Red Means Run Page 15

  He turned to look at Jane. She had her eyes closed and it seemed she hadn’t heard him. He walked over and sat down in a chair beside the sofa.

  “You okay?”

  She spoke without opening her eyes. “Yeah. The whole thing is so surreal. I was thinking earlier—you hear about stuff like this on the news and you wonder how people handle it. I don’t think you do handle it, though. It just kind of picks you up and carries you along.” She sat up then, eyes open. “I need to go for a run.”

  “Maybe you should wait,” Walter suggested. “Let the cops do their thing. They’d want to send somebody with you and I don’t think that’s what you want.”

  She nodded, seeing he was right. “Do you think this guy is done now?” she asked. “I mean, is there anybody else he thinks is responsible?”

  “I’m holding out the naive hope that the police will actually arrest him again in the pretty near future. And maybe even find a way to keep him in jail this time. That’s not asking too much, is it?”

  “I don’t know, Walter,” Jane said. “I don’t seem to know anything today.”

  When Suzanne arrived, Walter took it as an opportunity to leave. Jane watched the two of them talking on the lawn out front and when Suzanne came inside to announce they were going to her house, Jane assumed that she and Walter had conceived of the plan on the spot.

  “What are you going to do—spend the night here alone?” Suzanne asked when Jane attempted to beg off.

  “I’ve done it plenty of times.”

  “Not under these circumstances, you haven’t. You throw some things in a bag and I’ll tell the cops you’re out of here.”

  “I’m not sure you can tell them I’m just leaving.”

  “Fuck them. They caused this mess.”

  Jane left her car there and rode with Suzanne to Boddington Stables. Miller was still in California and the chef Henri was gone for the day. They sat in the Spanish-style kitchen and watched the sun go down as they picked at some cheese and crackers that Suzanne found. After a while Suzanne opened a bottle of good brandy and poured snifters for them both.

  Suzanne never asked anything about the actual killing. She was not a details person. She knew that Alan had been shot, and, to her, that was all she needed to know. Who cared where, when, how many times? It wasn’t as if she could undo the deed.

  “Did he want to be cremated?” she asked. That was more of a Suzanne question. She’d been watching Jane in the chair staring blankly out the window.

  “He never talked about it. I doubt he thought he would ever die.”

  “Then it’s your call.”

  Jane nodded. “You know, I never really thought about it until this minute, but the only reason Alan would want a big funeral would be the chance to rant about the people who didn’t bother to show up. And ridicule the people who did.”

  “He’s going to hate to miss it.”

  Jane found herself smiling at that. “But no,” she said after a moment. “I think something quiet is the way to go. I could scatter his ashes on the property. It was the one thing he loved unconditionally.”

  She took a drink and rotated the glass in her hands, looking at the liquor inside. “He does have his legacy, Suzanne. No matter what else they’ll say about him, he was a giant in his day. I mean, he created some great music.”

  “No question. Shit, I grew up on that stuff. And it’ll all get revisited now. I daresay the New York Times will find reason to invoke the phrase ‘musical genius.’ Maybe Elton John can rewrite ‘Candle In The Wind’ one more time.”

  “Spare me that,” Jane said. She took a drink of brandy and looked out at the fading light. “I have this weird feeling of . . . guilt. There have been times, you know, in recent years, that I actually thought I would be better off without him.”

  “Times you wished he was dead?”

  Jane shook her head, as if to clear it, and then had another drink. “Have you ever thought that way?”

  “About Miller?” Suzanne asked. “Two or three times a day on the average.”

  Jane laughed. “When is he coming home?”

  “Tomorrow. Or so he says. That’s one advantage I always had over you. He’s gone at least half the time. Alan never left the house, other than to go to the studio.”

  “And that was pretty seldom,” Jane said.

  “Does he have any family? Isn’t there a daughter somewhere?”

  “There’s a daughter. She basically hates him, but she cashes his check every month. She lives in Arizona, all that new-age nonsense, you know? She’s an artist who never sells anything, so she struggles to get by on fifteen grand a month.”

  “Poor baby.” Suzanne leaned forward to pour more brandy for them both. She was a little tipsy, and it occurred to Jane that she was probably that way when she drove over to pick her up.

  “Did Miller buy his winery?” Jane asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe two. He’s talking about getting out of the horse game altogether.” She hesitated. “I have a feeling he’s going to want to move to the coast.”

  “He’d sell this place?”

  “He’d better not try,” Suzanne said. “He can go back and forth. Or just go. He has to get out from under these charges first. He’s talking to a lawyer from out there about them. Now that Mickey’s out of the picture. Miller was actually pretty upset about Mickey. They were kinda close, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Mickey liked the horses. He stayed in Saratoga with Miller last August. He basically cleared his schedule so he could do it. He bet big and he bet stupid, so he usually lost big.”

  “Well, he could afford it.”

  “I don’t know how flush he was. He pissed a lot of it away. He was charging Miller a ton of money to defend him, especially when he didn’t seem to be doing much defending. He had a private investigator on the case.”

