Corkscrew (22 page)

There was no way to trace her. He fretted for a while over that, feeling he'd had an opportunity for some sort of calm life, good life, with Isabelle, and he'd dropped the ball there somehow, failed to get that right. But there was nothing to be done about it now.

On the second Wednesday in March, after he'd done the plot outline he called
Kyrgyzstan,
he went shopping as usual, was not approached by any women, and when he drove home there was a strange car in the driveway, tucked to the side to leave access to the garage. The car was a dark maroon brown, almost black, dusty, a small-model Chevy, some years old, with a few old dents that had been hammered out and painted over. It had a blunt efficient air, as though its driver didn't care anything about style, only about getting the job done, but there was no driver in it, nobody in sight anywhere.

Bryce thumbed the control and the garage door lifted as he drove slowly toward it. As he entered the garage, he caught movement off to his left, someone coming around the corner of the house, someone dressed in dark clothing, like the car.

Bryce stopped the BMW, switched off the engine, and climbed out. Leaving his few groceries on the passenger seat, he stepped out of the garage and saw Detective Johnson walking toward him. There was a smile on Johnson's face, but Bryce didn't trust that.

'Beautiful grounds,' Johnson began. 'A really beautiful setting.'

'Thank you,' Bryce said. 'I'm kind of surprised to see you.'

Johnson stuck his hand out. 'Just a courtesy call,' he said.

Shaking his hand, Bryce said, 'A courtesy call?'

'Well, a progress report,' Johnson told him, and shrugged, with a rueful grin at himself. 'Which is to say, none.'

'No progress. With Lucie, you mean.' Which was the first time he'd said that name aloud in a few months; he was pleased to note that it didn't affect him.

'Sure, with Mrs Proctorr,' Johnson agreed. 'I tried calling you in New York, but they said you gave up that apartment.'

'It was in Lucie's name,' Bryce told him. 'The lease. You want to come in?'

'If I'm not interrupting anything.'

'No, no, come on. We'll go in this way, if you don't mind, I've got groceries to put away.'

'Sure, no problem.'

They went in through the garage, Bryce getting his plastic sack of groceries, shutting the garage door. In the kitchen, he said, 'Would you like coffee?'

'You know, I would. It's a long drive up here.
And
back.'

'You can hang your coat in that closet,' Bryce said, tossing his own on one of the stools in here, and Johnson put his black topcoat away, showing the dark gray jacket, dark blue shirt and black slacks beneath.

Putting today's groceries away, Bryce was startled to realize just how much stuff he had accumulated in here. Buying a few items every day, living alone, not using that much, he now had four identical unopened jars of mayonnaise, seven cans of coffee, six boxes of the same kind of rice, on and on. Embarrassed, afraid Johnson would see all these extra things and somehow understand what that meant, he left the sack half-full on the counter and said, 'I'll do these later. Coffee first.'

'This is a very nice place you have here, very nice,' Johnson told him.

'Thank you.' Bryce busied himself making coffee. 'Why don't you sit on one of the stools there.'

'Thanks.' Seated at the island in the middle of the kitchen, like a man bellied up to a bar, Johnson said, 'So you don't have a place in the city at all any more.'

'No. I didn't need it.'

'I envy you.' Johnson grinned, and said, 'I suppose your accountant told you we checked up on you.'

Surprised, Bryce said. 'Checked up? No, he didn't. What do you mean, checked up?'

'We got a court order to take a look at your financial records,' Johnson explained. 'We informed your accountant, Mr Steiner. Usually the accountant tells his client.'

'I guess he didn't want to upset me,' Bryce said.

'And I suppose,' Johnson said, 'he knew we wouldn't come across anything that would be a flag.'

'When did you do this?'

'Back in December. Just before Christmas.'

Two weeks before Pegasus paid for
Two Faces,
and the big payout to Wayne. Bryce said, 'You were looking to see if I paid somebody to kill Lucie.'

'Sure,' Johnson said. He didn't seem at all troubled by the admission. 'You know you've got to be the prime suspect.'

'The husband.'

'And conveniently out of town.'

'That wasn't convenient,' Bryce assured him, 'but I know what you mean.'

