Stranger Things Have Happened: An Adrien English Write Your Own Damn Story (The Adrien English Mysteries) (5 page)

“Why would you say that?”

“Just little hints I’ve picked up.”

“Like what?” you insist.

Bruce smiles regretfully. “I can’t reveal my source.”

Who has he been talking to? Someone who doesn’t have a clue, obviously. Or maybe someone who wants to get you in trouble with the police? You say, “Your source has it wrong. Robert and I were friends from way back, but the way back is all we really had in common.”

He studies you thoughtfully. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

“In that case, what’s your opinion as to why the police are so sure you killed Robert?”

“According to the police, I’m just one of a number of suspects.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you? They’re going to arrest you. I guarantee it.”

He seems so completely sure of his facts. It’s unsettling. Disturbing. If only you could think more clearly, but that drink has really gone to your head. You feel almost woozy.

“Another?” Bruce asks, rising. He’s smiling at you.

“No. Thanks…” You should probably get this round, but the fact is, you’re not sure you can stand up.

All at once you’re drunk off your ass. Or
on
your ass. Yes, that’s it. You’re drunk on your ass. You smother a laugh.

Bruce moves off to the bar and you blearily puzzle over your predicament. You actually have a pretty good head for alcohol. True, you didn’t eat and you’re not sleeping well and it’s been an emotionally exhausting day, but…

Bruce finally comes back and places another drink in front of you. He sips his own and begins talking again, but you don’t hear a word of it. His voice sounds far away and echo-y.

Finally you feel obliged to interrupt. It’s either that or put your head down on the table and go to sleep. “Bruce, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling very well.”

His brows draw together. “What’s the matter, Adrien?”

“I’m just…I need to go home.” How are you going to get home? You can’t drive like this. You’re not even sure you can walk. You’re going to have to call a cab. You should surely be able to manage that, right? Just find your phone and…fuck…you’ve dropped your phone and if you bend down, you’re liable to wind up face first on the floor…

Oh. But it’s okay because Bruce is coming around to help you. He retrieves your phone, pockets it, helps you to your feet. He’s stronger than he looks. He gets you on your feet and walks you out to your car. He helps you into the passenger seat and gets behind the wheel.

“Just relax, Adrien,” he tells you. “You’re okay now. I’m going to take good care of you.”

That’s the last thing you remember until he’s helping you out of the car again. You’re back at Cloak and Dagger, and Bruce is walking you through the towering maze of bookshelves and up the mountain of stairs. You look over the railing and down at Angus who gazes silently up, his glasses glinting like two enormous sunspots. He’s saying something, and Bruce answers, but the words sound fuzzy and foreign.

The next time you open your eyes, it’s eight o’clock at night. You’re in bed, nude, and you’re pretty sure that you’ve been drugged. Drugged and maybe worse. You’re not sure because you’re feeling pretty stiff and achy, and you seem to have picked up a few bruises in places you don’t typically bruise.

The last thing you remember was having a drink with Bruce Green at a bar in Atwater Village.

Is it possible Bruce drugged you?

No. No, that’s ridiculous.

But as you slowly move around your living quarters, you see little signs of disturbance. Drawers not quite flush, cupboard doors ajar, items moved. Nothing dramatic, but you live on your own and you’re pretty set in your various routines. You notice when things are different…and this evening everything is different.

You sit down on the sofa, feeling confused and shaky. None of this makes sense.

Or does it? Bruce is a reporter after all. Maybe he took advantage of your drinking too much to snoop around your place.

But that’s the problem. You
didn’t
drink too much. You had one drink. Even taking into account skipping breakfast and not sleeping well, one drink should not have knocked you out for most of the afternoon.

You can’t find your phone either. Or your keys.

You’re in the midst of a panicked search when you hear the downstairs buzzer. Someone is knock-knock-knocking on your wee cottage door. What the hell now?

You stumble downstairs and who should be leaning on your buzzer but granite-faced Detective Riordan.

“Where have you been all day?” he demands. “I’ve left you three messages.”

“I-I’ve been out.” Which is true.

“Listen, English. I get that your mother is a big society dame, but you don’t get to ignore phone calls from the police. I can make your life very uncomfortable — and that’s whether you actually killed your pal Hersey or not. Understand?”

