Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (6 page)

“I remember.”

“I know.”

Your lips, your hair, oh, Victoria. I was terrified. My first time ever. Your breasts and those dark eyes. Jesus. And it was something you wanted too. You pushed away the silk spinnaker sail and made room. You kissed me and the saliva caught the light as you sat up and climbed on top of me. And you said, “This is position twenty-one from the Kama Sutra” in an Indian princess accent. A joke against yourself, the exotic Oriental. And I thought it was the funniest thing ever and laughed and relaxed and we screwed for an hour and a half. I remember. Truth, is that what heroin brings?

“No,” she says.

But that was truth. Her words fade. Gone into the smoke in the air above the river. And in every gasp I can’t help but breathe in ash, little particles of sandalwood and cherrywood and her. The wind changes its direction and the rain comes down and I open my mouth and it’s cold, like the coldness in my heart.

* * *

Things happen to fuck you up. Little things. You get chased from a boat and you accidentally forget your heroin. It forces you to go to the pub quiz but you get the crucial question wrong and have to steal more heroin from your dealer—Spider. Spider realizes it could only be you that stole from him and wants to get you. And how to get me? Tell the peelers that an English copper has been seen going into my house. That’s all it would take. Everyone would know what that meant.

And they got me. A week after Victoria Patawasti’s funeral. Walking along the sea front. They were so smooth that I didn’t even notice the Land Rover pull in beside me.

“Lawson,” a voice said.

I turned, saw the open door at the back of the Land Rover, legged it, got about twenty feet. A burly man tap-tackling me to the ground. I didn’t recognize him. In his forties, alcoholic face. Leather jacket. Old stager. Reliable. He had two fingers missing from his left hand. Bombing, shooting, accident?

“You’re under arrest, Lawson,” he said.

“What for?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The man slapped cuffs on me, hauled me up, dragged me to the Land Rover. Three more men inside. One was Facey, looking guilty. The second, a copper in a flat cap, green sweater, tanned face, and finally a bald man with glasses and a raincoat, trying to cover a police uniform. High one, too, chief super or above. The Land Rover drove off. It came back—that familiar stench of diesel and lead paint and ammunition. Same claustrophobia.

“Alex, I’m sorry, they needed someone to ID you,” Facey said.

Flat Cap turned to Facey: “You shut up and don’t speak again,” he said.

The bald man nodded at the big guy, he held my arms, Baldy leaned over and punched me in the stomach. I retched. I looked at Facey but he was looking away. Flat Cap grabbed me by the hair. Shook me. Shit, they weren’t going to kill me, were they?

“What do you want?” I managed.

“We heard you were talking to the Old Bill, the Metropolitan fucking Police,” the bald man screamed in my face.

“Think we don’t know about everything that happens in this town, in this country? Your mate Spider told us. Wipe your fucking arse and we know,” Flat Cap continued.

“You know what we’ll fucking do to you. You’ll go down. You’ll go down, Lawson. I don’t care what they promise you,” Baldy said.

“Aye, whatever they threaten you with, Lawson, it’ll be a thousand times worse if you ever fuck us over. Remember that. You’d be dead if you weren’t such a fuckup. You owe us. You owe us. We’ve been lenient. We could kill you now. We could do anything we like, Lawson. Do you understand? Do you understand?” Flat Cap said.

“I understand,” I gasped, shaking.

“Says on your file you’re Jewish, not even Protestant at all. Is your loyalty a question we should be worrying about?” Baldy said.

“No,” I spat, somehow managing to answer this humiliating question.

“Hope fucking not. You’re a fucking sorry excuse for a human being,” Baldy said.

“Aye, he is, but he gets it. Good. Stop the vehicle,” Flat Cap commanded.

“Stop the vehicle,” the big guy yelled to the driver.

The Land Rover stopped. Through the armored windows I could see that we were in the middle of nowhere. They uncuffed me, pushed me out the back of the vehicle. I stumbled and fell.

“Think about it. We know where you live, we know everything you do, we know everyone you fucking see,” Baldy said, closing the door.

The Land Rover drove off in a slew of mud. I got up and brushed myself down. Smiled. The icing on the cake. If I didn’t cooperate with Douglas, he’d have me arrested. If I did cooperate, the RUC would at the very least release my confession. Worse. Get me, get Da. Or that age-old drama. A car, a gun, a struggle, a field far from anywhere, a bullet in the neck…

I got my bearings. They had dumped me way up Empire Lane. I calmed myself. Walked down the hill. My wrists hurt. I went past the big, asymmetrical Patawasti house. Farther down. The rich neighborhood giving way to the poor. Council houses, bungalows. A bonfire being built for the twelfth of July holiday.