'So we had to check on you,' Johnson said. 'You know that.'

'Of course.'

'You made no unexpected withdrawals, no unexplained payouts, nothing out of the ordinary at all.'

Bryce said, 'So that gives me a clean bill of health.'

'Not entirely,' Johnson said. 'Nobody killed your wife for you for money. There was always the chance that somebody did it for love.'

The coffee was ready. Bryce said, 'For love? I don't follow that. How do you take your coffee?'

'Just black.'

Bryce poured the cups, added half-and-half to his own, and gave Johnson a cup, as Johnson said, 'You had a girlfriend then. Ms de Fuentes. While you were out of town, she could have arranged it for you, even done it herself.'

Astonished, Bryce said, 'Isabella? But Lucie was beaten to death!'

'With a little table. A woman could have used that table. And there was no sexual assault.'

'Isabelle wouldn't — You can't be — I can't imagine such a thing.'

'That's my job,' Johnson said, 'to imagine every possibility. Check out every possibility.'

'But Isabelle. Come on to the living room.'

'Sure.'

Johnson got up and followed Bryce from the kitchen down the wide art-hung hall past the dining room to the long living room, saying as they went, 'We looked into her, too, just to see. She was at the movies with friends that night, so she had an alibi. And there was nothing off-base about her finances, either.'

'You checked
her
finances?'

'Naturally,' Johnson said. Bryce gestured for him to take a seat, they both sat, and Johnson said, 'That would be a couple months ago, early in January.'

'You went to her accountant.'

'Well, no, she didn't have an accountant, not the way you do. Just somebody to do her taxes every year. So we went to
her,
had her show us her checkbook, savings account.'

'Oh, poor Isabelle.'

'She took it very well,' Johnson said.

'But — What did you think she could have done? Paid somebody to kill Lucie? Why?'

'Maybe it was a loan,' Johnson suggested. 'You'll pay her back when the coast is clear.'

'I couldn't even
think
of such a thing,' Bryce told him.

'Well, like I say, that's what my job is, I'm supposed to think of things like that and everything else, and then check them out.' Johnson sipped. 'Good coffee.'

'Thank you.'

'Anyway, there was nothing there, and she took it fine.'

And left, Bryce thought. Got as far away from me and Johnson and the whole thing as she could. He said, 'So what else is there? My ex-wife?'

Johnson chuckled. 'No, and not your kids, either. We did a little looking into that — No, no, don't get upset, they didn't know we were around.'

Bryce suddenly remembered Ellen's response when he'd confessed to her, the immediate instinct to protect the children, and now he saw she was absolutely right. He said, 'You really do burrow in, don't you?'

Johnson shrugged. 'That's the job. Anyway, my report right now is, we don't have a goddam lead. We aren't giving up, you know, we don't give up, but at this moment we've run out of theories to check.'

He isn't even asking me about Wayne's story, Bryce thought. He bought that, too. He said, 'You're going to open it.'

Johnson gave him a surprised look, and a laugh. 'How do you know about that?'

'Research for a novel once,' Bryce told him. 'The New York Police Department never closes a case until there's a conviction. But if there's nothing more to do, you open it, open and inactive. You go on and think about newer things, fresher cases, but you're always ready to come back if something else shows up.'

'Exactly.'

'Like me moving out of New York,' Bryce said.

Johnson laughed. 'You're getting to know me,' he said.

'Anything I might do, that's just a little off from my pattern,' Bryce said, 'you're going to notice, and you're going to say, 'What's that all about?' So you came up here — That's a department car, isn't it?'

'Sure. They're hard to disguise.'

'You came up here to see what the story was,' Bryce said. 'And the story is, the lease was in Lucie's name, she decorated the apartment, it was hers, the furniture was all hers, it reminded me of her. They said I had to sign a new lease or vacate, so I vacated. I don't have a job to go to every day in the city, and I like it up here. This is
my
place.'

'I can see that.' Johnson had finished his coffee, and now he put the cup on a coaster on the end table and said, 'Do you mind if I ask you a question?'

With a surprised laugh, Bryce said, 'That's all you do!'