  “Buddy Townes?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “He was on Alan’s case too. He was Dupree’s guy.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure that Miller and Dupree argued about the money. Miller has a habit of not paying bills if he thinks he’s being taken advantage of.”

  “Alan used to say that’s how the rich stay rich.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem with all these men. Too much money.” Suzanne laughed and drained her glass. “But we wouldn’t have it any other way, would we?”

  Jane sat staring out the window and made no reply.

  “Not to be blunt but there is a positive to take from this,” Suzanne said.

  Jane looked over. “Glad you’re not being blunt.”

  “Fuck it,” Suzanne replied. “Subtlety makes me crazy. I’m talking about Edie Bryant’s seat in Washington. Alan was going to be a huge hindrance. You know that or you wouldn’t have brought it up that day.”

  “Christ,” Jane said. “I can’t even think about that tonight. My brain is not functioning on that level. Right now, I don’t even care about it.”

  “I’ll think about it for you,” Suzanne told her. “A grieving widow might make an appealing candidate. Especially one who runs marathons and has cool friends like me.”

  “Maybe you should run,” Jane said.

  “Not me,” Suzanne snorted. “I have too many skeletons hidden away. Not to mention the unhidden one, flying home from the coast.”

  “Can we talk about it later?”

  Suzanne smiled. “We can do whatever we want.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Claire didn’t sleep particularly well. She had brief disturbing dreams, one after another, and each time she woke she had trouble getting back to sleep. She didn’t dream about Virgil Cain but couldn’t help thinking about him while she was awake. She kept hearing his voice on the phone, his sardonic tone, his wit. He was an unusual man, joking, flirting even, in the face of the charges against him. And who the hell breaks out of jail and doesn’t flee? On one hand, it suggested that maybe he really was innocent in these matters. Of course, i
f he was guilty, it meant that he was completely unhinged.

  And if he was deranged, with two killings under his belt, what did that say about Claire, and the fact that she was looking forward to talking to him again?

  In the early light of day, she put that out of her mind, attributing it to any number of things. To the late hour, to her disappointing date with Peter who couldn’t bother to ask where she was from. To whatever. She got out of bed at half past seven, showered, and had a bowl of granola, then drove to the station.

  The autopsy had been performed on Alan Comstock the night before. The six slugs taken from his body were indeed .32 caliber. The boys in ballistics would be testing the nickel-plated Smith & Wesson later that day to see if the slugs came from the gun, but already the smart money was on a match. There were no fingerprints on the thirty-two. It had been wiped meticulously clean; not even a partial print could be found. There were prints on the shell casings in the cylinder, but they proved to be Comstock’s, as Claire had suspected. At the time of his death Comstock’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit for driving. Specific cause of death was still unknown, as at least three of the bullet wounds could have proven fatal, depending on which had arrived first.

  “But I think at this point we can rule out natural causes,” Claire told Joe Brady when he came in a little after ten o’clock.

  “Anything from the Canadians?” Joe asked.

  “Nothing that I’ve heard,” Claire said. “I’m pretty sure they haven’t got him yet.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Women’s intuition.”

  Joe gave her one of his impatient looks and headed for his desk.

  “What have we got on Dupree so far?” Claire asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did forensics turn up? Any prints on the club or the golf cart?”

  “The club that killed him? Nothing. All kinds of prints on the cart.”

  “Any of them belong to Virgil Cain?”

  “No. Why would he touch the cart?”

  “I don’t know. What about the rake?”

  “Same thing. Lots of prints. Who knows how many times it got used that day?”

  “But none from Cain?”

  “Who knows? There were prints on top of prints. Nothing you could match to any one person. I’m assuming he wore gloves anyway.”

  “Why are you assuming that?”

  “Because we can’t find his prints anywhere, Claire.”

  “All right,” Claire said. “So what do we have putting him in the vicinity?”

  “He was in Middletown a half hour earlier. Which makes it easy for him to show up at the seventh hole at the same time Dupree did. Or he was waiting for him. He must have known his routine. Dupree played there every Tuesday, we know that.”

  “Okay,” Claire said. “How does he get from a gas station in Middletown to a sand trap on an exclusive golf course without anybody seeing him? He was driving a twenty-year-old pickup truck and from what I saw of the guy, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wearing Sansabelt slacks and a golf shirt. He would not have fit in with that crowd. Have we got anybody who saw him or his truck at the golf course?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How about this?” Claire asked. “Whoever killed Dupree went through the park next to the course. He could have crossed that ravine on foot and scaled the fence to the grounds.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said.

  Claire sat tapping her pen against her teeth. “He would have to pay to get into the park. If it was Cain, they’d have a record, and his license plate.”

  Joe hesitated a moment. He was becoming perturbed, his color getting redder. Claire suddenly realized that he’d already considered what she was suggesting. “They don’t have him driving in. But they say there’s always a few people they let in for a short time for nothing. Parents dropping food off to kids camping, or somebody delivering medicine, shit like that. Or there’s always a chance he parked outside the park and scaled the fence to get in. What the fuck are you doing here, Claire?”