My house. Kitchen. Da gone campaigning. I tried to find something to drink but there was nothing. What to do? Escape? Go to Douglas? Borrow some dough? I racked my brain but couldn’t come up with anything.

I picked the bills from off the hall floor. Final demands on electricity, oil heat, ground rent. Place was a mess. Ma would have cleaned it. Made Da clean it when she was sick. Ma. Jesus … What the hell was I going to do? I needed to think but I couldn’t do ketch again today. Twice in one day. Never. Back to the kitchen, opened the fridge.

The phone rang. I picked it up. It was Mrs. Patawasti. She asked if I had been up Empire Lane this morning near their house. I said I had. She said that Mr. Patawasti had come out after me, but his knees were bad, couldn’t keep up. She said that they would very much like to see me. Would this afternoon be convenient? I said it would.

I hung up the receiver. It didn’t take a genius to see what they wanted. All the pieces were there now. I would never have gone to America. I knew Victoria and I loved her and I was sorry that she was dead, but I had given up police work forever. I had failed in that aspect of my life and it was only heroin that kept me together at all. I had not, like so many RUC officers, put a bullet in my own brain. Detective work had destroyed me. Why had I resigned from the police? Because I had unearthed the case, because I had broken the case. The truth had imprisoned me, not set me free.

But everything had come together, leaving me one way out. The British cops were down on my neck, the Irish cops were on my head. I had to run. But it was all of it. The boat. The drugs. The quiz. Spider. And now the murder case. That English peeler was just the stoker, the driver of this great derailing train. And within a week we were in America.

Aye, within a week we were in America, we had killed a man, fucked up the case, and were on the run there, too.

4: THE FLOWER OF JOY

T
wo days after her murder, Victoria’s brother Colin had flown to Denver to pick up her effects. The murderer was already caught. The case was open and shut. Nearly half of all murders that are solved are done so within the first twenty-four hours. The Denver police had a known criminal in custody. His Mexican driver’s license had been found in Victoria’s room. In the U.S. he had previous convictions for theft and burglary. He wasn’t particularly bright—he had been arrested by the police at his brother’s house. The police had assured Colin that they had their man, that prosecution would be easy, that he could go home with at least the thought that Victoria’s killer would be brought to book. And that since the murder was committed during the commission of another crime, he might even get the death penalty.

The Denver police had an air of competence that impressed Colin and he was convinced. In violation of the rules, the cops took him to the jail to see the man who had killed his little sister. After that, Colin drove the forty-five minutes to Victoria’s office in Boulder, Colorado. He got a great deal of sympathy. She had been well liked. She worked for a nonprofit called the Campaign for the American Wilderness. A charitable organization that explored new ways of looking at environmental policy. A very successful group, so successful, in fact, that they were moving out of their Boulder headquarters to a shiny new office in downtown Denver. Victoria had been in charge of many aspects of the Denver move and it was difficult without her. Everyone had been sweet and kind, especially the copresidents of CAW, Charles and Robert Mulholland. Charles and his wife, Amber, took Colin to the Brown Palace Hotel and bought him lunch.

Colin gathered Victoria’s effects and gave them to a thrift shop. No will had been found, but, of course, Victoria had only been twenty-six. The cops released the body. Colin met with an undertaker and they flew her home.

Four days after Victoria Patawasti’s funeral, on June 16, Mr. Patawasti received a letter with a Boulder postmark. It was slightly faded, computer printed (rather than typed), and said simply:

Don’t let him get away with you’r daughter’s murder.


A lead. Revealing something about the sender, but the family didn’t know that and the local peelers hadn’t seen it either.

The family called Carrickfergus RUC. A Constable Pollock came to see them. He checked for prints, found nothing, held the note up to the light, found nothing, and on that basis somehow decided it was probably the work of a crank. After all, didn’t the Americans already have the murderer in custody? America was full of cranks. They should throw the letter out, burn it.

Mr. Patawasti was an Oxford graduate, a professor; Constable Pollock’s analysis did not satisfy him.

He called up the Denver police and after a great deal of trouble got through to the investigating officer. Detective Anthony Miller. Detective Miller assured Mr. Patawasti that they had their man and that everything was under control. Of course, he could send the letter to them and they would add it to the investigation, but really the Northern Irish police were probably correct, it sounded like a crank.

Mr. Patawasti had seen me at the funeral, talked to Dad, had a think….

A phone call. A change of clothes. Shirt, tie, jeans, Doc Martens. Mr. Patawasti’s house on Empire Lane. That big house from the 1930s. The two wings. The Gothic tower. The servants’ steps. The massive front garden with a lawn and roses. A view down to Belfast Lough. On a clear day you could probably see parts of Scotland.

Doorbell, living room: Mrs. Patawasti, Colin, Stephen, Mr. Patawasti.

