Harry Dolan (27 page)

“Is it really so hard to understand?”

She sensed him slipping away. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

“I’d like to, but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You already don’t approve of me,” he said.

Then he was gone. He had broken off the call.

She dialed his number, hoping to catch him before he turned off his phone. But after a single ring she got shuffled to his voice mail. She called in to the department next and learned that Shan had been in contact with Loogan’s cell phone provider—and was on the line now with the state police. Shan called her back a few minutes later.

“He’s in Livonia,” Shan told her.

Elizabeth had to suppress a laugh. “He said he was in Ohio.” Livonia was a suburb of Detroit.

“He’s somewhere around Newburgh Road and Six Mile. There’s a shopping mall there—Laurel Park Place. Lots of cars. He’d blend right in.”

“He knows what he’s doing.”

“The Livonia police have a cruiser there now, and they’re sending another. But he could be out of there already.”

“I’m sure he is,” Elizabeth said.

“He’s right next to I-275 and I-96,” said Shan. “From there he can go anywhere he wants. I talked to the state police and the Wayne County sheriff’s department. They’ve got his description and a description of his car. They’ll look for him.” He didn’t sound optimistic.

“They’re not going to find him,” she said.

Chapter 27

SARAH ARRIVED HOME FROM THE LIBRARY AROUND NINE O’CLOCK, AND Elizabeth put away her files. The two of them ate a late supper, then watched part of a documentary on PBS—people suffering injustice in foreign lands.

No word came in about David Loogan. Elizabeth tried to put him out of her mind, though there were echoes of him in her house. Once, as the night wore on, she looked in on Sarah and caught the girl standing in the middle of her bedroom, juggling three tennis balls with a look of fierce concentration.

Later, when Sarah was asleep, Elizabeth puttered around downstairs. She piled magazines, gathered stray dishes. She moved Sarah’s school books from the coffee table to the dining room. With a casual curiosity she opened a notebook and saw a drawing of Loogan’s face: rough-feather pencil strokes outlined his jaw; his gray eyes were clear and free of shadow. A good likeness, she thought—far better than the image they had released to the press.

In the morning, she decided to follow up on something Loogan had told her about: Michael Beccanti’s visit to the offices of
Gray Streets.
She drove to the
Gray Streets
building, rode the elevator up, tapped on the pebbled glass of the door. Sandy Vogel let her in. Elizabeth thought she seemed subdued. She leaned against a filing cabinet with her arms crossed, a slender brown-haired woman in her early forties, dressed crisply in a matching skirt and jacket.

“He was here,” she said when Elizabeth asked her about Beccanti. “I came in to use the copier Saturday night, around eight. The lights were on. The door to Tom’s office was open. Beccanti was in there.”

“You recognized him?” Elizabeth asked her.

“Yes. He used to visit Tom. I didn’t remember his name, but he came out and introduced himself. I think he realized he had startled me. He served time in prison, you know.”

“I know.”

“He told me David Loogan had hired him to do editorial work. I didn’t know anything about it. He left quickly after that. It seemed a little strange.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Just the brain trust.”

“Pardon?”

“Things have changed here, with Tom gone,” Sandy Vogel explained. “David Loogan was supposed to take over, but there doesn’t seem much chance of that now, does there? In the meantime, there’s still a magazine to run. Most of the work has fallen to me, so far, but I’m not who’s in charge. That would be the brain trust. Laura Kristoll, Bridget Shellcross, Nathan Hideaway, Casimir Hifflyn. Officially, they’re a board of directors, though we never had a board when Tom was alive. I’m supposed to keep them informed about what goes on here.”

“So you told them Beccanti was here Saturday.”

“I sent them an e-mail that night.”

“Did you get any response?”

“Nathan Hideaway sent a reply Monday. He said it was fine, Loogan could hire who he liked.”

“And when you found out Beccanti had been stabbed?”

Sandy Vogel frowned. “I suppose I should have called you, though I don’t see what his being here had to do with his death. Except in the obvious sense.”

“What sense would that be?”

