The Shoulders of Giants (24 page)

“What was the general impression?”

“I’d have to check the files. I think it was pretty standard ex-girlfriend stuff. They were going out, then they weren’t, and it was all his fault. Why do you ask? What do you know about her?”

“Nothing yet,” I said, “but I’ll keep you informed.”

“How did things go with the lesbian?”

“Would you quit calling her that?” I snapped.

“Hey, take it easy,” he said. “I was kidding. How was dinner?”

“Dinner was excellent.”

“And?”

“What?” I said, laughing, “I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Did you kiss?”

“Can’t you tell?”

I went to my office and opened some mail. When I booted up my PC I saw that I had an email from Abby. My right hand hovered over the mouse as I prepared myself, and then I double clicked on the envelope. Abby’s reply was short and sweet.

“Me too. Call me.”

And then she’d made a little smiley face with a semi-colon and a close brackets sign. What did she mean? Call me now? Call me at some point in the future? When had she sent it? I looked at the ‘Sent’ line. 09/25/07 16.27. Yesterday. Was she expecting me to call that night? Would she assume I hadn’t got her email? I didn’t know what she would think, so I called her at work. I got her voicemail.

I don’t leave messages. Not on voicemail, answering machines, answering services, or with seemingly helpful flatmates, who promise they are writing it down. Not because I have some phobia of machines, or that I don’t trust the flatmates. It’s just that I don’t like leaving it up to other people when they call me back.

Even so, I left it until the very last second before putting the phone down on Abby’s voicemail.

I walked from my office to the photographic studio, and when I buzzed, the voice on the intercom was Shelley’s, not her assistant’s. As I reached the top of the stairs, she was standing in the doorway to the studio. There were fewer lights on inside, and the blue sofa was gone, but otherwise it looked as it had the day before.

Shelley sat in the chair behind the desk. I stood.

“How can I help you today, Mr Abraham?” she asked.

I didn’t want to launch straight into ‘why didn’t you tell me Grant walked out on you when you were unconscious’, so I started her off with a few easy questions.

“There’s just a few details I forgot to clear up yesterday, I’m afraid.”

“Fire away.”

“While Grant and you were engaged, did he used to go to the OTB on Jackson Boulevard?”

“OTB?”

“Off Track Betting shop. A bookies.”

“I don’t know, probably. I think he went anywhere they’d take his money.”

“Seems like he had an addictive personality. Apart from the gambling, did he drink? Take drugs?”

“No. He smoked, which annoyed the hell out of me, because it made the whole house stink, but he just drank socially and he couldn’t afford drugs on top of everything else.” She smiled. “He used to say he spent ninety-five percent of his money on gambling, and the rest he wasted.”

I smiled back. It made it easier to segue into the next question.

“You said yesterday that you drifted apart. I understand you were in hospital when Grant actually moved out.”

Her face hardened. “That’s right.” she said.

“Mind if I ask what you were in for?”

“I had a house fire. I breathed in a lot of smoke, got burned.”

“And that’s when he left you?”

“The nurses said when I woke up that he’d come to visit, to make sure I was alright, but I never saw him again.”

“You must have been devastated.”

“Like I said, we’d been drifting apart. It was a shock, but it was all for the best.”

I thanked Shelley, and left as quickly as I could while trying not to appear rude. I wanted to get back to the office to check something.

I knew what I was looking for, and where I would find it. It didn’t take me long to leaf through my file on Grant Foster, and there it was, just as I remembered it. The first line of the newspaper article about the fire at Grant and Shelley’s house:

“An unattended cigarette ignited a couch and sent flames racing through a Westchester home early yesterday morning.”

Chapter 37

“You see, we have these rules,” Scott explained to me, in his best patronizing voice. “They’re very complicated, but the general gist is that we should rely more on evidence than on guesswork.”

“But just look at it,” I said, placing the printout of the article on his desk. “A cigarette. The first words. Shelley said Grant smoked, and it annoyed the hell out of her. Meaning she didn’t, or it wouldn’t have bothered her.”

“So?”

“What do you mean ‘So?’? So he burned her house down with her in it. Her house. After I visited her, I checked the property records at county hall. The house was all in her name. Then, when she was unconscious in the hospital, he went to see if he’d finished her off. When he saw he hadn’t, he took off with all her money. I figure that’s when he went to Atlantic City.”