'I suppose. But this is a little different. I know you and your wife were in the middle of a bad divorce, and you both had bad things to say about one another the last year or so. I'm wondering how you feel now. Would you like to see her murderer brought to justice?'

'I couldn't care less,' Bryce told him. 'I was wrong to marry her, I was right to get away from her, it was hell having the whole thing take so long, and I'd be a hypocrite if I said I was sorry she was dead. If she'd gone down in a plane crash or got shot in a bank robbery or whatever, it's all the same to me. You want to find the killer because that's your job. Her parents want you to find him—'

'I hear from them a lot,' Johnson agreed.

'I'm sure you do. They want him found because they loved her. It isn't my job, and I didn't love her, not any more, so I don't care. I hope you get him because I know it's important to your professional feeling about yourself, but it doesn't mean a damn thing to me.'

'Well, that's straightforward,' Johnson said. 'Thank you for answering that, and thanks for the coffee.' Standing, he said, 'If I get in touch again, it'll be because I have real news, not just to say I'm stuck.'

'Good.'

Bryce also stood, and they went back to the kitchen to get Johnson's coat. Johnson gestured at the grocery sack on the counter. 'You're a real homebody.'

'I am.'

Bryce led him through the house to the front door, and along the way Johnson said, 'I've been catching up on your books. Very enjoyable.'

'Thank you.'

They shook hands again at the door, and then Bryce went back to the living room to watch out the window as that ugly little car backed away from the garage and went out the circular drive.

Was Johnson really finished? This time, was it really over? Bryce was glad Mark Steiner hadn't told him about the search of his financial records, but he'd have to tell Mark soon that he knew about it now and was grateful for Mark's silence, but that now everything was okay. Anyway, everything seemed okay.

Back in the kitchen, he looked again at this mass of excess groceries. He opened cabinet doors, stood looking at all this stuff, wondered that he'd never even noticed it, not till Johnson was here to see it. After a while, without putting the rest of the groceries away, he went to his office. He sat at the keyboard and wrote:

I was doing a very stupid and a very dangerous thing, and I have to stop now. What if I'd found Marcia Rierdon again? Or some other woman? I would have run away again, I know I would, I think I would, I'm almost sure I would, but I could have got myself into all kinds of trouble along the way. And with Johnson watching, too.

What did I think I was going to do? Kill Marcia Rierdon? Even if I did, that wouldn't be the same, would it? It wouldn't. It wouldn't solve anything, and it wouldn't be the same as being there, and they would trace it back to me, somehow they'd trace it back to me.

I'm glad Johnson came here. Now I realize how far from shore I'd gone, how close I was to losing myself completely. It stops now.

Wayne had taken up jogging. With Central Park right there, outside the window, it seemed a crime not to. He'd work at his computer for a while every morning — he was starting to get assignments from the magazines, now that the editors had come to know him — and then jog before lunch, usually finding a snack somewhere in or near the park.

The second Friday in March, though, he'd be going home for lunch, because Susan had taken the day off. Tomorrow night, they'd have their first dinner party in the new apartment, six people in, including Joe and Shelly Katz, which was going to be a big deal as far as Susan was concerned, so this morning she had gone off to do the shopping. This afternoon she'd do the preliminary work on dinner, then finish it all tomorrow.

Wayne didn't have a specific route in the park, he was still getting to know the place, jogging at random, still finding new mini-landscapes within the boulders and low hills and specimen trees and sweeping lawns. As he ran, he usually thought about the piece he was then working on, or other pieces to come, but this morning he thought about Joe and Shelly Katz, because he'd be seeing them tomorrow night. And how oddly that had all worked out. He'd hoped Joe would be his editor, but he'd become a friend instead, and now he and his family were living in Wayne's old apartment on Perry Street.

What had happened, the two couples had had dinner together in a restaurant in the neighborhood, back in February, and Wayne had told Joe about their taking Bryce's apartment on Central Park West, and that he felt awkward about it. 'Susan just fell in love with it,' he said, and she said, 'I certainly did.'

'But I don't know how to tell Bryce,' Wayne went on. 'In fact, if I can avoid it, I think I won't tell Bryce.'

Joe said, 'Why not? He didn't want the place any more, he got out of it, what does he care who moves in?'