“David Loogan hired him to work here, and then David Loogan stabbed him. From what I’ve read in the papers, you don’t need me to work that out.” The woman’s frown deepened. “The truth is, I don’t care much for drama, or for mysteries. I like the stories we publish as much as anybody, but as for actual murders, real people dying—I’d like to stay as far away from that as I can. So you’ll forgive me for not rushing to the phone when Michael Beccanti died.”

 

 

 

Later in the morning, Elizabeth drove to Bridget Shellcross’s townhouse. She found herself less welcome than on her previous visit.

It started with Rachel Kent, who was doing stretches on the sidewalk in front of the house. She wore spandex and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She had obviously just come from a run.

“Is Bridget in?” Elizabeth asked her.

“She’s in. She’s not going to want to talk to you.”

“Why not?”

“Not for me to say.”

Elizabeth went past her and up the steps and rang the bell. Bridget Shellcross let her into the foyer, but invited her no farther.

“I hope this isn’t a bad time,” Elizabeth said, trying to get a read on the woman’s mood. “I’m here about Michael Beccanti.”

“Of course,” said Bridget tonelessly.

“Did you know him?”

Bridget stood with her hands on her hips and her feet apart on the tiles of the foyer. The light from the windows cast her diminutive shadow across the floor.

“I’m surprised you would come around here,” she said. “I’ve seen the news. Beccanti was stabbed in David Loogan’s living room, and now Loogan’s disappeared. You don’t need to look for suspects. You already have one.”

“We still need to talk to people who might have known Mr. Beccanti,” Elizabeth said. “It’s routine. Did you ever meet him?”

“I wish I was in a position to help you,” said Bridget, her tone suddenly grave.

“He was a friend of Tom Kristoll. You might have met him through Tom.”

“I wish I had some vital piece of information, something that could lead you straight to Michael Beccanti’s killer,” Bridget said. “Because then I would have the pleasure of withholding it from you.”

Her pixie hair seemed to bristle in the sunlight. “I’ve lived in this city for more than half my life,” she said. “I have friends here. One of them is a hostess at a restaurant downtown. She tells me that someone from the police came by with a picture of me and a picture of Tom, asking if we’d been seen together.”

Her gaze was piercing. Elizabeth made herself meet it. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t me.”

“No. She said it was a man. She didn’t describe him, but when I imagine him he’s stout, slightly greasy, with a yellow shirt collar. He smells of cigar smoke. And there are others like him, scurrying around in cheap hotels, flashing my picture at desk clerks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I suppose you found out that Tom and I dated in college, and that gave you license to root around a little, see what you could dig up,” Bridget said. “Well, so it goes. But now, if you want to learn something about Michael Beccanti, I suggest you find a good picture of him and start making the rounds. You’ll get nothing from me.”

Her voice fell on the last words and then she turned and vanished through a doorway, leaving Elizabeth alone.

Outside, Rachel Kent was still stretching. An ornamental fence ran between the sidewalk and the house, and the fence had a metal rail along the top. Rachel had a leg up on the rail like a ballet dancer. She nodded as Elizabeth walked by.

“I told you she wouldn’t want to talk to you.”

 

 

 

In the early afternoon, Elizabeth called on Casimir Hifflyn. He invited her into his workroom, a large space, sparely furnished. He had a bookcase and a divan, a computer with a flat-panel monitor set up on an antique writing table, and behind that a pair of French windows looking out on the terraced lawn.

“Rex Chatterjee warned me about talking to you,” he said lightly.

“Is that right?” said Elizabeth.

“He and Laura sat me down last night. Rex mistrusts the Ann Arbor police. I suppose that’s a common affliction among lawyers. He seems to think I’m in danger of being framed. You’ve got four murders to account for. If I’m not careful, you’ll have me running around at night stabbing people, and shooting them, and throwing them out of windows. And, I suppose, clobbering them with liquor bottles. That would make me rather eclectic.”

“It would,” said Elizabeth.

“But I don’t mind answering your question about Michael Beccanti,” Hifflyn said. “I got the e-mail about him from the Vogel woman. I glanced at it and deleted it. That’s what I tend to do with most of her e-mails. If I did much more I’d never get anything done. When someone renews their subscription to
Gray Streets,
Sandy Vogel sends me an e-mail.”