So here’s a weird thing. You don’t particularly like Detective Riordan. In fact, he makes you nervous.
And
he thinks you’re a murderer. But as you stare into his narrowed, suspicious hazel eyes, something seems to shift inside your chest. You’re relieved to see him. You don’t even mind him yelling at you.

You open your mouth to explain yourself, but you don’t know where to begin. So you stand there making like a guppy. But then something
is
fishy, right?

Maybe Riordan is a decent detective after all, because he seems to correctly interpret your appalled expression and inability to speak.

“What’s wrong with you? Has something happened?” His voice is still hard, but you hear a note of something…concern? Kindness? Probably whatever it was that first made him want to become a cop.

“I’m not even sure,” you answer. And then you have to stop because your throat closes as tight as if someone tried to throttle you.

Riordan studies you, frowning, and then he says calmly, “Why don’t we go inside and talk about it?”

It’s a relief to have even so small a plan of action. You lead the way upstairs. You offer Riordan a drink. He tells you to sit down and then he makes coffee. He seems perfectly at ease moving around your kitchen, finding mugs, spoons, cream, sugar. He puts what tastes like a cup of sugar in yours, and you realize that he thinks you’re in shock. And that he’s right.

You drink the coffee and you do feel better. You tell Riordan the whole story. He listens without interrupting. But then it’s not a long or complicated story.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” you finish up. “But…”

“You think you’ve been raped?” Riordan asks quietly.

Hearing it put so baldly makes you feel very weird, almost lightheaded. What seemed like maybe one of the least important aspects of all this is the first thing Riordan has glommed onto. You wish he wouldn’t, because you don’t want to think about that possibility.

It’s hard even to say this much. “I don’t know.”

“There’s one way to find out.”

“I don’t think I can —”

“You need to find out.” He says it with brusque kindness. “You’ll want to get tested. You’ll
need
to get tested.”

“Yes. I understand. I will. But I can’t…” You take a deep breath. “I’m sorry, because I know it’s going to sound chickenshit, but even if it’s true, even if this is some kind of date rape, I can’t press charges. I can’t go to court over something like this. I just…can’t.”

Riordan is silent. He says at last, “Then I don’t know what you think I can do for you.”

You stare at him and you can see that he is angry. Not with you. He’s frustrated with you but he’s angry on your behalf. He genuinely cares about this. It eases something inside you.

You smile. “I don’t think you can do anything for me,” you admit. “I just had to talk to someone. So thank you. You already have helped.”

Now it’s his turn to stare. His face flushes and he says in an odd voice, “No. Hell no. He’s not getting away with this.”

“I don’t —”

“I am. Are you sure you were drugged?”

Yeah. You’re sure about that. There’s a weird aftertaste in your mouth and you feel sick and shaky in a way that alcohol has never affected you. “I’m sure he drugged me. I’m sure he searched my place. And if he doesn’t have my phone and my keys, I sure as hell don’t know where they are.”

Riordan is silent. At last he gets to his feet. “Okay. Leave this to me.”

What does that mean? You have no idea, but you accompany Riordan downstairs. He pauses just outside the front door. “If Green’s got your keys, don’t stay here tonight,” he says. “Do you have some place you can spend the night?”

You could go to Claude’s. You could go to your mother’s. You have a number of friends who could put you up for the night. You don’t feel like going anywhere, but you nod.

“I’ll be in touch,” Riordan says, and he vanishes into the smog-scented night.

You go back upstairs and phone a taxi. You throw a couple of things in a bag. It’ll be easier to go to a hotel than try to explain to a friend, let alone your mother, why you need shelter for the night. Plus…you don’t want to talk. You don’t want to think. You don’t even want to drink. You want to hole up someplace warm and quiet. And secure. Some place with deadbolts and maybe a security guard. Or two.

You go downstairs and double check that Angus has locked everything up. You find your keys and your cell phone on the desk in your office where apparently Bruce left them for you.

