‘Hey, what’s goin’ on in there?’
By now I was checking his neck, wrist and ankle for any sign of a pulse. I hadn’t expected any and there was none.
‘He’s dead.’
‘Aw, shit. That’ll be more bad publicity for this place.’
I had to restrain myself from laughing. It was exactly the right and wrong thing to say on a night like this when so much turmoil ruled.
I had an image of the River Cabins public-relations staff sitting around a conference table à la Mad Men, wondering how they were going to deal with this tragedy. The place had such a sterling reputation. Unless they acted quickly and wisely the public might start thinking the place was some kind of dive.
The next thing I did, ghoulish as it was, was search him for the recorder.
He had change, car keys and a rosary in his front pockets. In his back ones there was a billfold and a comb.
I searched the room.
I’m not sure how long it took but a few times I wondered why Skully hadn’t either come in or started talking to me again. Then I realized he was talking to somebody else. I kept on searching. There weren’t that many places to look but I wanted to get to all of them before Skully interrupted me.
I found nothing and Skully didn’t interrupt. Now I wanted to find out who he’d been talking to.
‘Called an ambulance and the police,’ he said.
‘I need to leave now.’
But Skully was good for a plot twist. He shoved the gun in my face and said, ‘Like hell you’ll leave.’
Forty
Skully was good at doing two things at once.
He not only kept his firearm on me, he yanked a stopwatch out of his pocket and clicked it on.
‘All the damn taxes I pay, let’s see how long it takes for them to get here.’
And with that he waved his gun at me and said, ‘Let’s go up front.’
Given my age and relative condition, it shouldn’t have been too much trouble to dive for him and grab his weapon while he was falling to the ground. But Skully was Skully, a crazy but wily bastard who would probably be lucky enough to put two bullets in my head while I was trying to knock him over.
He insisted that he follow me this time.
Now that I’d had a few minutes to consider the fact that Grimes was dead and that Showalter would no doubt attempt to put my name on the suspect list, I decided it would be better to stay here and let Showalter confront me.
Skully and I ended up leaning against my car.
He held the stopwatch high so he could see it in the faint moonlight. ‘Five minutes and they ain’t here yet.’
He’d been giving me updates, of course, starting at three minutes. Did he really expect the police and an ambulance to get here in three minutes?
Interspersed with the minute-by-minute excitement of waiting for the sirens to arrive, Skully went back through the mistakes he’d made by giving Grimes a cabin at all.
‘He looked shifty.’
Grimes did not look shifty.
‘And he talked like a hood.’
Grimes did not talk like a hood.
‘And as soon as I seen him, I knew I’d have trouble.’
Then why the hell did you give him a room? I thought.
Then it was back to the updates.
‘You know how long it’s been since I called?’
‘No, and I don’t really give a shit.’
‘You would if you paid the taxes I do.’
As irritating as he was, he at least distracted me from the strange sadness for Grimes that kept creeping back.
‘I need to make a phone call. I’m going to step over there.’
‘I’ll be watchin’ you. Don’t try anything funny.’
A hopeless son of a bitch.
Cindy answered on the second ring. ‘Did you find my granddad?’
‘I did, Cindy. He died of a heart attack. At least that’s what it looks like to me.’
‘Where did you find him?’
I went into the whole story. I waited for her to start crying.
‘I know he knew how much I loved him.’
‘I’m sure he did, Cindy.’
I’d referenced Grimes’s letter only once to her. Now I returned to it.
‘Why would he leave me a stick match?’
For the first time tears shook her words. ‘I don’t know, Dev. I—’
She couldn’t restrain herself. A few sobs, then more tears.
I glanced over at Skully. He was watching me like a prison guard. I wondered what the old bastard would do if I flipped him off.
Suddenly she’d snuffled up her tears. ‘The votive candles.’
‘What?’
‘I told you he went to Mass three times a week since my grandmother died. He always lit votive candles for her. That was a big thing for him. That’s the only tie I can think of to a stick match. St Paul’s is an old church. New churches don’t use matches anymore.’
‘He hid the recorder in the church?’
‘Possibly.’ Then, ‘I want him brought to the Reardon Mortuary. We all get buried out of there. I’ll call the morgue. I’m sure there’ll be an autopsy. I’ll insist on it.’
A police car pulled up. A minute or so after that an ambulance appeared, and a minute after that another police car.
Skully greeted them with a rant about what a bunch of lazy-ass, incompetent, big-government Nazis they were.
I was able to give one of the officers the basic reason they’d been summoned and where they would find the body. One of the officers hadn’t made it past Skully so he was still getting the fiery speech. He took it as long as he could and then snapped.
‘I got work to do, old man. Now shut the fuck up and help me.’
Skully stuttered and sputtered but then he actually stopped talking.
All but one of the cops went back to Cabin Six along with the ER team. He sat in his car having a conversation with somebody at the station.
I kept waiting for Showalter to appear. Instead I got Wade.
He’d driven out in a recent-vintage tan Chevrolet sedan. His own, I assumed. He was dressed in jeans, a white shirt and a red windbreaker. He walked right up to me.
‘I understand we’re having some trouble here tonight, Mr Conrad. Finding a body is a pretty miserable experience. I was in Iraq in ’05 and had that happen to me a few times. The worst was finding a little kid.’
His gray eyes scanned the area next to Skully’s house.
‘When I started out in uniform we were always getting complaints about this place. Skully had a few hookers out here. He was quite the boy back then.’ Then, ‘So if you wouldn’t mind, Mr Conrad, why don’t you go over everything for me and we’ll get that out of the way.’
Karen was certainly right about Wade’s style. He would try to ingratiate you into saying the wrong thing. The words would leave your mouth and you’d hear them and then curse yourself for the duration of the prison term you’d just sentenced yourself to.
So I told him.
He watched me carefully as I spoke. As a good detective he knew all the physical signs of lying. I’d learned them in my days as an army investigator. Trouble swallowing, forced smile, sweating, gestures that don’t match what’s being said, a voice that changes pitch — standard issue for people who have something to hide.