“I told you, Eddie.” Sundance’s voice was shrill. “No way Randall would have killed her, not without knowing where the money was.”
“Shut up, damn it.” Lance Kovacs’s boot came back to my ear. “Go on.”
“Aggert used that legal authority to contact banks until he found out where she parked the money. He withdrew it.”
“And put it in that lockbox in Indiana?”
“The Workman’s Bank, in East Chicago.”
“We’ll kill you if you’re lying.”
“Aggert’s hanging around his law office in Michigan. He’ll leave the money alone until things die down.”
“How come you know this?”
“Aggert was setting me up. He hired me to nose around about the woman’s death, being real public about it, when all the time he’d already killed her. He was going to get me blamed for the murder, then for taking the money-and for killing Severs, too,” I added, as if I believed Aggert had killed the blueberry cop. “I put that file together to give to the cops, show them Aggert’s the one.”
“The money is in East Chicago?”
“I want Aggert dead.”
It was the truest thing I could say. My eyes were wet beneath the tape, from anger, frustration, and from stupidity that went back decades. I saw Maris smile, that first time we walked home together. I saw, too, a life with Amanda that would never be. It was all welling up in my eyes, all the waste.
Sundance’s boot pounded a step or two next to my head. He kicked me, and I blacked out.
Sometime later, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour, I came to. I was on my belly. Something stickier than water was working its way down the side of my head.
I strained to sense any change in the air, any sound in the room that meant they were still there. Outside, a truck with a bad muffler vibrated one of the slit windows. I could hear nothing else.
My arms, taped behind me, were numb. My shoulders throbbed as if they were being pulled from their sockets. I counted to ten as slowly as I could manage and lunged into a roll to my right. My shoulders ripped, and for a second, I thought I would faint. But I teetered, and held, and gradually some of the pain passed as I settled onto my right side.
I worked my left shoulder, up an inch, down an inch. The tape at my wrists tore at my skin, unyielding, but then it moved a little. Then, ludicrously, it came completely off my left wrist. I tore it from my hands, my eyes, my ankles.
My throat caught at the magnificence of it. They’d used my duct tape, the cheap, no-name stuff I’d bought at the Discount Den one day when I’d been killing time, watching Leo agonize over which dumb luau shirt to buy. I’d ended up buying two rolls of the silver tape, to keep the slashes in the Jeep’s side curtains closed. The cuts kept opening anyway. The tape was crap. The adhesive dissolved when exposed to water. Or sweat.
I stood up and hobbled on duckling legs to the slit window. The old sedan was gone. In the east, the sun was coming up.
They would have taken the file, to slap him with.
With luck, I’d just committed murder.
I put my palms on the stone sill, to steady myself as I looked out-and for a time, I cried, like a child, for things I didn’t understand, and for things I did, and for a blond girl with a boy’s name, who would never again see a sunrise.
Forty-one
“This is crazy,” Leo whispered.
It was the first week of April. Though it was one o’clock in the morning, the night was warm. The moon was cooperating, too, casting just enough light to work.
“This is restorative,” I said in a normal voice.
“Crazy,” he whispered.
“You don’t need to whisper,” I whispered. “No one can see us, down here in the dark, and the trucks on the overpass will drown out what we’re doing.”
He scraped in silence for a moment and dropped another piece into his plastic bag.
“Couldn’t you have found something else to obsess about while I was recuperating?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Like being straight with that Michigan cop, Dillard. You could have told him that Aggert killed Maris, that the Kovacs brothers killed Severs. You could have thrown in that it was Aggert who beat me up.”
I shifted onto my good leg. I’d been lucky. The break in my ankle had been clean. Even with a walking cast, though, it still hurt.
“Could you identify Aggert from a photograph?” I asked, dropping a particularly fine piece into my own bag. “Do you think they’d pick him up, based on your recollection that your assailant smelled fresh, and my assurance that Aggert’s a known breath mint user?”
“What about the Kovacs brothers?”
“Same thing. I can’t identify them. My eyes were taped shut.”
“You know what I mean.” Another piece fell into his plastic bag.
“You know what I mean, too. I don’t just want Aggert picked up. And I don’t just want him tried.”
“It’s been days, Dek. You’ve heard nothing.”
“Work.” I peeled away another sheet.
“Aggert could come back at you,” Leo said, which was what he’d really been talking about the whole time. “He broke into the turret a couple of times before that night he beat me up.”
“It’s worth the risk. Besides, he thinks I mailed him that key.”
“By now he knows better. He knows you set the Kovacs brothers on him. He’s got to want to kill you.”
“Maybe he thinks I’ve already tipped the cops.”
“Maybe Aggert’s been too busy fleeing the Kovacs brothers.”
I turned toward his place in the dark. “I want Aggert to run, like Maris ran. I want him to know fear, to jump at every little whisper in the night, like she must have, for all those years.”
“For most of her life, Maris was running from Rivertown.”
I leaned against the old wood, to give my ankle a rest. “Maris trusted Aggert, and he killed her. For that, I want him to run from the Kovacs brothers. Then I want them to catch him.”
Even now, well after the Kovacs brothers had kicked me into a week’s recovery, spent thinking, in bed, I startled myself by how certain I sounded, saying I wanted a man dead.
“How much of this is about punishing Herman Mays?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
Leo stopped scraping. “You can’t always put everything right, Dek.”
“We’re putting something right, this very minute.”
His breath quickened beside me, and I knew he was fighting a laugh. “Well, yes, there’s this…” He lost it then and laughed the longest he’d laughed since Aggert had beaten him.
“Why can’t Rivertown, tank town though it maybe, have its inviolate monuments, like Chicago and New York and”-I paused, grasping-”Pittsburgh?”
“But this, this is only-”
“Shush,” I said, not for the noise, but for the disrespect.
“Pittsburgh? Name a monument in Pittsburgh.”
“Don’t have to,” I said, working the broad, dull blade. The garbage bag next to me crinkled as I felt for the opening to drop another piece in. “The point is, every town’s got its monuments, places that must be maintained and cherished.”
“We’re defacing.”
“We’re restoring.”
“Speaking of restoring-”
“One project at a time,” I said, cutting him off.
“Have you talked?”
“Only after you called her to tell her I’d been roughed up. She wanted to come right over. I, being a hero, said my wounds were superficial. She said she was thinking of going to Paris, get a head start on an art book she was researching. I said she should go.”
“And?”
“I told her I loved her, as an adult.”
“And?”
“She said to call when I was ready to bury Maris.” I leaned into my work, and a piece the size of a road map lifted away. “I can feel your lips smiling. Keep scraping.”