Stephen, six years older than me; Colin, four. I knew them both vaguely from school. Stephen had been captain of the rugby team. Colin had been head boy and a prefect who had given me lines and detention at least a dozen times. Even now he intimidated me.

The living room. Pictures of her: playing hockey for Carrickfergus Grammar School, matriculating at Oxford, with the family in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, dressed in a sari and stepping out of an Indian river. The rest of the room was academic, tidy, scrubbed. A bookcase, framed cricket posters, shining surfaces.

I stared at everyone while we sat. Mr. Patawasti looking a hundred years old. Colin: angry, impatient. Stephen: aloof, sad. Mrs. Patawasti: utterly destroyed.

“Would you like some tea, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked, her face deathly pale, her hair gray.

I shook my head. I was supposed to take charge here, ask the questions, but I wasn’t sure of the protocol, I hesitated, stumbled over words.

“Um, well, uh…”

Colin glared at me. His lips white with mounting fury.

“Look at him. Just look at the state of him. Can we end this farce now, please?” Colin said to his father.

Clearly, Colin remembered me as the screwed-up wiseass from school. And here I was confirming it all, looking like a wreck. Hadn’t I quit the police under mysterious circumstances? Didn’t I have money troubles, too? Now come like a vulture to exploit his parents’ grief.

“Colin, please,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

“Look at him, what can he do that the Denver police can’t?” Colin insisted.

“Um, Mr. Patawasti, you said in your phone call that there was an anonymous note. Maybe I could take a wee look at it, if you don’t mind,” I finally managed.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Mr. Patawasti said, standing, going upstairs. After he left, silence descended.

A clock ticking. The gables rattling. Victoria staring at me from the photograph. The unspoken person in the room so badly needed now, so adept at defusing a situation such as this.

“Sure you wouldn’t like some tea, Alex?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

“I wouldn’t mind some tea now, please,” I said to give her something to do. She went to the kitchen.

Another long pause. Colin, Stephen, and I stared at the floor. Mr. Patawasti came back down. I took the note gratefully and examined it.

“Hmmm, very interesting,” I said. I knew I would have to bullshit them a bit to get the case. Not exactly ethical. But this was life and death.

“Why? How so? Constable Pollock said it was a crank,” Colin said.

I began slowly: “It says a lot. Obviously a great deal of thought went into this.”

“What are you talking about?” Colin interrupted. “Everyone agrees it’s a nutter.”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s a very deliberate piece of work. Taking the trouble to avoid fingerprints. And look at the mistake, ‘you’r’ instead of ‘your.’”

“Constable Pollock tells us it was an uneducated person,” Mrs. Patawasti said, coming back in with no tea.

“Aye, could be, but I don’t think so. I think that’s what he wants you to think. He wants you to think he’s stupid. He’s disguising himself by making a mistake, but would he (I say ‘he’ but of course it could be ‘she’) really make the mistake ‘you’r’ on a word-processed document? Most word processors have a spell check that would have caught that. The more common mistake is to mix up ‘your’ and ‘you’re,’ which a word processor won’t catch. Also, he doesn’t misuse the apostrophe after ‘daughter.’ I’d say that if he were an ignoramus, he would have blundered over the apostrophe first. You could say he was in a hurry, he didn’t have time to do a spell check. But it only takes a second and in any case this note was written with a great deal of consideration. An anonymous note about a murder. It’s not the sort of thing you dash off.”

“Ok, where does this get us then, Alex?” Colin asked a little less aggressively.

“Well, we want to know who wrote it. Someone that knew Victoria personally, someone who knows or suspects he knows who the killer is, someone who doesn’t believe the police have arrested the right man, someone educated enough to be worried about appearing too educated, so he makes a deliberate mistake in the anonymous note. I’d say someone who worked with Victoria or was a neighbor or close friend. He wants us to take an interest in this case and expose whoever did this crime but he’s not sure he wants to be involved. Do you still have the envelope it came in?”

“I think I threw it out,” Mrs. Patawasti said. “The RUC didn’t want to see it.”

However, she went into the back room and appeared with it a few minutes later. The envelope was more revealing than the note. A lot of times that’s the case. It was postmarked June 12 in Boulder, also slightly faded, and said:

Mr. Patawasti


The Tiny Taj


78 Empire Lane


Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim,


N. Ireland BT38 7JG


United Kingdom


“Any help, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

“Yes. Postmarked June the twelfth in Boulder. Your daughter was killed on June the fifth. The Denver police arrested their suspect two days after that. He thought about this for five days. He was frightened to reveal what he knew. He didn’t want to go to the police, but he wanted you to do something. To stir the pot, to lead the police in the right direction. He couldn’t do it—he’d be implicated because he’s already very close. Like I say, friend, neighbor, coworker. It’s interesting that Victoria lived in Denver, but commuted to her office in Boulder. Possibly a coworker,” I said.

