You’re a fool, Alex. You’re a goddamned fool. How did it take you so long to figure this out?
I crossed the bridge into the Upper Peninsula doing seventy. Suddenly I had somewhere to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It wasn’t hard to find his house. Not like when I dragged Prudell all over town for Julius’s house. This house was in the book.
It was a nice neighborhood, up on the hill by the college. Maybe not as nice as I thought it would be. The house was actually quite modest, a little two-story mock Tudor with a small yard. His car was parked in the driveway.
It was just after eleven o’clock at night. But I could see that his lights were on. I felt good about that. I wouldn’t have to wake him up. That would have been very rude.
I parked the truck on the street, careful not to block his car in the driveway. That would have been very rude, as well.
I walked up to the front door. I was about to ring the doorbell, but instead I tried turning the knob. It was unlocked. How nice. I walked right in.
There was a little entry way with a stone floor. A living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace. I walked through the room. In the back of the house there was a study. Lots of books on the walls. He was sitting there behind the desk, looking through a pile of travel brochures.
“Alex!” he said when he saw me. “My God, you scared me!”
“Good evening, Lane,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
Uttley gathered up some of his brochures. “I was just trying to decide where to go on vacation,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.” If he was surprised to see me here, he was doing a good job of hiding it.
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Alex, are you all right? What’s going on?”
“Don’t get up,” I said. “I’m just going to sit right here and ask you a couple questions.” I pulled up a chair and sat down in front of his desk.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “What questions?”
“I’m not even sure where to begin,” I said. “I don’t know which question I want answered first.”
“What’s going on, Alex? What are you doing here?”
“Okay, here’s a good one to start with,” I said. “A little ice breaker, if you will. Where’s Edwin?”
“Edwin is at the bottom of Lake Superior. You know that.”
“I’m supposed to know that, yes. Just like the police are supposed to know that. And Sylvia. And everybody else in the world.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“That night at his house. After dinner, he kept talking about how good it felt to be starting over. I guess he really meant that, huh?”
“Alex, what are you talking abouti”
“Next question,” I said. “How did you get Raymond Julius to kill those two bookmakers? I mean, I knew you were very persuasive…”
“What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
“And how did you get him to believe that my gun wasn’t real, of ail things?”
Uttley just sat there looking at me, shaking his head like I was a lunatic.
“And when did this whole thing start, anyway?” I said. “Does this go all the way back to when you asked me to be your private investigator? Was that all a setup from the very beginning?”
“I think you need to see somebody,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. It’s obviously gotten to you.”
“Here’s another question,” I said. “This one I really need you to answer. Would you have killed me if you had to?”
He stopped shaking his head. He just sat there. He looked at me without blinking.
“The night you sent Julius over,” I said, “he was just supposed to scare me, right? Is that what you told him? Leave the silencer at home, make a lot of noise? Don’t worry, his gun isn’t even real? You were right there behind him, weren’t you. You weren’t at the Fultons’ house. You didn’t call me. You were right behind him and you came along just as soon as you thought it was all over. And fortunately, I guess, everything worked out the way it was supposed to. But what if it hadn’t? What if I had just wounded him? What if I had disarmed him? If he had accidentally killed me, that one’s easy. You just shoot him. Tell the police you were trying to save me. But what if we had both been alive when you got there? Would you have killed both of us? I’m sure you had your Beretta with you.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out the very same gun. “You mean this one?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“Please put your gun on the table,” he said.
“I don’t have it, remember? The police have it.”
“I’m not stupid, Alex. You must have another gun.”
“No,” I said. “Why would I need one? You’re no threat to me. And I’m no threat to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t kill me now,” I said. “That would ruin everything. You’d have to dispose of my body, or try to make up some wild story about me threatening you or something. It would all fall apart eventually. And Mrs. Fulton would not be happy about that, would she.”
Just saying her name, I could tell that it registered. I could see it in his eyes.
“And why are you no threat to me?” he said.
“Because I can’t touch you,” I said. “You didn’t kill anybody. What am I going to say, arrest Lane Uttley because I think he made Julius do it? And by the way, Edwin isn’t even dead? It was all a plot and Mrs. Fulton is behind it, too? How far am I going to get with that?”
I watched him as he thought it over.
“I’m not here to stop you,” I said. “There’s no tape recorder, no police outside waiting to break the door down. I’m not going to stand in your way.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me why you did this,” I said. “That’s all. Why did you put me through all this?” I watched him shift the gun in his hand. I knew the man wanted to tell me how it happened. Above everything else, in his heart the man would always be a lawyer. And lawyers have to talk. Especially about how smart they are.
“Because you were the right man for the job,” he said. “But you have to understand. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Tell me how it worked,” I said. “Tell me from the beginning. You owe me that much.”
“It all starts with Edwin’s gambling problem,” he said. “That much you probably know. What you don’t know is how big his problem is. He was into those guys for a good half a million.”
“That’s not that much,” I said. “Not for a Fulton.”
“That was just the current total,” he said. “He had lots of other big debts in the past. He paid them all. He was draining money out of the Fulton Foundation. His mother found out. She threatened to cut him off if he didn’t stop gambling. He tried to stop, but he couldn’t. She put the squeeze on him, cut off a lot of the money. He fell behind on the debt, started betting even more, trying to win it back. The bookmakers, they started to lean on him a little bit. They wanted their juice every week, just maintenance on the debt. They’re all connected, of course. It’s all one big network.”
“Of course,” I said. “So why kill two bookmakers? They’re just the frontmen. The debt would just get picked up by someone else.”
“That’s what I tried to tell Mrs. Fulton. I told her it would be like that Hydra monster, you know, the one that Hercules had to kill? You cut off one head and two more grow back? But she was adamant. I think part of it was she didn’t want to pay those guys any more money. They were calling the house, making threats. They found out her private number and starting calling her. I think that’s what did it. She wanted them dead. And Mrs. Fulton gets what she wants.”
“So hire a hit man,” I said. “Like any other rich person would.”
“No. She didn’t want that. She said if we hired somebody, then that person would have an angle on her. He’d blackmail her. That’s the way she saw people. Everyone wanted a piece of her. All the things she’s been through, who can blame her? So she wanted a way to get rid of the bookmakers. Get Edwin away from gambling, if that was possible. And she wanted it to be clean. No loose ends.”