way, then?”

“That’s just it. You never know.” She nodded in the direction of a car coming down the street. “But we’re going to find out. Isn’t that him?”

“That’s him,” Shan said. “That’s his crappy little car. There he goes, turning into the lot of his crappy apartment building. Shall we let him go up first?”

“Sure. We don’t want to seem too eager.”

A few minutes later they were in the hall outside Tully’s door. Elizabeth knocked. Shan put on a pleasant, distracted expression—a bit of performance, Elizabeth knew, in case Tully looked through the peephole. There was no answer and no sound from within.

She knocked again. After a delay they heard Tully’s voice, as if from far off. “Who is it?”

“Detectives Waishkey and Shan,” Elizabeth said. “We need to speak to you.”

Tully took too long to answer, and when he did it was, “Just a minute, please.”

Shan was frowning. He unsnapped the holster at his belt and rested his hand on the grip of his pistol.

“Come on, Adrian,” Elizabeth said. “Open the door.”

“Just a minute.” Again, the answer seemed to come from far off.

Shan stepped to the left side of the door and drew his pistol.

“Is this the third way, Lizzie?” he said quietly.

“Easy, Carter,” she said. But she reached to her hip for her own pistol.

“Open the door, Adrian.”

The silence inside stretched out, and then there was the sound of a dead bolt being turned. Elizabeth held her pistol down at her side.