“Carl-” Tess was not inclined to touch people she did not know well, but she grabbed Carl Dewitt’s left arm and swung him around. “I’m not playing movie trivia. I am not asking a rhetorical question. Let me repeat: Did anything about that strike you as unusual?”
“Yes,” he muttered, yanking his arm from her and rubbing it, as if she had left a stain on his sleeve. “You called me your apprentice, which is one step above flunky. Why’d you do that?”
Tess got into her car, waited for Carl to do the same, then started the engine and began to drive, although she had no destination in mind. They weren’t done with Spartina, she was sure of that much.
“The guy was clearly paranoid about state authorities. It was his first question: ”Are you from the state?“ I wanted him to feel safe with us, at ease. I told an expedient lie. I wasn’t trying to demean you. You’ve got no ID. What were you going to show the guy, your Blockbuster Video card?”
Carl folded his arms across his chest and thought about this. After several quiet minutes, he nodded, satisfied. “Just so it’s not what you really think.”
“He said five years.”
“What?”
“He said his father died five years ago ”I think.“ ”
“Five years, four years, six years.” Carl shrugged. “Not everybody is exact about dates.”
“When did your mother die?”
“Eight years ago February.”
Tess didn’t bother to say anything, just let him listen to the precision of his own words.
“If his dad died around the time Eric was here, it would be sharper in his mind. The two things would be connected.”
Tess nodded. “I think so, yes.”
“So why would he lie about it?”
“Because he doesn’t want us to associate him with Eric. And, by extension, Tiffani. The guy back at the motel couldn’t have been chattier about Eric, and Eric apparently was pretty chatty his ownself. That Ashe guy lied to us. People usually lie for a reason.”
“So let’s go back, jack ‘im up.”
Tess winced a little at the slang, picked up, no doubt, from a movie or a television show.
“We’re not cops, remember? We can’t drag Ashe to an interrogation room and keep him there for hours, playing mind games. My intuition about people is pretty good, but it doesn’t give us any legal standing.”
“So what do we do?”
“I know of only one place to go when I’m stumped.”
The Spartina Public Library was plain, with an emphasis on bestsellers, but it had the Internet connections Tess needed. Using the wireless modem that Dorie had installed for her at an astronomical price, Tess booted up her laptop and began searching the on-line archives of the Spartina Messenger, while Carl flipped through the bound paper versions. Like most newspapers, the Messenger had an on-line database, but it charged for retrieval of articles more than thirty days old.
“So what are you going to do?” Carl asked, distracted momentarily by a page of movie ads.
“Hey, that’s what per diem expenses are for.” Tess signed up for the archive service and began downloading the articles that popped up, beginning with an obituary on Ashe’s father.
“Look at the date.”
Carl leaned over her shoulder. “Son of a bitch. It’s seven years ago.”
“So he wasn’t doing any business with anyone six years ago.” Other Ashes came up, but not the ones Tess wanted. She noticed the Spartina paper had a police log, where petty crimes were listed by address. She tried the address of the photography shop. She found a dozen listings over the past ten years, but they were the kind of petty property crimes one would expect in a depressed business area: smashed shop windows, car break-ins. And the addresses were not precise, so it was impossible to tell if the crimes had affected Ashe’s Studio Portraits or its downtrodden neighbors. She narrowed the search to the months before and after Tiffani Gunts’s murder. Here she found three calls to the fire department for “suspicious odors,” which was mildly interesting but didn’t explain why Ashe Jr. had lied to them about knowing Eric Shivers.
A subdued voice on the PA system reminded them that the library closed at 5 P.M. on Friday nights. Tess checked her watch and quickly plugged Ashe’s name into the form for the local telephone directory. The number popped up, along with a link offering to map the way. Modern life was almost too easy.
“Let’s go,” she said to Carl, then winced, lest this prompt another cinematic reverie on his part. But his mind was elsewhere.
“I thought you said there was no reason to go back and talk to Ashe if we didn’t know anything.”
“Yeah, I know what I said. But people get squirrelly, sometimes, when you show up at their houses. They don’t realize how much of their lives”-she patted the computer-“are inside these babies. It’s one thing to drop by a man’s business, another to go to his home uninvited. Total power play.”
“You showed up on my doorstep, and it didn’t bother me at all.”
Tess didn’t have the heart to tell Carl Dewitt that this was only evidence of how odd he was.
Ashe lived in a raw new development surrounded by shiny fields of mud. A sign at the main entrance promised LUXURY HOMES STARTING IN THE $200s, which seemed a lot to pay for the shoddy skeletons under construction here. It was as if the first two little pigs went into the building business, Tess thought, and let their brother come along at the end and slap brick veneers on these palaces of sticks and straw.
Ashe’s house was the only completed one on his cul-de-sac. Two cars were parked in the driveway, a midsize Japanese car and the inevitable SUV. A child’s Big Wheel had been left behind the SUV, and Tess knew it was destined to be crushed beneath the SUV’s wheels one morning.
A tired-looking blonde still in her day-job clothes answered the door. A television was blaring in the background, and a child appeared to be trying to outscream it. The presumptive Mrs. Ashe looked at once apprehensive and hopeful. The corners of her mouth lifted, as if she had not quite outgrown the fantasy that Publishers Clearing House would show up on her doorstep. But her eyes drooped with the knowledge that all news was bad news.
“Henry’s in the family room,” she said.
This suited Tess. Family rooms were now customarily built alongside the kitchen, creating vast cavernous spaces that offered no privacy. Ashe would have to talk to them in full view of his wife-or risk her suspicions by asking them to go somewhere else. Tess didn’t know what secrets Ashe kept from his wife, but it was a good bet that he had at least a few going.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, lifting his eyes from the television set. It was tuned to one of the financial networks, a summary of the day’s stock market gyrations flowing across the bottom.
“Your father died seven years ago,” Tess said.
“You don’t have to tell me when my father died.”
“I think I do. Because when we stopped by your studio, you said he was the one who dealt with Eric Shivers. Well, Eric last visited here six years ago.”
Ashe turned his gaze back to the television, which was just a way of not making eye contact. “Gee, pardon me. I’m sorry that in the confusion of settling my dad’s estate and getting married and having a child I forgot when I met with some guy named Eric Shivers. I guess I’m just a bad, bad guy.”
Ashe was in a stuffed chair, his feet propped up on an ottoman. Carl walked over and kicked Ashe’s legs from their perch.
“Hey!” Ashe’s yelp made his wife turn from the kitchen, where she had been pretending not to listen while she tended something on the stove. Tess stepped forward, angling her body so she was between the two men. She hated this kind of macho posturing. It was so unproductive and so phony. Just more movie shit.
“You didn’t forget when you met with him,” she said. “You forgot that you met with him at all. That’s why we came back. We’re curious about why you’d lie about such a little thing. Unless it’s real important to you to distance yourself from Eric Shivers for some reason.”