“Did you know Beccanti?” Elizabeth asked.

Hifflyn rubbed his bearded chin. “I’ve been trying to remember if we were ever introduced. I don’t think so. But I remember someone pointing him out to me at a party once. ‘Don’t look now, but there’s Tom’s burglar’—something along those lines. Tom had some unusual friends.”

“What about Sean Wrentmore? Did you ever meet him?”

“Yes. He cornered me at one of Tom’s barbecues, years ago. Gave me a lengthy synopsis of the novel he was working on. I gather it’s the one Tom edited, the one Wrentmore got killed over. A great convoluted thing. I believe he was hoping I’d offer to read it.”

“I take it you didn’t.”

“I like to be generous with my time, but not that generous.” Hifflyn glanced at his writing table and smiled apologetically. “In fact, I’m rather pressed at the moment. Need to put more words on more pages. I’m sorry to rush you out. I wish there were more I could tell you.”

“That’s fine.”

“I have to keep up a certain pace, or I’d never get through a book,” Hifflyn said as he led her to the front door. “Then I’d be in trouble. Nate Hideaway knocks out a novel every couple years, and his publisher is happy. Same with Bridget. But if I don’t manage a book a year, my agent looks at me like I kicked his puppy.”

 

 

 

Nathan Hideaway told Elizabeth he wanted to get out into the air. He took her along a path behind his cottage that led down to a wooden dock on the shore of the pond. They watched a trio of ducks glide slowly across the surface of the water.

“I tried to have a conversation once with Michael Beccanti,” Hideaway said. “This was last year, and if memory serves, he had just been released from prison. I did a reading at a bookstore downtown, and Tom showed up, Beccanti with him. They stayed afterward and Tom made introductions. The three of us went for a drink. I was thinking then of doing a book about a burglar, and I thought I might get some insight into the character. What does it feel like to climb through someone’s window, to know you could be caught at any moment? What would motivate someone to do that, again and again the way Beccanti had? I’m sure he could have told some stories. But I never got anything out of him.”

Hideaway fell silent and a leaf twisted through the autumn air and landed on the dock at his feet.

“Were you surprised when Sandy Vogel told you that he had been in Tom’s office?” Elizabeth asked. “That Loogan had hired him to work on
Gray Streets
?”

“It was unexpected, certainly. But I knew if we were going to put David Loogan in charge of the magazine, we would have to give him some latitude. Beccanti wrote for
Gray Streets
; maybe he had some talent as an editor that I was unaware of.”

“Suppose I told you Michael Beccanti didn’t go to Tom’s office to do editorial work,” Elizabeth said. “Suppose I told you he went there to snoop around, hoping to find something out about Tom’s death?”

“Is that true?”

“That’s my understanding. He and Loogan were working together, conducting their own investigation.”

Hideaway looked down at the water. “That should surprise me, but it doesn’t. Last week, when we offered Mr. Loogan the
Gray Streets
job, I spoke to him in private. He suggested I should hire him to investigate Tom’s death. I didn’t take the idea seriously. Apparently he did.”

He walked out to the end of the dock and then turned back. “And now Beccanti’s dead. The news reports take it for granted that Loogan stabbed him. What do you suppose happened? Did the two of them have a falling-out?”

“Not according to Loogan,” Elizabeth said.

“You’ve talked to him? I thought he was missing.”

“He is. We’ve been in touch by phone. He denies stabbing Beccanti, says someone else did it. Presumably the same person who killed Tom.”

“Remarkable,” said Hideaway. “Do you believe him?”

“It’s possible he’s telling the truth. What do you think?”

Hideaway scuffed his boot along a plank of the dock. “I think David Loogan is an unusual man. But Tom saw fit to trust him, so it doesn’t seem right to think ill of him. Last week I got an uneasy feeling about him, but it was nothing solid. And it still isn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth said.

“I wonder if any of us really know who David Loogan is,” Hideaway said thoughtfully. “Laura doesn’t know anything about his past. Tom didn’t seem to care. And I suppose it could be a coincidence.”