A Welcome Grave Page 5

  Outside, the silence made me pause next to the truck. I live in an apartment beneath which traffic passes at all hours of the night, sometimes with stereos pounding or sirens wailing. A quiet night is one where I can’t hear a woman having an animated cell phone conversation in a convertible or the loud laughter of men coming out of the bar up the street. Here, the only sound was the wind. It didn’t whistle or howl, just offered a quiet, constant rustle though the leaves and over the grass.

  I walked up to the barn’s front porch, my shoes slapping off the boards, and then went around the side of the building, the way Kara Ross had taken me earlier in the day. A moon that was about three-quarters full provided the only light on this side of the building. I knew there was a name for that stage of moon, waxing or waning or something, and it had that coppery color it gets only in the fall. I turned the corner and found the door to the loft apartment.

  The note was gone, every trace of tape peeled away. I banged my knuckles off the rough wood and waited. Nobody came down to open it, and I didn’t hear anyone move upstairs. I knocked again and got more of the same. There was no knob, just an odd hooked handle and a lock. I tugged on the handle, but the door didn’t open. Jefferson’s son had gotten the note, but he hadn’t waited for me. Maybe he hadn’t been as intrigued as Kara Ross had predicted.

  I turned away from the door, shoving my hands into my pockets and tightening my shoulders against the chill night air. Out ahead of me, the black surface of the pond rippled as the wind passed over it. I was watching that when I noticed the figure in the gazebo.

  There was no light in the little building, but the silhouette of a man was clear. He was sitting on the bench beneath the fancy trelliswork that passed for walls, as still as the scarecrow that hung in front of the barn. When I saw him, I tensed slightly, a human presence somehow seeming threatening in a spot that was absolutely desolate at night. Then I realized the man had to be Jefferson’s son. If I lived in this place, I’d spend my evenings down by the water, too. The gazebo and the pond were maybe a hundred feet from the rear of the barn, and I was surprised he hadn’t heard me approach or knock on the door, but maybe the wind had carried the sounds away from him. I set off down the stone path that led to the gazebo, stepping carefully in the darkness.

  By the time I was halfway there, I could see he was sitting with his back to the pond, facing me. He must have seen me at the door, and yet he hadn’t said a word, just sat there and watched. I’d planned on calling out a hello before I reached the gazebo, but his behavior was so odd that breaking the silence seemed wrong somehow, and instead of speaking, I just kept walking.

  When I reached the gazebo, I went up the three steps and onto the main surface, only a few feet from him. I could see now he was wearing jeans and a heavy flannel shirt; thick dark hair hung over his shoulders and across his forehead, a few strands in his eyes, blending with the shadows. His chin was close to his chest, but his eyes were up, on me. There was a bottle on the rail beside him, some sort of whiskey, not much left in it. I was opening my mouth to say hello when I saw the gun.

  It was resting on the bench beside him, but his hand was around the butt, and even though my night vision was still adjusting, I could tell his finger was on the trigger. The barrel was pointed at me but not raised. I stopped moving forward and looked from the barrel of the gun to hollow dark eyes that were watching me without interest or emotion.

  “My father’s dead, isn’t he?” His voice matched his eyes.

  I tried hard to look at his face and not the gun. “Yeah,” I said. “He is. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  The hand with the gun shifted, and then it was pointed at my chest, maybe six feet separating me from the barrel. It was the kind of range that took shooting ability out of the equation. Even if the whiskey bottle on the railing had started out full, he wasn’t going to be able to miss if he pulled the trigger.

  I stayed as still as I could. My mouth had dried out as quickly and completely as desert sand after a cloudburst, and I could feel my heartbeat picking up, the blood beginning to pound in my temples and wrists, my leg muscles trembling the way they do after a long run.

  “Listen,” I began, but he cut me off immediately.

  “I could kill you,” he said. “Could have as soon as you came around the corner.”

  I didn’t try to talk again. I’ve had guns pulled on me before, and I’ve even talked a few men into lowering them in the past, but this didn’t feel like a situation where that was an option. There was no quality of indecision to Jefferson, and also none of the boiling emotion you usually get when someone pulls a weapon. He spoke and sat like an actor trying to finish a scene alone—everyone else might have left, turned the lights off onstage, even, but he knew his role, and he was damn sure going to finish it.

  “Wouldn’t do any good to kill you, though, would it?” he said. “You didn’t come alone.”

  Now I felt like I had to say something, although I didn’t know exactly what, and with that gun pointing at me, I definitely didn’t want to pick the wrong words. I swallowed, trying to still myself so that when I spoke my voice would be calm and not escalate the tension of the moment.

  “At least he has a reason,” he said. “You got nothing but greed.”

  The gun moved again, a twirling flash, and in the darkness I wasn’t sure what he was doing with it, only that it was moving, and instinct forced me into motion. As I heard the clicking sound of the hammer being pulled back, I made a stumbling, awkward lunge to the right that would have accomplished absolutely nothing had Alex Jefferson’s son fired at me instead of jamming the barrel of the gun into his own mouth and pulling the trigger.