“All very well,” Scott said, “but it’s guesswork. All of it. Maybe they’d had friends round that evening who smoked. The article says he wasn’t home when the fire department arrived, right? Maybe he wasn’t there all evening. Maybe she was having an affair with someone who smoked. Maybe that’s why he left her.”

“My maybes are just as valid as yours.” I pointed out.

“Even if that were true, we can’t arrest people on maybes.”

“You can question them.”

“You know who Shelley Ryan’s father is?” Scott asked.

“What does it matter who her father is?”

“John Ryan.”

“As in Senator John Ryan?”

“As in.” Scott nodded.

“So does that mean she can do what she likes? Does it mean she has some kind of diplomatic immunity by proxy?”

“Means we can’t go around accusing people of anything when we have shit for evidence. Ryan already has it in for the Department. He’s trying to cut our budget even more. We really do not need to piss him off right now.”

“So she gets away with it.”

“Listen,” said Scott, firmly, “if she did anything, she will be arrested, tried, and convicted. Meantime, let me point out the many and varied flaws in your argument. One: evidence. We’ve been through that already, but it seems I need to repeat myself. Two: she’s a she. Shes don’t do serial murder.”

“I thought it was a ‘murder spree’.” I interrupted.

“Shut up. Three: even if he did burn her house down, or if she blamed him for an accident, or whatever. Even if that were considered a motive, it was ten years ago.”

I leapt on that. “Yes, look at the date. Exactly ten years. The house was torched on September 14th 1997, and the first victim, Walsh, was killed on September 14th 2007. That’s some coincidence.”

“That’s exactly what it is. A coincidence. It also happens to be very close to the sixth anniversary of 9/11. You’ve seen too many
Friday the Thirteenth
movies. People don’t commit murder on the anniversary of a traumatic event. Not in real life.”

“Look,” I said, calmly, “I’m not saying she definitely did it.”

“That’s a relief.”

“I’m just saying that it’s worth looking at. Maybe she had a motive.”

“Okay, since we’re compromising, I’m not saying she absolutely didn’t do it. I just don’t see it myself. Feel free to check it out, but do not harass her. I swear, if we all acted like Columbo, we’d spend half our lives fighting harassment claims. Anything shows up, you let me know.”

“And you’ll listen?”

“Oh, I’ll listen. Can’t guarantee I’ll agree with your interpretation of the evidence, but I’ll listen.”

We were interrupted by a uniformed officer dropping a small FedEx package on Scott’s desk. He opened it and tipped it up and a small audio tape fell out, like the ones in answering machines. After a brief search for a machine, Scott played the tape.

“Yeah, this is Calvin. I’m not in right now. You know what to do.”

The machine beeped. Everyone in the room held their breath.

“Walsh? This here’s Leon Walker. I know you been seeing Loretta. I warned her, now I’m warning you – you stay away from her or I’ll kill you. I swear, I’ll beat you to death with my bare hands.”

“Who the fuck is Leon Walker?” It was Scott that asked the question, but it was pretty much what we were all thinking. Whoever he was, he sounded pissed. Freedman was heading for the White Pages; another detective was already on the phone to the DMV. Within a couple of minutes we had an address and the Lieutenant was calling for backup. Scott took me to one side.

“You can’t come along on this one. We might have to go in hard. Anything goes down, it’s not going to look good that a P.I. was tagging along on a major bust.”

“Okay,” I said, “But you’d better tell me what’s going on as soon as you know.”

“You bet.”

I left the Station excited, but aware that this new lead could take us nowhere. Since there was nothing I could do about Leon Walker, in the meantime I decided I would work on the basis that Shelley was a suspect, and see what else I could find out about her. I’d probably be proved wrong, but maybe it would turn something else up.

I headed back to the office and phoned Carlton Pepper to make an appointment, claiming someone owed me money. He said he could fit me in that afternoon. I checked my email, and found a request from an executive at a local corporation asking whether I could handle a case involving computer fraud. Two weeks ago, I would have said yes immediately, done some reading around the subject, and learnt a new skill while earning a few bucks, but I had a little too much to deal with right now. I sent an email back with the name of a P.I. Hayes and Co. used to use when their computing expertise was found wanting. I asked the executive to let him know who had referred him, in the hope he might send some work back my way when I needed it. With a couple of hours to go before my appointment, I went shopping.

After a few minutes browsing in the true crime section of a bookstore, I came out with a book about female serial killers.