It’s a jolt. If you’re wrong about Bruce walking off with your keys and phone, what else did you get wrong? Maybe everything. Maybe you
did
just have too much to drink? Maybe you just sicced Detective Riordan on the guy who was kind enough to see you safely home after you got drunk and passed out after Robert’s funeral.

Oh hell
.

You’re still working this out when you hear a key in the side door lock. You walk out of the office in time to see Bruce coming in the side door carrying a couple of bags of groceries.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” he says. He puts the groceries on the wooden counter and comes around to kiss you. “How are you feeling? Pretty hung over, I guess?”

“What are you doing here?” You gesture to the sacks of groceries. “What’s all this?”

“Solid food.” He adds teasingly, “We don’t all like to drink our meals.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Any of it. All of it. What is going
on
? “Why are you here?”

“That’s exactly what I was going to ask,” a new voice puts in. Detective Riordan is standing in the doorway.

Bruce looks in confusion to Riordan and then you. “You asked me to move in,” he says.

“Huh?”

“This afternoon.” Bruce smiles self-consciously. “After we…” Bruce’s smile fades. “Are you saying you don’t remember?”

“There’s no way.” You’re talking to Riordan. “No way in hell.”

Riordan’s face doesn’t give anything away. Maybe he believes you, maybe he doesn’t. Bruce’s confusion and hurt seem pretty believable too, even you can see that.

Riordan asks for Bruce’s version of the afternoon’s events and the long and short of it is, Bruce interviewed you after Robert’s funeral, you got wasted, and Bruce saw you home like the gentleman he is. You begged him to stay with you, begged him to fuck you, then afterwards you passed out, and somewhere in the middle of all that Bruce fell for you because, wow, who wouldn’t be charmed by a promiscuous alcoholic subject to blackouts? Okay, Bruce doesn’t quite put it like that, in fact he’s very tactful in his recital (because you’re his new boyfriend, after all), but he does hint that he knew from interviewing your friends that you’ve got major issues as well as a drinking problem. He just didn’t realize how serious your situation was until this very minute when you’ve rejected him after your afternoon of mad passion.

He seems more sad than angry as Riordan escorts him from the premises.

When Riordan finally returns, you say, “I don’t care what his story is. I had one drink. And even if I had ten drinks, I wouldn’t ask anyone to move in with me.
Ever
.”

Riordan blinks at the vehemence of that. “Okay.”

“You’ve been investigating me too. Do any of my friends say I’m a drunk?”

“No.”

“Do they say I’ve got major issues?”

“Well —”

“Funny. Look, maybe I did ask him to drive me home, but I didn’t ask him to stay. I know me. I wouldn’t.”

Riordan asks, “Did he leave the keys and your phone on your office desk?”

“Yes. But he also had a key made! You saw that, right? He just let himself in here.”

“Well, he thought he was moving in.”

You have no answer to that.

Riordan says, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s a taxi outside waiting for you. I think maybe you’d be smart to stay somewhere else tonight.”

You nod. “I will.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

You spend the night at a hotel and the next day you have all the locks in the bookstore changed again, inside and out. Bruce phones you a couple of times, but you don’t pick up. After that, you don’t hear from Bruce and you don’t hear from Riordan.

Two uncomfortable days pass. You don’t hear from the cops at all — not even about the murder investigation.

Then, three days after the funeral, Detective Riordan shows up at the bookstore at closing time.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he says curtly. “You’re going to need a drink.” Before you can get too indignant, he adds, “
I
need a drink.”

You lead the way upstairs and ask Riordan what he’d like to drink. He was apparently serious about needing one because he asks for whiskey, if you’ve got it. You pour him two fingers of Bushmills.

“You’d better pour yourself one.”

His expression is so bleak, you obey.

“Cheers,” he says, and touches his glass to yours.

“Cheers.”

“We arrested Bruce Green for Robert Hersey’s murder this morning.”

You choke on your whiskey, but manage to get it down without spewing. “Are you serious?” you rasp.

“I’m serious. I got curious about Green after the incident with you. I started checking around. A couple of Hersey’s neighbors identified Green as the man Hersey was dating before his death. Also, I looked into Green’s background and it turns out Bruce Green doesn’t exist. Bruce Green was just an alias for a guy named Grant Landis. Does that name mean anything to you?”