“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and by now Anderson was looking at me. “We never found out. I was away. My mother was visiting her sister overnight. Somebody broke in to the house. My father came downstairs, found them. He was not a man who was going to back down in that circumstance. They killed him—deliberately, accidentally, I don’t know—and then they took the stuff anyway. An old television and VCR, a handful of jewelry, and around eighty dollars in cash.”
Fisher looked as if he didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not equating this with your loss,” I told Anderson. “Point is, I can’t bring him back. You can’t bring your family back either. Somebody came into a place that was not theirs and took these people. They had no right. The question is, what do you do about it?”
Anderson sat completely still for maybe a minute. Then he turned back to face the table squarely.
“What can I do? The cops think I did it.”
“So tell us something that will help them see it differently. Like what this has to do with a check you received for a quarter of a million dollars.”
His eyes went wide. “How the hell do you know about that?”
I nodded to Fisher. I wanted a cigarette. Talking to Anderson was making me sad beyond belief, and I didn’t want to do it for much longer.
“I’m working on Joseph Cranfield’s estate,” Fisher said. “I’m a lawyer. You were one of a very limited number of individual beneficiaries. I couldn’t help noticing that the check was never deposited. Why?”
“I never met the guy,” Anderson said. “I never even heard of him. Then one morning there’s this ridiculous check. I have no idea what to do with it, why it’s there, nothing. But there’s a letter with it.”
“I know,” Fisher said. “I wrote it.”
“Then where the hell do you think you get off?”
“What?”
“Sending someone that much money, with conditions like that?”
“What do you mean? What conditions?”
“You wrote it, you know.”
“The letter I wrote just said, ‘Here’s the money, have a ball.’ And where it had come from. Nothing else. There were no conditions stipulated in the will.”
Anderson kept looking at Fisher, evidently not inclined to believe him. For a moment I wasn’t sure either, but Fisher’s face was just too confused.
“What was in the letter you received?” I asked.
There were two small spots of color on Anderson’s cheeks now, livid against the gray. “It said this Cranfield person had bequeathed me the money on the condition that I stop my work. That if I did so, the money was mine. That if I took the money and kept working, there would be consequences. And, between the lines, that I’d better take the money.”
“What work? Teaching at the university?”
“No,” Anderson said, and for a flicker of a moment he looked cagey. “A private project.”
“Private?” Fisher said. “Private from whom?”
“Everybody.”
I remembered the way the basement workshop in his house had looked. “So how did Cranfield even know about it?”
“I have no idea. I was in contact with a couple of people on the Internet. Had a few covert discussions. All I could think is, the information got to him that way.”
“And you made the decision not to take the money?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell anyone that’s what you were doing?”
“No. I just didn’t take the check to the bank.”
“Do you still have it now?”
“It was in the house.”
Fisher was looking into the middle distance. I imagined I knew why. He’d thought he was running the Cranfield estate, or at least in charge of his end. But someone had replaced his letter to Anderson, and somebody had been monitoring the account from which the bequest had been drawn. How else would they have known that Anderson had refused to be paid off, setting in motion the visit to his house three weeks earlier?
“How could they have done that?” I asked. “Replaced the letter?”
“It was part of a batch of stuff that went via Burnell and Lytton’s office,” Fisher said quietly. “One of them must have done it.”
“Did you lose everything?” I asked Anderson. “In the fire? Relating to the work, I mean?”
Anderson nodded. “Everything. I forgot to take my backup with me that night. Only place any of it’s left is in my head.”
“What was it?” Fisher asked. “What were you working on?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Yes,” Fisher said firmly. “You can. I have to know more.”
Maybe it was only the harsh morning glare coming at him through the glass, but right then Fisher looked a little strange. The lines at the corner of his eyes were pronounced, his mouth thin.
“More?” I said. “I didn’t realize that you knew anything at all about this.”
Fisher looked away, and I knew he’d been lying to me.
“What Gary means,” I said, turning to Anderson, “is that it would assist us if you could give an indication of what led to the events that occurred in your house. To help the cops look at this differently, we need to build a credible case toward an alternative perpetrator.”
“How do I know you’re not one of them? Or that he isn’t?”
“You don’t,” I said. “Neither of us has a badge saying ‘Certified Good Guy.’ If that’s what you need, you’re going to have to wait until you get to heaven.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, looking at me.
The implication was clear. I turned breezily to Fisher. “Gary. Wonder if you might want to get some more coffee for Bill? I could use a refill, while you’re at it.”
Fisher kept his face composed. “Whatever you say.”
He got up stiffly, walked toward the counter. Anderson looked around the restaurant for the hundredth time, eyes darting in every direction.
“Going to give you a tip,” I said. “Don’t be looking around the place like that the whole time. If you want to be invisible, then you have to look like you’re heading from A to B and you have the right to pass through all points in between. If a cop with time on his hands catches you doing the shadows-in-every-corner thing, he’ll check you out just on the off chance.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I used to be one.”
“You’re a cop?”
“Listen to all the words, Bilclass="underline" used to be. Not anymore. Not on their side necessarily. Though I know they’re not all assholes either. You would be the main suspect for this case in any town in the U.S.A., trust me. Cops learn to break situations down according to the way they usually shake out. It saves time. It can save their lives. You’ve fallen on the wrong side of that process, but it doesn’t mean that the police are the axis of evil. Your best-case scenario right now is to get yourself to the point where you can go to them instead of hiding.”
Anderson shook his head. “How can I—”
“Tell me what this is about.” I said. “I get that it’s private. Something even Peter Chen doesn’t know about. It’s not my business, and I don’t even really care. But right now you’re running out of options, and this secret has already gotten people killed.”
“You’re not going to believe what I tell you.”
“Somebody evidently does,” I said. “So try me.”
He hesitated for a long time. I glanced toward the counter to signal to Fisher that I might be getting somewhere, but he wasn’t there. In the restroom, I guessed, or maybe he’d stomped outside. He was in a very spiky place this morning, especially for someone who’d found what he was supposed to be looking for.
When Anderson finally spoke, I knew it was not just in the hope that I might be able to help him but also because it was something he’d kept to himself for a long time. It’s not true that everyone wants to confess a crime, but most people do want to tell something of their story, to stop hiding for just a while.