I then spent a lot more time and a lot more money on a digital camcorder. I figured that I would be able to use it for surveillance in all kinds of cases and I would be able to pay for it out of the money I’d earned on this one. I quickly totaled up in my head how many days I had been working on it, and I worked out that I’d earned an extra thousand bucks on top of Gregory Patterson’s retainer. Not bad considering I used to work for a little over minimum wage at Hayes and Co.

By four o’clock I hadn’t looked at the rest of my files, and I hadn’t switched on my PC, but I had a ten minute film of the interior of my office, which included sequences in black and white, and in sepia, and some very detailed close-ups of my bookcase.

For a while, I thought that maybe I should film a promotional piece to advertise the agency. ‘If you’ve got a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find him...’ Then I thought maybe not.

Carlton Pepper’s office was above a dry cleaners on Delaware. He was indeed large, tanned and bearded, just as described by Grant Foster’s neighbor, but his head was bare, revealing a shiny dome I had to make a conscious effort not to stare at.

“So, how does this work?” I began, realistically nervously.

“I can do this one of two ways. Either I collect the money for you and take a commission, or I buy the debt off you and your debtor then owes me the money. The second option costs you a little more, but it does mean you get the money here and now and you can forget all about it.” He seemed to have it all worked out and, despite his immense muscles, was not coming across as an unmitigated thug.

“Okay. Say I pick the first option and the guy doesn’t want to pay.”

“Common problem. Why you’re hiring me, right?” I smiled and nodded. “Ninety percent of cases a guy looks like me turns up on their doorstep is enough to make someone pay up. If the guy’s a real hard-ass I might have to make some threats.”

“What about using force?”

“I’m not sure what you’re asking Mr…” he checked the notepad where he’d written my name during our phone call. “…Mr Spenser”.

“It’s just that the guy who owes me money likes to think he’s tough. He might give you a few problems and I just want to make sure you can handle it.”

Pepper smiled as if he’d handled a thousand guys who thought they were tough. “I assure you Mr Spenser, I can handle him. As far as force goes, I’m not going to do anything illegal, but if they start something I can finish it.” That sounded ominous. “What kind of money are we talking about here?”

“Sixteen and a half thousand dollars,” I decided. “Now if I sold you the debt, there’d be more incentive for you to get the money back. Would that alter your methods?”

“I’m not sure how that’s any of your concern,” he said, frowning. He seemed to be getting suspicious.

“I’m just curious how far you would go.”

He took a deep breath. Was he going to throw me out or offer to kill the guy for a price? “Mr Spenser. Please don’t take offence, but it sounds to me like you’re maybe interested in seeing this man get hurt. If that’s the case, then I think you’d better find someone else, because I can’t help you. Now if I’m wrong, and it is the money you want, then we can talk about my commission.”

“How dare you!” I said, indignantly. “I refuse to sit here and be accused of soliciting anything illegal. I’m leaving.” And I did.

I took my files home with me, with the intention of looking them over while I cooked my dinner and charged my camcorder battery. Dinner was simple - just a pork chop and some boiled potatoes, and I picked at it while I gave the files most of my attention. After two hours, I had in front of me one sheet of paper, with a section highlighted in yellow, and two cold potatoes.

What had been bugging me, even before I talked to Scott, was that nothing connected Shelley Ryan to any of the victims apart from Grant. If he had been the only victim, then I could have made some kind of case for Shelley being the killer, but the rest of it just didn’t add up. The same was true of the other people I could loosely describe as suspects. Dr Parker had had an affair with Susan Patterson, and maybe Susan had threatened to tell. Vittore Castelletti had threatened Calvin Walsh, and maybe Calvin hadn’t taken it seriously enough. Carlton Pepper had assured me he wouldn’t do anything illegal to collect my money, but maybe he was playing it safe in case I was wearing a wire or trying to set him up some other way. In any case, Grant owed him what was probably a lot of money and Pepper didn’t get paid by killing the people who owed him. Unless he was making an example of Grant in order to score a bigger payoff. But even then, I’d found nothing to suggest any of the other victims owed money. As for Leon Walker threatening to kill Walsh, who knew what his story was? I hadn’t heard from Scott and he wasn’t answering his cell. Until now, there had been nothing to suggest that either Shelley or any of my other suspects had any connection to any of the other victims before, during or after their murders. Until now.