  The bullet exploded out of the gun with a sound loud enough to make everything else in the world temporarily disappear, and then it punched through the back of Matthew Jefferson’s skull and scattered his brains into the pond. His body rocked back, following the path of the bullet, but then his shoulders caught on the railing and threw him forward. He slumped off the bench and fell, landing facedown at my feet, a pulsing crater where the back of his head belonged.

  I think I tried to shout, and maybe I even succeeded. If I did, though, I didn’t know it. All I could hear was the gunshot, still echoing through my head, even louder now. I looked down at Jefferson’s son, blood pumping out of what was left of his skull, and then I was scrambling backward, climbing over the gazebo railing without taking my eyes off the body. I fell over the railing and landed awkwardly in the bushes below, fought my way out of them, and staggered up the hill. When I reached the barn I fell on my ass, sat with my back against the weathered boards, and stared at the gazebo.

  He had not shot me. The gun had been pointed at me, held just a few feet away, and then it had been fired. He had not shot me, though. I had not been shot.

  “You didn’t get shot,” I said aloud. “You did not get shot.” I’d hoped the sound of my voice would calm me, but instead it made the shaking start. It worked its way through my hands and into the rest of my body, and I forced myself to get back to my feet and walked through the gardens to the stone path. I stood there, taking deep breaths, until the shaking stopped, and then I reached into my pocket and took my cell phone out. The first time I tried to open it, my hands weren’t steady enough, and I dropped it into the grass. The second time, I managed to punch in the three numbers I needed.

  I told them what I needed to tell them. The dispatcher wanted to keep me on the line until the police got there, but I hung up. I walked slowly back up to the gazebo, feeling a need to see the body again—maybe to reassure myself that it wasn’t mine.

  The blood had spread, pooling around the body. The gun had tumbled from his hand when he fell and lay beside him. Even outdoors, with a steady breeze blowing, the smell of the blood was powerful.

  “You’re a millionaire,” I said to the corpse. “That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know who the hell you thought I was, but that’s what I came to tell you.”

&n
bsp; It got hard to look at him then, and I turned away and refocused on the pond that had swallowed a piece of his skull. The moonlight reflected on the whiskey bottle that remained where the dead man had sat, and I saw the bottle was resting on a piece of paper, pinning it to the railing. I stepped closer and saw it was that apple-shaped stationery upon which Kara Ross had written my note.

  Matt—

  Man from Cleveland here to see you.

  Will return tonight.

  Family business.

  6

  The sheriff’s department sent the first car, driven by a deputy who looked about fourteen. He shuffled around in the parking lot nervously, talking into his radio, and when I called out to him he jumped like I’d fired a shot into his car.

  “There’s a body down there,” I said, walking up out of the shadows and into the parking lot. “And a lot of blood. You processed any death scenes before?”

  He shook his head and took a hesitant step backward. The damn kid was afraid of me.

  “Is there anybody else on the way?”

  A swallow and a nod, and then, “Yessir. State police.”

  “You want to just wait on them?” I said, my voice gentle.

  “Sure. Why don’t we?” He realized then how this might look to the state cops, him standing up here with me in the parking lot, having not even seen the body, and said, “Well, maybe I should . . . you know, secure the area.”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay. Follow me.”

  We were halfway down the path to the gazebo, the kid stumbling in the dark, when he was saved by the sound of another car pulling into the gravel lot. We both turned, and I saw that it was an unmarked car. A Taurus, just like Joe drove.

  “State police?”

  “Yeah.” The kid sounded relieved. He started back up to the parking lot. A cop in street clothes climbed out of the unmarked car and walked down the slope. He met us at the corner of the orchard barn, in the glow from one of the few outdoor lights.

  “We got a suicide down there,” the sheriff’s deputy said, his chest filling a bit, trying to impress the varsity.

  “Uh-huh,” the plainclothes guy said. “Kinda figured that, you know, when dispatch told me to come take a look at a suicide.”

  The kid’s chest deflated.

  “And who’re you?” the new cop asked me. He was an unremarkable man in every way—average in height and build, not handsome or ugly, just one of a thousand guys you’d pass on the street and hardly spare a glance.

  “Name’s Lincoln Perry. I called it in.”

  “Found the guy?”

  “Saw him do it.”

  “Ah.” He nodded and slipped a small tape recorder out of his pocket. “Lincoln Perry. Good name. I’m Roger Brewer, state police.”

  He turned the recorder on and spoke into it, giving his name and the date and time, then stating our location and what he’d been told by dispatch and by me. That settled, he held the recorder against his leg and nodded at me.

  “Lead the way.”

  They followed me around the side of the barn, and when we got into the darkness, the state cop produced a flashlight. I took them up to the gazebo and then stopped.

  “That’s him. I imagine you want me to hang back.”

  “Uh-huh.” He walked up onto the gazebo without any sign of trepidation, the deputy following nervously. When they got a clear view of the body, Brewer let out a long, low whistle and shook his head.

  “Did a pretty good job of it, didn’t he?”