“He could have just driven there, and posted it there,” Colin said sharply.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Victoria had an address book,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

“I’d like to see it,” I said.

“She didn’t know that many people, she didn’t have time to socialize much outside of work,” Colin said defensively.

“Well, I think we can eliminate some of the names. We know the writer owns or has fairly exclusive access to a computer. This isn’t the sort of thing you print out at the local library. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, but did you notice the way the note and the address were slightly faded?”

“I did,” Mr. Patawasti said.

“The cartridge was running out. Could it be that he didn’t know how to change the cartridge, that that was his secretary’s job?”

“You can’t know that,” Colin said.

“No,” I agreed. “Anyway, now I’d like to see her passport and her letters, the things that were in her apartment with her home address on them.”

With a heavy sadness, Mrs. Patawasti brought the meager box of things I wanted. I skimmed through them, saw what I needed. I knew I was on to something. Something significant.

“And do you still have an unlisted phone number?” I asked, remembering the frantic time eight years ago when I had temporarily lost her number.

“It’s not listed, so what?” Colin said.

“Well, it’s the name of the house. Victoria would never have told anyone that this house was called the ‘Tiny Taj.’ It embarrassed her. It’s not on any of her letters or her passport, or other personal items. The post office doesn’t give out addresses. So how could anyone know? It’s not here on any of her documents. When you wrote to her, did you put the name of the house on the sender’s address?” I asked.

Everyone turned to Mrs. Patawasti.

“No, I never write Tiny Taj, or mention it,” she said, “it
is
embarrassing.”

“So how could anyone know that this house is called the Tiny Taj? Victoria would never have told anyone. I’ll bet the only way someone could know was if he had access to her personnel file at work and saw it written there as her full postal address. She would never have spoken about it, but she might have written her full home address on her personnel file. It would fit. And who could know that but someone who worked with her in Boulder and had access to her file? It’s just a guess, but I’d say if you were to go to her office and ask around, you might be close to finding who wrote the note.”

I put the note and envelope and the effects down on the coffee table. A little silence. Some of it had been flimflam, but some of it real enough. Colin unfolded his arms. Mr. Patawasti’s face broke into a little half smile. I’d impressed them. Like I’d been trying to do.

“Alexander, do you think you can find the man who killed my daughter?”

I looked at him, nodded.

“Find him, find who did it, Alex,” Colin said, his voice breaking.

“It might well be the man they have in custody,” I said.

“Find out the truth,” Mr. Patawasti said.

“I will,” I said.

Mrs. Patawasti and the boys left so Mr. Patawasti and I could agree on terms. He’d pay me three hundred quid a week plus my airfare and any other expenses I’d need. I tried not to see it as a way out of my difficulties. A case. I was working for a family friend. I was doing them a favor using the skills I’d learned in the peelers. Everything I’d promised myself never to do again. But it wasn’t me. It was altruism. Victoria. The fact that it would be the perfect excuse for getting out of Ireland, getting money, away from Douglas, away from the RUC, was beside the point.

I went home and read all the documents. Mr. Patawasti had given me Victoria’s personal effects, employment documents, apartment receipts, company personnel profile, a copy of the Denver County Police report. Victoria had been shot during a struggle in her apartment. According to her cleaning lady, a number of things were missing. The police theory was that the assailant, Hector Martinez, had botched the robbery, killed Victoria. During the struggle his Mexican driver’s license had fallen out of his jacket or trouser pocket. It was too soon for forensic evidence, but the circumstantial evidence was pretty good. He had two previous convictions for theft and had fled the jurisdiction once on a grand theft auto rap. He’d been living with his brother and they’d picked him up easily. Martinez’s lawyer, Enrique Monroe, had been denied bail for his client. Martinez was considered a flight risk. Pretty damning, but clearly the note writer believed they had the wrong man. Either that or he wanted to muddy the waters to get Mr. Martinez off or implicate someone else. Worth checking out. I called John and asked him to do some snooping for me, using the police computers.

John met me in Dolan’s that night. He was happy. I’d given him a lot to do.

“Ok, Alex. Envelope and letter normal office stuff. No help there. But the font is New Courier 2. An updated version of Courier that is only available on the latest packages of WordPerfect. It’s been out about three months and is only in office suite packages. No, don’t ask, I already checked. Victoria’s employers, the Campaign for the American Wilderness, do indeed run WordPerfect rather than Word. And yes, they have the latest release. However, so do tens of thousands of other businesses. Hundreds in Colorado. Tough getting through to CAW, spoke to a college student, they’re moving the whole office from Boulder to Denver, Denver’s not set up yet and they only have a skeleton staff. But anyway, yeah, it’s not impossible the note writer could be someone who worked with her in Boulder and printed it out there.”