  “What am I doing? Well, while the Mounties are tracking Cain, I would like to find something of a physical nature to put him at the scene where Mickey Dupree bought it. Right now, you’ve got a semi-threat he made in a bar. A jury might just expect more.”

  “Yeah, that’s all we got,” Joe said sarcastically. “Oh yeah— that and the fact that he shot Dupree’s client to death a couple days later. The client that walked away from killing Cain’s wife. There is that little tidbit.”

  “Did he kill Alan Comstock?” Claire asked. “We have evidence placing him there?”

  “It’s a little early for that, Claire. The blood’s not even dry yet. They’ll find something. A hair, a print, something. He made a point of killing the man with the same gun that killed his wife. Who else would do that?”

  “Somebody who wanted to make it look like Cain?”

  “And who would that be?” Joe asked.

  I have no idea, Claire admitted to herself. And if it didn’t make sense for anybody else to have done the killing, then there was a pretty good chance Cain did it. But then why was he hanging around? What was in it for him? Maybe the phone conversation last night was another red herring. He wanted to put the notion in her head that he didn’t do it, so she would start looking elsewhere. But why double back from the border to call her? He could have crossed and called her from Canada. Why was he still in the area and pretending he wasn’t?

  “Any reports of a stolen boat along the St. Lawrence?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Joe said. “Oh, I’m sure he got across. The water’s warm enough, he could have floated a log across.”

  Right, Claire thought. Or maybe he built an ark. Her desk phone rang and she picked it up. “Marchand.”

  It was a woman from the phone company, saying she had Alan Comstock’s phone log.

  Claire grabbed a pad. “Okay.”

  “You were looking for yesterday only?”

  “For now. After, say, eleven at night.”

  “Hold on a sec. Okay, there were two calls. One at ten thirty-four. Second was twelve thirteen. First call was from a cell phone, number 914-487-9663. Number registered to Jane Comstock, same address. The second call was from a cell too, 914-487-5433.”

  “Whose phone?”

  “No registration. Pay as you go. I checked it out. It was purchased at the Walmart in Kingston two weeks ago. June twenty-sixth, activated that same day. It has been used just this once.”

  “So it’s a burn phone,” Claire said.

  “That’s what they call them. I have a serial number.”

  Claire took down the number and thanked the woman. When she hung up she looked over to see Joe watching and listening.

  “When did he buy it?”

  “June twenty-sixth.”

  “Comstock was acquitted on the twenty-fourth,” Joe said.

  “And Cain threatened Dupree in the bar that same night. Two days later he buys a burn phone. I would call that premeditation.”

  “What was he premeditating, Joe?” Claire asked. “Did he know that two weeks later he would need to call Alan Com-stock prior to shooting him?”

  “He was hedging his bets,” Joe said after thinking about it.

  “Better to have it than not.”

  “That’ll sound good in court. Maybe you can suggest that Cain is clairvoyant.”

  “Chrissake.”

  Claire looked at the information on the pad a moment.

  “Why would he pop Dupree first?” she asked. “It was me, I’d go after Comstock.”

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other,” Joe said. “He obviously was going to do both either way. Maybe he thought Dupree would be harder to get to if he killed Comstock first. Mickey Dupree was a slippery little fucker.”

  “He wasn’t on your Christmas card list, was he, Joe?”

  “I’m thinking he wasn’t on many people’s.”

  “And yet you’re sur
e there’s only one person who might have wanted him dead.”

  Joe got to his feet. “I don’t know what your problem is with this, Claire. Find me another suspect and I’ll take a look at him. As it is, we got one guy. And he had motive, opportunity, and he actually threatened the life of one of the victims. Throw in the fact that he has since fled to another country, and I think he’s our man. Tell you what, though—I’ll go out there and see if I can’t find some photographs of Cain actually pumping slugs into Comstock’s belly. Will that convince you?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Screw you, Claire.” Joe fairly spit the words at her and left. When he was gone, Claire poured herself a coffee and went over the autopsy report again. Toxicology would take a few weeks, but she couldn’t see it being a factor anyway. From looking in Alan Comstock’s medicine cabinet the previous morning, Claire knew it was quite likely that the man’s bloodstream was a playground of pharmaceutical delights. But whatever had influenced his behavior—gin or uppers or painkillers—none of them would have any impact on the case. The half-dozen injections from the Smith & Wesson took the other drugs out of the equation.

  Claire was supposed to meet Buddy Townes at Kingston Koffee at noon. The time had been his suggestion, and she knew he was setting her up for a free lunch. Buddy being Buddy. Claire was okay with that; given Buddy’s reputation, she figured she was getting off easy by buying him some soup and a sandwich. If he had suggested they meet later in the day, she might have had to spring for a dozen drinks to boot. She was early so she decided to swing by the Walmart on her way.

  The kid working electronics was gangly and acne-scarred, with a lock of black hair hanging over his eyes and a tattoo of a spider on his neck. He surprised Claire when he spoke with a lilting Irish brogue.

  “I can tell you what phones we sold that day,” he said. “But maybe not to whom.”

  “I have the serial number,” Claire said and handed him her notepad.