  I didn’t say anything. The young deputy’s face had blanched, and he stood at the far end of the gazebo, his hand tight on the railing, his eyes averted. The wind was blowing harder now, and cooler, rippling across the pond and sending a chill through me. A few leaves came tumbling down, one of them settling gently onto Matthew Jefferson’s back. Brewer flicked it off with his index finger.

  The woods and the pond lit up with flashing lights as another car pulled in up at the barn, this one a state police cruiser. The two cops who got out were in full uniform, right down to the tall black boots and the full-brimmed hats.

  “Wait there, would you?” Brewer said.

  “Sure.”

  I stood at the edge of the pond with the deputy while Brewer walked up to meet the new arrivals. I could hear him telling them to get an ambulance down to collect the body, and to make sure the hands were bagged. When he was done talking to them, Brewer called for me to come up to the top of the hill. I passed the uniformed cops in silence, both of them giving me hard, suspicious stares, and joined him on the front porch of the barn. He was speaking softly into his tape recorder.

  “Well, Mr. Perry, I’m going to need to take a witness statement from you. Going to be a pretty important thing, seeing as how you’re the only person who actually saw anything.”

  “Sure.”

  “You ever given a statement before?” The question sounded procedural, but it was also a slick way of finding out whether I’d bumped up against a criminal investigation before.

  “I’ve given them, yes, but I’ve taken a lot more.”

  “Oh?” His eyebrows went up.

  “I was a cop in Cleveland, Ohio, for several years. A detective at the end of it.”

  “No kidding.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And now?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Private investigator,” he echoed. “Well. The plot thickens, right? Were you down in our little part of the world on business or pleasure, Detective?”

  “Business.”

  “I see.” The recorder was still running, held loosely in his left hand. “Well, tell you what we’re going to do, Mr. Perry. We’re going to run through everything now, you tell me what you can, and then maybe I’ll have more questions later.”

  “Right.”

  He motioned with his hand for me to begin. I told it to him as clearly as I could, and as honestly, leaving out nothing except my personal history with Karen. It wasn’t relevant to what had happened, but I figured he might try to make it fit somehow, and I didn’t want that headache. Instead, I told him all the details that I could think of, simply presenting Karen as a routine client. That’s what she was, now. The ambulance pulled in as I was finishing, but Brewer let the uniformed cops deal with that, keeping his attention on me.

  “Now that,” he said when I was done, “is one hell of a strange thing to happen. I mean, the guy finishes a day of work, gets a note that you’re in town, and goes to sit by this pond with a bottle of whiskey and a gun. He doesn’t kill himself then, in private, but waits for you to show up. When you show up, he somehow is already aware of the very news you drove six hours to share with him. He tells you this and then kills himself.”

  I didn’t say anything, and Brewer made a little clucking noise with his tongue and shook his head.

  “One hell of a strange thing,” he said again. “You got any theories, Mr. Perry?”

  “Well, it seems pretty clear that he thought I was someone else.”

  “Someone who knew his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone who was not alone, based upon the comments you say he made.”

  “That’s right. He seemed to think there’d be someone else with me.”

  “And he was, what, scared of this third party?”

  I thought about it and nodded. “Yes, I think he was. Well, I think he would have been, maybe.”

  “Would have been?”

  “Had he not already made the decision to put the barrel of that gun in his mouth. That was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. He knew what he was going to do.”

  “But he waited for you to show before he did it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And didn’t wait for this unnamed third party to show.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “He didn’t know you.”

  “Thought he did, though. Thought he knew who I was, or knew who I was with, at least.”

  Brewer stood there and stared at me. I looked at the set
of his face, at his eyes, and I knew he didn’t like my account of things. He wasn’t ready to say he didn’t believe me yet, but he definitely didn’t like what he’d heard.

  “Mysterious,” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “No, really, it is. I mean, we’ll get a psychological profile together on this guy, and maybe that’ll tell us something. But at this point, it seems like a pretty unusual way to kill yourself.”

  “Agreed.”

  He shifted position, moving out of the glow of the floodlight. “That’s assuming he did kill himself.”

  “He did.”

  “Says the gentleman from Ohio,” Brewer said good-naturedly. “But, unfortunately, the gentleman from Ohio was the only person present. So if we say—just for the sake of argument—that he could be lying . . . well, that’s trouble. Because if he did happen to be lying, I’m looking at a homicide.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Gun wasn’t in the dead man’s hand.”

  “It fell out when he fell forward. You worked any suicides before?” When he nodded, I said, “Then you know that you often find the gun beside the body. The instantaneous rigor grips happen, but they aren’t the rule.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stood there and looked at me.

  “Check his thumb,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Check his thumb for a hammer imprint. The gun was a revolver, and he cocked it right before he fired. I know, because I heard it. Then he died damn fast. No slow process on that one. The hammer spur impressions could still be on the thumb. That happens when circulation stops abruptly.”

  “That’s a fine idea.” Brewer cleared his throat and spat into the bushes beside us. “I’ll be sure that the thumbs are checked, Mr. Perry.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s a strange thing,” he said for the third time and shook his head. “Now, Mr. Perry, as I said, I’m going to need to get that written statement.”